"Lev's great at secrets," Sasha says into Lev, and holds him tighter. 

He is so clearly resisting the urge to say "you two are cute."

Instead he sits down in a chair, touches Lev's shoulder, and says, "I'm not going to hurt you, I promise."

Lev has had a VERY STRESSFUL PAST TWENTY-FOUR HOURS.

He starts crying.

Asher hugs him.

He shifts around Lev to accommodate Asher, puts one hand on the back of Lev's head. "We've got you, I've got you —"

"Why are you all so nice to me--"

"I love you," he says, like it's all the explanation anyone could need. 

"I love Sasha and he loves you."

"And — I have no reason not to be? I love you. Of course I'm going to be nice to you." 

Cuddles?

Absolutely cuddles. 

Eventually Asher will leave to go to do work. 

Next time Sasha checks his phone, he will receive a notification that playboyphilanthropist posted something new last night. It is about Asher helping Spidey (now portrayed as having a normal human number of eyes) overcome his fear of mind control by using the mind control ray on him and then having a ton of sex while he is mind controlled.

....well someone checked his bookmarks and knows what he likes. 

He bookmarks it and leaves three heart emojis in the "bookmarker's notes" section. 

Time passes. 

Minors can't be emancipated in New York until they're sixteen, so Lev is hiding in Stark Tower for now while Asher bribes the cops to look the other way. (Asher makes various grumbling remarks about how for once the cops are being bribed to overlook rescuing an abuse victim, instead of the other way around.) Jarvis handles the paparazzi. 

Lev's still very thin, but he's not going to walk any catwalks any time soon. Asher's fridges are full of calorie-dense food: peanut butter fudge, avocados, protein powder, whole-fat milk. He lets his hair grow out, partially to make him look more different, partially because he thinks he looks better that way.

Asher has the hands-off attitude towards education of a person who was homeschooled and attended college at fourteen. Lev takes online classes and reads textbooks, supplemented by occasional tutoring from grad students at NYU. For the first time since he got his power, the classes actually go fast enough. The ever-present book of sudoku is replaced with a scrap of paper on which he proves theorems. 

Lev doesn't have the background knowledge or the interest to help much with Stark Industries, but he spends a bunch of time figuring out what various supervillains are doing and also working with the Yinsen Foundation. His list of courses becomes lighter on science and heavier on social science, although he still loves and is interested in everything. 

Sasha and Lev go out on dates. They can hold hands in public and kiss. He brings Sasha flowers he picked while Sasha was at school; he writes Sasha letters about how wonderful he is and how much he means to Lev; he learns first aid so he can treat Sasha's Spiderman wounds more easily. 

Lev's bedroom is soundproofed and they can have sex as noisily as they want. After the third or fourth time they've had sex, he has enough training data that he can just have his power running the entire time they have sex; it has advantages in terms of always knowing exactly how Sasha wants to be touched and what Sasha wants to have said to him, and disadvantages in terms of having to have fudge by the bed so he can eat as soon as they're done.

Lev is willing to do Sasha's homework for him but he really wants to explain everything to Sasha. It sometimes takes him a moment to remember which things are and are not obvious, but once he knows his explanations are generally very good and he never seems impatient with Sasha for not getting something. He does, however, regularly wander off onto some unrelated topic that Lev happens to find interesting. (Everything in the world, according to Lev, is interesting, especially anything that has to do with people. People are the most wonderful and fascinating topic on the planet and he wants to know everything about them.) 

He is so very, very happy. 

Asher is careful about how he texts Sasha. He doesn't flirt. His compliments are conscientiously platonic, things you'd say to a family friend you happened to like. After that one morning, he doesn't say that he loves Sasha. He doesn't offer to take Sasha flying unless Sasha initiates. But there are still jokes, and pictures of flowers, and rants about his dumbass supervillains; and there are pictures of Lev sleeping on a couch because he forgot to go to bed (with a blanket Asher presumably tucked around him), and cute stories about how excited Lev is to meet some professor, and CORVID FACTS or ANCIENT CHINA FACTS or ANATOMY OF THE EYE FACTS that are prefaced with "Lev says."

And Asher's AO3 updates much more than it used to, and much more single-mindedly. Not all of the stories are about bondage and hypnotism, praise kink and orgasm denial, but most are. Some of the stories have a furred Spiderman or a Spiderman with eight eyes or an exoskeleton, but a lot of them depict him as a pretty twink who has just turned eighteen. Sasha gets to read his first story where he has a spider dick. 

The first check deposited in Sasha's bank account is more money than he has ever seen in one place in his entire life. After that, he gets $1500 every two weeks like clockwork. He is apparently a Stark Industries intern, and Lev did the books so that everyone else would think Sasha was supposed to be working in some other department. 

He has enough to eat and enough to bring home to his family and he tells his parents he's sleeping at a friend's house almost as many nights he doesn't. It seems like a fair trade. 

His grades slip, some. He's busy being Spiderman, busy with Asher and Lev, busy in general, and Lev explains everything better than the teachers can but he has to wait until after school for that and Lev isn't there to help him cheat on tests anymore. But with Lev able to actually explain, he's enjoying learning more than he's enjoyed it in — a while, at least — and that's worth it, to him. Lev thinks everything is interesting and Lev is never wrong about whether something is interesting, as far as Sasha's concerned. 

He goes flying with Asher once, twice, and carefully files away the comment that morning. He doesn't try to initiate flirting; he does leave very enthusiastic comments on the fanfic. (He writes some of his own. He knows good writing when he sees it, and this isn't it. He hides the document in a tree of folders and resolves to try again if at some point he has more time.) He sends Asher pictures of birds and rants about architecture and poems he likes. He goes on dates with Lev and holds his hand while they walk and kisses him on park benches and can't take his eyes off of him. 

He has friends and loved ones who he doesn't have to hide from, and they're happy and safe and he gets to kiss Lev and hug Asher as often as he wants, and he's never in his whole life been happier. 

(Asher names some of the stories after the poetry.)

To Sasha:

your boyfriend just called me a moron

To Deadpool:

by any chance do you happen to be fifteen

...I assume there's a reason he did that?

uh it's complicated but he was right, ask him to explain it

it was really adorable though

I got backed into a corner by a yelling fifteen-year-old who's like six inches shorter than me

i’m 23 and what is this

just checking

for secret reasons

wait you're older than me????

yeah it’s fucked up

i try not to think about it

good thing I like older men

oh good

it’d really fuck up your plans to ravish me on the roof of stark tower otherwise

it would!

seriously, any time, what is the point of having stark tower if you don't get to ravish people on the roof