Black Dahlia (57782 words) by SilkThreadsAndDesperation
Chapters: 15/19
Fandom: Spider-Man (Tom Holland Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man - All Media Types
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Michelle Jones/Peter Parker
Characters: Michelle Jones (Marvel), Peter Parker, Ned Leeds, Frank Castle, Typhoid Mary, Mac Gargan
Additional Tags: Peter Parker Needs a Hug, Hurt Peter Parker, Peter Parker is a Mess, Protective Peter Parker, Michelle Jones Loves Peter Parker, Peter Parker Loves Michelle Jones, POV Michelle Jones (Marvel), POV Peter Parker, POV Ned Leeds, Yearning, Hurt/Comfort, Angst, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, no beta we die like men, Speculation for Movie: Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Post-Movie: Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021), POV Alternating
Summary:
Spider-Man: Brand New Day - A Love Story
Four years ago, Peter Parker asked Doctor Strange to make the world forget him. It worked.
Now he’s twenty-two, attending ESU part-time, living alone with a broken fridge, eating dry Cheerios over a sink, and his two best friends have just moved in down the hall. Ned remembers everything. MJ remembers nothing—except the hollow feeling she’s been carrying since the morning she woke up and something was gone, and the necklace she kept without knowing why, and the way the neighbor from 4E makes her feel like she’s trying to chase the memory of a dream.
Peter still has the letter. He’s been carrying it for four years. He keeps telling himself that’s enough.
Fanfic Reader Recents Challenge! Spread the love for your most recent reads by sharing the last 5 stories listed in your ao3 History tab. Then, pass this challenge along to another 3 readers!
They are all HTTYD/Hiccstrid, woops (Not really)
1.- Five times Hiccup Talked with Dragons and One Time He Didn't Need To by parallax9
2.- Uncharted Lands by @orlissa
3.- Vetrnaetr by @e-wills-afterhours
4.- Choices (or the Lack Thereof) by @chanceyy
5.- Soul Bound by @grayghostgal
Also not httyd but PJO that I haven’t read yet but I have been meaning to
Ned had been sitting on the floor outside 4E for forty minutes.
He'd brought a book, which he wasn't reading. It was open in his lap and he'd read the same paragraph four times and given up somewhere around the third. The hallway was quiet. The fluorescent at the far end flickered every few minutes in a way that was probably supposed to be annoying and was instead just something to watch. He watched it and thought about what he was going to say.
He'd been thinking about what he was going to say for three days. He wasn't any closer.
The thing about Ned Leeds was that he was generally good at talking. It was one of the things he'd always been reliably good at—filling space, finding the right tone, reading a room and knowing what it needed. Four years at MIT hadn't changed that. If anything, they'd sharpened it, because MIT was full of people who weren't naturally good at talking and Ned had learned to meet them wherever they were. He was the person in the group project who kept things from going sideways. He was the person who knew when to push and when to leave it alone. He had a whole toolkit and he'd used it in a lot of situations.
None of the situations had been anything like this.
He closed the book and set it beside him on the floor and looked at the door across the hall. 4F. His door. MJ's door. The door he'd found this apartment specifically to be down the hall from, which MJ had figured out in the way MJ always figured out when something didn't add up, and which she'd decided not to push yet. He knew her. She'd get there.
He thought about telling her. He'd thought about it a lot over the past three days, sitting with it the way Wong had taught him to sit with things that didn't have easy answers. Wong wasn't big on easy answers. He was big on looking at the thing clearly and accepting what you saw, which was harder than it sounded and which Ned had gotten better at, slowly, over two years of practice.
He'd decided not to tell MJ yet. Not until he knew.
Not until he knew if Peter remembered them.
* * *
It had started, as most things in Ned's life had started in the past four years, with Spider-Man.
The morning after the forgetting—which was how Ned thought about it, the morning after, because there wasn't another way to frame the experience of waking up and feeling like something had been taken out of you without knowing what—he'd felt wrong in a way he couldn't explain. Not sad exactly. Not confused. Just wrong. Like a word on the tip of your tongue that won't come, except the word was something important, something that mattered, and the more he reached for it the more certain he became that it had been there and was gone.
