Chapter Text
Oona had gotten used to the smell of antiseptic in a way that probably wasn't normal for an eighteen year old with no medical training whatsoever, but a year into dating a superhero had a way of altering what counted as normal.
"Hold still," she said, dabbing at the cut along Ramona's eyebrow with more confidence than she'd had the first time she'd ever done this, back when her hands used to shake through the whole process. At least nowadays Ramona wasn’t sneaking to Oona’s window and passing out on her floor. It was more so just an occasional fix up that Ramona might not actually need with her abilities, but Oona felt more comfortable knowing that she could offer her injured soldier some assistance. Maple didn't even blink at the sight of it anymore either. She had known that Ramona was Spider-Woman for months now. She admittedly first thought that Oona was in a relationship with both Spider-Woman and Ramona, based on how lovingly she talked about each of them, but she quickly caught on that Oona was only ever obsessed with one girl. Oona didn’t know that Ramona knew until a month later, when Maple had held up Spider-Woman’s mask that she found in the corner of Oona’s room and said: Ramona left her mask behind, and it took Oona an extra thirty seconds to connect that that was Maple’s way of telling her she knew.
Oona taped the last bit of gauze down, sitting back to admire her work. "There, you’ll live."
Ramona tilted her head, smiling at Oona lopsidedly.
“My hero,”
“I’m going to have to start charging you at this rate. Going to go through more medical supplies than Sully’s parents pay me to afford,”
Ramona laughed, and Oona leaned back against her headboard, genuinely content in a way that still felt fresh, despite being a year into her relationship with Ramona. It was strange, sometimes, to think how much had changed since Oona first found out Ramona was Spider-Woman. They had somehow managed to graduate high school, Oona split her time working for Sully’s parents, stocking shelves at her local grocery store, and being a self-assigned sidekick to her superhero girlfriend. Ramona, meanwhile, had since gone full in on being Spider-Woman. She told Oona that she might go to college next year, but Oona didn’t really believe it. She didn’t have any opinions on what Ramona should do with her life, except that she knew how much she loved being Spider-Woman and how hard she worked for it. So if she was planning on that being her full-time job for the rest of her life, who was Oona to complain?
"You're staring," Ramona finally said, nudging her foot against Oona's leg.
"I'm allowed to. You're pretty, even with the face damage,”
"Oh yeah?” Ramona questioned, smirking as she moved closer, until she was leaning just over Oona’s face.
“Mhm hm, looks rugged. It’s hot,”
They both leaned in at the same time, the kiss slow and easy, in a way that came so naturally to them now.
When they finally broke apart, Oona kept her forehead resting against Ramona's, smiling.
"I love you,” she whispered, and Ramona’s face broke into a shining grin like it always did when Oona said those words.
“I love you too,”
Oona pulled back, enough to actually look at Ramona properly.
"You look exhausted, though. Not in a hot, rugged way. In a you should sleep for twelve hours straight, kinda way."
"I'm fine,"
"You keep saying that,"
"Because it's true," Ramona flopped down beside her, head landing on Oona's shoulder, and Oona automatically wrapped an arm around her. Her fingers idly began to run through Ramona’s hair as they fell into a comfortable silence.
“Will Annie be there when you go home tonight?”
“Dunno. She’ll be with Ellis either way, but I’m not sure if he’ll be at ours or she’ll be at his,”
"They're disgusting,” Oona replied, her tone lacking any sort of genuinity.
“I know right? The whole friends to lovers, will-they-won’t-they, slow burn is just gross, isn’t it?” Ramona teased.
Oona rolled her eyes, smiling, “it’s different when it’s us,”
“Clearly, ”Ramona replied, tilting her head up to press one kiss to Oona's jaw before settling back against her shoulder.
They stayed like that for a while, just talking between themselves, until Ramona’s phone buzzed once against the nightstand. She glanced at it and sighed, meaning it was either a patrol alert or Annie.
“I should go,” she whispered.
