A/N: Thank you to everyone who's reviewed and favorited! I'm very new to this fandom so it's nice to know I'm not bungling it too badly. Also, as a general disclaimer, I know so little about NYC that it's ridiculous, so any landmarks, buildings, places to go to...all existing possibly only in the Marvel-world-NYC. Thanks for understanding! :) Also, I'm kind of foreseeing 10 chapters or so (6 are currently written), and I'm just posting whenever I have the time and chapters - but as always, reviews always help motivate!

When there's a knock at his door (the door of the apartment where no one knows him and he's the only one besides the landlord who's ever walked through it), Peter freezes. She's found him. She followed him. (She figured it out.)

His heart is in his throat, his spine is prickling, his hands are sweaty, but he's drifting to the door without hesitation. (She remembers.)

Just before his hand falls to the dented doorknob, Peter remembers to do a quick once-over of the apartment. His Palpatine Lego and a line of old coffee cups (We are happy to serve you, over and over again, a line of dominoes waiting to topple) are the only decorations unless he counts the GED textbooks he hasn't had a chance to donate anywhere now that he's passed the test. No sign of Spider-Man fills the rest of the emptiness (not that it matters because she knows again).

Peter pulls the door open, MJ's name on his lips—

—and comes face to face with a man so tall Peter's reminded of Thor or Captain America. He cranes his head up and sees a bristling haircut, a straight mustache bristling over a tightly clamped mouth, sharp eyes hard and incisive as the man looks past Peter to the space behind him.

"Hey, kid," the man says.

It's just a neighbor. No, no, not a neighbor, Peter recognizes him (Calamity and chaos will ensue, statistics on losses and property damage and escaped criminals, May's name scrolling under his shoulders like a banner of Peter's worst crime).

(Spider-Man is Peter Parker!)

J. Jonah Jameson.

Terror is scalding. All the cold, the chills, the ice that limns his soul—all of it gone in a second. Like boiling water poured down across him, Peter sees the rest of his life flashing in front of his eyes (running, hiding, terror and pain, death spreading out around him like lightning from a focal point, MJ and Ned forever lost to him).

"You know how hard it is to track you down?" Jameson steps forward, and in a daze, Peter stumbles back. "First, I had to get a description from someone who'd seen you, then I had to run a facial recognition algorithm, but even that didn't come up with anything—aren't you young? Never heard of social media? What'd you do, grow up under a rock?"

Peter can't say anything (sweat slicks his skin and stings his eyes and sears his lungs), but Jameson doesn't wait for a response.

"Eventually, I got lucky with some traffic camera that caught sight of you several times outside some crummy diner or other. And then turns out you just signed up for a library card and left your address. Couldn't have made it any easier for me? Usually people like you want a call-back."

"What?" Peter finally manages (though he's not sure what, exactly, he's questioning out of everything in this moment).

"Did you take these or not?"

Jameson spins a folder like a frisbee onto Peter's rumpled bed. His threadbare blankets aren't enough to obscure the photographs fanning out in a spiral.

Spider-Man stares back up at Peter, bright and colorful and dangerous.

"You…" Peter stares until he manages to flick a look back up at Jameson (A menace! he shouts, so often, on his little web-channel that's been picked up nationally now and gained viewers even quicker than Peter gains enemies). "Why are you here?"

"Are those yours or aren't they?" Jameson draws a lip back in disgust as he gestures around Peter's room. "Hard to believe, seeing this, but who knows. Sometimes it's the people most overlooked that see the most. If you think you can get me pictures of that web-crawler—as good as these or better—then you've got the job. Well, maybe, let's not get too far ahead of ourselves, there won't be a contract, pay will be based on the photo itself and may vary. Freelance. Best thing for you. Sound good?"

And now Peter remembers. The gnawing hunger in his stomach, the photos he printed out so carefully (scrutinizing each and every one to make sure they didn't give away his identity), sitting in the Bugle offices, seeing May's name, the date of her death, and then running, hyperventilating, the pictures left behind. But not, apparently, unnoticed.

"You want the pictures?" he asks dimly.

Jameson laughs without smiling, a feat so strange Peter blinks. "Kid, I already ran those pictures. I need new ones. A newspaper just picked up a proposed column about the dangers of living in NYC with all these masked freaks, and the only thing I'm missing are pictures."

