After the events of No Way Home, Peter Parker had the chance to restart his life and start fresh. But without his family, friends, mentors or fellow Avengers, his life began to spiral into darkness.
His new neighbour however, seems to make that dark...
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I had slept for a solid six hours before waking up blurry eyed and delirious in Peter's bed. He was laying next to me on his phone as I rolled away from him, freeing his arm from the inevitable numbness he'd be feeling from me lying on it for what I presumed was the whole time.
"You're still here," I said quietly, yawning and rubbing the sleep out of my eyes.
"Uh, yeah this is my apartment..." he said looking up from his phone and smiling at me.
Actually I think he may have been smiling at himself and his lame attempt at making a joke. Peter does that a lot, he cracks a 'joke' and smiles until I acknowledge it. Most of the time he's proud of them whilst I just shake my head at how dumb they are.
"No I meant like, you stayed in bed the whole time I slept," I explained.
"I ended up falling asleep too don't worry. I woke up like half an hour ago or something but I didn't want to move my arm and risk waking you up. You needed your rest," Peter continued, stretching his arms out in front of him to get the blood flowing into his hands again.
My thoughts were scrambled from only just waking up but I knew one thing for sure - I really missed this. I missed snuggling up in bed with Peter, his muscular arms somehow softening around me as he pulled me close to his chest. And how his heartbeat was such a soothing sound.
"So I was thinking..." Peter started to say.
"Uh oh," I joked, cutting him off.
"Oh shut up. I was thinking that I wanted to uh, I want to give you the Spider-Man story. I know you were trying so hard whilst writing about me for the past few months. I don't want you to expose my identity or anything but I feel bad you wasted so much time on a story that didn't go anywhere," Peter said gently.
To be fair, I had assumed my story wouldn't have gone anywhere once I had found out Pete was Spider-Man. I hadn't written anything new per say, I had just edited what I had written thus far. I didn't want to expose his identity by all means, but it was disappointing when I realised I had wasted my time. So hearing this was a shock.
"Maybe you could make up a story about what I did for all those years I was gone... I can't imagine the world would like hearing 'Spider-Man was depressed like a piece of shit so he left the public eye' as a story but uh, I can tell you the real story and then we could uh, we could craft some sort of journalistic white lie together. And then you can get a job at the Bugle like you wanted," he continued.
I rolled over onto my stomach to face him properly, propping myself up on my elbows and smiling gently at him. He looked healthier, far better than how he looked those few times I had seen him in passing through our apartment lobby.
"But before I tell you my story, I want to hear yours. I know we apologised last night for being dumb and awkward to each other but I wanted to let you know I'm hear if you need an ear to listen or a shoulder to cry on... You know I kinda think it's cool you have powers... I don't know much about them or anything but I got caught up in this whole internet spiral where I read about Ravencroft and-"
"You know about Ravencroft!?"
I felt like my world was crumbling around me yet feeling the warmth of the sun for the first time in my life. As shocked and confronting it was to hear Peter tell me what he had read about Ravencroft, it was a sigh of relief that I could nod and agree rather than give him my story from scratch. To be fair, majority of the 'conspiracy' evidence he had read was pretty accurate.
"I also saw that you changed your name... That you used to be named Gwen?" He asked softly.
"Please promise me than you'll never call me by that name Pete..." I responded gently.
He nodded. He promised.
"I don't think fondly of the life I had with that name so as soon as I left that school I gave myself a new one to start my own life. It was only a few months after I turned 18 I could legally change it though so uh, that's why you would've seen the name Gwen under that photo," I shrugged.
I thought about how Dr. Shao had urged me to open up to Peter given that I trusted him. So I did. I confirmed what was truthful in what he had learnt about Ravencroft, and I corrected what was wrong. I told him about my family, about my mother abusing me and I told him about how I reinvented myself when I went to college. I told Peter about what I thought about him when we first met, and when I had started to piece together the clues that he was in fact the notorious Spider-Man.
"So that's how you knew... 'Cos your powers don't work on me. Wait when did you try to mind control me?"
"I just wanted you to tell the truth about your weird habits and why you were always disappearing at night! Then when it didn't work it kind of convinced me you were the cities masked vigilante," I giggled.
We had spoken for hours, lying in bed in the pitch black darkness as we shared parts of ourselves neither of us had admitted to each other. It felt like a cathartic therapy session but without the icky vibes that come with actually going to therapy with Shao.
Peter told me that he had the world under some sort of trance that erased their memory and he told me about the passing of his Aunt May. I had to admit, I was heartbroken to hear about his Aunt's death but I couldn't shake the weird feeling knowing that Doctor Strange had apparently cast a spell for the whole world to forget Peter's link to Spider-Man.
"So you were like what, 17 when they found out you were Spider-Man? And I would've been a little teenage Avengers fangirl... I wonder if younger me would have found teenage Peter Parker hot after finding out or if she would have been disappointed seeing the kid under the mask," I laughed, prompting Peter to groan at the thought of remembering his 'ugly' high school phase.
We laughed together when I questioned whether or not Doctor Strange might have had cast other spells on us that we wouldn't know about. We started creating crazy hypotheticals about what he could have had 'erased' from society's minds. Like aliens invading the earth because of the Avengers making a mistake or small things like making a young barista forget that Strange had spilt a coffee in his lap.
As we realised the time and started yawning after every second sentence, we started to drift off to sleep in between our wild 'what if's' about Doctor Strange. Although a wave of seriousness suddenly washed over me yet again.
"I've done some pretty bad things that I wish I could erase like that Pete. Things that I couldn't stop from happening because of my powers..." I whispered.
"So have we," Peter said.
"We?" I repeated.
"Me. I meant so have I... I said we because like, I was in the Avengers back in the day. We as in superheroes. We've all done bad things we regret but you know, it's uh, it's part of the job I guess," Peter chuckled, rubbing my arm softly with his hand.
