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“Mr. Stark taught you how to break into buildings?” Ned asks skeptically, but with a hint of awe.
“I, um, I don’t think he realized that’s what he was doing?” Peter shoots back as they approach the back of the school. “He was trying to point out that places aren’t nearly as secure as people think they are, and it sorta… pointed me at the right YouTube videos.”
“I’d be impressed,” MJ says, tying back her hair, “except I was studying penetration testing, like, three years ago? My uncle’s a locksmith and he wanted me to be ‘properly paranoid’.”
“And you never thought to share this with us?” Ned accuses in a whisper, pulling off his hood to glare at her.
MJ rolls her eyes.
“Look,” Peter says, “we get in, we make the stuff, we get out, okay? I’ve been studying the guard’s routine for a month now. He seems to like the fresh air; he’ll make a good long circuit around the outside of the building every hour, and the rest of the time he basically stays inside the security room. If we time it right, we’ll have fifteen minutes to spoof the cameras.”
Ned grabs his arm. “You’ve been spying on old Mr. Greely?”
“Well… yeah? Mr. Stark gave me some neat spybots that send footage and alerts straight to my suit.”
“Okay, that’s cool,” Ned relents. “But this better not get him in trouble; my dad knows the guy.”
“Trying not to get anyone in trouble,” Peter protests. “If he sticks to his routine, we should be fine. If you can fix the cameras fast enough.”
“What if I can’t?” Ned asks, rubbing his arm.
“Well, I’ve got a little distraction bot just in case.”
“What if that doesn’t work?”
“Look, if he gets too close, you guys hide and I’ll, um, pretend I saw a burglar.”
“Can you even lie effectively?” MJ asks. “I mean, you sure have trouble with it when you’re in civilian clothes. There’s a reason you’re on the Decathlon team instead of in Theatre Club.”
“Yeah, well, it’s a skill I need practice in. And let’s hope we don’t need it today.” He looks up at the balcony. “You ready?”
Ned takes a deep breath. “You’re sure you won’t drop me?”
“Absolutely.”
“’Cuz this one time I went to ropes course, and they did this trust exercise where you fall backwards off this little platform and the group will catch you, and I thought I’d be fine ’cuz there were eighteen people besides me, only I guess they thought I was too big because they let me fall straight to the ground.”
Peter catches him by the shoulders and looks him straight in the eyes. “Ned. You’ve been my best friend ever since you spit chocolate milk all over my shirt in third grade. You think I would ever let you get hurt?”
Ned laughs, though it doesn’t completely dispel the nerves.
“Your friendship was formed over one of you spitting chocolate milk on the other. This explains so much.”
“I made him laugh,” Peter explains, rubbing the back of his neck. “Then he spent so much time trying to help me clean up that we missed the rest of lunch period. He swapped shirts with me so I wouldn’t have to feel yucky all day.”
“My mom kinda wanted to kill me,” Ned says with a sheepish grin. “Apparently chocolate is hard to get out of clothes.”
“Speaking of time,” Peter says, “we need to get a move on. Proportional strength of a spider, remember? I can pick up your mom’s van. With you in it. C’mon.”
Two minutes later, the three of them are on the balcony, and Peter’s using a piece of curved wire to thwart the lock on the door.
“That is so cool! ” Ned exclaims, keeping the squeal as quiet as he can manage.
“Except for the alarm,” MJ points out offhandedly, sounding bored.
“Solved that yesterday,” Peter explains, right as the door clicks open. “It’s a magnetic sensor; I stuck a strong magnet right on the door frame, so it shouldn’t… even… notice.” (Once through, he double-checks that it’s still there, and breathes a sigh of relief.) “Anyway, the whole problem is that people install the strike plates with too big a hole, so they don’t activate the security mechanism. When it’s properly installed, if the door is closed, you can’t make the bolt move. Plus,” he adds, “people get sloppy about entrances that aren’t on the ground floor. And schools don’t have a lot of money to throw into security, anyway.”
Which makes him feel ever so slightly bad about stealing from the school, but web fluid is the sort of thing he’d make in class anyway… if the whole city, including his classmates and teachers, wasn’t keeping more of an eye out for Spider-Man–related gossip. It’s vital for his patrols, the overall benefit to the city is more than worth the cost, and he doesn’t yet have a job that’ll fund the necessary lab equipment (and can’t really get one for another half a year, legally). Aunt May certainly doesn’t have the extra funding, and this all wouldn’t be a problem if Mr. Stark had thought to leave him some refills.
(It’s easier to stay mad at Mr. Stark than to let himself feel any other emotion about the man, at least while he’s out trying to get things done.)
