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It was, finally, movie night. Peter, Ned and MJ had been trying to do one for the past several months and had been unsuccessful, mainly because Peter was just so damn busy with patrolling and working at SI that he’d never had time, and then MJ was always going off on protest marches and planning Academic Decathon stuff. And then when they’d finally picked a date last month, Ned’s moms had whisked him away for a family get-together. It was a miracle that they’d managed to find an evening they were all free, in reality, but they had.
In all the time they’d tried to plan it, however, they’d never picked a movie to watch. They were all sat on Ned’s living room, and scrolling through the collection of films that the Leeds family had on offer. The family had purchased a wide array of their favourite films throughout the years, and Peter had stayed over at their house enough times to pretty much know the list off by heart.
“No Star Wars,” was MJ’s main rule, to which both Peter and Ned pouted.
MJ shook her head lightly and rolled her eyes at the silent protest. “That’s for you losers to do at your own little nerd meetings.”
“Fine,” Peter sighed, watching as Ned scrolled away from the collection of Star Wars movies that he’d been hovering over. It would have been too easy to watch Star Wars.
“Harry Potter?” Ned suggested as he clicked along to them. They had movies one through eight, but collectively as a group they’d kind of gone off Harry Potter after…everything that had happened with the author.
“Ew, no,” MJ rejected. “Let’s not be supporting the TERF tonight, please?”
Peter agreed wholeheartedly, and Ned did too, moving on without a word. They came across the action movies that one of Ned’s moms liked to watch, and all of them winced.
“Umm….Disney?” Peter suggested as a springboard, because the mindless scrolling wasn’t getting them anywhere. His mind immediately supplied Tangled as the movie of choice. It was just such a damn good movie, and he knew the Leeds had it somewhere.
“I’m not in the mood for Disney Disney,” Ned shook his head. There was a pained wince written across his face, and Peter quickly recalled the time when Ned had been so obsessed with Disney movies for like six months and had watched them all so many times that he physically couldn’t watch them anymore. That had been years ago, before high school, when they’d been just kids. Before they’d been friends with MJ.
“Pixar?” Peter corrected, knowing Ned’s slight aversion to watching a Disney film, but acceptance of Pixar films because they weren’t real Disney films.
“Technically, Pixar is part of Disney,” MJ corrected, but gave no objections. That was pretty much a go-ahead from MJ, to be honest.
“Yeah, but it’s just not though,” Ned contested, willing to watch one as well. “Okay, what Pixar film?”
Peter mentally scanned through the list of Pixar films he knew from when he was younger.
“Hmm…Toy Story?” Peter grinned, remembering how much he’d loved it as a kid. There was general assent to watch it, nods coming from the others too.
“God, I loved that movie,” Ned said. He scrolled through the list of the films he owned, once, twice, and found no Toy Story.
“Maybe it’s on Netflix?” Peter suggested, so Ned clicked onto the app to check, logging in to his profile and typing in ‘Toy Story’ into the search bar.
“Argh,” Ned said disappointedly as the TV displayed the lack of results found. “Guess it’s not.”
“That’s a shame,” MJ said, picking at one of her fingernails. “Kind of wanted to relive my childhood by watching it.”
“We could buy it?” Ned suggested. “I can ask one of my moms, I guess?” He seemed reluctant to move from the sofa, hesitant to ask permission.
Peter frowned. He’d kind of been jazzed about the idea of watching Toy Story. If only there was some way they could watch it without having to pay for it. Well, technically they could pirate it but that worked better on phones, and laptops, and Peter didn’t want to get Mrs Leeds in trouble for hacking into her TV.
But then—
“Oh!” Peter said as the realisation hit him, slapping his forehead with his hand because— he was an idiot! “Guys, wait, I’ve got this.”
Peter pulled out his phone and scrolled through his contacts to find the one he was looking for, entitled David (Nice Netflix Guy).
