Chapter Text
He was going to regret this. Oh god, Ned would never let him live it down. And MJ? Well, when it came to her response he may as well just start planning his own funeral so she didn't have to when this all inevitably blew up in his face. Peter didn’t even want to think about how Mr. Stark would react to what he was about to do.
He hit the publish button, before hiding from the rest of the world in the most secure, secret location he could possibly find. Which was, of course, under the covers of his bed.
Oh my god
Ohmygod
Ohmygodohmygodohmygod
Peter peered past the edges of his duvet to check his laptop screen and see if the article was still there.
“Insanely Cool and Relevant Spider-Man Helps Out At Local Soup Kitchen”
Yep. Peter Parker, absolute nobody, newest intern at Buzzfeed, nerdy high school student, secretly Spider-Man; had actually just posted an article about himself. Really though, it totally wasn't his fault that he'd been driven to such desperation. After all, he'd tried to think of something else to write about, really. He’d thought about his school, some of the smartest kids in the country all shoved into the one place must’ve had something interesting going on to write about. But no. He’d tried to think about his internship. When he had been actually working with Mr. Stark he’d had an incredible time. But his managers just weren’t interested in that kind of writing.
They wanted something snappy. Something opinionated. Something about Spider-Man.
And Peter Parker? Well he was nothing if not a people-pleaser. Thinking back on it, maybe that was his biggest fault. Maybe it was actually the cause of all of his problems and he should take this entire experience as a sign from the universe that he should never ever leave his house again, because now that he had succumbed to this pressure who knew what he would do next? He might try to take over the city. Or start a riot. Or poison the water supply. Or whatever other dumb schemes supervillains normally thought up because if he could willingly publish an article about himself there was practically no stopping him.
Peter groaned in anguish and huddled further under the covers.
-
It took four minutes before the phone rang.
“Peter Benjamin Parker what the fuck am I looking at?”
“How do you even know my middle name?” he asked.
“Did I stutter Benjamin?”
“MJ. I have no idea what you are talking about.” Honestly, Peter thought he might just have gotten away with it. For once in his life his voice hadn’t cracked in that high pitched squeak the way it normally did when he lied. He sounded like a real, normal person, the type of normal, average, generic human being who doesn't go around writing articles about their own secret identities online.
Static crackled through her voice as he held the phone closer to his ear, “Well Peter, I was just inquiring as to why I have come across a Buzzfeed article about my good friend Spider-Man.” At this point he was genuinely willing to bet that she was just pausing for dramatic effect because she is evil like that. The pause must've been deemed dramatic enough because eventually she continued to speak.
“While this in itself is not strange, the fact that this particular article is signed with the name of my other good friend Peter Parker, is.”
His mind grappled with dozens of half-baked excuses that would justify the extreme stupidity he was displaying at the moment, but even he knew Michelle would not put up any more poorly thought out lies. Silence was clearly the safest option for him.
“And why,” she continued “did you not let me in on this brilliant plan?”
Wait. He paused again. Just to make sure that what he heard was actual sincere excitement from her and not sarcasm.
“What?”
“You. Letting me in. On exploiting your most interesting and valuable resource.”
“Exploiting?”
“Yeah dumbass. I gotta admit, I’m a little jealous I didn’t come up with this idea first. I mean, really, hiding in plain sight is surprisingly brilliant of you. Not only are you going to be the most legit and informed source on Spider-Man but you are now publicly tying yourself to him which only an idiot would do if they were the real Spider-Man. I’m actually impressed.”
She was a gift from heaven, he was sure of it. Unbeknownst to her she had just given him the single greatest excuse in the history of mankind. There was obviously no way everyone wouldn’t find out about his Spider-Man article, but with this plot MJ had 'deduced', he had a real, legitimate reason to keep doing it. And what with her being Michelle Jones: The Smartest Person Ever, Peter now had a foolproof excuse that'll justify this whole mess to everyone else in his life. The only problem was that now he had to convince MJ herself that it had been intentional from the beginning. Apparently foolproof plans don't account for the one coming up with the plan being the fool himself.
“Uh, yes. Yes I was going to tell you when… when I knew it was going to work? My plan? It is working now so I can tell you. But you already called me. And you, uh, you figured it out. So yep. Here we are.” With every word that fell from his lips, Peter could feel himself sinking further and further into the mattress. If he was going to keep doing such a great job at digging a hole for himself with the giveaway squeaking of his voice as he lied, he may as well be comfortable doing it.
The tense silence on the other end of the line was loud enough that Peter could practically see MJ's face and the way it would be pinching together slowly as she remembered the fact her friend was an actual idiot.
