Lying Heart
Later his aunt explains that he was revived several times in the ambulance, and after Gwen's persistent screaming and protestations, his father decided, against his better judgment, to take Peter to a facility not far from the attack, where Gwen sat at his side all night and diligently shocked him back every time his heart stopped. Aunt May says she doesn't know much more than that, except that he was delivered to her the next morning when they seemed to think he was stable enough again. His father hardly spoke at all, except to give Aunt May instructions and to set Peter down.
Peter somehow doubts this part of the story. Aunt May was surely full of questions that his father couldn't have avoided or written off the way he did to Peter. But Peter isn't up to prying her.
"I wish you would stay in tonight," Aunt May laments, before Peter even says anything about leaving.
His lips pucker guiltily. "The robots are gone," says Peter. "And Gwen, I have to talk to Gwen."
Aunt May nods. "She wanted to stay, but your father drove her home."
It's the kind of phrase that might be uttered in a normal household but it strikes Peter as so nonsensical that he can't help his expression souring slightly at implausibility of it. A week ago his father was dead, and now he's driving his long-time high school crush home from Queens. He tries to imagine that car ride and he imagines she didn't make it at all pleasant for him.
"I won't be gone long," he says.
Aunt May raises her eyebrows. "I won't count on it."
She's waiting for him at the window. She's reading a book, trying to look occupied, but her chair is tilted in the opposite direction of her desk, so he knows that she has one eye on the glass. She's on her feet and trying to wrench the window open before he even manages to land on the fire escape.
"Peter," she gasps, standing there dumbfounded, not quite letting him inside.
It seems like a miracle, seeing her in her bedroom. Her hair is tangled, her face still gritty and smeared with grime from the night before, and she clearly hasn't changed clothes at all since his father delivered her back to her place. But she is safe. She is whole.
She is leaning toward him with her eyes closed at a speed and proximity that makes his heart leap into his throat. He licks his lips.
"Wait," he says, so quietly that she doesn't hear him. Their lips almost meet. "Wait."
She stops, looking up at him, her expression both reckless and tremulous. "I don't want to."
"I have to—I have something to say."
"No," she says, stepping aside so he can slide into her room. Before he can even plant his feet on the carpet her arms are around him; he can't help but reciprocate, drawing her in, smelling the familiar smell of her and feeling the unmistakable magic of the way her body fits with his. "Not tonight. I don't want to talk. Please."
Trying to separate her body from his is the slowest form of torture. He loosens his grip, untangles his arms from her and firmly puts his hands on her shoulders, nudging her away from him just slightly.
She looks at him incredulously, then buries her head in his chest, rebelling against him.
"Just wait," he says again, softer this time, coaxing her to meet his eyes. She looks up at him warily. He knows what she is expecting. Another speech about how they can't keep doing this, about how this is the last time they will speak to each other this way, about the promise and her safety and the dozens of other factors that have interfered with their happiness since the day she first spoke to him.
Instead he finds himself blurting the words, "I love you."
She hardly even reacts. It is the first time he has ever said it out loud, but it isn't news to either of them. Her body goes rigid slightly under his grasp and she forces a little smile and says, "But?"
"But—but nothing," he says.
"But you can't be with me."
He hangs his head slightly. "You could have died," he says into her hair.
"I would have," says Gwen, "the same way you did for me. Peter—"
"This is coming out all wrong," says Peter, shaking his head, wishing he could backtrack to the window and just kiss her, because every time he has tried to rely on words to express how he feels about her he has only failed miserably at it. He walks away from her, running a frustrated hand through his hair. When he turns back around she is a good five feet away and looking at him warily. "I love you," he says again.
"So just—love me, then," says Gwen, "it doesn't have to be like this."
He stares at her and tries for both their sakes to believe it could ever be that simple. He stares until her eyes grow wide with anticipation and her mouth starts to twist impatiently. "Peter," she says, taking dangerous steps toward him. The determination in her face is so palpable that for the first time in a long time he hears the captain's words ringing at a frequency that makes his whole body cringe.
Leave Gwen out of it.
He backs up easily. He is much faster than she is. She scowls, understanding but not understanding well enough, and then the words are spilling out of him. It makes him think of the night Uncle Ben was shot, how the blood just kept pouring out of him, until Peter couldn't even tell where it was coming from anymore. He feels the same way now that he did then—helpless, powerless, out of control.
"It's basic biology," he stammers. "It's you, and me, and pheromones, or fate, or I don't know, Gwen, but it's impossible to stay away from you, I just can't do it. Please, Gwen," he begs, "please. I can't do it. Please."
"What?" she demands. "Please what, Peter?"
"Please," he says. "Please just … you have to stay away from me. Because I can't do it."
Her eyes are steely. "I won't."
"Gwen." It feels like his knees might sink into the earth. He's tired. God, he's so tired, and nothing he says will make her understand, but he tries anyway. "I promised."
