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Peter Parker was Michelle Jones’s dream boy.
It was a weird thing to say, mostly because of the implications of it, but it was true. The random-ass regular from MJ’s job was quite literally in her dreams.
Flashes of his face would grace her mind at night. He always looked either overwhelmingly sad or happy, usually bruised and bashed but always looking exhausted. But he looked at her with love, pure love, and it made her sick to her stomach.
She had been feeling off for weeks, but she knew her lowest point, even after all of it, is the racing in her heart when that stale donut white boy Peter Parker shows up. He showed up every day she worked, and it was an absolute disaster.
Every time MJ saw his face, something in her just felt. Viscerally. Passionately. There were so many emotions swirling in her stomach every time she saw him pass the window to walk inside. And in reality, she knew the feelings were ridiculous and misplaced, because she hardly knew him. He was just some kid she thought was cute. And even that was embarrassing.
Most times he looked at her, he looked about ready to cry. Oddly enough, MJ completely understood, because she felt like she was going to cry too in their meetings. She couldn’t believe some stranger she didn’t even know the age of had her acting like this. But his face was so good. He had such a good face.
One day, he slipped up and called her MJ instead of Michelle. She didn’t notice until she was in the shower later, thinking about her day, but he definitely called her MJ. And she had never told him her last name, so she doesn’t know where the hell came from.
This is what started Ned’s theory that Peter Parker was a stalker. Some guy in his late twenties who was watching her, ready to kidnap her and keep her in some kind of sex dungeon for the rest of her life. But there’s no way that’s true, the only way that could be remotely true was if he only stalked her at the cafe: there were too many cameras at home and she definitely would’ve noticed him at school. Plus, he had only been showing up for three weeks, and he looked ready to cry on his first day in. And there was absolutely no way he was older than twenty-one.
It was all so strange. The off feeling started the morning that Peter Parker showed up for the first time. MJ would call it instinct if anyone asked, but she knew it wasn’t. She just did.
It wasn't until January ninth that she felt like something was really wrong.
She went to bed on January eighth feeling extremely anxious. That wasn’t uncommon, MJ had her own share of anxieties, but this was different. It was an excited kind of feeling, like tomorrow was going to be this great day that changed everything forever.
So, when she woke up and had the immediate, strange feeling to text somebody, she got stressed. She wanted to text a specific somebody. Not Ned, not Betty, not her sister Gayle. She wanted to text somebody she didn’t know the name of. She wanted to text somebody but she couldn’t remember who. She couldn’t even make out a piece of a name or a freckle on a face.
She got up to cross out January eighth on her calendar, and as soon as she saw that it was the ninth, how it was highlighted for a reason she couldn’t remember, her entire heart sank. MJ took a step back, completely overwhelmed by how sudden the feeling came, clutching her chest. It came so fast. It hit her so fast and it was so much and it made her wanna sit and drown and die and sob.
A girl at MJ’s work got massively sick that morning, so during English, MJ texted her and offered to take her shift. She was going to need the extra money for MIT, so any shift she could get was one she would accept. But her fingers almost betrayed her. She couldn’t type because she swore to god she had plans tonight, but no calendar showed it, and no friends implied it.
The sadness followed her around all day. She knew that it was directed at something, but she had no idea what. MJ had interrogated Ned during lunch, asking if he remembered anything about today. Ned shrugged, asking her if this was a test, and switched conversation when she said no. That was just Ned. At least, she thought so. She realized didn’t know as much about him as she originally thought she did.
At work, seeing the dirty tables and the musty, stale donuts, something in her felt sick again. She was sad. I shouldn’t be here, I should be…I should be…where should I be?
Somewhere in her short shift she found herself crying. There was an absolute truckload of emotions hitting her, following her all day but finally hitting her because the later it got in the day, the more she felt like something was wrong, like she was supposed to be somewhere with someone but not knowing where somewhere is or who someone is, and that scared her and stressed her out and-
”Excuse me? Are you alright?”
A sudden rush ran its way through her veins, making pause and recognize her surroundings. MJ had clearly been a few seconds away from a full panic attack, feeling how tight her chest was and how tears ran down her face quietly. God, she’d probably been wiping this one spot on the counter for a full ten minutes now; her hands were cramping up and her palms were sweaty. When she moved the rag, she saw that the counter hardly even looked clean, even after all this time. Only proved how the B rating for the health guidelines was completely undeserved.
“Yeah, thanks,” MJ muttered, looking up quickly. Then she recognized the face. It was dream boy, it was Peter Parker.
“Oh, hi, Peter Parker.”
“Hi, Michelle.”
Her sadness almost went away. For a moment, she felt one hundred and ten percent happier, almost completely unaware of the panic attack she borderline just had. He was exactly who she needed to see right now. He could make everything better. He could. He was great like that.
MJ reminded herself that she has almost no idea who he is, and that’s when the sadness, the loneliness, comes back.
“Is something wrong?”
MJ looked back up at him, clearing her throat. She shrugged, her walls building up as she moved them. “Not really.”
Peter Parker looked around, shifting awkwardly. “Um, why are you crying then?” he asked hesitantly, as if he was afraid to know her answer.
MJ’s only response is to shrug again. “I don’t know. I’m really sad today,” she said simply, no explanation required.
