Archive of Our Own

Whatever Miguel is looking at, the thing isn’t human. 

Maybe it used to be. Maybe the human-like skin tone and the depth of pain in its eyes means it’s still clinging to some remaining scrap of humanity it used to have. But the eight legs, and extra eyes, the pincers, those things do not belong on a person.

He, and just about every other person in the room, recoils from the sight as the lid of the machine is opened to reveal its gruesome insides. The creature makes a shrieking noise that might have been a scream if it still had a larynx to form the sound, and somehow the noise it does manage to make is much worse than anything a human would be able to replicate. 

It lurches, unsteady on legs that don’t bend the right way, and when it loses its balance and tumbles down the small steps to the floor below, it doesn’t get back up. 

His name used to be Mr. Sims. Who knows what his first name was, nobody bothered to mention it. And now he’s just another dead spider of many. 

His horror doesn’t properly translate to the others. This was their first human trial, their first human death, but while they’re just here to observe and calibrate everything correctly, Miguel was the one to flip the switch, to pull the trigger. They all knew it wasn’t ready for humans, but Tyler Stone pushed the issue anyway. They’ve all seen the animal deaths leading up to this one, some semi-functional one minute and falling apart the next. He knew it wasn’t going to work, but he let himself get talked into it anyway, and now there’s a dead body in front of him. 

The others get over it quickly, and Stone makes a disappointed noise but nothing more, like this is all par for the course. It’s horrific, but nobody with a clear conscience decides that they want to work for Alchemax. Not a single one.

A group comes in and takes the body away. To be thrown away or to be harvested, he really doesn’t want to know. 

“You okay, O’Hara? You’re looking a little pale.”

Body numb, he turns to see one of his coworkers watching him. There’s next to no emotion on her face, and it would be rare to find anyone here who appears any different, but what was once a normal, accepted part of his day has suddenly become grotesque. Nobody else is reacting, at least not now that that thing is gone. 

“I’m fine,” he pushes out, forcing his legs to carry him out of the room with a vague excuse of taking a bathroom break. He sees a trash can on the way through the hallway and he wonders if he might be throwing up in it right about now if he were a better person. If he were more like Gabriel, or maybe Dana. 

He writes his letter of resignation the same day, but it takes nearly a week before he works up the nerve to actually use it. He hesitates because he likes his job and the status it gives him. People call him a genius and he walks through the halls with a cocky smile. 

He wonders how much time he’s going to spend in Hell for each day he waits. He doesn’t believe in God anymore, if he ever really did, but that doesn’t stop him from feeling like a demon.

He slaps the papers down on Tyler Stone’s desk, trying to seem more confident than he actually is. He could have just done this digitally, but he has things to say to Stone about this project he’s working on. 

The guy just keeps smiling at him, but his eyes never crinkle, never change. He takes the drink because it’s polite and he’s nervous. And he doesn’t realize until the humor finally reaches Stone’s eyes just how big of a mistake he’s made.

He tries everything to shake off the addiction that never leaves. Just one sip and it’s bonded to him, just like Stone was counting on. Alchemax is supposedly the only supplier, but he’s going to take his chances elsewhere. 

His coworkers laugh when they hear the news. Many of them had taken Rapture willingly, either escaping from the horrors of their work or the nightmares in their heads. They think it’s something to celebrate about, and they barely bat an eye when he shoves them away and keeps walking. 

He makes his way Downtown, to the ugly parts of the city where people walk around like zombies and do everything they can to hide from the reality of the world. He’s been here many times, but never before has he been one of their desperate number, searching for a salvation he’ll never find. That doesn’t stop him from trying. Miguel O’Hara bows to no one.

He asks around, gets a little too close to the wrong people, and when shadows start to dance out of the corner of his eye he finally stumbles across a place that looks just shady enough to have what he needs.

He asks them for a way out, and they’re more than happy to deliver. Just not the way that Miguel was looking for. No, they wanted his life, his money, his image. And with Gabriel’s help, he barely makes it out of there with any of those things intact.

He doesn’t listen to his brother’s worrying, or his advice. He doesn’t listen to the holo-message from Dana with the bruise on her eye, and he doesn’t answer his mother’s calls either. 

He keeps searching.

Downtown yields no results. Every lead he chases ends in trouble or a dead end. The hallucinations start to get bad enough that he questions where he is, who he’s talking to, if he’s even awake at all. Sometimes the images seem real and then fade through his fingers like smoke. Sometimes they seem fake until someone taps his shoulder and he realizes how wrong he was. None of it makes sense, and he’s running out of time before Stone forces him into a corner.

Well, a corner he’s already been forced into, and he thinks he’s found a hole. 

The machine’s purpose is to alter the genetic structures of living creatures. He had tried to recreate the Heroic Age’s Spiderman, an ideal mix of superhuman traits and one of the easier heroes to research and attempt to replicate. He was their starting point, but now he’s changing the formula. Now he’s going to use himself as the base, and he has the perfect plan to get out of this nightmare. 

His research on spiders has taught him many things, but it doesn’t really matter what creature’s DNA he’s using as long as it’s there to replace the Rapture. He finds genes that should be harmless, pieces of evolution that shouldn’t disturb his own DNA drastically enough to notice. And he throws the sequencing into the machine, hops in, and turns it on.

He doesn’t see Aaron waiting just around the corner. He doesn’t know just how badly he’s messed up, how foolish he was to think that nobody would catch on to his plan. 

New inputs are made, and what starts out as a slight buzz soon turns into a burning agony. He screams, but he knows nobody here would care enough to save a dying man. They wouldn’t walk around an insect, they would just step. 

There’s an explosion, a malfunction bad enough that it shatters most of the windows on their floor and crumbles the ceiling down. And Miguel emerges from that machine not dead but wishing he was. His fingertips are bleeding, as are his gums, and his feet. He recoils from the too-bright light of the laboratory, wondering who turned the brightness up so high and why it hurts so much. 

Aaron stumbles away from him, slips on the edge and falls out a window. Miguel doesn’t claim to be a good person, but reaching out to grab his coworker’s wrist happens purely by reflex. As much as he hates the man for what he’s just done, letting him go would be murder, and he wanted to leave the company for just that. 

“Ah! Let me go, freak!”

And it’s confusing, because he’s trying to save this man, but he keeps struggling like he’s in pain, like Miguel is somehow hurting him and—

And with his grip slick with blood, Aaron falls. Miguel stares in horror, his eyes sharpened enough to see the landing at the bottom when he normally wouldn’t be capable of seeing that far. He stares next at his hands and the skin torn off by his claws, the life he just had gripped between them. His second accidental kill among many, and the first time he learned to be truly scared of what he had become.

Miguel has never been an honest person, but suddenly telling the truth has become more unbelievable than any other lie he could tell. 

“I’ve grown fangs, and if I speak up then you’ll see ‘em,” he tells Gabriel. 

His brother scoffs and keeps talking like Miguel hadn’t said a word. Which is fine by him. The less his brother asks about what’s going on with him lately, the better. 

How are you supposed to tell your kid brother that you’ve been turned into a much more shocked-up version of Spiderman? Or that you killed someone the other day? Gabriel wouldn’t even believe him, and that’s sort of the beauty about it.

His old unstable-molecule costume is the best he has, but what starts out as a temporary gimmick soon turns into something more personal when Spiderman starts making headlines again. It’s been so long since a real vigilante roamed the streets anywhere, let alone in Nueva York. The Vulture and Thorites and whatever other gangs that are out there don’t count, he thinks with a scowl.

It’s only been a few days, but he gets attached to his stupid “Spiderman” suit. And he gets just as attached to the appraising looks that strangers send his way. 

Not even a full week after he took a sip from that drink, Tyler Stone himself slinks over to Miguel’s condo to offer him the deal he knew was coming.

Stone is surprised by Miguel’s ability to find another source of Rapture out there, but he makes it clear that it won’t be continuing any longer if he has something to say about it. Of course he doesn’t tell Stone the real reason he doesn’t need Rapture anymore, because he has something much more sinister resting just under the surface, and the amount of effort it takes to stop himself from slitting his throat right then and there is proof enough of that. 

His new claws itch to be used, and he hasn’t even learned how to retract the fangs yet, but they yearn to sink into something as well. He wants to rip and shred, to rend flesh from bone and leave Stone’s corpse in a bloody heap on Alchemax’s doorstep. 

Except he has new plans forming now. An eye for an eye, and a net loss for Stone and his smart mouth. So he pretends to accept the deal, and as soon as Stone is gone he chucks the little vial of Rapture against his windows and watches it splatter all over the ground. 

Lyla asks if he’d like to have cleaner robots come up to pick up the mess, and he doesn’t give her an answer as he shoves himself into his suit and hits the town. He’s going to let his anger out one way or another, and going after some of the idiots on the street seems like the best way to do it.

Alchemax’s vents are large and unprotected. There isn’t a single person in the entire country who would be stupid enough to try to break in, and the vents are far too high up for anyone to make a reasonable attempt in the first place. But once he figures out how the webs work, it’s child’s play.

