Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Michelle Jones is not a hero.

She takes the long route to school if she hears gunshots or loud voices ahead of her. She’s never inserted herself between an arguing couple on the subway. She’ll share her homework if asked, but she’s never offered it out unprompted. 

No, Michelle Jones has one goal in life: keep her head down and her nose to the grindstone and graduate with all As so that she can go to MIT and start working towards making real money in any way she can, so that her family can rest easy. God knows her older sister isn’t going to do that, so that means it’s up to Michelle.

In fairness, she’s off to a good start. She’s a 4.0 student on a scholarship at the most prestigious science-tech high school in New York City, which basically translates to being a 4.0 student on a scholarship at the most prestigious science-tech high school in the whole of the United States, except for maybe in Silicon Valley or something. She’s never missed a homework assignment in her life. She’s never gotten anything below an A minus on an exam. She’s aware that her personality might be a problem when it comes to internships and job applications and stuff, but at least she knows it’s something to work on.

So, as long as nothing unexpected happens, Michelle is pretty sure that her dad will be able to retire before he dies.

And then something unexpected happens.

Michelle doesn’t actually notice when the spider bites her. She’s literally just on the subway, feels a pinch on her ankle, and without even thinking about it, she lifts her hand and slaps the spot. The stinging stops, and Michelle keeps reading her new library book on Jeffrey Dahmer. It’s not until she gets up to go that she sees the dead spider on the ground. And even then, there’s no connection in her mind between the little crumpled body and the flash of pain she’d felt until later that night, when she takes off her socks and sees an ugly, pulsating wound on her ankle. And even then, her first thought is not Oh yeah, the spider! but oh shit– did a rat bite me? Do I have rabies?

Her dad and older sister, Gayle, are both working late, so Michelle’s first stop is Google.

WebMD says that she might have either a rare and specific alien disease that the Chitauri brought with them back in 2012 that about four people have been infected with, or cancer.

Michelle really hopes that it’s cancer. How was she supposed to get treatment for some random alien disease that nobody else had recovered from yet? And the Chitauri photos online were seriously not pretty– Michelle has nightmares for several days afterwards about the molding wounds and bulging skin on Google Images. 

She decides to sleep on it– maybe it’ll go away in the morning.

It does not go away in the morning.

In fact, Michelle has to take her first sick day in all of high school. She’s shivering, running a fever, and she hasn’t puked yet, but there’s something coursing through her veins, and Michelle feels like it’s probably nausea, but it feels a lot more like adrenaline– like her body is getting amped up for… something.

Hopefully not to become the next victim of the Chitauri virus.

“You’ll be fine,” her father says as he leaves for work. “Just text your friends and ask for the schoolwork from today. See you tonight, kid.”

Michelle stares at her bedroom wall and doesn’t tell her father that she has no friends to ask for said schoolwork, because Michelle Jones has no friends at all.

Unless one counted her sister, who is currently shuffling around the bedroom and pulling on clothes to go to work. Michelle definitely doesn’t, though. 

Michelle’s sister Gayle is several years older than Michelle, has graduated college (at the City University of New York), and used to live in her own apartment before the sprinklers broke and doused everything she owned in a healthy shower of gray-brown stuff that Gayle refuses to admit is anything but dirty water. She’s generally more interested in ballet than in anything Michelle does. 

And, until Gayle can work things out with the renter’s insurance (which is taking a long-ass time– apparently, there are people who are still on waiting lists from when the Avengers had their big thing in 2012), she’s moved back home. 

Specifically, she’s moved into Michelle’s room.

Which is really great. Michelle loves sharing her room with her sister who is ten years older than her. It’s so great. Ten out of ten. She wouldn’t change it for the world.

(Michelle is seriously ready to hunt down the stupid insurance people herself and threaten them with serious bodily harm in all of the ways that she’s learned from reading about various serial killers over the years. There’s only so much privacy a person can get when their sister is sleeping five feet away from them.)

Gayle leaves, and then Michelle is alone in an empty apartment, with nothing to do but doomscroll about how disfigured she’s going to get before she dies of the Chitauri thing on her ankle.

God, she hopes it’s cancer.

By the time noon rolls around, the fever and chills are gone, but Michelle is beginning to notice some other symptoms of whatever the hell is going on with her body.

For one thing, she seems to have an endless appetite that she hasn’t had since she was twelve and going through the growth spurt that landed her at 5’10”.

She’ll have to text her dad to pick up more eggs and another rotisserie chicken for dinner tonight, because Michelle only meant to take a little bit and literally wound up devouring the whole thing. And then she ate seven eggs in a row.

And she’s still hungry.

Also, she seems to have abs now. And biceps.

Michelle knows that not eating enough can sometimes mean abs show up, but she’s been eating all day long, and she’s never been anorexic or anything like that, so that can’t be it. Plus, it does not explain the biceps.

And then there’s the reflexes.

Michelle is wandering around the apartment in her pajamas, eating peanut butter with a spoon, feeling annoyed about how it’s not really helping to sate her hunger, when she, very suddenly, finds herself eight feet across the room, heart pounding and not even sure what the hell had just happened or why.

She turns around to look at where she just was, and sees a spider crawling across the carpet.

And that’s when Michelle remembers the spider on the subway.

And she says, out loud, through a mouthful of peanut butter: “Huh.”

Googling Spider bit me and now I have abs and can’t stop eating does not give Michelle any helpful results. 

Nor does Spider bit me infection fast reflexes.

Or Spider subway nyc top secret government project??? because Michelle doesn’t know, maybe this was the next super soldier project that got out of hand or something.

So Michelle just gives up and Googles Most calorie dense foods because seriously, she is starving and at least that’s a problem she can work with.

Looks like her future holds chicken and garbanzo beans.

Lots and lots of chicken and garbanzo beans.

The next day, Michelle is feeling fine– well, she’s still jumping at every little noise, because everything seems so much louder than usual, but she hasn’t shot straight across the room again without even realizing it, so that’s something. Maybe that’s a low bar, but after yesterday, Michelle will take it.

Still, she arrives at school feeling like she’s going to spontaneously leap out of her skin at any moment.

Which is why she takes a few seconds to breathe in front of her locker instead of going to morning study hall. She’s pretty sure that they’re giving a talk on asking for letters of recommendation for college, but for once, Michelle is more focused on something other than eventually going to college– that is, not reacting to all of the noises around her.

People talking! Shoes squeaking on the floor! The rumble of a teacher’s voice scolding someone! A class pet squeaking in its cage! Lockers slamming, papers rustling, a hyena-like laugh, hands slapping in a high five, a door opening, a door closing, glass breaking, an annoyed growl, people making out in the bathroom, somebody’s drone whirring, thumbs tapping on touchscreens, rats scurrying through the walls–

Michelle’s going to puke.

Michelle slams her locker shut.

Well, she tries.

Instead of it closing normally, like she’d expected, her locker door rips off in her hand, and, as she’s still in motion, not quite processing what’s happened yet, Michelle’s hand keeps up its momentum, and she ends up hurling the door across the hallway, where it embeds itself in the far wall.

