Chapter Text
There’s that same song on the radio again. MJ is certain it has played at least five times in a row and she can’t remember a single line of it. Peering through the window, she can see the old man take the black board with the sales of the day inside his little shop. And in three, two, one – a quarter to ten on the dot, the eccentric lady with the tiny dog comes in to order a latte to go. And MJ is wiping the same spot again, the most pristine, shining spot in any diner in New York. Five more minutes, and she’ll put up the chairs, close the front door and do the cash register. She’ll be home by eleven, write the Cold War essay until four am, then get up at nine and do it all again. And that song will be on the radio again. Just to drive her insane. Just to drive home the point that she’s not being the perfect cliché of a partying college student living from one moment to the next. And on Friday, Ned will ask her what’s wrong, and of course nothing is wrong, everything is chill and fine, piece of cake, walk in the park, why do you ask?
And Ned will start rambling again. Do you believe aliens have infiltrated the government? (Probably.) What if we had another best friend, but were brainwashed by the alien government to forget about them? (Unlikely.) Do you think you might be a robot without knowing? (All the evidence points to yes.)
And that will be the only time of the week when she feels like a human person. But for now it’s the motions, the works, Ned’s voice in her head. How long do you think you’d survive in the zombie apocalypse? (At least long enough to start living in a van with a stray dog and five axes.)
She’s fumbling with the keys now. All she needs to do is close the back door, then she can get to more work, won’t that be fun? What if a worm was eating your brain? (At least since Middle School.) And she’s crumpled up the flyer for the dorm party on Saturday, because it was lame, because it was for children, because she’s a coward like that.
What if there was a hole in your brain?
She almost drops the keys, her hands are freezing.
What if there was a hole in your brain?
The crash tears through the night and MJ drops the keys. She is not ready to die. Not on a mind-numbing Wednesday night and not for a job that pays less than 15 bucks an hour. Nope. She is not about to be killed by some clumsy late-night serial killer. And not by a feral cat either.
She turns around slowly, ready to show her hands or threaten bodily harm with absolutely no credibility, depending on what the situation looks like.
Someone is standing in the dumpster. They’re not even looking at her. She steps a little closer. It’s kind of hard to tell in the dim street light, but – it’s a guy in a Spiderman costume. A pretty shitty one. Self-sewn, caked in dirt. His mask is rolled up half-way and he’s biting into a half-eaten hamburger. Classy.
He’s not that tall. She could take him in a fight. Probably. She crosses her arm, leaning back against the wall, as casually as possible.
“How’s the hamburger?” she asks.
A full-body flinch goes through him and he whirls around.
“Uhm. That’s – I wasn’t -” He throws the hamburger behind himself. Somehow, it lands on the roof of the neighbouring building. “What hamburger?!”
Something inside of MJ eases. Clearly, this guy is not dangerous. Way too awkward. And he sounds young. Maybe her age.
“Ah, I see,” she says, “you’re an experienced thief.”
“But I didn’t – that’s not – it was trash!”
“You know, store policy is to arrest anyone digging through that dumpster. Hefty fine, minimum of three years in jail.”
Bold lies. She has no idea what the store policy is. But even with half his face concealed, she can tell he’s horrified. Good. He nearly gave her a heart attack, so she’s only returning the favour.
“I- I’m sorry, I -”
“But you’re in luck. It’s not my policy.”
It’s probably not smart to trust strangers in gloomy alleyways, but this one is like a kicked puppy, and she’s not actually dying to get back to her empty word document, so.
“Come on. Pretty sure I could offer something better.”
She nods toward the door and picks up her keys from the ground. He’s not following, so she turns to look at him.
“I don’t have any money,” he says, sounding both chagrined and apologetic.
She gives him A Look and shakes her head in disapproval.
“It’s on the house.”
Duh. Is she going to have to spell everything out for this spiderman imposter?
He follows her into the kitchen, shifting on his feet the whole time and glancing around as if there’s a camera crew around the corner. (Or maybe an axe murderer.)
(Which could be MJ, for all he knows. It’s not the zombie apocalypse, but MJ is not afraid to use an axe when the situation requires it.)
(But it doesn’t. It’s fine, right? No worries, no worries, no worries.)
Fifteen minutes later, the spiderman imposter is sitting at the counter, wolfing down four hamburgers. The first one, he eats in two bites. She’s half-certain he’s going to throw it up again. But if he doesn’t, that’s great, because the Spiderman costume looks too loose on him, and it was clearly already designed for a skinny person.
“It’s not actually on the house,” she says, just to say something. “My boss would kill me if he knew about this.”
He pauses mid-bite and lowers the hamburger. “But… I can’t… pay you…”
“Don’t worry about it. It’s on me.”
“Thanks.”
She watches him gobble up half a plate of fries like it’s an eating competition.
