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Peter Parker had rehearsed the sentence in his head approximately four hundred times since Tuesday, and he still couldn't get it to come out sounding casual.
Hey, so, it's my turn to host decathlon practice this weekend, and, um, funny story, I live with Tony Stark and Pepper Potts because they adopted me eight months ago and I never mentioned it because I panicked and then it became A Whole Thing, so, cool, see you Saturday, bring snacks.
Yeah. No. That wasn't happening.
"You're doing the face again," Ned said, not looking up from his lunch tray.
"What face?"
"The 'I am spiralling internally but my mouth is a calm, flat line' face. You've had it since Mr. Harrington announced the rotation."
MJ, without glancing up from her book, added, "It's Tuesday. You've had it since Tuesday. It's a very committed face."
Peter dropped his head onto the cafeteria table with a soft thunk. "I don't want to do it."
"You don't want your friends to come to your actual house," MJ said, "because your actual house happens to be a heavily fortified, thirty-eight-thousand-square-foot compound owned by a man who has been photographed more times than most celebrities, and you're worried this might come up in conversation."
"When you say it like that it sounds insane."
"It is insane," Ned said cheerfully. "It's been insane since May. We've just gotten used to it."
Ned and MJ had known for months. Ned because Peter had leaked it within forty-eight hours of the adoption being finalized and told him everything in a breathless, borderline-hyperventilating monologue in the boys' bathroom, and MJ because she'd apparently known since the second week of school and simply hadn't said anything, waiting, as she put it, "for the theatrics to catch up to the facts."
"It's not that I don't trust everyone," Peter said. "It's that once people know, it's not just 'Peter's parents adopted him,' it's 'Peter's parents are Tony Stark and Pepper Potts,' and suddenly I'm not Peter, I'm the Stark kid, and everyone acts weird, and-"
"Peter." MJ finally looked up. Her expression was unbearably patient, the kind reserved for toddlers and men explaining things she already understood better than they did. "You have two options. Host practice somewhere else and lie about why, badly, for the rest of the semester. Or host it at your house and let five people find out a thing that is going to become public knowledge eventually anyway."
"There's a third option."
"What's that?"
"Move to Canada."
"Bold, but your dad would probably just buy Canada to stay close to you," Ned pointed out, entirely too pleased with himself.
Peter groaned and put his head back down.
❁ ≖≖✿❁ ≖≖ ❁
He brought it up to Tony that night, hovering in the doorway of the lab with the specific posture of someone about to ask for either money or a later curfew.
"Whatever it is," Tony said without turning from the holographic schematic he was frowning at, "the answer's yes, but I want it on record that I said yes before I heard the question, because that's the kind of dad I am. Generous. Reckless, even."
"It's not. I don't need anything. It's my turn to host decathlon practice. This weekend."
That got Tony's attention. He spun the chair around slowly, expression carefully neutral in the way that meant he was already thrilled and trying not to show it too fast, like a man approaching a skittish deer. "Here? At the house?"
"That's how hosting works, yeah."
"Your little nerd squad. In my house."
"They're not- okay, they're a little bit nerds, but so am I"
"I love your little nerd squad already and I haven't met them," Tony said, standing up so fast his chair rolled backward into the desk. "Pep! PEPPER! Peter's bringing people over!"
"I heard!" Pepper's voice floated down from somewhere upstairs, followed shortly by Pepper herself, appearing in the doorway with the specific alertness of a woman who had heard the word people in this house and immediately assumed the worst. "People like, decathlon people? Or people like the last time you said 'people' and it turned out to be an entire police department?"
"Decathlon people," Peter confirmed. "Just normal, regular practice. It's my turn."
"That's wonderful, sweetheart." Pepper's whole face softened in the way it did whenever Peter did something ordinary and teenager-shaped, like she was collecting these moments in some private ledger. Then her eyes narrowed, ever so slightly. "Do they know?"
Peter didn't need her to elaborate on know what. "No. And I don't want a whole thing. Can we please just be a normal family for like three hours? No press, no assistants walking through going 'Mr. Stark needs you,' no anything. Just normal."
Tony placed a hand over his heart, wounded. "I am extremely normal."
