Chapter Text
The Stark Humanitarian Gala happened every December, and every December Johnny Storm decided that galas were invented specifically to punish people who did not like standing still.
He had been standing still for forty-seven minutes. He knew because he had checked his watch eleven times, and the progression from six forty-three to seven thirty felt geological, the kind of slow that only happened when someone handed you a glass of champagne you were not supposed to drink and told you to look presentable. He looked presentable. He had looked presentable in the car, in the elevator, and through the first half of a speech about clean water initiatives that had been genuinely moving and that he had, regrettably, spent mostly thinking about whether the canapes on the far table contained shrimp.
They contained shrimp. He had confirmed this.
The ballroom of the Meridian Hotel occupied the forty-second floor of a building that had survived three alien invasions and one incident with Galactus that nobody in the city particularly enjoyed remembering. Whoever had designed the space understood money in the specific, total way that money understood itself: floor-to-ceiling windows stitching the Manhattan skyline into the walls like a second piece of art, chandeliers that looked like frozen waterfalls caught mid-fall, and tablecloths so white they were almost aggressive about it. The whole room smelled of gardenias and something warm underneath, vanilla or sandalwood, the kind of scent pumped through the vents on purpose to make wealthy people feel they deserved to be somewhere beautiful.
Johnny was not unbeautiful himself, and he knew it the way he knew most things about his own face: distantly, the way you know a fact you learned so young it stopped feeling like information. He had his sister's cheekbones and his own particular talent for standing in a room like he had been placed there by a set designer. The tuxedo was black with a subtle texture, something Reed had described as a microweave when he handed it over and that Johnny had thanked him for without retaining a syllable of the explanation. It fit well. Everything fit well when you ran hot enough that tailors made slight adjustments without being asked.
Sue was twenty feet away, luminous in something the color of good champagne, talking to a woman from a UN committee with the focused attention she gave to conversations she intended to win. Reed stood at her elbow in the posture he wore at formal events, the one that looked like attentiveness but was probably a private calculation about the load-bearing capacity of the decorative columns. Ben Grimm had stationed himself near the buffet with the self-possessed calm of a man who had made his peace with crowds and decided that smoked salmon was the correct way to engage with them.
Johnny loved his family with the bone-deep, non-negotiable permanence that came from years of shared danger and shared breakfasts and a specific kind of trust that had been tested in places with names most people would not believe existed. He also loved them in a way that included, without contradiction, the fact that he had been circling this ballroom for forty-seven minutes without finding a single conversation that wanted to go anywhere.
He took a sip of sparkling water and tried to look like someone actively enjoying himself, which was a different skill from actually enjoying himself, and one he had considerably more practice with.
The room was full of people who were famous in ways that each required a slightly different posture. Politicians angled their chins toward cameras. Scientists angled their eyes away from them. Celebrities had perfected the art of seeming unposed in the exact center of every frame. Tony Stark himself was somewhere near the far end of the room, holding court around a cluster of investors with the practiced ease of a man who had spent so long being the most interesting person in any given space that he had stopped performing it. He just was.
Johnny respected that. He also found it exhausting in large doses, and the large dose was currently forty feet away and approaching.
He pivoted.
Not obviously. He had grown up with the Fantastic Four, which meant he had extensive experience navigating spaces where obvious pivoting attracted attention, and attention could be the difference between a pleasant evening and a news cycle. He drifted left, past a clutch of senators' aides, past a woman photographing the hors d'oeuvres for reasons he did not investigate, past a waiter carrying a tray of something skewered, and came to rest near the eastern bank of windows where the city spread out forty-two stories below in its usual improbable grid of light and dark.
Manhattan at night from this height looked like something a child had built, neat and bright and full of internal logic that made no sense until you were standing inside it. Johnny had spent enough evenings above the city that the view no longer dropped his stomach the way it had when he was ten and fire-flying for the first time. But it still did something. It still made him feel the specific largeness of things, all those lit windows and the lives behind them, all that motion and intention, all those people going somewhere they had decided mattered.
He was in the middle of this thought, which was more introspective than he usually allowed his gala thoughts to be, when a camera shutter clicked somewhere to his left.
Johnny turned, expecting to see paparazzi but instead he saw…someone around his age?
The teen was maybe five-eight in shoes that were not expensive, dark jeans and a button-down that was trying very hard and had not quite arrived. He stood at a three-quarter angle to the window with a camera raised, and the camera was not the small digital kind that said personal photography. It was a Canon with a telephoto lens that said press credentials, and he was using it to capture the skyline in the gap between two clusters of guests, framing the window itself rather than the people in front of it, which was either unprofessional or interesting depending on how you thought about photography.
Johnny watched him for a moment.
