Morning. Midtown High.
Peter was at his locker between first and second period when MJ appeared beside him. She leaned against the neighbouring locker and looked at him with an expression he had learned to read as I have something to say and I am deciding how to say it.
He waited.
"You were out last night," she said.
Peter kept his expression even. "What makes you say that?"
"I don't know exactly." She shifted her weight. "I woke up at like one in the morning and I just felt." She paused. "Alert. Like something had happened nearby. But there was nothing. My apartment was fine. Nobody was in the hallway." She looked at him directly. "It was you, wasn't it. You were doing something."
Peter thought about this. The spider-bond did not work like a telephone. It was not a steady signal or a constant emotional feed. It activated on intensity. Last night had not been intense by his standards. A mugging stopped. A drunk driver detained. Routine.
But his spider-sense had been running hot the whole patrol. Heightened. Engaged. Maybe that was enough.
"I was out," he said. "Nothing serious happened."
MJ was quiet for a moment. "I'm not trying to track you. I'm not going to do that." She picked at the edge of her sleeve. "I just want to know when you're okay. That's all."
"I'm okay," Peter said.
She nodded. Looked away. Looked back. "Good." She pushed off the locker. "Don't be weird about it."
"I'm not being weird about it."
"You have a specific face you make when you're being weird about something and you're making it right now."
She walked away before he could respond.
Peter closed his locker. 'She's not wrong, hehe...' he thought.
---
The warehouse after school.
Gwen was already there when Peter and MJ arrived. She had moved the training markers into a new configuration and was running wall traversal drills by herself, moving across the upper section of the east wall in a pattern that looked almost casual.
She dropped down when they came in. Landed clean. No adjustment needed on the landing.
"That's better than last week," Peter said.
"It's fully passive now," Gwen said. She held up her hand and the adhesion activated and released in a controlled sequence. On. Off. On. Off. "I stopped thinking about it two days ago. It just runs."
"Good. That's where it needs to be." Peter set his bag down. "MJ, how's the threshold?"
MJ rolled her shoulders. "Better than Tuesday. The fire alarm in the building next door went off this morning and I only flinched a little instead of diving under my desk."
"Progress."
"It's a low bar."
"Every calibration starts at a low bar." Peter moved to the centre of the space. "Today we're doing something different. Distraction drills. Gwen, you're going to argue with me about something while maintaining wall adhesion. MJ, you're going to catch objects while I ask you unrelated questions."
Gwen raised an eyebrow. "What are we arguing about?"
"Doesn't matter. Pick something."
"The quantum cryptography paper. Third section. You changed my phrasing without telling me."
"Your phrasing had a logical gap."
"It was defensible."
"Defensible isn't the same as correct." Peter nodded at the wall. "Go."
Gwen went up the wall. The argument continued. Her adhesion did not slip once.
MJ caught a tennis ball Peter threw without looking at it while answering a question about the French Revolution. Caught it again. Caught it a third time when he threw two simultaneously.
"Better," Peter said.
"I know," MJ said. She threw one of the balls back at him harder than necessary.
He caught it without looking.
They worked for two hours. By the end, something had shifted in the session. Not a dramatic moment. Just a quality of ease that had not been there before. The three of them moving around the space, adjusting to each other, anticipating each other's positions without needing to check.
At one point MJ was mid-air from a wall jump and Gwen had already moved to the spot MJ was going to need to land on without either of them communicating it. MJ landed exactly there. They both stopped for a second.
"Did you plan that?" MJ asked.
"No," Gwen said.
They both looked at Peter.
"Coordination," he said. "You're starting to read the space the same way. It takes time but it builds." He picked up his bag. "Same time Thursday."
He left them there. Outside the warehouse he stood on the pavement for a moment. The late afternoon light was going orange over the Queens skyline.
Something was developing between the three of them that he had not fully planned for. Not the bond exactly. Not the training. Something in the space between those two things. A fluency. A shared understanding of how the other two moved and thought and reacted.
He had been worried about managing three separate relationships with three separate people. What was actually happening was different. The three of them were becoming something that functioned as a unit without any of them deciding to.
'Six days,' Peter thought. 'Phase 2. Then everything changes again.'
He started walking home.
The city moved around him. Normal and loud and completely unaware of what was growing inside it.
Check Patreon for 5 chapters/day (three days in a row) mass release event!
Read more chapters, days ahead of Webnovel Updates on Patreon marvelstark