Author's Note: Spoilers for No Way Home and Hawkeye. When I took the job at Bishop Security, I was convinced Kate Bishop would be my boss, nothing more. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd fall in love with her. Eventual Peter/Kate, with some Peter/MJ moments. T for now.

Reunion

By Ninazadzia

We visit a life we both left behind
Ignore the heart
Move to the ever-moving
Or, blazin', we go over
And over and over and over again

If I wait too long
I'll lose you from my sight
Maybe tonight
I could stop dreaming
And start believing in forever
And ever and ever and ever again

~Reunion, the xx

~June, 2025~

It started with a look.

"Parker?"

I looked up from my resume and attempted to swallow the lump in my throat. This was my third interview at Bishop security, and my last before they would decide whether or not to hire me. I'd landed the first one on a whim—six months of working IT at NYU got me some face time with a recruiter for the company, and when I managed to resolve a laptop issue she hadn't been able to fix for months, that was all I needed to get my foot in the door. But aside from that one IT job, everything else on my resume was either complete fabrication or required some serious truth-stretching. I couldn't list any of my jobs or teachers from high school as references because, well, it wasn't like any of them remembered me. And I sure as shit couldn't talk about being Spider-Man in my interview.

Up until this point, I'd relied entirely on wit and semi-awkward charm to get me through. And when I took one look at look at the woman calling my name, I knew I was screwed.

Kate Bishop herself was staring right at me.

I didn't know much about her, only that she was pretty young (22? 23?) and had acquired the company shortly after her mom had been arrested in December. I also knew that Bishop Security employed roughly a thousand people, and since she was both owner and acting CEO, I expected to only see or hear of Kate Bishop through at least three degrees of separation: my boss, my boss's boss, and then Kate would maybe be that boss's boss.

But her, interviewing me? A barely 18-year-old kid with a GED, applying for an entry-level position in the IT department? This had to have been some sort of mistake.

Okay, I reminded myself, Parker is a pretty common last name. She's probably waiting on someone else. I scanned the room, and waited for someone else to stand up.

"Parker, comma, Peter?" she called this time.

Shit.

"Oh! Yeah, um—right here."

I almost kicked over the cup of coffee I had sitting on the ground next to me as I stood up. If she noticed, it didn't phase her. "Hi—I'm Kate." She stuck out her hand for me to shake. "If you want to follow me over this way…"'

She rambled on about how sorry she was for being late, how she'd gotten stuck on a conference call and had to let her dog out before coming back from lunch. I was only half paying attention. The other half of me was internally screaming, oh my god oh my god oh my god. You are SO out of your league, Peter. Shit, what are you going to do, what the hell are you going to talk about?

"So, Peter. I'm going to cut right to the chase."

I blinked twice. She folded her arms across her chest.

"Sure. What's up?"

I mentally kicked myself. What's up? WHAT'S UP? She's the goddamn CEO, you do NOT say 'what's up' to the CEO in an interview, what the hell is the matter with you?!

She smiled, and then pointed at me. "Amy was right. You're cool."

I blinked again. "I'm sorry. What?"

"See, Peter," she sighed. "I'm not sure if you know this, but I'm really new at this job. And it's a lot of responsibility—which don't get me wrong, I can totally handle—but the thing is, just about everyone I worked with when I took over from my mom was at least twenty years older than me. And I swear to god, you wouldn't know it if you didn't work with them directly, but more experience does not necessarily mean you're good at your job, you know?"

I nodded slowly. "Sure?"

"So, here's the thing—I'm cleaning house. I'm sick of being told I need to surround myself with Baby Boomers and Gen X'ers for this company to be successful. Hell, I'm only five years older than you, and I've been running the damn thing for the last six months—I haven't burned the building down yet, have I?"

I started talking before I could stop myself. "Well, technically we're the same age." She cocked her head to the side. "I—I mean of course, this is assuming you didn't blip, but in any case, I did, and I was technically born in 2001—"

"No shit. When?"

"June 3rd. I only turned eighteen a couple of weeks ago."

She laughed. "No shit. I'm sorry, technically, I guess you're older than me—my birthday is tomorrow."

"No way!"

"Yeah. June 20th, 2001." She stopped for a second, and then added. "Of course, the asterisk with that is that from 2018 to 2023, I continued to age and you didn't, so…"

"Yeah. I'm definitely 'eighteen' with an asterisk."

"Yeah, it looks like you are," she laughed, and I couldn't help myself but laugh too. It wasn't really funny—nothing about losing five years of your life while the world went on was funny—but neither was having everyone who ever knew you forget you. And this was the first time in nearly a year, since Strange cast that spell, that I found myself laughing without having to force it.

"In any case—Amy tells me you're quite the IT whiz, experience on your resume be damned. The current IT guy we have in this department is pushing probably a hundred, which let me be clear, isn't a problem because that's ageist—the problem I have is he's a raging sexist who never got over my mom running this company after my dad died, much less me. So," she took a sip from her coffee, "What I'm trying to say is, I'm looking to hire someone who will work directly in this suite. With me."