But he did get kinda spoiled with his suit’s improved webbing, and now that that’s run out, it’s time to start figuring out some alternatives. Hopefully improve on the original stuff, if they can manage to test a few batches.
Five minutes later, they’ve bypassed two other doors and made it to the security room, where Ned is hacking into the system and making looped footage for the lab cameras. The exterior cameras that Peter installed weeks ago keep him aware of Mr. Greely’s movements, and his spybots are covering all the ways that anyone else might surprise them, but he’s still on edge until they finally lock the door again and ghost over to the lab.
Once inside the lab, the heist seems a lot less risky. It’s a place he knows well, the security cameras are showing an empty lab, and they don’t even need to turn on the lights (thanks to their night-vision goggles, courtesy of Happy sending him a box of useful tech). Three hours, that’s all he’ll allow them tonight; they need to be gone well before sunrise.
The first couple of formulas are duds, but the fourth is even more useful than he’d expected it to be; they make up a few batches and get them into the vials that Stark left him. Ned is entirely too enthusiastic about the web-fluid creation process (and geeks out at the laser-engraved Spider-Man logo on the top of each vial), but at least he manages to stay pretty quiet. Whatever MJ might be feeling, it’s kept on the inside; she says only, “Huh. Cool.”
Peter’s just given up on formula #6 when there’s a muffled thunk and Ned whispers “Oh, shit.”
His friends swivel to stare at him, standing near the sink with his shoulders a bit hunched and a sheepish look on his face.
Because it turns out he’s dropped one of the web vials down the drain.
“Why were you even holding it there?!”
“I wanted a closer look at the logo! The street light’s shining in through the window and there just happened to be a sink there!”
“Yeah, well now that engraving’s gonna prove that Spider-Man has been in the lab. And if anything corrosive goes down the drain, it might be worse than that!”
“Well, just, y’know, web it on out of there!”
“I can’t even see down there! The webs would just get stuck to the inside of the pipe!”
“Is it magnetic?”
“What, the plastic vial? No, Ned, it’s not magnetic, and even if it were, so are the pipes!! ”
MJ gives her companions a good long moment to freak out in heated whispers before she sighs and says, “You’ve never replaced a sink before, have you?”
“You have?” Ned asks.
Rolling her eyes, she opens the cupboard below the sink, gives it a quick look, and pulls out a bucket. “Hold this,” she says, swinging it into Ned’s stomach. “Time for a crash course in Plumbing 101.”
It turns out they don’t need a wrench, because Peter’s able to loosen the fittings by hand with hardly any effort. MJ walks him through removing the trap, including the crucial details of “catch the water in the bucket” and “don’t pour the contents of the bucket into the sink until the whole unit’s back in one piece.”
“There you go,” she says when the task is done. “You’re both Level One Plumbers. How’s it feel?”
“I’ll let you know when the adrenaline dies down,” Peter says. “How’d you know all that, anyway?”
“I’m the household plumber,” MJ says, a grin flashing across her face before it’s back to that same old “nothing fazes me” expression. “Mom doesn’t like getting her hands messy. Well, it’s, um, it’s more complicated than that, but I ended up being the one who handles the messy chores.”
“DIY side of YouTube?” Peter asks.
“Yeah. Helps offset the cost for school trips and such.”
“Ah,” Peter says, thinking of all the backpacks he’d lost in the first few months after getting his powers (before he’d started hiding them up high, in nooks where they wouldn’t be noticed). Should look into offsetting that cost somehow; Aunt May might take it in stride, but he’s nearly eighteen and he ought to be taking on more responsibility in matters not connected to his patrols (and occasional field trips to save the universe).
“Well,” MJ says, using a paper towel to mop up the rest of the mess they’d made, “ready for number seven?”
In three hours, they manage to make eleven useful vials, including the one retrieved from the sink. Since the formula expands into airy threads upon contact with air, a little goes a long way; these vials ought to last him a good year or two—by which time he ought to have access to his own equipment.
They make it back to the security room, undo the looped footage, and make it out again while Mr. Greely’s on the other side of the building. Then Peter sees his friends safely to their homes before swooping back to his own.
As Peter enjoys the night air on his rooftop, he considers how rarely MJ mentions her home life. The fact that she both mentioned her mom and hinted at their household budget feels like solid proof that she’s grown to trust them, at least a little. Putting out feelers, trying to determine whether it’s safe enough to come out a little more.
A bit of a shift from the girl who said she sat with “losers” because she didn’t have any friends.
Peter hopes to prove himself worthy of all of her trust. But, for today, this tiny piece of trust feels like a delicate, shivering moth that he’s sheltering in both hands, close to his chest.