Chapter Text
time and space, in-between
i. opening rites
Four years and a day after the end of the world, Spider-Woman watches the dawn-bruised sky split open above Brooklyn, and she curses. Heavily. Brutally. Each word catches in her mask, muffled but severe.
After a blissfully uneventful patrol—a rarity in a city as crime ridden as it is filthy—she has just a sliver of enough time to finally patch and bleach her suit before the sunrise. She doesn’t want to deal with aliens or time travelers or surgeons turned sorcerers or whatever is currently gestating in the sky.
Above the dim skyline, concentric rings of red and yellow swirl within each other. Growing brighter and brighter with each spin. Each blink bears the blinding imprint of it. It’s the most beautiful, vibrant thing she’s seen in a long time.
There’s a high whining, too artificial and chiding. Not of this world. It makes her teeth pang. Her ears ring. She’s two blocks away, but she’s careful not to lose sight of the distorted sky as she races through the streets.
There’s no risk of losing the sound of it. It gives off a shrill, grating cry like a spaceship readying to take flight. It rips through the empty streets. It only grows louder as she draws closer.
That preternatural flashbang—what Peter always cheekily called his Spidey-Sense—doesn’t need to tell her it’s bad news, but it helps ratchet up her apprehension. She doesn’t want to get any closer. Every instinct—Spider or otherwise—within her screams to just leave it be.
But she’s Spider-Woman. She doesn’t get to leave things be. No matter how much she stares into empty corners and longs for the days when these things weren’t her problem. Back when she was still just MJ. Back when it was Peter’s job to right the wrongs in the world.
The busted storefronts and boarded up homes race by as she vaults over the urban debris. Few people call Brooklyn home anymore. Most use it as a staging ground for petty crime and drug running, two of few industries that thrive in the post-apocalypse. For the most part, MJ ignores them, only intervening when the petty crimes become violent or the drug running turns bloody.
It isn’t the Nu York that Peter would want, but it’s the best she can do with the maggia waging war across the boroughs and a cavalcade of super villains using every abandoned skyscraper like the set for their big comeback film. Spider-Woman is one of the few superheroes left. She’s the only superhero left dedicated solely to Nu York.
Spider-Woman’s no Spider-Man, but MJ does her best. On the rare good days, she thinks she might even be making a difference.
Today has not been one of those days.
MJ turns the corner into Cobble Hill proper and skids to a stop.
Overhead, the crackling maw spits. The air quakes in its passing, wavering like jello knocked with a fork. Something large lands on top of her house.
Then, it's dark as it ever was. The meager stars seem all the dimmer.
Again, she curses, spewing poisonous profanities. Of all the places in the whole wide world, of course this thing would land on her house. Not on the crumbling apartment complex across the street. Not on any of the empty brownstones up and down the block. Not on Strange’s doorstep.
Nope, directly on top of her house.
Quiet as she can manage, MJ creeps up the time-worn facade of the Lees’ neighboring brownstone. The Lees haven’t lived here in years, but it’s a kindness to consider the hollow home as theirs. Otherwise, it’s just another empty home on another empty street.
One brick comes loose beneath her foot, crumbling under the pressure. The dull noise echoes. She winces, pressing herself flat against the side of the building. Not for the first time, she wishes invisibility was inherent with the Spidey mantle.
Thankfully, whatever’s taken up residence on her rooftop, doesn’t hear (or care about) the noise. She creeps the rest of the way up, quick and adroit as a real spider. Reaching the ledge, she vaults up and over onto the patio proper, careful to soften her landing.
Crouched against the ledge, MJ takes stock of her surroundings.
Once, the Lees’ rooftop patio housed an oasis of a garden so vibrant and beautiful that MJ had been inspired, with little success, to recreate it on her own patio. Over the years, the planters rotted and the dirt petrified. The squirrel statues Mrs. Lee so loved warped beyond recognition. Grotesque lumps of buffed cement and plaster mark where they once lay. Only a table remains in the center of the patio, standing vigil over a pathetic monument to something once so beautiful.
Now, it’s infested. Hazy yellow lights flit around the garden grave, spilling over the lattice fence dividing the Lees’ property from hers. They blink and bob like fireflies, but there’s no shape to them. When they dim, they vanish completely, only to reappear a few inches away, bright as ever. With baby helicopter floodlights, they cast broad swaths of electric light, nosing through the dust and decay.
Spider-Sense remains dormant, but she puts little faith in it. Unlike Peter’s super special extrasensory sidekick (another of his phrases), hers only pipes up when there’s a bullet already streaking towards her brain or a fist inches from connecting with her gut. It doesn’t often tell her anything she can’t see with her own eyes.
Crouched against the ledge, MJ studies the lights for a moment, but can't find any pattern in that on-off twinkling. She can’t draw the lines fast enough.
MJ keeps watching. Her breaths sound impossibly loud, even dulled by the excess of fabric bunched over her mouth.
No route forward makes itself known as one pesky light creeps closer and closer and closer. She’s left with no plan. No better choice.
Lunging forward, she aims for a dark patch, but it explodes with light a split-second before her landing. Midair, she twists serpentine to another stretch of darkness. She barely manages to stunt her momentum before strafing her pinky against a fresh blast of light. Ahead of her, a series of lights dim, lying out a clear path to the patio table. Or a trap.
With few options, MJ braces one foot back and squints. The table is a decent distance away. It’ll be one hell of a jump. If she gets caught, at least it’ll look pretty metal.
She dives.
The air whistles and the lights blink around her. She skids underneath the table, elbows and knees taking the brunt of the hit. It’s a discordant landing. One of her feet fishtails, knocking against the central support. The table warbles like a gong.
MJ whips her body, constricts it tight as a noose around the support. The warbling stops, but not soon enough.
A light blinks into life overtop the table, zooming from edge to edge to edge. Light and shadow lick like flames, edging closer but never quite brushing against her.
All it would take is a shift in axis for the light to find her. Up and down, instead of side to side.
Breath held, MJ locks her body into rigor. Her chest aches. Her pulse pounds black at the edges of her vision. She holds onto the support tight enough that it creaks, giving into her grip.
