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To Gwen Stacy, being spider-woman meant sleepless nights and missed essays. Being spider woman was all fun and games until grades started slipping, and her dad getting on her back about where she had been for two weeks. (which was a stupid question for the record, because she had been off saving Miles’ ass. again.) Being spider woman was a blessing and a curse, and even though she had powers and a whole other life to tend to, she missed actually being a normal teenager.
Gwen sighed, pulled on her mask, and leapt out of her bedroom window. Duty calls, she had said once to Miles when she had visited him very briefly in the summer. Except there was only a mundane duty to tend to, such as a robbery and some old woman who had let her cat out and was fretting about where it was. (Gwen was getting pretty sick of that job.)
At the end of the day, Gwen Stacy was just Gwen Stacy. She was in a band, she got good grades for the most part, and she snuck out to see boys. Maybe just a boy, singular. She missed her normal life, when she wasn’t bitten by a radioactive spider, when she did homework after school instead of throwing herself headfirst into a fight, when she didn’t have to pretend she was fine, because before she had been bitten, she had been fine. Nothing to worry about, no stupid villains to lock up, and no Miles. But no Miles meant nothing to fight for, so wanting her old life back felt ridiculous and somewhat selfish.
Most of all, she missed her Peter. The Peter she fought because he turned himself into a giant monster just to be special, as if he wasn’t special enough for her alone to make up for it. She had cradled his head in her hands and cried, wishing maybe that he had just talked to her about because god, didn’t he know she loved him?
Anyway, it didn’t really matter in the end because she had a job to do. She had to fight and run and swing from buildings. She had to hide Spider Woman from her Dad because her father was convinced that spider woman had killed Peter Parker, and wanted nothing else to bring him to justice just for Gwen. The overwhelming feeling of guilt kept her quiet at home, disguised as grief, but she kept working herself to the bone.
So in breaks she visited Miles, helped him with homework, talked to him about what was going on in his life, anything to distract herself from the constant guilt that gripped her every day. If he knew she was avoiding he didn’t saying anything about it, continuing to talk and sketch and showing her things in his dimension that she might not have.(Star battles was extremely different as it turned out. Star Wars? Stupid name.)
Miles was a good distraction for the most part, but the times she didn’t visit him she sat on top of a building and cried. Cried out of exhaustion from holding everything in, cried for Peter, sometimes for Miles, because she knew she couldn’t have him. She couldn’t risk her dimension being in danger. When she finished crying, she always felt frustrated, because fuck she didn’t even feel any better. She was so, so alone. The answer was just to keep going.