Annihilate

Tommy is tired to his bones when he gets home, but he has one energy drink left and his camera is heavy in his backpack.

His family isn’t home – he finds a sticky note on the fridge with Techno’s handwriting on it that reads Wil @ practice me @ uni Phil @ work curry @ fridge. Eat and grow little brother. He has to smile at it even though he’s feeling like the rhyme to the espresso he makes himself. Depresso.

What the fuck is he even thinking. He has to take a nap.

Yawning, he takes the curry out of the fridge and warms himself a bowl-full. He pours the blueberry Red Bull into a glass with his depresso espresso, which looks vile but he needs the damn caffeine so he can do his homework, and plops down at the dinner table to eat.

He’s too tired to think about the weird-ass conversation he had with Schlatt, and instead just pulls out his camera and has a look at the pictures he took of the data about the spider. The pictures are, thankfully, good quality, and so he starts reading through the account of experiments and base description of the spider.

It was a phoneutria nivigenter, a nocturnal wandering spider from the jungles of South America, specifically home to Brazil and its neighboring countries. Apparently, its bite can kill a grown human being, so that’s kind of… cool, he guesses. Could he kill someone by biting them? Fuck, he can never bite Wilbur again. Shit.

Yeah, he completely forgot how big it was too. The English name for it, banana spider, is pretty hilarious for a spider effortlessly the size of his hand. It doesn’t even look like a banana, it’s light brown. There’s a picture of it where it’s clearly going AYO I AM VENOMOUS by raising four of its legs and showing off the accordingly colored black stripes on them.

Then he gets to the part where they started experimenting on it and almost spits out his curry. The lady wasn’t shitting him when she said that the spider could camouflage itself. They crossed its DNA with the one of a drapetisca socialis, a tiny spider that camouflages itself to trees and is found very commonly in the UK.

Bruh. Maybe that’s why it gravitated towards him. They both had those British genes. Tommy shakes his head at himself and keeps on reading.

Oh wait. No. It couldn’t camouflage itself. Nevermind, the lady did just lie to him. The experiment failed, and they decided to try cross-species splicing instead. Tommy blinks at the picture of what they crossed it with – that has to be the ugliest fucking fish he’s ever seen.

Stargazer? Why in the fuck do all these weird-looking animals have such cool names?

Anyway, they’re apparently ambush predators who can camouflage themselves by burrowing in sand and they also have an electric organ behind their eyes. Oh, like electric eels, right? He remembers reading something about those bioelectronic organs for biology class once. But they don’t use it for hunting, only for defending themselves from predators.

This bad boy had also been irradiated by Oscorp, so there’s that. That fish was radioactive and they spliced its genes with the banana spider’s, which finally gave it the ability not to camouflage itself but to give off electric shocks when threatened. Jesus. That was the last of their experiments.

Tommy looks at his hand and decides not to think about that any more than he has to.

So he was bitten by a spider that had been genetically crossed first with a Brit other spider and second with a radioactive fish. Cool. No doubt. He’s hungry, man.

He finishes eating his curry and heads upstairs with his +2000 energy potion, throwing himself down on his chair. He does his homework, struggling to remember how any of that logarithm bullshit works, and gradually sips the cursed drink he made himself.

The Daily Bugle mailed him back. Ohhh. Tommy startles at the content of the e-mail.

They’re offering him a side job with consistent pay if he keeps getting them shots like that. Well, he could definitely use the money. He still needs to come up with some to cover a new phone and the camera. The five hundred bucks he earned with the gig of photographing the two vigilantes are coming in the mail, apparently, maybe he can find a cheap older model of an iPhone at Walmart’s online store.

He writes back with his school hours and asks if it works if he mostly works on afternoons, and also asks them to increase the pay because just fifty bucks for multiple hours of parkour are nuts. He doesn’t really expect anything less from J. Jonah Jameson, of course. Guy has a reputation. On second thought, he adds that he’d like to see him find someone else crazy enough to climb eighty-story buildings to get shots of the city’s most dangerous vigilantes, and sends the thing.

