Chapter 14: Cumflation Catastrophe
The city had a pulse, and Felicia Hardy knew how to listen to it. It wasn’t in the honking gridlock or the tourist chatter. It was in the silence between the crimes—the spaces where a certain web-slinger should have been, and wasn’t.
Spider-Woman had ghosted.
Three weeks. No witty quips from the rooftops. No sudden thwips of webbing nabbing a purse-snatcher mid-sprint. No flash of white and pink in the periphery. For the gossip rags, it was a slow news cycle. For the underworld, it was an unspoken holiday. For Felicia, it was a gut-deep wrongness.
She stood on a rooftop ledge overlooking the city, the night wind plucking at her dark suit. Her sources were dry. Police bands were quiet on the subject. Hospital admissions showed nothing. It was like Gwen had dissolved into the humid August air.
But Felicia knew Gwen. Knew the tells. Knew that beneath the spandex and responsibility was a girl who burned through energy bars like they were going out of style, who’d complain about backaches from the arc of her swing, who’d been… different, the last time they’d crossed paths. Softer. Slower. Distracted.
Her initial sweep of Gwen’s usual haunts—the clock tower, the old art college, even her dad’s place—had turned up nothing but dust and worry. So Felcia went lower. Into the pulse.
She dropped into the alley behind a dive bar in Kensington, the air thick with the smell of spilled beer and regret. A man in a stained denim jacket was nursing a cigarette and a bruised ego.
“Heard you got your clock cleaned by the Bride in Black last month,” Felicia purred, materializing from the shadows.
The man jumped, his cigarette tumbling. “Jesus, Cat! Don’t do that.”
“I’m looking for her. Where’d she go?”
“She didn’t ‘go’ nowhere. She just… stopped showing up. Mid-fight. It was weird.” He fumbled for another cigarette. “Had me pinned, right? Then she just… froze. Hunched over. Let go. I ain’t one to look a gift horse, you know? I scrammed.”
“Hunched over?” Felicia’s interest sharpened.
“Like a cramp or somethin’. Grabbed her stomach. It was freaky.”
Stomach. The word stuck. Felicia left him to his nicotine.
Her next stop was a network of snitches who lived in the subway grate ecosystem. A woman with a face like weathered leather and eyes that missed nothing sold her loosies and information.
“The Spider?” The woman rasped, lighting her own cigarette. “Yeah. Saw her. Weeks back. Down in the tunnels by the old 86th Street maintenance spur. Looked off. Clumsy. Not her usual floaty self. She was with someone.”
“Who?”
“Dunno. Big guy. Normal-looking. Not a cape. He was… helping her. Or she was leaning on him. Hard to tell.”
A lead. A thread.
Felicia spent the next two nights mapping the tunnels, a ghost in the dripping dark. She found the maintenance spur. It was quiet, abandoned. But there, scuffed in the grime near a service ladder leading up to a street grate, was a partial footprint. Size eleven, work boot. And next to it, a faint, strange impression in the damp—a rounded, heavy mark, as if a giant beach ball had been set down. She knelt, her gloved fingers hovering over it.
A cold drip from the ceiling landed on her neck. She looked up. The grate above led to a sidewalk. To a neighborhood.
Alex’s apartment was a cocoon of low light and lower sound. The only illumination came from the buzzing neon sign of the bodega across the street, painting the room in stripes of garish red and sickly blue. The fan by the bed whirred, pushing around air that was permanently warm, thick with the scent of skin, of milk, of sex.
Gwen floated in a sea of her own making. The frantic, clawing need of before was now a manageable tide, ebbing and flowing with a predictable rhythm. Alex fed it. He was methodical about it, like maintenance. When the hollow feeling began to gnaw, he’d see it in her eyes, in the way her hands would wander to the colossal curve of her stomach. He’d put down his book or his phone, unbuckle his jeans, and fill the void.
It was transaction. It was function. It was peace.
She was gargantuan. Movement was a theory. Getting from the bed to the bathroom, six feet away, was an expedition that required planning, grunting, and Alex’s bracing arm under her back. Her breasts, heavy and perpetually damp, strained against the stretched fabric of a grey tank top. Dark, visible veins mapped the surface of her belly, a universe under a too-tight skin.
She was tracing one of these silvery stretch marks when her spider-sense flickered.
It was a faint, dull thrum at the base of her skull, a ghost of its former self. For weeks, it had been silent, buried under layers of fat and fluid and contentment. Now, it buzzed, a low-wattage warning.
She froze, her finger stopping on a ridge of stretched skin.
Across the room, Alex looked up from his phone. “What?”
“Something…” she murmured, listening to the feeling. It wasn’t danger. Not immediate, sharp danger. It was… proximity. Familiarity. A presence skirting the edges of her dulled world.
