Who: Gwen and Peter What: Peter brings breakfast, Gwen sads Where: Gwen's place When: Backdated, after Gwen's phonecall with Harry Warnings/Rating: Nope
To say that Gwen was hungover would be an understatement.
She'd only managed a few hours of sleep after finishing her conversations with Peter, Flash and Harry, and then she'd spent what remained of the evening hugging the toilet in her small studio apartment.
She could count on exactly two fingers how many times she'd been inebriated in her life, and both occasions involved Harry Osborn in some capacity. This made instance number three, and she'd had twice as much to drink as she'd had the prior two times combined. As she hugged the toilet, she mentally lectured herself about the poisonous effects of alcohol on the body; it didn't make her feel any better.
By the time sunlight threatened through the window, she'd managed to brush her teeth, shower, and throw away the career she'd been planning since she was eight years old. She'd emailed Norman Osborn with so many tears in her eyes that she'd had trouble seeing the keys, and it was only the vestiges of pride and a lurching stomach that kept her from taking it all back and begging him to let her keep her job. She'd planned her future at Oscorp on her dad's knee, and letting that future go was like losing him all over again. It hurt more than Harry picking to spend the night with Mary Jane, more than being second-best to the redhead that had come into her life during high school and nudged her aside with everyone she cared about. And Harry could argue that he wasn't choosing Mary Jane over her, but even the residual alcohol in her system wouldn't let her believe that untruth. If anything, the encroaching light of day only made it more and more clear, and it hurt to think about.
She shoved the laptop away and, in a thigh-length nightgown of soft blue cotton, she crawled back into bed (after opening the window for Peter and his impending coffee). Maybe she could get a few more hours of sleep before reality kicked in again. She was sprawled out atop the covers, hair a mess, nose red and eyes red-rimmed, but she managed to fall into a hitched-sob sleep after a few minutes, exhaustion and what remained of the alcohol in her system finally taking over.
When Peter climbed the fire escape this time, it was without a spidey suit. Sure, the spidey powers gave him a leg up onto the first floor landing without spilling a drop of coffee or losing the bag currently clutched in his teeth, but hey, there had to be a few perks to the job, right?
When he reached Gwen's landing, he rapped gently on the windowframe before climbing half-crouched through the window. The coffee and bag both bore the label of a funky coffee shop down the street, because he suspected Gwen really did deserve better than big chain coffee shop this morning, if she'd had the night he thought. "Hey," he said, quietly, not quite sure if she was awake yet. He could see the edge of a blue nightgown and a spread of blonde hair, but not much else. "I brought coffee," he continued, in a low voice. "And croissant breakfast sandwiches. With bacon and eggs in them and I think cream cheese. Hello?" Quieter. "You awake?"
She didn't hear the rapping on her window, and the weight of his feet landing beside the bed only made her whimper in her sleep and roll over onto her stomach. She yanked a pillow over her blonde hair, wanting to keep whatever noise was happening in the room out, and she kicked at the blankets, trying to pull them up with her toes. The blue nightgown slid up to her hips, revealing small white underwear with ribbons at the sides, and she made a sound of sleepy pleasure when she managed to tug the blanket to behind her knees. But then Peter talked, and it was hard to ignore the way his voice made her head complain. She whined, and she pulled up the corner of the pillow and peeked out at him from under it. Awake, her eyes were puffy red, and there was no hiding the fact that she'd spent the night crying, even with the limited visibility the pillow provided. "I just ruined my career," she told him, because it was the first thing that she remembered. "Oh, God, I'm such an antifeminist example of womanhood," she whined, rolling over onto her back and rubbing the heels of her palms against her eyes.
Peter blinked at Gwen's underwear for a second, because it was really pretty and she had maybe the most gorgeous thighs he'd ever seen, long and strong like smooth, creamy saplings, and where was he going with this? Breakfast! Her eyes were so red that any thoughts about her underwear got stopped right in their tracks. "What are you talking about?" he asked, kneeling down next to her. "Do you...want a cold compress for your eyes, or something? They say to do that in movies, I think. Or little...cucumber slices?"
