Chapter Text
As far as bad days go, it was probably sad to admit that this didn’t even rank amongst his top ten. The metal doughnut that had flown into the city and caused a raucous for a few blocks was definitely an inconvenience, Tony wasn’t totally happy with the resolution but Peter saw small blessings in the way that Squidward packed up and retreated once his bigger and equally ugly friend was indisposed of. It meant he could get to his class (nearly) on time. His TA didn’t even glare at him for entering the lecture hall fifteen minutes late for his theory class He wasn’t going to look that gift horse in the mouth.
Nor was he going to overlook how MJ rewarded his lack of fatal injuries with subs from Delmar’s even though it’s so far out of her way and Sub Haven is definitely closer but she knows how he prefers the comfort of something familiar even if he wouldn’t complain otherwise. Delmar’s was a good midpoint between his high school and his apartment, usually where he made the split decision to go on patrol instead of making it back before May. It was where Ben would spend an hour catching up with the shop owner after they’d walked the extra few blocks simply because he wanted to see his friend. It tasted like home, and after a rough start to the day, it was everything he needed - he hadn’t had to ask. MJ just knew.
Nor was he going to complain about how she stared at him while chewing a mouthful of his food before reaching over tenderly to touch his jaw.
“You got hit.”
“Happens sometimes.” He shrugs. “Do I look rugged?”
MJ presses her fingers with more force into the bruise and turns his face away. Pain radiates out from the touch but all he can focus on is the lingering warmth of her fingers.
“You look like a loser.”
Yeah, he thinks. This was pretty far from a bad day.
“I know you are, but what am I?”
“Someone who acts their age.”
“Sounds boring.” Peter grins back at her.
MJ continues to stare, her eyes narrowing before she turns back to her own food. “You have something in your teeth.”
“Oh? So I didn’t lose any this time around. Huh.”
It was a pretty good day indeed.
The day only gets better when she lets him rest his head in her lap while he attempts to work on his report for tomorrow’s lab. Her fingers thread through his hair instinctively, lazily flicking through the TV while he works.
He’d be envious of all the free time MJ has in the evenings now that she’s working full-time at OsCorp, a job that he could have been a contender for if he’d been able to graduate on time, if it weren’t for the fact that she was so deserving of it. Her continual presence in his apartment, when he arrives back from class or patrol, is also a bonus.
He’s hoping that maybe he could ask her if she wanted to spend some of that free time with him outside the apartment too. Maybe at a restaurant. With some wine. Maybe a shared dessert. Followed by a walk along the waterfront because she likes to watch the gentle waves, thinks there’s something poetic about it and is always more willing to ramble when that’s the only distraction in front of her - Peter likes to listen. He wants to ask her if she might want to spend some of that free time spent in a similar position to how they are now, but maybe with her hands on his cheek again and her lips on his.
He hasn’t quite found the right way to ask about that without it sound all like a little too much, so he bites his tongue. Again. They’ve known each other since they were four, neighbours and then friends separated by different schools and the metro then finally classmates again in High School.
There isn’t much that MJ hasn’t heard him say, but somehow these words feel like they’re just a little too daunting.
Ned arrives home from his very real adult job that Peter isn’t envious of either despite how cool it sounds because once again, his friends are too good for this world and deserve good things in return. Plus his very real adult job helps cover a lot of their rent which Peter tries his best to subsidise further but between ongoing student loans and Jonah’s shit going rate for freelancers, isn’t all that much. Ned says he doesn’t mind; friends help friends and in return for Peter taking the more mould and damp infested room for significantly less rent, Ned gets confirmation every night that his best friend is alive and an in-house super-strength powered jar opener.
They all know who is getting the worse end of that deal, but Ned does a good job of not caring and Peter loves him so much for that.
His return breaks the tension that MJ probably doesn’t even realise is happening.
A day where Peter isn’t putting his foot in his mouth is a good one. More points for this day. Definitely not bad at all even with the flying spaceship trying to ruin everything. It hadn’t been the end of the world, and Peter is really seeing that now.
“You guys order in?” Ned asks, eyes scanning the abandoned wrappers and bags on the coffee table in front of them.
“Yours is on the counter.” MJ replies offhandedly.
