Chapter Text
Gwen should not be down here. Granted, she’s only been working at Oscorp for a few weeks, so she admittedly hardly knows where she is supposed to be, but she’s fairly certain this is not one of those places. It isn’t one of the airy, well-lit hallways the rest of the building seems so full of, with broad, glass-paned doors muffling the sounds of bustling laboratories within. Instead, this hallway is lit by badly flickering overheads, and seems to have no windows at all; despite the lack of windows, the damp, cool smell in the air gives Gwen the distinct feeling that she’s underground. She hadn’t even known Oscorp had a basement - there certainly isn’t a button for it in any of the elevators.
But she’d been sent on a coffee run - coffee, as if she isn’t in the middle of a master’s dissertation on cytopathology, for Christ’s sake - and, upon reaching the ground floor (where the break room is supposed to be, so legend says) had gotten hopelessly lost in a series of tiny, cramped passageways that culminated in a door, propped open to reveal a staircase leading down into near-darkness. And, well - Gwen is curious by nature, without the self preservation instinct the good lord gave a toddler, so. Down the stairs she’d gone.
It was as she reached the bottom of the stairs that the realization had hit her - that this was, perhaps, a restricted area. As much as halfway down the stairs, she’d still been able to hear the occasional siren from the street, or a bit of chatter from a nearby lab. Here, though, it wass absolutely silent. Gwen couldn’t hear a single living soul. There was, however, a soft, rhythmic beeping coming from beyond the stairwell. And if Gwen was already out of bounds, she might as well make the most of it - in for a penny, and all that.
So, feeling a bit like a member of Mystery Incorporated, she'd poked her head cautiously out the stairwell door and into the hallway to look around. She finds that the hall is lined with what appear to be thick, glass doors - or maybe observation windows, there aren’t handles on any of them - with various panels and monitor displays on the adjacent walls. The vast majority of the doors are dark, but the very closest one to the entrance, and therefore to Gwen, is lit up so she can see the inside. She ventures further into the hallway to investigate.
The lit room looks, for all intents and purposes, like a somewhat spartan bedroom. There’s a rickety-looking metal bed frame with a thin mattress against one wall, a desk piled high with sundry books and sheaves of paper and bits of machinery against another. High in one of the back corners, the edge of the room Gwen had been unable to see until she had come well and truly into the hallway, there’s a… Lump of something that looks like raw cotton, perhaps, or- oh, like the wispy moth cocoons that she and her brothers used to find in the nooks and crannies of the shed at their family’s summer home upstate. She has fond memories of their father telling them to leave those cocoons alone, because vulnerable things were growing and changing in there, and they were trusting big monsters like Gwen and her brothers to keep them safe until they were all done and ready to fly.
Large, strange cobweb aside, the room looks lived in, but - and Gwen checks a few times, to make sure she’s not missing anything, even though there’s not enough clutter to be hiding anything more - the theoretical resident of the space is decidedly absent.
She’s about to delve further into the seemingly barren hallway when her stomach drops at the sight of something stirring in the far corner of the room.
She then tries and fails to contain a small shriek as that movement gives way to a human head emerging from that webbed cocoon - which, now that she’s looking at it, with the perspective the head provides, really looks more like a hammock, anchored on one end to the wall and the other to the ceiling - and staring, unblinking, at her. The head is followed awkwardly by arms, one of which presses to the ceiling and sticks, what- as a whole man clambers out of the webbing and drops to the ground. He lands in a crouch to absorb the impact - the ceiling in his cell is higher than that of the hallway outside, Gwen notes - but slowly stands upright, posture almost defensive as Gwen surveys him.
He’s taller than Gwen , barefoot in sweatpants and a hoodie, and his eyes - still staring, unblinking, uncannily dark - are a warm, rich brown, and his hair is wild, also brown, and inexplicably windswept. He blinks, once, deliberately, and something in the way he does it - or in the way his head tilts, maybe, or his shoulders - sends a thrill of unease down Gwen’s spine.
That probably isn’t the only cause for the pit in her gut, though. Oscorp is… What? Hiding a man in its basement? The keypad beside the glass door is pretty good evidence that this cell doesn’t lock from the inside. The implications make her knees a little wobbly.
After what must be at least a few minutes of staring, the man raises a hand in a stilted wave. Gwen, unsure of what else to do, waves back.
The man seems to contemplate her response for a few moments before saying, with an odd lisp, “You’re not here to run tests.”