He still stood there awkwardly, clearly not accepting the answer. Normally, MJ would’ve hated that kind of thing, especially breaking down in front of somebody. But if it was gonna be anybody, she desperately wanted it to be him. Peter Parker would never judge her. She knew that. He was great like that.
This crush is fucking ridiculous.
“Can I say something weird, Peter Parker?” MJ finally settled on saying. She looked over at him, acting as if she hadn’t been crying, full confidence back in check. “Just unload onto you for a second?”
Peter Parker is quick to respond. “Yeah, of course.”
MJ couldn’t tell why she wanted to trust him, but she spoke again. “My chest hurts,” she admitted, sighing to herself. “I feel very passionately about something. But I don’t know what the something is. That’s why I’m crying.”
He didn’t look taken aback, per se, but he looked hesitant. “Oh,” Peter Parker muttered. “So you do know why you’re crying?”
“No,” MJ explained. Take it slow, she reminded herself. He’ll understand. He’s Peter. She takes a deep breath before continuing. “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.”
And there was that face. The face she saw in her dreams, the face that held full love and adoration. Peter Parker watched her with wide eyes, a wistful smile on his face. He looked like he was drinking in everything she said and got drunk on it. She doesn’t know why wanted to get drunk on what he said, too.
“Today’s sad for me, too,” Peter offered. “It, um, it would be an anniversary of my girlfriend and me.”
An anniversary. That’s right.
“‘Would be?’” MJ asked, both wondering about this girlfriend of Peter Parker’s and what about the statement was scratching an itch in her brain. An anniversary was right, that was right, it was an anniversary for her too. But for what? Anniversary of what? She’d never had a partner, she’d never had another job other than this, she’d never had friends.
No. She did have friends. She had friends. Ned. Ned was her friend. Maybe it’s the anniversary of when she and Ned met…but then again, now that she thought about it, she doesn’t even remember meeting Ned. And when she thought about being with him, all their memories together, they weren’t right because they didn’t happen that way, no, something was wrong, something had been different because it didn’t happen like that-
Peter Parker interrupted her thoughts. “Yeah, she’s um…” he hesitated, “...gone.”
Oh.
Oh.
“Oh,” MJ said dumbly, agreeing with her thoughts. “I’m…so sorry for your loss, Peter.”
“She’s not, um, dead,” he said immediately, stuttering through what he said. “Uh, not really.
“Oh.”
MJ’s coworker comes back with Peter’s order and the conversation is over. But it hurt MJ’s mind the rest of the shift. All she could think about is what the hell Peter Parker meant by “not really” and why she somehow felt like she understood what he meant.
So after the shift, MJ stopped at the office supply store a few blocks away from her place and picked up the cheapest notebook she could find: a thick, blue journal with Spider-Man’s mask plastered on the front in the most tacky fashion MJ had ever witnessed.
As soon as she got home, she kicked off her docs (she attempted, nobody can really “kick off” Doc Martens) and tumbled onto her bed, ripping off the plastic from the notebook and cracking it open. She clicked her pen with her teeth.
MJ started with everything she felt she needed to figure out. At first, when she started listing, she felt incredibly tempted to just write “everything” but settled for specifics that she can think of off the top of her head.
1. January 9th. (Anniversary? Why did I cry?)
2. The Ned Leeds Issue (no because how the fuck do I know this kid?)
3. The Peter Parker Issue (he’s just a white boy, MJ, calm down)
But the scariest part is that she just kept writing. The more she thought about it, the more she didn’t remember. The more that clicked in confusion.
There are little things that she noticed in the middle of writing. Her phone went off as she scribbled in number seven (the Europe trip feels wrong), and as she went to check it, her necklace clicked against the screen once, twice, thrice, four times. As she raised her hand to swat it away, MJ froze. Wait a goddamn fucking minute.
8. My favorite necklace.
She took the opportunity to write number nine too.
9. My lockscreen is set to default.
By the end of her list, she'd completely filled a page and a half (front and back) of her notebook. MJ sat back onto her heels, staring at whatever she had just admitted to herself, observing each number carefully.
MJ, though being better at literature, by all technicality, was a scientist. She went to Midtown Tech, and she was going to MIT next year. She knew how to run an experiment. This was clearly a trial and error type of situation.
She started with the answers that should be easier to find: stuff circling her own past. Most important to her was the necklace.
MJ hadn’t even thought about it. It just was her favorite necklace. She wore it every day, clicked it on every day, not really thinking about what or who it was from. It was glass, she knew that, so it came from the Europe trip, but the gift-giver was completely unknown.
It was so smashed to the point that it looked kind of like a bug, but MJ knew it was a black dahlia. Like the murder. The person who gave it to her had to have known her well enough to know it’s her favorite flower, and her favorite murder case.
She started by looking back on pictures from that absolutely wild trip. Spider-Man was there, MJ recalled, then retconned that. It wasn’t Spider-Man until the last day, it was that Night Monkey kid…right?
Most of the pictures she had from the trip were of the actual monuments and sights to see. Pictures of the class or of friends were few and far between - most were sent to her by Ned afterwards. But there was usually a notable gap in the groups, or a weird cropping, as if someone had erased an entire person from the picture. MJ swore those pictures didn’t look right.
She chalked it up to bad photography but marked it down in the journal anyway. Bad photography definitely isn’t a possibility according to some odd sense.
