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“That was hell,” Peter says feelingly, pressing down on the centre of his suit until it de-clings, and then shrugging out of it. His ears are still burning. “I’m talking old-fashioned Greek hell. Where they make you, like, gourmet cook your own balls and serve it to demons, except every day your balls regrow and you have do it over and over again--”
“Yeah, no, sufficiently vivid,” M.J. says from where she’s sitting cross-legged on the bottom bunk, face turned slightly away from him as he pulls a t-shirt over his head. Her voice sounds constricted, like she’s trying not to laugh. “And it wasn’t that bad.”
He’s going to kill her. “I hate you so much right now. It’s a testament to how much I like you more than I hate you that we’re still dating.”
M.J. stares at him for a full second, and then: “Y-you’re such a queen,” and yeah, she’s gone, just doubled over and sobbing with laughter at him and his stupid bright red cheeks--
“Take off your mask, she said. It’ll be fun, she said. I’m going to distract you with a million kisses while we’re fifty feet in the air and you’re trying to not die, she definitely did not say--”
M.J. resurfaces for breath, takes one look at his face, and loses it again.
“I’m serious. And it wasn’t just--” Peter drops his voice to a whisper, even though they’re alone in his room, because it’s weirdly intimate to say out loud: “Some of them were on the mouth.”
“But your face was right there,” M.J. says, apparently recovered: her hair’s extra-frizzed from the wind and hanging down her forehead in brown vines; she’s got her chin in her hands, super amused of course, and she’s smiling this broad, mega-watt smile that makes his chest feel abruptly decompressed because shit, she’s so lovely--“What was I supposed to do, behave like a gentleman?”
“Yes! Exactly, yes!”
“You’re the Spiderman--”
“--that’s not the point--”
“--like, come on, you multitask like a motherf--”
“I’m not a robot, I’m not immune to this stuff--” and shit, shit shit shit, that was loud, too loud.
The mood changes whip-fast: M.J. tilts her head at him, smile wiped clean. A small crease appears between her eyebrows, and slowly, she brings her hands to her sides. Peter’s heart is pounding. He wants to thumb away that crease. He wants to say I’m so sorry, that was so unfair to you, except there’s this thing; it’s got a vice-like grip on his throat and it won’t let go--
“C’mere,” is what M.J. says. Astonishingly, she pats the space next to her.
“I.” Peter swallows, tries again: “I’m.” Shit.
“Peter.”
He takes two steps forward and crumples next to her, and he can’t even look her in the face because it’s so awful--
“Hey.” M.J. takes his hand. She’s slowly slotting her fingers into the gaps between his, fitting Peter’s palm flush against hers, and yeah, the possibility of him crying just went from non-existent to threateningly imminent. “Hey. Talk to me.”
“It’s.” Deep inhale. “Really embarrassing.”
“Okay.” Her voice is quiet, and calm. The pressure on his hand is steady. “Exhale. Take your time.” Peter breathes, stares at his bare feet, and thinks about it, really thinks about it. He doesn’t want to articulate this wrong.
Haltingly, he starts: “The way I am--and especially when I’m being Spiderman--I have to take in a lot of stimuli, right? And even when there’s so much going on--if there’s three things collapsing and five sirens going off and seven people to rescue, all at the same time, I can do it. I can filter the stuff that doesn’t matter, because I’ve been gifted this--amazing--focus. And it helps me save lives.
“But when I’m with you in that zone, with the suit and the webs and the adrenalin, I.” He swallows. “It’s totally different. I can’t process anything but you. I can’t--things that should come like breathing to me, like judging momentum, or the ideal angle off a building corner--timing lifts and landings--it’s hard. Because you’re occupying like, all of my frontal lobe. And the parietal and temporal lobe. Probably the occipital as well!” and wow, he should’ve just run a bread knife through himself; it would’ve been more dignified, “All the brain space that matters, is what I mean. And I’m not--used to that. And at first, you know, I thought--‘s just hormones. Or maybe it’s because what we have is so new? But it’s been months now, and--”
Peter exhales, long and hard. “This isn’t just hormones. I mean, of course a part of it is, but it feels like--the notion of even thinking or worrying about anyone but you, when you’re in my arms, is just. Ugh. You affect me, and it sucks, because you’re never going to know what that’s like,” and oh, that’s the clincher, isn’t it.
