The Weight of Us ｡ Peter Parker [3]

11 - Gwenpool

Impossible things occurred every single second of the long days; boys were bitten by spiders and given mighty powers, women were beaten and tailored into weapons by villains, but rose like warriors seasoned by heartache and aliens fell to Earth in order to rain a little chaos, but surely, somethings were too impossible. 

"Dead? Like dead, dead?" Gwen Stacy, who could not possibly be our Gwen Stacy, stared at me with her eyes filled with a strange and delicate confusion. "Six feet under, huh? That's a new one." She fingered the coloured buttons on her jacket, a telltale of her hyperactive mind. 

Madness was slowly, but surely creeping into the dark corners of my brain. There was a lump of bile sitting in the back of my throat and my limbs felt heavy, pulling me towards the ground where I wanted to lay, still and panicked for a second, for a month. 

"I—who or what are you?" Words piled from my tongue quickly, nothing making sense. Anger, a scared helpless anger, washed over me. "Who sent you? I swear to some holy heavens above, I will stop whoever the hell thought screwing with me was a good idea."

Adelaide twisted her tiny hand around my own, maybe sensing something was wrong. The girl standing in front of me, wearing my dead best friend's face stepped backwards. At least she was not completely stupid. "You're really scary," she said, now weary. "Also, nobody sent me. Well, that's a little bit of a stretch of the truth, since I didn't come here alone, but that's a long story. And I should totally shut up because you may actually hurt me."

My eyes studied this Gwen; her pink hair was bright and playful and her lips quirked upwards, like all this seemed quite enjoyable. There was a tiny scar near her temple, soft and silver, something my Gwen never had. There was a different kind of freedom about her, like she had been trapped for so long and now, she was allowed to be herself. She was so familiar, but everything about this girl felt wrong and cold. 

Impossible things happened every single day, and the idea that my Gwen Stacy had somehow been reborn, brought back to life, back to me, was not the impossible miracle today. There was no way to bring a life back from the afterlife, not for somebody like me. 

"You're not her," Tears wanted to fall down my cheeks in rivers. "You just look like her."

This impossible person stared at me for a second longer. "You're the first person I've spoken to here and crazily, I happen to mean something to you. Well, another version of me, at least. What are the odds?" Her laugh was tiny, but not scared any longer. "Even crazier, you don't seem all that surprised. Why is that?"

How could you explain to somebody that your life was not so different from those the world called heroes? That your life was filled with greatness, but plagued by tragedy too. 

"I've been through crazy before, and science explains the idea of doppelgängers pretty well, so all this doesn't seem that crazy." My eyes dropped to my sister, who snacked on some candy. My hand tightened around her's. "I'm sorry for wasting your time."

Anger had been replaced by pain now, all those days dreaming about Gwen and thinking I had seen her standing in the streets, maybe trying to find a way home, but in reality, it was just some girl that happened to share her facial features. 

Twisting on my heels felt like turning my back on a dead friend all over again. Right now, all I wanted was to sit in the darkness of a movie theatre and let the tears fall silently as children around me giggled at some silly cartoon character. 

I did not get very far in the crowd, Adelaide staring up at me with questions her little mind could not begin to understand. "Who was that?" 

"Nobody that I know," I told her, trying to hold together a smile.