Homemade

New chapter is on the board.

Suit up. Queens is not getting quieter.

✦

Peter discovered before breakfast that sticking to walls did not make him Spider-Man.

It made him a tenant with ceiling damage.

The ceiling above his bedroom held him for eleven seconds before the paint gave up. He fell onto his bed, bounced once, and stared at the cracked white flake stuck to his palm.

"Right," he whispered. "Wall-crawling is not transportation. It is a lawsuit with posture."

From the kitchen, May called, "I heard the ceiling."

"It started."

"The ceiling is rent-controlled. Be polite to it."

He peeled the paint off with careful fingers. It came away too easily. Everything did, if he forgot to ask his hands to be gentle.

Strength. Reflexes. Warning pressure behind his eyes. Ears that heard pipes and the neighbor downstairs arguing with a weather report.

No mask, no technique, no webs.

Without webs, he could climb, jump, and hit things too hard. Heroism could not be property damage with a better motive.

His ribs still pulled when he breathed deep. The cut at his side had closed, but closure was apparently a liar with good skin.

By eight, his backpack held notebooks, safety glasses, old chemistry notes, a long-sleeved hoodie, and the ugliest pair of dish gloves Queens had ever seen.

Ben stopped him at the door.

"Plan?"

Peter held up the notebook.

"Make something that lets me pull instead of punch."

Ben looked at the notebook, then at Peter's hands.

"No testing on people."

"No testing on people."

"No jumping off anything taller than this building."

Peter opened his mouth.

Ben pointed at him.

"Try me."

"Fine. No jumping off anything taller than this building unless someone else is falling from something taller than this building."

May appeared behind Ben with a travel mug and a face that disliked the footnotes.

"Call every ninety minutes."

"Every ninety minutes is a lot."

"Every sixty."

He took the mug.

"I have learned negotiation is a living art."

"You have learned nothing," May said. "Show me your side."

The humor left the hallway.

Peter lifted his shirt enough for her to see the bandage and the too-smooth skin around it. May did not touch him. Looking was worse.

"If it hurts more, if you get dizzy, if you bleed through anything, you come home or you call me."

"I know."

"Say it without sounding like you are humoring me."

He lowered his shirt.

"I come home or call if symptoms get worse."

Ben's hand settled briefly on his shoulder, careful near the sore side.

"Better."

May handed him the travel mug.

"And Peter?"

He looked back.

"Do not make us learn what happened from a video."

The ESU materials lab smelled like ethanol, warm plastic, and ambition on a budget.

Peter loved it.

He did not love the hallway cameras. He did not love that his Oscorp visitor credentials were suspended while ordinary student lab access still worked. He signed in anyway, chose the far bench, and kept the main camera mostly at his back.

Nothing restricted. Nothing stolen. Biopolymer adhesive from an approved teaching kit. Cellulose fiber. Protein binder. Mild solvent. Safety sheets open because May Parker had raised a man who could crack glass by accident and still refuse to mishandle lab chemicals.

The formula needed three properties that hated each other: high tensile strength, rapid adhesion, timed degradation.

Too sticky, and he would leave criminals glued to sidewalks until the NYPD needed a construction crew. Too weak, and one swing turned him into a headline. Too permanent, and every use became evidence.

The first batch became gray soup.

The second stretched beautifully for four inches, snapped, and whipped his goggles.

The third foamed over the beaker like an angry marshmallow and glued itself to his lab notebook.

He stared at it.

"Prototype three," he said, voice flat. "Hostile pudding."

"That is not a standard materials classification."

He froze.

Gwen Stacy stood three benches away with a clipboard hugged against her chest. Lab coat over jeans. Hair tied back. Safety goggles on top of her head. Tired in the specific way serious students got when ambition outran institutional funding.

And watching him too closely.

"Gwen. Hi."

"Hi. Why are you making hostile pudding in the undergrad materials lab at nine in the morning?"

"Scholarship anxiety."

"Scholarship anxiety uses coffee and denial."

"I am innovating."

She walked closer.

He resisted the urge to cover the beaker with his hands. Normal if hiding contraband. Less normal for polymer foam.

Gwen scanned the labels.

"Cellulose reinforcement. Elastomeric binder. Mild solvent. Magnesium trace." She looked at him. "This is not for class."

"Personal project."

"For what?"

"Adhesives."

"That is a category wearing a fake mustache."

Despite himself, he smiled.

Her expression did not soften.

"Peter, your Oscorp credentials are suspended, lab safety got told to archive the tour forms, and Dr. Park has stopped answering emails with complete sentences. I am here because somebody is cleaning."

He had expected questions.

He had not expected anger aimed past him.

"You checked?"

"Of course I checked. I was there." Her fingers tightened on the clipboard. "You asked me not to tell May yet. Then you vanished into a week of bad excuses and polymer crimes."

"It has been two days."

"You are very efficient."

The lab door opened. Two first-years came in arguing over calibration, and the noise gave Peter one breath of cover.

Gwen lowered her voice.

"Did Oscorp do something to you?"

He thought about telling her.

The bite. The erased files. The match from traffic cameras. The fact that Norman Osborn's company had already moved too fast. Maybe even the panel if he felt like destroying every remaining normal thing in the room.

Warning pressure touched the back of his eyes.

Risk.

Gwen trusted data. She also had her own future, and too many endings in the borrowed memory Peter was trying not to let rule him.

"I do not know enough yet," he said.

Her expression cooled.

"That is a good answer when you are confused. It is a bad answer when you are lying."

Peter winced.

"I am trying not to drag you into something dangerous."

"You do not get to decide that by feeding me bad excuses."

