Annihilate

The wind is howling in his ears.

Tommy loves free fall – he loves when the world goes upside down as he twists in the air and falls, arms outstretched like wings he doesn't have. The city's lights turn into blurry splashes of color against the dark backdrop of the night, and he lets himself drop towards the hard ground, closes his eyes against the bright lights.

Then he follows his instincts, always follows his heart. He pins a web to the next best building and flings himself around the corner, back into the air, and aims for a lorry, shooting two webs onto it before pulling harshly and sending himself down on it. He jumps from car to car, effortlessly keeping up with them even as he gets onto the street and runs on his own, waving at a wide-eyed little girl in one of the car windows.

He's up in the air again in the next second, yanking at his webs and launching himself into the air. The cops can't keep up with him for long. His unsure, experimental parkour has turned into something at least halfway graceful. Tommy feels like he's flying, and he can't help but giggle at himself when he lands horizontally on the side of a skyscraper and casually takes a stroll up its side, admiring the beautiful colors of the city.

The night smells like illegal activities. He has half a mind to take nice pictures once he's on top of the building, thinking of his paycheck from the Daily Bugle. He scouted out Oscorp Tower, as he has been doing for the past couple days, and now he's just waiting for the clock to turn to midnight. Then, there's a shift change in the guards down in the subway tunnels, and he'll be able to break into the tower.

He might be a little stupid and reckless for this. But in all honesty, he's too angry to care. There's a feeling in his gut he can't describe, like he can feel something bad is about to happen. He just wants to be there when it does.

Tommy lets his legs dangle over the edge of the skyscraper and leans back, lying down. It's snowing again, but he's not cold even as the wind keeps howling in his ears, louder with how far up he is. His breath paints clouds into the freezing air every time he exhales, and he watches them dissolve in seconds, fleeting. There and gone in a single second, as everything else in his life seems to be lately.

He looks at his wristwatch, low on his arm because otherwise it'd get in the way of his web shooters. It's time, but he lets himself linger in the moment for a second. Something is brewing up in his veins. Then he pushes himself up and over the edge.

Free fall again, uncontrolled, everything spinning around him as he lets out a scream that gets lost in the nightlife of New York. Tommy aims blindly and his webs hit the next building, breaking his wonderful fall. He swings towards Oscorp Tower, long not lit up anymore, and drops into the next best alley.

The good thing about New York is that no one gives a shit about a masked weirdo in the subway. Tommy gets off at Dyckman Street where, just as it was in the last couple days, the security guard is about to leave his shift. Once the man is turned away, Tommy slips through the crowd and into the tunnel.

It's kind of funny, how so many people are there and yet no one sees him. Like all the failed attempts to give the spider that bit him the ability to camouflage itself are working in retrospect. He hums a tune of one of Wilbur's band's new songs under his breath, eyes wandering over the graffiti-covered walls.

There's the door with the Oscorp-logo on it. Tommy opens it carefully and peeks into the maintenance tunnel behind it. No one's there. He takes a deep breath before he slips into the tunnel and soundlessly closes the door behind him, leaving him in total darkness. It's not the first time he's thanked God that the bite gave him clear night vision. It allows him to stay concealed and gives him an edge over anyone who might be in this tunnel.

Pretty instantly, he comes across a vent that was all but torn open from the inside. He resists the urge to whistle appreciatively at the claws marks in both the wall and the metal frame of the vent cover, crumpling the thing up like a soda can. He had those same claws in his shoulder.

Tommy sighs to himself. Time to go see his good friend, the lizard.

He pulls himself up and into the vent. It's slightly claustrophobic, but he forces himself to stay calm and wiggles into the opening, arms first so he can pull himself forward. He has absolutely no fucking idea how the lizard fit through this thing, but he supposes it didn't have to deal with things like fears of enclosed spaces.

It's silent around him, and as he pulls himself through the vent, he finds himself anxiously listening for noise. All he hears is his own unsteady breathing and the occasional echo of a something creaking somewhere, so he finds himself focusing on breathing evenly. It doesn't really work.

Tommy doesn't like tight spaces. No amount of doped-up radioactive spider-fish venom can ever change that. When he comes to a point where the vent gets even tighter for a couple meters, he has to stop in the middle of getting through it and close his eyes against the tricks his brain is playing on him. The walls feel like they're closing in around him, and his breathing is too fast and what if he dies in here he feels like he'll die in here what if he–

He shuts his eyes and tries to think about something, anythingelse but the nausea bubbling up in his throat. All he can think of is the stupid song Wilbur played for him on the acoustic guitar the other day, like he does all of his band's songs, just for Tommy.

