Chapter Text
“You’re insane,” Gwen said plainly, her paper coffee cup an inch away from her glittering pink lips and her green eyes rimmed with black eyeliner. Harley only knew this because of the way she was squinting, their current perch by the slowly melting green of the park the perfect spot for the glare of the sunlight to reflect back into their eyes off of the white peaks of snow that remained. Harley had sat sideways, his right leg bent at the knee and his right arm slung around it, his own paper cup hanging deftly from his fingertips, his back to the sun. “Wanda Maximoff?”
He shrugged. There wasn’t really anything else to do about it - he had already begun researching months before. If there was one thing that Harley knew he was, it was ridiculously stubborn. He would say it was why he and Peter seemed to work so well but he knew it wasn’t. Peter was just as, if not more, stubborn. Peter Parker could out stubborn anyone. “Why are you against it?”
“Why are you for it?” Gwen demanded, her fingers brushing back her newly cut blonde bob from the corners of her chin. She had refused to wear a hat, citing that, since it was officially meteorologically spring, the weather should start to match her attitude. Harley would have said she was being ridiculous, but he was pretty sure Gwen had done the same thing for years and, somehow, she had always managed to force the weather into following her direction with sheer will. She sipped a rather passionate sip of her coffee, scowled at the taste of it, swallowed it forcefully and pointed her finger viciously in Harley’s direction. “Wanda Maximoff is on the run. She’s been on the run for years . Longer than Peter was -.”
“Gwen, we have literally only covered people that have been on the run.” Harley thought back to their previous seasons - to Clint Barton hiding on a farm that Harley carefully chose to pretend he knew nothing about, to James Barnes who Harley still didn’t actually know where he was staying, to Peter Parker, the man Harley had left lying in his bed just his morning, pouring over something that had him frowning at his phone, sleep warm and strong. Their job as podcasters wasn’t a particularly difficult one - Harley had always said that the hardest part of his job was actually doing it - but Harley wouldn’t have traded it for anything (except, perhaps, for the man he had left behind. If Peter had wanted to, he would have been able to convince Harley to stay. Hell, if Peter wanted to, Harley was pretty sure he could have taken over the entire world without lifting his pinky). That being said, his job wasn’t difficult, but his job was important. He would maintain that to his grave (which Harley was beginning to think would be where he lay at an early age, if not from being shot at by FBI agents than by stress and an incredibly high caffeine intake).
Gwen hummed and kept her narrowed gaze on him despite the snow glittering in her eyes. “You’ve had this idea for a while, haven’t you?” She said with a press of her lips.
Harley hummed back at her and smirked, the twist of his lips pulling at the corner of his mouth and something mischievous glittering in the gold of his eyes. “Maybe.”
Gwen let out a long suffering noise, a cross between tired and frustrated, and flung her hair head backwards, blinking up at the big, fluffy white clouds as though they held the answer to all of Gwen’s questions. It was fine, Harley decided, even if Gwen decided she would rather focus on someone else, Harley was pretty sure nothing could beat their season before. And he refused to think that all of his research had been for nothing - he did, after all, have a more solid understanding of the person Wanda Maximoff had been to the public. A recluse, a martyr, but human. Even with all of the power at her fingertips, she remained human.
Harley couldn’t say that he saw himself in her but he, perhaps, understood her. Understood her want to hide away from the world. She had lost her entire country in Ultron’s attack, had lost her brother then too, and then had found happiness, for a moment, in Vision, only to lose him in yet another fight - a noble sacrifice that it seemed no one but her mourned. Where was Vision’s monument? Where were the people thanking him for what he had chosen to give up so that they could survive?
He would hide away too.
“Fine,” she said after a long moment of contemplating the clouds. “On one condition.” She said with a glint on her face, her own lips twisting up into a smirk ten times more mischievous than Harley’s ever had the chance of being.
His own smirk dropped.
Nothing good ever came out of that expression on Gwen’s face.
She drummed her fingers on the rim of her cup. “Do we have a deal?” She asked innocently.
“You didn’t even tell me the condition.” Harley pointed out lamely, something unnerving twisting in his gut.
He wasn’t going to like it, whatever it was Gwen was going to say, he just knew it.
“Peter has to do an interview.”
Harley was right, he didn’t like it.
Him and Peter had a deal. It was an implicit deal, one that they had struck up a week into dating and with Harley’s scrapes and bruises healing and Peter wrestling with the fact that he had just told the entire world who he was under a mask. Their deal was an easy one - Peter gave them one exclusive interview, the only one he would ever do about Spider-Man, and Harley wouldn’t ask for another one. It was one thing, perhaps, if Peter came to them himself but Harley had almost ruined what they had before they had ever gotten a chance to have it by digging into Peter’s life so relentlessly. The real problem, Harley knew, was that Gwen wouldn’t have asked if he had told her about their deal. Gwen could be cruel and relentless when she wanted to be, but she wasn’t about to make Harley’s life a living hell by putting him in such a complicated spot.
But Harley didn’t tell her.
Peter was a rather private person, Harley was rapidly finding out the hard way. He didn’t talk much about Spider-Man even with prompting, at least he didn’t to Harley. Peter rarely even spoke about May or his Uncle Ben. He shut Harley down with a look if Harley ever so much as mentioned Harry Osborn or Michelle Jones in anything other than a passing observation and Harley still wasn’t entirely sure what it was that Peter did for a job. Head of Research and Development at OSCORP sounded like a big title, but Harley was pretty sure only a CEO or CFO did as much paperwork as Peter did on the daily. But Peter was private and the parts that he did share, Harley tried to keep close to his chest for his own sake.
