Spiderling ; Peter Parker.

spiderling ; peter parker.

sequel to particles!

pairing ; peter parker x stark!reader

synopsis ; peter was supposed to find you after strange wiped everyone's memory of him away. instead, you found him.

words ; 2.0k

themes ; angst, mild fluff and comedy

warnings / includes ; lots of feels crammed into this, peter is a flustered mess, reader is an insanely smart kid of tony’s, mentions of may and the rest of the spidey gang :(

main masterlist.

Ever since Peter had asked Strange to wipe the entire world’s memory of him, things had been… uneventful to say the least. He studied, he worked two boring jobs for a low minimum wage, and he visited May’s grave every afternoon. 

There wasn’t much else to do when nobody knew him as Peter Parker. 

Sometimes, he’d go out in his itchy, make-shift spider suit that he’d fashioned with bright fabrics from a corner store that also sold his most favorite orange-flavored popsicles, stopping common crime as the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.

Other than that… he slept. He played Crossy Road on his phone—or he’d rewatch the Star Wars movies for the billionth time. 

He thought of his best friends, Ned and MJ. He thought of his brothers, Peter 2 and 3. He thought of his Aunt May, and Happy, who visited her grave almost as frequently as he did. He thought of the closest thing he had to a father figure, Tony Stark. He thought of Mr. Stark’s oldest kid—which he used to refer to as his significant other. 

The love of his life. 

Y/N Stark.

Peter missed you. He missed you more than anything in the entire world. He missed your wide smile and the specific way you’d throw your head back and laugh so hard you’d be grabbing onto his arm, gasping for breath. He missed how you’d press your chest into his back and kiss along his neck while he did his physics homework, quietly mumbling corrections to his calculations when he’d distractedly scribbled down the wrong formula. He missed how Mr. Stark would pull him to the side to give him the ‘Responsible Dad Talk’ just about every time the two of you hung out together, and how you’d have to tell your dad that you could make your own decisions and you didn’t need him to hover over the two of you.

Besides, you used to say with a soft smile, it’s Peter. You know Peter. He’s… he’s Peter. He’d never hurt me, pops.

But he did hurt you. He erased all the memories you had together—he completely wiped himself out of your life.

You loved him—and he had taken that away from you. 

“I love you,” you had whispered into him as you hugged him tight, a tear slipping down the corner of your misty eyes. Peter wrapped his arms around your waist and held you all the closer. “Come back to me, Peter. Or… or I swear to fucking God—I’ll find you myself and—” 

Your words died on your tongue as he surged forward and kissed you, hard and desperate. The kiss tasted of salt from your tears, of coppery blood from his throbbing, split lip. Neither of you cared.

You hiccupped a sob when he reluctantly pulled away, pressing one last kiss to your grimy forehead, before letting you go entirely. He turned before he could see you crumpling into MJ and Ned, who had roped you into a pained embrace, your shoulders trembling with wracking cries. 

That was five months ago. Five months after Strange wiped everybody’s memories of him.

He’d wanted to find you again—he really did. Obviously, you were an extremely busy person, not only being the oldest kid of Tony Stark, but also a genius student, a researcher, the heir of an entire company, and an older sibling to Morgan. But, if he was completely honest, he didn’t really know what to say.

Hey, I’m Peter Parker and I’m in love with you, but I never got the chance to tell you because this wizard that’s sort of a friend of your dad’s erased everyone’s memory of me because the multiverse broke and a bunch of bad guys from other universes slipped into ours because I ruined my friend’s chances of getting into their dream college—

Yeah. That wouldn’t really work out, would it?

So he put it off. 

Put it off for a week, which rolled into two, which became three, which became three months.

All of a sudden, it was summer, and he still hadn’t seen you. 

He made sure to go to the coffee shop MJ worked at, just to see how she and Ned were faring. From what he heard while he eavesdropped—they were doing great at MIT. 

Peter tried his best to keep up with you through those news articles that kept flashing him ads like You Wouldn’t Believe What This Celebrity Looks Like Without Makeup! or Learn All About Steve Rogers’ Exercise Routine! 

There wasn’t much that he could find about you, other than a couple pictures of you with your little sister, Morgan, chowing down on cheeseburgers at McDonald’s. After all, you’d always been a rather private person, which was the one jarring difference between you and your infamously public father. 

Your social medias were, expectedly, all privated. Peter doubted you’d accept his follow request, anyway.

It was an ordinary Tuesday—Peter had a shift at a car garage in a couple hours, which left him quite a bit of time to burn. He had ACDC softly playing in the background—a band that both you and your dad had been completely infatuated with—half a dozen books spread out around him as he multi-tasked studying new chemical compounds for his web fluid, and rotational mechanics for an upcoming exam. 

Then, much to his surprise, the doorbell rang. 

It’s probably the landlord, Peter thought with a grimace, thinking of the old woman who always had a cigarette between her coarse fingers, despite her own strict policy of no smoking in the building. He turned the music down to a low thrum, before swinging the door open.

And… there you were.

Peter could feel his heart drop to the floor.

You were… God, you were beautiful. There wasn’t much about you that changed—you got a new pair of glasses, he could see, and you’d cut your hair shorter. There was a tattoo peeking slightly out of your loose-hanging t-shirt etched over your skin, depicting a sketch of an arc reactor, in memory of your late father. 