He'd gone to class. He'd eaten breakfast. He'd done all the things a person did on a regular Tuesday morning. And then he'd walked past a newsstand and seen a headline about Spider-Man and stopped dead on the sidewalk for no reason he could explain, standing there in the November cold with people moving around him, feeling something in his chest do something he didn't have a word for.
He'd bought the paper. He'd read the article three times. He'd gone back to his dorm and stared at the ceiling for a long time.
He didn't know why Spider-Man felt like something he was supposed to know. He just knew that it did.
By sophomore year he had a wall. Not in a weird way—or maybe in a weird way, he could acknowledge that from the outside it probably looked a little intense—but it had started as just clippings and had grown into something he couldn't quite stop adding to. Every article, every sighting, every grainy photo from someone's phone. He'd look at them sometimes and feel that same thing in his chest, that reaching sensation, and not be able to name what he was reaching for.
He'd started having dreams that didn't make sense. Not nightmares. Just fragments. A kid his age somewhere high up, a city spread out below, laughing at something Ned had said. Ned couldn't see his face in the dreams. He could feel the friendship, though—how real it had been, how long, how much it had mattered—and he'd wake up with it sitting in his chest like something he'd dropped and couldn't find.
He'd gone to the Sanctum in the fall of his junior year. He wasn't sure what made him go. He'd known it existed, or known in the vague way you knew things in New York that were strange and didn't quite belong in ordinary daylight. He'd stood outside it for twenty minutes before he knocked. A man with a beard and an expression of profound patience had opened the door, looked at Ned for a long moment, and said come in.
That was how he'd met Wong.
* * *
Wong didn't explain things he didn't think you needed explained yet. That was the first thing Ned learned about him. He'd sat across from Ned in a room full of books that moved on their own and listened to the whole story—the morning after the forgetting, the wall, the dreams, the feeling in his chest that something important was missing—and when Ned finished Wong had been quiet for a moment and then said: you had your memory altered.
Not a question. Just a statement, said the way Wong said most things, like he was reading something off a list.
Ned had said he didn't remember that.
Wong had said that was rather the point.
He'd explained, carefully and without unnecessary drama, that there had been a spell. That it had been cast at someone's request and that it had worked as intended. That the person who'd requested it had had reasons, and that those reasons were not Ned's to know unless that person chose to share them. He'd said that Ned's sensitivity to the gap—the wrongness, the reaching feeling—was unusual, and that it suggested a latent capacity for magical perception that was worth developing if Ned was interested.
Ned had said he was interested.
He'd been coming back ever since.
Wong taught him the way Wong did everything—practically, without fuss, with an occasional dry observation that took Ned a few seconds to realize was a joke. He'd learned to perceive things, to read the residue that magic left on people and places and objects. He'd learned a handful of spells, none of them especially impressive, all of them useful. He'd learned to sit with not knowing and to trust that knowing would come when it was supposed to.
He'd learned that the gap in his memory had a shape. That he could feel the edges of it if he sat quietly and paid attention. That at its center, if he got close enough, there was something that felt like a name.
It had taken him most of his junior year to get close enough.
The name was Peter Parker.
* * *
After that, finding him had taken a few weeks and a significant amount of what Ned preferred to think of as aggressive research.
Wong couldn't help with this part. The spell had taken Peter from everyone's memory, which meant Wong didn't know Peter Parker existed any more than anyone else did. All Ned had was a name pulled from the edge of his own memory, which was not a lot to go on in a city of eight million people.
So he did it the other way.
He started with college registries. It was an educated guess—Peter had been a senior when everything happened, which meant if he'd kept going he'd have had to enroll somewhere. Ned worked through the New York schools methodically, starting with the ones closest to Queens, and on the third day he found him. Empire State University. Part-time enrollment, ongoing, four years running. Peter Parker, listed at an address on the west side of Manhattan. Ned had sat with that for a long time before he did anything else.
Ned had sat outside the building for an hour before he went in.
He'd talked to the super. He'd seen the name on the mailbox—P. PARKER, 4E—and felt something in his chest shift so hard he'd had to put a hand on the wall.
