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It wouldn’t have been so bad for MJ to get saved by the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man if he hadn’t been cut badly on the torso by the thief's knife. She had been walking home late from her study group and had ignored Peter’s offer to walk her back to her own apartment. She wanted some time to herself to just think. College was more stressful than high school and alone time just helped sometimes. There were earbuds in her ears and she always carried pepper spray in her right hand. The guy moved out from the alley quickly from her left and knocked the small can from her hand and pulled her into the dark. She let out a quick shriek but that was when he pulled the knife out. She was holding her purse out in seconds, hoping he didn’t take too much from her. Just some cash and maybe a card that she would cancel the second she got home. Before he even started digging through her purse, though, Spider-Man showed up. He slung a web to the thief’s hand and yanked him back onto his ass. MJ ran to hide behind a dumpster while the two struggled together. There was a thud of a body and the thief cursed a bit and ran off. It was quiet for a long moment before MJ stepped back out to see the spider guy laying on the ground, holding his bleeding torso.
MJ rushed forward and kneeled by his side. Her purse was webbed to the ground so she assumed that was why the thief cursed before leaving. Tucking her curls behind her ears, she moved his hands to inspect his cut. It wasn’t too deep but needed to be tended to as soon as possible.
“No,” Spider-man whispers out. “Don’t warn Mr. Stark, Karen.”
“Excuse me?” MJ leans closer in case she misheard him. It wasn’t any secret that he worked closely with Tony Stark but how was she going to warn him that this guy was injured.
“Not- not you. I’ve got… nevermind.” He tries sitting up but hisses in pain before being pushed back down by MJ. “Don’t you call an ambulance,” he says, obviously talking to her this time.
“Well, we have to get you somewhere safe.” She takes her thin jacket off and presses it against his wound, making him wince again. “What about your place? Where do you live?”
“No,” he shakes his head and his voice sounds familiar. It makes her wonder for the millionth time if her best friend throughout highschool and well into their early years of college is this Spider-Man vigilante. But it’s a bad time to wonder about that.
“Okay,” she tucks her hair behind her ears again and thinks quickly. “My place then. I’ll help fix you up.” MJ looks around quickly, still on edge about getting robbed. “How do I get my purse back?” She looks at the webbing covering it. They can’t just leave it there. Her keys are in there.
“Hey, wait,” the masked guy says, making her look back at him. “I’m- I’m fine. You just go back to your apartment and I’ll be on my way.”
MJ rolls her eyes. “Yeah, no. Not happening. Now, my purse?”
“You got a knife?” He sits up slightly with her help.
Looking around again, she sees the knife the guy dropped. “No, but he did.” She reaches over for it and cuts her purse free. They get up together, MJ helping him slowly so he doesn’t hurt himself any further. He slings an arm around her shoulder and she keeps one behind his back. Her jacket stays on his torso, the blood starting to soak through a bit. “I’m just a couple blocks away,” she says as they exit the alley. “Think you’ll be good until then?” The guy only nods and they walk the rest of the way in silence.
By the time they make it to her building, he’s using her a lot more to keep standing and it’s hurting her shoulders. The blood is going down his suit and leaving a thin trail behind them as she makes her way through the lobby of her complex. She hops nervously on her toes slightly as they stand in the elevator. Her landlord is going to have a fit after finding all this blood, but they don’t have a way to stop it. The spider guy leans his back against the wall as she unlocks her door. He’s thrown on her couch as she runs for the first aid kit in her bathroom. There had to be something to patch him up enough until he got serious help. As she reaches to take the suit off from around his neck, his hand grips her wrist.
“The mask stays on.” His voice shakes.
“Well, the suit needs to come off somehow. I need to get to the cut.” He lets go of her wrist, his palm pressing against the little spider on his chest and the suit loosens immediately. She raises an eyebrow at him as he wiggles the suit off enough to get to his injury. The guy just shrugs so she pulls her hair up so it’s out of her face and opens the tiny antiseptic package. “You look ridiculous by the way,” she comments about being shirtless with a mask on.
