#gigi calling peter 'little spider' has me 🙃

[shadowglens]

"a kiss between exes who meant to walk away" for gigi/peter pls mcu clowns support mcu clowns 😤

prompt list | ~1k words

The smoke clears, and Gigi can see Peter’s blood on her hands. If she closes her fingers into a fist, turns them from marrow to stone to lead, she could watch it trickle out between the cracks like it was her own. Maybe it is. Hard to tell these days.

Peter’s blood is on her hands, and the smell of melting rubber and electrical fire is thick like poison in the air, and there is a wail of a siren somewhere, distant, and all she can look at is Peter where he’s on his knees before her. His suit is torn down the front, leaving the pale skin of his eye, jaw and throat bare to the smoke. Gigi allows herself the indulgence of staring at the mole above his Adam’s apple.

Peter rasps, chokes. Falters onto his hands and knees, stumbling, until he’s got one foot under him. Blood splatters through the red of his mask to the concrete below. Gigi thinks for a moment that she’s never seen the suit so vibrant, but then she’d be lying, wouldn’t she? This game of theirs, blood and smoke caught between them like the love used to be, is going to be the end of them.

Or at least, so she hopes.

“George,” Peter coughs, struggling to look at her. The fire consuming the building behind them makes the blue of his one visible eye burn gold. “Gigi. Please.”

She stalks forward, dragging the tip of her boot along the concrete until it screams in mockery of the police closing in. Two avenues over, maybe there?? Tick tock, Georgina.

“Now, now, Spiderman, didn’t I tell you to call me Atomia in public?” Gigi bends at the waste, her hand shooting out to grab his chin just as she shifts its buoyancy, so Peter is forced to look at her. She can almost taste the blood on the inside of his suit where her boot had landed with the force of a tonne of solid ore. “Wouldn’t want to ruin this little charade of ours, would we?”

His laugh rattles through a near-broken jaw. “Sorry, didn’t realise you were trying to be subtle.”

“A snarky little spider, aren’t you?”

“Only for you,” he rasps.

It’s a lie. From the moment Gigi stumbled into Peter at ESU during the hottest summer in her living memory, he has thrown barbs and sarcasm at anything within a ten-metre circumference of himself, inanimate objects or living ones. If he has any serious bones in his body, they are few and far between, hidden deep beneath his ribcage. She would know. They only protrude through the skin when she’s shattered everything else. Evidently, she hasn’t dug deep enough today.

“Please stop,” Peter is saying, and Gigi hadn’t realised he was still talking. His hand is white knuckled around her wrist where it still clutches his chin. “Please.”

A siren wails a few blocks away. Above them, a window bursts, and glass rains down behind them. Gigi feels a few shards dig into the shoulders of her suit. Her usual retort sits heavy on her tongue, the words recycled enough that Peter could say it himself if he really wanted to. But he doesn’t, just sits on his knee with his blood pooling in Gigi’s palm, and stares at her with one human eye and one arachnid. The drug and the addict. She’s not sure who they play anymore.

May as well take the needle and dig it deeper for the both of them.

Gigi leans forward and kisses the exposed, bloodied skin of Peter’s cheek.

She feels him tense as she leans forward, expecting teeth and being given tenderness instead. He is as clean shaved as always, not by choice she’s sure (Peter always was incapable of growing facial hair). The skin under his eye pulses like a freshly forming bruise, stuck halfway between green and purple. When she pulls back to look him in the eye, Peter just chokes out a sigh.

“Gigi . . .”

She tsks him, shifting her hand to splay flat against the emblem on his chest. The sound of her name on his tongue makes her centre of gravity sit heavier than normal in her gut. She turns it to steel, to trap the feeling or keep it out she’s not sure. “What did I tell you?”

The blue and red of a police siren bathes the alley in neon just as Peter’s phone starts ringing. Gigi takes a large step back, molecules shifting so she’s already a foot off the ground and out of reach. Peter doesn’t let his chin drop.

“Would you look at that,” Gigi hums, the taste of him burying into her gums like a parasite, “saved by the girlfriend.”

Peter staggers to his feet, eyes flicking between her hovering in front of him and the sound of police shouting from the street. “Meet me. Let me help you. Please.”

The laugh drags itself up her throat before she can stop it. Gigi can feel herself drifting higher in the breeze, her bones turning feather-light by the second as her ribcage draws tighter around her heart. “Ever the optimist aren’t you, little spider. You better scurry off before Ms Watson gets worried.”

“Wait – ”

A blast of heat slams into Gigi as another window explodes, and oh, she’d almost forgotten. The flames have almost jumped to the building next door, and the drone of Peter’s ringtone and the wail of the siren doesn’t mask the growing scream of nearby civilians. Gigi directs herself higher, higher, until she clears the roof, and the roaring summer wind of New York City douses the embers that were caught on her suit.

For once in her life, Gigi relents to the city, and lets the wind take her. Peter swings up to the roofline just as she disappears behind a nearby skyscraper, leaving the pool of his blood to seep into the concrete below. Either that or burn up in the flames Gigi’s left behind.

*

“Pete, was that explosion you? Are you okay?”

“Yeah. I mean, no – but also – ah fuck, I need to go MJ. Call you later?”

“Sure. Be safe.”

“Always.”