[spidey kids in silent hill]
[Gwen thought it had something to do with being dead.
At least that had been her thought earlier, before encountering Flash. She'd heard the siren during her conversation with Peter, and it was almost a welcome interruption. She would've kept talking to him otherwise, and maybe he would've convinced her that hooking up with Mary Jane didn't mean anything. Maybe he would've made her believe it, even though she knew better. She knew Peter Parker; he didn't just hook up with girls, and no amount of weirdness was going to make him do something he didn't want to do. She knew that, and she wasn't very good at lying to herself these days. And it hurt, because he'd spent months telling her this wouldn't happen, and she'd begun to believe him. Maybe if they hadn't kissed on the carousel, and maybe if Jason hadn't slept with the redhead just a little while earlier, then maybe this wouldn't have been so bad. But it was everyone - Harry, Jason, Flash, and Peter after Peter after Peter. And it hurt, and it was really terrible, and even some siren was better than thinking about all the ways in which it hurt, all the ways in which she kept just opening herself up to it like the worst idiot.
But she didn't see what she'd been expecting to see. Eyes red from crying, and she walked the hallways and saw monsters, yes, but there were no visible or auditory hallucinations. Nothing pertinent to her, which she'd been led to believe would be the case. Not only that, but nothing tried to hurt her. She walked through Flash's nightmare, unknowingly in his wake, perfectly unscathed. She'd thought maybe this what Flash meant when he said the door didn't want him. But he'd been seeing Mary Jane's corpse since he'd arrived, so the two experiences didn't sync up.
It was like she was dead, or like she was one of the things that lingered here. She knew it was all controlled by a little girl who was technically dead, and maybe she and the little girl had that in common.
For whatever reason, nothing had affected her until she found Flash. It was the injection, the anti-hallucinogenic, that made the nightmarish structure become Midtown High once more, and her mind embraced the lie to eradicate the memories of heartache and redheads and dying.
She heard the same bell that Flash did, and she found the same classroom. She took a seat, and the message on the board wasn't Algebra. She raised a hand and informed the teacher that the information on the board was incorrect because, unlike Flash, she didn't see the placebo balm of numerals.]