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Michelle Jones (MJ to her friends, and never Jones-Watson, thank you all very much, please fuck off now) has a best friend. His name is Ned, and he’s a massive loser with a better head for computers than anyone she’s ever met before. They’re going to MIT together, and they’re going to have a great time, and no shitty donut shop shift is going to make her lose sight of the real goal.
MJ does not have a boyfriend. Or a girlfriend. Or anything in that vein. She says it’s because she’s too busy for that sort of thing, or because she doesn’t really believe in love, or because nobody really measures up to her standards. She could claim it’s because she’s too cynical from seeing her parents’ marriage fall apart—goodbye, Dad, and take your last name with you—but that’s not really true either. It’s honestly just a matter of not really clicking with anyone. She’s pretty sure she’s attracted to people, but she’s just… not found anyone she thinks she could match with yet.
She tried going on a date with Liz Toomes a year or two before the blip. It had gone… well. It happened. Nobody cried or screamed. Nothing had caught fire. It was just very… okay.
There just hadn’t really been any sparks.
MJ doesn’t think anything of it when Peter Parker introduces himself with his full name and stutters his way through the purchase and small talk. He’s distracted by something, polite and awkward and uncomfortable, but trying anyway. She only remembers him because he bounces off her sense of humor, and because of his full-name introduction. Ned jokes about how she has an admirer, after, but she thinks the guy was just an anxious mess.
She doesn’t think of him very much. He stops by the donut shop once or twice a week. He smiles, and stutters, and asks her how MIT prep is going. He always seems depressed as hell.
Once or twice, she catches him looking at Ned, still sad but also a little longing, and she wonders if maybe there’s a reason other than coffee that Parker keeps coming by.
“How about you?” she asks, once, when Parker’s having trouble digging out some exact change from his wallet. “You’re about my age, right? Are you still in school or did you already graduate?”
He freezes. He doesn’t meet her eyes, just starts digging out the last penny from the awkward pocket it’s in. “I, um, my aunt died a month ago. I was a high school senior, and I’d applied to a few schools, but… I couldn’t afford rent without dropping out, so even if I could make tuition, it’s… yeah. Not in the cards right now.”
Well, shit. She kind of walked right into that one.
“Good luck,” MJ tells him. It feels a little underwhelming, given how badly she’s handled that, but he smiles awkwardly and lifts the cup in a salute, and wanders off.
She goes to where Ned is and swears. He pats her arm, and offers a sympathetic but slightly mocking smile.
“Don’t.”
“I’m pretty sure he forgives you.”
“I should know better than to assume.”
Ned shrugs. He doesn’t say he looks well-off enough that you couldn’t have guessed. He doesn’t say almost eighty percent of students in NYC graduate high school, and it’s higher for white, abled kids like Peter, you were statistically in the clear. He doesn’t say a lot of things.
He does say, “you know, he was looking at you when you had your back to him to get the coffee.”
“Yeah, I was getting him coffee.”
“No, no, dude, I mean like… looking, you know?” Ned tilts his head and raises his brows as if she needs that to figure out what he means. “I think at your hair? But he looked lovesick.”
“As if you know what lovesick looks like,” MJ scoffs. “Parker doesn’t have a crush on me. He’s a customer that comes in once a week for a coffee and a short conversation. Sounds like he’s struggling enough that me even trying to be nice to him—”
“Which you failed at.”
“—fuck off—might be the best human interaction he’s getting right now.”
Ned shrugs. “I mean, it’s not really our business.”
“I guess not, but it still feels bad,” MJ mutters. The boss calls for her to get back to work, and she groans, shoving away from the counter. “Also, he is not lovesick, and if he is, it’s not at me.”
“It totally is.”
“You haven’t seen the way he looks at you, Ned.”
--
The pattern continues. Parker’s mostly delivering pizzas right now, and the smell clings to him, even if he usually comes in at the start of his evening shift, before he’s really started on those deliveries. MJ doesn’t comment when he looks a little rumpled, but she does ask about the massive bruise on one side of his face.
Sort of.
