Work Text:
S🅱️iderman
(3:32) hey mj is it cheating if i write for my biochemistry uses in medicine paper about my spider Fluid ™
(3:34) the deadline is tmmrw at 12pm.
(3:34) 12am?????
(3:35) i never got the knowledge of how to count the hours despite my cool superpowers. which could MAYHAPS explain how i got in this situation
(3:35) haha. i bet youre wondering how i got in this situation
(3:43) this paper has to be an 8k words paper. if this is the way this city finds out about the man behind the mask So Be It. this is the hill i die on
MJ?!!?!!?!1!
(7:53) okay let me just. a) you do realize you have been working as tony stark’s intern for years and it is well known that you have worked on spiderman’s gear? Like. u are aware that you literally have an alibi, and it says on your own cv you have worked on that. are we on the same level here
(7:55) b) i LOVE how, according to the news, youtube, and every spiderman spotting twitter, you had indeed been fighting mr. fisk right up to 3am. i hope you see your errors here because ned and me sure do and sure are laughing about them
(7:56) won’t mention how you told me you have to do that paper at the beginning of the year
(7:57) i’m taking introduction to social psychology next term and my paper will be on the topic of how is it possible that someone can be a superhero and also have like two brain cells; a study of masked vigilantes with a focus on new york’s spider man
(8:03) i know you have an 8am class today. miles is on his baby vacation im sending him over
The cool things about being able to climb walls and having a super cool spidey sense (probably in exchange for actual common sense), a list by Peter Parker, student and vigilante extraordinaire:
- It’s really cool. It’s like, mindblowingly cool, and also? It boosts your self confidence up to the stars (behind the mask, at least. SHIELD’s psychiatrist had told him that there might be some underlying issues there but Peter decided to just… ignore those and say it’s super cool. No metaphoric masking of trauma there at all.)
- It brings people together! Nothing says friendship like patching your best friend up after a gunfight (one-sided. Spidey doesn’t do weapons.) at 2am! If you want to take it up a notch, nothing says friendship and brotherhood like finding a teenager with the same powers as yours and doing your best to stop him from fucking up like you did when you were fifteen. Peter wishes he could say it taught him some self-care but, uh. Nope.
- You get some cool perks. Mainly, travel. While Spidey is, primarily, a New York based dude, some spoiled superheroes just don’t get the concept of i can’t i have finals tomorrow this is literally your job aliens are like breakfast for you fuck off. It does get him to travel a bit, see some monuments (hopefully without destroying them). Also, while the whole Tony Stark mentorship thing for sure had its ups and downs (looking back, Peter does regret not telling Aunt May immediately. He sometimes, thought he won’t admit it, does envy the support Miles gets from his parents. Hindsight is a bitch.) it did boost up his CV to the heavens, and Stark did pay his scholarship as an apology for the whole uh. Buildingfallingomtopofhimbecausehetookhissuitanddidn’tlistentohim fiasco. He also got an incredible amount of super expensive and tasty food for nada, and his superpowered and teenage metabolism sure did appreciate it.
- Super healing. Which directly brings Peter to the next list:
The seriously uncool things about being able to climb walls and having a super cool spidey sense (probably in exchange for actual common sense), a list by Peter Parker, student and vigilante extraordinaire:
- When you’re studying biochemical engineering, having a side job and living in a dorm, it really doesn’t help that your nights are spent mostly webbing up knives from sidealleys would-be-muggings, and it definitely doesn’t help that once a month you’re stuck fighting some kind of a supervillain who’s stuck up on destroying your life and New York, while also having way too many limbs.
While there’s more to that list, for sure (traumafearforyourfamilytrauma), Peter does not have time to go over all of those points (and also, even if he did have a gazillion negative points, he still wouldn’t give up the mask. Great power and responsibility and all that jazz.) because the one and only point he brought up brings him to this exact situation – waking up to a sound of the newest teenage meme craze (vine is dead, and Peter will not ever admit that he doesn’t know what the current cool thing is, nuh-uh.) and way too much sunlight for a late autumn morning at 7am.
Except, that song? Isn’t his alarm. And it’s not coming from his phone, and also, he’s sitting at his desk, never going to the bed, his computer showing that it’s 12:43pm and also, right there, on the screen, his paper opened up in the document, completely and devastatingly unfinished.
“Oh no, oh God, oh no. That was worth so much of my grade, oh n-“
“Seems like the spider got lost in its own webs! Or uh, university’s webs? Uh.”
“Miles?”, and as Peter said that and turned around, the teenager for sure was there, holding some ramen (bless his soul), barely holding laughter in from watching his mentor? suffer, “god. Miles, this is why you can’t do this sh.. stuff until you’re done with school. Also? I’m ninety percent sure that spider lost in its own webs is not a saying.”
“Uh, it is? Also, you’re, apparently, failing college so you’re not one to speak.”
“I’m not failing college and also I’m studying biochemical engineering, not spider-quotes. Ask MJ about that.”
“That’s not even a name of a real course you can study!”, at this point Miles made a bit of a thoughtful pause, which made Peter immensely worry that, if the course existed, Miles would major in it, “but look, I Googled – and here, on Spider sayings and quotes it clearly says that – well, it doesn’t. But! It does say, and I quote, spiders so large they appear to be wearing the pelts of small mammals. Dave Barry said that.”
Not a lot of people can make the physical manifestation of ??? as an emotion on their face, but Peter can and does. It’s a talent, comes with the swinging. “Wh- I – Look. Yeah? Uh. Look, thanks for the food and the wake up, but I really have to hurry and find this professor and beg for a day more, he never answers his e-mails. Appreciate you Miles!”
In the end, Peter got to finish that paper and send it, thanks to the fact that the professor saw the news and came to the conclusion that he was too busy patching Spider-man up to finish it (and MJ complains that he has two brain cells).
And he did do it, and he did get an A on it, so thank you very much, Miles, he’s not failing college. This is an occurrence that, unfortunately, repeats itself, and Peter does spend more nights awake, bruised and hurting and typing out whatever he can just to at least pass a class, but it works out. He hears stories of the people he saves – some of them students at his campus, even a professor once – and he knows that it’s worth it. Wounds and lack of knowledge of spider sayings aside, Peter Parker survived way worse things than finals season, and he will, therefore, survive this too.
(Mostly thanks to MJ, who switched her dorm room to be the room next to him, checking up on him and waking him up when needed, saving him time and energy and, most importantly, stress. If you ask Peter in fifty years what the best thing about being Spider-man was he will have one and only one decisive answer: the bonds he made with people along the way.)