Work Text:
Location: Gotham City
Year One
Rain. Always the damn rain.
It was her first real Gotham winter, and the cold cut like a knife. Her gloves were soaked, her mask smelled like mildew, and her stomach had been growling since yesterday morning.
Still, she swung.
The city below was a patchwork of rusted fire escapes, shattered glass, and old sins. The kind of place where hope came in coffee cups and five-dollar bills, and disappeared before dawn.
New York had been cruel sometimes, yes — but Gotham? Gotham wasn’t cruel. Gotham was hungry. It devoured.
And that first year, Gotham nearly devoured her too.
Location: The Narrows.
Penny crouched on a ledge above an alley, watching two men corner a woman against a dumpster.
Her body screamed for food, for rest — but instinct screamed louder.
She fired two webs, dropped down between them, and said, “Hi! Bad news, fellas — Gotham’s got a new neighbourhood spider. You can surrender now, or we can do the whole ‘broken teeth and regret’ thing.”
They lunged.
She ducked, kicked, twisted — it wasn’t graceful, it wasn’t pretty. One guy went down, the other swung a knife and caught her across the ribs. She hissed, webbed his hand to the wall, and slammed him with her shoulder until he fell.
Then she turned to the woman. “You okay?”
The woman stared at her — eyes wide, trembling. “You… you’re not with them?”
Penny blinked behind her mask. “What? No! I’m the good guy!”
The woman flinched back anyway. “There are no good guys in Gotham.”
Those words stuck with her for weeks.
It became a pattern.
She’d save someone, and they’d run.
She’d help a kid, and he’d flinch when she reached out a hand.
She’d stop a robbery, and the cops would point their guns at her.
She couldn’t understand it. Not at first.
Until she did.
Because in Gotham, masks didn’t mean hope.
Masks meant fear.
So she adapted.
She started moving slower when she landed near civilians, speaking softly. She began carrying spare gloves and blankets to hand out to the homeless. She left handwritten notes on the victims she saved:
“You’re safe now. — Your Friendly Neighbourhood Spider-Woman.”
Sometimes, she’d add a doodle of a smiling spider.
It didn’t erase their fear overnight. But slowly, word began to spread of a strange, small hero who helped people and asked for nothing in return.
Location: Crime Alley
Two months later.
Penny had been bleeding from her shoulder after a run-in with Two-Face’s crew. The alley was empty — or so she thought — until a kid, maybe eight years old, stepped out of a doorway.
“You’re Spider-Woman,” he said quietly.
She froze, half crouched, one hand on her wound. “I am.... Hey, you should probably get inside. It’s not safe.”
The kid didn’t move. “You saved my brother. From those guys with the skull tattoos. He told me you were real.”
Penny’s throat tightened. “Yeah?”
“He said you smiled.”
Something in her chest broke open at that.
She lifted her mask just enough for him to see her grin. “Guess he wasn’t lying.”
The First Lesson: Gotham doesn’t need perfection. It needs persistence.
Penny couldn’t save everyone.
She learned that the hard way.
There was a fire in the Bowery. She’d gotten six people out before the building collapsed. The seventh didn’t make it.
She screamed under the rubble, ripped her hands bloody trying to dig through debris that was already too late.
Later, when Batman found her sitting on the curb, ash in her hair, she whispered, “I wasn’t fast enough.”
He looked at her — that heavy, quiet kind of look that said more than words could.
“No one ever is,” he said. “But you try again anyway.”
The Second Lesson: Gotham doesn’t reward mercy. But Penny still gave it.
There was a mugger once — a teenager, barely older than she’d been when the spider bit her. He tried to rob a grocery clerk with a broken pistol.
Penny webbed the gun away, disarmed him easily.
He screamed at her — called her names, begged her to kill him because “that’s what freaks do in this city.”
She just knelt, took off her mask, and said softly, “I’m not that kind of freak.”
Then she handed him a granola bar from her bag and said, “Eat. Then go home.”
He stared at her like she was made of light.
She left before he could thank her.
Two months later, she found a crudely spray-painted spider emblem on the wall of that same street corner — and beside it, graffiti in block letters:
THANK YOU.
The Third Lesson: Gotham doesn’t trust easily. But trust can be earned.
The first time Gordon’s cops didn’t shoot at her, she almost cried.
The first time an old woman waved instead of crossing the street when she swung by, she did cry.
And when a crowd of kids on Burnley Avenue started leaving her little paper spiders folded out of scrap newspaper, she kept them all — a growing collection stuffed in her bag, reminders that even Gotham had a heart.
Scene: The Rooftop, Year’s End.
Snow drifted over the city. Penny sat on the edge of a church roof, legs dangling, chewing on a sandwich she’d bought with scavenged change.
Oracle’s voice crackled through her comms. “You’re still on patrol? It’s Christmas Eve, Spider.”
“Yeah, well,” Penny said, mouth full, “crime doesn’t take holidays.”
There was a pause. Then, soft warmth in Barbara’s tone. “You’ve done good work this year.”
“Doesn’t feel like it.”
“It never does. That’s how you know it’s real.”
Penny looked out over Gotham’s lights — cold, sharp, endless — and smiled faintly.
“Hey, Oracle?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you think… do you think a city like this can ever really change?”
Barbara chuckled quietly. “Maybe not. But people can. And you’re helping them do it.”
And so she kept swinging.
Through hunger. Through pain. Through nights where she doubted every choice she’d made.
Because someone had to believe Gotham could be better — even if the city didn’t believe it itself.
Someone had to smile when nobody else could.
Someone had to be the spider in the gutter, still weaving hope from ruin.
And for the first time since she’d landed in this strange, brutal world…
Penny Parker wasn’t surviving.
She was living.