Peter Parker was not a dog person. That may sound bad but it still sounded better than saying that he would rather put a bullet through his own foot than get a dog. Don’t get him wrong, it’s not that he has a problem with dogs, per say. It’s more that the thought of having a living, breathing being with big eyes and a sorrowful snout rely on him for food and water and walking it so that it doesn’t shit in his flat, well, it’s terrifying the shit out of him. Dogs were perfectly alright if they were someone else’s dogs and he didn’t have to deal with them for too long at a time.
Which was exactly why he had been less than thrilled when Mrs. Garcias from next door asked him to look after her Mr. Puggles while she went to replace the flowers on her daughter’s grave – a bright woman who had succumbed to an enemy Peter couldn’t have stopped even if he had known when she died of cancer at merely thirty-seven. But who could have said no to that little old lady with brittle bones, giant glasses and a striking resemblance to Aunt May in so far that Peter was almost absolutely sure that you did not want to get on her bad side? Peter wasn’t a monster which basically meant that he was a fool. A fool that was now stuck with a pug drooling all over his furniture.
All this did not mean that he had to be happy about dog sitting, though. He had done an absolutely spectacular job of staying sullen and glowering about not being able to go out swinging for the remainder of his free day – of course he could have left the dog on his own but the whole reason he was with him was that he was old by now. Really freaking old for a dog if Peter may so say himself, and Mrs. Garcia had been worried about him being alone in a space as crammed as her little flat for any amount of time. And Peter wasn’t about to leave the little old lady’s little old dog on his own in an even tinier, more crammed flat while she was visiting her daughter’s grave, for god’s sake!
So he had figured he could at the very least make the most of the situation and invite someone over. He didn’t have very much free time between all his official and not-so-official jobs and he saw Johnny in particular rarely enough as it was. As it turned out, having two completely unrelated, contradictory superhero-schedules to work around left you with very little overlap of free time to hang out. Which meant it couldn’t hurt to use this unexpected free time to ask if Johnny wanted to come over, right?
Wrong. Because now, watching Johnny laughing and wrinkling his nose and being the absolute goddamn incarnation of sunshine as he let Mr. Puggles lick chees of his fingers, that absolutely disgusting slob, Peter couldn’t help but employ the thought of getting a dog after all. Sure, there were all those responsibilities and the fear of the poor thing being stuck with him, but what was all that when you weighted it against a shining and happy and godforsaken giggling Johnny Storm lying belly down on Peter’s couch and talking to a dog about having to come over more often if “you bud will be there”. And damn it, Peter hadn’t even known that he had it in himself to be jealous of a dog of all things. Being a dog sucked! They didn’t even have thumbs! But, a traitorous voice in the back of his head whispered, do you really need thumbs when you could have Johnny Storm scratching you behind your ears and beaming at you with his stupidly bright sunshine smile?
Maybe you didn’t. Maybe it would be totally worth it to spend the rest of his life unable to swing around the city and take pictures or, you know, open doors and jars and stuff if it meant that Johnny would look at him like that. But unless he wanted to go hunt down Doctor Strange with a really strange request, he should probably just get a dog.
Or maybe not, thinking about the poor creature. Maybe he should just ask Johnny out. And risk getting laughed at for thinking that someone as bright and amazing as Johnny would ever even consider going out with someone as, well, peter as Peter. But it had worked out with MJ who, if Peter was painfully honest here, had always been just as much out of his league as Johnny. And Gwen, and Felicia.
Yeah, Peter thought twenty minutes later, as he was cleaning up dog shit from his, admittedly already fairly dirty floor, while Johnny quipped about how maybe the dog wouldn’t have mistaken his living room for a toilet if it smelled less like one. Maybe he would just try that.