Chapter Text
“Peter!”
“What are you doing he—”
The girl pushes her way in and cuts him off with a hug, which startles Peter so completely that he takes a minute to hug back.
Jean? Like Jean Grey? Ned thinks; it has to be, he confirms to himself, otherwise how would she have known where to find Spider-Man, how else would she have known his name?
He considers her, matching the image to the scant few things he knows about her. She doesn’t look like much. She’s shorter than him by a few inches, thin enough that a stiff breeze could knock her over, swimming in a coat far too big for her; her eyes are big and blue and wide open, constantly moving, cataloging everything she can see. Ned recognizes that look from seeing it on Peter far too many times; she’s searching for threats.
“Jean, what's wrong, what happened?”
“I’m fine, I’m fine.” She pulls back, holding Peter’s upper arms. “I heard you like four hours away, you were like, screaming, I had to come find you, I—” she touches his face, cups it in her hands. “Are you okay?” Her hands move softly but her eyes are fierce, protective, ready to take on whatever’s hurting him.
Peter just looks at her, gobsmacked. “You.. You heard me? Like in your mind?”
“Who's this?” MJ says from behind them, before Jean can respond. Ned turns to look at her; her eyebrows are raised, no hint of a smile. Strangely, Ned sees a similarity between MJ and Jean immediately—a wariness, a defensive posture, rivals about to start circling each other. A threat identified and pinned.
Peter steps between them. Ned isn’t sure who he’s protecting. “MJ, this is my friend… Jean.”
Jean clenches her jaw guiltily as MJ realizes who she is.
Without taking her eyes off of Jean, MJ says evenly, “Peter, can I talk to you in the kitchen?”
Peter nods, reluctant, and follows her through the door. Which leaves Ned standing in the entryway in the presence of one of the most powerful psychic beings he’s ever encountered, awkwardly rocking back and forth on his heels while she shivers in the cold. Ned steps around her to close the door against the outside wind. The silence once the door clicks shut feels loud and stretched.
“Um, are you... Ned?” she says.
“You know me?” Ned asks, surprised. “I mean, yes, hi, yes, I’m Ned.” He sticks out his hand and she shakes it after a moment of bewilderment.
“Yeah, sorry. I just wanted to introduce myself. I’m Jean.”
“Oh, okay. Hello. You’re the one who froze us a few weeks ago, right?”
“Yeah, uh. Sorry about that.”
“It’s okay. It was interesting.”
“I hope I didn’t hurt you.”
“No, not at all.” He thinks back to that long moment, frozen like a stone gargoyle in his apartment. “Scared, for sure. But it didn’t hurt. It was kind of cool actually, once I got over the initial not-being-able-to-move thing.”
Jean smiles crookedly, like she’s trying not to and can only partially control her face.
“Good,” she says. “Um, listen. Do you know what’s going on? Like why… I heard him, yesterday. I mean, I heard him scream in my head. It sounded bad.”
Ned looks toward the kitchen and thinks about yesterday. Peter not looking at him. Peter’s breathing a stuttering mess. Peter’s eyes. His eyes darkening, becoming like obsidian, light reflecting strangely off of them. Peter’s body forming half of a capital C as the guilt punched him in the stomach. Peter covering his ears and screaming at the floor like the building was coming down around him.
“Does that happen often?” Ned asks. “Like, can you hear people from far away when you’re not trying to?”
She shakes her head. “It’s only happened one other time, and it was… Well, it…” She shakes her head again, can’t say whatever it was. “Anyway. What’s wrong?”
Ned sighs. “It’s me.” He explains the whole thing, their friendship and the spell and the forgetting and the years without Peter and meeting him again, in the suit and out of it, and the breaking of the spell and the physical consequences of it. He explains who Doctor Strange is (which Jean takes surprisingly in stride; though, to be fair, he supposes, she is a wizard herself, of a different sort) and that they’ve been looking for him, fruitlessly.
“And of course,” Ned finishes, “Peter thinks it’s his fault, but it’s like, of course it’s not, you know? He couldn’t have known what would happen, he’s not a wizard!”
