Michelle Jones came home super late. Not drunk, but exhausted and just wanting to sleep. She expected Peter to be out somewhere, superheroing. As was only appropriate for, Michelle checked her phone as she kicked off her flats, fuck, nearly one am. She was out that late, really?
Instead of being alone, she found Ned at the kitchen table, where a pan of lasagna sat, untouched, and an unlit menorah.
“It was his first,” Ned said, a small package in his hands. It
That slight buzz she had been nursing as she walked into her apartment dissolved away, and she couldn’t move from the doorway.
The pair of them had promised to be there for, at least, the first night of Hanukkah to help Peter feel better, to make sure he didn’t get too down on himself. It would be the first one since Aunt May passed. His first holiday season without her. Ned mad sure he was good at Thanksgiving, and she contributed best she could across the country, texts and snaps, but their friend go through it.
“Work,” Ned said, “a last minute error turned a five minute tinkering session into a three hour debugging nightmare that nearly cost us the entire program. I called, told him it’d be a bit but I’ll be here eventually.”
Need looked up at her.
“He said you were running late, that you’d just texted and were almost here. I didn’t...” He looked back to the packet, no phone, in his hands. “Where were you?”
Michelle didn’t have an answer. No, that’s wrong. She had an answer, a completely inadequate one.
A surprise dinner and show from Harry Osborn, her boyfriend. A celebration of her soon-to-be published manuscript. He also gave her an offer that she still hadn’t quite figured out what to do with. Distraction after chosen distraction filled her night enough for her to forget her promise.
Ned held out the phone. “He said you texted. That’s the one he sent to you.”
Why was he- Michelle took the phone. The screen instantly unlocked from her touch, and an empty text log appeared. Peter lived on his Starkphone, a strange obsession held over from high school prior to his full enrollment into the Avengers. He texted constantly, rarely called anyone, but he’d send a massive text to just about anyone, any time of day. At least, she thought he did. He hadn't with her for a while. He’d been pulling away too, but she figured that was more just part of growing up, what with her job and writing that damn book and her boyfriend. Growing apart.
Her name sat at the top and an empty set filled the rest. Not a single message sent or received. “Ned, I...” she stared at nothing. The screen was empty. Not a single text, dm, anything.
She wasn’t surprised – she barely talked to him outside of the apartment – but something about seeing it pressed on her in an awkward, almost painful way.
She flipped the menu, revealing the Ned, Peter, and her together, laughing on the couch of Peter’s old apartment. When he lived with May.
Michelle looked away.
She hated what she saw in its place.
The lasagna wasn’t the only thing he prepared it seemed.
Small gifts, no larger than book. At least one book.
Probably for her.
Fuck.
“Yeah,” Ned agreed.
Peter planned an evening for them, one they hadn’t had in a long time due to adulting and life. A reminder of their simple life, back when they saw each other nearly every day, spent all the time in the world together. She could still remember, still hear, the smiles and feel the laughter.
Life was life, but that was no excuse for drifting away. She lived him for fuck’s sake, and the past two weeks she hadn’t said more than a dozen words.
And those words were to accept the invitation to tonight.
Michelle walked over and pulled out a chair at the small table. She collapsed into it. “Fuck,” she repeated. “Just … fuck!”
“You haven’t talked to him?” Ned asked.
She shook her head.
“Why?”
She shrugged. Many reasons. Many things come up to distract them from each other. They were constantly pulled in two different directions these days. But no texting? She hadn’t thought about it, but Peter used to text her nearly hourly, sometimes even when she was in the same room.
She flipped through the screens until she found something, anything, that could be related to the empty text log. She had to wad through an exhaustive amount of pictures, most from their summer last time they hung out.
Until she found the last time Peter texted her. It had a link to all their conversations saved on a doc. Everything they sent each other, including pictures and voice-to-text files.
Including the last text from her telling him to stop.
One she never sent.
Michelle fumbled at her pocket for her phone and quickly turned to Peter’s name and their texts between them. The last message she sent him was from three months ago and dealt with something concerning a strange smell in the apartment. It didn’t match what Peter’s list had. The day was strange too. She knew it. Something important and-
Michelle hurled her phone across the room. It shattered into a few dozen pieces. She refused to retrieve it, to touch it. At least not now.
“MJ, what the-”
She handed the phone to Ned instead of snapping at him. Nervous energy made her grab on of the gifts. It didn’t get rid of what she saw on Peter’s phone.