Somebody screams. The rest of the hallway falls silent.

Blissfully silent.

And then, suddenly, Michelle realizes that she is exactly where she’s never once wanted to be: the center of everybody’s attention.

The nauseous feeling soars, and Michelle swallows bile.

“Uh, sorry,” Michelle says to the shocked hall. “Woah. Sorry. I didn’t know that could happen. Did that… hit anyone?”

Nobody’s screaming in pain, so Michelle takes that as a no. Still, Michelle looks shakily down at her hands, wondering what had happened.

“I think the hinge was loose,” she says, and that seems to be the thing that gets the hallway moving again, people nodding in acceptance, moving to their own lockers. 

But Michelle knows that the hinge wasn’t loose. Even if it was, she knows that she couldn’t have possibly thrown anything so hard that it would get wedged in the wall.

Could this be another symptom of whatever was going on with her? Getting super strong? 

Michelle turns back to her locker, which is now mostly just a shelf, just to hide her face. She’s sweating now. She’s sweating a lot. Is this normal? She’s still nauseous. Is that normal?

This is fantastic. Now, in addition to being the weird kid with her weird nose in a weird book all the time, she’s the weird kid with her weird nose in a weird book all the time who had anger issues that are bad (and weird) enough that she threw a hunk of metal across the hallway like she thought she was Captain America himself.

…Captain America.

Wait. The thought had briefly crossed her mind during her frantic Googling session, but she’d discarded it in favor of looking up Unathletic human jumped eight feet from a standstill. Was this a super soldier serum? Had she somehow been dosed with a super soldier serum?

And had it come from the spider?

Had Michelle really accidentally been infused with a super soldier serum via spider bite?

This was nuts.

Michelle dumps her belongings into her bag– she doesn’t trust the kids at this school not to steal something from her locker just to mess with her– and hurries to her first class as the bell rings.

Somehow– Michelle’s pretty sure it’s by the grace of some divine being– Michelle survives the day. She keeps thinking that she must have accidentally dropped some of her belongings– shouldn’t carrying the entire contents of her locker around all day be heavier than this?– but her bag feels as light as a feather.

Michelle has decided not to worry about that for now. She has way weirder shit going on than a sudden increase in strength.

Like how when she’s leaving for school, Michelle finds herself in the pathway of a boy who’s about to be tripped.

How does she know he’s about to be tripped? Michelle doesn’t know– all she knows is that she’s listening to her new favorite serial killer true crime podcast at top volume in order to calm down after a seriously nerve-wracking day, and then she sees this redheaded boy in front of her and realizes that he’s heading right for that hole in the floor that had been created by those kids in AP Chem the other day, and he has no idea.

And then the boy is falling, and Michelle thinks Great, now he’ll knock me over, too– perfect.

But then, instead of being tripped, Michelle somehow twists out of the way of the falling boy, jumps, does a backflip over his still-dropping body, and lands on the lockers– and stays there.

Backflip.

Lands on the lockers.

And stays there.

Michelle’s hands and feet are planted firmly in a squat. Her head is pointed at the ground. And she’s not falling.

Nobody’s looking at her. They’re all staring at the redhead. But Michelle feels a jolt of panic anyway, and in the same moment, she slides down the wall and lands in an awkward roll on the ground.

Or– it should be awkward. But Michelle ends up balancing effortlessly on the balls of her feet, as poised as a ballerina. 

She rises from her crouch, heart pounding, as the boy much more sheepishly clambers to his feet in front of her, bright red and staring at the ground.

Maybe it’s the lockers. Maybe she’s magnetic or something.

So, on the way home, before she gets on the subway, Michelle ducks into an alleyway and presses her fingers against the dirty brick.

Then, as easy as breathing, she pulls herself up and onto the wall. She stretches herself out against it, twists her body, and hangs there, sideways, effortlessly, four feet above the ground. Her feet dangle in midair, but there’s no instinct to scramble for purchase. Her hands– splayed flat across the brick– are more than enough.

Okay.

Not magnetic.

Michelle gets home at four, which means she has about three hours before Gayle comes home, which means she has three hours to experiment.

Which is probably a very normal Teenage Girl Thing to do.

What isn’t normal was what Michelle planned to experiment.

Michelle puts her hands on the wall of her bedroom. The wall feels normal– a little cool to the touch. Her hands can move– they can tremble and make fists. They’re not stuck.

“This is stupid,” Michelle says to herself, staring at her hands against the wall. “I’m imagining things. This is stupid.”

She plants her hands firmly against the wall anyway. Then she lifts one socked foot and places it on the wall.

And then it’s the moment of truth.

Michelle lifts the other leg– and her body holds.

She’s holding on to the wall.

Without even trying.

Without any kind of grip at all.

Michelle lifts one hand and reaches higher, placing her whole palm against the wall. Then the other hand. Then her right foot. Then her left. She starts to bear-crawl up, higher and higher until she nearly hits the ceiling, and then she looks down and feels a sudden wave of nausea, because holy shit she is at least seven feet in the air right now. That might not seem too bad, but Michelle is suddenly picturing all of the ways that she could fall at all of the wrong angles.

She focuses on the wall and takes a deep, calming breath.

And she keeps going up.

And then Michelle is squatting on the corner of her wall. She reaches one hand– out? up? against the ceiling, and just… keeps going. Gravity rotates with her, mostly– she can feel her hair and jacket dangling beneath her.

But her body stays attached to the ceiling. Her hands and feet are planted, and she’s upside down. With seemingly no danger of falling.

Huh.

Michelle tries to ignore it. She honestly does. She’s at least forty percent sure that she’s been infected with some kind of alien outer-space disease. She doesn’t need this kind of stress in her life.

But she just keeps sticking to things. She tries to swipe her MetroCard on the bus and then can’t let go of it for four whole stops. She gets in trouble for traveling when they are all forced into playing basketball in PE, even though she had been trying to dribble– she just couldn’t get the ball to drop from her palm. And she tries to turn in her math worksheet, she really does, but she ends up ripping it in half trying to hand it off to the teacher and then gets detention, as if she had been messing with him on purpose. Who even rips their own homework in half as an own on the teacher?

Hopefully this– whatever it is– clears up fast. Michelle would like to go back to her regularly scheduled programming now, please.

For now, she’ll just keep scraping her socks off of her feet and handling everything around her with the lightest of touches, because, oh yeah, she has super-strength, too, which explains the locker.

Head down. Nose to the grindstone. Weird sticky-strength or not, Michelle Jones will go to MIT, even if she has to ace the SAT from a padded cell to do it.

Michelle’s downfall, so to speak, begins with a documentary that she has to watch for her APUSH class. They’re supposed to be taking notes on World War Two propaganda in the United States, which basically translates to spending a whole class period on Captain America and then spending the next class period talking about everything else the American government did to trick their own citizens into supporting the bloodiest war in human history the next day.

It’s so boring.

Especially because Mrs. Jamison very clearly has a crush on Steve Rogers, and it is really hard to ignore your teacher sighing at the TV when Michelle is sitting in the back of the room, right next to Mrs. Jamison’s desk.