He'd gone back to Cambridge and thought about it for two weeks.
Then he'd called MJ.
He hadn't told her everything. He'd told her he'd found an apartment in New York, that it was a good deal, that he thought it would be good for both of them to be back in the city once her lease was up. She'd looked at him for a long moment over the phone in the way she had when something didn't quite add up, and then she'd said okay. He'd felt guilty about the not-telling for approximately three days and then made his peace with it, because the alternative was trying to explain something he didn't fully understand yet himself, and because he needed to know one thing first.
He needed to know if Peter remembered them.
Because the way Peter had acted when he came into that diner four years ago, deliberately neutral, the way you went when you were performing not-knowing someone—Ned wasn't sure. It looked like forgetting. It felt like something else. And he needed to be in the same building to find out, needed to be close enough that the question could actually get asked, and so here he was.
Sitting on the floor outside 4E on a Wednesday evening in December, waiting.
* * *
He heard the stairs before he saw anything. One set of footsteps, unhurried, the rhythm of someone who knew the building well enough not to think about it. Ned had learned to notice things like that. He closed his book and straightened up and waited.
Peter came around the corner and stopped.
He looked—different, was the first thing. Ned had known he would, four years was four years, but knowing it and seeing it were two separate things. Taller, maybe, or just carrying himself differently. A canvas jacket, dark, collar turned up. Grey hoodie underneath. The kind of face that had gone somewhere quiet, somewhere controlled, that Ned recognized from people who'd learned to hold things still. There was a scar below his left eyebrow that hadn't been there before.
He looked like Peter and he looked like someone Peter had become, and Ned felt the shape of all four years sitting between them like something physical.
Peter looked at him. Something moved through his face—fast, complicated—and then he said, very casually, "Hey man. What's up? Did you get locked out?"
Ned's chest hurt a little. Because it was such a Peter thing to say. The performance of it, the careful neutrality of it, the way he'd defaulted immediately to stranger-mode—it looked exactly like forgetting. But Ned had been sitting outside this door for forty minutes and he'd had a long time to think, and the expression that had crossed Peter's face in that first unguarded second before the performance kicked in had not looked like nothing.
"No," Ned said. "I'm waiting for you."
Peter went still. "For me."
"Yeah." Ned looked at him. "I live down the hall. 4F. I moved in Monday."
Something happened in Peter's face again, controlled and gone before Ned could read it. "Oh," he said. "Cool. Welcome to the building." He said it evenly, reaching for his keys.
"Peter," Ned said.
Peter's hand stopped on the key.
Just that. His name. Ned watched him hold very still and felt his own heartbeat doing something complicated in his chest.
"Do you know who I am?" Ned asked.
The silence that followed was its own kind of answer, though not the kind Ned could be sure of yet. Peter turned around slowly. His face had done the thing where it went careful and neutral and gave nothing away, and for a second Ned thought he'd been wrong, thought the hope he'd been carrying for three years was about to get a very quiet and devastating correction.
"I don't—" Peter started, and stopped.
Ned waited.
"I don't know what you—" He stopped again. His jaw worked. He looked at Ned and Ned looked back at him and neither of them said anything, and then Ned said, quietly:
"Do you remember that we used to be friends?"
Peter closed his eyes. He stood there in the hallway with his eyes closed for a long moment, and Ned watched his throat move when he swallowed, and then Peter said, very quietly, "Yeah, Ned. I remember."
Ned let out a breath he'd been holding for three years.
It came out shaky. He hadn't meant it to be shaky but it was, and his eyes were doing something he'd also not meant them to do, and he pressed his lips together and looked at the ceiling for a second. Peter was looking at him when he looked back down. Not performing anything. Just looking.
"Hey," Peter said, and his voice had changed completely, all the careful neutrality gone, and it sounded like Peter—the real one, the one Ned had known—and that was what actually did it.
"Hey," Ned said, and his voice cracked embarrassingly on the single syllable, and he didn't care.
* * *
They went inside.