“Something what?”
Before she could form an answer, a shadow detached itself from the fire escape outside the window. It was sleek, fluid, and silent. It crouched on the rusty platform, peering through the grimy glass.
The Black Cat’s masked face was pressed against the pane, her eyes wide with a mixture of shock and dawning horror.
“Oh, my god,” Felicia’s voice was muffled by the glass but crystal clear in the room’s stillness.
Gwen’s heart stuttered. A flood of emotions—shame, fear, a bizarre defensive pride—surged through her. She instinctively tried to pull a sheet over her body, but it was futile. The sheer scale of her was impossible to conceal. She was the crime scene.
Alex was on his feet in an instant, his body tensing. “Who the hell is that?”
“It’s… it’s a friend,” Gwen whispered, the word tasting strange in her mouth.
Felicia didn’t wait for an invitation. Her claws dug into the window frame, and with a screech of protesting metal, she forced the old latch and slid the window up. She slipped into the room like smoke, landing in a crouch.
The atmosphere curdled. Felicia straightened up, her gaze sweeping the room: the mountain of laundry, the empty protein shakes, the bed that looked like a biological event, and finally, settling on Gwen. Her eyes, visible behind the mask, did a slow, painful journey from Gwen’s swollen face, down the staggering shelf of her breasts, to the planet of her stomach dominating the bed.
“Gwen.” The name was a prayer and a curse.
“Felicia,” Gwen breathed back. She tried for a smile. It felt like a crack in dry mud.
Alex stepped between them, his posture aggressively casual. “You need to leave.”
Felicia didn’t even look at him. Her focus was laser-locked on Gwen. “What is this, Gwen? What’s going on?” Her voice cracked. “People are looking for you. I’ve been looking for you.”
“I’m… I’m okay,” Gwen said, and the lie was so pathetic it hung in the warm air, obvious and sad.
“‘Okay’?” Felicia took a step closer, her nose wrinkling at the close, organic smell of the room. “You’re a prisoner in a… a fucking bio-pod. Who is this guy?” She finally flicked her eyes to Alex, a look of pure venom.
“He helps me,” Gwen said quickly, a note of pleading in her voice. “He… takes care of me.”
“It doesn’t look like care, Gwen. It looks like a science project.” Felicia’s gloved hand gestured weakly at the vast expanse of her. “What has he done to you?”
“He hasn’t done anything!” Gwen’s voice rose, surprising herself with its force. A defensive heat flushed through her. “This is me. This is what I needed. You don’t understand.”
“I understand that Spider-Woman is gone, and in her place is…” Felicia trailed off, struggling for words. “This. In a shit-hole apartment with some… some nobody.”
Alex’s face darkened. “Get out.”
“Not without her.” Felicia’s tone turned to steel. “Gwen, come on. We’re getting you out of here. To a hospital, to your dad, anywhere.”
Gwen shook her head, a slow, heavy movement. The idea of moving, of being exposed in the cold, sterile light of a hospital, of explaining this to her father, was more terrifying than any villain she’d ever faced. Here, she was safe. Here, the void was kept at bay. “No.”
“What do you mean, ‘no’?”
“I mean I’m staying.” Gwen’s voice firmed. She placed her hands on her stomach, a protective, grounding gesture. “I’m where I need to be. You should go.”
Felicia stared at her. The friend she knew—fierce, independent, stubborn—was buried under layers of alien flesh and stranger submission. A deep, cold fear settled in Felicia’s stomach. This wasn’t mind control. This was something worse. This was consent.
“You’re not in your right mind,” Felicia said softly.
“I’ve never been clearer,” Gwen replied, and she believed it.
Felicia looked from Gwen’s resolute, glazed eyes to Alex’s stony, possessive stance. She was outnumbered in a way she’d never been before. She took a slow step back towards the window.
“This isn’t over,” she said, her voice low and dangerous, aimed at Alex. “I see what this is. And I’m coming back.”
“Don’t,” Gwen whispered.
But Felicia was already gone, melting back into the night, leaving the window open. A cool draft cut through the room’s warmth, making Gwen shiver.
Alex walked over and slammed the window shut, locking it with a definitive click. He turned back to her, his face unreadable in the neon stripes. “She’s a problem.”
Gwen was already sinking back into the pillows, the brief spike of adrenaline leaving her exhausted. The hollow feeling was returning, a faint ache in her depths. She looked at him, her eyes wide and needy.
“She won’t be,” Gwen murmured, her attention already turning inward, to the emptiness that needed filling. “Just… come here. Please.”
The outside world, with its questions and its judgments, receded again. The pulse of the city faded. All that mattered was the man moving towards the bed, and the profound, silencing fullness he alone could provide.