Stevie and Peter hold hands. Then they both admit to liking one another. Also, do they really have to call it dating as long as they're spending time together? Basically
they're adorable.
⚠Nada.
It wasn’t hard to spot from the neighboring rooftops. Stevie’s red shirt with a yellow star fluttered slightly in the wind that carved through the buildings, making it look like a little flag stating that the fire escape had been claimed in the name of Stevie. Peter grinned beneath his mask -- which was pulled on, just in case. New world didn’t mean he needed his identity or face to be in plain sight as he navigated the city in his favorite way: free and loose in the air, playing with gravity in a way that almost defied physics.
He took a running jump and anchored a web to just the right fulcrum point, then tucked himself into a tidy arrow and sailed right onto the fire escape. The metal echoed under his impact, but the sound deadened quick. Those fire escapes were over-designed and secure, after all. Maybe that wasn’t as much of a NYC feature, but here… here was different.
The window was open, just as Stevie said it would be. Peter loosened his shoulders, took a breath in, and slipped into the apartment on the other side. In the same fluid motion, he tugged his mask free. It left his hair in some disarray, but an instinctive hand smoothed it back (mostly) into place.
“Hey, Stevie?” he called, as he set the backpack that had been on his shoulder onto the ground and started to pull out a quick change of clothes. Lesson learned. If you didn’t have to wear layers… don’t. It got stuffy quick.
It never once occurred to Stevie that the words, Maybe figure out dinner or something? could be potentially interpreted to mean date. Stevie had never really dated in the traditional sense. She didn’t particularly know what dating was. Gems didn’t have dating, her parents had charitably been unconventional free spirits, it was mostly just made up as they went along.
Stevie figured it was more like a light switch. At some point, if Peter did ever decide he liked her more than a friend, the switch would flip. Spending time together would more or less be the same? Just with more blushing. And then eventually marriage. Maybe. Probably not. People didn’t seem to stick around that long and marriage wasn’t really necessary. But theoretically, if they were able to stick around that long, that’s how Stevie imagined it would go.
Stevie’s clothing reflected her knowledge of human social interaction. Which was to say, she wore the same thing she wore every day. Kind of literally. Stevie’s wardrobe reflected her wardrobe back home with t-shirts with a simple star design, boyfriend cut jeans rolled at the cuff for her short legs and flip-flops. Always flip-flops. She wasn’t the type of person to wear makeup or jewelry unless she was specifically putting on some kind of performance.
They were just hanging out.
It was kinda nice.
“Oh hey!” Stevie’s face brightened as she popped out from the kitchenette area into the living room. “How was college?” she asked.
In the back of her mind, she realized this was how it was supposed to have gone with Connie. Her best friend, former girlfriend, slightly awkwardly back to best friend. Connie was going to go to some major college far away and Stevie would have called to ask how her day went…
But Peter wasn’t far away. He was right there.
When Stevie peeked in, Peter gave her a small wave. He didn’t consciously choose to smile, but he did all the same. All told, the week so far wasn’t that bad and it gave him a chance to exercise his webslinging muscles. That alone was a serotonin boost.
But then getting a chance to actually go somewhere with someone and get food. It felt like ages since he’d done that. And it also felt like maybe a chance to… well, to see if there was a level up from friends? In a weird way, fusing with Stevie felt like the most personal and intimate thing ever, but then they had just carried on. It toggled something in Peter’s mind, and the moment he realized that he was seeking Stevie out to hang with and to practice fusing -- it felt obvious. Except maybe it wasn’t.
Or, maybe they were both just awkward and hesitant.
“I’m just gonna swap clothes quick,” Peter told her, as he jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. Then he followed the direction of his thumb with his focus and realized he was pointing to a TV set. He adjusted with a point at what looked like a bathroom and scrambled over. He’d dropped his drawers in front of people before, but that was more of a boys locker room situation with Ned. Or mistaken timing with MJ.
“College wasn’t bad!” His voice carried through the door as he flung off his Spider-Man top and swapped it for a plain t-shirt and a button-up (which remained unbuttoned). “I don’t know if I learned anything I didn’t know, but I don’t think we’re here for long so I --” He stopped to stoop and swap his pants. He smacked his elbow into the doorknob and hissed a breath out. “-- so I figure why not, right?”
