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loveissupernatural · 5 years ago

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“The Man Behind the Mask” Pt 7

Peter Parker x reader

Warnings: Slight violence, spiders

Summary: You’ve recently moved to Queens, New York after your father finds a new job with the U.S. government handling alien affairs in the city. You’ve grown up in a small town, and it’s your junior year of high school; culture shock takes a whole new meaning when you’re saved by the famed new web-slinging Avenger - and when you meet a new group of friends at Midtown High that seem to always be hiding something. But things quickly get personal.

Masterlist / Pt 1 – Pt 2 – Pt 3 – Pt 4 – Pt 5 – Pt 6

Peter exited the bedroom to find another chair so that he could join you at the desk. You took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, trying to calm the frantic pounding in your chest. You and Peter were about to look at something that very few people had seen, and that even fewer were supposed to see. You were about to get your answers.

Peter returned quickly with a metal folding chair, placing it next to yours with a dull thud.

“Here we go…” he all but whispered to you, opening the envelope and carefully pulling out its contents. You held your breath. Peter’s brows furrowed as he pulled apart the multiple files and pages, spreading them out on his desk until the entire surface was covered. You finally let out the breath you were holding in an awed whistle.

You scooted your chair even closer to the desk, eager to get a close look. Peter sat down as well, scooting close, and if you weren’t so enamored by the secrets these pages held, you’d be drinking up his proximity with barely-controlled enthusiasm.

You spread your palms over the endless diagrams and reports, sighing. “So, smart guy, what’re we looking at here?”

Peter’s mouth curled into a half grin at your nickname for him, sneaking a peek at you from the side of his vision. “Well,” he began, sounding flattered and a little proud, “from what I can tell – ” he brought a few thin sheets of paper toward you that contained light drawings “– we’ve got some kind of schematic here. See?” He layered the long pieces of paper together, a few different ways, before a bigger picture began to appear. “Lemme figure this out,” he murmured, almost to himself, and you loved the way his tongue barely peeped out from the corner of his mouth as he thought.

You leaned in closer toward him and toward the desk, watching the papers intently. Peter began to slow, and placed one last sheet on top.

“What the hell is that?” he asks himself quietly, and you would think his puzzled face was adorable if it wasn’t for the fact it was slowly morphing into horror.

“Peter?” you asked hesitantly, looking from him to the schematic. “What – what’s wrong?”

You’d never seen this expression on his face before, and it disturbed you. He looked angry, but mostly scared, eyes full of question.

“I’ve – I’ve seen something like this before,” he said, and he twisted the pile until it was facing you. Your eyes wandered the pages, looking for his cause for sudden concern, and then you saw it.

Between thinly sketched lines and footnotes, a layered image of a creature began to emerge. Each thin page contained one small part of its body and make up, full of scribbles and calculations that you couldn’t begin to understand, but when the pages were placed on top of each other, it formed a blueprint of some kind. A schematic of something that looked terrifying.

“What… is it?” you breathed, finger tracing the faint outlines.

Peter shook his head slowly, but it wasn’t from lack of understanding. It was from disbelief.

“I thought – I thought this was over,” he said to himself, running a hand through his hair. He suddenly shot up from his seat, knocking the metal chair onto the ground, making you jump. Peter was pacing back and forth, back and forth, not looking at you. His eyes were pink.

You were in the dark. “Hey, hey! Peter, what’s going on? What’s wrong?” “I’ve seen that tech before,” he grimaced, pacing even faster now. His eyes were darting around the room, as if his saving grace was written somewhere on the walls or on the ceiling. “This is bad, Y/N. This is really, really bad.”

“I’m lost,” you blanched, standing up. You approached Peter’s frantic form and placed your hands on his shoulders, then gently slid them down his arms, trying to calm him. Your hands settled at his wrists. He looked up at you, and you didn’t like what you saw. You’d never seen him like this.

“It’s hard to explain,” he shook his head. But then the words started pouring out. “I – not me, I mean Spider-Man – he’s dealt with this tech before. There was this super bad guy, h-he was stealing alien wreckage from the attack on New York years ago and using it to create weapons. He was hurting people.”

“You mean that guy with the metal wings?” you asked, trying to catch Peter’s gaze long enough to calm him down. “I remember, I saw it online. Spider-Man stopped him, didn’t he?”

“Yeah, he did,” Peter answered darkly. “The government went in and cleaned the place out. He was sent to prison.”

“Well, that’s good, right?” you asked encouragingly, squeezing his wrists gently.