Michelle puts her head down on her own desk, has a brief moment of panic about what if her forehead sticks to the desk what the hell would she do if that happened, and decides to slouch in her seat instead, looking blankly at the screen, where Steven Grant Rogers is currently posing on top of a clearly-cardboard mountain, saying “The boys in the Pacific need YOUR HELP TODAY!”

But then things get more interesting, because the documentary starts showing previously-classified footage of Steve Rogers actually demonstrating some of the super-soldier stuff, even just in the context of training exercises.

Specifically, they show blurry footage of Steve Rogers jumping from tree to tree, right over the heads of the “Nazis” and sneaking through “enemy lines.” He’s running along branches twenty feet in the air and jumping off to get to the next tree. Below him, there are words on the screen saying DONATE TODAY TO HELP CAP AND OUR BOYS AGAINST THE KRAUTS!

But Michelle is not thinking about World War Two propaganda or degrading names for German people. Michelle is watching Steve Rogers running along the trees, high in the air, and thinking That looks like fun. It would be cool to climb like that.

And then she looks at her deceptively normal-looking hands and wonders if she can.

Jumping headfirst out of a window is a lot harder than Michelle had first thought it might be.

It shouldn’t be so difficult. She can stick to walls. She can hang upside down. She did her homework next to her ceiling fan because Gayle was at the gym and Michelle just could. 

So, logically, stepping out of the window and climbing up the brick outside should be no problem, except it was very much yes problem. 

Michelle used to be scared of heights. Ever since her little allergic reaction, that has seemed to have ceased to be an issue beyond a quick swooping in her stomach whenever she stops long enough to think What the hell am I doing? But ooh, there is something bone-deep about the way that she really does not want to get out there.

She could stick to things through her shoes. She could stick to things with her hands. Things would be fine.

Michelle opens the window, pokes her head out, and sees how far away the ground is. Vertigo hits her immediately, and she yanks her head back inside, heart pounding.

Since when was three stories so high? 

Deep breaths. Deep breaths, deep breaths, deep breaths. Nobody was forcing her to do this. She could just go sit down in the living room and do her homework. 

But Michelle… despite everything, she doesn’t want to do that.

She wants to see what she can do. 

Michelle slowly, tentatively, puts one hand on the brick outside.

Then she gets her right foot up on the windowsill.

And then, before she can lose her nerve, she pushes off, twists out of the window, and slams her other palm against the wall, pressing her toes to the brick.

And she isn’t falling.

The wind whistles above her– Michelle’s window opens into a dumbbell air shaft– and, slowly, Michelle begins to climb, leaving her window behind.

She’s sticking. She’s sticking.

She gets to the roof and stands, looking at the city around her. She looks down, and suddenly… suddenly, the height doesn’t seem so scary at all. Suddenly, Michelle feels sure that if she were to fall, she could catch herself.

She knows that she could catch herself.

Michelle walks to the other side of the roof and looks out over the street. Nobody sees her up here. Nobody’s looking up.

And, all of a sudden, Michelle thinks I could probably jump across the whole street if I wanted to. 

And the weirdest part is that she’s not really feeling any urge to not do that.

Well, what was the worst case scenario? Michelle had already survived climbing up brick walls and doing flips in the hallway and being able to land as light as a feather on her feet. Evidence points to her being fine if she tried this.

Yeah.

Evidence.

So, before she can keep second-guessing herself, Michelle leaps.

The whole street flashes by below her in an instant. The wind bites at her face. There is a bubble of exhilaration building inside her chest, and then Michelle is landing on the next roof and tucking into a roll on pure instinct. 

Shouting has never come naturally to Michelle, but suddenly it just feels like the natural thing to do. 

She whoops as loudly as she can as she pops to her feet, just to get the energy out. “Woah-ho! Yes!”

She turns and realizes suddenly just how far she’s jumped– from the edge of the other rooftop to where she is now, halfway across the next one– it’s a long way. A very long way. Winning-the-gold-in-the-Olympic-long-jump kind of long way.

And Michelle isn’t even winded. She feels like she could run a marathon.

And, for the next few hours, she probably does– the run-and-jump thing goes on for hours and hours, blocks and blocks, until she’s looped around the neighborhood so many times that she’s starting to get cocky enough to wave at passerby below. Nobody looks up at her, though. Everybody keeps their heads down.

Not Michelle, though. She keeps her head up, on a swivel, alert. She feels more in-tune with the world than she’s ever been before.

She is going to save so goddamn much on subway fares.

Michelle genuinely does not touch the ground once on her run to school the next morning, literally just because she can. It’s twelve miles from where she lives, and the river’s in the way, but Michelle discovers the joys of running along the cables of the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge, which beats playing 2048 on her phone in a crowded, stinking subway car any day of the week. Goodbye, A and E trains, hello, cardio.

The really weird part is that Michelle has a great time doing it. She’s never once enjoyed exercise. She doesn’t understand the whole runner’s high thing. But here she is, running twelve miles, jumping between buildings and metal struts and whatnot, for fun. She’s thinking about figuring out some kind of rope system, like rock climbers have, just in case she ever does fall, but she’s not totally sure how to install anything without basically outlining her route from her home to her school for anyone to notice. Besides, she either has a crazy sense of balance or she’s unconsciously sticking to things instead of letting herself fall. Either way, it’s fantastic.

However, just because she‘s having fun does not mean that she’s not getting sweaty, which Michelle figures out in the first mile, but at that point it’s already too late to either double back for a change of clothes and a stick of deodorant, or to try to get the train, so Michelle gets to spend the whole day smelling like– well, like she just ran twelve miles, in jeans, and didn’t bring anything with her to wash up with. The paper towels and watery soap in the bathrooms can seriously only do so much to save her.

So Michelle keeps to herself even more than usual, which means that she’s probably going to forgo her usual lunchtime spot– i.e. as close to Peter Parker as she can get without seeming creepy.

Peter Parker.

Peter Parker has dark brown eyes, neat brown hair, and is the kind of guy who wears collared shirts and cable sweaters to school. He spends a lot of his time smiling and laughing with his best friend, Ned Leeds, and Michelle is pretty sure that he doesn’t even know she’s alive.

Peter is also probably the nicest person that Michelle had ever met. He lives in Queens with his aunt, and Michelle only knew that because, before his uncle died, the two of them had showed up to every single parent event they could before freshman year started and loudly declared to everyone how proud they were of their kid for getting into Midtown, while Peter trailed along behind them, half looking like he wanted to melt into the floor and half looking as proud of them as they were of him.

Michelle had spent the last week too busy with all of the… whatever was going on with her, to really pay attention to Peter, but in English class today, she noticed that he’d gotten a haircut, which was really annoying, because his hair had previously finally getting a little too long to be attractive, and now Michelle was back at square one with him.

Which meant that she definitely did not want to sit near him while she was all sweaty.

So she scans the cafeteria, and mentally groans when she sees the other option, which was to sit beside a pair of twins who are, quite possibly, the most silly people Michelle has ever known.

