Chapter Text
The beginning of the end is easy to pinpoint.
It starts with MJ Watson arriving, four hours late with sunglasses resting on her head, jaw working on a piece of gum that went stale on hour two of her drive. She normally prides herself as a good planner, but this move has been one of desperation after her sister had urged her to do something, anything aside from port her from appointments. The resulting fight was bad enough that the room she’d found and the moving van she’d hired had all been arranged within a week. Her emotions had been too high to consider that she’d still been planning to pick Gayle up from her latest round of chemo before she left Pennsylvania and her departure might be delayed by her sister having her head in a metal tray, meaning MJ ran right into the traffic jam that had her moving van arriving on a New York City curb she had never visited without her there to unload it.
It starts with Gwen Stacy who hadn’t wanted to go into another shitty college dorm, dating Peter Parker who couldn’t afford to move out of his Aunt’s spare room. It starts with her childhood friend and soon-to-be-roommate dropping out at the final hour to travel around Asia after failing her first year. It starts with Gwen desperate not to move back in with her own parents, searching for someone normal to fill the space and finding MJ instead.
It starts with Peter Parker in a sweat stained t-shirt after unloading her moving van without her presence or even an introduction, watching on as his girlfriend tries to clear the air by wrapping her arms around MJ in a welcoming hug. He doesn’t know the journey she’s been on because she is not inclined to share that sort of thing with strangers.
“Everyone, this is Michelle.” She says, turning to the room. “Michelle, this is everyone; Ned, Harry and Peter. Betty was here earlier, but had to leave because—” Gwen’s introduction trails, beginning to look abashed at the mere mention of MJ’s belated arrival.
“You were late.” Peter says bluntly and unimpressed.
“Hi MJ.” Ned says. Despite his forehead being as speckled with sweat as Peter’s is, he manages a warm greeting, picking up where Gwen left off in a practiced act. . “S’nice to meet you. And nice of you to bear the burden of rooming with our Gwen. She’s a terror.”
Gwen scoffs and MJ tries to smile back. The words lodged into her brain. She and Gwen had only spoken over the phone. She was late and now she has possibly signed with a nightmare roommate. The first impressions were going splendidly. She pops her overly worn gum. The line in Peter’s forehead deepens and his lips twist downwards into a scowl.
“MJ is an actress, she can pretend that Gwendy is sufferable.” Harry chirps. The lot of them have a whole routine, riffing off one another. They had been talking about her. Expected, unsurprising and yet MJ is wishing there was some mint left in her gum to wash away the acidity burning the back of her throat.
Ned frowns, leaning into Harry’s side and not so quietly whispering. “I thought she was a waitress?”
“They’re the same thing.” Peter answers him with the same bland tone he has answered everything else with.
MJ squints, stubbornly working her gum to pop more deliberately this time just to see his eyebrow twitch. If that’s the kind of person he’s decided she is, she isn’t going to waste any energy proving him wrong. She finds him rude and obtuse, he could keep his little opinion of her.
“I got called into a last minute audition on the way, big medical drama. They took my phone and kept me for a few chemistry reads.” A lie. A big fat, fucking lie, but it was better than sympathy from strangers and pity from the likes of Peter - although it might be nice to see his scowl drop into horror when he realised what exactly had delayed her so much. Gayle wasn’t something she would use as an excuse. “But you guys are so sweet for uploading the van. I really appreciate it. Dinner on me as thanks?”
Her bank account cannot afford for the six large pizzas, sides and beers that get charged to her card, but if she’s going to make this work (and she has to – she isn’t sure that she can stomach more of Gayle’s disappointment, all things considered) then MJ cannot afford to do anything less.
The beginning of the end starts with MJ Watson moving into an apartment in New York with a girl she met on the internet and no solid employment in the city. It starts with that girl looking up at her with big blue eyes, straight blonde hair that has somehow managed to survive the humidity and who looks like the epitome of having her life together. It starts with Peter Parker leaving early with a slice of pizza hanging out the side of his mouth with Gwen kisses him goodbye on the other corner.
