Chapter Text
In the Tower, the silence is barely broken by the sound of keyboard clicks. Tony's voice pierces the air, projecting the files onto a giant screen.
"A single experiment, that's what these reports indicate. Only one is still ongoing. The others were completely dismissed."
Steve frowns, crossing his arms.
"Can we really be sure of that? Hydra falsifies data all the time. There may still be more children out there... maybe they're not dead."
"And how do you plan to find them, Rogers?" Tony spits out, more sharply than usual. "They don't exist. Hydra literally erased them, and if there were any trace, they were probably silently eliminated. To the world, those children never existed."
Steve's eyes shine stubbornly.
"Even so, we should keep investigating."
Tony pinches the bridge of his nose, exasperated. “What do you want me to do, Roger? There’s nothing. There are no ages, no names, if we can even call a number like “003” a name. There’s absolutely nothing.”
In the bowels of Hydra, alarms blare through the halls. Red tinges everything, intermittent, like an open wound that won’t stop bleeding.
“Protocol 0.0.3 Hydra. Run. Run.”
The AI’s metallic voice reverberates relentlessly, almost drowned out by desperate screams. The echo of hurried footsteps resonates against the metal, mingling with labored breaths, gasps, and pleas.
“Protocol 0.0.3 Hydra. Run. Run.”
Spider staggers forward. Every inhalation is a rumble in his chest, every exhalation a burning pang. Her eyes, glassy from crying, barely make out the figures running around her.
"Spider!" a woman gasps at the sight, but her cry is cut short when he grabs her arm. Her small, bloodied fingers clench with an unnatural force.
The bone gives way like rubber. The arm comes loose with a sickening snap.
The woman's shriek cuts through the air. She falls to the floor, writhing, crawling in a desperate attempt to escape.
Spider follows her with reddened eyes, and with a sudden movement, he steps on her chest, immobilizing her. The impact echoes in the hallway, stifling her sobs as it crushes her lungs in mere seconds.
The alarm continues, repeating like a mantra.
"Protocol 0.0.3 Hydra. Run. Run."
His hands are covered in blood, a red too bright yet too dark that can only be clearly seen when the red light on the alarm flashes. He continues on his way, leaving behind the woman, who is now gasping as the light disappears from her eyes.
She looks like Hanna.
He suppresses that thought by punching one of the walls, which cracks from the force of the impact, revealing more doctors.
"Where's Amanda?" he asks timidly, which contrasts sharply with his hands, his shirt, and most of his body, which are stained with blood.
"We don't know!" a doctor shouts, pointing a gun at him. "B-back up!" he says, trembling. The other doctor raises her hands, trembling as well.
"I don't want to die!" the woman sobs, sobbing in an annoying way, too loud, too anguished. "I was never cruel to you!" The woman cries, and Spider feels his stomach twist.
Was it really like that? Spider doesn't remember. Spider doesn't remember many things, really.
The other doctor fires.
The bullet slices through the air... and stops in Spider's palm. The boy crushes it like clay, throwing it to the ground. He moves forward. The man barely manages to scream before Spider snatches the gun from him, and with a sharp blow against his temple, his head splits open. The sound is repulsive: bone cracking, skin tearing. The man's eye bulges grotesquely from its socket, hanging only by a thread.
He applied too much force.
Spider looks away, fighting the urge to vomit. He can't. Not now. He chooses to focus on the woman.
"Please..." she mumbles between sobs, but her voice is so high-pitched, so annoying, that it irritates him.
A web shoots out, covering the woman's mouth, sticky and rough. The woman moans, struggling uselessly to tear it away. Her breathing becomes frantic, like a trapped animal.
It's annoying.
Spider reaches out and digs his hand into her neck. His fingers pierce the skin with ease, tearing flesh and arteries in a hot torrent that drenches him anew. Blood spurts like a fountain, slipping through his fingers, dripping in torrents. The woman kicks, clawing at her arm, leaving useless marks before falling limp.