“Where’d you go?”
“Uh– this new place? I’d heard good things, can’t remember the name now.”
Peter hums, making a mental note to find out where that place was. The food was good, really good. It’d settled something in him and honestly, had been a cornerstone to his not-so-bad-probably-actually-very-good day. He’d like to go back there one day - every day if he could afford it.
Something itches at the back of his head, tingling and pulling him away from the moment. He was spacing out, everything feeling like it was ten feet further away from him and the room shifting on an axis. Knowing him better than he knew himself, MJ’s nails scratch along the base of his skull, grounding him again and everything in the room falling where it was meant to.
He probably just needs to drink some water.
Sometimes May joked that Peter’s ‘spider-sense’ was just another word for paranoia. He would always reply that she had never worked alongside Tony Stark. That really taught him a whole new definition of the word, and made him feel a whole lot better about his own work-life balance.
May would then remind him that comparing or modelling himself after Tony Stark probably wasn’t the greatest of ideas; MJ vehemently agreed; Ned conceded that if Peter could replicate his corporate work-life balance, that might be nice - they could use the money, after all, not much, just a single billion dollars would do.
All this to say that three days later when Peter is sprinting towards the ESU campus, he is unsurprised when a call from Tony automatically connects itself through his headphones.
“Kid, you’re coming in for a debrief with Bruce. I hate to ask.”
Peter bites his tongue to refrain from pointing out that he hadn’t asked and more told him. Demanded, in fact. “Bruce wasn’t really involved in that fight, plus… didn’t we win ?”
“Big green guy crashes back into Earth saying the end is nigh and you think one fight is all we had in store?”
“You might not know this because it’s not exactly somewhere someone of your networth goes outside of an ad placement but that really just sounds like any other Tuesday in Times Square.”
“Pete–”
“Tony, I would love to really, but I’m on my way to an interview for a TA position that I can’t miss. I need this, and do you know how rare it is that this spot is open with my theory prof? Dude usually has a backlog of students for the role and he just forgot to assign anyone this year.”
The lack of forethought definitely could be a horrific sign of what’s to come in terms of his own workload. If Professor Warren is spacing on the finer details of his teaching because he’s split between so many classes, hell knows what will be in store for Peter’s assignments.
Once again though, he’s choosing to look at this as a glass-half-full situation. They were two-thirds of the way through the semester? What were the chances that Warren would realise he hadn’t chosen a TA when Peter had finally started to get his schedule under control?
Slim to none.
Parker luck wasn’t such a bad omen anymore!
“I thought you graduated? Aren’t you old enough to have graduated?”
“If we spoke more, you’d know that I had to repeat a class. Or a year. Or two.” Peter says, his lie getting increasingly closer to the truth with every word. He should shut up, Tony didn’t need to know all that. Their relationship worked best when there was as little opportunity for meddling as possible. He provided technical support and medical facilities along with the occasional upgrade and that’s all Peter needed. Back in High School, there were bi-monthly catch-ups to check that Peter was alive and not another dead body on Tony’s conscience but the time restraints of growing up had meant they both got a little too busy for that when he started college. “Let’s pencil in a lunch instead. No shop talk necessary.”
“Sucks to be the guy with six tickets on his car out front, huh?” Peter says to May around a mouthful of broccoli. He’s getting close to the wrong side of twenty and she’s still taking care of him like a little kid, using their weekly (or whenever they can be scheduled in) catch-ups to force-feed him some vegetables because she doesn’t trust that he and Ned eat anything remotely like them if Ned’s family haven’t supplied them with leftovers for the week.
Whenever he visits, his old room is always made up too. MJ and Ned both complained that the second they moved out of their family homes, their old bedrooms were converted into offices or that siblings had overtaken the space. Peter never had that. Maybe it’s because May never intended to have a child that she can’t seem to let go the way other parents do, but secretly he hopes she never learns that lesson. He likes feeling as though he has a place here - even if he doesn’t always deserve her kindness for everything he puts her through.
“Oh no one owns that. It’s been a right pain when the alarm goes off on it - no one in the building has the keys so it rings and rings and–” May cuts herself off with a frustrated shake of her head.
