"Spider-Man," Ned says dumbly. "Actually, really, literally, the real-life, flesh-and-blood, absolute, one and only—"
"Yes, Ned," MJ says impatiently, which makes Peter smile despite these terrifying circumstances. "Spider-Man, like he just said."
Ned lifts his hands and covers his mouth with both of them, then speaks through that barrier in a hushed, disbelieving tone (the same tone he used when he and Peter first found out that there was going to be a new Star Wars movie for their generation; the same tone he used when he and Peter learned they were both going to get to go to Europe). "This. Is. The coolest. Thing. That has ever happened. In. My. Life. I know Spider-Man!" Unfortunately, he ends on a shout, and both Peter and MJ wince and glance around.
Peter knows no one is nearby. The shaded park MJ brought him to on their second (new) date is quiet and sheltered, and his senses would have alerted him. But still…it's the nature of the thing.
(It's the fact that he can't stop waking up from nightmares in which Ned and MJ both die for the secret they're now once more a part of, embroiled all over again in his life.)
(It's the way this all seems like a dream, like he's graduated from MJ the Mirage to a full-on delusion, and any sound too large might startle him awake to a black-and-white world.)
"Sorry," Ned whispers, quelling under MJ's glare. "But, seriously, how cool is this? You're a real-life superhero."
"You can use less italics," MJ says.
Despite his very real interest in Ned's reaction, Peter studies MJ out of the corner of his eye. She's so…calm…about all this. He knows she took everything really well the first time, but he'd always supposed that was because she'd guessed it and had time to process it before she actually talked to him-as-Spider-Man. But, no, maybe MJ has a superpower too, and it's being able to just accept astonishing things in her life with preternatural calm.
(Or maybe there's a part of her that remembers. That knew already. That guessed it. That knows him.
Loves him.
Or is that just stupid wishful thinking?)
"Okay," Ned says, rubbing his hands together. "Okay, first, I just want to say, thank you for telling me. Being included in this secret means the world to me, you have no idea. Second, you will not be sorry. I will keep this secret to my dying breath…which, okay, let's hope is like many decades away, at least, but still…" He perks up (Peter winces away from what he knows is coming). "And I can help! I can be your guy—"
"No, no, no, no." Peter only realizes he's stood when he's backed several paces away, his arms frantically waving denials in the air between him and his friend. "No."
Ned looks hurt. Wounded, even. Which is a problem, because Peter's never been able to turn his friend down when he looks so much like an abandoned puppy.
"Peter," MJ says slowly, thoughtfully, and Peter's heart spasms inside his chest.
"No! Thank you, really, thank you for offering, but—"
"If you're worried about us turning into supervillains and trying to kill you, that would never happen," Ned says with a strange air of solemnity.
Peter can only stare. "What?"
(Wasn't there…didn't Ned say something about this before? With the other Spider-Men? So much happened that night, all of it tinged in the haze of anguished grief that was May's absence, but…he's sure Ned made a similar promise before.
Didn't he?)
"I would never," Ned says. "I promise. No, I vow to you."
"Uh." MJ blinks when Ned turns to her expectantly. "Right. Me too. Vow. Yes. Sure."
Okay. Vow from MJ sounds a lot different than from Ned (one conjures up images of role-playing games and knights and quests; the other white dresses and I do and rings: both equally as impossible to him now).
"It's not that," Peter blurts. "It's just…" He takes a deep breath and feels the burn of the pull in his shoulder, a reminder of the necessity behind his next words. "You guys are heading off to Boston in a few months. And that's…great. It's amazing. But I just…I can't pull you into this life. I can't steal anything else from you."
"You haven't stolen anything from us," MJ says, her brow furrowed. "And we could still help before we leave—"
"No." Peter clenches his hands into fists (he will not cry in front of them, not again, they already think he's fragile and he needs them to think he's strong, like a real-life, flesh-and-blood, actual superhero). "I don't think it's a good idea for you guys to even know. But I just…if this is going to pull you into any danger…I'll leave. Okay? I'll delete your numbers and never see you again. So, please, please, just listen to me on this, okay?"
Even from three feet away, he can feel MJ's anger, can see every ounce of Ned's disappointment, but it doesn't affect him (it doesn't).
"MIT is a great opportunity for you both," he says, looking up at the sky and using all his strength not to imagine a world in which he heads off with them. "I won't let anything jeopardize that. Not even yourselves."
"Fine." MJ's tone is terse, her movements jerky. "You've obviously been doing so well on your own. Who are we to stand in your way, right, Ned?"
His shoulder burns and itches simultaneously. His arms feel empty without her encircled in them. But the whisper of her words (I'm proud of you, Peter Parker) fits him like armor against the world, heavy and protective and chaining.
