Chapter Text
New York was a dangerous city, teeming with people and terrifying wonders long before Will moved there. Luckily, he didn't come alone; his friends did too. He’d been living there for a year, dividing his time between his art degree at NYU, his low-paying job at a dive bar, and his own life—always trying to find time to hang out with his friends, or with Mike in their tiny apartment. There, they could do absolutely nothing, but at least they shared as much time together as possible.
Or at least that's how it was until his life took a 360-degree turn and left him, quite literally, hanging from the ceiling. It all started in the stupidest and most academic way possible: with a science fair that Dustin's department was organizing. All of his friends went to help him set it up, while Dustin couldn't stop smiling, surrounded by terrariums and charts about arachnid sequencing that none of his friends could even begin to understand. Lucas and Max helped him arrange the samples of some baby spiders, while Mike, Jane, and Will observed the rest of the fair. They only heard their friends' small "ouch" when one of the glass jars hit one of the tables in the booth a little too hard, chipping. It was a minor accident that even they didn't think much of, with Lucas scratching the back of his palm and Max his right wrist, joking that it was just part of the job of being friends with the next Einstein.
A week later, Will was helping Dustin take those same experiments to a larger laboratory, loading them onto the back of a van with the Columbia University logo on the outside. He was carrying a heavy box when, suddenly, he felt something crawl across his hand, followed by a sharp sting.
"Ouch," Will whispered, setting the box aside and killing the black spider that had been crawling on his hand. The dead spider fell to the dirty Manhattan pavement, leaving a red, almost shiny mark where it had bitten him.
"All good?" Dustin asked, carrying folders full of reports toward the truck.
"Yeah, yeah, something bit my hand. It's nothing," Will said, looking at his friend, dismissing it even though his hand throbbed a little. "Do we have much longer?"
"Not really, why? You have to get back to your prince?" Dustin said, punching his friend's shoulder. Will couldn't help but turn red in a matter of seconds.
It was no secret that Will had been in love with Mike for as long as he could remember, except to Mike, who seemed oblivious to the fact that Will was head over heels in love with him. Will was resigned, accepting his place as "best friend" forever, even though every interaction they had left him, without a doubt, with a racing pulse and his mind anywhere but in reality.
Will wondered every other day, if not every day, whether Mike had ever seen their relationship as anything more than platonic. If the endless nights watching movies until dawn, snuggled up on the couch in his apartment, sharing beers straight from the bottle; if the endless winters taking care of each other when the other was sick, preparing hot baths or chicken soup for sore throats; or the private drawings Will made of Mike or the stories Mike created about Will being a powerful sorcerer meant anything more than that—demonstrations of a purely brotherly love, with no room for anything else.
"Shut up, nerd," Will replied, hitting his friend on the forehead, while Dustin laughed at his undoubtedly red face. "Let's finish this, I want to go home."
After ten minutes, his cell phone rang, making him smile at the screen.
Mike :3: I'm home!! Crazy day at work, I'm EXHAUSTED!! R you coming home soon? Lmk if you want me to start cooking the noodles :)
Will smiled as he typed:
Will :p: Still w Dustin, but we’re almost done!!! be home in 20 ;)
He put the last box away and said goodbye to Dustin, moving his hands and massaging them because one had cramped up—he assumed from the weight of the boxes.
Will's life continued its normal course for a week, immersed in the routine of university, work, and going back home to Mike. But alchemy doesn't ask for permission before it takes hold.
A week later, on Will's day off, he was in his apartment reading a magazine while Jane, his twin sister and friend, was there stealing his Wi-Fi, since the apartment she shared with Dustin didn't have enough signal for all her experiments—and on top of that, Jane's computer. Mike had left early to get to his internship at the Daily Bugle, where he was trying to do well to get a permanent position, carrying his camera, his backpack, and that smile that could stop and tear out Will's heart as he pleased.
All day, Will's head had been particularly aching. Not like a migraine or a normal headache, but something sharper, almost as if a needle were pricking the nerves in his brain and twisting them this way and that. He had taken ibuprofen, drunk cold beverages, and tried not to look at his phone to strain his eyes, but nothing was working.
He was chatting about something vague with Jane when suddenly, his ears felt every clock in New York City ticking the seconds like hammer blows. Jane's typing on her computer felt like someone was hitting him over the head with a baseball bat. The rustle of the pages of the book between his fingers became rough, unbearable, as if he could feel every microfiber of the paper. He looked toward the window, trying to regain his balance, but the light fragmented before his eyes, becoming a thousand seething prisms, while his equilibrium slipped from his body. Before his head hit the floor, he felt his sister rise from her seat, her face contorted in horror, and run toward him. He heard her call his name before everything went black.
