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The boy comes into the shop twice every week.
Rain or shine or snow; hair slicked flat or curls lying against his forehead. The time is never the same; it could be a Monday or a Wednesday or a Friday, morning or night. But it’s always during MJ’s shift, and it’s always twice a week. She knows, because she asked Ginger if she’d ever seen the boy and she said no. She would be weirded out by him if he wasn’t so...him.
At first, he wears a peacoat a lot, like he did on that first day, looking nervous like he has to say something important. He never says anything, though. He always closes his mouth, pursing his lips, looks away, and leaves with his coffee. He stops wearing the fancy clothes after a few weeks. Once he came in, eyes a little red, and didn’t make eye contact, and she had to bite her tongue to stop from asking him what was wrong. Once, she gave him his coffee and he smiled a big smile and said, “Thanks, MJ!”
“My name’s Michelle,” she told him, because it’s true, and only her friends call her MJ, that’s a rule, and the smile slid off of his face.
“Right,” he said, “Right, sorry,” and he turned around and left, without his coffee. She had to call him back to get it.
“You watch him a lot, huh,” Ned said knowingly when she was telling him about this.
“I just like observing people,” she said. “You know that.”
Michelle has always liked observing people. There’s volumes to read from every hand movement and twitch of the face and the boy is an enigma; a completely new book with strangely familiar pages. She has racked her brain for who he reminds her of, why she wants to smooth the wrinkle between his eyebrows, but an answer is frustratingly far.
Michelle has always been smart, and she knows it. But there’s something about the boy that she can’t put her finger on and that bothers her. And she doesn’t have time to be bothered, because it’s her senior year, her last year of high school before she goes to Cambridge and starts anew. A fresh start, a voice says in the back of her head. When she chases it, it disappears.
Every time the boy comes in, he introduces himself. It’s strange; she doesn’t think she could forget his name if she tried. The fifth time he does it, she cuts in when he starts with “I’m—”
“Peter Parker,” she says. “I know.”
His face does a funny thing.
“You say it every time,” she says, because she feels like she has to explain herself.
“Sorry,” he says.
“You don’t have to be sorry.” She shrugs. “You don’t have to introduce yourself either; I know who you are.”
This makes his face do something even more complicated, and when he gets his coffee he all but runs from the shop.
What makes him even weirder, honestly, is that he’s her age. He doesn’t look eighteen, sometimes. He looks older. She imagines him at Midtown, with her and Ned. They could all laugh at Flash’s buffoonery together. She’s weirded out by how easily imaginary-Peter slots beside imaginary-MJ and imaginary-Ned. She doesn’t even know him.
It’s Ned who starts a conversation with him first. Peter doesn’t come into the shop for a week, and she wonders if he’s going to stop coming in. But on a rainy Wednesday afternoon, he walks into the shop, looking particularly haunted.
“How do you feel about Star Wars?” Ned demands.
Peter’s lips twitch. “I like Star Wars.”
Ned turns to MJ. “See? That’s the normal person thing to say.”
“You guys are nerds,” MJ says. The words come almost too easily to her tongue, like she’s said them before.
“You’re going to MIT,” Peter says. “You’re a nerd, too.”
Ned laughs, and to her own surprise, MJ smiles. Her hand goes to her necklace. She doesn’t know why. Peter’s eyes track the movement.
Ned pulls Peter into an argument about Star Wars as Michelle takes orders and by the end of her shift, Peter looks less like a walking corpse. Michelle is grateful to Ned for it.
Peter looks surprised at how late he’s stayed. “I’ll see you guys around,” he says, turning to go.
“Why didn’t you drop by last week?” she calls, as he’s at the door.
He pauses, and he seems burdened again, and she regrets asking. “I wasn’t feeling well,” he says finally, and her eyes follow him as he walks through the glass door and onto the street.
Something inside of her aches, watching him.
The next time he comes, he calls her MJ again, then freezes. “I mean. Michelle.” he says. “I’m—I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine,” she says. “You can call me MJ.” She turns to tidy up the counter and ignores how he brightens at that, blooms like a wilted flower given water for the first time in days.
