Chapter Text
one year later
Peter swung across the Brooklyn Bridge in consistent motion, one web after another. The song ‘We are the People’ by Empire of the Sun was playing in his headphones as he swung, and he grinned as he did a loop the loop. His evening was pretty much perfect as he swung back from his college accommodation to the florist store—it was faster if he swung than if he suffered through the subway on an early Friday evening. Besides, the subway didn’t exactly provide him with the same sunset view as it did when he got to swing his way through New York City.
Reilly’s was where he was headed—not to crash out there for the night, but merely to kick back and be able to watch something on a screen larger than a laptop for once. The NYU dorm that he was living in was not equipped with a TV, obviously, and sometimes he got a bit homesick for his old apartment. So most of the time he slept at the dorms—but the occasional night he ended back in Queens, sleeping above the store. Often it was if he needed to crash late after Spiderman patrol in Queens, or if he’d done a shift there.
Because Peter still was connected to his old life, even though he was a freshman student at NYU who was aiming to major in engineering. He still ensured that he kept the people of Queens safe—when he could, and did the occasional weekend shift at the florist. Peter didn’t want to be the absentee owner of a store—and at heart, he was still a little bit of a control freak who needed to be involved. Peter couldn’t relinquish control over to Manuel completely, even though he’d become for all sense and purposes the main florist. Besides, he liked making bouquets. He was able to unwind when he did it.
Reilly’s was doing well—better than it ever had. Peter had stepped back massively to focus on his studies, but Manuel kept the ship afloat, and Will and some other part time employees supported him as well, with deliveries and customer service. The additional staff enabled them to actually flourish and become more successful—expanding the number of orders, establishing a proper social media presence. Which turned out to be a real boon for them, considering the attention that had been drawn to the store based off an Instagram story.
As they got more and more well-known, building up a following across all platforms, it attracted more celebrities to the small store out in Queens. One highlight had been when one of Taylor Swift’s many assistants had called to arrange a bouquet from the store for her NYC apartment when she was staying over for a long weekend. Tony had honest-to-god almost passed out when he’d found out about that.
The store also had its own fans, too. Generally, they tended to come to the store based on the TikTok posts (which seemed insane to Peter, but Will truly was a social media genius. Much like how people online had started simping over the pictures of Peter that had ended up on Twitter after Pepper’s Instagram story—there were people online who said shit like that about Will too. He’d been the one to suggest they try and create a following over on TikTok—when he’d asked permission, he’d said it was really easy to grow followers on there. He’d started making and starring in TikToks too, all for the store’s account. Peter—who, to be honest, had kind of ignored the entire rise of that app, had no clue how to manage that kind of thing, or any idea about the trends on that app, so left Will to it. It was only after he heard some customers talking about it when he was on a weekend shift that he actually checked the page itself and ended up seeing that Will had somehow convinced Tony to feature in one—with a wig on, for some reason? It had gotten millions of likes, so the kid was clearly doing something right.
He’d known Will would flourish if he was just given the chance—and a year on from hiring him, he considered it one of the best decisions he’d ever made. Will was friendly, and funny, and he was genuinely glad to have him in his life. Sure, floristry wasn’t his passion like Manuel, but he put in the graft and was truly committed to doing his best at his job every day. And he had picked everything up super quickly. It was really cool, coming back every week, and seeing him be ever so slightly more confident in himself when he made bouquets for people. Peter saw a lot of himself in Will—and he knew that eventually, he’d leave and go on to pursue his own passion (Peter suspected it would be something in social media management), but he was really proud of how far he’d come along in the year he’d been at Reilly’s.
As for Knife Guy—the guy who’d nearly killed him with a stab wound, whose real name was Marcus. Well, he’d been arrested. They’d let Peter testify as Spiderman, and Tony had seconded his story with description of the medical attention he’d had to receive and providing detailed reports that showed how close he’d been to death. It had been a closed hearing, than god, but the guy was behind bars, and would be for years to come. Peter struggled to come to terms with the fact that he’d put a guy away in prison that long—but talking to Will about it had helped. Marcus had been truly awful to him over the years—so in the end Peter came around to the idea that he wasn’t going to be able to hurt anyone else. And at least he wasn’t able to go nowhere near Will ever again.
But he was headed to the store to watch a bit of Netflix, and have a chill evening. It had been an intense week of class, and he’d been the assistant organiser for the NYU Robot Wars event the day prior, as well. It had gone great—better than he could have expected—but he needed to crash.
