Back on my MCU BS: Peter and Harley as fanfic writers
Okay, so, hear me out. I would LOVE for Peter and Harley to meet online, as fanfic writers.
They both become really well-known names on Ao3 and Tumblr; every time ItsWednesdayMyDudes or potatoboi3000 updates, the Avengers fandom goes wild on every platform. Because ItsWednesdayMyDudes just has a knack for writing Spider Man - every fight scene he publishes is cinematic perfection, but more than that, the internal monologues and moral dilemmas he pens are so humanizing for Spidey, and so real and raw and at times heartbreaking. Peter, who started writing these stories because his (NDA’ed to secrecy) therapist convinced him it would be a good outlet for his very real hero-related emotions, is flattered by the attention. And though he has no plans to publicly reveal his identity any time soon, it’s still nice to see that there are people who care about Spider Man on a human level.
potatoboi3000, meanwhile, becomes well-known for Avengers slice-of-life drabbles. The stories he tells are absurd - like the one where Tony mistakes motor oil for coffee after 57 straight hours in the lab - but they’re funny and entertaining and just realistic enough to be possible. He has an entire series dedicated to “times when someone asked Thor to open a jar but he just ended up breaking it.” His longest fic is a multichapter one where Hawkeye crawls around in the vents of the Avengers complex, dropping glitter on people who have pissed him off. They’re not deep or meaningful like the stuff ItsWednesdayMyDudes writes, but hey, Harley’s never met any Avengers in person besides Tony. He doesn’t know how Black Widow talks or how Captain America thinks, but he does have the stories Tony relays in their weekly phone calls and dammit he’s gonna share them with the world.
The two “meet” when they get asked to collaborate on a Spider Man fic for Avengers Week. The blog organizing the event is the premiere Avengers tumblr. All of the most popular writers in the fandom will be participating, and it’s truly an honor to be asked. They’ve been tasked with writing a Spider Man fic together for Day 6. And it goes well, really well. potato admires how in-character Wednesday is when it comes to writing emotional scenes for the masked hero; meanwhile, Wednesday appreciates the humorous situations and witty one-liners that potato plots. Their styles are so different, but they click, and so do the writers themselves.
Avenger’s Week ends (to huge success), but their partnership doesn’t. The two keep talking together, and writing together, and okay flirting too but it totally doesn’t mean anything because they don’t know each other names, right?
But then, a really weird thing happens. Spider Man gets into a fight with the Green Goblin. It’s a small one, with no witnesses (besides Karen, and therefore Tony). And Peter gets his ass absolutely handed to him when the Green Goblin uses a modified version of his own webs to restrain him. And so he’s forced to wriggle out of the suit, which is absolutely glued to the ground and not going anywhere anytime soon, and chase down the Goblin wearing nothing but his boxers and his mask.
He succeeds. Under any other circumstances it would be funny (and oh boy does Tony laugh when they talk the next morning), but somehow the internal crisis he’s having over putting his best friend’s dad behind bars sours his mood, ya know? So he writes it.
And so does potatoboi3000. Less than a minute later.
And of course Peter is dumbfounded. How does this boy from tumblr know about this very small fight with no witnesses? Because it’s clear, he has to know, there’s no way that potato randomly devised a drabble where Spider Man has to fight a villain in his boxers within 24 hours of it actually happening in real life. On the other side of the screen, Harley is also mystified. How did Wednesday hear about this very small fight with no witnesses? And not only that, but how did he know that Green Goblin was actually the father of Spidey’s real life best friend? (That was a detail he’d had to confirm with Tony after reading Wednesday’s fic, and the man had been surprised that Harley knew to say the least).
Harley comes clean to Tony about his Ao3 account, worried that there’s been some kind of security breach that could put the Avengers’ lives in jeopardy. It’s embarrassing to admit to his father figure that he’s a popular fanfiction writer, but this is a serious situation and he has no other choice. And Peter comes clean to Tony too, for the same reasons.
Tony thanks them both seriously with an impressive poker face. He sets up a Zoom call, telling each boy that he’ll need them to repeat the story for a member of their security team so they can figure out who the leak is. But instead, when the three log into the Zoom call, Tony says “Harley, meet Peter, aka ItsWednesdayMyDudes. Peter, meet Harley, aka potatoboi3000. Peter is Spider Man. And Harley is a pain in my ass from Tennessee.”
