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She tells a boy she loves him as the sun rises and the world changes, and it’s not the first time she has loved but it is the first time it has felt like this.
She tells a boy she loves him and it’s nothing like in the stories she’s grown up with, it’s nothing like watching her own parents fall out of love and then back into it and nothing like watching her classmates get roped in by broad infatuation with one another.
She tells a boy she loves him and that matters in the grand scheme of things, even if she won’t let him say it back, but it matters too that she forgets.
It matters in the sense that loving him was still important even if he’s gone now and it matters in the sense that everyone she loves to come will be equally important.
Michelle doesn’t know this, though.
To Michelle there is no before, to Michelle there’s just her life and all of the people worth loving in it.
I.
“Excuse me, sorry, I’m just gonna— yeah, I’ll just— if you could go sit a row up, that would be great,” Michelle smiles at Harriet Lindstrom, both of them squashed chest-to-chest in this narrow row of seats.
Bright blue polyester against blue polyester, Michelle’s honor cords held in two fists like suspenders as she nods to the seat a row ahead she’d left unoccupied on her trek to get here.
“But they told us we had to—”
“Harriet,” Michelle cuts her off flatly, patience dwindling, “you’re literally graduating today. You’ve already earned your diploma, alright? They’re not gonna take it away for switching seats with me so I can sit with my friend here.”
Ned, for his part, sinks lower in his seat with a roll of his eyes and an under-his-breath grumble of, “you’re making a scene, MJ,” but he doesn’t complain when Harriet ultimately and inevitably relents, allowing Michelle to fall into the seat beside him and cross her legs triumphantly.
“Told you we’d get to sit next to each other,” she says, nudging his knee with hers, swishing fabric of graduation robes more a feeling than a sound amidst the chaos of Midtown High’s student body.
This place is rumbling with a nervous sort of excitement, kids turning grown and looking at their futures, if not right in the eye then at least somewhere vaguely to the left of them. Michelle hasn’t always been much of a planner, has watched her parents break up and get back together, has lived with so much love and so much instability in equal measure to know that sometimes the heart just changes its mind, and so she doesn’t always see the point in long term planning.
She knows what she wants right now, though, knows that the roommate request form open in a tab on her laptop back home is what she wants, that this guy sitting next to her in this bustling, blustering space is what she wants. At least for the nearest of futures.
After all, Michelle has known her entire life that some things just change, and sometimes the brain can’t be entirely predictable. There are gaps in her wants, always have been, this humming sort of uncertainty that tells her when her instincts want her to pay attention to something, and Michelle has figured out how to listen recently.
Her instincts, for example, tell her that MIT is a good idea, that this is what she wants, that this, although being a relatively new plan in the grand scheme of things, is the right one. Michelle couldn’t verbalize why, not when she can’t even land on a definitive major yet, isn’t sure that she’ll end up in the sciences long-term at all, but she knows it’s right.
She knows it, right?
“You’re supposed to be up there, Salutatorian,” Ned tells her, fiddling with his own honor cords and trying to even out the length on each side of his neck.
“The cool thing about not making valedictorian is that no one really gives a shit what I do,” Michelle responds with a shrug. “I don’t have to give a speech, I just have to show up and accept my empty diploma case like everyone else, so if I want to sit next to my best friend while I do that then fuckin’ sue me, Leeds.”
Ned looks up from his fiddling and fussing, smile on his face growing into something blatantly shit-eating as he gives her a once-over.
“Best friend, huh?” he grins.
“Oh, shut up,” she rolls her eyes and crosses her arms, slumping down in her seat.
“I thought Michelle Jones-Watson didn’t have any friends,” he prods with a nudge of his shoulder.
“Congratulations,” she shoots him a deadpanned look, “I made a grand total of one friend in four years of high school which puts you at the top of the ranking by default. Nice work.”
“Thank you,” Ned postures mock-seriously, “I worked very hard for that spot.”
“Of course you did,” Michelle shrugs, “my standards are incredibly high.”
“Huh,” Ned cocks his head to the side, a contemplative sound escaping his lungs in between all the laughter and jubilee of their fellow students around them. A little bubble just for them in the midst of chaos.
Chaos, Michelle understands, although that’s not entirely true, is it?
“What?” she clears her throat, frowning at his knowing look.
“Nothing,” Ned shrugs. “I’m just pretty sure you just gave me a compliment. You like me so much. So much,” he wraps an arm around her shoulders and jostles them both back and forth a little bit and Michelle just makes a loud groan of an argument in response.
“I’m going back to my old seat.”
“No, you aren’t.”
“No,” she sighs, “I’m not.”
***
Michelle Jones-Watson graduates as salutatorian of her class.
She walks up the steps and she shakes Principal Morita’s hand, catches sight of Mister Harrington shedding a tear in his seat and hears her dad clapping louder than anyone else in the place.
And her heart gets bigger, she thinks. Four years focusing on her brain, on getting her grades and her extracurriculars to the point where she could attend any school she wanted with the scholarships she’d be offered, and she’s done that of course. She’s done good work, put her all into learning as much as she could from this place, but she shakes Principal Morita’s hand and hears his quiet congratulations and she realizes that it’s not just her mind that’s been affected by this place and this time.
Her heart’s gotten bigger.
Ned is waiting for her on the other side of the stage, diploma in hand and tassel switched from one side to the other. He’s there and he’s beaming, he’s throwing his arms around her and leaning so far back in the embrace that Michelle’s feet leave the ground despite the fact that she’s taller than him.
And she doesn’t even make fun of him for it, she doesn’t even pretend she doesn’t want this little celebration that feels so much bigger and broader and deeper than it has any right doing.
They’ve been working towards this for a good, long while, sure, but it’s just high school. All they’re leaving behind is high school. All they’re leaving behind is this one inconsequential era of their lives with homework and school dances and club trips that all seemed to end with— something. Something.
So, it’s not a huge deal, graduation, it’s been a long time coming and of anyone Michelle and Ned have always known they’re destined for college. It’s just a stepping stone, they aren’t leaving anything behind, they’re moving forward together, no one left behind and so—
“Why are you crying?” Ned asks the moment he’s put her back down on the ground and pulled back enough to see her face.
“What?” Michelle balks, lifting a stunned hand to her cheek “I’m not—”
Her fingers come away wet, the sudden weight on her chest of tears being shed that she only notices now that it’s been pointed out, but she can’t place that feeling, that weight. She can’t place it, even if this isn’t the first time in recent weeks it’s shown its stupid face because when she tries to look it in the eye it just burrows deeper into her chest.
It just burrows deeper, tears on her cheeks that she brushes away with hesitant hands.
“I’m just—” she clears her throat, shakes her head, “overwhelmed I guess. Excited. Yeah.”
“Yeah,” Ned exhales harshly like he’d breathed too deep and held it too long, “yeah, me too.”
“Hey,” she clears her throat, lifts her hand up between them, “go team, right?”
Ned laughs, surprised and watery before slapping her hand in a smack of a high-five.
“Go fuckin’ team.”
***
Ned Leeds is Michelle’s guy.
That’s her guy, in the trust without remorse, always has her back, will always have his back sort of way she’d never expected to find in some boy she met in high school.
