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One week.
MJ waits one week, a full seven days, one hundred and sixty-eight hours from the moment she woke up for Spider-Man to contact them. Ned has a little less patience. He waited three days before he started hanging out at Midtown High’s rooftop more often than not, and MJ joined him when she was free. They sat there with their fists shoved into their pockets, clutching hand warmers. But she had to go home at some point. So did Ned. His lola called her instead, asking if he’ll be in time for dinner and she didn’t even lie when she said, “Sorry, Lola, I don’t know.”
Spider-Man hasn’t been seen in Queens or even the whole state of New York since late December and it’s already the new year. Ned set up alerts globally, too. If the Avengers went to space again, or they’re spotted somewhere in the Antarctic or Paraguay or Romania they’ll know.
No hits.
It’s like he’s gone ghost, Ned told her on the fourth day. But MJ waits a little longer out of hope.
When she woke up, she knew she was missing something. She was home, for one. She’d been on the Statue of Liberty with three Spider-Men around her the last time her eyes were open. She went through the usual questions: How did she get home? Was Ned okay? Where was Spider-Man?
Then she dug a little deeper into her mind. Another question appeared, seemingly random: How did she ever kiss Spider-Man if she’s never seen his face? Her first kiss now lost somewhere in her memory. How did—What happened—Where was—
Ned called her and her questions went subdermal.
MJ combs through each one of her contacts to see if she hid his phone number somewhere under a fake name, but she attaches a face to each name and can’t find anyone else. Her patience is tested, but still she holds out hope. As the final minute passes, MJ gets up, gets ready for her shift, and gets to the very normal conclusion that she should just search every street to find him because what if he’s out there and he’s hurt and alone and he needs them and she might actually cry if she thinks of him bleeding in an alleyway waiting for somebody to save him.
One last question crawls out from under her skin: Who is Spider-Man?
Who is Spider-Man?
Wait. She knows this. She should know this, shouldn’t she? MJ stops in her tracks. What the fuck.
Who the hell is Spider-Man?
🕷️
Her final semester of high school starts with a whimper.
Spider-Man pops back up in New York, not Queens, but Manhattan and it’s a bit of a kick to her knees when Ned shows her a tweet with a blurry photo of Spider-Man swinging during passing period. Snow obscures a lot of it, but he looks like he’s got a beanie and a winter vest on. The caption says: SPIDEY SIGHTED 23RD ST/7TH AVE MOVING WEST!!
“He’s alive,” she says faintly. MJ clutches Ned’s arm until his skin whitens. “He’s alive, Ned.”
“I know!”
Her entire body unclenches. She doesn’t fall apart, but she does have to actively think about staying on her feet. She lets him go. Stands tall and strong.
There were whispers that people saw him during December but no one had any proof. They just said that he looked different. spidey’s new fit don’t look too fancy like before, said someone’s tweet. Omg he looks COLD, said another.
Ned says, “I think I’ll create a website or something, so anybody who’s spotted him can drop a location for a sighting. We can track him like that and not be, like, a surveillance state because that’s probably messed up.”
“Yeah,” she says. “I’d rather not be on the same level as the government.”
What MJ doesn’t say is that it’s probably easier to track down Spider-Man if Ned hacks into the CCTV footage. But she’s got her own morals. Good old community stalking is better. Besides—“Maybe there should be a feature, like, if Spider-Man’s fighting someone and it’s really dangerous that it should tell the user to stay away.”
“Wouldn’t that be self-explanatory though? I mean if he’s there, there’s probably something going on.”
But MJ counters, “You know how he is. He’ll put on the suit just to grab a bite to eat or maybe he’s saving someone’s cat. And people try to follow him all the time.”
“True, true.” He nods. “There needs to be a credibility—”
The bell rings and they go to class and he brainstorms more ideas and she adds on top of them, in the margins, crossing out things that wouldn’t make sense. She doodles little Spider-Man emblems on the side and thinks of cracked lips meeting her own, the soft breaths against her mouth, hands—actual hands, not gloves—cupping her face and pulling her closer.
No face. Only a feeling.
In her periphery, Ned unknowingly arcs his palm in a low half-circle as he tries to catch his mechanical pencil.
Something sparks gold.
His pencil sits on his desk like it never swan-dived off. Neither of them speak. He looks at his hand then at her and says, “I think I’ve done this before.”
“I think so, too.”
They sit through the rest of chemistry without another word spoken.
🕷️
The website’s up and running in a month.
