"Alright, I have had enough. What is going on?" Peter's voice is firm, just daring them to refuse him his answers. Both look away in fake uncaring.
"I've no idea what you're talking about," Harley says, voice aloof. Peter takes a moment to watch them before sighing. At the sound both Harley and Riri lookup. Peter looks tired and halfway done with them in general.
"This is about the suit that Riri's been trying to make isn't it?" he phrases the question in a way that makes it seem like it's not a question at all. Rather it's an acknowledgment of something he already knew. Riri opens her mouth in shock while Harley giggles.
"How did you know?" Riri's voice is panicked and her breathing starts to pick up. Peter winces at his fuck up. He should have prepared her a bit more before dropping that bomb on her (not that he knew she would react that way).
"When you started asking me about heroics I sort of figured," Peter says softly. Harley looks at both of them before he settles back into the couch in a relaxed manner, his face smug as he regarded them.
"I'm also making a suit," Harley said, his entire body screaming the cat got the canary.
"Then why the fuck were you disrupting my building process!" Riri shouts. She quickly turns pale though when she realizes that she lost the competition. Harley's smirk only grew larger on the other hand. It disappears however when he opens his mouth to answer.
"Cuz you didn't tell me," he sounded genuinely betrayed by this fact and his face only cemented it further when they saw his lips press together tightly.
"Well, you didn't tell me either" Riri throws back. Peter watches in silence, already whirling with ideas and opportunities. He hides his smile behind his fist as he thinks about how he's going to stage this to Mr. Stark.
"But I was going to when I came into your workshop that first day! But what did I find? Nothing but betrayal," Harley hisses. It's honestly a bit overdramatic but Harley felt distressed that Riri would hide something like that from him when he had been fully willing to spill his guts. It was treachery.
"Like I was gonna bring in a 14-year-old into superheroing" Riri jeers. Harley is immediately on the defensive.
Meanwhile, Peter plays candy crush on his phone, completely ignoring the two in front of him while he loses yet again.
"Peter was 14 when he first put on the suit!" Peter looks up briefly before going back to his game when he realizes that they weren't actually calling for him.
"Peter has superpowers! He's not a good example" Riri tries to argue.
"What about those sidekicks then?" Harley says, unwilling to give her any leeway.
"They- your- it's different!" her voice going desperate, her eyes begging Harley to let it go.
"How?!" Harley ignores her quiet plea and instead pushes on.
"They're not my little brother!" explodes out of Riri's mouth.
Silence. Brief glorious silence.
"You think of me as a little brother?" Harley's voice is small, almost fragile in a way. Riri looks away in embarrassment before answering.
"We're all we've got you know? All alone in this stupid house with no one else but each other, of course, I think of you as a brother," she sits back down, unaware that she had even stood up, Harley quickly follows.
Peter puts his phone away before clapping his hands loudly. It echoes throughout the room, forcing the two other occupants to pay attention.
"Now that that's done with it's time to make your suits," Peter says with a bright smile. Riri sputters as Harley answers with his own grin. Peter takes a moment to observe them. Riri still looked weary and Harley's shoulders were far too tense.
"I'm not going to have his death on my conscience," Riri says determinedly. Peter looks at her in empathy.
"You know he's going to go out regardless right? It's better to have his back then let him run solo. Trust me, I know" the heaviness of his voice spoke of a story that Riri was begging to ask about but was unsure whether she should. Harley took that choice out of her hands by questioning Peter's meaning himself. He ignores Harley's question and stands up, leaving the room. Both Riri and Harley follow.
He comes to a stop in front of Riri's workshop. Riri unlocks it and they all file in. Peter turns to where her suit was hidden and pulls off the sheet covering it.
"We'll work on Riri's suit first before moving onto Harley's. Three heads are better than one and I refuse to have one of you killed because there was an easily preventable coding error or a life-saving invention that one of you has already invented absent from the suit. Final decisions of what stays and what goes, of course, go to the wearer of the suit as well as design" Both Riri and Harley nod after a moment of hesitation. Peter smiles at them, his hands moving to ruffle their hair.
They all settled around the suit, already bouncing around ideas.