It isn’t a question, but Gwen says, “No, I’m-” before her brain catches up to her mouth and she gapes as she realizes that the lisp was caused by the honest-to-god fangs in his mouth. His canines are several shades too pronounced to be normal, and as Gwen falters, he bares them again in a flash of a grin that vanishes as quickly as it comes.
“Tests?” she asks, once she’s gathered herself. She feels embarrassed, almost, at how taken aback she is by his appearance. She can practically hear her mother saying, Don’t be rude, Gwen. People look different sometimes, that doesn’t mean we get to stare. Her mother had, admittedly, likely never come face to face with a man with fangs who lives in a cocoon, but good manners are good manners.
“On… On me?” The man suddenly seems less confident, his turn to be embarrassed. He tilts his head to one side. “Are you new?”
“Yes,” Gwen says, and that, at least, is an easy question to answer. “I’m pretty sure I’m not supposed to be down here.”
He smiles a little at that, nervous. “Probably not.”
“Are you?” It’s not one of the million questions Gwen means to ask, but it’s the one that comes out.
His face drops and he shrugs, the gesture somehow uncannily smooth. “I’ve never been anywhere else.”
Gwen doesn’t know what to say to that. So, ignoring the uncomfortable squeezing in her chest, she asks another question.
“What’s your name?”
The man doesn’t answer for several seconds, enough dead air to make Gwen wonder if she’s crossed some sort of line, or if - god forbid - he doesn’t have one. At length, though, he says, “Peter.”
“Peter,” she repeats. “It’s… It’s nice to meet you, Peter.”
“It’s nice to meet you, too, Gwen,” he says, brown eyes so earnest and intense and trained on hers that Gwen almost forgets that she never told him her name.
“How did you-”
“It’s on your name tag,” he says. “Sorry.”
“That’s fine,” Gwen says, even though she’s standing much too far away for Peter to realistically be able to read the small font of the business card-sized ID clipped to her breast pocket.
She wants to ask him about that - about his eyes - or about any number of other things, what the cocoon in the corner is, how he got here, why it’s apparently all he’s ever known, but before she can, Peter puts up a hand. His head tilts to one side again, but this time, his expression pinches, eyes squeezing shut before blinking open again just as fast.
“Someone’s coming,” Peter says, “from that way.” He points in the opposite direction of Gwen’s escape route, which is only a slight balm to the way her stomach plummets at the idea of being caught. “I can keep them busy while you get out of here. Bye, Gwen.”
Gwen can only blink at him for several moments, until he flicks a glance expectantly toward the stairwell she’d emerged from - and it feels like it must have been eons ago, even though it can’t have been more than half an hour - and raises his eyebrows.
“Bye, Peter,” she manages, before disappearing back up the stairs.
The rest of the workday passes in a haze - the sort that comes from knowing something you’re not supposed to know, but not knowing what, if anything, to do about it. Once, in the fourth grade, Gwen had wandered downstairs before school to find her mother watching the news with her fingertips white against the armrest of the couch. On the TV, there was live footage of a shootout her father was involved in. Her mother had shut it off as soon as she had realized Gwen was there, and Gwen had pretended she hadn’t seen, but navigated school that day with sick anxiety casting a veil over everything and everyone she did or saw, until she got off the bus in the afternoon and Captain Stacy had been there waiting for her. This is nothing like that, though, because when Gwen gets home at the end of the day, groaning softly as she toes off her heels and stretches her arches, there is still a man in a cell in her new job’s basement.
She shimmies out of her pencil skirt and blouse and into leggings and a hoodie, thinking about Peter. She swaps her makeup for moisturizer and ties up her hair, thinking about Peter. She makes herself a mug of tea, cycles through three of her favorite shows on Netflix, makes a poor attempt at meditating, and tries and fails to decide on what to do for dinner, all while thinking about Peter. She just can’t get his eyes - big, dark, wary, intense - out of her head. Someone at her new job is holding a presumably genetically modified man captive in their fucking basement. What the hell is she supposed to do with that information? So, like any girl in the face of a life crisis and in need of advice, she texts her best friend, and asks him to meet her for coffee.
By the time she arrives at Beans ‘n’ Things, their preferred coffee shop simply by virtue of the fact that it’s open past 2 PM, the last few rays of the sunset cast the shop’s cozy interior in a rosy golden hue, and Harry Osborn is waiting at their usual table with two steaming mugs already in front of him.
