Chapter Text
After putting away the Vulture, Peter does good on his promise to just focus on being a kid for a while, with some friendly neighborhood Spider-Manning on the side. Even though the idea of being an Avenger someday still totally makes his heart go pitter-patter he knows better now. Experience is totally key to being a good global superhero. Once he gets some more experience, he can think again. And without those all-consuming thoughts taking up storage space in his head, he can start to think about stuff like homework and Legos and driving lessons. College, someday. New friends.
And improving relationships with old friends. After Liz left Midtown and Michelle became decathlon captain (thus becoming MJ, though it’s still hard to remember to call her that), Peter and Ned notice that she’s acting...not different, but the same in slightly closer proximity to them. Instead of reading alone at the opposite end of the lunch table she reads alone two seats away from Peter, and was Ned’s partner in chemistry for a month-long experiment involving mold cultures that they dubbed their spore baby. Many co-parenting jokes were made. It was awesome. And it keeps happening, little things that lead Peter and Ned to believe that maybe not all hope is lost if Michelle—MJ—is capable of calling them losers with a hint of affection in her voice instead of scorn.
Every time Peter’s out of school with a “bad cold” (some kind of injury that takes longer than a few hours for his super-healing to handle) he comes back to a locker stuffed to overflowing with single-serve potato chip bags and gummy worms and a tidier stack of his homework assignments at the bottom. When some senior gets jealous that Ned's science fair project made first place over his and give his computer a bad virus, MJ stayed up all weekend with them combing over codes and calling anti-virus software developers to help fix it, and then puts ghost pepper juice in all of the senior's jock straps, because of course he's on one of Midtown's underperforming sports teams and has a lot of compensating to do when even sophomores can outsmart him.
Michelle is actually a really good friend, once you know she’s your friend in the first place.
As the end of sophomore year creeps closer, the frigid chill of New York spring mornings giving way to exhaust-tinged afternoons and dewy nights, decathlon practice gets more loosely policed. MJ’s strict phone ban is loosened and the first 15 minutes of practice are usually devoted to who can find the funniest Reddit videos. The infectious attitude of school ending makes everyone giddy-headed and a little silly; even MJ smiles more without any mean words for counterbalance. And Flash Thompson miraculously managed to stop being such a dick a few months ago, once Peter stopped skipping team practices and committed. It’s a weird kind of thing to realize, that the people he thought hated him for no reason actually hated him because he spent a year blowing them off. Really, really weird.
Another thing changes, too. Aunt May blames raging teen hormones and is probably right, but he starts to notice things about MJ. Little things at first, that she usually wears her hair up on days she works after school, or the eyedrops she uses for springtime allergies. Then it’s other, kind of creepier stuff. Depending on type and book size she can read ten pages in under four minutes, and her favorite color for highlighting passages is green but her favorite color for memorizing details and equations is pink. He starts to notice the things that make her smile and tries to do them more and more often. He notices when she's gone, and wishes she was there.
But it’s fine. He doesn’t expect her to like him back. Actually, she’ll probably think he’s just rebounding off of Liz onto her, even though he’s pretty sure what he feels now is totally different than the baseline awe and admiration he felt for Liz. Still, he doesn’t want to mess up what they have going now, so…he’ll just let it pass.
So on the last Friday night before school ends there’s a party, to celebrate the end of final exams. Academic decathlon team and plus-ones only. Peter’s wondering if he’s even going to show up since he wants to squeeze in a patrol and the party’s at Flash’s house when suddenly MJ materializes next to his locker like a phantom or a vape cloud that smells pleasantly of her jasmine shampoo.
“So, are you going to hang out with me at the party tonight?” she asks point-blank, staring directly into his face with such an amount of force that he thinks she has to be covering something else up. Her jaw is clenched and her knuckles are pale where she’s clutching This Bridge Called My Back. But she doesn’t tear her eyes away from his, expectant.
“Uh...yeah,” he says, feeling himself turning red when his voice cracks, “yeah, definitely. I’ll be there. Will...will you? Show up, I mean?”
Her thick, soft brows draw closer together, because of course she’s showing up since she just asked him to hang out with her, and he’s pretty sure he’s going to die of embarrassment. Then her features soften and she smiles. He almost dies again but for different reasons. “Not because I want to. I have to, I’m the captain, but I expect a rich-person house like Flash’s probably has some wicked hiding spots for when everyone gets annoying. So we’ll find one and hang out until you get annoying too. Then I’ll just go home. Later, loser.” Then she, like, playfully shoves him toward the locker bay with her shoulder and walks away, immediately swallowed up by the sea of classmates on their way to next period.