There’s so many “odd senses.” Michelle Jones was not a reckless person, in fact, she was extremely thorough in most of her thought processes. She went based on fact, not feeling. And yet, there was no evidence of most of what she thought in this whole predicament. There was no evidence that she hadn’t just had a slippery memory and a rough day on January ninth, but she just felt like that wasn’t true.
So she continued to search through her camera roll. She noted the oddest revelations.
Since when do I take so many selfies?
It isn’t until she sees a video thumbnail of her floating, quite literally straddling the fucking air that she actually freaks out.
She anxiously taps the video, awaiting an answer, but her phone pops up a quick “file not found” notification and she doesn’t have any way to change that.
Something was clearly wrong. Apparently she’s fucking magic and her depression hit her because of something actively important, plus, her camera roll was absolutely fucked along with her memory.
When she looked at her list, it became more increasingly obvious that the memories she lost were older, from way before that first day Peter Parker showed up.
In fact, if she thought about it, the first day Peter Parker showed up is the first one that’s weird. Around then is when the dreams started, which made enough sense: if he was her dream boy, she couldn’t really have dreams about him until she saw his face. But the weird feeling, the odd sick-like sense, did not have an explanation.
MJ ripped the calendar off her wall and dug last year’s out of the trash in a hurry. She sat back down on her bed, looking back on her plans for the past few weeks. She knew it had been around two-ish since Peter Parker had shown up, so she counted backwards, figuring out what days she knew she had been off and what days were normal.
It had been since December nineteenth.
And, in figuring that out, MJ finally notices that December ninth was highlighted too. In a shock, she flipped backwards in the old calendar and forwards in the new one, seeing that every single ninth had been highlighted. Except for July. July had a big circle drawn around the number, circling once, twice, thrice. MJ, for the life of her, has absolutely no memory of doing it, or why she did.
MJ checked the box next to the January ninth point. It was definitely an anniversary.
Skipping on to motivate herself a bit more, MJ moved on to point number two: the Ned Leeds Issue. She pulled up her camera roll again and dug out her yearbooks from the past years she had been going to school with Ned.
They’d definitely known each other since sophomore year. Possibly even longer, what with AcaDec and the lunch table they had shared all four years at Midtown. She assumed they probably met through the Decathlon team, but had no recollection of actually meeting him at all. When MJ closed her eyes and tried to picture him, it was fuzzy, and he was with somebody else.
She started with the yearbooks, paging through the Academic Decathlon’s section (and maybe lingers on how her name is written in gold by her sophomore year) and the headshots. Ned is there, naturally, and so is she. There’s a singular picture of him hugging her when she answered the winning question, but everyone hugged her. It wasn’t anything unique.
So she looked through the other two she had, trying to find something at all. Her junior year was odd because it was the school year after the blip, but it had gone well, and she was reappointed AcaDec captain and such. Ned was there too, she knows that for sure, but this year, there are no pictures of them together at all.
Her freshman year, MJ wasn’t even on the AcaDec team, but she looks at the page anyway. Ned is there, of course, and there’s a picture of him this year - but just him. As in, a picture put into a yearbook page about teams, with one singular freshman in frame and nobody else. MJ supposed it wasn’t too peculiar, but the slight gap in the framing urged her to scribble it down anyway.
To confirm her suspicions, MJ looked at the team photo. Sure enough, there was a weird centering issue in it; if the front row had four freshmen, there should be two kids centered, and not one. The weird gap on the far left made her uncomfortable, too, so she wrote it down.
After doing a few more background checks, MJ moved on to point three - the Peter Parker Issue. She didn’t exactly know what the issue was. Was it the obvious and overbearing crush she had on him? The suspiciousness of the way he talked to her? His familiarity? The impending sense of doom she felt when he’s around?
Easiest solution is a Google search.
MJ, like many women, prided herself on her ability to learn an infinite amount about a person with just the use of their Instagram handle. She would regularly do full background searches on kids she hardly knew for the fun of it, or just to see what kind of person they were. With a good eye and an astute understanding of the human brain, MJ could learn some random kid’s full name, familial relationships, future college, and social security number before she could learn where they sat in her English class.
But never in MJ’s life did she Google somebody’s name to find absolutely fucking nothing.
And it wasn’t “nothing” as in “little to nothing, maybe an old Facebook or a mention on a school website.” It was “nothing” as in “absolutely blank slate frick-frack-fuck-nothing.”
MJ supposed it was fair at first, Peter Parker sounded like a common enough name. So she made sure to look up “queens” and “new york” after it the second and third time.
A few things come up.
The first is an article from the Daily Bugle, a news source that MJ was not particularly a fan of. It was from a day ago, illustrating once again how Spider-Man was the Spider-Menace and only caused destruction for New York (so basically, nothing new). There’s a photo of Spider-Man, swinging directly towards the camera, and in the right corner, in a small, golden font, was photos taken by Peter Benjamin Parker.
MJ clicked on the link, leading to a staff page. A small bio was written about him, calling him their great new young photographer, who had apparently only started there a few days prior. At the bottom of the screen is an ID picture of him - and it is him, the boy from work. The dream boy.
Well, at least he isn’t lying about his name. She saved the photo quickly and went back to the Google page.
