Chapter Text
Gwen does not dramatically claw her way out of her grave. She learns later that Peter already has that covered.
She cracks one eye open when she feels someone jab her in the shoulder. As awareness returns to her, with it creeps in the realization that she's curled facedown against an intensely uncomfortable surface.
"Hey, lady," says a man's voice. Light, noticeable Brooklyn accent. The poking in her shoulder happens again.
She pushes herself up against whatever she's lying on, and pins and needles flood her limbs in retaliation. She lifts her head far enough away to see what it is. It's a bench. One of those green ones, molded out of links with plastic poured over them. The sleeping surface equivalent of a LEGO to the foot.
She levers herself into a messy seated position.
She swivels, her neck cracking, to face the man who woke her up, scowling fiercely. Her hair whips around her face. It's a police officer, white, brunet, thirtyish, pursing his lips at her. When he sees her face he blinks and lets out an involuntary whistle, even though she can feel there must be a red lattice imprinted in her right cheek.
"Okay, even pretty girls can't sleep here," he says. Then, in a transparently leading voice, "I hear you've been here all morning. You got somewhere to go?"
He thinks she's homeless. She can't blame him. She isn't sure how she got here. "Of course I do," she snaps. Her head is swimming. She tries not to let it show.
He looks dubious. "If you want, I gotta list of resources--"
She lurches abruptly to her feet, startling him into silence. "I do not," she says, icy. Her legs wobble, and he holds a hand out to catch her arm. She smacks it viciously away. She'll barely tolerate that kind of behavior unsolicited from Peter, and she's in love with him.
It takes her a second to get steady in her heeled leather boots and pencil skirt. She straightens out her olive jacket, shaking it out. Dead leaves and debris shuff off and spiral to the ground and onto her recently vacated bench.
"I've just been overworking myself," she says, looking up and piercing him with a glare. "Midterms, you know. I just fell asleep. A fluke."
She picks a direction based on facing away from him and starts away at a brisk clip, not letting her legs shake anymore.
"Hey now, miss--"
"Goodbye," she bites out.
As she stalks away as fast and steadily as she can manage, she hears him mutter, "What kinda school is havin' midterms now?"
She walks more to get her bearings than anything. She racks her brain in a state of controlled panic, trying to piece together how she got here. She gets less than a block away before she takes off her coat. She's dressed for crisp spring weather, but it's unseasonably warm. The bareness of the occasional tree dotting a yard or sidewalk actually makes it seem like an unseasonably warm Fall day.
What kind of school has midterms now.
She massages her forehead, frowning. It feels like she's been asleep for...a long time, somehow. Like when you dream a lifetime, and finally wake expecting to be changed. But where feelings like that quickly slip away even when you try to hold them close, she's having trouble shaking this. She feels dizzy.
She claws for some kind of grounding in the present. She still hasn't figured out how to help Harry. Her brainstorming session with MJ proved futile. She told Peter to come over so they could talk it over in person. To pool strategies, doubled with finally getting to see him again.
She'd waited in her apartment, treading the same mental paths into canyons, and then...
A thump on the windowsill behind her, spinning to dodge a blow delivered with a hideously stretched grin, a scuffle, a blow to the back of her head, her vision tunneling, falling into the gray.
...Shit.
"Did the fucker really kidnap me just to dump me in a public park?" she mutters.
She looks around, like the street is going to reveal any clues.
The Brooklyn Bridge hangs across the horizon, offering no explanation.
She turns away from it, unsteadily, her ankle wobbling on her heel once. She clenches her fists and starts walking with determined balance for her neighborhood.
It went like this:
The Green Goblin nipped in through Gwen's open window on his stupid flying boogie board, which scattered everything in her living room. He continued to hover on it, crouched, watching her behind bugging mask eyes. One of her curtains had snagged on the spikes at the front, and hung there. It looked absolutely ridiculous.
"No more," he said.
The glider swayed in a small, rocking rotation as it hovered. Gwen tried to time inching to put a side table between her and him with its ebb and flow, just in case that would muffle the motion to his vision.
"None of you," he continued, "are going to poison my son anymore, you useless, you filth. I'll go in order, I think! First you, then that musclebound galoot, then Parker, and then the redheaded whore for dessert."
This was raving nonsense, and horribly revealing.
"Mister Osborn?" she gasped, aghast.
She had known Harry's father could be an awful man, but she hadn't thought--
She hadn't thought he would actually--
How dare he.
"Does Harry know?" she demanded. "Does he know what you are?"