“Want me to take the alarm out of it on my way back out?” He offers because it’s been the two of them for so long that he can’t help but want to take care of her the same way she does him.
May has had a far few sleepless nights because of him - injuries or late patrols, arguments and growing up, all bringing a turmoil that Peter will never be able to apologise for. Not really. He can try and give her this though, a little bit of peace for the moment by sorting out a broken car.
“No, no. The city’ll handle it soon enough.”
Three days later, MJ complains of the same thing, except this time it’s three abandoned cars that no one in her building is willing to claim. Four days after that, he’s woken up by the sound of horns blaring in front of his apartment and Peter notices that there are empty, abandoned cars in the middle of their street.
Once again, something scratches at the back of his head, begging for his attention but as the room begins to spin around him, nothing sharpens. There’s no siren call for him to pinpoint. Everything is just sort of— off.
Maybe May was right about that paranoia.
He cancels his plans with Tony to just be on the safe side, see if it isn’t something symptomatic of even considering spending time with him and absorb his fanaticisms through sheer osmosis.
Two weeks later, Peter is sitting in a lecture hall with the rest of his class. The buzzing sensation returns because not a single one of them can figure out why they’ve been assigned to a class with no professor.
There has never been a Theoretical Physics professor at ESU, the class shouldn’t even be listed on the website and yet Peter’s calendar states that he’s TAing a couple of classes for Freshman later in the week for the subject.
They all agree it must be a system error but that doesn’t satisfy the itch at the back of his head.
“Walk me through it again,” MJ says, crossed-legged on the edge of her work building. They’re meeting for lunch because Peter was ‘being weird and flaky’, and she’ll ‘take him dressed in the suit but you need five minutes of normalcy’.
She was right, he did. She was always right.
Would telling her he loved her right now be considered bad timing?
“You’ll think I’m crazier if I repeat myself.”
Her brow arches, eyes flicking over him in derision. He is perched opposite her with one leg dangling off the building with no concern about the massive drop below them dressed in a red and blue spandex suit. There is nothing strange or crazy about that at all - he steals a chip from her as compensation for the silent remark, although it wasn’t technically theft - she’d brought a second (and third) bag up to the roof because the vending machines in her office are free and stock the fancy lentil chips that Peter would never willingly buy from Trade Joes given their price but adores dearly. He brought her a burrito bowl and a coffee.
“I think my Theoretical Physics Prof has something to do with all the abandoned cars.”
“I didn’t realise you took–”
“I don’t, but according to the school system, I do but–”
“And hasn’t there just been a rise of car jackings? Isn’t that all it is?”
“Car thieves don’t usually leave the car in the middle of the road. It’s usually sold on, left out of city limits. You know… in a way that they can actually make some money. Plus none of them have registrations, right? That one outside your building, no one’s had collectors ‘round asking for the ticket money, have they?”
An expression crosses MJ’s face like it’s the first time she’s thought to question that logic. The same way Peter hadn’t - probably wouldn’t have- if it weren’t for that incessant fucking buzzing.
He’d spent the morning over at the metal doughnut’s crash site, helping with recovery. There was still rubble covering the ground and the cars that people had left in the middle of the street hadn’t been collected. The nearby subway exit was still blocked, and with every second he spent there, he couldn’t actually remember many details of the fight like there were huge black holes in his memory. It was as though the whole ordeal was fast paced, quick cut footage jumping from moment to moment rather than something he’d actually experienced.
It’d left him feeling a little suspicious of– something , and his pride wasn’t in a place quite yet where he could go to Tony and tell him he was right.
“Okay so… what? This guy, who you think might have been your professor is orchestrating, a– mass car movement? Is this a social experiment?”
Peter shrugs lamely, feeling more frustrated for the lack of anything that he has to go by.
“Your sister’s dating someone in the admissions office, right? Do you think she could– I don’t know, look into it, see if there maybe was someone and they erased their record or–”
MJ’s expressions turns sympathetic, head lowering and her hand going over his. The reassuring squeeze she gives his fingers feels more pitying than anything else, and he can’t stomach it, instead flipping over their hands so that his were on top.