“Holy shit, what happened to you?”
Peter Parker blinks at her. “Wh-what?”
She points to her own face, eyes wider than she’d have thought herself capable of. Parker mimics her and winces when he touches the bruise.
“Right. That.” He grins nervously at her. “Um. I’m living in kind of a rougher area right now, so…”
He shrugs. He does not explain further. She gives him his coffee on the house.
--
When Parker comes in with a button-down and slacks under his jacket two weeks after, she raises both brows. Neither piece is pressed, but she’s pretty sure he doesn’t own an iron. It’s definitely not pizza delivery clothes. “Big interview?”
“Um, just finishing up my first day, actually,” Parker says. He smiles, and it’s shy, and she’d call it cute if she wasn’t a little distracted by the faintest edges of yellowed bruise on his face. “Last week, I ran into a lawyer that helped me out back before… well, before, and when I told him about my aunt, he offered to let me have the internship he usually gave to undergrads. It’s paid and I’ll probably learn something useful while I work on my GED, so…”
He shrugs. He smiles. His eyes skitter away from hers with that always-present anxiety.
“Damn, an internship for the college kids, look at you,” she says, which sounds more condescending than she means it to, but Parker doesn’t seem to take it to heart.
“He said that so long as I can fax, file, and fetch coffee, I can learn the rest as we go,” he tells her. “It’s… a lifesaver, honestly.”
She smiles at him as genuinely as she can manage. “Let me know how it goes.”
He gives her that little salute with the cup and leaves. She hopes things keep going well for him.
--
She meets the lawyer in question somewhere near the end of February.
Parker comes in first, and a middle-aged man in a suit follows. She doesn’t initially realize they’re together. The man’s wearing sunglasses, and doesn’t take them off even after stepping inside, and MJ’s first thought is asshole.
Then she sees the cane, and thinks that, yeah, this time, she’s the asshole.
“Hello, Peter Parker,” she says, falling into customer service as well as she can. It’s far from natural, but she’s had a few months to practice. “Not exactly your usual time.”
“Um—uh—yeah," Parker stutters out. She’s gotten used to it by now, and just waits for him to get some words together. He’s more nervous than he has been, recently. "Hi.”
“In Brooklyn for something in particular?" she asks. "Or is it just the donuts?"
"Not just the donuts," the man in the suit interrupts.
Parker grimaces. “Right, right, um… it's good to see you, MJ.” She can’t remember when she told him to call her that, but he’s been doing it for a while, and it’s never felt wrong, so she must have done so at some point. “Er—this is Mister Murdock, my boss.”
Murdock smiles, charming in a way that says he knows it, and nods at her. “Pleasure to meet you, miss…”
“Jones,” she tells him. “So, uh… you guys getting anything?”
“Coffee, black, and… Boston crème for me?” Parker decides. “Mister Murdock, what do you usually look for?”
“Well, I smell cinnamon,” Murdock announces. “I’d rather not get anything too crunchy or with a filling. I don’t suppose you have any suggestions, Miss Jones?”
She does. She lists them off, and he picks two. Murdock elbows Parker out of the way to pay for both of them, presumably because the man is a whole-ass lawyer that can absolutely afford to treat his intern to a snack.
“So, um… MIT?” Parker asks, like he always does. It’s his default topic. The second is Ned, and the third is school. He likes to hear about how the AcaDec team is doing.
“I’ve been looking over course options and clubs,” she tells him. He smiles. “Still have no idea about a specific major, but I think I can take a few semesters to decide. Ned’s already decided he’s going into coding for spaceships or Helicarrier security systems or something, but I’m thinking I might go into… I don’t know, medical technologies?”
“Like cathode ray tubes?” Parker prompts. “Or more like… prosthetic organ development? I feel like you could make a kick-ass cardiopulmonary bypass machine, those are insane.”
This. This is what makes MJ wish she could have gone to school with this guy. The second she hits on a topic he’s at all confident about, the stutter’s gone and he’s talking to her like an old friend, and he actually does know what he’s talking about. He’s as much a STEM kid as Ned. He might be as much of a genius as MJ herself. He’d have fit right in at MST with their AcaDec team.
