Flower Girl: Gwen & Perry Who: Gwen and Perry What: Meeting Where: Outside Flower Girl When: Nowish Warnings/Rating: Y for Young Adult Emo
It was early, but Gwen always got up early. She had to be at the lab by 7 a.m. in the morning, or the League would think she was reneging on her agreement, and she totally didn't want that. Things had been better since the League had tracked her down, which might sound super weird, but she wasn't looking over her shoulder all the time anymore. Okay, so she didn't really have freedom, since they'd put in a subdermal RFID chip, but it felt like freedom to the girl who'd been locked up in a lab for as long as she'd been alive, which, okay, wasn't a super long time. But this felt like a life, and she was only reminded of how messed up things were when Jason got weird about things. And the new scientist at the lab was much nicer than the one that had been there before. There were bruises from IVs and stuff, but this scientist wasn't cruel, and Gwen kind of wanted to just live while she could. Maybe that was super defeatist, or maybe it was just super determined. She'd gotten a job, and she'd gotten identification, and she'd gotten her own apartment (even though she was always late paying for it), but the new owner of the flower shop seemed like she might not care if things were a little late, and Gwen was feeling really okay as she left the apartment that morning. Even her run-in with Flash had gone well, and she was almost done feeling awful about her fight with Jason.
She was dressed casually, with her white lab scrubs in the messenger bag she carried over her shoulder. She didn't have to go to work until 6 p.m. (since she was on the night shift), and she'd have tons of time between the lab and work, and she wanted to see if she could catch a bus into the Capital and find out about school stuff. She didn't want to bother Babs about money to pay for a class anymore, since Mr. Wainright seemed to have kind of disappeared (and since Damian thought she was totally evil), but she didn't want to give up on her dream of taking a class, either. Maybe they had some kind of programs for people without money. She was a little too naive to realize her identification, while really good, might not be good enough to survive the scrutiny of a financial aid application.
She took the steps downstairs two at a time, and she landed on the sidewalk with a hop. It was totally Spring now, and she was amazed by the birds, and by the way the grasses and flowers were coming alive. It even smelled different than Winter had, which she should've realized, but she hadn't. Reading about stuff wasn't the same as living it, and nothing made her as aware of that as being outside. She stood there a few seconds, her copper-dyed hair whipping at her cheeks in the light breeze, and then she turned seafoam gaze (slightly unlike the donor's purer blue) when she heard footsteps on the sidewalk.
Gwen didn't recognize the boy there, but she smiled at him trustingly as she tucked wayward strands behind her ear. "It's a super pretty day, isn't it?"
It was Perry’s first day in town. He had spent most of the last week moving his aunt into the the place they were renting, a pretty small place they were sharing with a widow who smelled like a closed pantry. The place was nice, even kind of scenic with a view down the winding road, and his aunt liked it. To Perry, everything seemed over-quiet and isolated. His senses were full, full of new sounds and strange scents, and he missed the dull roar of traffic more than could be believed. There was also this weird feeling of being exposed, because he would look up and there was an incredible amount of sky up there… nothing to grab onto and pull up to… well. It made sense in his head.
The town forum was the best idea ever, though. He didn’t even have to go through the want ads, or make cold calls. The familiar florist was a break that he hoped was a start of a run of luck. He needed luck. He needed anything that wasn’t the latest in a string of bad news. (And he needed to pay rent pretty bad too, that was the least of it.) The last hour or so had been kind of a miracle: now he had a small town editor willing to pay for his stuff, and at least a part-time delivery job too. Perry pocketed his phone, feeling pretty good about the day despite the overcast gray of the too-big sky.
It didn’t take him long to find the flower shop, and he stopped across the street, his hat down low over his brow and his hands chapped red from the wind.
Gwen came out. He saw her. It wasn’t the first time he had seen her. It was usually like this, too, across a street, a flash of white blonde and a turn of a head to look at him. He looked back at her, and he didn’t expect her… he didn’t expect her to speak. To be real. His look of mixed pain and static concentration began to flicker. “I…” The words didn’t exactly manifest. His tongue didn’t work.
