Chapter Text
On Friday she walks past where she normally sits. She walks an extra two metres and sits opposite Peter and Ned. Not just near them. She is indubitably, 100% sitting with them and not near them.
Why?
Because yesterday she approached Peter (‘summoned him’ is probably a better way to put it, since she asked him to stay behind after decathlon) and had a surprisingly serious conversation about his reliability and then – and then – after a few seconds of silence when the conversation ended at its natural point of conclusion, the words came out, almost by themselves:
“My friends call me MJ.” That didn’t seem enough, so she also gave him a whack on his shoulder. He moves a tiny bit with the blow, a little late to look natural, but it was nice that he tried anyway.
“Okay, MJ,” he said, and she had to physically prevent herself from punching the air because that? That right there?
That was an honest-to-god friend.
“I kinda have to go now,” he continued, fingers playing with the cord of his hoodie. “My train – ”
“Go dude,” she said quickly, “I’ve imparted all orders I meant to today. I gotta go think up some more orders to give you lowly subjects tomorrow.”
He smiled at that – a real smile – good god. Good fucking lord. “See you tomorrow, MJ.”
So that’s why she’s sitting with them today. Maybe it’s not wise to count Hulks before they destroy a building, but she thinks – and Mom does too – that that was a confirmation that Peter Benjamin Parker considers her, Michelle Olivia Jones, a friend. And Mom is usually right when it comes to social things.
Sitting with them is about the extent of her courage today, so she dives into Oscar Wilde and tells herself that this is a baby step, and it's the only one she needs to take today. Jump in all at once and she’s sure to drive them away. Give them time to adapt to her sitting with them. Then talk when everyone’s ready for it.
Apparently, Peter’s already ready for it. Or maybe not. But willing to take the leap.
“What are you reading now?” He leans on his folded arms, smiling nervously at her.
MJ stares at him for a few seconds, swinging wildly at the balloon swelling in her chest with a sharp hairpin. This is the moment she should just open her mouth and tell him the title, and maybe smile a bit. Continue the conversation. Try to add something new to it.
Her tongue refuses to cooperate. The moment’s slipping away, but she can’t miss this chance. She closes the book on a finger marking the page, and shows him the cover. He mouths the title as he reads it, which is impossibly adorable, and then looks back at her in comprehension.
“Oh. That’s the one by Oscar Wilde, yeah?”
She looks at the cover herself. Oscar’s name isn’t displayed, which means he recognised the title and knew the author off the top of his head. “You’ve read Oscar Wilde?”
He flushes a little. “Nope. But I did see that movie about him with Stephen Fry and like. Super-young Jude Law. May thinks he’s really hot.”
He says May like he really means I.
And god, it’s true isn’t it? She can’t stop the smile. It feels a bit alien on her face, but it’s a genuine one. She leans a bit more towards him and thinks that maybe this whole friend thing won’t be so difficult after all.
))8((
“Do you have any book recommendations?”
MJ looks up from her notecards. They’re in morning decathlon practice, in the later half where everyone’s concentration is starting to wane, and Flash’s obnoxiousness is starting to wax as caffeine kicks in. “What?”
“Book recommendations,” Peter repeats. He takes Mr Harrington’s unoccupied seat next to her. “I wanna do some more reading, and you’re pretty much a library catalogue, so …” He adds a smile on at the end. It’s disarming. Which is stupid because every smile he gives her is disarming, so she should be fully used to them by now. Which she isn’t, damn it. There’s a streak of blue pen on his cheek because he’s stupid and probably forgot he had a pen in his hand and then leaned his face against it. She bets if she doesn’t point it out he won’t notice. He’ll walk about for the rest of the day looking dumb, and it serves him right.
Stupid, dumb boy.
“MJ?”
“Sorry, I can’t concentrate on anything you say ‘cause up-close you look very stupid.”
“What?”
“You have pen on your face.”
Goddamnit she’s weak she’s weak she’s fucking weak –
“Oh! Thanks!” he licks his thumb and scrubs at the bit of skin next to the mark, and there is a real physical pain in her chest as she resists reaching out and getting rid of it herself. “Did I get it?”