"Uh." Ned looks between them both. "Right. I guess."
"Thank you," Peter says.
And then they all stand there, silent in the park next to chittering squirrels, and pretend that his secret hasn't once more ruined everything that could have been.
Ned's graduation party is actually pretty low-key, but Peter's not used to being around more than two people at a time now, so it feels crowded and like too much. Still, he keeps a smile on his face, and he hands Ned the present he picked out especially for him (Ned pretended like he doesn't need the special headphones for his games, not wanting to make his Lola guilty, but Peter's noticed his longing gazes and the jar of coins that always starts filling up when Ned has something he wants in mind), and he tries not to give any sign that the noise and the lights and the people aren't about to make him hyperventilate.
"Is this party for you too?" he asks MJ when they've gravitated together to a corner.
"No." MJ gives a half-shake of her head. "My dad and I went out for dinner last night. And I think," she gives him his special smile, "that my boyfriend has something planned for tomorrow. Tonight's just for Ned."
"And Peter!" Ned exclaims as he crashes into them. Peter leans back from the smell of Ned's breath and wonders who was brave enough to sneak in some alcohol past Lola's watchful gaze. "Congrats, Peter!"
"Thanks, Ned. You too."
"We made it!" Ned wraps an arm around Peter's shoulder, gives him a half-shake, nearly spilling the cup held in his other hand. "We did it!"
"We made it." Peter meant to mimic Ned's excited tone, but the words come out wistful. Wondering.
Four years (well, nine, if you count the Blip) since that spider bit him. He was fourteen, and just after Uncle Ben died, he was out there, fighting crime, trying to be a hero like the ones he saw in the news (trying to live up to the example Ben had played out in his life). How many times has he almost died? Trying to figure his powers out, learning how to stop a car from colliding into buildings, catching crooks—all of that seemed so easy when he started fighting heroes like Captain America and Antman and the Winter Soldier. Or when he ended up in space, so far from home he never did let himself stop and think about it. When he faced aliens and felt his body being ripped apart at the seams. When Mysterio put him through so many hells that Peter woke up weeks later from nightmares thinking he was still trapped in some mirage-world. Hated by the whole world, demonized on every side, blamed for things that even now leave him in cold shakes.
Unmaking the universe. Messing with parallel worlds. Meeting multiple versions of himself. Nearly becoming a murderer (or does it still count, if he brought a murderer to his home and let him add Aunt May to his body count?). Having to give up everything.
Having to survive giving up everything.
All of that, and yet here he is.
He's made it.
(And his future stretches out before him, more of the same, over and over again, eventually without Ned and MJ, just Spider-Man and Jameson and villains and muggers and his cranky landlord, ad infinitum.)
"We made it," he says again, a bit stronger, when MJ shifting next to him reminds him that she's here. Alive. That Ned is alive too. They've both nearly died more times than he wants to face, but they're here. They're happy. They're headed off to the school of their dreams.
(It's worth it. All of it. Everything he's gone through is worth it as long as they keep living and thriving.)
"You okay?" MJ asks, quietly, while Ned laughs at some of the people brave (or drunk) enough to dance.
"Yeah." Peter takes her hand, his thumb against her pulsepoint, and smiles. "I'm good."
He takes MJ to an observatory. It costs eight dollars to get in. He sits side by side with her in the uncomfortable chairs, their hands laced, and they stare up at the stars. They stay past closing, which costs him twenty dollars in bribes for Gus, the night security guard. He shows her the pint of her favorite ice cream that he had stashed in the employee freezer, which cost him four dollars, and together, they eat the melting ice cream and laugh at their made-up constellations. Then he gives her a present, and tries to look happy and proud of her rather than terrified.
MJ stares down at the bracelet in the box. It cost him sixty dollars and nights of sleepless trepidation. MJ doesn't say anything for a long second, just lets her fingertips brush over the black beads.
"It's your favorite animal," he jokes.
She doesn't laugh.
Peter's stomach is shriveled into a tight little kernel. (He should have gone with the tickets to that play she mentioned wanting to see. Or just a plaque. Anything else.)
"If you don't like it, I can take it back," he says (which is a lie; he's pretty sure pawnshops don't have much of a return policy).
"Spiders," MJ finally says. The bracelet is black beads woven into a slender band, with a white spider picked out in its center. (Black and white: if she takes it, if she wears it, it'll be the only thing bi-chromatic about her, just enough to set her apart from the hyper-stylized terrors in his nightmares.)
"It was…kind of a joke. I'm sorry, MJ. I'll get something else, all right? What do you want? Maybe you should just tell me since I'm obviously not too good at this whole—"
MJ's mouth covers his so that he bites off whatever else he might have said and lets her swallow the last of his backpedaling. Her hand threads though his hair to keep him in place, her lips sealed over his, the bracelet clasped tightly in her other hand.