Peter's apartment was spare in the way Ned had expected and also in a way he hadn't—the bones of a place a person lived without much interest in the living part of it. Ned clocked it all in a few seconds: the lack of anything on the walls, the boots by the door, the dark jacket on the hook, the Cheerios on the counter. The refrigerator that hummed wrong and then didn't hum at all, which meant it wasn't working. He filed it without saying anything.
Peter filled the kettle and put it on the burner and they stood on opposite sides of the small kitchen and looked at each other for a moment.
"How," Peter said.
"Wong."
"Wong." Peter seemed to process that. "You went to the Sanctum."
"Junior year. Something felt wrong from the morning after and I couldn't shake it." Ned leaned against the counter. "I had this feeling like I'd forgotten something important. And then I kept seeing Spider-Man stuff and it kept doing something to me that I couldn't explain, so eventually I just—" He gestured. "Went and knocked."
"Wong helped you figure it out."
"He pointed me in the right direction. I did most of the figuring." Ned paused. "I've been training with him. Magic. I'm still pretty new at it but I can perceive things. Residue. The edges of spells." He watched Peter take that in. "I could feel the gap in my memory. Where something had been. It took me a long time to get close enough to find the name at the center of it."
Peter looked at the kettle. "Peter Parker," he said.
"Peter Parker," Ned confirmed.
The kettle started its climb. Neither of them said anything for a moment.
"So you found the building," Peter said.
"I found the building eventually." Ned crossed his arms. "Wong couldn't help with that part—the spell got him too, he had no idea you existed. So I just—worked through it. College registries. I figured if you'd kept going you would've had to enroll somewhere."
Peter looked at him. "You hacked into college registries."
"ESU had you listed as a part-time student. Four years running." Ned held his gaze. "I got your address from there."
Peter was quiet for a moment. "And then you moved in."
"And then I moved in."
Peter turned to look at him then, and there was something in his face that Ned recognized as the expression he'd always made when he didn't know whether to be frustrated or grateful, which was a specific expression and which Ned had missed more than he would have known how to say.
"I didn't know if you knew who I was. The way you acted—"
"I was being careful."
"I know that now. I didn't know it then." Ned held his gaze. "You looked like you didn't know me. And I needed to be sure before I—" He stopped.
Peter was quiet. He poured the water when the kettle boiled and made two cups of coffee, black, and handed one to Ned without asking how he took it. Ned noticed he'd gotten his coffee wrong—Ned took two sugars—and said nothing about it because he suspected Peter simply didn't remember that, and because it didn't matter at all.
"You brought MJ," Peter said.
"Yeah."
Peter held the mug in both hands and looked at it. "She doesn't know."
"No."
"Does she—" He stopped. Started over. "Wait, I saw her yesterday. I fixed the— I helped her with a box. And she didn't—"
"She doesn't know," Ned said again. "She doesn't know about you or the spell or any of it."
Peter set the mug down. Picked it back up. "How do you know she doesn't remember?"
Ned looked at him for a moment. This was the part he'd been thinking about the most, the part he'd rehearsed the least, because he still didn't have a way to say it that didn't land hard. "Because I know her," he said. "And because she's never been the same since it happened." He watched Peter's face. "Every time Spider-Man comes up—on the news, in conversation, anything—she goes quiet. In the beginning she'd cry. She didn't know why, couldn't explain it, and that made it worse I think. Over the years she stopped crying and just—" He paused. "She just looks really sad. Like something far away that she can't reach."
The kitchen was very quiet.
Peter had gone completely still, the mug held in both hands, and Ned watched him absorb it and watched his face do things he was clearly trying to control and not entirely managing. His jaw was tight. His eyes were doing something.
"I didn't tell her," Ned said, more gently, "because I didn't think she'd believe me without proof. And because I didn't want to make it worse. If I tell her there's this whole part of her life she can't remember and I can't give it back to her—" He shook his head. "That seemed cruel."
"Yeah," Peter said. His voice came out rougher than before. "Yeah, okay."
"I figured you should know. That she's here. That she's close." He watched Peter. "I thought you deserved to at least know that much."