But the time he reopened the door, he was a dressed and only minimally disheveled Peter Parker. He flattened his shirt down, a little self-consciously. “How did high school treat you?”
Stevie winced from the other side of the door as she head the smack from within the bathroom. She was about to suggest her bedroom for privacy, which was a bigger space, but he was finished before she could offer.
“Oh! Um…” Stevie rubbed the back of her neck. “...I guess I thought it would be harder? Or maybe I didn’t realize how much Pearl and Garnet had really taught me growing up? Except they teach math weird and you have to show all the steps, but the steps kinda seem overly complicated and it wasn’t really like that with the gems. I guess it’s so people understand why it works, but I feel like getting the right answer is more important? I don’t know. I have homework. Maybe it doesn’t matter if we’re gone in a week.”
Stevie didn’t register the disappointment in her own voice. Wasn’t this what she had always wanted? To go to a normal school, have a normal life? Nothing to fear, no one to fight. This was supposed to be the dream.
“The kids at the school… I don’t know. I thought I’d make new friends or figure out what it was like to be in high school, but they were sort of just there. Even the watermelon Stevies had more personality than they did. So most of us from Derleth just sort of stuck together.”
The Spider-Man suit was loosely folded and put into the backpack as Peter listened. He looked up when he heard a melancholy note. It took some mental gymnastics to make sense of what could have caused it. He knew Stevie had an atypical life, and that school didn’t exactly happen in the traditional sense. Almost everyone Peter knew would love to blow off homework for a week without risk of failing.
Almost everyone Peter knew had no choice about going to school.
“Homework can be fun.” He threw up his hands and rolled his eyes at himself. “Yeah, said no one ever. But actually, if it’s math? Math’s my jam. Maybe I could see what they gave you? I’m just curious…”
He zipped up his backpack and slung it over his shoulder again. There. Peter Parker, ready to go out into the world.
“But, yeah. The students in college were about the same. Eerily silent. I asked one guy what he wanted to do after college and he just told me ‘get a job.’ Which is true, I guess? But wow.” Peter shrugged and offered his hapless smile. “I don’t think it’s us. I think this place is just super mellow and a little robotic.”
“Food first, then homework?” Stevie asked. She wasn’t sure how hungry he was, other than he could eat a lot. She stuffed her hands into the pockets of her jeans, not sure what to do with them while making a casual shrug with her shoulders.
Then she launched into a continuation of her thoughts, “I mean, I don’t understand it. Wouldn’t it be easier to learn this stuff by actually using it? Instead of copying numbers out of a book and writing the answers down? Like the time Pearl and I made a rocket to go to space, or the time Pearl and Peridot built super cool mech robots in a competition, or just construction in general. There’s a lot of math involved in building things. Why don’t we get to do that?”
Maybe her dad had been right to keep her out of school. But Stevie was not emotionally ready to admit he might have made the right call. She was still upset with him on some level.
Despite growing up on Earth, even her version of it, Stevie had not yet internalized because that’s just the way we do things. Any variation of those words usually had the opposite of its intended effect.
“Food first,” Peter agreed. He found himself to be, at minimum, a food while homework person. Food prior to homework was even better.
He started for the door on the assumption that Stevie was all set and ready to go, then waited beside it. She probably knew the way to get out because he had bypassed the whole route with his window entrance. That was the one drawback about the approach: once you were in, your internal compass had nothing to operate off of.
“Also… I think you’re talking about engineering.” Peter’s tone was light, understanding. Engineering was part of the backbone of how his mind worked, and he completely got what Stevie was saying. “When people design things, they usually don’t have natural abilities to manifest a… a fully-realized thingie. Oh, like…”
He lifted a sleeve to indicate the webshooter strapped around his wrist.
“I knew what I wanted these to do, but I had to sit down and figure out a bunch of things. If it needs to support my weight, then I have to make sure the tensile strength of the webbing can handle me -- but I’m not standing still. So what kind of force does a Peter Parker exert on a strand of webbing if he’s trying to slow his fall from a hundred stories high? And what chemical composition of webbing would have just enough elastic to snap back, but also not stretch so much that I become a sidewalk pancake. And -- oh, and then can the holder withstand the thermochemical reaction of web fluid turning into a…”
Peter paused, realizing he’d been talking for an extending reply that had started to veer into the depths of his design. He offered a shrug. “I mean, those are all math problems. I just… I like math,” he finished. God, you’re so cool, Peter.