"You have a car that flies."
"That's a feature, not a personality trait."
"Dad."
"Fine. Fine! We'll be normal. Boring, even. I'll wear a cardigan." Tony paused. "Do normal dads wear cardigans? I feel like that's a normal-dad garment."
"Just don't scare them," Peter said. "Please. And don't make it weird. I want to tell them myself. In my own time. Which is not this weekend, technically, they're just going to sort of... figure it out."
Pepper reached out and tucked a strand of hair back from Peter's forehead, the gesture so casually maternal that it still, eight months in, made something in Peter's chest go soft and a little overwhelmed every single time. "We'll behave," she promised. "Won't we, Tony."
"Depends on what 'behave' means, technically speaking, in this context, as a legal-"
"Tony."
"We'll behave," Tony said. "Mostly. Ish."
Peter decided that was the best he was going to get, and went to bed that night with the specific dread of a boy who knew, deep down, that "mostly ish" from Tony Stark had approximately a fourteen percent success rate.
❁ ≖≖✿❁ ≖≖ ❁
Saturday arrived with cruel efficiency.
Peter stood at the end of the long private drive at 11 AM, arms crossed, doing his best impression of a boy waiting for an Uber and not a boy waiting to detonate his own carefully constructed double life. Ned and MJ had come early. Ned to help emotionally support, MJ to watch the chaos unfold with the quiet satisfaction of someone who'd bought a very good seat to a show months in advance.
"You look like you're about to give a hostage statement," Ned said.
"I feel like I'm about to give a hostage statement."
"You'll be fine," MJ said, not looking up from her book, which she had somehow brought specifically for this occasion, as if she'd anticipated needing something to read during the inevitable meltdown. "Worst case, everyone finds out your dad is a billionaire superhero and it's a mildly awkward Tuesday. Best case, it's Saturday and there are probably good snacks."
"There are always good snacks," Peter muttered. "That's not the issue."
The rideshare pulled up. Doors opened. Flash Thompson climbed out first, already talking.
"so I told the driver, I said, listen, man, I've been to Stark events, okay, I know how this city works, I've literally shaken Tony Stark's hand, so don't try to take the scenic route and pad the fare, and he just- Parker." Flash blinked, taking in the property for the first time. The long winding drive, the manicured hedges, the glass-and-steel structure looming in the distance that looked less like a house and more like a very tasteful spaceship that had crash-landed and decided to stay. "Uh. This your neighbourhood?"
"This is his house, Flash," MJ said, deadpan.
Flash laughed. It was a good laugh, confident, the kind of laugh a boy does when he is one hundred percent sure he's about to be proven right. "No way. Parker doesn't live here. This is like a...this is a compound. This is where a tech billionaire lives."
"Yeah," Ned said, popping a piece of gum into his mouth with the casual air of a man detonating a very small, very satisfying bomb. "It is."
Cindy Moon, climbing out behind Flash with Abraham and Charles crowding the doorway of the car, took one look at the house and went very quiet. Sally, last out, actually gasped, a real, audible gasp, hand pressed to her chest like she was in a period drama.
"Peter," Cindy said slowly, "why does your house look like the opening shot of a documentary about Silicon Valley?"
"It's okay, so, funny story-"
"Is this a rental?" Abraham asked hopefully. "Are we filming something? Is this a prank? Charles, is this a prank, did you set this up?"
"I did not set this up," Charles said, sounding personally offended at the accusation. "I don't have the budget for this kind of prank."
Flash was still staring at the house, his mouth slightly open, some deep tectonic recalibration happening behind his eyes. "Parker," he said again, quieter this time, all the earlier bravado gone soft and confused. "This can't be your house."
"It's my house," Peter said, and something about actually saying the words out loud, finally, after eight months of dodging, felt strangely good. Terrifying. But good.
"Whose house was it before you lived here?"
"Nobody's. I mean, it's not like I inherited it." Peter took a breath. Ned gave him an encouraging nod, the exact expression of a man watching his best friend rip off a very large, very expensive Band-Aid. "I got adopted. Last year. By the people who own the house."
There was a pause. A genuinely impressive, cinematic pause, the kind that television directors dream about, where five teenagers simply stood on a gravel driveway processing information at wildly different speeds.
