Birds of a Feather
The window to Peter's bedroom is already open when they swing through it, landing gracelessly, rolling on the carpet and tangled in each other's limbs. The impact of their bodies on the floor creates a thud loud enough to wake the entire apartment building and she sees Peter reflexively about to ask if she's okay, but she's already laughing, and then so is he, and then –
And then neither of them is laughing, his lips on hers, stealing her breath.
His back is pressed to the floor, the warm weight of him on below of her, his hands roaming her shoulders, the lengths of her arms. His touch is light and reverent – she presses her own fingers into the ripple of muscle on his shoulders, drawing him closer, deepening the kiss.
They are so consumed that neither of them intentionally rolls to the side, but at once they are facing each other, still laying on the floor. They break the kiss for just a moment, and she meets his eyes, warm and gleaming in the dark.
"So," he says playfully, "I have to ask – Why 'Red'?"
She presses her lips against his and feels the hitch in his breath. "I don't know," she answers, so close that their noses are still grazing. "It seemed a hell of a lot more subtle than Spider-Man."
He grins and takes hold of her hips, pivoting her yet again – she can't help the gasp that escapes her at how easily he moves her, at the sensation of suddenly being below him. She curls one of her legs around his hips and feels his entire body shudder in response. The next kiss is long and slow and deep, her fingers trailing down the length of his torso, his hands still firmly planted on her waist.
When his lips graze her neck her skin feels electric, as if he is pulsing a current through her entire body. She rolls her head back, feeling the faint scrape of his unshaven face as he exposes the shoulder of her uniform and travels into the crook of her collarbone.
"Peter," she breathes.
She doesn't know how it is escalating this quickly, but it is suddenly terminal, something that cannot be stopped. She has no idea where his suit ends and begins, but she reaches for the seam, surprised by how easily the top of it peels off of him. She stares at his exposed torso – there is no surprise in it. She has seen him before, has watched him more exposed than this after getting out of the shower, but this – this is different. This, right now, is hers.
She presses a palm to his chest, pausing for just a moment, feeling the way his heart slams into her bare hand.
"Sorry about that time I headbutted you," she says.
She can see the bare edges of Peter's smirk in the dark. "Sorry for sic'ing the NYPD on you."
She slides her hand further down, pressing into the muscle, practically able to feel the blood coursing under his skin.
"Consider it costumed hero hazing," says Peter, and there is something breathy and thin about his voice, something that makes her smile. There have been plenty of moments in her life when she has affected men, but there is something so much more rewarding, so much more meaningful, in the hungry way his eyes trail hers, in the sync of their movement, in the way their bodies fit together.
"Sorry that I socked you in the arm."
He kisses her deeply, intensely, breathing the words out of her. He parts and stays so close to her that their noses touch, his eyes set on hers.
"Sorry that I made fun of your wig."
She balks. "Excuse me?"
"You might have been unconscious for that," says Peter sheepishly.
She wraps her arms around him and yanks him so that they are both half on their feet, both stumbling blindly into the clutter of his bedroom. The back of her thighs find the edge of the mattress and she lets her body fall into it, pulling him down with her. She notices how he doesn't fall completely, how he braces his palms against the sheets, with a caution in the tension of his arms.
"Hey," she says, skimming her hands on his shoulders. "You don't have to …" She feels her face heating up, because there is no way to say it without giving it some other less innocent meaning.
He is waiting for her, his face cast in shades of blue and yellow, the familiar planes of him in an unfamiliar light.
"I'm not fragile," she reminds him.
A breathy kind of laugh escapes him. "MJ …"
She is grateful for the dark, grateful that he cannot see the blush creeping up her neck, rushing through her cheeks. "No, Peter, I mean that – " She grabs him by the shoulders again, moving his entire body with ease. In the next moment he is pinned to the mattress and looking slightly stunned as she crouches over him. "I'm not fragile."