He runs home from school without stopping to talk to Ned, unsettled and unbalanced, wanting no one to know about this minor development except Aunt May.
“Oh, sweetie,” Aunt May sighs when he tells her in a big, ugly rush that he definitely knows he likes Michelle now, and she might like him back, and doesn’t know what to do because she’s basically the scariest most beautiful person he’s ever met in his entire life, and the last time he liked a girl her dad literally tried to murder him. She wraps long, warm arms around his shoulders, ruffles his hair, and says: “I have reason to believe she’s been in gooey teenager love with you since you two met, my precious dumb boy.”
“What?!” He doesn’t even mind being called precious and dumb in the same sentence, he’s so shocked.
“Yeah, Pete, remember the decathlon meet at Bayview High School?” May asks. She squeezes his shoulders because she knows he won’t, and makes him follow her into the kitchen so she can keep systematically destroying the meatloaf she’s attempting. “I was watching! She’d only been on the team for, what, a week? Every time you both went for the button at the same time I thought she was going to attract passing aircraft, she turned to red! Sweet thing.”
Sweet? May thinks Michelle is sweet? Peter remembers Michelle’s first month at school, if not that particular meet, unexpectedly showing up midway through the second week of freshman year with no explanations and no introductions, melting into the background except to tell Peter he was a loser. Singling him out... But she was so mean! Even though Liz had easily and instantly folded her into the ac-dec team, and classmates tried to become her friends, she had remained virtually friendless and isolated until her big DC win a year later. She sat near Peter and Ned at lunch but never mentioned it. When someone tried to talk to her she was crass, rude, and so extremely sarcastic that Peter still can’t take anything she says without a huge grain of salt. Why would she be mean to him if she liked him? Why be so mean to anyone in a new school?
Because now he’s really panicking about whether or not MJ likes him after all, May spends two hours helping him pick out what to wear to the party (complete with mini fashion show) before they give up on the meatloaf and get Chinese for dinner instead. A dark blue t-shirt and his better jeans. A red hoodie, in case it gets cold later. The most boring outfit in the world.
“And if there’s alcohol at this party?” asks May in a very leading way between bites of noodles.
“Drink just enough to look cool, but not enough to puke,” Peter retorts with a grin, and narrowly dodges a projectile carrot slice. “May! I’m kidding! It’s a bunch of ac-dec kids watching movies and getting sugar-high. Seriously, how much trouble do you think honor students are gonna get into?”
That just gets him another scathing look. “Work hard, play hard,” she says sagely, then beams at him. “Let’s get out of here, huh? You’re gonna miss spin the bottle!”
“May, don’t joke about that!”
He follows her laughter out of the restaurant, ears burning.
Flash’s house is terrifyingly huge and with an illogical number of windows. Peter always wondered why rich people have so many windows; is it a status thing, like chimneys were in the 19th century? The more windows means you have the extravagant funds to pay people to clean them all? Peter shakes the thoughts from his head as he climbs out of May’s car. The front door opens to emit a shaft of golden light across the darkened drive. Flash is holding a two-liter of Mountain Dew like it’s something a lot more potent (when Peter walks past he’ll realize it’s because the contents of the bottle are actually honest to god whiskey), and loud music is already blasting from what have to be really impressive speakers, because there’s no sound distortion at all.
He turns back to wave goodbye to Aunt May, but she’s saved him the embarrassment of getting a ride and glided away into the night. He hears the engine cough a block away and feels comforted before going inside.
For a small intimate party only for the ac-dec team, it’s cool. It’s a cool party, and Peter is supposed to be there. He’s never really regretted turning down Mister Stark’s offer to join the Avengers, but every time he goes to team practice or Ned’s or gets a second to breathe without being crushed by his own anxiety about underperforming for Avenger standards...he actually feels good about the choice. He feels lighter, more like a kid.
He sees MJ in the kitchen; she’s just shoved what looks like approximately two hundred tortilla chips into her mouth at the same time and there’s queso on her chin and Peter knows at that moment that he really, really, really likes her.
Gooey.
Teenager.
Love.
She sees him coming and claps one hand over her mouth, flipping him off with the other. To hide that she’s blushing? Holy crap. Holy crap! Maybe spin the bottle wouldn’t be such a bad idea...just kidding, he would probably have a stroke and die if he has to kiss Michelle in front of everyone. Plus maybe she really doesn’t like him and he’s just reading into it because of Aunt May sticking her nose in.
