Chapter Text
The bullet had not been meant for him. This was, Jean Grey understood even as she watched Frank Castle carry Peter Parker's bleeding body through the hospital entrance, the kind of distinction that made no difference to the body receiving it. A .50 caliber round did not pause to consider who it was supposed to hit. It simply traveled. It traveled and it tore and it stopped when it hit something solid enough to stop it, and the something solid had been Peter Parker's torso, and Jean had watched it happen from his arms. The proceeding part of the nightmare didn’t happen immediately. He said something to her and she said something back, though the memory of the sound was already going fuzzy at the edges like a photograph left too close to a flame.
What she remembered clearly—what she would remember clearly for the rest of her life, however long that turned out to be—was the way Peter's body had folded. Not the dramatic collapse of a movie death, the artful crumple, the final heroic pose. Just a body. A body that had been standing and then was not standing. A body that had taken a round designed for armored vehicles and reacted the way bodies react when physics overrules intention. He had been in front of her and then he had been on the ground and the ground had been very red and Jean had not known, until that exact moment, that a single human being could contain that much blood.
She was a telepath. She had spent her life knowing things other people didn't want known. And yet this, the sheer volume of it, the way it spread outward from his chest like a statement of intent, was information her mind had refused to process. For a long, suspended second, she had simply stared at the red and thought: That's too much. That's an unreasonable amount. Someone should tell his body it's made a mistake.
No one told his body it had made a mistake. The memory became blurry again afterward. She knew she knelt next to him and said ‘no’ a bunch of times as though reality was a film shoot and she was its director telling a terrible, horrible scene to just cut it. He told her something very selfless and heartbreaking. She pleaded something back, something of equal parts desperation and ridiculousness. Everything after this was a blur.
Frank Castle appeared at... some point... and brought Peter away.
She had followed them. That was the part that she kept getting stuck on, replaying in her head like a song she couldn't stop humming. When she could think again, she had followed them. Not because she was brave—bravery would have required action, conviction, a clear sense of what she was doing and why. She had followed them because the alternative was standing on Roosevelt Island waiting for someone to arrest her, and she was too tired to be arrested, too confused to be brave, too something to just let Peter Parker bleed out on a gurney while she stood around cataloguing her own emotional state like a scientist observing a specimen she had already decided was defective.
The possession had been instinctual. Almost reflexive. A woman in a sedan, mid-forties, on her way home from a shift at a dental office in Astoria. Jean had slipped into her mind the way you slip into a coat you've worn a hundred times, familiar and unthinking and vaguely unpleasant in a way you'd long since stopped noticing. The woman's name was Cheryl. Cheryl had five cats and a mortgage and a mild caffeine addiction, and for the duration of a thirteen-minute drive from Roosevelt Island to Manhattan, Cheryl also had a telepath in her head and a said telepath's body in her back seat. Jean had piloted Cheryl's sedan through traffic with the same detached competence she'd used to pilot innumerable other bodies over the past month—the gas pedal and the brake pedal and the turn signal, all of it muscle memory on muscles that weren't technically hers—while her own body sat in the back seat with its hands fidgeting with its jacket and clawing at its pants like an addict waiting for her fix.
She had released Cheryl two blocks from the hospital. Cheryl would remember nothing except a vague sense that she'd forgotten something important, which was, Jean reflected, a kinder gift than most people got from her. She had walked the remaining distance on her own legs, and her own legs had felt strange beneath her, her walk was strange, as if she'd been away from them too long and they'd forgotten how to carry her weight.
By the time she reached the hospital, Frank Castle was already inside with Peter, and Jean was standing on a patch of grass next to a low concrete wall that bordered the emergency entrance, and she was doing the thing she had been doing since the bullet hit: keeping Peter Parker alive.
Here was what keeping someone alive felt like, in case someone was wondering:
It felt like holding a handful of sand and trying not to let any of it slip through your fingers. It felt like balancing a glass of water on your head while someone pushed you down a flight of stairs. It felt like the most exhausting thing Jean had ever done with her mind, and she had just held everyone in a kilometer radius around her in frozen time, so the bar was not low.
The .50 caliber round—and Jean kept coming back to this, kept circling the fact like a tongue probing a broken tooth—had not been designed for human bodies. It had been designed for engine blocks. For armored plating. For the kind of targets that didn't have heartbeats or futures or aunts who had told them they were beautiful. Peter Parker's body had absorbed this round the way a paper towel absorbs a flood: bravely, futilely, with catastrophic structural compromise. The wound was less a wound and more of a reconfiguration. The bullet had entered his back, sheared through the edge of his left shoulder blade, torn a channel through the muscle and connective tissue that should have been keeping his arm attached to his torso, and lodged itself comfortably behind his chest just below the collarbone, leaving a hole that Jean could have put three fingers into. The subclavian artery had been nicked. The brachial plexus was—she didn't know enough about medicine to name what had happened to the brachial plexus, but she knew enough about pain to recognize the nerve damage even through the fog of Peter's unconsciousness. The lung on that side had partially collapsed. The amount of blood he had lost was not measured in pints but in are you sure he's still alive, and the answer—yes, barely, through her—was becoming harder to sustain with every passing minute.
She was manually inflating his lungs. That was the simplest way to put it. She was reaching into the autonomic nervous system and doing the job that the brain stem was supposed to do automatically, the job it had been doing without conscious intervention for every second of Peter Parker's life until a bullet had rattled the machinery loose. Breathe in. Breathe out. Contract the diaphragm. Expand the rib cage. Over and over and over, like rowing a boat across an ocean that had no far shore. Simultaneously, she was maintaining his blood pressure—not by pumping his heart directly, which would have required a precision she wasn't sure she possessed, but by constricting the peripheral vessels, keeping the remaining blood where it needed to be, in the center, around the organs that couldn't function without it. It was like trying to conduct an orchestra while someone set the concert hall on fire.
And it was slipping.
She could feel it slipping. Every few minutes, his heart would stutter, not stop, but… hesitate, as if it were considering whether the effort was even worth the pain in the ass, and Jean would have to push a little harder, dig a little deeper, remind his body that it wasn't allowed to give up yet. The medical staff were doing what they could, she assumed. She hadn't possessed any of them. She had thought about it—her mind had flicked through the possibilities like a deck of cards: the triage nurse, the attending physician, the anesthesiologist whose thoughts were a calm gray of professional detachment… but possessing a doctor would mean splitting her focus, and splitting her focus would mean letting some part of Peter's autonomic function slip, and letting something slip would mean—
Stop, Jean told herself. You're spiraling. You're standing on a patch of grass outside a hospital spiraling while a man bleeds to death because you can't decide whether possessing a surgeon is morally worse than letting him die.
Possessing a surgeon is morally worse, said herself to Jean. You know that. You've done enough possessing for one lifetime. For several lifetimes. For a whole multiverse of lifetimes.
He's going to die if I don't do something.
He's going to die if you do the wrong something. You're not a surgeon. You're a telepath with a guilt complex and a savior fantasy. Do you really think inserting yourself into a thoracic repair is going to improve the outcome?
Jean didn't answer. She didn't have an answer. The voice was right… it was usually right, which was why she hated it so much… but being right didn't tell her what to do. Being right just stood there, arms crossed, pointing out the flaws in every possible course of action while offering none of its own.
Peter's heart stuttered again. Jean pushed. The heart steadied. For now.
She needed to sit down.
The bench was not, strictly speaking, a park bench. Jean had been wrong about that, or imprecise, which was a form of wrongness she usually tried to avoid. It was a bench in a small, landscaped area adjacent to the hospital's main entrance, a rectangle of tired grass, a few bushes that had seen better decades, a single tree whose leaves were doing their best to look optimistic despite the city's best efforts to kill them. There was a plaque on the bench, the kind that memorialized someone who had presumably donated money or died well or both. Jean didn't read the plaque. She didn't want to know who the bench was for. She had enough ghosts in her head already.
