Chapter Text
Michelle watches Spider-Man swing off into the sunrise, and something twists deep inside her, like her heart has just been squeezed by an invisible hand.
She can feel the memory of a kiss lingering on her mouth, and she brushes her index finger across her lips, confused, before wiping away tears she doesn’t remember crying.
“Oh my God,” Ned gasps behind her. “Holy shit, MJ.” He grabs her hand in his and moves to stand next to her as Strange slowly drifts down from high above Lady Liberty’s crown. “Are you OK? That was crazy. You saw three Spider-Men, right? I’m not just having some kind of stress-induced hallucination?”
“I saw them,” she says, her voice thin, feeling trapped in her throat. “Something doesn’t feel right.” She reaches up to hold the broken dahlia pendant that has a permanent home around her neck since that weird Stark Industries guy, Happy, gave it to her in London. She’s still not sure why he gave it to her, or why she accepted it, but she loves it, and touching it makes her feel comforted, safe.
Strange lands neatly in front of them, his cloak billowing out around him as his feet silently touch the rubble-strewn floor. “Something has changed,” he says, repeatedly clenching and relaxing his hands like he’s working out a cramp.
She knows what Ned is going to say before he opens his mouth. “Do you sense a disturbance in the Force?” he says, his voice gleeful, and that’s her boy; even after nearly dying, he can still throw in a pop culture reference.
Strange raises an eyebrow, and she thinks Ned’s about to get a lecture, but the doctor-slash-wizard nods. “Essentially, yes. I just cast the Runes of Kauf-Kaul. Our memories have been altered.”
“What did we forget?” Ned says, and Strange doesn’t reply but Michelle knows the answer anyway.
“Who Spider-Man is. ” She plays with her necklace, twisting it between nervous fingers. She doesn’t know why she thinks that, but it seems to fit.
Ned frowns, and she knows he’s sifting through his own memories of Spider-Man. “You’re right,” he says eventually. “Like, there’s absolutely no way we didn’t know who he was under the mask. Why else would he have us on video when he went out to that military base?” He brings his hand up to knead the muscle at the junction of his neck and shoulder, and winces reflexively. “Ow. I think I pulled something hanging off that scaffold.”
Michelle flinches, remembering what it felt like to fall, how one Spider-Man – their Spider-Man, his unmasked face a featureless blur in her memory – reached out for her, only to be knocked off course by a glider, leaving another Spider-Man to catch her. She can recall that Spider-Man’s kind face clearly enough to draw him; he was taller and lankier than theirs, his dark eyes full of relief mixed with grief as he cradled her like she was something precious.
Ned notices her twitch, and he moves closer, concerned. “You hurt your head,” he says, his fingers not quite touching her temple. “I think you might need to go to the hospital.”
She presses her own fingers to the dull throb, and they come away slick with blood. “Oh,” she says. She doesn’t remember being injured, but she guesses it was during the fall; there had been a lot of debris from the explosion and the shield smashing its way through scaffolding that shattered like it was made of Pocky.
Strange steps up in her personal space and cradles her face in trembling but gentle hands. “That needs irrigating and stitching,” he says after a moment, letting go of her and standing back. “I have a friend who can check you both over.”
The friend turns out to be a doctor who works at Metro-General, and she doesn’t seem at all perturbed when she finds two teenagers and a wizard waiting for her in a supply closet. She simply sighs and leads them to an empty room where she stitches Michelle’s wound, then examines Ned’s shoulder, diagnosing him with a muscle strain and fitting him with a sling.
“How about you?” she asks Strange, her eyebrow raised, and Michelle shares a look with Ned as the tension in the room dials up a notch. These two clearly have history, and it’s apparently messy.
Strange lifts his hands. “I’m fine, Christine. It’s nothing two day’s sleep won’t cure.” Those same hands make a series of graceful gestures, and a portal opens behind him. “I’d say send me the bill, but we both know I’m broke.”
Doctor Palmer rolls her eyes, stripping her vinyl gloves off. “You owe me,” she says, but a faint tinge of pink stains her cheeks when Strange winks at her. “OK, go, get out of my ED before I call security. Michelle, Ned, nice to meet you, but maybe hang out with someone other than this guy.”
Strange bows deeply then sweeps his arm towards the portal. “Children. After you.”
