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The worst conversations were the ones where you knew exactly what you wanted to say, and yet the words couldn’t seem to form. They tangled in his throat, squirming around like he’d swallowed a live octopus that wanted revenge.
It’s a leap of faith, just like everything else. He did, deep down, believe this would probably work out.
Probably.
He could just picture Miles or Gwen making a joke about his inability to do this. Maybe it would have been easier if one or both of them had been there.
“MJ…”
She looked at him with an expression that baffled him and said nothing, waiting for whatever else he might say.
She wants you to say something, his brain whispered.
His mouth did not comply.
Take the leap.
“Peter, it’s late. What are you doing here?”
Still wordless, Peter thrust the flimsy bouquet he’d bought on the way over here towards MJ, hoping that would buy him another second to remember how to talk.
She took them, which was a relief; part of him had expected her to toss them on the ground, possibly even stepping on them for good measure.
“Peter…”
“I wanted to talk you! Uh, to you. I wanted to talk to you. Now. Please. Maybe?”
He was diving, falling, stomach turning. This was far worse than any of the millions of literal leaps he’d taken in his life.
MJ watched him, and he saw how tired she looked. She could never look bad, not to him at least, but right now she looked faded.
He was sure he looked pretty pathetic too, not to mention how he sounded. He’d come over immediately upon returning to his dimension, which meant he was still wearing a rather battered suit. He might have been bleeding. He’d lost track of his injuries the second MJ had opened her door.
She stepped outside onto the porch and started to say something before she stopped. “What the hell happened to you?”
“Just a fight,” He attempted his signature smirk. “You know, the usual.” This kind of pretending was easier, solid ground to stand on.
MJ didn’t laugh. “I didn’t hear about anything on the scanner.”
“You wouldn’t have… Wait, what scanner?”
Her face twisted into a stubborn grimace. “The police scanner. I may have… borrowed one so I could keep an eye on you.”
Oddly touched, Peter stepped forward.
“Spiderman didn’t fight tonight,” MJ said, right to the point, “So what happened to you?”
“I wasn’t… I wasn’t here. The fight, I mean, it wasn’t around here.” Not this version of around here anyway.
MJ nodded. She turned around and went back to the door.
No! Words were finally happening, she couldn’t leave now!
He moved towards the stairs, trying to close the distance while his leap began to feel like plummeting end over end towards a painful demise. His stomach twisted.
She turned around, framed by the golden light inside her house. “Are you coming?”
Uplifted, he managed to keep his feet as he climbed the stairs, darting in the door as if it might close on him at any second. “Yes! Yes, I’m coming.”
She sat him down at the little kitchen table, the hum of the police scanner in the background while she patched up the cut on his forehead.
It was so normal Peter could almost forget the years that had gone by since their separation. Back in the good days, she had always helped patch him up when he got home. This felt like habit, and the words settled down, no longer choking him.
“Thank you,” He said.
She nodded. “Are you going to tell me why you came?”
“I… something happened to me and it’s going to sound crazy—crazy even for me—but it made me think about… well it made me think about us, and I wanted to—”
Her eyes were steady and soft when she interrupted him. “Peter, I have a rule, and it’s a really important rule and I’ve never broken it: I don’t get back together with people unless the problem that broke our relationship is resolved. I still want to have kids.”
“I had a son!” Peter burst out, before backtracking to explain. “Well, not really. I knew him for a couple days and he had a dad, but he was like me!”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“He was like me! He was a Spiderman!”
“A Spiderman?” MJ raised one of her eyebrows in a look he was a little too familiar with. “Peter, did you hit your head? Do you know what day it is?”
“No, well, okay, no I don’t know what day it is, and I did hit my head, but this isn’t about that. This is about alternate dimensions.”
So he told the whole story, from being pulled out of his apartment and meeting Miles at Peter Parker’s grave to the collider and suddenly finding himself home. She listened with her usual patience and interest, barely reacting to most of the story, though some parts tripped her up.
“A spider pig.”
“Yeah, he was from some dimension with talking animals, it was more normal than it sounds.”
“Nothing about it sounds normal.”
“I wish I could explain it to you, MJ, but all I can say is that when I looked at him, and the kid, and Gwen, and all of them, I just knew. They were like me. They are like me, in their dimensions.”
“Okay. Keep going.”
He gave her as many details as he could, telling only the absolute truth. “The alternate universe you was at this party. She was like you, but younger and less pretty. I didn’t speak to her; she could barely compare.”
MJ didn’t seem to believe him completely, but she didn’t attempt to call him on the lie. “As if I would ever go to Kingpin’s party. And why the hell was Kingpin throwing a funeral party for Spiderman? And who throws a black-tie funeral?”
“With waiters wearing Spiderman masks!” Peter agreed. “If everything else about that moment hadn’t been crazy, it would have been really crazy.”
The battle was hard to describe. For parts of it, he’d felt like he was out of any dimension, caught between here and nowhere. The Spider-People had been all he could really keep track of, so he told everything that had happened in relation to them, and especially Miles.
“And then I ended up at home,” He finished, feeling like it was a cop-out ending. And I woke up and it was all a dream.
MJ was silent for a long moment. She stood slowly and poured herself a cup of coffee. She sat back down.
“In this other universe… You were dead?”
“Spiderman was dead, yeah.”
“But Spiderman was Peter Parker, right? You died.”
“He wasn’t really me, just like she wasn’t really you. They were like us, but not. He was blond.”
“Right.” More silence. “And this Miles kid?”
“He was great. I looked after him for a few days and it just felt… I don’t know, there was something right about helping a new Spiderman become Spiderman.” A little twist of sadness settled in Peter’s stomach; he would never get to see Miles truly become Spiderman.
MJ nodded. “That made you want kids?”
“No,” Peter said. “I’ve always wanted kids. I was scared. I spent three days with Miles, teaching him what I know, and I didn’t mess him up.”
“Mess him up?”
“Yeah. You ever think about how easy it is to fuck a kid up, just by accident? I thought if we had a kid, I might mess him up and I might not even know it until he’s almost forty and his life’s a disaster and he doesn’t know how to handle it.”
MJ’s eyes softened. “I never thought that. I always knew you’d—we’d— be okay if you tried.”
“I should have trusted you.”
She smiled and reached for him, pulling him into a hug that felt more like home than anything he’d seen since returning to his dimension.
He let go to look down at her. “Does that mean we’re trying this again?”
“Yes. But no more running away. This time when shit goes to hell, when we get scared, when the universe collapses, we face it together, okay?”
“I promise.”
He settled back at the table that had once been theirs and everything settled. MJ was sitting with him, smiling at him. Already, they were off to a start. He’d taken his leap of faith and landed on solid ground.
There was a little more chatter from the scanner in the corner, and Peter glanced at it. “So you’ve been keeping tabs on me?”
“I’ve been keeping tabs on Spiderman,” She said, rolling her eyes.
“But I am,” Peter said, “The one and only Spiderman.”
Sort of.
For now.