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She’s three chapters into The Buried Giant when there’s a quiet knock on her door.
MJ looks at the time on her phone: 10:42 PM. She walked through the door nearly two hours ago to be greeted by Ned and Peter hanging out in the living room, a box of pizza between them while The Empire Strikes Back (Peter's favorite, apparently) played on their television. Ned had invited her to watch with them, while Peter had done nothing but politely smile and wave. She ignored the way her chest constricted at the sight enough to lie and say she was beat and wanted to go to sleep early, retreating to her room before Ned could question her.
“Come in,” she sighs. She left her bedside lamp on to read, and she knows they can see the glow from under her door. She sticks her pointer finger in her book and prepares to justify herself to Ned and his inquisitive eyes.
When the door creaks open, she’s met with Peter’s instead. “Hey.”
“Hi,” MJ says, surprised. She’s spent enough time around Peter since the day she invited him up to her apartment, but never without Ned, never alone. The bruise between them is still too tender to touch, in a way it isn’t with him and Ned.
“Sorry,” Peter says, sheepish at the sight of her laying on her bed. She can tell he’s trying very hard not to let himself look around her room. He mostly succeeds. “Um, I just wanted to see if you’re okay.”
MJ isn’t okay. She’s living a life that, for the past few weeks, hasn’t felt like it’s fully her own anymore. “I’m fine.”
“Okay,” he nods, and he looks like he doesn’t quite believe her. “You just… you seemed kind of upset, and I just wanted to make sure it wasn’t because of me.”
She grabs the custom leather bookmark Ned got her for graduation from her nightstand and places it inside of her book before closing it. It’s more performative than anything, because she knows she’ll have to reread the first three chapters anyway; her mind kept wandering into the living room while she skimmed the words, barely processing any of it.
“You think highly of yourself, Parker,” she tries to joke, and it must work because he huffs out a laugh before stilling.
“I’m serious, MJ.” She knows it by the way he’s looking right into her eyes. He doesn’t let himself do that often. “If me being here makes you uncomfortable, or it’s weird for you, just tell me. Or even if it’s not weird, but you just don’t want me here… you can tell me that, too.”
MJ watches him fiddle with the edge of his sweater, the way he shifts his weight from foot to foot. The anxious energy is practically radiating off of him. She tries to imagine a time where it wasn’t like this between them - where the nerves and awkwardness of young love had blossomed into comfort and ease. It’s nothing more than a fantasy.
Ned had started slowly regaining memories a few weeks ago, and has been making a real effort to reconnect with Peter since. MJ is happy for him, knows that Peter being back is patching up a hole in Ned’s life that he’s spent years trying to fill without even realizing it. Ned is doing his best to try to include her in the process, to make her feel like she’s not now on the outside of something she’s told she used to be right in the middle of.
But that doesn’t change the truth.
Ned remembers, and MJ doesn’t.
“I don’t have a problem with you being here, Peter.” She means it. Watching him and Ned together thaws her heart in a way that’s almost enough to distract her from the ache of it.
“Okay. Well, if you change your mind.” He smiles politely, not pushing the subject, and readies to walk out of her room.
Her mouth starts moving before her mind can stop it. She’s noticing that tends to happen around him. “I’m just - I’m having a hard time with all of this.”
Peter stops, waits for her to continue.
“Ned’s memories coming back while mine aren’t. I’m happy for him, I really am. And I understand it. I understand why.” She knows Ned was around much longer than she was and their bond spanned many more years. Ned remembering before she does, if she ever even does, was completely logical. It still doesn’t feel fair. “But it’s still hard. It’s really frustrating.”
He goes to take a step towards her but stops himself, a silent question. She answers it with a nod and he quietly closes her door, putting space between them and their best friend. Even though, from what she can tell, Ned has gone into his room already. He surely was the one who gave Peter the courage to get up off the couch and knock in the first place.
“I know it is.” From anyone else it could feel patronizing, but all she recognizes is empathy in his tone.
“It sort of feels like I’m a stranger in my own life. There’s all these things I don’t know about myself, and now I have to live with the possibility that maybe I never will. Or maybe I do remember, and then what happens?”
