MJ’s arrival in Goodland came with a mother of a headache. Suddenly, her head was full of all of these new memories she was sure she hadn't had a minute ago. One second she'd been standing with Peter on a bridge, super happy to see he was okay and the next she'd been standing in... New York? The barrage of memories hit before she even noticed the note and MJ let out a curse as the force of months of new memories almost brought her to her knees. Goodland. Shit. She still didn't actually remember leaving, but obviously she had, because this had happened.
It didn't take her long to connect with Peter and after taking something for the splitting headache, she found herself sitting with him in one of their favorite pizza places. She'd been gone for months, from what she could tell and there was obviously a lot to catch up on. Orders placed, she sat in the booth across from him and almost wished she could have something stronger than the cola that sat in front of her.
“So,” she said conversationally, “what have I missed?”
What had she missed? That seemed like a loaded question with a long answer. Peter took a sip of his water as he tried to figure out the best place to start. He didn’t think there really was a good place to start with this kind of thing, though he was glad he didn’t have to start at the very beginning of things with this place being an alternate reality pocket dimension thing. That helped. A lot. Even if not having to explain left more questions than answers since there was no real rhyme or reason as to why some people seemed to have memories while others didn’t.
“Well, you missed Disney World, for one,” he said, taking a sip of his soda before continuing.. “Some weird thing where all these… I guess villains from different worlds appeared. Ultron showed up. So did Voldemort, but I didn’t see him. And a Decepticon. And some others.
“Stuff’s been weird, but this place is always weird. I think it’d be weirder if it weren’t weird, you know?” he said, playing with the straw in his glass.
A brief flash of disappointment flashed across MJs face before she managed her usual more aloof expression again. She didn’t like to act like she cared about stuff, not stuff like, you know, missing Disney or thinking it was almost half-cool they’d gotten to fight a Decepticon. Sure, she’d get her social justice on with impassioned speeches and judgy comments, but admitting she cared about this kind of stuff required more of an openness than she was willing to show.
It came though, anyway, with Peter. There were little cracks in her armor that just seemed to grow the more time she spent around him and it wasn’t because he was Spiderman and had just, like, saved all of them from that Beck dude. It was Peter and how great he was and easy to talk to and, okay, she guessed he was a little cute, too. He made her want to be more open, but she definitely wasn’t ready to just bring down all of her walls, not even for him.
“Oh, that’s cool,” she said, trying not to really show how kind of bummed she was that she’d missed it. It wasn’t like she’d ever had the chance to go before. Her family didn’t exactly take a lot of vacations. She laughed when he said it’d be weirder if it wasn’t weird, because she knew what he meant. There was always something whimsical about this place that was almost [...] comforting. Familiar.