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“Everything I’ve ever let go of,
has claw marks on it.”
- David Foster Wallace
It’s not a matter of whether Gwen can’t or can go home. It’s simply the stupid, unreasonable, vapid fact that she wouldn’t bring herself to attempt going home.
There’s no rule in being Spiderman, woman, for her, but those terms hadn’t applied to Gwen when she felt the gun pointed at her chest and Captain Stacy’s cologne sloughing off him. The scent of the wreckage was still new to her, it stuck to her skin and made her wish that Jess had talked sense into Miguel to let Gwen pack some of her clothes before jumping right into the Lobby. She’d walked in there, trailing behind the two of them while other Spiderpeople stared on and wondered what stray had stumbled onto something not meant for her.
Okay, she had thought. I can work with this.
(Really. There was no rule dictating what Gwen could, or could not do, when she wore the mask. She felt it slip over the curved buzz of blonde and pink. Briefly, she wondered if her webs could build out a father. He would tell her to go out and play soccer like the other kids in a watercolor blur of worlds. She had stopped a helicopter. She could do anything.
Later on, Jessica will tell her to pick up the pace and teach Gwen how to work out the watch that hung limp on white stretched wrists. Gwen listens. She does not speak.)
Miguel is strict.
He doesn’t negotiate with Gwen, he doesn’t treat her like an equal, he doesn’t listen to her; all of those reasons Gwen has stored up into her heart and packed them up into her big girl ballet flats for late night walking. At least during the night of Nueva York, Jess was back home with her husband, and she could pick at day-old scabs while hurling swears at Miguel O’Hara. Silently. Miguel’s bark is worse than his bite, Peter assured her, but some days Gwen can't start to give credence to an adult anymore.
She tells herself, repeatedly, like a prayer or a hymn (and Gwen can’t choose between the two but the visceral imagery that she had to decide for trivial wording, made her world tilt over and almost hurl across the side of a platform. When she felt her stomach about to quench its inside from vertigo, Jess reprimanded her for almost disposing of their mission. Gwen had wanted nothing more than to disappear.) that Miguel had given her a place to stay. Somewhere stable, and safe, and that was more than anybody had ever done for her for months.
He’s why her father hasn’t locked her up behind bars, or why Gwen isn’t running around a fractured dimension, a child playing dress up for survival. She has many to be grateful for. Smile, Gwen, her mother’s frail voice echoes behind beaded rosaries and draining hospice. Smile, it’s a nice thing to do.
(Nueva York is not her home. There’s no trusted guardianship between Gwen and Jess; or Gwen and Miguel. Simply, they’ve given her a rebranded meaning for purpose. Cruelty isn’t a paradigm that she could shy away from, grow up, Gwen: vulnerability can’t be shown, if Gwen is not paying attention. Jess had told her that. Listen, Gwen. Sorry, she immediately apologizes. She does not want to go home.)
So, she keeps her mouth shut when Miguel reminds her that she is a child, and that somewhere between the fine line of kindness and the heat of the moment, he’d decided that she was a better fit for the Spider Society. Gwen had been fifteen then, approaching fast from behind is her sixteenth; and then the sweet, bitterness of tangible aftertaste in her mouth that she was celebrating without a father and a home, left her wondering what else she was good for. She is a child, she is fifteen, and has no true use between Jess and Miguel. He tells her all of this, and yet, somehow she still follows curfew.
Miguel is strict. That is a fact. True.
Every so often Jess would sneak Gwen a piece of strawberry cake from the cafeteria (they run out before Gwen even had enough time to pull her hair into a ponytail) and tell her to make friends.
At first she thought the woman was joking – make friends, tell them your name, tell them what you’ve been through, tell them everything – and she wanted to shut the thought out, first. She doesn’t do friends. (Lie.) She had Miles, he was enough. But she can’t control dominance over feelings moving to the side, making her heart ache, and Gwen had spotted the bright girl from before.