“Whoa,” Jean says under her breath. She’s not necessarily floored by Peter’s guilt complex, Ned thinks; that is just a fact of Peter’s life that surely she knows about if she’s really his friend. But the entirety of the situation—she seems to understand the enormity of it, the weight of it bearing down on them.
“So…” she starts, wringing her hands a little. She’s thinking as she speaks, her brain tripping to keep up with her mouth. “I don’t know how much he’s—Peter, I mean, I don’t know how much he told you about me, but I was—he kind of… like, saved my life. I mean literally, he took a bullet for me, but he also showed me a lot of kindness when he didn’t have to, when I didn’t really… deserve it. And I want to—pay it forward. Like, make up for everything I did. So if there’s anything I can do…”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean… I guess I could… Take a look?”
“Like go into my mind?”
“Only if you’re okay with it,” Jean says, holding her hands out. “Um, I’ve been taking classes at this school upstate, and one of the things they talk about in my classes is using our powers on other people and when to do it and when not to. And um, they talked about, um, consent? Like, if you are going into someone's mind, you should ask them first. So… If you don’t want me to, I won’t. But I promise it won’t hurt, and I won’t touch anything. I mean—” She waves her hands when Ned raises an eyebrow. “I don’t mean literally touch, I mean I won’t do that either, but I mean—I just want to help. Any way I can.”
Ned opens his mouth to respond, but MJ’s voice hisses through the cracked-open door at that exact moment: “She mind raped me, Peter!”
Jean and Ned wince in tandem.
“Yeah,” Peter says, testy, “but she had a good reason, she was looking for her sister.”
“How does mind raping me help find her sister?”
“It's complicated—” Peter says, and then Ned shuts the door pointedly mid sentence, not a slam but not quiet either.
“Sorry about that,” Ned says. “Where were we?”
Jean recovers quickly. “Consent.”
“Right. Good concept. Um…”
On any normal day, he wouldn't hesitate to give her the go ahead. Any interaction with superhumans gets sorted in his mind into the So Cool It's Not Even Fair category; the concept of them using their powers on him should be making him nearly pass out with excitement. But this…
He's struggling to parse why it's different, why he's reluctant to give her access. It's not that he doesn't trust her; Peter trusts her, she saved Peter's life, and that's enough for him. But it's his mind. It's private and embarrassing in there. As open as he is in the everyday, there are things he doesn't want people to know, things he doesn't want to face himself, let alone allowing someone else to see them.
“I don’t know,” he says, apologetically. “I mean, it would be really nice to not have a headache anymore, I will say that.”
“I used to get those all the time,” Jean says. “Huge pain, right?”
“Pain in the ass,” Ned agrees. “Or, well. Not literally.”
Jean giggles, seemingly despite herself.
Peter’s voice raises loud enough to be heard clearly through the door again. “We should at least try—”
“YO!” Ned bellows at the door. “We can hear you! Can we all have this conversation in the same room, please?”
The door gets opened, Peter showing his sheepish face, smiling briefly at Ned. Ned feels an inexplicably strong wave of affection for his friend as he waves them in. “Sorry, guys.”
Ned gestures for Jean to follow him, and they step into the kitchen. MJ moves to the opposite corner from Jean, understandably, Ned thinks, for what Jean put her through. He stands near MJ, hoping to impart some measure of calm onto her, but it doesn’t appear to work; she’s buzzing with suppressed anger, and deeper underneath that, fear.
“So, I filled Jean in on what’s been going on,” Ned says. “And she wants to help.” He realizes in that moment that he’s warming up to the idea, and that although he’s not quite there yet, eventually he will take her offer. He can’t pinpoint when the warming started; maybe it was seeing Peter’s face, seeing him smile. A reminder of who he’d be doing it for.
“No,” MJ says immediately.
“MJ,” Ned says.
“Ned.”
“I—let’s just talk through this,” Ned implores. “Peter trusts her, right?”
“Trust me, Ned, you don’t want this girl rooting around in your head.” She looks pointedly, coldly, at Jean. “Last time that happened, I ended up falling off of a roof. Again. Thanks, but no thanks. We’ll take our chances at the hospital.”
“What if they don’t find anything, MJ?” Peter says.
“I’d trust doctors with degrees and experience over this child—I’m sorry, how old are you?”