Harry had been Gwen’s best friend ever since she’d tripped him to steal his purple crayon in the second grade. Somehow, throughout Harry’s years of shuffling between multinational boarding schools where he got into more and more trouble, they’d managed to keep more or less in touch, and ended up - entirely by accident - in the same undergraduate program at Oxford. Shortly after they had graduated, Harry had been summoned back stateside by his terminally ill father and Gwen had moved back home to be closer to her own family as she started on her master’s.
Of course, their return to the US had been rung in with the news that Harry had apparently inherited his father’s terminal genetic disorder in lieu of his fortune, which had gone over about as well as could be expected. Harry looks pale today, in perhaps a few more layers than most would consider necessary for the tepid September evening, but otherwise in good spirits. Gwen is glad to see it. She almost doesn’t want to ruin his good mood. Almost.
“I’m sorry, but I need to talk to you about work,” she says, her self control crumbling after a few minutes of idle conversation over oat milk lattes. “Did your dad ever-”
“Jesus, Gwen, I don’t want to talk about my father,” Harry groans. “You promised you wouldn’t bring him up when you got this job.”
Which, fair. If Gwen were estranged from her family, written out of the will of a father who hated her, and left ill and scrambling for a career plan after years of having assumed she had one, she, too, would be disinclined to entertain conversation about said family. Especially if immediately after said estrangement, her best friend had gotten a position at said will-excising father’s company, which that friend had taken, not knowing about the will situation at the time, and then been unable to quit for “paying rent on time” reasons. It had taken them ages to be on speaking terms again. Unfortunately for Harry and his understandable hangups, there are larger issues at play here.
“Wait, you big baby,” she hisses, “it’s not about him, or me, even, it’s- did. Not that I would think- but- um. Did you know that he’s keeping a man in, like, a cell in the Oscorp basement?”
“A what?” Harry’s voice is far too loud, even for the cafe’s sparse evening crowd.
Gwen frantically claps her hand down over his on the table with a clatter and digs in her blunt, burgundy nails, just a bit.
“Shh!”
“A what?” He’s brought his volume down to a shrieky whisper, which is all Gwen can really ask for, given the circumstances.
Gwen sighs, and explains as much as she can.
Alone once again in his cell, Peter feels oddly bereft, but he doesn’t expect the woman - Gwen - to come back, so he shakes his head a few times and tells himself to get used to it. It was strange that she’d been there to begin with, had made his whole body tingle with anxiety, both for her and for himself. If she had gotten caught - he hopes she hadn’t, doesn’t think she had, he probably would have heard - things could have been very bad.
He still thinks about her, though, for the rest of the day - he probably will for a while. He can’t help it, despite his general policy not to think about Oscorp scientists any more than he strictly has to. She has very soft-looking hair, and pretty eyes, and despite the way she’d startled at his chelicerae, she had otherwise looked at him as if she thought he was a person. It was a novel experience, and one he thinks he’d like to repeat sometime. She had asked for his name.
He can still smell her perfume, a little, after she leaves. He hopes against hope that it isn’t a strong enough scent that Dr. Connors and his research team will be able to pick it up; they probably won’t, Peter has stronger senses than people who haven’t been modified. And, as the Connors contingent make their purposeful, self-righteous way into Peter’s space to collect blood and tissue samples, inject him with whatever noxious cocktail is on the rotation for today, and generally poke and prod him until he feels like a piece of meat, all without making eye contact or speaking any more than absolutely necessary, they don’t seem to notice the lingering, musky smell. That’s for the best - and it means that it’s a little, secret comfort for Peter and Peter alone, something to distract him from the barely-healed bruises blooming anew in the creases of his elbows.
He wonders, absently, what he’s been dosed with today. Last week’s “live” injection, amongst a never ending parade of placebos, had been some kind of flu-like infection that had had Peter feverish and coughing up unnatural-looking things for days before they’d finally treated him for it. He hopes this week’s trial is at least less uncomfortable.
When they all bustle out, scribbling on clipboards and sealing the door behind them, Peter doesn’t need a mirror to know that he looks like a corpse, all pale skin and bruises and under-eye bags. The check-ups are his least favorite part of the day. In part, because he hates being jabbed over and over even though he’s mostly used to it now, and in part because they leave him feeling so ill and exhausted that he can hardly do anything but sleep and eat for hours afterward.
Moreover, the researchers have managed to waft away the last vestiges of Gwen’s perfume, leaving in its place a raw, bleach-y sterility that mixes nastily with the constant dankness of the hallway.
