Lying Heart
The next week feels a bit like living in a dream—in a stolen idea of what his life would be like without abilities, without overwhelming, life-altering promises to keep and the fate of an entire city on his skinny shoulders. Peter spends his days feeling like a stranger, like a happier, more colorful version of himself. The weather is cold, but not unbearable. The entire city is teeming with excited tourists and holiday shoppers. He gets to spend his days off of school Christmas shopping with Gwen and his nights actually eating civil, uninterrupted dinners with his aunt.
Most importantly, there are no major attacks following the incident the week before. No reason for Spiderman to be slinging around the city, no reason for Peter to put himself and everyone he loves at risk.
Which is good. Because his abilities still have not returned.
Peter is aware he should be more concerned, especially now that the condition seems to be a permanent one, but he isn't. He feels punch drunk. Giddy. He submits his portfolio for review at Empire State, he gets a fantastic mid-term report card, and even throws in a college application for their rigorous academic program as well. He embraces normalcy with a fervor. He imagines himself, just Peter Parker, a college student with a pretty girlfriend and a stable future, the kind where he and Gwen move in together and have nice, normal lives, and matching dishware, and an old-fashioned radio that doesn't pick up police frequencies; where Aunt May can finally retire and live in a little house in New Jersey but always comes to visit twice a week; where Peter lives up to everyone's expectations, instead of always just falling short every time.
It's a pipe dream. He knows it. This calm cannot last forever, and he knows that if this goes on much longer, he'll have to brave that basement and find some way to obtain his abilities again. But it's going to be Christmas soon, and Peter finds that the closer it gets to the holidays, the easier it gets to push back the gnawing anxiety and let himself fall into a dangerously normal routine.
One day he and Gwen are in a department store, helping each other with some last minute shopping, when Peter says as casually as he can, "Where is Richard, anyway?"
Gwen bites her lip, examining the texture of a display scarf. "Skiing," she says. She holds up the scarf. "What about this one? Does your aunt wear a lot of blue?"
"Skiing where?"
"Some place where there's snow, I'd imagine," she says wryly, still holding up the scarf.
"I don't know. It's kind of tacky."
"Skiing?"
"No, the scarf."
"Old women love tacky," Gwen protests.
Peter raises an eyebrow. "I can't wait to tell my aunt you called her an old woman."
She swats the air with the scarf playfully, then sets it back on the shelf. It's clear that the conversation about Richard has been dropped. Peter doesn't mind—he doesn't want to talk about Richard at all, but it doesn't change the fact that Richard exists, and will inevitably pry his way back into Gwen's life when he returns. Peter knows Richard must be getting anxious. Gwen's phone buzzes an awful lot, and even though she claims it's her mom or her brothers or one of her friends, Peter knows it must be him, and can't help the small triumph he feels when she sticks her phone back in her backpack without answering it.
"Speaking of missing people," says Gwen. She doesn't continue for a moment, looking a bit hesitant. She lowers her voice so the people milling around the store won't overhear and says, "Where's Spiderman these days?"
Peter's shoulders shift uncomfortably. He looks around at the other shoppers, fully aware that they can't hear and that they wouldn't care even if they could, but he needs a moment to think of what to say.
"My suit," he finally says. "I need to—I've gotta make a new one. And it takes time, you know? Just a lot of … spandex manipulation, and measuring, and time."
"Uh-huh," says Gwen. "But—I don't know, it's been, like, three days since you've been back, and—"
"I thought you didn't even like me being Spiderman," Peter says, somewhat snappishly, forgetting to keep his voice down.
"I don't," says Gwen, looking surprised by his reaction but thankfully not too offended. "I really don't, I was just curious, is all."
"Sorry," Peter mumbles. He looks up and tries to smile at her. She isn't the one he's frustrated with. She smiles back at him easily, a quiet little forgiveness, and they start walking again, this time toward the sports equipment section to shop for her brothers.
Halfway through determining the difference between a wooden and aluminum baseball bat, Gwen says, "I could help you, you know." When Peter looks up at her in confusion, she elaborates, "You know, with the suit."
"Oh," Peter says, not quite sure what to make of it.
