First Cause • Spider-Man: Homecoming [Unedited]

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By the time dawn breaks the next morning, Gadea has spent a good chunk of the night before prepping her space craft for the long and laborious journey ahead.

Days of inactivity of the ship's computing processors and electrical hardware, due to low fuel reserves, have left the processing unit and overall mainframe in a such a state that space travel is not a feasible goal. With the decision to tranquilize herself with the med bay sedatives should sleep attempt to evade her during the flight to the Craad outpost, she works throughout the night running repairs. And then simulations to check if those repairs have been fruitful or a waste of valuable time.

Most of them are a waste, but she must confess her errors aren't inspired by the machines.

A piece of her mind is ever trapped on that fire escape by his bedroom window, frozen physically in an inner battle with its conscience if the drastic measures it intends to take are as pure of heart as it once thought. The shadows of doubt her encounter with Peter cast over her mind are long and bereft of light; they slowly consume the fires of her furious, blazing righteousness and aim to temper the flames. Aim to offer an alternative action.

In the many but short-lived moments of fortitude in which her old personality slithers out of its dying hole to train an evil eye at the carnage her deteriorating mindset has wreaked, Gadea periodically berates herself for allowing her will to be tested by the likes of a human. A child even, who has probably never had to worry about anything more serious than a bunch of fools running around in wingsuits.

His fingernails don't have the coppery, vile residue of dried lifeblood. What does he know about suffering? Surely not enough to be able to tell her that her way is not the best way.

All the information he has about her life with Umbra's Grip are tidbits and morsels Gadea herself has thrown him. He knows not about the more nightmarish details of her dealings as a Hand, of the evil these hands of hers have created and participated in even before she was kidnapped and taken into servitude on Sitigog. The way Odara  died, the way her family intended to punish her for her atrocities.

Those are the kinds of anecdotes that turn the hearts of men, and the kinds of anecdotes that deserved to be buried deep in one's own subconscious, never again to be unearthed.

What does Peter know?

What higher position gives him the merit required to advise someone in Gadea's predicament? Should she really be heeding the words of someone who can't even keep it together long enough to avoid claiming numerous human lives aboard a ferry?

Even he has shortcomings of his own, and his reckless actions have now led to the retiring of his suit, and the further plunging of Queens into a state of vulnerability. At least she has a way to mend her dispute for the better.