Chapter Text
Whenever home gets too loud or too quiet, Margo Kess goes to the Web.
Margo is no one of importance. The most she can be at home is an occasional participant in her parents’ frequent arguments. And online, she doesn’t have any friends or mutuals or followers, and her classmates at the Parker Institute don’t have much use for her outside of group projects. Nobody gets her.
But Spider-Byte?
She’s different. She’s special. When she changes her hairstyle three times a day, the polls about which one people like best rack up thousands of votes. When she dashes through a digital marketplace, leaving a trail of micropixel glitter in her wake, everyone stops and stares and showers her with likes.
Margo likes to imagine that at home, they’re leaning forward in their chairs. She hopes they’re smiling.
She makes Margo smile too. Not out of true happiness— to be honest, Margo isn’t sure what that feels like, or if it’s even real. She’s not happy, but she’s content enough, helping others find theirs.
And the world needs a lot of helping. Which is good, because it keeps Margo busy. Keeps her online and out of her parents’ world. Keeps her doing productive things, like password recovery, hunting identity thieves, summoning daemons to go haunt cyberbullies and rounding up bots. The work is constant and difficult and often dull, but it feels good, being needed.
Home isn’t great, but that doesn’t matter, does it? Not if she’s always on the Web. (And she’s always on the Web.)
Being Spider-Byte eats up a lot of her time, especially since she’s doing the job alone.
The Cyber Crimes Investigation isn’t interested in recruiting her (not that she asked or anything), and We So Incognito have been… unresponsive. She’s beaten enough of their hacker tournaments to qualify, and they’ve worked together over a dozen times, so she knows she’s a shoe-in for recruitment, but the invitation just never shows up in her inbox.
She knows deep down that it won’t be coming.
And even though Margo could smash right through the firewalls guarding their stupid little servers, there’s something so important about being invited that she lets the rejection stand. She does her work and she waits and she wonders when they’ll change their minds.
A change comes, eventually. It’s not the one she wants.
It happens like this: one day, a Captain from Cyber Crimes Investigation dies. Death is so rare to Spider-Byte, so unthinkable, that she doesn’t even realize it happens. She just keeps thwipping lines of code at Electro, expecting the Captain to respawn with a shiny new avatar any minute now, the way people usually do when their digital selves walk off a cliff or lose battery life.
But then the fight’s over— Margo’s hot on Electro’s heels, then slams hard into a CAPTCHA, and by the time she’s tapped all the squares that have a traffic light in them (which, come on, that last one’s kind of ambiguous, it should count either way), her villain’s slithered away into a different browser and the chase is done.
Margo grunts, uncurls her sweaty fingers from her controller and wipes them on her sweatpants. She calls out to the Captain, asking for a status report.
And there’s no response.
She checks if their channel’s still open. She cranks up the volume. She listens to the funny sizzling sound on the other side. The creak of a door opening. An unfamiliar voice fighting to get through the feedback: … baby, wake up. You fell asleep with your headset on again. I keep telling you to log off when you’re tired. You know you’re gonna hurt your neck like that. Wake up. The power just died. Wake up—
Margo logs off.
She removes her headset, gets the tiger plushie off her bed, and sits in the living room with her nose in the stuffed animal’s fur. Her parents log out of work an hour later and putter around the kitchen, and after a while Margo joins them. When dinner’s made and everyone shovels it onto their individual plates and heads back to their computers, Margo stays on the couch, moving potatoes around on her plate. It’s like it wasn’t even real.
The next morning, her newsfeed tells her otherwise. An AI reporter’s clipped voice chirps about a team of paramedics that untangled the Captain from their VR set, brain thoroughly fried by all the wires hooked into it. It’s reported that when Electro shorted out the Captain’s headset, they had also shorted out the Captain’s head.
She feels it then. The hard kick to the chest that leaves her breathless and blinking, staring at the white walls of her room. She’s unsure how to feel. Unsure if she’s even allowed to feel– after all, she never even knew the Captain. Until their photo flashed onscreen, she’d never even seen their face.