He finds that his claws are surprisingly strong as he rips through the vent cover with ease, marveling for a second at the feat of strength. He hasn’t failed to notice how muscular he’s suddenly gotten since the incident, but scowling at himself in the mirror and actually using those muscles are two different things. 

The flexibility is also strange, he thinks as he crawls through the vents. He’s never done the splits in his life, but now he’s sure it would be just as easy as walking, and he finds that he wants to use his flexibility more often than not. Moves and poses that he never would have attempted before now come to him naturally, and the less he tries to fight it, the more attacks he’s able to twist out of the way of. 

But it’s the question of why that bothers him. He’s 50% spider now, and he’s still trying to figure out what exactly that means. The question of how much of it has affected his brain and thoughts is something that keeps him up at night. Not that he needed another reason to have insomnia though. 

He knows exactly where to go and how to get there. All of the important data for this project is kept in one place, not too far away from the machine itself. Or at least, where the machine used to be. They’re already trying to rebuild it, but if he can manage to get rid of these files then they might not even have enough to recover a blueprint. 

He slips into the room undetected, and while he briefly debates with himself on whether he should just use his claws to destroy the console and servers entirely, he eventually decides that it’s not worth it. It’s a miracle that Stone and his coworkers don’t already know that the new Spiderman is him, and coming back to target their data would make it even more glaringly obvious than it was before. So he chooses the slower, safer option.

But while the new Spiderman may be knowledgeable of the building, he’s only had to deal with the Public Eye in passing up until now, and it never crossed his mind to be wary of cameras while he was climbing thousands of feet off the ground to get inside. It’s a mistake he will sorely regret, and one he will never make again.

He barely even has a chance to reach for the console to begin when the door bursts open. Soldiers come rushing in, having been alerted by Stone of Spiderman’s exact location. He was being tracked through the vents, and his first growl makes its appearance as soon as he realizes he’s been made.

He tries to leap up for the exposed vent again, intent on simply escaping, but one of the soldiers shouts and grabs for his ankles. His claws dig into the metal ledge, and he doesn’t yet have enough control of them to not tear right through the metal and land him back on the ground. He flips and crouches low, taking half a second to consider his options before the first shot is fired. And he decides, shock it, the vents won’t work a second time, so his only way out is through. 

The talons unfurling on his feet to launch himself forward is unintentional, and he ends up crashing head-first into the nearest soldier with more force than he was trying to go for. It works out fine though, because the soldier is pushed through a lot more soldiers and out into the hallway, which means he’s successfully gotten past the choke point already. 

He’s not fast enough to dodge one of the many blasts aimed for his back, and as he leaps away from the fallen soldier he yells out and tries to keep going. 

He realizes quickly that they’re not trying to kill him, at least not yet. Nobody aims for his head, and they try to avoid his heart. They’re trying to bring him down, to capture him, and while that thought is already anxiety-inducing on its own, the feelings he has for it now couldn’t possibly compare to what he’ll be feeling soon. He pushes on, unaware of just how much danger he’s actually in. 

He gets hit in the arm, and then another shot to his shoulder. As he’s trying to break through the seemingly never-ending crowd, he moves so fast that all of the attempts to grab him fail, but he knows that can only last so long. 

He leaps over someone’s head, and as soon as he’s touching the floor again, another, bigger soldier is charging towards him. He tries to dive out of the way, but somebody wraps an arm around his throat from behind and he takes the full force of the attack in the stomach. 

He heaves, choking on a gasp as he tries to wrench his way out of their grip. He almost succeeds, his own strength exceeding that of the arm holding him. But the big soldier is still there, and when he grabs the back of Miguel’s head, he knows he’s not getting out of there a second before his face is smashed into a wall. Repeatedly. 

He’s dropped to the floor, and with the first sign of blood trickling from his mouth through the fabric of his mask, he tries to pick himself up and keep going. But then he’s tackled, the weight of several bodies wrenching his arms behind his back to pin them and keep him down. He struggles, of course he does, but even unnatural strength can’t compete against the dozens of people piled on top of him. 

His first experience with overwhelming instincts not his own was when he first came out of the machine. He was overwhelmed by his senses being flooded with new information, disoriented by just how badly the experiment was successful. It was brief, and mostly overshadowed by his efforts to save Aaron from falling, and then to escape before someone could catch him there.

This time it’s more concentrated, less easy to simply be distracted and move on. No, he feels the way his thrashing turns frenzied the harder that he’s pressed down. There’s a haze of red he’s never experienced before, like a truly primal kind of rage and fear that consumes his senses and lights his thoughts on fire. He snarls, and the noise doesn’t sound human even to his own ears. 

Someone reaches down to pull off his mask, and although he’s webbed it on so it doesn’t go far, they still manage to expose his teeth. That’s a big mistake on their part, because in the next moment he manages to get enough leverage to twist and clamp down on the hand in front of his face. They cry out in pain as the fangs pierce nearly all the way through their palm, and he growls and shakes his head like a wild animal, which only prompts screaming.

Others try to come to their rescue, fingers prodding at his jaw and trying to reach in to pry his mouth open. The soldier between his teeth goes quiet and falls to their knees. When he tips sideways and hits the floor, Miguel detaches his fangs of his own accord, and they all stare in horror at the greenish drip of venom from his mouth as he snaps at them. 

He nearly gets to someone else’s wrist before that big guy is grabbing his head again, and this time when his face hits the floor he’s just as gone as the soldier next to him.

He wakes up feeling distinctly like he’s been drugged. There’s an awful taste in his mouth, and his limbs are far heavier than they should be. When he blinks his eyes open, he has to slam them shut a second later when the room swims and prompts a nauseous gag. 

When he moves one of his arms to reach for his face, there’s a loud shriek of metal being dragged across the floor. Startled, he opens his eyes again to see that his hands are shackled together. Magnetic cuffs are enclosed around his wrists, uncomfortably pressing against his spinnerets and restricting blood flow to his hands. They’re a bit longer than other cuffs he’s seen before, and he quickly finds that he can’t bend his wrist more than the barest amount. Somehow they’ve figured out that’s how he controls his claws, because without that extra bit of tension they refuse to unfurl more than a few millimeters. Just enough to scratch, but not do any serious damage. 

They’ve done the same thing to his ankles. The cuffs there aren’t held together like the ones on his wrists, but they stop the talons there from coming out all the same. 

Cursing, he finally realizes that his mask is gone, replaced with a piece of metal that wraps around his head and feels suspiciously like a muzzle. It takes a second to realize that the growl he hears is coming from his own throat and not something else. If his mother could see him now…

It’s a struggle to get himself upright, not just because of the lingering effects of whatever drug they gave him, but also the inability to use his hands and feet properly. Groggy and fighting to get his eyes working correctly past the light searing straight through them, he suppresses a hiss and gets himself propped up against a wall. He finds glass there, and glass in front of him. To the side and behind as well. Half-blind and only able to take slow, shuffling steps, he’s able to walk to the other end of his little glass cage far too soon. It’s barely big enough for him to lay down and stretch out, no larger. 

It’s not a good position to be in, but for some reason he starts to get more freaked out about it than is probably reasonable. Something about the lights shining directly on him or the lack of anything to hide behind makes his stomach tighten and thrusts his mind into a smaller version of the frenzy he was in earlier. 

He hits his shoulder against the wall that he thinks is the front of the box, growling low as he scrapes his too-small claws against it. Thin white lines are left in their wake, and he knows that it would take weeks of digging to claw his way through. But there’s no way anyone would let him get that far. 

His vision clears just enough for him to see past the sheer brightness of the lights, and he finds that he’s not alone. The box he’s in is placed in the center of a room on a slightly raised platform, with Alchemax’s employees, his coworkers, walking around and observing him.

And it’s very unfortunate that he recognizes the place he’s in. Because he sees the shelves full of spiders in their own separate containers and others dissected on tables. He sees the tablets with notes being jotted down and the clinical way people he recognizes look at him, the cameras watching his every move.

He’s in his own lab, except now he’s on the other end of the scalpel. How shocking ironic. 

“You’re making this more difficult than it needs to be.”

Miguel really can’t control the snarl he lets out. Nearly all of the noises he’s been making lately have been involuntary, ripping out of his throat in moments of weakness and fear. He’s getting just as tired of it as they are.

This time, he has his back pressed against one of the corners of his cage, teeth bared despite not being able to use them. There are two soldiers at the opening, both tense as they try to find a way to subdue him without getting too messy. He managed to headbutt one of them as soon as the glass wall came down, and now they both have batons in their hands. 

He really doesn’t feel like getting electrocuted, but he’s not the one in control of his body right now. It’s something else, some other part of him that must have gotten all shocked up when that machine spit him out. He doesn’t know how to describe it other than some kind of rabid beast. 

It snaps and snarls, makes him feel like not having a shadowy corner to hide in is flaying the skin off his bones. He recognizes the same behaviors he’s been showing from the spiders he used to work with, the spiders just a few feet away, watching him become the same thing they are; experiments, creatures to be studied and harvested and nothing more. He sees their branches and leaf coverings, and he finds himself getting jealous of all things. He’s the farthest thing from an empathetic person, but now he truly understands why the spiders always freak out when he tries to handle them, because now he is the spider being handled.