He might as well have cut to that last sentence and saved the painful prologuizing, because this is what it really boils down to; what every relationship insecurity in history has, at one point or another, really boiled down to.
There’s a ringing sort of silence, and with every passing moment where neither of them says anything, Peter’s heart crawls up his throat. Jesus, okay. He should probably make this easier on M.J--Peter tries to twist his hand out of her grip.
M.J. immediately plants her other hand on top of his, firmly keeping him in place; then: “Have I ever told you about that time I hopelessly pined after you for a full year before we became friends?”
She says it so matter-of-factly that it startles Peter into a laugh. What?
He looks sideways at her in disbelief, and she’s looking right back at him: open and frank and deadly serious. “No, really, pined. Like, I’m sorry Ms. Catherine Earnshaw, but this town isn’t big enough for two gothic heroines--” and yeah, Peter’s fully smiling now. He bumps her shoulder into M.J’s, and she bumps right back.
It’s sweet: she’s trying to make him feel better about his huge emotional vomit. “You’re exaggerating.”
“Except I’m really not,” she says drily, and shrugs. “You were smart, obviously. Not that ‘smart’ is a high bar given Flash’s inexplicable and continuing presence on the decathlon team,” amen, “but yeah. You were really smart. Still are.”
“Oh. Thank you?” Peter says, not very sure where this is going.
“And, you were--are--undeniably,” and here, she looks pained, “fit.”
“Fit,” Peter repeats, like some sort of moron.
M.J. rolls her eyes heavenward. "Of course, fighting beefy criminals every day while hanging upside down does things to your core muscles, but at the time I had no knowledge of this. So my preferred instinct was to sort of hate you.”
“Right.”
“And then. You just--did good things, man. Constantly. Like steal isopropyl alcohol from the chem lab to rub off the ‘dyke’ written on Lakshmi Laube’s locker before she could read it.”
A beat. “I didn’t think anyone had seen me do that.”
“Yeah. I know.” M.J. fidgets a little, clears her throat. “But obviously you were besotted with Liz, and you had this whole separate love story going with Leeds, and I didn’t think I had much of a chance. Of getting into your orbit, or whatever. And I thought: well shit, he’s probably the coolest person I’ll never know.”
“Besotted is a strong word,” Peter says, but his cheeks are rapidly heating up again. Does M.J know--does she even know how everything she’s saying is almost too much for his stupid, struggling heart? “I’ve only recently figured out what it means.”
M.J scoffs, and squeezes his hand. “Don’t be gross.”
Peter laughs. “Seriously?”
M.J. tugs him down onto the bed, and Peter lets her. She pushes him to his side, and then curls around him, arm slung across his waist. Her breath is soft and warm on the nape of his neck, and it's maybe the most amazing thing in the world. Jesus. She can’t assume big spoon position all the time, just because she’s taller! Well, that, and the fact he goes through these mortifying full-body shivers that really, really, ought to remain confidential information.
“Yes, seriously,” she answers quietly into his hair, nudging his feet with hers, aimlessly. The little action sends bursts of liquid gold up into his chest. “Let me have this, for once,” and he lets out another startled laugh. “Okay. So you care. Big deal. Of course you care. That’s you. When you care, you go all out. And I knew that before I knew you were Spiderman. The bane of Queens Police Department, vigilante-next-door, honest-to-god-Avenger. Before all of that.
“And having been, quite frankly, obsessed with everything you do over the period of time that I’ve known you--it’s impossible for me to think anymore that caring is--is some sort vulnerability. That it’s anything but--” M.J’s arm tightens around his waist, his breath catches, time slows, “--the most worthwhile strength there is.”
