Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Lunch at Two-Oh-Eight was busy, as usual. Gwen sat at her spacious table, off to the side of the cafeteria. Her feet were kicked up on an adjacent chair, which was fine because the rest of the room was all crowded together, while there were only two at her table-for-eight. She paid her compatriots slightly more mind than the rest of the school, but most of her attention was for the ham-and-cheese she was working on.

"Too much mustard," she declared.

"What was that?" Peter said, looking up.

"The sandwich, silly."

"Oh." Peter was, as ever, distracted. "Too much mustard?"

"It was made with love, but also with too much mustard."

"Gwen," Peter pointed out, "you complain about having to make your own sandwiches everyday."

She took her feet from the chair so she could turn to face him. "Doesn't mean it wasn't made with love. A girl can love herself. I can prove it."

Peter twitched his eyes back down to his book. Gwen snatched it out of his hands, which finally got a proper reaction.

"Hey!" he said, glaring.

She looked over the page he was on. "Why are you reading up on genetic recombination?"

"The sit-down with Mr. Orborne that we won and you decided to miss out on. I'm still thinking about what I, uh, ran into there."

Gwen shrugged. "I was busy. Speaking of which..."

She half-stood, looking around the place. It didn't really require a hard look, but she gave one anyway. Either Flash would be obvious or he wouldn't be there, and Harry would be with Flash. As it turned out, he wasn't there, and then he was obviously walking in through one of the doors with a crowd of cheerleaders and meatheads.

He walked past their table and stopped. "Still hanging with The Brain, Gwen?"

"I'm sorry, were you looking for something other than, 'Obviously yes?' I'm sorry, we can't all share your interest in dimwits."

Flash glared as he always did when stymied like that, but he recovered quickly. "You know, there's more to life than just good grades, babe."

Gwen rolled her eyes, and Flash and his buddies kept going. Except for one. Harry spun a chair around and settled onto it, arms crossed on the back. "You know, some people are both intelligent and wealthy. The two aren't mutually exclusive."

Flash gave a glance back, but Harry waved him off. He may have been a part of Flash's clique, but Harry generally did as he pleased. One of the benefits of staggering wealth.

Peter closed his book and looked sick as he stood, saying he'd rather go. He hadn't even finished his meal. Gwen resisted her urge to kick Harry in the shins, being as she was working.

Once they were alone, Harry's expression tightened, his confidence sliding into worry. Gwen pulled out her notepad, down on her knee so nobody at another table would see, and got ready to write. "Well, what did you want? Some girl you want looked into?"

Harry was her best customer. He wasn't confident enough to just introduce himself to a girl if he knew nothing about her, which meant he paid well for some background, and background on people was basically the easiest bit of investigation the world offered. It was a bit stalker-y, but Gwen had decided she was fine with it. She charged an extra twenty-percent as a moral-discomfort premium.

"No, not that. I mean, yes, but not like that. So, I've been kinda getting somewhat serious with Mary-Jane."

Gwen nodded. "Yeah, I gave you a precis on her at the end of summer break. You'd best not break her heart, she's one of the good ones."

"Trust me, I know," he insisted. "Look, this isn't me going after her, I'm just worried. Mary-Jane's been acting odd. She missed a date last saturday. Not cancelled, just missed it entirely, and said she forgot, that she'd been busy. She wouldn't say why, though. That's happened a couple of times. During class, she's been falling asleep. She's never been an amazing student, but she's always been pretty good. Then, last week, I saw her up in Manhattan, looking all stressed out. She ran into the subway and I hate going down there, but when I said something later she lied and said she'd never been there."

"And you think she's stepping out."

"No. She's broke, and stressed out, and moody all the time. I'm just worried she's doing drugs or something."

"Wow. That's actually admirable."

Harry glared. "What, I'm too rich for admirable emotions?"

"Your words. And yes, I'll look into it." She tore off a piece of paper and passed it to him.

"This seems... cheaper than usual." He narrowed his eyes. "I'd best not get cut-rate service."

Gwen struggled not to laugh at him. "Wow, remind me not to do any favors. That's the admirable intentions discount."

"And my usual intentions aren't admirable?"

"No."

"I just want—"

"Don't try."

"But—"

"Seriously."

He sighed. "Whatever. Just get on this, okay?"

"I will. Now go away, before I get caught socializing with you."

"Fine."

Harry headed over to Flash and the gang, and Gwen got to planning her day. It was going to be a long day. Long night, really.

—    —    —

Long week, as it turned out, but a good one. Amazing, even. She hoped not to find someone hooked on drugs or something like that, and while Mary-Jane wasn't meeting the nicest of people, the truth turned out to be quite benign.

Photos of her going in looking a little nervous and coming out teary-eyed and stressed out seem bad, up until Gwen went into a couple places and realized they were talent agencies. The girl wanted to be a model, but her parents didn't approve and she was still a minor, so she was trying to get a job with a fake ID and a lot of moxie.

Gwen sent her an anonymous email offering a better fake at a reasonable price, as the one Mary-Jane was using really wasn't up to snuff. Gwen almost offered the service free of charge, but then she looked at the specs on her wish-I-had-it computer and decided to just offer the admirable-intentions discount.

That wasn't the amazing part, though. The amazing part came during the last little bit of picture-taking, as Mary-Jane left a talent agency at five in the afternoon. Gwen took a final few shots—she already knew what was going on, but preferred to have more proof rather than less—and then sat back on the bench, hoodie up so Mary-Jane wouldn't notice.

That's when a man when shooting by overhead.

Instinct brought the camera up and Gwen started snapping pictures as quick as she could. Up he went. And up, and up, and up, and gone. She kept looking, camera at the ready, but he didn't reappear. A few other people on the street were looking up, but nobody seemed to know what had happened. Gwen looked for anyone with a cell-phone out, ready to try and get another angle, but was let down. Her pictures would be all she had.

Back home, she started them developing and went to finish up the job for Harry. She did the write-up, double checked all her sources, and then went back to get the photos out. She didn't make any prints, just sent the negatives through the scanner. She wanted to check the shots of the super, but kept her focus on the job at hand. It was almost done, and then she could properly move on.

After adding a few key photos to the file, she emailed it out, along with the final bill. She never made Harry pay in advance the way she did most people. He was always good for it, and it seemed more likely to make him happy.

With that file closed out, Gwen moved on to the potential-new-superhero shots. A man with a read hoodie and ridiculously fashion-less khaki pants went leaping across the street. He landed on a wall and jumped off. He grabbed the side off a lamp-post and flipped to the bar arcing out over the street. He leapt again, high. He landed on the wall and ran. On all fours, he practically ran up the wall. And kept going. He disappeared over the edge of the roof and was gone.

A hundred pictures in those few short seconds. Gwen went through them again, clipping out headshots. She fiddled with blurring and levels, and even dug up an algorithm for enhancement of a form based on other pictures of the same object, but that was a desperate hope. The algorithm really needed a series, or at least pictures from similar angles, and she had almost nothing. In the end, she just marked out a key area and made a print—her scanner couldn't close to match the resolution of a print on a zoomed in portion—showing the line of his jaw and a bit of the profile of his nose.

Not a lot, but a huge scoop at the same time.

Gwen didn't consider herself a hero-chaser; far from it. A new hero, though? The first pictures of a villain? Whatever he turned into, those shots would be something. They could be sold. He scurried up walls and could leap great distances. He had to be new.

She went to hero-stalker forums and sank into the depths of the internet, until finally it was time for another day of school and she hadn't slept. He was new, though; she had done enough digging to be sure of that.

—    —    —

Gwen sat at the lunch table, lying flat, glaring at her self-made-with-love sandwich. Turkey with cheese, and not enough mustard.

"Are you alright?"

She looked up, surprised to hear concern in Peter's voice. "I'm fine."

"You don't look fine."

Gwen sat up entirely. Two weeks of searching for information about this new hero, of whom she had the first-ever-photos, and she had nothing but exhaustion to show. Well, and an A- on a test, but mostly exhaustion. "You know what fine looks like?"

"You look like you've barely slept. I know what that looks like because I have mirrors in my house."

"My, how persceptive of you," Gwen snapped. He didn't look chastened. She rolled her eyes. "Alright. Fine. I've been working too much. Actually, you don't look so hot yourself."

"Like I said, I know what tired looks like. I was thinking, maybe we could just chill this weekend." He was suddenly looking down, not quite meeting her eyes. "You know, like, take a break from all the, uh, busy stuff—"

"Are you asking me on a date?" Gwen said, suddenly much more wakeful.

"No," he said immediately, his voice strained. "I'm just, you know. Not a date just, maybe a movie, or something."

"Well, if it's JUST a movie, I figure I might as well JUST do something else. Is it, JUST a movie?"

He bit at his lip. "Yeah, just a movie."

"Ugh. You're the smartest idiot around, Peter." Gwen reached out, grabbed his hands, and after an initial tug where he ignored her, she was able to move them. She set them flat on the table between them, so they were both forced to face each other, directly, sitting upright. "Now, repeat after me."

"What?"

"I said, repeat after me, Peter Parker."

"Alright."

She spoke slowly, clearly. "Would you..."

"Huh?"

"You're supposed to repeat it. Now, 'Would you...'"

"Would you..."

"Like to go..."

He paused a moment, but she just stared at him until he continued. "Like to go..."

"On a date with me..."

"On a date with—" He swallowed midword, his voice squeeking. "Gwen—"

"I'd love to, Peter!"

"Uh, you would?"

In her mind, she traced back through the week, to Flash cornering her against the locker while she was too tired to tell him to screw himself, to Tiny telling her she should go see a movie with him, a midnight showing of something violent, and finally to Peter, just worried that she looked tired, that she was overworking herself. "Of course I would."

Besides, he was literally the smartest guy at school, and he had cute eyes. Caring, cute, clever— if he was courageous and strong he'd be five-for-five.

—    —    —

Gwen sighed. Looking back from the mirror was a properly done-up face. Her hair was curled, nice and bouncy-blonde. Her eyes had that harsh line and a deep violet shadow, egyptian eyes as she liked to imagine them. She had matching purple lipstick, that she'd bought almost a month before but not found an occasion to wear. All of that matched the purple bag she was bringing. Admittedly, the bag was too big to be a proper date purse, but it was big enough for her camera and her notes, and she hated leaving them behind, even on a date.

Except she couldn't go. Her father was, at that moment, sitting at the dining room table feeling proud that the sanctity of curfew was inviolate.

Gwen's phone blinked at her. Running late, Peter said.

Me too, she texted back. She looked at the window, scowling, then texted a little more. I'll meet you at the theatre. Hopefully we only miss the trailers.

She pulled on her jacket—it wasn't matched to her ensemble, but she liked the vintage olive field jacket look—and walked to the window. She opened it and peered out. Ten feet over was the fire-escape, next to the dining room. She reach out, grabbed a pipe, and pulled herself onto the thin ledge of her window.

Scooting over, she got entirely onto the waterpipe and started going down. Hand over hand, feet in the cracks between bricks, slowly descending. One floor down. There was a little boy in his bed, staring at her wide-eyed. She grinned at him, then focused on descending.

She didn't exactly want to hurry, since it was still forty feet down to the pavement, but her arms were aching, and she had to keep going. Just a little further. One more floor, and the building had a ridge around it. Her toes touched that, and she sagged in relief. She still held the pipe, but it wasn't supporting her entirely. Next, to the fire-escape. Fingers in the cracks, toes on the narrow ledge, she edged across.

One step, a second. Her toe twitched, and panick shot through her. Thirty more feet of falling would kill her. Why hadn't she just tied a rope to something in her room, just in case?

Lessons for the future. No going back, that far in. Another step aside, one more. Her toe slipped free, and she was on one foot, breathing hissing in as her muscles tightened to lock her in place.

She didn't fall. She put her foot aside, got it onto the fire escape, and in a sudden rush of energy was doubled over the railing, safe. After a minute to catch her breath, she climbed properly onto the fire escape and went the rest of the way down on stairs and a ladder.

The plan had been to get down and run to the subway, but she found that running was out of the question. The short climb had totally winded her, and given her a new respect for the already-impressive parkour videos the internet offered up. If she were in better shape, it might have been easier, but Gwen had never been an athlete, and she sure didn't intend to start then. What would have been really nice was being able to run up a wall, but that wasn't likely to just be given to someone at random.

All the same, she managed to make the train, and was walking up to the theatre just about the same time Peter came jogging out of an alleyway. He was wearing a suit. Not that it looked bad on him, he just had no idea how to dress for the occasion. At least he had went without a tie.

Also, his hair was a mess. She decided to ignore that, just smiling and waving.

"Hey, Gwen." He ran up, grinning and starting to blush. "I think we might have even made it before the previews."

"One can hope." She glanced past him, at the dark alley. "You take a different route?"

"Oh, um, I was a few blocks over, so I just uh, cut across."

Peter was a terrible liar. All the same, she didn't really want to stake out her boyfriend—was he really that? It was a date; she had insisted—so she just smiled, grabbed his elbow, and gave him a push so he'd walk her inside.

As it turned out, they missed part of one trailer, and then enjoyed watching the new Iron Man/Tony Stark biopic.

"How weird is it to do a biopic about a guy that's still doing all that stuff?" she asked, as they walked out.

"A little weird," Peter agreed. "I mean, are they gonna just do a sequel in twenty years, after he saves the world a few more times?"

"Iron Man, the Second Decade? Iron Man, Over The Hill? Iron Man, Back Brace?"

Peter laughed at her jokes, which made Gwen feel all-sorts of warm inside.

Alright, she thought to herself, you like him. That's fairly well established, so why is this just a movie? "So, where are you taking me for dinner?"

"Uh, dinner? I uh—"

"Perfect." She stopped him at the corner and pointed down the way. "Pizza."

"I thought your father had a strict curfew."

"He does. In fact, it's so strict that I'm already breaking it, so I figure I may as well utterly demolish it. Now, about that pizza."

Nervous as ever, Peter let her lead him into the little corner pizza shop and bought them each a slice.

"So, Gwen," Peter said, starting to get a little twitchy, "I've been meaning to ask. What's been keeping you up all these nights? I mean, you said you've been working, and I know you never talk about it because it's private stuff, other people's problems, but it usually isn't like this. Can you talk about it?"

"I can," she replied. "Actually, I'm kinda excited to. It's not regular work, more of a one-time opportunity."

"What is it?"

"So, the other day, I managed to get a whole slew of pictures of a new superhero. Or villain. He didn't really do anything, so it's hard to say. Now, it's getting a bit too late to make much of it."

"What, selling the pictures?"

"Yeah. It's been two weeks, and now there's a picture of him in a fancy new outfit. Still, they are the first pictures, and they're way better quality than the grainy one up on the Bugle. I was trying to track him down these last two weeks, and all I caught was a little hint of a foot. Better quality than that other picture, of course, but still just a basic little thing."

"Huh. I never would have thought about selling hero pictures. You think they're worth a lot?"

"Yeah, heroes get clicks."

"That's a really good idea."

"Problem is, I haven't been able to pinpoint where he's coming and going from. It's somewhere in Queens, I'm sure of that, but that's still a couple million people."

"Queens?" Peter bit at his lip, as he always did when nervous. "Is that so?"

"I'd even wager pretty heavy on central Queens, although that's harder to say. Still, a million people to pick from. Households, say four-hundred thousand. Probably he's young, being new on the scene and wearing a tight, unremarkable outfit. Honestly, I'd call it a low-budget outfit, which fits as well. Not some old guy with savings to draw on, somebody in his twenties, maybe a bit younger or older. Still, a few hundred thousand people."

"You've, uhm, narrowed it down a lot."

Gwen grinned. "You know, when you put it that way, it doesn't sound so bad. I mean, I can facebook out a lot of those. There are lots of photo-processing algorithms, I can maybe find one to differentiate height. I'm sure I can determine his height from the photos. I mean, he's on a lamp-post, and those are completely standard, so I have great references. Male, too. Maybe just a hundred-thousand people, all in the age-range that uses social media."

"That's quite the get. Outing a hero?"

Gwen shook her head. "Nah, not outing. Firstly, that's his secret, unless he's a villain. Secondly, that's killing the golden goose. If I'm the one who gets the pictures of this wall-crawler, whatever they decide to title him, I get paychecks on the reg."

"You always had a mind for—" Peter just stopped talking, mid-sentence.

"What?" Gwen followed his gaze past her shoulder and took in the TV. Local news had broken in to show a downed police helicopter. Above it, a winged man flew. He circled once, and was away. "Wow."

Just then, Peter's phone dinged. Gwen looked back at him, seeing him already lowering the phone from reading a text. "I'm sorry, I forgot something for Aunt May."

Gwen rolled her eyes, and Peter's face stiffened. His eyes narrowed just a touch. "Ben's gone. She raised me when I needed it. I don't like letting her down."

Gwen had to swallow back a sudden lump of shame. "Sorry. Go ahead."

He instantly looked worried, like he'd done something wrong. For a second, she thought he'd apologize to her, but then he just left.

"Weird," she said, picking up the last of her slice of pizza and turning to the TV, where the flying man was no longer in sight. Nothing more to see.

She thought back over her conversation, a practice which was essential to detective work and close to as important for dating, in her estimation. Everyone had secrets, and Gwen wasn't one to let that slide.

She thought about Peter's talk about the business plan. About his reaction to the news broadcast. About the twitches that told about lies and nerves. About that text he received, and read, in seconds.

"Damn!"

Gwen scooped up her pizza, threw it into the trash, and rushed outside. She'd faked enough texts to recognize the practice, and that had been a fake text, surrounded by a mess of lies. Her 'boyfriend' was lying to her on the first date. Well, in fairness, dating was usually mostly about lying, but not about lying to her!

She couldn't make it into Manhattan quickly enough, especially not when she didn't know quite where to go, but she could think a step ahead.

—    —    —

The door to the parker residence shut with a solid thunk, sounding throughout the house.

"Aunt May?" Peter's voice was calm, unhurried.

The response was quiet, from the kitchen. A few words of muffled conversation, and then footsteps up the stairs. The door to Peter's room slid open, a band of light sweeping across the floor. The light turned on.

Peter yelped and jumped halfway across the room.

Gwen smirked.

"Peter?" May called from below. "Are you alright?"

It took him a moment to gather himself for a reply. "Yeah, I'm fine. Just startled myself, nothing serious."

May's next comment was indecipherable through three walls of plaster.

Peter straightened from the crouch he'd landed in, pulled over a chair, and settled into it. "What are you doing in my room, Gwen?"

"Are you familiar with my philosophy on secrets?"

"Um, secrets are powerful things for you to have, and inappropriate things for anyone else to keep from you?"

"Exactly. And yet you thought you could keep a secret from me."

Peter sighed. "Was it that easy to figure out?"

"Let's see, males from Queens with slim builds, about five-ten, who lie about texts and then disappear the instant they see a supervillain on TV. Honestly, I didn't check anyone else, I just assumed I was right."

"Damn. I'm gonna get figured out."

Gwen gave a pshaw and waved the worry away. "Nobody is going to find you out. I had inside knowledge, and I'm an awesome detective, and I'll help you learn to hide it better. Now, dish."

"What?"

"Tell me what happened. The flying guy, with the wings. Dish."

"Oh." Peter rubbed the back of his neck. "Yeah, he got away."

"You suck at telling stories."

"Alright. I tried to web him down, but he could fly with my weight as well. He has the razor-sharp wings that can slice through my webbing, so he flew high and sliced me loose. I think he assumed the fall would kill me."

