Chapter Text
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Evan Buckley can pinpoint three major moments where his life changed completely. He can look back on his whole life and attribute the way he is to three specific events.
First: the death of his older brother when he is twelve.
One day Daniel is fine, he’s playing with Buck and helping him with English homework. Maddie is in college and their parents are too busy so Daniel is all Buck has. And it’s fine, because they have each other, and that’s all that matters.
The next he is lying on a hospital bed struggling to keep his eyes open, every breath sounding painful. It sounds like it takes Daniel every ounce of strength to stay alive.
Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia.
Buck remembers it because he was twelve and his mother was crying so loud it was hurting his ears. They do every possible test and every possible scan in the book, but the hope for a successful transfusion dies when the tests come back and neither Maddie or Evan are a match. He goes on the waiting list but the chemotherapy works for a while..
Daniel starts feeling a bit more like himself, Maddie comes home from college for the holidays, and it feels like things go back to normal for a bit. Their parents stop screaming at each other and Daniel has enough energy to play chess with Buck, both huddled together on his hospital bed. And for a second everything is gearing up for a great holiday season.
Until Daniel gets a respiratory infection a week before Christmas and declines so fast that Evan can barely comprehend it. His heart stops on two separate occasions while Buck is in the room and even if Maddie covers his eyes while the nurses run both codes, the sound of the monitor flatlining is permanently etched into Buck’s brain.
He’s in the room when Daniel takes his last breath, and he’s pretty sure it changes the whole fabric of his being.
Number two is his parents basically disowning him at thirteen. Buck comes back from school on a Friday to his parents screaming at each other, and he ignores it –because screaming wasn’t unusual in the Buckley household. It was normal when Daniel was alive and Maddie was home. Now that it’s just Buck, it seems like it just gets worse. He learns to get used to it pretty quickly.
There are two settings in the Buckley household– screaming and deathly quiet. And as long as the screaming isn’t directed his way, Buck is fine. Buck misses Maddie, he misses Daniel, he misses the life he had before Daniel died.
When he gets home, he isn’t surprised by his parents fighting. He just walks past the living room and up the stairs without any recognition from either of them. He drops onto his bed and stares at the glow in the dark stars he put up there with Daniel. Their parents freaked out but both of them just laughed the whole way through the scolding they got. Daniel would often sneak into Buck’s room to just stare at the ceiling with him and he would promise they’d go stargazing once he got his license. Buck would get excited. Now, the idea of stargazing without Daniel makes him sick to his stomach.
He closes his eyes in the hope that the screaming would subside at some point and tomorrow would come faster.
Only that day it’s different. We just can’t deal with you, Evan his mother tells him, cold eyes. His father doesn’t say anything. Buck just nods, because what are you supposed to do when your parents admit they want nothing to do with you?
And that 's that.
Evan is on a bus to Maddie’s in New York the next morning with his whole life stuffed in a suitcase and one backpack. He doesn’t turn in his English report on Monday, it feels unimportant. He immediately misses the glow in the dark stars on his ceiling.
Number three is getting bitten by a spider.
That last one might not seem like a big deal, he’ll admit it. In the grand scheme of things– watching your brother die and getting kicked out, disowned– getting bit by a spider doesn’t sound all that life changing. People get bit by spiders every day. Spider bites are one of the most common insect bites in the world. Scientists say that so many people are bitten by spiders and don’t realize it, that it makes it impossible to calculate an accurate enough likelihood.
He knows. He researched it. Ad nauseam. He knows that the most a spider bite can do is cause muscle spasms, shortness of breath, nausea, pain, and in the most extreme cases, death.
Normal spider bites don’t turn you into a wall crawling, web-shooting, agile spider person.
But Buck has terrible luck. The universe loves toying with Buck and making him dance for its own enjoyment– it loves to twist and turn his life just to see how Buck manages to get out of it. So of course the spider that bites him does just that. The turning him into a spider person thing.
His research tells him that farmers are most likely to be bitten by spiders. Not seniors on field trips.
Only, Buck is a seventeen year old on a field trip to Oscorp Labs in Manhattan. And Buck gets bitten by a spider. Because he wanders off even though they were specifically told not to. Because he’s curious and he hopes to work there one day and he just needs to see everything.
A vial breaks, a spider crawls up his arm and onto his neck so fast he can barely react, and when Buck goes to swat it off, it bites him. And he doesn’t tell anyone, casually rejoins the group, ignoring Taylor's confused stares, and hopes to god the laboratory doesn’t have any cameras.
Buck becomes a wall crawling, web-shooting, agile, hard-to-kill spider person at seventeen on a random Tuesday at four a.m.
