Chapter Text
The library smells like mildew, stale coffee, and BO.
Before you had decided on ESU, you’d gone down a rabbit hole on Reddit and had been aptly warned against all the smelliest places on campus– surprisingly, the library hadn’t cracked the top ten, but to your standards, it was still pretty rank.
Luckily, after living with Ned and MJ for the past three years, you’d smelled far worse in the form of Ned’s dirty socks, thrice worn, so your tolerance was pretty high when it came to unbearable stenches. You shiver at the thought and turn up the music filtering through your headphones, just a few clicks.
The electric tune crackles through the tangled white cords until it reaches your eardrums, and crackles some more. Ned’s been begging you to upgrade, 'Just get regular AirPods, dude,' but you kind of like the nostalgia of never losing your earbuds. Sue you. And even slightly distorted, Prince’s Purple Rain sends a shiver down your spine.
You love that song, always have, but the last few years, when you play it, it feels like it's prodding at something buried deep within the cobweb-dusted corners of your mind. It’s like it’s begging you to remember something, but you just can’t.
MJ says something across the table, tapping her fingernails against the rough wood between you. You glance up at her and shake your head, merely trying to indicate that you can’t hear her and you have no interest in rectifying that at the moment, but she rolls her eyes and tugs out your right earbud.
You level her with an unamused glare and hit pause on your music.
“What?”
“Did you see the news?” she chirps, emphasizing each word as if it's the eighth time she’s had to repeat herself. A flare for the dramatic, that one.
“No,” you answer, popping the earbud back into the shell of your ear and attempting to return your focus to the piles of paper spread out before you. You move your pencil rhythmically between your fingers, the lead whittled down to a dull, flat surface.
MJ leans forward and smacks it out of your hand, and you watch, forlorn, as it skitters across the aisle to a near-empty table beside you. There’s a guy sitting down by himself, floppy brown hair obscuring his face, his own pencil moving so furiously on the paper that he doesn’t notice the intruder to his sacred space.
“Hey,” you frown.
“Earth to Sunny,” MJ hisses, waving a hand in front of your face.
You purse your lips at the nickname, which you had been crowned with the very first day you had met Michelle Jones. Something about you being too sunny for a Monday morning fresh after the death of summer and youth and a few other morbid adjectives.
You swat her away with an eye roll. “I was like, kind of using that.”
“I like kind of don’t care,” she smiles sarcastically at you. “The news?”
You shake your head, pursing your lips together tightly. You’d all but given up on the Spider-Man hunt, especially when Ned had announced he’d whittled the contestants down to Flash Thompson and one of your old high school teachers. There was just no way; you refused to believe his insane theories any longer.
You’d even pitched taking down the posterboard theory wall that he had plastered in his room, since it was starting to freak out your friends, but he opted for leaving his bedroom door shut instead and, really, you just had to pick your battles.
MJ gives you an incredulous look and then buries her face in her hands and groans loud enough that you jump and then glance around to make sure the elderly yet ferocious librarian wasn’t on her way to burn you at the stake, but the only person who had seemed to notice was the guy sitting at the table next to yours. You shoot him a sheepish, apologetic smile when his wide, brown eyes meet yours. He blushes furiously, blinking at you like he can’t quite believe what he’s seeing. Then he turns back to his notebook and hunches over again, and you opt to ignore that strange response.
“Just tell me,” you say, turning back to MJ. You catch the corner of one of her dark eyes, and it's crinkling in that rare and specific way that tells you she’s grinning behind her mask of fingers.
“Oh my god-”
“Spider-Man,” she singsongs in a way that is very unlike Michelle Jones. When you’d met her in high school, she was moody and morbid, and generally nonplused. She had really come out of her shell in college. You? Not so much.
It wasn’t that you hadn’t tried, but Ned and MJ had always been closer. You guess you hadn’t noticed the third-wheeling as much in high school, but something had changed a few years back. Maybe it was you, but it had felt like the world had shifted around you, like something was missing and gone from your life, but no one would tell you what it was. No one would help you get it back. Even now, your last semester in college, you’re reeling from it. It feels like emptiness, like grief.
You chew on the inside of your cheek as MJ waggles her dark brows at you.
“What about him?” you mutter, letting your eyes fall back to the open book in front of you, before bouncing your gaze to your lost and forlorn pencil, which has rolled far enough away that it’s almost too much trouble to get up from your mildly comfortable, somewhat padded wooden chair, and traverse the few terrible footsteps it would take to scoop it up and return it to your station.
Still, you persevere.
MJ watches you stand, then pulls out her phone and begins typing on it furiously. You roll your eyes and approach the boy at the table neighboring yours. You can feel the flash of his gaze, even as his head stays lowered, and you whisper a quiet “Sorry” as you stoop down and snatch your pencil up.
When you stand, you realize he’s snapped his notebook shut, and you see Peter scribbled in the corner, in sloping, swooping letters. Something stirs in your chest at the name, like a memory, unbidden, but you let it slip through your fingers as you return to your table and slide back into your own chair.
He looks familiar, but you’re sure he’s not in your major. Maybe he’s in your English class? Yeah, that has to be it. Peter from English.
You nod to yourself as MJ slides her phone across the table, facing you.
There’s a video playing, the volume soft and garbled from her speakers, which had gotten wet one too many times. You’re quite the pair when the subject is the destruction of your own property.
