Archive of Our Own

The bus smelled like feet and old vinyl seats, and Harley Keener had his forehead pressed against the window, watching the city go by in grey smears of concrete and glass. He'd been on this bus for two hours. He had approximately negative amount of patience left.

"You nervous?" Abby Miller asked from the seat beside her, not because she cared, but because she was bored and he was the nearest thing resembling entertainment.

"No," Harley said.

"You're doing the thing with your leg."

He looked down. His knee was bouncing like a sewing machine needle. He stopped it out of pure spite.

"I'm not nervous," he said again, mostly to convince himself.

Behind him, Connor Riggs leaned forward between the seats, grinning the way he always grinned right before he said something Harley was going to want to punch him for. "Bet you're hoping Iron Man's gonna swoop down and personally escort you inside, huh, Keener? Roll out the red carpet? Maybe he'll finally remember your name this time."

"Shut up, Connor."

"I'm just saying. It's been, what, six years? Seven? And he still hasn't called. Hasn't texted. Hasn't sent so much as a thank-you card for damages to the illustrious Keener garage." Connor pressed a hand to his chest in mock sorrow. "Rude, honestly. After everything you did for him."

"I didn't do anything for him. He crashed into my garage and I gave him a granola bar and helped him fix his suit, and then he left."

"Right, right. The famous granola bar. I remember. You've told this story, oh, I don't know, four hundred times since the fourth grade."

"Because it happen."

"Sure it did." Connor sat back, satisfied, like he'd won something. Around him a few other kids snickered, not cruel exactly, more like the reflexive laughter of people who'd heard the same joke enough times that it had become furniture. Background noise. A bit they did because it was easy and Harley never quite managed not to react.

Mrs. Halloway, three rows up, half-turned in her seat. "Mr. Riggs, that's enough. Mr. Keener, settle down."

"I'm not doing anything," Harley said.

"You're getting that face."

"What face?"

"The face you get when you're about to argue that Tony Stark personally knows who you are." She said it without malice, exactly the way you'd correct a kid who still believed the tooth fairy left cash under the pillow , patient, a little exasperated, entirely certain she was right. "Harley, sweetheart, I know it's a good story. But we are guests at Stark Industries today, and I would love, I would love, to get through this trip without an incident."

"There's not going to be an incident."

"There was an incident at the aquarium."

"That octopus started it."

A ripple of laughter went down the bus. Harley slouched lower into his seat and turned back to the window, jaw tight. He was seventeen, not ten, and it had stopped being funny to him a long time ago. The way "Harley says Iron Man crashed in his backyard" had become one of those permanent labels that stuck to a person the way "kid who threw up at Six Flags" or "kid who cried during the fire drill" stuck to a person. Didn't matter how many years passed. Didn't matter that it was true. Somewhere along the way the truth of it had become irrelevant to whether people believed it, and that still needled at something in Harley's chest he'd never quite been able to name.

Because here was the thing nobody understood, the part he'd never bothered explaining because what was the point, it wasn't really about being believed, not exactly. It was that for one long, strange week when Harley was seven years old, he had been important to someone. Not in the way parents were important, obligated by blood to care whether you lived or died. Important the way it felt when someone chose you. Tony Stark, broken and bleeding and furious and scared in ways adults weren't supposed to be scared in front of kids, had looked at Harley like he was worth talking to. Had let him help. Had called him "mechanic" in that dry, assessing way that had made ten-year-old Harley feel ten feet tall.

And then he'd flown away, and Harley had gone back to being a kid in Rose Hill, Tennessee, whose father wasn't around and whose mother worked two jobs, and nobody, not one single soul, had believed him when he told them what happened, and after a while it had just seemed easier to stop telling anyone at all.

Except it kept following him. Kids didn't forget a good story just because you stopped repeating it.

Now, sixteen years old and on a school trip to Stark Industries headquarters for a science elective field trip that half his class had only signed up for because it got them out of two periods of actual class, Harley was fighting a low, persistent thrum of anxiety he refused to call by its name.

What if he doesn't remember me?

That was it. That was the whole ugly shape of it. Not "what if no one believes me", he'd stopped caring what Connor Riggs believed roughly four years ago. It was what if I finally get the chance to prove it and it turns out I was never as important to him as he was to me. What if Tony Stark, who ran a multi-billion-dollar company and saved the world with some regularity and had, according to the news, an actual son now, a kid he'd apparently adopted, some genius orphan from Queens who'd been photographed at three separate galas in the last year alone, what if that Tony Stark looked at grown-up Harley Keener and saw a stranger.

The bus hissed to a stop. Mrs. Halloway stood up at the front, clapping her hands twice like she was herding cattle.

"Alright, we are here! Everyone stays with a partner, everyone keeps their voices down inside, and nobody touches anything without asking first, are we clear? This is a privilege, people. Stark Industries does not have to let high schoolers wander their building, and I would like to be invited back next year, so let's be on our best behaviour."

Harley grabbed his backpack and shuffled off the bus with the rest of them, and when he stepped out into the cool shadow of the building, his neck craned all the way back before he could stop it.

Stark Tower, no, not Tower anymore, they'd renamed the whole complex years ago after the Avengers thing in Manhattan, this was Stark Industries headquarters proper, a gleaming spire of glass and steel that caught the afternoon light and threw it back silver, rose up so high it made his stomach do a slow, dizzy roll. Somewhere in there, presumably, was Tony Stark's office. Maybe Tony Stark himself, at this very moment, drinking coffee, blissfully unaware that a kid he'd once called "mechanic" was standing on the sidewalk fifty stories below trying not to have a full-blown panic attack about whether he'd be recognized.

"Wow," said Abby, beside him, sounding genuinely awed for the first time all day. "Okay. Okay, that's actually really cool."

"Yeah," Harley said. His voice came out steadier than he felt.

Connor jogged up on his other side, craning his neck too, temporarily forgetting to be a jerk in the face of sheer architecture. "You think we'll see him? Iron Man?"

"I don't know, Connor."

"I heard he doesn't really come to the public floors anymore. I heard he's basically a hermit now, like Bruce Wayne."

"That's an insane comparison, he's not Batman."

"I heard he's got like six labs and he just lives in them."

"You heard that from where?"

"The internet, obviously." Connor said this like it settled the matter permanently, and Harley didn't have the energy to argue.

They filed through the revolving glass doors into a lobby so large it swallowed sound, ceilings that vaulted up three stories, a floor so polished Harley could see the ghost of his own sneakers in it. There was a wall of screens behind the front desk cycling through Stark Industries logos and clean corporate footage, clean energy initiatives, disaster relief drones, some kind of prosthetics program, and beneath all of it, quiet and constant, the low electric hum of a building that was, on some fundamental level, alive.

"Whoa," Abby said again.

"You're gonna wear that word out," Harley told her, but honestly, he got it. It was a lot.

Mrs. Halloway herded them into a rough clump near the front desk, doing a headcount by pointing at kids like she was afraid one of them might have already been lost to the building's sheer scale. "Okay okay, everyone's here. Good. we're just going to check in, get our visitor badges, and then someone from the company is going to take us on the tour."

"Someone from the company," Connor repeated, unimpressed. "Bet it's some random intern."

It was not, in fact, a random intern.

Harley knew this the second the elevator at the far end of the lobby chimed open and a voice, young, a little too loud for the size of the room, carrying that particular strained enthusiasm of someone who'd clearly rehearsed this, called out, "Rose Hill High, right? Hi, sorry, I'm a little behind schedule, there was a thing with a...never mind, it's not important, hi!"

The kid who came striding across the lobby toward them could not have been older than sixteen or seventeen. He was slightly built with dark brown hair, dressed in a button-down that had clearly been ironed by someone with more patience than he currently possessed, sleeves shoved up to his elbows, an lanyard bouncing against his chest with a badge that read P. PARKER-STARK, in a font too whimsical to have been officially sanctioned.

Perched on his nose was a pair of sleek, dark-framed glasses that didn't look quite like ordinary glasses, there was a faint shimmer to the lenses, like they were doing something more than correcting vision, a soft blue light flickering at the edge of the frame every few seconds like a heartbeat.

The entire class went absolutely, instantly silent.

"Oh my god," Abby whispered, grabbing Harley's arm so hard he nearly dropped his backpack. "Oh my god, that's Peter Stark."

"Parker-Stark," someone corrected in an urgent whisper, like the distinction mattered enormously in this specific moment.