Michelle thinks there’s this weird expectation that best friendships, that guys like Ned Leeds, have to come from this bond of childhood, that they have to grow up together to really see and get each other, but that’s not the case here.
She didn’t meet Ned in kindergarten and ask him to be her friend; they didn’t grow up attending the same science camp or live on the same block. They didn’t even really know each other past being on the same Academic Decathlon team until junior year so far as Michelle can remember.
So far as she can remember, one day she had just been unbelievably close with Ned and that’s— well, that’s— that’s probably— that’s—-
He’s her guy.
In that trust without remorse, always has her back sort of way, and when they move into the place they’ve found together in Boston, a two-bedroom somehow cheaper than student housing, she’s so grateful for him she could burst with it.
Scared of how grateful she is and grateful because she’s scared. This new life with all its new people and new places and new expectations for her to create and fulfill for herself, it’s terrifying, but it’s also nice to know that there’s going to be a familiar face in the next room.
A familiar face right here and now, two new-adults and brand new at that, lying on the floor of their brand new living room in this brand new city, boxes half emptied and piled around them like a maze of the past as it finds its way into their own personal futures.
“We have our own apartment,” Ned breathes, a certain amount of awe to the words as they float up to rest on the dusty ceiling fan spinning above them. “Our own apartment.”
“We have to pay our own rent,” Michelle points out. “And clean up after ourselves. You better clean up after yourself,” she turns her head to look at him, hands resting on her stomach whereas his pillow behind his head.
Ned snorts and returns her gaze with amusement.
“Between the two of us, you’re absolutely gonna be the messier one,” he says, only laughing more at the offended frown deepening in the center of Michelle’s forehead.
“I’m tidy,” she says with all sorts of confidence that only makes Ned’s grin go disbelieving and broad. “I am.”
“Alright, MJ,” he says, situating himself back on his pillowed hands, eyes closed and breathing deep. “Whatever you say.”
This is her guy, stepping into the terrifying unknown of brand new adulthood, of college and this city so far from home and whatever new mysteries it might have in store for them. So very much newness that Michelle is simultaneously thrilled and uncertain to face, heart thrumming out a nervous, jittery pace in her ribs.
So much newness, but still this guy, telling her, whatever you say.
“Damn straight,” Michelle takes a page out of his book and lets her eyes fall shut, breathing in all the newness and excitement, refusing to push aside the nerves because she wants to feel every single bit of it.
She deserves to remember every single bit of it.
Growth and life and Ned fucking Leeds.
She loves it all.
She loves him.
II.
“I can’t believe I agreed to this.”
“Of course you agreed to this,” Flash says, a spring in his step as they make their way across campus to the theater building. “You owe me one and you’re a woman of your word.”
“I’m a woman of my word but I also never do anything I don’t want to do,” she points out, “so you’re really lucky that one of those things didn’t cancel out the other in this case.”
Flash rolls his eyes, used to her threats and the way they’ve become more and more empty during the full semester and a half they’ve completed at MIT together. He’s gotten used to her in the same way she’s gotten used to him, which is to say maybe Michelle made it through high school with a grand total of two friends, not that she would ever admit that to Flash’s ego.
There’s something comforting in having this trio of kids from home, though, two guys who can recall what it's like to be from where they’re from. They miss the same things, find nostalgia in the same things, get homesick for the same New Yorker nonsense that their friends from elsewhere will never really get, and so Michelle goes along with their shenanigans more than she ever would have expected just a handful of years ago.
The late night trips to the convenience store because Ned has convinced himself he needs to make box mix brownies right now; the study sessions where Flash always tries to convince them to leave the library a mere twenty minutes after they’ve arrived; the first time party-going that ends up with the three of them at Ned and Michelle’s apartment, eating pizza from that cheap place with the free branded plastic cups.
And this, the getting roped into auditioning for a non-majors production of The Importance of Being Earnest because Flash thinks he knows her well enough to know she’ll enjoy it.
Who knows, maybe he’s right, but she’s not going to admit that until she’s sure.
“You have your sides?” Flash asks, opening the door for her so they can step inside.
“The script?” Michelle frowns, following him towards a directory sign that points towards the theater. “I didn’t bring it.”
“You didn’t— MJ,” Flash stops dead in his tracks, and she doesn’t understand why he’s so invested in this. He’s going to be working on production design, they won’t even get to spend that much time together in the event that Michelle does get the part.
“I don’t need it,” she tells him, but Flash just balks.
“Yes. You do.”
“No. I don’t,” she counters with a mirror of his cadence and lift of the brow. “I know it,” she points to her temple.
“You…” Flash stares at her. “You memorized it? They might ask you to do both parts.”
“I know both parts,” she tells him, poking at his shoulder so he’ll start walking again.
“You know both parts,” Flash says with a breath of a laugh, allowing himself to be led down the hall. “Fuck. This is gonna be so much fun.”
Michelle isn’t sure why he thinks that.
***
In high school, Flash Thompson had been something of a pain in the ass.
Relatively harmless at the end of the day, but still kind of a nuisance with the way he hadn’t found out how to be comfortable in his own skin yet and was still in the stage of his life where he insisted on taking it out on everyone else.
She had suspected then what she now knows to be true, that he needed to get out of the house he grew up in to really find that comfort, to find the freedom to explore what it is that he cares about outside of familial expectations, or in this case maybe lack thereof.
He had been a pain in the ass, had earned every harsh comeback she’d thrown at him at the time, but she’d actually consider him a friend now against all odds, because now he grins at her when they find out she’s been cast in a secondary role in the play, high fives her in a properly dorky way.
“I’ll help you run lines,” he says, sitting on the back of the couch with his feet on the cushions in a way that Michelle always thinks is going to make it tip over backwards. “And I’ll talk to Bridget in costumes to make sure you don’t get one of those older dresses with all the moth holes.”
“There are costumes with holes in them?” Ned asks, laptop open in front of him where he sits at the coffee table, but assignment all but abandoned in favor of chiming in on this conversation.
“Alright, maybe not holes,” Flash rolls his eyes. “You know what I mean. I’ve got your back, Jones.”
“He’s got your back, Jones,” Ned grins up at her, Michelle still staring at the email on her phone, a little bit gobsmacked by this turn of events.
She’s a physics major, after all. She went to a STEM high school and got a scholarship to MIT. She goes to MIT.
And yet, still, there’s a little hum of something good in her chest seeing her name listed amongst that cast. Something good and gobsmacked nonetheless.
“I’ve got a man on the inside,” she clears her throat, forces her way into conversation mode, continues to feel it all dancing in her insides. “I’m gonna be a regular diva by the end of this thing.”
“You joke,” Flash points a finger at her, “but you’ve got the makings of one already, don’t fool yourself.”
“What?” Michelle balks as Ned begins to laugh. “What’re you laughing about?”
“He knows I’m right,” Flash shrugs and plops down to sit on the couch properly, feet propping up next to Ned’s laptop on the coffee table.
“You’re not right,” Michelle frowns at him, but Ned makes a face at her, halfway between a grimace and a grin.
“He’s a little bit right,” he admits through his teeth. “It’s not a bad thing though.”
