Chapter Text
Nothing interesting ever happens on the night shift.
It shouldn’t have bothered him as much as it did. Harley hadn’t gotten the job in the hopes of anything interesting happening, or really anything happening. The decision, like most of his decisions, had been primarily motivated by spite.
Two months ago, he’d called Tony to tell him that he was coming up to New York for college. Tony had been, well, Tony about it. He had cracked exactly three terrible jokes about the state of dorm living, asked Harley why the hell he was going to Columbia and not MIT, and proceeded to offer him one of the empty rooms in the Stark Tower Penthouse. It would have been fine, it would have been great, except for his closing remark.
“Thank fuck you’re going to college; I’ll finally be able to give you a job.”
Which. Well.
Harley had helped rebuild the iron suit when he was twelve years old, Tony shouldn’t need a cult of stodgy old professors to tell him that Harley knew enough about Newton’s laws of motion to be hireable. In retaliation to this gross underestimation of his competency, Harley’d switched his major to English, thrown a fit about how the intricacies of transcendental literature are far too complex and nuanced to be fully appreciated in the glaring light of day, and applied for the 6 P.M. to 2 A.M. job at Crêpes and Waffles.
Admittedly, this might have been a little bit of an overreaction, but at least it’s on-brand. Harley is the unofficial king of overreactions.
To be fair, it’s not a bad place. With its painted awning and small round tables topped with flower vases, it’s probably what his mom’s daytime TV shows would call “rustic.” His boss is terrifying, but she does have a floor-to-ceiling shelf devoted to an assortment of various sprinkles and sauces.
It’s not a bad place, it really isn’t.
The only problem is that working the night shift at a waffle place is possibly the dullest job in all of existence.
There are absolutely no customers, ever, and Harley’s kind of terrible at baking anyways. He finished his overhaul of the security system in the first week, so now the only thing he has to occupy himself is a mind-numbing collection of century old literature. But he made a plan, and he’s going to stick with it. He’s going to win. (How? He’s not entirely sure yet, but it’s going to end with him telling a remorseful Tony, “I told you so.”)
So, every night, after eight hours of waffle making and stuffy-book-reading and staring at the chequered floor in a state of debilitating boredom because who even goes into a waffle place in the middle of the night, he comes back to the tower. He slams all of the doors as loudly as possible (unless Pepper’s sleeping, he doesn’t have a death wish), and he sings ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ at the top of his lungs. Sometimes he switches the sugar for salt, or puts ketchup in Tony’s shoes. At one point, he codes Dum-E to shoot glitter in Tony’s general direction every time he plays a Black Sabbath song, though he had to put an end to that one pretty quickly for fear of completely burying the lab and Tony with it.
It occurs to him, about two weeks in, that he could probably do all of these things while getting an BSME and not fucking over his sleep schedule in the process.
(It also occurs to him that this might not be the best way to prove that he’s a responsible candidate for a job, but he quickly dismisses the thought as ridiculous. Tony is in desperate need for someone to knock him down a couple of pegs, and if that someone isn’t Harley, then who is it?)
It’s halfway through October, somewhere in the vicinity of one a.m., when he realizes that the Waffle job might have been a slight strategic miscalculation.
Just as he’s begun banging his head on the counter (which, ouch), the bell over the door rings. His first thought (he always has the same one when someone walks in this late) is that it’s too close to midnight for anyone to be buying breakfast food. His second thought, when he looks up, is:
“Shit, is it Halloween already?”
The guy in the suit blinks, and the suit blinks with him. He must have paid a lot for a spoof that good.
“What – it’s the seventeenth, why would–” the guy (a kid probably, from the sound of it) looks down at himself, and then in realization protests: “no, no I’m – I’m Spiderman.”
Harley gives him a once over, drawls, “Yes, I can see that.”
“No, I mean I’m actually Spiderman,” he shoots a web at the still-open door pulling it shut. Harley groans. Now he’s going to have to figure out how to dissolve artificial webbing. Lovely.
Spiderman (Spiderboy) takes several steps closer to the counter. It’s awkward. It’s all so awkward. Is anything about this kid not awkward? He makes an aborted gesture towards Harley, swallows (somehow audibly despite the suit) and asks, “Are you ok? Like, are you concussed?”
“What? No!”
“It’s just, you hit your head on the counter pretty hard when I came in here, and now you’re making pained noises, these lights are way too bright for someone dealing with head trauma, is it ok if I look at your pupils?”
Apparently, Spiderboy speaks exclusively in stutters and run on sentences.
“Oh my god, no. Just– no.” Harley valiantly fights the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose. “Was there something that you wanted, or did you come in here to question my health?”
“Uhm– I–,” his eyes flick to the menu, somewhere behind Harley’s head. “Can I please have three – uhm – Nutella waffles, please?”
Harley, thankful for the excuse to escape, pours out batter into the irons.
In a strange moment of good grace from some higher being, he manages to only get approximately three-and-a-half drops on the countertop. It’s a PR for him, by no small margin. This merits more than a fist pump, this is deserving of a full-on victory dance, a three-act ballet maybe–
“Look, I know you said you were okay–” (Harley at no point recalls saying he was okay) “–but are you sure you’re doing fine?”
