Chapter Text
Many years later, as Peter Parker is dying in her arms, MJ will remember that distant morning when she kissed Spider-Man at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. It’s only the shape of the memory in the form of the tiny scar above her eyebrow that returns to her, the outline of his arms around her, the imprint of his lips against hers, the snapping of the bitter cold wind that preceded the coldest winter the city had seen in years, the one she escaped just in the nick of time and watched batter New York with snowstorm after snowstorm from the safety of her dorm in Cambridge. That was the period of her life where she was still forming the idea of who she would be, introducing herself to various colorful strangers, to future friends as Michelle first, MJ later.
There had been some itching on her skin, from that tiny scar, from the center of her soul, that she couldn’t quite scratch. Not with her brief party animal era where she’d throw back shots before stumbling to her 8am writing class, and every weekend blended together in a blur of neon colored lights and her cheek resting against Ned’s shoulder as he dragged her home. It subsided, she thought, with time — with the overwhelming coursework and club activities and internship responsibilities — so when she’d finally returned to the city sitting on an island that rocked so much she thought she’d gotten seasick, MJ had assumed she was free.
But then, Peter Parker.
“Homegoing.” The spoon rattles against the ceramic tea cup, a gentle clink that’s deafening in the gap of silence between his sentences. MJ peers over the book, almost regretting it when she’s met with Peter’s awkward smile. “How are you liking it so far?”
Curtly, she replies, “I’m liking it.”
Whatever Peter’s next question is is trapped between his teeth as he snaps his mouth shut with an oddly tight expression. MJ supposes she should feel bad, but the itch is back and she can’t help but shift uncomfortably in her seat, rub the paper between her fingertips, glance as discretely as she can at the bathroom where Ned disappeared to all of the epic time of 4 minutes ago. Truly, an eternity.
“How’s the job search going?”
“You’re asking me that?”
Peter leans back in his chair, puts some more distance between them. MJ tries not to read into it too much.
She isn’t sure why she agreed to this. Not that there’s anything wrong with Peter Parker, perfectly tolerable and even enjoyable company as he is, but she finds herself anxious when she is in his proximity. Walking on eggshells isn’t quite right, more of tap dancing over shattered glass. Every word out of her mouth makes his face do funny things that MJ is sure she should know how to read, sure she should understand and respond to in the way his expression screams he’s expecting her to, and yet every sentence ends with disappointment smacked across his face for a traitorous split second before he quickly replaces it with some disgustingly disingenuous smile that makes her regret ever engaging in conversation with him.
And she knows that isn’t fair. He’s trying his best, a voice that sounds too much like Ned to be nestled so deep in the depths of her subconscious says, and yes, MJ mentally responds, she knows this. But he did erase our memory, so I’d say I’m kind of justified.
“I… am?” Peter says, reminding MJ that the conversation is only over in her head unfortunately, more asks in that tone of his that brings to mind images of puppies turning their heads. “Am I not supposed to?”
MJ holds back a sigh and chooses to take a sip of her coffee in the hopes that it’s gotten a little less bitter in the time it’s been sitting abandoned in her cup. It hasn’t.
“I think I’m going to have to be content being an unemployed bum for the rest of my life.” She pauses to stir the concoction that must be 80% poison and 20% shit. “Or a miserable bum. Either way, I’ll be a bum.”
Peter huffs a laugh. “Have you thought about Stark Industries?”
“They’re the epitome of evil. Of course I have.”
“Former weapons supplier.”
“Former or not, they supplied weapons. And their work with AI? Mass surveillance technology? Government connections? Yea, no. That whole Stark family is a plague to our planet, good riddance.”
Halfway through the sentence, MJ had stepped on a Stark Industries made landmine and kept plowing through the ensuing explosion on her quest to prove her point. She only realizes the damage done when she sees shrapnel in Peter’s expression, something caught between grief and reckoning. Somehow, in the cavernous pit of where her answer to I love you should’ve been, MJ knows that whatever words are written across his face aren’t ones she understands. Anger is all she feels at that, and she gulps down the rest of her drink along with whatever rage has clawed itself into her tongue. Disgusting.
“Tony Stark did a lot of good, too.” The words drag from his throat with all the grace of broken glass. Peter winces at his own pathetic tone and clears his throat. “He wasn’t all bad.”
With that sentence, something clicks. “How old were you when you started…” she makes the hand gesture she sees him doing when he’s about to start swinging. It cramps her hand.
