Chapter Text
All right, let’s do this one last time.
It was the summer of 1987, and Michael Emerson, along with the rest of his family, had just hauled their lives from a dusty apartment in Phoenix to sun-kissed Santa Carla—where they could start anew. Their first few days in California were spent catching up with his estranged grandfather, whose house he so kindly lent to his daughter and her two sons in need.
Even if it was a touch eccentric for their liking. It was a roof. Under their heads that they could make into a home.
Lucy made quick work of rebuilding the lives they led in Arizonia, working around the hole his father left, while Michael was in charge of distracting Sam from… everything. They went swimming in the Pacific Ocean, then straight to grazing on all the boardwalk had to offer. Every day was something new and exciting.
They hadn’t even been there a week when Sam toted a disinterested Michael into some back-alley shop called ‘Bonanza Curiosities and Oddities.’ The shop stretched straight down a lengthy, narrow hallway. As they descended farther, the shelves full of uncoordinated bizarreness caved in on them. Michael wondered if Grandpa had ever stopped to shop around in here as he twisted sideways so he could squeeze past a—“Is this supposed to be a dragon?”
Sam didn’t even spare a look back, far too focused on finding his footing between uneven floorboards. “I think so. Neat stuff, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” he swallowed, looking down into a bedazzled wine bottle supposedly complete with ‘vampire blood,’ “Real neat.”
The store was exactly as advertised, he’d give them that.
The back wall of the room was lined with different-sized jars filled with submerged specimens, all being various states of revolting. Michael removed his glasses and stepped closer to one of the smaller bottles settled on the jagged shelves. It housed a spider marinating in yellow-tinted liquid. He stayed completely still while studying the arachnid until he flinched towards Sam and threw a hand in his direction. “Boo,” he barked. Sam yelped and stumbled into the wooden crate behind him, marked as an old coffin, which made him jump again back to the middle of the room.
“Don’t do things like that,” he huffed, his palm pressed against his chest, “Maybe we go now.”
Michael quickly agreed, flinging an arm around the base of Sam’s shoulders to guide the two of them far away from this minefield disguised as some mere tourist attraction. An abrupt pain blossomed at the nape of his neck, which made him jerk back, pulling Sam uncomfortably underneath his arm. “Hey, what was that for?” he squirmed until Michael relinquished his hold and the pain disappeared as quickly as it had arrived.
Sam was the one guiding a dazed Michael now, holding his neck in confusion, looking back down the hallway they came from.
~ ~ ~
Fast forward one very nauseating night spent shivering uncontrollably beneath his bed covers while simultaneously sweating half his body weight, and a morning spent standing in front of the mirror staring at his crystalline reflection before he even put on his glasses, and noticing the bicep bursting out of what used to be a loose sleep shirt that swallowed his frame whole.
He pulled the fabric over his head and tossed it to the side so he could get a clearer look at the six-pack brandishing his stomach. Then he twisted around and raised his arms to watch his changed back contort with the movement. His eyes trailed up to his neck where he found a small bump with two red dots in the middle. Michael ran his fingers over it and cringed at how sensitive the spot was.
He went back to the shop.
He headed right for the back of the spindling hall, keeping an eye out for anything that could have caused these new… developments, which is what Michael was referring to them as. He found himself at the spider’s jar again, only, this time it was empty.
“Ma’am,” Michael approached the beaded curtain that led into what he assumed was the store’s back room. His eyes settled on an older woman. “Ma’am, could you tell me what was in this jar? It’s important.” Though he really didn’t know why.
The lady moved roughly, having to brace herself on the shelves, which in turn jostled the items on the entire wall. Michael braced for something to fall—maybe for her to. She removed her glasses and tapped on the jar, “Eh, that was the widow for sure. Damn kids must have snatched’er up.” She walked back through the beaded curtain mumbling something about ‘those damn motorcyclists’ without ever acknowledging Michael.
His sights lingered on the barren jar for a moment before backing away. It was crazy to even think that a preserved spider would be the cause of—he looked down, his new physic sticking to his sheer shirt—this. Not that he was complaining, but it would still be nice to know the cause of it.
The first step forward he took, something crunched under his shoe. Michael lifted his foot up to unveil the pristine widow from yesterday, mangled and broken on the floor with a single web attached to it.
Michael made sure the woman was distracted in the back room before scooping it up and hastily making his exit. He disappeared around the corner and uncupped his hands. Upon closer inspection, its color was radiant, a very bright blue and crimson. The spider was quite beautiful to look at.
“What are you?” he whispered.
~ ~ ~
The spider lived in the top drawer of his dresser after that. Now and then Michael would take it out just to admire it. He noticed new things every time, like the way its blue faded into red at the tips of each leg, or the texture on the widow symbol brandishing its back.
She was fascinating.
And Michael assumed that was that. Whatever happened, happened, and he had just been blessed with the few small changes. It could be worse.