He had dark curly hair that looked less styled than simply dry, brown skin with the kind of color that photographed well, and an expression of focused concentration so complete that it had apparently blocked out the entire event happening around him. He adjusted his angle by two degrees, checked the frame through the viewfinder, adjusted again. His sneakers were clean but old. There was a small ink stain on the left cuff of his shirt that he had either not noticed or decided was not the evening's most pressing concern. He looked like someone who had been sent to cover the event for a high school newspaper and was taking it more seriously than any of the professional photographers across the room, who were all camped near the stage waiting for the plaque presentation.
He looked, in other words, like he had no idea anyone was watching him.
Most people at this gala knew someone was watching them. That was more or less the function of a gala: the watching, the being watched, the calibration of your expression to account for both. Johnny had been doing it since he was twelve years old and it was as natural to him as breathing and almost as tiresome. The kid by the window was simply not doing it, and the absence of that self-consciousness was strange enough to read as its own kind of presence.
Johnny took a step toward him. He did not plan this.
Then he took another. He also did not plan this.
"Nice shot."
The other lowered the camera. He looked at Johnny with the kind of look that assessed rather than recognized, taking in the tuxedo and the face and reaching some internal conclusion that did not visibly impress him, which was, in Johnny's recent experience, unusual.
"Thanks." His voice was lighter than Johnny expected, a Queens inflection in it, the kind of New York that had not been smoothed out by money or ambition. He glanced down at the camera's LCD screen, checking the shot, apparently satisfied with the result, and then looked back at Johnny with the expression of someone trying to be polite while also waiting for the conversation to end so he could get back to the thing he was actually there for.
"You're with the press?"
"I do pictures for the Midtown High Newspaper." The other dropped it without detectable embarrassment, which was its own kind of confidence. "And I do some freelance for the Bugle. Mr. Jameson wanted coverage of the Stark attendance angle."
"He wants photos of Tony Stark at his own gala."
"He wants photos of Tony Stark doing anything." A dry quality pulled at the corner of the kid's mouth, either the beginning of a smile or the memory of one. "Preferably something embarrassing, but Jameson's not picky."
Johnny laughed before he decided to, which happened to him less often than people assumed. "Good luck. He's over by the bar being disgustingly poised."
"I know. I've been watching him for twenty minutes." A beat. "Professionally." He checked his camera again. "I should get a few more shots before the lights change. Nice talking to you."
He was already turning away.
"Johnny."
He paused. He looked back over his shoulder with the patient expression of someone giving a stranger the courtesy of two more seconds.
"Johnny Storm." The clarification that usually changed things.
The brunette looked at him for a moment, “I know.” Something crossed his face that was not quite recognition and not quite surprise, more the mild expression of someone confirming a thing they already half-knew. "Peter Parker." His thumb tapped the side of his camera once.
He turned back to the window.
Johnny stood where he was for a moment, sparkling water in hand, watching Peter Parker raise his camera and return to the problem of the skyline as if the conversation had been a brief and minor interruption in the ongoing project of his evening.
He went to find Ben.
He was thinking about it the whole time.
* * *
The group near the dessert table formed with the natural gravity of people who had been placed in the same circles enough times to know each other's faces without particularly liking each other's company. Marcus was twenty-two, recently graduated from Columbia's engineering program, with the loud imprecise confidence of someone told he was smart for so long he had stopped fact-checking the claim. His friend Cara laughed at most things Marcus said in the way of someone with low social overhead costs. Two people whose names Johnny caught and lost immediately stood nearby. Bex, who was Sue's friend and who had a gift for standing in the center of any group in a way that redistributed everyone else into approximate orbit, had a glass of wine and the expression of someone enjoying the material.
Johnny had been standing near this orbit for fifteen minutes. It was, comparatively, better than standing by the window alone. Marginally.
Marcus was talking about the event coverage.
"The Midtown kid is still here." He let the emphasis carry the entertainment value. "I saw him near the dessert station earlier. Very earnest about the petit fours."
"Who?" Bex asked.
"Parker. Peter Parker. Midtown High." Marcus's expression carried something that was not quite contempt and not quite amusement, the expression of a man with a specific history with a specific name. "He tutored my sister for AP Physics last year. Spent the entire first session explaining where my explanation of torque was wrong. Very patiently. Very thoroughly." He said the adverbs the way you described a small but recurring injury.
"He corrected you in front of fifteen-year-olds." Cara's voice carried a particular smugness.
"He corrected me in front of my sister's entire study group, who are all fifteen, while looking like he didn't even notice he was doing it." Marcus reached for a chocolate-covered strawberry. "Zero self-awareness. Just opens his mouth and the correct information comes out, completely regardless of what the room needs from him."
Johnny looked across the room.
Peter Parker was now positioned near the edge of the stage, lying completely flat on the floor among the chair legs with his camera angled upward, shooting the chandelier's reflection in the polished floor. A passing waiter stepped over him with the tired professionalism of someone paid by the hour to have seen everything. Parker did not look up. He adjusted the exposure dial with his left hand and held absolutely still for the shot.