“Stay at my place tonight, I think the mould in your room might be getting to you a little bit. You need a clear head–”
“I know I sound crazy, but I swear, something is going on I just–”
“And I believe you! I do, but, Peter… I don’t have a sister.”
The world feels like it’s spiralling out, like Peter has turned and allowed himself to fall off the edge of the roof and embrace the freefall below. He’s known MJ since she was four. He spent so many afternoons in her house before his parents died and he had to move across the city to live with May and Ben. Mr. Watson was a teacher so his schedule allowed him to watch the kids- plural- after school. Kids, plural because– because there was MJ and Peter. There was– No.
In her house, she had the backyard with the swingset and three bedrooms– her parent’s room with the ensuite that they’d make ‘potions’ in, MJ’s bedroom with a bunk bed and an– an office. There was– There was only MJ.
He rubs his free hand over the top of his mask.
A fire engine crashes into the side of the building. Thankfully no one is severely injured, all parties are dazed and extremely confused. The driver’s set is empty but it’d been travelling through a green light and all the other guys couldn’t figure out why they weren’t the ones behind the wheel, as if someone else had been driving all along and they just never took notice.
The buzzing in Peter’s head has turned to screaming.
New York has always been his home. His parents lived a little further out in the suburbs of Queens - they were the kind of people who had their life together; married with a house, and they planned Peter because his mom wanted to time her ‘maternity leave’ with a natural break in her doctorate so she wouldn’t fall behind. They still had a New York zip code, though, and he would drift further into the city when he visited May and Ben in their small apartment that wasn’t designed for children because they never wanted any.
Mr Watson took them into the city on weekends to visit place like the M&M store, braver than Peter is now by loading a couple of kids up on sugar and carting them around the subway system; Ben took him to ball games.
After he met Ned in Middle School and was given permission to move around the city of his own accord, they would spend hours after school visiting retro games stores and trying to find the best dollar slice of pizza and more.
Peter started to find his feet in the city, and saw a version of New York that was his .
When he got his powers and began to scale the walls and swing between buildings, he saw even more of it, tapped into the beating pulse and found that his heart was matching its rhythm.
Standing on the edge of a roof, staring down at a street where every single shop window is empty and there are only a few lights shining out from the apartments above them, he feels his stomach bottoming out. Worst of all, it is quiet.
New York has always been his home, it has never been quiet.
He doesn’t understand how he failed to notice the city dying out right in front of him and he doesn’t understand how no one else is worried.
Throughout school he had complained that there was never enough time in the day. He had around a million things to do between class, AcaDec (which he couldn’t quit once MJ became captain because he’d already been suffering her quiet disappointment all year when Liz was in charge and refused to let her down further), homework, chores and patrol, there was never any time to do anything else.
The summer between High School and College was meant to be a break. His responsibilities were quite literally cut in half. The plan was to spend his time annoying Jonah into giving him something that reassembled a paycheck, spending that paycheck on discounted doughnuts and coffee at MJ’s work and patrolling whenever he could.
Obviously that meant that he and Ned decided they would pick up a project that would consume their whole summer.
He found an old radio at a chop shop, brought home and– decided to turn it into a makeshift police scanner with the aim that he could streamline his patrols a little better if he knew where he was needed.
The AI in his suit was meant to do that, but Karen was filtered through Tony’s system and trained on Tony’s idea of what reasonable expectations were for him. Despite the years in Peter’s hands, she’d never really outgrown her programming. A radio was something that Tony couldn’t hack and it consumed most of their summer trying to get it dial into the police channels without offering any feedback in return.
In the grand scheme of things it was pretty low on the list of felonies they’d committed, illegal vigilante topping it off, but with college on the horizon they decided to do it right and do it carefully. Many sleepless nights were spent bent over that thing.
Now it lives on the dresser in Peter’s bedroom.
It’s strange. For how quiet the city has been, the radio itself has been chirping non-stop with traffic accidents and pile ups, robberies from unmanned stores, it’s been– strange.
Weirdest of all, he’s grateful for how busy that radio has kept him. If given the time to think for very long, he starts to believe that he might be going insane.
“MJ told you?” Peter assumes when he slinks out of his room after patrol to find Ned still awake in their lounge.