He clears his throat: holy shit. “Um. Wow.”
Oh, eloquently done, Peter.
“Yeah,” M.J. agrees, sounding contemplative. “It’s screwed up all my established premises about human behaviour. So congratulations, loser.” She buries her face in Peter’s shoulder.
It dawns on Peter, a little later: "We are gross.”
“Right? The fact that I’m actually empathizing with Leeds--”
He turns and adjusts himself, so that they’re face to face. M.J. smiles at him, and oh, this is a rare one--it’s of the shy, tentative variety. And if Peter looks closely--which he does, which he always does--there’s something just a little uncertain, a little questioning in her expression. It nearly kills him. He leans forward, and kisses her.
“What?” she asks automatically when he breaks off.
“Pining?”
“I literally just spat a whole thesis about it, were you there?”
“I feel like I would’ve noticed, though.”
“Nope.” M.J. pops the ‘p’, and pulls a face. “It’s actually kind of appalling when I think about it, because I used to send you hundreds of texts in a row, and actually point out when you had responded to Liz and not me. Like, next-level desperate. That you didn’t figure it out is equally appalling, and in fact, the subject of my second thesis--”
“Oh come on, that never happened.”
M.J. sits up so fast that Peter has to blink, several times: “I’m going scroll through my chat right now.”
“You’ll be scrolling for decades before you find anything.”
“True,” M.J. says, already unlocking her phone. “Let the record show that’s only because you compulsively share every meme you’ve ever seen--”
“Wh--you like the memes I send you--”
M.J. looks down at him with narrowed eyes, thumbs paused above the screen. “Do I, Peter? Do I?” Then, head going bent over her phone, she says, “Also, you need to tell Tony Stark about your focus problem around me,” and in the middle of all this light-heartedness it’s the most unlikely sentence she could’ve possibly uttered. Peter takes a couple of moments to process.
When he finishes: “Are you kidding--no, no way am I telling Mr. Stark--I thought--you said caring was a strength!”
M.J. had set her phone down exactly as he began his outburst, which, yeah--makes sense, because she has a freaky instinct for this kind of thing (recent events notwithstanding). Once he's done, she says: “Of course it is. But what are you going to do when the bad guys figure out who you are? When the Sinister Six try to use me against you? Or use Ned?” Peter is quiet. “Or May? Are you going to let yourself be overwhelmed? Or are you going to learn to weaponise what you feel, and then kick their ass?”
Peter stares at her.
“There you go.” M.J. says, taking his silence for stunned agreement (which, really: good call). She picks up her phone again and wriggles, lying down next to him. “So are you ready to eat your words?”
“What--oh!”
M.J. nods, and grimly passes over her phone. “Hey--no, I want to read too--” so Peter brings up his arm, and a frisson of pure happiness runs through him as she curls against his chest.
A few seconds in, and Peter’s trying his best not to laugh: “This is. Incriminating, yeah, you weren’t wrong.”
“No, I rarely am,” M.J. says, but he can hear the fondness in her voice. “You were so oblivious. Loser.”
“Hey loser,” he says softly, nudging her head with his nose. “Hey. Hey, hey loser.”
“Okay Parker, that’s straight up schadenfreude and you cannot use that against me--”
“Can’t I?”
“I can’t imagine why you would, seeing as I happen to occupy all four lobes of your brain.” Peter recoils in horror as M.J. tilts her head upward, looking very pointedly at him, and all right, fine: spectacularly played, he’s blushing just remembering it.
“This is bullshit,” he informs her. M.J. scrunches her nose in mock-sympathy--which is another freaking cosmic plane of adorable. She’s just asking to be booped at this point, honestly.
“The doctrine of mutually assured destruction, actually, but close enough,” she says, reaching up to press a kiss to his smile, “Close enough.”