Connor doesn't have a (chaoticduallife) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-03-03 23:50:00 |
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Entry tags: | gwen stacy, plot: switch, spider-man |
Who: Peter and Gwen (with a brief cameo by Flash)
What: Meeting up at a cafe in Vegas for comparing notes and general awkwardness.
Where: A cafe in Vegas.
When: Recently.
Warnings/Rating: None.
Peter was sitting at a table by the window with a steaming coffee open in front of him. He studiously added three packets of sugar to the dark mixture. Just a little cream to take off the sharp edge, and buckets of sugar. He’s always had a thing for lots of sugar in his coffee, mostly because Aunt May disapproved heartily when he was a kid. He’d been kind of hyperactive back then, and even a hint of sugar had him bouncing off the walls. Not sticking to them yet, at that point, but bouncing off them for sure.
He had his chucks tucked back behind him, toes on the floor only, behind the legs of his chair. He’d never been to this place before, but it had a good vibe, which was nice. The girl behind the counter with the short cropped hair had smiled at him, which was always a plus.
At the table, he’d spread out a local newspaper, and, as promised, he was attempting to fill in the bubbles with a very nice pen he’d stolen out of Connor’s spooky apartment. He had one of those wooden stir stick thingies in his mouth, and he was quietly gnawing on it, another bad habit, and a sure sign he was nervous.
When he’d showed up in this whacked out place, rolling around in the back of a guy’s head, he’d actually thought everything might turn out okay. He’d seen familiar names on the journal and thought that if he could just get in touch with his friends, they could all hold hands and kumbaya their way through this together. That wasn’t really how things had worked out, though, and it’d left him feeling the way he had a few other times in his life, when he was forced to push people away, or they left. He was alone, isolated, with the world on his shoulders and the responsibility to keep everybody safe from people like Norman without anyone to really turn to. It was hard to take that your friends didn’t really know you for who you were, or the nutjobs for the trees. It was kind of like having amnesia, if everybody else had it about stuff you remembered and you had it about the stuff they remembered. Amnesia if it was selective. Ironic. Designed by a jerk.
But they seemed like the same people, basically. Kind of. And while, truthfully, it stung to feel like everyone saw him as the clone of some other Peter Parker they had known, he didn’t know what there was to be done about it. He didn’t blame anyone for not wanting to start over with him. The only person who seemed to be even a little in sync with him was Harry, and he’d found out Peter was Spider-man from someone else. He had no idea how that possibly could have gone, even if Harry hadn’t gone through all the horrific crap with his dad yet.
Gwen asking to see him did tweak Peter out some. Gwen was one of his best friends, but that didn’t change the weirdness of the situation. Would she look different? Would she act differently? Would she give up halfway through and declare him a space alien after all and ditch him? Would he be left to hang out by himself in Connor’s creepy, creepy, apartment? Only one way to find out. Until then, he hunched his dark head over his crossword, refolding the paper, laying it out, and starting with the really easy clues.
Six-letter word for a person outside a group. ‘Outcast’. Hey, he could do this. He knew this game.
Gwen had taken just enough time to swing by Doc's apartment and wash the blood off her face and out of her hair. Sam had gotten attacked in nothing but her underwear, but Gwen had ended up in the hallway of Passages in her own, clean clothing, which meant she could head out after washing up, without wasting any extra time. It would have been more complicated if she'd needed to find something to wear, because the only female clothing hanging in Adam Waterhouse's closet had been left there by MK, and Gwen and MK couldn't have been further apart on the style spectrum.
She'd seen the coffee place through Sam's eyes before. The Cup was small and local, no tourists need apply, and Gwen had chosen it for that very reason. She looked terrible, and she didn't want to draw attention to herself; locals would be less likely to care about the bruised girl looking for a cuppa. Anyway, that's what she was counting on.
As for nerves, she had plenty of them. Gwen Stacy wasn't the most socially adept teenager in New York. She wasn't Peter (her Peter) with his adorable stammering and blushing cheeks, but she still didn't function at the same level as Flash and Mary Jane. That had never really felt like a problem until this month. This month, she felt like she kept tripping over her own social awkwardness, and there was no textbook that would help her figure out where she was conducting this experiment called life inappropriately. In short, she wasn't doing so hot.