"You ran these?"

He has been distracted lately, hardly able to look away from MJ's name on his phone to look up at anything other than the world from behind Spider-Man's curved lenses.

"Don't worry, here, this should do."

Green bills land on top of the photos.

"You got anymore?"

"Not…not printed." Peter clears his throat and looks up at Jameson (at the man who's made him the city's number one enemy, the man who plastered his face over every billboard, called for him to be prosecuted for a thousand crimes, makes daily demands for Spider-Man to be unmasked or be vilified forever).

And Jameson has no idea who he is.

"I can get you more," Peter says.

May would hate it, he thinks (she always bristled, puffed up like a cat protecting her kitten, when Peter was bullied or made fun of, when people sounded extra pitying for her about having to take him in as her own), but this is money. And it's security (not even Spider-Man would be dumb enough to sell pictures of himself to the man who hates him more than anyone else; no one would be).

And what does Jameson say, anyway, that Peter doesn't deserve, even if in a different way than Jameson knows?

"Great!" Jameson gives one more judgmental scan of the apartment and turns for the door. "Make yourself easier to find next time. Come down to the office with whatever you get. Payment will be discussed then. Oh," he stops just over the threshold, his phone already in hand, his attention moved far beyond Peter. "What's the name for the photo credit?"

"Peter Parker," he says, and when the door closes, Peter collapses in a heap to the floor, shaking and sweaty and relieved.

Peter Parker—no longer the unknown, the forgotten, the invisible, the fake identity for a superhero on his off-hours.

No, now he's Peter Parker—the photographer, the Daily Bugle employee, the menace to the Masked Menace.

He's safer. So much safer.

(And therefore, everyone around him, anyone he's weak enough to keep seeing, keep talking to, keep loving, is safer too.)

"Hey, MJ!" he says as soon as he's through the door and into the diner.

MJ's brows go up (his heart stutters a beat) before she smiles (another stutter, but this time for a different reason). "You said you'd call."

"I thought this would be better," he says, barely keeping the phrase from turning into a question. His stomach twists with nerves, his hands are sweaty, his pulse skitters like mad in his throat—but it's all familiar and exciting because this is what MJ does to him (or did, before an unmasking, before panic took the place of beginning nerves, before they had to hide on rooftops and talk over the phone and avoid public places, and all their conversations revolved around Spider-Man).

MJ makes him wait, but eventually she smiles again and says, "It is."

So simple. So wonderful.

Peter sits at the counter (not quite at his usual seat, before, but close, getting closer). "No Ned today?" he asks.

"He's swamped with homework. I told him he shouldn't leave it all till the last minute."

"He always does." Peter blanches and adds, hastily, "Or, I mean, he seems like he's the kind of person who would. Leave things. You know, procrastinate. Maybe he's not, though, I mean, how would I know?"

"I thought he said you guys had been talking."

"Oh. We have." Peter squirms in his seat. "You know. He called. Then I called. Then it just…kind of became…a habit."

"Hmm."

He wonders if she's jealous that he's called Ned more times than he's called her. He wonders if he shouldn't have been so afraid to bother her. He wonders if she's not even thinking about this, or him, at all and he's freaking out for no reason at all.

To remind himself of his recent bravery, Peter sticks his hand in his pocket where his wallet is. It's filled with money. He sold more photos that afternoon. Who cares what Jameson will use them for. Headlines aren't the point (so long as none of them are linking Spider-Man's name with Peter's). What matters is he finally has some money (some flowers on May's grave, his rent paid in full, some actual food on the shelves in his apartment, web-fluid in extra canisters), and he wants to spend it on MJ.

"I was thinking," he begins just as MJ says, "Did you ever get your GED?"

"Oh," Peter says.

"Sorry," MJ speaks over him.

Their eyes meet and suddenly he can't help laughing. She's laughing too, bending over the counter toward him, and Peter wants to stop time right now, right here, with MJ so close he can touch her, eyes sparkling and happy, laughter bright and loud, joy like a balloon inflating inside his chest (and there's no band-aid anymore, no scratch, no reason for anything to hurt).

"This shouldn't be quite so awkward," MJ finally says when their laughter trickles away.

"It must be you," Peter says with a shrug as carefree as he can make it. "I'm never awkward."

"Really," she says flatly.

"Of course not. Some have even been known to describe me as suave."