Margo is not Peter. Margo is eight months younger than her and thinks that Comic-Con is a great event. Margo doesn’t draw, but she was smart enough that Gwen lets the virtual reality Spider-Byte walk into her room with no qualms, the shared understanding of a thin blanket covering the checkmarks for friendship.
Margo is nice. That is a fact. True.
In a fleeting moment of rebellion, she muses on whether Jess had pushed her to branch out to the younger generation of Spiderpeople, because she can’t have either of who she would want.
Margo is not Peter. That is a fact. True.
Margo is not Miles, either. That is a fact. True.
Miguel’s words echo into her own, he curls up into Gwen’s body, positioning himself in a closed off proximity contrast to her mother. They snarl and bite their fangs at each other. They leave claw marks on her skin. Sharp words can dig underneath stringed bullets, but they don’t coalesce with each other. They forcibly tear Gwen apart in their own temperament, until she can’t take it anymore.
Her mother and Miguel are not the same.
That is a fact. Lie.
She learns – from a fucking rocker – that her father will die as Captain Stacy.
Hobie holds her close and pats her back, but Gwen can drown in shallow water.
She presses her palm against her face and selfishly wishes for death. Let me die, please. Please. Please. Let me go home. She’s heard countless stories of a Gwen Stacy who falls to her stumbling end, a Gwen Stacy who has died. They all applaud her in the Lobby, since she is the one who has survived.
There must be some kind of prank written into the universe’s canon where this time, she has lived. She has no idea who Hobie is. Her mind is muddled, beneath Hobie’s tight embrace, there are tiny rivulets of blood that appear in Gwen’s vision.
“Please,” she murmurs into Hobie’s soaked shoulder. Gwen knows what she’s doing. Manipulating. It’s not a pretty sight on her. She wears it on her face, rather than her heart. Integrity does not show its compassion to death. “Please,” she tries, again. Harder. Forceful.
His grip loosens. They are standing in Gwen’s bedroom (not her own, one that has been handed down to her in an effort to let her express herself between the slitted bars of a cage). He smells of fumes and something else Gwen cannot place. He does not know her. She does not know him. She wonders why he is still here, standing in an ovation mess that she had created, inwardly the little girl that kneels down to an altar of prayer inside of her begs. “What?” He has an accent, British.
Gwen shakes her head and in that moment, she does not blame that little girl for crying. That’s what little girls do. Gwen is none of that.
Her father, with a loaded gun pointed at his baby girl, and a bullet passes through Gwen, narrowly missing her heart. There is a multitude of what she can say, rather, she doesn’t. She keeps quiet and drags her gaze down to the carpeted floor.
“Sorry,” she manages to cough out before she crumples into a pile on the floor, Hobie coming down crashing with her. “Didn’t mean to do that.” Gwen reaches out to her cheek to wipe away tears, she finds herself coming out dry. She wonders if he thinks there might be something wrong with her, he’s probably right. Miguel had kept on reminding her of what an anomaly she was, Spiderwoman and Gwen Stacy are the same. The good, the bad, the ugly.
Hobie is watching her. She screams for the need of praise that there is no little girl inside of her that donned the mask anymore. He stays still, and watches.
Old habits die hard.
(They met at the cafeteria. If he can, Hobie avoids the Lobby like it was a plague and it would drive him into a feverish sickness of turbulent disturbance, before he could even return to his own dimension. From him Gwen had learnt that there was a tracker in each watch, they claimed it had been built in for sensibility and welfare, but Hobie, ever the anarchist, spoke out about the Society with barely hidden repulsion. Gwen silently wonders to herself if she could co-exist in a world that she held hatred for without there being a single person she loved.
He learns that she is a drummer. He lets her hold his guitar. They share a mutual understanding of where the world had let them down. Hobie is outspoken about it, Gwen keeps it to herself because she could not bring herself to go against Miguel’s word. She tells herself there was nothing innately inappropriate about searching for dependency through approval. There truly isn’t.)
Jess is as good as a mentor as she is a person. She doesn’t hide behind an identity unlike most Spider People do. She has an unborn child that Gwen notes it was impossible to not marvel at her ability to fight and still kick ass with, because Jessica Drew is a parent, but it’s clear she loves her child, and she loves her husband.