Only then does it seem to register, and only then does she appreciate the real strength of him, the scale of everything he has been holding back. She arches up to meet him, kissing him fiercely, and is astonished by how matched they are. They nearly topple off the mattress and instinctively she shoots off a web that latches onto the headboard; she feels his appreciative smirk in the dark, but it does nothing to slow them, the two forces of nature that they have become in the dark.
There is still some present, lingering part of her that knows that things are far from settled. That this moment is both the answer to a longstanding question and the birth of so many more. That when they come down from this high, from the rush and the heat of skin on skin and the sound of their own breathing in the dark, she is going to have to tell him everything.
But not now. He presses her body into his hungrily, impatiently, and she responds in kind – and the rest of her thoughts are silenced, overwhelmed by want, by need she didn't know she was capable of feeling.
He pulls back for just a moment, pushing his fingers through the tangle of her hair, his chest rising and falling against hers.
She almost tells him right then. The words are on the base of her throat, and the tip of her tongue, but then his lips are on hers again and the moment is gone. I love you. She wonders if he can feel it in the pressure of her hands on his skin, in the thrum of her blood, in the rhythm of her hips. I love you. And it still might not be enough.
It is tempting to fall asleep beside him, to sink into this moment, the two of them laying tangled in his sheets, sharing the heat of their skin. Every part of her feels like it is humming, breathing some new life, serving some new purpose. This is more than she has ever hoped for. It is more than she deserves.
She has to tell Peter. She knows that. But she will hold onto these precious moments for as long as her selfishness will allow.
Peter's shoulders tense under her, and she knows their time is up. That he doesn't want to be the first one to say something.
"I know, I know, we've got to meet Felicia," she says.
Peter raises his head up out from under her arm. "Meet who?"
MJ feels the surge of guilt warm her cheeks.
"Oh my God, no way," Peter realizes.
"I shouldn't have …"
"Felicia is the – "
MJ widens her eyes in warning, because she does genuinely feel bad for the slip. It was careless. She really just assumed, given the shock of the last few hours and the connection that the two of them already had in the real world, that he already knew.
"Shit," says Peter. He brushes her hair out of her face and she moves her body off of his, letting him reach for his suit. "She tried to flunk me in that class, did you know? Poor attendance."
"Don't tell her I told you," MJ says, still wincing.
"I won't." Peter laughs. "But jeez, the world is kind of small, don't you think?"
"Hmm," MJ agrees, reaching for the pieces of her own suit, which are strewn in various places on the bed and on the carpet.
Usually in the aftermath of something like this she feels self-conscious, overly aware of herself, but oddly right now she does not. She doesn't mind what Peter sees, doesn't mind what he thinks of her, or rather – she isn't afraid of it.
But there is a definite shift as they both don their respective spandex, as she rights her wig and he pulls his arm through his shirt. The room sobers as they slowly become the people that they are beyond themselves; she wonders if their feelings for each other will extend into this alternate place, if there is a Red and Spider-Man the way that there now seems to be a Peter and MJ, and he answers in the gentle way he picks her mask up from the bed and clasps it back onto her face, letting his knuckles linger in the soft hollow of her cheek.
"I'm glad we're on the same team again," he says.
Just before he dons his own mask, she leans forward and presses her lips to his, bare and quick. "Me too."
Once they're both ready, he opens the window and surveys the alley, making sure nobody will see. Then he turns to MJ, cocking his head so that she can sense his smirk even through the mask.
"Think you can keep up, kid?"
She grins back at him. When her abilities are gone, this might be the only thing she'll really miss.
She slings out a web while he's waiting for her to answer, catapulting herself across the street before he can react. She hears him whoop almost gleefully as he follows after her, and as they soar in tandem she feels something light and giddy lifting up in her chest, an unmatchable and invincible kind of feeling.
She has no idea where they're going, so eventually she lets him lead. They weave up and out of Midtown, dipping in and out of the sky, two oscillating shadows in the dark. From here she can admire his form, even take note of it to help her own: the way his shoulders rotate, the way he anticipates every movement, the way he streamlines his body. She tries to imitate him, feeling the difference almost at once.
