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An announcement: “We’re not going to MoMA tomorrow. Catch.” Sitting on the floor, her back towards the bottom bunk of Peter’s bed, MJ lobs a peanut up the ceiling.
Peter jumps to the ceiling, catching the peanut with his mouth while upside down. “Why not? You love museums.”
MJ throws another peanut to the general direction of Peter’s knees. “Group tour.”
That makes sense. MJ took Peter on an art gallery, once, where she spent an inordinate amount of time dissecting the subtleties of an abstract painting while he drowned in her presence, dopey grin and weak knees. Being shepherded around would not agree with her. “Point,” Peter says as he dives to catch the peanut. Object secured in his mouth, he jumps up to stand, his face a handbreadth away from hers. “But I really, really have to go. I can’t afford to get into detention again.”
MJ narrows her eyes at him. “Fine, Parker. We’ll go to MoMA. If only so you don’t miss any more Decathlon practices.”
“Aye, aye, cap’n.” Then, feeling bold, he tilts his head back to steal a kiss, a sweet press of his lips against hers.
She swats his chest, and he readily steps back, but then her hand fists, grabbing the fabric of his shirt, and she tugs, once, a demand. He complies and this time the kiss is anything but sweet, this time it’s messy—she takes, and she takes, and he gives. The hand bunched up in his shirt releases, only to snake up inside his shirt, returning to the same spot, but under, and her fingers trace the raised skin of his soul mark.
Hesitant, he toys with the hem of her top. She shows no resistance, and he slowly, ever so conscious, touches the smooth skin of her waist. First, his fingers ghosting over, then a firmer touch, an anchor. MJ is solid, real, and as Peter’s hand climbs up her spine to rest between her shoulder blades, he hopes she’d forgive him for thinking of her as his.
One moment, Peter is on the bus, half-asleep, and MJ is next to him, sketching his hunched profile; the next, he jerks awake, looks out the window. MJ follows his gaze and her insides run cold. A spaceship, she’s sure—it looks nothing like what she knows of spaceships, but what else can it be, really—and Peter meets her horrified eyes, and she knows.
Don’t go, she wants to say. Faith on his abilities aside, she’s quite sure that aliens are out of his league. Instead, she casually says, “Told you we shouldn’t go to MoMA.”
“Sorry,” Peter says. He climbs over her towards the opposite window, quickly pressing his lips to her temple—another apology—before shooting a web to pull himself out the window.
MJ watches as Peter swings away from the bus, mask in place but otherwise unsuited for whatever battle awaits him. She then nudges Ned, gesturing, and he sits next to her. They watch a livestream of the ongoing fight on her phone. Ned’s phone is synced to the sensors on Peter’s suit; they keep an eye on that, too.
Iron Man, Spider-Man, and two men doing—is that magic? Or a sufficiently advanced technology indistinguishable from honest-to-Thor magic? Either way, four humans against two aliens, and they’re equally matched, from what she can make out of the grainy footage.
A beam, light blue. The flashier wizard and Peter gets dragged up, despite all efforts to pull away. The spaceship takes off. The display on Ned’s phone flickers, once, twice, then the screen dies.
“Shit,” Ned hisses. “Shit, shit, shit.”
“Shut up,” MJ says. She pulls her left leg up the seat, yanks the hem of her jeans away from her ankle, and expels a breath. The soul mark is still black. “He’s alive.” She swipes her fingers over the raised skin, just to be sure. There was a time when she wished it would fade, that her soulmate should die before they meet. It was easy to wish a nameless line to fade, less so as soon as she actually met Peter.
“He’s on that ship,” Ned says, unbelieving, “isn’t he?”
“Looks like it.” That suit of his doesn’t have oxygen supply, and so he better be on that ship, because the alternative is inconceivable.
Ned huffs. “Why does he get to do all the cool stuff?” he whines, but his knuckles are white around his phone.
MJ doesn’t answer, and they both stay silent the rest of the way.
They do eventually arrive at MoMA, but barely anyone is paying any attention on the tour, including the museum guide. MJ can’t remember any of the exhibitions, after. All she remembers is pretending to fix her shoelaces every few minutes, checking her mark. Every time, she exhales a breath she doesn’t realize she is holding. Every time, she catches Ned glancing at her and she nods, and he, too, exhales.
