Chapter Text
MJ likes solving problems. She likes understanding them, getting to the bottom of them, reverse engineering them.
Which is why, for the vast majority of her life, she wanted to be a chain-smoking, coffee guzzling detective when she grew up (even though she detests the smell of cigarette smoke and caffeine just makes her sleepy—thanks a lot, ADHD). It’s also why she used to fall asleep watching episode after episode of BuzzFeed Unsolved, her laptop overheating against her quilt, a Wikipedia page open on her phone pertaining to whatever murder mystery it was that Ryan and Shane were investigating that week.
Then she got to high school and figured out that, at least for her, people can be just as hard to solve as true crime cases. Oftentimes the only way she was able to figure them out was to take them apart piece by piece, to see what was inside making them tick.
Not in a, like, body dismembering, gross type of way. She’s not a serial killer. It’s more of a psychological thing; a jigsaw puzzle without a reference photo, where she has to feel her way around the edges and flip every piece the right way around first.
For years, Spider-Man has been exactly that. A big fat question mark at the center of a cork board, threads of red yarn criss-crossing into an indecipherable web. Ned even took it right out of her head and made it material. There are newspaper clippings and photos and suspects and everything—though she’s always contested that Flash is too much of a self-centered dickwipe to spend half his waking hours helping old ladies cross the street and taking crime rings apart—which Ned always argued was exactly the point, it’s a secret identity, duh!
But now she knows. Now, she’s been given an answer in the form of Peter Parker’s name, his face, his carefully handwritten letter. I love you, and I hope that deep down, something inside you remembers you love me too.
There’s a sick and twisted kind of irony to the fact that the answer she’s been waiting for, searching for, straining for, has only left her with a million more questions.
Like, for example, who was she before the spell wiped her memory? Who exactly did Peter Parker fall in love with?
When was their first kiss? Her first kiss (his too?). A few days ago, she thought she hadn’t been kissed until the first semester of college—Sam, who was awkward and shy and liked dogs, who she went on a few dates with, and then he’d said something about Thanos having a point with the whole overpopulation angle and any semblance of a spark between them was snuffed right out.
She hadn’t cried about it. She’d just shrugged and moved on, not exactly looking to date anyone, but always looking. She’s realizing that now, in hindsight; her eyes scanning every room she walked into for a face, for someone.
For him.
She knows it now. She has it memorized. She’d seen it before, too, Christmastime four years ago. He’d been holding the letter then, she remembers that now. He’d been about to tell her and then he just… hadn’t. He’d walked away and left her with a gaping, cold hole in her heart, and time had cauterized the edges of it but it was never filled, it was never—never fixed.
He has a nice face. It’s—she’d meant what she said to him before. She gets it, she can see why she loved him. It’s—he’s—with the puppy dog eyes and the curls and the bruises, he’s—ugh, whatever.
The point is, Benoit Blanc’s donut hole theory is universally applicable. Peter Parker is the even smaller donut inside of the larger donut that is Spider-Man.
And MJ knows herself. She knows she’s not gonna be able to rest until she figures this whole thing out, until she gets to the true hole of his donut, the metaphorical center of his Tootsie pop—
“What are you thinking about?”
MJ glances over her shoulder at Paul. He’s a pace behind, smirking a little, their hands linked. “Huh?”
“You’ve got your thinking face on,” he explains.
“My thinking face?”
“Yeah, where your eyebrows get all scrunched up and stuff?” He gives her arm a little tug to get her to stop shuffling toward the subway entrance, and then cups her cheek. “You’ve been in your head a lot the past few days, actually. Something on your mind?”
“Um, a lot of things,” she says vaguely (why do you always have to be so withholding—), and forces a smile that she hopes comes across as reassuring. “Just with, y’know, job interviews and everything.”
“Yeah?” he brings her knuckles up to his mouth to kiss. He’s so tactile and she’s still not sure she likes that about him, but she allows it because she feels like she should like it, and maybe her aversion to it is just due to her many, many neurodivergencies, or the lack of physical affection in her house growing up. “You hear back from Chromalloy yet?”
Her nose wrinkles. “No, but they’re more of a last resort anyway. Too far out of the city. But I actually, um—I got an offer from somewhere else.”
His eyebrows climb. “Oh yeah? From where?”
“Uh,” she resumes walking so she doesn’t have to look at him for this part, “Stark Industries?”
Predictably, he scoffs. “Thought you didn’t wanna work for a soulless corporation.”
“I wouldn’t exactly classify them as soulless.”
“They laid my dad off in the middle of an economic recession, MJ—”
“Because they weren’t making weapons anymore and your dad is a ballistic machinist!” she reminds him. “I mean, I get that it sucked for him, but if he didn’t have a place in the company anymore then what were they supposed to do, stick him in HR?”
Paul frowns. “You’re being unkind.”