"I—" Peter tries to pull in a breath, loses it when MJ kisses him again, tightens his own grip on her hips to keep himself from pulling her on top of him, and says, "You…you like it then?"
"I love it," she says. Then she slides onto his lap, rests her wrists on his shoulders, and meets his eyes. He can barely see her through the daze shooting sparks through the room, like the stars all decided to fall at once to halo MJ in their cosmic glory, but he's careful to balance her, one hand splayed over the small of her back.
"Congratulations, graduate," he whispers.
"Thank you," she whispers back, then she bends her head, and Peter tilts his up, and they don't talk for quite a long while.
When he finally walks her home, stealing kisses every dozen steps or so because that's apparently something he's allowed to do now (because she smiles every time he does it), the bracelet is clasped around her wrist.
(With the web fluid he used getting to her place and back added in, he spent about a hundred dollars that night. Later, after their kiss good night, after she's back safely home, swinging on patrol himself, Peter feels like what he got out of the date was worth at least a million bucks.)
"Come see me," she told Peter (Spider-Man; her boyfriend). "Whenever you want. No matter how late it is. You can drop by my room anytime in between web-slinging and vigilanteing."
It takes him a while (and more repeated invitations), but eventually, he does. Always on quiet nights, she thinks, when he can convince himself that nothing will follow him back to her. The first time, MJ almost misses his little tap against her window, and he's just getting ready to swing away (a traveling choice she will never understand) when she unlocks and opens the window to him. He comes in hesitantly, his mask crumpled and played through his shaking hands, standing in the middle of her room like he's never been there before (like he hasn't laid beneath her, over her, in her bed and kissed her until she nearly forgot her own name).
"Peter," she says, laughing, and grabs his hand, rescues his mask, and pulls him down to sit beside her on the floor, their backs against her bed. "Relax. Come on, talking to me has to be less scary than fighting bad guys and juggling the fate of the world."
A tiny smile peeks through his bashfulness. "I don't know. You can be pretty intimidating."
"Thank you," she says primly. And when he only smiles at her, eyes soft and dark and so much (more, somehow, than they should be after the relatively short time they've known each other), MJ adds, "I'll take that as a compliment."
"It is," he says, and MJ tries to hide her pleased smile.
For a while, they just sit there, pressed close against each other, his head tilted down to rest on hers, hers comfortable on his shoulder. Gradually, bit by bit, the tension eases from Peter. MJ feels him relax, melt, sink closer into her, the strain that tightens his shoulders loosening until she can almost imagine him as just a regular boy, some loser nerd from her high school with a bright future as some notable scientist ahead of him.
She loves that she can do this for him (that she can give something back to him, help him find some of those happy moments he thought were behind him forever), but at the same time, she wishes she could do more.
She wishes he'd let her and Ned share the burden that threatens to crush him anew every day.
"How do you do it?" she asks, softly. She slides her hand into his, feels the textured nuances of his glove, the cobwebbed accents, the warmth of his palm beneath, the tensile strength of his fingers as he weaves them between hers. "How do you go out, day after day, and save people?"
"What would I do if I didn't?" he asks with the suggestion of a shrug against her cheek.
"Laugh," she says. "Dream. Go to college."
(Tell people his name without that half-terror, half-longing look scrawled over his entire face.)
MJ tried the causes route once, back in the first couple years of high school. She'd protested, campaigned, boycotted, supported, passed the word along, done the whole nine yards and gone even further, so much so it carried her straight through to conspiracy theories, true crime, and unexplained phenomena. But the thing was, none of it had felt right. Because causes are just a lot of people, and MJ knew that in large groups, people are just sheep—and she doesn't like sheep.
In the end, she couldn't care enough. Couldn't fool herself into thinking that anything she did was helping at all. It's just…not her. A painful realization that had set her back a while during the summer after their DC trip, but necessary. She's observational, but on a microlevel rather than a macro, her focus insular, her concerns laser-pointed. And besides, she's spent so much of her life caring for things (people) that don't care back, or at least not enough, that she eventually learned it's easier to be the one who doesn't care (even if she does) rather than the one ignored and overlooked.
And maybe because of that, MJ admires people who care anyway. People who keep going, keep fighting, keep caring, even when the problems never seem to end, and the people never care back, and there's never any reward. MJ thinks there's nothing more admirable than a single soul finding the strength to fight against the tide.