And it wasn't even Peter (new Peter). His arrival hurt, and the loss of old Peter hurt, but there were so many other things happening that it was easy to steam past those feelings in order to keep her head above water. It only got really impossible at night, when she was lying in her bed and trying to sleep, that the sadness threatened to overwhelm her. But those nights, she could usually flop on the couch with some Froyo and a documentary, secure in the knowledge that Flash would come out and mock her until she felt better. It was avoidance, but it was better than becoming that girl who cried and played emo music; she would leave that to Mary Jane.
She walked into the coffee shop in pleated grey and knee-highs of the same color. The sweater she wore was a light blue, but it did nothing to hide the collection of bruises that rounded her throat. The pattern overlapped, and it was clearly made by fingers; she was counting on the ends of her long, blonde hair (held in place by a blue headband) to hide the worst of the damage. But there was nothing to be done about the purpling around her mouth; she hadn't even bothered wasting time in the ultimately pointless attempt.
She scuffed one chunky black shoe against the other as she looked around the shop, butterflies settling into her stomach. Mentally, she explained the reaction as physical sensation resulting from elevation in sympathetic activity in the autonomic nervous system, but it didn't make the wings flutter any less quickly.
She noticed his shoulders first, that hunch that was so familiar it made her hurt, and then she straightened her own shoulders in response and closed the space. "Buy me a cup, bug boy?"
Peter looked up sharply, and his first reaction was one of instantaneous pleasure, the way he always felt when he laid eyes on the people he cared about. He smiled. He was relieved. She looked just like Gwen should look, so at least there was that. The distance couldn't be so far, could it?
Then, even as that thought was crossing his mind, his eyes fell to the bruises she couldn't quite hide, around her neck from the heavy press of fingers, and the berry swollenness of purple at her mouth. He catalogued, then looked up, eyes a little wide, and he stammered. "Uh, yeah, sure, of course. Any time, your humble servant, jeez, all I do is cook and clean in the kitchen all day and this is the thanks I get." He stood up, a little too sharply, his chair squealing back, and he looked at her for about a second too long before running over to the barista and ordering a coffee.
As soon as the coffee was in his hand he was back and setting it down on the table in front of her. He shoved his crossword out of the way when he realized there was nowhere to put the cup down, folding it up and dropping it on the floor next to his chair. "So," he said, gesturing to her neck. "You have to tell me what happened, because that looks like a story."
It wasn't easy to tell when Peter was angry, or upset. Long practice had hidden that sort of thing under jokes and jibes and laughter because that was a lot easier than breaking down when things were rough, and tended to keep him from going nuts. But it was there when he looked at her and saw bruises obviously left by human hands, despite the fact that his expression was all open concern and curiosity.
Her Peter would have had a fit, right there, at the table. She wasn't sure if she liked this Peter's response better or not; she would need to think about it. But he looked right, and that was reassuring somehow. She pulled out the chair once he left, and she filled in the missing items on his crossword without thinking. Rote, and the pencil scraping against the paper, which she then returned to its previous place.
She watched the crossword fall, and then she reached for the coffee he handed out. The plastic top came off, and she looked at the liquid out of curiosity, wondering if he knew how she took it. Maybe she was looking for some validation that he had known some version of her in his world. She knew his relationship with whatever version of her he knew wasn't the same as her relationship with her Peter Parker had been, but something that indicated close association would be reassuring. It was entirely emotional, which she recognized, but she couldn't do anything about it. All her childish declarations of not turning into other girls were being destroyed with the speed of subways these days.
She pushed her sleeves up slightly, the bruises their telling a story as well. "I think your guy talked to Sam." She shook her head a second later, because this wasn't her Peter; there was no need to demure to keep him from getting angry. "Your guy talked to Sam. She's my girl on the other side. She met up with her boyfriend, and he just happened to have Goblin in his head," she explained. He could fill in the blanks from there, without any help from her, so she sipped at the coffee and closed her eyes with girlish pleasure. She didn't get much good coffee these days. Paying rent meant all her internship money (which wasn't much) went to bills for the place she shared with Flash - the place that was destroyed now.
"I talked to Harry about it, but he didn't take it very well. He can't employ logic when it comes to his father," she explained, but there was hurt in her words, and it overflowed. "So, I'm staying with Flash, because Sam's place is probably full of Norman Osborn right now." Her expression turned curious, scientific. "Do you know if there's anywhere I can access anything on Mr. Osborn? He hasn't been tested here, and I was thinking there might be a way to separate Goblin from him, but I would need data. I'm not sure he's going to let us catch him to run analysis. I work for him, but I don't think he's just going to roll up his sleeve for me."