Michelle bristles at being called a child, but she thanks Doctor Palmer and takes Ned’s hand, pulling him through the portal with her. He stumbles a little as they step onto the smooth marble floor of the Sanctum Santorum, and she steadies him. He looks washed out, the adrenaline crash clearly leaving him shaky and exhausted.
She doesn’t feel so hot herself, so she sits down on a velvet-cushioned bench alongside the ornate staircase, tugging Ned down to sit next to her. She drops her head onto his uninjured shoulder, he rests his cheek against her crown, and she knowns in her gut that her head usually rests on a different shoulder, but it’s still comforting.
“What time is it?” Ned asks as Strange snaps the portal shut. “I’ve lost all concept of time.”
“Just before nine,” Strange answers, and the exhaustion – aside from the fact that they’ve just been in the middle of a fight between superpowered people – suddenly makes sense. They’ve been up for more than twenty-four hours, and they’re running on fumes.
“I wanna go home and go to bed,” Ned says, sounding very young and very tired, and Michelle feels that with every ounce of her being. She wants to crawl into the blankets piled up on her bed and sleep for the next week.
“You’ll likely feel low on energy for at least a couple of days,” Strange tells Ned. “That’s what you get for casting portals without training in the mystical arts. You’ve depleted your magical core.”
Ned sits up. “Dude. I have a magical core? My Lola was right? Would you train me? Is there, like, a Wizard school I can go to? Because I’m holding out for MIT’s appeal process, but I’d totally give that up for Hogwarts.”
Strange pinches the bridge of his nose and looks pained. “Yes, yes, no, no,” he sighs.
Ned’s hopeful expression falls, and Michelle wants to punch Strange right in the middle of his smug face, but she stuffs her hands under her thighs instead. “Shouldn’t he have some training? Isn’t it dangerous for him to not know how to control his magic?” she says, and her tone is probably curt but she doesn’t care.
“It’s not a case of control, he simply needs to refrain from doing it. Be that as it may, I can’t train him even if I wanted to. Only a Sorcerer Supreme can mentor an acolyte of the mystic arts, and Wong has that particular pleasure.” A slow grin makes its way onto Strange’s face, and he laughs, extending his hand, a slip of white card appearing between his fingers. “You’re Wong’s problem, Mr. Leeds.”
Ned takes the business card Strange had seemingly pulled out of thin air, and Michelle leans in to read it. The card has no text, just a phone number with a Greenwich area code. “Cool,” he breathes, slipping the card into his pocket.
“No more magic until you talk to Wong,” Strange cautions. “We’ll know.”
Ned nods enthusiastically. “No more magic. Can I call you Stephen, now we’re like, you know, magical brethren?”
“You can call me sir,” Strange says, and an odd look flickers across his face. He shakes his head, almost like he’s trying to clear it. “Déjà vu,” he explains when he spots Michelle watching. “Now. Go home. I plan on being unconscious in the next half hour.”
“We don’t have any money,” Michelle says. “No MTA cards, our phones are still in the lab at school, and it’s a long walk to Queens from here.”
Strange huffs. “I can open a portal for you back to your school. I trust you can make your own way home from there?”
At their nods, he circles his hands in the air and a portal opens into the school lab. “I suggest you go now. I’m at the point of magical fatigue and won’t be able to hold this open for long.”
Michelle and Ned step quickly through the softly sparking circle and Strange closes it behind them without even so much as a goodbye, leaving them standing in the partially destroyed lab.
“Damn,” Ned says, surveying the destruction. “The dinosaur really did a number on this place, huh?”
Michelle takes a moment to be grateful that Midtown’s budget doesn’t extend to security cameras in the classrooms, because otherwise they’d be having a very interesting conversation with Principal Morita come Monday morning.
Her phone is still on a lab bench, somehow miraculously undamaged, and she unlocks it to find dozens of missed calls from her dad, and almost as many from her mom, and it rings again as she swipes away the notifications.
Philip Jones is calling.
Shit.
“Hey Dad,” she answers, keeping her tone light and watching Ned answer his own phone.
“Hey Dad? That’s all you have to say, huh? Your mom and I have been losing our minds, what the hell were you doing on Liberty Island? I told you to stay away from Spider-Man, he’s bad news. He got that nice lady from FEAST killed.”
“May Parker.” Michelle drops down onto a lab stool. “She died.” It’s not a question but her dad takes it as one.
