There are streamers stuck to ceiling behind the bar, some looping out into the ceiling in the middle of the room, others hanging in slowly spinning strips, dancing on the breeze each time the door opens.
A cake on a pilfered table is being fiercely guarded by Eddie Brock, Wade already having gotten a swift kick in the ass for trying to get his fingers in the icing.
Written across the top of fluffy white buttercream, in the universal cursive of grocery store bakeries, is written You’re Not Dead! in bright red gel icing. And speckled around it is enough candles to have cleared out the peg in the very same grocery store.
Tony lost count when he got to fifty candles.
Peter is of course, nowhere near fifty. But that’s half the fun.
In his pocket, Tony’s cell chirps. That would be Cobb, who was running interference for him. Tony shushes the room, and Wade flicks the lights off from behind the bar, plunging the room into semi darkness, the various neon signs from different booze companies sending a series of circles of light across the floor.
Pointilism, Tony’s ancient education supplies him. It’s not information he needs anymore, if he ever did.
The back door to the bar creaks open, old metal scraping against even older concrete. Tony hears Peter mutter ‘what the hell’ before he flips the switch, flooding the room with light and cries of
SURPRISE!!
The bar is dotted with groups of men, old friends and new, smiling and laughing and raising their glasses.
Tony rings an arm around Peter’s waist and tugs him in to peck his cheek.
@polyfacetious big ass Christmas Drabble Extravagaza: Day Eight
Eddie never felt the need to mention the fact that he’s never done this relationship thing before. Not even a highschool girlfriend or nothing. It’s never been on his mind. Yeah, he liked sex and yeah Eddie has had a lot of it. He didn’t have any lack of willing participants when he went looking. But he’s never had anybody be there in the morning.
At least, not anybody that he wanted. There was that one weekend where Carmella Guillespie wouldn’t take a hint and leave, but that was the closest Eddie had ever got to a relationship and that was more like a hostage situation.
Until he met Pete.
Pete had been the first American accent he heard on anybody besides a tourist, and it felt like coming home. Because it wasn’t long and drawn out California in his words, it was short and snappy New York.
Queens, to be exact. Eddie grew up in the Bronx. But he didn’t hold it against Pete. Home was home, even if it was a little further down the Avenue than Eddie ever really went on his own when he was a kid, living back there.
They’d both come in to interview for the bartender position from where it was posted up on a bulletin board at the end of the road. And they’d sat outside on one of the benches in the sun and shot the shit until the bartender called them inside. The owner said the two of you get along better than anyone else I’ve brought here. It might as well be you.
So that was that, and one carefree conversation in the evening sun became night after night behind the bar, shoulder to shoulder. The boss might have made a gut call, but he made the right one. So much so that Eddie got Pete to cosign with him on a loan when the owner decided to retire and move out to France.
The place was theirs now, their own little bit of home carved out of an unfamiliar place. Eddie had no intention of changing the name over the bar. This would always be Marv’s Place, even without Marv here to run it.
“Try this.” Eddie plucks a bottle down from the mirrored shelves behind the bar. It was early in the afternoon, and the only reason they were open at all was so that Five could work on what he wanted to put on the menu for the night. The kid was a force to be reckoned with, but he looked at Peter like he hung the moon, when no one was looking.
And Peter looked at him like a proud papa, no matter who was looking.
So they were here, the smell of the fryer heating up from back in the kitchen sitting over the lemon scent of the cleaner Eddie used for the bar. They had time to kill while Five was prepping his “test subjects”.
The bottle itself didn’t have a label on it, just a date written on it in sharpie. Eddie could see the way Peter was eyeing the bottle. He pours a finger into two glasses, sliding one across the bar to Pete and keeping one for himself.
Eddie lifts the glass to his nose, letting the stinging sweetness take up residence there, and in the back of his throat. The first sip he takes burns, but there’s a smoothness to it, and a smokey aftertaste that takes away the bitterness of the bite.