“Alright,” he says happily. “Can I have a coffee, please, MJ?”
And so the weeks go on.
She studies. School is easy, though even there it feels like something is missing. She eats lunch with Ned and sometimes she turns to talk to someone who isn’t there. It’s confusing, like the healing cut across her forehead, like the black dahlia necklace that she doesn’t remember buying but she can’t take off without feeling wrong, things that go fuzzy at the edges if she thinks about them too hard.
Part of her wants to leave it alone. She’s MJ, she’s not meant for worrying about sad white boys with big brown eyes and stupid fluffy hair. But she’s also an engineer, and she finds solutions to problems, and this boy is a problem to which she hasn’t yet found a solution.
Michelle has never left anything alone before. Why stop now?
Peter spends Christmas alone.
There are always more crimes on holidays, so at least there’s something to do. Justice can’t take a day off, after all. So as the snow falls, lightly dusting the ground, like powdered sugar on a Christmas loaf, Peter takes care of the city.
No one takes care of him.
Peter is doing okay. (He is not.)
Life has fallen into a routine, because without routine he doesn’t know what he would do. Peter has always been an optimist, but then again Peter has always had something to believe in. When his parents died, there was Uncle Ben and Aunt May; when Uncle Ben and Tony died there was still Aunt May. When the public hated him, he had Happy and Aunt May and his best friends in the world.
Everyone is dead or gone. Dead or gone; dead or gone; how long till he’s dead or gone, too?
It hurts to be Spider-man, Peter thinks, one day, battered and bruised, blind from exhaustion, lying in his bed but unable to fall asleep because his mind is still whirring. It hurts, it really does. All he tries to do is good, and all that happens is bad, bad, bad. And maybe it’s good that there’s no one around anymore, because there’s no one he can ruin anymore.
Once, when his senses go haywire, when the static in his head gets particularly bad, when everything is too much, he stares off into the Queens landscape until all the lights blur. He closes his eyes, tips his head, and lets the snowflakes frost his face. It used to feel nice, being up here, away from all the noise, but now he just feels lonely. Lonely and cold, wrapped in a suit he made on his own.
He’s not alone, he tells himself. He still has Spider-man. He still has the ghosts of all the people he loved, the memories that live in his brain and the words that live in his heart. That hasn’t been taken away from him yet.
And he has the shop, the place where he can see his friends, who don’t know him and don’t love him, but they are safe and alive and whole, and he knows them, and he loves them, and that’s enough.
Peter is selfish. Every week he tells himself he’s going to let Ned and MJ move on and then every week, he shows up to Peter Pan’s. If he’s lucky, he’ll hear a minute or two of Midtown gossip and pretend that it’s the three of them talking, that they’re the way that they’ve always been.
The whole thing is his fault. The spell, the cracks in the multiverse, all of it. So he spends more and more time on patrol. He watches over Ned and MJ’s houses, just in case. He does anything he can to atone for his mistakes until he can pass out on his lumpy mattress to a hopefully dreamless sleep. The nightmares are still pretty bad, but Peter’s lived through a lot of the bad ones now. He dully challenges his brain to come up with something worse than reality, and regrets it when he wakes up screaming, Ned and MJ’s bloody bodies burned into his brain.
He doesn’t go into the shop that week.
Ned is worried about Peter Parker.
He hadn’t really noticed him the first time he had walked into the shop, furtive glances and big coat and all. MJ had pointed out later that her last customer had been strange. “He finished my sentence,” she said, staring out the window as though she could track the boy down and find out all his secrets. “That was weird.”
“What was his name again?” Ned asked.
“Peter Parker,” said MJ.
Peter Parker, a child’s voice rang in Ned’s mind. My name’s Peter Parker! What’s yours?
That marked the first of a series of bizarre events surrounding Peter Parker.
The next time Peter comes in, Ned watches. For an awkward teenage boy ordering a coffee at a doughnut shop, Peter looks oddly vulnerable.