Peter nodded, once, and looked out the window at the alley. Ned let him have the quiet for a minute. That was another thing Wong had taught him, not that Ned had really needed teaching—when to let a silence sit.
* * *
They stayed in the kitchen for a while and then moved to the main room, and somewhere in the transition the heaviness of it lifted slightly, the way it sometimes did when something that had been held too long finally got put down. Not gone. Just lighter.
Ned sat on the couch. Peter sat on the floor with his back against the wall because apparently that was a thing he did now, which Ned clocked and didn't comment on. The coffee was terrible. Ned drank it anyway.
"Okay so Wong," Ned said. "He's not as scary as he looks."
"I've met Wong," Peter said.
"Right. Okay, so you know." Ned thought about it. "He told me once that I had an unusual sensitivity to magical residue. I think he said it like he was telling me I had an unusual sensitivity to dairy. Very matter of fact."
"That tracks," Peter said.
"I made a portal once," Ned said. "By accident. It went to a broom cupboard in the Sanctum which Wong said was actually impressive for a first attempt and then immediately assigned me three weeks of theory work."
"Three weeks," Peter said.
"He takes the theory very seriously."
"He would."
Ned looked at him. Peter was looking at the ceiling, and there was something around his mouth that Ned recognized—the thing that happened on Peter's face right before he actually smiled, the small private version that most people never got close enough to see. Ned had seen it a thousand times. He felt something in his chest go quiet.
"You know what I kept thinking about," Ned said. "The whole time. Like randomly in the middle of other things."
"What."
"The Death Star."
Peter looked at him.
"I kept thinking about how we built it," Ned said. "Freshman year. My mom kept asking why we needed three industrial fans to keep the room temperature consistent and we told her it was for the structural integrity of the model and she absolutely did not believe us."
"She brought us lemonade anyway," Peter said. His voice had gone somewhere else, somewhere quieter.
"She brought us lemonade every single day. With the little paper straws because she'd seen something about plastic."
"The paper ones dissolved."
"Every time," Ned said. "Every single time. By the end of the lemonade it was just lemonade with paper in it."
Peter laughed. It came out like it surprised him, short and real, the kind that got out before you decided to let it, and Ned felt it like something physical in his chest. He hadn't heard Peter laugh in four years. He hadn't known how much he'd been missing the specific sound of it.
"God," Peter said, and the word carried about four years' worth of things inside it.
"Yeah," Ned said.
They sat with that for a moment.
"Tell me," Ned said then, more quietly. "What it's been like. You don't have to but—I want to know. If you want to say it."
Peter was quiet for a moment. He turned the mug in his hands. Outside the window the alley was dark and the building across was lit in patches, the woman on three with her succulents just visible behind the glass. "It's been okay," he said finally.
"Peter."
"It's been—" He stopped. "It's been hard. In ways I got used to. And then some ways I didn't." He looked at the window. "I found someone a few years ago. Frank. He kind of—I don't know. Took me under his wing isn't really the right way to say it. He wouldn't say it that way."
"What would he say?"
"He'd say he just gave me something to do." The corner of his mouth moved. "Which is probably also true."
"Is he good people?"
Peter thought about it. "Yeah. In a complicated way." He paused. "He lost his family. His wife and kids. He knows what it costs. And he shows up anyway."
Ned nodded. He thought about what that would have meant to Peter at twenty, alone and trying to figure out how to carry everything without anyone to carry it with. He thought about what it would mean to find someone who knew what it cost and showed up anyway.
"Good," Ned said. "I'm glad you had that."
Peter looked at him. Looked away. "What about you," he said. "MIT. How was it."
"Hard," Ned said. "Good. Lonely at first and then less lonely." He paused. "I thought about you all the time. Not in a way I could explain. Just this feeling like something was missing that I couldn't name." He looked at his mug. "Now I can name it."
Peter didn't say anything. He didn't have to.
They sat in the quiet of the apartment for a while, the two of them, the way you could only sit with someone you'd known a long time. Outside, the city did its thing. The woman on three moved away from her window. The alley went darker.
"She's going to figure it out," Ned said eventually. "MJ. You know how she is."
"Yeah," Peter said.
"She already noticed you. She didn't say anything but she noticed."