Their names are Cindy and Cynthia, and Michelle has no idea what their parents were thinking when they named their kids, because nobody deserves to have an identical twin with a name so close to their own. They’re also the school gossips, and Michelle can tell from the way that they’re eyeing her that they’ve heard about the locker thing. Yikes. Michelle shrinks into her book, and tries to ignore their whispering.

Foucault was all right– well, he filled a lunch hour, which meant he was okay– but Michelle just couldn’t focus on the Panopticon when, as soon as her thoughts were off of CeeandCee, all she could think about was the rush of the wind in her hair as she’d ran through the city this morning.

She needs a better way to get through the city. When she was a kid, she’d watched this cartoon mystery TV show where one of the main characters used a grappling hook to swing around places sometimes. Michelle needs something like that– something where she could swing around corners and race traffic down avenues. It would probably make getting across the bridge a lot faster. It would probably also help with sneaking out if she ever found a friend group to sneak out to do stuff with.

Well, she had Chem next period, and, as one of the “good kids” in class, Michelle was usually more or less left to her own devices in the back corner of the room. She didn’t get into Midtown Science for nothing. Maybe she could figure something out.

So, everything continues as normal– or whatever normal is in a world where it’s suddenly an important part of Michelle’s life to wear a face mask, beanie, and goggles outside regularly, because the whiplash from the wind is crazy– until there’s an incident which takes place inside about ten seconds on the following Thursday.

Michelle is testing out her new swinging material, which she’s attached to little shooters on the insides of her wrists and, for the sake of the spider theme, is calling “web fluid,” carefully using it to wobble nervously from building to building, when something catches her eye– a flash of metal on the ground below her.

Suddenly, multiple images spiral through her brain. A bus, a kid on the crosswalk, the driver screaming, slamming on the brakes, the brakes aren’t working, the driver can’t stop–

All of this is condensed into the time that it takes Michelle to think Bus! and that is the last conscious thought she has before she’s suddenly on the street, right in front of the kid, one hand on the girl’s chest, the other hand out like she’s a traffic cop, like she thinks she can stop an out-of-control vehicle with her bare hand, what the hell is she–

The bus crunches around her hand, the metal folding itself forward in a massive screech! The front window shatters, and instinctively, Michelle twists away and folds herself around the girl’s body, blocking her from the shards of flying glass, feeling the front of the bus hit her ankle, then her calf, then crumple across her back. Michelle thinks, I am going to die.

 And the bus stops.

And Michelle hasn’t moved.

Through the shattered windshield, the driver is staring at Michelle, wide-eyed and white-faced. Michelle looks down at the kid, and sees her gaping at Michelle in utter shock.

Michelle lets go of the kid, then inches away from the bus. The metal groans, but it doesn’t move.

Michelle turns, looking for somewhere safe she can take the kid. The sidewalk will do. Michelle grabs the kid’s hand, unsticks her feet from the road– so that was why she hadn’t moved– and herds the kid towards the staring crowd, then hands her off to a guy who immediately reaches for her. Given that the kid doesn’t immediately start screaming bloody murder, Michelle is pretty sure that this guy is her dad. She can’t think about it too hard, though– every part of her brain is too occupied with screaming WHAT JUST HAPPENED? WAS THAT A BUS?

Everybody is staring at her, and it is one hundred percent making Michelle’s skin crawl. She reaches up to touch her face mask, making sure that it’s still in place, then nods to Probably-Dad and turns to go– only to see about twenty iPhones pointed directly at her.

Right.

Videos.

Uh oh.

It turns out that the swim goggles-slash-beanie-slash-face mask combo, which she was only wearing because it is impossible to see when she’s swinging around and getting the wind in her eyes and hair, did wonders for concealing her face, because nobody’s figured out who she is yet. Michelle just counts her lucky stars that her father is too busy with work to pay much attention to the crazy Reddit theories about the new superhero in town (they think she’s an Inhuman, which had also been Michelle’s first theory until she realized there had been no telltale black crust), and Gayle is too busy with whatever it is that Gayle does to put together the pieces that the girl in the videos is, in fact, her sister.

And Michelle doesn’t even know if she wants to be called a superhero.

Superhero. Michelle. Those two words in the same sentence. Crazy. 

In any case, Michelle’s ribs hurt way too much to go out again any time soon, and when she took a shower the night of the Bus Incident, she’d realized that her entire back was a dark brown-black-blue mess, and her rib cage and shoulders were outlined in brilliant purple. 

So it was probably a good thing that she didn’t go swimming often.

She takes the subway to school again for the next week, and hates every single second of it in a way that she never has before. It’s too cramped, too hot, too crowded. Michelle is glad to be back in the open air when she gets out.

But her rib cage heals way faster than she’d expected it to. By the time the week is up, Michelle doesn’t feel any pain or see any bruising at all– which, considering that she got hit by a goddamn bus, is pretty good.

And then everything changes all over again, with the Alleyway Incident– although, really, looking back, Michelle knows that once the Bus Incident happened, it was really only a matter of time before the Alleyway Incident did.

The Alleyway Incident happens like this:

“We’re out of eggs,” her father says as Michelle walks in one afternoon after school, and hands her a ten dollar bill. “Can you run to the corner and grab some?”

“And milk!” Gayle yells from the kitchen, before Michelle can answer. “I had to make my protein shake with water today!”

“I just got home,” Michelle points out, because that’s true. 

“So you still have your shoes on.” Michelle’s father ruffles her hair. “It’ll take five minutes, kid. Go, please.”

“If it’ll take five minutes, why can’t you or Gayle go?” Michelle asks.

Her father gives her a severe look. “Please, Michelle.”

Michelle snatches the ten. “Fine.”

It takes five minutes to walk to the nearest drugstore. Michelle runs into trouble in two.

Her first hint is a big guy, dressed in browns and greens, hiking up his pants as he goes. He’s eyeing the whole world around him, and his whole demeanor screams shifty. Michelle can’t stop watching him. There’s something in her hindbrain, whispering threat, threat, threat, and Michelle crosses the street to trail behind him without even consciously making the decision. Her feet are feather-light against the pavement, and Michelle can feel the beginnings of adrenaline trickling through her body.

And then she sees who he’s tailing, because he’s definitely tailing somebody.

A thin guy with wire-rim glasses, probably with a similar racial makeup to Michelle herself, is hurrying along ahead of the shifty guy. Non-shifty guy is dressed in a clean navy suit, but his shoes are scuffed white tennis shoes, which seems like a strange choice for a guy who seems to be in his twenties, but Michelle generally only judges people a little.

Also, he seems to be very aware that he’s being followed.

And then Shifty puts on a burst of speed, crashes into Non-Shifty, and then immediately turns on his heel and breaks into a run.

“Hey!” Non-Shifty yells. “Hey! My wallet!”

Michelle doesn’t even think. She takes off after the guy, who notices her immediately and runs even faster. The two of them are dodging pedestrians, bicyclists, dog walkers– and then the man slides over the hood of a parked car, dodges the honking traffic, and dives into an alleyway across the street. Michelle charges after him. She crosses the street much faster than he did– she leaps over the car he’d slid across, then, without even looking, swerves and jumps to dodge the still-moving cars, getting across the street and into the alleyway without even getting a scratch.

