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When Gwen had been Spider-Woman for seven months, a boy in her Physics class cracked a joke about Peter. It wasn’t very creative, but it was pretty mean-spirited, especially given the circumstances of his death. She can’t remember the particulars now, since everything was sort of a haze. Something something lizard brain, something something dead.
(Crash course: Peter M. Parker, a.k.a. “Gwen’s Peter,” a.k.a, “Dead Peter; no, the other one,” a.k.a. “that guy who went crazy and turned himself into a giant lizard, wow, what was up with that? Supervillains, amirite?”)
When the teachers arrived, they found Gwen standing over him with blood on her fist and his two front teeth lying on the ground beside him.
In her defense, the memory was still fresh when it happened. Teach him to make a tasteless joke, anyway.
(It got her two months of mandatory therapy and a suspension. The super barely convinced the kid’s family not to press charges.)
After her suspension was up, she sat alone in the lunchroom for weeks. Nobody talked to her; nobody came by her locker with notes or club invitations or offers to hang out after school. Nobody would look her in the eye when she passed, but she could feel them studying the back of her head, and she didn’t need superpowers to pick up the whispers. And listen, it wasn’t like she’d ever been popular in the first place — her lunch table was her and Peter and sometimes MJ, kicking back and cracking jokes and getting ignored by pretty much everybody except themselves, and that was how they liked it — but it hadn’t been like this. It hadn’t been this attention without camaraderie, this rapt and giddy spectacle, as if her grief were some mutant animal that fascinated and horrified her classmates in equal measure.
And it was awful. Gwen was fairly certain that if she had to sit around and be goggled at for the next five years until high school graduation, she’d snap. Eventually some kid would crack another joke about Spider-Woman and reptiles and she’d lose her temper and judo flip him down a flight of stairs, and he’d end up horrifically injured and she’d end up miserable with guilt, and she’d be expelled and her family would get sued and that would be that. It would take a while, since Gwen was a generally peaceful person, but better people than her have lost their minds under less stressful circumstances.
So she packed her bags, aced an entrance exam, and transferred to Visions Academy.
Visions was better. Not just because it was a whole new set of hallways and classrooms and lunch tables that didn’t remind her of Peter, although that helped. It was better because it meant a fresh start. She got to restructure her classes to take an advanced track, skipped a grade, and moved into accelerated science. She picked up ballet again. Tutored in Calculus and Physics, joined debate team, chess club, and fencing; took drum lessons at a place downtown, judo lessons at a place uptown, and moonlighted as a full-time superhero when she wasn’t busy with any of that.
(Gwen staggers through her first year of superhero work on a diet of black coffee and energy drinks. Her blood caffeine levels could kill a large rabbit, but hey, it wasn’t as though she’d be sleeping anyway.)
She gets damn close to forgetting Peter. Well. Not forgetting him, exactly, or getting over him, or anything remotely in that direction, but sometimes she looks at his picture on her lockscreen and she doesn’t feel like she’s going to—
(Gwen has this tendency to pick at scabs. It’s a problem.)
Then she gets flung a few dimensions over and a week back, and she finds her best friend’s face staring out at her from a billboard. She won’t admit it, but there’s this shard of hope that snags in her heart like a piece of shrapnel in the millisecond before she sees word DEAD.
It’s fine. She’s fine. Everything is fine and nothing is different. She goes to school. She gets half her hair ripped out and introduces herself as “Gwanda,” so it’s not her best week. But it’s still fine. Not her worst week, either. When all else fails, she can still say that.
Then he’s there again, thirty-something and dead-eyed, wearing sweatpants over a mustard-stained variant of her costume, unshaven and thirty-six hours out from his latest shower by the looks of it, but that’s nothing, because his hair flops in his eyes the same way her Peter’s did, and his eyes are the same hazelnut brown as her Peter’s. He sprawls with the same lackadaisical slouch and he talks with the same flat deadpan, mutters under his breath in the same nonsensical way, as though he’s narrating his own life to the invisible audience. Her name on his tongue is a familiar sound, and truth be told, that name very nearly breaks her.
