Work Text:
The first photograph Peter Parker ever took of Jean Grey was supposed to ruin her life.
Okay, that might be a bit of an exaggeration.
That wasn't how he'd have put it at the time—at the time, it was just an assignment, scrawled on a Post-it in Jameson's handwriting and stuck to Peter's monitor like a summons:
MUTANT PRESSER 2PM—GET ME SOMETHING WE CAN USE.
Everybody in the building knew what something we can use meant. It meant a bad angle. A flinch caught mid-motion and captioned like a threat. Jameson had run four consecutive weeks of front pages that made the X-Men look like they were one bad Tuesday away from levelling the city and Peter's job that afternoon was to hand him ammunition for a fifth.
He hated it. He took the assignment anyway, because rent was rent and because turning down Bugle work on principle was the kind of thing you could only afford to do a few times before Jameson started noticing.
He knew what it was like to have a person reduced to a picture and a headline.
Spider-Man had gotten used to it already—a blur on a rooftop, a kick against a bruised jaw, a photograph Jameson could turn into an Avengers-level threat with a few words underneath it.
He'd never liked the idea that a camera could make somebody into whatever the person holding it wanted.
It was a particularly unpleasant thought to have while being paid to do exactly that.
The event was in a conference room two blocks from the paper, folding chairs and a podium and too many reporters shouting over each other and Jean Grey stood in front of the microphone answering questions about mutant rights with a controlled patience that meant she had already answered this same question a hundred times that week.
Peter was ready, hunting for the shot—the unflattering one, the one with her eyes narrowed, something that would read as aggressive—when she became visibly infuriated at a comment that aimed to incite violence rather than promote journalistic integrity.
He found his opportunity. He had his thumb on the shutter, had the angle, had everything Jameson had asked for sitting right there in the viewfinder.
He didn't take it.
He lowered the camera an inch or two, which was apparently enough—because Jean's eyes flicked straight to him, sharp and sudden, like she'd felt something land.
Why didn’t you take the shot?
A voice rang out in his head that was impossibly hers.
He very nearly dropped the camera. You're in my head right now?
Only the part of it that was about to sell me out for a headline. A private curl at the corner of her mouth, even as she kept answering the reporter in front of her without missing a beat, a skill Peter would spend the next several months being thoroughly unable to replicate in any context.
Relax, Mr.—Bugle, right? I can see the badge. I'm not going to make a habit of this. I just wanted you to know I noticed.
Noticed what?
That you put the camera down.
He'd waited for her after (she asked, he wasn’t being presumptuous), badge tucked into his jacket so the other reporters wouldn't notice him lurking.
When she came out, he held up the memory card.
"I got some good ones," he said. "Podium shots and some others. I thought you might wanna see before I turn anything in?"
She'd looked at him for a long moment, trying to gauge if this kindness, if one could call it that, had a hidden price tag on the back of it.
She looked through them one by one. Not just the ones where she was speaking, but the ones where she was listening, where she'd turned towards somebody in the second row, where the expression on her face exuded pure exhaustion.
"These are good," she said.
Peter shrugged. "They're accurate."
That earned him a look.
"Those aren't always the same thing." Jean handed the camera back.
"So, what happens," she asked, "when your dear editor finds out you didn't get him his monster shot?"
"He yells for ten minutes, more than his usual six. I've survived worse."
"You could've just taken the photo. Nobody would've known."
"I'd have known and that’s one person too many," Peter said like it wasn't a big deal, even though a miniscule part of him was aware that it might have been.
Jean’s face was having an effect on his heart that he couldn't explain.
"Peter Parker," she read off his badge, testing the name like a secret she intended to keep to herself. "I'll remember you."
She had, as it turned out, an excellent memory.
Two years, one increasingly poorly-kept secret identity and several hundred dinners later, the press badge around Peter's neck still said DAILY BUGLE—STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER.
What it did not say was that the man wearing it had, four hours earlier, stopped a bus full of tourists from going into the Hudson and could very possibly be doing more of the same before the night was out.
That was just how Tuesdays went for him.