Spidey-sense might not recognize the threat, but she knows better than to let some spooky alien lights have their way with her. Her thoughts are a steady beat of: Go Away. Go Away. Go Away.
“Fuck!”
MJ startles. Squeezes sharp and hard.
The tabletop falls against her head with a thunk, support snapped clean in two. Her hands catch it, palms pressed flat to stick to the underside before it can clatter to the ground.
All the lights wink out. Only stiff darkness remains.
A barrage of Spanish booms in the night. It’s the same voice as before. Male. Not too deep, more tenor than baritone, but rich. Commandeering. It swallows up all the creaking, shuffling sounds of Nu York battening down for the coming day. Most importantly, it doesn’t get any closer.
Still, MJ waits. Listens. Her mind regurgitates high school Spanish, but two classes nearly twenty years ago do little to help her now. Still, she gets the gist clear enough. Mr. Fell Out of the Sky is not happy.
Carefully, MJ leans the tabletop back from her head. Her pecs and neck elasticize, activating that pleasant burn of a good stretch. She feels kinship with turtles everywhere as she cranes her neck out further and scans the area, searching for her otherworldly visitor. Try as she might, her angle sucks. She can’t see over the top of the lattice fence.
Even worse, the grumbling stops, silenced mid-rage. Her only frame of reference is her memory, the place it sounded like it was coming from.
Thinking fast, MJ repositions the tabletop over her head and begins an inching duck waddle towards her patio. She could close the short distance in a single stride, but experience (and a few beatings) tells her to be cautious.
The world is still around her, but there comes a constant, unsteady clicking. It’s the sound of fingers typing an old, clunky keyboard. Hooves clacking over cobblestone. Skittering mandibles. Exposed bone scratching against the lid of a coffin. Each sonic association conjures a more frightening imagination of her visitor than the last.
Slow as honey hung from a spoon, MJ moves the tabletop to the ground. Nothing jumps her. The clacking doesn’t stop. The lights don’t come back. She doesn’t know what to make of either, but she’s confident she hasn’t been caught.
Straightening to her full height and rolling her stiff right heel for good measure, MJ finally sees her visitor.
Just visible above the fence, a lone figure stands on the overhang of her rooftop access door. Clad head to toe in a skin-tight suit of bruise blues and crimson rich enough for royalty, he isn’t anyone, or anything, she recognizes. And she would certainly remember someone so well built. Legs like industrial pistons. Shoulders broad like a private jet. Biceps to rival Thor in his prime.
The shimmering crimson of his suit emphasizes the defined musculature, dimming and glowing like a pulse. Whoever he is, he looks like a funhouse mirror reflection of her late husband, as big and broad and masculine as Peter always longed to be.Thank God he faces away from her.
Still, he’s too close. If he turned around, he’d clock her immediately. And then what would she do?
Gritting her teeth around a fresh curse, MJ thrums her fingers against her skull. No ingenious plan shakes loose of the snarl of fear and anxiety.
First encounters with new enemies, historically, haven’t gone well for her. This one is shaping up particularly bad, on account of her opponent's positively jacked physique and the fact that he fell out of the fucking sky.
With few choices, she chooses her best one: hide.
Though the electric fire no longer works, the pit jutting from the back end of her patio, close to the street, remains like a vestigial limb. It isn’t perfect, but crouching behind it should cover her enough to observe her visitor a little longer.
She steadies herself, counting down from five, but launching into the air on two. With a single flip, she clears the fence. One quick roll later, she kneels beside the firepit. The road below to her back, she locks her fingers tight along the crumbling lip of the pit. Maybe she’ll break it loose and wield pieces of it as blunt weapons if it came to that.
Another cursing barrage. Some of it she recognizes, run of the mill goddamnits and bullshits, interspersed with rapid-fire Spanish.
Up above, her visitor rocks back and forth on his feet. A far flung arm gestures aggressively. He shouts, “How is this possible? The chronometers should all be synched! I set this one myself!”
A small white light, distinct, and vaguely person-shaped blips over one of his broad shoulders. It moves, a small yellow screen popping into life in front of it. A woman says, “Still scanning, but the temporal stability here is, well, not very stable. Scale of one to ten, it’s not good. It’s bad.”
There’s a grumbling of something MJ doesn’t understand as he shakes his head.
The unknown woman huffs, and says, “Monitoring the multiverse isn’t a perfect science, and it isn’t easy. Even if I make it look that way.”
“I know, Lyla. I’m not blaming you." He turns his head, just enough to reveal a crimson crescent on the face of his mask. It pinches smaller, dejected, as he sets his jaw like a sulky cat.
“Sensors report a sharp decline in the population density of 7782,” the woman says. “Down two-thirds from the last reading. Pending additional scan to confirm. So, no time for a classic O’Hara guilt spiral. Chip up, big guy.”
Lyla. O’Hara. MJ rubs the heel of her hand between her brows, hoping to massage some errant memory loose from the snarl of her past. Peter always rambled about his myriad of crazy and kooky encounters. She always did her best to listen, but, if he ever mentioned a Lyla or an O’Hara, she can’t remember. She definitely doesn’t remember any wild stories about giant masked men popping out of the sky for a visit.
There’s a crackling noise from above. A voice, familiar as a toothache and just as disorienting, says, “You know, babysitting is a bit above my paygrade. Rampaging super villain? Sure, call me up. But babysitting? Are you trying to kill me?”
The masked man, O’Hara, huffs. “This line is for emergencies only."
“Told you to encode it,” Lyla mutters at the same time the little person-light shifts and crosses their arms. MJ squints, trying to make out whether Lyla is a ghost or an alien. Or a ghost alien.
Any option is bad. MJ’s way out of her depth.
“Oh, is it for emergencies only? Maybe put more holo-notes around it saying so. Thirty isn’t enough of a deterrent.”
The voice is unnerving in its familiarity, but MJ can’t place it. There’s an affability and good-natured sarcasm to it that are sorely out of place in her nocturnal hellscape. It reminds her, achingly, of her husband. But it isn’t her husband. It can’t be.
Peter’s been dead for years.
“What is it?” O’Hara says. His shoulders draw tight. The fabric moves like a second skin over the musculature. MJ has a sobering thought—what if the unnatural blue is his skin?