Margo pauses the stream. Stares at the photo. Thinks, stupidly, about touching the face.
(Stupidly, because what would even be the point? What she feels about the Captain doesn’t count. It’s not real.)
She takes all that emotion and swallows it up. She wipes her eyes with her shirt sleeve, slides the display visor down her nose, and gets to work.
Spider-Byte sics a vicious rootkit on Electro. While it winds like a tapeworm through the villain’s software, Margo does what she always does: she gets busy.
She’s got a Zoom call with her Parker Institute classmates open as they divide up portions of their 21st Century History project, and Season 65 of Doctor Why is on mute with the subtitles on at 1.25 times the normal speed off to the side, and she’s switched avatars so Spider-Byte can suss out whether an identity thief’s a person, bot or AI (and she doesn’t feel a thing. She doesn’t.)
And a chatlog opens remotely. Margo groans, and gets ready to hop off mute and snap at one of the Institute kids to just use the dang voice channel if they want her attention…
Then she reads the IP and says: “What?”
It’s not CCI. It’s not WSI. It’s someone different. Someone working off an OS so old Margo’s grandparents would probably know what to do with it.
Someone who has noticed what Margo did— what Spider-Byte did— what she’s been doing for a year now. Someone who wants to collaborate with her.
Spider-Byte’s digital spider-sense shivers so hard Margo’s controller vibrates in her hands. It’s never done that before.
Dimly, Margo knows she should probably be a little worried that someone has deduced her secret identity. The thought barely penetrates through the fog of excitement flooding through her— someone was looking; someone cared— and by the time it does, it’s lost all urgency.
Margo looks that thought dead in the eye and then swivels away. What should she care? She’s known for some time that all it would have ever taken Spider-Byte to reveal her secret identity was for someone to genuinely ask for it.
No one has. Not until now.
The person on the other end asks again: can we talk?
Margo replies: “Sure.”
There’s a funny humming sound somewhere outside her headphones, and static chatters through the fibers of her sweatshirt. Ugh, Margo thinks. Gonna zap myself.
Someone’s spinning her chair around.
Margo sighs, slides the visor up to her forehead, ready to snap at Dad (it feels like Dad), and—
It’s not her father.
The man in her room is tall and dark and so handsome it makes Margo’s mouth dry out. And that’s not the only thing about him that has her stunned— there’s something about him that’s just a little… off. The light moves off his skin differently, and the lines that define him are unusually sharp.
And the suit. It’s like the one Spider-Byte uses, only Margo isn’t sure how he’s got one off the screen and folded around his body, hard and scaly like lizard skin, and glowing just a little.
Outside her room (door still closed and locked, she notes), her parents are arguing.
The man tilts his head, listening for a moment. Then he talks.
He introduces himself. Says he’s like her, he’s from another dimension, there are many dimensions actually, an infinity of them all tangled together like a spider’s web, and he’s trying to make sure the delicate balance keeping that web intact stays balanced, and he only wants the best and brightest to help him do it.
“So… why are you here?” Margo asks.
The man sets a flash drive on her desk, looks right at her, and smiles. “To give you an invitation.”
Margo looks at it. Looks at him. Remembers the shudder of the controller in her hands.
“Can I think about it?” she asks.
That night, after a Wikipedia deep-dive into theoretical portable wormhole technology (a necessity, after watching how the Spider-Man left), Margo scurries out of her room and heads to the kitchen. Her parents haven’t stopped fighting.
“A man was in our apartment today,” Margo says, scraping macaroni into a bowl. “He came into my room and talked to me. He says he wants my help with something, and not to tell you. I think he’s a little weird.”
No one responds. No one even looks over.
She leaves the bowl on her counter, goes back to her room and accepts the invitation.
The flash drive contains two things: a sequence of code and a list of instructions.
Margo uses the latter to understand the former, and by the end of the night she’s augmented her avatar to access another dimension’s cyberspace.
And just like that, she’s cracked interdimensional travel, all without ever leaving her gaming chair.
