Chapter Text
I
“My name is Peter Parker and I… would like a coffee, please.”
To call this moment the beginning wouldn’t exactly be accurate, considering it occurs within the middle of a story that’s been half unwritten, but it is the point from which everything else unravels. Her hands stuffed in her uniform pockets, the snow falling softly outside, the smell of powdered sugar in the air, and the shape of his name in her mouth—strangely familiar as if she’s uttered it before many times, as if it somehow already belongs.
His choice, and the cascade of events that it sets in motion; the first flutter of a monarch’s wings, a domino precariously laid in place.
MJ sketches him for the first time that night, thinking of the nervous way he’d held himself when he’d come into the shop, of the emotion in his eyes and the way they’d stuttered over the band-aid on her temple.
She draws people in crisis because they’re more interesting subjects. Their faces tell stories, their bodies. The particular downward slope of his shoulders, the sharp angle of his jaw, the flick in his left eyebrow, the small divot in his chin, the way his ears protrude a little too far beyond what’s strictly normal. All of these details had been distinctive to her, but then, she’s always been observant.
He’d clutched the piece of paper in his hands like a lifeline. Ned had suggested he was suffering from debilitating social anxiety, but that doesn’t feel right to her, especially with how he’d initiated conversation about M.I.T., and the way he’d finished her sentence for her. Expect disappointment so you’ll never be disappointed. Her mug-worthy motto. Pessimistic, sure, but it’s not as if her life’s been especially pleasant up to now. Getting into M.I.T. is probably the best thing that’s ever happened to her.
So logically she should be happy. And she is, mostly.
Except at night, when that inexplicable feeling rattles through her and her bones ring hollow like a bell without a tongue. The sadness washes over her, drowns her, a deluge that she’s powerless to stop. It sits thick and hot inside her lungs, her chest, like pneumonia. She keeps crying herself to sleep.
What’s even stranger is that she’s never been a particularly emotional person. Not even as a little kid, but that was on purpose; a survival tactic she developed after figuring out how much her dad resented her mom for the way she used to turn herself inside out, attention-seeking, always throwing her heart up onto the floor and then eating it whole again upon realizing he didn’t care to hold the mealy mess of it.
So MJ choked and swallowed, her feelings compressed into coal inside of her stomach.
Only now they’re too much, too complicated, because her sketchbook is full of all these faceless drawings of Spider-Man that she doesn’t remember making—him depicted in vivid detail up to the neck and then… nothing. The masked ones she remembers: him hanging upside down from the corner of a page by a web, flashing a peace sign; him crouching on a rooftop, his eyes squinted. He’s almost a caricature at first, but he becomes more solid, more real, as the pages turn.
Her fingers brush their graphite edges, her heart fluttering inside her ribcage. A blown glass black dahlia, whole and then broken, only two petals left. He loves me, he loves me not.
MJ never takes it off, not even to shower, not even to sleep. I like it better broken. She hadn’t been talking about the pendant, she remembers that much.
Speaking of pages, there are dozens of blank ones now and there shouldn’t be any at all. She has a rule about using up every single one before buying another book because of how expensive they are—thirty dollars at Art World—but suddenly there are untouched folios going all the way back to her books from her freshman year at Midtown. It makes no sense to her. It’s entirely out of character.
She wonders if maybe she’s going insane, or if maybe her grandma’s apartment has carbon monoxide poisoning. She replaces the batteries in the monitor just to double check, and when that’s ruled out, she pursues the only avenue remaining: the scientific method.
As in, record her observations, ask the right questions, and formulate a hypothesis.
Observation #1: subject has gaps in her memory.
Observation #2: subject is experiencing a sensation of (seemingly misplaced) loss/grief.
Observation #3: subject has a fixation on & strong feelings toward Spider-Man despite their acquaintance being built entirely on chance encounters.
She brings up the latter with Ned one afternoon in the middle of winter break. She wants to test out her carefully formulated hypothesis, which is:
“I’m in love with Spider-Man.”
