“No, Peter!” Gwen would not yield and risk Peter's warped sense of the situation endanger Jay, or himself. She shoved him back and he, unprepared for this resistance, stumbled backward and banged his hand on one of the high metal chairs bolted to the floor. He looked shocked and disgusted with this turn of events. Steadying himself and steeling himself against all possible answers, he asked, “Whose side are you on?”
“I'm on Neverland's side,” she answered.
But she had wounded Peter in the one place he could not stand to be wounded. With this blow to his pride, followed by the condescending sentiment that she was the one fighting for Neverland, he lost what little temper he had.
“Hey, get back from her!” Jay yelled, taking aim again with his gun.
“Stay out of this Jay!” Gwen yelled right back. She didn't need him to rescue her, and she hoped to the high hill of Mount Neverest that she had made that clear to him.
If Peter had any quaint qualms about not fighting girls, he abandoned those quaint sensibilities. He sprung at Gwen with the intent to tackle her down, but she saw it coming. Peter's transparency meant his intentions were always printed all over his face. She pushed back and grabbed his arm, forcing him back. Both off balance, they gripped each other and stumbled back in a desperate attempt to stay on their feet.
“You don't know what you're doing!” she told him.
“You never know what you're doing!” he retorted.
They continued to wrestle, each trying to force the other off their feet, but Jay was too invested to standby idle as this transpired. Lasiandra's convincing and conniving rhetoric may not have held water against Gwen's own claims about Peter's moral fiber, but the mermaid's accusations were reinvigorated as he watched this boy try to overpower the very girl he'd come to protect from him. Unarmed, he didn't pose much of a physical danger to Gwen, but Jay didn't want to wait until that changed. Picking up the communicator he warned, “If you don't let go of her, I'll call for officers right now!”
Gwen, fighting for more present and pressing stakes than Peter, managed to trip him and pin him down as he fell. “He can help us,” Gwen insisted, “and fighting him will accomplish nothing.”
For a moment, it looked like she had won. She knew better than to expect Peter to listen to reason, but had hopped a fight would sober him up and force him to recognize the situation for what it was. Instead, he fought harder. Shoving against her with both muscular and magical strength, Peter forced her up so fast and so far that in a second he had her pinned down—against the ceiling.
Gwen used her own strength as much as gravity to help thrust him back off, but he had as tight a grip of her as she had of him. Rolling along the ceiling until they hit the edge, they continued to wrestle down along the wall.
Jay shouted, as surprised as terrified by this sudden and physically impossible shift. Gwen didn't pay attention to his reaction, but continued battling with Peter until she realized that Jay had the intercom on. “This is the captain! I need the CAO in here now and—”
As they wrestled along the wall, Peter spun out of her reach and grabbed his dagger.
Her heart collapsed when it should have beat, and for a second Gwen feared for her life at the hand of her friend. As soon as he had it in his hand, however, he threw it with his usual precision and impaled it in the speaker Jay spoke into. The blade came alarmingly close to Jay but didn't so much as scratch him. Garbled language came out of the device, but Jay discovered he could neither continue nor clarify his request.
Peter and Gwen continued trying to overcome the other. Intermittently using gravity and flight to aid them, they both tried to force the other into surrender. “He's not the problem,” Gwen insisted, a feeling of faintness started to overtake her. “They're only using him to get to the mermaids!”
“Lies!” Peter declared. “What would some grown-up boy have to do with mermaids?”
The fight was draining Gwen of her energy, and a piercing headache returned as she panted for breath. She was in no shape to stop Peter, and did not have it in her heart to hurt him, no matter what he threatened to do. Wheezing through her gritted teeth she told him. “He made a deal with a mermaid.”
Had Gwen known what reaction this would elicit form Peter, she would have started with that fact. At once, he seemed to forget the frustration that had him battling with his friend. Confusion captured his face and Peter asked, “He did what?”
But he did not let go of her and she stayed pinned to the high wall. Gwen knew she had finally broken through to him, but below them Jay stood on the floor with no such understanding. Stripped of the intercom, Jay had only one weapon with which to protect Gwen with, and now a brief enough pause in which he could fire it in the confidence that he would not hit her.
As soon as the fight started to subside, a greater crisis exploded out of Jay's gun. Gwen, focused on Peter, saw only his expression, the pain that instantaneously seized him. If he made a noise of shock or agony, it was lost in the sound of the bullet firing. She felt his strength leave his body like water draining irretrievably down a sinkhole. Tension sprung into her muscles
