Quick Peter/Gwen oneshot. Pure fluff. Some immaturity-induced grossness, but nothing too serious.

There Once Was a Boyfriend Who Swallowed a Fly

By TheFictionFairy

Honestly, Gwen would have loved to spend all of her time with Peter doing clichéd, romantic things. Taking long walks in the park and trying to steal licks off of each other's ice cream cones. Seeing bad movies and doing impressions at each other in the back of the theater. Going on exhilarating web-swings through the city at night. Or just plain making out. Okay, maybe that last one was more clichéd teenager than clichéd romantic, but Gwen felt she was fully within her rights to be both sometimes.

But, sadly, Gwen and Peter were both still high school students (extracurricular super-heroing and science-interning aside) – and pretty good ones at that. So, a lot of the time, "let's hang out after school" actually meant: "let's sit in the same room as we quietly focus on our homework and not each other."

Peter usually had problems with the "quietly" part. So even though Gwen's room was high enough off the street to dull most sounds of traffic, there was a litany of other, slightly annoying sounds that she had long since trained herself to ignore. The creaking of Peter's chair as he easily balanced it on two legs (which was doubly annoying, because it made Gwen jealous that he never seemed to fall over backward). The occasional muffled voice from elsewhere in the apartment when other people were at home. The quiet grumbling from Peter's stomach whenever he hadn't eaten one of his frequent snacks in awhile. The persistent buzzing of a fly that had been stuck in her room since the night before. The regular, unconscious tap tap tap of Peter's pencil as he read through his textbooks. Gwen had learned to tune all of it out.

So when her room suddenly went dead quiet – no more creaking or buzzing or tapping – Gwen was jolted out of her reading on the French Revolution as quickly as if someone had cracked a raw egg over her head. She carefully bookmarked her place and sat upright slowly from her reclined position on the bed, almost afraid to see what was going on at the desk at the other end of the room.

There was Peter, back to her, standing with one foot on the arm and the other on the narrow back of his chair (still balanced on two legs – the showoff!), his arm outstretched toward the ceiling. Seeing him like this – an easy reminder of just how different, how lithe and powerful and… almost supernatural he was – took Gwen's breath away. Gwen would be lying if the little shows like this didn't get her a teensy bit hot and bothered. There were perks to having a boyfriend who was part spider, she supposed. So long as she didn't think too hard about it.

Slowly, Peter brought his hand down in front of his face, absent-mindedly studying an object held delicately between his thumb and forefinger.

"What are you…?" asked Gwen, leaning forward to try and identify it.

Peter turned to her, crouching down on the chair as its front legs hit the ground with an impossibly light thump. Gwen sometimes couldn't get over how he managed to fold himself up – tangle up his limbs in ways that made her own ache to watch – and stay so comfortable. Peter sheepishly extended his arm toward her, showing off his prize – the fly that had been buzzing around the room.

"Sorry," he said, rubbing the back of his neck with his other hand. "It was bugging me."

Gwen was unable to hold in a rather unladylike snort at Peter's unintentional pun.

All of a sudden, as if deciding that it had been left unattended for too long, Peter's stomach rumbled loudly, sending Gwen into a fit of inappropriate giggles that she tried to stifle in a pillow. The juxtaposition of the hunger and the fly in her spider-guy's hand was just too much.

When she finally got herself under control, she looked up to see Peter grinning mischievously at her.

"What do you think?" he asked, twirling his hand up into an 'OK' gesture by his face to put the fly at his eye-level. "Two birds with one stone? They don't call me Spider-Man for nothing."

"What?" Gwen asked, not quite willing to believe he would come to the same conclusion she had. Horrified realization dawned. "Are you actually suggesting–?"

Before she could so much as form a properly disgusted facial expression, Peter popped the fly into his mouth and swallowed.

"Oh, gross!" Gwen cried, torn between the urges to gag and giggle.

"What, not sexy?" Peter asked laughingly. Gwen scrunched up her nose and shook her head, shoulders shaking with suppressed mirth.

"Are you sure about that? Because I think you shouldn't knock it 'til you try it," Peter joked, lunging at her clumsily and making exaggerated kissy faces.

"Ew! Go brush your teeth! No. No!" Gwen shrieked, unable to contain her laughter as Peter began to tickle her.

So yeah, Gwen would have loved to spend all of her time with Peter in all those clichéd, romantic ways.

But, as she rolled around on her bed with her super-gymnast, super-cute, super-hero boyfriend, Gwen concluded that clichés were overrated.