"That's the son. Oh my god, he's giving the tour, he's actually giving the tour-"

Mrs. Halloway, to her credit, recovered her composure faster than any of her students. She stepped forward with the bright, slightly too-eager smile she usually reserved for school board visits. "Mr. Parker-Stark! What an honour, we didn't realize. I mean, we're thrilled to have you."

"Please, God, just Peter is fine," the kid said, running a hand through his curls in a way that suggested this happened to him constantly and he had never once figured out the correct response to it. "'Mr. Parker-Stark' makes me sound like I'm about to read someone's will. Which, no offense, but you're the teacher, right? Your name please?"

"Halloway. Cynthia Halloway."

"Ms. Halloway, hi, sorry, I do this every time, I front-load introductions and it gets weird." He turned to the class at large, hands shoved into his pockets, and Harley watched thirty kids who five minutes ago had been complaining about the bus ride now stand at a kind of unconscious attention, like he was a substitute teacher who happened to also be famous. "So, hi, everyone. Welcome to Stark Industries. I'm going to be your tour guide today, which, full disclosure, is a job I have because my dad thinks it's character-building for me to interact with 'people my own age' instead of, quote, 'talking exclusively to robots, a princess from Wakanda and a bunch of adults,' that's a whole thing, don't worry about it. Anyway! Before we start, I have to hand out badges, because apparently that's a fire code thing and not just corporate paranoia, even though I've personally been in this building since I was fourteen without one and nobody's ever-"

"Peter." A voice crackled faintly from somewhere near his ear. Harley realized after a beat it was coming from the glasses themselves, a soft, dry, distinctly feminine tone. "You are currently three minutes and forty seconds into a tangent. Mr. Stark has asked me to remind you that tangents exceeding four minutes result in a five-dollar deduction from your allowance."

"E.D.I.T.H., I do not have an allowance, I have a salary, we've had this conversation-"

"He has also asked me to remind you that you still owe him twelve dollars from the incident with the drone and the pigeon."

"That was ages ago, why do you two keep a running tab-"

The entire class had gone from silent to visibly delighted, and a low ripple of laughter went through them. Peter seemed to register, belatedly, that he had an audience for this, and his ears went faintly pink.

"Right. Sorry. Badges." He clapped his hands together and gestured them toward the front desk, where a stack of laminated visitor passes sat waiting, printed the night before with each student's name in tidy block letters. "One at a time, I'll call your name, you grab your badge, we clip it somewhere visible, and then we go have a genuinely great time, I promise, this building has a floor with a literal rainforest in it, it's not just, like, cubicles and sad fluorescent lighting."

He started working through the stack, calling names, handing out badges with a little flourish each time like he was dealing cards. "Abigail Miller, hi, Abigail. Connor Riggs, nice, dude, love the shoes. Jasmine Torres-"

The class shuffled forward one by one, collecting their badges, most of them stealing glances at Peter's face like they were trying to memorize it for later, for texts to friends who weren't lucky enough to be on this particular field trip. Harley hung back near the rear of the group, badge anxiety momentarily eclipsed by the much larger anxiety currently sitting in his chest like a stone, because somewhere in this building, maybe on the very next floor, was Tony Stark, and Harley still had absolutely no idea if any of this was going to matter.

"Harley Keener," Peter called out, reaching the last few badges in the stack, and then he stopped.

He stopped so completely, badge halfway lifted off the stack, eyes fixed on the name printed across it, that Mrs. Halloway actually took a half-step forward like she thought something was wrong.

"Sorry," Peter said, distant, still staring at the badge. "Sorry, is there a Harley Keener here? Like, an actual-" His head came up, scanning the clump of students with an intensity that made several of them straighten reflexively, hopeful it was them. "Which one of you is Harley Keener?"

Harley's stomach dropped somewhere around his shoes. "That's...that's me."

Peter's whole face did something complicated and fast, surprise, then a flicker of something that looked almost like disbelief, then a grin that broke open so wide and so genuine it looked like it physically hurt his face to contain it. "Wait. Wait, no way. No way. You're...okay, this is either the coolest coincidence in the history of coincidences or my dad set this whole thing up and didn't tell me, which, frankly, would be very on-brand"

"I'm sorry," Harley said, "what?"

"You're the Harley Keener? Tennessee? Garage? Iron Man's mark forty-two just, like, falls out of the sky and crash-lands right into your backyard and you build him a whole suit and used a Potato gun to help him fight the Mandarin"

The lobby went dead quiet.

Harley heard, very distinctly, Connor Riggs say, "...what."

"and then you basically saved his life, and he wouldn't shut up about you for, like, years, he kept a photo of your garage on his phone for the longest time, he still tells the story at dinner parties when he's had two drinks, my dad, Tony Stark, talks about you constantly, and I always thought it was kind of a legend, like an urban myth he told to make himself sound cooler at Christmas, and you're just" Peter gestured, a little helplessly, at Harley's entire existence. "You're real. You're standing right here. In my lobby. Holding a badge with your actual name on it."

Harley opened his mouth. Nothing came out.

Behind him, he heard Abby whisper, "Oh my god," in a completely different tone than she'd used it five minutes ago.

"What?." Connor's voice, quieter now, almost stunned. "He's telling the truth? This whole time he was-"

"I mean, obviously," Peter said, glancing over like this should've been self-evident. "Why, did people not believe him? That's...okay, that's genuinely wild to me, because my dad has literally shown me the security footage from that day, there's a whole clip of Harley here handing him a granola bar and being extremely unimpressed by the fact that Iron Man was standing in his garage, it's one of my favourite things he's ever shown me"

"There's footage?" Harley said, weakly.

"There's so much footage. FRIDAY, Dad's AI recorded basically everything, and half the reason he kept it was because, I mean, no offense to present company, but you were kind of a genuinely funny seven-year-old? You called him an idiot to his face within like the first ten minutes."

"He was an idiot," Harley said, automatic, before his brain fully caught up with the fact that he was defending an insult he'd levelled at Tony Stark six years ago to Tony Stark's actual son, in the middle of a crowded lobby, with his entire class staring at him.

Peter laughed. A real laugh, sharp and delighted, the kind that seemed to catch him off guard. "Okay, you're exactly like he described you. Dude, this is genuinely so cool, I've been hearing about you since I was, like, thirteen, I used to think you were basically fictional, like a bedtime story he told to make a point about being nice to strangers even when it's inconvenient"

Mrs. Halloway, meanwhile, had the expression of a woman watching her entire understanding of a student get quietly rewritten in real time. "I'm... I'm sorry, are you saying that Harley's story about Iron Man was-"

"True?" Peter said. "Yeah. A hundred percent. Why, did you think he made it up?"

"I-" Mrs. Halloway looked, for one brief, satisfying second, genuinely flustered. "We had...there was some scepticism, given the scale of the claim-"

"That tracks, honestly, it does sound insane out of context," Peter allowed, generous about it in a way that somehow made it worse for everyone who'd spent years mocking Harley for exactly this. "But no, it's real, there's video, my dad talks about it constantly, he actually wanted to send a car for the Keener garage repair bill and Harley's mom wouldn't take the money, which, again, exactly the kind of detail that made me think it had to be true, because nobody makes up a detail that boring and specific."

Harley became aware, distantly, of Connor Riggs staring at him with an expression he had genuinely never seen on Connor's face before in the entire history of knowing him. It might have been called awe. It was deeply, deeply satisfying, and Harley filed the moment away to treasure later, privately, probably for the rest of his life.

"Anyway," Peter said, clapping Harley's badge into his hand with the kind of enthusiasm usually reserved for handing someone a trophy, "huge honor, genuinely, I've wanted to meet you for years, my dad's gonna lose his mind when he finds out you're actually here. Okay, badges, everyone, let's, right, we still have a tour to do, come on, this way, elevators are through here"

He turned and started walking backward, still talking, waving them forward, and the class, bewildered, recalibrated, suddenly viewing Harley Keener through an entirely new lens, followed after him in a loose, murmuring clump.

Abby fell into step beside Harley, staring at him like she'd never seen him before. "You've been telling the truth this whole time."

"Yeah," Harley said. "That was, uh. That was the general idea, yes."

"I called you a liar in the sixth grade."

"You called me a liar last week, Abby."

"I'm going to need you to accept my apology retroactively for all of it."

