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i. (Phin)
They try dating exactly once.
They’re best friends, so when hormones and puberty happen at the end of middle school, dating seems kind of inevitable. A smart girl and a smart boy always spending time together? It has to happen, right?
Miles tries to be romantic, so he sets out a picnic on the rooftop, that’s all he can come up with, and things seem to be going well. At first, anyway.
“Oh, wow, what a nice view,” Phin says, nudging her glasses, placing her hand so close to Miles’s on the blanket they’re sitting on.
“Right?” Miles's heart picks up its rhythm. He knows he should take her hand, or maybe lean over and kiss her on the cheek or something. Is that too soon? His mind is whirring, but it’s coming up empty.
He looks over the city skyline, and it’s not dark yet - his parents and Rick didn’t let them meet too late, but man, Miles aches to see the city in all its glory in the dark with lights like jewels thrown across it.
“Oh, man, can you imagine just soaring through the sky?” Miles says, way too excited. His head spins at just imagining thwipping through the city. “Like Spider-Man?”
Miles shifts, and stands up, walking to the edge of the roof, drinking in the gorgeous sight.
“Really, Miles?” Phin says, and there’s something in her voice that Miles can’t figure out.
“Yeah, oh my god, really!” Miles exclaims, looking back at Phin. “Can you imagine the exhilaration, the rush of adrenaline?”
Phin’s eyes soften as she stands up, and steps next to Miles.
“Yeah, I bet you’d like it.” Her voice is low and warm.
“Ah, man, and the suit! Have you seen his latest suit design?”
Phin scrunches her nose. “Is it, like, so different from the last one? I haven’t noticed.”
“Yeah, the web-pattern design is more sleek, it makes Spidey’s form look so much leaner.”
Phin shoots a look at him. “Uh-uh.”
“What?! I can’t help it.” Miles shrugs. “He looks so good!”
“Yeah, you can’t help it.” Phin bumps her hip to his, a soft smile playing on her lips.
And just right then the form of Spider-Man appears, web-swinging between the buildings: his movements are all grace, he’s sinewy muscles, power, and beauty, all wrapped into one.
Miles sighs wistfully.
“Oh, come on, Miles, snap some photos for your collection!” Phin’s jab is only half-mocking, as they both burst into a laughing fit.
They never talk about this pitiful attempt, and soon Phin figures out she’s into girls. Somehow it leaches some of the tension from Miles’s chest about how he should have tried harder with her.
ii. (Barbara)
Barbara is beautiful, she’s all lush hair, nice tinkling laugh, so it makes sense when she asks Miles out, he says yes.
They’re drinking milkshakes, and on the desk their fingers brush together tentatively, leaving a nice warmth in their wakes. They’re even talking about the latest game and comic releases, so Miles is in his element, and Barbara seems to inch closer, but…
A cacophony breaks their moment: screeching of brakes, honking, crashing glass. All noises of chaos. A rush of air, and screaming, as the café’s window breaks in, sending slivers of glass everywhere.
Luckily, Miles and Barbara are far from the front, they’re sitting in one of the back corners, but they still take cover under the desk. All around the floor, there are weird carrot looking things, that suspiciously seem like some kind of supervillain grenades.
But before Miles’s mind can catch up and try to figure out what to do, familiar thwips sound, and Spider-Man has all of that wrapped up and dealt with in a few smooth moves.
“I think you missed a corner there, Rabbit!” Spider-Man says. “This is a café shop, I think Alice is waiting for you somewhere else.”
“Fuck you, Spidey!” A legit white-rabbit-slash-lady snarls. She even has bunny ears! Amazing how wild New York’s supervillains are, Miles muses.
“Aren’t you late for that tea party?” Spider-Man quips, while he jumps into the battle.
The fight is finished in under a few minutes; White Rabbit and her goons are no match for Spider-Man’s speed and experience.
“Come on, Rabbit, it’s not nice to intrude on other people’s dates!” Spider-Man says as he’s dragging away a webbed-up, angry, flailing Rabbit. “Sorry, kiddos! Have a good date, or what’s left of it, anyway.” He shoots fingerguns at Miles and Barbara as they crawl from under the table, and Miles feels his knees go weak.
“Oh, man.” Miles sighs, looking at the receding form of Spider-Man. “So awesome.”
Barbara scoffs. “What’s awesome about the costumed freaks?”
Miles’s stomach plummets.
“What?” He shoots a glance at Barbara.
“Miles, they’re vigilantes, they operate outside the law, not better than the criminals themselves.”