“H-hey, MJ,” he says when he finally makes it to her and pretends not to notice the chips-and-queso-face situation. “Am I late?”
“Oh, no,” she says quickly, waving a napkin at him in a vague kind of way. “I came early to help set up, this place is on my subway route. Plus, I’m kind of, like, in charge, I guess? So I figured I should probably be here first.”
He nods, wondering if the action makes him look like a bobble head. Why? He’s nodded to or at her probably a million times before and never worried—but maybe now he’s known for nodding and that’s why she thinks he looks like a bobble head and is always calling him a loser—oh my god Peter shut up. “That makes sense. You, uh...pretty.”
Her eyebrows shoot up. Peter loves her eyebrows: they’re so expressive even when the rest of her face is set into determined lines of apathy. “I pretty?” she echoes. “Did you pregame or something before coming over? Don’t answer that or I’ll have to put you on team probation for unsportsmanlike conduct, by the way. I didn’t give Flash that warning...oops.” Her eyebrows wiggle and Peter laughs. He can’t help it. He’s a little bit obsessed with her and has been for a long time now.
Which is why he suddenly thinks he knows why MJ came to the party early and basically set up camp at the food table. At time, he can be pretty observant, too, and he hasn’t seen her eating lunch—hot or brown-bag—all week. Or last week, and she cut practice short last week because she had to work a double shift at the bodega. There are puffy bags under her eyes, but he stands by what he said. MJ...pretty. She’s wearing her usual shades of black and gray, but there’s a headband holding back her wild curls the exact same warm nut-brown as her skin, which looks so so soft and a little shimmery in the low lights.
Yeah, he’s screwed.
He’s interrupted from this particular train of thought by Ned crashing headlong into him, as if it’s been five years since they’ve seen each other instead of maybe five hours, tops. He staggers from the memory of Ned doing this pre-super strength, since he can actually probably bench-press three of Ned now, and gives him a feeble shove for good measure. “Dude!”
“Cindy signed into JackBox,” announces Ned without preamble. “MJ, you are going to be, like, so good at Fibbage and Quiplash that I almost don’t want you to play? But it would actually probably violate some law of the universe to deprive everyone of that experience. So, you gotta play.”
He doesn’t take no for an answer, which is very Ned of him, and less than a minute later Peter and MJ are sandwiched together on the couch amid the small throng of humanity that is the ac-dec crew. It’s hot and loud and weirdly really nice. He can feel the warmth of MJ's skin through her leggings.
When too many people want to play to accommodate the server Peter concedes his spot so Michelle can get in on her phone. She makes her username GeorgeKush, and completely kills it, obviously. Peter gets caught up watching her, so serious and thoughtful as she comes up with fake answers to real questions in Fibbage and tricks everyone into voting for them. She maintains the stern look through Quiplash too, but there’s a definite dimpling in her cheek that means she’s trying not to grin to herself when she comes up with a response to the prompt that has the whole room shrieking with laughter.
They play each game a few times so everyone can have a turn, and everything is noise and laughing and mild tipsy confusion when Cindy changes her username to Flashboi. Then a text pops up on MJ’s screen and she gets up with a perfunctory, “Bored, bye,” and vanishes into the kitchen again. Before Peter can think to wonder if everything is okay, Flash yells a very loud, very bad word in shocked reaction to the hilariously wicked answer Abraham just came up with for Something You Should Never Stuff a Bra With.
Before he knows it, an hour’s passed. Peter realizes Michelle never came back, tunes his hearing toward the kitchen but can’t make anything out over the noise caused by the gameplay. Claiming a bathroom break, he gets up and starts to snoop. Why not? It’s just Flash’s house, and it’s not like he’s going to steal anything. Just see where MJ is. She did mention wanting to find a hiding spot. And to hang out with him in it. That makes his guts turn into jelly, to be honest. What does she want to hang out with him for? He’s a loser, she says so herself pretty much all the time. There really must be a lot of places to hide here, though; he wanders up a staircase and pokes his head in doors that are already open, not rude enough to help himself to the privacy of closed doors until he knows MJ isn’t in the open ones.
On the opposite end of the house from the party and two floors up, he finds a kind of mini-staircase up to a trapdoor. Attic or roof, he asks himself, and decides why not find out? It’s something Michelle would do, and he’s somewhat inclined toward wanting to impress her, so he climbs. The air gets crisper as he goes up, the nights still coming on chilly enough to recommend a jacket, and he’s grateful for his hoodie.
