Oh my god, hi! 🩷
It's been ages since I've been here but someone left a playfully aggressive comment on one of my old fics and I watched the new Spidey movie last week and suddenly here we are!! My beloved spideychelle took over.
This might be rusty but I hope you like it!
Dialogue prompt: “We have to be quiet” (from this list!)
AO3
Enjoy! ✨
“We have to be quiet,” MJ whispered in the dark.
Ned fell asleep on the couch almost an hour ago, his head lolling back at an awkward angle with his mouth wide open as he snored loudly. It used to bother her so much —in that affectionately annoyed way you hate things your best friend does— but now it seemed useful. She could hear it drowning out their footsteps as they walked across the creaky floors towards her room.
Her heart kept beating hard beneath her ribs. If she could look at herself in the mirror, she could probably find a faint blush on her cheeks and wild eyes. Her hands were sweaty like never before, and the impulse to dry her palms on the front of her jeans only stopped because she didn't want to let go of the other —just as sweaty— hand clasped around his.
“Are you sure about this?” he said, abandoning the whispered tone, probably knowing that once Ned fell asleep, he would be out to the world for hours, no matter what. They were best friends after all. They are best friends now.
It was unfair. How quickly they fell into the same routine, got back to their private handshake, their inside jokes, and their quiet complicity.
Meanwhile, she had to work hard for it —it was torture to do it while trying to act nonchalant. It was stupid; she had a boyfriend, a career, a whole life built around the non-existence of Peter Parker. And then an evil —but not really— mind-controlling teen was taking her hostage —which was kinda cool but also mean— and now she had a whole high school ex-boyfriend who moonlighted as a superhero, and everything she knew had changed. Her story was different.
Her first crush wasn't the cool professor of Robotics in her first semester of college but the awkward nerd with crooked, patched-up glasses who dropped them overnight and came back to school being able to run the gym class without using his inhaler.
Her first kiss didn't taste like cheap, warm beer from that guy she met at a study group party and then never saw again. It tasted like gravel and dust and a bit of blood. It had been soft, rushed, and terrible but just so perfect that hearing him talk about it made her wonder if she was getting a stomach bug from the ticklish feeling.
That was the wonderful part. Listening to him talk about them before. To see his eyes shine and his cheeks blush until the warmth reached his neck. His voice turned soft and low like a caress. It kept her up at night, reviving his stories and trying to turn them into her own memories or drawing them down with as much detail as possible to show him the next day as if they were pictures. He would always smile softly, tap his fingers over them, and mumble ‘almost there' before telling what to change —the pattern of her shirt, the background of the room, the direction of her curls pinned down by a hair clip.
But his stories seemed cut off at some point. A sudden halt that wasn't suspicious the first few times but turned obvious after.
It was his biggest mistake because once there is a mystery to solve, MJ would get obsessed with it. He should’ve known.
“MJ,” he said when she didn’t reply, stopping them a few feet away from her room door. “Are you sure?”
It was hard to meet his eyes when he looked so sincere. Luckily, he stopped looking for her old self a long time ago, learning her new ticks and tells that he keeps swearing are way too similar to before, but an upgraded version.
“Of course.”
She pulled again, using none of her strength. It didn't matter when she knew that if he wanted to, she wouldn’t have been able to move one inch away from the warm lights of her living room.
“We don’t have to-”
“I know.”
“I just-”
She pushed him inside and closed the door softly.
“You won’t tell me,” she said, accusatory.
For a second neither moved. Peter stood there looking almost caught—white shirt wrinkled, feet tapping anxiously, and eyes wide and dark—and a voice inside her head begged her to never forget again.
“I want you to show me,” she whispered. It was hard to stand there under his adoring gaze and not run towards him —old habits die hard. High school MJ ran to him for a love confession in the middle of a destroyed London; adult MJ wanted to collapse against him and let his hands protect her. But she did it— She looked straight into his eyes, letting him look back, searching her face for any sign that she might change her mind.
Whatever it was he seemed to find there made his shoulders finally relax.
“Okay, then,” he whispered back.
He extended his hand between them, palm up in offering. MJ looked down at it, holding back a smile before placing her hand in his. For a blink, she wondered if it felt like this before: the almost uncontainable excitement, the nervous anticipation, the warmth and familiarity twirling around her heart.
But maybe she didn’t need to remember. Maybe she needed him to show her how it goes.
