for the ask game, spideytorch for #33? :)
Got two requests for this one! So here's Spideytorch + 33. On a post-it note, for the "I love you" fic meme.
Peter woke up to the distinct sensation of something being stuck to his forehead.
“I’m warning you, blondie,” he said, not bothering to so much as crack one eye open. “If this is a prelude to you shaving off my eyebrows, I will escalate the situation, and you won’t like it.”
“Your unibrow is safe,” he said. “Shh, go back to bed.”
Now that Peter was slightly more awake, he could feel the warm weight of him straddling his waist. It was almost enough to make a man want to sit up and do something about it, given some alternate universe where said man hadn’t gone ten rounds with the Thing from 34th Street the night before.
Which he had. And it had been slimy.
So his beautiful, treasured, incredibly annoyingly awake husband would just have to remain un-groped. Those were the breaks.
“All right, whatever,” Peter said, those three little words he knew everyone longed to hear from their devoted spouse. He waved a hand in the air. “Do your worst.”
It was his big mouth, he reflected later, that always got him in trouble.
A few hours later, when he managed to drag himself out of bed and stumble his way into Johnny’s unnecessarily gargantuan en suite bathroom, he discovered the Post-It note stuck to his forehead.
“Well,” he said, staring at his reflection in the mirror. He looked like hell. “At least it wasn’t the eyebrows.”
There’s coffee in the kitchen! the note read, complete with a little doodle of a lit, smiling matchstick. Peter peeled it off his forehead, raising his eyebrows.
Johnny didn’t usually tell him he’d made him coffee. He just left it somewhere Peter would find it, and exactly how he liked it, too: strong enough to burn a hole straight through his stomach lining.
Ben was snickering behind his copy of the Bugle—Peter had begged him to switch subscriptions—when he walked into the kitchen, but that could have meant anything. Maybe a rival sports team had lost. Maybe Latveria had been eliminated in the Eurovision semi-finals.
It didn’t have to be suspicious. It was possible that years of chasing around men in stupid animal costumes had just made Peter paranoid.
He took a sip of his waiting coffee and nearly gagged.
“In the cup, hot stuff?” he said to no one, sticking out his tongue and pulling an orange Post-It note half out of his mouth. “Who raised you? Aside from any beautiful, intelligent, invisible women who may or may not be in this kitchen.”
There was no response and he didn’t get hit by a force field, so Peter figured he was safe. He turned his attention back to the Post-It note.
“What has one head, no body, and the next clue?” he read out loud.
It would have been an easy puzzle to solve, even without the moloid kids giggling right outside the door.
Peter looked at Ben. Ben lowered his newspaper just enough to stare back.
“Don’t blame me,” he snorted. “Yer the bright boy who went and married him.”
Peter wasn’t going to say he had regrets. Not out loud.
“Kids,” he said, throwing his voice towards the direction of the giggling. “Is there something you want to give me?”
Besides the growing headache, he didn’t add. He eyeballed Turg, floating just behind the others. Sure enough, there was a Post-It note stuck to his capsule.
You never forget your first stolen DaVinci.
Peter took a deep breath in through his nose.
“He wants me to go to the Statue of Liberty,” he said, “on a—”
He paused for a second to do the math, counting off on his fingers. If he’d beaten up the Shocker on Monday, and then been punched through that billboard on Thursday, crawled into bed exhausted on Friday, et cetera, et cetera.
“Weekend, is he out of his mind—?”
Ben started snickering harder.
“To rekindle the flame of your love,” Tong declared, her arms dramatically flung out, “you must solve the Torch’s RIDDLES THREE.”
She triumphantly held up three fingers. Her pink sleeves fluttered in the breeze—had someone brought a fan in? Peter tilted his head and spotted Korr pointing one at her. He felt his eyebrow twitch.
“Kids, I’m going to need you to be honest with the Spider-Man,” he said, rubbing at his temples. “Are there only three riddles?”
The moloids looked at each other. They huddled up together and began frantically whispering. Peter waited them out, sipping at his coffee. Finally, Mik glanced back at him.
“No,” he said, his little voice somber and grave.
“Yeah,” Peter said. “That’s what I thought. Okay, kids, go play. I have a homicide to contemplate.”
“The FLAME OF LOVE,” Tong repeated as the siblings filed out of the kitchen.
Peter spared the kitchen ceiling a brief look, wondering where he’d gone wrong. It was a toss up between the time in third grade when he’d stuck a pencil in Liz Allan’s ponytail behind her back or the moment he’d first realized he wanted to stick his tongue down Johnny’s throat. Either or.
