Chapter Text
I was alone so long
I didn't even know that I was lonely
Out in the cold so long
I didn't even know that I was cold
Turned my collar to the wind
This is how it's always been
All I've ever known is how to hold my own
All I've ever known is how to hold my own
But now I wanna hold you, too
– Eurydice, Hadestown
Christmas is really overstepping the limit this year.
Maybe it’d be alright, all the decorations and jingling music and strobing lights choking the avenue and the collection of mechanically ho-ho-hoing Santa figurines Dunderman felt compelled to line up along the counter the moment December hit. Not MJ’s favourite atmosphere, of tacky goodwill. It’s just that the string lights Sasha put up are too low for her to clear without stooping just slightly. Every time she serves a doughnut, pours a coffee, goes to the door to flip the sign to CLOSED when she takes her break, she has to do this stupid little bob of her knees to duck underneath them. Every time.
Nia saunters neatly under the string lights, bags a donut, hands it to a hipster boy with a smile. He smiles back. Leaves a dollar on the counter when he goes and everything. The doorbell tinkles in this frustratingly festive way, rubbing it in.
Noting MJ’s scowl, Nia says to her, “You’re a grinch.”
“You’re five foot two.”
“Fix the string lights if they bother you that much.”
“Michelle!” Dunderman hollers from some passageway to hell, probably. “Don’t lay a finger on the string lights!”
“Wasn’t gonna, sir!” she calls back.
Nia already has fifteen dollars in tips neatly stowed in her apron pocket. Nia is neat about everything.
MJ has zero dollars.
She takes out the antiseptic spray and cloth and soaks the counter with the spray. “Okay, can you leave some of the sappy boys to me for a change?”
“You won’t get tips from them, Michelle. You’re never nice to them.”
“I’m nice,” MJ bites with a scrub at the ringed surface. She wants to see her fucking face in it. “I just don’t flirt with random customers.”
“I’m not flirting. I’m being nice.”
“You’re trashing your integrity. You’re submitting to your assumed role in life of
pretty girl.”
“I’m being a pleasant person, Michelle. You should try it.”
This rag is worn out. MJ goes to grab a new one and nearly gets garrotted.
She’s usually somewhat of a fan of winter, at least, with the power it has to keep people indoors and give the grimy streets a fresh coat of white. Snow days spent at home watching The Ted Bundy Tapes. Her and her dad have their own way of doing things at Christmas. Namely: quietly. Which is good. Kids lose their shit at Christmas then realise when the day is out it wasn’t half as much fun as they thought.
But this year, for whatever reason, watching tourists slip on ice patches doesn’t hold the same entertainment value as it once did. MJ feels like she’s lost a puzzle piece somewhere. It’s not Ned - he’s dorky and sweet and the unexpected yin to MJ’s yang like always. It’s not college. It’s not Midtown High. She’s actually the Academic Decathlon captain, which is so cool.
“I’ll give you whatever tips I get today if you take the flack for trashing the string lights,” she propositions Nia from her tangle of plastic.
Nia stares at her, disbelieving. With her voice hushed: “Dunderman’s halfway to a pedo. I’m not getting in any more trouble with him than I can help.” Then, at her normal volume: “Besides, I’d like to see you make more than five on this shift.”
MJ’s out of the string lights. She’d like to tear them down and maybe burn them, but she straightens them instead because she is a slave to the corporate machine and she needs money badly. “Okay.” She pulls at the hair tie in her ponytail, tightening it. “Alright. Six dollars by 7pm. Will you do the string lights then?”
“I’m not betting with you.”
“Well, it’s a challenge for myself. It’s a, it’s a self-improvement challenge.”
“Michelle, my shift is literally over. Now. Please stop talking to me.” Nia is, in fact, hanging up her apron right now.
“Well, that’s why it’s a self-improvement challenge. It’s for me, not you. Don’t try to steal my self-improvement challenge.”
Nia’s back is turned. She walks out of the door, throwing up her hands as she leaves. The bell tinkles. Fucking tinkles.
That’s it. No more Christmas.
Just tips. And lots of ‘em.
It’s 5. Ned’ll be around soon, which means MJ’s gotta think of another excuse for Dunderman as to where one powdered donut might have disappeared to.
