Reckless

Gwen is still wide awake by the time Peter swoops onto her windowsill that night. She does a quick scan of him before she jerks the window open, but to her relief he seems well enough, even if she still can't see his face.

"What happened?" she asks before he can fully twist himself to get inside.

He doesn't say anything, reaching forward with impressive speed and grabbing her hand. For a moment she is stunned by the almost aggressive gesture until he sees her tracing the star inked on her skin.

"You remembered," she says, feeling a little proud of the both of them.

He heaves a sigh and everything about him seems to loosen. "You will not believe what just happened," he says, and only then does he tear off the mask, ungracefully tossing it to the floor and rubbing at his eyes as if he still can't believe it himself. Once he's finished he just stands there and stares at her for a moment, with a critical kind of silence that she can't interpret. She's dying to ask him, to know everything right now, but she knows she'll only get the answers faster if she lets him drag himself out of whatever stupor he is in on his own.

She's waiting, trying to be patient, and she's so focused on that task that she can't help her surprise when he reaches out and puts his palms on her shoulders. It's the second time he has done it today, but it feels somehow less urgent, more reassuring. He sighs again, just staring at her and shaking his head.

"You're the real thing," he says, mostly to himself, and only then does she have an inkling of what must have happened.

"Peter …"

He nods. "Just a second," he says, and then he pulls her in with a sweet little tug and kisses her, a little more gently than she's used to. It feels like an apology. She doesn't want to brace herself for bad news, but now she can't help it.

When he pulls away his forehead lingers on hers for a moment. "He was pretending to be you," says Peter, his voice low.

She nods slowly. "But you knew it wasn't me."

"Of course I did," says Peter, "of course. But it didn't make it any easier." His eyes are on the floor again and he takes a step back from her, glancing at her guardedly with unmistakable guilt in his eyes. It takes her a moment to understand what's happening, why his arms are suddenly rigid at his sides like he's afraid to touch her again, why he is rooted to her bedroom floor like a caught criminal.

"Hey," she says, stepping over to him. "Whatever you had to do—you knew it wasn't me."

"It looked just like you," says Peter, unable to repress the slight shudder that runs up his spine. He looks at Gwen, his eyes almost pleading with her, like he needs forgiveness. "It looked just like you. And I had to fight it."

Gwen's eyebrows knit together in confusion. "He didn't—he's not supposed to have abilities if he's pretending to be me, that's not how it's supposed to work."

"He didn't," says Peter darkly. He sinks into the chair that has now made a permanent residence by her windowsill and rests his head in one of his hands. "He was doing this thing—he would shift. He would be my dad one second, or me, and fighting me, and whenever I gained the upper hand, he would—" Peter stops for a moment, cringing. "He would just turn into you, and I'd hesitate, how could I—how could I ever hit you?"

"Peter, you knew it wasn't me," says Gwen fiercely. She doesn't like this, seeing him defeated and guilt-wracked by something that isn't even real, something that feels like her fault when she knows it isn't. "I'm right here. You know the difference."

Peter can't quite look at her. "When it screamed … it sounded just like you."

Gwen stands there, a few feet away from the chair, not sure what she can even say. She wants to apologize, to somehow make this alright, but how can she apologize for something that's completely beyond her control? How can she even begin to assuage a guilt that she can't understand? There is no standard for things like this, no model example for her to follow, and just like half the time with Peter she feels like they are trying to make up the rules as they go along and watching them blow up in their faces when something like this happens.

After a few moments she takes a step back and sits on the corner of her bed. She doesn't want to try and touch Peter again, not right now, when he's all worked up like this about hurting some version of her. She wonders with an unsettling feeling in her gut how this man was even able to transform into her, since he always seemed to need prolonged exposure to the person in the past, and not for the first time she shudders at the idea of laying unconscious and shackled to a bar for hours in some grimy basement with Peter. What happened in all the time that passed? Could he have had the forethought to memorize her face, to touch her hand and try to take on her image?