When he woke up, he wasn't lying in his cheap armchair, and the air didn't smell like the pine perfume he and Mike sprayed on the pillows. The room smelled like confinement, a mixture of ozone, ethyl alcohol, and hot computer circuit boards. He blinked slowly, feeling his eyelashes flutter like a butterfly's wings. He saw his sister talking to Dustin, who was frantically typing on his computer, and in the background, he thought he heard Lucas and Max talking about something nonsensical. "What the h—"
"You're awake," Jane said, approaching Will, who was lying on a cold, hard table. "You hit your head pretty hard when you passed out. Does anything hurt?" Will shook his head.
"Where the hell are we?"
"In Columbia's basement—or Dustin's playground, to be more precise," Lucas answered, approaching his friend, black gloves covering his hands despite it being May.
"What?"
"You fainted, just like Lucas and me, Will," Max said, strangely calm. "Something happened to us, and Dustin's trying to figure out what."
Will looked around, seeing no logic in what his friends were telling him and not finding Mike anywhere in that dark basement. Dustin got up from his chair with a speed you'd only find in comic book stories. Will could hear, without understanding how the hell he did it, Dustin muttering to himself, "Holy shit... holy fucking shit..." Jane approached Dustin and read what the monitors said, making the same surprised face as her boyfriend. They grabbed some papers from the counter and compared the graphs.
"It can't be..." Jane said, looking at the screen, then at a sheet of paper, and then at her three friends. Friends.
"But it could be. They're all modified. The same thing happened to all three of them..."
Will was not only distracted but also losing patience.
"Guys, I don't understand a damn thing you're saying. Where are we?" "Where's Mike?" Dustin and Jane stopped looking at the graphs and turned to their friends. Will looked bewildered, while Lucas and Max just exchanged resigned glances.
"Okay, this is crazy—do you want the short version or the long version of the story?" Dustin said, getting up from his chair and walking the five feet that separated him from his other friends.
"I want the fucking truth, and I want it fast before I completely lose my mind." Will didn't know if he was angry, worried, or both.
"Okay, remember a week ago you were helping me load some stuff into my university's van to take it to another lab, and you told me something bit your hand?" Dustin said. Will nodded, remembering that his hand had felt uncomfortable for the next two hours. "Well, you got bitten by a spider—a genetically modified spider from one of the teams in my class. And that spider has genetic modifications; it was radioactive... And when it bit you, the venom that came out of the bite, kind of... modified your DNA."
Will wasn't quite grasping that everything he was hearing wasn't a dream or a hallucination from the blow to his head.
"Long story short, the spider that bit you modified your DNA and kind of gave you arachnid properties... Like, as if you were a human spider." Dustin turned his gaze to Lucas and Max, who were now listening more clearly to the explanation Dustin had given them a few days earlier. "Lucas and Max were also bitten by others—different kinds than yours, but still, they had the same reaction."
"Yeah, I almost fainted at work. I managed to call Dustin to come pick me up, and just as he arrived, Max texted me saying she wasn't feeling well either, that her vision was blurry and all that, and that she was going to the hospital," Lucas said, sitting on the edge of the table. Max was rubbing her eyes, pushing back the tint mask she was wearing, leaving a black smudge at the corner of her tear ducts.
Will's expression was instantly understood by Max, and she stroked his back. "There's something about genetic symbiosis. It's like we're humans with spider-like abilities. I know, weird as fuck, right?"
"To say the least..." Will looked at his wristwatch—8:39 p.m.—and jumped up, but Jane and Max caught him when his body swayed from the movement. "I have to go, I have to get back home. I'm sure Mike—"
"Mike thinks we're at Mom's house, that she invited us over for dinner out of the blue, and that your phone isn't charged. Don't worry," Jane said, almost robotically, as if it were rehearsed.
Will didn't know whether to feel relieved or worried about hiding something from his best friend that, it seemed, would be key to his life from now on. "So, he doesn't know."
"Nope, he doesn't know anything at all—not about you, not about Lucas and Max. Only we know."
Will sat up slowly, feeling his hands sticky against the wooden table, as if he had school glue on them.
"There must be a way to fix it. I mean, mutate our DNA so it's, you know, 100% human, right?" Will said, hoping Dustin—Einstein's prodigal son and the greatest brain in all of Indiana and probably New York—would nod. But he didn't; in fact, he only looked at him.