Peter blinks at the sudden shift in topic. “14. Remember that field trip to that research lab in freshman year?”
She tries not to bristle, still upset. “Sure.”
He shows her the back of his hand, where a lightly dark circle just below his thumb joint sits. “Got bit by a radioactive spider. This led to that and,” he mimics her gesture, much more accurately, and she bites back a smile, “vigilante stuff.”
Spider-Man. Funny, a boy dressing himself up in color coordinated pajamas and saving cats from trees and stopping bike thieves calling himself a man. Before he knew what taxes were. That same boy drafted by Tony Stark in whatever personal war he had against Steve Rogers, pitted against super soldiers and super spies and aliens and robots. Pitted against the world, himself, against whatever gripe MJ’s soul won’t let go that makes every interaction with him a prick to her heart. Because of a field trip.
Ned slides back into his seat and he and Peter get to chatting, the thickness in the air that had settled finally lifting, just a bit. Ned has gotten very good at being an intermediate between them, for whatever it is Peter and MJ have festering between them, his presence a gentle balm that drains the malaise neither of them can seem to stand. Or, that MJ can’t stand, she’s gotten the sense that Peter is very adept at putting up with bullshit and pain.
Though it’s more than a sense; he’s crawled into their apartment closer to sunrise than sunset a handful of times over the past few months they’ve gotten refamiliarized. A tap tap tap at their window until she hears Ned rush out of his room, slides it open with as much grace and quiet as a bomb detonating, ushers Peter-Man into their bathtub and leaving a trail of red spots littered across the floor to the door of the locked bathroom where Peter probably has his mask shoved between his teeth to muffle his screams as he stitches himself up and Ned loses his fucking mind. MJ gives them the grace of pretending she doesn’t know, that she doesn’t have her ear pressed to the wood to listen, that she doesn’t constantly spend the meager extra funds she makes at her shitty barista job restocking their first aid supplies and keeping their window greased so it opens faster.
They are intent on keeping her in the dark, stay on that side, just beyond the door. She doesn’t remember, Ned doesn’t remember entirely, but MJ doesn’t love him and Ned has their handshake.
“You’re still awake?” Paul yawns, drops his hand on her cheek and caresses the skin under her eye. “What’s rattling around in there?”
MJ chews on the inside of her cheek and turns on her back. She doesn’t want to cry right now, she won’t have an explanation for why. The gravity will keep the tears in her eyes this way, but she misses the weight and warmth of his palm on her skin. Her tiny scar itches.
“I’m falling behind,” she whispers to the scraps of the memory that has yet to take form, just pushes against the inside of her skull with a dull pressure that’s threatening to spill over in waves that she knows she won’t be able to stop once they’ve started rolling.
“You only just got back, MJ, give yourself more grace.”
When she dreams, it’s of Cambridge, or what she thinks is Cambridge. It’s the roof of a red brick building, her head resting on a book, someone by her side, saying words that the breeze sweeps away into that winter wind that makes it feels like she’s falling, falling, until she lands on a cloud and watches the sun rise, the distinct feeling of loss aching in the space between her ribs. When she dreams, she’s afraid she’ll never wake up, and somehow she isn’t scared. And that scares her.
She swallows hard and tries not to choke on her words. When she turns to face him, she sees his eyes glittering in the shallow moonlight that slices through the gaps between the neighboring buildings, and though it’s beautiful, it’s not quite right.
“I miss you,” she says, not to Paul.
He kisses her forehead, gently and it burns. “I’m right here.”
Ned steals the last slice of pizza, for which MJ shoots him her deadliest glare, just as the shadow of Spider-Man sails over. She watches Ned follow his instincts to look up, fights her own as she snatches pizza and scarfs it down before he realizes what’s happened.
“You suck.” Ned chomps down on his garlic bread in mild irritation. “You suck and I hope you trip on a banana peel and step in a suspicious green puddle.”
“That’s an insane thing to wish on someone.”
“I know, that’s why I said it.” Both their phones ding in tandem, the Spidey Tracker alerting them to what they both already know. Ned stares her down, she stares back. “Is Jenna coming tonight?” He asks, knowingly.
“When does Jenna ever miss one of your ragers?”
“When you ‘forget’ to invite her?”
MJ sucks her teeth. “You act like that happens often.”
Ned shoots her an unimpressed look. “You act like you like her.”
“Whatever.” MJ fiddles around in her bag for longer than she needs to and pulls out a tiny Lego figurine, placing it between them. “Found this last night.”