"I don't care."
"I do!" Peter yells. "I care. Not about the promise, about you. You're not going to get caught up in this again, Gwen, and even if I hadn't promised your father, nothing would change: I can't be with you, I can't even be near you—I'm making enemies, Gwen, new ones every day, and if another one figures out—if they ever know how I—how I feel about you, and they find some way to hurt you—"
"No," Gwen cuts him off. "No, you don't get to talk like that. It's an excuse, Peter," she says plainly. And when he doesn't answer fast enough, she says, "What? What is this, Peter? We take an inch forward and move a mile back—I can't understand this, why you treat me this way, what is it? Are you scared? Are you guilty?"
Peter flinches. Gwen's face finally softens a bit.
"You shouldn't be. It wasn't your fault."
It is his fault. She understands this, of course, and it kills him that she insists on denying it. He turns away from her. He can't do this anymore. He's so tired, just so tired. He's been running for so long, from the police, from reality, from her. Suddenly it is too much to bear, and he leans against the wall of her bedroom and lets himself slide to the floor.
For a moment he just sits there with his head in his hands, thinking she should walk away, praying that she won't.
After a little while he hears her kneel down and sit beside him. It is quiet now. Peter thinks that maybe they are really only themselves with each other after one of them has ended up screaming. He isn't surprised by the weight of her head on his shoulder, isn't surprised when he feels his arm wedge between her back and the wall to pull her closer to him.
"I can't lose you," he says finally, the words like gravel in his throat.
She burrows her head deeper into the crook of his neck. "Then stop leaving."
Leaving isn't the problem, Peter thinks. The problem is that he never left.
They sit there for a long time. Peter can hear her brothers making a ruckus a few rooms away, can hear dishes clinking in her kitchen, can feel her breath on his neck. He's afraid to move and he thinks she must be, too. But it's Gwen who moves first—isn't it always?—arching her head slightly, looking up at him with a question in her eyes.
He doesn't make a conscious decision to kiss her. The way she is looking at him in the dark is so reminiscent of the night all those months ago he barged into her room after his bloody encounter with Connors that for a moment he forgets himself, forgets everything that has happened, and even forgets to feel sorry when their lips finally meet and the noises of the world seem to evaporate around them.
It isn't like their first kiss, not by a long shot, but in some ways it is—intense, breathtaking, surreal, but this time full of an unspeakable kind of sadness. He shifts his body, pulls her in tighter. It feels they are suspended in this moment, dangling from a thread, and he has to keep her here or she might disappear and all of this will be just some illusion of what might have been.
"Gwen," he says breathlessly, in a brief moment that they pull apart, but she grabs the back of his neck and pulls him back in. She isn't ready for it to end, and he doesn't have the power to end it. It's all too easy to let himself fall back into this rhythm, this mindless, beautiful thing that they have together.
She pulls away from him, slowly, her eyelids low and sleepy as if they are in a dream. "I thought I remembered what that felt like," she says, "but I didn't."
Peter smiles the barest of smiles. There is always a consequence, and they have reached it now. He breathes in, shifting his attention to his feet, and feels her deflate next to him and pull the rest of her body away, so nothing touches anymore.
"So," she says.
Peter purses his lips, gnashing his teeth between them.
"So next week—when I see you at school …"
He opens his mouth to answer, but nothing comes out. He tries again and then shakes his head.
"Peter," she protests, her voice barely above a whisper.
He needs to say something to her, so he settles on, "I'll always be there when you need me."
Her response is heart-wrenching but frank. "There isn't a single moment I don't need you. I always will."
There is no more kissing after that; there isn't even a good-bye. He leaves her room wordlessly, feeling her eyes on him every step of the way. He turns to look at her before he shuts the window behind him. She stares at him through the glass.
There are sirens in the distance. She looks away before he even releases the biocable; by the time he gains the momentum to swing away, she has turned her back on him and righted her chair at her desk, making it as if he was never even there.
Peter doesn't see his father for three days after that. When he does, his father is standing outside of Midtown Science at four o'clock in the afternoon on a Monday, looking stiff and out of place leaning against a bench. Peter has to look for a long time to make sure that it's him.
"What are you doing here?" Peter asks. His father doesn't answer. The sunglasses are secured on the bridge of his nose. "You're leaving, aren't you."
"You know I can't stay."
Peter's throat is tight. He doesn't want to do this here. He barely pays attention to any of his classmates but that doesn't make this any less brutal and public.
"No, I don't," he says lowly, "I never know anything with you." He is still a few feet too far away from his father, not quite committed to engaging in this conversation. He watches the man flounder for a moment. "I don't understand why you're leaving. I don't understand why you ever left in the first place."
"It wasn't leaving—this isn't leaving, it simply isn't a choice."
