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There are memories of a bone-aching grief that MJ doesn’t know the root of. She’s been living with it for years.
It’s why she can’t take the necklace off, even though it’s so broken at this point it’s impossible to tell what it used to be. She can’t remember buying it, can’t remember receiving it. She came home from that disastrous trip to Europe with these shards of glass around her neck and she knows it’s important. She knows that somehow all of this is important.
It’s why she can’t settle. She’s waiting for something, someone, constantly. Her muscles are tensed and her body is poised to move like she’s waiting for a signal that’s never going to come. It’s why every job offer gets turned down and every boyfriend leaves. It doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t feel like she’s seen her full hand.
But there’s a man at her party with a bruised face and slightly-wilted flowers, and for a moment, her grief quiets. The humming that’s been rattling through her veins and knocking around in her brain finally stops, and for a moment, MJ is able to take a full breath.
The man is handsome. Their neighbor, Maynard, but that doesn’t feel right, even beyond the fact that it’s an obviously stupid name. He’s got this dark hair that looks like it would be pretty curly if he used the right products and an empty look in his eye that makes him seem a lot older than he is. He clutches at his bouquet of flowers like they’re a lifeline. In a crowd of all of her and Ned’s friends, Maynard stands alone, and MJ has a feeling that this is something he’s used to.
Her boyfriend kisses her in the middle of the kitchen and it’s all fine. He’s nice. He gets her—tries to get her. He makes an effort, which is more than some of the other people MJ’s dated, even though she knows she’s not the easiest to get close to. It’s always been that way, which is what she tells him when he accuses her of being withholding. This is who she is. It’s still something she’s trying to figure out.
Eventually their party ends and everyone leaves, and MJ finds herself staring at Ned’s Spider-Man wall at three in the morning, a cup of some mixed drink that’s long since gone warm in her hand. And there’s this ache she feels somewhere beneath her skin where she can’t quite reach. She’s talked about it with Ned a bunch over the years. Spider-Man saving them over and over and over again, from Queens to DC to Europe, and neither of them can figure out why he was there in the first place.
***
Ned goes to Boston and MJ stays home. She needs to figure out her next steps, needs to figure out how she’s going to pay her share of the rent. She’s got a degree in aerospace from MIT and a short list of internships experiences that tell all of the hiring managers that she couldn’t figure out one thing she wanted to focus on—recruiters tell her how to spin this, how to turn her indecision into multifaceted experience that can apply to a whole array of job descriptions. She’s received offer after offer with paychecks and benefits packages that make her eyes water. None of it feels right.
But then Spider-Man appears bursting through her window, and he’s telling her that she has to come with him, that it’s a matter of her safety, and maybe this is a choice that can be easy.
She steps forward to leave with him and everything goes black.
***
Spider-Man is just on the other side of the curtain and talking to him is easy. Weirdly easy. He’s tinkering with his inhibitor and telling her she can’t contact anyone from her life to tell them that she’s okay, and she can’t even bring herself to be mad at him. Something about him feels safe. She can’t describe it, really, other than an instinct.
“Is there a Mrs. Spider-Man?” she asks him.
She smiles when he laughs. It sounds like he does it despite himself, like maybe it’s an action that’s grown tired from disuse. Maybe she’s projecting. She doesn’t actually know Spider-Man, she reminds herself, even though something feels like it’s clicking into place the longer she sits and talks to him.
Maybe they’re just two people who have a habit of withholding. Maybe there’s something inside them that’s the same.
***
Spider-Man is Peter Parker, and MJ wants so badly for that to mean something to her, but it doesn’t. She doesn’t remember him. Doctor Strange’s spell worked exactly as he said it would. MJ forgot, and Peter’s been spending the last four years figuring out how to pick up the pieces by himself.
There’s a not insignificant part of her that’s angry at their circumstances. That Peter lied to her, that he didn’t come to her and force her to remember. That he made that choice for her, made it for Ned, and she’s been walking around without the memory of the first boy she ever loved.
And she’s not that person anymore. She tells him that. MJ is no longer the girl that loves Peter Parker, and she doesn’t remember who that girl was. She knows who she was in high school—smart, but with a lack of confidence. A loner who couldn’t put an outfit together to save her life. But she can’t connect that to this person that Peter’s described in his letter with its wrinkled paper that has so clearly been crumbled and folded and unfolded numerous times over the years.