My stomach dropped. I could feel my pulse racing. "You mean, like—"

"You would be my on-call, personal tech guy." Her lips turned up into a smile. She pulled a manila envelope out of her drawer, and slid it over to me across the table. "Details are in the contract. Take your time, read it over, the job is yours if you want it. Truthfully, you absolutely nailed that last interview, Jack loved you—we don't normally go to a third interview. I just wanted to meet you face to face first."

I only had to skim the top of the contract. At NYU, I was making $18/hr, no benefits, working on-paper as a part-time employee but in practice well over 40 hours of a week. This job would almost double my salary, give me full benefits, PTO, sick leave, everything. I'd be a fool not to take it.

"Where do I sign?" I asked.

Right after I walked out of the room, Kate called "Amy."

"Well? What did you think?"

She could finally drop the fake New York accent, although hints of Brooklyn were slowly creeping into Yelena's natural Russian speech. The longer she stayed in New York, the more she sounded like she was from there. It made slipping into her "Amy" alias that much easier.

"You sure this is our guy?" Kate asked.

"Not positive. But the prints I pulled from my computer were an identical match to the ones on the projector."

She was referring to one of the projectors from Mysterio's drones. Yelena had been in Europe at the same time Mysterio had "fought" the Elementals, and managed to recover one of the drones Spider-Man used to 'execute' Mysterio. Neither Kate or Yelena believed I had anything to do with Mysterio's death ("That footage was beyond doctored," Yelena would later tell me), but the projector tied "Spider-Man" to me, since my fingerprints were all over them.

"So you're saying that if Parker isn't our Spider-Man, he at the very least knows who Spider-Man is?"

"Seems that way."

Yelena paused for just a beat too long.

"What are not telling me?" Kate asked.

"There's something not adding up about him. Have you put him through a background check yet?"

Kate sighed. "You know that I have." She scanned my resume again. "It's funny, he's got like, three jobs listed on here, and every person I've called to ask about him has no idea who I'm talking about."

"But yet—"

"—the second I give them a date of birth or dates of employment, sure enough, he's in the system. So either he has the most forgetful supervisors in the world, or he's the most forgettable employee in the world." She waited a second, and again, Yelena didn't respond. "Or there's something else."

"There's something else, alright."

"Which is?"

"You met him, you tell me. You really think Peter Parker is the kind of guy that slips your mind?"

She didn't have to think about that one, because the answer was a definitive no. I was awkward, sure, and not the most well-spoken teenager she'd ever come across, not by a long-shot—but (to hear Kate describe it) I was charming, and endearing, and just about the furthest thing from "forgettable."

"So, what?" Kate asked. "You think he's our guy, and he's been paying off his former employers to keep quiet?"

"Not just his former employers, Kate Bishop. Everyone."

"What do you mean 'everyone'?"

"Well, let's see. He was on the Academic Pentathlon in high school—I've spoken to every member that was on the team at the same time as him. Nobody knows who he is. I've met with former classmates, neighbors, colleagues—it's the same thing. The only place I've been able to find anyone who can tell me anything about Peter Parker has been at NYU, where he's been working for the last six months. But before last winter, the guy's a ghost."

"A ghost," Kate echoed. "And you really think he's not just paying everyone off?"

"He's from Queens."

"Okay, so that's a definite 'no.'"

"Look, for me to say he's our Spider-Man—I can't say for sure. I really can't. But I don't think he's a liability to have around, at least for now. And hey—worst case scenario, he actually does a pretty decent job fixing laptops."

"Yeah," Kate sighed. "He's got that going for him."

"Did he take the job?"

"Yep. Signed on the dotted line and everything."

"So we should find out soon enough, in that case."

Kate would tell me years later that there was a part of her that wished I wasn't Spiderman. That I would just be this dorky guy she hired to work in her office on a whim, that she took a chance on me and it paid off. That we would have a normal, albeit semi-flirty relationship, and that the second things even veered slightly towards a power-dynamic gray area between the two of us, she'd suggest I work for their sister company a few buildings over. That I'd have better career prospects there, which wasn't a lie, but also meant we would be able to give things a shot for real, without having to worry about navigating the dynamics of a boss sleeping-with-slash-dating a subordinate.

That I could just be this normal, sweet, younger-even-though-we-were-technically-the-same-age boyfriend, without any of the messy strings attached that came with being a superhero.

Of course, though, we couldn't change reality. I was Spider-Man. And that meant things were about to get way more real and way more messy between us than Kate ever realized they could.

Author's Note: I realized while watching Hawkeye that if Kate didn't blip and Peter did, they technically would have been born the same year (since Kate is 22 during the events Hawkeye, and Peter is 16 going on 17 in the events of Far From Home/No Way Home), which is what spawned the idea for this plot bunny.

I also want to play with an idea I got from Teen Wolf's final season, when Stiles is abducted by the Wild Hunt—even if the whole world "forgets" someone, you can't fully "erase" a person. Traces of them are inevitably left behind. With all of the different movies we've gotten with Tom Holland's Peter Parker, it seems super unlikely that his identity wouldn't be tied back to Spider-Man at the very least among the superhero/Avengers community. And which better duo to have figure it out first then our next gen Black Widow and Hawkeye?

In any case, let me know what you think in the reviews! Thanks for reading.

xx Nina