“So what’s with the costume?” she asks, leaning back. “Comic con?”
More fries are sizzling in the deep fryer. So far, the stranger seems okay with all the food, and he could probably do with some more.
“Costume? Oh. Yeah, it’s a – a costume, for sure.”
“Then why won’t you take off the mask?”
“What, so you can give a better description to the police? Uh uh. Nope. Not doing that.”
He’s barely looking at her, although he’s eating a little slower now.
“If I was going to rat you out to the cops, wouldn’t I have done it by now?” she says.
“You might be trying to lure me into a false sense of security.”
She turns back to the deep fryer, tapping her fingers.
“So could you.”
MJ shoots him a sideways glance. He finishes chewing, then says quietly: “Then I guess we’ll just have to trust each other.”
Trust? No way. But of course she isn’t going to say that to him. She is going to wait until there is a knife in her back and then she’ll say gotcha.
But there is something about him – it puts her at ease, it makes her feel warm. Which is probably a bad sign. Undoubtedly, everything is about to go horribly wrong.
But she can’t stop looking at him and she can’t help but think he’s a whole tragedy. Not because of the dirt on a costume he hasn’t grown into or his obvious hunger or the smell, but because in the slump of his shoulders and his shifty feet, she reads loneliness. And she knows a bit about that.
“Although you probably shouldn’t,” he continues.
“And why is that?”
She raises her eyebrow at him.
“Common sense? I don’t think I give off stand-up guy to introduce to your parents vibes at the moment.”
“Oh, I think they’d just be happy I’m making friends.”
She puts another plate of fries in front of him, then takes one of them to nibble on.
“But – but you’re great,” he says, and somehow sounds like he actually means it. “I’d have thought you have tons of friends. Truckloads of friends.”
“Why? Because of my sunny personality?” she says in the gloomiest tone she can manage.
He only shakes his head and points a fry at her.
“You just made a complete stranger dinner. Speaks of great character.”
“Or maybe I just felt sorry for you.”
“Fair enough.”
He chuckles darkly and she wants to say, no, wait, I didn’t mean it that way – but he’s already talking again.
“I shouldn’t even be here.”
Almost like he’s talking to himself. He stands up and gives her an awkward little wave. “Uh, thanks for the – and it was nice meeting you, Em- uhm. Strange waitress who I’ve never met in my life.”
He’s walking backward toward the door. Like she’s going to call the cops if he takes her eyes off her. Or disappear. Inevitably, he walks into the door, and then reaches behind himself for the handle.
“Wait, do you have a place to stay?” she yells after him.
But he’s already gone.
Like a ghost in an empty diner.
Ned isn’t going to believe she did this when she tells him. It’s uncharacteristically brash. And later he’s going to ask another random question, like, if you could have any superpower, which one would you want? And she’ll lie and say something cool like telekinesis, when really it would be invisibility. Which is objectively one of the least cool ones.
And she should go home, to her one-room-apartment and her nearly dead orchid, but the leftover fries on his plate look like they could really use the company, and so she stays and eats them, one by one. Even once they’ve grown cold.
He shouldn’t have done that, any of that. Not even for a burger. He should have bolted as soon as he heard her. But he had been so, so hungry. And she had appeared to him like an apparition, like a long buried dream, and for a moment, he had thought she would say, stop being an idiot, Peter, and get inside. Or that a loud voice would call and yell at him to wake up, and then he would and it would be three years ago, before Aunt May died, before Tony Stark died, before he even became spiderman – and none of it would ever happen at all. But of course it wasn’t a nightmare, it never is, it’s just life.
Out of all the dingy alleyways in New York, why did it have to be the one behind her workplace? He didn’t even know she had a new job.
He’s pacing on the roof of the building now, fighting against the ludicrous urge to go back inside. Get it through your thick skull, Peter, you’re not her problem anymore. You won’t drag her into your mess again.
And he didn’t want any of this. He certainly didn’t want her to get the impression that he is a homeless guy dressed like spiderman and a complete weirdo. Although, to be fair, he is currently homeless, he is dressed like spiderman and it’s been a long time since anyone would have described him as normal. So what, he still didn’t want her to make the completely accurate assessment that he is a homeless guy dressed like spiderman and a complete weirdo. The point stands.
He can’t ever come back here again. It’s fine. He’ll just be a bad, slightly odd memory for her and that’s all there is to it. (He really, really shouldn’t, but, fuck, how badly he wants to be any memory of her at all.)
He walks over to the spot where he dumped his backpack. It contains everything he own, which is mostly a stock of web fluid. He needs to be careful with it now. If there’s one thing he can’t do, it’s to stop being spiderman. Even now. Even though he gets weaker every day and the petty thieves get more and more punches in, he can’t stop.
