Chapter Text
Yosuke Hanamura was Spiderman, but he was an idiot first and foremost.
Despite being part of the team of highschoolers who successfully caught the serial murderer plaguing the town of Inaba, Yosuke was not a very well put together guy; he spent the majority of high school failing class, making shitty electronic music on bandcamp, and arguing with his parents. Despite the shoddily bleached auburn hair and high-sprung demeanor, his presence in a school hall was not particularly notable – he was certainly not disliked, but the town of Inaba seemed at least slightly averse to city types like him. Anyway, Yosuke couldn’t sit and complain too long over his unimpressive high school career; his friends made all the worth. A big group, they were – 7 all up, though it would very frequently be 8 when Yosuke’s little brother Teddie rocked up uninvited. Standing out of the pack was Yu Narukami, who, similarly to Yosuke himself, moved to Inaba from Tokyo as a teenager and was forced to accustom himself to small town life.
Unlike Yosuke, Yu didn’t seem to struggle whatsoever. He didn’t seem to struggle with anything, really. Despite his reserved nature, he was a magnet for attention. He was friendly, with a slight air of nonchalance that made him undeniably intriguing to the small community of Yasogami High. Girls wanted him, and boys wanted to be him, but he couldn’t care less. He dressed well, had radiant skin … radiant hair … radiant … clearly, Yosuke was beside himself. Yu and Yosuke were fast friends, shockingly (Yosuke feels like he lucked out here) and through the investigation they lead, Yosuke had proudly proclaimed them partners, best friends through thick and thin. And so they were. Yosuke wouldn’t admit that somewhere deep, deep inside him was the feeling that the heat that he felt wasn’t exactly the kind of passion boys usually had with other boys.
Yu eventually went home for their 3rd year of school, but his connection to their friend group never faltered – his visits to Inaba were frequent, his texts and calls even more so. When Yu and Yosuke both decided they wanted to go to the University of Tokyo, the solution for Yosuke’s housing was apparent. Yu’s … lavish … apartment was a 20 minute train to Uni, with his parents constantly away for business. With a tenancy agreement between Yu’s parents and Yosuke signed, Yosuke packed his bags and finally ditched Inaba for a life he had dreamed of for years. Majoring in music production and his partner in biophysics, their lives could intertwine whilst retaining their own privacies and habits. He couldn’t stomach the thought, but he really did enjoy the domestic nature of their lifestyle … Yu would cook his meals, force Yosuke to wash the dishes to make sure “he wasn’t doing all the work”; they’d watch films together every Friday night, revel in each other's company, missing each other when they were apart.
Yosuke really liked Yu. Fine! It might be unboyish, but it was true! Yu basically took up the role of a girlfriend in his life. It was far too easy to project those types of feelings onto him, with his placid temperament and delicate features, but it was entirely illusory. Best friends were what they were, and best friends were what they would stay.
Ultimately, it was Yosuke’s stupidity – his inability to not follow around Yu like a sad puppy – that landed him in the situation that transformed his life a few months ago. Enthusiastically accompanying Yu on a trip for his biophysics class to an open lab tutorial that demonstrated the effects of radioactivity on living creatures, Yosuke found himself barred from entering (a natural cause and effect of not actually being a biophysics major) and wandering around the sterilised halls of TakutoCorp.
Into an eerily fluorescent room (which he had thought to be a toilet at first.)
Promptly following suit into a web of spiders.
The bite stung a little, but it was no more painful than an ant bite.
It took around a week for the boy with auburn hair to start experiencing the symptoms. Like a second puberty, he was sore, irritated, exhausted… Unlike a second puberty, he was sticking to walls and had… webs coming out of his wrist.
Yuck!
Yosuke was a child at heart – that shit looked suspicious as hell.
That week, he couldn’t even approach Yu without sweating a little, his chest tightening and his face turning a humiliating rouge. His silver headed counterpart was certainly concerned – especially when he heard clutter and shouting from Yosuke’s locked room. Nonetheless, the chaos died down soon enough, and Yosuke managed to compress the commotion inside of him regarding the mutant spider powers he had been regrettably bestowed, and the fluttering weakness infiltrating his stomach when he thought of Yu Narukami.
Levelheading himself allowed himself to see the opportunity he really had here; Yosuke craved a purpose, to be special to someone. To Yu. In the midst of study, he kicked himself off his desk in the midst of studying at home and whipped off his headphones. This was the perfect opportunity. He could stick to walls, for fucks sake! If that wasn’t special, he wasn’t sure what was. His life had been littered with a mundanity only ever placated by his high school friend group. What was this if not a chance to prove his worth, to have a little thrill in his life? Maybe these powers would have been more useful in the hands of someone kinder, smarter, more genuine than him.
