After telling Peter to meet her, Gwen stared at the data pad and stared and stared again. Peter was on the ship. On the ship and right across the hall from her and while she was often confident (she could step up to Flash and dress him down in the most simplest of words, could stubbornly put herself in the line of danger because she could help and any other number of things that showed Gwen Stacy could hold her head up high and walk through life with steel in her spine and ready to take on the world), this was Peter. Her hands shook after sending that message and shaky breaths followed because she also knew he was here after she died.
She’d died. And then she saw a door and instead of following some white light, she went through the door and ended up here. And she hoped that he wasn’t here because of the same reason. The fall had been too fast for her to think of too many things other than the path she didn’t get to set out for herself, the family she was leaving behind and Peter, what she wanted for him, the hope she still held and the blame she didn’t place at his feet when it came to her death.
The knock at the door, that snapped her from her thoughts and she realized she couldn’t keep him waiting. She could hear her mom’s voice in her head saying it would be rude, that she’d been raised better than that. The wait between his knock and the door opening, it hadn’t actually been that long, maybe a minute or two tops, but upon seeing him it actually felt like longer.
For her, the last time she’d seen him (without his mask) hadn’t been all that long. It was before stopping Max Dillon, before Harry Osborn and…everything that happened after that. But she could tell, just from looking at him, that time had passed. The tiniest of things, nothing hugely monumental, but changes that showed the passage of time.
Without a word, she closed the distance and hugged him, something that was as much for her as it was for him and held there for a long beat or two before pulling back and away, giving him just the tiniest of smiles after.
“Hi.” Gwen’s own greeting was simple, before she felt like she needed to…apologize? “Sorry. I felt like we both maybe needed that and couldn’t help myself.”