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01
Peter opened his eyes to a slightly water-stained ceiling. The familiar hospital smell of disinfectant was almost reassuring. This was definitely not his first time — two weeks ago he'd taken a round from Frank's anti-materiel rifle square in the ribs, and that was still fresh — except this time he couldn't actually remember why he'd been admitted. Had he gotten sloppy tracking Metzger?
Thinking about Jean, still out there on the run alone, put a small sour weight in his chest. He'd been doing everything he could to chase down the DODC case, but there were still stragglers hiding in the dark, and you couldn't watch every corner. If Jean would just stay, he could protect her properly.
He struggled upright.
Jean Grey was sitting beside the bed.
She was in the visitor's chair with her eyes closed, though her posture wasn't what you'd call relaxed — her jacket was thrown over her legs, the hem creased. Her red-brown hair was down over her shoulders, longer than he remembered.
"Jean?"
Her eyes opened too fast. Fast enough that she hadn't been sleeping at all. They landed on his face and held there for a second, and something wound tight in her let go, and the air in the room went easier with it.
"You're awake."
"Thank God you're okay." Peter exhaled too. "Wait, why are you here—" He pushed up off the mattress and his ribs filed an immediate complaint. He ignored them. "Can you show your face in public now? Nobody followed you, right? You look a lot better than— where'd that jacket come from? What's the X on it, is that—"
Jean's expression went blank.
Like something had been drawn out of her from behind, silently. Her lips moved. No sound came.
She didn't answer a single question.
"Peter," she said. "Can I go into your head?"
"Of course!" He didn't even hesitate. Jean had met May, for God's sake. What was left to hide?
This time it didn't hurt. It didn't feel like being searched, either. It was more like someone walking around inside the back of his skull, slowly, opening one door at a time. Some rooms had the lights on. Some had nothing under the door at all.
She stopped in front of one door for a long time.
"What's that."
She didn't answer.
She kept going. Somewhere further in, her steps stopped a second time, longer than the first. Peter felt something faint that he could only describe as hesitation — like a hand resting on a knob and not turning it.
Jean sat back in the chair and let out a slow breath. She looked at him until it made his skin crawl. Her hand was still on the armrest. Her knuckles tightened, once, and released.
"Peter," she said. "What year is it?"
"What?"
"Answer me."
He opened his mouth.
He hadn't expected to get hit with the classic time-traveler question, and his first instinct was to laugh. Then he looked up, past her shoulder, at the calendar hanging next to the wall clock.
The numbers were big. 2035, printed nice and clear. Hospitals were like that.
The disinfectant smell was still there. The ceiling was still that ceiling, the stain in the upper right corner unmoved. His fingers were still pressed into the sheets, and he could feel every wrinkle in the fabric. All of it was real. Real in a way that wasn't open to negotiation.
"…That's a typo," he heard himself say.
"Seven years." Jean was watching him, and there was something careful in it. "You've lost seven years of memory."
The room stayed quiet for a long time.
Peter didn't shout. He didn't argue. He didn't look at the calendar again. He just lowered his back against the pillow and fixed his eyes on that stain in the corner and didn't move.
Seven years.
The whole world had forgotten him once, for four years. Nobody knew who he was. Nobody remembered anything he'd done. Everyone he loved looked at him like a stranger. He'd gotten through those four years alone.
Now it was his turn to forget the world.
Something cold started climbing up out of his stomach.
"What about Metzger," he said suddenly.
"Went down a long time ago," Jean said. "Thanks to you."
"Are you still wanted?"
"No."
Peter let out a breath. He badly needed one piece of good news to steady himself on.
"How did I get in here."
"You went after Mister Sinister. Alone."
Peter's eyes widened.
"…Mister Sinister? Is that a name a person actually has?"
"Who knows. Villains have questionable taste." Jean shrugged. "He built something new recently. He probably used it on you."
"What kind of something?"
"Based on your current performance, I'd say a memory-sealing device."
The door opened.
A blonde woman in a white coat came in. The badge said C. PALMER.
