Chapter 6

Miles POV

Following his meeting with the Kingpin last night, Miles had asked if he could keep the pictures of the Spider-Woman that had been shown to him, claiming that he wanted them for reference material. Assuming that Miles had simply wanted to examine the images closer in preparation for his new mission, Mr. Murdock had generously allowed him to take them, but that wasn't quite what Miles had in mind when he'd made his request.

He'd stayed up late last night examining the images that were currently in his backpack, trying to memorize every detail not for his mission, but for what he was doing now, right after the school day had ended, trying to recreate those images of Spider-Woman in his sketchbook. With the new reference material he'd acquired last night, he was now drawing a multitude of all-new images and poses to join the ones that he'd done just after he'd first met the spider-themed vigilante.

By now, he had several pages dedicated solely to her, but he couldn't bring himself to stop. In the Spider-Woman, he almost found what he felt was a kindred spirit. When Mr. Murdock had asked Miles to relate to her, he'd internally been thinking that in some ways, he already did. Whoever was beneath that mask was strangely similar to him in several ways. Like him, she seemed to be young and fairly inexperienced but still skilled and possessing a natural talent for the job.

As much as Miles had been upset when he'd seen what Spider-Woman had done to his uncle's arm, he had also internally felt rather impressed by what she'd accomplished. Miles had seen his uncle as the Prowler in action, even sparred with him on occasion, and he knew that Uncle Aaron was no easy enemy to defeat, yet Spider-Woman had managed to take him down hard the first time she'd encountered him, earning Miles' respect before he'd even met her himself. And when he did meet her… she'd been even more spectacular, even if he did win by quite a large margin.

In fact, not that he would ever admit it, but Miles felt that he may actually be developing a small crush on the heroine… Still, it was better than him having a crush on-

In the middle of his latest drawing, Miles' marker came to a sudden stop as he abruptly realized that his drawing was not turning out as he'd expected. At some point after he'd turned to a new page and begun drawing a simple picture of Spider-Woman, just standing in place with her arms crossed over her chest, he had accidentally started drawing a different girl. He hadn't finished the coloring yet, but the outline was in place, and there was no mistaking those curls of hair that came down just to her neck, or the way that she always liked to tuck it behind her right ear but allowed it to hang freely on the left (not that he'd ever noticed, of course). Nor could he confuse those eyes where he'd miraculously managed to capture the sparkle inside them when she looked at him, or that lopsided smirk that barely tugged at the corners of her mouth like she was holding back her laugh at a hilarious joke, as if she knew that her smile was too infectious to be out in the open.

His eyes wide in shock, Miles recognized the figure that he'd been drawing as his best friend, Gwen Stacy, and muttered to himself, "Oh, estoy en problemas…"

"Why are you in trouble?" came a familiar voice from a few feet in front of Miles, and his face blanched before he snapped his sketchbook closed and looked up in deepening horror to see the real Gwen, standing in front of him with a hand on her hip as she looked at him curiously.

Quickly thinking up an excuse, Miles said, "I, uh… I was going to ask you if you wanted to hang out over the weekend, but I just remembered that I'm gonna be busy."

Leaning against the wall next to him, Gwen sighed and said, "Quite the friendship we have, huh? We both always seem to be busy."

"We did talk about that before," Miles defended, not wanting to raise suspicion but also hoping that she wasn't having second thoughts about their friendship.

Nodding slowly in acceptance, Gwen said in a resigned sort of way, "Yeah. But we do need to find some time when we're not both busy. I need to do some stuff over the weekend too, but… Tell you what, we can text each other. If we find a break in our weekend plans, we'll text each other and decide on somewhere we can go to relax. If my weekend is as productive as I'm hoping it'll be, I don't know about you, but I'll bet I could really use some relaxation at the end of it."

You have no idea, Miles thought to himself, but out loud he said, "Sounds good. I'll keep you posted."

