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Peter’s slouched on his laptop when MJ walks into the otherwise empty Biology classroom. She’s not surprised. He’s on that thing almost constantly, rotating his screen time between watching random videos, talking with Ned about whatever the fuck, and showing Ned those same videos. He always reacts in the same way, eyes widening and turning to exclaim something to Peter before Peter tells him to “keep it down, not here Ned, people can hear us you idiot”. Ned typically whispers something to Peter after that, communicating with ninety percent hand gestures and facial expressions, and their conversation typically dissolves around there.
He always keeps his laptop shut around her, though. It wasn't like MJ was jealous or pissed off or anything, but, well, she was a bit confused. And curious.
Always, except for today. He’s too engrossed in whatever it is he’s watching that he doesn’t even notice MJ enter the room.
She sneaks around the perimeter of the classroom slowly, attempting to keep her steps from echoing off the tile. He doesn’t look up from the video, or make any sort of indication that he’s seen or heard her since she’s been in the same room. That’s some crazy level of hyper-focusing, MJ thinks, but that thought is quickly replaced by wait, what the fuck when she manages to see the laptop screen over Peter’s hunched shoulders.
Peter’s face makes up the majority of the image, talking excitedly into the camera. She can’t hear what he’s saying as the real life Peter sitting in front of her has his headphones plugged in, one dangling loosely onto his thigh. She snaps her eyes back onto the screen, away from Peter’s (rather defined) thighs, and yep, she’s missed something because Peter’s now standing in the doorway of the room, talking to some overweight balding guy in a suit jacket.
Strange.
“Are those vlogs?” She asks suddenly, and enjoys how Peter scrambles to shut the laptop, but MJ, suddenly grateful for her height and exceptionally long limbs, snatches it out from in front of him and holds it out of his reach. “Are you trying to be a YouTuber? What are your videos like, ‘Hey guys, it’s Peter, welcome back to my channel, today we’ll be doing the Star Wars trivia challenge -’”
“MJ! Give it back!” he whines - honest to God whines. It’d probably be funny, really, if it wasn’t for the panicked expression on his face.
MJ narrows her eyebrows and cocks her head. “Why? What’s on there that’s so important to you?” She’s aiming for suspicious and slightly terrifying with her voice, and, well, it works if she’s going by the way Peter gulps and shifts his eyes away from hers.
“It’s. Stark internship stuff, I’m not supposed to tell - or, er, show - anyone.”
“Hm,” she says as he stands up and reaches for the laptop. The hem of his shirt gets pulled up over his stomach and, wow, okay. Distraction by abs. Well played, Parker, well played.
He shuts his laptop as soon as he has it in his grasp and shoves it into his bag swiftly. “Anyways. Don’t you have class? There’s, like, two minutes until next block.”
A not at all subtle topic change. Hmm, less well played, minus points, et cetera. Is he…
Nervous?
MJ squints at him. “I’m in this class. With you.”
Peter’s face rearranges itself into an expression of recognition as she takes the seat beside him, but MJ isn’t giving him any further attention. She’s deep in thought, and she’s got plans. Big, big plans.
Peter’s been shirty for a while, ditching Decathlon randomly and showing up late to class, and he won’t give anyone a straight answer when asked about his behaviour. It’s odd. And MJ’s a smart person, thanks. She knows that whatever it is he’s doing, it’s probably got something to do with those vlogs, sorry, videos, judging by how protective he was over them.
She’s got to find out why Peter’s acting so weird. She’s going to watch those videos, somehow, even if it kills her.
And judging from the way she’s been so easily distracted by Peter lately? It just might.
-
It’s not like she’s suddenly obsessed with him, she rationalizes while pretending to be absorbed in The Bluest Eye and ignoring the nerdy conversation taking place at the other end of the lunch table. Okay, so maybe she cares about Peter more than she previously thought she did. It’s not hard to see why: he’s a genuinely nice guy (not like a self-proclaimed nice guy that’s just trying to get with a girl, because ew) who cares about people. And that’s a surprisingly rare quality for people, especially teenagers, and especially white boy teenagers, to have.
Plus it doesn’t hurt that he has somehow mysteriously, under the nose of Midtown’s entire student body, gotten seriously built in the past couple of months. Like, his shoulders are actually really broad. And his arms look like they’re in a constant battle with his gym shirts, stretching the fabric so thinly that MJ’s surprised that they haven’t ripped.
And, okay, maybe the way his hair frames his face in waves that ever-so-slightly brush against his shirt collar is nice. He’s got a really nice smile as well, the kind that you’d see on a newspaper advertisement for a dentist or an oral surgeon or whatever. His whole face is nice, objectively speaking, and the fact that his eyebrows seem to be more like third-cousins-twice-removed than sisters or twins and that his ears seem to constantly want to fly away from his head, both things that should make him less attractive, just seem to add to the overall niceness of his face.
MJ flicks her vision up from her book to look at him, to make sure that she hasn’t, like, somehow made up his attractiveness in the fifteen minutes she’s been looking at something that wasn’t his face, and catches him looking at her with a weird expression. “What?” she asks, and it’s a good thing her face doesn’t flush easily because if it did it would probably be bright red.
“Nothing, nevermind,” he grins before turning back to Ned.
MJ rolls her eyes and returns her ‘concentration’ back onto her book that’s been open to the same page for the entire lunch block.
Fuck, she thinks. This is more than just her being curious. This is bad.