As predicted, he’s entirely unhelpful. “God, same. Did you see the videos of him swinging around in his new suit? I swear, I must’ve watched them like, ten times minimum. He’s so cool, and we actually know him which sort of makes us cool by proxy when you really think about it—”
“Ned, you’re not listening to me,” MJ snaps, throwing a small, stuffed Iron Man in his direction—she’s on his bed, he’s swiveling around in his desk chair. They’re supposed to be going through his stuff and organizing it to make packing for M.I.T. easier, because MJ is type-A and very proactive and has them on a strict college prep schedule, except they haven’t actually done much yet other than order in Thai (which she’s been craving for two weeks) and watch the first half of the Hannah Montana movie. “I’m not talking about being a fan, okay? I’m trying to say that I have… I have deep, real feelings for someone that I’ve never actually met before.”
“Uh, we were literally just at the Statue of Liberty with him like, a month ago. And like, didn’t he give you that necklace? So if you ask me I’d say your crush is more than justified.”
MJ fumes. “It’s not a crush, I just said that.”
“Well yeah, but you can’t be in love with someone when you don’t even know their name, right? Or what they look like. I mean, he’s definitely ripped under the suit, but he could still be pretty hideous, like, facially.”
“Yes, exactly my point, thank you.”
Ned blinks. “Okay. Okay. Okay. I can see how that would be confusing.”
“It’s insane, is what it is.”
“I wouldn’t go that far. I mean, it’s maybe a bit—uh, parasocial, but it’s not like you’re one of those crazy people who camps outside of Avengers Tower and spams superheroes with fan mail.”
“No, because I’m me,” MJ agrees, propping up on her elbows. “I’m a very practical person, Ned. I don’t let myself form attachments when I know they won’t lead to anything. It’s a rule I have.”
Ned hums and haws, scratching his chin. He crosses his legs at the knee and asks, like a fledgling therapist, “How would you describe this ‘attachment’?”
“Um. It’s intense, I guess. Every time I see him I feel like… like crying? Sort of?”
“Crying?”
“Because I miss him,” she explains. “Like. A lot. Like too much.”
“…Oh.”
“Ugh,” she rolls over, hiding her burning face in his pillow, “you know what? I’m actually done talking about this. As a matter of fact, just forget I said anything at all!”
“MJ—”
“No, no,” she covers her ears with her hands, “literally never bring this up with me ever again. Start talking about something else right this second or I’ll leave.”
“Okay, um—shit, uh—did you know that one of the biggest subway rats ever recorded weighed almost two whole pounds?”
“That’s your idea of a good segue into a new topic?!”
He sputters, throwing up his hands defensively. “You didn’t give me a lot of time to brainstorm!”
So like, ever since MJ brought him up and then subsequently ordered Ned to never speak of him again, Ned’s been thinking a lot about Spider-Man.
How they know him, what they know (which is, admittedly, very little). And the crying thing that MJ mentioned, he’s been wondering about that and how it might be connected, because it’s been happening to him too.
It came on suddenly. He just sort of woke up one morning with a pit in his gut like somebody died, only as far as he knows, no one has.
As a matter of fact, life’s been pretty sweet lately. Like, he just got into M.I.T., his literal dream school. His acceptance letter is stuck to the kitchen fridge with a Mjolnir magnet and everything. His parents and Lola have never been prouder. Plus it’s winter break, so logically he should be totally chilling, euphoric even. And he is, but also—
Yeah. The crying.
And not just the sniffling weepy kind like when he watches The Notebook with his mom, no. Like the full on snotty, gross, bawling kind. He hasn’t felt this way since his Lolo’s funeral, when he’d snuck into his room during the lamay and crawled under his bedsheets to sob his eyes out.
As time goes on, the feeling grows more intense instead of fading, turning his body into something heavy, slow, and hollow, sort of like a Jack-o-Lantern. He has a hard time getting up in the mornings. Most days he just lays there staring at the ceiling trying to work out what’s wrong with him.
His mom suggests that it might be burnout and signs him up for therapy. Ned goes to the intake, spends an hour struggling to describe the nebulous ball of misery that’s taken residence inside of his stomach, and promptly gives up when the therapist starts asking all these leading questions about childhood trauma.
Sure, his parents have never been perfect and his mom has always been a little overbearing, and yeah, he got bullied a lot in middle school for being overweight and stuff, and he’s always been a loner, but he knows it’s not about any of that the same way that he knows, the second MJ mentions him, that whatever’s wrong with Ned definitely has something to do with Spider-Man.