Gwen was getting better at social interactions, but there were lots of things she hadn't encountered yet, and the way the boy stammered was one such thing. She tried to figure out the cause, using facial clues, but she'd never been super good with the expression recognition software the League had exposed her to for months. She'd learned quickly that context clues were kind of super important, and the League software just showed people's faces and labeled their expressions, and it ended up being kind of useless. So she was learning all about facial expressions every day. The diner helped a lot in that regard, because upset people looked consistently upset, and happy people looked consistently happy. It was kind of simple, and it was easiest to take that learned knowledge and apply it to more complicated things, like things that didn't involve toast being too burned or eggs being too runny.
So, she didn't have anything to draw on in order to interpret his particular combination of stammer and expression, but there was something familiar about it. It was kind of like when she'd been talking to Flash, and she hadn't needed to think about those expression recognition lessons at all.
She cocked her head to the side, like she was trying to figure him out, and her copper hair slid free of the ear she'd tucked it behind, but she didn't bother with putting it back in place. She moved a little closer, smelling of clean soap and too much time in a lab, even with a night's sleep behind her, and she tried to give him a reassuring smile (which totally mirrored that of a girl buried in Olivet Cemetery back in New York). She tapped her knee-high boots on the sidewalk, and she gave him a few seconds later to manage something that could be considered a complete sentence, or maybe even a word consisting of syllables.
When language didn't seem likely, she decided to go for a more direct approach. Babbling. Babbling worked well when she didn't know what to say, because sometimes something turned out to be the right thing. "Are you okay? I live upstairs, if you need to sit down for a little bit," she offered with that trusting naivete again. "You're not sick, are you? You don't look sick. I'm Gwen. I'm on my way to the lab, but I've got plenty of time. I kind of show up everywhere early," she admitted unapologetically. "It's totally good work ethic, which I think is supposed to be kind of important. Hi." She toed the sidewalk and shifted her hips in another unknowing echo of a dead girl's movements. "Okay. You talk now."
When she moved forward, he moved back. He felt her like a blow, like her existence was a burst of pressure that drove him backward against the wind. He turned his head away from her in a slow swipe through the air, his expression under that red hat one of combined disbelief and the futile attempt to control the tremble of his open mouth. He rolled his eyes upward to get the vision of her out of his sight, even just for a moment. “Okay, Perry.” He was talking to himself now, obviously, and not her at all, whispering reassurance. “Okay. You’re okay.” He moved away from her again, not a step, not yet, just a waver, like he was drunk.
The thing was, Perry had a lot of ghosts. Not real ghosts, just… just a lot of loved ones that were dead. And he’d seen the dead ones before. Maybe not this vividly, okay, maybe they never actually talked to him, except in a dream or a nightmare or two, but this… this was it. Maybe the stress or something had finally got to him. He was going crazy.
He closed his mouth and looked back at her again, hungrily now, as if he knew he shouldn’t. “You-” he stopped again, unable to get the words out. He looked up, tried to control it again, failed, and then looked back at her. “You’re… on the way to the lab,” came the repeat of what she had said. It didn’t sound clear because he was crying and it was hard to get the words out through his closing throat. He pressed his hands into his jacket and hugged himself through the pockets. A long wet sniff. “Is this… this is some kind of joke?” He didn’t think it was, he was grasping for an explanation. Nothing about him said laughter.
She was surprised when he drew back from her. She'd never experienced that before, and she was pretty sure she hadn't invaded his personal space (it had taken her a long time to understand the concept of personal space). But she was pretty sure she hadn't come close enough for him to pull back from her like that. She was left looking at him with that same cock of her head, and her expression was just super perplexed. She wasn't physically imposing or threatening or anything, and none of her bruises were visible under the white sleeves of her shirt (she knew sometimes people took the IV bruises to indicate drug usage), and she sort of stuck to mostly long-sleeve shirts lately. But none of these factors applied at present, and she just waited a few seconds.