Gwen nodded along as he talked. "Alright, new idea. What can you do? Because that made no sense."

"Oh, Yeah," Peter said. "You're not gonna out me, are you?"

"Oh, come on. Of course not." Gwen hopped to the edge of the bed, so they were sitting knee-to-knee. "Now, dish."

"This word means a lot of things to you."

Her eyes narrowed menacingly. "Don't make me— huh, I guess I can't beat you up anymore, can I?"

He held up his palms, as though to display his defenselessness. "Trust me, I know the value of your threats. I'll dish."

"Good."

"So, I got bit by a spider at Oscorp, and a few days later I could stick to walls. It was awkward at first, but I learned to control it. I'm also ridiculously strong, and really fast. I can kinda sense when something dangerous is coming my way."

Gwen nodded as he talked. "Yeah, yeah. Strong, fast, good reflexes. Webs?"

"Oh, those?" Peter dug into his bag and pulled out a pair of metal cuffs. "It's my own mixture. It's got some kinks, still. Tensile strength is good, at 54 kilograms per millimeter, but it degrades fairly swiftly. It dissolves entirely after 56 minutes, on average, but after 33 minutes its strength begins to swifty decline."

"That doesn't sound like kinks."

"The increased longevity and strength require more chemicals, which shortens the usage I can acquire from one capsule, so I need to carry lots of spares, and I go through it faster, and that costs money. I need a way to pressurize the base fluids better, and I need a way to streamline the process, because currently it has a waste-rate of 22 percent."

Gwen grinned. "You have more fun making webbing than fighting super-villains, don't you?"

Pater laughed. "Oh, definitely. Those fights are scary. Now, swinging between skyscrapers, that's more fun than making webbing."

"So, you're gonna take your girlfriend for a tour of the city, right?"

He blushed, red as ever, swallowing with that audibly-nervous gulp he always had. "So, you're not breaking up with me, even though, I'm—"

"Super-athletic, a hero, and still smarter than anyone I've ever met?" Five-for-five, not that she'd share her measurement system with him. "No, Peter, I'm not dumping you for being awesome. Now, if you don't scoop me up, leap out the window, and carry me to the top of the Empire State Building, we may have issues."

—    —    —

The ride to the top of the Empire State Building was awesome. It was also cold. Standing at the top was even colder than the ride over. Gwen endured it long enough to take a few dozen pictures to cull through later, and then they went to a much lower rooftop.

"Rule number one," Gwen announced, "I'm always wearing pants when we go on a date."

Peter flicked his eyes down at her skirt, biting at his lip. She wondered if he knew how obvious her was. She broadened her stance and swished her hips to send the fabric swinging. His eyes bugged out and he managed to draw them upwards. "Uh, yeah."

"As I was saying, rules."

"I won't—" Peter began.

"That's not one of them."

Peter flicked another glance at her legs, then back to her eyes. "Okay."

"But there are some big ones coming. Rule number two: You tell me everything that happens with a villain. Rule number three: You buy me lunch every tuesday. Rule number four: You text me whenever you go haring off after a villain. Rule number five: You don't get hurt."

"I can do that."

"Good," Gwen said. "I like pizza and other greasy foods, unless I'm on a diet, in which case I'll tell you what I want."

"Yeah," Peter replied, shaking his head, "rule number three wasn't specific about quality. You sure you don't want to renegotiate this contract?"

Gwen lifted her chin. "New rule number three. Right here, right now, you have to kiss me."

He was dumbstruck again—it's good to be able to keep them dumbstruck—and she had to initiate the kiss. It was good, though.

—    —    —

Sunday was a long day. It was good, because Peter had snuck her back in through her window so she wasn't in any trouble. It was also good because she had something to do.

Gwen was up early, skimming articles on the web. To start with, she read the Bugle's newest headline, accompanied by its first ever clear picture of Peter in-uniform. Well, relatively clear. Still, it showed the red and blue, and a bit of the webbing, which was why they dubbed him Spider Man. The man he fought—the Bugle claimed the two were accomplices, not enemies—a distant winged-blur in the night sky, they dubbed Vulture.

That wasn't important. The important bits were the details Peter had shared about this Vulture. Wizened skin where it was visible. Thin limbs but powerful strength. His suit was fairly thick, at least a centimeter of metal all about him, and the wings were metal blades that attached to it. Electronics, robotics, other such advanced equipment. He was masked above the lips, but that was fine.

Old man, slightly taller than 5'10", either with significant wealth or extreme skill in robotic engineering. Likely from the New York area, but that couldn't be decided with any certainty. Not a lot to go on, but it was something.

Wealthy old men were a dime a dozen, but she could discount most of them. If he was still wealthy, he wouldn't be robbing armored cars. She kept those up as a possibility, in part because the field wasn't too large to winnow, but turned more to the idea that he had made his own suit.

If he were young, the worry would be that he was working for someone who could afford the suit, but an employer would be unlikely to hire a septigenarian. Thus, she began looking at defunct electronics and robotics laboratories, especially failed startups. If it were still a successful business, there would be no need for the theft, unless it was flagging. Of course, with that tech to show, it wouldn't likely be flagging, it would likely be doing tech demos and making millions.

It wasn't a lot to go on, but it was a start. She found a dozen prospects and headed out. Coleman Robotics was now a loft, and the former owner was very polite and invited her in for coffee. He even helped her out when she explained that she was doing a science fair project with a robotic arm, and a friend had mentioned his name. She was well-prepared, with the robotic arm she'd helped Peter make—he did most of the work—for the Midtown Science Fair the year before. She'd removed a few pieces so it was semi-functional and would actually benefit from some assistance.

After Coleman came Razzle-Dazzle Racers, which was actually doing fine, despite what the internet implied. Topher Industries, Bestman-Toomes, Quantum Solutions, and Hyperpress all were likewise lacking in answers.

Then she got a text from Peter. 'Vulture Spotted.'

She began skimming twitter for info, and soon had an address. She considered setting his phone up to track him, but that would be too easy for someone else to discover and hack, ruining everything. She'd just have to tell him to text her addresses whenever he could. She waved down a cab, got going the right direction, and ended up stopped by a police barricade. They were out in force, guns aimed and loudspeakers blaring. It appeared that red-and-blue costumes and flying mechanical suits got you more than just a stop-and-frisk.

Gwen looked around, spotted her dad, and went the other way. Of course, he'd want to be down there. That's where the action was, and action meant advancement, and advancement meant something he never really explained, although probably money and wasted time. If he saw her, he'd flip his lid. Danger was fine for him, and only for him.

She headed around the outskirts, found a restaurant with a rooftop grill, and got a table. She perfunctorily ordered fries and a milkshake, already looking through her camera. It was clear to the waiter that she wasn't there for a meal, but he let it slide. Everyone else had run when the chaos started.

She aimed as best she could, taking photos swiftly. She had to swap out the film a minute in and resume. She'd taken a lot of pictures in her life, but she could tell she was going to have to practice quick-loading if she was to make a career of this. Or go digital, which unsettled her stomach a little. She finished the change and raised the camera again.

The vulture slugged Peter and sent him hurtling towards the cops. Her stomach dropped into her toes and the camera fell to the length of its lanyard, jerking hard against her neck.

A barricade shattered into splinters and Peter bounced off of the pavement, rolling over, ripping his uniform in a dozen places. He struggled to stand, clearly unsteady on his feet, and the vulture plummeted towards him. Cops were running, screaming, panicking. A shot was fired. Gunfire filled the air. Steel-bladed wings swiped towards Peter. He dove sideway, vaulted off a parked car, kicked off a wall, launched two webs, and sent the Vulture spinning towards a window while Peter swung around the corner.

Gwen caught her breath. As swiftly as she could manage, she swapped in new roll and took aim. As soon as she saw motion, she began snapping pictures as fast as the camera could manage. The vulture exploded out, hurtling down the street. Peter swung after, launched a web at the Vulture's foot, and missed. Gwen expended the last of that roll and lowered her camera.

"Get anything good?" the waiter asked.

"We'll see," she said. "It's hard to tell with that much action going on."

"Can I see the pictures?"

"Sorry, real-film camera."

He looked a little confused, as if he'd only ever seen digital cameras in his life. Gwen went through most the rest of the milkshake in a rush, then headed home without waiting for Peter's text. She had to start the film developing, which was not an overly-swift process.

—    —    —

"This whole in-through-the-window thing is great."

Peter looked nervous as he pulled off his mask. "Are you sure your dad won't find out?"

"Aw, are you scared?"

"Yes. I'm scared you'll get grounded and I'll never speak to you again."

"Well, that lock won't open, and if he hears me talking I'll say it's skype. By the way, you need to make an account on skype."

"Fine."

"Now, on to the photos."

Peter stepped up behind her and looked over her shoulder as she pulled one roll out of the film-scanner and put in another. "Get anything good?"

"I think so." She started skimming through them.

"I can't even see them, you're just skipping through. Oh, that one looked awesome."

She flipped back a few, to one of Spider-Man's foot connecting with the Vulture's jaw. "Nah, too much blur on the motion, and it was mostly out of frame. Besides, I'm not looking for awesome."

"I thought we were gonna sell photos to the Bugle."

"We are. We're also going to catch this guy, and sell photos of him getting caught. Oh, did you get anything good?"

"My efforts at web-launched cameras were close, but not quite," Peter admitted.

"Missed and covered the lense with webbing, did you?"

"How'd you know?"

Gwen looked back at him, then grinned and gave him a quick kiss. "Don't look so down, it's the first try at that. My camera, by contrast, is the culmination of over a hundred years of technological innovation, wielded by a hand with a decade of practice."

She went back to the screen, skimming through even faster. "These ones," she explained, "might be great for sale, but I'm looking for a little bit I took near the end."

At last, she got to the window.

"It's just a window," Peter said.

"Right now, it's just a window." She started moving through the rest of that rush of twenty-four frames, an almost movie-like progression of the Vulture bursting out into the the street."

"Those are fairly blurry, too."

"That, Peter, is why they invented algorithms." Gwen switched into a terminal and started typing. It took a second to get the right pictures selected, and the right areas to focus on, and then she threw it all into motion. As the computer crunched the numbers, she explained. "The first algorithm is detecting faces, or in this case the lower half of a face. You can see these all picked out successfully. If it had missed—not too likely here because his green outfit is high contrast—I'd have to hand-pick those. After that, it gets to the more complicated portion: interpolation."

"That's genius," Peter said. "You wrote this?"

"Nah. I mean, technically I coded this instance, but it's all really closely based on other bits of code out there."

"It looked like it was done, and now it's starting over. Multiple passes?"

"It still has to deal with the blur. There are a lot of methods, but the one I use is using a filter before-hand to try to sharpen the image, then use the sequence of images to try to add detail. There will be eighty-three different filters to reduce the motion blur, and they'll all be done before, and they'll also be done after to the one attempt that had no blur beforehand."

"So, in a few minutes, we'll have one-hundred-sixty-seven images of this guy's jawline?"

"A few minutes?" Gwen laughed. "Try four hours. These are film-scans at the best resolution I can manage. In the meantime, we can do something else."

She stared at him, and he started looking uncomfortable. It was tempting to kiss him again. Really tempting. It was even more tempting to jump him, and have him hold her up like she was weightless, as his superstrength could easily manage that. However, he really did look a little overwhelmed. Take it slow, he's still Peter, she reminded herself.

Scooping up her tablet, she hopped onto the bed. "Come on, we still have sixty other shots to pick through for what you can sell to the Bugle."

"I can sell? They're you're pictures."

"The Bugle did a scathing piece about my dad a few months back, on account of him restraining his men when there was a super-villain loose downtown. He won't pay as well with a Stacy on the byline."

"You think he cares about names as much as he cares about results?"

She shrugged. "Also, my father would flip if he knew I was doing this, and he would find out if I put my name on it. Now, get into bed with me and start looking at pictures of how awesome you are."

His nervousness leapt right back to the surface.

—    —    —

Peter had to go before the image refinement finished. Gwen spent the last thirty minutes pricing out the system she wanted. It would have finished the entire process in about ten minutes, but she definitely couldn't afford it. She also needed to buy a better film scanner and improve the dark-room in her closet. She had a lot of needs and not so much money. And that was if her father didn't notice that she was suddenly going through a lot more film and not showing him quite so many pictures. She checked her accounts. She was actually getting close to the computer, if she bought only the key components and kept using her old case and drives. Close.

She sighed and lay back, waiting for the program to announce its completion. Soon enough, it was done. She loaded up the pictures and started swiping through them. In truth, it was close to random whether they were right or not. She was looking for commonalities, things that implied something was actually there, not invented by the computer. Reducing blur and sharpening photos was a science, but it was far from perfect. The true data simply was not present, so the computer tried to make educated guesses about what was supposed to be there.

There was a lot to go through, as her twenty-four images had been turned into over three-thousand possible faces. Over half of them she could discard without worry because what the computer had guessed was clearly not a person's face. Another chunk were too young for what she and Peter had seen. The remainder were less clear. She slid through them all over a dozen times, spending a good amount of time on each.

She sorted a dozen to the top. They had a commonality that it seemed unlikely the camera would invent. A smear across the jaw, following the edge of a wrinkle. Liver spots. The Vulture had liver spots.

"Yes!" Gwen yelled.

"What are you on about?" her dad called from the living room.

"I'm on about winning, which I am doing. I am winning at life and at all things, and you can suck it!"

"I'm glad you're feeling upbeat, but that sort of language isn't allowed under my roof," he called back.

"Dad, you can't really say 'under my roof' when you rent an apartment. That's a house-ownership-thing."

"I can say whatever I want to say, under my roof."

Gwen laughed, then looked back at the picture.

She opened her door and joined him in the living room, where he was skimming a case file and watching TV at the same time. "As you wish, Father, I shall be polite, under your roof, and request egress for the evening."

"Seriously? That's your only mode of speech that isn't inappropriate?"

"Hark! He understandeth."

"Go, go. Enjoy your evening. Tomorrow's a schoolday."

"I'll be back by eight," Gwen called as she grabbed her coat and rushed outside. This was too easy. She texted Peter as she went and discovered he was busy. She suspect that if she had given him detail he would have made time, but she really didn't need him along for this. Four trains and three short walks later, she was standing outside of Bestman-Toomes on Staten Island.

It was an ugly, boxy little building, with boarded-up windows and graffitti on the walls. She snapped a few pictures and headed in. There was a chain locked around the door-handles, but she had her picks. It wouldn't do to leave home without them. Inside, the place was vacant, as expected. She turned on the flash and took some photos, anyways. This might all fit into the story, if they wrote a story, rather than just selling photos. The obvious gaps where machinery used to be were great, too. It had a bit of that Old-Detroit-Factory vibe to it, reeking of abandonment and waste.

She headed upstairs, into the offices that overlooked the workfloor, and found a room ripped apart. The desk was flinders, a table by the window was legless and broken, the filing cabinet in the corner had been caved in, and the windows looking down below had been shattered. She found pieces of a chair embedded in the filing cabinet, and it wasn't easy to ram a wooden rod through a piece of steel. More photos, more documentation of the evidence.

Unfortunately, it was all empty. The filing cabinet had—apparently with great difficulty—been pried open and emptied. All the desk drawers were pulled out and trashed. The table had been a drafting-table, which seemed normal enough in a place like that. Kicking through the mess on the floor, she found the only thing with an ounce of writing in the entire place, one of those pompous triangular nameplates. Gregory Bestman.

There was little evidence of Toomes and Bestman on the internet, but when she went digging that morning she had turned up one picture. They were posing in front of their newly-opened business, touting their prowess at small-scale robotics and custom electronics. Toomes was robotics, Bestman electronics. Toomes was fifty-seven—almost seventy, now—and Bestman was forty-three, now dead for over a year, at fifty-four.

There was only one problem remaining: She had no idea where Toomes lived.

She headed east. What records were available online—older people tended to have less—indicated an address in Dongan Hills. She went there and found a new name on the mailbox. The current owners were polite, but they didn't know who lived there before them and had never met a Toomes.

Gwen walked up and down the street, eying houses, until she found one that had too much lace visible through the windows for any reasonable person. She rang the doorbell, then again after waiting a long minute.

"I'm coming," came from inside, a thin voice.

As expected, the door was opened by an old lady. She actually looked a lot like Peter's aunt, perhaps twenty years on.

"Oh, hello young lady," the woman said.

"Hi there, I'm Stacy."

"Well hello, Stacy. What can I do for you?"

"Actually, I was just in the neighborhood, and my grandfather said he knew some people around here."

"Is that so?"

Gwen nodded. "Oh, yes. Talked about them a lot. The Toomeses." She almost stumbled over the plural of that name and had to hide a grimace. "They don't seem to be here anymore, though. I thought, maybe you'd know where they've gotten to."

"Oh, they haven't lived here in years, no they haven't. Moved off to Brooklyn after his parents passed, Adrian did. I'm afraid I don't really know what happened with him."

"Well, thank you for your time, ma'am."

"Oh, I'm always glad to help such a polite young girl as yourself."

Father would be shocked to hear that description, Gwen thought as she waved and walked away. So, no joy there. Well, a move to Brooklyn. She pulled out her phone and did a quick search. There were seven Toomeses in Brooklyn, and none of them were Adrian. Still, only seven.

Nine trains later, Gwen was at a strange little library in a strange little corner of the Bronx. She hadn't been by in a while, but nobody was really a regular there, so they still recognized her. In truth, that was the fifth time a case had required a visit to the Phonebook Cemetary, as she preferred to think of it. The place was actually the Archive of Telephonic Records, which was less inspiring.

It had every phonebook ever published in New York City, as well as more than a few from elsewhere in the country. It had phonebooks from way back when Toomes moved to Brooklyn, back when Adrian's parents passed, which has thirty years earlier, according to the death record for them. Gwen started going through old phonebooks until she found an Adrian Toomes. Then she went in five-year chunks until he disappeared, and narrowed it down to when exactly it was that he disappeared. A year ago. Right around when Bestman died.

She took the subway again, and sat there watching a man do an impression of Micheal Jackson, wishing she could just swing across the city. Not all things for all people, though. Peter got super powers, Gwen got a new computer. Assuming this story sold, which she was confident of.

More photos as she approached the place, then upstairs and knocking on every door but his, asking about the neighbor. It was a mediocre place, neither fancy nor poor, which meant stable residents. Specifically, old people with enough savings or children to support themselves decently.

Every neighbor knew Adrian, and every neighbor knew he'd not been back in seven months. His place wasn't rented out, though. In fact, it still had his name on the door.

Gwen stood outside the door, staring at it. Had he abandoned it and kept paying rent for some strange reason, or did he just resort to flying in and out of the window, rather than speaking to his neighbors. They hadn't made him sound like a very nice person, so he might have stayed around and just ignored them. It didn't seem overly likely that he was, at that very moment, inside. On the other hand, he'd punched Peter hard enough to shatter wood on impact.

She turned away, pushed the button on the elevator, and got a text from Peter just as the doors opened. Vulture spotted. Going after. Gwen let the elevator close and walked back to the door. Nobody was paying attention. It was a trickly lock, taking a few minutes, each second making her more nervous about some neighbor stepping outside, but no doors opened and nobody came.

At last, she stepped inside, and knew she was in the right place.

Immediately, she was snapping photos. The dishes, piled high. The empty boxes of chinese takeout atop the one bag of cash he'd managed to make off with when he robbed an armored truck. The rest had been left behind, on account of Peter's intervention. She took several pictures of that. It seemed such a perfect shot, the pile of money alongside the cheap food.

