Seven years ago.
Peter Parker wasn’t supposed to die.
He was the kind of person who made you believe in second chances. He smiled too easily. Apologized too much. Always carried an extra charger in his bag just in case someone needed it. That kind of person.
And still, death found him.
We were both twenty-one—students at Empire State University. I majored in biochemistry, Peter in physics. We met during orientation when a spider crawled onto a girl’s sandwich and everyone screamed. Everyone but me. I gently scooped it up, let it dance across my hand, and watched it weave a single silver thread into the air.
Peter leaned in, curious. Not afraid.
“You’re not gonna squash it?”
“Why would I?” I replied.
“I dunno. Most people would.”
“Most people are cowards.”
He laughed at that. Said I was weird. But we stuck. Like web to skin.
It was raining the day of the Oscorp lab tour. The kind of weather that clings to your bones and whispers that something’s wrong.
The facility was cold. Clinical. Full of chrome and quiet footsteps. They were working on bio-enhancement through animal gene fusion—grafting selective traits onto new lifeforms.
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And then we saw it.
Spider-991-X: engineered with regenerative abilities, exoskeletal reinforcement, and venom that adapted on a genetic level. A marvel. A mistake.
It shouldn’t have escaped. But it did.
None of us saw it leap from the containment pod. Just Peter’s sharp inhale, then the slap of his palm to his neck.
We all laughed at first. Even him.
Until he collapsed in the hallway an hour later—eyes bloodshot, lips pale, his body convulsing like something inside him wanted out.
He was hospitalized that night. Coma by morning.
His aunt May visited daily. So did MJ, sometimes. But they came with flowers and tears.
I came with notebooks.
Because Peter wasn’t just sick. He was changing.
At first, it was subtle. His skin darkened around the veins. His eyes twitched unnaturally. Then came the growths—hard nodules pressing beneath his skin like pebbles trying to escape.
The doctors said it was some kind of neural degeneration. A rare allergic reaction.
Liars. Blind men in white coats.
I saw it. The elegance. The transformation.
The silk that began to seep from his fingertips like bloodied thread. The whispers he began to mutter in his sleep—not words, but clicks. Patterns. Signals.
And the legs. The first leg split from his back on the 40th day.
It cracked through his skin like a blooming bone flower, twitching and searching for something to hold.
The nurses screamed. I didn’t.
I wept.
“He’s becoming,” I whispered.
When he died, I was holding his hand.
He didn’t cry. Didn’t beg. Just looked at me with the last two eyes that still resembled something human.
“It hurts,” he said.
“I know,” I replied. “But it’s beautiful.”
He smiled. A small, trembling thing.
Then the monitor flatlined.
And I was alone.
But I remembered every angle. Every leg. Every eye. Every gasp of silk-drenched breath.
I remember it perfectly.
[End of Chapter 1]