No. Ridiculous. Unless he is an alien. Then she’d really be fucked. She’s never fought an alien before. MJ worries at her temples. Wavers on her toes. Debates running. Really, she’s not cut out for this kind of work.
“Is Gabi allowed to watch The Oozes? She says she is”—the voice softens, addressing someone else—“okay, but just nodding your head isn’t as convincing as you think it is.”
There’s a squawk of indignation, shrill as only a child can be. Then, the voice says, “I’m not convinced, Miguel. Looks a little too scary for an eight-year-old.”
Another sweep of her memory finds nothing in Miguel O’Hara, which is a distinct enough name that she thinks she would remember. Maybe.
Peter talked so much about everything and everyone, but there had been so much going on in her own little world that she didn’t always catch everything he said. The tragedy of it all is that she hadn’t known how much she was missing until it was too late. She should have paid more attention. She should have paid more attention to everything.
“Lyla—”
“Don’t sic Lyla on me! She already gave me the spiel on babysitting. I’m asking you, soon-to-be dad to dad. How do you know it’s okay for her to watch?”
MJ clutches at her head. It’s too much. It’s too familiar. It’s not like anyone really knows,” she says to Peter, running a quick hand over the pudge of her belly.
They sit across from each other in the dining nook of their newly purchased Brooklyn brownstone. Half-eaten plates of an honest attempt at mac n cheese sit in front of them. She is two months pregnant. He is two months petrified.
“And that’s terrifying!” he cries, throwing his hands up. His upper lip quirks, caught between smile and exasperation. “How can you say that and not want to upchuck all of the very lovely dinner your beloved boyfriend slaved over?”
MJ rolls her eyes, but her smile betrays her. “Because then your darling girlfriend would have to clean it up since my beloved boyfriend would be running to the bathroom to upchuck his very lovely dinner.”
Peter groans and knocks his head back, squeezing his eyes closed and making his mouth a wobbling line. “Okay, no more talking about upchucking. I’m queasy.”
She laughs and lays a comforting hand over his, slotting their fingers together to squeeze. He looks at her with a twitch to his mouth. His eyes are the sweetest green she’s ever seen. She hopes their baby will have his eyes.
“It’s like you’re always saying, with great power, must also come great responsibility. And this little bean will be our greatest responsibility, but also our greatest power.”
“Oh, Christ, MJ,” he says, laughing through a cringe so hard it looks painful. “That may just be the sappiest thing I’ve ever heard.”
MJ comes to with a faint ringing of nostalgia still in her ears. The man that sounds enough like her husband to split her head in two, says, “Are there some Parental Powers that kick in once you have a kid or are you just winging it? Because if you’re winging it—"
“I’m hanging up, Parker.”
She hisses in a breath of surprise and knows immediately it is a mistake. Miguel O’Hara whips around, just as she panics, flipping backwards with enough force and height to clear the safety rail of the patio and plummet over the edge of the building.
Her senses relay his appearance in a series of flashbulb afterimages. Harsh, red curves, mirrored reflections of the other, over the face of his mask, narrowed in suspicion. Curving, bladed protrusions of the same unreal color bursting from each arm. A watch with a broad, plasticky orange screen over his left wrist. Fingers ending in the pointed talons of a bird of prey. The emblem of a sinister spider sprawling along the planes of a broad chest thinning into a trim waist.
Quick as a snakebite, MJ lashes out, slapping her hands flat against the side of her house to halt her freefall. She narrowly misses bashing in the bay window of her bedroom, hitting the strip of brick just beside it. With quick, panting breaths, she scrambles back up the ledge, peeking up over it.
Miguel O’Hara is already gone.
The lights have returned, cutting through the darkness in uneven and sudden intervals. The bricks of the building jut at uneven angles into her hands. Thunderous in her chest, her heartbeat pounds. She needs to move. Now.
That raw, panging nerve ratchets within her head, offering a flash of a migraine over her left eye as a warning. She lurches to the right as a thwip thwip thwip of red, glistening webbing blooms over the ledge where her hands just gripped.
A shimmer of crimson reveals his location—the caddy cornered rooftop behind her. How can he move so fucking fast?
MJ flings herself back over the railing, careful to avoid the webbing, but she isn’t quick enough. The bursting instinct in her skull fails to understand. It blazes across her subconscious.
There’s another thwip. Her feet catch, cemented to the ground by red webs. She jerks to a sudden, unpleasant halt. She has to windmill her arms to keep from pitching over.
She struggles, but the webbing is too strong. She doesn’t try to peel it off with her hands, fearing she’d lose both to its stickiness. Just curses and turns her ire to the man swinging over the street to drop beside her. He lands easily with a grace discordant from his massive stature.
Up close, his size is all the more staggering. At 5 '11, MJ is not a small woman—though she was once—but Miguel O’Hara makes her feel small. He remains several feet away and still manages to loom over her, squinting down at her through his mask in the same, discerning way as a pathologist on the brink of dissection.
But she refuses to be cowed. She meets his gaze, masked glare to masked glare, and strains again against her binding.
“You’re not Parker,” he says. He waves a taloned hand.
Blisters of light dot the air around her. One blips in front of her. It casts over her in a full sweep, and she glares into it to hide her wince. Her rough-hewn mask isn’t quite as expressive as his, but she expects the intent comes across well enough. “Where is he?”
“I was going to ask you.”
“You were talking to him! From your watch!”
“It’s better than a watch,” he says, quickly, like a reflex. He prods at the Better-Than-A-Watch with two fingers.
The person-shaped light reappears over his shoulder. Up close, MJ can see that the white light is a person. A little woman in an exquisitely white puffer and pink-heart glasses, she scrunches up her nose to report, “Signature’s wonky, Miguel. It mostly matches up with the data for Marilyn Jane Parker-Watson, but there’s a lotta interference. Standard radiation and cosmic. I’m also getting some trace Spidey readings and that shouldn’t—"
There’s more crackling from the Better-Than-A-Watch, a strangled Hey! from Lyla as she vanishes with a wink of light, and then: “Very rude of you to hang up like that. Think of the example you’re setting for your daughter.”
“Peter!” MJ cries.
