hext | in the night

So a spider walks into a church...

does he need one million spider eggsorcisms?

[ whatever response peter was expecting, that was not it. peter's well-acquainted with the distracting nature of a well-timed (and utterly terrible) joke, and this is a fine one.

(he both loves and hates it.) ]

Just the one will do.

Hey.

[ sorry if she stole your punch-line, pete. she's picked up some tricks from the best over the last few months, here. he always seems to know exactly the right timing to break her out of her train of thought. tonight, she'll just... share that back with him. ]

hi.

[ wanda pushes her arms further onto the sill of her window, tablet in her hands, pressing her head against the glass. she uses no other light but the endless night sky, and tries not to give much thought to the ghosts in the corners of her vision, dancing against the window pane, the pale hands of her brother. ever since that magical sleep...

it's just her reflection. ]

are you in? or prowling.

Prowling? I don't prowl. [ felicia prowls, he suddenly thinks. the greater point was that spiders don't — at best, he crawls, all limbs and angles. there's a fluidity to it, but it's discomforting in a way that prowling isn't and he finds himself, not for the first time, missing her. they'd just become friends again, and now—.

those bubbles, the ones that indicate typing, linger whilst he regathers his thoughts. ]

You know, in high school I earned the title of Midtown High's Professional Wallflower. I'm very proud of it.

[ (he's not.)

a slight delay. ]

I'm around.

i could have said you creep, but i suppose it was a mislaid attempt to spare your feelings.
creeper.

[ she watches him type, stop, type again, idle in her receptiveness to whatever he's processing. wanda likes that about peter. he's not afraid to process in front of her. it does mean he edits himself, but it also means he is never not trying to express himself.

he rarely... goes dark.
she doesn't always pay him the same courtesy. ]

wallflower. what do they say? it's always the quiet ones.

[ he's around. the night feels approximately five degrees warmer. ]

I've never known what they actually meant by that. It's always the quiet ones what? What do the quiet ones do? Eat popsicles? Make a surprisingly good apple pie? Do you think they actually had an ending to that, or was it always a case of 'fill in the blanks and let everyone make their own assumptions'?

[ it's easier to focus on that than to focus on the larger topic at hand — distract with offhand jokes and remarks and humour and pretend that everything's okay, even when they've been here for months and been through so much.

still— ]

You could've gone for crawl.

it's always the quiet ones who creep and crawl and absolutely do not prowl, clearly.

[ she presses her lips together thinly, but there's a wry bend at the corner, just so. ]

you should come in soon. you'll freeze.

Uh-huh, remind me to check my yearbook when I get home to see if that's what's written beneath my picture.

[ jokes, like anyone wrote anything on peter's yearbook. ]

My aunt asked me to travel to Queens from Manhattan just to shovel snow once. I've got this.

[ yes, she has a point, but is he going to acknowledge that? absolutely not. ]

[ she pauses, thinking back on her youth. grade school. through the state system, one foster situation to another with pietro, boarding houses... teenage years were pretty dismal for them, too. she did things she was less than proud of now to help them scrape by. but she'd do them all again.

how would she and peter have gotten along, had they met as kids? ]

i wonder what we would have written to each other. in a yearbook.
pietro and i didn't have those.

[ she runs her fingertips along the ghosts that flutter up again inside the window pane. ]

[ he wants to ask how and why do they always end up talking about home. there are similarities between the two: shared names, if not a shared past. occasionally, peter's wondered what wanda has waiting for her in her future, if it'll be anything like the past of the wanda he knows.

("knows".)

but he doesn't — it'd be opening a can of worms he really doesn't want to go near. if he asks why they always seem to talk about home, he thinks he'll probably start talking about mj — or, more likely, he'll try and talk about anything except mj and he's not sure which is worse.

he doesn't ask, then, if she misses pietro: of course she does. he doesn't ask if she wishes he was here, because it's an awful question. he misses mj and there's a part of him that wishes she were here just because he'd like to see her again, and it's selfish and it's awful and he knows she's better off at home, whatever home is now. whether that's without him or not. ]

I might have tried to make a joke. Probably about chemistry, before realizing that all the good ones...

Argon.

Edited 2020-02-04 10:33 (UTC)

in the night — inbox.

—text / @parker

you dare

JESUS

thou shalt not take the name

excuse you, i'll take whatever name i want

engelbert humperdink!

......no, not that one. that's the Wrong one.

dingybell humpdyback?

that's more like it

and bingo was his name-o!

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