“Hey, Gwen,” the other Peter says, and Gwen aches so badly she wants to weep. She doesn't.
“Hey,” she says instead. She brushes him off and keeps going, because there’s only a few billion universes hinged on her ability to keep her shit together. The box holding her feelings about Peter B. Parker goes right next to the box holding her feelings about Peter M. Parker went, at the back of her mind, under a few trunks of trust issues and the aggregative trauma of almost getting killed on a daily basis.
On the trip back from the Alchemax lab, Miles dozes. The effort of his first superhero outing took a lot out of him.
His head tips against the window, glazed by the amber sunlight of the late afternoon, and he snores quietly. A soft ease comes over his face when he’s sleeping. The tension slides out of his muscles, and his mouth lolls open, his cheek smudging the glass. She watches him for a while, and then feels creepy, and then stares at her shoes with a warm guilty feeling burning her cheeks.
When she glances at him, a thorny vine curls around her ribs. It feels suspiciously like tenderness.
And that’s no good at all. It’s just not. She clears her throat and folds her arms, shifting away from him.
“Hey,” Not Peter murmurs, clambering over from the back of the bus. The carriage rattles and he gets shunted into the seat behind Miles, sprawling out with limbs akimbo. He moves like a rag doll held together by puppet strings, but nevertheless maintains an odd, shambling grace. “So you’re Gwen, huh?”
“Yes,” she says stiffly.
“Little young, aren’t you.”
“Little old, aren’t you.” She keeps her head forward and her shoulders stiff.
He snorts, as if to say, Point. “You go by Spider-Woman?”
“Or White Widow, sometimes.” She refuses to indulge the conversation. Maybe if she stares at the seat in front of her hard enough he’ll take the hint.
“Can I call you Gwen?”
“You can call me whatever you want.” Except that.
“You can call me Peter,” he said. “Or Peter B., if it helps.”
“All right.”
“There a Pete Parker in your universe?”
“There was a Peter, yes.”
“There was a Gwen in mine,” he says casually. Just as casually: “She’s, uh. She’s not Spider-Woman.”
“I figured.” One Spider-Person per universe seemed to be the quota.
“She’s not around anymore,” he adds, hedging.
“Oh.” Typical, she thinks, not unsympathetically. Did he still lose Uncle Ben? It seemed unfair for the universe to take more than one as backstory fodder, but then, it’s not like the universe prides itself on its sense of justice.
“Is your Peter still around?”
“No. He’s dead,” she says straightforwardly. Crudely, perhaps, but Gwen hates beating around the bush.
“Ah.” He nods, and shoots finger guns at her. “Twinsies.”
Her lip curls. He catches her inadvertent expression of disgust, and cringes. “Sorry. Tasteless?”
“I don’t know if you’ve interacted with any other Spider-Men besides Miles,” she says icily, “but it’s pretty basic etiquette not to ask someone about their dead friends right after meeting them.”
“No, I get that,” he says hastily. “I do, it’s just—”
“You thought it would be a funny coincidence. Is that it? If my friend got killed just like yours did, you thought that would be a hilarious cosmic joke?” The words come hard and fast, rapped out like a staccato drumbeat, and she knows she’s being cruel, but the hatred boils up from her stomach in a sudden wave, and she can’t resist it.
“You look like her,” he says quietly, and never have four words so quickly silenced her.
She must be silent for a long time, because he wets his lips and says, “Um. I’m sorry, though. I didn’t think. My bad. I’ll just . . . leave you alone, then.”
Gwen doesn’t offer him an answer except to stare at her hands and let the guilt curdle in her navel. He coughs awkwardly and gets up, brushing off his pants in a little needless gesture, before stumbling back to the rear of the bus. She hears him flop over in the backseat with a quiet sigh.
The rest of the ride elapses in silence, and it’s worse. It’s so much worse.
