The first time he hit a roadblock with the Avengers was not when Doc Ock attacked a bank, or a super villain stalked Aunt May, or his full name came out. It was when Clint Barton offered him a drink.

Peter blinked. "I'm sorry, what?"

"A drink, Webhead," Clint said. "It's on me. Today was a rough one."

They were in the ruined remains of what had once been a bar, at least before the Hulk got to it. Chairs and debris lay scattered over the floor. Sunset poured through the gaping hole in the roof. A thin layer of dust covered everything. Natasha looked annoyed that it had bothered to blemish her hair. Peter didn't know how she always got out of fights looking viciously perfect.

Vision was off searching for Bruce, and Cap and Tony were arguing over something in the corner, their voices not quite low. Falcon was talking to an overly grateful old lady outside. Both Clint and Peter, the sole two near the bar, looked as scorched as they felt.

"I'm good," Peter said, "thanks. I don't drink."

Clint raised an eyebrow. Peter traced the surprise along his expression. It lasted longer than usual.

"Alright, Webhead," Clint said, before signing, "Whatever you say."

The archer poured himself a glass of whiskey on the ruined counter. Mahogany splinters blossomed from its broken center. Peter tried to sooth the sudden unease within him. It was the first time in several months that he thought they might be on to me.

The Avengers would not work with an underage superhero.

The whole "teaming up with the Avengers" set-up was an accident. Freshman him would have screamed. Sophomore him also screamed, but a little less loudly. And a little less shrilly. And mostly not in front of them. Except Nat and Vision, who definitely heard him. But Nat and Vision heard everything. It wasn't like he was a member or anything. He was mostly there for back-up. Still, the collaboration was going well. Peter supposed that he owed his success to the same man who had dropped a building on him a year ago.

The Vulture had catalyzed all this. After the perilous fight to stop The Vulture on Moving Day—which Peter had only known about through eavesdropping on lackies—the Avengers had taken interest in him. It was another three months before they spoke to him. Their rapport on the streets grew from there. Peter was just relieved that he was wiser post Moving Day, which made working with the Avengers easier. I embarrass myself enough, he thought. It would have been worse before that.

He frowned at the Scarlet Witch's text. Hey, itsy bitsy spider, it said, could u help me with homework? Nat is forcing me 2 learn and she won't let Vision help me. :(

"Oh, come on!" Peter exclaimed, staring at his cellphone. "Just because they don't know my real name doesn't mean they have to make a spider joke every time. Be more original."

Sure, he texted back. Hmu with the math.

It took less than five seconds for the reply. Thanks spidey, it said. You r a real hero.

Peter scoffed. "You're darn right. A hero of science and the streets."

"Peter! Are you ready to bring your laundry out? Your sheets are filthy!"

Aunt May's muffled voice echoed from behind his room door. Peter hastily got up, spilling pencils, papers, and a calculator off his bed. His tracfone landed on the pillow.

"Coming, Aunt May! I'll be out in a second!"

As Peter sorted out his school supplies from the vortex of tangled TMNT sheets, he had a moment to reflect on his phone's scratched screen. Why, he thought, does Wanda always come to me for homework help? Especially when Bruce is around?

Maybe it was time to lie low for a while.

"Underoos! Are you hanging in there?"

Tony's shout crackled through the headpiece. Peter heard his voice in the distance without it. Fire fumed on the pile of rubble nearby. Beams stuck out of the fallen concrete blocks like skeletal bones, leaking molten marrow. Peter tried not to throw up. Don't think about Moving Day, he told himself. Don't think about The Vulture. Or the time the Goblin trapped you in a falling building. You're outside. Breathe. Breathe.

"I'm fine!" Peter managed to sound stable. "The eight-armed pain-in-the-butt is down. Where are you?"

"Coming your way," Cap said, causing another crackle in the com line. Peter tried not to flinch. How annoying. He needed to get that fixed. "Falcon and Nat are taking care of the civilians. Vision and Clint are chasing down the octobots. They should be here soon."

"Roger that," Peter said, webbing down another one of Doc Ock's free arms. The super villain, stuck under several cement blocks and layers of webbing, groaned. Peter spotted the shine of Cap's shield down the street. Wanda flew behind him, surrounded in a red shimmer, and behind her followed the smoke of Iron Man's suit.

Doc Ock muttered something incomprehensible. Peter turned, frowning at him.

"You brought this on yourself, you know," he said. "If you put your ego to better use then busting buildings and self fellatio we wouldn't be in this situation right now."

"Excuse me?"

"Nothing, Mr. Stark," Peter said. "Just talking to the metal octopus."

