Lying Heart
"Pe—" Gwen stops herself, her whole face reddening, wide eyes shifting between Peter and the gun in the man's hand.
Peter crosses over to her. "Put that thing down," he snaps, even though he is safely in between the two of them and he's reasonably certain the man won't shoot him down.
The man stands his ground. "Who are you?"
"Gwen," she stammers. "Gwen Stacy."
"What are you doing here?"
"Put down the gun," Peter yells. "Now."
The man finally seems to register Peter's demand and stares at the two of them incredulously. "You know each other," he says, shifting the gun away from them but not quite putting it down. "You know each other?"
Peter purses his lips. He knows this looks bad, especially from the man's perspective. Here he already believed that Peter was irresponsible and reckless about his decisions as Spiderman, and now that he knows that Peter has revealed his identity to a teenage girl, it admittedly seems as if Peter has only proved him right.
"Yes," Gwen finally answers in a small voice.
"Let me get this straight," says the man evenly, but Peter can tell he is angry by the way his jaw is set. "You risked everything, the safety of not only yourself but your family, by telling some silly high school girl your identity?"
"It's not like that," says Peter, even though it is, technically. "You don't understand, Gwen isn't just—"
"Some high school girl who works for OsCorp, no less," he says, having seen the badge of Gwen's lab coat.
"If you would just listen—"
"Just when I think you couldn't possibly be more careless about these abilities, you show thiskind of disregard for yourself and everyone around you by—"
"Who the hell are you?" Gwen finally interrupts, taking a few indignant strides forward so Peter is no longer shielding her. "Because I'm going to assume you don't know Peter very well if you think for one second he's been careless about this, because believe me, he goes to unbelievably infuriating lengths to keep the people who are close to him safe, that I can assure you."
The man stares at her, not looking at all surprised by her outburst, still not quite setting down the gun. "I see," he says. "The two of you may be somehow romantically involved, but that doesn't make this any less ill-advised."
"We're not," says Peter, and for a moment the situation strikes him as almost comical. He's standing hear in a full spandex suit trying to explain his not-relationship to Gwen Stacy to a man holding a gun. "We're—uh."
"We go to the same school," Gwen supplies.
It is obvious by the way the man's eyebrows are raised that he doesn't believe them, but at least he stashes the gun away again. "Either way, you obviously have no business being in these quarters. I suggest you leave before I report you."
Peter rolls his eyes from under his mask, knowing full well the man can do no such thing. "What are you even doing back here?" he asks Gwen, turning away from the man.
"Trying to help you," says Gwen a bit sheepishly.
They haven't seen or spoken to each other since the eruption of New Year's Eve and the awkward, silent walk back to her place. Peter has been fairly wrapped up in this business with the robots over the past few days, but that isn't to say he hasn't spent every moment not occupied with that thinking of Gwen. He thought that maybe she had dropped the incident altogether, that she had decided to pretend it hadn't happened. He is both relieved and disappointed that she clearly hasn't, as evidenced by her little trip into the weapons department for him. Before he can express any sort of gratitude, though, the man speaks up again, his tone harsh.
"I doubt you'll be of any use."
"Excuse me?" Gwen says, incredulous, all signs of sheepishness immediately erased from her features. "You never answered my question. Just who are you, anyway?" She looks to Peter as if he might be able to supply an answer, but Peter unhelpfully looks away.
Predictably, the man deflects the question with one of his own: "How did you even know to be in here?" He looks at Peter. "How much have you been telling her?"
"It doesn't take a genius to figure out that this is the only active computer in the entire weapons department," Gwen snaps at him. "And Peter didn't have to tell me anything—I happen to work here, I recognized those lasers the very first time the robot attacked."
If she was expecting the man to be impressed, she must be disappointed, because he looks every bit as irritated and suspicious as he did when he first walked into the room. He walks a few steps forward so that he's uncomfortably close to her, and Peter would intervene, but she stands up straighter and her eyes level with his unwaveringly and she seems to be doing just fine on her own.
"How am I supposed to know you aren't working with the man behind all of the attacks?" the man says in a threatening tone. Peter realizes now that the man was never truly suspicious of him, because he has never heard him talk like this before.
"I'm just a silly teenage girl," Gwen says, mocking the man's earlier choice of words.
This seems to rattle the man more than ever before. "Tell me everything you know right now, or I'll have to assume that you're working for him, and believe me—"
"Don't talk to her like that," says Peter angrily.
The man rounds on him now. "How well do you really know this girl?" he asks. "You're young, you have to understand, you can't just let your feelings cloud your judgment. You find this girl in a secluded, off-limits section of OsCorp, the in front of the one computer that has enough information to kill you, and you just take her word that she isn't—"
"That's enough," says Peter. "Yes, I take her word, I take her word over yours any day."
The man looks like he has a thousand reasons to protest this, but Peter cuts him off before he can start.
"She is the reason I'm alive. There was an attack before you even showed up, you know, an attack where I was shot and if she hadn't been clever enough to find the antidote, I'd be dead—which is a lot more than I can say for you, since it's your fault I've been completely powerless for two weeks," Peter fumes, "so don't you dare say anything against her. She has been on my side from the beginning, and I still don't even have any idea who you are."
"What are you talking about, powerless—" Gwen starts, but the man interrupts.
"If she's so trustworthy then she won't mind stepping aside and letting us take a look at the computer she has apparently hacked," says the man.
Gwen forgets about her concern with Peter, steeling her eyes angrily at the man. "Not at all," she says, "if Peter thinks it's okay."