"You're up," she said. "Mr. Parker. Tell me how you feel. Don't say 'fine.'"
Peter opened his mouth. He had, in fact, been about to say fine.
Christine Palmer planted herself at the foot of the bed and delivered a long paragraph while flipping through a chart. Peter got the gist: no organic damage, no intracranial bleeding, two clean scans. She talked fast and didn't soften anything. She said this wasn't an ordinary medical problem. It was caused by "something else."
Bingo, Peter thought. This doctor clearly had extensive experience with "something else."
"I've seen far stupider things than this in this building," she said, with no expression whatsoever. "So don't waste energy convincing me."
Peter found that weirdly comforting.
"As for recovery." She tapped the chart with her pen and looked at Jean. "My recommendation is to put him back into his normal environment. Familiar places. Familiar people. Familiar motions. Let the clues find him." She took two steps toward the door, then looked back at Jean. "Don't rush it. Just wait."
Peter saw Jean nod, very slightly.
"Let's get you home first," Jean said.
02
Jean drove.
"Hey — thanks for saving me, Jean." Peter broke the silence. "Frank told me you kept me alive with your powers! So how does that work? Did you, like, telekinetically stop the bleeding? Can telekinesis even do that…?"
"Telekinesis isn't that versatile." Jean's face seemed to go faintly pink. "I just leaped into your mind and breathed for you. The rest was your healing factor."
"Oh. You — breathed. For me."
Peter stammered, which was rare, and heat went up the back of his neck.
They both looked very hard at the road and stopped talking.
The car stopped outside an apartment building he didn't recognize. Jean badged in, turned, climbed the stairs, produced keys — every motion smooth as something she'd done a thousand times. He followed her up like a guest visiting for the first time.
The door opened.
The smell hit him first.
The smell a place gets when people have lived in it a long time — coffee, old books, laundry detergent, and something else underneath that he couldn't name. All he knew was that it made him feel safe.
There was a ceramic dish on the console by the door with a chip out of the rim. Jean dropped the keys in. The dish held a jumble of keys coins hair ties a ring and other assorted junk.
Peter didn't notice. He was looking at the shoes.
Four pairs by the door. Three of them were women's.
"So this place…" He hunted for a word. "Looks like somebody lives here."
"Somebody does."
"Right."
He sat down on the couch — the left end — and only after he was down did he notice the dark grey hoodie thrown over the right end, cuffs turned back, like someone had shrugged out of it and never come back for it. He shifted two inches left to give it room.
There was a stack of takeout menus under the coffee table. The fridge door was covered in magnets from countries all over the world. The left half of the bookcase was psychology and biology, the right half physics and engineering, and there was no line between them — the two halves were interleaved, like two decks shuffled together. There was a pile of ungraded homework on the dining table. In the corner of the living room, a toaster had been disassembled into three neat piles on the floor, with a screwdriver and a ballpoint pen laid beside them.
Jean handed him a glass of water and he said thank you. Jean asked if his ribs hurt and he said not at all. He got up to get himself a second glass and asked "where are the cups" — and as the words left his mouth, his hand was already opening the second cabinet on the left, above the counter.
The cups were in there.
Peter's hand stopped in midair.
"…"
"Second cabinet," Jean said behind him.
"I know," Peter said. "I mean. I know now."
Since when does Peter Tingle have that feature, he grumbled internally.
He took a cup down. There was faded lettering on the side: WORLD'S OKAYEST SCIENTIST.
He put it back and took the plain one next to it.
Jean reached over to smooth down his collar where it had folded up, and when her fingertips touched his neck he went stiff for an instant, barely visible. Peter felt like he still wasn't used to this kind of adult interaction.
Her fingers paused near his collarbone for half a second, like she was checking whether something was still there. Then she stepped back twice and sat down on the far side of the dining table.
There was a sealed plastic bag on the table with his personal effects from the hospital. Jean pulled it over and tipped it out.
A ring of keys. A crushed web-shooter. Half a MetroCard soaked through with blood. A phone with a shattered screen that somehow still looked functional.
And a chain.
