Chapter Text
Stupid smart boy.
That was the nickname Michelle had given Peter in her head. Ever since she came to Midtown and joined decathlon, she couldn’t stand him. He answered more questions than everyone. He knew more than everyone. One time, he had corrected Michelle on her chemistry problem. He had been right, but still. Who the hell did he think he was?
Michelle wouldn’t have been so annoyed if she didn’t see him so often. But with decathlon and having six of her eight classes with him sophomore year, he was basically always in the room when she was. And she hated it.
She hated that she began noticing his frequent absences and weird behavior more and more. She noticed how Peter always seemed exhausted, and not just the “overachieving high schooler” exhausted. Some days he was straight up dead on his feet. He was able to make it through classes and practices, but would either rush off after or stagger to his feet.
She hated it because the more time she spent around Peter, the more he got into her head. He was incredibly smart, and she kept expecting him to show off and put down other people, like she’d seen others at Midtown do. But he was always nice - he never talked in a way that made people feel dumb, and often helped others if the teacher couldn’t explain it well. She noticed how even though she was odd and didn’t have any friends, he would try to make small talk with her if they were ever put together during decathlon practice or in a class project.
Peter Parker was nice when he didn’t have to be, and to Michelle, that made him weirder than she was.
There was also the huge fucking secret he was poorly trying to conceal, but everyone had their issues, and to Michelle, the kindness thing was more of a rarity.
With the decathlon season over, Michelle didn’t see Peter as often as she used to. Not that he ever stayed in one place for long, but his appearances became especially sparse with the team only meeting once a week in their off-season. He also only showed up about half the time and usually ended up sprinting out of the room as soon as practice was dismissed.
Michelle honestly didn’t care that much about why Peter was acting so weird. It was just an unknown, and Michelle hated unknowns; Peter acting uncharacteristically weird served as a missing piece of a puzzle.
She had all the factors of Peter’s puzzle, but didn’t connect them until the truth literally smacked her in the face.
It was a rainy Wednesday in November when the 7-11 close to Michelle’s house was robbed, and she was inconveniently inside of it.
She hadn’t planned to be long; she was about to start her period, and picked up some pads since she was running low. She had just spotted the box she was looking for when the poppy, low-volume music overhead was drowned out by “ Hands up! Everyone down, NOW!”
She couldn’t breathe, and felt like a needle was poking into her lungs. It was a dingy part of Queens, and these guys just wanted some free cash, she reasoned. As long as the cashier didn’t try anything and she stayed down, everything would be fine.
As Michelle’s thoughts trailed off to focusing on breathing the correct amount of air so she didn’t pass out, she heard the door jingle open. The needle was gone, and she could breathe again; the robbers were gone.
Then she heard Peter’s stupid, snarky voice, and the prickly feeling increased ten-fold.
“Hiya, guys! There was a job fair for that new mall last week, in case the whole convenience-store robbing bit gets...inconvenient.”
Gunshots went off, and her heart started beating overtime. What the fuck is Parker doing taunting robbers with guns??
After only a few shots, there was only silence and the store music playing. She heard some sort of whooshing sound, and then the cashier gratefully thanking someone - Peter ?
Michelle heard Peter replying to the cashier, and now that the threat was eliminated, she felt her head spin with all of the missing puzzle pieces. She slowly got up from her spot on the ground to ask Peter what the fuck he was doing here, when she realized his head of neat brown hair wasn’t anywhere. Instead, standing in front of the cashier was Spider-Man. On the ground, the robbers were completely webbed up and incapacitated.
Michelle was pretty sure that a part of her brain imploded as the pieces fit together before her eyes.
Michelle was introverted, but not exactly quiet. If something was awry, she spoke up; if someone treated her like shit, she would throw it right back. But in this bizarre, insane, perception-of-the-world-altering circumstance, she had nothing. She felt physically incapable of response.
Despite her trepidation, she never doubted that Peter was Spider-Man once she connected the dots. It was definitely his voice that she’d heard, before she even saw him in the suit. And once that little link appeared, everything else fit neatly together. Spider-Man being in D.C. (like Peter), even though he was known to operate in Queens, Peter not showing up for the competition, Peter being flaky even though it seemed contradictory to his character (which Michelle was only a casual observer of), Peter working long hours as an intern at Stark Industries even though he was only in high school...it all fit.
When Michelle usually solved a problem, there was nothing but satisfaction. Even if the results weren’t what she was hoping for - a precipitate forming in chem lab when there shouldn’t be, Sylvia Plath’s metaphors in Lady Lazarus evincing traces of some anti-semitism - she had direct results that she could work with. But this new information about Peter just felt heavy. She felt weighed down by it, and had no idea what to do with it. It felt like Peter’s alter-ego secret was concrete tied to her ankles, pulling her to the bottom of the sea.
How would she look him in the eye ever again? She felt like as soon as she saw him the next day in school, that she would immediately spill it all out to him.
...which she could do, feasibly. There was nothing stopping her. She wouldn’t tell anyone else - it wasn’t her secret to tell - but she could tell him that she knew. That she was in the 7-11 last night and heard his voice and just knew. But something was stopping her.
Michelle generally never interfered with people’s lives. Unless what they were doing was directly harmful in some way, she didn’t care; and Peter’s situation was the opposite of harmful - he helped people every day. He was on the news. He was a fully-fledged superhero. And it terrified the shit out of Michelle.