He said his name, and she smiled, thinking he was giving it to her to use (which had to mean he was totally okay now), but then she realized he was talking to himself. She didn't actually focus on the name, or she would've understood the problem. But the fact that he was talking to himself on the street, while looking at her super weird, took her back to her original concern that he might be sick or hurt. "Do you want me to get anyone for you? Do you know my name?" Because she'd just told him, and that would be a good way to know if he was suffering from some debilitating mental condition (if he didn't remember). He repeated the thing about her going to the lab, and she couldn't determine if that was good repetition or bad repetition, but it was something, so she nodded. "It's at the facility-"
That was as far as she got before he started hugging himself and crying, and she stared intensely when he asked if this was some kind of joke. Gwen had a lot of trouble with jokes sometimes, but she didn't think he meant this in a humorous capacity. And then she remembered his name. Perry. She had this really horrible feeling of dread, and she really wanted to scream at Jason for being right about things. Because it couldn't be a coincidence, right? She was starting to believe in coincidences less and less. She swallowed nervously, and she gave him a shaky little smile. "Guinevere. My name's Guinevere." Maybe that would totally be enough for the moment. "Gwen's just a nickname. That's a weird word isn't it? Nickname, but it's a mispronunciation of Old English neke, which means addition. So it really means additional name. I'm babbling."
Perry got his hands out of his jacket so he could wipe his face with the sleeve, the palm of his hand spreading the fabric so he could push it all down his face and clear his eyes and nose. The result was a pair of brown spots that were his eyes in splotches of red emphasized by the hat and the hunch into his collar. Now that he could see again, he stared at her, hard, hoping that she would resolve into a stranger and this would all make sense again. Gwen was dead (he reminded himself) and he’d put that somewhere it didn’t hurt so much. Or he thought he did.
“Yeah no.” He started nodding at her, because he realized he was making her upset and Perry never wanted to do that to anyone. He nodded hard a few times and then stopped, pressing his mouth together before he spoke. “No. I’m--I’m good. I’m okay.” This time he was talking to her, not himself, and he wasn’t saying it because he was okay. He just wanted her to look a little less freaked out. Thinking of something, he darted a gaze around the road to see if anyone else was there, to see if anyone else was looking at him talking to nothing. He didn’t know if she was really there or not. There wasn’t anyone around to help him, though, because this wasn’t New York.
He moved forward as she prattled, sidling still, like she might burn him and he wanted to minimize the exposure, hip leading and elbow out like he knew it was weird but couldn’t stop himself anyway. He put a hand out and swiped gently at her elbow, without warning, just to see if she was solid, and then immediately stepped back again, fingers tingling. Okay. Maybe not crazy. “Gwen.” Now he said it to see if she would look back at him and smile, call him by name, reassure him the last few months had been a really bad dream.
Gwen had never seen anyone cry in person, not like this. Some of the test subjects cried, but it was a pained crying, and it usually accompanied screams and physical resistance, and it wasn't anything like this. She felt super guilty about being the cause of it, and she couldn't remember ever feeling the sensation of guilt before. It wasn't unfamiliar, because nothing was, really. It was like a muscle memory, and she recognized the feeling once it settled to stay in the pit of her belly, and she didn't want him to think he was totally crazy or something.
He was telling her that he was okay, and she blinked away something wet from her eyes. She realized they were tears, and it wasn't that she'd never cried before. She had cried a lot, especially in those early days when she woke up at the facility in New York without anyone or anything or even any idea who she was. But these tears weren't for herself, and that was totally new. She tried to smile at him through the welling in seafoam eyes, but she knew it wasn't working super good. She tried anyway, and she waited for him to finish reassuring her, like she wasn't the one who'd completely blindsided (she liked that word) him on the street.
She stayed still as he touched her elbow, and the guilty feeling in her stomach grew exponentially, and it kind of caught her unawares, like unexpected integer progression. This totally sucked (she finally understood that phrase entirely now), and she took a really deep breath in when he said her name. She did smile, but she couldn't reassure him the way he wanted. She knew, somehow, that he wanted that, and it was super weird to understand the expressions on a face she'd never seen before, even if she didn't comprehend them in a super verbal way. It was like Flash, kind of, and maybe even a little like Jason, and she exhaled as deeply as she'd inhaled. Maybe she should offer to take him inside again, because she didn't want him to have a super bad reaction to what she was about to say. He might run into the street or something, but she had a feeling he wasn't going to go upstairs with her, even if she asked. So, as the saying went, it was time to bite the bullet (and that was a totally macabre saying, in her opinion).
"Perry," she began hesitatingly, "I'm not her." She really did intend to say more, but it kind of ended there. "I'm sorry. I'm super sorry." She reached for his hand.