"Suave."

"Yes." Peter lasts only a second more before his smile breaks free. "Okay, sorry, I just…I'm not sure I even know what suave means."

"Not you," MJ says, but the glitter in her eyes, the way she reaches out to nudge his wrist with her hand, makes her words fond rather than derisive.

"I did get my GED," he tells her (he had to tell Ned, when he got his results, so relieved, one less pressure crushing him, that he'd called to share the news with the person he always imagined being right at his side in countless cheesy graduation pictures; the phone-call, Ned's easy excitement and earnest congratulations, are as close as he'll get to that).

"Congrats." She slides him a hot chocolate. "Here, a graduation gift."

Peter sips the rich drink in an effort to hide the lump in his throat. "Thanks."

A customer comes in, and Peter smiles at MJ when she rolls her eyes and goes to help him. The moment alone gives him the chance to rehearse what he wants to say. Of course, he's only halfway through his private pep-talk when the man shakes his head, eyes on his phone, and says to no one, "That spider freak's done it again. Fouled up a train with webbing and left it sitting on the tracks."

"Your coffee," MJ says, her tone so bland, so neutral, that the force with which she sets the coffee cup down in front of the man—so hard hot liquid slops over the rim of the lid—seems accidental.

(Peter knows MJ. He can read behind the impassive tone. Knows how calculating her every move can be.)

The man doesn't notice. "Wish he'd blipped out and not come back."

MJ turns her back on the man and walks back toward Peter without another word.

His hands are cold again. Though he cradles them around his nearly empty mug, Peter can't feel anything but ice (better than terror, he reminds himself). Hearing Spider-Man's name when he's maskless, defenseless, is just as terrifying as it had been in Times Square. Thinking about the Blip and everything that came after (everyone who didn't make it through undoing it) is like an electric shock jumpstarting his heart—or stopping it.

(That train had been running without brakes. If he hadn't nearly killed himself stopping it, everyone aboard would have died. Afterward, he'd nearly passed out from the strain and the exertion; there was no way he could have moved it out of the way. Besides, wasn't that, like, the city's job?)

(He couldn't control what happened after the Blip. If he could have, maybe he would have made sure he didn't come back too.)

When MJ rejoins him, she seems stiff.

"Are you okay?" he asks.

"I hate the Bugle," she says before giving a slight shake and tilting her head at him. "Weren't you saying something, earlier?"

Peter watches the man leave with his coffee, shaking his head over whatever he's still reading on his phone (blame and accusations; hate and resentment; crimes and murders, and all for Spider-Man). And what pictures accompany the articles? Peter's?

"Peter?" MJ asks.

(He's not only Spider-Man anymore. Peter Parker is a man with a job with an apartment with a friend with a chance.)

Looking back to MJ, Peter meets her dark, concerned eyes and blurts, "I…I was wondering if you wanted to go somewhere. With me. Whenever you're off."

It's quick. She looks away, looks back with her reserve back in place—but he sees it. The tiny smile hidden in the corners of her mouth (his smile).

"Okay," she says. "Tomorrow? After school?"

"Yeah." He can feel his hands again. He knows because they're tingling—not with foreboding or warning, but with the urge to reach out and slide his hand into MJ's. "Sounds great. I'll text you?"

"Okay."

Just that. No witty one-liner. No put-down.

That's when he knows how much this means to MJ.

(That's when he knows just how much he can mess this up.

Again.)

They go to Central Park and walk around. He buys her a pretzel (Tony Stark, move aside, ladies, watch out—here comes Peter Parker), she challenges him to a game of Chess, he pretends not to be freaked out by the squirrel that runs over his hand (and then wants to find that squirrel and buy it a pretzel too when MJ takes his hand in hers as she laughs at him), and for a few hours, Peter isn't cold (isn't numb). For a few hours, he remembers what the world looks like when colored golden, a warmer color than black-and-white, more restful than the surrealistic mode of his nightmares.

The next day, he forgets all over again.

The bank is safe, the money back in the vault, the criminals in a heap on the floor, bound all together in webbing (he's running out of canisters again; he'll have to sell Jameson more pictures), and Peter (no, no, there is no Peter when the mask is on, never again), Spider-Man is just about to swing away when he hears someone shouting his name.

Not just anyone, either.

It's J. Jonah Jameson.