The response comes just a couple minutes later, agreeing on fifty per picture. He’s fine with that, honestly. If he consistently delivers three per session, that’s more than perfect, actually. He agrees on a job interview with credentials and everything, first thing next Monday afternoon, and goes back to his diabolical maths homework.

Wilbur comes home at three and pokes his head into his room.

“Hey,” he says, “you alright?”

Tommy is trying not to fall asleep by that point again, because fuck his metabolism again, and yawns in response. “Yeah. Just dying over physics.”

Wilbur makes a derogatory noise. “Physics.” He comes in unprompted and flops down on Tommy’s bed. “Man, I hate my job sometimes.”

“What happened? Did Joe sing louder than you or something?”

Wil laughs. “Shut up. No, I just spent the day arguing with our record label about how fucked we’re allowed to make our music thematically. I wanted to go for some real like… messed-up stuff that hits deeper than the old relationship shit, but it’s not marketable, apparently.”

Tommy scrunches up his nose. “Uh-huh? I have no idea what your relationship music means either. Aren’t people listening to you for the sick instrumentals more than your apathy metaphors?”

“I know, I said the same thing. And don’t make fun of my apathy metaphors, they’re very dear to me. Spent three hours debating how deep we could make our own music. We made something of a compromise, though. Started brainstorming new ideas. It’s fine, I’m just…”

“Tired?” Tommy suggests.

“Yeah. Funeral’s tomorrow, you know?”

The topic change catches him off-guard, but he nods anyway. “Yeah, I know. Been meaning to ask if you can iron my shirt.”

“Course I can. I'm in charge of writing the eulogy and everything, but I wanted to ask you if you want to read it."

Tommy stops short in the middle of writing down a solution. His pen kind of hovers there for a moment before he sets it down and turns to face Wilbur, who’s still lounging on his bed like a French girl waiting to be painted.

“I’m not sure,” he cautiously says. “I don’t think… I don’t think I knew him any better than you did.”

Wilbur frowns. “You were like his–”

“He wasn’t who I thought he was,” he says abruptly. “I’m not– I don’t know what to think about him. I have so many questions that he can’t answer anymore.”

His brother stares at him for a moment. Then he sighs. “Yeah, I guess. Bit of a kleptomaniac, wasn’t he?”

Tommy looks back at him sharply. “You knew about that?“

“Hard not to. I, uh, may have assisted him once or twice when we were still younger.”

He opens his mouth and promptly closes it again, because he has no idea what to say to that. Wilbur immediately follows it up with a short rant, though, which saves him the embarrassment of gaping at him like a fish. His brother stands up and starts pacing exactly like Tommy did in the morning – a wave of emotion hits him at that.

Fuck, Wil is so much like him sometimes. He swears they were cut from the same kind of cloth. It’s like they were destined to be brothers.

“I didn’t– listen, I figured you’d find out eventually. It was never anything big, we just broke into a couple warehouses. I was never really all that tech-savvy like he was, but I knew people, I was charming for a kid and I could lie convincingly enough. One time– I was what, seventeen to Deo’s fifteen? Yeah, Phil caught us on the premises of some stupid Oscorp facility. That was after he’d already adopted me. That’s how I– that’s why he never liked Deo. But I– God, I owe him so much.”

Wilbur is so dramatic sometimes. He goes down on his knees before Tommy like they’re in Mamma Mia or some bullshit and takes his hands. It fails to take the weight off his next words.

“He was the reason I met you. When you were just a tiny ten-year-old, Deo took you under his wing, and I met you. And I– I heard myself in your voice every single time you spoke, Tommy. I saw every bit of myself in you that I thought someone should’ve cared for. And when Phil adopted me, I just– I couldn’t do anything other than ask him to care for you.”

Tommy thinks he might be trembling a little, because then Wil tugs him into a bone-breaking hug. “I love you so much, you fucking dickhead,” he thickly says through tears he doesn’t think he should blink away.

