Chapter Text
One year.
That’s how long it takes, for Peter Parker to become as constant as a fucking star, in the polluted New York City sky that is MJ’s post-grad life.
“Sounds to me like they were a bunch of blood-sucking trust-fund parasites, and you knocked ‘em down a notch. If anything, management should’ve been thanking you,” he tells her now, voice muffled slightly by the mask held between his teeth as he fastens the newest version of his hybrid web-shooters onto his wrist.
Ned tosses him his phone from where he’d left it on the counter, and Peter catches it without looking, bicep flexing almost imperceptibly.
Almost.
“Don’t encourage her,” comes Ned’s voice from the island of their kitchen, amused, but not without a hint of weariness beneath it that makes MJ’s stomach turn over dully, guiltily. “I’m not convinced it’s not your fault, somehow.”
“I can get myself fired, thanks,” MJ says primly.
“Welcome to the pink slip club,” Peter agrees. “The Christmas party, for the record? Rad as hell.”
MJ collapses back onto the couch with a distinct woe-is-me air, more for Ned’s benefit than her own. She’d do it again, fifty times over. One hundred.
Point her finger in their smarmy faces. Make a scene. Storm out in a huff.
Feel nothing but a profound, all-encompassing sense of relief, packing up her desk for the last time under security’s watchful eye.
“Yeah, well,” MJ says to Peter, instead of any of that, “Seeing as how you’re still convinced the sun shines out of my ass, I’m not sure considering your opinion on my career path counts as methodologically sound.”
Peter snorts, glancing up at her as he tugs the mask on with something remarkably like fondness in his eyes.
“It’s an illness,” he agrees easily, pulling the window open and stepping over the sill. “And both of you do me a favor, yeah? Stay outta Brooklyn until we get this guy back on the good drugs.”
Then he shoots a web, twisting gracefully out of MJ’s view and towards the endless sky above.
MJ wonders if he looks back.
--
That’s how they do it, in the months after Jean Grey’s attempted mass-something. When Peter tastes death and somehow manages to worm his way back into Ned’s memories instead, when MJ arrives home two out of every three evenings charged with the task of finding a way to slot herself into the space between these two men and the sudden history burning bright between them.
Her missing memories are—a blight, maybe, on what has all the feelings and trimmings and trappings of a homecoming. Peter’s confession from that night on Frank’s boat is a heartsore, an awkward vacuum that sucks the air out of any room he and MJ share, as Ned clears his throat and changes the subject and tries his best to bridge the divide.
So it’s just—easier, is the thing. To make it a joke. To make it smaller, less embarrassing, less earnest, less emblematic of the void of missing memories still inside her that MJ swears she can feel pounding like a wound some days, can’t feel at all on others.
You’re just saying that because you’re obsessed with me, Parker.
Or, when she’s in charge of the rocket fuel for one of Ned’s get-togethers:
This tastes like actual gasoline, MJ. You’re lucky I’m like, madly in love with you, or I'd dump it.
Or, when she’d still had a boyfriend and found herself bandaging his bloody, sweaty, shirtless torso on more than one occasion, and Peter couldn't not run his mouth about it:
Thank God you’re not the one in love with me, or this could’ve gotten real weird, real fast.
And it worked, is the awful part. Or—the good part, MJ means. Slowly, the laughs stopped brimming with overwrought longing and too-earnest glances and awkward parrying. Stopped being an excuse to not meet each other’s eyes. Turned into something real, something genuine. A sledgehammer taken to Peter’s brittle confession, over and over and over again, until the only thing left were shards, forged over the course of a year into something new. A foundation, of sorts.
A friendship.
It suits them, MJ thinks. Swears.
It does.
--
“Darin asked me if he was single,” Ned tells MJ in an unreadable voice, as the two of them watch Spider-Man hold court across the street from the corner cafe they were supposed to meet Peter at ten minutes ago.
In the distance, Spider-Man crouches down next to a little girl, whose dark pigtails ripple in the breeze. MJ watches as Peter tilts his head to listen to what she has to say, then laughs, shoulders shaking as the girl grins at him with wide, delighted eyes.