"Noted," Harley said, and found, somewhat to his own surprise, that he was smiling.

❁ ≖≖✿❁ ≖≖ ❁

The elevator ride up was, by Harley's estimation, the single most surreal six minutes of his entire life, and he'd once had a robot with a laser attached to its arm hover a foot from his face in his own backyard, so that was saying something.

Peter stood near the front of the group, one hand braced against the rail, the other tapping idly against his thigh, glasses catching the overhead light in intermittent blue flickers.

"E.D.I.T.H., pull the security clip. The garage one. Tennessee, seven years back, tag: Keener."

"Which version," the voice in the glasses said dryly. "The one where Mr. Stark says, quote, 'this kid's smarter than half my engineering department,' or the one where you replayed it forty separate times last winter."

Peter's ears went pink again. "That- okay, either, doesn't matter, just...later, not now, I'm working."

"Copy."

Harley leaned toward him, unable to help himself. "You've watched it forty times?"

"That number is not accurate, E.D.I.T.H. is exaggerating for comedic effect"

"Records indicate forty-one, as of last Tuesday."

"E.D.I.T.H."

"I am simply relaying accurate data, Peter."

"You are relaying it at maximum embarrassment," Peter muttered, but there was no real heat in it, just the low, familiar exasperation of someone who'd clearly had this exact argument many times before and lost every time. He glanced sideways at Harley, and something in his expression shifted a little more open, a little less performative. "It's a good clip, okay. Sue me. You were a genuinely funny kid."

"I feel like I should be worried that a stranger has watched forty-one hours of me being seven."

"Forty-one viewings, not hours, it's like four minutes long, don't make it weirder than it already"

"Forty-two," E.D.I.T.H. corrected. "You just paused it in your peripheral vision as a comparison point."

"E.D.I.T.H., I am going to throw you into the Hudson."

"You have said this before. I remain un thrown."

The elevator doors opened onto a wide, sunlit floor lined with glass-walled labs, and the class spilled out, immediately distracted by the sheer scale of everything, robotic arms moving in slow, precise arcs behind protective glass, a wall of monitors tracking something that looked like weather patterns, a floor that seemed to hum faintly under their sneakers.

Harley hung back a half-step, watching Peter watch the class scatter toward the glass, and found himself asking, quieter, "Is she always like that? The- the glasses?"

"E.D.I.T.H.? Yeah, pretty much constantly. She used to belong to my dad, well, technically, she's kind of an evolved version of an old project, but the personality's mostly just... absorbed from being around us for years. Sarcastic. Merciless. Frankly, I think she does it on purpose because she knows I can't turn her off without Dad's override code, and he refuses to give it to me because, and I'm quoting directly 'character is built through mild digital humiliation, bambino.'"

"Bambino," Harley repeated.

Peter's whole face went a shade pinker. "It's a thing. He does the accent, sometimes, when he's feeling, it's a whole bit, don't ask, it started as a joke and it just... never stopped."

"That's the most embarrassing thing I've ever heard," Harley said, delighted.

"You don't even know," Peter said. "He does it in front of board meetings. I have had actual investors witness my father call me bambino while patting my head like I'm a golden retriever. I have a doctorate-track internship and I still get patted on the head in front of Forbes photographers."

"I like him already."

"Everyone likes him already, that's the problem, he's basically un-hate-able, it's infuriating." Peter said this with such genuine, long-suffering fondness that it landed less like a complaint and more like a confession.

They fell into step together as the group moved toward the next lab, and Harley became aware, with a small, warm jolt of surprise, that he was having fun. Actual fun. Not the performative kind he did around Connor and the others, the constant vigilant management of what he let show — this felt easier, somehow, talking to a kid who'd apparently spent years hearing stories about him before they'd even met.

"So he really talks about me," Harley said, testing the words, still not entirely sure he believed them even having heard the security-footage evidence.

"Constantly," Peter said, without hesitation. "I'm serious. When I first got...when Dad and I first started, y'know, figuring out the whole 'teenager' thing, back before the adoption was even finalized, he used to tell me the Tennessee story like it was some kind of parable. Like a lesson he was trying to teach me without actually saying the lesson part out loud, because God forbid Tony Stark just say the emotional thing directly." He rolled his eyes, but it was soft, affectionate. "He'd be like, 'you know, there was this kid, brilliant kid, fixed my suit with parts from his garage, didn't ask for anything, didn't even seem impressed, actually kind of rude about it'"

"I was ten, and he just crashed a giant metal suit into my yard"

"'and he just helped anyway, because that's what you do.' And then he'd look at me really intensely like I was supposed to extract some deep moral truth from it, and I'd be like, Dad, are you telling me to be nicer to strangers, or are you telling me a bedtime story about a kid named Harley, I genuinely cannot tell, and he'd just go, 'yes,' and refuse to elaborate further."

Harley found he was laughing, really laughing, the kind that came up from somewhere low in his chest, unplanned. "That is exactly the most Tony Stark answer I've ever heard, and I've only met him once."

"Right? It's like arguing with a Magic 8-Ball that also happens to run a Fortune 500 company."

Behind them, close enough to overhear, Abby had drifted nearer, listening with unmasked interest, and a few other kids had slowed their pace too, apparently deciding that trailing Peter and Harley's conversation was more interesting than the robotic arm exhibit. Connor, notably, had gone quiet, hovering at the edge of the group with an expression Harley didn't fully know how to parse yet something caught between chastened and fascinated.

"Okay," Peter said, raising his voice slightly to address the group at large as they reached the next set of doors, "this floor is Prosthetics and Regenerative Tech, which, fair warning, is the floor most likely to make you cry, in a good way, we've got some genuinely incredible stuff happening in here, there's a woman on this floor who's basically single-handedly revolutionizing. E.D.I.T.H., can you cue the intro reel," he added, quieter, mostly to the glasses, and a soft chime answered him.

The tour moved on. It was, by any measure, a genuinely fascinating hour. Peter clearly knew the building inside and out, clearly loved it in the specific, proprietary way of someone who'd grown up half-living in it, and he narrated each floor with a mix of genuine technical knowledge and irreverent commentary that kept the entire class laughing more than Harley suspected any official Stark Industries tour script had ever intended.

But underneath the jokes, underneath the sarcasm, Harley started noticing something else, the way Peter's hands moved when he explained something he really cared about, quick and precise, sketching shapes in the air; the way he'd occasionally go quiet and intensely focused when a piece of tech genuinely impressed him, forgetting for a second that he was supposed to be performing tour guide; the way, every so often, his shoulders would tuck in slightly when the class got too loud with excitement around him, like he wasn't entirely used to being the centre of that much attention despite clearly having grown up in its orbit.

Shy, Harley thought, surprised. Underneath all the mile-a-minute sarcasm, underneath the Stark-honed wit, there was something genuinely shy in there. It made the whole thing feel more real, somehow. Less like meeting a celebrity, more like meeting a person.

"You okay?" Harley asked quietly, when the class had scattered momentarily toward a display of experimental limb prosthetics, leaving the two of them briefly alone near the doorway.

Peter blinked, glancing over. "What, me? Yeah. Why?"

"You get kind of, I don't know. Twitchy. When everyone's staring at you at once."

Peter's mouth twisted, a little wry, a little embarrassed. "Yeah. It's...I don't love the attention thing, honestly. Dad's basically been famous my whole life at this point, and I got kind of roped into it when he adopted me, and I never really...I don't know, I never asked for the 'Stark' half of it, it just sort of happened, and now I've access to a whole empire and thirty kids taking pictures of me like I'm at the zoo." He shrugged, self-deprecating. "I'm working on it. Dad helps, in his own extremely Tony Stark way, which mostly involves him telling me I'm allowed to tell people to back off and then immediately modelling the exact opposite behaviour himself in every press conference he's ever done."

"That tracks," Harley said.

"Doesn't it just." Peter glanced at him, something curious and warm in the look. "You don't seem that impressed, though. By any of this."

Harley considered the question seriously, because it deserved a serious answer. "I mean, it's incredible. Genuinely. This building, what you're doing, all of it. But I already met the guy who owns it while he was bleeding out of a hole in a metal suit in my backyard, eating cold pizza off my kitchen counter and complaining about his arc reactor. Kind of resets your baseline for what counts as impressive."

Peter laughed, that same sharp, delighted, off-guard laugh from the elevator. "Okay, that's fair. That's genuinely fair. I forget sometimes that you've got, like, prior clearance on the mystique."

