The Odd Couple

A/N: This story takes place ‘during’ Web of Spider-Man 12, but deviates from canon. However, Marvel decided they really don’t have canon anymore, so take it up with them before you come crying to me, okay?

“Where do you want it?” Peter asked, hefting the wooden Indian that was about the only thing salvageable from his burnt-out apartment. It weighted a good sixty pounds, which he could manage with one hand if not one finger, but it was an awkward weight and anyway, he didn’t like showing off too much out of costume, except in private.

Well, Mary Jane was private enough, considering she knew he was Spider-Man, but Peter didn’t know how comfortable he was—or should get—with parading that life in front of Mary Jane. He was already moving in with her, which seemed intimate enough.

Mary Jane put a finger on her chin, thoughtfully regarding him and the statue he was lugging around. Then she stuck her finger in the air. “I got it! The city dump.”

“I’m serious,” Peter insisted. “This guy saw me through college. Old Chief Wooden Nickel is good luck!”

“Not if Marlon Brando sees it. Peter, I’m an actress. Ever hear of political correctness?”

“Right, right.” Peter set the statue down in the corner. “I’ll start dating a black woman, you get together with another girl.”

“Let’s not go crazy.” Mary Jane held up her hands, framing her view of the room. “A little to the left, I think.”

Peter scooted it over. “See? It makes the room pop.”

“No, I just don’t want people to be able to see it from the window.”

“I don’t know. Maybe if you get a stalker, he’ll leave you alone if he thinks you’re racially insensitive.”

“Less people paying attention to me. Strong argument in favor of the Injun, tiger.”

Once, Peter would have thought stumbling onto a crime in progress was inconvenient, but usually he had time to get into costume. This one time, he’d had to take care of the jokers as plain old Peter Parker, and that had bought him no end of trouble. It’d climaxed in his bachelor pad being burnt down as part of their campaign of harassment against him. And now that he knew the harm these creeps were capable of, Peter was determined to sort them out.

In the meantime, he had to sleep somewhere. He didn’t want to involve Aunt May—it’d been hard enough reassuring her as it was. And Mary Jane had offered to let him stay with her for a while. She was the only one who knew he was Spider-Man, which was the next best thing to having his own place. But then again, MJ’s exacting thoughts on feng shui were nothing like Peter actually having his own place.

Peter twisted the statue around to satisfy some vague OCD floating around in his psyche, waiting for its turn among all his other neuroses. “Doesn’t matter much either way. As soon as I find a new place, me and the Chief are out of your flaming red hair.”

Mary Jane let out a quick bark of laughter. “Don’t rush,” she said, distracted by noticing that Peter had brought in the mail, picking up the envelopes and looking through them.

That stopped Peter short, leaving the Chief off by an iota. He finished rotating it, thinking to himself that she’d just asked him to stay—hadn’t she?—and that hit him in some symphonic resonance deep inside, remembering him of times in the past when the door had shut with a click and she’d stayed or he’d stayed and they’d been together.

She didn’t mean it like that, Peter told himself firmly.

Mary Jane evidently agreed, because she looked up from the mail to face Peter. “I mean, I know the pressures you’re under. You’re practically a collector. I’d hate to think that you’re worrying about finding a place to stay while Doc Ock is after you. That’s why I said you could sleep with me—here. Sleep here.”

Peter grinned, but tried to bury it immediately with a cough. Slip of the tongue. Completely innocent. They were just friends. And things were muddled up enough as they were without thinking about her body and his body and it was a body worth thinking about, wasn’t it?

“I get it,” he said, taking a step toward her. “One of the reasons we don’t work together is because you’d be in danger—Spider-Man’s girlfriend—and you’re still in danger doing this—Spider-Man’s roommate—so I should move along pretty quick.”

Mary Jane shook her head. “It’s not the same thing.”

“My last apartment got firebombed, MJ. I don’t think guys like that would hold back because you have your shoe closet here too.”

“I mean being your roommate is different from being your lover. At least, I hope it is. Unless you’d like to tell me something about you and Harry.”

“No, I think he should be the one to tell you,” Peter quipped. “I’m talking about being in the line of fire.”

“And I’m talking about caring about you,” Mary Jane replied quickly. Maybe a little too quickly. She carried the stack of envelopes to the kitchen counter and started going through it again.

Peter fixed his gaze on the Chief, gauging how it looked in its new home—in its temporary holding facility. “You care about me,” he said offhandedly, because he felt overstuffed not saying it, like it might burst out of him if he didn’t let it vent.

“Yes, Peter, obviously. But as a friend. Nothing more.”

“I never said anything more. I care about you as a friend too. If it weren’t for the danger, we’d probably make great roommates, because I’d love to sit down and make a list of things I could do for you and then just do ‘em.”

“And I’d love if you actually had someone around who knew how to take care of you,” Mary Jane said. “Who I trusted enough to take care of you. Like me. Which is why we’re good roommates.”

“Aside from the danger.”

“Aside from that.”

“And the wooden Indian.”

“He’s starting to grow on me.”

Peter ran a hand through his tousled hair. He felt sweat greasing his scalp. He wasn’t used to that with someone as friendly as Mary Jane, who usually put him at ease—but he supposed it was fitting that he’d end up with sweaty palms when it was someone as beautiful as her.

And she was beautiful. Not just her spectacular body, but every freckle on her face, every curve of her eyebrows, the entire set of her sweet face when she smiled and all the mystique and allure she’d been blessed with since birth became mischief and enthusiasm, affection waiting to be directed at someone…

Peter felt a drop of sweat wind down from his hairline and needle his right eyebrow. This. This was why he’d been reluctant to move in with her. His spider-sense might as well have gone off…

He got angry with himself, doing what he’d promised himself and, wordlessly, Mary Jane that he wouldn’t do, and he felt that anger spill over onto MJ. “Well, in any case, I wouldn’t want to stay here too long. Hold up your busy social life.”

Mary Jane carried the junk mail and not too serious bills over to the recycling. “I wouldn’t socialize with someone who minded me hanging out with you,” she told him, a bit snappishly.

Peter nodded. “Then I guess I’ll just move out to free up my social life.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Mary Jane retorted, her voice rich with irony.

Peter chuckled. “I actually wouldn’t mind too much if you did bring a guy over. You deserve someone to make you happy. And anyway, crime rates would probably go down if you kicked me out of here now and then.”

Mary Jane ran a hand through her hair. “I’m actually focusing on making myself happy right now. No boys. I am working on my career and my friends and myself… If you wanna bring someone over, though, be my guest. I’ve had roommates before. I get how it goes.”

“No, no, I’m working on my career too,” Peter said, shaking his head. “I’m going to join the Avengers. Move into their mansion. That’ll take care of the housing situation too, it’ll be great.”

“And if you hit it off with Black Widow, that’s the social life sewn up too.”

“A redhead, MJ? I think I’ve learned my lesson.”

“We’ll see,” Mary Jane trilled airily—a little too airily, maybe.

***

In Mary Jane’s experience, breaking in a new roommate was a combination of a grace period and a transition period. Grace period because unless someone was a total sociopath, there would always be a time when a roommate was on their best behavior, trying extra hard to be normal and make the living arrangement last until a sister had unpacked her silverware at least.

And transition period because, despite that politeness—maybe because of it—it took some time for the psyche of the non-sociopath to accept having a strange presence in the personal space of the home. And everyone was strange when you came right down to it. So, ideally, as the politeness leveled off, it was replaced with a measure of comfort in having a friend and countryman who had access to your underwear drawer but could be trusted to mind their own business.

There was also, Mary Jane learned, the situation in which you bought groceries, walked into your own damn apartment, and your ex-boyfriend was half-naked in the living room. And the other half was spandex.

She dropped the bag of groceries, prompting Peter’s attention. “Hey,” he said casually.

“Hey,” Mary Jane replied by rote.

Peter’s voice went up an octave as he realized their circumstances. “Hey!”

He sounded so scandalized that Mary Jane took a step back, as if she’d walked in on him getting out of the shower, and not him in fully half of his Spider-Man costume, shirtless, bleeding, his pants drawn down one side of his hips while he sutured a cut under his waist.

She took a step forward. “I guess this is on me. We didn’t really discuss boundaries, but, I like to keep all the topless bleeding in the kitchen or the bathroom.”

“Topless?” Peter repeated. He kept his eyes on the cut he was sewing up. “Oh. So here’s the thing—it’s not as bad as it looks. A helicopter shot a missile at me, don’t worry, I dodged it, but there was a pretty big explosion. Shrapnel. I get home, first thing to do is sew up the costume, right?” He nodded to the top half of his costume, which laid on the floor like a perfect parody of exactly what Mary Jane had been worried about, dating Spider-Man or living with Spider-Man. His messy laundry left just lying on the floor. “Then I notice I’m bleeding. Not that bad, don’t worry, you get a feel for these things. But I thought I’d better stitch it up. And I just didn’t think that you would be walking in on me, even though it’s your apartment, cuz I’m used to having the place to myself. Even though it’s not my place. With you out on your errands, guess I just forgot. Did you get eggs?”

“Eggs?”

“Eggs. It’s what I do for breakfast. I don’t eat cereal, I’m surprised you do. Nutritionally they’re kinda, bleh.”

“I got eggs.”

“Okay, great, I’ll pay you back.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Mary Jane said, still a touch stunned.

“And feel free to have some yourself. I don’t really get territorial over my stuff. It’s not like you’re going to eat me out of house and home, you’re, what, a hundred pounds soaking wet?”

“Only when I’m retaining water. Which I guess counts as soaking wet.”

She was still a little distracted by his body. Or a lot distracted by it. Once the surprise had been set aside and she was sure he wasn’t mortally wounded or anything, it occurred to Mary Jane how Peter actually looked.

Most musclemen she knew had an overripe sausage look—juicy veins splitting out of their swollen muscles—that never failed to turn MJ off. Peter was nothing like that, even though his physique could put any of them to shame. His musculature was sculpted, aesthetically chiseled, fitting naturalistically into his slender height. He reminded MJ of a statue of a Greek god, a meeting of man and superman, with his burgeoning muscles delicately laid over the frame of someone who was average, handsome, normal. It made him entirely approachable… her friend Peter… but at the same time, almost otherworldly in how taut muscle rippled in his powerful thighs, his strong arms, his belly with its lean six-pack.

And without him in motion, or swinging up in the skyscrapers, she had to be aware of how revealing his costume actually was. It adhered tightly to all that rigid muscle, only in a few places being mercifully slack. Mary Jane’s eyes darted to his groin, acutely aware of the tempting bulk cupped by his costume. She looked away quickly. Now that she’d decided they worked best as friends, she was going to change her mind just because it’d been a while since she’d gotten laid?

Even though Peter was one of those men who made it feel like a long, long while…

“Do you have a headache?” Mary Jane asked.

“Yeah, now that you mention it…”

“Good, one of us should.”

“What?” Peter asked, his expression perfectly quizzical.

“I mean, I should get you some ice. I figure as long as you’re getting shot at by missiles, you should have some ice.” Mary Jane hurried to the refrigerator. One icepack for your head, and one for me to sit on… c’mon, Red, he’s sewing up a cut. What’s next, lusting after a coma patient?

A voice seemed to reply to her when she opened up the freezer. You’d probably be in a coma if you went twelve rounds with that. Don’t most people need to get more sleep?