-
She’s at Peter’s apartment, and it’s not like that’s anything new, over the past few months her visits have grown from ‘occasional’ to ‘frequent’ to ‘habitual’, but the thing is. This is the first time since her Realization (with a capital R) yesterday that maybe, just maybe, she likes Peter as more than a friend.
Maybe.
She wants to groan in frustration and kick her legs and just have an all-out meltdown because this situation is so stupid, she’s so stupid, stupid Peter with his stupid toothpaste-advert smile, but Peter is literally in the room with her so doing that would probably be unwise.
Ned asks her what she got for question five of their Chemistry homework and their answers aren’t the same. Well, fuck, that’s not good. She’s distracted.
“It’s products minus reactants, you have it the other way around,” said source of her distraction says, standing in front of her and somehow managing to comprehend her scrawled formulas while reading them upside down.
She scans her answer for the offending error. “Oh, shit, you’re right,” she mutters and grabs for an eraser.
If Peter or Ned notice that she’s acting flustered or distracted, well, she’ll just stab herself with her pencil right then and there and bleed out on Peter’s carpet. That’d probably be less awkward.
-
She decides to ask Ned about the videos one day when they’re sitting at lunch, sans Peter. It used to be weird, hanging out with just Ned without the buffer between them that Peter’s presence provides, but Peter is busy with his new hobby of being a flakey piece of shit that never shows up on time to anything so MJ and Ned have, as an unexpected but not entirely unwelcome side effect, spent a whole lot of time together in the recent months.
He knows that she gets soy milk in her London Fog lattes from Starbucks, and she knows who he would’ve chosen to cast as Han Solo in the spinoff movie. They’re friends, even without Peter, and somehow it manages to not be weird at all.
“Videos? I - I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ned sputters, attempting to hide his piss-poor lie behind a sudden bout of unsure laughter. If MJ wasn’t so annoyed at the two of them from keeping secrets from her, she would probably find Ned’s uncomfortableness entertaining.
She quirks an eyebrow and points her yogurt spoon at him. “You know, those videos that he shows you practically every single class. You know what I’m talking about? Those ones.”
Ned shifts uncomfortably. Poor guy can’t lie to save his life.
MJ spoons some more yogurt into her mouth and continues to stare at him. He withers in his seat. Perish.
Luckily for Ned, Peter chooses that moment to slide into the spot next to MJ. “Hey guys, sorry, had a phone call,” he says, setting his lunch tray down on the table. The tension between MJ and Ned is apparently pretty obvious, because he starts to look back and forth between them, eyes narrowing in confusion. “What’s going on?”
“I was just asking Ned about the videos on your laptop,” MJ replies candidly, freeing Ned from her laser stare so she can look at Peter with wide honest eyes and a smile. “You know, since you won’t tell me what they are I thought I’d look for answers somewhere else.”
Peter groans. “You’re still on that?”
MJ nods, licking the yogurt off of her spoon. She doesn’t miss the way Peter’s eyes flicker down towards her mouth briefly, or how he pointedly swallows and steers the conversation away from the videos and towards a different topic. Huh.
(She ignores the fact that the only reason she noticed his two movements was because she watching him like a movie playing on the big screen. That’s irrelevant.)
She eats the rest of her lunch without joining in on the conversation occurring at the other end of the table. “Bye, nerds,” she says abruptly, standing up, “I’m going to the library where hopefully there’s less people talking about Legos.”
If she detours past Peter’s locker and has a couple of tries at his locker combination, well, that’s no one’s business but her own.
-
“The speed of Mach 3 to the nearest hundredth is...?”
Peter buzzes in first. “1534.54 miles per hour.”
“Nice.” MJ flips the card to the back of the pile. She’s currently testing the team on science, so it’s really only Abe, Cindy, Ned, and Peter answering any of her questions. Reading off the next card, she asks, “In 1912, Alfred Wegener hypothesized which theory?”
Instead of immediately hearing the sound of three buzzers being hit simultaneously, the Jaws theme rings out loudly from the general direction of Peter’s thigh. He scrambles for a second, eventually managing to produce the offending phone. “Ah, MJ, can I take this real quick?” he asks, already half-sliding out of his chair before she responds.
“Whatever, go for it. I’m, uh, going to run to the bathroom, so Flash, you can quiz everyone on American History for a sec, cool?”
Flash grumbles and rolls his eyes, but stands up and snatches the stack of cards out of MJ’s hands. He knows better than to question MJ.
Peter’s already out of the room, so she hurries out and ducks into a niche behind a group of lockers that’s fairly close to the girls’ bathroom. She can hear Peter’s half of the conversation clearly, his voice ringing down the hall.
“...wait, today? Like, today today? No - yeah, that’s chill, that’s fine, but May says I gotta be back for dinner tonight and I gotta to bed earlier because apparently sleep is important for growing teenage boys - okay. Sorry. You’ll know where I am? Right, obviously. So I’ll see you tod -”
He cuts off abruptly in the middle of his sentence and huffs, annoyed. MJ slips out of her hiding spot and slinks back in the direction of the practice room before Peter manages to walk back down the hallway and notice she’s there. Entering the room, she strides straight towards the podium, bumping Flash off mid-question with her hip, and resumes her position facing the team. Peter enters the room some two seconds later with a perturbed expression clouding his face, but he brightens when he notices MJ looking at him.
“You good, Parker?” she asks.
“Yeah, let’s do this,” he replies, grinning at her while he takes his place.
She can’t stop the grin that forms on her own face as she looks down at the cards. Not that she really tries.
-
MJ stares at the back of Peter’s head during History, deep in thought. In the back of her mind she’s listening as the teacher drones on about the the War of 1812, but the majority of her attention is being used to speculate about how to handle her current Situation (with a capital S).
So maybe she likes Peter. As more than a friend would. Okay. What exactly is she going to do about that? Knowing who she is as a person, probably nothing is what. Who is she kidding, she’s perfectly content with watching him workout during gym exist from the sidelines like she used to before she started talking with him and Ned, and hey, if she plays up the sarcasm during conversations with him, everything will be fine.
It’ll never even cross his mind that she likes him in that sort of way, because...
Because, to be honest, it’s just so random and weird. Because this crush came way out of left field and Peter probably thinks that MJ has the emotional range of a ballpoint pen. Because there’s just no way he likes her back, plain and simple.
Because - and MJ’s thought a lot about this - she knows what Peter’s like when he has a crush on someone. He wore his adoration and admiration of Liz like it was some obnoxious holiday sweater that lit up and played Christmas carols, and people couldn’t help but to notice it. Everyone, even Liz, knew about his crush. And, at least as far as MJ can tell, he’s not like that with her.
He doesn’t trip over his words when he talks to her, he never blushes randomly while in her presence, he never looks at her any differently than how he looks at Ned, and he never treats her as more than a friend. Sure, she’s caught him looking at her for extended periods of time, and, okay, there was that time she was fairly sure he was staring directly at her mouth, but still. He’s a friend, like Ned. They’re friends.
She’ll be okay, she supposes as her teacher tells the class about the time Canadians burned down the White House (while simultaneously thinking God I wish that were me). She’s Michelle Jones. She’s not gonna beat herself up over a boy, of all things. Even if said boy somehow has exceptionally toned abs despite not working out ever and actually engages with her in discussions about the effects of Eurocentrism in the American education system.
Even if he’s the best friend she’s had in years and makes her heart beat wildly whenever he so much as smiles at her.
Even if.
-
(1:21) from: peter
so u know that history essay
(12:21) from: peter
can u uuuuhh proofread my first draft tonight
(12:21) from: peter
bc i love ned but his grammar is the literal worst
(12:22) to: peter
we have a history essay? since when?
(12:22) from: peter
he assigned it today in class?? were u not listening
(12:22) from: peter
disgraceful .
(12:23) to: peter
shut up i was thinking abt other stuff. sure yeah
(12:24) from: peter
sweet u can come over to ned’s tonight cause im gonna b there helping him with the bio project as well
(12:24) from: peter
i mean if that works for u ofc
(12:24) to: peter
yeah sure that works
She’s not quite sure why he couldn’t just ask her to come over in person, but she’s glad that he didn’t. If he did, he would’ve seen MJ’s flustered face when she realized that she was so distracted by looking at Peter that he missed the teacher fully assigning an essay.
Peter was right. That is disgraceful.
-
He’s watching the videos again during Chemistry.
Well. MJ can’t see his screen so she can’t exactly be sure, but he’s staring at his laptop with such rapt attention that she doubts he’s just reading over his lab report.
Ned nudges him slightly with his elbow, and all of a sudden Peter’s sitting up straight and completely focused on the lesson, not paying the video playing on his laptop any mind. And then he shuts the laptop and actually opens his textbook for what is probably the first time in months.
Damn. There goes that snooping opportunity.
Then MJ realizes: She hasn’t exactly had many ‘snooping opportunities’ (to use proper journalist terms) to begin with. She’s not exactly doing a great service to Christiane Amanpour right now.
Sure, she listened to that phone call, but that didn’t exactly provide her with a lot of information as to what Peter’s hiding. Just that his aunt cares about him, which. Shocking.
She knows the videos are really the key to unraveling the enigma that is Peter Parker. If she could just get her hands - or, rather, her eyes - on them, she would be set. She wouldn’t have to spend hours puzzling over his mysterious absences and bruises that appear and disappear in the course of a day. She could just take the Gordian Knot approach and cut right through her problem. But the thing is, MJ doesn’t exactly have a plan for how she’s going to watch them. And that makes her mad.
She’s an organized person at heart, the type who has a colour-coding system for annotating textbooks and visits Staples on the regular to get new binders and duotangs for each and every subject. She makes plans, be it for studying or Decathlon practices or even the general structure of her day, and damn it, they’re good plans. But apparently, she just can’t seem to plan a way to get Peter to leave her alone with his laptop.
There’s other factors that are at play, of course, and she knows that. Between figuring out her crush on Peter and attempting to do well in her AP courses, she hasn’t really had a ton of time to go behind her crush her friend’s back and figure out all of his secrets.
That doesn’t mean she’s not going to figure him out eventually. After all, there’s a reason her journalism teacher called her ‘terrifying’ in her report card comments.
Peter rolls his shoulders and cracks his neck, and MJ can just make out a small scrape on the side of his neck. Weird.
-
They’re on the floor of Ned’s room, MJ on Peter’s laptop, highlighting all the things that he needs to cite in his history essay, when Peter gets a phone call.
Classic.
“Shit,” he scrambles up, pulling out his phone and sliding across the screen with his finger, silencing the ringtone blaring out. “Hi, May, sorry - I forgot, no I’m not right now, I promise! Yeah. I’ll be back soon, I’m at Ned’s. Okay. Bye,” he hangs up and looks apologetically at the two of them.
