Chapter Text
September 2006
Skye was fourteen years old and she’d just been moved from Saint Agnes’ Orphanage to a foster home for the twenty-seventh time in her life. Not that she was counting or anything.
Foster Home Number Twenty-Seven was all the way in Brooklyn, and Foster Couple Number Twenty-Seven was apparently very excited about some school near their house that was a good fit for underprivileged kids interested in STEM. The school was funded by billionaire Norman Osborn, so that meant all freshmen started their high school careers with a field trip to tour Osborn’s building Oscorp Industries in Manhattan so that they could all see the place they had a good chance of working at one day.
Skye was supposed to just keep her head down and enjoy not being stuck at a desk all day. Her life probably would have been easier if she had. But she saw an opportunity and took it. Everyone else in the class already had established friend groups they could goof off with, but Skye didn’t have anyone to goof off with, which meant no one would notice if she… lagged behind a little on the tour, and accidentally made her way to the server room in Oscorp.
There was this hacker group Skye had been in contact with, the Rising Tide. Skye just had to prove herself to them, and they’d let her join up and teach her everything they knew about hacking, and then one day she’d be able to erase her identity and leave the foster system, Saint Agnes’, and the whole fucking sad little life of Mary Sue Poots behind her. She would get to be Skye, and she would be able to focus on the things that really mattered: bringing down the corrupt and powerful who tried to keep the honest and weak down, and finding out what had happened to her family.
She’d just have to get into the server room with her USB drive and take as much as she could off the Oscorp servers before she got caught. The Rising Tide couldn’t turn her down if she came in with something like that.
She lagged behind the tour group, slowly, making a show of peering down corridors they weren’t taking like she was wondering what was down there until she caught sight of words painted on the far side of the hallway with an arrow next to it: WEB SERVICES.
Yes! That had to be it.
Skye casually turned down the hallway and hurried down it, following the signs painted on the walls until she came across a black glass door with WEB SERVICES written on it. There was a handprint reader right next to it. There were no cameras around that Skye could see.
Skye tried the door first, just in case. Locked. No problem. She’d brought her computer along, just in case. Security had frowned at her when they’d caught sight of it in her backpack when they’d entered the building, since they’d had to go through metal detectors while their bags were x-rayed, but she’d just smiled and said she was going to work on an essay at the Starbucks down the street after school and they’d let her go.
One quick, surreptitious hack later and Skye was in.
The room was dark. Skye could hear chittering around her. She’d expected to hear more of a whirring noise, like in a normal server room, but Oscorp was a huge company. They probably had the most cutting-edge tech around. Hopefully it would be compatible with her USB drive. If it wasn’t, she’d have to get out of there and figure out a new plan to get that Rising Tide membership.
She fumbled for the lights. She’d worn thin but in-fashion gloves to keep herself from leaving behind any fingerprints, but they dulled the tactile sensations she was getting from the walls around her. She could feel a kind of fine metal mesh along the walls. It was more pliable than she’d expected. More like a weird cage than a computer.
There was a button. Skye pushed it. The lights flicked on, dim, steady, and red.
Skye was not surrounded by computer servers.
Skye was surrounded by spiderwebs.
She inhaled sharply, looking around. The webs were contained behind the mesh cage, but there had to be multiple spiders behind all those webs, and there was no spider in sight.
She must have taken a wrong turn into a seriously abandoned room. There were so many webs. But why would Oscorp have a giant cage like this inside a web server room? It wasn’t like they’d known when they built it that it would be taken over by a crazy amount of spiders.
Skye’s heart rate kicked up a notch. The spiders had to be in the cage around her, right? She would just back out of the room slowly and keep looking for the server room elsewhere and hope she didn’t have a tiny eight legged hitchhiker on her.
Then, in the dim red light, she saw a tiny flaw at the top of the mesh wall nearest her, as if one of the spiders trapped inside had somehow had the strength and leverage to wrench the mesh apart.
Skye reached behind her for the door handle, but instead of the handle she touched something small and spindly and delicate. Shit.
The spider bit her. Right on the hand.
Skye gasped in pain. She yanked her hand back to clutch it to her chest before the spider finished dislodging its fangs from her skin, and accidentally crushed the spider between her torso and hand, probably getting spider blood into the bite alongside its venom. Her other hand shot out and shoved the now spider-free door open and she stumbled into the hallway, mission totally forgotten. The corpse of the spider dropped to the floor and was crushed to an unrecognizable pulp beneath Skye’s feet. She followed the signs back to the main hallway and rushed down the hallway, cradling her hand to her chest. It was pulsing in pain. Shit, shit, shit.
