The door banged shut behind Peter, and he took a moment to just breathe. To attempt to forget the shittiest day that had shit on him. Ever.
It smelled so good. Like spices, fresh cut vegetables, homemade tomato sauce, and under that, the clean floral scent of his Aunt May's perfume and the products she used around the house.
He could hear her puttering around in the kitchen, which meant she was already making dinner. There were dusty boxes on the table as well, which meant Uncle Ben was home too.
"It's meatballs tonight, Peter," May said as she worked the little yellow stove, turning the cooking meat over in the frying pan as each piece browned.
"Oh, I dunno…" he mumbled, pretending a lack of interest and made a beeline towards the refrigerator. He looked over his shoulder and made sure she was occupied before opening the fridge to steal a drink of orange juice directly from the carton.
"You've always liked them before," she said and before he'd even managed one gulp, she slapped him with the back of her wooden spoon, ignoring his yelp of "Ow!"
Which came out way higher pitched than he intended, because damn, the woman had a sharp left hook, made even fiercer by the expert wielding of her weapon of choice.
"Fu-" he tried (foolishly, he knew) in an attempt to recover from the emasculating yelp, before getting another one with that back of her spoon for his trouble.
"Peter Parker. Language!"
With, what he'd swear to anyone who'd listen, were ninja skills, she had the orange juice back in the fridge and had delivered another slap with the flat of her hand for the back of his head before he could recover from the first.
"And don't drink from the carton!"
He hid a smile behind a mumbled apology. It was something they did, just the two of them. He'd be a brat and she'd give him a good-natured slap for it. He loved being able to get her Queens attitude up and he knew that she loved it too.
It was comfortable, normal.
It was home, and thank god for that, because this was exactly what he needed today.
And then he saw the water. Everywhere.
"Hey!" Uncle Ben said, as he shuffled into the kitchen and put another dusty box on the table despite Aunt May's obvious displeasure.
"Where's the flood?" Peter said, and he knew he wasn't going to like the answer.
A short, "follow me," and Uncle Ben's back was the only response he got.
Yeah, this couldn't be good.
Why did today have to suck so, so bad?
The morning was a nightmare.
School was like an episode of Jersey Shore (ok, even more like one than usual, anyways), without the tanning and laundry, but all the drama and random violence. If Midtown was Jersey Shore, then Peter was definitely the guy who got his ass handed to him at the local club by a couple of overly tanned meatheads. If, you know… clubs in Jersey would let a pasty, skinny loser from Queens like Peter Parker in, or, if through some miracle they did, MTV would actually show it on TV.
Which they wouldn't. Like ever.
He got his ass kicked, in front of everyone. Again. Even Gwen was there, he knows she was. Her blonde, shiny head bobbing through the crowd of laughing students was like his own personal cue card of fail. And when his eyes met hers, for just a moment, before the swelling made the world into floating blobs and brightly colored streamers, it was like Flash hadn't just kicked his ass, but had delivered a Mortal Combat fatality on his dude cred and kicked him in the ballsack instead of just applying a little repair to his face.
He knew he was Midtown Science's resident punching bag and pseudo loser. But today? Today was one of those days where the world seemed out to remind him of exactly where he stood.
Want a photo? Then Pete's your man, other than that? Kick his ass. Each day he ran the gauntlet of cheerleader disdain (take a pic of my boyfriend's car, Pete?), meathead bullying (I'm not Eugene!) and his own hormones (no, no a hard-on in gym class was not appropriate).
And now the basement was flooded.
It was official. Today sucked.
It sucked, so, so much.
Who knows how long the filament had been on the fritz. It wasn't like Peter or Ben went down to the basement often or any longer than it took to retrieve something from the backup freezer.
Peter hated the place. It was musty and old, and reminded him of how much work the house really needed and how little money they had to make it happen. When Uncle Ben went into the basement, he always came out with a frown and extra creases of worry on his face. Then, he'd spend days down there, doing god knows what, until Aunt May'd retrieve him and that'd be it, until the next time.
So, yeah, the Parker basement was the one place in the entire house that only Aunt May was brave enough to frequent on a regular basis.
Peter thought that maybe she was doing laundry down there, which, in retrospect, made him feel like utter shit for not helping more. But the last time he did laundry, she just smiled at him with a sad, sad smile.
"Thanks, dear," she'd said, and then redid it anyways.
Later, she tried to explain. Something about "colors" and "whites" and not "doing them together" and he got it, really he did, but somehow he still couldn't do it right.
Most of the time, it turned out, Peter really was no help at all.
