cv (ephemeras) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-04-22 13:20:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | door: marvel comics, gwen stacy, mary jane watson |
Who: Gwen and Mary Jane
What: A subway ride
Where: En route to Midtown
When: Recently, just after the anti-fear toxin wears off
Warnings/Rating: Cattiness?
Gwen woke up feeling normal, and she immediately wanted to go back to sleep. She wanted to go back to sleep, and she wanted to ignore the thoughts were quickly sifting into her mind. It was like all the things she hadn't worried about for weeks filtered in at once, and she buried her head under the pillow and pulled the blankets over her head, willing the light to stop shining through her bedroom window, willing the thoughts to go away. But she couldn't find sleep again, and she knew it was illogical to try. She flopped onto her back ten minutes later, and she stared at the familiar ceiling, counting the popcorn kernels on the dingy white and trying to remember to breathe.
Five minutes later, and Gwen was out of bed. She could never lie still when she was worried about something. It was completely against her nature to hide from things, and this was no exception. She paced, baby blue pajama pants dragging over her toes, and her blonde hair a tangled mess. She paced, and she tried to think of a way out of the maze that had become her life in the previous two weeks. Whenever she hit a mental wall, she turned, and she turned, until she wound herself up so tightly that she was in the center of the room, nowhere left to go in her mental maze.
Logic was Gwen's best friend; it always had been. When other children talked to imaginary friends and pretended to parent baby dolls and inherit queenly crowns, she'd taught herself magic tricks by counting cards in the Uno deck. Everything, even magic, had a reason, a purpose, a logical way to make sense of it. But she couldn't make sense of this. Her future was ruined, and she was ruined. That should have been enough to bring her to her knees. It would have been enough to bring her to her knees once. But she was more concerned with the shame she felt over having to face Harry again. It was, all things considered, the least pressing of her problems. But it loomed largest, and that made absolutely no logical sense.
Gwen sat down on her unmade bed, and she pulled her laptop to her. It only took seconds to find the pictures of Harry and her in the lab. She groaned, shut the laptop, and padded to the shower. A half hour later, and she was dressed in a skirt and sweater, headband holding her blonde hair away from her face, and legs encased in black thigh highs. Simply, she looked like she always did. Bravely, she walked to the subway, and she sat, trying to ignore the way the Midtown football players in the corner of the subway car pulled out their phones and pointed at her from behind them. There was only one month left of school, she reminded herself, in an effort to make herself feel better.
MJ hadn’t seen Gwen come on her car at the previous stop, too absorbed in the trig homework she should have finished two days beforehand. She had no excuse, really, for not finishing it aside from wallowing in an indulgent sort of self-pity she rarely allowed herself. Not only was she the only goddamn sane person out of all of her friends (and that was saying something, as everyone knew), but none of them seemed the little bit concerned about what had happened to her in Vegas, or how MK’s actions affected the younger redhead. She was fully aware that usually she would rebuke concerns and questions, but it would have been nice to see a little bit of worry over how she was doing, too. But, no one was worried about anything at all, were they, and that was the fundamental root of the shitshow going down at Midtown. No concern for anything, not a shred of fear or common sense to rub between most of the high school students that attended the school.
MJ might not have seen Gwen squeeze onto the morning rush hour subway car, but she heard the loud snickers and catcalls fill the crowded space through her headphones. Huffing a sigh, she pulled one out to listen to what was going on, and when she finally glanced over, she saw the hulking masses of the football players prattling in the corner, and then their target. Gwen, huddled in a corner seat and trying to avoid them as best she could. Without another thought, she slapped her textbook shut, trapping her packets within the pages, and unapologetically pushed through the grumbling, sleep deprived commuters toward the blonde. But, first, she stopped in front of that group of dumbass jocks. “Seriously?” she snapped, fixing a glare on them. They burst into a rowdy round of laughs, shouting things about overdosing and having no place to talk, slut, and MJ balked for the tiniest fraction of a second before turning away. Making sure to accidentally dig her heel into one of their toes. “Oh, oops.”