“Yeah. She was at an apartment building and got caught up in a fight between Spider-Man and that weird green guy on a glider. They found her in the lobby.” She hears her dad take a breath, and when he speaks again, the terrified anger has gone from his voice, and he just sounds sad. “Where are you, baby? I’m gonna come pick you up.”
“I’m with Ned at school.” She waves at Ned to get his attention and mouths My dad is coming to get us, getting a nod of acknowledgment.
“School? How did you get there, the bridges are all closed?”
“A wizard.” She’s too tired to be anything other than bluntly honest. “He sent us here through a portal.”
She can hear her dad moving around their apartment, picking his keys up from the table by their front door. “That Strange guy?” her dad asks, as he unlocks the door. “We’re having a serious talk about who you spend time with once I get you home.”
“Dad, I’m OK,” she assures him. “I promise.”
“Call your mom,” he says, and the way he doesn’t respond to her reassurance tells her he’s only going to relax once he sees she’s OK for himself. “She’s trying to get a flight, but the FAA have shut down travel. I’ll be with you in fifteen. Love you, Meech.”
“Love you,” she echoes. “See you soon.” She's definitely not going to call her mom, not yet, but her dad doesn't need to know that.
She ends the call and looks over at Ned. “I’m going to be grounded until we graduate,” she says, seeing that he’s finished talking to his parents.
“High school or college? Because I’m pretty sure I’m grounded until 2029. Maybe even until I die. Which might be today if my mom doesn’t calm down before I get home.” His phone pings and he looks at it, frowning. “My home screen looks weird,” he says, walking over to show her.
It’s the same old photo of the two of them, but it looks – off, like she’s getting a migraine and losing her central vision. She can see their faces clearly, but when she looks at the gap between them, it feels like her eyes are losing focus.
She unlocks her own phone. Her wallpaper is mostly blue sky with a few scattered clouds, but when her gaze focuses on the bottom of the screen, it all goes – not blurry, but wrong.
She screenshots her home page, then changes the wallpaper to a stock image, deciding to deal with the problem later. “We should head out front,” she says, standing up. “My dad is on his way.”
“That’s great, but I portalled us in here and Strange took the ring thingy. How do we get out?”
They end up climbing out a ground floor window of a room at the back of the school that Ned swears isn’t covered by CCTV, though when she asks, he can’t tell her how he knows that.
Her dad is waiting out on the street, and when he sees them, he gets out of the car and sweeps Michelle up in a tight hug. “You scared the shit out of me, Meech,” he says, pressing a kiss to the top of her head.
She tucks her face against his shoulder and squeezes her eyes shut against the prickle of tears. “I’m OK,” she says, letting him gently move her back so he can look her over.
“What happened to your head?” he asks, carefully sweeping back the curl that partially obscures the dressing.
“I got a few stitches. I’ll heal,” she says, and her dad doesn’t look convinced, but he lets it go. “Ned? You OK, buddy?”
Ned nods, giving him a thumbs up with the hand sticking out from the end of his sling. “Just a muscle strain,” he says.
The drive up to Queens is spent in an awkward silence, Ned in the back staring out the window and Michelle up front. She can all but hear her dad’s thoughts working overtime, and he has the pinched expression on his face that usually means he’s just about holding it together.
They drop Ned off, and he stands on the pavement outside his building, watching them drive off and looking like a man about to have his last meal, waving forlornly with his free hand.
“You know you’re grounded until after winter recess, right?” he asks as they turn at an intersection. “You can go to school and work, but you come straight home otherwise.”
Winter recess is only four weeks away, so as groundings go, she got off pretty lightly. The only person she hangs with is Ned, and he’s going to be in the same situation, so it’s not like she’s going to be missing out on much. “Fine,” she says. “Spider-Man needed my help, but I’m sorry I made you worry.”
Her dad’s phone chirps from the center console, and she glances down, curious, to see that it’s a message from her mom. “It’s Mom. Should I get that?”
Philip nods, concentrating on merging on to Jackie Robinson Parkway.
Michelle puts in her dad’s code – her birthday, he’s one of the least security conscious people she knows – and opens up the message. FAA said flights r suspended 4 rest of day … I bkd a red eye into La Guardia arr 7:15am tmrw.
“Tell her we’ll pick her up,” her dad says, before swearing at the car that had just cut in front.
