Lying Heart
Peter walks Gwen back to her place sometime around one in the morning, and doesn't hear from her New Year's Day at all after that. He stays awake well after the party repairing his suit. Sometime after the sun comes up he puts the kettle on the stove and actually manages to have breakfast ready before Aunt May comes in.
Peter grins proudly as she walks in, but as soon as she looks at him she scowls. "You said you were going to a party," she accuses him.
"What? I did," he says, offering her a cup of tea, trying to impress her.
She doesn't even look at the counter. "Then what happened to the side of your face?"
Peter touches his cheek, the one Richard drove his fist into, and winces at the memory. For some reason he feels far removed from it, even though it only happened a few hours ago. "Oh," he says. "The, uh. The dancing got—a little out of control."
"Peter."
"What?"
Her eyes are trained on his, unrelenting. He sighs.
"Gwen has a boyfriend," he says into his bowl of cereal, "and he doesn't like me very much."
Aunt May looks a bit surprised by this but is all too willing to accept his explanation. It irritates him how well she can distinguish the truth from a lie. "No, I imagine he wouldn't," she agrees. She takes her mug of tea and sits down beside him, still looking at him carefully. "What … exactly happened?"
"I didn't hit him back, if that's what you're asking," Peter says.
The slight relaxation of her shoulders tells him that that's exactly what she was asking. "So he started it?"
"Aunt May," Peter protests, "when have I ever started a fight?"
Her eyes glint knowingly. "Trouble seems to follow you."
He shrugs. He doesn't really have a good counter-argument for that one.
"Doesn't it bother Gwen that she is dating a person who resorts to violence?"
Peter considers this. He understands that Aunt May is concerned for Gwen's well-being, and as much as it irks Peter, he really, truly knows that Richard would never lay a hand on her. "He was really drunk, and in his defense … I've been … well, I hang out with Gwen a lot. But he's good to her. He—he's a nice guy." The words feel like acid on his tongue and even taking an unnecessarily long sip of tea doesn't help. He looks up and sees that Aunt May is looking at him warily. "Look, I'm the last person on earth who should want to defend him, but he's alright, I guess."
He left out the daily crossword for Aunt May to start, but she hasn't touched it and looks pensive, so he knows the subject hasn't been dropped yet. "I think Gwen deserves better than alright," she says after a few moments, proving him right.
Aunt May knows a lot of things already, but Peter won't ever tell her about that night he watched Gwen's father die, the night he listened to the last promise of a dying man. The memory of it is almost sacred, the burden his alone to bear. He doesn't want her knowing and trying to talk him out of it, or worse, knowing and agreeing with him. He doesn't want anybody's input or advice because after last night it is clear that he hasn't decided what kind of person he is: someone who keeps his word, or someone whose word means nothing.
"There's no use in punishing yourself. It's clear that she likes you."
There it is—the temptation to ignore the captain, coming from the one other person in the world who might be able to sway him. Peter shakes his head, just once, not even letting her words register in his consciousness.
"She's with Richard," he says, "and besides, Gwen and I are just … we're friends."
The address the man meets him at later the next day is a block away from OsCorp. It's another basement, similar to the one Peter met him at before, but now he feels considerably less anxious about following him down the stairs. Maybe because he knows it's a different place, or maybe because he isn't as wary of the man as he used to be. By now he has had plenty of chances to betray Peter but instead he actually seems, if Peter is not mistaken, to somewhat care about his well-being.
"You brought your suit?"
"It's under my clothes," says Peter, glancing around the lab that the man leads him into impatiently. "You finished the serum?"
He nods. "In the interest of exercising caution, though, after I administer it I would like to wait a few minutes to make sure there aren't any complications."
"Well, there weren't any real ones last time," says Peter. "Except for the part when it stopped working."
"I can assure you I designed this one in a way that will fully restore your abilities. This isn't a quick fix like last time, but should serve as a catalyst that speeds up the restoration of your abilities, which otherwise might take a few more weeks." He holds up the needle and says, "It's going to take a bit longer to inject, sit down over here and try not to move."
Peter tries not to hiss as the needle sinks into his neck. He doesn't feel the same euphoria pulsing through his veins as he did with the last injection, but instead a dull ache, as if he can feel his muscles whining in protest. He grits his teeth, and only after the man removes the needle does he realize he was holding his breath and lets out a small gasp of air.
"What was that?"
The man sets the needle back down on a counter. "I've come to discover that your father was incorrect in assuming how his formula would manifest in you. As it turns out, once you reached the end of maturation, this was going to happen to you no matter what. The spider bite was only a catalyst—and the serum I injected you with a few weeks ago halted it. In order to set the catalyst back in motion, rather than wait until you were fully matured, I had to harvest the spiders from OsCorp."
Peter shakes his head. It's too much to absorb all at once, and he is still fixated on first bit. "So you're saying … I was always going to be like this," says Peter, dumbfounded. "My father—if he really did do this to me—no, he wouldn't have made a mistake like that."
"I'm afraid he did," says the man, not quite looking at Peter. "By the time you were eighteen or nineteen this would have happened regardless of that spider bite. A lot more gradually, but inevitably nonetheless."
Peter rubs the injection site with the palm of his hand. He doesn't want to think about this. It doesn't matter—what's done is done, and he can't ask his father the hundreds of questions littering his brain because he's dead. Either way, Peter's fate has already been sealed by a ghost.
Somewhat tentatively, he yanks at the armrest of the metal chair he is seated on, and it rips off easily and noisily.