She misinterprets his silence, because she adds quickly, "You're right, I'm sure you've got a whole plan and layouts and stuff like that, and all I've got is, like, a semester of home ec that I pretty much failed after I set off all the fire alarms, but I was just thinking, if you needed the company or an extra set of hands—"
"Sure," says Peter, "yeah, no, that would be great. Maybe tomorrow?"
"Yeah," she agrees. "Your place?"
For some reason the idea of Gwen in his bedroom feels a lot like crossing the line he has been tiptoeing by all week. But he trusts himself, and he trusts Gwen, and he knows that they are levelheaded enough not to do anything stupid, especially since she is very publicly dating someone else.
It's Aunt May Peter is concerned about.
"Sure," Peter says before he even really has a chance to think of the consequences.
The next day Peter finds himself sitting on the floor of his bedroom perilously close to one Gwen Stacy. Hours before, when she entered, she seemed to take an unnecessarily long sweep of the room, taking it all in; Peter had shamefacedly acknowledged old posters of bands that he'd had pasted up on his walls since middle school, the less than orderly pile of dirty clothes he had shoved at the mouth of his closet, and the stupid desktop screen, which still featured a blatantly obvious debate team picture enhanced to see Gwen and Gwen alone.
He focuses on his tape measure and another yard of spandex, trying not to let himself think about it much more, before his face turns bright red again. Gwen, to her credit, keeps the conversation light.
"So how do you design the front pattern, anyway?" she asks.
This is an easy question, a harmless one, the kind he is happy to answer. "I designed the logo on the computer," he says, "and then used the pattern to carve out the design on a metal slab. When you heat it up and put the dyed spandex under it for just the right amount of time, it ends up like … well, like the Spiderman suit, if all goes well. I'll show you, I left it in the basement."
Gwen traces her fingers along a strip of some of the unfinished spandex. "It's weird," she muses. "Spiders. Being like, the thing that defines you." She looks up at Peter and says in mock seriousness, "I don't know what to do when I find a spider in my room anymore. Is it disloyal to smush it?"
Peter looks at her with somber eyes. "Every time I sense a spider die at the hand of a skinny blonde girl a small part of my soul is crushed."
"I'm humane about it," she protests. "I use the most interesting magazines in my room to swat them." She gets up and stretches her arms out. "That spider should be glad its last moments on earth were spent speculating about whether or not Katie Holmes is pregnant."
"Who's that?" Peter asks absent-mindedly.
She doesn't answer and since Peter doesn't really care he doesn't look up from his measurements and doesn't notice Gwen hovering over the clutter on his desk. A few minutes pass that require his complete and total focus, because if he messes up the curve of this cut then the entire suit ends up asymmetrical and the emblem won't be centered on his chest. Once he's finally satisfied with the cut, he looks up at Gwen looking over his desk papers and his eyes grow wide.
"What are you looking at?" he asks, leaping up from the floor.
She has found all the old copies of the portfolio work. His first instinct is to snatch them from her—he doesn't want her to see, and he can't explain to her why. The photos he has been taking out in the streets at night as Spiderman seem so separate and removed from Gwen. Finding the subjects for his shots, setting up the angles, the precarious precision of the whole affair was the only thing he had that could take his mind off of Gwen; taking those pictures had been his only escape.
And now here she is, touching them, poring over them without saying a word. It makes the hairs on the back of his neck stand up on edge. He doesn't want her to see, doesn't want to know what she thinks, doesn't want her to recognize that most of the street corners he has chosen subjects on are almost exclusively within a mile of her apartment building.
Gwen sets the photos down and looks at him. "These are … "
"Just pictures," says Peter quickly.
"Amazing," Gwen finishes. "I mean. They're dark, they're kind of sad, but … really amazing, Peter."
He blushes. Okay, maybe he does want to know what she thinks after all.
"You're submitting them?" she says, picking up the pamphlet describing the Empire State scholarship.
"Yeah," he says, walking over to her so he can collect the photos and put them in a drawer. "I mean, I already did. It would be a full ride."
When she looks up at him, she's grinning. "You want to go to Empire State?"
"Yeah," he says. "You don't—I mean, you don't think I could get in?"