"He seems fine."
"He made me look bad in front of my little sister."
"Sounds like a you problem."
Bex pointed at Johnny. "That's what I said."
Marcus looked at Johnny with the particular angle of someone setting something up. He had a way of pausing just long enough to let you know the pause was intentional. "You know what would be funny? If someone tried to actually talk to him. For real. Like, tried to charm him."
"He's working." Johnny wasn't sure why he said it. It came out the way statements of fact came out, without particular feeling behind them.
"He's always working." Marcus smiled. "My sister said he's like that all the time. Lives in his own head. Doesn't really notice people in that way." He turned the smile toward Johnny with the slow precision of someone who had thought this through. "I'll bet sixty dollars you can't get him to agree to a date tonight."
The ballroom had one of those momentary lulls that large rooms sometimes produced, a breath between the orchestra's songs, and in it the bet hung in the air between them with the particular weight of something said loudly in a quiet moment.
"A date."
"Verbal confirmation. Tonight, before the event ends. In front of a witness." Marcus nodded at Cara. "Her."
Bex was looking at Johnny with the expression she sometimes wore around her brother-in-law's poker games: the expression of someone watching people bet on things that were not entirely their business to bet on, but who was too interested in the outcome to say so.
Johnny looked at Peter Parker, who had stood up from the floor, brushed off the front of his shirt without looking down, and was now examining the shot on his LCD screen with his brow slightly furrowed in the way of someone who already knew what he needed to fix.
The thing about dares was that Johnny did not take them because of the stakes. He had never in his life taken a dare because of the stakes. He took them because of the specific quality of aliveness that arrived in the moment before you committed, the fraction of a second where something was still possible rather than decided. He had once flown through a thunderhead for twenty dollars. He had once eaten an entire ghost pepper on video for nothing at all, just because someone said he wouldn't.
Sixty dollars was beside the point.
"Sure," he said. "I'll take that."
Marcus looked pleased in the way of someone who believed he was keeping his money.
Bex murmured, almost to herself: "This is going to be instructive."
Johnny was already moving.
* * *
Peter Parker, up close and no longer viewed from across a ballroom, had a face that rewarded the additional distance. Not because it was a face that looked worse up close, but because it was the kind of face that did most of its communicating in the small adjustments, the slight pull at the corner of the mouth, the way his eyes moved when he was thinking versus when he was listening. He was crouched at the base of the stage examining his camera's memory card with the focused displeasure of someone who had realized he was running out of storage, and he did not look up until Johnny was close enough that looking up was no longer optional.
"Hey." Johnny put a comfortable lean into it, the kind of lean that said he was entirely at ease in this room and had simply happened to wander in Peter's direction. "Peter, right?"
Peter looked up. He did the same brief assessment he had done at the window, and it reached the same conclusion, but this time something else moved underneath it: the small, private recalibration of a person who had recognized that a conversation was now unavoidable. "Yeah. Hey."
"You get the shot?" Johnny nodded toward the stage floor. "Y'know, people would be more excited to see me. They're usually like: 'Oh my god, it's Johnny Storm, the Human Torch!' or something like that." He put his hands on his hips.
"I guess." Peter glanced at the camera screen. "The exposure was off." He didn’t sound particularly bothered by this. He sounded like someone who had known the exposure might be off and had a plan for fixing it.
"I saw you down there. The reflection shot."
"It's better than the stage setup." Peter's voice carried the mild conviction of a professional opinion shared without much expectation that it would land anywhere interesting. "The chandelier at this angle does something interesting in the floor. The actual awards are just trophies on a table."
"Most photographers are over there." Johnny nodded toward the stage, where four people with significantly more expensive equipment were jostling for position near the podium.
"I know." Peter did not elaborate. He slid the memory card back into the camera with the practiced one-handed ease of someone who had done this so often it had moved out of conscious thought. Then he looked at Johnny with the polite, patient quality of someone who had concluded that the conversation probably had a point and was waiting to find out what it was.
Johnny gave him the smile. The one that worked on everyone. He had tested it on four continents and in two dimensions and it had a success rate that he privately considered embarrassing for the people it worked on.
"So you go to Midtown."
"Yeah."
"I've been there. Career day thing once. Sue said I had to connect with more people my age."
"I know." Something in Peter's voice settled into a particular dryness. "I was there. You knocked over a lab cart in room 214 and then signed it."
Johnny blinked. "I signed the cart?"
"Someone handed you a marker." A pause. "It's still there. They turned it into a display." The dryness in his voice occupied the space between mockery and warmth without committing to either. "The lab teacher finds it very motivational."
"That's either a compliment or an insult."
"It's just true." Peter raised his camera.
He aimed it at the room, tracking something across the crowd with the steady patience of a person waiting for a moment to assemble itself. Johnny watched him work for a second. The camera moved in a small arc, settled, stilled. The shutter clicked.