MJ understands. The feeling of making Peter Parker laugh isn’t all that dissimilar to a hit of adrenaline, buzzing low and sharp in the ribs. Ned was the only one capable of drawing so much as a genuine snort out of him, those first few months, and MJ thinks that must be why she notices, now. Why the sound of Peter, joyful and uninhibited, feels so much like dipping her toes into something fresh and cold and clear.
“Does he even…” MJ trails off, glancing at Ned. Wondering if this is one of those things, where she wouldn’t have known then, so it’s not his place to tell her, now. “Uh.”
“Swing both ways?” Ned suggests, poker-faced. “Who, Spider-Man?”
MJ shakes her head. “You’re embarrassing. Both of you. I’m embarrassed, to be seen out in public with you.”
“Whatever. I see right through you. You love me so bad it makes you look stupid.” Ned pauses, a thoughtful expression passing quickly over his face. “And, actually? I have no fucking idea.”
MJ looks at him as she sips lukewarm cafe water through a biodegradable straw. “Huh.”
“He had a weird thing about Thor, sophomore year, but like, who didn’t, you know? And it kind of went away, anyways, after the Snap. Probably because by then he was so obsessed with—”
Ned cuts himself off, and immediately it’s one of those moments. Increasingly less common over the course of the past year, but still…there. Always there, like an itch MJ can’t scratch. Like a race where if she just stretches her hand far enough she can reach out and touch the guy in front of her, but she stretches and stretches and stretches and she just—can’t.
And it feels like losing. A year later, in a way it hadn’t before, still missing her memories of being seventeen and in love with Peter Parker feels a little (a lot) like MJ has lost.
She glances back at Peter to avoid Ned’s eyes, and he’s back at full height again, talking to a woman about their age who must be connected to the little girl in some way, if their interlocked hands are anything to go by. He ducks his head at something she says, and the woman smiles. She’s pretty. Peter scratches at the back of his neck. Laughs again. Nods.
MJ can feel Ned’s eyes on her, and she looks away. It doesn’t save her from the sensation that she’s being x-rayed, the layers of her peeled apart and laid bare the way only a friend who’s seen you passed out against the dumpster behind your college bar and carried you home with no questions asked, can.
“I think he might be done waiting,” Ned says quietly, and it lands on the table between them with a specific profundity that MJ can’t, won’t, will not acknowledge.
MJ looks at him sharply. “I never wanted—”
“I know,” Ned says firmly. “He does too. I promise.”
“Then why—”
“I just...thought you should know.” Ned shrugs, taking a sip of his own water. “And it’s not like he said it, that way. To me. For all we know, I’m talking out of my ass, it’s just…”
He looks back over at Peter, and MJ feels her gaze following, unbidden. Her eyes track the loose square of his shoulders. The easy angle of his stance, relaxed as he listens. As he tilts his head forward and shakes it in obvious amusement.
MJ finds herself wondering what’s so funny.
“He seems so much better, now, than he was,” Ned finishes his own thought, shrugging like it’s something that can’t be helped, Peter’s escape from his life of hermit-tude that he still refuses to fully acknowledge as the hellish existence it was. “At the whole, learning-to-just-be-a-guy thing. Not sure he’ll ever, like, get there completely, but—he’s circling in. On it. And part of that circling in is...uh.”
“Getting over his high school ex,” MJ shrugs. “Like he should’ve done four and a half years ago.”
Ned x-rays her with his eyes again, and it takes everything in MJ not to squirm.
“Yeah,” he finally says. “That.”
MJ’s always hated the feeling of someone speaking to her like they know something she doesn’t. She’d originally taken her first aerospace class out of spite, finding herself unable to just let it lie after an aerospace guy in her physics class had neatly torn her argument regarding the use of palladium in military drones apart in front of their study group, alleging that her plan was good in principle, but lacking technical soundness.
And it’s beside the point, that she started dating that guy a year later. She’s not dating Ned. She’s avoiding Ned’s thoughts and opinions on her life as a whole these days fairly thoroughly, to be honest.
But it’s still annoying, when Peter spots them across the street and gives a near-imperceptible wave, presses his fingers together in a move you’d only recognize as an apology for lateness if you know Peter Parker and you’re looking for it. It’s annoying how Ned studies her.
It’s annoying how MJ can’t stop herself from quickly turning, so she can’t see if Peter watches the girl with the sister-niece-child as she leaves.
Not because she’s scared to feel.
