Reckless
Gwen is halfway to OsCorp when it occurs to her that OsCorp is the absolute wrong place to do this. Only yesterday Johnson was telling her that he's been tracking her for weeks, tracking everyone there, and even if this formula in her hands is a harmless antidote, she can't risk someone interfering. She can't risk a supervisor hovering over her shoulder at the wrong moment, or Owen asking too many questions. Aside from unintentionally raising suspicions, she just doesn't have the time, not now. Now that Peter is stuck behind bars and every second that ticks by is another second that the entire city is defenseless to attack.
She stops short stands stupidly at the corner of a busy intersection. A woman with a bunch of shopping bags slams into her and doesn't look back. Gwen snaps back to her senses, shuffles out of the crowd and stands on the side of the road, trying to decide her next move.
OsCorp is the only place in the city that she has access to that she can make this work. She could try the university labs, but she doubts her abilities to sneak the materials, and doubts that they would even possess the materials she needs. She leans against a brick wall, leans the back of her head to rest on it.
Think. Think, think, think.
God, she's tired. She hasn't let herself stop in what feels like months. She blinks, trying to keep herself alert and on point, and sees bright, multi-colored lights in the distance. Christmas lights. Is it seriously almost Christmas?
She takes a breath. She needs a place to go, she needs access and convenience, but above all she needs privacy.
And that's when it occurs to her: Peter's father. He had labs hidden away underground, multiple labs, and if Gwen's memory isn't failing her, she still knows where one of them is.
It occurs to her how dangerous and stupid this might be—Peter's father has been missing for months now, and Peter said it was one of the labs that he found all torn apart that made him suspicious of his father's disappearance in the first place. But it's a risk she's going to have to take if she wants to put an end to this. She takes a breath and throws herself back into the throng of New York, weaving in and out of crowds, relying on her feet to carry her to a place she hasn't seen in years.
She has almost arrived when she feels her phone buzzing in her pocket. She assumes it's MJ—she and MJ have only ever really fought four or five times since they've known each other, and the calls from MJ usually start about twenty minutes after the fact, which would put her right on schedule. Gwen feels a pang of guilt for ignoring it, albeit a short-lived one, pressing on.
No more than ten seconds pass before it buzzes again. "Come on," Gwen mutters, because she has to check now, she knows she can't afford to ignore two calls in a row at a time when there are so many factors on the line.
It's her mother. Gwen slams her thumb down on the screen to answer. Her mother wouldn't be calling her now for anything trivial.
"Hello?"
"Have you heard?"
Gwen feels a knot of panic twisting in her gut at the breathlessness in her mother's voice. "What? Heard what?" There's a pause, the tiniest beat of silence, but Gwen has no patience. "Mom."
"I just got a call from the station. Captain Johnson never made it back."
Gwen stops on the street. She hears her own breath hitching without feeling it. "What do you mean? What's happened, where's Peter?"
"I don't know."
She balks, her jaw unhinging. It takes her a few moments to recover herself, and she steps near a phone booth to get out of everyone's way. "Peter wouldn't—Mom, I know what this looks like, but he went willingly, he would never—"
"No, Gwen, I know, that's what I'm trying to tell you. Nobody knows where Peter is. Someone started shooting at the car—"
"What—"
"Nobody is hurt, as far as I know, but someone took him. It looks like both he and Johnson and the other officer in the vehicle were hit with tranquilizers and—"
"He took Peter," Gwen says lowly. The realization reminds her of when she was small and accidentally set her hand down on a hot plate—she jerked her hand away and cried out before she even understood why, her body anticipating the pain that her mind couldn't understand. She stands there as a similar horror overcomes her, the impact of the realization trickling in, overwhelming her in its wake. "Oh my God."
"Gwen. You need to come home."
"No."
She understands that she is truly on her own now. That she has nobody, not Peter, not Johnson, not a single person in this city that can protect her from a man that is surely coming for her next.
It also means that she is last person standing. She is truly the last person who can put an end to this, the only one who has a prayer of saving Peter—she just has to be ready for the imposter, has to have the antidote in hand before he inevitably finds her.
"Listen to me, Gwen, you come home this instant—"
"You have to trust me, I know what I'm—"
"You're a child, Gwen. A child. And whatever is happening here, it's not your fight, it's not your responsibility!"