The fact that Gwen was crying didn't bode well, and after about two seconds he put together what she probably meant. "Did you quit at Oscorp because of Harry getting engaged?" he asked, which was a little more bluntly than he intended to broach the subject of Harry. He shook his head. "Forget I said that. More importantly, here." He offered her the coffee, gently unbending her fingers to put it between them. "You are Gloria Steinem, shush."
If Gwen knew her legs were being compared to tree trunks, she would have cried. Normally, she might have seen the correlation between limbs and saplings, but right then she felt second-rate, and she would have been absolutely positive that no one had ever thought to compare Mary Jane Watson's thighs to tree trunks. So, it was a good thing she wasn't aware of his train of thought. She pulled her hands from her face when she felt the bed dip beside her, and she looked up at him with tear-stained cheeks. "Cucumbers would require some kind of kitchen," she told him, because that was the logical and ready explanation for why she didn't have any. "Cucumbers have powerful antioxidants and flavinoids that are thought to reduce irritation," she added, sitting up and looking at him. It didn't escape her notice that she was sitting there, nearly naked, and he seemed entirely nonplussed. It made her sigh, and she climbed out of bed and walked to the closet, tugging things aside as she looked for something to wear.
"I quit Oscorp because I asked Harry to sleep with me, he said yes, and then he tried to reschedule for this morning because Mary Jane was going over to have sex with him last night instead," she said plainly, and she managed not to let her voice hitch when she said it. She pulled a shirt from the closet, the tug a little angry, and then she turned to look at him. "What's wrong with me?" she asked him, arms wide and the shirt hanging from her fingertips.
"Physically, what's wrong with me?" she repeated, edges of her eyes going damp again. "What makes it so that Mary Jane is always the first choice with everyone?"
Peter was from nonplussed, but equally as determined not to make Gwen uncomfortable. Now really wasn't the time. He set the coffee down on her nightstand when she didn't take it from him, and he stayed on the floor, drinking his coffee and watching her dress.
It wasn't exactly news that Gwen had asked Harry to sleep with her. At the very least, it didn't surprise him. What was really disheartening was what followed. "Nothing's wrong with you," he said. He didn't have a joke for that. He was trying to sort out how Harry had turned into such a jerk while he was looking the other direction for five minutes. What did he think he was doing? "You're perfect. Something's wrong with Harry, is the problem. He knows better than to treat anybody that way, you least of all." Peter didn't like to admit to anger, to let it through the gates. If he let a little bit go, there was a lot more that might follow it. A little leaked into his voice then, all the same.
He shook his head. "Gwen, there's nothing wrong with you. Nothing. You're gorgeous. And Mary Jane is not everybody's first choice." He rocked back a little. "For instance - I mean, she's my friend, and I like her a lot, but she's not mine."
She turned her back to him in order to slip on a comfortable pair of jeans beneath her nightgown, and the grey henley that had been hanging from between her fingertips was slipped on next, after the nightgown was cast aside. She made a sound of choked disbelief when he said nothing was wrong with her, because logic and precedence dictated that he was incorrect in his assessment. She crossed back to him, and she picked up the coffee he'd set aside, and then she moved away and dropped onto the couch with her arm outstretched, careful not to let any of the liquid slosh. "Peter," she said, sad-serious and a shake of her head that said she wasn't any dreamy-eyed little girl, "he was going to come over to sleep with me. He talked to Mary Jane, and he decided he would rather sleep with her first, and with me in the morning." Her voice cracked at the end, shards and sharp edges and a hitch of breath that was damp and unsteady. "He still wanted me to come sleep with him, but in the morning." And she wasn't sure there were words to convey how raw and bloody that made her feel. It wasn't even that Harry hadn't been interested, it was that she'd been put on the second rung, something to be had after he'd been with the girl he'd really wanted to see. As far as self-esteem blows went, that one was at the topmost rung.
