Re: AMNH: Gwen & Pete
She'd be a lot harder to web these days, and she'd learned how to escape pretty early on anyway. Even with how things ended, she'd argue that she'd helped him a lot, if he pushed her on it. He might not even be standing there looking awkward and totally not cute if she hadn't helped a few of those time. And she knew there was one deviation from the norm where Carnage killed her, instead of Goblin being responsible, and that could always be how things went here. But playing it safe and letting someone else handle her problems just wasn't who she was. She'd let him help, though, if he wanted to. She just wasn't sure he did want to help, and she'd learn not to expect it from the Peter Parkers that had come before. And it wasn't like she blamed them for it; they were all kind of traumatized she was alive at all, and it made things kind of weird.
She tried really hard to be super outraged at being accused of bias and lying, but his idiot's grin made it too hard not to smile, and she was laughing behind her hand by the time he gasped in mock outrage about the serious damage to his rep that would come with the global breaking news about his convos with the dinos. She wanted to say she would totally dare, but she was laughing too much to manage it with a straight face, and all she did was nod, yep, telling. Informing the world! Bug Boy talks to dinos! Nod. Nod.
There was a hard and fast rule in effect that said no butterflies around him. None. She replayed all of Flash's warning words in her mind, and she remembered how bad she felt in Silent Hill when she learned about Mary Jane, and it helped. Okay. Better. She totally had this under control. She could rattle off the chemical causes for attraction, and this was just science. Yep. Just science, logical, and there was no need to let any butterflies flutter anywhere.
But then he started sway-waltzing, and she was trying so hard not to smile cheesily that worrying about butterflies was completely forgotten. "You're so terrible at this. So terrible," she said, her voice all young smile as she tried to keep up with whatever he was doing with his feet. He wasn't going to win any competitions, but she couldn't stop smiling, and the hand on his shoulder relaxed, fingers light against the side of his neck as she closed the distance she'd put between them just a small bit, and then a small bit more. "Less waltzing. More swaying," she suggested softly.
She'd totally get on with that whole spider-demonstration-confession thing in a second.