Chapter Text
When one looked from the outside, it seemed like Noa Wood had everything waiting for her.
She lived in a penthouse in the middle of Brooklyn, bought by her father, a lawyer known all over the country. He was rarely home; people called him from different states, voices tight with desperation, asking him to take their cases, to stand in court and pull them out of whatever they had fallen into. He always accepted. It didn't matter what his client was accused of. Money came first, morals after.
Her mother worked on Wall Street, doing something Noa never truly understood, even after she had sat through The Wolf of Wall Street in an attempt to make sense of it. If anything, it had left her more unsettled than before. She tried not to think too hard about what her mother's job actually involved, or how easily things could slip into something else entirely.
Her mother was home more often, at least. Almost every night. But she never spoke about anything other than work; the numbers, the rises and falls of the market, the endless complaints about her colleagues, especially David Greenwood, who, according to her, had no business speaking to clients at all. He should've gotten fired months ago, really!
Noa never listened. She never interrupted either. She would sit there just long enough for it to pass as polite, then the second her mother's phone lit up with another call, she would take her plate and leave without a word. Her mother never noticed the moment she disappeared.
In her room, the air felt different. Quieter, even with noise. She would set her laptop on the bed and put on a film before turning to her sketches, letting the familiar voices and sounds fill the silence. It was never something new, just something she had already seen too many times to count.
(Truth to be told, there probably wasn't a movie that Noa Wood hadn't watched.)
To have something playing in the background helped her focus, helped her stay in the lines she was trying to draw, in the shapes she was trying to build.
For as long as she could remember, Noa's biggest dream was to become a stylist. She loved clothes, the way fabrics could be combined, the way a single piece could change everything about a look, about a person. She could spend hours sketching outfits, thinking about who would wear them, how they would move, how they would be seen. It made sense to her in a way nothing else ever had.
Her father hated it.
He wanted her to become a doctor. He needed her to become a doctor. The few times she had tried to tell him it wasn't what she wanted, he had dismissed it without hesitation, telling her she should feel honoured to even have the opportunity to follow such a path, to secure a future that was stable and respected. He spoke like it was already decided, like her opinion had never been part of the conversation. So he enrolled her in Midtown School of Science and Technology, in Queens, convinced that immersion would correct her, that she would finally understand what real passion looked like.
Noa had tried to argue.
He had slapped her.
So now, Noa stayed where she was put. She went to classes she didn't care about, listened to things that never held her attention, and felt her real dream slipping further away with each passing day, thinning out until it barely felt reachable anymore.
Until a new superhero called Spider-Man came into the picture.
The YouTube videos had started appearing everywhere; shaky footage, glimpses of something fast, a figure moving between buildings like it meant nothing. The suit was... not great. There was no denying that. But none of that seemed to matter when he moved, when he laughed sometimes in the clips people managed to catch. There was something unrestrained about him, something careless in the best way.
He looked like he was having fun.
He looked free.
Noa had never felt jealousy settle so sharply in her chest as it did when she watched Spider-man.
She didn't know what it felt like to be that untouchable, to exist without someone else deciding everything for her.
She didn't know him at all.
And she had no idea that, somewhere not so far away, the boy behind the mask had noticed her too