She sat. The iron was cold through her pants, she was still wearing the same clothes from Roosevelt Island and before that, she realized, which meant she'd been wearing them for the better part of twenty-four hours, which meant she probably looked like someone who had been through a psionic explosion and a vigilante shooting and a series of increasingly poor decisions. The thought was distant. Academic. Her body was a thing that existed somewhere to the left of her attention; her mind was elsewhere, reaching across the hospital's footprint like a hand stretching toward a flame.
She could feel him. Not his thoughts—he was too far under for thoughts, his consciousness buried beneath layers of anesthesia and blood loss and the body's primal, animal drive to survive—but his presence. The shape of his mind. The particular frequency of Peter Parker, which Jean had learned to recognize the way you learn to recognize a voice in a crowd. It was dimmer now than it had been on the bridge, on the rooftop, in the test chamber where she'd entered his memories and let May Parker's words fall on her like rain. But it was still there. Still burning. Still him.
His breathing was getting worse.
She could feel it from the bench; the ragged, uneven rhythm, the way each inhalation was a negotiation between his damaged lung and his exhausted diaphragm. The way his heart kept trying to give up and she kept not letting it. The medical team was doing what medical teams did: fluids, transfusions, pressure, the urgent choreography of people who had trained for exactly this scenario and were currently losing the battle against it. They didn't know they had help. They didn't know a telepath was sitting on a bench fifty yards down, her eyes closed, her hands gripping the iron armrests, her mind buried so deep in Peter Parker's autonomic nervous system that she could feel the individual alveoli struggling to expand.
This isn't enough, she realized. The thought was quiet. Clinical. The kind of thought you have when the situation has passed beyond panic into something colder and clearer. Keeping his lungs moving and his blood circulating—that's buying time. But it's not enough. The damage is too extensive. The body is too tired. He's going to slip.
Unless what? asked the inner Jean.
Unless I go deeper.
A pause. The voice, for once, seemed uncertain. Define "deeper."
Jean didn't define it. She didn't have the vocabulary. She knew only that there was a level below the autonomic nervous system, a place where consciousness and biology stopped being separate things and became a single, continuous medium, and she had been there before, with Sara, in the years before she died, when they had practiced their abilities on each other and discovered that telepathy wasn't just about thoughts. It was about connection. About merging. About letting your mind become someone else's anchor so completely that you couldn't tell where you ended and they began.
She had not done this with anyone since Sara. She had not wanted to do this with anyone since Sara. The intimacy of it was—there wasn't a word. "Intimacy" was too small, too romantic, too suggestive of things Jean had never let herself feel for anyone except, briefly, disastrously, the boy whose mind she was currently considering entering like a second body.
You're going to possess him, her inner voice said. Not an accusation. One could not accuse oneself of anything. This is a recognition of fact. Fully. Not just his lungs. All of him.
I'm going to keep him alive.
That's the same thing and you know it. You're going to take the wheel of his entire body—his breathing, his heart, his brain stem, everything—and you're going to sit there in the dark of his skull and drive him like you drove Cheryl's sedan. And you're going to tell yourself it's different because you're saving his life and not stealing his body. But is it different? Is it actually different?
Jean opened her eyes. The grass was very green. The tree was very old. The plaque on the bench was very unread. The world, she noted with the distant surprise of someone who had been somewhere else for a long time, was still here. The sun was still in the sky—late afternoon, maybe, or early evening, the light going amber at the edges. A few blocks away, a crowd was gathering at the hospital entrance with signs and flowers and the kind of desperate hope that Jean had never learned to feel. They were here for Spider-Man. They didn't know who she was. They would never know who she was.
She closed her eyes again.
It's different, she told the voice. Because I'm asking. He invited me in. On the bridge. In the test chamber. He showed me his aunt. He said "you have me." That's—that's permission. That's precedent. That's not the same as hijacking a stranger.
He invited you into a memory. He didn't invite you into his brain stem.
He's unconscious. He can't invite me into anything right now. But if he could—
If he could, what? You think he'd want you inside his head after everything you did? After the rooftop? After MJ? After the Hulk? After you tried to kill him and after you almost got him killed?
He took a bullet for me. He already forgave me. He forgave me before I'd even asked for it.
The voice was silent for a long moment. When it spoke again, it was quieter. Almost gentle. Do you believe that? Or are you just telling yourself what you need to hear to justify what you're about to do?
Jean didn't answer. The question was fair. The question was always fair. That was the worst thing about her thoughts: it asked questions she couldn't dismiss, questions that had teeth, questions that would follow her into the deep and wait for her to come back with an answer.
But in the meantime—in the small, desperate, unphilosophical meantime—Peter Parker was dying. His lung was collapsing, his blood was leaking, his heart was losing its rhythm, and the girl who had spent a month being the worst version of herself was the only person in the world who could reach deep enough to hold him together.
Was it different from possession? Maybe. Maybe not. Did she believe he would want her there? She didn't know. She hoped so. The hoping itself was suspect—since when did Jean Grey hope?—but it was what she had.
She unlocked her fingers from the iron armrest. She let her shoulders drop. She let the noise of the city—the sirens, the crowd, the distant helicopter that was probably news coverage by now—fade into a hum and then into a silence and then into a space she had been avoiding for years.
And she dove.
The dive was not a dive. That was the first thing she noticed. A dive implied water, gravity, a surface breaking, a direction that was down. This was none of those things. This was… she didn't have a word for it. The closest she could get was unfolding, the way a flower unfolds, or inverting, the way a sock turns inside out, or drowning, except she was drowning into air, drowning into light, drowning into a space that had no dimensions and all of them at once. Her consciousness, which had been a single steady point behind her eyes, became a ribbon and then a net and then a fog and then a presence distributed across an architecture she couldn't see but could feel, the pressure of it, the terrible and beautiful weight of another mind opening beneath her like a city seen from above.
She passed through layers. She didn't know what the layers were—personality? identity? the neural correlates of consciousness that scientists had been arguing about for decades?—but she felt herself moving through them the way you move through rooms in a house you've never visited, each one stranger and more intimate than the last. There was a layer that tasted like grief. A layer that tasted like guilt. A layer that burned with the particular, unquenchable fire of responsibility, the sense that everything was his to fix, his to carry, his to die for if necessary.
And beneath all of it, at the center, so deep she almost missed it:
Peter.
Not his body. His self. The irreducible core of him, the thing that had been there before the spider bite and would be there after the wounds healed and the scars faded and the city forgot his name for the second time. It was not a voice exactly. It was not a thought. It was more like a frequency—a particular resonance, a harmonic that Jean recognized without knowing how, the way you recognize a song you haven't heard in years.
She settled into the space next to it. Not merging. Not possessing. Just... being there. Close enough to feel his pulse from the inside. Close enough to breathe when he breathed. Close enough to catch the edges of something that was not quite a memory, too fragmented, too random, too early, drifting toward her like a piece of paper caught in a current.
She reached for it without thinking. Or maybe not reached. Maybe just noticed. Maybe the memory came to her, and the distinction between reaching and receiving was one of the things that stopped mattering when you were this far inside someone else's head. It felt like childhood, this moment in time.
And Jean, who had not been a child in a very long time, let herself fall.
Still here, she thought, or Peter thought, or both of them thought together, the words blurring at the edges where one mind ended and the other began. Still breathing. Still—
...
The first thing that came to her was not a memory so much as a texture—the particular sensation of cheap drugstore sneakers on linoleum, too-big shoes on too-small feet, the rubber soles making that squeak-squeak sound that only ever happens in school hallways when you're already late and trying not to draw attention. Jean had never worn cheap drugstore sneakers in her life. She had never been late to a class she cared about being late to. And yet here she was, feeling the squeak of rubber on waxed floors in a body that was not hers, inside a mind that was currently bleeding into a hospital mattress twelve floors above her conscious awareness.
She could have pulled away. She should have pulled away. This was not her business. This was a stranger's childhood, unspooling like old VHS tape, and she was watching it like a creep. But pulling away required a kind of mental locomotion she wasn't sure she could manage while simultaneously commanding Peter Parker's lungs to inflate and deflate, his heart to keep squeezing, his blood to stay where blood was supposed to stay. So... she stayed. Or at least, that's what she told herself.
You could leave if you wanted to, said Jean to herself. You're choosing not to.