“What’s up?” Ned asks, looking up from his brightly coloured protein synthesis diagram. He looks slightly more concerned than he should about a simple phone call to one’s aunt, in MJ’s opinion.
She listens attentively to Peter’s reply because she damnit, she’ll take every snippet of information she can about what he’s keeping from her. So what, she’s being nosey. She prefers the word ‘opportunistic’.
Peter half smiles, half grimaces while grabbing his backpack and textbook. “I forgot I promised May that I’d be home to help with dinner tonight, sorry guys but I gotta go.”
“Yeah, sure, whatever,” MJ says with a hint of dejection in her voice and shoos him out of the door with a flick of her hand. “Bye loser.”
“Bye.”
Please leave, please leave, please leave…
Yes.
MJ listens out for Peter as he says goodbye to Ned’s mother and shuts the door behind him before returning back to his essay. She pretends to continue proofreading for a good five minutes before she says to Ned, attempting to sound like she just realized that “Oh, shit, I still have his laptop.”
Ned flicks his eyes towards the laptop in question. “I’ll drop it by his place,” he offers, but MJ is quick to shake her head.
“Don’t be dumb, I’m going that way anyways. I’ll take it.”
Ned opens and closes his mouth like a fish before replying, “Sure, yeah, that works.”
MJ hums in acknowledgement. “I’ll text him and take it over after I leave.”
-
Spoiler alert: MJ doesn’t take the laptop straight to Peter’s place.
Oh, she texts him after she leaves Ned’s place to let him know she still has it, sure, but she also makes sure to include the fact that she’ll drop it off ‘later that evening’ and not within the next few hours. She’s got plans (that part she excludes from the text, obviously).
Step 1: get onto Peter’s laptop.
MJ makes sure that the laptop doesn’t shut down, only goes to sleep, so it doesn’t ask MJ for a password upon waking it up, which, score. She probably could’ve gotten onto it had the password protection been there, but it’s nice that she didn’t have to waste her time on such a menial task when she could be doing much more important work.
Step 2: find and watch the videos.
This step is a little harder, because in a shocking turn of events Peter doesn’t have a folder labeled ‘Suspicious Videos’ conveniently right on his desktop. He does, however, have a general ‘Videos’ folder, which MJ clicks and is immediately greeted with the sight of over twenty video thumbnails, each named ‘Germany’ plus a number. She clicks on ‘Germany 1’ and the screen fills with a shot of a quickly moving road taken through a car window.
“New York, Queens. It’s a rough borough, but hey, it’s home.” Peter’s narration filters out of the speakers, and MJ scrambles to get her headphones before her little sister overhears the video and demands to watch as well. Once she finds and plugs them in, the video has ended, so she clicks on ‘Germany 2’ and settles herself on her bed.
It’s not until ‘Germany 4’ when the videos start getting a little strange. Peter’s voice says “Something about Captain America going crazy?” over a montage of different clips and MJ furrows her eyebrows at that. That’s weird, she muses, Peter’s so-called ‘internship retreat’ was at the exact same time as the Avengers’ ‘Civil War’ (as coined by the BBC).
Huh. Okay. That can’t be a coincidence, right?
‘Germany 5’ starts playing automatically, and MJ’s starting to like the guy who’s been in some of the other videos, because the way he delivers “Well, we’re not roommates” is the exact same way that MJ would. She appreciates that.
The screen changes to ‘Germany 6’, which -
Wait. What?
MJ sits up away from the screen and blinks, as if that’ll make the image disappear. That’s - that’s a really shitty Spider-Man costume. What the entire fuck is going on?
The other man ushers Peter through a door (“That’s still my room? I thought that was a closet. My room is way bigger than I thought it was -”) where he gets greeted with a silver briefcase-looking thing donned with a card saying “A minor upgrade. -TS” and the briefcase opens and okay. That’s a Spider-Man suit. Okay.
“This is the best day of my life!” Peter says into the camera.
This is the craziest day of my life, MJ thinks.
‘Germany 7’ starts playing, and the screen fills with Spider-Man, now donning the costume MJ recognizes from their interaction in D.C., talking and it’s Peter’s voice so it must be Peter talking so Peter must be Spider-Man.
Holy shit. Peter is Spider-Man.
MJ groans. She’s been crushing on a superhero this entire time.
Of all the things she thought that Peter was hiding, this certainly was not it.
-
(6:47) from: peter
hey im like 2 mins away from ur place can i pick up my laptop?? just so u dont have to come over to my place
The text pulls MJ away from the laptop, which she’s been watching for over half an hour with laser focus. There’s all sorts of videos on there, most of them semi-blurry recordings Spider-Man - no, wait, Peter - fighting off various members of the Avengers, with a conversation with Tony Stark happening at the end. It was all so surreal, seeing Peter ‘I wear t-shirts with science puns on them unironically’ Parker holding his own against and helping to take down some guy the size of a small skyscraper. MJ almost couldn’t believe it, except for the fact that she could.
Because it’s Peter. Of all of the people she suspected to secretly be a vigilante in their spare time, he certainly wasn’t one of them. But MJ realizes now that she shouldn't've been so surprised because everything about Peter screams kindness and selflessness and all sorts of heroic qualities.
(6:50) from: peter
time sensitive question blease respond
Shaking herself out of her thoughts, MJ sends off a reply.
