Meeting Him
CW: Fluff, Peter Parker x reader, no use of y/n, a green flag of a man
The festival took over three city blocks, spilling color and sound into every alley.
Food trucks lined the curb, each one scented with a different promise. The air pulsed with overlapping melodies, snippets of rehearsals and half-finished soundchecks. Volunteers in branded shirts hustled between stages, arms full of cables and clipboards. Somewhere, a jazz trio tried to tune over the thump of an electronic bass from the next tent.
She stood just offstage at the smallest of the festival’s venues, clutching her program so tightly the paper had softened under her fingers.
Her name was printed there.Not as an opening act. Not as “and others.” Not as an afterthought tucked under someone else’s title.
Commissioned work by [ ].
The first time she had seen it in the festival brochure, she had stared for a full minute, waiting for the surname to betray her. Waiting for someone to have slipped and added “Wayne,” to tie her back to the city she had left behind.
The page stayed stubbornly correct.
New York did not care whose blood ran in her veins. It cared about what filled the seats and what people remembered when they went home.
A stage manager with a frazzled ponytail glanced at her clipboard, then at her. “You’re up in ten. Need anything?”
“Water would be great,” she managed.
“On it. You’re going to do fine, by the way. The quartet loves your piece. They’ve been talking it up all morning.”
The casual reassurance hit harder than it should have. In Gotham, praise always felt transactional, tangled with agendas she had never been invited to understand. Here, it was just information.
People liked her work. That was enough.She stepped out of the tent for air and was immediately nearly decapitated by a camera strap.
“Oh my God, I am so sorry.”
The voice came with a flurry of motion. A lanky guy in a faded festival volunteer shirt scrambled to catch his swinging DSLR before it collided with anything expensive or fragile.
He caught the camera, straightened, and froze when he realized how close they were standing.
“Hi,” he said, a little breathless. “Sorry. Again. Apparently I am a menace to both myself and innocent bystanders.”
She blinked, half startle and half amusement. “You’re fine. No harm done.”He pushed his glasses up his nose with the back of one wrist, fingers still curled protectively around the camera. Brown eyes, warm and sharply observant, flicked over her badge.
“You’re one of the composers,” he said. “Right. I saw your name on the schedule board. The piece with the ridiculous time signature that made the percussionist swear."
Her mouth fell open. “You were at rehearsal?”
“Guilty.” He winced. “I was shooting B-roll, I wasn’t spying. Promise. The swearing was extremely artistic, for the record.”
Laughter bubbled up in her chest, the tension in her shoulders loosening a notch. “He volunteered for that time signature.”
“Masochism is real in the percussion community,” the guy said solemnly. “I’m Peter, by the way.”
He stuck out a hand, then seemed to realize his palm was smudged with something unidentifiable from the last food truck he had passed. “Oh. Wow. Okay, maybe not that hand.”
“[ ],” she said, shifting her program to shake with the cleaner one he offered instead.
The handshake lingered a fraction of a second longer than necessary. Not in a creepy way, more like neither of them had decided yet who was going to pull back first.He noticed her program and gestured to it. “Nervous?”
“Yes,” she said, because there was no point lying.
“Good,” he replied.
She arched an eyebrow. “Good?”
“Nerves mean you care,” he said. “The day you walk onstage and feel nothing is the day you should worry.”
“You say that like you have experience.”
“I have a long and tragic history with science fairs,” he deadpanned. “Trust me, this is better. At least no one’s going to judge you on whether your hypothesis holds up.”
“I think some critics absolutely would,” she murmured, but the edge of panic had softened into something almost like anticipation.
Peter glanced toward the tent. “What’s your piece about? If that’s not a weird question.”
Most people either did not ask, or asked with the kind of distant curiosity that made honest answers feel like oversharing. For some reason, looking at him, she chose the truth anyway.
“Being ,” she said quietly. “Or… not. How rooms can be full of people and you can still feel like furniture."
His expression shifted, some quip aborted before it reached his mouth. “Yeah,” he said after a moment. “I get that.”
He said it like someone who really did.
Before she could decide whether to follow that thread, the stage manager reappeared. “Two minutes.”
Peter stepped back, expression apologetic. “Right. Break a leg. Not literally. Please do not literally break anything. I cannot afford to be responsible for that.”
“Maybe don’t swing your camera at me then,” she said, surprising herself with the tease.His answering grin lit his whole face. “Deal. Afterward, if you want, I can send you some photos. Of, you know, your moment of triumph.”
“Assuming it is a triumph.”
“Oh, it will be,” he said, with a certainty that felt like a hand on her back. “I saw the rehearsal, remember? They’re lucky to play your stuff.”
He said it easily, as if the idea of anyone being lucky to touch her work were obvious rather than radical.
Onstage, under the hot lights, as the first notes of her piece rose and wove themselves into the open summer air, she caught sight of him at the edge of the crowd.
Camera forgotten at his side, he watched the musicians, then her, like this was the only set on the schedule that mattered.
When it was over, when the applause swelled and she bowed because the quartet physically tugged her onstage to take it, Peter whooped loud enough for her to pick his voice out of the noise.
She caught his eye.He mimed the exaggerated wipe of a tear from his cheek, then snapped a photo, framing her with the cheering audience behind.
Later, when the chaos of congratulations and business cards and scheduling talk thinned, he found her again near a taco truck.
“Told you,” he said, handing her a soda. “Triumph.”
She took it, cold condensation shocking against her hot palms. “You don’t even know me.”
He tilted his head thoughtfully. “I know you wrote something that made a guy with a tattoo of a skull on his drum arm look like he was about to cry. That’s a start."
She laughed, full and startled.
They ended up talking for the rest of the evening.
At first it was the usual festival small talk. How long he had been doing photography. How she balanced commissions with survival jobs. The horror story of the time his lens had fallen three stories and miraculously survived, unlike his dignity.
Then, somewhere between the second food truck and the third bad pun, the conversation shifted.
He asked about her inspirations, and she found herself answering honestly. About loneliness and visibility and the way sound could carry feelings that otherwise had nowhere to go.
He listened.
Really listened.
Not with the polite half-attention of someone waiting for their turn to speak, but with a focus that made her feel, for once, like the main subject rather than background framing.
When she turned the question back on him, he hesitated, then shrugged.
“I take pictures because I spent a long time thinking I was only ever going to be in someone else’s story,” he said. “It’s weirdly empowering to frame things myself now. To decide what matters.”
“Who decided before?” she asked.
He gave her a crooked smile that did not reach his eyes. “Long story. Involves bugs. Not as fun as it sounds.”
She let it go, the easy way he had let her dodge earlier mentions of family.
They exchanged numbers when the festival lights began to dim.
“I’ll send you some of the shots,” he promised. “Unless you’re like, anti photographic evidence.”
“As long as they don’t end up on some ‘up and coming artists’ list that my father’s board members read,” she said lightly, then froze, realizing how much she had given away.
“Complicated family?” he asked.
“You have no idea,” she replied.
He did not pry.
“Okay,” he said. “You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to. For the record, though, ‘complicated family’ is kind of my whole deal too. So. No judgment. Just… curiosity, if you ever feel like indulging it.”
Something in his tone, in the way he offered understanding without demand, cracked open a door inside her she had kept barred for years.
By the time she went to bed that night, phone buzzing with a text from an unknown number labelled “Peter (camera menace),” New York did not feel quite so impossibly big.
She had written music that filled a city block.
Someone had heard it and stayed.
A/N: Why couldn't he have been REAL!!?!
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