She sat next to Gwen without asking if the seat was available or even asking if she wanted company. “Hey, girl,” she said softly, almost drowned out by the rattle of the car barreling down the subway tunnel to the next stop.
Gwen was busy creating a To Do list on her phone, in an effort to visibly ignore the things the football players were saying. She was pretending, but her actions were convincing, and she felt she was doing a good job of pretending to be unconcerned by the mocking coming in her general direction. She was listening, however, at cataloguing everything. Flash had been correct, she realized, and she'd misunderstood Mary Jane's appeal. She'd always thought that Mary Jane's popularity was due, in large part, to her daring sexual behavior. But recent experience had taught her that, while Mary Jane was lauded for being sexually active, Gwen was merely ridiculed for it. She turned her attention to what other aspects of Mary Jane could cause the difference in reaction, and she was attempting to determine how much physical attributes played a role. The football players were making derogatory comments about her own lack of breasts (though they used other terms), and she had to concede that Mary Jane had a nicer physique than she did. But she didn't think it was all physical, not in that way.
She was so lost in thought, that Gwen didn't notice Mary Jane's approach. She didn't notice when the players' words shifted. Instead, she was staring at her phone, where she'd unthinkingly navigated back to the photos from Midtown's lab. She was staring at them, unseeing, and then she looked over when she heard Mary Jane's voice. The phone was tucked into the schoolbag at Gwen's hip a moment later, and she turned her face toward the redhead. "I'm back to normal," she said, sounding more like herself than she had in three weeks. She wasn't sure she needed to say more than that, and there was a silence that was filled by more snickering from the football players. "I'm glad you're back," she added. She was jealous of Mary Jane, and she was still hurt that Mary Jane had gotten with Harry, but she was glad Mary Jane had come back. She'd been worried about Flash during Mary Jane's absence, before everything went crazy. Whatever her roommate said, he was crazy in love with the redhead. Which reminded Gwen that she was angry on his behalf for the Harry thing. She looked down at her hands, now folded on her lap, and she tried to think of small talk.
MJ nodded. “Good, I’m glad,” she said of Gwen being back to normal. Okay, good. One down, three more to go, though Peter had seemed better last time she’d spoken to him as well. So, probably two down, two to go. She had no idea how Harry or Flash were doing at that moment, choosing to not push them further when they were in their weirdly poisoned and intoxicated and very irritated by both of their words and actions. Plus, she still couldn’t stomach Flash after what he’d said to her all the way back in February in Vegas. Did he show her a lick of concern, especially after what happened with MK? No. So he could kick rocks for all she cared. But, that didn’t mean she wanted him all drugged up.
“Thanks,” the redhead said because she was the first person (aside from Norman Osborn) to even acknowledge that she was gone. Most of the school probably thought MJ had gone on an extended trip to rehab or something. The news of “her” overdose in Stark Tower wasn’t a secret in Midtown, and the redhead came back to a different sort of reputation. Not tarnished, per se, but certainly changed. She almost told Gwen how it didn’t feel like people were very happy to have her back at all, but the blonde’s situation was way worse. She fell into an awkward silence, one where she began picking at the fabric of her messenger bag, and the car halted at the next stop before she spoke again. A number of people filed out, but more tried to sardine themselves in. “Don’t listen to those jackasses,” MJ told Gwen firmly. “If their brains were any smaller, they’d be drooling with their eyes rolling back into their heads.”
"Mr. Osborn is going to help track down who caused the contamination," Gwen said, because it was always easier to focus on tangible things, things with causes and effects that could be labeled and graphed. "I think there a high probability that we'll be able to trace the toxin back to someone or, at the very least, work up an antidote based on the blood samples taken and the residue in the school ventilation system." She paused, wondering if she could have stretched that particular explanation out any longer. "When I talked to Peter, he was okay. Flash still seemed completely under the influence of the toxin. Harry never got sick, like you." Because those were all their shared people, and that had taken up another fifteen seconds to say, even with the distraction of glancing over at the football players as a few of them stood up and gripped the pole a few seats down.