For an instant, Spider-Man nearly webs away anyway (he doesn't want to hear accusations face to face, it's bad enough through a screen). For an instant, he nearly waits until Jameson reaches him and then webs away (words hurt worse than sticks and stones and radioactive bites, sometimes, and Jameson's words have been some of the worst).

But he's a hero (he's not, but he's trying), and if there's a danger coming his way (there is, there's always danger coming), he should know it.

"You!" Jameson shouts. People are gathered around (it's a busy street), but they're keeping a sizable distance (it's New York, center of every alien invasion, robot uprising, and supervillain origin), so Peter stands his ground.

"Me," he says. "Thanks for clearing that up."

"Just a minute." Jameson moves as if to grab hold of him—Peter's reaction is instinctive, a flinch he turns into a flip out of arm's reach.

"Just hold on there," he says in an attempt at confidence. "I hardly know you, Mister. Maybe we should introduce ourselves, have some drinks, maybe even dinner, before we move to the hand's on stuff."

"You're a menace to society," Jameson says. Peter barely has a chance to roll his eyes behind his shaped lenses before he adds, "But I never thought you were a cyber-terrorist too."

"Huh?"

This is bad. He's shaken. Off-balance. He has no idea what Jameson wants or how he found him or why he's here (the last time he was this shaken, his face was exposed to the world). Peter leaps until he's above Jameson's head, stuck to the side of a building, fingers hovering over his web-shooter. His tingle's telling him he should leave (he knows he needs to get out before he starts hyperventilating behind his mask), but he can't go. Not yet. Not until he knows what Jameson's talking about.

"My footage!" Jameson cries. "What did you do with it, you freak?"

"Your what now? Listen, Mister, I don't know who you are"—a lie, but so worth it when Jameson actually quivers with indignation—"but I haven't touched your footage, your foot, your hand, or anything but some walls like this one."

"Hours of footage with nothing showing—interview rooms, police stations, that apartment building that was destroyed by you a few months back, Midtown High School. All of it there on camera, but no reason for it. No one there, no one talking, no one moving, nothing I can see. I don't record empty rooms, Webhead, and I certainly don't keep useless footage. So, tell me before I sue you for hacking and infringement of privacy and whatever other charge I can get to stick—what did you do to my footage?"

It's his phone all over again. Traces of Peter-Parker-as-Spider-Man erased, vanished (his life ravaged and ransacked, pieces ripped away, fragments left torn and scarred, a bloodless crime that hurts).

"Sounds like an IT problem to me," he says as flippantly as he imagines Tony would (if Iron Man were ever stupid enough to get himself into this kind of situation, but he wouldn't, would he, no, this is all Peter Parker). "Have you tried turning your device off and then back on again?"

Jameson's face turns purple, he shakes his fist at the sky (literally, Peter had no idea that was a thing anyone but cartoon characters did), but whatever rant he spews is to empty air.

Peter's already gone.

He barely makes it to his apartment before he collapses in a corner, his mask (flimsy and thin and almost nothing at all) crumpled in a shaking fist, as he fights to breathe past the rock where his heart should be.

"Bet you can't guess my favorite animal," MJ says when Peter's been quiet for over two minutes (a new record, she thinks). He insisted on paying for her ticket to the zoo as well as his own, and was so excited, so obviously happy, to have money that MJ didn't have the heart to protest. Now, though, she wonders what's distracting him from the animals (from her).

"The giraffe," he says without pausing, and to hide how taken aback she is, MJ arches an eyebrow at him.

"Nice try," she says.

He misses a step and flails, his hand brushing against her elbow for balance. "Wh-what?"

"It's spiders," she says. "Seriously, how can you not know that about me?"

His face is a study in perplexed confusion (in disconcerting loss) that MJ memorizes for later sketches. The moment stretches, but not too long (MJ's not cruel, and there's something that aches in Peter's expression), until she laughs and says, "No, not seriously. Spiders aren't even technically an animal."

Like the polite person he seems to be, Peter laughs (it's shaky). "So…your favorite animal…"

"It's the giraffe," she says, so gentle, so careful (there's something about this boy that brings out a soft side she didn't even know she had). "How did you know?"

His smile is bashful and pleased and so striking that MJ's fingers twitch in search of a pencil and sketchbook. "Beautiful, graceful, a little strange—they suit you."

