cv (ephemeras) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-06-24 17:35:00 |
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Entry tags: | door: marvel comics, gwen stacy, harry osborn |
Who: Gwen and Harry
What: A very public dinner
Where: Le Bernardin, Marvel
When: Recently
Warnings/Rating: None
She was dressed in expensive cream. Heeled chocolate boots to her knees, and her pale hair blown straight. It could be said that she was a late bloomer, and Gwen could explain the science of that better than anyone she knew, but suffice it to say that she wasn't the little girl she'd been when she'd left New York for California, at least on the outside. Inside, there wasn't much difference from the girl she had been, though she was disappointed in that fact. Surely personal growth could have matched the pace of physical maturity. It would have made navigating this new New York so much easier, and she'd always been an abysmal failure at social situations. Flash was easy, because Flash had always been easy. Peter was, too. But Mary Jane and Harry were both difficult for her, and they were both difficult in different ways.
Upon returning to New York, Gwen had promised herself that her competitiveness with Mary Jane Watson was behind her. She had multiple degrees, and she was a doctoral student, and she had a promising career. She wasn't the ugly duckling she had been; she was passable to look at now. She had no reason to continue feeling inferiorly insignificant around Mary Jane. But the logic, no matter how many times she played the infinite loop of proof in her mind, didn't sink in. And she'd left her initial conversation with Mary Jane feeling like the other woman was even less trustworthy than she'd been four years earlier, despite marked attempts at a clean slate.
As for Harry Osborn, surely four years was long enough to forget someone's smile. It should have been long enough, but it wasn't. The first year she'd been away, while she'd been pregnant and scared, she'd picked up the phone to call him at least a hundred times. It was the fact that he'd been so entirely reluctant to discuss what had happened between them that had stayed her hand. In those first few months, she'd blamed her constant thoughts about him on hormones. After the baby had been born, she'd blamed her constant thoughts about him on postpartum depression. After, when she hadn't forgotten, she'd simply accepted the fact that he'd been a part of her life since she could remember, and the chances of her forgetting him were infinitesimal. It had been easier then, once she'd given herself permission to miss him.
But none of that made this any easier. She waited in the lobby of Le Bernardin, making small talk with a man that was both too old for her and too eager to buy her a drink before dinner.
Harry wasn't nervous because there was nothing to be nervous about. He'd thought he'd been in love with Gwen Stacy once, but he'd been a fucked up kid with some natural inclination for trying to possess things he wasn't supposed to have. He'd invested his senior year in parties and chaos, and he'd nearly ruined some lives because of it. If his father hadn't written that letter of recommendation for Gwen, he wasn't sure that she would have gotten into her choice school so easily. Administrations were forgiving of boys when it came to bad behavior and sexual appetites, but rarely girls. That's just the way it was. Regardless of what had happened back then, Harry Osborn was assuredly a very different person now. He'd graduated from a top tier college with admirable grades, and now he worked in the corporate sector of his father's empirical company.
That last year of high school, and all of the eclectic, abstract headfuckery that came along with it, had changed Harry. He'd entered college with the determination of someone wholly aware that this was their last chance at turning things around. He didn't want to become the paragon of disaster and embarrassment that he'd witnessed on Christmas.. and he would have been lying if he didn't at least partially acknowledge that in the beginning, Gwen had been a driving point of focus for his success. While he wasn't entirely convinced that she would come back one day, he intended to see that she would at least hear about him in stock reports and see his face in the Daily Bugle's online edition. He wanted her to know that he'd done it, that he hadn't fucked everything up like he supposed she(and everyone) expected him to. At this point, his life couldn't have been more polished and, by all outside perception, perfect. His father seemed legitimately proud of him for once. Harry Osborn had it all; the career, the prestige, and even the girl. The engagement ring he'd acquired a couple of weeks ago for Lily was still in its box, tucked away in his dresser. He hadn't given it to her yet, and he was kept busy these days by coming up with new excuses for why that was. The fact that he was still regularly sleeping with Mary Jane was only one petition in the litany.
Not that he wanted to concentrate on any of that tonight. It would be so convenient to turn his brain off for once, and stop thinking so damn much.. but he just couldn't do it. The entire ride to Le Bernardin was ripe with brooding, and it was not quite alleviated by the time he arrived. Which is why, not thinking clearly, or simply not recalling that Gwen had a tendency to be early rather than punctual, he nearly walked right past her.
Harry's suit was black, but the tie was grecian blue with a complicated Eldredge knot. The cufflinks were antique silver just like the pin tacked into his tie. The pin was a simple, shining O that beckoned with as much mystery as his family name did. In his jacket's breast pocket, there was a handkerchief of delicate ivory, folded into effulgent origami. His shoes were shiny as black latex, seal eyes, and oil. Those polished shoes came to a hesitant stop in the lobby upon hearing her voice, and he turned.
Of course he knew what she looked like now. He'd stared at his computer screen with the fresh image of her Oscorp security badge for a long while on the day she started. Yet somehow he was still anticipating the Gwen he had known all those years ago, all headbands and knee-highs. Which was ridiculous, because he'd seen the evidence of her maturity, but still. When he saw her now, it was very different from any glimpse on a computer screen. The years in California functioned as sleek razors to the delightful exposure of her cheekbones. Suddenly, like he'd just blinked and it was four years later, she was more woman than girl. He saw Mary Jane all of the time, and maybe that's why she seemed so very the same to him. Peter was only slightly different in Harry's eyes, but that had more to do with actually being friends again. Harry certainly didn't feel like he'd changed much at all... even if part of him was forced to accept that with the goblin project he'd been working on lately, he'd changed in ways that nobody, not even his father, knew.
Upon noting the eager man with silver boxing his temples, who was leaning awfully close to Gwen with a Manhattan in his hand and flirtation in his eyes, Harry stalked closer with a slow, leonine pace. Hands found his pockets as he arrived behind her in a moment of perfectly rude (although likely wanted) interruption. "I didn't realize you brought a date, Ms. Stacy."