The next few times Peter comes in when Ned really starts to get worried; once or twice he’s walked in with a visible bruise, he always looks hungry, and his eyes are tired. Ned barely knows the guy, but he can’t help it; he’s a worrier. He got it from his Lola.
Also, another thing that worries him about Peter is that when he smiles, Ned thinks, I’ve seen that before somewhere, but he doesn't know where and it’s driving him crazy.
“Do you think he’s a model or something?” he asks MJ. They’re in the renovated chemistry lab.
“He could be,” MJ says. “He has the face for it.” She frowns, like this admission pains her to make.
“I don’t know,” Ned says. “I just feel like I’ve seen him somewhere before.”
“Maybe he has one of those faces,” MJ says.
“It’s something more than just his face though, isn’t it?” Ned says.
MJ turns back to her work. “Yeah,” she mutters. “There’s something about him.”
There’s a day in January that Peter comes in looking like hell. Ned and MJ trade glances as he orders a coffee. His eyes are red rimmed, his hair is wild, and there’s something vacant in his expression. It’s easy for Ned to loop him into their conversation, and it’s even easier to keep the conversation going, and watch the terrible stillness slowly leave Peter’s body. And after that, it becomes a thing. When Peter comes by the shop, he joins in on their conversation. Sometimes he even sits down. Everytime, he lights up. Privately, Ned delights in that. Peter deserves to be happy. And, a little selfishly, Ned just likes talking to him. They fall into banter like they’ve been doing it their whole life.
Once, and only once, Peter talks about an old girlfriend. When Peter mentions he works at the Bugle, Ned tells him that his ex works there, too. And then all of a sudden he is asking Peter if Peter’s ever been in a romantic relationship.
Peter looks down at the counter. “Yeah,” he says softly.
“Did you break up?”
“In a manner of speaking,” Peter says, still quiet.
“You’re not over her?” Ned asks sympathetically.
“Not even a little bit,” Peter says, with a sigh.
They leave the conversation behind, though Ned notices that MJ touches her necklace, just once, almost absentmindedly.
Once, Ned is working on an advanced Chemistry problem set and pushes his calculations to MJ so she can check them for him. She’s busy with customers, though, and Peter intercepts it.
He scans the paper, points to a few equations down, and says, “There’s a minute algebra error here but your theory’s all solid. The answer should come out to seventy eight point fifty six.”
Ned stares. “Did you do that in your head?”
Peter stares back, before swiftly reddening “Oh— sorry,” he said. “Were you passing that to MJ? I didn’t realize—force of habit, sorry.”
Ned is still staring. “Did you do that in your head?” he repeats. “Peter, that’s so cool! Why aren't you at Midtown with us? Where do you go to school?”
Peter neatly avoids the question by asking Ned one about density functional theory, and then they’re stuck talking about that for a while. Ned is secretly impressed. He knew that Peter was smart, but he hadn’t known that he was a genius.
Never a boring day, Ned thinks to himself, when you’re friends with Peter Parker.
And that’s a thing—by late January Ned has decided that Peter is his friend. He starts bringing extra food to the shop and forcing Peter to eat it. Now that Peter is officially his friend, the fact that he never says anything about himself gets more concerning. Ned knows Peter’s favorite movie, his thoughts on string theory, and his favorite book growing up, but doesn’t know what high school he goes to, his college plans, anything about his family, or where he lives. And Ned wants to get to know him better, so he asks Peter if he wants to come over later and binge watch the Star Wars original trilogy.
To his surprise, Peter says yes.
MJ also tells Peter to come ‘round the shop more often. “You don’t have to order coffee,” she says. “You can just come hang. Like Ned.” Which was as good as an admission of friendship, from her.
Peter hesitates, for a bit, before he smiles. “Okay,” he says. “I will.” His cheeks are flushed pink, and the tips of MJ’s ears are red.
Ned feels an overwhelming sense of deja vu.
Peter is doing better.
He has a job at the Daily Bugle, because he has to eat somehow, and the irony is funny enough to him that he doesn’t really care when J. Jonah Jameson starts ranting about Spider-man. Peter remembers what May told him. Jameson can’t take that from him.
