Reckless
It's Peter. Even before she reaches them she can tell, because Owen is trying to grab him by the shoulders and hoist him up. Gwen gets on the other side of him, the word Peter dangerously close to slipping off of her tongue, but she catches herself in time.
"Where did it hit you?" she asks immediately. There is enough commotion that nobody can hear the three of them, she is sure.
"My—my side," says Peter through clenched teeth. "What is—what are you doing—"
"Can you get out of here?" asks Gwen.
Peter takes a little too long to answer. "Yeah," he says, his voice strained.
"What's the plan, then?" asks Owen, and Gwen looks up with a start, embarrassed that she almost completely forgot he was there.
"I just—can you—?"
Peter holds out his wrists and Gwen sees that both of his biocable devices are crushed. She doesn't even see where he produces a fresh one from, but she wastes no time in securing it to him. It's been years since she has handled one of them but she feels like she is on autopilot, like she is capable of anything even with the dozens of weapons aimed in their direction—it is the kind of calm she can only assume comes with being the daughter of a police captain, or the ex-girlfriend of New York's most wanted superhero.
She leans in, her hand lingering on his wrist, speaking low enough that Owen won't be able to hear. "Go home."
Peter doesn't nod, but there is no doubt that he heard her. Owen stares at Gwen, baffled and clearly bursting with a thousand questions she doesn't have the time to deal with.
"Do you two … do you know each other?" asks Owen.
"No," they both say at the same time, loudly.
Peter clears his throat, and before an awkward silence can further give them away, he turns to Owen. "Thank you," he says. He seems to realize after a beat that he should acknowledge Gwen in a similarly unfamiliar way if they really want to seem like strangers, so he adds, "Both of you."
Only after he slings away does the smog clear up enough for Gwen to notice the alarmingly large puddle of blood on the concrete.
Almost instantaneously after Peter's disappearance the police rush forward, and Gwen is handcuffed and being ushered toward a police car. She doesn't protest. She holds no clout here, now that her father is dead, and she doesn't want to simper and moan and remind everybody who she is to get out of this.
Owen is cuffed beside her, still looking a little bit as though he's seen a ghost. Gwen looks out at the crowd still pressing forward to see what the commotion is about and even from this distance can see a head of red hair bobbing toward them—MJ has missed everything, and will no doubt be upset to realize it. Gwen turns her attention to the police car, anticipating someone's hand on her head to bully her into the backseat, but just then the man that Gwen recognizes as the new police captain steps forward and regards the pair of them.
"Gwendolyn," he says, nodding his head.
Gwen looks down at her mucked up flip-flops. "Captain Johnson," she mumbles.
"May I ask what on earth you thought you were doing just now?" asks Captain Johnson, his teeth grit. Gwen has known this man since she was in kindergarten and in some ways it feels like being scolded by an uncle.
"Spiderman hasn't done anything wrong," says Gwen quietly, trying not to draw too much attention to herself.
Captain Johnson's expression is incredulous. "Spiderman killed your father."
"What?" says Gwen, feeling the blood drain out of her cheeks. The notion is so absurd, so untrue, that she can't believe anybody would think it, but she stares at him and sees that he wholeheartedly believes. "No," she stammers, "Spiderman didn't kill my father, Connors did, you don't know what you're talking about—"
"Uncuff her," says Captain Johnson, looking away from her curtly.
Gwen scowls at him, at his condescension and his presumptions. "Owen, too," she says, jerking her hands away so she can't be released without him.
He turns back to her, his eyes steely with disappointment. If he thinks this will faze her than he has no idea what she has been through in the last few years. After a moment he shakes his head and says, "The boy, too."
She hears the click-clack of the cuffs releasing and lets her hands fall to her sides without acknowledging whoever let her go. Captain Johnson is already walking away from her.
"He didn't kill my father," Gwen calls after him. She can't explain the almost jelly-like feeling in her limbs, the rushing of the blood in her veins. She is somewhere trapped between disbelief and fury, coming to the sickening realization that her father is probably the reason Peter has been hunted all this time. "He didn't kill him, he was trying to help—"
Owen puts a hand around Gwen's arm, gentle but firm. "Let's go," he says.
