Chapter Text
MJ Watson is trying to remember how to breathe when the news breaks. She doesn’t know if it’s on the television in her and Ned’s apartment, or if it blinks up at them from one of their phones. Maybe it’s shouted from the passerby on the street down below. All she knows is her world has expanded by one glaring headline, the only thing that can suspend her again completely.
BREAKING NEWS: SPIDER-MAN IN CRITICAL CONDITION.
Through her body’s jagged attempt at memory (the gasps she can hear through her own ears but somehow cannot feel, freeing themselves from the cage of her chest), she thinks, that can’t be right. He was just here.
She’d told him to be careful, and he’d promised he would be. Critical condition isn’t careful.
It’s a news alert from Ned’s computer, she realizes next, sniffling away the remaining tears being literally trapped in her own body had produced.
Another thought rises, slamming into her like a truck. It pushes out all logic, blocking every one of her more rational senses. She can’t name it, though it’s familiar to her, something akin to pure desperation, or as close to it as she can currently get.
She needs to see him.
Now.
“Yeah,” Ned says as they rush around the apartment, grabbing only the essentials as they practically sprint outside, jumping into the fray, “someone should make sure he’s okay! He’s probably all alone up there, you know? He’s always looking out for us. The least we can do is look out for him.”
MJ nods her agreement, only because she knows that if she opens her mouth now, she has no idea what will come out. Thankfully, her best friend doesn’t ask too many questions as they make their way to the hospital. They manage to slip inside amongst the already large crowd of well wishers, though the vigil is growing larger and larger by the second. It doesn’t take long for her to find out the room he’s in; a few well placed lies and the exhausted, tear stained face she sports sees them up to the top floor in no time.
Frank Castle stands guard at the door, his eyebrows lifting up when he sees her.
“Can I… see him?” she asks, clutching her bag against her, her fingers worrying a few loose threads in the strap. He nods, stepping aside.
“He’ll be glad to know you came.”
“Can you, uh, tell him thank you?” Ned asks just before she goes in, “and that we’re all rooting for him to pull through?”
MJ forces her head to nod, a barely audible, “Of course,” leaving her lips before she enters the room, closing the door behind her.
Her eyes go straight to him.
Peter looks… broken. He’s pale, almost sickly, his body covered in a hospital gown, a mask strapped to his face, pushing oxygen through to his lungs. The bruising on his face paints it purple and red, burst capillaries beneath the skin alight beneath the harsh fluorescents. The hospital room is nice enough, but she hates it, hates hospitals, has since she was seven years old. It reminds her of her grandmother slipping away before her eyes, the life fading out of the older woman as she held her hand.
Maybe that’s why she doesn’t touch him as she approaches, still holding on tightly to her bag instead. It’s silly, but she doesn’t want to risk making anything worse.
MJ pulls up a chair to sit at his side, exhaling heavily.
“I told you to be careful,” is the first thing she says, and she doesn’t mean to chastise him when he’s like this, barely alive and fighting like hell to remain just that, but god damn it she’d meant it when she said it. It was two words, so simple. Foolishly, she’d thought they’d protect him. But even if she’d been wrong, that isn’t his fault.
She doesn’t know what happened, how he got so severely injured. The only clue was Frank’s eyes, flashing with guilt as he’d moved to let her in. MJ decides the how isn’t important, focusing instead on the fact that if he’s clinging to life, that means he hasn’t released it entirely yet.
Peter, of course, says nothing. He doesn’t move a single muscle as the machines keeping him alive beep and whir. It frustrates her as much as it saddens her, even if she knows he won’t wake up while she’s here. There is no true love’s kiss to break this spell, just a woman alone, hoping to every force in the universe that he will get through this.
“I brought you something,” she tells him next, as much of an apology as she can manage without shattering before him. She rifles through her bag, lifting the sketch she’d made of him and Ned up before carefully placing it on the table with the rest of the well wishers gifts. It’s an extensive pile, Spider-Man balloons and gift bags, hand written notes and Hallmark cards. So she chooses a spot in the middle, easy to see for whenever his eyes open.
MJ continues, “I thought it might be… comforting, to see something familiar. When you wake up.”
When, not if. He’s pulling through this. He doesn’t have a choice. Not because the city needs their hero — it’s selfish, that should be the first reason on her mind to wish for a speedy recovery for him. But in the short time she’s known him, she’s felt a warmth she’s certain she never has before and never will again. He fills every room he enters with all of himself, every emotion he carries. He’s kept her and Ned safe all this time, now it’s her turn to return the favor the only way she knows how.
Speaking of —
“Ned says thank you.”
She can’t stop the words from coming out, doesn’t even try to hold them back anymore. She’s frozen enough for one day.
“And that we’re all rooting for you. The entire city is — everyone wants you to make it. Including me.”
Something breaks within her chest, swift and harsh. Her breath comes out shaking. She doesn’t know why she’s still talking; he probably can’t even hear her, but somehow, she has to tell him what she feels again. She owes him that much, after everything.