“No, that’s true,” Flash agrees readily.
Michelle gapes at them, “how is it not a bad thing?”
“You’re fucking— self reliant,” Ned throws up his hands in amused exasperation, “you know what you deserve.”
And it’s a compliment wrapped up in the usual teasing. It’s a compliment on top of the fluttering nonsense at seeing her name on that cast list. It’s these two guys seeing her for what she is and celebrating it in their own, joking, prodding way and she doesn’t know what to do with it.
She can’t express the way it makes her feel, doesn’t think she probably needs to either, and so she just says, “what I deserve is better friends,” as she slumps lower in her seat and aimlessly scrolls through her phone just for a reason not to look at them.
God, they’re insufferable.
It’s delightful.
***
It’s like she doesn’t get any say in it, the way she falls in love so fast and so hard.
She falls in love with the storytelling of it, falls in love with speaking words that are meant to be spoken rather than just read, falls in love with the community of people around her and the way they all have a common goal, falls a little bit in love with Flash Thompson too, of all people, for making her try it in the first place.
There’s no decision to be made in the matter, no list of pros and cons or lengthy discussion to have with her father about what choice to make next, because it’s so clear to her.
Michelle loves being on the stage, even if she’s far from considering herself an actress in any real way, she loves to do the work and she loves the way the weight of the world lifts off of her chest when she puts another person’s words in her mouth and lets herself just feel it.
She feels it all and she doesn’t have to hold it together because she’s not hiding in plain sight, she’s not tucked behind a curtain of hair and a book, she’s letting herself feel the world through someone else’s skin and see it through someone else’s eyes and if that’s not catharsis then she doesn’t know what is.
Maybe it’s a different mask for her to hide behind, this costume and these lights, but it feels better than the rest of it ever has. It feels better and it feels so true to her that she almost can’t believe she’s waited this long to give it a go.
She rehearses her heart out and she makes friends with people unlike anyone else she’s ever befriended (save maybe Flash himself) and on opening night she gets these butterflies in her stomach like she’s about to fall from a great height.
Fall from a— fly from a— swing from a—
And on closing night she finds herself tearing up as she takes a bow, finds her heart so full in ways it hasn’t felt in the past year or so, like she’s patching up a hole that she hadn’t even been aware was there.
She’s still in her costume when Flash finds her backstage, his suit crease-free but his grin leaving laughter lines right there in his cheeks.
He high fives her again, rambling about how good of a show it had been, going on about how she has to keep doing this, about the community theater that’s doing Wicked in the Fall and how she should really—
“Oh—” he cuts off because she grabs his hand at the top of the high five and pulls him into a tight hug. Short but meaningful, because something ending quickly doesn’t mean it doesn’t still continue to matter.
“Thank you,” she smiles at him, hands on either shoulder and eyes on the surprised but fond look on his face. “Y’know, for all of it.”
“Sure,” he says through a breath of a laugh. “Anytime.”
Michelle loves that night, knows she’ll never forget it as long as she lives.
She loves to be on stage, and in back of it too.
And, lo and behold, she loves him.
III.
Michelle has known her entire life that part of it, the living, is in changing your mind.
She’s changed her mind plenty over the years, changed her mind enough that she’s probably done her fair share of mind changing in the long run, but that’s not going to stop her from doing it one more time.
Two years at MIT, and Michelle understands deep in her heart that at eighteen years old and straight out of high school this had been the right place for her to spread her wings. She had to find her own way outside of the city that had raised her, far enough from the comfort of her parents’ house that she couldn’t call them for every little thing, because as much as life is about changing your mind, it’s also about making your own choices.
Michelle has made every choice necessary to get her where she is (she has, hasn’t she?) and she makes this choice too, the choice to leave so she can keep growing, so she can keep changing her mind.
She had left the city because she had needed too, but that doesn’t mean she’s not allowed to come back home to it, let herself pursue the arts for which her love has only grown in her avoidance of it.
And if her transfer to NYU ends up lining up with Ned’s to Columbia and Flash’s to ESU, their little trio all finding the need to return to New York slamming into them at the same time, then she’s not going to complain about it.
She’ll never complain about having her people in her place in this time when they’re all stumbling their way into their twenties and whatever that entails. Adulthood, she supposes, even if it doesn’t quite feel like it most days, still putting in the work to finish her halfway-done physics degree while also pursuing a life on stage more completely.
It’s a workload that keeps her mind pretty well occupied, not leaving much space for outside endeavors like parties or, as Flash likes to point out, having a life, but she’s proud of herself and she likes what she’s doing and screw you, Flash, I don’t need to date just to prove—
“Hey, you don’t happen to have the notes from Tuesday’s lecture do you?”
Bottle blonde bangs hanging over sheepish eyes, Michelle had been too busy remembering to submit her assignment online three minutes before the deadline to notice the girl that’s just sat down next to her, pulling out the little fold out desk and leaning on it imploringly in Michelle’s direction.
“It’s just— I had to go to office hours for this other class I’m in because the professor’s a bastard who hates my guts,” she goes on without Michelle having to say anything, “but the only reason he hates my guts is because I never go to office hours because they’re during this class. So, like, what does he expect me to do, right? I dunno, the point is I missed the lecture on Tuesday.”
Michelle doesn’t know why this girl is asking her in a lecture hall full of kids who haven’t halfway given up on the world of STEM in favor of chasing nonsensical artistic dreams, but she also figures this stranger is just looking for anyone to help her out.
So Michelle shrugs.
“Okay,” she says simply.
“Okay…?”
“What’s your dot EDU?” Michelle asks as she navigates away from one window and opens her email in another.
“Oh, you’re a godsend,” she exhales, slumping in her seat slightly. “GMStacy, please. Gwendolyne. Gwen. You can call me Gwen.”
“Okay, Gwen,” Michelle clicks send, looks up at her with a smile that just sort of happens without her permission.
Bottle blonde bangs and grateful eyes, Gwendolyne GMStacy Gwen grins as she gets up to return to whatever her usual seat is.
“I owe you one…?”
“Michelle.”
“I owe you big time, Michelle,” Gwen tells her, trying to walk backwards out of the aisle and stumbling over her own feet, Michelle unable to hold in the burst of a laugh that it elicits from her. “See you around,” Gwen grimaces, a cute little sheepishness to her wave as she departs.
Michelle catches herself still smiling as she turns back to her notes and waits for the lecture to start.
As far as surprises go, it’s not unpleasant.
***
As it turns out, Gwen isn’t kidding when she says see you around.
It’s not even an intentional thing, but Gwen Stacy just starts showing up in Michelle’s path time and again. In line at the Coffee Bean just off campus, commenting on the paperback with the broken backwards spine in Michelle’s hand; by the couches in the student union, where Michelle offers to share her seat during the rush time of students taking up every other available spot; at the study session for an exam months later where the two of them somehow find themselves strolling their way across campus slowly.
Slow but bubbling up with laughter when Gwen makes a joke about their professor or Michelle tells a story about a modeling session she’d done recently. Slow, like neither one of them want to say goodbye at their usual parting spot, a fork in the road where their conversations and their laughter usually ends on their individual journeys back home.