Just as she throws the rag and spray under the counter, the bell tinkles, almost splattering the smile she’s prepared. A grey-suited businessman who doesn’t look up from his phone. How best to approach?
She catches him before he can speak. “One flat white, am I right?”
Business guys always order flat whites.
He frowns. “Strawberry frap, no coffee, whipped cream and sprinkles.”
She raises an eyebrow.
“Not sprinkles, Daddy, chocolate flakes.”
MJ peers down over the counter to find a little kid attached to the guy’s pant leg, toting a flat white in her sticky hands. “Lemme grab that, sunshine,” the businessman says to her, taking the flat white. He takes an expectant sip.
At least she wasn’t totally wrong.
“Yes, sir,” MJ says. She tries a smile when she comes back with the milkshake. He’s already back on his phone. Is he gonna talk to this kid or just make her carry his drink around like a living breathing coffee holder?
Bell tinkles.
The most wonderful time of the year.
Ned, please save her from the hellscape that is Peter Pan Donuts.
Fifty bros pile in and grab the entire stock of Mountain Dew from the fridge and try to order donuts that don’t even exist.
She rings up their total and one says to her, “Man, normally I’m telling girls to smile more but you smile too much.”
“Does it make you want to spare a dollar?” she says through cheerfully gritted teeth.
“Nah,” replies Bro Number Two. “More like run in the opposite direction, really.”
MJ drops the grimace, cursing.
She gets a dollar in the jar from Bro Number Two, but the victory feels very much hollow.
An old couple comes next - smiley elderly folks MJ presumes will be easy game, but forgets that baby boomers don’t understand the importance of tipping their baristas. Rich baby boomers, too, with real gold-plated jewelry.
The gaggle of trendy teenage girls that follow are no-gos.
MJ smiles at a single mom, a road sweeper, at least five more businessman, a business woman, someone dressed as Spider-Man, a burly woman with two tattoo sleeves, a biker couple, a rickshaw driver, three pole dancers, and a number of surprisingly-not-bad-looking guys, and none of them think to slip her an extra dollar. The jar remains empty.
What’s reliably depressing and grinchy? This playlist of pessimistic podcasts MJ curated. She shuffles it, just to create some extra mayhem, and the voice of J Jonah Jameson roars out of her phone speakers.
“He’s a menace! He’s ruining Christmas for the hardworking citizens of New York. How can we focus on the holiday season with a murdering vigilante literally crawling around the streets? Just last week, I was kicking back with a few–”
Tinkle. MJ spots the proud to support Spidey pin before she registers the face. She scrambles for her phone to switch off the Bugle–
“You didn’t say on the window Peter Pan supports Mysterio,” a girl in a beanie comments disapprovingly.
MJ can already feel those dollars slipping out of her reach. (Oh, who’s she kidding? She’d be lucky to get a single bill.) College running from her grasp. The notion that a minimum-wage barista stint can actually raise enough to cover her living costs looking more and more like a pipe dream she should never have fallen asleep to.
“Oh, come on, you can get a coffee from someone who listens to JJJ,” she retorts, raking her hands through her hair. She pauses to tuck the one loose lock behind her ear. It never stays behind her ear, goddamn. “He’s a cathartically angry man.”
“He’s
wrong.”
“Everything on the internet is probably wrong.”
“You’re on their side. It’s fake news, you know.” She dusts snow self-righteously off the beanie and replaces it. Yay, snow on the floor she mopped this morning.
“I don’t trust news, period.”
“I’m going to the Starbucks on fifth,” declares the girl.
Slowly tinkles the bell of doom.
“If you’d actually bothered to listen, I believe Spider-Man,” she hollers at the closed door.
Resting the crown of her head against the glass in exhaustion, she pulls at the chain of her necklace to unearth the dahlia pendant. Well, the few petals of it that are left. The rough edges of the broken parts feel grounding against the pad of her thumb.
Ned has to be coming soon. He texted eight minutes ago to say he’d be here in five. When he says five, he pretty consistently means ten, so two minutes to go. MJ slopes back behind the counter, dodging the string lights. She shoots them two middle fingers because it’s cathartic and nobody’s around to watch her flip off string lights.