Gwen didn't even want to think about how Sam's arrest - her arrest - factored into all the rumors swirling around. She'd gotten herself out of jail almost as soon as she'd ended up back in New York, but the damage was done there, too. She wondered what was worse - jail or having sex with Harry Osborn in a school lab. Either way, the principal had asked to speak with her today, ands he knew mother had been called; she wasn't looking forward to that, and she tugged her sweater's sleeves down over her wrists more carefully. She watched the new people board, distracted by the addition of new students that looked at them like they were something to be gawked at. Oh, this was going to be so hard. She looked down at her hands again, before glancing up once more. "Harry isn't interested in me, you know. He's interested in you. I invited him to the lab knowing that, and when he resisted, I pushed him." She shrugged her shoulders, and she looked back out at the students around them. There, she'd said it. "He was really bummed about your fight in Las Vegas." It was the final bit of peace offering, though it left the question about Mary Jane's relationship with Flash unasked.
The intercom dinged again, indicating the door closing and the train moving onto the next stop. Over the rattle, Mary Jane watched the people just as Gwen did, green eyes boring into every nanny that dragged a crying child on, every exhausted overnight worker finally on their way home after a long shift, every 9-to-5 stockbroker sucking on their venti hazelnut macchiato from Starbucks, and she wondered if any of them truly knew what was rumbling under the surface of this city. Not just crime or whatever, but what kids like she and Gwen were going through. Suffering consequences not quite born of themselves. Paying for the mistakes of people through some door to Las Vegas, or through other doors of other fictional places. Did they know that the tracks rattling the train underneath their feet wasn’t, technically, real? MJ shook her head, too lost in thought too deep for so damn early in the morning.
She snapped out of her reverie, turned to Gwen, and raised her eyebrow. Harry hadn’t been sick? At all? Then the fact that he fled after what happened in the lab made it ten times worse. “Are you sure he wasn’t sick? Maybe he was just real good at hiding it, Gwen.” Because she refused to believe Harry would be that much of an asshole to Gwen Stacy. To her, maybe, and to any of the other girls he slept with at Midtown, probably, but never, never, ever to Gwen Stacy. And that thought had her rolling her eyes with an amused, knowing smile. “You didn’t just push him. He wanted to.” She buried the bitterness about that deep because as much as Gwen thought everyone loved her, lately MJ felt like the people that meant the most to her, the only ones that really mattered, liked Gwen much more than the redhead. “You know,” she continued with a quiet, exasperated sigh, “people are allowed to like more than one person. Harry might have a thing for me, sure, but that doesn’t matter.” MJ turned away from Gwen and stared at an ad lining the lighting fixtures across from them. Some stupid, bright thing flashing a plastic surgeon you could dial up.
The redhead rolled her eyes and tried her best not to sound too unimpressed. “Harry was only upset because, I’m sure, he got in trouble with his dad. I’d be bummed about that, too.” She’d had to deal with her own round of problems from her father when she returned after being gone for so long, and after they dealt with the ramifications of MK’s overdose, and she knew Harry’s father wasn’t the most pleasant either.
"He wasn't sick," Gwen assured Mary Jane about Harry. "Maybe he just didn't come around the school enough to become ill or, more likely, he had some kind of natural immunity. I was going to do bloodwork to see if I could tell why he wasn't affected, but we never got to that," she admitted, cheeks going bright red. She was looking down at the floor between her feet then, watching it shift almost imperceptible with the movement of the subway. Mary Jane's next words made Gwen lift her head again, though. "He said no a bunch of times, Mary Jane. I wasn't wearing underwear, and I had to put his hand under my skirt twice, and he only agreed to do anything with me because I threatened to sleep with someone in the hallway. Harry Osborn has been my best friend since we were kids. Trust me, I pushed him into it," she said, not adding that Harry had repeatedly admitted that it was a mistake. She wasn't willing to let Harry be vilified, not when she'd used every trick her stupidly virginal mind could concoct to get Harry to participate.
