Birds of a Feather
Now that Spider-Man is back, MJ hardly ever sees Peter anymore. Whenever there is any kind of breaking news he is out of the dorms so fast that MJ is lucky to even catch a glimpse of him – it gets the point where if she hears the door slam to his room, she knows that if she turns on Blake's television she will see coverage of some fire or robbery or other public disturbance.
Some hours later he will always return, streaked with grime and red-cheeked from the cold. Sometimes he is brooding and tired and she knows not to talk to him, but other times – the better times – she will wake up to a knock on the door and open it to Peter, who can't wait to show her the photos he's taken.
Of course, she worries whenever he goes. But that worry is worth seeing the quiet pride on his face when he comes back, and a sense of calm that he hasn't had in a long time.
"This is physically impossible, that you got this shot," MJ insists, shoving the Bugle under his nose on one of the last days in November. "Are you in Cirque du Soleil?"
"No, actually, but I did get a job as an exotic dancer and decided not to mention it for three months."
She whacks Peter in the shoulder. "Ahh. Now the image of you dancing on a pole is branded in my brain forever."
"You – you did what?"
"Kidding," she assures him. (She isn't). She takes the newspaper back and squints at the headline, trying to straighten her too-short hair by raking through it with her fingers, a habit she has picked up in the last week since it was cut.
Peter reaches an arm out and pushes his palm onto her forehead, intentionally messing it back up.
"Hey," she complains, but when she looks up he is smiling, and something cinches in her stomach, buoyant and unanticipated.
The door opens then, and jams on Peter's heel.
"Move it, move it," says Blake, pushing past him.
She is like a bull in a china shop, the way she comes and goes, always waking MJ up in the middle of the night or spreading her books around like a small tornado during the day. She has grown used to Peter well enough not to blink twice at the sight of him standing there.
"What's this?" asks Blake, yanking the paper out of MJ's hands.
MJ follows her gaze to Peter's picture of Spider-Man.
"Spider-Man and Black Cat: the New Bonnie and Clyde," Blake reads.
MJ thought it would be a difficult topic to broach with Peter, all things considered. She didn't imagine he would be running out to take pictures of Spider-Man, let alone showing them to her and selling them to that douche-nozzle at the paper. But Peter seems … okay. Not good, necessarily. But okay.
She doesn't want to wreck that by bringing up the question that is screaming on the tip of her tongue: How can he not be furious with Spider-Man after what happened to Gwen?
"He was actually stopping her from robbing that bank," says Peter.
"How would you know?" asks Blake, tossing her messenger bag onto her bed.
"The Bugle prints bull," says MJ. She points at the photo credit. At the infinitesimally small print where Jameson has allowed Peter's name. "And Peter was actually there."
Blake's eyes are like moons. "No shit."
Peter looks over at MJ a little sheepishly. Blake does not seem to notice the exchange.
"Tell me they're hooking up," Blake says, perilously close to Peter's face.
Peter takes a stumbling step back. "Wait, what?"
"Spider-Man and the Black Cat!" Blake exclaims impatiently, her cheeks flaring up. "They're totally a thing, right? I mean, look at them, they're always together, they both have freakish super powers – "
"They're not," says Peter bluntly. "The Black Cat is a criminal, and – "
"The sexy kind. She only steals money. And beats up bad people."
MJ already knows there isn't any point in trying to slow down one of Blake's tirades, so she turns her attention back to her desk, where there is an unfortunate pile of reading that she needs to get done for her acting class. She thumbs through A Doll's House and Of Mice and Men – she's read them both before, so the papers on them shouldn't be too hard to write …
Except that she's distracted. Almost all of the time. Staring down at her hands, flexing her muscles, testing herself.
Nothing unusual has happened to her since the attack a few weeks ago. They've been calling the guy in the metal suit the "Rhino," and although MJ was less than conscious for the extent of the battle, she has heard enough about it to guess that he won't be a threat again any time soon. And now that Spider-Man is back, there really hasn't been any crime. MJ isn't stupid enough to go running around on the streets for fun at two in the morning, but it's hard to deny that the city is a much safer place with Spider-Man than it is without him.
And there's too much else to deal with – finals, for instance, which seem kind of insignificant next to the decidedly more pressing problem of finding a source of income.
