Chapter Text
He is thirteen years old and he finds a poem online.
Looking back on it, he doesn’t think he was searching for the poem, doesn’t think he ever really intended to find it, but he’s scrolling through his third attempt at a Tumblr account because he always ends up deleting them in shame and he sees the name Richard Siken and something makes him stop scrolling. The poem is called A Primer for the Small Weird Loves. Harley knows nothing about poetry. The only poems he’s ever read are the ones he has to read for his literature classes, and he understands the ideas of comprehension and hidden meaning and all the things he was taught about interpreting poetry, but he’s never had to apply it outside of class. The name of the poem intrigues him. He thinks, maybe foolishly, that he can just take what he’s learned and see if he can apply it outside of school.
The poem starts like this:
1
The blond boy in the red trunks is holding your head underwater
because he is trying to kill you,
and you deserve it, you do, and you know this,
and you are ready to die in this swimming pool
because you wanted to
and Harley stops reading, because the next words make something ache in his chest, his gut twisting ‘round an invisible knife that burns and makes him want to scream. This is not what he thought the poem was about. This is not what he wanted it to be about. He stares at the words wanted to and doesn’t dare let his eyes continue, and he sits there for what feels like hours but what must only be minutes, before bookmarking the page on his phone and closing out of it entirely. He doesn’t know why he bookmarks it until three weeks later, when he locks himself in a bathroom stall at school with a split lip and a bloody nose because a high school kid decided to push him down and punch him, calling him things that he doesn’t want to think about, doesn’t want to face. Something in him begs to continue the poem he never finished reading, and he goes to his bookmarks, clicks the link, and blinks away tears.
because you wanted to touch his hands and lips and this means
your life is over anyway.
You’re in the eighth grade. You know these things.
You know how to ride a dirt bike, and you know how to do
long division,
and you know that a boy who likes boys is a dead boy, unless
he keeps his mouth shut, which is what you
didn’t do,
because you are weak and hollow and it doesn’t matter anymore.
The poem does not end there, but Harley reads no further. He’s crying too hard, teeth digging into the meat of his palm to muffle the noise, to be able to make much sense of the words anyway.
It isn’t until Harley is fifteen that he looks the poem up again, his old phone a shatter screened mess thrown in a dumpster back in Tennessee, left behind when he packed his bags and ran to New York, to a man with tired eyes and a fatherly smile that replaces the barely-there memory of the dad that left him. Tony doesn’t ask questions when Harley pleads for a room, or an apartment, or even just a decent homeless shelter that might take pity on him being so young. All he does is open the door and usher Harley inside, sporting a black eye and rubbing at his left arm with a little frown as he tells Harley that there’s a room just down the hall from his own that’s up for grabs if he wants it. Harley doesn’t hug him, even though he wants to—it doesn’t matter if he looks at Tony and sees a father, because the church has engrained it in his head to avoid the touch of any male—but he does thank him over and over again, until his gratitude is unquestionable and his lungs beg for even a semi steady breath.
In this room, there’s not much more than a luxurious bed, a simple, modern looking dresser, a door leading to an ensuite bathroom, and a walk in closet that’s the size of Harley’s old room in Tennessee. All Harley has is a duffle and a backpack and whatever it is he’s wearing, and he doesn’t feel like unpacking anything right now, so he just makes his way into the bathroom, finds it stocked with fancy shampoo and conditioner and body wash, and he takes a long shower, scrubs at his skin until it stings and his mind is empty, and when he comes out in a pair of ratty sweatpants and a random plain black shirt that he digs from his duffle, there’s a brand new Stark phone sitting on top of the nightstand by the bed. No note is with it, nothing to provide any explanation, but he picks it up and turns it on and finds that it’s mostly set up already, not including a password and everything to personalize it.
Within ten minutes, he has the device completely set up, and no sooner than he finishes that does he get a text from Tony telling him that the phone is already connected to his main bank account, so Harley can feel free to use the device to order things, buy movies, whatever the hell he wants, and that there’s no need to ask before he does. Harley sets up a Spotify Premium account and does absolutely nothing else because the guilt of that alone is enough to make him feel queasy.
“You already fit right in,” Tony tells him when he finds Harley eating a bowl of ice cream at three in the morning, making his way into the kitchen on uneven footing and instantly heading to the coffee machine. It looks like he’s struggling to stay conscious, let alone keep walking. “What’s got you out of bed so late, kiddo?”
Harley takes a bite of his ice cream and says, “I don’t sleep a lot.” And it’s true, he doesn’t, because he has dreams he shouldn’t have and if he stays awake long enough to crash, he usually doesn’t dream at all. He takes in Tony’s tired features and the black eye and the way he’s once again rubbing at his left arm while he waits for the coffee to brew. “What happened to you? Someone bullying Iron Man now?”
“More like Iron Man got his ass beat by Captain America and his little assassin friend,” Tony says, tone a bit bitter and self-deprecating as he tries for a weird little smile. “Jokes on Cap, though. He broke up the Avengers and half the team are wanted fugitives now and Rhodey’s fucking paralyzed from the waist down, but I’m working on leg braces so he can walk again and I found an annoying little arachnid kid that I have to keep safe, so who really won, huh?”
“Arachnid kid?” Harley repeats, frowning. “What does that mean?”
The coffee machine beeps. Tony pours himself a large mug and waves a dismissive hand through the air, saying, “He’s a… Spider… Peter… whatever. You’ll probably meet him. I think. I don’t know.”
With that, he leaves the kitchen, steaming mug of coffee in hand, leaving Harley alone at the counter with his melting ice cream and the curious thought of why Tony hasn’t bothered to ask why Harley is here. He shoves the thought away, knows better than to question the few good happenings in his life, and when he goes to lay down—not to sleep, never to sleep—he thinks of the last time someone opened their doors so easily for him, remembers the pastor giving him a pitying smile and the way his mother nodded at him when he looked back at her, terrified and silently pleading with her to let him go home.