“... You have no idea what you’re doing, do you?” She asked.
“What’s going to happen if I say no?”
He figured her sigh of disappointment was enough of an answer.
“You actual dweeb. Alright I’m coming over,” She informed him, not even asking as per usual. “And then we are going to plan out how you can keep this up without exposing yourself or getting ridiculed by literally everyone you know.”
-
Fifteen minutes later found MJ sprawled across Peter’s bed as if she owned it. Her fingers flew across the keyboard of her laptop the way they'd been doing since the very first moment she walked into his bedroom, having not even greeted Peter when he opened the door for her. The only sounds to fill the room were the insistent, almost frantic tapping of keys and the muffled thumping of Peter's fidgeting feet against the floor. He waited a few more moments, as wary as always when needing to interrupt her. Her eyes shifted to his, as if sensing his discomfort. Not that it was that much of an achievement though, what with the way he slumped awkwardly at his own doorway, unsure how to approach her whilst she undertook this self appointed mission. She quirked an amused eyebrow at his visible trepidation at having her in his room.
“So are you going to come over here and help me plan out your next articles or what?” she finally asked.
“Oh, ah, yeah of course.” He said, grateful for finally having a reason to move in his own bedroom. MJ was just like that, she commanded whatever space she was in if she felt like it. She was still perfectly good at being invisible at school, of course. He couldn’t even count the amount of times she had snuck up on him, spidey senses be damned. But when she was like this, she was indestructible. He was a little bit in awe of her to be honest. She sat there on his bed, typing away without a single care, planning his superheroing future like that was something normal friends just did for each other. Maybe normal friends wouldn't, but that's why Peter was lucky he had MJ on his side.
Together, they huddled over the laptop for nearly an hour as MJ directed Peter in the mystical ways of both Buzzfeed article writing, and maintaining a secret identity. When he finally questioned her on how she was at all qualified to instruct him in regards to secret identities, she simply fixed him with a blank stare and reminded him just how easy it had been for her to figure his secret out months ago. After three whole seconds of careful deliberation, he decided it was probably in his best interests to just start listening to her advice. By the time Aunt May came home MJ had already disappeared, gone as quickly as she arrived, leaving him to his own devices. In a way it was a comfort to see that she trusted him. But that probably had less to do with her belief in his own competence and probably more that she was confident he at least had one of her plans to go off, which theoretically would've meant he had a hundred percent chance of succeeding. She had reluctantly conceded that the infamous Parker luck that Peter possessed would inevitably balanced out her brilliance just a bit, bringing it down to an eighty four percent chance.
-
In the entire history of mankind there had never been a more shocking event than the moment Peter woke up to see an email from his editor at Buzzfeed praising him for the article. After shooting off a quick text to MJ promising to go to her five year old cousin's birthday party as Spider-Man as thanks for her services to humanity (Well, service to the part of humanity that was comprised of Peter Parker at least), he then checked to see the literal thousands of new readers that had accumulated overnight and the hundreds of comments that now adorned the page of his article. The only other text he'd received came from Ned, who, as a fan of both Peter and Spider-Man, was now having the time of his life. He'd already sent Peter a dozen screenshots of the best responses to his article. Throughout the rest of the morning Peter's phone would periodically ping with a new notification from his best friend telling him about how someone else had just shared the article around.
When Peter's shoes first scuffed the ground outside of Midtown High he couldn't help but feel a little... well, anticlimactic. He'd just spent a whole hour revelling in his newfound internet notoriety but the other students couldn’t seem to care less about him being an actual published writer. At least, mostly. The writing wasn't important to them, no, they were far more invested in how the hell Peter had gotten such an exclusive photo of Spider-Man, and did that mean Peter had actually seen him, and did he know him through the Stark internship, and were they friends, and could Peter introduce them to Spider-Man? The constant barrage of questions was only quelled when MJ appeared from nowhere and glared any curious stragglers away to class and far from Peter.
For the next few weeks those reactions only grew, repeating more and more each day as Peter continued publishing new articles about his own alter-ego.
‘Beloved Sweetheart And Icon Spider-Man Saved An Old Lady So She Bought Him A Churro (Pics Will Make Your Heart MELT!!)
The more he published the braver he felt.
‘Photographic Proof That Spider-Man Is A Thousand Times Cooler Than the Queens Police Department’
Fully leaning into his new identity as a Buzzfeed writer Peter reveled in the opportunity to say all the things that Spider-Man could never get away with.
