Chapter 5: Rooftop Expansion
The rooftop gravel bit into her knees through the thin, torn fabric. Gwen sucked in a breath, the cold city air sharp in her lungs, and tried to will her legs to work. She planted one palm flat against a vent casing, the metal shuddering with a deep, mechanical heartbeat. The other hand went beneath the impossible weight of her belly, a futile attempt to lift what was essentially a part of her own body now.
She pushed.
A hot, liquid shift deep inside her abdomen made her gasp. It wasn’t a kick. It was a whole, slow, tectonic roll, a repositioning of mass that made her stomach lurch up against her diaphragm. The movement was followed by a sickening, internal squelch—a sound of fluid and pressure rearranging itself. Her already-stretched skin tightened another agonizing degree, the shiny black spandex of her makeshift suit giving a pained creak.
“Oh, come on,” she whispered, her voice swallowed by the wind. “Not now. Just let me stand up.”
Her body, as ever, did not listen.
The deep ache in her breasts, a constant since the bank, intensified into a seizing, urgent pain. It was a familiar prelude, a terrible pressure building behind her nipples. She fumbled for the clasps of the old suit vest, her fingers clumsy and cold. She got one open. The other stuck.
It didn’t matter.
With a soft, wet tear, the strained fabric of the yoga shirt gave way completely. Two powerful, hot streams arced out into the night, hissing against the cold gravel and painting the side of the rooftop HVAC unit in stark, white streaks. The release was a relief so profound it left her dizzy, head bowed, as the last of the pressure drained away into a weak, dripping trickle. The wind carried the scent—sweet, metallic, animal—back into her face.
Before the shame could even register, the second wave hit.
It started in her sacrum, a deep, granular popping that vibrated up her spine. Then her pelvis seemed to come apart. A series of loud, dry cracks echoed in the empty rooftop space, each one a lightning bolt of pain firing from her core to the tips of her toes. Her hips, already widened from the bank, ground outward with a ruthless, biological inevitability. She felt the suit’s last intact seam along her hip tear open with a sound like a sail ripping.
She cried out, a raw, animal sound lost in the city’s hum. Her legs spasmed, buckling completely. She collapsed forward, catching herself on her hands and knees, her vast belly hanging ponderously beneath her, almost brushing the gravel. The world narrowed to the cold bite of stone on her palms, the fire in her joints, the crushing, breath-stealing weight of her own growth.
She stayed like that for a long minute, just breathing, trying not to vomit. Each inhale was a negotiation. Her sweat, cold now, mingled with the milk drying on her skin. She was a ruin. A leaking, broken, expanding ruin.
A deep, guttural groan rose from her gut, bypassing her brain entirely. Hunger. Not a suggestion, but a primal command. Her metabolism, supercharged and fueling this explosive change, had burned through everything. It was an emptiness that felt like violence.
“Okay,” she muttered to the gravel. “Okay. Food. That’s… that’s a thing I can do.”
Crawling was the only option. Every attempt to get a foot under herself sent a nauseating bolt of instability through her new, unfamiliar geometry. So she crawled. One hand, one knee, dragging the immense cargo of her body toward the roof’s edge. The rough texture grated her skin raw. She focused on the rhythm: scrape, drag, heave. Her phone, still in its pouch, dug into her hip with every movement.
She made it to the low parapet. With a grunt that ripped from her throat, she hauled herself up enough to peer over. The street six stories below was quiet, just a few late-night cars. A flickering neon sign halfway down the block advertised a 24-hour diner. The Golden Griddle. The word ‘Griddle’ did something to her. It promised grease, carbs, protein. A stack of pancakes the size of a manhole cover.
It was maybe sixty yards away. A distance she could have covered in three elegant swings ten months ago. Now it looked like a marathon.
Her Spider-Sense, dulled by exhaustion and the all-consuming physicality of her condition, flickered. Not danger. Just a static-like awareness of the immense space between her and the ground. A calculation of weak points, of stressed masonry, of the terrible, terminal physics of her current mass.
“Don’t think,” she ordered herself. “Just move.”
