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oh, when you grab hold of me
yeah, i can be anything;
your fickle flower in bloom
was so alive in this room.
- john the ghost
“Hey,” MJ says.
“Hey,” Peter says, like it’s completely normal for him to walk into P.E. with a big-ass black eye.
“Let me rephrase,” MJ says. “Hey, Peter, what happened to your face?”
It is face and not eye, because on top of the shiner he’s got a bleeding lip and half a dozen bruising cuts, and he’s limping a little and holding his ribs, so a better question would actually probably be what happened to you, but MJ has found that if she goes too broad with a question Peter will find some transparently vague way to answer it without really answering it. He’s a terrible liar, but apparently nobody has ever told him that.
He looks strangely surprised that she’s bothering to ask. “Oh. Um, yeah, nothing. I mean, it looks worse than it is.”
“Shockingly not as reassuring as you think,” MJ says. “Considering you’re actively bleeding.”
“Shit, I am?” Peter pats his face.
“Yes, from about four of your eighty-seven visible injuries,” MJ says flatly. “Come with me.”
She grabs his arm and pulls him toward the locker rooms. Predictably, he resists.
“MJ, I’m fine. Don’t worry. I just, it was just, I just, I crashed my…bike. Into a. Lamppost.” Peter tugs his arm out of MJ’s grip, forcing her to turn and face him and his flagrantly unconvincing attempt to lie. “It was an accident.”
“See, the part that’s confusing me is that you think I care how you got this way,” MJ says. “Accident or not, those cuts could get infected, and as your friend, I can’t let that happen. So come with me and let me clean your dumb face or I’ll tell everyone you lost a fight with a lamppost.”
“We have class,” Peter says half-heartedly.
MJ rolls her eyes. She drags him over to Coach Wilson and says, “Mr. Wilson, Peter and I are both sick today.”
Coach Wilson raises an eyebrow. He looks between them. “You’re both sick?”
“Yep,” MJ says. “Incredibly sick. So we can't do P.E. today, and we need to be excused from class. I mean I guess we could still do P.E., if you want to clean up all the vomit, but that’s up to you.”
Coach Wilson has visibly lost interest.
“Just go to the nurse’s office,” he sighs before turning away to blow the whistle at everyone else.
MJ smirks at Peter. “Bam. Easiest hall pass ever.”
“I’m not going to the nurse,” Peter says.
“Who said anything about the nurse?”
He doesn’t resist when she pulls him along this time, still slightly limping and doing a bad job of pretending like his body is in tip-top shape. If this is a bike accident, MJ is a people person.
“Wait a minute, I can’t go in there,” he protests once it becomes clear their destination is the girls’ locker room.
“Grow up, there’s nobody in there, everyone in our class is in the gym right now,” MJ says.
“If that’s true, why not use the boys’ locker room?”
MJ gives him a look which hopefully conveys how idiotic that question is, and consequently does not deign to answer it.
She marches him through the door of the girls’ locker room and leaves him by the wall of sinks and mirrors to retrieve her first aid kit. Four years of carrying that thing around without using it. When superheroes and malevolent aliens stepped out of the pages of science fiction and into New York City, she figured it was safe to assume winding up in their crossfire was a question of when and not if, but somehow she’s gotten to today without ever breaking into her supplies.
It’s fitting that she’s finally using it on Peter, of all people. The one person in MJ’s life who is probably, actually, a for-real superhero.
It’s her own quietly-held theory. She’s still gathering evidence. Not that she ever plans to tell anyone, even if the proof becomes irrefutable; it’s not her secret to tell. And anyway, nobody would ever believe her. Even landing on that conclusion in the first place had felt totally outlandish, but there’s only so many times the same exact coincidence can occur before it starts being a pattern, and one thing MJ is good at is identifying patterns.
The Washington Monument incident. His chronic absenteeism. The so-called Stark Internship that doesn’t actually exist according to every source online. A hundred other data points anyone else would call apophenia, not to mention obsessive. She can admit some of them are reaches. If she were someone else looking at the case from an outside perspective, she's 50/50 on whether she'd get on board or put herself in therapy. Saying I think my friend is a superhero sounds crazy. It might be crazy. But if it’s not, then Spider-Man is one of her best friends. And if that’s the case, then MJ deserves to know, because if Peter is Spider-Man then her odds of becoming collateral damage exponentially skyrocket.
