Gwen Stacy Notices

New chapter is on the board.

Suit up. Queens is not getting quieter.

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Gwen Stacy met Peter outside the ESU biomechanics lab with a spreadsheet in one hand and enough calm to make him wish she had shouted first.

It was 7:12 in the morning. The hallway smelled like floor cleaner, burnt coffee, and the kind of academic desperation that happened before anyone had slept enough to deserve questions.

"Morning, Gwen," Peter said.

Gwen lifted the page.

"Your solvent usage quadrupled after the Oscorp tour."

He looked at the numbers. "Morning to you too."

"Your tensile tests disappeared from the shared log."

"It is a personal project."

"Your personal project uses a protein binder from arachnid silk research."

"Lots of people appreciate spiders."

"Name two who are not you."

"Me," he said, then regretted the honesty. "Apparently."

Gwen's eyebrows moved by half a millimeter. Somehow that was worse than a lecture.

Peter checked the hall. Two students waited near the elevator. A janitor changed a trash bag by the stairwell door. No Oscorp badges, no obvious security, no spider-sense shove at the base of his skull.

Only Gwen, which had become its own category of danger.

"Can we not do this beside the lab cameras?"

"The stairwell has fewer cameras," she said.

"I was hoping that would sound like my idea."

"Then walk faster before I change my mind."

She followed him through the door and closed it carefully behind them.

The stairwell swallowed the hallway noise. Peter leaned back against the wall and had to peel his shoulder away before the paint came with him.

Gwen saw it.

Of course she saw it.

"Tell me what actually happened."

"I was bitten at Oscorp."

"You told me the part that sounded least impossible."

"It was still pretty impossible."

"Peter, do not make me drag this out."

His thumb rubbed along his backpack strap. The web cartridges inside clicked softly.

Gwen's eyes went to the sound, then back to his face.

"Your grip changed. Your reflexes changed. You are making adhesive fibers in a lab where Oscorp just erased work with my name in the metadata. Yesterday a video hit a local board of somebody stopping a robbery with white strands."

"You have been busy for somebody avoiding lab cameras."

"I have been implicated, which makes busy seem reasonable."

That landed better than anger would have.

He wanted to say he was protecting her. He had already used that thought too many times, though, and it was starting to smell like fear wearing a nicer coat.

"I do not know how far this goes," he said.

"That is at least an honest place to start."

"I am not ready to tell you everything."

"Annoying, but still better than another joke."

"You might be in danger because of me."

Gwen gave a short laugh without humor.

"I am in danger because Oscorp put my name on work they are now deleting. You are just the boy in the middle pretending silence is a shield."

The door above them opened before he could answer.

MJ Watson leaned over the railing one floor up, coffee in hand, red hair loose around her shoulders, looking less surprised than anyone had a right to look.

"You two picked the least romantic place on campus to have conspiracy tension."

"MJ," Peter said. "Hi, this is not what it looks like."

"Hi. It looks extremely weird."

Gwen sighed. "How much did you hear?"

"Enough to know he is lying for noble reasons, which is still lying."

Peter stared up at her. "Do you practice saying things that precise?"

"Theater," MJ said. "We weaponize timing."

For half a breath, the stairwell felt almost normal.

Then the spider-sense hit hard enough to empty the air from his lungs.

Up.

Move.

Peter lunged.

He took the stairs three at a time, grabbed MJ around the waist, and pulled her back just as a steel maintenance cart burst through the upper door.

Coffee exploded against the wall. Metal slammed into the railing where MJ had been leaning.

The cart tipped.

Below them, the janitor looked up from the landing.

Peter jumped.

One hand stuck to the wall. The other caught the cart frame. Weight tore through his shoulder and made the whole railing scream.

Too heavy to hold cleanly.

He fired one webline under the stair rail and another through the cart's wheel brace, then flattened himself against the wall and pulled.

The webbing stretched white.

The cart stopped six inches above the janitor's head.

Nobody moved.

"Hi," Peter said, breath thin. "Facilities problem."

The webbing hissed.

Breaking down already.

"Move away from the landing," he snapped.

The janitor scrambled backward. Peter eased the cart down as far as the strained webbing allowed, then let it drop the last foot. It hit the landing with a crash that made the whole stairwell ring.

MJ stared from above.

Gwen stared harder.

The janitor crossed himself. "I should report this."

"You should," Peter said, because Ben had ruined him for convenient lies. "The wheel lock failed. The cart was overloaded, and the hinge on that door has been loose for a while."

The janitor blinked at the hinge.

Peter did too.