"I've got prior clearance on the mystique," Harley agreed, deadpan, and Peter laughed again, harder, and something settled between them in that moment, easy, unforced, the specific alchemy of two people who'd just discovered they liked each other's sense of humour and weren't going to waste time pretending otherwise.

"Okay," Peter said, wiping his eyes, still grinning. "Okay, I like you. This is...you're gonna be a problem, I can already tell."

"Takes one to know one."

"Truly. Come on, mechanic." The nickname came out easy, unthinking and something in Harley's chest went warm and strange hearing it in a new voice. "We've got four more floors and a rainforest to get through."

❁ ≖≖✿❁ ≖≖ ❁

The rainforest floor, it turned out, was not a metaphor. It was an actual, honest-to-God two-story atrium with live foliage, a humidity system, and Harley was fairly sure, though he couldn't confirm it, an actual small waterfall running down one glass wall, all part of some biotech research initiative Peter explained with visible pride even as he insisted, three separate times, that he "personally had nothing to do with the actual science, I just really like that it exists."

The class had scattered through it, snapping photos, Mrs. Halloway trailing after them with the harried energy of someone trying to prevent thirty teenagers from touching things they weren't supposed to touch in a room full of very expensive plants. Connor had drifted close to Peter twice now, clearly working up the nerve to say something, and finally managed it while they stood near the base of the small waterfall.

"Hey, so, Peter, right? Can I ask you something?"

"Depends what it is," Peter said, not unkindly, but with the wary flatness of someone who'd learned to brace for a certain kind of question.

"Is it true your dad's, like actually crazy rich? Like, top-ten-in-the-world rich?"

Peter's expression didn't change much, but Harley, standing close enough to notice, caught the small, tired flicker behind his eyes, the look of someone who'd answered this exact question roughly four thousand times and never once found it more interesting the four-thousand-and-first time.

"I mean, yeah," Peter said. "I don't really think about it that way, honestly. It's more like, it's just the house I live in. Weird thing to be impressed by, when you're actually inside it."

"That's insane, though. Like, genuinely insane. You just get to, what, do whatever you want?"

"Not really," Peter said, and something in his tone sharpened, just slightly. "I go to school. I have homework. I have a curfew, which, believe me, is enforced with genuinely alarming precision given that my dad can apparently track my phone from orbit. I have chores. I do this" he gestured vaguely at the tour "because Dad thinks it's good for me, not because it's fun, though it has been today, actually, mostly because of him" he tipped his head toward Harley, and Connor's eyes flicked over, reassessing, "but generally it's a lot of standing around answering variations of the question you just asked."

Connor had the grace to look slightly abashed. "Sorry. That's, yeah. That's probably annoying."

"It's fine," Peter said, and softened, visibly making the effort to be generous about it. "I get it. It's a lot to process all at once. I just, I don't know, I'd rather people ask me about literally anything else. Ask me what I actually do here. Ask me about the tech. Ask me if I've ever set off the sprinkler system by accident in this exact room." A beat. "Which I have. Twice."

"Wait, how?"

"That's a story for if you ask nicely," Peter said, and the tension of the moment broke, and Connor actually laughed, and just like that the dynamic in the group had shifted again, less "meeting a celebrity," more "meeting a person who happened to have a wildly unusual life."

Harley watched this happen with a small, private satisfaction. He recognized the shape of what Peter was doing, deflecting the money question without embarrassing Connor for asking it, redirecting attention somewhere he could actually stand to have it — and he recognized, too, that it was a skill you only developed if you'd had a whole lot of practice being looked at for the wrong reasons.

"You're good at that," Harley said quietly, once Connor had wandered off toward the waterfall.

"At what?"

"Making people feel dumb for asking the money question without actually making them feel dumb."

Peter shrugged, but he looked pleased. "Lot of practice. You get real good, real fast, at redirecting a conversation when the alternative is explaining your entire tax bracket to a stranger at a birthday party."

"Rough life."

"The absolute worst," Peter agreed, entirely deadpan, and they both laughed, and Harley thought, not for the first time in the last hour, that he liked this kid. Genuinely, easily liked him, in a way that had nothing to do with who his father was.

❁ ≖≖✿❁ ≖≖ ❁

They lost the rest of the group's attention somewhere around the fifth floor, in the best possible way. Mrs. Halloway had gotten deeply invested in a conversation with one of the actual Stark Industries scientists about renewable energy grants for public schools, and most of the class had drifted toward a hands-on display where you could design and 3D-print a small robotic hand in about ten minutes, which had proven an excellent distraction for thirty sugar-crashed teenagers.

Peter steered Harley gently toward a quieter side hallway, glancing back once to make sure nobody was watching too closely. "Okay, come here for a sec, I want to show you something, and also I want to talk to you without an audience, because that many people staring at both of us at once is doing something bad to my nervous system."

"Lead the way."

They ducked into a smaller lab, mostly dark, a single workbench lit by a low overhead light, scattered with half-disassembled tech Harley immediately, instinctively wanted to touch, a drone missing half its casing, a tangle of wiring that looked suspiciously like it belonged to something much larger.

"This is my actual lab," Peter said, a little sheepish, flicking on another light. "Well, one of them. Dad and I share space on the big floors, but this one's mine, mostly. He lets me have it because otherwise I apparently, quote, 'take over his workbench and leave it covered in web fluid,' which" He stopped.

Harley looked at him. "Web fluid."

"...Yeah."

"Why would you have web fluid on a workbench."

Peter was quiet for a second, weighing something, and Harley watched an entire internal negotiation happen behind his eyes, quick, visible, the kind of decision someone made once and then had to keep re-making every time the moment came up.

"Okay," Peter said finally. "I'm gonna tell you something, and you have to swear, actually swear, not just say the word, that you're not gonna freak out or tell anyone, because it's a whole legal thing, there's an NDA my dad's lawyer made me have literally everyone sign at one point, present company somehow excluded because you weren't previously in my life, but I'm telling you anyway because" he exhaled, "because I think you're gonna get it. And because my dad talked about you like you were basically already family before I ever met you, and that has to count for something."

Harley's pulse ticked up. "Okay. I swear."

"I'm Spider Man."

The words landed in the quiet lab and just sat there for a second, and Harley became aware that he was staring, mouth slightly open, running the sentence back through his head to make sure he'd heard it right.

"You're Spider Man. The Spider Man. From the news. The guy who swings around Queens"

"Webs, yeah, the web fluid, that's what that was about, it's a formula I designed myself, actually, I'm very proud of it, it's got this great tensile strength-to-weight ratio"

"You're Spider-Man," Harley said again, because his brain seemed to require several repetitions before it would fully process the information.

"I mean, yeah. Have been for a few years now. Dad knows, obviously, he's known since basically the beginning, he actually helped me build the suit, well, several suits, there's been an evolution, don't get him started on the evolution, he'll talk for forty-five minutes about spider-leg attachments"

"You get bitten by an actual spider?"

"Genetically modified, but yes, technically, an actual spider, it's a whole story, I was on a school trip, ironic, I know"

Harley started laughing. He couldn't help it, it burst out of him, half disbelief, half sheer delight, and Peter watched him with a slightly nervous, hopeful expression, clearly gauging whether this was a good laugh or a bad one.

"This is insane," Harley managed. "This is genuinely the most insane thing anyone has ever told me, and I have personal history with an actual Avenger."

"Is that a good insane or a bad insane?"

"Good. Extremely good. This is the best thing that's happened to me all year." Harley shook his head, grinning so wide his face hurt. "Okay, wait, so when you're doing the tour thing, and you're being all sarcastic and shy at the same time, that's just you, that's not, like, a secret identity thing"

"Oh, no, that's just regular me, actually, being Spider-Man doesn't really change my personality that much, if anything I get more sarcastic in the suit because nobody can see my face making the face that goes with the sarcasm"

"Do you actually stick to walls?"

"Yes."

"Can you show me?"

Peter's mouth curled into something sly, something that suddenly looked a lot more like Tony Stark than Harley had noticed before. "You want a demonstration."

"I want a full demonstration. I've earned this. I helped fix a suit of armour with a Potato gun when I was ten, I think the universe owes me a spider guy walking on a ceiling."