She grins at him, ready to actually talk about this, and he blushes. Then he turns away. “Right, sorry. You, uh, probably get all that from your parents, or, like, your teachers or something already. Don’t need it from strangers, too, right?”
He takes a bite from his Boston crème. She wants to tell him that she does want to talk about this, but another customer enters, and she has to say bye and ditch to take their order instead.
Parker and Murdock are gone by the time she’s free again.
--
Parker keeps stopping by. One time, when she’s too busy to talk to him but notices that he looks even more like shit than on other ‘rough neighborhood’ incidents, Ned drags him into a conversation instead.
She overhears only snippets. Here and there, between customers, she has an ear free.
The boys spend half an hour talking about LEGO Star Wars.
Whenever she glances over, she sees that her best friend is engaged, and her customer is… very engaged.
MJ thinks he might be about to cry. Part of her thinks he also might be about to kiss Ned. She’s not entirely sure, honest. She hopes he has friends that aren’t his boss. She hasn’t heard him mention anyone else, though, just Murdock and company. She has a regular sinking feeling that Parker’s only teenage interactions are her and Ned.
Parker does have to leave at some point, because he has an apartment of his own, and neighbors who are loud enough that he has to try to get to sleep early if he wants to get to sleep at all, and he has nobody to pick up the slack with laundry or cooking or cleaning when he’s busy studying.
MJ waves goodbye when he leaves, and goes back to organizing donuts.
She tries not to think too hard about Peter Parker, honestly. He’s got a lot going on, sure, but he’s also an adult, if barely, and not her problem. He’s got a job and his boss seems relatively invested in his well-being, and a well-meaning lawyer can definitely do more for Parker than MJ can. The guy is just a regular who comes by once or twice a week. He’s not her responsibility.
She wants to help, but it’s not her job and it’s not her business. She’s only here to provide him with coffee and the occasional donut, and that minimum of interaction with someone his own age.
She tries to remind herself of this whenever something happens to make her want to get more involved.
Peter Parker comes in. He gets his coffee. He avoids questions about whatever bruise or band-aid he’s got hanging out on his jaw or chin. He chats. He leaves.
He’s just a guy.
But he comes in, once, looking even more shit than usual, giant eyebags almost hidden by a massive bruise, and he fumbles during the handoff of his coffee. It falls onto the counter, tips and opens and spills, and suddenly there’s coffee everywhere. It’s on the counter and under the register and dripping onto the floor, and it’s definitely on a large part of Parker’s shirt. MJ curses and grabs some napkins, mopping up as much as she can before it spreads further.
Parker just stands there.
He’s staring at the puddle of the coffee. He is very, very still.
MJ doesn’t notice at first. She’s too busy cleaning up the coffee. She looks up long enough to offer a napkin for Parker’s shirt, and finds him just… standing there.
His hands are shaking.
“You good, man?”
It takes a few seconds for him to look up at her. He opens his mouth, and half a sound escapes. He closes his mouth. He swallows on nothing, and then opens it again. His voice is uneven and high and cracking, when he finally manages to say something. “You know how sometimes your life is just going horribly, and it's a whole lot of big problems like making rent and not getting mugged and trying to find the time to study for your GED, because your last living relative died a few months ago and you had to drop out of school to not end up on the streets, and then one relatively tiny thing goes wrong and it just feels like the last straw and you want to scream and cry but you're in public so you can't?”
MJ stares at him. His eyes are looking a tad shiny. She doesn’t know how to deal with crying people, especially crying strangers. She holds out some napkins.
“Do you have a bathroom I can borrow?” Parker asks, voice cracking even more.
She points at the door in question. He moves away. He does not take the napkins.
The door locks with a click, and MJ turns to the next person in line and smiles as well as she can. They grimace back.
“Take your time with the mess,” they tell her. She nods and grabs some more napkins, and mops up what’s left that hasn’t already gone to the floor. Out the corner of her eye, she sees Ned get up and go to the bathroom door while she’s taking the next order, absolutely eavesdropping. She sees him knock and say something, and then make a face and go back to the counter seat.
