Chapter Text
Michelle Jones was no liar.
Not until the day she met Tony Stark.
The day she'd been held at gunpoint while Peter—who’d been poisoned—tried to protect her.
The day they’d both been kidnapped, but only one of them had been found.
The day Iron Man had assured MJ that he’d find Peter and that she shouldn’t involve the authorities because Iron Man hadn’t dealt with anything as mundane as authorities in years.
And when Iron Man told you to lie to your mom and your other best friend to protect your first best friend, you did it. You did it despite your long-standing and deep-seated reservations about the problematic, capitalist, classist privilege that Iron Man represented because it was easy to believe that being Iron Man actually meant something—something powerful and good—if it also meant that Peter could be saved.
It was an optimism MJ had been able to cling to just long enough to start spinning a web of lies that any spider would be proud of and that she couldn’t wait to be rid of. If only she knew how to free herself.
She’d told herself she could be a liar for a day to save Peter, to try and protect him like he’d done for her. For a day though, not for the rest of her life. Even the idea of being a liar for the rest of junior year was unfathomable.
But so far she had spent three weeks strung up in her own lies like a puppet, and with every day that passed without a word from Tony Stark and no sign that things were going to change, MJ was starting to wonder if her continued cover-up was actually helping Peter or was only protecting Tony Stark.
But how could she take everything back now? If she cut the strings and tried to come clean, everyone would know she was a liar. Would anyone even believe the real story? Would anyone believe her ever again? Was that what Tony Stark had intended?
You couldn’t be friends with a liar. That was why MJ had always said she valued truth more than friendship, and why she’d always had so few friends. It was also why her hands shook and her stomach tightened as she stood in the doorway of the school gymnasium, looked her last friend dead in the eyes, and lied straight to his face without a single tell.
“I can’t make Acadec today, Ned. My aunt really needs my help with her kids. She still can’t find a new nanny.”
A lie.
She had an aunt—a mortician over in Brooklyn—but she didn’t have any kids, even though that had been MJ’s excuse for ditching Academic Decathlon practices for the last few weeks.
Ned’s face fell, and MJ struggled to keep her face neutral as the knot in her stomach tightened so much she could barely breathe.
He was never going to forgive her. He’d never trust her again once he found out about her lies. Not unless Tony Stark himself came down to explain things, and maybe not even then.
Ned glanced behind him at the team. MJ could see them over his shoulder as they dropped their backpacks around the gym tables. Their not-so-subtle glances over to Ned and MJ showed just what they thought about their team captain bowing out of practice again. Her ditching was straining the whole team. She wished she could tell them why.
“Can you at least make it to the meet on Friday?” Ned pleaded.
“I’ll try, Ned, but I can’t promise anything. I don’t know what I’ll be doing then.”
Another lie. She knew exactly what she’d be doing if Peter hadn’t been found. The same thing she’d been doing every afternoon since he’d been kidnapped. Trying to wrangle some answers out of Tony Stark.
“Abe can’t run a practice like you, MJ. No one listens to him.” He was practically begging now. “Can’t she hire a babysitter or something? We’ll get absolutely slaughtered at the meet if you’re not there and we’re still missing Peter.”
MJ flinched at the wording, even though she knew Ned didn’t mean it. He didn’t know that Peter was literally missing. Like everyone else, he thought Peter had mono. It was one of the things MJ had lied about the most the first week.
The sounds of students pounding through the halls and buses pulling up outside echoed behind MJ, the squeaky push-bar doors constantly wailing their use. MJ wanted to be out there, swinging through the doors instead of lying to her friend, but he had something she needed. Then she had somewhere to be.
“I’ll try, Ned. Did you get Peter’s work from Mr. Munts?”
Collecting Peter’s work was the only reason she bothered to meet up with Ned after school at all. She’d been diligent about personally collecting all of Peter’s assignments from Peter’s teachers, even from the classes she didn’t share with him. But there was one teacher she couldn’t face.
She knew it wasn’t really Mr. Munts who had kidnapped them, wasn’t him who had chatted idly about nothing before pulling a gun on them. The next day she’d gone to Mr. Munts’s class, a period she usually shared with Peter, and tried to act normal like Tony Stark had told her to. Only he hadn’t told her what to do when the mere sight of Mr. Munts’s face took away her ability to speak or breathe. She’d lasted through two minutes of light-headedness and telling herself to get it together before Mr. Munts had approached her desk to pass out a worksheet, and she’d bolted. Her mumbled excuse of feeling sick hadn’t been a lie by that point.