She can't help squeezing her hands together, staring down at her fingers as the skin around the pressure points turns white. She doesn't want to share herself, doesn't want anyone to have any piece of her, let alone her in her entirety. It never occurred to her that she might live in a world where that wasn't her choice anymore.

"How did it end?" Gwen finally asks.

Peter shakes his head. "I guess someone heard the screaming and called the cops. He busted out of there. Your buddy Captain Johnson tried to put another bullet in me," he says, running a hand through his hair, "but lucky for me, the chameleon-thing decided to throw one of those awful smoke bombs again."

Gwen's lips curl into each other, forming a tight line. She thinks of her encounter with Johnson at the kitchen table this morning, of all the visits to Connors, of Bonnie and Clyde in the lab. He needs to know, he needed to know all of this weeks ago, but better late than never.

"Peter, before this gets any further, there are few things I need to tell you."

He looks up at her, his eyes alert and set on hers for the first time since he came through her window. "What's that?"

She takes a breath and sits up a little straighter against the mattress. It won't be hard to tell him everything that she knows, everything that's happened, but it will be hard to explain why she didn't tell him sooner.

"First off—I've visited Doctor Connors. Twice now."

Peter's mouth opens just slightly. "What? Why?" he asks, careful not to sound too upset, because he knows that Connors is more of a sore point with Gwen that he ever will be with Peter.

She fiddles with the hair tie on her wrist, knowing she should look at him when she says this, but she doesn't want to see the hurt on his face when he realizes what a giant thing she kept from him. "The code that the guy used to break into OsCorp—it was Connors' code, years ago. We were the only two people in the building who knew it."

When she does look up at him, his expression is skeptical. "You're sure," he says.

She nods. "Yeah. I'm sure. That's how I knew he was involved."

"So you—you what? You just went down to that facility they locked him up in and they let you walk right inside?"

"Basically," she says.

He doesn't say anything and she can sense that he's waiting for her to look at him again, so slowly, reluctantly, she does.

"I just wish—"

"I know," she says, "I should have told you, I meant to."

His reaction isn't the one she expected. "It's just—I hate that you had to go alone. After everything that he did, I mean."

There's a solemn acknowledgement of her father's death that seems to settle heavily on the room for a few moments. It occurs to her that it's November now, that it will be his birthday in a few weeks, and no matter how many of his birthdays pass by it doesn't seem to get any easier to endure them. It takes her a second to collect herself, to remember the task at hand and keep talking.

"I didn't know he knew you were Spiderman, or I might have brought you," she says, even though she knows she probably wouldn't have.

"Oh, he knew it was me all right. Not outing me was the only favor I ever got from him."

"He seems concerned for you. For both of us." Gwen's fingers are digging into her bedspread at the thought of his sympathy, so blatant and so unwanted. "But he wasn't helpful on that first visit. He didn't tell me anything important, except that he didn't know who it was who broke into his room to ask for his code, but that he gave it. Apparently he thought whatever this guy was after would be a cure for him—he's dying, you know."

"Oh," says Peter, without much feeling, his face unreadable. "So … that's how the guy broke into OsCorp. But that doesn't explain how he can—"

"I know. There's more," says Gwen, "and unfortunately, it involves Owen."

Peter raises an eyebrow.

"He doesn't know about any of this," says Gwen defensively, "but he did something stupid, something very stupid that actually helped this make a lot more sense. He used our new solution on the rats we keep in the lab, and—well—it wasn't pretty. They were essentially trapped in between formations, all lumpy and malleable the way I'm assuming that man was when he was shifting back and forth between personas."

"Yeah," says Peter, "it was disgusting, I know exactly what you're talking about."

Gwen wishes there weren't a part of her so completely and objectively fascinated by the whole concept. She has to keep some of the excitement out of her voice. "Well the mice never had any intentions of shifting, I guess, so eventually they just returned to their normal states when they figured out how to control it—our formula, whatever it was that affected them like that. And I wouldn't have realized that that's what was happening, that it was why this man looked so much like your dad, if I hadn't seen Connors yesterday."