Roof. Rooftop patio, oh freaking sweet.
At first all he sees is the furniture, probably worth more money than Aunt May pays for their apartment in a month, the string-up lights, the (thankfully disconnected) speakers placed discreetly along the safety railings. The lights are on, casting long shadows, and it takes a good minute before he sees Michelle.
Or rather, hears her. She’s sat on the edge of the roof beyond the safety rail, phone to her ear, angrily talking in a thick and shuddering voice, something something huge mistake something what about my something something didn’t even think to ask me? Oh, no.
“Michelle?” he peeps before thinking about it first. She turns around too fast, startled, and almost loses her balance. For a terrifying second Peter thinks this is it, this is how she finds out I’m Spider-Man, because I scared her off the roof, oh god, this is awful. But she catches herself and stares at him hard, probably wondering how much he heard.
There aren’t tears on her face but the ends of her sleeves are wet, a darker shade of gray than the rest of her definitely-too-thin cardigan. “Mom, I have to go,” she says without looking away from Peter’s face, and she hangs up without waiting for a maternal goodbye. For a few moments neither of them says anything. Michelle works her jaw silently, anger and despair at war in her eyes. She’s shivering. That’s at least something he can latch onto.
“Here,” he says, quickly pulling off his more substantial hoodie as he walks toward her, since she shows no sign of moving his way first. “It’s cold up here, huh?”
She silently accepts the hoodie and wraps herself up inside of it, still watching him, so he decides to alleviate her worry before she has to ask. “I wasn’t trying to listen or anything. I just, uh. Hadn’t seen you in a while. Wanted to make sure you’re okay?” He makes it almost half a question, but still with the chance to act like it wasn’t one. The red of his hoodie pops almost violently in contrast to the grays and blacks of her outfit, the soft brown of her hair. Like a cartoony splash of blood.
“Thanks,” she says, and there’s definitely some finality in her tone, but she also doesn’t tell him to leave, so he climbs over the safety rail to join her. They sit as close as they did on the sofa earlier, arm-to-arm and leg-to-leg. He might be imagining it but she might also lean against him a little. “You’re warm. Why are boys always so warm?”
“Male privilege.”
A bubble of pride swells in his chest when she lets out a startled “Ha!” of laughter at that. It’s a perfectly enunciated laugh, exactly how laughing is spelled in books. No more, no less. Her smile fades too fast.
“The rent was late,” Michelle says flatly after a few quiet minutes, trying for nonchalance even while hugging her knees tight against her stomach, “for, like, the third time just this year, so I guess we’re getting evicted.”
And that's when his heart drops down to the pit of his stomach. This isn't something Spider-Man can fix. This isn't even something Peter can fix. But adults can, and within seconds he's resolved to call Aunt May and see if there's anything they can do, anyone she knows with a spare room. "Do you need somewhere to stay?" he asks after a stunned silence that lasts probably a little too long. "You can stay in my room, I have bunk beds, I know Aunt May will say it's okay, and our couch is super comfortable, your mom and sister could probably—"
He stops talking, because MJ's whole face is tightening and going slack and scrunching up with the effort she's putting into not crying. Her hand closes around his arm and clings tight. Not wanting to dislodge her grip is the only thing stopping him wrapping the arm around her instead.
"Michelle, you can talk to me," he says, and he can hear the plea in his own ears. He puts his free hand over hers and squeezes gently. "I'm your friend, I'm here for you. It's okay. It's okay, MJ." He doesn't know what else to say.
Taking a shuddering breath, she wipes her eyes on his hoodie sleeve and shakes her head. "Mom decided…that we're moving back in with my dad," she says, and now there's a definite tone of fear mixed in with the anger and sadness. Her hand is so tight on his arm it would have really hurt if he didn't have his powers, but he doesn't want to pretend right now, not when she clearly needs something to hold onto.
He's never met MJ's dad. She talks so rarely about anything even remotely personal, but in points of conversation where most people would say my parents Michelle's always says my mom. Just like Peter says my aunt, like there's no one else. Some small part of Peter had just assumed her dad died before she transferred to Midtown, because she never mentions him in that kind of way that people don't mention things that hurt them. Which means her dad is still hurting her, but he’s alive.
"What can I do?" he asks, and she aggressively shrugs, but he can't just leave it there. "MJ, are you going to be okay living with him?"