The rest of the place was more of the same. A half-made bed with old sheets. Laundry that may have been clean, may have been dirty, spilling out of a basket. A sink with toothpaste crusting in a few places.

She switched rolls, and used half of the next on the workstation. Tangled bits of wire, bits of rubber scattered about from stripped wires. An entire box of unused actuators, and another bin full of metal slats that looked right for his wing-feathers. A grinder, to sharpen things. There was a padded box beside that, with glove-holes. Not to keep something toxic contained, like in all the movies, but just to mask the noise from nosy neighbors.

The window was open. Gwen leaned out and took photos up and down the street. Sometime soon, he would fly back in through there.

Gwen hurried out, trying to leave most everything as she'd found it, and got down to street level. She texted Peter the address and told him that was where Vulture was stashing his stuff, that it was where he'd return to, and if he turned away from there he'd go to the old factory on Staten Island, most likely. She attached pictures of both—cellphone shots, not the good pictures she had for the story—so he'd know what he was looking for.

Then it was across the street, buzzing at random until someone opened the door. Up she went, until she was at a service door. It was, surprisingly, locked. She opened it anyway and went out onto the roof, situating herself in the shadows near the edge. And it was back to the stakeouts she knew too well. She waited, and she waited, and she waited.

More than usual, time crawled instead of rushing. Somewhere, Peter was chasing the Vulture. She kept checking twitter and instagram, finding stupid comments and blurry pictures under #spiderman. Useless.

Then another text came: He got away.

Get here, she texted back. He'll be here soon.

He texted back that he was on his way, and then Gwen was back to waiting. And waiting. And cringing when a rush of air signalled something flying by overhead.

She twisted about and aimed the camera, snapping a few good pictures. He didn't notice. He just climbed in his window and threw a little bag across the room. The twitter feeds said he had hit a jewelry store, so there could have been anything in that bag, but he looked too angry for her to believe it was full of diamonds.

She photographed him pacing, photographed him glaring down at his workbench, and photographed him hurtling across the room as Peter swung through the window, foot leading.

Vulture had escaped before because he was out in the open sky. Indoors, surprised, he had no chance. In seconds, he was bound up in webs. He started to cut free with his bladed wings, but Peter slapped unsharpened metal over those blades, bending it into place with his hand, and then webbing it down. Three minutes later, Peter strung him up on a streetlight. He had to wait another two minutes for the police to arrive. He gave a quick salute and was off.

Seconds later, Gwen's phone vibrated: Meet me on the other side of the building. I didn't want the cops to see you.

She grinned and ran to the opposite side of the roof, and then they were both airborne, swooping across the city.

"Where are you going," she yelled, trying to be heard over the rush of a downswing.

"Home."

"Go to my place. We need to sort through these photos and get a package together. The Bugle will pay way more for this tonight than they will tomorrow."

He adjusted directions.

Chapter Text

Of Gwen's three screens, two were dedicated to competing photographs of Peter at work. On the left was Peter—in costume—doing a dive through two silvery loops, catching another and throwing it aside, while shooting a ball of web at a man in a black suit with silver loops inset into it. The Ringer was an idiot. To quote Peter, he'd been a great morning workout. If he could, Peter would keep the man around as an exercise machine.

Thing is, the Bugle didn't like happy stories. They didn't want the title to be 'Spider-Man Wins', they wanted the title to be 'Spider-Man in a Fight for His Life'. If they didn't go with that photo, there was one of the Ringer catching Peter's foot with a well-placed ring, so it looked like Spider-Man was about to derf headfirst into the ground. Villain smiling and looking triumphant, Spider-Man derfing. They'd love it. It might even pay well.

Gwen loaded her accounts page again. It was not near so flush as she had been hoping. Seventy-percent of their income from the paper went straight to web-fluid and film. Admittedly important expenses, but higher than she'd anticipated. Then, they split the last portion evenly, which meant she didn't get a lot. If she spent literally every dime she had, Gwen could buy her computer. She

She put the derf-picture up, titling the article 'Spider-Man Struggles to Best THE RINGER'. Then she emailed it to Peter. He did the actual writing. For being terrible at telling stories, he was surprisingly good at writing them, and he didn't need more notes than the title implied. He knew as well as she did that they'd get paid twice as much for a story of Spider-Man nearly losing.

After a moment, she put the other picture up with the title 'Ringer no match for THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN'. She added a note that they might try both, see if they could actually sell the better one. They needed the money as much as they needed the good press, though.

Her phone buzzed. A string of police codes and an address. They'd found the shorthand was easier. Gunfire down near the port, no big deal, but he was in the area anyways.

No big deal.

She lay down, then slapped a pillow over her face and screamed into it. No big deal. Her boyfriend was just running at some gunfire. No big deal at all.

Maybe it wouldn't feel so awful if she wasn't always encouraging. He'd said it first: With great power comes great responsibility. She'd sure backed it up, though. And she did believe it.

She also believed that, with friendship to great power came a moderately large amount of responsibility. Like making sure nothing big slipped through the cracks. She grabbed her tablet and went back to a story she'd ditched a week ago.

There was something new, and her initial hunch no longer looked crazy. Thirty stores of sewer alligators. Except, the witnesses didn't say alligator or crocodile, which was what tripped something in her mind the first time. They said, 'Some big lizard thing.' It just felt weird. Now there was a new one. A wrecked veterinary clinic, just ripped apart, and the owner claiming some big lizard did it.

She loaded up the video. The news quoted 'It was a huge lizard' but they cut some key bits of the raw footage she'd acquired.

'He looked up from where he was digging through that cabinet over there.'

'He?' the reporter asked.

'Uh, the huge lizard thing. I swear, he— it was up on it's hind legs, digging in there. Maybe it was a dinosaur?'

He said it might be a dinosaur despite the scales, but his instinct, the first thing he said, was that it was a man. 'He' wasn't a meaningless word.

Gwen dug up the address and started finding out everything she could about the clinic. It was in the same vicinity of the other sightings, which meant she had a firm pattern. Not to bring to Peter, though. He'd think it was too dangerous, tell her not to investigate, and then he'd be trying to find it on his own, which really wasn't his specialty.

Work was always a good way to distract herself. It took a while to do research properly. She was digging through property records, making sure she had the right owner to contact, when the scrape came at the window.

"Come in," she said in her most alluring voice.

He didn't.

"Peter?"

A cough, a scrape at the glass.

She rushed to the window, and on the other side, Peter dangled from a web, one foot on the wall, one hand barely reaching high enough to touch the window. She scrambled to grab the window and jam it open, then grabbed his shoulder to pull him in. He immediately gasped and twisted out of her grip.

Gwen looked down. There was blood on her hands. He'd said it wasn't serious, just a little thing down by the port. She reached out again, slipped her hands about his chest, lower down, and dragged him in. Once he was halfway through, he released the web and his weight was entirely on her. They fell hard, a strained whimpering sound coming from him.

"Oh shit. Peter. Peter, look at me!"

Gwen jerked off his mask, revealing a face clenched tight with pain.

"Peter, where are you hurt?"

He didn't reply. She looked across him, but couldn't see anything, not even on the shoulder she knew was bloody. A red uniform hid blood too perfectly. "I'm gonna get you into the bed, alright?"

No reply. She started to stand, trying to pull him along. For the first time in a very long time, Gwen wished she worked out more. "Alright, the floor is fine."

She straightened him out and began trying to pull of his uniform. It wouldn't move. She dashed out into the kitchen.

"What's up?" her Father asked. He was in the living room again, TV on, reading up on some case.

"Nothing," she called as she grabbed a towel to cover her bloody hands as she dug for scissors in the knife drawer.

"We should talk more," he said. "I hardly see you outside of your room, these days."

"Tomorrow," she replied as she ran back into her room with a bundle of towels under her arm.

She could almost hear him trying to find something to say as she slammed her door shut and bolted it. She ran over to Peter and started slicing away his clothes. In seconds, he was in just a pair of briefs, with bloody little ducks on them. Gwen forced herself not to cry, she just began pressing towels to wounds and then securing them firmly in place with belts from her closet. Once she had everything covered, she wiped away the blood, pulled out a clean sheet, and set him on it.

On her tablet, she started searching for anything, looking up every few seconds to see if there was any change.

A circle of blood was spreading out on the white sheet, spreading from the small of his back. She braced him, tilted him up, and found a little hole there. She put a towel on it, then belted it down. An army medical guide on bandages had a section on irregular places and she skimmed over it. The lower back wasn't like an arm, since she couldn't just put a belt as tight as she wanted. The abdomen would just compress, and he'd get hurt more from the pressure on his organs.

She didn't have quite what she needed, but it would have to do. She stuffed torn-up sheet-cloth directly into the wound, then reapplied the towel and used two belts around his hips, as well as some cloths tied about his thigh, to pin it in place.

Looking elsewhere online, she found some EMT guides, and found out more than she wanted to know about what bullets did when they entered a person. She turned on her music to mask the sound as she threw up into her trash can.

He still wasn't conscious. She went over and flicked his eyelid, as the guides recommended. He twitched, which was apparently a good sign. He was still responsive to pain. It seemed rather dire to be considered a good sign.

She checked all the bandages, and confirmed that they weren't getting any redder. So, he was probably stable. Probably. But there were still bullets in him, possibly, and if she went anywhere for help their lives would be ruined. She pulled down a whiteboard, listed times down a side, and then checked his pulse twice. She wrote it down. Every five minutes, she'd check, and if there was a decline, then she'd get help, she decided. He didn't want to go to a hospital, but she wouldn't just let him die.

"You can do this," Gwen said softly. "You're Gwen Stacy, and you can do this."

She grabbed a smaller whiteboard—usually, the large one was for planning, not the small one—and made a list of what she needed. Then she read a few chapters on suturing and removing bullets, checking his pulse twice more along the way. It didn't look impossible. In fact, it looked easy, which was worrisome. Gwen had done a lot of things after reading about them, and things that looked easy were usually hiding something.

Still, he needed those bullets out of him.

She removed the pad on his shoulder. Beneath it, the blood was mostly clotted, only a little sluggish trickle resuming once the bandage was gone. She grabbed an old computer mouse, wrapped it in a towel, put it under his arm, and used two belts—her last two, and now every belt she owned was bloodstained—to pin the arm in place. As promised by the reference, the bleeding slowed. The mouse added bulk, and pinned hard enough against his side it pinched down on an artery going to his arm. It wasn't a proper tourniquet, but it was something.

Next came the worst parts. She started cutting. And failed. The kitchen knife was dull, but not that dull.

"Damnit, being super-durable is supposed to help you," she said, somewhere between whining and yelling.

Another quick trip into the kitchen—she had to change clothes, to hide the blood—discretely procured a sharpener and a better knife. She spent a few minutes honing it, checked his pulse—still steady—and went to work. A small slit to open the wound, then in with the clamp she had from the third-hand she used during their robotics project. It was meant to clamp down, but it could be screwed wide just as well, pushing the muscle aside so she could see.

She ran to the trash-can and wretched up water and bile, then got back to Peter. She swabbed away the blood, and began poking in with the tongs, trying to get the bullet. She could see the glint of it, but pushing the muscle aside was difficult. Whenever she pushed, he would twitch and tense his muscles, disturbing the scene. She needed anesthetic, but there was no getting that.

Taking a pause, she decided to give it a rush, to try to beat him to it. She pushed in quick, clamped onto the bullet, and lost her grip on the tongs. There was a sharp metallic clink, and the clamp shot out of the wound. A muscle spasm had pinch shut the opening she had, knotting the tongs in place and completely wrecking her clamp.

She sat back, got a grip on the tongs, and waited. Slowly, his muscles unclenched. She pulled the tongs out. The metal was twisted, wrapped around the bullet. Cheap tongs on a super, go figure.

"I'm gonna spend my computer money on a medical kit," Gwen mumbled.

She wasn't sure why that was what made her cry, but it was. She tried to work through the tears, trying to stitch the wound closed, but it useless. She leaned back against the bed, toes just touching Peter's bloody arm, and scrubbed at her eyes, wishing she was anywhere but there. The responsibility didn't feel moderate at all. It felt monumental, crushing, deadly.

Then the timer beeped. Time to check his pulse. Despite the tears, she made herself take the notes again, and was surprised to find that the counting and keeping time pushed the tears away. And his pulse was still steady. This could work. It had to.

She got to stitching. The guides on sutures were for special tools, but the basic principle translated easily enough. The main problem was that he was too strong and too durable. Whenever he spasmed, she had to wait for him to unclench. Twice, she bent a needle on his skin, but she didn't want to use a heavier gauge and leave a massive hole in his skin. The only large needle she had was for canvas, and it was almost two-millimeters across at the eye.

She kept going through the smaller needles, using ten stitches to close his shoulder. She removed the binding from his sides and pressed a clean bit of towel onto the wound. After a minute, she checked, finding little blood. She waited another minute, and found similarly little blood. This time, she just used a large, stick-on bandaid. It was sufficient.

Then came the wound on his leg and the wound on his back. At first, those had been the terrifying ones. There were all sorts of comments from EMTs on forums—she had read quite a bit in her rush to figure out what to do—about how a bullet would ricochet through a person, splintering and coming out in odd places. Internal bleeding was deadly, they all warned.

Thing is, if he was bleeding internally, his pulse wouldn't have stayed steady. Closer inspections revealed clear through-and-throughs for the other two hits. She stitch shut the wound on his leg—seven stitches—and decided to just tape down the one on his back.

She knew she should clean up, but she couldn't find the strength. She just lay down beside him, curling against his uninjured side, and fell asleep.

—    —    —

Sounds of motion woke Gwen, and for an instant she was terrified that there was an intruder in her room. Memory rushed in, and she was terrified that Peter was alright. She leapt up, searching for him. An instant later, he stumbled out of her closet, the shreds of his uniform in his hands.

"I had to cut it off," she said, as though she had to make excuses for what she'd done.

He let it fall. Looking down at himself, he seemed to finally realize there were stitches in him. "I didn't know where to go."

"You made the right choice," Gwen assured him. "When in doubt, come to me."

"Thank you. Where did you learn to stitch up gunshot wounds?"

"The internet. It's not all supposed to be free, but there are some excellent references for most everything." She scooped up the tongs, still bent around the bullet, and showed it to him. "This one was still stuck in your shoulder."

He looked down, trying to see the cut there, and winced at the pain. "It's weird, getting shot didn't hurt too badly, way less than getting kicked around by some super-powered baddie, but I could always just bounce back from those hits. This, it just kept hurting, worse and worse."

She set the bullet down. "Let's not talk about it, not right now."

He smiled, that same shy smile he always had. Then he looked down, blushing at he took in his boxers.

"Let's get cleaned up. I'll be right back." Gwen went into the hall, came back with the last of the towels and a pitcher of water. She dipped one into the water and walked towards him, setting the wet towel against his blood-smeared chest.

"Gwen, I can—"

"Shh." Gwen slid the towel across his chest, wiping away the blood. "Don't talk."

He blushed even harder as the water ran down towards his boxers. "Gwen—"

She kissed him, which shut him up properly. "Now, let's get cleaned up, alright?"

—    —    —

The next morning, Peter and Gwen rushed to clean up the last of the blood, then he had to dart out the window just seconds before her father would have thrown a fit if she didn't open her door.

The bloodied mess was all in Peter's bag, ready to be burned somewhere discreet, and then they had a list of household goods to replace, and then they had to track down the people that had shot Peter up, and in the midst of all that they had to go to school.

It was feeling like a normal day again. Peter was walking around like nothing happened, and she envied his powers a bit yet again. She was still sore, and she hadn't been the one getting shot. Still, better it was him. He could already smile about the encounter with the gunman, not at all worried about going out there again. Had it been Gwen, she suspected she wouldn't have been a hero at all, she'd just have been a girl with superpowers.

Or maybe the superpowers changed people, she didn't know. All the same, even if she wasn't a superhero, she could help. During school, she spent her class periods noting down possible ways to figure out who had been there. She also downloaded some information about ballistics and read up on that, being as she had a whole bullet to work with.

Lunch and the afternoon were dedicated to the news, blogs, twitter, and what police reports she could scrounge. It looked like the encounter on the docks had been between the Manfredi crime family and some unspecified vigilante that loved to kill people. No wonder everyone had ended up shooting at Peter. The idea of him going back in there was more than a little terrifying, but Gwen made herself imagine him going back in not knowing what to expect. That was clearly the worse of the options.

So, she didn't head home after class. She headed to the subway and came up near the crime scene. It was still taped off and busy with forensics teams, so she just took some photos from a distance, making sure to include every marker they had laid down, so she could better place things later. She also tried to get some good angles into the adjacent warehouse, as some of the gunfire had come from inside it, but the angles weren't the best. Then it was off to police headquarters. She said hi to her dad, which cheered him up, then found a quiet corner to sit down in for a few minutes, earbuds in like she was listening to music.

She had the workup of the bullet on her tablet, and police headquarters had wifi. It wasn't hard to break in, and from there to hi-jack a computer that was recognized as being on the right network. A few queries later and she had ballistics reports.

Those were, as it turned out, rather arcane. At first, she was just confused, as the bullet didn't have striations like she was seeing in the comparisons, but then she did some more reading on rifling, specifically looking for that, and found the answer: polygonal rifling. The facts were clear: There was no reliable way to match a bullet to a specific gun with polygonal rifling.

That said, there was some she could learn. From the slug size—45 ACP, full-metal jacket—she narrowed the list down a lot. Not too many polygonal-barrel pistols used those. The next step was careful comparison.

She pulled a few hundred images, all the ones that seemed relevant, and cleared out before anyone asked her some awkward questions. She sat around on the subway for a while, just riding in circles, doing more reading and comparisons.

She had a copy of Forensic Investigation of Unusual Firearms up to reference, and a whole lot of pictures to go through. It wasn't easy, but it wasn't exactly difficult, either. A few hours later, she switched trains to reverse direction, as she'd passed her stop on the loop yet again, and went back to the station.

The slug had been fired from a very short-barreled pistol, probably a compact designed for concealed carry. There were a couple rare possibilities, but only one likely match: an H&K USP 45 CT. They weren't the most numerous guns in existence, and they weren't exactly cheap. Not the sort of thing random thugs walked around with.

Nobody much noticed her walking through the parking lot, and it was easy to lean into a car and stick a wifi link into one of the computers. She walked away and started loading up crimes involving an H&K USP 45 CT, keeping an eye on the car the whole time. Fortunately, nobody drove off. It would have sucked to lose the transmitter—fifty bucks sort of sucked—or to have to search for it later and risk getting caught again. Nobody did drive off, and she finished her download.

Gwen walked back over, leaned in, pulled the drive, and turned away.

"Hey!" Someone yelled.

Gwen let out a breath. She'd prepared for this. "Yeah?"

"What the hell you doing?" He was rushing her way.

She leaned against the car and let a little box discreetly drop in. "Eating."

"You pulled something out of the car."

"You caught me officer." She held up her hand. "I pilfered a donut. Hey, you should charge me with theft. Value of stolen goods: maybe a nickel."

He towered over her, and was unfortunately not the sort of fat cop that would have made for good donut jokes, but a younger, fitter guy. "Don't I know you from somewhere?"

"Yes? No? I'm not psychic?"

"Just sarcastic?"

"Not just, but it's in the mix." She stood up, making it obvious she was walking away. "Are you gonna let me go, or do you want the donut back. Because I gotta say, it's not in good shape."

"I remember, you're Captain Stacy's girl."