He was quickly discovering that, in the wake of dating the world’s most famous arachnid-human hybrid, that Harley much preferred it when people weren’t digging into his every moment.
Which really was rather ironic considering Harley’s job.
This all didn’t even include the actual problem that Harley was facing now - he was pretty dead set on doing season four on Wanda Maximoff and had a slew of research at his fingertips. He had updated the blog, had talked it over with Peter even, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to do the season on Wanda Maximoff enough to break the one rule that Peter had asked him to follow.
“Gwen,” Harley cautioned and glanced away from her smirk, towards the little girl, slowly teetering on a log in snow boots and a spring jacket, arms outstretched from her sides like she was begging for a light wind to brush through the fabric at her hips and whisk her away to some magical place. “You know Peter doesn’t do interviews.” He finished lamely.
Gwen rolled her eyes and knocked her knuckles against his knee. “I know he doesn’t do interviews.” She agreed. “But I know he might , if you asked.” She finished with a triumphant sip of her coffee, only to scowl again once it hit her taste buds. “I don’t know how you drink this shit, Harls. This tastes terrible .”
“Don’t blame Starbucks for your weird obsession with chewing your sugar.”
“I do not chew my sugar.”
“You always go to Dunks and you always get an iced coffee and you always end up chewing on the sugar at the end.”
“You’re avoiding the question.”
“Gwen,” Harley groaned. He had been avoiding the question, he had just hoped, foolishly, that Gwen would have let him get away with it without much prodding. It had been a stupid, baseless hope. “I can’t ask him to do that.”
“Why not?” She prompted with a snort and a stubborn cross of her arms.
Harley licked his lips. “ Because .”
“Good comeback.” She scoffed. “Harley, come on ,” her nails dug into his forearm until he looked up at her, her green eyes imploring, begging even. “Our numbers have never been as high as they are whenever Peter’s mentioned. He’s the most famous person in the world . You know everyone’s going to be tuning into the show expecting him to join the crew -.”
“He’s already busting his ass at work every day and preparing for a supreme court case to overthrow the Accords. I can’t ask him to co-host -.”
“Don’t interrupt me,” she snapped. “I’m not suggesting Peter Parker become a series regular. I’m suggesting you do whatever it is you do that gets him all stupidly mushy eyed and ask him to do an interview with the show on his perspective on Wanda Maximoff.”
“Why not just as Tony?”
“What?”
“We’re literally owned by a superhero, Gwen. If you want a hero’s point of view on Wanda Maximoff - who used to be an Avenger, by the way - why not ask Tony Stark and leave Peter out of it?”
“Because I don’t care about Tony Stark’s opinion. I care about Spider-Man’s.”
Harley rolled his lips, defensiveness coiling in his gut and painting his cheeks pink. The worst part about it was that Gwen was right, their numbers were up ever since their season on Spider-Man and the blog’s engagement had more than doubled when Peter had agreed to answer questions every now and then. But asking Peter to be on a blog and asking Peter to come on the show were two very different things. One Peter had agreed to do because his friends were already on it, and the other Peter was steadfastly against. “Gwen,” he groaned.
“Is this going to be a problem for you?” She asked seriously, studying the lines of his face.
Harley blinked. “Asking Peter to come back on the show? I mean, probably.”
“No,” she shook her head. “Is dating Peter and you doing the show going to be a problem?”
“ No ,” Harley insisted. “We’ve already talked about it and -.”
“So if you’ve already talked about it, and it’s not going to be a problem, then why is the idea of him coming back on so terrible for you to think about?”
“It’s not that it’s terrible .”
“It’s just that it’s uncomfortable?” She prompted.
Harley dropped his face into his knee, rubbing his nose along the seam of his jeans and, not for the first time since the end of last season, wondering how in the hell he had gotten to where he was now. Dating a superhero, dating the superhero, working for Iron Man, and now… fighting with his best friend over something he hadn’t bothered to make known to her. “I’ll ask him.” He said into his knee. “I’m not promising anything .”
Gwen smiled, triumphant, and sat back on the bench. “He’ll do it.”
“He might not.” He wouldn’t. Harley knew that Peter absolutely would not agree to come on the show just so that all of Harley’s research didn’t go to waste. Peter would, instead, raise both of his eyebrows and, with an expression terribly reminiscent of his aunt, ask Harley why he made up his mind about something without checking with his team first. He had seen that expression plenty of times in the nine months they had been dating. Typically, when Harley had put something together for dinner that absolutely did not taste good enough to be salvaged.
Gwen simply hummed and argued about it no more. She had gotten what she wanted, after all.
The only problem remained for Harley and how, exactly, he was supposed to go about holding up his end of the bargain.
--
The thought did occur to him, on his walk back to his apartment, that he could simply not hold up his end of it. If there was one thing Harley was good at, it was looking like he knew what he was doing. He could very well tell Gwen a half truth - they had spoken about it and Peter had said in his best Spider-Man is in charge voice, that he would absolutely not sit through another interview with them even under the threat of death. Or, maybe that was going too far. Peter had never said that he wouldn’t do it under the threat of death.
Maybe Harley should threaten death.
