Chapter Text
It was a Thursday when Penny Parker stopped talking.
Uncle Ben had only come back at 3am the night before. She’d heard him. She’d been awake.
He hadn’t woken up in time to see her before she left for school. It wasn’t unexpected, he’d expected the gala to run late, and therefore to get off work late, and Penny had said she’d be fine to get breakfast and walk to the bus stop on her own. She was almost 11, she could manage a morning alone.
She didn’t get breakfast. She got dressed, she managed that. But everything around her seemed so slow, and she’d felt too sick to eat, so she just left and gone to the bus stop.
She remembered that the world around her had seemed to flash, like her vision was lagging behind her eyes, but it wasn’t really, it was just her mind playing tricks on her. She curled up on the corner seat, right at the very back of the bus and stared out the window into nothing. She was the last one off the bus when it got to school, moving slowly enough that the driver yelled at her to hurry up. Ned ran up to her when she eventually got off, his mom drove him to school but he always waited for her. He was talking about some cool lego set he was saving up for, and asking if Penny would save up with him, but she couldn’t quite make the words make sense at the speed she normally could. Everything had seemed so slow, so far away. She sat down in her seat with her coat still zipped up, and the teacher sent her to the cloakroom to put it away.
She didn’t want to take the coat off. She remembered that. Everything had been so slow and far away, and the entire world seemed dreamlike, but she hadn’t wanted to take the coat off. But the teacher said she had to, so she unzipped it and hung it up. Her jumper was on inside out. She hadn’t noticed earlier. It didn’t seem important anyway. She walked back out of the cloak room and sat down. She remembered the way silence seemed to follow her across the room like a wave. She remembered the teacher turning round. She remembered the pile of books in the teacher’s hands thudding to the ground.
She remembered being asked questions. Question after question after question. She remembered opening her mouth, remembered nothing coming out. She remembered uncle Ben arriving at the school, sprinting into the nurses room, and the horror in his eyes as he saw the dark bruises around her throat and wrists. She remembered the police coming, and more questions until uncle Ben made them go away. She remembered the hospital, and more questions. She remembered the doctor, hours or days later asking her to open her mouth, asking her to say ‘ahh’ and just looking at him.
She didn’t say a word through any of it.
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There was nothing wrong with her voice box. The doctors had examined her multiple times in the days and weeks that followed, and eventually she’d heard one tell uncle Ben that she could talk, she was just choosing not to. Penny didn’t think she was choosing anything. She couldn’t talk.
It wasn’t that her throat was damaged. If she chose to talk her voice would work. It was just that she couldn’t choose it. She couldn’t talk.
She couldn’t rationalise it to herself. Couldn’t explain ‘this is why I can’t talk’, she just couldn’t. She tried to make herself, one day months after it, but when she opened her mouth nothing came out. She gave up eventually.
Three months after it uncle Ben took her to a sign language class so she could stop having to write everything down. He went with her every day for another three months, and then couldn’t afford it any longer, but it was ok, they had the basics all down, and they could (and did) learn the rest of the vocabulary off the internet.
Ned learned sign language too. He learnt it more slowly, because his parents wouldn’t send him to classes, so he had to completely teach himself, but it meant more to Penny than she could ever express. Ned never asked what had happened. Lots of the other kids did, and some jeered at her for her silence, and others called her attention seeking, but Ned never asked or pushed or laughed. Without Ned, Penny didn’t think she would have made it through the rest of the school year. So when Ned told her his parents were making him apply to Midtown school of science and technology, Penny applied too, and she studied as hard as she could for the entrance exams so she could get a scholarship. She’d always been smart, always been bored while her classmates struggled, but she wasn’t sure if smart would be good enough. Everyone applying to Midtown would be smart. And she was mute. Would Midtown want a mute scholarship kid? She managed to get the scholarship anyway.
Things were better at Midtown. She heard some of the kids whispering that she only got the scholarship because she was mute, because it looked good for the school. Penny didn’t care. She was with Ned, and nobody else from their old school went to Midtown. Nobody remembered that she used to talk. Nobody remembered that she’d walked into school one morning with hollow eyes and bruises around her neck.
Most of the teachers never called on her in class, and she never raised her hand. It suited Penny fine. She didn’t want attention. Attention felt dangerous. And she could often do her own thing if the teachers ignored her. It let her study different stuff in class. Stuff that didn’t bore her. She did the class work when it was handed out, and her homework, and maintained straight As, but she also did her own stuff, borrowed textbooks from the library and set out on her own personal mission to work out how the world worked. She liked chemistry best, although engineering was a close second.
