Chapter Text
When Peter was six, he had to have his appendix removed, because it decided to throw a full-scale rebellion in the middle of his first grade graduation and he puked on the multi-purpose room floor. Even now he doesn't remember it as particularly traumatic, the surgery was already so streamlined he's pretty sure it only took an hour. But surgery is surgery, even with a scope, and he remembers waking up feeling groggy and sick and like someone had just stabbed him. Which. They had. But Mom and Dad were there standing over him, fussing over him, giving him hugs and kisses and petting his hair and saying You're all better now, Peter, they fixed you right up. It's okay, baby, everything's okay.
He almost has his guts ripped apart and burned to cinders when he’s fifteen. He wakes up before May is allowed to come back, and for just a brief second expects to see Mom and Dad standing over him again. Then he goes from expects to wants, and the pain of that feeling is so much worse than the pain of his shredded abdominal muscles. It's choking, it's gripping his heart in its hand, it's disorientating, even after so long. And he's drugged to the gills on superhero-levels of pain medication, so he doesn't exactly have a firm lid on his self control, so by the time May gets there he's just. Bawling. Because he hurts and he was scared and he almost died and he wants his mom and dad to be here to hug and kiss it away, but they can't, they left him, they're gone and never coming back, and sometimes he still feels so lost without them, he—
May fusses over him. She gives him hugs and kisses, and pets his hair, and says It's okay, Peter, it's okay, I know, I know, I know, I wish they were here too, I love you so much, it's okay, baby, you're okay. And after a few minutes the world slides back into place. The pain doesn't go away, it never does and never will, but it crawls to the back of his brain where it'll leave him alone for a while. He reaches up to wipe the tears from his face but May already did it for him, so he just hugs her and says a silent thanks that he still has a mom after all.
"You've had everyone worried," May smiles through her tears, speaking softly as she perches on the edge of the bed. "Tony had you choppered in. I—I may have hit him. But I stand by it!"
He's too tired to say anything much, just smiles at her and lets her stroke his hand between her own. His limbs are heavy and full of Jell-O, and he thinks he might have woken up at some point during the surgery, but he’s not. He doesn’t want to think about it too hard right now. He thinks maybe he talks about something, maybe the poop emoji. He wonders if MJ’s pillow got left on the beach, but only to himself. May kisses his cheek and he goes to sleep again.
The next time he wakes up for longer than a second, there’s daylight peeking around the edges of the black-out curtain in his window. His midsection feels itchy and deeply uncomfortable, but it doesn’t hurt outright. The next thing he notices is that his arm is asleep.
Actually, his MJ is asleep on his arm. There’s a couch in the corner on which his May is also asleep. All of his favorite things asleep in one room, that’s awesome. Except Ned, but that’s okay because he and Peter have sleepovers all the time, so he can probably miss one. This is great. He definitely doesn’t want to wake MJ, but he also realizes that he has to pee, like, urgently. What on a normal day would be a smooth effortless maneuver to free his arm is today a jerky and awkward business that makes MJ mumble and pick up her head, sleepily smacking her lips. She is so cute.
“Sorry,” he whispers, “but can you maybe get May? I gotta, uh...”
She wakes up about as easy as pulling teeth, trudging around the bed with a mumbled “shut up,” and helping him to stand while holding his IV pole.
He still has his boxers on, thank you baby Jesus. Lying still was mildly uncomfortable, but moving and standing and walking is still stiff and painful, and any hope he might have of getting through this with dignity goes out the window. It’s a good thing he’s a little stoned and doesn’t care much. She walks him to the bathroom and waits outside the door with her ears plugged and hums—she is a merciful and benevolent soul—until he washes his hands and pushes it open.
Then it strikes him that MJ is here again, and he’s just so happy. And, again, a little high. So he hugs her. She smells like Wanda, and that’s pretty weird. She pats his back in a mechanical kind of way and takes him back to bed.
“You remember waking up when I was here earlier?” she whispers as she helps him with his blanket. He groggily shakes his head. “Good. Then I don’t have to kill you.”
“Huh?”
“Don’t worry about it,” she assures him, sitting on the edge of the bed and looking down at him. She’s so tall, and he can barely see her in the darkened room, but he’s glad she’s here. “My dad’s gonna be here in an hour to pick me up. He kind of knows your secret identity now, so I guess I have to keep him around. Make sure he doesn’t snitch.”