So, instead, he did some calc homework and then chemistry. Sometimes, after class , the AP chemistry teacher, would sneak in some chem-phys or just straight up physics. He'd draw on the board and Peter would take notes and notes and even more notes. Mr. Warren thought it was cool that Peter memorized the periodic table without being forced to.
It was a good time. Better than what he usually had at school, anyways. And Peter was really into it, because, hell yeah, fission was sweet. So, he did the dishes and spent several sleepless nights trying to figure out if it was possible to buy enough uranium ore off the internet to refine an appreciable amount of U-235 for a mini-fission reactor that he could use to power the refrigerator. You know, without poisoning everyone, getting arrested or blowing shit up (the answer, it turns out, was no, or so Uncle Ben told him after finding his rough draft plans).
It was the least he could do, on this day of shitty days, to help his Uncle clean up the one room in the house that they could both barely stand.
He didn't know it was possible for the day to get worse. There had to be some quota of shittiness that could exist in one period of time before it turned, instead, into complete awesomeness.
Then he saw it, almost by accident, shoved under the stairs in a faraway corner. Forgotten by everyone.
A familiar brown, leather briefcase.
And that's when he knew that the "shitty quota" was probably his crappiest theory ever (heh, pun totally intended). And it went from a shitty day, to an indeterminate length of shitty time in general.
The briefcase was old, and not in the best condition, stored as it was in the Parker's basement for so many years.
Peter was seventeen now, so by his calculations, it had to have been hidden away in the dark recesses of the basement for nine years and four months, at least. Not that Peter was keeping track. He just, you know, had a thing. For time (ask Einstein, time was waaaay cool).
Peter could imagine its once sleek exterior, the lovingly cared for leather, fading as time passed and day turned to night and night, again, turned to day.
For years and years.
And he never knew that it was there. That its thick skin of brown leather was slowly cracking with age as it languished in the Parker basement.
But now, he had the briefcase, right in front of him and if he was honest with himself, he was doing everything to not think about what that meant, while trying to understand it with everything he had.
The case had been exposed to high heat, severe cold and the cloying humidity that was part and parcel of summers suffered in Queens. There was dust too and the general attitude of neglect that was a staple of a room that was just too expensive to maintain (and yeah, that was Queens too). Especially when there was a kitchen that always needed work, a bathroom with a leaky sink and a toilet that just seemed to never stop running no matter how many parts you replaced (Peter was sure they'd replaced them all at some point) .
And never, ever enough money to go around.
When he could finally bring himself to open it, the leather creaked in protest, flakes of damaged and dried matter falling to the carpeted floor. He stared at them. For a full minute he stared at them. Sure, that he'd just watched as entire pieces of his family disintegrated into the carpet. More of his past disappearing to never be seen again.
In a hidden pocket, he found the real payload. Secrets scrawled in his father's handwriting. God, it hurt. This relic of a painful hectic night was more than just paper. It was an aborted game of hide and seek, a broken window, his father's voice raised in fear and his mother's tears. It was all he knew going away in one night and never coming back again.
And then he saw the rest of the contents of the document. An entire life so far removed from the one he lived now, that he may as well live in a fantasy as exist in the same world that this came from. Oscorp, it said. Genetics, it said. A life you can't have, it said. It screamed it from the yellowed edges of paper to the rubber stamp of the Oscorp logo on the front.
His eyes stung, and his throat was tight, and he felt embarrassed because he was supposed to be growing up and right now he felt like a little boy again. But his door was locked and no one would see what this piece of ancient history was doing to him. No one could see how, no matter how amazing his Aunt and Uncle were, these secrets still mattered to him.
How they were destroying him and yet remaking him at the same time.
These secrets, once his father's and now his.
The first of many.
Going to Oscorp was a spur of the moment decision, made almost as soon as he'd found his father's briefcase. He knew he shouldn't do it and yet, as soon as he thought of it, he knew he would.
This wasn't like the fission project. A game he knew would be nothing more than ideas and fun.
This was serious.
One small connection to the life he should've had. Didn't he have a right to that? Who could it hurt anyway?
And for a moment, he was sure his Uncle Ben was right there, blunt as always with his answer, "Everyone, Peter."
In the gleaming, ultra-modern lobby of Oscorp, it was easy to open his mouth and let the harmless lie fall out.
"Yep, Rodrigo, that's me," he said with a smirk as he pinned the stolen badge to his hoodie and joined the rest of the new interns for an introductory tour.
It was much harder to silence the inner voice, the one that sounded like his Uncle Ben.
"There are no harmless lies," it said.