Damn. "You caught me. Next time, I swear I'll try to abuse that relationship, rather than hiding it from you."

"What do you think he'll have to say about this?" the man asked.

"What do you think he'll have to say about harrassing his daughter?"

The man sighed. "Come on, do you expect me to—"

"Let me leave? Yes, I do, because you don't need this today."

The police officer glared, just glared at her. He move to stop her, though.

She kept calm all the way down to the subway platform, where she sank down against the wall and stuck her head between her knees, trying to slow her racing heart. If she ever got caught hacking into the police databases, she was going to be in worlds of trouble. Yeah, being a police captain's daughter would shield her, but that only went so far. Just one little thing she needed, and she was nearly caught trying to get it.

The train arrived, and she made herself get on. Almost caught. Only almost. But she had gotten what she wanted: every crime with an H&K USP CT in the last ten years. It was a sizeable list.

—    —    —

The first step was culling all the weapons held in evidence, which was most of them. The next step was ignoring cases which were self-defense, because those just seemed unlikely to involve a vigilante. Then there was the comparison: crimes with the right gun, and crimes involving the Manfredi Family.

There were seven over the last three years, none before that. The locations gave her nothing, but it did imply some intent.

Unfortunately, that sent her back to the waiting game. She had sent out a request that would help clarify the situation, but hadn't gotten a reply yet. Not everything was easily hacked into. Often, the best route was the legal one.

Slumping back in her chair, Gwen loaded up some TV channels on her main computer screen. Nothing interesting presented itself.

She checked her phone. No texts, no calls. She thought a moment, then called Peter.

"Hey, Gwen," he answered. "It's uh, been, since last night."

God, still so shy. "Yeah, it's getting towards evening again. What're you up to."

"I was swinging past the docks, seeing if I could spot anything."

"Still crawling with cops?"

"Yeah, they're still busy."

"The first report indicated a few hundred rounds fired," she pointed out. "They need to collect all the slugs, and photograph all of the impacts, and generally just record a whole lot about a fight that big. DNA swabs from blood stains, all that nonsense."

Her eyes widened, her mouth turned dry.

"So," he said, "when do you think—"

"Peter, where did your blood land?"

"What?"

[[Peter's blood. Add this in later?]]

"Peter, you were shot, and the cops are collecting blood. Some of it's yours."

"Oh. Shit."

"Dammit!" Gwen snarled. "I should have thought of this earlier. It's already gonna be at the lab, or at least being packaged to ship out. This is way too late."

"Alright, we'll figure something out. We'll, I have no idea."

"No, I know what to do about this. Trust me. It's not something we can solve just yet."

"You're sure?" Peter's nervousness came through clearly.

"I'm sure. Look, just come by my room. Let's relax a bit."

"Relax?"

"Maybe."

—    —    —

Thursday was a schoolday like any other, which is to say Gwen largely ignored her teachers and focused on her work. It wasn't that she didn't care about her education, she just didn't find that it came from school very often. School was for most people, smart or not. Peter needed school, and he was way smarter than Gwen, by her honest estimation.

However smart he was, he was at his best with a little guidance. He didn't just grab a book and learn a thing on his own, and Gwen did. Teachers just felt superfluous to her.

Also, of late, school seemed less important than ever. She had the manifests she had requested. It wasn't precisely legal, but it wasn't precisely illegal either. It was one of those things that happened as a favor and wasn't prohibited, even though it obviously violated the spirit of the regulations. It took a while to find everything that had been off-loaded to that warehouse, and that assumed nobody had been playing with things—a serious concern, being as this was the Manfredi Crime Family.

There were quite a few things shipped there that night, and any of them could have been a cover for drugs. One stuck out, though. Roxxon Europe. It could have been entirely innocuous, if she hadn't bothered to actually look at the rest of the manifests. It wouldn't do to just glance at one warehouse without context, so she'd done a little research.

Roxxon was massive. Beyond massive. It had an entire complex of warehouses entirely its own. If it shipped something from its European facilities to its headquarters in New York, it would ship them through its own facilities. It had entire container ships dedicated to its shipments, yet there was one lone container shipped on an otherwise unremarkable cargo freighter and stored in a facility that happened to be the location for a serious gunfight. Something was inside that container.

She went back to her photos from earlier, looking at all the containers she could see. She did her best to enhance the numbers on all of the container doors, and could quickly discard most of them. One, depending on whether or not the last two numbers were sevens, might have been the Roxxon container. The door was open, so the shot only caught the numbers at an angle.

Probably the correct container, being as it was open and almost a perfect match. She mentally filed it as being the target of Manfredi's goons, and then it was time for the really important question: were the contents missing?

The report said nothing about theft. For that matter, it said nothing about breaking and entering.

Gwen spent the entirety of fifth period chewing on her pen. It was impossible to get any real work done during the lab portion of physics. Last year she'd been partnered with Peter, which meant the teacher let them do whatever they wanted. Peter had just been a geeky guy, then, if a little cute. She wondered what would have changed if she'd asked him out then.

At the least, working on the robotic arm would have been more fun. Less successful, perhaps, but certainly more fun. He could have—

"Miss Stacy."

Gwen looked up. "Yes?"

"Would you care to participate?"

She shrugged. "Sure, it's not like I've got much else going on right now."

"I don't appreciate your tone."

"Really? That's funny, because I got just for you." She picked up her bag in preparation

The teacher glared. "Miss Stacy, report to the prinicipal's office immediately."

"Sure thing. Later." She gave a quick wave to the class as she walked out, immediately pulling out her tablet to load up the files while she walked. The records listed warehouse owners. The warehouse in question was owned by Coordinated Holdings, Ltd.

"That's a fake front if I've ever seen one," Gwen muttered as she got to the principal's office.

"What was that?" the secretary asked.

"I said that I'm Gwen Stacy, here to be talked at by the principal."

"Again?"

She smiled. "Guess he likes me."

"This isn't a joke, Miss Stacy. Your parents will be called."

"Really? I'm pretty sure I was telling a joke," Gwen replied. "Also, you might want to check your records about whether that was supposed to be plural."

The secretary glared. They did not get along. "Take a seat. He'll be with you in a few minutes."

Gwen walked over to the row of chairs alongside the door, sitting down beside Tiny, who she knew well from detention and other instances of this particular situation. She gave him a fist-bump before sitting down and going back to her research. So, Manfredi—or someone associated with him—owned the warehouse. A shipment arrived, and while he was retrieving it, a vigilante interfered. Manfredi's men managed to get away with the goods. Therefore, the vigilante would next strike where that shipment had been moved to.

The vigilante who had shot her Peter in the shoulder. Gwen did not like people who shot Peter in the shoulder.

—    —    —

Once her father got the call from the principal, Gwen was grounded. Since she had to stay in her room, she had Peter swing her out the window and they went down to the docks together. He stopped atop a nearby warehouse, checking out the scene from a distance. It was probably a good precaution, the sort of thing a responsible superhero did, rather than just rushing in blindly.

"You have a clever plan to track this shipment down?" he asked.

"I do not. But that doesn't mean something won't come to me as we work. Let's get down there."

He scanned the area once more, but shook his head. "May as well. Uhm, I'm gonna lower you down, then split up. Not that I don't want to go with you, but I'm in uniform, so in case we get seen..."

"Yeah. Good idea. Or, you could change again. I do like it when you change."

"Later, Gwen, later."

He was bolder already, just having the outfit on. She gave him a quick kiss—weird feeling, with a layer of polyester in between. Next time, she'd pull it up before she kissed him.

He pulled her close for a second, then swung off the edge. A little yelp of surprise escaped, but he set her gently down before leaping away. On her own in a dark lot where a gunfight had happened only two nights earlier. No big deal. She suppressed a shiver and started exploring.

She checked her photos to look everywhere the cops had been looking, but it was all just bullet-marks, nothing useful for her. She made her way inside, towards the questionable container. Someone had closed it.

She sat down and fiddled with the lock, spending a few minutes getting the stiff tumblers to move, then opened it up and looked inside.

She turned, walked back out. No traces in the vicinity, no traces in the container, no leads for her to follow. Except, there were always leads. Gwen had talked to her father more than a few times about his job. He skirted a lot of topics, but he was proud of his detective work, and damn good at it. Now, he had a team of detectives. He didn't get to work as many cases, but he still kept up with them, kept an eye out for leads others had missed. There were always leads, he insisted.

She began wandering through the warehouse, wondering what she was missing. They needed a truck to move whatever they'd taken, but there was no easy way to figure out which one. Any truck would do, and she had no pictures from the night of the firefight. Peter hadn't seen them unloading anything, had claimed the containers were all closed when he cleared out.

So, after Peter left, Manfredi's goons had driven the vigilante away, gotten a truck over there, loaded it up, and driven off. Gwen headed over to the forklift in the corner, a hunch starting to form. The manifest said there was one object inside. The name had clearly been fake, as was typical with some sorts of high-tech shipments, but it would still have been a single box inside the container. If it were just one box, it weighed a lot. The manifest listed it at 16120 kilos with the container, 14220 for the contents alone.

A search turned up the fact that forklifts have a clearly labelled plate that listed their weight capacity. The forklift in the warehouse was limited to 10000 kilos. Maybe they'd ignored that and just moved it anyway. Those 'maximum' limits always had some leeway.

Still, that was off by a lot. More likely they had a truck that was designed to load it, either an overhead crane or a bed that was hauled up by hydraulics. She went back to the container, shining a light on the ground out front. There was a hard groove in the ground, the point where a descending bed, not yet onto the truck but with all of those 14220 kilos on it, pressed into the concrete. So, that was the truck type, and where the truck had been.

She turned her light out and headed outside. Time to hope for luck. She called Peter. He confirmed that his wider search had turned nothing up, so he came back to get them swinging again. She gave directions to four different sites. They were every place she had been able to connect to the front-business that owned the warehouse.

The first turned out to be an office in a shared building with limited parking. No leads, there, although if the others didn't pan out they could always break in and hope the criminals kept meticulous records.

The second was another warehouse. Peter crawled along the windows and assured her there was nothing inside that matched the truck she had described.

The third location, far enough out that she suspected they were actually leaving the city, required them to abandon webbing their way between skyscrapers. Peter changed back, but insisted on keeping his outfit on underneath, which made it much less fun to watch. They took a bus to a nearby stop, then ran.

Well, Peter ran. She made it a hundred yards and gave up, so he carried her, piggy-back style. That was actually kinda fun, although it got scary when he turned off onto a path through the woods and didn't slow down. He was kicking off of trees, barely touching the ground, once doing a flip over a branch, all without dropping her or slowing down. He made it look easy.

She hugged a little tighter and gave a kiss to the back of his neck. No time for the evening she suddenly wanted to have, though. They had arrived, and they were in the right place. Up ahead was a truck of the type she'd been suspecting, parked alongside a low, concrete building. Just past the truck was a large, roll-up door.

"Is it just me, or does that look ominous?"

Peter stood tall. He swiftly undid his shirt. When he slipped his shoulders back, and shirt and jacket both slid to the ground. "It looks like an invitation to the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, to me."

She lunged forward, grabbing him and pulling in for a kiss, this one much deeper. After a few seconds, she backed off. "Alright, let's save that for later. Don't get shot, okay?"

"With that for later, how could I risk it?"

He pulled on his mask and began sprinting across the open ground, bent low in the high grass to keep out of sight. He moved so naturally out there, like he had always been meant to be a hero. It wasn't just some fluke of powers, she decided. The powers hadn't made him the sort of man who would rush headlong into danger just because he believed it was right, that confidence had always been in him.

She watched him a moment more, then took out her camera and started taking pictures. Seconds later, the shooting started. She twitched, but forced herself to keep her camera trained. The action was all indoors, but that didn't mean it would stay there.

A sudden staccatto screed of automatic weapons being fired, then quiet. The metal rollup clanged, as though it had been rammed by a truck. Light spilled from where one corner had been torn open.

She trained her camera there, ready for a photo. The wind carried Peter's voice to her, bellowing. "Seriously, how do you get these things? Is there a catalog?"

"Get offa me!" roared somebody with a voice that fair overwhelmed Peter's.

The rollup shredded, a massive gray bulk plowing through. She started snapping pictures, wishing that she could use a flash, or better yet, flood lights. The night was not kind to high-action photography. She could use a really high f-stop and a really sensitive film, but if she lowered the shutter speed it would turn into a blur. Her only hope was to take enough shots that a few of them worked out, which made her glad she'd filled her bag with rolls of film before they left. If any of the shots came through, they'd be spectacular.

The brute facing Peter was easily twelve feet tall in that massive, mechanical suit. The top of the suit, where the man's head stayed level with his shoulders, came to a point, as though it where some rhino, designed to ram through doors headfirst. Perhaps that was the design, as the door had ripped apart like newsprint rather than steel. Now, he was wheeling back towards Peter. He ducked a bit, as though bracing himself, and the suit opened up, revealing gun-mounts. Her heart climbed into her throat, but Gwen kept her camera snapping.

The two gatling guns began to spin, spitting fire towards the slight figure before the Rhino, but Peter just leapt towards them. He twisted strangely in the air, tugging himself about with two webs he'd shot wide. He passed the fire untouched, flipped over the brute's head, and jumped down behind. The brute fell, although Gwen couldn't see how he'd been tripped.

Peter jumped away, launching webs behind himself, then diving into the grass. The Rhino struggled to his feet, tearing at the webbing, and just as he got upright, Peter dove in. He rolled, planted himself on the side of the truck, and tugged.

The truck fell apart, and he came up with the entire, twenty-foot drive-shaft. On the end Peter held, the axle was still attached, one wheel dangling. The other end collided with his opponent, a clang ringing through the night air.

"Home run!" Peter yelled.

The Rhino started shooting, but Peter was already in the air, landing on top of his foe. He had the metal bar high, ready to swing down in a powerful strike. "And the crowd goes— Oh crap!"

Peter leapt, and the Rhino was engulfed in flame. There was a clang and the mechanical suit went to one knee, and then silence. Gwen got pictures of where the metal armor was damaged, a big gap in the armor on the left shoulder. Not indestructible by any means. Hopefully that shot developed.

Gunfire sounded, and Gwen spotted a flash from the other side of the drive, just at the edge of the treeline. She aimed her camera, homing in on the flashes, adjusting the zoom, and taking more pictures. Finally, she got the shooter fully in frame. A man, lying down behind a rifle, sighting through some big, ugly optic, shooting. When the muzzle flared, it illuminated a discarded rocket-tube, and an open case that had probably held the rifle.

Gunfire sounded from the Rhino again and the man rolled aside, the ground where he had lain spraying dirt. Rifle in hand, he ran deeper into the trees. Seconds later, another muzzle-flash shone from the darkness.

"Where are you!" roared the man in the mechanical armor.

"Well, I'm right here," Peter replied.

Gwen spun, just in time to see him take another swing with the drive shaft. This time, he hit the back of the Rhino's knees and toppled it. Lying on its back, the Rhino bellowed and thrashed, ripping up concrete with each swing of his arms.

Another gunshot, and Peter leapt aside.

Gwen spun back that way, refocusing the camera on—

"Shit, he's gone," Gwen said, then silenced herself, glad the thrashing mechanical suit was making such a ruckus.

She scanned the area for the other gunman, but couldn't find him. Then, he just walked out of the treeline.

Peter scooped back up his driveshaft and glanced at the Rhino. "If you stop struggling, I won't hit you again."

The Rhino kept struggling. Peter raised the bar high, and when the brought it down one of the Rhino's arms stopped moving.

"See," Peter explained, "you have these huge actuators in your joints, and if they get dented, they bind up. So, you can stop thrashing, or I can keep breaking your actuators." The Rhino stopped struggling.

The gunman came closer, stopping several paces from Peter. Gwen swapped film as swiftly as she could manage, then resumed her picture-taking. The man was a touch taller than Peter, with a hard-edged, unshaven jaw. His scowl looked permanent. He was laden with weapons, grenades and handguns, but the rifle was the only weapon in-hand.

"I see that we're allies in this," he said.

"Allies?" Peter pointed at his shoulder. "You shot me. Have you ever been shot? What am I talking about, of course you've been shot. Just look at you, you probably get shot for fun on the weekends."

The man shook his head. "Are you going to finish him, or should I?"

From behind his back, the man produced a white block, about the size of a brick. Peter stayed still, staring blankly. "Is that C4?"

"Yes."

"You're going to kill him."

"Yes."

Peter shook his head. "Yeah, uh, no. See, he's defenseless. Well, I mean, he has some guns and a semi-functional mechanical suit of armor, but defenseless against us. It's over."

"If you let him live," the man said, "he'll just do this again. They'll give him a trial, give him maybe a few years in prison, and let him go again. If you let him live, you've accomplished nothing."

Peter drew himself up. "If I let him die, I've accomplished nothing. This world doesn't need anymore death. It needs second chances."

"He'll waste his."

"I don't—"

Gunfire sounded. Gwen stared, open-mouthed. She hadn't even seen the man move, but the rifle was pointed at Peter, muzzle smoking. Peter shrugged. "See how you missed me?"

"But—"

This time, it was Peter who interrupted, a spray of webbing coming at the gunman. He dove aside, and Peter gave chase. Suddenly, they were swinging at each other. Gwen didn't get it. Peter was so strong, he could have tossed the guy with ease, but instead he was just fighting like they were equals. It made no sense. The man tripped Peter.

Gwen expected him to leap up, but he just lay there, hands casually linked behing his head, looking up at his enemy.

"So," Peter asked, "this is what it comes to. Do you fire, do you slay a man who is innocent, or do you let him live, and back away from the path you have chosen?"

"You are not innocent. By your mercy, you aid them, you aid the enemies of mankind."

"They are mankind."

The man glared down at Peter. "Not anymore. They've made themselves less. And you've chosen to join them."

There was a burst of sound, a scream, and Gwen gave a little cry herself, her eyes suddenly filling with tears. And then Peter stood up. Her fear turned to confusion. The gunman had fallen, the gunman was screaming.

"Funny how a barrel filled with webbing doesn't work so well. Sometimes the choice is between doing the right thing and failing entirely. Shame about the choice you made."

Gwen remembered to take more pictures, and caught the entire sequence of Peter webbing the gunman to the wall, then got good pictures of him dismantling the suit and webbing that man up alongside. He dug through both of their pockets until he came up with a phone, and he called the police.

Once they were blinded, he joined Gwen, to wait for the police together. She pulled his mask up a bit, and kissed him again, properly.

"I've never seen you like that before."

"What, out there fighting?" He glanced at the smoldering wreck of the truck, at the twisted mess of the mechanical suit, at the damaged wall of the building. "You've seen me fight dozens of men. You took pictures of it."

"It was always in the city, with so much else going on. I couldn't hear it. You're so calm out there, snapping jokes, just laughing it off."

"Me? Calm?" Peter laughed. "Oh no. I'm not calm. But once it all starts up, the adrenaline pumping, once I know it's going to happen, I guess I just have to joke around a bit. It's crazy in there, and if I didn't have some humor, I think I'd lose it. Joking around's the only thing that keeps me calm. Also, it throws them off. They're all like, 'Huh? Is he a comedian? Have I seen him on TV?'"

She laughed. "It's really like you're a different person, once you put the suit on."

"Is that... weird?"

"Weird?" Gwen grinned. "It's great. It's like I get to date two people at once, and neither minds. I've got this smart, considerate guy back home that is always making sure I'm alright, and I've got this badass muscular athlete out in the city who is always saving the day. It's way more fun this way."