He’s too tired to worry about that now, but he must make some kind of unhappy face or noise—he’s just really not good at this whole masked vigilante thing, is he?—because she makes that amused psh! noise again. “He mad?” he asks.
“I think more worried,” she admits, taking his hand so perfunctorily in hers that it takes him a few delayed seconds to remember to blush. “You almost died, Peter. That sucks. And, like, you get these expectations in your head of how things are going to be, and then they turn out different and people disappoint you and it’s just, it’s hard, you know?”
He doesn’t know, actually, but her voice is quiet and wobbly when she says it so he’s pretty sure it’s bad. “MJ,” he breathes out, trying to put together a string of thoughts and not doing a great job. “I-I don’t know what to—”
“Because, like,” she interrupts him, and suddenly something about her voice clicks in Peter’s head and he starts to grin before his conscious mind catches up, “I really wanted to do this shitty cliché moment when you woke up, but...your breath smells so bad? Like, so bad I think something died in there? Because the last thing you ate was a chili dog and it’s been like twelve hours, so this is so much less cute than I thought it would be, you’re really letting me down, Parker.”
Then she leans down, and with utmost gentleness, kisses his forehead. A jolt of electricity zaps from the point of contact all the way down to his toes and back up again.
“I can get up and brush my teeth right now,” he offers weakly. His eyelids are already getting heavy again, though, like the top lids are magnetized to the bottoms and resistance is futile. MJ smiles and shakes her head, squeezing his hand.
“Go to sleep, loser. I’ll wake you up before I go.”
Yep. He still likes it when she bosses him around. It feels like he goes to sleep smiling, though he’s sure he starts drooling way sooner. It doesn’t matter as long as she’s holding his hand.
This time he dreams. Peter doesn’t have many pleasant dreams since becoming Spider-Man; usually they’re about everything that’s ever gone wrong on a patrol or every time he ever got hurt or everything that possibly could go wrong in the future. Tonight—technically today—is different, in the way that it’s good. He and MJ are in a big empty warehouse kind of place, with no machinery or garbage or anything inside. She’s holding his hand, which is awesome, but then she steals the web shooter off his wrist and starts doing all these cool acrobatic flips and stuff from the roof beams. He watches for a while, then uses the shooter on his other wrist to join her.
I didn’t know you knew how to do this, he says.
She smiles at him as she reaches the pinnacle of an upward swing. I will, she replies.
They swing toward one another, he takes hold around her waist, and they spin in a mad vortex of tangled limbs and the smell of jasmine, their connected foreheads the center of gravity. It’s like magic, but better.
He wakes again in a fug of confusion to the homely sounds of doors opening, keys softly chiming, and lowered voices. Prying his eyes open (they are. Extremely crusty), he watches May and Robert hovering near the door, whispering, while MJ roots around behind the bed for something. Probably her phone charger. She’s the smartest person he knows but also has a habit of forgetting her charger everywhere she takes it.
“I had a dream,” he says as her head pops up at the side of the bed.
“Okay, MLK,” she replies with a mindless pat to his shoulder. “Dad’s here, so I’m out. You gotta pee again?” He nods and she wrestles him out of bed with a lot less gentleness than before. He would complain, but he remembers that there’s a small disposable toothbrush and tube of toothpaste in the bathroom and almost skips there himself, tender abdomen or no.
He’s so weak he has to pee sitting down, and not for the first time wonders why guys bother standing at all when sitting is an option. Aunt May told him once she catches up on her emails and sometimes reads a few pages of a particularly juicy sci-fi romance while she takes care of business; girls get more time to hang out before it’s weird, that’s. That’s reverse sexism, is what it is. What if he wants to read about time-traveling sexcapades while he pees?
So. Clearly still a little doped up.
As he washes his hands and cleans his teeth with enough toothpaste to make the whole room stink of spearmint, he listens to the comforting rise and fall of the voices in his room. The low rumble of MJ’s dad chuckling. Can they smell his toothpaste? He swallows a little worrying about it, and fumbles to put the toothbrush back in its little plastic wrapper and hide the evidence.
