Reckless
Peter leaves some time in the middle of the night, after she yawns one too many times and Peter hears sirens blaring somewhere in the distance. She isn't expecting him to be waiting on the sidewalk outside her apartment building when she leaves the next morning, but there he is, hunched over in a winter jacket and eyeing her doorman uncomfortably. When he sees her he waves her over, and without so much as a hello he says, "What time does the facility keeping Connors open?"
Gwen clutches her thermos of tea and blinks off the three hours of sleep she managed to achieve the night before. "I don't know—probably nine?"
"What time is it?"
"Nine thirty," she says, wondering how long he's been out here, and if he has even bothered going to class in the last month.
He nods, walking fast, too worked up to realize that his footsteps are near twice the length of hers and she is struggling to keep up. "You ready to go now?" he asks.
Gwen stares up the street, where a mile or so away there is a seat in a class she should probably be occupying in a half an hour. She tries to rationalize missing another class, tries to tell herself that she can catch up on the material or put in extra time at office hours, but her brain is too fried to even think that far ahead. "Sure," she says, because she doesn't think she would even absorb anything the professor said in this state.
Then something occurs to her that snaps her right out of her daze. "Wait," she says.
He stops obligingly. She feels a little silly that this only occurred to her now, but she has to be careful, she can't help it. "Your hand," she says.
"Oh. Shoot. I forgot," he says, extending it so she can see the star. She extends her own hand and they look at their matching scribbles for a moment, until Peter laughs nervously. "This is freaky."
Gwen lets out a breath, feeling her shoulders relax. "Better safe than sorry."
Peter nods. His eyes sober as he looks at her. "I won't forget next time."
They keep walking, shaking off the eeriness of the situation. Gwen sneaks secret glances at his hand, stiff at his side, as if at any moment the sign will disappear and reality will upend itself again. He catches her staring and slows down his strides, really seeming to notice her for the first time that morning.
"Hey," he says, extending his hand out. She's embarrassed, thinking that he is trying to show her the mark again, to reassure her, but instead he reaches for her hand and laces his fingers through hers.
She feels a strange heat in her cheeks and a weird, irrepressible urge to smile. It's embarrassing, how suddenly girlish she feels, walking down an otherwise dreary city street on one of the cloudiest days of the year with a world of trouble lurking in every corner, but she's never held Peter's hand before—not like this, not like someone who belongs to him, someone he doesn't have to hide or be ashamed of.
The walk feels like stealing something. It's so simple, it's so arbitrary, but just the simple act of holding his hand exhilarates her. But, like most moments with Peter, it's over too fast.
"This is it?" asks Peter, when Gwen halts without any warning.
"Yeah," she says, trying to shake herself out of her happy daze. Whatever this is, this unfamiliar euphoria, she doesn't want to bring it into this place or anywhere near Connors. "They're open."
The woman at the front desk looks up and ushers Gwen over, already knowing who she's here to visit. She eyes Peter curiously and asks for his name to put into the guest log. Peter looks over at Gwen and she nods at him before he says, "Peter Parker."
The woman nods and takes a moment to write it down. "Right this way," she says, ushering them toward the doors that lead into patients' rooms.
The walk has always been long, but today it seems longer than Gwen remembered. She feels her heart beating a little faster in anticipation of seeing Connors. It was one thing when she came here alone, to pretend to be calm and aloof and in control, but now that Peter is here—Peter, who she has bawled in front of and told everything to; Peter, who knows that she isn't as unaffected as she pretends to be—she's afraid that she won't be able to keep herself half as composed as she has in the past.
Peter reaches over and squeezes her hand, just briefly, and she looks up at him in surprise. As his hand drops and their eyes meet she remembers that he can hear everything, every uneven breath and too quick heartbeat, and she looks away self-consciously, wondering why every little gesture with him seems so familiar and yet so completely new and inexplicably thrilling.
The woman opens the door to Connors room, letting them inside with a perfunctory nod. Peter walks in first and that's as far as they get, because he stands ramrod still and won't budge from the doorway. Gwen touches a hand to his back, gently urging him forward, thinking that she can't really blame him for his shock. Yesterday Connors looked half-alive at best, and between the weight he has lost and the horrible mottled, sunken quality of his skin, he looks like something out of a horror movie.
Peter still doesn't move.
"Hey," she says, because he's tall and she can't see anything and she's feeling a bit impatient.