“It’s imperative that my identity remains a secret.” After Tony found out Ned knew, he threw a shit fit and almost didn’t talk to Peter for days but he calmed down. Ned was his guy-in-the-chair and Tony began to see that as a good thing since he couldn’t always look out for the kid.
“Yeah, you sound stupid too.” She wipes away the blood and he winces at first but as she goes on, he just deals with the stinging pain. They don’t talk much as she cleans him up but she kind of likes it that way. The less he talks, the less she wonders who is under the mask. Her curiosity always got the best of her, especially when she wanted to be right about something. After she cleans away the blood and it actually slows on bleeding, she grab two large pieces of gauze pads and tapes them down. Just in case, she wraps some rolled gauze around his torso for extra padding.
“I would ask you if you wanted something to drink but…” MJ stands and stares down at the masked man, hands on her hips.
“Look, ma’am,” oh no he just did not call her that. “It was so nice of you to help me but I need to be going.” He tries to sit up again but she’s pushing him back down by his shoulders. For a guy with supposed super powers, he seemed very weak against her pushing.
“Oh, no you don’t. You need to rest or else you’ll open it back up and you’ll start bleeding again.” Would this guy ever start to listen to her?
“What do you suggest I do?” He huffs, clearly annoyed that she won’t even let him sit up without pushing him back down. If he didn’t know any better, she was probably just using it as an excuse to put her hands on a shirtless stranger who was clearly fit. He can hear her saying ‘whatever, loser’ in his own head after the thought.
“Call your buddy Stark,” she pulls out her phone and puts it in his hand. “I’m going to clean up this mess. If you leave the second I turn my back, I will find you someday. Trust me.” He sees scary MJ come out that he’s very used to by now. “I will find you.”
He nods and starts putting in Tony’s number. She gathers all the trash and stands to leave but before she does, she turns back to him.
“Don’t ever call me ma’am again either.”
“You what?” Tony asks after Peter explains the whole situation, leaving out the detail that MJ was the one helping him. “Why didn’t Karen alert me? Did that chair friend of yours mess with the suit again?”
“No I- I told her not to tell you.” Peter speaks at normal volume since MJ is outside in the hall, cleaning up the blood. She was going to tell her landlord about the blood later and pretend she had no idea that there was a freaking superhero in her apartment and that he was the source of the blood in his building.
“And why is that?” He makes a mental note to override that somehow.
“Well, she- I didn’t want to freak out the girl. I needed to know that she was okay.” Because that’s what he does. He always puts himself before everyone else and Tony annoyingly knows that he can’t argue with that. “She was nice enough to patch me up.”
“Okay,” Tony sighs. “Where are you at? I won’t be able to show up until the morning--”
“Happy can just pick me up can’t he?”
“No because I’m picking your sorry ass up myself.” There’s a sharpness to his tone at being interrupted. Peter can’t blame him being a little worried but he was twenty now and Tony still acted like he had no faith in him. “Now where’s your location?”
“You, uh, remember MJ right…?” Peter almost didn’t want to ask but he knows Tony would recognize the address immediately. She’s listed as one of the very few people Tony requested to know about in case of certain villain emergencies. He was bound to find out who he was with right now.
“She knows?” He was fine with Ned because he was useful and Aunt May was a complete accident, but he knew what too many people knowing did.
“No!” He clears his throat and keeps his voice at a calmer volume. “No. I’ve kept the mask on. She hasn’t really asked who I am either. I- she was walking alone after our study session and a guy started following her the second she left the building and I--”
“Kid, it’s okay.” Tony sighs but he isn’t too mad or disappointed. He’s just worried about Peter. “I’ll be there in the morning, okay? Just get some rest.”
“Thank you, Mr. Stark.” Tony doesn’t comment about formalities and instead hangs up. Peter isn’t left alone for long as MJ comes back in with her mop seconds later. “He won’t be here until the morning.” He tells her before she can ask.
“He’s coming himself?” She looks surprised but it was how Peter felt too. “That’s new for the guy.” MJ doesn’t bother putting her mop back into the closet she got it from and moves his legs so she can sit on the other end of the couch. When he puts his feet back up, she takes some of his suit between her fingers, checking out the currently loose fabric. “I should offer you clothes right? If you’re actually going to stay the night on my couch that is.”
