Chapter Text
Life used to be simple.
Mark used to wake up at the buttcrack of dawn and sluggishly drag himself out of his very warm bed to brush his teeth, half-asleep, while smoothing down his bird’s nest of hair with a handful of freezing cold water, the sound of early risers honking their horns on the nearby freeway blaring through his window.
He used to scarf down a bowl of Honey Bunches of Oats—the one with granola crumble and what looked like remnants of roasted almonds—and sling his tattered black Jansport backpack over his shoulder, kiss his mom goodbye, and head off to the bus stop on the corner of his block, waving hello to the friendly old lady—she’d asked him to call her Aunt Mae, short for Margaret—that would occasionally drop by to gift him whatever baked creations she’d made that week. Last week, she’d made a delicious peach crumble that he’d devoured within a day and still couldn’t stop thinking about.
And then, he used to spend a whole seven hours, five days a week, barely listening to his teachers drone on about whatever important topic they’d decided to focus on that day, often falling asleep in the back of the classroom before being nudged awake in time to save his own ass whenever he was called to answer a question. He’d made a deal with his elbow-mates back then: free desserts, thanks to Aunt Mae, if they woke him up before he got caught. He’d only been chastised once by a naggy Mr. Kim, who’d shot him with his water gun from where he sat behind his desk, a perfect squirt to the eyelid to jolt the boy awake to the sound of his classmates’ boisterous laughter. He didn’t talk to Jeno for a whole week after that.
He would eat lunch with the usual gang: Donghyuck, his very best friend (of all time, Donghyuck likes to add) that he’d met in the second grade, when the younger had transferred to their school and had tackled Mark to the ground during a ‘friendly’ game of freeze tag; Jeno, track star and soccer player extraordinaire with a strange affinity for stray cats despite his allergy to them; Jaemin, the community service geek with an alarming caffeine addiction who was somehow president of both UNICEF and Key Club; and Renjun, future astrophysics major with a knack for any hard science subject and a love for traditional art.
They’d sit together at their designated spot under the wooden canopies lining the exterior of the school library, a round picnic table shaded by an old beach tent Jeno had scored on his way home from school one day. Their usual lunches consisted of chicken sandwiches and tangerine fruit cups and whispered discussions about the latest gossip circulating throughout the school hallways.
But now — Now, life was a bit more complicated.
If you’d caught Mark on a good day, perhaps on an afternoon where he wasn’t busy bugging police radio transmitters or swinging about Downtown, he’d probably tell you about how he’d found a bug bite on the back of his hand one morning, about two years ago—which had grown into a huge, scary mass that freaked him out to the point that he’d thought he going through some kind of weird second puberty—that just disappeared all of a sudden, as quickly as it had come. Poof.
He’d then probably tell you about how he accidentally glued his palms to his face one morning shortly after the Freaky Hand Incident, after he’d shut off the alarm blaring into his ears and then slapped his hands to his cheeks to wake himself up. At first, he’d thought that maybe it was his younger sister playing some kind of sick prank on him and locked himself in the bathroom to run warm water over the junction of skin—as if warm water would’ve worked to dissolve super glue— but after about twenty minutes of tugging, tugging, tugging and then taking a closer look into the mirror, he’d realized that there was nothing on his hands at all.
He’d spare you the details—he doesn’t really know all too much about the physics of intersurface attraction himself. Long story short, Mark had suddenly grown about a few million tiny, almost microscopic little hairs on the tips of his fingers, like peach fuzz, if you’d looked closely. And after doing a little bit of research (re-reading the few chapters he’d skipped from his General Biology textbook, which actually came in handy a few weeks later for a pop quiz), he realized that that sticky feeling, the one he’d inadvertently experienced that one morning, was due to something fancily termed van der Waals force, some kind of scientific magic that allowed him to stick to any surface as if he was a permanent magnet.
So, as the story goes, Mark starts his junior year at Midtown High School with an out-of-the-blue freakish ability to stick to walls, telephone poles, ceilings —he’ll save that story for another time—and spends the first few days with his new abilities hiding in the bathroom during lunch to avoid his best friend, which was, to put it lightly, almost impossible.
Mark would run out of his classrooms as soon as the bell rang and make a mad dash across campus to spend his thirty minutes of lunch alone, squatted over the A-Building toilet, bathroom door locked shut for the entirety of his break no matter how many times students banged on it from the other side. He’d spray some webbing over the lock and door frame for good measure, since there was one incident where some football jock had been called over to slam into the door with his shoulder and had almost knocked the whole building over (or at least, that’s what it’d felt like), then nibble on his (usually) ham and cheese sandwich with one hand while his other hand gripped his cell phone, where he’d watch videos of spiders knitting their webs.
Yes, he’d go on YouTube, type in ‘spiders making webs,’ then spend the whole thirty minutes of his lunch watching spiders poop webs out of their butts.
Donghyuck’s worried texts eventually evolved into annoyed voicemails to pester him about where the hell he kept hiding, and Mark would have to lie, obviously, about his predicament, because how do you break it to your best friend of nine years that you’ve suddenly morphed into some kind of human-spider hybrid without scaring him away forever?
Mark quickly learned that the only way to get Donghyuck off his case was to say something along the lines of “food poisoning” and “explosive diarrhea,” which, trust him, embarrassed him to no end, but Donghyuck was just so adamant about spending every moment of his time with Mark that he had to come up with some kind of bogus, disgusting excuse (but honestly, knowing Donghyuck, he probably would’ve been okay with holding Mark’s hand through the stomach problems if it meant that he’d be able to make fun of him about it afterwards. They were just that close).
