Another Snip to 43

(Baxter Building, Med Bay)

Tense moments are a part of life. They happen to everyone, no exceptions. A confrontation with a boss or colleague, family dinner, politics, really it’s a daily occurrence. 

But for Peter Parker, tense moments are not ever under the normal circumstances. 

Standing in the same room as his resurrected ex-girlfriend and trying to think of something to say to her, is a hell of a tense moment. Peter's eyes are pointed to the ground and he can feel Gwen’s eyes on him. Waiting for him to say something. But he can’t look at that face. The same face that has haunted him for years. The face he’s wished he could see smiling and laughing again. The face that was just so full of life at one point. 

As the saying goes, be careful what you wish for. 

“Nothing to say?” Gwen asks, breaking the silence. 

Peter hesitantly answers. “I don’t know what to say.” 

He hears her take a deep breath before letting it out, “Then how about you start with the obvious, Spider-Man.”

The way she says his name, almost like an accusation and insult, makes him flinch. She has every right to be mad at him, he knows that. But it doesn’t make it easier. Just more bitter.

Peter risks a glance up and finds her eyes already waiting for him, unblinking, almost clinical in their assessment. For a moment, he remembers the last time he saw her—falling, hair streaming, hand outstretched, the world gone impossibly slow.

“I heard him,” she says quietly. “On the bridge. The Green Goblin. I heard him say your name. I heard your voice.”

He flinches inside the memory. Wind howling, stone and steel, her hair snapping like a flag—he drags himself back. “Yeah. He knew. He used it. That was the nightmare I’d built the secret to stop, and it didn’t matter.”

The monitors keep up their steady beeps. Her fingers worry at the blanket seam. “And my dad.”

His throat tightens. He deserves that blade. “Your father died saving a kid during a fight I was in with Doc Ock,” he says, careful, even. “Debris came down. He… he made a choice and told me to look after you. The city blamed me. You did, too. I didn’t correct you.” He swallows. “I didn’t know how without telling you everything, and by then you were grieving and I—” He shakes his head. Useless explanations littering the floor between them. “I should have told you. I didn’t. I’m not asking you to forgive that.”

“Mary Jane,” Gwen says, and it’s not a question so much as an accusation placed on the table. “She knew. Before me.”

He grimaces, “I didn’t tell her.” He says quickly, “She saw me climb out of my window from her Aunt Anna’s place. She didn’t tell me she knew until much later.”

“She said the same thing.” She says, her tone softer than it was a moment ago, as she lowers her sights, “She said that it was a burden for her to carry that secret and not be able to tell anyone. Me and even you.”

“She said that?” Peter asks. It’s reflex, but it’s also the echo of every moment in his life when Mary Jane surprised him with hidden depths.

Gwen nods and continues, “She told me how lonely it was to be carrying a secret like that. How it made her feel like she was always on the outside, even when she was right there with us. And I started to realize—” Gwen’s voice falters, not with emotion, but with the shock of a new hypothesis forming on the fly. “I started to realize how she always pushed me to keep giving you chances. Even when I wanted to walk away, she wouldn’t let me.”

Peter begins to recall moments when Gwen would come to him angry, or sad, or just tired of the whole mess, and then she’d go have a conversation with MJ, at a party or small social gathering, and when they returned it was as though the weather had changed. She wasn’t upset with him anymore, she was all lovey dovey again.

He’d always thought Mary Jane was just being a friend to her, hearing Gwen out and smoothing things over, but now he sees it—the way she was building a bridge over the chasm he’d created, stone by careful stone.

He owes that woman more than he realizes.

“She liked the same guy I did, and she pushed those feelings aside because she was my best friend.” Gwen then gets a smile, “Even when she competed with me, it was to make sure I knew what I had.”