When the bus drops them back at school, Ned says, “I’m going to tell May—you know. Wanna come with?”
“I guess,” she says, shrugging.
The feigned nonchalance doesn’t convince Ned; she can tell he’s skeptical. But he just shrugs back.
May opens the door on the first knock, then deflates at the sight of them. “Peter?” she asks.
“We don’t know,” MJ says, but she quickly adds, “but he’s alive.” For now, but none of them needs to hear that.
“I called that Tony Stark,” May says, voice low, “but my call doesn’t connect. I don’t—I think there’s footage of him flying after that spaceship, but I don’t know—”
“That’s good, right?” Ned says. “I mean, I mean, if Iron Man is with him on that ship, they can look after each other. Right?”
May smiles, brittle, and says, “Well, in any case, I made too much casserole. Stay for dinner?”
They do. Dinner is quiet. The casserole is too salty, but no one says anything. They watch news on the TV, rapt. Tony Stark is missing. Damages left behind by the spaceship and the ensuing battle, to be restored by Stark Industries. Over and over, all channels report the same thing, some with hot takes, none with news they actually were waiting to hear.
After, MJ asks May if she can stay over. “That way I can tell you, if—if—” her tongue is lead, words failing her. She looks at her empty dish, then shoots up. “I’ll do the dishes.”
“Michelle,” May says, leaning closer, placing her fingertips on MJ’s elbow. “You should go home. I’ll be fine.” May smiles, and MJ thinks she looks old, older than she should, lines on the edges of her eyes and mouth. “Don’t worry about the dishes. You too, Ned. You both should stay with your families.”
Barely anyone can make it to Decathlon the next day. Several don’t even come to school altogether, having been whisked away to a remote safehouse by their families. The rest can’t stay after school, citing parental restriction. Ned apologizes, over and over, for not being able to stay, for practice or otherwise. “The way my parents see it, last time aliens came to New York half the city got decimated.”
MJ can’t blame them. There is no way the fight stopped with just the two aliens yesterday. Something else—bigger than what she can fathom—is happening. Her gut clenches at the thought of Peter being in the middle of it all. “I’ll be fine, loser,” she says. “Just keep your phone charged.”
“Always,” Ned solemnly swears with one hand over his chest. “Keep me updated,” he says. “Stay safe.”
She shrugs. “Come on, what would evil aliens want from me?”
Nothing, her mind supplies. They won’t even care if you’re stuck under the rubble they’re making.
MJ comes home to her brother’s shoes on the shoe rack and his jacket hanging on one of the mounted hooks. He’s got the graveyard shift last night at the ER, and from the deathly quiet, he’s probably asleep.
“Gabe?” she tries, knocking lightly at his door. No answer, but the door swings open, not being shut properly. Gabe is asleep, one arm over his boyfriend Kai, who, ever a light sleeper, opens his eyes blearily, pressing a finger to his lips. MJ nods, carefully shutting the door so as to not wake Gabe up.
She puts the kettle on—she maintains that microwaved water doesn’t taste nearly as good as properly stove-boiled water—and spends way too much time wondering what tea she should make. In the end, she settles on the blooming jasmine tea Peter got her on their first proper date. She tries not to dwell on why.
The tea comes in a tin box, five marble-sized bundles, each wrapped in parchment paper. This batch would be the last one. When Peter get back she will demand another box.
She gets the book she’s reading—a retelling of the life of Circe, which is ridiculously good she’s savoring every sentence—and by the time everything is set up on the dining table, the water is ready.
She’s watching the bundle of tea leaves and jasmine flowers bloom in the teapot when she hears a shout from Gabe’s room.
“Gabe? Kai?” she calls out, already moving.
“Michelle,” Kai’s voice calls out, tremulous. “Michelle—what—” he chokes out as MJ opens the door. Gabe is not there, and the bottom part of Kai is somehow turning into dust. The dust floats, murky brown, as if blown by a wind despite the air being completely still. Kai’s gasping for air, soundless, until the disintegration reaches his neck, then head, then he’s gone. The dust swirls in the air, then vanishes, and MJ is left rooted on the doorway.
