Written to: Red Hands - Walk Off The earth, crosspost from AO3
Gerascophobia: The fear of growing old.
Gwen sits at the dining table in the Avengers Tower with Peter, eating a quick breakfast of cereal and buttered toast before school. Peter was currently eating his way through a small country's annual food stores, claiming with a mouth full of granola that he was a growing boy and theAmazing Spider-man and she couldn't begrudge a superhero his daily meals, could she? Gwen had rolled her eyes as JARVIS piled more plates in front of Peter.
She watches as Steve walks into the room, grimacing with every step and limping along as he settles himself with a flinch into an empty seat at the head of the table.
"Hey, Gramps," she says, tossing him the day's newspaper. "JARVIS will have your oatmeal and prune juice ready in a second. I'll put your walker out for you before I go to school."
Steve rolls his eyes at her before flicking open the newspaper and scanning the headlines. He turns to Peter, who currently has a mouth stuffed full of French toast, before turning to Gwen and holding up the paper.
"What is this iPad?" he asks, showing her a headline regarding current sales of tablets and market competition. "It is certainly not a sanitary napkin, is it?"
Gwen rolls her eyes right back at him, before explaining what it is.
As Gwen clings to Peter's chest as he rappels down the side of the Avengers Tower, she tells him, "My God, just put me in a home when I get to be that old."
"Pardon?" he asks. "Steve's not that old, he's only..." A pause as he bites his lip and frowns, thinking; there was a reason Gwen was doing a summer abroad at Oxford and Peter, well, wasn't. "Oh my God," Peter mutters, swinging easily around a skyscraper, "he's practically ancient."
"I told you he was," Gwen says, her stomach leaping into her throat as Peter releases a strand of web and they freefall thirty feet before he attaches another strand to the corner of a tower; she didn't think she'd ever get used to that feeling.
"I couldn't put you in a home," he says, absentmindedly, pressing a kiss to her cheek and just barely missing the next skyscraper. "They'd kick you out the first day. Something about organising senior citizen rebellions. I can see the headlines now: 'Local Resident Starts Hunger Strike; Claims She Is Tired of Tapioca Pudding."
"Is that really what they feed old people?" Gwen asks, grimacing. "I'll have to do something about that. Maybe, invent some sort of non-aging serum thing. Or at the very least, something much tastier than tapioca pudding. Do you think I could make something like Willy Wonka's dinner gum, or whatever it was, where you chewed it and it was like a full meal? You know, where the girl turns into a blueberry."
Peter laughs. "You know I'll still love you when you're senile and decrepit, don't you?" he asks, grinning at her.
She rolls her eyes at him and punches at his chest lightly, good-naturedly. "Well, just remember you've forever consigned yourself to diaper duty, and I'll scream bloody murder and beat you over the head with my cane if I'm even the slightest bit uncomfortable," she tells him, and he can only laugh, set her gently down on the ground, and press a kiss to her forehead before running off to his first class.