“Stay five more minutes,” Oona responded, grabbing a hold of Ramona’s hand.
“You always say that,”
"And you always leave anyway, so clearly it doesn't work, but I keep trying," Oona continued.
Ramona stood up, and turned to look down at Oona. She smiled softly at her, and then graced her with a final gentle kiss.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, yeah?”
“I’m technically working until 6 but I can probably sneak off around 4:30 if Sully’s working,”
Ramona rolled her eyes, “I’ll see you after six,”
“You’re a downer, you know that, right?” Oona teased as Ramona opened Oona’s bedroom window and began to crawl out of it. She turned one last time, poking her head back through.
“I love you,”
And then she was gone, falling backwards into the street below, and Oona could imagine the way she caught herself with her web right before she hit the pavement and swung away.
That was the last easy night that Oona could remember, looking back on it later. She just hadn't known it yet.
It didn't happen all at once. That was the part that confused Oona, because there wasn’t a single moment. There was this slow accumulation of what would normally be forgettable, insignificant things, that started to eventually feel bigger.
The first thing that Oona noticed was Ramona’s lateness. She would text her and tell her she’d be over at five, and then would arrive thirty minutes later with no real excuse. Then it turned into forty five. With only a I got caught up to explain. It wasn’t that Oona minded that Ramona was late, it wasn’t abnormal for patrol to run late, but when Ramona did arrive…it didn’t even seem like she cared about Oona’s time.
Then it was the conversations. Where they used to sit and talk about everything about their days – from annoying customers Oona was dealing with, to Ramona pacing back and forth as she explained the people she saved that day, to a story about Maple or about Annie and Ellis. Somewhere along the way, it simply started thinning out. Oona would tell her that a customer at the grocery store yelled at her colleague, and would only get a passive hum in response. Soon enough, it felt like Oona wasn’t even hearing anything about what happened on patrol, the stories got shorter, and flatter, until eventually Oona stopped asking follow up questions, not because she stopped caring, but because it started feeling like pulling teeth.
One night, while they lay next to one another on Oona’s bed, her foot grazing Oona's, she asked her if she was okay.
Ramona simply hummed an affirmation, “yeah, I’m just…stressed,”
Oona stared at her side profile for a long moment, considering, before she continued.
“You can tell me if something’s up,”
“I know,”
Oona hesitated, still watching her carefully, “okay,”
She didn’t look away until Ramona turned to her, looking slightly confused. Oona just furrowed her brow, unsure how to continue on from there.
Oona let it go, the way you let go of a hundred small nothings in a relationship a year deep.
It kept happening, though, gradually. Walking home one evening, Oona reached for her hand out of habit, the same way she'd done a thousand times before, and felt Ramona's fingers stay stiff for a beat too long before finally lacing through hers, like she'd needed a second to catch up to the motion.
Around the same time, the city's crime numbers started climbing. A string of break-ins spread throughout the city, enough that it started making the local news. Spider-Woman was still active, but it was like she gave up every night, half way through her patrol. But it gave Oona a perfectly reasonable explanation to reach for every time something nagged at her. Ramona was tired, and stressed. She had been working hard as Spider-Woman. Maybe she just needed a break? It was a good enough story, and for weeks, Oona believed it, mostly because there wasn't yet any reason not to.
It wasn't until dinner with Annie one night that Oona realised that it wasn’t just impacting her.
They were splitting a pizza at Annie and Ramona’s apartment. Ramona was meant to be home, but she wasn’t yet. Annie had made the executive decision to start eating before the pizza’s got cold.
After a long beat of silence, the two of them eating their meals, Annie finally spoke.
"Has Ramona seemed weird to you lately?" she asked, not quite looking up from her slice.
Oona felt something small and cold settle in her stomach at the realisation that it wasn’t just her who noticed, or who was affected.