He smiled and closed his eyes, obviously readjusting toward a better conclusion, one he liked infinitely more. When he opened his eyes again there was more of the happy young man who knew her well. Or… the girl he thought she was. He wasn’t embarrassed that he was in tears, not yet, not even close. It was almost like he didn’t notice, just trying to get through the sting of them so he could see and think. Her obvious reflection of emotion he did not read appropriately as the pity it was.
“Gwen. You are you.” Perry stepped forward, the smile now real, the hesitation abruptly gone. He reached for her waist with one arm, the embrace sweeping and not clutching, looking for a closeness gone. His other hand welcomed hers. “Of course you are.” As if he couldn’t imagine that she would be anyone else. It was all a mistake, what he knew before. What he’d done. Some… some weird mistake. He was strong, and almost had her off her feet.
And yet… yet there was something. Something not quite right. He knew before she even reacted to him that something… something else wasn’t there. Maybe it was her scent, fresh from the flower shop and still reminiscent of medical, or maybe it was her expression when she looked at him. He stared into her eyes and the realization that they were not what he wanted was probably worse than that initial strike of recognition. His grip loosened, and he set her down gentle as his smile fell entirely away. “Gwen?” Now it was a question.
Gwen didn't remember dying as a first-hand experience. None of the donor's experiences were first hand, and the League scientists were really hoping that was because of the trauma of the experience, and not because of something biological failing in the cloning process. If it was the former, it meant they could control it with proper conditions, but everything was kind of super lost if it was the latter. But she didn't remember it as something that happened to her, and she was watching him as he insisted that she was Gwen. She was trying to think of an answer, but he swept her up in an embrace, and she absolutely had no idea what to do.
She'd never been hugged before.
It was a delay, one which wasn't deliberate, but she hugged him back with one arm over his shoulder, and her fingers turned white from how tightly she clutched his fingers. He almost swept her off her feet completely, and that made her laugh. She even surprised herself with the burst of giggles, and she was unaware of just how much she sounded like that girl in New York (Jason always said she wasn't really like Gwen at all).
His grip loosened, and he set her down, and she looked at him as he said her name. She couldn't just let him believe it, no matter how much she liked the hug, and no matter how much her heart thumped against her ribcage (which was totally just a saying, because the pericardium kept the heart from doing any such thing). She squeezed his fingers once more, and she looked at them sadly, and then she looked back up and steeled her spine and straightened her shoulders.
"I'm kind of a clone." Which she said kind of muttered, and it wasn't even entirely true, so she tried again. "I'm a clone." There. The words were out, and she couldn't take them back. "You're allowed to hate me, okay? Jason kind of does. He did a lot at first, but now he only kind of does. I think MJ," (she remembered not to call her Mbali this time), "does too, because Jason told her. Flash doesn't hate me, but he's Flash, and I think he kind of just wants to see her in me. Jason says I'm not like her at all, and I'm babbling a super lot. I'm sorry." She looked up at him from under pale lashes. "Are you okay?"
Perry separated himself from her again, unwrapping the arm from her waist and pushing himself back so he could clearly see her face and judge her expression. He almost laughed when she said the word “clone,” something he equated with sci-fi tv and late night space exploration shows. The laugh died at the top of his throat before it became real, and the flood of names that she came out with put a ripple of visible tension through him, and he pulled his shoulders back much the way she had a moment before. Elbow locking in place as if to solidify the distance and keep it there, he rolled his chin back on his neck, making a joint pop and obviously helping to reassure him that he was in the present and himself.
“Okay.” This was not to her. It was to himself. Okay, we accept this. Resignation, solid and strong, an echo of all the terrible stuff that had happened, and he was still here. Let’s deal with this, Spidey. (It helped to be in the extra third person with a superhero.) “Okay. You’re a clone.” He said it like he still didn’t entirely believe it. He decided not to deal with what his friends thought, MJ and Flash, because he hadn’t seen either of them and he wasn’t sure how they would feel.
“Why would anybody make a clone of Gwen?” Here his eyes narrowed slightly, like he was asking her a biology question at a religious seminar.