The closest soldier jolts, feinting in one direction before actually going the other. Miguel flinches and hisses as he raises his hands to aim for the eyes. There are helmets in the way, but if he can just reach under the visor then he might be able to—

A baton scores a hit against his side, and in the next moment he’s going down. Limbs seizing and eyes nearly rolling back into his head, electricity courses through him painfully enough to white out his vision. For a second he worries that he’s actually going to pass out, and then both soldiers grab an arm each and drag his limp body out of the cage to a new room nearby. 

They drop him unceremoniously on the floor, but they don’t leave as the door closes behind them. He recognizes this room too. A place to run the spiders through various tests to gauge how each individual fares with different stressors. It’s been modified to house a much larger creature, and the tools laid out on a nearby table look like torture devices when he realizes who exactly they’re going to be used on. 

They start with a shocking intelligence test, and Miguel is so offended that he tries to get up and attack the proctor. When the soldiers take the batons out again, he very quickly learns never to do that again.

He doesn’t know what comes over him when the door opens and he sees Tyler Stone come in one day. Even barely able to stand from the pain of having two of his talons surgically removed and the muzzle tightened over his face, a kind of rage he’s never felt before comes rushing to the surface. 

He bashes against the glass walls, roaring and clawing and putting more energy than he really has to spare into his single-minded focus to rip him apart. Several others jolt at the sudden commotion, a few of them rushing to jot down notes as they observe the new behavior. But he doesn’t give a shock about them. 

Stone smiles at him as Miguel presses his forehead against the glass, panting and keeping a furious, predatory stare focused on him and him alone. His fangs are so exposed that they drip venom onto the floor, and Stone is looking at him like it’s all some great joke. 

Everything after that is lost in a haze of red. 

On the rare occasions where he’s sane enough to push past the cobwebs nestled in his head and speak, he tries to talk to his coworkers. They hear his words, but they never really listen. 

It’s intentional, he knows it is. He tries to appeal to a humanity he knows that nobody in the room has, tries to get them to see him as a person instead of an animal. He gets a very different reaction than the one he had hoped for. 

They test his speech, trying to figure out if he’s really understanding the English language or if he’s just mimicking the people around him. He gives them the finger and curses them out in Spanish just for the attempt, and thankfully that seems to be confirmation enough for them after the first few times.

They study his larynx next, and he has to be restrained but not sedated as they poke and prod, trying to elicit new sounds. He tries to thrash around when a camera is shoved into his mouth and down his throat. They’re trying to figure out if the growling is a mutation or not, but shock is it painful. The chair that they’ve strapped him to keeps his head and body locked in place, and he has to fight back tears when they just keep pushing.

At some point, they grow bold enough to test his healing factor. It’s not quite up to par with the estimates for the first Spiderman, but he manages to start growing back the removed talons, and once they figure that out, his time there truly becomes Hell on Earth. 

They cut into his arm first. One of his spinnerets is sliced clean down the middle and pulled apart, examined from every angle and documented accordingly. He isn’t conscious for the surgery, but it takes every ounce of strength he has not to scream when he wakes up and feels what they’ve done. 

The pain is debilitating, and it takes two missed meals for them to finally cave and give him a dose of drugs good enough to make him see stars. 

It takes two days for it to scab over, and they decide that two days is long enough, because after that they take needles to his eyes. 

It’s dark, late enough in the day that everyone has gone home for the day and have mercifully turned off the lights on their way out. Sometimes they don’t even bother with that much. 

Miguel is curled up in his cage, shivering and barely conscious as he drools blood onto the floor. They took his fangs out today, and he thinks that just ripping them out would have been better than slicing into his gums and removing them that way. The bleeding hasn’t stopped for hours and it’s starting to get cold.

He’s exhausted in every single way a person can be exhausted. He can’t move, can barely form a coherent thought between one instinct and another. There’s still a little plastic container full of the mush they feed him that he hasn’t touched or let anyone else touch. It’s the only form of sustenance he’s going to get until tomorrow, and he knows he’ll have to eat it eventually.

He has to give them credit though. At least they made it a disgusting oatmeal-like texture instead of solids, because with his mouth throbbing in pain like this, he won't be able to swallow anything else. He can’t even work up the energy to scowl at the thought. He just lies there, pathetically. 

He’s Spiderman, isn’t he? Sure, he’s absolutely nothing like the original, and maybe he’s only been “fighting crime” for about a week total, but the headlines, the excitement on people’s faces when they realized their long-lost childhood hero had returned was… it was exhilarating. Even if he isn’t really Spiderman material, people want to believe he is. When he’s wearing that mask, people look at him like he’s something special, something worth admiring and looking up to. He can’t say whether he really deserves it or not, but shock, Spiderman doesn’t just lay down and take it, does he? 

Maybe he’s just a pretender. An unlucky guy in a silly costume. But… he was only out there for a short time, but it felt like he could be what Spiderman was. 

He wants to be something, as crazy as that sounds. But he’s stuck in a tiny glass cage with nobody around to help him. He shouldn’t even need help in the first place. He should be able to get out of here on his own, like the heroes before him could. 

Can he really call himself Spiderman if he can’t? 

And through his spiraling thoughts and dripping blood, he hears something. Or, well, he feels something, but it sort of translates to sound anyway, which is odd.

Threat! 

He blinks, brow furrowing as he tries to figure out what the shock he’s hearing and why he can understand it. 

Eyes idly wandering around the room, his gaze automatically lands on the containers along the wall, but it still takes him a few more minutes to find what he’s looking for. 

The containers are all next to each other, separated by thin layers of glass, and it seems that two of the spiders have met in the middle. A brown recluse on one side and a Carolina wolf spider on the other, both holding their foremost legs up in threatening displays, trying to scare each other off.

Threat! 

He blinks again. The word is crystal clear in his head, but it’s—it doesn’t make any sense. How is he able to understand…?

He’s worked with both of those spiders before, and he’s done enough research to know how spiders communicate with each other. Logically, he knows he probably got some kind of gene that allows him to instinctively know what they’re saying. But it shouldn’t be possible for him to hear them in the first place. That tapping is far below what even the most sensitive humans can hear or feel, but he can not only hear but understand them. 

The wolf spider taps again. She sends a message of threat! and stay away! And finally the recluse realizes he can’t get through the barrier separating them and wanders off. 

And something in Miguel’s head just clicks. Wary of the cameras still recording him, he winces and drags his hands over so they’re shielded by his thigh. Gathering the energy to close his mouth and swallow down the blood, he taps his own message back.

Greeting, he says tentatively. He’s never done anything like it before, but the language fits on his fingertips like it was meant to be there. His head races with possibilities for how this managed to happen, what genes went where to allow him to know in the same way a butterfly knows where to migrate or a salmon knows to swim upstream. It’s fascinating and terrifying at the same time. If anyone else finds out about it, he doesn’t want to know what they might do to test it out.

The spider stops, and a few others peek out of their webs almost curiously at the sound of his message. He’s a spider they don’t recognize, their DNA carried on through him.

Greeting, she says back, followed by the tiny hello’s of a few others. 

And for the first time in what has to be weeks now, Miguel lets himself show the tiniest amount of genuine happiness with a grin.

Talking to the spiders becomes his lifeline. The one light at the end of the tunnel that allows him to survive each new day is having the chance to quell his loneliness. 

The others have assumed that Miguel’s chaotic mixture of different species and genes has culminated in a solitary, territorial creature. But Miguel has found the exact opposite. He finds that much like a wolf spider and her children, or a community of velvet spiders and their shared web, he craves a kind of social connection he’s never wanted before now. 

He keeps it well hidden, only communicating at night or when nobody is watching (which is rare in the daytime). And they may be simple creatures, but as long as he’s the one starting the conversation, they surprisingly have a lot to say. 

In their own rudimentary way, they mention how much they hate the people who disturb them practically every day, which coincidentally forces Miguel to realize just how much he used to disregard them as living creatures. They were scared of him, like they are with all the other scientists that bother them for reasons they can never fully comprehend, and he excused it on the basis that they were just arachnids without any real emotions beyond hunger. And sure, they spend a lot of time talking about food or the construction of their webs to get food, but sometimes the wolf spider mentions a cluster of children she used to have, and even if she only says a few words about it, Miguel starts to wonder if maybe they have more humanity than the people studying them. 

He almost gets caught talking once, when a man who Miguel is fairly sure was hired as his replacement goes to take a giant huntsman spider out of its habitat and he taps at it to hide before the man can reach for it. 

The spider ducks underneath a fake hollowed-out log barely big enough for it to fit under. It doesn’t send Miguel a reply, but he’s not expecting one. This particular spider tends to listen but not talk, and he takes full advantage of it when the man reaches in to take the log away. He quickly tells the spider to attack, and grins when the man yanks his hand out of the container with a yelp. 

