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Harley Keener had exactly one plan for the first day of summer break: sleep until noon, eat everything in Tony Stark's absurdly stocked fridge, and remind the Avengers compound what actual competent engineering looked like.
That plan lasted four minutes past the front door.
"INCOMING," someone bellowed, and Harley's duffel bag hit the floor half a second before he did, flattening himself against the wall as a nerf dart the size of his fist whizzed past his ear and embedded itself in a very expensive-looking abstract sculpture.
"Sorry! Sorry, collateral damage, my bad!" A man in a Henley — Sam Wilson, Harley placed him after a beat — skidded around the corner reloading a blaster that was definitely not store-bought. Behind him, Bucky Barnes strolled in with the unbothered energy of a man who had already won. "Wilson, you've got a metal arm chasing you and you're still losing."
"I'm not losing, I'm regrouping—"
"FRIDAY, tell Tony his houseguest is here and possibly about to be shot," Harley called out, mostly to the ceiling, because that was apparently how you talked to things in this house now.
"Mr. Stark has been notified," said the AI, entirely too calm about it. "He also says, and I quote, 'duck.'"
Harley ducked. The second dart took out a vase.
By the time Tony ambled out of the elevator, sunglasses on indoors like the disaster he was, Harley had already decided that visiting for the summer had been the correct call, if only for the show.
"Kid!" Tony threw an arm around him, steering him past the wreckage like it was Tuesday, which — Harley was starting to suspect — it might actually be. "You're taller. Rude. Stop doing that. How was the flight, is MIT still standing, did you blow anything up—"
"Nothing illegal."
"That's my boy." Tony beamed with the specific pride of a man who considered minor property damage a love language. "Okay, house tour, rules, don't touch Bruce's things, don't touch Wanda's things when she's had a bad day, don't touch anything with a biohazard sticker even if it looks cool, especially if it looks cool—"
"Noted."
"—and stay out of the east lab, my intern's in there and he bites."
Harley snorted. "He bites?"
"Figuratively. Mostly." Tony waved a hand. "Kid's brilliant, kid's a menace, kid has apparently decided the lab is also his bedroom, his kitchen, and his emotional support system, and I have given up trying to extract him from it."
"You just described yourself."
"I contain multitudes, Keener, don't test me."
Harley meant to let it go. He really did. But he had unpacked exactly one sock drawer's worth of belongings before curiosity — the same curiosity that had gotten him a full scholarship and also once nearly gotten him expelled — dragged him down two flights of stairs toward the east wing, following a smell like solder and ozone and, faintly, something burning that probably shouldn't be.
The door was propped open with a fire extinguisher. Inside was chaos of the specific, loving kind that Harley recognized instantly, because it was exactly the kind of chaos he made himself: three monitors running different code, a soldering iron balanced dangerously close to a stack of papers, an honest-to-God web of red string connecting a corkboard that looked like a conspiracy theorist's fever dream, and, in the middle of it, a boy.
Not a kid. Harley's brain helpfully corrected itself on that point immediately and with some urgency.
The boy — dark curls sticking up like he'd been raking his hands through them for hours, oversized Midtown Tech t-shirt with a hole at the collar, safety goggles pushed up on his head instead of over his eyes where they were supposed to be — was half-under a workbench, muttering to himself in a stream that didn't seem to require an audience.
"—no, that's not it, that's not it, if the polymer ratio's off by even point-two percent the whole thing just goes gluey instead of tensile, which, fine, sticky is a vibe, but it is not a load-bearing vibe—"
"Talking to yourself's the first sign," Harley said, leaning in the doorway.
The boy jerked upright so fast he cracked his head on the underside of the desk with a sound that made Harley wince in solidarity.
"OW — okay — that's — hi." He scrambled out, one hand clapped to his skull, immediately dropping the wrench he'd been holding, which bounced off his foot. "Ow. Hi. Sorry. Who — you're not Mr. Stark. You're very not Mr. Stark. You're, uh. Tall. And not him. Which I already said. I'm gonna stop talking now."
"Please don't," Harley said, delighted, and meant it. "This is the best thing that's happened to me all day and I got shot at with a nerf gun twenty minutes ago."
"That tracks, honestly, that happens more than you'd think—" The boy blinked, visibly rebooting. "I'm Peter. Parker. Peter Parker. I'm the intern, I work here, I'm not just — squatting, even though it does look like I'm squatting, there's a very good reason there's a sleeping bag under that desk—"
"Is there," Harley said, glancing over. There was, in fact, a sleeping bag under the desk.
"It's for — naps. Strategic naps. Power naps. It's a productivity thing." Peter's face was doing something complicated and pink. "You're Harley."
Harley raised an eyebrow. "You know my name."
"Mr. Stark talks about you," Peter said, then seemed to hear himself and rushed on. "Like, a lot. Constantly. It's honestly a little intense, there's a whole — he showed me the go-kart thing, the one with the arc reactor bike, he's very proud, it's borderline embarrassing for him, not for you, you built a bike with an arc reactor in it when you were like fourteen, that's not embarrassing, that's — I'm still talking."