Her eyes roll. She’s always being unkind, apparently. At least once a day, she says or does something that he deems unkind. “I’m being practical.”
“Maybe too practical,” Paul huffs, following her down the litter-ridden steps to the train platform. “I’m just saying, you shouldn’t count on them for long-term employment. Cool projects and stuff, yeah, and I’m sure they offer valuable work experience, but—”
MJ pushes through the turnstile. “They’re offering me six figures and a 401k, Paul, and I’ll get full funding to R&D my heat-resistant alloys—”
“Sweetie,” Paul jogs to catch up with her, “I’m not saying it’s a bad idea, I’m just trying to caution you against putting all of your eggs into one basket—”
MJ scowls, turning around to face him directly. “Yeah, well, not all of us are like you, okay? Not all of us have cushy jobs lined up for us at one of Mommy’s startups—”
His lips press together. “Michelle, you’re being really—”
“Unkind?” she guesses. Her raised voice gleans a few curious glances from tourists, and the attention makes her flush. She deflates a bit. “Look, this was—the movie was great and I had a fun time, but I think I’m just too exhausted to have a productive conversation about this right now.”
“Well, that’s okay. I mean, we can just go back to mine and chill, sleep…”
She shakes her head. “I think I just wanna go home. I’m sorry,” she leans forward and kisses his cheek, which is scratchy with stubble. “I just wanna get in bed and watch a true crime doc, and I know you hate those, so.”
He shrugs, unabashed. “They scare me.”
What a loser, says a voice in her head that—weirdly enough—doesn’t sound like her own. MJ blinks. “Well, I’m gonna—”
“I could try to watch one,” Paul barters, keeping her hands in his. “I mean, if it means more time with you, and if I’ve got you there to protect me…”
Holy shit, there’s no way this guy is for real. This is the chump you turned Peter down for?
Okay. Okay. That’s definitely not her voice. Throat cinching, MJ scans the platform for anything out of the ordinary, her eyes roving over men in business suits and women wrapped in trench coats and a kid busking on a flattened cardboard box and—
Hi, the voice in her head says, at the same time the redhead by the vending machines raises her hand and offers a jaunty wave.
MJ’s only seen her in grainy surveillance pictures, but she knows without a shadow of a doubt who it is that she’s looking at.
Jean Grey.
“MJ? You still with me, space cadet?”
MJ’s gaze snaps back to Paul. “Um. I, uh—I think I just need to be alone, if that’s okay? Just for tonight.”
His face falls, but he nods. “I get it. Text me though?”
Needy, Jean comments. MJ feels like her brain is glitching out. She makes herself smile. “For sure. Bye, Paul.”
“Oh, okay, uh—bye—”
She presses a quick kiss to his lips and then ducks around him, pushing through the crowd toward Jean. But when she emerges through the bodies, Jean is gone, she’s—
Not gone, no. She’s just moved; she’s on the stairs now, leading back up to the sidewalk. MJ wonders if maybe her sanity’s been compromised as she follows after her without hesitation. But then, she has Peter’s stamp of approval now, right? So it’s probably safe to engage.
Hopefully.
When she gets back onto the street, she finds Jean leaning against the side of a storefront with her arms folded across her chest. “Hey, stranger.”
“Hey,” MJ echoes, her eyes wide. “Um, what’re you—what are you doing here, exactly? I mean, aren’t you supposed to be on the run from the government right now or something?”
“Oh, that,” Jean waves a hand dismissively, “don’t worry about it. I’m not actually here, like, physically. I’m astral projecting!”
MJ blinks. Astral projecting. “So I’m… talking to myself?”
“Sort of, but so what? It’s New York, people do it all the time.” Jean pushes off the wall. “Walk with me?”
“First off, I wanted to apologize for, um, getting inside of your head like that,” Jean says. “Using you was—it was really screwed up and I shouldn’t have done it and I know that, I just felt so cornered and—anyway,” she shakes her head, “I don’t wanna make excuses for what I did. I just thought you should know that—while you were under, um. I sort of—I was using you to get to Peter and I-I don’t know if he told you, but you guys—”
“Kissed,” MJ finishes for her, shouldering past a particularly fast-walking pedestrian. “He told me, I know.”
Jean hums, and the sound is almost pointed. “Decent of him.”
MJ raises an eyebrow, and Jean shrugs. “I’m just saying most guys probably wouldn’t bother.”
“You’re certainly advocating a lot for a person you were trying to kill a week ago.”
Jean grins. “Yeah, well, times change. I mean, just look at the Avengers: half the time they were at each other’s throats, the other half they were banding together to save the world. Besides, he took a bullet for me. Feels like the least I can do is try and help fix whatever’s going on with you two.”
MJ shakes her head. “Our problems started way before you got involved.”