Fine silver, snapped. The break was a tear, not a cut, and one end still had a twisted half-link hanging off it.
There was nothing on it.
Jean picked it up and held it at eye level, looking from one end to the other.
Her expression didn't change. Peter would remember that later — her expression didn't change at all, and that was the part that was wrong. A person who sees a broken chain frowns a little, or sighs. She did neither. She just looked at it, for a long time, long enough that Peter started to feel the temperature in the room dropping.
"That's mine?"
"Mm."
"Was something on it?"
Jean set the chain down. She set it down very gently, almost without sound.
"Something of yours," she said.
Her expression still hadn't changed.
Not at all. Clean as a table someone had just wiped flat. Peter looked at that face and couldn't help thinking it had picked up something more grown-up than he remembered, and then he refused to let the thought stay in his head any longer than that.
The broken chain lay on the table with two of her fingers holding one end down.
Every hair on his arms stood up at once. His spider-sense had picked up something extremely dangerous — though not aimed at him.
The last time he'd felt this was on Roosevelt Island, when she put half of Manhattan on the ground.
"I'm going out."
"Where?"
"To settle something with Mister Sinister."
Peter opened his mouth almost on reflex. "By yourself?"
Jean turned and looked at him.
There was something complicated in that look, and Peter couldn't read it. He only knew he'd said something wrong somehow — like he'd taken a line out of someone else's hand and read it aloud without the right to.
He shut up.
"I'll be back soon. Get some rest. When you're feeling up to it you can call your friends — doctor's orders. Think of it as a vacation."
"…Okay."
The door closed.
The apartment was quiet enough to hear the fridge humming.
He sat on the couch for another ten minutes doing nothing, just looking at the toaster in three pieces.
Then he stood up.
"Dr. Palmer said," he announced to the empty room, "let the clues find me."
He paused.
"So me going and finding some clues is reasonable and logically consistent." Peter successfully persuaded himself that searching Jean's apartment was a necessary action. "I hung around Tony and Stephen long enough. I think I'm qualified for detective work."
Spider-Detective. On the case.
He started with the bathroom.
The mirror cabinet had frosted glass, so he couldn't see through it. He pulled it open.
Second shelf. A ceramic cup.
Two toothbrushes in it.
Peter looked at them for three seconds. Then he closed the cabinet door, very gently, slowly, like he was afraid of waking someone.
He went back to the living room and picked up the dark grey hoodie off the other end of the couch.
He shouldn't wear another guy's clothes. He knew that. He put it on anyway.
The shoulder seams sat exactly on his shoulders. The sleeves ended exactly at his wrist bones.
Peter stood in the middle of the living room with both arms out, not moving.
"…Okay."
He didn't take it off.
He walked down the hall still wearing it.
There was a row of picture frames on the hallway wall.
Five of them. Jean with a group of students. Jean playing chess with a bald man. One that was obviously taken without permission — Jean asleep over a stack of grading.
The fourth frame had two people in it. Jean on the left, doing an exaggerated angry face. The person on the right — the photo only caught a forearm and half a shoulder.
In the fifth frame, Jean was leaning into someone, both of them laughing hard. The someone had a paper bag over his head and was wearing a dark blue skintight suit. There was a large ④ on the chest that was impossible to ignore.
…Where'd this creep come from?
Peter took a step back.
He suddenly wanted very badly to sit down, but the living room was too far.
He went back to the dining table, where a stack of mail was pinned under the homework with one corner showing. He moved the homework.
The top envelope was an electric bill.
Two words in the addressee line.
BEN REILLY
Peter stared at the name.
"…Ben Reilly."
When he said it out loud, the apartment was quiet enough to hear the fridge humming.
03
He looked at that electric bill for about a minute.
Then he pulled the whole stack out and spread it across the dining table.
Internet bill, Ben Reilly. Water, Ben Reilly. A postcard addressed to J. Grey, with a student's crooked handwriting on the back saying she'd finally passed. A letter from a bank, addressed to Ben Reilly, still sealed. Peter weighed it in his fingers and put it down. You don't open other people's mail. It was one of the few lines he had left.