Stevie needed a moment. She wasn’t the kind of person that could look disinterested in something in order to appear cool, Stevie was a wear her excitement on her sleeve sort of person. She didn’t mean to stare at Peter, but she couldn’t hide the awe in her expression.
Wow, he was so cool.
And smart. Definitely Pearl or Peridot smart. Maybe smarter? And he wasn’t even a thousand years old or born knowing everything he needed to know. He’d figured it all out.
“Yeah,” she said, realizing she probably should say something. “I guess that makes sense it’s just… doesn’t all that stuff kind of mix together usually anyway?”
Stevie opened the front door for Peter and when she closed it, nearly left without locking it. Locking doors wasn’t something she was accustomed to until traveling recently in her car and she had to take a few steps back, fish her keys out of the pocket of her jeans to do so.
“Did you see anything that looked good when you were swinging around?” she asked. Stevie lead him through the hall, to the elevator -- maybe the stairs would have been faster? Too late, she committed by pressing the down button -- and waited for the ding before they could step in.
“It mixes,” Peter replied. He popped through the door and turned to wait for her to lock up. “But math orders it. Hopefully. I mean, that’s the reach you make and sometimes it takes a bunch of tries.”
The elevator was an odd negotiation if only because people had apparently called it for every floor going down. Peter squeezed slightly behind Stevie as the occupants squeezed in. What were the odds? He did his best to keep the chat going from diagonally behind her.
“I did see a noodle place. Noodles are always good because they’re a reliable base, y’know? Who doesn’t like noodles?” He hoped Stevie wasn’t the one to identify herself because that would be his luck. “Unless you don’t like noodles. In which case, uh… pizza?” One carb or another. He should’ve probably thought about this a little more before meeting her.
The crowded elevator disappointed her, but she could not quite put her finger on why. It was a big building in a big city, of course it would be busy, right? And it wasn’t like the two of them were talking about anything particularly private or secret? …Though maybe that would have been nice. To share more. She wasn’t sure what exactly they’d be sharing. Stevie did her best to reply, looking back over her shoulder.
“Noodles are good! They usually have more vegetarian options.” Between being a werewolf one week, a vampire another, and some of the other stuff that had happened in Derleth, Stevie hadn’t kept to a vegetarian diet perfectly, but this week seemed like it would be easier, right?
The elevator stopped and someone else managed to fit into the limited space. Stevie was tempted to jump into a corner and just sort of hover there for space. She’d never tried hovering in an elevator, however. How would that work?
Maybe they would have just gone out the window.
Each floor the elevator stopped at made it appear to be the more reasonable option.
“Noodles --” Peter found himself cut off as a larger man pressed into his space. He gave the taller individual a side look, but found himself more debating options. They were close to the bottom floors, but also…
Peter reached for Steve’s hand as he pushed through the crush of people. He gave it a tug and swung himself right into the path of the closing elevator doors, which reopened upon sensing something in their track. After the doors closed again behind them, Peter gave her a small smile. “Stairs the rest of the way down?”
At which point he tugged her hand again and didn’t let go. Internally he hoped she wouldn’t either. “The noodles place was about four blocks up, so it’s not too far.”
First there was the surprise of feeling his hand on hers. The relief of being out of the elevator. Then the mild anxiety that came with realizing his hand was still holding hers. A good kind! She reminded herself. The kind that made her wonder if she was blushing or low grade worry she might turn a more literal pink or hope that her hand wasn’t sweaty.
But after a few steps, she realized, it was just nice.
When they entered the stairwell Stevie was almost disappointed in the concrete rectangle pattern that went all the way down, with no space to simply leap down and slowly descend down the stairs, with angles too sharp to show off and roll down the rails in a bubble. There was probably too big of a risk to the other tenants in the building anyway. But weren’t teenagers supposed to do crazy, irresponsible things?
She didn’t think any of the students at the high school would. Not the local ones. They didn’t really do much.
Since when had she ever wanted to show off for someone?
Stevie squeezed his hand. Not consciously. She just wasn’t sure what else she was supposed to do. They were just going down the stairs to go get noodles, right?