She took a sip of the coffee, and then she stared at the cup. She longed for a scientific formula that would take the hurt away. Before Peter, she'd never felt hurt like this. It had started with her dad's funeral, when everyone she'd known had shown up but him, and it had just keep gaining momentum, like a rock rolling downhill. She looked over when he said Mary Jane wasn't his first choice. "No, I'm your first choice, and then I die, and then you realize what was in front of you all along," she said, because she believed the story. She was a scientist, and she wished fate didn't play into her view of the world, but there was a literary logic in her death being a catalyst. She took another sip of her coffee, the old worries about not fulfilling her role in this world of theirs seeping back in with the heartache and the hangover. It had been four years since she'd felt like this. Four long years, but it was like being right back in high school, and she wanted it to stop.
Peter fished one of the two sandwiches out of the bag and set it down next to her in its wrapper, a gentle reminder that she seriously needed to eat something. "Because he's a jerk," Peter said, matter of factly. He was starting to believe it, too. "You really don't think there could be any other reason aside from something being wrong with you? ...look, there's no excuse for treating you like that. At all. But maybe he's got...a thing for Mary Jane." Now wasn't really the time to bring up what MJ had said Harry told her the night before, and knowing he'd said he loved her just made it all seem worse. "Which is irrational, and can't be figured out by sketching pros and cons or weighing people by their merits, right? It makes no sense."
Peter looked down at his sandwich with the kind of vague despair of a death row inmate. "I don't think there's anything I can say to convince you that's not true," he said. "We've already argued it like five times."
Her stomach turned over at the very thought of food, and she shook her head. "I spent the whole night being sick," she told him, and she took another sip of the coffee and managed to keep it down. Her ears felt like they were stuffed for cotton, and her head felt heavy, and she knew that her nose was bright red from the expanded blood vessels that drinking caused. "I guess he told her that he loved her," she said of Mary Jane, because she knew that, too. "I asked her if they were together. I asked her when I got back into town, because I didn't want this to happen again. She knew I was crazy about him in high school, but she hooked up with him, and I didn't want to go through that again. But she lied to me." There was distrust there, old anger and something that sounded like resignation to not trusting someone ever again. And she knew he was angry at her for feeling the way she did, or disappointed, or something, but logic couldn't control her emotions just then.
She looked up at him, over the brim of her coffee. "When we went to dinner, Harry and I, he told me he'd loved me in high school. He says this is my fault, because I ran away. I didn't," she insisted, hungover and not measuring her words like she should have done. "He said he didn't want to talk about what happened with us anymore, that I was a mistake, and I didn't know what else to do-" She took another sip of her coffee, and she sighed, voice starting to warble again, and it took a second for her eyes to widen with realization of what she'd almost said.
She looked down into her coffee again, when he said they'd already argued about Mary Jane. He was right, but right now the redhead was at the forefront again. After all these years of pushing her away, she was back, and Gwen hadn't been prepared. She'd believed Mary Jane; when it came down to it, that was the problem, and she hadn't seen this coming as a result. It wouldn't happen again.
Peter gently set the food aside, and left his own sandwich in his lap unopened. It made him feel sort of bad that he'd brought it, since the smell was probably making her nauseated. He hadn't thought of that. He could count the amount of times he'd been drunk on one hand, but he knew that hungover people were supposed to like replacing the lining of their stomach with greasy, nutrition intense food. Apparently not so much.
Peter sighed. Why would Mary Jane have lied if there was something going on with her and Harry? It was hard to justify, and hard to understand. "I don't know why she did that," he said. "All I can think of is that maybe she was trying to keep from hurting your feelings. Or ratting Harry out, if he already had this...engagement in the works." It sounded more like a business arrangement, the way he talked about it.
As Gwen went on, Peter's expression knitted together further in concern, right up to the point where she cut herself off. "This isn't your fault," he said. "From the sound of things, Harry's being a real jerk. I don't know what's going on with him, but that's not on you." He paused a moment, then leaned in a little closer. "Did something happen between the two of you that I don't know about?"
