Chapter Text
Ned has been making an effort to see Peter pretty much every day, even just for a few minutes at a time, since he got his memories back. It’s weird being without that contact now, holed up as he is in the New York Sanctorum with Stephen Strange treating him like a pincushion. At least Stephen seems to be enjoying himself.
On day two of the tests and trying to entertain himself around the Sanctorum without causing any universe-altering mishaps, Peter gets a call from an unknown number. Normally he’d just decline—even people who don’t exist get scam calls, apparently—but there’s a borderline magnetic pull between his finger and the answer button and he doesn’t fight it.
For a moment, there’s just silence on the line.
“Hello?” Peter asks hesitantly.
“Peter,” a soft, familiar female voice replies. “Uh, hey.”
Peter’s eyes go wide. “Jean!” he exclaims, before quickly looking around in case someone overheard. A ridiculous notion—he’s pretty sure he’s the only person in the entire Sanctorum, and if any building’s walls are soundproof, it’s this one’s. Still, he ducks into a small side room and plops down on a worn-out loveseat in the corner. Dust billows around him and he coughs it away. “How—hey! How are you? I’m so glad you called.”
“I’m… I’m okay,” she replies hesitantly. “How are you? Have you healed up?”
“Uh, yeah, mostly.” He doesn’t feel the need to go into detail about the DNA manipulation errors. Jean’s worried herself enough about him. “Hey, I never got the chance to really thank you for saving my life. I heard you kept me alive until my super healing got a chance to kick in.”
She scoffs. “Saving your life? Pete, you took a bullet for me.”
“Ehh. Part of the job description.”
They fall silence for a moment. Peter drums his fingers on his jeans. “So, uh, what’s up with you? What’s your plan now that you’re…”
Free doesn’t feel like the right word. Technically, Jean was free before, too, free to stop hunting for Sarah whenever she wished. That mission didn’t end in success—it ended in grief. That’s not freedom. It wasn’t a choice.
“I’m traveling,” Jean replies hesitantly. “I’m… in Vermont, actually. There’s a lot of nature. Not a lot of people. I’m trying to get a sense of my abilities now that they’ve… changed.”
“Right, that’s awesome,” Peter says, trying to sound encouraging. “But, hey, you know you’re always welcome to come crash with me in New York, right?”
“Sure, yeah.” She doesn’t sound skeptical, but he doubts she’ll ever take him up on the offer. “So, uh… how’s it going with you? How’re your friends—did they, uh, did they ever remember you?”
Peter fights a grin. How different this Jean is from the one who’d coldly told him that there was nothing of him in Michelle’s mind. The transformative powers of Aunt May—even post-mortem—have struck again. “Believe it or not, Ned did. You never met him, but you should, Jean, seriously. He’s the best. He’d fangirl over your powers so hard—you’d hate it.”
Jean laughs. Just a little laugh, but it still warms him from the inside out. “Well, uh, that’s… that’s good. What about MJ?”
The smile dips from Peter’s face. “Not yet,” he replies, trying to sound upbeat. “We’re working on it.”
“Well, if you get really desperate, I guess I could poke around in there,” Jean says. “But, I don’t know. Maybe don’t want to risk it until I figure things out a little more.”
“Fair enough.”
Another silence, this one more comfortable. Peter leans back against the love seat and inspects the intricate carvings on the ceiling above his head. Is it a spell? A message in some other language?
“What was it like?” Jean asks suddenly. “When that Doctor Strange guy erased you from the world. What was it like to suddenly have no one know you existed?”
Peter’s shoulders fall. He doesn’t like to think about the time immediately after the Spell. There were moments where he had to fight to even convince himself that he was still alive, that he was still a person. He’d never known loneliness so all-consuming and heavy before, and he hopes he’ll never have to again. He hopes no one will.
“It was…” He swallows. “It was pretty bad, yeah. Everything just felt… empty. I didn’t even feel real. It was like Peter Parker was dead. Worse than dead. Never born at all. And I’d just… I’d let it happen, you know? I couldn’t even blame it on anyone else. I was sort of forced into it, but I still chose it, and it… yeah.”
It was sort of like he’d killed himself. You don’t realize how much of your personhood is tied up in being known until that piece of it is gone.
Another silence. “I don’t want that,” Jean whispers. “Peter, please don’t let me ever become like that.”
“I won’t,” he says firmly. “Anytime you start feeling like you’re vanishing, you just call me, okay? And if that’s not enough, we’ll meet up. And—and you’ll find your people, Jean, seriously, you will. They don’t have to be powered, even. They just have to love you for you.”
“Kind of a tall order.”
“Yeah,” he admits, then frowns, because he thinks he hears someone in the hall calling his name. “I know. But it’ll happen. You just gotta be open to it.”
He hops off the love seat and cautiously opens the door, listening to Jean’s shaky breathing on the other end.
“Peter?” That’s definitely a voice—a familiar voice. Michelle. MJ’s looking for him.
“Hey, I might have to go in a second, will you be okay?” he says into the phone, heading down the hall in the direction of her voice. He turns the corner and MJ stops short, hand on a doorknob. She looks between him and the phone pressed against his ear and shuts her mouth.
“Yeah, I should probably go, too,” Jean answers. “Thanks for picking up, Peter.”
“Anytime. Take care of yourself, Jean.”
He lets her hang up, then turns his attention to Michelle. “Hey. Sorry about that. I, uh… I didn’t know you were coming by.”
She’s standing in the hallway like she’s not actually sure where she is. “You and Jean have… stayed in touch?”
Peter smiles a bit. “If her calling me once about ten minutes ago counts as staying in touch then, yeah, sure.”
“Good, that’s good.” She clasps her hands in front of her, then unclasps them, then sticks them in the pockets of her embroidered jeans. “How… is she?”