He swings to the next house and to the next and wills himself not to ever turn around. He needs to find someplace dry to sleep tonight. After getting evicted a month ago, he’s been digging through dumpsters all over the city, finding a different place to sleep every night, rooftops and bike stands and sometimes abandoned houses.
It’s temporary, though. He’ll find a job soon. And if he keeps swinging and swinging, ignoring the biting cold and the excruciating hunger, then maybe one day he can forget that even once he finds another ratty apartment to stay in, he won’t ever go home again.
Sometimes he thinks forgetting would be a gift. Then he wouldn’t know what to miss, he wouldn’t know where to hurt. But the truth is, his memories are the only precious thing he was allowed to keep. And if he didn’t have at least this one thing, well then – he would keep going. Because that’s what he does.
When MJ sees the gun, she freezes up. At that point, her hands are already up because she heard the yelling first, but it’s only when she sees the gun that terror fills her completely, from head to toe. The irony is that this is the punchline to most of her jokes – for weeks, it was just shoot me in class, and I wish something interesting would happen, at this point I’ll take anything. Well, here is anything and it isn’t fun at all.
She watches in a trance as the masked guy in the bomber jacket walks over to the cashier and the thoughts are hammering in her brain. When it comes down to it, she’s just talk. She’s not the girl with the axe. When it comes down to it, she’s scared shitless that her brain matter will end up splattered across the shiny supermarket tiles, right here in the soup aisle.
And for all that she was telling herself that she was going to feel empty forever, she never actually thought that she would. That her life would end with that hammering in her brain and that her very last thought would be, how endlessly dull. She’d written it somewhere, in a high school yearbook or a buzzfeed quiz, most likely way for Michelle Jones to go out: Bored to death.
She isn’t bored now, but she is alone, and everybody saw this coming. Flash is going to laugh when he hears the news. (That’s not entirely fair, Flash isn’t as bad as he used to be in high school.)
But the truth is, no matter how often she made the same stupid joke, she doesn’t actually want to die. Not in the soup aisle. Not today.
“Hey, guys.”
Everyone turns to the door, to the newcomer, to Spiderman, and MJ suddenly feels like she can move again.
There’s three armed guys in the store, and all of them are walking toward Spiderman.
“I hate to be that guy,” Spiderman says as he dodges their hits, “breaking up the party, but I think the neighbours called the cops.”
One of them punches his face, but he jumps backward in an instant. He webs up the two of them and then steals the gun of the third guy. “Isn’t it past your bedtime?” He tilts his head. “Don’t worry, I have just the thing that can put you to sleep.”
With those words, Spiderman knocks the gun over his head and webs him to the counter. The cashier is staring at him in shock. Everyone is staring at him.
“Is everyone okay?”
MJ is staring at him and for a moment, it’s almost as if Spiderman is staring right back at her. He saved her. He’s a hero, obviously he saves people, but as soon as he walked in, she somehow knew she was safe. Which makes no sense at all.
She has to get out of here. She can’t wait for the cops or for more men with guns to show up or for Spiderman to look right into her eyes and see everything she was trying to hide. She pushes past the other costumers, past Spiderman, and flees.
The next day, MJ is back at work, because the stipend doesn’t pay for everything and because she can deal with a tiny store robbery just fine. After closing, MJ sees a shadow in the backroom. She can feel her heartbeat quicken, but she grabs the broom that she had set aside and points it straightforward. No robber is going to get the drop on her tonight.
“Freeze!” she shouts and switches on the light.
There’s a loud shriek. “It’s just me!”
The guy – the guy from weeks ago, in the crappy spiderman costume, is standing in the middle of the backroom with his hands up.
“Just me?! Who’s that?” she says and steps forward with the broom.
“Me, the dumpster guy, don’t you remember? You made me a burger, it was really nice? Please don’t -” he hesitates, considers, “uhh, beat me up with your broom?”
She slowly lowers the broom a little.
“I made you five burgers.”
“Yeah, yeah. Totally.”
“Still doesn’t explain why you’re here, burgerman – you’re a burglar.”
He steps toward her, but still keeps his hands up.
“Burgerman?” he mutters. “That’s a new one. But listen – I’m not a burglar.”
“Did you break in here?” she asks pointedly.
“I mean, technically? But to be fair, you left the window open.”
“That’s not fair! You can’t just climb through peoples’ windows. We have a door, you know?”
“Okay, okay! I’m sorry!”
She gives him a considering look. He’s definitely still too skinny. She pokes him with the broom, which makes him go: “Ow.”
Yeah. It’s definitely the same awkward guy from weeks ago. She’s fairly certain he isn’t going to point a gun at her any time soon.
“Come with me,” she says and goes back to the kitchen and starts making burgers again.
She probably shouldn’t feel so good turning her back on him, but again, she gets the weird feeling that it’s all okay.
“Talk,” she says, “don’t tell me you came for another burger. You can’t expect me to cook for you every time you show up.”