Michelle doesn’t want it to end, and it’s like a jolt to her heart, this feeling. It’s not that she hasn’t had crushes before, she’s dated, she’s hooked up, she’d found her way through her first fumbling pseudo-relationships when she was still in Boston, but this feels different.
Different because she’s looking for more than a one-off get-off, or at least that’s not what she sees in this thing with Gwen. This thing with Gwen, which might just be friendship, might be nothing more than pals who share a class with too many boys and not enough people with their same deadpanned, vaguely harsh sense of humor.
It might just be friendship, and that’s okay, but maybe Michelle has dived into sex the past two years without finding any sort of romance at the bottom and maybe this is different. Maybe this is new and maybe it is good.
It certainly feels good, as they approach that fork in the road where Gwen turns left and Michelle turns right.
It feels like a heart wrapped up in the comfort of a weighted blanket; it feels like the first blue sky at the end of winter; it feels like a kiss as the sun begins to rise— begins to— when the sun—
“So, I guess I’ll see you on exam day?” Gwen asks, tucking her hands into her pockets as a gust of cold wind cuts through them, chilling Michelle everywhere except that one spot in her chest.
“Oh, yeah,” Michelle nods hurriedly, toe of one boot scraping against the concrete beneath her feet, glow of street lamps casting shadows across Gwen’s face in the same line her windswept hair takes. “Yeah, exam day, definitely.”
“Definitely,” Gwen smiles, something nervous to it that’s not usually there, something that hits Michelle right below her ribs, straight in the gut.
It might just be friendship, Michelle might be so off base and she might completely humiliate herself if she opens up the door to this feeling she’s been feeling, this feeling she’s avoided her whole life, letting herself find pleasure in one direction and companionship in the other but never in the same place, never from the same person.
She has friends to love, she has a body she knows how to work with, and that’s always been enough. That’s enough. She doesn’t need to be seen and known and made laugh bright and loud on her walk home from a study session with that hand so close to touching, so close—
“We could do something after,” she blurts out, because she’s lying to herself and she wants to stop. “To— to celebrate?”
“Celebrate?” Gwen’s eyebrows lift, voice ticking upwards. “Celebrate— together?”
“We could get dinner— somewhere off campus,” Michelle suggests, “if you want?”
Gwen smiles, doing this thing with her shoulders where she shrugs a little bit before standing up straighter and nodding.
“Yeah, yeah,” she agrees, “I would love that. I would— yeah.”
“Okay,” Michelle can’t help the way she grins, can’t help the soft laugh that pulls itself out of her either, a completely involuntary duck of her head as her cheeks go warm against the cold of the city in November. “Okay, yeah, I’ll see you then. I’ll— think of a good place. Celebratory.”
“Celebratory as fuck,” Gwen beams at her, backing away down her block, a skip to her step as she turns, but looks back over her shoulder at Michelle, still standing, unable to take her eyes off of this beacon of light in the short days of winter.
Gwen waves and Michelle waves back, laughing at herself a little bit as she forces herself to turn around and start walking, heart drumming out a fast paced jig that she can hardly keep up with.
She doesn’t even mind it.
***
“You’re a mess.”
“Well, don’t tell me that,” she strips out of the sweater she’s wearing and pulls another off its hanger unceremoniously, unashamed of standing in her bra in front of the boy lounging on her bed.
“You don’t look like a mess,” Ned rolls his eyes, barely even paying her any attention with his laptop open on his legs. “You’re just acting like one. Hey! Acting! You should just act like you’re not a nervous wreck about your date.”
Michelle pulls her head through a turtleneck to reveal the deep scowl on her face, hair still trapped in the sweater as she pulls it down over her torso.
She has no right being as nervous as she is, except maybe she does when her perspective on romantic love is so twisty and turny. She’s never done the romance thing before— the sex thing, sure, but not romance. Not dates and holding hands and kisses on cheeks and promises—
Promises of— promises to— promises for—
She’s never done it before, and in part she knows it comes from watching her parents’ version of love. The on-again-off-again, the literal divorce and then getting back together ten years later creating a push and pull in Michelle’s young life that she’s always had trouble understanding, even if the complexity of it becomes a bit more clear with every stutter of her heart when Gwen sits close to her.
Still, she has no right being as nervous as she is.
“You’ve never given helpful advice in your life,” she deadpans, “how the fuck are you so confident about it all the time?”
“I’ve got loads of self trust,” he says with a wave of his hand, “and I’m, y’know, secure in myself and shit.”
“So am I,” Michelle grouses, fixing her hair in the mirror, choosing a pair of hooped earrings to add to the ensemble that she’s trying to make simultaneously believable she’d wear to take an exam and also put-together enough to not make a fool of herself in the thing coming after the exam that she’s somehow more nervous for. Physics has got nothing on the likes of Gwen Stacy. “I’m just also…”
“Crushing super hard on the pretty, pretty blonde girl from your class?” Ned teases, looking at her over the top of his computer screen with raised eyebrows and too much delight to his grin.
Michelle scrunches up her face at him in the mirror.
“I’m firing you as my best friend,” she says. “You’re out and Flash is in.”
“Yeah, because he gives such great advice,” Ned snorts.
Michelle just looks at herself in the mirror, her own nerves clear on her face but at least her outfit looking better now. She heaves out a sigh, hands pressing into her abdomen.
“I’m gonna fail this test, huh?”
Ned just laughs.
***
Michelle, as it turns out, does perfectly fine on the test.
It’s a piece of cake, actually, after all that studying she’s been doing with a girl from her class who’s actually very good at this stuff.
What’s more surprising than that, however, is how easy what comes next is. There’s some fumbling when they meet outside the lecture hall, a stuttered out decision of where to go to eat, nervous laughter and jittery, quick steps as they make their way off campus, but it passes.
It passes with finding a spot at a little hole in the wall taco shop; it passes with the falling into natural conversation; it passes with good food and seats pulled close to one another.
It passes with this quieting of the rest of the world, like the friendship Michelle has built with Gwen is finally reaching the potential that had created all that nervous energy to begin with. It brings with it a stillness that Michelle has never experienced with another person in this context, always putting up her walls, always playing a part even when she’s not on stage, always expecting disappointment.
When you expect disappointment you don’t have to— you can’t be— there’s no—
It passes.
It passes like a warm breeze, like the curl of Gwen’s fingers around hers when they leave, take a walk around the block despite the cold chill in the air. This is a girl who isn’t afraid to poke fun and even less so to be poked fun at. She’s sharp and she’s quick and she isn’t remotely taken aback by Michelle’s deadpanned humor, by the darker twists to it that come out sometimes when even Michelle herself doesn’t quite expect them to.
When Michelle was seven her parents got divorced and when she was seventeen they got back together, and Michelle had resented them for a long time for blowing her life up twice just because they couldn't make it work the first time. But she understands it’s complicated now, when she kisses Gwen Stacy and knows her heart has suddenly been stripped of all its defenses.
She understands that it’s not so simple as loving when Gwen kisses her back, fingers slipping under the band of Michelle’s knit cap and tangling in her hair, because she is enthralled and invigorated and terrified all at once.