Ned observes it for a beat, studying the cloak covering the evil looking guy, before grabbing it and turning it over and over in his hand. His mouth works, something threatening to spill that he knows he shouldn’t say and that he knows she desperately wants to hear, even if she pretends otherwise. He turns his gaze back to her. She found it on the windowsill, outside, slightly bloodied. She cleaned it before, cradling it against her forehead as if that would jog something that’s not there, and carefully placed it in the inner pocket of her purse before setting out that morning to a job interview that she aced at a company that she would rather drink from a suspicious green puddle before working for. She’d heard the tap tap tapping on the glass and woken up to catch just a glimpse of red and blue flash away as soon as he realized it wasn’t Ned that had awoken.
“Is Peter coming?” She asks, fake innocence sweetening her tone.
Ned shrugs.
They gather their things and set off down the block to the skyscraper that Ned works at. 24th floor, with a stunning view of the skyline and his own cozy cubicle nestled a few steps away from the office water cooler. It’s a nice work environment, MJ got halfway through the job application Ned practically forced her to fill out under threat of his steely silence before she came to her senses and decided a few hours of his frustrated anger was better than feeling her soul fall to pieces working that nine to five with good benefits.
“Ugh I don’t wanna go back.” He stretches the final syllable into a whine as he drags his feet. “I wish I could be unemployed again, I didn’t know how good I had it.”
“Who’s gonna pay the rent if you are?”
“Pft, not you.” MJ has half a mind to shove him into the window.
“Who’s the Lego guy?”
The look he whips at her is scandalized. “You don’t know Emperor Palpatine? From Star Wars??”
“No, I’m not a fucking nerd like you. Why’d he leave it?”
“Dunno, not like I know him,” Ned attempts at a joke that only sinks to the bottom of her stomach and settles amongst the pebbles of unwarranted guilt that’ve made their home there. “Is he coming tonight?”
“So now you’re asking me?”
“Because if he told you yes then he’ll be there. Guaranteed.”
She frowns. “And if he told you yes? Does that not count for anything?”
Ned hums. “Yea it does. But it’s not the same.”
“I have a boyfriend, Ned.”
The revolving door nearly smacks into him as he stops right outside the entrance to the building, pinning MJ with something foreign on his face that makes her question if, somewhere in the scraps of those memories from four years ago, there’s a version of him that exists that she never quite knew.
“I know that. He knows that. It’s not about that.” Ned fishes his ID out from under the sweater he’d thrown on and seems to temper his tone with the movement. “I don’t really know him, MJ, not like I used to. He told me one thing but I don’t know if that means anything.”
The ground beneath their feet shakes, threatening to split open and end this conversation that’s gone in a direction MJ doesn’t want to follow in death. She contemplates if it’s another earthquake, there had been one last week in New Jersey that could be felt from the city, Ned had called her breathless asking if she’d felt it, he’d fallen over because of it, and MJ responded she hadn’t even noticed, standing at the register of the coffee shop with the horrible feeling of déjà vu, wondering if she’d always be left out of things like this.
No, is the answer to that thought, plastered in bold font by Ned’s comment, the world doesn’t revolve around her, it’s just the subway rumbling just beneath where they are on its way to Coney Island and it’s just her catatrophizing tendencies she thought she’d packed up and put in a Goodwill donation box with all the rest of her childish nonsense when she moved away for college rearing its head, but Peter has a knack for making it seem like it does. To the detriment of all the other planets in his tiny solar system.
“I’m sorry,” she says, for lack of anything better to say.
Ned waves her off with a hand that’s more flippant than the hurt he’s doing a terrible job of hiding. “Just ask him, and let me know if I need to leave the window unlocked or if he’ll be using the front door, like a normal person.”
They part ways and MJ decides to take a walk, not like she has anything better to do. The weather is nice, that late fall sunshine and coolness that allows her to wear something other than shorts and a tank top and there’s a lot of people out, tourists meandering, college students skipping classes, locals rushing to and from. She stops at her favorite vintage store in SoHo, picks up terrible pizza on Bleecker Street — incredibly overrated, but if she says that out loud she’ll be drawn and quartered — almost falling to her death as the ground splits beneath her feet, for real this time, she would do the math to calculate her velocity as she tumbles down into whatever abyss is swallowing her whole, it’s pretty simple stuff, but all she can think of during her brief descent is I can’t believe this shitty pizza is the last thing I’ll eat.