She didn’t understand why, though. She and Peter weren’t really friends; they were maybe friendly acquaintances on a good day. She observed him a lot, but that was due to her innately observant nature and Peter acting weird (because he’s fucking Spider-Man ).
This was the last piece to the Puzzle of Parker (yeah, she created a name for it, she’s also incredibly organized, it’s not weird ). Maybe if she focused hard enough, she could will herself into a state of not caring. Michelle tended to be particularly selective on that sort of thing, so it shouldn’t be too difficult, she thought.
The last piece hit her like a train. It was the Friday of the same week when Michelle heard Peter/Spider-Man in the 7-11, and the girl was seriously considering if Peter was going to give her a heart condition one day.
She hadn’t been sleeping well those past couple of days (nightmares, conjectures about how Peter’s powers worked, and how to shorten her English paper from eleven pages to two), and that morning when she got her textbooks from her locker, her limb movements were so miscalculated that she went to close her locker with the arm that was holding her books. They unceremoniously and mercilessly fell onto her feet. Thankfully, there weren’t many people in the halls to hear her resounding “Oh, fuuuuck !”
There weren’t many people, but of course, since the fates were probably eating popcorn and watching her suffer from above, Peter was one of those few people.
“Jeez, Michelle, are you okay?” he asked from above; she’d crumpled to the ground to cradle her probably black toes.
Her look was a mixture of incredulous and scathing. “Yeah, I’m all set to make it to my ballet class later today.”
Peter’s head tilted like a dog’s as he asked, “You take ballet?”
“No, goddammit. Are you going to help or just stare at me suffering?” Even though she was talking to Peter, she felt that the latter sentence applied to the universe as well.
Peter stuttered out some apologies as he bent down to help her walk. After arguing over whether she should go the nurse or to go straight to class (Michelle: “I’m fine, I can walk it off,” vs. Peter: “You should let the nurse make sure your toes haven’t fallen off,”), Peter helped her go to the nurse’s office.
The walk was slow, since Michelle was heavily relying on her heels to walk, even with Peter’s help. She had her arm around his neck, and his had a steady, but not overly constricting, grip on her waist. She tried not to think about how he could probably easily lift her above his head without breaking a sweat.
“Michelle, are you seriously okay?” he asked ten minutes later. It usually took no more than five minutes to reach the nurse from where they’d started. Since they were so close, he most likely heard her small squeaks of pain whenever she stepped too hard on her feet.
“If you need to leave, I can walk on my own,” she said. She looked at his face to gauge his reaction, and didn’t like what she saw: genuine concern.
“No, no, no, it’s just that I can tell you’re hurting,” and he suddenly looked up, seemed to consider a thought, and then nodded his head as he made a decision. Then her feet were off the ground.
“Parker! ”
“What? Now you don’t have to walk, and it’ll be quicker.” He was annoyingly chipper at picking Michelle up like a rag doll. Michelle felt livid.
But he was right, so she huffed and rolled her eyes. “The next time you grace us with your presence at decathlon practice, I’m so grilling you in the humanities sections.”
Peter kept smiling as he walked, unperturbed by Michelle’s constant stream of threats. She mainly kept talking to distract herself from her senses; due to their proximity she realized that the laundry detergent he used must be top-dollar, because his clothes smelled amazing. Sweet, but not sugary - like baking bread. Was that a scent they sold? Peter also had an irritatingly defined jaw line. And his hair looked really soft…
Michelle slapped herself out of ogling Peter when they reached the nurse’s office and he set her gently on her feet. She’d expected him to leave, but he stepped in front of her and opened the door for her. Which she would have protested, if she’d been able to get the door herself at the time. Instead, she narrowed her eyes at him and she limped inside.
Stupid smart, secretly super-powered boys…
As Michelle predicted, going to the nurse was useless. She just gave Michelle some ice (which is all that school nurses can do anyway, Midtown could just replace their nurse with an ice machine if they needed to make budget cuts) and told her to not walk too fast or run for a few days. She did receive a pass to explain why she was late to her teachers if she walked too slow due to slamming books of knowledge on her feet; so maybe an ice machine couldn’t do that.
She walked back into the waiting room, and that’s when the truth hit her harder than her demonic textbooks hit her feet. Peter was sitting in the waiting area, humming some song under his breath, and waiting for her to come out. Waiting for her. When he noticed her standing there, he smiled and started asking her what the diagnosis was. “Will they have to amputate? Are you gonna turn into one of those myths where there’s an evil magician with four toes? Could Michelle Jones be the first ballerina to achieve the perfect on-pointe because there are no toes to get in her way?”
She had a crush on Peter Parker.
It made no logical sense; Peter was a short white boy with thin lips, weird eyebrows, and a dangerous vigilante streak, and yet there she was, with her heart trying to leap out of her throat and her self-awareness falling from the top of a thirty-story building. Because when he was walking her to the nurse she noticed that there are small smatterings of freckles on his nose and his eyes reminded her of soft chocolate candies and despite how dorky he was, he was obviously a good person, which she knew before the spandex extracurriculars were discovered.
Michelle hadn’t been listening, but noticed when he grinned at her and effectively shattered her attempt at apathy. “What, no giving me the birds this time?”
The fates were probably howling in laughter.