"Define," Sally said carefully, "the people who own the house."
Peter opened his mouth. Closed it. Rubbed the back of his neck.
"Just tell them," MJ said, already walking toward the front door, entirely unbothered. "It's faster than watching you do the thing with your hands."
"I don't do a thing with my-"
"You're doing it right now."
Peter dropped his hands to his sides. "Tony Stark and Pepper Potts," he said, all at once, like ripping off a bandage. "They adopted me. Last year. That's why. That's the whole thing. Please don't make it weird."
The silence that followed was not cinematic. It was total. Charles actually sat down on the hood of the rideshare car, which had not yet pulled away, prompting the driver to honk in mild alarm.
"I'm sorry," Abraham said, very slowly, like a man double-checking he'd heard correctly before committing to a reaction, "Tony Stark. The Tony Stark. Iron Man Tony Stark. That Tony Stark is your dad."
"...Yeah."
"AND PEPPER POTTS," Sally added, at a volume that suggested she had temporarily lost control of her own vocal cords. "CEO Pepper Potts?! The one on the cover of- the one who runs the entire company-"
"Also yeah."
Flash had not said anything in almost thirty seconds, which for Flash was a near-medical event. Finally, weakly, he managed: "I've met him. I met Tony Stark. At the Expo. I told you guys I met him."
"You shook his hand for four seconds in a crowd of two hundred people," MJ called back from the porch, not even turning around. "This is slightly different."
"HOW LONG HAVE YOU KNOWN?" Sally rounded on Ned, who held up both hands in the universal gesture of a man who has, in fact, known everything the entire time and would like to not be yelled at about it.
"Since it happened. I was sworn to secrecy. I'm very good at secrets, evidently, because you're all just now finding out and it's been almost a year."
"I've known since five months ago," MJ added, unlocking nothing, simply pushing open the unlocked front door like she owned the place, which, at this point, seemed like a reasonable assumption to make about her. "I do my research."
"How do you two look so calm," Cindy demanded, staring between Ned and MJ like they'd personally betrayed her by being emotionally regulated.
"Because we've had eight months to arrive at acceptance," Ned said. "You'll get there. Give it, I don't know, twenty minutes. Also there's a home theatre. That helps."
Peter, meanwhile, had gone the colour of a tomato that deeply regretted its own existence, and was steering the group up the front steps with both hands, muttering something about how they were supposed to be practicing for regionals, you guys, remember regionals, which nobody was listening to at all.
❁ ≖≖✿❁ ≖≖ ❁
If the exterior of the house had shattered everyone's understanding of Peter Parker as a person, his bedroom finished the job with brutal efficiency.
It wasn't just big, though it was big, easily the size of the entire downstairs of most of their houses combined, it was considered. One wall was floor-to-ceiling glass overlooking the grounds. Another was lined with shelving that held, in careful rotation, actual vintage comic books in acid-free sleeves, a scattering of half-disassembled electronics that looked like ongoing projects rather than décor, and a shockingly comprehensive LEGO collection that Abraham took one look at and made a small, wounded noise about.
There was a desk with three monitors and what appeared to be a small holographic display unit currently idle, throwing soft blue light against the ceiling. There was a bed that could have comfortably slept four people, made with hospital-corner precision that nobody who knew actual teenage Peter Parker could quite believe he'd achieved unassisted.
And on the opposite wall, half-hidden behind a hung jacket, was a small brass nameplate that read, with unmistakable Tony Stark humor: PETER'S LAIR. UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY WILL RESULT IN A VERY DISAPPOINTED LOOK FROM PEPPER, WHICH IS WORSE THAN ANY ALARM SYSTEM.
"Okay," Charles said, turning in a slow circle in the middle of the room like a man trying to physically absorb the full scope of what he was looking at. "Okay, so, question. Does your closet have, like, a secret passage. Because at this point I would not even be surprised."
"It doesn't," Peter said.
"It does," Ned said. "It leads to the lab. But we're not doing that today."
"NED."
"What, it's cool, they were gonna find out eventually"
"There's a lab passage," Sally said, sitting down hard on the edge of Peter's absurd bed like her legs had simply given out. "In your closet."