"What did you just get?"
Peter turned the camera around. The screen showed a woman in a red dress caught mid-laugh, her hand at her collarbone, completely unaware of being photographed, and behind her, slightly out of focus, a man in a dark suit watching her with an expression that was either admiration or grief or both at once.
"Oh," Johnny managed.
"Yeah."
Johnny looked at the photo for another moment. It was the kind of image that made you feel like you had interrupted something private even though it had happened in a room with four hundred people in it. "You're good."
"Thank you." Peter received it the way you received a thing you already knew but were glad someone noticed.
Johnny recalibrated. He was used to conversations that moved in a particular direction when he applied himself to them, that bent slightly toward him under the weight of sufficient charm, but Peter Parker was not bending. He was not cold about it. He was not rude about it. He was simply occupied with other things and making space in his evening for Johnny the way you made space for furniture you were politely waiting to walk around.
This was new.
He tried a different angle.
"You know, I spend a lot of time up high. Good light up there. Have you ever thought about aerial photography?"
Peter lowered the camera slightly and looked at Johnny with an expression that took a moment to read: not annoyed, not flattered, more the expression of someone who had received a question they found genuinely interesting and was deciding whether to engage with it or not.
"I've thought about it." He turned it over like a problem he had already half-solved. "The light at altitude is different. No atmospheric diffraction below you. You'd lose the haze that makes city shots soft."
"Exactly." Johnny leaned in. "So what I'm saying is, if you ever wanted a personal aerial tour, I happen to have very good fire control and a high tolerance for carrying passengers."
He watched Peter's face to see where it landed.
Peter's brow moved in a thoughtful direction. He looked at the ceiling for a moment, as though running internal calculations, and then back at Johnny with the expression of someone who had reached a conclusion about a genuinely interesting structural problem.
"The shutter speed would have to be really high. Wind at that velocity would blur anything under one-two-thousandth. And I'd want a wider aperture to compensate for the light loss, but then the depth of field gets shallow and you lose the ground detail." He paused. "Have you ever taken someone that high before? Like, not in an emergency?"
Johnny opened his mouth.
"Because most aerial photography is done from helicopters," Peter continued, "and even then the vibration is a problem. With a human being as the platform there would be constant micro-movement from breathing, which is honestly more disruptive than wind at speed, and I'd need image stabilization that I don't currently have on this camera body, so the results might be technically interesting but not actually usable." He considered this. "It's a nice idea though."
He raised the camera again.
Johnny stood in the wreckage of what had just happened and tried to identify the moment at which his very successful flirting had been thoroughly redirected into a discussion of image stabilization. “…How about you just take more pictures of me then?” Johnny flashed his signature smile, running a hand through his blond hair.
Peter had a small smirk on his face, “Fine fine, if you want to.” he raised his camera again and Johnny found a familiar pose. “Not half bad. You’re pretty photogenic.”
”Of course I am, I’m a model.” Johnny said smugly.
He couldn’t identify the moment. It had been invisible. It had been smooth as glass.
Across the room, Marcus was watching from the dessert table with the comfortable expression of a man waiting to be right.
Johnny straightened up, adjusted his jacket, and considered his options.
* * *
He did not give up. Giving up was not a thing he did. He had flown through a thunderhead for twenty dollars.
He waited four minutes, until Peter had moved from the stage area to a spot near the far wall where he was shooting the crowd from behind, catching the backs of heads and the geometry of the room, and then he arrived alongside him with two glasses of sparkling water, one of which he held out.
Peter looked at it. Then at Johnny. Then took it. "Thanks."
"You've been working for two hours. You should hydrate."
Peter drank about half of it in one go, which Johnny had not been anticipating and which was somehow extremely on brand for someone who had been lying on a ballroom floor twenty minutes ago.
"Are you following me around?" Not accusatory. More the mild curiosity of someone trying to categorize an unusual event.
"I'm floating. I have no one to talk to."
"You're Johnny Storm." Peter gestured at the room with his water glass. "There are four hundred people here who would talk to you."
"I don't want to talk to four hundred people. I want to talk to you."
He said it the way he said things that he meant to land, putting the weight behind it without overplaying it, and he watched Peter's face.
Peter looked at him for a moment. His expression was doing the thing again, the small adjustments, the internal assessment. Then: "Is this a bit?"
"What?"
"Like, is this a you've-decided-to-charm-the-weird-kid-for-fun thing, or…” He didn’t finish the sentence. He tilted his head and waited.
Johnny felt something move in his chest that was not quite embarrassment, because he did not embarrass easily, but was adjacent to it. It was the feeling of being read accurately and without hostility, which should have been fine and was somehow worse than a wrong read would have been.
"What if I told you it's neither?”
"I'd ask what the third option was."