"I know." A beat. "I fixed the door."
Ned looked at him. "You fixed the door."
"The hinge was off."
"Peter."
"The hinge was genuinely off, Ned. It wasn't—" He stopped. Ran a hand through his hair. "It needed fixing."
Ned looked at him for a long moment. Peter looked back at him with the expression of a person who knew exactly how that sounded and had no good defense. Ned felt something rise in him that he didn't try to name.
He'd missed it so much.
"Okay," Ned said. "Okay. We'll figure it out."
"We," Peter said.
"We," Ned confirmed. "You don't get to be alone in this anymore. I'm sorry, I live down the hall, it's over."
Peter looked at him for a moment. Then he looked at the window. Then he looked at his terrible coffee. "Okay," he said quietly.
"Okay," Ned said.
Outside, the city kept going. Inside, in the quiet of a sparse apartment on the fourth floor, something that had been broken for four years began, carefully, to be repaired.
MJ had said this was fine, which it was. She'd been carrying things by herself her whole life and was good at it. Stack lighter boxes on top of heavier ones, keep the center of gravity low, don't get greedy on the trips. Four years of moving herself in and out of dorms had made her efficient. She trusted the system.
The system failed on the third trip.
She'd misjudged somewhere between the lobby storage unit and the fourth floor, or she'd just gotten tired, which she wasn't going to say out loud even to herself. Either way the stack shifted on the last turn of the hallway and the top box began its slow lean toward the floor and she did the math quickly and the math was bad.
She didn't drop it.
Someone else caught it.
A hand came in from her left, flat against the side of the box, and the lean stopped. Just like that. She stood still. The boxes stayed where they were. She looked to her left.
He was already looking at the stack, not at her, making sure it was stable before he let go. Dark boots, grey hoodie under a canvas jacket, a scrape of stubble. One hand flat against the box, the other loose at his side. His attention was entirely on the boxes. She noticed that.
He stepped back. The stack held.
"Thanks," she said.
He nodded once. Still not looking at her.
She shifted her grip and started toward her door. He fell into step beside her without being asked and lifted the top box off her stack before she could say anything about it, easy, like it weighed nothing, and carried it the last few feet. She set the rest down outside her door. He set his down next to them.
A beat of neither of them saying anything.
"Down the hall," he said.
"4E," she said. She'd clocked the apartments when they moved in—which doors had mats, which had scuffs at the bottom, which looked lived in and which didn't. 4E had a scuff and no mat and looked like somewhere a person came back to rather than somewhere they stayed. She'd noticed without meaning to.
Something moved across his face when she said it. Brief, gone before she could read it. He looked at her door. His head tilted slightly, eyes going to the hinges.
"It doesn't close right," she said.
"Top hinge is off. Frame probably shifted when the cold came in."
"The super said—"
"I have a screwdriver," he said. "Give me a minute."
He was gone before she finished the sentence. Back down the hall, unhurried, like it was already decided. She stood in her doorway and watched him go and then looked at her door and then looked back down the hall.
She should have said you don't have to do that. She hadn't. She wasn't sure if that was because it happened too fast or because she hadn't wanted to.
She picked up her boxes and carried them inside.
* * *
He came back in under two minutes with a flathead screwdriver and a replacement screw he'd thought to bring, which meant he'd already looked at that door and worked out what it needed before she'd said a word about it. She held onto that without deciding what to do with it yet.
She propped the door open with one of the boxes and leaned against the wall and watched him work. He crouched to check the bottom hinge first, stood and looked at the top one, pressed two fingers against the frame like he was reading something in it. Then he got the old screw out and fitted the new one and started tightening it down, and all of it was quiet and methodical in a way that made her feel like she was watching someone who'd fixed a hundred things like this and never made a production of any of them.
He didn't talk while he worked. She didn't mind. She watched him and tried to work out what it was about him that had her paying this much attention, because she was paying it and she'd learned to be honest with herself about that even when she didn't have an explanation.