It was just Manuel closing up the store that night—not Will—so Peter knew he would be safe to simply swing in through the apartment window still wearing the suit when he got back to Queens, as long as he checked there were no civilians spying around. He hadn’t meant to reveal his secret identity to Manuel—that had been an accident, when he’d swung through his bedroom window when he’d thought Manuel would already have left, but the disturbance upstairs had made Manuel think there was an intruder. Which had been how Manuel had walked in, holding a broom handle out in front of him and florist scissors in the other hand threatening, only to be greeted with his boss dressed up like the local vigilante. He’d had a lot of explaining to do after that. But Manuel had actually been very cool about the whole thing, and it made things easier, him knowing.
But he didn’t make it off the Brooklyn Bridge before there was a familiar whooshing noise, and suddenly there was Mark 72 right beside him, fresh out of the workshop. Tony must have been testing it out on a flight run.
“Hey Spidey!” Tony declared loudly—his voice masked through the modulator the suit had. (They kept to Spiderman-related nicknames only when they were flying. Strict rule. Peter didn’t want any old civilian hearing his actual name). “Saw you flying about, thought I’d pop by and say hi.”
“Tony!” Peter exclaimed—genuinely surprised. He held on with one arm to one of the bridge posts, no longer swinging. Iron Man held himself static in the air. He hadn’t expected to see Tony that night—the man had plans. “What are you doing here—isn’t the Avengers movie night tonight?”
Tony let out a dramatic sigh. “Postponed to next week. Thor had an incident with the penguins.”
Peter made a face. “Again?!”
Tony just did an exaggerated nod. “I’ve learnt to stop questioning the scenarios he gets into.”
“I was just off to Reilly’s—was going to order a pizza in, curl up and watch some Netflix for an hour before heading back to the dorms. Fancy joining me?”
Tony put one index finger on his cheek. “I mean, sure, but where on earth are we going to put the Iron Man armour? I’m pretty sure it won’t fit in your apartment without crushing at least something.”
“It can go behind the counter downstairs,” Peter brushed off the question. “We’ll figure it out.”
“Sure, sure, I’ll just leave my multi-million dollar superhero suit downstairs unsupervised. No biggie.” Tony said, a layer of sarcasm running through his speech.
“Hey, the store has a double lock now.” Peter defended. “And an alarm. That’s secure.”
“Oh, yeah, real secure.” Tony drawled. “Exactly like Stark Tower.”
Peter raised a finger. “Watch it—I can still accept that job offer from Hammer Industries.”
Tony retched dramatically, loudly.
Justin Hammer had come along and had given a demonstration at NYU for the science majors, and had taken a particular liking to Peter. Within five minutes of talking to him, he’d offered him a full time engineering role at Hammer Industries. Peter had been polite about turning him down—saying he had years of college left before he even had a diploma—but internally he’d just been counting down the moments til he could spill the beans to Tony and watch him have a meltdown over the idea of Peter working for Hammer Industries. (As if he would ever).
It had been three months, and Tony very much still hadn’t gotten over it.
“Don’t even joke about that. I’ll throw myself off the roof of Stark Tower if you do that. My mentee, at Hammer Industries.” It was hard to notice a metal suit of armour in the air shuddering, but somehow Tony managed it.
“I wouldn’t dare. I know my loyalties.” Peter reassured him.
There was nowhere that suited him better than working at Stark Industries after he graduated, and he knew that. He was already so familiar with the working culture and business practices there. Pepper would have offered him a job on the spot, even without a degree—and he knew that. But he genuinely wanted to go through college before he even thought about any of it—have that experience, and get the education he’d always wanted.
Secretly, without telling either of the Starks, he’d submitted an application to be a summer intern for the R&D department. It was only going to be the HR people making the decision on that, so he figured it wouldn’t get back to either Pepper or Tony, and he could see if he could actually get in on merit. He knew that all he had to do was ask a favour from Tony and Pepper, and he could be enrolled in the program before he even finished his sentence. But he didn’t want to be the nepo baby in the class—he wanted to earn that shit.
He might have learned to accept a bit of help here and there, but he was still a stubborn little shit, at the end of the day.
But he was exactly where he wanted to be in life, and he knew that May would have been proud of him and where he'd gotten to.
“Shall we swing?” Peter asked, smirking at the thought of Tony and Pepper seeing the list of interns and the surprise at seeing his name on it. He put the idea to one side and focused on Tony. Mark 72 was holding up well—it probably still needed a few tweaks, but it was almost finalised. Their hard work in the workshop to make it perfect was really paying off.
“Race ya.” Tony dared—and then quickly listed terms of conditions before Peter sped off. “Don’t get injured. Don’t do anything stupid. Definitely don’t do anything I would do just for the sake of winning a competition.”
Peter grinned, “You’re on.”
So, yeah. Most college students weren’t part-time florists with their own business, nor did they spend much of their free time helping Tony Stark tinker with each of their superhero suits in his personal lab but….hey. Peter Parker had never been quite typical.