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Peter hasn’t been sleeping well. While this in itself is worrisome, it’s the fact that he’s not even able to attempt to hide it that bothers her. Even with a good night’s sleep his skills of deception are subpar, but with him meandering the school like a drunken zombie, his facade of normalcy is coming apart even quicker than usual. Under typical circumstances, Michelle would have spared no time backing him into a corner and interrogating him until he sang like a bird. Under typical circumstances, she might’ve even done it because she cared about him a little bit - but, mostly, because she wanted everyone at their sharpest for decathlon meetings.
Of course, since it’s Peter, there is no such thing as typical circumstances anymore.
Infuriatingly, his alter ego is the least troublesome thing between them. Ever since that morning in the diner, and the proceeding afternoon spent together binge-watching sitcoms with their sides pressed together, Michelle isn’t sure what’s happening between them. They act like friends - they talk, they text, they hang out between classes when they’re able and sit at the same table at lunch, they make bad jokes and snipe at each other. But beneath all that is the tense feeling of other, something intangible and foreign to her in a way that borders on frightening.
(If she lets herself think about it for too long, she can picture an edge of a cliff that’s she’s standing on, looking into the black abyss of this other with no way of fathoming what could be waiting if she ever fell over the side. So, naturally, she represses it - shoves it in a box and pushes it into the dustiest, most abandoned recess of her mind where she never intends to get it.)
The last thing Michelle wanted was to be some girl who never stopped thinking about a guy. She didn’t want to be the type to revolve around someone else - the type that waits for his text, for his eyes to meet hers across the room, impatiently counting down the seconds until she sees him again. Her high school years aren’t supposed to be about boys. She is supposed to bring a revolution.
If it were any other guy, Michelle would force herself to remain detached, no matter how much a small, annoyingly emotional and sentimental part of her argued otherwise. If it were a guy who hadn’t appeared at her door broken and bruised and fell asleep that night wearing her clothes, she would find every reason not to care. If it were a guy who didn’t feel the need to buy her breakfast because she might have maybe saved his life in some way that night, she would look the other way.
But it’s Peter. It’s Peter Parker, Spider-Man, world-class awkward nerd, and of course Michelle is going to get involved.
Even Flash has taken notice of Peter’s behavior, which wouldn’t be a big deal if Flash was a normal person who didn’t walk around with his head stuck up his ass.
“What’s up with Parker?” he asks her after a lunch decathlon meeting. He barely waits for Peter to drag himself out of the library before launching the question at Michelle like a grenade. Underneath the usual veneer of entitled curiosity and haughty superiority that he usually spoke in, she thinks there’s a mild trace of concern.
Michelle’s annoyed for a variety of reasons - one, she doesn’t know the answer, and she hates not knowing something, especially when a jackass like Flash Thompson asks and she isn’t able to put him in his place with an answer wrapped in a smart remark. Two, things with Peter are becoming harder and harder, whether he wanted to admit it or not. No longer were his troubles being confined to the small circle of her, Ned, and him (and, occasionally, May) if people are starting to take notice of his well-being. Three, she has no clue what to do about it.
“He’s having a rough week.” She shoulders her bag and walks around Flash, effectively ending the conversation. “Not that it’s any of your business!” she tosses over her shoulder for good measure.
Michelle goes the rest of the day without seeing Peter - or Ned, for that matter. With her and Peter hanging out more, she is subsequently linked to Ned. They aren’t ones for having conversations without Peter between them, but she’s been meaning to talk with him about Peter, try to see this from a best friend perspective instead of a potentially-semi-romantic perspective. Maybe Peter’s hit this kind of rough patch before. Maybe there’s a way of pushing through this and no one comes out worse for wear.
Or maybe she’s just in way over her head, like usual.
She waits on the steps after school ends, looking into the sea of eagerly fleeing students for any of Ned. The crowd eventually thins, buses cough exhaust as they leave, and tires squeal against the pavement as they tear out of the parking lot.