"It's for emergencies," Peter said weakly, which was not, strictly speaking, a lie, but also wasn't doing him any favours in the please act normal department.
Flash had wandered to the window and was staring out at the grounds with the thousand-yard stare of a man re-evaluating his entire personality. "I called you a loser for two years," he said quietly, mostly to himself. "You have a lab passage."
"You can still call me a loser," Peter offered. "I won't be offended. It's kind of a running bit at this point."
"I don't think I can anymore," Flash said. "I think something in me has broken."
"Great talk," MJ said, dropping her bag onto the floor with a thud and pulling out her decathlon binder like this was, in fact, an entirely ordinary Saturday. "Now can we practice? Regionals are in three weeks and half of you can't remember the difference between mitosis and meiosis, which, frankly, should concern you more than Peter's real estate situation."
That, at least, got everyone moving, reluctantly, still throwing wide-eyed glances around the room, but moving, settling onto the floor and the enormous bed and the window seat with binders and flashcards, the familiar rhythm of practice slowly, grudgingly reasserting itself over the residual shock.
They made it almost forty minutes before the door creaked open.
"Knock knock," Tony said, already halfway into the room, balancing a tray with the practiced ease of a man who did not, generally, carry his own trays, but had clearly decided this particular tray was worth the personal effort. Pepper followed behind him with a second tray and the specific, watchful expression of a woman monitoring her husband's behaviour in real time.
The room went, once again, dead silent.
"We come bearing snacks," Tony announced, setting the tray down on the desk with a flourish. It held an objectively absurd spread. A charcuterie board that had clearly not come from any grocery store, a bowl of some kind of homemade guacamole, three varieties of soda chilling in a small bucket of ice, and, bizarrely, a plate of what looked like handmade cannoli. "Studying requires sustenance. This is science. I read a thing."
"You didn't read a thing," Pepper said, setting her own tray, cookies, still warm, the smell hitting the room like a physical wave, down beside his. "You had FRIDAY read you a thing."
"Semantics."
Nobody in the room appeared capable of speech. Charles had frozen mid-flashcard. Sally's mouth was open. Cindy had gone very still in the specific way of someone trying to determine if she was, in fact, hallucinating.
"Hi," Pepper said warmly, into the silence, with the easy grace of a woman who had run boardroom negotiations with far scarier people than five stunned teenagers. "I'm Pepper. It's so nice to finally meet you all — Peter talks about decathlon constantly, I feel like I already know everyone's names."
"You-" Abraham started, then stopped, then tried again. "You're Pepper Potts."
"Guilty," Pepper said, smiling.
"And you're-" Sally turned to Tony, pointing, her finger actually shaking slightly. "You're Iron Man."
"I contain multitudes," Tony said. "Also I brought guac. Focus on the guac."
Peter had buried his face in his hands. "This is exactly the whole thing I asked you not to make it," he said, muffled, into his own palms.
"I'm not making it a thing! I brought snacks! Snack-bringing is a completely normal parental activity, ask any parent, they'll confirm, snacks are like ninety percent of the job"
"You flew in on a repulsor boot last week to bring me a forgotten lunch, Dad, you don't have a normal baseline-"
The room, which had already been thrown into chaos multiple times that afternoon, seemed to physically ripple at the word.
Dad.
Flash actually dropped his flashcards.
"Did he just-" Cindy whispered.
"He calls him Dad," Sally confirmed, in the reverent tone of someone confirming a rare astronomical event. "He just called Tony Stark Dad. Casually. Like it's nothing."
Tony, for his part, looked delighted, glowing in the specific way he only did around Peter, an expression none of his employees had ever been permitted to witness and would probably not believe existed if described to them.
"Come on, bambino, just once for my old heart"
"Oh my god." Peter's face went, if possible, redder. "Please don't."
"Bambino?" Charles repeated, delighted despite himself, some scientific part of his brain apparently deciding that if the world was going to be this insane, he might as well enjoy it.
"It means baby," MJ said helpfully as pepper took a seat on the window bench with the easy confidence of a woman perfectly at home amid academic chaos. "Tony's mother was Italian. He's been doing it since Peter moved in. It only gets worse from here, I should warn you."