“That’s not true. Spider-Man… he’s awesome! He’s saving people! People others couldn’t save!” His voice is higher than he’d like, and he feels his face heating up. Other people are starting to notice them, and this is so not good. Very bad.
“Or, have you thought that he’s the one endangering the people in the first place? Masked freaks only attract more masked freaks.” With that Barbara sashays off, leaving the bill and a broken heart for Miles to pick up.
Man, how was he so unlucky to date a mini J. J. Jameson? Guess he’s not going to prom with Barbara after all. (Sometimes he wishes he could ask Spider-Man to a school dance. Would be so much easier than dating girls.)
So what? Miles shrugs off his failure.
He might have missed out on his first kiss but at least he got to see Spider-Man up close, and well, it was almost as good. Or he’d like to think so.
iii. (Danika)
He wouldn’t call this a date, not really, because he’s not gonna reveal his identity, so nothing serious will ever come out of this. But taking up Danika on her coffee date offer feels nice. So normal. And he craves normal.
After he became Spider-Man, he never really got around to dating much – for one thing, it’s difficult to get enough free time between patrols, crime-fighting, training, and school, and for two, well, it is dangerous to get people involved in his life. And he can’t for the life of him lie to someone he’d like to spend time with. He couldn’t do that to Pete either, revealing his powers right away.
So here he is, sitting on a rooftop Danika asked him to get to, as they wrap their hands around their hot cups of coffee.
“Amazing view,” Danika notes, with a sidelong glance at Miles.
“Yeah.” Miles inhales long. “I love it up here, one of the best parts of being Spider-Man. You know just thwipping through the city with the OG Spidey.”
Danika is looking at his carefully rolled-up mask, a half-smile tucked away in the corner of her lip, a twinkle in her eyes.
“And the suit is definitely hot,” she says, and Miles relaxes because it’s a topic he loves to talk about.
“Right?!” Miles animatedly gestures, sloshing his coffee around. “Oh, man, I loved to tinker with the spider design. And oh, the original one’s blue and red base color just pops with the white. I’m so jealous of that…”
“Yeah…” Danika trails off, and leans back, eyes narrowed. “Plus the suit is very form-fitting… shows off the muscles well.” She cocks an eyebrow.
And Miles’s brain stops working, because red and blue flashes in his mind, and how the fabric stretches on those damn well-defined muscles. His heart starts racing, and he feels his face heating up.
Shrugging, he shifts uncomfortably. “Well, I might not be as muscled as the OG Spidey is… I know he’s well-built and all. Damn, those biceps and shoulders, and… But he has a lot of years on me. Guess I’ll catch up on that later.”
Danika has an incredulous look on her face that Miles can’t place.
“Ooookay.” Danika’s reaction is not one he was expecting.
What did he say? He feels so lost right now. There’s a shift now, Danika closes off, her expression guarded.
“Sorry, I misread…” She waves her hand between them.
“What? You didn’t?” Miles hates how his voice squeaks, how his words sound like a question.
But Danika only leans back, a soft smile playing on her lips.
“Oh, I just don’t think it was me you wanted to bring here.”
And Miles can’t for the life of him figure out what she means.
iv. (Hailey)
It was easy to flirt with Hailey with the guise of the mask between them, and it feels inevitable that he asks her out later when she already knows about his real identity.
Miles wants to grasp this last chance at happiness and human connection: someone who knows both sides of his. It seems like the logical solution to his problem.
They both like art, so when Hailey suggests doing some street art together, Miles enthusiastically agrees.
The vivid colors splash against the gray concrete, and how they create something out of nothing makes warmth bloom in Miles’s chest. It’s stunning how he can pour his heart out, paint his feelings, make them tangible.
When he steps back, and admires what he made, Hailey is there beside him, a warm presence. The flickering lights cast a halo around her, as she smiles at him.
‘Not bad,’ she signs.
“It’s not really anything, to be honest,” Miles says and signs at the same time.
‘It came from your heart, that’s what counts.’ And Hailey shifts closer, touching his chest, near his heart.
The smell of paint and Hailey’s perfume turn into a heady mix, and the red and blue splashes he painted on the walls swirl around him, overwhelming him.
Her smile is blinding. ‘You know, I’d like to know how Spider-Man kisses.’
“Yeah, me too,” Miles mumbles, and sighs wistfully.
Images of Peter’s distracting pink lips are flashing in his mind, and…
What. The. Hell.
Hailey’s eyes widen and she steps back.
