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It had been five hundred and two hours, thirty-two minutes, and seven - eight - seconds.
Peter didn’t like counting. He hated it even when an experiment or personal project involved it. His attention span was too short, and the higher the numbers went up, the more nervous he got. It was an irrational anxiety, but weren’t they all?
When big events happened in Peter’s life, his body subconsciously calculated the time that had passed since then. Sometimes, it was fun. When he had first kissed MJ, he was counting the time until a week after, wondering how he was existing past that point in time. His counting was only disrupted by the identity leak, to which came new counting, the less fun kind.
The calculations were involuntary. Usually, it would just happen lightning-fast if he even caught a glimpse of the time. So, in situations such as this, Peter would flip over every alarm clock and cover every traditional one. He wished he could do something about his phone, but setting the time to be slow or fast just freaked him out more.
Anxiety was something Peter had always dealt with, but with his ever growing PTSD and daily intakes of trauma, his meds rarely cut it anymore. And it wasn’t like he could get more anyway.
He laid in bed, restless. It happened most nights, but never like how it had been for the past three weeks. Peter doesn’t trust himself to close his eyes and risk sobbing, but he doesn’t trust himself to stare at the ceiling either and notice how cold and dark and depraved this shitty apartment was.
The apartment was his as of recently. It was a quick transaction: some landlord was desperate to sell it after the economic crash of the blip, and Peter was desperate for shelter. He ransacked every money stash that he had kept and that May had kept to scramble the money for it. Peter hardly had anything to move with. Just a box.
He had always assumed that by the time he would get an apartment, he would have someone to share it with. Maybe Ned. Maybe MJ. Hell, Peter would take Flash right now. Anyone except the cold emptiness that he sat with now.
It’s the first moment Peter even considers it in his entire life, and he would never admit it (who would he even admit it to? he thinks). But right now, he felt an odd, deeply-rooted gratefulness that Tony had died. That May had died. Happy was already too much for Peter to process. If they had forgotten him, too…he wouldn’t be pushing through it.
Even now, he’s close to giving up. Three weeks with absolutely nothing, absolutely nobody. He just got a job with the Daily Bugle about a week ago. He was just looking for a job with MJ a month ago.
Sometimes, Peter considers walking into the Sanctum Sanctorum with nothing but “Hello, Dr. Strange. I’m Peter Parker, and I’m Spider-Man.” He would have to know he was telling the truth, and even if he didn’t, there would be ways to prove it. He could tell Stephen and Wong about the spell, and at least somebody would know. At least he would know somebody, even if they couldn’t do anything about Ned and MJ.
He gets most of his food from FEAST, specifically the one May used to volunteer at. Every time it’s surreal, because wasn’t he just running through here with his mask off, searching for May, three weeks ago? And now he’s eating here, making small talk with the little kids.
The lady who serves him food is named Rio. She had learned his name about a week ago, and it was the first time he had even heard it in weeks. He almost cried when she did.
“Parker?” she had asked. “Popular last name?”
“I knew May,” he stuttered. “I’m her nephew.”
Rio looked shocked. “She never mentioned a nephew.”
Peter shrugged. “We weren’t close,” he lied. That one hurt.
Either way, Rio looked thoughtful. “I’m sorry for your loss, honey.”
Nobody had told him that yet. “Thank you.”
While Peter gets most food from FEAST, he puts cash aside to get coffee and a donut as often as he can. That absolutely godawful place MJ works.
He already knew her work schedule from before everything. He goes in on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays, but on Sundays, instead of 3:00 after school ends, he goes at 9:30. That’s when MJ works. And usually Ned is there.
She didn’t remember him, of course she didn’t, but she was mostly friendly. It was weird, because MJ was not the friendly type, and she wasn’t as friendly to other customers. Maybe a part of her remembers, Peter selfishly thought. Maybe she thinks I’m cute.
Then her voice had echoed in his head from a FaceTime, long before the spell, but not too long after the identity leak.
“My parents think I’m going soft,” she said. “Personally, I believe that’s a stereotype for black women that they’ve internalized. They think I need to be aggressive.”