She isn't panicking, though. She already hit rock bottom over the summer and clawed her way out of it, didn't she? This is just one more obstacle. One more challenge. She opens up the playbooks, determined to knock her finals out of the park, and decides that even if her super strength turns out to be a fluke, her resolve won't be. She will be strong for herself, and make it through the next few weeks.
"Mark my words," says Blake, so smug that MJ is roused out of her thoughts. "There will be a picture of Spider-Man and the Black Cat making out by Christmas."
"Well, I won't be the one taking it," Peter mutters.
He offers MJ a small salute in farewell, and is out of the room before MJ can interpret his tone. The door clicks shut behind him. Blake turns to her with the subtlety of a gunshot and asks, "Speaking of, when are the two of you going to quit dancing in circles and just screw already?"
A few days the answer to MJ's prayers comes in the form of a starchy green dress, striped tights, a clip-on hat and a pair of booties with jingle bells on the top of the feet.
Blake spares no feelings in her commentary: "If you were looking for something more effective than birth control, congratulations. You did it."
MJ scowls, which only serves to make the ensemble look even more ridiculous. Being part of the small army of Christmas elves at Macy's wasn't exactly how she envisioned using her theater education, but twelve dollars an hour was hard to say no to when nothing better was in the works.
She straightens out her puffy sleeves and reaches for the container of glitter dust.
"Don't," Blake begs. "Have some self-respect, MJ."
MJ turns to her. "It's Sprinkles now," she says darkly, dabbing the glitter on her cheeks. "Sprinkles the Elf."
Blake throws a pillow at her. "I can't condone this."
Santaland isn't really that bad. It's eight hours on her feet, which is enough to make anyone punch drunk, but she can pretty much say whatever wacky, jolly things she wants – within reason. Some of the other elves are maybe a little too enthusiastic, but a lot of them are just people around her age who are chill and normal, minus the fact that for a significant portion of their day are also cleaning children's vomit and flailing their limbs to the beat of the same twenty Christmas songs playing on a loop over and over and over and over.
"You're almost there!" MJ chirps about eight hundred times a day, reassuring stressed out parents and cranky, tired children with a blatant lie. The truth is they're at least an hour out, and that's if Santa doesn't take his union-enforced fifteen minute break.
MJ does a sweep of the lobby. Across the hall one of the other elves tugs on her ear – that means drunk teenagers are coming through. The silent code the elves have arranged is really half the fun. Nose rub means crying kid, neck itch is angry parent, so on and so forth. The elves out on the front lines are always the ones signaling for the sake of their fellow elves further in the abyss – yesterday MJ was a greeter, but today, for better or for worse, she is stuck smack in the middle of the line.
The tip about the drunks is more than enough motivation for MJ to decide to take her break.
The truth is, MJ loves Christmas. She loves the kids jacked up on sugar and the cheery Christmas carols and cheap decorations, the touchy-feely commercials on TV and the sprawling, decadent window displays on Fifth Avenue. She loves candy canes and dressing up and watching half-baked holiday romances on the Hallmark channel.
She shuts the door to the locker room behind her and is, as usual, astounded by the quiet in comparison to the outside world. She peels the elf boots off and sits on a bench.
The actual day of Christmas is the only part of Christmas MJ can't stand. It's not that she was ever disappointed. Her dad was a drunk. She always knew what she was getting – or not getting, more like.
It's that there is some deep recess in her mind that remembers having a mother who baked cookies and cocoa and wore a frilly red apron, who helped her prop up treats and leave a note for Santa. She remembers having a mother who cherished old Christmas records and danced in the living room. She remembers waking up in the morning so excited that she couldn't believe she'd ever fallen asleep in the first place.
MJ tries not to think of her, because it doesn't do any good. Over the years she thought that maybe age would bring some sort of wisdom, some cosmic understanding, and that she would be able to forgive her mother, or at the very least understand – but she doesn't. She can't.
Life has sometimes been terrible. Life has been brutal, and heartbreaking, and hard, but above all it has been beautiful. MJ couldn't imagine gambling it for a different one, not when there was so much left to do and see and try.
And it wasn't just her own life she lost – now her mother would never see her grow up. When her mother left, she ended so many things that had just barely begun.
MJ is dozing on one of the benches, nursing the old sadness, when she hears the first crash.
The impact is enough to knock her flat off of the bench, onto her thankfully well-padded costume. Before she can even attempt to clamber up to her feet there is another crash, so intense that it rattles through the floor to her propped up elbows, her heels, her jaw.
