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***
"I..." Colleen hesitated, frowning and lowering her gaze, focusing on a spot on the table. "I want to help people. I want to teach those who can't protect themselves how to protect themselves. Give them the tools so they won't be victims."
Peter fell silent, processing what she said. Those clearly weren't empty words — he could feel the emotion behind them. Colleen wasn't giving a rehearsed speech or trying to sound noble. But after what Norman Osborn did, deceiving him repeatedly with words that also weren't empty, Peter would be very naive to believe right away in something his intuition told him had something wrong with it.
Even so, he smiled on the outside.
"Why are you looking at me like that?" Colleen asked, frowning and narrowing her eyes. There was also a hint of defensiveness in her voice, as if she were preparing to start an argument.
Peter blinked, realizing his smile had been interpreted in completely the wrong way. 'She thinks I'm mocking her motivation?' He knew Colleen had built high walls around herself, and those words had been a rare glimpse of what was behind them.
In other words, she was finally opening up to him a little, and he, with that smile, had made her feel exposed. 'Colleen must not have said this to many people...' Quickly formulating a response to fix the situation and push that tension away, Peter let his gaze soften. "I just didn't expect something so noble, Colleen. You're a genuinely good person… the kind who does the right thing even when no one is watching. That's very rare nowadays. I couldn't have chosen someone better to teach me."
Colleen blinked once, twice, three times, her expression frozen between surprise and something else Peter couldn't identify. She kept staring at him for a moment that felt much longer than it was before finally speaking, looking away toward the street. "Hm. If you think so."
"Of course I do." Peter replied immediately, leaning slightly forward in his chair, his elbows resting on the plastic table. "I'm really glad I met you—"
"Enough." She interrupted him dryly, but without the earlier harshness, keeping her gaze away. "You're not going to get anything out of me with that sweet talk." Colleen paused briefly before continuing. "And don't think you're going to make me go easy on you on the tatami."
"It hurts my heart that you assume my words have ulterior motives." Peter said with a sad expression, although the playful glint in his eyes gave away how much he was enjoying it. "I'm an extremely sincere person, you know?"
Before Colleen could respond — probably with something sharp judging by the expression forming on her face — a waiter walked up to the table, balancing a tray in one hand. "Large pizza, pepperoni and mozzarella?" he asked, shifting his gaze between the two.
"Exactly." Peter replied, already feeling his mouth water with the wonderful smell of pizza rising from the tray. In front of him, Colleen had a similar reaction — but much more intense. Her eyes locked onto the pizza as if she had just discovered a legendary artifact, something lost for centuries and finally found.
The waiter placed the tray at the center of the table, and steam rose in spirals, carrying with it the aroma of the sauce, melted cheese, and freshly baked dough. "Buon appetito!" he said with an exaggerated accent that was far from authentic Italian, before walking away.
"Thank you," Peter murmured, keeping his attention on Colleen, who continued staring at the pizza in silence, completely still, her eyes wide and her mouth slightly open. 'Oh?' A mischievous smile began to form on Peter's lips.
"Colleen Wing…" he began, straightening his posture and extending a hand toward the pizza, like a presenter revealing a work of art. "What we have here is known as pizza. Originating from Naples, in Italy, it crossed oceans brought by immigrants in search of a better life. This one, specifically, is made with tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese—"
"Peter," Colleen's voice cut through his speech like a blade — dry, direct, leaving no room for continuation.
"Yes?" he asked innocently.
She slowly lifted her face from the pizza to him, looking at him with a completely neutral expression. "I know what pizza is."
"Are you sure?" Peter asked, his hand still extended over the table. "Because you're looking at it like it's the first time you've seen one in your life."
"I'm looking at it like someone who's hungry." Colleen shot back, reaching out and smacking Peter's hand away. Then, without wasting any time, she grabbed one of the slices.
"You can be hungry and it still be your first time seeing a pizza," Peter argued, letting out a laugh as he pulled his hand back. "I'm not judging. I mean… there probably aren't many pizzerias in the temple where you grew up, right?"
Colleen narrowed her eyes immediately, stopping halfway as she brought the slice to her mouth. "Do you think I spent my entire life in a temple?"
Peter tilted his head. "No?"
"Of course not!"