“This is good.” Eddie is choosing to ignore the way Peter looks so surprised, like he was going to serve him some kind of swill or something. “Where is this from?” Pete was a smart guy. He knew that no label meant that it wasn’t some big, expensive brand.
“Back home.” Because this place was real nice, but it would never be home. New York had a way of getting underneath your skin. It got into your blood, it pumped through your veins. It didn’t matter if you never moved back, New York would always be home. “A guy is making it in his basement.”
The guy in his basement actually has a pretty good set up. Eddie’s been following him on twitter and looking at the pictures, but that must not come across in the sentence, because Pete is looking from his glass to Eddie in bewilderment. “And why exactly are we drinking basement whiskey?” That was a hand up, palm out. Peter was always real expressive with his hands when he spoke. “Not that I’m complaining. I appreciate a good prohibition style drink as much as the next person, it’s just…”
Peter trails off, and Eddie holds his ground. He figured out real fast in knowing Peter that he trailed off like that because he was used to being cut off. (Sometimes, he just wanted somebody else to do the heavy lifting of the sentence, but that wasn’t so much.) And Eddie made a promise as soon as he figured it out that he wasn’t ever gonna be the type of person who cut Peter off.
So he waits. And Peter takes another sip, his laughter warm enough to condense against the side of the glass where he lifts it to his mouth. “You don’t strike me as the type of guy to do late night internet shopping sprees. That’s me. Remember? I’m the one who bought us a pair of matching unicorn onesies.” Peter shakes his head, solemnly looking off into the middle distance. “This is why you don’t let me use Amazon drunk anymore.”
The onesies were just the last straw. Peter found some wild shit on Amazon. The kind of things Eddie thought you had to go into a creepy store to get, and come out with a black plastic bag so nobody knew what you got. But it’s easier to let Peter think it’s about drunken pajama buying than Eddie having to make eye contact with their landlord. “So why do we have off label whiskey from all the way across the ocean?”
There was something there, behind those bright brown eyes. Eddie must say it a dozen or more times a day, but Peter was a real smart guy. And he could read Eddie like one of those chemistry books that he pretended he didn’t enjoy reading that were upstairs in there apartment. For something that was supposed to be used to keep a table even, the pages were sure dog eared.
“Local made breweries are getting popular all over the place.” You couldn’t turn a corner in Manhattan without stumbling into some mook making their own IPA. “People want to know where their shit is coming from. They want to support small businesses and buy local.” That’s a repetition of a line from an article he read online. Eddie knows how obvious it is that he’s been working up to this conversation.
“But whiskey, that’s different than brewing an IPA in your basement. Whiskey takes a commitment.” Not just of space, either. Yeah you needed the barrels to age the booze in, but it was more than that. Whiskey meant time. If they started a business right this second, it would still be years before they had the first haul to sell.
You could brew beer with a fuck buddy. But asking somebody to make whiskey with you, that was asking somebody to stick around for a long time.
That’s why it took Eddie so long to even bring the question up. He needed to be sure that this was what he wanted. You didn’t make that kind of commitment lightly. But the more and more Eddie thought about it, the more he realized that his future smelled like Peter Parker’s drug store cologne, and it sounded like the way his laugh rushed out of his nose, like it was afraid if it didn’t hurry, it wouldn’t make it.
Peter was everything that Eddie never thought he wanted, all tied up neat with a bow and a flannel shirt and dropped on his doorstep.
Eddie downs the rest of his drink and puts the glass down on the counter. He’s never had idle hands, being still has always been a part of him. But he wants to do this right. God knows he’d kick himself at night if he didn’t.
“We got room downstairs. It’s already the right kinda set up, temperature wise.” Dark and cold, that’s what those barrels needed. They needed to be able to sit and marinate, to really come together so that they were the best of each other.
The more Eddie thinks about it, the more he thinks he can get behind the idea of two things being together so long that they become something new all together. Maybe two people could marinate like that, long enough to become distilled, better versions of themselves.