Line Break

Gwen POV

Perched on a ledge on the 61st floor of the Chrysler Building, her favorite lookout point, late at night and wearing her brand-new suit, Gwen pulled out her phone and began to browse the web, searching for news about any sort of advanced technology that had been created in New York lately.

This was her new method for searching for the Prowler. Both times she'd encountered one of them, the Prowler had been stealing some sort of technology, first from Roxxon and then from Oscorp. Maybe it was part of how they made their own gadgets, or maybe it was just something for them to sell to criminals willing to pay a hefty sum or even rival companies. Either way, by now Gwen believed that the best way for her to track the Prowler was to track his targets instead.

Unfortunately, to her frustration, she quickly found herself unable to find any company in New York that had recently created any sort of important technological advancement. "Seriously?" she muttered to herself. "This is New York City, and no one is working on a… super-laser or something?"

Of course, she couldn't completely rule out the possibility that Prowler would be going after a smaller score or even changing his usual focus for the night. The news didn't mention everything, after all, and she had no idea how he usually picked his targets.

Sighing to herself, Gwen idly stood up and walked over the edge of the building and stuck her feet to the wall so that she was standing horizontally, then leaned back and pressed her back against the wall, trying to get comfortable. She had a feeling that she may be in for a long night. What had she been thinking, coming out here and hoping to catch the Prowler red-handed on the first night of her search? "It beats doing my homework," Gwen mumbled, trying to cheer herself up.

Suddenly, her phone vibrated. As she'd set her phone to notify her of important news updates on pretty much every technological company in New York that she could find, Gwen immediately pulled her phone up once again to look at the notification, but sighed in disappointment when she saw that it was just a text from Miles. Not that she wasn't pleased to hear from her friend, but it was a bit annoying to get her hopes up for something else only for those hopes to be dashed.

Still, Miles' text was a welcome distraction from her current predicament. Opening her messaging app, she read what Miles had sent her.

MilesInSilence: What r u doing?

Gwen looked down at the busy street hundreds of meters beneath her, a height that could easily kill her even with her powers, all while a strong wind whipped at her face and she held onto the wall with merely the sticky fibers that covered her entire body. She was currently in a position that most people would probably have a heart attack trying to replicate even if they had a rope.

Gwen: Just relaxing. You?

MilesInSilence: Getting in my steps for the day, climbing a building.

Gwen: How many flights?

MilesInSilence: Flights?

Gwen: Of stairs.

MilesInSilence: I'm not exactly counting.

Fair point, Gwen had to admit. No one counts stairs. But she had been looking for an excuse to prolong their conversation, seeing as her night was starting to look maddeningly uneventful. This made Miles' next text even more painful.

MilesInSilence: Hold on, my mom's calling me. brb.

Gwen sighed to herself and pocketed her phone before laying her head back against the wall. At this rate, she was going to be busy/bored all weekend and probably still wouldn't find Prowler. Well, tonight was a bust anyway. Maybe she could get her dad to let her do her homework on the roof of their apartment building, somewhere that she could bring her penguin and listen to the police broadcasts.

She was just about to get up and make her way back towards home when suddenly a voice came from above her. "I hoped I'd find you up here."

The voice was familiar and sent a chill up Gwen's spine as the deep, modulated tones reached her ears. Immediately after she'd recognized the voice, Gwen's eyes widened and she jumped off the side of the building, falling for a few seconds before she stuck herself to the wall again so that she could get some distance on Prowler.

Turning around before she even touched the building's surface so that she could look up towards the source of the voice, Gwen quickly took note of the sight that greeted her. The speaker had been the younger, new Prowler that had defeated her at Oscorp, yet she was surprised to see that even as she dodged away from him, he didn't move from where he was. In fact, he almost seemed to be relaxing, slouching lazily on top of one of the building's eagle sculptures with his legs propped up in front of himself, resting his chin on the knuckles of one of his clawed gauntlets while he watched her jump away from him.

