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Alright, let’s do this one last time.
“My name is Reki Kyan. I was bitten by a radioactive spider and for the last 2 months I’ve been the one and only, Spiderman! You know the rest. I got a raise at my job, saved my boss, spent the whole summer skating but also saving Okinawa and I even built myself my own mechanical spider! There’s only one Spiderman, and he’s your friendly classmate!”
On his shoulder, Sketchy #2 beeped loudly, sounding human enough for Reki to understand. The boy gnashed his teeth, annoyed as he kept swinging from building to building. It was moments like this that he regretted creating his silly mechanical spider.
“I know! I know I can’t say that as an excuse for being late.” He complained. “But just how cool would it be? I am sure everyone’s a fan!” A loud beep and slight flash of red light that was quickly over made him move his eyes from the yellow metallic animal on his shoulder to the streetlight that he was about to collide with. Shifting positions not as smoothly as he had wanted, he was able to avoid the streetlight. No more thinking about how much he regretted the creation of his spider, it was. “Do you think everyone became a fan during summer? Oh, imagine they are all wearing my merch or something…” Another annoyed and annoying beep. “Come on, dreaming is free! Do you think anyone can see me from here? We’re pretty high up.”
Originally, having his suit be yellow had been a great idea. He loved the colour yellow, it matched his personality perfectly, it made him feel like the sun itself as he swung from building to building when defending his beloved city from the evil guys and he just thought that his second favourite colour, red, would have been overdoing given his hair was the same shade. Now that he wasn’t defeating anything but his attendance record at school, the brightness of it made him self-conscious. What if someone noticed that Spiderman was out there, believed he was about to take care of some risk and then got suspicious when he didn’t make it to the news? He started to swear to himself, knowing he should have skated to school.
But his skateboard, which he usually took with him everywhere both as Reki and as Spiderman, had been broken yesterday, so this was all he had. At least, he thought, he had packed his school uniform inside his backpack so he could quickly change into it.
From now on, he was limited to keep on almost flying with his webs and his stupid spider who kept beeping about anything on his shoulder. While he had to avoid some more street lights here and there or some pigeons that were about to hit him in the face, he was able to make it to school smoothly.
“Record time!” He whispered to his spider, purposefully ignoring the fact that every time was going to be a record given it was his first day of the year as he entered the already empty school hall and made his way into the bathroom.
In the end, he ended up being late to his first class for just 5 minutes or so, which seems good enough to him. Reki opened the door to the lecture, bursting inside clumsily. He was counting on his homeroom teacher for the year to look down at him and make some comment about how he was already late on the first day, but to his surprise, the eyes in front of him didn’t belong to any teacher he had ever seen before in the school. He found himself looking at a tall boy with blue eyes and hair, who was standing in front of the class. His face was not familiar at all, Reki thought, getting lost in a bunch of memories from past years as he tried to place this face and failing completely.
“Reki, would you mind taking a seat?” His teacher’s voice rang from behind the new boy who, Reki considered, was actually kinda cute. He mumbled an apology and made his way to one of the two only free desks of the whole class, in the last row, trying to ignore the not very discreet giggles of his classmates. “As I was saying, we have a new student this year. Mind introducing yourself, kid?”
Oh, so a new student. Reki placed his eyes on him and tried to pay a lot of attention to his introduction, hoping he would say that they had an interest in common so he could approach him. Thanks to the enhanced senses that he had obtained when he became Spiderman, he could hear a bunch of girls from the class whispering to each about how cute he was, mentioning his height and peculiar hair colour. He’d to agree with them, he was handsome.
“I am Langa Hasegawa.” The boy said, growing quiet right after as if that was all. Maybe it was.
“Anything else?” Their teacher asked him to continue.
“Eh… I came here from Canada?” Once again, he was short with his sentences.
“Is that all?”
“Should it be longer?”
