Chapter Text
Peter Parker had a growing body; Spider-Manning kept his metabolism high, but he was also a growing teenager who by default had the appetite of a horse. May never insisted on giving him school lunches. He appreciated his aunt’s effort, but somehow even creating a sandwich proved a heated challenge. Since that one specific disaster involving peanut butter, jelly and the vacuum cleaner—don’t ask, May avoided cooking and just sent Peter to the cafeteria with a couple of bucks and a pat on the back.
That was how he ended up alone in the lunch line, waiting patiently to collect his daily dosage of three chicken nuggets made of mystery meat, sorry, soggy salad and enough mediocre pasta to feed a family of four. He never questioned the integrity of his meals, but it sustained him enough to make it through two more subjects without genuinely considering how edible chalk was.
Eventually, he’d collected his food, carried it carefully with precise placement of footsteps and his Spider sense on high alert. He knew that his sixth sense usually didn’t constitute to avoid Peter’s general clumsiness, but it was there to help.
Just as Peter had predicted, a faint buzzing on the nape of his neck warned him of an inching presence. He turned around, and the concentrated look he’d adopted fizzled into an eyeroll.
‘Princess,’ Harley narrowed his icy eyes, as if the pet name that had just rolled off his tongue was more of an insult. The cafeteria was like a war zone, No Man’s Land being the lunch line running straight through the space, where the blonde stood on one side and the brunette the other.
‘Sunshine,’ Peter scowled back, folding his arms over his chest.
‘Can’t afford food?’ The blonde looked him up and down, before grimacing at the cardboard chicken nuggets and soggy yellow fries on Peter’s tray.
The brown-eyed boy frowned. ‘At least I don’t abuse Tony’s funds.’
‘He’s a billionaire, he can spare a couple meals for us poor people.’
‘Doesn’t mean he has to,’ he scowled, giving the blonde a knowing look. ‘There are other things that he has to replace fairly often.’
A vision of his blown up, charred Spider-Man flickered in his mind. He repressed a snicker, imaging that was not on the list of things Harley had imagined.
Harley just shrugged nonchalantly, turning away from Peter in the dust for his group of friends, the other members of the varsity basketball team. They all reeked with superiority, as if they stood on top of the world. Honestly, it was a little appalling as Peter stood there with his bleak food and science pun t-shirt.
The blonde met the deep brown eyes of his girlfriend, Liz Allen, the captain of the Academic Decathlon team who’d slithered her way between two of Harley’s friends to meet the blonde in the middle. The whole relationship put Peter on edge, especially since he’d had a crush on the girl in sophomore year before ditching her at homecoming to stop her villain dad from stealing billions of dollars of superhero weapons. You know, complications.
‘Baby, you’ll love my treat tonight,’ Harley lulled, and the brown-eyed boy wished he’d taken his opportunity to leave a second earlier.
‘I can’t wait, my love,’ the girl smiled warmly, pressing a kiss to the blonde’s lips. Harley waved goodbye as she left, before turning on his heel again.
He wrinkled his nose. ‘What, don’t have any friends to go to?’
‘Our conversation didn’t finish,’ Peter quipped, narrowing his eyes. ‘And any longer you make me stand here, the worse it is for both of us.’
The blonde’s friends just stared down at him like he was a shrimp, waiting for him to continue.
‘Whatever,’ he huffed. ‘Mr Stark has a business meeting so he won’t be at the tower.’
‘You’d think he’d just text me himself,’ Harley huffed, staring at his feet. ‘That’s all you’ve gotta tell me?’
‘Yeah,’ Peter shook his head in disbelief. ‘Now move.’
‘Sure,’ the blonde retorted, and with a sharp sway of his arm as he shoved past, tipped the lunch tray up. The brunet yelped, let out a defeated sigh because of course, even if he’d tried to be careful, Parker Luck came to haunt him and ruin his day.
‘Go fuck yourself, Sunshine,’ Peter hissed, before swearing profusely as oily food ran down his shirt and dropped at his feet. The teenager didn’t respond, instead snickering with his friends like a lunatic.
Harley Keener-Stark was a textbook popular student. He was a senior who took all AP classes. He had cerulean blue eyes that charmed anyone that he met, messy blonde hair that wasn’t too long but also not at an awkward length like his mother had forced him in the barber’s seat and asked for whatever every other teenager boy had. He was captain of the basketball team and the eye candy for every cheerleader on the team. Turns out he was also ridiculously smart, and knew Tony motherfucking Stark personally.