He first met Spidey in Washington D.C. during his school’s decathlon field trip. Well, actually they must have met before then since he also vaguely remembers that he was keeping some kind of glowy bomb thing safe for Spidey, but then the bomb went off in the elevator and Spidey showed up just in time to save them, and—
…Huh. Now that he thinks about it, it’s pretty weird that he doesn’t remember actually meeting Spider-Man considering the fact that he’s been an avid fan since forever, but it was probably just like, so overwhelming that his brain forgot to record what was happening at the time.
Anyway, the second time Ned met Spider-Man was the night of his sophomore Homecoming dance; that’s also the first time he’d helped him take down a bad guy. From then on, he was Spidey’s occasional civilian assist, and Spidey constantly repaid the favor by looking out for Ned in return—like in Europe when the Elementals showed up, and Spidey was wearing the Night Monkey suit because otherwise it would be too suspicious, him being in D.C. and then in—
Okay, wait.
Wait.
It actually is really suspicious that Spidey was in D.C., Venice, Prague, Berlin, and London at the exact same times as the decathlon team.
“Oh my God,” Ned rolls out of bed and lunges for his coat, and then his backpack, “oh my God.”
He almost forgets to leave a note for his mom in his rush to catch the train. The F line takes him straight from his neighborhood to MJ’s, the car screeching and rattling along, full-up with people heading home from work for the day. Power-dusted, red nosed, tired.
MJ takes forever and a half to open her front door when he knocks on it, and she keeps the chain intact even when she sees him bouncing up and down in the hallway. “What’re you doing here? It’s late.”
“It’s only four.”
“It’s dark out.”
“It’s winter. MJ,” he whines, “let me in.”
“But I—I’m in the middle of something,” she says vaguely, looking kind of, like, embarrassed, which is super rare for her.
Ned flails. “MJ, I literally don’t care if you’re in there watching The Vampire Diaries—and don’t even try to pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about because I saw your Netflix history and I know you’re on season four already—”
“Did you hack my account, Leeds?!”
“My subscription expired and my allowance was drained, okay? Just,” he gets his foot in the door and tries to wiggle inside, “let me—”
“Ned!” She starts pushing against him, “this is breaking and entering!”
“I don’t care! I have something important I need to tell you.”
“Ugh,” her resistance gives way and he tumbles inside, “fine, but we’re not going inside my room.”
Ned glances over at the living room couch where MJ’s grandmother is busy knitting what looks vaguely like a sweater. She’s blatantly staring at them. “Um, no, this is definitely the kind of conversation that needs to be had in private.”
MJ’s cheeks get redder. She looks at her grandmother too, and then hiss-whispers, “She’s literally half deaf.”
“I heard that!” Mrs. Watson hollers.
Visibly furious, MJ grabs Ned’s wrist and drags him down the hallway to her bedroom, stopping just before the threshold. “Okay, before we go inside, I need you to promise me you’ll keep an open mind because it’s—uh. A lot.”
“What, is it super messy in there or something? Are there dead bodies under the floorboards? Wait, oh my God, are you a hoarder?”
“No, Ned, just,” she rolls her eyes, turns the knob, and swings the door open.
Inside, her room only displays slight disorder—the bed unmade, her desk covered in charcoals and pastels, some clothes on the floor—but the thing that immediately catches his eye is the gigantic rolling corkboard by the window, which is covered in photos and notecards and red yarn.
At the center of it all, as the focal point where everything connects, is a picture of Spider-Man.
“Oh, good,” Ned doubles over with relief. “I thought I was gonna have to convince you.”
“Alright, so starting from the top: Spider-Man sightings almost always happen within the confines of one borough: Queens. Admittedly deviations from this pattern occur, but they’re pretty rare. Bearing that in mind, you and I have had encounters with him both out of the state and out of the country, and always on school trips. Spidey was in every single city on Midtown’s European tour, he was in D.C., and he seems to have a vested interest in keeping the both of us alive. Obvious conclusion A: Spider-Man is someone we know. Sub-conclusion A: we know him—or her, I guess—through school.”
Ned bangs her squeaky toy gavel, which he’s pretty sure was a Christmas gift from Cindy Moon for last year’s decathlon Secret Santa exchange. “I concur.”
MJ nods, businesslike. “This narrows down the scope of contenders to our classmates and/or teachers. As a sidenote, I think we can rule out Flash based on, like, physique alone, and also just his general unpleasant countenance and complete lack of wit. And also my, uh, weird feelings.”