“Whoa, is that a woman? Did you saddle me with babysitting duty just to—”
Her husband’s voice cuts off. Lyla’s voice, pitched high with urgency, overtakes it. “Sensors are giving out bad readings, Miguel. Temporal flux imminent. You have to—”
The line goes dead. The twinkling, firefly lights blink back into nothingness. A shiver crawls along MJ’s spine. Goosebumps break out across her skin. An aluminum taste coats her tongue. Her heart spikes with a cold pulse of anxiety, but the sensation’s familiar. It happens, every so often, ever since the collider blew. Nothing ever comes of it. Just a nibbling unease in her chest that lingers until it’s gone.
Miguel curses loudly—Spanish again—and begins tapping rapidly at his Better-Than-a-Watch. The orange glow has died with the other lights. She can’t see but suspects the entire apparatus has gone dark.
“Lose touch with the mothership?” she asks.
“I’m not an alien. Obviously.” He doesn’t look at her. He continues to fiddle with his watch.
“Dude,” she says. “You fell out of the sky. And you’re glowing.”
He drops his wrist and draws himself to full height, rolling his neck in a way that would probably be impressive if she was willing to be impressed. Instead, she just raises a brow when he announces, “I’m from another dimension.”
It doesn’t phase her. Just last Wednesday, she got into a scuffle with a burn-scarred woman claiming to be a failed clone of her husband. When the so-called clone lost her balance and took a jutting steel girder through the chest, she disintegrated into dust. So, sure. Why not?
Miguel O’Hara is from another dimension and MariJane Watson-Parker is Spider-Woman. Big whoop.
But, she needs to keep him distracted long enough to think up a stunning escape plan. It’s a classic Parker Play—if you can’t compete, infuriate—and one she’s used for her own purposes with mixed success. “An alien dimension.”
“No,” he says. Frustration bites in his tone. “A future dimension.”
“You came back to fix this then? You’re about four years too late, champ.”
He just stares at her. His mask is unlined, unemotional, but the sharp red curves over and around the outsides of his eyes give him a perpetually skeptical and skeletal appearance. “What happened here?”
“You’re from the future, you don’t know?”
“Not your future.”
“Oh, okay, sure.” She nods, making a small mhmm noise. “That makes sense.”
The red of his mask pinches together, glaring. He says, “My name is Miguel O’Hara. I lead an elite strike force dedicated to upholding and maintaining the multiverse.”
“Well, that sounds very important.” She upturns her nose with a snobby sniff. “Very made up too.”
“It’s not—”
“Why are you here? Did you know my husband?” she demands. “He never mentioned you.”
His shoulders tense. His jaw juts. “He wouldn’t. Where is he?”
“Gone.”
Miguel’s masked eyes pinch tighter. He repeats, “Gone?”
“Gone.”
Miguel huffs and brings a hand to his face, plying the bridge of his nose through his mask. His tone remains low, clinical, but there’s a nip to it now. For a self-proclaimed messiah of the multiverse, he’s easily frustrated. “Where did he go?”
“If I knew that, I'd be preaching on a street corner, not running around in spandex.”
“The fate of the multiverse—”
And then, like a blessing from a heaven she doesn’t believe in, the sky lights up once more with swirling, crackling cosmic flare. The split erupts and a figure clad in red and blue blasts out. He catches the edge of a faded billboard across the street and then hangs from the side, offering a two fingered wave.
“Yikes. No offense to this universe, but wow. I’m glad I do not live here.” He flips off the billboard and onto the rooftop, landing right beside Miguel. He’s only a few feet away, a distance she could cross in a second (pesky webs on her feet aside), but the shock of it all overloads her system.
Looking at him, her senses erupt. Sight and scent and sound and taste and touch all narrow into one continuum. MJ at one end. Him at the other. All the history and the horror between them.
When the maelstrom quiets, she can scarcely breathe. Peter is here. He’s alive. He’s home.
He looks exactly like he should, exactly like she remembers, save for a pair of ratty sweatpants over his suit. Even the strange fashion choice doesn’t alarm her. Peter never had an eye for style. Without her and Harry, he would’ve ended up in the dictionary beside Sloppy instead of Spider-Man.
Peter doesn’t acknowledge her beyond that first glance and that’s okay! He’s always been a little airheaded and distractible. Even superhuman sensory enhancements hadn’t been able to help him there.
He tosses something small and silvery to Miguel, who catches it deftly and begins to tinker with his Better-Than-A-Watch. The noises of his machinations aren't as pronounced. His fingers are no longer talon-tipped.
“Lyla says it’ll be about a half hour or so until the next temporal flux,” Peter says, “so, you got some time, but let’s make with the getting out, right?”
Miguel nods once, sharp and assenting. Then, his masked eyes shoot wide in alarm and his head whips to Peter. “Where’s Gabriella?”
“Cuddled up, watching Inspector Gizmo, holding down the fort—”
“You left her—”
“Of course I didn’t leave her alone!” Peters shouts, throwing out his hands in exasperation. “Jess is with her. Jess, who you probably should’ve called first anyway!”
Peter turns to MJ and juts a thumb at Miguel. Lightning cleaves through her body. She is alert and anxious and aching, all at once. Because Peter is here. Peter is here and he is alive and he is talking to her.
“This guy! Calls me across ten dimensions to watch his kid but has no faith in me. Can you believe that?”
MJ swallows, thickly, because it’s real and she’s not dreaming. She’s not concussed. She’s not coming down from Venom. She’s not hallucinating.
She’s here. He is too.
A thousand questions flick through her mind, but only one sticks. She asks, “Where’s Mayday?”
“Mayday?” His masked eyes squint, discerning, and he cocks his head in that cute, oblivious way she always loved. “Uh, she’s good, I hope. That’s very weird of you to ask, Spider-Person I’ve never met before.”
Faced with a reality she never thought possible, she can hardly choke down the glut of emotion in her throat. It’s even harder to speak, but she manages. “It’s me, Peter."
A quick rip of her hand tears off her mask. The years have sapped all the softness of youth from her face. The radiation has washed out all her little vibrancies. Her freckles have faded. Her hair has dulled from blazing fire to muddy copper. Her eyes have lost all their gold-flecked richness. But she’s still MJ; his first love, his wife, his best friend, his daughter’s mother.
