cv (ephemeras) wrote in rooms, @ 2014-09-17 20:18:00 |
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Entry tags: | !marvel comics, *log, *narrative, gwen stacy, jason todd |
Narrative & Quicklog
Who: Gwen (+ Jason)
What: Mostly a narrative & a blip (quicklog in comments)
Where: Marvel x2
When: Seconds after this
Warnings/Rating: Probs none
If she took her feelings and examined them beneath a microscope, the sentiment on the slide would be a hybrid of anger and ache. It wasn't that she didn't hold herself responsible for Jason's actions with Carnage; she did. She knew she'd made a mistake to trust anyone with the symbiote outside of herself. She knew that mistake had caused various deaths. She knew that irresponsibility had led her here. She wasn't unaware of those things.
But she took exception to the entire notion that she couldn't be trusted. That was more hurt than anger, though she could parse through the emotion to find the logic at its core. They didn't trust her, and they never had. That kernel of doubt had been sown by the last Peter, and she wasn't sure she would ever be able to escape it. That anger churned in her stomach, a physiological reaction to emotional stimuli, and she tried to ignore it as she made her way down the stairs in jeans and a hoodie, hands tucked away in the front pocket of fleece to ward off the early New York cold.
Without touching anything, she pushed open the doors to the outside world, and she stepped out into something entirely different.
It was New York, but with a sheen that felt brighter than the one she'd resided in for years. A look over her shoulder verified that her location had changed, too. The Midtown police station was at her back, and the pair of officers that moved around her greeted her by name. But she didn't know them, and this wasn't the Midtown she'd originated in, either. That caused her a pang of ache that made her knees threaten to buckle, and she looked around, almost expecting the stone steps beneath her to have turned into a river of water. But the steps were fine and, slowly, she turned and entered the police department.
The halls and walls were familiar. They evoked memories Gwen generally tried to keep at bay. They were weekends in her dad's office, a game on the television and her homework on his desk as he worked overtime. Her mom would go shopping, but Gwen hadn't become interested in clothing until much later. Even then, weekends had always been about her dad. These halls looked the same, and her steps slowed as she neared her dad's old office.
She never went back to the station once he died. They'd boxed up his career and sent it home, and her mom had packed it away with a folded flag. The service had been Category 1, full honors. It had rained, and Peter hadn't been there.
She blinked back tears, and she checked the wall at her left for stability, because she had good control over her ability now, but it still did its own thing when her amygdala was in overdrive. Limbic system aside, the wall beneath her fingers seemed solid.
She pulled her hand back from the flat surface, but her fingers stuck.
It took a few panicked tugs to get free, and plaster flaked off brick, but nothing around her changed, and when she ducked into her dad's office it was to examine her fingertips in confusion. She closed the door behind herself, and she stared down at her hand.
"Is it going to do a trick, Gwendy?"
She raised her head quickly enough that she experienced whiplash. Cervical acceleration-deceleration, that was the actual term for the mechanism of injury, but whiplash was fine for now. Because her dad was standing there, alive. Tired, he looked tired, but he was alive, and there was no time for logical processing of thought before she crossed the room.
He chuckled, and he pulled her into a hug.
"You're alive." Finally, and it took her a long time to get that eloquence out.
"Course I'm alive." He sighed, and he pulled back.
He looked just like she remembered, and he simultaneously looked nothing like she remembered. Memory was an imperfect thing, and no one understood the capacity of the human brain well enough to fully grasp why.
"Quit staring. I'm angry, but I love you. Now, sit down," he said, gruff.
That confused her, but she did as he asked, and she watched as he rounded the big wooden desk that had been the home of all those weekend homework assignments. As her gaze tracked his progress, she noticed the papers spread out on the wood. Spider-Woman, and something about the death of Peter Parker. She reached for one of the papers, and her hand stuck. She tried to shake her hand free, and that just made it worse.
She looked up. "Dad, what's going on?"
He told her. When she left the station hours later, she wasn't at all surprised to see Ms. Carter's familiar stoop at her back.