Harley almost crashes into the countertop (pirouettes are hard), turns, and wishes he really had brained himself on the marble. One a.m. is not the time to deal with a rouge superhero sitting on (dangling from?) the celling of the kitchen of his workplace.
“What the actual fuck.”
It’s not a question, Harley is past the point of questions.
Spiderboy doesn’t pick up on this.
“Well, it was boring in there,” if Harley rolls his eyes any harder, they’ll be in danger of popping out of his head and bloodily rolling across the black and white tiles, “so I came back here, but then you started doing a dance–seizure thing, and I wanted to make sure–”
Harley shuts the iron rather emphatically. Spiderman jumps. (Seriously, why is this kid not equipped to deal with loud noises? This does not bode well for the borough of Queens in the event of another alien invasion.)
“Right, we’re going to make a deal. I’m not going to mention the fact that you are violating several New York City health codes, and you are going to stop obsessing over my hypothetical head trauma. Cool?”
Spiderman’s responding nod could give bobbleheads a run for their money.
They both sit there, in one of the most stifling silences Harley has ever experienced, for five too many moments before Harley cracks.
“What are you doing downtown, anyways?”
“What?”
“I thought the whole ‘Friendly Neighbourhood Spider’ gig,” (Harley most definitely does not use finger quotes) “was more of a Forest Hills thing?”
“There was a…situation,” he gestures vaguely, “Wait, why do you know where I live?”
Harley just barrels right on through.
“What exactly does this ‘thing’ entail?”
Spiderboy, well, falls off of the ceiling and flops himself atop the nearest counter. It’s all very graceful. Harley doesn’t know whether he’s jealous, impressed, or just second hand dizzy.
“There was a whole altercation,” cue more hand waving, “and then there was a whole motorcycle chase, except then the motorcycle chase was in the sewers – Have you seen the rats down there? Oh my god they’re the most terrifying things I’ve ever seen, they were eating through my webs, I’ll probably have nightmares – and then I caught them (the criminals, not the rats), and now I’m here.”
Harley opens the irons, forks the waffles onto a plate, and adds a slightly ridiculous amount of Nutella and powdered sugar on top. The kid deserves it. No one should have to deal with facing the rats of New York City, whether that person has superpowers or not.
Harley grabs a fork, a knife, and a glorious napkin blue covered in a chicken–waffle motif (he’s rather fond of the napkins at Crêpes and Waffles, if nothing else) and pushes back through the swinging doors, Spiderboy in close pursuit. He sets the plate by the cash register and punches several keys in quick succession.
“That’ll be $7.85, please.”
Spiderboy stands stock still for half a moment and then proceeds – like he’s some sort of mime instead of a superhero – to comically pat at his spandex-covered thighs in search of a wallet.
Harley clears his throat.
The superhero looks up bashfully, and proceeds to bluster, “Y-you wouldn’t, uhm, maybe give them to me for free, uhm, y’know, on account of saving the city from criminals on motorcycles?”
“I’m really sorry, I wish I could,” he really does, rats are terrible, “but my boss would probably boil me alive,” she really would, Madame Boudinot she likes to check the security cameras bi-weekly to make sure Harley’s not been up to any ‘funny business.’ What with her habit of threatening him bodily harm by means of various kitchen paraphernalia, it really makes him regret fixing the shop’s security.
Harley looks from Spiderboy, to the waffles, and back up to Spiderboy again. His hand goes for his own wallet before his brain has quite decided on the action, ready to–
“No!” Spiderboy is loud enough that Harley nearly jumps half out of his skin, “Just… just… just don’t pay for me, please.” He scuffs his spandexed-feet (seriously, Harley’s going to have to ask Tony how the boots on this suit work) on the chequered floor. “Can I– can I come back tomorrow, and I’ll pay you then? Then your boss won’t murder you, right?”
Harley shrugs.
Spiderboy quite literally lets out a sigh of relief, “Great, good, great, great!” Harley raises an eyebrow, and the kid shrugs, “Causing civilian casualties probably goes against a superhero code somewhere, and I don’t want to get fired.”
“I didn’t realize ‘Superhero’ was a job that you got hired for.” As far as he can tell, Tony woke up one day and decided to make his suit-clad self the world’s problem (though, to be fair, he’d already been doing that before he built the suit.)
Spiderman waves his arms, barley on this side of wild, “you know what I mean.” He then proceeds to attempt to eat one of the waffles through his mask. He realizes just before smearing Nutella all in the fabric. The dry-cleaning bill for that thing must be insane.
The kid makes several sounds that may or may not be aborted words and flails an arm (the one that’s not holding the plate of waffles, thank heavens for small miracles). Harley is willing to bet his soldering iron – the nice one that he refuses to let Tony use – that he’s blushing underneath the suit. After several moments of this Spiderboy seems to collect himself enough to form a sentence.
With a muffled “Well thank you, happy Halloween!” he turns his tail and races out the door, the bell jingling behind him as he disappears, suit, waffles, and all, into the early October air.
Harley stares down at the counter, scrutinizing the remnants of the past interaction. Assorted cutlery, Harley’s wallet, and one incredibly fabulous napkin. No plate.
His first thought is that he really should quit this job.
His second is, “How the fuck am I going to replace that plate?”