He takes the GED, and doesn’t think about MIT, about Mr. Stark and his beaming smile and his ‘of course you’ll go to MIT, kid, that’s where I went’, and he doesn’t think about MJ and Ned and the vice chancellor who looked at him like he was worth something and he doesn’t think about MIT.
Peter misses a lot of things. A lot of people. He misses himself, a little. But he can’t fix any of that, so he turns to something small. Something he can fix.
Peter misses tinkering. So he reaches out to Happy, as Spiderman, and he gets the parts he needs for his projects.
He’s talking with Happy again. He patrols with Daredevil sometimes. He works on his projects. He goes to the shop, and he talks with MJ and Ned, sometimes for hours, and it actually feels real. He goes to the park and does the crossword every Sunday. He feeds his next door neighbor’s Corgi treats and dog-sits for her sometimes.
He has a routine. He is not alone. He is alive. He is lucky.
He doesn't let anyone get too close.
He’s learned his lesson.
But.
But Ned asks Peter if he wants to come over and watch the Star Wars movies and Peter and Ned had a tradition of watching the Star Wars trilogy every year, and who is he to break tradition? He knows he should say no, that he should distance himself, but Peter has never been very good at saying no to Ned Leeds.
Michelle figures out two things in February.
The first is that she has a crush—god, it sounds so juvenile—on Peter Parker.
The second is that Peter Parker is Spider-man.
The first is somehow more surprising.
In February, Michelle sees a lot of Peter. He comes in for most of her shifts and talks to her or Ned. Sometimes, he leaves with a hurried excuse, but most of the time, he stays. And he looks a little happier, being in the warm bubble of the shop. After his and Peter’s Star Wars movie marathon, Ned tells MJ that he learned that Peter lives alone.
He’s only eighteen.
She wants to know more about Peter, but she doesn’t want to pry, so she doesn’t, content to just have him around. Peter feels like a friend, like he belongs in her and Ned’s little group of two. Sometimes Ned isn’t around, so it’s just her and Peter. Those days are nice, too. It’s on one of those days when he offers to walk her home after her shift.
MJ is perfectly capable of walking home alone, but she finds that she wants to spend more time with Peter. So she says yes.
The ground is covered in a layer of snow when they leave. The streetlamps glow warmly, and the swirling flakes catch in the lights before landing on the ground. MJ is wearing her favorite scarf. Peter’s ears are tucked into a knit hat. It is comfortable and cozy and when they get to her house MJ wishes that the walk was just a little longer.
They linger at the porch for a few minutes before Peter smiles at her, soft and slow and fond. Her breath catches, just for a second, just looking at his face, open and unguarded.
“I’ll see you around, MJ,” he says, quiet, his hands tucked in his pockets.
“Okay,” she says, managing to sound normal.
She unlocks her door, goes upstairs, and lies down on her bed, ears burning. She twists her necklace between her hands.
MJ remembers the conversation that Peter and Ned had had a while ago. Peter is obviously still in love with his ex, so her feelings are ridiculous and unwelcome, but she can’t quite stop the warmth in her chest that comes when she thinks about him.
In February, Michelle also sees a lot of Spider-man. Ever since he showed up a few years ago, Spider-man has always been a part of her life—from the attack on the Washington monument to London to just a couple of months ago, when she and Ned were at the Statue of Liberty, it seems that wherever she goes, Spider-man is never too far away.
But this has become even more so the case as of late. MJ is doing homework in her room on a Saturday when she sees a glimpse of red out of the corner of her eye. When she turns to the window, the red is gone. She thinks she might have imagined it, but just a couple of days later she looks out her window and makes eye contact with Spider-man, who’s perched on the roof across the way.
He freezes. She does too. Then she blinks, and he’s gone, webs flying.
So she’s not imagining it. The flash of red she keeps seeing in her peripheral vision—that’s Spider-man.
She puts the pieces together slowly and purposefully, like she always does. Spider-man on her rooftop, Peter in her shop. Spider-man in a fight on the news, Peter with bruises the next day. Peter darting from the shop with a hastily mumbled excuse, Spider-man in a fight two blocks over.