“The government went in and cleaned the place out,” Peter repeated slowly, shaking his head. His brows were so furrowed that multiple stress lines were forming on his forehead.

“You – you mean, they didn’t get rid of it,” you realized, and your hands dropped from his wrists weakly.

Peter marched over toward the desk, pointing at the precise drawing of the creature. “Some of these parts, they were in Vulture’s lab,” he insisted. “I-I mean, ya know, that’s what Mr. Stark said. That Spider-Man said. That he saw.” Peter suddenly seemed awkward.

“So, what, instead of dismantling this guy’s work they just…?”

“Revamped it. And they’ve added to it. They’re…” Peter leaned over the schematic, chocolate waves falling messily to his forehead. “They created a-a weapon. But it’s not… I don’t think it’s just a weapon. It’s, like, a thing.”

You joined him, leaning over his shoulder, looking at the drawing again. You could see where Peter’s horror was building from. The machine, or creature, or whatever it was, looked like a cross between a giant spider and some sort of alien being. Its multiple arms were large, jagged, and stretched rigid, it’s head large and covered in what appeared to be metallic plates. You’d seen the news footage from the attack on New York years ago, and you’d seen what those aliens looked like: a nightmarish combination of technological battle armor, putrid skin, and sharp teeth.

Peter began separating the pages, and pointed to each individual one. “Look, Vulture used these kinds of plasma cannons, he built them himself.” Peter pointed to its frightening head, and to its eyes. “Do these look familiar to you?”

As he picked apart each page, he slowed, fixated with one in particular. He looked like he was going to be sick.

You searched the page Peter was staring at, and saw the words “tissue regeneration” scribbled in red ink at the very top. The depictions were obviously not technological, and you realized with a pang of terror that this was alien tissue, pulled from the corpses of the fallen army. There were detached arms and legs, a sketch of vein and organ structure, bones.

“They’re stitching it together,” Peter croaked.

You covered your mouth. You weren’t sure of what this meant for you, or for your family. You weren’t sure what this meant for anyone else.

“Is – is that what hurt my dad?” you asked, but your voice was hoarse, blocked by the nausea and fear congealing into a ball inside of your throat.

Peter didn’t answer, but started rifling through the remaining files so quickly that you don’t know how he could possibly be reading them.

He held up something that looked like a journal, turning to you. “It’s an event log.” —————————————– Ned rushed over as soon as his family dinner finished, barely making it out the front door with excuses about helping you two with your Chemistry project.

“Pete, my mom’s gonna kill me,” Ned whined, taking a seat on the top mattress of Peter’s bunk bed. He threw his backpack down on the ground without care. “She knows that you’re the best Chemistry student in our class. You should’ve seen the look on her face when I told her I had to come over to help you guys. No way she believed me.”

“Dude, worry about your mom later,” Peter said exasperatedly, shoving the pile of schematic papers into Ned’s hands. Peter’s hair was a total mess at this point, and he looked a little crazed. “We’ve got a problem. Like, a really big problem.”

“Like, a Spider-Man-sized problem or a Mr. Stark-sized problem?” Ned asked, turning the papers every which way in his hands, then holding them up to the light.

Peter looked at you nervously, then back to Ned. “I-I don’t know, man. But we’ve gotta tell somebody.”

You held up the black, soft covered journal that Peter had found. “We think this is an event log or something,” you told Ned. “We were waiting to go through it until you got here.”

“Oh, thanks guys,” Ned said, touching his heart. “I feel like an important part of the team.” He grinned to himself and muttered something that sounded like ‘guy in the chair’.

Peter sat down beside your place on his lower bunk, peering into the journal as you opened the first page. It was covered in numbers and words that meant nothing to you. It was chicken scratch. The next page, however, contained dates and times, with short descriptions written out beside each one.

“August 20th, 15:00 hours,” Peter read aloud over your shoulder. “Project Megarachne begins testing phase 1.”

“Megarachne?” you repeated, confused.

“It means big-ass spider,” Ned offered offhandedly, still twisting the schematics in every direction like some secret would reveal itself if he just stuck his tongue out the right way. You gulped.

Peter continued reading over your shoulder. “Memory configuration complete, A.I. integration successful.”

“Is this thing some freaky alien robot?” Ned asked, turning his body so that his head hung off of the edge of the bunk upside down. You doubted he could decipher the scratch-like handwriting like that.

Peter kept reading to himself silently, and reached to gently take the journal from you. You obliged, although you’d miss him peering over your shoulder.

“Yeeesss?” Peter answered eventually, “But… no?”

