Annihilate

Tommy still has a little trouble breathing when he gets off his bus to Oscorp.

He thinks the lizard busted one or two of his ribs when it threw him out of the window. It’s not enough to really bother him, which is kind of insane if he thinks about it, but alas. There are bigger things to do. He spent the last couple hours breaking into Deo’s place again to get himself fresh clothes and shower while he was at it.

Alarming news: Deo’s place also got cleared out. He supposes by the same people that cleared out his room, because as far as he knows, the legal processing of Deo’s stuff hasn’t started yet. He took the time to clean his injuries out thoroughly, but didn’t stitch himself up, as he heals too fast for that to make any difference.

He re-packed his stuff, all too glad Deo kept a shitton of bags in his apartment (probably for heist-related reasons, no?), and neatly puts his clothes into one of those. Then he’s off to Oscorp with a fresh resolve and stinging wounds.

In all honesty, he’s nervous as all hell. He hates being in the unknown – he doesn’t know how much Schlatt knows. If he knows about the spider bite. If he doesn’t, he still has an edge over the man. Schlatt might have the means to cover up a dozen murders, but Tommy still has the means to commit them himself, via freaky spider-powers.

He still has to take a (slightly painful and very uncomfortable) breather before he enters the tower.

As it was last time, he gets held up by security instantly – not the nice guy from last time. He needs to pull out ID to convince him that he’s really the kid who has a job interview here today. Then it’s hallways and straight to the elevator.

Tommy is almost glad that this guy isn’t as talkative as the other one – what did Schlatt say was his name again? Charlie? – that way, he can fully calm himself down on the way up and walk the last couple steps towards that talk with the man that killed his oldest friend with at least some confidence. Not much. Definitely not much.

He knocks.

“Come in,” Schlatt calls, and Tommy hesitates for one second. The guy sounds… sick.

Which adds up, doesn’t it?

He opens the door and enters, freezing in the doorway. Schlatt stares back at him from where he’s hunched over his desk, eyes tired, looking like he’s dying.

Which also adds up perfectly, because according to those folders he opened in Laboratory C, he is.

“Hey, Tommy,” Schlatt croaks out. “Why don’t you close the door?”

Tommy does just that. “You look like shit,” he says.

Schlatt really doesn’t look like he’s having a rosy time. His face is incredibly ashen, his eyes sunken – they’re bloodshot and it’s hard to tell if he’s cried or drunk too much shitty booze. Both of those options seem viable. He’s wearing too many layers, and he just looks… ill. He looks and sounds ill.

“Thanks,” he drily says. “Sit down, please. I paid your apartment a little visit, as your father has probably told you.”

Tommy blinks at him. “…What?”

Schlatt looks at him like he’s stupid, which almost makes him feel like this is going to be one of their more normal interactions. “I showed up at your apartment in a little frenzy. Your father was kind enough to let me in. You weren’t there, and your room was a mess. I think someone broke in.”

Uh.

Oh.

Tommy sits down and mentally scratches his head. So his cleared-out room and broken laptop wasn’t Schlatt? That actually relieves him quite a bit. That means– oh thank all the fucks he doesn’t have, that means Schlatt doesn’t know that he knows he had Deo murdered. The plans and prints were taken by someone else. Someone that also smashed his laptop.

What? Is there a fucking third party in the game all of the sudden? Who in the fuck broke into his room? What the fuck was the motive behind that break-in?

Why didn’t Phil tell him that Schlatt showed up at their apartment in the middle of the night? He must’ve been really concerned about what Tommy was up to. Well, yeah, he can actually understand that. Thinking about Phil makes his heart hurt.

“Hello? Earth to Tommy?”

He blinks again and shakes his head. “Sorry. I read the sticky note you left me.”

Schlatt nods. “Yeah, good. We have to talk.”

Tommy leans back. “What is it?”

Schlatt sighs.

“I’m terminally ill.”

It’s not surprising because a) he certainly fucking looks the part and b) Tommy read it in the Laboratory C-files. The genetic research was always aiming for healing, to heal whatever genetic disease is driving Schlatt towards an early death. It makes sense that he’s so determined to make human experimentation work, in a very morbid way. If the information Tommy read is correct, he might only have a couple of months left to live.

And he has no idea if either of his children inherited whatever the fuck it actually is that’s killing him.

“With what?” Tommy asks even though he knows the non-answer.

Schlatt slumps a little. “I don’t know,” he says, and he sounds tired. “I have no idea. All I know is that I don’t have long left to live. And in the past week, I just… I think I realized that I’ve been doing way too much bad trying to cure myself.”

