Lying Heart
Peter hardly leaves his room after the fight with Gwen. He goes through various stages of alternately feeling sorry for what he said and feeling sorry for himself until he starts overthinking every little thing they said to each other, and becomes convinced that if he doesn't find some way to apologize in the next ten minutes she is going to hate him forever, and the urge to just zip over to her place and pour his guts out is so compelling that more than once he has to deliberately walk away from his backpack, where his suit is crumpled in a heap.
He is restless. Unfocused. It feels like there is a literal ball of anxiety wadded in his chest. He worries briefly about Gwen's reaction as she left, but she is a reasonable girl, and will most likely cope with the fight the same way he will, by neurotically pacing around her room.
He paces and paces until he can recall every line of the fight like a movie script. Sometimes he remembers and cringes at his insensitivity, and sometimes he remembers and thinks that he's right, if she could just see that there wouldn't be a problem at all, but just as soon as he's thought either thing, he changes his mind and is back at square one.
He should just apologize. Right now. Knock on her window and get it over with before the ball in his chest grows into a black hole. But his thoughts are far too scrambled to apologize, he'll only make an ass of himself if he does it now.
Instead he forces himself to make his last minute edits to his application. It's calming and methodical, spending the next two hours clicking away subtle imperfections in his photos and writing down all his standard information in neat scrawl on the application. By the end of the two hours he decides there's really not much else he can do to perfect it, so he addresses an oversized envelope and very neatly and carefully slides the semester's work inside. He can put it in the mail on Monday.
Now that he is reasonably calm, he decides to head over to Gwen's. He still isn't sure what he'll say, but he knows that he is rational enough now not to let the fight continue by saying something as equally stupid as this morning.
He swoops up near her window and stands there for a moment, where she can't see him. Her back is turned to him. She let her hair down from its ponytail and it is hanging loose on her neck. She is unreadable, inaccessible. He wonders if this is such a good idea after all, or if he's just using it as an excuse to see her. Is he doing this for Gwen's benefit or his own? Is this apology, this impromptu evening trip to her window, breaking the promise to the captain?
It's the closest he has come to disobeying the captain's final wishes, but Peter feels that anxious stirring in his chest and can't help himself. He knocks gently on the window.
Gwen startles, but doesn't move to look at him. Peter waits a few seconds. She'll turn around eventually.
She doesn't.
He knocks again, and this time she doesn't even flinch.
"Gwen," Peter says loudly, knowing she can hear him through the glass. His heart starts pounding. Oh, God. She's totally ignoring him now. "Gwen, please," he says, louder this time, "I'm sorry. Just—just open the window."
She looks like a statue, the way she's sitting. He wishes he could see her face. He wishes he had the right words to make her turn around. He puts a hand up to the window, feeling more powerless than ever.
"Fine," says Peter. "Fine. I'll just sit out here, however long it takes. I'm not leaving until you talk to me." It occurs to him that this is an incredibly stupid thing for the most wanted man in New York to be vowing to a girl with a very publicly displayed fire escape. It must occur to her, too, because her shoulders tense just the tiniest bit.
Peter hears one of Gwen's brothers call that it's time for dinner. She gets up, taking almost absurd care not to angle her body in any position where he can see her face.
"Come on, Gwen," he says one more time, but she shuts the door behind her.
He knows he's being stubborn, but now that he has made his ridiculous declaration not to leave, he can't go back on it. It's mid-December, freezing, and dark, but Peter will not let this deter him. He will sit here on her fire escape for a week, if he has to. He'll call Aunt May and tell her that he's staying at a friend's house, he'll miss all his classes, he'll miss the deadline to send his portfolio, but he won't leave, not until she caves in and talks to him.
Leave Gwen out of it.
The words are so jarring and clear in his consciousness that Peter could almost believe that the captain is on the fire escape with him. He shakes his head. No, it's not like that, he is leaving Gwen out of it, but why does Gwen have to hate him to make that happen?
It starts to snow. "Seriously?" Peter groans, feeling it stick to his clothes and melt into the fabric.
It must be an hour before she returns. She opens her door and he looks up at the motion, and for just a split second the two of them are staring straight at each other. Her eyes widen and he's almost insulted by her disbelief that he is still out there. She starts moving to the window, her movements quick and full of intention, and Peter's heart starts racing with anticipation because he's that certain that she's going to let him in.
"Gwen," he says, just as she reaches him.
Her blinds tumble down with a clatter. For a moment he is so stunned that he doesn't even react. Then he sees her move to the next window and pull down the next set of blinds. He jumps up just as she's touching the third one, about to hit his hand against the glass, but at the last second he remembers that he might just accidentally shatter it in the state he's in and thinks the better of it.
"I'm not going to leave," he says instead. "You can pull them down, I'm not going anywhere."
He thinks it might stop her, but it doesn't. The third set of blinds goes down and Peter is completely cut off, probably for the first time since they met. For a long time he doesn't even move. It feels as if she has slapped him in the face—no, it feels worse than that, Peter thinks he might have even been comforted by a slap in the face, because that would at least mean that she was acknowledging his presence.
