Holding To The Ground

MJ sat on a hard hospital bed that she had been forced into until she was “out of shock,” scrolling through her phone without really seeing the headlines speeding past. Flash sat in the bedside chair, his eyes closed and his head leaning on his hand as if he were asleep, but his leg bounced so quickly it just looked like a blur. She found that she, too, was struggling not to jump out from between her stiff sheets and run through the hospital to find Peter. She had been confined to that same stupid room for five hours and thirty-seven minutes and counting, and had spent every second wondering if her friend was okay, if he was even alive.

She sighed and turned off her phone. She observed the circular scars on the back of her hand and, not for the first time today, pushed back her own memories of the same Hell that Peter was in. Over and over, she told herself that this was not her fight. Her job was not to escape or beat, but to testify and comfort. She wasn’t chained, she wasn’t bleeding. She was here for her friend.

The door swung open and the doctor who had forced her into the bed despite her protests came through, exuding a calm, kind air that was false and cold. She could already see the storm beneath the woman’s skin, fighting its way out. The doctor, whose name tag read Dr. Singh, closely examined the numbers flashing across the screen that MJ was hooked up to, scribbling notes onto a clipboard. Finally, she nodded to herself, still writing, and said, “Well, Ms. Jones, it seems that your vitals have returned to normal.”

”So I can go?” She inquired as Flash sat up straighter in the corner of her eye.

Dr. Singh hesitated, if only for a second. She set down her clipboard and assumed the universal I-have-bad-news-but-I-have-to-stay-professional stance, with her hands clasped in front of her and her eyes softened to a perfect degree. “Actually, no, not yet. See, we don’t know much about what has happened to your friend, Peter.” MJ flinched at the name, and Flash wilted. “We know that he was hurt very, very badly, we know that you saw it, and we know that, for some reason or another, Tony Stark was caught in the act. None of these pieces seem to fit together, and we need your help—both of you,” she said, eyeing Flash, “To set the record straight.”

As she spoke, two police officers entered, as did a young nurse in pale pink scrubs, filling the tiny room so much that MJ curled into herself in an attempt to minimize the clutter. One of them, a severe looking man with just a few too many moles on his face, said, “Are you Michelle Jones?”

MJ straightened. “Yes, but most people call me MJ,” she said defiantly. 

“Uh—alright, MJ. I’m Officer Glover, and this is my partner, Officer Cook.” The tall woman next to him nodded and tipped her cap, showing a hint of a sleek bun. “Now, we need to ask you some questions. Is that alright?” The woman pulled out a clipboard and held her pen at the ready, and the man turned on some sort of recording device.

”Depends. Do I get a lawyer?”

Officer Glover blinked, taken aback. “Do you—do you want a lawyer?”

MJ smiled slightly. “Nah, I’m just fuckin’ with you. What do you need?” Even as she said it, her fingers twitched, a feeling like ice spreading out from her heart to her fingertips.

Officer Glover sputtered, but Officer Cook pushed him behind her with a single arm, and said calmly, “MJ, Tony Stark has been accused of assault of a minor and attempted murder. These charges can and will lead to a life in prison unless refuted. Do we have any reason to believe that he is either innocent or guilty of other crimes?”

MJ blinked. She tried to speak, but her mouth was dry, and felt as if it had been filled with cotton balls, as if all of the feeling had been sucked from her body. “Okay, uh...right. Look, I need to start this off by saying that none of it was Mr. Stark, alright? From what I can tell, Peter was being abused by his aunt for—God, at least two months. And I guess today she just snapped and tried to kill him, and somehow Tony found out because me and Flash were on our way and ran into him and when we got there Peter was all beat up and Tony was the one pulling out the fire poker out of his hand so we could move him but then you came in and I tried to tell you it wasn’t him but you wouldn’t listen and—“

”Hey, hey, hey,” interrupted Officer Cook, “Slow down, please. You’re telling me that Tony Stark, caught holding a blood covered weapon above a boy with a matching puncture wound, is innocent?”

”Yes! Can’t you use, like, fingerprint dusting or camera footage to figure this all out?”

