Earth -

Okay kids let’s do this one more time,

My name, is Kim Minji,

I was bitten by a radioactive spider.

Honestly, we should really think of the health concerns of multiple universes just having a radioactive spider loose to just bite students.

And for the last four, wait, is it four? Let me think, yes, four years, 

I have been the one and only Spiderwoman.

I’m pretty sure you know the rest.

I saved a lot of people, both grateful and ungrateful ones,

Sons of bitches, really I was saving them from a falling building and they can only comment on their phone being destroyed like…

Ughhh.

I saved Seoul, then Busan from zombies, then Seoul again, then Seoul, then Seoul again… I kind of lost count.

I fell in love.

I pulled a kid off a train track, stopped a train, stopped criminals, and then my villains,

Did community service once, that was honestly the most tiring task I’ve ever done.

I got a webtoon! 

That we don’t and shouldn’t talk about, my boobs were so big and my waist is so small like damn I appreciate it but lets stick to realism okay?

I have a theme song, it grows on you on the third listen.

I love being Spiderwoman. 

Who wouldn’t?

Even when it's raining and I'm clinging to a slick surface and my web cartridges are running low and some criminal is monologuing at me about their oh so very tragic backstory that I'm pretty sure is fake. 

Even when civilians film me and the angles that are always terrible and one time someone posted a photo of me landing face first on the pavement while fighting Missterio.

Even when I got injured and almost died once.

Almost!!

I love it.

I love the weight of it, the impossible tightrope of being everything and nobody all at once. I love the moment right before I leap from a building, that half-second of freefall where nothing exists but the wind and the city, spread out below me. 

I love landing a bit wrong (it hurts my hips but I look cool) and spinning it into something that looks intentional. I love the kids who recognize the suit and wave. I love the way they look up at me, grabbing their parents hands and saying they wanna be me when they grow up.

I love it.

I just hate what it costs.

Her name is Pham Hanni.

Was, Pham Hanni.

She was the most skilled, most adventurous, most courageous photographer I have ever met.

The nicest, purest, and brightest girl I have ever met.

And, the most beautiful woman I’ve ever had the pleasure of laying my eyes on.

She was twenty-two years old, she’s a photographer, she had this way of noticing things — small things, the shine of a glass, the sun hitting off a pavement, the difference between the way someone looks at their loved one and then a stranger, the type of things people don’t pay attention to and she'd pull out her camera and frame them, and whatever she saw through that lens made the world look like it was worth to pay attention to.

She noticed me before she knew I was Spiderwoman. 

She noticed me as Minji.

Just Minji, the loser, the engineering nerd, the girl from her class, the weird girl, the girl who lived two floors above her in the building, the one who kept leaving her shoes outside the door in the wrong order, left shoes first, which Hanni had found inexplicably fascinating and a bit somehow amusing.

"Why left first?" she'd asked, the first time she mentioned it. We were in the elevator. She was holding her camera.

"I'm left-footed," I'd said, which I doubt was a thing ever, and she'd looked at me for a long second with those beautiful dark eyes and then she'd smiled, slow and real, like she knew I was bullshitting and decided to believe me anyways.

I fell in love with her in that elevator. Possibly before. Way before honestly. Possibly the moment she had noticed something as small and stupid as the order of my shoes, had thought about it, had been curious enough to ask.

We were together for two years.

And then Hitman Bang had her killed.

He did it himself. Which is more infuriating as he never does. After an illegal underground meeting, a crowded evening and a back street where Hanni, was not supposed to be, had been documenting something she wasn't supposed to see, something fraudulent, something that connected Bang's money to a string of disappearances, he found her before I did.

Before I did.

I made it too late, Bang was already leaving and Hanni was already leaking blood from her chest, still clutching her camera.

That's the thing I keep returning to, the part that replays cruelly in the five minutes between when I close my eyes and when I fall asleep, if I even fall asleep.

I was close. I was in the city. I was two streets over, which in Spiderwoman terms means I was measly fifteen seconds away, which means if I had been paying different attention. If I had not stopped to help a scared kid who'd gotten their kite tangled in a transformer, if I had gone right instead of left —

Fifteen seconds.

I keep doing this, finding an answer. I have been doing this for seven months.

I haven't found any that makes it hurt less.