The guy is cornered in the alleyway. Michelle steps forwards, and says, hoping that her voice isn’t conveying her absolute confusion about what just happened and why she had done that: “Give me the wallet.”

She sees a weight in the guy’s pocket and knows, somehow, that that is where it is. The guy sees her eyes dart there, and he backs up, breathing hard and fast. He paws at the inside of his jacket with shaking fingers. Michelle could swear that she could hear his heartbeat, throbbing out a panicky rhythm, but then she thinks GUN.

She doesn’t know how she knows that. She doesn’t know why it’s not just a guess, why she knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is a gun in there. She can hear his fingers closing around something metal, and Michelle thinks Some random guy’s wallet is SO not worth this.

The man withdraws his hand from his interior pocket in what seems to be slow motion. Michelle sees the glint of metal. She sees the tiny hole in the barrel, pointed straight at her, a dark, deadly eye.

And then Non-Shifty appears at the entrance to the alleyway. “You!” he yells at the gunman. “You took my–” 

And then he sees the gun, and his face goes slack in shock and terror.

The gunman’s weight shifts, and some instinct inside of Michelle, an instinct that she doesn’t even know the origin of but she somehow trusts completely, thinks He’s going to shoot us both.

Michelle surges forwards, grabs the barrel of the gun, and yanks it out of the guy’s grip, crushing the metal as she goes. It’s her weird sticky powers versus his normie human strength, and the gunman stands no chance.

The guy howls in agony as she rips the gun away, and she registers too late that she’s probably broken his hand, but the thought flies into her head at the same time that she’s twisting to throw the ruined gun down the alleyway, so it’s probably a moot point. She steps in close to the man, her hand darts to the pocket with the weight in it, and she’s pulling out a leather wallet in the same instant it takes her to twist away from the man’s searching grasp and sprint down the alleyway towards the other man. 

And then she grabs the other man’s hand (he shrieks out an “Ohmygod!”) and books it down the sidewalk.

She’s bolting down the street, the gunman’s yelling and swearing fading into the noise of the city, and Michelle has no idea where she’s going, but she chances a look backward and sees the gunman skidding out of the alleyway, looking wildly around, and Michelle practically dives around the corner and out of sight, dragging the victim with her. 

From there, it’s a twisting sprint from street to street until Michelle’s instincts stop going Danger, danger, run, run, and start being quiet again, but Michelle only slows a little, until the two of them stagger to a stop in front of a Walgreens.

“I was getting out of a job interview,” the guy babbles at her. “I don’t really know what I’m doing. I saw online that you should wear a suit, and I did, but now I’m thinking I should have gotten nice shoes somehow, too. I steamed the suit, at least. And I researched the place ahead of time and even took a tour so that I could talk about seeing their new exhibit. I really wanted this job, so I did that. I’ve never done that for a job before. Did you know that you can get a museum pass at the library? You can. You just have to ask. They’re really nice. That guy had a gun. He had a gun. He had a gun. Oh, my god. Oh, my god. Oh, my god. Are you a cop?”

Michelle is lucky they’ve stopped, because if they hadn’t been, she definitely would have tripped over her own feet.

“What?” she says, wheeling around to face him.

“I was just–” the man stammers for a moment, breathing hard, then makes some kind of vague karate motion with his hands. “You just did that. I was just wondering.”

“I’m not a cop!” Michelle says indignantly. She’d been corralled out of one too many protests and into a jail cell (and then subsequently let go pretty quickly, because she’s still under eighteen) to ever, ever consider being a cop. Michelle’s always said that she would join the damn Avengers before she became a cop, and now she nearly trips again at the sudden realization that with these weird spider powers, she actually might be able to join said damn Avengers. 

“You’re not a cop,” the guy repeats obediently, and continues to boggle at her.

“Good luck with the job,” Michelle says, because she can’t really think of anything else to say, and then she hands him the wallet and heads into the Walgreens, leaving him staring after her on the street.

Going inside was a bad idea.

Adrenaline is still pumping through her system, and Michelle can hear everything in the store– the buzz of the fluorescent lighting, the hoarse breathing of one of the two cashiers who is looking flushed and ill, and even the rattling of plastic as customers rummage through various products to find what they want to buy. There are people walking and talking all throughout the store, and Michelle presses her hands to her ears, but all that does is make her aware of her own heartbeat, loud and fast, blood roaring through her system. 

“Shit,” she hears herself say, and presses her back against the wall. She’s not sure if it’s her stickiness or the strength of her legs that’s keeping her upright right now, but she’s grateful either way.

Gun, gun, gun, gun, gun, she thinks, and some other part of her is screaming Get it together! Get it together!

It’s a very small part, though, so Michelle lets herself hyperventilate. People pass by without even looking at her. Good old Enn Why See. Yeah, just ignore the teenager having a panic attack. That’s totally fine.

Okay.

Okay.

So. Take stock. Michelle Jones has just won a physical fight against a guy that has to have been at least a hundred pounds heavier than her with a gun.

An actual gun.

And Michelle won.

Mechanically, Michelle starts to move, going farther into the store. Gun. Get it together. Milk and eggs. Milk and eggs. Gun. Milk and eggs. Gun.

She’d won a fight. She’d won a real-life fight. The guy had had a gun, and she hadn’t even blinked.

Milk and eggs.

Could she do that again? Did she even want to? The adrenaline still had her heart rate jacked up, but underneath it all is a vicious satisfaction.

Satisfaction. That’s all. No fear, no regret, nothing so human. Satisfaction. Like a predator. A hunter.

Michelle gets the milk. She gets the eggs. She gets in line.

Could she do it again?

The line shuffles forward.

She could.

I am not going to go out and fight crime just because I can, she thinks. That is a very stupid decision to make and I should not do that.

Part of her wonders if Peter might think it was cool, but shoves that thought down as fast and as hard as she can.

And then, before she can second-guess herself, Michelle grabs the ski mask off of the rack beside the conveyor belt and wheels around to thunk it down on the counter with the milk and the eggs.

And then, on second thought, she grabs a pair of gloves to go with it. 

On the first night that MJ leaves her room, she can’t help but feel a little bit like a rebellious teenager, which is exactly what she is, so… accurate. She picks a Saturday, because there is no way that she’s skipping class and jeopardizing her shot at MIT for something this dumb, and second-guesses herself all the way out the window.

To get ready, she pulls on dark blue sweatpants and a matching hoodie– baggy enough to hide her body type, hopefully– and ties on a pair of ancient black tennis shoes of Gayle’s that hopefully have worn enough soles that if someone were to get her footprints, it couldn’t be traced back to a specific shoe. She knows how the Night Stalker got caught, and Michelle Jones is not going to become the next Richard Ramirez. Besides, it’s not like she has to worry about traction. She’s pretty sure that her sticky powers will be more than capable of taking care of that for her. Lastly, she pulls on the gloves and wraps duct tape around her wrists, hoping that that will stop someone from pulling them off and getting her fingerprints somehow.

And then she crawls out of her window and into the night.

