Reckless
As soon as MJ leaves on Sunday morning, Gwen knocks on Peter's door, but nobody answers. She tentatively touches a hand to the knob and twists, but it's locked. She can't decide whether or not she should be relieved by this.
She thumbs her phone again and considers calling him, but today is Sunday. It feels somehow irreverent to call Peter Parker on a morning that she ritually spends visiting her father's grave. So she shoves her phone into her purse, zips it shut, and flags down a taxi.
The drive takes twenty minutes. Gwen has her own car, parked in the lot under her family's apartment, but she doesn't take it. The rest of her family members don't know that she makes this trip every Sunday and she doesn't want them to figure it out when they see her car missing from the lot. It's not that Gwen feels that the brief moments she spends there are especially private moments that she doesn't want to share, but she doesn't want her mother worrying that Gwen is hung up on his death, doesn't want her brothers to make an example of her and start doing it too.
The truth is, Gwen will never recover from it. The idea of recovering from it is unrealistic and unhelpful. After her father's murder the rest of her family went through therapy, but Gwen politely declined, knowing that the end result would always be the same: she would never accept it, she would never lose the anger and confusion and shock that have rolled like a unpredictable tide ever since her night he died. She would only find ways to make it easier to live with, and she can do that on her own.
It's the walk into the graveyard that Gwen usually wakes up on these mornings. The faces here have become more familiar than the faces in her classes. She never speaks to the other people visiting graves—the old woman in her pearls, or the somber man who sits by the tree with a hat covering his eyes, or any of the strange cast of mourners she has accidentally joined over the years. But she feels like she knows them. She invents their losses and feels their pain without knowing what it's for, because at the end of the day her grief is raw and writhing and, she suspects, just the same as everyone else's.
There is a red rose on her father's grave. There usually is, when she gets here. Today it looks withered—it rained last night, so it's hard for Gwen to try and figure out how long it has been here, but usually they're fairly fresh. Gwen's mother has never said a word about it, and Gwen wonders how she gets down here so often to replace it, but she has never asked.
Between the drive and the walk it takes almost an hour round trip, but Gwen never stays very long. Her father wouldn't want her sitting here at his grave and feeling sorry for herself. She kneels down, nodding slightly at the headstone, imagining that she is saying hello. She sometimes feels as if she talks to her father all week long, as if she directs her thoughts at him purposefully enough that he can hear them, and even though she isn't naïve enough to believe there's any real benefit in being close to his grave when she does this, she imagines that he hears her better here.
The taxi driver is still waiting for her when leaves through the gates. She notices that taxi drivers rarely talk her ear off whenever she's coming back and forth from a graveyard. They drive back into the bustle of the city in silence as the rest of the world wakes up and the stifling summer heat starts to hiss off the sidewalks.
She asks him to drop her off at her family's apartment. She'll walk in, pretend she is dressed like this for church, and help her mother make breakfast, and just like always, neither of them will say a word about the place they both have been.
It doesn't usually take Gwen so long to choose an outfit. She is a girl who puts considerable care into her appearance, but she usually does this with ease, selecting items from her closet, admiring their cohesiveness in the mirror, and heading out the door.
Today nothing seems to fit right.
She's going to Queens, so she doesn't want to be too flashy. She wants to impress Peter's aunt by looking sophisticated, but she doesn't want to remind her of the very large difference in their financial situations. And—well, there's Peter to consider, and even if Gwen is pretending that she isn't considering him, she is.
She considers him in the floppiness of her shirt, in the slight wrinkle of her skirt, in the scuff on her sandals. She considers him in the mascara she shouldn't be so carefully applying and the headband she shouldn't be fretting with three times before letting it alone. She considers him in every item of clothing hanging in her closet and every beauty product in her tiny, stale-looking bathroom. If she wears this dress will he remember that she wore it to school that day she borrowed his pencil? If she sprays on perfume will he even notice anything about her has changed?
Eventually she overthinks it—scrubs all the make up off and opts for clothes that have absolutely no connection to Peter or high school or anything that can give her an excuse to continue her fit of indecision. She looks at her reflection, trying not to scrutinize herself too much. She shouldn't care. She won't care. She doesn't.
She swings past her place to get her car. She doesn't know how late dinner will go, but she doesn't feel like taking the subway back into Manhattan, not after last night's debacle.