Ned reached into his backpack and pulled out two worksheets. “Uh, Mr. Munts asked about you. Said you’re still on his roster.”
She hadn’t been back to class since. Her chem lab time was spent in the library these days, never mind what the roster said. Going to a school counselor and switching classes or teachers might have been an option earlier in the semester, but exceptions this late were nearly impossible to get. And MJ couldn’t tell them why she needed an exception. Couldn’t tell anyone. Couldn’t even explain to Ned why she’d asked him to pick up Peter’s assignments every day from just that one class.
MJ took the paper from Ned and slid it into her backpack. “Yeah, I’m working it out with the counselor. Switching to AP Bio.”
Another lie.
This was something she didn’t know how she’d work out even if Tony Stark found Peter today and came and apologized to Ned. That wouldn’t make it any easier to look Mr. Munts in the eyes or even pass him in the hall. It wouldn’t get her class schedule changed. It wouldn’t take away the nightmares.
“You think he’s done any of it yet?” Ned asked, fidgeting awkwardly with his backpack straps. “It’s kind of piling up.”
“I don’t know. I just give it to his aunt.”
Another lie. All of Peter’s work was in a folder full to bursting that she carried everywhere with her. And anyway, she wasn’t even positive where Peter lived. She’d lied to Ned about it without thinking the first week, so now she couldn’t ask him. Tony Stark probably knew, but he’d dropped off the face of the earth as far as MJ could tell.
Damn superheroes.
“Have you talked to Peter at all? He’s still not answering my texts.” MJ had to look away from the honest concern plastered on Ned’s face. He deserved a better friend. He deserved the know the truth. If only she could give it.
“He hasn’t answered mine either,” she lied. “I think his aunt took his phone away or something.”
“Oh.”
Ned’s face fell as he bought yet another lie. MJ wanted to shake him, wanted him to shake her, wanted somebody in the whole wide world to have noticed her lies and called her out for them. She wanted to be a terrible liar, but apparently she was a natural.
What a terrible thing to be amazing at.
At this point, she’d be better off shutting up completely and assuming a vow of silence. Then at least there would be less hole to dig herself out of later.
Mr. Harrington pushed through the door across the gymnasium, carrying a massive briefcase and looking a little lost, like he always did. Then he laid eyes on MJ across the room and started a beeline straight for her.
Time to go.
“Tell Mr. Harrington that Abe’s running practice again,” MJ said, shrugging her backpack on. “I gotta go.”
Not a lie.
She ignored Mr. Harrington calling out her name and hurried through the door to the courtyard, joining the last remnants of students with places to be who were filing out into the streets.
Mr. Harrington was probably ready to fire her as president of Acadec, but if he couldn’t talk to her to actually do it, maybe she could buy a little time. At least until Tony Stark found Peter.
Unless he never did.
Unless he already had and it was too late.
She swept the dark thought to the corner of her mind, where all the dark thoughts lived. All the statistics on kidnapping and murder victims that her morbid interests kept a close catalog of. All the things she wished now that she knew less about.
As she walked down the sidewalk, coat collar pulled up against the brisk fall air, she tried instead to focus on the positive statistics she knew. Like that despite the crime podcasts she liked to listen to, the odds for missing people were actually pretty good. It was the outliers and anomalies that made for good entertainment.
She knew cerebrally that the vast majority of kids who were reported missing were found alive and well. Of course, most of them weren’t kidnapped by super-teched-out professionals with probable ties to secret government agencies and/or a grudge against Iron Man. There were no statistics for that.
A missing person flyer fluttered on the pole to the entrance of the subway station a few blocks from the school, and MJ looked away as she descended the stairs, sickened by the sight. It had been there, aged and water-wrinkled since before Peter went missing. Some kid a little bit younger than him that the Stark-funded Missing Persons of New York non-profit was trying to find. MJ hadn’t been able to stomach reading any more details than that, but she couldn’t help but wonder: If Peter had a poster, would he have been found by now? Would Tony Stark ever put up posters of Peter? Would he let MJ?
MJ focused on slowing her breaths as she descended the station steps, starting her daily pilgrimage to Manhattan.
It was far away. It was stupid to go. It was the only lifeline MJ had left. It was the only place she could think of to find Tony Stark: Stark Tower.
The subway ride from Midtown School of Science and Technology to Stark Tower in central Manhattan cost her three dollars and thirty minutes each way. The Avengers had moved their home base somewhere else early in the year (MJ and most of New York were glad to see that danger magnet leave the city), but Stark Tower and the offices of Stark Industries still stood as tall and as proud and as pompous and as capitalist as ever.