They weren’t in those hands. They were in his. Being a superhero wasn’t so farfetched – the Phantom Thieves have been vigilantes in Tokyo since he was in high school, and they seemed young enough. Who was to say that Yosuke couldn’t become a superhero too?
The initial design of his costume was originally not very well thought out – similarly to many of Yosuke’s half-baked ideas. A baggy orange hoodie overlaying a yellow t-shirt embellished with a chunky spider drawn sloppily with sharpie, purple jean shorts, and his face mostly covered by a matching orange beanie thrown over his head – sunglasses peeking under the eye holes. He looked stupid.
Nonetheless, Yosuke trained, trained as much as he could with an at home pull-up bar and weights. Nights were spent sneaking out his window and trying to best understand the methods available to climb up walls, use his webs – yuck – to launch himself through Tokyo’s skyline, and accommodate his extremely sensitive hearing. The boy ended up more bruised up than he’d like to admit, but Yu didn’t once catch onto his evening escapades – Yosuke spent evenings atop buildings wondering what would happen if Yu found out.
He fantasised a genuine concern on his face as he held Yosuke’s palms and insisted he stay safe at home with him. In his fantasy, Yosuke stood up boldly and nobly assured that ‘this is what he had to do’ before gallantly embracing Yu, lightly kissing his cheek and disappearing into the night. Yosuke shook that thought out of him and reminded himself how imperative it was that he’d get a girlfriend.
His first attempt at stopping crime was sloppy at best, and absolutely humiliating at worst; more shocking was the successful capture of the criminals. Passing by a private bank on the way home from class, he found himself in the precise position to watch as two men brutishly shot their way into the building, all caution thrown to the wind. Yosuke’s throat clenched up and his hands became sweaty – he had been preparing for this! He unzipped his hoodie and threw on the beanie (the most idiotic part of the look, for sure) and launched himself into the building. He basically flailed around as two thieves clad in noir viciously attacked back, armed and brutal. Yosuke shot his webs sporadically until he actually managed to take one down. Absolutely freaked out, the other man stopped in his tracks at the sight of spider webs coming out of a man’s hands, giving Yosuke a perfect opportunity to take down the second. Surging with adrenaline, Yosuke cheers,“hell yeah!” He was promptly reminded of his situation by the man trapped under his webbing groaning loudly. Yosuke stiffens himself in an attempt to deepen and disguise his voice.
“Ahem… I better not see you back here again. I won’t be so easy on you the second time.” Yosuke watched the criminal’s eyebrows furrow mask and felt absolutely idiotic. “I’ll be going then,” he awkwardly coughed before hastily seeing himself out.
As the police force followed suit to the scene of the crime, Yosuke watched from the side of the building as an officer bearing a distinguished cap and notebook questioned the man on the mysterious vigilante who had restrained him with a web.
“The guy had that shit coming out of wrists, like some sort of man spider mutant! Gross as hell, man!”
“A spider man, huh? Hm.” The officer replied plainly.
“Yes! A fucking spider man!”
“Hm… Watanabe-senpai, I’m going to need the footage from tonight. If we have another vigilante in Tokyo, I think we better get in touch.”
Yosuke shuddered a little. That voice was terribly familiar… Upon closer inspection, was that even an officer? He looked terribly young, for starters… and was terribly short… Shit.
Naoto Shirogane. What the hell was Naoto doing here? They were a part of his Inaba friend group, an essential part of the solving of the Inaba serial case. They were a year younger than him, and so it would be natural to assume that he should still be in Inaba, finishing up his high school degree, but Naoto Shirogane was a whole lot smarter than that. The Detective Prince – as the media has subtitled her since her first solved case – returned to the city after his second year of high school to return to his work as a private investigator in Tokyo. A legacy set down to her through heritage, Naoto was undeniably committed to her profession and decided it’d be best to finish school through homeschooling to allow herself the maximum capacity to work.
For the police to have brought along the detective prince, they had to think something was afoot with the scene. Yosuke wasn’t the brightest, but he quickly realised that the show he had put on for the security cameras was not going to save his ass.