He sounded like he genuinely wasn’t sure what to do. To Reki, it came off as dorky, maybe charming, so when he heard a girl and a boy from the first row talking about how dumb the new student sounded, it was enough to upset him. He frowned, annoyed, not noticing that Langa had made his way to the desk by his side. Right, there were only two desks left when he’d come… He smiled when the other boy took the one by his side. Reki was about to turn to Langa and start talking with him, confident the teacher wouldn’t be able to hear him from there, when suddenly a conversation from close by that he was sure he wouldn’t have heard without his powers distracted him.
“Have you seen Reki?” A boy from class spoke. “Look at his sleeves, he’s wearing a Spiderman costume under the uniform.”
“Aren’t we a bit too old for that?” Another boy laughed.
Reki shot his eyes down to his arms, noticing that the uniform sleeves weren’t long enough to hide his suit, given that it covered his whole hand in yellow fabric decorated with black lines. Fuck. He tried to pay no mind to it, hoping that the guys’ conversation would die soon when they started to pay attention to the lecture, but that simply didn’t happen. Somehow, those two were able to keep talking and talking about such an undebatable topic like “Reki is a loser” was. It was only after some moments that their conversations seemed to change to what hopefully would be a better topic… But that didn’t end up being so, since they decided to move onto discussing how average of a superhero Spiderman was.
“He thinks he’s so cool but I don’t see the vision.” Said one of them as Reki tried to make himself small in his chair and hide his hands. “Who even likes spiders? They’re disgusting, come on. Why would he choose to be a spider out of everything?”
“Also, some of the merch they did for him is so horrible. Have you seen the popsicle?” Reki had, and could confirm that it was a horrible popsicle, he thought as he sank more into his chair.
“Ew, don’t talk to me about that. My sister bought them for no reason and they tasted like shit. Maybe they used spiders on them and all, can you imagine?”
He was starting to feel sick to his stomach. Not only did the idea of eating spiders in his food make him a bit nauseous, but also his insecurities always left his tummy feeling silly when something happened that made him anxious. He was used to being Reki, the loser, but he hadn’t thought that his first day would be spent hearing about how he now was also Spiderman, the mid hero. Great. Cold sweat was quick to cover his back, making the suit uncomfortably stick to his stick, and it was a matter of time that his thoughts became loud enough to muffle any other conversation at class. He just hoped that the new student didn’t notice he was sweating so much, or that he had his suit on… Reki didn’t want him to think that he was wearing cosplay to school, much less that he liked what apparently everyone recognized as an average at most hero.
He was getting extremely stressed, enough for him to barely recognise the tingling sensation going over his body. At first, he related it to the uncomfortable mixture of tight fabric and sweat, but it was situations like this that he had built himself a mechanical spider for. Though he had placed his creation carefully inside of his backpack, a glimpse to his table revealed that it had somehow made its way on top of Reki’s notebook.
“Huh?” He grunted lowly. “Come back, what are you doing?” He said, still not realising what was happening and taking the robot between his hands to drive it back into his bag.
It was then that he watched in awe how his bot gracefully jumped from his hand onto the floor and walked away from his desk, once again making him regret its existence but also forcing him to finally notice the weird feeling all over his body. As he watched Sketchy #2 make its way from one side of the class to the other, thanking silently that no one seemed to be paying attention to it, he tried to make sense of the situation at hand. Judging by the way his spider’s eyes were lighting in red and turning on and off quickly and by the way his body was starting to feel more and more strange, danger was near.
But what was he meant to do? It’s not like, unlike his robot, that was now climbing up the wall and exiting the room through one of the windows it had leading to the corridor, he could leave the classroom without no one noticing. The teacher for this subject wasn’t known for letting students go to the bathroom either, so he was fucked. Looking at the clock on the class’ wall, he found out there were about 10 minutes left of class, which he couldn’t wait to be over and which coincidentally felt like the longest 10 minutes he had ever gone through. Reki felt himself having to hold back the urge to bounce in his seat out of desperation and unreleased energy and nerves, he had something to be doing that was more important than Maths class and he was worried about what would happen if he didn’t do it right now. So, as soon as the bell rang and announced class was over, he basically jumped outside of his chair and rushed to the corridor.