Until he woke up standing on the ceiling. Unbeknownst to him how he got there.
“What the hell?” he shrieked when he opened his eyes and saw his entire room flipped upside down, and then his feet planted on the ceiling split between the fan blades. He stretched his arms in a vain attempt to see if he could reach his bed frame, then focused on his feet and managed to detach one, leaving his leg hanging in the air.
“No, no, no,” he muttered, pulling it back up in one giant step towards the wall, now stuck in more of a split position. He was stretched towards the top of the window frame, and that—for some reason—was enough motive for his legs to detach from the ceiling. His body swung down and crashed out of the opening, leaving him dangling by just two fingertips that managed to catch on the glass before he plummeted down a story.
He hung there for two seconds before he slipped, because of course.
Michael yelped and squeezed his eyes shut, bracing for an impact that never came. When he peeked one eye open, he was standing upright on the side of the house looking down at the flowers planted below. It took him two seconds to kickstart his mind again and whip around to latch onto the ledge of his window before his feet detached. Again.
“Shit, shit,” he repeated over and over again. He couldn’t pull himself back into the safety of his room from the position he stuck himself in, barely clinging to the window ledge.
“Michael?” Sam’s voice called from inside, “What’s with all the noise?”
“Sam,” Michael hollared, and pretty soon his younger brother was sticking his head out, staring at him with wide eyes.
“How—why—what in the—” he sputtered as he watched Michael lose his grip more and more.
“Pull me up,” he strained through clenched teeth. It was rough and uncoordinated, but Sam managed to get Michael up to a position where he could get himself up the rest of the way and land on the floor in a heap.
“Do I even want to know how you ended up out there?” Sam stood over him.
Michael was grasping his chest, taking in shallow breaths. “Not really.”
So yeah, apparently he could stick to things. And that was only the first of his developments to make a surprise appearance.
~ ~ ~
He was strong, like, freakishly strong.
“Michael, would you do me a favor and toss me the sack of rice?” His mom asked while sautéing vegetables over the stovetop.
Michael hummed, paying more regard to the arachnid book he borrowed from the library than his mother’s request. He reached next to him and slid the bag across the counter without looking.
“Michael,” Lucy gasped, which made him glance up from the pages to see the bag busted open against the wall across from him with grains of rice spread everywhere, as if the sack exploded.
He shrank into himself to appear smaller. “Sorry?” He squinted.
And that wasn’t the only time things like that happened. He had to be very careful opening doors ever since he tore one of the knobs right out of the wood—much to Grandpa’s dismay.
~ ~ ~
Sometimes…
“Mike, heads up,” Sam frantically called from across the horse stables.
…There would be a thrumming at the base of his skull. Not so much a voice, but an electric current that flowed up through his brain, pushing outwards. If anything was ever about to happen, anything dangerous, everything would become fuzzy, and a muffle would settle over his ears. All of his senses only focused on telling Michael that something was wrong in that moment.
He doesn’t know how, but his body knew to lean over just slightly, and he watched as Nanook’s tennis ball buzzed right past where his head was two seconds before. He watched the world as if it was sifting through molasses. Then, he raised his right arm and watched Nanook bolt towards the ball underneath it.
Time returned to normal, and the sensation disappeared. Michael shut the binding of his book and turned to see Sam standing there, confusion evident on his face.
He moved his hand between the dirt path and the chair Michael sat in. “How did you—” he ignored Nanook, who was back at his feet with the ball, patiently waiting for Sam to nab the toy and throw it again.
He got up and swiftly made his exit. “Good heads up,” he called back on his way out. Michael locked eyes with one of the horses Grandpa rents his land out to. “You saw nothing.”
~ ~ ~
His healing stumped him because on one hand, he still had the spider bite on his neck, but then, things like this would happen…
“Dammit,” he yelped, standing across from Lucy in the kitchen. There was blood dripping onto the cutting board and down his fingers from the fresh slice he just carved into his hand. The sting pulsed through his hand as that already familiar buzz of warning settled into the back of his skull.
“Honey, let me see,” Lucy coaxed. He stuck his hand in his pocket, feeling a layer of dried blood start to cake around his denim. He didn’t know why, but something told him to keep his injury concealed.
“I’m fine,” he stepped further back. They both glanced down at the bloody cutting board in the same manner, “Promise.”
“Go clean it up,” she tentatively ordered after a lengthy stretch of silence.
Michael nodded and shuffled away, peeking at his hand when he wrapped around the corner to see nothing but dried blood caking a pristine hand with no massive slice across the palm where there should absolutely be one. “Why am I not surprised?” he muttered to nobody but himself.
~ ~ ~
Every sense of his was heightened tenfold.
“Alright, see you tonight,” Michael heard all of a sudden, which was odd, since nobody was around besides him and the sixth spider book he was on, which—might he add—was getting him nowhere near closer to deducing what was currently going on with him, he thought about as he sat upside down attached to the ceiling.