Peter wrapped his arms around her, pulled her against him, and kissed her again. "Let's go back to your place."

Gwen pulled away a bit. "Hey, don't get too excited, or I won't be able to wait until we leave. The cops aren't even here yet."

"I have supernatural hearing. There are sirens on the road. Now, can we go back to your place?"

"Actually, I don't think that's where I want to go," Gwen said.

"Oh, and where do you want to go?"

"I want to go to the top of One World Trade Center."

He quirked an eyebrow, a motion oddly conveyed through his mask.

"Keep the outfit, and bring some blankets."

He didn't ask, he just scooped her up and started running. They didn't make it all the way there in one go, but they did finish the night there.

Chapter Text

Peter swung Gwen over to her room, she changed, and grabbed her homework—she could finish it on the subway. Probably. She was tired, as they hadn't slept at all, but she figured she'd be fine for school.

Her trip to school made it to the living room, where her father stopped her with a look. His face had a layer of stubble over its usual stony expression. He was wearing a uniform that usually looked perfect, but right then still had the previous day's wrinkles in it.

"You didn't come home." His voice was flat, just stating facts, not letting his real emotions—disappointment, anger, worry—show through.

"I—"

He shook his head, cutting her off with that alone. "Be honest, Gwen."

"I didn't come home last night."

"Where were you?"

She paused a moment. "I was out."

"With who?"

She stared at him, knowing there was no way out. Gwen was a skillful liar. She could sound believable for a hundred different situations. Just, not for situations involving her father. She wasn't sure if it was her own nerves, or if it was his experience from hundreds of interrogations, but he always knew.

"Peter."

"The boy from the science fair?"

She nodded.

"You came and went from your window?" he asked.

"Yes." Don't ask how, don't ask how, don't ask how, she silently begged.

He nodded, and acceded to her silent demand. "Peter is going to join us for dinner tonight."

"Alright."

"You're not coming home on your own, I'm picking you up after school, just like I'm about to go drop you off."

She nodded, knowing there was no way out. Hell, he'd even see her doing her homework, which would probably extend her grounding from one lifetime to two.

—    —    —

Since she'd found other things to work on during the day, school had become swift, but that day it was endless. Before first period she told Peter that her father had caught her. They had no classes together, and could only brush past each other in the hall. They ate lunch, and then he took classes at a community college nearby and she didn't even see him in the hall.

It didn't give them much time together, but she wouldn't have tried to change his schedule. To hear him tell it, his college 'classes' were more like free time in a lab with a guy who liked science. He loved it. Except, now he spent his nights hunting down villains, and he kept getting to school exhausted. They had to lay off villain-hunting, if they wanted him to have that future he'd always dreamed.

Or, she could pick up some extra slack and take some weight off his back. Gwen spent what time she could find during class looking at photos. The connection back to her computer wasn't perfect, but she had to host them there. That way, she could modify the high-resolution scans. She'd done her best when developing them to compensate for the poor lighting, but there was a lot of progress left to be made. It was obvious that the best shots would be those few where explosions, gunfire, or flame illuminated portions of figures.

By lunch, she had it narrowed down to a dozen that had potential. She and Peter talked it through at lunch. Two of the photos were certain. One showed Frank Castle—police reports were already identifying the vigilante gunman's name—with his face perfectly lit by the muzzle-flash of his rifle. Another captured what the media referred to as "The Rhino", actual name Alexander O'Hirn, firing his gatling guns at an acrobatic Spider-Man. Those were the clearest pictures, and rather key to the story. Peter said he'd write the story on the subway, drop it off at the Bugle, and then go to his college classes.

Gwen reminded him about dinner, as if anyone could forget that, and gave him a kiss goodbye. A secret boyfriend had seemed wonderfully exciting, right up until she got caught.

—    —    —

She waited at the curb, running through possibilities in her mind. They mostly ended with her father saying, 'Gwen, you are grounded until you turn twenty-five,' to which she would reply, 'I'm an adult at eighteen,' and then he would look at her with that a-block-of-iron-would-lose-this-fight look he had and say, 'Don't try me.'

When he arrived, her father was driving a police cruiser, because it wasn't already embarrassing enough. She got in silently, and they drove away.

"Gwen?" he said.

"Yes?"

"Are you alright?"

This wasn't in any of her imaginings. "Am I... alright?"

"You're sneaking out with a boy, you're sleeping through class, you're going to the prinicipal on a regular basis. If you didn't have the grades you do, you'd probably be expelled. What's going on?"

"Lots of things are going on."

"Let's have some specifics."

She sighed, looking down. "It's just been really good with Peter."

"If it's good, why are you so tense all the time?"

"I'm not tense."

"Gwen, I'm your father. You're tense."

"Fine," she grudgingly admitted, "I'm tense."

"Now, tell me what's going on."

The truth was, Gwen had to admit, that the reason she couldn't talk her way through this was her own fault. She didn't like lying to her Father. She was fine lying to random guys at school, to strangers she was trying to get information out of, to people that hadn't raised her. Scratch that, she would have been fine lying to her mother, who hadn't raised her for all that long. The thing is, it wasn't her secret. She kept found out secrets and she kept secrets, but she never gave them away, but at the same time she didn't want to lie.

So, it was time to figure out a good lie and go for it, even though he was her father. The key to a good lie was truth. Every plausible lie was really just a diversion made out of truths. So, she needed a straight-forward truth to keep him distracted, and then he wouldn't suspect anything about what they were really doing.

"Peter's, well, he's having a really rough time."

"Is that so?"

She thought back to a conversation they'd had in confidence. Except, it wasn't the real secret, it was just a minor secret. Sometimes, one of those had to be given up. "This summer, his Uncle Ben died."

"His Uncle?"

"Yeah." Gwen was talking slowly, making sure she didn't say too much, but keeping it natural too. It was normal to talk slowly about such a weighty topic, so it worked for her 'lie'. "He was orphaned when he was three, and his aunt and uncle basically raised him."

"I didn't realize."

"There's more, but, you can't ever tell him this. Not ever, okay?"

"I can keep a secret," her father told her.

"Usually I can too." She thought about that, kept right on thinking about it.

"Gwen?"

"Actually," she decided, "this really is his secret, not mine to tell. Just, he's having a hard time. As for the details, you'd have to ask him, and I don't think he'd tell you."

The car stayed silent. They came to a stop light, then another, and still there was silence. At long last, just before getting home, he deigned to speak. "Thank you for telling me."

—    —    —

Dinner went well. Gwen was grounded for one month, and Peter could come visit for an hour a day. The next morning, after she'd slept off the all-nighter and the stress, she got back to her previous work, from back before Peter went and got himself—

She cut off the slightest hint of thoughts of him being injured and just focused on the problem. Charting lizard sightings, searching for a pattern to how they were laid out.

In truth, there wasn't a lot to do. She knew the lizard was out there, whether it was a giant lizard or a burgler with a skin disorder, and she needed to get out there on the ground if she wanted to find it. She didn't sneak out, though. It was midday on a weekend, and her father was home. She didn't quite close her door, so that he would know she was in there alone.

So long as she kept the music loud, he'd give up on wanting the door open soon enough. Or she'd get grounded from music, too. That would suck.

Being stuck in her room, she decided to improve her tools. It took far too long to plot things onto maps, and she could only do it well if she was in her room. First, she wrote a script to pin a mess of things to a map, then she set up a server to push it out to her phone and tablet, and Peter's if he decided he wanted it.

Then she started working on some voice recognition. That was not easy. Voice recognition was one of the great problems, but the police dispatch was all verbal, no digital copies to be gotten. So, she worked away, right up until the news turned to an ongoing story.

She turned off the music and turned up the volume just as Peter texted her. There was some man in green and purple flying around blowing things up, and Peter was going after him. By instinct, she grabbed her camera bag and got ready to go, but she had to stop herself. Her father was right out there. He would notice.

She turned to message boards, to twitter, to anything. She had grainy camera-phone footage and contradictory comments, but nothing real. He was out there, on his own. She had to gulp back a rush of bile. The last time Peter had been out there without her, he'd come back with bullet holes. "Not again," she whispered to herself. "It's not going to happen again, he's better than that."

Still, she went back to all the medical guides she'd gotten. Then, she took out the medical kit she'd bought, the custom one with the extremely expensive titanium composite. She lifted the tools, tried to remember the feel of them. Nothing to practice on, but she still wanted to be familiar.

"Gwen," her father called.

"Yeah, Dad?"

"I gotta go. I'll be back soon."

She ran out and saw the front door slam. The TV was still on, the volume low. A news chopper was looking down onto a city with smoke coming from dozens of buildings. It cut to a cameraman on the ground, trying to get a shot of Spider-Man darting by, a man on some sort of glider racing after. They were moving too fast, and the camera only caught a blur.

Peter was out there already, and now her father was en-route. Gwen grabbed her bag and her jacket and sprinted down the stairs.

She didn't even try the subway or a taxi, not with the way things were out there. Instead, she went down to the bike-rack, found a lock with a shackle-and-combo, and started cracking it. Those were easy, that being the reason they weren't recommended for bike chains, and she was on her way in under a minute.

It was providence that the direction she was going was largely on a slight downhill, because she could not have been making good time, otherwise. Gwen was by no means a biker, and when she came to the Brooklyn Bridge, even that slight rise was a noticeable problem.

She let up a bit on the other side, catching her breath, then hurrying on again. When arrived, the place was bedlam. The fighting was over, but the problems weren't. There were fires all over the place, and too many panicked people in the way of fire engines trying to get through.

Gwen made her way to where it had all started—where it had first been reported, at least—and worked from there. This was the hard part, where there were plenty of questions and no good answers. The people she interviewed didn't want to give useful responses, either.

"He just swooped in from nowhere!" was useless.

It took thirty people for her to get any confidence of which direction this new villain—the news had dubbed him "The Goblin"—came from. That mattered, mattered a lot. People who didn't have to concern themselves with streets tended to just go in straight lines. She'd had to coach Peter about taking alternate routes, so that nobody else could find him as easily as she had, or he would have been doing that, too.

The exit, the direction he had finally fled, was much more known, as there had been hundreds of camera-phones tracking the battle by that point, but that was still only two data points. Hopefully, they wouldn't matter. Hopefully, this threat would be handled quickly and easily.

Gwen didn't want to rely on hopefully.

Along with all the interviews was the evidence collection. Those bright red burning bombs appeared to be a combination of incendiary and concussion devices, which was an odd choice. Shrapnel bombs were much more dangerous, albeit less flashy. Perhaps this Goblin was just going for show. On the other hand, the fires left behind from incendiary grenades caused much more panic, so perhaps that was his goal. Flames, clouds of smoke, and chaos throughout the city.

Whatever his goal, the important part was getting evidence. She searched around every blast site she could get near, gathering any fragments that might have initially come from the bomb. There wasn't much, but there wasn't nothing, either.

Then, she took the subway home. As expected, her father was still gone. He'd be gone for a while, after a day like that. In fact, it would probably be an all-nighter.

She texted Peter to come by and got to work. She was reading up on chemical analysis when he climbed in the window. His outfit was already gone, replaced by the T-shirt and jeans he usually wore, along with a hoody so nobody would spot his face while he was out.

Gwen spun her chair around and ran over to him. She grabbed him tight, gave him a quick, hard kiss, and leaned back, still held close by his hand pressing the small of her back against him.

"Peter, you were amazing out there, absolutely amazing."

"He got away," Peter pointed out.

"We'll get him. Don't worry, I've already got some leads."

"You do?"

"Well," Gwen said slowly, thinking back on how little she actually had, "I have the start of some leads."

"What've you got?"

"A few hundred interviews, a bit about which direction he came from and went to. Oh, did you get any cameras up?"

Peter reached into his bag and pulled out seven cheap, digital cameras. "Two got blown up while he was lobbing those bombs everywhere."

"These will help, then."

"So, not many leads?"

"Actually, I have something." Gwen walked over to her desk, where she had a pile of fragments on a tray in front of the keyboard. "These are fragments of his bombs."

Peter leaned past her looking at the pieces and the research up on her screen. "A chemical analysis? I can get into the lab at the university and do this. There's a mass spec that should be able to handle this just fine. You're hoping to find a manufacturer?"

"There's more to it than that." Gwen picked up one of the smaller fragments and offered it to him. "Squeeze it between your fingers."

He gave her an odd look, but did as he was told. It squished a bit, then crumbled. "What is this stuff?"

"It's explosives."

"I know it's a bomb, but—"

"No, it's explosives. It took me a bit to figure out why there wasn't any shrapnel at all. This guy's got a fancy little device here, and I'm fairly sure how it works." Gwen sat down and started loading up camera-phone footage she'd pulled from youtube. "So, these are the things he's throwing, and you can occasionally get a glimpse of something spraying out when the bomb impacts."

"Alright, I see what you're saying. So what does that mean?"

"What he's got is a bomb shell that's the actual explosive, no metal body whatsoever, not even a thin cannister that gets destroyed. I think there also are no electronics, it's a combination of det-cord and mechanics for the trigger. That can be made out of most anything, specifically out of this material, this fairly-hard explosive this shell is made from. Then, inside of it, is something similar to napalm."

"Seriously? Napalm?"

"Similar. From the videos, it looks like it burns both hotter and faster, but it's still a flammable agent designed to stick to things."

Peter nodded along as she showed him the timing of a few videos that showed the things ignite and burn out. "Alright, so I need to not get splashed with those even more than I thought."

"Yeah. There's actually very little explosive, just enough to throw the incendiary everywhere. Thing is, nobody on earth makes a weapon like this, officially."

Peter grinned. "Homemade explosives. If we can do a proper analysis, we might be able to figure out where the component parts were gotten from, and then track down the man making the bombs."

"Exactly."

"Gwen, have I told you you're a genius?"

"A couple of times, but you can say it again."

He leaned in for a kiss, instead. Unfortunately, the sound of keys at the front door interrupted them. Peter dashed for the window, but she stopped him. She scooped the fragments into a bag, handed it to him, and gave him a kiss goodbye.

"Gwen," called her father from the front door, "why is your door closed."

She rushed over and opened it. "Sorry, Dad. Forgot."

"Don't forget again. I've got to go back to work, I just came back for my laptop, but you're still grounded while I'm gone."

"I know," Gwen said, not really meaning it. If she had to head out, she would. On the other hand, she had work to do in her room, so she might stay put.

She texted Peter to work on the chemical analysis while she worked on clarifying the images. The shots from Peter's cameras was almost as bad as the camera-phone footage, but it looked slightly usable once cleaned up. If she got enough, Gwen might get a proper look at this guy, and more specifically at his glider. That was another thing she thought might be a way to track him down.

—    —    —

"The glider's a bust."

Peter looked over her shoulder at the model that was rotating on her screen. It was a 3D representation of the glider, or as best a one she could emulate. "Man, that's impressive."

"That," she said glaring, "is seven hours of wasted time."

"You're sure it's useless?"

She spun the model, stopping it so they were looking at the bottom. "See how that's a flat sheet of metal? It's not a flat sheet of metal, I just don't have enough resolution from any of the photos to get anything. No markings of any sort. No indentations, no striations, no aerodynamic grooves. You saw it up close, it had grooves along the bottom, right?"

Peter sighed. "Yeah, I suppose it did. Not as if I can get anything useful from memory alone."

"No, it would only help if we could get more exact measurements. Or a fragment. Another chemical analysis would be useful."

Peter looked at another of her three screens. "The one we have isn't... completely useless."

She sighed, and nodded. "No, no it's not. So, there's something. Your analysis of the explosive."

He set his hands on her shoulders, giving the start of a shoulder massage with his thumbs. "It's not my analysis. It's a chemical analysis of the fragments you collected."

She set a hand on his, and his thumb stopped working. "Thanks, Peter. Also, don't stop, this feels amazing."

She sighed, ready to settle back into the back massage, then was tossed into the air. She gave a whoop of surprise, then was settled onto her bed, face down. "Peter—?"

"Shh." He leaned over her, and went back to massaging her.

Gwen let out a heavy groan of relief as the pressure of his hands seemed to force the tension out of her. She rested her head on the pillow and let him work. He massaged down her back, then crept his fingers under her shirt and started back up, her shirt slowly rising as he massaged up her bare skin. Gwen let him go slowly, wanting this to last a while, even though she was a little anxious to get to the obvious next step.

The front door clanged open.

"Dang," Peter said, pulling his hands clear.

"Fuck," Gwen pointed out, "is the right reply. You need to learn to swear."

He had already started heading to the window, but he paused there, one foot on the ledge, the sunlight haloing him. "Fuck is what I want to do, not what I want to say."

Gwen's mouth dropped. "Oh, I like this more forward Peter Parker."

"That's good, because—"

"Gwen," came from just outside the door, "how are you?"

Her father swung open her door, but he didn't quite step in. She looked back to the window, which was now empty. The smile of moments earlier turned to a grimace. She was all ready to go, and Peter wasn't coming back anytime soon. "I'm grounded," she snapped. "What does it look like?"

He gave that hardworn, exhausted smile, and she was immediately sorry. She wasn't yelling because she was grounded, she was yelling because about five seconds earlier she'd been getting an excellet backrub that was a prelude to quite a bit more, and now Peter was gone. "You'll be fine. Look, this is going to be a long week. I'm trusting you. Even though you're grounded, you're gonna be on your own a lot."

Gwen climbed off the bed and walked over to her father. "What are you talking about?"

"Look, it's bad."

"The Goblin thing fighting Spider-Man?"

"It may have looked like he was fighting Spider-Man," her father said, "but he was mostly hitting cop cars."

"He was?"

He nodded. "Lots of people injured. I'd still be there, but the chief ordered that people keep trying to get sleep. I'm trying to set a good example for my men by catching a few hours back home, visiting my family, just like they should be."

Gwen flashed back to not even a week earlier, to Peter lying on her floor, gunshot and bloody, and now she saw her father there. She lurched forward and wrapped him in a desperate hug.

"Gwen, are you alright?"

She pressed her cheek against his chest. "As long as you are, I will be."

He pulled her close as well. "I will be, I promise."

Her father kissed the top of Gwen's head, then slowly pulled from her embrace. She watched him walk to his bedroom, then looked back to her computer. Targetting cops. She had to find this guy, had to make sure he was taken down before he could do anymore harm.

There still wasn't a lot to go on, but the idea of what the Goblin's target had been gave her something. Back through the photos, this time checking for damage to police cars. A few minutes of that and Gwen snarled at herself for being wasteful. It was fine to be cautious most days, but this wasn't most days, this time it was urgent.

She started digging through botnets she'd previously uncovered, pinging laptop locations. Before long, she found one in the police department. Plenty of cops had computers they didn't secure properly. It wasn't completely open, but it was a good start, since the police network did have genuinely better security against outside threats than inside threats. Shoddy work, that. Proper admins would secure against all threats, but Gwen wasn't one to complain about their complacency right then.

She used that laptop to hack another, and then started pulling reports from the past twenty-four hours. Her mouth went dry as she sent them through a script to find ones of damage to police property and injuries to police officers. Two hundred and seventy.

A sigh of relief came out. The first one was a police bike getting a bent rim on a curb. Not anything real. Not a full two-seventy, then.

She started sorting, plotting the relevant ones. It wasn't good. It wasn't good at all. Forty-seven police cars set on fire or blown up. Thirty police officers injured. Two police precincts burning.

