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When Peter was a kid, he thought it sounded like a superhero name. Like Batman or Wonder Woman. He liked to imagine that one day he'd fall in a vat of radioactive waste and get cool shapeshifting powers. Or he'd be really smart and invent a ton of cool tech to fight bad guys with. Maybe he was even from another planet like Superman, dropped into the cornfields when he was too young to remember. That one made the most sense, if you asked him.
He would fill notebooks with doodles and drabbles about having superhero adventures. He burned through packs of crayons like his mom did packs of cigarettes. His classroom aides liked to say he had an “overactive imagination.” To him, it wasn’t active enough. He was still stuck at school all day, with no powers to speak of, counting down the time until he could get back to his comics.
The summer before fourth grade, his dad started to come up with creative ways to get him out of the house. He'd pick Peter right up off of his chair and take him on character-building car trips.
“You can’t save the world if you don’t get out and see it once in a while," he told him, as they walked through a climate-controlled, dimly-lit section of the local zoo. “Lex Luthor’s not gonna turn up in the computer room and let you kick his ass from the comfort of your beanbag chair.”
Lex Luthor wasn’t gonna turn up at the zoo, either. He didn’t have to. It was bad enough without him. It felt like a relic from a time before Google. The animals didn’t do anything but sit there and stare back at you. It smelled like a bathroom full of wet dogs. There were strangers everywhere, all of them staring at paper maps and running over each other’s toes. And everyone was acting like it was the most fun they could be having.
Peter grumbled and groaned and dragged his feet through the whole thing.
His dad stopped walking in front of one of the terrariums. He pointed at it with an excited gasp trying to get Peter to care. “Pete, look! Look, what’s in there?”
Peter peered over the shoulders of the couple of kids standing in front of the glass. There was a giant spider skittering around the tank, big and fuzzy with way too many eyes. A real life spider. He fell in love the second he saw it. He ran up and pressed his nose to the glass, just to see the thing up close. There were more in the tank. There was a smaller guy, from a different species, spinning a web between the rocks along the back. One of them was camouflaged with the plants. It made Peter jump when it started to move around.
It took his dad forty-five minutes to lure him away, and only with the promise that he could come back another day.
That night, he stayed up until the sunrise reading everything he could about spiders. He learned that spider webs were stronger than steel. He learned that some spiders made traps with them and some lassoed up their prey like cowboys. He watched entire YouTube playlists of spiders. He went down a Wikipedia hole of Linnean taxonomy, evolutionary tactics, and physiology. It had been years since he’d learned anything worth learning. Now he’d stumbled into something so interesting he’d never get all of his questions answered in a million years.
He quickly became one of those kids who had a Thing. His birthday parties, his school supplies, his small talk, they all became spider-themed. Maybe the nickname was more along the lines of “horse girl.” He'd grow up to be a spider expert – an arachnologist – or at least an amateur one. That was fine by him. If he couldn’t be a superhero, he’d happily settle for being a scientist.
It wasn't until middle school that it dawned on him it might not be a compliment. A kid like Peter was bound to get teased to begin with, as gangly and gawky as he was. The whole spider thing, though, was enough to earn him actual physical violence. Kids would roll up their homework and smack him with it. They'd slap him upside the head as they went by him in the hall, with horrified shrieks that 'it's still alive.' He got hit with a gym shoe at least once a month, and he was lucky if it was above the belt.
This soulmate of his had better be a knockout if that nickname was how they were kicking things off.
If there was a bright side to losing the world he knew overnight, it was that he never had to go back to his old school again. Moving cross-country to New York gave him the chance to start fresh. He could pretend he wasn't a geekazoid supreme. Even his Aunt May and Uncle Ben didn't know what Peter's soulmark said, and he planned to keep it that way.
Day one at Midtown High, he made a beeline for the school office and begged them to issue him a censor band.
"Does your soulmark contain prophecies, infohazards, obscenity, or references to illegal activity?" asked the secretary in a bored-sounding voice.
He scratched his wrist nervously. "Not exactly?"
She looked back down at her books, losing her last shred of interest. "Then you're not required to censor."
"Well, can I anyway?"
The secretary looked up again, with her brow furrowed. "You want to censor voluntarily?"
There was something in her voice that told him it was a bad idea, but he wasn't taking any chances. "If that's an option, yeah."
"Do you belong to a religious order that necessitates the covering of soulmarks?"
"Is that a thing?” Peter asked curiously.
"Do you believe," she continued in a monotone, "that showing your soulmark will put you or others in danger?"
He latched onto that like a spider onto its prey. "That one. Yes. I do."
The secretary didn't seem to believe him, which was fair enough. Peter looked about as dangerous as a bubble-wrapped baby rattle. Thankfully, she didn't ask questions, and Peter walked out with a wristband he never wanted to take off.
