Reckless

When Gwen wakes up, Peter is gone.

The first few seconds of consciousness are some of the most disorienting of her life. She remembers pulling up the lone chair next to his bed, she remembers perusing one of the textbooks that they have in common, and she maybe remembers resting her eyes for a second—but how and when she ended up alone on Peter's mattress with her boots neatly lined up against the wall and a blanket over her is a complete and utter mystery.

She roots around the mattress for her cell phone, but of course it wouldn't be on the bed, it would be somewhere in her purse. She finds it sitting neatly next to the bed and flicks it on.

It's four in the afternoon, and there are two texts and three missed calls from MJ, six missed calls and a voicemail from her mother, and a text from Owen, but absolutely nothing from one Peter Parker.

She glances around the apartment, looking for some sort of explanation. He wouldn't just—would he really just leave her here? It's thoughtful and all for him to have put a blanket on her, but it seems abrupt and cowardly, and uncharacteristic of Peter. She finds herself gnawing thoughtfully at her lip, wondering if maybe she was completely off-base in thinking that he had somehow changed, that he seemed older and a little more put together. Maybe he is worse off than before. Maybe he is the kind of girl who ditches a girl in his apartment without a word.

But Gwen doesn't want to think that. She wants to have faith in him, the same way she always has wanted to, even when it seems like he is doing everything in his power to disprove it. But faith or no faith, it doesn't make her current predicament any less awkward.

She stares at his door as if it might open at any moment and solve everything, that he might burst through the door and save her from the burden of deciding on a next move, but of course everything is impossibly quiet and still on this New York afternoon.

What is she supposed to do now? Leave, or stay here and wait for him? Will he be upset if she leaves? Will he be surprised if he walks in and sees that she is still here? Should she just pretend to still be asleep, pretend there was never any decision to be made?

No, she can't do that. Gwen is terrible at pretending, first off, and even a lie as inconsequential as pretending to be asleep seems like an insult to them both.

In the meantime she reads the texts from MJ, not bothering to deal with her mother yet.

Where are you?! Reads the first one, followed up by, You and Owen are ALL OVER THE INTERNET! Lucky! About three hours after that is, But seriously, where are you? Your mom just called me, kinda freaking out over here.

All over the internet. Oh, God. Gwen shuts her eyes again. She had briefly considered this consequence, but now facing it in its entirety she can't believe how colossally stupid she was in barging past that police barricade. It's the kind of thing she would expect from herself back when this whole mess began, back when she was younger and had all these romanticized notions of right and wrong, but now—now she should have known better, should have realized it was going to cause more harm than good, the kind of harm that drives her mother call her six times and will probably drive Peter away for good.

I'm fine, she texts MJ, and then sends her mother a quick message telling her that she's alright, that she's busy in class and she'll call her later. She sets down the phone and wonders why it's so easy to lie to everyone else in her life, the people she sees every day, but even after all this time she can't lie to him.

As if on cue, the door swings open. They immediately make eye contact. Peter does seem surprised, his eyebrows raising at the sight of her sitting up on the mattress, but the goofy half-smile that creeps on his face before he can look down is enough to reassure her that she isn't unwelcome as she feared she might be.

"I, uh—you want a bagel? I bought bagels," says Peter, holding up a bag.

"Bagels," Gwen repeats. It isn't funny, but for some reason she wants to laugh. Relief, maybe. Peter isn't making a big deal out of this, or settling in for some long talk about promises or time passed, he just went downstairs to buy bagels.

"Yeah. Plain ones," he says, setting the bag down on the chair she had been occupying only a few hours before.

"You—you shouldn't be walking around getting bagels," says Gwen, "you were just shot—"

"And feeling a lot better," he says, simultaneously sinking his teeth into a bagel and holding one out for her to eat. She takes it from him, dumbfounded. "Thanks for that, by the way," he says, once he has swallowed the first bite. "I … well, I got a little bit in over my head, and I really appreciate your help."

Her face is hot, and she has to actively will herself not to stare at his chest, thinking of how bare and familiar it was when he was just inches from her hours ago.

"Did you, uh—did you kick in the door, or something?"

She looks up at him. "Yeah," she says, a grin splitting on her face.

Peter grins back. "Badass, Gwen."

She bites her bagel, her expression smug. They chew in silence for a few moments, neither of them directly looking at the other, listening to a car alarm go off on the street.

She wonders how the rest of this encounter will unfold, knowing it can go one of two ways. Either they will say everything and say too much, or they'll say a few things and say nothing at all.

She casts a cautious glance at Peter but his expression is unreadable. He looks thoughtful, almost removed, but knows him well enough to expect that he will sigh slightly and turn to her and say something completely unrelated to the rather large, untapped issues they have spent the last few days not addressing.