When his hand brushes against hers for the third time in a minute, MJ doesn't let herself feel too anxious about intertwining her fingers with his. It's almost spring now and the weather's been warmer, but Peter's hands are ice-cold.

MJ tries not to worry about that.

(Or about the bruise all down the left side of his face. Or the way he winced when he pushed open a door with his shoulder. Or the limp he had last time he came into the diner. Or the sharp wrist bones she can see peeking through his cuff, and the threadbare state of his coat, and the flush to his cheeks when he had to count out the price of their tickets from crumpled ones and fives. She tries not to worry about him in general.)

(She fails.)

"What's your favorite?" she asks him.

"The spiders," he says, surprising a laugh from her. "No, really," he says, "the insect that isn't an insect, the creature that isn't an animal, a being entirely unto itself."

He started out with an amused tone. He ends sounding almost sad.

MJ squeezes his hand. "I think dogs."

"Dogs?" He blinks and looks at her (she feels a pleased tug in the pit of her stomach). "Why?"

"Loyal. Brave. Know more than they should. Happy."

His eyes tighten and widen all at once, a contradiction MJ hopes to see a hundred more times. "Oh," he says thickly.

"So?" she asks. "What is it really?"

"Dogs," he says, and MJ has to turn her face and bite her lip to hide her smile.

He walks her home when it gets colder and darker. MJ wants to invite him up, but her dad's home and Peter seems antsy, his hands shoved into his pockets. Shivers roll down over his shoulders, and MJ should let him go, should say goodbye and hope he doesn't live too far away so he can go inside where it's warm (he does have a place to live, doesn't he?).

She doesn't, though. Instead, she stands in place, and stares at him, thinks about the romance novels she checked out (furtively, like a criminal) a couple weeks back. Unfortunately, she's too tall to peer up at him, too nervous to keep her face open, too self-conscious to bite her lip—all the signs she knows to indicate that she's open to a kiss good night from her date.

So, like a dork, she finds herself standing in place, hands twitching at her sides, staring at Peter and hoping he wants to kiss her (tonight, right now, at all).

"I…I had a nice time," he says.

Any other day, she'd laugh. Now, she just nods and wonders if she's licking her lips because they're dry or because…(some other reason).

"Maybe…maybe we could do something tomorrow?" His voice shakes. She doesn't think it's from the cold.

"Yeah." Belatedly, she adds, "I have to work, but…you could stop by?"

He smiles. "Okay. Yeah."

She doesn't move. The breath audibly hitches in his throat.

"Oh," he breathes out, and his eyes go so wide she can see the whites all the way around.

Panic nearly sends her running—thankfully, Peter moves before she can.

His hand brushes, cobweb-light, over the back of her hand. She just has time to curve her thumb over the top of his, and he's leaning in, staggered, a bit at a time.

MJ leans in too (so much better than running).

The kiss barely qualifies as one, at least compared to everything she's seen on TV or read in those romance novels. But by definition (his lips touched hers and they both wanted it, both leaned into it), it is a kiss, and MJ feels her mouth widening into a smile.

Peter stares at her—not nervously, or urgently, or anxiously, or cautiously. It's a look she's never seen from him before (so why does it look so familiar?), relaxed and easy and happy.

"MJ," he says (she loves the way he says her name, like a thousand hims have said it in just this way to a thousands hers and they have all felt the same way toward those MJs—and all the hers would love hearing it from all those Peters, she knows that down to her bones).

This time, when he leans in, MJ reaches up with her free hand to curve her fingers along the slope of his neck, and for all that his hand is cold in hers, his mouth is warm and soft and so much more than she'd dreamed (but so right that it clicks into place like she's always been meant to be here, pressed face to face with this boy).

"Good night, Peter," she says when he pulls back, when her hand slides down from his neck to his shoulder to her side.

"Good night, MJ," he repeats. When she steps back, he makes a tiny move, as if he meant to follow her. "I…I really…"

"I like you too," she says, and then she runs (because what if that wasn't what he meant to say?).

(But it is, she's sure of it, as sure as if she heard him say it after all.)

That night, she stays up far too late and fills up half a sketchbook with Peter.

(Smiling, happy, reaching for her, MJ falling from his lips.)

(Bruised, hurt, afraid, letting her go, I promise like a lie against her mouth.)