The second thought she has after she should’ve been long dead is I’m going to Mama’s Too.
“Holy shit!” She screams as she’s swept into the air, swings in a wide arch through the air, and is gently guided to her feet. She glances over the shoulder her hand rests on down the block, where a huge crack in the earth is claiming the lives of a couple of innocent cars and one not so innocent cybertruck. “What the hell?”
“MJ.”
The breathless way her name is said draws her attention to the wide white lenses peering straight into her soul. They aren’t completely opaque, MJ realizes standing this close, if she really looks, she can make out the shape of his eyes behind them, just as wide. And suddenly, the hands on her shoulder, her waist, are too warm.
“Are you ok?”
She swallows and nods shakily. “Um, yea. I think so. What just happened?”
Peter— Spider-Man lets out a long breathy laugh. Some hair is stuck to her forehead, he brushes it out of the way, his touch featherlight and too brief as he catches himself mid-motion and freezes. “Explosive, I think. Some rat guy—“ punctuated by the piercing squeaks of hundreds of vermin crawling out of the newly formed scar in the street, “—uh I gotta go. Are you sure you’re ok?”
At her nod he steps back, with great effort, moving out of the range of her magnetic field. She feels herself drawing towards him, so she digs her heels in the metaphorical dirt and stands her ground.
“I’ll see you soon?”
Spider-Man jerks back as if yanked out of place by someone tugging his strings. “Um—“
“I’ll see you tonight,” she says in place of his response, as his response.
“I, yea,” he glances away at the sound of screeching echoing from the ravine, still spins back to her and answers, “I’ll be there,” before he swings away.
And so MJ makes herself scarce, walking 20 minutes to stand in line for another 20 to spend $14 on pizza that’s much better but really not worth the price or impending stomachache or headache as she looks at her horribly pathetic bank account, but whatever she almost died and Paul is texting her and her forehead still tingles from where red gloved fingers brushed against her skin, the itch in the invisible sliver of her scar flaring.
The party starts at 9pm, officially, but this is New York and their friends have a habit of never showing up to an event less than 2 hours early, so she and Paul get busy, with each other first, then with setting things up. Lining up bottles of alcohol, bought legally this time, running to the bodega to get more cups, more food, more plates and napkins and plastic table cloth because MJ will not clean and Paul hates picking up her slack and soon it’s 12am and the room is not yet spinning, but turning so slowly on its axis you wouldn’t be able to tell it was if you weren’t paying attention. MJ is though, she’s paying very close attention to that and the bubbling of tequila in her stomach, cushioned by nothing more than the cheese and bread she’d eaten too long before. She needed water an hour ago, she needs space now.
“I gotta, I gotta go,” she inhales sharply as she braces herself against Ned, “I gotta.”
“Don’t hurl,” he says hurriedly, abandoning whatever conversation with someone who looks vaguely familiar and if MJ were any less fucked, might’ve recognized. There’s gotta be more than 30 people crammed into their tiny apartment and she just knows they’re going to get a complaint about it in the morning, but she really can’t bring herself to care about any of the old friends or potential fine they’ll have to pay when her lunch is threatening to have a word with the ground.
Ned waves his hands aimlessly in the air around her as if he were casting some spell, and maybe he wasn’t the right person to come to right now, he had a habit of chugging whatever drink people shoved into his hands and his face has that telltale flush that warns of a rough tomorrow and bade choices tonight. “If you are, don't do it on me.”
“Gee, thanks for the support.” MJ lightly shoves him away and quickly regrets it when she nearly loses her balance. She catches herself on the arm of someone nearby, a someone she quickly realizes is Jenna and the sickness has morphed into some unnamed ball of emotion that’s making her choke. “I need some air.”
“Want me to get Paul?”
“No.” That’d make things worse, make her feel worse but she doesn’t know why the bubbling joy has soured so suddenly. Something isn’t right, something is missing. “No, I’ll be outside. I’ll be back.”
She clumsily weaves her way through the room, out the door, down the three flights of stairs and out to the curb outside the apartment building entrance, where she plops her ass on the sidewalk and holds her head in her hands, counting down from 10 then up then down again. Until she can smell the weird city tinge and feel the rough asphalt under her sneakers and hear crunching of sneakers against concrete. MJ runs her tongue over her teeth, swallows back the wave of sickness that really wants to join the party and ruin her night. She swears she’s never going to drink this much again, not until the next party that is.
“I’m not too late, am I?”