"All the genetic modifications that exist so far have been irreversible, and those that weren't... well, they killed the DNA carriers. Sorry, I don't think there's any way this is reversible."
Will looked at Dustin, who was looking downcast, then at Jane, and then at Max and Lucas, who were looking at each other as if this were a story they'd heard before—which they probably had. Will laughed sarcastically, even though he knew there wasn't much blame to place on anyone.
"Well, fuck me, am I right?" Will felt a heat rise up his neck, the stickiness on his hands becoming more pronounced, almost as if they were covered in some magical goo oozing from his fingerprints. "I'm out of here. Can someone give me a ride or do I need to call a fucking butterfly to take me home?"
Lucas raised his hand, showing him his car keys.
Around 10:30 p.m., he was home, with every light in the small apartment he shared with Mike off except for his bedroom light, his door ajar and a Cure song playing softly. He opened the door gently to find him asleep at his desk, his head resting on his laptop keyboard, a Google Docs page open with a draft for his screenwriting class. Will couldn't help but feel his own heart leap at the sight of Mike sleeping so peacefully atop his mountain of college stuff.. If he closed his eyes, he could feel how much his lungs inflated and deflated with each breath, and how his eyelashes barely moved with the dreams Mike might be having.
His enhanced senses, mapped out the space in a way his eyes never could. He could feel the microscopic displacement of air as the ceiling fan whirled in the living room, but more than that, he felt him. Mike’s presence was a low, steady hum vibrating through the floorboards. To Will’s hyper-aware ears, Mike’s sleeping pulse sounded like a distant drum, rhythmic and grounding. As he approached the desk, the air around Mike felt warmer, charged with a familiar static that made the hair on Will’s arms stand up. It wasn't just sight anymore; it was a biological tether. Every slow, deep breath Mike took sent a ripple through the room that Will caught in his own lungs, making his own heart sync up with the person who was, quite literally, the center of his gravitational pull.
Will slowly shook Mike's shoulder, feeling his body just begin to stir. He opened his eyes gently, smiling at his best friend from the desk, and Will couldn't help but wonder what the hell he had done in his past life to have to live with the most beautiful person he had ever seen.
"Hey, hi..." Mike said, yawning and blinking in Will's direction.
"Hey... you fell asleep at the desk. I thought your back would appreciate me waking you up so you could go to bed."
"Always saving me, Byers. You never change, huh?" Mike said, stretching in his cheap chair and closing his laptop. As he stood up, he gave his friend a sleepy smile. "How was your day? I barely saw you."
Will wondered how he could tell Mike everything Dustin, Jane, Lucas, and Max had explained, and how Mike would probably think he was either completely crazy or had somehow managed to make up a story so bizarre it sounded like something out of a superhero movie. Will shook his head.
"It was, well, a weird day, you know... It's nothing, don't worry."
"Okay, I'm not worried, don't worry." Mike took off his shirt while Will looked away, feeling his own heartbeat quicken significantly. "Are you sure you're okay?"
"Yup, just incredibly tired. In fact, I'm going to bed right now," Will replied, feeling his stomach rumble, but knowing it would be incredibly suspicious if, after having dinner with his mother, he was starving when he got home. "See you in the morning."
"Okay, weirdo," Mike said, throwing his jeans and work shirt—a black shirt with the Daily Bugle logo on the side—onto the chair. "Good night, Will."
"Night, Mike."
That night, with his bedroom door closed and his brain more active than ever, Will researched spiders, their mutations, their abilities, and, above all, whether there were any recorded cases of someone suddenly acquiring these characteristics, for lack of a better word. Unfortunately, and quite obviously, he found nothing about the latter, but he did understand that spiders are much more than their eight legs and webs; there was something about them that compelled them to protect their surroundings, their eggs, and their own home from invaders or external predators. He went to sleep with this thought ringing in his head, like a small bell tolling in the distance.
But the idea of actually becoming superheroes wasn't brought up until two weeks later, when all the friends decided to pretend that nothing they had talked about had happened and simply tried to live their lives as humanly and normally as possible. The city, in one way or another, forced them to become the heroes it needed, because crime was on the rise, and when dangers abound, only something like this can save those who don't make the news.