Enthralled and invigorated and terrified the first time they kiss, but that third descriptor melts with each subsequent meeting of their lips, with every nuzzle of Gwen’s face into Michelle’s temple, with every walk to that fork in the road, hand in hand now.
Always hand in hand.
Michelle understands it’s not simple as falling head over heels and being together forever and never facing hardship again, but as the months pass as the cold in the air shifts to warm breezes and blooming trees she also feels better than she ever imagined a relationship could make her feel.
She feels, not invincible, but light, head gone quiet and heart gone steady as the time goes by and Gwen becomes a part of her life that she can’t imagine stripping herself of.
Because Michelle looks at her, blonde bangs over teasing, loving eyes, and no matter how complicated she knows it to be, she still knows it to be true.
She loves her.
IV.
“Okay, you have to be nice when she gets here.”
“You’re telling me to be nice?” Michelle snorts from the recently acquired couch in the middle of an otherwise sparse room, half-filled with Gwen’s boxes and about to be the rest of the way full. “You’re the one that’s been complaining about this girl for two weeks.”
“Listen,” Gwen stalks to a box, tearing it open with a pocket knife that’s apparently been in her back pocket this whole time, and starts throwing pillows onto the couch where Michelle lounges, having to catch one before it can hit her in the face, “just because she’s super flaky and only answers her phone half the time and is chronically late and jittery about it doesn’t mean I want to make a bad first impression.”
“You think I’m gonna embarrass you in front of your new roommate?” Michelle smirks. “Gwen, I’m, like, the biggest pro to living with you. I bring so much positive energy to a home.”
Gwen shoots her a look, blunt and disbelieving as she says, “you’ve been spending too much time around actors. That was the most Hollywood thing you’ve ever said, and if this trend continues I might have to break up with you.”
“Sure,” Michelle laughs, “but then who would be the buffer between you and your new, flaky roommate?”
Gwen groans, but she’s laughing through it as she gives up on unpacking and flops to her knees on the couch beside Michelle.
“You’re gonna make her hate me, aren’t you?” she pouts, taking Michelle’s face in between her soft hands. “You’re gonna do that intimidating thing you do with new people and I’m gonna have to convince her you’re allowed to hang out here.”
“You think it’s hot when I’m intimidating,” Michelle grins, pressing her forehead into Gwen’s, letting the bridges of their noses slot up against one another. “Don’t lie to yourself, Stacy.”
Gwen tries to frown at her, really puts in a good effort, but her mouth twists up in amusement and she’s inevitably kissing Michelle to cover up her grin before Michelle can even call her out on it.
Those hands on her cheeks, fingertips skating across her hairline, kissing Gwen is something that doesn’t get old even nearly a year into doing it. Not old, not boring, and Michelle doesn’t see how it ever could be, even in all of her pragmatism and understanding of how complicated it is, a love like theirs.
And so she kisses her and she kisses her and she lets her heart distract her mind so she isn’t clued into the sound of the door opening until Gwen is pulling away from her hastily and swiping at her lipstick.
“Oh, I—”
“Hi!” Gwen jumps to her feet, too enthusiastic to look like she’d been doing anything other than making out with her still-lounging girlfriend on the couch. “I’m Gwen, do you need help with your stuff?”
The girl in the doorway, a little bit stunned but clearly trying to not show it, opens and closes her mouth a couple of times like a fish out of water.
“I, um, my stuff?”
“Your boxes?” Gwen questions.
“I, uh, don’t…” she looks around the apartment, dragging in a rolling suitcase and letting it sit flat on the floor behind her, a backpack slung over both shoulders but otherwise empty-handed as her eyes land on Michelle.
“Hey,” she lifts a hand in a wave, not bothering to get up from the couch. “I’m MJ. We can help you carry stuff up if you need.”
She seems to jolt back to reality then, or at least realize that she hasn’t said a proper full sentence yet with a clear of her throat and a sheepish smile.
“This is all of it,” she motions down to herself. “I thought it said it came furnished so I didn’t…”
“Oh, yeah, you don’t have to worry about that—”
“Gwen’s a hoarder, you’ll have everything you need—”
“MJ.”
“Okay, well,” she cuts into their back-and-forth as she closes the door behind her and squares her shoulders. “Nice to meet you,” she holds a hand out to Gwen, “I’m Cindy.”
***
Cindy Moon is flaky and runs late more often than not and is kind of awkward on a surface level social way, but so are all of Michelle’s friends in one way or another.
It becomes clear pretty quickly that Cindy isn’t actually all that different from any of them in that sense, because they’re all a little bit weird by normal standards, and just because Cindy’s quirks are a little different from the rest of them doesn’t mean she doesn’t still belong. Plus, Michelle thinks Cindy maybe doesn’t have that many friends outside of them and the people she interns with at the Bugle, and who are they to deprive an awkward but otherwise good-hearted girl some people to call her own?
And so it may start with Cindy being Gwen’s roommate who only appears at get togethers when she happens to be at home when Gwen has the rest of them over, but it doesn’t stay that way for long.
Cindy wins them all over in their own ways— Flash is always interested to hear about whatever scoop on the local vigilantes Cindy’s got, and oddly enough they have a shared interest in clothing design too; she and Ned are the vocal minority on movie nights for old-school, low budget science fiction; and when it comes to Michelle, Cindy just so happens to have the same deadpanned, vaguely dark sense of humor that usually Michelle has to wait for to grow on people before they can truly get her.
She wins them all over in their own ways, and really it’s Gwen that takes the longest. Michelle knows her girlfriend has a territorial streak, sees it play out here, but also knows that it’s going to be a short-lived thing even before it does, inevitably, die out with a bit of incidental gossiping on Cindy’s part.
As it turns out, Cindy and Gwen both have a sharpness to them that feeds off of each other that might make them quite the force to be reckoned with should the circumstances allow for it.
And so Cindy Moon joins their little family, running in late to group study dates at the Coffee Bean and joining Ned’s team every month in the great movie night debate.
Just a kind-of flaky girl with a sharp edge and a good heart.
That’s all.
***
Michelle loves living with Ned because she does, in fact, love Ned himself.
Loving it and loving him, however, don’t offer her the quiet alone time she sometimes needs to get her work done. It’ll be Ned and Flash having an argument about whatever’s going on in the kitchen or Ned and whoever that guy he’s been seeing making out on the couch or, even when it’s quiet, still just too easy to go into Ned’s room and fall face first on his bed and ignore all of her responsibilities in favor of listening to him talk about his day.
So she loves living there.
She needs somewhere quiet and alone to learn her lines for an upcoming audition, too though, which is what brings her to Gwen’s apartment on an afternoon when Gwen has class and Cindy has work.
Alone and quiet but still a comfortable and familiar space in which she doesn’t feel like she’s intruding on anyone’s life by being here, just lines to learn and notes to jot down about the scene and she’s not the one intruding.
Not when she can hear a window on the other side of the apartment slide open followed by the immediate clattering and falling and thumping of what Michelle can only assume is a person sneaking into the apartment.
While she’s here alone.
She freezes mid pace, folded up print out of her sides in one hand and a highlighter stopping its twirl through her fingers in the other. She stops breathing, scanning the wide open living room and cursing the size of it for not offering any good hiding spots.