More because she’s worried, about what it will mean if she does.
“Darin should go for it,” MJ tells her plate with a decisiveness she absolutely feels deep in her bones, cross her heart and hope to die, and Ned snorts.
“It’s Darin,” he deadpans. “And a curly-haired, maybe-straight white boy with a kicked puppy vibe, no real job, and daddy issues. He was always going to go for it.”
MJ nods, because she knows Darin. Not as well as Ned, but—well enough.
And…yeah.
That sounds about right.
--
Job applications. Six, ten, thirty, a hundred in a day cycled through. Three filled out, maybe. Half as many interview offers, all denied on her side.
Rent’s due, and Ned doesn’t ask for the check with MJ’s half. She waits all day for the inevitable confrontation, stomach in knots over how she’ll promise, and scrape her savings together, and look for another tenant if they have to, and it just—
Never comes.
Ned works late into the night three times that week, something about a big project and a manager on his ass.
The next recruiter to email MJ about a second interview gets a yes.
--
“Hey,” Peter nudges her with his foot, glass of water sloshing dangerously. He’s not drinking tonight. Likes to say that since he missed out on the partying at MIT he can’t keep up with them now, but MJ can always tell. Something about the way his eyes shoot towards the window whenever the conversation lulls, or a car alarm honks, or a shrill sound splits the air.
Spider-Man is on call, tonight.
“Congratulations,” he tells her, reaching forward all the way to clink his glass against MJ’s beer bottle when she makes no move to meet him halfway. He quirks an eyebrow. “Unless I’m at the wrong party?”
“You saw Ned’s e-vite, didn’t you?” MJ deadpans, taking a swig before gesturing to herself sweepingly. “Meet the newest member of the rat race.”
“How many times do you think you get to join it, before you’re not considered a new member anymore? More like, the prodigal’s rat, returning.”
“I think we’ll know when he stops throwing these.”
Peter laughs, ducking his head before he looks up to survey the collection of bodies occupying their apartment. He sets his glass down on the coffee table behind him where he’s perched, and leans back onto his hands. MJ can feel the weight of his gaze where she sits on the couch, and it’s…not heavy. There’s nothing remotely heavy, about the way his eyes flit over her face and the fingers clenched too-tightly around her beer.
“You okay?” he asks, so simply. MJ can’t remember when a question like that, between the two of them, got so simple.
She doesn’t like him. She doesn’t. She doesn’t even remember, back when she had. MJ is—morally opposed, on her own behalf, to even thinking about this man in front of her, as anything other than just, Peter Parker. Spider-Man. A good fucking guy dealt a shit deck of cards, who made bad choices MJ can’t say with certainty she wouldn’t have made either, all else equal and the roles reversed. Ned’s best friend and—
One of hers. One of her best friends, somehow, a year and two months after the world imploded.
MJ looks away from Peter’s expectant eyebrows and takes another drink, relishing the burn this time. Thinks about the text from her ex-boyfriend sitting heavy like a rock in her phone, a congratulations on the new gig message worded so carefully that MJ can’t read into the implications either way, even if she wanted to. Thinks about the pit in her stomach today as she had toured her new office, the NDA she’ll be expected to sign come Monday. Thinks about the relief that had broken like sunlight over a snowy street corner on her dad’s face, when she’d called to tell him the good news.
“How about this,” Peter offers when it’s clear she doesn’t have it in her to form a coherent answer to the simple question of are you okay, eyes skating the room even as the rest of him points firmly to her, protecting her from other would-be congratulators like he just knows, somehow. “I’m gonna try and list off as many of these names as I can, for when Ned grills me later. You can be my incorrect buzzer.”
“Bold to assume I know half the people here.”
Peter squints. "So what's like—the point, then?"
MJ shrugs. “Ned misses people,” she says, without stopping to think about how the words will sound when they come out until they’ve already left her, spinning through the air between them.
There’s a beat.
Wryly, Peter says, “that’s deserved.”
MJ closes her eyes, regretful. “Peter.”
“Hey,” he taps her foot again with his own, “It is. Every time until the end of time, it’s going to be. Don’t worry about it.”