“Oh, no, no, no, I didn’t mean…” Miles starts and tries to reach out for Hailey, but it already feels like a world is between them.
‘Or you did,’ Hailey signs at last, and nods toward the mural Miles painted.
Miles is left alone to stare at it: It’s a perfectly fitting mosaic of red-black-blue-red, spindly strands of spider-web-like lines crisscrossing it all.
It doesn’t mean anything, right?
Right?!
v. (Tiana)
He meets Tiana years later, and she’s doing well, all things considered. She turned a new leaf, being on the right side of the law finally.
She’s a force of nature, a fury of wings and claws. All powerful, smooth movements and grace, as she dispatches Fisk’s goons, but she’s a little too harsh on them, breaking more bones than necessary.
“Hey, ease up,” Miles warns her, as he’s webbing up a few of the gunmen.
Tiana scoffs. “You ask me out on a date, and you criticize my style? Man, you’re crazy.”
Yeah, Miles landed on the solution to ask someone out who’s not a civilian. And yeah, maybe Tiana doesn’t know his identity yet, but he needs someone he can be honest with about both halves of his life. Like he can be with Pete.
And Miles doesn’t want to endanger more whoever he’s dating than they already do themselves. Like Tiana.
“Yeah, well, you don’t have the proportionate power of a spider and you still manage to wreak so much havoc on these guys,” Miles notes. “You don’t even need to hold back your true strength like the other Spidey does.”
Tiana shoots a look at Miles through her orange-tinted visor and breaks the wrist of the guy she’s holding. The sickening crunch makes Miles’s stomach roil.
“Come on, man,” Miles pleads. “Was that really necessary?”
She shrugs, letting the guy go. “No, but it was fun.”
They clear out the rest of the hideout and go search for info on the next weapon or drug shipments.
Miles huffs, as he’s decrypting files on a computer they’ve found. “It would have been so much better if we took them out stealthily.”
“Let me guess.” Tiana folds her arms in front of her, leaning her hips against the desk. “Like the OG Spidey, am I right?”
“I mean, he doesn’t have invisibility like me, but man, he’s so graceful and sneaky. He clears out a warehouse full of goons in a blink of an eye while making hilarious jokes, and he looks good doing it!”
“Uh-uh.”
There are a few moments of silence, broken only by the moans of the henchmen waking up, or the muffled groaning from the spider cocoons.
“Say, Spidey,” Tiana says after a while. “Do you always talk so much about your old pal, the other Spidey?”
Miles is taken aback. “What do you mean?”
“Dude. For one, you compared my every move to his.” She holds up her fingers counting. “Then came the oh, he’d do this or that.”
“Sorry,” Miles mumbles. “I guess I’m just used to working with him.”
“Yeah, and that’s why you can’t shut up about how incredible he is, how amazing…”
“Well, he is,” Miles mutters.
Tiana shoots him a look. “And how good he looks?” She enunciates the last word, but the meaning is still lost on Miles. Which Tiana must see, because her shoulders slump, and she exhales a long tired sigh. “Look, I’m no one’s rebound, okay? If he broke your heart or some shit, deal with it. And call me when you get him out of your head.”
Miles sputters, but before his mind could form a coherent reply, Tiana is out the door, taking the USB drive full with the shipping manifests, leaving Miles gaping like a dumb fish.
+1 (???)
The night started out as one of their usual patrols but soon spiraled into Miles’s worst nightmare.
Peter got hurt.
That’s all that echoes in Miles’s head, and his fingers are itching to just reach out and check that Peter is really okay. Miles wants to search every inch of him for wounds, cuts, and scrapes. He needs to know if Pete’s really fine, even if Peter’s sitting on his bed opposite Miles.
He’s still shirtless, the knife wound on his stomach neatly patched up. The gauze taped to his side is the only reminder of what happened tonight, and Miles’s heart skips a beat.
Miles hates how badly he takes it when Peter gets hurt - how easily his mind flashes back to a motionless Peter in the back room of F.E.A.S.T. or when Rhino…
“Sorry to steal you away from your lady friend tonight.” Peter’s voice steadies Miles and pulls him back from the edge of an abyss he doesn’t want to look into. A life without Peter. Even just imagining it for a fleeting moment leaves a searing pain in his chest.
“What lady friend?” Miles asks and tries to not focus on Peter’s perfect abs. All that taut muscle, smooth skin, how it’d feel under his fingertips… Just to check if Pete has any broken ribs.
“The date you had last night.” Peter’s lips twitch into a half smile, and Miles tears his gaze away to look Peter in the eye.