He told the pastor about the poem and the way his heart fluttered when he met the eyes of pretty boys from across the classroom and the pastor clicked his tongue and said that it’s not right, it’s not normal. When it became clear that Harley would never be able to convince the pastor that the butterflies feel right, he decided to play along, to answer how he should, to lie through his bloodied teeth and put bandaids on his knuckles when he punched the walls in the dead of night because he was so angry.
This is not like the church. When Harley said prayers he didn’t mean and murmured thank you, father, he did not mean dad. Tony opens the doors, gives him a room, and does not pry. Father, in regard to the pastor, is not the same as father, in regard to Tony Stark. One is a holy man that cures people of sinful things. The other has sinned and grown and is accepting, is kind. Harley trusts Tony Stark. Harley ran away from the pastor and Rose Hill and the mother who told him he isn’t allowed to be queer.
He reads the next part of the poem, doesn’t need to reread the first because the words have been burned into his head since he was thirteen years old. It goes like this:
2
A dark-haired man in a rented bungalow is licking the whiskey
from the back of your wrist.
He feels nothing,
keeps a knife in his pocket,
peels an apple right in front of you
while you tramp around a mustard-colored room
in your underwear
drinking Dutch beer from a green bottle.
After everything that was going to happen has happened
you ask only for the cab fare home
and realize you should have asked for more
because he couldn't care less, either way.
He doesn’t read the rest of it and deletes the poem from his browser history on his phone, and he wonders why he feels like the ice cream in his stomach is threatening to come back up.
Not long after, he hears more about the apparent arachnid kid. Harley listens as Tony rants relentlessly about the recklessness of this teenage hero, is sitting on the couch with his feet tucked beneath him when the man storms in holding a plastic bag containing a bright red suit that Harley has only seen glimpses of on the local news. Happy follows after him, murmurs something about how maybe Tony might have gone too far, and witnesses the way Tony explodes with, “He could have fucking died!”
There’s a strange lapse in time where Harley merely exists in the penthouse of the Stark Tower, where Tony hardly leaves the lab and grumbles under his breath whenever he does, where Happy visits Harley a lot and assures him that it’s nothing personal, that Tony is just too stubborn to admit that he cares about the spider kid and knows he should have handled the situation differently. And then there’s an alert from Friday, late one night, saying that the plane of Avengers crap that’s being sent to the compound — “I want it away from me,” Tony tells Harley, when he finds the time to ask. “I don’t want it anywhere near my home.” — has crashed on the beach, and Tony looks more annoyed than anything else, until Friday mentions the name Mister Parker, and then Tony looks pale as a sheet and is rushing to the balcony, a suit already waiting for him there by the time he makes it outside. Harley doesn’t have the time to ask where he’s going before he’s taking off, and he simply sits on the couch and watches videos on his phone until Friday tells him that Tony will be landing on the balcony again in approximately two minutes.
Spider kid is named Peter Parker, and he looks like a wreck when Harley first meets him, leaning heavily against the Iron Man suit, the metal warping under the strength of his shaking fingers. There’s blood caked into his clothes and drying against his skin but he still smiles at Harley and says a breathless little, “Hey, I’m Peter,” and his smile doesn’t even falter when he presses his other hand into his side and he winces in pain. The hoodie he’s wearing has various holes and burns in it and the skin peeking out looks charred and sliced and horribly painful, and all Harley can do is stare with a slightly dropped jaw as this kid, who must be Harley’s age, maybe a few months younger, struggles to stay on his feet and still attempts to chirpily greet him, even as he’s quite literally bleeding out on the carpet.
“Is Cho in the building?” Tony asks, head tilted up to the ceiling, the mask of his suit pulling back to reveal the way his eyes are squinted and his features are scrunched up in concern. Harley is still looking at Peter and he hears the pastor in his head, the way the man’s voice dripped with some kind of twisted worry, saying odd and hurtful things, the kind of things Harley didn’t want to listen to.
“It’s unnatural,” the pastor had said, lowered tone and narrowed eyes and a sickly smile pulling at his chapped lips. There were four days until Harley’s fifteen birthday and he was sitting stock still, head bowed, hands clasped in his lap because he just wanted to see his sister and try to convince his mother that the church wasn’t helping, that he just wanted to go home and then he’d be as normal as she wanted so long as he never had to see the pastor again. “You’re sick. Do you understand that, Harley? The way you look at boys, the way you feel about them, it’s an abomination. You’re in need of being saved.”
Harley remembers the indents left in his palms from digging his fingernails so deeply into his skin lasting for hours, nearly breaking the skin, but he had managed to keep his voice steady as he stated his agreement with everything the pastor said. And he thinks of that now, as he looks at Peter Parker, the heavy look in his eyes and the smile still pulled up on bloodied lips and the dirt and the grime and somehow, in some unnatural—wrong, sick, abomination—way, he’s absolutely beautiful despite it all. Harley’s tongue feels knotted and non-cooperative in his mouth, but he manages to spit out some kind of response, says a simple, “I’m, uh—I’m—I’m Harley,” before Tony is leading Peter towards the elevator upon being informed by Friday that Helen Cho is in the Med Bay and prepared for operation.
“Nice t’meet you,” Peter sort of slurs out over his shoulder, beams at Harley as his eyes go half lidded and he practically collapses, legs giving out but Tony keeping him up with the arm wrapped around his waist. As the doors slide open and they step inside, Harley hears Peter murmur, “Seems nice, Mis’er S’ark.”
“He’s very nice,” Tony agrees, that tinge of concern rolled into each syllable of every word. There’s a little trail of dripped blood following them, staining carpet and wooden floor, oozing from wounds that are hidden under the torn up clothes hanging loosely off of Peter’s pale, shaking frame. “Maybe you can talk to him some more when you’re all healed up, huh? I’m sure he’d be okay with that.”
The doors start to slide shut, but Harley catches the quiet mhm that Peter hums out, and he keeps staring at the elevator for a long moment after they’ve gone, a twist in his gut that makes him feel sick and uncomfortable and flushed and he tries to tell himself that the reason he came to New York is because he hates feeling ashamed but the shame has been carved into his head and seared into his skin and it claws up his throat no matter how hard he tries to swallow it back down. He feels horribly dizzy and suddenly he’s rushing to the bathroom because whatever’s in his stomach is crawling up with very little warning, and he barely has time to skid to his knees against the tiled floor before the half assed sandwich he had for dinner is spilling past his lips and splashing into the toilet bowl.