By the time she’s done with the round of customers and has had enough of a break to clean up the coffee on the floor, Ned’s wandered over.
“Is he okay?” she asks. It’s been twenty minutes.
“Dude, he was like… full on sobbing,” Ned says. “I don’t think he’s been okay for a while.”
Yeah, that tracks.
It takes another ten minutes for Parker to leave the bathroom, and he looks… uh. He looks like shit. Red eyes, both rim and bloodshot, and splotches all over his face. His voice is ragged when he apologizes for spilling the coffee and his life troubles.
MJ gives him a coffee and a donut, and says, “free of charge, man. You look like you need it.”
He nearly starts crying again right then and there, but just thanks her and leaves instead.
She shares a look with Ned, and tries to remind herself that it’s not her problem.
--
So like.
Here’s the thing.
MJ doesn’t like to make things complicated.
She has a job in a donut shop. She goes to school. She’s preparing for MIT. She doesn’t really date, and her best friend is just as much of a nerd as she is. The most complicated thing in her life is her relationship with her absent father, and even that is less complicated than it could be, mostly because she refuses to talk to him more than once a month.
She avoids drama and she avoids people who create drama.
Sometimes, though, drama finds her.
“Michelle?” her mom’s calling for her; she takes out an earbud. “Michelle, hon, can you see what’s going on with the window? I think one of the plants might have fallen over.”
Vaguely, she can hear an irregular knocking against the window of her bedroom, where the fire escape is. A flower pot being rolled by the wind is… yeah, she can an see where that’s the most likely option. She takes out the other earbud and leaves the dining room table, heading to her room. She turns on the light.
Spider-Man is at her window.
MJ stares for a bit. It takes a few seconds for her to process, past the glare of her light off the glass, that the young man in her window is in fact deliberately knocking at her window. He’s not doing it very strongly, or very consistently, and she’s rushing over before her mind consciously processes that ‘weak and irregular’ is a bad sign.
She shoves the window open. Spider-Man slumps down into her arms before she can say ‘what are you doing here’ or even a ‘Spider-Man?!?!’
He’s definitely bleeding. That is one hundred percent what’s on her hands right now. Holy fuck.
“MOM!” She screams, and hears a clatter as her mother drops whatever she’s doing and comes to join her. MJ’s already dragging Spider-Man into her room, and her mom slams the door open just in time for the man’s—boy’s?—feet to clatter to the floor. Her mom’s face goes pale.
“Hospital,” her mom says, going to leave the room.
“No!” Spidey chokes out. He tries to web her mom, but misses. It hits the wall instead. “No hospitals!”
His voice is too rough, like he’s sick, or—or got punched in the throat, maybe.
“You’ve been shot,” MJ says. She finally locates the wound and grabs the nearest fabric—an old shirt from science camp when she was twelve—and presses it to the wound. “You—”
“Stabbed,” Spidey corrects, gasping and whimpering a little at the pain that’s probably stemming from the wound getting pressed. “Not shot. Been—been stabbed before. No h-hospitals.”
“You need medical attention!” Mom hisses out through grit teeth.
“Claire,” he says. “C-call Claire.”
MJ is freaking out, kind of a lot. “Is Claire a doctor?”
“N-nurse. For p-people. Like me.” Spidey tries to sit up, groaning.
The mask is probably making it hard to breathe. MJ slips a finger under the edge she can see, but Spidey’s hand grabs her wrist before she can pull it off.
“No,” he says. He doesn’t elaborate. She’s not entirely sure he can.
“Phone number for Claire?” MJ asks instead.
He says it, slow and choking and stuttered. The call goes through. A woman, tired and annoyed, picks up. “Claire Temple.”
“I’ve got Spider-Man bleeding out on my floor,” Mom says. The woman on the other end is silent for all of two seconds, and then starts asking questions. It starts with ‘where are you’ and goes through ‘is he cognizant’ and ‘how much blood has he lost?’