Peter had doctored the coffee based on a vague memory of getting coffee with Gwen once. They hadn't really done it otherwise, since most of their hang out time tended to be tooling around downtown museums or hanging out at someone's house. He added cream and a couple sugars, the coffee mixed up carefully and capped off tight so it didn't spill.
The bruises on her arms caught his eye, and he frowned, sharply. Nope, this was no good at all. Worry creased his brow. "I didn't know she was your alter person," he said, though of course that made sense - of course Norman would be so cowardly and cruel as to target someone only tangentially related to him in order to taunt him and get his attention. "I sent my guy over again to track her down, but neither of us had the faintest clue where to look." His mouth set a little tighter, because that failure didn't bode well. He couldn't have known where to go. He'd never seen where Gwen was living now, and wouldn't have known where she was living if someone had told him to check the apartment. Norman hurting some poor random girl, and Gwen by association, while he was unable to help? He didn't like that. Not a fan.
"You sure you're okay?" Peter asked first. It was hard not to seem really worried. Even though they were practically strangers, she was still Gwen. Right? She'd been hurt because of her association with him. That sucked. "What's the guy's name?" he asked, because he definitely wasn't getting left behind on info that would help him keep people safe next time.
Peter's concern didn't dissipate when she spoke of Harry, but it reverted to more normal levels, his mouth screwed to the side as he thought. "Nah, he never could," he said, picking up his coffee and spinning the crossword around. "You're right to stay out of there. Don't go anywhere that guy knows. As for Osborn, I haven't got a clue." He tapped a finger on the table. "I feel like I've got a lot of catching up to do," he said, rueful. This was no longer just a problem for him personally. The way things sounded, it was becoming a fire hazard. "Next time he shows his ugly face, though, I'll be waiting. Or the other guy will, anyway. I'll make sure he grabs a sample, even if it means snagging the jock off him while he flies by on that stupid glider. Hopefully gonad sweat will have enough testable DNA in it to do us some good."
"I live with Flash," she explained. It was hard to parse what he knew from what her Peter had known. "Mary Jane was living with Aunt May, but she's back with her parents now, which isn't really good for anyone," she added. "She's at a penthouse in Stark Tower right now, but she ends up in trouble a lot, so she's a good person to keep an eye on. Especially since you guys are best friends, right?" She liked having all the pieces to a puzzle before she tried making heads or tails out of it, and she wasn't sure she had all the pieces here. And so she wasn't really eager to give up Mr. Donovan's name, not yet. Her Peter hadn't been very forgiving of anyone, and she was going to assume the same thing about this one until she was proven wrong.
"You know that hurting people back home ends up hurting them in Las Vegas, don't you?" she asked, taking a sip of the coffee (close, but not perfect) and watching him over the plastic lid. "Whoever has Goblin isn't responsible for what happened." She blamed Mr. Donovan for plenty of things, but not enough to want him broken apart by someone who had just gotten here and didn't know the rules yet. "He didn't throw me off a bridge and kill me, so I think I'll take that as a win," she added, which was as close to being okay as she could give him just then.
She made a face at his DNA joke. "You're even worse than Flash, Peter Parker. Gross." She took another sip of her coffee, and then she set the cup down on the table and ran her fingers over the cardboard. "Why don't you tell me what you know about everyone, and I'll fill in missing data?" she offered. She was going to just start telling him things herself, but she was concerned she wouldn't get a clean telling from him if she did that; she didn't want to contaminate his story, since she had a sneaking suspicion that it deviated from everyone else's pretty significantly. After all, Peter Parker absolutely knew how she took her coffee.
"I know, you said." Peter was starting to think that Gwen was trying to make a point by bringing up Flash. He understood that she thought he should be besties with Flash Thompson, but he didn't know how he felt about that one. He was going to need to see, firsthand, that Flash had magically reformed from dickness. "What's wrong with her parents?"
That question about who was best friends with who made Peter feel like he was being led, and it was weird. "I'm...not best friends with anybody here," he said, with a half-shrug. It was as honestly as he could think to put it. "Not anymore, anyway. I'm starting to think I've got as much in common with the other guy as two people in the phone book with the same name." That didn't mean he wasn't going to be keeping an eye on MJ, though, not by a long shot. "What kind of trouble is she ending up in?"
"Yeah, I know. And I get that it's not really his fault he picked up Norman's crazy. Still doesn't make any of this okay," he said, gesturing to her bruises. "It just means your girl was really lucky to get away, and I'm glad she did. It means Norman needs to get re-shelled in his nutcase ASAP, too."
