AUTHORS NOTE
you guys kept spamming me to write the headcanon so i did! and wow! i feel in love with mj and peter all over again! hope u guys like it 💘💞

* * *

Peter Parker has not been in a rush this Friday afternoon. Which was not surprising, since he hadn't been in a rush for basically weeks. He had decided that maybe if he later off Mr. Stark's back he would give Peter a mission.

Which didn't work.

But it doesn't mater, Peter thought, because maybe if I keep trying, it will work! And it wouldn't, but the boy was so happy with this idea of helping the a Avengers again that his feet were buzzing each day of the week.

As he was exiting his class room, his eyes were drawn to a journal on the floor. It had lots of doodles in sharpie on it. Ranging from a unicorn being abducted into an alien space craft to a cow wearing knee high stripper boots.

Peter picked it up, studying the wrinkled pages for a while (it had obviously been through a lot) before his teacher gave him an odd look and he realized he had to leave.

When he got home, he began to study the cover of the book, and he realized how weird it really was. There was a lot of drawings of the X-Men and aliens. A lot. There was a snarling Wolverine, smiling Kitty Pryde, and a indifferent Cyclops crudely drawn on the back cover. And there was a alien with a speech bubble saying "aliens don't have assholes". Which made Peter laugh and be confused at the same time.

He finally decided to open and see who it belonged too, since he had taken it home, instead of having been smart and asking everyone before they left the class who dropped their journal.

He flipped to the first page, and it took him a while to read as the handwriting was very loopy and looked like a dog had written it.

"dream, march 2nd, rating 3/5
— ok so i was in like a van but not a creepy van. like a van for a band with the scenery from that pup video finn wolfhard was in
— and there was this girl who looked like jean grey screaming AT THE TOP OF HER FUCKING LUNGS
— then it turned to a very josie n the pussycats comic vibe
— i remember the satanic symbol?? for some reason
— and eventually the crazy jean grey bitch got on the top of the van as it was moving then went all phoenix and shit blew up"

Peter smiled at that. He didn't know why. It was basically nonsense. But it was also cute? Like a really muddled up sort of adorable gibberish.

Then there were lines and lines of "RED", some in cursive, some in small font, some neat, and Peter didn't understand that. So he flipped the next page.

"spider-man but every time he gets cuter my heart beats faster until eventually it bursts out of my chest like the alien from alien"

And wow, Peter almost fell off his bed. Scratch that, he totally did fall off his bed. His elbow hit the floor loudly, and he had to bite his lip so he didn't scream. He was really glad he had a healing factor, if he might have just broken his elbow. If that was a thing.

"Pete?" His Aunt May's distant voice called form the kitchen, "You alright?"

"I'm fine!" Peter called back, not wanting to cause a commotion. He rubbed his elbow because it felt like someone had grabbed a sledge hammer and went to town on it, "Just dropped. . . something."

They liked Spider-Man! They knew about alien! Peter still hadn't gotten over the shock and his toe tapped impatiently on his floor and his grin was widening with every passing second. He couldn't help it.

God, he was starting to crush on a person he don't even know. But that person was crushing on him (kind of), so does that make it okay? Probably.

"mj + dying ♥︎ ♥︎ an otp for all ages" It took Peter a couple seconds to work out that MJ must be the name of the owner of the book. What kind of name was MJ?

It sounded like MJ's parents were hippies.  Now that he knew their name, he was staring to get a picture of them. Maybe a girl who wore her hair in a bun? And he didn't know why, but he imagined blue eyes.

He tried his best to get the fact MJ liked Spider-Man out of his head, but he couldn't. It just stuck in his head, moved it's furniture, and flipped Peter he bird when he told it to get lost.

Then he turned another page.

"cute people in class? maybe so!
— alex
— peter ( not peter j he's annoying. the other peter )
— taylor ( the one with the blue eyes )
— ash w.
— jesse ( kind of tall )
— cameron"

And this confused Peter more then anything. Because there was a lot of things about this list.