She feels the knot in her stomach unraveling, relaxing. It's an inappropriate moment to feel a surge of confidence like this, but she straightens her shoulders and plants her feet in resolve. She has heard these words before. They are the same words she has said to Peter countless times, the same hopeless words she would think as she willed herself to sleep every night, wondering why he didn't just give it all up and choose her instead. For the first time she knows how it feels to be on the other end of it. Now she knows how it feels to watch someone who loves her beg and plead for something she doesn't have the power to walk away from.
"There's nobody else," says Gwen solemnly. "Nobody else can stop him. It is my responsibility now."
She hangs up the phone and allows a moment to collect herself, but she finds that she doesn't need it. She feels suddenly clear-headed and sure. She feels like the Gwen that she was only months ago, before Peter came crashing back into her life, before this imposter Spiderman hit the scene. She is capable. She is ready.
She doesn't hesitate when she finds the dimly lit alley that gives way to the staircase where she last saw the lab. The door doesn't open on the first try. This time she doesn't even hesitate—the boots are on, the door is old, and in less than ten seconds Gwen busts it in, feeling suitably bad-ass as she walks away from it without a second glance. It takes a bit of memory to remember which of the winding hallways leads to the more equipped lab, but once she finds it she lets herself in easily.
The lab is pristine and untouched. It's clearly not the one that the imposter Spiderman tore apart a few months ago, which brings her some limited relief. There's a chance, then, that he has no idea that it's here.
It takes a little while for her to get to work. Peter's father is an organized man in all the ways Peter is not—all of the materials and substances are laid out in an orderly fashion, neat and clean and usually just where she expects them to be. Still, it takes her a few minutes to adjust to this unusual space, and to take out Connors scribbled note and try to decipher just what changes need to be made to the original formula to come up with this one.
She tries not to let herself think about the importance of what she is doing, that she really only has one crack at this. Not that Gwen is prone to making mistakes in the lab, but any mistake right now could be a costly one. Every now and then she feels a brief flash of panic—He took Peter—but if she shuts her eyes, hard, and exhales it away, she can grab back her focus before it overwhelms her.
At some point—maybe hours, maybe only minutes after her arrival—she is so absorbed in anticipating a reaction that she doesn't notice the figure in the room's window until the door is creaks open. She looks up with a start, feeling her heart leap into her throat, the beat of it thrumming urgently in her fingertips. She is so gravely certain that he has come for her, that she is too late, that when she looks up to a stranger she doesn't know whether or not to feel fear or relief.
"Gwen Stacy?"
The man's voice is rough and almost sickly, but familiar. Gwen stares back at him. There is an uneven, patchy growth of beard obscuring his face, the rest of which seems too pale, with sharp cheekbones and sunken eyes. She doesn't recognize him as anyone she knows. She takes a step back. He looks half-crazed, like a homeless person, and there is an urgency dancing in his eyes that is sets her on edge.
He takes a step forward, insensitive to her fear. "Where's Peter, is he here?"
Even after he says it, it takes her a few moments to understand, to really look at him and make the necessary connection. "Mr. Parker?"
He narrows his eyes at her in confusion. "Yes. Of course."
She still hasn't moved. She has learned in the past few months to never trust what she sees, and she knows that there is a very real possibility that this isn't Peter's father at all.
"Where have you been?"
His shoulders seem to slump, his chest deflating. He looks weary and spent. "It's a long story."
She takes a step back. There's a beaker in her hands and she can't remember for the life of her what's in it, but she hopes for her sake that whatever it is will burn if it comes to splashing it in his face. "I—I don't want to be rude or anything," she says, because it's true that her interactions with Peter's father have been less than cordial in the past. "But how am I supposed to know if it's you?"
It's a stupid thing to ask. She should have asked him something personal, something only the real Richard Parker would know, but she hardly even knows the man and Peter barely talked about him. She's got nothing. She clutches the beaker, still half-anticipating an attack.
His stare is incredulous. His teeth, Gwen notes with some dismay, are grimy and yellow and very unbefitting of a man she has always found condescending.
"What do you mean? What the hell are you even doing down here, anyway? This is my facility."
It's the sternness of the reprimand that finally makes her shoulders relax and her grip on the beaker loosen. She sets the materials down carefully and says, "You've been gone for almost three months."
For an almost imperceptible moment he looks stricken by her words. Then, as if she imagined it, he gives a calm nod. He looks around the lab, noting with a scrutinizing eye which materials she has pulled out and the scribbles of notes she has etched onto the whiteboard on the other side of the room. His eyes wander further, toward Gwen, past her, to all sides of the room. Gwen doesn't have to ask to know that he's still looking for Peter.