The next two are obituaries - one for May Parker, who died just about a week before Christmas, and one for Mary and Richard Parker, who died fifteen years ago. After a read through, MJ didn’t find Peter’s name anywhere.
She understood that. His last name was Parker and so was theirs, it meant nothing.
She does, however, almost get whiplash when she’s offered links to the Midtown Tech web pages.
Incredulously, she noticed that one is for the AcaDec team, of all things. She clicked it immediately, as if it would disappear a second after.
She found her name, she found Ned’s name, Liz Toomes, Abraham Attah - but no Peter Parker. There was absolutely no mention of a Peter and none of a Parker. This one, for complete certainty, made no sense, and couldn’t be explained away.
There are those gaps in the AcaDec team pictures.
MJ thanked every god that a human could ever fathom that she wasn’t an oblivious type. She quickly opened her yearbooks back up and pulled up the Daily Bugle staff page.
Parker was born on August 10th, 2001-
MJ was born in 2001, too. If Peter Parker was blipped, he would’ve been a freshman in the 2015 - 2016 school year, when she was a freshman, meaning he could’ve been in those empty spaces in the yearbook photos. Meaning he could’ve gone to Midtown Tech with MJ, and that’s why he was familiar, and something happened that changed that fact and her memories and everything.
If, and only if, Peter Parker had been blipped like she had.
MJ really prided herself on her smarts as she looked up a log for every blipped citizen of Queens in 2018.
There are two Peter Parkers, but just to please her ego, MJ takes it as a yes, Peter Parker had been blipped like she had.
MJ didn’t sleep much that night at all.
-
She went to school the next day, notebook in hand, pen in pocket, evidence in camera roll, and energy in Thanos’s asshole.
MJ slammed the notebook on the lunch table with her tray, locking eyes with Ned and looking at him dead-on. Ned eyed her skeptically, leaning back on the bench, as if to get away from her. “What?” he asked.
“I did some research,” MJ said easily, sitting down on her side of the table.
“Do we have a project coming up?” Ned worried immediately, reaching for his bag. “What class? When was it assigned? Oh God, when is it due?”
“No, I did my own research.”
“Oh. Ew.”
MJ sighed. “You know that Peter Parker kid?”
Now Ned sighed. “Yes, MJ. How could I forget the kid you’ve talked about every day since he entered the cafe?”
MJ deadpanned. “Ha ha.”
“I get it, though,” Ned admitted. “I feel weird about him. He’s familiar, kinda.”
“Yeah, exactly,” MJ agreed. “But I have proof he went to Midtown with us. He’s our age.”
Ned shrugged. “Well, that’s why he would be familiar, I guess.”
“No, I mean he was literally on the Academic Decathlon team,” MJ clarified. “We knew him.”
Ned creased his eyebrows. “What? MJ, I think I would recognize someone of such high prestige.”
“It’s AcaDec, Ned, not Betty White’s friend group.”
MJ presented all the evidence, showing him pictures of the highlighted dates and recalling the conversation she and Peter had, showing him pictures of the yearbook and the link to the Midtown page, showing him pictures of Peter Benjamin Parker’s staff profile.
At the end of her presentation, she promised Ned she was going to search for more as much as she could, but tonight would be out of the question because of her double shift.
But Ned did not respond as enthusiastically as MJ had hoped.
“MJ, I love you,” Ned started, playing with his plastic fork. “I just…isn’t this a little bit ridiculous?”
MJ hadn’t really had the time to stop thinking to actually consider that. Sitting back, she supposed that was true. There were two Peter Parkers on the blip casualty list, so who’s to say there wasn’t more? There had been no sign of him anywhere, so why would he have been on the AcaDec team? And he didn’t even have a picture in the headshots. It could’ve been a different Peter Parker.
It’s then MJ realized that she hadn’t even presented an answer. She presented a theory that they had kind of known some kid that regulared her work with basically no solid evidence. She didn’t even know how that linked back to the anniversary thing, or how that affected her black dahlia necklace, or how that applied to basically anything she was trying to figure out.
Plus, she had really been thinking that someone had altered her memory, and that made borderline no sense at all. She had no affiliations with any kind of magic or superheroism and therefore would not be a part of that.
And lastly, MJ realized that she hadn’t acted on fact. She had been acting on instinct, on the pure sense that she was right.
“Yeah, I guess it is,” MJ finally agreed. “It’s just…do you remember meeting me, Ned?”
Ned shrugged. “Not the particular instance, no, but it’s like that with a lot of people I know. It’s not that weird. We met in AcaDec during sophomore year and that’s really all that matters, right?”
“How?” MJ pressed. “How did we meet?”
He hesitated for a second before speaking. “I’m pretty sure a friend introduced us.”
MJ agreed with that. That sounded right. “Who, though, Ned?” she asked, exasperatedly. “I don’t have friends other than you. Nobody would’ve introduced us.”
“I-” Ned started, but stopped. He had no answer. He knew MJ was right.
MJ smirked to herself.
Ned shifted uncomfortably before opening his mouth again. “Listen, I hate to say it…but I get what you’re saying. It makes sense to me, too, it’s just that objectively it makes none.” He looked down at his grilled cheese. “Now can we please change the topic before this makes me sad?”
“Sad about what?” MJ asked skeptically.