Which was way too full.
He’d become Spiderman during the summer break, so he hadn’t been sure about how it would be like to be Spiderman at school, but it was proven to be horrible. Overhearing chit-chats during class had been bad, but only because the conversation he’d caught was horrible… But standing in a crowded corridor in which he could hear everyone’s words and smell every single one of those teenager’s perfume, deodorant or lack or both while blinded by tube lights was hell. Worst part is he’d no idea where his spider was, but no way of figuring it out either, given how nauseous and dizzy he’d gotten in just a few seconds of this new environment. Man, he really felt like he was gonna die, puke or both. He knelt down on the floor, hands going straight to his hair as the sensory stress drove him to tears.
“Hm… Are you alright?” A voice he didn’t know but that sounded terribly loud and distorted sounded above him. He groaned out loud. “Oh, you are not.” The person talking to him stated the obvious before wrapping a hand around one of his wrists. “Sorry for touching you, but let's get you somewhere quieter, alright?”
Reki felt himself nod as he was being driven somewhere else, not forgetting about the upcoming danger and his lost robot, but not having it in him to tell anything to the person that was walking him to the boy’s bathroom. Once the door closed behind him, the sounds from the corridor muffled slightly and he was able to relax a bit. He took a deep breath and looked up to the boy that had taken him there, who was none other than the new student, Langa.
“Thank you.” He said, voice hoarse.
“Don’t talk if you don’t want to, I understand.” Langa told him. “Hm… Do you feel better?” Reki nodded, lifting a hand to clean his tearful eyes. That made his eyesight less blurry and allowed him to focus his eyes in a spot on the wall behind Langa: Sketchy #2 had climbed up the bathroom’s wall and was lighting up brightly in the colours that meant danger was about to happen there. Great, now he just had to get Langa to leave. “Nice! That’s great. Um, do you like Spiderman? I noticed your costume, heh.”
“Ah, yeah, I like Spiderman.” If they had to converse, he needed it to be short and fast, as much as he disliked that.
“Me too! I really like them, I think they’re super cool. I own a bunch of merch but I’d never seen such a realistic costume, it looks really well done. Was it super expensive?”
“Eh, more or less. You could say that I made it.” His voice did something funny at the end of the sentence, when he saw the robot was moving and going back to him. Langa was gonna see it and he couldn’t have that.
“Oh? You can sew? That’s amazing! Is there anything else you like to do? Maybe you’re one of those people who are very crafty?” It seemed like Langa wasn’t looking at the robot, even if Reki’s eyes were stuck on the floor where it was walking. It didn’t matter, because soon enough he felt its little pointy legs crawling up his leg and back to take its usual position on Reki’s shoulder. He was fucked. “What’s that?”
“Uh… You see, I also really like… Mechanics.”
Please, don’t ask anything else. Please, don’t ask anything else.
“You made yourself a copy of his spider?” Oh, thank God, this guy seemed just as dorky as Reki was and it was about to save his ass.
“Sure did! Isn’t it amazing, haha?” He wanted to kick himself in the face as soon as the nervous giggle escaped his mouth.
“Mhm! What’s your name, by the way?”
“Reki, Reki Kyan, it’s a pleasure.” He rushedly said. “Now, if you…”
“Nice to meet you, Reki.” Langa held his hand and shook it. “I think we are very similar, you know? It’s been a long time since I met another autistic person!” Since what? “Because you’re autistic, right?”
“Eh…” What was he meant to say? “I am not autistic, just Spiderman”? He didn’t want to lie about this. “Not really? I mean, not at all. I do have ADHD, and all, but that’s not autism. Sorry to disappoint?” If he wasn’t so worried about an impending danger that was about to happen somewhere in the school, he would have actually kicked himself somehow for sounding so stupid.