She doesn’t want to be right.
He’s only eighteen. He lives alone. Does he have anyone looking after him?
She could be wrong. She still doesn’t understand why he felt familiar from the very first day. She doesn’t understand the looks he gives her, looks that she sometimes thinks could be a mirror for the strange aching inside her heart. She doesn’t understand him, but she thinks that Spider-man might be the first piece in unraveling him.
Anyways. It all comes to a head when MJ sees the news as she’s heading to school, and it’s Spider-man fighting some guy whose limbs are turning into lava in a burning building. Spider-man defeats the villain, but the entire building collapses on him.
The cops don’t find a body, but all the media talks about for the whole next week is whether Spider-man has died or not. J. Jonah Jameson says good riddance! and MJ wants to punch him in the face.
There are no Spider-man sightings that week. And Peter doesn’t come into the shop.
Ned mentions that Peter hasn’t been around in a while, and MJ turns to him. “I think he’s Spider-man,” she says.
Ned’s eyebrows raise. “Peter?” he asks.
MJ explains her theory, and Ned’s eyes widen. “Oh my god,” he says. “He’s Spider-man.” He pales. “Is he okay? Oh my god, do you think that lava guy killed him?”
“Ned!” she hisses.
“Right, sorry, I’m sure he’s fine. He probably has someone patching him up, right? He’s gotta have a guy in the chair.” He frowns. “D’you think he has a guy in the chair?”
“What?” Michelle asks.
“Y’know, a guy in the chair. The backup person who’s on the computer and in the chair and talks through the hero’s ear and everything. Basically runs the whole operation.”
Michelle pinches the bridge of her nose. “We need to find him,” she says firmly.
“Yeah,” Ned said, sobering up. “We do.”
After school, in the shop, MJ hands a customer a donut with a smile as Ned furiously types on his computer.
“He doesn’t have an internet presence, which is weird,” Ned says. “But his photos are on the Bugle, so I went to J. Jonah Jameson’s email and there are emails from Peter. I traced his email—”
“Isn’t that illegal?”
“Deeply. I have Peter’s address, though.” He frowns. “This is an invasion of privacy, right?”
“Definitely.”
Ned nods. “Cool.”
They go to Peter’s place after MJ’s shift is over. The sun is setting, turning the sky pink and orange. The building is small and the paint on the wall is chipping.
They pause in front of the door that they think is Peter’s apartment, and trade glances. Then Ned knocks on the door. Nothing happens, so MJ knocks again, louder, more urgent.
The door opens. MJ only has time for a moment of relief to see Peter alive, before she sees what he looks like, his eyes widen in panic, and the door slams shut.
“Peter,” she says. “Let me in right this instant, or I swear to god I’ll kick the door in.”
“She’ll do it!” Ned calls.
There’s some muffled cursing, and then the door opens again, just a crack.
“We know that you’re Spider-man,” MJ informs him, pushing her way in. Ned follows.
It’s dark in the apartment. Peter is hunched over. “How did you know?” he asks. “And how do you where I live?”
She crosses her arms. “I can figure anything out,” she says. “If I try hard enough.”
“Anything?” he says, and there’s a note of hope in there.
“Anything,” she says, and it sounds like a promise.
“Can we turn a light on in here?” Ned says. “I can’t see anything.”
Peter flicks on a lamp. The dim light throws the bruises on his torso into sharp relief. He watches as she sucks in a breath, looking at the jagged scars crossing his chest.
“I stitched myself up,” he says. He lets out a weak laugh. “Not my best work.”
“Peter,” she says, and doesn’t have any more words.
He shrugs. “I’ve had worse. It’s not a big deal.”
“Peter,” Ned whispers. “How can you say that?”
Peter looks away.
They help him change his bandages. Peter’s fridge is empty, so Ned goes to get groceries and MJ stays with Peter. They sit on the threadbare couch in silence. Even now, she feels warm when she’s around him, like she’s stepped into a sunbeam.
Peter looks like he did on the first day she had seen him. In turmoil. Like there’s something he needs to say.
“What?” she asks.