And then she hears the screams.
"Shit."
Her first instinct is to run out the back door of the locker room. It will lead into a long and winding hallway, which will lead clear out to the street a block away from here.
But she knows the drill by now – the thousands of tourists flooding into the city do not. One glance at the back door and she knows, almost as if it is settled in the marrow of her bones, that she can't just leave.
Without another beat of hesitation she sprints toward the door that leads back to Santaland, surprised that she is able to keep her balance when the next few crashes shake the building's core, surprised by how fast she is.
It's happening again.
She doesn't have time to be scared of the inexplicable, pulsing confidence that surges through her like a command. She slams open the door with her shoulder so hard that it comes off its hinges.
For a split second she is stunned, wondering how she made it out into the street. And then she realizes it only looks that way because there is nothing where the front wall used to be, only rubble and the bright, glaring sun.
Something metal glints in her periphery. It could be the Rhino again, or something else entirely. She doesn't waste her time finding out.
"Through here!" she screams, grabbing the nearest kid she can find. "Through here, there's a door that leads to another exit, go!"
In their panic people are only half-paying attention to her. She pushes her way through the crowd, wrenching little arms, pushing white-faced parents as the world starts collapsing around them. "Move!" she shrieks, pointing toward the other exit now, because with all the noise her voice doesn't have a prayer of carrying over.
Suddenly a shadow is plummeting, obscuring her sightline – she reaches her arms up just in time and catches a beam just before it collapses on the crowd.
Her entire body is trembling, her vision spotting at the edges. For a moment it feels as if all the chaos has stilled. She glances around, the beam still clutched in her hands, splintering her fingers, and sees that at least a dozen people have stopped to stare at her.
"Get out of here!" she yells, casting the beam aside.
Another part of the wall crumbles and MJ finally sees the source of it – a man, an almost completely ordinary looking man, with enormous, jagged metal legs protruding from his back, using them to crawl and leap and destroy everything in his path with terrifying agility.
She watches in horror as the impact of one of the protruding legs alone knocks out the enormous Christmas tree in the center of the lobby. There are at least twenty people directly underneath it, and more that are running right toward it, not even noticing in their panic that it's about to topple on them.
If she had taken a moment to gage the impossible distance between her and the tree then she probably wouldn't have even tried. It feels as if the muscles in her legs are splitting with the effort, ripping away from the bone as she launches herself, arms extended, her ears swollen with the gasps and the screams of Santaland shoppers as they finally see the tree plummeting towards them.
She crushes her eyes shut as she leaps and catches it before it falls completely. Immediately she feels the same weakness, the same shock to her body from before, and she struggles to take in air, to open her eyes and find a safe place to deposit the tree while everybody gets out of the way.
Her vision is immediately obscured by the color red.
"I've got this," she hears him say firmly. Spider-Man. He is maybe two inches from her face. "Get out of here, okay? I've got this."
It's too heavy for her to keep lifting, and she doesn't want to take up any more of his time in the middle of this disaster, so she doesn't question him. He grabs the tree trunk out from under her and she stumbles away from it, with no intention or direction, sliding to her knees only a few paces away.
There is a throbbing in her head and a faintness in her heart, like it is beating up out of her throat. She has to get up. She can almost feel the pulsing messages from her brain to her limbs trying to compel her to go, but she cannot move, as if the effort of the last few minutes has drained the will right out of her body.
If she passes out again, Bradley won't be here to hover over her, to tell her what happened after. If she passes out here, she will die.
She breathes in and breathes out and tries again, and miraculously manages to stumble to her feet when somebody yanks her arm.
"Ah," MJ exclaims, but the vice grip doesn't let up.
The voice in her ear is clipped and impatient. "It's going to hurt a lot more if you don't get out of here."
MJ looks up in astonishment. "F-Felicia?"
"Yes, Felicia," she snaps, "Felicia, assistant to Harry Osborn, a respectable job title that up until right now did not involve babysitting you."
"Wait—what?"
"I mean honestly, could you be less subtle about the crazy super strength? Were you just too poor to afford a billboard?"
MJ huffs defensively, feeling her cheeks burn. "Somebody had to help them."
"Somebody who knows what they're doing," says Felicia, less than a beat later kicking her foot up to stall a piece of splintering debris that was headed straight for them. "Somebody like that doofus in the unitard up there."