“Wait, how?” Peter had asked her.
“Aggressive black stereotypes go back, like, a trillion years,” she shrugged. “When that shit gets told to you forever, eventually you’re gonna start to believe it. There’s real psychology behind that. I read something on it the other day, actually. They said that-”
Peter had meant “in what way did you go soft?” but didn’t interrupt. He loved listening to her talk, especially about something that really riled up her emotions. Those passionate subjects, usually about social justice or dark forgotten history, were the ones that made her so unique. Unique from Liz and all the other girls he had liked.
So, instead of asking MJ what she meant, he had asked Ned.
“Have you really not noticed?” Ned asked him, raising an eyebrow.
“What? Her ‘going soft’?” Peter asked. “Not really.”
“I guess she acts the same around you,” Ned said. “She’s like, less awkward around people.” He looked over at the taller boy, eyes wide. “Not that she’s awkward. Don’t web me.”
Peter laughed to himself, picking at the threads on his crewneck.
“She’s friendlier,” Ned decided eventually. “More willing to talk to people.”
“But what does that have to do with me?” Peter had asked.
Ned groaned. “Jesus Christ, Peter.”
Peter guessed that her emotional development didn’t exactly disappear with the memory of him.
He liked to imagine that maybe her body recognized him anyway. Maybe she was so nice to him because something in her snapped into it, like muscle memory, softening up when she looked at him, like she used to. Peter knew he still did when he looked at her.
When she told him she loved him, when she said those three words he had basically been pleading the gods to say to her, his body did a reset. Until then, he thought that maybe, somehow, it would be okay. Then she said it. Then he knew. This was it.
She was sobbing, but she looked gorgeous. Her face shined brighter than the rising sun, and in the moment before he responded, he tried memorizing the copper patterns in her eyes. Those round, doe eyes, the ones that used to look at him in complete boredom but now look at him in pure adoration. It was the world’s best drug.
The ninth of January was a hard smack in the face, one that might as well have left a mark, because it was supposed to be their six month anniversary, but it wasn’t, and she didn’t even know. He wished she knew. He told her he would take her to a really fancy restaurant today, months ago.
Peter needed a treat, something to take his mind off of it. Maybe a good donut.
Lucky for Peter, January ninth was a Tuesday, and MJ shouldn’t be working.
Unlucky for Peter, she was anyway.
At this point in Peter’s excruciatingly long, unfortunate life, he’s accepted the way that Murphy’s Law has followed him around since he was a child. But as soon as he walked in, seeing MJ wiping down a counter with her hair in her face, he wanted to run and scream and cry. Of course, this is the one Tuesday she would be working. Of course.
Peter considered running out, but realized how stupid he would look. A server had already noticed him.
As he ordered, he watched MJ. She didn’t look up. Instead, she robotically wiped the counter in circles, never moving the hair out of her face. Peter heard small gasps for breath.
When the server left, he moved in her direction, still feeling protective after all this time, all these weeks.
“Excuse me? Are you alright?” he asked, possessing his Spider-Man lingo.
MJ looked up hesitantly. Her eyeliner had begun bunching up under her eyes, ready to spill soon, but her eyes were glossy and her cheeks were read. She sniffed, a useless one because it sounded like she hadn’t breathed through her nose in hours.
“Yeah, thanks,” she said, then did a double take when she saw his face. “Oh. Hi, Peter Parker.”
Peter wished she was saying it out of memory instead of facial recognition. “Hi, Michelle. Is something wrong?”
She shrugged. “Not really.”
Peter looked around awkwardly. “Um, why are you crying then?”
She shrugged again. “I don’t know. I’m really sad today.” He gulped. Her body had the muscle memory of him, he knew it.
“Can I say something weird, Peter Parker?” MJ asked bluntly, looking over at him. “Just unload onto you for a second?”
“Yeah, of course.”
“My chest hurts,” she said shyly. “I feel very passionately about something. But I don’t know what the something is. That’s why I’m crying.”
“Oh,” Peter said awkwardly. “So you do know why you’re crying?”