She swung one leg over the parapet, then the other, her belly pressing hard against the cold concrete. She found her web-shooters, the familiar wrist devices feeling ridiculously small and delicate on her swollen wrists. She pointed a trembling hand at a sturdy-looking flagpole bracket on the diner’s facade.
The web-line shot out, true and strong. The tensile strength was, thankfully, one thing her pregnancy hadn’t messed with. She tugged. It held.
“Alright, babies,” she breathed, one hand cradling the underside of her belly. “Hang on tight. Mom’s gonna be… really ungraceful.”
She pushed off.
The swing was nothing like it used to be. There was no soaring arc, no exhilarating whip through the canyon of buildings. It was a grim, plunging descent, a controlled fall where she was a prisoner of gravity and bulk. The web-line groaned under the load. She hurtled towards the diner wall, knees drawn up as much as they could be, and hit the bricks with a thud that knocked the wind from her lungs. She clung there, spider-like, for a second, feeling the vibration of a vent fan through the stone.
She descended the rest of the way web-by-web, a slow, laborious climb down. Her arms burned. By the time her feet touched the grimy pavement of the alley beside the diner, she was trembling with exertion. She leaned against the damp brick, the smell of old grease and garbage washing over her. She was here.
She looked down at herself. The outfit was indecent. Torn, wet, stained, and stretched to obscenity over a body that no longer felt like her own. She couldn’t walk in like this. But the hunger was a screaming void inside her, overriding dignity.
Shucking off the ruined mask, she used a few short bursts of webbing to awkwardly bind the most egregiously torn sections closed around her hips and chest. It formed a crisscross, makeshift harness of white filament over the black fabric. It wasn’t good. It was arguably worse. But it held.
She took a deep, steadying breath, smoothed her sweat-damp hair back from her face, and pushed open the diner’s side door.
The warmth hit her first, a thick blanket of air smelling of coffee, bacon, and bleach. The fluorescent lights were painfully bright. A few bleary-eyed patrons glanced up from their booths—a taxi driver, a guy in janitorial blues, a couple nursing mugs in silence. Their eyes lingered on her for a beat too long. On the strange, webbed-up clothing, the shocking swell of her pregnancy, the sheer, undeniable mess of her.
Gwen ignored them, beelining for a corner booth as far from the windows as possible. She slid in with a sigh that was almost a whimper, the vinyl creaking loudly under her new weight. She took up the whole side of the booth, her belly pressed against the Formica table.
A waitress with a tired smile and a name tag that read “Donna” approached, her eyes doing a quick, professional scan of the situation. She didn’t blink at the webbing.
“Rough night, hon?” she asked, her voice raspy from cigarettes.
“You could say that,” Gwen managed, her voice hoarse.
“Coffee?”
“Milk. Whole. A lot of it. And a menu. Actually, just… bring me two of the biggest breakfast platters you have. Extra everything. Potatoes. Bacon. Eggs. Pancakes on the side.”
Donna’s eyebrows rose, but she just nodded, scribbling. “Comin’ up. You look like you need it.”
Alone, Gwen let her head thud back against the seat. The quiet clatter of the kitchen, the low hum of a radio, the hiss of the grill—it was all so normal. So human. She placed her hands on the taut dome of her stomach, feeling the relentless, eager movement within. The growth spurts were slowing, the pain subsiding into a deep, pervasive ache. For now.
The food would help. It had to. Then she’d figure out how to get home, how to explain the state of her suit, how to be a person again. One step at a time. One greasy, life-saving plate at a time.
Her phone buzzed again on the table. She flipped it over. A news alert.
‘Spider-Woman’s Messy Intervention Thwarts Bank Heist.’
Below the headline was a blurry, distant photo taken from a phone. It showed a figure on a rooftop ledge, unmistakably her, silhouetted against the neon skyline, her form swollen and distorted.
She put the phone face down. The milk in her glass arrived, cold and white and perfect. She drank it in one long, desperate gulp, and waited for the food to come, staring out at the dark, unsleeping city beyond the glass.