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Peter was guarding a tennis ball with his life.
He refused to set it down. He carried it around with him in his hand constantly, as though loss of contact was the difference between him catching the pox and living through the next five hours.
It was very obviously a tennis ball.
It was very obviously as old as the empire state.
MJ consulted with Ned’s eyebrows as to how to approach this and he good-naturedly swiped the ball out of Peter’s lax hand at lunch when Peter was staring off into the ether, communing with the arachnid hivemind in the sky.
You’d have thought they burned the Library of Alexandria right then and there.
Ned apologized profusely and with great gravitas, but Peter was now not only a man scorned, but also a man burned. He graduated to clutching the tennis ball to his chest and told everyone that he, sixteen-year-old Peter Parker, had debilitating heartburn when they asked if he was okay.
The next day it was gone, and MJ and Ned sincerely feared for Peter’s sanity.
He oscillated between being on the verge of tears and vibrating with unbridled fury as he snarled out the window of every classroom they went in.
Since the reorganization of Nelson, Murdock & Page, MJ had found herself promoted from sometimes-intern to part-time office assistant. The expansion of the firm meant that Becky was busy locking down three different google calendars and so had less time to deal with the tripled amount of paperwork which needed to be filed. Hence MJ’s sudden paycheck.
Mr. Nelson begrudging accepted Becky’s laying down the law in terms of his whereabouts and wanderings. Ms. Page and Becky were struggling.
That’s what Mr. Nelson called it because otherwise he’d have to admit that they were planning each other’s murders. Mr. Murdock called it like it was and told Karen to get in line and stop harassing their mutual handler.
Karen told him she didn’t need a motherfucking handler.
Mr. Murdock told her that that was fine, but he did, and neither Foggy or Karen were up for the job so suck it.
MJ was surprised that the firm had lasted the two months it had.
But none of that mattered at the moment because Mr. Nelson and Mr. Murdock were locked in a battle of wills in Foggy’s office, where Foggy was trying to extricate a tennis ball from Mr. Murdock’s grasp while telling him to stop picking up weird shit in the street, it wasn’t sanitary.
There was a cry of triumph and then Mr. Nelson emerged from his office to drop the ball in the trashcan by Becky’s desk while Mr. Murdock stood behind him in horror. Mr. Nelson turned around and dropped his triumph in the face of this honest devastation.
“Buddy, if you want one that bad, I will buy you a tennis ball,” he said. “Hell, I’ll get you three. They’ll even be from this era.”
He started to kind of herd Mr. Murdock back to his office for what MJ presumed was going to be a heartfelt discussion about emotional attachments to inanimate objects when Mr. Murdock leapt over him to rescue the tennis ball from the trash.
After a beat of appreciation by all present parties for the fact that really had just happened, Mr. Murdock took off through the front door at top speed, with Mr. Nelson hot on his heels, swearing after him. He didn’t even take the cane.
They heard a shout of “Oh no, you don’t,” in the corridor followed by a squawk, and then Mr. Nelson reappeared in the doorway, manhandling Mr. Murdock through it in his pressed blue suit.
Mr. Murdock took the following scolding with his head sunk deep into his shoulders. He refused to relinquish the tennis ball. He retreated to his office and slammed the door and 100% climbed out the window to go sulk somewhere high, safe, and unjudgmental, away from the rest of them.
Mr. Nelson lasted all of ten minutes before he felt bad enough to go say sorry.
MJ imagined it was hard to work with your boyfriend.
She came back that Friday and legitimately thought someone had died for a while because Mr. Murdock was inconsolable in his office. His glasses were on the floor in the waiting room, where he appeared to have thrown them. Mr. Nelson and Karen were both squatting next to his desk, Foggy pulling his wrists away from his face, trying to find something to give him the means to go on.
Michelle referred to Becky who watched this display with interest.
“Is he crying?” MJ whispered.
Becky pursed her lips, raised her eyebrows, and nodded.
They did not discuss it any further.
MJ now had two depressed enhanced idiots in her life and she didn’t really know what to do with that except to buy them both tennis balls. It was a good thing they came in three-packs. She and Ned tried to find some the same grimy gray as the prized but lost one and ended up settling on a pack of hipster-y ones with teal and pink triangles printed over their light slate base.
When they handed Peter one, he started dry-sobbing.
Mr. Murdock pitched his out the main window and set off a volley of car alarms.
Michelle and Ned were at a shell-shocked loss. Foggy and Karen were too.
They were all too numb to exchange apologies.
To get to the bottom of whatever shit this was, the auxiliary members of Team Spiderman and Team Daredevil went to hunt down Deadpool.
They found him, surprise, surprise, with the motherfucking tennis ball.
It was soaked in blood.
Deadpool was not letting it go.
They knew Deadpool was not letting it go because he was surrounded by two people all in black who they all realized with horror, were Team Deadpool, and Team Deadpool was pleading with him to just give them the tennis ball.
“Over my fucking body,” he swore, uncharacteristically serious.
“Wade, it is a toy,” The black woman said slowly with her hands out in front of her placatingly. Deadpool snarled at her.
