Saving Grace

Eighty One

That night, the first night in her own room, all alone, Grace can't sleep. She remembers Thanos snapping, the world going white, everyone turning to dust, then the fear that Nat would go, leave her too. That her father wouldn't come back.

That Peter wouldn't.

Out of all her losses, that is the one that hurts the most. The loss of Vision and Wanda pains her deeply, but there's a sort of comfort in the fact that they're both gone, one not left to grieve over the other. The look of peace on Wanda's face as she faded away said it all. Bucky and Sam — and she was closer with the latter — send a pang through her chest, also making her hurt for Steve, despite the resentment between himself and her father; he's still family. May hurts her too, and so do Ned and MJ, even though she never really knew them. And she aches for Harley and his mom — and Hannah — as he lost his sister. Everyone else, she either didn't know at all or knew briefly, surface-ly. She can only think on them with sadness, wish she got to know them better, hurt for those who miss them.

But Peter. Peter was her normal, ironically. He was her future. He was her first love, and, more likely than not, her only love. And losing him feels like something has been ripped out of her, leaving a gaping, jagged hole where he'd been.

He's practically everywhere in the compound, wherever she turns. He's on the couch, watching Merlin with her, laughing at Arthur and Merlin bickering. He's in the kitchen, raiding the fridge, calling back to Grace and asking if she wants anything. He's on the ceiling, waiting for her to come back in the room so he can try to scare her, even though it never works. He's hanging from a web, upside down, watching her draw or reading to her, doing funny voices for every character, making her laugh. He's halfway down the stairs, saying goodbye a hundred times and then running back up for just one more kiss, one more hug, one more, "I love you."

He's even in the living room sometimes, fighting with her, exasperated, frustrated, angry, but never saying anything mean, anything to hurt her, no matter how much his voice is raised to combat her own volume. He's stopping the fight right in the middle to calm them both down so they can actually talk about it instead of just shouting over each other, and he's hugging her and reminding her — and himself, really — that it isn't the end, just a little bump in the road, and they're going to get over it together.

His hand in his her hand and his lips are on her lips and he is in her arms and always, always in her head, just where exactly being the only question — the front or the back of her mind.

On her wall is a cork board that Tony bought her for her last birthday. And pinned to it are pictures, printed or drawn, memories, most of them of Peter. The postcard he got her from the Washington Monument, the picture she drew of him that day on the balcony, their homecoming dance, a picture she took of him asleep in the middle of a movie because he told her adamantly that he wouldn't fall asleep and then he did, and more of the two of them or just him or him and Ned or, in one case, MJ too. On one pin, the necklace he got her for her fifteenth birthday hangs, the words on it illegible from here, but Grace has them memorized.

'There I was, way off my ambitions, getting deeper in love every minute, and all of a sudden I didn't care.'

And she was, wasn't she? The way she thought her life was going to go, the way she'd planned her future with what she had, trying to ignore all her wishful fantasies, and he'd just dived right into the middle of it all, making waves and ripples. He made it so easy to fall for him, to want to talk him and be with him. And all of a sudden, he was her new normal. The geeky teenage boy with spider powers became her new normal, her best connection to the outside world that she would've been living in if things were different. But if things were different, she wouldn't've had him. And then she found herself not wanting to change things all that much anymore. She found herself not caring about the rest of the world and how it cared about her — at the very least, not as much. She was too in love to notice.