“Do you even have anything that will fit?”
MJ looks him over then looks down at herself before getting a smug look on her face. “I’m sure I could find something that fits.” She pats his legs to move them and stands. “Hey pull up my texts and just look for landlord. I still should tell him about the blood in the elevator. Play a little dumb.”
Then she’s gone, looking for something that would work. Peter does as he’s asked, imitating her text speech, playing completely dumb like she suggested but doesn’t raise any red flags, suggesting a neighbor that has terrible nose bleeds. It’s a lie obviously, but there’s no need to involve the police. MJ comes back with a pair of old joggers and a sweatshirt that annoyingly fit him. She helps him get dressed, worrying that he’s going to hurt himself or open his wound. Peter hasn’t really seen her worry about a stranger so much and it’s kind of interesting to see her that way. They sit back the way they were before, Peter laying down with his feet in her lap and it’s quiet for a long moment. Neither are really sure what to say. He knows he needs to thank her for helping him but he’s actually afraid of speaking in case she recognizes his voice. But she has. She just doesn’t believe Peter was actually Spider-Man. Maybe she just wanted to deny that her best friend could keep such a huge fucking secret from her for so long. Though, he wasn’t too subtle about it.
“Is it hard to breathe with that?” She gestures to her own face to indicate that she’s asking about the mask.
“Uh, no. Mr. Stark made the suit so it’s kind of high tech.”
MJ looks to the suit folded up on her coffee table in front of them. “I figured. Pretty high grade material.” What was she doing just sitting with this guy? Was she just hoping he would reveal his identity or was she just still spooked about the events of the evening? “Thanks for, you know, coming to my rescue by the way.” She avoids looking at him, not used to showing so much humility.
“It’s my job.” He almost calls her ma’am but catches himself before he does. “Thank you for bringing me here and fixing me up. Mr- Tony was pretty pissed I got hurt.”
“I guess sometimes you just can’t help it.” She tugs at a section of her hair nervously. “Shit happens.”
“Are you okay, MJ?” Well, shit. It just slipped from his mouth and he couldn’t stop it from escaping. Her head turns to look at him so fast he almost doesn’t notice that fact that she was tearing up.
“How did you know my name?”
“Your-” he gestures to her phone next to his suit. “It was in your texts with your landlord.” He really hates his brain sometimes. A small part of him told him to just leave instead of calling Tony and now he wishes he listened to that small part of him.
“Oh…” she looks away, sniffling a little. There’s a small feeling of relief. When he said that, she was really hoping it was Peter but she knows her name was mentioned in the last text she had received from the guy. “Sorry I just- I guess I was hoping for something else.” She wipes the tears away quickly, hating that she’s crying in front of what she suspects to be a stranger. “I guess everything is catching up now that it’s all a bit calm.”
Peter sits up a little, reaching out for one of her shaking hands but she moves it to bring it up to her mouth to chew on her thumbnail. It was the wrong move but she wasn’t mad. Just not comfortable with it. “It’s okay. That guy isn’t going to mess with you anymore.”
“Yeah,” she breathes out a laugh. “Thanks to you.” She sniffles and clears her throat. “It’s- it’s late. We both should get some rest.” Before Peter can interject she’s standing and grabbing her phone. “If you get thirsty there's cups in the far left cabinet. I don’t care what you drink. The bathroom is pretty easy to find. It’s not my bedroom which you probably saw earlier.” And then she’s gone.
MJ can’t sleep. She keeps wondering who is under that mask. For about an hour she tosses and turns trying to go over the evidence she has. It could probably fill a book, but for some reason she uses it to prove that Peter isn’t Spider-Man. For one thing, he was too awkward to be a hero like that. Then again, she thinks as she rolls back over onto her back, throughout the years he had gained unknown confidence. He began talking back to Flash a lot more and after the whole incident with Liz’s dad, he seemed to take it personally. Then there was the fact that he was always unavailable when Spider-Man was. Did that count as credible evidence? Ned wasn’t available either but she always suspected he was involved in some way. No, she thinks as she covers her tired eyes with her arm, no fucking way Peter Parker is the Spider-Man. There’s not enough evidence. All the answers she needed were right in her living room though.