The last text Peter received from her was on the night Harry told her he loved her. A night she remembered pretty well. It wasn’t the first time they had sex, but there was something primal and overwhelming that night she spent at his apartment.
She joked that he must be trying to claim her or something when she examined the copious hickeys the next morning.
One text explained everything.
Well not everything.
Ned put the phone down too gently. “You-”
“Obviously not,” she growled. The gift weighted nothing in her hands, yet she could barely hold it up.
“Harry sent it.”
“And then deleted it off my phone.”
The why was clear. What she’d do with that knowledge, well that would be a decision to handle later.
(*(*(*(*(*(*
Peter climbed into the apartment he shared an hour before sunrise. A calm night. No villains, super or otherwise, to spoil the cold, winter air. New York had found a calm that only seemed to climb from the ashes of a tragedy. But nothing cursed the city. Nothing shattered the serenity of the holy season this year.
So many extra lights littered the trees and walls and roofs.
Songs of peace and harmony echoed against building even through hate and violence still reside inside.
So strange this time of year.
Last December, he spent hours swinging from crime to crime, trying to help where he could, stop the worst before it became final, to rise above the horrors of people.
Last December, he wasn’t alone.
He closed the window with a practiced ease and dropped his suit onto the floor. No one to see it. Not now. Hadn’t been for a while.
The routine of surviving even a simple and easy night took over and Peter let nothingness consume him, becoming a series of nouns without adjective and verbs.
A shower.
A towel.
A toothbrush.
A set of pajamas.
An MJ.
A fridge.
A bottle of orange juice.
An MJ.
Peter paused, his foot hanging in the air in a manner no human could imitate. He held the bottle of OJ up. Still looking at her. He wasn’t sure if she was blinking as he watched her watched him at the table still set for three, though the dinner had been put away, probably wrapped up and saved for leftovers.
She didn’t move.
He didn’t either. Was she even there? He hadn’t eaten since, when? Peter wanted to wipe his face to erase the haunting of her, but her gaze froze him.
She looked amazing. Her curls flared around her head, similar to how they got when a storm was coming and she couldn’t be bothered to tie them up. Her eyes were dark, and the dim light of their kitchen didn’t hide the cold and stony expression.
“Leave me alone, Parker” she said, eyes on him. “Just leave me the fuck alone. I doesn’t want you. You’re a leech in my life. You aren’t wanted.”
He said nothing, just looked at her and his phone in her hand. She wasn’t reading from it, but she was saying the words he knew so well. She stared at him with the old gaze of an outsider.
“Don’t text me. Don’t call me. Hell, if I thought you would, I’d say move out, but my prince isn’t ready for that stage yet. You’ve held me back. It ends.”
He said nothing.
“I don’t want you.”
He stared at her. Why was she repeating the words he still saw as clear as when he first read them three months ago. Why was she forcing him to hear them? Did she-”
“You aren’t needed.”
He stood like the freak statue he was.
MJ put the phone down and stood up. “He lied.”
He… “what?” He who? Those were her words. From her phone. And now her mouth. And her eyes. They hadn’t moved off of him. But that phrase was new. That wasn’t part of what he almost burned into his brain from reading it so often.
Whatever curse she held him under kept him in place. He still couldn’t move. Every instinct in him said to flee, but her eyes held him still.
Michelle took a step towards him. Peter watched as her mouth opened, and he knew the words to follow. Almost whispered them along with her as she spoke. “You mean nothing to me,” Michelle said, “Whatever Leeds said was a joke, a lie. No not nothing. You’re a waste of time and space in my life, a failure in this experiment of a friendship.”
She glided closer, silent and smooth.
“Years to make you into something worth something. Anything and-”
“Stop,” Peter said. His face was wet. Why was his face wet?
She stood a foot from him; her mouth in a thin line. He could feel her breathe and feel her heartbeat. Steady and sure. “I can… I can...” Peter tried to speak, say anything, to tell her he’d leave and-
“Three months,” she whispered. Her hands twitched by her side, but she didn’t move any closer to him. “Three months you’ve been avoiding me. I thought I did something wrong. I thought I hurt you.”
“You did,” he said and sniffed. The curse broke, and he looked away. “You said-”
“Fuck those lies.”
“Wha?’
“Fuck,” she repeated, one words at a time. “Those. Lies.”