I am manually keeping him alive, answered Jean to herself. Forgive me if multitasking isn't my strong suit.
Is that really why?
She didn't dignify herself with a response. She was busy watching a twelve-year-old boy trip over his own shoelaces in the middle of a hallway.
The memory, as it resolved:
Peter Parker—age indeterminate, but young, definitely young, the kind of young where your face hasn't figured out what shape it's supposed to be yet—was speed-walking through what appeared to be a middle school corridor. He was carrying a diorama. A diorama. The kind made of painted styrofoam and hot glue and ambition. It was supposed to depict, based on the wobbly cardboard label glued to its side, something called "THE WATER CYCLE (WITH ACCURATE EVAPORATION RATES)."
The diorama was too big for his arms. This was objectively true. He could barely see over it. Every few steps he would tilt his head to one side, navigating by the slice of hallway visible past the styrofoam clouds, and if Jean focus, she wouldn’t be to see anything either, and she felt (felt, not observed, because she was behind his eyes, inside the moment) the specific anxiety of a child who has worked very hard on something and is now careening toward disaster.
He was late for first period. The diorama was due in first period. He had stayed up until 2 a.m. gluing cotton balls into cumulus formations while Uncle Ben sat at the kitchen table pretending to read his book but actually just keeping him company. ("You know clouds aren't actually shaped like that, right?" "Yes, but Mrs. Delgado gives extra points for artistic interpretation." "Artistic interpretation. Right. That's one word for it.")
The memory of Ben was folded inside the memory of the hallway, a nesting bubble of consciousness that Jean experienced not sequentially but simultaneously—the kitchen fluorescence and the school hallway fluorescence bleeding into each other, the warmth of Ben's voice overlapping with the cold terror of approaching a classroom door with a diorama that was visibly shedding glitter onto the floor.
This is inane, Jean thought. This is the most inane thing I have ever—
The diorama snagged on a locker handle. Peter didn't notice. The diorama tilted. Peter noticed then, but noticing and correcting were two different processes, and the gap between them was where disasters lived. The whole thing, cotton clouds, evaporation rates, glitter all, tipped forward in catastrophic slow motion and hit the linoleum.
It did not shatter. Dioramas and other things made of styrofoam rarely do. But it did... deform. The cloud layer detached. The "RAIN" arrow (made of pipe cleaner) bent at an angle that no longer accurately represented precipitation. A small plastic tree came loose and rolled under a bank of lockers.
Peter stared at the wreckage.
And then—and this was what made Jean's attention catch, snag on the memory like it had snagged on the locker handle—he did not cry. He did not get angry. He knelt down on the hallway floor, assessed the damage with the same clinical focus she'd later see him apply to a band of colorful ninjas in a Damage Control facility, and said, very quietly, to no one:
"Okay.... Okay. Clouds are fixable. The tree is—" he craned his neck under the lockers— "the tree is retrievable. The evaporation rates are still accurate. This is salvageable. Yeah! This is completely salvageable."
The hallway was empty. No one had seen. He could have thrown the whole thing away and told Mrs. Delgado the dog ate it, assuming he had a dog, which Jean was now realizing she didn't know. But he didn't. He gathered the pieces, re-glued the clouds with a glue stick from his backpack, and walked into first period eight minutes late with a slightly lopsided diorama and a perfectly steady expression.
Mrs. Delgado gave him a B+. "The cloud formations are creative," she wrote on the rubric. "But the precipitation arrow is confusing."
He kept the rubric. Jean knew this because she could feel the memory connected to other memories—a folder in his closet, a box under his bed, the quiet pack-rat instinct of a boy who kept evidence of every small success.
Jean surfaced—not physically, but meta-cognitively, her awareness pulling back from the memory like a camera zooming out—and sat with what she'd just seen.
It was nothing. It was literally a nothing memory. There was no tragedy here, no formative trauma, no moment of heroic awakening. It was a child and a diorama and a B+. She had watched the whole thing like it mattered, and it didn't. It didn't.
And yet.
The way he'd knelt down. The way he'd said okay, okay, this is salvageable. The way he'd assessed the damage without once looking around to see if anyone was watching, without once performing his distress for an audience. Even at twelve. Even with a styrofoam cloud in one hand and a glue stick in the other. He was annoyed, she felt that, and he was tired, he was probably mortified on some level—but he didn't spiral. He just... fixed it. Or tried to, at least.
You're reading into this, she told herself. You're doing the thing where you extract profundity from banality because you want to feel like you're having a meaningful experience instead of just sitting here keeping a stranger's diaphragm moving.
Is that what I'm doing?
Obviously. You just watched a diorama fall over and now you're having feelings about it. That's not insight. That's boredom.
But the feeling didn't go away. The feeling was: this is what he was like before the spider, before the mask, before the city started writing his name in headlines, and before people started having his name tatted onto their upper back. And she hadn't earned this. He hadn't given her this. It had just floated up, driftwood on the current of his unconscious, and she'd watched it.
That was the part that bothered her. Not that she'd seen it. That she'd wanted to keep seeing it. That the diorama had ended and she was already waiting for the next one.
Voyeur, she thought. Invasive. Manipulative. You're supposed to be keeping him alive, not conducting a psychological autopsy on his childhood.
And yet here you stand.
And yet here I stand.
Game of Throne reference. She rolled her eyes—inside her own mind, where no one could see, because what was even the point of rolling your eyes if there was no audience to register the gesture? But she did it anyway. Some habits survived even total psychic immersion.
The next memory was already rising. She didn't stop it.
She told herself she couldn't stop it. That the current was too strong. That her focus was too divided.
She was good at telling herself things...
Still here, she thought. Still breathing. Still—
The diorama dissolved.
Not with a fade or a dissolve or any of the cinematic transitions Jean had seen in the movies she used to watch with Sara on Sunday afternoons when the world outside was too loud and the inside of their shared apartment was just quiet enough. No. It came apart the way sugar comes apart in water. Granular. Gradual. The styrofoam clouds lost their edges first, then the crooked pipe-cleaner arrow, then the linoleum, then Mrs. Delgado's B+ looping into itself like cursive ink dropped into a running sink. For a moment Jean felt the absence of the memory more than she'd felt the memory itself, a reverse-imprint, the knowledge that something had been there and was now not there, and she experienced the distinct and irrational sensation of missing a twelve-year-old boy she had never met.
You're being dramatic, she informed herself.
I'm inside a dying stranger's head keeping his autonomic nervous system running while floating through his childhood like a ghost with boundary issues, she answered herself. I think I earn dramatic.
The other voice—the cross-examining one, the one that never slept, the one that had spent the last several hours interrogating every flicker of feeling for signs of insincerity—did not dignify this with a rebuttal. It simply filed the exchange away for later use. Jean could feel it building its case against her even now, collecting evidence, stacking every moment of potential empathy like exhibits in a trial she was destined to lose.
Because here was the thing about being a telepath who had just spent a month hijacking strangers' bodies and a day inside the mind of the boy who had taken a bullet meant for her: you started to notice the architecture of your own bullshit. The way every thought looped back to you. The way you couldn't even watch a child's diorama collapse without making it about your own capacity for feeling. As if the memory existed for you. As if Peter Parker's life was just a test to determine whether Jean Grey was a good person.
It's not about you, she thought, and the thought itself was about her, which proved the point, which made her want to roll her eyes at her own brain, which was also about her, which—
She stopped. She was doing it again. She was always doing it again.
The next memory rose before she could spiral further. And this time, it didn't wait.
Still here, she thought. Still breathing. Still—
The shift came not as a picture but as a pressure—the particular gravitational pull of a mind moving from one moment to another without the permission of linear time. Jean felt herself being dragged sideways through something that was not space, felt the texture of Peter's consciousness change around her like water temperature dropping as you swim deeper. There was a flicker of color. A brief sensory stutter, the smell of cheap bread, the rough bite of brick against the back of a hoodie, and then the memory snapped into place around her with the suddenness of a door opening onto a room she hadn't known was there.