MJ stares at him. Expectant. Half-crazed. Mask dangling lank from her fingertips. Mouth edging towards a grin. Eyes wide with hope. He’s here and Mayday is good and they’re alive! The air already tastes a little sweeter! The burden of her Spider-ness is a little lighter!
Soon, he’ll take her into his arms and it will all be okay and she can hold her daughter and make up for every single day they’ve spent apart and tell them both how much she loves them, how much she’s missed them, how sorry she is.
And she won’t have to be alone ever again.
“No kidding?” Peter shakes his head. Chuffs.
The manic joy-state freezes on her face like a bad paparazzi photo. The hope in her eye stings. The exhilaration curdles.
“Wait ‘til I tell my MJ. The magic of the multiverse!”
I’m your MJ, she nearly insists, but then he tugs off his own mask. Most of his face is the Peter she remembers: same long face, same bowed mischief to his mouth, same perpetually mussed mop of brown hair. But his eyes are the wrong color. Brown instead of green. And his nose is crooked. An ancient break bisects the bridge. Crooked. Flaunting its brokenness. Something Peter would have been too self conscious to leave untouched.
Tears well in her eyes, pressure threatening to burst the ball from the socket, and a guttural, tearing scream butts up against the back of her teeth, begging to be freed. Neither sensation breaches. MJ collects her expression, drawing it tight and sharp and still too exposed without her mask. “Is this some kind of fucking joke?”
“Watch out! MJ’s hot!” the Peter that isn’t Peter says, chuckling in discomfort. It’s the same awkward laugh as her husband. When he sweeps a quick hand through his hair, it’s with the same jerk of his arm. The same endearing slant of his eyes.
Four years without him, but she never forgot him and all his intricacies. Never let herself forget.
Acid burbles in her throat. She grits her teeth together until her jaw throbs. Once more, she strains her feet against the webbing. Both break through in a little bunny hop. The webbing dissolves immediately.
Miguel’s head whips towards the small rip of the webs, but she ignores him entirely. She swells upright, stretching her spine tall as she can manage, and steadies her stance. Her fingers itch, but she doesn’t move them. She glares into the brown eyes of the man with her husband’s face, even as her heart revolts at the wrongness.
“Who are you?”
His expression strickens—just like her Peter—but Miguel answers for him.
“He’s from another dimension.”
She whirls on Miguel instinctively, seamlessly redirecting the full force of her fury. Rage crawls over her skin like a bad itch when he asks, “What happened to your husband, MariJane?”
Righteous anger quickens her tongue, makes her spit her response because how dare he call her by that nickname, any nickname, like he knows her. Like he knows anything about her. “He’s dead. Just like the rest of the world.”
“How did it happen?” Miguel presses, frustrated and clearly trying not to be, but failing all the same.
So, MJ presses right back. “Your little lady friend didn’t tell you? Seems like she knows a whole lot.”
“Lyla? No, she just interprets the data.”
The little woman pops up over his shoulder. She crosses her arms and pouts her lips, saying, “Wow, you really know how to make a girl feel important, Miguel. Just interpreting the data is taking up 43.44% of my drive. If you—”
“Enough, Lyla,” he says. Lyla glares and then turns her back on him with a dignified huff. She winks away.
“What happened here?” he asks again.
It strikes MJ that she’s never had to explain it all, never had to detail the how and the why to anyone who didn’t live through it, who doesn’t already know. And now, faced with interdimensional beings, one with the face of her dead husband and the other with perpetual disdain in his voice, she doesn’t want to.
“Look, Mr. Leader of an elite task force—”
“No, you look," Miguel says. He emphasizes his frustration with a pointed, lecturing finger that she doesn’t appreciate. She glares at his finger, imagines taking hold of it to pitch him into the street below. “We lost contact with Parker three hours ago, but the readings here say years have passed. There are temporal fluxes every half hour. Radiation levels are off the chart—”
“Oh, is that why I feel like my brain is bleeding?” Not-Her-Husband mutters.
“—Parker shouldn’t be dead, and you shouldn’t be a Spider. This world is completely off-model, and if you don’t tell me exactly what happened here, we won’t be able to stabilize it.”
MJ bristles. She itches for a fight she will most assuredly lose. Miguel’s already proven himself to be faster and better equipped than her. Not to mention the backup he’d get from Not-Her-Husband. But she’s gotten her ass kicked over smaller things. It would feel pretty good to slap the holier-than-thou tone from Miguel’s voice.
“MJ,” Not-Her-Husband says, “I know this must seem completely insane, but, please, Miguel knows what he’s talking about. If he says things are bad, they’re probably worse. We just want to help.”
Turning on him so quickly the world around her smears, MJ snarls, fire and fury and pure Watson rage. “You want to help? You should’ve been here four years ago to stop the collider.”
“Why’s it always a collider?” Not-Her-Husband groans, hanging his head.
“A cross-dimensional collider?” Miguel asks. “Built by Kingpin?”
“Goblin called it a quantum collider,” she says, crossing her arms. “What the hell is Kingpin?”
Miguel’s already running for the ledge, lithe as a cat, saying, “Lyla—”
“Already on it, big guy.”
Then, they’re off into the night; him swinging between the buildings with his eerie red webbing and Lyla hovering just over his shoulder.
MJ watches them go, curling and uncurling her hands into fists against the crooks of her elbows. She struggles to breathe. Not-Her-Husband takes a step towards her. His hand is outstretched, flat palmed and straight out in a gesture of goodwill. She glares at his hand first, and then fully at him before taking a pointed step back.
His hand falls. He sighs and rubs at the back of his neck. “Look, I feel a little awkward about this. Like, you seem kind of… mad at me?”
“I am mad at you. You’re not my husband.”
“Yeah, sorry about that,” he says with a wince. “And for whatever happened here. I had a bit of an incident with a collider myself and I know it could’ve been bad, very bad.”
Trans-dimensional interloper or not, he has the same wounded puppy dog eyes her husband so loved to employ. She wants to be mad, and she still is, but the edge of her anger dulls. She considers his response, rolls her own around on her tongue, wanting to ask what the hell he’s talking about, but unsure whether to maintain her rage or feign an apology for her tone.
