Reckless
There are reporters everywhere.
They have staked out the bottom of her family's apartment building and look positively hawk-like, near assaulting every small-to-medium sized blonde girl within a half block radius. Never before has she been so grateful for her intimidating doorman, who seems at least to be holding his own and stopping them from entering the building and pestering her family. Gwen ducks her head in the taxi and mumbles to pull over at the mouth of the private garage where she parks her car—there's an elevator there that will get her in unnoticed.
"Gwendolyn. Petunia. Stacy."
Gwen winces as she opens the door. It's an unfortunate middle name, the perfect kind to reserve for moments like this.
Her mother thrusts a newspaper in front of her—there's a grainy picture of her running into the smoke, and a less grainy one, much bigger and much more unmistakable, of Owen trying to lead her out of the crowd afterward.
Man and woman step in to aid vigilante! screams the headline.
"I can explain—"
"And this isn't even the worst of it—they've identified you, publicly, might I add—what were you thinking? Captain Johnson tells me you nearly could have been shot—"
"Captain Johnson?" asks Gwen, scrunching her nose. "When were you talking to—"
"And then you don't answer any of my calls—"
Gwen cringes again. "I'm sorry about that—"
"Oooh, Gwen's in trouble!"
"Bradley, go to your room!" says her mother, rounding on her youngest brother. They see two other heads poking out of the hallway and her mother adds, "All of you! Now!"
Gwen finally manages to shut the door behind her. When she turns around her mother is desperate, frantic, coming apart at the seams. She steps forward and takes Gwen's cheeks into her hands, searching her face madly, as if she is trying to find some evidence of insanity or other sufficing explanation for her behavior.
"Mom," says Gwen uncomfortably, and her mother releases her.
"Were you—Gwen, I just don't understand it, were you trying to prove you were brave, or did you just need attention, please, what is it, just tell me—"
"No," says Gwen, "Jesus, Mom." She came in here ready to apologize and calm her mother down but now she is slamming her bag to the ground and shoving off her shoes and doing it all wrong.
"Then what?" her mother demands, her voice high and shrill. "What on earth could you have possibly —"
"They were going to kill him!" Gwen says. "Did you not see what was happening? He was out defending the city and the instant he gets a little bit in over his head, what—thirty armed police men outnumbering him when he can't even—"
"What do you care?" asks her mother, "What does it even matter to you if some man in a costume gets arrested?"
"Not arrested," says Gwen, "shot. They were going to kill him. Did you know—did you know that they're blaming him for dad's death—"
Her mother crosses the room almost violently, the expression on her face as fierce as Gwen has ever seen it. "Stop that right now," she says, her eyes darting to the hallway where all of their bedroom doors line up. "Your brothers will hear you."
Every time her mother has used this tone with her in the past she has instantly backed down, her easy-to-please first child instincts kicking in, but now Gwen can only blink at her in disbelief. There is a beat between them, when Gwen's mother realizes that Gwen isn't going anywhere, and then realizes that she has blown her cover.
"You knew, didn't you?" says Gwen, incredulous.
"Yes," says her mother, her teeth grit, "and I don't know what it even matters to you, but I couldn't tell you, couldn't tell your brothers, not when he's flying around the city night and day and they all look up to him the horrible way that they do."
"You could have told me," says Gwen, her voice growing hoarse already from overuse.
"And what good would it have done?" her mother hissed. "What good would it have done for you to wander around the city and see the man who murdered your father just swoop by every now and then—"
"Spiderman didn't kill our father!" Gwen screams.
Her voice echoes through the apartment like a gun backfiring. Her mother is rigid and shaking, her mouth opening and closing like a fish. Gwen knows that she has done something unforgivable. She knows that she has created a distance between them, drawn some sort of invisible, insurmountable line that will change the way her mother thinks of her forever.
When her mother finally finds her voice, Gwen almost trembles, afraid she will hear something like "you're just a kid, what do you know?", or worse, something like "get out", but instead she says to Gwen, her voice surprisingly even, "Regardless, your obsession with this freak is unhealthy."
Gwen's first instinct is to lash out again, but she knows that this is one of her mother's cheap tricks in an argument—shaming her by making accusations, deliberately using heated words like "obsession" and "freak." Her mother thinks she has caught onto something, that she has embarrassed Gwen into dropping the subject, but Gwen is older now, and much more invested in this than she has been in any of their few arguments in the past.
"It isn't obsession. It's my conscience, it's the sense of justice and morality that Dad always taught us."
Her mother flinches just as Gwen expected her to. She should feel bad, but she doesn't.
"I wasn't raised to turn my back on someone who needs help. And think what you want to, I don't care." Gwen's fists are so tight that her nails are digging into her skin. "I know that Spiderman is a hero."
Her mother's face crumples. This isn't what Gwen was expecting.
"Oh, Gwendolyn," she says shakily. She crosses the room, arms extended for a hug. "You poor girl."