Ned gave her a look that she could easily read. A silent understanding fell between them - an “I don’t know” remaining unspoken but very loud in her ears.
As aforementioned to Ned, MJ had to work a double a few hours after school that day, which, to put it lightly as possible, sucked absolute ass. Why her boss would be making her work a double on a school night, MJ didn’t know, but she did feel like she regretted taking that shift the day before.
Good news though, Peter Parker was already there before MJ even got to work. This, to MJ, is a clear sign from the universe. She smirked to herself. And so, the investigation continues.
MJ gave him a tight-lipped smile and immediately, he looked like he’d been shot through the heart. After punching in and checking in with a coworker, she came back into the dining room, purposely noticing that Peter Parker sat at the barstools.
“Hi, Michelle,” said Peter Parker, almost bashfully. MJ smiled at him again.
“Good to see ya, Peter Parker,” MJ teased, leaning onto her arms on the counter.
Peter cleared his throat. “Feeling better today?”
Oh, you have no idea. “Yes, thanks. You?”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
The conversation ended for a second, but MJ didn’t move, and Peter didn’t take his eyes off of her. It was nice, for a second, a nice sense of tranquility that felt familiar and quiet and completely normal. But it wasn’t. And MJ couldn’t handle that.
“You work for the Daily Bugle?” MJ asked, not even prefacing with him or thinking of any consequences.
Peter Parker hesitated. He looked taken aback, as if he were absolutely bewildered by the question. He probably was. MJ’s Google skills were unmatched.
“Uh, yeah, new job,” he responded, nodding to himself. He looked down at his linked hands quietly, clearing his throat again. “New start, I guess.”
Suspicious. New comment to add to the notebook.
“Saw you took pictures for the paper the other day,” MJ said casually, shrugging it off. “I saw ‘Peter Benjamin Parker’ and thought: that’s the sad donut kid from work.”
Peter Parker does manage to laugh, which MJ can’t tell if she hates or loves. Usually, when she made jokes like that to people she hardly knew, they’d get really offended. She’d pushed someone away again. She’d gotten used to the feeling and had even become addicted to the quick goodbye at some point. But not with him.
MJ continued. “Yeah, can’t say I’m a fan of the Daily Bugle.”
Peter Parker laughed again. “Don’t tell my boss, but…yeah, neither am I.”
This was a good opportunity. “How come?”
He looked confused for a second and clearly at a loss for words: a common reaction when coming up with a lie. But then he switches. His fear flipped to a sort of smugness, a sort of pride. “You first. ‘Cause you said you weren’t a fan first.”
“But I asked you why first,” MJ responded, a small smile creeping on her face too. She found herself matching his energy quickly, like a learned habit.
“Well, yeah, but why would you even ask why I could possibly hate something you also hate?”
“Never said hate.” She was still fucking smiling.
“Didn’t you, though?”
Now she kinda wished she did.
“Answer my question,” she finally responded, flicking at his joined hands. Peter Parker watched her do it, sucking in a small breath.
“I just don’t like the way Jameson talks about Spider-Man,” Peter decided. “He’s a hero and they should respect him.”
“Me too,” MJ said slowly. She didn’t even realize she didn’t know why she hated the particular company until Peter said it.
But Peter Parker perked up at this. “Spider-Man fan?” he asked teasingly, smiling to himself.
MJ was inclined to say no. She wasn’t exactly a “fan” of anybody who technically caused destruction and trauma to people worldwide, so she had never considered herself a particular “fan” of any superhero, much less any Avenger. But she kinda guessed she was a bit of a fan of Spider-Man. She hadn’t thought about it until now.
“A bit,” MJ admitted. “He’s saved me personally a fair few times.”
“Was he nice?” Peter Parker asked. Something about the conversation felt off, almost comical, but she didn’t ask. She didn’t even know what she would ask.
“He was,” MJ said. Something in her forces out her next line. “He’s cute.”
Never, ever, ever, in MJ's eighteen years of living and five years of blipping, had she ever said anything like that. MJ would never fawn over a celebrity, much less a man, much less a man with no face. Just because he had saved her once or twice didn’t make him an object of her affection, or an attainable man in her life.
But the absolute weirdest part that MJ just can’t ignore is how Peter Parker blushes at her comment. She thought, just for a second, that maybe she should ask him about it and make fun of him for it, but she doesn’t. That would make this investigation worse. And more creepy than it already was.
“Oh,” he stuttered. “Yeah?”
Wait. Maybe she was onto something.
“Yeah,” MJ repeated, playing along. “Maybe next time he saves me I’ll give him my number.”
MJ was a lot of things. She was arrogant, she was a good mix of quiet and extremely outspoken, she was opinionated, she was creative and clever and strong. But MJ, for one hundred percent certain, was not stupid.
She knew Peter Parker had to be at least a little bit into her. The way he stared at her with huge innocent eyes like he missed something he never had, the way he stuttered over his words and sweated like a pig when they spoke, the way he watched her work when they weren’t. But whatever, Peter Parker had some kind of feelings for her. And one would think a guy who had feelings for a girl would be jealous of someone she hypothetically had feelings for
“You should give it to him,” Peter Parker decided, nodding with tight lips.
MJ perked up. “Really?”