He reached his hand into the air, waiting for the schematics, but Ned was still twisting them above his head like he was trying to see some optical illusion.

“Dude,” Peter said insistently, wiggling his fingers, and Ned handed him the papers with a huff.

Peter flitted through each page with speed, and you wondered how he understood a single word or number. Then he looked back to the journal. Then back to the schematics. Then back to the journal again.

“It’s – I think it’s both?” he said, and it was obvious that while he was fearful, he was captivated. “It’s like a robot, but with real tissue. They created an A.I., but… but it was sourced from base programming they found inside the aliens’ brains.”

You’d never heard of anything like it before.

“Mr. Stark – Ironman – that’s why he blew up the Mothership during The Battle of New York. It was the power source, the command center,” Peter explained to you, and Ned nodded in rapt agreement, his head still upside down. “When Ironman nuked the Mothership, they all shut down and they died. They weren’t robots exactly, I mean, they were alive, ya know? But they weren’t.”

“So… they’re playing Frankenstein with this thing?” Ned asked with equal measure of awe and fright.

Peter flipped through each page of the journal until he came to the last entry, and to your horror, it was covered in ash and what you sincerely hoped wasn’t –

“Aw, man, is that blood?!” Ned asked, almost sounding like he thought it was cool.

Peter held it away from his face, cringing. “Ugh, gross.”

“What does the last page say?” you asked, and now it was your turn to lean over his shoulder.

Peter squinted. A lot of the timestamps were unreadable behind the rust-colored stain.

“Being… is… sentient?” With a nose wrinkled in disgust, he brought the journal close to his face again. “That’s it. It’s stopped after that.”

“Yeah, well, we know why,” Ned said pointedly. With a lurch of your stomach, you wondered whose blood was on that page. You hoped it wasn’t your father’s.

“So… you think that it, I don’t know, came to life and broke out?” you spoke your thoughts aloud. “It caused the explosion and that’s why my dad is in the hospital?”

“I mean, it makes sense,” Peter replied, chewing his lip. “That could explain why they’ve got goons covering the place. They don’t want a word of it leaked to the public.”

“No one on the floors above or below…” you mumbled to yourself in thought. “But why all of the guns? Why the steel doors and security protocols?”

Peter took a deep breath. He stared at the menacing creature on the page before him, and his eyes never left the drawing when he answered, “Maybe they’re scared it’s gonna come back.”

You swallowed hard, fighting the tears that were threatening to spill. The thought of your father covered in gauze and casts, comatose, trapped in that bed with nowhere to go as this monstrous creature stalked through his doorway to finish what it started…

“You – you have to tell Spider-Man, you have to tell Mr. Stark,” you squeaked pitifully, a rogue tear leaving a trail down your cheek. “This thing, it could come back for my dad, for everyone in that hospital. Could you im-imagine what it could do to do New York?”

Peter grasped your arms, desperately trying to catch your frantic eyes with his wide chocolate ones. “Hey, hey, hey, Y/N, it’s gonna be okay. We’re gonna take care of this, I promise. Your dad is gonna be fine.”

As much as you wanted to believe Peter, you couldn’t. “You can’t know that.” A look of pure determination set across Peter’s face, and he looked up at Ned, still hanging upside down. “C’mon, man, we’ve got work to do.”

Although neither of you wanted it, you went back home shortly after your revelations. Peter insisted that you needed a good night’s sleep, and that they couldn’t contact Spider-Man while you were still there, in case your personal goon was still keeping tabs on you. You knew he was right, but Peter’s presence made everything going on in your life at that moment seem more tolerable, and you’d miss the balm of his kind eyes and sweet voice. Ned and Peter promised to update you at school the next day.

Just as Peter warned, Aunt May shoved cab fare in your hand and absolutely refused to take it back. You waved goodbye to them both solemnly, trying to hide the panic in your eyes in front of Peter’s aunt.

Your apartment felt even more lonely and cold now that the sun had set, allowing darkness to creep in like an unwelcome house guest. You laid in bed, staring at the shadowed vaulted ceiling of your bedroom, watching the fan lazily turn with a faint click.

Your mind, through the trauma of your recent discovery, tried to logically wrap around what you’d learned with Peter and Ned. The government, like they always do, played around with something that they didn’t understand and ended up creating a worse monster than they had to begin with. They thought, in their predictable arrogance, that they could control it. Use it. They’d been wrong, and people were hurt because of it – people were dead because of it. You were so grateful that your father wasn’t the latter.