After everything is done and over with and they’ve saved the universe(s), Gwen makes an excel spreadsheet of all the differences between her Peter and him. It’s meticulously organized, with sub-categories for physical, emotional, and trivial distinctions. (The ‘trivial’ section she waffles over, but there’s nowhere else to put the fact that Peter B. isn’t allergic to peanut butter, so she caves and adds it.)
She means to trick herself out of comparing them. Surely, Past Gwen reasoned, if she could see all of the differences laid out before her at once, her brain would surrender in the face of in cold, hard data. But it backfires, because four hours and three Redbulls later, she’s hunched over her computer, struggling not to get teary-eyed over a spreadsheet.
No. 82: Peter B. does not press his socks.
Dweeb, she thinks fondly, and then angrily, and then miserably.
(“Gwen,” Peter screams as he falls, and even half-mutated into some horrific reptilian creation, she still knows her name when it’s coming out of his mouth, panicked and begging for help.
She doesn’t think. She shoots a web and dives, dropping like a bullet towards the bottom of the clock tower, and chokes on relief with the web connects—
Three seconds earlier, and his head would have cleared the pavement.)
She slams the laptop shut and gets up. She strips off her clothes with a brutal efficiency that leaves her muscles aching from the sudden demand, suits up in record time, and leaps out the window.
After the fight, Gwen thought about quitting. She did. She thought about taking a break. She could’ve given herself time to grieve, because that was what people did, wasn’t it, when people died? They stepped back. They let themselves heal. They gave themselves space to be hurt, and then came back whole.
(Gwen has this tendency to pick at scabs.)
Thing was, evil didn’t step back. Evil didn’t take a break. People were out there hurting other people every hour, every minute, and nobody ever asked Gwen whether or not she was okay to keep going, after it happened. And what if someone else’s friend died when she was sitting on her ass and feeling miserable? How would she feel then?
She’s saved enough lives now that she knows the cost of a day off.
Gwen loops a web around the top of a building and hauls with all her strength. It sends her freewheeling into the sky, borne up on a dizzying rush of momentum, only for her to hook another web around the corner and wrench herself around with a punishing jerk.
Her therapist says she works too hard. Gwen disagrees. She knows for a fact she doesn’t work hard enough. If she did, she’d be distracted from the pit in her throat, and she could go a full day or two without thinking about it, for once. If she worked hard enough, she wouldn’t care about things in the past, because busy people don’t have time for things in the past. (Or friends, but that’s besides the point.)
So no, she isn’t going to sit down and have a good cry about it, because who would that help?
(When the world needed her, Gwen Stacy took her heart off her sleeve, put on her big girl boots, and never, ever cried.)
She still doesn’t. The world still needs her, after all.
“Hey, look up for a second,” says Miles.
Despite her best intentions, she glances up from her lo mien, and catches the flash of his camera before he whisks his phone down into his lap and starts tapping furiously.
“What was that?”
“Nothing.”
“Who are you sending it to?”
“Nobody,” he says innocently.
“Miles.”
“I’m serious, nobody.”
“Don’t post it,” she warns. “What if your universe already has a Gwen Stacy? That photo will raise a lot of questions if it gets around to her.”
“If my universe has a Gwen Stacy, I’m pretty sure she doesn’t follow me on Instagram,” Miles replies easily, which she wrestles with for a minute before shrugging aggressively and shoving another forkful of food into her mouth.
“Aight, but it’s on you if she does,” she warns him.
“No problem.” He stuffs his phone in his pocket and pulls one of the cartons towards him. They’re packed in the corner booth of a tiny Chinese takeout joint a few blocks from Miles’ house, laboring over enough food to satisfy a small army. Superhuman metabolisms are relentless.
“So I was talking to Peter recently,” he says, reaching across the table for the dish of egg rolls at her elbow. She moves to deflect him, and they have a brief sparring match with chopsticks before he successfully swipes a roll, popping it in his mouth with a smug beam. “He says hi.”