A tinkle welcomes in MJ’s favourite regular.
“Harry,” she greets him.
“Michelle Jones.”
He’s got his big old brown coat wrapped around his shoulders like always and his goofy parted white hair. The smile that lights up the lines on his face coaxes one from her own face, a real one.
She offers him her arm as he makes his way towards his customary seat at the counter towards the back of the room. “You’re a sight for sore eyes,” she admits to him.
“Rough day?”
“Nobody wants to tip me. I think I’m a people-repellent.”
“Hey. You’re not a people-repellent, you’re just not entirely people-adjacent.”
“Maybe so. How’re the ferrets, Harry? How’s Diana?”
Harry plants himself on a stool, rests his elbows on the counter. His eyes are gleaming. “She is a new mother.”
Harry’s eccentricities make him right up MJ’s street. He’s far less grating than ninety percent of the people she serves. A diamond in the rough. A ferret-breeding diamond.
She goes to fetch him his coffee. “Congratulations for Diana,” she says over her shoulder, sending an impressed huff with it. “Was that–do you go to the vet for that?”
“I took her to be certain. Fifteen pups, she has. Fifteen.”
She checks a hip against the counter. “No way.”
“Hard to believe, isn’t it?”
Before she can respond, the door swings open, and get this: no tinkle. No bell. It’s as if the store is holding its breath.
MJ takes in the customer that’s approaching her. He’s one of those not-cool-but-cute boys that probably go to Brooklyn Visions. A boy who walks into coffee shops alone. A boy who gels his hair too much. A boy in a puffer coat and sweater that can’t quite hide the collar of an old-man plaid shirt beneath. A boy who can’t afford new sneakers, those are definitely second-hand, second-hand to the point of falling apart. A boy who’s been out in the wind a while, judging by the pink tip of his nose and his chapped lips. A wind-beaten, world-wise boy. That’s what MJ gets from his eyes.
Wait, why is she looking at his eyes?
He stops in the entryway like he’s posing for a closeup. It really does look like that. His eyebrows stopped halfway up his forehead, caught in a moment of realisation. Maybe he’s had an epiphany about the meaning of life. He’s clutching a half-sheet of paper in both hands.
Ned lets himself in behind the guy and she throws him a wave. Ned gives her his signature cheery grin. “Hey,” he greets her.
The boy turns to watch Ned walk around him and settle at the counter, his mouth still slightly parted and paper half-raised.
“One sec,” MJ tells Ned. She gets to the front of the counter, ducking under the string lights successfully. For once, it’s not the first thing on her mind. She puts on her barista smile. “Can I help you?”
“Hi. Um.” He taps his chest with a hand. His eyes fix on her with this intriguing and quite alarming intensity. “My name is Peter Parker,” he says, “And I…”
And on stretches a silence of at least three seconds. He continues to train that gaze on her, that gaze that seems to light up something hollow in her. She nods to prompt him, thoroughly interested in what exactly his deal is. Peter Parker.
At last, his mouth closes and forms the necessary words: “...Would like a coffee, please.”
A little disappointing, given the dramatic introduction, but, well, par for the course at Peter Pan, if not positive.
She can’t help huffing a little. “Okay, no problem, Peter Parker.”
Turning her back on the mystery boy, she grabs a powdered donut on a paper plate and sets it in front of Ned, who looks up from his phone.
She motions to it. “Doughnut for my fellow Engineer.”
“Oh!” He shoots her a thumbs-up, then pauses. “Wait, what?”
“MIT, they’re the Engineers. The mascot.”
“Oh, right, right, right. I should probably know that.” Ned looks impressed. “Look at you with the school spirit,” he says.
“Tell anybody, I will deny it.”
Ned surrenders with a wave of his hands. “Okay.”
The coffee pot beeps at them. MJ shakes out a cardboard cup from the stack, pours the coffee, adds milk and sugar–she figures Peter Parker is a sugar and milk guy, he doesn’t look like he could stomach black coffee–and presses on the lid.
“Peter Parker?”
He looks caught in a dream, staring down the counter.
“Peter Parker,” MJ tries again. Her own voice sounds nervous. “Your coffee.”