“Agreed.”
“Moving on to the phenomenon that I’ve dubbed the Sudden and Mysterious Memory Loss of Doom: both you and I both seem to be experiencing some kind of amnesia, coupled with a deep-seated certainty that someone we know and love has died. Very strange indeed.”
“Speaking of strange,” Ned sits up a little, accidentally jostling the bag of Cheetos enough for a few to spill out onto MJ’s bedspread, “oops, sorry. Anyway, Dr. Strange was there, remember? So whatever this is could definitely be magic-related.”
MJ’s head tilts. “I’ll allow it,” she says after a moment of consideration. She grabs a pen and scrawls the word ‘magic’ on a flash card, tacking it to the board. “Obvious conclusion B: whatever happened to us was targeted and deliberate. Posit: we saw something we shouldn’t have, possibly Spider-Man related, and somebody—maybe SHIELD, I don’t know—Man in Black’d us both into forgetting.”
Ned shakes his head in awe. “I literally wouldn’t even be mad. Like, I’d be honored, actually.”
“Next, we have the creepy faceless-slash-headless sketches of Spider-Man that I don’t remember drawing,” MJ says, using her back grandma’s scratcher to point to the cluster of them on the board. “Plus there’s all those blank pages in my sketchbooks.”
“Eerie,” he says.
She takes a deep breath. “Anyway. Slightly-less-obvious conclusion C: whatever happened to our brains transversed from the psychological to the physical, meaning both of our memories were erased as well as any tangible evidence. Sub-conclusion C: this shit is definitely related to Spider-Man.”
Ned scratches his chin. “And you’re sure we don’t just have, like, Dissociative Identity Disorder? Or brain tumors, maybe?”
“Believe me, I’ve considered both options at length and neither of them fit.”
“Okay, so… what do we do now?”
“Well, we either need to figure out a way to get in touch with Spidey that doesn’t involve almost dying, or we need to ask Dr. Strange.”
Ned hums, phishing through the bag for a thick Cheeto. “I vote B. Seems much easier.”
Bleecker Street is pretty quiet this late at night. The falling snow muffles everything, crunching beneath their boots as they head for the Sanctum Sanctorum. MJ doesn’t really have a plan of action beyond the two of them walking up to the door like a couple of Mormons, knocking until someone answers, and do you have a minute to talk about magical amnesia-ing their way inside.
It pretty much goes exactly like that. Dr. Strange himself is the one to receive them, wearing a pair of Hulk pajamas underneath his weird, sentient cape, a steaming mug of hot chocolate in hand and a very annoyed expression on his face. Then he blinks with clear recognition. “Oh. It’s you two.”
“It’s us,” she agrees. “Do you have a minute to talk about magical amnesia?”
Dr. Strange’s head falls back. “I knew it. I knew it. Wong! I knew it!”
“Knew what?” Wong calls from deeper inside the house.
“Don’t play dumb, you know well what,” Strange snaps. He opens the door wider to admit them, ushering them inside with a wave of his hand. “For days I’ve been fighting a seemingly displaced sensation of confusion and loss. My conclusion was that I must have spelled myself into forgetting something or someone as a way to dull the pain of—I don’t know, a break up, or—but if you’re both experiencing it too…?”
Ned nods eagerly. “We are, yeah, it’s—”
“It sucks,” MJ supplies.
“Yes,” Strange agrees simply, leading them through the house and into the kitchen. Wong is there, shaving a chocolate bar over the mountain of whipped cream in his mug. “Wong, the children require cocoa.”
“Oh, no, sir, that’s really not—” Ned starts, but Strange holds up a hand.
“Nonsense, I insist. It’s cold out, it’s Christmastime, and you came all this way just to validate me, so.”
“Uh,” Ned glances at MJ, uneasy, “sir, that’s actually not what we came here to do.”
“Well, obviously,” he rolls his eyes, “but two birds with one stone, as they say. Wong?”
Grumbling, Wong abandons his cup of cocoa to make more. Strange heads for a rickety looking butcher-block table, so they follow and sit down with him. “We’re definitely not imagining it then, right?”
“Oh, no. The likelihood of the three of us all undergoing the same form of psychosis at the same time in the wake of our last interaction is far outweighed by the likelihood that a spell was cast on us as a collective. Really, it becomes an almost irrefutable fact that magic of some kind was used.” He sips his cocoa and comes away with a foam on his mustache.