Rooftop. Fire escape, technically. The distinction mattered to the memory, which noticed the corrugated metal grating under its soles, the rust on the railings, the way the sunset was hitting the building across the street just wrong enough to make you squint. Someone was eating a sandwich. Ham and cheese, if Jean was reading the sensory data correctly... which she was, because she was inside the person eating it, and the person was Peter, and Peter was—what—fifteen? Fourteen? Young enough that his voice still cracked occasionally but old enough to have developed opinions about it.
He was also, Jean realized, on the phone.
"Hey, Happy," he said, and his voice was doing that thing where it pitched up half an octave because he was trying to sound professional but also casual but also like he wasn't sitting on a fire escape eating a sandwich he'd bought from a bodega that definitely had a C rating from the health department. "It's Peter. Peter Parker. Um. I was just calling to—to check in. Give you an update. On the, uh, the patrol. Last night. Which I did. The patrol. I did the patrol."
Oh no, Jean thought. Oh no, no, no.
But she couldn't look away. She was inside his head. She was inside his head and he was leaving a voicemail and every word was a small, earnest disaster.
"So I stopped a grand theft bicycle. Couldn’t find the owner, so I just left a note. Um... I helped this lost, old Dominican lady and she was really nice, she said I was muy valiente, which I think means—I mean, I know what it means, it means very brave, I'm taking Spanish, I'm not—anyway. She bought me a churro. Which was—I wasn't expecting that. It was a good churro. Really good. Cinnamon-y."
A pause.
"Anyway. So that was the—that was the update. I also helped a guy with directions, but that wasn't really a Spider-Man thing, that was more of just a—a regular person thing, I don't know why I'm mentioning it. Um. Okay. So that's—yeah. That's everything. So. Bye. Thanks, Happy. I mean—you don't have to thank me. That's not—I'm thanking you. For listening. To the voicemail. Bye."
He hung up.
The silence that followed was so dense Jean could have used it as a weapon.
Peter closed his eyes. He let his head fall back against the brick. And then, in the exact tone of someone who has just remembered every embarrassing thing they've ever done in chronological order, he said aloud, to no one, to the sunset, to the indifferent brick and the rusted fire escape and the universe that had given him spider powers and no social skills whatsoever:
"Why would I tell him about the churro?"
Jean—the Jean who was watching, the Jean who was keeping this boy's lungs moving twelve floors above her conscious awareness while simultaneously observing a memory of him being fifteen and terminally awkward—felt something crack open in her chest.
It was not a big crack. It was not the dramatic, cinematic fissure she might have expected, if she were the kind of person who expected dramatic, cinematic fissures. (She was not. She found dramatic cinematic fissures cliché and she resented how often her life seemed to provide them anyway.) It was more like the small, sharp noise an ice cube makes when you drop it into water. Thermal shock. A reaction the object itself didn't see coming.
Because this was—this was exactly the kind of thing Jean did. The over-explaining. The post-interaction cringe. The standing outside of your own sentences and grading them for errors while the person you were talking to had already stopped listening. The way Peter had said "it was a good churro, really good, cinnamon-y" like he was submitting a Yelp review for a snack that a grateful civilian had given him for being a hero, and then immediately, immediately, regretted the level of detail. Jean had done that. Jean had done that yesterday. She had spent her entire life doing that.
It was not a comfortable recognition. Comfortable recognitions were supposed to be about shared values, shared experiences, shared depth. You were supposed to see yourself in someone's courage, their sacrifice, their moral clarity. You were not supposed to see yourself in their inability to leave a voicemail without spiraling into self-conscious despair about churros.
Except.
Except this was depth, wasn't it? Not the kind you put in a eulogy or a Wikipedia summary or a news headline about Spider-Man, but the kind that actually mattered. The kind that told you who someone was when no one was watching, when the mask was off, when they were just a kid on a fire escape trying to impress an adult who would never listen to the voicemail anyway. (Happy wouldn't, Jean could tell. The memory had that particular weight to it—the knowledge, absorbed retroactively from an older Peter, that Happy Hogan had never once listened to these calls. Or at least, never responded. The calls just went somewhere dark and silent and the silence became a kind of answer, eventually.)
You're projecting, said the cross-examining voice. You're doing that thing where you take someone else's perfectly normal adolescent awkwardness and make it into a Mirror of Your Soul because you can't handle the alternative, which is that your awkwardness is just awkwardness and not a sign of some profound shared humanity.
Maybe, Jean answered. Or maybe I just watched a superhero eat a churro and ramble about it and I find that genuinely endearing. Is that allowed? Is endearment allowed?
The cross-examining voice did not answer, which meant either Jean had won the point or the voice was saving its rebuttal for later. Probably the latter. It always saved its rebuttals for later.
The memory held for another moment—Peter still on the fire escape, still grimacing at his own voicemail, still seventeen or eighteen or whatever age he was in this particular sliver of past—and Jean found herself not wanting to leave.
That was the thing. That was what she kept coming back to. She didn't want to leave.
She could have pulled away, she told herself. She could have surfaced back into the clinical hum of the hospital, the beeping monitors, the angry presence of the guy who tried to kill her with a .50 Cal, Frank Castle, in the corner, the distant murmur of the crowd that had gathered outside with signs and flowers and a gratitude that the man in the bed had earned a thousand times over but would never feel he deserved. She could have done her job—breathe, heartbeat, blood pressure—without engaging. She could have been a machine. She was good at being a machine.
But she didn't pull away. She stayed in the memory until it started to dissolve on its own—and even then, she lingered.
Voyeur, she thought, but the word had lost some of its bite. She'd been calling herself a voyeur for hours now and it wasn't sticking the way it should. Maybe because voyeurism implied a kind of theft, and she wasn't stealing anything. She was just... watching. Letting Peter's life wash over her like water. Like the current of a river she had no intention of fighting.
The memory released her, eventually. The fire escape faded. The taste of ham and cheese went with it. The churro—which she had not eaten but had felt him eat, the phantom cinnamon still warm on a tongue that was not hers—lingered the longest, a sensory ghost, and then it too was gone.
Something else was rising. She could feel it forming in the dark behind her eyes.
She didn't stop it.
Still here, she thought. Still breathing. Still—
The next door opened.
It came in the shape of a dining table. Not a memory of a dining table; the dining table itself. Solid. Wooden. Slightly too small for the room it was in. There were chopsticks. There was a half-finished plate of pad thai. There was a woman across the table with tired eyes and a smile that had been through things and survived them, and she was—
"Larb," said the woman.
"—What?" said Peter.
"I said larb. It's a Thai word. It means, um..." She gestured vaguely in a way that suggested she had not, in fact, known what larb meant before this moment. "...delicious. It means delicious."
"That's not—that's definitely not what larb means."
"It might be. You don't know everything."
"I know larb is a meat salad. I looked it up. That's what you ordered."
"Well," said May Parker, with the serene confidence of a woman who had decided to lose an argument on her own terms, "maybe I'm saying the meat salad is delicious. Did you think of that?"
Peter stared at her. She stared back. Neither of them blinked.
And then, from somewhere deep in the memory's texture, Jean felt something unfamiliar rise up through Peter's consciousness: a warmth so specific and so unguarded that she almost pulled away on instinct. Not because the warmth was intrusive. Because it was not intrusive. Because it was so completely, achingly ordinary—a teenager being embarrassed by his aunt over Thai food—and Jean had never had this. Jean had never sat across from someone who made terrible puns at her expense over takeout. Jean had never been loved in this particular key, the key of someone who knows you well enough to annoy you on purpose.
She stayed. Of course, she stayed. She was constitutionally incapable of leaving once something interested her, and this interested her.
The memory unspooled like thread from a sweater: May doing her "nervous" voice, May making Peter promise to always run the other way if he saw something dangerous, May's face doing that thing where humor was a thin film over genuine fear and they both knew it but neither would name it. Peter telling her about the internship with Tony Stark and May's face shifting through about six emotions in the space of a breath before settling on “I have to tell you, not a fan of that Tony Stark. Distracted all the time... he’s got you in your head.” She added a little head shake after that ‘Distracted all the time’ comment. Jean wondered whether or not they had met before or if May Parker was just that good at keeping up with the Stark... Yep, they had met before. Peter recalled it just now. Another memory within a memory. A memory remembered.