"You are," Harley agreed, grinning now, because this was, objectively, the most fun he'd had since finals ended. "You always talk this much when someone catches you concussing yourself on lab furniture?"
"Only when the someone is—" Peter stopped dead. Went pinker. Picked the wrench back up like it might save him. "Attractive. I mean. Only when they're. There's usually not a someone. Nobody comes down here. It's mostly Dum-E and he doesn't judge my life choices out loud."
"Dum-E judges silently, then."
"Dum-E judges constantly, he's incredibly passive-aggressive for a robot with no face."
Harley pushed off the doorframe and wandered further in, careful not to touch anything that hummed or sparked, taking in the wreckage of half-finished projects with the specific hunger of someone who'd been starved of good, weird engineering all semester by professors obsessed with "showing your work" and "following safety protocols." "What is all this, anyway?"
"This" Peter gestured at the red string corkboard "is a webbing tensile-strength problem I've been stuck on for a week, this" the soldering setup "is unrelated and also possibly a fire hazard, and this" he nudged something small and metallic with his toe, half-hidden under a rag "is nothing. Ignore that. That's nothing."
Harley, who had never in his life successfully ignored a "that's nothing," crouched down and lifted the rag before Peter could stop him.
It was a wrist-mounted device, sleek, clearly homemade, clearly not Stark Industries polish.
"You built this?" Harley turned it over, genuinely impressed. "This isn't SI hardware. This is scratch."
Peter made a strangled noise. "It's a hobby thing."
"A hobby thing that shoots" Harley squinted at the mechanism "is this a fluid dispersal system? What are you dispersing"
"Okay, that's — I need that back, actually, thank you—" Peter practically lunged, and Harley, laughing, held it just out of reach on instinct, which was how they ended up chest to chest in the middle of a lab with a homemade web-shooter caught between them and Peter's hand wrapped around his wrist, both of them abruptly, acutely aware of how little space was left.
"You're Spider-Man," Harley said. It wasn't really a question. It just sort of fell out of him, quiet, delighted, slotting a hundred small things into place — the reflexes that caught the wrench before it fully hit the floor, the sticky residue on the desk, the webbing tensile strength problem he'd been working on for a week.
Peter's face went through several emotions very fast, landing somewhere between panic and resignation. "...Yeah. Please don't — I mean, you can't — okay, you know Mr. Stark, you're basically vetted, but please don't put that on a T-shirt or something."
"Wasn't planning to." Harley finally let the web-shooter go, and Peter took it back like it might bolt. Neither of them stepped back. "For the record, this is, hands down, the best superhero reveal I've ever gotten. No dramatic rooftop, no mask coming off in slow motion. Just a guy concussing himself under a desk and then getting flustered about his tech."
"I hate that that's now, like, canon," Peter said, but he was smiling, the panic bleeding out of his shoulders. "For the record — you're not what I expected either."
"Yeah? What'd you expect?"
"I don't know. Meaner? Mr. Stark makes you sound like you'd eat me alive in a debate about thermal regulators."
"Oh, I absolutely would," Harley said. "Give me like a week to unpack first."
"There it is." Peter huffed something that was almost a laugh, finally putting a few inches of actual distance between them, though it didn't do much — the lab wasn't big, and Harley found he didn't especially want distance anyway. "So you're …. staying? All summer?"
"All summer," Harley confirmed. "Tony's paying me in lab access and better snacks than the dining hall, so. Yeah. I'm not going anywhere."
Something in Peter's expression did a small, involuntary, entirely too obvious thing — pleased, and trying hard not to look pleased, and failing spectacularly at it — and Harley decided, that this was going to be a genuinely excellent summer.
"FRIDAY," Tony's voice crackled cheerfully through the lab speakers, uninvited and entirely too smug, "log the time. Twenty-two minutes. That might be a record."
"A record for what—" Peter started.
"For how long it took Underoos here to start blushing at somebody," Tony said. "Nat owes Rhodey twenty bucks. Carry on, don't mind me, pretend I'm not watching on four separate cameras—"
"Mr. Stark, there is no version of this where I don't mind you—"
"He does this," Harley told Peter solemnly. "It's a permanent condition. You get used to it. Mostly."
"I have not gotten used to it and I've lived here for eight months," Peter said, but the mortification was fighting a losing battle against the grin threatening the corner of his mouth, and when he glanced sideways at Harley — quick, unguarded, still a little pink around the ears — Harley thought, with the calm certainty of someone who built things for a living and knew a solid foundation when he saw one:
Oh. This is going to be a problem.
A very, very good problem.
Later, after Tony had finally taken his commentary elsewhere and Peter had — after a lot of protesting — let Harley help fix the webbing polymer ratio in about a third of the time it would've taken him alone, they ended up sitting on the floor with their backs against the workbench, shoulders almost touching, going through Peter's disaster of a corkboard piece by piece while the compound's chaos rattled on somewhere upstairs — Sam and Bucky's nerf war apparently escalating into something involving Wanda's patience and a very loud Rhodey demanding to know who authorized live ammunition in his living room ("IT'S FOAM, RHODEY"), Pepper's voice cutting through it all with the weary authority of a woman who ran a Fortune 500 company and also, somehow, an entire building of grown men behaving like this.