She didn't turn upon hearing his voice. It wasn't out of any scientific desire to map the auditory differences before seeing him, though she would have preferred that to be the case. It was nervousness, and that teenage girl she had been. She'd intended to return to New York having made such a drastic change that no one would remember the silly, socially awkward girl that she'd been four years early. And, perhaps, it could be argued that she'd made some progress toward that. Physically, she had matured. Conversationally, she was much better than she'd been. But inside, four years hadn't done much of anything but add a layer of intimacy that the man behind her didn't share. And she had followed his career online. Not in that first year, when she'd been trying to forget. But after, when she'd given herself permission to remember. She knew what he looked like, but she still waited a second before turning around, her cheeks rising with red that remembered how pathetically she'd begged him to kiss her the last time she'd seen him. That memory made her shoulders straighten, because it mortified her, and the only way to fend off mortification was with outward calm.
She smiled as she glanced over her shoulder, the smile something that spoke of intimacies that she wouldn't have known how to convey in high school. She hadn't slept with anyone in the intervening years, but she knew how to pretend at sexual experience now. "My new acquaintance was just keeping me company while I waited for you, Harry," she said, intentionally avoiding calling him Mr. Osborn, despite the fact that it would have been appropriate, given his greeting. And his name sounded like an unintentional caress on her tongue, but it didn't flavor of desperation, and she would count that as a win. "If you'll excuse me?" she asked, turning back to the older man just long enough to dismiss him without even a hint of her youthful stammer. It was still there, inside, the stammer, but she'd practiced in front of a mirror long enough to keep it at bay. Whether it would hold up under scrutiny was still debatable. Said older man glared at Harry, and then politely offered his business card.
When he looked at her now, he didn't reflect on the last time he'd seen her, truly seen her, witnessed her in person with his eyes, if not his hands. A smile acted on its own, sabotaging the strictly business line of his mouth, which broke into a familiar glimpse of Crest-kid teeth. There were too many years between where they stood now and high school for him to look at her and recall prom. Their dance was one of the warmest memories he had of her, and for that reason he'd buried it deep in a chained coffin, refusing to ever open it again. Forgetting what he'd done had been difficult at first, but after a few months it got easier. Of course, there were still the times when he'd get drunk and lament the old days. It felt like a curse to be so young but feel so fucking old. More experienced with pain, and loss, and bad decisions than men twice his age. The fact that nothing had gone down the way he'd trained himself to believe it was going to did manage to alleviate some of the guilt he'd felt for pursuing Gwen Stacy in the first place, although just barely.
After starting college, Harry gradually realized how wrong he'd been about everything. He'd never been in love with Gwen, not really. It was easier to believe that when she was gone, but he'd spent enough of his senior year vehemently insisting that their relationship was a lot simpler than than anything truly destined for romance. Harry wrapped himself tightly in that belief for those first few months, and ultimately it was accepted as reality. Even emotions respond to conditioning.
And now look at them. They were both admittedly successful, and in Harry's opinion, the most successful out of their friends. That realization(because it was the first time that Harry had begun to think of himself as successful) made him smile, and even if he was far from ignorant of the way the businesscardshark was glaring daggers his way, Harry overlooked it in favor of Gwen. A knife to his neck would have been easy to overlook while she was here and close and new somehow while seeming so comfortably the same. God, he'd missed her.
"Our table is ready," he assured her with no inclination to actually check if it was ready, or even to check if the reservations had been appropriately made. An Osborn could have walked into any restaurant in the city on the busiest night of the year and had their choice of table. He did not take her arm, and he did nothing a formal escort would do in this situation. Harry just strode toward the hostess with her crayola smile. Maybe it was subliminal, not touching Gwen, not hugging her, no leading brush of fingers on the crook of arms. Part of him still wanted to forget her so badly that the addiction she promised frightened him as much as it lured. The thing about Harry Osborn was that he was a lot stronger than he used to be. Self-control was his testament.. and it was just like they'd always joked when they were kids, he was going to be her boss one day. It was best to find some vein of professionalism now.
He might not have been reflecting, but she couldn't help it. She'd told Peter she was over him, and she'd believed it at the time. She'd believed the truth she'd wrapped around herself for the past four years. It wasn't scientific, though she tried to find explanations that centered around chemistry and childhood emotion. But, in the end, the need to believe she was over him had nothing to do with science, unless the science of survival was taken into consideration. Four years was a long time, and time was supposed to cure things like puppy love, which she'd almost convinced herself was the full weight of what she'd felt for him. But standing there, pretending to have absolutely no interest in him beyond reconnecting with an old friend, she had to admit that her hard-earned denials didn't stand up so well under the petri dish of close contact. Perhaps, she considered, trying to view it with a scientist's eye, distance and time only made things heightened. But there was no indication of that on her features. If there was one thing she had no intention of doing again, it was making him feel the discomfort of needing to reject her. Her memories of prom were stark white and shame red. She remembered begging him to kiss her, and she remember him telling her that he wouldn't. Then, and she remembered it very clearly, she remembered forcing the kiss on him anyway.
She was lucky he was standing there, with her, at all.
And she agreed about how successful they were. If things were better between them, she would have quipped about it. Maybe, after a strong drink, she would.
She didn't question his assertion that their table was ready. She'd spent enough of her childhood in the Osborn home to know what the name brought with it, and she knew the respect it garnered in this city. Luckily, she also knew no one seemed to recognize her as the baby-faced, flat-chested girl from a sex video, so she didn't immediately worry about being recognized with Harry. It had been one of the main reasons for taking care of her appearance before returning to New York. She wanted to leave that Gwen Stacy behind.
She noticed that he didn't touch her, and she followed his lead there, though she wanted to hug him so badly that she could almost imagine a phantom ache from it. When the hostess stopped at the well-placed table, she thanked the woman and took her seat, all the training her mother had put her through as a child ensuring that in this, at least, she wouldn't embarrass him. She deferred to him on the selection of the wine, and she paid the right amount of attention to her menu, before suggesting the chef's selection.