The waiter came. The waiter—mid-thirty, kind eyes, absolutely no ability to read the room—set down a complimentary sticky rice pudding in front of May with the air of someone who had just performed a courtship ritual.
“Sticky rice pudding.”
May looked at the dish and at the waiter “Oh, we didn’t order that.”
“It’s on the house.” Jean didn’t like how he winked after saying that.
“Oh! Thanks.” May smiled, then to Peter. “That’s nice of him.”
Peter's face did something complicated. Not quite horror, not quite delight, somewhere in the suburbs between the two. Perhaps he felt the same way as her. "Oh," he said, as he watched the waiter retreated. "I think he larbs you."
May laughed—really laughed, the kind of laugh that crinkled her nose and made her look ten years younger—and Jean felt it like a physical blow. Not the laugh itself. The absence. The knowledge that she had never made anyone laugh like that, not since Sara, and Sara's laugh had been different anyway, sharper, more conspiratorial, less invigorating. May Parker's laugh was a blanket. May Parker's laugh was the thing Jean had never known she was missing until she saw someone else have it.
Okay, said the cross-examining voice. So you're jealous of a dead woman's laugh now. That's healthy. That's definitely a normal emotional response.
Shut it, Jean replied. I'm not jealous. I'm observing.
You're observing how much you wish you'd had someone who laughed like that at your terrible puns.
I don't make terrible puns.
Exactly. Maybe that's the problem.
Jean wanted to argue with that. She genuinely wanted to argue with it. But the memory was shifting—Peter leaning forward, May's expression changing, the easy warmth of the dinner table giving way to something more serious—and she found herself pulled forward before she could formulate a rebuttal.
"Peter," May was saying, her voice suddenly quieter, the performance stripped away. "I know it's been—I know things have been hard. Since Ben. And I know you're out there... doing things. I'm not stupid."
"I never said you were."
"You didn't have to." She reached across the table and covered his hand with hers. "I just—I need you to be careful. Whatever you're doing. Whatever internship you're doing. I can't—"
She stopped. Swallowed. Restarted.
"I can't lose you, too."
Peter looked at her hand on his. For a long moment, the memory was so still Jean could feel her own heart beating inside it, even though her heart was not in this memory, even though her heart was twelve floors below from where this memory was being recollected, manually sustaining... tethered to someone else's body.
"I know," Peter said. "I know. You won't."
You can't promise that, Jean thought. You can never promise that. You're Spider-Man. You're going to put yourself in danger every day for the rest of your life and she'll never stop being afraid and you'll never stop lying to her about it and you will be shot because of me—
But May just nodded. Squeezed his hand. Let go.
"Eat your pad thai," she said, her voice almost normal again. "Before it gets cold."
"I larb you," Peter said.
May threw a chopstick at his head.
And the memory, impossibly, held its warmth all the way through to the end.
When it faded—when the Thai restaurant dissolved into the same sugar-water nothing as the diorama and the fire escape—Jean found herself sitting with something she couldn't name. Not quite grief, not quite longing, not quite hope. Something adjacent to all three. Something that had no vocabulary in the language she'd built for herself, which was a language of analysis and self-recrimination and the constant low hum of suspicion about her own motives.
She wondered, idly, if this was what normal people felt when they watched someone else be happy. Not envy, exactly. Not the sharp sting of I want what they have. More like the quiet, aching recognition that this exists. That somewhere, somehow, people sat across from each other at dinner tables and made each other laugh and said I can't lose you too. That the world contained warmth of this particular variety, and it had simply... never found her. Or she had never found it.
You could have had this, said the cross-examining voice. If you hadn't spent the last decade armored. If you'd let anyone in after Sara. If you'd tried.
Maybe, Jean answered. Or maybe some people get Thai dinners and some people get revenge quests and the universe doesn't actually care which one you end up with.
He got both, the voice pointed out. Peter got the Thai dinner. He also got the revenge quest. He just handled it differently.
He handled it by not going on the revenge quest at all. He handled it by dragging Toomes out of the fire. He handled it by curing his villains instead of killing them. He handled it by—
By being better than you. Yes. You've established that. What are you going to do about it?
Jean didn't have an answer. She didn't have an answer and the next memory was already forming—something with a school hallway, something with a locker, something with a voice saying you're the Spider-Man, from YouTube—and she let herself be carried forward anyway.
Still here. Still breathing. Still... whatever came next.
The Thai restaurant thinned at the edges first—the amber lights bleeding into something cooler, the smell of pad thai replaced by the particular scent of a teenage boy's bedroom that had been closed for too long: stale air, old laundry, the faint chemical sweetness of Lego plastic. Jean felt the transition not as a cut but as a gradient, a slow shift in the emotional weather of Peter's mind. One moment she was sitting across from May Parker in a restaurant that smelled like fish sauce and forgiveness; the next she was somewhere smaller, darker, the walls pressing in with the specific intimacy of a space that had been lived in for years by someone who never quite got around to throwing anything away.
The memory didn't announce itself. It simply was, the way memories in other people's heads always were—no title card, no establishing shot, just the sudden and total immersion into a moment that had already started before she arrived.
Peter was on the ceiling.
This was, objectively, an absurd thing to realize. Jean had known, intellectually, that Spider-Man could cling to walls—she'd experienced it herself during Roosevelt Island, the unsettling vertigo of Damage Control's weapons neutralizing his synthetic webbing, the way he'd adapted instantly, dropped his inhibitor, let his organic spinnerets do what they were designed to do—but knowing a fact and watching a fifteen-year-old boy crawl across his bedroom ceiling in a desperate attempt not to be noticed by his aunt were two very different categories of experience. The latter was, frankly, hilarious. Jean did not laugh. Jean was constitutionally incapable of laughing at things she found funny while also being deeply, uncomfortably aware that this too was probably another form of emotional avoidance. But she registered the impulse. She logged it. She would interrogate it later.
Below him, sitting on the bed with the posture of someone who had been waiting patiently for approximately twenty minutes and was beginning to regret that patience, was Ned Leeds.
And in Ned Leeds's hands, balanced with the ceremonial care of someone who had built something significant and was about to watch it die—
The Death Star.
Peter webbed the door and pulled it closed. He dropped from the ceiling. The latch clicked into place with the quiet finality of a guillotine blade. He turned around. He saw Ned Leeds.
Ned Leeds saw him.
Ned Leeds dropped the Death Star.
Three thousand nine hundred and seventeen pieces (Yes, this fun fact was the first thing Peter’s mind jumped to) hit the floor with a sound that was not so much a crash as an annihilation. The kind of sound that made you believe, for one irrational second, that you could hear every single piece separating from every other piece, a cascade of tiny plastic click-click-clicks like rain on a window if rain were made of ABS and represented the complete destruction of a weekend's worth of careful labor.
Neither of them looked at the wreckage. Neither of them could.
From the hallway, muffled through the door: "What was that?"
May. Peter's body went rigid in a way that Jean felt physically—the snap of adrenaline, the spike of cortisol, the sixteen-year-old fight-or-flight system kicking in with the force of a car alarm. She was inside this body, sort of. She was feeling what it felt. And what it felt was: caught.
"Uh, it's nothing!" Peter called. His voice cracked. It didn't always crack, but it cracked now, on the word nothing, which was ironic because the thing he was calling nothing was possibly the most consequential something in his entire life. "It's nothing!"
And then Ned Leeds, who had just watched his best friend descend from the ceiling like he was Spidermonkey from Ben 10 and who was currently above the debris field of what had once been the Galactic Empire's ultimate weapon, said the thing that would change everything:
"You're the Spider-Man."
A pause.
"From YouTube."
Jean had seen many people learn many secrets in her life. She had been the secret, usually. The revelation that someone could read minds, that someone could reach inside your head and pull out whatever they wanted, was not the kind of thing people absorbed calmly. There was fear, usually. Sometimes anger. Occasionally the kind of blank, institutional acceptance that was worse than either. But Jean had never seen someone react the way Ned Leeds was reacting right now—which was to say, with the barely-contained glee of a child who had just been told Christmas was coming early and also it was bringing a gaming PC.
