House Fire
Saving a sleeping pretty boy from a burning library hadn’t really been planned so much as happened. The boy (sweetly smiling, dreaming away)—he was snoring at the corner of Maddis and Greene, in between Shakespeare and Shannon, five feet and three bookshelves below Harley’s space, right when he needed to be surrounded by stars and asteroids and swirling galaxies in the space of his head.
He needed to curl up and hide in the general vicinity of the moon for a lot of reasons, starting with this one: He had let loose a secret that was supposed to stay safe, and his mom was on a rampage and Abbie wasn’t home and Harley wanted to scream some Very Bad Words with capital letters because he was well and truly scared now.
What would happen if he had just gotten himself kicked out? He didn’t have any friends, had nowhere to stay. No family to run and hug and sob into the shoulders of. And Tony—well, Tony had probably long forgotten about him, because Harley, in his own experience, was a very mundane, ordinary, and overall forgettable person.
A good person to leave behind.
See, this was why he always died in video games.
He should’ve played less. Cleaned his room more. Maybe the garage, too? That was kind of his second room. But he was, like, at least 97% sure that cleaning that particular black hole of mechanics and poetry and screwdrivers tucked behind oil-stained ears was far beyond his current level of organizational pay-grade.
But whatever he should’ve done, it was what it was—a should’ve been, just like so many other things (thoughts, ideas, plans, dads). And right now was right now, and right now he didn’t want to be kicked out for a secret that was supposed to stay locked up forevermore and eternity. He didn’t want to have to live out of dumpster fires and empty, cockroached flats. He didn’t want to do a lot of things, and that was why he was trying to achieve liftoff to reach his hideout on the moon and do what he did best.
Hide.
The key word there was trying, just in case you didn’t catch it.
The boy in the way was snoring, still, with a collection of Dickinson slipping from his limp-noodle palms. Whoever this guy was—(brown hair pale skin with a little swoopity-curl of sun-kissed freckles, lean and wiry and too many muscles and pretty mouth pretty face)—whoever he was, he had good taste.
“Psst! Hey! Hey, you! You awake?” He tried poking the sleeping dude (Brown Eyes, he had secretly dubbed him, because there was no way someone that pretty couldn’t have melted-coffee pot eyes) with a feather quill he had snatched from the Harry Potter shelves, because Harley had no chill and did things like that.
Brown Eyes groaned (didn’t drool, though, which was impressive. Harley would’ve drooled by now.) and stirred back into what Harley was at least 98.9% sure was the land of the living, because that last 1.1% was what was left when he inevitably questioned what reality was and wasn’t while brushing his teeth every Monday.
Brown Eyes blinked, once, twice, and Harley had been right about the name. Brown eyes.
This relationship was off to a wonderful start, Harley could already tell.
“Oh, fu—figglewoggles! Am I in your way?” Brown Eyes asked, yawning a yawn of awakeness.
His voice was nice. Quiet, unsure, but saturated with a vodka shot of hallucinogenic silk and confidence.
Brown Eyes probably just was nice, in general. Like, person wise. A nice person. Quiet, unsure, but confident and kind.
Nice people—good people—they didn’t belong in Rose Hill, Tennessee. Especially not in the orbit of Harley Keener, Rose Hill, Tennessee.
Because the orbit of Harley Keener was full of explosive, hydrogen gas-filled asteroids, and it tended to break things. And people. It tended to break things, and people. Especially people. It was why he had no friends, and he needed some bubble wrap over here on Aisle Seven, please, for a boy named Brown Eyes? ASAP, manager.
“Kind of, yeah, but don’t worry about it. I’m just trying to hide, and you’re cute, and oh my god I just said that out loud didn’t I.”
Tact? Who was she? Some sort of alien princess from the planet Tattooine? Because his mom said that aliens didn’t exist, and princesses did, but only in the UK. So hah. Take that.
Brown Eyes laughed nervously, and flushed a bright, beet-root red, and his hair flopped in his face all attractive-like, except this was exactly like bad fanfic and Netflix rom-coms with semi-decent music tracks, so Brown Eyes didn’t notice that he was cute and Harley was left to ponder the startling fact that he might be forming a fireworks-and-Fourth-of-July crush on a complete and utter stranger.