Peter's head is shaking. "Gwen," he says, his voice so low she barely hears it.
She thinks he's going to say something more and she waits, waits for all of two seconds, before saying, "What?" and pushing him forward, less gently this time.
He takes a few steps, reluctant and slow and grave. She cranes her head past him and sees it before he's fully out of the way—the limp, unconnected wires and needles riddled over the bed, surrounding the lifeless body of Connors.
The woman who accompanied them comes to her senses long before Gwen does, and immediately picks up the emergency landline at the front of the room and starts to dial. Gwen stands there, stunned, feeling panic and tears starting to clog up her throat and not understanding why. She hates this man, she wished nothing good for him, but it doesn't change the fact that he was the last hope they had at gaining the upperhand.
"You need to leave," says the woman, her voice tight, her eyes trained on the hallway in anticipation of a crash cart.
"He's dead," says Peter, as if anyone needs any confirmation.
It's almost a heartbreaking thought, how it must have happened. How he must have sensed himself starting to go and deliberately, painstakingly pulled out every wire and needle monitoring him and keeping him alive before just laying there and letting everything come to a halt.
It's almost a heartbreaking thought. It would be, if this weren't the man who killed her father.
Peter takes a step forward, towards Connors.
"You need to leave," says the woman again, louder this time, sounding panicked. Gwen doubts that she has dealt with anything of this magnitude before. It's evident that she doesn't have any medical training.
Gwen hears the sound of a commotion down the hallway, of what is no doubt a team of people who will uselessly try to bring Connors back to life. She should move, she should get out of the way, but she's watching Peter. Watching as he darts forward with his almost impossible speed, then pulls something out of Connors rigid hand so quickly that she thinks she might have imagined it, before returning to her side.
"C'mon," he says.
She has no excuse to linger.
"Gwen," he says, and the sound of her name is enough to propel her out the door just in time for the team of doctors to barrel past them, and then she hears the barked orders and the clanging of equipment and the scuffle of feet against the tile floor before the door shuts in their faces and everything becomes indistinct.
They take a few steps away from the room and Gwen has to stop, unable to tear her eyes away from the door.
"I knew he was going to die," she says, almost under her breath.
Peter doesn't answer. She clears her throat.
"I wanted him to," she admits, feeling that horrible twist in her stomach again, the way she felt after her less than successful first visit to Connors. "I told him so."
Still, Peter is silent. She doesn't know what she even expects him to say, because really, there's nothing anyone could say to comfort her now, especially because she shouldn't need comforting—she hates that she is distressed by this, that it is causing her to feel even a morsel of emotion. But still, Peter should say something. Someone should say something.
She turns to look at him, to prompt him to reply, but he's staring at a slip of paper in his hands. Everything was happening so fast that she almost forgot that what he pulled away from Connors' corpse.
He finishes reading it, then scrutinizes it before extending it out for her to take. "It's for you," he says.
She takes it from him. The tips of her fingers feel numb as she folds it back open and stares at the faint, sloppy scrawl, barely recognizable from a man who used to pride himself on perfection.
"What does that mean?" asks Peter, and she's suddenly aware of his shadow over her, of the proximity of his body.
"It looks like … it looks like our formula," says Gwen. She blinks at it, then realizes she is blinking back tears, and reluctantly swipes at her eyes. He wouldn't just write down a copy of the formula and press it into his hands before he died, he wouldn't let the last meaningful thing he left on this earth be something so redundant and useless. She needs to focus, she needs to figure out what's different about this formula than the one back at the lab because something must be different, why else would he bother, but she can't for the life of her look at it in any reasonable frame of mind.
There are noises picking up from within Connors room. The sound of a flat line, the sound of people talking over each other, the sound of what she assumes are the paddles hitting his lifeless chest.
"Let's get out of here," says Peter.
She nods, carefully folding up the paper and slipping it into her jacket pocket. There are a hundred symbols and letters and numbers on that piece of paper but all she can remember as she tucks it away is the neat, tiny scrawl in the bottom right hand corner, so faint but screaming with the effort to be legible, as if it were the last thing that Connors ever wrote before the life extinguished from him: For Gwen.
When they hit the street Gwen is relieved for the snap of cold air on their cheeks. Peter is mercifully not looking at her, giving her the moment she needs to collect herself, following her as she wanders out of the facility aimlessly without any real intention of going anywhere. She can almost feel the weight of the slip of paper in her pocket, and she touches it again to make sure it's there, like it's alive and precious and has a beating heart.