Today, however Tuesday meant the press pit outside a midtown gallery, roped off with velvet cord, packed shoulder to shoulder with photographers for the X-Men's first sanctioned public appearance with the Avengers and the Fantastic Four—a joint charity gala thrown together by Xavier's people and roughly six PR firms all fighting over the same clipboard. It was, on paper, the single largest gathering of costumed do-gooders the city had seen outside of an actual crisis, which meant Peter's night was destined to be complicated before anyone had so much as swiped a champagne flute.
Peter had gotten the assignment because Robbie was short-staffed and because—though nobody at the Bugle knew this part—Peter happened to have a better sense than most of exactly which mutants in that building could bend a spoon with their mind versus which ones could bend a steel bar with their actual hands, which came in handy for staying out of blast radii.
He also happened to be dating one of the mutants in question. Jameson, mercifully, remained ignorant of that detail.
"Peter." Robbie's voice crackled in his ear. "Faces. Handshakes. I want one good shot of Wolverine looking like he's about to fight the paparazzi, readers will eat that up."
"On it, Robbie," Peter said and lifted the camera.
The gallery steps were a wall of white light, forty cameras firing at once, a noise like a swarm of very expensive insects. Names went up in a chorus that never fully stopped—Storm, over here—Beast, one more—Cyclops, to your left—
And then:
"Marvel Girl, right here!"
She came up the steps in deep green, hair loose, moving like she'd been born knowing exactly how to be looked at and all eyes towards her like sunflowers finding noon. She smiled the smile Peter had learned to recognize as professional—effortless, entirely unreachable, built for a room and not for a person.
Then her eyes found the one photographer not shouting her name and the professional smile dropped into something that remembered exactly what it had felt like the first time he'd chosen her over the shot.
Peter, from behind the camera, mouthed: Hi.
She turned and posed for him. And him only.
He took the picture. His hands were, admittedly, a little clammy.
A thousand kisses in and she still did that to him.
"Is this okay?" Jean asked, low enough it didn't carry past the rope line—though six boom mics were pointed her way and Peter had no idea how much of this she managed to keep private and how much she didn't care to.
"Yeah."
"You sure?"
"Yeah."
"You look a little pink there, babe."
"It's really hot out here."
"It's October." She smiled once more. “Take the picture.” No question in it this time and he did and it came out perfect, because of course it did.
Beside him, a heavyset photographer from the Post—Gary, Peter was fairly sure, a face from a dozen prior events—lowered his own camera and squinted sideways.
"How'd you get her to turn like that?"
"I called her name."
"I did that too."
"Try it quieter."
Gary tried it quieter. Jean did not even spare a glance at Gary. Somewhere in the back of Peter's head, like a held breath, he heard: he's trying so hard. Be nice to him later.
Are you reading my colleagues now?
Only the loud ones, darling.
He found the rest of the guest list more alarming, once he had a spare second to read the press packet.
Johnny was inside working the room in a tailored suit, five drinks into an open bar he had no business being anywhere near for another hour. Reed was fielding questions from a cluster of science journalists with the distracted patience of a man who would rather be anywhere with a whiteboard, while Sue kept one hand on his elbow, steering him back towards the room every time he drifted. Ben had found the one corner of the gallery with reinforced flooring and was doing his level best to look like furniture.
Steve stood near the coat check looking like a recruitment poster that had wandered in from 1943. Sam held down a corner by the auction tables, doing an unconvincing impression of a man not people-watching. Natasha was somewhere in the room too, which meant, by definition, nobody could say exactly where—Peter had clocked her twice and lost her twice. Wanda and Vision were near the string quartet, Wanda visibly regretting agreeing to small talk with a gallery board member about abstract sculpture.
The X-Men had turned out in force—Ororo and Hank were the two Peter kept spotting near the drinks. Xavier and Erik were debating something with the many 'investors' who had turned up. Anna was working the rope line with gloves on and a careful distance from everyone, Kitty had already made a beeline for the dessert table, Bobby was somewhere behind her complaining about the lack of attention and Scott was trying to wrangle them. Remy had a card between two fingers that he was flipping absently and not, as far as Peter could tell, actually cheating anyone with yet and Nightcrawler had charmed the members of the catering staff into letting him near the kitchen, for reasons Peter did not want to speculate about.
Johnny reached him first, because Johnny always reached him first—that was a law of the universe now. A very annoying law but a law nonetheless.
"Parker!" Drink in hand, grin already implying things Peter did not care for. "You're on photo duty?"