Because — Peter owned Netflix. It had been a…gift, of sorts, from Tony. Peter had asked for a Netflix subscription for Christmas, but had just texted Tony the word “netflix” when the man had asked, and had suffered the repercussions of that when Tony had handed him over the company.
Which, apparently, Tony had already owned, having realised the potential of it before it became famous. He just switched over the legal ownership to Peter, and then, bam, Peter owned a company. Peter didn’t have much actual input in it. When Tony had been in charge, he’d left all of the actual running of the company down to the CEOs, and Peter pretty much did the same. Occasionally he had calls with the people in charge, but it was really no different to talking to people at SI. The nicest person he’d found at Netflix was David, one of the higher-ups who didn’t mind taking the word of a teenager as gospel. Some of the other higher ups had problems with Peter being a teenager and being their boss, but hey. You couldn’t win over everyone.
So when he had to communicate with anyone from Netflix, he tended to liase with David. Peter didn’t know whether it was going to work, as he clicked on the call button to call David. They hadn’t spoken in a while, really, and it was like nearly 9pm at night. It was highly likely the man had gone home.
But he picked up within a minute of the phone ringing. Ned and MJ were staring at Peter in confusion. Peter had taken a lot of weird phone calls over the last couple months, but they could see no way how he was going to resolve the issue of Toy Story not being on Netflix.
“Hi, Mr Parker,” David said. He sounded tired. “What is it that you need?”
Peter had tried, so hard, to get David to call him Peter. He’d tried everything. He’d gotten to the point where he’d considered blackmail, and had considered some very immoral working practises which would be sure to get a union called on him. He could truly empathise with how Tony felt when Peter had been so insistent on calling him Mr Stark and Tony had been begging him to change it.
But David refused to use his first name, and it was devastating.
“We still chill about me asking for films to put on?” Peter asked, skipping past the whole Mr Parker thing. That was a conversation not to have in the evening.
“It’s your company,” David mumbled, and it sounded like he shrugged, but that kind of thing was sort of difficult to tell through the phone. “But that depends. What film is it?”
“Um…Toy Story.” Peter bit his lip. It was technically a stretch, that request. Netflix were very much against making deals with Disney. Well, actually it was vice-versa, Disney didn’t like letting people have access to their films, even though Peter thought that was kind of the point of…making films.
There was a pause.
“Jesus Christ,” David sighed, and made it sound like Peter’s request had aged him ten years. “Kid, that’s Disney. You know what we said about Disney?”
“Yeah, that they’re corporate assholes?” Peter nodded.
“Yes, and also that they don’t negotiate with us,” David reminded him, and Peter winced, shooting a look at MJ and Ned. They couldn’t hear the other half of the conversation, because Peter didn’t have it on speaker, and looked extremely confused.
“But you can do it, right?” Peter queried, shutting his eyes and crossing the fingers on his spare hand, hopeful.
“Yeah, I can do it,” David muttered frustratedly. “But it’s going to cost us…you, really… a lot.”
“That’s fine,” Peter waved it off. “You know I don’t care about that.”
“Ted is not going to be happy,” David mumbled. “The stocks…”
“You can tell Ted I don’t give a shit about the stocks, dude,” Peter shook his head. “If anyone tries to give you shit for this, tell them it was for me, and that should shut them up.”
David coughed, and started typing furiously on a keyboard. “I’m on it, Mr Parker.”
Peter grinned. “Awesome. Oh, and also, you gotta stop working this late, dude.”
Peter shot a look at his watch, double-checking— and yeah, it was definitely nearly 9pm. David needed to go home and go to sleep.
“What do you mean? It’s only like four—oh,” David said, clearly only just glancing at a clock himself.
“Yeah. Tell Ted and Reed to give me a ring,” Peter said with a frown, disappointed. They shouldn’t let their employees stay that late at work. He was going to have some very strong words with the joint CEOs of the companies. They would probably still keep their jobs, but the jury was still out on that one.
“Will do,” David said, spaced out. Peter could hear the rapid typing of his keyboard. “Right, well, I’ll get on that.” The way David was speaking implied that he wanted to end the phone call.