Except that would probably not end very well either. The last person that had threatened Peter with death was currently sitting in jail, on twenty life sentences. Harley never thought he would even long to be Wilson Fisk and yet… here he was. Longing to be Wilson Fisk.
“Are you okay?” Peter asked, nudging his shoulder with his own as they walked, hands shoved down deep in his pockets, his elbow linked tightly around Harley’s.
He jerked himself back into the present, narrowly avoiding walking directly into a young mother thanks to a sharp tug from Peter that nearly wrenched his arm out of its socket, and focusing, instead, on the cooling night around them. He knew, from the way Peter had tugged on his black beanie instead of his favorite bright red one, and the way Peter was carefully keeping his gaze up and his chin down, that there were a lot of eyes and ears on the two of them. Not that Peter’s body language always gave it away, but the people on their phones snapping pictures, talking to their friends, and one even following them and live streaming, was as good of any way for Harley to figure out they had an audience.
If it was uncomfortable for Harley - and it was . It sent shivers down his spine and made him want to tug Peter into an alcove and hide, tuck his face into Peter’s neck and avoid, avoid, avoid - then it had to be downright unbearable for Peter. Harley, after all, was an afterthought to them. He was the reporter that broke the story, the guy that had swept Spider-Man off his feet.
But he wasn’t Peter Parker .
Harley huddled Peter in closer, uncoiled their arms and placed his, instead, lazily over Peter’s shoulders, wishing, not for the first time, that he hadn’t spilled Peter’s entire life for the world. That he hadn’t forced Peter out of hiding - not that he had , Peter had reassured him that if Harley hadn’t then Fisk would have. The truth would have come out either way, be it on Peter’s terms or someone else’s. Harley pressed a kiss to the side of his head and glared at the livestreamer until they pointed their phone towards the trees instead of towards them with a hasty movement and bright red cheeks. “I’m fine. Just thinking.”
“About what?” Peter asked apprehensively, his glove covered fingers brushing lightly over Harley’s waste and settling there, comfortable as they walked. Harley thought about the muscles coiled in those arms, stronger than they looked, slim and defined. “It better be about dinner.” He said, not waiting for Harley to answer. “Because I can’t get pizza out of my head.”
“Pizza,” Harley scoffed lightly, against the coil of discomfort in his belly.
They were putting on a show, he knew that, for anyone paying attention to them. “What do you have against pizza? We could do tacos - Wade suggested this really good place but it’s like… half an hour away on foot.”
“Why can’t you ever take me anywhere fancy?” Harley sighed up towards the sky, not for the first time wishing for the stars he grew up seeing in Rose Hill. “You make all of this money and the best you do is pizza or tacos .”
“Excuse you,” Peter teased, nudging Harley again, although this time it was lighter, gentler than he had before. “I take you out to nice places all the time . Why don’t you ever take me out, huh? Why is it always ‘Pete, let’s go out for dinner,’ and then I end up paying?”
“You’re my sugar daddy.” Harley declared blandly.
Peter sputtered and then started laughing, the bright, happy laugh that made something in Harley’s heart seize in joy. Harley had caught him off guard, he knew that much. Peter hadn’t expected the joke, not because Harley wasn’t the type to make them, but because Peter and sugar daddy had never been in the same sentence before. That wasn’t to say that he didn’t make enough money - Harley didn’t know exactly how much money Harry Osborn paid Peter in his yearly salary, but Harley wasn’t dumb . He knew that Peter wouldn’t be able to afford his own rent, plus half of May’s, without making more than he had ever been used to - just that Peter wasn’t the type of person to be a sugar daddy .
Or perhaps he was. In a much less… sexual sense, anyway. Harley had seen Peter give someone the jacket off his back before, he wouldn’t put it past him to be financing more people than Harley knew just out of the kindness of his heart. “Hey,” Harley asked once Peter’s laughter had died down into tiny, comfortable sputters. “Have you heard from Miles, lately?”
Peter smiled, not without happiness or pride, and tilted his head closer, mindful of the ears that were listening into their conversation. “He’s good. Settling in well. Happy to be back home.” The last sentence was said like a mutter, soft enough that Harley wasn’t sure if it was anything more than a brush of air against his cheek until he glanced down at Peter and caught the uptick of his lips.
Miles Morales was probably the best thing to come out of the mess with Wilson Fisk the year before. Or, the best thing aside from Harley’s blossoming relationship with Peter. At least in Harley’s mind. That was another thing they didn’t talk about. Wilson Fisk, Kingpin, Peter’s near death experience five years before and the looming cloud it placed over his head. Peter was scarce about a lot of things - what his feelings in the moment had been, what fear felt like to him. But Miles. Miles was the one thing Peter wasn’t scarce about.
Fundamentally, Harley knew that Peter hated that Miles existed. Well, that wasn’t quite right. Miles was a ray of sunshine on an otherwise cloudy time of their history, a beacon to hold onto and celebrate.
Miles also shouldn’t have survived and the fact that he did ate at Peter more than he would allow himself to say.
Harley saw it in the way his eyes clouded. In the way his smile dipped at the corners. At the way Peter looked at Miles sometimes, as though he didn’t know whether to be excited that he wasn’t alone in anything anymore or heartbroken that it happened to someone else. There wasn’t blame to be passed onto him. Rio and Jefferson, Miles’ parents, didn’t load Peter’s shoulders with any more blame than was necessary. Without Peter’s DNA, without whatever it was that Fisk’s scientists had discovered to make the Spider Genome Project something that Miles could live through, without whatever it was that Miles and Peter shared - it had kept their son alive. It had granted him something he wouldn’t have had before.