"Yes, Johnny."
"Buuuuummer, dude! Your girlfriend just made every guy in the room blow a fuse for a second there. I watched it happen."
"Hey! Keep your voice down."
"Why, is it a secret you're—" enormous stage whisper "—whipped?"
"I will drop this camera in the punch bowl."
"It's a rental, you won't."
It was, in fact, a rental and Peter hated that Johnny knew that. Fucking Johnny.
Steve arrived a beat later with the gravity of a man who'd once given orders to entire platoons and had never quite learned to stop doing it socially. "Parker. Didn't know you did press work."
"Cover assignment, nothing special."
"Mm. I was hoping you’d be in a different suit." His eyes drifted, briefly, towards the far side of the room, where Jean was laughing at something Scott had said, effortless and bright.
“Ahh, I don’t know if our mutual friend would be really welcome here.”
“Nonsense. Tony told me he had sent you the invitation weeks ago.”
“Steve, you know me. It’s just—not my style.”
Steve sighed, "Peter, I hope you understand you are a valuable part of the team."
Peter could not help being moved by the sincerity of his words. “Thanks, Cap. It really means a lot.”
“Keep being you, son. You will be just fine.” Then he flashed a grin. "I also see a certain someone who keeps looking over."
Peter didn't have to turn around to answer and he blushed a bit before he did. He'd felt it already—a warm prickle at the back of his neck that had nothing to do with any spider-sense and everything to do with her eyes on him. "...Also yes."
"Remember to have fun," Steve said, like a verdict and clapped him once on a shoulder that had been dislocated and reset twice this month and moved off towards the bar to have, presumably, club soda and a serious conversation about tactics with anybody willing to listen.
Across the room, Jean had drifted into Wanda and Ororo's orbit, champagne barely touched, doing the kind of small talk that women who were in dangerous professions used to size each other up without ever saying so.
"You keep looking over there," Wanda said, mild as anything, nodding faintly towards the press pit without being too obvious about it. "Should I ask, or is it none of my business?"
"It's a little bit of both," Jean said.
"That's not a no."
"You won't hear a yes, either." Jean's mouth curved. "There's someone. That's all you're getting out of me tonight."
Ororo raised her brow, delighted. "That's the most anyone has managed to so far."
"And it's already more than I meant to." Jean took a slow sip, eyes flicking, just for a second towards Peter. "I like him better as my secret than as gossip. Ask me again in a year."
"He's cute," Ororo said, entirely too innocently, following the look for exactly as long as it took to be caught doing it.
"I have no idea who you mean," Jean said, sailing off towards the next cluster of people with the serene gait of a woman who had just told the truth and a lie in the same sentence and enjoyed both.
Wanda watched her go, then glanced at Ororo. "She's not going to tell you either, is she?"
"Not a chance."
Meanwhile, Gary found the object of Jean's attention again by the dessert table. Peter had just managed to grab a cup of strawberry ice cream and was about to have his first bite.
"Seriously," Gary said, "what is it. Cologne? Pheromones? Code word?"
"Do I look like the Mandrill’s long-lost cousin? That’s offensive, Gary."
"Marvel Girl!" Gary called towards the middle of the room, testing. "Over here, one more!"
A polite half-glance, that went as fast as it arrived.
"Maybe she's just tired of cameras," Peter chimed in.
"Then why does she look at yours?" Peter didn't have an answer for that one.
Jean glanced towards him, never minding the distance between them. He lifted the camera slightly and Jean blew him a not-so-discreet kiss. Gary unfortunately, followed everything.
He looked back at Peter.
"...Oh."
Peter sighed. "Don't. Just don't."
"I didn't say anything."
"You were about to."
"I was absolutely about to."
His spider-sense prickled before he even saw her—a light warning, the kind that said: watch that one.
White-blonde hair swept up, a dress the exact deep blue of a security camera's dead zone, moving through the crowd with the speed of somebody who knew exactly when to bolt.
Felicia Hardy did not belong on this guest list. Not unless she'd forged it herself.
Peter wasn't the only one who noticed. Across the room, Natasha had gone very still for exactly one and a half seconds, a professional taking note of another professional, before returning to her conversation as if nothing had happened at all. She didn't move to intercept. She didn't so much as glance towards Peter. It just wasn’t her problem. Atleast not yet.