Peter Parker is being stitched up three floors down, unconscious and miraculously alive, even after being trapped under slabs of concrete and crashing a plane into the beach and being slammed against the sand with metal talons digging in his chest over and over again, and Harley Keener is throwing up because he looked a pretty boy in the eyes and felt his heart flutter and he tells himself that there’s nothing wrong with that but his mother and the pastor both told him it’s a sickness and now it’s making him sick, and something about that means something significant, in a way words can’t explain.
After, when there’s nothing left for Harley to puke, when Peter’s healing has finally kicked in, Harley uses shaky hands to pull out his phone and look up that poem again, no matter how much something in his head tells him not to do it, no matter the fact that his mouth tastes of bile and stomach acid. He pushes those things away, doesn’t focus on them, and reads the words on the screen.
3
The man on top of you is teaching you how to hate, see you
as a piece of real estate,
just another fallow field lying underneath him
like a sacrifice.
He's turning your back into a table so he doesn't have to
eat off the floor, so he can get comfortable,
pressing against you until he fits, until he's made a place for himself
inside you
The clock ticks from five to six. Kissing degenerates into biting.
So you get a kidney punch, a little blood in your urine.
It isn't over yet, it's just begun.
The phone clatters to the tile and he dry heaves as something within him ruthlessly twists.
He sees Peter Parker again two days later, laying on the sofa when Harley leaves his room around six in the morning, unable to make himself lay restlessly in bed any longer. For a long moment, Harley just stops and looks, that queasy feeling in his stomach again, but he swallows roughly and pushes it down and looks harder, takes in the way that Peter’s knees are drawn up to his chest, a blanket draped over his shoulders and his head leaning against the arm rest as he stares at the TV, whatever’s playing reflecting in his inviting brown eyes. It seems like he doesn’t realize someone else is there, but when Harley is about to turn on his heel and walk away, heart thudding in his chest, Peter speaks up, voice merely a croak when he says, “You can come sit down, y’know. I wouldn’t mind the company.”
“Um.” Harley looks over his shoulder, down the hall and towards the door of the room that he’s able to call his own, thinks of returning to his bed and trying to sleep. He thinks of harsh words and how simply seeing Peter Parker smile at him had been enough to make him sick and maybe he should stay away until he’s got a handle of his own shame, but then he looks back over to the living room and Peter is looking at him with wide yet tired eyes and a hopeful look on his face and Harley nods before realizing he’s doing it, stepping forward on shaking knees as he murmurs, “Yeah, okay.”
It’s an infatuation built at first glance, a feeling of being wrong as he settles on to the opposite side of the couch, slouches down with hunched shoulders and a ducked head and looks resolutely at the screen, absolutely zero recollection or recognition clicking in his head at what he sees. Apparently, seeing or sensing the uncertainty, Peter tells him, “You don’t have to sit if you don’t want to, though.”
“No, it’s—” Harley stops, clears his throat when his voice sort of cracks, tries for some kind of smile even as he can’t meet Peter’s eyes and shakes his head sheepishly. “It’s fine. I’m just… yeah. It’s fine.” Then, because he seriously has no idea what is on the TV right now, and because he’s so quietly intrigued by the boy that he’s already heard so much about, the arachnid kid that Tony has been telling him of since he showed up two months ago, he sinks his teeth into his lower lip and tries to sound like a normal person when he asks, “So, you’re, um… you’re Spider-Man, then? I’ve seen you, on the news, sometimes.”
Peter is looking at the screen and his pulled up hoodie hides most of his face but he’s still sporting a small little smile when he answers, “I guess there’s no point in denying it when you saw me the other night, so, yeah, that’s me. And the news doesn’t always say the nicest stuff, so hopefully you don’t think I’m, like, some crazy secret murderer or whatever crazy stuff they say about me sometimes.”
Again, Harley shakes his head, but now he does it with slightly wide eyes and a pursed lipped frown, telling Peter, “No, I don’t think—I mean, the stations I watch don’t say stuff like that, and Tony talks about you, so I don’t—I know you’re not—”
“Thanks,” Peter interrupts, head fully turned to face Harley with a little grin on his face.
“The cuts are gone,” Harley says, blinking owlishly in mild surprise. At the look of confusion that crosses Peter’s features, Harley quickly jumps to explain, “I mean, the—when you came in, you had a bunch of cuts and bruises and stuff on your face, but they’re—they’re already gone.”
Silently, he curses himself for bringing it up, afraid that it sounds too observant to be casual, terrified that it’ll give away just how intently his eyes had been drawn in the moment he looked at Peter, so beyond frightened that Peter will be disgusted and tell Tony and Harley will be sent back home to be fixed by the pastor. Part of him knows that Tony wouldn’t do that, trusts Tony not to do that, but the fear persists anyway. He presses his trembling hands between his knees to conceal how bad they’re shaking and averts his eyes to the far wall, suppresses the urge to flinch away when Peter mumbles a quiet little, “Oh, um… well, I have, uh—part of the Spider-Man thing, it gave me fast healing, so all the little stuff is already gone. The bigger stuff isn’t really, not yet, which is why I’m still, um—still at the tower, and not at home yet, but it’s good enough that Doctor Cho said I could leave the Med Bay, which is—which is good.”
With a nod, Harley softly agrees with, “Yeah, that’s good.”
“What are, um…” Peter trails off, and when Harley glances at him, he sees that Peter is looking down at his own lap with a little frown, brows knitted together in some kind of thought. Harley looks away again quickly, feels a residual fear at the idea of what his brain may conjure up, where it may go, if he continues to look. “I, uh… I don’t really know—I mean, Mr. Stark has mentioned you a few times, but he never said, like, who, exactly, you are, you know? I’m kind of just assuming you’re his son or something, but you don’t look a whole lot like him and I think he said your last name is, um… shit, I don’t remember what it was, but I know it started with a K, and, like, maybe you’re adopted or something, but, um… I don’t know. I guess I’m just kind of curious about who you are, if that makes sense?”
