Chapter Text
The first indication that Peter had that something wasn't quite right:
He turned up for work an hour late…
and Liz didn't even give him a hard time about it.
Or dock any of his stipend.
As usual, Peter couldn't explain that he was late because of his secret life as one of Manhattan's longest serving superheroes; he started explaining in a rush that the Rhino had interrupted his commute, which was totally true, in the broadest sense. Liz didn't even roll her eyes. She just waved him through and later Peter would discover that she didn't even log the tardy.
Never one to look a gift horse in the mouth, Peter filed it away as maybe Liz just having a good day for once, and he continued hurrying down to the Osborn building which housed all of ESU's laboratories. He didn't have a class that needed him until eleven, so he had still had time to check his current experiments and maybe do his daily check up on the third year marine biologists' aquarium.
The second indication that something was wrong:
Peter checked all of his cell cultures,
noting their growth levels as quickly as possible,
but he couldn't work fast enough to make up for the time he'd lost battling the Rhino.
Peter resigned himself to a late finish,
and dropped by the aquarium to do his basic water checks…
…only to find Gwen there, already halfway through adjusting the pH levels for him.
Gwen. Gwen Stacy. Doing something voluntarily which wasn't on her usually packed to-do list. Peter opened his mouth to say something, because apparently the world had gone mad, but Gwen just gave him the weirdest look in the world, passed him a log of information about the lobsters' behavior that morning, and hurried off to her office.
Peter watched her go, wondering who'd died.
The third indication:
Peter made it into his eleven o'clock class with plenty of time to spare.
Dr. Connors introduced Peter to the new second year Ecology students as his lab assistant,
and,
for the duration of the class,
instead of ignoring him until they needed him,
the students kept staring at him.
Peter ignored the staring and tried to help the ones who asked for assistance. He liked this work. The class was too large for Dr. Connors to help all of them individually, and most of their questions were about the microscopes and the large unwieldy field guides anyway, questions Peter could answer with his eyes closed. The job was pretty perfect for Peter: he could work on his PhD and get some funding from assisting Dr. Connors with his undergraduate students. His work ranged from classroom lab work to assisting with dissertation projects, and Peter enjoyed both. He was even starting to think about a future in scientific education.
It was a double session, and the students kept staring at him throughout, muttering things that he couldn't hear; it wasn't the first time that Peter had envied Matt Murdock's enhanced senses, but maybe it was better he couldn't hear what the students were saying.
The fourth indication:
Going to the staff cafeteria to get his — thankfully subsidized — cooked lunch,
and the serving guy gave him a free fruit pie.
And also his number, scrawled on the side of Peter's coffee cup.
Peter only realized after he'd swiped his staff card at the till, and that was only because the guy was smart enough to write 'Dave! CALL ME' above the number, otherwise Peter probably wouldn't have recognized it as a cellphone number. He glanced back in surprise, and the guy — Dave, apparently — made a 'call me!' gesture. Peter hid a grimace by turning back quickly and heading for his usual corner; he could see MJ's head bent over her cellphone, and Harry staring vaguely out of the window. When he got to their table, he put his tray down and sat down opposite his friends.
"I've had the weirdest day," Peter sighed.
Harry startled, beamed at Peter automatically, and then his smile fell almost immediately. "Uh," Harry muttered. "Hi?"
"We know you had a weird day," MJ said, putting her phone down. "We saw the news. You should have texted us."
Peter froze, looking up at them with dawning horror. The news? What the hell ? He thought back quickly to Liz not giving him grief for being late and to the muttering in the lab and Gwen Stacy voluntarily doing his work. There was only one option that made sense, and it made no sense at all:
The news must have outed him as Spider-Man.
He squinted at his friends appraisingly. It’s honestly not what he’d ever expected. Of course he’d thought his identity would be revealed at some point. But he’d pictured screaming and pointing and angst and tears and so much grovelling. There was none of that. Instead, Harry had ink all over his hands. He'd said something yesterday about Professor Gilbert giving him a mountain of marking to do. MJ didn't technically work for ESU, but she and Liz seemed to have some sort of deal going on; MJ got access to the staff facilities, and Liz turned up at a lot of MJ's plays for someone on an ESU salary.
Peter had given a lot of thought as to how the people in his life would react to being Spider-Man.
Only three people in the world even knew that he was Spider-Man: Nicholas Fury, because he knew everything ; Iron Man, because Tony Stark couldn't leave a single thing alone in his life; and Johnny Storm. Peter smiled fondly just thinking Johnny's name. Boy, he had it bad.
Johnny sulked for a week solid on finding out Peter and Spider-Man were one and the same, and he'd known Peter for much less time than either Harry or MJ. Peter imagined them reacting to his secret very differently. MJ had a decent right hook on her, and Peter's face was miraculously punch-free. Something was definitely going on.
"Want us to beat him up for you?" Harry said. "Gilbert's got a lifetime supply of liquid ice in his lab, I'm sure between us we could fashion a decent delivery system, douse his head in nitrogen. Might even snap off his boy-band hair in the process."
" Harry, " MJ chastised gently, before leaning forwards and pulling Peter's hands towards her, clasping them intently. "Peter, it's gonna be okay. You were much too good for him anyway."
Peter looked at her helplessly, lost. "What do you mean?" His stomach dropped. He knew he should have checked up with Johnny after his fight with the Rhino, but he'd been running so late… He yanked his hands from MJ and fumbled for his StarkPhone as he stared at her. Harry's right in front of him and Peter can't think of another him that MJ might mean; his mouth tastes like acid as he asks, "Did something happen to Johnny?"