Now a small patch of his cheek is pinker than normal, but the ink is just as dark as ever.
It would be very easy to reach out and touch his face. She even has an excuse. But if she did that she could freeze up the second her fingers touched his cheek and her brain would turn off and she’d stare at him weirdly until he decided that she was too weird to be friends with and probably would want to be friends anymore.
But by god if she isn’t still tempted to reach out.
“Half-inch to the left,” she says instead. “No, your left. Idiot.”
His thumb moves to the clear skin on the other side of the streak.
“No.”
“Here?”
“No.”
He starts scrubbing with the whole heel of his hand. It’s cute, but now the blue ink is encroaching on yet more of his cheek.
“Look,” she says, and rummages in her bag for a packet of baby wipes. “Wipe it off.”
“You keep baby wipes in your pencil case?” he asks, accepting them anyway.
“You keep drug-store quantities of ibuprofen in your pencil case?”
“Touché.” His eyes dart away from her as Flash makes an especially loud and annoying comment to Betty, at the full moon of his obnoxiousness.
“Douché,” MJ points out.
Peter laughs so loudly that Ned turns to look at them from his dissociating a table away. His eyes flick from MJ, to Peter, to Peter’s cheek.
“You told him about the pen?” he asks, incredibly disappointed.
))8((
They walk to class together afterwards, and Peter once again brings up books.
“I, like, haven’t read anything for ages,” he complains.
“Except for Star Wars novelisations, I guess.”
He scoffs.
“Am I wrong?”
“I will neither confirm nor deny.”
“God, you suck, Parker,” she says in her friendliest, most scathing manner. She knocks into his shoulder to show it’s friendly ribbing, not Flash-ribbing. The latter is just blatant douchebaggery, and MJ may be a bitch but she isn’t a douchebag.
Smiling, he knocks back. “So do you have anything to rec?”
It’s her turn to scoff. “Obviously I have recommendations, loser. I can’t believe you felt you had to ask that.”
“I was just checking,” Peter replies, playfully defensive. He rearranges his books in his arms as if they’re incredibly difficult to carry. She won’t lie, it’s a convincing act: she would genuinely believe he was incapable of holding them properly if she didn’t already know he was a superhero. There’s a fluidity to the movement that shows he’s faking the extent of it. There’s a stiffness to one arm that shows that something went wrong last night.
During break she goes immediately to her locker and searches frantically for a good book to give him. There’s one in there.
She spares a look at it. It’ll do. She kind of enjoyed it, but there’s still a passionate part of her that wants to bash Rochester over the head with a grand piano for being such a shit-tier asshole dickhead shitheel motherfucking creepy-ass godawful shit piece of shit.
She has very strong feelings about Rochester.
“Jane Eyre,” she says, depositing just that in front of Peter at their table in the cafeteria, a few short hours later.
“Whomst?” Ned asks, peering at the cover.
“Jane Eyre,” Peter says, spinning the book around on the table. “You know. The next in the cycle after Jane Earth and Jane Fire.”
“I hate you,” MJ says cheerfully. She can’t believe she never thought of that joke before.
“Only Jane Avatar, master of all four elements …” Ned starts, but she throws a piece of cucumber at his face before he can get any further into Katara’s monologue.
“Thanks, MJ,” Peter says smilingly. He puts the book in his bag with the utmost care, which leaves a warm, fuzzy, and all-round disgusting feeling in MJ’s chest.
“Whatever,” she answers genuinely. She wonders if he’ll really read it.
))8((
“I’m just saying,” Peter says two days later, tapping the oscilloscope absently with his pencil, “Rochester is like. A douche.”
“No shit,” she replies happily. Two days. Only two days and he’s finished the book and is talking to her about it. Like he genuinely paid attention reading through the slog of Charlotte’s prose and Jane as a character in general.
“I mean he just baited her. Like straight up. That’s so shit on so many levels – ”
MJ clicks back to MatLab and looks vaguely in their plot’s general direction. She isn’t paying much attention to it. Her brain is too busy focussing every single neuron on this conversation with Peter. “Rochester fucking sucks,” she agrees. “So you liked the book?”
“Kinda,” Peter says, frowning at the circuit readout on the tiny oscilloscope monitor.