"Were you at OsCorp today?"

Gwen feels her mouth twist. "No, I guess not," she says.

Peter nods.

"Why do you—"

"Has anything—" Peter cuts her off, then licks his lips, clearly trying to decide how to phrase whatever it is he is getting at. "I know you're not allowed to talk a lot about what goes on in there," he says, almost guardedly, as if he is afraid that she won't trust him with whatever information he is looking for, "but—has anything major happened in the last few days? Anything worth … well, anything worth trying to break in for?"

"What do you mean," asks Gwen, her chest already constricting. "What happened?"

"That guy I was chasing—I think he was trying to break into OsCorp." Peter rips off a piece of bagel that he stares at but doesn't eat. "In fact, I'm certain he was."

"That's—that's impossible." She looks to Peter for some sort of confirmation, because he knows as well as she does how tight the security is on that building, but he only shakes his head. "How could somebody possibly—"

"There's a tunnel. Under the city. The only access point is one of the underground facilities my father uses, it's how we got into OsCorp that night we found you in the weapons department."

Gwen addresses him slowly, trying to make sure she understands him before she lets the unpleasant sensation of foreboding settle in her stomach. "A tunnel—that leads into OsCorp—that nobody knows about. Except for you and your dad."

"And apparently my new friend," says Peter lowly.

Gwen tries to process this—her mind, of course, stuck on the horrible idea of someone breaking into their specific lab, finding their specific breakthrough, and running amok with it. She tries to tell herself that the chances are small that it's her tiny department with their tiny team and unpublicized work that the man is after, but at the same time she has a very real, nagging feeling that it can't be anything but.

She doesn't know why she doesn't tell Peter this. Maybe because she doesn't want him thinking that she is in over her head again at the hands of OsCorp, doesn't want him to tell her all the things her own father would be telling her if he were still alive, which would probably be to get the hell out of OsCorp and never go back.

"Is there a way to seal the tunnel? Some way to stop him from trying to get back in?"

Peter looks down at the floor, mumbling a bit. "My father is fixing it. He says."

"Oh," says Gwen. The whole situation with Peter's father was so surreal that she sometimes forgets it even happened. It doesn't surprise her that he stayed in touch with Peter, though. In fact, if she recalls, she was the one who had to convince Peter that he would. Peter, understandably, had very little faith in the man himself. "So your father's still in New York?"

"No, no. He just … now and then we meet up, I think he likes to keep tabs on me."

Gwen notes that even though Peter is trying to seem annoyed by it, his ears perk up and his nonchalant shrug is less than believable. She is sure that he is still on his guard around the man, but she is glad that he didn't let Peter down a second time, especially since it seems that he has had a hand in the majority of the weirdness that Peter has had to deal with ever since that spider bite. As much as Aunt May has tried to help him, as much as Gwen has fretted on the sidelines, they will never be as much help as the man who, for all intents and purposes, created Peter.

"That's the thing, though. We just happened to be meeting up in one of his facilities and—well, he had a bad feeling first, whatever this weird … sense that we have—"

"Spidey sense," Gwen says, nodding.

"—well, his is a little stronger than mine, I guess, so he took off into the tunnel first and I had to catch up but as soon as we chased it out into daylight, he had to leave, of course." Peter has to think for a moment. "And then … well, you saw what happened. The smoke. I couldn't see much of whoever it was, but he had a ton of smoke bombs and this mask he could apparently see and breathe through, which was why—well, why he beat the crap out of me, I guess," he says candidly.

He takes another bite of his bagel, but Gwen can tell by the rapid, unself-conscious way he is chewing that he isn't quite finished yet. "I met up with my father just now. Before I grabbed the bagels. He's working it out, the tunnel and everything, so you shouldn't need to worry."

Gwen looks at him and can tell by the way he sucks in his bottom lip that he is still worrying. She can't help but worry, too.

"We had a breakthrough with one of the projects," she admits to him.

He looks up, his eyes widening at her. "Yeah?"

His stare is so intense and serious that she has to look away, feeling another unwelcome blush creep into her cheeks. She doesn't want to alarm him. He already seems completely on edge about this.

"Not anything huge," she says, waving him off.

His face doesn't relax in the slightest. "You can't tell me, then?"

She can tell him, of course. She told her mother, she told MJ, she just about broadcasted it to the chemistry class she teacher assists for yesterday, but looking at him now she falters a bit. Nobody else in her life outside of OsCorp understands the magnitude of their breakthrough, and if she tries to explain it to Peter he will know in an instant, and start blowing everything out of proportion.

"It's fine," Peter mumbles, "you don't have to—"

"No, no, I can—"

"No, it's fine," Peter says firmly, trying very hard not too look insecure by forcing himself to meet her eyes. "I get it."