The squeeze made Peter look up and over, since it was one of those call and answer things, wasn’t it? He turned and saw she was keeping up and didn’t seem unhappy. He squeezed her hand back.
Probably this was where someone should clarify things. Was it a date? Peter didn’t know. It was spending time with someone he enjoyed being around. It was dinner together. Derleth made for a messy journey and it strained the moments of everyday enjoyment -- but when they hit just right, it was a breath of fresh air.
Doubly so as Peter pushed the main entrance open so they could step onto the street. The street always looked so odd after a round of webslinging. It was slower and solid, but in a way that meant he could let his mind focus on things that weren’t trigonometry and going splat against a building.
“Okay, so this way,” he told Stevie and he pointed with his free hand. “You know this place isn’t so bad if we had to spend a week somewhere. It feels a little more like home. Like, a city way? Maybe not the flying cars or the… the random giant trees.”
“Yeah, it’s alright,” Stevie said. She’d grown up in a small town, but she didn’t mind visiting new places. If the places Derleth took them to had just been a little consistently nicer, she might not have faulted the abduction at all. “Kinda makes you wonder what the rest of the planet is like. Is it just called Planet? Is the country called Country? But then what are the other countries called? Or the other cities, for that matter? And the towns? You’d think they’d run out of names pretty fast.”
There being no maps, and Stevie not having attempted to get out of the city, didn’t realize this was it. This was all there was to this world.
Was she talking too much? Stevie suddenly worried she was talking too much. She smiled at Peter as if she weren’t concerned at all.
“I hope it’s just called Planet,” Peter told Stevie. Was his hand sweating? It usually didn’t. Now he was thinking about it, and maybe that was making it start to sweat. Was Stevie thinking ‘ew, sweaty hand’? Once the intrusive thought had intruded, Peter found it was about as successful as trying to shake gum off his shoe to keep trying to will himself to not think about more.
He turned to the sidewalk ahead of them and tried to replay in his mind his spider’s eye view of where he’d seen the noodle place. He was sure it was two more blocks, but someone broke his focus calling out, “Hey, Peter!”
Peter looked up, noticed an absolute stranger and waved. It was the uncertain wave of someone seeing an absolute strange call out their name. He whispered to Stevie, “That keeps happening. I don’t know why people seem to know me.”
In any case it did take his mind off his possibly-sweaty hand. Shoot, now it was back to thinking about that.
Stevie whispered back, “Do they know about the other guy?” She didn’t dare say Spider-Man. If they didn’t know about Peter’s secret identity, Stevie didn’t want to risk it. While she didn’t understand the significance of keeping that part secret— Stevie never got to keep her identity secret— she knew it was important to Peter.
“Uh, hey.” Stevie called back to the person waving, but they didn’t seem to know her. They weren’t unfriendly, but her presence didn’t get the same kind of response. It was unnerving. Stevie couldn’t name it, exactly.
“Maybe we should walk a little faster to the noodle place?”
She didn’t really think about her actions. The way she let go of Peter’s hand to put her arm around his back. The way she stepped in closer to him. It was hard not to see Peter as human, which meant someone Stevie was supposed to protect. She didn’t even think about it, she just did.
She felt silly about it a few seconds later after ushering Peter past the friendly stranger. Peter could protect himself. He could websling himself away any time he wanted. But now that she had taken this course of action she had to commit as to not call attention to it and maybe Peter wouldn’t notice somehow.
“I don’t --” But Peter stopped his reply at being swept into Stevie’s arm. It also stopped his mind from putting the words together to complete the sentence. What he meant to say was that it wasn’t a concern. All day long people had been casually saying hello and using his name. He didn’t get it, but he’d made peace with the fact that somehow Peter Parker was someone here. No one seemed to have any cares about anything else Peter Parker might be as soon as they bid their greeting. It was odd. Harmless, but odd.
Instead, what Peter’s mind had manifested as a thought in the midst of a sudden gesture was that Stevie thought he was going too slowly in an I-like-you way. The hand holding? Maybe it wasn’t a good choice.
He furrowed his brow, trying to figure out what now.
“You want to go faster?” He asked.