There’s a strange quality to his voice, something caught between a warble and a drumbeat. It catches her off guard and when MJ looks up, she half expects to see a version of Peter Parker she never knew. The one she imagines Ned sees whenever she catches those moments of Peter distracted by something and Ned staring as if he’s seeing a completed puzzle where the pieces don’t quite fit into place, where the image doesn’t quite match the box. But it’s the same Peter Parker she’d been dragged to an awkward coffee hangout with, the one that will occasionally show up at their door holding a bag of Thai takeout for him and Ned to share that just so happened to have something extra for her.
The fluorescent streetlight catches on the edges of his curls, making him look like a sticker cut out and pasted onto thin air. Peter tilts his head.
“Drank too much?”
MJ shakes her head. If she admits that, she’s admitting defeat. And the party’s only just started. He walks closer and helps her to her feet, holding her until she’s steady enough to stand on her own and then letting go.
“Thanks. I’m good, just, taking a break.” He nods and says nothing, so she says nothing, and they stand in silence for long enough that MJ begins to question if he has always been this quiet or if she manages to steal his voice every time she’s around. “Wasn’t sure if you’d show.”
“Fight ended faster than I expected.” His hand instinctively goes to rub his face. There’s a bruise blooming on his jaw, it looks days old. “And you invited me, so.”
“So did Ned,” she adds.
Peter’s lips twist into a tiny grin. “Yea. He did.”
“Did you win?”
“Hm?”
“You’re— the fight, or whatever.”
“Kinda. Rat guy got away, but I made it out in one piece.”
She taps her jaw, the matching spot where his is purple. “Mostly one piece.”
His grin widens and the quality of his voice tips towards that drumbeat. “Small victories.”
The ground rumbles, it drags her back into her body and reality. She’s been out here too long, Paul and Ned will be wondering where she is. But if she goes back up now, it won’t feel right. Just a little empty, with Peter still outside, something still missing.
She asks, “Are you planning on heading up anytime soon?”
“In a bit.”
“Party’s not moving out here, you know.”
“Ha.” Peter rocks back and forth, heel to toe. “I think if I go up there, I’ll split open and something no one likes will crawl out.”
She blinks at his surprisingly raw answer, caught off guard that they aren’t doing the usual dance around the fire neither of them will acknowledge is burning them. She opens her mouth, closes it, repeats a few times until the words find themselves but Peter speaks before they can fall.
“Did you mean to invite me tonight?”
MJ clamps her jaw tight. “Yes.”
Peter nods. “Ok.” He sucks in a breath. “Ok.”
Since they’re being so truthful, she says, “Do you think just because I don’t love you, that I hate you?”
“No,” he lies.
Not too far in the future with a Peter Parker whose heart would be stuttering to a stop cradled in her arms with the tenderness of handling the reconstructed Death Star sitting on Ned’s dresser, MJ will come to the abrupt realization that this moment in front of a pile of trash bags waiting patiently until daybreak for sanitation to pick them up but until then they get a front row seat to whatever this is, that she should not have known he was telling a lie. Because she does not know Peter Parker, she hasn’t known him for four years and in her mind she’s never known him. But he’s lying, and she knows.
(“Stupid me,” she will huff between tears that mix with the dark red puddle collecting on the tile beneath her crossed legs. For a moment, the saltiness masks the smell of iron that she will never seem to be able to rid herself of. “I’ve known you for too long, Peter Parker. For longer than is probably healthy for anyone to know you.” She will kiss his chin, his nose, his forehead. “For far, far too long.”)
“You should head back up,” he continues, still rocking. “People will start to wonder.”
“Will you stay?”
MJ is angry at him, she can hear it dripping off her tone like venom. Peter winces and chews on the inside of his cheek, letting her get angrier.
“Yes.”
She holds his gaze until she’s sure he won’t vanish in a puff of smoke the moment she turns her back to him, then goes back to the party and drinks more, too much more, much more than she promised herself she would so she could let some of the rage sail off on a boat she envisions carrying everything and her sobriety far away. So when he reappears later in the night, in a corner chatting aimlessly with some people MJ is sure she knows the names of and Ned’s face light up when Peter finds his way to him, when she’s half present and half asleep nearly falling out of Paul’s hold tangled in the sheets, she imagines him her dreams, lying next to her on that rooftop, saying something she doesn’t need to hear to remember.
MJ watches the news the next morning, nursing her hangover while Paul makes them eggs, and watches Spider-Man disappear behind a skyscraper as her heart hammers away in her chest.