“No,” MJ reestablished. “Today is important to what I feel passionately about. The crying is the outcome of the overwhelming emotion I’m feeling because of it. I don’t know why it’s important, but I just feel like it is.”
Peter missed this. She missed her bluntness, the way she just talked without being worried what anyone else would think or say. MJ doesn’t even care if he thought she was crazy, someone who was a stranger to her.
But he didn’t think she was crazy. He knew why she was crying. She remembered. Something in her did.
“Today’s sad for me too,” Peter said. “It, um, it would be an anniversary of my girlfriend and me.”
“‘Would be’?” MJ asked, something in her eyes lighting up. If Peter didn’t know better, he would guess she was about to laugh at him. But it looked closer to curiosity, closer to the gears in her brain clicking and turning. A lightbulb in her brain went off.
“Yeah, she’s, um…” he didn’t know how to phrase it, “...gone.”
MJ’s face fell. “Oh. I’m…so sorry for your loss, Peter.”
So, MJ thought Peter had a girlfriend who was dead. Smooth, Parker, smooth.
“She’s not, um, dead,” he stuttered. “Uh, not really.”
“Oh.”
Someone cleared their throat from Peter’s right. The server came back, waiting for the money he was supposed to be paying her.
“Oh, sorry.”
MJ had been giving him different looks since then, as if she was trying to understand what was off about him. Every time they spoke, it looked like she was trying to read him. Peter knew that she never could. “You’re too unpredictable,” she had told him.
Same went for her. The tingle never worked for her. It still didn’t.
Most nights, he would cry on the floor instead of his bed, curling up into a ball and sobbing loud, heartbroken, thick sobs, ones that came from his chest and made him wheeze. When he had breakdowns like this, May would be there. When he had breakdowns like this, MJ would be there. They aren’t.
At night, he reminisced on swinging with MJ, remembering just how much she used to trust him. She would grip him in a hug like he was the only thing she’d ever hold, still managing to be witty and clever in her fear. He remembers how she’d flip off the guys protesting him as they swung by, promising she didn’t do anything when asked about it. But he knew. He could see it, even if she didn’t know.
He reminisced on how he had skipped away after their first kiss, how he should’ve been in pain and agony and filled with fear of the repercussions of the attack. But he felt like he had been shot of pure heroin, jumping with a stupid smitten smile on his face, making him look dopey. His face burned red under the mask.
He reminisced on how she’d visit him in Happy’s apartment when May wasn’t home. There was one time they had been listening to music and the song Peter had jokingly deemed as theirs came on. He shuffled over to her, offering a hand and asking if she wanted to dance. MJ had deadpanned a rejection before smirking and grabbing his hand. She cuddled up into him, craning her neck to fit into his shoulder. Experimentally, and nervously, he had pecked a small kiss on her neck and a second one on her shoulder. She held him tighter. Her hair smelled like lemons.
But at night, most often, he reminisced on her interrupting him; kissing him in the middle of a sentence just to fluster him or walking over and grabbing his hand when he spoke to somebody else. Inherently, it was rude. Peter, god of manners, didn’t think so.
He could only compare his life to the one he used to have.
She and Ned are still his phone’s lockscreen. He still has all the pictures, all the videos, all the memories saved. He’s pretty sure that nobody else does, but sometimes he wonders what MJ’s lockscreen is now. It used to be a picture of his face in her hands, squished and painted in a dopey stupor, smiling wide and cheesily. Did it stay? Did it change? What did it change to? Does the spell work on specific details like that?
When it gets bad, really bad, Peter opens the cloud and dares to look back on everything he’s got. He silently thanks himself for that one night he convinced MJ to record herself straddling him, nuzzling noses and pecking each other on the lips, little goofy giggles escaping their mouths. It’s nothing sexual, it’s just quiet domesticity. Peter always says the words with them as they speak: MJ and a version of him that doesn’t exist anymore.
As MJ sits down onto his lap, Old Peter sighs. “You look so pretty from here,” he mutters to her. He buries his face in her chest, kissing her shirt.
MJ bites her lip in embarrassment, looking down at him. “You look pretty too.”