“Okay,” MJ’s shoulders sink as a wave of relief washes over her. Whatever else, it’s nice to know that she hasn’t gone completely insane. “So… how do we reverse it?”
Strange starts to laugh. “Reverse it? No, no,” he shakes his head, “I’m sorry, kid, that’s just not possible.”
“What?!” Ned explodes. “But—but there has to be some kind of magical undo button for things like this, I mean, what if you accidentally make yourself forget something really important or—”
“Alright, first of all, something like this would never happen accidentally. The Runes of Kof-Kol must first be written before they’re cast. Secondly, I never said it was impossible in the sense that I can’t do it, I mean it’s impossible in the sense that I won’t.”
Anger whips through her, white and hot. “Why not?” she grits.
“Because I would never go to such lengths as to cast a spell unless it was absolutely necessary,” Strange says with a shrug, completely unintimidated by her scowl, which she hates. “Clearly whatever was erased from our minds was dangerous in some way—for us personally, or for the planet, or—honestly, who knows. Point is, undoing the spell could very well unravel the universe as we know it—nay, the multiverse, even.”
Wong snorts. “Did you seriously just say ‘nay’?”
“Silencio.”
Ned frowns. “Isn’t that a Harry Potter spell…?”
Fed up, MJ slaps her hand on the table, causing Strange’s cup to rattle. “Let me get this straight,” she seethes. “You’re telling me that I’m just supposed to go on with my life despite the fact that I’m—I’m in mourning, okay? I feel like I should be walking around wearing a black veil and—and doing Shiva or something! I haven’t been this depressed since I started puberty, but whatever! Who cares, right? Doesn’t matter that something was erased from my brain without my consent.”
To her horror, she feels her eyes start to burn with the prickle of fast-forming tears. Strange sighs heavily. “I sympathize with you, Jones, truly. But I must reiterate that my top priority will always be to maintain the stability of our timeline. Every decision that I make is weighed against that goal, and I can say with the utmost amount of confidence, without even remembering all of the details, that I wouldn’t have cast that spell unless it had to be cast.”
“Fine, whatever, forget it then.” MJ shoots to her feet and grabs her backpack. “Speaking of puberty, I just got my period, so if you’ll excuse me I’m gonna go use the bathroom.”
Just as she’d predicted he would, because he’s a lame middle-aged man, Strange gets all visibly uncomfortable and waves her off. “Of course, of course. Just, uh, the toilet downstairs is currently housing a small galaxy, so you should probably use the one on the second floor. It’s the third door down the left hallway.”
She flips him off on her way out.
“So that was like, super depressing.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I mean, I can’t believe Wong uses water to make hot cocoa and not milk.”
“What? That’s—” MJ cuts herself off when she sees the look on his face and huffs, a small smirk starting to lift the corner of her mouth. “Whatever, it doesn’t matter. Strange is a loser and we don’t need him anyway.”
With that, she scoops her backpack off the subway car’s floor and into her lap, unzipping it to reveal several ancient-looking, dusty tomes stuffed inside. Ned’s eyes blow wide. “You stole these?! MJ, oh my God, they’re gonna kill us!”
“Relax,” she rolls her eyes, “there were thousands in that library and there’s no way either of those goons is gonna notice a couple of misplaced grimoires. Point is, you’re magic, right? So I figure with a bit of practice, you could work your way up to being an actual wizard someday.”
“Well, maybe, but I don’t have a—”
MJ pulls something gold out of the side pocket. “Sling Ring?”
Ned literally starts to hyperventilate. “Oh my God, oh my God—”
“Again, there were like a dozen of them just sitting in a drawer. Moreover, the drawer wasn’t even locked, so in my opinion they honestly deserved to get robbed. Should teach ’em a lesson at least.”
Ned takes the Sling Ring from her, examining it with awe. It’s heavy, just like the one he’d used to help Spider-Man, and fits perfectly on his index and middle fingers. He wiggles them a little. “Wow. I feel so powerful.”
MJ pats him on the shoulder. “Now all you need to do is hone that power into an actual practiced ability so you don’t accidentally rip the universe apart undoing the spell we’re under.”
“Uh, right,” he swallows. “Piece of cake.”