When Miguel happens to glance to the side, he sees another person watching him, eyes narrowed as he looks where Miguel is hiding his hands in his lap. He covers up his nervousness with a throaty rumble, sneering at both of them. 

The man’s hand twitches over his tablet like he wants to type something, but a moment later he seems to let it go and raise an eyebrow at his colleague instead. 

“I think it’s laughing at you.”

The other man looks at Miguel and scowls, shaking his hand out as if that will help with the pain of being bitten by a spider so large. Miguel wishes he could bite the man himself, and he makes that idea clear when he bares his mostly-healed fangs with a drawn out hiss. 

“Nonsense,” the man dismisses. “It’s just an animal.”

The second time Stone comes to see his little pet project, Miguel is sedated and strapped face-down on a table. They’re sticking him full of needles, drawing out blood, bone marrow, spinal fluid, and whatever else they can get their filthy hands on. He can’t feel anything more than slight pinches here and there, but it’s still a struggle to keep calm even through the cloud of drugs. 

As soon as the door opens and he drags half-lidded eyes over to see who’s there, he gives a pathetic growl and hopes beyond all hope that Stone will just go away. But of course that’s not what he does. 

He makes a noise of interest and begins to circle the table, making Miguel nervous when he can’t turn his head that far and loses sight of him. A hand brushes along his exposed side, not currently covered by his suit where they had pulled it down to his waist, and he’s never felt more revulsion in his life. 

His growling picks up in volume as he jolts against his bonds, prompting disapproving or startled sounds from the others working on him. He tries to pull his head free, but they’ve attached parts of the muzzle to the table very securely. This isn’t the first time he’s tried to get free of restraints, and he even partially succeeded a few times before they learned to take extra precautions. 

“Mr. Stone, sir? I believe you’re upsetting it. It’s making our work difficult.”

Stone doesn’t seem concerned when he comes around to Miguel’s front again, staring down at him with a slight smirk that makes Miguel’s blood boil. 

“I am aware.”

Miguel shakes against his bonds, halfway to snapping his own neck with the force he’s putting into it. He tries to speak but his words only come out as incoherent snarling, eyes bright red where they look up at Stone and promise nothing but a gruesome death by his hands and his hands only.

Then a needle is stuck into his neck and everything goes dark. 

“Lyla, can you tell me where Miguel is, please?”

She appears in a burst of golden light that illuminates the darkened room and reflects along the windows. She strikes the same pose she always does, hands fluffing up her hair and dress billowing out behind her. It would be a long time yet before she would form her first opinion, create a more human personality, pick a preference for her appearance. Home AI are pre-programmed against thinking for themselves, but Gabriel has always had a policy for politeness no matter who he may be talking to. 

“Hello Gabriel. Miguel is in Alchemax.”

He sighs and runs a hand through his hair. This is maybe the fifth or sixth time he’s come here looking for his brother, and the answer always seems to be the same. Is Miguel really so aggressively anti-social that he would bury himself in his job just to avoid everyone? On the surface, that sounds exactly like something he would do, but Gabriel has had a bad feeling about this ever since Rapture got involved, and he needs to know that his brother is okay. 

“I know that. But he hasn’t answered any of my messages, or Mom’s, or Dana’s. And you said that he hasn’t showed up here in a few weeks. What’s going on with him?”

She ruffles her hair, utterly unconcerned. “I don’t know what else to tell you, Gabriel. Miguel is in Alchemax.”

Gabriel is just about to protest, maybe demand a better explanation because this is getting ridiculous, but he stops himself after only a few syllables. Lyla knows where he is but clearly doesn’t have the kind of clearance or power necessary to get into Alchemax’s system. So why not just look into it himself?

“Thank you, Lyla. Will you let me know if he goes anywhere else?”

“Of course.”

As Gabriel leaves the condo, he wonders just what Miguel might have gotten himself into this time.

It isn’t until a day after Stone’s second visit that Miguel finally finds a weakness to exploit.

He wakes up from a nap before anyone else arrives for the day and finds that venom has been dripping from his mouth while he was out. There’s a tiny puddle of the stuff by his face, and he finds out very abruptly that it’s just as acidic as it is paralytic, because one of the bars of his muzzle has been melted through. 

He nearly yells in joy, all traces of tiredness disappearing as he quickly scrambles to hide the evidence from the cameras. He pretends to be asleep by folding his arms around the puddle and hiding his face behind them. He puts the side of his head against the puddle, hoping it will eat through one of the straps keeping the muzzle over his mouth. He hears the sizzling as the process begins, and he holds his breath when the first employee walks in and turns on the lights. 

He pretends to be sleeping even long after the point where he’s usually up and growling at people, and he can tell that they’re starting to get just as antsy as he is. Any kind of change in behavior is documented and studied, but the cause for this one is unknown. He’s always preferred to make his displeasure very well known, so going from that to near-unresponsive is alarming. 

There’s a conversation about the possibility of depression or an illness while Miguel is pleading for the venom to work faster. If they decide to send the soldiers in to check on him then his plan is ruined. This is his only chance.

“There’s no way it could have gotten sick. This lab is a very controlled and clean environment, and nobody could have carried anything in.”

“Not that you know of. Who knows what those Public Eye soldiers step in every day, or what could have gotten into the specimen’s food. If we don’t consider all the options, no matter how improbable, then we can’t really call ourselves scientists.”

“Still, I believe it’s simply a problem of behavior. We have yet to test what kind of environment the specimen is adapted to, and the lack of foliage or hunting grounds could be causing it distress.”

“But if it’s sick then putting it in a new environment could stress its immune system and exacerbate the issue. I think we should at least test it for diseases first.”

“Fine. Just be sure to notify Mr. Stone for clearance first.”

“We don’t need clearance for a simple blood test—“

He’s cut off when the power in the room suddenly goes out. The holograms fizzle away, the consoles go dark, and the room is plunged into darkness. 

Miguel can’t help but grin. Whatever is going on, the timing is impeccable. 

“Shock it. We don’t need lights to get a sample. Guards? I need the specimen subdued.”

The two soldiers at the door look at each other, hesitating, before they both seem to decide that they might as well listen and step forward to reach the glass. The lock mechanism is powered separately from the main building, so they don’t have any trouble getting it open. 

And just as they’re about to grab him, there’s an audible snap followed by a dull clatter that echoes through the room. Everyone freezes.

Miguel lifts his head slowly, wide-eyed as he realizes he actually managed to do it. The muzzle falls from his face, and there’s a tingly feeling on the side of his head where some of the venom has coagulated. When he flicks red eyes up to look at the soldiers, he can smell nervousness in the air.

His pupils dilate when he grins, and he doesn’t give them a chance to attack first.

Moving faster than anyone else can react, he launches himself up and sinks his teeth into the meat of the first soldier’s forearm. Fangs pierce through the protective fabric of their gear and deliver a potent dose of venom. 

The man yells, bringing his other arm up to aim a punch for his face while the other soldier scrambles to attempt to pull him off. Before either the hit or the grab can land, he digs his teeth in with a snarl and whips his head to the side. There’s enough force put into the move that the soldier is tugged off his feet and into the box with Miguel. He lets go and watches the man get slammed into the glass wall before whirling around to face the other one.

Everyone else who doesn’t have a weapon is quick to start panicking. Some are trying to push the soldier away so they can close the box again, but the guard refuses to budge. If he listens to them, then his paralyzed buddy gets trapped in a cage with Miguel, and he makes it clear with the way he’s growling that only one of them is coming out of that scenario alive.

The guard shoves the others aside and takes out his baton while they all retreat from the room. Miguel hunches his shoulders and snarls at him. If he wants his friend back, then he’s gonna have to go through Miguel to get him. 

The soldier attacks first, raising his weapon high and aiming for a decisive strike to the head or shoulders. With his options limited to basically only teeth or brute force, he dives under and goes for a headbutt that sends them both crashing to the ground. 

The baton is brought down repeatedly on his back, not electrified as long as he doesn’t give the soldier enough time to turn it on. The attack only serves to make him angrier, and as he claws his way more upright he goes snapping for the man’s exposed neck. 

He yells out and tries to shove Miguel away, dropping his baton when it becomes clear he can’t do it with only one hand. There’s nothing organized about the way both of them flail against each other, one rushing for a kill and the other fighting to survive. Which one is which, Miguel doesn’t know anymore. 

But finally, there’s a mistake. The soldier tries to reach for the baton again, slapping the floor in his haste to grab it. It gives Miguel enough leverage to pin his other hand to the ground and sink his teeth into his target. 

The man lurches beneath him, weakly pushing at his chest but unable to do anything more against such a fast-acting dose entering his bloodstream. Miguel’s growl is muffled by the neck in his mouth, and when he presses down a little harder he feels satisfaction at the half-gurgle sound the man makes. 

When the soldier finally goes completely still, Miguel drops him and staggers to his feet. The room is empty now, everyone else having fled, probably calling for reinforcements right now. The power being out gives him the perfect cover to escape without being tracked through the building. He just has to make it to a vent and leave the same way he came in.

