[flash and gwen at the hospital]
[Gwen had been hanging around non-stop, and the hospital staff had started to regard her as a curious and nerdy fixture in their midst. She asked questions, talked to patients, and she read a lot; anything not to think about how the young man in the bed would feel once he learned the news about his legs.
They'd talked about this for years. His comicbook fate wasn't any secret, and they'd discussed it as casually as they'd discussed her death and Harry inevitable descent to madness. They talked about it casually, as if that made it something casual. Or maybe they'd been trying to keep all of it at bay by convincing themselves that their fates would be different. There had always been the possibility, right? Other people and other doors, they deviated from their storylines. But it hadn't ever been that way for them. They'd only been pretending. But she had to find a way to walk in that room (she heard him crying; she gave him a few minutes of quiet for that), and make something sound positive, and she wasn't sure she could do that. No lists or graphs or charts were going to help her with this, and she wasn't feeling very uplifting,
But she wasn't the kind of girl to avoid bad things, and once she heard the movement on the hospital bed that indicated Flash was sitting up, she walked into the room.
Jeans and a sweatshirt from the NYPD that was way too big and had belonged to Captain Stacy, she closed the door and crossed the room with zero awkwardness. She climbed onto the bed, and she sat against the low footboard with crossed legs, like she was in this for the long haul.]
We totally got shafted when it comes to this comicbook thing. [Kind of casual? She figured she'd gauge his mood before she went in for a hug.]