Peter usually tries not to think too hard about how miserable his situation is - when he was very young he hadn’t even thought it was abnormal, until he’d put together that everyone else he sees on a day to day basis gets to go somewhere other than this 200 square foot room come nighttime - but right now it’s hard not to. It tends to be, when something breaks the unpleasant monotony of his routine, reminds him that there’s a world outside these four walls that he simply isn’t privy to.
Exhaustion, both physical and existential, bowls Peter over in the space between heartbeats, and he drags himself up to his web, curling up small inside of it to take a nap.
The last thing he thinks of before he drifts off is Gwen. Another disruption wouldn’t resolve his current crisis, but he can’t keep himself from wanting to see her again. Like when he was younger, and kept crawling up to the ceiling to touch the bare lightbulb with his chubby fingertips, even though it burned. It was the experience, the understanding that he’d wanted so badly, and the pain was barely an afterthought. Knowing that something beyond this exists hurts, makes his chest ache with jealousy, but it doesn’t hurt nearly as much, he thinks, as the idea of there being nothing out there at all. Gwen is, somehow, a stark reminder of that. The first one he’s had in what must be years, now.
He doesn’t expect her to come back, though, and frankly she would be smarter if she didn’t.
Which is why it comes as such a shock the next morning when he catches a waft of familiar perfume moments before Gwen comes creeping back through the stairwell door. She pulls up short in front of his room and stares for several moments - a recurring theme, then - before he realizes that he’s been pacing the ceiling as he reads the latest printout he’d been given from Science, which is not something humans can typically do.
He hurriedly drops to the floor.
After another few seconds of staring, he says, “We could stand to get better at saying hello.”
Gwen, at long last, comes unstuck. “Yes,” she says, a bit of a breathy laugh in it, “sorry. I was just… Do you - are you often on the ceiling?”
“Yes,” Peter says.
“Sure,” says Gwen. “Okay. Do you mind if I ask how?”
Peter doesn’t, so he explains as best he can. He’s done a fair amount of research on his own genetics, has a basic understanding of how his DNA had been spliced with some bastardized amalgam of the DNA of various spiders when he was very young, and how that’s influenced his biology. He doesn’t remember learning to read, but he certainly can - and regularly supplied reading material, usually from scientific journals or even reports on his own “project” lying around the upstairs offices, is part of an ongoing deal he has with Dr. Connors and his team. The more entertainment he has to pass the time as he rots away, the less likely Oscorp scientists are to leave his cell with broken noses instead of blood samples. Being a one-of-a-kind, twenty-years-in-the-making, miraculously viable genetic engineering project does come with certain benefits.
Gwen, to her credit, manages an admirable poker face for the duration of Peter’s backstory, though he can hear the way her heart starts beating faster a few minutes in and doesn’t slow when he’s done. In fact, once he’s described his whole genetic situation and the resultant mechanics of his ability to stick to the ceiling, she has more questions, and follow up questions for those questions - and they’re all smart, detailed, sharp. Almost an hour later, she’s sitting cross-legged on the floor outside his door, and he’s mirroring her, greedily drinking in the personhood she lends him just by holding a conversation. It’s almost more devastating when she has to leave the second time, standing and brushing off her skirt to return to work with an apologetic smile.
But the next day, Gwen’s back again. This time, Peter asks her questions - she’d found her way down to him because she’d gotten lost, because someone left a door open by accident. She has brothers, a mother but no father. She went to college in England, a different country, which feels so far from this sunless room that it might as well be another planet. Her favorite food is Korean meatballs from a little shop that’s on her way home from work. She’s in a graduate program, and working for Oscorp alongside to pay the bills. It’s all so foreign, but she talks about it in a casual way that makes Peter ache. Could he have had that, if he weren’t here? College, an apartment, a mother, a favorite food? He can’t stop poking at the unfamiliar bruise of what he might have been, question after question, until he hears Connors coming and shoos Gwen back up the stairs before she gets caught.
And somehow, the next day, she’s back. And the day after that. And the one after that as well. Gwen comes back, and they talk, and Peter learns how to make her laugh, which he’s never to his knowledge made someone do before, and that she sticks her tongue out when she’s thinking very hard.
And every day, the next day, she comes back. Every day, he thinks that surely this will be the last time she comes to visit, and then every day she proves him wrong. Peter isn’t an expert at this sort of thing, hasn’t been given much opportunity to practice, but - he thinks Gwen might be his first friend.
And sure, it’s taken him a few years, and maybe things could be better, but still - a friend. How cool is that?