"The third option is that I met you at the window an hour ago and you were the most interesting person I'd talked to tonight and I've been thinking you ever since that. Also that picture you showed me, it was pretty cool.”
The woman in the red dress. The man watching her. The thing that had moved in that photograph like a tide.
Peter was quiet for a moment. He looked at his water glass. Then at the room.
"That was a good photo," he offered finally.
"Yeah."
"I'm probably going to print it at five by seven. Maybe bigger. It depends on the grain."
"Peter." Johnny sighed, guess it was time to get more direct.”
"What?”
"I'm trying to ask you something."
Peter turned and looked at him directly. He had very dark eyes, the kind that were hard to read at distance and harder to read up close, and they were currently fixed on Johnny with an attention that was complete and level and entirely undecorated. No performance. No calibration. Just the thing itself.
"Okay."
"Do you want to grab food sometime?”
A pause.
"Like." Peter paused again. "A food occasion?”
"A food occasion," Johnny confirmed, very patiently. "Like coffee. Or dinner. Like a date."
Something moved across Peter's face that Johnny could not identify before it finished moving. He had the impression of watching someone process several things in rapid sequence, arriving at a conclusion that surprised them, and then carefully filing the conclusion away behind a neutral expression.
"You don't know me."
"I'd like to."
"We've had two conversations."
"I know."
"The first one was about Tony Stark."
"The second one was more interesting."
Peter looked at him. Then at the room. Then at the camera in his hands. He had very still hands, Johnny noticed, the kind of still that was trained rather than natural, the stillness of someone who had learned to hold things carefully.
"I have to work."
"I know."
"Like, tonight. I'm working right now."
"I know that too."
"So?”
"So maybe when you're done working." Johnny kept his voice easy. No pressure. He was very good at easy and no pressure. "Or not tonight. Some other time. The offer's open."
Peter looked at him for another moment. Then something shifted in his expression, something that was not quite a smile but was definitely the thing that happened to a face before it decided whether or not to smile. "I'll think about it."
"That's not a no."
"It's not a yes either."
"Right, but it's not a no."
Peter made a sound that was approximately a laugh, or the compressed version of one, a small exhale through his nose that carried amusement the way a sealed envelope carries a letter. Then his phone buzzed in his pocket. He looked at it.
Something happened to his face that was quick and practiced, a shutter closing.
"I have to go."
"Right now? Let me get your number first."
"Right now." He was already moving, camera back in the bag with efficient motions, the strap over his shoulder. He was already turning when Johnny grabbed his arm, pulled the marker he kept in his jacket pocket for autographs, and pressed his number into Peter's palm with a small drawn wink beside it. Peter looked down at his own hand for half a second. "I. Whatever. It was nice talking to you, Johnny." A quick wave, and he was gone through the crowd.
"You're going to think about it," Johnny called after him, quietly enough that only Peter could hear.
Peter looked back over his shoulder, one hand already pushing through the door to the lobby. The expression on his face was the same one as before: not quite a smile, but the shape that came before one. The door closed.
Johnny stood in the middle of the ballroom with an empty water glass, a crowd of four hundred people around him, and the extremely specific feeling of something he had not quite caught.
Not yet, anyway.
* * *
Marcus was waiting at the dessert table with the satisfaction of a man who believed the universe had confirmed his priors. "Well?"
"He said he'd think about it."
"Think about it," Marcus repeated.
"He had to leave. Work thing."
"So he didn't say yes."
"He didn't say no. There's a difference. And I gave him my number."
Bex was eating a petit four and looking at Johnny with the expression of someone watching a very specific kind of man discover that the universe had additional dimensions he had not previously mapped. "What happened exactly?"
"I asked him to dinner. He said he'd think about it. Then he left."
"Did he leave because you asked him to dinner?"
"He left because his phone buzzed."
"Could be the same thing."
"It wasn't the same thing." Johnny was quite sure about this. He had watched Peter's face when he looked at his phone, and what had moved across it was not relief or escape. It was the closed, quick expression of someone receiving information that needed acting on. That was not a person fleeing a conversation. That was a person with somewhere to be. “I’m like sixty percent sure he definitely wants to go on a date with me. After all, who can ignore the charm of Johnny Storm?”
Bex seemed to consider this and arrive at a partial verdict. "He's interesting," she admitted. “He definitely could ignore the charm of you though. I mean he didn’t even say yes immediately to your date.”
"I guess you’re right. He also talked to me for ten minutes about image stabilization."
"Because you invited him on a date via aerial photography."
"I thought it was a good angle."
"Did he think it was a good angle?"
Johnny thought about Peter's face when he had worked through the aperture problem out loud, genuinely engaged with the technical question, not playing hard to get but simply more interested in the photographic physics than in the compliment underneath it. Not because he was dense. The question about whether it was a bit had come about thirty seconds later. He had heard the compliment. He had prioritized the photography problem.