Gwen just gave Mary Jane a look when she said Harry could have a thing for her, and that it wasn't a big deal. She knew Harry had more than a thing for Mary Jane; that wasn't the reason for the look. Maybe she just saw things differently than Mary Jane; maybe she expected more from a guy. When she'd been with Peter, he hadn't wanted anyone but her; she could tell, and she thought it was settling otherwise. "The guy you're with is supposed to like you, not other girls," she told her. And she almost said like Flash, but she held her her tongue. If she started on that topic of conversation, she was pretty sure she'd have a hard time stopping.
"Harry didn't get in trouble with Mr. Osborn. They're getting along really great since Las Vegas," Gwen added. She thought the Goblin thing coming to light was largely responsible for that, the fact that Harry had offered to help Mr. Osborn, instead of judging him for the situation. "He's bummed out because he likes you. His girl told Sam," she added, trying to keep the jealousy out of her voice and almost managing it.
MJ smiled, something bright and knowing, even as her eyebrows raised over Gwen’s candor. She kind of expected a blushing, stuttering mess over everything that had happened; a lot of girls who MJ encountered were after something like that happening. She certainly wasn’t as cool and calculating and logical when she lost her V-card to Flash Thompson. But, then again, that was Gwen Stacy. Logical and scientific and focused on facts. Not on feelings or emotional reactions. At least, not what she’d seen. Flash and Harry and Peter would say something else, would defend her to the end of the Earth and raise her to some high pillar so all of Midtown (herself included) could ooh and ahh and worship at her thigh-high booted feet.
“It doesn’t work that way,” MJ said, as if she were the expert authority on boys and their feelings. She was better than Gwen, at least. That much was obvious. Didn’t she understand how teenage boys’ brains functioned? “It’s cool, seriously. We all do it. Just because we like one person doesn’t mean we’re blind or that we’re dead, girl. You might like someone, and still like someone else.” She looked at Gwen again, soft and trying not to sound frustrated. She was resisting the urge to say something about her obvious feelings for Harry and Peter, but Mr. Osborn won out in the end. “He checked in on me when I came back. Mr. Osborn, I mean. He was--.” She cut herself off, swallowed away the only one who cared, and instead continued with, “He doesn’t seem like the worst, at least now. Maybe he’s trying to avoid everything that’s supposed to happen. Either way, he didn’t seem like, really bad, and I’m kinda an expert on shitty dads.” As told by the bruises hidden under the long sleeves of her sweater, mottled marks lost among scars suffered from MK. Her father hadn’t been thrilled when she came back this time and had heard the rumors of her (read: MK’s) escapades.
Gwen wasn't aware of Mary Jane's thoughts about her reaction to what had happened with Harry, but she wouldn't have shown more emotion, even if she had been aware. She'd talk to Flash about it eventually, once things got back to normal, and Flash would get a more accurate representation of her feelings. Her relationship with Mary Jane, which had always been tenuous, had definitely taken a turn for the hurt when Mary Jane had hooked up with Harry. She didn't blame them for being into each other; it wasn't that. But Mary Jane had known Gwen had a thing for Harry, and Gwen was having a hard time forgiving that. She would never do that to a friend, but she saw world in a much more black and white way than most people; she knew that about herself. She knew, too, that she was never going to agree with Mary Jane about being into all kinds of people at the same time. She knew they were young, and being monogamous wasn't cool or whatever, but she was who she was, boring nerd square, despite what the Midtown student body thought right now.
Mr. Osborn was a really touchy subject for Gwen. She wanted to find a solution to the Goblin problem, because she wanted Harry to be happy. Christmas had shown her just how much Harry loved his father, and it had shown her just how badly his life could turn out if things with Mr. Osborn went sour. That brought back memories of that Harry marrying Mary Jane, only to lose her to Peter, and any warmness on her face dimmed. She glanced toward the football players, glanced toward the doors, and wished for the ride to end. "Mr. Osborn can be really nice," she said truthfully. She'd spent her entire life around the Osborns, and she'd been interning at Oscorp since she started high school, but that didn't mean she had forgotten about what Goblin had done to Sam, not by a long shot. "But we need to be careful until we find a way to resolve the issue with Goblin." The mention of shitty dads made Gwen think of her Peter, of how he'd gone to such lengths to keep Mary Jane away from her father. She'd mention it to this Peter; she was sure he'd make certain everything was okay.