“I’m not Tony’s son,” Harley says first, though he silently wishes he was, because maybe things would have been different, would have been better, if Tony Stark was his father growing up. “I’m just some kid that helped him out a few years ago, after the battle of New York, when the Mandarin stuff was happening, you know? And he’s helping me out now by giving me a place to stay. That’s all it is.”
Peter doesn’t seem one hundred percent sure if he believes that, but he just slowly nods, looks at Harley with a curious sort of expression before asking, “Where are you from?”
A hellscape, Harley thinks bitterly. “Tennessee. A small town that you’ve probably never heard of. You?”
“Queens,” Peter answers. “Why’d you come to New York? Is your family here, too?”
An image filters through Harley’s mind of Darcy Keener and her motherly smile and the smell of her homemade blackberry pie, of his lovely baby sister Emma and how she rolls her eyes when he tells her jokes, and he thinks of how he hadn't had the time to say goodbye to her after running from the church and breaking in to his own house to pack his duffel and his backpack. Slowly, he shakes his head. “No, they… it’s kind of… kind of complicated. And they’re still in Tennessee. I came here to get away.”
“Away from what?” Peter asks, voice hushed.
“I don’t know,” Harley murmurs, brows furrowed and fingernails digging in to his palms. “Just… stuff. It’s better here, I guess.” Safer, he wants to add. Free from the talk of sins and being damned and how something as simple as the way he feels is apparently, inherently, wrong.
Peter hums a bit, looks back at the TV but doesn’t appear to really be watching it, so Harley looks even though he isn’t watching, either, until a few moments later, when Peter asks, “You good at building shit?”
Harley’s eyes flicker to Peter suddenly, uncertainly, and Peter offers him a wide, toothy grin.
An hour later, Tony finds them in his lab, Peter talking Harley through how he came up with the design for his web shooters and the formula for the webbing itself, leaning close to him to point at the sketches and writing he has jotted on a piece of paper. Harley is feeling on the brink of panicking with how close Peter is but doesn’t know how to put space between them in a way that won’t draw attention to it, finds the perfect reason when the doors open and Tony walks in, sounding both fond and amused when he sighs and says, “My nerdy little teenagers are bonding. The world’s not going to implode now, is it?”
“Of course it is,” Harley tries to quip, leans back in his seat and takes a deep breath for his begging lungs, trying to calm his racing heart and instinctively telling himself that pretty boys shouldn’t make him nervous, that he shouldn’t find boys pretty in the first place, swallows back that shame that tastes like copper on the back of his tongue. “World domination is clearly inevitable.”
The chiming little laugh that Peter lets out makes Harley feel a little bit dizzy, not used to being so close to the pretty boys that he wasn’t allowed to look at back home, but he tries to play it off as nothing when Tony quirks a brow at him. Either he does a good job at it or Tony chooses not to point it out, instead making his way over and leaning between them, giving Harley the chance to put even more space between him and Peter, until he isn’t feeling anxious over the feeling of their knees brushing together every few minutes or so, and he asks, “What are you two working on, then?”
“I’m showing him the web shooters,” Peter explains chirpily, spins the paper a bit to show Tony. “Specifically, I’m showing him how I came up with the design and the formula, and I was just about to tell him about my new ideas, too, ‘cause he said he can build stuff and I thought he might wanna see it or give some kind of input or—or, maybe, like, help me build them, if he wanted to, or something. See?”
“Woah.” Tony grabs the paper, lifts it a bit to squint at the scribbled out formula on the bottom of the page—not the one for Peter’s current webbing, no, but an idea for a new kind of webbing, one that might be stronger, better for the heavy lifting. “What’s this for, kid? Fighting Godzilla?”
Peter shrugs, but Harley can see from where he sits that Peter has averted his gaze to the ground and seems some kind of mix between saddened and sheepish, and Harley thinks, oh so suddenly, that he’d rather be nervous from a pretty boy’s smile than have to see the kind of subtle pain etched into Peter’s features as he tries for a smile and says, “I was thinking I could use it for the big stuff, like… like holding a ferry together. If I get it right, it should be able to help me with things too much for just my strength.”
And it’s a bit harsh, the way Harley remembers the news stations showing footage of Spider-Man trying to stop a weapons deal, the shaky recordings from inside the ferry as the boat split in half and the echoing scream of a teenage hero trying to keep the thing from falling completely apart, and he thinks of the blood and the dirt and the grime on Peter’s face when he stumbled through the living room and the way Tony’s voice shook when he yelled, “He could have fucking died!” at Happy while Harley watched.
He thinks he gets it, a little bit. Spider-Man could kill Peter Parker. It’s dangerous.
So was running away to New York, but Peter has Tony, and Harley kind of has Tony, too, but he hasn’t relied on Tony, hasn’t opened up to Tony, hasn’t said a damn word about why he’s here. It’s time for that to change, time for him to open up his concaved chest and show the broken parts within and hope that someone—Tony, maybe Happy, anybody—can help him start to push the pieces together again.
“Mama made me go to the church,” he says, with no warning, no preamble, nothing to lead up to it. With his feet tucked beneath him and a plate of cold pizza in his lap that he can’t be bothered trying to stomach, he forces it out, says the sharp words that slice him up inside. Tony is already looking at him in mild alarm, the movie on the TV muted, and Harley swallows back bile before he continues with, “It was… I mean, in a way, I guess it was my fault. I should’ve known she wouldn’t be okay with it, not after all the times she ranted about… about people like me, y’know? But I hoped it would be different, ‘cause I’m her son, and she’s supposed to love me for who I am, so I… I told her, after school one day. She was in the kitchen makin’ dinner and I marched on in and I told her, I said—I said, Mama, I’m gay.”
Just breathing those last two words out is enough to make him feel dizzy with fear and sickness and a feeling of doing something wrong. Tony pushes his plate onto the coffee table and moves just a little bit closer, something in his eyes that Harley can’t see because he refuses to look away from the loose threads sticking out on the knees of his ratty pajama pants.