“Which Peter?” She feigns ignorance and warily shifts the plate out of his reach.
“B,” he clarifies. “Hobo Spider-Man.”
“Ah. That one.”
“Yeah. He mentioned wanting to do a group movie night one of these days. You in?”
“What night was he thinking?” She carefully aligns the plate with its neighbors.
“The eighteenth.”
“Oh, I can’t, sorry. I’ve got a gig that night with the Mary Janes.”
Miles hums in acknowledgement, his jaw working around another mouthful of food. He swallows, and then clicks his chopsticks contemplatively. “How about the nineteenth, then?”
“It’s a three-day gig.”
“Huh.” He nods contemplatively and puts down his chopsticks, settling back into the booth, stretching. She pokes around her plate.
“Why are you avoiding Peter?”
She splutters. “What are you talking about? I’m not avoiding anybody!”
“You’ve been busy every time he wants to hang out—”
“I’m a busy person!”
“—don’t talk to him, even when we’re doing group Skypes, you barely touch the group chat—”
“Oh, come on, how many people do you know that check their group chats—”
“—barely even mentioned him since he went back to his own dimension, even though you talk to everybody else—”
“So we’re not that close! That doesn’t mean anything, I mean, have you checked in with Ham lately? You don’t keep tabs on everyone, either.”
“And now you’re deflecting.” He folds his hands expectantly.“So . . . ?”
She eyes the distance from the table to the exit. It’s short enough that she could make it if she bolted, but then he’d be stuck paying the bill, and that would be mean, besides.
Her lip catches between her teeth and she gnaws it. “I don’t . . . dislike him,” she says, at length.
“But . . . ?”
“But we’re not friends. That’s all.”
“Gwen, c’mon.”
Miles has this expression that he gives people when he’s disappointed in them. It’s a cross between sadness and unhappy surprise, where his shoulders sink and the light goes out of his eyes, and it guts her every time. God forbid he learn to use it on command, she’d never win an argument with him in her life.
“You know what happened to the Peter in my universe,” she hedges. A flicker of understanding races across his face. He nods.
“And he reminds you of him.”
“No,” she bites out. “Yes? Not really. It’s complicated.”
“Like how?” he encourages.
“Like—” She drops her fork abruptly and swallows a growl of frustration. “Do you know Peter B. doesn’t press his socks?”
Miles blinks, wide-eyed. “I . . . did not.”
“He doesn’t wear tie pins, either,” she says. “He doesn’t even wear ties. And he’s a Knicks fan. I saw him wearing the cap.”
“Oh,” says Miles, as if something is dawning on him.
“He’s allergic to peanut butter. And shellfish. He doesn’t like boba — who doesn’t like boba? But he doesn’t. And he eats pineapple on pizza. Pineapple!”
“Right,” he says, as if this all makes sense, and does not come across as the rambling prologue to Gwen’s slow descent into madness.
“He doesn’t shower often enough, he wears Old Spice, he drives a minivan, and despite all of that—” Her knuckles turn white on the tabletop. “Despite all of that, he’s still just like my Peter. Except old. Which, you know. My Peter didn’t get to be.” She vibrates, knee bouncing. “So.”
Miles reaches for her hand. “Gwen—”
“I’m sorry. This was dumb. I’ve got to go.”
“No, wait—”
She slaps a twenty on the table and stands up. “Sorry,” she repeats, voice high, and then runs.
There’s the sound of him scrambling after her, but she’s faster than he is, and she’s out the door before he can follow her.
The Mary Janes really do have a gig on the eighteenth. It may not be a three-day extravaganza, but it’s a three-hour set at a nice basement café, the kind of underground hipster place that’s lit by neon decor and fairy lights, and it comes with free drinks, which Gwen thinks would probably be much more appreciated if any of them were old enough to partake.
MJ is in rare form. Their last song of the night she finishes off with a high, rough note that warbles on the edge of a scream, which she only does when she’s really vibing with the music. This probably means she’s pissed at Gwen for something. MJ usually vibes with the music when she’s pissed at Gwen, since she writes a lot of it in the same state. It’s not a passive-aggressive gesture; MJ just writes music to cope when she’s pissed.