Her safety is at stake, that’s all.
To her relief and mild surprise, Peter is still there when she comes back, leaning against a ceramic sink and staring at his hands. His backpack is now on the floor. He looks like he’s in another world.
She snaps in his face. He startles back to Earth and notices the case in her hands.
“You just have a first-aid kit?”
“I like to be prepared,” MJ says. She washes her hand at the adjacent sink.
Peter says, “You know, Coach Wilson totally thinks that we’re skipping class to, um…you know. Not that— but that is definitely how it sounded. Like. Just saying.”
MJ looks at Peter, who is turning pink under the orange-and-purple of his bruise stellium.
“Good,” she says, purposely keeping her cool. “That means he’s even less likely to come after us.”
“You don’t care that he thinks—” Peter clears his throat. “That he…thinks that? About you? And me?”
“Do you?”
“No!” Peter yelps. “I mean…only because…it’s crazy. That would be crazy. We’re friends. Just friends. Obviously.”
“Right,” MJ says, and it really bothers her, how this is the one thing she can’t see through him about. If he likes her, or if it’s wishful thinking. “I’m way out of your league.”
“Yes. Exactly.” Peter frowns. “I mean. Hey!”
“Oh, relax,” MJ says, “I’m kidding.” She smirks. “I’m only slightly out of your league.”
“That's such a lie. We're both losers.”
“Yes, but one of us recently lost a fight with a lamppost, and it wasn’t me.”
“It was actually my bike that lost the fight. I was collateral damage.”
“Right, my bad. I’ll be sure to include that in the press release.” MJ raises an eyebrow and a Q-tip of Neosporin at the same time. “Don’t you have a helmet?”
Peter winces when the Q-tip meets his face, but he doesn’t recoil. “Uh, no. Nope. I do not have a helmet.”
“I’m starting to see where this all went wrong for you.”
“You have no idea,” Peter mumbles.
I have some, MJ thinks.
If he’s Spider-Man, then whatever left him in this shape is a lot more nefarious than a bike accident. Then again, there haven’t been any local Big Bads recently, and MJ has a vested interest in knowing that kind of thing, so she would have heard if anything was trying to terrorize New York the last couple days, even if Spider-Man ultimately defeated it. No such news: the latest on Spider-Man is a few car crashes prevented and one little kid on NY1 talking about how their friendly neighborhood superhero reunited him with his parents in Sunnyside when he got on the wrong train by mistake.
Nothing to put someone who’s supposedly Spider-Man in this state, is the point.
But he might not be Spider-Man. That’s the null hypothesis. Every good scientist worth their salt knows not to dismiss the null. If he’s not Spider-Man, then there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for why Peter is in such a bad way. Maybe it really was a bike accident. Maybe worse. Maybe it wasn’t something, but someone.
But really — bike accident. Come on. That’s just the kind of innocuous lie people tell when they need to be believed. When they’re hiding something. The question is just — hiding what?
She’s fallen silent, and now she realizes he has too. It’s too quiet in the locker room, especially for having Peter there, a person notorious for his inability to shut up.
That used to be true. A lot more true than the last few months, anyway.
When the news broke, everybody mourned. Iron Man had always been a larger-than-life figure, and when he died, the world lost a hero. But Peter took it hardest. He never talked about it much, at least not with MJ, but she knew it was different.
The world lost Iron Man. Peter lost Tony Stark.
It was like some part of Peter died, too. Especially those first few weeks. MJ noticed, though she doubted anyone else did, the way he would miss class more often, fall silent on a dime, zone out and stare into the middle distance with a haunted look on his face. She asked him if he was okay once, and he plastered on this smile so fake it actually hurt to look at, and swore up and down that he was fine, just tired, nothing wrong, really. As soon as she pretended to look away, still watching him in his reflection off the window, he slumped like a deactivated android, his fake smile vanishing in an instant.
She learned her lesson then: the best way to know how Peter is doing is never to ask him. It’s to watch him.