Gwen stiffens. "No, what—"
"You're confused, I understand, it's been a rough year on you and the boys and you—"
Gwen reels back from her. "Don't touch me," she says.
Her mother freezes, her arms still outstretched and empty. "Gwen …"
Gwen just shakes her head. "I can't," she says. She wrenches her book bag up from the floor and jams her feet haphazardly into her shoes. She opens the door and hears her mother make a small noise of protest, but Gwen can't do her the charity of pretending to calm down, of faking a smile with her brothers over dinner and spending the night.
"You're wrong," is what Gwen says instead, and then she slams the door in her mother's face.
Her mother doesn't come after her, but Gwen is determined to get out of the building before anyone can stop her that she doesn't pay any heed to how she is going to leave, and as a result she marches right out into the chaos outside her apartment building.
"Gwendolyn!"
"Gwen Stacy?
"Over here, doll, look over here!"
There are a dozen people shouting at her, accompanied by an endless series of flashing bulbs in her face. Gwen squints at them, holding her bag closer to her body. For a moment she is caught so off guard that she can only stare at the spectacle in front of her—who are these people? Why do they even care?—but once she tries to take a step forward and the crowd blocks her, her curiosity gives way to white hot fury.
"Move," says Gwen loudly, using her shoulders to barrel her way through them. Once she has reached the edge of the sidewalk she yells for a taxi, and mercifully sees a guy a hundred so feet away starting to pull over to the curb for her.
"Is it true that you're in love with Spiderman?" asks one of the particularly aggressive reporters, stepping in front of her right before she opens he taxi door.
The words Fuck off come dangerously close to rolling off her tongue, but instead she shoves the camera lens to the side and says, "Get out of my way."
She spends most of the drive back to her apartment trying to breathe, to organize her thoughts and find a way to approach her mother's disbelief. She thinks they both need time to calm down, she thinks she might not go home for awhile. She alternately thinks she needs to find some way to prove Spiderman's innocence, to decisively and loudly show her mother that she is wrong.
It's only after the taxi pulls up to her building that Gwen realizes she came home intending to mention the break-in at OsCorp to her mother, and ended up telling her nothing about it at all.
Half of MJ's toenails are bright purple.
"So … they didn't take anything?" MJ asks Gwen, blowing on one of her nails to dry it. It's Thursday and they are sitting in MJ's dorm, studying. At least, that's what Gwen is trying to do.
"Nothing's missing," says Gwen, to answer her question.
"I don't get it," says MJ. "Some guy … busted into your lab at OsCorp, set off a smoke bomb, knocked out your co-worker—Jeannine?"
"Julie."
"—knocked out Julie, poked around for a few minutes and just—left?"
Gwen forces herself to stop gnawing on the sleeve of her sweater. "Well, we can't really see any of the security footage with the smoke, but it looks that way, yeah."
"You think it's the same guy Spidey was chasing? Because of the smoke and all?"
Gwen shrugs. "I don't know," she says, even though she fully does. The question reminds her, though, of how irked she is at Peter. She hasn't heard from him in two days, not since he went tearing out of his apartment and left her there with half a bagel and a panicking Owen on the other end of her phone. She knows he must be alive and well because somebody fixed his apartment door and she's almost certain it wasn't their lazy landlord—so where is he? Why hasn't he said a word to her about this matter that highly concerns her?
It doesn't help that strangers have been shouting questions and pointing cameras in her face for the past two days, and ordinary people have started recognizing her on the street as "that girl" who helped Spiderman. She feels a guilty pang, not just for Peter's sake, who did everything in his power to avoid this, but for her father's—this was surely his worst nightmare, surely the scenario he was imagining when he made Peter make that promise in the first place.
"I wonder if he's alright. He hasn't been out on the streets since that whole thing with you and Owen."
"I'm sure he's fine," says Gwen.
MJ frowns. "How would you know?" She untwists the cap of her nail polish and starts on a second layer. "For someone as Spiderman crazy as you are, I thought you'd be at least a little concerned, too."
Gwen can't help the flash of annoyance she feels at MJ—of course she cares, she cares an infinite amount of times more than MJ ever will, so it is infuriating, almost like an accusation, to hear MJ talk like that. But she has to steel herself, remembering that MJ's remark is completely innocent and that she doesn't have the faintest idea of Gwen's connection to the man behind the mask.
"Well, the man has endured a lot worse," says Gwen, "so I wouldn't worry too much. He's probably just trying to lay low."
Or completely and totally irritate his kind-of-ex-girlfriend by inexplicably falling off the face of the universe, she thinks bitterly, turning back to her textbook and re-reading the same line for probably the fifteenth time.
She wouldn't be this wound up, except that she hasn't gone into the lab since the break-in, thinking that Peter would be upset if she did before he reported back to her. Now she wonders what he was even trying to do when he ran out of the apartment so fast—the break in had already happened, what exactly was he going to do? She thought maybe he would try to watch the security footage, or that he would meet back up with his father and that they might try to figure out who exactly it was targeting Gwen's department, and initially she was fine to let him have a day or so to work that out before updating her.
