"…recent footage seems to confirm what many residents say has become a pattern of 'concerning behavior' on the part of New York's infamous web-slinging vigilante, Spiderman. Here with us today we have Ms. Wanda McEntyre, a self-proclaimed Spiderman fan and photographer of a local newspaper…"
Michelle frowned as she wiped out the inside of one of the last dishes of the day. Her boss installed a new TV over the door a few days ago in an attempt to keep customers inside the shop longer, but he only ever played the news. Apparently, though, very few people seemed interested in hearing any more depressing news reports than they absolutely had to.
Go figure.
Luckily for her, this particular anchor frequently covered the latest news on Spiderman, a figure she had become more and more interested in since the conversation she'd had with Ned and her strange encounter with Peter a couple of weeks ago.
Michelle paused her work when Ms. McEntyre appeared on-screen to be interviewed because this was slightly different than the news reports she was used to seeing. They were usually either bashing Spiderman or were consistently supportive of him, with no true in-between. However, lately, the supportive ones had been sharing more and more firsthand and eyewitness accounts of people who had been directly saved through his efforts, and that didn't seem to be the goal of Ms. McEntyre. She seemed to want to draw attention to Spiderman because she was worried about him. Michelle listened carefully as the woman began talking.
"…it's beginning to look like he just doesn't care what happens to himself at all," the woman was saying, using one hand to gesture at the city as a whole for emphasis. "I saw footage of an armed bank heist about a week ago. Naturally, Spiderman got everyone out of the bank first, but then he just seemed to—to throw caution to the wind. He locked himself in there with the criminals and eventually delivered them, all webbed up, to the police, but not before it looked like they got in some heavy gunfire, which could have been avoided if he'd just dealt with them like he normally does. And that's not all, either. I've heard that…"
The door swung open, breaking Michelle's concentration, but any annoyance she might have been feeling immediately dissipated when she realized the person who'd just come in was none other than one Peter Parker. She hadn't seen him since New Years' Eve, and he looked rough.
A moment later, as Michelle was drying her hands so she could take Peter's order, Ned came in too. He made a freaked-out face where Michelle could see but Peter couldn't and then assumed his normal seat in the corner. Michelle came to the register. She smiled—more genuinely than she had been able to at any other customer today.
(It came easily for some reason).
"How can I help you?"
Peter let out a breath through his nose and lightly gripped the counter in front of him as he scanned the menu above Michelle's head.
He looked absolutely exhausted. His cheeks were unnaturally flushed and the coat he was wearing—already not nearly thick enough to withstand the bitter breeze blowing outside—was actually so threadbare she could see the shirt underneath in some places. She even noted, with some alarm, that he seemed to be swaying on the spot.
"I would like a coffee please. And three donuts. I don't care what kind," he rasped eventually, and when his eyes found her, they seemed to look straight through her. Like he was seeing a ghost.
She half-turned to fulfill his order, surprised at his deviation from the norm, and then made up her mind. She swallowed the inexplicable feeling of panic rising in her throat and asked him, "Hey, are you okay?"
Peter blinked at the question, seeming to truly look at her for the first time. He didn't say anything for a few expectant heartbeats, and then he let out a short, sharp bark of hysterical laughter. He leaned forward afterwards, and the smile on his face was nothing like the one she'd seen before. This one was hard and thin and didn't get anywhere near his eyes.
It…it actually kind of scared her, and she drew back without thinking as he spoke.
"I'm fine," he said, with fervor but not really any kind of emotion, as if he wanted her to believe him no matter what the evidence suggested.
Michelle swallowed, and even though her headache was back and intensifying quickly, she followed her urge to respond to him before she could think too hard about if that was a good or logical idea. Her voice came out surprisingly even and nonchalant.
"You look cold. And like you've been in a fight."
Peter blinked again, and then, totally unexpectedly, his eyes began to redden as they filled with tears. He worked his jaw for a moment and then lifted his chin slightly.
"It could be worse, he said quietly. "I'm fine. I promise."
A moment later, after he seemed to compose himself somewhat, he slid a ten-dollar bill toward her.
"Keep the change, and call me when my order is ready, please," he said, jerking his head toward the wall he usually sat up against. Before she could say anything else, he limped over to a booth and sank heavily into it.
He pulled out his phone and began scrolling through it, then, and Michelle did the only think she could think to do at the moment: she fulfilled his order.
The day finally came.
The day he knew his selfish hope really was dead.
Peter walked into the shop like always did—or maybe a little less smoothly than he usually did because he'd been grazed by a bullet the night before—and mechanically walked to the counter to do the same thing he'd been doing every day for weeks now: order his coffee and then go plan for his patrol and for the next place he would visit to find an odd job.