She swivels around, about to scream at him, too, but the rage dissipates halfway up her throat. She still hesitates, not quite letting him lead her away.
"Right now is not the time," Owen reminds her, and only then does she become really, truly aware of half of Manhattan ogling at them—aware that she has, yet again, dangerously connected herself to the one boy she is supposed to avoid at all costs.
She ducks her head down and follows him. The crowd doesn't part for them in their parade of humiliation, but instead only seems to make it more difficult for them to pass through, trying to catch a glimpse and making comments that Gwen doesn't even process as they go by. She sees the flash of a camera out of the corner of her eye and wonders just how far the damage is going to extend on this poorly planned stunt.
There are a lot of reasons she should be upset—that she put Owen in danger, that she might have just put her family in danger, that whoever it was Peter was chasing is dangerous and on the loose, but all she can focus on is the bleak irony of her actions. She has only just managed to earn back a sliver of Peter's attention, and here she is, reminding him in the loudest, most public way possible why the two of them can never be together.
"Hey!" MJ catches up to them, grabs Gwen by the arms and practically rattles her. "Are you okay?"
Gwen blinks at her friend. "Yeah," she says.
"I heard a gun go off—"
"They hit Spiderman," says Owen grimly.
"Jesus." Mary Jane looks at Gwen again, her eyes swimming with tears, her cheeks as red as her hair. "I thought—well, I'm glad you're alright," she says, pulling Gwen in for a hug. "You stupid idiot."
Gwen hugs her friend back—she appreciates the gesture, appreciates MJ's concern, but it's the last thing in the world she wants right now. Her skin is crawling. She doesn't want to be touched. She wants to take off running down the street she knows will take her back to their apartment complex in the next five minutes and bang on Peter's door until she sees him in the doorframe, alive and mostly whole and waiting for her.
She looks at Owen. "You shouldn't have—" she starts, but that's not what she means. "You didn't have to … "
Owen just shrugs.
"Thanks," she finally says, because nothing else seems to suffice.
It takes almost ten minutes to shake them off. Gwen stands as patiently as she can, listening to Owen as he tries to digest everything that has just happened, to MJ as she demands a play-by-play of the whole scene, but the entire time it feels like she is stifling a scream. She taps her foot, crosses her arms, looks around the city block, but she stands there, for the life of her, stands there and listens to them and answers questions even though she feels as if the front of her skull might implode.
She needs to get to Peter. It feels like something is literally tugging her chest forward, drawing her back to the apartment building; she can only compare the feeling to the tug of the biocable on her chest that time Peter threw her out the school window.
Once she finally reaches their hallway she wastes no time with formalities, breathlessly knocking on his door at a volume that will surely alarm the entire hall.
She waits five seconds. Ten seconds.
"Peter?" she calls, banging on the door again.
No answer. She doesn't wait for any seconds this time, she can't even remember how to count—she jiggles the doorknob, but it is unyielding.
"Peter," she says again, kicking the door with her foot in frustration.
She can't help the noise of frustration that escapes her, growling from her throat. She has the absurd idea of breaking down the door, because she thinks after the past hour there is just enough adrenaline coursing through her veins that she could just do it, but she forces herself to take a breath and take stock of the situation.
Her phone. Yes. She'll call him.
She deftly dials his number. She waits for three rings. He wouldn't do this to her—he wouldn't be away from his phone, he wouldn't be ignoring her, not after what just happened. Peter is a lot of things—stupid, bullheaded, impulsive, but not thoughtless, not when he knows she is worrying about him, not after leaving her to stare at a puddle of his blood on the sidewalk.
She hangs up before it goes to voicemail, and pounds on the door a third time. "I swear to God, Peter," she says under her breath. Again, no answer, but she is expecting it this time. She smacks the wood in frustration and sits there for a moment, breathing in, breathing out, feeling like a crazy person.