“I love you too, Tommy. And Deo loved you. He was always looking for something to pin on Oscorp and he had criminal connections across the whole city, but he never wanted you to get involved like I did back then. He was always looking out for you. I promise you that.”

Mission phenomenally failed. Hot tears run over his cheeks as he nods and buries his face in Wilbur’s shoulder. The stress of the last few days is getting to him, the way his world has turned upside down is just too much to handle. But Wilbur always just knows. Even if he doesn’t know everything, he knows what will make him feel better.

It takes a while, but it’s not the hysterical breakdown he had right after Deo died, and not the soul-crushingly empty feeling in his chest that he had in the night. Tommy just holds onto his brother and breathes through his grief, and something in his chest loosens at the firm admission that Deo loved him and protected him.

“You have an e-mail from Oscorp on your computer,” Wilbur says suddenly.

Tommy blinks and disentangles himself from his arms, turning to look at his desktop. True to Wilbur’s word, there’s an e-mail notif on the side of his screen, reading… Schlatt’s e-mail address? The subject line reads OFFER.

“Huh,” Tommy says. He clicks on it and frowns.

Heya Tommy,

I just had a conversation with your science teacher about the field trip your class took to our company, and I had the pleasure of reading your essay on genetic splicing. You have a remarkable amount of knowledge about this topic and, after I showed your essay to George, I wanted to ask you if you want to come and give your input on a current project of ours. With appropriate pay, of course.

It may seem a little out of left field, but you have an incredible talent in this area, and I think you might be able to pitch us an idea on what we’re doing wrong in this. It’s kind of urgent for the company. And, I don’t know, I also want to talk to you more. You’re a very interesting young man and I think I should’ve given you the benefit of the doubt a long time ago. I’m not at Oscorp tomorrow, and I don’t want to steal your weekend, so what about Monday?

Regards,

J. Schlatt

Tommy stares at the e-mail for a moment because it kind of fries his brain. What the fuck is it with Schlatt and acting so nice all of the sudden? Is he– does he like, want to keep an eye on Tommy or something? Because he doesn’t want him looking into Deo’s killers and their motives?

This is actually kind of an A+ opportunity to snoop around the place. He frowns. Fuck, but he’ll have to blow off his Daily Bugle interview then. Eh. Or he could just tell Schlatt that he doesn’t have time on Monday.

“Uh… you’re not thinking about accepting that, are you?”

Jeez, he forgot Wilbur’s still here.

He sighs. “Wil, I killed both my camera and my phone in the span of two days. I need money.” And proof that Schlatt is cooking something up in that office of his.

Wilbur looks appalled. “It’s Oscorp.”

Tommy rolls his eyes. “Yeah. And? If I’m lucky, I’ll find viable dirt on them and blow a hole in the company.”

His brother opens his mouth, but then seems to bethink himself. He ends up just shaking his head at Tommy. “I trust you, man. Just stay out of trouble, okay?”

He nods and smiles and Wilbur pats his head like he’s a cat and leaves, taking his crumpled white shirt with him as he goes. Tommy writes back with an apology and offers his Tuesday afternoon, and that’s that.

Fuck, he’s so tired.

He didn’t shower in the morning, so he goes now, washing the grime of two days off of himself. It’s only four in the afternoon when he emerges from the bathroom, but he’s never felt more ready to crash. He’ll start up his suit project over the weekend and see how far he gets. Until then, he’ll have to stay working with his hoodie and cargo pants.

Also, he should probably get a police radio. He feels like an eventual repeat of that subway lockdown might be impending. That lizard thing is still at Oscorp, after all, and it already escaped once. He doesn’t think they’d be dumb enough to put it down.

The last thing he does before collapsing into bed is send an e-mail to Sapnap.

Hey Snapmap,

It’s Tommy. I need to talk to you pretty soon, I have a lot of questions that I think you could answer for me and I also think you can help me figure something important out. Sorry, I know this is super vague, but I really need your help.

Hope you’re alright.