She was surprised at how kind of sad she felt when he pushed himself back. Okay, that was totally logical, because she'd never been hugged before, and it was kind of like losing something she hadn't even realized she liked until that moment. And she knew she looked super down, and she thought maybe she should explain. But she didn't want him to pity her, because she didn't want to be pitied. She kind of hated people knowing she was a clone, too, because it completely defined her in a way that made her feel weird. But she accepted that pity and weirdness might kind of be inevitable this time. "Sorry. That was kind of my first hug ever," she said apologetically.
He started talking to himself again, and she let him. She didn't interrupt, and she just waited until he repeated the fact that she was a clone, which kind of felt weirdly like something sharp jabbed beneath her ribs (which wasn't literally a thing he was doing, and she thought it was a super weird sensation). She nodded, agreeing with his repetition, because he didn't actually look like he was seeing a ghost anymore, and that was good, right?
"It's kind of complicated." And this was such a weird conversation to have in the middle of the sidewalk. She moved a little closer to the end of the building, where someone wouldn't come by and hear or anything. The way he narrowed his eyes said she shouldn't suggest they actually go somewhere else (if she was interpreting that correctly). "She was kind of working with this symbiote, because it had the ability to generate matter somehow from its cells. Which is totally something we think is scientifically impossible, but this thing kind of did it. Kind of, because it loss mass when it did it, so it was still within the realm of possibility. But she thought it might be able to fix cellular damage or, at the very least, slow it down. She couldn't get test subjects, so she kind of tried it on herself for really dumb reasons. Okay, fast forward to when she died in the library. Somehow, whatever she did must have caused her body to replicate at the point of death. It's super weird. I know it's super weird. Anyway, there was this organization keeping an eye on her, kind of because of Jason, and they got there before the authorities and took me. I wasn't conscious or anything, and I woke up in a lab in New York like a year ago."
She could've said more, but she'd majorly babbled already, so she smacked her lips closed and waited for him to either get super upset, or think she was lying, or leave, or something similar.
Perry watched her speak. His hands had appeared out of his sleeves again, and he kept flexing them, wishing he had hold of a backpack or something more substantial than the cheap weave. The way she moved was almost the same, little shifts of the same weight and height from one foot to another, even the way she held the bag against her hip. He made himself look for differences. No one was jumping out to laugh at the very unfunny joke, and she was too real for her to be something out of his imagination. The worst any of his other ghosts did was stare at him and die over and over in his nightmares.
And the things that Perry had seen, well, cloning wasn’t that far off.
“The eyes,” he said. It was probably right in the middle of something she was saying, clear that he hadn’t fully been listening to the explanation. “Your eyes are a different color.” His face screwed up again as he fought back another unexpected bout of tears, and this time he was successful. He gave an unsteady sniff and had himself stable again. “You can tell me. You’re some kind of relative, right? A cousin?” He dug his chin down deep into his collar, staring down at the scuffed mess of his shoes without seeing them. Not Gwen at all, that’s what she was saying. He should have known that.
She watched his movements with curiosity. Her exposure to people she could actually just look at for a while (without seeming totally creepy) was limited. And she kind of liked watching him scuff around, which was definitely not a logical reaction. But Jason didn't do that, and Flash didn't either, and she tried to reason that it wasn't anything more than that. She was super curious about everything, so it wasn't like a stretch or anything to come to that conclusion. But she did stare a little, which he maybe possibly kind of noticed.
He did interrupt her babbling, and she wasn't sure if she was glad he did or not. But he mentioned her eyes being a different color, which she knew about; Jason had pointed it out too. "And my hair's dyed," she added helpfully, thinking it might be good for him if he could see the differences. But he looked like he was totally going to cry again, and she didn't want that, so she filled in the sniffly space with the first thing she thought of. "I thought dyeing it would keep people who knew her from feeling bad when they saw me, and I kind of escaped the facility, and I thought since they'd be looking for a blonde-" But then he asked about her being one of Gwen's relatives, and she gave him a look. She came close, and she was super quiet. "Bug boy, Gwen only had brothers. You know that. Okay, she had an aunt too, but she only had boys."
He was staring at his shoes, and she touched his forearm lightly. "I know it's weird, but I remember all her things. I can prove it if you really need me to." As if she just hadn't.