"It does not get worse, it gets more affectionate, which is different"
"Tesoro," Tony said, apparently just to prove a point, reaching out to ruffle Peter's hair as he passed. "You want a soda? or are you still doing the thing where you pretend you don't like the orange kind."
"I don't pretend, I have genuinely evolved past liking the orange kind, it's called maturity, Dad"
"Sure, Bambi."
"Bambi?!" This, from Sally, genuinely, deeply delighted. She actually set down her binder. "There's a Bambi. How long has there been a Bambi and why did nobody tell me there was a Bambi."
"There is not a Bambi-"
"There has always been a Bambi," Pepper confirmed, sipping delicately from a water bottle like she wasn't actively destroying her son's dignity in front of five witnesses and enjoying every second of it. "Since the adoption went through. Tony cried, actually, the day it was finalized, and called him Bambi for a week straight because he said Peter had 'the eyes of a woodland creature who'd just discovered indoor plumbing.'"
"That is not what happened-"
"It's exactly what happened, cucciolo, don't rewrite history"
"Cucciolo now?! How many are there?!"
"We're not doing a tally," Peter said, with the flat, resigned tone of a boy who had, in fact, done the tally, privately, at 2 a.m., and knew the number was distressingly high.
Flash, still sitting on the floor, had picked his flashcards back up but was making no move to actually use them, staring instead at the scene in front of him . Iron Man affectionately harassing his son with Italian baby names while the CEO of Stark Industries calmly ate a cookie on the window seat, with the expression of a man whose entire worldview had been quietly and irreversibly rearranged.
"This is the weirdest day of my life," he said, to no one in particular. "And I once watched a guy in a metal suit fly through my apartment building's airspace at nine a.m. on a Tuesday."
"Get used to it," Ned said, grabbing a cannoli with the casual air of a man who had, in fact, gotten used to it. "It only escalates from here."
❁ ≖≖✿❁ ≖≖ ❁
Ned's prophecy proved uncomfortably accurate within the hour.
They'd resettled into something resembling actual practice. Cindy quizzing Abraham on organic chemistry, Sally and Charles running through a rapid-fire history round, Flash sullenly reviewing math formulas while stealing periodic disbelieving glances at Tony, who had settled into the corner armchair with a tablet, ostensibly working, mostly hovering, when Peter's phone buzzed against the desk.
He glanced at it, sighed, and picked up without much enthusiasm. "Hey, Dr. Frank."
The team's heads turned, collectively, as one organism.
"No, it's fine, I'm not busy. okay, wait, say that again, the boundary condition on the...right, no, that's your problem, you're integrating over the wrong domain, you need to flip the- yeah. Yeah, exactly. No, don't redo the whole simulation, just adjust the tensor at that one node, it'll propagate correctly if you…mm-hm. Yeah. No problem. Bye."
He hung up. Set the phone down. Went back to his flashcards like nothing had happened.
The room stared at him.
"What?" Peter said
"Nothing," Charles said faintly. "You just casually solved a tensor field problem, over the phone, in like ninety seconds, and then said bye like you were talking about a substitute teacher."
"He's on the propulsion team. It happens sometimes. People call."
"People call," Sally repeated.
The phone buzzed again almost immediately. Peter groaned and picked up, this time putting it on speaker without thinking, which Tony, from his armchair, watched with the barely-contained glee of a man who knew exactly what was about to happen and had absolutely no intention of stopping it.
"Yeah, hi, is this...okay, sorry, mini-boss, quick question, we've got a materials failure in the composite lattice and R&D is split on whether it's a stress concentration issue or a resonance problem, and your dad's phone is going straight to voicemail"
"He's in a meeting with his decathlon team," Tony called out cheerfully, not looking up from his tablet. "Priorities, Greg."
"okay, well, Mini Stark, we were hoping you could just take a look at the"
"Send me the stress readout," Peter said, already reaching for his laptop, entirely unbothered, like a boy fielding a request to pass the salt. "And the resonance frequency data if you've got it logged. I'll take a look."