There’s some sort of instinct that takes over her then, an instinct she doesn’t understand and an instinct she can’t remember ever having used before, but she’s moving on quiet feet to the kitchen, pulling a knife out of the woodblock by the stove and slipping as silently as she can down the hallway before she can second guess herself.
A careful listen tells her that the noise— the grunting and the moving of furniture— is coming from Cindy’s room rather than Gwen’s, and she presses back against the wall just outside the cracked door.
Michelle acts on instinct and because it's instinct she won’t take the time to consider how weird it is that she’s confronting an intruder like this until much later down the line, so she just presses up against that wall and takes a deep, centering breath.
A clench of the jaw.
A squaring of the shoulders.
A launch through the door with a kitchen knife brandished—
“Who are you and what do you— what?”
She freezes, not for the first time in the past five and a half minutes, but in a desperately different way than the first time, point of the knife stalling aloft in the air as she takes in the sight of local New York vigilante Silk holding one hand up in surrender while the other seems to be holding her upright against the desk by the window.
“You’re— you’re— Is Silk breaking into my girlfriend’s apartment?” Michelle gapes at her, gapes at the sight of that familiar suit she’s been seeing on the cover of the Bugle more frequently these days, that red mask over the lower half of her face.
“Um…” Silk says eloquently, eyes huge under dark hair gone astray, and Michelle thinks she’s going to speak up, going to offer some sort of explanation to being caught in such a strange position, but instead of that she just sort of…
Falls over.
Collapses straight onto poor Cindy’s nice rug, which Michelle can see soaking through with blood as she finally unfreezes from her probably less-threatening-than-intended pose in the doorway and drops the knife to go to her.
“You’re bleeding,” she says, feeling frantic as she gets to her knees in front of where Silk is trying to be back up onto hers with a hand pressing messily into her clearly injured side. “You’re— you’re Silk and you’re bleeding and I just—”
Michelle lifts a hand, all of her intentions on blocking Silk’s head from slamming into the corner of the desk, a simple and kind task to help this disoriented, bleeding-out hero on the floor in front of her, only for her pinky to get caught on the edge of Silk’s mask at the same moment that she’s jerking away from Michelle’s hand with a choked out no, don’t on her breath.
And Michelle has no interest in outing this woman. She understands the desire for people like Silk to keep their identities under wraps, and although Michelle has her own hang-ups on superhero-dom, some of which are political, some of which are moral, and some of which have to do with the weird way her stomach jumps when she watches Spider-Man get into a fight with a big bad on television, she knows somehow that their intentions are good.
She looks at Silk and she knows that her intentions are good.
Even before she finds out that she’s Cindy Moon.
“MJ, please—”
“What the f—”
***
Cindy Moon has radioactive spider powers.
No one knows, except for Michelle now, and anyone that might have heard Michelle’s very loud exclamation of surprise through the walls of this apartment building.
Cindy Moon is Silk, fights for the little guy, gets herself into big messes and survives the tragedy of her own life by the web at the tips of her fingers.
Cindy Moon is a superhero, and the only issue Michelle really has with that is that she hadn’t figured it out on her own already.
“It explains a lot, you know,” she says, pulling a needle through the gash in Cindy’s side to the soundtrack of hissing through teeth and the creaking of the countertop where Cindy sits as she grips it too hard. “The crazy schedule you always try to pass off as Bugle stuff, the privacy about your bedroom, the fact you can eat like three truck drivers stacked up in a trench coat and still look like that…”
“You guys pay attention to that stuff?” Cindy asks, brow furrowed as she looks up from the wound Michelle is mending.
“The you being a weirdo stuff?” Michelle snorts. “Yeah, we’re your best friends, of course we do.”
Cindy’s eyes are on her as Michelle finishes stitching her up, cleans up around it one last time and bandages it with careful, steady hands, and she knows Cindy’s eyes are on her even if she doesn’t go searching for them.
She’s only known Cindy Moon for a matter of months, just barely half a year, but there’s some sort of kindred to the two of their spirits, the masks to be worn in the face of being truly known, so Michelle can understand that being seen would knock the wind out of her a little bit.
It knocks the wind out of Michelle, after all, every time Ned brings her a cookie from their favorite bakery because he can tell she’s been stressed all week, or when Flash sends her a funny tweet he sees just because it reminds him of her, or how Gwen will leave her big comfortable sweatshirt in Michelle’s room because she knows Michelle likes to wear it a few times before she returns it.
To be known is a terrifying thing, and Michelle can only imagine that’s magnified when the mask you wear is literal rather than just a metaphor for how you carry yourself through the world, so she lets Cindy look at her.
She lets Cindy accept it.
And she patches her up until she’s ready to speak again.
“You’re really good at that,” Cindy says, a tenderness to her voice as she slides off the counter and looks at the bandage in the mirror beside where Michelle is washing her hands. “Where did you learn how to give someone stitches?”
Blood rushes off of Michelle’s hands under the flow of warm water, fingers scrubbing under nails and around cuticles.
It’s a lot like— don’t try to handle it on your own— don’t— just let me help you—
“Um,” Michelle clears her throat, brow furrowing around a moment of absence on her brain’s part. “First aid training in— high school?”
She says it, and she doesn’t mean for it to come out like a question, but that’s the choice that her vocal cords make so she has to let it happen.
“Yeah,” she doubles down. “First aid training.”
Cindy doesn’t seem to notice anything off in Michelle’s voice, too preoccupied with looking at the pull of her bandage with a grimace as she slips on a sweatshirt over her sports bra. She doesn’t notice anything off in Michelle, but maybe it’s because there’s a weight emanating from her own nearly visible thoughts.
There’s something heavy she is carrying, something she looks like she’s trying to figure out how to set down, where to set it down to begin with.
“Cin…?” Michelle begins hesitantly, a prompt and an offering, something rather than nothing because she can’t look at this person she cares about struggling so much and not feel a responsibility to help.
Not when she has the power to.
“Thank you,” Cindy blurts out, finally looking Michelle in the eye. “Just. Thanks, MJ.”
Michelle goes soft, tender hearted and loose-browed.
“Yeah,” she exhales, because it feels obvious to her, that this is how it should play out despite the shock and the blood on the carpet and the knife from the woodblock in the kitchen. “Yeah, of course.”
“Not of course,” Cindy shrugs with a half-hearted laugh. “Just…” she shakes her head, purses her lips around whatever she can’t find to say, and then surges forward to pull Michelle into a hug.
It’s words enough, Michelle thinks, from one girl in a mask to another, because Cindy Moon is a semi-awkward young woman with a propensity for lateness and a life more complicated than Michelle had ever considered, but she is good at the core of it all.
Cindy is out there trying to do good and what’s Michelle to do but help her?
There’s nothing else to do.
Not when she loves her so.
V.
“MJ, hide. I swear to God, if you would just listen to me—”
“As long as you’re sitting out in the open doing the crazy shit, I’m sitting out in the open with you,” she tells Ned, watching the door and watching his back as he does his thing.
They’re in a fucking sewage plant, which isn’t where Michelle had been planning on spending her Saturday night, but it is where she’s spending it, so there’s no point dwelling on that.
