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She has an uncommonly long neck, Peter offhandedly thinks. He notices all kinds of dumb, arbitrary things about Michelle Jones, but here, in gym class, his mind wanders and fixates on the most peculiar things. Her neck isn’t something he usually gives much thought. Yet, as MJ stretches her arms up over her head across the gymnasium, his eyes traitorously wander down the length of her nape and further.
She has lovely collarbones, too, which he can barely see through the cotton fabric of their school-issued gym shirt. There isn’t really much about her that he isn’t outrageously fond of, to be perfectly honest.
He isn’t sure how there was ever a time when he wasn’t completely obsessed with her. He was dumber then, at sixteen. He knows a lot more about the world now. Being seventeen (and one absolutely disastrous space mission that resulted in a five year snap) has changed a lot about him.
The Peter before was the Peter that liked girls at a distance. The Peter before was the guy that mooned over a girl and every time said girl talked to him, he completely and utterly shut down, like a broken computer.
The Peter now isn’t really sure how much time he has left. There is expedience to everything he does, everything he risks, because he knows, with certainty, that he is not guaranteed tomorrow. He learned that lesson the hard way.
MJ drops her arms back to her sides and spots him watching her. He quirks a smile. She returns it. His heart does a stupid somersault.
Ned thumbs him on the shoulder, drawing his attention back to the task at hand. “What?” he shakes his head free of MJ-related-cobwebs.
His best friend puts effort into not smiling. Peter is thankful for small mercies. Ned jerks his head up to the rope lamely hanging above them. “You wanna go first?”
Peter nods, “Yeah. Yeah, sure.” He glances back at MJ who is watching him, observing. Peter works extra hard to hulk up the rope. After all, strictly speaking, he doesn’t have any super powers.
“Holy shit,” she pants, later, as he colors kisses down the neck that drove him to distraction in gym. Michelle fists her hand into the fabric at the back of his shirt, clutching at him for delirious purchase. He smirks against her skin. “Oh shut up,” she quips, and he nips at her ear.
He feels her shake in the circle of his arms. He holds her closer as his mouth noses back up to her lips. She captures him in a heady bite that makes something deep in his chest roar in delight. “Holy shit,” he reiterates.
It is her turn to smirk. She slides her hand down his spine as she fully settles in his lap on the crappy IKEA couch in her mother’s basement. Peter tilts his head back to kiss her mouth better. From this vantage point, she is in absolute control and it makes his blood burn.
She grinds her wicked hips down into his lap. He groans. “You’re really wound up today,” she remarks, easily coaxing kisses on his jawline. “What brought this on?”
He grabs the back of her head and draws her back down into a brutal kiss. It is silly, he knows, but he misses her kisses, already. She hums a laugh into his lips. His heart performs another somersault.
Between kisses, he barely manages to say, “You stretched in gym. Your neck looked good.”
She tears her mouth away from his lips and he feels bereft. She blearily blinks down at him, her hair and lips ruined from their kisses, and prompts, “You wanted to get hot and heavy in my basement today because I stretched. In gym class?”
He nods.
She cups the side of his face fondly and presses their foreheads together. “Peter,” she whispers, “that is the dumbest thing I have ever heard.”
He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. He feels her affectionately knock her nose against his own. This, he thinks, this is what he fought for all those months ago. “It is pretty dumb,” he readily agrees.
Her mouth grazes his in a sweet, brief kiss. “Mhmm. Very dumb.”
“Hey now. I said pretty dumb.”
“You just want me to call you pretty.”
His eyes remain closed. He nuzzles their foreheads, too comfortable and at peace to dare move away, and asks the same question he has asked every day for the last three months, “MJ, when are we going to tell people about us?”
At once, she goes rigid in his arms. He knows what is likely to happen next. Every time he talks about their not-relationship, she shuts down. If the snap made him bolder, braver and more sure of what he wants, Michelle has swung in the other direction. She is afraid to lose things.
Peter knows fear. He lives with it every day, but he wears his better than she does. He won’t let it rule him. It isn’t what Tony would have wanted for him.
As she tenses, as she completely folds in on herself in his lap, he waits patiently for her to say something, anything.
He doesn’t know the details of her snap. He doesn’t know where she was or what she lost in the five years she blinked out of existence. She doesn’t talk about it, but he knows her parents don’t live together anymore. He knows her father remarried in the five years her and her mother were gone and that she has a three year old brother, now. He knows her family was broken by Thanos.
He wants to tell her he won’t break. He wants to tell her she won’t lose him. Yet, every time those words hit the back of his teeth, he swallows them. He can’t make any promises beyond the present. Even if she doesn’t know it, he is Spider-Man. He isn’t guaranteed tomorrow.
And so, he supposes, with a wealth of secrets between them, they are at an impasse, and the tiny, stolen moments she grants him will have to be enough. (It isn’t).
“Em,” he whispers, cupping her face. Her tongue darts out to nervously lick her lips. He says her name, again, softer, “Em.”
“There isn’t anything to tell,” she settles on and climbs out of his lap, brushing his hand away from her face.
She retreats from the room and Peter’s head falls against the back of the couch.
Brad never would have been an issue if the snap had never happened. When they were all in high school, the first time, before Thanos, he had been just a kid. Then, the world lost and Brad aged in the absence of half the universe. He is seventeen, now, too.
And Peter hates his guts.