At the bottom was a flyer from a real estate agent.
The addressee line read: Mr. & Mrs. Ben Reilly.
Peter flipped it over. On the front was a photo of an agent with an extremely fake smile, under the slogan Not just another realtor, a man who cares.
"Junk mail!" he said. "This guy doesn't even look like a real man."
He threw it in the trash.
The bedroom closet was split in two.
The larger left half was obviously Jean's, and there were things hanging in it that looked good just hanging there. Peter caught himself imagining how she'd look in them, how pretty, how impossible to ignore.
Definitely better than that jacket with nothing on it but an X, he thought.
He stood in front of the smaller right half and evaluated it objectively — presumably someone else's things, but he had legitimate cause. He was looking for clues.
The clothes were about his size. The taste was slightly better than his. A lot of them matched things on Jean's side.
He sat on the edge of the bed and looked at them for a solid minute while his brain refused to process the implications.
After a minute he lay down.
His body rolled itself to the right side. His head landed in a depression already worn into the pillow, and the fit was nearly perfect.
Peter stared at the ceiling.
"…I hate him."
Back in the living room, he found the phone in the plastic bag, a small web of cracks across the lower left of the screen.
He plugged it in. It buzzed once and lit up.
Lock screen. He leaned his face toward it without thinking.
Click. Open.
"…At least it still recognizes me."
He wisely ignored the mass of colorful apps and went straight to Contacts.
There were five people in Favorites.
Ned Leeds. Yelena Belova. Frank Castle. Michelle Jones. Madelyne Pryor.
Peter scrolled down hoping for a sixth.
There wasn't one.
He didn't know why Jean wasn't even in there. It couldn't be that they were so in sync they didn't need each other's numbers.
Five people. And one of them was a Madelyne Pryor he'd never heard of.
Probably someone I met in the last seven years, Peter thought. Better not to call that one yet.
He tried searching instead.
"Peter Parker" first.
Same as seven years ago: a pile of accountants and dentists with his name, a high school quarterback in California. Not him. The world still didn't remember. Somehow that hadn't changed, and Peter couldn't tell if what he felt was relief or something else.
Then he searched "Ben Reilly."
Nothing.
Peter looked at the empty results page.
"Is nobody using their real name online anymore?"
He leaned back in the chair.
Then he went back to Contacts.
Five names. He put his finger on the first one.
Ned Leeds.
"Okay," Peter said. "Let's find out who this guy actually is."
Somewhere along the line, getting the seven years back had stopped being the thing he was working on.
He pressed down.
04
When Ned picked up, the camera was swinging across a ceiling.
"Peter! Have you seen my plastic screw box—"
"Ned, I—"
"The blue one. With the dividers. I swear it was here last— hang on."
The phone got propped against something. Peter spent roughly fifteen seconds looking at a blurry stack of cardboard boxes and listening to a man rummage.
He used those fifteen seconds to figure out how to say it.
Ned, I've lost seven years of my memory.
Simple. Say it and it's over.
Then he thought about those four years.
About standing at Ned and MJ's housewarming as a complete stranger. About watching MJ with her boyfriend. About going home alone, closing the door alone. About MJ telling him flatly that she didn't love him, that she didn't even know him — and Peter noticed, with some surprise, that all it did now was tighten something in his chest for a second. It was two weeks ago as far as he was concerned, and the part that had felt like being cut open had already gone soft at the edges.
He still couldn't get his mouth open.
He could not say I don't remember you to Ned. He knew exactly what that sentence felt like landing on a person. He'd taken it for four straight years.
"Got it!" Ned's face reappeared, holding up a blue plastic box. "What were you saying?"
"Nothing," Peter said. "Just asking what you're up to."
"Moving. Brooklyn. Don't ask about the rent."
Peter suddenly spotted, in the middle of the boxes, a blue phone box. Wooden. Taller than a person. Square. With a lamp on top.
He put his whole face up to the screen.
"Is that—"
"The TARDIS! From Doctor Who! Full size! You came and looked at it, remember?" Ned said. "New place can't fit it. I'm gonna list it."