He whips around all at once and darts forward to take it, finding the cooler top of the cup with a hot-potato flutter of his fingers. “Right. Thank you. Um.” The thank you is oddly sincere. He glances up at her and adds, “Are you excited for MIT?”
“Oh.” MJ looks back at Ned. Peter Parker must have heard them. Is he a senior too? “Uh, right, yeah. Yeah, actually. I am excited.”
She herself hadn’t expected those words to leave her mouth. This is exceedingly weird. She’s talking about her feelings with a customer. She doesn’t even do that with Harry. Or her dad.
“Which is weird,” she carries on, rolling with it, “Because I don’t really get excited about things. I kind of expect disappointment.” Because then she’ll never actually be disappointed.
A singular expression comes over Peter Parker then.
“‘Cause then you’ll never actually be disappointed, right?”
MJ feels a single beat of her own pulse ringing through her ears.
Now this is spooky.
“Uh… yeah. Right.”
She studies Peter Parker, notes no subterfuge, just this incredibly open honesty all over him. The honesty you only get with the sorts of friends MJ doesn’t have, the ones you’re joined at the hip to.
She feels compelled to prove something to this guy. “It’s just, um, I don’t know. It kind of feels different this time, for some reason.”
They watch each other until both become aware of the strangeness of watching each other.
“Right,” says Peter Parker. “What I was–”
MJ’s ringing up the price of his coffee. When she looks up, he looks concerned all of a sudden.
“You okay?” he asks, motioning to his forehead. MJ remembers the Band-Aid on her own.
“Doesn’t really hurt anymore.”
She doesn’t know why she phrases it like that. Truth be told, she doesn’t even remember how she got that cut. She has always been known to open tins pretty crazily. Plus, she’s always banging her head on stuff that’s too low for her.
He’s still standing there, still looking like he’s having a major epiphany and that epiphany is her, so she leans on the cash drawer and says, “Is there anything else?”
He takes a while to think about it. But then, quietly: “No.” He fishes out a five. “Thank you.”
She stows it, feeling like an interaction like this can’t just end here. But here they are.
“No problem.”
“I’ll, uh, see you around,” he tells her with a little tilt of his head as he turns away. And before he goes, he fishes something out of his back pocket and shoves it in the tip
jar without looking at her. He speed-walks out.
MJ stares at his retreating back. Then she stares at the tip jar, no longer empty. She fishes out the bills: a ten and two fives. A ten? And–
Peter Parker just tipped her twenty dollars.
The bills feel very heavy in her hands all of a sudden. What does this mean? Is it a flirty thing? Is it a stalker-y thing? And how did she know that she expected disappointment because she wouldn’t actually be disappointed? And what was the paper for? And why didn’t he say whatever was on it? He’d obviously deviated from whatever plan he seemed to have set out for himself when he walked in. Maybe he just had a lot of social anxiety. Only it didn’t seem like social anxiety. Or, at least, not just social anxiety, because he had been pretty awkward, actually.
MJ hates the things her heart is doing right now. It’s stirring, almost fluttering, in this frivolous and completely un-MJ fashion and she can’t seem to quell it.
She crosses to Ned’s side of the counter, sinks onto the neighbouring stool, and waves the twenty dollars between him and his phone screen. His eyes cross for a moment.
“Aren’t you supposed to get paid more than that on a four-hour shift?” he says. So he’d been totally engrossed in his phone. MJ casts a glance to the display: a LEGO Millenium Falcon going on EBay for half the retail price. Typical.
“This random boy tipped me all of this.”
“Ooh. I hate to say it, but that gives me creepy obsession vibes.”
“Hey, you’re supposed to be the optimistic side of the argument. You’re supposed to be the one going wow, that’s so sweet, and I’m the one that goes no, Ned, tipping twenty bucks goes past sweet and into shady.”
“Well, it is nice.”
“And shady.” It’s more of a question, a search for affirmation, than anything else.
“Sweet and shady. The word sweet makes shady sound like the tree type of shady, not the suspicious type of shady. Was it that guy that came in before me?”
“Yeah, the one with paper.”
“He was kind of unique. But in a very endearing way, from what I could tell. I mean, I didn’t really look at him other than to be like,
huh, he’s holding a note, that’s weird.”
