Peter Parker (Tom Holland) Imagines

Longing in the Labs

Peter Parker is trying his absolute hardest to make this work, and after all of his efforts, he's still come up with nothing at all. The most difficult task in Peter's life should probably have to do with his secret reality as Spider-Man, all the times he's risked death to protect a city that really doesn't know him all that well, yet it isn't. Peter doesn't even think he was this stressed when he got his abilities in the first place and could suddenly start sticking to walls and taking hits that would normally kill anyone else.

And, instead of handling his problems like a normal person (because Peter's totally normal at this point, yeah, right), Peter is instead flinging himself into his struggles with the force of a hurricane. It feels as if his every waking moment is spent trying to find the answer to a puzzle that refuses to stop stumping him.

This problem, one might ask? Is it an impossible science question that brainiacs and scholars have studied for centuries? A battle plan for how to take down the latest villain plaguing New York? Literally anything that would account for the amount of hours Peter has poured into this? No. It's all to do with a crush.

A crush. Peter is driving himself mad over a crush that doesn't even like him back. That's the problem, of course, because Peter has gone and fallen for Y/N L/N, the one boy who means the most to Peter and thus will hurt him the most when he can't seem to like Peter the way he wishes.

That's what you get for falling for your friend, Peter supposes. If he could have just minded his own business, kept his head down and only felt things that were strictly platonic, Peter could have avoided this whole mess. Instead, he's counting the amount of times his heart has skipped a beat upon seeing a familiar smile, and he's completely, utterly smitten.

Peter's one goal in life has now switched away from handling life as Spider-Man or getting the top grades in his classes to figure out how to get Y/N to like him back. Or, the bare minimum, finding a way for Y/N to actually pay attention to him. He's not having great luck in either department.

In truth, Peter doesn't know how he's supposed to get Y/N to fall in love with him if Y/N seems far more invested in whatever he's doing at the moment than Peter himself. Y/N literally works in Tony Stark's labs and goes to Peter's high school, yet Peter's scrounging for scraps of a conversation like they've never had less in common.

It makes no sense, which is what's killing him. Surely they should be the best of friends, right? Peter has imagined how things should have gone about a thousand times already. They should be trading inside jokes like playing cards, whispering over discoveries that no one else in the school could even hope to understand. Y/N knows that Peter is Spider-Man, for heaven's sake, and that still isn't enough to interest him.

It's unfathomable. Peter isn't going to claim that he's always needed attention, far from it. Peter has always been content to fade more into the background, to watch as people make mistakes and learn from the whole of it. Yet when it comes to Y/N, Peter finds himself desperate to have just a fraction of the other boy's heart. Even a little bit would be enough, but no.

They're in the labs again today, and Peter's distracted from his work by another bout of wishing he could mean more to the one boy he needs more than anything. Peter is supposed to be fabricating a more durable formula for his webs due to an incident the past week involving him trying to swing on a sharp edged skyscraper and accidentally plummeting ten stories before he managed to catch himself just in time.

It would be really great if he could focus, too, because Peter would have to list nearly dying due to his webs getting torn to shreds as one of his top ten least favorite things, but he can't manage it, not in the slightest. Instead, he's staring hopelessly as Y/N bends over his notes, making careful modifications to some integrated armor circuits that Tony had asked for.