"Have you ever kissed anybody before?"

"What?"

She can practically hear Peter turn beet-red.

"Kissing? You know. Spit-swapping. Seven minutes in heaven. We're in a closet." Actually, it's an industrial freezer, mercifully, not turned on—yet. The kidnappers want them alive, apparently.

"Uh."

MJ has this huge problem, see? When she thinks she's about to die, she takes…risks. Very slowly, as if that makes it more sensible, she says, "Listen, Parker. Things are going sideways pretty soon. I'd like to get a kiss out of it. You game?"

Because kidnapping or no, MJ is all about consent.

Peter leans in.

Ned is a blanket-burrito on the sofa and the credits of The Last Jedi are rolling and MJ is all hot-and-bothered about John Boyega again. And Adam Driver.

Ah, the duality of womanhood and teenage hormones.

She rolls her hand experimentally, imagines what it would be like to hold a lightsaber.

"MJ?"

She turns. Peter's face is suddenly…closer…than she remembers. The warmth of Aunt May's cat-shaped lamp glows gold around them.

MJ tilts her chin forward, not thinking about what this means. Peter freezes, lashes flicking up-down, up-down—

His lips part against hers, soft, and then not soft at all.

They end up at the same college. Luck, right?

Only—Peter isn't the same since the world almost ended. Sure, MJ can see his future in particle physics, she just wishes she could see him, Peter, more clearly.

It's a Thursday night party. She didn't think he went to those. He's definitely not drinking. Peter Parker, always ready to be somewhere else.

She walks up to him, steady because she's always steady. One hand on the back of his neck. He's not stopping her. She nods a little, he nods and it's over like that.

He still tastes the same.

She's just a big old softie with no sense of adventure after all, because she's kissing Spiderman upside down in the rain, and all she can think of is Peter-Dumbass-Parker. What right has Peter to her guilt?

All the same she pulls away, still wanting more, still shaken to the asphalt under her feet by the tenderness of the thing, and she says, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. There's this guy..."

And Spiderman, a freaking caped hero (ok, without the cape), squeaks, "What do you mean there's a guy?" and yeah, he actually squeaks it and—

"Are you shitting me, Parker?"

Her family crumbled to ash and left her alone, blinded by the blare of the television, by the way that sound turned to lightning.

The whole of the city falls inwards. MJ wanders streets that aren't paved with blood, only with the wreckage of death, invisible. She doesn't know what any of it means, if it ends, or if it already ended.

She doesn't know where he is, either.

(Afterwards, when they've all come back again, the boy she loves will crash into her arms, saying her name like a prayer, and she will kiss him, and taste no ash.)