"What happened to you?" Gwen presses on. "Peter's been looking for you, all over the city. We thought—I thought you were dead."
"Where is Peter? I need to talk to him."
"You can't."
She shouldn't feel this flash of irritation at him. She has no idea what he's gone through in the last few months, and based on his disheveled, dirty appearance, it isn't hard to imagine that he has endured a lot worse than she and Peter have. Still, she feels a twinge of impatience toward this man who has no idea of the chaos he is partially responsible for unleashing on the city. It is, after all, Richard Parker that the imposter has been posing as for so long.
"What do you mean?" His scowl is nothing like Peter's, calculated where Peter's is thoughtful, harsh where Peter's is almost goofy with youth. "Where is he?"
"I couldn't tell you," Gwen says, not successful this time in keeping the edge out of her voice. "There's a man, he's been posing as Spiderman by somehow morphing himself into you, he's been doing it for months. Peter's been trying to stop him, and now—now he's taken Peter, and I have no clue where they are, but we don't have to wonder too long, because the moment I hit the street I become bait. Turns out he's got it in for me, too."
She looks up at the man sharply, feeling the heat of frustration rising into her cheeks. She hadn't meant to sound so biting, hadn't meant to let herself start so rant, but it's hard to ignore all of the pressure mounting on these sparse few moments she has left to figure this out while he's standing there, useless and distracting her.
And then it occurs to her: he's Richard Parker.
Before he can recover from the shock of what she's told him, she rushes forward, thrusting the antidote formula at him. "The morphing abilities were caused by a formula leaked from OsCorp. This is the only lead we have on an antidote, and I need to finish it, fast."
His mouth is open, and the breath he takes in is one full of confusion and uncertainty. She watches as he stands there a few moments, staring at the fading, crumpled piece of paper in her hands, and she is a little surprised that the first thing he says is, "That's Connors' handwriting."
"It is. I don't have enough time to explain. If we want to get Peter back, you have to trust me."
There's a beat where he stares at her in that same disbelieving, incredulous way that he did back when she was seventeen, back when a look like that was swiftly followed by an undeserved reprimand in a restricted weapons lab at OsCorp or the back of a getaway van. But something in his expression shifts and hardens. It isn't quite respect, but it's something close to it.
He plucks the piece of paper out of her hands. "How far have you gotten with this?"
As they work they fill each other in on the details of the past few months, mumbled between measuring chemicals and watching reactions and scrawling notes on the whiteboard. Peter's father make a wry, cryptic comment about how last he heard, Gwen and Peter weren't maintaining any contact; Gwen manages not to blush and says that circumstances forced them to, which isn't completely a lie, since the imposter Spiderman was OsCorp's formula through and through. She tells him about Connors involvement and recent death, and Peter's father relays a brief, sparsely-detailed account of the past few months.
He tells Gwen that he was working in one of his other facilities a few months ago when a smoke bomb went off. He says he had been prepared for such an attack after helping Peter stop OsCorp break-in attempt, but before he could fasten the gas mask he was tranquilized, and woke up some time later chained up in a basement that sounds familiar to the one she and Peter woke up in not too long ago. He tells her he remembers very little, that until recently he has been kept in an almost constant haze of subduing drugs, but that the man who usually tranquilized him hadn't returned in a few days.
"As you know, I have similar abilities to Peter's. It took a few days, but once I was strong enough to recover them, it was obviously easy enough to break out of there myself, which may be some help to us later. It's the only place I can think of to look for Peter."
They continue working in companionable silence for another few minutes. She doesn't mind when Peter's father hovers over her shoulder, checking and double-checking her work. While she is reasonably confident in her abilities, it's comforting to know that the responsibility for this isn't hers alone.
"Here's my thoughts on the matter," says Gwen, without looking up from her work. "I think when he initially captured you—" She pauses for a moment, draining one of the beakers carefully—"he thought you were Spiderman. That's why he took the biocables, created his own suit, right? I imagine he was surprised when Peter came after him."
"And Peter hasn't been able to stop him?"
Gwen shakes her head curtly. "It's hard. He can change form. Into anybody—you, me, Peter, even our friends. As long as he has physical contact with them he can completely reconstruct his physical features, take on your abilities."
"Turn off that hot pad, would you."
Gwen switches the dial down. "We're going to need to be ready. The formula. Smoke masks. How far is the place he kept you?"