It takes Ned a week to get the bones done but he spends hours and hours debugging and complaining about debugging. MJ draws him like that once. Hair limp, dark shadows under his eyes, the most severe frown on his face. When she shows it to him, he breaks into a laugh, so she figures that’s a decent enough win.
Gonna add more features later, it needs to go live now, Ned tells her as she uses the library’s printer to spit out hundreds of pages of a missing person’s poster with Spider-Man’s face on it. MJ thinks it’s funny. Ned thinks it’s morbid. They both think it’ll catch people’s attention.
And it definitely does.
HAVE YOU SEEN THIS SPIDER?
SHARE YOUR SPIDEY SIGHTINGS @
SPIDEYTRACKER.COM
MJ tapes the poster everywhere and is careful not to be seen, or she blends in at the very least. Subway windows, telephone poles on every block she’s on, tack boards in corners of small shops. Some of their classmates help, too. Flash blasts the url on his Instagram story and, oddly enough, he has enough followers that it starts becoming global.
Site traffic explodes.
Ned builds a program that verifies how credible each sighting is and still keeps rumored sightings available until proven otherwise. MJ tries to catch Spider-Man on his non-dangerous days during her non-busy hours not at school or at her part-time job or sleeping, and the window is extremely limited.
But she makes do.
Her frustration builds with each missed connection. He’s spotted in Forest Hills right as she’s about to head to Ned’s and she rushes over, only for the Spidey Tracker to ping her phone with a notification that he’s back well out of her reach.
“I don’t know why he won’t talk to us,” MJ complains into her phone as she walks home. “We obviously know something’s up with our memories. Is he being coerced or something?”
“What if…what if he doesn’t remember us like we don’t remember him?”
Her heart twists. Her fingers touch the pendant around her neck, a gift from him. Another opaque memory. “Then we’ll figure all this out together.” Her voice comes out shaky. “I just need to find him and talk to him and maybe I’ll sound crazy but it’s fine because—because he needs to come back.”
Ned lets a pause linger. “And what if he does remember?”
He doesn’t add any more, but MJ doesn’t need him to. She’s smart enough to fill in the blanks. What if he remembers but he’s staying away. What if they did something wrong that warrants losing their memories of him? Or is this all a part of Spider-Man’s doing? She doesn’t know.
MJ has all these half-memories, more phantom sensations than anything, that she can’t lay to rest as long as they don’t talk. If Spider-Man wants to stay away, she needs to hear it from his masked mouth. Preferably his unmasked mouth, but you never know. His anonymity is a pretty big deal.
“If he does,” says MJ, “then he’s got some explaining to do.”
🕷️
“Stay safe, stay fresh, and stay outta Spidey’s way,” says Flash as he ends his Instagram live with a slick smile on his face.
“Alliterative.” MJ flips a page of her sketchbook to a blank sheet. She drew Spider-Man again. Not in his suit, but out of it. He’s wearing jeans and a science pun related shirt that would make even forty-year-old teachers sigh. He has no head, so it just looks like she drew a decapitated high schooler. “Clever. You know, for your hundreds of bots.”
Flash scowls at her. “I have way over a couple hundred followers. I’m almost at ten thousand. And my followers are a hundred percent legit.”
“Are they?” she says neutrally.
“Look, do you want my help or not?”
“Thanks, Flash,” Ned butts in, sighing. “We appreciate boosting the site.”
Flash runs a hand through his gelled hair and claps Ned’s shoulder a little too harshly. “No problem, man. It’s pretty sick.”
“Thanks,” Ned says again, meaning it this time.
“I caught up to Spidey once because of it,” continues Flash. “I tried to get him on my livestream, but he just waved and swung away which was so cool. I got, like, so many followers after that. And he remembered my name! I didn’t think he’d remember since all that stuff with Mysterio happened.”
MJ’s pencil hovers over the page. “When was this?”
“Uh, a couple of days ago?” His brows furrow. “Why?”
With an audible thwack, she closes her sketchbook and stands. “He called you Flash,” she states and tries not to explode with anger—real fucking anger. “He knew you.”
Ned sits.
“Yeah, duh.” Flash looks at the both of them like they’re stupid and, honestly, MJ’s feeling a little dumb and a lot hurt. “Didn’t you guys spend more time with him? He literally asked about you both.”
“Really?” Ned asks as he lifts his head.
Flash holds his hands up. “He totally saved me from getting mugged by this spy group—”
She scoffs; he ignores her.