3 days. 3 days was all it took for Naoto Shirogane to knock on Yosuke's front door and rat him out. Unsurprisingly, it was Yu who calmly picked himself out of his dedicated study spot on the kitchen bench and went to his unprecedented guest. A key part of their domestic lifestyle – Yosuke studied with headphones, worked on projects with headphones, went to bed with headphones … if Yu wasn’t home, the likelihood of entering their flat was minimal at best. Opening the door was Yu’s job – people were usually around for Yu or the both of them anyway, so the responsibility of door-opening wasn’t quite Yosuke’s biggest priority. Thus, when Naoto coolly asked if Yosuke was around, Yu must have been – at least – slightly taken aback by the request. Nonetheless, Yu led the detective to Yosuke's room, which was – as usual: sealed tight shut. He had recently embellished the bedroom door with a nifty new sign:
YOSUKE’S. DO NOT COME IN UNLESS I SAY SO!! THANKS A TON
The message was clear as day! It had actually solved the issue of Yu and Yosuke having very little spatial boundary without needing to talk it out. Yosuke really didn’t mind it at all (he really did prefer how it was before), but this superhero business meant absolutely no charming best friends walking into his room uninvited. For any reason.
At the notice that Naoto needed to speak with Yosuke privately, Yu returned to his studies as Naoto knocked on the door softly. And again, with a little more gusto. Naoto found themself banging on the door incessantly with unimaginable force before Yosuke had begrudgingly ripped off his headphones and opened the door.
“Naoto, hey!” Yosuke smiled sheepishly, hoping to cover the absolute dread enveloping him upon seeing the detective prince. “Were you guys needing me for anything?”
“Hello, Yosuke. I’m here to see you, actually. Let’s talk.”
Shit.
“Right, yeah, absolutely…” Yosuke took her shoulder and lightly nudged her into his room, gently shutting the door behind him. His spider instincts fuzzed up as if to signal to Yosuke that he had been caught out. One bloody mission, and he had been caught instantly! There goes any hope of anything ever! His hands were clammy as he sat himself back onto his desk.
“You look nervous, Yosuke. I suppose you already know why I’m here?”
“Yeah, um, look, not really… sure what you’d–” Yosuke’s hands were getting clammy-er, if it were possible.
“Let’s cut to the chase.” Naoto slammed his phone down onto the table to reveal a set of blurry – but clear enough – captures of Yosuke from the back ripping off the stupid orange beanie to reveal an unmistakable head of vibrant auburn hair. “What the hell did you do?”
Shit shit shit!
“That’s not me!” is all the poor saintly victim can choke out.
“Oh please, yes it is. You don’t need to be a detective to know that’s you, Yosuke. You’re lucky it was me who got their hands on the footage first – I was shadowing the chief of police that day,” Naoto pauses, and shifts uncomfortably. “I saw the fight you put up with the brutes. What did you do to yourself?”
Yosuke had no chance of getting out of this. He dramatically slumped his shoulders in defeat.
“I got bit by a radioactive fucking spider.”
“What?”
“I got bit by a weird spider, like, three weeks ago. And then I woke up one morning and I was sticking to walls and shit … you saw the video!”
“Where?” Naoto doubtfully crossed her arms.
“I tried to sneak into one of Yu’s radioactive biophysics external tutorials, like a big idiot! I thought it’d be funny, I had a day off, you know how it is… obviously they didn’t let me in! I wandered around the building, and I walked into a spiderweb and the bugger got me.”
“You just walked into a web of random radioactive spiders?”
“I… stumbled into a room?”
“You know what,” Naoto shook her head and sighs in relief, “sure. You’re a clumsy guy.”
“No I am not!” Yosuke hissed, before admitting slight defeat, “though I did end up in this situation accidentally, so I thought I’d just try to, you know, join the cause, use it for good or whatever.”
The detective prince furrows his brows. “Right. Well, I won’t tell anyone.”
“For real?”
“If you can help us, and I can stop you from getting killed, then yes. For real.”
Thus began Yosuke’s agreement with his detective friend to join him as a private agent of the police. The disclosure entailed joining forces with the police department when necessary, in return for Naoto’s development of professional equipment that would flawlessly paint the image of Yosuke as a true, real life, superhero. Naoto emphasised that – similarly to themself – Yosuke, in his spider costume, had the liberty to really do whatever he wanted despite the police, so long as he upheld his obligations and didn’t push any buttons. Sweet deal, really – Yosuke was going to have a real life superhero suit! Goodbye to the awful beanie that tormentingly itched his face!
Yosuke had it all worked out for him over his first few months of becoming Spiderman. Turns out the Tokyo police department wasn’t particularly the creme de la creme; they were inactive, sloppy, lousy at best … Yosuke would inadvertently outshine them by rocking up, slinging some webs, beating the bad guys, and heading home before Yu even knew he had left. Naoto had organised him a pretty slick suit – the final design came out as a yellowish-orange bodysuit with tangerine accents (his favourite colour!) which extended as webbing across the costume before meeting in the middle at the orb spider ornamenting his chest. The Spiderman logo, as the public quickly adopted it.