The room is warm and there’s a lingering smell of tarragon in the air. Ned had cooked for him. An old comforting recipe that Peter’d fallen in love with the first time he stayed overnight at Ned’s house; he’d begged May to make it the very next night but the creamy sauce burnt to the pan and they ended up just ordering pizza afterwards.
“Thought we could hash it out like old times.”
“And you cooked?”
“MJ’s description of you might have… made it sound like you needed a pick-me-up.”
“She said I looked pathetic?” Peter asks through a laugh. The tight knot in his chest uncurling just a little.
Ned makes a vague noise of assent and gestures Peter over to their coffee table. They sit on the floor with their legs crossed and the plates between them, and suddenly, they’re thirteen again talking about how they’re going to win the robotics club competition. The world doesn’t feel so scary when Ned is breaking it down for him like this.
Except, Ned can’t find an answer to this either.
“It sounds like… they never existed.”
“But they did. They must have… There’s echoes of them, like they weren’t fully erased.”
Ned looks down at the table in consideration. They- well, Peter - pulled it off the street and hauled it up the stairs. The first day it was in the apartment, Ned was horrified to see Peter place a beer bottle straight down on the wood without a coaster; Peter reminded him that it was on the street and had probably seen worse things than a watermark. There’s coasters shaped like the DeathStar and a vinyl Record and a single slice of Swiss cheese that protects it now. Ned picks up the cheese coaster, pressing his fingers into the small ceramic holes as he thinks.
“What if–...” He cuts himself off and shakes his head.
“Say it.”
“What if it’s sort of like the false hydra? You’ve seen it but you forgot about it and everyone it eats, you forget about them too?”
Peter wets his lip, thinking back to his conversation with MJ. the slight slip-up he’d made. “I thought MJ had a sister, just– briefly. I don’t even know why, but– if it was a false hydra, why would it go after her? Why would it go after a physics professor?”
“If it’s a monster then it’s not exactly going to have a plan, is it? It’ll just be like ‘ooh, hungry’... indiscriminate.” Ned deflates a little, worrying his lip between his teeth. “Do you think we’ve forgotten anyone like… Do I have a brother I forgot?”
“I don’t know.” Peter says mournfully, wishing he could give Ned a solid answer. What was the point in having a hero for a friend if he couldn’t give you any assurance that the day would be saved?
After a while, Ned speaks again. “I’m not sure I’d want to know… It’d hurt a lot more if I did, right? If I remembered them and now they’re gone.”
Peter sort of thinks that’s the whole point... The memories were what made the pain, but they’re also what made the pain worth it. He missed Ben everyday, an ache stronger than the pain of losing his parents because he had more time with him. He wouldn’t give any of that up though… Not for a second.
He makes the executive decision not to tell May.
It isn’t that he’s deliberately keeping her out of the loop, it’s that it will worry her more if she thinks he’s chasing after something he can’t even put words to. She’ll worry even as she supports him. The world feels scary enough without May needlessly worrying too.
Unfortunately for him, his aunt knows him too well to fall for the silence. They’ve had too many fights about the things he kept from her when he was younger and now she knows when she can push.
Dinner had wrapped up quickly. Peter shovelling his food into his mouth to fill the silences where he’d normally run through whatever was on his mind. He was unable to find any new conversations to start because anytime he looked up from his plate, May would level him with an all too knowing look. For an exceedingly warm woman, May Parker knew how to appear stern and frightening. Every time she looked at him over the rim of her glasses, he felt a shot of fear run through him - it was the same tactic his eighth grade Math teacher used that had both he and Ned confessing to it being their RC car that’d crashed into her classroom and singed Flash’s backpack.
“You’ve been quiet all day.” She points out when he’s trapped under the sink. With dinner finishing so quickly, May had set him on a few household chores that she knew he wouldn’t be able to resist helping her on as a ploy to corner him until he was ready to talk.
He gestures to the spanner between his teeth as an explanation.
May rolls her eyes. “You know what I mean, Pete. C’mon. What’s on your mind.”
“Nothing, really! I’ve just been… busy. School, patrol, impending doom of what I do when I graduate.”
“All things you deal with on the day to day and it never gets you down this bad.”
