Heroes of the Spider-verse: Earth 2
Disclaimer: This story is sort of a vignette fic, and deals with grief a bit.
Earth-2
Mumbai
Gayatri Singh pulled on her mask before she jumped from the rooftop of her college building, freefalling through the air for a while before her wrist swung on instinct, shooting a thread of web that attached to a transmission line, and she used the momentum to swing herself forwards and upwards.
It had been five years since she was bit by that damn spider.
She landed on top of the Mumbai Gate and almost immediately, she heard them… The voices of the pedestrians and tourists who noticed her and even though she usually visited this site on a near daily basis, they never stopped to act surprised on spotting her. The chitchat was quickly accompanied by clicks from their phones and cameras. They treated her as if she was a Bollywood celebrity or something. She wondered if they would regard her with the same splendor if they knew who she really was… a college student with a miserable life.
Gayatri sighed. From all her time hanging out with Pavitr, she had got a good grasp on photography but even an amateur could tell that with the sun on the backdrop, all they could get of her from most angles was a silhouette.
She looked up from the sea of people and saw the Taj Hotel not far away and the statues of Shivaji and Vivekananda in the locality of the Gate.
This entire city, full of history, celebrating legendary freedom fighters who had liberated her country from more than two centuries of colonial oppression… She wondered if she even made a tiny impact on its legacy.
So much struggle, so much pain… Yet evil never stopped.
Their faces changed, but crime and greed plundered their lives repeatedly.
She could deal with that. She could beat up supervillains, apprehend criminals and save people from being mugged…
Except even with all her abilities, she knew she could not stop everything… could not save everyone.
Not all misfortune came through the hands of criminals.
Her father was a man who had always done his part to keep the streets of Mumbai safe, yet his death did not come at the hands of a gun wielding criminal, it creeped up on him like a parasite, draining away everything he was, before ending him. A rare form of cancer, which was detected too late.
She wondered how it could have happened. He took care of his health, exercised regularly, went on morning walks, did not smoke or drink, did not eat all the oily food proven to cause morbidity… Yet he died from a disease that swallowed him up in mere months…
He was a proud man, but in the end, he had to rely on others to even sit up. He was in his late fifties, but with shrunken muscles, baggy eyes, wrinkly skin, and visible bones, as a result of chemotherapy, he had looked as if he was in his nineties.
It killed her to not be able to help him… to keep hoping despite seeing his body wither away every day, yet she had.
She had prayed to every God, asked every doctor for help, and had not spared a thought on expenses.
In the end, he lied in a casket, having died after spending days, hooked to a ventilator…
All those times, she had believed in karma… in God… She was proven wrong…
Life was unfair.
There was no karma.
No one would automatically fix stuff.
There was no one looking after them.
So, when she got her powers, she had been tempted to solely look out for herself. Why should she care for the world when the world had not cared for her father?
All those talks about destiny and "everything happens for a reason" infuriated her to no end.
There was no destiny.
There was no reason.
For nothing could justify the untimely deaths of good people.
But then he came to her life.
Pavitr Prabhakar.
A ray of sunshine in her bleak world.
His optimism and faith made her believe that there was good in the world again.
So, when she saw him and his uncle being cornered by gangsters, she didn't hesitate to save them, though for some reason, she did it from the shadows… Fast enough so that neither Pavitr or his Uncle Bhim saw her as their mysterious savior.
Saving them gave her a purpose again, lifted a weight she didn't realize she had been holding all this time.
Later that night, when she was back in her room, she looked up superpowers and superheroes. All those people who showed up in flashy costumes and saved the day.
From Agni, Nagraj, Tribhanga and the other heroes of Brahmand Rakshak in her own country to the multitude of heroes in America like the Flash, Stargirl and the members of the Justice Society, and those in Paris like Hesperia, Ladybug and Chat Noir. Heck, there were heroes all over the world… Storm, Vixen, Black Panther in Africa. The spandex clad hero teams of Super Sentai and Kamen Riders in Japan. Shang Chi, Dragon Fist, Lady Dragon, and Quake in China.
She had always thought of these heroes as something out of the world. Something that would never concern her.
Yet without even realizing, she had become one of them.
It took her a while but she made her own hero costume using old clothes. She had never been so glad for the brief course she had taken in fashion designing before.
The moment she came out in the open, she became subject to the ire of reporters and supervillains alike.
Spider-Woman, they started calling her.
Pavitr found out her secret and after a month of geeking out about knowing a hero in real life, he started helping, using his knowledge of superheroes, science, and urban legends to making her life a bit easier… to make sure the two sides of her life did not bleed into each other.
She got other allies along the way.
A trio of superheroines with the ability to bend the elements to their wills… Celsius, Maya and Solstice.
The millionaire philanthropist and renowned cryptozoologist Nalin Oberoi, who had often helped her out of tough situations and improved her public image after a slander campaign by J. Jonah Jameson…
And the clairvoyant Madame Web, the only person to know her identity aside from Peter. She appeared with warnings and premonitions, aiding her when she needed it the most.
It took a while, but the moment it seemed that she was getting a hang of her new responsibilities, the unthinkable happened.
Venom.
A mysterious demonic parasite that claimed her. It was a battle for her soul.
She won, but at a hefty cost.
Just before Venom was exorcised and banished into the demon realm, they reached out with its tentacles and pulled Pavitr along with him…
She asked everyone she knew for help.
From the various heroes of the Brahmand Rakshak to Nalin Oberoi's vast contacts in the supernatural community. They all said the same thing. No human soul can survive in the demon realm.
Pavitr suffered a fate worse than death because he tried to help her, and she could do nothing about it.
Just like she could do nothing to help her father.
What was the point of all these powers if she could not help the people she loved?
There are things beyond her control… She knew that… But why must she be the one to suffer always?
Whenever she got a tiny silver of happiness… a ray of hope that everything was going to be okay, everything gets ruined…
Her getting these powers could have been random… She doesn't need to do right by them. She could just go about her life like any other girl, but she couldn't.
Or she would not be her… the daughter her father had raised or the hero Pavitr had believed her to be.
She needed to do right by them.
She was Gayatri.
For the better or worse, this city and the people living in it were her responsibility…
She was a hero.
She was Spider Woman.
Hope you liked this story and please review.
This story is a part of the Infinity Crisis series.
So, this story was obviously inspired by "Across the Spiderverse" and "Spiderman India."
Nagraj, Tribhanga and Brahmand Rakshak are superheroes from Raj Comics. I have not read them yet but I did see a youtube animation video featuring them, and really liked the designs, so had to include them.
All three superheroines mentioned are from DC comics.
Agni is basically a version of Thunderbird/Neal Shaara from Marvel.
Hesperia, Ladybug and Chat Noir are from Miraculous, but not the prime timeline. Earth 2 is the timeline from the 2023 special "Miraculous World Paris: Tales of Shadybug and Claw Noir", and both Ladybug and Chat Noir are reformed villains now.
There are references to other canon heroes from Earth 2- JSA and the Flash, referring to Jesse Wells, as well as the Totem Warriors from my other Earth 2 story.
Nalin Oberoi is a good guy here, just like Norman being a good guy in Spider-Gwen's world/Earth 38.
Madame Web is the 90s animated version, who can hop timelines and monitors spider totem warriors across the multiverse.
Earth 2 Venom is a demonic parasite just like the Spiderman India comics.