He was maybe her age, maybe a little older. His face was still in a way she didn't usually see in people her age—not blank but settled, like he'd worked something difficult out and wasn't performing anything about it either way. He kept not looking at her directly, and she'd clocked it from the first second: caught the box and looked at the box, walked beside her and looked at the door. She didn't think it was rudeness. It felt more deliberate than that, like he was making a choice.
There was a scar below his left eyebrow, thin and pale. She noticed it when the light caught him and then stopped noticing it because it wasn't her business.
He still hadn't told her his name.
"You do this a lot?" she asked.
He glanced up from the hinge. "Do what."
"Fix things for people you don't know."
He looked back at the door. "Door needed fixing." He said it simply, like it was a complete answer, turning the screwdriver.
"That's not an answer."
"It's the one I've got." Still not looking at her, still focused on the hinge, and there was something so matter-of-fact about it that she almost smiled.
"Fair enough," she said.
He worked the screw the rest of the way in, stood, and pushed the door experimentally. It swung clean. He pushed it again, watching the frame this time, then a third time just to be sure. She got the impression he didn't do things halfway.
"You always this chatty?" she said.
He looked up at her then—not the quick glance from before but a real look—and she saw something move through his face that wasn't quite a smile but was related to one. "No," he said.
"Hm." She held his gaze and he held hers for a beat too long before he looked back at the door. She watched the back of his neck.
"You always interrogate people who fix your door?" he asked.
"I'm not interrogating. I'm making conversation. There's a difference."
"Is there." He crouched back down to double-check the bottom hinge, and she couldn't tell if he was asking seriously or not.
"Usually. When I'm interrogating you'll know."
He made a sound that was almost a laugh—something coming up from somewhere real before he caught it and pressed his lips together and looked very focused on the hinge. She felt unreasonably pleased about that and noted it and moved on.
"You been here long?" she asked.
"Couple years," he said, wiping the old screw on his jacket and dropping it in his pocket.
"Like it?"
He was quiet for a moment. She'd asked to fill space, expected a yeah or a shrug, and instead he actually thought about it. "It's quiet," he said finally. "Mostly."
"Mostly," she said.
"The couple in this apartment used to argue. You could hear it through the walls."
"Sorry if we were loud last night," MJ said. "We weren't arguing. That's just how it sounds when two people are trying to get furniture through a doorway that doesn't want to cooperate." She paused. "Forty minutes."
He glanced over at her. Something around his mouth shifted. "Forty minutes," he said.
"It's a good couch."
"Must be." He stood and pushed the door again, watching the hinges move, and she got the sense he was fighting something, some expression he'd decided wasn't appropriate for talking to a stranger in a hallway, and she found herself wanting to see what it looked like when he stopped fighting it.
"Two of you?" he asked.
"Me and my friend. We went to school together." She paused. "MIT."
He stilled for just a second—barely anything, a slight tightening—and then he was moving again. MIT. Both of them. He’d known it was coming and it still landed somewhere. He kept his face where it was. "What did you study," he said, and his voice came out carefully, the way he made it come out carefully when something was working against it.
"Genetics. Biology." She watched him. "You?"
"Didn't really go to school," he said. He stood and brushed off his knee, and she got the clear sense the subject had just been closed from the inside without her being consulted.
"Long story?" she asked.
"Yeah."
She let it go. "Fair enough."
He glanced at her sideways. "You say that a lot."
"I’m used to people giving me non-answers," she said. "I've adapted."
"I noticed." There was something dry in it that surprised her—a quiet wryness she hadn't expected from someone who'd been so measured about everything else.
"And yet," she said.
He looked at the door. "And yet," he said, almost to himself, and the way it came out made her feel like it meant more than it appeared to, like she was catching the edge of something with more underneath it. She looked at him but he wasn't looking at her.
"What do you do then," she said. "If not school."
"Little of everything." He tested the door again, slow, watching the hinges settle.
"That's vague."
"It's honest."
"Those aren't the same thing," she said, and she meant it the way she always meant it, and she watched something move through his expression—brief, like a reflex, like she'd said something he recognized from somewhere. He looked at her for a second, and she had the sense he was trying not to smile and not entirely managing it. Then he looked away.