“I can see and hear you through my headset,” Margo explains to the AI who greets her in a room set aside for orientation. “But I’m controlling the avatar from home. It’s like a video game.”
“Sure it is,” LYla replies with a megawatt smile.
Then the Spider-Man they’re all here for walks in and orientation starts.
Miguel O’Hara shows them the Web. He tells them about Life and Destiny. He tells them it’s okay that you feel a little lonely, that things are hard and keep getting harder. These things are necessary, you see; each hit you take will harden you and sharpen you into the better hero you’re destined to be. It all means something.
A universe away, Margo leans forward in her chair, feeling so seen.
This place will be different, she thinks, grinning like she's just won the jackpot.
It’s early days for the Spider Society. Headquarters is half-complete and three-quarters empty. The only people in the room with Margo during orientation are Web-Slinger and Spiders-Man. She assumes that means they’ll want to be friends.
They don’t.
She doesn’t care. It’s not like she has anything in common with a cowboy and a few thousand spiders packed together in a Halloween costume anyway. Not them or any of the dozens of other Spiders who start flowing in over the next few weeks. They’re mostly adults, mostly men, mostly variations on one specific guy called Peter.
Miguel’s the one she really cares about. He saw her. He came to her. He brought her here. He knows how special she is. That’s got to be why he’s letting her build the code that’ll run this place from the ground up.
It’s just the two of them on this project. They time the hand-off so every time she reports in or logs out he’s there to pick up where she left off, and Margo says nothing about how her access to the security feed means she knows Miguel doesn’t actually leave for the night when she arrives for her shift. That’s okay. He can trust her with that. He can trust her with everything.
When Margosoft is finally up and running, fully installed on the Go Home Machine and every single Society watch, Margo does a little spin in her chair, kicks her feet and beams. “What now?”
Miguel regards her carefully. The corner of his mouth twitches, which is the closest he can get to a smile these days. Then he returns his gaze to the monitor and his expression hardens.
He waves her over. He’s monitoring a mission in progress—another Captain’s death is in progress, and a handful of Society agents have been dispatched to correct a hiccup on the timeline. “We’ll try it now,” he says, nodding for her to take his spot.
Her spider-sense prickles again. She ignores it.
One of Margosoft’s features is an efficient scan of the Web to generate the simplest action that’ll guarantee a particular result. The idea is to send orders to agents in the field as quickly as possible, to make any corrective measures as Canon-compliant as possible.
Take for instance: A Captain’s due to be crushed by falling rubble, except there’s no rubble at all. What’s a timeline to do?
BLOW UP THE BUILDING, answers the screen.
“... What?” Margo asks. She didn't think it would do that.
“Just read the mission brief,” says LYla, flitting around his head like Tinkerbell. “The section there that says what has to happen to keep Canon on track. If it says the building’s supposed to collapse and it won’t do that on its own, you tell them to make it happen.”
“Okay.” Margo reads the brief. “Why? Is anyone in there?”
(Stupid question. She knows there’s someone in there. She knows that’s why they want to do it. She asks anyway, because maybe if she makes them say it…)
“You’re not here to ask questions,” Miguel cautions.
“So what am I here for?”
“Push the button. It’s a yes or no, Byte. Yes, they should do it, no they shouldn’t. Simple. I thought I could trust you with this.”
“You can.”
“Then prove it.”
Margo takes her headset off, and she’s a million miles away. She stares at the white walls of her bedroom and lets a flood of air conditioning wash over her face. She removes her glasses, wipes sweat off the bridge of her nose and thinks about logging out and not coming back.
She listens to her parents on the other side of the door.
Margo puts the headset back on, bites her tongue so hard it hurts, and sends the order to blow up the building.
“See?” LYla chimes. “It’s like a video game, remember? Easy.”
It is, actually. It’s as easy as looking at the brief and following whatever it tells her to and not asking why. It gets even easier when she opens a tab or two in another window right after, so she can keep herself so busy she doesn’t have to dwell on what she’s doing. It’s so easy, because she’s a world away and the watch on her wrist that she’s never used is the only thing that’s ever reassured Margo that what she’s doing here is real.