Some of the kids picked on her, and occasionally one or two of the teachers, but it was better than her last school, and the library on its own was enough to make her want to stay. The school offered her someone to help her in class, but she refused it. She didn’t need help, and she didn’t want someone looking over her shoulder. She was managing fine.
When she was thirteen Flash Thomson started picking on her properly. He started small, little comments about ‘the dumb kid’, and then moved on to putting gum in her hair, or throwing spitballs, and from there to tripping her and shoving her into the lockers. She was the perfect victim, she never spoke, never told anyone. She could write it down of course, or sign to Ned to tell someone, but she didn’t, and she wouldn’t let Ned tell anyone. It would only get worse if she complained, and she still liked it at Midtown.
She joined the robotics club that year as well. Ned joined academic decathlon as well, because his parents wanted him too, but Penny didn’t. She thought about it, and Ned said they’d make a way for her to take part, that they’d have to or they’d get in trouble for excluding her, but Penny didn’t want to stick out in it. She preferred to be invisible. And robotics was more fun. She started going through dumpsters around then too, salvaging electronics for parts. Uncle Ben let her tinker with whatever she wanted, even got her a good toolkit for her birthday. He said not to listen to anyone who told her girls weren’t supposed to be into engineering, so Penny didn’t listen. That was one advantage of being mute, people didn’t expect you to respond, so they didn’t notice if you didn’t listen.
When Penny was almost fourteen, uncle Ben was shot. They’d been shopping together, and three men came in with guns, and uncle Ben tried to interfere because he worked as a security guard. One of the men came up behind him and shot him in the back and Penny screamed so loud one of the men shoved a gun in her face and told her to shut up or he’d blow her brains out. It was the first sound Penny had made with her voice in four years. She closed her mouth and shut up.
Uncle Ben was dead. She found out later that he’d died as soon as the bullet hit. He hadn’t suffered. Sometimes, Penny wished the robbers had shot her too.
The police got them. Penny saw it on the news, and a policeman came to tell her. They got them and they locked them up, and Penny was supposed to find it comforting that they were being punished for it.
Penny had learned long ago that bad people being punished didn’t make anything better. Skip being arrested hadn’t made her feel better. The robbers being arrested didn’t bring uncle Ben back. She wondered if uncle Ben would have lived if she’d been able to speak to warn him someone was behind him. She tried not to think about it. She tried not to think about a lot of things.
They put her in a massive group home for a couple of weeks, and then she got fostered into a smaller group home. There were less kids there, but only two carers, a husband and a wife, and they were overworked and Penny was silent and it was easy to be invisible. She kept her scholarship at Midtown, she kept that, and it was the only thing that kept her going. Ned stuck with her and helped in any way he could. Some of the teachers did too, in their own way. They let her use the labs after school hours sometimes, while they marked homework.
One of the kids in the group home was fostered, and then adopted, and the social workers looking after them said that maybe they’d all be adopted someday. Penny doubted it. It was the youngest kid who got adopted, the rest of them were too old for parents to want them. And Penny didn’t talk. Who would want her?
Things got a bit better as time went on, or at least Penny told herself they did. Things got less raw at least. She tried to look on the bright side, at least she had her own room. She didn’t think she could have been able to deal with it if she didn’t. Her room was tiny, but at least it was hers, and it had a lock on the door. Locks were important to Penny.
In November it was announced that Stark Industries were going to take on ten interns from high-schools in New York, and there was going to be a competition to win the places. Penny was only just old enough, you had to be fourteen, and she didn’t think she had a chance. It sounded like they were really looking for older interns, they just wanted to look like they were giving the younger students a chance. And Penny didn’t speak anyway, she couldn’t do it.