Donghyuck spends a week of lunches moping on Jeno’s shoulder and afternoons insistently knocking on Mark’s front door, his mother having to pitifully shoo the younger away on his behalf while he pretends to vomit in the upstairs toilet. Despite the guilt eating away at his insides like termites feasting on premium redwood, Mark didn’t want to—couldn’t—admit to Donghyuck about what he’d suddenly become. Yes, they’d been best friends for almost a whole decade and had promised to never leave each other no matter what, but something nagged at Mark from the deepest crevices of his brain and told him that this would be the very straw that would break the camel’s back.
So Mark kept his mouth shut and gave himself one week to get a hold of his senses and control his abilities (he didn’t think he’d be able to hold out for any longer, seeing that Donghyuck looked like he’d attempt to bust down his door at any given moment after about three days of on-campus radio silence). He’d sneak out once he heard his mother snoring down the hall, once the streetlights had been on for a few hours and the night had turned ink black, and swing from tree to tree, lamppost to lamppost, until he’d make it downtown, where he could practice scaling skyscrapers and apply all those physics theories about angular momentum he’d been (for once in his life) attentively noting down during class.
It takes him a few hours to get a hang of shooting webs on command, the first night he’d attempted to do so. It’d kind of freaked him out, to be honest, seeing that his wrists didn’t look like they had any holes in them, but were still somehow able to produce sticky, silky fibers with the force of a nuclear explosion and the strength of hardened steel. Mark quickly came to accept it as it was, because there was no way anyone on this earth would be able to explain to him the science behind all that.
It didn’t hurt, not really. It was a kind of little zing—a tingle, almost—with every burst of silk (or whatever it was) that erupted with every snap of his wrist, the string immediately hardening into strong rope that he’d use to swing from building to building. The webs seemed to disappear into thin air if he willed it to, he’d noticed, after suddenly realizing that there’d be obvious evidence of a ginormous spider ravaging downtown if he didn’t go back to clean up after himself. But if he wanted to, let’s say, stick a fallen leaf back onto a tree, the web would stay there, a glob of semi-opaque fibrous glue that would only be noticed if someone took a long, hard look at it.
The next few nights consisted of the same routine—Mark would come home, shoot Donghyuck another apologetic text and a few funny memes he’d found that day to cheer the younger up, attempt to finish his growing mound of homework assignments, then wait for night to fall, the cool breeze welcoming him every evening whenever he’d finally crack open his bedroom window to slither out without a sound. Mark gets better at flying, more confident in his ability to land on his feet every single time, and even tries his hand at talking to a spider he’d found hanging out on a streetlamp one evening—sadly, he’d quickly realized, just because you can suddenly shoot webs and stick to walls doesn’t mean you’ll be able to have conversations with spiders. A very disappointing turn of events.
One Saturday evening, nearing the end of his week-long not-really-but-kind-of breakup with his best friend, Mark stumbles upon an old lady depositing some cash into the ATM by the Starbucks near the bus station and for some reason, decides to watch her from where he’s perched atop the huge Fisk tower looming over the street. If you’d asked him why his brain had suddenly started blaring like a fire engine when he’d laid eyes on her, Mark wouldn’t be able to tell you, but he’s definitely learned to control the sound by now, turning the volume down a couple of notches to help with the ringing in his ears after it's passed.
There was nothing out of the ordinary, not at first. She’d slowly pulled her wallet out from the front pocket of her purse, a plum-colored alligator-skin handbag that matched the mauve scarf she’d tied around her neck, then opened the wallet to retrieve her bank card to insert into the ATM machine. Then Mark noticed him—a shadowed figure slowly inching towards her from the cramped alleyway about twenty feet away, hand in his front pocket. Mark usually isn’t one to jump to conclusions—he’s always the one that mediates the many petty arguments between Donghyuck and Renjun—but he’d suddenly felt something pricking at the nape of his neck and just, well, jumped.
He’d leaped without really thinking, one arm coming up to swing towards the building ahead and the other coming out in front of him, and with a snap of his wrist, had choked the head of the gun in the man’s hand, the heavy weapon falling with a clunk onto the gritty cement a few feet away from where the woman stood. The man had looked at him in horror, his hazel green eyes widened from behind his black ski mask, and ran as fast as he could in the opposite direction—but not fast enough, Mark had assured, a ball of silken fibers hurled at the man’s ankles to send him tumbling down.
“Get away from me, you freak!” the man yelled when Mark began to approach him, his arms coming up to shield his face from the teenage boy who’d just foiled his attempt at a heinous crime. When Mark had lifted his arm to launch another flurry of webbing at the man’s face, he felt a sudden tug against his sleeve and turned around to see his neighbor, the nice old lady who’d make him strawberry pastries and milk bread, with eyes widened in dismay. “Mark—”
“I–I can explain—”
“Mark,” she emphasized, the blaring of sirens nearing from around the corner, “you need to get out of here. Now.”
He’d stared at her with fear in his eyes, his life flashing in front of him like movie stills on a reel until she’d shaken him from his stupor with a steel grip and her lips pulled into a hard line, her gaze now determined, ablaze.
“Thank you,” she’d whispered, shooting him a wink and a kind grin before pushing him away towards the flickering streetlights. “It’ll be our little secret.”