Peter pressed the spider emblem on his chest. The suit went baggy. The mask waw off beforehand. His hands were shaking, Jean realized. She hadn't noticed before. The memory was holding the detail for her, offering it up: his hands were shaking, and not from the physical exertion of the ceiling-crawl. From fear.
"I'm not," Peter said. His voice cracked again. "I'm not."
If there was a less convincing denial in the history of human speech, Jean had never encountered it. The suit was literally falling off his body as he said it. The suit that had a spider on it. The suit that was clearly, visibly, unmistakably the Spider-Man suit. He was standing in his boxers in front of his best friend, a red-and-blue puddle of incriminating fabric around his ankles, saying I'm not like the words could retroactively erase the last thirty seconds from Ned’s head.
Ned, to his credit, did not dignify this with a response. He simply pointed up. The finger was more damning than any argument. "You were on the ceiling," Ned said.
Peter tried a different approach.
"No, I wasn't." Maybe not. He just told himself and Jean that. Still denying it. Still standing in his boxers with the suit on the floor. "Ned, what are you doing in my room?"
"May let me in. You said we were gonna finish the Death Star."
"You can't just bust into my room!"
The door opened. May Parker, a dishrag in one hand, her hair falling loose from a low bun, waved away smoke-edged stove air with the beleaguered air of a woman who had been fighting a losing battle with a turkey meatloaf recipe for the better part of an hour. "The turkey meatloaf recipe is a disaster. Let's go to dinner. Thai? Ned, you want Thai?"
"Yes," said Ned, at the exact same moment Peter said, "No."
"He's got a thing."
"A thing to do after," Ned added, recovering with the speed of someone who had been lying to adults about video game age rating since middle school.
"Okay." May pointed a finger at Peter, who was—Jean had almost forgotten, so consumed was she by the social catastrophe unfolding—still standing in his stripped boxers. "Maybe put on some clothes."
The door closed. The latch clicked. The room was silent for exactly one breath.
Then: "Ohh," Ned said, his voice dropping to a whisper, not because anyone was listening but because the information, he was about to speak felt too large for a normal volume. "She doesn't know???"
And Peter—Peter, who had just been caught on the ceiling, who had just watched his best friend's Lego Death Star disintegrate, who had just lied to May's face for the thousandth time and hated himself for it and would do it again anyway—shook his head.
"Nobody knows." A pause. "I mean, Mr. Stark knows because he made my suit, but that's it."
Ned's eyes went wide in a way that Jean could feel even though she wasn't looking through his eyes, she was looking through Peter's, and Peter was watching Ned's face do something between religious awe and the expression of a person who had just realized their best friend was, technically, a celebrity. "Tony Stark made you that???" His voice dropped even lower, barely a breath. "Are you an Avenger?"
Peter hesitated. The hesitation was small, barely a flicker, but Jean caught it because the memory caught it, because Peter's own mind had flagged this moment as significant—the moment he decided, consciously or not, to inflate the truth just enough to sound impressive. "Yeah," he said. "Basically."
Jean knew, from having seen the later memories, that this was not exactly true. Peter Parker was, at this point in his life, an Avenger in the same way a collage intern at Apple was a Fortune 500 executive: technically on the payroll, technically present for one major event, but not exactly in the group photo. But she understood the impulse. The desire to be more than you were in front of someone who was looking at you like you'd hung the moon. She had done it herself, with Sara. I'm not dangerous. I'm special. There's a difference. The difference was real. The difference was also, sometimes, a lie you told yourself until it became true.
"Whoa," Ned breathed.
"You can't tell anybody about this. You gotta keep it a secret."
"A secret? Why?"
"You know what she's like." Peter's voice shifted—the bravado draining out of it, replaced by something rawer. "If she finds out people try and kill me every single night, she's not going to let me do this anymore. Come on, Ned, please."
Ned nodded. A lot. "Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay." Six okays, Jean counted. Six okays and he still wasn't done. "I'll level with you. I don't think I can keep this a secret. This is the greatest thing that's ever happened to me, Peter!"
"Ned." Peter's voice caught. "May cannot know. I cannot do that to her right now, you know? I mean, everything that's happened with her, I—" The sentence died in his throat. He would’ve let it trail off if it didn’t collapse on him. The way a bridge collapses when the weight is too much. "...Please."
Jean had felt this before. Not in her own life—she had never begged anyone to keep a secret for her, she had been too busy keeping her own secrets, too busy building walls no one could see over. But she had felt it in Peter's head, earlier, when she'd stumbled across the memory of his uncle. The shape of an absence. The weight of a name unspoken. Everything that's happened with her. He couldn't even say Ben's name. He couldn't even name the loss. He knew it would have made it worse. He just carried it, like a stone in his chest, and asked his best friend not to add another one.
"Okay," Ned said, seventh time, and this time the word was not excited. It was steady. It was solid. It was the sound of someone who understood, without needing to be told, that something heavier than Spider-Man was being protected here.
"Just swear it, okay?"
"I swear."
"Thank you."
"Yeah." Ned was quiet for a moment. Peter walked away, running his hands through his hair, and Jean felt the whole body sigh—the adrenaline crash, the exhaustion, the impossible relief of being seen and not destroyed.
"I can't believe this is happening right now," Peter muttered. The words were not for Ned. They were for the universe. For the ceiling. For the pile of Death Star pieces that had died so this moment could live.
"Can I try the suit on?"
"No."
"How does it work? Is it magnets? How do you shoot the strings?"
"I'm gonna tell you about this at school tomorrow, okay?" Peter led Ned to the door as if he knew the other boy’s legs were moments away from growing roots. He grabbed the handle.
"Great." Ned stopped. Considered. "Okay, well, wait, then. How do you do this and the Stark internship?"
Peter turned. The answer, when it came, was almost an afterthought—but the memory flagged it, highlighted it, made sure Jean noticed: “This is the Stark internship”. The words landed in the room and changed the shape of everything that had come before. All the lies, all the excuses, all the times Peter had said internship and meant this. The entire double life, folded into four words.
"Oh," Ned said. The word contained multitudes.
"Just get out of here."
Peter ushered him out. The door closed. Peter leaned against it, his weight settling into the wood like he was trying to become part of the frame, and then—facepalm. A full, two-handed, exhausted, what just happened facepalm that Jean felt in her own palms as if the gesture had traveled across the gap between minds and imprinted on her nervous system.
She wanted to laugh. She didn't. But the wanting was, she was beginning to understand, a kind of progress.
The memory held for a moment longer—Peter's back against the door, his hands still over his face, his heart rate slowly dropping from fleeing a crime scene to normal adolescent panic—and then it began to loosen. The bedroom softened at the corners. The Death Star pieces blurred into points of color. Ned's voice, still asking questions from the hallway, faded into the same sugar-water dissolution as the memories before it.
But Jean wasn't quite ready to let this one go.
Because here was the thing that was sticking with her, the splinter under her skin that she couldn't stop worrying at: Peter had told someone. He had been fifteen or sixteen, terrified, carrying a secret that could destroy his life and the lives of everyone he loved—and he had told someone. And that someone had responded not with fear or anger or the clinical blankness of an institution that wanted to study you, but with a series of increasingly ridiculous questions asked at maximum volume.
Can I try the suit on?
Is it magnets?
How do you shoot the strings?
Ned hadn't asked if Peter was dangerous. He hadn't asked what it meant, exactly, that his best friend could apparently cling to ceilings and lift cars. He had asked how does it work, because to Ned, Peter was still Peter. The powers were new information. The person was the same.
‘Can you jump into my head and violate the sanctity of my body??’ That's not how it would have gone for me, Jean thought.
The thought was not self-pitying. It wasn't even sad. It was simply true. If someone had discovered Jean's abilities at sixteen—if someone had watch her make them hear a thought they hadn't spoken—they would not have asked how it worked. They would have asked whose mind she was reading right now. They would have asked if she'd been doing it the whole time. They would have backed away slowly, or not slowly, or reported her to someone with a clipboard and a bad attitude about genetic anomalies.