“I don’t know. It’s probably nothing,” Stevie admitted. At least she didn’t reflexively bubble them or turn pink. Even if she did, Peter would probably understand, right? “My roommate Jon, he’s new. Earlier today on the network we were talking about horror movies and this place is kind of weird, and now people just wave to you, and last time we walked alone on a world together we were kidnapped and…”
Stevie forced a breath out of her lungs.
“There’s something really weird about this place.”
Her expression softened a little. She knew how it sounded. How could someone waving at Peter be bad? Maybe it wasn’t and she was just overreacting.
“People who act nice but you know they aren’t being nice just really freak me out. They’re usually the worst, you know?”
“Oh, you meant faster because of the people,” Peter observed, wielding his impressive intellect to miss the context and then be smart enough to remark on it out loud. “I thought you meant the date.”
And he started to smile, to laugh it off when he realized a subconscious thought had wriggled its way out into his reply. He threw his hands up. Maybe that was a bad decision.
“I mean not the date. This isn’t a date. This is --” Bad decisions. “-- something that could have been a date if I asked like in a… a date way. But I just thought -- y’know, the hands and the holding and the…”
Further into murky waters. Peter stopped and sent a pained look at the noodle place. So close, and yet. “Ah… uh.”
Stevie forgot about her paranoia and stopped. She tried her hardest to read Peter’s face. Was he embarrassed? Did he want to hold hands? Did she do something wrong or…?
She frowned and chewed the inside of her lip.
“...I’ve never been on a date.”
Stevie ran her fingers through her hair and sort of smiled at herself, as if trying to huff away the embarrassment at the admission. “So, I guess it’s a good thing that it’s not? I don’t really know what people are supposed to do on dates. Gems aren’t great at relationship advice and my dad isn’t really much better.”
Her smile turned apologetic.
“But I liked holding hands,” she offered. “And… you…”
The last bit was offered as casually as she could, as if maybe he wouldn’t notice or he could laugh it off like it was a hilarious joke and it really didn’t have to be that big of a deal, right?
Peter stood on the spot, feeling a little like a dandelion swaying in the wind. He might be a math whiz, but he wasn’t as great with tracking the emotional beats of a conversation when he was actively trying to remove his foot from his mouth.
But then Stevie offered that last assurance, and Peter breathed out. “Oh, good.”
He realized that without context, Stevie wouldn’t know what he meant by that. “That you liked it. That -- I mean, I guess the people are good, too. I don’t know. I meant the hands. And dates are just intentionally spending time with someone you like spending time with, right? So you’re doing fine. If this was a date. I don’t want to make you think you have to agree to that just because I… like, what I mean...” Peter winced at himself. “I like you, too.”
Stevie felt a tension in her shoulders evaporate that she didn’t realize she’d been holding. Her face lit up. …And then what? Stevie realized she had no idea what she was supposed to say or do next. That was like a big moment, right?
“Okay, good,” she said.
Was she doing this right?
“I guess, it doesn’t matter if it’s a date or not? I mean, as long as we’re intentionally hanging out together? Unless it does. I just mean, it doesn’t matter to me either way, unless that matters to you. I just like spending time with you.”
Stevie did her best to gauge Peter’s reaction, not sure if she’d insulted him or hurt his feelings. She’d figure out what dates were if that’s what he wanted? Carver would probably know, right?
“It doesn’t, does it?” Peter echoed after Stevie. He wrinkled his nose, trying to make peace with the fact that trying to classify this whole thing was making a problem that didn’t need to exist. “It doesn’t matter. I come from a place where everyone makes it matter, but we don’t… we don’t have to call it anything. We could…”
He jabbed a thumb at the Noodle place. “We could just get some noodles and hang out. We should, uh…” He laughed. At himself, at how he was overcomplicating this. “We should just get some noodles, huh?”
He held out his hand to her to take.
Stevie took his hand and gave it a brief squeeze. She didn’t let go afterward as she fell into step next to him. “Yeah, noodles sound great, actually. Have you ever been to Korea? They have really good food there. But I’m pretty much a fan of all noodles. Spaghetti, ramen, pho…”
Peter made it easy. Given how they’d been able to fuse a few weeks back, how similar they were in some respects, Stevie wondered if this was what rubies felt like when they fused together into one giant ruby-- like she and Peter were the same cut, just different facets of the same gem.