He wants to look away. To look anywhere but at Pete’s face. Because Eddie might not be the type of guy to read the chemistry book holding up their uneven kitchen table, but he can read Peter Parker pretty damn good. And for once in his life, he doesn’t want to. Because if this is a swing and a miss, he’ll see it in the drop of Peter’s eyebrows and the flatline of his lips before the words ever make it off of his tongue.
But he was in for a penny, in for a pound now. “We could make our own whiskey. Sell it around here. I don’t think they get a lot of whiskey around in this area.” He doesn’t know. For all of his research into this, Eddie didn’t check into the market. But he had a good feeling in his gut that they could make something special, and make it work.
Even if they only ever uncorked bottles to have here at the bar, it could still be worth the money. It wasn’t like most of the people who came in here were short on cash. Too many snowbirds passing through and bored vacationers for that.
Eddie drags his teeth over his tongue, and for once, it’s Peter waiting him out. They were good like that. One of them got low, the other helped pull them up high again.
The seconds drag on, but Eddie still can’t find the right way to phrase it. So he finally just blurts it out. “We’d need five years, at least.” Five years was a long time for anyone to stay. Especially when you didn’t even have a word for what you were. (Boyfriend seemed too small for Pete, too frivolous for Eddie.)
Pete’s eyes light up, and Eddie loves him even fucking more in that second. Because what words Eddie left on the cutting room floor, Pete was picking up and piecing them together. He knew that he was being asked about a hell of a lot more than whiskey.
There was forever hanging in the air between them.
Peter watches him for a second that seems to stretch on into eternity, and then the smile unfolds on his lips, as slow and sweet and thick as the molasses they would need for their whiskey. “My schedule is clear for the next oh...however many years. I don’t see why we can’t fit a little whiskey making onto the agenda.” Peter mimes flipping through a calendar as he speaks.
“I thought maybe you could use that degree of yours. Making booze is just chemistry, isn’t it?” Peter’s smile tips over into a grin, pleased and sly in equal measure. Not for the first time, Eddie realizes he’s hitched his wagon to a wild stallion, but he’s never been happier about it than he was right then.
“Guess I could.” That little shrug isn’t fooling anyone, but Eddie lets it slide. That’s what they did, that’s how this worked. The two of them, reaching out for each other.
Making something new out of each other. Marinating.
For the rest of their lives, if Eddie had anything to do with it.
polyfacetious asked: ☕ Our muses drinking something warm on a cool evening
Autumn Starters: (Accepting)
Alice is remarkably, monumentally drunk. The kind of drunk that comes with a case that falls apart at the judiciary level, red tape and technicalities letting a man walk, coupled with a case where they have no evidence but all the proof in the world.
Everything is awful, to say the very least.
But Peter is here, pressed against her side, and Alice’s hot toddy is warming her palms.
“Do you remember...” Her mind feels like the honey in her drink. Warm and sticky and smooth. “When you kissed me.” A pause, and a long one. “Or I kissed you.”
Honestly? She doesn’t remember. All Alice remembers is a new partner and a new case and the adrenaline rush of bonding after a dangerous experience. And then...lips. On lips. A good kiss. Full of heat and want and need.
And then the reality crashing down on their stupid heads. Peter was married. Alice had Bertie at home. They peeled apart like guilty teenagers and refused to speak about it, let alone think about it.
Alice rests her head on Peter’s shoulder, eyes closed. Princess Tippy Toes herself, Mary Jane was gone. Bertie was gone. But things weren’t the same. It was a moment missed, lightning in a bottle.
“Do you think there’s a universe where we didn’t go home?” She tries to picture it through the syrupy softness of drunkenness. Sharing a flat with Peter. Sharing her life with him. It was silly, the change would be incremental at best, and it still seemed so completely alien.
“A universe where we’re everything they ever whispered about us?”
polyfacetious asked: Tony & Peter Teeny Weeny Au Meme: (Accepting)
Telephone - Lady Gaga
Arizona is a long, flat plane of nothingness. Scrub grass and the horizon. Tony hasn’t looked in the rearview mirror in over an hour. Two lane roads were good for that.