But Peter had found a Ned. Peter had found someone who looked at the impossible thing he had become and said: this is the greatest thing that's ever happened to me.
You had Sara, said the cross-examining voice.
I had Sara, Jean agreed. Sara was the one person who never backed away.
So you do understand.
I understand that he has someone who knows and I have no one. Not anymore. That's the difference.
The voice didn't answer. But Jean could feel it thinking. She could feel it building the next argument, the one she wouldn't be able to deflect, the one about how she was projecting her own loneliness onto a fifteen-year-old's friendship because it was easier than admitting she missed her sister, easier than admitting she was terrified of what came next, easier than admitting that sitting inside a dying stranger's head and watching his happiest memories was the closest she'd felt to okay in months.
But that argument hadn't arrived yet. For now, there was only the quiet, the slow dissolve of Peter's bedroom into the dark behind her eyes, and the knowledge—uncomfortable, undeniable, increasingly difficult to cross-examine into silence—that she still didn't want to leave.
Still here, she thought. Still breathing. Still—
The bedroom dissolved, but not gently this time.
Jean had grown accustomed to the slow fade, the sugar-water dissolution, the way Peter's memories released her like a hand opening finger by finger. This was different. This was a lurch—a sudden, almost violent sideways pull, as if the current of Peter's consciousness had hit a drop-off and she was being dragged over the edge with it. For a disorienting half-second she felt the boundaries of her own self smear against the boundaries of his, and then—
A classroom. Midtown School of Science and Technology, she assumed, though the assumption was based less on any identifying signage and more on the inescapable, low-grade hum of teenage anxiety that saturated the air. Fluorescent lights. The particular squeak of sneakers on linoleum that she now recognized from the diorama memory as Peter Parker's personal soundtrack to adolescence. The distant smell of cafeteria pizza and floor wax.
But what stopped her—what reached out of the memory and grabbed her by the throat before she'd even fully oriented herself—was not the classroom itself. It was the walls.
The classroom walls were a shrine.
Not a literal shrine. Nothing that obvious. But the artwork—hand-drawn, printed, collaged, taped up in overlapping layers like the accumulated sediment of a school year that had been through something—was almost entirely dedicated to one subject. Crayon Iron Man, marker Iron Man, Iron Man rendered in what appeared to be torn construction paper, Iron Man in flight, Iron Man with his repulsor raised, Iron Man surrounded by hearts and exclamation points and the wobbly block letters of children who had been too young to understand what they were thanking him for but old enough to know they should be grateful.
He died, Jean thought. And then, almost immediately: No. He saved them and then he died. Those are two different things. But the walls didn't make the distinction. The walls just said thank you in every medium available to the student body of Midtown School of Science and Technology, and Jean found herself unable to look away from a particular drawing—purple crayon, Iron Man's helmet disproportionately large, the arc reactor a blue scribble in the center of his chest—that had been signed at the bottom in letters that tipped forward like they were falling: THANK YOU MR. STARCK.
One had misspelled his name there. They had misspelled his name and they had drawn him anyway and they had hung it on the wall of a classroom he would never enter in a city he had died to protect and Jean felt something move in her chest that she could not immediately cross-examine into silence.
The thing was—and Jean hated that there was always a thing was with her, that she couldn't just have a feeling without also having a thesis statement about the feeling—anyway, the thing was that she remembered where she'd been when it happened. Not the snap, although she remembered that too, the sudden wrongness of a world losing half its souls, the way the silence afterward was louder than any scream. But the return. The “Blip”, they called it, as if it had been a momentary interruption, a commercial break in the broadcast of human history. Jean and Sara had been in a park. They had been practicing. Sara wanted to see if Jean could hold a thought long enough to trace it back to its source, and Jean had been trying, really trying, her temples aching with the effort, when the air had seared open and the world had doubled.
People everywhere. Appearing out of nothing. Stumbling from heights that hadn't existed five years ago. The chaos was not the chaos of destruction; it was the chaos of... restitution, which was somehow worse because no one had planned for it. You could plan for an attack. You could plan for a war. You could not plan for half the universe suddenly remembering it existed and reappearing mid-stride, mid-breath, mid-sentence. Sara had grabbed her hand—Jean could still feel the pressure of her sister's fingers, the specific way Sara's grip always tightened right before she was about to lie and say everything was fine—and they had run. Not toward anything. Just away. Away from the screaming and the confusion and the impossible, beautiful, terrifying miracle of a world being stitched back together.
And Tony Stark, a man Jean had never met and never would meet, had been the needle.
She'd known this, of course. Everyone knew this. It was the kind of historical fact that transcended countries and languages and political affiliations: Tony Stark died to bring everyone back. But knowing a fact and standing inside the memory of a boy who had loved him—who had been mentored by him, scolded by him, believed-in by him—while surrounded by crayon drawings of his face were two very different categories of experience. The classroom wasn't just a classroom. It was a memorial. A living, breathing, crayon-and-construction-paper memorial to a man whose last act had been to save everyone, including two sisters in a park who had never known his name until it was already over.
Jean felt her throat tighten.
You're doing it again, said the cross-examining voice. You're feeling someone else's grief because it's safer than feeling your own. Tony Stark isn't your tragedy. He's Peter's tragedy. You're just borrowing it.
Maybe, Jean answered. Or maybe I'm just capable of being moved by sacrifice. Is that so hard to believe?
The voice didn't answer. But Jean could feel it making a note. Filing the exchange under Exhibit G: Attempted Sincerity, Probably Performative.
She made herself look away from the drawings.
Peter was sitting down next to Ned.
The shift from the walls to the conversation was so abrupt that Jean almost lost her footing in the memory—the emotional temperature dropping from global mourning to teenager who has a plan with the whiplash speed that only adolescent boys could manage. Peter's body was practically vibrating with barely-contained enthusiasm. His knee was bouncing under the desk. His hands were doing that thing where they couldn't decide whether to gesture or stay still. He looked, Jean thought, like a golden retriever who had been told the word walk and was trying very hard to be calm about it.
"I have a plan," he said.
Ned, who had clearly been in this position many times before and had developed the appropriate emotional calluses, which was: "Mhm."
"Okay." Peter leaned in. The memory sharpened—not visually, but emotionally, the way moments that mattered always did in retrospect. "First, I sit next to MJ on the flight."
Ned's eyebrow twitched. "Mhm" again, but this one had a question mark attached to it that the first one hadn't.
"Second, I'm gonna buy a dual headphone adapter and watch movies with her the whole time."
"Okay." The word was neutral. Ned's face was not. Jean, who was inside Peter's head and therefore had access to the way Peter was reading Ned's expression, felt the flicker of doubt before Peter did—a tiny premonition that this plan, this beautiful six-step plan, was already being judged and found wanting.
Peter pressed on. "Three. While we go to Venice—Venice is super famous for making stuff out of glass, right?"
"True." Ned's delivery was flat. The flatness was, Jean was beginning to understand, a form of affection. The specific flatness of a best friend who knew what was coming and had decided to let it arrive on its own terms.
"So, I'm gonna buy her a Black Dahlia necklace. Because her favorite flower is the Black Dahlia, because of, well..."
"The murder."
"The murder." Peter's voice landed on the word with a strange, almost reverent emphasis—like he was acknowledging the darkness of it while simultaneously choosing not to be deterred. Jean, who had been drawn to dark things her whole life and had never quite known whether the darkness was a flaw or a feature, recognized the impulse. MJ liked the Black Dahlia because of the murder. That was weird. But Peter liked that she was weird. He wasn't just tolerating the darkness; he was incorporating it into the plan. Step three: buy her a flower named after a corpse.
"Four. When we go to Paris, I'm gonna take her to the top of the Eiffel Tower, give her the necklace."
Ned's "Oh!" was a single note of dawning comprehension. The shape of the plan was becoming visible to him now, the architecture of romance assembled from airline seating arrangements and Venetian glass and a flower that was also a horrific crime scene.
"Five. I'm gonna tell her how I feel. And then six." Peter paused. This was the big one. The finale. The part where the plan either became genius or disaster and he had no way of knowing which. "Hopefully she tells me she feels the same way."