Panting faintly and wiping blood from his face, he promises himself in that moment that he is never coming back to Alchemax again. Not for a supervillain fight, not for a favor, not for anything. And, now that he thinks about it, he might as well do what he came here for in the first place before he leaves. He casts his eyes around to the vials and jar containing all the things they’ve harvested from him and others. Whatever data these people have collected from him, they’re never going to see it after today. Not once he trashes this place. 

His focus sharpens, and he crouches down to rummage through the soldier’s things for something that might be useful. Of course he doesn’t find a key or anything to help get the shackles off, they were at least smart enough to keep that elsewhere, but he does find plenty of other things. 

He may be just a geneticist, and sometimes a crime-fighting vigilante, but that doesn’t mean his knowledge is limited to only those two things. It isn’t difficult to find a small toolkit hidden in one of the soldier’s pouches and use it to pry the casing of the baton open. He knows which wires aren’t supposed to be crossed and he crosses them. Trying to maneuver his bound hands around such small components is the trickiest part, but soon enough it’s finished. 

He takes it in one hand, picks a wall, and rams his shoulder into it. The metal bends with one hit and breaks with another, and he grunts as he peels the outer layer away to reveal the delicate wiring that controls the consoles and holograms of the room. He turns the baton on, tosses it inside, and waits for the smell of smoke.

Grinning, he also takes a bunch of equipment and chemicals and smashes them on the floor. He opens the drawers embedded in the walls and doesn’t bother with reading the labels as he takes a handful of samples and smashes those as well. Smoke starts to spill out of the wall and into the room while Miguel decimates anything he can get his hands on. He hisses in a kind of maniacal delight when he finds a vial with some of his own teeth inside, carelessly tossing them over his shoulder to join the pile of other bodily fluids and pieces. 

He feels the vibrations through the floor before he actually hears the footsteps approaching, and he rushes over to push the paralyzed soldier against the door to make it more difficult to open. They pound against it, yelling through the gap while Miguel goes about his destructive business. 

Ignoring them, he scans the room and finds his new target. The tablets that were left behind will melt away soon enough, but the console where all that information is kept is more resilient, and he wants to make sure that Stone and everyone else in this company loses everything. 

He slams the cuffs around his wrists into the thing until he can see its wiry guts. And when he goes digging around inside he finds the little chip that stores it all. 

When he pulls it out, he has to stare at it for a second or two. 

All of the research he did, all of the data on spiders and DNA that he ever contributed to, years of dedicated experiments and discoveries, all of it on this drive in his hand. As ridiculous as it sounds, he hesitates, though he’s not entirely sure why. Maybe some long-buried sense of sentimentality, or maybe just stupidity. But eventually the smoke gets thicker and the voices get louder, and Miguel crushes that chip in his hand with a short growl. 

He finds the single vent in the room, and it takes some difficult maneuvering to be able to leap up there and pry the cover off. But before he can climb up into it, he pauses and glances over his shoulder.

The shelves full of spiders are still there. The same tiny creatures that he experimented on, and also the closest things he’s had to friends in his entire terrible time here. Maybe it would be more logical to let them burn away with everything else, but…

He sighs and turns around. 

It takes some rushed tapping to communicate what he wants them to do as he tips the containers and pours them all into one. How he manages to stop them from immediately eating each other, he has no idea, but it works and that’s good enough for him. Closing the lid and awkwardly stuffing it under one arm, it becomes even more difficult to get up into the vent this time around, but he manages because he has to. 

Coughing through the thickening smoke, he gets up and starts running. 

Gabriel feels like he’s going to be sick.

He knows that Alchemax is bad news, everyone does. He knew that Miguel was heading down a dark path when he decided to work there, and he even figured out that Tyler Stone had something to do with his brother’s sudden addiction to Rapture. But he never could have known just how rotten it was.

It wasn’t easy to find Miguel. He had tried several times to get into the building itself, but without the proper clearance and an intentionally vague AI at the desk, he knew that was a dead end. So he had to call in some favors, getting some friends from Cyberspace on board to hack into one of the biggest companies in the world. Yeah, that was totally a walk in the park.

But nothing could have prepared him for what he saw when he got a hold of the live video feed from Miguel’s lab. The Spiderman suit, the shackles around his wrists and ankles, the blood on the floor, the cage— he didn’t know what to focus on first. It felt like he was looking at something deeply personal, something Miguel wouldn’t want him to know about, ever. He’s never seen his brother so defeated, so broken. 

He didn’t think about the Spiderman thing, not until later, only about how to get him out. So he convinced the others to help him cut the power, and as soon as he lost the visual, he packed a bag and made his way straight to Alchemax. 

He sees the smoke first, a billowing cloud rising far above the city and a fire raging on one of Alchemax’s higher floors. The same floor he knows Miguel was just on, and could still be on. Gabriel admits to himself that he’s scared, because he knows nobody else will admit it for him. 

Lyla popping up as a hologram from his phone nearly startles him into falling over, and she smiles at him like absolutely nothing is wrong. To her, it probably isn’t.

“Hello, Gabriel. I’m here to inform you that Miguel is leaving Alchemax now.”

His breath catches in his throat as he looks up. And then, moments later, a dark figure without a mask goes leaping from over one hundred stories off the ground towards another building nearby. Miguel hits a window, goes sliding down, down, down before he finally catches himself on a ledge. Gabriel can vaguely see that he’s carrying something, and it’s making it more difficult for the normally nimble and fearless hero to move. 

And God, his brother is a hero, isn’t he? Granted it wasn’t for very long before he went missing for nearly a month, but Miguel O’Hara is Spiderman. There’s no way he doesn’t make it out of this okay, right?

It doesn’t take more than a few seconds after that thought crosses his mind for Miguel to lose his grip. He falls, twisting in midair so he’s facing down and his limbs are outstretched to slightly slow his fall. Spiderman’s cape-like webbing is stretched under his arms, but he can’t separate his wrists to maneuver properly, so he ends up in a rapidly falling glide instead of the high soaring Gabriel has seen Spiderman show off before. 

He’s going to crash, Gabriel realizes too late. And when he starts running in Miguel’s direction, his brother has already disappeared into the gaping chasm that leads Downtown. 

He doesn’t hesitate to nab someone’s unattended hover-bike and dive down there after him. He’s already come this far, and he’s going to get his brother back.

Finding Miguel a second time is even more difficult than the first. The guy is incredibly fast, and as soon as Gabriel drives down into the chasm he’s already gone. Without enough tech in the area to monitor him through, Lyla is unable to pinpoint his location, forcing Gabriel to try and find him by ear.

There are way too many places to hide in Downtown, especially for a guy that can climb walls and blend in with the shadows so easily. He spends a lot of time at first just searching in every nook and cranny he can find, and then he switches to a more broad search when that doesn’t work. He asks around, giving descriptions of both his brother and Spiderman in intervals he doesn’t keep track of. Lyla tries to help in her own way, although letting him know where he can jack someone’s car so he can get around faster is illegal enough that it would get any other person’s AI hard reset. But Miguel likes her, and Gabriel has never been one to care about legality when it comes to family. 

He takes the car and he drives for what feels like hours. The sky goes dark, he loses sight of the city above, and he’s no closer to finding anyone than he was before.

That is, until he comes across a mother and her two children yelling and running away from something, and when he goes over to ask them what’s wrong, he finally gets a clue.

“There’s a monster!” one of the kids cries.

“Be careful out there, boy,” the woman warns, glancing briefly to an alleyway nearby before she ushers her children quickly away. 

Gabriel follows her line of sight and goes rushing into that darkened alley without a second thought.

There’s a fairly short path in between houses and other buildings. Holo-graffiti litters the walls and an increasing amount of trash covers the ground with each step. There’s a foul smell that only gets stronger the closer he gets, and soon enough he’s forced to step over and wade through heaping piles of garbage. 

There’s a small kind of clearing between the back of a few buildings and a large wall leading all the way up topside, and embedded in it is a large sewer hole, the source of the trash and the smell. It leaks a liquid onto the ground that looks like it would kill him if he touched it, and Gabriel grimaces as he pinches his nose and makes his way further into the disgusting space. 

But he doesn’t get very far before a deep growl echoes around him. He stops, turning his head this way and that as he searches for the source. When he still doesn’t see anything, he tries to take another careful step forward and that growl returns again, a little louder this time. 

“Miguel?” he calls out cautiously. He tries to peek over a few mounds of trash that his brother might be hiding behind, but he can’t see anything if he doesn’t move. “Miguel, are you here?”

He finds a container tipped on its side with a whole lot of spiders crawling out of it, and he very quickly goes in the other direction because he is not about to deal with that. And then he’s distracted by a whine, like an animal dying, and then a scraping sound as Spiderman’s signature colors come into view. Miguel rises from behind a pile of trash, hunched over and stumbling slightly as he gets upright. 

And Gabriel may be a little too hasty as he rushes towards his brother, out of breath with worry. Because one moment he’s reaching out wondering how he’s going to get those things off his wrists, and the next he’s being slammed against a wall with an arm pressed to his throat. 