She watched him set down the food, and she sighed a regretful sigh. She could tell she was making things difficult for him, and it really wasn't the intention. She leaned across him, and she pulled the bag he'd set aside toward her. She unwrapped the sandwich slowly, and she tore a corner of the bread off and tucked it into her mouth. "Eat," she told him with a nudge of shoulder, as she considered the things he'd said about Mary Jane. She wanted to protest that Mary Jane had no interest in sparing her feelings, and that Flash's description of Mary Jane's reaction to Harry's engagement indicated that she hadn't known about it in advance, but she ultimately kept both of those comments to herself. Mary Jane and Peter had always been friends, and she'd never been able to shake that friendship. Now, it seemed childish and illogical to even attempt it. She set her coffee between her thighs, and she slowly tore pieces off the breakfast sandwich in silence.
There were things she was quickly realizing about this Peter Parker. Her Peter had been moral; he'd gotten angry when she drank, and he'd gotten angry when she and Harry stole something once. But this Peter was even more like that, and she had the very real fear that he wouldn't be able to forgive her for putting a baby up for adoption. She shook her head. "Nothing happened between the two of us that you don't know about," she told him. "Harry and I were never involved, except that one time at the school." She didn't want Harry to lose his friend either, and nothing good would come of presenting Peter with a version of reality that was tainted by her own loss. She smiled at him instead, a shaky smile. "Thank you for bringing breakfast." She didn't feel any better, and she didn't feel any less inferior to Mary Jane, but the coffee was warm in her stomach, and that helped her to feel more human. She could get a few hours sleep before meeting with Harry, and that would help.
Peter's intention hadn't been to guilt Gwen into eating, and when she unwrapped her sandwich despite what she'd just said about throwing up all night, that was the moment when he realized he was in over his head. It hadn't occurred to him until then that he needed to step really carefully around Gwen. Once upon a time, that hadn't been the case. But now it seemed like even the smallest cues might be turned into something they weren't intended to be, and made him feel guilty in the extreme. "No, come on," he said. "Only eat if you want to, okay? It's fine."
It didn't exactly take a scientist to figure out that Gwen was lying, but it didn't hurt. Two seconds ago she'd been about to say something, and now she'd doubled back. Where had he misstepped? He didn't have a clue. All four of his friends were beginning to feel like a chokehold of tangled threads, and he couldn't tell one from the next from the next. There was too much history from before he'd show up. He'd known that in high school, but in the intervening years, he'd started to think maybe it didn't matter. Now that they were all in the same place again, he didn't feel like that anymore. He felt, again, like the outsider looking in, who didn't have a clue what was really going on.
"Of course," he said, smiling a little. "It was the least I could do, seriously." He paused a moment. "You know you can tell me stuff, right?" he asked, watching her, and there was a flicker of someone older than the guy who made stupid jokes, and more of the person who brushed off the worst of life because there was no other choice if he was going to keep walking through it upright. "Anything you want to."
She didn't realize he would use her acquiescence with the sandwich to determine his own capability in this situation. And, given any other day of the week, she probably would have reacted very differently to his reaction. But she was sad, hungover, and her entire career had just gone up in a metaphorical puff of smoke. Losing Oscorp wouldn't matter to him, since he'd wanted her to quit since he'd arrived here, but it was something significant to her. To her, it was the loss of her father all over again, and she was functioning largely on very-sad autopilot.
Had she known about his feelings of being on the outside, she would have argued that he wasn't alone. She felt like she knew Flash, and like Flash knew her, but she didn't know Harry Osborn anymore. The Harry Osborn that had cared for her when they were children, she didn't think he would have put Mary Jane before her. It was an unexpected realization, and it didn't actually make her feel any better to realize she'd even lost that tendril of their friendship along the way. As for Mary Jane, they'd never been close, but that bridge had been irreparably felled now, and there was no way to repair this kind of severing.
When he looked at her with that hint of seriousness, she paused. She hadn't confided in Peter in so long - any Peter. "I couldn't confide in the Peter that was here before you," she said, tearing another corner off the croissant, but not popping it into her mouth. She smiled then, sad and remembering. "My Peter, I could tell him anything," she admitted. "But that was such a long time ago," she admitted, looking up at him with wet blue eyes. "And Harry and I were best friends since we could talk. Our dads would spend hours discussing the city, while our moms planned our futures. I remember running through the halls of that house and thinking I would live there one day," she admitted. "Everyone was alive then, and everything was so different." She took a shudder-deep breath. "You won't tell Harry what I tell you?" she asked. "Or Mary Jane?"