"How much." Peter's eyes were shining.
"You're buying a phone box. Right now."
"Can you hold it for me."
"Peter."
"I've got something I have to deal with. I'll come get it after." Peter put his palms together. "Please."
Ned looked at him for two seconds, then shrugged.
"Fine. But you're explaining it to her yourself."
"Explaining to Jean?"
"Mm."
"Why do I have to explain buying a phone box to Jean?"
"Look at you. Growing up." Ned gave him a look of genuine newfound respect. "I'm going to remember you said that. Okay, what else."
Peter set his jaw and committed.
"What do you think of Ben Reilly?"
"No. No. No—"
"What no."
Ned sighed, long-suffering. "I'm moving. I have twenty-seven boxes. Can I get a pass this once?"
"I just want to hear what you think."
"That's what you said last time. And then I sat in a bar for three hours drinking four things I don't like so that I could walk over at the right moment and say, 'Ma'am, the gentleman over there would like to buy you a drink.'"
So Ned's the one who introduced them? Peter's feelings got complicated.
The tape gun went off.
"You actually want to hear this?"
"Actually."
"Fine." Ned straightened up. "He thinks extremely highly of himself."
"…"
"He pauses when he talks, like every sentence is important. He has a patent in Delaware, and he will make sure you know that. And he's got this accent—"
"Accent?"
"I don't know what accent it's supposed to be," Ned said. "I don't think he does either."
Peter waited three seconds and then asked the question that mattered.
"Does Jean like him."
Ned paused.
"Peter," he said. "Jean is the only person on this planet who genuinely finds him interesting."
Something cold went through Peter all at once.
Of course Jean was free. She had every right to choose who she spent her time with. As long as she was happy, as long as the guy wasn't some supervillain in a costume, what standing did he have to say anything about it?
Peter's rational mind understood all of this completely.
Unfortunately, the tightness in his chest had not consulted his rational mind. He'd felt a smaller version of this two days ago on Frank's old boat.
"Okay…"
Someone shouted at Ned's door: "Mr. Leeds?"
"Coming!" He grabbed the phone and the picture became a smear. "I have to go. Anything else?"
Peter got his face in order.
"How's MJ… doing."
"She's good."
"I mean," Peter said, "relationship-wise."
He wasn't sure whether he and MJ were seven-years-later close enough for him to just call her out of nowhere. And there was a small part of him pushing him to ask the question and hoping for a bad answer. A small part.
Ned brought the phone closer and squinted at him for two seconds, visibly wondering whether someone had taken over Peter's body.
"Ask her yourself."
"I don't want to ask her myself."
"Why not—"
The person at the door shouted again.
Ned sighed. It was a long sigh. Long enough that Peter got tired on his behalf.
"Fine. What am I, if not your Man in the Chair." Ned waved a hand. "I think they had a fight a couple days ago. I'll send you the details later."
"Thanks."
"You're weird today." Ned raised his right hand. "Do the thing."
They did it through the screen. Fist bump, twice, palm flip, and then that ending nobody else has ever managed to learn. Both of their hands were only half in frame.
The screen went dark.
05
When Yelena picked up, the camera was jammed against her chin.
"Happy man. You still owe me three hundred dollars."
"I know."
He didn't know.
"You don't know," Yelena said. "You never know."
The picture pulled back to a normal distance. Behind her was that familiar Russian bathhouse. There was a person sitting in a chair against the wall with something over his head and his hands tied behind him.
The person moved a little.
"Who's that."
"Work."
She showed no intention of elaborating.
Peter shook his head once and got to the point.
"Yelena. What do you think of Ben Reilly."
"Oh. Ben." Her voice changed. "I hate that man."
Peter's grip tightened on the phone.
"Why."
"Because he is always making me book impossible restaurants and hotels," Yelena said, with feeling. "I am a New Avenger! I am not a concierge."
"…What?"
"Last month he wanted a place booked out to March." She held up a hand. "Eleven phone calls. I had to smile at Valentina for an entire day, Peter. For a table for two."