“She didn’t say anything, not for a while,” Harley whispers. “And when she did, she—she was crying, and she was begging me to say I wasn’t telling the truth, and I—I just wanted her to tell me she loved me, but when she realized I was bein’ honest, she told me to pack a bag. She didn’t even let me wait until Emma got home from her friend’s house, didn’t let me talk to her, just—just drove me to the church on the edge of town and gave the pastor a hundred dollars and told him to fix me. And then she left me there, just like that, didn’t even look back when she was walkin’ away. I didn’t… didn’t see her for two weeks.”
“Harley…”
There’s an edge to Tony’s voice that makes Harley want to run and hide, but he doesn’t, just clamps his teeth down on his wobbly lower lip until he doesn’t feel like he’s about to cry, and then he goes on. “At first, it was just… it was weird, but it wasn’t bad. There were some rooms in the back of the church, ones with beds, but no one else stayed back there other than me. He said it was ‘cause all the other kids were already fixed and got to go home, were out in town living their normal lives, as God intended. I asked ‘im why I was there, and he said it was ‘cause my mama can’t have a homosexual for a son. Every day, he sat me down and he tried to talk me through my—my feelings, and explained to me that it was wrong, that it was an abomination, to look at boys and to—to like them, the way I did. The way I do. And then Mama came by to see me, told me that I just had to keep trying, gave the pastor another hundred dollars, and left again, telling me that she was so proud and that she just wanted me to be—to be normal again.”
He doesn’t realize his breathing has gone a bit shallow or that tears have started trickling down his blotchy red cheeks until a comforting hand settles on his shoulder and Tony’s calm voice tells him, “Take a breath, kid. Give yourself a minute, okay? It’s alright, Harley. You’re safe here.”
You’re safe here. You’re safe here. You’re safe here.
It’s alright, Harley. You’re safe here.
“I just—” Harley, sucks in a sharp, sudden breath that stabs at his lungs and blinks away the tears burning at the back of his eyes. “I know—I—I couldn’t stay there, I couldn’t do it, ‘cause no matter how much I said what I knew he wanted to hear, no matter how hard I tried—I tried to act normal, so I could go home and see Mama and my sister, he—he knew, somehow, that I was lying, and I had a feeling that—that if I stayed any longer, it was—he was gonna—gonna do something, and I couldn’t—and—and I hoped that, maybe, maybe you could—maybe you’d let me stay here, or do something to help, ‘cause I always feel accepted with you, but I couldn’t—I was so scared to tell you why I ran away, and you never asked, so I just let it—I didn’t—I never said anything and I’m so scared that you’ll send me back and—and—”
“Let’s get one thing clear, kid,” Tony tells him, gentle and caring but still set and firm. “I’ll never send you away, alright? And especially not for something like that. I mean it when I say you’re safe here. Your mom… Christ, what she did, that isn’t okay, and you’ll never have to go back there unless you want to. I’ve been working with Pepper and my lawyers since you got here to try and draw up some kind of guardianship papers because I knew you wouldn’t have come here unless something happened. All I need is a good reason to get the courts to let me take you in. She’ll never be able to do that shit again.”
Harley squeezes his eyes shut and curls his shaking hands into fists. “You promise?”
The hand on Harley’s shoulder carefully pulls him in for a gentle side hug, gives plenty of time for Harley to pull away. He doesn’t. “I promise. This can be home for as long as you want it to be. Give me two days and I’ll have the legal side of it all figured out, and no one will be able to force you to go anywhere.”
“Okay,” Harley murmurs, nodding against Tony’s shoulder and trying to pretend he isn’t crying. “Okay.”
That night, in the safety (you’re safe here, you’re safe here, you’re safe here) of his (safe, safe, safe) room, he pulled out a ratty notebook that he had been using for English back at his school in Rose Hill, notes that he should make sure to bring up the topic of school when Tony has the whole guardianship thing figured out, and he rips out all the used pages, leaves the notebook even more crumpled and used but completely blank on the inside. Then, plucking a pen from the desk in his room that he hasn’t properly used quite yet, he scribbles down the first three parts of the poem by memory alone, looks it up to double check he wrote it down right, and then he stops, freezes, scrolls down to read part four.
4
Says to himself
The boy's no good. The boy is just no good.
but he takes you in his arms and pushes your flesh around
to see if you could ever be ugly to him.
You, the now familiar whipping boy, but you're beautiful,
he can feel the dogs licking his heart.
Who gets the whip and who gets the hoops of flame?
He hits you and he hits you and he hits you.
Desire driving his hands right into your body.
Hush, my sweet. These tornadoes are for you.
You wanted to think of yourself as someone who did these kinds of things.
You wanted to be in love
and he happened to get in the way.
Something hurts, Harley realizes, staring at those words with a creased brow and some kind of tremble to his breathing. This can’t be it, can it? The poem, it doesn’t really… it doesn’t feel promising, it feels anxious. It feels like the stutter of Harley’s heart in his chest and the way his fingers trembled when Peter leaned too close and he could feel breath brushing hot against his skin while Peter explained the mechanics of his web shooters because Harley was a bit too stuck in his nervous fear to tell him that he had figured out how they worked the second Peter made the sketch. Harley doesn’t want more anxiety.
He wants to feel some kind of hope, after crying his eyes out on the shoulder of the man who’s more of a parent to him than either of his ever had been, after blubbering about how Peter’s smile made Harley feel sick to his stomach because a pretty boy is the kind of boy he was told to fear and Tony softly assured him that there’s nothing wrong with being fifteen years old and having a crush on someone you find pretty. There’s a desperate bubbling in the center of the chest for something that makes him feel hope, in the same way he felt hope when Tony told him that having a crush on a pretty person is the most normal thing in the world, even if his crush is on a pretty boy. Craving that reassurance, he keeps reading.
5
The green-eyed boy in the powder-blue t-shirt standing
next to you in the supermarket recoils as if hit,
repeatedly, by a lot of men, as if he has a history of it.
