Chapter Text
If the headache was already jackhammering his skull, it definitely was now. Incredibly.
He clutched the grains of the brick wall in the damp alleyway, flashes of light blinding the back of his vision. He could hear nothing, and feel nothing. Just the feeling of his brain splitting in two.
Peter could’ve been screaming, but he doubted it. It was just so loud. And harsh. And…. wide.
He had–perhaps a bit naively–assumed that his headaches would be fixed after Jean and the whole disaster at the Center of Damage Control a month ago. Or at least, that the arachnid genes wouldn’t have been spiking again, and finally balanced out. But that hypothesis had been wrong, and instead, the headaches were few and far between, but ten times worse. And lasted longer.
Like now.
Breathing slow, he dully felt his knees hit the wet concrete, and tried to come back to life again. But the pain was really really fucking getting to him. The honking of the cars was accentuated by every breath, and every rumble of the engines felt like it was reverberating in his bones. It was like he was stuck in a magnifying petri dish, and he was pelted over and over and over again.
Vaguely, he felt himself sink lower into himself, fully resting on his knees with his head against the cool brick, and a slight pressure on his shoulders. It grounded him, smoothed him out. And little by little, the honking faded, the vibration settled again, and his senses seemed to return to humanly normal levels.
“Peter? Peter, -oh god. Please, just breathe-”
He blinked, stunned a little, before realizing the frantic voice was MJ. Bizarrely, his first concern was the mask, and he felt himself flinch against the voice.
“Peter? You there?” her voice came again, soft and quick.
And carefully, he drew in a deep breath, trying to steady his voice. But it still came out shaky and high.
“Ye-eah,” his voice cracked at the end. “Just.. my senses. I swear I’m fine, it’s just-”
He wasn’t sure how to finish, but hoped she understood. She seemed to anyway, and just kept rubbing his shoulders in slow motions, oddly reminiscent.
“I uh- I have your clothes in my backpack… If you want to change into them now- well, I mean maybe not like, here, you know, in public, but I’m sure we could find like, a dumpster you could hide behind and-”
“MJ?”
“Yeah?”
“That’s perfect.”
“Oh.”
She let out a nervous laugh at the end, “Good. I wasn’t sure but Ned told me I should.”
He carefully straightened, and groaned as the bruises pulled, and his head gave another wave of pain. Not blinding, but still blistering. Her hands slowly melted away from his back, leaving them cold and feeling naked.
Turning, he used the wall for support as she pulled the clothes from her bag, head still bowed in an effort to keep the light from triggering. It felt like a dull migraine, rather than a beat down.
Silently and quickly, he ducked behind a turned over trashcan and small mountain of boxes as he changed, with MJ keeping a soft lookout, and he emerged a quick second later in the ragged hoodie she had brought, and sweats.
The sunlight felt stronger now, with his mask off, and he had to squint at her, while she snatched the bloodied suit and stuffed it into her bag.
“Jesus,” she muttered, and he blinked at her.
“What?”
“Nothing, it’s just- you look a wreck.”
“It’ll heal,” he waved away her concern, but she was looking at him with something else. Something deeper, and fiercer. And for the quickest second in the world, it was as if they were back to the same people four years ago, that MJ was still the graduating teenager, and he was the teenage Spiderman, and they had to only deal with “small potatoes”. But with a blink, it was gone, and she looked away, hefting the backpack onto her shoulders.
“Do you wanna come over-”
“I should probably go home-”
“Oh yeah, no, you probably need to wash your suit.”
She was the first to shoot down her own idea, and the spark of disappointment lit a match in his chest, burning as it went up. But he swallowed it anyway.
“Yeah uh- you wanna come with?”
She shrugged and nodded nonchalantly, blissfully unaware of the fire brewing in his heart. “I can’t say I’m not curious to see where Mr. Spiderman lives.”
And he chuckles at that, wishing that they were themselves four years ago.
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Half of him wishes he had the premonition to clean up, and half of him is defiant that it’s not his fault. There are webs on the ceiling–old and thin–and his computers are still whirring, creating another DNA inhibitor. She purses her lips at it, but doesn’t say anything, and instead, quietly scours the room with her eyes.
“It’s like a lab,” she jokes.
Peter snorts, “Yeeah. It’s New York so, take what I can get.”
“And all this stuff,” she raises an eyebrow and the random junk piled in the far corner of the big attic.