1). All these names were annoyingly gender neutral except Peter? Hey MJ, what the fuck?

2). There are LOTS of Peter's. Like, there's at least 3 in his Language Arts Class.

So now he didn't know if MJ liked him. Which sucked. He had felt happy for a moment, thinking not only did MJ liked Spider-Man, she liked him as Peter too! For a second he had thought "Not Peter J.? Shit, that's me!" But then the crushing reality that he was born with a boring and common name shifted itself into his mind.

His eyes skimmed page after page, looking for a last name. And he started to enjoy it. It's not like there was a private thing about this journal, except for a few pages of "i hate my fucking dad" and then MJ explained why she hated her fucking dad, but when Peter realized how horrible and sensitive the topic was, he skipped it.

And he kept reading, looking for the magic words when there it was, written in exaggerated and sparkly purple ink that glittered on the page. "if lost return to mj watson for whatever amount of cash i have on me. which is probably 2 dollars sorry"

And then Peter suddenly remembered MJ was a real person. Which seemed like such a weird concept. He felt like he was reading one of those fake diary stories, or a poem book, by a author. Not some teenaged girls diary.

And then he felt guilty because he had read a teenaged girls diary. He knew their crushes, their dreams, some things about their dad, and a lot of things maybe MJ didn't tell anyone. And wow, Peter really did not regret it because MJ seemed like an amazing confident person and the brunette boy had a crush on her. Just by reading some words she had written. How weird would it be to walk up to her and give her book back?

He placed the book down onto his desk, and tried to go to sleep but he couldn't. Because he kept tossing and turning and thinking about how terrible was it that he had a crush on a girl he didn't even know? How weird was it he liked someone he hadn't even looked at?

Eventually, he did fall asleep, and when he woke up the next morning, being a total spaz, he reread the journal and all those kooky drawings. And he noticed a lot more. Including—
1. MJ had snuck in a lot of spider puns into her dreams
2. She liked drawing boots
3. She couldn't draw noses
4. Sometimes she forgot to put a line over her t's, so they looked like l's
5. They had written the word pan on the backside of a page, but crossed it out so violently it took peter a couple of minutes to figure it out

And all he thought about that weekend was MJ and her stupid journal. He had stopped a bank robbery. He had sent a identity theft to jail. Yet all he could think of was a girl and her weird ass book.

And when Monday came, he was buzzing at a frequency that could shatter glass.

He went to his algebra class with his brows furrowed and his knees shaking. Because this was such a simple thing, yet it wasn't.

He got to class 10 minutes early, just to ask the people their if they knew/were MJ. He asked three girls who had looked at him a little weird. And one of them smiled like a grandmother and glanced at Peter's desk. Not Peter's desk. The boy next to his desk.

"Does he know MJ?" Peter asked her, looking back at the boy, who was tracing invoke circles on his desk with his finger.

"Sure, Parker." The blonde replied, her dimples caving in her cheeks. She wore collared pink shirts and poodle earrings and she screamed I'M BETTER THEN YOU. But he still headed her advice and say in his seat, next to the kid she had glanced at.

Peter glanced at the boy, not knowing his name. But he remembered him. He was a little quiet, and when he was called on he usually gave the right answer. He had red hair, very light brown skin, and just about a million freckles splattered on his body. You could even see from the bit of ankle peaking from the space between his pants and his socks that he had freckles on his ankle.

"Hey, do you know an MJ? MJ Watson?" Peter leaned over to the boy. He was a little taller then Peter, which wasn't surprising because Peter was much shorter then the other kids in his class.

"MJ Watson?" The boy said quizzically, looking at Peter with a bit of amusement, "Yeah, that's me."

You know that phrase "world turned upside down"? That's how Peter felt know. First, he had imagined MJ as a brunette with like. . . maybe blue eyes? But here was this red haired, freckled boy in front of him and he was the girl Peter was crushing on.

And it wasn't the fact that MJ was a boy, because honestly, Peter really didn't care that MJ was a boy. Peter had blushed at MJ's words and their weird doodles and quirky nature, not their gender or whatever they looked like.

