Chapter Text
The true horror of my power didn’t sink in when I was hugging my knees in that dark room home alone. Rather, it waited, if only because I didn’t know I had it.
Over the following days, I gained a truly impressive fever. My blood was warm saltwater and my skin was a stretched water balloon. They still didn’t notice, of course. It took Kurt and Lacey coming over for anyone to notice. Lacey put the back of her hand on my forehead in an achingly familiar gesture, noticed how warm I was and then the rest was a blur.
Taylor had recovered somewhat from the whole ordeal by then, so she had headed off to school, leaving me on the sofa with a head of cotton-wool. It was sometime between then and noon that something in my head just clicked,like a screensaver hitting the corner of a screen, jolted me into some stage of clarity. Enough to notice how.. Itchy I was.
My nails were long, so I scratched and scratched until I bled, and it felt like all the horrid heat had drained out of me in an instant. I could feel information pressing into the back of my head where the fever used to be, whispering beetle, spider, centipede, and other bugs over and over. Once I focused on one -spider- it began to narrow further. I chose one template out of curiosity, and then the globule of blood oozing out of my skin began to wiggle.
The general shape formed first, then the legs, curled up under it, until finally the hairs on its limbs emerged, at which point it was no longer the rusty-red colour of blood. It looked just like a normal spider, but something inside me told me it wasn’t. I mean, I knew what it was , proprioception, the way you know where all of your body is, but it didn’t make any sense. The spider wasn’t me.
Then, I made it open its eyes, and I could see through all eight, and my heart skipped a beat.
At first, it was euphoria. I had always loved bugs, and now I could make them. In addition, it was a power! I was a cape! That was supposed to be good, right? But reality crept in like frost, and I realised that I could let no-one know what I could do. There was only one way people tended to talk about capes who messed with biology and living things, and Nilbog probably couldn’t see through his goblins. Therefore, I sent the spider to nest in some small corner of the house while I schooled myself into composure and went to sleep. When I awoke, my dad simply greeted me, checked my temperature, and congratulated me for having overcome the fever. I smiled back, as if I didn’t want to scream, and that was that.