He swore he heard Wanda snicker.

Iron Man, Cap, and Wanda were almost to him—and Vision and Clint were visible—when it happened. His spidey sense went crazy. Hot metal scraped the back of Peter's neck. He lunged forward in time to escape a spray of sparks and the snap of mechanical claws on his spine. Doc Ock lay twitching in the rubble, nearly unconscious, one spasming metal arm swinging in the air. Material hung from one broken claw. Peter swore, webbing it down.

"Stop ruining my suits! I don't have the budget for a whole closet of them!"

"Spider-Man!" Clint's shout cracked in his ear.

"I got it, guys!" Peter yelled, pivoting as the swears of other Avengers overwhelmed him. "It's cool! He only scratched me. He's a bunch of mechanical nori now."

It took Peter a moment to realize that ashy air was kissing his face, all of his face, and that the cloth hanging from Doc Ock's claw was a mask.

The question didn't come up until five hours later. Peter spent those entire five hours dreading the moment it would and alternating between nervousness and stages of grief. When it did come up, they were in one of Stark's complexes. Everyone was tending to wounds. Clint slurped some noodles as he watched Wanda help Falcon pull shards of debris out of his wings. Peter stayed in the corner, claiming a couch for himself.

He restrained a flinch when Tony sat across from him, a take-out box of shawarma in hand. Iron Man was in casual clothes now. His arc reactor glowed through his GOT SCIENCE? shirt. A bruise covered the bridge of his nose and purpled his right eye, but otherwise, he seemed to be fine.

"You get enough food before the piranhas dug in?" Tony said. "I swear, these maniacs eat enough food to put a place out of business, especially the big guy. They're lucky I can foot the bill."

Peter didn't know if he meant Cap or the Hulk. He didn't ask. He managed a nod. Now that they were inside, his mask felt hot against his face. Peter couldn't bring himself to take it off nonetheless.

"So," Tony said, stirring his shawarma. Peter didn't need spidey senses to know what was coming next.

This is where I die, he thought.

"What year are you in?" Tony said.

A thousand useless excuses blistered Peter's tongue. All of them went out the window the instant Tony Stark spoke. How did any of them matter? They had seen his face. Almost all of them. There was no covering this up. It all ended here. Peter swallowed the lump in his throat. Tony poked at a chunk of chicken with impatience.

"I'm a sophomore," Peter said, fear swimming his veins. Tony nodded.

"Thought so. How's your major treating you?"

Peter's brain short circuited.

"Well," he spluttered, trying to find his bearings. "It's treating me well."

As Tony ate Peter made some calculations. The mention of 'major,' the requests for homework help, the offer for a drink, and Tony's indifference to his mention of sophomore year added up to one conclusion: the Avengers thought he was in college.

Holy shit, Peter thought.

Peter Parker didn't like thinking about it, but he looked older than he actually was. Not in a cute way. Not like the protagonists of those harlequin pulp novels MJ read but pretended she didn't. ("They're self-satirizing," she said. "The jokes write themselves.")

No, Peter resembled the polar opposite of appealing. Sixteen years old was the worst age on earth. The last growth spurt had placed him among the tallest people in class. It had not come with grace. Peter was 60% awkward legs and 40% awkward everything else. He had started growing facial hair last year, but not enough to shave. Patches of bristles splotched his not-quite-pointy chin intermittently. Peter felt like a haggard elf.

His voice was no more stable either. Sometimes it cracked into a deeper pitch, sometimes it stuttered into a higher one. It was mostly stable at a whine. Peter resented that. So the radioactive spider bite gave him abs, but it couldn't lower his voice by a few decibels? Or widen his shoulders to look more like Captain America's, or King T'challa's? Pretty please?

The long story short was that Peter looked like a missing link in the evolutionary aging process. His identity as Spider-Man didn't matter. Outside of the mask, he remained a pasty nerd between sixteen and twenty two that couldn't dress to show off the virtues he did have, because secret identities sucked. Ned had cackled when a waitress called him 'sir.' Peter was ready to be done with ambiguity.

At least before the unmasking occurred. Now, he was grateful for it. The Avengers thought he was in college! Captain America, Iron Man, Scarlet Witch, Falcon, Vision, Bruce Banner and the Hulk, Black Widow, Hawkeye, all of them—they had no clue they were kicking ass alongside a high schooler.

Peter was so giddy he called Ned.

"Ned," he said, wiggling under his blankets. "Ned. I have the craziest news to tell you."

Ned shrieked just as loud as Peter thought he would.

"You have a name besides Spider-Man, don't you?" Cap said, looking exasperated after sitting through five minutes of Clint's puns.