The alternate-universe Winter Soldier tried to work the thing out of Wade’s grip while he was distracted with menacing the gal. Wade snarled at him too and out of nowhere, unsheathed one of his swords to stab through his arm. Thankfully it was the metal one, and the guy jumped back, hands up like his partner.
“What the fuck’s your fucking problem?” he demanded.
Wade didn’t respond. He whipped around and vaulted over a wall in the alley next to them and was gone within seconds.
Team Deadpool introduced themselves, after the shock wore off, as Cable and Domino. They did not know what the deal with the tennis ball was either. They said that it was interfering with their work. They were willing to lend a hand where they could.
MJ got a text the next day in class from Domino.
It read: “So don’t recommend talking to Wade rn. He’s doing the thing where he tries to kill himself in many different ways.”
Evidently, Wade had lost the ball.
Wade had lost the fucking ball to Peter. And Peter wasn’t even a little repentant. He set his brow and growled, literally growled at MJ and Ned when they asked him what was up.
This was getting out of hand.
Michelle had never had any intention of meeting Tony Stark and could have gone her entire life without doing so happily, but desperate times call for desperate measures.
She negotiated Peter’s phone in exchange for not looking at the ball. She texted Tony Stark and arranged a meeting that afternoon. Given how fast he texted back, she decided she and Ned weren’t the only ones concerned.
“I have no fucking clue,” was Tony Stark’s answer. Peter grimaced at all three of them when they looked his way. He tucked the ball into an elbow and hunkered down over the device he was dismantling at his station.
Tony Stark pressed his knuckles against his teeth and MJ truly felt for the guy for the first time in her life.
“Is it some kind of vigilante thing?” Ned asked. Tony Stark looked back at him and shrugged.
“I don’t know, I’m not one of them. Maybe? I guess we could ask Barnes what he knows of it, he spends more time with those folks than anyone else.”
Peter whipped around and snarled, “DON’T YOU DARE TELL HIM,” and threw himself bodily into the stairwell.
Well, it wasn’t like they had much choice, now.
“He’s got the ball?” Bucky Barnes said with huge cat eyes. Captain America executed a full-body flinch behind him and he and Sam Wilson both started ripping their hands across their necks desperately. Tony Stark backtracked.
“I mean, no? He just said he’d heard of the, uh, ball being, uh, somewhere up north?”
Bucky Barnes seized Tony Stark with two fists in his shirt and shook him once. Twice.
“If you’re lying, I’ll end you,” he threatened.
Cap blustered over and began prying his buddy’s hands out of Stark’s shirt.
“Buck, Bucky. Darlin’. We’ve talked about this,” he damn near pleaded, “We’ve talked about this, Buck. C’mon. This is silly, remember?”
Bucky Barnes didn’t ease up on his grip or his stare. Mr. Stark tried to look away, but it was hard with a guy six inches from your face.
“Where is he?” Barnes hissed. Cap dislodged his hands and started shoving him back.
“C’mon, ace, we don’t need this,” he soothed.
Barnes rounded on him in cold fury.
“I will find it if it kills me,” he said.
“Okay, good talk,” Cap squeaked.
It was definitely a vigilante thing, they all decided. Sam Wilson told them that he and Cap didn’t know much about it besides that the last time the damn thing had entered city limits, Sergeant Barnes had planned for its acquisition like he was hunting Armin Zola.
He hadn’t eaten for days. Their living room would never been the same.
“The best thing to do is to get it the fuck out of the city,” was Sam Wilson’s advice.
MJ and Ned dispersed this information to the other Teams in their phones and got back many calls of agreement. Tony Stark said he’d see if he could get the Widow in on it.
The Widow agreed far too readily, which made Tony Stark extremely nervous. She said she and Hawkeye would ‘handle the situation,’ and Stark sent out a text to all parties saying that he thought he’d just fucked up big time.
Also, Peter didn’t have the ball anymore. He had a black eye and a mouthful of blood. Where the hell was it?
Turned out none of their guys had it. Not even Sergeant Barnes.
Foggy asked Mr. Murdock and revealed to MJ and Ned that someone called the Immortal Iron Fist had it and Matt had formally declared that his ass was grass.
True to his word, Matt got ahold of the ball by that night. MJ saw him guarding it, crouched like a cat watching moths through a screen, in his office window. He just about hissed at her when she knocked on the door. Mr. Nelson and Karen’s attempts at negotiations hadn’t gone down well either.
He’d given the thing to Becky to admire for all of ten seconds before getting antsy and stealing it back.
MJ managed to convince him to let her hold it for a few seconds. She did not understand. It was literally a balding tennis ball. This was the thing which was causing actual warfare in the city’s underworld?
She handed it back and Matt hid it from her immediately in his jacket. He did his weird watching-without-watching thing at her until she left the room.
She was about to tell Ned that it was going to be easier on all of them if they just let all these guys fight it out themselves when she got front-row seats to Mr. Murdock’s ninja skills. Someone came flying at him and knocked him right through his window and there was a fantastic beat down in the little space between his desk and the door.