They looked at Peter and saw a hero.
The biggest problem was that when Peter looked at Peter… Harley wasn’t sure what it was that he saw.
“He told me about this art project he’s working on for the community center he volunteers at,” Peter continued, that shadow on his face again that Harley couldn’t name beyond Ben Parker and everyone else Peter had lost. “He gets to paint his mural on the side of a building.”
Harley hummed in all the right places, counted the steps between when they had started walking and when they had arrived at the restaurant - a small pizza place that really did sell the best melted cheese on bread mixture that Harley had ever tasted. The owner, Harley had noticed, always took Peter’s money with a big fuss, like he would rather do anything else with his time. He never referred to him as Spider-Man, though. Only as Peter. He asked after May, after Michelle Jones, Ned Leeds, and, occasionally, Harry Osborn. He ruffled Peter’s curls and muttered something in Italian every time they came in - something that sounded like a thank you to whatever deity had decided to let Peter Parker live another day.
Harley could relate to that feeling.
They slid into the vinyl booth, cracked at the edges and Peter used a napkin to wipe off the remaining crumbs. Whoever had been filming them outside didn’t bother following them in, small mercies, and the restaurant was blissfully full enough that no one paid them any mind.
Not for the first time, they lulled into a comfortable silence, Harley toying with his fingers and Peter drumming his own on the edge of a menu. He always looked it over, even though Harley knew he would end up ordering the same thing, but he looked happy. The happiest Harley had seen him looking in all the time they had known each other. “So Jess called the other day,” he began after a moment, sliding the menu back into its place behind the crushed red pepper, parmesan cheese, salt and pepper.
“Jess…?”
Peter rolled his eyes. “Jones.”
“Married to Luke Cage?” Harley asked absently.
“Yeah.”
“They have a daughter, right?”
“They do.” Peter shrugged as though knowing every myriad of heroes that ever existed in New York wasn’t anything to balk at, and carried on when Harley waved at him to do so, placing his cell phone on silent and flipping it upside down on the table.
If Gwen or Abby needed him, Harley thought, they knew where he was. It wasn’t like it was that hard to get a hold of him. “She’s working on the case that, get this, involves someone that dresses up in a legit monkey onesie and robs convenience stores.”
Jessica Jones was someone that Peter did talk about. Harley had a catalog of everyone Peter mentioned on a regular basis. The chances of them being the ones that had signed the Accords were high, but there were a few that Harley knew hadn’t that Peter only referred to as their civilian names. Matt Murdock was a constant, but while Harley knew he had been Daredevil before the Accords were put in place and that he had helped out Peter during the whole Fisk scenario, Peter never referred to him as DD unless he was wearing the mask. Which… he hadn’t been. And might never be able to do again.
But Jessica Jones had been a superhero once and was a private investigator now . She hadn’t signed the Accords, either, but her line of work led to some interesting conversation starters between the two of them. Harley had met her and her gigantic husband once or twice and he still wasn’t entirely sure if she liked him or wanted to punt him off the roof of a skyscraper.
That was actually a common experience with Peter’s friends.
They ate in comfortable conversation and Harley almost allowed himself to not do what he had promised Gwen he would except, when Peter had excused himself to a bathroom break, Harley had made the mistake of checking his phone and balked at the messages that had come through.
You promised , Gwen wrote.
Bring home leftovers, pls! Abby begged.
Family dinner, tomorrow? Bring Spidey. Tony wrote.
Harley groaned.
“Uh-oh,” Peter joked, his fingers chilly against the back of Harley’s neck. He dropped an unconscious kiss to the crown of his head, tactile in a way that Harley wasn’t used to, and dropped inelegantly into the seat across from Harley once more. “What’s the matter?”
Harley made another noise despite himself, a cross between an annoyed grumble and giving up. Peter wrinkled his nose - rather adorably, at that - and tilted his head (a motion that Harley had seen Matt Murdock do on more than one occasion that never failed to get Foggy Nelson’s eyes a little hazy). “Abby wants leftovers.” Harley settled on.
The thing was, that Peter would have let him have it. He would have accepted the excuse for what it was and he never would have dug anymore. Except Harley would have felt like a dick for not saying anything else and there was always the possibility that Gwen would go over his head and message Peter about it herself.
Or post it on the blog and cause drama that Harley really wasn’t in the mood for.
“You can take the leftover’s home,” Peter said happily and chewed on the end of his plastic straw.
“I know we made a deal.” Harley said slowly, as though the words were a bridge that might break if he stepped too hard or ran across it.
Peter stopped and narrowed his gaze.
There was a reason Peter wore a mask as Spider-Man. He hadn’t ever really said it to Harley but, in the amount of time they had known each other, it was definitely something Harley had picked up on. Peter Parker was terribly easy to read. He never bothered hiding his expression the way others might - the way Harley so easily did. It wasn’t how he was raised or one of the many talents Peter had.
Which meant that Harley knew the moment it clicked what exactly it was that Harley was bringing up. He straightened up, rolled his tongue over his lips and sucked in his right cheek. He didn’t look his age, then, only years older. He looked like someone who had expected this to be brought up a lot sooner than it already was.