MJ sighed quietly, suddenly remembering what had happened to Sam when Gwen warned her of the Goblin issue. She pursed her lips and threw Gwen a guilty sort of look. She’d forgotten about that completely. MK rarely let her in anymore anyway, just like she never let the older redhead in anymore. “I’m sorry,” she said out of nowhere. She scanned the other girl for tell-tale bruises or marks that marred her beautiful face or skin. Because Gwen Stacy was beautiful. She was beautiful and smart in a way MJ could never be and sharp as a whip, and MJ knew exactly why Peter was in love with her (at least their Peter) and why Harry was, too (because MJ was convinced of that) and why Flash was more fond of her lately. “I forg--after everything that happened with MK and at Stark’s, I forgot. I’m sorry, I’m terrible.” She refused to silently acknowledge that Flash might have been right in calling her selfish, but the pull of her mouth betrayed something. Yeah, Saint Stacy. She always had been the best out of all of them.
Which was why, at the end of the day, she didn’t deserve what was happening to her. She didn’t deserve the dirty pictures plastered on Facebook, passed through text messages, burned in people’s minds. MJ wasn’t lying when she told Peter that Gwen didn’t deserve this at all. Throw something like this at she or Harry or Flash, and most people wouldn’t be surprised. Sure, they’d point and whisper and chatter, but it was kind of expected, wasn’t it? Whatever. MJ wished she could fix all of this for the blonde, if only to assuage any sort of guilt she might have for it not being her. “Are you okay?” she asked quietly, head tilting in a sort of concern Gwen might not have witnessed before. “If you want, I can totally take the heat off you. Sleep with a teacher, flash the water polo team, OD again.” She counted each off on her finger and tried to sound more upbeat than she felt.
The apology surprised Gwen, and she gave Mary Jane the kind of confused look that normally accompanied lab results that hadn't been what she was expecting. "It's okay," she said truthfully. "It didn't happen to me. It happened to Sam." She and Sam weren't close enough for her to be scared of Mr. Osborn because of what happened, and she had gotten used to Sam's issues across the door now and how they affected her. Well, she'd gotten used to the issues enough that she didn't mention them very often. "Anyway, it was Mr. Donovan, not Mr. Osborn. Mr. Osborn didn't have Goblin at all when it happened. But he does here, and we should be careful." She had no idea what was going on in Mary Jane's mind, and she could theorize about that tug at the edges of Mary Jane's mouth, but they would just be theories. "I'm going to find a way to help him," she added, determined, the same way she approached maintaining her perfect GPA at all costs.
The question about whether or not she was okay made Gwen look around the subway. She'd seen the comments and posts on Facebook, on Twitter. There was even a grainy video clip floating around out there. No, she wasn't okay with any of that, and the way men and the football players looked at her made her uncomfortable, but there wasn't anything she could do about it. Like when her dad died, everyone just expected her to move on, and so she would. "I'm fine. It's weird, but I'll be okay," she said, and that didn't encompass her feelings about Harry's rejection, about his insistence that sleeping with her had been a mistake. It was just about people having seen her naked, and the fact that it would be okay, eventually. "Graduation is in a month, Mary Jane, and nothing that happened at Midtown will matter. And you doing something stupid isn't going to change the fact that there are pictures of me having sex all over the internet. Plus, Flash would be bummed," she added, mentioning her roommate for the first time, since Mary Jane seemed reluctant to do so herself.
MJ pursed her lips. “I’ll help, too.” It wasn’t a question, it wasn’t asking for any sort of permission; Mary Jane Watson didn’t do that. Goblin was a fundamental problem in all of their lives, and even though that sort of disease didn’t play as heavily with her as the others thought, she didn’t want any of that to happen. She didn’t want Norman to go insane, she didn’t want Harry to turn to drugs and stuff. Gwen couldn’t die, and Peter and Flash couldn’t go through the hurt of losing her. “He’s reached out to me a couple times. Maybe that’s a good sign.” He’d wanted help in Vegas, right? So, she would help him. She, Gwen, and the rest would keep all that awful stuff from happening altogether.