This is not your problem.
You have your own body to deal with.
The lamp by the bed is broken.
You are feeling things he's no longer in touch with.
And everyone is speaking softly,
so as not to wake one another.
The wind knocks the heads of the flowers together.
Steam rises from every cup at every table at once.
Things happen all the time, things happen every minute
that have nothing to do with us.
6
So you say you want a deathbed scene, the knowledge that comes
before knowledge,
and you want it dirty.
And no one can ever figure out what you want,
and you won't tell them,
and you realize the one person in the world who loves you
isn't the one you thought it would be,
and you don't trust him to love you in a way
you would enjoy.
And the boy who loves you the wrong way is filthy.
And the boy who loves you the wrong way keeps weakening.
You thought if you handed over your body
he'd do something interesting.
7
The stranger says there are no more couches and he will have to
sleep in your bed. You try to warn him, you tell him
you will want to get inside him, and ruin him,
but he doesn't listen.
You do this, you do. You take the things you love
and tear them apart
or you pin them down with your body and pretend they're yours.
So, you kiss him, and he doesn't move, he doesn't
pull away, and you keep on kissing him. And he hasn't moved,
he's frozen, and you've kissed him, and he'll never
forgive you, and maybe now he'll leave you alone.
And there’s no more to read when Harley tries to keep scrolling down.
He angrily scribbles the rest of the poem in his notebook and rips the pages out and shoves them into the top drawer of his desk to never be seen again, can’t bring himself to throw it away because something within him tells him he shouldn’t, but part of him demands to burn the pages entirely. He’s mad, terrified and shaking because that can’t be it. There has to be more, right? Something that makes him think he might get a happy ending, something that makes him excited to be who he is, to accept how he feels.
The next day, he doesn’t look Peter in the eye when Peter’s Aunt May picks him up from the tower and takes him home, just offers a noncommittal hum when Peter asks if they can work together in the lab sometime, excitedly tells him that he should attend Midtown now that he knows Harley’s staying in New York, seems overjoyed at the idea of spending more time with Harley.
Tony asks if he’s okay, after Peter leaves. Harley nods, feels sick, and spends the next two days in his room, staring at the bumps and grooves in his ceiling and thinks—thinks—thinks—
You do this, you do. You take the things you love and tear them apart
You take the things you love and tear them apart
You take the things you love and
t e a r
t h e m
a p a r t
The third day, he starts at Midtown, Tony his legal guardian and no word from his mother even though he knows that she knows where he is. He almost calls home, just to talk to Emma, but backs out at the last minute and takes a shower instead, trying to prepare for his first day at a new school. When he wakes up the morning of his first day, there’s a backpack fully stocked with everything he needs for his classes, a schedule tucked into the front pocket with a note from Tony attached, saying, I managed to get you the same schedule as Pete so that he can show you around and keep you company. Lunch money is in your wallet. Call me if you need me for anything, big or small, okay? Love you, kid. T.S.
Despite the heavy dread that’s been sitting in the pit of his stomach like a heavy stone, Harley smiles a bit and realizes that his mom never left him notes, even though she always left for work before he got up for school. Thinking back on it, Darcy was a little on the distant side. Tony, so far, is not.
Peter grins when he sees Harley.
It’s an ear splitting sort of grin, one that’s so wide and excited that it looks like it hurts, and then he grabs Harley’s hand and weaves them through the crowded hall while Harley’s heart lodges in his throat at the feeling of the soft hand holding his own, almost doesn’t realize that they’ve come to a stop until Peter drops his hand and chirpily exclaims, “Harley, this is Ned! Ned, this is the guy I told you about!”
“You told him about me?” Harley asks, before his eyes have even focused on the kind faced boy that’s smiling at him, before he takes in the way that Peter is still grinning with a glowing beam of brightness that Harley has to duck his head and look away from before it makes him feel some kind of blind.
“Of course I did,” Peter says, scoffing a bit, like it’s obvious. “You’re, like, the coolest person I’ve ever met, other than Mr. Stark, obviously. Even Ned can’t keep up with my science crap as well as you can!”
Ned just shrugs, clearly not bothered by that statement. “It’s true. And now that he has someone as smart as him, I don’t have to be the only person he rambles about science to. You’re saving my life, honestly.”
A dust of pink—a blush, a pretty, pretty blush, Harley realizes with his breath stuck somewhere in the molasses that’s filling his weakened lungs—dusts over the curve of Peter’s cheeks as he glowers at Ned and lightly shoves his shoulder, grumbling, “Don’t be a dick, Ned. I talk about non-science things.”
“When?” Ned asks, all teasing with a cheeky grin. He sticks a hand out to Harley them, still bright and happy and definitely the kind of person to be Peter Parker’s best friend. “It’s nice to meet you, though!”
“Yeah, uh—” Harley pushes past the clawing urge to pretend he doesn’t see Ned’s hand, reaches forward and shakes it slightly, quickly, pulls his hand back like he’s been burned because Peter grabbed that same hand, too, and he feels like he’s done something wrong, touching two boys, even in such harmless and simple little ways. “It’s nice to meet you, too. I’m—I’m Harley. Harley Keener.”
Neither of them points out that Peter already said their names. Ned just smiles wider. “Ned Leeds.”
The bell rings before Harley can scramble for a response, and suddenly Peter’s holding his hand again to show him where their first class of the day is, barely manages to wave to Ned as they leave, his hands hopefully not shaking so bad as to be obvious when he does so. Ned waves back and laughs a bit and disappears in the opposite direction from them and Peter doesn’t let go of his hand until they’re sitting down at the middle table of their first period class, Peter already happily talking about how excited he is that Harley is going to Midtown, doesn’t stop talking until the teacher walks in.
Harley is hooked on to every single word, even when his ears start to ring.
In comparison, Midtown is a welcome change for Harley, intellectually stimulating in a way that Rose Hill High had never been for him. Ned treats him like they’ve been friends for years and MJ is quiet but smiles at him and lets him sit next to her when waiting outside for Happy to pick him up from school. Homework keeps him distracted from the crumpled up pages in the top drawer of his desk and he learns to act more normal despite the way his heart still thuds in his chest when Peter’s near.