"That's actually a pretty solid argument." Peter considered it, glanced toward the door, clearly calculating risk versus reward, and then shrugged, already peeling his shoes off. "Okay. But if my dad finds out I did this during an official Stark Industries tour, you're taking at least sixty percent of the blame."

"Deal."

Peter climbed the wall.

It was, Harley would think later, one of the single coolest things he had ever witnessed with his own two eyes better, honestly, than the memory of Iron Man's faceplate cracking open in his garage, because this felt personal in a way that memory never quite had. Peter went up the smooth vertical surface like gravity had simply forgotten to apply to him, fingers and socked feet finding purchase on a wall that had no business offering any, until he was hanging upside down from the ceiling, arms crossed, grinning down at Harley with the specific, smug satisfaction of someone who knew exactly how cool he currently looked.

"Okay," Harley said, staring up at him, "that's okay, that's genuinely one of the coolest things I've ever seen, and I want you to understand that I do not hand that compliment out lightly."

"I'm aware. I could feel the weight of it." Peter dropped, landing in a smooth crouch that looked entirely too practiced for a normal human spine, and straightened up, brushing invisible dust off his shirt with theatrical nonchalance. "So, We're best friends now, right? That's...I feel like that's the natural conclusion of everything that just happened in the last two minutes."

Harley grinned. "Yeah. I think that's exactly the natural conclusion."

"Cool. Great. Excellent." Peter stuck his hand out, and Harley shook it, and something about the gesture, a little formal, a little goofy, entirely sincere, settled a warmth into Harley's chest that he hadn't quite expected to feel on a Tuesday afternoon field trip. "Okay, we should probably get back before Ms. Halloway starts a search party, but this was, genuinely, the best surprise I've had in a long time. I've been hearing about you for years and you're exactly as cool as advertised."

"Right back at you, Spider Man."

Peter winced, glancing toward the door. "Please don't say that out loud in the hallway."

"Sorry. Right back at you"

"Better."

They headed back toward the group, and Harley felt, for the first time in longer than he wanted to admit, like the strange, half-forgotten week from his childhood had finally connected up to something real and present and ongoing, not a story people didn't believe, not a memory slowly calcifying into myth, but an actual thread leading somewhere, right now, in this building, toward whatever came next.

❁ ≖≖✿❁ ≖≖ ❁

What came next, as it turned out, was Tony Stark.

They found the rest of the class gathered on the seventh floor, in the middle of what had apparently been billed as the "grand finale" of the tour, a viewing platform overlooking the central R&D floor, all glass and open air, dozens of engineers visible below working at long tables scattered with half-built prototypes. Mrs. Halloway was deep in conversation with a Stark Industries publicist about scheduling a return visit for next year's class, practically glowing with the prestige of it, and the rest of the students had spread out along the railing, phones out, snapping photos of the view.

Peter had just started explaining the floor's layout, something about modular workstations and open-collaboration design philosophy, when a voice cut across the room, warm and dry and instantly, viscerally familiar in a way that made every hair on Harley's arms stand up.

"You know, for a kid who complains constantly about doing tours, you sure do a lot of standing around narrating things to strangers."

Harley turned.

Tony Stark stood in the doorway of the platform, hands in his pockets, dressed down in a way Harley hadn't expected. Dark jeans, rolled shirt sleeves, no suit, no press-ready polish, just a man who looked, if Harley was being honest, older than the memory Harley had carried around for years, a little more silver at the temples, a few more lines at the corners of his eyes, but unmistakably, entirely himself.

The whole class froze. Somewhere behind Harley, he heard Abby make a small, strangled noise.

"Dad," Peter said, and the shift in his voice was instant and total. The sarcastic, performative tour-guide cadence dropping away into something younger, warmer, unguarded. "You said you were in meetings till five."

"Meeting ended early. Also I got a very specific, very urgent notification from a certain glasses-based AI that made me cut it short." Tony's eyes moved past Peter, scanning the clump of students along the railing, and Harley felt his heart lodge somewhere up near his throat, the old fear rushing back in with a force that nearly knocked the wind out of him what if he doesn't remember, what if seven years and a hundred crises have worn the memory smooth, what if-

Tony's gaze landed on him and stopped.

For one endless second, nothing happened. Tony's expression didn't change, didn't do anything at all, and Harley felt the floor drop out from under him, felt the old, familiar shame start crawling up the back of his neck-

And then Tony Stark's whole face broke open.

"No," Tony said, softly, disbelieving, taking a step forward like his body had moved before his brain finished processing it. "No way. No way, that's- Harley? Harley Keener?"

Something in Harley's chest cracked open, warm and overwhelming, six years of doubt collapsing all at once. "Hey, Mr. Stark."

"'Mr. Stark,'" Tony repeated, crossing the platform in a few quick strides, and before Harley had fully registered what was happening, Tony had grabbed him by the shoulders, holding him at arm's length, staring at him with an expression somewhere between disbelief and open, unguarded delight. "Kid, look at you. You're...how tall are you now, Jesus, you were up to my knee last time I saw you, what happened?"

"Growth spurt," Harley managed, laughing, a little wrecked with relief. "It's been, um. It's been a while."

"It's been seven years, is what it's been, years and you never once called, I gave your mother my direct line, did she not-"

She said it felt wrong to bother you when you had, y'know. A universe to save."

Tony's face did something complicated. Half laugh, half something softer and sadder underneath it, gone again almost before Harley could catch it. "That's such a Keener thing to say, I want you to know that. That's exactly the kind of infuriatingly considerate thing your mother would think, while I'm sitting there checking my phone every six months like an idiot wondering if the number even still worked."

"You checked?"

"Of course I checked, what do you think I am, some kind of monster who hands a woman his direct line and then just forgets about it? I'm offended you'd even ask." Tony's hands were still on his shoulders, gripping like he needed the physical confirmation that Harley was actually there, actually real, actually not some elaborate hallucination brought on by exhaustion and bad coffee. "You have no idea. You have genuinely no idea how many times I brought you up. Ask him." He jerked his head toward Peter without looking away from Harley. "Ask the kid. Go on. Ask him how many times I've told the garage story."

"I already told him," Peter said, from a few feet away, arms crossed, watching the whole reunion with an expression that was trying very hard to look casually unaffected and failing completely. "Forty-two viewings on the security footage alone, according to E.D.I.T.H."

"That number is a gross exaggeration and also, somehow, not the point right now, bambino, can we circle back to your data-collection habits later"

"You're the one who showed it to me the first time," Peter said. "I just kept it in the folder. That's not a crime."

"It's a little bit of a crime."

"It's really not."

Harley, still slightly dazed, still riding the aftershock of six years of anxious waiting finally resolving into this — into Tony Stark's hands actually on his shoulders, into the specific, undeniable warmth in the man's eyes, became aware, distantly, that the entire viewing platform had gone completely silent behind him. He turned his head, just slightly, and found his whole class staring.

Not the ordinary staring, either. Not the low-grade astonishment they'd been directing at Peter for the last two hours. This was different — slack-jawed, frozen, the specific look of thirty teenagers watching several years of settled social consensus collapse in real time.

Mrs. Halloway had one hand pressed flat against her own chest, like she was checking to make sure her heart was still beating correctly. "Mr. Stark," she said, faintly. "I — I didn't realize you and Harley—"

"Didn't realize?" Tony turned toward her, releasing Harley's shoulders but not stepping away, one arm settling loosely across the back of Harley's shoulders instead like he had every intention of keeping him within arm's reach for the foreseeable future. "You're his teacher, right? Halloway?"

"Yes, sir, Cynthia Halloway, I teach-"

"Cynthia." Tony said the name with the specific, deliberate courtesy of a man who was about to be extremely pleasant while also making a point, and Harley recognized the tone immediately. He'd heard a smaller-scale version of it in his own garage seven years ago, right before Tony had said something devastatingly on-target to a very confused ten-year-old. "This kid." He nodded at Harley. "Fixed the housing on my repulsor with parts pulled out of a busted washing machine motor, at ten years old, while his mom was at work and there was an actual lunatic three states over trying to locate me. Then he built a Potato gun because he was worried I'd get jumped before I could fly back out. You want to tell me you had scepticism about that story?

Mrs. Halloway's face had gone a deep, unmistakable red. "I...there was no way for us to verify-"

"There's footage," Peter offered helpfully, from the side, entirely unhelpfully, given the tone.

