Chapter 1: Milk, Swell, & Superhero Problems
The smell hit her first. Sweat, stale milk, and something vaguely chemical from the half-empty bottle of nipple cream on the bathroom counter. Gwen Stacy dropped her keys into a bowl already overflowing with loose change and expired coupons, her other hand instinctively cradling the enormous curve of her belly. It was less a belly now and more a separate planetary body she was hauling around.
Her apartment looked like it had been ransacked by a very specific, very frazzled burglar. A sagging couch was buried under damp laundry and half-empty diaper bags. Her once-slim jeans, a relic from a past life, hung like a sad flag of surrender from a tension rod in the closet, overshadowed by a landslide of maternity leggings. The bathroom counter groaned under the weight of supersized nursing bras still in their packaging.
“Home sweet hellhole,” she muttered to the empty air.
Walking from the door to the living room felt like a marathon. A sharp, braxton-hicks-style contraction tightened her abdomen, making her gasp and pause, leaning against the wall. Her enhanced metabolism was turning this pregnancy into a time-lapse video on overdrive. The doctors—the few she could trust with her unique biology—just shook their heads and used words like “unprecedented” and “volatile.”
She finally reached the couch and let herself fall backwards. The impact was a wet, squelching fwump. A second later, a warm, damp patch spread across the front of her stretched-thin tank top.
“Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” she groaned.
Her engorged breasts, heavy and tight as overfilled water balloons, had chosen that moment to let go. Twin streams of milk sprayed out, pattering against the far wall and dripping down the cover of a physics textbook she’d been meaning to read.
She fumbled for the box of lactation pads on the floor, tearing one open with her teeth and shoving it into her bra. It was immediately saturated. She added another. And another. It was like trying to plug a dam with tissue paper.
Another contraction, stronger this time, gripped her. This wasn’t a fake-out. This was the real deal, a deep, internal squeeze that stole her breath and made her vision whiten at the edges. She whimpered, her hands splaying over the taut, moving skin of her belly. Inside, a frantic elbow—or maybe a knee—pushed back against her palm.
“Okay, okay, I feel you,” she breathed, tears of pain and sheer overwhelm pricking her eyes. “Just… give mommy five minutes. Please.”
How much bigger could she possibly get? The thought, dark and terrifying, slithered through her mind. She felt stretched to the point of translucency, a overripe fruit about to split its skin. The city’s skyline, usually a source of calm from her web-swinging perch, was just a grey blur outside the grimy window. Spider-Woman was supposed to be up there, not down here, drowning in her own biology.
Her phone buzzed on the coffee table, rattling against a empty mug. She stretched, her fingertips just brushing it, her distended belly pressing firmly against the table’s edge. She managed to drag it over.
The screen lit up with a news alert: ARMORED CAR HEIST IN PROGRESS, MIDTOWN. POLICE CONTAINING.