Her grimace finally made him smile, a bright curl from the edge of his mouth. "I'm just saying it's a vulnerable spot," he reasoned. His smile faded a little when she asked about missing data. "Uh...that'd be a pretty long list," he said. "I guess...well, to start with, I already told you about you coming and living with us after your dad - what happened," he said. His smile had faded altogether by then. "MJ never lived at the house, though."
"No, you said you didn't know where to look for Sam. I was just telling you where to look, in case something else came up," she clarified. But she forgot about all that in order to give him a confused look about Mary Jane's parents. "I think her dad's a violent drunk," she said, because that's what she'd been told. "Peter rescued her or something, and she was crashing with him ever since, until he went missing, which was for weeks before you showed up." Shouldn't he know that? For the first time, she wondered how many versions of their lives existed out there. He was obviously from a different one than the rest of them, but she was curious how the others turned out. Maybe she didn't need to die after all?
"Huh?" she asked about being best friends with people, wondering if she'd misspoken, or if he'd misinterpreted. That felt familiar, because it happened with her Peter all the time. Maybe there was some chemical malfunction that made her not able to speak Peter here in a way that made sense. "I meant for you to tell me what your life was like, so I could help you with differences," she clarified, not realizing that he was referring to Mary Jane being his best friend, her fingers pressing harder against the cup's cardboard sides as she spoke.
"Goblin did say that Mr. Osborn was better at controlling him, and that this person wasn't even half as strong, even if he was trying harder." She paused, considering. "He wouldn't have hurt Sam if he could help it. They know each other, and he cares about her. We can't hurt him. It would just make things worse." Which was the problem in general here, wasn't it? How to stop people that had innocent counterparts in Las Vegas?
Her expression turned to confusion when he started to answer her question about what he knew, because that meant she'd misunderstood something along the way. "Who was the best friend comment about then?" she asked, and then she answered her own question a second later. "Mary Jane. You meant Mary Jane." And she missed the fading of his smile when he talked about her dad until the very last moment. "My dad died just before I ended up here. I was dating my Peter when it happened, and he stopped seeing me for a little while, but we patched it up here. We fought a lot, though. It wasn't a very good relationship after dad asked him to leave me alone." She tugged his crossword away, because it was making her nervous, and she dropped it down next to his bag again. "Mary Jane lived next door to Peter, and we fought about her a lot. You're supposed to live happily ever after with her in our timeline, after Goblin kills me. Flash worries about that a lot too, since he and Mary Jane are together." She tapped her fingers against the table, trying to think of what to add. "Harry and I grew up together," she said with a fond smile. "I work at Oscorp, for Mr. Osborn. Did I leave anything out?"
The revelation that MJ's dad was 'a violent drunk' was definitely a new one. "What?" he said. No quips, and no humor, not on that one. "I guess I'm a little more behind on info than I thought," he said, uncertain. "Well, she definitely shouldn't stay over there. She can totally crash at our place, I'm sure Aunt May wouldn't mind."
"Oh," he responded, when she clarified. Well, that was awkward. It always felt weird to label anybody as his best friend, especially to someone who was supposed to be his friend. "I guess...I don't know, you and MJ and Harry. You guys are - were - my best friends." He was trying not to seem in over his head here, but it was hard. She was treating this like a science experiment to take notes on, and it was...well, it was his life. And she was a stranger to it.
"I'm not saying we hurt him," Peter said immediately. "I mean. Much. I'm saying he needs to be someplace where he can't hurt anybody else. Norman, I mean. If his guy normally isn't affected by this kind of crazy then of course nobody wants him to be hurt, but Norman still needs to get taken down. When things go back to normal I'll try to take him out quickly, if I can. If they don't go back to normal soon, though, somebody really needs to lock up the other guy when he's on the other side. If he's not a crazy jerk normally, I think he'll thank us when he's thinking like a normal person again."
He paused. Had he missed something? "It was about everybody," he said. "Like I said. You guys were my best friends before. Now nobody really knows me. So nobody is." Dating? Well, that was doubly awkward. Hooray! "Uh, nope. Never dated you. Or MJ. Whatever is 'supposed' to happen, apparently it didn't. You guys are my friends." He watched her pull the crossword away with similar anxiety to hers, wondering if he'd done something wrong. "MJ lives next door to me, yeah."
Then he stopped cold, and looked well and truly alarmed. "What do you mean, 'after Goblin kills you'?"