(6:50) to: peter
yeah i’ll bring it down
As soon as she gets the Delivered notification, she hears someone knocking on the door. She hurriedly exits out of the video player and shuts Peter’s laptop before going to answer the knock, praying that her sister doesn’t come investigate. Her parents are both out, which is good. One less thing to deal with.
Peter’s standing right outside her door and he smiles when he sees MJ. His hair is slightly more tousled than it usually is and his cheeks look rosy and oh, he’s just been out Spider-Manning, MJ realizes. Huh.
“Here,” she says, snapping herself back to reality. She hands over the laptop.
“Thanks,” Peter says, taking it out of her hand and shoving it quickly into his backpack that’s currently slung over one shoulder. His expression falters slightly, and he asks, “Did you, um, look at it at all, or...”
MJ shakes her head. “Nah,” she lies, “if you have a secret folder of Star Wars fanfiction hidden on there somewhere, I haven’t found it, don’t worry.”
Reassurance floods over Peter’s expression as he loops his other arm through his backpack strap. “Ha, okay, yeah. Thanks, uh, bye -” he makes to leave but MJ interrupts him.
“Hey, why were you even out here? I don’t even live close to you?”
Peter licks his lips (stop staring, MJ, you’re better than this) and stutters, looking a little like a deer in the headlights. “How do you know where I live?”
“Don't dodge the question.”
“I was… about to run errands for May.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah, um… I’ve gotta go get some… paper towels.”
“Paper towels.”
“Yep. We were making lasagne but it ended in catastrophe so now we have none left, and knowing who we both are as disaster-prone people that’s not good.”
“And there was no other store closer to you that had them?”
“May’s really specific about her paper towels. She needs, um, brand name.”
God, he's a shitty liar. How hasn't she noticed this before? “Brand name?”
Peter nods vigorously, and if MJ hadn’t just watched a recording of him getting smacked around by a guy five times taller than him, she would be a little worried about him becoming concussed. “Yeah, and nowhere else sells them. The stores are about to close, so…”
“Oh, don't let me hold you back.” MJ smiles, but she can’t make it reach her eyes. If Peter notices, he doesn’t say anything. “Go get your paper towels.”
“I will,” Peter says as he stumbles out of the doorway, “go do that.”
MJ shuts the door before he manages to take two steps away. Paper towels? Seriously? It’s like he’s not even trying to come up with a believable excuse. MJ doesn’t even know how she hadn’t figured out Peter’s secret a long time ago, what with his awful excuses, constant absences, and unexplained injuries and fatigue plaguing him during school, but now that she knows what she does, she can't help but feel a little dumb.
God, she’s really not as observant as she thought she was.
-
She’s not going out of her way to avoid Peter at school, it’s just that she hasn’t been going out of her way to see him. And apparently, that makes a big difference.
Two days have gone by without Peter or Ned approaching her about the fact that she’s started sitting four seats away from them at lunch instead of her usual two, or the fact that the frequency of her sarcastic comments has dropped exponentially. Two days isn’t exactly a long time, and if she goes the weekend without seeing them, well, maybe she’ll be less pissed at Peter and not want to avoid him constantly so things can resume as normal.
Then, of course, Ned goes and includes her in some plans for a study session that will probably dissolve into a movie marathon on Saturday and she finds herself making up a reason why she can’t go.
“I’m having dinner with my family and I can’t get out of it, sorry,” she says and she can tell as soon as the words leave her mouth that the excuse falls flat.
“Okay…” Ned says, “Maybe Sunday?”
“Yeah, maybe.” She continues reading The Bluest Eye, and ignores the fact that she’s made a lot more progress in this book since she’s stopped talking to Peter (and Ned by extension) all the time.
Because, well, she hadn’t realized just exactly how much of her time Peter and Ned took up until she kind of cut them out. Just last night, she was surprised about how quickly her homework got done when she wasn’t taking constant breaks to text their groupchat. Maybe this is good for her, she thinks.
But then she remembers the feeling she gets in her chest whenever she hears Peter laugh and no, this can’t be good for her. Not if it means cutting off the only two people in her life she’s ever considered her friends.
-
“The organelle that processes and bundles proteins and lipids as they are synthesized in the cell is called?”
Ned hits the buzzer. Odd. Biology isn't his strong suit, but then again, maybe Peter’s help on that assignment has resulted in him learning stuff. “The Golgi body.”
MJ looks at him. “Also known as…”
“Golgi… apparatus?”
“Mhm.”
Peter hasn’t answered a single question all practice, and she’s been focusing on science, specifically chemistry and biology, so she knows it’s not because he can’t answer any of them. MJ watches him as he high-fives Ned below the table and returns back to just staring at his hands, hands that have decidedly not been hitting the buzzer. She wants to call him out on it, but that would mean instigating an interaction with him, and she hasn’t done that since the weekend. It’s Wednesday.
Practice continues without incident and then, before she even realizes, MJ’s packing up her question cards and shouldering her backpack and making to walk out of the room. She notices that Peter’s the first person to leave. She also notices that he’s not in Chemistry, which is right after lunch.
When she checks the news later that evening, she finds that Spider-Man was spotted with Iron Man dealing with some giant mutant lizard down in Manhattan, and she doesn’t exactly know why her heart races when she reads that headline.
It’s probably worry, but maybe it’s something else.