"This is wrong," it urged.
But there was a commotion in the lobby, which brought the intern tour group to a momentary halt, and made Uncle Ben's voice fade.
Peter didn't look, like the other interns did.
A young man was being removed by a security detail.
Peter didn't listen.
"I'm Rodrigo!" the boy yelled.
He didn't care.
Not now, not with a chance to finally know why.
Why everything.
The end justified the means. It had to, because he had to do this.
Dr. Conners was even more glamorous than he had appeared in his articles. He was smarter than anyone Peter had ever talked to. Their short conversation tickled Peter's brain, inflaming his mind in a way that he'd rarely experienced before. For once, being smart didn't make him someone to ignore, or beat up, or make fun of.
He felt like here, he could be someone.
Peter was sure his father had to have been like Dr. Conners. That he must have once led a life just as glamorous. Worked in a place like this.
Moments passed, and so did the tour group. He was so focused, that he couldn't focus at all. He was mesmerized by Oscorp. By the gleaming labs and sharply intelligent people. He wandered the halls, trying to take it all in, moving from lab to lab. His eyes skipping from one amazing thing to another without ever coming to rest on one single thing.
Then he saw the spiders. A glass-walled clean room full of them, weaving webs, their elegant bodies easily navigating the complex geometry of their own creations. Their very existence was a work of art by way of science. Doing what was natural to them, and in the process creating a miracle.
And yeah, it was weird, but somehow he knew that they were exactly what he'd been looking for, even though he hadn't known he'd been looking for anything, let alone that they were it.
He'd made the right decision, coming to Oscorp. In that moment, he was meant to be here.
He was sure of it.
Queens was so far away. The flooded basement, the rickety house and the simple lives of his Aunt and Uncle were the fantasy and this, this… the reality.
These spiders, with their sleek engineered bodies were telling him something, sharing a secret only they knew. It resonated with him, like the first time he'd understood the structure of an atom. He knew something about the universe, about himself, about everything that was anything. Something that he hadn't known before.
The spiders at work, reminded him of his dad's study, eliciting a sense of nostalgia so strong that it was almost as if he could see the room now. The chalk board full of messy writing, a sports jacket left on the threadbare couch, and leather bound journals filled with his father's excited scrawl. Even sounds, the pleasant hum of his mother and father's voices caught up in one of their many intense conversations. The cadence of creativity. The music of his youth.
And the spiders, of course. They were everywhere, drawn on the chalk board, remade in sketches, bodies preserved in jars and petri dishes. They were as much a part of that room as everything else was.
His hands were moving and then he was pushing at the door and his feet shuffling forward. It took a moment before he noticed that he'd entered the room. He didn't mean to, not really, but now that he was here, it was fine.
It was great even.
He couldn't stop thinking about it.
If he could just touch one of them… he knew he shouldn't, but if he could.
He could just reach out.
Just one finger.
For just one moment.
What could it hurt?
"Everyone, Peter," his internal Uncle Ben reminded him.
And then the spiders were stopping, their beautiful webs disappearing and they were not so agile now. Falling and falling.
Falling on him.
And he knew he'd fucked up. He was Prometheus stealing fire. Worse, he was the mortal who tagged along.
Oscorp wasn't as shiny on his way out. His feet scuffing the tile as he walked faster and faster. What seemed sharp and smart before now seemed threatening. Smiles like grimaces.
What the hell was he doing? Had he really lied? Had he wandered around Oscorp?
The last hour had the quality of a lucid dream.
But, damn it, to touch the fire for even a moment. To be close to its heat.
It was worth it.
When the spider bit him, he didn't know what it was at first.
Not even when the pain really started.
Peter walked the streets of downtown New York for a while, thinking about what Dr. Conners had said. Wandering what the hell he'd been doing, attempting to insert himself into a world that he didn't belong in.
As if it was that simple.
Oscorp was not Queens. Obviously. And Peter was a nerd with good grades, sure, but he was also the loser who'd made his high school rep off of taking photos of people who hated his guts and sucking at having crush on a girl who didn't even know he existed.
A girl he'd just pissed off by sneaking into her place of employment.
He was probably going to get arrested.
Yep, it was official. He was a fuckup.
No old briefcase, abandoned with the rest of the stuff his parents didn't want, could change that fact.
Bravo. He'd failed once again.
It was time to go home. Time to get back to reality.
He grabbed the next train to Queens, digging the fare out of lint filled pockets. In the subway car, he lay back against the hard plastic of the seat and let his eyes drift closed.
He was so tired and he didn't want to think about it anymore.
