“If you keep talking, my answer’s changing to no.” Con: your favourite superhero couldn’t figure out a way to make rainbow-coloured webs. “Pro: you’ll get to spend the day with your favourite superhero. Tony studied Peter and his wide, hopeful smile for all of two seconds before sighing. The melodramatic speech was not necessary.” “Oh, my God, Parker,” Tony interrupted, kicking out his foot and sending Peter’s chair rolling away from him. And don’t get me started on the little kids, looking up at you with their wide, innocent eyes, seeing Tony Stark be unapologetically bisexual, and understanding, right in their core, that who they are is-” It could be so much fun! And New York would love to see us. “People might need Spiderman! And they might need Iron Man, too!”
Pete, that suit’s for fighting crime, and-and, saving people.” “And why would wandering around in the disgusting New York summer heat, in the middle of a crowd of sweaty people, buying food with a two-hundred percent mark up in price be more fun with you?” “It’s just that I think you’d have fun at Pride, especially if you went with me.” “It’s not that I want you to go to Pride,” Peter replied, as casually as he could. Peter had long stopped denying that Tony Stark cared about him – somewhere between the Vulture and the time Peter showed up, unannounced, with a destroyed suit, no remorse, and a pigeon with a broken wing, Tony had started looking at him like he was less a strange kid to be mentored from a distance, and more like a friend – or, dare he say it, part of the family. “I’m getting the hint you want me to go to Pride,” Tony said, his eyes lit up with fond amusement.
“Well, sure, but you can do it with thousands of other people!” “I think you’ll find I’m loudly, unapologetically myself every day.” “It’s a celebration! It’s a day to be loudly, unapologetically yourself!” “Why do you care if I go to Pride? It’s just a parade.” Tony placed down the tools in his hands and looked over. “Sure, but I love parties where I can drink wine and wear a nice suit and not be in a crowd of ten-thousand people.” “You’re not going? But it’s, like, a massive party. “Seriously, what?” Tony asked, not looking up. So when Peter looked up from the desk where he’d been powering through his calculus homework so he could get onto helping Mr Stark with his projects, and said, “Hey, are you going to Pride this weekend?”, he was surprised by the answer he received. They just hadn’t talked about it, was all. Not at school, not at home, and not with Tony Stark. There was that debacle a few years ago with Tony appearing on a dating app – interested in Men and Women – and when Peter Googled Tony Stark bisexual, a number of interviews came up that had been largely ignored and buried where he outright said it. Well, Peter hadn’t told Tony, but he knew his mentor/father-figure/ Iron Man would be okay with it.īecause Tony Stark had been parading around with male dates since the mid-90s. His best friends, MJ and Ned, were also both the most chill and not-chill-but-fantastic people he knew, respectively. Aunt May was known for being a caring and kind woman, and he knew her like the back of his hand – she wouldn’t think negatively of him because of who he liked. It wasn’t like he was running around yelling about it, but it wasn’t like he was hiding it, either. One closet Peter had never really been in was the sexuality one.
And there was the one in the hall at the Avengers facility that hid the vent grate behind mops and brooms, where Peter had once found a detailed hand-written journal about the day-to-day events of the compound, as seen from the vents. There was the one in the Parker apartment that he used to hide in during games of hide and seek with his uncle but was now filled to the brim with dusty old boxes.
There was the one in the science lab at Midtown where he once spilt like six different beakers of acid by accident and ended up running out of the room, never admitting it was him who’d caused The Great Evacuation of ’16. Peter had, statistically, been in many closets in his life.