He obviously didn't. Even if he'd decided not to tell her, she'd have been able to tell he was hiding something.
The Goblin laughed high and hysterical. "People like your little boyfriend and I don't need to tell useless specimens like you and my son what we do in the air."
What--
No.
Wait--
No.
"...Peter isn't," she started.
He couldn't be.
Of course he was. God, didn't it explain everything?
But then he killed--
Peter killed--
Gwen rallied. "You're lying," she snarled. "Peter wouldn't--"
"Lie to you?" interrupted the Goblin. Which would really be proof that he was Harry's awful dad if every awful man in the city didn't serially interrupt people. "Little chit, he lies to everyone. He has unmade me to keep his secret. He is, a li-ar--"
"Peter wouldn't kill my father," Gwen finished, balling her fists.
"Would he?" the Goblin said. "What wouldn't he do?"
"Not that," said Gwen, more to tell herself than to convince the tedious madman invading her home. She realized as the words slipped free that this denial was also an admission that he would do the rest of it.
That Peter would lie to her, to all of them -- that he would make a massive nuisance of himself trying to help people.
Which was, put like that, his general approach to life, just expanded logarithmically.
Dammit.
God. Every time she ever saw Peter run away from danger... Every time I tried to coax him into being brave with me...
What a perfectly mortifying trick to fall for. They were going to have such a talk, she reflected. She was almost close enough to make it to the door to the hall in one lunge now.
He swooped in between her and the door with a cough of exhaust, caging her against the window-housing wall. Double dammit.
"Well, I wouldn't know," Norman said. "Parker does leave quite the trail of destruction in his wake. But if I had to guess, this was another Parker failure -- I bet he didn't even mean to kill him."
She was going to have to talk her way out or go through him.
The mask's grin was a white fissure cracking it in two. "Ha," he said, like it was a word you could just say. "Might as well say your father killed himself! With his reckless heroism! His nobility!"
She shoved the glider, and he actually just shot away from her like an air hockey puck at an odd angle between the way she'd pushed and where the glider pointed. He hit the wall by the door and knocked down her Standard High Seals (Go Seals go, MidTOWN's going DOWN) poster.
"You," she snarled, forgetting about any reasoning she'd been processing that talking would be smarter. She scooped a microbio textbook off the ground and hefted it.
Mask eternally the same frozen glee but posture surprised, he wobbled back to a proper crouch, saved from going flying by the glider's footrests. She pictured him knocked out while he was strapped to the thing and flopping from them like a fish.
"Didn't mean to," he repeated in a private sing-song, then ascended in volume abruptly: "Just like he didn't mean to ruin my son!"
He swooped in for a wild swipe at her, knocking a lamp over. She threw the book while he was in motion while also trying to dodge, and missed.
"But the results-- The results are what matter, aren't they? That's--" A creaky laugh. "That's the worst thing about him, don't you see? He acts like his intentions justify his results."
That might have struck a tone with Gwen-- If it wasn't familiar logic. Circuitous. Hypocritical. It had had Harry walking in fear since the day she'd met him. Equal fear of action and stillness -- safety from censure teased, but always unattainable. She'd untangled it with him a dozen times. Even before she learned who was pouring it in his ear.
"Peter isn't the one who's ruining Harry," she said.
The face under the permanent grin of the Goblin mask contorted. She couldn't say how. Perhaps a pulling back of the lips from over the teeth.
"Remember that your poor taste in friends is why you're going to die," Norman said, voice now cold.
Gwen had the time to say, "You can just choke on your speechifying, you insufferable little--" before a hand cuffed her with should-be-impossible force on the skull.
Didn't matter. She'd made her point.
Okay, so Harry's crazy dad knocked her out and dumped her in a park. Good job doing something about that, oh good Samaritans of New York. You're just doing amazing. She hasn't spent time trying to convince people that bystander syndrome is a myth for this.
"Fuck," she says. "Shit."
She starts walking faster.
Peter, she knows, didn't save her, even if he is Spider-Man, because he wouldn't leave her in a park.
...Unless he's still fighting, somewhere, right now.
Or if he died in the doing.
A jog and a train ride later she ends up on Peter and Harry's doorstep, breathing hard.
You were supposed to come to me.... Guess I'm coming to you. I'll excuse you the change of plans. God, he must have gotten to her empty apartment. He must have been so worried. She doesn't even have her goddamn purse.
Both the mat in front of the door and the number plaque have changed since the last time she was here. She double checks she's not on the wrong floor, but the number is right.