MJ strains her neck around to try and get a look at the battle that is crashing around them. The man's mechanical arms are silent and so fast-moving that MJ can barely keep track of one, let alone all four of them; Spider-Man is up on the ceiling, or what is left of it.
Felicia pulls her forward intolerantly. "Enough with the rubbernecking."
"He's trying to kill Spider-Man," MJ realizes. Even in five seconds of watching she can tell that the other man is aiming fatally – there is no mercy in him, no hesitation, no regard for anybody who happens to be in the way. His entire focus is on the masked man who is just barely dodging his blows.
"Spidey can handle himself just fine," says Felicia, with an irony in her voice that doesn't escape MJ's notice.
But it isn't Spider-Man MJ is worried about. She glances around the now empty street, sure that she will see some tell tale flutter of movement, a sloppily tied Converse on the pavement, the snap of a camera shutter. She knows Peter's photography is important to him, but would he be stupid enough to risk his life for it?
"Get in," says Felicia.
Only then does MJ notice the black town car, identical to the one that picked her up when Felicia first hunted her down all those months ago.
"Now."
MJ is too exhausted to protest, slinking in through the open door. Felicia moves to shut the door behind her.
"You're not coming?" she asks, still breathless.
Felicia's lips tighten critically. "No," she says, her eyes flitting back toward the scene unfolding behind her.
MJ shakes her head. "I'm not leaving unless you – "
"You're not in any position to be bargaining with me," says Felicia, halting MJ with a firm arm. "You are in way over your head. Now listen to me – the car will take you back to the dorm, and you will stay there until you hear from me. Alright?"
Felicia's eyes are so fierce, her brows so unyielding, that MJ can only manage to nod. The understanding starts to seep in, tingling and reluctant on her skin. If Felicia knew to be here, if Harry really sent her here for MJ's sake – then whatever is happening to MJ goes well beyond just her.
"And if you're going to do the whole costumed hero bit – for the love of god," she says, dragging her eyes up and down MJ's elf attire. "Do better than this."
By the time she gets back to the dorm she has called Peter three times and he hasn't picked up. She doesn't even bother knocking on his door, just barges right in, which is how she finds her roommate topless with Peter's roommate and making out on the rug.
"Hey!" Derek yells, as Blake scrambles to cover her chest, falling off of him.
"Sorry, sorry," MJ squawks, slamming the door behind her.
She considers looking for Peter, but where would she go? Where could she even start? He's either at the scene or he isn't, and in this state, barely able to keep herself upright, there isn't anything she can do about it …
MJ wakes up with a gasp that threatens to tear a hole in her lungs. When did she fall asleep? Her body is so heavy it feels as if she is made of stone, her limbs moving so slowly that they might as well be underwater.
She can't remember anything after getting into the room. She must have passed out. Her head is throbbing again, her throat as dry as sandpaper.
The phone is ringing. Clumsily, she gropes her arm forward and clicks it on, pressing it to her ear.
"Peter?"
There's a pause. "No, Mary Jane. It's Harry."
She is very still for a moment, sliding her eyes shut in embarrassment. She has been avoiding his calls for weeks.
"Don't hang up."
"I won't," she says. "You obviously know something that I don't."
"Why are you angry with me?"
He is so sincere, so pained. The image of him the night that they were together comes unbidden in her mind – his red-rimmed, tired eyes, the way she was draped on him, the dim light catching long shadows on his face. How he thumbed away her tears and listened so patiently, how he spilled out his secrets and let her absorb them into her own.
She promised Harry she wouldn't pick sides, and it is clear now that she did.
"I'm sorry," she says, because there is no way she can explain to him when she doesn't even understand the choice herself.
"I'm downstairs."
"In the lobby?"
"No, in a car. And Mary Jane – whatever is going on between us, or with Peter – this is more important."
She asks him so quietly that she wonders if he can even hear: "Do you know what's happening to me?"
When his answer comes, she doesn't know whether to be terrified or relieved. "Yes."
Before she leaves she tries calling Peter again, and this time it goes straight to voicemail. She knocks on his door one more time – no answer.
Her stomach lurches. It is not unlike Peter to disappear like this, of course, but this time it is different. This time she saw what happened, how easily he could have been crushed or trampled or fallen off of whatever death-defying perch he chose to get a good angle on the fight.
She slams her fist down on the door one more time, this time out of sheer frustration. "Dammit, Pete."