He was trying to be more conservative with his money lately, but the food here was cheap and high in the calories Spiderman's metabolism desperately needed. He was always cold and hungry these days, but it was what it was.
He ordered quickly and was debating whether or not he should try to apply for a job at Delmar's just for the heck of it when MJ spoke to him.
She actually initiated a conversation that had nothing to do with his order and asked him if he was okay.
For the briefest of seconds, his entire world froze up again.
Then he became dully aware of his own heartbeat, pounding loud enough to make it past the cotton in his hears, and he realized that it was steady. It wasn't speeding up. He didn't feel tears in his eyes.
He was numb.
MJ was talking to him, but it didn't matter now.
He didn't mean to bark out a hysterical laugh or to smile like he did afterwards—both reactions happened entirely of their own accord. A result of the fact that the hardest battle he'd been fighting lately was finally over, he guessed.
"I'm fine," he said when the hysteria faded, and his voice was confident even to his own ears.
He dimly noted that MJ's expression changed, but it wasn't until she said something else—once again breaking script—that he realized he really had proven that time was fixing him. That it was truly making him into the Spiderman he needed to be—the one who didn't have to worry about the disaster that was Peter Parker.
"You look cold," MJ said (because she was a light and she cared even when she shouldn't and maybe he loved her but it didn't matter now). "And like you've been in a fight."
Peter was cold. And he'd been fighting a lot lately—and not just bad guys.
(He'd been fighting himself too).
And he was winning.
"It could be worse," he said, the words bubbling up on their own. "I'm fine. I promise."
Because it was true, wasn't it?
He knew his eyes were filled with tears and his jaws and throat were aching from the strain of keeping from crying. But he wasn't crying because he was sad. He was crying because of something that felt a lot like relief—albeit, a relief that didn't quite seem to fill up his chest—and even if his crying freaked MJ out again, it wouldn't matter in the long run.
From now on, he knew that coming to this shop wouldn't hurt him anymore.
He wouldn't have to wrestle that stupid, selfish hope that his friends would remember him.
It would become just another part of his day, another part of the endless blur of grey and cold and a red and blue suit that was his life now.
He could really protect them now—by being there if they needed his help but never actually engaging with them in a way that could get them hurt.
Peter told her to keep the change and call him when his order was ready, and then he walked away.
He knew now that he could live without the piece of himself he'd lost inside this shop.
The realization was both exhilaratingly light and impossibly heavy at the same time.
After that last encounter with Peter Parker, Michelle resorted to simply trying her best to not think about him at all.
She did this for two reasons. First, every time she did think about him, her mind and heart alike would begin racing for no discernible reason, and she'd grow steadily closer to having what felt a lot like a panic attack. She would become ensnared by a tangle of indistinguishable emotions so thick and dark that she began to suffocate. And the more she struggled to think reasonably and calmly, the faster they sucked away her breath. It was stupid. She hated it. And it just didn't make any sense—which might have been the worst fact of all.
Secondly, she and Ned were spending more and more of their time at the shop trying to figure out why Michelle had developed these weird symptoms and why they both had memory gaps in many of the same places and ways.
At this point, they had quite a list of memories that just didn't sit right with either of them, and Ned was convinced the pattern they were seeing had something to do with the person of Spiderman himself.
"Listen, something's up with the dude," he said of the vigilante on one of Michelle's rare work-free afternoons. They were sitting in the public library where they were supposed to be studying for a test, so he spoke quietly so he didn't disturb any of the other patrons. "Have you seen the news lately?"
Michelle chewed on the inside of her lip and tapped her pencil absentmindedly against her thigh as she thought about what Ned was referring to.
"Yeah," she said after a moment. "He's more reckless than usual. Taking on huge risks in fights when he doesn't have to, going after bigger and bigger crime, even expanding where he works. A lot of the reports could be rumors, but I don't think they are."
Ned nodded and tapped his black notebook, which was open, a messy tangle of hastily scrawled notes inside.
"And think about it: most of the weird memory gaps on our list really are related to him in some way. Why wouldn't the weird feelings be related too? They started around the same time, didn't they?"
Michelle thought about it.
Ned was right. It made sense—a lot of sense actually, and the kind of sense that seemed so obvious now that she felt incredibly stupid for not having connected the dots earlier. But something was still off. They were still missing crucial parts of the puzzle.
"So how exactly do you think he is connected?" Michelle asked, in part to reorder and refocus her own thoughts, which were bouncing around her already aching head in a way that had unfortunately become familiar since meeting Peter Parker a few months ago.