He fell asleep.
When the pain started, it was so subtle. He clenched his eyes and ignored it. But it grew, a burning, itching sensation, like a rash, crawling across his skin until it was inside him. The pain inflaming him. Setting him on fire. Destroying him. Burning him up. Leaving him so many ashes on the once immaculate floor of a room full of beautiful dancing spiders.
Then Aunt May opened the screen door, her right hand gripped tightly around the handle of her favorite patio broom and a well-used dust pan clutched in her left.
"Peter!" she said, tsk tsking when she saw the mess he'd left. He was always leaving messes.
He was such a burden.
"Well, boys will be boys," she sighed as she made her way onto the patio. "I won't be but a moment," she promised and she swept him into the dust pan and threw him into the trash bin.
He knew that he deserved it for never doing the laundry and for lying and stealing and going into Oscorp, where he never should have been. But it was so hot in the trash bin and so dry and the spiders were not dancing anymore. They were gone now.
And god, he was scared, because it was so dark.
He pushed his pride aside, and like he used to do when he was just a kid and he wanted his night light, he yelled.
"Uncle Ben!"
But Uncle Ben didn't come.
He knew he should call for Aunt May. She'd put him in the trash bin, but she was always there when he needed her. She'd always slap him when he needed it and hug him too.
He could just see it, her brow furrowed with worry; she'd come equipped with a cold wash cloth, a plate of waffles and a glass of orange juice.
"Anything can be solved with a healthy meal," she'd say and he knew that she would try her best to spare him embarrassment. Let him keep that so fragile sense of machismo he'd been working on.
Let him stay a man, instead of a little boy, even if she was mothering him in just the way he needed.
"Aunt May!" he called, "Aunt May…"
But she never came, and Dr. Conners was talking about cross species genetics and he didn't care about Peter's attempted fission project, about the leaky basement or even the bills piling up on the kitchen counter that his aunt and uncle thought he didn't know about.
Dr. Conners had a glass of water that he sipped from when his throat became dry. A tall glass, with beads of condensation on the side, which collected in rivulets around Conners' fingers before dripping down his wrist to wet the sleeves of his pure white lab coat.
"Lizards are cold blooded," he said in his prim accent, waving the glass of water about as he made his point, "so I'm not interested in your fire young man!"
Peter reached for the water. He stumbled forward, but no matter which way Peter turned he always ended up grasping the wrong side. Hands waving through empty air, or worse, latching onto the empty sleeve on Dr. Conners' right side.
"Please, Dr. Conners," he begged, "Just a little!"
Instead, Gwen asked him to leave.
"You're getting ashes all over the polished floor," she complained.
"But, I'm in a trash bin," he responded.
By then she was gone and so was Dr. Conners, taking his glass of water with him.
Throat dry, lips cracked, his head felt like it weighed a hundred pounds, he begged for his dad and finally for his mother.
And still no one came.
It burned, and burned.
The trash bin disappeared and the glass-walled room from Oscorp rose up around his pile of ashes. The spiders crawled in through cracks and crevices that appeared and disappeared as he watched.
And, oh god, he panicked, because they were burning too!
Until he really looked at them. They were on fire, but they were not burned by the flames.
His brain felt so hot that he was sure if someone could see inside his head, the gray matter would be glowing like a coal in a banked fire. Just a little bit of oxygen and it would be bright enough to illuminate the darkest corners.
The spiders began remaking their webs, exactly as they'd been before Peter had entered the room at Oscorp. But this time the webs were of fire. The same amazing geometric shapes took form as the small creatures navigated their new homes with an agility that left him breathless. Weaving their webs around and around until they'd covered his whole body.
Peter wasn't scared. He knew he should be, but he wasn't. It was a good fire. A purifying fire and it made him feel alive like he'd never felt before.
He was so hot. Sweating and shivering. He could feel the heat seeping from his head, fingers and toes, radiating, up and up until he wasn't a pile of ashes anymore. He was flesh combined with the essence of the spiders in the crucible of that hidden room in Oscorp to make a better product than what had existed before. All the things that made him Peter Parker put over a flame with an old brown briefcase, yellowed papers and spiders, until it had reformed into an alloy of great strength.
Aunt May clutched her broom, Dr. Conners smiled, Gwen frowned and Uncle Ben gave him a glass of cool water.
When he took a drink, it all shattered.
And then he woke up to chaos.
And his world was never the same again.
Peter knows this much. He went into Oscorp as one person, and he left as another. That person, the one who left? He looked like Peter, he sounded like Peter, he lived Peter's life, and he made Peter's mistakes, but all the same, he was something entirely new.