But one of her teachers handed her a packet of information after class one day, and said she should enter, and that even if she didn’t get in, she’d have fun making a project. He made a good point, so Penny filled out the paperwork, and got her guardians to fill out the ‘parent or guardian’ bits, and brainstormed projects with Ned. Ned wasn’t applying, because his parents wouldn’t let him because he’d gotten caught hacking again a week ago, and they were still mad. But Ned brushed it off and helped her brainstorm projects. Penny made a robot in the end, because she thought it would be fun to make a robot like R2D2. It didn’t come out very well in the end, she couldn’t get it to roll smoothly like it did in the film, and it didn’t look that much like R2D2 because she gave it arms so she could program it to bring her things on command. She did manage to get it good enough that it could write with a pencil though, and she was proud of it, even if she was a little embarrassed to hand it over to the Stark Industries people in December. Someone came to the school to collect the projects of the students who entered. Almost fifty people entered from Midtown, and Penny wondered if it was just Midtown where so many students entered, or if the less science focused schools had lots of students enter too. She knew she wasn’t going to get it anyway. She knew her guardians had written on her form that she was mute and would need special help. Even if she wasn’t on the young end, and even if her project was better, they wouldn’t pick her. It had been fun though.
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They went to tour Osborn Research Labs as the end of semester school trip. Her entire year group went, and Flash was being particularly cruel that day, so Penny dropped back and did her best to disappear. There were too many students really, to all tour at once, and even keeping at the very back she kept getting shoved around. It was horrible because she didn’t like physical touch from anyone not family at the best of times, and people kept knocking into her or crowding her, and she couldn’t even enjoy the advanced science all around her. When someone in a lab coat at the front shouted to let him through she got shoved so hard she tripped backwards and hit a door, which was unfortunately unlocked, and she fell through it, flailing for balance. Her hand hit a glass tank of something, and it hurt so much it took her several seconds to realise she’d knocked the tank lid off and several spiders had climbed out.
Horrified, she scooped them up and deposited them back in the tank, put the lid back on properly, and backed out of the lab, which was mercifully empty. She reluctantly rejoined the crowd of her classmates, desperately trying not to let anyone touch her, but failing miserably. She told a teacher she didn’t feel well half an hour later, unable to bear it anymore, and went to sit in the couch with the driver for the rest of the trip, irritated and miserable to miss all the science.
She puked her guts up that night, and thought nothing of it. She’d been feeling queasy ever since people had started knocking into her that morning, and it wouldn’t be the first time she’d puked after something like that. She reassured the Prescotts that she was fine, and managed to convince them to just let her have an early night, and triple checked she’d locked the door before she slept.
She dreamed of heat and pain and darkness and hot breath and fear, and woke up hours later than usual to Mr Prescott banging on the door shouting for her to get up and do her chores. She tried to climb out of bed and accidentally jumped out instead. The world snapped into focus around her, unlike the blur she’d been used to all her life without her glasses. She felt her face to make sure she hadn’t slept in her glasses, but she hadn’t. But she could see! But she wasn’t wearing her glasses! But she could see!
Things only got weirder from there. It took her half an hour to get dressed, because she kept sticking to things, and then she realised it wasn’t just her eyesight that had changed, she could hear and smell more too. It took her two hours to make it downstairs to do her chores, and Mr Prescott gave her more chores as punishment (or rather because he needed stuff from the shops and didn’t have time to go himself), and sent her shopping. Penny carried two stuffed bags of shopping and didn’t feel the weight at all, and realised she had abs. She put the shopping away, went back upstairs, locked the door and stripped, looking at herself in the mirror and trying to work out how she’d grown so much muscle overnight. And how her eyesight had fixed itself, and how her ears had gotten more sensitive, and how she could smell exactly what was being cooked downstairs, and how she’d walked for half an hour in the freezing cold without her asthma making itself felt.
It took her two days to absorb that she had changed. Two days for it to sink in. It wasn’t until she was sorting out her washing and a crushed red spider fell out of her T-shirt that she realised what had happened and fully absorbed that she had changed. That she would never be the same again.
Things got better. Not in slow drips. Not in the way of things becoming less raw and immediately painful. But really, properly better.
There were downsides. She quickly worked out she couldn’t thermoregulate much anymore, and she was constantly hungry, and there was never food spare in the group home, and she spent hours curled up in a ball in her room overwhelmed by everything she could hear and see and smell and feel. But the upsides were so much bigger.
She wasn’t weak anymore. She wasn’t helpless anymore.
She’d known what she wanted to do the moment she’d seen that spider (which she’d buried in the park, she didn’t think she should leave it lying around) and absorbed that she’d changed. It took her two days to cobble together a costume from dumpsters and charity shops. And then she hit the streets.