Harley couldn’t help the ping of defensiveness at the look of it. Harley hadn’t even done anything yet. There was entirely no need for Peter to look at him like that when he hadn’t even done anything. “Don’t bite my head off before you know what I’m going to say.” He rushed to say, perhaps a bit more heated than he meant to.
“I wasn’t aware I was going to bite your head off.” Peter quipped but sunk back into his booth, his foot pressing insistently against Harley’s in what Harley chose to take as comfort rather than challenge.
“Gwen’s insisting on this.”
“We don’t talk about work.”
“No, I don’t talk about work.” Harley corrected. “ You don’t talk about anything.”
Peter bristled but didn’t try to argue it other than a muttered, “I was literally just talking.” He said it more to his hands than to Harley’s face, though, so Harley chose to ignore it in favor of powering through.
“I promise, it’ll be just this once.” Harley said softly, aiming for earnest but terribly afraid he failed from the way Peter flinched.
And then his boyfriend stared at him, and stared some more, and promptly deflated with a loud, put upon and much too dramatic sigh. He reached forward, grabbed Harley’s hand in his own and pressed a quick and hard kiss to his knuckles. “I barely talked to Wanda Maximoff.” Peter admitted and Harley’s heart jumped into his throat.
He wasn’t able to help himself. For all that he claimed that he had grown used to the fact that Peter Parker and Spider-Man were the same person, there was a small thrill that traveled through him whenever it was acknowledged by Peter himself. “I know that.”
“She worked with the Avengers,” Peter supplied. “For a really short time.”
“Did you guys ever run a mission together or something?”
“Me and the Avengers?” Peter snorted and shrugged. “I mean, once or twice. Nothing too huge. And when we did I was on the ground and she was usually controlling things with her mind and swearing in Sokovian.”
Harley’s lips twitched up into a gentle smile and he tangled their fingers together, running his thumb along the inside of Peter’s palm if only for the small shiver that he was never able to hide at the tickle of the touch. “I know you don’t want to talk about this.” Harley told him softly, soft enough that he knew Peter was the only one that caught it. “And you don’t have to. I can always tell Gwen to go fuck herself and deal with the consequences.”
“Castration?” Peter joked with a roll of his eyes. “When has telling Gwen to fuck off ever done anyone any good?”
“First time for everything.”
“And you only have to be castrated once.”
“You’d still date me.”
Peter hummed. “Debatable.”
Harley gasped in mock hurt, but there wasn’t any sting to Peter’s words. There wasn’t anything in his tone or on his face that was meant to cause Harley any sort of hurt. “I didn’t spend a lot of time with anyone that Wanda ran with.” Peter continued with a shrug, scarily good at staying on topic when he wanted to be. “She didn’t exactly get along great with Reed or Johnny and rarely did anyone but Wade work with the X-Men.”
Harley narrowed his gaze, that feeling of a creeping, lingering hint , crawling up his spine. Something that either Peter hadn’t meant to let slip or something that Peter hadn’t known meant as much as it did. “She worked with the X-Men?”
“From time to time,” Peter shrugged. He hadn’t known, then. What it was he was saying. That what he was saying was something that Harley didn’t know about until then. “All of Professor X’s people signed the Accords. Xavier argued heavily for the students at his school to be protected at least until they were eighteen and could make the choice themselves. And what I was doing was pretty illegal. It wouldn’t have been a good idea for me to work with them so I tried to steer clear.”
There was something, there, something that Harley knew Peter was implying without saying and Harley wasn’t an idiot. It had come up during the holidays, a residual hurt left over from all of the people that he had called friends (and some that he still tentatively did now) and had left him to fend for himself. Peter hadn’t been close with the X-Men, but he had gone to them for help with Fisk too and been turned away. It was one of the bigger things that had torn apart what Harley had learned had been a rather… close relationship with Johnny Storm. Things around the Accords were difficult and a painful topic to broach. They had left Peter for dead, all of them aside from maybe Matt Murdock and Wade Wilson, and then they had reappeared when Harley had started his podcast. Coming out of the woodwork to defend and protect something they had stomped all over years before. “Pete,” Harley started and then stopped.
Peter continued as though he hadn’t noticed, but Harley knew he had. Peter noticed a lot more than people ever expected him to. “I mean she didn’t really work with the X-Men that much but,” he shrugged. “Xavier definitely tried to keep her safe. Just like he did all of his students.”
“Wanda’s a mutant?”
Peter blanched and rather abruptly tugged his hand away from Harley’s, shoulders high and expression as closed off as it could get. “I’m not doing this.” He groaned, tugged at his curls and begged Harley with his gaze. “Please, don’t make me do this.”
Something broke in Harley. Something helpless and small. He wasn’t sure if it was breaking for Peter or because of him. “I’m not making you do anything.”
“Harley, you…” Peter cut himself off with a press of his lips and when he blinked his pained expression cleared into one of pure stubbornness. “People deserve to have their story come out how they want it to.”
“Peter, come on -.”
“I might not be Wanda Maximoff’s biggest fan, but everyone deserves to have their privacy respected.”
“I feel like you’re saying something that you don’t want to actually say .”
Something to do with the year before, something to do with bullets and secrets and panic attacks in his apartment alone at night. Something to do with how their original meeting was tainted by Harley digging and digging and digging until Peter had finally crawled back out with a roaring cry that was still dragging itself out of his throat. “I’m fine.” Peter lied through his teeth, reminding Harley that it was something Peter had done his entire life and was scarily efficient at.