Peter's head snaps up even further. "Yesterday?" he asks a little guardedly, because yesterday is all too fresh in their minds—the kissing, the promise breaking, the complete upheaval of their little universe together. "When?"

"After I saw you." She waits to see if he has anything else to say, and although she can see him actively tapping his foot on the floor he stays quiet, waiting for her to continue. "Connors injected himself with the formula, too. He's still dying … but he has the same abilities as the guy we're after, or at least with whatever energy he has left."

Peter isn't doing a very good job of concealing the panic spreading across his features. "I don't trust him," he says vehemently. "How do we know this hasn't been him the whole time?"

Gwen shakes her head somberly. "He looks like a corpse."

"So what?" Peter says unsympathetically. "You said he has the same abilities, can't he just transform himself into a corpse?"

Gwen is a little embarrassed this didn't occur to her, but she shoots down the notion just as quickly as he brings it up. "No," she says, her voice firm. She knew Connors was too proud of a man to ever intentionally want someone to see him in that state, he would never concoct a plan that revolved around his own feebleness. And besides that, as much as she hates herself for it, she really does believe Connors is concerned for them and has no reason to hurt them more than he already has.

Peter sits on the chair, tense and unyielding. "I just can't—he already has way too much of a hand in this, again," he emphasizes. "I just can't believe he isn't involved more than you think."

Gwen feels a flash at annoyance at him, because it feels like he's not trusting her, but she reminds herself that it's Connors he is suspicious of, not her. She takes a breath and says calmly, "Well, you can come with me tomorrow to visit him and determine it for yourself."

He nods, as if this were already a given, as if he planned to come along with her whether she agreed to it or not. For a few moments he looks lost in thought, the scowl deepening on his brows, and she already knows what's coming next: "I just don't understand. Why didn't you tell me … any of this?"

Gwen has a handful of reasons, but none of them are sufficient. After a few beats of trying to string them together, she shrugs, which is probably the wrong thing to do. She doesn't want him to think that she's blowing him off, that it doesn't matter to her, because it does.

"Everything was so … weird between us," she finally says, "and besides, I never—well, most of it wasn't relevant, or I didn't think it was. Until now, of course."

His eyes are level with hers, unwavering. He looks so serious, like something out of an old novel, and the way the light from the city is hitting him through her window he looks every bit the part of the mysterious vigilante that crawls through the streets at night. "I don't want any secrets between us," he says. "Not anymore."

Before she can answer, he's on his feet, closing the distance between them. She watches as he sits down beside her, the mattress creaking slightly under his weight. She wonders if she'll ever stop feeling like her heart is thumping in her throat every time he draws near.

"I know," she says, leaning her head into his shoulder, feeling an immeasurable relief now that everything is clear, everything is out in the open and she doesn't have to share the burden of her knowledge alone.

She lets the rest of her body sag into his and he puts an arm around her, steadying her there. She feels his fingers in her hair and shuts her eyes. For all the insanity of the past few months, she can't think of a time when she has felt safer than this, just sitting here with Peter and thinking nothing in the world could come between them—that if they can endure everything they've endured together, they're going to make it through this, too.

"We know his game now," says Peter, his voice low and comforting. "We know his tricks. We're gonna stop him, and everything will be fine."

He isn't expecting the smile that curls on her lips, but he returns it, somewhat hesitantly. It isn't that she necessarily believes that they'll succeed, that they're capable of outmatching this man and that everything will be okay. She just loves that for the first time he used the word "we."

I know, I know, I haven't updated in a zillion years and this chapter isn't the most exciting, but it had to be done. NEXT chapter will pick up the pace. And I graduate college in like two weeks, so I'll have lots of time being an unemployed singer who writes Spiderman stories for no money after that!

In other news, our musical finally opened last night. I did not trip, drop any lines, or puke on anyone, so I'm going to consider the night a success. Also, there was free cheese after the show, which I like more than anything, even more than the guy who crushed my soul the other week - he tried to hug me and when I saw it happening, I shoved another piece of cheese in my mouth so large that it forced him to back away in horror. Priorities, ladies.

I lied. I did trip once. I'm a choreographer's worst nightmare.