“—and I was like, ‘Yo, Spidey! You saved my life again, man,’ and I was getting my phone out and starting a live and he said something like, ‘Hey, Flash,’ and I was totally shocked, you know, and I was like, ‘You remember me?’ and he nodded and then he asked me, ‘How’s everyone doing?’ And I’m thinking he’s talking about our whole AcaDeca group, and I’m about to say something when he was like, ‘Are Ned and MJ doing all right?’ and obviously I told him you two were good because you are good, right?” Flash looks between them.
They are decidedly not good.
“But that’s how it happened.” Flash slings his backpack over one shoulder. “Anyway, I’ve gotta run. See you.”
The moment the door closes, MJ almost screams.
Almost.
🕷️
Twelve missed chances to talk to Spider-Man.
She’s not exactly in the habit of putting herself in danger, but this is getting ridiculous. So when she’s getting off her shift at the donut shop and she gets a notification that Spider-Man is a block down trying to stop a robbery, MJ rushes right into the thick of the fight. Police cars surround the bank and cops are cordoning off the streets, trying to get everyone away, and she gets it, she does, but she’s got her own mission. Her phone buzzes with the Spidey Tracker’s alert that she’s too close to something a little too dangerous and she knows. Right before a cop barks out orders for her to leave, MJ watches Spider-Man take a nasty punch from some guy in a quilt-like suit and glowing gauntlets.
Spider-Man crashes into the next building over and MJ winces.
After the cop tries to bodily push her away, MJ side-steps, but she doesn’t run back home. She goes up. The shop owners of the bodega wave people in to get away from the immediate damage, and she comes in but quickly sneaks off. It’s her luck that nobody’s stopped her, but they’re all probably too busy watching Spider-Man to think about some girl escaping the cross-fire.
When MJ gets to the roof, the chill of the early spring air settles on her skin. She doesn’t have the best view, but she sees a bright-blow glow of the other guy’s punches. Harsh sounds puncture the air: concrete breaking, walls crashing down, alarms and sirens and so many people yelling, trying to get away or trying to get too close.
Then—silence.
MJ is afraid of heights. It’s a perfectly rational fear. She’s fine on planes and being on rooftops and staying on top floors. But she’s leaned over railings before and got dizzy at the sight of people looking like ants. She’s been in Spider-Man’s arms as he’s swung her across the city, and despite knowing that he’s super strong and he could hold her with ease, her stomach swooped like her gut’s already splattered onto the pavement below.
She’s afraid, but she needs to know.
MJ clutches at the ledge and leans over.
A wave of vertigo hits her, but she pushes through. Spider-Man’s talking to one of the detectives, gesticulating wildly with his whole body. He’s fine, she thinks. He’s fine, he’s okay, he’s alive. It’s just a bank robbery. He’s been to space. He’s fine.
He shoots a web and is about to pass her, so she yells out, “Spider-Man!”
He doesn’t face plant into the next building, but it’s a near thing. MJ moves further away from the ledge, but that free-falling sensation in her belly doesn’t disappear. He’s here, she thinks as he lands a few feet away from her. He’s here, she thinks as she steps closer.
“Are you all right—”
“Why haven’t you called me and Ned?” is the first thing she asks.
Spider-Man’s new suit is really different up close as it seems like in the pictures that have been floating around. The Spider emblem is bigger, and the blue is brighter, the black webbing is raised. Like he’s done it as an homage to the other Spider-Men in those alternate universes. It doesn’t look all that tech-y. It looks like he made it with his own two hands. She can see the shape of his ears and for some reason it makes her want to cry.
“W-what?” His voice goes higher. He runs a hand over where his hair is under the mask. “I don’t—”
“You talked to Flash fucking Thompson before us.” MJ crosses her arms over herself. “We’ve been looking for you for months. We thought it’s because maybe you forgot us but then you asked about us by name, and I’m so mad at you for making us worry. Ned created the Spidey Tracker so we could find you because there are things I can’t—we can’t remember you.”
His arms hang limp at his sides.
“But I used to know. There are so many things that just don’t make sense. We were…we were together before, weren’t we?”
“Yeah,” he croaks out.
Tears flood her vision. Furious, she wipes them away. “What happened?”
“What do you remember?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “You were there in DC, and Europe, and Ned’s your best friend and you were mine, too, but I can’t remember your face at all.”
“MJ.” He takes a deep breath in and pulls his shoulders back. “Do you trust me?”
She gnaws on her bottom lip. “I really shouldn’t.”
“But do you?” He holds his hand out.
MJ takes it.
“God, I had a whole letter written out and everything,” he mutters. “I need to take you somewhere more private, so we can talk. Properly.”