He references one of his favorite moments, face still shoved into her shirt. “And therefore I have value?”
She swats at one of the arms wrapped around her waist, laughing to herself but rolling her eyes sarcastically. Old Peter giggles into her shirt, wrapping her up tighter and pulling her closer. She presses her nose into her hair, kissing his crown and ruffling it.
Eventually, Old Peter looks back up at MJ, kissing her quickly. Peter remembered how badly he was trying to tell her he loved her then, because he did. He loved her. And he had for a while.
The video ends before the moment is over, but the last seconds are full of giggling at the awkward air or kisses to fill up the dead space. Peter can see the strawberry chapstick she wore that day sitting on her nightstand.
Then there’s the saved TikToks, the ones that Ned made as a joke and quickly became obsessed with. Peter has all of the ones he’s featured in saved, but doesn’t have the guts to see what Ned’s page looks like now. It’s public, but it felt too private. Plus, Peter didn’t trust that he wouldn’t break down.
His favorite one is of him and Ned doing a dance while at Academic Decathlon practice, wearing their blazers for the fun of it. Peter still knows the steps, probably because he’s watched the video so many times, but he’s never heard the song outside of the video. He never wants to know what it’s called.
The two boys awkwardly do the dance, Ned knowing everything perfectly, but Old Peter following along with almost no knowledge of what he was supposed to do. Abraham is in the very corner, raising an eyebrow at how bad it was, but Mr. Dell next to him waves at the camera enthusiastically. Old Peter and Ned laugh and make comments that were completely inaudible due to the music. Old Peter gives up halfway through and boycotts the video by sitting on the floor. He pouts and Ned starts to laugh, looking at somebody off-screen and making fun of him. Peter remembered that it was MJ, because of course it was.
And then there’s the pictures.
The pictures are somehow worse than the videos because he can’t see the event play out. He just has to fish what he can from his memories, remembering how the events and the moments made him feel. Thankfully, though, Peter had been somewhat of a photographer most of his life, which is what had gotten him his new job and also gotten him all the pictures in his seemingly infinite camera roll. “Seemingly” because he always gets to the end of it, every time, way too fast.
Any group picture from the past six months has MJ and Old Peter wrapped up in each other, even if it’s subtly, like having their arms linked or their hands joined. Sometimes that sentence was quite literal, like the picture taken for Ned’s birthday, with Old Peter and MJ hugging and looking at the camera.
MJ also took a bunch of pictures for her art, so he had been saving every one that she sent him. She took a lot of pictures of Ned and Peter, usually candid while they were distracted doing something else. If Peter was lucky, MJ would send pictures of the art she did based on the pictures, and Peter would save those too.
He knew that she drew him pretty often, but he didn’t know that she drew them together. One night, she had nervously admitted that she sketched out pictures of them cuddling or kissing when she felt lonely. It was the cutest thing Peter had ever heard. He asked for copies of them, but he only ever got one: a beautifully drawn, deeply detailed picture of Peter and MJ holding hands for the first time after London. She looked down bashfully and Peter looked at her with an awkward adoration that seemed to be extremely accurate. MJ said she was going to water paint it. Peter doesn’t know if she ever did.
How could she leave?
Before Peter could sob again, he had to remind himself that technically, very technically, he was the one who left. She didn’t want to forget, but he made her. She didn’t leave. He did.
It’s like he felt her forgetting more and more every day. Sometimes, he thought that maybe he had accidentally made a breakthrough. Sometimes, when he talked to her, she seemed to get lost in a confusion of explaining a story that he was present for, or found familiarity in something that he said. But Peter never asked. He knew how much of a coward he was for running from it, but that didn’t motivate him anymore.
Peter hoped, more than anything, that MJ was simply happy. That Ned was simply happy. If he really thought about it, he didn’t care if they forgot him, as long as they were alive and happy. And they seemed to be.
He never thought anything like this would happen. When he had nightmares where Ned would start hating him or where MJ would break up with him, he had always imagined it would be a fault of his that affected them too closely this time. But they’d always remember him. And when he woke up, he could call one of them, sobbing, making sure they still loved him.
