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When the news is broadcast—Spider Man Returns?—the public begins to doubt whether they got it right, whether Peter was who they thought he was. Whether he was their protector, or just some kid who got himself killed pretending to be a hero.
Gwen’s blood boils. How dare they? She is not a replacement, she is a legacy. And for all the good she is trying to do—and she really is trying, with all her heart and soul—she is not Peter Parker, she never will be. But she’s all they have now. It is when someone speaks of exhuming his body in order to sate public curiosity that she knows she has to do something. This new Spider Man, an embodiment of hope to help heal the wounds left by the loss of their true hero, has been in the public eye for weeks.
But Gwen Stacy?
Gwen Stacy has been in hiding.
Of course, the entire world wants to talk to her. The whole world wants to know the story of the girl who loved Spider Man. They want to know the truth, they want to pick at her insides and tear her apart, they want to make her grief a public spectacle for their own morbid amusement. Oxford will wait, they contacted her in the wake of all of it, when she didn’t make her flight, and her place will be held. A mercy, because she isn’t sure she could think of anything other than this smothering sphere of grief and sadness and loss.
But she can’t stay in hiding for much longer. Someone needs to say something, someone needs to stop them before they take even more away from Peter—they had his life, his entire existence swallowed in his quest to keep them all safe, how could they possibly want more?
And Gwen doesn’t think Aunt May will be able to take it—Aunt May who has become family to her now, Aunt May who needs her to be a crutch, so that the two of them may limp on in the wake of their loss.
So for the first time, two months after the loss of Peter Parker Spider Man, Gwen accepts one of the requests for interviews. There have been dozens, at first she tore most of them up. She would not be the would-be widow of the dead hero. She wouldn’t. She’s tired of all this, of the reporters camped outside their building, of the people assaulting Aunt May with their questions and cameras every time she leaves the house, of them digging and digging into the past, into things they have no understanding of, trying to make sense of a life they knew nothing about until it was already over.
Her interview is going to stop the world in its tracks and her entire body is so numb from dealing with all of it that it scarcely even occurs to her that she is going to expose herself to billions of people, all watching with their sick fascination, wanting to know, feeling like they are somehow entitled to the truth of Peter’s life, for they have already taken his death. She tells Aunt May, and the woman weeps in gratitude, for she lacks the strength, the will to make them stop. To tell them what they need to hear in order to leave them all alone.
“So, the entire world wants to know, was Peter Parker really Spider Man? Since the appearance of this newcomer, there have been a lot of doubts.”
She wants to hit the man in front of her, asking her these questions. But Gwen sits there, in front of a room full of people and cameras, broadcasting her to the world, in her nicest clothes, feeling utterly naked without her favorite coat—the one she keeps meaning to burn, because it still reeks of dirt, sweat and above all else, blood—and she refuses to cry for them. They have taken enough, they have enough of her tears—she remembers, her tear streaked, distraught face was on the front page of every damn newspaper in the country the day after the funeral. That can’t happen again.
“Peter was Spider Man, I spent enough nights stitching him up to know—“ She had started reading manuals on first aid then, because for all her knowledge on a variety of rather strange and specific topics, she was not a doctor, and her ability to give him stitches was a little iffy to begin with. She had learned. She’d learned to stitch him up as best she could, try to minimize the scars, she’d learned how to make his wounds stop bleeding, how to set broken bones, but most of all, she’d learned to lie. Peter fell. He tripped. What a clutz. He was the most graceful, fluid person she had ever met, and it felt like a disservice to say otherwise. “—I see this…newcomer as a legacy. Peter, he…he did something important. He gave people hope, hope that things could get better, that the city could be safe—and I think that this person is just trying to continue doing that.”
“And for how long were you aware of your boyfriend’s secret identity?”
“From the very beginning.” She still remembers that first night at her apartment, in which Peter managed to offend her father so very deeply that he never quite got over it. How out of place he had been among their supposedly sophisticated ranks. She’d like that about him—nothing like the boys she had gone to middle school with, all too trained in the art of manners and being well dressed, the kind who wore cologne from the time they were twelve. Peter had been badly dressed, always in the same worn out coat, his hair always stuck up at silly angles—Especially in the mornings--, and he smelt like earth and burnt wood and Aunt May’s cooking—And blood. “Before what happened with Doctor Connors—“ Doctor Connors, her mentor, someone she had trusted, someone her father had trusted, someone who had betrayed them, been the starting point for her ruination. “—He told me and I…I did my best to keep him safe, to help him as much as I could.”
Reckless, reckless boy. Too concerned with the wellbeing of anyone and everyone who wasn’t him. Too ready to throw himself into danger because he felt he had the obligation to help people. He always said that, that he had these abilities for a reason, that if he didn’t help people with them, then he was wasting them, then he was a bad person, that fate had made a mistake in choosing him for this task. She couldn’t keep him safe, but she had tried. And he had hated her for it, she knew. He wanted to keep her safe, just like he wanted to keep everyone else safe. But she hadn’t listened.
If she’d listened, maybe he wouldn’t have died.
He wouldn’t have followed her into that fall, his body wouldn’t have been destroyed protecting her own from the awful descent. It would have been easy to blame Harry—whatever was still in that thing that had been Harry—but instead, she blamed herself. She told no one this, but it seemed that those around her already knew. She wasn’t sure if the silence on the subject was because they knew talking about it wouldn’t make it any better, or because secretly they agreed with her guilt—she had gotten Peter killed. The girl who loved Spider Man, and the girl who killed him, one and the same.
“Is there anything you want to say to the people of New York, the people mourning Spider Man?”
“He thought he had an obligation to help people. He thought that because he could do things that other people couldn’t, that he had a responsibility to protect people, to help. He wanted to make the world a better place, to defend people who couldn’t defend themselves. That was what he believed in, and he…he died for it. I hope that all those people, the ones you claim are mourning him, think about that. Think about what he lived for, and what he died for. Trying to make the world a better place. To mourn him, and not carry on that legacy? It’s downright disrespectful to everything he was.”
That night, wearing her costume, a mask covering the tear tracks running down her face, she dives off the Empire State Building, and only as the ground was closing in on her did she remember.
He was no longer there to catch her.
She’d have to learn to catch herself.