While MJ might not have been present for the unloading of her things, she is adamant to do the unboxing by herself. Peter doesn’t see the show she puts on for Gwen, Harry and Ned but they are all suitably amused by her ramblings about traditions and auras; ‘If I let you all help me unpack then the space will be more yours then mine, and while you all have a place in our home, I need to do this to carve out my own. You know?’
It is Ned who asks, “Did you not do this in your dorms?”
MJ swallows and waves him away. “A diploma didn’t get Marilyn on screen.”
The remaining trio laugh, confusion evident in the sound but none of them question her decision further. It is easier that way. MJ is happy to play it off as a joke, knowing that if any of her family heard her, they’d all cry in indignation - Gayle especially. They might support her decision to defer from college, and they might support her decision to look into alternative career paths but they always, always wanted her to have a backup option.
However, their finances didn’t exactly align with that. Her deferral from MIT was a necessity to help ease the burden on her parents’ who would have been facing the cost of Gayle’s repeated hospital visits and treatments paired with the cost of MJ’s Freshman year. Instead she stayed at home to help Gayle, got a part-time admin job at call centre and continued to pick up shifts from her high school waitressing job. Her decision to pursue acting had been made at the same time as her choice to move to New York - on her first call with Gwen, actually. Her new roommate had picked up on the Community Theatre playbill in her background and made an enthusiastic assumption which MJ had gone along with because it made her sound purpose driven and like a desirable roomie rather than a girl just running from her problems. Acting might have only been a hobby before but with how easily both Gwen and her family had eaten up her words, she thought it might be her true calling.
“Are you sure you don’t need help? Your bed is in pieces. That’s gonna be hard to do alone.” Harry says. He is stretched out on their couch, which must have been Gwen’s addition to the place along with so much else of the furniture - the bookcase that MJ’d had delivered feels like it was a platitude to help her feel ‘settled’, it won’t even really fit in their lounge - looking as though he owns the place. With a surname like Osborn, that might be a literal assumption.
“I can do lots of things with my bed alone, don’t worry.” She answers back just as sweetly earning a scandalised laugh from Gwen.
“So with that, I bid you all adieu and Gwen, I’ll see you in the morning.”
Gwen looks up at her from the floor, face bright and innocent, still somehow full of energy even though it’s dipping close to ten and she has definitely had a long day. It is the sort of perfect that makes MJ all the more happier she had held her ground on unpacking alone because she isn’t sure she is in the right state of mind to see Gwen Stacy effortlessly put a bedframe together without consulting the internet once. She doesn’t want to start hating her new roommate on the first day.
“See you, Michelle.”
MJ wets her lips, pausing for only a second before waving at them and heading towards her room, stepping slightly uncertainly as she peeks in to confirm she is at the right door. Once inside, she is immediately on the phone to her sister.
“Have you only just got there?” Gayle asks in lieu of a greeting, panic and guilt dripping through every one of her words. She immediately tries to turn it into a video call.
MJ declines the request.
“No, I beat the van here. Told you the traffic wouldn’t be so bad. Almost like I know what I’m talking about.”
Gayle tries again to turn on video. MJ declines once more. “I want to see your room, brat.”
“I’m in bed and the lights off.” The main light is on because she cannot remember which box holds her lamp and her bed is in pieces scattered across the room.
“Turn it on then.”
“Making me move after a long day?” She asks. There are some lies that she’ll tell to keep her sister from worrying too much. This guilt-trip is a necessary evil to stop Gayle from feeling worse. As manipulative as it was, it saved the pair of them from another argument. If Gayle knew that she’d started so wrong-footed with her new roommate then she would try to claim once again that ‘MJ’s concern for her was holding her back’.
The notifications stop.
“Is your roommate nice?”
“Gwen? Yeah, she’s great. Introduced me to her friends who seem lovely. Boyfriend’s a bit of a dick.”
“Ew. She had her boyfriend there the day her roommate was moving in? Feels like that’s something you do later. Gotta ease ‘em in.”
“He was helping lift boxes. Didn’t make much conversation.”
“Least there’s that. Is the apartment nice?”