He could be unconscious somewhere on the streets. Bleeding out in an alley. In the clutches of whatever he was chasing. He could be anywhere in this godforsaken city full of people who will not raise a hand to help him. She wouldn't even know where to start looking for him, she wouldn't even know who to turn to for help.
Or he could be in his apartment. It is the thing she both prays for and dreads—he may be safe from the rest of the world in there, but if he isn't answering, he is badly off.
Then, of course, there is always the possibility that he ignored her altogether, that he's still out prowling the streets as Spiderman, but she can't imagine he would do that to her. She doesn't want to imagine that he could.
It's her faith in him in the end that helps her make the decision—to stalk into her apartment, to grab the only pair of boots she has left in there over the summer, shove them on her feet and head back to his apartment door.
She has seen this done a thousand times. Not just on television, but from her own father. She was only eight years old the first time he taught her how to break down a door. It was only a joke then; she was so little, and so impressed by the idea of it when she saw it in some action sequence on television that he had methodically gone through all the motions of it with her, and even then Gwen had been rapt with attention, soaking in every word. The memory of it makes her chest ache, but she barrels past it, letting her father's ancient words settle her heart.
Aim for the area just below the doorknob.
Gwen steels herself, staring at it. The door is flimsy, the wood is hollow. It shouldn't be so hard.
Swing with the momentum from your dominant leg.
She twitches her right leg experimentally, then backs up a few feet. She takes a deep breath.
Don't hesitate. Come at it with everything you've got.
She shuts her eyes—she probably shouldn't, it occurs to her, but it's too late—and pushes herself forward, throwing her entire mass into her splayed right leg, colliding with the door with a thud. It swings open so unexpectedly and unceremoniously that Gwen stumbles through it, barely able to keep her balance—it kicks back from the wall with a clatter and she catches it as it swings back at her, minimally damaged, but open, thank god.
"Peter?" she says, quieter this time, feeling kind of embarrassed. She swings the door behind her, jamming it upward to get it to close. She finally turns around and gets a full glimpse of the apartment.
"Peter."
He is breathing. That is the first thing she notices, because she can see the exposed wound on his side rising and falling unevenly. His entire body sags into the bed and his sheets are already soaked in blood. There is red everywhere, more of it than she has ever seen, and her first thought is to call her parents (no, her mother), and her second one is to call an ambulance, but she remembers with a grim, horrified sort of acceptance that there is nobody they can rely on, that she is the only person who can help him now.
She walks over him, lifting her hands uselessly, hovering over him but afraid to touch him. He is too pale. The bruises seem to leap off of his skin in comparison, dark and offensive and already starting to color sickeningly at the edges. One of his eyes is rimmed with purple from a blow, and the entire left side of his face is one large, grotesque looking scrape.
His wrists are mottled where his biocables were crushed. She touches one of them gingerly and he flinches, but doesn't open his eyes.
It's the bullet wound she's the most concerned with. It seems to have grazed him, but badly. It is the kind of wound that would put an ordinary person in the hospital for days, and although it looks particularly gruesome and painful, it has, at the very least, stopped bleeding.
"Hey," she breathes, knowing she can't hear him. I'm gonna have to take off your suit, she almost says, but it feels silly to say it to an empty room, feels wrong to vocalize something this oddly intimate when he can't hear her.
She touches the tips of her fingers to the edge of the spandex, near the base of his neck. It's strange, how easily it comes to mind, the last time she had to do this for him. She almost shudders, remembering the smell of burning spandex and flesh, the sound of the city whirring past and Peter's father yelling at her from the driver's seat.
It peels off easily this time, though. She can't help but stare—the skin of his back is miraculously pale and smooth and unharmed, and not for the first time she appreciates the magnitude of whatever it was Peter's father created all those years ago. She props him up as gently as she can manage, hesitating a little bit when she peels off enough of it to see his chest, feeling her cheeks heat up.
Why is she so embarrassed? She has seen him like this before—seen much more of him before, in fact. This shouldn't be any different, it isn't any different, but the blood rushing to her face and the clumsy way she keeps snagging her fingers on the suit says otherwise.