Scratch marks. Wobble. Stress in the screw plate. He saw all of it before he understood how he had seen it.

Gwen understood enough to go pale.

Campus security turned the stairwell into a polite disaster.

Peter gave a statement built from true pieces arranged to hide the monster in the middle.

The cart fell. He reacted. The adhesive was a prototype from a personal materials project and had discharged from his bag during the accident.

It sounded ridiculous. That almost helped. A sane liar would have chosen something cleaner.

Gwen did not contradict him.

MJ said very little.

That worried him more.

When security finally left, Gwen pulled him into an empty prep room and shut the door with a steady hand.

"Sit down before you make this harder."

"I am hearing a lot of commands today."

"Peter, I am not negotiating this."

He sat.

She took a penlight from a drawer. "Pupils."

"Gwen, I can stand."

"You caught a loaded maintenance cart after a spider bite connected to a deleted Oscorp project. I am checking whether you are concussed before you go home and call jokes a treatment plan."

He opened his mouth.

Nothing clever came out.

"Fair enough."

She checked his eyes, pulse, grip response, and the bruise blooming near his shoulder where metal had clipped him. Her voice stayed professional. Her hands did not quite.

"How much pain?"

"Two if I am lying."

She waited.

"Four if I am not."

"Thank you for arriving there eventually."

"Please do not write 'stubborn idiot' in the notes."

"I use abbreviations when the patient earns them."

His laugh slipped out young and tired.

Gwen wrote anyway, then set the pen down.

"You are healing too fast."

"I know that part."

"Your reflexes are not only reflexes."

"I know that too."

"And yesterday, in the library, you looked at empty air like it looked back."

The system stayed silent.

Coward.

Peter looked at the counter edge. "Something like an interface."

Gwen inhaled through her nose and held the breath long enough to make herself behave.

"Does it talk to you?"

"Sometimes it gives warnings."

"Does it tell you what to do?"

"It tries when I am scared."

"Do you obey it when it pushes?"

The answer should have been easy.

"Less often than it wants me to."

Gwen's face changed. Not trust. Not yet. But the question she had been building softened around the edges because the answer had cost him something.

"I can help with biology," she said. "Lab records. Tests that keep you alive. I am not signing up to become the nurse for a secret war."

"I do not want that."

"Wanting is not the same as doing."

He thought of the pharmacy, the warehouse that had not happened yet but already waited somewhere in the city, and the ugly relief he felt whenever someone else took one piece of the weight.

"I promise to tell you before the lie becomes your problem."

Gwen's mouth tightened.

"It already is my problem."

He had deserved that.

"Then I promise to stop pretending I get to decide your risk alone."

She looked at him for a long second and nodded once.

It was not forgiveness. It was a place to stand.

Outside by the loading dock, MJ handed him a replacement coffee he had not asked for.

"You are terrible at mysterious," she said.

He took the cup. "I was aiming for distant."

"You landed on exhausted and guilty."

"Close enough to fool campus security."

MJ leaned against the brick beside him. The morning had brightened around campus, which felt rude considering what the stairwell knew.

"I do not need whatever Gwen knows," she said.

"But you are about to tell me anyway."

"But people who protect everyone by standing alone usually make everyone else chase them into worse places."

"That sounds very specific."

"Theater people date badly and learn quickly."

Peter laughed into the coffee.

MJ smiled, but her eyes stayed serious. "Gwen is scared."

"I know she is."

"You are scared too."

"I know I am."

"Then let that make you careful instead of weird."

"Is that from acting class?"

"Call it life class."

Gwen came out before he could answer. Coffee still marked one cuff of her sleeve. Her expression had been cleaned less successfully.

MJ pushed off the wall.

"I am going to be somewhere with fewer secrets."

"On this campus?" Peter asked.

"A girl can dream between disasters."

She left them with the delivery-truck beep, car noise, and the sticky residue of almost being found out in public.

Gwen stopped in front of him.

For a moment, neither of them spoke.

Peter looked at the flakes of webbing drying on his sleeve. The strand had held the cart. It had also put a new witness, a new report, and two friends on a line he could no longer pretend belonged only to him.

Finally Gwen said, "Whatever happened to you, Peter, it is not staying hidden."

He wanted a joke.

None came.

"I know it is not."

"Then decide who gets the truth before someone worse decides for you."

He met her eyes.

Gwen did not look like a sidekick, a shield, or a conscience he could borrow when the math got ugly.

She looked like a person who had noticed the door was burning and chosen to stay long enough to drag him out of it, provided he stopped locking it from the inside.

Peter nodded.

This time, silence was an answer she could use.

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