Her eyes hovered over the thirty injuries. It would be easy to follow up, find out how they did in the hospital. Stay focused, Gwen told herself. The Goblin isn't at the hospital, he's in his workshop. It had to be a workshop, too. He had to have somewhere extensive to build those things.

She plotted the locations of every record of damage or injury onto her map, but realized immediately it was lacking. She went back to a video she remembered, and sure enough, there was a burning police car on Brooklyn's Park Avenue. They hadn't all been reported. So much for saving time.

She went back to the video, adding everything she could spot, while her crawler sometimes sent her a report from the police department, newly added to their system. If she gave them long enough, they'd probably get everything reported, but she didn't have that sort of patience.

Two hours later, she had everything she expected to find plotted. It was a disgusting trail of green dots along the path that Peter and the Goblin fought through the city. She changed them to color-code by time, and found that it basically followed a progression from one end to the next, with the odd ones out probably having mis-reported times.

No luck there, she already knew where he came from. Except, there was one dot north of that first sighting. It was from a police report, which she loaded up. Police car on fire and it was—Gwen's eyes widened—called in over 911. Not a report by the officer, a report by a civilian.

She started searching blogs, twitter, and youtube, and soon turned up a video of the car at that location. A couple guys were circling it, taking photos and talking. A girl stepped in frame, posing in front of the cop car, like it was all too funny. Gwen blocked out the troublemakers—not surprising about the response, considering the neighborhood—and focused on the fire. It was burning hot, warping the metal. The people weren't coming near it for long, but it suddenly cooled to a more normal flame part way through the video.

That was the first site hit by the Goblin, and her father was right: it hit the police, not Spider-Man.

She called Peter, and had all of the map annotation pushed to his phone.

"You alright?" he asked.

"Yeah, I'm fine. Check your phone."

"I'm on my phone. Oh yeah, maps. What's this?"

"The spots hit by the Goblin. Peter, he's targetting cops, not you. Those are all injured cops or burning police property."

Peter's sharp inhalation sounded through the line. "Oh no."

Gwen felt her eyes tearing up and had to fight to keep her voice steady as she continued. "My father's home, taking a mandatory rest. In about an hour, he's going to go back out there. You need to find this guy."

"I don't even know where to look," Peter said, sounding angry and worried all at once. "I've got nothing out here."

"I highlighted one point. That was the first target he hit. It looks like he was flying from north of there, and then he hit every police car he could."

"I'm on it Gwen!" he cried, and she could hear wind rushing by.

"Be careful," she said, knowing he wouldn't be able to hear her while webswinging.

She texted him to come by later, and then she got back to work. Spaces in the Bronx that could house a workshop. That gave her pause. A workshop, or a secret workshop?

This wasn't like the Vulture's suit, which could have been viewed at an attempt as useful hardware, this was the manufacture of a massive amount of customized incendiaries and explosives. This was clearly weapons.

She started checking abandoned factories, loading up property records time and again. There were more than a few possibilities, and she pushed them out to Peter as she turned them up, along with pictures and blueprints when she could get them. None looked promising, though. They were just empty factories, rusting warehouses, and other wasted properties. He could be anywhere, but that somehow didn't feel right.

She looked at the list of properties, realizing she'd basically, after her last pass, widened it to include everyone. That was useless. Motive, means, opportunity were the criteria for showing someone was a criminal, and her father insisted on motive being the key to catching someone.

Gwen sat back in her chair, staring up at the best shot she had of the Goblin. That ugly metal face. No benefit was to be had in crafting a face on a mask. It could have been a blank slate, as Iron Man had chosen, but instead it was hideous. Behind that display was something she did not yet understand. Something motivated a man to those lengths.

Some part of that motive involved the police. He hated the police because... well, a lot of people hated the police. But he wasn't just anybody, he was a very clever man. Or a very rich man, who employed very clever men. She started scanning the news from days earlier, anything with a relation to the police.

There was always a ton of news, good and bad, about the NYPD. They had enemies and they had allies, and none of them like to be quiet. She was sinking into that morass when her father walked in to say goodbye.

Gwen jumped up and gave him a hug. "Be careful, Daddy."

For a moment he just blinked, frozen in her arms. He wrapped his arms around her squeezing her back. "I will, Gwen, you know that."

She nodded and let him go, thinking that she knew quite the opposite. There were whispers all around the station about a new police unit to handle superpowered people, and while the unit was rumored the prospective leader was certain: John Stacy. He was a captain, and he still acted like he belonged on the streets. Not because he was careless, but because he valued his men over himself. He would never let them risk themselves while he stayed safe. She expected that he wouldn't even go to the station, that he'd just go right out onto the streets.

She scrubbed away tears and got back to her computer. She had to find something. Except, there was nothing. It was just rich men making annoyed comments that made the news, not anyone actually dangerous. Up there in her room, there was nothing.

Gwen looked to the closed door. It took about zero seconds to decide she needed to get down to street level. Camera bag over her shoulder, she headed out. This time, she took the subway instead of stealing a bike, and was soon in the Bronx. The burned out cop car was taped off, nervous cops all around. She got to somewhere they wouldn't see and started taking pictures. In part, she wanted to start her search where the attacks began, but she knew in her heart that that wasn't her only motive. If this story ever went to the Bugle, she wanted a shot of the site of the first attack.

That was what set their work apart from the start. Peter hadn't just brought the Bugle pictures of Spider-Man fighting the Vulture, he'd brought them a detailed history of how Adrian Toomes fought with his partner, wrecked his old studio, and went on a rampage, all while living in a tiny, dirty, one-bedroom apartment. The entire story, start to finish. Sure, the Bugle had edited the writing to make Spider-Man sound worse, but they'd still told the whole story, not just the bits where things exploded.

They would want that first police car. As for Gwen, she wanted to start there and backtrack.

She walked north, taking pictures every so often. The world looked different through a lense. She held that camera up, and instantly she was considering the elements not just as buildings, but as parts of a composition, as parts of a story. There was the blocking of red of the left third, which set off the broad blue sky and the wide avenue. Yet at once, there was the corner the Goblin must have shot around, trailing thin white smoke from the engine on his glider.

Except, she didn't know where he had turned, so she just kept walking, taking occasional pictures, and then she got the shot she needed. She adjusted her angle to catch a glimmer of white, peeking from behind a row of buildings, a broad low building that she'd not even considered. That artistic, curved rooftop housed the Oscorp Research Facility. Oscorp had been founded in New York, and while most companies kept their headquarters in the city but moved their operations somewhere less expensive, Oscorp kept its research close to home.

It was in the right place, it was easily capable of making everything in question, it was a company that had major military contracts and thus surely did develop weapons, and it even had motive. Orborn did, at least. Three weeks earlier, there had been a warrant carried out on Oscorp Global Headquarters, over in Manhattan, digging for some supposedly incriminating record. One of the spats of yelling at the police that Gwen had skimmed through was Norman Osborne, yelling that the police had gone too far, that they'd see what came of pushing him. He actually said that. 'They'll see what comes from trying to push me around.'

There hadn't been audio, just a transcript, but Gwen tried to imagine what sort of man said 'They'll see' without sounding like a mad villain. Before she could dial him, Peter called.

"You got something?" she said as she picked up.

"Nothing."

Gwen sighed. For an instant, she'd wished he'd found someone else. "It's Oscorp."

"What?"

"Oscorp, or at least Norman Orborn, is behind this."

"Are you sure?"

Gwen paused, then gathered her nerve and replied as honestly as she could. "One-hundred percent? No. But sure? Yes. Check it out, Parker. Somewhere in that facility, there's a Goblin."

He took a moment to think, but he said he'd go in, then ended the call. She put her phone back in and started towards the broad, shining building. She took a dozen pictures of it peering through the gaps between other buildings as she approached, hoping she was right. Time was getting short. Nobody went on a spree like that without a yearning for more. He'd take to the skies again, attack cops again, and when he did her father would be right there, in the thick of it. This had to be the right location, this had to be a chance for Peter to end it.

For her, all it meant was waiting. Peter was nowhere to be seen, and Oscorp lay silent. It was Sunday, so all they had was a minimal level of security. Everything else lay dormant. That tugged at Gwen's thoughts. If the Goblin were in there, he would leave a sign.

She got her tablet out, linked back to her computer. It was a trade-off, taking the latency of the connection back to her computer, but gaining all that computational power. Also, it meant not lugging around a heavy laptop, and her camera was heavy enough already.

She started slow, just poking around the edges, looking for a way into a system she'd never considered touching. Hacking the police was a serious concern, but this was far beyond that, this was national infrastructure. Specifically, this was the power grid. Not tampering with it, just getting a reading. Oscorp was on the forefront of technology, including the fact that it was a major manufacturer and advocate for smart meters, which meant all its facilities had them. If she could get some historical data, she could find out if the research center had more than the usual power draw for a Sunday.

It was slow, getting into that system carefully, but it wasn't impossible. She was hitting the two least secure parts of the system. The meter itself could be intercepted while it was sending data to the power company, without actually hacking into the power company or tampering with the meter. That gave her a stream of data to log.

The records were just an archive, not the live system. In a fit of actual good security practices, the archives were completely disconnected from the control system, which meant they didn't have the same over-the-top security that the power grid as a whole had. She was working at that when someone sat down beside her. She nearly jumped out of her chair, then sighed away the startlement.

"Peter, what are you doing here?"

"I looked as best I could without alerting security, but that place is huge. So, I thought I'd join you. Besides, I'm starving."

She glanced at the five overpriced sandwiches he'd bought. She was at a coffee shop across from an Oscorp facility, which didn't make for cheap, filling meals. All the same, five sandwiches was a lot. While he started eating, she explained what she'd been working on.

"That's clever," he said around bites. "When can we expect a result?"

"Soon," she told him. "I'm trying to figure out their filing system. See, I can get to the files, but not through their front-end, and so the labels are all just numbers to me. Once I figure out which one's Oscorp, I can download those files and get some details."

"When will that happen?"

"Five minutes, twelve seconds."

"Exactly?"

Gwen grinned. "They dump another set of archives every four hours. I can check for what matches my own readings from the meter, and voila."

"You're too smart. You know that, right? You're so smart, it's causing problems."

Gwen gave him a kiss on the cheek. "And you're too kind. I'll stop believing you, if you always shower me with compliments."

"I can stop. Here, how's this: 'You're alright. I like you a little.'"

Gwen slapped him upside the head, and he pretended that it hurt. They kept teasing each other as they waited for the data dump, and then it came: four hours of records into the archive. Her crawler started, and in seventeen seconds she had the numbers for the Oscorp Research Facility. She put them into a database, made sure they were right, and plotted them out.

"So, it looks like it's always this active?" Peter asked.

She frowed, skimming back, week by week. Five weeks back, the power-draw fell off, and then it stayed off. "No, it is not."

"Five weeks ago." Peter frowned. "So, he's in there, but we don't know where."

"Yes, yes we do."

Gwen split the graphs into a dozen smaller graphs, all up at once. She deleted everything but sundays and showed a year's data.

"What's that?"

"The research center is a complex, not just one space. With the sort of power it uses, it's got seperate meters for each subsection. They keep them pooled together because it's one client and pays one bill, but the details are still there. And, as you can see, the excess power draw is all from... section 1-4-7-4-9-2-0-3-6-4-4-3. And I don't have any idea what that is."

They stared at the almost-useful screen. It was Peter who broke the silence. "Can you show only that section, for the entire year?"

Gwen did so, looking at the various peaks. "Oh, very clever. And now we look for what area would have been active when that section had major spikes. First, let me cut out every spike that was also a spike for the whole facility, and, there we go, seven times in the last year."

She pulled up news footage from those days on her tablet while Peter searched on his phone. They both found it at the same time. "Agricultural Redesign?"

Peter met her eyes equanimously. "Well, it's probably a secret lab, so why not Agricultural Redesign?"

Gwen nodded. "Now, promise me you'll be careful."

He lifted a hand, three fingers up. "Scout's Honor."

"You weren't a boyscout. Were you?"

He grinned and rushed out onto the street. Gwen smiled as she watched him go, then got serious. This was the big one. This was the story that would put them over the top. Nobody was there. Nobody had this but them. There weren't going to be camera videos of the fight from start to finish, there was going to be her record and nothing else. She was going to show the downfall of the menace that had burned forty-seven cars and hospitalized thirty cops, and it would put her on the map.

Well, it would put Peter on the map, since he was the one who was on the byline. Maybe she should have told her father about her new job. He would have flipped, though. In fact, the thought of her being right there, right then, would have given the man a heart attack. She decided not to worry about that quite yet. She went outside, set up, and started shooting pictures as Peter launched himself across the street, onto the Oscorp grounds. She got quite a few good shots of him going in, then swapped that almost-full roll of film for another. It was time to wait.

She wasn't sure what to hope for. If all went well, it would end inside. And then they wouldn't have pictures to sell.

Whatever she should have hoped for, Gwen was unsurprised when, after twenty minutes of gnawing at her fingernails, a wall exploded in flames and the Goblin went flying out of it.

She started taking pictures a second later than she wished she had, but they were still good shots. The Goblin was damaged, his left arm blackened, the metal slightly torn. He circled back to close with Peter, and she got some good combat shots. Peter did flips around that glider like it was nothing.

Her heart clenched when some smoking red spheres, each the size of a large marble, were thrown Peter's way, but he sprayed webbing at them, and the thick mass on the side nearest him was enough to send the explosion away. He leapt through a haze of smoke and flame, and came out unscathed, slugging the Goblin in the jaw. It would be over soon. It had to be.

Then she heard the sirens. She lowered the camera and looked over, seeing patrol cars speeding onto the street, parking at those haphazard-looking angles that looked chaotic but that Gwen knew let them all drive off quickly and easily. There were officers coming onto the street, trying to get people clear.

Gwen ducked into the alley beside the building and stepped behind a dumpster while a cop walked past, and then she was back out by the entrance. The fight had moved, now taking place over the bulk of the Oscorp building, each explosion staining the white exterior an ugly black. Peter was leaping about like a madman, dodging explosions with ease, and then he leapt high and got a grip on the glider.

The Goblin went into a spin, then spun even faster. Peter went flying, twisting about in the air and landing in a comfortable crouch on the street.

"Pity you can't fly!" the Goblin yelled, sending himself almost straight upward.

Peter leapt high, almost sprinted up a wall, and went hurtling after the glider. A thread of webbing shot out, snagging a fin on the side of the glider. Another went low, spraying a thick web across the side of a building. The glider jerked to a halt, and then was on a parabolic arc defined by the limits of the webbing. The Goblin twisted, hurtling explosives behind him, but he was racing too fast, too out of control, and the bombs sailed past Peter and hit the pavement below.

The arc of the glider continued. Gwen tracked ahead and ran into the street, lining up a shot. She got it just as they passed her line, straight down to Peter, and straight past him to where the Goblin struggled with his glider.

At the last instant, the Goblin managed to twist a little aside, skimming across the ground, and then his glider glanced off the pavement and he was tumbling.

Peter was on him immediately, "How's that flying working out for you lately?"

The Goblin surged upright, throwing Peter like a ragdoll. Gwen ducked back into the alley as she snapped pictures of the duel. That was the first time the Goblin had really shown his strength. Before it had all been explosives, but it seemed his suit was more than just armor. It didn't amount to much, though. Spider-Man didn't even land, he just checked his momentum with webs and went hurtling towards the Goblin again.

"Let's try that again," Peter called as he returned. This time, the Goblin didn't manage much of anything. He was swinging at air, Peter almost casually dodging his blows.

"It's not about you, anyways," the Goblin bellowed.

"It isn't? Man, my girlfriend said that, but I didn't believe her. It's different with you, though. You make me feel like I can trust you."

The Goblin wasn't paying attention to the banter. He reached down to his waist, lifted a hand filled with little red orbs, and said, "It's about THEM!"

He spun about, flinging the orbs. Peter screamed, leapt, and began launching webbing like mad. Orb after glowing orb was pegged by webbing, dragged down in the middle of the street, but there were too many. Hundreds of the things, flung at the cops that had blocked of the area. Cars ignited. Men screamed.

The Goblin laughed. "Now they see."

Peter stared at the mayhem, aghast. Gwen leaned out for the shot. Peter, standing tall. The Goblin, just past him, in profile, a hand at his side to draw out more deadly, explosive beads. Beyond them, a cluster of cops, fleeing.

"You can't save them all," the Goblin crowed.

"I will," Peter said, and leapt forward.

Still taking pictures, Gwen felt her heart freeze as the moment crystallized. Peter was going to save them all. He was past the Goblin, weaving a web between his hands. The beads, thrown to spread wide, were still a tight cluster, and he caught them, every last one. He spun ever-thickening layers of webbing about them, trying to protect himself. They burst. Fire erupted, and Peter went hurtling into a brutal roll across the pavement. The Goblin danced as he tugged yet more bombs from his seemingly endless supply.

And a little blast of webbing slipped into that gap, straight into the gap where the bombs were pulled from. The Goblin's face turned to terror. The explosion from his mechanical armor was twice the size of what Peter had been hit by. The Goblin was slammed into the ground, flame pouring from the missing side of his armor, black smoke roiling skyward. He screamed in agony.

Through the smoke, Peter stepped. His suit was blackened, cracking and breaking across his chest and down his legs. The only hits of blue and red were on his head and down near his toes. He sprayed webbing over the flames to smother them. "You'll live, Osborn. You'll live."

The Goblin pulled himself up on one arm, still glaring with that same madness. "You can't save them all!"

Peter stopped in surprise, then looked aside, alerted by a sudden roar. The glider was shooting past, trailing flame in its wake. Mad laughs tumbled from the Goblin. Peter sent webbing, caught the glider and wrestled it careening into the side of a building, but it kept spraying bombs as it went, hurling them out towards the police. Through the smoke, Gwen saw the orbs flying towards a cluster of men in uniform. Out front of them, Captain John Stacy was shoving the others away, trying to get them into better cover. One man stumbled, and her father stood over him, shielding him, as flames descended.

Gwen screamed, running down the street. She reached him as the officers did. They were slapping at him with fire blankets, trying to put him out. He rolled over, his blackened back giving way to his untouched face. His eyes were wide, rolling, then they focused on Gwen, and he smiled slightly. "Gwen, there you are. Is it that late already?"

"Dad."

He blinked, his eyes seeming to clear up. "I'm, oh…"

Her father's words turned to gasps of pain, and then he screamed. He didn't stop screaming as they loaded him into the ambulance. She forced her way in as well, crouching beside him, refusing to be anywhere else. His screaming continued most of the way to the hospital, and when it finally stopped, the silence was not welcome.

Chapter Text

The Bugle was chaos. The bellows were constant, and to Gwen, inscrutable. People wanted things, but the things they wanted didn't make sense. She hadn't looked up anything on newspaper jargon. Most places, there was a reference online somewhere. Normally, she would have read it beforehand, but she just didn't care right then. She looked over the area, about to ask, when she finally managed to spot a sign with the editor's name on it: John Jonah Jameson. It didn't say editor-in-chief, but it didn't need to, not with a name like that on the door.

Gwen walked straight through the chaos. There was a secretary, but Gwen wasn't in the mood. Ignoring the woman's protestations, Gwen opened the door and stepped inside. Two old men were arguing. One, she recognized as Jameson, and the other looked a little older and calmer..

Jameson finished his tirade and looked her way. "Who the hell are you?"

She reached into her bag and pulled out a large envelope. "I've got some pictures, and a story."

Jameson glared past her. "Betty, why are you letting people just walk in here?"

"She just barged in, sir," the secretary said.

