Chapter Text
Peter is five the first time it happens.
He’s playing in the sandbox, his mommy reading a book on the bench just a few feet behind. Her eyes flash up every few minutes, sometimes catching his. They exchange smiles when it happens. He loves his mommy a lot, even if both her and his daddy are busy most of the time.
Another boy comes up, maybe seven or eight. He’s taller, bigger, chest puffed up like it means something. In his hand is a stone, a polished thing from a gift shop.
Peter’s seen them before—the kind you find at the end of your museum visit. Peter likes visiting the museum with his Uncle Ben.
“You’re pretty,” the boy says. “A pretty omega.”
Peter squints, knees in the sand and Captain America action figure gripped tight in one hand. He’s heard the word omega before. On TV, and in that children’s book he doesn’t like reading because he’s not a child. He’s totally a big boy.
“I’m not an omega,” he tries to say. “I’m Peter.”
The boy tries to press the stone into Peter’s hand, hovering over him and blocking out the sun. “I’m going to be an alpha when I grow up. You’re small and pretty. You should be mine.”
Peter doesn’t like this at all. He tries to push away. “Stop it!”
Then his mommy is there, pulling him from the sand. Her arms are strong as she lifts him up, up, up to land on her hip. He wraps his arms around her neck and feels her chest rumble.
“It’s time to go home,” she says, not looking at the other little boy at all. Her voice is more of a growl, but he’s not scared at all.
He looks back as they leave, watching the way the other boy runs with tears in his eyes and red cheeks, tossing the stone far into the bushes.
His mommy’s hand is warm on his back.
Peter’s nine the second time it happens.
He’s old enough now to know what words like omega, alpha, and beta mean. His mom and dad were alphas, his aunt and uncle are betas. Peter hasn’t presented yet—won’t, until he’s a little bit older. He’s still unsure about a lot of things, and he doesn’t know which one he wants to be.
(Does it have to matter so much? While everyone obsesses over dynamics, he’s more interested in dinosaurs.)
He’s in the kosher bakery in Rego Park, his Uncle at the register chatting away. Peter steps off to the side, peering out the storefront into the bustling streets of Queens. It’s getting late in the afternoon. They’re on their way back from Peter’s elementary school, and his backpack is still hanging off his shoulders.
A girl walks in, old enough to be in middle school. She has her dark hair in a high ponytail and a baseball jersey on. The knees of her joggers are grass-stained, and her backpack has a bat strapped to it.
She sees him not a moment later, and he doesn’t even realize it until she’s leaning over him. Taller, older, smelling like the sun and grass. Since he hasn’t presented he can’t smell anything about her designation—if she’s even presented herself. But there’s something in her eyes he doesn’t really recognize.
“Are you an omega?” She asks, and then reaches out and touches his face.
He pulls away and pushes his glasses further up his nose. “How should I know?”
“You’re pretty. And my ma says omegas are easily spotted. They’re born only good for one thing.”
“What’s that?”
She tries to touch his wrists, where a scent gland will one day produce pheromones. She scowls at him when he pulls away again. “I dunno. Making babies and being pretty?”
He frowns. “That’s stupid. I don’t want babies and I like science.”
“Omegas aren’t smart,” the girl snorts. Then she slips off her bag and starts rifling through it. She pulls out a pen, a glittery one that sparkles under the fluorescent lights. “I’m an alpha, and I’ll be a super rich baseball star. Be my omega.”
He likes the way the pen looks, but he shakes his head. This time, he doesn’t have a mom to pull him away. He doesn’t have a dad, either. They’re both gone. Far, far away where they can’t be reached. He can only look at their names carved into two stupid gray rocks.
“Peter?” Uncle Ben comes over, a brown bag in his arms. It smells good.
He runs past the girl and clings to his Uncle’s leg. “Can we go home?”
“Hey! Didn’t you hear me?”
“I’m not an omega,” he mutters, and Uncle Ben’s places a hand on his shoulder.
“Missy, I think you should wait until you’re older for that kind of thing,” Uncle Ben scolds.