And so I find myself in your mum's bedroom–

Tommy has to giggle in the middle of his mild breakdown. Wilbur's lyricism is so funny sometimes – on one hand, he has this eloquent and sophisticated way of wording things, intercut with lyrics where you can tell they're having just so much fun, and on the other hand, there's bangers like This just in, I am a total fucking dumbass. He loves his music. He can almost hear him telling him to calm down, to take a deep breath.

He keeps his eyes closed as if that could make the walls around him disappear and keeps going.

After the narrow passage, he gets to a sharp bend in the vent – not to the right or left, but upwards. Tommy twists around once so he can look up it. He's willing to bet good money that up there is where the tower's laboratories are. Infinitely glad to get out of the suffocating lying stance, he uses his hands to pull himself into a sitting position and then, pressing his hands to the sides of the vent, stems himself upright. It's just wide enough that he can stand in it, but it feels so much better than lying.

Tommy takes a couple deep breaths and tries to calm down a little more. Then he begins his ascent, which is made a bit easier by his general stickiness.

In the middle of the upwards vent, there's a spot that was hastily patched up. Tommy can still see the claw marks on the sides, covered by a quickly screwed-on panel. He uses his legs to hold himself in sort of a crouching position mid-air and feels around on the screws of the thing. Doesn't feel very secure, honestly.

Tommy rips it off with little effort and peeks out of the hole.

He's looking into a gigantic room, with a lot of desks and lab equipment. It looks like most of Oscorp's research rooms, just with a lot more advanced technology. It's weirdly narrow, and Tommy has the feeling that it should be wider, and there's definitely no inhuman experiments.

Something's foul here.

He spots a control panel on the wall and gets out of the vent, gingerly placing the cover he ripped off onto the ground. Thankfully, as he knows from Deo's detailed experiences of breaking into this place, Oscorp usually just alarm-locks their doors. Which is really stupid for a group of scientists and geniuses – it seems like a simple solve for any thief. If you can't open one door, make another. That's probably why Deo got away with what he did for so long.

Until he dug too deep.

Tommy is at the control panel in seconds. There's a button that says 'showcase' under it. He feels something deep in his bones when he looks at it, that weird thing that he always feels during thunderstorms and snow and rain. He understands what it is for the first time – electricity. He can feel the electric current in the panel.

He reaches for the showcase button and presses it.

The walls shimmer – Tommy lets out a yelp when they flicker like holograms and then disappear, becoming see-through. He was right about the narrowness of the room. It is wider, and the lab acts like a hall between multiple secluded rooms where they keep their experiments.

Tommy's spider sense flares to life and he flinches away from the panel and the now visible room behind it, head snapping to the side. Just like that, he finds himself face to face with his lizard friend again.

He can see it better now, as it’s standing still behind the… glass? Whatever separates them. It looks worse than it did last time he saw it, it looks injured and sick – and there’s multiple IVs in its body, restraints around its hands and feet. Like a dangerous, wild animal. Like a tortured animal.

It's staring at him from behind the glass that separates them, eerily still. Tommy is reminded of the subway tunnel, but he's standing here with a mask and the lizard looks almost curious. He reaches for his mask, slowly, and pulls it off.

The lizard keeps staring at him. There's something like recognition in its eyes even though they’re hazy, and it gets up from where it was sitting and moves closer to the glass. Tommy does the same, stepping forward. For a while, he just stares at it and it stares at him, and he sees his reflection in its shining eyes.

"Who are you?" he absently mumbles. Who were you before they turned you into this? He can’t even remember who he was a week ago.

The lizard doesn’t answer. But it moves closer and bumps against the glass separating them, scales shimmering in the light of the hologram when it flickers again. Tommy raises a hand and rests it on the cool glass. The lizard closes its eyes and breathes deeply, its chest moving up and down.

“I’m going to help you,” he promises quietly. “I don’t know how yet. But I am going to help you.”

The lizard doesn’t answer, again. He takes his hand off the glass and takes a couple steps back – then he pulls his camera out and takes a picture. He takes pictures of everything in the lab. His hands are shaking, and he’s never been more afraid, but he keeps photographing everything potentially incriminating he can find in the laboratory.

Then he gets to the panel again. He pulls up the same function he used a couple days ago, to look for data he can take pictures of. One of the folders catches his eye.

SCHLATT RESEARCH, it says.

