Annihilate

The school day passes in a blur.

Tommy doesn’t have class with Ranboo and Tubbo until their very last period, but he has maths with Ran alone in the second last one. He tells Mr Nook about the photos and he waves him off and says they’d rather not brag about their trip to the accident company anyway, so that’s fun. But he does tell him it’d be nice to at least get some replacement pictures.

Which is even more fun. Because Tommy needs to go to Oscorp anyway.

Ranboo looks alarmed when they see him in maths. They pass him a note that reads WTF HAPPENED YESTERDAY and Tommy passes back a somewhat chill i’ll tell you n tubs later before letting the teacher reprimand them for passing notes.

He opens his notebook to the sketch of the shirt he wanted to make for Deo and has to pause before he opens up a new page. He draws the lizard from memory as best as he can, half an ear on his teacher while he relives what happened in the abandoned station. Not as fun.

Ranboo and him get out of the class as soon as the bell rings, and Tubbo joins them moments later, looking like he just ran across the entire school to get to them as fast as possible. They basically corner his ass.

Tommy tells them… most of it. He tells them about the lizard sans the fact that he actually fought it, he just makes it seem like he spotted it, it attacked him and he ran the fuck away. He tells them about running to Deo’s in a panic and he tells them that they got mugged and Deo got killed. Tubbo’s eyes go wide and wider while he talks.

When he’s done, Ran blinks before hugging him. Tommy lets himself fall into it. His side hurts where the lizard got him, but he hugs Ranboo anyway. His eyes are burning.

“Fuck, I’m so sorry,” Tubbo says quietly. “Tommy–”

“I’ll be fine,” he says. “You know I always am.”

His friends glance at each other and Tommy’s spider-sense comes to life briefly, just enough to perplex him. He blinks in confusion, looking around, but they’re standing in the corner of the cafeteria and nothing looks out of the ordinary. He turns back to Tubbo and Ranboo, trying to shake it off.

“Phil doesn’t believe the whole chemical accident thing,” he says.

Tubbo shakes his head. “I didn’t tell him that something from the labs escaped, I used the accident excuse. As far as my dad’s concerned, I don’t know about it. I only found out because I was snooping. And I heard later that they contained it again, so it’s back in the labs.”

“We need to do something,” Ranboo suddenly pipes up. “That’s human experimentation. And they’re covering it up.”

“Fuck am I supposed to do?” Tubbo hisses. “You know that if my dad gets a whiff about the fact that Phil is suspicious, he won’t allow me to hang around Tommy anymore. Same with you. He’s on the brink of sending me off to some private boarding school anyway.”

Tommy is getting restless. “Guys, you shouldn’t… we shouldn’t get involved in this.”

Ranboo turns to him with an incredulous look on their face. “What? You want to just do nothing? Tommy, you sawwhat Oscorp’s doing, we can’t just stand by–”

“One of my oldest friends was shot right in front of me yesterday,” Tommy snaps. “I think I have better things to do than go up against a multi-million company full of dangerous people. Like burying him.”

Ran shuts their mouth. There’s a beat where they just stare each other down, and Tommy frowns at them when Ran inevitably looks away, glancing over to Tubbo.

They’re hiding something. His best friends, that is. Tommy’s spider-sense weakly rings again, like confirmation. He narrows his eyes at them, and Tubbo looks at him like a deer caught in headlights when he looks back at him.

Okay. He wasn’t expecting this.

“What are you guys doing today again?”

“Gotta get home to Dad.” “Band practice.”

They’re lying to him.

He suddenly feels uneasy, just like yesterday in the subway station. Oh. His spider-sense was warning him about them. Considering that the other times it’s gone off have included him getting attacked by a monstrous lizard, Deo getting murdered, and Phil and Techno almost walking in on his superpower-shenanigans, he feels kind of unsafe very abruptly.

Still, he forces himself to relax his expression. He shakes his head and rubs his hand over his face, bandage scraping across the scar on his cheek. “Yeah. Uh. Sorry, I’m just… it’s been a long couple days.”

Ranboo’s expression softens, and before he knows it, he’s being smothered in their arms again. Tubbo joins and makes it into a group hug seconds later, wrapping his arms around both of them. Tommy kind of feels like screaming again. He dutifully ignores the feeling as he closes his eyes and counts to ten before extracting himself from the arms of his best friends and saying his goodbyes. He gives the page with the lizard drawing to Tubbo and gets the hell out of there.

True to his word, he makes a trip to the store to buy a new camera. Thankfully, he didn’t have any of his fancy lenses on it when it got fried, so he doesn’t have to buy any new ones. Then he buys the edition of the Daily Bugle Phil was reading at breakfast and takes the subway to 96th.

Because yes. He wants to go back to 91st. We established that he’s got a couple screws loose when he threw himself off a twenty-story building for the heck of it, didn’t we?

The Daily Bugle says that a ‘chemical accident’ damaged some important pipes that connected to more important pipes in the subway tunnels around the tower. It’s all very vague and Tommy can smell the paid-off journalists through the paper, which kind of pisses him off. The paper also says that the Bugle is paying good money for a proper shot of the Vulture and the Shocker, who apparently showed face around these parts yesterday but have yet to be linked to any criminal activity.

Tommy briefly wonders if he might’ve run into them if he had gone home instead of going to Deo. Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, he could use the money since, thanks to the new camera stored safely in his backpack, he is now broke.

91st is just as deserted as it was yesterday, but now daylight is coming from the entrance. Tommy’s blood is on the floor. He has half a mind to pour water from his flask over it and at least scrub it off a bit with his shoes. He waits until the next metro passes and hops onto the rails, looking for his phone on the way to 86th where he wandered off to yesterday. He wonders how far back to 96th the lizard was when Ranboo and Tubbo were still here.