"Right, sorry." He raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. "It's just that you're so good at fighting that I assumed your training started from the moment you were born. You know, wake up in the morning, push-ups, meditation, kicking trees, listening to monks' teachings, that kind of thing."
She let out a small breath through her nose, something dangerously close to a laugh. "That would be impossible. No one starts before they're five."
'Interesting...' Peter picked up a slice of pizza and brought it to his mouth, the cheese stretching in golden strands that he had to wrap around his finger to break. "So you started at five?" he asked before taking a bite.
"Something like that." Colleen replied evasively, leaving no room to dig deeper. And then, without any ceremony, she brought the pizza to her mouth — and in two quick bites, the entire slice disappeared. "Hmm~"
The sound that escaped her throat was so unexpected that Peter almost dropped his own slice. "You sure this isn't your first time?" he asked, watching her already grab the next slice and take another bite.
"No." The answer came quickly, slightly muffled by her partially full mouth. "It's just been a long time since I've had one. I barely even remembered the taste." She ate the second slice with the same voracity as the first, her eyes half-closed in pleasure.
'That's… kind of sad.' Peter frowned for a second, but quickly masked it with a smile. "Then don't hold back. Let's make up for lost time."
"Hum-hum."
***
After destroying the pizza — in record time, thanks mainly to Colleen's efficiency — Peter walked her back to the Chikara Dojo. She had been against it at first, of course, saying it was ridiculous for him to worry about her safety. She was the one who should be worried about his safety.
But she ended up giving in after a few minutes of persuasion and him playing the old "chivalry" card… or at least, that's what he'd like to believe. The truth was far less flattering: Colleen only agreed because she was full and too tired to keep arguing. At that moment, arguing required energy — and she had spent it all eating.
Which brought them to now, walking side by side along the busy nighttime sidewalks of Chinatown, with Peter in the middle of a particularly unfortunate story from his life.
"And then?"
"And then I started to smell like tomato juice," he concluded, finishing telling the story of the time he stank like garbage for three days until he followed J. Jonah Jameson's advice and took a tomato juice bath to get rid of the smell. "My aunt said you could smell the tomato from the other side of the house."
"Pfff."
He obviously left out the part where he almost died that day, defeated by Shocker, crushed under tons of garbage, saved by pure luck when he managed to squeeze himself into an old refrigerator, preferring something much simpler like: he fell into the trash while trying to take pictures of Spider-Man.
"See what I told you? That job of yours is awful." Colleen commented, regaining her composure, although there were still traces of laughter in her voice.
"I see we're done with half-words, huh?" Peter said, putting his hands in his pants pockets. "But... I agree. I urgently need to find a new profession." He let out a small sigh. "The problem is that the options for a sixteen-year-old student are... minimal."
"Not minimal." Colleen dodged a group of people without breaking her walking pace. "You're just looking in the wrong places."
"Any suggestions that don't involve pizza delivery or babysitting?" he asked, slightly raising an eyebrow.
Colleen thought for a moment, resting her finger on her chin. "You... could teach."
Peter turned his head toward her, "Teach?"
"On the first day we met, when I said I also offered a scholarship along with the classes, you told me you didn't need it. That it wasn't a problem if you wanted to go to college and I should offer it to someone who really needed it." She shrugged, "If you're a genius, use that. Start offering private lessons for a fair price. I'm sure you'll make a good amount. There's always someone out there who needs help."
Peter considered the idea for a few seconds, his gaze briefly drifting to the street ahead. It wasn't a bad idea. However, there was no chance he would follow it. He needed something that wouldn't interfere with Spider-Man, and depending on who it was, a private lesson could require a lot of time. "I didn't say it in such an arrogant way, but... yeah, it's not a bad idea. I've given some private lessons before, so it wouldn't exactly be unfamiliar territory."
"Then that's it. Problem solved." Colleen said, extending her hand and giving a light tap with the back of her fingers on his shoulder. "You don't need to risk your life to make money anymore."
"Worried about your favorite student?"
She frowned, throwing him a hard look. "You're my only student."
"Which implies I'm your favorite."
"You do understand that also means you're automatically my worst student?"
"... touché, Colleen, touché."
***
Disclaimer: This story and its characters belong to Sony Pictures and Marvel Comics (Disney). This is merely a fanfiction written by a fan, with no intention of infringement.