“Peter, come on.” Harley laughed hollowly. “We’re going to have to talk about this sometime.”
Except Peter looked like that was the exact opposite of what he was planning on ever doing. He smiled brightly, but it was without a hint of real joy. “Do you want to salvage this night or end it early?” His tone wasn’t one Peter usually used. It was Spider-Man, Harley realized abruptly. It was a mask fitting over his entire being and leaving no trace of Peter Parker behind. “Because there’s this really good milk and cookies bar down the street that MJ said we have to try.”
Harley pursed his lips. On one hand, digging into things and prying the truth out was what Harley did . On the other hand, Peter was asking for privacy without asking for it and Harley was pretty sure privacy was something that he still owed him. Still, “You’d tell me,” Harley began cautiously. “If we weren’t okay, right?”
Spider-Man disappeared in a second and Peter’s earnest brown eyes implored Harley - reached into his chest and speared his heart with a single glance. He planted his palms on the table and leaned over it, his pink lips a pressure point on Harley’s, lingering perhaps a moment too long for a public place. But his nose was warm against Harley’s cheek, his neck a familiar curve under his hand, and his mouth a gentle heat that Harley wanted to make a home inside of. They broke apart, nudged noses against each other, and Harley took a moment to look at him, at the splay of eyelashes against his slightly red cheeks, the freckles hidden underneath a healthy tan.
It wasn’t an answer but a distraction.
Harley found he was happy enough to be distracted if this was how Peter was willing to go about it.
--
Dinner at the Stark’s was a weekly affair, something a much younger Harley had had dreams about lying in Tennessee and begging his ceiling for something that Tony Stark hadn’t been quite ready to give back then. Him and Abby had become a welcome addition over the years, Abby more than happy to watch Morgan Stark grow with the fondness of an aunt, and Harley tiptoeing his way into an actual relationship with Tony that went beyond that of the man that had broken into his garage.
Tony was insistent on forging a relationship with Peter. It was hilarious only because of how difficult Peter was making it on him.
“He feels guilty,” Peter had said once in the car ride over. “That doesn’t mean that I need to take it easy on him.” And it was fun to watch Tony scramble with someone that was just as smart and ten times more clever than him. Harley was pretty sure that whatever it was that Tony was apologizing for Peter had already forgiven, but he was also pretty sure that neither man had ever actually talked about it. A fact that would have had May Parker staging an intervention if she was ever included in on the Stark family dinners that her nephew graced with his presence only when he felt up to it.
This, Harley noted, was one of the times Peter had but the moment Pepper had asked about work Peter had pretended to get a phone call and stepped outside with a curiously distressed look on his face. They would have to talk about it, whatever it was that was lingering in the air around what had happened the year before, especially if the way Eddie was raising his brows significantly in Harley’s direction was any indication of the fact that everyone had noticed Peter’s less than tactful exit. “Everything okay in paradise?” Tony asked lightly and yelped at Pepper’s elbow in his side.
Harley flushed but nodded. He would have to trust Peter’s lack of communication as reason enough to believe that they were fine and Peter would just rather not get involved in whatever it was that Harley was doing for the podcast. “So,” Tony stuffed his hands in his pockets and flicked his gaze between the young adults he had gathered in his living room - Abby sipping on a glass of wine Pepper had placed in front of her that stained her lips red, Eddie fumbling with Morgan’s rubix cube, a frown of concentration in the center of his forehead, Gwen lying on the floor staring at the ceiling and Harley, staring after where Peter had been moments before. “You’re doing your season on Wanda Maximoff?”
Gwen perked up. She had been down ever since Peter had left the room, a clear indication that he wasn’t willing to participate in anything she wanted him to no matter how much she pushed or Harley prodded. Disappointment was something she would have to get used to with Peter, not that Harley knew the right way to tell her that. “Harley picked her.” She pointed unhelpfully in his direction.
“I did.” Harley admitted.
Tony furrowed his brow. “Why? Why not do someone cool?”
“Like you?” Abby asked wryly.
“Well, I wasn’t going to say that.”
“Weren’t you?”
Tony grunted, a concession at best, and swirled his glass of water in Harley’s direction. “You have any questions?”
“What?” Harley blinked.
“Do you have any questions?”
“I have a lot of questions.”
“Well,” Tony gestured. “Go ahead.”
“Are you suggesting we interview you for the show or are you being factitious?”
Tony rolled his eyes. “Bring out the records, kid. I know you have a mountain of shit you want to get off your chest.”
Never had Tony been so willing to talk before. He hadn’t offered more than a passing opinion on Barnes, had talked for only a minute about Barton, and had been ridiculously cagey about Peter. He had an angle here, something that he was vying at, someone he was protecting….
Harley glanced back at the door, at the shadow of Peter’s silhouette on the porch, at the phone pressed to his cheek. Actually on the phone, then. With who, Harley wondered. There weren’t many people Peter would willingly call in a crisis. Harley had his suspicions on either Harry Osborn or May.
He was finding he rapidly hoped it was May Parker. At least she didn’t already have a terrible image of Harley in her head.
Harley slapped the recorder on the coffee table, the green light already blinking. Eddie sat up straighter. “Don’t tell me you’ve been recording all night.”
Harley waved away his question.
It was useless, anyway. Harley was almost always recording. “What do you know about Wanda Maximoff?” Gwen was the first to ask, annoyed in her incredibly sweet tone of voice, something that Harley only rolled his eyes at.