"No," says Peter, "you're leaving me here, the same way you left eleven years ago—leaving me to try and make sense out of whatever it was you did, whatever you did to me. Why do you get to leave? Why am I the one left with the consequences?"
Only when his father speaks again, much quieter and calmer than Peter, does Peter realize he was raising his voice. "I regret your involvement in this. I am a man with my fair share of regrets, Peter, but that is the one that weighs on me most."
Peter snorts unkindly. "Oh, good. You regret it. That's helpful."
His father turns his head slightly to the side and says, "I can't stay here. I am glad to have gotten to know you, I am proud—" He looks at Peter for a moment, almost for permission to continue, and Peter begrudgingly lets him go on. "I'm proud of you. I never meant for this to happen, and not many people your age would handle this even half as well as you have." He looks at Peter, his eyes still hidden behind dark shades. "But my presence here would only put you in danger, more danger than you are already in. I need to disappear again."
"You could have told me you were alive," says Peter, trying not to choke on the words. "Every day I thought of you. Every day I grew up—thinking you were some kind of hero."
"If you had known I was alive—"
"Uncle Ben—when I was growing up, he would—he would tell me about you. How you were brave, and intelligent, and thought that if you were in a position to help someone—anyone—then it was your responsibility, your moral obligation to help them." He resists the obvious jab, asking his father where he was when Peter needed his help all these years. He grits his teeth and tries to swallow his rage because he wants to be coherent for this, he wants his father to fully and completely understand the devastation of the last week, wants him to remember this in the next eleven years or more he will miss. "I grew up—living, eating, breathing these words about—about a man who isn't even real."
As soon as Peter finishes he feels an unbelievable ache in his chest for Uncle Ben. It suddenly feels as if he is on his bike again as a kid, flying down that hill, out of control, but this time there are no handlebars and he is certain he's going to crash. Uncle Ben would make sense of this. Uncle Ben would know what to say, what to do.
Uncle Ben would have been able to make his father stay. Peter isn't worth staying for.
"I can't be that man anymore," his father says quietly. "The consequences … after I lost your mother …"
"You may have lost her," Peter says, denying himself any sympathy for the man, "but I was here. This whole time I've been here. You didn't lose me."
His father looks up at him slowly. "Haven't I?"
Peter stares back, forcing his face to stay neutral, but he can feel his lower lip shaking and no amount of biting it down seems to help. "Fine," he says tersely. "Be a coward. But if you're going to leave like this—please. Don't come back."
His father takes in a breath. "I'm not leaving forever, Peter. I'll be around."
"I don't want you to be," Peter seethes. "Just leave this time and stay gone. I don't need you, I never did."
"You're going to," his father says, sadly. "You were right. There are questions you won't be able to answer, and battles you haven't even imagined yet. And I'll be watching when I can, and I'll be here. When you need me."
This is so startlingly similar to the very words he used with Gwen just a few nights before that Peter almost reels back. They aren't nice words. They aren't words he wants to hear. He cringes, thinking of Gwen, how it must have taken every fiber of her being not to scream at him when he used them on her.
If Gwen can grant him enough forgiveness to allow him to live at arm's length from her, he should be able to give it to his father. But he can't.
"You told Uncle Ben about all of this, didn't you?" Peter asks instead.
His father nods. "I didn't believe these abilities would ever manifest, but if they did, I never intended for you to go through this alone."
It is all Peter knows now, this feeling of being alone. He is losing everybody. His uncle is dead, Gwen is an impossibility, and even Aunt May he has to keep as dissociated from him as he can when he finally graduates and can leave her safely in Queens. He tells himself he doesn't need anybody, but only because it's an easy thought to think.
His father hands him a piece of paper. "You're the only one who has this number."
Peter holds it in his palm, staring at the neat scrawl. He folds it carefully and puts it into his backpack, but he thinks bitterly it wouldn't make a difference if he marched it over to the trash can right now. He will never call.
A crowd of students emerges from one of the sports teams, presumably being let out from practice. The noise and clamor is enough to bring the two of them back to the present. Peter stares at his father, waiting. He won't be the one who says good-bye.
His father steps forward and puts a hand on Peter's shoulder. Peter does him the one service of not pulling away.
"Be good."
One more chapter left. I may have just purchased another pair of Gwen Stacy boots, this time in black. It's like a zillion degrees here, I will not be able to wear them for months, but I am beyond reason and common sense now. All. I know. Is boots. (And Andrew Garfield).
Thank you guys so much for the reviews over the past month or so. This was really not meant to blow so far out of proportion, it was only going to be like a four or five chapter fic (WOOPS), but I really appreciate people who have reviewed, especially the ones who have been reviewing since the beginning. I feel like I know you all a little bit now, it's weird that this will end tomorrow, it feels like leaving summer camp or something. If I were cool enough for summer camp, because let's be real, I was a space camp kid.
This, of course, surprises exactly no one.