And they always said yes.
So, laying in the cold apartment and unable to sleep, Peter’s phone goes off because it’s fully charged, and he gets a glimpse of the time. It’s been five hundred and two hours, thirty-seven minutes, and twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one seconds.
Peter still hates counting.
He remembered the first ever time he and MJ shared a bed, completely restless because holy shit that’s MJ in my bed, MJ laying next to me, MJ cuddled into my side, MJ MJ MJ. She was completely knocked out, snoring lightly with no worries about the situation at all. But even now, Peter mostly thinks that he was restless because of how he watched her sleep and watched her breathe. She was so peaceful.
When she was out with him, she always seemed to be so stressed and aggravated by the press and the fans and the everything. But here, now, she laid with her hand wrapped around his in a firm grasp, her face in his shoulder, and her arm lazily laid over the arm he had wrapped around her waist.
Peter remembered noticing how small she was. How fragile she looked. He knew that she wasn’t, that she could hold her own. But in the dark room, the vulnerability of her peace, and the distant sound of cars honking in the distance, Peter knew that he would do anything and everything to protect her.
-
The next morning is a Sunday, and therefore, it’s a donut day. So, Peter, running on about three hours of sleep, kicks his legs over the side of the bed and gets a glimpse of the time - he’s at five hundred and eight hours, forty-five minutes, and forty-four seconds. Forty-five.
His head is always filled with what-ifs on the way to the cafe, but today he’s mostly focused on the last few minutes where things were normal.
He finds himself missing the other Peters. He knows Peter 2 was much older than him, meaning he would probably know what to say to make him feel better or what to do to fix it a little bit. He knows Peter 3 was about twice his age, and going through his own self-proclaimed existential crisis after the loss of Gwen, so he could probably relate and understand his pain. But he knows they don’t remember him, and that it’s a pipe dream that can’t come true for multiple reasons.
His last kiss with MJ is something he thinks about a lot. It haunts him like a regret, or maybe the best decision of his life, or maybe a small part of it he’ll hardly remember in a few years’ time. He doubts the last one. She kissed him with such love and adoration, with such force and passion, and he tried to reciprocate as best as he could express. There weren’t even words for half the love he had for her, but he tried his best.
The kiss leaves him cold even now. He doesn’t know how to miss something like this. Sure, he’s missed his parents, he’s missed Uncle Ben, he’s missed Tony, and now he’s missed May. But he doesn’t know how to miss someone romantically, someone who professed deep love for him and someone he reciprocated that feeling for. The kiss had him begging the universe just to call her MJ again and to stop calling her Michelle, why am I calling her Michelle? She hates that name, she’s not Michelle, she’s MJ, so why am I calling her Michelle?
She’s walking away from the table by the window when he gets close enough to look inside, and she seems to be walking to the backroom. She says something to the server at the front and heads back, tossing a rag between her hands. Peter opens the door and greets the server, one he’s never seen before, but makes sure to keep looking out of the corner of his eye to see if MJ ever comes back.
He sits down on a barstool and looks around, fidgeting and trying to waste time. Peter notices a stack of MJ’s books off to the side of the counter. He knows they’re hers because one has the Midtown Tech logo on it and another is the one she carries around to draw people in distress. He’s in many of the pages of that book. Or he was.
One, the very top, is flipped open, the front half of the book hanging off the pile. Peter cranes his neck to see what it is.
It’s her sketchbook, a brown leatherback that he had actually gotten for her birthday in late November. He had written a note in the front. It probably wasn’t there anymore.
But something catches Peter’s eye in particular. There’s a sketch the book is open to, one that she must be working on in between customers, because a pencil sat in the margin, slightly dull.
Today’s date is scribbled into the bottom corner of the page and a note, very lightly written, is etched above it. “I know why I cried.”
And, at five hundred and nine hours, twenty-seven minutes, and fifteen - sixteen seconds, Peter Parker makes out the sketch of a tall girl with scuffed converse kissing a slightly shorter boy in a spider suit.