"There is extensive footage," Tony agreed. "E.D.I.T.H., pull it up on the main display, would you, let's do a little retroactive vindication"

"On it," said the dry voice from Peter's glasses. "For the record, this will be viewing number forty-three."

"Nobody asked you," Peter muttered.

The wall panel at the far end of the platform flickered and resolved into a live feed, a slightly grainy, timestamped clip, seven years old, shot from the low, distorted angle of a suit's internal camera. Harley's stomach did a strange lurching thing, seeing it. There he was: seven years old, missing a tooth, hair sticking up in the back the way it always had in those years, standing in the doorway of the Keener garage in an oversized T-shirt, staring up at a cracked, sparking suit of armour with an expression of profound, unimpressed scepticism.

"You're Iron Man," ten-year-old Harley said, in the recording, flat as a pancake.

"I am," said Tony's voice, from inside the suit, distorted and pained.

"You don't look like it."

"I got shot down by a helicopter, kid, forgive me if I'm not looking my best."

A beat. Then: "You want a granola bar or not?"

The entire class erupted.

It wasn't cruel laughter, Harley registered that immediately, with a strange, disorienting rush of relief. It was the good kind, delighted, disbelieving, the sound of thirty people getting handed proof of something they should have believed years ago and simultaneously realizing exactly how badly they'd misjudged the situation.

"Oh my god," Abby said, hand over her mouth. "Oh my god, you actually, you weren't even impressed, you were just standing there like-"

"I was ten, I didn't know what impressed was supposed to look like," present-day Harley said, though he was grinning too hard to sound remotely defensive about it.

"He wasn't impressed for the entire week, either," Tony put in, delighted, clearly enjoying himself immensely now that the footage had done half his vindication work for him. "Kid handed me a granola bar like he was doing me a personal favour, made me sit on an upturned bucket while he rewired half my chest plate, and when I tried to give him a compliment he told me, and I quote, 'you talk a lot for someone who almost died.' Seven years old. I nearly hired him on the spot, legal guardianship issues notwithstanding."

"You didn't nearly hire me," Harley said, laughing, "you offered me a job in, like, twelve years, when I told you I wanted to fix suits for a living."

"And I meant it! I've held that offer open this whole time, it's been gathering interest, there might be a signing bonus at this point"

Connor Riggs, standing near the back of the group, had gone very quiet, staring at the footage still looping on the screen, the wide-eyed TENn-year-old on it, unmistakably, undeniably Harley Keener, and when Harley glanced over, Connor actually met his eyes and had the grace to look, for what might have been the first time in four years of friendship-adjacent tormenting, genuinely, thoroughly abashed.

"I owe you an apology," Connor said, loud enough for most of the group to hear. "Like, a real one. I've been making fun of you for that story since the fourth grade."

"You have," Harley agreed, not unkindly, savouring the moment slightly more than was strictly necessary.

"I'm sorry. Genuinely. That's rough, dude. Years of that."

"It's fine," Harley said, and found, to his own faint surprise, that he mostly meant it, the sting of it had been worn down over time by something more complicated than simple forgiveness, closer to the specific, quiet satisfaction of finally, finally being right in front of an audience. "You can make it up to me by never bringing up the aquarium incident again."

"Deal. Never happened. Erased from history."

"The octopus started it," Mrs. Halloway murmured, almost to herself, and it took Harley a second to realize she was actually, genuinely trying to smooth things over on his behalf, in her own belated, flustered way, and something in his chest loosened another few degrees at that.

Tony, meanwhile, had turned his attention fully toward Peter, looking him over with the particular scrutiny of a parent checking whether their kid had behaved himself during an unsupervised period. "So, How'd the tour go? Anybody catch on fire? Anyone try to lick the prosthetics display again, because I want to remind you that happened once, and it was not, in fact, my fault"

"Nobody licked anything, Dad, and also that story isn't even about me, that was a completely different school group two years ago, I don't understand why you keep attributing it to my tours specifically"

"It's a good bit, bambino, let me have it."

"It's slander."

"It's color," Tony corrected, entirely unbothered, and reached out to ruffle Peter's curls with the casual, proprietary affection of someone who'd done it approximately ten thousand times and had zero intention of stopping now that Peter was visibly too old and too dignified for it.

"Dad." Peter ducked, half-heartedly, clearly resigned to losing this particular battle the way he'd apparently lost it every single time before. "There are literally thirty witnesses right now, do you have to—"

"I absolutely have to, it's tradition, it's practically load-bearing at this point"

"E.D.I.T.H., is there a legal precedent for filing a restraining order against your own father"

"There is not," E.D.I.T.H. said serenely, "though I have, on file, at least eleven prior instances of you threatening to research one."

"Thank you, E.D.I.T.H., extremely helpful, as always"

"You're welcome, Peter."

Tony grinned, unrepentant, and finally released Peter's hair, though his hand lingered briefly on the kid's shoulder in a way that made something in Harley's chest go soft and a little wistful — the particular, unguarded ease of it, the total lack of performance in a man who otherwise performed for a living. "He do good? Tour-wise?"

"He did great," Harley said, and meant it. "Best tour guide I've ever had. Set a very high bar. Ruined every future school trip for me, honestly."

"Good," Tony said, and there was something in the way he said it, quick, quiet, almost private, that told Harley this mattered to him more than the offhand tone suggested. "Good. He works hard at it. Doesn't love the crowd part, but he works hard anyway."

Peter's ears had gone faintly pink again. "Dad."

"What, I'm complimenting you, this is a compliment, take the compliment—"

"You're doing the thing where you compliment me in front of strangers specifically because you know it embarrasses me more than if you just said it privately"

"That is a scurrilous accusation and also, incidentally, completely true," Tony said, without a trace of shame, and Peter groaned and dropped his face into his hands, and Harley, watching the two of them, the easy, well-worn rhythm of it, the total, bone-deep familiarity, felt a small, unexpected pang, something that wasn't quite envy but lived in the same neighbourhood.

He didn't have this. Didn't have a dad who ruffled his hair in front of strangers, who kept an old security clip in a folder because it made him happy, who called him something as ridiculous and tender as bambino just to watch him squirm. His own dad had been gone a long time, in the way that mattered, and his mom worked two jobs and loved him fiercely but tiredly, and there had never really been room in that equation for this specific kind of easy, embarrassing, wall-to-wall affection.

But watching it now, close enough to feel the edges of it, wasn't painful exactly. It was more like standing near a fire on a cold day. warm just from proximity, even if it wasn't burning for him specifically.

Tony seemed to catch something in his expression, because his gaze flicked back to Harley and softened, and his hand came up to rest briefly, warmly, on the back of Harley's neck, the same gesture, Harley realized, he'd just used on Peter, extended without hesitation to include him too.

"How's your mom?" Tony asked, quieter now, some of the performance dropping away.

"She's good. Tired, mostly, but good. Still at the diner, picked up some extra shifts last year when" Harley stopped himself, unsure how much detail was appropriate for a reunion currently being witnessed by his entire class, and shrugged instead. "She's good. She'll probably cry when I tell her I actually saw you."

"Tell her I want to see her too, next time you're anywhere near New York, I mean that, I'm not just saying it as a thing people say"

"I know," Harley said, and was startled to find he actually did know it, could feel the sincerity of it the same way he'd felt it six years ago in his own garage, unadorned and immediate. "I'll tell her."

"Good." Tony squeezed the back of his neck once, gently, and let go, seeming to physically shake off some of the sentiment before it could get too heavy, the same defense mechanism Harley remembered from years ago, the quick pivot away from anything that threatened to sit too long in silence. "Okay. this whole thing is genuinely one of the best surprises I've had in months, and I want to actually do something about it, not just stand here getting emotional in front of thirty teenagers who are gonna go home and tell their parents that Tony Stark cried"

"You didn't cry," Peter said.

"I was building to it, Peter, don't rush the process"

"E.D.I.T.H., for the record, did Dad cry?"

"Threshold moisture detected but not classified as full tears," E.D.I.T.H. reported, with what could only be described as clinical relish. "I would estimate we were approximately ninety seconds from confirmed crying had the conversation continued along its previous trajectory."

"E.D.I.T.H., you're fired."

"You have said this before as well. I remain, similarly, un-fired."

The class laughed again, looser now, more comfortable, and Harley caught Mrs. Halloway wiping at her own eyes with the back of her wrist, trying to be subtle about it and failing completely, and found he didn't even feel smug about it, just quietly, deeply satisfied, the kind of satisfaction that came from finally, finally being seen correctly after years of not being.