"Gwendolyn."
The sound of her name is quiet and assured, but she still whips around, unable to project any semblance of calm. The finds herself facing a broad chest that is closer than she expected and before she even looks up she knows who it is.
"Captain Johnson," she says uneasily, glancing at Peter out of the corner of her eye, watching as his shoulders tense and he swallows in the least subtle way Gwen has ever seen.
Captain Johnson takes his eyes of Gwen to regard Peter for a moment, seeming to take into account everything Gwen just did. Peter, to his credit, stands up a little straighter, but the tension between the two men is palpable. Peter knows full well that it's Johnson who has been pulling a gun out of his holster and shooting at him every other night, but what scares Gwen is the way Johnson is looking at Peter—why would he have any reason to be narrowing his eyes like this? What could he possibly know?
Johnson lets his eyes fall, back to face Gwen again. "When did you stop calling me Mike?" he says, trying to sound conversational and chummy and failing miserably at it.
"When you started sleeping with my mother," says Gwen bluntly.
Peter shuffles his feet and clears his throat. Johnson doesn't even flinch. His features seem to sink back into its more natural state, stern and uncompromising, and he turns to Peter and says, "If you wouldn't mind, I'd like to have a chat with Gwendolyn."
She is glad to some degree that Peter doesn't budge, glad that he is loyal to her and won't let anyone intimidate him, but at the same time she wishes he could be spineless just this once and look like anything but the punk kid he looks like now.
Johnson raises his admittedly fear-provoking eyebrows at Peter.
"Gwen …" says Peter, ignoring Johnson, looking over at her.
She hesitates for a moment. She doesn't want to talk to Johnson, that's the last thing on this earth she needs right now, but she can't risk digging a deeper hole for herself than she already has. She looks up at Johnson, trying to meet the challenge in his eyes, and addresses Peter: "It's fine. I'll call you."
He takes a second before he leaves, brushing her hand and putting just the slightest bit of pressure on the point where she is still marked. She listens to the sound of his footsteps slowly padding away. Johnson stands there, a few feet away but somehow uncomfortably close, watching as Peter leaves and letting the silence stew between the two of them until Peter has fully rounded the corner, shot them one last glance, and left their sight.
Only then does Johnson turn his attention back to Gwen. "Let's sit," he says, motioning to a bench not too far from them.
Gwen follows him, brushing a few leaves off of the bench and sitting down. Johnson sits beside her, as from her as he can, his expression set and heavy as if he is anticipating another meltdown like the one she staged in her kitchen.
"Gwendolyn," he starts, as if he is choosing his words very carefully. "I care about you, and your safety. I always have."
She juts her chin out slightly, willing herself not to respond.
"I've known you since the day you were born. I've watched you grow up, into a smart, independent, strong young woman," he continues, and Gwen feels her teeth starting to clench, because it's true—he never missed a birthday, he sent them presents at Christmas; he used to pick her up to sit in his office chair and spin her around, and he gave her a toy police badge back when he was one of the few people who obligingly called her "Officer Gwen" during her law enforcement obsession in second grade. All the memories come rushing at her, uninvited and embarrassing, because it was all carefree and inconsequential back then and now it seems like every move he made was a conscious effort, another step in his plan to replace her father all along.
He's still talking. She forces herself to make eye contact. "That's why I can't sit here and watch you put yourself at risk. If you can't consider the sake of the city, consider your own sake, and your family's. I'd hate to see anything terrible happen to you."
She can think of a dozen spiteful things to say, but on the forefront of her mind is, You're not my father. The terrible things have already happened, the terrible things are happening right now, whether or not Johnson thinks he can swoop in with a gun, blow it all to pieces, and make everything okay again.
Gwen shakes her head curtly. "I'm not sure what you want me to say. I've told you everything I know."
Captain Johnson's lips tighten. She has never seen an expression on his face quite like this, and as he leans in almost imperceptibly, Gwen feels a sudden chill in her bones in anticipation of something she doesn't even understand.
His voice is quiet and controlled. "I haven't told your mother," he says, and she almost relaxes, thinking that this isn't what she expected, that maybe he thinks he has caught her visiting Connors and her mother will be upset. The next words, though, near make her heart stop: "But I know that Peter Parker is the man behind the mask."