"Is it always like this?" Harley asked.
Peter considered the question with real seriousness, like it deserved an accurate answer. "Pretty much. It's a lot. Like — a lot, a lot. But it's..." He shrugged, a small, fond thing. "I don't know. It's home. Weirdly."
"Yeah," Harley said, looking at him instead of the corkboard. "I'm starting to see the appeal."
Peter caught him looking. Didn't look away first.
Upstairs, something crashed, spectacularly. Neither of them moved.
Three weeks later, "not going anywhere" had turned into an established fact of compound life, and Harley Keener had officially logged more hours in the east lab than several actual employees.
Nobody had made anything official — there'd been no big conversation, no defining-the-relationship moment, just a slow, inevitable slide from arguing about tensile strength until 2 a.m. to arguing about tensile strength until 2 a.m. while sitting closer than was strictly necessary to, currently, Peter with his back against the workbench and Harley's hands braced on either side of him, both of them very much not thinking about polymer ratios anymore.
"You," Peter said, somewhat breathlessly, between kisses, "were supposed to be helping me fix the trigger mechanism."
"I am helping." Harley's mouth found the corner of his jaw, unhurried, like they had all the time in the world, which — given that it was nearly midnight and the rest of the compound had long since gone quiet — they more or less did. "Structural integrity's a metaphor. This is a metaphor."
"That is not — that doesn't even mean anything—"
"Shut up," Harley said, fond, and kissed him properly, and Peter, predictably, stopped arguing.
Neither of them heard the elevator.
"Alright, FRIDAY said the lab's still occupied at midnight, which either means someone's having a breakthrough or someone's on fire, so I figured I'd—" Tony rounded the corner with a mug of coffee in one hand and the specific weary optimism of a man expecting science, and instead found his intern very thoroughly pinned against a workbench by his other, equally beloved disaster child.
There was a beat of profound silence.
"—come check," Tony finished, faintly.
Peter and Harley sprang apart with the guilty velocity of two people who had, in fact, forgotten they existed inside a building with cameras, security personnel, and a father figure who apparently kept irregular hours.
"This isn't—" Peter started, in the exact strangled register of someone whose brain had fully short-circuited.
"It's exactly what it looks like," Harley said, because unlike Peter, panic made him more composed, not less, and he'd apparently decided the best defense was aggressive honesty. "Evening, Tony."
"Evening." Tony took a slow sip of his coffee, eyes flicking between them with the deliberate, torturous patience of a man about to enjoy himself immensely. "So. How long has this been a load-bearing feature of my lab."
"It's not a feature, it's — this is the first — we haven't even—" Peter's hands were doing something helpless in the air, gesturing at nothing.
"Little over a week about ten days," Harley said, at the same time.
Peter turned to stare at him. "You could've let me finish a sentence."
"You weren't gonna land it."
"Ten days," Tony repeated, setting the mug down with theatrical care, like a man preparing for a very long speech. "Ten days, in my building, in my lab, and nobody thought to mention it to the guy who built the security system currently recording this entire conversation—"
"FRIDAY, delete that," Peter said quickly.
"Compliance protocols prevent me from deleting footage at the request of a minor security clearance, Peter, sorry," FRIDAY said, entirely too cheerful about it.
"I'm not a minor—"
"It's a figure of speech." Tony held up a hand, silencing everyone, and turned the full weight of his attention on Harley, who, to his credit, didn't flinch. "You. Tennessee. You couldn't have picked, I don't know, a barista. A nice normal college kid with a normal job and no access to weapons-grade adhesive."
"Didn't pick anybody," Harley said, easy, unbothered, one hand finding Peter's without looking, like it was the most natural thing in the world. "Just walked into a lab and there he was."
Something in Tony's expression cracked, just slightly, underneath the theater of it — something that looked, for half a second, dangerously close to soft, before he visibly stamped it back down in favor of maximum drama.
"That's disgusting," he announced. "That's the most disgusting thing I've heard all week, and Sam described his gas station lunch to me in detail this morning. FRIDAY, wake up Pepper, tell her the interns are canoodling and I need emotional support—"
"Please don't wake up Pepper," Peter said, mortified, face doing something spectacular with color.
"She's gonna find out eventually. Might as well be dramatic about it." Tony picked his coffee back up, already retreating toward the elevator, entirely too pleased with himself for a man who'd just walked in on his kid making out with another kid he considered a kid.
At the doors, he paused, pointed at both of them with the mug, and added, almost gently, underneath all the noise: "Door stays open from now on. And somebody better still be fixing that trigger mechanism by morning."
The elevator doors slid shut. The lab went quiet.
"He took that better than I expected," Peter said, after a moment.
"He took that exactly as well as I expected." Harley tugged him back in by the front of his shirt, unrepentant, grinning. "Now. Where were we."
"Absolutely not, the door thing, he said the door—"
"He's three floors up already." Harley kissed him anyway, and Peter, predictably, stopped arguing again.
Somewhere upstairs, faintly, a text notification chimed — Tony, presumably, informing the entire compound group chat in real time, because subtlety had never once been part of his skill set.
Neither of them checked.