Now it's been two days, and she is restless, she is pining for her lab equipment, and above all, she is annoyed.
Then again, she wasn't exactly the most forthcoming with him. Maybe Peter doesn't intend to tell her anything at all—maybe he hasn't found her because he doesn't want her to know.
"When are you allowed to go back to work, anyway?" asks MJ.
Gwen juts out her jaw. She's done waiting. "I could go right now, if I wanted," she says, almost to herself more than MJ. She shuts her book. "I think I'll go now."
"What?" MJ squeaks. "My nails haven't dried—"
"I'll be back in an hour," says Gwen, "is it okay if I leave my books here?"
MJ looks put out. Gwen knows it's partially because she can't help but get caught up in the media storm following Gwen around, and now she can't follow Gwen outside. MJ, naturally, thinks that the whole thing is very glamorous, and was most pleased to see that half of her face made it into a back page of the Daily Bugle yesterday morning.
"Sure," says MJ. "And hey—watch out for yourself out there."
Gwen shoves all of her hair in one of Richard's old baseball caps that he left lying around MJ's dorm, and pulls a hoodie over her head even though it's probably hot enough to cook an egg on the pavement. "Can do."
Owen's the only one there when Gwen arrives. He is so surprised to be interrupted that he nearly topples out of his seat. He looks over at the door wildly, as if poised to defend himself, and only once he realizes it's her does he drop his guard and settle back into his seat.
"Hey, Gwen."
She shifts uncomfortably in the doorway. "Jumpy today?"
Owen's smile is tight. "I guess," he says. "I wasn't really expecting anyone up here, not after …"
"Yeah. How has Julie been?" asks Gwen, suddenly feeling a guilty pang for not having visited the woman in the hospital herself.
"Better," says Owen. He's peering into a cage where two of their resident lab mice, Bonnie and Clyde, are awake and running around. One of them is making the wheel squeak rhythmically and the other is greedily sucking water out of the tube attached to the cage. Owen sticks his finger in and rubs at the drinking one's head—the mice are pretty much useless in their department, but they all get a kick out of having them around anyway.
"It's just—I can't really wrap my head around it. Whoever it was, he didn't really break in. He got in using a security code."
Gwen shuts the door behind her. "Like—one of our security codes?" she asks, painstakingly trying to recall every and any moment she might have written her code somewhere, or mentioned it to someone, but no, she has never been that careless. She looks at Owen, but he only shrugs.
"Nobody recognizes it," he says. He points up to a piece of paper they have tacked on the wall by the door. "They posted it, just in case anyone knew—it's disabled now, of course."
Gwen isn't sure why she even bothers to look over at the wall, but he is pointing at the sign expectantly so she slides her bag further up on her shoulder and turns her head.
The code is five digits, unique and unmistakable.
"Nobody … recognizes this code?" asks Gwen, feeling an unwelcome foreboding prickle her neck.
Owen says something back to her, something trivial, something unimportant. Gwen stares at the code, hoping the old baseball cap obscures the shock that she knows she knows is contorting her face.
Miss Stacy, this code is distinct and will grant you access to all the rooms in this building. You and I are the only ones who know it, but I trust you will use it with discretion.
It's the code Gwen used that night the Lizard was rampaging the city to get access to the antidote. It's the code she used to break in to the weapons department when those robots were attacking the city. It's the code Dr. Connors gave her three years ago, when he first named her head intern and told her she showed some real promise here.
She hasn't used it in so long that she forgot it even existed. Now it seems to be leaping off the page, the font thick and black and accusatory.
It doesn't matter, whatever Peter has been investigating. It doesn't matter, because he will get nowhere—there is no trail leading back to Connors, nothing to connect him to the code that is responsible for this deed, nothing to incriminate him except one little intern he must have forgotten.
She doesn't need to wait for Peter to sort this all out. She can do this all on her own.
"Where are you going? You just got here—"
Gwen shuts the door behind her without answering, and is already halfway down the hall in the time it takes for her to dial the number of the mental hospital she knows Connors is currently residing in. She doesn't know exactly what his involvement is, if he planned for this to happen or not, but Gwen knows one thing for certain: Curt Connors has already taken something precious from her, and she will do anything she can to stop it from happening again.
Sorry it's been like a bajillion years since my last update. I've been being productive! School, job, plus I shocked the world by actually finishing some of my homework early and going to the gym every day this week (only because House reruns are always playing at specific times on the TV there and it's not on Netflix, but let's pretend I'm motivated and full of dedication to fitness instead.)
Anyone else see Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone and their little signs? They're so cute together I want to scream. Half of me wants them to stay together forever and make babies with freakishly large eyes and the other part of me is like MOVE ASIDE, HE'S MINE.