The redhead knew enough about pushing through things that she didn’t really want to needle Gwen into talking. She didn’t talk about nearly as much as she should have, and she knew she had no place trying to get Gwen to do what she couldn’t. Hypocrisy, USA. Population 1, Mary Jane Watson. But, that didn’t mean that she wasn’t concerned, and she didn’t think any of the boys were equipped to deal with what happened in the way a girl might. No matter how their relationship stood. “Of course it’s weird,” MJ agreed, narrowing her eyes and knowing that the other girl wasn’t completely telling the truth, but she dropped it. “Yeah, you’re right. Which is totally weird to think about. We’ll be adults soon. Big, bad world.” MJ hadn’t started to take school seriously yet, especially since she’d been so busy. It’d be a miracle if she graduated and got into some school. She rolled her eyes so hard it almost hurt, however, when Gwen brought Flash up. “I don’t think he’d give a shit right now. He and I aren’t talking, and he’s stupid spiteful.” She hadn’t spoken to Flash, not really, since the whole mess in Las Vegas, and you know what? It hurt. With Flash, and with she and Harry fighting, and with this Peter not being her Peter, she hadn’t felt so lonely in any time she could remember, and she could figure what MK felt, even the tiniest bit.
When the redhead offered to help with Mr. Osborn, Gwen just stared at her a second. "I was thinking of trying to find a way to separate the entity, based on the chemical compounds that caused the alteration in the brain," she said plainly, because that was helping in a way that wasn't going to get her thrown off a bridge. "Don't do anything victim stupid, Mary Jane. It'll only make things worse in the end," she added, because she knew how Mary Jane operated; she'd seen it before. The last thing they needed was Goblin doing something, and Flash going after Mr. Osborn for it. She wasn't worried about Peter; she was worried about Venom, and what he could do if pressed. "I finally talked Peter into leaving him alone, Mr. Osborn, so long as he doesn't do anything. I don't want to be in Sam's head if something happens to him, so we have to be careful."
And maybe Mary Jane was right. Maybe Gwen needed to talk about things, like the fact that she really needed to get tested, and that she couldn't look in a mirror without seeing her expression on the internet pictures. She had never been a head-down, shoulders-hunched kind of girl, but she was now. She was uncomfortable with non-academic attention on a good day; she didn't know what to do with this. And she just didn't trust Mary Jane enough to blurt it all out to her. Part of her relationship with the other girl was all about saving face, being cool, and she was having trouble letting go of that and feeling vulnerable around the other girl. Because no matter how bad things were for Mary Jane now, next month that would all change. She was supposed to marry the hero, no matter what anyone said. "Leaving Midtown will be nice," was all she said; leaving high school was the goal right now. She just needed to find a place to get things working for the team Flash and Peter had been discussing. And Mr. Osborn would take her on full time at Oscorp, even without college, if it came to that.
When the conversation turned to Flash, Gwen didn't say anything for a few seconds, as the subway began to slow at their stop. "His feelings are hurt. Just because you're okay with everyone hooking up with everyone, it doesn't mean he is. And you can't hold his behavior this month against him." She blushed. "We weren't us."
MJ pulled a face. Victim stupid. She wanted to snap at Gwen, ask where she’d gotten that sort of idea. Victim stupid. She let the label roll around in her head, and it felt worse than slut or drug addict or whatever else the student population had cooked up. She normally let those roll off her back, Gwen said it without any bit of malice or jealousy. Just god’s honest truth. And, that left a bad taste in her mouth, one that had her lip turning down. “Yeah, well,” MJ said, with that hint of bitterness buried away so only those who knew her best could hear it. “Let me know what you need me to do. I don’t want him to go off the deep end either.” For anyone’s sake.