She runs along rooftops, listening to her own breathing, her heart beating out a steady rhythm. It's as easy as anything to jump from building to building, saving her web fluid for later. 

It’s a quiet night, all things considered, which Michelle feels a little annoyed by. Here she is, dressed up and out and about at two in the morning on a Saturday night, and this city doesn’t even have the decency to give her a good fight. She does see cop cars, though, and stays low against the shadows when they pass. She does not need a rap sheet for vigilantism– or, worse, for her father to get a phone call from the cops at three in the morning regarding his delinquent kid.

By three, Michelle is in Queens, figuring that she should probably turn back and try to sleep before Gayle gets up for her Saturday morning shift– and that’s when she sees the figure slinking around the edge of somebody’s home. 

Michelle pauses, crouching on a rooftop, watching carefully. She doesn’t want to attack some random homeowner. That would be embarrassing. This guy seems shifty, though, in the same way that Wallet Guy had seemed shifty. There’s some sense, tingling in the back of her brain, telling her that this dude is bad news. He’s white, over six feet, and he’s wearing a green beanie, but his blond hair is sticking out in a long, thin ponytail.

She doesn’t hesitate for long. The guy is sneaking up to the porch now, reaching through the slats in the railings, and carefully tugging a package off of the front stoop.

Aha. He’s been avoiding the front door cameras.

Michelle hops down, landing right in front of the man. “Hey!”

Michelle sees a dark glint on metal, and that’s all the warning she gets before her body is in a backbend. The guy’s arm darts out over her face, right where her stomach had been a second earlier, and Michelle sees a knife. 

A thrill of terror shoots through her, but as soon as it’s arrived, Michelle’s hand is moving, snagging the knife easily, doing a flip over the guy’s head, and landing on the wall. Her head’s pointed at the ground again, but this time, she doesn’t flinch. Danger over. “Dude, you have a knife? What for– the box? You afraid the old lady’s medication is gonna attack you? You think a Nintendo Switch Lite can throw a punch?”

The guy snarls at her. “What the fuck? Who are you?”

“I’m Tony Stark,” Michelle crawls higher up the wall, looking for a place where she can throw the knife. 

“Liar!”

“No kidding.”

He howls something degrading below her, which probably means that he’s caught sight of her skin color somehow– probably her ankles. She’ll need to buy knee-high socks.

“Wow,” she calls down, after the initial jolt of surprise and rage has faded from her system. “Aliens exist and you’re still trying to divide humans against each other? Dude, this is monster movie 101. If you’re gonna insult me, insult me for having DNA fused with a bug, at least that makes sense.”

“Give it back, you Inhuman fuck!” he yells, which is hilarious because Michelle is pretty sure that he’s so pissed that he doesn’t even realize he’s obliging her. 

“Nuh uh. C’mon, dude, whatever you can get by swiping random packages off of people’s doorsteps is so not worth the jail time. Ring cameras are a thing, man. It’s the twenty-first century. Just… set up a Nigerian prince scam or something.” Michelle looks at the knife in her hand, remembers her strength, and suddenly, the silver blade is crushed inside her palm as easily as if it were a soda can. “Heh. Cool.”

She drops the knife, letting the twisted metal clatter against the ground. The guy rushes to it, then says, “The fuck?”

“I know. Crazy, right?”

“The fuck?” he says again, and Michelle sighs.

“Look,” she says. “Mr. Porch Pirate.” 

He glares, but what the hell is he going to do about a stupid nickname? Tell her his real one? Yeah, right. 

“Put the packages back, man,” she continues anyway. “You do that, and I’ll let it go. We cool?”

“Cool?” he repeats, in disbelief. “You destroyed my property!”

“Are you actually going to try that route?” Michelle says. 

He seethes, silently– but as Michelle relaxes (in hindsight, a rookie move) he whips around and tries to book it down the street. Michelle jumps after him, and completely misjudges her ability to land.

She hits the ground hard. She hears something tearing, and when she tries to push herself to her feet, agony rips through her arms. Her elbows are a bloody mess, and Michelle can see skin dangling, dripping red. Oh, god.

Footsteps! The thief is running, and adrenaline shoots through Michelle. She is up and after him immediately.

It’s easy to run him down. Michelle is probably faster than an Olympic sprinter. Following some non-human instinct, she gets within twenty-five, twenty, fifteen feet of him and leaps, landing on his back and sending them both crashing to the ground. Michelle rolls with him, keeping a tight grip on his wrists, and winds up sitting on his back as the guy twists and yells below her.

Sweet.

Michelle digs into the guy’s pockets as he squirms, and comes up with a wallet, which she flicks open. There’s a Blockbuster card that must be a bajillion years old, a MetroCard, and– aha– a driver’s license.

“Okay, Mr. Cross,” she says. “Here’s what’s gonna happen. You’re going to put this package back. You’re going to figure out some other way to make money. And you’re going to…” maybe she should have thought this through a little more before she started talking. “Okay. You’re going to stop doing this kind of thing. Get a job, man. You look like you just watch Andrew Tate all day long.”

“Easy to say,” the man says, but he’s not struggling anymore. Instead, he’s looking up at her hatefully. “Fucking DEI. Taking away jobs from–”

“Never mind, I actually don’t feel like being nice anymore.” Michelle hauls him to his feet. She definitely remembers seeing a cop car prowling the neighborhood– she’d had to dive behind a chimney to avoid him. And now she was going to be marching right up to one. 

Hmm. She didn’t exactly have proof that this dude had committed a crime. And if the cop was white, he might believe this guy over her. She might have to work on the strategy part of all of this. Tape a camera to her forehead or something.

Wait. Camera. 

She’d seen this guy sneaking around the edge of a house, but there were other houses nearby, including directly across the street, which– Michelle glances over, maybe two hundred feet away– does have a camera. There was video evidence that he’d taken something.

Loser.

“C’mon,” Michelle says, and leads him down the street.

When she gets to the cop car, she raps on the window until the officer fumbles his way out of the car, looking out of breath already, clearly eyeing her like he thinks she’s the new Ultron or something.

“Citizen’s arrest,” Michelle says. “You’re welcome.” 

She turns and hurries down the street, letting the cop and the thief stare in confusion after her.

Okay. Okay. That was cool.

Michelle heads home.

She’s careful to take off her shoes before she climbs back inside. Her dad goes berserk when she forgets to take her shoes off in the entryway to the apartment– she can’t imagine how mad he would be if Michelle left footprints on the ceiling. 

Gayle is asleep, if the snoring lump on her bed is anything to go by, so Michelle drops onto her own bed undetected, peeling off her sweaty clothing and stuffing the whole bundle under her bed. She seriously needs a shower– but not yet. For now, Michelle just sits on her bed and laughs to herself, high on the thrill of getting into a fight and winning. 

It had been easy. It had been so easy.

Michelle’s always been a wallflower. A nobody. A girl with her nose in a book who still got followed by out-of-uniform officers every time she walked too close to the local Apple store. Midtown SciTech was always going to be Michelle’s way out of that. That wasn’t going to change.

But now, Michelle tightens her fists, and, for the first time, feels power thrumming inside of her.