It’s fine. They’re fine.
Gwen pounds out the last few bars and then drops her drumsticks on the toms, not bothering to pick them up. She stands up to the scattering of applause from the few patrons that are still there after midnight, and stalks to the side of the stage to grab a drink of water. The lights have her flushed red and sweaty. The room is hazed with smoke and the heavy smell of coffee, and she’s sweltering.
MJ hops off the stage, mic still in hand, and catches the water bottle Gwen tosses her. “Good set,” she says brightly. “Don’t you think?”
“Yep.”
“Loved the improv on your solo, this time. It was really cool.”
“Thanks.”
MJ tucks her hair behind her ear shyly, which she does when she wants something but she’s afraid to ask for it. “Betty wants to go hit up McDonald’s for the afterparty. You in?”
“Um,” says Gwen. She has gymnastics first thing in the morning, and she’s already been out late. Plus, she doesn’t typically do post-gig dinner runs. It throws off her meal schedule.
MJ’s expression falls. “Oh. Okay, that’s chill. You don’t have to come if you don’t want.”
“Well, it’s not that I don’t want to, but—”
“You don’t have to explain,” she says. “Let me guess: you’re busy, right?”
Her smile is too thin to be genuine, but the fact that she’s trying plagues Gwen with guilt. “I want to,” she says, and she’s not even lying.
“No, it’s fine.” MJ fiddles with the mic, and steps away. “See you at practice.”
“See you,” Gwen echoes hollowly, and watches her retreating back as MJ grabs her jacket and jogs to the door, where Betty and Glory wait for her. They leave without looking back.
Gwen crushes the empty water bottle and tosses it bitterly into the trash. She slumps down on the edge of the stage, hunched over her knees.
“Hey, awesome set.”
A shadow falls between her and the stage lights. She looks up.
Peter B. Parker stands over her, wearing a denim jacket and sweats, no suit underneath. He’s better shaven than he was the last time she saw him, and he’s gotten a haircut, which does wonders for his apparent age. He’s still prematurely grey around the temples and has a few bags of exhaustion under his eyes, but for somebody who used to look like death warmed over, he’s doing pretty good.
“You guys sound great,” he adds. “Where can I pick up an album?”
“What are you doing here?” It’s more brusque than she means to be. He arches an eyebrow.
“Patronizing the arts,” he says loftily. “Or trying to, anyway. Where’s the others? They bail on you?”
“They went to get food,” she says stiffly. She stands up and slings on her jacket, an old leather number she’s had forever and has a patch with their band name sewn on the shoulder. “If you run, you can still catch them.”
He doesn’t. “You do autographs?” He keeps pace with her as she walks to the door.
“No, thanks.”
“Selfies, maybe? I’ve got a niece who’d be over the moon if she knew I met a genuine rockstar.”
“You don’t have a niece, Peter.”
“By marriage, yes, I do, thank you,” he says indignantly. She winces. MJ has a brother; she’d forgotten.
“What do you want?” she demands, rounding him in the doorway. “Not to be rude or anything, but. This isn’t really your part of town.” Or his part of the multiverse.
“I wanted to talk to you, actually,” he says. “Are you free?”
“Is this about the movie night? Because as you can see, I really did have a gig, so whatever Miles told you—”
“No, no,” he says, waving it lazily away. “We rescheduled that. You should come, by the way, Peni is bootlegging some sequels from the future, it’s gonna be awesome. But. Not what I’m here for.”
She spreads her hands and arches her eyebrows inquisitively.
“I think we should talk,” he says. “It’s kind of serious, though, so could we maybe go somewhere else? If that’s okay with you?”
“Like where?”
“I dunno. Somewhere more private?”
“Said every kidnapper ever.”
“Wow, okay, never mind, then—” Peter rears back, offended, and she deflates.