"…"
"And the hotel. He wanted a room with a balcony. And it had to have a view of the river. Had to."
She bit off a piece of the black bread in her hand.
"Is he rich."
"No."
"…What?"
"He is poor," Yelena said. "Absurdly poor."
"Then how does he—"
"He saves."
Peter didn't say anything.
"He saves for a whole year," Yelena said. "Then he spends it in one night. Every year. I have told him to stop. He does not listen."
"Once a year?"
"Same week. Every year."
So they have an anniversary.
A day that comes around every year. A reservation that takes eleven phone calls. A room that has to look out over the river. A man who saves for a year for one week of it.
Peter had been fully prepared to hate a jerk who threw money around.
He was not prepared for this.
"…Does Jean like him."
"She is crazy about him." Yelena chewed three times. "God knows why."
Yelena stared at the screen for two seconds. Somewhere behind her, a man's voice started begging.
"You are talking strangely today."
"I'm normal." Peter felt like he'd denied it too fast.
"You used to ask how I am first."
Peter opened his mouth.
"…How are you."
"Too late."
The screen went dark.
06
Frank picked up.
What appeared onscreen was a bare lightbulb with no shade. Somewhere in the background, a drill.
"Frank. What do you think of Ben Reilly."
The drill stopped.
The phone was lifted off the table.
Frank Castle's face came onto the screen at completely the wrong distance — far too close. He looked at Peter. He looked at him for three seconds. It was the way he'd look at Matt Murdock asking whether he wanted to pray first.
"Not today."
The screen went dark.
07
Peter stared at Ned's two-line message for forty minutes.
It was simple enough. She's good. Living with Paul. They had a fight a couple days ago and already made up.
He sat in the living room afterward without moving.
Then he realized he was doing something extremely stupid — bracing himself, on a two-week-old timeline, for something that had actually been over for seven years.
He pressed down.
"That was slower than I expected." MJ hadn't taken long to pick up, though.
"…Why?"
"Ned asked if I was home three hours ago." She propped the phone somewhere and stepped back. "He asked out of nowhere. I figured something was up."
She stopped moving.
"So why did you have Ned ask about my love life."
"I didn't—"
"You went to a movie with him last week."
MJ narrowed her eyes at him. It was a familiar kind of suspicion.
In the little self-view window Peter watched his own face — he hadn't known that being caught out could look so vivid.
"What happened to you." It wasn't a question.
Peter opened his mouth.
He'd been holding those words in it all day. He hadn't gotten them out to Ned. Or Yelena. Or Frank.
"I've lost seven years of my memory."
The room went quiet after he said it.
"Okay, not exactly a first for you." MJ's expression changed three times, fast enough that Peter only caught the last one. "Are you alone right now?"
"Yeah."
"Where's Jean."
"Out. She said she's settling something with someone."
MJ shrugged, unsurprised.
He walked her through the day, with particular emphasis on the accusations against the mysterious Ben Reilly.
The closet. The shoes that fit. The name on the electric bill. The photo with the paper bag. Ned's version of the introduction. Yelena's eleven phone calls and the room that had to look out over the river. Saving for a whole year. Same week, every year.
"He's poor," Peter said. "He's as broke as I am. And he saves for a whole year just to take her out to dinner."
He stopped.
"I spent all day looking for something wrong with this guy. Aside from the pervert costume in that photo, I couldn't find a single thing."
MJ had lost control of her mouth the moment the name Ben Reilly came up. It started as one small sound, and by the end she had to put a hand over her face, shoulders shaking.
"What are you laughing at."
"Nothing." She was trying to talk through it and running out of air. "I don't have anything useful to tell you about Ben Reilly. But I would suggest you say all of that to Jean, too."
"Would that work?" Peter looked doubtful. "Wouldn't that make me sound like a stalker or something?"
"Trust me. Absolutely not a problem." MJ produced the most confident expression of her entire life.
"Okay." Peter accepted this, grudgingly. "I feel like I'm doing something terrible."
"Doing what."
Peter looked down at his hands.
"I think I'm in love with her."