He picks her up with ease and she wraps her legs around him, and it’s all so familiar. His arm moves and they’re in the air. She doesn’t know if she’ll ever get used to this. The seconds in the air that feel like they’re almost flying before gravity reminds her that they’re genuinely hanging on by a synthetic web that Spider-Man literally admitted to her that he made during chemistry class.
But Spider-Man’s grip on her is strong. If she falls, he’ll do everything he can to save her.
Wind whooshes through her ears and it takes maybe five minutes until he lands on another rooftop. He doesn’t let go of her hand, and she wouldn’t let him let go of her anyway.
“You live here?” she asks, surprised.
Spider-Man opens the door to his apartment. He’s the only one on the floor, but that’s probably because it was never meant to be a room for rent anyway.
“I mean, I have to live somewhere.”
MJ steps away from him into the middle of his place. The small tech set-up by the windows. A GED prep book on the couch. One of the flyers she’s printed out sits on the fridge. Belatedly, he tries to clear up the take out containers on the metal shelves and lay his blanket flat over a pile of laundry.
“Sorry, it’s a mess I know. May would kill me if she saw.” His voice wobbles at the end.
May. The name rings a bell. She used to work at F.E.A.S.T. until…
MJ asks, “Can you please take off the mask?”
Spider-Man’s lungs expand. Contract. On the next inhale, he removes his mask and MJ’s brain goes blank except for one, tiny moment in December.
Hi, my name is Peter Parker and I—
MJ remembered thinking that it’s kind of weird that he introduced himself with his government name. Maybe he has bad social anxiety, she deduced from the way he gripped a notebook paper in his hands like it was some kind of script he needed to follow. Despite the weirdness, she thought he was cute. Without much fanfare, he left quickly after and she went over to Ned and talked to him about MIT and she never Peter Parker again.
“You visited me,” she says and closes the distance between them. “At my work. You ordered a black coffee.”
There’s a sheen to his sad, sad eyes. “I did.”
“Peter Parker,” says MJ and her voice thickens. “You were gonna tell me then, but you stopped.” She pokes the emblem on his chest. “You fucking dodged me, like, three times.”
“Five,” he corrects. “But you didn’t notice the other two times.”
“Don’t try to be funny with me right now, Peter.” Her anger builds exponentially. “What the hell did you do? And why couldn’t you just come to us?”
“I wanted to keep you guys safe, okay!”
There are bags under his eyes and his lips are cracked and he’s got cuts and bruises all over his face, one still bleeding, and she doesn’t even know Peter Parker, not with all the gaps in her memory, but somehow, she misses him. This him.
“That wasn’t your call to make.”
“I know.” He takes a measured breath. “And I’m sorry. It’s just that something bad was going to happen. To the whole world, and the only way to stop it was to make everyone forget me.”
“Everyone,” she repeats hollowly. Her, Ned, the rest of Midtown High.
“MJ, I ruined your life.” His shoulders hunch. “I ruined Ned’s life, and May—she’s dead because of me. All because you all loved me enough to stay by my side. Before Doctor Strange did his spell, I made a promise to you that I would tell you, and I tried, MJ, I really tried.”
“You only tried once, Peter.” A sound, almost like a scoff leaves her throat. “And never again. You did your best to ignore me and Ned for months.”
Peter steps forward and cups her face. His gloved thumb traces the skin over her eyebrow. Roughly, he says, “You were hurt. Right here. And you could’ve been hurt worse.”
Her eyes sting and, despite her anger, she leans into his touch. The layer of separation between skin makes her throat close up. “Tell Ned and don’t you dare avoid us.” MJ leans back. His hand falls and she resists the urge to place her palm everywhere he’s touched her as if she’s begging for the warmth to seep inside and stay, stay, stay. “Let us make the choice to be in your life. We can handle it.”
He nods slowly, taking it all in.
MJ sighs. “Can you take me home please?”
Peter picks up his mask and puts it on. Spider-Man, here again. But he’s not running away. If she focuses, she can see his eyes through his lenses. “Yeah,” he says softly. “Of course.”
And with Peter’s grip holding her, with hundreds of air between her and the ground, this doesn’t feel like an end. It doesn’t feel like it when he sets her on the fire escape that leads right into her bedroom. It doesn’t feel like an end when she wraps her arms around his neck, half her body hanging out her window, his arms banding around her waist, pulling her in so close that she’s so sure their hearts are a pair matching in rhythm. He’s trembling, she thinks. Fuck, so is she.
“Don’t be a stranger,” MJ breathes into his neck.
Peter huffs a shaky laugh. “I won’t,” he promises.
It doesn’t feel like an end.
When Spider-Man swings away from her, it feels like the beginning of everything.