Chapter Text
People didn’t picture someone like Penelope Parker when they thought about the web-slinging vigilante swinging above Queens.
Nobody ever stopped to think that Spider-Man might be a young woman who kept her head down during the day so that New Yorkers could keep looking up at a superhero after dark.
No, they imagined someone male in the faceless silhouette soaring through the city skyline. They preferred it, rather than ever consider the alternative.
Penny had learned first how to live with that, then how to make it work for her.
When she was fourteen, the first week she’d ever put on the initial iteration of her suit—
(still a baby bird figuring out how not to slam face-first into brick when she left the nest)
—a shaken victim in a police report had said he helped me, he was fast.
One pronoun was all it took.
The bodega shop talked to the NYPD, who talked to the Daily Bugle, who then sounded the alarm about Spider-Man with the same level of drama Sybil Ludington—forgotten heroine, the sixteen-year-old girl who’d rode farther than Paul Revere—might’ve once possessed, hollering about the British.
The vigilante is coming! The vigilante is coming!
Once the shock wore off, Penny was caught between her outrage—why was it that people assumed a man came to the rescue—and practicality. While she struggled with her pride, the truth was that Spider-Man had become a person of interest to the eyes of the law. As a freshman in high school scrolling through Reddit discourse about whether this new "vigilante" was even legal, that had scared her enough to squash her feminist protests.
Ultimately, Penny never corrected them.
It was for the better, really. “He” was the best armor she’d ever worn.
Spider-Man became the perfect cover for Penny Parker. Year after year, and no one had even come close to suspecting her. The cognitive dissonance required to connect timid Penny Parker with Queens' web-slinging vigilante was apparently insurmountable.
On record, Penny Parker had debilitating stage fright. Her medical history documented chronic asthma and a severe peanut allergy. Her classmates whispered she had some kind of binge-and-purge eating disorder because of how much she could demolish at lunch without gaining an ounce.
(Enhanced metabolism was a bitch. Penny was always hungry.)
Nobody trusted her to open a pickle jar, and she was always picked last in gym class after deliberately tanking her performance.
Her Instagram was private with exactly twelve followers, plus a pity-follow from Del Mar's sandwich shop after she hit twenty punches on her loyalty card and then become a part-time employee.
On record, Spider-Man’s most viral TikTok sat at 15 million views, partly because he stopped a runaway train, but mostly because he was rapping Cardi B’s “WAP” while doing so.
(MJ had insisted it was perfect and it had been surprisingly fun)
Spider-Man fight compilation videos regularly dominated trending pages across every platform. He was always gone before the cameras could focus, vanishing before anyone official could pin him down or ask questions.
He had millions of followers who either raucously cheered him as he constantly thwarted and escaped the NYPD, or called for his arrest. Spider-Man was an anti-establishment icon who created an endless cycle of discourse that only fed his legend.
Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg following him on TikTok had somehow made the whole internet lose its collective mind.
Spider-Man’s infamous reputation was crafted just as carefully as Penny Parker’s anonymous photography work; since she’d become a vigilante, Penny exploited her manufactured mythology by selling exclusive Spider-Man photos to the Daily Bugle.
It had been the only major publication which cared about Spider-Man at all at first.
So, fourteen-year-old Penny Parker—anxious, uncertain, and two months into the surprisingly expensive hobby of being Spider-Man—had snuck into the Bugle with her first photos and no concept of a long-term plan.
Just desperate to help Aunt May pay the bills now that Ben was gone.
The perpetually cranky J. Jonah Jameson had taken one look at Penny’s photos, scowled, and ushered her away into the privacy of his office.
“Kid, what’s your name?”
“Uh.” Penny panicked. Flailed wildly. “Benjamin P-Peters,” she stammered, improvising the first name to come to mind.
His blue eyes narrowed. “That’s a boy’s name.”
“Um,” had been Penny’s brilliant response. “It was my grandmother’s.”
His mustache twitched, and for a moment it seemed he might laugh. A second later, that begrudging amusement vanished, and his glare returned twice as fierce.
His eyes flicked to the photos again, then back to her.
“Fine,” he grunted. “B. Peters. You keep bringing me these, I pay cash. No names in print. We never see each other again face-to-face. You're a minor—I'm not painting a target on your back. Capiche?”
Penny capiched.
One reluctant handshake later, and Penny started to get cash through a PO box in Queens, and placed small deposits under a pseudonym into a bank account that Ned helped keep discrete.
It’d all been manageable until the past few months, when being Spider-Man had gotten risky. A peril which came not from the threat of violence, but politics.
Nearly every major government had ratified the Sokovia Accords, and unfortunately for any aspiring superheroes, the Avengers had signed on too.
Why they agreed remained a subject of great debate—there was a fifty-part podcast series, copious Reddit threads, unending YouTube essays with dramatic background music, but most of them agreed: Steve Rogers only put pen to paper after the President waved a full pardon in the fugitives’ and, most importantly, Bucky Barnes’ direction.
