Gwen Stacy was falling, but she showed no panic. She actually laughed even as the streets grew closer. Just as she was about to crash land into a truck, she stretched her hand and pressed her palm with her middle and ring finger. A line of web-fluid stuck to the surface of the building and pulled her upward again.
She'd been overthinking it for weeks. All those nights lying awake in her bedroom, losing her mind whether the arachnid bite had changed her into something else, something fundamentally wrong. But swinging through New York at midnight, with the winter wind rushing past her hood wasn't a burden. This was freedom.
She had never felt more uncaged.
Her web caught a fire escape on a twelve-story apartment building, and she pivoted hard, momentum carrying her across an entire avenue in a perfect arc. Below, a couple stopped on the sidewalk and pointed their phones up at her. She didn't slow down. Let them wonder. Let them see that something extraordinary existed in their ordinary city, something that defied the boringness of the normal world.
'I was being stupid.'
She had to suppress another laugh as she pivoted off a water tower and launched herself toward the Manhattan skyline. The web-swinging made all the gruesome work she had invested in creating the web-fluid, the web-shooters, and her spectacular suit feel justified.
Every. Single. Second.
She was approaching the bridge that connected Manhattan to the island territories when a gunshot echoed in the night. She would've missed it if not for her somewhat enhanced hearing.
Her enhanced senses pinpointed the origin instantly. Oscorp Island, across the water, beyond the bridge structure.
She landed on the bridge structure and stuck herself to the beam. More gunshots followed, sporadic at first, then a sustained volley.
Her phone was in her suit's inner pocket. She pulled it out with trembling fingers. Her spider-sense warned her to not go in that direction. It was dangerous.
But she dialed her father's number anyway.
"Dad, my friend who lives near... the bay area, she just called me." The lie came smoothly after weeks of deceiving her friends and family about the so-called research project. She'd become disturbingly good at lying. "She heard gunshots from Oscorp Island. She's scared, Dad."
Her father's sigh came through the speaker.
"Gwen," he said in a weaker voice than she'd ever heard from him. "We're not authorized to investigate that location."
This wasn't right. Captain George Stacy was persistent in doing the right thing, seeing the good in people, and a stubborn no-quitter. He didn't get tired. He never bent the knee. The man on the phone sounded so defeated and so exhausted, like he'd given up on something.
"Dad?" Her confusion was genuine, authentic, because nothing about this made sense. "Why?"
For a moment there was silence and the sound of doors opening in a series. Her father was leaving his office.
"Higher orders came down directly from Captain." His voice dropped lower, and she could hear the shame in it. "It's private property outside our jurisdiction. The NYPD is not to act there."
More gunshots erupted across the bay as her father made excuses.
"But that doesn't make sense," she said, and the frustration in her voice came from the very sense of idealism inherited from her father. "It could be a crime scene! What if innocent people get hurt because we're too afraid to act? What if someone dies because—"
"Gwen, sweetheart, I can't… If I move against orders again, they'll take my badge. They made that very clear after the last incident. I've got nothing else, sweetheart. This job is everything I have. I can't fight this."
She understood that her father's hands were genuinely tied by forces beyond his control. Understanding didn't magically change reality, it certainly didn't erase the gunshots in the distance.
Which made her next decision not just easy, but inevitable.
"Bye, Dad…"
She ended the call with a soft tap and stared at her phone screen.
Sorry, Dad. But I can't leave it like that.
The memory of Harry's bruised face flashed through her mind. She'd watched that happen and done absolutely nothing. She'd been afraid, which was perhaps the most damning realization of all.
'Never again.'
She pulled her hood tighter and tested her web-shooters on a metal beam. After seeing the web come out in perfect condition, she launched herself toward Oscorp Island without another moment of hesitation.
Her momentum carried her from bridge support to bridge support. She was fast, efficient, and by the time she landed on a tree on Oscorp's perimeter, the gunfire had stopped.
That silence was somehow worse than the violence had been. Silence after chaos always was. Silence meant someone had won. Silence meant people were dead.
She slingshot through the air using her web-shooters on the tree and saw men coming towards her in panic, running, limping, some barely able to move their legs. These weren't ordinary criminals. All of them were well-built, many bearing visible scars of people very used to violence.
She narrowed her eyes in the direction these men came from. These men were fleeing from the danger her Spider-Sense warned her about.
Another sling-shot sent her zooming through the air.
Then she saw him.
He stood alone in a clearing, surrounded by cars, fallen bodies, and weapons. His presence generated a kind of danger that made her skin prickle. Her spider-sense transformed from warning into actively screaming at her.
He was walking toward someone on his knees. A man dressed expensively, clearly a criminal of some rank, judging by the designer suit. The man was pleading in words.
A shout left her mouth without thought, without planning, without any real strategy beyond the instinct that she had to stop him. Otherwise, the man pleading on his knees would die.
"STOP!"