Miguel sits with her the first few times, guiding her hand. Then, once her hand stops shaking, once she’s so used to it that she’s started multitasking as she makes the calls, he pulls away.
Which would be great, except it’s around then that he stops talking to her too.
It’s not a coincidence to Margo that this coincides with the arrival of the new girl.
She comes limping in after him and Jess a few days later, pale and dirty and very, very quiet.
Margo isn’t there when the girl shows up, but she hears about her. She can’t not hear about her. No one will shut up about her. She’s Gwen Stacy and somehow she’s one of them.
Margo Kess doesn’t have a Gwen Stacy. Or at least, not one that’s of any importance to her.
The Gwen Stacy of Earth-22191 exists. Existed. She was the girlfriend of the arachnologist her school is named after. There isn’t a Wikipedia page on her, like there is for him— just a mention that when Dr. Parker jumpstarted his dynamo career at Empire State, he’d had a girlfriend named Gwendolyn E. Stacy, who he was nice enough to credit in a handful of his undergrad papers.
Other than that, Margo found only a record of her birth (September 9, 1965) and death (March 13, 1984) in a decrepit hospital’s records. When Margo did the math on the girl’s lifespan, she thought, distantly: oh, that’s sad.
Then, because Gwen Stacy wasn’t anything to her, and that funny feeling in her stomach couldn’t possibly count as true sadness, Margo closed her tabs and gave the girl no second thought. She’d only looked her up out of obligation to find out where the other usual suspects had gotten to (Peter Parker: dead, obviously. Harold Osborn: dead too. Mary Jane Watson: dead end.) and not at all because she was hoping she might stumble across their socials and send them a friend request.
This Gwen isn’t from Earth-22191. She’s still in high school (or, she was). She’s sullen and awkward and always bumming around Headquarters and she lets her shoes get all ratty. Her hair's a mess. And, most annoyingly, she keeps coming in to use Margo’s workstation when she isn’t around.
One day, Margo skims through the device’s history when she logs back on, casually hits RESUME SESSION and—
A face, upside-down. Purple with congealed blood, eyes like milky glass, hair dripping river water, mouth hanging open. A breeze plays with her bangs. There’s a bulge of bone popping out of the thin translucent skin of her neck.
Margo wipes the log and signs off.
She sits in her chair with her headset in her lap, picking at a loose thread in the cuff of her sweatshirt sleeve. And she slowly understands what the other girl’s doing on the Web at night.
Margo thinks about talking to her. Keeps thinking about it, when she goes back the next day, and the next.
She never does. Margo just says I’ll be back in a bit, or I’m taking a bathroom break, or I’m done for the night, and retreats to the safety of her parents’ dimension, where she puts something on to drown out the funny feeling in her chest and tells herself what she needs to to make the apathy okay: It’s not like I’d be allowed to talk to her anyway. It’s not like she’d want me to.
She’s Margo Kess, Spider-Byte. She’s no one of importance. She’s not entitled to a special spot in the Society, or its leader’s affection, or any kind of exception, or her own feelings. She’s here to run the computers and flag anomaly sightings and smile and nod and say supportive one-liners when someone looks at her and repeat orders but never give them.
And that’s Gwen Stacy. That’s the Spider-Gwen. That’s Miguel and Jess’s little pet, the Society mascot, the one the newbies line up around the corner to gape at. That’s the girl they’re going to bend all the rules for.
Sure, you can stay over, stay as long as you like, even though you got a world back home that needs you and plenty of other kids here have shitty parents, and you don’t see us letting them have sleepovers at HQ. As if it’s so hard to bite your tongue and stick it out for the greater good. As if it’s so terrible to be loved to death.
The Kess family have a stubborn streak. It keeps them hanging on when they ought to just let go already and admit defeat. It’s what keeps her parents from getting the damn divorce already. It’s what keeps Margo awake after she logs off, stewing in her own bitterness.
It’s what makes her choke those feelings down and come right on back the next day, because it’s better than staying here.
And besides, whatever she feels doesn’t count anyway.