“She’s… hanging in there.” Peter tips his head, curious. Why does she seem so nervous? “How are you? What’re… what’re you doing here?”
“Oh!” Michelle rocks forward onto her toes. “I just thought that you might be lonely. And then I started thinking about all the other times in the last four years that you were probably more lonely. And then I just felt like I should stop by.”
“That’s… really sweet,” Peter says with a sideways grin that he has to really fight to keep from spreading across his whole face. “Want to, uh… wanna go sit down?”
She nods awkwardly and the two set off down the hall. Peter thinks there’s a sitting area down this way, but things seem to move around in the Sanctorum.
They walk in silence, shoulders not quite brushing. It fills Peter with deja vous and he’s suddenly cast back to the bridge on their school trip, night air cooling his perpetual blush, neither of them sure what to say to each other and cursing every second they waste in silence.
“So, what have you been up to?” he asks, trying to get the ball rolling in some sort of direction, here.
“Not much,” Michelle replies. “Job hunting, sort of. I don’t know. Employment is weird.”
She squints in a very MJ way and Peter smiles down at his shoes. Being with her again sends him right back to high school: butterflies in his stomach, that feeling like he’s stood up too fast every time he catches her looking at him.
“Yeah, try getting a job when you effectively don’t exist,” he huffs. “But you’re so smart, I’m sure employers are practically fighting over you.”
“Yeah, see, that’s just the thing.” Her voice sharpens with frustration. “I was so good at school. 4.0 GPA. Teachers loved me. Or at least loved to hate me.” She shakes her head. “But the job market isn’t like school at all. You submit your stupid one-page resume and it’s probably not even a human being reading it on the other end. And maybe you get an interview, where you end up answering all these questions about how you “handle conflict” and what your “three greatest strengths” are, when you know for a fact that the people doing the interview don’t really care because, for all they know, you’re lying about everything, and whether or not you get the job really just depends on their mood and whether you can possibly manage to make an impression in a sea of other equally qualified candidates, most of which have job experience which is required for pretty much every position. Answer me this, Peter: how am I supposed to get job experience without a job?!”
She pauses for breath, stopped short in the hallway, and all he can do is just look at her like she’s hung the stars in the sky. I love you hovers on his tongue and he clamps his lips shut, exhaling shakily.
“What?” she asks, tucking her hair behind her ear. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
Peter shakes his head. “I, uh… I’m not.”
“Yes, you are.”
They look at each other a while longer, caught in some shiny magnetic vortex.
Then MJ clears her throat and quickly walks on. “So… any more results? From Doctor Strange?”
He trots after her, willing to let the moment go. It’s better for both of them, really, at least for right now. “Yeah, he’s pretty sure that the DNA hacking is causing the headaches. So I, uh, I guess you were right.”
“Of course I was right,” Michelle huffs. “Can he help you?”
“He thinks so.” Peter isn’t sure if he’d even be able to accurately convey all of the medical jargon Stephen had thrown at him last night, so he just leaves it at that. They’ve reached the sitting area, anyway: a small nook of chairs and cushions out front of a stained-glass arch. Michelle stares up at it a moment wonderingly before taking a seat and Peter hesitates before taking the one beside her. Hopefully that’s not too close.
“Well, that’s good,” Michelle says. “I’m glad you agreed to come get it checked out.”
“Yeah, me too.”
Another silence. Peter wracks his brain for something to say, but all of the small talk tricks he knows depend on you actually knowing things about someone’s life. He supposes he could ask about her family, but who knows what’s going on with them after four years. They’ve already touched on the job thing, he doesn’t know any of her friends, she doesn’t have any pets…
“How’s your boyfriend?” he blurts. Stupid. Stupid stupid stupid. Recover, Peter, recover—“He, uh, he still think you’re withholding?”
She looks at him for a long time, unreadable.
“Sorry,” he mumbles. “I shouldn’t have—”
“Peter, are you and Jean—” Michelle stops and shrinks into herself. “I—I know it’s not really my business. I just, after everything, I just… I wanted to know if…”
Peter tips his head. “She’s, uh, she’s not going to be the new Mrs. Spider-Man, if that’s what you’re wondering,” he tells her gently. The fact that she cares, that’s a good sign, right? A great sign, even.
“Oh.” Michelle exhales, cheeks darkening. “Okay.”
He searches her face. “MJ, can I ask you something?”
She nods mutely, eyes wide.
“Did you get your memories back?”
Her eyes widen again and she reels back slightly. “Peter, I—”
“Ah, there you are.” A voice from down the hall makes them both jump. Peter represses a sigh of frustration and leans forward to see Stephen Strange making his way towards them. His eyes fall on Michelle. “And with company. Good for you.”
“What’s up?” Peter asks. Is it really so important that he couldn’t have held off for one more minute?
“I thought you may want to know that what looks like a giant half-human rhinoceros is stampeding downtown.”
Peter jumps to his feet. “What!? Wait, why didn’t-?” He frantically pats his pockets only to realize there was an alert pinging on his phone, he’d just been too distracted to notice it. “Shoot. Shoot! Okay, uh…” He looks back to Michelle. “You stay here. I’ll be back. Or—”
“I can just go home, too,” Michelle mumbles, getting to her feet.
A groan of frustration fights to surface in his throat but he gulps it down and nods. “Oh, sure, okay, whatever you want to do.”
“Don’t do anything too strenuous out there,” Stephen calls after him as Peter heads for what he hopes is the exit. “I’m working on a solution to your problem and don’t want to waste time patching you up.”
“I can patch myself up!” Peter shouts over his shoulder, spotting the foyer of the Sanctorum and beelining towards it.
Honestly, after that aborted talk with Michelle, he’s got a lot of pent up feelings rushing around inside him and he would not mind getting to punch something.