She finds a place to park, walks up to Peter's door and feels temporarily paralyzed. She can't remember the last time she saw this house, or the last time she was even in Queens. Everything about the area seems so inextricably tied to him, and spending the last two years trying to purge him out of her thoughts has made her either unconsciously or all too consciously avoid everything related to him.
Eventually she summons the nerve to walk up the steps to his house. The door is flying open before she even finishes walking up—Peter is in the doorframe, and she is so stunned that she freezes, her mouth wide open.
"Are you—" They both start at the same, awkwardly cutting each other off.
"Are you okay?" Peter finishes.
Gwen nods. "And you're—"
"Yeah, yeah, fine," he says, looking relieved, opening the door a little further.
"Last night—" Gwen starts, but then they both hear a happy trill from the kitchen, Mrs. Parker asking if it's Gwen at the door.
Peter turns around. "Yeah, she's here," he says, sounding surprisingly okay with the situation. Gwen has wondered all week if he would behave weirdly around her, if he would be as stiff and uncomfortable as he has seemed to be every other time they barely interact, but if anything he looks a lot more collected than Gwen is herself.
Dinner runs smoothly, with Mrs. Parker acting as the cruise director of their conversation ship. Throughout bites of mashed potatoes and some form of beef Gwen doesn't ask too many questions about, Mrs. Parker determinedly fuels the dialogue along, excavating the last few years of Gwen's life. She prompts Gwen to talk about her classes, her various club activities, her tutoring, her brothers, her position at OsCorp. Their project at OsCorp strikes a particular interest.
"Cloning?" says Mrs. Parker, sounding impressed. "Are you working with actual subjects?"
Gwen shakes her head. "A lot of it is theoretical now."
"But … they've cloned plenty of things before," says Mrs. Parker. She looks to Peter for confirmation. "Haven't they?"
Peter smiles good-naturedly and nods. "But not very successfully," says Peter, "so I assume that OsCorp is trying to improve the process."
Gwen finishes chewing a bite of her mystery meat. "The process of stripping a nucleus from an egg cell and replacing it with a donor is tricky business. A lot of species have never been successfully cloned." Gwen looks down at her meal and tries not to wonder exactly what it was they would be cloning when their meal was alive. She swallows another bites and continues, "But OsCorp is trying to develop a way to streamline the process so it isn't so traumatic for the subject—a lot of animals who have been cloned in the past have suffered defects that hopefully we can correct."
"So when do you start actually testing it out?" asks Mrs. Parker, intrigued.
Gwen can sense Peter smiling at his aunt's curiosity from across the table and it's hard to keep herself from smiling, too. "That's the advantage of working at OsCorp—we don't have to test it out on real subjects initially, we have the technology to run theoretical trials and once we find a method that works, we can test it with almost guaranteed success."
She looks up and sees that Peter's smile has twitched. OsCorp's ability to run theoretical trials must be all too fresh in his mind, even after all this time.
"How impressive. Your mother must be proud," says Mrs. Parker, earning the slightest eye roll from Peter.
Gwen laughs. "Well, it's no freelance job at the Daily Bugle," she says, and the instant she teases him she feels her face heat up—is that okay? Do they do that anymore? But his eye roll has become exaggerated with pretend irritation, so she lets herself relax, forking in another bite of the mashed potatoes.
By the time Gwen leaves that night, she has lost three rounds of Scrabble, been forbidden from calling Peter's aunt "Mrs. Parker", and has been invited, without Peter's consultation, to every Sunday dinner his aunt ever makes. As she heads to the door it occurs to her that her cheeks actually ache from smiling, that her chest almost tickles from laughing. She leaves reluctantly, she leaves as if she is leaving her own home, or at least she imagines how she should feel when she leaves her own home—these days it seems like she can't leave her own family fast enough.
Peter walks her back out to her car. It's past ten now. She wonders how the past five hours snuck away on her.
As soon as they hit the street Peter seems to flounder for the first time the entire evening. "I'm so sorry—I couldn't stick around last night," he says, the light of the streetlamp reflecting the guilt in his eyes. "I wanted to make sure you were alright, but with all those police out there, they've been so determined lately—"
"Peter, you don't have to worry—you stopped the guy before he could do anything to us, and besides, we were fine," says Gwen.
"We?" asks Peter, looking confused.
"My friend," says Gwen, "she was standing right next to me."
Peter looks sheepish. Gwen doesn't know why she feels somewhat gratified knowing that Peter didn't notice her loudly attractive friend, but she smiles a little bit. He seems to interpret this as forgiveness for his slight.