"Alright," Tony said, clapping his hands together, visibly gathering himself, "here's what's going to happen. This kid" a nod at Harley, "and I have a lot of catching up to do, and I'm not doing it in a five-minute window sandwiched between your bus schedule and whatever's next on the tour, so. Ms. Halloway. What's your itinerary look like for the rest of the afternoon?"

Mrs. Halloway blinked, visibly recalibrating from "overwhelmed" to "professionally responsible" in real time. "The tour was scheduled to end in about twenty minutes, and then the bus back to the school for a three-forty departure"

"Perfect. You've got twenty minutes, I've got a kid I haven't seen in seven years, math works out fine. Peter, take everybody down to the café on four, my treat, tell them to put it on my card, get whatever they want, I don't care about the sugar content, live a little"

"You say that every time and then you complain when I actually order the thing with three espresso shots"

"That's a me problem, not a you problem, go, be generous with the pastries"

Peter rolled his eyes, but there was no real resistance in it, and he turned to address the class with the easy, practiced cadence he'd used all afternoon. "Okay, you heard the man. Café's this way, everything's free, do not tell my dad I let anyone order the seventeen-dollar smoothie, he'll bring it up for the rest of my life"

"I absolutely will," Tony called after them.

"I'm aware!"

The class trooped off after Peter, buzzing with a new, giddy energy. Free food, a celebrity tour guide, the residual thrill of watching their classmate get vindicated in front of everyone and Mrs. Halloway lingered a moment longer, hovering near Tony with the particular anxious deference of a public school teacher standing in front of a billionaire.

"Mr. Stark, I just want to say, I'm sorry, if we made Harley feel"

"Don't apologize to me," Tony said, not unkindly, "apologize to him. I'm not the one who spent six years getting side-eyed at the lunch table."

"Right. Of course." She turned to Harley, and there was something almost sheepish in it now, genuinely humbled in a way that felt different from the performative flattery she'd shown Peter earlier. "Harley, I really am sorry. I should have, well, I should have believed you a long time ago. That's on me."

"It's okay," Harley said, and this time he really did mean it, lighter now, unburdened. "I get it. It sounds crazy out of context."

"It sounds crazy in context too, frankly," Mrs. Halloway said, with a small, rueful laugh, glancing toward the security footage still frozen on the display. "But I'm glad it's true. I'm glad you get this. You deserve it."

She excused herself to catch up with the group, and then it was just Tony and Harley, alone on the platform, the city spread out gold and hazy through the glass behind them.

"Hey," Tony said, quieter now, some of the showmanship falling away entirely, just a man looking at a kid he'd genuinely missed. "I mean it. It's really good to see you. I've thought about you more than you probably know."

"Yeah," Harley said, throat suddenly tight. "Same. I mean, obviously not in the same way, you didn't crash into my garage, but. Yeah. I've thought about it a lot too. Wondered if you" He stopped, embarrassed, but Tony just waited, patient in a way Harley didn't remember him being particularly good at, six years ago. "Wondered if you'd remember me. That's dumb, I know it's dumb, you've probably got a hundred people"

"Nobody like you," Tony said, immediate, certain. "I want to be really clear about that. I've met a lot of people, kid. Genuinely, an exhausting number of people. Nobody handed me a granola bar and called me an idiot in the same conversation. That doesn't happen twice. You made an impression that stuck, and it stuck for a good reason, and it's not the kind of thing that gets crowded out by, I don't know, whatever else happens in six years. Trust me on this one."

Harley nodded, not quite trusting his own voice, and Tony seemed to sense it, and mercifully changed tack, glancing toward the elevator with a faint, crooked grin. "Come on. Let's go rescue my kid from thirty teenagers and a free café before he racks up a bill that requires a board meeting to explain."

❁ ≖≖✿❁ ≖≖ ❁

The café on the fourth floor was chaos in the most delightful sense. Students crowded around a long marble counter, Peter fielding drink orders with the harried, good-natured energy of someone who'd clearly done this exact thing several times before and had a system for it, E.D.I.T.H. occasionally chiming in with dry corrections ("that is, in fact, a seventeen-dollar smoothie, Peter, I did warn you") that made him wince and mutter under his breath.

Harley slid onto a stool at the end of the counter while Tony went to intercept an actual Stark Industries barista mid-panic over the sudden influx of complicated teenage drink orders, and Peter dropped into the seat beside him a moment later, looking faintly wrung out.

"So," Peter said. "That was a lot."

"That was a lot," Harley agreed.

"You good?"

"Yeah. Yeah, I'm genuinely, I don't think I've felt this good in a while." Harley turned the words over, testing them, surprised by how true they felt. "It's weird. I spent so long being annoyed that nobody believed me, I kind of forgot the actual point was never really about being believed. It was about, I don't know. Whether it mattered. Whether I mattered, to him, past that one week."

"You clearly did," Peter said, quiet now, without any of the earlier performance in it. "For what it's worth, and I know I'm sort of a biased source here, given the whole 'have literally lived with the guy for years' thing, but my dad doesn't do the thing he did back there for just anybody. That hand on your neck, the eye contact, the actual, honest-to-God vulnerability. He's not great at that, generally. He does it for like four people. You're apparently one of them."

Harley felt something warm settle into his chest, steady and unshowy. "Thanks. For telling me that."

"Least I could do, given that I've been living off your legend for years without knowing you actually existed." Peter grinned, some of the sarcasm creeping back in, more comfortable now. "Speaking of, I feel like I should point out, you called Iron Man an idiot to his face at ten, and now you're just, like, extremely normal and well-adjusted about all of this?"

"Extremely normal is generous."

"You handled meeting a superhero's actual identity secret about ninety minutes ago with more grace than most adults, so I'm gonna go ahead and stand by 'extremely normal.'"

"Okay, fair." Harley considered him for a second. "So, hypothetically, if we're best friends now, which you declared unilaterally, no vote taken"

"Democracy's overrated, I run a tight ship"

"does that come with, like, obligations? Do I have to help you fight crime? Because I want to be upfront that my combat skills are limited to 'built a potato gun' and I don't think that scales."

"No obligations," Peter said, solemn. "Though if you ever want to help me troubleshoot web fluid viscosity, my door's open. Metaphorically. Also literally, actually, you should just come by the lab sometime, I have genuinely never had anyone my age to talk shop with who wasn't also secretly evaluating whether I was worth being friends with because of the last name."

"I already decided I liked you before I knew the last name mattered," Harley pointed out. "You told me about the security footage before you told me you were Spider Man. Priorities were established early."

"That's actually, yeah, that's true, and it's honestly the thing that made me trust you enough to tell you the other thing." Peter's expression went, for a moment, genuinely soft, stripped of the constant deflecting humour. "It's hard, you know. Finding people who aren't weird about it. Either the money thing or the other thing, once they know. You get treated like a superhero or a bank account, and it's rare that anyone just treats you like a person who happens to have both those things attached."

"I mean, for the record," Harley said, "I'm gonna be at least a little weird about the money thing, because you bought thirty teenagers free smoothies without blinking and that's objectively insane to me."

"Okay, fair, some weirdness is allowed. Reasonable amounts."

"But the spider thing, I don't know, man, I've got bigger context for weird. I met your dad while he had a hole in his suit and pizza sauce on his face."

"There was pizza sauce?"

"There was pizza sauce."

"I'm telling him you said that."

"He'll probably confirm it, he has zero shame."

"That's accurate, actually." Peter laughed, and then glanced toward the counter, where Tony had apparently commandeered the espresso machine himself and was in the process of making something with far too much foam while lecturing the barista on proper crema technique. "Okay, before he comes back and derails this, gimme your phone."

Harley handed it over, and Peter tapped through it with quick, practiced fingers, adding himself under a contact labelled, when Harley checked it a moment later, simply Peter (Spider-Man, but like, keep that part quiet), complete with a spider emoji and, for reasons Harley chose not to question, three separate exclamation points.

"Subtle," Harley said.

"I contain multitudes." Peter handed the phone back and held his own out expectantly. "Your turn. And I want full access — number, socials, everything, I need to be able to send you memes at inconvenient hours, that's basically the entry fee for best-friendship."

"Deal." Harley added himself under his own name, no theatrics, and then, after a second of consideration, added a small mechanic emoji next to it, because it felt right. "There. Now you're stuck with me."