MJ is consumed by dread. She lays in bed at night and dreads waking up in the morning to another day where her life feels like it isn’t her own anymore. Then she wakes up in the morning and dreads that this will be the day she gets what she’s wishing for – that she’ll remember, and she’ll have to face what that means for her.
She’s not looking for an apology, but she knows he can’t help himself – he gives one anyway. “I’m sorry.”
“I know you’re sorry,” MJ tells him, and she knows it’s not just something he says because he feels like he’s supposed to. The mournful look that plagues his eyes most of the time tells her he actually means it. “But you don’t regret it, do you?”
MJ sits up, rearranges her limbs to make room on the end of her bed. An invitation he hesitantly takes. This is the closest they’ve been since that first day when he took her home.
“I regret that I hurt you. I regret how it’s affecting you now,” Peter starts, and MJ waits for the truth she knows is coming. “But the only thing that gave me any sense of peace over the past four years is knowing you both were safe away from me. You were happy, and safe.”
MJ felt the anger burning under her skin when she first read the letter and realized what it meant. Peter had made a decision that wasn’t his own to make, and it felt like a slap in the face to discover the way her agency had been stolen from her without even knowing it. The anger is met with equal parts grief, not only for herself but for him, too. The choice he’d made was for her wellbeing, and she knows he’d ripped his own heart to shreds by making it.
“Then you came back, and you were immediately in danger. Because of me. It was my worst nightmare come true, and I’ve spent every day since reliving it.” MJ can tell he’s reliving it even now, doesn’t miss the haunted look in his eyes as he speaks.
“Every minute of every day, I’m terrified something is going to happen to you or Ned because I’m back in your lives.”
MJ understands that he’s letting them make the choice for themselves despite his fears screaming at him telling him to run. She knows, from the little that Ned has shared with her, the trauma Peter is doing his best to work through. For himself, but for them, too.
“But I hate that you feel this way because of me,” Peter continues, “that you feel like you don’t know yourself anymore because your memories are gone.”
“I don’t blame you for it,” she tells him. It’s something she’s been trying her best to come to terms with – this part was out of both of their hands. “You did what you had to do.”
MJ knows that much is true. He had explained the timeline of events to her, with Ned chiming in with the little bits he could recall. She knows it was the only way out of the mess he’d found himself in. It’s not something he ever wanted either.
“But I do… I do think about how things would have been different if you had told me the truth that day you came into the donut shop.” MJ is stuck between grieving the life she doesn’t remember, and the life she could have if he’d done things differently. “If you kept your promise.”
“I think about it, too,” Peter admits, the guilt dripping off his words. “I think about it all the time, MJ.”
‘But you still weren’t planning on ever telling me.” He'd admitted as such with his silence when she'd first asked.
“Do you wanna know the truth?” Peter sighs, shakes his head. MJ can tell he’s frustrated with himself but is trying his best not to show it. “I didn’t tell you because I wanted to protect you. But I’m realizing… I also didn’t tell you because I was scared.”
“Of what?” MJ questions softly.
Peter doesn’t speak for a few moments, wrestling with his thoughts, and then he takes a deep breath. “I knew that you’d believe me if I read you the letter. But deep down, I also knew what your answer would be at the end of it. I knew you didn’t remember, or know who I was, and I knew… I knew you didn’t love me. I just didn’t want to face it. Because I’m a coward.”
He only meets her eyes until he’s done speaking. She’s met with the same look he gave her in the bunker that day, and it makes her chest hurt the same way it had then. She sees someone who has spent years getting beat down and beating himself down even worse. It’s not something she’s willing to contribute to.
“You’re a really good guy, Peter,” she tells him with certainty. She felt it within just a few hours of meeting him. It must be why she feels disarmed when she’s around him, why she’s so willing to open up to him in ways she can’t with other people. Or maybe it’s not that she can’t; she won’t. She thought maybe she just wasn’t capable of it, but now she knows that isn’t the truth. “Our lives are better with you in it. Even after everything. Even if I don’t ever remember. I’m glad you’re here.”