“You should be more careful,” she tells him conversationally. She puts a hand under his chin to hold him still as she wipes the blood from below his lower lip with an antiseptic wipe. It crosses her mind that he looks awfully handsome for someone whose face got allegedly kicked in by a light fixture. She packs the thought away in her Crush On Peter box, which stays duct-taped shut until she knows whether or not he’s a literal superhero, because if he is, then she’s setting the box on fire. Self-preservation. Notwithstanding how awesome and kind of hot it would be to have a superhero boyfriend.
Peter’s gaze skips between her facial features like it can’t pick one to land on. “What?”
“In the future. On your bike.”
“Oh,” he breathes, then shakes his head a little as if to clear it. “Right, yeah. I should. I mean I definitely will. Absolutely.”
“The way you say that makes me think you won’t.”
“I, uh, I actually…swerved to avoid hitting someone,” he says. “But, um, they…swerved to avoid hitting me, and we swerved the same way, so in the end we both still crashed. But I was trying to be careful, is my point. I just, um, didn’t try hard enough.”
“This isn't making me feel better,” MJ says. “Next time don't swerve in the direction of government-subsidized infrastructure, maybe? Just a thought.”
“Yeah. No, yeah, I won't. I mean I didn't see the… I wouldn't have swerved that way if I had seen the lamppost. Um, obviously? But yeah, you're right. It was my fault. I should have seen it coming.”
“So you’re telling me you biked directly into a lamppost because you didn’t notice it,” MJ says. “Gotta say, Peter, my next thought is you might need your eyes checked.”
Peter seems to fold in on himself as much as is possible with MJ holding his face. He laughs, but it’s the laugh of a person whose only defense against tragedy is humor.
“It happens more often than you’d think,” he says. “I have a talent for missing the forest for the trees.”
“Are the lampposts the forest in this scenario?”
He frowns a little. “Uh…I’m not— yes? Maybe? Or well— okay, forget I said that. What I mean is, I’m really good at putting myself into dangerous situations that get people hurt.”
“And yet here you still are,” MJ observes. “Clearly you’re doing something right.”
“I don’t mean me,” Peter says quietly. He clears his throat. “I just, I feel like…when I screw up, it’s always the people around me that pay the price. Even if I win, I still lose.”
“Alright, take it easy, edgelord,” MJ says. “It’s not your fault when other people get hurt. Just like it’s not my fault you biked into a lamppost.”
“It’s my fault when I could have stopped it.”
“You did your best. You swerved into a metal pole to avoid hitting them.”
“And I failed,” Peter says in a clipped tone. “All I did was make sure we both got hurt.”
“You're being too hard on yourself,” MJ says. “I could have stopped you from looking like a Jackson Pollock by buying you a helmet, but that doesn’t mean it’s my fault that you didn’t have one.”
“That’s not the fucking same, MJ,” Peter snaps. MJ frowns, taken aback. Immediately, Peter shrinks, muttering, “Sorry, sorry, I didn’t mean—”
“It’s fine,” MJ says. She puts away the Neosporin and unwraps a Band-Aid for the big laceration above his eyebrow.
“I’m sorry,” he repeats, miserably. “I shouldn’t— it’s not your fault. That this happened.”
“I know that.”
“It’s my fault,” Peter says. “I have to live with my failures.”
MJ sighs. Whether or not he’s Spider-Man, this was no bicycle crash. But whatever did happen, she knows one thing for sure.
“Trying to protect people isn’t failing. Even if you don’t succeed.”
“Not succeeding is the literal definition of failing.”
“Okay, that’s on me,” MJ says. “I’ll put it this way: bad things will always happen. Just because they happen around you, doesn’t make them your fault. And trying to stop them from happening doesn’t make you a failure. Some people would even call it heroic.”
“It’s not,” Peter says bitterly, despondently. “I’m not.”
She wants to push. So badly. She wants to know, and not just because the not-knowing is burning a hole in her brain. She can tell his pain isn’t a product of his patchwork injuries. The damage is a symptom. The so-called bike accident is, too. He looks like he did that day MJ asked if he was okay, and she's scared to ask again, afraid he'll plaster on that same smile. Afraid to find out that he'd still lie to her like that.