She didn’t want Tony’s opinion, even if Peter’s wouldn’t be nearly as informative. Peter would bring the ratings - while Iron Man would get people to listen, Spider-Man was still what everyone was talking about. Gwen knew exactly what it was that Tony was doing and she knew exactly why Harley was going along with it. “She grew up in Sokovia. Was part of extremist groups protesting for their freedom.” Tony stared at the wall, where Harley knew there was a picture of the Avengers hanging in a dark corner, taken years before they had broken apart. “She was closer to Rogers than she was to me. Vision loved her.”
“Vision, as in the sentient robot you built for fun?” Eddie asked wryly, frowning down at the rubix cube as though it personally offended him by being more difficult to solve than Morgan made it look earlier that evening.
“I didn’t build him.”
Eddie gave him a sharp look that had Tony wincing and scratching at his beard. “This isn’t about Vision, anyway,” Harley insisted and dragged Tony’s attention back to him. “Did you like Wanda?”
Tony winced. “She was a good kid, I think. Eager. Seriously depressed.”
“Why do you think she was depressed?”
“I don’t think it.” Tony said with a sharper tone than he intended. “Look, Harley, this kid… she lost her entire country.”
“In an attack orchestrated by something you created, right?”
“If you’re asking if she blamed me, I can’t tell you one way or another.”
“You don’t know if she blamed you?”
“She didn’t talk to me.” Tony stressed. “Nothing beyond the mission parameters.”
Harley pursed his lips. This wasn’t helping. This wasn’t getting them anything they actually could use. All it was was… conjecture and frustration. “Captain Rogers handled most of the training for the new recruits, right?” Abby asked softly, doing what she did best and smoothing things between whatever cracks Harley always managed to cause during interviews.
“Yeah.” Tony nodded after a moment. “Him and Romanov.”
“Did you guys ever talk about her?”
“In passing, mostly.” Tony admitted. “She was promising, but her power wasn’t even something she could tell us about.”
“Meaning?”
“She didn’t know how she got it, didn’t know how it worked.”
“You must have had a theory, though.” Abby pressed with an easy smile. “You always have a theory.”
“I did.” Tony shrugged.
“Care to share.” Eddie prompted with a dry laugh.
Tony echoed it with one of his own. “I think it was tied to her emotions. They were erratic, hard to control. If she was in a good place then she usually didn’t do anything too bad, if she had a nightmare she was capable of exploding the entire training facility.”
“She had a brother, right?” Harley asked absently. “A twin?”
“Pietro.” Tony hummed with a twitch of a smile. “He was… a lot. Fast. A little frustrating. But protective.”
“How did he die?”
“Ultron.”
Ultron. The same thing that had taken away the entirety of the Sokovian country and left nothing but a pile of rubble and devastation in its wake. Wanda Maximoff hadn’t been the sole survivor, but she had certainly lost more than a lot of people realized in a short period of time. Abby shifted closer to Harley’s side, her knee nudging his and his arm draped around the back of where she sat. Not for the first time was Harley struck with the thought of what his life would be like without Abby in it. In between gunshots and fearing for his own life, Harley had become acutely aware of the way his life would have been vastly different without his sister in it. “She didn’t handle it well?” Gwen asked softly when it became obvious that no one else was going to.
“Would you have?” Tony asked, his eyes begging Harley to understand.
He didn’t have to beg. “No,” Harley answered softly, his admission barely more than a whisper.
“Wanda didn’t lose control a lot, but she was a kid. She made decisions like a kid. There was a bomb, she… tried to redirect the power and it blew up a building.” Tony said to his melting ice cubes. “When the government found out, they decided it was best to police people with powers. To put limits on what they could and could not do.”
Wanda Maximoff was the reason the Accords existed. Harley had known it but it wasn’t something he had conceptualized. He had forgotten that it hadn’t been Captain America and Iron Man fighting alone in an aircraft carrier. That it hadn’t been only a fight between whether Barnes should be arrested or not. Harley wondered what side Peter would have been on, if they had bothered asking him about it. He wondered if it would have done any good to have Peter involved in the first place. “That explosion is what caused the Accords.” Abby said out loud, her voice steady where Harley’s felt like trembling.
Tony nodded. It was also the explosion that had ended one of Tony’s closest relationships. The explosion that had effectively cut the Avengers in two. “She was on Cap’s side?” Eddie asked.
“I wanted to keep her safe,” Tony insisted. “I just wanted to keep her safe.”
Harley licked his lips. “What did you do?”
“I wanted to keep her
safe
.”
“What did you
do
?”
“I asked Vision to keep an eye on her.”
Something sick swirled in Harley’s stomach. Something that he was sure he could name as only having existed because of Peter. “You asked her boyfriend to tail her?”
“I asked him to make sure she didn’t leave.”
“The state?” Tony said nothing. “The building ?” Abby gasped and fluttered her dark eyelashes against her cheeks.
“Tony….”
“Listen, it was just to keep her safe! We didn’t know what she was capable of!”
“She’s a human being!”
“She was a ticking time bomb!” Tony snapped. “Her powers weren’t even something she understood.”
“So you locked her up ?” Abby demanded.