He probably thinks I'm scared, Gwen thought to herself angrily. After their first meeting hadn't ended well for her, this Prowler probably didn't think too highly of her ability to defend herself. Fine. She could use that fact to her advantage.

Standing horizontally on the wall and aiming her wrists up at Prowler, Gwen rapidly fired numerous small balls of webbing at the dark figure, trying to stun and/or restrain him. To her annoyance, however, he just moved his free hand into the path of the webs and caught all of them in his palm, then stood up with a sigh and used his other hand's claws to tear the webbing off of himself before he cast it aside like it was nothing.

Not giving him a chance to counter, Gwen shot a web line at the wall above him and pulled herself upwards to kick him in the face before bouncing off of his chest and shooting a second web line right over his shoulder, then pulled herself in again with her arm pulled back in preparation to punch him, but one of his hands suddenly shot out and seized her by the throat to stop her dead before she could reach him.

Holding her out over the empty abyss beneath them, Prowler growled, "Could you, like, not do that for a second?"

"Well, I'm not exactly trying to make this easy for you!" Gwen gasped out before Prowler spun around and tossed her back onto the ledge. However, Gwen didn't even allow her feet to touch the ground, instead just bouncing off the ground with her hands towards the wall, then using her feet to launch herself off the wall and tackle Prowler off the edge. As they fell together, Prowler grunted as he fought to extricate himself from her grip, but Gwen held on tightly, needing to resort to using her sticking powers to keep ahold of him.

Prowler suddenly directed his legs downwards, and then a burst of magenta light from beneath his feet launched them both back up to the ledge from where they had fallen. He then firmly grabbed Gwen by the wrists and used the strength of his gauntlets to overpower her sticking and roughly pull himself out of her grip, then pulled his legs up to kick her away, blasting her into the wall with whatever sort of emitters were on the bottoms of his feet.

Reacting quickly, Gwen reached out her hands to desperately stick them to the floor before her body hit the wall, both to avoid damaging the famous tower and also because hitting that wall would just really suck. Prowler landed on his feet right in front of Gwen, the eyes of his mask narrowing at her in apprehension as she climbed back to her feet, but before he could attack her again, Gwen held out a warning hand towards him and asked, "I don't suppose we could take this somewhere else? It's just, this building is kinda famous and I really don't want to get blamed for it getting damaged just because you attacked me."

Gwen had a habit of trying to enter some sort of conversation or banter during a fight with her enemies, but they usually didn't respond. She certainly hadn't imagined that the Prowler would be among the few exceptions, given his usual "dark and silent" behavior, so she was surprised when after his eyes narrowed even further into the thinnest of white slits, he said, "I attacked you? Uh, no."

Confused, Gwen slightly lowered her guard and tilted her head as she asked, "No?"

"We both know that it was you who attacked me," Prowler insisted.

Gwen opened her mouth to respond, then realized that, technically, it could be argued that she struck first by shooting webbing at him and kicking him in the face. Scoffing as she threw her hands up in exasperation, Gwen tried to excuse herself, "Well… I mean, you just showed up out of nowhere and tried to get the drop on me!"

"If I wanted to get the drop on you, do you really think I would've announced my presence like that?" Prowler questioned like it was obvious.

Folding her arms over her chest defiantly, Gwen said, "Uh, excuse me, but which one of us has tried to kill the other in the past?"

"I didn't try to kill you."

"My crushed bones are evidence to the contrary."

"You know what's better evidence? You're still alive."

Gwen huffed in annoyance, but she had to admit that that was a pretty good point. He had technically spared her after their first encounter. She may not like it, but if he had chosen to kill her after breaking her so badly, she couldn't possibly have stopped him. "Fine, I attacked you, but only preemptively before you could attack me," Gwen admitted.

"I wasn't going to attack you," Prowler said.

"Riiiight, my mistake. The claws were obviously for a pool party later tonight," Gwen said sarcastically, not believing him.