Jess has held a lot of love for people, that, Gwen has learnt from her short time of mentoring under her.
She loves a lot of people, so Gwen genuinely cannot hold any factual or concrete abhorrence towards her when Miguel’s firm underlying tone of threat, reminds Gwen that he can return her to her home (it’s not a matter of if, he warns Gwen, it is a matter of when) and Jess stays reserved to the side, quiet and unspoken.
She’s resigned to the sympathetic admission that Gwen was nothing more than a charity case they could ship back if the faulty packaging couldn’t uphold that many issues in herself. It’s a messy situation, their relationship with each other. But Gwen figures that if she does better in Jess’s eyes, she can somehow slip past her way into a crevice for her mentor’s love; and then she won’t have to bite the inside of her cheek from tears when Miguel lashes out at her.
(Even then, she cannot claim that he lashes out with anger towards her. If anything, he gets exasperated with her actions. They are stupid. Unjustifiable. Teenage mistakes that Gwen should reiterate herself to not do. To herself, she agrees, who wouldn't?)
She celebrates her sixteenth with Hobie.
Lately, there’s been a numbing feeling accompanying her wherever she went, the kind that sunk deep and burrowed beneath bone before she could even notice. It’s unfamiliar, new, and it was not anything worth mentioning for a birthday.
She’s grown close to Hobie, if Gwen’s compulsion back on her own New York with band hopping had been bad, then with Hobie it was worse. She’ll storm out on his drums and block out all noise until he starts to join in too. Loud and louder. They drown out the city, the two of them, together.
He lets her crash into his dimension – and not his home, because frankly, he doesn’t have one. They’ll poke fun at buildings he calls “safe zones” that are really just abandoned decorated spaces they’ve claimed as their own, but they both don’t have anywhere to go. Gwen can tell that the comfort they find in each other is good, they are good. Hobie is better than her, though.
“Sixteenth,” he acknowledges with a nod of his head. Gwen shrugs in reply. She’s got better things to worry about, the tip of her tongue wants to tell Hobie all about Miles, and how Miguel refuses to speak a word about him, or how Jessica has been adamant about what Gwen could or could not do regarding missions.
And then – there’s a rendition of Happy Birthday being played on his guitar she hadn’t seen him plug in, the song echoes off the walls in a raucous manner. She taps along to the beat with her fists, and grins at him. He grins back, and she can spot the sparkle in his eye that forces him to do the most obnoxious, awful, chord progression that gradually gets louder until it bleeds through the walls. Literally. She’s seen the clef notes struggle past concrete.
She dwells on whether to ask Hobie about what she’d been feeling lately. Ultimately, she goes up against it since their friendship wasn’t solidified on feelings . It was music and spray paint, and the Society, and rebellion. She wonders if Hobie had ever been through this. She wonders if he knew how to get rid of it. She wonders if he can.
(Later, they will eat cake; lots of it, until Gwen vomits from the amount of icing she’s eaten, and Hobie will make fun of her for it. They’ll tag a bunch of walls across the city, and they’ll thread the needle together (He does backflips and jumps around, and she’s more focused on not dropping out of the sky) and her mind will clear from all the thoughts that remain. Those that have disappeared already, pull Gwen up from the shore and no longer does she bob her head, gasping for breath. With Hobie, it’s brighter, clearer, she can see again. Later, they will part their ways and Hobie’s grip on her will tighten momentarily. He gives her a jumper and Gwen fiddles with her watch, reluctant to go back. Home is not home anymore, and Nueva York doesn’t fit her size like she had hoped it would.)
Next week, Jess will pawn off another everyday villain mission towards her direction, and each time she will accept (how can she not?) with the hopes of doing better than the previous time. She has more to gain from this than what she has to lose, Gwen isn’t solely dependent on Jess and Miguel for their praise, but she knows she can’t upset Miguel over a mistake, anymore. She hopes this will be the last.