She looked across at him, then, and she tried to decide where to begin. Her expression went soft, fond and honest. Underneath the grown-up looks and demeanor, she was still very much Gwen Stacy, and there was candor and hope in her cornflower blue eyes. "I missed you," she said, because it was the truth.
There was no reason that he shouldn't be over her. It was the most reasonable thing to be at this point, and Harry was a rather reasonable guy these days.. except, of course, when he wasn't. Whatever had happened between them was from years ago, and he was always going to have to acknowledge that the steps he'd taken with Gwen had never been meant. Nowhere in their history was that kind of thing written, and while Harry was now forced to accept that they might not have to live and die by the code of comic books it still didn't feel right.
There was a sense of wonder that came with thinking of the future. Gwen and Harry could create their own greatness, they were two people who were never meant to survive and see the happy ending. Yet here they were. Gwen was going to live, and Harry was going to salvage his father's name. Wise men might say that only fools rush in, but Harry had undoubtedly set in motion some different strain of universe for himself when he'd started looking at Gwen Stacy as more than just a friend.
He used to regret it, the guilt over her had been cloyingly sweet for years, spoiled strawberry milk in his memories. But now all of that was gone, replaced by the cool acceptance that came from true absolvement. Things were going great for both of them, and when he'd heard that she'd graduated(as if there had ever been a doubt about it), it was probably the proudest he'd ever been in his life. Which was strange, because it had nothing to do with himself. The feeling had to come from some selfish place, Harry knew, because he knew himself. Maybe it went back to all of those talks when they were kids, when they'd promised to be great. Now it was happening for her, and surely that meant it could happen for him.
"I missed you too," he said with a smile aimed at his own lap while he unfolded the white linen of a table napkin. It felt great to see her for once and think about now rather than then. It helped that she looked so mature, it made everything else feel like forever ago. Hell, in the short span of their lives, it practically was.
The bottle of wine he ordered was white, a crisp pinot grigio that promised to go well with the tonight's featured fish. He might never realize that he always ordered red wine(merlots and cabs and summered berry blends) with Mary Jane while the whites (classic, sparkling, delicate chantilly moscatos) were only thought of with Gwen. Not that he'd ever ordered a bottle of wine for her, only stolen them from his father's cellar and brought them along to their playdates.
Harry refused to be nervous, although being sober didn't help, and he paid more attention to his menu than was necessary even though he knew he was too distracted to do anything more than order at random. Finally, he set his hands on the table, and he smiled at her all the way across the white tablecloth as their table attendant uncorked the wine and poured a generous glass for both. "Are we supposed to talk about work tonight?" It seemed silly to do so, although wonderfully safe at the same time. For the first time in a long time, he felt a twinge of jealousy. Things would be a lot easier if he had Peter's easiness in conversation or Flash's ability to not care about ease at all. Instead, Harry was trapped somewhere in the middle. Carrying too much, and refusing to care.
Withholding oxygen from the brain was a terrible idea. It caused hypoxia, which could do anything from causing permanent damage to the organ, to causing momentary inability to think clearly. Gwen knew these things, and yet she was fairly sure she'd been holding her breath until he answered about missing her too. Admittedly, she would have passed out before any true damage was done, but the concept remained. If she was disappointed that he managed to look down at the napkin on his lap while he said it, she managed to hide it admirably, and there was only a smile waiting for him when he looked up, pale blue eyes and a little sheepish at the outburst.
"I didn't have one alcoholic beverage during my entire time at Stanford," she admitted, not caring that he would label her as the same geek he had always known through that admission alone. It was an affectation for her to pretend to care about things like that; she could manage it for a few minutes, on the surface, but she forgot the charade the longer she was around someone. "And now I've had two glasses since I've been back," she said, holding up the white once it was poured. She sniffed it, having seen her father do it often enough in her childhood to emulate the swirl of liquid and the delicate movement of wrist. "This is nice," she said truthfully, pale blonde refinement and the kind of quiet pleasure on her face as she took a sip that made the waiter smile proudly.
As for talking about work, she shook her head a little. "Only if you want to. I'd rather hear what you've been up to for the past four years without me," she said, a hint of her old confident teasing, and enough hopefulness to indicate that the exterior hadn't changed the interior very much. "I'll return any information you provide with equally weighted information," she suggested, smoothing the linen tablecloth with long fingers gone graceful over time. "I can start," she offered, and she tried not to look at him too long, but she failed. He'd always been so handsome. Even as children, she'd told him so. She'd told her father she was going to marry him. She'd told his father she was going to marry him. She'd been too young at the time to realize he might not love her in return. "One, I really hated how thin dorm room walls were. My roommate never, ever slept. Two, I spent every Wednesday afternoon at the beach, regardless of the weather. Sometimes, I would sit there beneath a poncho and still get drenched. Three, when I got really homesick, I would watch Disney movies, just like we did when we were kids, with sugared popcorn and really good chocolate." She paused, her expression and smile earnest. "I really wanted to call you on Skype those days, to make you watch with me," she confessed.
"Was nobody at Stanford willing to inaugurate you into the club for binge drinking?" The question was paired with a slightly disbelieving laugh which also managed to be unassuming. Stanford was a top contender for the party school of the ivy league.. but Gwen Stacy was Gwen Stacy. Without outside influences like Flash or himself, he just couldn't see her breaking rules or curfews. He remembered her as being popular in high school, although it was the kind of vague observance taken from the same small room with the same shallow view of their student body. For a kid who always had more than enough, it was easy to fit in. He'd always thought that the case was the same for Gwen, but it wasn't until the most recent couple of years that he could truly reflect. People looked at her differently when her father died, he remembered now. She'd become someone who people prefered to whisper about and grow quiet around, the perfect feeding frenzy for a relentless student body. Harry prefered to think that things would be different now, as they were assuredly not children.. but people were still judgmental and speculative.