(And she thinks, here in the dead of night, drowsy and content, warm and holding hands with a superhero, that maybe instead of devoting herself to a cause, instead of spending herself on some movement that will never end, she could care about an individual, could devote herself to a hero, could pour her passion into a person who in turn cares and helps and saves and never seems to count the cost too high. Maybe there's more than one way to fight the tide, and maybe even the ones who care the most need one person unequivocally, irreversibly, absolutely in their corner.)
"I have to help," Peter whispers, his beath stirring the unbraided hair obscuring her face. "It's my responsibility."
"Why?" she whispers.
"Because…"
He's silent so long she nearly falls asleep. But then, just on the threshold between waking and sleeping, she hears him say:
"Because once I didn't, and my uncle died. And once I failed, and my aunt died. And once…once I dreamed for too much, and my world forgot me."
MJ curls in tighter against him without opening her eyes, without letting her breath hitch. (If she lets him know she's awake, she thinks, no, she knows, he'll fall silent.)
"Nothing I do can ever make up for that," he whispers. "But I have to try. I can't ever stop trying."
He sits with her a while longer, then, when she really is falling asleep, he lifts her into his arms and sets her in bed, pulls the covers around her.
"Peter," she can't resist saying.
"Good night, MJ." He kisses her brow, and then swings away into the approaching dawn.
After that, MJ never locks her window, and Peter begins to stop by more often. Not every night, or even every other night, but at least two or three times a week. Sometimes he barely speaks at all, his movements stiff and pained, his eyes desperate on her. Other times, he jabbers on as if he'll never stop talking, as if he only has a limited time to pour out all the things he wants to say to her. Little tidbits, scientific facts, nerd culture anecdotes, private wishes, childhood remembrances, all of them random and unimportant except that it's Peter telling (confiding) these things, her he's trusting, and so MJ soaks in every word, every half-finished sentence, every stuttered uh and um. And every night, she finds herself caring more.
I love you, she thinks when he tells her good night and kisses her (she rarely lets him get away with just a kiss to her forehead now, not when her lips are eager to give as well as receive) and leaves.
It's too soon. Too rash. Too careless. Michelle Watson-Jones is far too cynical an observer of human behavior, far too jaded an adult, to believe that real love forms so quickly, so utterly—or that it will last (particularly when the date of her departure for Boston grows ever nearer).
So she doesn't say it.
But she thinks it.
Every time he leaves. Every time she sees him (at her window, at the café, at dinner, at Ned's house over video games and laughter). Every time she flips through her erased sketchpads and imagines what might have been there before, set behind her hovering initials.
You remember.
"I don't know, MJ," Peter's saying as she looks away from the sketch she drew out of frustration one night (a cranium chock-full of things falling away more quickly than they can be processed, remembered) and back to her boyfriend, pacing back and forth through her room, his hands (minus the gloves that are tossed with his mask on her desk over the printouts of her and Ned's new lease) gesticulating wildly. "I mean, I saved him from a car that would have fallen on him. Don't you think that deserves a little gratitude? I mean, just a smidge? But, no, not according to this guy, who was, if I'm to believe his million protestations, going to be late for an appointment. I mean, what? Really, I just wanted to say boh to him and swing away. But I didn't. I was very polite, helpfully informed him where he could go to check his blood pressure, and then left. That's superhero-esque, isn't it?"
He probably goes on. MJ doesn't hear him. Her mind has frozen on one word.
Boh.
Her word. Her favorite word. The one she learned in Italy and longed to tell someone about (her signature word, the one she was born to say, saved and preserved just for her on a trip that promised to have so many good things happen for her) but never did. The one she wrote in calligraphy over several pages of her sketchbooks.
The one she's never heard anyone else use.
(Except Peter. So casually. So obviously. Without a hint of a thought that she might not know the meaning.)
You remember.
"MJ?"
MJ blinks. Blinks again. Finds herself staring into Peter's face, hovering near hers, eyes worried.
"You okay?" he asks (that ever-present strain of terror is there, peeking past the edges of his normal Peter-mask).
"Yeah, sure. Just…had something on my mind."
"Really?"
This garners a smile that MJ doesn't have to fake. She lays her palm along the line of his jaw, and says, "Yes, Peter, I'm fine. I definitely would have said boh to that guy. That's exactly the kind of situation that word was invented for."
The terror retreats (never gone entirely, she's come to realize, just sometimes tamed back into submission), and Peter smiles. "I wish you'd been there then," he says.
"I wish I was too," she murmurs, and thinks of a trip that doesn't make sense, and empty pages, and a word that matters (and a boy who looked at her with hunger and horror in equal measures and said, You remember, as if it was both the best and the worst thing he could possibly imagine).
That night, when he heads to the window, before he can pull on his mask, MJ holds him extra-tight, kisses him with unusual ferocity, and is slower to let him go.
I love you, she thinks, and I wish I could remember you.