Yeah, no shit. Tommy can admit that, from the outside looking in, it makes sense that Schlatt desperately wants a cure at least for his kids if they ever turn out to have the same disease. Fuck, from the inside, he definitely doesn’t want Tubbo or Dream having the same disease. But he still killed his parents and Deo’s parents and Deo and Prime knows who else. And it seems that he’s only not killed Tommy too because he keeps underestimating how big of a part he has been playing in all this.

The why that Deo was so desperately looking for for such a long time is unearthed now. It’s just not a good one.

He wonders, for the first time, if Schlatt even knows that he’s the son of someone he used to work with. Maybe he has no idea. Hell, Tommy had absolutely no idea whose son he was until very recently. Schlatt effectively erased his parents from history.

And he just can never forgive him for that.

He crosses his arms. “And? Why am I here? Why are you telling me this?”

Schlatt smiles just a little. “Because you’re sharp, kid. And you’re wicked smart, and my son’s best friend. I want to tell you the truth. I don’t know if my sons have the same disease I have.”

Fuck, Tommy hopes not. He so desperately hopes not.

“And?” he asks again, quietly.

“And I don’t want to tell them,” Schlatt says. “I don’t want them to live in constant every-day fear of the first symptom showing up. I don’t want that stress on them for as long as it can be avoided. So I’m asking you, because I hardly trust anyone else with it, to just look out for them. You can intern here, just keep looking out for them. You know. When it happens… you tell them. Maybe, until then… maybe you can even find a cure.”

Tommy stares at him for a bit. “You’re trusting me with an awful lot,” he hesitantly says. “And you don’t even know me that well.”

“I think I know you well enough.”

Bull-shit.

Schlatt leans back. “It’s over for me,” he says. His eyes are clear even though they’re bloodshot, and for all intents and purposes, Tommy actually does believe him when he says, “I don’t want it to be over for my kids too.”

It’s like a sad echo of their last one-on-one conversation. Tommy shoves his internal turmoil aside for the moment and just nods. Schlatt offers him his hand and they shake on it.

For a moment, they sit there in silence.

Then Schlatt sighs and gets up. It looks like his limbs hurt. “You know them vigilantes, Shocker and Vulture?”

Tommy blinks, completely taken off guard by the topic change. “Yeah?”

“They keep breaking into this place,” Schlatt says, gesturing around aimlessly. “I’ve dealt with people like that before, who stick their noses where it ain’t supposed to be. But those two… they recently broke into one of our labs. I think they found out about my illness. And what I’ve done to combat it.”

Ohhh.

Oh, that’s… actually very convenient. And it makes sense that Spider-Man (is he really keeping that name? He’s kind of getting attached to it) isn’t on his radar yet. Compared to the Vulture and the Shocker, he’s a newcomer in terms of vigilantism. And Schlatt thinks Tommy’s attempts to uncover the truth were them? That’s good with him.

“What is it that you’ve done to combat it?” he asks, mind racing.

The Vulture and the Shocker are… well. Vigilantes. Experienced vigilantes. Schlatt doesn’t know who they are and can’t just place a hit on their heads. They’re safe scapegoats.

And it seems like they just keep popping up in this as well. Tommy has solved the mystery of his parents’ death, and justice is coming to Schlatt in the form of the slow march of time. Isn’t that ironic? Time is what will kill Schlatt. Now he still has a lizard to cure and another mystery to solve – why are the Vulture and the Shocker even in on this whole thing?

He remembers that conversation they had on the rooftop, what feels like so long ago but can’t have been that long. They knew Deo. They wanted to break into his place to find something. They were afraid of someone being in danger, he remembers suddenly, they kept talking about ‘him’ being in danger. Who were they talking about?

“I experimented on humans,” Schlatt says. The straight confession manages to temporarily cut off Tommy’s train of thought. “I’m not proud of it. People tried to stop it and uncover it once it was done. I think that’s what the Vulture and the Shocker are trying to do now. Expose me, and I can’t… do that to my children either.”

Tommy keeps having this problem where he understands where Schlatt is coming from and yet completely disagrees with his actions. Exposing Oscorp would jeopardize at least Dream’s life completely. He’s the chosen heir to the empire and he’s never been prepared to be anything else. Tubbo would probably be fine. Tubbo is strong like no one else he knows.

“…So what are you going to do about the Vulture and the Shocker?”