Felicia caught his eye across the room—of course she did—and gave him a look that said, as clear as speech: don't spoil this for me, Spider.
Peter knew what he was in for. She had already decided that whatever she was about to do was going to be somebody else's problem.
Which meant like all the other times, it would be his.
There was a diamond necklace in one of the glass cases, insured for a sum with way more zeroes than his yearly salary. He did the math in half a second and didn't love the answer.
"Busy, are we?"
He nearly dropped his camera again. Jean had crossed half the room—she only managed that when she wanted to—and was watching him with her head tilted.
"No, of course not."
"Your shoulders just did a weird thing and you stopped looking through the lens." Her gaze followed his, unerringly, to the woman in blue. Something in her expression sharpened by too many degrees. "Who's that?"
"Nobody you need to worry about," Peter said—possibly, in retrospect, the single worst sentence possible—and Jean's spine went very straight.
"She was looking at you like she knows you."
"Lots of people look at me like they know me. Memorable face."
"Peter Benjamin Parker. You will tell me right now or—"
"It's a work thing. I'll explain, I promise. Just—trust me?"
Jean held his eyes a long moment, deciding whether to let it go—and then her whole expression changed, fast, real alarm that had nothing to do with what was there a moment ago.
"Something's wrong," she said, quiet and urgent, hand closing on his wrist. "I felt it—like somebody's pulse just—"
She stopped. Her eyes had gone distant, listening to something Peter couldn't hear.
"Security's about to move on her."
Peter glanced towards Felicia. She was still smiling, still moving, still looking like she had absolutely nothing to do with anything.
"How do you—"
"I'm a telepath at a party full of anxious minds, Peter. I feel everything within thirty feet whether I want to or not."
She looked at Felicia, again. Recognition dawned on her.
"Is that who I think it is?"
There was no version of the next ten seconds that ended with Peter successfully lying to a telepath holding him.
"...Yes."
Jean closed her eyes briefly.
"Of course, it is."
"Jean—"
"Go."
He blinked.
"Go," she repeated, already turning towards the nearest gathering of reporters. "I'll keep everyone looking this way. Five minutes."
Peter looked at her for half a second longer than he should have.
Then he ran.
It took approximately six seconds for Felicia to get the necklace out of its case, four more for the silent alarm to stop being silent and approximately one and a half for the universe to decide that was nowhere near enough chaos for one day.
The gallery had strung its centerpiece—a hanging installation of hand-blown glass, four hundred pounds of it, cabled to a rig that had not been designed with a cat burglar vaulting off it in mind—directly over the dance floor.
Felicia's boot caught one of the support cables on her way past. It didn't snap. It just—stretched, groaned and started walking itself loose from the bracket, all that glass beginning a descent towards people who had absolutely no idea.
"That wasn't me," Felicia said, already one window away and accelerating.
"For the love of—" Peter said, already mapping out the trajectory and load-bearing tolerance and realizing there was exactly one version of the next ninety seconds where nobody got hurt and it did not involve him staying in this rental shirt.
He was in the suit by the time he hit the gallery floor.
There was, to his enormous relief, no scream, no panic, no single moment where the room understood how close it had come—because a web-line caught the cable's slack half a second after it gave and Spider-Man was already threading a second line before the first glass panel had dropped more than a foot.
"Huh," said Logan, from somewhere near the bar, not even putting his drink down.
What followed was: Steve directing traffic like this was a beachhead, Ororo literally calming the air currents around the installation so it stopped swaying, Hank working his magic with the frayed cable that Peter didn't fully follow, Sam hovering nearby "just in case," and Peter himself doing the unglamorous work of holding the whole mess together by sheer strength and a heroic quantity of webbing alongside Jean easing some of the weight with her telekinesis until Ben and Reed pronounced it secure.
It was, all things considered, an impressive rescue.
It went exactly the way these things always went for Peter—publicly and with absolutely no way to leave the room afterward without being seen.
Then Jean cut a path right to him.
"Well," Jean said, tilting her head up at him, green eyes bright with something that was definitely not concern for public safety. "Aren't you impressive."
"Ma'am," Peter said, trying very hard to sound like a stranger to his own girlfriend, "just doing my part."