Two days later, there’s still blood sticking to the elbows of her sweatshirt, and it’s getting annoying. Michelle is counting herself lucky that she wears a lot of black, but someone– like her father– will probably notice the way that she flinches every time she brushes against something eventually. She can barely stand the shifting of the cloth against her skin right now, and the only reason she can is because wincing is a lot less suspicious than baring two bloody elbows to the whole world. Peter Parker asks if she’s feeling okay during Spanish class, though, so, really, the pain is super worth it.

She’s not doing much. She discovers that it’s a lot of fun to taunt people from twenty feet above their heads, definitely– but mostly, she’s stopping randoms from sawing at bike locks and teenagers from graffitiing the police station (seriously, are they trying to go to jail?). And it’s not always Grand Theft Bicycle or stopping package thieves. Michelle is usually giving directions to lost tourists who think she’s either a surprisingly helpful homeless person or someone who’s just bundled up super tightly.

Once or twice, Michelle gets people asking her who she is, why she’s doing this, how she got her powers. Michelle doesn’t know, not really. She’s kept her head down all her life. And she isn’t getting anything out of this– she can’t put any of this on a resume or talk about it in a college interview. In fact, she’s pretty sure that all she’s getting is bad knees and probably eventually PTSD.

But she keeps going out. Every night, she keeps going out. 

It’s something else, she supposed. Something that’s not school-related. Something that’s not endless college planning, or something she’s only doing because she needs to. This is something she wants to do. This is something she’s going to keep doing, even if she never gets any kind of reward for it. It’s something just for her. Just for Michelle. Not for her family. Not for her future. And maybe it’s stupid, but Michelle likes it that way.

And her mind keeps returning to the spider.

Michelle figures that she should give it credit. Who knows? Maybe some Internet sleuth could figure out that she’d gotten her powers from its bite and reverse-engineer it. Michelle wouldn’t say no to a couple of answers in her life.

That night, Michelle takes an old white T-shirt and carefully cuts a spider symbol out twice, sewing it onto the front and the back of her costume, so that everybody could see exactly who she was.

She falls into a shaky routine. Every day after dinner, she goes out for an hour. Then it’s two hours. Then it’s three. She gets to four and her father meets her at the door, trembling with anger and fear, and tells Michelle to never come home past midnight again.

So Michelle comes home earlier, and starts sneaking out after midnight instead.

She has a name now, sort of. At least, she has a name that’s popping up on Reddit and TikTok, and she’s pretty sure that there’s a whole conspiracy subreddit about her now: Spider-Woman. It’s probably because of her new emblem.

Michelle helps kids cross the street. Michelle chases down phone thieves. Michelle comforts a crying teenager after his boyfriend cheated on him. Michelle cheers on a little girl at her track meet after her mother realizes that she’ll be stuck at work for hours as an EMT. She does some good, maybe. She keeps busy, definitely.

And then, after an afternoon of meandering around the city, spent fishing a tourist kid out of the Central Park Reservoir and literally saving a cat stuck in a tree, she walks in through the front door of her apartment and sees Tony Stark sitting on the couch.

Michelle’s brain short-circuits.

It’s the Tony Stark. Avengers member. Richest person Michelle can think of. Playboy in all the tabloids. Probably friends with the likes of Bill Gates and all the other bajillionaires in the world. 

And he’s in Michelle’s living room.

Immediately, alarm bells go off in her brain, problem number one being: does Iron Man somehow know what she’s been up to in her free time? 

Surely not, she reassures herself frantically. She’s one of the top of her class at the top school in the city for scientifically-minded high schoolers. He’s probably here to offer her an internship or something.

Here at her home? Was that normal for internship positions? Michelle has no idea, but she doesn’t think that it is.

Maybe it is for Tony Stark, though?

Her father and Gayle are in the room with Stark, and they all turn to look at her as Michelle walks in. Her father’s face is shining, and Gayle is looking at her with a grudging sort of pride that is typical of Gayle. Stark, for his part, is unreadable.

“There’s the scholar!” Michelle’s father says proudly. “Michelle, why didn’t you tell us you applied to a Stark internship?”

“What?” Michelle says.

“Oh, she wouldn’t know– it’s based on PSAT scores from Midtown Science,” Tony Stark says, and smiles at her. It doesn’t reach his eyes, and Michelle is reminded, uncomfortably, of the time when she’d been twelve and a sixty year old white woman had called the cops on her for “walking suspiciously”– but when Stark reaches for her hand, Michelle takes it automatically in a firm shake. “Congratulations, Miss Watson.”

Michelle’s brain is still trying to catch up to the situation. “Wait. What did I… win?”

Tony Stark turns to her father. “Maybe we could go to Michelle’s room and talk in private?”

Michelle can see the exact moment that her father’s brain makes the switch from Holy Shit Tony Stark Is In My Living Room! to This man is a pervert. Gayle, who has been feigning disinterest via scrolling on her phone at the kitchen counter, suddenly draws herself up, eyes flashing dangerously. Her father is quicker to the draw though, and snaps, “Absolutely not!”

Tony blinks, looking affronted. 

“Living room,” Michelle suggests, before her family can have a competition for who can punch Tony Stark in the balls first. “That okay?”

Her father still doesn’t look happy, but he swats at Gayle until she moves into the hallway anyway. From there, Michelle hears the doors to her father’s bedroom and her and Gayle’s room, respectively, close.

“Right!” Tony spins towards Michelle. “This place is nowhere near soundproof, so shh.” 

Michelle crosses her arms and lifts her eyebrows, staring at him.

He copies her pose almost immediately. “Well, aren’t you the picture of a sixteen year old girl who thinks she’s too good for the world? Overprotective family, much?”

“They care about me,” Michelle says testily, which is true.

“Mom at work?”

“No,” Michelle responds shortly. “What’s the internship for?”

“About that,” Stark says, and steeples his fingers. “You’re in dire need of an upgrade, Miss Watson.”

“Jones,” Michelle says sharply. 

Stark lifts his hands in an I surrender gesture. “Miss Jones. You know who I am. And I know who you are.”

“Yeah, you’re Tony Stark,” Michelle says. “So– is there money involved in this internship?”

“Oh, tons.” Stark leans against the back of the couch, drumming his fingers. “Out of curiosity, what do you call yourself? I know the press certainly has a name for you, but do you have a name for you?”

“What?” Michelle says. There’s a trickle of fear going down her spine, and she’s suddenly very sure that there’s no internship offer on the table here.

Stark crossed his arms. “Oh, are you going to keep lying to my face here? That’s a little cold. What’s wrong– don’t like me?”

“Well, I just think that all billionaires are a cancerous threat to our society, and that you made all of your money by killing little kids in the Middle East,” Michelle replies, and smiles with all of her teeth. Don’t keep pushing, she wants to say. Stop asking me questions.

Stark holds up a finger. “Okay, hostility detected. Also, my company did that, not me.”

“You mean, your company which you made money from?”

Stark rolls his eyes. “It was a lot more complicated than that. And I don’t have to take any lip from a high school girl, okay?”

“Didn’t you come here to ask me about something?” Michelle says, and Stark visibly takes a calming breath.