Before she can open her mouth, his watch tootles a shrill little tune. A small projection of Miguel’s glaring mask pops up over the surface. “Peter! Enough chit chat. Get over here!”
As fast as he appears, Mini Miguel vanishes. Not-Her-Husband rolls his eyes. He shuffles to the ledge but stops just short. Turning over his shoulder, he draws his mouth to one side, contemplating. He sticks a hand in the pocket of his dingy sweats.
“You should come,” he says at last. “We’ll help fix your world, and then I’ll sweet talk Miguel into letting you come back to HQ. Meet some other Spider people, yeah? There’s even a couple of other MJs there. Always weird for me, but might be good for you.”
He flicks his wrist and a burst of webbing—white and stringy, the kind she remembers—sails from it, snagging the edge of the nearest tall building. He gestures with his other hand, encouraging her to do the same. A flush of embarrassment rises in her throat. She shakes her head.
“No can do on the web slinging,” she says. “This Spider-Woman is ground support only.”
He smirks. The left side of his mouth rucks up higher than the other. Her Peter used to smirk like that once, when life was kinder. “Makes it a tough gig, no?”
“I figure it out,” she says, shrugging. Inadequacy hollows her stomach. Her shoulders hunch, tightening with resent.
“Of course, not just a pretty face!”
She only stares at him, letting her expression betray nothing. Is he hitting on her?
Peter course corrects with alarming speed, near-shouting, “Not that you look stupid! Or that you’re too pretty to be smart. MJ always, not you MJ, my MJ. My wife. MJ. My wife always says she’s not just a pretty face. It’s funny when she says it. She’s funny.”
When he runs out of steam, he stares at her. She stares at him. Then, she laughs. It bursts out of her, delightfully unexpected, and he laughs with her. He throws his head back when he does, completely taken with the motion.
“This is such a head trip,” she says.
“Yes, extremely!” He nods enthusiastically. “I’m so glad you said something. I was really sweating over here.”
It shouldn’t be this easy. She shouldn’t be falling into familiar cadence after years without him or accepting his goofy, stupid charm so easily. But she is. Something within her, the part that’s more Spider than MJ, knows that this Peter isn’t her Peter, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t still Peter.
It confuses her, even if it makes perfect sense.
“I know, extrasensory senses and all that.”
His face scrunches, perturbed. He asks, “Wait, really? Can you smell me?”
“Yes? Should I not be able to smell you?”
“No, I mean like can you smell me, smell me? Do you have super Spidey smell?”
MJ sniffs, smells the ever-present stink of the world scrubbed raw, the lingering lash of blistered ozone, and the sharp, sweat-laced, citrus bright and woodsy Peter smell emanating from him. No further revelations whirl in the scent. She can’t smell deeper than his skin, his presence. Can’t scent anything strange on the wind or reach beyond the small space around them.
“Well, I wouldn’t say super."
“Ah, okay. So just heightened then. I know a guy, Spider-Ham, watched him catch a whiff of a fresh baked pie on a windowsill three city blocks away! It’s crazy what some of us can do!”
“Spider-Ham?”
“Yeah, good guy. Bit heavy on the gags, but—” Peter’s watch chirrups again. His eyes widen with comic alarm as he breaks his web line to smack his hand over the watch face. Trapped beneath his palm, the orange light shifts, searching for an escape.
“Parker!” Miguel shouts.
“Right, I’m en route. Almost there, actually. Just taking the scenic route,” Peter says with an exaggerated wink for her benefit. She stifles a snort, chews on a smile.
“I can see your location.”
“Well, no, you can see my hand.”
Miguel’s huff of frustration sounds like static through the watch. “Lyla? Will you—?”
Peter’s smile cracks when Lyla flickers overtop of his hand. Crossed legs dangling between his pointer and middle finger, she sits in the divot between his knuckles like a chair. With a fist pressed to the edge of her jaw, she cocks her head. “Hey Pete. Might want to get on the rendezvousing. Miguel’s in a mood and it’s only gonna get worse. He skipped dinner.”
“Oh god,” Peter says. Then, shooting MJ a look, he adds, “He’s a nightmare when he’s hungry.”
Suddenly, Lyla pops upright, shifting from sitting to not in the blink of an eye, and nods vigorously. “He’s the worst when he’s hungry! Always like"—Her voice drops into an alarming imitation of Miguel’s, as if she were a dummy and he, the ventriloquist—“Lyla, power down! Lyla, just do your job and stop messing with your avatar. ¡Ayúdenme! Lyla, run the schematics for Earth-8415A and no, I will not say please! Lyla, ¡vete!”
MJ can only listen, transfixed, while Peter chuckles.
An exasperated groan rustles from beneath Peter’s hand. Miguel says, “Still on the line, Lyla.”
Lyla shifts again. Her body angles towards the underside of Peter’s hand, leveled with the watch. She shouts directly into the ear of Miguel’s stymied projection. “Tell me I’m wrong! No? You know it’s true, Miguel!”
Miguel huffs something new in Spanish, more to himself than anyone else. “Just get over here, Parker.”
The light under Peter’s hand fades. Lyla disappears too, but not before blowing a kiss goodbye. MJ doesn’t know what to say; what to do with her hands. She shifts, uncomfortable, but amused.
Peter takes one look at her and laughs. “They’re like an old married couple. You get used to it. Eventually.”
With a flick of his wrist, a fresh jet of webbing thwips out over the still street below, catching the edge of a tall building across the avenue. He offers his free hand to her, palm up. “I’ll swing us over.”
MJ bites her lip. Talking to her dead husband’s dimensional double is one thing, but pressing up against him while he swings them through the city? Too intimate. Too familiar. Too soon.
“No, that’s okay, thanks.”
“Oh, c’mon, it’ll only be a little awkward.” Peter emphasizes with his free hand, flexing the fingers out, insisting. “If we don’t swing, I’ll have to walk with you and then I’ll die because Miguel will bite my head off when I’m not there in two minutes.”
MJ balks, remembering with crystal clarity the B-roll horror movie she starred in early on in her career—the one about humanoid, cannibal spiders the director swore were based in a real phenomenon. She has no idea what Miguel looks like under the mask. Maybe the skull design is more indicative of his actual face than just a flourish of style. Maybe he’s actually a huge, anthropomorphized spider. Maybe he’s hangry because he skipped his daily portion of Spider-Man.
But MJ’s not stupid. She doesn’t really think one Spider-Man would eat another, especially not the self-important leader of the Spider-men, but she lets the notion propel her forward, lets her take Peter’s outstretched hand without feeling too much about it.
Peter smiles, thin and awkward as her heartbeat. Then, he effortlessly scoops her up with one arm, holding her to his chest with palm pushed flat against her back. She wraps her arms around his neck, resisting the instinct to curl her legs around his waist. She doesn’t slot against him as neatly as she should. She’s not the same, soft MJ anymore. He’s not her Peter.
As he thwips between buildings, she can only think of her Peter, of the first time she clutched him tight after his identity was revealed. She held him like a secret then. He was precious and sacred and all hers. Until he wasn’t.
Other-Peter says nothing as he swings her out over the quiet, cold city her Peter left long ago.
***
The collider site is mostly as MJ remembers her. There’s a few pieces freshly scavenged, and a swarm of incessant, flickering lights sweeping the place. Otherwise, the same hunk of rubble.
Peter swings them in through the convenient hole in the ceiling, depositing her on a bit of still-standing scaffolding where Miguel stands, fussing with a projection of lines and numbers and letters that looks like alphabet soup.
“Took you long enough,” Miguel mumbles over his shoulder, not bothering to greet them further.
“Took a wrong turn off Atlantic Ave,” Peter says. “Honest enough mistake since all the street signs have been sold for scrap around here.”
Peter presses his hand to his shoulder and then rolls his arm, wincing. MJ squints at him.
Up close, she noticed threads of gray weaving through his mousey brown hair, but couldn't place his age. He still looks fairly young—late 30s, at most—but Spider metabolism is a strange thing. Her Peter reached 32 before the end, and he didn’t look a day over 21. Is this Peter much older than her Peter? If he is, does that mean there are other Peters that are younger? Are there MJs that are older/younger too? Have any of the MJs lived through what she has? Are there any that haven’t yet, that she could forewarn?
Mind spinning with possibilities, she barely takes note of Miguel’s crisp orders to Peter—get readings from the other side of wreckage—and Peter’s cheeky salute—aye aye, Cap’n—until she’s left alone with the Leader of an Elite Strike Force.
On Miguel’s end, he seems to have forgotten she exists.
MJ crosses her arms and leans back against a jut of rubble. It shifts and then the top of it breaks backwards, leaving her half-sprawled over the bit that remains upright. She scrambles to salvage her appearance, hefting herself into a sitting position and crossing her left leg over her right.
Miguel doesn’t say anything, doesn’t turn to her, but, by the way his shoulders suddenly tense and his breath silences mid exhale, he’s trying not to laugh. She glares at the back of his blue-covered head until she can breathe through her embarrassment.
Based on Other-Peter’s earlier comments, there’s a greater game afoot, one in which Miguel seems to be both referee and star player. She needs Miguel to explain all this interdimensional nonsense and her husband’s role in it. Chewing him out for the unlucky circumstance of bearing witness to her embarrassment won’t get her very far. It’s hard to swallow her pride, but she manages, keeping quiet and maintaining the performance.
But, the silence elongates into sinister shape. It prickles at the back of her neck. Makes her toes twitch. She never wanted to come back here. Ever.
Once and only once, soon after it all ended, she dug through the rubble, looking for something to lay to rest. But there was nothing. So she never came back. Swore against it.
Though, it’s easier to be here now than she would’ve expected. Though, she didn’t factor in two variant Spider-Men occupying her attention. How could she have expected that?
Still, even with Miguel tapping away at his gizmo and the occasional hoot and holler from Other-Peter across the gap, vapid and half-formed memories dance at the edges of her vision. Teasing and cruel. Gone when she looks. Just like her nightmares.
Harry asked about it once, how it all ended, and she tried explaining how awful it was to be in the heart of the world when it died. But he didn’t understand—couldn’t follow her metaphor to save his life. Her explanation went something like this:
At 16, her wisdom teeth impacted down into her jaw. At the dentist, terrified of a needle drip, she opted for laughing gas. The consequence? All throughout the procedure, she kept waking up, droopy, but fully aware of it all. The stick and pull of thick, latexed fingers in her mouth. The crunch of her teeth between pliers. The sharp snap of her jaw. The spurts of warm, gooey blood from ruptured tissue. Everything. But she felt none of the pain.
Living through the end of the world was the opposite. She wasn’t aware of any of it, but felt all the pain of being strung apart and welded back together.
Sometimes, she can still feel it. And she shatters all over again.
Miguel mumbles something. A quick explosion of words that sounds vaguely scientific. Like Peter used to grumble in his sleep and she would roll over, smoothen the wrinkles from his brow with a slow swipe of her thumb, and snuggle into the hollow at his side until he fell quiet.
It’s all too much.
Ever the actress, she doesn’t let any of it bleed into her voice when she sighs and asks, “How long will this take? I did have plans this evening.”
“Oh, really? Anything fun?” Miguel’s sarcasm is oddly cheerful, nearly chipper with faux brightness. All the more unwelcome.
“Oh, just the usual. Dry rations for dinner then just sitting around hoping the world doesn’t end a second time.”
Miguel doesn’t offer a response, once again engrossed in the slow rotation of equations in front of him.
MJ huffs, hanging her head.
From across the way, Peter surfaces above the crumbled concrete, flipping through the air to reach the other side of the collapse. He moves with ease, totally at peace with his Spider-ness as he sails through the air. Envy pokes her in the sides, but she doesn’t flinch. Another dimension or not, he’s Peter. Of course he’s a perfect Spider-Man.
Then, he disappears beneath eye level, back to investigating the wreckage, and MJ is left with three options.
The first: Fall deeper into reminiscing on the horrors of this place—the fabric of reality ripping apart, waking up alone in the wreckage, stumbling over the Green Goblin’s unquiet corpse.
The second: Go mad with the anticipation of unasked questions—is this one great trick? Can she trust Other-Peter and Miguel? Is she a fool for even considering that she can? What would Peter do in this situation?