"A little," she admitted. “I just assumed it was with me. I only really see her once she’s done with patrol. She said she was feeling stressed,”
"Yeah," Annie replied, not sounding entirely convinced. "She's just like… off. I feel like I haven’t seen her smile in like…weeks. She comes home, and goes straight to her room. I feel like I barely see her,”
"Oh,"
"She snapped at me the other day,” Annie continued, “over, if I’m being honest, like… nothing. I asked if she wanted leftovers and she just–, " Annie shook her head, frowning. "It wasn't even what she said, it was how she said it. It was like I had just asked her to… I can’t think of anything, but it was not a pleasant feeling,”
Oona sat with that for a moment, turning it over, feeling the weight of it differently now that it wasn't just her own observation floating alone. "I thought it was just me,"
"I don't think it's just you," Annie pushed her plate away, the pizza mostly forgotten now. "I don't know. I mean it could be nothing. Maybe she's just exhausted and being a bad communicator about it….but it feels like more than that?"
"Yeah," Oona replied quietly. "It kind of does."
Neither of them said anything else about it that night, but something had shifted. Knowing that someone else saw it, someone else felt it, was new. And Oona didn’t know what to make of it all.
It didn’t get better over the next two weeks. Ramona stopped inviting Oona to hang out, and the space between them when they did felt so vast and uncomfortable.
Each time she felt the gap, Oona told herself to wait a little longer. She wanted to give Ramona space, and let her come to it all in her own time.
But the waiting had started to feel less like patience and more like she was holding her breath, waiting for the guillotine.
It was a Thursday when she finally decided she couldn't do it anymore. They were sitting on the floor of her own bedroom with Ramona across from her, fixing up one of her Spidey-Tools that Oona never really understood how it worked. The two of them were barely a foot apart, but somehow felt further away than ever.
They'd been sitting there for twenty minutes, cross-legged, a silence between them that used to feel comfortable but now just felt heavy.
"Can we talk?" Oona asked finally.
"We are talking,”
“No, we’re not. We’re sitting in silence. Like we have been doing the entire time since you arrived,”
Ramona's jaw tightened slightly. "I don't know what you want me to say,"
"I don't need you to say anything specific, I just… " Oona took a breath, trying to keep her voice steady, the way she had rehearsed it in her head over the past few weeks. "I just don't know what's going on with you. And I know you keep saying you're fine, but I don't believe you anymore, and it's starting to really scare me, Ramona,”
Ramona glanced up, face expressionless. "There's nothing going on,”
Oona forced out a laugh, “There is, though. You barely talk to me. You barely talk to Annie. She says you just come home and disappear into your room, and when I try to ask you how you are, you shut it down immediately, and I don't know what I'm supposed to do with that. I've tried giving you space. I've tried not pushing. And it’s just gotten worse,”
“I told you before, I’m just like… stressed,” Ramona responded, unconvincingly.
“With what? Being Spider-Woman? Because if that’s the case then maybe you should take a break,”
“I don’t need a break,”
"Then what is it?" Oona's voice cracked slightly, the calmness she had been holding onto starting to slip from her grasp. "Ramona, you told me you loved me a month ago like it was the easiest thing in the world. Now I can barely get you to look at me for more than ten seconds. That's not nothing. I need you to actually talk to me, because I can't keep guessing whether you even still want me here."
“I’m sorry, what’s going on right now?” Ramona questioned, finally putting her tools down to really look at Oona.
“That’s what I’m trying to work out, babe. I mean, we were talking about you moving in and everything before all of this. Do you still want to do that?”
Ramona sat further back, leaning against the wall, and crossed her arms.
“Yeah, I just have like more going on in my life than planning to move in with my girlfriend. Like, there’s a lot of pressure on me to do shit, Oona,”
"Well then tell me about it. You're the one who's been acting like a stranger. I feel like if you keep going down this path you’re going to never come back. From yourself, but also like… just going to move on from us,”
Ramona pauses, pursing her lips.
“Yeah, glad to think you think so low of me. That’s really cool.” She stood, shaking her arms out, “I’m gonna go,"
Oona tilted her head back, frustrated.