Shit, Michelle thinks. She hadn’t wanted to do this over phone. Nevermind the fact she didn’t like holding any or all personal conversations over the phone - the government’s always listening, of course - Peter’s well-being feels too big and intimate for the confines of her phone screen. But her options seem severely limited at this point. Beginning a slow descent down the street, Michelle reluctantly pulls out her phone.
Where are you?
at d comix on captial. y?
We need to talk about Peter.
He goes so long without responding that Michelle starts to fume with the annoyance of being ignored. Finally, as she’s crossing the street in brisk strides, home visible in the distance, her phone pings. It’s a drawn and weary sound, as if even her phone is disappointed with the answer she receives.
i dont know wat’s going on w him.
Shit, Michelle thinks again. She pauses into the middle of the street, staring forward in contempt. Fuck.
The rest of the week follows with equally dismal results. The glances she gets of Peter are more discouraging with each passing day. She can tell he’s avoiding her - he conveniently spends the lunch hour holed up in the bathroom or library or some other undisclosed location and ducks out of sight whenever he sees her coming in the halls. Even if he was slowly but surely deteriorating, it's nice to know his brain is still sharp enough to fear her.
By Friday she’s an untouchable ball of frustration and fury, taking down whoever stands in her way. Classes are a haze; she’s pretty sure she made her history teacher cry. The only one who seems immune to her wrath is Peter, whose dark bags get deeper and stealth skills get infuriatingly better. He always manages to slip from her grasp - he’s even gone as far to have convenient excuses to avoid their decathlon meetings, which he makes Ned feed to her when she demands where he is.
She contemplates her next move as she aimlessly wanders her favorite bookstore - a cozy, vintage independent place with chill employees and an amazing collection. More often than not she doesn't buy anything, just spends hours wandering - maybe tucking into a beanbag chair and reading if she has nothing else to do. One of the reasons why she loves this place is because the employees leave her alone. They know her well enough by now to know she wouldn’t do anything stupid.
When it came to Peter. her options are limited. Michelle ponders the idea of talking to May, but that could do more harm than good. No matter how good May’s intentions would be, trying to lock him up and keep him bubble-wrapped from danger at every turn would just suffocate him, squeeze any sense of life that hasn’t succumbed to insomnia out of him.
There is another option - what she likes to call the nuclear option.
Tony Stark.
Michelle has never met the man personally, and she’s never managed to wring enough information out of Peter to label their relationship. A mentorship? A pseudo father-son thing? Acquaintances? With such little to go on, there’s no way of knowing how Tony Stark would react if she, a stranger to him, appeared out of nowhere and started making demands for Peter’s well-being.
Michelle stops, looking down at the Edgar Allan Poe volume in her hand like it personally offended her. Her sour mood is dampening one of the few places she thought could never make her sad - she should leave before her negative energy wrecks this place for good.
She walks out into the twilight, forcefully shoving her hands in her pockets, when she catches sight of him, sailing through the air.
(Her heart does a little jump in her chest as she captures him, in a freeze-frame mid-air, as he’s between buildings with his webs extended. A small part of her always fears that his webs will fail him or his aim will falter, sending him throttling towards the pavement with a morbidly cartoonish splat! But then she’ll shake it off because, really, he wouldn’t be much of a superhero if he couldn’t keep himself from falling to an untimely death, now would he?)
She doesn’t mean to follow him, but her legs carry her after his swinging shadow as her blood simmers in irritation.
Whatever they are now, Michelle is adamant against turning into the kind of girl who has to know where a boy is at all times. It's clingy, pathetic, and the complete opposite of her independent nature. But she isn't following him out of an obsessive sense of micromanagement - she is creeping after him in the approaching gloom of night because all she can think of is his face underneath the mask, purple with enormous bags underneath his eyes and ashen with lack of sleep. It's for his own good that Michelle tails him - if he isn't going to look after himself, she would be damned if someone else doesn’t step up to the plate.
As his lithe formed leaps from rooftop to rooftop, launching and catching himself through the night air, Michelle can’t help but have some begrudging respect for him. If you didn’t look beneath the mask, you couldn’t tell he was on the cusp of death. The switch he makes from boy to hero - it’s impressive.