“Did you see any of what was on it?”
With incredulity, Ned says, “No.”
“Worth a shot.”
“So what’s that bring your tip total up to?”
With a sigh, MJ drops her forehead against the counter. “Twenty-one dollars.”
“Did you try smiling?” he reminds her.
She turns her head to the side, squinting up at him. “It just scared people off. That’s how I got the one. I think he thought I’d follow him home if he didn’t.”
“Asking them about their Christmas plans?”
“I forgot. I wasn’t interested.”
“Grovelling on your knees?”
“I did… lightly threaten a Karen.”
That gets Ned to set his phone down. “Threaten?”
“I didn’t threaten her. I threatened that I’d cry.”
“Oh.” With a twitch of his nose, he says, “I don’t think I can imagine you crying.”
“Well, it didn’t work, so…”
“Oh, MJ.” Ned gives her a sympathetic little pat on the head. MJ can’t deny that it brings a glow to some neglected embers in the corner of her heart. These weird little exchanges are her and Ned’s normal. If it works, it works, you know? If a head pat is the easiest way to bestow a little gem of I appreciate you, so be it.
Ned’s mouth quirks decisively. “Tell you what…” He fishes around in his own pocket and slides a five across the counter so it rests just in front of her nose.
Her affronted exhale ruffles it. “I’m not taking your charity, Leeds.”
“It’s the price of the donut.”
“But it’s a tip.”
“But it makes sense numerically.”
“But you’re only doing it because I’m a bad waitress and you feel sorry for me.”
“I’m doing it because I want a friend at college.”
He’s unguarded for just a moment, and MJ sees him. There’s worry in his gaze.
“You’d make friends,” she says quietly.
“I want you.”
MJ didn’t have friends before she met Ned. Like, period. She’s an introvert, yes, but it’s nice to be able to do things like going to the cinema with somebody now. She only realised she didn’t like going alone when she started going with Ned. Okay, he whispers her ear off with factoids, but it’s not the worst thing. Having someone in the seat beside her is really nice. New, and nice.
They met through Decathlon, mostly. Both trailblazing members. He’d asked her about her book on the bus to Washington, and when she scored that winning answer in the competition, she’d found herself tackled by him in a not-unpleasant way.
Neither of them had really wanted to engage with Liz’s midnight pool party the night before (or, that’s what MJ tells herself; Liz hadn’t come to her room, probably guessing she wouldn’t be up to it anyway.) They both found themselves studying in the Business Centre instead. It had been excruciatingly weird for fifteen minutes or so as they typed in silence on their respective laptops, ten feet apart, not quite acknowledging each other, but he’d caved first, admitting he felt rusty on his Art. She’d scooched over and showed him her flashcards, and there it began.
They were close by the time the Europe trip rolled around, and bonds are always strengthened through a catastrophe: namely, those Elementals that started popping up wherever they went. First it was the water monster that surged up out of the canal and wreaked havoc on the centuries-old architecture before Mysterio ‘defeated’ it; then the huge thing made of lava that tore apart the Carnival of Lights just as she’d snuck away from the opera. That moment is an enigma to MJ still; she literally can’t recall why she didn’t stick around for the opera. She wasn’t thrilled about watching it, but she hadn’t been too enthused about the Carnival either. She’d been waiting on Paris, really, and the theories she could investigate surrounding the Eiffel Tower.
And then there was this Night Monkey guy that kept showing up, who was very clearly Spider-Man, and who led MJ to the conclusion that someone in her class secretly moonlit as a vigilante, something she’d suspected from Washington. Only nobody fit into the equation. Nobody was consistently gone when Spider-Man was there.
MJ hates to like popular things, but she supposes Spider-Man is currently unpopular enough to be safe ground for her to be fascinated by him. And frustrated, in equal measure. She’s convinced he’s someone, someone she knows, and yet he can’t be. Nobody she knows would be that stupid to run around risking their neck in spandex, for starters.
Sometimes MJ resigns herself to the probable fact that she’s going out of her mind.
Tapping the Band-Aid on her forehead, she asks Ned about it on a whim: “Do you remember when I got this?”
