Castillo's seminar had resumed on the Monday of the third week, the university having taken ten days after the invasion to assess structural damage and return to normal scheduling. The room was the same room. The same eight students. The same view of the campus through the windows, which looked exactly as it always had because the invasion had missed the upper end of Morningside Heights entirely.
Gwen was at their table when he arrived. She looked up when he sat down and their eyes met for a moment, and there was something in it that hadn't been in the library looks before the invasion. Not unfriendly. Something that had moved past the point where it could pretend to be neutral.
The seminar ran ninety minutes. Castillo was in her post-disaster mode, which meant She talked about nothing directly related to disaster and kept the work precise and structural. It was, Dan had learned, one of the better things about Castillo. He paid attention and contributed where he had something and kept his notes clean.
After, when the others had packed up and left, Gwen stayed. She was organizing her papers, unhurried the way of someone did who had decided to stay and was giving it a reason to look natural. He stayed too. He waited.
When the room was empty she looked up. "I saw the footage," she said. "Bay Ridge. The rooftop."
"I know."
"Eighty thousand views." A pause. "More now."
"Yes."
She put her papers down. "I'm not going to do anything with it. I said that on the bridge and I meant it." She looked at him directly. "But I want you to know that I know what I'm choosing not to do. It's not a small thing."
"I know it isn't."
"You have a SHIELD file."
"Yes."
"An elevated one now."
"Yes." He met her gaze. "You've been tracking it."
"I have access to certain things." She said it without apology. "You already knew I did."
He had. She was Spider-Gwen. The information access came with the territory. "What do you want from this conversation?" he said.
She thought about it. Not performing the thought, actually doing it, which was one of the things he'd come to recognize about her over eight months. "I want you to know that the decision I made on the bridge, to trust the picture, I'm still making it. Every day. Including the days when the picture gets more complicated." She paused. "I also want you to know that if the picture ever changes. If you cross the line. I will stop making it."
"That's fair," he said.
"It's not about fair. It's about what I can live with." She picked her papers back up. "The line is still where it was?"
"Yes."
"Good." She zipped her bag. Then, quieter: "The Bay Ridge thing. Those soldiers would have reached me." A beat. "Thank you. Again."
"You returned it on the rooftop. The intel about the Goethals."
"That's not the same thing."
"It helped us get out."
She looked at him for a moment. Something moved in her expression, brief and not entirely readable. Then she shouldered her bag. "Us," she said. Not a question.
He didn't answer that. He didn't need to.
She nodded once and left. He sat in the empty seminar room for a few minutes, looking at the view of campus through the windows, thinking about the shape of the arrangement he now had with two people who knew who he was and had both, independently, decided to hold it quietly. He didn't know what to do with that except be careful not to make them regret it.
He picked up his bag and went to find Castillo. He had a question about the module paper. Clean, academic, unconnected to any of the rest of it. That was what made it good.
Castillo was in the corridor with two other students. Dan waited until they moved on, then asked about the module's third section, which had a gap in its argument he'd been sitting with for two weeks. Castillo answered, which led to a twenty-minute conversation about cytoskeletal dynamics. No invasions, no operators, no Fisk. Just two people arguing about cell mechanics in a hallway on a Tuesday.
He left the building at half past one feeling better than he had since the warehouse conversation with Felicia. Not fixed. Not resolved. But there was a thing that two lives being available at once gave you, which was the ability to walk from one into the other when one of them got too heavy. He'd been using this ability without consciously deciding to. He decided to consciously use it now, which was, he thought, a form of maturity he hadn't had in October.
He texted Felicia on the subway. Nothing operational. Something he'd read that morning had connected to what she'd said in New Jersey. She replied in two minutes with a question, then a follow-up question, then an opinion that was sharper than the article's authors deserved. By the time he got off at 116th Street they'd been going back and forth for twenty minutes and he was smiling without having planned to, which still happened.
He went back to work. That evening he and Felicia ate at the kitchen table and she told him about a contact she'd made in London who had access to estate contents from a recently deceased collector whose family didn't know what they had. He told her about Castillo's argument and where he thought it was wrong and she listened with the focused interest she brought to things that weren't her field but that she was genuinely curious about. Two hours passed without either of them tracking them.
This was, he thought, what the rest of this looked like. He was fine with it.