It was just the fact MJ was THERE. IN FRONT OF HIM. SMILING. FUCK HIS SMILING. It should be illegal for a boy that cute to smile!

His stomach twisted into eight separate knots and his knees stated to shake. He was talking to MJ! He had talked to MJ! Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! Is all he can think.

"MJ?" He asked the boy, not really believing it. It almost seemed like MJ couldn't be a real person. And seeing this boy, saying he was MJ so calmly was like a fire hydrant had broken in Peter's brain, "Like the letters?"

"Yeah, I know it sounds stupid." He shrugged, not knowing the boy in front of him was basically contemplating taking a deep dive out the window of the class room, "But I like it more then Mason James. I think my parents were hippies."

"I..." Peter begin, but the words couldn't leave his mouth. The journal was basically burning a joke through his backpack.

"You...?" The boy teased, smiling in this weird way that made it look like a smirk but also a shy grin. He's just as cute as he sounded, Peter thought, but then realizes he's staring and he ducks his head.

"I think this is yours." Peter says, searching through his backpack and his heart is literally pouring out of his chest to the white marble floors. He feels so light and dreamy.

Peter finally pulled out the red journal with the crazy drawings cascading across its cover, and handed it to the boy, who Peter noticed had oddly knobby and long hands. And they had freckles on them. MJ Watson was officially the cutest boy on the planet and Peter had known him for the entirety of 6 minutes.

"Oh, hey, thanks." MJ said, smiling, but smiling more at himself, like an after thought. He moved the journal closer to his chest like hugging an old friend, before putting it in his backpack. "I knew I left this somewhere."

"It's no problem."

"You didn't read it, did you?" MJ asked, looking back and forth between his backpack and Peter .

"Sorry, I had too," Peter told him, which was true. He just didn't tha Roy tell him he liked it, "to see who it belonged to."

"Oh, yeah, shit, right. I should have written MJ on the front. That was so stupid of me." He rubbed the back of his neck, looking smaller then he was, "Um . . . well, now I'm embarrassed. There's some weird stuff in here."

"Like the Jean Grey dream?" Peter asked, grinning.

"Yeah, like the Jean Grey dream." MJ said, but Peter was very sure he was not talking about the Jean Grey dream which made Peter's mind scream so loudly Peter was 200% his ears were bleeding, "You're Peter, right? We also have AP Latin together."

"We do?" The brunette felt extremely embarrassed he didn't know that, "Oh, uh, not that good with faces."

"It's okay, I'm not either." MJ told him, and he gave that weird grin again, which made Peter want to fall onto the floor and cry, "I just remember you well because you're always sleeping in class then getting the right answers."

"It's a gift, I guess." Peter chuckled lightly. And MJ chuckled back. It was such a nice sound.

You can't like someone this much when you've known them for like 2 seconds! He thought to himself.

Have you ever watched Titanic? He shot back to himself, before realizing he was arguing with himself and he was being stupid.

"Do you want to get coffee with me?" MJ asked the boy, that grin (which Peter would now know as the MJ grin) still on his face, "After school? I feel like I have to repay you for finding this. It-It means a lot to me. This journals a year work in progress."

Then Peter's mind took over again and told him This boy likes you! He called Spider-Man cute! That's you, dipshit! You're Spider-Man! MJ Watson, cutest boy on the world finds you cute!

"Yeah." Peter said, words so simple yet so not escaping his mouth before he could even think about them, "That'd be great."

And maybe MJ was just words on paper, a boy who drew cows in stripper boots and had a weird obsession with the X-Men. But he was also a boy with freckles pecking his skin like stars, and who smiled so much being around him was like rolling a ball of sunshine together.

Just the way Peter Parker a high voiced superhero who wasn't really used to his whole hero thing and took churros as payment. But he was also a boy who cared too much for his own good with a heart so full it was bursting at the seams, and feet that were always tapping, even if he didn't know.

So maybe they'd be alright.