“Uh…” he furrows his eyebrows at it. “Nah. I feel like I do, but I don’t.”
“Yeah. Me too. Kind of weird.”
“Probably you were too tall for something, right?”
“That’s what I was thinking.”
Barista-ing in the afternoon, housekeeping in the evening.
MJ stirs the sauce vigorously into the two servings of Kraft mac and cheese she’s lovingly handmade. She doles out her portion into one of the nice blue bowls, wanting to feel nice, knowing a fresh choice of ceramics will do precisely nothing to help that, sprinkling grated cheese on top of the cheesy pasta because more cheese always equals better.
The kitchen is in disarray, but that’s nothing new. MJ hasn’t grown up quite enough to care about cleaning up properly, and her dad rarely gets home before night. Sometimes he works nights if he’s working to fix a road and they’ve closed it overnight to avoid traffic.
The living room is marginally better; she takes her gently steaming bowl and pads in her frayed socks to the couch in front of the TV and curls up there instead, scrounging around for the remote. She’s got Amanda Knox queued up and waiting for her–kind of mainstream, but the story is too interesting to pass up on because of its popularity. It’s well-known for a reason.
The door crumbles open about twenty minutes into the documentary. It does that–crumbles. It’s a shitty door. Little pieces of it break off in your hands no matter how gently you try and close it.
“In the living room,” she calls over her shoulder, pausing the TV. She lets her head tip back onto the couch cushion to watch Jeremiah Jones slope in in his luminous jacket and trousers. He really does resemble a mountain in his construction uniform, huge and imposing with globed shoulders that could shoulder a continent. MJ got all her height from him and none of her sparrow-boned skinniness. That’s from her mom, who she doesn’t care to have inherited anything from. She’d prefer to be a mountain like her dad. She’d be taken much more seriously.
“Jones Junior,” he mutters with his usual detached, gruff fondness.
“Senior,” she says back at him.
Technically she’s not a Jones, so not Junior, making him not Senior–she’s a Jones-Watson, if semantics are taken into account. But really, she’s a Jones. She’s a Jones in her bones.
Ew.
Dad looks tired today. He usually does, but especially today. There’s exhausted irritation in the lines around his dark eyes.
He scrubs his stubble with a palm, takes in the contortionist act she’s doing on the couch and the paused image of Amanda Knox on trial. This is the position he finds her in pretty much every evening. She’s a creature of habit, what can she say?
“Still glorifying crime?” he comments mildly.
“Still building a capitalist world?”
“Did you make dinner?”
“Mac and cheese on the stove.”
She watches for a few more minutes while he heats his food up, half-paying attention and half-scrolling through her phone.
“I’m starting to see that Jameson guy’s point of view,” Jeremiah says as he sinks down beside her on the couch with his mac and cheese. “They started us on Liberty Island today. Absolutely trashed. They hadn’t even taken the scaffolding off of that new Cap shield they added to the statue. Admittedly, the Cap shield is…”
“Touristy bullshit,” MJ fills in helpfully.
“Language.”
“That’s what Captain America always says.”
“There’ll be no tourist attractions left if Spider-Man has his way,” her dad protests. He stabs his fork into the sacred fakeness of the mac and cheese. “No monuments. New York’s knocked down enough of its own history already. Now we’re having to abandon restoration projects just to clean up Spider-Man’s messes.”
A pang in MJ’s stomach. It’s fine, somehow, when JJJ rages at Spider-Man, because he’s this distant figure who must have been born to hate on him. Her dad is different. She’s not upset, but she’s not pleased. “They’re really not his messes. It’s not his fault a bunch of supervillains crawled out of the ether. He wouldn’t be Spider-Man if the city didn’t need protecting.”
“Wouldn’t expect you to be on his side.”
“I’ve done my research.”
“I don’t doubt that. It’s just been a long day at work. Why’s it always gotta be New York, you know?”
MJ kicks her legs out to stretch them.
“Were you around when I cut my forehead?” she asks him on a whim.
“Don’t think so.” He turns an understanding smirk towards her, his head lolled back against the cushion in the same way as hers. “Probably you were too tall for something.”
“I know.”
“I know.”
She looks down at her hands and finds she’s been turning the broken dahlia round and round between her fingers.