Peter swung away from the scene in short, awkward arcs, already replaying the whole thing in his head — and cringing harder with every replay.
Why did I catch it?
Why didn’t I just dodge?
He’d had time.
He knew that now, turning it over mid-swing — his body had reacted fast enough to simply step aside, let the bullet pass harmlessly by the way it easily could have.
Instead some instinct had reached out and grabbed it clean out of the air, right in front of a dozen officers and however many phones had been recording.
Showing off.
Unnecessary.
Exactly the kind of thing that got remembered.
Great.
First real appearance and I’m already an idiot about it.
Still, some quieter part of him noted that he hadn’t actually decided to catch it — his hand had simply known it could, the same certainty he’d started feeling about everything else his body did lately.
He dropped into a quiet alley several blocks from the scene, ducked behind a dumpster, and concentrated the suit back into himself, feeling it recede beneath his skin the same way it always did.
He straightened his hoodie, smoothed his hair back into some kind of order, and jogged the rest of the way to school like a kid who was simply running late.
He found Harry first, then Gwen, MJ, and Felicia not long after, and the relief that flooded through him seeing all four of them safe and whole was almost enough to make him forget the ache still lingering in his knuckles from the mercenary’s jaw.
“You heard?” Harry asked immediately, grabbing his arm.
“There was a whole thing with Gwen’s bus—” “I heard,” Peter said quickly, aiming for shaken instead of relieved.
“Are you okay?
All of you?” “We’re fine,” Gwen said, though her voice was a little higher than usual, still riding the adrenaline.
“Some guy showed up.
Some — I don’t even know what to call him.
He took out six armed guys in about ten seconds.” “He caught a bullet,” MJ added, eyes wide.
“With his hand.
I saw it happen.” “That’s insane,” Peter said, and meant it, even if not quite for the reason they thought.
The day passed in a blur after that, the whole school buzzing with nothing else.
By lunch, half the cafeteria had a phone out replaying shaky footage someone had caught from a nearby building, and every table seemed to be running its own theory about who — or what — had shown up that morning.
“We need a name for this guy,” Flash announced through a mouthful of fries, dropping into his usual seat at their table like he was chairing an official meeting.
“Can’t just keep calling him ‘that guy.'” “You’re deeply invested in this,” Harry said.
“I’m deeply invested in naming things.
It’s a gift.” Flash pointed his fork at nobody in particular.
“I’m thinking Arachnid.
There was a literal spider on his chest.
Big white spider, right in the middle.
Arachnid.” “That’s just the scientific word for spider with extra steps,” Gwen said.
“It sounds cool, though.” “He seemed pretty daring,” MJ said, tapping her chin thoughtfully.
“Caught a bullet, threw a guy through a window, wobbled away like it was nothing.
Very dramatic.
I feel like his name should have some flair.
Something bold.” “Arachnid Man,” Gwen offered, half-joking.
“Combines both, really.” Peter kept his eyes on his tray, doing his best impression of someone mildly entertained by a conversation that had nothing to do with him.
“Spider-Man,” Felicia said suddenly, not even looking up from her food, like it had just occurred to her and wasn’t worth much more thought than that.
The table went quiet for half a second.
“…Okay, that’s actually good,” Gwen admitted.
“That’s really good,” Flash said, sitting up straighter like Felicia had just handed him a personal victory.
“Spider-Man.
Yeah.
That’s the one.
That’s sticking, I can feel it.” “You’ve said that about three different names in the last ten minutes,” Harry pointed out.
“This one’s different.
This one’s got weight.” Flash was already typing on his phone, presumably telling the entire internet his verdict on the matter.
Peter allowed himself the smallest, most private smile, filing the name away somewhere it would stay with him for a long time after this lunch period ended.
Spider-Man.
Yeah.
I can work with that.
School let out, and Peter said his goodbyes with more urgency than usual, citing homework he didn’t actually have, already thinking ahead to what came next.
He’d made a decision that morning, before any of this had even happened, and nothing about the day had talked him out of it.
Tonight.
Oscorp.
No more waiting.
He went home just long enough to grab a few things, told May he had a study group, and made his way to the warehouse to change, letting the suit sweep over him in the privacy of the empty building before heading out into the dark.
He swung most of the way to the Oscorp tower, keeping to the shadows between buildings, and found a ventilation duct on the building’s rear side exactly where he remembered it from the school tour — a small mercy from a day that felt like it belonged to a completely different life.
Getting in wasn’t easy, exactly, but it wasn’t the impossible task he’d half expected either.
His new body moved through the tight ducting with an ease that would’ve been laughable a week ago, senses picking up the vibration of footsteps and the hum of machinery well before he ever needed to see them, letting him route around two separate security patrols without either one so much as pausing.
He found the server room roughly where he remembered from the tour, tucked behind a heavy security door he bypassed with a careful application of strength instead of any actual skill.
Inside, rows of servers hummed quietly under cold blue light — all of it new, gleaming, obviously replaced in the days since the attack.
Of course they replaced everything, Peter thought grimly, moving to the nearest terminal.
The old data’s probably long gone with whoever hit this place.
He plugged in a small drive he’d bought that afternoon and sat down at the terminal, cracking his knuckles once out of habit before getting to work.
Whatever else the last week had thrown at him, this part, at least, wasn’t new — coding, systems, logic puzzles built out of other people’s carelessness.
He’d been the kid quietly acing programming competitions since middle school, the one who read security whitepapers for fun on weekends when nobody was looking.
He worked through Oscorp’s login layers methodically, exploiting a sloppily patched access point he recognized from an old vulnerability report he’d read months ago purely out of curiosity, and found himself inside the system faster than he’d expected.
Some things don’t need superpowers, he thought, almost smiling despite everything.
Just paying attention.
He copied whatever he could find — most of it disappointingly thin, exactly as he’d feared, the servers largely rebuilt from scratch with the truly sensitive material either destroyed or removed entirely.
He almost gave up on the main terminal and turned instead to an older backup server tucked in the corner, dust-covered and clearly overlooked in whatever rush had gone into replacing everything else.
This one’s security was older, clumsier, and Peter cracked it in a fraction of the time the main terminal had taken.
He found logs there the newer system didn’t have — and buried among them, several encrypted files that refused to open with anything he tried.
He copied all of it anyway, figuring he could work on cracking it later.
That was the exact moment the alarm went off.
A high, piercing wail cut through the server room, red emergency lighting flooding the space in strobing pulses.
Peter’s heart slammed against his ribs.
Did I trip something?
Did I miss a sensor?
He didn’t wait to find out.
He yanked the drive free, shoved it into his suit, and was moving before he’d even fully processed the decision, retracing his path back through the vents at a dead sprint, security teams already mobilizing somewhere below him.
He burst out through the same duct he’d entered from and didn’t stop swinging until Oscorp’s tower was several blocks behind him.
He got home well past midnight, exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with physical effort, and went straight to his desk.
He pulled out an old laptop he’d never bothered connecting to Wi-Fi, disconnected the little hardware antenna inside it for good measure, and plugged the drive in only once he was certain the machine had no way of pinging anything or running a location script even if something on the drive tried.
He ran a scan first, slow and careful, checking for anything that might be watching him back — a tracker, a virus, some kind of trap buried in the files themselves.
It came back clean.
Then he turned to the encrypted files, and it didn’t take long to realize cracking them properly was going to take a while — hours, easily, maybe longer, even with everything he knew.
He set the decryption running in the background and let it work while he combed through everything else on the drive instead.
Most of what he found was mundane — shipping manifests, vendor contracts, records of recent dealings that meant nothing to him.
But buried in an older folder, he found something that made him stop scrolling entirely.
A file labeled simply: Project Symbiosis.
He frowned at the header sitting just above the file name.
Every document in the folder carried a small joint logo he didn’t recognize at first — until he looked closer and realized it was two logos overlapping.
Oscorp’s, and beside it, one he’d seen before somewhere in passing on a news segment about biotech funding.
The Life Foundation.
Peter sat back slightly.
This wasn’t just an Oscorp project.
They were working with someone else on this.
He opened the file, and line by line, a piece of the puzzle he’d been chasing for over a week finally started clicking into place.
Research logs.
Containment notes.
References to a specimen recovered from a meteorite years earlier, an organism capable of bonding with a host and dramatically enhancing its physical capabilities.
Notes on failed attempts.
Notes on a joint venture between the two companies — Oscorp providing the facility and the test subjects, the Life Foundation providing the organism itself.
A collaboration neither one, apparently, had any interest in making public.
Then, further down: a note on a single successful bonding — a specimen from the Life Foundation’s collection, merged with a genetically enhanced spider, meant to test controlled enhancement on a smaller scale before ever risking a human subject.
He found the date of that last experiment.
The same day as the attack.
Peter’s blood ran cold.
That’s it.
That’s the spider.
The one that bit me wasn’t just some random spider caught in an explosion — it was already carrying that thing when it happened.
For a long moment, he just stared at the screen, his own breathing loud in the quiet of his room.
Every instinct in him wanted to panic — wanted to spiral into everything that phrase implied, an alien organism, something engineered in a lab, something that had apparently been designed specifically to merge with and control a host.
He made himself stop and actually think it through instead.
Okay.
Okay — if it’s controlling me, wouldn’t I know by now?
Wouldn’t there be some kind of sign?
He ran through everything methodically, the same way he’d run through a lab report.
No voice in his head.
No blackouts, no missing time, no urges that felt like they belonged to someone — something — else.
No unexplained aggression, no strange cravings, nothing that felt like anything but his own thoughts in his own head, just faster and clearer than they used to be.
He’d been scared, stressed, exhausted plenty of times over the last week, and through all of it, he’d still felt entirely, completely like himself.
He held out his hand and let the black creep down over it, watching it settle over his fingers like a glove, entirely at his command, exactly the way it had been every single time since that first night.
I’m in control of it.
Not the other way around.
He thought back to the bite itself — the spider already carrying the symbiote, already dying from the trauma of the explosions before it ever reached him, and the strange hesitation he could almost still remember feeling in that alley before everything went dark.
A theory started forming, slow and careful, the same way every real theory in his life had started.
What if the whole thing — spider and symbiote both — was already dying when it bit me?
What if it had nowhere left to go, and my body did something to it nobody predicted.
Something that let it become part of me instead of the other way around.
It didn’t explain everything.
It didn’t explain the dreams, the hive, the shapes circling that one caged form that had looked at him like it recognized him.
It didn’t explain why he seemed to be handling something that, according to this very file, had never actually been tested on a human being before at all.
Why am I fine?
Why aren’t there side effects?
What happened to me, exactly?
And why were Oscorp and the Life Foundation working together on this in the first place, quietly enough that nobody outside a locked server even knows it happened?
He didn’t have those answers yet.
He wasn’t going to find them tonight, either, not with a laptop full of half-decrypted files and a body that was finally, belatedly, starting to remind him how long the day had actually been.
Peter shut the laptop, leaving the decryption to keep grinding away in the background, and told himself he’d pick this back up tomorrow with a clearer head.
He climbed into bed, and for the first time in days, sleep took him almost instantly, no dreams waiting for him at all.