“And I’m going to change the subject now, to something hopefully less awkward but probably not actually, what with my amazing track record and all with, you know, human interaction. What was it that you said earlier? Figglewoggles? Cool word, by the way, and also, do you mind if I smoke here? I have an unfortunate addiction to nicotine and I’m trying to wean myself off, but like I said, I’m an addict. It’s not going so well.”
At the mention of his botched-up, half-baked f-word attempt, Brown Eyes flushed even more, which Harley didn’t even know was possible, transforming into this odd plum-purple color. It was interesting shade, but still one that screamed “Bad Harley, bad.”
He really needed to shut up now, so he pulled out a Marlboro and a lighter and choked on the smell of the smoke, just like he always did, before inhaling the drug that was so bad for him and his lungs and was killing him slowly.
Maybe the eventual lung cancer would be enough to keep him quiet.
“Oh, uh, no. I don’t mind if you smoke. And I’m Peter.”
Brown Eyes—Peter—stuck his hand out, and looked at Harley as if he was supposed to do something. What, was he supposed to lick it?
Peter faltered, and Harley realized a moment too late and with a gasp of the fourteenth letter of the alphabet (o, for those of you who can’t count) that he was supposed to shake it.
Well, crap.
“Nice to meet you, Peter,” Harley responded, smiling from within a cloud of grey. “What brings you to the humble library of the Hilly Roses?”
“I thought it was Rose Hill? But, um, my boss sent me. Do you know where I could find a guy named Harley? Keener?”
Harley looked at him—Peter—as if from a separate state and several country roads and highways of shock away. His lips quirked down, on the defensive. What was that one position on the football team? Quarterback? No, they were offense. Wait, was there even defense and offense in football? Figglewoggles, he needed to pay more attention to sports.
“Who’s your boss?”
“Oh. Um. I’m an intern at Stark Industries. Mr. Stark sent me,” Peter stuttered, and Harley was flipping through his files and redacting his earlier statement about confidence. This boy—this kid, really, even though he couldn’t have been any more than a year or two or maybe a month younger than Harley himself—he wasn’t confident. He was a bumbling dwarf of a baby giraffe, in a world much too big for him. He still had the silk, though. There was something gracefully awkward about him.
“Tony? What’s he want with me?”
“You? No, he sent me to find Har—oh. You’re Harley, aren’t you?”
Harley nodded, and Peter (finally) got to his feet, reaching his full height of 5’6”. Harley almost laughed. The difference between 5’6” and 6’ was striking when you looked it in the eye.
And Peter had very drowning-worthy pretty sunken shipwreck with carved masthead eyes.
“Yeah,” Harley chuckled hysterically. There was absolutely no way that he was going to let himself form yet another unrequited crush on a stranger straight boy. Because that was creepy, and he had already gone through that rodeo once before. It… It wasn’t fun, to say the least. “Yeah, I’m Harley. And what, exactly, does Tony want with me?”
“Oh. Oh. Right. Well. That’s kind of a long story.”
Harley flicked his cigarette out of his mouth, spraying a spark or two to the ground and blowing out a cloud of smoke. He didn’t notice the little glow of embers tucked behind Sherman and Shiaretti, and neither did Peter, because Peter’s spidey-sense was going off for a lot of reasons at the moment, and he couldn’t particularly tell what for. He was kind of in the middle of a panic attack, thank you very much.
“I have time.”
Peter sucked in a long breath. “Okay. Okay.”
This… this wasn’t going to go well, was it?
“So, you know how Mr. Stark—you know how he has a problem, right? With anxiety?”
“Yeah. I know.”
A harsh swirl of snowglobed memories came swirling back into the room. He was stuck on Hoth (Star Wars, Luke and Leia and a million magic Jedi), in the middle of a battle to the death. Harley didn’t want to die, but he would, because that was inevitable and the only promise that would ever be kept. Your fault, kid. Your fault.