It’s hell.
It’s hell because Buck wakes up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night, shivering and his neck hurts and he’s positive he’s actively dying from the spider bite.
Everything hurts, getting out of bed feels like a chore, and for some reason he can hear everything.
Maddie has her boyfriend over, and Buck can hear Chimney breathe from her room. He can hear the car alarm beeping from down the block and whatever the neighbor on the first floor is watching on the television. It plays in his ears as if Buck is sitting right next to it and it’s so disorienting that he knocks onto his bedside table trying to drag himself out of bed.
Buck feels like he’s dying for a second, and he drags himself to his door, with the hope that he’ll at least make it to Maddie before it happens. Only, when he grabs his door handle and pulls to open it, the whole thing sticks to his hand and comes right off– breaks clean off of the door.
He stands there, with his door handle in his hand, and he feels insane. He’s been living in this apartment for the past four years and, yeah it’s pretty shitty, but not ‘ door handle breaks off at the slightest touch ’ kind of shitty. The living room window doesn’t close, the front door doesn’t really lock, the ceiling drips when it rains and they can’t open a specific kitchen cabinet because the door falls off. But they never had troubles with the handles.
And Buck is seventeen and he’s still a pretty scrawny kid, he’s all limbs and no coordination. So there’s no way Buck broke it with nothing but his strength.
He opens his hand, shakes it out and the thing just… won’t fall. it sticks to his hand no matter how hard Buck shakes it. Buck feels like he’s actually losing his mind.
He just needs to splash water on his face, he’s probably just going insane from the lack of sleep and from the stress of this being his last year of high school. He just needs to wash his face, pop in an ibuprofen and go back to sleep. The car alarm is still going off and Buck wants to climb the walls.
He’s breathing in deep, counting the seconds and trying his hardest to not wake up Maddie and Chim, but that all proves to be impossible. Because the second he grabs the faucet to open it, the metal sticks to his hand, breaks off the sink and water immediately comes spraying out.
He’s drowning for a second trying to get it to stop and the faucet is still stuck to his hand, as is the door handle, and Buck wishes the spider had killed him right away because this is just ridiculous.
“Buck? Evan! We heard some noise. Are you okay?” He hears Maddie yell from the other side of the door, and he realizes she can’t come in because the door is shut, and the handle is currently stuck to Buck’s hand. “Evan? We can’t open the door. Are you okay?” Her voice sounds panicked, and he’s still trying his best to stop the water coming out of the hole where the faucet previously stood, so he can’t really properly reply to her. The water bill is going to be so high this month, he thinks.
Before he can manage to answer, he hears Chim. “Buck, I’m going to kick in the door okay? Try to get away from it.” Right. Because Chim is a firefighter and Buck is so busy with the water that he can’t reply. So both of them think he’s hurt. And Chim is going to kick in his door. Great. Buck wishes the bite had taken him out in his sleep.
He hears the door slamming against his wall and, in no time, both Maddie and Chimney are staring at him from the doorway to his bathroom. “Evan, what happened?” He must look insane because both of them are looking at him with wide eyes. He still has the door handle and the faucet stuck to his hands. The sink is still spurting water and Buck is soaked, standing in the equivalent of a great lake, but in his bathroom.
Chimney rushes to the sink, crouches behind it and does something that turns the water off. Buck breathes out in relief. He wipes his forehead with the back of his hand, mindful of the door handle that has the ability to take one of his eyes out.
He’s soaked from head to toe, his hair is dripping steadily onto the ground and Buck can hear it. It’s loud in his ears and grating and he wants it to stop .
“Evan? What happened? Are you okay?” Maddie approaches him slowly.
The neighbor has turned off the television. And his bones don’t hurt as much anymore, there’s just a dull thud behind his eyes and a stinging in the back of his neck. “I don’t know.” He whispers, and Maddie takes a step forward and grabs his hands. She turns them around, looks at the objects stuck to them. She gives them a shake, to see if they fall off, but when they remain stuck on, her eyebrows furrow.
Chim, who is still next to the sink, slowly walks by them and puts a hand on Maddie’s shoulder. “I’ll give you two some space. Shout out if you need me.” Maddie nods, shoots him a small smile and turns back to Buck.
She grabs both of his hands. “How did you–” She tries to pull at the faucet, and fails at disconnecting it from his hand. Tries the same with the door handle, and no luck. “Buck what happened?”
“Maddie I’m going crazy. Everything hurts and I can hear everything. And these just– they just stuck to my hands. I feel insane, I don't know what happened. Maybe the spider at Oscorp, but that doesn’t make any–”
“What spider at Oscorp, Evan?” She looks at him with wide eyes.