Aside from being overcrowded with someone else’s belongings and hours away from where she actually wanted to be because she never did anything by halves, she figured it was okay. If MJ stood upright and stretched her arms out either side of her she could just about touch the walls. So far the amp patches she had noticed in the corners of the rooms didn’t look too severe and there were no signs of mould anywhere. All in all it didn’t look like the hell trap her mom was terrified she had signed up to living in.
It was liveable. For New York that felt like it constituted as nice.
“It’s really nice.” She replies, knowing Gayle will probably never see the real thing in person, saving her the energy once again.
“See! Sounds like I was right already - this is going to be good for you.”
Her eyebrows lift as she bites back a heavy sigh, scanning the small room. The amount o debris she had packed up from her former life, scattered all over and consuming every last bit of floorspace possible. IT din’t look good for her right now, especially when all she wanted to do was sleep rather than build her fucking bed. There was no way she would be able to get her mattress down on the ground without moving her bedframe outside her room. With the muffled sounds of Gwen’s friends still in the apartment, that felt like a kind of defeat she wasn’t ready for.
“Yeah.” She mumbles. “It’ll be great.”
It’s midnight by the time MJ manages to get her bed built. She still doesn’t know where her sheets are. The apartment is muggy enough that she will be fine for one night without them, managing to source just one of her pillows and then stuffing some of her clothes that she’d packed into her car to give some extra cushioning. It isn’t perfect, no first apartment was. This was all part of the experience. This was the kind of thing Gayle had thought she was missing out on.
She is laying flat on her bare mattress, staring up at the ceiling with her hands folded on her stomach when there is a hesitant knock at her door. The temptation to ignore it is only marginally beaten out by the knowledge of what a bad roommate she has been to Gwen so far today.
“Come in.”
“Sorry if I woke you up.” Gwen says, carefully opening the door. Her eyes widen in surprise at the state of her bedroom, but she kindly does not say a word about it. “I just– I don’t know. It’s nice.”
MJ shifts, swinging her legs over the edge of the bed. She has stripped down to her shirt and underwear. It’s a level of exposed she wasn’t expecting to be so soon with her new roomie, then again, none of this day had gone according to plan so MJ was beginning to throw it all out the window.
“It is nice, right?” Gwen asks, seeming human for the first time that day.
MJ graces her with an honest smile. “Yeah, it’s good.”
“Great. Amazing.. And I–” She blows out a breath. “I wanted to apologise. For Peter, and what he said. I– Sort of overheard you on the phone earlier, and you are right. He was a dick.”
“I don’t think it’s your job to be apologising to him, and if that’s something you do a lot–”
Gwen interrupts her with a laugh, head hanging. “Yeah, no. I definitely don’t do that. We’re usually better at— holding him to task. You know? I think everyone was just trying to be on their best behaviour. Not freak you out.”
“Everyone except him.”
It is her turn to be the blunt one. Peter’d occupied the role earlier, but now with her peace disturbed, MJ is more than happy to take it over, worrying that her roommate is only trying to placate things after a messy first day– that Gwen might also think the things that Peter had said aloud.
“Peter’s always been an outlier.” She says. The fondness that creeps into her voice does not outshadow how sincerely she says the next part, apology written across her whole face. “But he was rude. I think it’s cool what you’re doing, coming here and following a dream. College was kind of the only path for me - my parents did it, my brothers did it, it was my turn, right? But you— that’s brave.”
MJ’s mouth dries, only managing a nod that she hopes comes across as modest embarrassment. Gwen takes it as such, her smile only widening. How was she still so chipper after a day like this?!
Gwen waves her own words away. “Sorry. I’m just… Really relieved this all worked out. And excited. It’s going to be a good year.”
“Yeah.” MJ forces herself to agree.
“Well. I’ll leave you to finish making your bed.” She steps back away from the door, ready to close it after her. “Night Michelle.”
“MJ.” She says, stopping Gwen in her tracks. There was an olive branch extended this evening, more than once. Gwen had done nothing but make her feel welcome. Peter’s attitude had been a damper on the day, but MJ could give him the smallest amount of slack– or at the very least, not hold Gwen accountable for it. This was her way of repaying the favour, introducing Gwen to herself, properly– honestly. And maybe, if she just allowed herself, Gayle might be right and this could turn out to be something good. “You can call me MJ. All my friends do.”