A helix of paranoia sprouted hydra heads as those thoughts collided with the awareness that somebody was looking at them. Even if the businessman seated a few tables away was only glancing past them, there was a momentary and (for Harry) uncomfortable locking of eyes between him and the other that confirmed a half dozen worries that had no voice of their own. Harry suddenly wondered if it was unacceptable that he'd taken Gwen, an employee, here. Their picture would inevitably be taken, and while Harry was accustomed to that degree of privacy invasion in his own life, he hadn't considered Gwen's involvement until right now. After all, they'd had a few infamous pictures that headlined their lives in the past.
Distantly, he was aware of the fact that Gwen was talking. Her voice was warmer than he remembered, still teasing but far from adolescent, impeccably cultured without becoming marred by an accent of haughty grandeur like a lot of the girls who'd grown up too fast in the bittersuite, upper echelon of their city. He consciously made an effort to look at her again, aware of the fact that he was being lousy company. Harry reached for his wineglass and took a long sip. The cold helped him think, the crisp effulgence cleared everything but her away for the moment.
He smiled when she mentioned movies and sugared popcorn. He could remember young movie marathons with her where they'd eaten so much they'd gotten sick. Sugar coma and all, it was easily one of the greatest days of his life. Definitely one that he would reflect on when he was lonely himself, and Harry's grin turned sheepish when he realized that it had never occurred to him to try and recreate the moment for nostalgia's sake. "I can't remember the last time I watched a movie," he admitted. The statement wasn't brought out of sadness, but rather a self-deprecating amusement mounted at the expense of his own life. He didn't do a whole lot these days that didn't involve Oscorp or obsession aside from occasionally burying his body in Mary Jane's or Lily's for the pure need to think about something other than goblins for an hour.
"I would have watched with you," he admitted with honesty. Even if Harry kept staring at his hands, his words were genuine. He wasn't sure what he felt when he looked at her, the radiating familiarity of her smile was a spear he took willingly, and Harry felt like he gave every thought in his head away when he looked at her. He didn't know how not to smile, he tried. It just kept creeping up on him all over again. He didn't even realize that listening to her had chased the paranoia off, shadows shrinking away from her gold glow.
Aware that it was his turn to share if he wanted to keep the conversation going, which he did, Harry took another taste of wine from his glass. "I lived at home while I was at Columbia, it kept me from getting distracted."
"I was at Stanford to earn impressive enough degrees to earn myself a corner office and freedom over what projects I worked on, Harry Osborn," she reminded him, the teasing of their youth in her voice, if warmer and more grown. No longer the scared little girl, at least not on the surface. If he scratched beneath the skin, he'd find that she wasn't so different, but she didn't expect him to scratch. And he was right about high school. At first, it had been great. Sure, she'd been a nerd, but she'd been the kind of nerd that still fit in. She'd bossed the jocks around, had the right address, and she'd come from the right kind of family. It wasn't until her father had died that things got uncomfortable. First Peter - her Peter - abandoned her, and then her mom had started drinking, and then the sex photos and video had gotten leaked. She tried to write off the entire final half of her senior year, but that was hard when it had so many repercussions in her life. And she knew, better than him, that Flash had been right about rumors following her through her adulthood. It was hopeful to think her childish indiscretions would be forgotten, but the Osborn name was too big, too powerful, and scandal attached to it would always resurface. Part of her thought that was only right. After all, more than one permanent thing had come from her youthful indiscretion, hadn't it?
The reminder made her go a little pale, and she drank her wine too quickly as a result, wanting the reassuring buzz. The waiter refilled, and she thanked him gratefully. A glance told her that Harry wasn't paying close attention, and she was torn between being hurt and thankful. A camera flashed somewhere, and she blinked; she'd forgotten what that was like. At Stanford, she'd gone unnoticed. Here, with Harry, that wasn't ever going to be an option.
She watched him sip from his wineglass with too much interest, as if the act itself was something to be placed under a microscope for observation. His smile pulled her back into the moment, and her own expression warmed as his did. "I missed that smile," she said honestly, and she almost regretted it a second later. But she was still herself, even with the veneer of sophistication. She had missed his smile, and there was still enough social awkwardness to her to make her say it, instead of just thinking it. But his admission that he hadn't seen a movie in a long time made her frown. "We should see one," she suggested, as a camera flashed somewhere. "Maybe in private," she added, for his benefit. She didn't think about the possible discomfort he would experience being alone with her, because she was determined not to throw herself at him. That made all the difference, didn't it?
His admission that he would have watched a movie with her made her stare. It was a soft stare, all brilliant blue and golden arched brows, surprised. "I really thought you wouldn't want to hear from me," she admitted. There was no point in couching that truth, was there? And he was smiling, so this couldn't be going so terribly. She had missed that smile. Once she'd believed that was only for her. That other girls just wanted that expression directed toward them, but that she (as his friend) really had that kind of affection from him.
Her head was swimming a little by the time he said he'd lived at home while he was at Columbia. "I always assumed you'd be the most popular fraternity brother at Columbia," she said honestly. He'd always been popular without trying. "You didn't miss anything by not living in a dorm. I actually missed my terrible little apartment with Flash." She went quiet when the food arrived, giving the chef her polite attention as he explained his selections.
"It was lonely," she added, reaching for her fork.
Gwen's affirmation that she'd missed his smile made the expression widen despite Harry's original aspirations for guarding against sentiment joining them for dinner. The spring-warm bloom of a broken laugh seemed almost guilty. Although it was followed by the exaggerated rolling on his eyes that was reminiscent of younger years, movies and sugared popcorn years. He could remember those movies vividly now, and it left Harry with a kind of bewildered amazement that he'd managed to forget their better days at all. He remembered those long, dark afternoons in his home. His father was always gone in those days, at Oscorp deep into the night, and sometimes not even home by the time Harry rose for school the next morning. Having Gwen over had pulled a bit of warmth back into the dark corners of the Osborn mansion, even if she had been a girl at a time when boys did not have friends that were girls. Harry could remember a point when Gwen Stacy had been his only friend.