Dazed and gasping, Gabriel goes tense when Miguel gets in his face and snarls. For a second he wonders if he’s made a mistake, if this person is even Miguel at all.

He’s never seen Miguel’s eyes so red, or his teeth so sharp, his anger so visceral. Gabriel can feel the breath on his face and he’s never been more scared of another human being in his life. 

Heart racing in his chest and wondering when those teeth are going to slice him open, he tries to slowly raise his shaking hands, hoping that maybe he can get Miguel off his neck. Miguel’s eyes flash down to see the movement and he flinches. Gabriel swears he almost passes out right there when Miguel only redoubles his efforts, pressing hard enough to bruise and growling deep enough that Gabriel can’t tell the difference between him and a lion. 

“H-hey,” he squeaks out, swallowing when Miguel growls again. “Hey, Miguel. It’s Gabriel. Y’know, your brother.”

He manages to worm his hands up so he can lightly grab Miguel’s arm and shoulder, hoping that maybe a gentle touch will calm him down. He flinches, looking uncertain for the briefest second before he gives Gabriel a warning hiss. 

He’s not sure how he knows it’s just a warning. Maybe it’s the way Miguel is faintly trembling under his palms, or the slight downturn of his face. Maybe he just knows his brother well enough. But it’s a warning and not an outright threat, so even though seeing those teeth flash is terrifying, he’ll count that as a win.

“W-We’ve been really worried about you. Me and Mom and Dana. Maybe Lyla too. You’ve been, uh, gone for a while.”

Miguel’s scary image starts to break as he talks. He doesn’t think he’s seen the guy blink once this entire time, but some of the intensity dulls. The growling quiets until he’s just baring his teeth, and then that starts going away too.

“I think I called you like a thousand times. Lyla was super vague about where you were, but I figured it out. And I’m sure you probably didn’t mean for me to find out that you’re Spiderman, but I think that’s pretty cool.”

It reminds Gabriel that not only is he talking to Spiderman, but Spiderman has claws. And when he glances to the side he finds that the things on his wrists must be restricting them somehow, because it looks like Miguel is trying to pull them out but can’t get them very far. God, he’s so lucky that Miguel didn’t decide to use those on him. 

When Gabriel glances back, Miguel is just staring at him. His mouth has mostly closed, leaving his fangs poking above his bottom lip but otherwise not nearly as angry as he looked just a second ago. Gabriel remembers weeks ago that he said he had grown fangs, but he thought Miguel was joking. Clearly he wasn’t.

Finally, Miguel’s face changes, his eyes lose just a little bit of that bright red color, and a big chunk of the tension he had leaves him in an instant. He groans and loosens his hold on Gabriel as he leans over and presses the top of his head against the wall. He stares off into space somewhere around Gabriel’s shoulder, taking a few deep breaths that cause him to tremble with each exhale.

“G… Gabri…?”

Gabriel lets out an immense sigh of relief, legs nearly collapsing under him with the sheer drop in adrenaline. 

“Yeah,” he breathes, slightly squeezing Miguel’s shoulder. “It’s me. I’m here.”

The rest of Miguel’s tension leaves him after that, and the arm against Gabriel’s neck slides off to hang limply below. Miguel starts to lean most and then all of his weight onto Gabriel, and with a huff he has to hold his brother around the middle to keep them both upright. When did Miguel get so heavy?

Something touches one of his hands and Gabriel shivers at the crawling sensation that follows. He shifts Miguel’s weight to one arm fairly successfully to flick off whatever bug has landed on him, only to get a good look at a massive tarantula slowly making its way up his arm. He yelps, and of course he freaks out, but then Miguel swiftly catches his wrist and Gabriel stares, wide-eyed and fairly certain that he’s about to get bitten by something that could very well be venomous. Miguel carefully turns his arm so the tarantula crawls onto him instead, and despite the circumstances, it’s probably one of the gentlest things he’s ever seen Miguel do. He has a distant look on his face as he points his elbow towards the wall and waits for the spider to crawl off that way. Thankfully it heads away from Gabriel. 

It’s that moment, on top of everything else, that makes Gabriel realize just how different Miguel is from the person he‘s used to knowing. There are so many things he expected to happen here that didn’t, so many ways this could have ended that wouldn’t have been surprising at all. He may care about his brother, but he’ll be the first to admit Miguel is a slimeball on a good day. But slimeballs don’t hold spiders so gently, or go out fighting crime as Spiderman, or look so exhausted and vulnerable in front of other people. Just the fact that he’s not trying to bite Gabriel’s head off, either literally or figuratively, is already a massive improvement. He came down here expecting a screaming match and possibly an outright fight, but Miguel is just watching him silently, swaying on his feet like he’s two seconds from passing out, and for once Gabriel gets to be the kind of support that he’s always wanted Miguel to have. 

“Alright,” he says breathlessly, moving so he can get Miguel’s arm around his shoulders even if the cuffs make it awkward, “we’re getting you back home. Don’t worry, I’ll drive.”

Trying to get back to a functional condition again is a long process. Gabriel takes him back to his condo and Miguel is exhausted putty in his hands as he sits him down on the bed, rushes to find some tools, and gets to work on the restraints. 

He’s not sure why he’s so tired exactly. The amount of activity he’s had today isn’t much more than an average day out as Spiderman, and his stamina after the accident is incredible. Maybe it’s the still-healing cuts and bruises from Alchemax and the fall into Downtown, or maybe it’s the lack of proper food. Maybe his body is just making the executive decision that he’s gone through enough and needs to sleep off the few weeks he spent there all at once. 

Having his own bed back is a welcome change from the cold, hard ground of his cage, but even with the lights dimmed to his preferences and his brother here taking care of him, there’s something missing. Some tension begins to return to his shoulders as a tingling, uncomfortable sensation works its way up his body. All of the sudden it feels like he’s being watched, but when he glances around and even sniffs the air, he doesn’t find any sign of other people there. 

Gabriel pauses in his work to look up at him questioningly, but Miguel doesn’t notice it, nose flaring and eyes twitching as he continues to search for something that isn’t there. 

“Is something wrong?”

Gabriel lays a hand on his knee, and that seems to be the last straw because before either of them can blink, he’s shoving himself off the bed and falling to the ground. Gabriel scrambles out of the way before Miguel can bowl him over, and some spider instinct in his head screams at him to dive for cover. The only thing he can find quickly is the corner between his bed and the wall, but that isn’t shielded enough so he catches his claws on a blanket and pillow to drag those down with him. Shaking, paranoid, and confused, he keeps the wall to his back and tries to move the blanket in a way that will make him feel more protected, failing each time. 

Gabriel is looking at him strangely, and Miguel can’t blame him. He doesn’t have a much better idea of what he’s doing than his brother does.

“Sorry,” he stammers out. “I don’t—I don’t know why—“

He growls softly, frustrated with his own lack of understanding. He’s out of Alchemax, so why does it feel like he’s still in a cage? Hunching over and gripping his hair in his hands, he struggles to get himself back under control. 

“Lyla, what’s wrong with me?”

She appears in a burst of light that stings his eyes and forces him to look away.

“Welcome back, Miguel. While I can’t say for certain, you once explained that the spider genes mixed with your DNA was causing you both anatomical and behavioral abnormalities, so maybe what you are experiencing now is another symptom. Should I call a doctor to come see you?”

He rapidly shakes his head. “No, don’t do that. Don’t call anybody. Just—Can you tell me if anyone else is here?”

“Of course,” she replies cheerfully. “You and Gabriel are the only living beings in this home. The floor below yours is currently vacant, and the two neighbors above are sleeping. Would you like me to tell you about the rest of the building?”

He pauses, lowering his hands as he tries to force himself to calm down and actually think. Nobody else is in the room or nearby, which means he’s getting worked up and paranoid for nothing. That tingling sensation is still trying to tell him to find a deep, dark hole and stay there, but he has to remind himself that he’s not a spider and he’s not at Alchemax. The room he’s in is plenty dark enough, and Gabriel being here means safety. It’s enough. It has to be. 

Once he’s as relaxed as he’s going to get, he glances up at Gabriel and tries to push away guilt and embarrassment for his outburst. 

“You can—“ he swallows, faintly tasting blood as he gestures to his still-cuffed hands and the exposed wiring that Gabriel was messing with a minute ago. “You can keep going. Sorry.”

Gabriel comes up to him hesitantly, looking at him dubiously even as he sits down and gets to work again.

“Saying sorry twice? I think that’s more than your quota for the year,” he jokes. All it does is make them both frown. 

Miguel watches him work in silence for a while, the tense atmosphere only dulled by the sound of wires being cut and his own unsteady breathing. He starts leaning, eyelids drooping as the fight to stay conscious gets progressively harder. Gabriel must notice him struggling, because once he breaks the magnetism and moves on to getting each cuff off individually, he starts talking again.

“So, spider genes?” 

Miguel huffs and rests his forehead on Gabriel’s shoulder, closing his eyes. 

“Yeah,” he murmurs. “I kind of shocked up.”

Gabriel chuckles, and Miguel is puzzled by how soothing the vibration of it feels.