“The landlord’s stuff. I doubt it’s anyone’s living stuff, but I don’t wanna get rid of it so-” he broke off with a shrug. It felt wrong and invasive of him to just throw away possibly someone’s whole life, even while it collected dust and webs.
She nodded, seemingly to understand, and leaned down for a closer look at the little device coming to life.
“I thought you said you weren’t going to use one anymore?”
“Yeah I uh-” he stopped short, another sharp pang spiking his head, and his fingers instinctively reacted. It was a car alarm outside. He blinked, and realized she was now looking at him, waiting for an answer. “Sometimes, it just gets really bad. It’s more of a uh-” he stopped again, the blinding pain taking over for a brief second. But long enough for her to notice.
“Peter?” she had stepped a bit closer, her eyes wide with worry. He hated making her worry.
“Sorry- shit, I’m fine, I swear. But’s its what I’m talking about, my head-”
And then it came, worse than before. Everything was working overtime, drilling into his brain, making holes, amplifying the sound. The whirring of the computer, the smell of old tobacco and musk, E.V. asking if he was okay, the vibrating floorboards, the sound of cars from below. All of it, was shaking his bones, literally. He felt like he could feel his entire body vibrate to all the different frequencies.
Two hands appeared on his forearms, and then he was being pulled, his knees hitting what he assumed was his bed, and then something soft placed over his body. Cold hands traveled through his hair, but he barely felt them as the sound kept taking over, wave after wave after wave. And eventually, without realizing it, he passed out, eyes rolling back, and everything went still.
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“Uh… hello?” MJ spoke, eyes wide, as her hands kept moving through his scalp. The motion felt familiar, and his curls felt like they were bending to her touch.
The robot voice she heard earlier when Peter had practically kneeled over in pain spoke again, softer this time, but laced with concern. Which, she hadn’t known was possible.
“Would you like me to check his vitals?”
“Yes, that would be great actually.”
“Full body scan in process.”
She waited, still moving her hand, eyes still locked in on his bruised face. He reminded her of a bruised peach, soft and sweet, but bruised all around.
“His arachnid DNA briefly overtook his Human DNA strands, with a large spike, but have settled back to equilibrium.” There was a pause, like the robot was considering, before it spoke again. “He is exhausted, and his body needs to recover.”
MJ still had a focused mind to notice that the robot seemed to be holding back a bit of information, but she trusted it to the last word. If Peter had worked with the robot for four years, then MJ could do the same.
“Thanks,” she murmured, and the Robot only hummed back, seemingly to keep things quiet, which she appreciated.
She didn’t like the device changing his DNA. She didn’t like the idea that she might lose someone she had just found. Or parts of someone. Someone she had loved.
Her eye twitched.
While Ned remembered right away, her memories came back slow, and in dreams, where she couldn’t tell them apart from her imagination to reality.
But seeing him collapse against the wall like that, and then here in his apartment, with his eyes all pained and lost, brought her back to a memory from high school.
She had needed to find him for some reason, she couldn’t remember what. But she had somehow known he would be on the roof where an Iron Man mural was. And she silently approached him, and somehow, she knew exactly what to do, and held him.
And Peter had looked with the same lost and desperate look, the pleading and broken stare. With his eyes rimmed red, his face all cut up and bruised, and she held him.
Now, he was laid on the bed, eyebrows scrunched up and breathing in deep. MJ was itching to call someone, but she had no idea who. Maybe Frank, but what he could do in this situation was unknown to her.
So instead, she pulled from that memory, and pushed away the Spiderman she was used to. The one who shook Mayor Mamdani’s hand, the one who always seemed to save the day, the one who always swung around and never got too hurt to stop, the one who wasn’t invincible, who wasn’t cracking jokes every so often, the one that wasn’t a cartoon figure tracked on Ned’s app.
He was Peter Parker. A kid her age. Who she had gone to high school with, entertained in clubs, was Ned’s best friend, who built Ned’s Lego Deathstar together, who was into the same nerdy things he was into.
Who was dying.
A sharp intake of breath rattled her chest. She wasn’t sure how she knew, but she knew. She felt it. She was losing him to whatever spider genes that were living inside of him.
MJ made a silent promise, and a plan to speak with Ned, to save Peter. Not the unstoppable force and character Spiderman, but the person Peter, who they loved. If they saved Spiderman in the process, great.
But Peter came first.