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For Science!

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Gwen Stacy is pretty sure that when a girl has a good looking and adorable pseudo-boyfriend at her beck and call, she’s supposed to be thinking about experimenting  with  him rather than  on  him.

Then again, most boys in the dating pool haven’t bitten by radioactive spiders and can’t hurl themselves off the side of buildings without smashing their adorable, pseudo-boyfriend faces on the pavement below as a result of said bite either. 

Gwen just can’t help herself sometimes. She’s curious by nature and a fledgling scientist by design, and all of that is hard to turn off, especially when she just has so many questions about the walking, talking, web-slinging science experiment that is Peter Parker. 

It’s not like studying Peter Park is a new subject for Gwen. She watched him long before his change, when she wanted to learn more about the quiet, unobtrusive boy who had the brains but couldn’t quite catch up to her in all their classes. She knows a lot about Peter, maybe more than he thinks she does, but now there’s a whole new set of unanswered questions about him that she can’t wait to get to puzzle out and get answers to. 

Like, how much velocity does Peter gain when he swings from building-to-building and what conditions are needed for a perfect swing? How far does the average swing take him and what kind of strain does that put on his body? And how did his reflexes improve so fast and how is he able to stick to ceilings and walls while wearing all that spandex? And how did the spider manage to do all this with one bite? Was an ability of that breed of spider or was Peter just special? 

And... and... 

Okay, so  maybe  it’s a little weird that Gwen’s contemplated snatching a few of his hairs out of his head when he drops by to visit her so she can get a good look at a DNA sample, but come on. How often does someone come across a live, human specimen of cross species genetics, huh? Peter’s a miracle of science who shows up at her window in spandex and kiss her senseless every night. Surely she should use that to her advantage to advance the greater scientific good, right? 

( Screw the scientific good , her hormones insist,  you’ve seen that boy’s biceps, right? )

Peter, thankfully, likes it when she bounces ideas off of him and they trade notes and debate about different hypotheses like the two geeks they are. He’s even put a few of her smaller scale experiments into work - she’s still getting a glare from her doorman about the watermelon incident and her mother  really  wants to know how she got footprints all over her bedroom ceiling. 

Peter wants to know just as much as she does about the changes he’s going through and she thinks he’s happy he finally has someone confined in without being treated like a freak or arrested.(Not that the latter is out of the cards entirely. Her father thinks Peter’s much too cheeky for his own good and frequently wonders if he’s ever since a comb in his life.)

Really, Gwen’s relieved Peter trusted her enough to tell her what had happened to him, that he didn’t let her father’s opinion of his alter ego scare him into hiding from her. He could have easily run and shut her out for good, but he wanted to let her in and Gwen is so very thankful for him. 

It might not be an easy burden to bear in the long run (because god knows Peter will give her ten times the anxiety her father ever did if he keeps this hero business up) but right now, Gwen wouldn’t have it any other way. Peter’s expanded her horizons in ways no one else could and he’s opened up possibilities she couldn’t have dreamed of. 

She’s always wanted to get to know Peter Parker better — inside and out, spider-bite or no spider-bite — and now, she knows quite a little something that no one else does. 

And no, it’s not how awesome his butt looks in spandex, okay. Like she’d really pay attention to that,  god

Except for scientific purposes. And casual experimentation in the cause and effects spandex on dorky pseudo-boyfriends has on hormone fluctuations in a teenage girl. 

Obviously .