“You do that a lot. What was it this time?”

Miguel half shrugs, rubbing his wrist in relief when the first cuff comes off. He’s barely had any blood flow there for weeks on end, and he tries to work out the pins and needles feeling while Gabriel switches to the other wrist.

“Lyla can tell you about it later, but I’m 50% spider now.”

His brother pauses, clearly surprised, and when Miguel peeks an eye open he finds Gabriel giving him a very concerned look. 

“How is that even—Is that why—Actually, you know what? I don’t even want to know. Just tell me this. Am I gonna have to worry about you doing some kind of werewolf transformation and eating people or is this something you can control?”

He groans and closes his eye again. “Moderately. I did almost maul you, so clearly I have some work to do to fix this.”

Gabriel shivers and he pretends not to notice as his brother dives into the wires again. It’s kind of funny and kind of gut-wrenching at the same time. He didn’t mean to scare Gabri like that, and Miguel is lucky that he’s still willing to help at all. 

As for how he’s going to go about neutralizing his own behavior, he’s not entirely sure. Without Alchemax’s resources and with not just the machine but also all of their research destroyed, his options are far more limited. He’ll have to get his own equipment, test his DNA, figure out which genes cause what one by one. He’s starting almost from scratch, with only his own body and whatever he can remember about his research as a shaky foundation. He’s just going to have to figure it out from there, because he doesn’t have much of a choice.

The other cuff comes loose and clatters to the ground. Miguel hisses and brings it close to his chest, leaning away from Gabriel. He jolts slightly when Gabriel reaches for him, not expecting the kind of care he puts into pulling Miguel back so he can see the damage.

The surgical slice from the top of his wrist down to his elbow is mostly healed but still pink and painful at the edges. They gave him stuff to numb the area and make it more bearable, but it’s been aching ever since. The spinneret beneath the cut is probably fine by now, but he has no intention of using it until it’s fully healed. More than the possibility of causing damage, he’s afraid of how much he knows it’s going to hurt. 

Gabriel gasps when he sees it, brushing a thumb gently beside it in a way that he would’ve expected more from their mother than him. And then he catches sight of the claws faintly peeking out from his fingertips, and Miguel has a very hard time staying still rather than snatching his hand away as Gabriel carefully moves his hand to tease them further out.

His brother has a look of wonder and maybe a little bit of wariness as the claws are extended to their full height, each one a little smaller than an inch. The last time Gabriel came over to visit him, he had kept them very well hidden. The way that they fold and sink into his skin doesn’t hide them entirely, and if anyone were to look too closely then they would still see the slight shine of the sharp ends just under his nails. Luckily Gabriel was more focused on lecturing him and asking about the sunglasses indoors than anything else. But he sees them now, and Miguel has to fight the urge to squirm. 

“That’s weird,” he says in a faintly amazed tone. He looks at the slight indent where the spinnerets sit under his skin as well, but Miguel pulls away before he can get the bright idea to mess with those too. 

A few seconds of staring later and Gabriel moves towards the ankles next. Miguel leans back against the wall and tries to stay still and calm. 

“So you really are Spiderman,” Gabriel remarks suddenly. It’s rhetorical, they both know it is, but Miguel feels like he needs to answer it anyway.

“Yeah. I was always the unlucky one.”

Gabriel furrows his brow and glances up at him questioningly. “You think being Spiderman is unlucky?”

Miguel gives a flat, pointed look at the cuffs on the floor and the ones he’s still working on.

Gabriel ducks his head sheepishly. “Okay, well, maybe getting caught was unlucky, but there’s no way being a hero is all bad, otherwise you wouldn’t have put the costume on in the first place. I mean look at all the good you’ve already done. Even while you were gone the Public Eye was less aggressive and the streets were safer. People finally have something to believe in around here.”

Another cuff comes off and Miguel looks away. 

Growing up hearing stories of Spiderman and the other old heroes is one thing, but becoming him is something entirely different, something unexplored. The old Spiderman didn’t have claws, or fangs, or whatever the shock is going on in his head. The only thing linking Miguel to him is spider silk and a costume. Belief is intimidating, and the legacy he has to live up to if he tries to go out there again is a staggering mountain to climb. Swinging from building to building and helping people makes him feel alive, but is it really worth the pain? He’s been cut open and flayed alive only a month into this hobby of his, and he stopped Alchemax just like he was aiming for in the first place, so what does he do now?

The last cuff comes off, and Miguel could jump for joy if he had even a little bit of energy left to do it. He can finally move properly again, and he ignores Gabriel’s surprise at seeing more claws on his feet as he stretches. He grabs the edge of the bed to heave himself up off the ground, but it takes a lot more effort than he’s expecting, and he would have fallen right back down if it weren’t for Gabriel sliding his other arm around his shoulders to keep him up. 

He murmurs a thank you before Gabriel suddenly winces and leans away from him. “Ugh. You smell like a sewer.”

Miguel huffs and rolls his eyes. “Maybe it’s because I was in one.”

Gabriel hoists him up more securely and grimaces the whole time, unable to plug his nose while holding Miguel. “Alright, I’m giving you a bath. Don’t give me that look. I’m not letting you die of an infection after all this hard work I’ve put in to keep your eight-legged ass alive.”

Miguel laughs incredulously and lets Gabriel steer him towards the bathroom. Of course he would be the first one to start making spider jokes of all things. He supposes that’s another one of the downsides of being Spiderman and having a brother in the know. 

It’s a slow but short trip, and Lyla opens the door for them before Gabriel sits him down on the side of the tub. Trying to peel the suit off of him is easier said than done even with two pairs of hands, and he knows once it’s thrown in a heap on the floor that he’s going to have to wash it several times very thoroughly to get all the grime off. Gabriel gets him in and then Lyla fills it up with exactly the temperature he likes. He crosses his arms on the side of the tub and pillows his head on them as he melts into the water. 

Gabriel lets him relax only until the tub is full, and then Miguel is grumbling at him as Gabriel tries to poke him into moving. 

“Come on Migs, I’m not Mom. You gotta wash yourself too.”

He bares his teeth without any heat to it and almost apologies for it before Gabriel takes shampoo and starts rubbing it into his hair. Whatever noise comes out of his throat is utterly embarrassing and is absolutely going to turn into blackmail material, but he’s sure that if he were to pass away right then and there that he would be completely at peace. 

Gabriel laughs at him and finally nudges him into helping, and it doesn’t take too much longer to get to a much more acceptable level of cleanliness.

It’s easier to get out of the tub than it was to get in. Miguel isn’t so stiff and hurting anymore, but he is still ready to sleep for a year, so Gabriel takes his hand to help lift him up but otherwise just hovers as he retrieves a towel and dries off. Lyla shows him the available wardrobe and he doesn’t really pay attention as he picks the first thing he sees. Just a simple shirt and pants, although Gabriel also asks her to get him a hoodie, and he can’t really say no to that.

Once he’s dressed, Gabriel takes him by the sleeve and brings him back over to the bed. He doesn’t let Miguel do anything as he goes to pick up the blanket and pillows himself, and he gets the distinct impression that he’s being mother-henned by his own brother. 

“What’s that look for?” 

Miguel frowns at him as the blanket is thrown over the bed and the pillows stuffed back into place.

“I’m just thinking that I’m pretty sure I’m supposed to be the older brother, but here you are doing more work than you need to.”

Gabriel laughs and crosses his arms. “You went missing for weeks, Migs. I have no idea what went on in Alchemax, but it couldn’t have been anything good. You clearly need rest and you’re not being an asshole about it for once, so I’m here to help.”

Miguel frowns again and looks away, not wanting to push the issue further. Gabriel has only ever tried to help him, and what has Miguel given him in return? Gabriel is always complaining about how unpleasant he is, so Miguel is surprised he still sticks around.

He sighs and flips the hood over his head, bringing the blanket up to his shoulders as he flops into the bed. It’s nice to be home again at least, no matter how empty it may be.

He feels the bed dip as Gabriel sits on the edge behind him, and he already knows what his brother is going to say before the words even leave his mouth.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No.”

Because God, where would he even start? The part where Tyler Stone ruined his life with a single glass of wine or the part where they were planning on vivisecting him? He’s sure Gabriel would get a kick out of him being able to talk to spiders, but he doesn’t want to relive the nightmares and he doesn’t want to share them either. He’s already given Gabriel enough grief without dumping more problems on him. 

Then Gabriel is silent for long enough that Miguel worries he’s hurt his feelings somehow, and normally he would just leave it at that. But this time, unlike all the other times, he actually wants Gabri to stay, not go. So he picks up his twig of an olive branch and extends it.

“I can’t stick to things like the old Spiderman, you know.”

“Yeah?”

“The claws are a substitute. I think I’m more of a running spider than a crawling one.”

“And a flying one too.”

Miguel grins and Gabri chuckles like he can see it. The silence is more peaceful this time around.

He closes his eyes and focuses more on going to sleep. He’s probably going to be out for a while, and he wonders if his brother will still be here when he wakes up. 

“Thank you, Gabri.”