Gwen laughs nervously, and instantly regrets it. The silence that follows is awkward and unendurable. She feels the skin on the back of her neck crawling—he thinks she doesn't trust him, and maybe it's true, maybe she doesn't—she doesn't trust him not to try and insert himself in whatever this is, and for some reason she feels adamant about keeping Peter separate from her life at OsCorp, separate from everything, maybe. She needs him at arm's length. She needs to protect herself.

"About today," Peter starts, and that's how Gwen knows that she is right to keep her guard up, because here comes the lecture.

"I know," she says, before he can get any further, "it was stupid, and reckless, and I won't do it again."

He isn't finished. "It's not even that people have connected you to Spiderman, Gwen, it's that—I mean, you could have died. You could have been shot just as easily and you're just—you're just human." He is stammering in earnest for the first time since they started talking again, and his fingers are picking at what's left of the bagel, littering crumbs in his lap and on the floor.

"I'm sorry," she says weakly.

He shakes his head. "You scared the shit out of me. You have to promise—"

The word almost seems to split a chasm straight through the middle of the room, dividing them. Her eyes fly up to meet his in disbelief. Promise. She feels the blood in her arms, her cheeks, her neck starting to simmer. She doesn't need a reminder of what's at stake here, she's had a reminder every day for the last two years of living across the hall from him, of wanting everything she can't have, of living in a permanent state of freefall since she can't even remember when.

Peter tries to recover. "Just—you know what I'm trying to say, but I just really, really want you to understand that I love you, and I don't want you to get hurt."

And just like that, the anger dissipates. She doesn't know where it goes, doesn't know where anything she feels belongs. It is suddenly very difficult to swallow the bite of bagel in her mouth. She chokes it down with some supreme effort, staring at Peter out of the corner of her eye, trying to make sense of him.

It isn't that he hasn't said he loves her before—but the circumstances were different then, they were different then, they were seventeen and probably at least one of them was on the verge of tears and if she recalls, they had both almost just died. She didn't doubt the sentiment then, of course, and she doesn't doubt it now, it's just that she never expected him to admit it again.

When he catches her gaping he frowns a little bit. Her heart thuds even louder—is it possible that he can just throw words like that into the air and not think twice about it? Has she missed some cue, some part of the conversation or some gesture that would somehow explain how he could go two years without talking to her and then tell her he loves her as casually as he would tell her that her shoe is untied?

"What?" he asks quietly.

She opens her mouth—to say what?—but her phone saves her, buzzing loudly on Peter's table. He deftly leans over and grabs it for her, then stares at the screen.

"Owen?" he says, and she can't help but be a little bit amused by the edge in his voice.

She takes the phone from Peter, seeing that, sure enough, it's Owen's name popping on the caller ID. "He's the guy who helped you out in the smoke earlier today," Gwen explains. "He—well, he followed me when I took off, and beat me there."

Peter's features seems to soften a little bit. "Oh—I couldn't really see his face. So you two—?"

"Yeah, yeah, he works with me."

Peter nods. "Are you gonna … are you gonna answer that?"

"Huh?" Gwen follows his gaze to the buzzing phone in her hand. "Oh. I don't—no, no, it's probably just a work thing, he'll leave a voicemail."

The call ends, and Gwen sets the phone down, expecting a little voicemail notification in the next minute, but instead the phone just starts buzzing as persistently as it did before.

"I don't mind, you should take it," says Peter, abruptly getting up and busying himself with something in the kitchen.

Gwen hesitates. It really is unlike Owen to even call her in the first place, let alone call her persistently. He knows enough about her to know she isn't very tolerant of that kind of thing.

"Hello?"

Owen is breathless. "Are you at OsCorp?"

She's on her feet in an instant. Peter must sense her alarm because he rounds on her, his eyes wide. "No. Why?" she asks, even though she has an unwelcome feeling that she already knows.

"There's been a break in. Gwen, you're not going to believe this. Somebody broke in to our lab."

Gwen meets Peter's eyes instantly. He has heard, of course. She can't even be surprised when he mouths the words "Stay here" and runs for the door. It's still a little uneven from when she kicked it, so it slams behind him with an unexpected clatter.

"What—what was that?" says Owen.

Gwen purses her lips, deliberately turning away from the door. It will only frustrate her to look at it. "Nothing," she says. "Tell me everything you know."

Guys. I don't know where you all are, but let me just say. The weather is AWESOME here. Like, I wasn't drenched in sweat after my walk to class and people actually voluntarily sat next to me.

Also, just know. I should be studying for a massive bio test right now. Even put off the Glee premiere to get it done. And naturally, as is the order of things, I ended up on fanfiction instead. SENIORITIS FTW