i couldn't write anything for spideychelle week, so this little birthday fic was born instead! i hope you enjoy :)
xXx
"Happy birthday!"
MJ stares at Ned, shaking her head with thinly-veiled amusement. "I told you I wasn't celebrating today."
"Hush." Ned pushes past her into the house. He holds a perfectly bow-tied cube of a gift box in one hand and a red velvet cupcake enclosed within a small plastic travel container in the other. "Like I would miss out on your exact birthdate."
MJ laughs as she closes and locks the front door, following Ned as he heads up the stairs after leaving his shoes in the foyer—he's going straight to her room, no doubt. "You're literally invited over tomorrow with everyone else. I don't see how the date makes a difference."
"Of course it does!" Ned says with an affronted look over his left shoulder, and MJ rolls her eyes, fighting back another laugh.
"If you say so."
Her parents both work today, which means MJ's official birthday celebration won't be until tomorrow afternoon, which is completely fine with her. MJ wants her mom and dad to be there, and if that means waiting an extra day to have cake and presents and a few friends over? Something tells MJ she'll survive these mere 24 hours.
There's nothing special about a date, after all. Only who she spends that day with.
Ned comes to a stop outside her closed bedroom door and gives her a plaintive look, earning a snicker from MJ.
"Ah, I see your hands are full."
"With presents for you. If you don't open the door, you'll never get them."
"Alas, woe is me," MJ says, pressing the back of her right hand to her forehead. "What a conundrum I have encountered! My friend, I fear that I must protest—"
Ned tries to kick her in the shin, and MJ is still snickering as she jumps back out of the way.
"Hey, violence is never the answer."
"It is to break your door down."
MJ shakes her head, grinning and grinning like there's no tomorrow. "You drive a hard bargain."
Ned sticks his tongue out at her, and MJ responds in turn before opening the door anyway, because he's Ned and she's MJ and it's always been just them, the two of them, eight years going on eighteen.
"Damn, girl, you live like this?" Ned says as he enters, watching where he steps so he doesn't trip over one of her many piles of everything—textbooks, clothes, journals, old CDs too scratched to use that will soon become the basis of MJ's next art project: voices we no longer hear.
She remembers getting each CD, starting with Let Go on her tenth birthday, back when she lived in New Orleans and always kept her curly brown hair in symmetrical cornrows or cropped at the base of her neck because of the suffocating humidity. She remembers taking each CD and ripping the music to her computer so her dad could move it onto her tiny red MP3 player for the long, long ride to Queens that began the next day. She remembers two CDs breaking during the drive and one CD breaking when they arrived because she threw it at the wall of her empty new room, angry, so angry she'd been ripped from her home like music from a shiny silver disc and it wasn't fair, it wasn't fair—
"You see, guests usually stay downstairs," MJ teases, pushing aside a pile of clothes so Ned has room to sit on her bed. She takes a seat at her desk, spinning the chair around to face her dearest friend. "If I'd known you were planning to invade my personal space, I might have considered making my living arrangements more presentable."
Ned snickers. "Considered, and then not done a damn thing about them?"
MJ winks at him. "You know me so well."
Ned has known her so long, known her messy room, known her impenetrable walls, known her since she was thrown into a new school in a new city expected to make new friends when Michelle knew even at ten that would never happen, not that year, because 5th graders had already chosen their loyal companions five, six, seven years ago and there was no room for a Black girl to fit into a white noise machine that already hummed along without her.
Her parents sent her to school anyway. She must not have been persuasive enough.
Ned hands her the box in his right hand, a simple white gift box tied off with a striking red ribbon. "The sooner you open the gift, the sooner I will be out of your hair. Which looks fan-fucking-tastic, by the way."
MJ grins, resisting the urge to fluff her newly red curls. "Wow, first you stand outside my house and demand my presence, and now you're already trying to escape with flattery?"
"You may find the mess of your room livable, Ms. Jones-Watson, but I would be terrified to lift any of these piles because I know I might find a family of horrible bugs crawling beneath it."
"Well, there's your problem, Mr. Leeds. You see, if I never clean, I'll never have to look at what lies beneath. Ignorance is bliss."
"I hate you. Open your gift."
It's so easy to laugh with Ned, so easy to talk with him about things she isn't sure she's talked about with anyone else ever before. Her parents fuss at her mess, she doesn't dare let her grandfather see a single pile, but for all Ned threatens to bring a broom and vacuum up there himself, he understands.
A home is messy because it's lived in, and when Michelle was ten, she convinced herself that if her room was always a mess, it would mean her room was always hers to live in, it would mean home would always be home, because from one city to another had been hell on wheels and she couldn't go back no matter how much she cried and tried so she wanted to make damn sure history didn't repeat itself.
She can't say if it has, and maybe that's the weird part, the part that makes time twist and turn like tidal waves rolling through her mind.
MJ pulls at the ribbon with melodramatic slowness, flipping Ned off with her other hand when he tells her to hurry it up, for Christ's sake. "Please, Ned. I am trying to savor the moment. You should be flattered."
Ned grumbles something under his breath in Tagalog, not that MJ needs to understand the words to understand what is being said. Ned's predictable like that, but having her world rocked once, just once was more than enough for MJ—sometimes she needs and always she likes a bit of predictability.
"Hi, I'm Ned," he whispered to her on the second day of school as they stood in the long, long lunchline for the cafeteria. Jones-Watson and Leeds, no K's in their class, side by side every day for a year—it made MJ wonder if their friendship was inevitable.