After seeing a few of the Winter Soldier’s leaked Hydra files—
(and oh, the nightmares she’d had of being buried alive in her own icy sarcophagus, Spider-Man caught, Penny Parker tortured, frost so cold it withered her soul, until she became vacant and barren and gone)
—Penny couldn’t judge Captain America’s desperation to protect his friend too harshly. Bucky Barnes needed all the help he could get.
Some speculated about Iron Man’s guilt post-Ultron. Most said it was strategic. Tony Stark had been navigating political waters for decades, knew when the tides were inevitable. Rumor had it that he wanted the Avengers to have a seat at the table in order to rewrite the rules from the inside out.
As her personal hero, Penny hoped that Tony Stark didn’t actually believe in the Accords as-is. Really, really hoped that there was some long-game behind his choice.
Whatever the reason, the Accords had their signatures and the weight of their backing behind them.
There’d been exactly one “historic” press conference featuring Steve Rogers and Tony Stark shoulder-to-shoulder. Hailed as a triumph of reconciliation, a supposed show of unity on loop for weeks.
But beneath it…
Penny had watched the performance once, twice, then a dozen more times. Each replay further convinced her of one thing: these two immaculately dressed superheroes, left to their own devices, would try to render each other limb from limb.
Tony Stark had leaned into the microphones with his usual rakish smirk and billion-dollar confidence. He spoke as if he were humoring the worlds’ assembled news outlets with his presence. Condescending to speak to them as he would to a lovestruck, small-time reporter who had been lucky to catch him for a quote. “What can I say? I’m irresistible. Not even good ol’ Captain America can escape my charm.”
The crowd laughed; the cameras loved him. But Iron Man’s eyes darkened as he deliberately turned to Steve and said: “He knows the Accords are the only way forward.”
Beside him, Steve Rogers had looked still as stone. An unsmiling figure of propaganda rolled out before the public, posture unfazed by how Tony played the audience. His voice was so devoid of warmth it sent a chill down her spine. There’d been no doubt, only fierce conviction in his words as he replied: “This isn’t about me or Tony. It’s about protecting people. That’s why we’re here.”
To Penny, the entire production was clearly a manufactured fairytale that shrieked at the masses: Look at how nice we play! Oh, Civil War? Such a nasty phrase. Even friends fight. And we’re best friends forever!
Whether they believed this, were bullied into, or bought by the government, the major news networks ran the clip of their handshake endlessly, always accompanied by praise and relief.
After Captain America and Iron Man disappeared behind the curtain, the task of speaking on behalf of the Avengers regularly fell to the alluring Black Widow.
Penny hated how good she was at it.
Natasha Romanoff was the real, perfectly-poised professional, her composure terrifyingly flawless. Untouchable, unhurried, unaffected by the snarling reporters and careful verbal traps.
A mesmerizing beauty; her green eyes beguiling, her rose-red hair enchanting. Always feeding them soundbites in that silk-soft, persuasive manner that was a danger in and of itself. “Unregistered enhanced individuals operating independently need guidance and support.”
But Penny heard the subtext loud and clear: Play by our rules, or don’t play at all.
Spider-Man was an ideal pilot test-case for the Accords. Penny’s TikTok alone could topple entire marketing campaigns. If the Accords could roll Spider-Man out as Exhibit A it would flip the narrative from authoritarian to aspirational. Look, even Spider-Man signed up. Why haven’t you?
Penny balked at the idea of becoming an influencer, in any way, shape or form. It was against her religion. Accords brand ambassador? Government media campaign icon?
Her stomach roiled at the thought. No thank you, I already have three jobs.
Meanwhile, it was getting harder to vanish. The Avengers didn’t need to personally hunt Spider-Man, the system tightened of its own accord.
New protocols, new surveillance, new consequences.
Every upload MJ scheduled, every exclusive Jameson bought, fed the mythology that might one day crush her.
MJ carefully managed Spider-Man's socials on Penny's behalf. It required careful coordination between them; Penny would provide the raw footage, while MJ handled the editing, captions, and posting schedule with the strategic mind of Sun Tzu.
It was a delicate balance because too much content for Spider-Man’s personal accounts meant less exclusive material for Jameson at the Daily Bugle, but her alter ego’s accounts were what really drove Spider-Man's cultural relevance.
Still, re-reading the comments section on TikTok remained Penny’s guilty pleasure. Especially the thread on that runaway train video.
@spiderman_nyc: POV: you’re just trying to get to work when things go off the rails 🕷️ anyway here's WAP
15.2M views • 3.8M likes • 847K comments
replies:
♥ 145K likes @Ned_Declassified: ok but the physics…sir you dropped this 👑
♥ 127K likes @emjay_writes the duality of this man... superhero by day, absolutely unhinged by also day
- ♥ 67K likes @Ned_Declassified: @emjay_writes did you see the conductor's FACE though
♥ 287K likes @Spotify_Official ✓ : NYC vigilantes really built different when they have Spotify premium 💯
- ♥ 178K likes @wecantstopwegamestop: we got Spider-Man rapping Cardi B before we got GTA 6
♥ 2.1M likes @CatsOfNYC: @blackwidow is he the black sheep of your family or are all spiders like this 👀
- ♥ 523K likes @marvel_stan_account: @blackwidow NAT WE NEED YOUR THOUGHTS ON THIS
Less amusing, was that at eighteen Penny had learned this much:
A man could flip over Range Rovers in the name of justice, beat the shit out of muggers, swing impossibly through the city, and people would call him reckless, wild, maybe even noble.