Perry’s haggard brown eyes swept up and over her hair, which was catching the light like a copper penny. “Yeah.” Perry was not an idiot, and he knew like all men over the age of 12 that he should have said something complimentary about her hair after she said she’d done something to it, but he couldn’t bring himself to do so. It seemed that even making an expression, lifting the muscles around his mouth and opening and closing his eyes, required more energy than he had. Grief drained him of everything. He felt it inch back over him, pound by pound, pulling him downward into immobility.
Something she said lit him up though. He yanked his head up and reeled back, his mouth outraged, his eyes glancing around for a target that wasn’t there. “You can’t remember her things. They’re hers. Genetic material doesn’t store cognitive experience.” He snapped it out like a quick challenge, a sudden spike of intelligence and observation he had not had until that very moment. Yet his limbs were soft, his elbows without tension, his body direct as he faced her.
“Don’t call me that.” He said it… very softly.
He made her feel sad. Nothing had ever done that before, not like this, and she was thinking about it while he stood there. She wasn't thinking about him complimenting her hair, because she totally didn't have the kind of experience with relationships that led her to expect that. She'd pointed it out as a way of differentiating, not as something that she expected him to acknowledge even a little bit. She was trying to process how he was making her feel sad, just by looking sad himself, when he yanked his head up and reeled back.
It totally took her five seconds to realize he looked angry. Then it took her another few seconds to understand why he was angry.
"That's not entirely true," she began, going for logic, because logic was absolutely her go-to and her comfort zone. "Epigenetic marks have proven that it's totally possible for some information to be inherited biologically through chemical changes that occur in DNA." She was finishing the statement when she realized that it might not make him feel any better to hear her explain genetics, because the donor had been totally into genetics. "I know it's weird," she finally added, because she didn't think anything she said was going to make him feel any better about anything. Jason had been totally right, and she'd never felt so much like a walking science experiment as she did standing in front of Perry just then.
Maybe it was being upset, but she didn't even remember what she'd called him. Maybe she'd heard him wrong, because he was talking really quiet, and she cocked her head to the side in emulation of that dead girl. "What?" And then because she just wasn't good at not saying the things she was thinking, she added in her own quiet tone: "I'm not just genetic material."
Perry was angry. He had anger in him as long as he could remember, realizing what it was to be privileged with “real” parents and quick to discover the dear substitutes could be taken either by circumstance or his own negligence. Perry’s existence was surprisingly violent, and he was equally surprisingly non-violent in the face of pressure. His first reaction was rarely to confront or to shout, and when he damaged anything he always reacted with a kind of wonder, as if he never expected to have that kind of ability. Perry was obviously not angry at her. In fact he gave her a strange look of confusion when she replied.
“The only evidence of that is for certain kinds of animalistic instincts. They don’t affect memory or higher brain function. Nobody grows cognitive-capable matter from nothing.” He was saying it with the same snap-to, comfort logic that she did, because as he said it he also knew it wasn’t true. The things Perry had seen… He gave her a wild look. “Nobody is just genetic material.” As if that was the stupidest thing she had said so far.
Perry was obviously incapable of repeating Gwen’s nickname for him, and he gave her a hard shake of his head before turning abruptly away. He decided to try to put a different face on hers, and try to separate her from the woman he’d loved. That was his only option, really. He didn’t have to believe the clone stuff; she had told him that she was not his, and he had to accept that even if… well, even if she was a dead woman walking. There was still a chance she wasn’t actually there. “I gotta go.”
Gwen had a surprising amount of experience with violence for someone so young. Not things experienced as the donor, though that girl totally had a lot of stuff in her lifetime, but life in the lab had been pretty violent and uncaring. Not like firefights or anything, but a lot of the scientists were super sadistic, and a lot of the test subjects she'd seen in the past year had been really violent themselves. Until this moment, though, she would've totally said she didn't understand anger in any real way. But she was totally wrong, and she realized it while she was standing there and looking at him, because she understood the look in his eyes. Maybe she felt it a little too, how unfair all of this was. She knew he wasn't directing his anger at her, but it was still there, and there was a definite spark in her eyes when he tried to argue away memory or higher brain function transfer. "No one's cloned someone at the same age as the original donor before. There's no way for us to know what transfers, because there's no precedent. Before this, cloning was limited to gestational cloning, which means cognitive capacity hadn't even developed fully yet, so who knows if those clones could carry memories from their donors? No one can know, because their minds weren't developed enough to process that kind of knowledge or understanding," she said, and it was only the wild look he gave her that made her stop explaining. "And you said genetic material didn't store cognitive experience, and I'm more than just genetic material." There wasn't any arguing that, despite the lack of logic behind it. She did know the things the donor had known, no matter how much both of them wanted her not to know them. "And you know there's weird stuff out there which hasn't been seen scientifically yet, and prior nonexistence doesn't make things invalid. Like getting bitten by an irradiated spider at RyCorp."
