Chapter Text
Alright, people, some of you know the drill after the whole ‘save the multiverse’ thing, but some of you look pretty fresh. So let’s take it from the top again—
My name is Gwen Stacy. I was bitten by a radioactive spider, and for the past seven years, I’ve been my universe’s one and only Spider-Woman. Or, the only resident Spider-Woman; people visit. Anyways, after I saved the multiverse, I graduated from high school, started college, and got a part-time job. I even started working on having friends again. Sorta. Look, it’s a process, and I’ve got Miles and Hobie helping out. You’ll meet them later, if you haven’t already.
Caught up? Good. Because that’s when I met her.
~ ~ ~
My spider sense was never like the others’. Miles and Hobie—even Peter and Jessica—they all had more or less the same thing. That sense (it is not a ‘tingle,’ no matter what that dork from Earth-199999 calls it) that something bad was about to happen or that someone else was a Spider Person. Not for me, or not just that, anyway. Mine was stronger, told me when I needed to be somewhere. It told me I needed to be at Visions Academy, where I first met Miles—before he even was a Spider. It told me I needed to get to Earth-42 to save Miles from his alternate self. It told me which hospital I’d find Jessica at when she went into labor.
And currently, it was telling me I needed to be in East Harlem and that I needed to be there fast.
Okay, so I didn’t always know why I needed to be somewhere, but that was fine! After seven years on the job, I’d long since learned to trust and just follow that sense, no matter how weird the destination. It was less fine that this was the fourth time this month, but hey, I was always down for a quick patrol, especially if it meant I got to skip out on Marketing in a Modern World. Any excuse to avoid that snoozefest was worth it.
Though speaking of excuses, I was going to run out of them if I kept missing whatever it was my spider sense wanted me to find. If I kept failing to get where my sense needed me in time, then I might have to ask Dad to bail me out with a fake ‘family emergency.’ And I wanted that can of worms to stay firmly sealed and collect dust in the back of my metaphorical pantry, thank you very much. Things between us were... Well, they hadn’t invented a word yet for, “I love you so much, but I need to be around you the absolute minimal amount of time I need to be.”
Let’s just go with ‘complicated.’
I heaved a sigh of relief as I swung around a corner, the sense of destination finally resolving into agreement I was where I needed to be. I could continue avoiding Dad. Best for everyone involved, honestly.
A quick fwip of my web shooters shifted my momentum upward into an arc towards the top of a fading billboard for that crooked skeezeball of a lawyer Matt Murdock, my so-called ‘Kingpin of Crime,’ who was finally in jail where he belonged thanks to yours truly. Though nobody seemed to quite believe he was in there for good yet.
“Justice is blind,” I quoted, mocking, as I landed on the thin, slippery bar of one of the billboard’s lights, grateful for the extra traction of my ballet flats. Hobie’s chucks had been what I needed for a while, but once seeing him and Miles became a regular thing, I’d felt comfortable enough to switch back. Came with the territory of kinda being an ex-Dance-major—which Dad would not get off my back about—and easier to stash in my bag along with my new costume. A graduation gift from Jessica in the same tried and true style but made from better, stronger materials.
“Well, here it is,” I muttered as I began slowly scanning the area. “Whatever it is.”
It took time for ‘it’ to finally happen—real life wasn’t like comic books, with the plot advancing the moment the hero gets where she’s needed—but hey, at least it was fairly obvious when the reason my spider sense wanted me here finally occurred. The crack of a gunshot split the air as a gangster, one of the Hammerheads by the look of his cybernetics, rushed out of a nearby alleyway. I was moving before I even registered it, swinging down as civilians nearby screamed and ran away from the guy taking wild potshots over his shoulder and running into traffic. I webbed him to a car parked along the curb before the idiot got himself run over and landed on said car a moment later, my focus on the alley he’d been fleeing from because there was no way my spider sense had brought me here and with so much urgency for this mook.
If it had been nighttime, I might not have noticed her in time. The jet black tentacle that had been rocketing towards the ganger reversed course, snapping back into the equally dark body of lithe muscles and curves it was attached to, then it vanished into thin air with a ripple.
The thin alley between the two surrounding buildings was empty.
“What—?” I frowned behind my mask, searching for where the figure went. It took me several long seconds to detect the barely noticeable, unnatural shift in the bricks as my quarry slipped around the corner of the short alley. “Well, that’s a useful trick.”
I sprang into motion, shooting forward in pursuit with a quick use of webs to yank myself into motion. I bounced between the walls and reached the corner in two, three seconds tops, but I was already too late. I caught a hint of the camouflaged figure as it hurtled down the street and away, but it was already ducking into another alley. By the time I caught up and reached the second street over, there was nothing to see but people going about their business, a smattering of people turning my way in surprise as I shot out of the alley and killed my momentum by latching onto a light pole to flip up into a crouch atop it.
If anybody had heard the commotion from before, they didn’t seem to care. That was over there, not here; New York at its finest.
“A very useful trick,” I amended under my breath before checking the multiverse goober on my wrist. Two minutes until Marketing was over. “Well, you might have dragged me across the entire city for a glimpse of an alien, Spider Sense, but... Actually, no, totally worth it even if there hadn’t been an alien involved. Marketing sucks.”