It is weird, he tells Ned whenever his best friend brings up the new Captain of the decathlon team, that Brad likes MJ. He is, essentially, trying to force Michelle into robbing the cradle, he reasons. Ned rolls his eyes, “We’re all the same age, Peter.”
“Nuh uh,” Peter argues. “I’m, like, basically twenty-two.”
“No,” Ned corrects him. “Abraham and Cindy are twenty-two. We’re still seventeen. You know that.”
Peter grumbles, “I don’t like the way he looks at her. Its weird.”
“Yeah, yeah. We get it. You like MJ. Maybe you should stop complaining and do something about it,” Ned replies.
Peter remembers the way MJ squirmed under him the night before when he worked his way under her shirt. He could faintly hear her uneven whimpers of delight. He smiles a secret smile to himself. “Its complicated,” he manages to say, between flashes of memory.
His best friend shakes his head, “I don’t get it.”
No, Peter thinks, no, he doesn’t either.
He hears about the Europe trip from Brad the next day. The smarmy dickhead announces it in decathlon practice. Brad and MJ—apparently they are a cozy pair outside of school, which makes Peter uncharacteristically glower—decided that Europe would be a good team building trip. They have been divided, the snapped and the not, since returning to school after Thanos. This trip will unify them so they can compete as one team next season.
It makes sense.
He hates that Brad is the one who suggests it. He hates that when Brad smiles at MJ, she smiles back. He wonders if Brad would still smile if he webbed him up against the door and he left him there.
“I want to date you,” he tells her in Venice on the banks of some water-logged street.
Her mouth falls open in shock. It is the only sign of surprise written on her face. Michelle is better at concealing her emotions than most, but he knows he has never been so blunt with her before about what he wants. He wants her. He doesn’t want to dance around it anymore. If not now, if not here, when, where?
She impulsively tucks her curls behind her ear. “I—I don’t know what you want me to say.”
He sadly quirks a smile, “I think that much is obvious, isn’t it?” Michelle bites her lip. “You, Em. C’mon, its you.”
“You’ve got me,” she replies.
“No,” he shakes his head. He almost reaches for her hands. “Not like that. I want more than that. You know I do.”
“I’m sorry, I—”
The world explodes. A water monster appears from the depths of the quiet Venice street. Their conversation is forgotten as he lunges across the docks to fight another bad guy.
He doesn’t realize how often he leaves her behind for Spider-Man.
He misses a lot of things as he is running headfirst into danger.
She avoids him in almost every city after that. He knows she is afraid. Hell, he is afraid, too, but it isn’t enough, stolen moments in shadowy corners. He wants to be with her, officially. The secret relationship is draining. He wants to be able to hold her hand when they walk down the street.
He almost does in Prague, but she diverts the conversation with admitting she knows he is Spider-Man. He had suspected she might, he supposes, if he thinks about it, but she has never brought it up before. And, for the first time, he wonders if that is the heart of what is between them—Spider-Man.
They don’t talk about the snap—she can’t—but where Peter had been a victim of the snap, Spider-Man had been one of the players that failed to stop it. Maybe she wants to be with Peter, but not Spider-Man. Maybe he is the reason they aren’t together, after all.
It all gets out of control very fast.
When London is burning and he feels his chest filled with smoke, he thinks about Michelle. This city is not safe for her with Mysterio hellbent to torch it. “Happy,” he chokes into his comm, “Happy, you gotta find MJ and my friends. You gotta get them out of here.”
He gets knocked down by fire and ash. Peter still isn’t sure if the monster he is fighting is real or not, but the aches and wounds feel real enough. He struggles to get back on his feet. “Peter,” Happy says frantically.
He coughs, “Happy, promise me.”
“I promise.”
She appears, like an apparition, out of thin air. He does not trust his eyes, anymore. He knows he cannot trust his senses. Mysterio has played too many tricks on what he perceives to believe in anything, really.
Peter catalogues the past much easier than the present. In the past, Tony was still alive. In the past, Ned first learned his secret and, without hesitation, jumped onboard to help. In the past, Michelle kissed him for the first time in front of the Tony Stark memorial in Central Park.
In the past, everything was better. Nothing burned and nobody died.
The present is only ash and destruction and loss. So much loss. It has been never-ending loss since Thanos. Peter used to think Thanos made him braver and bolder. It isn’t true. He doesn’t wear his fear well. He wears it in tattered scrapes of misguided bravery. He wants to lie down. He is seventeen years old. He shouldn’t be an Avenger. People shouldn’t rely on him.
He is only a kid.
Michelle runs toward him and he, stupidly and on auto-pilot, stumbles toward her. It is the easiest thing in the world when she throws her arms around him. She feels real. He realizes he doesn’t care if she is real or not. He is so tired and he still just wants her.
“You’re okay,” she whispers against the side of his head.
“MJ?”
“It’s me,” she clutches him closer.
He holds her tightly, “How can I know for sure?”
“You’re very dumb,” she exhales into his neck.
Relief hits him like a wave, painful but sobering. She is the real MJ. “Pretty dumb.”
“I’m not going to call you pretty, Peter,” she says.
“What are you gonna do, then?” he asks.
She doesn’t seem to be able to let him go. He doesn’t mind. “Date you, if you don’t mind.”
“No,” he clings to her helplessly but feels the private stirrings of hope. He has wanted this, wanted her, for what feels like a lifetime. It only took them to end of the world and across an entire ocean to make it happen. Peter noses into the crook of her neck, breathing in the soot and smoke and the uniquely MJ smell. “No, I don’t mind at all.”