He sighs, leans against the wall opposite from Maddie. “At the field trip today. I wandered off and got bitten by one in one of the labs.” The back of his neck is throbbing. His heart feels like he just ran a marathon.
“Evan!” She exclaims, takes two steps to stand in front of him and looks all over his body. “Why didn’t you say anything? They do all kinds of experiments there. We need to get you to the hospital–”
She turns around, and Buck panics. He can’t grab onto her, the faucet and door handle are still stuck to his hands, and he’ll hurt her. “Maddie, no.” He can feel his heart beating in his ears, and the panic growing in his chest and he doesn’t know what comes over him, but he instinctively reaches his hand out to her.
There’s a white string connecting Buck's wrist to Maddie’s arm. They both stand in the flooded bathroom and Buck stares from his wrist to Maddie’s arm and he feels like he’s going to be sick.
“Oh my god.” He whispers. He loses all strength in his legs, falls to his knees and stares at his hands because what the hell. The back of his neck keeps stinging and now he can hear Chimney pacing down the hall. He wants to turn it off. He wants to go back to sleep.
“Hey! It 's okay.”
“Maddie, I don’t–” He’s hyperventilating, staring at his hands and he wants to throw up. Maddie drops to her knees in front of him, and her pajama pants are getting soaked. She doesn’t seem to care, just places a hand on his cheek, forcing him to look her in the eyes.
“It’ll be okay.”
“I don’t want to go to the hospital.” His voice comes out shaky, breaks off at the end. He sounds like a little kid.
Buck has avoided hospitals like the plague, ever since Daniel died. Because Buck is bad luck and bad things happen in hospitals. He would rather stay home and suffer.
Maddie nods. “Okay, we won’t go.” She extends her pinkie his way, letting him intertwine his own pinkie around hers, and ignores the faucet poking at her hand. She pauses, looks at him worried. “At least let Chim check you out. Just to make sure you’re okay.”
Buck nods, lets Maddie keep her hand on his cheek. He takes a deep breath, closes his eyes and tries to calm down. He feels the handle and the faucet slide out of his hands and hit the floor with a clang. He shakes his hands out, rubs them together to see if they feel any different, but they don't. They just feel like his hands.
They get up slowly, Maddie keeps a hand on Buck at all times. When they’re about to leave the room, Buck stops her. “We can’t tell him.” Chim is a great guy, he makes Maddie happy and he’s the first boyfriend of hers that actually likes Buck. It’s just, he already feels like a freak, feels out of control and like he’s losing himself. He doesn’t want to add any one else to the equation. Buck wants to keep this between him and Maddie, at least until they can figure out what is wrong with him.
Maddie nods, keeps her arm around his waist. He’s already way taller than her, and she's doing very little to support his weight, but the touch feels comforting– grounding.
He sits on the couch and lets Chim look him over. He takes his blood pressure and his O2 levels. He checks his muscles for any sign of atrophy. He looks at his ears to see if anything is different that could affect his hearing. There isn’t, everything’s normal.
He checks where Buck was bitten, and is surprised by the fact that it already looks healed. Like Buck was bitten a week ago, not earlier the day before. He doesn’t ask any questions, and when he’s finished, he leaves them alone again– places a small kiss on Maddie's cheek and walks out of the living room.
Maddie sits on the couch next to him and lets him lay his head on her shoulder. And he feels like he’s eight all over again. She runs a hand over his back. Buck feels safe.
“We’ll figure it out.”
They do figure it out.
Maddie keeps her promise of not bringing Buck to the hospital. She goes to the roof with him when they can, to see what he can actually do. Buck figures out he can stick to walls pretty well, and the web slinging turns out to be fun too. Maddie almost has a heart attack the first time he swings between the buildings on their street.
She helps him focus, helps him control his panic so he doesn’t do anything suspicious at school.
Buck also figures out he’s pretty strong, and if he starts using it to beat Chimney at arm wrestling more often, Maddie doesn’t say anything.
The secret would be easy to keep at school if it wasn’t for Taylor. Buck forgot about Taylor, but she realizes immediately that something is up with him, and Taylor isn’t one to let things go.
The whole thing lasts two weeks before Taylor follows him home and up on the roof. She catches him mid web slinging.
Taylor keeps his secret, because she’s his best friend and if it wasn't for her, Buck’s time at Midtown would be hell.
She’s the one that puts the idea of crime fighting in his head.