Standing at the doorway that leads to the stairs, she pauses for a moment, the indecision excruciating. She is sick at the idea of something happening to Peter, and sicker at the idea of betraying him like this, especially when she doesn't even know if he's alright.
But then her hands ball into uncertain fists, feeling the surge of power that doesn't belong to her, thrumming just under the surface.
She has to know. Even if it means using Harry to find out.
By the time she hits the street she feels significantly less woozy, all of her senses slowly waking up, the spring back in her step. She spots Harry's car at once, idling on the corner. She starts making her way toward it.
"Hey!"
She turns to the sound of Peter's voice with almost embarrassing eagnerness. He is halfway down the block, in the opposite direction of Harry's car, but she doesn't hesitate – in the mad dash toward him she accounts for all of his limbs, for his posture, for the steady and even way that he walks. He's okay. He's okay.
"MJ – oof!"
She throws her arms around him. She is so short that she barely manages to wrap herself around his shoulders. "You're such a dick," she says into the flannel of his shirt.
"Excuse me?"
"You heard me."
"MJ, I …"
It occurs to her that Harry is watching this. She takes a self-conscious step back, lets the warmth of Peter fall out of her arms, and after a moment he releases her too. He thoughtlessly brushes a short strand of hair out of her face and she sees that he is staring at her with a strange concentration, as if he doesn't recognize her.
"Are you okay?" he asks, but the question seems loaded, as if he really is trying to ask her something else.
"Of course I'm okay. It's you I was worried about," she says, and her voice is actually shaking. "You're just so – reckless and stupid with that camera, I thought maybe something had happened to you, and then you don't answer any of my calls –"
"The network's been down all day, after everyone started calling out. I saw your missed calls at least or I would have been worried. Are you sure you're alright?" he presses, looking her over. "You're the one who actually works there."
She grimaces. She explicitly did not tell Peter about that gig.
"Blake told me," Peter says, staring briefly at the concrete.
"Oh." She shifts her weight between her feet. "Yeah, yeah, I'm fine." She raises an eyebrow at him, and smiles despite herself, happy just to see him. "Better now. Where the hell have you been?"
"I had to get the pictures to Jameson," he says, "but listen, MJ. I have to – I need to talk to you."
In the corner of her eye she can see the glint of Harry's tinted windows. "I don't know what time I'll be back," she says.
"It's important," says Peter. "Where are you going?"
In the breath before she tries to come up with something, she sees the slightest disappointment heavy in his eyelids: he already knows she is going to lie to him. She has to tear her eyes away from him, ashamed, knowing if he presses her that she'll have to do it anyway.
"Can we talk in the morning?" she asks.
It takes him a moment to answer. "Okay," he says.
She is about to lift her head up to look at him, and is surprised by the warmth of his hands on her cheeks, tips of his fingers combing through her hair. He cups her face, bracing her head between his hands, and she tilts her head to look up at him. She doubts that there has ever been a moment with him that was this direct, this demanding, this intimate. The street suddenly feels like a vacuum; when he finally speaks, she is surprised that the world is still capable of sound.
"You can trust me," he says.
If her guilt were a knife sunk into her side, then he has just twisted it.
"You know that, right?" he breathes. "You can tell me anything."
When he drops his hands she can still feel them there. She wants to touch the skin of her face, now expectant and thrumming, as if there is a piece of her missing without his hands there.
"I know."
But she won't. She knows this already, staring up at Peter – sweet, innocent Peter, who has already endured so much, the kind of loss that can never be measured. Her world is going to change when she opens that car door, and she knows it won't be for the better. She feels it like an inevitability, like someone has sentenced her to it.
Everything is about to get complicated. Messy. Dangerous. And she will do anything she can to prevent Peter from getting dragged into it.
She walks toward the car and suddenly the dorms and her homework and her classes all seem impossibly small. It feels like every step she takes toward the curb is a step away from that life, from the place she has spent carving for herself in the last few months.
Before she reaches the car she turns around, suddenly desperate for one last look at Peter before she goes, but he is already gone.
Thank you thank you for your patience with me ... it has been the most bonkers few weeks. I have been interning full time and running around like a crazy person and going on adventures by myself. The weather has been insanely beautiful so I've walked ten miles every day this week taking random turns in the city for the hell of it. Today I found cupcakes. Who knows what tomorrow will bring.
Solidarity to all the other humans who are yet again missing Comic-Con. Someday, my friends. Someday.