“Level with me, Benjy,” Peter said. “Did I forget an anniversary? Or has he decided to torture me for no reason?”
“He made you decaf,” Ben said by way of reply, flipping to the sports page.
Peter sucked in a breath and thunked the mug down on the counter.
“Torture it is,” he said, and sternly reminded himself that strangling the love of your life to death was generally frowned upon by polite society and the justice system.
Johnny was not at the Statue of Liberty. Instead, Peter was accosted mid-swing by a tourist who looked disturbingly enthusiastic about having been conscripted to stand around for a few hours until Peter’s sorry ass caught up.
“Tell me he paid you,” he said to the tourist, holding yet another Post-It note up to the sunlight. If this all turned out to be about Johnny having some kind of office supplies brand deal, Peter was getting a divorce.
Johnny hadn’t paid him. He had taken a selfie with him, though. Peter guessed that went for something in Bulgaria, where you weren’t tripping over superheroes every time you turned around.
From the Statue of Liberty, he ended up at the restaurant he and Johnny had gone to for the first real date—where they’d had the night crashed by the Mole Man and ended up eating dirty water dogs down the street instead.
(The cart was next. The owner didn’t look impressed.)
Then from there, the Bugle offices, where Betty and Glory forced a cake on him with an air of smug superiority, like they knew something more than him. Then from there, Times Square, which was around the time Peter tried Matt’s number and asked if he handled divorces.
Around the time he was haggling with a violinist for a Post-It note that saw him on the subway to Queens, Peter was rethinking that strangulation thing.
“You’re going to need this,” the violinist said, and handed him a suit, still in a bag with tissue paper and everything.
Peter heaved a long sigh, looked up at the sky, and wondered what he’d done to deserve this.
He didn’t waste any more time so much as entertaining the idea of another Post-It note. As soon as Johnny’s wild goose chase had landed him in Queens, he’d known exactly where to go. So he wrangled himself into whatever hideously expensive suit Johnny had acquired for him, manfully did not search around for a brand label or a price tag, and then booked it out to 20 Ingram Street.
He spotted it from the street and resisted the urge to sigh, or worse, smile.
There, on his aunt’s door, there was a Post-It note reading simply I love you.
It was hard to stay mad at Johnny sometimes, Peter thought, peeling it off the door with careful fingers. Then he opened it, and got hit in face with confetti.
“SURPRISE!” a baker’s dozen of his nearest and dearest shouted, at least half of them grinning vindictively at him. He eyeballed Mary Jane, who had the audacity to wink; she knew just how much he hated surprises.
Johnny was standing front and center, right next to Peter’s aunt, wearing Dolce and a cat that got the spider smile.
“Are you serious right now?” Peter said, ducking to kiss his aunt’s cheek. He got a pat on his own and a stern be nice as she took the cake box off his hands and into the kitchen.
“As serious as one of your villains in a fashion district bargain bin,” Johnny said. He held up something between two fingers—another Post-It. Peter snatched it out of his hand.
What’s red and blue and forgot his birthday all over?
“That’s not even how that joke goes,” Peter said. Johnny, preening, clearly didn’t care. He wound his arms around Peter’s neck, swaying into his space, his head tipped back to the side.
“Deal,” Johnny told him, kissing his nose. “Happy birthday, Webhead. Did you like your surprise?”
“Seriously? That’s the best you got?” Peter said. “Post-It notes?”
“I got back from space like two days ago,” Johnny said, rolling his eyes. “Be happy one of us remembered your birthday.”
“Which we could have spent at home,” Peter pointed out. “Quietly. Without Harry bringing a karaoke machine all the way to Queens.”
“You love it, Parker!” Harry called from across the room, where he was trying and failing to get said karaoke machine set up.
“Anyway, I needed you out of the way for a few hours,” Johnny said. “It worked, didn’t it?”
“You sent me to Times Square on a weekend,” Peter accused. “Twenty different tourists tried to give me money to take photos with them and the Naked Cowboy tried to make me fish your little clue out of somewhere unmentionable.”
“Tell me you didn’t love it,” Johnny said.
“I didn’t love it,” Peter said, but he couldn’t stop the corners of his lips from twitching.
“Tell me I’m not a genius,” Johnny continued.
“You’re not a genius,” Peter said, rolling his eyes. “I’m a genius. You’re a danger to society.”
Johnny smirked, sinking his fingers into Peter’s hair.
“Okay,” he said. “Tell me you don’t love me.”
Peter paused. He raised an eyebrow. Johnny’s smirk widened.
“Don’t make me a liar, Torch,” Peter said. He kissed him before he could say anything about that one.
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