“Yeah, that didn’t… uhm, go so well,” Miles mutters, sighing, leaning back on the bed next to Peter.
His heart starts racing, and the closeness (and inconsiderate shirtlessness) of Peter makes his head spin. Since when is he reacting to Peter this way?
Oh, yeah, Miles sure has eyes, he knows Peter is attractive, but…
But Miles is straight. Period.
Is he though?
“Sorry to hear that.” And Peter sounds so sincere. “So you got stuck with little old me tonight.” Peter chuckles and his voice sends heat through Miles. Oh, no, no. This is bad. How didn’t he notice this before?
Miles tries to shrug nonchalantly. “Nah, man, no worries, it was the perfect date night,” he says with a smile, looking up at Peter sitting next to him.
And his mind needs a few seconds to catch up to what he’s just said, and when he processes it, he flinches. Shit. He didn’t mean it like that? Did he?
There’s a split second where Peter’s eyes widen slightly, then he relaxes and laughs.
“Man, you set your bar too low.” Then in a softer voice, he adds, “You’d deserve better, you know.”
And is there something else Peter is saying or is Miles overthinking this?
Miles sits up, leveling his gaze on Peter’s, and man, those hazel eyes, he could drown in them.
“What if…” Miles starts and doesn’t find the right words at once. Everything is jumbled in his head, every thought is clamoring in his mind, and he tries to pull at the webstrings, to figure this out.
Then he finally grabs a thread, and oh.
How did he not figure this out sooner?
It’s so obvious. It was staring him in the face for a long time.
How they fit together, how easy everything is when they’re next to each other, how safe he feels with Pete, how Peter makes him laugh…
A thousand little pieces click into place.
How Peter complements him in the best way possible, how their lives are so intertwined already he didn’t realize he was still missing something.
“What if this would be really the perfect date?” Miles asks, voice low, but he forces himself to look at Pete, so he can’t misunderstand it.
A sharp inhale from Peter. “Miles.” It’s a plea, it’s a wish, rolling off his tongue, and it sends a shiver down Miles’s spine. “You don’t mean it. Not really.”
“Well, yeah, not the you getting hurt part.” Miles cocks his head and flashes a smile. “But the you half-naked on your bed part.”
Peter only sputters a laugh, and Miles leans forward slowly, giving Peter enough time to react, to run away. Miles’s offering a piece of his heart here, a piece that already belongs to Peter, and Miles didn’t even realize this until now.
There’s a moment when Miles can barely breathe. Peter’s so close, a few inches away, and Miles can even notice the shadows his eyelashes cast on his skin, can feel the faint scent of Peter’s sweat and deodorant, a heady mix.
But then Peter rushes forward in one smooth move and kisses Miles, crushes his lips against his. Miles lets out a moan, because oh, man, this is everything he wanted.
This feels just right.
It’s surprisingly an aggressive kiss, teeth grazing, and hands touching everywhere, all the pent-up tension finally breaking.
Miles soon finds himself straddling Pete, and he doesn’t even know how he ended up there, running his fingers over Pete’s searing hot skin, carefully minding Pete’s stitches.
But Peter still pulls away, breaking their kiss, and Miles makes a noise of protest in the back of his throat.
“Really, I wanna take you out on a real date before…” He waves a hand between them.
“I don’t mind.” Miles lets his fingers splay on Pete’s chest, feeling his racing heartbeat under his palms. Miles needs to swallow hard twice before he can continue. “If you think about it, we were on hundreds of dates before.”
All that time they shared on rooftops, eating pizza after a hard night, all those times when they ended up falling asleep next to each other while watching dumb movies.
Peter’s laugh is husky and sets Miles’s every nerve on fire.
“Man, we really need to rewrite your definition of a date.” He leans forward and touches his forehead to Miles. “Come on, at least let me cook dinner for you.” He nudges Miles to get off him, but Miles doesn’t feel like moving at all, now that he finally found his place.
“Not like you haven’t done that before,” Miles grumbles.
“I’ll break out the candles or put on some romantic music.” Peter waggles his brows, and Miles has to laugh.
“How about neither? You’re a fire hazard all alone, we don’t need the candles.”
Peter huffs. “How about you just shut your mouth.”
“How about you shut me up?” Miles proposes, all cocky and giddy, happiness bubbling over him.
Peter grabs his shirt, and pulls him in for another kiss, gladly showing how effectively he can shut Miles up.
And, well, they do get dinner sometime after that.