"He's just got his own order of operations." Johnny crossed his arms, the defensiveness arriving before he could decide whether it was warranted. "That's not a problem. That's information."
Marcus looked skeptical. "You have two weeks to get a yes."
"I don't need two weeks."
"You couldn't get it in one evening at a gala."
"He was working." Johnny helped himself to the last chocolate-covered strawberry on the tray, and Marcus watched him take it with the expression of a man who had been outmaneuvered in a small way he could not quite name. "I'll get it. Give me a week."
He meant it the way he meant most things he said with that particular weight: completely, and with very little plan behind it, which had historically been the right ratio for him.
He just needed to find Peter Parker when Peter Parker was not working.
He was beginning to suspect that the window for that was narrower than it looked.
* * *
The subway home took forty-two minutes, and Peter spent them with his camera bag on his lap and his head against the window and the particular low-level internal noise of a night that had been too many things in succession.
He had the mugging photos. The ones on his phone, the ones the Bugle would actually want, taken from a fire escape two blocks from the Meridian after the police scanner on his watch had flagged it and he had made his exit from the event slightly earlier than planned. The mugger was web-wrapped and upside down on a lamppost in three of the shots, which was good, and the old woman had her bag back in four of them, which was better. Jameson would complain about the composition and run them anyway.
He also had a hundred or so photographs from the gala itself. Only about forty of them were worth anything. The chandelier through the chair legs. The woman in the red dress. A series from the window that he had not entirely planned, taken in the first twenty minutes before he had gotten into the rhythm of the event, and which included one frame he had not consciously decided to take.
He pulled it up on the LCD.
It was the eastern bank of windows from the inside, the skyline behind the glass going dark and luminous, and in the foreground, partially in frame, slightly out of focus in the way of something that had moved into the shot rather than been placed there: a shoulder and the side of a face and a hand holding a water glass, caught in three-quarter profile, looking at the city.
He had taken it automatically. He had not known he was going to take it until after he had.
He looked at it for a moment.
The thing about Johnny Storm was that he was recognizable. You could be completely indifferent to celebrity and still know that face from a hundred news cycles, from the coverage of the Latverian business last spring, from the documentary about the Negative Zone that Peter had watched twice for the extraterrestrial biology content and once just because it was good. The face in the photo was recognizable.
That wasn’t why Peter had taken the shot.
He had taken it because the expression was right. Not the performance of someone at a gala, not the face you wore for photographs or conversations or rooms full of people watching to see what you were going to do next. Just a person at a window looking at a city, with the unguarded quality of someone who had forgotten, for a moment, that looking was not the same as being seen.
Peter knew that look. He lived in that look. It was the look of being the person in the room who was watching and not being watched, which was something he was extremely practiced at and which, it turned out, also happened to Johnny Storm in the gaps between performing Johnny Storm.
He put the camera away.
The subway moved through the tunnel with its reliable rattling dark, and Peter thought about image stabilization and the problems of aerial photography and the question he had asked, is this a bit, and the answer that had come back: the third option is that I met you at the window an hour ago and you were the most interesting person I'd talked to tonight.
Peter was seventeen years old and had been Spider-Man for long enough that his threat assessment instincts ran independent of his conscious thoughts and arrived at conclusions before he had finished asking the question. The conclusion his threat assessment had arrived at, approximately thirty seconds into his second conversation with Johnny Storm, was: this is not a bit.
Which left the question of what it was instead, and Peter was very busy, and very tired, and had web fluid to synthesize before school tomorrow and a chemistry lab to finish and three Bugle photos to edit and a very specific reason why the complications of his life did not play well with the complications of other people's, and all of this was true and relevant and he knew it in full.
He also knew that I'll think about it was not no.
He had meant it to be no. It had come out as something else.
He opened his hand. The marker ink had smudged slightly at the edge of his palm but the number was still legible, and below it the small drawn wink, which was either charming or insufferable and he had not decided which.
He looked at it for a moment longer than he needed to, then closed his hand.
The train pulled into his stop. He got off. He walked the four blocks home in the December cold with the camera bag tight at his side and the city doing what it always did at this hour, its deep, indifferent, necessary work all around him, and he thought about how the chandelier had looked refracted in the floor and how the woman in the red dress had been laughing without knowing anyone could see and how the exposure through the chair legs had been almost right and how there was a photo on his camera of a shoulder and a water glass and a face looking at a city that he had not consciously decided to take.
He went upstairs. He checked his web-shooters. He made sure Aunt May's kettle was off.
He ultimately decided to not delete the photo.
He was very busy, and very tired, and he had not deleted the photo, and he told himself those two facts were unrelated and went to bed.
* * *
Tuesday nights belonged to Spider-Man.