“Come on, Ramona, don’t go. That isn’t going to solve anything,”
“Isn’t it? Well, from where I am standing, this all feels like it’s less about my supposed issues and more about you needing constant proof that I’m not going to disappear on you,”
"Mona, don’t.” Oona started, genuinely frustrated now. “Don't twist this into being about me. I have spent forever trying to be patient, trying to give you space, trying to not push, and every single time I ask you a simple question you act like I'm interrogating you,"
"Maybe because it feels like an interrogation!"
"It's not an interrogation, it's called caring about someone, Ramona, which apparently you've forgotten how to do lately–,”
Ramona scoffed. “Well while you’re focused on psychoanalysing me and our relationship, I’m actually out there saving people’s lives. You want to know what's going on with me? Fine. I'm exhausted. I'm exhausted from patrol, I'm exhausted from our friends, and from Annie, and I'm exhausted from you only caring about how all of this affects you, and your life, and your happiness and wellbeing. None of this is actually about me,”
Oona stood up too, brow creasing, “of course this is about you, Ramona, that's literally the point, I'm asking about your wellbeing right now because I'm scared for you–,”
"You're not scared for me, you're scared of what it means for you if I'm not okay. There's a difference,”
"That's not true,”
"Isn't it, though?" Ramona's voice had gone cold, deliberate now, each word landing like it was aimed to hurt. "Your mom left you, and instead of dealing with that, you just– you turn everyone who gets close to you into a stand-in. You need me to keep proving that I'm not her, and that I’m not gonna break down and abandon you like she did. Over and over again, forever, and it's never gonna be enough, because it was never actually about me. It's about her. It's always been about her. I'm just the closest thing you've got to take it out on. And I’m not her, Oona. I haven’t done shit to you,”
The room went completely, and utterly silent.
"...Say that again," Oona finally said, barely above a whisper.
Ramona's jaw tightened, something flickering behind her eyes, something that used to be familiar but was slowly becoming less so. It was as if she had only just heard what she had said.
"Oona-,”
"No." Oona's voice was as steady as ever. She wasn’t going to cry, not now. "You don't get to walk it back. You said it. You meant it enough to say it out loud,”
Ramona fell silent, just staring wordlessly at Oona.
"I think we're done," Oona said.
The words landed heavier than either of them expected.
"...What?"
"I said I think we're done, Ramona. Here, right now? Isn’t going to work,”
"Oona–,”
"I think you should leave,”
"I-,”
"Get out, Ramona." Her voice cracked on the name, and for a second something almost broke through Ramona's expression, something like panic, or regret, before it smoothed back over into that same cold blankness.
"Fine," Ramona said, voice flat. "Fine. I'll go."
She grabbed her jacket and left without another word, the door clicking shut quietly behind her. It was quieter than Oona expected, quieter than the moment deserved. Oona sank down onto the edge of her bed, alone, shaking, the echo of I'm not her ringing hollow and cruel in the empty room.
She felt slightly nauseous, as she stared at the door Ramona walked out of. She thought back to all the conversations she’d had with Ramona about her fears of losing her. On the day of their first kiss Ramona had said you’re never going to lose me and that no matter what’s going on with me, it doesn’t change how I feel about you. You’re not losing me. You’re never losing me. I’d rather die, than live without you in my life.
Oona sat there, feeling hollowed out. She supposed Ramona had just changed her mind, like she had known she would do eventually. Oona thought Ramona might be different, but she saw now that she wasn’t. She didn’t blame Ramona for it, per se. It was just something that happened. People left Oona. She supposed she was just easy to leave.
***
She didn't tell anyone that night. Maple came home and asked her what was wrong, but Oona didn’t have it in her to tell her. Maple just nodded at Oona’s wordlessness, and sat on the ground beside Oona’s dangling legs off the bed, hugging them tight.