It used to make MJ feel better, how dead-set Peter was on refusing to forgive himself. On his insistence in shouldering the full brunt of the blame, for those five years and millions of memories of him, missing from their lives. Righteous suffering, penance, apologies Ned and MJ deserved. Atlas, adding another dumbbell of responsibility to the weight of a city he’d already learned to carry on his shoulders.
And even if it makes her a bad person, MJ can admit it helped take the pressure off her own missing memories, her own conflicted feelings. Peter's guilt, around Ned. The sheer force of his regret. Overshadowing even the strange, fucked-up layer of undeserved guilt MJ felt those first weeks, every time Peter glanced at her like a lovesick puppy.
So, yeah. MJ was grateful, once.
But that was before.
“All right,” Peter rubs his hands together, leaning forward to brace his hands on his knees. He points to a new-ish friend of Adel’s, who MJ had somehow won in the breakup. “Josh.”
“J is close.”
“J…eff. Rey. Jeffrey.”
MJ makes a buzzer sound with her mouth, and Peter frowns. “Gerald?”
“Warmer.”
Peter frowns again, closing his eyes and pressing his fingers to his temples as if he can sense the name calling to him, from somewhere out in the spider-void. They snap open. “It’s a grandpa name,” he squints, taking MJ’s non-committal shrug for confirmation. “Like fucking—George, or something equally terrible. Wait,” he eyes MJ’s quirked lip disbelievingly. “Don’t tell me it’s fucking George.”
“What’s your damage, dude?” a hurt female voice floats from a few feet from their left, and Peter blanches, ducking his head to try and hide behind MJ’s profile as she snorts so hard into her bottle she nearly chokes.
Peter winces, peeking one eye open and looking left. “Hey, uh…also-George, I’m guessing?”
“Don’t worry,” MJ says to George number two, choosing to save him. She’ll always choose to save him, she’s realizing in a way squeezes, feels like a fist around her heart, chokes her from the pulmonary system, out. “His name’s Peter. Doesn’t get more grandpa than that.”
“Peters and Georges gotta stick together, man,” the girl shakes her head sadly, and Peter nods vigorously, glancing back at MJ with an amused look that is so overwhelmingly, so clearly just for her, that MJ can actually feel the fist around her heart actively tightening. Squeezing her, within an inch of her life as the realization comes crashing down around them, so heavy and whole that she can’t believe the pictures on the walls don’t come down with it.
Peter coaxes George Two into a conversation about her relationship to Ned, and MJ watches the sharpness of his cheekbones as he listens raptly, the way he subconsciously massages a thumb over his wrist like he always does when his sleeves are too short to completely cover the newish, unnoticeable holes in his skin. The way his smile shrinks the bags under his eyes when it’s genuine, emphasizes them when it’s polite.
Thank god you’re not in love with me.
MJ takes another sip of her beer, hands shaking.
And she thinks:
Shit.
--
The good news is this:
It isn’t the first time, that MJ has had to convince herself to fall out of love.
She’s a modern woman, and college is college, and she wasn’t the first nor the last to catch ill-advised feelings for what was supposed to be a no-strings hookup, a lab partner, a funny TA.
She wasn’t like Ned—trampolining between lovesickness and actual love illness like a flicked doorstop, swearing off the stuff completely only to fall into the next pair of whiskey-brown eyes two weeks later, but MJ…she dabbled. In bad sex, poor choices, unrequited love.
And what works, what has always worked, for MJ and her fleeting young adult feelings, is rationalizing. Rationalizing and repressing, with a healthy dose of working herself into the ground, late and hard and long enough that by the time she gets home at night and collapses into bed, she’s too exhausted to think.
So MJ signs her NDA. Takes on the biggest, least offensive project she can find and buries herself neck-deep, only coming up for air when her singular chill co-worker asks her to grab lunch, and they can both bitch and moan about how much they hate this job, this job that MJ needs like breathing, if she wants to keep the lights on.
And under all of it, the job she hates and the lies she's telling and the dreams she wakes up from with a pounding heart and throbbing brain, MJ rationalizes.
--
MJ can’t be in love with Peter Parker, because to be in love with Peter Parker would be—on some level so deep and complex that even with all her rationalizing she has a hard time verbalizing it—a betrayal of herself.
MJ, who prides herself on her discernment and the bullshit detector built into her nose, fooled by him.