After awhile, when they're closer to the meatpacking district, Peter slows and looks back at her. She can tell in that gesture alone that he's been holding back the whole time to make sure she stays with him. She wonders, in a world where her body was made to sustain these abilities, if over the next few years she would be every bit as skilled as Peter.
He lands gracefully on a rooftop where Felicia is already waiting for them, her arms crossed in impatience. MJ lands half a second later and she doesn't miss the surprised lift of Felicia's brow.
"My, oh my," says Felicia. "Am I supposed to believe it's a coincidence that you two mutants just showed up together?"
Felicia waits for a moment for either of them to contradict her. MJ glances carefully over at Peter, assuming he will say something to deny it, when instead he shrugs in the most awkward way possible and makes it about as glaringly obvious as a neon sign on their foreheads.
Felicia snorts. "Well, that turned around pretty fast," she comments. "And here I thought you were burning a torch for that nerd from last year."
She leans down to pick something up before she can notice the chagrinned exchange between Peter and MJ. It's a laptop, which strikes MJ as a bizarre thing to bring up to a roof. Felicia snaps it open and keys in a few words before turning the screen, more to Peter than to her.
"I told you I had a guy on the inside," says Felicia. "Today he got us this."
MJ recognizes the footage faster than Peter does, for obvious reasons. She spent months and months in the bowels of the training center, long enough to know even the parts of it she barely ever visited on sight. The screen is divided up in at least twenty different moving images. The security cameras. And it's streaming to them live.
In the corner of one of them she sees Harry sitting on a black leather chair in the room that served as a makeshift medical center. He is slouched, his chest visibly rising and falling with difficulty, his face tilted away from the camera's lens. The sight of him sends a shiver up her spine.
"Now we can stay a step ahead of him," says MJ.
Peter has already stepped away from the laptop. "Who is this 'guy' you have on the inside?" he says. "How do you know you can trust him?"
Felicia is nonplussed. "How did you know you could trust me?"
"To be honest, sometimes I don't."
MJ winces, but Felicia laughs. There is that same ease to it that MJ could never quite master herself, a nonchalance that must come with years of doing what Felicia does. It has always stricken MJ, how unpredictable Felicia can be, snappish and furious over some things and completely unaffected by others.
"Good," says Felicia, "you shouldn't." She clicks on one of the camera streams, widening it to full screen. Not the one where Harry sits, but another one, of a room MJ doesn't think she has seen before. "But this guy is safe."
"Then why can't you tell us who he is?"
Felicia's lips twist. "He asked for anonymity. I may be a lot of things, but I never go back on my word." It is clear even in the smallest flicker of her eyes returning to the computer screen that the conversation is over.
Peter settles into an uneasy silence, and the three of them stand there for a moment, watching the footage. Harry doesn't move from his chair. MJ wonders how much longer he will be alive for, and immediately feels guilty for it. She doesn't want Harry to die. She just wants the Goblin gone.
"So basically one of us will have to be watching this at all times," says MJ.
"No." Felicia shuts the laptop squarely. "My guy is on it." As Peter opens his mouth to protest, she adds, "You'll still have unrestricted access to it as well."
Felicia slides the thin laptop into a bag strapped tightly to her shoulders. MJ glances over at Peter, struck again by the bizarreness of their situation. It was one thing to be standing on these rooftops addressing a mouthy masked vigilante she didn't know, but standing here with Peter is quite another. Every word that comes out of her mouth somehow feels heavier, more pronounced, more open for judgment. She didn't care what Spider-Man thought of her half as much as she cared about Peter.
Peter is watching Felicia with a clear caution in his stance, but doesn't say anything more. Sensing his hesitation, though, MJ starts to feel her own. It occurs to her that Felicia has no real stake in this fight. Sure, she used to work for Harry, and undoubtedly she will have to lay low to avoid his attempts at getting back at her – but that's easy for Felicia. She is practically a shadow. If Harry is going to unleash carnage, she is the last person he'll be able to reach.