Peter paused, mulling it over. The trees in Central Park dappled the grass with shade. Wanda was trying to convince Bruce to play volleyball with her. Vision was engaged in a staring match with a squirrel. Even directly after a fight, Natasha and Tony looked ready to recline with expensive sunglasses on and glasses of chardonnay in hand, per always. Clint and Thor had disappeared to raid a hot-dog stand Peter had recommended to them.

Peter extended his hand. "Peter," he said. "It's Peter."

Cap shook it. "Nice to meet you, Peter. The name's Steve."

Peter cracked a wide grin beneath his mask.

Lying to the Avengers was a risky undertaking, especially where the spies were concerned. Peter found that it came easy to him. He lied to the entire school about being Spider-Man. Lying to a few powerful but out-of-touch adults about going to college was a cakewalk. He had Decathlon, so telling the team that he needed to duck out for exams worked well. Peter found himself more relaxed. Not having to hide his schoolwork or his face all the time was a blessing. As a precaution, he didn't unmask around Natasha or Clint unless he looked particularly haggard.

Pretending to be near twenty was harder. Peter didn't have a driver's license or passport. He still had to watch what he said around the team. If one of them asked for his license, he had nothing to offer but a flimsy Midtown Science and Technology School ID, and that would not fly. The idea of buying a fake ID off one of the common criminals he webbed all the time melted Peter's brain slightly, so he let that thought be. Right now, praying that no one asked for identity verification was his best play.

"You're helping me with the party in July, right?"

"Of course." Peter switched his phone to his other ear, his backpack bouncing against his spine. "I'm ready for it. Over the hill birthday cards, black balloons, '100 years' candles, streamers, Foxy Grandpahats, dentures; the whole shebang. It's not every day you get to roast Captain America."

Sam snorted. Peter pictured him circling a building with his metal wings extended. "You're a gremlin."

Peter's retort died when he saw the local news scrolling across a taqueria's TV. HOME ROBBERY NEAR FOREST HILLS, it said. ONE DEAD.

"I have to go," Peter said.

Sam didn't question his urgency. Peter clicked his phone shut. It took three minutes to change in an alley and hide his backpack. Every minute felt like a hundred years. By the time he burst onto the street, Peter's heart pounded a staccato against his ribs. Every web shot was not fast enough. The wind whistled by his ears in a scream. Peter almost slammed his face against the building ledge when he skittered onto his apartment's roof. He took the stairs two at a time, then three.

"May? May!"

It was stupid to yell for her with the suit on, but he did anyway. Thankfully, no one was in the hallway. Peter scrambled to the fifth floor. The key threatened to shiver out of his hand. No signs of forced entry, a little voice in the back of his head noted. No spidey sense going off. That's good. It was forced with Ben.

He burst into the apartment. The door had barely slammed behind him before he ripped his mask off. Terror sped through him, real terror this time. It was muscle memory that made Peter yank his suit off. He threw it into his bedroom before throwing the door shut and fleeing into the living room.

"May! MAY!"

"Peter?"

Aunt May limped out of the kitchen, pale. Her cane clattered against the floor. Peter saw the news scrolling across their TV. SUSPECT APPREHENDED, it said.

The first thing Peter did was hug her. He was shaking too hard to feel her hand on his hair. She felt so frail, even if he couldn't tell her that. Peter sobbed into her shoulder as she hugged him back. May's tears speckled his shoulder.

"Thank god you're okay," she said. "I didn't know if you had come early. I knew you were visiting MJ for a while—"

"I'm okay, May," Peter said. "I'm okay."

They stood there as the news played out, holding each other. Peter sniffed and wiped his face when he pulled away. May rubbed at her eyes with a thin wrist, her delicate veins visible.

"Oh, Petey," she said. "You're crying."

Peter didn't correct her to 'we're crying.' He let her wipe his face with a handful of tissues. Aunt May's white curls stayed perched atop her head, more unshakable than both of them.

"I was worried," he said.

"I know." May pulled him into a hug again. "So was I."

This time, their embrace was broken by May's soft chuckle.

"Petey," she said, "why are you in your underwear? Where's your backpack?"

"I don't know," Peter said. His body wouldn't cease shaking. "I wanted to get changed I guess. I left the backpack at MJ's."

May rubbed his shoulder.

"You're cold," she said. "You should go get changed. I'll finish making dinner. Goodness, what a scare we had."

"Right," Peter said.

He limped back to his room. Instead of getting changed, he sat in his room for a long time, his face in his hands. He didn't move until Sam called him asking what had happened.