Ned threw his hands up.
"That's what I don't know. He's acting weird and we have these weird memories of him—and this weird lack of memories—and I just don't know. It's so…weird."
Michelle smirked despite herself.
"You used the word 'weird' so many times just now."
Ned snorted.
"I know. But how else am I supposed to describe it?"
The pair of them sat there for another hour after that, swapping increasingly random and implausible theories until it became obvious they were being disruptive and also not ever going to get any studying done this way. Her personal favorite conspiracy theory was the one where Spiderman was actually just the product of mass hysteria, and the reason she and Ned remembered spending so much time with him was because New York City as a whole had been abducted by aliens and then had their memories tampered with.
Obviously, that wasn't the case, but it felt good to laugh a little bit after all the craziness of college application season—and whatever was going on with their brains.
Despite her best efforts, Michelle couldn't help but notice Peter Parker.
What she noticed was that ever since he'd almost cried in front of her, he acted different every time he came into the shop.
He hadn't openly stared at her—stalker-style—since the second time he'd visited, but now he was fearlessly meeting and holding her gaze like any other customer, even if his eyes did seem…vacant. He began to actually eat his food after he'd gotten it, too—but always in the corner with earbuds in and his head down. He left soon as he was done.
He interacted differently with her and the other customers in the shop too. He was extraordinarily polite when ordering and always seemed to have a smile for anyone he ran into, even if it dropped so fast after the fact that she knew it was taking significant effort to convincingly pull it off. And he began carrying himself with a sense of purpose and deliberateness that had been markedly absent from his movements before. In some ways and at a first glance, he seemed more alive than she'd ever seen him, more focused and aware of his environment.
In fact, she might even have believed that was the case if it weren't for his empty eyes; the consistent signs of sleep deprivation and injuries in his face and movements; and even the expression she sometimes caught on his face when he was listening to whatever it was he listened to on his phone every day.
It was a look she knew because she'd seen it before—on her father's face when he thought she didn't know exactly who he was thinking about.
It was the look of a deep sadness trying to hide from itself.
And this disturbed her in ways she didn't understand—even though she knew Peter was just a stranger and she could be wildly misinterpreting all of this in the first place (she hated not feeling like she could trust her own judgment). But her feelings about him had somehow become even more complicated and confusing. Now that he was acting more like any other longtime customer, she felt more at a loss than ever about what to do with the strange physical symptoms and eerie feelings she'd been experiencing around him. In other words, she wasn't quite relieved that he was acting less unnerving than usual. As long as he had been acting unorthodox, she could convince herself that her physical reaction to his presence didn't mean there was something wrong or broken in her—only that there was something about him that she needed to figure out.
She had actually tried repeatedly at this point to convince herself that her desire to figure out what was going on with Peter Parker was borderline obsessive and stalker-ish, but—like the sadness in his eyes the first time they talked—the smile of his she had accidentally killed weeks ago haunted her.
And the migraines, nausea, and shakiness every time he was in the shop still didn't go away.
If anything, they got worse, and while painkillers helped, she knew she should probably bring the symptoms up to her dad soon if they continued. They definitely weren't just the result of stress or allergies.
The thing was, she felt stuck—trapped in her own head, which ran in ceaseless, increasingly urgent and uncontrollable circles around Peter Parker and the gaps in her memory and Spiderman without ever getting any closer to a real resolution. It was like her brain was determined to put a puzzle together, but the puzzle had come with several key pieces missing, and the picture she was seeing was doomed to never make any real sense.
(But to just…let it go was unthinkable, and she didn't know why).
It was beginning to affect every part of her life.
She couldn't concentrate on her schoolwork.
College prep seemed strangely dull and unappealing when before it had been one of the most exciting things in her life.
Every conversation with Ned seemed to be about the same things, and she could tell that while he wanted to figure out what was going on too, he also just wanted a brain break and something else to think about. Like she did, if she was being entirely honest.
It was like she was grieving but had absolutely no idea why, and it was beginning to really scare her.
What if she was going crazy?
What if she never figured out what was wrong with her?
What if she was already crazy?
A/N: The bad news: this chapter was still sad (sorry) and Peter went through some more stuff.
The good news(!): the part of this chapter with Peter and then all of chapter 3 should be the lowest points of the whole fic - which means it can only go up from here (maybe not steadily up, but up nonetheless). You can safely expect the true beginning of the fix-it part of this story in the next chapter. :DThank you so much for persevering through all the angst with me...and thanks for your feedback! :)
"When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me." 1 Corinthians 13:11