How much of his spider-sense was alerting him to Ranboo and Tubbo lying to him and how much of it was alerting him to the danger creeping up on him in the darkness?

He actually finds his phone on the rails. It’s broken, though. Damn. But, on the bright side, he can definitely use the spare parts. He has a basket at home where he throws in all broken shit he has, and whenever he’s bored, he builds something out of them.

Tommy looks up at the walls. He needs something like a grappling hook. So he doesn’t have to take off his shoes all the time to get across buildings.

But he’s sticking to the spider theme. He’s fucking dying on that hill now.

If he had, like… webs…

Okay, he’s saving that idea for later. He jumps on the wall as a train passes by and then leaps onto it, sticking with one hand and letting the subway carry him. It’s elating, somewhat, to see the graffiti on the walls whizz by as he sticks to the train and uses his free hand to pull out Tubbo’s bandana once more. He covers his mouth and nose, pulls his hood deep into his face, and jumps off as soon as the train starts to slow down at 86th.

He rolls the force of his jump off on the floor (he still doesn’t know quite what to do with all of his momentum) and sprints out of the station, an officer they probably posted due to the ‘chemical accident’ yelling after him to stop. Tommy doesn’t listen, he just runs, sprinting through the streets of New York and basking in the feeling of being alive. His heart is pounding in his chest as he runs straight into traffic, knees buckling as he jumps and does a somewhat clumsy, somewhat elegant flip in the air and lands on a truck.

He leaps from car to car, police sirens going off as the cops start to chase after him for real. When he’s close enough to his destination, he loses them with ease, tugging Tubbo’s bandana off and waiting in a deserted alley not unlike the one Deo died in until the police cars have driven by.

Tommy looks around the alley once and then casually walks out of there, burying his hands in his pockets. His school is just around the corner.

There are still people there, of course, its just shortly after three, but he happens to know that Mr Nook only has six periods on Wednesday. Sneaking into his classroom is pretty easy when he can climb up the side of the building and enter through the window.

He takes a hammer to his phone and pulls out the bits he can use to create what he experimentally calls web-shooters. Because he’s not fucking creative. He’s cutting himself enough slack. He starts stirring up a project in development Tubbo told him about a long time; an adhesive fluid strong enough to carry tons of weight without ripping. Oscorp scrapped the idea because it dissolved after a few hours, making it virtually useless for them.

Tommy doesn’t care about that. He just needs it to be useful to him. Not for the first time, he thanks whoever or whatever gave him his good memory, because he can still recall most of the chemical components of the fluid and remake it fairly easily. He makes it more solid than the original and adds some compounds, and boom. Spider web fluid.

Spider fluid? No, that sounds… slightly weird. Web fluid. Yeah. That’s– better.

Tommy builds himself two prototypes of his web-shooters, with a trigger that will find its place in the middle of his palm. They’re designed so that he can slip them onto his pointer finger (so whatever he aims at will be aligned with it) and close them around his wrist, where the fluid itself is stored in two rings because he’s not sure how fast it’ll run out and he’d rather not risk chancing it.

He puts one on and aims his pointer finger at Mr Nook’s desk, pressing his middle- and ring fingers to the trigger. The spider-web goes more upwards than he expected it to, attaching go the classroom’s projector with a thwip, and Tommy tugs at it experimentally and rips the entire thing out of the wall.

Panicking, he pulls at the web hard, and the projector flies straight into his chest and knocks him out of the chair he was sitting in. He lands on the floor and dull pain flares up in his injured shoulders and side, yet he has to giggle.

Oh, this is so much fun. It’s almost distracting him from how messy and painful his life is at the moment.

His spider-sense flares up. Someone’s coming.

Tommy shoves the projector off of him and grabs web fluid, sketchbook and web-shooter #2 before jumping back out of the window. He turns his hand this time so his palm faces upwards instead of downwards and stretches both his pointer and little fingers out, pressing the trigger same as before. The web attaches to the window and he pulls it closed before letting go of it and landing on his feet.

“That was crazy,” he whispers to himself.

Cool. Now he only needs a boogeyman style mask and he can be right up there with Vulture and Shocker. Tommy outright cackles at the thought.

Yeah, no. He’s not doing that.

On the subway home, he throws up a proper sketch with his measurements and everything – at least the ones he knows. He’s gonna have to re-check them anyway if he wants this to go smoothly. He wants a suit that looks bright, because he wants to be one of the good guys.

What you always do. Just do good.

He can hear Deo’s voice echoing in his ears as he finishes the rough sketch of what he wants it to look like – he’ll go with his signature color red because he imagines everything else would be a bitch to wash stains out of, and on second thought adds black accents to the mix, and on third thought slaps the spider logo that he sprayed in 91st street onto the chest and the back. He makes the lines of the spider’s legs on the chest longer so he can have a bit of a creative touch, renewing the symbol but keeping the old version on the back.

It’s so weird. He knows the voice is the first thing he’ll forget about Deo, but he doesn’t think he’ll ever forget the things he said to him that night.

Whatever you do with this– these abilities you have now, I know whatever you’ll do with them will be great.

The skating protectors he wore on his first leap of faith would probably look kinda strange on top of that, since they’re baby blue, so Tommy envisions his elbows and knees to be padded with black and white material that will protect his joints there. He draws himself a simple mask with big goofy white eyes, framed with black in a curved half of a circle.

With great power… comes great responsibility. Promise me you’ll do good.

It looks like something he could imagine wearing, yeah. He leaves the soles of his feet and palms of his hands in white because he needs to make them out of a material thin enough to allow his van der Waals to still van der Waal without hindrance. Then he’s done, and he stares at it for a bit before writing above it.

SUIT #1: SPIDER-MAN