MJ, begged by two different boyfriends for a second chance, for far less offensive reasons than mind wiping her for five years, who she refused.
MJ, who broke up with Adel six months ago for pushing her for answers she doesn’t understand herself well enough to give, back in a job she hates and no closer to figuring herself out than she’d been a year and four months previous.
MJ, who can’t get over the uneven ground they’d be building this thing on, of it all.
MJ, who talks herself out of loving him around in circles until her heart feels numb and her work-brain comes back online, and convinces herself it’s self-respect.
--
She’s been at her new job two months, working through her Saturday night for the third weekend in a row, when Spider-Man slices himself open on what he claims is a piece of construction equipment and nearly passes out from blood loss in their bathtub.
“I know that you want to help,” Peter wheezes at her as MJ tries to put the fucking—thing in the thing, and sterilize that other thing, and get the other thing out of the first-aid kit, all while holding pressure on the bath towel pressed to the ragged, glistening gash in his suit. “I love, how much you guys always want to help. But—Jesus H. Christ—nine times out of ten, it’s just—easier if I do it, yeah?”
“By all means,” MJ practically screeches, no small amount of relief to it as she pushes the saline bottle towards his limp fingers and throws up her hands. “Take over, Spider-Man. Knock yourself out on your own petard.”
“Not how the saying goes,” Peter breathes through dry lips, eyes shut tight as he reaches down to rip a larger, more accessible hole in the suit’s stomach. He grunts. “Not even…what the saying means, I don't think.”
“Oh, because you read,” MJ rebuts, fighting the urge to bury her face in her hands as Peter glances down at the wound, jaw clenching as he reaches for the saline with trembling fingers. And, unable to help herself as dabs the first of it onto the gash, “Are you sure you don’t—”
“MJ,” Peter says tightly, voice practically a hiss. “I need you to be quiet. Punch me later for suggesting it, if you have to.”
MJ glares but does fall silent, watching with what is definitely not anxiety as Peter cleans and dresses the wound, glancing down at it occasionally to guide his pale, trembling fingers before shutting his eyes and looking up at the bathroom ceiling again, clearly pained. MJ hands him the towel, when he asks. Gauze, when he can’t reach it.
Not for the first time, she wonders about the depressing specifics, of those five years he spent doing this alone.
“Okay.” Peter collapses wearily into the tub when it’s over, stomach and fingertips still stained a dark, rusty brown but the wound clean, bandaged. “Good job. You did—so good. Gonna pass out, now.”
MJ starts. “What?”
“Three hours,” he mumbles as he shifts in the tub like he’s looking for a comfortable position. “Tops. Ned’s gonna want to move me. Don’t let him.”
“Ned’s gonna—Peter, you’re in the bathtub. I’m going to fucking move you.”
“You won’t.” He’s slurring so bad his voice is nearly incoherent, eyes slipping shut as MJ hovers helplessly, angrily above him, hands inches away from the dark hair plastered to his forehead. “Because I skipped the stitches. In the—interest of time. My skin needs to not move until it’s started to heal. Understand? Skin. Cannot. Move.”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” MJ breathes.
“Hey.” Peter grabs her wrist with his eyes still closed, grip almost strong enough to bruise. “It just looks bad, okay? Had worse.”
MJ shakes her head at him. “I don’t care,” she hisses, voice shaking as his chest moves shallowly. “When it looks this goddamn bad, it doesn’t help that it’s been worse. That actually helps—a negative amount. You just—your fingers were fucking—inside, your skin, Peter.”
Peter glances down at himself again, then nods as he leans back into the tub, as if agreeing with her. “You’re right,” he murmurs, and MJ can tell that he’s slipping, slipping, slipping into unconsciousness. “That probably…sucked ass, to watch. Bright sides, though. At least you're not in love with me.”
And then, because MJ’s life is one big goddamn joke, he finally loses his battle against passing out, blood shining against the porcelain as his breath goes steady and even.
Numbly, MJ removes her wrist from the loose circle of his grip and leans back against the bathroom wall. She presses a trembling hand to her mouth, and tastes iron. Not hers. She spits into one of the only remaining clean towels, and when that doesn’t clear the taste she gets unsteadily to her feet, stumbles to the kitchen, and finds the wine Ned’s friend Salma had brought to her most recent congrats on the job celebration.
