WHO: Peter Parker and Felicia Hardy WHERE: Galveston Harbor WHEN: Tuesday, March 1st, directly after the TBTN lantern ceremony. WHAT: Peter catches up with Felicia. I assume stuff will happen.
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Peter hadn't shown up to help make posters (though he'd meant to, he'd told Felicia that he would), but he'd gone to the rally. He'd immersed himself in getting good photographs, knowing how important the whole thing was and eager to forget what had happened earlier that day. Instead of going to the student center, Peter had stayed in his dorm room and read Norman Osborn's contract.
Peter Parker wasn't stupid. While, yeah, it did say that OsCorp would handle expenses and liability and all that fabulous stuff, it also said that Peter's abilities---and by extension, Peter himself---were OsCorp property. It was all very clever, making Peter's "enhancements" the focus rather than Peter as a person, but the only way to test his abilities was with his physical presence, and the contract would give OsCorp the right to test them whenever they wanted in whatever facility they wanted. Peter might not have been a law student, but he'd seen too many sci fi movies not to know exactly what that meant.
And it was creepy.
Despite all that, Peter hadn't breathed a word to Felicia. She didn't need to worry about it, not when she had her own thing going on. He'd made up some kind of bullshit schoolwork excuse for being hours late to the student center and then went along like nothing was wrong. It was Felicia's day, not his, and he was more than happy to follow her around for the next few hours.
When the lantern ceremony was over and everyone was drifting back toward the school (or whatever they were planning on doing afterward), Peter finally let his camera rest and caught up with Felicia, reaching for her shoulder.
"Hey." He normally would have followed that up with a deliberately cheesy pick up line, but tonight that seemed a bit out of place. So 'hey' it was.