Karen was ready to shoot the person, but Foggy threw out an arm and stopped her.
The person, a woman with a red kerchief around her face, slammed Mr. Murdock’s head into the floor and grabbed for the ball, but he shook it off hard and then flipped her over and planted his weight on her hips. The ensuing wrestle deserved to be televised for Olympic training.
Matt took several knees to his side and caught the blade that came crashing towards his ribs without so much as a blink. He snatched the ball of the hand he’d pinned down and he was off like a shot through the still-open window.
The woman sat up, cursed and threw herself up and after.
“Oh good, it’s a family feud now,” Mr. Nelson observed.
Elektra was Matt’s ex, sort-of sister, MJ came to understand. And she was an assassin. And she and Matt were raised and trained by the same guy which meant that Matt was coming home that night, if he did, with a whole lot of damage.
He returned sure enough, mournful and pitiful, with a dislocated elbow not half an hour later. He sniffed and valiantly did not cry at the loss for a second time.
“Pal, why are y’all doing this to yourselves?” Mr. Nelson asked him after he’d gotten off the phone with their nurse friend.
“I’d rather Elektra have it than Danny,” was what he had to say for himself.
Wade got the ball from Elektra and lost it to the Black Widow, who then lost it to Hawkeye, who hurled it out to sea.
It was recovered by Barnes after a whole night of peace, and the whole thing started up again in earnest.
The Widow took it from Barnes and they volleyed for a while before fate intervened and they dropped it right into the hands of Patricia Walker, who didn’t know what it was and took it to Jessica Jones, who vehemently didn’t want it and pawned it off, once again on Matt.
Who was delighted.
Obviously.
Until Frank Castle plucked it out of his hands and Mr. Murdock, bless his heart, wasn’t tall enough to reach it.
That was probably the highlight of Michelle’s month if she was honest.
Wade secured the ball from Castle while he antagonized Matt and almost got away with it before a giant man made of metal caught him by the scruff of his neck and announced,
“No. This is over now.”
He confiscated the ball to everyone’s shock and amazement. He informed them all that they could have it back once they were willing to play nicely.
It said something about her life that MJ was witness to half the big names of NYC’s vigilante community falling over themselves in the middle of Hell’s Kitchen, swearing to god or on the graves of dead relatives that they’d be nice—so fucking nice—to each other, they swore it. Just give back the ball.
Please, sir, Mr. Colossus, sir.
We’ll be good, we promise.
He didn’t believe them. He thought they needed a Time Out. He told them that he would release the ball back into play when he was good and ready and away he went.
Wade swore he’d kill him if he killed himself trying. He rallied a team to help him break into the guy’s house and said not to worry, he had a taxi waiting.
They got there, according to Elektra, who sat grumpily in Matt’s office chair as Matt wound gauze around her wounds, all former betrayals forgiven, and found that that motherfucker had given the thing right back to Peter because he genuinely believed Peter’s sweet, syrupy act.
And Peter had dug in his heels.
“Hey, be my second,” she told Mr. Murdock. He considered her for a moment but then shook his head.
“Kid got it fair and square, can’t fight him on that,” he said.
“Wilson will,” she pointed out.
“So then I’ll get it from him,” Matt said. He tied off the gauze and patted her hand as she sighed and draped herself all over the desk. He sighed with her and draped himself all over her to be an asshole. He leaned extra hard so she couldn’t get up and she started cursing him and his ‘big fat ass.’
Peter was not holding the ball the next time MJ saw him. No, that was too bold, he informed her and Ned covertly, looking around for eyes and ears.
“They’ll never find it,” he informed them with a shark’s grin.
Michelle was rarely moved to emotion by his dumb-shittery, but there they were.
“You hid it in the lab,” she said.
“No,” Peter told her, “I—”
He froze dead staring past them. Through the cafeteria window, a girl with black hair stood. She wore torn jeans and a double-layered purple shirt. She waved and then, with overblown surprise, produced the ball in the palm of her hand. She made a show of gasping at it, then blew a kiss and, just as Peter crashed through the double doors, disappeared.
Peter returned to their table after a few minutes and fell more than sat back into his seat. Tears shined in his eyes as he stared at the other two, heartbroken.
“I’m so fucking bad at this,” he said.
Eventually, all good things come to an end, and they came to an end this time by that Hawkeye losing the thing to her girlfriend.
Apparently, it was on its way to torment the opposite coast now.
Vigilantes mourned something awful.
The whole city went silent that night. Even the usual suspects were on edge at the lack of someone hiding around the corner to do their heads in.
Peter was desolate. Mr. Murdock wistful. They didn’t say anything, but the amount of firepower being shot into the sky in Wade’s part of town was evidence enough of his fury.
“What’s the big deal with it anyways?” Michelle asked Peter the following morning. It was a safer topic than addressing the fact that he’d worn all-black for the second day in a row.
“Doesn’t matter,” Peter sighed. “It’s okay though, we still have all-hands hide-and-seek coming up.”
Dear fucking god.
Not again.