When Oona went to bed, she just lay awake, replaying the argument, and Ramona’s words until the words stopped sounding like a sentence and just became a looping ugly noise that became impossible to shut off.
The next day, she called in sick to her shift and told Sully over text she wasn't up for talking about it yet. They sent back emoji hearts and whenever you're ready, I'm here and I love you, and she didn't reply properly for two more days.
Annie texted her once, around lunchtime.
i heard what happened. oona, i'm so sorry.
Oona read it three times before she replied.
is she okay?
The reply took a while to come through. Oona watched the three dots appear and disappear twice before Annie's message finally arrived.
honestly? i don't know. she told me that you broke up as if she were telling me that she picked up groceries on the way home.
but try not to worry about her right now, oona. take your time and i’ll let you know if i need backup <33
Oona's chest ached reading it, an old, familiar instinct to worry about Ramona kicking in even now, even after everything she'd said. She set her phone down after that, staring at the ceiling.
By the third day, the hurt had curdled into something flatter, harder to name. It wasn’t quite anger, or quite grief, more like exhaustion, the particular kind that came from replaying a wound until it went numb at the edges.
She finally told the whole story to Sully over the phone that evening, voice flat, worn thin from repeating it too many times already in her own head.
"She said all that? About your mom?"
"Word for word, pretty much,” Oona replied, wiping away a lone tear that snuck it’s way past her eye.
"I’m so sorry babe, that’s genuinely messed up. I know things were rocky, but that's not a normal fight thing to say,"
Oona sighed, "I know,"
"Do you think she meant it?"
She hesitated. "I don't know anymore. It didn't even sound like her. The words sounded like something she might think, deep down, in some worst version of herself, but the way she said it. She was speaking so… flat and cold. Like she didn’t even care,”
Sully paused on the other end. "Maybe she's going through something. Doesn't excuse it, but–,"
"Yeah,” Oona rubbed at her eyes, exhausted by the conversation before it had even gone anywhere. "I don't know. I think that’s the worst part. I just don’t know,”
"You don't have to know right now," Sully replied, gently. "You're allowed to just be hurt for a while without figuring out the whole mystery of it,"
"I know. I just keep like… replaying it. Trying to find the part where I could've seen it coming, or done something different."
"None of us saw it coming. You guys are Ramona and Oona, y’know?"
Oona pulled her knees up to her chest, phone pressed to her ear, staring at the same patch of ceiling she'd been staring at for three days now. "It just doesn't feel like that. It feels like I did something to make her turn into that,”
"You didn't."
Oona let out a shaky breath, something in her chest loosening slightly at that, even if it didn't fix anything.
"Thanks," she said quietly.
"Always." A pause on the other end. "You want me to come over? I can bring food?”
"Maybe tomorrow. I think I just need to sit in it a little longer tonight."
"Okay. Whenever you're ready," Sully's voice softened. "I love you. This isn't your fault, whatever it turns out to be."
"Love you too." She hung up after that, setting the phone face-down on the mattress, and lay there a while longer in the quiet, the exhaustion finally starting to outweigh the ache, at least enough to let her eyes fall shut.
A week later, Oona had had no communication with Ramona.
She'd gone back to work, because she had to really. But most nights she found herself scrolling on her phone before bed. Mostly on sites all about Spider-Woman updates. It was some sort of habit she couldn't quite break. She both dreaded, nad needed to see what Spider-Woman was up to.
What she was used to though, was different to what she was seeing.
Previously, the Spidey Updates would be sharing how Spider-Woman saved a woman’s purse from getting stolen, or returned a bicycle, or on occasion stopped an arson or a mob boss of some kind’s plan. But this week, it all felt darker.
Spider-Woman under fire after another violent altercation downtown.
The headline sat there for a full minute before Oona made herself click it, stomach already sinking. The article was accompanied by a grainy photo, Spider-Woman standing over a webbed suspect who looked considerably more roughed-up than the ones from a few months back usually did. He had a split lip, and a bruise already blooming along one cheekbone. It was way beyond what looked necessary to just bring someone in, and beyond what Ramona always did.
