Spider-Gwen 3 || The Fall

As I Say || Gwen Stacy

"You've got to lose to know how to win"

-Dream On, Aerosmith

Not a single sound was made in the apartment as Gwen slouched in her chair at the dinner table. The clock was reading 1:08 in the morning, and Gwen still couldn't get herself to fall asleep. This place that she had called home for over eighteen years felt colder and lonelier than ever as her eyes stared straight ahead, unable to move off of the empty chairs were her mother and father used to sit.

You couldn't have expected them to live forever... right?

The thought made Gwen's hand slide towards herself on the table, suddenly feeling stupid and insecure as she realized the symbiote was making a good point. Maybe the point didn't apply to her mother, who had died when Gwen was only eleven... but it certainly applied to her father. She was realizing now that, since her mother had died so suddenly, she had fooled herself into thinking that something similar would never happen to her father.

Oh, how wrong you were... but even throughout all that, you could've been right. Remember that... The symbiote reminded Gwen as she folded her arms on the table and rested her chin on them. ...You could've saved him if you had given in completely to us.

Even if Gwen couldn't trust the symbiote, the logic could not be denied. There was a non-zero chance that allowing the symbiote to take over could have prevented Otto from killing her father... a small chance, but even a chance that small brought tears of remorse to Gwen's eyes. This was why she'd been letting the symbiote call the shots more often now... she didn't show it to the few people she encountered these days, but there was terror constantly gripping her heart at the thought of potentially losing any of the people she had left.

But despite her current obedience to the symbiote, there was just one thing that Gwen couldn't understand.

"Why?" She whispered, gripping her arms as she continued to stare at the two empty chairs across from her. "Why do you want control so badly...?"

"Isn't that what you've always wanted, Gwen?"

The symbiote's retort sounded different-less like a voice in her head and more like a person talking to her. Chills crept up Gwen's spine as she felt someone's presence by the kitchen sink, and she slowly looked over to see who it was.

Owen.

The young man she'd once fallen for was leaning against the counter, tossing a bottle of Gwen's antidepressants from one hand to the other. Upon noticing her look at him, Owen stretched his hand forward, holding out the bottle of Effexor to her. "Ready to take one?"

Gwen didn't respond. She'd seen this song and dance before... Owen Octavius was dead, killed because Gwen had stretched herself too thin back during her junior year. Her doctor had claimed that one of the side effects of her Effexor medication was vivid hallucinations like this... which didn't line up with the facts anymore, since Gwen had neglected to take her medicine after her father had died. "You know that I'm not taking those."

"I wouldn't have expected anything less." Owen smirked, promptly tossing the bottle of Effexor over Gwen's head and listening to it clatter against the ground.

Gwen sighed softly, realizing that she was probably in the middle of another nightmare. "Talk all you want, I know you're not there-"

"Think about it, Gwen..." Owen said calmly, rolling up the sleeves of the black sweater that he was wearing. "...All the way back at the beginning, what did you try to do?" His question hung in the air, making Gwen look to the ground as her past missteps surfaced fresh in her mind.