Michelle can think of nothing less that she’d like to do than getting up at the ass crack of dawn to drive out to the airport, but she guesses she has to show willing. She replies to her mom, signing off with Meech ❤️, then rests her head against the window.
Her dad holds his hand out, palm up, and she rests hers on top. She can’t look at him, because she knows she’ll cry if she does, but she squeezes his hand and takes the comfort that he’s offering.
“How did you get involved in that mess?” he asks, his voice gentle. “When the news showed footage of you up on that scaffolding, I thought I was going to puke.”
“The footage was clear enough that you could see my face?” she says, and shit, like she needs any more attention at school. The fact that she’s Mary-Jane Watson’s daughter in addition to the notoriety from the video of her swinging with Spider-Man in the summer, means she’s already had far too many eyes on her for comfort.
“God no, the footage wasn’t that good. But I knew straight away it was you, plus I recognized the sweater your mom got you for your birthday.”
Said sweater is the most expensive thing in her wardrobe and is now covered in blood and soot, and definitely has a run in the stitching; she’d picked a bad day to wear a $100 sweater. “Oh.”
“Oh,” her dad echoes. “We’re ten minutes out, I’m a captive audience. Story time, kiddo.”
“I – I don’t know,” she says, sitting upright. Her brain is desperately scrabbling for purchase, searching for memories it apparently doesn’t contain, and it makes her feel nauseous. She literally has no idea why she was involved, how she got pulled into some weird multidimensional fight. She’s seventeen years old, why the hell is she hanging out with superheroes? “Dad, I promise I’m not messing with you or trying to hide anything. I really can’t remember how I got involved.”
She grips the dahlia, the edges of its broken petals pressing into her palm, and takes slow, steadying breaths. “I went to see Strange to help Spider-Man. But I don’t know how I knew I needed to go. I’ve got all these weird gaps in my memory.” She’s always been proud of her near-perfect recall, her ability to remember anything she considers important, and it’s disconcerting to suddenly have Swiss cheese for a brain.
“Did you get checked for a concussion?” her dad asks as he pulls up outside their building. “Maybe we should go get you checked out at the hospital if you’ve got gaps in your memory.”
“No concussion,” she says. “Other than the stitches I’m physically fine. Strange said he cast a spell that altered our memories.” She doesn’t tell him about her theory that she and Ned used to know who Spider-Man is – he’s already freaked out enough without adding another element of stress.
Once they’re inside she heads straight for the shower to wash off all the muck and grime, then cries under the streaming water with her hand braced against the wall like she’s the twenty-something lead in a bad Hallmark movie.
Her dad insists that she bundle up on the couch, tucking blankets around her like she’s four years old again, and makes her hot chocolate and a bowl of oatmeal with cinnamon apple compote and raisins. She shovels it down like she hasn’t eaten in a day, which is probably accurate given she can’t remember the last meal she had.
She turns on the news and she sees her dad open his mouth then think better of it. It’s blanket coverage of the fight on Liberty Island, and she’s grateful to see that it’s mostly just explosions and smoke, with the occasional flash of red-and-blue and red-and-black swinging around the scaffold.
The five second clip of her falling is show twice – once at full speed, then again in slow motion, and she watches dispassionately, tracking the way her body surrenders to gravity, only wincing when the green guy’s glider slams into one Spider-Man, and then another leaps headfirst to catch her instead.
Her dad was right – there’s no real way to identify her, she’s just a blur of dark hair and long limbs falling. There’s only a brief glimpse of Ned, not enough for anyone to be able to identify the school his jacket is from. She’s pretty sure they won’t be recognized by anyone outside of their families.
She messages Ned to ask how his family reacted and gets a pained grin emoji in response, quickly followed by grounded until january. lola told my parents i did magic and ngl think they’re legit a little bit scared of me now, otherwise i’d have been grounded until i turned 30.
After replying to tell him her own grounding terms and conditions, she opens her gallery to pull up the screenshot of her wallpaper. There’s definitely something weird going on with her phone; some of the thumbnails before the screenshot are just blurs of color that make her eyes itch.
She feels a sense of creeping disquiet, and she knows that she’s missing something – someone – but that’s OK.
Michelle Jones doesn’t back away from a mystery. She likes to dig and observe and make connections grounded in facts.
She needs to know why she feels like a puzzle missing a piece.
This is a mystery she’s going to solve.