“Yes,” he says, and pulls out a sleek black phone, which he swipes at a couple of times before a projection pops up above it. He turns it to face her. “This you?”

It’s only confirmation of what she’d already guessed, but Michelle still nearly swallows her tongue. 

The image hovering above Stark’s phone is from weeks ago, when she’d caught that bus. So people had been recording. And one of those recordings had fallen right into the lap of Tony Stark.

“No,” she says, a beat too late.

Stark looks triumphant. He looks back down at the screen, at mini-Michelle catching the bus midair. Michelle wonders if he’s even seeing the little girl cowering behind her, or if all he can see is Michelle and her useful, useful, useful power.

“That is quite a suit,” he says. “Make it yourself?”

“It’s not mine. That’s not me,” Michelle insists, already thinking fast. Her father would kill her if Tony Stark was here to recruit her for the Avengers. For one thing, Michelle is pretty sure that there’s no real career path there. 

“Fascinating.” Stark turns the screen around to look at it again. “Then somebody else is running around with your exact same weight, height, build, hair color, oh, and I can see your little watch gizmos on your wrists.” 

Michelle’s gaze snaps down to her wrists, wondering if she’d somehow forgotten to take off her webshooters, but then Stark sing-songs, “Made you look,” and Michelle feels a combination of anger and embarrassment welling up in her throat.

“They’re not watches,” she says through gritted teeth.

Stark just looks back at her smugly. “Well, obviously not, you’re using them to– what?– shoot biodegradable rope all over the city? Does that stuff come out of you, by the way?”

“What?” Michelle says, too surprised to deny it. “No. I made it.”

“Interesting. So, you buy those pajamas somewhere online? Amazon?”

“They’re not pajamas!” Michelle says. 

“So you made the whole thing? The whole deal’s yours?” Stark nodded appreciatively. “You’re smart, kid.”

“Yeah, I know ethos, logos, pathos, too.” Michelle crossed her arms. “What are you here for, Mr. Stark?”

“You’re very rude for someone who’s only just met me,” Stark observes. “Usually we talk for a few minutes before people decide they hate me.” 

“We’ve been talking for a few minutes.”

“Yeah, okay, smartass.” Stark puts his phone in his pocket, and the projection disappears. “So, here’s the deal. I’m putting together a team of like-minded people. There’s something… hero-ish, that needs to be done. You in?”

There it is. Michelle can’t help it, but her heart quickens.

Tony Stark is more or less the face of the Avengers. Earth’s mightiest heroes. He noticeably isn’t offering her a spot on the roster or anything, but this team that he’s talking about… it’s definitely a step in that direction.

If she wants to take it, that is.

“I’m… not really a team player,” Michelle says cautiously, hoping that he’ll take the hint and add more information.

“Even if the team is the Avengers?” Stark says. “Even if the team is having a stable, steady job with the U.S. government at sixteen?”

The U.S. government? Michelle’s been seriously behind on the news, given her new extracurricular activities. What the hell did the government have to do with Tony Stark? 

“Yeah, you know, I’ve always wanted to help terrorize third world countries, that’s definitely why I’m in this line of work,” Michelle replies, trying to cover up her confusion.

Stark considers her. “You really don’t like me, do you?”

“It’s nothing personal,” Michelle admits. “I just don't think that any billionaires are good or moral people. Like I said.”

“I’m a philanthropist,” Stark says coolly. “I made a lot of mistakes when I was younger, but I’m trying to make up for that now, all right? I’ve seen the light.”

Michelle can’t help scoffing. “The light?” she says. “Is that why I’m killing myself running around every night trying to make things safer for kids who look like me in this city?”

“Wow, overreaction.” Stark presses the heels of his palms against his eyes. “Look. Look. All cards on the table, I really need your help. And…” he hesitates. “I’ll get you a real internship. Paid. Do you know the kind of doors having a Stark internship on your résumé can open? Or a personal letter of recommendation from me? You could do anything you wanted with your life, Michelle. Anything.” He pauses. “Including fighting crime in your sweatpants. We would subsidize that.”

Michelle feels her heart skip a beat.

This is it. This is everything she’s been working towards, for her entire life. This is why she wanted to go to Midtown SciTech. This was why she worked herself to the bone, making sure her grades never dipped, making sure she never failed.

This opened doors that she didn’t even know existed. This was how she got a stable career, a steady paycheck, a way to make sure her family was taken care of. Gayle could stop worrying about her shitty apartment with its stupid plumbing issues. Her father could retire, could take a break, could finally rest. 

Tony Stark and Michelle Jones.  

She could play it off to her father and Gayle as a normal internship. She could pretend that Stark just wanted her at weird hours in a lab somewhere. She would still have to lie, but she wouldn’t have to hide. Not nearly as much.

She swallows. “How much of a salary are we talking about?”

Stark waves a hand. “We can work out the details later. You ever been to Germany?”

“I didn’t say yes,” Michelle points out, not that that meant much– she knows that her face had probably had some kind of reaction to his offer.

Stark rolls his eyes. “You drive a hard bargain. What do you want?”

Michelle really, really, really wants to say “As much as you’ll give me.”

Instead, she says, just to make sure that this is the right choice: “What’s in Germany?”

And Stark– blinks.

It’s half a second, but Stark’s whole demeanor, all of his swagger, all of the bravado he’d come in with, falters. For half a second.

And then Stark shrugs and says “Let’s call it training camp.”

“I thought you said you needed a team,” Michelle says.

“I need both. It can be both.” Stark presses his fingers to his forehead. “Look, kid. Are you in, or are you out?”

It’s vague. It’s far too vague. It’s like those scams that get old people– I can help, but you need to send me all of your banking details and Social Security Number RIGHT NOW. BS meters that Michelle has had long before she was ever bitten are blaring in her skull. She doesn’t know this guy. He’s already lied about why he’s here. She doesn’t know if he’ll keep his word. He won’t even tell her what’s in Germany. What did the U.S. government have to do with any of this? And why did Tony Stark, who presumably had the whole superhero world at his beck and call, need a slightly sticky teenage girl for anything?

Michelle Jones might not be a hero, but she’s definitely not an Avenger.

“Thanks for the offer,” she says, and walks over to the front door to open it. Then she stands beside it, waiting for him to get the hint.

He does. 

Michelle doesn’t watch him walk away, but she does watch the bright red sports car roar away down the street and turn the corner.

And then she hurries out the door, muttering something about going on a walk to her dad, and swings away over the city, where she stops a bicycle theft and a bodega robbery.

Her dad wants to know why on earth she would turn Tony Stark down. He grounds her when she doesn’t have a good answer. Michelle keeps sneaking out anyway. Gayle notices the empty bed, and Michelle buys her three months’ worth of protein powder to buy her silence. Her dad finds out anyway, and takes away her keys so that she can’t let herself back into the apartment once it’s locked at night. He can’t figure out how that’s not stopping her.

At school, Michelle drops debate. It was kind of her only social outlet outside of Academic Decathlon, and she hopes that Peter– well, that someone would notice. 

And then Homecoming happens.