She turned, then stopped beside the bench.

"Your solvent ratio is wrong. If you want timed breakdown, stop treating the binder like the enemy."

"You are helping?"

"I am correcting bad science. Do not mistake that for forgiveness."

Then she left.

He stared after her until the first-years stopped arguing and began staring at him instead.

He adjusted the binder.

Prototype four did not foam.

It stretched.

Only a few inches. Still ugly. But when Peter fired a thin strand across the bench with a modified squeeze nozzle, it stuck to a metal clamp, held for six seconds, and dissolved into harmless flakes after eighty-two.

He forgot to breathe.

One success was a miracle. Twelve successes began to resemble engineering.

On the seventh, the strand snapped and slapped his cheek hard enough to leave a red line.

On the ninth, it held a ten-pound weight for nine seconds before failing.

On the twelfth, he muttered something uncharitable about brilliant people being correct at inconvenient volumes.

The formula was crude. The webbing could not hold a swinging person for long. Cartridge pressure had to stay low enough that a misfire would not punch through drywall.

But it could pull a knife away.

Bind a wrist.

Yank a door shut.

Catch a falling object for a handful of seconds.

Enough to save someone if he stopped treating good intentions like equipment.

[GREAT WEB PROTOCOL]

[Spider Core Integration: 5.1%]

[Applied Engineering Recognized]

[Web Matrix: Unstable]

"Unstable is not a compliment," Peter whispered.

The panel vanished, offering neither comfort nor warranty.

***

By nightfall, Peter had two ugly wrist rigs built from old watch casings, refillable cartridges, salvaged springs, and a pressure valve that made him deeply aware of how cheap engineering could become before it turned into an obituary.

Gardening gloves under fingerless work gloves. Two hoodies. A cut-up black T-shirt over his nose.

The mirror hated it.

"You look like a burglar who lost a fight with a thrift store," Ben said.

"Stealth prototype."

"People say prototype when they know the thing is bad."

"Accurate naming is part of the scientific method."

May stood in the doorway with her phone in one hand.

"Before you go anywhere, you say the rules."

Peter looked at Ben. Ben did not rescue him.

"Low buildings. Observation first. No fights unless someone is in immediate danger. I call when I get there, before I move locations, and before I come back. If the ribs get worse, I stop. If the webbing misfires twice, I stop. If police show, I leave unless leaving gets someone hurt."

May's thumb hovered over the phone.

"And?"

Peter swallowed.

"If I end up on video, I tell you before the internet does."

Her face moved. Grief, fear, pride, anger. None of them stayed long enough to become a speech.

"Go," she said. "Come back."

The first swing lasted half a second.

He fired a strand at the edge of a three-story brick building, jumped, felt the web catch, and learned that understanding pendulum physics did not prepare the stomach for becoming one.

"Oh, bad."

He slammed shoulder-first into a fire escape, stuck to the railing, and dangled upside down over an alley while his ribs filed a formal complaint.

The second attempt was less humiliating.

The third nearly counted as movement.

By the sixth, he could cross an alley without touching the ground if the alley was narrow, the anchor point obvious, and nobody expected dignity.

Then someone screamed.

He landed on a rooftop edge and looked down.

Two men had cornered a delivery driver beside a closed pharmacy. One held a knife. The other had the driver's backpack and kept glancing toward the street.

Two attackers.

One civilian.

Low stakes, unless you were the civilian.

He dropped.

Badly.

He hit an awning, bounced, grabbed the pharmacy sign, and swung feet-first into the knife man's shoulder. The man spun away and fell hard.

Too hard?

Peter's stomach went cold until the man cursed and moved.

The second attacker stared.

Peter pointed one web shooter.

"You picked a terrible night for crime."

The web fluid fired in a fat white glob and glued the man's sleeve to the pharmacy shutter.

Peter stared at the glob.

"Line delivery needs work."

The attacker yanked against the shutter. Metal rattled. The first man came up with the knife.

Warning pressure arrived before motion.

Peter ducked, caught the wrist through cloth, and turned instead of squeezed. The knife clattered away.

Control.

He webbed the knife to a storm drain, then webbed both attackers' shoes to the pavement. One fell backward with a howl. The other swore with enough creativity to deserve a notebook citation.

"Stay," Peter said, and hated how close it sounded to something he had said to a tied-up man two nights ago.

The delivery driver backed away.

Peter lifted both hands.

"Hey. You're safe."

The man's eyes stayed on the mask.

"What are you?"

Peter had imagined that question sounding amazed.

It sounded terrified.

The victory thinned.

"Someone trying to help."

Police sirens wailed blocks away. A phone appeared in a second-story window.

Public heat, his mind supplied.

He fired a webline, missed the roof, hit a hanging sign, and had to climb by hand before the police turned the corner.

The delivery driver still looked afraid.

Peter texted May from three rooftops away.

Alive. No bleeding. Coming home by side streets. Video possible.

Her reply came fast.

Come home now.

The missing exclamation point made it worse.

He carried the driver's face all the way back.

***

At the Daily Bugle's late-night digital desk, an intern opened a submission titled SPIDER THING IN QUEENS???

The video was shaky, vertical, and mostly useless.

A blur in black dropped from an awning. White strands flashed. Two men fell. The delivery driver survived. The blur looked at the camera for less than a second before climbing a wall.

The intern almost deleted it.

Then J. Jonah Jameson passed behind his chair, saw the frozen frame, and stopped.

"What the hell is that?"

"Probably fake," the intern said.

Jameson leaned closer.

On-screen, two white eye shapes cut through a black cloth mask.

"Probably," he said, already smiling like a headline had bitten him.

✦

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