If Mr. Osborn is expressing his concern over Harry by renovating his son's apartment in between trying to murder his friends, he's even dippier than she thought.
She knocks sharply. With luck Peter will be there. Peter will be there and will pull one of his occasional miracles and identify her and her mood from the tone of her raps and already be in a helpful mood when he opens the door.
After a moment, an older-looking black woman who Gwen has never seen before answers the door. She's wearing a frilly pink apron and huge reading glasses. She peers benignly through them at Gwen.
Gwen blinks, surprised, but recovers. Maybe she's a friend of May's. "Is Peter...in?" she asks. She aims for a tone that is neither sharp nor dizzy and very nearly hits it.
The woman peers some more. "Now, I don't believe I know a Peter," she says. "Can't think of one in the building, but now I don't know everybody. So you may have gotten the wrong door."
It takes several minutes for Gwen to extricate herself from a friendly, but not very helpful, conversation, baffled. She was difficult to steer onto topics, but the woman was fairly plain that she didn't know a Peter Parker, any other Parker, or a Harry Osborn. She was convinced Gwen had the wrong address. Gwen does not have the wrong address.
She stands outside the building, summarily booted from her destination. "Why the unmitigated nerve," she mutters, tugging her coat more tightly around her.
She heads to the nearest payphone. With every minute her head gets clearer and her surroundings make less and less sense. She dials Mary Jane collect.
"The number you are dialing has been disconnected--"
She hangs up. Her hand is shaking.
She gives herself thirty seconds to steel her nerves before trying the Osborn residence, resolved to silently end the call if any of the wrong people answer. This earns her nothing when the number gets her a drug store's customer service line.
Feeling like she's being irrational about it but also too unsteady to try her own home lest the same Twilight Zone experience present itself, Gwen turns instead for somewhere steady, safe, and most of all less personal.
The Bugle.
The Bugle building is refreshingly the same. The door is unmanned, and since before entering the news room she straightens her posture (and jacket, again) and affects a busy, businesslike expression, everyone ignores her. They tap away like mad things at keyboards and shout to each other. In a way, it's soothing. She stops at Betty Brant's desk.
Betty looks up at her face, and Gwen's heart jumps in shock at how much the other girl seems to have aged overnight for half a heartbeat before Betty inhales raggedly, blood draining from her face, her pen falling from her slack hand.
They keep giving her a blanket, filched from somebody who's been sleeping under their desk. She keeps handing it back to them, but someone will come back over and drape it over her shoulders again. She rips it off each time, but it keeps migrating back to her shoulders. Nobody seems to know what else to do for somebody who should be dead. There seems to be an expectation for her to kick up a bigger fuss than she has.
Everywhere there are fluttering offers of help that is at once too little too late and unexpectedly unneeded. They're superfluous. The tragedy was years ago.
At least she can still say that bystander syndrome can suck it.
"Is--" she starts to ask, and then falters on what she should even be asking.
Harry overdosing. Flash muted somehow since the army. Peter, Spider-Man. MJ seemingly the most secure but with that inner fire that made her a runaway at 17. "Please, is everyone alive?"
An entire committee assembles to have a go at answering this, borne from relief at having something to do.
Apparently Norman is dead. None of them give the impression they know what he was. Just that he mysteriously popped his clogs hours after she did.
I am compartmentalizing that, thinks Gwen.
...Peter definitely murdered him for her. Well, at least there's that.
After a little prodding Betty reports that Harry's "In SoHo, I think?" This is the least information Gwen has had about her best friend's whereabouts since they met, but it's better than clear and specific directions to a plot in a graveyard.
People mutter over her head about "next of kin", but she doesn't have any close by enough to be applicable, so she tunes them out, channeling her attention away from them and into thinking. Brilliant she may be, but this is...too many things. To think about. She closes her eyes.
Holding Spider-Man culpable for the negligence of not saving George Stacy-- No. That's not off the table, even if he is Peter. She's been too mad about it for too long. She won't -- renounce her dad by letting it go just like that, just because it doesn't feel good to be mad anymore. Holding Peter responsible for that isn't off the table.
Hating him for it might be.
She's unclear how much of this is actually because she cares for Peter and how much is just instinctively drawing away from the Goblin's summary of the situation. Talk about a disreputable source. Even putting aside the fact that he murdered her.
A radio snaps on at full volume somewhere in the bullpen and starts screaming a blend of big band and static. Gwen presses her eyes shut harder.
"For the love of all the little baby angels, turn that off--" says a woman Gwen doesn't know.