She hears screams from her neighbors, sharp through the thin walls. Below, she learns later that dozens of cars crash into each other, all at once, just like everywhere else.
She moves to the front door, unthinking, but then terrible nausea seizes her, twists her insides. Cold sweat beads on her temples and her legs give up, sending her to the floor. She’s on all fours when suddenly the sick feeling is completely gone. Just like that, she’s fine, except for the bile stuck at the back of her mouth, except for a sudden hollowness. A wrongness she can’t explain. Whatever it is, it compels her to sit back and look at her left ankle.
The mark is white, like a scar, barely readable. The skin is no longer raised. Soon, she knows, it will be completely gone. As if she never had a soulmate. As if Peter Parker was never a part of her life.
She sits there, tasting ash in her mouth until the sun sets and the moon rises high in the polluted New York sky. When she moves, her joints are stiff, leaden. She checks her phone. Nineteen missed calls from Liz. Seventeen from Ned. A handful from various other people in her life. None from May.
MJ calls Liz first. She picks up on the first ring.
“MJ? Oh, thank God, MJ. My mom—my mom is—how are you?”
MJ tells Liz about her brother and his boyfriend. “Ned and Abe called me. Some relatives. I haven’t checked social media, so I don’t know who else is still—around.”
“Peter?”
“Gone,” she answers. In her head she can only hear Kai’s hoarse shout, can only see his pale face as he tries to gasp for air. Is that how Gabe went, too? Did it wake him from his sleep? What about Peter? Did he also turn into dust? Or did he die in battle? Die in battle, her mind sneers, as if it makes a difference how.
Liz is quick to comfort, platitudes with a soothing voice. For once, MJ cannot stand her.
“I have to call Ned,” she says, then hangs up.
She doesn’t call Ned. She checks in on Facebook. Tweets “still here”. Sends the same message to everyone who tried to call her, Ned included. Rejects incoming calls, then turns off her phone altogether.
There will be things to do tomorrow. Repairs, clean-ups. Tonight, MJ drinks her cold tea and goes to sleep, alone, half-wishing she’d also turn to dust in her sleep.
Tony Stark comes to MJ just as she hands out the last sandwich to a red-faced volunteer.
“I’m all out,” she says, terse. “Go ask Betty over there, maybe she still has some left.”
“I already had lunch.”
MJ glares at him. He’s in a tracksuit, some sort of tech on his chest, tinted glasses perched on his nose. His stance is stiff, and MJ knows it’s how people stand when they’re trying to hide a wound. MJ knows for a fact he is wounded, because she watches the news. His return to Earth was treated with the fanfare it didn’t deserve.
“Look, Peter talked about you, MJ—”
“Michelle,” she snaps.
“Michelle,” he says, raising both hands as if it could placate her. “Like I said, the kid never shut up about you.”
“I don’t want to hear it.”
“Listen, just—if I can do anything for you.”
“You can’t.”
He offers a card anyway, which she takes because otherwise he’d never leave. She crumples it and leaves it among the rubble.
The world is barely back on its feet when another battle happens in New York. To be precise, it happens in Manhattan. Ned and MJ, both the only one left in their respective families, stay together at MJ’s apartment in Queens, the TV on at all times.
Two days in, Ned returns from the bathroom, stops behind the couch, and says to MJ, “I didn’t know you had a tattoo.”
“That’s because I don’t, dweeb.”
“Okay, wait.” Ned takes out his phone and snaps a picture. “Here.”
On the nape of her neck are her initials, punctuated with a question mark. She touches it—the skin is slightly raised—and looks again at the picture, at the sharp dark lines. Barely a sentence, too short to show any character in the handwriting, but a soul mark nonetheless. MJ laughs. “A replacement,” she chokes out between gasps of laughter, “because the universe is kind and gracious.”
“MJ, don’t you think—don’t you think that looks like his handwriting?” Ned asks, his voice small as if he didn’t want MJ to hear.
“It can’t be,” MJ says. “He’s dead. Like three and a half billion other people.” There’s no trace left of the mark around her ankle. Sometimes, when she sleeps, she dreams of his fingers caressing it, of that afternoon at the gym when he wrapped her ankle, when she let him know.
Ned doesn’t have time to answer, as they hear a yell from her brother’s room.