“Must be the weather. That’s a thing, right? Maybe it’s the weather. Maybe it’s the moon, what’s Mercury up to these days?”
May snorts, “All convincing suggestions, but not quite the answer I was looking for there, kiddo. It’s just you and me here, you can tell me.”
A beat as a lump forms in Peter’s throat. He definitely does want to tell May everything that’s on his mind because she’s never been able to solve all the problems that Peter brings to her doorstep - superheroes and fighting crime bosses and healing within a day from a bullet wound aren’t exactly normal things most mothers have to deal with - but she’s always been good at helping him parse through it. Supportive in any way she can be.
The look on both MJ and Ned’s faces has him biting his tongue though; there are some things that he has to keep from her.
“Just… girls. You know.”
“MJ?” May guesses, a softer smile taking over her face. One that Peter can’t help but mirror. “Yeah, yeah. It’s MJ. She got those chips for me again, I nearly proposed, normal stuff.”
“You know your uncle practically proposed to me on our second date, already had a ten-step plan and everything about how things would go–” May continues on, breaking into a winding story about her and Ben. Peter sits on the floor with his arms draped around his knees, listening to every word like he’s a kid hearing it all for the first time again.
Eventually, when the city that never sleeps has become so quiet that the only thing Peter can hear when he walks to his class is his own thoughts, he decides to take Tony up on that debrief.
There are no dots that really connect these supposed disappearances with the aliens that they’d battled, but Peter had made broader jumps with less concrete evidence in the past. It was better than nothing. It was better than sitting by and letting the world slowly fall apart around him without him trying to stop it.
“Finally decided that those aliens weren’t just taking a violent pit-stop on Earth?” Tony asks as soon as he arrives, working alone in his lab. His eyes are red rimmed and his cheeks look more hollow than Peter has ever seen him. The illusion of ‘Tony Stark’ has fallen away and he can see the man that works to keep it afloat, haunted by something greater than them all.
There is rarely anyone else in this lab. The few times that Peter’s been around Tony, he’s been– disconnected from other people; Happy was always in the driver’s seat, separated by partition glass; Pepper was either in a press room or just didn’t want to step into the lab; Rhodey was only ever interested in getting Tony out of the lab and making sure Peter got sent home on time.
Despite all this, there is a wrongness to witnessing Tony puzzle over this conundrum all alone. Like there is something missing. It sits on the periphery of Peter’s vision, his senses screaming at him to turn his head just a fraction so that he might see all the missing details, except when he finally gives in, there is nothing there. There is no one there. Maybe there was never meant to be or–
“You see it too.” Tony says, rising from the bench and studying Peter’s face.
“There’s nothing to see, that’s the whole problem, it’s just— gone. Like it was never here in the first place.”
As kind as Ned and MJ have been, as much as they’ve tried to understand, there is a relief that floods Peter when Tony offers him a grim smile in return. This is someone who gets it , isn’t indulging him for his own delusions. He’s looking at the problem in front of them like the fight that it really is.
“Do you know what started it? How they’re doing it?”
The ‘it’ in question remains hazy.
“No.” Tony replies through an annoyed huff, turning back to the bench and pulling up a hologram from FRIDAY. It’s a map of the city, every residential building is lit up with around 25% of the map faded out in black. In between the streets of the 3D images are green specs. “This is showing abandoned or recently for sale homes, not including new builds or anything less than 5% of the city’s population could afford, the dots are cars. The orange is crashes or recent accidents where no one can figure out who’s at fault, missing drivers, kids stepping out into roads with no parents– you name it.”
Once in High School, he went to the Met with MJ. She liked the unspoken rule that everyone seemed to follow: that galleries and museums were quiet spaces. Inside, there was painting by Monet, and MJ had told him something about how the distance the painting was viewed at made all the difference. She said that a lot of impressionist paintings fell apart if they were looked at too closely, and stepping back was key; ‘it’s important to look at the bigger picture, don’t you think?’
Peter had agreed at the time. Looking back, he isn’t entirely convinced he quite knew what she meant until now.
“This is a massacre…” He whispers, horrified.