He pulls it open, flicking his fingers to spread the holographic sets of data across the air. But instead of doing that, the data gets sucked into a holographic square and a lock pops up. PASSCODE REQUIRED, it says.

Tommy halts for a moment. Then he types in a four-digit number.

Suddenly, there’s a lot of new folders around him, and documents and so much data that he doesn’t know where to look first. He inhales sharply when he starts scrolling through the folders, reading through their titles, and comes across one that’s titled ‘SICKNESS PROGRESSION’. Before he can stop himself, he opens it.

Oh.

Oh.

Tommy’s jaw drops slightly as he looks at the information laid out in front of him. The information that puts everything, everything into perspective so bafflingly quickly that he can’t keep up for a moment.

What it is with these world-shattering revelations lately? Every twenty-four hours, he unravels another knot in the Gordian knot that is this conspiracy he’s digging up.

All this time, he felt like something about all this was off. He kept asking himself why. Why? Why did Schlatt kill his and Deo’s parents? Why all four of them? Why not just blackmail his employees? Was it really just them refusing to let him conduct human experiments? Was it them threatening to go public with it? Why kill Deo too, more than ten years later?

He’s staring the answer to his questions in the face, and suddenly everything starts making sense.

Tommy startles out of his trance when a thought abruptly crosses his mind. The equation. His equation. 

His spider-sense shrieks and he flinches. A light turns on somewhere to his left, and a familiar voice calls out, “Hello?”

Fuck.

He tugs his mask back over his face and goes back to the vent, but he doesn’t manage to close the panel or put the cover back onto the hole he came through. He has his mind on something else, anyway – it’s racing with a million panicked thoughts and realizations as everything slots into place and his anxiety kicks into overdrive.

Charlie Slimecicle enters Laboratory C with a stifled yawn, turning on the light. He freezes in the doorway. The cover of the vent that the lizard broke out through is on the floor. He looks at the open file floating in the air, the hologram brightening up automatically to adjust to the light in the room.

Didn’t Schlatt have the dude that kept breaking into this place assassinated or something? Charlie sighs. He hopes they didn’t kill the wrong guy. The kid that showed up here a couple days ago, the one with the blue eyes and bright smile, apparently knew him. He seemed so nice.

The lizard stares at him like he always does. Charlie looks at him, then back at the holographic data, then at the hole in the vent. He has half a mind to stick his head into it and look – but no one’s there.

He looks back at the open document and sighs. Schlatt’s not gonna be happy about this. Charlie closes the control panel and calls out to the lizard before he turns the lights back off and leaves to report.

“Night, Sapnap.”

Tommy drops down on his balcony soundlessly, more shadow than anything else. The light in his room is on, and he curses under his breath as he opens the door and lets himself in, already halfway through changing out of his suit.

Shit. Shit, shit, shit.

His room is a mess. Someone clearly rummaged through it, every last bit of it, and he confirms what he suspected with a look underneath his bed. Deo’s stuff is gone – all of it, all of the shit he stole from his apartment, the plans, the technology, everything. Tommy pulls on a hoodie quickly and swears quietly, kicking the box with his suit underneath his bed.

Fuck. Fuck.

He starts pacing, burying his hands in his hair. They know. They know that he knows. Which means Phil and Wilbur and Techno – they’re in danger. All of them are.

The equation is gone. He finds his laptop in pieces on the floor, whoever was through here smashed it. So he doesn’t have the spider stuff anymore, or the e-mail from Deo. Tommy feels like collapsing. He feels like screaming. He feels like bursting into hysterical tears.

He has the why. He knows where, and when, and why now, and when his eyes catch on something bright on his closed door, he knows how, too.

There’s a post-it note in bright neon green. It reads, Changed my mind. Tuesday is good – we should talk.

Tommy rips it off the door and crumples it up in his fist. His heart is hammering in his chest. This can’t be… real. He knows the why and it’s so much more than just Schlatt’s reputation and business being on the line.

He opens his door quietly and tip-toes downstairs, trying to move as soundlessly as he can with his shaky hands and rotating thoughts. What is he going to do now? What can he do?

Someone behind him clears his throat and Tommy whirls around, fight or flight response in overdrive.

It’s just Phil. But he looks more pissed than he’s ever seen him before, just genuinely angry in his pajamas. Tommy blinks. He completely forgot that it’s like two in the morning.

Then Phil speaks, and he also sounds more pissed than he’s ever heard him before.

“Mind telling me where the fuck you were?”