He slumps against the walls of her building, forgetting that the ground is freezing wet with melted snow. He doesn't bother getting back up. It's going to be a long night.
Just then he hears his phone chirping at him. He programmed it to alert him whenever certain phrases were used in the police frequency, and it seems to have picked up on several of them, including the key "all available units." Peter quickly tunes in. The call is summoning officers to an intersection a good twenty blocks from where Peter is now.
He looks at the window, at the bleak white blinds separating him from Gwen. He wants to stay. He wants a lot of things. But before he can imagine what his Uncle Ben would say, he tears off into the evening light to find a place to change into his suit, hoping Gwen will understand.
When he gets closer to the scene, he immediately knows he is in over his head. From his perch on a tall rooftop he can see that there are, in fact, two ridiculously large and well-armored robots soaring over Manhattan. Peter grits his teeth and pushes forward. He doesn't have a plan—he never does—but he's hoping the man from before will be there to disable them before they blast him to smithereens.
He lays low for a moment when he finally arrives, searching for the man with the bazooka, but he doesn't see him anywhere. "Great," he mutters. "Guess I'm on my own for this one."
He soars into the air, intent on getting in the sightline of the two massive beings, which seem to be ignoring each other in favor of shooting at moving cars and buildings. Not for the first time, Peter wonders what possible reason anyone would have to unleash these things on the city. Why is it just New York? How many are there, and if they keep getting stronger each time, is somebody really producing them in a matter of days?
The only person he could discuss this with currently hates him. Before Peter can feel sorry for himself some more, he directly enters one of the robot's sightlines, and so the absurd chase begins.
Peter decides to head for higher ground this time—he's in a less populated area and doesn't have to worry so much about interrupting drunken hotel rooftop parties. He climbs and climbs, not quite fast enough, but it really isn't his intention to keep up the chase for long. He keeps a decent aerial view of the street. The man with the bazooka thing has to be here somewhere. Honestly, someone that arrogant and self-important surely wouldn't miss this, especially after telling Peter off for getting involved in the first place.
He hears the shots getting closer to him. It's a hell of a lot harder to dodge them when he's slinging from his webs, but there's also no way he can outrun them just by climbing. He compromises by trying to alternate between the two—the only advantage is that he can turn himself around much faster than the bulky robots.
Not that this matters much, because they seem to be tracking his heat even when he is hidden behind buildings. After the first minute or so of their chase, only one of the robots' attention is on him; he doesn't know where the other one has gone, but it concerns him enough that he lingers for a moment, looking for it, and that is the moment he gets shot straight through his side.
The pain is so intense and disarming that Peter doesn't even realize he is falling for the longest time. The falling seems to last forever. The sting in his side only gets unimaginably worse as he falls, and all he wants to do is shut his eyes and just let himself hit the ground, because he does not have enough attention left to spare on anything but the pain.
He doesn't consciously sling the web that saves him, but suddenly he is dangling about twenty feet from the ground off of a building. One of the robots is fast approaching to finish him off. Peter lets himself fall the remaining twenty feet, landing less than gracefully.
That's when he sees him: the man with the disabling weapon, pointed toward the sky.
"Where the hell have you been?" Peter snaps at the man, whose face is still obscured by sunglasses. "I thought you had this taken care of!"
The man ignores him, shooting at the robot, which seems to have gained better reflexive skills since their last encounter. His second shot hits the mark. The robot falls with an earth-shattering, electrified thud and the man sets down the bazooka and turns his attention to Peter.
"Don't put the damn thing down, there's another one!" Peter yells. His mouth is full of blood. It's sticking uncomfortably to his mask.
"It has already retreated."
"What?" Peter's tongue is thick in his mouth. He can barely stand. But he's not going to sit here and believe this blowhard a second time. "How the hell would you even know that?"
"I told you to stay out of this," says the man, reaching into his coat.
"That's all well and good, until you're letting a bunch of giant robots shoot at innocent people—what the hell do you expect me to do?" Peter fumes. He's so dizzy he can barely stay upright, which is why he does not notice the man pulling an oddly shaped weapon out of his coat. "I want answers! After the last few weeks of running around the city after these hunks of metal, I deserve to have some—"
The shot rings out and hits Peter's chest. It's some sort of high-powered taser. By the time it is pulsating through his body, he is already beyond feeling pain. He hits the ground with a thud.
The last thing he sees is the strange man in sunglasses looming over him, and then everything is dark.
Things are happeninggggg. Thank you for the reviews. I had such a stressful day at work today and the reviews pretty much were the only reason I didn't bang my head against the wall during my lunch break (that, and I really, really like food, and head banging kind of gets in the way of eating it). I work with babies, so I can't really be stressed at work, so as soon as I left and some woman honked at me for taking too long to cross the intersection, I literally looked up and screamed "DON'T HONK AT ME WHEN I HAVE THE WALK SIGNAL, LADY!" and pointed emphatically at the walk sign like a crazy homeless lunatic.
Friday, man. Friday.