She can see Peter's father frowning in the periphery, but he doesn't pause in his work to acknowledge her. "You're not thinking of coming, are you? You'll only get in the way."
The comment stings. She isn't used to people being so blunt with her, at least not since she rose through the ranks at OsCorp. But she keeps her neck straight, her stance firm. "Maybe. But of all of us, I know the most about what we're dealing with. And even if that's not useful, at the very least he can't morph into me and convince Peter that I'm there when I'm not."
Peter's father doesn't answer, and she assumes that means he won't try to stop her. Satisfied, she sets back to the whiteboard, erasing things as they go along. She has this dark but oddly calm resolve to get rid of all the evidence, thinking that if they never make it back here again, they shouldn't leave their notes here for someone to find.
There isn't much ceremony when they finish. Peter's father hands her a gas mask and they both pocket several hypodermic needles full of the solution. The only thing he says to her as he leaves the lab is a brusque, "Follow me."
She does, without comment. She wonders how people will react to them on the street, Peter's father looking as grimy and unkempt as he does, but he's walking so fast that she doesn't have time to gage anyone's reactions. She doesn't ask where they're going or how long it will take for them to walk there, and he doesn't seem interested in telling her. She strains to keep at his heels, clutching her shoulder bag as it bangs against her hip, feeling the wind whip through her clothes and straight to her skin.
After twenty-five blocks of twisting and winding, Peter's father takes an abrupt turn onto a quiet street. There are barely any people out and the entryways to every building she can see look boarded up or somehow dodgy. She's glad that Peter's father is here, because now that she's really thinking about it, she didn't have a coherent plan beyond coming up with the antidote. How else did she plan on finding them, short of letting herself get kidnapped?
Peter's father stops short on the street. Gwen stares at him curiously, then follows his gaze to a plume of smoke emerging from a building not far from them. She looks back at him, at his thinned lips and tight, contained expression, and prepares herself to run toward the smoke.
He seems to be anticipating this. "Wait."
Someone is running toward them. Her heart seizes as she makes out the familiar shape of him, the familiar slap of his worn out shoes against the pavement and that wide-eyed, disbelieving look he always gets on his face when she turns up somewhere he doesn't expect her to be. She can't help the way her eyes water, the way her knees start to throb. She opens her mouth, his name on her lips, but then out of the corner of her eye she sees Peter's father stiffen.
"I know," she says, before he can tell her. It feels like her heart is breaking. She feels a pit of dread in her stomach, but she pastes a similarly sloppy smile on her face and tries to crush her disappointment. Her eyes flick to Peter's father; he has taken a step back, but his hand is in his pocket, where she knows he has kept the antidote.
She tears her eyes back at the running figure, extending her arms,
"Peter," she says, crashing into him, enveloping him in a hug. She clutches to him, hoping he mistakes the desperation in her voice for love, the quaking in her shoulders for relief. It's so foreign and horrible, the notion of what she is doing, that she has to squeeze her eyes shut. She is holding him and he feels so heart-wrenchingly similar to Peter, even smells like him, that she almost feels a twinge of guilt when she opens her eyes and sees Peter's father looming behind him, ready to strike with one of the hypodermic needles.
In an instant, though, Gwen is reeling back, hitting the pavement with a thud. She can't see from the ground but she hears a snarl and assumes that the imposter Peter has rounded on Peter's father, and when she finally manages to prop herself up on her elbows she sees that they're already engaged in combat, in an equally matched fight that neither can find the upper hand.
She clambers to her feet. The needle has rolled to the sidewalk, only a few inches from her, and she yanks it up and poises it in her hands.
"No," Peter's father yells. Her eyes snap up to meet his for a brief second and then he dodges a blow from the imposter that ends up planting itself in a building. In the brief moment his opponent is distracted, Peter's father says loudly and clearly, "Leave it. Get Peter out of there."
She doesn't hesitate. She drops the needle and runs.
All things must end, and unfortunately, this story is ending soon. I think between finishing this, and the impending January finale of 30 Rock, I'm just going to be lost in a strange new world where there's nothing left to write, nothing left to watch, nothing left to do but ... find a job.
I'm moving to Nashville in a week! Is the good news. The bad news is, I'm totally unemployed, car-less, aaaaand apparently writing your own songs with the seven guitar chords that you know does not pay the billzz. Lately I've taken up this new hobby called "apply for everything and anything ever posted in the jobs section of Craigslist," but apparently in this market even job scammers don't feel like bothering with me. HARRUMPH.