PROLOGUE

"Your best friend is a psychopath."

Gwen looks at him with a point-is-proven face. Peter hardly makes a gesture, his eyes fixed at the glass vase sitting in the middle of the table, inside a smallish café they had barely visited before. Gwen still shudders at the memory of the night – hanging onto a web line long enough to feel as if her ligaments would tear apart and shoulder would come off, long enough to apprehend what would've happened had the web torn off and Harry hadn't withdrawn into the wrecked OsCorp tower.

If that wasn't enough, she observed how Peter was a complete wreck for at least a month. It was almost disturbing, so much so that she had to argue the world with her mother into giving up the Oxford offer ("This is suicide, Gwen!" her mother had left the room with this one resounding sentence). She had watched him. She had watched the self-blame chew him from the inside. She had even appointed a psychiatrist for him, but he evaded the sessions with varying degrees of pathetic excuses. But more importantly, she knew she had to stay back.

Not that Peter had insisted. She knows he has always loved her enough to know when to let go. She knows, with a heavy heart, that if things had gone according to plan, Peter would've been back in New York within a week or two, perhaps out of some moral call of duty. She wouldn't have complained though. She'd rather not see him for three years than see him in the way he was for that past one month.

One of the things she has always loved about is that he never gives up, no matter what. There are people who will break his body, his soul, his psyche. But he will stagger up to his feet again.

And as much as she wants to deny the fact, after the fateful night at the watchtower, he almost had.

So she had to stay. Be his moral spine. Make sure he doesn't collapse. Because that is what she had learnt from him – sometimes we need to sacrifice some of the more luring things in life for the greater good. Oxford shall come again, and who knows, maybe if she doubles up her efforts this time she might even land up with a research spot at the Ivy League. She suspects Peter even holds himself responsible for her abrupt career demise, but she knows this is just a matter of a few days. This, too, shall pass.

"No, he's just a junkie. And I need to help him."

Peter's words only echo her thoughts. But it is never the same. What has Harry ever done to deserve the kind of sacrifice she made for Peter? When has he ever been a hero? All he has been is a desperate, hopeless bastard who's been freaking out since the day he has heard he'll die the same way as his father. He has been a man incompetent enough to be kicked and tricked out of his own company. A man so blinded with rage that he didn't think twice before ambushing Peter or hurling me (a complete third party who had no role in their feud) a hundred metres down from the sky.

She rolls her eyes. "You can't be serious."

"I really am. He's my best friend."

"You've uttered that line for the fifteenth time."

After the clock tower incident, Gwen thinks she doesn't have the slightest care regarding the certain taboo regarding the two of them sitting together having coffee. One year and a half into this and both of them (or at least Gwen) have probably realised that it's no use even trying to stay apart, given they bump into each other in the unlikeliest of situations. The dry bite of sandwich has to push past her throat with some real effort as she watches Peter begin talking again.

"He isn't a psychopath, Gwen. He's got issues. That's it."

"Which includes sending us crashing down through a massive glass roof."

"Will you stop being so defensive? He lost his father –"

"Well, that didn't make me going down on a killing spree," she retorts, her eyes flashing with such ferocity that Peter forgets his sentence midway, "Wait, what did you say? I'm being what?!" She goes on to glare at him with a you-don't-teach-me-how-it-feels-to-lose-a-father face.

"Uh, okay," Peter raises his hands in surrender, "Let's get a bulldozer to run over the asylum he's kept in. Perhaps that'll teach him a better lesson." His words are soft but with a sense of sharp sarcasm nonetheless.

"Peter, try to understand!" she bangs her fist on the table and consequently spills some of her coffee, "I don't want him dead. But I can't support your idea to free him out of wherever he is, so he can wreak havoc with his dark twisted mind."

"That doesn't change the fact he's my best friend. He's like a brother," he adamantly stays put at his position.

"You are incorrigible!" Gwen flails her arms in exasperation; she feels like banging her head onto that Advanced Biotechnology book lying on the table. "And so you're gonna be the big brother and he's gonna get away with whatever he wants."

"That's not what I meant. That's absolutely not what I meant."

"Then what, Peter? Don't tell me for the seventeenth time –"

"How do you manage to keep a count and argue at the same time?" asks Peter. She cannot understand whether he was joking as he manages to keep a poker face with his googly eyes and slowly creeping mischievous smile.

"We're women folk. Masters at multitasking," Gwen has a hard time uttering every syllable seriously and has to bite her lip to stop herself from chuckling aloud. Eventually she fails, and Peter joins in.

"We fight like a married couple," he laughs.

"Only that their issues don't concern quantum physics, Einstein, a red and blue spandex clad idiot who doesn't have his mind in the right place, and a green monster who happens to be his best friend."

"There you go, seventeen!" Peter raises his mug of coffee as a toast to her testament, guffawing.

There is something very special about watching him laugh. Or watching them both laugh together. Maybe because that's something they didn't have the privilege to do very often. Maybe that's what makes it even better. The ridiculous sound he makes, the curve of his smile and the big brown doe eyes that twinkle, his laughter is infectious and uncontrollable. It must be a remarkable task to be so adorably snarky and make this number of enemies at the same time.

"Alright you win," says Gwen, still grinning, "I let you win. Do whatever you want. I can just hope he doesn't kill you off."

"Come what come may, beloved" he quips.

"Reading Shakespeare, are you?"

"Not really, I heard on the TV that day it's the ultimate cliché way to impress gals."

"They read Blake, you moron. Which gal can you possibly impress by quoting Macbeth?"

"I don't know. You?"

"Not so easy, hero," she takes a sip at the coffee and laughs again, "Hell, before you can sweep me off my feet, you swept me off my point. So, what're you gonna do? Meet Harry?"

ANDREW GARFIELD IS GONE. :'(((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((