"Huh," says Peter, staring at the chunk of metal in his hands. "Well, it worked."
After an hour or so has passed and the man is certain that Peter isn't going to suffer any drastic side effects, he explains that for now their goal is to infiltrate the OsCorp weapons department, because he tracked the signal to an unregistered computer within its confines.
Peter checks his watch. It's almost midnight. "We're just going to stroll into OsCorp?" he asks skeptically.
The man does not appreciate Peter's doubt. "Unlike you, I can assure you that I have planned this infiltration far in advance and I know what to expect. Thanks to the high security clearance I had back when I was working with your father, I still have access to most of the inside information at OsCorp. Most of the weapons department has either dispersed in fear of being blamed for information about their patented lasers somehow being leaked to a mad man, and those who have remained are likely to be in a conference outside of the city discussing the matter, where they feel they are safer."
By the man's tone Peter can tell his disrespect for OsCorp runs deeper than he initially thought. While Peter agrees that the employees are certainly acting like cowards, he can't exactly blame them.
"You still haven't told me anything about the man responsible for the robots," Peter says, trying not to sound accusatory.
"I'm afraid that is for your own good."
The way he says it reminds Peter so much of the way Uncle Ben used to talk to him that Peter's first instinct is to accept the man's lacking explanation and duck his head down the way he might when an adult chastised him. Then Peter can't help the scowl that crosses his features. Who is this man, and why does he think he's allowed to talk to Peter like this? Even adults he has known for years from school or part-time jobs have never talked to him like this, and here this man he knows virtually nothing about, this man he has really only known for a few weeks, thinks he can patronize Peter like this without a second thought?
"I thought we trusted each other now," Peter says guardedly.
The man opens the door to the lab, waiting for a moment so Peter knows to follow him. Grudgingly, Peter gets up and walks out the door with him, into the open area they initially met an hour or so before.
"As I said before, I trust that you are well-intentioned," says the man. "However, I do not and cannot trust your judgment."
"What?" Peter manages, feeling his face burn. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"Tell me right now that if I gave you even a hint of who was behind this, you wouldn't try to go after them."
"I wouldn't," says Peter immediately, but even he doesn't quite believe himself.
"You tell yourself that now, but we cannot afford to take that risk. If he manages to get a hold of you, he has the deadliest weapon of all—the formula, inextricably tied to your DNA, will be his, and there is no telling what he will do with it." The man stares at Peter through his sunglasses. "You think of yourself as a hero, but you have to understand that in the hands of an appropriately learned scientist, you can also be the greatest weapon this city has ever seen."
A few beats pass, and once the man has let his words sink in, he abruptly turns away and heads toward another door not far from them.
"I wouldn't have gone after him," Peter mumbles one more time for good measure, but the man is ignoring him now.
"The reason I chose to meet you in this location is the existence of an underground tunnel that should lead to one of the biocontainment labs. It's a little known evacuation tunnel that I believe hasn't been used since the nineties. Once we're inside," he continues, "it should only be a short walk to the weapons lab. I disabled the internal cameras an hour ago, which should not raise too much suspicion as the weapons lab has taken to disabling the cameras of their own accord—nobody wants to be connected to this mishap, I suppose."
"I don't understand," says Peter. "Why do you even need me?"
"I probably don't," the man admits. "But it is always difficult to weigh all the potential risks in a situation like this. And that aside, I felt you deserved to be involved."
Peter perks up a little bit at this, and then immediately regrets the little skip in his step that follows. He shouldn't want this man's approval, and certainly shouldn't show any signs of being pleased by it.
Their entry into OsCorp tower is surprisingly smooth. Most of the lights are off. It's still technically the holidays, and it's late, so for once OsCorp seems to be empty. It's only when they reach the first handprint recognition pad that Peter thinks they've encountered an obstacle, but the man lifts his hand up to the pad without hesitation and the doors slide open.
"You said you hadn't worked for OsCorp for years," Peter says a bit suspiciously.
"I haven't. My data was just never erased from the security clearance logs."
"Why?"
"Because they believe I'm dead."
Peter wants to ask more, but they have now reached the weapons lab and he is shocked into silence. He has never seen so many things that could kill him in one room at the same time. There are contraptions he can't even begin to recognize. There are guns and there are tanks and there are contained shooting ranges for testing and the room seems to go on forever like this, just one deadly device after another.
It really disconcerts Peter that these are just chilling out in a major building in Manhattan.
"This isn't the room we need," says the man, striding past all the weaponry as if it doesn't surprise him at all. Peter follows, having to jog every now and then to catch up because he keeps getting distracted staring up at the walls. The next door the man leads them to doesn't need just a handprint, but also a series of codes, which the man enters with confidence.
Peter immediately senses as soon as the door opens that they aren't alone; apparently so does the man, because he whips out a gun on his person that Peter didn't even know existed in the time it takes Peter to blink.
"Don't move," the man demands.
The girl obeys, petrified, throwing her hands up. Peter's eyes widen in disbelief.
"Gwen?"
OTHER songs that go well with the web crawling universe: "I Was Never a Normal Boy" by Nightmare of You (the chorus, not the verse, I never know what artsy hipster verses of songs are getting at) and "It Doesn't Matter" by Alison Krauss.
Anyway, it's time for me to go to an outdoor concert and dance around like an idiot. To give you a sample of the kind of day I had, I wore a nice flowy skirt to work today, and when I asked a two year old to please go dry his hands, he stuck his fists in aforementioned skirt and rubbed his paws against it for all he was worth.
The good news is, I was only spat up on twice.