“Yeah, I mean,” he started, running a hand through his hair, “he’d probably accept it. ‘Cause you’re pretty. Or, I mean- well, yeah, you’re pretty, and like- I mean, any guy would be lucky to- uh…”
MJ stifled a laugh. Yeah, Peter Parker definitely had feelings for her.
“You’re pretty too,” MJ muttered back, giving a small smile. She takes the opportunity to walk away, while his jaw remained hanging slightly open.
The conversation left her so relaxed that the thoughts of the investigation came to a simmer. She hardly thought about it for the rest of the night, especially after Ned came to visit her. Most of her thoughts had drifted to MIT after Ned started a conversation about it, and that was about it for the night. Even after the double shift.
Well, mostly.
MJ’s eyes fluttered open to find the dreamscape. It was dark, really dark, and cold. It was a New York winter, yet her dreamself wasn’t even wearing a coat. Ridiculous.
She was holding onto something, hanging over a long, long drop. Dreaming about falling wasn’t exactly new to MJ at all; she regularly had vivid, morbid dreams of falling to the ground or watching others do the same. But never had she regained consciousness before the fall.
The object splinters and she falls off, her arms flailing. MJ recognizes the screams from nearby, coming from Ned, who was reaching out to her. MJ reaches for his hand. She misses. Her throat rips more screams out of her chest.
She kept flailing, as if maybe, somehow, that would save her. She can see now that she had been on the new Statue of Liberty, now screaming with Ned’s pain.
Someone comes flying off the building in her direction. MJ makes out his face and immediately reaches to him - which he does in return - because it’s Peter Parker. He’s wearing something ridiculous, something that clearly doesn’t function as proper clothes, but her brain can’t picture it fully. His hand is red. MJ can’t tell if that’s blood.
They’re about to grab hands. She feels the warmth of it radiating off of him like some sun god, like pure sunshine and golden hour.
Almost in slow motion, he’s shot into the other direction. Flying away, as if gunned down by a hunter, Peter still reaches out for her. MJ watches as he falls in the other direction.
Her hope’s gone. She’s going to die.
She closes her eyes, biting back tears. She doesn’t want the last thing she sees to be Ned and Peter Parker reaching for her, wishing they could help. She wished they could help too.
“No!”
Within seconds, a body wraps around her, hugging her from the front. When MJ opens her eyes, it’s a completely different man. A guy, maybe in his early-thirties or so, tall and long and lanky. He looked nothing like Peter Parker. But it was undoubtedly, with no hesitation, Peter Parker. Someone’s version of him. She just knew.
MJ feels his feet land on the ground, her body bouncing as they did. Her eyes have reopened and she takes a moment to look around, seeing that this is in fact solid ground, and that yes, she had lived. When she looks back up at him, he goes to say something.
MJ blinks. She’s lying on the ground.
Wherever she was, she had never been before. The room was tall, really tall, and dirty. Cold. It didn’t look like a place she had ever seen.
She hears a loud bang from next to her. A clock chimes. Immediately, MJ’s head whips around.
A girl lays there. Well, she doesn’t lay, she’s strung onto something from the ceiling, her back arched and limp. Her blonde hair is tumbling all over the floor, and MJ can see it easily: blood has begun to mat it. MJ wants to run forward and help her, holy shit because that girl must’ve fallen from extremely high onto hard concrete. But she can’t move. Her body is stuck to the floor. And that girl hangs above it.
Another body comes flying down. MJ’s terrified she’s going to watch another person hit the ground, back arching and breaking like she had just witnessed, but he lands.
It’s Spider-Man. And when he takes off the mask, it’s the man who saved her.
This definitely wasn’t the same Spider-Man that had been around Queens MJ’s entire high school life. He had a different suit, and was taller and leaner. He didn’t quite look the same. But it was definitely Spider-Man, some kind of Spider-Man.
He walks forward hesitantly, not even seeing MJ. His hands go for the girl’s body, whispering to himself.
“Gwen?”
That name rings a bell. A very small, very faint bell.
He takes her off of the string and brings her to the ground. “Hey?” he asks quietly, waiting for a response.
There’s nothing.
“Hey!”
Spider-Man starts to hyperventilate, holding Gwen’s body close to him. He shakes her a bit, expecting some kind of answer. But she doesn’t give one. She lays with her eyes closed and tight lips. Her skin is growing pale.
“Gwen, hey!” he chokes out, staring at her eyes. He wants her to open them.
Then MJ knows. Gwen’s dead.
She holds a hand over her mouth, biting back tears. She doesn’t want him to see her.
“Please, hey, hey, hey. You’re okay…”
Something about this hurts more than it should. She doesn’t know either of these people. She doesn’t know what kind of relationship they had. But she feels for the girl, that girl who just loved and who had to die because of it. She knows what that was like. She doesn’t know how. But she feels it, the exact feeling of distress, in her stomach.
Spider-Man begins to sob. MJ’s crying with him, every whine positively gut-wrenching and heart-breaking. They’re loud, obnoxious, angry sobs; sobs of love. “Stay with me, stay with me, stay with me, stay with me, you stay with me.”
He calls her name again. Then again, louder. His sobs shake his body harder, his face turning red and congested. He asks her please. He asks her please over and over again.
MJ’s just about to let out a sob of her own when she blinks again.
She’s still there. Still in the same place, but now someone holds her. Of course, who else would it be other than dream boy. She just knows.