There was no sound from the other end.
"In my memory," he said, "two weeks ago I was standing in Frank's place telling you I loved you and listening to you tell me you didn't know who I was. Two weeks. And now I'm sitting here hurting over somebody else."
He looked up.
"I don't know if I've earned the right to say any of this."
MJ didn't answer right away.
She went to the table and sat down, set the phone in front of her, and wrapped both hands around a mug.
"Peter," she said, "the thing you're hurting about? I finished crying about it seven years ago."
"…"
"And I wasn't crying over you. I was crying over somebody I was supposed to know and didn't know at all. By the time I actually met you again, it didn't hurt anymore."
She looked up into the camera.
"I'm good. I've always been good. I have my apartment, my work, my person. We had a fight two days ago and then we were fine. These seven years have been genuinely good — good enough that I forget, sometimes, that you once deleted yourself out of the world for us."
Peter didn't say anything.
After a while he spoke again.
"I want to ask you one more thing."
"Ask."
"Why is she so good to me."
MJ's fingers shifted on the mug.
"Let me tell you something," she said. "That night on the roof — when she was using my body — she apologized to me."
"…"
"A lot of times. Enough times that I eventually had to ask her to stop."
"Did you forgive her?"
"Peter, I don't remember it happening." MJ said. "The only person I can forgive is the one who still does."
Peter felt his shoulders come down. He hadn't noticed that he'd been holding them since the word roof.
"Go get her, tiger," she said. "You don't need my permission. But if you want it, it's yours."
"Thanks. I will." Peter nodded, resolute.
"Oh — and film the whole thing, and send me a copy." MJ lost the fight with her face entirely.
The screen went dark.
08
The door opened at ten at night.
Peter was on his feet a second before the lock turned. He'd been sitting on the couch for three hours waiting for exactly that sound. Though part of him was afraid two people would come through it.
Only Jean.
She came in and hung her jacket on the back of the door. She looked exhausted.
"Well, that's done." She pushed a hand back through her wavy red-brown hair. "I put our friend Sinister on the Raft."
She set a metal box the size of a palm on the dining table, turned around, and saw Peter standing in the middle of the living room wiping both hands on his jeans.
"Peter—"
"Jean, let me talk first."
She stopped.
Peter saw her set the keys down gently on the shoe cabinet instead of dropping them into the dish. He didn't think anything of it at the time.
"Okay," she said. "Go ahead."
"I searched your apartment today, and I found out about this Ben Reilly guy. I read your mail. I looked at your photos. I wore his clothes. I slept on his side of the bed. I'm sorry, and if I ever meet him I'll apologize to his face, but I'm not sorry I did it, because I had to know what I was up against."
He got all of that out in one breath before he dared look up.
"He has a patent in Delaware and an accent nobody can place. Ned's sick of him. Yelena hates him. He's broke — he's as broke as I am, and he saves for a whole year so he can take you somewhere with a view of the river."
"I spent all day looking for something wrong with him. Aside from the pervert costume in that one photo, I couldn't find anything."
A car went past outside and its light swept across the ceiling.
"Seven years ago I told you something. You have me. I meant it. I wanted you to have somebody so you wouldn't be alone. I thought that somebody could be me."
"And today I found out this Ben Reilly did it too. And there's nothing I can do about that."
"I think I'm jealous of him. I'm jealous that he gets to be the one who's there for you. And I'm jealous that he gets to have you."
"But I'll go. You already have him, and he's a good man."
A pause.
"He's even named after my uncle. I personally take enormous issue with that. But that's not his fault either."
Peter was done.
He stood there and waited for the room to come down on him. This was the only thing he'd gotten clear all day: say it, then leave, and once he'd left he wouldn't have to think about it anymore. He'd used up everything he had.
Jean didn't say anything for a long time.
She looked at him. Her eyes were red.
"Wow," she said. "I am blushing."
"…What?"
"But that Ben Reilly is you, and we've been married for three years." Jean put her arms around him. "You really are a simple spider, aren't you?"
The fridge hummed.
"Married," Peter heard himself say.