Peter knew what it was like to lose a father. He'd managed to lose two along the way, and he knew the look in Gwen's eye when she thought about the days when 'everyone was alive'. He knew that the way he knew the writing on himself, inside, and it took nothing to understand it. "Well you can confide in me," he said, with the same kind of surety that led him to jump off buildings and throw himself into stupidly dangerous situations day after day. Whatever else you wanted to say about him, Peter had convictions, and it was very difficult to sway them.
"No," Peter said. He tipped his head. "Quid pro quo, Clarice, okay? I'll tell you something if you tell me something." He didn’t want Gwen to be sad, or to see all the friendships between the people he liked best collapsing and falling like rope bridges in an Indiana Jones movie. Things were looking dark on the horizon, like they’d all need each other soon. He didn’t like that just as things got complicated again, those bonds were getting weaker.
There was as much careful consideration as she could muster with the increasing pounding of her brain against her skull, and she finally decided that the probability of him being earnest was higher than the probability that he was lying to her. Peter Parker had morals where other boys had stashes of dirty magazines, and she didn't see any indication that had changed when she looked into his face. She set her sandwich aside, and she took a sip of her coffee before that followed suit. Both items were placed on the small, crowded table beside the couch, and she turned her body toward his.
She opened her mouth to explain, but only silence poured forth, and she snapped her jaw closed again. "You go first," she finally said, and it had nothing to do with distrust and everything to do with the disappointment she expected to see on his face when she told him. Her Peter would have forgiven her anything, and perhaps that was a bit of revisionist history, but she knew the Peter before this one would have never forgiven this.
Peter settled cross-legged on the floor, picking up his coffee again. "...I'm worried about Harry," he said, after a moment's hesitation. "Really worried, actually. Stuff like this? Him getting engaged for his dad and then trying to get with you and Mary Jane? The way he's been talking? It reminds me of the way things went in the world...timeline, whatever you want to call it, that I came from. He was weird, off, before..." He stopped, drumming his fingers against his coffee. "Before things got really bad. It was his dad's fault, when it comes down to it." He hunched over his coffee a little, talking to the bed skirt, eyes down. "I want to believe everything's different here, that nobody's on a set path and anything goes, right? But I can't help it. I'm never going to forget it." He bit his lip. "It wasn't the kind of thing you forget. I feel like I've got a second chance, here, to make things right and keep them from turning out the way they did back then. But he isn't going to want to hear it if I try to explain. He never wants to hear anything about Norman. Nobody does." He shrugged. "I don't know. I'm starting to feel a little bit like the crazy prophet on a cardboard box shouting about the end of days with a colander on my head."
Halfway through, she slid down onto the floor beside him. She crossed her legs, and she waited until he stopped his confessional to the bedskirt in order to speak. Her fingers closed on his wrist, drawing his attention away. "Peter, don't you see? If we believe you about Mr. Osborn, if you're right, then it means all we've done is delay timelines. All it means it at I'm going to end up dead, and that Flash will end up without his legs, and we can't actually change anything. It's not logical; it's emotional." Her fingers slid away, and she plucked at the carpet between them. "I've known Mr. Osborn since before I could talk. Harry and I, we spent all our time together when we were small, because our parents were so close. It's hard to believe that someone you've known that long and that well could be evil. I know he has the situation with Goblin, but he says he has it under control. Nothing has happened. There have been no sightings, no reports, nothing to warrant concern." But she couldn't help but look up and backtrack to his original point. "How did things go in your world with Harry?" she asked. Because he wasn't wrong about Harry's relationship with Mr. Osborn, that obsessive desire to live up to his father's expectations. "Mr. Osborn was kind when I quit Oscorp an hour ago," she added, as if that made matters somehow better.