The first to have a heroic revelation was Lucas, who was walking down Eighth Avenue, a peculiar electricity coursing through his veins, when he simply felt it—he felt a lurking danger on the other corner. An elderly woman was crossing the street when a car, speeding, almost hit her. Lucas couldn't quite explain how, but his legs tensed almost electrically, and in the blink of an eye, he was on the other side of the street, with the woman in his arms and the car smashed against a lamppost. Lucas left the scene before anyone could ask, "What the hell was that?"
Next came Max, who in an alley on the Lower East Side heard a little girl sobbing. In an unnatural, but above all, silent way, she slipped between the trash cans and, with a grace straight out of a superhero book, grabbed the girl by the arms and lifted her onto a balcony a block away, with a subtlety that defied every law of gravity.
And finally, those senses of salvation also awakened in Will. In the cafeteria where he worked, while waiting for his lunch to heat up in the microwave in the back, he felt something—a tingle. His hypersensitivity detected a strange smell that triggered every alarm signal in his modified DNA: the smell of gas, every fiber of his body sizzling. DANGER. In one swift motion, without thinking twice, he ripped the rivets off a table and pulled a group of three high school students away from the kitchen window before a spark flew and shattered the glass partition from the kitchen flame.
Will almost escaped from the cafe, and that same afternoon he sent a message to his boss saying he was quitting, not to worry about being paid for the days he'd been there that month, and that he was fine—since he didn't even want to think about setting foot in that cafe again and having someone recognize him for his heroic act. That same afternoon, he sent a message to all his friends except Mike, and they met at Dustin's makeshift laboratory.
The news was reporting on their events: the woman Lucas had saved from being hit by a car said she "felt a force that moved her in a second and saved her life," and the girl Max had rescued had uploaded a video to social media recounting how someone, without revealing their identity, had taken her up to a rooftop, saving her from the thugs who wanted to rob her or worse. Finally, the videos of the cafe where Will worked and had saved that group of teenagers from serious injuries from fire and broken glass, or even death, played on TV, with the headline underneath reading: "No serious injuries in the surprise fire at the Manhattan cafe."
The three rescuers didn't quite know how to explain the satisfaction they felt from their actions that afternoon, almost as if a saving force had taken hold of them—almost like a sixth sense that always told them they had to save each other no matter what. Something was different; something felt different about them.
"You guys could be a team, you know?" Jane said, turning down the TV when the news switched to something about the weather. "Kind of like the Avengers, but without so much visibility to protect yourselves and everyone else."
Lucas, Max, and Will couldn't tell if Jane was joking or serious, but their doubts were confirmed when Dustin jumped out of his chair, grabbed his laptop, and started typing, shouting "Aha!" when he found the file he was looking for.
'Lucas, your DNA merged with a Heavy-Clad genus—your muscle and bone density are off the charts, making you a literal human tank. And Max, yours was a Salticid, a jumper; your fast-twitch fibers are so explosive you could probably clear a city block in two bounds.'
He then turned to Will, his voice dropping an octave.
“And you, Will... yours is the most refined. You’re a Weaver. You don't just have strength or speed; you have the Symphony. That "tingle" you feel? It’s a hypersensitivity to the world’s vibrations. You don’t just see danger—you feel the invisible web of the entire city moving around you, reacting to a punch before it’s even thrown with a fluid, haunting grace that makes it look like you’re dancing through a battlefield you’ve already mapped out in your mind”
Dustin went through the entirety of the confidential document and began to read out loud, his voice showing an excitement he and his genius brain could comprehend.
"According to the mutations shown in your tests, you now have almost the same abilities as a spider: walking on surfaces regardless of gravity or height, subtlety and speed in your movements that make you almost invisible, enough strength to lift 500 times your own weight, hypersensitivity to your surroundings, high resistance, rapid detection of danger and external factors, and rapid recovery from serious or superficial wounds. Oh, and fucking awesome reflexes," Dustin said, throwing a several-kilo paperweight at Will, which Will caught in mid-air almost without blinking. "Fucking hell, you can literally become a brigade of spider protectors for New York City."
It wasn't just a generic mutation; the vials Dustin’s department had been tracking belonged to three distinct subspecies, creating a specialized hierarchy within their small group. Dustin pointed at the flashing monitors, his eyes wide with a manic sort of brilliance.
Dustin's excitement was contagious almost instantly. Jane was on board with the plan from the very beginning. The next to join was Lucas, who had always dreamed of being someone who protected others. Then came Max, who couldn't help but be taken by the idea of a little girl seeing her as a role model. Will wasn't too convinced at first, repeating more than once that "everyone was completely crazy if they thought this was a good idea."