“Me too,” Peter says, and he doesn’t try to wipe away the tear that falls.
She finds that she doesn’t want him to go. She wants to stay in this bubble with him, in her room, just the two of them. “Tell me something.”
She doesn’t have to explain herself any further – Peter knows what she’s asking of him. He thinks on it for a minute, until something catches his eye. “Your necklace. I gave that to you.”
MJ had figured as much. She’d always known it was important to her but couldn’t figure out why, where she’d gotten it from a gap in her memory. She’d realized it must have had something to do with him once she’d learned the truth. She tied the black string back around her neck anyway. “When?”
“Summer before our senior year, on our class trip to Europe. I bought it in Venice. My plan was to give it to you and tell you how I felt. It shattered into pieces before I could, and that was all that was left.”
MJ touches the broken petals on her sternum. “I like it like this.”
Peter’s mouth stretched into a small smile. “I know. You told me so back then.”
“Sounds like me.”
“You figured out I was Spider-Man on that same trip,” Peter smiles, and he says it with such fondness that it makes her smile as well. “You’re the only one who has ever figured it out, and you never let Ned forget it.”
“That sounds like me, too,” she says with a small laugh.
Peter takes a beat, then quietly says, “It was you.”
MJ feels the tears spring to her eyes and bites her lip to stop it from quivering. She knows, logically, that Peter is right. The person in all of his memories is the same one sitting in front of him today. But it’s difficult for her to wrap her head around when every story she hears about herself sounds like it’s about a stranger.
“I know it doesn’t feel like it. I know you feel disconnected from the version of yourself that I knew. That I know,” Peter continues, his eyes glistening in the glow of her bedside light. “But… you’re exactly the same as you were back then, and you’re so different, too. All at the same time. In all the best ways.”
She’s trying her best to believe him. She wants to reconcile the girl she was in his memory with the woman she is now. MJ has always known exactly who she is; she’s never needed anyone to tell her. She’s doing her best to accept that’s not the truth anymore.
“Thank you,” MJ says wetly.
“For what?”
“For telling me about the necklace. And about me being smarter than Ned,” she smirks through her tears, and the corners of his mouth turn upwards too.
“You don’t have to thank me, MJ. It’s your life.” The longing is in his words, written all over his face. She doesn’t know what it feels like to love someone who can’t remember you, but she knows it can’t be easy. It’s something she wouldn’t wish on anyone.
“Still. I know it’s hard for you, too.”
“You can ask me whatever you want, whenever you want. I like talking about it,” Peter says wistfully. “It makes it feel real.”
MJ is struck by something that she hadn’t considered until now: she may have lost her memories, but Peter has been living alone in his.
She’s been dealt a shitty hand in all of this, but so has he. Peter has lost so much, and he hasn’t let it make him bitter or resentful. In the little time since he came back into her life, she's never once heard him complain. He cares so deeply for her and Ned. He'd broken his promise to them, but he's the one who has had to live with the consequences. Completely alone. He'd given up the only love he had left in his life to protect them. She’d only met him again a few weeks ago, but she already knows who he is at his core: kind, tender, selfless. Earnest, almost to a fault. The reasons she would have fallen for him back then aren’t things she needs to look hard for.
“I didn’t think I’d ever been in love before,” MJ admits, trying her best to swallow down the lump in her throat. She’s dated, she’s had fun. She has a boyfriend she met four months ago who she likes, who treats her well. He is, all things considered, perfect. It doesn’t change the truth. “I didn’t think I’d ever been loved like that before. Now I know that I was. I just can’t remember it.”
Peter looks at her, and the unshed tears in her eyes are reflected in his own. “Maybe you will.”
Maybe in the future this whole thing will be nothing more than a distant memory. Maybe they’ll laugh at it, can you believe there was a time I didn’t remember you? falling from her lips stretched into a grin.
Maybe one day MJ will touch her necklace, or accidentally brush Peter’s hand, or wake up from a dream that feels a little too real, and her memories will suddenly start flooding back the way they did for Ned. But MJ has never been one for cliches.
Maybe this can be enough for now.