Peter sighed. "Gwen, if you really wanted to work there, you shouldn't have to quit because Harry's being a jerk." It was blunter coming out of his mouth that it had been in his head, and he shook his head. "I'm sorry, you shouldn't be anywhere you're unhappy. And I do think Norman is unsafe, and that you'd be better off working somewhere else. But if that's where you want to be, there's no reason for you to let me or anybody else stop you."
As for timelines, he drummed his fingers against the cup again, nervously. "What I don't get about your theory is why can't parts of it be true and parts of it not be?" he asked, looking over at her. "I've seen some of those comic books. Lots of them have lots of different outcomes. It's not always the same. Some of them pick and choose bits and pieces from the other ones. So maybe Harry will go down the path I remember, but you won't. Or maybe nobody will." Drum, drum. "I could just be paranoid."
Peter didn't know how to explain what had happened to Harry to Gwen. He knew how it would sound, how bad it would seem, and the last thing she needed were more potential destinies to fear. But it had happened. He'd seen it. And someone ought to know.
"His dad...hired a guy, Shaw, to hypnotize him so he'd forget seeing the accident that turned him into Goblin," Peter said, looking up at her. "But there was more to it than that. Norman used him to control Harry. Shaw screwed him up big time. Basically created a whole different personality under the surface, and all this conditioning, so when the time came and they wanted to use him, turn him on like a time bomb to come after me, all they had to do was say the right words, and he used the serum on himself." His gaze went a little distant. "He was a monster," he said. "He tried to kill...everyone." He took a short, sharp breath. "And then my friend broke through it, the conditioning, and he...begged me to kill him." His stare wasn't focused anymore, only halfway in the room. "Begged me. Then the brainwashing took over again, and he went back to tearing everything apart. SHIELD showed up, and they took him down, and...that was that." He shrugged. "I managed to get somebody else killed. Hooray for the amazing Spider-Man.”
His immediate statement that she wouldn't have quit Oscorp if she was happy there made her angry enough that she couldn't even feel her head pounding for a second. "I quit Oscorp because I'll give in if I see Harry every day. He spent an hour on the phone begging to see me. I won't sleep with him while he's with Mary Jane, or while he's married, because I have too much self-respect for that. But I know that self-respect will get worn down if I stay. Maybe that makes me weak, but I refuse to stay where I'll just end up being a stereotypical lovesick female mistress. But don't think that means I don't love my job. I'm working on accelerated genetics. It's amazing. Other little girls dream of getting married and having family. I dreamt about Oscorp, Peter."
It took her a few deep breaths to calm down enough to think about his theory regarding multiple timelines. "I never survive. There is no timeline or variation in which I survive," she insisted. "My method of death might change, but the fact that I die doesn't. Does Mr. Osborn always become a monster? Do you always end up with Mary Jane? How can you assume one constant, while not assuming others? It's not logical."
But logic stopped mattering when he actually told her the story of what happened to Harry. She couldn't even imagine the series of events he was describing, which made her a terrible scientist. Imagining probabilities was what they did, and seeing potential avenues through science was a cornerstone of her particular field, and yet she couldn't envision a world where Norman Osborn would brainwash his son to turn him into a killer. She had to swallow three times before she could speak. Even then, it took some work for her to build up the volume and strength to sound steady. "Harry knows about Goblin, and Mr. Osborn hasn't felt the need to make him forget. There is no one named Shaw in Mr. Osborn's employ. Harry doesn't have enough interest in science to create any serum for himself, and Mr. Osborn is remorseful about his own actions in regards to the serum." And yet his words still loomed, and she couldn't get them out of her mind.
"You didn't get him killed," she added after a moment, quieter, but no less firm.
"Because none of this is logical," Peter said. "We're sharing our bodies with people who live in another world, aren't we? I haven't seen even one comic book that mentions something like that."
