Two best friends in a room... they might kiss... or end up completely killing each other.
Tasm!Peter Parker story.
Book [3] of the Paracosm series (but can also be read as a stand-alone).
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⋆ fifteen ⋆
The posters are all up on her wall, annotated blueprints been getting her ready. Sure, it's usually months or years of planning in movies, but they didn't have what Madison has: powers.
But as she stands before her pinboard, preparing herself for the reality of the situation, it all dawns on her. She's breaking into prison.
No. She's going to get her mom back.
All her life, she's been trying to find ways to get her mom back, to beat everyone at their own system. What happened to her family wasn't fair, and while she'd never dare tell Gabby about her powers, what the accident really did to her... she wants to give her this.
She wants Gabrielle to finally have a mom go through her wedding album with her rather than settling for the shitty replacement of Madison, who she's been stuck with at every point in her life. Graduation, first dances, engagement. It was always Maddy, but she was always so busy that Gabrielle never really had a chance to bond with her, especially after she moved out.
She wants Imani to finally hug her mother-in-law. After her own parents died and she lost contact with her brothers, she's always relied on just her small family. Sure, she visited Jada in prison sometimes with her wife, but it wasn't the same.
She wants Aleah to finally meet her gran in person. Outside of a prison hall. She wants them to hold hands as they skip across the street, for Aleah to show her terrible finger painting and drawings that she insists are the next Picasso, and for Jada to finally take her to Six Flags like she always promised.
If she does this, they all get their family back. They can get pulled together through the one thing keeping them connected rather than becoming a family that were plucked from their own separate lives and drawn together by the freaks of blood and nature.
And perhaps, somewhere in her, she selfishly wants to do it. She needs her mom back. She needs to prove that after everything, she's good enough, that everything she's ever done in her life can amount to something. She can finally tell her mom all her problems and go out for meals and take her to her workplace and all the things normal families are supposed to do, the things she missed out on growing up in a foster home where she didn't connect to anyone.
Why does Maddy have these powers? For a decade, Madison's been working on something that could help get her mom out, but it backfired. It gave her these freakish abilities that made her recoil into herself, but slowly she became more confident, became more certain in the things she can do. Why can't they be the reason her mom was supposed to get out, like she always intended for it to be?
But Peter.
Her best friend is Spider-Man. He'll know. He's the only person who knows.
But he might just be the only person who'll understand. Understand what it's like to have someone you love cruelly torn away from you, and she knows that if he had the opportunity given to him, he'd take it to bring them all back. Uncle Ben, Captain Stacy, Gwen, his mother and father...