"Good. Was hoping for that outcome." Peter checked the contact, grinned at the emoji, and pocketed his phone. "Okay, we're doing this properly. You're coming back. Not, like, in years. Soon. There's a lab bench with your name on it, metaphorically, and also I want you to meet Ned, my other best friend, who is going to lose his entire mind when I tell him I met the actual garage kid, he's heard the story almost as many times as I have"

"There's a Ned too?"

"There's a Ned. He's great. He's gonna want to talk to you about the tech specs of the taser rig, fair warning, he's very thorough."

"I can respect thorough."

"Good, because he will not stop until he gets a full schematic, verbal is not sufficient for Ned"

"Bambino," Tony's voice cut in, arriving at the counter with two coffees, one of which he set down in front of Harley without asking, "you're monopolizing my long-lost mechanic, share the wealth."

"I'm establishing a friendship, Dad, this is important groundwork"

"Groundwork can happen on a schedule that doesn't exclude me, I have exactly as much claim to this reunion as you do, arguably more, I was there for the original event"

"You were there bleeding on his kitchen floor, that's not really a flex"

"It's absolutely a flex, it's an origin story, there's a difference." Tony slid onto the stool on Harley's other side, effectively bracketing him between himself and Peter, and there was something so unselfconsciously happy in the gesture, claiming territory, physically inserting himself back into Harley's orbit — that Harley felt his chest go warm and a little overwhelmed all over again.

"So," Tony said, wrapping both hands around his coffee, looking between the two of them with an expression of frank, undisguised satisfaction. "This is nice. This is genuinely, unreasonably nice. My two favorite disasters, in the same room, apparently already conspiring."

"We're not conspiring," Peter said.

"You exchanged numbers under the table like you were planning a heist, I have eyes, bambino."

"That's just called being friends, Dad, it's a normal thing that happens between people-"

"I'm aware of the concept, I invented several of the underlying social technologies"

"You did not invent friendship"

"I invented the group chat feature on three separate platforms, which is basically the same thing, don't argue with me on this"

Harley, watching the two of them volley back and forth with the easy, well-worn rhythm of people who'd had a thousand variations of this exact argument, found himself laughing so hard his ribs ached, and when Tony glanced over and caught the look on his face, something in the older man's expression gentled, unguarded.

"You're staying for dinner," Tony said. It wasn't quite a question.

"I've got a bus," Harley said, though there wasn't much resistance in it.

"The bus can leave without you, I'll have someone drive you back to Tennessee myself if it comes to that, I have a jet, this is genuinely not a logistical problem for me—"

"You are not commandeering a class field trip bus, Dad"

"I'm not commandeering anything, I'm offering a superior transportation alternative"

"Mr. Stark," Harley said, laughing, "I really do have to get back on the bus. My mom's expecting me home."

Tony's face shifted, some genuine consideration replacing the theatrics. "Right. Right, of course. Okay, compromise. You go home today, like a responsible person with a mother who worries, and then you come back. Soon. Not seven-years soon. Actual soon. I'll have someone reach out about flights, we'll figure out logistics, you and your mom both, I want to actually see her too, this isn't just a courtesy thing."

"You really mean that."

"I really, genuinely mean that. I don't extend transportation offers lightly, ask anyone." Tony's eyes flicked toward Peter, something warm and unspoken passing between them. "Also, this one's gonna need someone his own age to talk to who isn't impressed by the last name, and apparently you've got a head start on that particular skill, so really, you're doing me a favour. Consider it mutually beneficial."

"I like him because he's funny, not because I feel sorry for the poor rich kid," Harley said, deadpan, and Peter made a triumphant noise.

"See, this is what I mean, Dad, this is exactly the energy I've been missing"

"I'm thrilled for you both, truly, this is a beautiful thing," Tony said, entirely unbothered, sipping his coffee. "Just remember who introduced you. Not weird at all."

"Everything's weird until it's normal," Tony said, sagely, and stole a sip of Harley's untouched coffee with the casual entitlement of someone who considered it a father-adjacent right, and Harley decided, watching the whole absurd, warm, impossible scene unfold around him, that he did not mind even slightly being adopted, however loosely, however unofficially, into whatever this was.

❁ ≖≖✿❁ ≖≖ ❁

The bus ride back to Rose Hill was, by every measurable standard, the opposite of the ride out.

Harley had a window seat again, same bus, same cracked vinyl, same low hum of tired teenagers decompressing after a long day — but this time Abby leaned over almost immediately, practically vibrating.

"Okay, I need the full story. All of it. From the beginning. I want details."

"I've told you the story a hundred times."

"You told me the before version. I want the after version. What was he like? Was he exactly like on TV? Did he actually call Peter 'bambino' the whole time, because I'm still not over that"

"He called him bambino no less than six times in the space of ninety minutes," Harley confirmed. "It's apparently a whole tradition."

"That's the most adorable thing I've ever heard, and I want to hear every single second of it, don't leave anything out"

Connor, a few rows up, turned around again, but the energy behind it had changed completely, no smugness in it now, just genuine, unguarded curiosity. "Hey, so, are you actually gonna go back? Like, hang out with them? For real?"

"Yeah," Harley said, and felt the truth of it settle warm in his chest, solid in a way that seven years of doubt had never quite managed to be. "Yeah, I think I actually am."

"That's insane. You're gonna be, like, friends with an actual Stark."

"I'm gonna be friends with Peter," Harley corrected, gently, because it mattered, because he'd spent the whole afternoon watching a kid work hard to be seen as more than a surname and it felt important to honor that, even in casual conversation on a bus. "The Stark part's just, like, incidental."

Connor considered this, and then, unexpectedly, nodded. "Yeah. Okay. That's fair." A beat. "Still insane, though."

"Still a little insane," Harley agreed, and let himself grin at the window, at the city sliding away behind them, gold light fading into early evening.

His phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out, and found a text waiting from the contact labeled, absurdly, Peter (Spider-Man, but like, keep that part quiet):

made it home yet? E.D.I.T.H. says your bus is currently 4.7 miles from the Lincoln Tunnel, which is either impressive or deeply unsettling that she knows that

also dad wants me to tell you, and I'm quoting directly, "tell the kid the job offer's still open, interest included, no rush." he has been saying this to literally everyone in the building for the last hour, I think he might actually mean it

also also. good tour today?

Harley smiled down at the screen, thumb hovering for a second before he typed back.

best tour I've ever had. 10/10. would recommend to a friend

tell your dad the offer's noted. also tell him bambino is the single most embarrassing thing I've ever witnessed and I say that with love

also. thanks for today. genuinely. it's been a weird six years and this fixed a lot of it

The reply came almost instantly, quick enough that Harley suspected Peter had been sitting there watching the screen, waiting.

don't get sentimental on me, mechanic, I'll cry and then E.D.I.T.H. will have documentation and I'll never hear the end of it

but yeah. me too. glad you're real. glad the story was true. glad you exist, honestly, this has been a genuinely great day and I don't say that a lot about tour duty

text me when you're home safe. and tell your mom my dad says hi, and that the offer to visit is real, and that he means it even though he says everything with the same amount of dramatic flair so it's hard to tell sometimes

see you soon, harley keener. for real this time. no more six years.

Harley typed back a single line, and meant every word of it:

no more seven years. promise.

He pocketed the phone, leaned his head against the cool glass of the window, and watched Manhattan fade slowly into the dark behind them, carrying with him, for the first time in longer than he could remember, the settled, solid certainty of having been exactly where he was supposed to be.

Behind him, Mrs. Halloway's voice drifted up the aisle, gentler than usual. "Everyone doing alright back there? Good trip?"

A ragged, tired chorus of yeahs answered her, and somewhere in the middle of it, quiet but unmistakable, Harley heard his own voice join in, easy and unguarded and, for once, entirely without doubt.

"Yeah," he said. "Really good trip."

The bus rolled on through the gathering dark, carrying him home, and in his pocket his phone buzzed once more, a final text, sent, according to the timestamp, at the exact same moment somewhere high up in a glass tower he was already looking forward to seeing again:

E.D.I.T.H. says to tell you she's added you to her contact list. she says this is, and I quote, "an honor rarely extended." take the honor, mechanic. she doesn't do that for just anybody.

Harley laughed out loud, alone in his seat, and typed back a single word before pocketing the phone for good:

noted.

The End