Witnesses report the vigilante's methods have grown increasingly aggressive over recent weeks, the article read, with several incidents drawing criticism from local police for what one officer described as "excessive force."
Oona sat with that for a long time. Her phone glowed in the dark of her room, as she thought about every small, easily explained thing from the last month. She felt something in her stomach twist harder than it had in days.
It was Maple who finally pushed it further, a few nights after that, sitting cross legged at the foot of Oona's bed while Oona picked half-heartedly at a bowl of cereal she hadn't actually wanted.
"You've been sad for over a week now,"
"I'm allowed to be sad,"
"I'm not saying you're not allowed," Maple's voice was careful, older than her years. "I’m just saying that it’s not like a normal sad. It’s not a crying sad or an angry sad. You have an empty kind of sadness,”
Oona set the spoon down, hesitating before pulling up the article on her phone and handing it over. "Have you seen this?"
Maple scanned it quickly, brow furrowing deeper with every line. "This doesn't sound like Ramona,"
"I know,”
Maple hesitated, squinting her brows in a way that was becoming so similar to Oona’s own expressions.
“I’ve known Ramona like the majority of my life,”
Oona nodded slowly, confused, “yeah?”
“It’s just that…she’s never once said anything close to what she said to you. Even in your worst fights, she's never gone for something about Mum. It’s never been that personal, or if it was she’d apologise immediately. She loves you. It's honestly kind of embarrassing how much,”
Oona shrugged, not wanting to think about the possibilities Maple was offering her. "People change,”
"Not usually overnight, though," Maple's expression stayed serious. "And it's not just the fight. It's the whole last month. I don’t think it was stressed behaviour. Ramona has dealt with so much, and she’s never acted like that,”
Something uneasy stirred low in Oona's chest, the same feeling she'd been quietly avoiding feeling for weeks now.
“Maybe it all just piled up to be too much,” she responded, swallowing hard. Maybe I am too much, is what she didn’t say out loud. “She made her choice. She chose to leave,”
"I don't know, Oona," Maple hesitated, choosing her next words slower. “What if this isn't really her? What if something's happening to her? Like, actually happening? And this isn't just her being a bad girlfriend or frustrating sister?”
Oona sat with that, the cereal bowl forgotten completely now.
"So what, you think something’s happened to her? Like on a Spider-Scale level?”
"I don't know," Maple pulled her knees up, frowning hard, clearly not any more certain than Oona. "I'm just saying that it feels wrong, like there's a piece missing."
Oona hummed in acknowledgement, brain ticking away.
"I just don't buy that she woke up one day and decided to stop loving you. That's not how it felt watching her with you this whole year, and all the years before that. It’s like she’s a whole different person,” Maple continued.
Oona sat with that, staring down at the article still glowing faintly on her phone screen.
"I don't know either," she admitted quietly. She had spent the last week telling herself that Ramona had left her because she wanted to, but now…it was starting to feel different. "I keep trying to make it make sense, and it just doesn't. None of it lines up with who she actually is."
"Yeah,”
They sat there a while longer in silence, neither of them offering anything more to say, and eventually Maple wandered off to bed, leaving Oona alone with the glow of her phone and a question neither of them had been able to answer.
She didn't sleep much that night. She kept scrolling, starting with new articles, then older ones, working backward through weeks of headlines, trying to pin down exactly when things had started shifting. There was a night about six weeks back, a report of a break-in gone wrong. The descriptions were vague, the injuries minor, nothing that stood out on its own. But it was the earliest one she could find where the tone of the coverage had changed even slightly: a notably rougher takedown than witnesses are used to seeing from the vigilante.
Six weeks. That lined up, roughly.
Oona sat up straighter, pulled her laptop over, and started digging properly, into anything that might tell her what had actually happened that night.
If Ramona wasn’t going to tell her what was going on, she was going to find out herself.