She remembers, suddenly, how Felicia tried to stop her after the face-off with Mysterio. He wouldn't have been able to do it, if it weren't for me.
"What happened to Harry – it's irreversible, isn't it?"
She is met with a grim silence from them both. From Felicia it is unsurprising. From Peter it is chilling.
"You know something," she presses Felicia.
Felicia raises her head to face MJ, her eyes steely through her mask. "I led him to the extracted spider venom that did this," she admits, with a bluntness that MJ isn't expecting. "He was dying. And I – " She shakes her head curtly, dismissing whatever thought is about to leave her tongue. "I had no idea he would turn into this."
MJ has stepped so close to Felicia that she can't even see Peter in her peripheral anymore, but she can sense the tension, can feel the roots of his unspoken guilt. There are key elements that are clicking into place, making the picture more alarmingly clear: Harry wanted Spider-Man's blood. And when Peter wouldn't give it to him, he turned to Felicia.
They're blaming themselves, MJ realizes. All this time she has been so wrapped up in her own guilt for helping Harry that she didn't consider theirs.
"At least – none of the previous research indicated that he would."
MJ nods slowly, feeling her chin sink into her chest, her head suddenly heavy understanding. "Me," she says. "I was the previous research, wasn't I?"
"I didn't know that at the time. Your name has been redacted from all of the files. But yes," she confirms.
Felicia's fingers skim the insides of her palms and her eyes dart to the skyline with an uncertainty that MJ has not seen in her often. There is something more to this than Felicia is willing to say, and it doesn't take much for MJ to guess, since it's a weakness she recognizes all too well: Felicia must have cared about Harry once. Maybe she still does. Why else would she be willing to risk so much for him?
"I didn't think it could save him. I just thought it would buy him some time – "
"It doesn't matter," says Peter roughly, breaking his silence. "Not anymore." He shrugs one of his shoulders, his gaze not really directed at either of them, and mutters, "We all made mistakes."
Felicia recovers quickly. "Fortunately, so did Osborn. Now that we're tracking their movements we can be ready for anything his goons plan to throw at us."
"How many – goons does Harry have?" MJ asks.
"Four," says Felicia as-a-matter-of-factly. "You've seen Mysterio, Doctor Octavius, and the Rhino. Kraven's probably next up to bat, and we're going to have to prepare." She must sense some trepidation from MJ because she flips her hair back over her shoulder and says, "It could be worse. It would have been six, until Spidey offed the human toaster."
"Electro?"
"I'll get her up to speed," says Peter in a clipped voice. "Just send me the access link to the footage."
Felicia scowls. "What crawled up your web?"
Peter deflects her question with his own: "Are we through here, or is there anything else?"
MJ can feel the divide growing between them as Felicia's lips thin, and she stares at them both in turn. It makes the skin on MJ's arms prickle. She knows what this must look like to Felicia, who has no idea that MJ has a history with Spider-Man – hell, MJ didn't even know until a few hours ago herself.
"I don't particularly care what is going on between the two of you, but whatever it is," says Felicia in a tone every bit as unyielding as Peter's, "don't lose focus on what matters most."
The implication is insulting, enough to make MJ's entire face hot with indignation, but before she can muster any kind of defense, Felicia is gone.
No more than a second passes before Peter turns his back. "Let's go."
MJ watches him walk toward the edge of the roof with a sharpness in his gait that she remembers too easily. She knows what he is thinking of without having to ask – or who he is thinking of, more to the point. So many missteps, so many chance encounters, so many careless mistakes, and one death.
It is more unfamiliar than ever, the territory that they've delved into now. She wonders if it is right to comfort him the way that she once did, or if there is something that rings false about it, something self-serving, now that she has in some way taken Gwen's place.
She wants to reach out, to find some way to take away his pain, but this particular pain she isn't sure she has a right to fix anymore.