Gwen looked at the other man, the one who was keeping his cool, and handed the envelope to him. She took a seat.

Betty spoke up again. "Should I call security, sir?"

"Yes!" Jameson snapped.

"No," the other man replied.

"Did you just buy my paper, Robbie?" Jameson said, then looked back to Betty. "Call security."

"Yes, sir," Betty said.

Robbie spoke up again. "Betty, don't call security. J, look at these."

Jameson started mumbling curses under his breath as he snatched the pictures from Robbie's hand. He saw the first one, and his mumbling slowed. He looked at a second, and the cursing stopped entirely. He rifled through the rest. "Betty, get accounts. Who took these?"

"I did," Gwen said, "but Peter Parker helped, too."

"You did?" Jameson crowed. "Well that really helps make out a check. I need a name, girl!"

"Gwen Stacy."

He was laying out the pictures on the desk, an expression that twisted somewhere between excitement and irritation on his face.

"You took these, not Parker?" Robbie asked.

"Yeah."

"You're the good one, then," Robbie said, starting to smile. "Always thought it looked like two photographers. No offense to Parker, but if these are yours, you're amazing and he's just good enough."

"Um, thanks. He does the writing, and gets the extra angles. It's just a different job."

Jameson laughed, a sharp, ugly sound. "Nice excuses you got for him. These are perfect." He straightened, spreading his hands as though he were unrolling a banner. "Spider Fails New York's Finest. It'll be national. Hell, this'll go worldwide. Are you seeing this shot, Robbie?" He pointed at the picture of the Goblin's glider sailing towards a row of cops, restrained by one of Spider-Man's webs, but still send flaming bombs into the crowd of officers.

Gwen stood up and leaned forward on the desk, making sure that she was in the way. "The title is Assault on New York's Finest. And that's not the cover picture. The story is in there."

"Great," Jameson said, "now little girls are buying my newspaper from me. The title's whatever I say the title is."

"It's a tribute to the police officer who died yesterday afternoon or it's going to another paper," Gwen said. Seeing his glare, she smiled for the first time that day. "I'd fucking love you to try me on this. I'm really in the mood for that shit."

Jameson stood up tall, glaring, and Gwen glared right back. "You think you tell me what the story is. What gives you the right?"

Robbie set a hand on Jameson's shoulder. "Uh, J, you recall the name of the man that actually died out there."

"Of course, he was—" Even Jameson had the sense to restrain himself, at last. His eyes stayed hard, fixed on Gwen as he spoke. "Robbie, set Stacy up with one of our writers to clean up whatever they gave us. Betty will have your check shortly. And don't waste any damn time! This is gonna be on the mainpage in thirty minutes, and it'll be the banner for the morning run. Have it on my desk in twenty."

—    —    —

Gwen took a taxi. She didn't want to sit down in a subway, with all those people, jostling elbows and making noise. The cabbie tried to talk, and she just looked out the window, hoping he would take the hint. Fortunately, he did, and it was a relatively quiet ride to Peter's house.

As she went up the narrow walk, May opened the door. The woman's lined face drew concern better than any cartoonist. "Gwen, dear, come in."

She was perfect, right then. No words of consolation, or questions. She didn't ask if Gwen was fine, or how she was doing. All she did was promise to bring some snacks up to Peter's room. Gwen nearly cried right in front of her. She ended up stopping outside of Peter's room and wiping away tears before going in.

The big surprise was to see him up and about, walking around. He could have come to the Bugle with her. "Peter, how are you fine?"

He glanced down at his legs, which had been badly burned only the day before, and they'd been in better shape than his chest. "That is something of a mystery. I mean, I've been able to recover quickly ever since I got bit—you remember those bullets—" she shuddered at the thought "—but this was really something else. I just woke up an hour ago, feeling fine. I mean, I overslept and I'm still a little tired—ravenous, really—but fine."

She grabbed his shirt and pulled him close, getting a quick scent of him. He wrapped his arms around her. "How are you doing, Gwen?"

She kicked his shin. He wasn't as good at it as his aunt.

"Sorry, I, uh, don't really know what to do. What should I do?"

She pushed away and sat in the chair at his desk. Peter's desk was odd, for such a smart guy. Perhaps that was the secret, though. He was so much smarter than her, he didn't worry about the same things. Just papers and books, nothing else. No computer. If he needed the internet, he had his phone, but he didn't use a computer for any of his work.

Well, he used computers in the lab. He was perfectly competent with them, he just didn't keep one at home. Papers and books, everything hand-written. It helped him think, he said. Gwen picked up a pencil, looking at the NYU logo. He already had pencils from the university he was going to attend next year.

She heard the bed creak as he sat down on it. His voice was soft when he spoke. "When Uncle Ben died, I didn't do well. I went off the rails, really. And what helped me get back was, well, what I do, helping people." He wouldn't say aloud that he was Spider-Man, lest Aunt May hear him. "That's not a real solution, though. I just don't know how to help."

Gwen glanced back, and right then there was a knock at the door. Gwen looked that way instead. "Come in."

Aunt May pushed the door open, a tray held before her. "It's just some finger sandwiches, some veggies, and a little lemonade. Oh, I know it's not summer, not the right weather for lemonade, but I always like it. You can have water, if you'd rather."

"Lemonade is great, Mrs. Parker."

"Well I'm glad. And if you want anything else, I'll be just downstairs." Her face hardened up just a touch, probably as close to a glare as she came. "But leave the door open. There are still rules in my house."

Gwen smiled, nodding her acceptance, and May only left the door open a crack when she left. Gwen giggled. "She does know I've got an entire two-bedroom apartment to myself, doesn't she?"

Peter tried to laugh along, but it wasn't very strong, and she couldn't keep the humor, either.

"What can you do?" Gwen said. She sipped at the lemonade, which was just a little tart, mostly sweet. "You can get a nice suit and take me to the funeral on Friday."

"Of course."

Gwen picked up one of the sandwiches, and tried to think of anything other than the funeral, but that was clearly impossible.

—    —    —

The funeral procession was beyond massive. Every cop in existence wearing their nicest dress uniforms, standing solemnly along the streets leading to St. Patrick's Cathedral. Inside, the room was awash with rich black suits from supposed friends of the family. Not that Gwen had ever consider the mayor or the governor a friend, yet still they were right up at the front.

Opposite them, on the left of the aisle rather than the right, was the less glamorous crowd, the actual friends. There was Gwen's mother, who would have fit better with the mayor than with Gwen, along with some of mother's friends. There was an aunt and uncle and two cousins, who were family even if they weren't overly close. At the other end sat six police officers that had been partners to John Stacy at one time or another. Alongside then was a guy that Gwen knew as Uncle Thompson, who had been friends with her father since before she was born.

Gwen and her friends were between the family and the friends. Peter looked perfect, just as she'd asked. He had on a suit and tie, and he'd even had it tailored so it fit perfectly. There was Tiny, who probably didn't realize his suit didn't even close to fit. he kept looking around like he wasn't quite sure what was going on. Liz was there, looking nice in a black dress, as well as Sally, who looked much the same.

And right at the center of all of them sat Gwen, like a cancer of inappropriateness. It made her want to grin, the looks she was getting. It wasn't their funeral. The police wanted to claim it and— alright, she didn't begrudge them. But her mother, the mayor, all those people, hell with them. Just her and the cops, everyone else could shove it.

As such, she was wearing a sun dress. White, with patterns of flowers and leaves in pastel colors, getting thicker towards the bottom, where it was a mixture of a soft green with some blues and yellows mixed in. Because that was what she wanted to wear. In fact, that was what she was going to keep right on wearing. She made up her mind, right then and there. Well, with pants, most days. Getting swung across the city by web while not wearing pants had been found to be a bad idea.

The service went fine, as the priest surely wasn't going to say anything. It was the walk back up the aisle that was problematic. The buffer Gwen had engineered of Peter and Tiny between Gwen and her mother had disappeared, and there was nothing to stop a few whispers.

"What are you wearing?" her mother asked.

Gwen ignored her.

"You are making a spectacle of yourself. It's ridiculous."

Gwen decided she was done ignoring anyone. Her restraint, it seemed, was worn thin of late. "Shut the fuck up."

"What did you just say?" her mother asked, forgetting to whisper.

If they weren't going to whisper, she might as well go straight to yelling. "I said shut the fuck up!"

The choir, which had been singing something, tumbled into discord. They tried to recover, but it was clearly a wreck.

"You little—"

"You know what, mom? You've got no right to be here. You're lucky they let you into the cathedral, you bitch. Now stop talking at my father's funeral."

Her mother snapped back just as angrily. "Let me in, when you're wearing that happy little dress. It's a funeral!"

Gwen tried to glare, but found that the muscles on her face wouldn't do anything but scrunch up into the ugliest crying ever. She could barely see past the tears. "Daddy hated it that I wore black! He told me to wear something brighter, so fuck you and your fucking idea of what I should wear. He wants me to wear something happy, and I'll fucking well wear it you stupid hag."

Everyone was silent. The procession had stopped. Peter had a hand on her shoulder. He leaned in, and decided to put in his two cents, a rather risky proposition. Perhaps being Spider-Man had made him fearless even outside of a fight. "Come on, Gwen. She's not worth your time."

Gwen managed a bit of a pained smile through her tears at that. He was right, of course. Helen Stacy wasn't worth anyone's time. Gwen lifted her chin, didn't try to stop crying, and resumed walking. She had the pleasure of hearing her mother splutter as she was pushed back into motion. The pall-bearers clearly agreed that, no matter her choice of attire, it was Gwen's father's funeral, not Helen's husband's.

—    —    —

Peter stepped in, seating himself on the window ledge. "What's up, Gwen?"

She looked up, smiling a little. A week on, it was getting easier to smile, even if the painful thoughts between the smiles stayed largely unchanged. She had decided on what her way through would be, though: work. Lots and lots of work. Being as she'd dropped it entirely, there was certainly some to go back to.

"There are two things I want from you." Her eyes slid up and down him and a different smile touched her lips. "Alright, three things, but I'm gonna try to focus on the productive two."

"Productive?" he asked with a wry smile.

"Okay, bad word choice. Anyways, number one, can you describe everything you saw in that Oscorp facility?"

"Everything?"

She went over to her computer and loaded up the model she had going. "The police found no hidden lair where all this was made, so whatever it was, it was sealed off. To me, that means somebody is still operating it, so we need to know what sorts of things they have down there. Someday, someone is going to use those things again. Now, you said that there were some really strange things in there, but I, well I wasn't up for talking right then. So, let's sketch this out, so I can finish this model.

He walked over, looking at it what she had so far, which basically ended at the bottom of the elevator that, according to Peter, ended about six floors down from the publicly-known basement. He settled against the desk, so he could look both at the screen and at her. "Let's see, I guess I can do that. I mean, I came in through this shaft here, into a little open area, nothing there.

"On the right, first place I check, I'd call that the chemistry section. All sorts of massive cannisters and apparatuses to combine things. Basically any raw chemical combination could have been made there. I went back and went straight—I never took that initial left, but I never spotted a foundry or metal-working area, so that'd be my guess. Keeping on going, there was a huge room and two side-rooms.

"To the left, it looked like a bedroom and a gym sort of setup, like he lived down there, or at least stayed there sometimes. The door to the right was closed, so I went past it. It was heavy-duty, and I was still trying to sneak around, not get caught. Of course, turned out he kept the suit there, so that might have been my chance to catch him."

As he went, Gwen updated the model, taking notes of everything he said. She added the huge room. "This room, this was the one you said was creepy. Creepy how?"

"Creepy. Well, it was massive, and it had these things along the walls that looked like stand-up coffins. They each had packets of notes on the fronts. I didn't get a chance to read them, since I was looking around, and then he attacked. The creepy stuff, what I paid the most attention to, was in the middle."

"What sort of stuff?"

"Just... weird things. Some were simple, bits of robots and all that, but some was a lot stranger. One area looked like it was fit for a museum, ancient mesopotamia or something. There was one big vertical glass tube, filled with water—maybe not water, but a liquid—and there was half of the body of some weird mutated thing in it, all blue-skinned and not-quite-human. There looked to be other partial bodies further down. The room was massive."

Peter shrugged and shook his head. "Other than that, I'm not sure. He attacked, and I got tossed through a few of the displays. I got thrown at this machine that was levitating something, broke it entirely. There was this glowing thing in a super-heavy container, like for radiation control. The glow came out of a little slit-window on the front. Those are the only things I could specifically describe. I threw a camera, but it got stuck down there."

Gwen nodded, finishing her notes. "Well, it's not much, but something is always better than nothing."

He slid over on the desk, between her and the monitor. "You said something about a third thing."

She smiled, but pushed him back. "I said something about a second thing, too."

He slid back over, so she could get to the keyboard. She punched up the lizard file.

He glanced over it. "So, weird sightings?"

"It's real, I'm confident of it. Problem is, the only way to get evidence is go out there and do a stake-out."

"I'll go," he said, shrugging off any worry. "I'm not too worried about a lizard that knocks over drug stores."

"I'm going too."

"No," he said immediately.

"Sorry, not your call. I'm going to investigate, because if I stay here I'll go insane. So, if you want to be a supportive boyfriend, you'll start thinking about how to be a bodyguard, alright?"

"Gwen, this is a really bad idea."

Her eyes narrowed. "It's also not a debate. Do we understand each other?"

"Gwen, I will never understand you."

—    —    —

New York City made stake-outs awkward. In the rest of the country, it was fairly easy to park a car and watch something. New York was travelled on foot. It wasn't easy to just park in Manhattan for hours on end.

Peter made New York City stake-outs easy. The two of them were halfway up a skyscraper, her sitting on a little swing-like chair made of webbing and he just crouched with his feet on the wall and his butt on his heels like it was the most comfortable position in the world. They were high up, but she had a telephoto lense.

"Are you sure he'll hit this one?"

"I'm sure he'll hit it sometime. By the way, this is going to be a long week, Peter."

"I'm fine with that, but why can't we just catch this on the police scanner?"

"He always goes when they're closed, with nobody inside. He's only been spotted by random people on the street and by one vet that just happened to forget his wallet on his desk. Even if he were spotted, he's always in-and-out really quickly."

Peter nodded. "Alright, I'll give it to you, a stake-out is the only way to go."

"Exactly."

And it went alright. They didn't spot him, but they did make-out a bit and head home with enough time to catch a few hours before school. Then, it was back to class, home for a little more sleep, and back to work. A little research, a ride over to Peter's—she quite insisted that he not always come to her, even if it was more practical—and back to the stake-out.

Night two went like night one, and on night three they were extra-tired. It was also a bust.

Night four, thursday, they were whacked. She fell asleep in her little seat, leaning on him. She woke up when Peter moved and her head fell off his shoulder. She gave a little yelp, but he'd already caught her.

"And there he goes," he said.

"Get me down when you go down," she insisted.

He grabbed her and jumped. Her stomach leapt into her throat, and she shut her eyes, fighting off a scream. The angle changed, they slowed down, and then there was something solid under her butt. Gwen opened her eyes and found herself sitting on a bench beside the subway entrance. She stood, got her camera out, and started taking pictures of Peter running into the shop. He went hurtling back out. It made for a good photo, but Gwen still had to fight a quiver of fear.

He landed fine all the same. Out of the shop, beady eyes on Peter, stomped a beast that was surely somewhere between a lizard and a man, but larger than either. His scales were a rich green, with a lighter underbelly, and some sort of white pattern about his neck. Even hunched over with the way it walked, it had to tuck its shoulders to get through the doorway. Outside, it drew itself upright, and clearly had no trouble standing as a man, albeit a man twice Peter's height. She wondered exactly how it moved in the sewers; they weren't really all that spacious.

The lizard leapt, and Peter dodged and began fighting back. As ever, it was difficult for Gwen to follow the fighting. She could see specific things, some of them awe-inspiring, such as when Peter ducked under a swinging claw, caught the thing's forearm, and trailed along behind the swinging arm to kick it in the face with all of its own strength, then proceeded to plant that foot, leap off it's head, dash down its back, catch its lashing tail, and throw it like the hammer toss. He even yelled "New olympic record!" when the Lizard hit the side of a building.

Peter was impressive in a sleek, agile, cool, totally sexy kind of way. The Lizard had power. Raw, terrifying power. It threw a car at Peter. It ignored a kick to the face, not even flinching, and responded by punching Peter hard enough to crack the pavement when he landed.

Gwen kept taking pictures, trying to think of anything she could do. Of course there was nothing. She wasn't a superhero, she was just a photographer. All the same, it was clear Peter was losing. He was getting slower with each passing moment. He was struggling to dodge swings.

Gwen swapped her film for the second time, which told her this had been a very, very long fight. She raised her camera once more, and wondered if she was going to photograph the death of a second man that she loved in the span of a single month.

She knew she should do something, but all she could think of was to just keep taking pictures. In some ways, it went back to the only way forward she could see: just keep working. If she put the camera down, if she looked at what was happening through her own eyes, as a part of the world, rather than through a lens, as a composition, she would just break into pieces. It was like that lens was a wall of glass holding back an ocean that would otherwise drown her. As the camera clicked away, Gwen felt a coldness settle into her, a stillness. This was easy, right here.

The Lizard reared up, towering over Peter, where he was backed against a wall. She'd seen him like this before, in other places. The wall wasn't a barrier, it was an avenue, a way out. He wasn't confined, and he would dodge. She lined up the shot, ready to take the picture, and then he didn't dodge.

The Lizard's clawed hand swept down, and Peter's hand came up to meet it. A shadow shifted across Peter's form, until he was wrapped in darkness. Their hands interlocked, and the Lizard's brutal strength was stopped. The tableau held. Peter stood, clad in shining blackness, holding the beast at bay.

The lizard roared and lunged down again, with his other clawed hand, and Peter caught that as well. He didn't go to his knees, he didn't even waver. Then he began to twist his hands inwards, bending the Lizard's hands back on themselves. The Beast let out a pained, wailing rasp of noise and began to struggle. It thrashed, ripped one hand free, and another.

Loose, the Lizard hopped backwards, landing on all fours, hissing at Peter. Peter advanced, and the Lizard fled. It scooped off a manhole cover and flung it into a nearby building. Despite its size, the beast flowed into the tight sewer entrance with ease.

Peter ran to the entrance as well, jumping down, but moments later came back out. He looked Gwen's way, but she shook her head. "Witnesses," she mouthed. He took off, webbing his way back towards her apartment, still clad in that strange black suit.

The subway ride back was terrifying. All she could think of was that thing he had been wearing, how it had come over him as though by magic. It was impossible, but she had seen it with her own eyes. She kept looking at her camera, wishing she could see the film. One of those few cases where she needed digital and didn't have it.

She finally got to her stop and ran all the way to her building. The elevator ride let her catch her breath, and she was almost steady by the time she opened the door. He was there, in that black, shining outfit, looking at her.

"Did you see that?" he asked, his tone bright.

"Peter—"

"I tossed that guy around like nothing. I've never felt this strong before."

"Peter—"

"I think I'm getting stronger. Faster, too. It's—"

"Peter!"

He finally stopped. "What?"

"What happened to you out there?"

"As I was saying—"

"No," Gwen interrupted, "the new suit. Where did it come from?"

He glanced down at himself. "What new— Why is my suit black?"

"Look in a mirror!"

He opened the bathroom door and jumped back when he saw his reflection. "What the—"

Suddenly, it changed. The black retracted, and he was wearing a T-shirt and jeans, just like normal. "Gwen, what's happening?"

"I don't know."