Besides that, you were the very same. The same bright, intelligent eyes, the same lips that puckered ever so slightly to the side in thought, and the same brows that knitted together whenever you were concentrating. 

Your hands were shoved into your jeans as you cocked your head, studying him with narrowed eyes.

“Erm,” Peter started, mouth opening and closing as his brain struggled to comprehend that you were here. In the flesh. Fuck, you were gorgeous. “Wh… Y/N?”

Your eyebrow arched high up, closer to your hairline. “First name basis already, huh?”

“I’m—”

“You’re the Spiderling, aren’t you?” you asked abruptly, nearly giving him whiplash. Before he could say anything else, you were swiping your phone open, a hologram of a Youtube video playing right in front of his face. The video displayed Spider-Man swinging from building to building, stopping a car from ramming into an elderly woman crossing the street with nothing but brute strength. Peter didn’t even remember that happening. To him, that was just an ordinary day. “That must’ve been, what—like, thirty-five hundred pounds, about fifty miles an hour? Impressive.”

“Wh—”

You brushed past him into his tiny apartment. Peter cursed himself for not throwing away the pizza boxes stacked on his kitchen counter, and for leaving his sketches of web shooters out on his desk. 

A small smile graced your lips as you spotted the blue and red scrap fabrics discarded into the trash can. “Hm. You make your own suit? My dad did, too. God—are those goggles?” You picked up his vision goggles from his unmade bed, peering through them as you snorted in amusement. “How on earth do you see anything though these?”

“I—”

You turned to him with an intrigued grin. “I’m sure you already know who I am, seeing as you knew my dad. It’s nice to finally meet you, Spiderling.”

Peter blinked. The overwhelming sense of deja vu washed over him like a tidal wave—you were behaving eerily similar to when Mr. Stark had approached him to go to Germany back in 2016.

“I… how…”

“What’s your name?” you asked, gingerly stepping over his textbooks to stare at his pinboard, where his calendar hung. 

“Peter,” he finally mumbled in reply, shaking his head to clear his thoughts. “And it’s Spider-Man, not Spiderling. What are you doing here? I mean, not that I don’t want you here, but, uhm—how did you find me?”

You looked over your shoulder with a knowing glint to your eyes. “I keep tabs on everybody my dad used to work with. Honestly, it wasn't too difficult to track you down—given the radius of where Spider-Man usually frequents and his response times to local crimes, it was easy to pinpoint where you lived. After my AI ran a couple voice recognition tests and estimated bodily proportions, that led me right to you.” You leaned against his rickety wooden desk with a curious grin. “Thought you’d be a bit older, though. Looks like you’re around my age.”

“I… that’s… wow.”

Wrinkling your nose in amusement, you turned back to his full calendar. 

Peter prayed you wouldn’t flip over to your birthday month—he’d circled your birthday with bright red sharpie and drew loopy hearts all over the little square. Thankfully, you stopped skimming through, pausing at the relatively empty weeks where he had nothing planned other than a few work shifts.

“Looks like you’re free from school in a couple weeks,” you said. “I know this is really sudden and very abrupt of me, but—I’d love to offer you a job at Stark Labs. You must be crazy smart to design synthetic webs with a Young’s modulus that’s off the charts. Could really use that brain of yours at my company. Plus, you’ve got a lot of work experience in the bag.” 

There was a beat of silence. Peter stared at you with parted lips. 

A bit more timidly, you added on, “And… it’d be nice to work with someone that knew my dad.”

Well, Peter didn’t want to brag, but he’d definitely say that he didn’t only just know Tony Stark. But you didn’t need to know that right at this moment. 

“Yes,” he blurted out, a bit louder than necessary. “Are you kidding me? That’s… that’s amazing! Yeah, oh my God, I’d love to! Thank you!”

Before he could stop himself, his body moved out of pure muscle memory and excitement, stepping forward to wind his arms around you, squeezing you tightly. Your familiar perfume made his eyes well with tears—fuck, he missed you so fucking much.

“Oh—” you began to say, muscles tensing. “Okay, then. You’re welcome, pal.”

Rouge flushed hotly over his cheeks as he realized that you weren’t his significant other anymore—in your mind, this was the first time the two of you were meeting. Quickly, he let you go, backing away with a grimace. 

“Sorry,” he winced. “Sorry, I just—”

“Have we met before?” you asked, cutting him off. “I don’t know… it just feels like… nevermind. I’d probably remember a cute face like yours.” 

Peter’s face burned an even brighter shade of red. 

“Here’s my contact information. I’ll send you any contracts, NDAs, legality issues, dates for any research projects you might be interested in joining, payment negotiations, all that jazz,” you told him, placing a card onto his desk. “I look forward to working with you, Patrick.”

“Peter,” he corrected.

A smile played with the corner of your lips. “Right. Peter. Nice music taste, by the way. I love ACDC—I can see why my dad liked you so much.” 

With that, you ambled over his scattered belongings on the floor, flashing him one last beam, before striding straight out the door. 

Peter stared at the open doorway for a minute—or was it an hour? He really couldn’t tell. 

He collapsed into his bed, the goggles you’d dangled digging into his back. He arched up just enough to pull it away, clutching it to his chest with a goofy smile.

You found him. 

Against all odds, you’d found him.

Fuck, Peter loved you so much.

Telling you though—now that was a different story entirely. One that Peter knew was going to take time. 

But for you… 

He’d wait centuries.