Two blocks up the street Peter’s body makes a sharp descent, angled between two buildings into an alleyway. Michelle picks up her pace to a jog, willing her long legs to take steeper strides.
The scene she arrives to is nothing new for Spider-Man. At the end of the alley, with his back pressed against the dead end, a man is clutching a knife and a camo backpack. He looks rabid - face unshaven, hair matted and greasy, pants too big with holes and patches of dirt in them. He holds out the knife in front of him while keeping the bag lifted above him, like a bully on a playground taunting his victim with a game of keep-away. Michelle keeps herself tucked away around the corner of the building, just out of sight.
“Get the fuck out of here!” the man shouts. His eyes are enormous; Michelle doesn’t think he’s ever blinked a day in his life. “Get away from me!”
Peter keeps his arms out. “Come on, buddy. No need for that. We’re all friends here, right?” He keeps his tone pitched low and soothing, almost casual, as if he’s consoling a friend over a plate of fries.
“I said leave me the fuck alone!”
Michelle sees it before it even happens, and from the way Peter’s shoulders tense, he can too. The knife, long and rusty and sharp, arcs through the air, on a path straight for Spider-Man’s chest. He should have been moving, and he is - not away, but back, his feet stumbling with the misstep.
She’s going to going to regret it later, she knows. The pain will last for days, maybe weeks - if she’s even alive to feel it.
But, since it’s Peter, she does it anyway.
Michelle launches herself forward, arms reaching out to shove Peter sideways as she takes his place. He lets out a grunt, shoulder slamming into the wall.
It hurts.
Oh, fuck, it hurts.
She stands for a still moment, hand clutching the blade still buried in her side. Her shirt’s already staining red - she can feel the warmth of her blood seeping down her side and into her jeans.
The world speeds up as the robber darts past, shoving her aside with an unexpected amount of force. He’s strong for such a lanky looking guy.
Her ankles tie around each other, sending her plummeting towards the ground. Michelle tries to throw out her arms to break the fall, but her brain is screaming at her hands to keep pressure on the wound.
Her head breaks her fall instead.
Whenever Michelle gets sick, she has weird dreams. They start out normal - at school or the diner or the bookstore, but as soon as she tries to leave the sky turns lavender and the cracked cement street turns to sand dunes. Palm trees will sprout instead of weeds. She’ll find pimples on her arms that burst with markers whenever she pops them.
The dream she’s in now isn’t the oddest she’s ever had. The sky is creamsicle orange and the high school is surrounded by tennis courts lit by street lights. She’s weaving between parked cars in the parking lot when an announcement comes over the outdoor speakers.
“Shooter. Shooter. Everyone must leave now.”
She turns around and starts heading home. Wheely office chairs line the sidewalk. She sits in one and begins the slow ride home, pushing forward with her feet. Doctors scrubbed and gloved for surgery fill up the space; their orthopedic shoes dent like clay underneath her chair’s wheels.
All the while her side is slick with purple slime, bubbling in a steady stream out of a gaping hole in her side, just below the rib cage.
Michelle has no clue where she is when she wakes up.
It’s unnaturally bright like a hospital, but the bed she’s in is huge and soft, unlike the skinny stiff ones that patients are forced to stay in. A small throb in her arm makes her look down. An IV pokes out of her skin. No wonder her head feels like she’s spent hours on a mary-go-round; whatever they’re pumping her with is working flawlessly.
The last time she was conscious she had just been stabbed. Spider-Man, a robber - she plays hero and catches a knife to the side.
What happened next?
With a grunt, Michelle pulls herself up. Her bandaged side protests as she settles against the cloud-like pillows, back straight as she examines the room.
Aside from a panel of screens mounted to the wall, showing things like heart rate and body temperature, it could have been a guest room. A gorgeous, expensively designed guest room. An entire wall made of dimmed windows keeps the sun at bay; artificial light panels wash the beige walls and silk sheets in an ugly bright glow.