“I had this file created three weeks ago.” Peter’s eyes snap to look at Tony with his hands braced against the bench. His knuckles are turned white. “I had no clue. Found it just two days ago when I saw FRI was running some unfamiliar diagnostics.”
“Someone else asked her to make this?”
“Or I asked her to while they were here… But it got filed away when they–” Tony breathes out heavily. A weariness settles in over his shoulders. “What’s the easiest way to stop someone fighting back?” Peter doesn’t answer. “Make them forget they were ever in a fight to begin with. I think our little alien friends were heralds. They were collecting something whether that was resources or intel and then– poof. Anything to do with that–”
“You think half of New York was relevant to their search?”
“Not a fucking clue.”
Funnily enough, that was the worst thing he had ever heard Tony Stark say.
–
It’s not that Peter doesn’t trust Tony to find a solution - despite their differences, they do work well together and looking at this problem from his viewpoint with his resources is as comforting as the whole ordeal can be - it’s that Tony can be very… narrow minded with these things.
Peter can be too.
As they spend hours trying to figure out what is going on and how it’s happening, his mind drifts to his family and his friends. As ever, he thinks of how he can protect them, and by extension, watch out for everyone else. Even if he forgot them, Peter knows that if May or Ned or MJ disappeared, he wouldn’t be able to properly focus. His solution to this all would be shaped more like a hammer, destroying everything until he could make a mosaic version of them from the pieces.
While Tony worries about the statistics and reviews footage that they’ve already watched five times over, Peter tears his suit apart. History repeating itself, he pulls the tracker from out the lining of his suit and replicates it two more times. He creates three individual trackers, barely bigger than a nickel. Something that can be left in a pocket and forgotten about, twisting the ridiculousness - something they can always keep on them and a way for Peter to always find them.
The tracker isn’t specific to any of them. No names or identifiers that could be wiped from Peter’s memory. Just a small dot that is always blinking on the map.
He uses the lab to etch a spider on to one side of the coin and a cartoonish rendition of his mask on the other - Ned will more readily accept it if it looks ‘official’.
May will take it because he asked her nicely although she will purse her lips and biting back further questions, unsatisfied by his silence.
MJ will tease him, contemplating not taking it at all but she’ll be the one who slides it into the back of her phone case so that it’s on her at all times.
Giving Ned and May the trackers is easy.
He presses one into Ned’s hand when they’re making coffee together the next morning. Bleary-eyed and barely awake, his best friend grins so broadly at the sight of it before asking a million questions about the wiring inside. Dumb questions like ‘what are you doing today’ weren’t allowed before 8am for obvious reasons - they required too much thinking. Topics like tech were permitted at any and all hours of the day because they flowed like second nature from him.
The fondness he felt in his chest made him all the more grateful that he’d given Ned the tracker. That wasn’t something he was willing to lose.
As expected, May accepts it with a concerned look.
MJ is– harder to pin down. When she doesn’t immediately answer his messages and then lets his calls go through to her voicemail, Peter panics. A shot of terror running through him that it might be too late and she’s been taken.
He spends every second betweens dials, reciting facts about her and ingraining them into his memory.
When did they meet? Neighbours since they were four. Her dad watched them in the afternoon. She was quiet and listened to him talk about frogs whereas all the adults he knew would laugh and say that he ‘talked a mile a minute’.
(He got quieter after his parents died. Ben said he missed when Peter was a loudmouth and Peter just shrugged.)
Her favourite food? Vegetable biryani from a small Indian takeout that closed five years ago when the owner died. When she’s had a bad day though, she’ll always reach for a bowl of instant ramen and melted cheese.
What did she look like? Beautiful– Currently , she has long braids that stretched down her back. In college, she went trough a phase where she was sying her hair regularly. The single strands of colour that she’d worn in school evolved to cover her own head. They haven’t made an appearance lately. She has a freckle under her ribs and a mole in the centre of her back, she had a scar on her elbow that looked a little bit like a star. She got it when running away from Scorpion.
What is her name? MJ Watson. Michelle Jones Watson.
What is her name?
What is her name–
“Peter, hi.” She breathes when the call finally connects. “You okay? I can leave in two seconds, how far away are you? Do you need bandages? Do–”
“MJ.” Peter says, her name filling his mouth and tasting like relief. “No, no. I’m okay.”