"I don't think you're behind," she told him, sitting back in her chair and tucking a chunky black shoe around one leg. "I think we're from different places, which explains a lot." She sounded pensive then, like she was trying to figure out how that worked, and if one reality displaced another reality as being more real. She poked at her cup, and she only looked up again when he mentioned Mary Jane crashing at his place. "I wasn't supposed to tell Flash about things being bad at home for Mary Jane, so maybe ask her." Not that anyone thought she didn't have a big mouth. But still.
"I never talked to you until this year," she explained, not contradicting his story, just comparing it to her own. "My Peter, I thought he was pretty great, but we didn't talk until Flash was a stupid bully one day." There was nothing angry there, not even her comment about Flash's behavior. Everything had been so simple then. "He and Mary Jane were friends forever, though, and he and Harry were too. We just never synced up before." She frowned then. "But the Peter that was here before, he didn't know Harry, so he wasn't exactly mine either." Which she should have realized when all the fighting began, but who expected this kind of stuff? When it came to romance, she could absolutely lose her ability to extract the science out of any situation. His comment about not dating her went ignored, because what could she say about that? For once, she wasn't even jealous of Mary Jane.
She gave him a long look when he said he wouldn't hurt Norman. She wasn't sure if she trusted him yet, and staring at him wasn't actually helping her form a clear theory. "He's kinda apathetic, but he's not a bad guy. And he cares about Sam, and she's crazy in love with him." Which complicated things. "So he needs to be able to control Norman and Goblin, because they live together, him and Sam, and Goblin's kinda obsessed." She tugged the lid off her coffee for no good reason, and she replaced it again. "He's supposed to throw me off a bridge or something? I think you're supposed to mess up or something, and I die." She quirked a brow at him. "Not ringing any bells?"
Peter liked watching Gwen think. She'd always been ridiculously smart, and he appreciated that she could at least try to approach everything with a logical bent. He loved logic, and the way scientific projects and experiments fell together apart in logical lines. But he liked them because his brain didn't really emotionally function that way. He was always all over the place in his thoughts. He couldn't pattern them the way she did in his everyday life if he tried.
"Sounds like Flash," Peter said, without thinking. "I mean, you and I have been friends since like...sophomore year? It's been a little while." Not that any of that mattered anymore, or seemed very important in the face of her very real-sounding death scenario. "Nothing like that ever happened on my watch," he said. His stomach clenched just thinking about that. "That sounds like a couple bad dreams I've had, though," he offered. That was the picture of what he feared, every day - that his friends would be hurt because of their association with him, and, even worse, he'd make some terrible mistake that would worsen it. He tapped his fingers on the table, biting his bottom lip. "Good...good times. It's always good to have stuff to look forward to."
During the pause, Gwen's attention strayed to the window, where she could just make out Flash on his skateboard. She grinned, and she almost laughed, because he was doing tricks, and messing up half of them, all while pretending he wasn't messing anything up. Strangely, it made her feel better. It made it a little less stinging that the boy across from her wasn't into her, especially when he reminded her so much of her Peter it hurt a little. He was different, less awkward, more joking, but still close enough that this whole thing was harder than she let on.
She did laugh when he said it sounded like Flash, and she nodded to the window that was just over his shoulder. "I think it doesn't happen until we're in college," she said of the bridge. "But I'm supposed to get knocked up with Mr. Osborn's kids too, and that isn't happening either," she explained, and she was emphatic about that. She was still clinging to the hope that Goblin could be controlled, while letting Mr. Osborn be himself again, for Harry's sake. But she wasn't going to sleep him with ever, no way, even if the thought had crossed her mind when she was messing around with older-Harry at Christmas. She shook her head to bring herself back to the conversation. "No one is going to get hurt, bug boy," she assured him. "My dad already made you - my you - agree to stop talking to me for that very reason, and you gave in and came back to me eventually, so there's no point in reliving my timeline. We're all smart, and we're really capable, even Flash on his skateboard. We should work together."
She considered whether to go on, but there was a point to this, right? A goal, to make him trust them, and to start to trust him. "A few months ago, our Peter got captured by Goblin. I borrowed some equipment from Oscorp and modified it to find your DNA mutation, and Flash went and brought that Peter back. We can all work as a team, if you're game."
Peter followed Gwen's look to the window, but didn't spy Flash. He wasn't looking for a guy on his skateboard - for all he knew, she was just staring into space. He didn't make the connection until she gestured toward it when he mentioned Flash. Oh, there he was, tooling around on his skateboard. Like. A tool.