He turned away and shook his head, and she watched him. She should totally let him go.
But Gwen, even this version of Gwen, wasn't super good at just letting things drop. She reached for his sleeve as he turned, her fingers pale and cold, and she held on for a second. "Look, I know you don't want me to be here, and the last thing I want to do is hurt you, okay? I know she wouldn't want that. But I didn't ask to be here. I didn't ask for any of this, and I kind of can't make it go away, either." She paused, and she tried to consider some emotional olive branch that she could offer, but she kind of only had one thing to give him, and she found herself not wanting to offer it. She had to fight past that desire, and the words sounded forced to her ears. "I can stay away from you. I'm at the lab most days, and then at the diner, so if you don't go to either of those places, then you can kind of avoid me, and I can kind of avoid you." Pause, and she scuffed a toe against the ground and rolled her hips side to side a little, and her seafoam gaze settled on a crack in the sidewalk. "If you want that."
Perry didn’t want to debate the likelihood of a clone’s existence just then. How insane it was to imagine that a clone of equivalent age could exist twice, with its own consciousness. From what she was saying, she already knew how unlikely she was, and he wasn’t there to convince her. No one had jumped out to laugh at the joke, and she hadn’t done anything but stare at him and babble--no cons, no games, nothing about the Spider at all. It didn’t matter to him if she was a clone, a crazy half-sister, a plastic surgery miracle or just happenstance. She wasn’t Gwen.
He felt her pull him back and did not resist. Her grip, while weak, turned him back toward her and he gave her a many-blinking look that made it obvious how much he was trying to hold back. Not anger; he didn’t have the capacity for that much emotion just then. The grief was bad enough.
Perry gave a short, humorless little laugh at the idea that she should offer to avoid him. He hadn’t managed to stay away from Gwen the last time she’d asked, and New York was a big city. Perry lifted one red-knuckled hand and gave a short wave at the flower shop. “I’m getting a job.” He didn’t look up at the window, but at her. “My aunt and I live that way.” He moved his arm again across his chest in the opposite direction over his shoulder, and pointed, gaze still focused forward on her. “She’s going to the facility for treatments.” Now his gesture went nowhere, but fluttered in front of his face, a stuttering “all around” indication, like those people were everywhere.
He took a deep breath down into the bottom of his lungs. “What did you say your name was?”
She didn't push the scientific possibility of clones, not when he didn't rebut. Something in her knew when it was time to call it quits and to let him go silent, which was kind of weird, because calling it quits just wasn't something she was good at. But she had lots of anecdotes about him in her head, and most of them included him joking and smiling about things, and he totally wasn't doing that now. She knew there was a flipside to him, too. Anger and getting all quiet and despairing, and she was just sorry it was her that had put him there. Again, Jason's cautionary words rang in her ears (okay, not literally, because words didn't ring), and she kind of deflated a little as she stood there. Her shoulders slumped, and she fidgeted with the long strap of her messenger bag, and then with the zipper pull, which she zipped back and forth a little.
He talked about his job, about Aunt May, about where he lived. He motioned all around, and it was the thing about Aunt May that caught her attention quickly. "Why does Aunt May need treatments? What's wrong with her? Who's doing them?" That last part was asked louder. There were some super good pharma companies in the facility, but there were bad places too. She was genuinely super concerned, and it showed, but she knew that wasn't the point of the stuff he'd said. "I can't leave town, Perry. I'm physically not allowed to, but I can-" She looked back at the flower shop, and at the tiny windows above it. "I can totally find another place. MJ lives upstairs too." Might as well be honest.