“Kinda?”
“I mean, I thought the characters were engaging and interesting but. The actual writing, and like … I dunno what the right word is for this. Agenda? Like the author’s agenda, or – opinions? God, I don’t know. This is hard. Like the – the mysterious kinda ambience it had was neat, but there was a lot of stuff that was just. Y’know, like, yikes.”
She sits up a bit straighter. Something in her chest is thrumming against her ribcage. He read it? He finished it? He analysed it? “Like?” she asks, trying very hard to stay cool.
“Well,” he says, starting to chew on his pencil and looking thoughtful in a way that MJ doesn’t think is in reference to their stupid band-pass circuit. “I didn’t like how his ‘crazy wife’ was, like, a woman of colour who ends up locked in an attic for being mentally ill, or – or that it kinda projects a narrative where, like. People of colour are devious and tricked Rochester into marrying Bertha. A … And, and then Jane and Rochester only end up actually together after he loses everything, she inherits a bunch of money, and he goes blind. Like one of them has to be in a position of power, instead of equals? And that he being disabled – ” Peter stops, and drops the pencil excitedly. “Wait, I know what’s bugging me! Okay, so Rochester being injured in the fire reads like it’s his punishment for his actions, and acting like being disabled is a punishment when it’s actually just something that is? That isn’t a punishment or gift or some kind of martyrdom bullshit, but just - just a thing? Feels very gross. Especially as with how it seemed that Charlotte Brontë was like, ‘oh look at helpless Rochester, now Jane’s inferior, good thing she’s here to look after him because he’s incapable of doing anything’. So it’s like? Rancid takes about race, mental illness, disability, and marriage equity all in one book?”
MJ stares at him. Peter stares back.
His cheeks go bright red.
“Sorry.”
Why the fuck doesn’t he do better in his English essays?
“Excellent fucking critique,” she manages. “You mentioned like. A shit ton of things I hated. I mean, it was so rambling and incoherent but, dude! Nice!” She pokes him in the forehead a bit harder than necessary. “Nice to know you have some woke braincells in there.”
“Thanks,” he replies. He looks both bemused and pleased.
“You’re welcome. What are we gonna do about the filter roll-off?”
He blinks, and looks back at the MatLab code and circuit and oscilloscope like he’d forgotten they were there. “Oh! Um. Maybe add a small resistor? In series.”
“Cool. Let’s go point five Ohms, yeah?”
He nods, reaches for his pencil and scribbles out a new transfer function. MJ praises Ada Lovelace that she finally has a competent project partner.
“Also Rochester is such a fuckhead to Adèle.”
“I know.” Peter looks so angry about people who aren’t real. “She’s nine. Like fuck off.”
“Fuck Rochester,” MJ says with finality as she types the new function into the code.
“Like I get he has his stupid shitty personal issues to deal with and – oh, hey, that looks better.” Peter leans over, chin almost on her shoulder, to stare admiringly at their new plot. The hair prick up on the back of her neck. “Nice.”
“Yeah, it’s dope,” she manages. She screenshots the resulting graph and copies the code onto a Word doc with the previous eight graphs and codes. Then she hits print and spins in the chair. “Not it.”
“Not – agh.”
“I said it first. Go get it.”
“I object to this system.”
“Your objection is denied,” she tells him. “Now shoo.”
The printer hiccoughs to life and sluggishly begins churning out pages of the physics assignment. Instead of waiting for it to finish printing the whole lot, Peter picks up each warm sheet as they are coughed out.
MJ looks at him.
Peter picks up page three.
She narrows her eyes.
Peter picks up page four.
She narrows them harder.
After agonisingly long, the last sheet is vomited out. Peter picks it up and puts it on the bottom of the pile.
Then he spends an absurdly long time straightening the stack.
He’s doing it on purpose. He’s biting the inside of his cheek to stop himself smirking. He takes so long that Ms Lopez asks MJ what is so interesting about the printer that she’s plainly not listening to a thing she’s said in the last two minutes.
“Sorry,” she says, and Ms Lopez moves away.
Peter grins evilly across the classroom.
Bastard.
She thinks it with a smile.