Beat.
"Oh!" said Ned, with a completely different inflection now—the "oh" of someone who had just spotted the fatal flaw in an otherwise elegant machine. "Don't forget step seven."
Peter leaned forward. His face was open, curious, genuinely expecting wisdom. It was, Jean thought, one of the most vulnerable expressions she had ever seen on a human being. He actually believed Ned was about to contribute something useful to the plan. He actually trusted him.
"Step seven..." Peter prompted.
"Don't do any of that."
Jean felt the laugh before she could stop it.
Not aloud—she was inside someone else's mind, twelve floors above her physical body, and making sounds would have required a mouth she wasn't currently using. But internally, somewhere in the architecture of her consciousness, a laugh occurred. It was small and it was startled and it was accompanied by an immediate, reflexive wave of self-annoyance, because laughing meant she was engaged, and engagement meant investment, and investment meant vulnerability, and vulnerability meant—
Stop, she told herself. Just stop. It was a joke. You laughed at a joke. That's a normal thing that normal people do.
But you're not normal people, the cross-examining voice noted. You're a telepath who spent the last month hijacking civilians and now you're laughing at a teenage boy's romantic problems like you're his friend. Like you belong here. Like you've earned this.
I'm keeping him alive. Doesn't that earn me something?
That's debt repayment. That's math. Laughing is different. Laughing means you are fond of him.
Jean didn't have an answer for that. Or rather, she had an answer, but it was the kind of answer she wasn't ready to give. Maybe I do. He took a bullet for me. I should be fond of him. What's so wrong with that?
The cross-examining voice went quiet. Not defeated. Just... waiting. Filing. Building the next case.
The memory played on. Peter's face had crumpled from enthusiasm into confusion. "Why?"
And Ned, with the serene confidence of someone who had thought about this extensively and arrived at a conclusion that was both completely wrong and absolutely sincere, explained: "Because we're gonna be bachelors in Europe, Peter."
"Ned, look."
"I may not know much," Ned continued, "but I do know one thing: Europeans love Americans."
The sincerity of this statement was so total, so impervious to doubt, that Jean felt Peter's skepticism hit it like a wave against a cliff. "Really?" Peter asked, and the word contained about six different layers of I don't think that's right.
"And more than half of them are women," Ned added, which was—objectively, mathematically—a true statement, and also completely irrelevant to the argument he was trying to make. Jean almost laughed again. She caught herself this time. The catching itself was a kind of progress, she supposed. The laugh had happened; the suppression had been slightly less reflexive.
Peter's voice shifted. The enthusiasm was gone now, replaced by something quieter, something that didn't have steps or phases or backup plans. "Okay, sure, but... I really like MJ, man. Okay? She's awesome, she's funny in a sort of dork way, and sometimes I catch her looking at me, and I feel stood up..."
He trailed off. The sentence didn't end so much as it evaporated, leaving behind a residue of something Jean recognized—hadn't she felt this? Hadn't she been looked at by someone who saw past the walls? Sara didn't count. Sara was family. But someone else? Someone who wasn't obligated?
The recognition was uncomfortable. So, she filed it. She was good at filing things. There’s money in that.
"Wait," Peter said, his voice snapping back to alertness. "Dude, she's coming now. Just don't say anything."
Michelle Jones walked over like she had somewhere better to be and had decided, provisionally, that this detour was worth her time. Her posture was a masterclass in casual indifference; her eyes, Jean noticed, were anything but. They flicked across Peter's face with the precision of someone who was always collecting data, always cataloguing, always seeing more than she let on.
Jean felt a complicated knot tighten in her stomach.
This was the girl she had possessed. This was the girl whose body she had borrowed, whose lips she had pressed against Peter's, whose memories she had rifled through like a filing cabinet while Peter stood on that rooftop thinking—believing—that the woman he loved had finally remembered him. Jean had worn MJ like a costume. She had spoken through her mouth and smiled with her face and delivered cruelties that weren't MJ's but had arrived in MJ's voice. And now here she was, watching the real MJ from the safe remove of someone else's memory, and the disparity between the version she'd stolen and the version in front of her was so stark it made her want to look away.
But you can't look away, she reminded herself. You're inside his head. There's nowhere to go.
"What's up, dorks?" MJ said. "Excited about the science trip?"
Peter's voice did the thing where it pitched up slightly, the way it had on the voicemail to Happy, the way Jean was beginning to recognize as his talking-to-people-he-wanted-to-impress register. "Hey, uh, yeah. We're just talking about the trip."
Ned, whose ability to read a room was apparently determined by a coin flip Jean couldn't see, added: "Yeah, and Peter's plan."
Peter's head snapped toward Ned with the velocity of someone who had just been betrayed by their own immune system. "I don't have a plan," he said, which was technically a lie but spiritually a plea.
"No," Ned amended, winking at Peter with the subtlety of a brick through a window, "he's just going to collect tiny spoons while we're traveling to other countries."
MJ's eyebrow arched. "Like a grandmother?"
"I'm not collecting tiny spoons," Peter said, the words tripping over each other in their haste to exit his mouth. "He's collecting tiny spoons." These guys are giving Jean motion sickness.
"Oh." MJ nodded slowly, the way you nod at someone who has just told you something that is clearly not true but which you have decided, for reasons of your own, to accept. "Okay, well, that was a real roller coaster."
"Mhm," said Peter, which was not a word so much as a surrender.
MJ didn't leave immediately. She paused, tilting her head slightly, and Jean felt the weight of her attention like a physical thing. "By the way," she said, "travel tip: you should probably download a VPN on your phone, just so that the government can't track you while we're abroad."
"Smart," Peter said, and the word came out slightly breathless. "Will do."
She left. The classroom air rearranged itself in her absence, settling back into the ordinary hum of fluorescent lights and distant hallway noise. Peter stared at the space where she'd been standing. The expression on his face was not quite hope and not quite despair—something in the postal code of both, the specific emotional ZIP code of a teenage boy who had just survived a conversation with his crush and was now replaying every single word to determine if he'd embarrassed himself.
"Dude," Ned said, with the confidence of someone who had not, in fact, embarrassed himself, "I think that went really great."
Peter did not agree. Jean could feel the disagreement in the slump of his shoulders, in the way his hand came up to rub the back of his neck, in the whole-body sigh that he was too polite to vocalize. The plan—the beautiful six-step plan—had hit its first obstacle, and the obstacle was reality.
The memory began to soften at the edges.
Jean felt the dissolution coming, but she didn't fight it. She was learning to recognize the rhythm of Peter's mind now: the way memories rose and fell, the way the current carried her from one to the next without ever quite letting her choose the destination. It was not unpleasant, this drift. It was not comfortable either—she was too self-aware to ever be fully comfortable anywhere, least of all inside someone else's head—but it was something adjacent to both. A strange, tentative third thing that she didn't have a name for yet.
He made a six-step plan, she thought, as the classroom walls began to blur into watercolor. He made a six-step plan to tell a girl he liked her, and his best friend told him not to, and he ignored him. And it worked. Eventually. After a drone attack and a European disaster and a man who pretended to be from another dimension.
And then I ruined it. Four years later. On a rooftop. With her face.
The thought should have hurt more. It did hurt. But alongside the hurt, almost imperceptibly, was something else: the quiet, stubborn recognition that the boy who had made that plan—the boy who had sat in this classroom and bounced his knee and said she's awesome, she's funny in a sort of dork way like it was the most obvious truth in the universe—was the same boy whose lungs she was now keeping inflated. He had been earnest and ridiculous and completely incapable of being cool. And he had grown up. He had lost everything. And he had still taken a bullet for her.
You like him, the cross-examining voice said. It didn’t sound like an accusation this time. It was just... a statement. Almost gentle.
I like the memory of him, Jean corrected. The sixteen-year-old version. That's not the same as—
Isn't it?
She didn't answer. But she didn't deny it either. And the not-denying, she suspected, was the most honest thing she'd done all day.
The current moved. The classroom was gone. Something else was forming in the dark—something with water and glass and a necklace that would outlive everything. She let it come.
Still here, she thought. Still breathing. Still—