She is over-thinking this. It's probably because he is unconscious. She feels jumpy, as if he will wake up with a start, see her undressing him and freak out. She stares at him tentatively—he is clearly not going to wake up anytime soon, she shouldn't even be worrying about this, she was doing this at seventeen, for god's sake, how does it make any sense that she has gained this inconvenient idea of propriety at twenty?
She only takes it off as far as she needs to, in order to uncover the bullet wound—she leaves the bottom half of the suit untouched. Kneeling this close to him she can still see the faint outlines of where Connors dragged his talons across Peter's chest. Unconsciously she lifts a finger to one, tracing it, wondering if it will ever heal, wondering if she'll still be trapped in his orbit when it does.
The apartment almost looks unlived in, a stark difference from Peter's bedroom back home. Here he has nothing on the walls, nothing in the shelves except a few unopened containers of ramen noodles and textbooks. There is one chair and a little fold out table where she supposes he eats and studies. He does have a few pictures in frames—one of him with his aunt and uncle, another one, much older, of him with his parents, but the frames almost look a little lost on the otherwise bare counters.
The closet is the only sign someone even exists in this tiny space—that, at the very least, is bursting with clothes, most of them probably waiting for a good washing. There's something comforting in looking at all his old familiar t-shirts and jackets. It's nice to think that he's still the same old Peter she remembers, even if they are bizarre versions of themselves around each other now.
It isn't hard to find first aid kid, mostly because it's wide open and spilling its contents, looking very recently used. She finds some antiseptic, which is, in typical Peter fashion, unopened—she supposes it's only a formality when he heals as fast as he does, but it wouldn't kill him to be a little more responsible about his injuries.
She finds a clean washcloth and wipes up most of the blood, careful to avoid the wound itself. A small groan escapes him when she applies the antiseptic and she freezes for a moment, afraid he'll wake up, but he doesn't.
Once the wound is wrapped she considers the sheets, which are decidedly ruined forever. She untucks the corners and manages to shimmy them out from under him, guessing that Aunt May must have been the mastermind behind the plastic mat under the sheets that has spared the mattress from ruin. She has spare sheets in her apartment. She gives him a once over even though she knows he will survive for thirty seconds on his own, then darts across the hall to her place to grab them.
When she comes back she sees him at a distance from the door and her heart hammers in her chest. She lets her mind wander to a place where it's normal to see Peter half-naked on a bed, the afternoon sun streaming through the window, nobody here to stop her from taking long, selfish looks at him.
Just as quickly as she lets the thought slip in, she shakes it off, focusing on the sheets. She can't quite make it look pretty with him lying there—it's more difficult to shove them back under him than it was to pull them out—but it's a lot better looking than it was before, at least.
After she finishes she stands there, feeling useless, listening to him breathe. She wonders if she should go, but that seems so melodramatic, like something a martyr would do—fixing everything and then ducking out to make him feel guilty about it. It's something she might expect from MJ, she thinks uncharitably. Despite everything, Gwen and Peter are past all the game playing and secrecy that sometimes comes with two people caring for each other—there is nothing left to hide, everything that could possibly influence their relationship is already exposed and acknowledged and present.
So she will sit here with him, exposed, acknowledged, and present, until he wakes up. As long as he is asleep she hasn't compromised anything—she isn't defying her father, or making things harder on herself, or ascribing meaning where there isn't any at all. She will sit here, however long it takes, the same way she has for the last two years.
So. Monday. I'm a little loopy between the food poisoning (from cookie dough, class act) and the aftermath of the Worst First Date Ever (to paint a picture, it started with meeting a guy who had seemed like a normal gentleman at a restaurant and ended with him yapping at me through his tobacco chew in a parking lot because I didn't want to go home with him on the first date, and also, surprise, a quick google search afterward revealed he'd been arrested for assault lots of times! I'm such a winner!). BUT it's an insanely beautiful day outside. And they finally announced the date of The Amazing Spiderman DVD release. So just like the contents of my stomach, things are looking up.