MJ’s phone buzzed with a text in her pocket as she passed through the station turnstile, and she flinched. That would be her mom’s daily after-school text. She pulled it out once she was seated on a slightly swaying subway car headed to Manhattan, the shiny glint of her new Starkphone grating on her nerves.
The phone was just one more lie she’d had to spin. Tony Stark had insisted on replacing hers when it hadn’t turned up again after the kidnappers had stolen it. She’d been grateful at first, not eager to tell her mom she’d lost her phone and hope she could afford a new one, but it had been one of the first things she’d had to lie to her mom about. A vague story about some school raffle had done the job, but it had started the knot in her stomach, and it tightened a little every time she saw it.
It was the same flashy overkill as Stark Tower and MJ hated carrying it around. And to add insult to injury, he hadn’t bothered to put his own damn phone number in it just in case MJ had to get a hold of him. If he wasn’t going to make it actually useful to her, then why had he even bothered?
Maybe to track her, just in case the kidnappers came back for her again. Both the thought of the kidnappers returning and the thought of someone tracking her—even a superhero—sent shivers down her spine. If the kidnappers came after her again, would that justify being tracked? She pushed the question into the dark corner of her mind without allowing herself to dwell on the answer.
She was getting paranoid. She knew it. She’d known it since the first night after the kidnapping when she’d stayed up until 3 a.m. researching self-defense techniques on Youtube. But she didn’t know how to stop it.
Her mom’s text was simple, almost textbook helicopter parent.
You’ve got practice today, right? Coming home straight after?
Not exactly.
Of all the people in her life, it bothered her the most to lie to her mom. She’d been rightly upset when she heard from the school that MJ had missed an entire day. It had opened a can of “I thought we were past this!” and “It’s been years since you acted out like this!” and “Not since your father left!” worms that had burrowed their way into their relationship before MJ even realized they were free.
And when she’d realized MJ was still ditching her chem lab, she’d gone overboard with the rules. Home right after practice every day, no later than six. No TV time. Respond to texts within thirty minutes or else. “And go to chem lab, Michelle!”
Even if MJ tried to come clean, no way would her mom believe the truth. “Sorry, mom. A friend from school who interns for Tony Stark got into some government trouble, and we were both kidnapped by someone who looked exactly like our chem teacher, and then I was kind of rescued by Iron Man, who said he’d find my friend but that I shouldn’t tell anyone what was going on because he’d handle it.”
Yeah. That was bound to go over well. She’d get grounded even worse for lying.
Michelle didn’t fight against the no-TV or answer-texts rules, but she couldn’t bear chem lab, and she couldn’t just sit around while her friend was missing.
She typed a quick response to her mom.
I’m going to Ned’s after. We’re swamped prepping for the meet next week. I’ll be home by nine.
More lies.
The only honest thing in that response was her intention to skip the six o’clock curfew. It would make her mom mad, but as long as MJ didn’t smell like alcohol or worse when she got home, her mom wouldn’t do anything drastic. Yet. Probably.
But even if she did, MJ wouldn’t care. The Stark Tower public lobby was open until eight every night, and MJ needed to spend every second she could there until Tony Stark showed his stupid face so that she could figure out what was going on.
She’d seen him once, four days after Peter had gone missing. He’d walked in the front doors, wearing a pair of dark sunglasses, a figurative cape of over-eager businessmen trailing behind him. They’d made eye contact for a second—or MJ assumed they had when his dark-lensed visage paused on her corner of the lobby—and he’d shaken his head without even pausing the sentence he was in the middle of.
She’d thought he’d been saying not now with that look. Not now, not here, in front of all these people. But when he hadn’t reappeared before the lobby closed, MJ had realized he might have meant not ever.
Whatever the head shake had meant, she hadn’t seen him again, despite spending every available minute in the Stark Tower lobby. Maybe she’d gotten lucky the first time. Maybe he was avoiding her. The details didn’t really matter. There was definitely something fishy going on. Tony Stark had lied to her. He’d said he’d be in contact. He’d said he’d let her know the moment he’d found something. Iron man couldn’t possibly have found nothing in three whole weeks.
If that was the case, what chance did Peter have?
The typing indicator dots appeared in the phone conversation, but Michelle flipped her phone closed and tucked it away for the ride before she could read her mom’s reply. The painfully familiar knot twisted in her stomach.
Michelle Jones was a liar now.
But she’d be damned if she was going to let Tony Stark get away with lying to her.