“None of your business,” Jean says tartly.
“Okay, so she's not old enough to even be able to say how old she is without getting defensive.”
“MJ, seriously?” Peter cuts in. “You want to just let Ned die?”
“Obviously not. I just said we’re going to the hospital tomorrow.”
“I think Ned’s right, MJ, they won’t be able to do anything. If we can’t find Strange and we can’t use Jean, what chance do we have?”
Ned’s about to cut in with Hello, I’m right here when he feels a sharp pinch between his eyes, the telltale tickle of the first drops of blood about to drip from his nose.
“Oh, man,” he groans, and goes for the paper towels on the counter while pinching his nose closed.
“Is that— That’s how it starts, right?” Jean says.
“Yeah,” he says reluctantly. “Sorry. I’ll be out of commission for a few minutes.”
“What if I went in during the seizure?” she says hurriedly.
Ned cocks his head, considering.
“It would be less invasive since you’re already unconscious,” Peter says.
“Right, and you black out for the seizure and then come back when you wake up, yeah? I’ll go in then just to see what's happening and I’ll come out when you wake up. Fair?”
Ned opens his mouth, looks at MJ. She purses her lips, then lifts her hands up, defeated.
Ned turns back to Jean and nods. Wadding the paper towel up and sticking it in his nose, he holds out his hands to Jean. She looks at them blankly for a second and then realizes what he wants. “Oh,” she says, and takes his hands.
“Do you not need—”
“No, but it's fine—”
“Sorry I guess I just assumed—”
“It’s okay.”
They wait a few seconds.
Jean says, “How do you know when—”
Ned snaps back into consciousness.
His eyes swim into focus; at almost the same moment, Jean’s body jerks backward, her hands pulling out of Ned’s. She catches herself quickly and reorients.
“Whoa,” she says. “Pen, paper, now.” Her hands flap open and closed as she looks around frantically for something to write on. Peter shoots a quick web into the living room and grabs MJ’s sketchbook, the pencil stuck in the rings for safekeeping. Jean scribbles, nothing comprehensible at first, but then diagrams and symbols bloom out from the center of the page, long looping strokes of pencil that go beyond the boundaries of the paper, like she needs to be sketching on something larger. What she’s drawing begins to take shape quickly, and it sends a shiver running through Ned’s spine; it looks very much like a drawn version of the spell that swirled around Doctor Strange as he cast it four years ago, glowing gold symbols floating like a giant’s crown around him, just before he pushed it outward onto the whole world.
Jean’s hand gradually slows down and stops and she stares at the paper for a few moments, then looks up at Ned. “Does this look familiar?” she asks.
Ned nods. “Yeah. That’s the spell, that’s what it looked like.” MJ moves closer and squints at it, eyebrows furrowed, seemingly against her own instincts. Wordlessly, Jean hands her the sketchpad; MJ brings the drawing close to her face and looks, tracing the symbols with her eyes and fingers, almost like she’s trying to memorize it, or unlock something.
“Do you recognize it?” Peter asks.
MJ looks at Peter. Tense energy shimmering between them, a quivering sheen of hope. MJ opens her mouth, closes it again. Then says, in a small voice, “I don’t know.”
She hands the sketchpad back to Jean.
Jean says, quietly, “I think I understand what’s happening.”
“Okay, what is it?” Ned asks.
“It’s hard to explain, but… To make a long story short, the spell is still in there.”
“How can you tell?” Ned asks, curious.
“I don’t know how to explain it. It’s like…” She opens and closes her hands, like she’s grasping for the words but can’t quite get to them. “It’s like everything else in there has a… It’s not really like this, but it’s like everything that’s you has a special stamp or something. The spell doesn’t have it. Like, it’s like you have a garden and everything in the garden is roses. You would notice if someone planted, like, sunflowers in there. You could tell.”
“But what’s it still doing in there?” Peter asks.
“Well, it’s broken, it’s obviously not working right, but it’s like… It’s like it’s trying to put itself back together?”
Jean clenches her fists, frustrated at her inability to explain what she means. “I think your mind is trying to reconcile the truth with the spell. Which is impossible. Hence the seizures and the bleeding. Peter broke the spell, it is broken, but the architecture is still there trying to assert itself.” She turns to Ned and asks, “You still have all your memories of Peter? Are you sure?”