"I'm Michelle," she said, once she realized maybe he wanted to talk, maybe his smile was real, maybe he wasn't like the girl behind her in line the day before with straight brown hair who thought it was okay to tug at Michelle's braids.
She'd almost gotten in trouble on her very first day, because that stupid, stupid teacher just hadn't understood why Michelle yelled Stop! so loud. At least her dad came to the rescue when he picked her up after school.
"Sorry I wasn't here yesterday to meet you with everyone else," Ned said.
Michelle smiled, a little bit. "That's okay."
"Wanna sit with me at lunch?" he asked, and MJ giggled, because she knew and he knew they'd be stuck together either way with J through L, but she liked his politeness.
"Sure."
"What the fuck," MJ breathes, pulling out a polaroid camera the same shade of red as the box's shiny ribbon. "Ned, how much did this cost?"
"None of your business," Ned says with a smirk. "I know you've been wanting one of these for ages, and I figured you'd waited long enough."
"You're gonna make me cry, you asshole."
"Hey, you wanted to be able to take more pictures! I am more than happy to help you on your way."
A picture is worth a thousand words, and it's such a cliché but it's so damn true, MJ knows because there's a novel of her life missing, there's a novel and an epilogue that are gone with the wind because when the day to day changes faster than a hurricane some things get washed away in the storm and they will never be recovered again.
There's a hole in MJ's heart. Maybe that hole has felt bigger, emptier, heavier since Christmas. But goddamn if Ned Leeds isn't doing his best to fill it.
"I could kiss you right now," MJ says, holding the camera to her chest, and Ned laughs.
"My boyfriend might take issue with that."
"Tell Flash I'll kiss him, too."
"I mean, I'm pretty sure he's had a crush on you for a hot minute."
"Can you blame him?"
"Of course not, I've been in love with you since sixth grade."
MJ blows him a kiss, and Ned catches it before making a heart with his hands, and they're serious and not because MJ loves him so much it aches and she always has and it's just hurt so much more lately, hurt like coffee scalding the back of her throat even as winter turned to spring turned to summer and she's decided it's just an ache that won't fade and she tells herself she's okay with that.
She has to be.
"Check the box again," Ned says with a grin. "There's still one more thing."
It's a picture, MJ realizes as she looks down, a picture of them at senior prom—MJ wearing that blue and red dress she and her mother stitched and sewed by hand together, arm in arm with Ned on her left and Betty on her right and Flash giving her and Ned bunny ears from behind.
It's a little off-center, this picture, with a space to Ned's left that looks like it could be should be filled, but MJ loves it anyway, emptiness in her and around her and all.
She places the box down to grab a thumbtack from the small glass container in her desk drawer, unable to stop herself from smiling as she stands to pin the prom picture on the wall next to the one of her and Ned at homecoming.
MJ isn't sure, but she thinks she got taller.
One change of many.
MJ spins on her heel to hold out her hands like a letter-turner on Wheel of Fortune. "Like it?"
"Love it," Ned says, and MJ laughs before hopping over a pile of her books to fall next to Ned on her bed, not even protesting as he presses a kiss to her cheek.
"My friend, I apologize for almost refusing to let you in. You have proved me a fool."
Ned laughs, too, and it's like nothing but everything has changed since that second day of fifth grade.
Michelle followed Ned through the lunch line, or maybe she should say he waited for her while she went through the lunch line, because Ned had a red lunchbox in his hands but didn't go anywhere until Michelle gave the cafeteria worker her thumbprint with a quiet Thank you and they could both head into the lunchroom together.
They sat down side by side, and Ned opened his lunchbox, pulling out a red velvet cupcake enclosed in blue tupperware. "Wanna share?" he asked, and Michelle's eyes widened.
"Really?"
Ned nodded, opening the container to carefully break the cupcake in half. He gave Michelle the bigger piece, and she beamed at him, not even caring that she'd lost her upper left canine three days ago and had been too afraid to smile at school.
"Thank you!"
Ned hands MJ the red velvet cupcake he's been holding hostage in his left hand until that point. "Happy birthday, MJ."
MJ smiles, tearing off the plastic top of the container and handing it to Ned. "Let me guess—you made this with your lola?"
"They just don't taste as good without her touch, I'm telling you."
"Oh, I believe it." MJ breaks the cupcake in half, careful not to drop crumbs on her bed as she gives Ned his to eat over the plastic top. "Cheers."
Ned laughs, and they tap their containers together.
MJ rests her head on Ned's shoulder, enjoying the sweetness of the cupcake on her tongue. She sighs, content. "Thanks for coming over."
"Any time."
MJ thinks she should take a picture with her new camera, thinks she should document the moment, and she probably will, yes, but not so soon, not yet, not when she's happy as she is to be with her friend and all that matters is being, is feeling, is the here and now and whatever gaps, whatever holes there may be in MJ's past there is at least no space, no emptiness between her and Ned and their future, there never has been there never will be because MJ will not allow it.
Not again.
She doesn't know why she fears repetition of what never happened.
"I love you," MJ whispers, closing her eyes as a solitary tear slides down her cheek.
MJ loves Ned, she loves her CDs and her photos and her cupcake and her friends and her family and her city and her home, she loves them like it's all she knows—
Ned turns, burying his face in her red curls, red like a break of a heartache, and MJ doesn't need to look to know his face is as tear-streaked as her own. "I love you, too."
xXx
i have Many thoughts and headcanons about mj's life, feel free to chat with me about them on tumblr at starkravinghazelnoots :)