"I didn't turn it on--"
"Then don't keep a broken radio at your desk--"
"It's not broken--"
"Doesn't matter," sighs Robbie's voice as the noise finally snaps silent. Him and Jonah seem to have switched jobs, which is a story she'd normally want to hear very badly. "If your city editor says fix it, you fix it."
The voices blend together. She can say without irony that the Bugle lobby was a good choice of venue to start this breakdown. The ebb and flow of harried bitching is very soothing.
Closing her eyes proves to have been a mistake, because it means she doesn't get any warning about who the panic committee decided to call until he's shoving his way into the circle of bodies fluttering around her.
"Now, son, just wait a minute. Please, I'm asking you--"
"No, Robbie, I need to see, I don't-- Let go of me."
That voice is more familiar to Gwen than any other left living. She looks up.
Peter's holding three people away from him in a foolish show of strength, glowering at them and spoiling for a fight. But it's like he senses it when she looks at him: He stills and looks over, expression scooped out and open, one hand and an elbow still raised and holding people bodily away. A buffer between body and busybodies. MJ would like that one.
There are deep lines across his forehead, the same ones he gets when he concentrates she always taps to make him laugh and let them smooth back out. His shoulders are squarer and broader. His nose has been broken at least one more time, the line of it jinking more noticeably than before between his eyes.
"Gwendy," he says, and she staggers upright and throws herself into his arms.
He holds her like she's eggshell-breakable while she sags her entire weight against him.
She extricates her right arm, leaving her face mashed against his collar, and thumps blindly against his bicep twice until he gets the memo and pulls her closer.
She hears a whapping noise and heels on sidewalk at this point, and then Mary Jane's voice: "For God's sake, let me in."
Gwen scrapes her face up to look in that direction. MJ is wearing her hair blown out into big soft waves around her face instead of silky and flat, and the lines between her nose and mouth are deeper. The same mouth is dragged down at the corners instead of smiling blindingly. The style makes her hair look like it's a lighter color.
Her hand is raised holding a big purse like a weapon -- Gwen suspects she can deduce what the whapping sound was -- and on that hand she's wearing a wedding ring.
She's wearing a wedding ring?
Suddenly completely sure, but needing to confirm, Gwen gropes blindly for Peter's hand and pinches at it until her fingers hit the unforgiving band on his own ring finger.
Here, MJ falls on them both before Gwen even gets to process this addition to the circus that is her undeath, saying, "Oh, Gwendy, d--"
She chokes on the "darling", sobbing instead. Her hand, nails long and painted professionally, loops around Gwen's free wrist.
Gwen's existence is narrowed down, pressed against solid brunet by warm, teary redhead. It's nice. Even in the small crowd, it's almost private.
Linked to them each by a different hand, MJ's front against her back and Gwen's front against Peter's, it's easy to detect the silent, exaggeratedly mouthed conversation they have over her head, MJ on tiptoe to clear her mouth over Gwen's hair. She thinks she can even guess from the motions against her scalp what they're saying. MJ: What do we DO?
Peter: I don't know.
Is it really her?
A minute, staccato headshake. I don't KNOW.
"I think I'm real," she reprimands sharply.
Peter jerks against her, arms around her curling closer, then further away. "Shoot," he says very softly, then sighs. "I wish that was enough."
Gwen's head finally shoots up all the way. "What is that supposed to mean?" she demands.
"It... Ghhh," says Peter, unhelpfully.
"Later," says MJ, slightly more helpful but even more infuriating. "I promise. Alright?" And then she jerks her head minutely to indicate the large, twitchy crowd.
"Fine," hisses Gwen. "But later--!"
Gwen feels MJ stretch up on tiptoe, and then she kisses the crown of Gwen's head. "Of course, darling, of course."
MJ fast talks the alarmed Bugle staff and the paramedics they called into ceding Gwen to them. After all, she's physically fine, so there aren't any problems with her, except, perhaps, legally. Peter glowers with barely sheathed hostility at anyone who looks doubtful about MJ's points, and it's eventually conceded that as the undeceased's former almost-fiancé, his home is still the best place for her to go.
Gwen doesn't understand how no police ended up in the mix in all the time this fuss has taken. But then she'd noticed an impulse building, before, in the populace of New York, to stop thinking of law enforcement as applicable once things got weird enough. If she were majoring in one of the social sciences, she'd have written a paper on it and called it the Vigilante Threshold. Maybe in the years she's missing it's fully come to fruition.
If she had been majoring? She's going to dig up Harry's dad's body and spit on him. Or cry. Maybe both.