”That takes time, at least a full twenty-four hours. For now, your testimonies are as much as we can get. Now, some things that you’re saying match up with what injuries and scars that we have found, and others don’t. For one, Tony Stark was caught seemingly assaulting Peter, and there were no other adults in the house. However, we have no idea what Stark’s motive could be for beating a teenager, or why you would defend him. And, the idea of Peter being continuously hurt for a long period of time matches up with the idea that a caretaker was his abuser, but we have no idea what frequency Peter sees Tony Stark. So I’m going to ask you to explain everything from the beginning, okay?”

MJ blinked. She glanced quickly to Flash, who shrugged, deferring to her. With a short breath, she said, not looking at the officers but the wall behind them, “Alright. I’m not really sure where to start, um...Peter’s never had the best family. His parents are dead, and he watched his uncle die last year. He doesn’t really talk about it, but from what i know, I’m pretty sure he was shot. So he lived with his aunt alone since then, and she was taking care of him. But the last few months, he was dirty and way, way too thin, and he always had bruises or something that he tried to cover up. And yeah, Queens is a dangerous place, but the idea of him being mugged every other day didn’t make sense, so when Flash told me it was probably May, it seemed right. And this morning—“ God, it felt like years ago, “We went to confront him about it, and he all but told us it was May but then we saw his actual body for the first time and...he looked like a skeleton, and Jesus, he was covered in so many bruises, and—and he ran home, and I don’t know what happened but by the time me and Flash got there he was...”

She couldn’t go on. Everyone in the room—the calm nurse with sad eyes, the forcefully serene doctor, the harrowed officers—knew what he was. They knew that Peter was starving and broken and on some operating table trying not to die as the spoke. She took a deep breath and finished in a low voice, “But I know for damn sure it wasn’t Tony Stark, because he was with us when we found Peter, alright? Just let him go, find the right person, and we’ll go from there.”

She watched as Officer Cook scribbled down the last of her notes. Cook blinked, turned to Flash, and said, “And what about you?”

Flash straightened, his eyes wide with surprise. “Uh, I guess...I mean, I’m...Peter, he—I guess MJ really said it all. All I can add is whenever I was being a dick to Peter, his first reaction was to apologize to May.”

”What did you do to him when he had those reactions?”

Flash gulped and turned red, but said anyways, “Just, like, pushing and stuff. Nothing serious, just little things. I guess.”

Cook nodded. “Alright. Now I need verbal assent from both of you: Both of you agree not only that Tony Stark is innocent on charges of attempting to murder and possibly ongoingly abusing Peter Parker, but that May Parker is guilty and should be accused?”

They both confirmed. The officers thanked them for their time and left briskly. MJ let out a breath as the room emptied and Dr. Singh started to remove her IV. “Can I go now?” She asked.

”I’m sorry,” said Dr. Singh as she disposed of the bloody needle tip. “We need to keep you for at least a few more hours to make sure you don’t fall back into a shocked state.”

”Can I at least see Peter?”

Dr. Singh finally looked at her with something other than detached calmness. Sympathy, a sort of detached sadness slanted her eyes downwards as she replied. “He’s still in surgery. He’s...alive, but there are so many issues regarding improperly healed injuries, reconstruction, and adjusting our tactics to account for his starvation that it will be a while before he is out.”

The obstacles, one after the other, each hit MJ like a block of ice until all she could feel was freezing cold. Shivering, she nodded.

”Whenever your guardian arrives, I’ll make a plan of releasing you. And you, young man,” she said to Flash, “might want to call someone as well. I can’t force you out, but dinner is reserved for the patients only.”

With that, Dr. Singh left, and the room fell back into silence. After a long moment of staring at the blank walls flickering under the fluorescent lights, Flash said, “MJ, what happened to you?”

”What are you talking about?”

”You know what i mean.”

MJ sighed. “Yeah. I do.” Normally she would never tell anyone about her life, much less Flash Thompson from Decathalon, but something about the rumble of crash cart wheels outside and the smell of antiseptic and the suffocating lights weakened her, took down all the walls she had spent years building. Suddenly, she was ten years old again, alone and afraid and far too small for the world.

”My parents were, like, super in love. It was almost disgusting. They brought each other roses every Saturday, it was that gross. They were good to me, too, and we’re super excited when Mom got pregnant. But when I was ten, my mom had a placental abruption having my brother, Beaux, and...she didn’t make it.