“I’m kidding,” she mutters, begrudgingly, because her Peter would’ve laughed — it was his kind of joke, she’d only said it because it’d have made him laugh — but that’s just the thing, isn’t it? She forgets so easily, around him. And then she’s disappointed when he turns out to be himself, which is a terrible thing to feel towards someone. It’s a terrible thing to feel at all.
“Well, if we’ve established that I’m not trying to get you to a secondary location—”
“Kidding! I was kidding—”
“—then I could go for a burger,” he huffs. “There’s a Burger King a few blocks away. Nice and public, how does that sound for you, Patti Smith?”
Her lip quirks. “Patti Smith, the country singer?”
He blanches. “God, really?”
She innocently maintains his horrified gaze for all of second before she breaks, and snorts, scuffing her shoe in the pavement. “No. No, I’m just fucking with you.”
“I knew it! I knew it, there was no way — hey! Language!” He actually looks scandalized, bless his heart.
“I’m fourteen, Peter.”
“You’re a child!”
“Are you under the impression that children don’t say fuck? You can’t be that out of touch.”
“Miles never said fuck!”
“I’m not sure that Miles knows he can,” she says, “and anyway, are we going to get burgers or not? The night’s getting as old as you are.”
“Excuse me, potty-mouth, you’ll wish you look as good as me at thirty-seven.” He elbows her, and then freezes, like he’s not sure he’s allowed. She’s not sure either.
They both shift and give each other uncomfortable looks, and he says, “Burger King’s that way,” nodding down the street.
“Better get going,” she says.
“Right.”
He orders three burgers and demolishes them, one after another, with a relish that would make most carnivorous quadrupeds quiver. She gets two and a large fries, and she eats hers slower, although she underestimates how hungry she is. Playing a set wears her down, and by the time Peter gets around to to steal fries from her plate she’s almost finished with them herself.
Peter webs them up to sit on the roof, since it isn’t his universe and apparently he doesn’t care about keeping a low profile. Of course, Gwen gives equal consideration to the idea that he acts with the same total disregard for his secret identity in his own universe, too.
“So,” he says, munching a fry. “Business.”
“Business,” she says dubiously.
“Yeah.” He cleans his hands. “I talked to Miles the other day.”
Shit.
She clears her throat. Their legs dangle off the side of the roof, and the parking lot sprawls out beneath them, dotted only by one or two cars. The roads are empty. They’re a ways out of the city, now, and the noise is low; the night grows quiet in the suburbs.
“What’d he say?”
He shoots her a cryptic glance. “He talked about you,” he says. “And Peter. Not me, Peter, I mean—”
“I know what you mean.”
“And what you told him about him. And me.” He kicks one leg idly. “I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to be sorry,” she snaps.
“Well, tough, because I am.” He folds his arms. “I’m sorry about your Peter and I’m sorry I asked about him.”
“Jesus.”
“No, I’m serious.”
“I know you are.”
“You aren’t my Gwen, and it wasn’t fair to come out the gate swinging like you were, so—”
“Stop.”
“—I won’t act like you’re her, but Miles said you thought I was a little like him—”
“Peter, stop.”
“—and there’s something in that, you know? There’s something to that idea. Like, maybe our universes are closer together than most.”
“So what?” she snaps. She regrets it when he gives her a sad little stare. It’s not pity, but it’s not many steps removed.
Looking at him hurts. She keeps doing it.
(Gwen has this tendency to pick at scabs.)
“I know I’m not him,” he says. “But you can pretend for a little bit, if it helps.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I mean — it’s this thing that May and I worked out.” He fidgets. Toys with the ragged cuff of his trench coat, fingers weaving through the loose thread. She catches herself comparing the movement to her Peter’s anxious fidgets, and scowls. “To deal with . . . everything. You know. It’s this experiment we came up with, it seemed to help — if I was your Peter, what would you say?”
Her fingers curl around the greasy wax paper of her burger wrapper. “I don’t know,” she says numbly. “I — but you’re not him.”