This was not something Johnny had decided so much as something that had become true the way most true things became true: gradually, and then completely, without the moment of decision being available for review afterward. It had started as coincidence. Three Tuesdays in a row, different parts of the city, different problems, and Spider-Man arriving from one direction while Johnny came down from another, and the two of them working through whatever it was together in the easy, unplanned way of people who happened to think about problems the same way. Then it had become a pattern. Then it had become the thing where Johnny started Tuesday evenings with a particular kind of attention, the kind you applied when you were moving toward something specific.
He had not said anything about this. He was fairly confident Spider-Man had not said anything about it either. They had simply arrived at Tuesday.
Tonight Spidey was already on the Ansonia's roof when Johnny got there, sitting on the ledge with his legs over the side and a brown paper bag next to him that smelled of cumin and warm tortillas. The city was doing what it did at ten-thirty on a December Tuesday: moving with intent, the streets below still threaded with headlights, the residential windows lit and curtained, the occasional siren describing some distant emergency that was someone else's problem for now.
"You're late, flamebrain.” Peter didn’t turn.
"I was at a gala. I also told you to stop calling me that, Webs." Johnny frowned before landing beside him and let the flame bank down to the low warmth he kept in cold weather, heat pooling comfortably under his skin. "It had very good petit fours."
"What's a petit four?"
"A small cake that costs twelve dollars."
"I've been eating a burrito for four dollars." Peter patted the bag. "Got you one."
This was the thing. This was the specific, particular thing that Johnny could not explain to anyone who had not experienced it: Spider-Man had gotten him a four-dollar burrito from a cart three blocks away and held it warm in a bag for twenty minutes because Johnny ran hot and foil kept things warm near him longer than it had any right to. He had not announced this. He had not framed it as effort. He had just done it, the way he always just did the things that made the evening easier, the way the extra slice of pizza appeared without discussion on the third Tuesday.
Johnny sat down on the ledge and accepted the burrito.
They ate for a few minutes without talking, and the not-talking had the quality it always had between them: not empty but full of the city's sound, the hum of traffic and the distant water tower creaking in the wind and the specific New York silence that was made entirely of noise.
"How was the gala?" Peter asked it the way he asked most things, with a rhythm that made it clear he was actually listening rather than filling space.
"Loud. Tony Stark was poised. Someone gave a speech. I had sparkling water for ninety minutes."
"Sounds awful."
"It had moments." Johnny looked at the skyline. The Chrysler Building was doing the thing it did in winter where the cold made the air clean enough to see every rivet. "I might have done something dumb."
Peter did not respond immediately. He had a way of creating space in conversations by not filling it, which Johnny had noticed early on and which he appreciated because it meant he did not have to work against the current to get something out. He could just let it come.
"Took a dare."
"What kind?”
"To get a date. With someone specific."
A pause. "So your usual jack-assery?”
”Hey!”
“Okay okay, was it someone you knew?”
"Someone I talked to twice tonight."
"And you made a bet about it."
"My friend made the bet. I accepted the bet. There is a meaningful difference."
"Really?” Peter said incredulously.
"Philosophically, yes."
Peter looked out at the city. Something in his posture had the quality of listening that it sometimes had when he was following a thread rather than just hearing words. "What's she like?"
Johnny took a bite of the burrito. "It's actually a dude."
He thought about Peter on the ballroom floor with the camera, unbothered and flat on the polished marble among the formal shoes and chair legs, getting the shot because the shot was down there and he had decided to go after it. He thought about the way he had dropped Midtown High Gazette without any detectable embarrassment. He thought about the aperture problem worked through out loud with genuine interest while Johnny's flirtation evaporated unacknowledged around it. The question: is this a bit. The answer it had required.
"But he's different," Johnny said. Which was not the answer but was the true part of the answer, the part that he had access to.
"Different how? You say that about every new love interest.”
"Low blow. But he’s actually different this time!" He looked at the Chrysler Building. "You know how most people in rooms like that are doing the thing. The looking and being looked at thing. Figuring out where they are in the room."
"Sure."
"He wasn't doing the thing. He was just working." Johnny paused. "And then when I tried to talk to him he talked back, but like. Normally. Not, you know."
"Not like you're Johnny Storm?”
"Not like I'm Johnny Storm," he confirmed. "He knew who I was. It just didn't change anything."
Peter was quiet for a moment. Then: "That's the part that's interesting to you? You need higher standards."
"It's just different," Johnny said again, which was still not the full answer but was still true. "Usually I know what I'm doing when I talk to people. Like, I know what I'm working with. He was just. I don't know. I couldn't tell what it was landing as."
"Was that good or bad?"
Johnny thought about the way Peter had said I'll think about it in the tone of someone who had meant to say something else and found, at the last moment, that they meant this instead.
"Good. I think."
"But you still made it a dare."
"I made it a dare before I talked to him. The dare was already there."
"So the dare is separate from actually wanting to."
Johnny looked at Peter. Peter was looking at the city with the expression that was always partially masked and therefore readable only in the set of his shoulders, which were doing something between neutral and attentive.
