Work Text:
Inside of an unkempt studio apartment, one where dirty clothes were strewn half-heartedly around the room, amongst empty takeout containers and pizza boxes, the last remaining Parker stared down at a pill bottle.
[Prescription for: Peter Parker
Estradiol: 2mg: tablet
Count: 60 tablets
Renewals remaining: 1]
Even in as progressive a city as New York is, getting these pills was no easy feat. Not because of some waitlist, or a diagnosis. Every planned parenthood in New York let anyone walk up, say they know what they’re doing by taking them, grab an appointment with a clinic, and get to it.
The problem itself was walking into the building the first time.
Because when she did that, it became real. It wasn’t a daydream or an off-color thought after seeing what Sauron could do with people’s DNA. It wasn’t a dream she’d wake up from and shake the funny feelings away from it, or a fantasy she’d let herself get wrapped up in and then the shame and guilt wash up with her after it was all said and done.
It was real. It meant it was happening. It meant it was taking the first, humongous, titanic step in a journey. She knew the odds were against her, that friends would leave her if she did, that the Bugle would villainize Spidey even more, but life as the Web Head never pulled any punches. So she couldn’t either. She thought about names. Index cards, sticky notes, hastily written word scribbles on napkins that still had a little mustard on them, all tucked away in a drawer or scrapped when thought about. Polly, Petra, Jennifer, Jessica, June, Penny (sharing a name with a girl that could ride around in a mech could be cool), Piper, Paige, Patricia. All considered at one point or another, but she had narrowed it down to her favorite. A lone little secret kept tucked away, the lone survivor of the wistful dreams of names, its peers simply not being up to snuff.
Yet here she was sitting. In a baggy zip-up hoodie, looking at a bottle of her estradiol.
Her estradiol she had been taking for 11 months.
With her other hand, she had her phone open, and looked at some of the scarce selfies she had taken, the idea was to show her progress. One right before starting, one at 3 months, one at 6 months, one at 9 months, and then finally, a full year.
She figured by then the differences would start to be obvious enough for her to at least come out to someone.
She wished it could have been to Gwen.
Gwen was probably the one person that she could tell, even before the first pill got taken.
She still talked to MJ sometimes, but, even though she’d never done anything romantic with her since that one blind date in college, something about her and Paul really got under his skin.
Maybe she just didn’t like Paul.
No matter how the cookie crumbled didn’t matter, the point is, she and MJ didn’t talk as much as she wished they did.
So she sat there looking at her phone. Her gallery opened up on the first picture she took, an awkward, forced half-smile, standing in the area she knew was in fact the front of a planned parenthood. The one she went into. The building wasn’t in the view, naturally, she didn’t want anyone to see it. That didn’t stop her from knowing where she was in that moment.
She scrolled through to the next selfie, three months in. A similar forced smile. She didn’t notice any difference. When she first took the picture, she had the same thought as anyone would in that moment. That’s normal, this stuff takes time. Then six months came. She had taken the picture, and compared it to three months. She didn’t notice any change. Then nine months came. Now, she sat here, looking at herself in her rear camera, and, for the sake of needing to satiate some morbid curiosity, she lifted it up, put on whatever grimace-looking smile she could muster, and let the speakers play the sound of a shutter. She looked at it, she looked at the picture 11 full months ago.
There was no change.
It wasn’t her eyes deceiving her, it wasn’t some sense of warped perspective or dysmorphia, there was simply nothing. And there wasn’t any of the other effects with hormones either. Her scent was the same, her body hair situation was the same, she hadn’t even formed the smallest buds of breasts, not even a mote of sensitivity had formed yet. She hadn’t gained any curves, nor any feminine features.
She stared at those pictures. Making a little album of just them to make it easier to compare. She scrolled through them each, one, two, three, four. Then back the opposite direction. Four, three, two, one.
Nothing.
Sure maybe some days she was happier or some days she looked more tired, on the month 9 picture she had a bandage on her face. Her hair grew out in that time, definitely. Yet there was nothing else.
She didn’t know that was possible.
This isn’t how its supposed to go, “estrogen is magic”. She saw all the timelines, she saw people, even people who CLAIMED there was no change, still had some change. Still grew even the slightest bit more feminine, all wonderful and pretty in their own unique ways. She watched as girls declared they were ugly, or had received no difference, and yet, even if it wasn’t quite so noticeable, it was still there for them.
She had none of it.
Not one scrap of her had changed. It made her as sad and angry as it did confused. This isn’t how it works. This isn’t how biology works, this isn’t how human anatomy should work.
Her eyes snapped open at that last thought.
She was right. This isn’t how human anatomy works.
She let her thumb trace across the palm of her other hand, and activated the same reflex as if she needed to crawl a wall. She felt it. All of the little setules that had formed across her hand.
This isn’t how human anatomy works.
At the revelation, she felt her blood turn to ice, and the whole world got foggier. She felt like she was going to burst into tears, but she couldn’t find herself emotional enough to do so.
Just another part of her shitty testosterone.
She let her phone fall onto her bed with a soft padded thump, and let the hand holding it move to her face, snaking across the bridge of her nose to her eyes and forehead.
“How could I be so stupid.” She murmured to herself.
She had super DNA, it didn’t work like anyone else, her hormones were probably just as souped up as the rest of her genes were. Treating the excessive estrogen like a foreign entity, not part of the body’s creation, and the lack of ability to acclimate to her mutated body meant it would just fizz out, and get treated like waste.
It wasn’t an impossible fix, especially not for someone like Parker. In theory, anyhow, one could simply splice a part of whatever super spider nonsense was going on in her body, make a compound of it and estrogen, and process it.
That thought, however, stopped her dead in her tracks as she thought of someone she knew. Someone she was once close with. A man who just wanted a little change to his body, to get something he felt was lost. A man who tried and worked hard, who went to fix it himself, spliced the genes himself, and where did that get him? Covered in green scales, forced to become a horrible monster, one that killed his own child.
She never saw Curt Connors after that day. It was always just The Lizard.
Where did this leave her?
What, try and tell Tony, ladies man asshole and have to be genuine and vulnerable with him? And then what, what if it didn’t even work.
Not like talking to Reed would be much easier, the fantastic four were some of the closest people in her life as Spidey. She couldn’t risk losing that. She couldn’t risk losing Johnny.
She let out a deep sigh, coming all the way down from her stomach full of butterflies, tangled knots, and nausea.
“It’s probably for the best.” She said, flatly.
She saw girls online talking about how estrogen made it a lot harder to keep up their muscle mass, and god knows she had been in situations where every single bit of strength she had counted. It counted to keep everyone safe. To keep girls like her safe out there, to keep a whole world of aunts, of uncles, of lovers and family and friends all living to see another day.
She threw her pill bottle into the air, and with a thwip, a clump of web stuck onto it, the velocity making it crater into her trashcan with a large clatter of pills rattling in its container, smacking into the inside of it, and the thud of the trash can bouncing against her wall from the impact.
She reached into the drawer, grabbed her mask, and looked at the last remaining index card there with quick sigh, working up her willpower, she slammed the dresser shut and webbed it secure.
The mask went on, The hoodie was off, the spandex suit coming back into the forefront. “The world still needs Spider-Man.”
The red and blue superhero leapt out of the apartment window, and slung a web to a skyscraper’s peak, swinging from it.
That means it still needs Peter Parker.
All he could do was hope for something to take his mind off it all.