‘Awesomely Powerful and Suave Vigilante Spider-Man Just Stopped a Crime Ring from Stealing All of Tony Stark’s Shit’
That bravery, of course, dissipated the exact moment that Peter checked his phone only to find thirteen missed calls from Tony Stark. The real Tony Stark. He hadn’t even gone through Happy to contact Peter, which as far as Peter was concerned, meant that either the world was about to explode, again, or he was about to regret an awful lot of his recent decisions. Like not telling Mr Stark that he was posting about his alter ego online. Or that he had now amassed a shockingly large following. Or that he had branched out from just posting solely about Spider-Man and now addressed the Avengers too and it was entirely possible that recently he had maybe, just a little bit, suggested Spider-Man was cooler than Iron Man.
Oh dear.
He was going to return Mr. Stark’s calls, of course he was. But it was a Wednesday which meant academic decathlon training, and weirdly enough MJ didn’t take “Iron Man will actually murder me if I ignore him any longer” as a valid excuse for skipping. Which is how Peter found himself fidgeted in his seat more and more with every tick of that damned clock hanging on the wall. Questions flew by him as he couldn't even hear over the roaring of the blood in his ears. Throughout the hour long practice Peter had felt the telltale buzz of his phone ringing in his pocket two more times before finally falling silent in an ominous hush. Peter had fought multiple people who genuinely wanted to kill him and never before in his life had he felt the amount of stress that was radiating from his body the longer he couldn't answer Mr Stark. Until finally, after what was either three centuries or, slightly more likely, the last thirty minutes of practice had passed, MJ called the meeting to a close fifteen minutes early. If he were willing to give it a moment's thought, Peter might wonder whether she did that because she was nice and wanted to set him free from his eternal suffering - or if she was just sick of hearing his foot tap impatiently against the ground. Both options seemed equally likely.
Despite the ever pressing need to just leave ,Peter somehow managed to still be the last one out of the doors. With his eyes trained on his phone as he deliberated seventeen different ways of explaining himself to Mr Stark, he didn’t even notice the rest of his Acadec team huddled in his way. He slammed straight into Flash’s back. Instinct sent him cowering away from the other boy the second he realised his mistake; awaiting Flash’s inevitable retaliation. But nothing happened. Slowly, Peter opened one eye, then the other when there seemed to be no immediately consequences. Flash and everyone else continued to just stand there, frozen in place in what looked to be shock and awe. Was this a particualrly weird prank his classmates were pulling on him? The ol' "make peter think he's insane because no one is responding to him and we're all just going to block his view and his way of getting out"? Or were they just possessed? His spidey senses weren’t alerting him to any danger, so after a moment of deliberation Peter decided to give up on guessing and instead just muscle his way through the frozen students.
The regret arrived instantly.
There, right in front of him and his classmates, leaning against a ridiculously expensive car and wearing probably equally expensive sunglasses, was Tony Stark. In the flesh. At his school.
... Was hiding under his blankets still an option to escape from the world?
One by one his classmates seemed to register who it was that had pushed his way to the front. Each seeming to come to the realisation that maybe, just maybe, Peter's whole "fake internship" might hold just a little more credit than they'd expected. By that point Peter was pretty sure he was either going to melt from the embarrassed flush of red at his cheeks or maybe just from the burning stares of his classmates on his back as he shouldered his backpack and trudged down the stairs feeling more like a child walked towards their parent who was about to scold them for drawing on the walls, than like the superhero he was.
He refused to turn back and see his teammates’ faces, instead simply pushing past Tony and jumping in the passenger seat. As Mr Stark rounded the car to get to the driver's side, Peter allowed himself a glimpse back at everyone through the tinted windows. MJ had already decided she was unfazed by this turn of events and was on her way home. Ned’s grin could have split his face it was so wide. Everyone else, however, were busy trying to pick their jaws back up off the floor as their faces exhibited just about every single human emotion ever felt - with a rather heavy focus on both shock and awe. Except for Flash that is, because Flash looked like he’d been forced to inhale his bodyweight in lemons. His pursed lips wobbled slightly as he tried to compute how nerdy little Peter Parker actually knew The Tony Stark. How he could possibly be familiar enough with The Tony Stark to get into his car without a word.
The engine purred to life as the car pulled away from the curb, and in the privacy of the car's interior Peter allowed a self satisfied smile to tug at his lips, proud that he had finally Flash to believe his Stark Internship story in the best possible way.
That smile dropped at the very first words Mr Stark spoke after two whole tense minutes of silent driving.
“So, Buzzfeed huh?”