"Yes," Johnny said. "They're separate."
"Then the dare is just decoration."
"Decoration for what?"
Peter picked a piece of tinfoil off the ledge and turned it in his fingers. "For something you were going to do anyway."
Johnny did not say anything for a moment. Below them a taxi made a sharp right and another one honked, and then both of them moved on.
"Maybe," he said.
Peter nodded once, the kind of nod that meant: that's what I thought.
They finished the burritos. The scanner on Peter's wrist picked up something at the west side, a break-in, and they both stood, and the city pulled them back into it. They worked together for two hours in the clean, efficient way of a partnership that had found its rhythm: Johnny flanking while Spidey webbed, Peter talking while Johnny held the perimeter. A mugger on 73rd who found a dead end. A car fire in a parking garage that required careful heat dispersal. A kid on a roof who had climbed up on a dare and discovered the dare had not included a plan for getting back down.
Peter handled the kid.
He was good at scared teenagers in a way that was specific and genuine, the kind of good that came from remembering what it felt like to be one. He crouched at the roof edge and talked the kid steady, voice even and slightly funny in the right proportions, and Johnny held altitude nearby and watched the kid's shoulders descend one inch at a time from somewhere near his ears.
When it was over and the kid had been sent home with a firm instruction to call his mother, they caught the air again.
"That's a skill."
Peter swung level with him. "What is?”
"The talking-people-down thing. You've got a whole method."
A slight pause settled over him. "It's not a method. It's just. You tell them it's going to be okay, and you say it in a way that means you know it's going to be okay, and then it usually is."
"But you have to believe it first."
"Yeah?”
"So you do believe it."
Peter was quiet for a beat. "Most of the time."
Johnny filed this in the section of his understanding of Spider-man that was full of inferences rather than disclosures, accumulated over months of Tuesdays, and said nothing about it. That was the Tuesday thing: you could say things and they stayed here, on the rooftops, in the cold air, and they did not have to go anywhere.
"You're going to look him up when you get home." Peter dropped it out of nowhere, easy and certain.
"What?"
"The dare guy. You're going to look him up."
Johnny almost said he wasn't, but that would have been a lie and they both would have known it. "Maybe. You seriously know me way too well."
"You talk with your heart on your sleeve."
"Can't argue with you there." Johnny's shoulders dropped a little. "He's just an interesting guy, okay? Not like anything permanent will happen."
Peter turned that over for a moment, looking at the middle distance. "Wouldn’t that be just leading him on?”
”Maybe? I’m sure he wouldn’t even like me for real anyway.”
Peter was quiet, staring at his burrito.
It was after a usual banter that they split at Fifty-Seventh Street, and Johnny flew north and home, the cold air cutting past him, the city laid out below in all its improbable luminous density. He landed on the Baxter Building roof and stood there for a moment in the post-flight quiet, his ears still full of wind, the warmth bleeding off his skin into the December dark.
Then he took out his phone and searched Peter Parker Midtown High.
One result. Science fair announcement, one blurry photo, dark hair and that focused-elsewhere expression. A byline on an article about solar panels. No social media on the first three pages.
Johnny looked at the photo. He looked at it for longer than made sense for what it was.
He thought about I'll think about it. He thought about the offer's open.
He put his phone away and went inside.
He thought about it twice more before he fell asleep.
* * *
Peter, on the subway, had not deleted the photo.
This was still true when he got home. Still true when he transferred his shots to his laptop at midnight, sitting at the small desk in his room with the city a quiet sound outside the window and Aunt May asleep down the hall. He moved through the gala photos file by file, sorting, flagging the ones worth processing, deleting the ones that were not. It was methodical work and he was good at it, the same way he was good at most things that rewarded patience and a clear eye.
He got to the window shot.
He looked at it for a moment. The shoulder. The profile. The hand on the water glass. The city outside the glass going dark and bright simultaneously.
He didn’t delete it. He moved it to a separate folder he labeled with the date and nothing else, the same folder where he put the chandelier shot and the woman in the red dress and the things he kept because he wanted them and not because they had a use.
With one final glance he closed the laptop.
He lay in the dark and thought about image stabilization and shutter speeds and a laugh that had come out without being decided, and the very particular feeling of being told you were the most interesting person in a room full of much more obvious candidates, and how he had not believed it immediately and had then found, against his usual instincts, that he believed it anyway.
Peter was busy anyway. He had a chemistry lab and web fluid to synthesize and a very specific set of reasons why other people's complications did not slot into his life without consequence.
I'll think about it, he had told him.
He was thinking about it before eventually deciding to go along with it. He stared at his phone for a moment and his palm and saved Johnny’s number, he’ll text him when he had the chance.
Peter closed his eyes. The city did its work outside his window, enormous and indifferent and full of light, and eventually he slept.