He opens his mouth, then closes it. “I didn’t want to involve you,” he says, his voice low. “I don’t want you guys to be hurt.”
“You didn’t involve us.” she says. She looks at him. “We’re involving ourselves, Peter. You’re our friend.”
He looks at her, eyes dark and unfathomable. “Okay,” he says. “Okay.”
It’s March. The snow is melting. Green grass peeks from under it. Soon it will be warm and sunny.
Peter hasn’t run away from them. Every day until he healed, Ned or MJ went over and made sure he ate and changed his bandages, and tried to make sure that he knew that they cared about him.
Peter had always been oddly guarded, and Ned had been worried that he might completely shut down on them after his injury. But after Peter heals, he starts coming back to the shop. And Ned’s glad. Things are good. Peter is their friend, senior year is going smoothly, he’s going to MIT next year.
There’s just one small interruption. Ned and MJ are both having migraines. Bad ones.
“It’s like something’s missing in my brain,” Ned says to her at lunch one day. “Something important. And if I try to find it, my whole head tries to split apart.”
“Are we going crazy?” MJ mumbles.
“Of course not,” Ned says, but he doesn’t really believe it.
It’s a Saturday when it happens. It’s miserable outside, rainy and cold. She’s lying down on her bed, toying with the black dahlia necklace.
Where did she get the necklace, she thinks, and there’s that fuzzy feeling that tells her mind to think about other things, but no, MJ wants to know where the necklace came from, so she goes through her mind again. She didn’t have it before the London trip, so she must have gotten it in London, but she’s never been the type to buy herself an expensive necklace. She unclips it from around her neck and stares at the pendant, the intricate black petals and crystal center.
Where did she get this? How did it break?
Her head hurts. There’s so much fog in her brain. But it’s there, she knows it’s there, the answer is there and it’s the answer she needs.
Where did she get the necklace?
Flashes from the Spider-man attack—Mysterio, his drones, the Crown Jewels, shattered bits of a memory, and there, in the shards of it, Peter, looking at her with those brown eyes, and.
And.
Peter?
She met Peter in January.
But there’s Peter, in her mind, and he’s wearing the suit with his mask off, and he’s smiling at her, and, and, and.
Peter.
MJ jumps up from her bed, necklace in her fist, runs down the stairs. She puts on boots and a raincoat and leaves her house, barely noticing the sharp bites of rain against her skin.
She calls Peter, but he doesn’t pick up.
She calls Ned instead.
“Hello?” he says when he picks up.”
“Ned,” she says. “Ned.”
“What’s up?” He's on high alert. “Are you okay? Is Peter okay?”
“Ned,” she says. “We didn’t meet Peter in January. We’ve known him for years.”
“What?” Ned says.
“Ned,” she says, a little desperately. “Your Millennium Falcon lego set. Who gave it to you?”
“I dunno,” he says, lost. “MJ, are you okay?”
“It was a Christmas gift,” she tells him. “In junior year. Who gave it to you? Think about it, Ned, really think about it, even through the headaches. Got it?”
“Got it,” he says, bewildered.
“Come to Peter’s apartment as soon as you can,” she says. “And think about the legos on your way here.”
She hangs up, fingers shaking, and walks even faster. The rain bounces off the plasticky material of her coat. Her boots splash through puddles of water as she crosses the street, the traffic light blurring behind her.
She can’t believe she—that she forgot—
She’s a minute away from Peter’s apartment when he calls her back.
“MJ?” he says, and she turns the block and she can see him, the person that she fell in love with twice over, and he’s leaving his apartment wearing one of those dorky science shirts and holding an umbrella, and her heart squeezes.
She hangs up and runs toward him.
“Peter,” she calls.
“MJ?” he says again. “What’s wrong?”
She slams into him, wraps her arms around him, real and whole and Peter, and presses her face into his shoulder. He catches her, like he always has and always will.
“Is everything okay?” he says, his voice frantic.
“Peter,” she says. She steps back to look at him, and smiles, big and wide and happy, so happy. “Peter, I remember. I remember you.”
Peter’s umbrella falls to the ground.