“Oh, my bad!” Langa didn’t seem disappointed. “Uh, your spider is doing something weird, what does it mean?”
“Doing something weird” was beeping repeatedly and lighting a bright, red light that was meant to alert everyone to leave the place. However, for a Spiderman fan, Langa didn’t seem to get it.
“Would you look at that? It totally is.” Reki told him. “Aw, man, I don’t think I can go back to class with it doing this. Why don’t you get going while I fix it? It’s your first day and all, so you shouldn’t make a bad impression by being late… I would know about that!”
Langa smiled at his joke, which made him happy. “I will get going. See you later, Reki.”
“See ya!” He smiled at him as Langa exited the bathroom, hoping that they could still become friends regardless of the weird situation in which they had met. He sighed loudly once he was confident he was alone in the bathroom, quick to take his uniform’s jacket and pants off. “Where is it?” He asked the spider, which pointed towards the bathroom’s translucent window.
Reki opened it and looked outside, finding a group of three masked and armed men entering a nearby bank before he put his mask on and jumped.
…
He and Langa had, against all the odds, actually became friends. Matter of fact, they had even become co-workers, which was great. There was nothing like working together with your best friend, Reki thought as he finished packing some of the new skateboards they had received today. Honestly, there was nothing like being with Langa, he said to himself.
Langa coming to Japan was easily the best thing that had ever happened to Reki.
The boy was hilarious to be with and extremely kind to him, something that Reki had felt was missing with most people he’d met. He understood Reki in most things, never blaming him for not doing something at work when out of energy or when his executive dysfunction made fighting crime and evil seem easier than doing homework. And, most importantly, he asked Reki whenever he didn’t understand him. Even if he knew it would be counterproductive, he regretted not being able to tell him about his secret identity. He’d tried to leave subtle hints about it in hopes Langa would find out, but to no avail. He’d never felt cared for like that before, so he treasured Langa like a jewel. Other than that, spending time with him was just easier than with most people. Be it at class, at work or at S, which he didn’t think Langa would enjoy but ended up loving, it was always fun and not stressful (relaxing, more than anything) to be with his new friend.
Moreover… He was still very cute in Reki’s eyes. Perhaps handsome was the better word. He was told, with delicate features and a soft voice that was everywhere in Reki’s dreams. His hands were soft and his hugs were warm and long, and perfect… Hugging Langa was heaven, so at some point his naturally curious head had driven him crazy about what kissing Langa would be like.
“Reki!” His friend called. “Are you done? Wanna close and get going?”
“Would love that.” He said, dusting off his hands after finishing the task at hand.
They were going to S together tonight, and he couldn’t be more excited about it. Reki allowed Langa to close the store for the day, not something that usually happened since he hadn’t been working there for long. He picked his backpack, where he kept Sketchy #2 and his Spiderman suit in case it was needed, and his skateboard from their resting room for staff as his friend looked for the keys and then he waited outside so they could go to S together. Langa was having a beef against Adam tonight, and the truth is that Reki was more nervous about it than he was. It wasn’t the first one, but one of many, yet Reki could never get used to the fear he felt whenever those two went against each other. Langa was the most important person in Reki's life and he didn’t want him to get hard over skating, especially when it had been him who introduced Langa to S. At least, he was there if Langa needed him, no matter the reason, and that helped him feel better.
So, he filled his lungs with air, sighed loudly and left Langa on the start line while Adam went on a dramatic speech no one was paying attention to. A pat on the back and his usual words of encouragement got Langa to smile at him before he had to leave somewhere else to watch their beef, which started shortly after.