Her class was going to stop the tour for lunch soon, so Skye followed the signs to the cafeteria until she arrived. As soon as she got to the cafeteria, she headed straight for the teacher in charge.
“Mary Sue, we were wondering where you got off to,” the teacher said. His hands were on his hips disapprovingly. “Where were you?”
“It’s Skye, and I got bit by a spider,” Skye said.
“You did?” the teacher said. “Where?”
Skye held out her hand, wincing. The skin around the bite was red and starting to swell a little.
The teacher inhaled sharply. “I’ll get something for the swelling,” he said. “Does it hurt?”
“A little.”
“Okay. I’ll call your parents and let them know to expect you early-”
“They’re my foster parents. John and Susan.”
“Okay, I’ll let them know. I’ll get you some first aid, and then you can head home and rest.” The teacher smiled awkwardly at her and then hurried off.
Skye’s skin was starting to tingle all over her body. Both of her wrists were starting to burn with equal intensity, even though only one hand had been bitten. The teacher came and went and Skye was escorted out of the building by a security guard who constantly reassured her that she was going to be okay and practically begged her not to sue Oscorp for their shitty pest control. Skye only half heard him. Her head was starting to pound.
Somehow she made it to John and Susan’s place without incident, even though by the end of her commute her vision was starting to get so blurry that she couldn’t read the subway signs. She got inside the apartment and registered somewhere in her brain that none of John and Susan’s other foster kids were there, and neither were John and Susan.
She collapsed into the skinny bed John and Susan had allocated for her and was out like a light.
She dreamed of red lights, spiders, and the Rising Tide.
Skye woke up.
Her mouth felt like a desert. Her clothes were sweaty and sticking to her. She hadn’t even taken off her shoes when she’d fallen asleep. There was something pressing down on her, and she realized two things: her backpack was still on, and she wasn’t in any pain. Even the spot on her hand where she’d been bitten felt fine, and the only way anyone could tell she’d been bitten was a small dark scab on the bite site. The swelling and redness and pain were gone.
The other foster kids she shared the room with were running around the room, getting ready for school. No one was talking much. No one really talked much in this house, but Skye figured that if the worst thing about this place was the silence, then it was already better than most of the places she’d lived. Besides, if her previous track record was anything to go by, she’d be heading back to Saint Agnes’ Orphanage in a month or two anyway. She could stand the silence for a month or two.
Skye shrugged off her backpack. It was lighter than it had been the previous day, and she looked through it quickly. To her relief, everything was still there. The bag just felt light for some reason.
Skye set her bag aside and got out of bed, accidentally bringing her sheets along with her when she stood up. She tried to drop them, but they stuck to her hands like she’d dipped her hands in glue before she’d gone to sleep.
What…?
She shook her hands a few times and, as the other kids filed out of the room, totally ignoring Skye’s plight, the sheets eventually dropped away.
Skye bundled up the sheets and put them on her bed. There wasn’t enough time to shower even though Skye felt gross, so she had to settle for changing her clothes quickly and slathering on a few extra layers of deodorant. She had PE today. She could shower then.
Skye headed off to school.
Her wrists itched.
School passed in a strange haze. Her English class assigned an essay on their experience at Oscorp. Her Comp Sci class assigned a coding project based on something they’d seen on the Oscorp tour. Skye barely registered any of it. Her wrists itched.
After school, Skye inspected her wrists carefully on the subway. They looked normal as ever, aside from a strange little flap of skin that might have been from a scar, but Skye knew where all her scars were and she didn’t have any on her inner wrists.
Maybe it was a side effect from the spider venom somehow. She rubbed at one wrist with her hand, exactly where the itching was coming from, and a weird white pus came out.
Skye’s blood ran cold. That wasn’t normal. That was going to mean a medical checkup. That was going to mean someone would have to spend money on her, and that meant she’d be shuttled back to Saint Agnes’ after only a couple weeks at John and Susan’s.
The subway rattled around her.
Skye poked carefully at the pus with a finger, and then at the spot on her wrist it had come from. The pus was sticky and acted more like a web of some kind than anything that would normally come out of a human injury. And her wrists still itched. There was no pain.