The world is in chaos. The flashing red light burns her eyes, her ears throb, barely distinguishing the roar of alarms amid all the screaming.
But none of that matters. He just has to find Amanda.
"Over here!" Voices shout, armed men. Spider snarls, leaping up the walls and climbing to smash into them. His feet feel disgusting beneath the hot, sticky blood.
“Well, according to these analyses…” Bruce hands out a piece of paper to everyone, “Spider doesn't have all of our DNA mixed together. What we found is that barely 10% of its genome matches ours.”
Everyone frowns, intrigued. Bruce clears his throat before continuing, “Apparently, the incident with the spider wasn't just that it bit him, but that it injected a load of radiation-altered genetic material into his body. This DNA integrated into his genome, replacing much of the original material. It's as if the spider had “rewritten” entire sections of its biological code.”
Clint frowns. “Is that even possible?”
Bruce sighs thoughtfully. “Under normal conditions, no. But radiation can cause mutations, and apparently the spider's organism was artificially or experimentally modified… so yes. What happened was a massive integration of genes, something similar to what some viruses do: they insert their information into the host cell and alter how it functions.”
Banner uses the digital screen to zoom in on the image. “The difference is that this wasn't just a few infected cells. It was his blood, his bone marrow, his entire hematopoietic system. That caused his body to reprogram itself, eliminating much of its old code and replacing it with a new one.”
“Are you taking the super-soldier serum into account?” Natasha interrupts, raising an eyebrow.
Bruce shakes his head slowly. “No, but if you consider it, the serum represents only about 5 percent of his DNA. The interesting thing is that the integration of the spider-altered DNA not only helped him adapt to that component, but also partially rejected it.”
Tony crosses his arms, tilting his head. “Like the plague.”
Bruce nods. “Exactly. The spider's genetic material seems to behave like a filter: what it doesn't consider useful, it blocks. It's as if its own body has decided what to keep and what to discard in order to maintain a stable balance.”
Thor shrugs. “What good does it do us to know his DNA? Doesn't that kid have, like, the same strength as Steve's friend?”
“We don't really know that,” Tony interrupts. “Like Brucie says here—” Banner frowns. “Um, we don't know if that spider DNA gave him super strength or if super strength just comes from the super soldier serum.” Tony changes the image, showing the boy. “If the spider DNA gave him powers, we have no idea what we're dealing with. But if he has powers more related to the super soldier, he'll be easy to handle.”
“Amanda,” the boy sobs, stumbling as he reaches out a hand toward the dark-haired woman. “Amanda,” he hiccups.
The woman trembles, backing away as far as she can before slamming her back against the wall. She's unarmed, her hair in disarray, and her teeth gritted.
“Spider,” she says with venom, but her voice trembles.
The boy sobs louder before running into Amanda's arms. They greet him not with love, but with a tense, trembling body and labored breathing. "It hurt so much, Amanda! It hurt so much!" The brunette bursts into tears, wrapping his short arms around Amanda's waist as best he can.
"Oh..." Amanda whispers, running her hand through the boy's curly brown hair. "How many did you kill? Let me be proud."
"Twenty!" he says, pulling away and smiling at her, the hands that caressed his hair gently moving down to his neck.
"Oh yeah?" Amanda smiles. "I'm so happy..."
The woman barely manages to try to prick the boy's neck with the needle, but is stopped by Spider’s hand.
"Miss Amanda," asks a high-pitched voice, broken and worn from crying. "Why do you all hate me so much?" Spider mutters, squeezing the woman's hand, which bends at an odd angle. The syringe also breaks, stabbing into the woman's hand.
Amanda screams, writhing as she falls to her knees on the floor. "You're a monster!" she snaps, her eyes bloodshot with rage.
"No," Spider replies, grabbing the woman's face in his hands. "Like you said before, I just get rid of the useless stuff."