Spider-Man is helping a little boy from the broken edge of the Manhattan Bridge. The boy can’t be older than five or six. He’s wearing a mask nearly identical to Spider-Man’s, but the eyes are a little bigger, the red a little brighter. He’s holding tight to the hero’s hand, who crouches down in front of him with a hand on his shoulder, and says something that the camera can’t catch amidst the chaos.
You don’t realize you’re smiling until MJ scoffs and plucks the phone out of your hand.
“Knew it,” she says haughtily.
“Knew what?” you ask, tone flat.
“After all these years,” she says, not even attempting to be at a library-appropriate volume. “You’ve still got it bad for the mask vigilante.”
You frown, tapping the lead tip of your pencil against your study book. “He’s not a vigilante.”
“That’s the point you’re gonna argue?” she deadpans, crossing her arms.
“Who doesn’t have it bad for Spider-Man, Michelle? Be for real.”
You barely catch the flicker of irritation that sparks behind her eyes at the use of her government official name, before the sound of a clatter, followed by a deafening crash, ricochets from beside you.
That guy– Peter, from English– is standing, his chair pushed far back, and the piles of books and papers that were on his desk are now scattered across the floor.
He looks surprised, sheepish as his face blazes red. If you knew him better, you’d probably be laughing. Then again, MJ doesn’t take English with you, and she’s pressing her fist into her mouth to keep herself from wheezing out loud.
“Oh my god, are you okay?” you ask him, pushing your own chair back to help him clean up his mess.
He mumbles something that sounds like one big stutter as he moves around his table, scraping together his scattered sheets of notebook paper that hold lines upon lines of what look like equations and little notes in the margins. You stoop to pick up a book that landed near your feet and glance at him again just in time to watch him reach beneath his desk to grab a pencil, then launch himself upward into the underside of it.
You wince and hear MJ’s sharp inhale and whispered yikes.
“Shit,” you breathe, wide-eyed as he slowly stands and rubs the back of his head, where there’s surely a goose-egg beginning to form. “Dude, are you good?”
“Y-yeah!” he tries to smile, but it looks more like a grimace. He begins shoving his things into his waiting backpack, a faded emerald green with a couple of pins you can’t make out. He seems to be in a hurry, but every few seconds his gaze jumps back up to you.
You step up to him and gingerly place the textbook on the desk. His eyes meet yours again, just for a second, before he swallows hard and looks away.
“Thanks,” he mutters, swipes the book from the table, and he’s gone, stumbling down the aisles until he turns a corner and disappears.
MJ snorts and says, “Okay, that was weird.”
You nod, chewing on the inside of your cheek. You’re about to go back to your own studying when something catches your eye.
There’s a folded sheet of paper, still lying beneath the table. When you pick it up, you notice the flash of that same, messy handwriting. It’s a letter, or it looks like one. You keep it folded, not even entertaining the idea of reading it, and turn to MJ.
“I’ll be right back.”
You want to run, but the crabby librarian would like to have your head– a real stereotype, that one– so you settle on a brisk walk. You’re surprised when you push through the glass doors of the campus library and immediately spot him sitting on its steps, his head pressed into his hands like he’s trying to block out the last five minutes.
“Hey,” you say, jogging to where he’s hunched over, his bag slouched against him like it too would like to forget that whole ordeal. It’s not that big of a deal, but you’d be embarrassed too if you’d made such a ruckus in a library, and then proceeded to concuss yourself for all to see. “You dropped your-”
The words are cut off abruptly when he lets out a shout of alarm and jumps up, stumbling away from you like he’s been burned, or like you’re holding him at gunpoint. You can only watch, mouth ajar as he gawks at you for a moment, then shakes his head and says breathlessly, “What?”
You let out a soft laugh, then offer him the paper.
His eyes widen, and he snatches it away from you with a speed you didn’t know a person could possess. He looks panicked, so you say the only thing you can think of: “I didn’t read it, or anything.”
He swallows hard and nods just once. “Yeah, of course.”
His voice is kind of soothing, and you find yourself not wanting him to walk away, wanting to talk to this guy who might be in your English class a little longer.
He offers you a tight, pained kind of smile.
“Uh, Peter, right?” you blurt out as he begins to turn. He freezes, his entire body going rigid as if he were cast in ice, and left to thaw in the sun– slowly, painfully. He’s a strange one, that much is certain, but there’s something almost sad about him, and you’re a sucker for taking in a stray.
His eyes meet yours again, his eyebrows lowered. There’s a crease between them, and you have to fight the urge not to smooth it out with your fingers. That would be… weird.
“Do you…” He hesitates. “Do you know me?”
He sounds almost hopeful, and you’re starting to think that maybe you’re right about English, so you say, “Yeah, we share a class, right?”
He masks his disappointment well, but you catch the flicker of it all the same. You’re not sure why you feel like you’re mirroring him, but you’re kind of disappointed too.
“Uh, yeah,” he says, then, like it’s an afterthought, he murmurs your name.
You nod, smiling politely and trying not to feel too much like an open wound. You don’t even know why, but you feel like you know him, and you want to talk to him, but you want to run away and hide at the same time.
“Well, it’s nice to officially meet you, Peter,” you offer, starting to turn back to the library doors. “I’ll see you in class.”
You barely catch his response as you make your way back inside, towards MJ and the piles of assignments you have yet to tackle, but his eyes stick in your mind, and you think about Peter from English for a long while after that.
You think about how he acted, how you felt, and what you thought you heard him say.
“You too, Sunny.”