He’s not Peter’s mom, but he pulls him away and to safety anyway. They leave the bakery and Peter doesn’t let go of his Uncle’s pant leg until they’re two blocks away.
Uncle Ben shifts the bag. “Which knish do you want?”
“Kasha.”
“Not spinach?”
“Kasha!”
“Are you sure? I thought I heard spinach…”
“Uncle Ben!”
Peter is eleven the third time it happens.
But this time there are no gifts presented, no offers of service or courtship. Peter’s not an omega yet, if ever, but Skip Wescott, alpha bachelor, doesn’t care.
He doesn’t give Peter anything at all.
Just takes.
Peter is fourteen when he presents as an omega.
The scent unfurls from his neck and wrists, soft and still childlike. The presentation is merely a marker, a check on puberty’s list. His designation will not affect him with heats until he’s at least eighteen, or at most twenty-two. Still it’s like a noose around his neck. A declaration that every person who’d approached him on the street was right.
Peter Parker is an omega.
The realization is sour, the acceptance is bitter.
It’s very rare that beta parents have children who aren’t also betas. Peter’s parents were both alphas, and they would have scented him with their familial markers as a way to let others know he’s loved and cared for and watched. His aunt and uncle try their best to be kind, to be helpful, to be understanding. But they’re only betas, and they have no ability to scent him for his own protection.
Peter’s first day back at school after his presentation is a nightmare. Other presented students stare in the halls, eager to inhale the fresh omega scent wafting around Midtown High. He finds trinkets and pens and wads of paper on his desk, pressed into his hands, or—on one memorable occasion—thrown at his head.
And he knows most of it is because he’s newly out. A sparkly new omega for everyone to stare at. To desire. To think they can own.
He’s fourteen.
A man comes up behind him on the metro, taller than Peter by a head and stinking of alpha. He dips down and tries to put his nose to Peter’s neck. Tries to suck in a lungful of unbonded, unprotected omega.
Peter twists and nails the man in the gut with his backpack, hard enough to draw a wheeze. His body shakes with adrenaline and fear because men who loom and take without giving scare him in a way nothing ever has before. It makes him think of white-blonde hair and sparkling blue eyes. A smile like a curse and a tongue made for lying.
He is nothing special at fourteen. His skin is pimply and ruddy, his hair a mess and his curls more frizzy than not. Baby fat still clings to his cheeks, and his limbs are knobby from the last growth spurt. His ears are a bit too big for his head at the moment, and his brows are thick and take up too much space over his eyes. His clothes are secondhand. There are still days where he forgets that he needs deodorant.
But his features are on the side of average that people can squint at and call pretty—the kind everyone says he’ll grow into. His eyes are lined by thick, dark lashes, and his mouth is pouty. It doesn’t seem like enough, but to desperate, narcissistic alphas it is.
It fucking is.
When the commotion at school settles down—because more kids start presenting and soon Peter is old news—the gifts stop. Now he’s just treated like a set piece. Most of his teachers are betas, but a few are alphas. A few are omegas. They all purse their mouths at his grades, at his interests, and his attitude.
The science teacher, a beta with a receding hairline and sweaty hands he frequently wipes on his pants, always shakes his head but lets Peter use the labs.
“You’re good,” he’ll say. “So I want to let you do what you can…while you can.”
He sits alone in the room, simmering in rage. The words of a little girl ring in his head.
Omegas aren’t smart.
The rage is easy.
He waits for the omega nature to surface. For the desire for pups, for being nurturing, for the need to lower his head and flutter his lashes. It never comes, and apparently everyone else has an issue with that.
Peter doesn’t want to be treated like glass, he wants to be treated fairly. He wants the chance to learn, to grow, to change the world. What he does instead is throw barbs at Flash Thompson until the alpha puts his fist to Peter’s nose.
He smiles through the blood.
When he’s fifteen, Peter is bitten by a spider.
The change from human to something more is not painless. It’s nausea, pain, cramps, blood. He spends hours in the shower vomiting, bleeding from every orifice, and shivering because he feels so, so cold even under a boiling spray.