“Cindy will be here any minute,” Ned goes on with frustration, “you should go.”
“Fat chance,” she snorts in response, seeing his eyes roll even if he doesn’t look away from the task at hand and Michelle isn’t sure how they got here.
Well, that’s not true, she’s painfully sure of how they got here and it includes the most absurd series of semi-nonsensical events that have filled her senior year at NYU.
It includes them stumbling into the possession of a ring while trying to help Cindy track down her family that it turns out Ned is specifically capable of wielding in a magical sort of way.
It includes a Goblin King and an underground city full of people infected by some sort of goblin-making serum that Cindy gets wrapped up in.
It includes Ned finding a way to put his magic and his science together to come up with a cure while Michelle and Gwen try to keep their spider-friend from diving headfirst into the madness without backup.
It includes this moment, right now, while Ned is preparing his magic to force it through the entrance to the sewer where they stand, down into the underground city, and waiting for the cue from Cindy who is supposed to be coming through that door at any moment—
“We’re here— we’re here!” she comes crashing through the door with none of the grace usually exhibited by someone of her enhancements, all that fluid swinging and lyrical fighting having no place as she comes panting to a stop in front of them, door only swinging half shut before it’s opening again, “you need to—”
“Wait!”
Spider-Man, sprinting through the door and skidding to a stop with his hands up, those wide, white eyes not giving the same level of urgency as is in his voice.
“You need to wait, you need to stop— that spell is— the spell you’re doing—”
“Is gonna get fucked if everyone keeps distracting me!” Ned exclaims over his shoulder, a droplet of sweat dripping down his temple from the exertion of energy into this thing.
“Can he do it?” Michelle looks to Cindy instead of this other guy— this guy she doesn’t know past her friend’s stories and that one time in high school he’d saved her friends at the Washington Monument— because she’s the one Michelle trusts. She’s the one that doesn’t give Michelle weird, inexplicable heart palpitations and complicated vibes every time she sees a picture of him in the paper. “He’s been ready and he’s holding it back, can he—”
“No,” Spider-Man takes a jerky step forward and Michelle steps between him and where Ned’s back is still turned. “I— Okay,” he lifts his hands in a pseudo-surrender. “Okay, just—”
“Back up,” Michelle tells him sternly, ignoring the way her heart races, not understanding what’s going on inside her body to make it feel— not scared but, but, but—
“I’m not gonna hurt you,” Spider-Man says, something like a tremor to his voice, Cindy coming into the mix with careful steps as she watches him, like she can hear it too, this distinctly un-superhero-like anxiety. “I promise— I promised myself— I promise—”
“He has to do this spell, right?” Michelle looks to Cindy. “All those people, they need him to do it?”
“The memory component,” Spider-Man insists, cutting in before Cindy can respond. “It’s not safe while you’re in here, you have to take the memory component out, man, please.”
“You’re all debating this thing,” Ned says, strained, “but it’s kind of too late to stop it now and if we’re gonna do this in time—”
“Just go,” Cindy makes the executive decision. “Just do it—”
“Silk—”
“It’s just gonna affect us in this room, Webs,” Cindy implores, “they’re just two people and I trust them with my life, so if they find out about your— if they remember—”
“They’re not just two people—if they remember—”
And Michelle is intrigued now, caught up in an argument she doesn’t understand but scratches at something uncomfortable, something like tears she didn’t notice at her high school graduation and a fall from a great height and the sun, sunrise, sunlight.
Her intrigue is cut short, however, because Ned doesn’t wait for Spider-Man to try and explain his issue here, he just trusts Cindy and he lets the spell go. He stops holding it hostage and he lets it go, a blast of gold light down the entrance to the sewer and bouncing back into the room with them.
Blinding and all-encompassing, Michelle feels rather than sees her own self toppling to the ground as it wraps itself around her, Ned’s magic like the warm, thoroughly spiced smell of a kitchen in use, filling her to the brim with the feeling of it.
Light.
Rising.
Falling.
Tell me when you see me again.
It feels like it lasts a lifetime, and maybe it does, the reliving of it all. It feels like being submerged in it, viscous and thick, difficult to navigate but impossible not to on the slow drag back through her own life.
Blank spaces filling in, snow on a television screen going clear in full HD and surround sound, it leaves Michelle gasping her way back to reality on her hands and knees with all the understanding in the world and none of it.
None of it.
None of it—
“MJ— MJ— Hey, you’re okay, are you okay?” Gwen’s hands, those familiar hands, those hands that carry Michelle’s heart, that Michelle loves like nothing before, like nothing, like no one— “Cin, what happened to her, is she—”
“Oh my God,” Ned’s voice breaks through, and it’s not like he’s interrupting Gwen, he’s just talking. He’s just talking his way back into life like Michelle is breathing her way in, and she can look at Ned but she can’t look where Ned is looking, not yet.
Gwen’s hands on her face, when did Gwen get here? Gwen holding her tight with all that fear in her voice all of that—
“Peter?”
Michelle releases an unsteady breath when Ned says it because it can’t be real, how can any of it be real? How can this be where they’ve ended up after— after—
Spider-Man, right at the corner of her vision, reaches up and pulls off his mask without so much as a beat of hesitation.
“Oh my God,” Ned walks forward, “oh my fucking god—”
“Ned, I can explain—” Peter. Peter Peter Peter—
“Don’t,” Ned tells him flatly, “don’t yet, I’m— I’m about to get unbelievably angry with you but I just— just— holy shit,” he collapses on that final breath, arms falling around Peter’s shoulders and pulling him in close in a move that forces Michelle to look at him.
Forces her to look, but not keep looking as she turns her head back to Gwen, lets this woman press their foreheads together, eyes frantic and searching as they rove across Michelle’s face.
“Are you okay?” she says quietly. “MJ, are you okay?”
“I’m okay,” she tells her on an exhale. “I’m—” a wobble of her chin, “I love you. I love you, I love you—”
“I know,” Gwen pulls back, kisses her on the forehead. “Hey, I know, I’ve got you. Cindy’s— Cindy’s leaving to go handle the rest of it and we can go home, okay? I’ve got you.”
It’s all that Michelle wants, to go home, but there’s a part of her that realizes even as she nods and lets Gwen help her to her feet that it will never be the same again. Everything is different now, everything is changed and changing, everything that Michelle has built her worldview around has suddenly shifted and as she crosses that room, as she looks at Peter and Ned pull apart with remarks about—
“You’re such a bastard—”
“I know, I know—”
—Michelle can’t help the burning fury in her gut.
She reroutes her and Gwen’s path, feeling that steady hand at her lower back like an anchor to reality, an anchor to her own sense of disruption, and then she stops right next to Ned.
“Are you okay here?” she asks, a hand on his shoulder. “Are you okay if I leave?”
Peter is right there, he is right there in the corner of her eye and it’s too much, it’s too much all at once and she can’t keep up the facade that it’s not for much longer.
“Yeah,” Ned tells her, because he looks at her and he knows her. That’s her guy. “Go ahead, and we’ll— we’ll talk later, okay?”
He knows her and she knows him, squeezing his shoulder and nodding with a meaning spanning longer than just the four years they’ve lived in each other’s worlds so entirely.