Two plushy chairs are near the bed, one on each side. The one to left is empty; the one to her right is occupied by the curled form of Peter Parker. His legs dangle over one arm, his head over the other. His right hand rests lazily against his stomach while his other grips her IV-free wrist, fingers directly over her pulse like he was scared she lost her heartbeat.
If she still wasn’t so incredibly pissed at him, she might have found it cute.
Gently, Michelle moves her arm out of his grasp. His arm flops onto the bed like dead weight.
“Peter.”
Nothing.
“Peter.”
A small head twitch, but still nothing.
“Peter Parker.”
Finally, he jolts awake. “Huh?” He scrambles to correct himself, pulling his legs back and swinging them to face forward. He’s traded his suit for some sweats and a T-shirt. His hair sticks up at odd angles, presumably from where his hands have run through it. Disoriented, it takes him a while to focus on her.
“Michelle?” He scans her from top to bottom, as if she sprouted more injuries just from lying there. “Thank God you’re awake.”
She purses her lips. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
Stunned, all Peter can do is gape at her. “What’re you talking about? I’m not the one who got myself stabbed!”
“You haven’t been sleeping,” Michelle accuses him. “And instead of telling anybody, you going around acting like everything is fine. How’re you supposed to protect Queen if you fall asleep mid-air?”
Peter slumps, looking properly chastised. Michelle looks forward. Good. He deserves it.
“Why did you follow me?” he asks miserably, staring at his hands. “Something much worse could’ve happened to you - you could’ve died. And it would’ve been all my fault.”
Michelle sighs. “Peter, you didn’t make me jump in front of that knife. What happened was that I made a choice. I’m a big girl, Peter. I know how to decide what I do and why.” She reaches up and brushes a hand across the coarse surface of the bandage on her side, thoughtfully adding, “and when I die, it’ll be on my terms and no one else’s.”
In the moment she hadn’t even been thinking of it like that - she tried to think about death as little as possible, really - but that didn’t make what she said any less true. Whenever it happens, however it happens, Michelle will be the one to decide and no one else.
“And,” Michelle says, “I followed you because I was worried about you.”
Peter studies her profile. She keeps running her hand over her bandage; the feel of it is paradoxical - the roughness underneath her fingertips is soothing, but the weight of its tight embrace around her is unnerving.
Gradually, one of his hands creep forward to take her free one.
“I can’t promise that I’ll be able to go to sleep,” Peter confesses. “I’ve tried. I’ve really tried, MJ, I swear. But the things I see - it’s stuff I never want to face again. And they don't go away, no matter how hard I try. So, sometimes, I don’t try. I just stay awake so they can’t get to me.”
“I’m not asking you to pretend that everything is fine. I just want you to get through your thick skull that it’s okay to ask for help every once in a while.”
The corners of his mouth twitch. “Yeah, Mr. Stark said something like that when they wheeled you into surgery.”
That makes sense. Michelle takes another sweeping glance around the room. “So that’s where we are, huh? One of his billion-dollar facilities - does he have one specifically dedicated to the teenagers whose lives he meddles in?”
“Now you sound like Aunt May.” Peter leans forward, eyes sparking as he tells her excitedly, “this is Avengers HQ.”
Michelle shifts, aware of another uncomfortable ache. “Well, does Avengers HQ have room service, by any chance? I’m starving.”
Peter gets put on some medication. He still keeps irregular times and almost never wants to talk about the things that plague him during the night, but the bags under his eyes get lighter. People at school stop making looks and Flash goes back to being the same asshole he’s always been.
Michelle ended up with seven stitches and has a wicked scar as long as her middle finger. Tony Stark offers her some technology that’ll clear up the scar within a day, but she declines the offer. She likes the thought of a scar - from a stab wound. From the knife of a criminal. It’s exactly the kind of badass reputation a revolutionary like her needs.
As far as Michelle and Peter together, though - well.
There is still no defined label for them, but maybe they don’t need one. Michelle’s the type of girl to take a knife for a guy. Peter’s the type of boy to wait at a girl's bedside until she wakes up okay.
Maybe that’s all they need to know.