MJ wants to make fun of the situation but she can’t open her eyes. She can’t move. She’s completely paralyzed, and she’s about to have a total freak out about it, because does that mean that she’s having sleep paralysis, or is it just part of the dream, is this happening in real time?
“Em? MJ?” he’s whispering. The same way Spider-Man did.
“Stay with me, please,” he says to her, louder. “MJ, please.”
The way he calls her MJ is so natural, so much better than Michelle, but he chokes it out. He stutters over his words and she can feel the way his breathing starts to take sharper halts and a quicker pace.
He tries again. “MJ…Em, please.”
She doesn’t respond. She can’t. She’s pretty sure she’s dead.
MJ can hear the way Peter Parker starts to cry, starts to let out the loud sobs like Spider-Man had before. She feels a tear land on her cheek, which he quickly wipes away. He’s stroking her hair, pulling it behind her ears and framing her face so that he can see it.
“No, please!” he calls out, to nobody, no answers from anywhere. “Please, no, please.”
He holds her head next to his, kneeling down to bury his face into her shoulder. “I can’t do this,” she hears him whisper. “I can’t, I can’t, no, Em, I can’t, I-” he breaks out in a hard, choking sob.
“Em, MJ please, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I wanted-” he sobs again, “-I wanted to save you, I wanted… I’m so sorry, I love you, I’m so sorry, I’m so-!”
MJ shook awake.
She was panting, loudly, looking around her room for any sign of what had just happened. That had never happened before, she knew that, MJ had never died.
She can’t say the same about the blonde girl.
But she had a new theory - one she felt should’ve clicked forever ago, two weeks ago when Peter Parker came in sporting a huge gash on his face the day after a big, chain robbery in downtown.
“Where the hell did you get that?” MJ asked him, a slightly teasing tone in her voice.
Peter Parker stuttered for a second. “Oh, I, uh, fell down the stairs.”
Michelle squinted at him. “So you got a cut?” she asked him incredulously. “From falling down the stairs?”
He shrugged. “Yeah, I guess. I, like, hit my head on the corner of my wall, you know? So it cut, like-”
“Mhmm.”
“Yeah, like the pointy part just cut my face, I guess.”
“Yep.”
Peter Parker sighed. “You don’t believe me!” he accused, laughing to himself.
“Not even a little,” MJ admitted. She found herself smiling, again.
Peter Parker rolled his eyes affectionately before leaning forward. “Fine. I, um, got stuck in that robbery yesterday.”
Well, this certainly piqued MJ’s interest. “You were in it?” she asked, hopefully, excitedly.
He looked flabbergasted. “What? No! No! I was just, like, nearby. When it happened. Glass shattered and I got cut,” he explained quickly. Something about the story seemed a little off, but MJ didn’t wanna ask.
“Would be more fun if you were part of it,” she deadpanned, grabbing a donut for a customer. “Do you got anyone to patch that up?”
Suddenly, he seemed less upbeat, less cheery. “Yeah, uh, I used to. I do it by myself now.”
MJ twisted her lips. “You regularly get caught in these kinds of things?”
He snapped back into reality. “No.” He says it more like a question.
With that instance in the back of MJ’s mind, she had always found it suspicious. She never pursued anything, because until now, it didn’t matter. But it does, it does now. Between that conversation, an encouragement to get Spider-Man’s number, and the sad, mopey loneliness of the kid, MJ knew the truth.
Peter Parker was definitely Spider-Man.
And two days later, two days after the dream that still haunted her relentlessly, MJ started to draw.
MJ’s brain itched. That usually meant she wanted to draw, but it was different this time; it itched like something was missing. Immediately, in the middle of an unassigned, voluntary Saturday detention, MJ took out her notebook and began sketching, because surely, that should help. It just had to. Something was itching her brain.
Her hands started to draw before she could even tell them to. They were drawing something, but she didn’t know what, however, she recognized the outline of a woman straddling something. She was going to slam the book shut, because there was no way she was going to draw this in the middle of fucking Saturday detention, but she recognized the face. It was hers. It was the face of adoration she was making at the air in that video of her floating.
Suddenly, she’s drawing a man in place of the air. His figure is familiar, his face is a shape she had expected, and quickly she realized that she was drawing stupid fucking Peter Parker again, and she just wanted to give up this dumbass crush that would be going absolutely nowhere-
But it already did.
She stopped. She almost stopped breathing.
Because this really happened. She remembered it.
She remembered swinging a leg over his and sitting on his lap, pressing her forehead to his. She remembered how he smiled up at her, how he sighed in complete contentment and muttered “you look so pretty from here.” She remembered the embarrassment she felt when he buried his head into her sweater, kissing it right under her collarbones. She remembered how awkwardly she had admitted he was pretty too.
She looks at her drawing, now complete.
They’re kissing.
MJ whipped out her phone, scrolling back to that old video that had confused her for the past few days. The thumbnail had changed- it was an exact, real-life copy of the sketch she had just done. She pressed play.
It worked. It played out exactly as she remembered. The words were exact. It was as if Peter Parker had always been there, she doesn’t know how she didn’t see him before because he was definitely there. He was.
MJ put down her phone in distress. She made sure to turn it off and close her sketchbook as well: she just couldn’t look at it. She needed a moment, multiple moments. She stared at her hand.