"That's a comfort," he said, all cheer. "Everybody loves a stay of execution." He smiled faintly. "It's not going to happen," he added, a little more sober. "It hasn't happened for me, and I think I'm further down the line than you guys are. Or, I was. Or whatever. And it still hadn't happened. I know I'm not in college yet, but I wouldn't let it happen." And that was that. If he thought it through any more, it was just going to give him heart palpitations, or something. All this meant was that Goblin needed to be taken care of much sooner than later.
Her anecdote about Flash saving him wasn't exactly a rousing endorsement. "Yeah," he said, "I heard about the suit." It didn't take a rocket scientist to read his face and see he had real worries about that wrinkle in the situation. "Look, I'm not saying Flash can't turn himself around and do some good. I'd like to believe that, seriously. But that suit is like maniacal crack with a consciousness. It's just not good. I've never met anybody who it didn't tear down inside, little bit by little bit, until it ran them. It made Eddie a complete psycho. I mean, he had problems to start with yeah, but he wasn't a psycho killer." He glanced behind him again, picking out Flash on his skateboard with his eyes. “Nobody who’s got any kind of a brain would complain about having backup going after somebody like our friend Normie. But I don’t think the suit’s a good idea. It’s just not worth it. Not for anybody.”
"I don't think you're further down anything, Peter. I think you're just from a place that's different. Further down would mean you'd dated me, and you haven't," she said practically; it was always a reassuring thing to fall back on logic and let things make sense again. "Maybe that means Goblin won't ever do that here. Maybe we'll be lucky," she said, but there wasn't much faith behind the words. Scientists weren't good at faith, and recent events tilted the odds in favor of Goblin causing some kind of trouble. "But you have other problems too. Dr. Otto is here, and so is Dr. Connors. But the thing to remember is that they're all really good people in Las Vegas, okay? That's important." Because as messed up as Sam was, she would only get worse if the people she trusted got hurt through the door.
When he started in on the suit, she sat up taller. "I built that suit, Peter Parker. Whatever its limitations are, its better than when Venom was controlling Flash all the time. And Flash is strong; he can handle it. We just need to lock it away where no one can get to it." Just because Adam was weak, it didn't mean the suit was the problem. It had been tested, tested, tested again. "You might not like it, but it's better than the alternative, and I trust Flash. I want to trust you, but you need to trust us in return. I know it's not like it was where you came from, but it's not like it was where I came from either. So, if I can be okay with us never dating, and with my dad's death meaning nothing, then you can be okay with being part of a team." She didn't yell it. It wasn't even particularly forceful, but it was certain. "We kinda don't think we need to follow a script, okay? Because the script kinda sucks for everyone but you and Mary Jane. So it's time for you to stop following yours."
She pushed back her chair with the air of someone who was going to give him time to think things through. "And talk to Mary Jane. I don't think she knows how to function in a world where you don't adore her." For once, she didn't sound jealous. She just sounded sorry for the other girl, because she knew exactly what that was like now.
Peter paused. He wasn't sure he bought her assessment that he would have dated her if he was further along in a timeline than she was. That wasn't really what he'd meant. He'd meant that maybe there were a whole bunch of splinter universes where things diverged in different places, and he was further along in experience than the Peter she'd known despite the fact that some things had gone differently. There was something about her tone, though, that made it seem best to leave this particular fight alone, so he didn't protest. It wasn't as if it changed anything one way or the other.
"Octavius? Awesome, he's always good for a laugh riot," said Peter. "I know about Connors already," he added, and lifted his left arm. It had been mostly resting in his lap, but the exposure made the gauze wrapped around his forearm obvious. It was clean white, since he'd just changed it before coming over. "The other guy got on the wrong side of his guy while trying to get him locked up somewhere safe. Good guy or not, he went totally nuts as soon as the serum hit his system."
"Why did Flash have the symbiote anyway?" he asked. That was what he really wanted to
know, before he dealt with all this suit weirdness. "Where I'm from, Eddie's got it. Eddie Brock? Have you even met him?" Maybe in this universe the symbiote went to Flash instead. That was a chilling thought. Peter raised a brow. "Wait. Are we talking about two different things here, with the suit and the symbiote? Because where I'm from, it's just the symbiote. It looks like a suit, but only because it's adapting to try to fix you. But it's broken at its core, so it just ends up making you crazy and want to eat brains and stuff. It's not a suit and a symbiote, though. And you're not telling me you built the symbiote." No, even with his esteem of Gwen, he didn't believe she could have pulled that one off. It had taken his father and Eddie's years to get a working compound, and even then, they had created something a monster rather than the cure they'd been seeking.