He thinks about his Don’t Forget Book, the pages filled with memories. He carries it everywhere, writing down memories as he thinks of them, and he rereads the book every night to make sure everything is still intact in his mind, counting the pages, notching his favorites. The contours of the notebook, sharp edges already gone soft after a few weeks of constant use, the dwindling number of clean pages.
He’s sure. “Yes.”
“Okay. I can’t be totally for sure, but the best I can explain what's happening is that your mind is trying to like, match up two realities that can't be matched up. So you're choosing one or the other during your seizures. You choose the truth every time, and it's getting harder to do, because the spell is repairing itself, or like, it’s trying to. So it takes longer, because the spell keeps trying to reassert. It’s growing resistant to you. Like a weed, or something.”
She quiets and lets them absorb the information.
“So what happens if we leave it there?” Peter asks softly. Prodding on his own bruise, looking for worst case scenarios. Ned wants to hug him.
Jean looks up at him. “I don’t know,” she says simply, but bluntly. “Nothing good, I assume.”
“How do we get it out?” MJ asks. “I mean, can you?”
Jean sweeps her eyes over the floor, seemingly calculating something, or working out a plan in her mind. “I think I can,” she says.
“You think?” MJ presses.
With steel in her eyes, Jean looks up. “I can. Yes. I can pull it out.”
-
It’s different this time, when she goes in.
She has Ned sit on the floor, on one side of the low coffee table, and settles herself on the other side. MJ and Peter drift to the outer edges of the table and sit down. Ned looks around the table; the lights are low, the sun quickly setting outside, casting a strange shadowed aura over the room. He half wonders if Jean is about to produce candles for them to light, or pull a crystal ball out of her coat pocket. He almost expects her to prompt them all to hold hands.
She does none of these things. Instead she makes steady eye contact with Ned across the table, as though expecting him to ask a question.
A question does fall out of his mouth, something he didn’t know he was going to ask: “Will it hurt?” He sounds just as pathetic and scared as he is.
This time, Jean is the one to reach for his hands, stretching out across the table to connect with him. Her hands are thin and cold but her grip is strong, assured and confident.
“It’s going to be okay,” she says.
He believes her. He squeezes her hands, closes his eyes and says, “Okay. I’m ready.”
-
When he opens his eyes, he’s in a garden.
Not a tiny garden manicured to within an inch of its life, or the gardens contained on New York City roof tops desperate to grow beyond their boundaries but brutally constrained by the lack of space; this garden sprawls, as far as the eye can see, verdant green vines and trees and flowers, all of it growing and expanding infinitely outward and upward. Long blades of grass shoot up from the fertile ground, tall enough for Ned’s hands to brush the ends; they’re soft as bird feathers, just a whisper across his fingertips. Water gathers on flower petals, as though it had just stopped raining, and drips noiselessly to the ground, where it soaks into the thirsty, greedy loam. Sunlight catches the water and throws up hundreds of infinitesimal rainbows, there and gone in a flash.
As he adjusts to his surroundings, he realizes someone is humming nearby. He discovers that he can move, that there is a path he can follow, so he follows it until he comes upon Jean, dressed in overalls and a sun hat, digging in the ground with a spade, a metal bucket sitting next to her. She’s wearing gardening gloves, long ones that almost reach her elbows; her sleeves are pushed up and streaked with dirt.
Are we in my mind? Ned thinks. He realizes that he didn’t actually speak, just thought the question at Jean, but she must have heard it anyway, because she nods.
As she confirms it, Ned becomes aware of his body, still seated on the floor in his own living room. He can both feel and not feel the creaky wood under his knees and the table in front of him; he can both hear and not hear MJ and Peter on either side of him, murmuring in low, nervous voices.
He refocuses on Jean and the garden, and the physical reality melts away again, into the background, present but not urgent.
Can I just talk to you like this?
Yes.
Cool.
A little smile peeks out from under the wide brim of her hat.
What are you doing? he asks.
She gestures to him to come closer so he can see her work.