Suddenly somebody’s holding it. She can feel it too, it’s warm and it’s pale and it’s sweaty because whoever is holding her hand is terrified to do it. She looked to her left in a panic. Peter Parker smiled back shyly, giving her wide, adorable eyes.
Blink. He’s gone.
MJ stormed out of detention.
So she spent her whole Saturday drawing. Drawing detailed, intense memories, things she swore didn’t happen but something tells her that they most definitely did. All of this time with Peter Parker, with Ned, with Spider-Man.
When her dad comes to get her for dinner, she hardly even notices how she’d been drawing for five hours and only catches it because of the cramping in her hands. There’s papers sprawled all over the ground, all around her, covered front and back of memories she has with Peter and Ned and their classmates - with everyone. She was there.
MJ goes to sleep in a panic. She doesn’t remember the small details, she doesn’t remember why she doesn’t remember in the first place or what had happened leading up to it, but Peter Parker was her boyfriend. He was her boyfriend, and January ninth was their anniversary, their sixth months, and he had introduced her to Ned, and he had given her the black dahlia necklace, and he had been there in Europe-
She wakes up in a new dream. It’s the shortest she’s had in a while.
”I’m glad we’re doing this,” Peter says from next to her.
”Yeah, m-me too.”
“Just…see the city a little bit.” He’s being quiet and awkward, but she feels like she wants to hole up and die. This was, like, basically a date.
MJ couldn’t help herself, and it was too quiet. “Y’know, they used to execute people on this bridge? They would, like-”
“Oh.”
“-put ‘em…in a basket, and they would drown in the water…” MJ fidgets with her hands. Peter’s too quiet. Of course. MJ scared him.
“Sorry.”
Peter laughs a bit. “It’s okay!”
It goes quiet again for a second, and MJ can feel her knuckles skimming across Peter’s. She moves it as fast as possible. She really, really, really did not want him to know. Not now.
“Uh,” he says loudly, trying to cover up the awkward silence. “Look, there’s this…thing that I’ve been wanting to talk to you about for…a while.”
MJ stops. Oh, okay. “Yeah?”
He’s hesitant. He’s gonna say it. But he prefaces instead. “It’s our last night in Europe,” he starts, bouncing on his heels, “and I had this whole plan that I wanted to…tell you…I’m just gonna- I’m just gonna tell you.”
He takes something out of his pocket. “MJ, I…”
“‘I’m Spider-Man,’” MJ feels herself saying easily.
Peter looks terrified. “What?”
“That’s what you were gonna say, that you’re Spider-Man.”
He looks around. “No…I’m not Spider-Man.”
MJ shakes her head. “I mean…I’ve been watching you for like, a while now, it’s kind of obvious.”
She hates admitting it, but it was the truth. Not only was it extremely obvious, but she had been keeping close tabs on him, watching him more often than she would anyone else. Peter didn’t just fascinate her, but she genuinely, genuinely liked to know about him. He was so great. She always wanted to know him more.
“I’m not Spider-Man,” he promises, “I mean, what would make you think that I’m Spider-Man?” He looks like he’s about to pass out.
“Peter! Washington?” MJ asks incredulously.
He plays dumb. “Yeah?”
“The fact that you, like, disappear? Out of nowhere? For no reason?”
Peter clearly thinks she’s talking about the opera. “No, that was- I was sick! Remember? I had my…the…tummy?”
“Y’know Suzan Yang thinks you’re a male escort?”
The funniest part to MJ was just how clueless he was. This was a regular part of conversation for a lot of the kids at Midtown - most specifically kids in her grade and even more specifically kids in AcaDec. Everyone had their own theory as to why he’d disappear the way he did. Betty Brant thought Peter was actually a spy for Stark Industries. Jason Ionello thought Peter was a robot built by Tony Stark and Bruce Banner to protect Midtown. Tyler Corbyn thought Peter was simply a hologram that died every few hours and had to be recharged.
Peter’s face paled. “What? No, of course I’m not a male escort!”
“So, then you’re Spider-Man.”
He’s defiant, though. “No. I’m not Spider-Man, at all.”
MJ sighed. “Well what about tonight? You snuck off, and you fought that thing, I saw you.”
“You can’t have seen me because I’m not Spider-Man,” Peter promised. “And also, on the news, it was the…Night Monkey.”
MJ raised a skeptical eyebrow. “The Night Monkey?”
Peter nodded. “Yeah. That’s what it said on the news, and the news…never lies.”
MJ’s alarm woke her up before the conversation ended. But she knew how it did. She remembered.
She was ecstatic to say she remembered. Because she did. It was all coming back, most of it at least, and she knew Peter. She knew, she knew, she knew. Holy fucking shit, she knew!
She had to find Peter at work. Immediately.
MJ, struggling to get into the normally horrendous mint and pink work uniform, stumbled around her room in pure excitement. She knew she’d probably cry today and avoided putting on makeup, but when she reached for a hair tie, she caught a glimpse of her last drawing before bed.
She stood there with him, on their last day, kissing. He was bloody. He was bruised. She was taller, but not much. His arms pulled her waist close to him.
It was her and Peter. Of course it was. It always was.
She grabbed her pencil, wiping her eyes a bit before scribbling the date and a note to self: “I know why I cried.”