He knew about lonely.
Hearing her say such a thing about Stanford kept him quiet for a moment longer as he started on his second glass of wine. He toyed with his own fork for a moment, rolling the sterling tongs against the delicate edge of his plate without any inclination of spearing food any time soon. A shadow of that former smile remained, the sliver side of a crescent smirk, as he considered that she must have been joking about him having the potential for frat royalty. That sounded more like Flash's kind of gig. Even now Harry didn't quite grasp that he didn't see himself in the same way that everyone else seemed to. It had always seemed to him, especially when they were in high school, that he was too caught up in his own head, too determined to be solitary, too disappointing, and way too morose to be popular. But he had been, and money always counted for something.
"Why would you think I didn't want to hear from you?" Harry finally asked while spearing a single haricot vert with his fork, and while he glanced up at her before dropping his eyes back to his food, the question was slow to form and therefore genuine. It'd been weighing on him since she'd said it. Honestly, it had seemed pretty obvious to him that Gwen wanted and needed nothing to do with him after she'd headed off to California. He'd been so surprised when she actually came back to New York that he was still soaking in the shocking rays of it. He still couldn't quite believe that she was here, and he was still having trouble looking her in the eye. Harry lifted his wine and drained the second glass with annoyance over his nerves.
When his smile widened, hers brightened, and it was something she was consciously unable to prevent from happening. Peter Parker had always made her shuffle her feet shyly, and Flash Thompson had always made her relax, but Harry Osborn had always made her happy in a way that she'd stopped trying to rationalize a long time ago. His laughter made the last vestiges of politeness slide away, leaving behind the trusting girl she'd always been where he was concerned. She laughed when he rolled his eyes, and she reached across the table and flicked one of his knuckles, not even thinking about the fact that this was a restaurant for elite, quiet sedateness, and not for laughter or the flicking of knuckles. It was supremely evident that she was enjoying herself in his company, because she'd never perfected the art of acting nonplussed; her life would have been easier if she had. She was a socially awkward, open book, without any of Mary Jane's coyness. "Do you remember?" she asked him, rapidly losing herself in memories of better times. Living parents, and before she'd stopped knowing how to act around him. "We would play hide and seek in the mansion, and I would always win, because your choices were perfectly logical and patterned." And she remembered, too, when those games ended in both of them sitting quietly against a cold wall, knees bent, her head on his shoulder and their fingers entwined, because that was the best way she knew to comfort him.
She watched him twirl his fork, marveling in the movement of joints beneath skin in a way that only a lover of science could manage, and she considered the best response to his question. She looked up at him, candor replacing the smile on her features, and she sighed. "I wanted to come back here and be refined and say all the right things," she told him, but the longer she spent around him, the harder that was to do. "How do people do it, Harry? Recreate themselves?" she asked, trusting him to give her an honest response. Another sigh, and she returned her attention to his question, her gaze dropping again as he speared the greenery on his plate. She took a polite bite of her own food.
She knew there was an apology to be made, but that didn't make it any easier to actually make it. "The last time we saw each other, I pressured you," she said, setting down her fork as her cheeks began to burn. "Before that, too, and I need to apologize for that. I never wanted to make you uncomfortable, " she said. It was ineloquent, but it was out, and she hoped that was enough.
Harry knew they looked ridiculous, both grinning like fools over their plates. He was a constellation of dimples and star-bright teeth while Gwen was the simpering kaleidoscope of every warm memory he could afford to relive. For the first time in a long time, he didn't care what other people might think. A story would inevitably make its way to the round table of gossip queens, but that couldn't be avoided in a city of exploit. And who cared? Maybe it was the first stage warmth of wine blowing coals through his veins, but Harry didn't believe that people were nearly as vicious in their storytelling as they had been in high school. Besides, that was years ago. He would be engaged soon, and eventually married, and all the while Gwen would work at Oscorp with him, so it seemed like it was best to establish their friendship to the public sector now. Its not like anything was going on. It's not like he'd ever do that to her again.
"I remember," he murmured over the rim of his wineglass before pointing a finger of accusation her way. "I remember you always won because you were a cheater. I said it then, and I'll say it again now. The only difference is," and he leaned close to the table to share a plotting secret with that revived and less-than chivalrous grin, "is that you can't hit me on the ear. We're not eight." But part of him wished that they were. As sad as he'd been then, he'd grown sadder as the years wore on. Harry had lost his mother as a child, and he'd always been alone then. His father cherished privacy too much, even then, to employ housekeepers or doormen.. so Harry was always alone. As a child, he hadn't made friends easily. Children don't care about money or family names. That was an age when somebody's daddy being a fireman was more impressive than if he was a stockbroker or entrepreneur, and everybody just thought that the quiet Harry Osborn was too weird. It wasn't until they'd grown older and became transfused with an appreciation for wealth that he became one of the popular kids. But he remembered Gwen Stacy as always being well-liked, always beautiful and laughing and accepted. Until he'd ruined her reputation.
And it was his fault, he didn't need anybody to tell him that, it was so fucking obvious. He knew better. A girl like Mary Jane was tough enough to handle the aftermath, but not Gwen. She'd always wanted to help people, being wronged by them had taken something away from her that he wasn't sure she could get back. Even if he hadn't meant for those pictures to become public knowledge(he'd tried to contain it), he doubted that she could ever trust him again.
Harry followed her lead, remembering to take a bite of his food. It was good, exceptional really. Delicate in flavor, precise in structure, and entirely forgotten when she started to blush. Confused, Harry straightened, wondering for a moment if he'd started to zone out in his head like he did so often these days. But no, he'd heard her. He just didn't understand. "Pressured me? You don't make me uncomfortable, Gwen." Which was a lie, but he didn't want her to know that.