It worked perfectly. He didn't get teased for being a spider freak. He did, however, get relegated to the lowest social caste in school. It turned out, broadcasting that you had a dirty little secret was not the path to popularity. Still, a group of loser friends was better than no friends at all. He wore that wristband like a wedding ring. For the first time in his life, he wasn’t defined by the soulmark. He was normal. And normal felt fantastic.
What was even more fantastic was that New York had as many spiders as it had people. Peter got into the habit of looking for them as a grounding strategy in public places. Aunt May and Uncle Ben would've flipped out if he told them how often he found one. He tended to keep it to himself if he saw one with folks around, but if he was walking alone, he would always stop and say hi. It was totally unfounded, but part of him still wanted to think that spiders liked him better than people.
He found a gorgeous black widow scampering through his neighborhood one day. It certainly wasn't the rarest type out there, but it came right up to him when he bent down to say hello. Spiders hardly ever gave him the time of day. Having one crawl over his hands was a blessing.
What was particularly interesting, though, was that it bit him. Black widows weren't supposed to bite like that.
It really wasn't supposed to hurt like that.
It really, really wasn't supposed to give him spider-themed superpowers like that.
That wasn't the vibe. This was totally not the vibe. The superhero shit was a fun fantasy when he was a kid, but at fifteen? When he had friends to keep? Classes to ace? A life he wanted to survive? Hell to the no. You couldn't pay him to go running around in tights, climbing walls and shooting webs. That was a thousand times dorkier than knowing fun facts about spiders. And he wasn't looking to get himself killed before he met the soulmate that fucked his life so hard.
Opportunity didn’t knock so much as it held up Uncle Ben’s bodega and shot him through the chest.
With great power came great revenge fantasies. Once the press got wind of a new supe trapping a bad guy in spider webs, the moniker was inevitable.
He was twenty when he burned his mark off. It was too risky for Peter Parker to walk around with those words on his wrist. He shot up with a homemade numbing agent in his college’s chem lab and imagined it was his soulmate’s arm he was torching.
He’s twenty-six now, and he’s still playing dress-up. He’s got it down to a science, catching criminals, playing politics with the cops, and, his personal favorite, pissing off all the supervillains dumb enough to set up shop on his turf.
He’s swinging home from a job when he passes over this ridiculous-looking ninja in a red leather suit. He's wielding a massive sword against a masked robber outside the B of A.
Somebody’s going to die if Peter doesn’t intervene. He’s goddamn sure of it. Odds are it’s a civilian.
Peter drops down out of the sky and webs the robber up against the side of the bank. He turns his attention immediately to the maniac who thinks he’s entitled to slice people up in the middle of town.
"Spider-Man!” the ninja shouts delightedly, in a bitterly cold Canadian accent that nips at Peter's nose.
No prologue. No frills. Just the name.
He sheathes up his sword and extends a hand in the hope of shaking Peter’s. “So glad I finally have the honor of meeting the biggest piece of shit this side of the Mason-Dixon. I’m dying to know, were you assigned cop at birth or was it a sort of gradual process of self-discovery?"
Peter keeps his mouth clamped shut. He’d gag himself with a web if he could shoot it through the suit. He’s going to be razor-precise with the words he brands into this man’s arm.
The ninja pulls his hand back and runs it along the side of his smoothed-over skull as if he’s fixing his hair. "¿Qué pasa, pana? ¿No hablas inglés?" He makes a string of gestures that probably mean “can you hear me?” and “fuck you” in sign language.
Peter shoots another web, hoping to tie the ninja’s arms up to disarm him. The ninja pulls a pair of daggers in response and diverts the webs like they’re flimsy curtains. He spins around with impressive speed, ending up behind Peter holding a dagger to his throat. Peter’s reflexes are just fast enough he can wedge his right arm in between the blade and his neck. He groans in pain as the dagger slices into his arm, biting his lips together hard so as not to say a word.
The ninja lowers the blade, surprised but not remorseful in the slightest to have broken skin. “Listen, sweetheart, I don’t wanna kill ya. In the words of S. Morgenstern, there’s a shortage of perfect ass in the world. It’d be cruel of me to rid New York of that delicious upskirt view. I just need you to stay out of my way when I’m on the beat. ‘Cause I’ve heard you’re a world-class pain in the patoot, and so far you’re living up to your reputation.”
Peter ducks out of the ninja’s grasp and dashes a few steps away. The ninja tries to chase after him, but he learns the hard way that his ankles are webbed together. He falls flat on his face with a groan that's more angry than pained.
“Not very sportsmanlike, Spidey." Peter pins him down and webs his hands behind his back. “I thought this was a gentleman’s fight.”
Peter gives him a cutesy, finger-wiggling wave goodbye and shoots back off into the sky without a word.