Which is how Ned finds her, two hours and half a bottle of red later, curled up against the wall of the bathroom, watching through wet lashes she can’t remember crying onto, as Peter continues to breathe.
Wordlessly, Ned drops his bag in the hallway and lets himself into the tiny bathroom, holding his hand out for the bottle before shutting the door behind him.
MJ hands it to him, and he takes a long swig before sliding down the wall until he’s huddled next to her. He holds out an arm, and MJ lists sideways into his shoulder, into the solid, steady shape of him.
She lets herself be held for a moment, drunk and shell-shocked and, maybe, just maybe, a little bit heartbroken. She lets herself breathe.
For the first time, she lets herself truly feel it.
A moment later come the tears. Again.
“You have to tell him,” Ned murmurs as his thumb swipes back and forth against her shoulder in slow, soothing motions. “He’ll never—he’s not going to make a move. You know that, right? Not after—everything.”
Not after Jean.
MJ does. She knows, feels it, in the careful way Peter has touched her ever since. Taps of his toe against hers, when he needs her attention. Fingers light and endlessly careful at her waist, when the stars misalign and she ends up taking him up on an offer to swing.
Because, what Jean Grey had done had hurt, in more ways than one, and Peter knows how long it had taken MJ to—untangle, everything that happened that night. Because, she didn’t love him, and he respected that. Because, he’s a good fucking guy.
“I’m quitting my job,” MJ blurts out, and Ned’s fingers don’t falter on her shoulder.
“I know,” he says.
MJ swallows, blinking back the emotion and gratitude for him, mingling in her chest.
“It’s a bad fit.”
She feels Ned nod. “I know,” he says again, voice soft. “You’re miserable.”
MJ shuts her eyes tightly, feeling the tear that drips down her nose, drops off the end of it. “I tried. I don’t—I normally don’t give a fuck, about explaining myself, to anyone. But, to you, I just—I want you to know, that I did. I tried. I just. I just—”
“Can’t spend the rest of your life working for a soulless corporation,” Ned finishes for her, with a hint of melancholy to it but mostly just understanding. Steadiness. Her best friend of five years, and that will never change. “It’s fine, MJ. We’re going to figure it out. We can move, if we have to. I’m not gonna freaking—kick you out, or something.”
“You could. You’d be…absolutely within your rights. To get rid of me.”
Ned pulls MJ in closer, his cheek against the crown of her head. “Death first, Watson.”
A pause. One that aches, pressing in on them from the fluorescent lighting from the bathroom walls. Peter makes a rough, pained noise in his sleep before settling back against the porcelain lip, and MJ glances at him.
“I’m a mess,” she admits throatily, swallowing. “He’s no better. He’s—we’re barely functioning on our own. Either of us.”
“Who cares?”
And MJ ducks her head. Almost laughs because, he would say that. Ned Leeds, with his big bleeding heart and inability to conceptualize, loving someone and choosing not to have them. Loving someone, and choosing not to pull them in as close as you possibly, physically can.
It’s why the comedown from the spell had been so much harder for him, MJ thinks. Why he still doesn’t quite understand in the way MJ does, after a year and a half of learning him again, what had been going through Peter Parker’s head when he’d been seventeen, walking out of that donut shop.
“I care,” MJ says earnestly. “I care, I—isn’t that the, the whole fucking point? Of a relationship? To be—two halves, that make each other better?”
“Is it?” Ned asks.
It was, with Adel. That’s what he’d always said, to her. What they’d said to each other.
You make me better.
I’m so grateful, that we make each other better.
“Not to be that guy,” Ned says dryly, and MJ must be more drunk than she thinks, if she said that out loud. “But…how did that end up working out for you two?”
MJ looks at Peter’s face again, the worry line between his brows that he never seems quite able to shake, even in sleep. She wonders if it was there before, back when her seventeen-year-old self had loved him, or if it’s something entirely new. Another scar to add to the near-fifty of them she can see littered across his bare upper-body. A product of the four and a half years he’d spent throwing himself towards danger off of higher and higher buildings, all while watching them from afar.
“Not as badly as this would,” MJ tells Ned, voice breaking.
She feels raw. Like she’s been cut open and left there, bleeding and unstitched, like the wound in Peter’s stomach.
“I promise.”