Tony teases him for his crush whenever Peter’s not around, pokes him in the stomach and snickers about teenage love and asks him every day if he’s made a move yet, even though he knows that Harley can’t really bring himself to, even on the days when he catches Peter looking at him, when their hands brush in the lab and he sees the way Peter’s breath gets caught and makes his chest stutter, when he thinks that his crush is a two way street. No matter how much he tells himself there’s nothing wrong with liking boys, it’s engrained into him enough to keep him from ever even thinking of bringing his feelings up.
Still, he appreciates the way Tony teases him about it, like a normal father in a normal family poking fun at his normal son about a normal crush. It helps, a little bit. Harley could tell him to stop and he knows that he would, but it’s not something he really wants to stop. Any sense of normalcy, he accepts.
Peter becomes a constant, a daily person in Harley’s daily life, meets him in front of the school every morning and goes to the tower at least three days a week to do homework and spend some time in the lab. When he gets hurt—and he does, on a regular basis, shows up on the balcony attached to the main living room with bullet grazes and minor stab wounds and cuts and bruises that are so dim in contrast to his bright, giddy smile that is just as blinding when it turns sheepish, twitches the ends of his lips every time Tony levels him with a stern look before leading him to get fixed up by Helen.
He grabs Harley’s hand so they don’t get lost in crowded hallways and sidewalks, and he laughs to the point of tears over a comment that Harley didn’t realize was funny at all, and Harley thinks they must be best friends because Peter climbs in through the window of his room one night with tears streaming down his face and all he does is ask if it’s okay that he stays the night before collapsing onto the bed at the sight of Harley’s timid nod. He doesn’t say what’s wrong until the morning, just clutches Harley in a hug and cries until he falls asleep and softly admits that it was the anniversary of his Uncle’s death when they stir awake in the morning, kind of tangled together with ankles hooked together and nose brushing with their close proximity and Harley is choking on the feeling of the moment but pushes it aside to hug Peter, doesn’t think once of the fear of a pretty boy’s touch because hugging seems to help Peter breathe and that’s all that really matters in the moment, whatever he can do to make it better.
Tony doesn’t say anything when they come out for breakfast, even though it’s a school day and Peter’s eyes are red rimmed and Harley looks seconds away from panicking. He just heads to the kitchen to cook up a nice breakfast and cancels his meetings for the day after making sure May knows that Peter’s safe.
It’s somewhere in the chilliness between Thanksgiving and Christmas that Peter finds the poem.
He’s not trying to find it, isn’t snooping around Harley’s room, rather hunched over at Harley’s desk with a highlighter and a red pen to edit the first draft of an essay that’s due in a week, absently asks Harley if he has a pencil because he lost his at school and doesn’t want to mark this certain mistake in red pen, and when Harley vaguely gestures at the drawers, he pulls open the top one and finds crumpled up papers staring up at him, sees the scribbled down words that make no sense without context, and, curious to an almost dangerous point, doesn’t hesitate to ask, “Hey, what’s this?”
Harley looks up from where he’s sitting on his bed and filling out notecards for his history presentation, sees what Peter is looking at and goes pale as a sheet. “Um, it’s—it’s a poem. Sort of.”
“You write poetry?” Peter questions, looks wide eyed and surprised and intrigued.
“No, I, um—I found it, online,” Harley corrects, looks down at where he’s tapping the end of his pen against his history textbook, just to have something else to focus on. “It’s by, um—by Richard Siken. I guess I just… I liked it, so I wrote it down, but then I didn’t like it anymore and put it in there.”
There’s a twitch in Peter’s fingers that gives away his want to grab the papers and read them, but he doesn’t do that, just tilts his head to the side. “Why didn’t you like it anymore?”
Harley shrugs a shoulder, doesn’t look up. “It’s hard to explain, but it… I guess it, um—I just assumed that it would… I thought it would be different than it was, and when it wasn’t what I hoped, I just…”
“You didn’t throw it away,” Peter points out. Then: “Can I read it?”
Instantly, Harley wants to say no, because he hasn’t told a single soul since admitting his truth to Tony, doesn’t know if he can do it again, but there’s something so genuine and sincere in Peter’s eyes, a curiosity that holds no malicious intent, something that Harley should know by now but still fears will change at the flip of a switch. Slowly, he nods. “Um, yeah, if you—if you want to, then go for it.”
“Are you sure?” Peter asks, clearly detecting the uncertainty coursing through Harley’s veins.
Harley falters, but nods. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m sure.”
For a moment, Peter doesn’t move, scans over Harley’s features for any sign of hesitation, any hint that he might want to change his mind. Once he seems satisfied, he finally reaches into the drawer, pulls out the crumpled up papers and flattens them out on the top of the desk. Harley looks away, looks back, looks away again, can’t decide if he wants to see Peter’s reaction or avoid it, feels the heaviness in the silence that hangs in the air as Peter reads it, then appears to read it again, then a third time, too.
“Um.” Harley clears his throat, can’t let it be quiet any longer. “What do you think?”
Peter glances at Harley, eyes unreadable. “It’s kind of… kind of sad? Good, but… yeah.”
“Yeah, it, um…” Harley trails off, scrunches his nose up with a frown and then decides that he doesn’t like the feeling of lodging his words in his throat when he’s too scared to say them. “I kind of—I liked it because I found it when I was, like, thirteen years old, and I could—I related to it, y’know? But then I wanted it to be, um—to be hopeful, I guess? And I really wanted something hopeful, and it—it made me kind of upset, but I didn’t want to get rid of it, for some reason, so I just… I just put it there instead.”
“Hopeful…?” Peter purses his lips a bit, looks down at the poem then up at Harley. “If you want to read something that’ll make you feel hopeful, there are other poems. There are happier poems.”
Harley frowns, shakes his head a bit. “I don’t think you get it,” he says, a bit hushed and fearful. “I related to it because… because that’s—that’s me, okay? I’m—I’m gay.”