“I don’t-”
“Fuck,” she stared at him, at his eyes, and raised her hand up to his check, cupping it. She spoke even slower, letting the words hang now. “Those. Lies.”
“Em,” Peter said and leaned into her touch. She hadn’t done this, touch him as gently as this, like ever. He wanted to fight it, pull away, but it was too much effort to go against her and himself. He wanted to see her, her cool brown eyes, a brightness of a hazy setting sun that slid over the autumn forest. “You shouldn’t-”
“You are not a failure,” she said, softly.
Peter shook his head, trying to pull away, but she held him, rubbing at the dark circles under his eye.
“You are not unwanted, you hear me?”
Peter closed his eyes.
“You have never been a problem, issue, complication, dilemma, dispute, trouble, botheration, quandary, scrape, worriment-”
“Okay, Ms. Saurus,” Peter said. He rolled his eyes under his closed eyelids. “I get it.”
“Do you understand that everything those texts told you are false?” she asked.
He nodded and leaned more into her touch.
“Harry sent them,” she said. Peter’s eyes shot open and he pulled away. Michelle followed him as he stepped back once, not letting him go. “Yeah, the fucker tried to send my best friend out of my life.”
Best friend? No, that wasn’t him. It couldn’t be. “Why would he-”
“Did you ever ask Ned about those texts?”
“Ned’s here?” Peter looked away from her, finally, to the kitchen behind her and then the bathroom behind her other shoulder.
Michelle shook her head. “I sent him home. Late enough when he was finally out of work. Betty was worried. And that’s a no, you didn’t. And you certainly didn’t talk to me about them.”
Made sense. Since the two of them got together senior year of college, Peter saw less and less of him. Not a problem; they grew up. They didn’t drift apart. Just new priorities. Same with MJ.
Life got into the way. Relationships, friendships even, ended. That was something he had to accept, no matter how hard it was to do so.
Three months since Ned, MJ and him did anything together. Just after May’s funeral. Ned with Betty and SI’s new production requiring more and more of the team lead. Her with Harry and her work at the paper, investigating and reporting further on the horrors of the Accords. Time pulled them in separate ways, responsibility held them there.
“I’m sorry,” she said. Peter looked back to her and found her eyes were wet. Tears? Why? “You were hurting and I didn’t notice.”
“Not your responsibility,” he muttered.
“You’re my friend, loser,” she said and pressed against his cheek.
He didn’t lean into it. Couldn’t. Not again.
“You’ve done nothing, well, maybe some things, like avoiding talking to me. Asking about this.”
“I thought-”
Michelle tapped his face lightly with a single finger and smiled at him. “Lies. You felt. And you’re worse with feelings than I am. The words dug deep, slicing away the little shield you built around-”
“How poetic of you.”
The glare she gave was brief and quickly replaced by her smile. “All to protect yourself. You want people close. To touch and care. But they leave you.”
She pressed against his cheek just enough for him to lean into it, fully. “May was a hugger wasn’t. I remember so many times trying to avoid them. You must have dove into them. A bad day or maybe even a good one, and she hug away whatever your anxiety filled mind conjured up.”
Peter closed his eyes and exhaled heavily.
“In high school,” Michelle continued, “Ned gave you plenty, a warm person to center everything, especially after the bite, huh? I remember the sleepovers. He’d stay up late, watching you, and at some point, you’d finally pass out on the couch, an arm or foot against him or me, dead to the world.
“Do you even sleep any more? Like that I mean? Like actually sleep?”
Peter bit his lip.
Michelle slid her hand down his cheek, his neck, his shoulders, his arms, to his hand. She threaded her fingers in his and tugged him to the couch.
She sat down and pulled him down until his head rested in her lap. She maneuvered the throw blanket over him, grabbed a random book off the side coffee table, and threaded her fingers through Peter’s hair, gently scratching his head.
“Sleep,” she said, “I’ll be here when you wake up, okay?”
Peter nodded against her and nuzzled her leg. He took a deep breath, inhaling her scent. He rarely slept out on the couch, like ever, because the damn thing had a spring that was just off and he couldn’t get comfortable lying on it. Except it didn’t bother him.
There were so much to talk about, and he still didn’t quite understand what Michelle was saying, but her warmth and scent just swarmed him, filled the space around him, and he drifted off without much concern about the fact he’d probably drool over her leg.