Evidence
She woke up sometime after four. He knew because he was awake. He'd been awake for about twenty minutes, lying on his back with her head on his shoulder and her leg over his and the bond humming low and steady between them. The ceiling crack was above him. The webbing from her laughing fit had thinned to almost nothing, a few threads catching the grey light starting to come through the window.
She moved. Her leg slid off his and she sat up, hair everywhere, and blinked at his room like she'd forgotten where she was. Then she looked at him and she hadn't forgotten.
"What time is it?"
"Four seventeen."
"How do you know that without looking at your phone."
"Spider thing. My internal clock is-" He stopped. "I don't actually know why I know that."
She was already moving. Shorts on, hoodie on, hair twisted into a rough knot at the back of her head. She moved around his room efficient, not wasting a step. She checked her phone. Put it in her hoodie pocket. Found her other sock under his desk.
She stopped at the window. Looked back at the room. At him, in the bed, in the blue sheets that were still stuck to the mattress, with the bare pillow and the crack in the ceiling and the grey predawn light. Her eyes tracked left to right. The poster on the wall. The desk. The model. Him.
"I have to go before my mom's alarm goes off," she said.
"Yeah."
"Tonight was-"
"Yeah."
Her mouth opened and closed. Then she leaned through the window, gripped the sill, and dropped out of sight. The sound of her spider-grip peeling down the exterior wall, getting fainter.
His room was quiet. It smelled like her shampoo and both of them and the particular warmth of a room that had been closed up all night with two bodies in it. The web strand on the ceiling was dissolving. By the time May came in for breakfast it would be gone.
He didn't get up. He lay there for another ten minutes and let the quiet sit.
School felt different.
He couldn't pin it to a specific thing. The hallways were the same. Flash was somewhere being Flash. Harry was somewhere being Harry. Nothing had changed except how Peter was moving through it.
Looser. His shoulders were lower. His hands were relaxed in his pockets instead of curled. His body moved like it had extra room inside it.
He opened his locker. The handle dented under his grip. Deeper than the last time. He looked at the five finger-shaped impressions in the metal and pressed them flat with his thumb and thought about that. He was stronger than last week. Training, probably. Or the spider-powers were still developing.
He didn't know. He straightened the dent and got his textbook.
Cindy was in the hallway between second and third period. Different school, but she'd started showing up at Midtown during her free periods and nobody questioned it because nobody questioned a girl walking through a hallway with a purpose.
The bond was there. Still there. But quieter. At the cafeteria last week it had been an eleven, a wall of noise he had to think through. Now it was at maybe a four. Present. Warm.
She was walking toward him. She saw him and her mouth didn't move but her eyes did. A small shift. The corners tightening.
They passed each other. Her knuckles brushed his as they went by, two people going opposite directions in a crowded hallway. Callused fingertips against his hand. Hockey calluses. The bond pulsed once, warm, and settled back.
She kept walking. He kept walking.
A kid dropped a binder behind him. Papers everywhere. Peter didn't help this time. He kept walking and his hand was warm where she'd touched it.
In fourth period he watched her through the window of the science lab. She was in the courtyard, sitting on a bench, and a kid from her school was talking to her and she was listening and peeling webbing off her own wrist under the table where nobody could see. The silk came off clean. She rolled it between her fingers and it dissolved. No residue. No pulling. Her control was better. Last week the webbing had stuck to everything and left marks when she peeled it. Now it was clean.
The cafeteria was Tuesday chaos. Half the tables were taken by the freshmen who ate early and the other half were in flux and somebody had spilled milk near the garbage cans and nobody had cleaned it up and the floor was a lake of white that people were stepping around or through depending on how much they cared about their shoes.
Peter sat near the windows. Turkey sandwich. May's handwriting on the bag. Same as last week. He ate and looked at his phone and didn't look at the door.
Cindy walked in. He didn't look. He was aware of her the way he was aware of the exit signs, a background certainty, the bond telling him she was thirty feet away and closing. She sat two tables over with a girl from her school who'd come with her. They talked. He ate his sandwich.
The glance happened at the same time. He looked up and she was already looking and they held it for maybe a second and then he looked away.