-
“Hey, MJ, can I talk to you for a sec?” Peter catches up to her as she shoulders her way down the hallway.
This is something MJ should’ve expected, she realizes in hindsight, because Peter’s a nice guy and would want to know what he did to make MJ pissed at him. She briefly wonders what he thinks is going on, and if he’s figured out that she knows about his secret double life. Maybe he’s going to talk to her about that right now.
But honestly, if he chooses right now, in the break between Biology and History class on a Thursday afternoon in the middle of the school hallway, to tell her that he’s Spider-Man, she might about lose it.
“Sure,” she smiles blithely and stops walking. “Let’s talk.”
If Peter’s put off by the shortness of her tone, he doesn’t do anything to show it. “Look, it’s just, you’ve kind’ve been a little distant this last, like, week and I wanted to, uh, check and make sure I didn’t, you know, do anything to piss you off or something.”
He cards his hands through his hair and looks up at her through his eyelashes and goddamn it, maybe if he looked less like a desperate puppy MJ could find the energy to tell him just how mad she is currently, but that would cause a potentially very public scene and she has a reputation to maintain.
“No,” she says, the lie tasting like bile in her mouth, “you haven’t done anything.”
She wonders, briefly, if Peter tastes it on his tongue too, whenever he lies. Or maybe he's just gotten used to it.
Peter smiles, and it’s like the entire sun is shining right there in the school hallway, that’s how bright his expression is. “Okay. Okay, cool. Um, see you later, then.”
He turns on his heel and bounds down the hallway, towards where Ned has been standing and probably watching them for the last few minutes. The bounce in his step is evident and MJ wishes he would’ve just told her about everything so that she wouldn’t have to lie to him like that.
This boy is going to ruin her, she thinks.
-
Peter asks her and Ned over to do homework and she can’t come up with an excuse in time to get out of it.
It’s fine, it’s not awkward at all, not really. MJ just… keeps to herself. Like she used to do before she started hanging out with them. They ask her questions and she replies and it’s almost like it used to be up until the point when Ned has to leave.
“My mom’s telling me I have to do chores,” he says apologetically as he backs out of the room. He shoots Peter a glance that MJ is sure is filled with all sorts of meaning, and then disappears from the doorframe.
The room is filled with silence. It’s overbearing.
Peter coughs and erases a sigfig.
“I need some air,” MJ says abruptly, standing up.
Peter stands up with her. “Yeah, ok, the roof’s open if you want to go up there.”
“Sure.”
She makes for the door, and Peter follows her. Damn, she wanted to get away from him, but she can’t exactly tell him that, can she? Well, she supposes, if he goes up onto the roof with her it could end in a Conversation (with a capital C). MJ doesn’t know if that’d be a good thing or a bad thing.
The air on the roof is chilly and the wind is wrapping around MJ, biting through the small holes in her cardigan. Peter stands some four feet away from her and doesn’t say a word. The tension is tangible in the air, and MJ knows she’s not the only one who notices.
“Are you mad at me?” Peter finally asks after they spend five minutes in silence.
MJ shrugs. She still hasn’t figured that out herself.
“Can you tell me what I did?”
Fixing Peter with a look, MJ admits, “Well, it’s more of what you didn’t do. Or say.”
She watches as Peter ponders her words for a moment and then turns to face MJ. “You watched the videos.” It’s not a question.
“Got it in one.”
Peter inhales sharply and runs his hands through his hair, pulling it up and away from his face. “So, wait, you went behind my back to invade my privacy by doing the one thing I asked you not to and then lied to my face about it? And you're mad at me?” he says, volume raising with every word that leaves his mouth.
“Oh, yeah, villainize me for lying, that makes a lot of sense,” MJ retorts. Fine, if he’s going to be pissed, she will too. “It’s not like I lied straight to your face for every. Single. Day for over four fucking months, but yeah, I’m the bad guy here, you got me.”
“I was going to tell you!” he exclaims, defensive.
“When? When were you going to tell me? Because there’s a part of me that wants to believe you but there’s a much larger, much angrier part of me that thinks you’re full of shit, Peter!”
He doesn’t speak. Or look her in the eye.
She forays on, ignoring the way her heart is steadily climbing up her throat. “Don’t you think that maybe I deserve to know when you’re off gallivanting around New York and risking your life on the daily? What if something happened to you and I didn’t know? You and Ned -” and she can’t finish that sentence because suddenly there’s a lump in her throat the size of her fist and when did she start tearing up?
“MJ,” he begins, softly, but she’s turned her head away from him and covered her face in her hands. God, she doesn’t even know what she’s crying over now. The thought of Peter getting hurt? Or him lying to her? “I did it to keep you safe -”
“Oh, so I need protection but Ned doesn't? Cool, Peter, real cool -”
“I didn't tell Ned! I haven't told anyone before, okay, so I wanted to figure out how and when to tell you without this -” he guesteres back and forth between them “- happening, but I guess it doesn't matter.”
MJ looks up to meet his eyes and sees that he’s crying too. Fuck, this shouldn’t be happening, she thinks. Not like this.
“I’m mad at you,” she says, fighting to keep her voice even, “very, very mad but I don’t want to fight because -” she stops herself, then thinks, fuck it, there’s a lot of emotions out on the playing field and adding one more won’t hurt, “- because you and Ned are the only friends I’ve ever really had and if something happened to you and I didn’t know I - I don’t know what I’d do. But it would be awful. So, yeah, I’m exceptionally pissed off, but I care too much about you to let this ruin us.”