“Okay. So, for a while, he was kind of refusing to get treatment for it, right? He felt like he was blocking other people from getting help, and that he didn’t need it as much as they did. So he just… he didn’t. And everyone around him—Colonel Rhodes, Mr. Hogan, Ms. Potts—they all kept telling him that he needed to get help, be-because he was getting worse, and everyone was worried about him. And then I came to work for him, and even I could tell that something was wrong. And then. And then. Captain Rogers—he… he did some bad stuff. Stuff that messed Mr. Stark up even more. Germany, the airport—Siberia. It just. It wasn’t good, okay? And Colonel Rhodes got hurt and Mr. Stark finally agreed to get some help, and he’s been doing better now. And it’s the good kind of better, too, so that’s good. He’s… he’s just… he’s doing good, okay?”
Right. Captain America. He had read about that, and what it looked like to him was that somebody needed to take that massive stick out of Steve’s butt and just sit down both Tony and him to talk things through. The Accords were horrible, he agreed with Steve on that, but also—they could have easily amended them. If they had just sat down. And talked it out.
Honestly, the stupidity of superheroes these days.
“Okay. But what does any of this have to do with me?”
Peter winced, eyes fluttered closed. It looked like he was having some difficulty breathing.
“Hey, are you… are you okay?”
Peter smiled, focusing his gaze back on Harley’s.
It was fake, Harley knew. He put one on just like it every day. But he wasn’t going to question it, because he got the feeling that Peter was one of those self-sacrificial idiots that wouldn’t ever let anyone know they were in pain.
“Oh, yeah, I’m fine. Just dandy.”
Wow, okay. Breaking out the masked sarcasm so soon, young one? Harley was going to reserve his until at least the third date, but if Peter was doing it…
“You sure? You look like somebody ran over your cat with a semi.”
Peter wanted to laugh. Replace the cat with him, and Harley would be spot-on.
“Yeah, I’m sure. I have a headache, that’s all.”
Harley knew it was more than a headache. He knew what the aftereffects of not okay looked like, and he was staring straight into their headlights.
“If you say so.”
He wanted to meddle, but that wasn’t Harley’s place, so he just blew out another cloud of smoke, breathing softly as they both continued to ignore the soft orange glow by their feet.
For two people so supposedly observant, they sure weren’t today.
“Right. You wanted to know what all of this has to do with you,” Peter said, nodding, picking up that particular ten-ton freight train and setting it back on the tracks that it had gotten off of. “And I’d—I’d love to tell you, but Mr. Stark—I think it’d be best coming from him. It’s his story to tell, not mine.”
Harley could respect that. He was infuriated by it, but he could respect it.
“Oh shoot, is something on fire?” Peter asked, finally stopping to sniff the air and finding something other than the pine wood and cedar scent of Harley’s skin and the cloudy burning from his cigarette. No. This was still burning, but not a cigarette smell. This was paper, maybe? Books? They were in a library.
Harley’s eyes dropped down (finally, seriously, how dumb were these kids?) to little cluster of orange and heat by their feet.
“Note to self: Don’t smoke in a library,” he said, laughing nervously and trying to figure out what the heck to do with his cigarette. He couldn’t stamp it out on the ground-- that might make it worse. And he didn’t have any water to drown it in.
Figglewoggles.
“Here, give me,” Peter said, taking action and gesturing for the cigarette. What was he going to do? Did he have a fire extinguisher in his back pocket?
He dropped it to the ground, and pulled out what looked like a small silver square from his pocket. “Prototype Stark Industries fire blanket. Don’t question why I carry it around with me, I just. I don’t like fire.”
Harley nodded, and Peter, working some cool fancy sciencey portable engineering magic, he flapped the silver square twice in the air (kinda like a bird? But less alive.) and it unfolded and swooshed out over the burning remains of bad science fiction and epic fantasy. It looked like Peter had done this kind of thing before. And who knew? Maybe he had. Harley wasn’t one to tell who was and wasn’t a secret superhero.
“There. Taken care of.”
“You do realize that I’m going to take credit for all of this, right? And then blame the fire happening in the first place on you?”
“Naturally.”
“Okay, good. Time to run?”
“Sure, yeah. You coming back to New York with me?”
“Naturally,” Harley smirked.
Saving a sleeping pretty boy from a burning library hadn’t been planned so much as happened. Because Peter was pretty, and because it was most definitely him, Harley, who had done the saving.
And he most definitely wasn’t falling for a stranger like fireworks on the Fourth of July.
Most.
Definitely.