MJ’s hand moves of its own accord, grasping onto his fingers gently.
“Look, Peter. I don’t know what you did, and I don’t really know you. But I know you saved us. And I don’t know what happened out there, but I do know that you’re gonna make it through this. You have to.”
Her voice cracks along the edge of every sentence, but she keeps talking to him. If she stops now, she’ll never have the courage to say these words again.
“And I know I said I didn’t love you, because I didn’t know you, but you are not robbing me of the chance of trying to know you better. That’s all I’m asking. Just let me try. Please.”
Her tears fall freely now, and she wipes them away with a dark grey sleeve, forcing herself to breathe.
“I’m going to see you again,” she tells him softly.
A promise of her own, one that strikes at the center of her heart, falling through time.
She’s said those words before.
This is the first time she’s ever told him that.
MJ shakes every confusing emotion swirling through her off, holding onto the only thread bringing her a modicum of peace long enough to whisper into his ear, “Come find me when you’re ready.”
She’ll wait. As long as it takes.
His fingers spasm in hers.
MJ stops breathing.
“Peter?”
She waits, as promised, five whole minutes to be sure she didn’t dream the movement or imagine it. Once it’s clear he will not move again, she decides she had better go home.
She doesn’t know what compels her to press a kiss against his forehead gently, or to brush his curls away from his face before she rises and exits the room.
She refuses to think about it.
She can’t look at Frank when she tells him, “Thank you,” as Ned comes up to her side. She hears his grunted, “Don’t thank me, kid,” from behind her as they make their way out of the hospital.
MJ cries all the way home, deep, heaving sobs. She doesn't know why. Ned takes care of her as best he can, making her tea and wrapping her in blankets. He doesn’t push or prod, and she’s grateful for that.
MJ draws for the next two days. It’s the same thing over and over again: Peter’s eyes. The real ones, not the ones behind the mask. They haunt her, flickering in the back of her mind during the precious few hours that she does manage to sleep. She’s sick with worry that feels like it shouldn’t even belong to her, and simultaneously that it’s hers alone to carry.
She doesn’t call her boyfriend back once.
Memories come to her as she sketches, dim scenes from the depth of her head. The first is her screaming and falling to the ground when he’d saved her initially, his rushed and hurried words blocking out the sounds of the city.
“MJ! Oh my God, no, no, no. Please, no. Come on.”
Suited fingers on her neck and his body sagging with relief while he held her in his arms, murmuring, “Oh, thank God. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”
She’d wanted to ask him For what? but she couldn’t make herself move for all the world.
She remembers the hide out too, and flying through the air to get there and back. Their conversation, fraught with emotions she hadn’t felt in years. She’d hated breaking his heart, but there was truly nothing there. Or, whatever flimsy sparks she’d caught while they spoke all night before weren’t enough to replace the years she couldn’t recall. Still, going to him was second nature; it wasn’t even a question, or a choice. Besides, there was no Mrs. Spider-Man to visit him at the hospital.
(She supposes, in another life — the other life he spoke of, the other life he wrote about — it would have been her, anyway.)
Confusion surrounds her — there’s so much she doesn’t know. The only certainty she can recall is she’s felt more alive in the last few days than at all of her time in college. She wants to blame that solely on the recent increases in her near death experiences.
She can’t.
She doesn’t remember the kiss, but her conversation with Peter about it afterwards rushes back to her as she shades in his iris. He didn’t have to tell her about it, but he did. He didn’t have to try and keep her safe anymore, knowing she didn’t know who he was, but he did. He’d come up to the apartment, laughed with her and Ned, even partially included them on his mission. And yes, he hadn’t told her his secret, their secret. But she knows now, and if he doesn’t wake up, she will never get the chance to tell him that remembering who he was isn’t as important as getting to know who he’s become.
She finishes her sketch and leaves her sketchbook on the couch, climbing up to the rooftop of her building. She comes here when she can’t sleep, or when the world is too noisy to let her think.
MJ sits, slowly rubbing a broken pendant in the shape of a black dahlia in between her fingers. She can’t remember anything about it, except that she got it on a trip to Prague in high school, and she’s worn it ever since. She’s always thought it was good luck, something to keep her safe.
She knows better now, but she still thinks it’s worked. After all, he’s been there all this time, protecting her, watching her back. She hopes her drawing can do the same for him, watch over him when she can’t, give him something to hold onto when everything around him spins out of control.
The sun edges across the corner of the sky as her phone dings with another alert.
BREAKING NEWS: SPIDER-MAN SEEN SMILING AND WAVING FROM HOSPITAL
MJ exhales, relieved tears pricking at the corners of her eyes. She holds her pendant, a bone tired smile lifting up the edges of her lips as she stares out at the sky.
A brand new day stares back at her.
She’s grateful that somewhere out there, Peter can see it too.