“Peter,” Mister Jones—Robert, sir—says as he shambles back into the big room. There are bags under his eyes to rival MJ’s, like maybe he didn’t sleep much either last night. Peter feels a spike of guilt in his guts for causing everyone so much worry, accompanied by a second, worse spike, for getting yet another civilian involved in his secret identity. But Robert surprises him by patting his shoulder in a kind of fatherly way he remember’s Uncle Ben doing, and smiling weakly. “Good to see you up and about, son.”
“Mister...Robert, sir, are Celine and Tabby okay?” he asks, surprised to find himself choking on tears as the idea of them being anything but okay suddenly occurs to him. But no, he wouldn’t be here with Peter if they weren’t okay. MJ wouldn’t, either. “I’m so sorry, sir, I messed it all up so bad, I-I’m still learning to be good at this, and-and the last thing I ever wanted is to put anyone in danger, MJ knows, I always try my best to do what’s right and-and...”
He thinks that maybe Robert is here to yell at him. To tell him he messed up bad and that he doesn’t want Peter to come anywhere near his family again. Instead he only firms his grip on Peter’s shoulder, and pulls him in for a brief hug.
“You and I both know once she’s made her mind up there’s no changing it,” he says very quietly into Peter’s ear. “Don’t make me regret saving you.”
“Dad,” MJ groans.
“I won’t, sir!” Peter hurries to promise him, wiping his eyes, and grins at MJ over his shoulder. She’s standing just behind her dad with a long-suffering look on her face and May’s arm around her shoulders, but she smiles when he shoots her a thumbs-up. “I always make curfew when I’m on—when I have friends with me. You can ask Aunt May, I am very responsible.”
Pleasantries are exchanged among the adults. Phone calls and coffee are suggested. Celine doesn’t know about Spider-Man’s secret identity and, if Robert has anything to say about it, never will. May agrees that’s for the best. She and Celine have already talked on the phone a few times in the past, apparently, which makes MJ blush like a radio tower as she shuffles from behind her dad to Peter’s side.
“It’s like they’re arranging a play date,” she confides quietly, putting a perfunctory hand on his elbow to help him back to bed because his legs are shaking with the effort of standing. “So awkward. They know we’re going to have our licenses soon, right?”
“Think May’s in denial of that one,” Peter grins as he nestles down into his pillows. “I’m really good at parallel parking.”
“That a euphemism?”
“Gross.”
They laugh. Her hand finds his among the folds of starched cotton sheets. It feels like the most natural thing in the world. “You brush your teeth yet?” she asks, and he nods so fast it makes his head spin and he has to close his eyes. She psh!es at him. “Good. Keep practicing until our first date and I might let you kiss me, loser. That’s not happening in front of our parents.”
His disappointment is augmented by the reality of how weird it would be to kiss her in front of May, and he nods, feelings his stomach flutter at the promise of getting to kiss MJ sometime in the near future.
Maybe he should look up the Wiki-How on French kissing, just in case. He’s never done it before.
“Snapchat me later?” he requests, unable to resist playing with her fingers a little.
She squeezes his hand. “Sure thing. Get me a quote from Captain America for his official stance on the Accords?”
“You bet.”
They smile at each other. She rolls her eyes as if they’re being so lame, but doesn’t stop smiling even as her dad says it’s time to go. They say goodbye and she kisses him so fast he barely notices until he feels the spot on his forehead burning. Robert smiles and wishes him well again as he puts an arm around MJ’s shoulders, but Peter’s suddenly seized by a memory of the beach and grips the safety rail on the side of his bed and calls out: “Sir!”
Robert slows down and looks over his shoulder at Peter.
“Thanks for saving my life.”
His mouth hardens into a thin line, and Peter thinks that maybe he sees a little bit of residual fear in Robert’s eyes. The thought My daughter is dating a funeral waiting to happen practically scrolls across his eyes like the display on those LED novelty t-shirts.
“Let’s not make a habit of it,” Robert says somberly, and he and MJ vanish around the corner.
The effort of just a few minutes of conversation has him drained and a little sweaty, and he lays back again as May reclaims the chair at his bedside. She helps him take a few sips of water (he thinks there’s maybe some pedialyte mixed into it) and tugs the blankets up under his chin. He looks up at his aunt with what she used to call moon-eyes when he was sick as a kid, and she kisses his dirty hair. “I love you, Peter, but don’t you ever scare me and MJ like that again,” she lovingly says.