“And I’m bi,” Peter tells him, simple and straight forward and to the point. “There are happy, hopeful poems for boys who like boys, Harley. This isn’t the only queer poem out there. I can—hold on, just let me, um—” he sets the pages down, pulls out his phone and taps away on the screen with a determined little furrow to his brows. Then, tearing out a paper from his notebook, he starts to scribble something down while Harley watches, unsure and confused.
“What are you—?”
“Hold on,” Peter says, tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth in concentration as the pen moves across the page. He rips out another page, then seems to grow frustrated and just opens up his notebook to start writing in it rather than stealing pages out of it. Harley feels stuck, flabbergasted and frozen, and he doesn’t know how long he sits there and watches before Peter lets out a huff and finally leans back, satisfaction in his eyes as he hands it all to Harley, all the scribbled writing and torn pages. “Read these.”
Harley blinks once, slow, as he takes the offered notebook with the ripped out papers on top. “What…?”
And Peter just smiles and shrugs. “They’re poems,” he says. “I looked some up, wrote down the good parts. Maybe those’ll give you that hopeful feeling that you were looking for.”
Cautiously, after a long moment of hesitation, Harley lets his gaze drop, eyes slowly scanning over the scrawled out words in front of him, and immediately, desperately, gets pulled in by the portions of poetry he reads, every poem separated by a simple scratch of a line.
-
But just possibly with you on a high hill, first watching lest any person for miles around approach unawares,
Or possibly with you sailing at sea, or on the beach of the sea or some quiet island,
Here to put your lips upon mine I permit you,
With the comrade’s long-dwelling kiss or the new husband’s kiss,
For I am the new husband and I am the comrade.
Or if you will, thrusting me beneath your clothing,
Where I may feel the throbs of your heart or rest upon your hip,
Carry me when you go forth over land or sea;
For thus merely touching you is enough, is best,
And thus touching you would I silently sleep and be carried eternally.
— Walt Whitman, “Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand”
-
oh god it’s wonderful
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much
— Frank O’Hara, “Steps”
-
Take me. Take this. My wasted life and all its bliss—the sea of your waking body
dawning with its warm grip on night’s wrist. Your lips once curled into me.
— Ruben Quesada
-
He sits
All alone
Waiting
For his love
Never would he guess
He would fall for him
A beautiful man
As bright as the sun
Like a flower
With no time to fade
Fluffy hair
Bouncing in the wind
What I wouldn’t do
To have him as mine
Over time they fell
Falling deeper as time went on
Finally ending
This romantic fairy tale
— Sunset Meadows, “His Love”
-
i’ll waste all my chances at heaven darling — i’ll waste all my chances for the midnights we spent dreaming, stranded inside an old lighthouse as the waves crashed on the shore. i’ll waste my chances for a mouthful kisses, dissolving the gaps between the stars. i’ll waste my chances for a sliver of early morning poems, for sunsets dripping on our skin, for seconds where i can hold your hand — free and unafraid, for minutes where i can be a sinner and you, my capital sin. for hours where i can melt all the world and its hurtful words inside your arms.
darling, i’ll waste all my chances at heaven if i can’t love you way past its walls.
i’ll waste all my chances at heaven — and i’ll waste them all on you.
— Fray Narte, “chances at heaven”
-
It’s this last poem that really makes Harley stop. He reads it a second time, a third, fourth, fifth. He reads it again and again and then he just stares at the blurry words as he asks, “Would you give up Heaven to be with someone you love? Even if… even if loving that person was a sin?”
“I don’t think I believe in Heaven,” Peter admits, a bit quiet and meek. “But my Uncle Ben did, and he always said that there’s nothing wrong with love, even when other people say there is. And, if… if I did believe in Heaven, I think I’d give it up for the right person, ‘cause if they really are the right person then loving them is all the Heaven you need, right? Nothing could be better than that.”
Harley considers Peter’s words for a long, drawn out moment, still staring down at that last poem with a sinking feeling in his stomach, heart thudding heavily and angrily and loudly in his aching chest. “So,” he starts, slow and unsure and weighed down by a million incomprehensible thoughts swirling around his overwhelmed brain. “So, like, a—a person? A person could be your Heaven?”
When he chances a look, Peter is pursing his lips in consideration, a crease between his furrowed brows as he tilts his head from side to side. Then, carefully, he says, “I think anything can be your Heaven.”
“Anything?” Harley repeats, all air and very little noise.
Peter nods, the action sure despite the frown pulling at the ends of his lips. “Yeah, like… I mean, I think it depends on the person, you know? Like, I—I dunno, it’s hard to—hard to put into words, but… but, like, comfort food, in a sense. Maybe one person’s Heaven is a person, maybe another person’s Heaven is their childhood home, or whatever. I dunno, I’m not—I’m not really, like, religious, and I never really have been, so I don’t really have, like, an idea of how a religious person, for any religion, might think about it, but—but I don’t believe in Heaven, and I don’t know if I believe in an afterlife, so I—I try to find comfort in the idea that Heaven can be found on Earth, y’know? Like, Heaven is something that can be found while you’re still alive, in whatever way, shape, or form is best for you. Does that make sense?”
Harley just stares at him, wide eyed and stunned because that’s a simple perspective that he’s never even considered before. His faith is based solely on what he’s been told his entire life, God and Jesus and Heaven and Hell being preached to him by every single person in his life—by his teachers, his mother, his father (before the guy took off, of course), even by the coach of the soccer team he was on when he was nine. No one ever gave him the option to question what he really believes in, and no one ever offered such a different idea on a silver platter. Maybe Heaven is more abstract than he ever considered it to be before.
And maybe there are more poems, too. Poems like the ones Peter found with a simple Google search.
“It makes sense,” he whispers when he realizes that he hasn’t responded yet. Peter flicks his eyes over to meet Harley’s and a sheepish sort of smile grows on his features. “It makes… a lot of sense, actually.”
There’s a moment of nothing, of quiet contemplation. Then Peter clears his throat and asks, “So, which drawer would a pencil be in, then? ‘Cause I really need to finish this essay, like, yesterday.”
For now, that’s all that needs to be said.