She landed between them, one hand extended toward the man.
"It's you!"
She'd seen him yesterday outside the Hellmoon Club, after she was done drowning in alcohol and despair and the crushing, suffocating weight of powers she didn't understand. She'd been an utter mess, if she was being honest with herself.
He'd sincerely complimented her father.
But now he was standing in front of her with an aura of danger so palpable that her legs refused to stop shaking despite her best efforts. It was like standing at the edge of a cliff with the knowledge that her fall was inevitable.
Dante tilted his head with innocent curiosity, as if he hadn't just killed people. What's worse, those corpses had no hint of blood. They look asleep peacefully, except from the complete absence of breathing from them.
They died as if they just stopped existing.
"Do I know you?"
She was masked, her voice deliberately pitched lower to make sure nobody recognized the university student beneath the suit.
"Then move. This is private property, and you're trespassing."
His coldness was reasonable. She was trespassing here. By any rational measure, she had no legal right to be on this island.
"You can't kill him!" She said, despite knowing that she couldn't fight this man with her new superpowers. "You can't just... look, he's a criminal, yes, but you can't execute him! The law will decide his punishment by trial."
Please understand. Please see that this is wrong. She forced herself to stand fully, despite her legs trembling like they belonged to someone terrified, because she'd learned that someone had to stand up when law couldn't. Someone has to be the person she wished she could've been for Harry.
Dante studied her for a long moment. "Fine. Take him."
Gwen's mask lenses widened comically. "What?"
"You heard me. Take him to the police and let the justice system you believe in handle it." He turned his back on both of them, reaching for a tactical radio clipped to his vest. "I'm too busy for this shit."
She'd been prepared for a negotiation. She'd even rehearsed the whole thing in the moment he seemed to be checking her out. She'd even been ready to take off her mask and invoke Harry's name as a leverage.
But he'd simply... agreed.
Was he mocking her? Planning something? What reason could he have for agreeing like this?
"Hades here," he said into the radio, his voice shifting to a more formal tone. "The situation has been handled. The north sector is free from Maggia maggots."
She finally realized that she was seeing things wrong. Even if he had supernatural powers, he was still a mercenary operating under Silver Sable's orders and employed by Harry. He killed these people because it was his job, like she attended university as Gwen Stacy.
Dante glanced back at her. "What now? You want me to drive you and your 'date' home?"
The lighthearted tone loosened something inside her chest, just slightly.
"I—I am leaving! And, um, thank you… for not killing this douchebag."
"Maybe I just don't want to argue. Get him out of here before I change my mind."
Gwen bound the criminal's wrists and ankles and zipped his mouth with a strand of webbing, then wound another cord around his torso.
She left the island with the criminal swinging alongside her. She webbed him outside the police station's front door and leaned in close to his terrified face.
"You're going to confess to every crime you've ever committed. I'm bringing you back to that man if you don't. We both know what happens then."
He nodded frantically.
"Good."
Then she disappeared into the night before the first patrol officer could respond to the frantic banging and muffled screaming. They would see her on the security footage later anyway.
By the time she made it back to her apartment and peeled off the suit, her hands were still shaking.
She collapsed onto her bed, her mind more exhausted than her body. The man on that island, Dante, tested her willpower just by standing in front of him. He'd looked so friendly and charming outside Hellmoon Club, enough to get MJ interested.
'Hades… he couldn't have found a more fitting title.'
A smile bloomed across her face despite her exhaustion. Like Hades used his powers for mercenary work, she would use hers for what she believed in.
She would protect the people her father couldn't reach. She would deliver justice to places where the system failed, zipping to a crime scene before innocents got hurt.
'Someone has to.'
She sat up on her bed and looked at her reflection in the nearby mirror. The girl looking back at her wasn't the same person who'd left this apartment hours ago, not after refusing to yield in the face of death.
"A woman with spider powers. I'm Spider-Woman."
The name felt small and insufficient for such a huge responsibility.
"It's too childish. Uh…"
She slipped into her suit and stood before the mirror, checking herself out in various poses.
"I'm White Spider. Not bad." She rubbed the back of her head. "Why not Ghost Spider because I'm as pale as one?"
It felt the most fitting and far cooler to be used for introductions.
She zipped herself up to the ceiling and hung upside down, arms crossed. "Operating within the boundaries of light and darkness, I'm New York's first superhero, Ghost Spider!"
The moment the declaration left her lips, she wanted to crawl out of her own skin. She threw herself on the bed and covered her face with a pillow as if it would allow her to escape her own embarrassment.
The clock ticked on hour by hour, but sleep didn't come for her.
It wasn't just her embarrassing moment, though that certainly haunted her, but the entire night. The Maggia corpses. The criminal boss. Her strange confrontation with the terrifying god of death… and the weight of what she'd chosen to become.
By morning, she wished her powers also made her immune to dark circles.
"I look like a zombie."
MJ was definitely going to chew her out over this.