Betty, as the one who recognized her, has been decided to be the Gwendolyn Stacy expert, so she was tugged away to speak with high agitation to official types as they manifested, Robbie at her elbow. (Jonah showed up partway through the hubbub, caught a look at Gwen's face, looked like his own had been smacked with a large fish, then turned away and has been sobbing wetly into his handkerchief ever since.) When the tide turns to let Gwen go, Betty rips herself away from those soft conversations, strides over to Gwen, and opens her arms like she wants to pull her into a bracing hug. MJ and Peter still have Gwen sandwiched between them, however, and there's literally no room. Gwen also still doesn't have a free hand. Betty brings her hands back together and cups them around Gwen's face. Her chin-length chestnut hair is straight sheets now, instead of curled.
"You'll be okay," she says. "Just -- be real? For us?" She smiles, watery. "Please?"
Gwen doesn't know what to say to that for several seconds, but then she finds herself saying, "I'll try my damnedest."
Betty snorts a surprised laugh and lets her go.
As the trio leaves, all the lights in the building emit a discontented buzz and go out, stay off for several seconds, then slowly flicker back to normal.
Jonah emerges from his blubbering fest long enough to growl, "Damn electric company. Robbie, permission to do an editorial on how businesses coasting on the ease of oligarchy get sloppy about quality."
"Granted," says Robertson absently, tilting his face up to look at the ceiling lights in confusion. "But edit out the swearing yourself this time; I'm not paying people for that."
Peter and MJ have a car -- which might be the most bizarre thing to come out of this day yet -- and they came in it. They lead her to it still pressing her between them, but now each against one of her sides, Peter's arm over her shoulder and MJ's slung around her waist. She's barely supporting her own weight, for which she's a bit grateful. When they reach the car -- they parked in front of a fire hydrant, and the windshield is sprouting tickets like mushrooms after a rain, but the car is still there -- and MJ extricates herself to step into the driver's seat, Peter deliberates for a moment, wearing a focused scowl, and then opens the curbside backseat door and maneuvers them both in without ever taking his arm off her shoulders. Instead, he scoops his other arm under her and physically lifts her in with him.
She's not sure whether to smack him or blush, but when she looks at his face his expression looks absolutely haunted, so she does neither.
Catching her eye, he watches her with an unreadable expression very briefly, then removes his arm and scoots backwards as far away from her as he can on the seat until he's pressed against the door.
Peter looks out the window at the pulse of city lights and twists his wedding ring, and for the first time Gwen feels jealousy roar hot in her like a flame in a freshly bellowed furnace. She wanted that. That habit was supposed to be for her. She'd won, dammit.
Then she remembers MJ teary and pressed against her, and realizes they must have bonded in the wake of losing her. Then she just feels coldly sick.
I will not give up, insists impulse one.
It is already over, laments impulse two.
Peter glances over at her, under the mistaken impression he's being subtle, and watches her, expression an unstable balance of predatorily assessing and hunted.
"Peter," says Mary Jane from the front seat without looking back from where she's pulling the car out into traffic. "I can hear you overthinking things."
Peter scoffs. "I don't think this is a situation where we'll suffer from doing too much thinking."
"Accept a good thing for what it is."
"Why would I want to do that? Why would you want to do that? You never want to do that. Are you even really my Mary Jane?"
Peter has always been an irrepressible flirt, but there's a wealth of history in that my. Years that Gwen missed.
MJ makes a frustrated noise.
"Optimism's hardly ever been the easy route before," she says. "...And I was always right when I thought things would go horribly wrong, so I'm inclined to trust my gut. So stop killing my buzz, Parker."
"But--"
"My buzz."
Peter makes a dubious noise but then falls silent, slumping down a good foot.
Gwen smirks at him. Also-- "Put on your seatbelt," she says.
"I think I'm durable enough to give it a miss every once in a while," grumbles Peter. Then his whole expression kind of flickers like a dodgy lightbulb. Did he forget that as far as he knows, she doesn't?
"Exactly," says Gwen. "I'm worried about the poor car. What if we get into an accident and you go flying and dent it with your head?"
"Don't bother," says MJ. "It's not worth the effort. You know he enjoys arguing for its own sake."
"I contest that," says Peter.
"See?" says MJ.
Gwen tips her head back against the backseat cushion. She should demand more information while they're all sitting.
She lets the rest of the ride pass in silence, watching hope flare and sputter in Peter's eyes, listening to MJ's nails tap the steering wheel.