Gwen Stacy

On her Earth, the bite that should have found a boy found her instead, and the story bent itself around that one small correction like a river around a stone. She woke with the proportional speed and strength of a spider, and a hum at the base of her skull that spoke half a second before danger did. She kept it secret, the way you keep anything you are not yet ready to lose, until the night it was not enough, and the boy she loved paid the price her power should have paid instead. The city called the killer a monster and hunted her for it. She let them. It was easier than explaining the truth: that grief, worn long enough, starts to look exactly like a mask. She wears white and pink now, colors nobody expects from a spider, and she answers to Spider-Woman in the borough that still isn't sure it trusts her, and Ghost-Spider everywhere the Web has learned her name. She drums in a band on the nights the city allows it, and she crosses the seams between worlds when the Web that binds every spider-touched soul calls her across them, one more strand in a pattern too large for any single Earth to hold alone.