"Peter …"
"I wish – " He rounds on her so fast, his voice so strained, that she stops following him with an abrupt stop. He puts a hand up to his mask, rubbing his neck uncomfortably with his palm. "It's not that you aren't good at this. I just wish – I just wish you weren't involved. Or Felicia. Or whoever the hell we've got inside OsCorp right now."
For a moment the roar of the city becomes a quiet hum. For the first time since she has acquired these abilities, she can tune out every stray noise, every honk and cuss and whir of the streets below.
"You can't do this alone," says MJ.
When Peter exhales the breath around him is heavy, weighted with what she fears will be an argument she doesn't know how to fight. What he says instead somehow makes her feel worse.
"I know."
A few hours later they are standing in the kitchen – pacing, more accurately, neither of them able to remain still. They are trying to pretend that their eyes aren't trained on the computer screen Peter has set up with the footage in the kitchen, which has become both a blessing and a curse. They're at an advantage, of course, but she doubts that they'll ever sleep again.
"The pizza should be done in a minute," MJ announces, if only to fill up the quiet, to have something to do.
Peter nods, and absent-mindedly flips through a textbook she knows he isn't reading. She wonders how many of her midterms she tanked a few weeks ago. Now their finals are in another week and it still hasn't occurred to her to check.
"I want to be able to forgive him," says Peter. The words are steady, but his eyes are still trained on the book, pointedly not at MJ. "I know – I know it's not him doing this."
"Peter, you don't have to – "
"And of course I remember," he says, his hand now frozen on a page mid-turn, the page poised in his fingers. "Growing up together. The three of us. You guys were the first friends I made after my parents – after they left, and honestly, I never thought I'd want to make more."
MJ's shoulders loosen a bit, some of the tension in the conversation easing as she walks over and sits beside him on the couch. "We were happy," she murmurs. It is something she took for granted then.
Peter closes the textbook and sets it down on the table. For a moment she thinks he doesn't have anything left to say on the matter.
"He killed Gwen."
MJ flinches – both at the brutal truth of it, and the bitter way the words fall off Peter's tongue. She knows what happened, or at least based on the evidence she has gathered, she has an idea of it. She never wanted the gory details of Gwen's death, but that doesn't mean she didn't hear about them – her old classmates muttered about the spinal break, about a head wound. She didn't suffer, MJ heard over and over again that day. It was quick.
All MJ has actually seen is the doctored video that Harry forced her to watch. But she knows that one part of it wasn't fabricated – the part where Gwen is falling, falling, perpetually falling into the abyss of that clock tower, toward her untimely end.
She doesn't know what to say, so she doesn't. She sits beside him and shoulders the burden of their mistakes, heavy between them, somehow even when it is shared. She thinks on these past few months when she was so determined to hurt Spider-Man to avenge Peter, to get justice for Gwen, and how all of it was so futile. So hopeless.
Even if she had killed the person responsible, it wouldn't change anything. Gwen would still be gone.
And Peter would still love her. He still does now. It is a strange thing to acknowledge, but not a hurtful one. She can make peace with it, she can even live with it, knowing now what that kind of love feels like. Knowing that if she lost Peter the way he lost Gwen, she could never truly replace him with someone else.
A few feet away, Peter's phone lights up and then buzzes, loudly. He places a palm on his eye and rubs it wearily.
"It could be Felicia," he says.
MJ reaches for it, and slides it open, wondering when Peter acquired a smart phone – she figures Felicia is responsible, if they are trying this hard to coordinate. It's a text, from a number she doesn't recognize, with a video attached.
She doesn't hesitate to open it, thinking that it's something from the footage that they might have already missed.
And then – it takes her a moment to understand, but even before she recognizes the blurry contours of the room, before she recognizes the sound of Harry's voice, there is an unthinkable chill in her bones, a ringing in her ear that shrills a warning. There is a woman answering him, her voice muffled and shaking, the words barely distinct, and then the camera focuses and the content of the video becomes all too clear.
It's her. In Harry's bed. That night over a year ago, when she was fired from her job, when she was at her ultimate low and had nobody else to turn to, and Harry was – oh, god.
It doesn't even occur to her to turn it off until Peter snatches the phone from her and does it himself. His knuckles are white around it, his jaw locked and his eyes so hard on the black screen that she can feel the excuses rising up in her like bile, all of them useless and stupid and nowhere near enough.
She is humiliated. Degraded. She was going to tell him, but God, not like this.
Still, she can't take it back, and he deserves an explanation. She takes a shuddering breath and says, "Peter, I know that you probably – "
"That – twisted son of a bitch," says Peter, rising up from the couch so quickly that it moves several inches across the wood floor with her still on it. He sets the phone down in a manner that suggests that what he really wants is to throw it. "That sick little – "
"Peter," she interrupts, because something is wrong here, he isn't reacting the way he should.
"This is low, even for him," says Peter, pointing at the phone as if it has committed some criminal offense. "To doctor up a video like that, to – "
"Peter."
His eyes snap over to hers, wild with the kind of fury she does not see in him often. There is no sinking feeling worse than knowing that the next few words that come out of her will betray him, but she can't let him believe this lie. If she is going to be with Peter, then he has to know the truth. All of it.
"Harry didn't do anything to that video," she says, in a thin voice that doesn't sound like hers at all.
Peter is paralyzed, his eyebrows lifting in a bewilderment that makes her feel rotten in the core. "What?"
She swallows hard and forces herself to look at him. So many times he warned her to stay away from Harry, all of which she ignored. And he says that he forgave her for it, even used it to his advantage to buy him and Felicia more time – but she sees now, from the slow and grim understanding that takes hold of every muscle on his face, that he could never have imagined this.
"I didn't know," she says, and it feels like she is ripping off some essential part of herself. "I'm sorry. I didn't know."
The quiet that follows is unbearable. Peter takes a step back, away from her, and there is something robotic about it, as if he isn't even aware that he has done it.
"Okay," he says.
MJ shakes her head, takes a step toward him, trying to close the gap. "It's not, Peter, it's—"
"You're right," he says, but he isn't looking at her. "You – you didn't know."
She tries to keep her voice even. It feels as if the world around them is shrinking, magnifying every excruciating moment that passes between them. "Just give me a chance to explain."
"You don't have to," says Peter, and when he tries to smile it is wobbly and unhinged, not even reaching the corners of his lips. He rocks uncertainly on his feet, his eyes flitting back to the phone, and says, "I'm just – I'm sorry, I just …"
He doesn't finish the sentence, and she is grateful. She doesn't think she could bear it if he did. She has a horrible, wrenching premonition of what is about to happen to them and even in these last few seconds before he says it, before he ends it all, she is still reaching out for a rope that has long slipped out of her hands.
"I'm sorry," he says again.
When he turns his back, it is almost a relief. It is over. Her worst fear has come to life. She no longer has to fight to protect this, no longer has to wait for the other shoe to drop, no longer has to live with the constant fear that she is going to lose what matters to her most. It's gone now, it's walking out that door, and her heart is still beating, the world is still turning, her life will go on.
The door doesn't slam, but clicks shut solemnly behind him. She sucks in a shuddering, wretched breath, stirring up the ancient sadness, the faithlessness she has had in herself all along. She can tell herself a hundred ways that this was inevitable, that it was only a matter of time, but somehow she can't imagine hurting any less than she does right now.
Okay, I know I'm probably dead to you guys. It's been an insane month. This job at Bustle has been amazing (not to pimp my own work, but I feel like you guys would enjoy the article "6 Things Fans Of Fan Fiction Are Tired Of Hearing" I wrote this week), but I'm churning out three to five articles a day, plus I'm still working night shifts for a few different promotional companies at night, AND I have this weird new gig food-blogging for a DC-based website. I basically only have time to write fanfiction while I'm peeing. Thank you for your patience with me, I do not deserve you guys, and I promise I will try to be quicker about this now that I'm getting into the swing of the new routine.
But right now I feel as if I have earned an hour of Netflix, so I will take my leave ;).