It went alright for a moment, maybe for 3 minutes, but it wasn’t enough for Reki to calm down his nerves regarding Adam. That’s why once it started to rain heavily, he immediately panicked. Anyone else would have realised it was impossible to skateboard like that, The ground was muddy and slippery and no one would skate on their right mind would skate on it, much less downhill, in the darkness of the night, against a man without boundaries of any kind. Yet again, those two were the last people that would come to his mind if told to find someone who would stop a beef for an understandable reason. Despite the rain, Reki tried his best to keep his eyes on the video of Langa skating on the big screen, wanting to check if he was going to be okay…
Which he immediately knew wasn’t going to be the case once his whole body started to tingle. Carefully, he inspected the screen once more to see what was happening: Adam was skating normally and ahead of Langa, who seemed to be about to attempt a shortcut in an extremely difficult part of the road to lessen the distance. Reki moved his head, trying to find the spot to which Langa was heading and trusting his senses to look for the danger. He squinted his eyes after finding the place and noticing that, at the end of it, a heavy branch hit by the wind and rain threatened to fall. He gulped, apparent now that his senses were warning him about Langa getting crashed by it. He didn’t have time to change into his suit or anywhere to do it, and if he did something without it, everyone would know… So, what was Reki meant to do?
He was shaking, completely lost and not knowing what to do, when a collective exclamation from everyone at S went off. Reki looked up to the big screen, scared something had happened, only to find out it had been turned off. What? He thought. That’s never off… A small, blue light from underneath caught his eye: There it was, his silly robot that he so many times had regretted inventing, saving his day by completely destroying one of the wires that connected the TV.
He was quick to put the hood of his sweater up and shoot a web from his red bracelets to latch anywhere that would allow him to go in Langa's direction. He swinged as fast as he could, swiftly jumping through S in hopes he could get where he needed before anything terrible happened. The path Langa had taken seemed long enough for him to reach him before anything terrible happened. His back was fully covered in cold sweat and he could barely see through the rain, but he really trusted his enhanced sight to spot Langa when he needed to. If he could prevent Langa from getting crashed, that was all that mattered, he thought as he tried to go faster. Cares about anyone seeing him were almost gone, and having the other find out about his identity hadn’t even crossed his mind.
Reki was able to find Langa after what felt like a very quick minute. His blue hair was dark with the water and sticking to his forehead, and so were his clothes to his body, yet, he determinant kept skating towards the end of the path, unaware of the danger. Latching his web to a tree farther away and in a safe and hidden area, Reki swinged past him, gently grabbing him around his waist and taking him with him, just as the branch tree fell with a loud hit to the ground. He used all the strength in him to avoid having the boy falling to his side, but he wondered if it was truly needed since Langa seemed to be hugging him.
Reki ended up dropping Langa on the floor as gently as possible as he himself sat on a low branch, trying to prevent his friend from seeing him. He waited there in silence, trying not to breathe too loud.
“Huh, what was that?” He heard Langa’s confused voice. “Spiderman? Reki? Whoever it was, where did you go? What just happened?” A bunch of very quick english expressions Reki didn’t understand followed the quote. “Please, don’t leave if you haven’t. Please, just wait!”
That sounded like distress in his voice, and there was nothing Reki hated as much as having Langa in distress. What else was he meant to do other than spiderly stick his calves onto the branch and drop himself back?
“You were about to get in a lot of trouble…” He said, trying to sound smug. Langa, who was facing somewhere else, turned and smiled at him.
“Reki? You’ve been… You’re…?” He said, pulling his bangs away from his face as it to check he was seeing right.
“Everyone can wear the mask,..” He mumbled, anxious but not sure about what. “Including your friendly… best friend?”
“Did you just save my life back there?” Langa’s face was so bright, his smile lighting up the dark night.
“You could say so.” He shyly told Langa.
“How will I ever thank you?”
“Oh, there’s absolutely no need. Just don’t tell an…”
He couldn’t finish the phrase, given that Langa’s mouth had just completely shut his up with a passionate kiss. Even upside down, Reki found himself unable to not respond to it, kissing back the best he could. This is what he’d been wanting for ages, as heavenly as he had always imagined.
And it was just next day that Spiderman became Langa’s friendly boyfriend.