It wasn’t hard to climb out of her window, not now she could stick to walls. It was hard to keep warm, but she layered up under the suit and kept moving to help her reduced thermoregulation as much as she could. She stopped two muggings that first night, and realised two things. One, she needed a much better way of getting around. Two, she needed a better way to deal with muggers than shoving and hitting them until they ran off.
It took her a week to make her first version of her web-fluid (which she managed only because she still had some chemicals left from the chemistry kit uncle Ben had gotten her for Christmas two years ago) and web-shooters (from the leftover accumulated scraps she’d used to build the robot that was supposed to be R2D2), and another week to make versions that actually worked smoothly. And then it took her another week to get the hang of it, and then she was really in business.
By early January she was going out almost every night, and most of the time it was just helping old people carry shopping, or rescuing cats from trees, or stopping the odd bike theft, but she’d also stopped ten muggings. She left the muggers webbed up each time, and watched their would-be-victims call the police, and watched from afar as muggers were arrested before they could hurt anyone. It felt good to watch. It felt like she was making a difference. Like she was making Queens a better place. It made it all the hunger and cold and sensory overload worth it, no, more than worth it. For the first time in four years she didn’t feel helpless. As soon as she put the costume on it was like she became someone else.
As Spiderman (as some blogger named her) she wasn’t afraid of anything. She didn’t feel small or helpless or broken. As Spider ‘man’ she could change things, she could make a difference. And people liked her. Blogs sprang up about her, clips appeared on YouTube of her. Spiderman was making a difference, making the world a better place, and with every little way she helped, Penny felt like she was reclaiming a tiny piece of herself.
Two days before school started again, she stopped another mugging and when the guy she rescued said thank you, she said “You’re welcome” back.
They were the first words she’d spoken in over four years, and her voice was rough and raspy and she was so stunned that the words had come out of her mouth that she froze in place for a solid five seconds before she remembered she had been about to leave and webbed away.
She made it to a roof top and sat there in stunned stillness for almost half an hour, and then said aloud. “I spoke. I just did it again. I’m talking! I’m talking!”
She went downstairs the next morning, full of excitement and ready to announce she could talk again, but when she opened her mouth nothing came out. One of her foster siblings cracked up laughing looking at her, and she burst into tears and ran back upstairs. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t make herself speak. She spent the entire day trying, even wrote out sentences to say and tried to just read it aloud, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t make the words come.
Penny Parker couldn’t talk. Penny Parker hadn’t said a word since the night before that Thursday morning over four years ago. Penny Parker was mute. She cried that afternoon, cried until her head throbbed with it and her throat was raw. Cried with frustration and anger and all the other things that hadn’t really gone away. Cried because Penny Parker was weak and mute and broken, and cried because uncle Ben was gone.
When she went out that night she could talk again. Hidden behind a mask, swinging around Queens with her webs, she could talk. She talked to everyone she saw, talked just because she could, talked until her throat ached and she didn’t even care that people were looking at her even more weirdly than they usually did.
School started the next day and Penny Parker still couldn’t talk. She concluded that Spider Woman was different, that she was different when she put on the costume. She didn’t try to talk again during the day.
Within a week Spiderman had become known as Spider Woman, her voice giving her away, but it didn’t matter. Penny had the perfect disguise. Who would think the chatterbox vigilante who swung around on webs and stopped muggings was the same person as silent, scared Penny Parker? Even Ned, who knew her best and had followed Spider Woman since the first clips of her (then thought of as ‘him’) hit YouTube (“Queens has it’s own superhero Pen! How cool is that!”) didn’t seem to have had the thought even cross his mind. It was so unthinkable that Penny was Spider Woman that a few times she’d forgotten it herself, and had genuinely taken part in Ned’s attempts to analyse who Spider Woman could be, only to abruptly remember and have to shake her hair over her flushing cheeks.
Three weeks into the new semester, Penny received a letter from Stark Industries. She’d gotten an internship. She read the letter, reread it twice, and then spent the next ten minutes staring at it. There had to have been some mistake. Her project had been awful! She was only fourteen! And mute! But the letter had her name on it, and further details about the internship, including a start time, and somehow, impossibly, she’d gotten in. She, Penny Parker, was one of the ten students across the entire city who would intern at Stark Industries.
She’d get to work at Stark Industries. She’d get to work in Tony Stark’s company. In the company that came out with all the most cutting edge new tech, which had the most state of the art labs, and where Tony Stark worked. Ned was going to flip.