Jean clicks her tongue. Someone walks through her, causing her mirage to flicker slightly, but she doesn’t seem deterred. “About that—when I was with the DoDC and my powers sort of, y’know, exploded, and I had a hold on everyone, it was like—I don’t even know how to explain it, but I could feel everyone, thousands of psyches layered on top of one another. I could feel your friend Ned, I could feel you,” Jean stops and turns to face her, so MJ does the same, “and I think—I think this time, you could feel me, too. Am I right?”
MJ’s mouth twists, her fists balling at her sides. “I… yes. Yeah. A little.”
Jean nods. She scans the street, the passerby, thinking. “You were crying.”
“I saw something,” MJ blurts, unable to choke the truth down any longer. “It was sort of fuzzy and vague and I’m not even sure if it was real, and I can barely even remember what it was now, but—”
“Was it this?” Jean asks, and then she reaches out and touches two fingers to MJ’s temple, and the sounds of the city muffle around them; for a moment, they’re encased in a pocket of absolute darkness, and then—
A bridge comes into view, covered in flaming wreckage. Spider-Man—no, Peter—stands a few feet away, unmasked and bloody and out of breath, his suit torn. And then MJ sees herself running toward him, an actual medieval mace in her hand that she tosses carelessly aside in favor of wrapping Peter into a vice-tight hug, her eyes wide with fear. His close, tension bleeding out of his body, relief washing over him. Because she’s safe? Because they’re together again?
Are you okay? her past self asks him. Still holding on, not letting go.
He nods. I’m okay, are you okay? Is everyone else okay?
Yeah, yeah, everyone’s okay—
What happened?
Th-there was just—the drones, and they were following us, and then they just stopped. Was that you? Did you get him?
They finally pull apart, and he nods softly, his gaze shifting downward, his expression grim and taut with guilt. Yeah.
Well, I brought that, she gestures to the mace on the ground, in case you needed some help.
He grins, laughs a little. Thanks.
Anyway, there was a sweaty guy in the tower with us. I think he works for you or something. He, um. He gave me this. Her past self pulls something out of her pocket, a silver chain and a handful of black glass petals—
A necklace. The necklace, her necklace; the one she wears every single day, the one she’s had around her neck since—since high school, and she’s always refused to take it off even though she couldn’t remember where it came from. She just knew it was special, knew it was somehow tied up in the mystery of Spider-Man. She knew it mattered.
No, Peter breathes, leaning in to inspect it, his expression crestfallen, no, MJ, I’m so sorry. I had this plan, this stupid plan—
Peter—
—I wrote it down, I was gonna buy you this and and give it to you in Paris at the top of—
MJ watches herself kiss him. She kisses him, and it’s just a quick peck but it leaves them both blushing and flustered and it’s—it’s sweet. He smiles, dazed. You kissed me. What…?
Yeah, um… I don’t have much luck when it comes to getting close to people, so I lied. I wasn’t just watching you because I thought you were Spider-Man.
Oh. That’s—great. He smiles, wider now.
They look at the necklace again. The black dahlia, MJ says, like—
The murder, they say together. He nods. Sorry it’s broken.
She shakes her head. I actually like it better broken.
Just like that, the memory fades into smoky tendrils around them. MJ’s chest tightens. She doesn’t want—she doesn’t want the moment to end, she wants to stay in it, to stay with him. She wants to know what happens next. She wants to remember everything, all of it, more than she’s ever wanted anything in her life.
Jean frowns. “Damn it. I’m still working on maintaining a connection within a connection. Just when it was getting good, too.” Her head tilts to the side. “You’re crying.”
“Yeah, well,” MJ swipes the tears off her cheeks, her hands shaking, “it’s a lot to take in, sue me.”
“Sorry,” Jean says. She looks a little sheepish, like really she hadn’t shown MJ that just to screw with her.
“Is there—can you do it again? Can we keep going until I get it all back?”
Jean winces. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea. Xavier says I still have a lot of training to do before it’s safe for me to go screwing around in people’s heads like that again. Besides, I really don’t need to give Peter another reason not to trust me by turning your brain into scrambled eggs. In good news though,” she pokes the center of MJ’s forehead, “I think whatever I did that day while I was in the DoDC might’ve weakened the spell suppressing your memories. Think of it like a wall, only now it’s got all of these cracks in it. If you keep working at it, you might damage it enough to break through on your own.”
“Yeah?”
Jean nods, and then smiles. “You still like him, don’t you?”
“I—I don’t even know him, I’m just—I’m curious.”
“Uh-huh,” Jean takes a step back, and then another so she’s standing in the street. She waves. “I’ll see you around… Em.”
A taxi comes barrelling at her, and MJ lunges forward illogically, but Jean dissolves into misty wisps right before the impact.
“Jesus,” MJ breathes. She covers her face with her hands and hides there for a second, trying to regulate her haywire nervous system. After a minute or so, she turns and starts shoving her way uptown against the current of bodies, heading for home.