Peter knew Gwen wasn't going to like his version of events, but there was nothing he could do about them. It was what had happened, what he had seen with his own eyes, experienced and been forced to live with after. It hadn't happened long before he found himself in this strange mirror world of his home, and when he'd first arrived it had the fresh raw pink of a new scar. It was older now, and more faded, but he hadn't forgotten. Not a detail. "Harry didn't create the serum," he corrected. "His dad hid some away for him. Knowing where it was hidden was part of his programming, I guess." He shrugged. "I went and I read the comic book about it when I first got here." His shoulders tensed, though he smiled a little. "Stupid move, I know. But I wanted to see if I could...figure it out if I read what happened to Harry, too."
He smiled a little, looking at her. "You're a nice lady, Gwen Stacy," he said lightly. I don't believe you, it said. “I still want to hear your thing, though.”
She couldn't argue with his stance that none of this was logical, because the only way logic applied here was that it was, at present, their reality, and it had its own rules that were, in a way, logical. But, then, she didn't think their normal lives could be considered logical, either. "Peter, you were bitten by a radioactive spider. You fight men who turn into lizards. I create suits to control alien symbiotes. We're not logical to begin with." She could admit that now.
"I read one book. Flash's robodoc sent it to me. It's called Blue. I still have it, if you want to take a look," she said, reaching over to open the drawer of the small table beside the couch. Inside, the hardcovered collection of Blue was tucked beneath papers, and she held it out to him. There were notes throughout, in the margin. "It's a nice story," she admitted, obviously fond of the book. "Harry's fine in there," she told him in advance. "Mr. Osborn isn't, but Harry is. You're roommates." As for Harry messing with the serum in any capacity, she couldn't believe it. "Harry knows what the serum did to his dad. I don't think he'd use it on himself, Peter."
"You don't believe me," she said knowingly, because that was the main thing she garnered from his insistence that she was a nice lady. "You won't think I'm a nice lady if I tell you. Can we save it for another day?" she asked hopefully.
"Exactly," Peter said. As far as she was concerned, she'd summed up his argument for him, case closed. Peter took the book, and flipped casually through it, the notes in the margins drawing a smile. "So thorough," he said, before closing it and settling it on his lap. "I'll read it. Promise. I'd like to think maybe everything works out that way. I mean...you never know."
That was distressing, and Peter didn't know precisely what to do with it. He'd really just been trying to lighten things. It was true that he didn't believe her that Harry dying wasn't his fault, but that wasn't on her. So why did it bother her? He didn't have the faintest idea. They'd gone into this with the promise she would tell him whatever it was that was eating at her, and her raincheck just felt like more pulling away. But he didn't say that. He smiled, instead, and he nodded. "I'll tie a string around my finger so I don't forget and let you off the hook."
She knew she was taking the easy way out, but as confessions went, this was one was pretty significant. She was still partially drunk, still seriously hungover, and she wasn't going to cancel out four years of lying without being clear headed. And there existed the very real reality that Peter Parker would never look at her the same again, once she told him. Just then, she didn't want that reality. She felt vulnerable and unattractive, second best to someone who she'd already felt second best to. She didn't want the way he looked at her to change at the same time, not until she was stronger and back on her feet again.
So, she smiled, and she leaned forward and kissed his cheek. "Thank you, bug boy."
Peter accepted the kiss, and, as if nothing at all had changed from high school, blushed a little, though he launched immediately into talking again to cover it. "Hey, you're welcome. Anytime you're hungover, just call me. I'm thinking about tacking this on as an extra superhero service. Hangover superhero, fighting hangovers with the power of breakfast food and coffee? I think it's pretty cool, personally. Maybe I'll open my own food truck. Spidey's hangover helper. It's a million dollar idea, Gwen, you better get in on the ground floor."
There was something sad in her eyes when he didn't pursue anything more than the kiss to the cheek, but she reminded herself that high school was over, and that she needed to stop wearing her heart on her sleeve and requiring romantic recognition from the men in her life. Her smile was slow in coming, but it came, along with a quiet laugh about his future in the food truck business; she nudged him with her foot before standing. "I'm going to get a few hours sleep before meeting Harry," she told him. She needed that rest if she was going to make it through hungover babysitting. She didn't even know who Harry could possibly need to watch, and she assumed it was a relative of his fiancee, as a result, which didn't make her any more inclined to actually go. "Get back to work, Peter Parker."