"Mm." She reached out and—an audience that included Johnny Storm, whose phone camera he didn't even bother to hide and at least three Bugle photographers—trailed one finger down a strand of webbing still hanging off his shoulder. "You're stronger than you look."
"I—get that a lot."
"Do you." Her voice dropped half a register, too pleased with herself. "Are you seeing anyone, Spider-Man?"
Behind the mask, Peter was fairly sure his soul briefly left his body. "I—that's—that's a very forward question for—"
"Just professional curiosity," Jean said, sweet as anything, close enough now that only he could hear the amusement underneath it and then, into his mind: you should see your own face right now. It's magnificent.
You are the worst person I have ever dated.
That's a lie.
"I cannot believe what I'm watching," Johnny said, to Steve, without lowering his voice much at all, unbothered by the several X-Men standing well within earshot who had no idea what any of this actually meant. "I am sending this in the group chat ASAP.”
"Leave the man alone, Storm," Steve said, not quite managing to sound like he meant it and then, lower, pitched just for the enhanced hearing he knew was listening under that mask: "Nicely handled, by the way. The cable, not—" a vague gesture at Jean "—whatever that was."
Peter, from inside the mask, made a sound that he would later describe to no one as a wheeze.
He excused himself—ma'am again, the second most difficult word he had said all night—and swung out a service window. Felicia was loitering on the fire escape when he came back, leaning against the railing like she had decided she might as well see how this played out.
He reappeared in the coat room two minutes later in a shirt that was, once again, the wrong shade of white, tie re-knotted crooked, hair damp, considerably later than the five minutes he'd promised.
Felicia, for the record, remained zip-tied to the fire escape by the time he got back. He almost didn't have the heart to leave her.
Almost.
Jean was waiting for him as he turned the corner, rather pleased with her antics.
"So late," she said, "You're building quite a tab, mister."
"In my defense, there was a huge art installation trying to redecorate the dance floor with several of your colleagues."
"Very impressive form, by the way. I told him so."
"You did not have to tell him so at that volume."
"I absolutely did."
Gary, who had spent the last ten minutes riding a high he would be describing to his editor for weeks, chose that exact moment to reappear at Peter's side, practically beaming.
"Parker! Parker, you missed it. Spider-Man was here, saved us and your girlfriend—" Gary lowered his voice to the volume of a man who believes he is being discreet and is not "—your girlfriend was flirting with him. Like, flirting flirting. Asked if he was seeing anyone."
"Did she," Peter said, in the wounded tone of a man rehearsing jealousy he did not feel.
"I have never seen anything like it," Gary confirmed, unaware of the irony. "Should I not have said anything? Are you two—"
"We're fine," Jean said, not looking remotely sorry, "aren't we, Peter?"
"I don't know, Jean, are we? Because it sounds like you've been seeing someone behind my back."
"He's very charming," Jean said, to Gary, who nodded along like this was extremely normal information to be receiving. "Good hands. Excellent upper body strength. I might have gotten his number, if he'd been wearing pockets."
"I cannot believe," Peter said, "that I am standing here being two-timed with myself."
It took Gary a solid second to catch that, turn it over and visibly fail to make it add up to anything—which was, the whole reason the bit worked at all: the joke only existed for an audience of two.
"...Wait," he said. "What?"
"Nothing," Jean and Peter said, in perfect unison and Gary, sensing correctly that he had wandered into the middle of something several levels above his security clearance, wandered back off towards the bar looking faintly haunted.
Once he was out of earshot, Peter let the last of the performance drop out of his voice.
He looked towards the gallery floor, where Spider-Man had just been the most interesting person in the room.
Then he looked down at his rental shirt.
"Hey," he said.
Jean's expression softened a fraction.
"Yeah?"
He hesitated. "Can I tell you something stupid?"
"Peter, you've spent the last ten minutes pretending to be a stranger to your own girlfriend. I think we're well past stupid."
"You know that's the version of me the whole room got tonight, right?" he said. "Spider-Man saved the necklace and the ceiling and snotty guests and he got a headline and a flirt from my own girlfriend and a round of applause from Captain America. Peter Parker got a rental shirt with a hole in it and a stern talking-to from Robbie about being late back to the press pit."
Jean's teasing dropped away all at once, fond and sudden and she reached up to fix his crooked tie with both hands, like there was nowhere else in the world she'd rather be.