Something amazing and terrible.
Instead of doing what was right, he did whatever he wanted.
And when that didn't work and he tried to do what was right? He still did it all wrong.
Now, when Aunt May looks at him, it's with this look… he can't ….he doesn't even know.
She doesn't get her Queens on. They don't laugh when he misbehaves. She never ever slaps him with the back of her spoon, and she never says anything when he drinks right from the carton.
And he can't even talk to Gwen. He has no words, not even the stupid ones he used to manage.
Because this? This is his reality.
Uncle Ben is dead and so is Captain Stacy.
And it's his fault. And it can't be fixed.
Not ever.
So instead, he does whatever he can to make sure that no one else has to suffer the same way.
It's impossible. He knows that.
But he'll keep trying.
He has to.
He'd been to the top of Olympus and instead of dying or going crazy at the truth he saw, he got as much of a grasp on it as any mortal could.
And what was that truth?
That there wasn't one, other than the one people made each day.
6 months later...
Peter liked to take a break from life and chill out on a sky scraper sometimes. Just sort of hang out there and let the blood rush to his head. No one to talk at him and drown out the sound of the city around him.
Though, it did suck sometimes, because he could be a total space-case. Last time he was here, he forgot to zip up his backpack and lost an entire set of really sweet gel pens and all his scribbled notes from the chemistry lecture he attended at ESU.
Fail.
"If you leave trash again, I'm pressing charges."
Fuck!
How'd he miss the approach of an obnoxious rich guy encased in brightly colored armor worth more than a small country? The repulsors alone made jet engines sound like the sweet flapping of a humming bird's wings.
And yeah, maybe his plans for solitude sort of sucked considering that the population of heroes in NYC seemed to be growing day by day and at least half of them were airborne in some way.
"Sup Irondude," he gives in. It's too late now to pretend he didn't hear him, what, with that jumping out of his skin thing. So he may as well try and be a good neighbor and make nice-nice. "The red's a bit much, isn't it? Also, can't you see that I'm, like, not really looking for company?"
All right. So, he's being a dick. Aunt May would not approve, if she knew about the whole swinging around town, being a jerk to Iron Man thing he has going on. Which she doesn't.
Thank god.
And, well, okay, so this is the first time he's been a jerk to Iron Man, considering he's never met him before, but he senses a pattern. And, obviously he was trying to have some alone time, but nope. Not for these "big" hero types. Save a city once or twice, hang out with national icons, be a billionaire, whatever. They can butt in whenever they feel like it.
"Did I say that out loud?"
"Yeah. Look, kid. Talk to yourself on your own time," Iron Man said. "I'm not the one wearing a onesie. Also this is my building and the last time you were here you dropped a bunch of really shitty pens all over my balcony."
"What? Do you still have them? Those were awesome!"
There's a beat of silence. Even the repulsors seem to pause and Pete is sure that if Iron Man's faceplate were actually capable of an expression, it'd be posed into a real special one just for him.
"No…" Iron Man says, and even with the weird metallic voice thing he's got going on the confusion is bleeding through pretty clearly. "Did you miss the part about trash? Pressing charges. Stay off my lawn. That whole thing?"
Pete flips around, moving so that they can actually be face to face. He might make a bigger production of it than is strictly necessary and pauses an extra moment to wave his ass in Stark's face, because really, throwing someone else's stuff away? That sucks.
"Aww... those cost five dollars, man," he says as a distraction and then when Stark is least expecting it, he flips him the bird (and thank god Aunt May couldn't see that one) and he's out of there, crawling up the side of the building.
"Hey! Nice chemistry homework!" Stark's saying, as if he wasn't just flipped off by a guy in a "onesie."
Pete shoots two webs at the nearest building and walks backwards a bit, pulling the web taut, to build up enough momentum to create a slingshot effect.
"A+," Stark is still saying, "Next time sign your name. Seriously. I'm being serious here. Just use some real fucking pens, for god's sake."
Not that Pete's running away. Nope, he's just vacating private property. He can just hear Iron Man say, "Hey, that's pretty cool. What's this stuff made of?" as Pete's feet leave the smooth glass of Stark Tower. And he can't help it, he's smiling. For the first time in months he's smiling.
And then he's off, swinging into the pins and needles of the New York skyline. "Whooooooooooooo!" he yells, in the amazing moment of freedom, when it seems like he's going to fall to his death and instead, he's shot another web line and he's in that perfect arc, up and up, to start it all over again. It's a roller coaster ride and he gets to control it all.