What Lies Beneath [The Amazing Spider-Man]

Prologue

       ANGELINA (OR ANGEL, AS EVERYONE KNOWS HER) CONNERS WAS A VERY BRIGHT GIRL. She was polite, and very quiet. She kept to herself most of her life and she was fine with that. She only had one friend - the well-known and outgoing Gwen Stacy. She had no interest in changing who she was so that she could make more friends, she liked herself just the way she was and no one was going to change her mind.

      She always seemed to be happy and most of the time she was but with her father working un-Godly hours at Oscorp and her best friend almost always interning there, she found herself to be quite lonely very frequently. Regardless of that fact, she managed to have fun in her room, doing her homework and helping out in the lab when she was needed by her father. Apart from Gwen, Angel thought she was invisible to the human eye - well she thought.

      Peter Parker has always kept an eye on Angelina Conners. To him, she was the cute, nerdy girl who was a grade A student and seemed to have this aura about her that just intrigued him. Every time she walked past him in the corridor with her head down and hair tucked behind her ears, his eyes trailed her until she walked around a corner or until the bell rang for class signalling he was late again.

      He never had the guts to approach her though. Even though they sat next to each other in class and occasionally she would ask him if she could copy the notes she missed from the day before; and that was all the contact they've ever had really. Peter knows that she's a sweet girl, who cares about a lot of people - especially the people she loves, but something about her makes Peter question... What lies beneath all the shyness, the quiet and considerate act? Is she hurting? Maybe she's lonely?

      The more Peter observed Angel from a distance the more he wanted to know who was really behind the smiles and the giggles that he saw her exchange from far away. For he saw that as soon as she was alone, the smile faltered slightly, her eyes became more tired the more she looked around or read a book, her posture became slouched and most of all - it looked like she didn't mind it. Like she was used to it so much so that she had been numbed by it. Peter wanted nothing more than to be there for her, but he knew it would be weird when she didn't know anything about him.

When her father turns himself into the Lizard, the journey to bring him down and save New York brings them together in more ways than one.