"Your dad's death didn't mean nothing," Peter said, immediately, and there was a flicker of something on his face. That bummed him out, that she would think that badly of him. "It didn't." For some reason she'd decided to bundle that in to working with Flash and the symbiote, and that didn't really feel fair, because the symbiote and her dad dying and them not dating really had nothing to do with each other, but then she was getting up and he didn't even know why.
He stood up with her. "Look, Gwen, I'm sorry. I'm not trying to be rough on you, or difficult, but I feel like...I'm on my own, here.” He spread a hand. “I just want everything to be normal again. I mean, normal as things can be when you've got freaky spider DNA. If I ask you questions and I'm not sure about things, you can't just shove me back. Okay? I'm trying, I really am, but I've seriously got no footing for a guy with sticky feet."
That gauze held her attention for awhile. Despite the fact that she'd had a perfectly rationally conversation with Liam on the journals, anything that had to do with Dr. Connors made her almost non-functionally sad. He marked the close of a bunch of different chapters in her life, and she still wanted to go back and turn the last page in reverse. Life didn't work that way, though, and she had too much of the scientist in her to have any kind of blind faith. She concentrated on the symbiote instead; it was easier.
"I don't know. He just had Venom when we got here." Eddie's name rang no bells for her, and she shook her head; she didn't know him. "When Flash got the alien - and even SHIELD doesn't know how the alien symbiote got to this planet - it could control him. We build him a suit that keeps the symbiote from taking control of his higher functions. It impedes the process by which the parasite integrates itself into the cells of the host. So instead of the parasite controlling Flash, Flash can control the parasite. Flash still has to do a lot of work to keep his emotions in check when he isn't wearing it, since it feeds off those, but he's strong, and he's good at it. He was filling in for Spidey after Peter left. We had a blackout, and Flash helped people. The suit is solid. The tech behind it is solid. Dr. Banner helped me build it, and it's based on schema that SHIELD develops in the future."
The mention of her dad was an immediate derail, however, and even her proudest achievement fell by the wayside for the moment. "Did he die stopping Dr. Connors where you're from? Because he did where I'm from. But here Dr. Connors is still loose, and dad didn't die for anything, Peter."
She picked her coffee up between her fingers, and she looked at him for a long few seconds before responding to him, her black shoes scuff, scuff, scuffing at the floor. He was so familiar that it hurt, and she gave him a shy little smile, blonde hair falling in her face, even though she knew she wouldn't get a shy smile in return. "It can't all be like you're used to, Peter. You have to meet us halfway. You keep telling us all the ways in which we're wrong, and all the ways in which you feel alone. I feel alone too, and I feel like everything I knew about everything is being contradicted." She shrugged a tiny bit. "It's not any easier for me than it is for you. My boyfriend disappeared. One second, he was in bed with me, and the next he was gone. That's kinda hard to deal with."
Peter was going to need to have a talk with Flash, namely about where he'd gotten his hands on a dangerous alien symbiote. But everything Gwen was saying was, at the very least, encouraging. If Flash had been dealing with that thing for a while and he had yet to go ballistic, that meant he had the kind of iron control over his emotions that he had never known Flash Thompson to have, and never would have expected from him. If she was right, that meant Flash had managed to do something pretty impressive by pulling this off so far. So far. "I'm more concerned about the symbiote than the suit," Peter said. "I believe you that the tech works, because as long as you're still a super genius I also know you double checked your work ten times before letting anybody test it. But he doesn't wear it all the time, right? When he's not wearing it, it's just his force of will between him and that thing, and it is seriously eight cups of crazy. There's ways to get the thing out of him," he pointed out. "I mean, there are where I'm from, anyway. It doesn't always work, admittedly. But if we could, then maybe we could see about integrating the symbiote with the suit tech somehow. It'd be safer and less screwy with his brain than having it in him, right?"
Peter paused, and then shook his head. "No," he said. Captain Stacy had been a good man. Not too keen on him, but not bad, either. "Where I'm from he was killed by somebody pretending to be me. A criminal who was dressing up as me and robbing banks. He saved a little kid. It was...he died saving a kid's life." For a man like that, there was no more noble way to have gone out if he had to go out early. "I don't believe that," he said, about her dad dying for nothing. Just thinking about it made him feel seriously bummed out, but he just shrugged. "Just because Connors is here doesn't make what he did meaningless," Peter said. "If he stopped him from hurting more people back there, then it mattered."
