Twisting the Hellmouth Fic-for-All
Title: Smile
Pairing: Forrest Gates & Mary Jane Watson (Spider-Man)
Words: 250
Disclaimer: I don't own Forrest or Mary Jane. Joss Whedon and Marvel Comics hold those honors.
Author's note: I'm pretending the age difference between Forrest & Mary Jane will work for this little ficlet. I figure that Mary Jane is practically immortal, since she's been written about for decades now. Right?
When Forrest was a kid, he traveled with his parents to New York City. He remembers looking up, up, up at all the buildings. At the time, he thought that his dad's joke about "Forrest in a forest of concrete" quite clever, though when he got older he decided it was a lame play on his name.
They saw the Statue of Liberty, read the names written at Battery Park, saw the city from the Empire State Building, and went to the wonderland of FAO Schwartz.
What Forrest remembers best from that trip, though, isn't tourist traps. Forrest remembers a nothing little diner and his mother's enthusiasm for 'local cuisine.' He remembers a beautiful redheaded waitress, Mary Jane, and that she smiled at him.
Forrest is sure that he remembers this woman from his childhood so well because her smile was genuine. He'd been at an age when he'd realized that adults patronized kids (not that he called it that at the time; he only knew that he didn't like the way grownups often talked to him). Her honest interaction with him had been the highlight of the trip.
Fifteen years later, when he's under cover of darkness hunting HSTs in Sunnydale, he finds his mind wandering back to that friendly waitress. Is she still working at that diner? Did she have a good life? Does she know that monsters wait in the dark?
He does this job, he knows, so that people like her never have to find out.
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