You fell into a fitful sleep that night, giant spider-like aliens crawling through your dreams. —————————————— The next day, after an awkwardly silent ride to school with your tree of a government-assigned babysitter (it was weird now that you were in the know about his secrets), you rushed inside the bustling halls of Midtown High with buzzing anticipation. You ran toward Peter and Ned’s lockers after spotting a mop of familiar-looking wavy chocolate hair through the crowd. Their backs were to you.

“Dude, you do know that this is gonna get complicated, right?” Ned told Peter, placing another piece of tape on the already large mound holding up the Death Star replica hanging from the top of his locker. “Helping Y/N with her dad, avoiding the feds, figuring out where Arachnizilla is and how to stop it all while hiding th—”

“Dude, I told you, stop calling it Arachnizilla,” Peter chided. “It’s lame.”

“No, it’s not!” Ned insisted, and it sounded like it was for the hundredth time.

“Arachnizilla, huh?”

Peter and Ned spun around at the sound of your voice, looking like they’d gotten caught with their hands in a cookie jar. How much had you heard?

“Heyyyy, y-you!” Peter greeted with a nervous grimace, deep-set panic in his eyes.

You narrowed your gaze at them, painfully aware that you had walked in on a conversation that you were not meant to hear. Peter and Ned did this all the time – talking about something heatedly under their breaths until you approached, then acted like nothing happened. You used to shrug it off, thinking that it was personal or just guy stuff, but this time you’d heard your name.

They were hiding something from you.

“So, what’s the big secret?” you laughed with a forced smile. This obviously concerned your father and the discoveries you all made last night. Why were you being kept in the dark? And why the hell did they look so nervous, especially Peter?

“Secret?” Ned laughed forcefully, swatting away your question like an invisible fly. “Pfft, what secret? Isn’t – isn’t that funny, Peter?”

“Yeah, f-funny,” Peter croaked weakly. His voice went up an octave.

“What’s gonna ‘get complicated’?” you quoted Ned’s words back to them. Your grip tightened on your backpack straps.

“Spider-Man,” Ned blurted. Peter slapped a palm to his forehead.

“Ya know, um, Spider-Man…” Peter fished, looking anywhere but at you for the rest of his sentence, “his, uh, his life is – is about to get complicated, you know? What with the f-feds looking for him and sneaking info to us and dealing with – with that alien thing—”

“—Arachnizilla—”

“Ned, shut up.”

You sighed. Of course this was about Spider-Man. You swore that you’d never heard of such a secretive superhero. Everyone knew the identity of The Avengers, with the exception of the masked web-slinger.

“Did you talk to him?” you asked, retreating your suspicious tone. Their reasoning was sound enough for you, for now at least.

If you didn’t know better, you’d think Peter was breathing a sigh of relief. “Yeah, we talked to him right after you left,” Ned chimed in, giving Peter a moment to regain himself. “He’s on it.”

You nearly collapsed in relief against the lockers beside theirs, closing your eyes and letting the weight of last night’s worry lift from you, if only for a moment. You smiled bigger than you had in days. “Guys, that’s so amazing.”

Peter still seemed nervous, but his smile mirrored yours. “I told you, Y/N, everything would be fine.” His smile grew a little, prideful. “Spider-Man is on the case.”

Suddenly, you felt a hand on your arm, and turned to find a dark-haired guy wearing a permanently-etched smirk. He was vaguely familiar, and as he looked into your eyes, you realized with trepidation that he was one of the many assholes that catcalled you in the hallways almost daily.

“I’m sure you’ve noticed me around,” he said, licking his lips as he looked you up and down. “I figured it was about time I introduced myself. The name’s Flash.”

“Flash,” you repeated, trying to hide the bite in your voice for the sake of propriety. You personally thought it was a dumb name. He evidently didn’t pick up on your less than enthusiastic tone because his hand was still on your arm.

“Yeah,” he affirmed with a cocky nod, leaning against the lockers beside you. “I figured it was high time I came and rescued the damsel in distress.”

You scoffed, but you’re sure that Flash thought you laughed. “Excuse me?”

His unkind eyes darted behind you toward Ned and Peter, and he sneered. “You’re new, so I wouldn’t expect you to know. There’s better company in this school than Penis Parker and Pillsbury Doughboy over there.”

You couldn’t stop the drop of your jaw. The nerve of this guy.

“They’re losers,” he continued, shrugging his shoulders as if they were diagnosed with a terminal illness and nothing could be done.

“Leave her alone, Flash,” came Peter’s voice from behind you, and you couldn’t help but savor the little spark of joy that his protective tone ignited within you.