He feels himself frown from far away, like the skin belongs to someone else’s face. “MJ wasn’t scared, she was yelling at me,” he recalls blearily.
Sighing, May scoots him over to the edge of the bed and crawls up next to him, just like when he was little and had bad dreams but didn’t want to leave his own room. “The year before you came to live with us, Uncle Ben had bad indigestion and thought he was having a heart attack; I spent the entire ride to the hospital telling him off for every McDonalds burger he’d ever eaten in his life,” she says, and pulls a battered paperback sci-fi romance from her bag on the bedside table. “Go back to sleep if you can, honey. Tony wants to go over what happened with that man as soon as you can stay awake longer than ten minutes.”
That man. The foggy memory of Shooty McLaser’s gangrenous arm, the feverish way he seemed to find Harry Osborn’s face everywhere he looked, his detached rage, they come back to him in flashes that leave him shivering. Aunt May huddles closer to him, and he sneakily curls up against her side like when he was little. Some superhero he is.
“I think he was really sick,” he peeps into the quiet of the dim room.
“I think so too,” May murmurs, stroking his arm. “Someone took a video on their phone. Kudos to the surfer who knocked him out, though. Looked like he was going to hurt as many people as possible to get someone to help him. He’s in custody now, and I’m sure being taken care of. There weren’t any—no one died, Peter. You did good, keeping him distracted, even if I’m not a huge fan of how you did it. You did a good job. I’m really proud of you.”
There’s suddenly a lump in his throat. He takes May’s arm and maneuvers it around his shoulders so he can lay squashed even more firmly against her side. He’s not going to be a kid forever, so he’s going to take advantage of being one as long as he can.
He spends the next two days of his recovery wondering if things are going to be weird and different, now that he and MJ are...whatever they are. He gives Mister Stark a play-by-play If Shooty McLaser’s attack on Luna Park in search of Harry Osborn, he goes on short walks up and down the hall with Steve flanking him to get his strength back, and he eats like a goatherd, according to Wanda, and he’s not exactly sure what that means but he guesses it’s a lot. He calls Ned the second he’s back from his family camping trip to catch him up on everything that happened this week, with some heroic embellishments so he doesn’t look as much like a square as he feels to his best friend. Then it occurs to him that his life is already pretty weird, and having a girlfriend is probably the least weird thing about him.
And it’s not weird at all. He gets home and finds MJ and Ned waiting in his room with a new Lego Millennium Falcon. MJ describes the directions between pages of Between The World And Me, and “hacks” into Peter’s computer to get into her Spotify account and educate them on real music. Ned shows off where he got bitten by like a million leeches going into the lake on a dare from his little sisters. Peter lays down on the floor with his head on MJ’s leg when he gets tired from sitting up, and listens to them argue about male power fantasy fulfillment in video games over his head until May yells that she’s ordering pizza from the other room.
When MJ leaves after dinner, he makes a decision and tries to kiss her; he’s so nervous that he just kind of closes his eyes and goes for it, and is very confused when he encounters her hand and not her face.
“This wasn’t a date,” she grins. As she turns away, though, he sees her touch the kissed palm to her cheek.
“Then let’s go on one tomorrow!” he yells down the street after her. “I’ll get coffee!” She just waves, laughing at him. “And a—MJ, stop laughing, I’m serious!—and a movie! That counts as a date, right? Text me!”
After she turns the corner, he hears her start to laugh, and it feels like there’s a hot-air balloon slowly expanding in his chest. This moment, these people, this life, it’s his, it’s all his. And he’s never taking it for granted. He’s going to hold on with both hands. He’s going to spend the summer pretending to chase after MJ when he knows she’ll be waiting at the finish line. He’s going to make more time to show Aunt May how special she is, and help Ned’s parents and sisters plan his sweet sixteen. He’s going to fight for these last few years of childhood he has left with the people he loves.
His phone chimes in his back pocket later, while he and Ned are watching Return of the Jedi. It’s a Snapchat from MJ_BushDid911, a close-up snap of her hand with the kissy-face emoji in the palm, captioned I’m home. Catch.
Grinning to himself like a doofus, he punches the air while Ned isn’t looking.