When he peeks in the bucket, he furrows his brow. He can’t quite understand what he’s seeing at first, only that whatever is in there doesn’t belong in this place. It has an air of wrongness to it, the sinister touch of a nightmare where nothing bad happens but you feel the dread anyway, crawling up into your throat and poisoning you slowly, no way to control it or stop it.
Look, Jean says.
She digs her spade into the ground and clears some dirt away, reaches her hand down into the hole, and pulls up a fistful of tangled spellcraft, glowing and inscrutable. The roots are deep. She grabs at the base of the roots with her other hand and pulls the whole mass out at once. Then, carefully, so as not to drop any of it, she shifts her body toward the bucket and drops the spell into it.
Understanding hits like sunlight through a morning window; Jean had described the spell like weeds that needed pulling, so his mind created a garden, an extended metaphor for whatever psychic work she’s actually doing.
Can I help? he asks.
She shrugs. Sure.
He’s never gardened before in his life, and this is just a metaphor anyway, but he crouches down nevertheless, kneeling on the cool ground, getting dirt in his fingernails. He parts the soil for her and she pulls the spell up, handful over handful. Then she directs him where to dig next and they repeat the process, painstaking and thorough. Ned thinks it should be awkward, mind-gardening with this person he’s just met, but it’s not; Jean is reserved and quiet, seemingly content with the silence between them, and Ned follows her lead. There are birds singing somewhere above their heads, calling out to each other across the garden’s thick canopy.
After a while, Jean says, without looking up or stopping her work, It's not your fault, you know.
What isn't? Ned asks.
Leaving Peter behind. He wanted you to.
In the real world, Ned’s feelings are so muddled and confused and tangled that he can’t really, fully understand them—there are so many factors to consider, other people’s similarly tangled feelings getting in the way, and it manifests outwardly as anger, and grief, and depression. He’d thought, understandably, that despite Peter’s perfectly legitimate reasons, he was angry with Peter for what he did.
In here, though, there’s a simplicity, a clarity of thought that turns the seething mass of feelings into one bright line of truth: he is not angry with Peter. He is angry with himself.
The deep, unshakeable guilt that he’s been turning himself inside out to get away from is undeniable here, just a fact, like the law of gravity. He’d broken their bond just as much as Peter had; he hadn’t seen Peter like he should have, hadn’t been able to divine what he was going to do, and couldn’t stop it from happening.
He sighs, sitting back on his heels. I know he wanted it. But it is my fault, though. It is. I should have been better. I’ve known him for so long, I should have known he was lying to me, and then I should have known something was wrong when the spell was cast. How could I not have known?
You think you should have been stronger than a spell cast by an interdimensional wizard?
Ned shrugs helplessly. I'm not saying it makes sense. I’m saying that's what loyalty is, and I broke it. Whether I meant to or not.
Then so did he.
Ned starts to defend Peter reflexively, then stops, thinking it through. I think Peter and I just have, like. Different understandings of what loyalty is, maybe.
Jean looks at him for the first time, and her eyes are intensely blue, full of more wisdom than her young age would seem to allow. I think you value each others’ lives and happiness over your own, she says. And that's going to hurt someone no matter what. Even when all this is gone, that'll still be there. That's fundamental.
Yeah. Maybe.
I had someone do that for me. She put herself in harm’s way to keep me safe. Died for it. She doesn’t avert her eyes, just keeps looking at Ned. He recognizes a toughness in her, much like the toughness in Peter when he was her age, steel hidden under young soft features.
I’m sorry, Ned says.
Yeah.
Would you have done the same for her?
Yeah. I would have. Absolutely no hesitation at all, just a bone-deep certainty of the answer that rings in Ned’s mind like a clear high bell.
I think that's just what love is, you know? Ned makes two fists and pushes them together. Like this. It’s like, inherent contradictions. And it’s like… Planting yourself like an old oak tree in front of danger and saying, no, I’m not moving. You'll have to take me out first.
Jean nods, pensive. Peter’s doing that for eight million people, she says with a soft smile.
He makes me want to be better.
Me too.
They work until the bucket is full and Jean leans back on her heels, wiping sweat from her brow. She looks tired but satisfied. That’s all of it.
Really?
Yep.