She wondered, as she sat there watching him smile, if anyone had conducted any serious scientific study on the subject of dimples and their effect on others. She ducked her head, blonde hair skimming her cheek and her smile completely genuine and stupidly raw. It was the kind of smile that spoke of fondness, of adoration, and that didn't realize that hiding itself was the best thing to do in an upscale restaurant filled with piranha. Yes, highschoolers were cruel, but socialites were even worse, and she didn't even realize that they were sowing the seeds of future gossip with their innocent smiles. When she was sitting there, with him, it felt like the entire world would accept anything they decided upon in tandem, and it had always been that way for Gwen, since their youth. Together, she'd believed them unstoppable. Once puberty came, bringing girls who Harry never remembered the morning after, and boys who Gwen was always too shy to approach, she'd held firm to that belief, that their future was each other. And she'd been right, hadn't she? Here they were, embarking on their respective futures together.
Her wine glass was refilled, just as she gasped in pretend outrage at Harry's suggestion that she was a cheater. She took a sip as he leaned forward, conspiracy and that less-than chivalrous grin making parts of her melt that she'd forgotten existed during the past four years. She matched the lean with one of her own, wine glass on the table and the dress baring a little more chest than was decent with the movement. "I'll still flick your ear, Harry Osborn," she promised him, conspiracy, whisper and red lips gone up at the corners. "You're no scarier than you were when we were eight." But he was, just in different in ways. In ways that were entirely and scientifically mature, and that she understood had everything to do with chemistry and the body's instinct to procreate. And she wondered then, as she had every night for years, what they'd created together.
She sat back, and she took a longer sip of the wine, because she suddenly needed it in a way she had never required an alcoholic beverage. She took another few bites of her food, though her stomach threatened to revolt at the very idea, but she managed, and she looked at him when he finally voiced the question about being pressured. She forgot to chew for a second, and then her fork was set down and the wine glass was finished. She could just imagine the headlines in the morning: Captain Stacy's daughter an alcoholic, just like her mother.
"To kiss me," she finally said honestly, because what was the point in new beginnings with lies? And wasn't that the most hypocritical thought that had ever entered her head. But she'd get there, eventually, she told herself. She hadn't considered it, but sitting there with him, she decided to tell him... eventually. "I pressured you to kiss me, and I made you uncomfortable. Let me finish?" she asked, before he could decide to say something gallant and kind. "I never meant to make it difficult for you to be around me, and I'd like to prove to you that it won't happen again, if you'll let me?" she asked, telling herself that the dimple incident from moments earlier would not repeat itself.
Oh, she didn't need to pretend with him. He remembered that she was a cheater with avid detail. Even with candyland, he was certain that she bent the rules and dropped some trick cards in their deck. At least, that's what he'd insist on now. He'd never admit to all of the times that he'd let her win, be it in boardgames or hide and seek. It wasn't the Osborn way to throw oneself down with defeat, and these days Harry was very much living up to his Osborn heritage. For the first time ever, really. Harry felt like he'd always been a disappointment before, but things felt different recently.
As they polished off the wine bottle, Harry motioned for another to follow. They took bites of dinner sparingly, and that seemed like the best way to keep their dinner forever extended. Even if their conversation was stained with lapses of awkward silence and toothy grins, he wouldn't have minded if it went on forever. Her statement on the kiss actually surprised him, though. Which was obvious by the way he straightened, tilting his auburn head to the right. "Gwen," he said softly before she interjected with insistence.
Then, after she spoke, he continued. "I can promise that you didn't force me into kissing you at prom." It seemed so ridiculous and so long ago that he could be honest now. "I was.. half in love with you senior year, and long before that really." He smiled, as if the confession was nothing because it was then and not now. God, how he needed it to not be now.
"I'm sure you felt an obligation to kiss me because of what we'd --" Correction. "What I'd done, but I don't remember the exact details of what we spoke about." He admitted that with apologetic nonchalance. It was his default mechanism, but simultaneously gave the impression that such things were not important enough to recall.
She turned down desert when it was offered, and she regretted it a moment later, because she would have no excuse to sit there once the meal came to its inevitable end. She was wine-buzzed by then, comfortable and much less stressed than she'd been when the evening began. And she didn't want to leave. Her expression had gone happy, gone dreamy, despite the turn the conversation had taken, and she was on the brink of telling him how much she'd missed him about a dozen times throughout the end of the meal.
She let her eyes drift shut when he said her name, because she'd forgotten what that sounded like. It was the moment - the true moment - when she realized that nothing had changed for her. She could pretend. She could spend time with Peter and she could hope that the fondness she felt for him turned into something that overshadowed this, but for now, well...
"Force might be too strong a word. Pressured?" she conceded, assuming that was where he was going with his rebuttal, but then he said he'd been half in love with her, and all she could do was stare at him, her lips slightly parted and something that looked very much like surprise and regret mingled on her features. "I didn't feel any obligation," she said too quickly. She gave him a shrug of thin shoulders that she still hadn't quite gotten used to, none of the young girlishness of her youth in the movement, and all newly grown coltishness in the angles of her collarbones. "I wanted to grow up and marry you since we were five years old, Harry Osborn. I didn't feel any obligation," she repeated, slowly this time, red cheeked and with a quick fold of her linen napkin, which she set on the table.
She could have stood and excused herself. Her heart was racing, and her head was spinning with recriminations for things she'd done years earlier, all based on the belief that she disgusted him. But she didn't excuse herself. The past was done, and she couldn't change it. "Will you give me a ride home?" she asked instead, boldness tempered with shyness in her tone.
Harry felt the need to argue with her, and he recognized that she inspired that in him too often. Not that the awareness kept him from speaking up. If anything, it encouraged him. "And I wanted to marry you as well when I was five, Gwen Stacy." A pronunciation of her last name felt important somehow. Like it would give him a branch to cling to during the inevitable wave goodbye. The folding of her linen seemed strangely meticulous, and Harry watched the movement of her slender fingers like he expected them to give up some secrets about who she was now and what she'd been up to in all the time between back then and right this moment. He went further, and would later blame it on the wine, "When I was five, I imagined we'd be married by exchanging candy, and by six, I understood there were rings. When I was eight, while you were hiding downstairs, I took my mother's old ring out of dad's safe because I intended to ask you then.. but I got scared and hid it away again."