“It’s much cooler than a watch,” I said in my best fake Miguel voice as I shot a web at the train passing by overhead, letting myself get yanked into breakneck speed before breaking off to swing south and begin a lap of the city. “I might as well turn this into a proper patrol.”
There was always some crime happening in the city, if not always the kind that involved metahumans, multiverses, or aliens. A handful of muggers, a couple attempted robberies, a successful robbery... Well, almost successful, since I left them practicing their cobra position after I webbed their legs to the sidewalk; a little yoga would do them some good. I even saved a cat from a tree, which sounds cliche until you’ve done it for the umpteenth time and realize there’s a reason why something became a cliche in the first place.
But I mean, hey, I got to pet a cat. Bonus.
Still, it didn’t matter how much petty crime I stopped or how many sweet furballs I saved, there was no distracting me from how my patrol had begun.
The sun had long since begun to set, so after a stop for a quick slice—not the healthiest choice, but I wanted some comfort food right then—I swung my way across the Brooklyn Bridge over to Miles’ spot. Our New Yorks weren’t the same; heck, they weren’t even mostly the same. But the Williamsburgh Bank Building was. I had no idea why, but you wouldn’t hear me complaining. It really was a great spot for thinking.
And speaking of thinking, thinking about Miles had me unconsciously reaching for my goober, as I paced around the top of the building, my pizza long since devoured. But I hesitated. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to talk to him. We talked all the time! Some weeks more, some weeks less depending on class and work and work. But unlike me, Miles was a full-time student on top of holding down a side job with more hours than mine and being Spider-Man. I knew he wouldn’t mind me reaching out to let him know I was on the crux of a canon event, but...
“He has more important things to worry about,” I told Brooklyn, the sound of her streets my answer as I started calling Miguel instead.
“Gwen,” he said as he appeared on the holographic display. As usual, while I couldn’t see the array of screens on his end, it was obvious from the slight tint of red playing over his face that he was at his command station in the Spider Society. “What’s your status?”
“Hi, Gwen. How was your day, Gwen?” I thought to myself as I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. Even now, years after we saved the multiverse and stopped the periodic incursions, he was still absurdly stiff and formal. I was convinced the man was physically incapable of small talk. Not for the first time, I wondered how he ended up with an AI like LYLA.
“Hey, Miguel. Just reaching out to let you know I, uh— I might be having a canon event soon?”
That got his attention. Where before he had been visibly distracted, his eyes were now properly focused on me. If I was being honest, the sudden increase in intensity was still a bit daunting, despite having known him for years.
“What event? What are you basing that off of?”
“Soooo... Last time I was in your ‘verse, I happened to overhear some of the other Spiders talking about a... Gee, what’d they call it? A ‘Venom’ event?”
“That event is restricted knowledge,” Miguel replied without missing a beat. I very carefully did not look away. That might have implied I had done— “I already know you looked at the files, Gwen.”
Well shit. “Look, I think mine’s here. If that wasn’t my ‘Venom,’ then I’ll eat my mask,” I said, trying to push past that point. “There wasn’t a white spider symbol on the chest, but otherwise, the physical description matched. Jet black body, powerful and fast, uses tentacles... I mean she—” had an amazing pair of tits, I didn’t say “—was obviously female which is outside the norm... But it seems like compared to the majority of the ‘verses out there, half the people in my world are the opposite gender and the other half are evil twins, so unexpectedly being a lady isn’t really unexpected.”
“... sounds like a match,” he agreed after a moment. “Venom is universally a tough fight. LYLA’s adding you to the list of Spiders who can view the Venom files without needing to sneak around. So stop doing that and focus on going over what we know from the others that have been up against their Venom. Speak up if you need help. Miguel out.”
He hung up, as brusque as ever. Safely out of his sight, I openly rolled my eyes and affectionately complained, “It was good talking, Gwen. Aw, thanks, Miguel, I appreciate you. I appreciate you, Gwen.”
At least he had unlocked the files. I had only gotten a brief glimpse of them before; enough to get the overview but none of the details. Hopefully knowing more about what was coming would help. Maybe I could ask Peter about his version...? It had been a bit since I’d seen Mayday, and I kinda missed the squirt.
I tilted my head up against gravity to look out towards where the Hudson met the East River, some of the last ferries of the day slowly chugging their way across the waves. The more I thought about it, I realized I was maybe a bit grateful that my Venom chose now to show up. Sure, the usual villains still popped their heads up occasionally, but our game of whack-a-mole had slowed down some, and it hadn’t been especially tricky taking them down for the better part of a year. If I set aside Dad being a pain in my side, there probably wasn’t a better time for an alien to come in and shake things up.
If I was really lucky, maybe Venom wouldn’t be much trouble either. Buuut I wasn’t holding my breath.
Putting the alien aside for the moment, I jumped off of my horizontal perch in a free dive to get closer to street level, then began swinging west to campus. I still had one class tonight, and unlike Marketing, I actually liked that professor.