“You called me like sixty times.”
It was only fifty-four, but he’d allow her to round-up.
“You weren’t answering.” He shrugs, hoping it sounds nonchalant enough to reduce any lingering worry. Sometimes he forgets that the panic he has about their safety is reciprocated ten-fold.
“I’ve been slammed at work, you’d think a company that’d just made it to FTSE 100 would hire a few more–” MJ’s words cut off and he can picture a frown beginning to gradually form. “The desk across from me is empty. We’re meant to have partners. I wasn’t this busy last week.”
“Probably not.” He tells her, heart sinking. Whatever was plaguing the city was invasive. It was like the shortened days in winter. One day the sun was there, and then the next it was as though they’d been living in darkness for their entire lives. “Can I swing by and give you something?”
“That’s why you called seventy times? Because you wanted to give me something?”
“It’s very important we celebrate birthdays as and when they happen.”
MJ’s birthday is in June. They were both among the youngest in their classes and would often have their parties together because everyone else got so busy over the summer. It is currently September.
“You’re either very late or extremely early.”
“No one tells you but that’s the sweet spot, actually.”
“You’re such–” Her words cut off with a huff of laughter. The sound of it makes him feel so much, even if it’s at his expense. He’ll take being the butt of her jokes any day of the week if it means he gets to hear her laugh, gets proof she’s alive and well. Hearing her laugh settles something in him, providing evidence for how stupid his spiral had actually been. Like he could forget something like her. “Meet you at my place?”
“Swinging to you now.”
“Was the design work necessary to make you feel better in your attempts to stalk us?” MJ asks, turning the coin over in her hand. “Pretty sure apple designed this like a year ago, and you can even get it engraved.”
“Air tags don’t have a handy-dandy Spider signal that you can press if you’re ever in trouble and it’ll give you a direct line to me.”
“Is the handy-dandy part trademarked?”
“Patent pending.”
“Good, think someone’ll steal that from you.”
With the teasing out the way, Peter expects her to pull her phone out and slip the coin into the back of the case - he’d made sure it was thin enough for them to do that. She doesn’t though. MJ keeps running her finger around the edge then flipping it over and beginning the pattern again. Her brows draw together in a deep consideration.
“You okay? I could probably do it in a different colour, I just thought you normally wear gold so–”
“No. No, that’s not it.” MJ replies with a rueful smile. She clutches the coin in her palm then looks up at him, eyes meeting and he can see a storm of thoughts spinning away in her head. “I’m just worried about you. ”
“Me? C’mon, I’ll be fine.”
“No, I mean… You’re looking into this with Tony, right?” Peter nods. “And you’re noticing more inconsistencies?” He nods again. “What if– What if whatever’s doing this sees that as a threat? What if it goes after you? How do I find you again?”
Peter offers her a small lopsided grin as he reaches out to take her hand. “Same way you always do? Figure it out within minutes and then come rescue me?”
“Peter–” MJ starts, eyes softening and looking up at him through her lashes. The temptation to kiss her bites at his self control, desperate and needy. He brings their joint hands up to his mouth and kisses her knuckles instead. It–... borders a line he never thought himself crossing, but she doesn’t pull away.
“I’d trust you to find me. You’re too smart not to, I’m just dumb and maybe a little paranoid. That’s why I need this reassurance. I need to know you’re okay so I can fix all this.” She doesn’t look convinced, lips catching between her teeth like she’s fighting to argue back against him. “Hey. I’m serious.”
“I am too. I’m worried about you.”
“I know, but– look.” He swallows, eyes darting away then back to her. He can feel his phone vibrating from its place against his thigh, a convenient exit presenting itself that makes him feel just a little more daring. Tomorrow when he has to face the consequences of his words, he’ll find a way to lessen the impact but tonight, he lets himself speak freely to ease her worries. “Just remember I love you, okay?”
“Peter.”
He kisses their hands once again and then steps back towards her window. “I gotta go. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“We’re talking about that.” MJ tells him, her voice thick. Her eyes are wet.
“Sure.” He promises, pulling his mask over his face so she no longer see the bright red flush on his cheek. “Tomorrow.”