Harry shook his head, enamoured with the innocence of the memory, and a little too buzzed to bother being mortified by telling her that bit of truth. It seemed so long ago that there was no danger in letting her know about it now, even the admission of how he'd felt about her in high school was made mild by the passing of time. But he didn't want to ruin their dinner by talking about that, because it seemed to Harry that discussing the silly crush he'd had on her was kind of depressing. When she asked about getting a ride, Harry took that to mean that she was ready to leave. He shrugged while withdrawing a credit card in order to pay the bill, "My driver can give you a ride home, its practically on the way."
"I stole the lace table runner once, because I decided I needed to have a veil for our wedding. I discussed it with my father at the time, when he came in and saw me tying it around my head, and he explained that I was much too young to get married, but that he'd give us his blessing when the time came. I was eight." She smiled at the memory, warmth and sadness and the desire for those much simpler times all writ on her face like the numbers in an algorithm. "If I was fanciful and romantic, instead of being a logical academic, I would point out that for at least that one year, when we were eight, we wanted the same thing." Wistfulness clouded her voice, just the smallest hint of a wine slur touching the ends of her words, and she smiled at him across the table and wished they could turn back time. Maybe that should be her area of study; time travel. She could fix all of their problems if she could just find a way to go back and reverse all the wrongs in their lives. Save his mother, and save her father, for starters.
She considered clarifying that she wasn't in a hurry, once she realized that he had interpreted her request as desire to leave, but she held her tongue, not wanting the wine to make her sound desperate. The last thing she wanted to do was plead for him to stay with her, and she might just do it if she wasn't careful. Logic dictated that type of a response would sound like begging him to kiss her had, all those years ago. She tried for Mary Jane's flirty, casual tone, and she failed at delivering it when she spoke. "You don't mind sharing your car with me?" she asked. It didn't quite make it to being flirty, but there was something like a smile around her cornflower blue eyes, something inviting that said she was being playful, even if it didn't exactly translate into something that people who knew her casually would recognize.
She watched the waiter return with the credit card, and she excused herself for a moment, disappearing into the bathroom, where she ran cold water over her fingers and tried to coax the red from her cheeks. She was a sway in her heeled boots when she returned, finding walking much harder in her buzzed state than sitting had been. She smiled at him, shy and sheepish and older.
"Your father would have never let you marry me," but Harry smiled when he said it. As if finding a way around that would have been quite the adventure. It had been too long since he'd reminisced on those days. Although he talked to Mary Jane fairly regularly, he'd really only gotten to know her while they were in high school. The same went for Peter. Gwen was the one that had known him the longest, and back then it had seemed like she'd loved him enough to forgive him for anything. He'd taken advantage of that, although he understood now that she might never see that for the truth that is was. Gwen was forgiveness and halo warmth while Harry.. he was sick, all of the reprehensible things got tacky and stuck to his soul. The warmth of his smile ultimately collapsed a little around the edges of his mouth, and he knew that they were both probably thinking of the fact that her father was long gone now.
He signed the bill while she made her momentary escape, taking the complementary digestif of cognac in a hard swig that was nothing like the savoring swirls of more grown men all around him. When he drank the thought went away. The thought didn't have a function or a name, but was more like an umbrella mist that made it difficult to think about anything else but the thought. Right now it centered on Gwen, and sometimes it centered on the city and how fucked up everything was.. but mostly it centered on his father.
Harry stood when she approached. He lifted his hand momentarily, designed to take her elbow or her hand, but he thought better of it and let the fingers fall to his side before they even made it to half-mast. "Are you ready?" The valet would have the car up in moments, and the idea of riding with her in the back was not nearly as daunting as it would have been earlier. The wine surely helped, but it also helped to recognize she was very much the girl he'd known in high school. That was comforting when so many other things were changing.
"You're probably the only person my dad would have let me marry," she countered. "He respected your dad," she reminded him. Her dad hadn't liked any boys that spent a lot of time around her, but her mom had always said he'd calm down when she was older and found the right man. That never happened, and he'd died asking Peter to stay away from her. She was glad for her escape to the bathroom after that. She was glad for the poison that made her head woozy and that took away the sad bite of memory. In her youth, she'd made so many comments about not understanding the unhappiness in other people. She'd had the kind of sheltered life that made melancholy and malaise foreign entities. She'd thought herself lucky, at the time, but now she wondered if it wasn't worse. If she wouldn't have been better served learning about life's ache's and pains earlier, and being conditioned and worn down like a rock in a riverbed, instead of being hit with it all in high school and never entirely recovering.
Was she ready? She nodded, watching his fingers fall back to his side. She considered for a moment, the blue of her eyes bright as she focused on the problem at hand, even through the warm buzz of the alcohol. A second later, she slid her arm through his, convincing herself that he'd been intending to do it himself. Ergo, the prospect must not be such an unpleasant one. It was flawed logic, but the wine had gone to her head, and flawed logic seemed eminently sound. She leaned against the long line of his arm, and she refrained from gazing up into his face the way the lovesick girl she'd been would have done. This was perfectly acceptable, she reminded herself. After all, they'd grown up in the polite circles of society where offering someone an arm was considered perfectly acceptable.
When the car pulled up, she forgot to be nervous. Her head was spinning enough that taking a seat in the cool, dark interior felt like a good idea. She was loathe to let go of his arm, and she held onto it for as long as was permissible, before climbing into that welcoming darkness. "I'm at Herald Tower, on 34th," she said of the address was comfortably wedged between acceptable and not-acceptable, even as she sat down and smoothed her skirt down over her thighs, entirely unaware of the attention they were garnering by getting into a vehicle together.
Harry slid into the back of the town car alongside Gwen, ignoring the small flock of people that turned to watch them leave the restaurant. Although dark out, it was still early enough that people were arriving for a late dinner. The whitehot buzz of wine left him unaffected when he would have normally been paranoid. Honestly, it didn't even occur to him that anybody might have recognized Gwen. She'd been away from the city for so long that her face wasn't bound to be all that familiar. Meanwhile, Harry was quite used to being recognized on sight. Doubletakes and second guessing glances were nothing new while making his way across a sidewalk.