Another shrug, this one accompanied by her free hand flying helpless into the air and settling on top of her head, restlessly patting down stray curls. He can't stop looking at her, watching every little change in her face (and it's going through a lot of changes, swinging from anger to fear to desolation to determination to thoughtfulness and back to its neutral state in a few seconds, it's amazing, it's the most he's ever seen her emote before now), and finally she looks back.
In the dark her eyes are black, fathomless as space itself, and totally beautiful. He wishes they had a better reason to be sitting this close so he could tell her that.
She lets go his arm, but then loops her own arm through it and puts her head down on his shoulder. He shifts slightly so his chin rests on her hair and his back curls protectively around her. If the only thing he can do is give her something sturdy to lean against, he'll be her wall. If she needs somewhere to sleep away from her parents from now on, he'll be her shelter. And if she's cold, he'll be her jacket. Not because he has a crush on her, either, but because she's his friend, and he would be a pretty lame superhero if he didn't even protect his own.
"I don't know," she whispers into the cold night air. "I haven't seen him in two years. I don't know what he's like anymore. He used to call every time he got back on the wagon and beg us to come home, but it's ben a while. A long time. But Mom says he…I don’t know, he’s making a lot of promises that I don't think he can keep."
He slips his arm free so he can hug it tight around her shoulders. A subterranean shiver rolls continuously under her skin, and she closes a hand around a gather of his t-shirt.
"I hope he keeps his promises."
"Me too,” she whispers, sniffling a little. “He’s s-still my dad.”
And because there's nothing else he can say that won't just make all of this worse, Peter doesn't say anything else. They sit there quietly until the distant thrum of bass is replaced by their teammates yelling their names out on the lawn, searching for them.
MJ picks her head up and sighs; it's not cold enough for her breath to vaporize in the air, but Peter still imagines he can see her bad feelings being exhaled on a little cloud. She's putting them aside to deal with later, unsticking herself from under his arm to rejoin the party. He's debating whether or not to stay up here a little longer and brood when her hand materializes in front of his face. She's looking down at him with her usual non-expression in place, but the corner of her mouth dimples just a little. "Let's go."
Taking her hand, Peter tries to do most of the actual work to get up so he doesn't accidentally fling her off the roof. "How long before you have to be out of your building?" he asks, giving her hand what he hopes is a reassuring squeeze. "I'll help you pack, if you want. After school. I'm...free."
Not really, he isn't, but he thinks he can probably delay his nightly patrols through the city by a few hours for a week or two. Most of the time nothing happens, anyway. If he tells Aunt May why he's missing dinner every night she'll totally understand and probably be kind of proud.
"No, don't," MJ says instead, pretty quickly. "I mean, it's fine, we don't have that much to pack, and—listen, don't tell anyone, okay? I just...it's drama, and you know I've made a sacred holy vow never to be involved in high school drama. So you especially can't tell Ned, oh my god, the whole team would know by Monday, feeling things at me."
Peter can't help grinning; she must be feeling at least a little bit better if she's back to pretending she's inorganic material incapable of human emotion. “I won’t tell,” he promises. Before she can duck down the trapdoor again, though, he reaches out to take her hand again. “MJ. Just...if you ever need to get out and don’t have anywhere to go. You can come to my place, okay? You should come to my place. Even if I’m not there, I swear it’s okay, Ned does it all the time when I’m—when I’m at my internship.”
“I won’t—“
“But if you do,” he insists, then let’s go her hand. “That’s all I’m saying. And now I’ll stop bugging you and we can go back to the party.”
She punches his shoulder, then opens the trapdoor and stomps impudently down the stairs. “Let’s see how drunk Flash is by now. He probably has the tolerance of a two-year-old.”
“How do you know what a two-year-old’s alcohol tolerance is? Where is your data on toddler inebriation, Michelle?!”
At the bottom of the stairs she spins on her heel to look up at him. It’s probably the only time in their entire lives she’ll ever be shorter than him, and it feels really weird. “You caught me, I’ve been getting my little sister drunk on weekends,” she deadpans, then grins and flicks his forehead.
Only much later, when the party ends because Flash screamed “BATH TIME!” and turned the sprinklers on his unwitting and fully dressed party guests, when MJ somehow masterfully dodges the spray and vanishes before he can offer her a ride home, when May has brought him and Ned back to the apartment...only then does Peter realize that not once did MJ call him a loser, all night. And his hand burns with the memory of touching her. And she never gave back his hoodie.
He really, really hopes everything will be okay.