He comes out of it with a new set of teeth, and sweeps all the ones that had tumbled from his gums into a trash can, buried under tissues and candy wrappers. His eyes have bleached to gold, and his body is so utterly graceful he has to forcefully watch how he moves so he doesn’t draw the wrong kind of attention.
Oh, and he has superpowers.
Super strength, super senses, super…adhesion?
He can lift tons, leap buildings, sense danger, hear a cry from three blocks away. He’s so hungry all the time he starts looking a little too long at pigeons and the passing pedestrian. The craving for sustenance is overwhelming, and he can only gorge himself on cheap take-out or raw meat straight from the freezer.
The scent glands on his wrists are now joined by a slight bump. Trails of silver, like veins, flare under his skin and fade out near his elbow. Spinnerets. Though the amount of webs he can create isn’t enough for what he does throughout the day.
So he makes web-shooters.
He becomes Spider-man.
And during shiva he sits silently next to his aunt, staring at the covered mirror across the room and the blank spaces on the walls where photos have been taken down. Neighbors and friends of Ben Parker wander in and out, presenting food and offering hushed condolences. No one tries to ply Peter with gifts, but the occasional alpha will hold his hand too long, or try to catch his eye.
They’ll murmur their sorrow at his loss, and then make a comment about how hard it will be for a widowed beta and an unprotected omega.
He wants to scream. Instead he glares, boiling under his skin, and perhaps whatever within him that changed can be sensed, because the alphas will freeze with fear and flee as soon as they can.
Aunt May cries softly, head bent low.
Peter wants to kill the man who did this.
Life goes on.
Peter takes to Spider-man with stumbling, painful steps. He doesn’t set out to become a hero, and he’s not the first one to call himself such. ‘ Menace’ and ‘ criminal’ are spat in his face long before he sees a person happy to have him come from the shadows to save them.
If he hits the alphas he finds attacking omegas a little harder, no one has to know.
Through it all, Peter is very careful to keep his designation under wraps. He wears altered, homemade scent-blockers to whisk away any possibility of his omegan scent escaping. He lines his suit with it. Adds a spray setting on his web-shooters in case it needs to be reapplied.
Spider-man is a complete disaster, a true menace, and a beta. He’s powerful and helpful and turning into something like a hero.
Peter Parker presses his body to the metro walls so he’s not groped from behind. He has to fight twice as hard for anything he writes, makes, or says to be acknowledged. And when he’s too loud about it, he’s talked down to like he’s an unruly child.
He fights and fights and fights. Loses a lot. People, comfort, peace of mind, love.
He finds himself visiting more of those stupid gray headstones every year.
Spider-man soars, Peter crawls.
Claws his way from high school, to his first heat, to college, to graduation, to a reality where barely anyone wants to hire an omega in the science field. He finds himself nowhere near the goals he had as a child. All the talent in the world meant nothing when it belonged to an omega. Now he’s thirty-two, burnt out, a year single, and living paycheck to paycheck.
“Are you sure about this?”
Peter glances up from his fifth burger, one thick brow raised. Randy looks sheepish for a second.
“I mean, there’s omega-only apartments, Pete.”
Oh, this is going to be one of those conversations. “If you don’t want to keep being roommates, that’s fine.”
“It’s just—I’m worried about your heats,” Randy says the last word like it’s a curse. The beta looks alarmingly like a man about to buy his girlfriend pads. You know the one. The guy who thinks women pee out of their vaginas. “I doubt this place is up to code. And the neighbor is…”
“A dick?”
“An alpha who looked at you the way wild dogs look at unlucky rabbits.”
Peter snorts. His spider-sense had been well aware of the man. The low buzz had rung through his bones the whole time. It’s not uncommon.
The spider bite did more than just give him superpowers. It drove his omegan systems into overdrive. His scent became mouthwatering, lightly persuasive even outside of his heat. The stronger the alpha, the more delicious he smelled. The heats he suffered through were intense enough to make him ill. Many times he’d nearly given in to calling Omega Services to get him a support alpha. Each time his insides immediately curdled at the very thought. Not to mention the fact that his… special circumstances made it too hard to get just any alpha to help him through it.