Inside the car, it was quiet. Other side of the galaxy quiet with a darkness that was barely permeated by the glow of dash lights before them. The windows were tinted, dark as their past. There was no radio on, and the driver had cloaked himself in road-focus to such a degree that the uniformed man seemed robotic and separate from the heady buzz they shared in the backseat. Harry dropped his head against the leather rest and closed his eyes, concentrating on the recycling whirl of cool air from slim vents above them. He wasn't drunk enough to not recognize how ridiculous it would have been for him to tell her again how much he'd missed her. Harry hadn't even realized how much until right now. She still looked at him like he could do no wrong, and that kind of unconditional affection had once been difficult for him to swallow. Now he was forced to accept that that was the sign of a true friend.
After a minute, he realized that they'd been cruising along in silence, and he opened his eyes to look over at her.
Unaware of his thoughts, she'd looked out the window at first, watching New York slip by in an old familiar pattern of lights muted by darkened windows and the car's quiet. That only lasted a few moments, before she realized he'd closed his eyes, and that gave her the safety to look at him, instead. In the minimal glow of the car's back seat, he was shadows and copper. His jaw had gotten more defined, and he'd lost some of the softness to his cheeks. There were indications of where lines would eventually show around his mouth, and a hint of the dimple that perpetually tormented her when he smiled.
She was buzzed enough that she allowed herself to turn slightly in the seat to see him better, her cheek pillowed against the smooth leather and her blonde hair clinging to string and the edge of his suit jacket's shoulder. She wondered that everything she'd told herself in the past four years about her nonexistent feelings for him could be destroyed over one meal, and she wondered if there was any scientific validity in any of her convictions while away. And, sitting there, she lamented the past and wondered about things she hadn't allowed herself to think about in years. Boy or girl, blonde or copper, dimples or no dimples.
When he opened his eyes and looked at her, she was cornflower blue, unfocused and slightly hazy, staring at him unapologetically. Caught in the act, her cheeks went red, but the wine had settled to warmly in her belly for any immediate reaction other than the flush of redness. She didn't look away, and she didn't fill the car with nervous chatter or noise. Instead, she just gave him a smile, and she reached for his hand on the car seat and twined her fingers with his. She was buzzed enough not to realize that repeating her missing of him was a bad idea, so she voiced what he hadn't. "I missed you." Earnest, and with none of Mary Jane's flirting or with the distanced demeanor she believed she'd perfected at Stanford. She had so many regrets, and there was a hint of sorrowed shadow in her eyes that hadn't been there when he'd last seen her. But still, her unflinching gaze was steady, and she didn't look away.
"I know," he whispered when Gwen spoke again about how she'd missed him. Harry could see it written on her face, he'd seen it all night. When she reiterated it now, he was forced to accept that he'd been a coward not to contact her, to actually think that she wouldn't have wanted him to. Regardless of what had happened between them, she was a friend. Harry understood now that avoiding her had been selfish. He'd wanted her to forget what had happened, he'd wanted to get over her, he'd needed to move on. He should have just been able to accept what had happened and owned up to it with some semblance of responsibility. He never should have let her go away believing that he didn't want to talk to her. That hadn't been it at all, but it had felt like a safe thing to wrap the both of them in at the time.
The car was dark in the back where they sat, although dusky streetlights permeated the windows' obscura tint, reflecting off of little things. Her eyes, his watch. The alcohol made him brave, and he hated that he'd never learned to do a brave thing without it. He wasn't like Peter, and he wasn't like Flash. "I want you to know how sorry I am, how sorry I was. I was just.. too afraid to say it then. I just.. wanted everything that happened to go away, I wanted to pretend it never happened so that we could go back to being us, but that wasn't right. It was wrong," he told her with wounded honesty, and he wasn't smiling now.
It wasn't any easier to hear how wrong he thought what had happened between them was than it had been in high school. She was sure that science dictated that an equation of time plus distance should have equalled a numbing of sorts, but it didn't, and it was impossibly hard for her to sit there and listen to him. Tears welled in her eyes, but she didn't allow them to fall. She reminded herself that she'd decided, before ever agreeing to meet him for dinner, that his friendship was preferable to nothing at all.
She slid her fingers free of his, the tug intended to be casual. She realized, then, that she could either go along with what he was saying, or she could hold her ground and say what she truly felt. The girl she had been before her father died, she would have simply told him the truth. Candor was the preference of scientists, and clouding truth with speech was bad form. But then Peter had abandoned her, and then he'd changed, and she'd ended up uncertain about her own footing in the world. That confidence that her father had so painstakingly ensured was part of her psyche, that he'd ensured was instilled in her early, had crumpled in the face of reality, and what she'd become had been weak and dependent. She had always promised herself that she wouldn't become one of those girls that did anything they could to please him, not like so many of her classmates who vied endlessly for his attention. She'd promised herself that she wouldn't do that to please any man, and yet she'd spent the past four years keeping secrets and avoiding truths. Well, he'd spoken his truth and, as the car began to slow, she took a deep breath, determined to voice her own truth.
"I'm sorry I pushed you into doing something that you feel was wrong, Harry. I never wanted to put you in that position," she said truthfully, because she did regret that. Her words were slurred, but her expression was honest, blue intensity. "But I don't regret what happened. I know you do, and I could go along with it and say I thought it was wrong too, but I don't want to sit here and lie to you." She shrugged her shoulders with the elegant grace of newly acquired age, as the car engine cut off, and as the driver came around and tugged open the door. In the brightened darkness, she leaned into Harry and kissed his cheek, almost at the corner of his mouth, the scent of lemons and clean clinging to her hair, just like it had when they were younger.
"Thank you for dinner, Harry," she whispered, before letting the driver help her out of the car, and then disappearing into her building.