The third: Make conversation with a Spider-Man pretending she doesn’t exist.
It’s a fairly simple choice, all things considered.
“So, what’re you doing?” she asks, toeing a bit of rubble.
“Calculating the polarity of the temporal axes.”
MJ scowls. The expression carves through her face, more familiar than smiling. “And for those of us that don’t speak scientific gobbledygook that means…?”
“Saving your world from imminent implosion.”
“Right. Well, much appreciated.”
Silence. Again. She would bang her head against the wall if she didn’t think the whole structure would collapse overtop her.
Thankfully, the projection in front of Miguel vanishes. He turns, slightly, head tilted back to her as he clears his throat. Slowly, testing out the words, he asks, “Your daughter… is she okay?”
The initial ice-cold shock dispels along her spine, stiffening her posture. Her fingers clench against and into her forearms. How can he know about Mayday? What does he know about Mayday?
But, then, she asked Peter B about Mayday. And Miguel admitted to knowing her Peter. Her Peter, who hung the moon and the stars by their daughter’s antics, who jabberjawed about Mayday to anyone who would listen (or wouldn’t).
Miguel’s question is kind, gentler than she would have guessed him to be by first impressions. But, he is Spider-Man. Spider-Man from a future, distant dimension, but Spider-Man all the same. That has to mean something.
“I don’t know. I’ve looked for her, looked everywhere for her, but I’ve never found her, alive or otherwise.” She swallows and the motion is thick, uncomfortable. “I have to think I would know, but I just… what kind of mother just loses their daughter?”
Miguel’s eyes narrow, but the expression isn’t cruel. It’s considerate, resolute. He nods, once. “I’ll help you look, once the data’s processed, but, there’s a chance, a big one, that the answer won’t be the one you want.”
MJ’s hands don’t feel quite like hers as they flex into open air. She’s lived so long with the certainty that Mayday is forever lost that the possibility, even as small and fragile as it is, brings a physical ache. It’s as close to hope as she can manage. “I have to know. If you can help me, I’d owe you everything.”
With a final, acknowledging nod, Miguel turns back to lord over the wreckage, holographic screen flickering into life in front of him again.
She stares at the colors that bleed and breathe in sharp lines along his suit until her eyes sting. She doesn’t cry. She isn’t even sure she still can cry. She says, “Thank you. God, thank you so much.”
Because she can’t help it. Because she can’t leave it unsaid. Four years ago, she would’ve hugged him. Now, a pithy thank you is all she can do.
“Don’t thank me yet,” he says, low, like he doesn’t want her to hear.
The silence passes quickly as her thoughts churn with the sepia-toned memories of her daughter. Mayday’s first day of kindergarten. Mayday’s slapdash attempt at fingerpainting. Mayday’s fifth birthday. Mayday’s gentle, rustling snores. Mayday dancing in the kitchen with her little feet tap-tap-tapping to the reggaeton beat of a song MJ definitely shouldn’t have played around her.
Soon enough, Peter returns, reporting on parameters and structure and thinness. MJ can’t make heads or tails of it, but Miguel hums in understanding. Before she can even ask for a recitation in English for the redhead, a portal is summoned with Miguel making overtures of safe haven and training while his Spider Society mends the temporal instability of her world. Peter hops through, offering to take her for burgers back at HQ.
“We’re not all like Miguel,” Peter says. “Pinky promise.”
And then he vanishes.
“I won’t force you,” Miguel says, all earlier softness gone as if it had never existed at all. The whir of the portal punctuates his every syllable. The colors around him teem, blending through the bright light of the portal. “The Society isn’t in the habit of conscripting anyone.”
MJ casts a glance over the rubble, remembering the way the place looked just before it all ended. The plain layout of the warehouse, drawing all attention to the sleek metal monstrosity in its belly. The incomprehensible sounds and colors spilling from the collider after it started up, after it failed. The sour taste of the gag in her mouth. The rough cut of the bindings over her wrists. Peter. Beautiful, brave, Peter, fighting against the Green Goblin. Fighting to keep her safe. Fighting and failing.
And then, she thinks of her life After. She thinks of Harry, toiling somewhere close, but far away. Not that he'll miss her—they're not on speaking terms. Again.
But there are some who might miss her. The soup kitchen in Greenwich. Mr. Al Khoudi, who asked her to investigate his bodega robbery. The basil plant she's managed to keep alive on her windowsill. Theo and Jesse, the lackey drug runners who feed her info on the bigger goings on of the streets in exchange for safe harbor from bigger menaces. The mayor's office, though they should really get the hint that—
“You coming, MariJane?” Miguel asks. He offers his hand, massive and long-fingered, but un-taloned. It’s a nice gesture.
She doesn’t take his hand. She sets her jaw. Straightens her spine. Stands stronger than she feels. Giving the rubble left from the end of the world one final glance, she turns and steps past him, through the portal.
It’s not running away if she promises to come back.
PERSONNEL FILE
CLEARANCE: Tippy Top Secret > If You’re Reading This, No You're Not
Agent No: 7782.02
Internal Ref : MariJane Watson-Parker; Anomaly; Extemporaneous; Distortion
Status: Inactive > Desertion & Unresolved Multiversal Incident
Supplemental Doc #XXXX: The Bugle newspaper clipping of the front page headline and cover drawing of the June 10 Edition of The Bugle from Nu York of Earth-7782. The boldface headline reads: “Double Trouble or Blast From the Past? Spider-Woman Seen Web Swinging with Spider-Man Through Brooklyn Badlands”. Beneath the headline, a black and white drawing shows SW-7782 “MARIJANE” held in a pseudo-bridal carry by SM-616B “PETER B” as he swings from a web. One of PETER B’s arms is beneath MARIJANE’s legs while the other grips the web. MJ’s arms are around PETER B’s neck. Both are fully suited and wearing their masks.
Supplemental Doc #XXXX Commentary: Exhibit was found among subject’s surviving possessions at HQ. Breach of LEAVE NO TRACE "LNT" was reported to LYLA at time of incident and no further action was deemed necessary. Notable as one of few remaining images of MARIJANE and the only one to remain unaltered by DISTORTION.
Further follow up in progress.