“Okay,” she agrees, and she starts to leave, lets Gwen’s confusion drag her back towards the door only for—
“Em.”
“Don’t,” she turns, not sharply, but with so much certainty to the movement that it doesn’t give him any wiggle room around the suggestion. “I can’t do this right now. I need— I can’t do this with you while it’s all…” she motions to her head where memory is still folding over memory in and out of origami shapes, crumpling and flattening out again as her brain tries to settle what is true against what she had believed to be true for so long.
He doesn’t get to look at her brokenhearted with his mask in his hands and call her Em and act like nothing has changed. He doesn’t get to do that when he should know she needs to process this behind closed doors.
He should know, he would know if he had been here for four years, the rest of them know.
“Okay,” he says with a clearing of his throat that sounds almost painful, feels it too, the sound of that voice all grown up.
“It’s my turn to walk away,” she says, a little less certain, a little more unsteady, but strong in spite of it all. “It’s my turn this time.”
“Okay,” Peter nods once more, looking at her like she’s risen from the dead, but it’s the last of him she sees before she’s turning and taking Gwen’s hand and dragging them out of that place.
She has a lot to process.
She needs to go home.
***
“Did you love him?”
Michelle breathes deep around the question, head on Gwen’s chest, those gentle, careful fingers smoothing over her hair in a soothing motion that Michelle isn’t sure she deserves after everything she’s just dropped in her girlfriend’s lap.
The chaos and the adventure and the trauma and the damned young love, doomed from the start she thinks maybe, but certainly strong when it had lived. Where it still lives to some regard, deep inside of her chest where that seventeen year old girl still resides, coming through more now than she has in years.
It’s been years.
“Yeah,” she admits quietly, waiting for the moment when Gwen pushes her away, waiting for the moment when she says the wrong thing and fucks it all up, because this is Peter Parker coming back into her life and if she knows anything about that it’s that something is probably going to get messy. She just hopes it isn’t this.
“Do you— do you still?” Gwen asks around a thick swallow, like she’s trying to keep her voice steady, like she’s trying to keep from sounding jealous even though it’s a reasonable request, the answer to that question.
Michelle sits up so she can see Gwen’s face when she tells her, “I love you,” with all the sincerity that belongs to it, all the truth of the thing because she is so mixed up and she is so confused inside her own head and heart but she knows this to be true.
“I know,” Gwen nods, a melancholy smile taking over her face as she tucks a curl of hair behind Michelle’s ear. “I know you do, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still have… lingering feelings?”
There’s a tension in Michelle’s jaw that she has to hold there to keep from choking on the mess of words she wants to spit out. She wants to make herself so very clear and it’s impossible when she feels so little clarity about any of it, about any of it other than the fact that this is Gwen and this is who she loves and this is her world.
Four years and so much life between who she is and who she had been standing at the top of the Statue of Liberty, this is the world she wants.
“I’m not going back to him,” she says steadily. “I’m not seventeen anymore, I’m a completely different person than the one he left behind and I have a lot of feelings for him, sure, and some of them feel like love but a lot of them are— are definitely not. He’s a story to me. He’s just a story without a conclusion, but maybe this is it. Maybe this can be how that story… ends.”
Gwen watches her face carefully, and Michelle can feel her holding back her words in a way that is so unlike her to the point where Michelle’s stomach flips with each scan of Gwen’s eyes. She doesn’t seem angry, doesn’t even seem entirely upset, but there’s something heavy here now, something that hadn’t been before.
Like empty spaces filling in.
“Okay,” Gwen finally acquiesces, leans forward to press a kiss to Michelle’s cheek. “Okay, I believe you.”
A breath of stale air escapes Michelle’s lungs, leaning into the hand that Gwen cups around her jawline, just under the curve of her ear.
“Thank you,” she says on an exhale of relief.
“But this isn’t how it ends,” Gwen goes on, almost apologetic in the curve of her brow, that same melancholy pulling at her lips. “This isn’t how it ends with him. You have to call him, MJ.”
“Gwen, I’m not—” she shakes her head definitively, “I’m not interested in—”
“I know you,” Gwen cuts her off, holding her face in both hands now. “I know you’ll regret it forever if you don’t ever talk to him again, if you don’t try and at least find some sort of closure from this whole thing. And I’m not gonna be someone for you to use as an excuse to not try, because you’ll only end up resenting me for letting you.”
Michelle purses her lips, trying against all hope to hold in the tears burning at her eyes, because she knows that Gwen is right and she doesn’t want to hear it. She doesn’t want this mess, she wants the life that she’s built because it’s a good life and she built it with her own two hands.
She built it without knowing the foundations atop it was structured and still it had turned out so good, so full of love and so full of life, and she hates that it’s been disrupted in this way, even if she also knows that in the long run it’s better this way. It’s better to know than it is to live in the dark, it’s better to find closure rather than keep living on with static in her head and walls she can’t see past.
That doesn’t mean it hurts any less.
“Call him, MJ,” Gwen grabs her phone from off the bed and presses it into Michelle’s hand. “I’m not going anywhere.”
And that’s the crux of the thing, the reason that this isn’t some fairy tale ending where everything goes back to the way it once was, because no one wants it to be.
No one wants it to be, and that’s the crux of the thing too, because no one wants it when they’ve spent so many years finding who they are, coming to terms with their own selves and identities and wants.
Michelle is a performer and she is a daughter and she is a friend and a lover too, to a woman who makes her heart sing.
Michelle Jones-Watson is intelligent, booksmart and emotionally in equal parts, and so she knows that although the space that Peter had left behind when he broke his promise, the space he had chosen to leave, no longer exists, that her heart still has room to grow, still has more space left to mold and fill. Even if that space will need time to become anything resembling the kind of trust they once had for one another.
There’s uncertainty here, that anything good could possibly come from this, but Michelle trusts Gwen, knows that she has her best interests at heart.
Michelle doesn’t have to change herself, she doesn’t owe this man anything and she knows that she’s strong enough to send him away again if he ever pulls another bullshit stunt like that. She knows she can do it, because amongst all of the other loves of her life, there’s another that she is mature enough even in her continuing youth to put first.
Because Michelle has respect for herself, respect which allows her to open her heart to Ned Leeds, to Flash Thompson, to Cindy Moon, to Gwen Stacy, and maybe even to him one day too, the boy turning to a man who had hurt her so deeply all those years ago.
Because he’s a different person now in the same way that she is, and maybe this version of her can love this version of him. There is no life without change and there is no love without it either, so she can find the space in her heart to love him again someday because she loves herself, loves this life she’s built enough to try.
For who she is, for who he is, for the memory of a hand in hers and a future when her past and present can meet.
“You’ll stay with me?” she asks, looking up from the phone in her hands and seeing the nervous but determined energy of a partner willing to stay through something so potentially troublesome in Gwen’s eyes.
“I’ll stay with you,” she insists, forehead nuzzling up against Michelle’s before she kisses her once on the lips. “I’ll stay with you through all of it.”
Michelle knows it to be true.
She respects herself.
She loves herself, she loves her life, and isn’t that what matters most?
At the precipice of everything else, she loves.