Holding up his hands and retracting his claws to show that he meant no harm, Prowler said, "Look, I think you and I got off on the wrong foot. And yeah, that's largely my fault, but now I think that we actually have a lot in common."

Still doubtful, Gwen asked, "Yeah? Like what?"

"We're both vigilantes in a city that hates us even though it doesn't know us," Prowler explained. "We can both run on walls. We're fast, strong, apparently out of our minds, and probably both stay out way past curfew. Yeah, that's another thing I noticed. Most people we fight probably don't really notice how small we both are. We move too fast, too much. But when we're standing still like this… I'm willing to bet you're like me, just a teenager that gets a real thrill from being in over my head."

Annoyed that he had managed to figure out her approximate age range, something that none of her previous enemies had ever done, Gwen said, "Yeah, and I bet you're gonna make me some offer about how 'Together, we can rule New York!' Hate to break it to you, Cloud City, but I've heard that one before."

"Why would I want to rule the city?" Prowler asked. "I don't care about power or authority. I'm just out to protect my home, and I think you are too."

Gwen scoffed and said, "We're nothing alike. I'm trying to do some real good. You… You're just a criminal. And I stop criminals."

Putting a hand on his chest in mock pain, Prowler said, "You wound me. 'Just a criminal?' Clearly, you didn't do your homework."

Bad choice of words, Gwen thought to herself as her mind suddenly got distracted by the image of her week's worth of unfinished homework back in her bedroom at home. However, she quickly shoved that thought aside and instead remained silent as she listened to what Prowler said as he began to pace in front of her.

"Roxxon's clean power source I stole? Not nearly as clean as they claimed. Anyone exposed to it for too long would develop a fatal sickness. The man who developed it died trying to destroy it," Prowler explained. "And Norman Osborn's electrode riot shield? He was selling it to foreign nation terrorists and pretending that the weapons were just stolen, profiting off selling to both sides. The man's committing war crimes, but he's too rich to get caught. Trust me, both Roxxon and Oscorp deserved a bit of misery."

This was all new information to Gwen. She'd never heard any of this, nor had she actually cared to research any of the things that Prowler had stolen. She'd figured that all she needed to know was that a criminal was running free and needed to be stopped.

Of course, he could be lying. Nothing suggested that he could be trusted to be telling the truth, except for perhaps the fact that she couldn't imagine why he would bother lying about something like this.

Gwen took a deep breath and said, "Look, even if I believed you - which I'm not saying I do! - you're still a criminal that needs to be brought to justice."

"You know that the police think the same thing about you, right?" Prowler asked. "This city isn't kind to people like us, but that doesn't stop us from doing what we believe in because people need us. How about a deal? You can join me on one of my missions, but this time you'll have the full story. Then you can decide what kind of person I am."

When she eventually managed to process what Prowler had said, Gwen looked at him in confusion and asked, "Wait, are you- Are you asking me to help you steal something?"

"Something that needs to be stolen," Prowler assured her. "You've been trying to protect this city for months, and this is a perfect-"

"Let me just stop you right there," Gwen said as she waved a hand to cut him off. She then glared at him and added, "I don't care why you claim that you do this. You're still a thief, stealing from people that can't stop you and hurting anyone that tries to get in your way. You dropped a building on me!"

"Okay, that's a bit of an exaggeration. And I said I was sorry!" Prowler tried to excuse himself.

"No, you didn't!" Gwen argued.

"Okay, well then, I'm sorry!" Prowler hurriedly said.

"Oh, thanks. Now it's all better!" Gwen said sarcastically. Before he could say anything else to try to change her opinion of him, Gwen held up a hand to stop him and continued, "I don't care about your apologies or your supposedly moral crusade. All I care about is that you're the bad guy, so I will never work with you. I'm just here to take you down."