Peter doesn’t speak for a moment and MJ gets worried that she said too much, that she revealed too much about how she feels because she never, ever gets emotional like this but then he says a simple, “I’m still sorry,” and takes a step towards her, shrinking the gap between them.
She follows his movements and steps closer to him. “Yeah, you should be.”
He bridges the gap and pulls her into a hug, tight and hard. They’re both crying, and they must look stupid like this, but right now there’s nobody else around to see. And MJ wouldn’t care if there were.
They stay like that on the rooftop of the apartment complex for what seems like forever, tears falling onto each other’s shoulders, until Peter pulls away and looks at her, the lights from the city glinting in his eyes. “Wanna see something cool?”
-
“If you die,” MJ calls out, struggling to be heard over the sudden wind that’s picked up in the last five minutes, “can I keep the costume?”
“Ned already called dibs!” Peter shouts back. “And also I’m not going to die!”
“The fact that you said that as an afterthought isn’t really doing much to convince me,” she mutters. Peter somehow manages to hear her and laughs.
He’s standing sideways on the outside of the building, feet planted firmly onto the vertical brick wall. “This is all me, by the way,” he says as MJ peers over the side, ignoring the sudden sense of vertigo that rushes over her body like a wave. It is vertigo, she swears. There is absolutely nothing else is making her stomach feel all upside down and twisted up.
“Uh huh.”
“I’m serious! When we get back inside I’ll show you by, like, I dunno, pacing on the ceiling or something.”
“Without the suit?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Hm,” MJ hums, trying to sound indifferent and keep her, ah, opinions about the suit out of her voice. Because the suit in question fits very tightly around Peter’s body, and the piping and designs do absolutely jack all to distract from his very visible, very defined muscles in his arms and thighs and core and probably his back and -
“Wanna try?” his question pulls her out of her wandering thoughts.
“Standing on the side of a building? Hm, I’ll opt out of that one, thanks.”
“Shut up. I’ll hold you,” his voice is sincere and okay, maybe the thought of being pressed tightly up against Peter’s body while he literally held her life in his hands was slightly entertaining to MJ. Maybe. Shh.
He has his mask on. She can’t even see his face so it might as well be literally anyone else offering this to her, and yet. She wants to try.
“If you drop me, I will come back from the dead just to kill you,” she warns as she extends her arm out to him. He bends up to grab it (the amount of core strength needed to not only hold your body fully horizontal but to sit up from that position? insane, probably) and pulls her down to meet him.
“I’ve got you, I’m super strong now, I can bench press, like, eight cars or something.”
And then she’s lying on top of him (innocently, like how friends always do) with nothing stopping her from falling except for Peter’s strangely sticky feet.
“Relax,” he murmurs as he feels her body tense up instinctively.
Oh God, what was she doing? If Peter’s legs gave way, or he actually wasn’t strong enough to hold the body weight of two people horizontally, she would literally and fully die. She’d never hear the end of it from her sister.
But.
She can also feel Peter’s warm, solid body underneath her, and when she lifts her head up and gazes around it almost looks like she’s floating above the streets of Queens. She wraps her arms around Peter’s neck and breathes, awestruck by every single thing happening around and below her.
“I’m going to do something and you can’t freak out,” Peter says, and MJ nods, too entranced by her situation to care. It’s not like he would do anything to hurt her, she thinks, and then -
And then lifts his mask up over his mouth and turns and kisses her.
Her first instinct isn’t to bite down on his lip, or to jump away, or to freak out in any sort of way. It’s to kiss him back, to roll up the remainder of his mask and throw it onto the roof, and then to run her hands through his hair and pull him closer.
His hands grip the side of her face, somehow managing to be both gentle and strong at the same time. She supposes she should be a bit more worried about him, you know, getting distracted and sending the two of them plummeting towards their tragic and untimely deaths, but right now she doesn’t care. She can’t feel anything except for the warmth of Peter’s body, his lips pressed against hers, and the wind whipping around their bodies.
Peter adjusts slightly, shifting his head so it’s tilted slightly and MJ presses deeper into the kiss. She doesn’t exactly know what she’s doing - she’s never really had a proper actual kiss before - but if judging by the way that Peter reciprocates the action and pulls her in tightly, she’s doing something right.
Eventually, after what feels like forever, they break apart, both breathing heavily.
“Yeah?” Peter asks.
“Yeah,” she replies, easy as breathing,
“That was…”
“Yeah,” she agrees.
“We should probably -”
“That’d be smart.”
Neither one of them move.
Peter’s lips quirk, and it’s only because MJ is staring so intently at his mouth that she manages to notice the slight movement. “Come on, I wanna show you one more thing.”
Then suddenly, one arm is wrapped around her waist while the other shoots a web upto the roof and they’re suspended in midair, hundreds of feet above the ground. Peter carries her up and sets her down gently on the roof before retrieving the mask that MJ had so easily thrown away.
“What else could you possibly show me?” she asks. The wind is whipping around her hair and she pulls her cardigan tightly around herself in an attempt to block it out.
Peter’s got the mask on now so MJ cant see his face, but she knows he’s grinning. “Do you trust me?” he asks her instead of answering.
“Is that even a question at this point?”
“Hang on,” he instructs and she’s about to ask why but then he’s jumping of the building and holy fuck they are going to die the ground rushes up to meet them but then Peter’s arm moves and shoots a web to some building and then they’re swinging up, up, away from the ground. The wind is still ever present and cutting right into her face but she’s not cold anymore, not with Peter so close to her.