“Thanks, man,” Peter said, “Please do get home as soon as you can, though.”
He felt kind of bad about piling that amount of work on David, especially at nearly nine pm, but he really did want to watch Toy Story, and it was the only way. And he was planning on sending David a nice little gift afterward, in any case. Peter smiled, satisfied, and turned to look at his friends.
“Pretty sure that will work,” He said.
“Peter…” Ned said, speechless. He blinked, then seemed to recover himself. “Was that—who was that? Was it Tony?”
What did Tony have anything to do with this?
“What? No, it was a guy from Netflix. David.” Peter corrected, “He’s like one of the Heads of Departments, I think?”
He’d forgotten David’s actual role in Netflix, which was like slightly disappointing considering that David was his main point-person at Netflix. Peter didn’t like having to talk to Reed or Ted, the joint CEOs. They tended to ask him difficult questions, even though Peter had expressly said that he hadn’t wanted to be in control of difficult decisions. That was their job.
“And…” Ned said in a voice slightly more high-pitched than normal. “Why do you have his number?”
Peter glanced between each of his friends faces. He’d presumably never told them about the whole, y’know, owning Netflix situation. He’d gotten so used to hiding it around May that he never really mentioned it. He forgot himself, most of the time, with everything that had been going on with Stark Industries and all. Peter was kind of more invested in running Stark than he was Netflix, given that he was the heir to the company and genuinely quite instrumental in running it.
“Oh,” Peter paused, decided to go for a cavalier kind of attitude about the whole thing. “I own Netflix. I thought I mentioned that at some point.”
“You own Netflix,” Ned said, staring at him. Peter nodded back, keeping his face clear of emotion and his eyes wide, blinking.
“You, Peter Parker, own Netflix.” Ned repeated, slowly. “As in, the multi-billion dollar streaming service.”
“Yeah, Tony gave it to me for Christmas.” Peter said, completely straight-faced. He didn’t want to make a big deal out of it, it wasn’t really that big a thing.
The pair of them were clearly reeling from that declaration, and Peter didn't want to address it. Their reaction, after all, was exactly the reason he hadn’t told May about owning Netflix. Whenever the Parkers wanted to watch something on the service that wasn’t already on there, Peter snuck off to the bathroom to give David a call, and then magically it appeared. Peter had kind of gaslighted May into making her think she wasn’t using the TV correctly. He felt kind of bad, but also….May would throw a fit if she found out the truth.
So instead of making eye contact with Ned, whose eyes looked like they were bulging out of his head, or with MJ, who was rapidly sketching Ned’s face in her People in Crisis notebook and had an amused smile on her face as she did so, Peter looked at the TV.
Where it had previously shown no results, the TV had updated to show that Toy Story, had, in fact, been recently added to Netflix. Very recently added, but Netflix didn’t have the option for that.
“Oh, look!” Peter said with a beaming smile. “He did it! Karen, send a thank you note to David.”
Peter paused, thinking. No, David deserved more than just a thank you note. “Hell, send him a gift basket. Chocolate, soap, the whole works. And a taxi.”
“It is done,” Karen said, with a slight lilt to her usually robotic voice. She always liked sending gifts to people, it was one of her favourite things. She shared that trait with DUMM-E, Tony’s first bot, who had a tendency to give people motor-oil infused smoothies and was always extremely content when he did so.
Ned eventually came out of his state of shock, settling back into the sofa and Peter grabbed the remote, because his best friend didn’t look like he was going to move any time soon. He clicked on the Toy Story icon.
“We okay to watch?” Peter asked, glancing at them. Ned gave a small nod, as did MJ.
It was a success, in the end, movie night, despite the ups and downs. All three of them enjoyed watching Toy Story thoroughly and vowed to do it again. And so, for the first time in the several months he’d owned Netflix, Peter found a true purpose for it: to ask for films to be added onto Netflix for the sole purpose of watching them at movie night.