“I know.”
“He won’t hear me.”
“I know.”
“He’s dead.”
“I know.”
“He’s dead because of me,” she bites out.
He considers this. “Do you think he’d agree with that?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “And he’s dead, so I guess we’ll never find out.”
“Gwen.”
“I don’t know!” She crumples her wrapper and flings it away. It’s too light to go far, and falls pathetically by her feet. “What do you want from me? Pretending that he’s alive isn’t going to help anybody. I’m not a kid, I know what death is. I know he’s not coming back, and I don’t need you or anybody else to baby me about it. He was my friend and I loved him and now he’s dead, boo hoo, that’s my big tragic fucking backstory, but it’s not as though pretending otherwise will do anything about it, so I’d love it if you and the rest of the world could just back off and let me fucking grieve—”
“Gwen?”
“I hate that you’re dead,” she cries. The echo of it races around the empty parking lot, bellowing. Her eyes screw shut and something hot boils behind them, scalding, aching, relentless as a pounding drum. “I hate that you’re dead and it was my fault, I hate you for being dead. I hate you so much sometimes I can’t breathe.”
Peter shifts. Fabric rustles, and his sleeve brushes against hers.
“I hate that I can’t look at your face without remembering that you died,” she says. “I hate that you’re everywhere, and not just the other versions of you, but you, just you, everywhere, why did you do that? Why won’t you leave me alone? I didn’t ask to give you up, I didn’t mean to, you didn’t give me a choice — Peter, you were going to kill people. You didn’t give me a choice.” She shoves her face into the cradle of her arms, and moisture seeps through her sleeves. “I d-didn’t have a choice. I’m sorry. I wanted to choose you, but you didn’t give me a choice.”
A hand comes down on her shoulder, feather-light, and moves in long, gentle strokes across her back.
“I think about you all the time. When I look at him, sometimes I blink and you’re standing there.” Her breath rattles through her throat like steel on chalkboard. “Sometimes I hate him for being like you when he’s not. You, I mean.” It gets easier with time, she marvels. The words drop smoother from her lips, one after another, like a brook feeding into a river. “He doesn’t try to be. I don’t know whether to be grateful because I don’t know what I’d do if he was. If he was any more like you I couldn’t look him in the eye, but I can’t help wanting him to be, which isn’t fair to him, but that’s what I feel. It’s stupid. I know.” She sniffles and scrubs her sleeve across her nose. “God, do you remember those stupid fucking chucks you used to wear? I found them in my closet the other day and I cried for an hour. Do you know how stupid that is? An hour. Over a pair of shoes. And I didn’t even feel better afterward.” She pauses. “I don’t even feel better now.”
The hand stills, and squeezes her shoulder blade. Then it retreats.
“I’m sorry,” she says softly. “That’s what I’d tell you, if you were here. I’d tell you I’m sorry, and I wish it was me. I hope you’d forgive me. You shouldn’t, but I hope you would.”
A car passes, its headlights cleaving the dark. It sloughs water over the edge of the road and continues on its journey, gliding under the flickering faded traffic light. The red glare of its tail eventually grows faint, and slips out of sight around the bend.
An owl croons. The sound hovers in the air, low and mourning.
She takes a deep breath and rubs away the tear tracks, businesslike. “Now you,” she says steadily.
“What?” Peter’s voice cracks with surprise. “What do you mean, me?”
“Tell me what you’d say to your Gwen,” she insists. “If she were here.”
He bites down on his cheek. “Kid—”
“Just do it.”
“It’s a different animal, I can’t—”
“It’s not fair if I do it and you don’t,” she says, and her voice breaks. Shit. She takes another few gulping breaths to steady herself. “And I’d feel better if you did.”
There it is. That catches him right between the ribs, and he winces, crumples the remains of his wrapper between his hands.
“Please, Peter.”
“All right,” he snaps. “I just don’t — just give me a second to think about it, okay?”
“Okay.”
Another car has come and gone before he speaks.