That little smile kind of hurt and felt good all at the same time, and he smiled back. Things were so weird. Why did everything in his life always have to be a messy insane catastrophe? Why couldn't things just...work out, for once? He felt bad for her, and for MJ and Harry. And, yeah, he felt bad for Flash too. "I'm not trying to contradict you," he said. "Or shut you down. I'm just freaking out." He shook his head, because what was he even supposed to say about her boyfriend disappearing? That was super messed up. It wasn't him, but it was him, and that had to suck. It kind of made him feel bad for existing. "I'm really not trying to make anything worse," he said. "I promise. I know it sucks for everybody. But I have to ask questions, or else I won't know what's going on. I can't just take everything at face value or I might make a mistake that gets somebody hurt. You know?" That was the real concern. If he let everything go with Flash and pretended it all seemed kosher, and then Flash went ballistic, it would be his own fault for not passing on what he knew and double checking that it all seemed safe. “I just kind of want everything to be okay. But it’s not going to happen overnight. And I get it.”
"Talk to Flash about it. The suit keeps the symbiote from bonding. He has to wear it every X number of minutes, but it works. He can explain it better than I can, since he's the one who knows how it feels to have this thing riding around with him. But I don't think he'll want to change, Peter. He wants to help people, and the suit and Venom let him do that. I think you're stuck with us how you found us, but maybe I'm wrong." Her expression said she didn't think so, but recent events with Adam and MK might have changed that. If Mary Jane was really scared of Venom, then maybe just having the suit wouldn't be enough anymore. But it was still true, what she said. They didn't need fixing, and he was going to have to be okay with how they were, even if it wasn't how they were supposed to be, and that went for all of them - him too.
She shook her head. "That's not how it happened here," she said of her dad, but that was all. Rehashing the events with Dr. Connors wasn't going to help anything, and it just made her kinda sad to think about her dad dying somewhere else, in some other way, with some other version of her. It made her think of her mom and her brothers too, and the fact that she hadn't seen either of them since Christmas. And suddenly the world didn't make as much sense as it had when she'd walked into the coffee shop. Weird, after all this, the only thing it took to jar her sense of understanding of what was happening to all of them was this, a new Peter with a different past.
She rubbed a hand at the bruises along her throat, and she gave him another small smile in return. "I know you aren't trying to contradict me. I'm freaking out too, but it'll get better," she said. It would. She would need to go home, make notes, plot out timelines based on the things he'd detailed. She'd make Sam read some comics, and maybe the Doc too. And then, once everything was methodically accounted for to the point where it felt like a reality she knew, she would feel better about it. She didn't ask if she still died where he came from, because she knew she died everywhere; Sam had already told her that. She just hadn't asked about all those "everywheres" before.
She reached out a hand, and she touched his wrist, low and beneath the bandage. "It'll be okay, bug boy. I'm top of our class. You can trust me," she said, a hint of teasing in her voice. It wasn't his fault he'd ended up here. She sighed and she tipped her head and gave him a long look, while she tried to decide whether to say what had just come to mind, or whether to keep it to herself. "The old Peter didn't get along with any of us really well. So you might find it easier than expected, if you just hang in there."
It was clear to Peter that he wasn't going to be able to get across to her why he didn't think that using the symbiote was a good idea, just the same way he couldn't make her believe that Norman was a nut. That didn't mean he'd keep it to himself going forward, but it did mean he was going to need to keep a close eye on Flash, and resign himself to the fact that, because they'd made this decision before he arrived, everything going forward was bound to be even more difficult. Hip hip hooray.
He didn't ask how things had happened with her father. Eventually, when they'd gotten to know each other again, maybe she'd want to tell him. Right now, it didn't seem right to push her on it. "Well, you can tell me about it sometime," he said, offering an out to her without shutting the door on it.
Those bruises really got under his skin in a big way, and it he could already tell it was going to be a rough thing, figuring out how to punish Norman and get him under control without hurting the weak guy on the other side. Oy. Like this situation needed more parts that were hard to figure out. "It's seriously worse than an IKEA chair," he said. "And I have no allen wrench."
The gentle touch was a surprise, since he had begun to get a general vibe from her of wanting him outside her personal space basically forever. "I know I can trust you," he said. And he did. He trusted his friends, even if they didn't know him. But Flash was going to be a toughie, and there was no getting around that. "Great. I always do better when everyone lowers their standards."