It was Sam’s voice—he was sure of it. Michael was ready to shrug it off as just another instance of him absolutely losing it as of late, until he heard it again.
“Ma, is it alright if I go to the comic shop later?” He caught it, but that was impossible. It didn’t sound like he was listening in from the next room over. Sam’s voice crackled in his head as if it were coming from a very low-quality record player.
“Sure, honey, Michael can take you.”
The sound persisted even after their conversation waned. He could hear Lucy flipping through book pages in the sunroom, and Sam shuffling through the kitchen cabinets. He could even tell that Nanook’s tail was thumping against the ground while he dreamt in the living room.
Michael pressed a hand to one of his ears, holding onto his book with the other. But even then, he could still hear everything, and now he could smell the sandwich Sam was beginning to make, the mayonnaise bottle just having been opened in the kitchen, and it was all hitting his senses at once.
“What the hell is happening to me?”
~ ~ ~
The final straw came about two days after he was just starting to get a handle on these new powers—or whatever he had decided this was.
Michael was walking back to the library—the only place he really went these days—when a woman right in front of him was about to trip on a stripped plank of wood under her. His head exploded, and before he could think, Michael was lunging forward to catch her.
Only, he didn’t—something else did.
A white strand came from his wrist and pulled her to an upright position. She glanced around but didn’t look far enough behind her to see Michael standing completely frozen with his wrist held out, what seemed like webbing hanging from it. Before he could process what just happened, he dove into the nearest alleyway behind a dumpster.
“What,” he took one giant, steeling deep breath, “the,” he reached out, “fuck.” Michael pulled the webbing out of his wrist, and where it had come from, a small hole remained. He pressed on his wrist, and a residual amount of the fluid came out. He audibly gagged and held his arm out as if trying to get away from his own body.
His feet turned him right back around, ditching the library completely, and he pushed his hand as far down into his pocket as it could go until he reached his bedroom. It took some finagling, but he eventually realized that if he pressed his middle and ring finger to his palm, he got… Michael looked around at his bedroom covered from wall to wall in—
Spiderwebs.
“Michael?” his grandfather’s voice snapped him back to reality, and he lept to the door, his feet barely touching the ground as he did.
“Yes, Grandpa?” he called back.
“Everything alright in there?”
Michael was currently tangled around his own webs as he unsuccessfully attempted to get them down from the ceiling. “More or less.”
The old man hummed, “Just wanted to check up on you. You’re worrying your Ma, Michael.” That made him pause, suspended a few feet above the ground, caught in his own web. “Anyways, I gotta date with the ol’ Widow Johnson tonight, just have a chat with her. You’re the man of the house now, and with great power comes great responsibility.”
“Yeah, sure,” he slumped onto the floor and listened to his Grandpa’s slow steps descend the stairs.
~ ~ ~
That was the last time he ever spoke to his grandfather. Michael can’t even recall when he saw the man face-to-face before that.
Lucy was in the kitchen that night when she found his forgotten heart medicine stashed in the cabinet. She was going to take it to him, but Michael instead insisted on talking with her at that exact moment. He thought it was what Grandpa wanted. He kept her at the house to pitifully tell her that he was okay—when he wasn’t—and to reassure her that he would be around more—he wouldn’t.
They spoke for so long that night, Lucy had forgotten to bring Grandpa his medicine by the time they were done. The next morning, they received a call from the police that some neighbor reported an intruder at the Widow Johnson’s house early last evening.
They were pronounced dead on the scene. Both of their throats were slashed, their bodies drained completely of blood.
Michael ran that night. He ran faster than he ever thought possible to the edge of town where an abandoned bridge sat perched over the river. Michael couldn’t bear his mother’s sobs anymore. He used a web to catapult himself over and hung under a railing, watching the fog settle above the water. He had barely known the man until a few weeks ago, but he was family. The only surviving remnant of the people his mother grew up with.
And Michael could have saved him.
If only he hadn’t suddenly decided to be an alright son in that moment. He was so good at being the angry and distant one. There was a reason he shouldn’t open up as he did. The first time he ever told Lucy about his father, he showed her the mostly healed scars he left—her own was murdered in cold blood.
Michael stared down at his hands. The same hands he came to Santa Carla with, but forever different. He clenched his fists, stronger now—he was angry. Furious that someone took his grandfather, and he did nothing about it.
But he had power.
‘With great power comes great responsibility,’ Michael remembered the last thing his grandfather ever said to him. He could find out who or what killed him—he could avenge Lucy’s father.
Michael realized that night he could save Santa Carla from being fated to be the infamous ‘murder capital of the world’ any longer.
~ ~ ~
Ever since that misty morning, Michael has kept to his Grandpa’s words. He swings around Santa Carla, perched upon the ferris wheel, seeking out crime and studying the characters that live within the shadows of his town.
They call him Spider-Man. The one, the only.