She’s not sure what she’d do if he told her the truth, anyway. She’s probably the last person he’d want to comfort him. He’s better off not telling her.
At least he’s still here. This isn’t nothing. He could have staunchly refused her help, but he’s humoring her and her first aid kit. He even let her drag him into the girls’ locker room, a perfectly objectionable decision that he could have fought against a lot harder.
It’s not much. But it’s not nothing.
“There,” she says, smoothing her thumb over the last of the butterfly bandages. “You look ten percent less terrible now. You’re welcome.”
She steps back, and Peter turns to examine his reflection in the mirror. “Only ten percent?”
“Well, I couldn’t do anything about your face in general,” MJ says.
Peter’s lips twist. “Right.”
“And here.” She squeezes her instant cold compress until she feels the inside burst, then hands it to him. “Shake that a couple times and stick it on your black eye.”
“Thanks,” Peter says, taking the compress. Their fingers touch. MJ wishes she wouldn’t notice things like that. “And thanks for…” He gestures at his face. “You didn’t have to do all this.”
“Duh,” MJ says. “We’re friends, you moron. Friends patch each other up. It’s one of the core tenets of friendship.”
Peter blushes. “Still. Thanks. And sorry.”
“For?”
“For being kind of an ass?”
MJ dismisses him with a scoff and a wave. “Please. You’re genetically incapable of being an ass. Besides, between the two of us, I’m a way bigger ass.”
“That’s true,” Peter says consideringly.
MJ flips him off. “You’re not supposed to agree with me, dipshit.”
“Hey, I was trying to apologize. You’re the one who turned it into a self-own.”
He’s right, she did. It worked like a charm, though, because now he’s too busy teasing her to keep wallowing in self-pity. She’s a master tactician when it comes to Peter. Another minor victory for MJ.
“Come on,” she says. “Let’s blow this joint.”
“We’re supposed to be in P.E. right now.”
“Uh, no we’re not. We’re sick, remember?”
Peter huffs a gentle laugh. “Right, yes. We’re super sick.”
“You’re projectile vomiting, I’m crippled by migraines, it’s a bad situation altogether.”
“Why do I have to be the one projectile vomiting?”
“Because it’s demeaning. And gross.”
“Exactly!”
“Get over yourself.” She pulls him, and like before, he obediently follows. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”
“And go where? We only have twenty minutes until the bell.”
“I know just the place,” MJ says. “Ever been on the roof?”
Peter cracks a smile. “Uh, nope. Never.”
“Then I’m about to blow your nerd brain to smithereens.”
He’ll go back to being haunted later. Probably as soon as the bell rings and they split in opposite directions. But for now, his cuts are clean and bandaged, his black eye is on ice, and he’s smiling at her. “After you.”
“For you,” she says three days later, standing at his locker. She didn’t bother wrapping it, but she did stick a bow on for effect.
Peter just kind of stares at the proffered gift. “You…bought me a helmet?”
“As fun as it is to skip class with you, I’m a little more interested in keeping all of your brains inside your skull. So. Yes.” She shoves it towards him. “Take it, dude. It’s a present, you can’t say no.”
“I— thanks?” He’s doing a lot better today; the damage on his face has healed with no sign that it was ever even there. It’s only been three days. Further fodder for her Spider-Man theory. But he seems better on the inside, too, and he smiles, albeit bewildered, as he accepts the helmet. “You really didn’t have to…”
“Parker, when will you learn that I don’t do things I don’t want to do?” MJ says bluntly. “Do us all a favor and wear that on your bike from now on.”
“Us all?” Peter repeats askance.
“The small minority of people who care about what happens to your stupid face,” MJ says, because she’s cornered the market on making nice things sound profoundly mean, for no reason at all. “So wear it, because if I hear that you lost any fights with infrastructure again I’ll know you’re not appreciating my extreme thoughtfulness, and that will hurt my feelings. Are we clear?”
“Crystal,” Peter says dutifully. But he’s smiling at her. Still smiling. He has an unbearably sunny smile. “I would never want to hurt your feelings.”
Damn it, MJ thinks as the Crush On Peter box rattles its new contents around. She may be screwed.