Okay. No pain meant no medical emergency, so Skye was going to keep this shit to herself. Nobody needed to know about this. She’d steal some anti-itching cream from Susan and John’s bathroom and she’d forget all about this. It would heal itself. It better fucking heal itself.
She rubbed at her other wrist, but instead of the weird spiderwebby pus coming out, a tiny rope shot out of her wrist and attached itself to the wall Skye had been facing.
Shit. Face flaming red, Skye tugged at the thin rope coming from her wrist attaching her to the wall, but it didn’t budge or break. She tried again, putting more strength into it, and then again, putting all her strength into it, but no luck. Skye was officially stuck to the subway. Her face burned with embarrassment, even though everyone else in the car was too busy with their books or music or staring emptily into space to notice or care about Skye’s predicament.
She twisted her wrist around, hoping to break the string. Muscles flexed in her wrist that she wasn’t sure she’d ever noticed before, and the string suddenly fell away from her wrist, though it stayed stuck to the wall. Her wrist was no longer itching.
Huh.
Skye held up her other wrist. She aimed her wrist at the inside of her jacket so she didn’t get stuck to the subway wall again. Some kind of muscle seized inside of it and another strong little rope shot out, attaching itself to the inside of her jacket. Another flex of the wrist muscle and she was free, the creepy sticky biological rope dangling from her jacket. Now neither of her wrists was itching.
Skye pulled out her phone and googled, spider bite + allergic reaction + string coming out of wrist, which got her a confusing mix of hits about allergies, spiders, and somehow using spider webbing to make bracelets.
The subway brakes shrieked around her.
Skye examined the string stuck to her jacket. It was thin and white and apparently incredibly strong. It looked almost like a spider’s webbing.
She googled, human making spider webbing, which got her results about how Oscorp was trying to make some kind of super strong, easily repairable cable line, but all their research funding had recently been slashed because none of their experiments were working. Interesting.
She got off the subway at her stop and headed for John and Susan’s apartment. She got inside, kicked off her shoes, weaved around the assortment of other foster kids living there, and managed to make it into the bathroom.
She turned on the light and examined her wrists again. They looked normal. There was a tiny flap of skin that could be mistaken for a weird scar, but otherwise they were completely unremarkable.
The webs had been pretty strong. She wondered…
Skye aimed one of her hands at the ceiling. The web shot out of her wrist and stuck to the ceiling.
Then, carefully. Skye gripped the web with both hands and tried to pull herself up. She wasn’t expecting much. She could do a couple pull ups in gym class, but anyone with a basic understanding of physics could tell you a tiny string isn’t going to support a human’s weight, and even if it did, the web would cut pretty badly into her hands.
But the web held her. Her arms and hands held her up like she weighed nothing. There was no muscle strain or burn to deal with. She dangled above the floor, held up by a single strand of webbing.
“Wow,” Skye whispered.
Someone pounded at the door. Surprised, Skye let go of the web, dropping to the floor, and put her hand against the wall.
“Hey, I gotta piss!” one of the other foster kids said from the other side of the door. “You done?”
“Almost!” Skye tried to tug the webbing down, but it was stuck to the ceiling. She tried to use both hands, but the hand that was touching the wall was stuck to it like she’d somehow glued herself to the wall. Just like how she hadn’t been able to let her sheets go that morning. Shit. Shit. Shit.
The other foster kid knocked impatiently again. “God, hurry up!”
Some people had no patience. “Just a second!” Skye abandoned the web and tried to yank her hand off the wall. What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck. How had she let go of the sheets that morning? She couldn’t remember.
Maybe water would help. She turned on the faucet, hoping she wouldn’t stick herself to the sink too, and haphazardly threw water onto her stuck hand. No luck. Fuck. She pulled at her stuck hand again, putting one socked foot on the wall to try to yank it off.
Except then her fucking foot got stuck too.
Okay. She could work with this. Skye jumped as well as she could with two limbs stuck to the wall. Gravity would for sure get her out of this.
Gravity did not get her out of this.
Gravity did nothing.
Gravity had completely betrayed her.
Skye ended up in the same position she had been in before. Fuck.
She pulled her hand again fruitlessly.
The other foster kid knocked again. “Did you fall in or something?”
“Give me a minute!” Skye took a deep breath and carefully, slowly, tried to peel her limbs away from the wall.