A couple of weeks of planning, setting up a headquarters, and organizing the team were enough for Will to be part of the brigade. The team was simple and small; the five of them were the only ones who knew what they were doing. Dustin was, as he called himself, the "man in the chair"—the brains and creator of any gadget the three rookie heroes would use, from web-shooters to voice modifiers they would need when they were out on the streets. Jane, in addition to creating a special suit for each of them, functioned as a hacker and managed the police radio, interfering with the signal to find dangers where her skills could be useful.
The five reached a conclusion: no one could know. Not their families, not their college friends, and above all, not Mike—at least not for now.
"We're getting into something we don't know how safe it is. I don't want to put anyone's life at risk because we save someone from a gang of criminals and they kill them," Will said that morning when Jane had summoned them to her apartment to give each of them their suits. They all agreed.
Jane had managed to give each of the suits a design that differentiated them from one another, yet still made it clear they were all part of the same team. They all had two or three characteristic colors: Lucas's was black with red details throughout the suit; Max's was white with black details and pink-outlined eyes on her mask; and Will's was perhaps the most striking, but also the most Will-like, with a red base, blue details, and the spiderweb design they all had across the chest in black. The three suits were not only incredibly representative but also highly functional for their abilities, made with reinforced fabric, featuring wrist-mounted triggers, clear vision, and voice modifiers inside the masks. It was almost as if the five of them had been born to be superheroes after all.
Will returned to his apartment that day around two in the morning, and despite having sent Mike a message that said, "Gonna be late 2 days, the study session is taking longer than expected, see you in the morning," when he walked in, he found Mike awake, drinking a cup of coffee in front of his laptop. The laptop was displaying the day's news, the most striking story being about a fire in the Bronx where a woman had been saved by a masked man swinging from the rooftops.
"Oh, you're awake. Hi."
"Hey. Was the study session good?" Mike asked, without looking away from his laptop.
"Yeah, it was good. I'm still having trouble understanding the things Dustin explains, but oh well, you know how he is..." Will couldn't help but yawn amidst the white lie he was telling Mike. "I think I'll take a shower and go to bed. See you in the morning."
"I'll see you in the morning, Will. Get some rest," Mike said, barely glancing up from his laptop, smiling at his friend before he went into the bathroom. "Oh, and Will?"
Shit, shit, shit, fuck—Will was a really bad liar and he could feel that Mike had already figured out he'd been lying to him for weeks. He was going to be mad because he hadn't told him the truth, and he was going to move out, and he wasn't going to talk to him anymore, and he was never going to get to smell his burnt toast every morning, the smell of his coconut shampoo in the bathroom after he got out of the shower, the feel of his denim jacket against his back when they were on the subway so crammed together they felt like they were sharing the same air, and—
"Are you free on Friday? It feels like it's been ages since we've had a night like the ones we had when we first moved in—you know, pizza and movies. I know we're both functioning adults and blah blah blah, but I miss you, and I miss us spending time together. I don't know if it's weird—you can tell me if I'm being weird—but you know, if you're down for it, maybe we could order some pizza, watch Grease for the ninetieth time... I don't know, chill out together."
Mike was sometimes so sweet that it made Will want to either jump out the window and crash into a passing bus, or jump onto the couch and devour every feature of his perfect face with kisses. Obviously, he did neither. He simply turned around and smiled at him, like friends do when one of their best friends invites them over to hang out, like Will has been doing for as long as he can remember.
"Of course, Mike, I'd love to. I miss you too. Not to be cheesy or anything, but who knew that being an adult would distance you so much physically from your best friends, right?" Will said, feeling one of his shoulders start to itch under his suit from friction, perspiration, or a possible burn he hadn't noticed. Mike smiled at him, the way only he could, and Will's heart melted again. "Friday: pizza, beer, and Grease?"
"Deal," Mike confirmed, his smile drooping to the side of his mouth.
"Deal. Goodnight, Mike," Will said, finally stepping into the bathroom and locking the door with the small latch—a new habit Mike had noticed but deemed insignificant enough to mention.
While Will dabbed a cotton ball soaked in saline solution and alcohol on a burn on his shoulder—which was easy to treat but no less painful—he tried to drown out each groan of pain with the sound of the running shower. Outside, just before Mike shut down his computer and went to sleep, he finished reading the article his own sister had written about this new masked hero, sparking a curiosity in him, without noticing that the shape of the masked man's profile in the red suit matched the shape of his best friend's face.