She can’t be who he wants her to be. She doesn’t even know him anymore. The realization, seconds before she tells him herself, feels like an unsteadiness in her bones. Like something’s been knocked off-kilter inside of her now that she finally knows what she’s missing. She finally knows the truth, after years of a tiny, persistent question mark in the back of her head, and she doesn’t love him.
He still takes her home, after. He’s a good man.
***
MJ watches Ned and Peter play with their Legos and make their nerdy references and it makes sense. She can see how he fit in with them. How Ned and Peter were best friends.
She sits on the couch and draws. There was a time she used to draw people in crisis, but she’s older now, and it’s not what Peter needs. She’s known him—this version of him, of them—for less than forty-eight hours, and he practically suffocates the air with how much he needs a fucking break. So she draws him and Ned, together, laughing. She draws him without the mask.
She thinks he looks better without it.
***
MJ is frozen in the middle of her apartment and she doesn’t know if Peter is okay. It scares her. Something this big, something this powerful that it’s able to stop her and Ned in their tracks when they can’t even see it, and Peter is facing all of it alone.
Just like he has since he left them behind.
She still can’t remember. She wants to remember. She wants to know what it feels like to love him, to have a reason to feel this scared for someone she doesn’t actually know. It would help her make sense of it. There’s a crushing weight in her chest that has nothing to do with whatever spell she’s under and she wonders if there’s a small part of her that knows, even if her brain can’t. Even if her heart can’t. It feels a little bit like grief.
***
Spider-Man is going to die. Spider-Man is clinging to life in a hospital room across town, and his powers might not be enough to save him, and New York is acting like he belongs to all of them, but they don’t even know the man behind the mask.
MJ doesn’t either, technically. She wants to remember.
She sits with Ned and watches the news on a loop. There’s nothing new. Spider-Man is in critical condition, Spider-Man is fighting for his life, Spider-Man may die trying to save the people of New York. It’s the same it’s always been with him, with any of the New York heroes who don’t deal with Avengers-level threats, except now she knows that Spider-Man is Peter Parker, and there was once a time where that was everything to her.
So she visits him while Ned’s at work. Frank lets her in, and he looks stressed in a way that doesn’t fit with everything she’s learned about him so far, and neither of them say anything. Peter is still asleep. He looks like he’s barely clinging on.
“Jean’s helping him breathe,” Frank tells her quietly. Absent from his voice is the sarcasm, the gruffness. He just sounds exhausted.
“I thought she—” MJ starts, and Frank shrugs.
“Kid’s always been good at getting people to like him,” he says.
They both stare at Peter’s still form for a moment. He’s smaller in the hospital bed, skin waxy and hair tangled. MJ clenches her jaw. Licks her lips.
“I just wanted to drop this off,” she says. She adds the sketch to his pile of flowers and well-wishes.
She doesn’t look at Peter again before she leaves.
***
MJ and Ned decided their top school was MIT while sitting on the roof of Midtown. She remembers the day so clearly—what they would study, where they would live, what clubs they’d join. Everything had started to click into place for her that day, however briefly.
She sits there now, four years later, and thinks that Peter must have been there too. Their trio. She wonders what he wanted to study, how he would have handled Spider-Man being away from New York for four years. What kind of dreams he had before he decided to throw them away.
She doesn’t remember him. She doesn’t love him. But MJ sits there alone and stares out into the sun and thinks of how she recalled his face from the donut shop right away, and she wonders. Four years and a one-time encounter with a customer. And she knew right away.
The broken dahlia necklace sits heavy in her hand. Peter probably gave it to her. Things in her life are starting to make sense in a way they haven’t for a long time, bit by bit. MJ doesn’t remember Peter Parker, but there was once a time where their lives were completely enmeshed. There was once a time where he was the first boy she ever loved, her first heartbreak.
She gets these feelings sometimes that she can’t explain. Muscle memories, if she had to put it into words. Curls carding between her fingers that don’t match her own. Looking to her left for someone that isn’t there. The smell of a certain laundry detergent that she’s never been able to identify.
MJ watches the sun make its way through the sky and she thinks that if there’s a version of her that loved Peter, if there are several versions of him that loved her too, then there’s probably something hiding inside of her that knows him. That remembers him, as much as it’s able. In the way that two people reach for each other in the dark, there’s something inside of MJ reaching for something inside of Peter, maybe, and that’s where she remembers.
She lets the necklace fall back against her chest and she gets to her feet. It’s a long walk home to her apartment. Getting some air might be nice.
MJ doesn’t remember Peter, doesn’t love him, but she would like to. She thinks that maybe she’d like to try again. Just to see.