That worked. Thank fucking god.
Skye hurried out of the bathroom, leaving the spiderweb behind for the next person who walked in to deal with.
This wasn’t an illness or an allergic reaction. This was something else. The webbing and the stickiness and the weird strength all added up to one potential answer: superpowers. She had freaking superpowers, Captain goddamn America style.
Skye couldn’t help the grin that crossed her face. Superpowers. Superpowers!
This was the coolest thing that had ever happened to her in her entire life.
Skye’s first Official Superhero Outing happened three nights later, two nights after Susan and John had been contacted by the school and informed about how Skye had disappeared during the field trip and reappeared with a serious spider bite on her hand, and therefore one night since Skye had been unceremoniously returned to Saint Agnes’ Orphanage.
It was probably for the best. Saint Agnes’ was in Hell’s Kitchen, so it was way closer to the tallest buildings in the city. Skye didn’t have to go far to test out her powers.
Skye slipped out of the building that night after the nuns had finished their dormitory checks and everyone else was either asleep or ignoring the world. She didn’t bring her shoes or anything with her. If she was stopped, she’d say she was going to the bathroom.
No one stopped her.
There wasn’t anyone in the hallway- unusual for a weekend night. Skye squeaked open a window in the third floor hallway, the one everyone knew was the best one to sneak out of because it was the window nearest to the older teens’ rooms, and if anyone snitched then the older kids would have something to say about the situation. It was also the window without a fire escape, so anyone sneaking out had to have a rope or a ladder or something set up. Skye didn’t need any of that, though.
She slipped outside, touching her socked feet to the cold brick outside. Should’ve brought a hoodie. Her feet stuck to the building outside, holding her up and stopping her from falling. Skye closed the window behind her, and then, going hand over hand and foot over foot, she crawled down the wall, her head tilted down toward the sidewalk, just like a spider. It was strangely comfortable to move like that.
She got to the sidewalk, shivering in the autumn air. They hadn’t gotten any snow yet, but Skye was already worried about how she was going to move around in freezing temperatures if her superpowers relied on her feet, hands, and wrists being partially exposed to the elements.
She hurried down the block, confidently making her way to one of the taller apartment buildings in the area. Hell’s Kitchen was never quiet- New York City was never quiet- but there weren’t many people out. It was just Skye, a few people walking urgently from one place to another, and homeless people scrunched up in doorways trying to sleep. No one took any particular notice of the teenage girl in sweatpants, a t-shirt, and socks, aside from a couple guys who leered at her but didn’t make any moves.
She got to the building she’d been aiming for and, after looking over her shoulders to check if she was being watched or not, started to climb it. Sticky hand over sticky hand, sticky foot over sticky foot. When she was about halfway up, Skye took a quick glance down at the ground so far below and couldn’t help grinning at the thrill of adrenaline crackling through her body. This was the coolest thing ever.
She got to the top and stood there shivering for a second, staring out over the beautiful lights of New York City.
Now or never.
She shot a web at her feet and it stuck there to the top of the building between her feet. Just in case.
Then she jumped.
Ohmygodohmygodohmygod-
Wind rushed through her hair in a roar. Her heart was beating a thousand miles a minute. Every nerve in her body was alight with adrenaline.
Skye flung out her hand and hoped this would work. A web flew out of her wrist and attached itself to the building across the street and with a jerk that threatened to dislocate every bone in her body Skye was suddenly hurled sideways, flying toward the building her web had attached itself to.
Then with a jolt her sideways motion stopped. For a second Skye hung there, suspended between both buildings, a web in each hand.
Her hands were shaking with terror, but she cut the first web and swung forwards through the open air. Her teeth were clenched so hard she worried about cracking something. She shot out another web, and then another, and then another.
It was jerkier than she’d imagined. It was harder on her arms than she’d thought it would be. But Skye was moving, from building to building, and she could already tell that she’d get smoother with practice.
This was the greatest thing she had ever done.
“Woo-hoo!” Skye shouted. She shot out another web. It caught against a building and she flipped in the air, limbs flailing, stomach swooping. “Yeah! Haha!”
She was out, swinging through the air until she found herself at the edge of the city and it was four in the morning. She’d have to get back before it got light enough for anyone to see her face.
She swung back to Saint Agnes’. For the first time ever, she smiled when she re-entered the building.
Even if no one else knew it, Skye was free.