Peter nods reluctantly. The man waits for Gwen to move over and then scans the documents she has opened.
"How did you get into this computer? The codes are encrypted to—"
"Set off alarms if certain hacking methods are used. I'm aware," says Gwen haughtily, "and I went to all possible lengths to do this carefully."
Peter watches the man click onto several different open files and check their pathways. "I see," the man says, a begrudging acceptance of Gwen's work. He takes another few moments to pore over all the open files. "If this is what I think it is, it will be easier to find the man responsible than I thought."
"What is it?" asks Peter, who still hasn't had a good look at the screen. He's been staring at Gwen, somewhat awed, not just by the drastic measures she has taken to help him, but by her gutsiness against his overly suspicious partner. The first time Peter met him he was nowhere near as eloquent or mature. Gwen is something else, he decides.
As if to prove his point, she says, "It's a new design, or a rough draft of a new design, and it looks as if … well, it looks as if it's meant to be manned, so someone will be controlling it from the inside."
They spend another half an hour in the backroom, but none of the other files are particularly enlightening, and at some point the man says that they might have overstayed their welcome. "I'll be in touch," he tells Peter curtly, clearly not having forgiven him for the matter of telling Gwen his identity, or for defending her as emphatically as he did. He escorts them out of OsCorp, then walks in the opposite direction of them without another word.
"I'll walk you home," says Peter.
She sticks her hands in her pockets and hunches her shoulders up against the cold. "So," she says, offering him a crooked, somewhat nervous grin.
He almost laughs. Aside from the extreme stress of the last half hour, there is still the lingering awkward, unspoken issue of the other night that they haven't dealt with, but when he smiles lopsidedly back, most of the tension seems to dissolve. It is a relief to know that no matter how bad it gets between them, they can feel somewhat at ease again without even saying a word. He thinks maybe they are unique like that, in the way they are so in sync. He has never felt this way with anybody before. He doubts she would ever feel this way with Richard. And as curious as he is how she handled him after the debacle on New Year's, he wisely doesn't ask.
"Who is that guy?" Gwen asks, skipping over the fight completely.
Peter is all too happy to leave that mess for sorting later. "I first met him after the second attack. He's the one who was disabling the robots after I sunk the first one, he was shooting some sort of devices that disabled them. He, uh, didn't like me very much when I met him—"
Gwen snorts.
"Yeah, hard to imagine," Peter agrees. "But he really, really didn't want me involved … and you know how I, uh. I wasn't around that one week."
"Yeah," she says gently, looking up at him but clearly trying not to pry.
"This sounds … weird. It was. But after the third attack he hit me with a tranquilizer, and honestly all I remember is waking up in a basement—tied to some chair." He gives himself a second, just in case, but he thinks that maybe he has relived the scenario so many painstaking times that it doesn't make him react so viscerally anymore. "He wanted a lot of answers … he had developed some sort of serum, and my abilities were gone."
Gwen processes this for a moment, and they walk in silence, her mouth pursed as if she is trying to recollect everything that has happened in the past two weeks and can't decide which issue to address first. "Peter … is that why—is that why you weren't out as Spiderman that whole time? You didn't have your abilities anymore?"
He nods. "I didn't get them back until today, actually," he admits.
"But the fourth attack—"
"A temporary solution," he says, wincing. "A fast-acting serum that barely outlasted the fight."
"That man is sick," says Gwen. "He locked you up in a basement for four days. How on earth can you trust him?"
Peter thinks about this. "I don't know," he finally says, "I just feel like I have to."
Gwen shakes her head vehemently. "No, you don't," she says, "just because he seems to know a lot about this person behind the attacks doesn't mean that—"
"It isn't just that," Peter says quietly. "He knows a lot of other stuff as well. About … well, my dad. And the formula. They worked together, before he died." He laughs, trying to sound nonchalant about it, but it comes out bitter and strained. "This is gonna sound crazy—but my father, he—well, I didn't … it wasn't the spider bite that did this to me," he says, his voice cracking despite his every effort. "My father had a different formula, one that worked, and … well, before he died, he somehow … well, he altered my DNA with it." He can't quite look at Gwen when he says, "This was going to happen to me whether or not I got bitten. Probably not for another few years, but it was always … it was always going to be this way."
"Peter," says Gwen. He can feel her eyes searching his face, trying to gage what to say, but he still doesn't meet her eye.
"It's just," Peter tries to express. "It's just—crazy, right? I mean," he says, and maybe he is laughing now, maybe it is a little bit funny. "I was six years old. That's crazy, right? Who does that to a kid? Who does that to their kid, and then leaves?"
Gwen wraps her arm around his, and the gesture is so seamless and comforting that at first Peter doesn't even notice it.
"I know it sounds backwards," she says thoughtfully, "but he probably did it because he loved you."
Peter blinks at her in surprise. "Well, that's a pretty terrible way to love your kid," he says, unable to suppress the bitterness in his voice this time.
She smiles a sad little smile and says, "Sometimes there isn't a good way to love someone."
Okay. I know this update is coming like four hours early. But I've got another gig tonight (at a coffeehouse! the artsiest of artsy!) that's going to last until pretty late and since my break from work today was heinously late in the afternoon, I figured I'd just post this now instead of letting everyone think I'd abandoned them.
In the meantime, I need to get back to the baguette and hunk of cheese from the grocery store that became lunch after I stupidly left mine in the fridge this morning. Wish me luck. The babies know it's Friday so they're doing their worst, probably so I remember who's boss over the weekend. I live in constant fear of people who can't even talk.