There was a pause on the line. "You got it, boss. Thanks, kid. You're a lifesaver. Hey, is it true you're hosting your school friends today? Tell them Greg from Materials says hi, and that you saved this entire division from a very embarrassing Monday."
"I'll pass it along," Peter said, already scrolling through incoming data with the specific unhurried focus of someone doing a mildly interesting crossword, not a materials science emergency at an actual aerospace-adjacent tech company. "Give me two minutes."
The room had gone, once more, completely, reverently silent.
"Mini-boss," Abraham said slowly. "Mini Stark. Boss. They called you boss."
"They're being dramatic. It's a nickname. It's not a big deal."
"You just solved a tensor field integration and are currently solving what sounds like an actual materials engineering emergency at a multi-billion-dollar aerospace company, over your phone, while also studying for a high school academic decathlon regional," Cindy said, each clause landing with increasing volume, "and you're telling us it's not a big deal."
"I mean, relatively speaking-"
"There is no relative scale on which this is not a big deal, Peter, this is the single most unbalanced sentence I have ever heard a human being say out loud"
"He does this literally every weekend," Ned said, not even glancing up from his own flashcards, chewing a cannoli with the world-weary calm of a man who had simply run out of capacity for astonishment months ago. "One time he fixed a wing-flap calibration issue during a movie. Didn't even pause it. We missed, like, four minutes of dialogue and he just picked the plot back up like nothing happened."
"It was a bad movie," Peter said, distracted, typing something rapid into his laptop. "I wasn't missing much."
Flash had put his flashcards down entirely at this point and was simply staring, slack-jawed, at the boy he had spent two years calling, with real conviction, a loser. "You're gonna run this company someday," he said, quietly, almost to himself. "Aren't you."
Peter glanced up, briefly, from his screen. "God, I hope not, running a company sounds exhausting, have you seen my dad's schedule?"
"I have a very reasonable schedule," Tony called from the armchair.
"You once had four back-to-back board calls and forgot to eat"
"That happened one time"
"It happens at least twice a month, Dad, I've started keeping a log"
"You what"
"For science," Peter said, deadpan, finally looking up from his laptop with the specific dry satisfaction of a boy who had, in fact, been saving that particular bit of ammunition for exactly this occasion. The room, predictably, dissolved into laughter, real laughter this time, easy and unguarded, Sally nearly falling off the bed, Charles wheezing, even Flash cracking a genuine, startled grin.
It was, Peter realized with a small, warm jolt of surprise, the first time all day that the laughter hadn't been about shock. It was just normal. Ordinary. His weird, chaotic, oversized family being weird and chaotic and oversized, and his friends, slowly, finding their footing inside that weirdness instead of drowning in it.
He finished the email to Greg in Materials "it's resonance, not stress concentration, dampen at the third harmonic and you'll be fine, tell R&D to buy me lunch" hit send, and closed the laptop.
"Okay," he said, clearing his throat, willing the blush in his cheeks to subside. "Can we please, please get back to actual regionals prep before Pepper starts telling embarrassing baby stories, because I promise you, she has worse than the Bambi thing."
"Oh, I have so much worse than the Bambi thing," Pepper said serenely, not looking up from her tablet.
"Mom."
The room went quiet again, a different quiet this time, softer, almost tender, as everyone registered the word landing as easily and unremarkably as Dad had an hour before. Pepper's expression didn't change much, but something in her eyes did, warm and a little bright, and Tony, watching from the armchair, went very still and very pleased in the specific way of a man storing a memory away somewhere permanent.
"Fine," Pepper said, voice a fraction softer than before. "For you, sweetheart, I'll save the worse stories for your college roommates."
"There is no version of the future where I have a roommate who isn't traumatized by pre-vetted stories about me as a baby, is there."
"Absolutely none," Tony confirmed, delighted. "It's basically a Stark family tradition at this point. Howard did it to me. Badly, and with significantly less love, but he did it."
Peter caught something small and unguarded pass over Tony's face at that, a flicker, quickly smoothed over, the kind of thing Peter had learned to recognize over the past eight months as the shape of an old wound quietly deciding not to repeat itself. He didn't say anything about it. Just reached over, from where he was sitting, and bumped his knuckles lightly against his dad's knee, a small, unremarkable gesture that nonetheless made Tony's whole face soften.