“Yeah, I’m ready to get out, too.” And that was that. She didn’t say where she would be going, or what she was planning after graduation because she had no plan. How could someone plan when they were constantly being jerked around and thrown through the ringer. Maybe she would leave, maybe she would cut ties with everyone. That was what she felt they wanted anyway. If MJ was out of the equation, everything would be different, wouldn’t it? Peter would wind up with Gwen, Harry wouldn’t fall into a pit of despair and drugs, and Flash wouldn’t get his legs blown off in war. She sat up stiffly, suddenly not that walking, talking image of that girl in high school. “Flash Thompson guilting me about stuff? Yeah, okay, I forgot he’s the paragon of being good and moral.” And there, there Gwen could hear that bitterness in her voice clear as day, the venom sneaking in and dripping from her words. MJ turned to Gwen as the train skidded to a halt. “I know no one was, Gwen. But, he was acting like that before. It’s not just whatever happened to you guys.”
Gwen didn't recognize that hint of bitterness in Mary Jane's voice; she didn't know the redhead well enough to recognize it. Instead, the offer of help made Gwen think of things she'd been putting off too long, and maybe something to concentrate on (something other than the jeering boys in the corner) would be a good thing. She'd meant to use her key to Stark Tower to check out the lab, to see what was left there. Mr. Stark's lab had to be better equipped than Dr. Banner's, and Gwen needed a backup, in case things went bad at Oscorp. She knew there was a lab under the Bay, too, and maybe she could get access to it at the Tower. Decision made, she glanced over at Mary Jane. She knew Harry would appreciate her offer to help his father, she just wasn't sure she trust Mary Jane's version of help. She didn't say that, though. She just nodded. "I don't think we can do much, not until we get some good blood panels." Which she'd been remiss about too. This past month had been a wash, and they really didn't have time for that kind of distraction anymore. "Just be there for Harry, I guess." It sounded dull, even to her own ears.
"I didn't say Flash guilted you about anything," Gwen added. "He's allowed to be upset, without it being about guilting you. He likes you a lot, Mary Jane," she explained, not using the word love for Flash's sake, even though she knew that was what Flash felt for the girl at her side. "You can be upset at him, without it being about you guilting him, too." He gaze was bright blue, and she looked long and hard, wondering when they'd all changed so much. "You're so bitter now. You sound like MK," she said thoughtfully. Maybe she shouldn't have said that, but being social wasn't exactly the thing she was best at. "You messed around with Harry. Of course he's upset." Because she got that. "He shouldn't have said the stuff he said while he was on the toxin, though," she added. It said something about what Flash thought of himself and of Mary Jane.
The subway doors opened, and the football guys walked by, all raised eyebrows, and Gwen just looked down at her hands. "Go ahead. I'll be in class after lunch." Now was as good a time as any to check out the lab, and she'd avoid the early morning crush at school. It was cowardly, and Gwen hated being cowardly, but she really didn't want to walk through those crowded halls just then.
MJ’s patience was wearing thin, and she kind of regretted coming over here in the first place. Her trig homework wasn’t done, and it wasn’t like she and Gwen became BFF on the ride down, and they hadn’t gotten anywhere in the conversation. Gwen still hated her, she was sure, and nothing that the blonde said landed with her to change anything. Except maybe to just be more wary of talking to her about anything. Talking to any of them about anything. So, she just nodded about being there for Harry, when she knew he would want Gwen around more, and she rolled her eyes over Flash again. “Gwen, you don’t understand us,” MJ said carefully, aware that the words had come out of MK’s mouth recently, too. Which made the comparison to the older redhead all the more nauseating. “And, I’m nothing like her, and I can’t believe you of all people would say that to me.”
Sighing sharply, she could feel a bit of bile crawling up her throat. Was she like MK? Really? Flash had said it, but that had been in Las Vegas. She hadn’t been herself. Gwen should understand what it was like to have an addict in your head. She stood, suddenly, and nearly knocked over an older woman in the movement. She apologized profusely, catching the woman by the elbow, and looked at Gwen. “Yeah, sure. See ya around.” With a quick wave and a frown, she pushed herself out just before the doors closed, knowing that this was going to be a miserable day at Midtown already.