That is how they find out about the return. Like susurrus on the winds, each unmade person materializes back into being, exactly where they were last.
“Well, he was in outer space. It’d take time for him to get back.”
“He’s always been a total flake,” MJ agrees, though she doesn’t want to hope.
Peter is bone-tired when they finally enter Earth’s atmosphere. It’s in the middle of the night, and he barely thinks as he directs Quill to Queens. Somehow, the window he arrives on is not his, or Ned’s. He jumps off the ship with artless grace and clings to her windowpane. The lights are off. Maybe it isn’t a good idea to bother MJ.
But his body aches for her. When he turned to dust, he resisted and clung to the one tether he had to the living world. The unmaking of their soul bond had hurt more than the physical disintegration. Until now, he wonders if a normal death would feel the same, or if the soul bond was broken on the account of the soul stone. Either way, he’s in no rush to find out.
Peter inhales. Exhales. Carefully, he knocks on the window. He waits.
MJ appears. Her hair is mussed, her outfit tattered, but her eyes are fully awake. She opens the window and steps back.
He climbs in. He wonders what he should say to her. How does one greet another after they are back from the dead? No greeting is sufficient. Their last meeting was a lifetime ago. Literally. He remembers the ease of their interactions, hard-won after a long period of navigating around the nature of a soul bond and her resistance to it. He wonders if he has to go through that again. He doesn’t mind, not really.
MJ, on her part, says nothing either. Her eyes, sharp and alert, scans Peter. His borrowed clothes that are too big on him. His slack posture. The faded bruises on his face. Each detail catalogued. Her brows furrow and he can tell she’s using her painter eye to assess him.
The silence stretches on until Peter can’t bear it any longer and snaps it by saying, “MJ?” He falls silent, then, not knowing what else to say.
MJ exhales a breath, or a sob, he’s not sure. “About damn time,” she says.
Peter smiles, wide and brilliant, and he’s not sure if it’s her or him, but they crash, his arms around her, hers around him, gripping hard as if they’re each other’s lifeline.
“I’m sorry,” he says, pressing a kiss to her temple. “I’m sorry,” he says again, this time to her cheek. “I’m sorry,” he murmurs into the crook of her neck.
“I felt you die,” she says in reply, and he feels tears pricking his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he says, his forehead pressed against hers. She’s solid. Solid and real, and he’s gripping her as hard as he could, and if it hurts her she doesn’t protest.
“Then everyone came back, but not you.”
“Sorry,” he repeats. His hands start to wander, relearning her shape, and when his fingertips reach the nape of her neck, he pauses. “Did you get hurt? Is this a scar?”
MJ extricates herself from the embrace, turning around and lifting her hair for him to see. It’s his handwriting, spelling out her initials, a question mark in the end. “The old one is gone,” MJ says.
“Oh,” Peter says. “Mine, too, but a new one shows up right where the old one was.”
“Let me see,” MJ says. He complies and takes off his borrowed tee. She studies the new mark, intent, then splays her hand over it. “There’s a moment—” she starts, swallows, then starts again, “right after I found the mark and before everyone else returned, for a moment I thought the mark was someone else.”
Peter says nothing, but he places his hand over MJ’s, squeezing.
“I was ready to fight it. I don’t care how. I’d fight it if it’s the last thing I do.”
“And now?”
“The mark was gone, and I still had dreams where you turned to dust in front of me. Actually, right now I’m wondering if I’m going to wake up anytime soon.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“You can’t promise that,” she argues. “You know you can’t.” Her head is bowed, eyes fixed on their joined hands.
The truth stings him, but he’s nothing if not determined. “I can try. Let me try?” He cradles her face in one palm, tilts it to meet his gaze. “Please?”
“Mulish,” MJ says, but a smile sneaks itself through anyway.
“You know me,” Peter says, grinning back, “I push my luck. Speaking of.”
“Mm?”
“Can I kiss you?”
MJ looks him in the eye and he can feel his senses sharpening, narrowing to her and only her, and it feels like his nerves are struck by thunder. Her hand climbs from his chest to his shoulder, then to the back of his neck, and she tugs him forward. Against his lips, she mutters:
“I was waiting for you to ask.”