Flash scoffed and his dark eyes filled with mirth. “Ooh, Parker’s coming out to play.” His eyes settled back on you, and you hated how it made you feel. His hand still hadn’t moved from your arm and its grip was tightening. “C’mon. It’s Y/N, right? Let me show you the people you wanna be hanging out with at Midtown. I could show you around after school.”

You had a gut feeling that you had no interest in this guy’s definition of “show you around”.

Just then, Peter was between you and the invasive Flash, pushing away Flash’s hand from your arm. Relief flooded you at the loss of contact, but your heart hammered at the evident upcoming confrontation.

“Dude, back off,” Peter said and his tone was barely even. You could tell there was irritation boiling just underneath the surface of his words.

Flash went from being amused by Peter’s quips to irritated. “Whatcha gonna do about it, barf bag?” He was a few inches taller than Peter, and he used that height to look down on him as he took a step into Peter’s personal space. All you could see was Peter’s back and Flash’s mocking face. The back of Peter’s neck was turning red.

“Peter…” Ned warned from behind you.

You didn’t like this. Sure, Peter was secretly kind of jacked (at least from what you could tell), but you’d never peg him as the fighting type, and you definitely couldn’t say the same about Flash. Your eyes darted to Peter’s balled fists.

“Shut up, Pillsbury,” Flash quipped at Ned, but his eyes never left Peter’s. He was taunting him. “Come on, Parker. I know you wanna punch me.”

“He’s just trying to get a rise out of you,” Ned said, stepping around you and gently tugging at Peter’s elbow. His tone had turned desperate. “Let’s just go, man.”

“That’s right, just go,” Flash shrugged. He grinned wolfishly at you over Peter’s shoulder. “Leave her with me, I’ll show her a good time.”

It happened so fast that you almost missed it. Peter’s fist flew out from his side and collided with Flash’s jaw, eliciting a sickening crack. You yelped in shock as Flash dropped to the floor.

He was out cold from a single punch.

You stared at the scene in shock. Flash had landed on his back, cushioned by his backpack, head lolled to the side. A tiny trickle of blood pooled at the corner of his mouth.

“Peter,” Ned breathed, and to your surprise he sounded almost disappointed. “Just one punch? You totally could’ve drawn that out longer.”

Peter shook his head at Ned in a “drop it” kind of way, then turned to you with searching eyes filled with pure concern. “Are you okay?”

You nodded and opened your mouth to speak, but no words came out. Were you surprised that Peter handled Flash with a seemingly-easy single punch? Honestly, yes you were. You would’ve never expected the sweet-looking bookworm to have such a grueling right uppercut. He hadn’t even drawn back his fist.

Were you embarrassed that the two caused a scene, over you no less? A little, but the stares of passersby was greatly outweighed by your shock. You looked down at Peter’s now unclenched hand, and there wasn’t even the hint of a mark.

But mostly, you were grateful. Nothing you could’ve said would’ve shaken Flash off, that much you knew, and Peter had stepped up to defend you. Effortlessly.

You flushed deeply at the realization that, honestly, you were a little turned on.

But you still hadn’t answered him, and worry pierced Peter’s brow. “I’m fine,” you finally said to Peter’s relief. You desperately tried to fight back the raging heat that you could feel rising from your neck, to your ears, to your cheeks.

“Are you sure? You seem kind of upset,” Ned said, noticing your redness.

Oh, that was the last thing you were, you thought with intense embarrassment. Peter gently placed his hands on your bare arms at Ned’s words.

“I’m so sorry about that,” Peter began in a clumsy tumble of words. “I – I shouldn’t have done that, and I know it was stupid, but – but he was disrespecting you and he wouldn’t leave you alone, and I’ve known Flash for forever, he’s always been a dick and never knows when to stop and—”

Oh, how much you wanted to kiss him.

“—and he always does shit like this, ya know? And it’s one thing when he’s being an ass to me and Ned, but you—”

Stop staring at his lips, you scolded yourself, which only turned the thermostat up on your already fiery blush. Of course, Ned and Peter thought this meant you were getting more upset.

“—don’t hate me,” Peter was saying, and you realized that you’d missed half of his sentence because you couldn’t stop thinking about how badly you wanted to make out with him. “I’ll – I’ll never punch anyone ever again, okay?”

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” Ned muttered under his breath. Peter shot him an unamused glare, but there was no venom in it.

“Mr. Parker!” rang a deep voice, and all three of you jumped apart. A man that you recognized from your first day as the principle was marching down the hall, his broom-like mustache quivering.

Peter gulped. “Shit.”

Pt 8

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