"No, no, of course you would, it's just—I think I'm going there, too," she says. "OsCorp wants to keep their trained interns around and the internship program's offering me a full ride, so."
Peter considers this for a moment. He knows Gwen will probably have plenty of other offers—better offers—in the coming months, and that she is the last person on earth who needs financial aid. He wonders why on earth she would stay in New York and go to an above average school like Empire State when she could go to an excellent school like Stanford or Yale.
She must understand that he's wondering this, because their eyes meet for a second and she ducks her head down and says, "I really think it would be best if I stayed close to home. After everything that's happened. My mom, my brothers—you know."
"Yeah," says Peter. He feels stupid for even thinking for a fleeting second that he is the reason she would stay in New York, when she has so much else going on. "Yeah, me too, with Aunt May." He finishes putting the photos away. "But hey, congratulations."
"Thanks," she says, and when she lifts her head up it's apparent that she didn't realize Peter had walked closer to her to put the photos away, because her head bumps his shoulder and she startles back.
"Sorry," says Peter, taking a step back and stumbling straight into his wheeled desk chair. She reaches out, presumably to help him balance, but he's already too far gone and when she latches her hand to his wrist she goes tumbling down with him.
She lands directly on top of him with a thud that almost knocks the wind out of him. He looks up at her face, inches away from his, and thinks how a thousand times he has seen things like this in the movies and thought it was absolutely ridiculous, but now that it's happening to him all he can think about is how he can feel her heart hammering against his chest and smell cinnamon gum and feel the tickle of her hair on his neck and—
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," she says, scrambling off of him ungracefully, landing on her side on the carpet. "Are you okay?"
"Uh," he says, still sort of in disbelief, still picturing her big, doleful eyes above his and not quite able to see anything else. "Yeah, I'll, uh, I'll live."
Neither of them makes any move to get up from the floor. They're still close. Too close. Laying on their backs, facing each other, and somehow getting closer. Peter is sure he isn't moving—or maybe he is, just the tiniest bit, but so is she, and he knows it isn't an accident because her eyes are wide open and waiting for him, he's sure of it—then suddenly they're so close that Peter can feel his palms starting to sweat, his heart starting to race—her eyes close in anticipation and the moment is suddenly so simple, so basic, the only thing that makes sense, of course he can't stay away from her, of course they will always be like this, inevitable, unshakeable, unstoppable—
"Peter! Is Gwen staying for dinner?"
Both of their eyes snap open. They're so close that in their mutual scramble to get up their foreheads collide and they both hiss back in surprise. After a few seconds of recovery she stares at him, her mouth open, her cheeks burning.
Then she snaps back into action. "I've got to go," she says firmly, grabbing her backpack from the floor.
"Gwen," Peter says, because he wants to be able to fix this, but he doesn't know how.
"Tell your Aunt May I'm sorry I can't stay. Good-bye."
To address an issue: A lot of people have been asking for longer chapters, and while I am flattered that you want to read more, I'm updating every day and they are going to remain 5-6 pages—which, quite frankly, is a lot considering I'm working nine hours a day until the next semester starts and preparing for some important music gigs on the side. I'm not miffed by people just asking for longer chapters in general (I've done that to other authors plenty), but more than a few people have either said or implied that I'm not putting as much care into my writing because the chapters are short—which is, quite frankly, ridiculous. Putting care into my writing is PRECISELY why the chapters are this length. I could give you 12 pages of me writing this story in a mediocre fashion, but I choose to give 5 to 6 pages of what I believe to be my most solid work, because I respect this site and respect the people reading this story.
More to the point, though, I'm doing this for fun. I really don't want to be stressed out by this. And to the majority of people who have left awesome reviews, either offering constructive criticism or telling me what you liked, I really appreciate that. It helps me improve as a writer. I welcome actual, legitimate suggestions because it makes me so happy that people are emotionally invested enough to offer them—I wish I could respond to you all individually, because I genuinely take everything you all say to heart, whether or not I am able to respond. But there is no place in reviews for comments that are unconstructive and unhelpful, so please, if you seriously think the chapter length is impeding on my artistic integrity or whatever, I'm gonna say it once so I don't have to say it again: Tough.