It’s indescribable, really. She wouldn’t say that she’s flying because she’s not, she’s swinging and jumping and dipping and racing towards the top of skyscrapers and the street below them like she’s riding some sort of roller coaster on cocaine. It’s amazing.
A laugh manages to bubble out of her mouth and MJ realizes that she’s smiling. Peter turns to look at her, the eyes of his suit adjusting, and she swears she can see the outline of his dimples through the fabric of his mask. She shouts and whoops as they swing through the buildings and Peter joins her, his chest thrumming with vibrations every time.
“Is this what it’s like for you every day?” she asks him over the sound of the wind when she somehow manages to recover enough to stop her yelling.
“Nah,” he responds, right in the moment at the top of a swing where gravity abandons them for a second, “It’s never like this.”
-
It’s over far too quickly, in her opinion.
-
“So, what else can you do, bug boy?”
“Bug boy?”
“You heard me.”
“Uh huh.” Peter slides open the window to his room and sits MJ down halfway through. “I’ve, um, gotten stronger but you already knew that, I’m faster, my reflexes are insane and my senses are, like, crazy. And I heal fast.”
MJ hums in acknowledgement as she pushes herself the rest of the way through the window into Peter’s room. “Interesting.”
“What, is that not good enough for you?”
“Oh, yes, I require that all of my boyfriends have at least six superpowers and you’ve only told me five, so I'm so sorry but -”
“Boyfriend?”
MJ turns around to see Peter leaning against his now closed window, grin threatening to eat his entire face. “Well, I’d hope so, since you are the one who kissed me.”
“Yeah, I know, it’s just. Peter and MJ, boyfriend and girlfriend, textbook case of the enemies to lovers trope -”
“Enemies? When were we ever enemies?”
Peter barks out a laugh and pushes himself off from the window. “You’ve called me a nerd pretty much every day since Homecoming, so...”
“Okay, no, that’s valid, I see your point. But I guess now you’re my nerd, so,” she sighs, “I’ll learn to deal with it.”
“Your nerd, huh? And, what, you’re my…”
“Exceptionally intelligent girlfriend with a radical feminist agenda, obviously.”
“Obviously.”
Peter makes to sit down on the bottom bed, but MJ’s interruption stops him. “But seriously. We are dating. Right?”
“Yeah, I mean, yes, God, I’ve been crushing on you for like, three months at this point so yes. Dating. Awesome.”
“Cool.”
“Great.” Peter pauses briefly before his eyes widen and his hand flies to his mouth. “Oh man, Ned is so going to flip his shit.”
-
(8:47) from: peter
ive put a heart emoji beside ur name on my phone
(8:47) from: peter
is that too much affection for u or ??
(8:48) to: peter
you can have 1 (one) and it has to be one of the pink small ones
(8:48) from: peter
ok but why those
(8:48) to: peter
they’re? prettier? duh
(8:48) to: arachni-kid
also your name in my phone is now arachni-kid and you’re not allowed to contest that
(8:48) from: arachni-kid
im ok w that
(8:48) from: arachni-kid
thats actually super clever
(8:49) to: arachni-kid
i am super clever? what did you expect
(8:49) to: arachni-kid
speaking of me being clever i actually have homework to do because some of us actually care about our gpas so goodnight
(8:50) from: arachni-kid
i feel attacked?
(8:50) from: arachni-kid
goodnight <3
(8:50) to: arachni-kid
disgusting
(8:51) to: arachni-kid
...do it again
(8:51) from: arachni-kid
<3
MJ’s glad she’s alone in her room right now, because if anyone in her family had heard the sigh that escaped her mouth she would not hear the end of it for weeks. And if she doesn’t exactly finish the first draft of her own History essay because she’s too occupied thinking about things, well, that’s for her to know and no one else to ever find out.
-
Ned, apparently, didn’t flip his shit when Peter told him the next morning, but instead pumped his fist and exclaimed “Finally!” before asking Peter a question about their Biology assignment.
Or, at least, that’s what Peter tells MJ as they wait for their History teacher to come to class.
MJ’s taken Ned’s usual spot beside Peter and has no plans to move from her seat. This is feminism, she thinks absentmindedly.
Peter notices her looking at him and grins. “What?” he asks, nudging her elbow with his own.
“Nothing,” she smiles, but instead of returning her gaze back to her book she keeps on looking at Peter. She probably has some stupid expression on her face right now, but she doesn’t really care.
The expression on Ned’s face when he walks into History and sees the two of them sitting side by side, however, is priceless.
“Okay, this,” he says, waving a finger between the two of them, “is cute and all, I’m very happy for you guys, but that is my spot.”
“I was here first and you don’t own it,” MJ replies.
“Peter, my man, tell her that it’s my spot.”
Peter shrugs. “She was here first.”
Ned gapes.
Peter snickers.
Their teacher walks into the room which means that everyone has to take their seats, so Ned glowers at MJ as he sulks to the empty seat she usually occupies a row behind Peter. MJ just smiles at him.
Peter sees her and laughs, bright, bubbly, and crystal-clear, and MJ smiles, because she knows, now, what that laugh sounds like at the beginning of a free-fall, on a blurry phone-recorded video, and breathed against her lips. And she knows, now, that she can hear it whenever she wants to.