She didn't expect him to ask her name, though. "Um. They just called me Gwen when I woke up, and I got used to it, but I wanted to differentiate, so I did Guinevere instead of Gwendolyne. And I changed the spelling of Riley." Somehow, she thought he wouldn't consider it nearly different enough.
Perry’s face shuttered again. He wasn’t going to give a stranger details about Aunt May, and a slow stubborn cast came over his eyes. His lower lip even came out as he dug his figurative heels in. “I don’t know who is doing them yet. Nobody’s called me back. We’ll figure it out Monday when we go in for the study.”
No, the difference was not enough. He flinched when she said “Gwen,” and looked away from her, up the street, but there was no one watching.
What she said started to sink in quick though, and he widened his eyes up. “What do you mean, you’re ‘physically not allowed to’?” he asked, suspicious. You could tell from his reaction that he didn’t like to hear that anyone wasn’t physically allowed to do anything, and he was already kind of spoiling for a fight. “They know you’re a person, right?”
It took her a second too long to realize he wasn't telling her about Aunt May on purpose. "You have to tell me who it is, okay? I know who's in the facility, and who's good that's in the facility. Is she super sick? I can help. I know a lot about biology and disease progression-" Then, belatedly, she realized he wasn't telling her more on purpose. The fingers that had been playing with the zipper stopped their tugging, and she wrapped her arms around herself instead. He flinched, and she just hugged herself tighter. "Oh-"
His eyes widened about not being able to leave town, but she totally wasn't going to burden him with her stuff, not after this, and not after that flinch. She'd just come to understand (super slow) that maybe he disliked her even more than Jason did, and the Aunt May thing felt like losing even the few things she did know about the world before she came into existence. It wasn't that she believed she was the donor, because she didn't, but those were the things she knew. It was super hard to differentiate sometimes, especially when everything you were belonged to someone else, at least as far as other people were concerned.
She gave him a stubborn smile, one without bite. "Totally. I just have a contract with them. I can take care of myself, bug b- Perry." She motioned vaguely in the direction of the facility. "I'm going now." Softer. "I hope your aunt feels better."
Perry recognized this offer of a valuable ally, and as anyone knew, he would do anything for his aunt. He knew that she knew that too, and he registered the fidgeting without consciously doing so. “I don’t know who yet. Her Primary just referred her for the study, and they said yes.” Perry was sufficiently distracted by the reminder of his primary worry that he forgot to look at her like she was an open wound. He pushed his hand through the riotous mess of his hair. “So we came here.”
Nothing in Perry was as simple as dislike or like, fortunate or unfortunate for those around him. Perry knew that look on her face, the hedging “I’m fine,” kind of look, because he’d used it before and not with as much success as she. He did not look as if he fully believed her, but it was too intimate to ask. He couldn’t deal with it right now. “Yeah… okay. Thanks.”
He stopped moving, obviously watching her to see which way she would go--so he could go the other way.
She was surprised when he kept talking about Aunt May, and she really did want to help. She might not even know what the older woman looked like, not in a way that would result in recognizing her on the street, but the donor had cared about Perry's aunt so much. "Okay. If you don't want to talk to me again, you can tell Flash. He'll know if they're reputable. He works in the military facility. MJ could tell Jason, too, if you want. They're super close, and he works security at the facility." She made the offers quickly, like he might interrupt her if she paused too much between the words. It was something tangible she could do to make stuff better, even though she (logically) knew none of this was her fault. She hadn't asked the donor to mess with stuff that would result in her cloning. But mentioning that to Jason had been totally bad news, so she didn't mention it here at all.
He pushed his hand through his hair in a way that was so familiar, and she had to stare in confusion, because knowing about him shouldn't equate with visual familiarity of movement. She shook it off, the wonderment in her eyes seeped, but it had definitely been there in bright and interested seafoam. And she could tell he didn't believe her about the facility, but it would be easier for him to believe it and accept it, and she figured it wouldn't come up again. She tugged on her sleeves, as if he could see the IV bruises hiding beneath her shirt, though he totally couldn't.
She gave him one last nod, the jerk of chin matching that of another girl in a grave, and then she turned and started the super long walk to the facility. Chances were pretty good she was going to be late, and that wasn't ever a good thing.