"Gwen, I—" Turning, he saw her, and froze. She was backed up against the door, shaking. "Don't be scared, Gwen. I won't hurt you. I'd never hurt you."

She swallowed back her fear, forcing it down to put on a good face for him. He was the one wrapped in some strange outfit, after all. "I know that, Peter. I know. It's not you that frightened me, it's that... whatever did that."

He looked at his hands. "I feel so normal. I don't understand this at all."

"Whatever it is, it made you stronger, far stronger."

"It did?"

She walked up to him, got close to him. He had to know she wasn't scared, even if it was a lie because the thought of that thing still frightened her a little. "Peter, when I develop the film, you'll see. It spread over you, like a wave of blackness, right before you caught his hands. It was plain as day, from where I was standing, that it was what made you stronger."

"That's... unnerving."

She paused a moment, a realization striking her. "Come here."

He followed her into her room. She lay her bag by the computer and began digging through drawers.

"What's up?"

"Give me your hand," she said.

He did, and she grabbed his elbow, reached up with scissors, and clipped the end of his sleeve off.

He leapt back, yelling, "What are you—"

He stopped when he saw what happened. The split piece of cloth turned into a black, inky fluid, and raced across the floor to slip into his shoe. His sleeve was uncut.

"How did you know to try that?" he asked.

"Because you weren't wearing a T-shirt and jeans, you were wearing your regular outfit. Which is gone, while this one remains. It might look like clothes, but it's not."

Peter stared at his outfit, started pulling it off, but when he dropped the T-shirt it flickered to blackness and rejoined his outfit, reforming over his chest. His breathing was coming fast, panicky, as he looked down at himself.

"Peter, just sit down."

"But—"

"Peter. Come here."

He did so, and she sat down beside him on the bed. "It'll be fine. You're smart enough to think this out."

He nodded. "We're smart enough. Let's talk this through."

"What do we know about it?"

Peter nodded, his breathing settling. Science. This was familiar ground. "Black is probably its natural color, but it can change color. It can assume various shapes. It is a single mass that readheres to itself."

Gwen got up, grabbing her largest whiteboard, wiping away the pulse-measurements she'd last used it for, and taking notes. "Good, great. What else?"

He paused a moment. "It displays some advanced algorithms or intellect, impossible to tell right now."

Gwen wrote that, then stopped. "No, displays some connection to you, mentally."

"How so?"

"If it just made an outfit based on what outfits were appropriate, it would make a standard one, but it put you in your own clothes."

"This is a green shirt with blue jeans."

She pointed at his waist. "And that's a grease stain, from that Kwikkee Burger date, when you jumped up to rush out and deal with the Ringer."

He frowned. "This is my exact shirt."

"No algorithm or intellect could know that except your own."

"So, it has a mental interface of some sort. It's being controlled by my subconscious. I needed to be stronger, and it made me stronger. I didn't want to be in that black outfit and I wasn't."

They were silent for a moment. Gwen expanded on what she'd written, clarifying the notes. It was just random ideas, but that was where things usually started. Observations, thoughts, eventually hypotheses and experiments. Maybe, sometime, results.

"I want to see something," Peter said. "Hand me those scissors."

She did so, and he tried to cut a chunk off his sleeve. He cut through, but it just mended in place, unhurt. The next time he tried, it pulled away and wasn't even cut.

Gwen re-wrote the 'advanced algorithms/intellect' she had previously erased.

"Yeah," Peter agreed, "signs of self-defense. I want to see that black stuff again."

"That I can help with," Gwen assured him.

"You can?"

"It'll take a bit, but yes." She lifted her camera and grinned. "Trust me, I've got some shots you'll want to see."

She went into the dark room she'd made her closet into and got to the slow, smelly process of developing a few hundred pictures. She was experienced enough to be quick, and had the room set up to do quite a few at a time, but it was a process limited by the chemical reaction. Still, she could start the right roll of film first, give it a little bit of a rush.

When she got out, Peter was sitting at her computer, skimming through articles about nanotechnology.

"Let's see," he said, holding out a hand

"These are just negatives. Be patient." She slid them into the film scanner and soon had them popping up on the screen. Fifteen shots in rapid succession showed Peter's red-and-blue outfit undergoing an eerie change. Darkness spread from the small of his back, racing across his body, down his legs and up his arms. It didn't look quite how she recalled, but that was the beauty of film: it told the truth. In the moment, adrenaline fighting with shock, she'd not seen things exactly as they were, but the lens had been as honest as ever.

Peter looked over the images a dozen times, then started zooming in. "Damn, it's all pixelated."

"Yeah, that's because the scanner can't exceed that resolution. If you want more, I'll need to make a print, which'll take another chunk of time."

He thought a moment, slowly getting a grin. "There are a lot of other things I'd like to do with a chunk of time. But, I do want to see it."

"Where, exactly, do you want to see?"

He looked at her, eyed her up and down. She rolled her eyes and he went back to the computer, zooming out to show her the spot he was interested in. She went back to work in the dark room. When she finished, he was lying on the ceiling, staring at her bed. "Peter, are you okay?"

"Fine. Just... nevermind." He jumped down, reaching for the developed picture.

She put the photo behind her back. "Oh no, this I want to hear."

"Gwen, come on," he said, trying to wheedle his way free.

"You want the photo? You give up the goods."

"Alright. But don't laugh. I was, I was imagining what you looked like, sleeping down there when I'm not with you."

"Oh!" She pulled him into a hug. "That's so sweet! Also, kinda stalkerish, but for some reason I don't mind."

He kissed her, then moved away just a touch, so they could really look at each other. "You want to, maybe, see about the photo later?"

She smiled, dropped the photo, and jumped on him.

—    —    —

She sat against the headboard, looking down at her toes. "Peter, there's something that's bothering me."

"Not something I did?"

"No, of course not," Gwen said, wondering how he could imagine she had minded anything he had done. "But, earlier, when I jumped you."

"Yeah?"

"How did you take your clothes off?"

"Well, I—" he paused, realizing what she meant. "I think I pulled them off, but they're not here, are they. I'm still wearing my—" from his left sock, blackness climbed up him, until he was clothed again "—sock."

Gwen jumped out of bed and began putting her clothes back on as swiftly as possible. "I'm sorry, we cannot do that until we've figured this out. Absolutely cannot."

When she turned, she found Peter on the opposite wall, up near the ceiling. He lowered himself to the ground, staring down at the thing that pretended it was clothing. "Trust me, I am entirely on that page."

Gwen finished getting dressed, then looked to where the photo lay on the floor. "Well, let's see what has you so interested."

He pinned the picture to the wall and stepped back. "Tell me you don't see it."

She narrowed her eyes, then stepped closer. "Is that, skin between the red and the black?"

"It's this black suit destroying my suit as it replaces it. It's rolling across my skin, removing one thing and adding another. But look at the patterns."

She stepped back, trying to find what he was talking about. "Alright, that I do not see."

"The blackness is advancing at an incredible rate, so it looks like constant motion of a line, but it's not just an even line. Look at the ridges, the protrusions."

"Yeah, it's not just a line, so?"

"It's an irregular fractal, which to me says a lot."

"A fractal?" She narrowed her eyes, looking at the pattern again. "Alright, I see that. But what does it tell you?"

"If it were mechanical, it would be more consistent. It's somewhat erratic, but still something of a fractal, the way that branching works in nature. Imagine it's a tree, growing across me."

"It's a plant?"

"It's a thing that grows like a plant. It's a lifeform of some sort."

Gwen walked over to the whiteboard and erased algorithms. "So, where does that leave us?"

"It leaves us with a fairly good idea of where to look."

Gwen was even more lost.

Peter grinned. "Man, this feels good. I can see why you like figuring this stuff out and lording it over me."

She rolled her eyes. "Savor it much longer and the dryspell might outlast solving this."

He broke quick. "In the Goblin's lair, several things got smashed. One of them was what looked like a black cube inside of a field of some sort, like something being electromagnetically levitated. That machine got smashed, the cube gone."

She took a slow, deep breath. "He has a room full of strange lifeforms, something gets broken near you, you have a strange lifeform on your skin. Alright, now we know. So, we have to go find out what he knew."

"If we can," Peter said. "The cops couldn't find the access shaft I went through, which means the place is sealed tight."

"Sealed," she said, "not nonexistent. We dig, we'll find it. We just need to go shopping for some shovels."

Peter smiled. "So, another all-nighter, then?"

Gwen gestured at the window, where the first hints of dawn were softening the darkness. "It's already an all-nighter. Let's just try not to make it two."

"Webswinging it is, then."

The suit reappeared, and she took an involuntary step back. Immediately, it turned to blue and red.

"You know, it's not the color that bothers me."

"I know." The suit went back to unrelieved black, perhaps preferring to keep its true color. She shivered at the thought of its sentience. Peter held out an arm for her. "You sure you're okay with this?"

"You wouldn't hurt me."

He nodded, and they began swinging north. They went through Manhattan instead of Queens because, despite the slightly longer route, it made for faster travel due to the buildings. A lot might have changed, had they taken a different route, but they didn't. As such, they were swinging through one of the many canyons between buildings, staying high so she wouldn't get recognized, a risk even with her hood up, when commotion broke out below.

Peter landed on the side of a skyscraper, looking down. A car flipped across the street, slamming into a concrete barricade, and a familiar form burst into sight. The Lizard. Around it, people fled, except for one. A security guard, gun in hand, and he started firing.

"I have to," Peter said, leaping down. Gwen clenched her eyes shut, trying not to scream as the ground raced up. Then she slowed, stopped, the ground beneath her feet. She opened her eyes to see Peter kick the Lizard square in the jaw. The Lizard's head rocked back from the blow, and it stumbled away. The security guard was on the ground, unhurt.

Gwen missed that picture, but she dug out her camera and kept going anyways. Maybe this would go into the papers, and maybe this would just be something they kept for later, a glimpse of Peter fighting while aided by this strange organism. She wanted to have the pictures all the same.

Although stunned, the Lizard certainly was not stopped. It came back with a vengeance, seeming faster and stronger than ever. Peter was fighting fairly hard to keep clear of its claws, but it was still clearly a one-sided fight. Peter landed punches and kicks, he tossed the Lizard into a car, and he not once had a touch landed on him.

Then the Lizard changed tactics, and Gwen knew she had the photo that would be on the front page. Peter leaping high, clear of a rolled car, while the Lizard lunged away from his diversion, towards a woman who screamed as she saw death approaching. She had them all in frame, she could feel it. The moment, captured, and with it then entirety of the battle.

Pictures or no, the fight moved on. The Lizard didn't try to kill the woman though, he just grabbed her, a single claw about her waist, and lifted her before him. Gwen twisted the camera, wondering if she had been wrong about the photo of the day. Spider-Man, standing upright, frozen for fear of worsening the situation. The Lizard towering over him, the woman held high in a clear threat. The woman screaming herself raw as fear overtook her. And an ounce of humanity on the Lizard's face: a cruel grin, as if it knew exactly what it was doing. Not kindly humanity, but not all humanity was kind.

"You know, this is why we nueter our pets," Peter said.

The Lizard tilted its head in an odd expression of uncertainty. Peter was right, the banter did throw them off.

"Too much testosterone makes them think they're a whole lot tougher than they are. Don't worry, I'll disabuse you of the notion."

Peter lunged, faster than Gwen had ever seen a man move. The lizard squeezed, but Peter's hands were already on its claws. His muscles rippled, and the claws bent the wrong way. The Lizard let out a roar that made tigers seem mild. Peter lunged in, but the Lizard spun, a quick, tight circle, and slammed him with its tail. He hurtled through the glass doors of a storefront.

The woman started to scramble away, and the other onlookers likewise fled. Nobody was going to stay after that, nobody except Gwen.

Peter rushed in again, swift and sure once more. The Lizard attacked, roaring still, not slowed by his mangled claw. But the beast was overmatched. Peter struck with brutal power, bludgeoning the beast down.

As Peter fought, he yelled. "You shouldn't have done that! You shouldn't have attacked that woman!"

That frame chilled her, and Gwen finally lowered her camera, let it fall about her neck, let herself see the moment as it happened, not as a part of some story she would tell later. Her eyes widened as she took it in.

"What are you doing?" she yelled.

The Lizard was on his knees, staring up at Peter. Peter spun into a powerful kick, tossing the Lizard into the street where it crunched into the hood of a car. Peter leapt onto the car, stood over the Lizard, and began punching it. "You shouldn't have done that!"

Gwen ran at him. "Peter, stop it."

His fist came up spraying red droplets of blood, then fell in another savage blow, another.

"Peter! Please!" she screamed. She grabbed at his arm and he twisted, tossing her off. Gwen hit the pavement, rolled over, and stopped against a car.

Peter was staring down at her. His fist, held high, dripped blood. "I- I- I didn't mean to. I'd never hurt you."

He stepped down from the car. "Gwen, I wouldn't hurt you. I don't, I didn't."

She looked past him, to where the Lizard was lying amidst twisted metal and broken glass. "You killed him."

Peter looked at the Lizard. "But I, he hurt that woman, and I had to stop him."

"You didn't have to kill him. He didn't need to die."

Just then, the Lizard's chest rose, fell again. Gwen jumped up, ducking under Peter's arm, rushing to the beast's side. At last, so close, she realized what she hadn't seen before. The white loop about its neck wasn't some sort of marking, it was the remnant of a shirt. The thing had been wearing a shirt. There wasn't a doubt left in her mind, the Lizard had been a man. Every other part of its clothing had burst, but its head and neck hadn't grown quite so far as the rest of it, and that bit of cloth had remained, a testament to what came before.

And that man, whatever he may have become, was broken. There was blood everywhere, but nowhere did it spurt out as she had feared. Perhaps Peter wouldn't be a murderer. At least, maybe if she tried, she could prevent him from becoming a murderer. She started running her hands across the cold, scaly body, trying to feel where the blood was coming from. She had her medical kit in the bottom of her camera bag, ready to go. It might even be enough to cut through his hide.

"What are you doing?" Peter asked, his voice rough.

Gwen didn't stop working as she replied. "You almost killed him."

"He was going to kill—"

"He didn't!" Gwen snapped. "You stopped him. That's what you do, you stop killers. You're not Frank Castle. You remember the story we wrote about him?"

"Castle? I, yes, of course. I stopped him from killing that man."

Gwen hissed in a breath as she finally realized the obvious injury, the one she'd been ignoring because she saw so much blood. The Lizard's chest moved unevenly. One side would rise, and a portion on the other would fall, then the reverse. She looked to his neck and saw his trachea shifting to the left, visibily diverted by the pressure on his lungs. Two things at once, both horrible.

Flail chest, where a section of ribs was completely disconnected, so that it didn't move right, ruining his breathing and damaging his lungs. No surprise that this coincided with a collapsed lung, with one half of the plural sack collecting air or fluid outside of the lungs, slowly filling and pushing both of the lungs aside. Hopefully it was collecting air, because otherwise she'd have to try fashioning a drainage tube, which she had no idea how to do.

She dug into her bag and pulled out a broad, hollow needle, carefully felt at the Lizard's chest, and drove it into the gap between two ribs. Immediately, the Lizard gasped in air. Even unconscious, the difference in his visible comfort was obvious. The flail chest would still kill him, though.

"Why are you only paying attention to him?" Peter snapped.

"Because he's dying," she replied. She needed to reconnect those ribs, somehow, so they didn't move seperately, or the lungs would just collapse again. She looked around, snatched up a piece of metal that had once been under the hood of the car, and tried to think of a way to attach it. She hadn't read much on how to treat a flail chest, not yet. She was just making a guess as to what to do.

Before she could act, Peter spun her around. "Gwen, he's going to be fine."

"He's dying," she replied, aghast at his nonchalance.

Peter was already webbing the Lizard down. "You don't understand. You can't. But I do. This creature, the one we're worried about, I think I understand it."

"You're scaring me."

"Trust me, just trust me. I'd never hurt you, you know that."

Gwen stayed silent.

"See, this man, and he was a man before, he's become like a lizard in a lot of ways. He can regenerate lost body parts, heal most any injury. Already, I can see where his skin is knitting together. From here, I can see it. No need for a microscope."

"What are you talking about?"

He looked around at the empty streets. "Sirens. Yes, you can't hear them yet."

He scooped her up and leapt skyward, and soon they were swinging back south, Peter still talking, sounding strangely excited. "I understand so much, now. This creature, it was getting some of my thoughts, but I can see its too. I can see what was happening, before. They were experimenting on it, experimenting on people with it."

He launched them higher, an arc far above the rooftops, and for a time he ran with her, leaping rather than swinging. "The people all died, of course. The process of bonding, that was too much, they couldn't survive. Me, though, I was fine. I had the strength to survive that, and now we are bonded. You see, it needed somebody strong. This relation is symbiotic. I give it the chance to move freely, it gives me the strength to do what I can."

"Please stop, Peter," Gwen murmured, knowing he wouldn't.

"Not yet, not quite yet. Here, here we are." He dove, shot a web, and went sailing through the air. They flipped free and landed atop the towers of Brooklyn Bridge. "Look around you, Gwen. This is our city, this is our home. I couldn't protect it before. I wasn't fast enough, strong enough. I didn't have enough time."

His chin was high, a proud angle, as he spoke. "With the aid of this symbiote, I have more than enough. Not just strength, though. I haven't slept, but I'm not tired. I won't be, ever again. It's improving me, and not only physically. All of my senses, not just the eyesight to see that man healing. Even my mind. I can think so much faster, as it improves the connections in my neural pathways."

Gwen stared at him. "Peter, it's changing you."

"It's improving me!"

She shook her head, slowly.

"Gwen, like this, I can do anything. Anything!"

She backed away. The chill morning wind seemed to freeze the tears on her cheeks. "That thing, it got into your head. It changed you."

"No, no," he said, the words desperate. As he approached her, the black suit pulled back, showing her Peter's strained expression. "I'm still me."

He reach for her, and she slapped his hand away.

"Don't touch me," she said.

He stared at her. "Stop doing this."

"You are becoming a monster!"

"Stop saying these things." He reached a hand up, gripping his head. "Stop it, stop it, stop it."

She stepped back, held her chin high. "If you do this, you're the villain."

"I am not the villain!" he screamed he bellowed, lashing out at her in blind anger as the blackness descended across his face once more.

Gwen felt his arm strike her, and her feet left the ground. She'd never imagined how hard he hit, how much it would hurt. As she hurtled away, time slowed. She could see the suit writhing before her eyes, and she wondered if this was what her life had been for. Everything for that one moment, the moment where she put a hero back onto the right path, because surely she had done that. She could see him fighting, see the symbiote moving seperately now. As she fell, she saw a hand clawing to get free from the blackness of the symbiote's chest, Peter fighting his way to the surface.

But no. Gwen didn't buy that. She didn't believe in fate, and even if she did, she didn't believe she was just some prop for a hero, a stepping stone in his journey. No, she believed in other things. For example, she believed that she was going to tell stories that the world would never forget.

Her hands moved with the fluidity of mastery, long practice honing perfect motion into instinctive ease. The camera came up before her eyes, and she started clicking away away. Above her, in that frame, a young man tore his way from a black beast. He could only barely fight free, a single limb, the line of his jaw, a portion of his chest. It was a heroic arm, though. The hands squeezing down on the web-shooter that still remained, launching a thread of webbing towards her.

She caught that on film as well, the impossible arc of that desperate effort to save her. It would make quite a story, whether she lived to tell it or not.

She felt a sudden impact. The world disappeared.