Fuck it.
MJ gets out of bed and tiptoes into the living room. Before she gets too close to the guy on her couch, she makes sure he’s asleep. She kneels down next to him and reaches out for the mask. Just as she’s about to touch it, she hesitates. This is so stupid and reckless. He’s bound to wake up the second she touches him. She shakes her head and stands up to go back her room, but he makes a noise in his sleep and shifts enough that maybe taking the mask off won’t be too much trouble. This was her chance. She moves back next to the couch and lightly touches the bottom of his mask. It’s not too hard to roll up and as she gets it just above his chin, her heart begins to race, afraid to be caught. This is it. She’s about to figure out who exactly is under the mask.
Unfortunately Peter wakes with a start, making her jump as well.
“What- what are you doing?” He asks as he sits up, forgetting about the cut on his body and winces.
“I’m-” she wants to move back but ignores her instincts and reaches back out for him. “I just need to know.” His hands hold her wrists tightly as he shakes his head. She mimics him and speaks quietly even though they’re the only two in her apartment. “It’s okay. It’s just you and me.” His grip on her wrists loosen and she starts rolling up the mask again.
“No,” he says suddenly and moves away from her, pulling his mask back down.
“Tell me it’s not you, Peter,” she says as he makes his way to her kitchen. That makes him freeze, his back turned to her and head hanging down. “Is it you, Peter? Are you Spider-Man.”
He sighs and turns back to her, pulling off his mask. His short curls bounce back into place and even though his head is still facing down, she recognizes him. “How’d you know?”
MJ crosses her arms and stares him down. “Are you kidding? You’re not exactly the expert at subtly.” Peter sighs again and lifts his head up enough to look at her through his lashes. “Why didn’t you tell me? All these years and you’ve tried to keep it from me. Badly I’d like to add.”
“I was- It’s to keep you safe, MJ.” He moves back to the couch, not realizing how painful it was to stand this long. “Not a lot of people know.”
“Does Ned know?” The silence she gets in return makes her a little jealous even though she knows it’s stupid. She expected this. “Does he know?”
“He found out.” Peter keeps his eyes on the mask in his hands.
MJ laughs, “Of course. Like I said, not subtle at all.” She moves and sits next to him on the couch. “God Peter… you’re so reckless.”
“I was just- I was just trying to protect you.” He looks over at her, unable to read her body language at the confession. “I saw that he was following you and I--” Peter stops talking when MJ leans over and places a kiss on his lips. It’s a little awkward and short but MJ didn’t want to keep a secret as long as he had. “Uh- wh- what was that for?”
“For looking out for me, loser.” She moves back to her side of the couch. Baby steps. “You weren’t the only one with a secret.” Peter’s face flushes pink and he’s glad none of the lights are on. “How about you sleep in my bed? I don’t have the best couch in the world.” For once that night, Peter didn’t argue.
When Peter leaves that morning, MJ helps him back into his ‘costume’ even though he insisted she didn’t call it that. He had gained more flexibility overnight but it was still pretty sore. They don’t talk about the kiss. They only think about it to themselves. MJ wants so desperately for him to bring it up. To bring up how they actually talked about their feelings once he got into bed with her. They talked for what felt like hours but now in the day, everything feels a little awkward. Peter keeps staring at her when she isn’t looking and avoiding eye contact nervously when she does. And notices it all. What can she say, she’s observant. And now Tony is in the lobby waiting and Peter is sputtering out an awkward goodbye when putting his mask back on.
“Hey loser,” MJ calls when he’s waiting for the elevator and jogs to him. She yanks up his mask with a smile and gives him another kiss. A better kiss than the one from the night before and it actually feels like things are starting to fall in place. “Just call me when you get home, all right?”
Peter doesn’t even wait until he’s home but MJ already knew he wouldn’t be able to wait.