After Peter, she can't stand to look at her father. Not that she sees him often while he's calling for her to be taken off the streets, but the only thing that makes her feel alive is not being Gwen Stacy.
At the funeral, she tosses in a handful of Instax photos she can’t bear to see ever again. Peter + Gwen 4evr. She buries her best friend, and he takes a chunk of her heart six feet under.
After Peter, she cuts class and sneaks off to Chelsea, walks the High Line until it hurts to be upright and befriends a bartender who looks the other way when she flashes an ID found in the bathroom.
An ID is an ID, right? “Your business, girlie.”
They always serves her house, though she sees them reach for something more expensive sometimes. They're good to her. A reminder that things can be good. People are good.
“Cash or card?”
Gwen always pays cash. The last thing she needs is the Captain finding out about her vices.
So she keeps up appearances. She takes her injections. She keeps up in school, but only by a thread. She keeps running and fighting and being someone else.
One month into getting wasted on Wednesdays, Gwen stumbles across a flyer for a band. Her first try, VRSS. She remembers the songs but not the members’ faces. It doesn't go well.
None of the first bands go well. All six of them. The reputation that follows her is a sticky one she's too tired to make excuses for. We can't reach you. Well, what if she doesn't want to be reached?
Gwen crawls in through the window and listens to the TV static crackle. She feels the cymbals echo and crash in her chest. When she closes her eyes, she can see the commercials flickering across the screen. The one that she and Peter used to clown doesn't play anymore. Is it pathetic to miss a pharmaceutical ad?
She turns over and dreams of scales. The music kind. Then they turn reptilian.
She screams every time he dies and wakes up alone.
When the dimensions converge, the sight of another Spider-Man knocks the wind out of her lungs. Gwen doesn't have to see his face to know who wears the mask; it's as if every atom in her body is screaming when he passes. Alive. Alive. Alive. Alive.
She follows him home because she can't believe he's real. He's older than the one she remembers, stronger.
She'd had this wish once, that he'd wake up and be alive somewhere else. Even if he didn't know her, Peter Parker could exist without pain. Without seduction of something sinister.
This one wears a mask, but he's like pressing your fingers into fresh dirt. Promise of better.
He has a lab partner named Gwen Stacy at the university. He ducks into a car owned by Harry Osborn. He kisses a woman named Mary Jane, and it's some small solace to know that this Peter is still breathing.
Gwen is glad that she isn't there when his breath stops. The flowers she leaves at his grave wilt.
Miles is different.
A good different. She knows what that look means when he looks at her. He's staring at her the way Peter did when he used to watch her dance.
Gwen chides herself. Be honest. You can't do this. She can't entertain it.
But Miles is so funny and smart and—
No, seriously, she can't think about him. She can't watch Miles take hits without feeling it in her spine. He can hold his own, but he is all that his dimension has now that Peter is gone.
It is infinitely lonely to be a Spider-Person. Peter B. Parker doesn't shy away from lamenting (and complaining… and moaning… and groaning…) about the emptiness that he feels.
Miles takes a hit and he falls.
Gwen’s stomach lurches.
Miles gets back up again. She breathes again.
Gwen doesn't claim to understand what it is that Miguel has lost. Sometimes he mumbles something about Thor that makes no sense—what does a Norse god have to do with anything? But he's cruel.
Not a fan.
Hobie clues her into some details, though she gets this feeling that there are some wounds that just never heal. Being around the other Spiders, it's this realization that every version carries a burden.
There are thousands and thousands of Peters and Petras and variants of what she's lost. Some of them look at her with the same haunted look she'd seen on her father's face at the funeral. That she'd seen on May’s seeing Peter walking in her front door. Split seconds of a heart slowly kicking in—that beat of alive alive alive—only to realize: you're not them.
Miguel calls her an anomaly. It’s not the first time in her life she’s been told she shouldn’t exist. Every other Gwen Stacy dies. A hard pill to swallow when she wishes every night she wasn't the one to survive. You can't break free of the canon.
She’s seen the playbacks, heard the snap of another Gwen’s spine. She’s careful to not repeat those mistakes, so fucking careful. She’d spent so long wishing for death that the accusation that comes with her being alive—well, she’s always been a little spiteful.
Her father turns the light on.
Gwen turns her head.
In her sixteen years, this is how she has always seen George Stacy, Sr.: uniform permanently attached to his body, military pressed and hair neatly combed.
In her sixteen years, she’s seen her father red-faced and angry, usually caused by her. In the earlier days, he’d flung out words just to hurt her. Then her mom had gotten sick and they’d tossed down their weapons if only to make mom smile.
In her sixteen years, she has only seen him like this once and it had been the night she’d felt sliced open. Please, she’d begged, nails dug into her fist. The gun pointed between her eyes. She wanted to throw up. Please hear me out.
It’d been her second death. The Captain is all she has.
But George is standing in the doorway with his palms turned up. She blinks and she's in her first communion suit and tie, posing with a candle and rosary beads. Her mother is screaming out her birth name when she sticks her grubby hands into the church fountain, telling her to smile.
Blinks again and she’s tugging at the dress she’d bought for the spring formal. Aunt May’s voice is in her kitchen, and Peter is texting her to please hurry… they're showing baby pictures, G.
There are no weapons now. (The gun belt is in the other room. She’d checked.)
Just faith, which is all her father has. He doesn't believe in predetermination, but in redemption and forgiveness. That look in his eyes when she asks him to believe her?
That's canon changing. I quit. That's belief in action. I believe you. I trust you. I love you.
Gwen Stacy doesn't die this time.
Gwen Stacy survives.