”I guess my dad kind of lost it after that. He couldn’t really handle not having my mom any more, and I look just...just like her. So he made me be her. I had to do the cooking, the cleaning. I had to wear her clothes, watch her favorite shows, do everything she would do.  And if I didn’t, I got punished. Like, way worse than just time-out. And, a couple months in, he made me start sleeping on my mom’s side of his bed, and...” she stared up at the ceiling, pretended she was telling this to no one at all, “did what a married couple would do there. I tried to stop it, but I was a ten year old girl living off of salad and depression,” she laughed, a bitter sound with no humor in it, before her face fell, darker still. “

After about a week, he got sick of me struggling and started chaining me to the bedposts.” She unconsciously rubbed her wrists, which still had faint lines of white encircling them.

“And since he blamed my brother for killing my mom, my dad refused to even look at him. He hid him away, pretended like he wasn’t even alive. Unless he cried too loud—then, my dad used him as a punching bag. When that wasn’t happening, it was my job to take care of him, but he wasn’t allowed outside of the attic. So I just brought him food and played with him up there.

”One day, when I was fifteen and my brother was five, I wanted to let him see snow. He’d never even been outside, you know? My dad was out, so I snuck my brother into the backyard. It was actually really fun. I made us some got chocolate, and he couldn’t believe how cold it was. We even made a snowman together...” she trailed off, a faint smile on her face at the silver memory. But it soon faded. “But I forgot to clean up the footprints leading back up to the attic. Dad didn’t kill me, he stopped just before he did. He only got my shoulder,” she resisted the urge to rub the scar, which still seared in phantom pain. “I think it was because I was his last scrap of Mom. But he killed...he killed Beaux. It was like he was falling asleep, kinda. He didn’t really fight when Dad stabbed him, and I couldn’t move from the floor. He just...looked at me, for a few seconds. He didn’t even seem scared. But i guess he lost too much blood. He just closed his eyes and he was gone.”

She licked her lips, cleared her throat. Willed down the burning behind her eyes like she had a thousand times before. “Of course, the school got worried when I didn’t show up. They did a wellness check, and they found me half-dead in the attic and my brother’s shitty backyard grave, and the rest is history.”

Finally, she turned to Flash, forcing a weak smile onto her face and trying to ignore how pale he looked. She couldn’t help but notice, however, that behind the shock there was no pity. She hoped, she prayed, hell, maybe she even believed that he wouldn’t see her as weaker after this. “Damn, I’m sick of monologuing,” she joked, and Flash blinked back into reality, the heavy mood in the room snapping like a rubber band. “Pass me the Jello?”

And he did, with not a single falter in his movement.

——

Tony had not moved for hours. The day had long since turned to night, and as he stared out of his tiny window, he thought that he might be able to see the first gray streak of dawn.

He turned his head at the rattling of keys. The same gruff guard as before opened his cell, with something like softness in his voice as he said, “You’re free to go, Mr. Stark.”

Tony stood. “What? How?”

”Two witness testimonies against your arrest, video footage of you entering the apartment after the police had been alerted, little physical evidence beyond the fire poker, and a lack of motive. Both you and the witnesses have accused the same woman, so we are in the process of finding her.”

”Oh,” was all he could say. He thought he would be happy, but all he felt was empty. Released didn’t mean Peter was alive. It didn’t mean anything was guaranteed.

”Someone’s here to pick you up.”

Pepper walked into view with the click of high heels on linoleum. Without a word, Tony all but ran out of the cell and embraced her. She didn’t even flinch, just held him back while he breathed into her shoulder for a long moment. Finally, he pulled away, but her hands stayed on his shoulders. “Thank you,” he whispered, barely audible.

She kept her gaze steady and her voice firm, and he was thankful for her grounding presence. “I’ve got multiple lawyers, private detectives, and forensic scientists looking for ways to solidify your innocence. We’re looking for May Parker frantically, but it’s like she disappeared. What do you want to do next?”

He didn’t even have to think. Anxiety fluttered in his chest, telling him he’d never be fast enough as he started down the hallway towards the exit, the click of heels behind him signifying that Pepper was following. 

“We’re going to the hospital.”