She needs to breathe. She has to breathe, and stop her eyes from blowing up like moons. She has to protect him.
"Peter Parker," she says evenly, "is my boyfriend. Believe me, if he were crawling the sides of New York's skyscrapers at night, I'd know."
Captain Johnson just shakes his head. "I was hoping you would be cooperative."
Gwen stands up from the bench, brushing her jacket off. "I don't know what you want from me," she says again. "Honestly, I have nothing to say that I haven't already—"
His voice is still quiet but somehow manages to overpower hers in an instant. "Don't think I believe whatever happened in your kitchen the other morning has even a grain of truth to it," he tells her, standing up to face her, looking down at her with his staggering height. "I've been keeping tabs on you, Gwendolyn. The missed classes. The extra time in the lab. The inexplicable visits to Curt Connors."
She feels her skin crawling at the idea of it. "That's … you've been having me followed?" she says, thinking she might just choke if she doesn't keep her voice level.
"For your own safety, yes—we've had an eye on you and everyone involved in the lab that was broken into at OsCorp," says Johnson, unapologetically. "I never had any reason to suspect you until recently."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
Johnson pulls out his phone. A picture of Gwen and Peter kissing on the street is prominently displayed on the screen. She looks up at him in horror, her mouth wide open, struggling to find air.
"You're sick," she says. "That's—I can't believe you."
"Unfortunately, I can't afford to believe you, either," says Johnson. "Peter Parker has been on our top suspect list for several months now. I have every reason to believe that he is the masked vigilante Spiderman, and judging by the way you put yourself in the line of fire for him last month—the way you did back in high school, even—I have every reason to believe that you know his identity. Either you can cooperate now and tell me everything you know, or you can suffer the consequences when he is apprehended and revealed."
Gwen is voiceless. He is threatening her. Telling her he wants to keep her safe, and then blatantly threatening her on a public street.
"Please, Gwendolyn," he says urgently. "I want to help you."
She pulls her backpack up on her shoulders, straightening her posture and trying to look as cool and relaxed as she can. "I don't need any help," she says. "I'm sorry, Captain Johnson, but you're wrong."
She doesn't dare call Peter as she walks away from Johnson. She pulls her phone out of her pocket and turns if off completely, resolving to stick to pay phones or MJ's cell phone from now on, knowing it isn't worth the risk of them tracking her calls. She walks down the street, feeling Johnson's accusing gaze on her back, barely breathing until she rounds the corner. She wants to put a hand against the building, she wants to let herself fall apart for just a moment so she can figure out how to put herself back together again, but she can't help the terrible thought flickering through her mind: They're watching.
Everyone's watching her. Peter. The police. The chameleon. Everyone.
She squares her shoulders, holds her head high, and feels as if she is making the target on her back more visible than ever. It's a price to pay, but it's a small one compared to the shred of happiness she has stolen back from the universe. She has Peter. They're in love, they're together, and they're finally as happy as she never imagined they could be. No matter what happens next, nobody can take this away from her: these past few days, the tingling in her limbs, the way she feels when he holds her hand.
She will handle this, and more if she has to. It's an awful thought, one that goes against everything Johnson said about her, every word she has used to define herself—strong, independent, smart—but she can't seem to hear anybody when it comes to Peter, not Johnson, or her father, or even herself. They are on a crash course to somewhere, and she can only push through it and hope it's somewhere good.
Well guys, I have a bachelor's degree now. What I'm basically trying to say is, expect this fanfiction to get super fucking awesome, because I now possess the infinite, bottomless wisdom of a human who successfully read and then promptly forgot thousands of pages of textbook material in a major I have absolutely no plans on pursuing further studies or career options in. The good news is, I ended college the same way I began it: awkward, clueless, and unhealthily invested in writing fanfiction.
My sincerest apologies for the time it has taken me to update. I really meant to get a chapter up as soon as the show closed and finals were over, but here's what happened. Upon taking my last final, I came home and grabbed my computer to complete two crucial missions: turn in my final paper, and update my fanfiction. But then - PLOT TWIST - I yanked my computer charger, and it quite literally snapped in half and died in front of my very eyes. I was on reserve battery power and knew the computer would die in mere moments, so I was faced with a choice: turn in my paper that was worth forty percent of my grade and crucial to my graduation, or update a chapter of this story.
In my defense, I did hesitate. With a lot more psychological distress than I am willing to admit.