Over breakfast, Yu and Yosuke would chat about Spiderman’s newest escapades – Yosuke swelled with pride when Yu commented how cool he found the newest hero of Tokyo, or expressed his curiosity about what the vigilante would do next.
Naturally, Naoto and Yosuke were in contact a lot more than usual due to the whole ordeal. Naoto managed crime tracking, consulted Yosuke over radio mid-missions, and chatted over coffee at LeBlanc in Yogenjaya, far enough from home that they could pass time without raising suspicion. Despite being in the same group in school, Yosuke had never been sure about Naoto. Their temperaments were in drastic contrast – the weary detective prince was someone who couldn’t be read, no matter her mood, whereas Yosuke was an open book of a man. Naoto was different to other people, in a way that at first comes off as slightly disconcerting, but Yosuke kept his prospects open, and he gradually learnt to appreciate Naoto’s wit, transparency and humility over their weekly coffee meetings. It was thanks to him that Operation Spiderman turned out such a huge success, after all.
More importantly, it was thanks to him that he had landed an unexpected romantic (???) rendezvous with his stoic best friend. It had come after Naoto had frantically phoned in regarding a mechanised man destroying the brakes of a moving train heading away from Tokyo University – a train Yosuke would have very much been waiting for if it weren’t for his escapades. Panic had viscerally set into Yosuke as he flung himself towards the trainline. Yu would be waiting for that train, and that bloody train was going to end up off its rails. The battle with the mechanised man was desperate, but was the opposite of futile – Yosuke had faced many enemies over his month or so of being Spiderman, and was getting more tactile by the day. The battle with the cyborg was won, and upon spotting Yu as the inevitable target of the train hurtling towards him, Yosuke engaged at 100 percent. By restraining the trains movement against the station walls, the train sharply came to a halt; though damage was inevitable, Yosuke managed to intercept Yu by the waist and sling him to safety as the wall behind him crumbled. An unfamiliar expression of frenzy was tacked onto his friend’s face as they soared, wind billowing through his hair.
Yosuke knows very well he could have taken Yu back home, or to a 7/11 or something – a highrise roof wasn't particularly secure – if there was a panic about the whole web slinging thing, he’d need Spiderman to take him back down anyway.
Yosuke internally scorned his own selfishness as he gently propped him against an air-conditioning system. There was no way he was going around Tokyo as a man dressed up in a comic-book costume so he could hold his best friend by the waist! He reiterated to himself how simply idiotic he was for bringing his housemate up here, risking his entire secret identity just to play hero to his housemate. Yosuke wondered if the anonymity of it all had any particular sex appeal before uncomfortably shaking that thought right out of his head. Forcing himself back into a more … reasonable … persona, he cleared his throat to speak his very first words to his best friend as Spiderman.
“Are you alright, mister? Hurt anywhere?” Yosuke tried to commit to a slightly huskier voice than normal – he can’t be sure he’s pulling it off, admittedly. He propped himself down close to the edge of the building, careful to keep his distance from Yu – more so than usual – who was taking time to reply, gazing into the skyline. He seemed shell-shocked, more than anything, before he carefully opened his mouth to speak.
“You sure are something, Spiderman.”
Enveloped by the rosy vignette of the Tokyo sunset, Yu Narukami looked like an angel descended from heaven – his mellow eyes sparkling with sincerity, a small, almost bashful, smile painting his face. Yu Narukami was an angel sent with the sole purpose of fucking with Yosuke, who, that moment, was sweating bullets under his mask. It had really saved his ass so far – no bad guys showing up to his place uninvited… no calls from concerned parents at home. More importantly, his housemate had remained entirely oblivious, and was now showering him with appreciation, as if Yosuke was a dashing Prince Charming who had gallantly swept him off his feet. Under his mask, Yosuke grinned at the absurdity of the idea – he kind of was his Prince Charming, for once.
“Oh no, I’m just doing what has to be done.”
They devolved into idle, yet natural, chatter, as the usually perceptive Yu failed to catch on as he continued to gently insist upon Spiderman’s sheer coolness. He was calm in the face, of course, though Yosuke swore he was coming off more … delicate than usual. He laughed softly and covered his mouth slightly as Yosuke cracked jokes about the battle, his silver hair prismatically catching the light. It was a moment of wonderful, hazy, reverie. As the sun tucked behind the skyline, Yu noted that his roommate must be waiting for dinner at this hour, and respectfully excused himself. Yosuke dropped him about a block away from their building, as to not be too overt, and as they said their goodbyes, Yu innocently pulls out his phone from his messenger bag.
“When can I see you again?”
The universe had to be fucking with him.