They’re having lunch on the roof, like usual, and Buck is scribbling his answers to the English homework he forgot existed. He has his own copy balanced on his knee while Taylor’s homework lays in front of him. Buck attributes his passing grade at English to Taylor, just like she credits Buck for her grades in Biology.
She’s typing away on her laptop, and her eyebrows are scrunched together in thought. She has a pimple right in between them, and Buck quite enjoys his life so he doesn’t point it out.
“They blew up another deli in Queens.” She speaks up and Buck lifts his head up.
“Where?”
“On 21st.” She doesn’t look up, keeps scrolling
“Delmar’s? Damn they had the best sandwiches in Queens.” He finds himself leaning over to look at Taylor’s computer screen. “Anyone get hurt?”
She shakes her head. “It’s the third one in two weeks.” She scrolls down a bit further and Buck she’s a picture of the aftermath. The whole palace is destroyed, burnt down to basically ashes, and he feels anger rise in his chest. “The police are looking but it’s not much help.” Taylor scoffs.
And then she slowly raises her head, stares off at the distance the same way she does when she gets an idea that Buck will think is bad. They rarely are.
“We need someone patrolling the streets– someone who can actually do it fast enough. Who can get to places fast enough.”
She’s looking at him with something mischievous behind her eyes, and Buck groans. “What do you mean by that?”
“You should do it.”
“What?” He looks at her like she grew another head, and a grin takes over her face. Her hair is a tangled mess around her face due to the wind. She looks wild.
“You should do it. You can basically fly, you’re basically indestructible. You’re– Buck you’re like a real life superhero. You should be out there helping people.” She sounds so excited, like she actually believes Buck’s new found abilities to be something good, instead of a nuisance.
Buck freezes. He never thought of it as a possibility. He’s been working on the swinging, and the web shooting, and just over all coming to terms with what happened– with what he turned into. And he does feel more in control. And he would be helping people. All Buck ever wanted to do with his life was help people.
There is only one minor problem. “I don’t want people to find out I'm… like this.”
Taylor shrugs. “You can sew. I can moderately sew. We can make you, like, a superhero costume.”
“A costume?”
“Yeah. Like I don’t know–” He watches her open a new tab on her laptop. She, honest to god, types in ‘superhero costume’ on Google. She scrolls, stops on the most hideous one on the page, because of course she does, and points at it. “Something like that.”
“I’m not wearing bright pink spandex, Taylor.”
“We’ll workshop it.” And she’s smiling at him with a glint in her eyes. And Buck can’t help but match it. Because as much as they still need to work on it– still need to hash out the details, Buck loves the idea. He wants to be out there– wants to help people. He wants to turn this honestly terrifying situation into something good.
Buck always wanted his life to have some sort of meaning. He might've just found it.
Maddie hates the idea at first. She begs him to think it over. Begs him to realize he’s still so young– too young to be putting himself in danger like that. He promises her he knows what he’s doing. That he’ll just patrol the street, help old ladies cross the street, save cats from trees, stuff like that.
Maddie cries, Buck sits next to her and pinky promises her to stay safe. He doesn’t argue when she says she’s putting in a transfer from the ICU to the ER. ‘So I'm the first to know if anything happens to you.’ He just nods, hugs her as tightly as he can. He tries to not think about the fact Maddie thinks he might get seriously injured– maybe killed– doing this.
Taylor comes over that weekend, arms full of thrifted clothes. They spend the entire weekend workshopping his suit. Buck thinks it should be all black, for practicality and if he’s being honest, style. Taylor argues that people need to be able to see him, that he needs to be noticeable so they can ask for his help.
They settle on a hideous red sweatshirt with a hoodie that Buck turns into a mask and blue sweatpants. He feels frumpy, nothing like a superhero, but Taylor says that the clothes don’t make him a superhero, his actions do.
Buck is glad he has her by his side, that she figured everything out.
That Sunday, Buck goes out on his first patrol. Taylor gives him her dad’s bluetooth earpiece and stays behind in his room to look through social media and report back to him. She talks to him the whole night, until she ends up falling asleep and snoring in Buck’s ear.
He doesn’t really stop any crime or save anyone but, swinging around New York City, Buck feels like he’s finally discovered what he’s supposed to do with his life. What his true purpose is.
Slowly but surely, people start recognizing him. He turns into an urban legend, and then an actual superhero. People call out to him for help, he trends on social media and people love him. He’s on the news and people recognize him swinging around the streets. And he feels like he’s changing the world. Even if it’s just his little corner of New York.
Evan Buckley can pinpoint three major moments where his life changed completely: when his brother died, when his parents kicked him out, and the day he became Spider-Man.
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