Peter Parker, on the other hand, was a junior with a not so spotless reputation as a nerd and the social status of gum at the bottom of someone’s shoe. He was, however, the most intelligent student in the grade, and probably the whole school, but none of his classmates needed to know that. Some people swore he had muscles, but it could’ve just been some weird fantasy that he was a hot nerd from a romance novel. He seemed to reclude from the whole popularity scheme, often sticking to his equally nerdy trio and whoever was on the Academic Decathlon team. His only claim to fame was his association with Liz Allen, the captain of the team, his issues with Harley Keener-Stark and also that he too knew Tony Stark personally.
The school separated to stand behind one of the teens. Of course people were more drawn to Harley due to his “natural charm and charisma”, but it didn’t stop Peter from having his own band of followers who relished in his sudden attitude problem.
It was the most interesting part of the day, watching Tony Stark’s intern and son bicker and banter with no other care in the world.
The rumour had gone that Peter and Harley had been fond friends, once upon a time, until in the middle of an experiment, a beaker broke atop their bunsen burner and most-likely hazardous foam began to explode around the lab like a volcano.
Covering his hair, Peter began to shriek, eye peeling for the gas source as he dug through mountains of bubbles. Fire licked the floor, flames crackling and exploding in flickering sparks as he dodged the inferno. Ash flicked into the air, melting through the bubbles. He yelped, arms flailing before he covered his head in panic.
‘Don’t be such a princess, Parker!’ The blonde snapped, digging for the fire hydrant. ‘Stop stressing over your hair and help me!’
Sneering, Peter shoved him out of the way, making a beeline for the sparking flames. ‘Not all of us just radiate rainbows and sunshine, Keener! And I’m not just covering my hair, there’s things under it!’
‘Like what?’ Harley retorted maliciously, eyes sharp as his hands finally found the fire extinguisher. He turned it on, before promptly spraying the room recklessly. It passed by Peter, who inhaled half of it in an attempt to catch his breath. ‘Maybe if you weren’t being such a prissy asshole, this wouldn’t have happened!’
‘Maybe you shouldn’t be so careless and we wouldn’t be trapped in a fucking inferno!’ Peter exclaimed, coughing up foam with a venomous glare. ‘This is all your fault.’
Since then, they were at each other’s throats with probably machetes and the sharpest tongues they could possibly muster. They competed for the same science awards, the top marks in every class, and for Tony Stark’s attention like the billionaire had none to give.
Peter was the only student to get full marks in AP Chemistry on their last test, so Harley weaseled his way into the lab at the tower to mess up Spider-Man’s web fluid—something worked on by loser Peter the intern who was definitely not the ultra-cool super amazing Spider-Man. He turned it into an almost impenetrable, rigid ball of glue, because if the brunet could ace an AP test as a junior, he needed an extra challenge to keep his nosy ass out of other people’s business. Because of this, Peter used the defect solution to glue the blonde’s basketball to the ceiling.
Harley had asked Liz out a couple of weeks after homecoming, when Spider-Man had almost died fighting her evil father, so the brunet told Tony all about it and then held the longest grudge humanly possible. Then the other teen won a science award for his ridiculous basketball shooting robot and Peter was livid. The blonde even used his winner’s funds to host a watch party for the NBA finals at the billionaire’s tower, as if Tony couldn’t throw a basketball party himself.
Now Midtown High School of Science and Technology was supposed to be specifically for science and technology, but as every student was aiming for ivy leagues, they all were ridiculous over-achievers, wanting their credentials to rain high over everyone else’s. The theatre kids were in the decathlon. The football players were on the swim team. The basketball players were in the robotics club. Of course this meant Peter couldn’t just have a minute alone because every club he was in to avoid the blonde quite literally had Harley listed in the attendees list.
Even the school musical. For fuck’s sake.
AP English Language was one of many classes the two shared. Harley thought it was stupid that a junior could be in so many AP classes and Peter was pissed that the blonde had to share every interest of his.
‘Harley, spell conscientious,’ Mr Dell tested, and the boy pondered for a moment, leaning back in his chair before sitting up stiffly.
‘Um, c-o-n-s-c-i-e-n-c-i-o-u-s,’ he tried, and Peter let out a snicker, slapping a hand over his mouth.
‘That was w-r-o-n-g,’ the brunet choked on his own laughter. MJ gave him an amused look, one he took pride in knowing it was a rare occurrence.
‘Mr Parker, please remain silent,’ their teacher reprimanded with a scowl. Peter shrunk lower in his seat—as if he wasn’t already so low that he could just slip off—and avoided Harley’s amused expression. Even if he’d gotten the question wrong, they both knew the satisfaction of seeing the other shameful outweighed any objective wins between the two.
A few seats away, Harley had long gotten over the embarrassment of spelling “conscientious” wrong and was sharing a look of mirth with his friends. None of them quite understood the significance of seeing Peter get scolded like a five-year-old, but Peter was a know-it-all nerd with a mouth too big for his face.