Harley had to give it to her, Abby had been on countless interviews and had yet to lose her cool in any of them. There was, it seemed, a first time for everything. He squeezed her shoulder in his hand and pulled her more firmly against his side. She went, but it wasn’t easily or without a frustrated huff. “Tony,” Harley began and then stopped. He rubbed at his forehead and then looked up at him, at the gray at his temples, the way Tony’s expression seemed to beg for Harley to understand and support his side of things. “Do you think Wanda Maximoff is dangerous?”
“I don’t think anything.” Tony stressed.
“Bullshit.” Eddie scoffed. “You’re always thinking.”
“I think…” Tony rolled his neck. “I think under the right circumstances, Wanda Maximoff could destroy everything we’ve worked to create.”
--
Harley didn’t usually have an open invitation to the dinners that the Jones’ hosted at their mansion. Or, penthouse. Harley referred to it as a mansion only for the way Peter snickered and the way Harry Osborn’s face tended to turn a ridiculous shade of red. Regardless, Harley wasn’t typically invited, mainly because Harley had it on good authority, aka his eyes , that the Jones’ didn’t particularly like Harley. He didn’t exactly blame them - he hadn’t exactly gotten off on the right foot with them by not only heavily investigating Peter but by outright stating years of abuse on a podcast. And they hadn’t made the best impression on him , either, what with slapping the podcast with a cease and desist order and making Harley’s job infinitely more difficult.
It made dinner when Harley did tag along incredibly… difficult.
“Here,” Michelle Jones shoved a basket full of freshly baked bread into his hands and pushed him towards their less fancy dining room - because they had three of those, one for friends, one for business, and one for elegant dinner parties - and turning back to her husband’s rather lazy stirring of whatever was in the giant pot on their fancy stove.
The two of them had officially gotten married a few months before at the courthouse, something that had taken a week to plan and only Peter and Ned and Michelle’s parents had attended. Peter had told him it was incredibly unlike Harry, to throw up his hands, decide a wedding was much too frustrating to plan, and decide that they should just go to the courthouse and get it over with. Harley wasn’t so sure that Peter knew his best friend as well as he pretended he did because, with what he had noticed, it seemed like exactly the sort of thing Harry Osborn would do. Jones. Harry Jones.
He was still getting used to that.
Harley left them to it, Peter sitting on the counter nursing a bottle of water, sock clad feet banging against their cabinets, Michelle Jones pressing a kiss against her husband’s shoulder and Harry Jones teasing Peter about something that had happened at work that morning. It was best for everyone involved if Harley spent as little time around the happy married couple as possible.
Ned, though, was a safe bet and was already in the dining room, playing with the record player in the corner, a screwdriver in hand and a look of pure concentration on his round face. Out of all of Peter’s friends, Ned was the easiest to get along with. He was jovial, kind, and the one to trust Peter’s judgment the most. Harley was pretty sure it came with the territory of having known Peter for as long as he had. “Hey Harley,” Ned greeted and glanced up at him with a bright smile.
Harley placed the bread in the center of the table and fixed his glasses, pulling out the chair next to Ned before dropping into it with a sigh. He watched him work for a moment before he decided to speak. Silence around Ned was never awkward, save for the one time Ned had asked him with a bright red blush about his sister and then proceeded to never bring her up again. Harley never had to navigate a minefield with Ned, not like he did with Michelle or Harry or Matt . All too smart for their own good. All with their own reasons not to trust him. “What are you doing?” He asked finally, arms crossed over his chest and sockless toes wiggling in the warm air of the Jones’ mansion .
“MJ mentioned their records are skipping.” Ned supplied and twirled a metal piece Harley was pretty sure he had produced out of thin air between his fingers.
“They listen to records?”
“MJ’s really into motown.”
“I would have thought she would be more into the screams of children.”
Ned laughed but knocked Harley’s knuckles lightly with the screwdriver. “She’s not the devil.” He chided gently. “Pete mentioned you’re working on the new season.”
It was a segway if Harley knew one. Ned was nice but he wasn’t a fan of shit talking about his friends. Harley couldn’t begrudge him that. If he was in Ned’s place he was sure he too would be rather defensive. “Yeah,” Harley hummed. “We’re following Wanda -.”
“Maximoff.” Ned finished with another smile. “Peter told me.”
“He did?” Harley was shocked, honestly. Sometimes it was difficult to figure out where Peter was with things - whether he was happy that Harley was still investigating or whether he strongly disliked it. Whether he talked to his friends about Harley or whether he held Harley as close to his chest as he held the rest of them.
Ned shrugged with a small flush. “Not in a lot of words.” He reassured. He straightened after a moment, shook out his shoulders, and tapped his fingers in a nervous pattern on the screwdriver in his hand. “Can I make a suggestion?”
“Sure?”
“Don’t…” Ned chewed on his lip. “Don’t go about this the way you did last season, yeah?”
Harley smiled, but it was hollow. “I don’t understand.”
“I just…” Ned huffed. “You’re good at what you do. And Peter respects you. You guys are in a good place.”
“What does this have to do with the show?”
“I just don’t want…” Ned paused. “Harry would be better at this.”
“I really don’t think he would.”
“No, Harry’s actually really good at just… being blunt.”
“You don’t say.”
Ned smiled, but it was nervous. Jumping around his face before settling into a frown. “Last year really messed with Peter’s head.” He finally settled on. “Just… remember that these people are human. They might have powers and save lives but they’re just… they’re just people too.” He shrugged and turned back to the record player. “Just try not to lose the human part of things. The empathy.”