And with that, Gwen leapt into action, shooting a web line at Prowler's chest and quickly pulling herself to him with her foot aimed to kick him in the face. However, one of his hands abruptly shot up and caught her foot in midair just before it hit him. Oh, come on!, Gwen just barely had time to think before Prowler spun all the way around, pulling her with him, and threw her back towards the wall. Even though this throw had been noticeably softer than before, not enough force behind it to damage the building when she hit it, Gwen once again had to use her sticky fingers to attach herself to the wall rather than smack her face against it, and then she hurriedly looked up worriedly as she felt her Spider-Sense tingle in warning while she was still recovering from the near miss.

She quickly pulled herself off the wall and turned to face Prowler once more in preparation for whatever was about to happen, and saw him holding out one of his gauntlets towards her before he quickly clenched his hand into a fist. From the sides all the way around his gauntlet, at least a dozen small, pointed shapes like arrowheads glowing a bright magenta hovered upwards to float around the wrist. Then, in an instant, all of them launched themselves towards Gwen at the same time.

Expecting to need to dodge them as individual projectiles, Gwen crouched and prepared to flip her way through all of them, creating a simulation of what was about to happen in her mind, ending with her giving Prowler a powerful uppercut. However, she was caught off guard when just before they reached her, all of the arrowheads spread outwards to avoid her and blinked in unison as they emitted lines of glowing light to connect themselves to one another before forming inwards to create a solid wall.

Gwen's eyes widened as she recognized the new shape, and she tried to dodge out of the way a fraction of a second before it hit her but was too late, and the glowing net wrapped itself tightly around her as the arrowheads along the edges impaled themselves into the wall behind her to keep her trapped. Immediately, Gwen began to struggle and writhe, attempting to push the net off of her, but it only seemed to get tighter the more she fought it, pressing her arms and legs down tightly and keeping her from being able to use most of her strength.

Meanwhile, Prowler lowered his fist and said apologetically, "I didn't want things to be like this, but I can't let you take me in. I don't really wanna fight you either. This net will turn off in an hour. Maybe you should use that time to rethink my offer."

With that said, Prowler turned to walk off, shaking his head in disappointment and muttering to himself, and stepped off the ledge of the building as easily as a normal person may walk down the stairs, disappearing from sight.

Once he was gone, Gwen continued to struggle against her bonds, desperately wanting to break free and go after Prowler before he could escape yet again, even though she knew deep down that it was already hopeless. If this one was anything like the first Prowler she'd fought (and in her experience, he was even better), he was already long gone.

Not to mention, this net he'd created was extremely effective at keeping her in place. It seemed to be made out of some sort of hard-light, and being a rather gifted physics student, Gwen knew full well that hard-light was incredibly tough, at least when created properly, and judging by the state of the rest of Prowler's tech, he probably knew what he was doing when he made it. If he had said that it would disappear in an hour, then that was probably exactly what was going to happen.

Gwen looked around at the net trapping her and said, "So this is what it feels like when I web someone up. Gotta say, not a fan. This guy's going to make me feel guilty about how I do things." Unfortunately, Gwen's attempts to amuse herself were all in vain as her jokes faded into the wind, never to be heard by anyone. She was unable to move her head much, but her eyes looked left and right as she asked, "Anyone? Anyone at all? Does no one like a good joke anymore? Come on, anyone?"

Suddenly, with a soft hooting, a pigeon flew down from above to land on top of Gwen's head, perching itself comfortably as she couldn't move to shake it off, and began to snuggle up into the fabric of her hood. Her face falling in annoyance, Gwen muttered, "Anyone except you."

After this, Gwen managed to hold out another few minutes. She waited and waited, unable to move and no longer even trying to fill the silence with her words, lest the universe should take it as an opportunity to make her situation even more miserable. Eventually, however, she simply broke.

"All right, that's it!" she abruptly snapped out, then began to push her body against the net to the best of her ability. Very slowly, she felt the net begin to pull away from the wall, even as she could also feel it tightening itself back down to try to keep her in place. Her muscles strained from the effort, but as she began to feel them weaken, wanting to take a rest, she growled and forced herself to continue pushing, knowing that stopping for a single moment would allow the net to shove her back down and rob her of all of her progress.