From the corner by the vending machine, Jessica Jones was watching.
Same corner she always sat in. Hood up, bag on the chair next to her, paperback facedown on the table. She was looking at Peter. Then at Cindy. Then at the space between them.
Their eyes met. Peter and Jessica. One second. Her face was still, but her eyes weren't blank. She looked away first. Picked up her book.
A face in a corner. He'd seen her there every day since he started at Midtown and he'd never thought about it beyond that.
He finished his sandwich. The milk lake by the garbage cans was expanding. A janitor was coming down the hall with a mop and a face that said he'd been doing this for thirty years and wanted to do it for zero more.
The fence was warm in the afternoon sun.
Peter was in the backyard, not doing pull-ups, just sitting on the back step with a glass of water and his phone and the late-afternoon light making everything gold. Ben was at work. May was inside watching something. A bird was on the power line above the Watson house, a fat sparrow that had been sitting there for ten minutes doing nothing.
MJ came out her back door.
Tank top. Cutoffs. Red hair down. She leaned on her side of the fence, elbows on the top rail, weight on one hip. She had a popsicle. Cherry, from the color. She bit the top off it.
"Hey, Tiger."
"Hey."
She looked at him. The look was different from her usual inventory. Slower. She started at his face and worked down to his neck and stopped.
"You look different."
"Do I."
"Mm." She bit the popsicle again. Her eyes were still on his neck. On the spot above his collar where the mark was. He'd seen it in the mirror this morning. Two small bruises and a crescent of tooth marks. Spider-strength bite, deep enough to break the skin, and his healing had closed the punctures but the bruise was still there. Purple and yellow at the edges. Above his collar.
"Like someone who slept well," she said.
He didn't touch his neck. He wanted to. His hand stayed where it was.
"I did sleep well."
"I bet." She bit the last of the popsicle off the stick. Looked at the stick. Looked at him. Her green eyes were sharp and she was adding things up.
She pushed off the fence. "See you around, Tiger."
She walked toward her back door. He watched her go. She was in cutoffs and her legs were long and the walk was unhurried. Deliberate. Halfway to the door she slowed down.
She didn't look back.
The screen door opened and closed. The sparrow on the power line flew away.
Peter sat on the back step and drank his water.
That evening Ben was asleep in the recliner and May was doing dishes and Peter was on the couch with his legs up. The TV was on. Channel 7 news. He wasn't watching. He was scrolling through the Bugle website on his phone, looking at the blurry dashcam photo of himself from the carjacking, thinking about Ben's Pentax in the hall closet and five hundred dollars.
The anchor said something that made him look up.
Footage. Phone footage, shaky, someone on a rooftop filming the sky. A woman flying. Red and blue suit with a gold star on the chest, crossing the skyline above Midtown Manhattan. Fast. Faster than anything Peter had seen. The camera couldn't keep up. She was there and then she wasn't and the person filming said something and the camera shook.
"Captain Marvel was seen over Manhattan today responding to what officials are calling an 'elevated threat level' at the Raft maximum-security prison. The Avengers-"
The Avengers.
Peter watched the footage loop. The woman in the red and blue suit. The speed. Someone flying through the sky like it was a hallway. He thought about his web-shooters and his terrible costume and the four blocks of Queens he'd covered on his first night out.
There was a whole world above street level. Gods and aliens and people who punched through buildings. Carol Danvers had flown over Manhattan today and the news had covered it like the weather.
The street-level was his if he wanted it. Queens, Brooklyn, the boroughs, the neighborhoods where people got mugged and cars got stolen and men with guns walked into corner stores. That was his world. The scale he could work at. The people he could actually reach.
May came in from the kitchen drying her hands on a towel. "What's on?"
"News."
"Anything good?"
"A woman flew over Manhattan."
"That happens," May said. She sat down next to him and put her feet up. "Your uncle snores louder than the TV."
Ben snored. The recliner creaked. The news moved on to traffic. May leaned her head against Peter's shoulder and he let her and the mark on his neck was hidden by his collar and the ceiling in this room didn't have a crack in it.
He wanted the street-level.