So here he was, over a decade of heats later, having never spent a single one with an alpha. It was close, back when he and Felicia were on and off. She wanted more than he could comfortably give, though. He did love her, but she loved him enough to want to mark him, to bond to him, to claim him as her omega.
And Peter couldn’t handle it.
Maybe something was wrong with him. For whatever reason, after her first rejection upon his identity reveal, she started giving him gifts. Natural for an alpha who wanted to court an omega. But all it did was make him want to disappear.
Why can’t we just be? He’d asked.
Their relationship devolved from there. It’s like the second an alpha knew he was an omega, they couldn’t just be friends. They couldn’t be just allies. He didn’t want a courtship as an immediate response. He wanted a relationship. One in which he could think about the possibility of ever letting the other mark him.
Not one where it would be expected, where he had to decide right then to be courted, to be scented, to have an alpha rub off on him just to stake a claim.
“I can handle a knot-head alpha,” he mutters. The burgers sit uncomfortably in his stomach. His appetite is lost. “I can find somewhere else if my heats really bother you.”
Randy grimaces. “It’s not like that, Peter. I know it’s just…biology. But sometimes you scare me a little.”
“I scare you?” Almost three years of them being roommates and he’s never heard that before. What a thing to spring on someone when you’re hunting for a new apartment.
“Whenever you were in your room during your heats and not out with whatever partner you had, you…you were scary. You made sounds like an animal in pain. I could hear it even with my headphones turned all the way up. You’d throw stuff around. Sometimes I even thought about calling Omega Services just to check in.”
Peter stuffs a ketchup-covered fry in his mouth. Now he’s eating just to eat. A trickle of embarrassment draws a flush to the back of his neck. “Oh.”
“Yeah,” Randy sighs. “I’m sorry. I know you don’t want to hear this, but as your friend…I’m worried. Your heats really take a lot out of you, to a point where I think it’s nearing a medical condition. You need an alpha.”
“I don’t need an alpha,” Peter says, and it’s nearly guttural. The sharpness in his voice has Randy gritting his teeth. The man doesn’t need to be an alpha or omega to feel the fear the spidery parts of Peter can inflict. “I’ve been handling myself fine. I’m dealing with it perfectly.”
“Alright, alright.”
“Sorry,” Peter murmurs after a moment. “I’m not going looking for an alpha, but I’ll check out the omega housing.”
Randy picks at what’s left of his own meal, dark eyes meeting the brown that Peter’s glasses project. “Just…be okay.”
“I’ll try, Randy. I’ll try.”
When they leave, Peter puts his hands in his pockets and inhales the smog and stench of New York. He watches Randy walk away and disappear into the crowd. He feels eyes on him even now, and it’s exhausting. That’s all he is these days. Exhausted.
They look at him harder now because he’s a far cry from fourteen. At thirty-two, he’s still with a face that looks even younger. Mostly because of genes… spider genes. His ears fit his face, his golden eyes are even prettier beneath the glasses. Dark lashes compliment plush lips. Moles and freckles are scattered across his skin, eye-catching enough to make people want to press close and map them. His brows are dark and heavy, his nose strong with a slight bump at the bridge from an old break before the bite. A mix of classic handsomeness and omega.
The kind that could pass for a beta if he tried, had his cinnamon and caramel scent not given him away.
Thirty-two and unbonded, unscented, unprotected. It means he’s faced plenty of alphas who think he’s desperate.
His spider-sense rings lowly at the base of his skull until he’s on his aunt’s street and eyes have finally faded away. He walks up familiar steps, hand hovering over the button. While he loves his aunt more than anything, because she’s the strongest woman he knows and she went through hell raising him, he also knows what he’s walking into. As he gets older, so does she. Recently she’s been more and more obvious about asking after his relationships, about alphas in his life, about anyone who might be sniffing around him.
He can already hear her asking if he’s met anyone new.
Peter sighs. He presses the doorbell. “May, I’m here!”
It’ll be a cold day in hell when he brings an alpha home with the intent to bond. A cold, cold day.