She stands up and picks up the bucket, full and heavy with spellwork. I’ll take this out. When you’re ready, just open your eyes.
Just like that, she’s gone, the bucket and the spell gone with her. Ned inhales deeply, drinks in the sun on his face, the smell of hyacinths and roses and new green life.
Then he opens his eyes.
-~-~-~-
Two Weeks Later
“Hey, MJ?”
MJ turns in her seat on the couch to look over her shoulder as he walks into the living room.
“What’s up?”
Ned hands her a folded piece of paper, the letters MJ scribbled on the front in light pencil. Confused, MJ takes it.
“What’s this?”
“It’s from Jean.”
Jean had stayed with them for twenty-four hours after Ned woke up, to monitor him and make sure there were no unintended aftereffects of her powers. He had remained pain-free, seizure-free and nosebleed-free for the whole twenty-four hours, despite Peter and MJ’s worried hovering, and while Peter made Jean a sandwich for the road in the kitchen, Jean had slipped Ned the paper, folded neatly into thirds. Give this to MJ in a couple of weeks, she’d said. When you’re sure the seizures and everything are gone for good. And… tell her I’m sorry. Then she was gone, Peter’s sandwich stuffed in her pocket, the feeling of her arms around Ned as she’d hugged him goodbye still lingering.
After two full weeks of nearly perfect health, MJ and Peter have finally lightened up on their hovering, have at least stopped exchanging aborted gasps whenever Ned reaches for a tissue to sneeze. Ned is grateful for them, so grateful, but—it’s nice to not be looked at like he’s marked for death.
MJ’s face does something complicated as she looks at the letter in her hands, her jaw tightening and releasing.
Then she opens the letter. Ned knows what it says; he’d looked at it almost immediately when he was alone. He’s nothing if not nosy, Jean hadn’t asked him not to.
MJ, I don't know how to start this…
I don't know how to apologize so I’ll just come out and say I’m so sorry for what I did to you. You seem like a really good person and you didn’t deserve that.
That being said, I kind of did it again. I went into your mind last night, after you all went to bed. You were asleep the whole time. So maybe that's better? No it's not. I'm realizing now as I’m writing it that it's not better. Sorry again. Anyway I took the spell out of your mind too. Then why don't I remember? you may say. Well imagine there’s a door and I unlocked it. You just have to open the door.
It's your choice though. If you don’t want to, you don’t have to.
Sorry again.
Jean
To Ned’s shock, MJ laughs.
Surprised, he looks at her. “What?”
MJ lifts her hands and drops them into her lap again, a gesture Ned takes to mean something like: what the fuck. “It just can’t be that easy,” she says.
“Why not?”
“That’s not how life works.” She’s messing with her necklace, running her fingers over the broken black dahlia petals. “You don’t just get everything you want handed to you by a psychopathic psychic.”
“She’s not a psychopath, MJ.”
“Maybe not, but she is young and reckless.” They’re sitting on either end of the couch, and she turns to face him. There’s real fear in her face, Ned can see, a fear of disappointment, a fear of pain and suffering. “What if it doesn’t work?” MJ asks. “What if she messed up and whatever she did completely erases all of my memory by accident and I end up a vegetable?” Then MJ shifts, curling inward a little, and voices the thing that Ned knows she’s really afraid of. “What if I get the memories back and I… and it’s been too long?” She’s half whispering, clutching the necklace in one fist now. “What if I’m just not that person that loves him anymore? What do we do then?”
“MJ. Listen. Look at me.” Ned looks straight into her eyes. “I know you, okay? I remember you. And Peter knows you. You’re still the same person, just older and wiser. And yeah, it’ll be different. It’s been a long time. I don’t know what will happen. But you deserve to have your memories back. It doesn’t mean you have to do everything the old MJ would’ve done, you know? You’re not, like, beholden to who you were at seventeen years old, none of us are. You can still choose differently. But you should have all the information before you do.”
MJ looks at him. Back down at the paper in her hands. “How does it work?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you just try and remember something and see where it takes you? Open the door, you know?”
She closes her eyes. Furrows her brow. Ned can see her eyeballs moving behind her lids as she thinks.
Suddenly she gasps. Her eyes fly open, and they are full of memories. “Peter!”