Spider-Gwen 3 || The Fall

The Fall || Gwen Stacy

"I'm sure I won't survive the fall"

-Choke, The Warning

Gwen woke up in a fit of coughing, her lungs burning as smoke wafted around the space she was laying in. She sat up in a daze, her head spinning as she observed her surroundings. Debris was everywhere-bricks, wood, plaster-and there was no roof over her head, exposing the smoke-clogged skies that continued covering Central Manhattan.

Venom... the symbiote collapsed the roof to save itself. He's still out there.

The blonde got to her feet in halting movements, her limbs having to fight through the aching pain to finally stand up. Gwen's eyes scanned the wreckage around her, looking for any sign of her friends or Venom. But she saw nothing.

A distant howl caught her attention, and she jogged to the nearest wall. Gwen climbed it, then perched on the edge of where the building's roof used to be to see where the sound had come from.

There.

Far up the Empire State Building, Gwen could see Venom and Miles dashing through the air at each other, each combatant furiously trying to land a solid hit on the other. Miles's speed and agility seemed to be the only things keeping him from getting torn to pieces by Venom.

Another sound came from her right; Gwen looked over and saw Ganke holding MJ down the road. MJ was pointing at Gwen with an extremely relieved look on her face.

They're all okay.

Taking a sharp breath of relief, Gwen looked up at the Empire State Building and stretched her arm upwards to fire a web and join Miles in the fight. But, upon pressing her middle and ring fingers to the button on her wrist, nothing came out. The web-shooter made an odd-sounding click and did not fire.

Gwen looked at her wrist to see what the problem was and noticed a crack in the space where the webbing cartridge was held. The debris from the roof collapsing had damaged them.

After several moments of racking her brain to figure out how they got damaged so easily, Gwen eventually realized why: these web-shooters weren't her normal ones, they were the ones she'd been in the middle of building for Miles before she'd lost her powers. In Gwen's haste to get them ready for this battle, she hadn't been able to put the proper protective material over the cartridge sections. Miles was still wearing Gwen's old web-shooters, which explained why he was currently swinging around the Empire State Building.

It was almost like this moment had been predestined to happen... and it didn't take Gwen too long to figure out why she felt that way. In every one of her recent dreams about falling from a building, her web-shooters hadn't been working.

"In every universe... Gwen Stacy falls to her death."

The fateful warning of Dr. Connors echoed in Gwen's head, along with his theory of her spider-sense being predictive enough to see the future and warn Gwen about it in her dreams. Her breath was stolen from her lungs, and a chilling sensation engulfed her nerves as she realized what all this meant.

It's time.

This is happening now.

Gwen's heartbeat felt like a kick drum in her heart, pounding against her chest as the gravity of this moment consumed her. Something instinctive and primal began to grow alarmed inside of Gwen as her eyes darted between MJ, Ganke, Miles, and Venom. All of the moments she'd held dear in her memory-her mother teaching her to ride a bike, her father watching proudly as she played a song with the Mary-Janes, cutting up with Jeff while taking down criminals, Rio taking care of her after Felicia had died, swinging around New York City with Miles-they all seemed to play at once in different parts of her brain, stretching it in different directions yet bringing her to the same conclusion: