Peter read through the files slowly, methodically, the way he’d read a textbook chapter he knew he’d be tested on later — except nothing about this belonged in any textbook he’d ever seen.
The first files detailed something called the Super Soldier Serum, and a name attached to it that made Peter’s breath catch in his throat.
Captain America.
He’d grown up hearing that name the way most kids heard about Paul Bunyan or Johnny Appleseed — a wartime legend, a propaganda figure from history class, a myth wrapped around whatever ordinary soldier the stories had actually been based on.
Except according to these files, he wasn’t a myth at all.
He’d been real.
A person.
Officially listed as Subject 1 of a program that had actually succeeded in creating an enhanced human being.
Officially, the file noted, in a clipped, clinical tone that felt almost obscene given what it was actually describing — because before Subject 1, there had been another attempt.
A German scientist named Dr.
Abraham Erskine had first developed the serum’s precursor during the war, and it had been used on a Nazi officer named Johann Schmidt.
The files called what happened to Schmidt afterward a failure.
Something about the process going wrong, the man surviving but changing into something monstrous, unstable, barely recognizable as human anymore.
Horrified by what he’d created, Erskine had fled to work with the U.S.
government instead, refining the formula until it produced something stable.
Something they’d been willing to actually use.
Peter’s hands had gone very still on the keyboard.
Captain America was just a myth.
A really good soldier who got turned into propaganda.
That was what everyone believed.
That was what Peter had believed, right up until about four minutes ago.
And this — Erskine, Schmidt, all of this — none of this is public.
Any of it.
So how does Oscorp have files on it at all?
He kept reading, and the file continued past the war years entirely, into territory that felt less like history and more like something actively hidden.
Captain America — Subject 1 — had gone missing in action over the Arctic near the end of the war.
Presumed dead.
With him gone and no surviving sample of Erskine’s original formula, all progress on the program had stalled out completely.
But it hadn’t stayed stalled.
A separate file, years later, detailed a second attempt by the U.S.
military to recreate the serum — this one led by a Dr.
Bruce Banner.
Peter scanned through dense paragraphs of technical detail before landing on a note about an incident, most of the surrounding context redacted entirely, that had triggered some kind of small-scale gamma radiation event during testing.
Dr.
Banner had gone missing shortly after.
No further updates followed.
Another one, Peter thought numbly.
Another attempt at this, and another disappearance.
A third file referenced something called the Red Room — a Soviet program, apparently their own attempt at replicating the serum’s success, details thinner here than anywhere else, as if even Oscorp’s own intelligence had struggled to get a full picture of it.
And then, at the bottom of the folder, a logo Peter had never seen before sat stamped across a final set of documents — an eagle, wings spread, encircled by a set of initials.
S.H.I.E.L.D.
Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division.
Peter’s heart started hammering.
None of this is public knowledge.
Any of it.
Not Captain America being real, not this Red Skull thing, not some secret government agency with an eagle logo apparently keeping tabs on all of it.
He sat back slowly, staring at the screen.
Superhumans already existed.
This whole time.
Just — hidden.
Kept quiet.
And whatever this SHIELD thing is, it’s clearly a huge part of keeping it that way.
He shook his head hard, trying to clear it, and forced himself to keep reading, following the thread back to where it actually connected to him.
Oscorp’s own contribution to all of this — the reason any of these decades-old files had ended up cross-referenced in their servers at all — was laid out in the next section.
Project Cross-Species Genetics, it turned out, wasn’t really its own separate thing.
It was a modern continuation of the same goal that had started with Erskine’s serum: create an enhanced human being, reliably, without needing another wartime miracle or a radiation accident to stumble into one.
Their approach had been different.
Genetically engineer spiders first — small, controllable, disposable test subjects — enhance them well beyond anything naturally occurring, and use whatever proved successful there as a template for eventually replicating the effect in a human host.
A stepping stone.
A proof of concept before ever risking a person.
The file was blunt about one thing: it had still been a work in progress.
Nothing about the spider program had been remotely ready for human application yet.
Peter felt the pieces slot together in his mind, one after another, and none of it made him feel any better.
All of this — Captain America, Erskine, Banner, the Red Room, all of it — was just people chasing the same thing for eighty years.
Trying to recreate one accidental success from a war nobody living even really remembers firsthand.
His stomach twisted.
And Oscorp’s piece of it wasn’t even meant to give someone powers.
It was just supposed to prove the spiders could be enhanced.
That’s it.
Nothing about giving an actual person abilities was supposed to happen yet.
Then it hit him, all at once, cold and sudden.
The venom.
The radioactive venom alone should have killed me.
That’s what the file on the spider program even says — it was designed as a weaponized enhancement compound for the spider itself, never tested on anything larger, never meant to be survivable for a human body at all.
I should have died .
If the symbiote hadn’t already been inside that spider — if it hadn’t merged with me the same moment the venom hit — none of this would have happened.
I wouldn’t have “gained powers.” I’d just be dead.
His breathing turned shallow, the reality of it pressing down harder than anything else in the files had managed to.
He’d spent the last week thinking of himself as lucky.
Chosen, almost, like some strange twist of fate had handed him something incredible.
It hadn’t been fate.
It had been an accident layered on top of an accident, and the only reason he was sitting here at all was that two separate impossible things had happened to collide at exactly the same moment, in exactly the right way, to save him instead of killing him outright.
He sat with that for a long moment, feeling something like vertigo even sitting perfectly still.
Okay, he told himself eventually, forcing air back into his lungs.
Okay.
What’s done is done.
Panicking about it now doesn’t change any of it.
The only real question left is — what do I actually do with all this?
He didn’t have an answer.
Not yet.
But sitting alone in a dark room with a laptop full of secrets that reached back eighty years suddenly felt like far too small a space to hold everything he’d just learned.
He closed the laptop, grabbed his jacket, and went downstairs.
“May,” he called, pulling the door open.
“I’m gonna go out for a bit.
Be back in an hour or two.” CREATORS’ THOUGHTS Crown_of_thorn Damn talk about Hiding Truth from Public