"More like, he happened to something," Harry muttered and Peter's phone clattered to the table between them, because his hands couldn't hold it, his hands couldn't do anything but tremble. Oh god. Oh god. Peter was so concerned with fighting the stupid Rhino and getting to work to check his phone, to check up on his own boyfriend. His mind reeled with what had happened.
Johnny had been fine last night. They'd fought the Sinister Six along with the rest of the Fantastic Four; it had been a delightful fight, really. Peter liked having an excuse to spend time with Johnny as Spider-Man. It had been one of those fights that got them both wound up; Johnny had been brimming with so much extra adrenaline that they ended up racing to their usual spot, and they made out on top of the Statue of Liberty until the small hours. Yeah, it had been a really good night; Peter had been able to check that Johnny was intact after the fight personally.
What the hell could have happened in the last twelve hours?
"Didn't you see the news this morning?" MJ asked, her voice dropping to the soft tone she used with kids and theater critics. She exchanged a worried glance with Harry and Peter got it together enough to pick up his phone, even though his hands were still shaking.
Forty-three missed calls, his notifications said. Twenty from Johnny, nine from the Bugle, and fourteen withheld numbers. Peter had put it onto vibrate as soon as he hit the subway and saw the telltale sign of supervillain destruction in the distance; the last thing he wanted was for someone to identify him from the distinctive Professor Proton ringtone sounding from his pocket. He hadn't turned it back on afterwards. That was apparently a mistake.
His text message icon displayed 99+. Peter rarely got more than 20 in a single day, usually from MJ panicking over what to wear; she still hadn't 100% grasped yet that someone's place on the Kinsey scale had no relation to their fashion sense, but she was getting better. Peter's relentless inability to pick his fashion on anything other than based on cost (low) and comfortableness (high) was working to persuade her.
Peter thumbed open the list and squinted, going to the thread including messages from Johnny first; the heavy weight in the pit of his stomach lessened when he saw that the flood of messages from him were fairly recent. He sighed. Whatever was going on, Johnny was alive, and that was the most important thing. The messages made little sense, though, ranging from CALL ME to OMG DO NOT LOOK AT THE BUGLE WEBSITE and DEFINITELY DO NOT READ THE COMMENTS.
"Peter," MJ said, with a deeper, more serious tone. He looked up at her. "I'm sorry, I didn't think I'd have to be the one to break it to you."
The weight in Peter's stomach deepened again, because MJ only spoke with that voice when it was something really very serious; he kept hold of his phone but looked up at her. "MJ, just tell me straight," Peter said. "What's going on?"
MJ swallowed, and then looked at him with such kindness that her words didn't really compute for a while. "Peter, I'm so sorry — Johnny cheated on you."
Peter blinked, staring at her while the words sank in. He frowned. He knew what the words meant when they were stitched together like that, but they didn't make any sense. It can't mean like it sounded. Johnny wouldn't cheat on him. He wouldn't.
So he said it, firmly: "Johnny wouldn't do that," and in return, got matching twin looks of sympathy from MJ and Harry. "He wouldn't, " Peter repeated, and maybe he shouted it a little, because some of the English Lit professors looked over from their table nearby… and glanced at him with the same sympathetic looks that MJ and Harry were still giving him, before looking away.
"I'm sorry, dude," Harry said, and he held out his tablet for Peter to take. Peter took it automatically and then realized what Harry might be handing him, and he almost faltered, but it was too late, he could already see the image on the screen, and—
Oh.
Oh.
"We're really sorry, Peter," MJ said, her words rushing together. "But we both love you, very much, and you are not alone, okay? You've got us. We'll get you through this, I promise."
"He mustn't have thought someone would have a telescopic camera trained on the Statue of Liberty at that time of the morning," Harry said, and Peter stared dumbly at the photograph, because he was right: neither Peter nor Johnny had thought it was even a slight possibility.
To be fair, the photograph wasn't even that incriminating — the camera had obviously only been able to catch one angle of the Statue of Liberty, and one a couple of moments of Peter and Johnny's make-out session had been caught. It was almost a chaste kiss— Peter's mask rolled up and Johnny's hands on his face as they kissed, mostly just breathing into each other's mouths at that point, just so damned grateful to be alive and together.
But it was absolutely clear who the two participants of the kiss were — both costumes so distinctively designed, and Johnny's face clear enough, and there was footage afterwards, of Spider-Man swinging up to latch onto a helicopter, and Johnny flaming off: there was no room for them to get away with saying it might be lookalikes.
"Huh," Peter said, and handed the tablet back to Harry in a daze. Well, his friends' support was nice, he supposed. He was going to need that love if they were going to ever understand the secret he was keeping from them.
Which they were probably going to find out sooner or later, when they put the pieces together. Peter was always missing when Spider-Man attacked. He was the same height as Spider-Man. And Spider-Man had been pictured kissing Peter's boyfriend.
Oh god, he felt sick.
"I think it's finally hit him," MJ whispered to Harry, and Peter looked upwards with a lurch, because they were misinterpreting the horror on his face.
Right now, they didn't know he was Spider-Man. And all the world at large knew about Peter Parker was that he was Johnny Storm’s boyfriend: Johnny was a celebrity, and insisted on dragging Peter to more red carpet events than Peter would ever be happy attending. Ergo, the world would think that Johnny was cheating on him.
With Spider-Man.
Oh, Peter thought dumbly. This probably wasn't the scenario Sir Walter Scott had in mind when he came up with what a tangled web we weave .