The police radio has been quiet. A few calls for domestic disturbances, one call for drunk and disorderly. And then an actual, God given call for a cat up a tree. They’ve crossed enough state lines, switched enough cars that no one is even looking for them here.
Tony reaches across the center console to put a hand on Peter’s knee, giving it a soft squeeze.
“I told you, I keep my promises.”
It didn’t matter if that promise was a diner full of dead bodies, or the endless horizon in front of them. For Peter, there’s nothing he wouldn’t do.
@polyfacetious how many starters can I write you in a week
The ground is soggy, sodden to the point of giving up water with each squelching step through the courtyard. In the edges, the corners where the sun doesn’t reach, there’s still patches of snow clinging to life.
Peter’s back is hunched away from the sun, like it’s hiding anything at all.
“Turn. Now.” Five straddles the stone bench, dumping his pockets out between them. Gauze. Tape. Antiseptic. And a thin, threadbare towel to wipe all the blood from his broken, gnarled hands.
(They’d heal. Probably in a couple of hours. Five knows that, he’s not stupid. But it’s not about that.)
Peter holds position, probably counting in his head, the stubborn bastard. But then he turns to face Five, face swollen, lip split and hands a bloody mess.
“I told you I could take care of myself.” It was Five’s fight in the first place. He’s the one who started shit with the guards, who kept calling them idiots and imbeciles.
People tended not to hold back when they knew you’d come back from dying.
And so Five had taken his beating. With a mouthful of broken teeth and spitting blood, still calling them feckless fucking idiots while the one with the taser kept him on the ground.
“You know, if you killed them, they’ll keep you from the studio.” From Tony. Peter was too easy to read. Only two things mattered to him.
Five takes a painfully twisted hand in his, and douses the rag in alcohol before he starts cleaning the cuts, gentle despite his sharp tone.
Disney Drabbles: Because if I can't take my trip this year, at least my characters can
@polyfacetious Tony and Peter: Gay Days
Main Street USA looks like a rainbow threw up all over it.
It’s packed with people, laughing and talking, stopping to look in shop windows. There’s even rainbows on display in each of the stores. Ears and hats, spirit jerseys and lanyards. There’s even Mickey and Minnie plushes on display, though someone has switched them to where it’s two Minnie plushes holding hands, and two Mickeys.
It’s fucking adorable.
Tony has never had any shame when it came to Peter. In some ways, probably better than others. But even on the streets of London, he’s never hesitated to reach out and take Peter’s hand and lace their fingers.
But there’s something (excuse the pun) magical about doing it here. About being surrounded by other people like them. About seeing happy kids with ice cream on their faces with two dads or two moms. (Or trans parents, nonbinary parents, poly parents. The combinations were dizzying in their freedom today.)
He takes their laced hands, bringing them up to his lips so that he can kiss Peter’s knuckles.
“So.” Tony waits until Pete is digging into his own Mickey ice cream bar before he drops his bomb.
“Kids, huh?” Neither one of them are exactly young. But all this nostalgia and happiness are caught up under Tony’s ribs, and he has to take the leap and ask.
“Why would you even want to be near a vagina anyway?”
Justin is a pint (or two) too many in. The walls are looking a bit like they’re underwater. Swerve-y like. He’s got his head back against the pub’s wall, most of the rest of the lads already given up the ghost for the night.
But Peter was still here. Justin would like to think it’s because he’s good company. But he’s got a sinking feeling it’s because Peter is waiting for him to fall apart.
He’s not, of course. No reason to. He’s got the job of a lifetime. Real leadership now. He’s helping people.
It’s completely fine that John’s retiring and he’s got a bird living with him that Justin won’t call by name for legal reasons, and they were happy.
Completely fine, that.
“The feet are weird enough. But muscular vaginas?” Justin shakes his head without opening his eyes.