Schlatt paces behind his desk. He’s limping. “I need to set my record straight. I’m going to confess to what I did, at least to Dream. He deserves to know. Tubbo… I don’t think he’d be surprised anyway. He knows what I am.”

What I am. Funny how he says that, unaware that Tommy across him is barely human anymore. Because of the spiders he experimented on. Which never saw human experimentation, not like the in-house lizards, anyway.

The lizard. The vigilantes also talked about the lizard on that rooftop. Tommy strains to recall that night, the hushed voices of the two vigilantes echoing in his ears. I don’t get how he fits into all of this. The spider, the lizard… now Deo’s death. 

They knew about him. For the first time, Tommy asks himself how in the fuck they even knew about the lizard in the first place. That was so shortly after Tommy first fought it in the subway tunnel. And he never told anyone about that. Except–

I don’t know, man. I wish I knew. I’m just scared that he’s gonna end up going after him,too.

He won’t. He doesn’t know where he was when Deo died.

And how do you know that? The whole incident with the lizard showed just how deep Schlatt’s connections to the cops run. What if he finds out? How much longer can we keep doing this?

We can’t– we have to keep doing this. You know we have to. You know I have to.

Fuck, for a supposed genius, Tommy is so fucking dense sometimes. It slots into place suddenly, and it adds up so damn well he asks himself how in the hell he didn’t instantly see it before.

Oh fuck, it makes so much damn sense. The way they told him to be safe at Deo’s apartment, like they knew him. The way the Shocker desperately insisted on keeping their gig up. Because Tubbo wants to know what his father is doing. The glances the two exchanged all the time, the random band practices Ranboo probably hasn’t really had in a year, the way the two vigilantes were sighted instantly after the two left him in that subway tunnel.

Ranboo and Tubbo.

The Vulture and the Shocker.

Tommy gets up abruptly. Schlatt looks up at him, confused. His face is probably very drained of its color, because the shock of the realization is ice fucking cold. Ranboo and Tubbo are the vigilantes he’s pinning his break-ins on.

“I– I gotta go,” he hastily says. “I– uh. I need a moment–”

Schlatt’s hand shoots out with surprising speed and grips his arm with even more surprising strength. “Hey,” he sharply says. “You’re keeping what I just told you to yourself. You hear me?”

Tommy blinks at him. “What happens if I don’t?”

“No one would believe you,” Schlatt simply says. “I’d make sure of that. I’m trusting you with this. You take care of my kids. You never tell a soul. There’s no proof anyway. No– none.”

Oh yes, there is. It just thinks that Tommy is the one that made it into a humanoid lizard, and not Schlatt. But if he managed to turn it back into a human…

“Fine,” he says coldly. “Mouth’s sealed. Let go of my fucking arm now.”

Schlatt stares at him for a moment longer and then lets go. “You got the job,” he says. “You’re welcome to come here anytime. I’m giving you some security clearance. You’re a brilliant kid, Tommy. I expect you to figure out how to save my boys.”

The equation. Where is the fucking equation? Who broke into his room, if it wasn’t Schlatt?

He doesn’t know where he was when Deo died.

What if he finds out?

Ranboo and Tubbo caught him practically red-handed at Deo’s apartment, taking stuff from it. They have been trying to figure out the motive behind Deo’s murder, but they don’t have the superpowers that allowed Tommy to crawl up a vertical vent and break into Laboratory C. He told them that Deo died in a mugging gone wrong. Then later, he said to the Vulture and the Shocker that he does know Schlatt placed a hit on Deo.

From their perspective, it must look like he’s driving himself deep into danger trying to find out the truth. They have to think that he’s inserting himself into stuff he doesn’t understand.

It must’ve been them. They broke into his room and took all of Deo’s stuff, then smashed his laptop. To scare him away from all this. To make sure he stayed safe as their vigilante selves when he pushed their civilian selves away.

Schlatt lets go of his arm. Tommy looks at him and says, “I’ll try.”

It’s no starry-eyed promise of a sure cure, and not even a promise of his best try, but Schlatt seems satisfied anyway. He nods and sits back down at his desk.

Tommy’s spider-sense weakly rings on his way out. “Goodbye, Schlatt,” he says over his shoulder.

No security is waiting to escort him back, so he takes the elevator back down and tries not to freak out before he’s left the facility. In a stroke of ingenuity, he stops at a random desk and tries to replicate the equation from memory. He’s not entirely sure if it’s accurate, but he shoves it into a drawer and leaves once and for all.

Unaware of the security camera pointed straight at him.