"Whatever needs doing," he said, and turned back to the door before she could follow up on it, and she let him because she'd gotten enough to file and she didn't need to push.
He pushed the door one final time, watched it settle into the frame, and gave it a small satisfied nod that she was fairly sure he didn't know he was making. She found it endearing and had no particular reason to.
"Should hold," he said. "If it gives you any more trouble, let me know."
"I will," she said, and noticed she meant it.
He picked up the screwdriver and stood there with his eyes on the door, and she had the impression he was looking for something else that needed fixing and coming up empty. Then he looked at her, the way he'd been carefully not quite doing the whole time—direct and steady, just long enough for her to see that his eyes were brown and that there was something in them she didn't have a word for and wasn't going to find one right now.
She kept her face still.
"Thank you," she said. "Genuinely."
"Don't mention it."
"I'm mentioning it."
Something moved across his face—quick and complicated and gone before she could read it—and then he turned and walked back down the hall toward his door at the same unhurried pace he did everything, and he didn't look back.
She stood in her doorway and watched until his door closed. Then she finally let her own, newly fixed, door swing shut and stood there with her hand flat against it, listening to it sit in the frame the way it was supposed to.
She still didn't know his name.
She'd had the opening more than once—in the natural pauses, she could have just asked and he would have told her and that would have been it. She'd let each one go. She didn't usually do that. She liked having information, and names were the most basic kind, and she'd had the opening and let it go and she wasn't entirely sure why.
She touched the pendant at her throat without deciding to, two fingers, and then dropped her hand.
* * *
Ned came back in the early afternoon and she didn't tell him about the neighbor.
It wasn't a decision exactly. He came in talking about the van return and the subway and a text from his mom, and MJ listened and made tea and the moment where she might have said by the way never really arrived. Or she didn't make it arrive. She wasn't sure which.
Ned would have listened and nodded and said something she'd have had to respond to, and she'd have watched his face and seen whatever he was sitting on that he wasn't saying. She'd been seeing that face a lot since he first suggested this apartment. She didn't have the energy for it.
So she said nothing and they spent the afternoon finishing up and arguing about where the coffee maker went and watching something on Ned's laptop because they hadn't sorted the internet yet, and it was a good afternoon. Easy. Familiar. MJ was there for all of it.
Mostly.
There was a part of her that kept drifting. Not visibly—four years of lectures had trained her to look engaged when she wasn't—but underneath the conversation she kept circling back. The way he'd caught the box without hesitating. The screw he'd thought to bring. And yet, said almost to himself like it meant something else. The one second of eye contact before he looked away.
The hollow feeling had been doing something all day she couldn't quite name. Not worse, not better. More alert than usual, like background noise she'd stopped hearing had shifted frequency.
She told herself it was the newness. New city, new apartment, new job Monday, new building full of people she didn't know. That was enough to put anyone's nerves on edge. It didn't have to be more than that.
She believed that about sixty percent of the time she thought it.
That evening she sat at her desk with the materials Dr. Okafor had sent over, going through the study methodology. She moved through the first section fine. Then she hit a paragraph about how the body registered unknown stressors over time and read it three times without it sticking and looked up at the wall above her desk.
And yet.
She thought about the scuff at the bottom of his door. She thought about the way he'd looked at her door before she'd said a word about it, like he'd been paying attention to something for a while already.
She thought about a person who came home late and left early and fixed things that weren't his to fix and didn't tell you his name.
She picked up the reading. Got through the next section. Made a note in the margin. Kept going.
Ned knocked around ten and asked about dinner. She said she wasn't that hungry and he made eggs anyway and she sat at the kitchen table while he cooked and they talked about his job starting Tuesday and her commute to the Genome Center and the ongoing coffee maker debate, and it was fine. It was good. She was there.
She went to bed at eleven. Lay in the dark with the pendant against her throat and the city outside the fire escape window doing what it always did.
She still didn't know his name.
She thought about that longer than made sense, then made herself stop and closed her eyes. The last thing she noticed before she fell asleep was the hollow feeling, quieter than it usually was. Settled, almost. Like something that had been in the wrong position for a long time had shifted slightly.