A ring came flying across the room from the ceramic dish by the door, and at the same moment Jean reached into her jacket pocket and opened her hand in front of his chest.
Two rings.
"This one's mine. I don't wear it when I'm teaching or in the field. I leave it in that dish by the door." Jean nodded toward the entryway. "And this one came back from Sinister. The chain broke at the scene, so he took it as a sample."
Peter took it.
A plain band, old, the edges worn bright. He turned it over and held it up to the light to read the inside.
There was a line of very small text.
YOU HAVE ME
"So why didn't you tell me."
They sat down on the couch.
"I was going to, in the hospital," she said. "The second I came back out of your head, I already had my mouth open."
"And?"
"And then I remembered the first thing you thought when you woke up. I didn't need to go into your head to hear it."
Peter waited.
"You thought something like Is Jean still on the run. Is anybody following her. I wish she'd stay, I could keep her safe."
Her voice was very level.
"You didn't know what year it was. The first thing you worried about was me."
"…"
"And then I wanted to hear the rest of it," Jean said. "I wanted to know if you'd do it again."
She looked up.
"I know what that makes me. It was selfish." Her eyes went somewhere else. "I'm sorry, Peter."
Peter looked at her.
He closed his hand around the ring.
"It's okay. You always have me," he said.
Jean's ears went hot again.
"…Could you not do that every single time."
"No."
......
"So while we were on the run I made up Ben Reilly for myself, and got a whole set of documents under it?" Peter had his head in Jean's lap on the couch, listening to her tell him about their own past.
"That's right. Ben was your uncle's name, and Reilly was May's maiden name." Jean was playing with his brown curls. "You really didn't catch that?"
I was panicking. Who has time to think about that. Peter did not feel he was performing well in the composure department. "So what Ned said about setting Ben Reilly up with you, and all the hotels and restaurants…?"
"Ah — well." Jean's face went faintly pink again. "It's an anniversary thing. We want to do something special. So sometimes we use the fake identities on each other. Pretend it's the first time we've met, in a bar. A whole torrid one-night — you know."
She kissed his forehead.
"Your character is a young researcher who won't shut up about his patent. And I honestly could never place that accent. If the others happen to be around, we get them to help set the scene."
Peter suddenly understood the expressions on Ned's and Yelena's faces.
"By the way, my alias is Madelyne Pryor," Jean said, with a certain amount of pride. "A tough single mother, a therapist, raising a son on her own."
"That name sounds like her son would grow up to be a lot like Thanos." A sharp pain went through Peter's skull. "I'm sorry, I'll stop. Okay, the photo in the hallway with the paper bag—"
"That's you. The Fantastic Four helped you deal with a certain parasitic organism and you had nothing to wear afterward. Johnny lent you one of their suits, and you flat-out refused to show your face, so he added the bag."
"I haven't even met these Fantastic Four people, but this Johnny doesn't sound like a good person."
"I hope you'll hold that position when you see him next." Jean gave up and kissed him.
He stopped partway through.
"Wait. Does this count as our first kiss, or, like, our four hundredth."
"First," Jean said. "It's always the first one. That's the problem with being married to you."
EPILOGUE
That night Peter fell asleep with one hand pinning down her hair.
Jean pulled it free very carefully, got up, and went to the dining table.
The metal box was still where she'd left it.
She opened it.
Inside was something shaped like a pen, with a dial on the end turned all the way to its stop. Sinister called it a reverser. Single use.
It could give him back the seven years.
Jean stood there holding it for a long time.
Those seven years were his. She had no right to hold on to them for him. She knew that better than anyone — she'd already admitted it to herself three separate times.
But the man who had stood in the middle of the living room tonight — remembering nothing, having turned her apartment upside down, having sincerely concluded that he'd lost, and then having decided to step aside for her sake — that man had chosen her again, knowing nothing at all.
She had never wanted anything more than that in her life.
She closed the box, put it back in the drawer, and shut it.
"Let me be selfish for one more month."
The man in the bed rolled over and said her name, indistinctly.
Not Madelyne.