“You were my first failure,” he says. The owl coos again.
“No, not my last. Not by a long shot. Yeah, laugh it up,” he adds, warmly, which startles her, since she didn’t laugh. “It was rough, the first time around. It wasn’t like you were some civilian I’d dropped the ball on, though that would’ve been bad enough. It was you. I was really broken up about that for a long time, although now I think maybe the universe wants it that way. Like a law of physics or something — Peter Parker fails, Gwen Stacy dies. It’s got to be you. That, or it’s got to be me. If there’s a universe where we both make it to twenty, I haven’t found it yet.” His laugh isn’t funny, but it’s bleak, as though it’s covering for a much more wretched sound. “Our universe happened to be my side of the coin flip. Which sucks, since you’d probably have made a better Spider-Man than me. In fact, I know you would’ve. I have empirical proof.”
Gwen shifts, letting her hair curtain her head, hiding the smile that wrestles its way, unbidden, onto her face.
“Now, she’s like seven years old and five foot nothing, so she’s got a long way to go—”
“Fourteen and five two, fuck you!”
“—Gwen? Is that you?” He’s grinning, too, which makes her want to punch him even more. “Holy shit, you can speak from beyond the grave?”
“Fuck you,” she mutters, folding her arms with a huff, but she lets him continue.
“She’s got potential,” he finishes, highly amused. “And she’s pretty cool, too. Enough to make me sad about how things went in our universe, even though it’s been twenty years. You ever think about how weird that is? Twenty years. I went to college. Graduated college. Saved the world a couple times, planned a funeral or two, got married. Sorry about that, by the way. I know I promised you’d be best man. Woman. Whatever.” He waves his hands idly, in the haphazard way Peter M. always did when he didn’t have the word he wanted and didn’t care enough to wait for it. “Anyway: new Gwen. She’s around the same age you were when you died. Which hurts a lot, if you want to know. She says I don’t look like her Peter, which is good, because she kind of looks exactly like my Gwen.”
She swallows and regards the dust on the edge of her boot. He nudges her with his elbow.
“Plus or minus half a head of hair,” he amends, and she shoots a glare at him from the corner of her eye.
“It’s nice being taller than you for a change,” he says. “Getting mistaken for your dad, that’s always a hoot. But what I like best about her is she’s tough as nails. I mean it. I forgot how hard you were, when you wanted to be, I mean real hard-boiled shit. It’s like arguing with a brick wall, except the brick wall is also a teenage girl, and she’s not afraid to knock a couple skulls together to get what she wants. Terrifying. Anyway, it’s a pain in the ass, but it’s nice, because it reminds me that you didn’t ever really need me to save you.” He blows out a long breath that turns to fog over his head. “Never needed me for much at all, really. Which makes me feel better, because then maybe it wasn’t my fault, how things ended. It tells me that somewhere in the multiverse, there’s a version of you without me, and she’s gonna be just fine.”
The woods rustle. She exhales long and hard and slow, and something leaves her on the current of breath. It leaves her light and mindless, as if caught in the moment of bottomless vertigo before a long fall, suspended there, drifting.
Peter shifts his arm, leaving his side open, and she shuffles into it. Her shoulder slots under his, and he wraps his arm around her shoulder, and she turns her face into his side. The sob tears its way out of her and is muffled in his jacket.
It isn’t comfortable. It’s awkward and clumsy and she’s getting his coat all wet and she can’t even make herself stop, but he hasn’t pushed her away yet, so she figures it must be okay. She feels like she might fall apart if she doesn’t hold on to something, so she does, fingers clenched in his jacket.
After a while, she notices that he’s shaking, too. She wraps her arms around his midriff and rests her head against his side, and rides it out with him.
It’s the strangest thing: once she’s done, she feels empty, and calm, and whole. The pit in her throat is gone, and when she looks for it she can feel it in the distance, but it’s far off. The grief is gone. Not forever. Maybe not for long. But for now.
Gwen will settle for now. It’s more than she’s ever had before.