Chapter 6
“That’s it?” Gwen exclaims. She’s looking better than this morning.
“How’s your head?” Tony asks, deflecting because he’s an asshole.
“Fine. Where the hell is Peter? You just left without him? We know he’s there!”
Tony purses his lips and looks at Helen who looks just as exhausted as Tony feels. God, it isn’t even ten in the morning yet. Tony’s only had one cup of coffee for Pete's sake.
Oh, does he feel bad for smiling at that.
“She’s got a mild concussion.”
“Ouch. How are you feeling?”
“I’m fine, we need to focus on Peter.” Gwen says sternly, narrowing her eyes at Tony..
“Mild concussion? What about all that blood earlier? I know head wounds bleed a lot.”
“Wounds in the scalp bleed profusely because the fibrous fascia prevents vasoconstriction. It looked bad but it was superficial.” Helen says casually, picking at her cuticles.
“Huh?”
Helen looks up from her nails. “ The head has many blood vessels close to the surface of the skin. On the plus side, she didn’t need stitches. Twenty minutes of pressure and the bleeding stopped."
“Head wounds bleed a lot, we get it. Mr. Stark, are you stalling?”
Tony sniffs defiantly. “Not stalling, waiting.”
“For what ? For Peter to get himself killed?”
Tony shrugs and Gwen’s cheekbones flush red in disbelief.
“Seriously?”
“They won’t kill him. They need him.” Tony says, pulling out his phone. “I’m working on it. Well, I have people working on it. Speaking of people,” he opens that lovely assistant’s contact information and texts her.
‘This is ridiculous. We should go to the police.” Gwen moans, rubbing her temples.
"There's no way of knowing who Osborn has in his pocket,” Tony says, still looking at his phone. Michelle’s reply is quick and he nods to no one in particular. “What’s your deal with Parker, by the way?”
Gwen stops rubbing her temples and sighs.
“There’s no deal. Not really-, I mean-,” she fumbles over her words, cottonmouth and dreary. “I have a boyfriend.”
Tony snorts and rolls his eyes. “Not that. You’re way out of his league. Why’d you have a mail intern in your lab in the first place?”
Gwen scowls. “Do I need to talk to a lawyer?”
“Maybe,” Tony says “Depends on what you say.”
The blonde doctor swallows hard.
“He’s brilliant, is all. That’s why I invited him to watch at first. I think it was his third or fourth day on the job delivering mail, and he made some comments after seeing my scribbling. I wasn’t paying attention and had the wrong valency for Na. I didn’t even realize. He came to drop off some mail and took one look at the sheet, frowned and said I didn't’ cross multiply the valencies.”
“The valency of Na is +1 and Cl is −1, so NaCl.” Tony says unhelpfully.
“Yeah, I know that.” Gwen says. “But I didn’t see I messed up. After that we talked and he said he maybe had some ideas…” she shrugs. “He had really, really good ones.”
“If he’s so smart, why not apply for a job?”
Gwen bites her lower lip, as if unsure about spilling the beans.
“Ah, well he’s had a rough time. A rough life,” she hesitates for a moment. “His parents died when he was little and his aunt and uncle took him in. His uncle died a few years later. It was just him and his aunt. He had to drop out of high school when he was sixteen when she got cancer to take care of her.”
“How old was he?”
Gwen thinks. “Maybe seventeen? I know he was in a foster home for awhile but it wasn’t very good. Peter said that one day he just didn’t go back and no one said anything. I don’t know how but he managed to keep his old apartment and just lived there. He got his GED after he turned 18 and got the job here after. He’s been taking a few community college courses for a couple of years, but he can only do one or two classes at a time since he’s so busy. He works here and at a coffee place and he does some odd jobs here and there.” Gwen gets a glassy, far-away look in her eye as she talks about Peter.
“He’s a really, really good guy. He doesn’t deserve half of what life has thrown at him. I pay for a few of his classes, but he doesn’t know. I just told him I applied for some grants on his behalf. He’d never accept it otherwise.”
“Hm.” Tony says noncommittally. What can you say to a story like that?
Ha-ha, your family is dead and you’re dirt poor!
Gwen sniffs, drawing Tony from his thoughts. Christ, she’s actually starting to tear up. She wipes her sleeve over her eyes and clears her throat.
“He just needs someone on his side. Something on his side for once.” she swallows hard, her voice catching in her throat.
“Uh, anyway. He’s brilliant. First I’d let him just check out what I was working on, but it turned into him helping me. I let him work on whatever he wanted after-hours. Then I told him about my idea about the nanotech a few years ago and-,”
“Hold on,” Tony puts out his hand, stopping her. “You’re saying you’ve been letting a kid with no training or qualifications tinker arounds in my multi-billion dollar lab for a few years?”
Gwen looks like a deer in headlights. “Yes?”
“Oh my god.”
“It’s not like he wasn’t an employee!” she protests.
“He did work for Starklabs.” Helen points out. Tony jumps. Jesus, he’d forgotten she was there. She’s moved on from toying with her nails and was now leaning on the counter, arms crossed thoughtfully.
“As a mail clerk!”
“Intern.” Gwen and Helen correct him at the same time. Tony groans. Great. He needed two more women smarter than him telling him what to do like he needed a hole to the head.
“The research was important, and Peter could handle it. We were close-, closer than anyone has ever gotten to nanotech before. Besides you,” she adds quickly, glancing at Tony.
“We developed the idea of Q-Blood to help people. It could be used to track people with dementia in the early stages, maybe even help heal people from the inside out on a molecular level one day. But then-, well we always knew there were risks but we were so caught up in the invention of it that we didn’t-,”
“It could be weaponized,” Dr. Cho muttered in realization. “If it got into the wrong hands, it could kill people.”
“Or used to blackmail. Like injecting someone and threatening them unless they did what they wanted. Or used in war to hurt innocent civilizations, or used to assassinate people, or-,”
“We get it.” Tony says dryly.
“The point is, it was too dangerous. Then Oscorp cornered myself and Peter with a job offer and funding to continue the project.”
Tony snaps his fingers. “They always try to take my people.” he mumbles angrily.
“They pay more,” Gwen says simply “plus better benefits. Not the issue here. The issue is that there was no way they could have known about Q-Blood. Peter and I were careful, paranoid even. Everything we did was on a secure server here or in notebooks that didn’t leave our line of sight.”
“Damn it!” Tony groans, throwing his hands up into the air, exasperated. “Not only do I have to worry about Peter, but a spy too? Corporate sabotage is so 2008.”
“That is concerning.” Helen says. “If you’d like, I can do some discreet digging around the science community to see if anyone knows anything.”
“Sure, whatever. As long as it’s quiet.” Tony agrees readily. If there’s anything he trusts, it’s Dr. Cho’s ability to keep quiet.
“Mr. Stark-,” Gwen starts to say. Tony’s phone starts to buzz and he holds his finger up.
“Ah-ha! See what happens when you trust me? Wonderful things, Dr. Stacy, wonderful things. Dr Cho, get your stuff together.”
“What?” Gwen asks as Dr. Cho mutters something in Korean.
“Peter Parker is downstairs.”