"I flirted with Spider-Man tonight because it's funny and because I like watching you squirm," she said. "It is never a competition, Peter. There's no version of tonight where I liked him more. He's not a separate person. He's just you, with worse social skills and slightly more spandex."
"My social skills are fine."
"You called a room full of superheroes ma'am."
"Under duress!"
"I know exactly who you are," she said, both hands flat against his chest, right over the place where the suit smelled faintly like it had been through a service corridor. "Every version of you, sweet man o’ mine."
Something in his chest, tight since the moment Gary opened his mouth, finally came loose.
"For the record," he said, "You do have great taste, by the way. In the—spandex-adjacent sense."
"I have exquisite taste generally," Jean said. "It's why I'm still here."
He kissed her then—quick and certain, right there in front of Gary's camera and the last stragglers of the gala—and felt her smile against it before she kissed him back properly, both of them laughing into it a little, the whole ridiculous night catching up and turning their insides fluttery and warm.
Gary, God bless him, got the shot.
Later—after the auction wrapped, after Xavier gave a speech that made the venue go quiet for four consecutive minutes—Jean found him at the emptied press table, scrolling back through the day's shots.
"Show me," she said, dropping into the chair beside him, shoes off, feet tucked under her.
He scrolled. Dozens of frames—Xavier and Erik's careful, photogenic almost-truce of a handshake; Ororo mid-laugh, hair lit gold; Steve looking baffled by a canapé; Johnny's bug-eyed expression when the daughter of a senator spilled her cocktail on his shoes the moment his incessant flirting ceased.
And Jean, over and over.
His thumb stopped without quite meaning to. A frame from early on—just Jean on the gallery steps, caught half a second before the pose settled into place.
Her eyes weren't on the lens. They were on him, somewhere just past the camera's edge.
She was not smiling but there was a truth hidden in her expression, as if she'd had promised to an unseen spectre to love whatever she saw.
It was the kind of photograph that would never make a good Bugle cover.
Peter thought it was perfect.
"That one," Jean said quietly.
"It's not the best shot."
"I don't care."
"There's a better one right after."
"Peter." She tapped the screen, gentle. "That one. Same as always."
Same as always—and he understood, what she meant, because he had a memory card from two years ago in a drawer at home he'd never once been able to delete, full of photographs of her at a podium looking competent instead of dangerous.
The first time he'd chosen her.
She'd known, even then in a corner of her soul, that this was the picture of her he'd always end up keeping.
"Yes," he said, throat a little tight.
The Bugle ran the article the next morning, above the fold, full color: Jean Grey on the gallery steps, bold and in all her glory. Jameson, in a display of editorial restraint that surprised everybody who knew him, paired it with:
X-MEN CHARM CITY—TELEPATH'S SMILE COULD MELT ADAMANTIUM
Peter stared at it over his coffee with the cheer of a man recognizing his own photo credit in eight-point font beneath a headline that made the woman he loved, seem like a goddess (which she most definitely was).
His phone buzzed.
jean: did you see the headline
peter: I am currently pretending I did not
jean: "could melt adamantium." Can adamantium even melt?
peter: I told JJ that exact thing. he said "science doesn't sell papers, parker, cheekbones sell papers"
jean: you made me look so good honey
peter: you made yourself look good, I just pressed a button at the right time
jean: still. you took the picture.
jean: keeping the other one though. not this one.
peter: figured
jean: and Peter
jean: Felicia texted me. how does Felicia Hardy have my number
peter: I would also like to know this
jean: she says shes happy for us and that you owe her a new set of zip ties
peter: we are never speaking of this again
jean: we are absolutely speaking of this again, tonight
jean: also Gary asked me today during the wrap up if "things worked out" between me, you and Spider-Man
peter: what
jean: I told him it's complicated but we're making it work
peter: JEAN
jean: :) later sweetums ilyyyyyy
He folded the paper, finished the coffee and went to go find his girlfriend, who was—if he knew her at all and by now he did, better than any headline anyone had ever run about her—going to make him explain, in full and excruciating detail, exactly what had happened on that fire escape.
He had, at minimum, six hours to get his story straight.
It would not be enough time. It never was, with her.
He'd stopped minding that a long time ago.