Claire apparently lives in Manhattan. She cannot get to the Jones-Watson apartment in Brooklyn in any kind of reasonable timeframe. She has a friend out here that can help, though, and she tells them she’s texted the address to this person, a fellow Metro Gen nurse by the name of Delicia.
MJ winces whenever Spidey whimpers, and follows instructions to keep the stab wound from doing more of… whatever it’s doing.
They do not use any first aid alcohol onto the wound. Instead, they’re instructed to take Spidey to the bathroom and wash out the area around the wound with cool water and the mildest soap they have, after cutting away the fabric around the injury. There are a lot of towels that are going to need to be bleached before they can be used again. MJ almost throws up at least twice.
This is not Spidey’s only wound, they find out, just the most aggressively terrible. There’s a pretty ugly gash across his cheek, and at least one broken finger.
MJ’s pretty sure gut wounds are usually worse, but Nurse Temple assures them that she’s treated Spidey before, and he’s got some kind of a healing factor, so while it’s bad… it could be worse.
Delicia arrives, harried and worried, and promptly deputizes them for handing her things and sterilizing the needle she uses to sew up the wound. MJ follows instructions and tries to tune out the heavy, forced breathing and sucking gasps from Spidey. It’s not easy. Her mom tries to make her leave, but she won’t.
“Why here?” Delicia asks, at one point.
“Trust Mi-Michelle,” Spidey grunts out as the needle keeps pulling, “don’t kn-know anyone—ah!—else in Brooklyn.”
MJ has never met Spider-Man before. She says as much.
“Probably know him outside of the mask, then,” Delicia says. “Alcohol wipe.”
MJ can’t stop thinking about it, not really. She doesn’t know Spider-Man. She has no idea who he is. If she’s the only person he knows in Brooklyn, that’s… that’s just…
That’s just really sad.
Spider-Man used to work with Tony Stark and the Avengers. Surely, he must have someone other than a single woman out in Manhattan. Surely he must have other heroes or friends. He’s a Queens hero. He’s got to have someone to trust out in the boroughs.
The fact that he’s only barely not bleeding out in her bathtub suggests that no, he doesn’t.
Spider-Man sleeps on MJ’s bed, and she takes the couch.
He’s gone by morning.
--
Spider-Man seeks her out a few days later. He asks what he can do to pay her back. He doesn’t really have any money, he explains, but if she wants to swing around the city or something, he can do that for her.
She tells him there’s nothing he needs to do.
He doesn’t seem happy with this, but he doesn’t press the issue.
--
Peter Parker has a cut on his cheek when he comes in on Saturday, a week and a half after Spider-Man crashed through MJ’s window.
It’s familiar, for all that it’s barely more than a scar.
She doesn’t comment. It’s not exactly proof. It’s barely even evidence.
Her heart twists a little. She doesn’t like it.
Should she tell Ned?
Something… something feels wrong, about her knowing before he does.
--
MJ is at Ned’s house, studying for a history test, when Spider-Man knocks on Ned’s window. He is not bleeding out this time, but rather hanging to the several inches of brick wall that jut out around the windowframe, in a way that should be impossible but isn’t for him. MJ and Ned look at each other, wide-eyed, and then MJ scrambles to her feet and runs over to open the window.
“Heya, folks,” he says, with a gravel to it that she’s pretty sure is faked. “So I was thinking about how to pay you back for saving my life a few weeks back—”
“I told you not to.”
Spidey tilts his head at her. She thinks he’s blinking, but it’s hard to tell. This mask doesn’t move with his eyes the way the last one did. “—and I figured that even if I can’t really pay you back, I can do a favor for your friend there.”
Ned points at his face. “Me?”
Spidey leans in—definitely not compliant with any physics that respects things like human joints and friction—and hands Ned an envelope.
It says, “Do not open. Deliver in person to Stephen at 177A Bleecker Street. Wait for response.”
Spidey leans back out the window. “You’ll thank me later!”
He backflips into the night.
MJ and Ned share a look.
Well, at least they know what they’re doing after the history test tomorrow.