She’s not even doing it for him. She just likes getting busy when she’s nervous. And she doesn’t like looking at his torso, where she could count every single one of his ribs.
“I would help, but I have a feeling I would only set something on fire,” he says, which would sound like a ridiculous excuse if he didn’t seem so painfully genuine. “I came to check up on you.”
She freezes mid-motion.
“Because of the robbery?”
She whirls around and grabs the broom in the same motion. “How do you know about that? Are you a stalker? Have you been stalking me?!”
“What? No! I’m Spiderman.”
If he was going to lie, he really shouldn’t have said something so absurd.
“Why would you be Spiderman? That’s crazy.”
He gestures vaguely to all of himself. In the crappy Spiderman costume.
“You said that was a costume,” she hisses.
“No, you said that.”
“You can’t be Spiderman.”
He crosses his arms. “Rude.”
“You’re homeless.”
“Yeah.”
“Spiderman isn’t homeless.”
She waves the broom in front of his face, like it’s going to underline her point.
“Maybe you should re-examine your biases. Against… spider-people.”
Realizing he may be right, she puts down the broom and goes back to making burgers.
“Huh…”
“You know, swinging through the city with superstrength and not having a place with a bed that I wouldn’t be kicked out of aren’t mutually exclusive.”
“But why?!”
He shrugs.
“There’s a housing crisis.”
“But you’re Spiderman.”
At least that’s what he’s saying. But he’s got to be lying. No way has she been making burgers for and chatting with Spiderman.
Maybe, maybe, she is freaking out a little too much about this, but he is certainly being too nonchalant.
“People don’t usually get paid for breaking the law on a daily basis.”
She shakes her head in disbelief and starts making a milkshake. She deserves a milkshake.
“Besides,” he – Spiderman? – says, spinning around in the bar stool, “it has its perks. No pissed-off neighbours knocking their broomsticks on the ceiling when I’m being too loud. No landlord stopping me from getting a pet turtle.”
“I see.” She turns on the mixer. “That doesn’t prove you’re Spiderman, though.”
“What, do you want me to do a backflip?”
He flicks out his wrist and shoots a web at the coffee machine.
She frowns and picks at the web. “Great job, Spiderman. I would have preferred the backflip.”
Obviously taken aback, he puts a hand to the back of his head. “O-oh. Sorry. It will dissolve in like, two hours tops.”
She sighs. Alright. This might as well happen.
She puts together two plates, shoves one of them over to the guy dressed like Spiderman, apparently actually Spiderman, and plops down next to him.
“Then you can see this burger as… thank you. For saving me.”
“I didn’t. If anything, I saved that guy’s cash register.”
Again, everything he says seems absentminded and genuine. He rolls up his mask under his nose and starts eating one of the burgers.
“Still,” she mumbles and starts eating her own.
He doesn’t know how scared she was. How certain that this was it. How relieved she was when he showed up like it was nothing at all.
And it is – it’s crazy, not because he’s homeless or because his suit doesn’t exactly look Stark Industry, but because she didn’t expect Spiderman to be so – human. Self-conscious. Humble. Kind of funny. Oddly… charming. (Okay, maybe she did expect that last one.)
“That is a mean burger,” he says, wiping his mouth with a gloved hand.
“Sure that’s not the hunger speaking?”
“Pretty sure,” he says and smiles at her. The smile takes her aback. She almost chokes on a fry. “So, how are you doing?”
“I don’t know. How could a cog in the ever-going machine of capitalism be doing?”
He stares at her. She tries to stay serious, but eventually can’t help cracking a smile. “I’m messing with you.”
Immediately, he gets awkward again. She wonders if he ever blushes under the mask. “Oh, okay.”
She isn’t going to answer his question. Anything she could bring herself to say would be a lie. How is she doing? Terrible. Abysmal. Better, right now, actually.
“You could be nicer, you know. I did just save your life. Your words.”
“I’m always nice,” she says.
He actually laughs at that, and not in a mean way. That laugh – another warm spot in her chest - she must have heard it before. Somewhere. On Youtube? No.
“Do I know you?”
He shoots up out of his seat.
“No. What? That’s insane, why would you – I mean, yes. We’ve met. Two times before. Why are you asking me all these questions?”
Okay. Kind of suspicious. But she doesn’t have any idea what it means.
“It was one question.”
“I should go.”
Again. Again he’s gone in an instant, going who knows where and she – she really shouldn’t. She’s never going to see him again. But as she clears away the plates (she can’t stomach any more of the food), all she can think about is if he’s safe. Where he is going to sleep tonight.
That smile. And where she’s seen it. But no matter how hard she tries to remember, it won’t come to her.
All the way home. When she’s lying in her bed, trying to sleep. She’s still thinking about it.
But there’s nothing.
Same as always.
Like there’s a hole in her head.