The net continued to be pushed outwards by Gwen's superpowered strength, and even though her progress was a mere crawl, it was progress nonetheless. She kept pushing and pushing, and just as her muscles finally felt like they were about to give out entirely, Gwen shoved her shoulder against the surface of the net and let out a mighty yell as she used the small amount of space that she'd made for her legs to run forwards.

Unfortunately, she'd put a bit too much power into that last push, and though she succeeded in pushing the net off of herself, the entire hard-light structure faded out of existence the moment that it was loosened and disengaged from the wall, allowing her momentum to carry her in running headlong off the edge of the building.

For a moment after freeing herself, Gwen looked down below in shock, but then recognized the familiar feeling of falling and instinctively shot a web line upwards to catch herself. Then, after deeply inhaling and exhaling a few times to get her breath back after what had been one of the harder workouts she'd had to do since getting her powers, Gwen looked out over the city and considered trying to go after Prowler once more, but soon just sighed and told herself, "Maybe that's enough excitement for one night. I've still got two more days in the weekend… And I really need to finish my homework."

Seriously, though, Gwen thought to herself, is there anything more annoying than underestimating someone again after you told yourself not to? She'd thought that she would be able to get the drop on Prowler this time instead of the other way around, yet he'd been running circles around her all night. First, he'd found her and snuck up on her while she was trying to find him.

She should've assumed that a guy called "the Prowler" would be some sort of hunter himself, but in her defense, she had never expected herself to be the prey in this situation. Plenty of her superpowered enemies tried to track her down to destroy her, but she hadn't expected it of a sneak thief. Of course, Prowler hadn't exactly been trying to attack her…

Now that she thought of it, why hadn't her Spider-Sense alerted her to his arrival before he'd announced himself? Her Spider-Sense could warn her of bad things happening even when they weren't happening to her. Even if Prowler hadn't been there with hostile intentions, her Spider-Sense should've been able to feel if there was an enemy nearby. It was usually very sensitive and reacted to anything even remotely unfamiliar or potentially unfriendly, even street food! Maybe he had something that blocked her Spider-Sense from- But no, it had always worked whenever he actually attacked her. Hmm…

Deciding that it was a problem for another day, Gwen moved on to critiquing her other mistakes. Her biggest one seemed to be trying her old moves. The first Prowler had been able to instantly cut through her webbing, which had been new and challenging, but the younger one was just too fast for her in general. It was like he didn't even need to think, he just moved. Not only could he react to her webs, but he could also counter each of her attacks with one of his own. In fact, Gwen was annoyed to admit to herself that after a year of being Spider-Woman, she had never dealt with an opponent that matched her as well as this new Prowler, and he didn't even have powers!

Finally, she had been foolish to underestimate his wrist darts. She had never seen that net thing before, not from either Prowler, and now it made her worry to consider what other tricks this guy had up his sleeves. Sadly, she imagined that there was really only one way to find out.

A/N: Alright, so I know that many of you will be wanting to know why Miles didn't recognize the new designs of her costume. Now, I could just say that Gwen wasn't very specific about her designs when getting his help (which is true), but I'd also like to point out the simple fact that many of you may already know, which is that any variants of Miles and Gwen and every other Spider-person share exactly half of a brain cell across the entire multiverse. In the words of Spider-Man himself, "Just because I had Spider-Sense doesn't mean I had common sense." Also, Miles has no reason to believe that Gwen would lie to him and is too trusting to doubt her. If he thought he recognized the design of Spider-Woman's new suit, he'd probably think something along the lines of "Hey, that looks kinda familiar… But nah. Gwen said it was for her dad's motorcycling jacket." However, to those of you who were expecting the big confrontation from this meeting, fear not. This moment will certainly come back to bite Miles eventually, but for now, there's still a bit more fun to be had.