"You're doing it better," Peter said quietly, just between the two of them, mostly lost under the general noise of the room resettling into practice.
"Yeah?" Tony said, equally quiet, oddly bare, for one second, of all the usual armour.
"Yeah. Way better."
Tony cleared his throat, loudly, and stood up, snack tray abandoned, visibly recalibrating back into his usual bravado before anyone in the room could notice he'd gone soft. "Well! On that emotionally devastating note, Pepper and I have a call in twenty minutes, so we'll leave you geniuses to your...whatever this is. Flashcards. Very studious. Very normal."
"Bye, Dad."
"Bye, bambino. Study hard. Don't let Flash near the guac, he's had four handfuls and I only made enough for reasonable adults."
"I was very good guac," Flash said, with the wounded dignity of a man defending his honour, and somehow, impossibly, that was the exact moment the last of the room's collective tension finally, fully broke, Flash Thompson, of all people, indignantly defending his guacamole consumption to Tony Stark's retreating back, while everyone else laughed until Sally actually had to lie down.
❁ ≖≖✿❁ ≖≖ ❁
They studied for two more hours after that, properly studied, flashcards and practice buzzers and Cindy running a brutal mock round on the periodic table that left Abraham genuinely rattled — but the shape of the afternoon had changed. The shock had worn down into something easier: sideways glances at the framed photo on the nightstand, quiet questions about so when did it happen, if you don't mind me asking, Sally asking, with real gentleness, whether Peter had had a hard time before, and Peter answering, honestly, for the first time to anyone outside Ned and MJ, that yeah, it had been hard, and yeah, this was better, so much better, and he still sometimes couldn't quite believe it was real.
By the time the rideshares were called for six o'clock, something had settled and shifted for good.
"So," Cindy said, at the door, hoisting her bag over one shoulder, "hypothetically. If we told anyone about this"
"You won't," Peter said, not a question.
"Obviously not," she said, sounding almost offended he'd needed to ask. "I'm just saying, hypothetically, if we did, what would happen?"
"Pepper's PR team would have a very bad week, and I would probably be grounded until I'm forty," Peter said. "We just, want to tell people ourselves. When it's time. Not because some kid at school leaked it and it turned into a headline before I even got a say in my own life."
"That's fair," Charles said, and he sounded like he meant it. "For the record. I don't care that your dad's, like, a superhero billionaire. I care way more that you beat me on the physics round three weeks running and I still haven't figured out how."
"Practice," Peter said, deadpan. "And also I've been doing actual applied physics since I was twelve, so, some of it's cheating, but mostly practice."
"I'm gonna need you to never say that sentence again."
"No promises."
Flash lingered last, hovering at the doorway with the specific awkwardness of a boy trying to figure out how to apologize for two years of behavior without technically apologizing for anything. "Hey, Parker," he said finally. "The — the Materials thing. The tensor thing. That was actually really impressive. Like, genuinely."
"Thanks, Flash."
"I'm still gonna call you a loser at school on Monday. Just so things don't get weird."
"I would honestly be concerned if you didn't."
Flash grinned, a real one, no edge to it at all, and jogged down the steps to the waiting car, and Peter stood in the doorway a moment longer, watching five rideshares pull away down the long drive, carrying five people who now knew the biggest secret of his life and had, somehow, against every anxious prediction he'd made all week, made it feel like less of a burden instead of more.
MJ appeared at his shoulder, arms crossed, watching the cars disappear around the bend. "Told you," she said.
"You didn't actually tell me anything specific."
"I told you it'd be fine. That counts as telling you something."
"It was extremely vague reassurance."
"It was correct vague reassurance, which is the best kind." She bumped his shoulder with hers, lightly, before heading back inside. "Come on, Bambi. Your mom made extra cookies and I intend to eat all of them before Ned wakes up from his food coma."
"There is no version of my life," Peter called after her, "in which that nickname doesn't follow me to the grave."
"None whatsoever," MJ agreed, without looking back. "Might as well get used to it, tesoro."
Peter groaned, long and theatrical, and went inside to save what cookies he could.
The End