The walk to Gwen's car is a short one. Gwen almost wishes she had parked farther away.
"I was worried about you, you know," she admits.
It takes Peter a second to figure out what she's referring to. "Because of the police?" he asks. He shakes his head and says somewhat bitterly, "I've gotten really good at dodging them. I mean, it sucks, but they hardly ever get me."
Gwen bites the inside of her cheek and tries not to look at the bare skin on his forearms and his neck and his calves, looking for parts of him that might have changed, that might have been scarred and altered forever in the time since she looked at him last. She doesn't want to think about everything that has happened in her absence, but she is also dying to know everything, dying to ask him about every little detail and struggle and thought he has ever had.
She doesn't want this two-minute walk to her car. She wants the hours, the days, the years she has wasted. It seemed so impossible back then, but here they are, with this same undeniable, electric feeling she seems to feel all the way to the tips of her fingers just by standing near him.
What happened to them? At what point did they decide to give up on everything?
She can't even think of a fixed moment in time. Even after that last kiss, when Peter crawled out of her window and she knew they could never be together, they were civil to each other. They spoke to each other in class. He let her know he was alive by texting her every now and then.
Maybe it was after high school graduation. They didn't speak that whole summer, and then when school started back up it was easy to be strangers, even when they lived mere feet from each other. Still, Gwen can't remember how, or why, or exactly when they became like this—broken, disjointed, out of touch.
She thinks irrational things, things she hasn't let herself think since she was still a teenager. That maybe if she had tried harder, maybe if she had never let him alone, he would have given up on the promise, on his attempt to keep her out of his life. She could have knocked on his door and let herself in. She could have hung out in the buildings where she knew he had class. She could have called when she heard reports about Spiderman's less successful ventures, or on his birthday, or over any number of things.
She could have—but he could have, too, and he didn't. She looks up at him now and wonders if he is thinking the same way she is, if he has any regrets, or if she is only reminding him of a possibility that he long since laid to rest.
"You're different," she says to Peter, feeling a little silly as soon as she says it.
He considers this. "In a bad way?"
What she means is that he seems older, somehow. Not necessarily confident, but comfortable. He seems at ease with her, not jumpy the way he used to be, as if he was afraid at any moment one of them would lose control and say or do something stupid.
"No," she finally says. "It's … not in a bad way."
Peter smiles self-consciously. "I don't think you've changed much at all," he says, and she wants to ask him what he means by that, but he's really close to her and she can't quite find the air.
"In a bad way?" she asks with a lilt in her tone. She's trying to make fun of him but it comes out a little too quiet, a little too sincere. She can see the blacks of his eyes—when did he get so close?
"Not at all," he says.
She can practically feel his breath on her face. She doesn't want to leave here, doesn't want to leave this moment behind. The heat of the summer has been relieved by a gentle breeze, and he's standing here so warm and familiar, like an anchor tethered to a time long ago, a time she was capable of being happy.
"I've got to … It's my turn to do the dishes," Peter finally says, interrupting the weighted silence.
Gwen nods, vigorously and awkwardly. "Yeah, yeah, you'd better get inside."
"It was good seeing you," he says, half of his body already turned away.
"Yeah—yeah, I had a great time."
He pauses for a moment, then leans in for a hug. It's awkward, it's brief, but it makes Gwen's heart leap right into her throat. It happens so fast that she doesn't have enough time to recover by the time he has pulled away.
"Good night," he says, waving, already three feet away from her.
She clears her throat, leaning against her car, and barely manages to croak a good night back. She watches until he starts walking up the front porch, and it occurs to her that he might turn around to see if she is in her car yet, so she scrambles to open the door and start the engine. The drive back to Manhattan is a short one, or at least it seems shorter than usual. She only realizes after she parks the car and heads up to her family's apartment that she hasn't stopped smiling the whole way home.
Well, I've just been informed that I'm "ineligible" for the class I've been enrolled in for two damn weeks and I might not be able to graduate this December because any class I could take instead to get those three credits is now full. So now not only is there a hundred fifty bucks of non-returnable textbook down the tube, also THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS of a semester's tuition I spent three and a half years kicking my own ass to try and avoid! The only appropriate revenge I can think of is giving all the people in charge names of random characters in this fanfiction and then sending them off to immediate, perilous, preferably embarrassing deaths. I'M OPEN TO SUGGESTIONS.