For Alchemax losing power, which Miguel is positive was his doing. For searching for him after the fact. For bringing him home. That’s a lot more than most people would do for a crappy older sibling. 

“No problem, Migs.”

In the present day, Miguel wakes up in a nest of webs with tears in his eyes. 

He hasn’t dreamt so vividly in ages, and his nightmares usually stop before the part where he escapes. It’s been even longer since he dreamt about Gabri, especially with such a tender memory. 

It’s been years since he last stayed in his old condo. With Alchemax and the Public Eye snapping at his heels, he started building the foundation for Spider Society and then never went back. His mom had enough dirt on Stone to keep herself and Gabri safe, though that wasn’t able to spare Dana. He still checks on them from a safe distance whenever he’s in their area, though that isn’t very often ever since Gabriella. 

Because how is he supposed to look his brother in the eye and explain that he destroyed an entire universe? How does he tell his own mother that he left to go be with another family, only for that one to fall apart too? He’s always been the unlucky one, but luck isn’t what dug this hole and luck isn’t what’s forcing him to lie in it. That’s entirely his own fault.

He sucks in a breath and wipes the water off his face, and when he pushes himself up he forces his legs to be steady. He makes his way out of the nest and is in the middle of composing himself when he freezes.

Because sitting at a console not far away with a hologram paused on the scene where he’s going to sleep is practically every single spider-kid and then some. Hobie, Miles, Pavitr, Pete, Gwen, Peni, and Margo all turn to him and they all look like they’ve been gutted. 

Miguel slumps, resigned. Lyla must have been recording his dreams as usual, and the kids probably saw all of it. Whatever the dream missed can be substituted with his own memories, which Lyla has documented as well. Why she didn’t stop them from viewing, he doesn’t know or have the energy to care. The evidence of his emotional state is still on his face, and he’s honestly just too tired to be upset about that. They know now, and that’s just one more unlucky thing to add to his ever-growing list. 

He only has enough energy left for half a sigh as he shoots a web and pulls himself up onto his usual platform. He even turns his mask on like that will actually hide anything, ignoring the watchful stares as he gets to work on the usual multiversal matters. It’s a good distraction from everything else he doesn’t want to think about.

But of course the kids just don’t know when to leave well enough alone, and he slumps again when he hears the thwips of other webs hitting the edge of the platform. He hunches over and leans on the console, hoping that maybe, just maybe, they’ll leave him alone for long enough to get his bearings again. But these are young spider-people he’s talking about, so he already knows that’s not going to happen.

“Ankal?” Pav asks tentatively somewhere to his left. He almost sounds scared, and if Miguel didn’t want to traumatize Gabriel with this story then he can’t imagine how much worse it is for them to have actually seen it. Why did they watch? Why did they stay? Why did Lyla let them? He hopes she at least made it a little less graphic for their sakes.

“Tío? Say something?” Miles asks from his right side. Pete taps a message of okay? into the console as well.

“I don’t—“ 

His voice breaks, and if he wasn’t worrying them before then he certainly is now, he thinks ruefully. He clears his throat and tries again. 

“I don’t know what you want me to say.”

There’s a tense pause, and then in the next moment someone is wrapping tiny arms around him. 

He looks down and finds Peni there, and all he can think about is how young she is, far too young to be witnessing anything like that. 

Lyla must be reading his mind or something, because she chimes in his ear the next moment.

“Don’t worry, Boss. I censored most of it.”

Which means she had full control and still let them see. 

“Why?” he finds himself asking to no one in particular.

“Why what?”

“Why did—Why did you watch?”

Another tense pause, and then Miguel is surprised when it’s Margo who steps forward.

“It was my fault. I came to ask your opinion about an anomaly and I saw some of the hologram before Lyla stopped it. And I thought that—You don’t really share anything about yourself so I just—Don’t blame Lyla because I asked her to show me. And then they were wondering where you were and they saw it too so—“

“Margo.”

Her jaw snaps shut. And then because she looks like she’s ready to get hit and he knows what her home life is like, he tells her “Esta bien. I’m not mad.”

She glances up at him hopefully, and then he huffs when she rushes to wrap her arms around him too. He puts a hand on her pixelated shoulder even though he knows she can’t feel it. Maybe it’s more for his own comfort than hers. 

Her hug is followed by one from Pav, and then Miles, and Gwen. And Miguel decides that this is not a situation he wants to deal with standing up, so he waves away the screens and eases himself and the kids to the floor of the platform. 

He ends up with several kids piled around him and in his arms. Gwen reaches up to poke at his mask pointedly, and he sighs before it disappears in a flash. He knows his eyes are probably red-rimmed and pathetic-looking, but thankfully nobody comments on it as they all settle in. It takes a few minutes before he can work up the nerve to speak again.

“Lyla?”

She pops up on Hobie’s shoulder, standing precariously on the spikes there. Even she looks worried about him.

“Yeah?”

He hesitates, wondering if he’ll still be welcome, if his message would be well received. It’s been over a year, and his brother’s opinion of him could very well have changed. 

“Call Gabri. Please.”

She smiles and flickers in front of him, typing on her own holographic keyboard before a new screen comes up. There’s no ringing noise like there is for cellphones in most of the kids’ times, just a little screen telling him who he’s calling. The kids look up at it in interest, and the longer it goes with no answer, the more nervous he gets. 

Does Gabriel not want to hear from him? Is he just busy right now? Did he really mess up badly enough to get his angel of a kid brother to actually hate him this time? That last one doesn’t sound too far-fetched to him, and the longer he sits there the more plausible it seems.

The call goes to holo-message instead, and Miguel’s heart drops. He almost waves it away, but Lyla is looking at him expectantly, and some of the kids are as well. He takes a deep breath and caves.

“Hey, Gabri,” he starts lamely, wincing when his attempt at a smile immediately falls flat. “I know we haven’t… talked in a while. Espero que estés bien.”

He sighs heavily and reaches over the kids to scrub a hand down his face, already reconsidering if he should be doing this or not. But the memory is still fresh in his head like an open wound, and while he never thought he would admit it to himself, he misses his brother.

“I’ve been… kind of a shit brother lately. Or always,” he chuckles, knowing that’s exactly the kind of comment Gabri would make. “And I should probably apologize to Ma too. I’m sorry I’ve been gone for so long. I found some new trouble-makers, and I’m sure you’d love to meet them.”

Margo is probably the only one of them that knows how this holo-technology works, so she gives a shy smile and waves at the screen. A few of the other kids jump, realizing only now that Gabri will be able to see them when he gets this message, and Miguel smiles genuinely this time.

“And… if you remember that night after Alchemax, when you asked me if I wanted to talk about it…”

He takes a deep breath, already wanting to rescind something he hasn’t even said yet. Lyla gives him an encouraging grin, making an interview microphone appear in her hand so she can hold it up for him. It’s funny enough that he’s able to shove the anxiety back down where it came from and continue.

“I think I’m ready to talk about it now. That and… everything else. There’s a lot of stories to tell, and not all of them are sad. But call me back, will you?”

And he nearly chickens out on the ending, but he rushes out a “Te quiero, Gabri” before stopping the message there. 

Once it’s done, it feels like he’s run a marathon. He breathes an immense sigh of relief and sends it before he can second-guess himself and delete it instead. When he glances down at the kids, this time they’re all looking at him with pride and appreciation, and he knows he must have done the right thing. 

Despite having woken up barely an hour ago, he wants nothing more than to get back into his nest and rest. He makes his wishes clear when he moves to stand and waits for the kids to stick onto him. With Peni unable to stick herself, Pete hoists her up onto his shoulders and climbs up Miguel’s back. Margo gets the privilege of having Miguel pick her up himself, and he almost entertains the idea of quickly hopping over to her universe to retrieve her real form, but he wouldn’t want to get her in trouble with her guardians. As much as he despises the idea of them having so much sway over her, he can’t exactly do anything about it without completely disrupting her life, so this is the best he can do.

He hops off the platform and makes his way back into the nest, moving carefully so the kids don’t hit their heads. It’s much more comfortable in here than it is on the platform, and even with the option of webbed hammocks above, none of the spiderlings leave his side when he sets them down and takes a seat in the middle. The slight dip in the floor seems to push them closer, but nobody complains about how cramped it must be for them. 

And Miguel realizes then, remembering the spiders he talked to at Alchemax, that he’s a social creature. He’s aggressive and has a tendency to bite, and maybe he’s territorial or overprotective at times, but this is exactly the kind of closeness he was missing. This community, this shared web and easy acceptance. 

Just like with Gabriella—unconditional love. 

Lyla appears in front of him, presenting a small screen with a grin, and his heart leaps into his throat when he sees the name staring back at him. He sits up straighter and ignores her teasing look and the watchful eyes of the kids around him as he moves to accept the call.

Gabriel’s holographic form comes to life in front of him, barely fitting under the nest’s roof as he stands there and turns to face Miguel. For the briefest second he worries that his brother really is angry at him, and then in the next second that fear evaporates when Gabri smiles at him warmly. 

“Hey, Migs.”