They rolled their eyes and muttered “boys will be boys,” with fond exasperation. Some even smirked when he left a trail of webbed-up criminals hanging from streetlights like cocoons. They'd trend hashtags like #SpiderManIsHimothy and argue in YouTube comment sections about whether he could beat the Winter Soldier in an arm-wrestling contest.
(For the record, Penny would very, very much like to try)
A girl doing the same thing?
The media would be vicious.
They’d call Spider-Woman undeserving of her power. Nasty. A spiritually lost, crazy, attention whore. Pick-me energy. Reckless in a different way. Reckless in the way that ends with Penny sitting in a windowless room while powerful people frothed at the mouth for the chance to get their hands on her, spitting words like competency hearing and indefinite detainment and psychiatric evaluation.
They'd psychoanalyze Spider-Woman: "she's clearly got daddy issues" or "bet she's not even that pretty under the mask." Someone would make a TikTok about how she was "very much desperate for male validation."
The think pieces would write themselves: Is Spider-Woman Setting Back Feminism? and The Concerning Psychology Behind Queens' Girl Vigilante.
Someone would bring up her uterus, and her speculate about her fertility as an enhanced individual, because of course they would. Someone would ask where are her parents? Someone else would speculate about how she’d scared off any chance of a husband, ever.
And the anger—God, the anger would be the worst part. Because Spider-Man's anger was righteous. When he webbed up muggers and left them hanging from streetlights, when he got pissed at injustice—that was admirably heroic. Hot, even, if the thirsty comments on her TikToks were any indication.
Spider-Man got to be fierce and uncompromising; Spider-Woman would be called hormonal and unstable.
Reporters would dissect every moment of her life: talking heads would declare that she couldn’t be trusted with her power and criticize how skin-tight her suit is—is this appropriate? Is she sending the right message to young girls?
Cameras would drift from the hands she saved people with, to her figure, all before a witch hunt began.
It would never end with the simple acknowledgment of her strength and heroism.
Never.
So yeah, if the city wanted Spider-Man, Penny would let them have their delusion.
Let them be fooled by a natural voice modulator, a chest plate, padding, and elevated boots that all shaped Penny into the illusion of a man of below average height and muscular build.
It was degrading. It was exhausting.
It kept MJ and Ned out of crosshairs.
(It had kept Aunt May safe until the car accident last year. Penny couldn’t web-catch the drunk driver because she hadn’t been there in the first place.)
In high school, Ned and MJ had realized pretty quickly she was harboring an exhausting secret, but it took two months for Penny to confess.
While part of Penny delighted in the mischief of her secret identity, mostly it still grated: the feeling of being written out of her own story just because she didn’t fit the part. It grated in tiny, steady ways; a sunburn constantly scraping against another surface, a bruise forgotten until someone’s hand lands right on it.
Thing is though, Penny was used to bruises.
Even now, purple-black imprints from night’s patrol sat atop her skin in a painful crescent.
Penny had crawled into a clean hoodie and passed out for two hours, gotten up to take her Integrated Systems Challenge final, and was now basking tiredly in the sweet relief of it being over.
Finals week had turned the Empire State University cafeteria into a disaster zone; Penny managed to commandeer a table, but it was a bitter, pyrrhic victory.
She’d exchanged verbal blows in a particularly bitchy shouting match with a sophomore who thought his Constitutional Law study group was more important than her need to decompress after the brutal final exam she'd just survived.
Her altruism had warred with her need to recover, the angel on Penny’s shoulder urging her to give the table back.
The angel sounded suspiciously like every socialization lesson she'd ever absorbed: Be nice. Be accommodating. Don't make a scene.
The sophomore had a study group. He had friends to commiserate with. He probably had parents who'd pay for his therapy when finals drove him to the edge.
Penny had survived a semester of engineered torture, had three jobs (four if you counted Spider-Man), and she was operating on fumes and spite.
So Penny told the angel to go to hell, and Satan won today.
The sophomore guy left cursing as Penny unrepentantly planted herself like a flag upon the spoils of her recently-won territory, feeling dazed and haunted.
It was amazing she’d been able to form the words needed to argue for her spot at all, given that her mouth didn’t feel connected to her face. A symptom of the shell-shock syndrome inflicted unto her via the ISC exam.
Dr. Chen, grinning demonically, had warned their whole class on the first day that, “At some point this semester, you will hit your breaking point. Just remember: before it gets dark, it gets pitch black.”
The Integrated System Challenge (ISC) course, "From Molecules to Machines: Building Across Scales," was infamous across prestigious STEM universities for good reason.
It had been created by sadistic minds who sought to humble overachievers such as Ned, MJ, and herself.
Highly confident prodigies who'd entered university with enough AP credits to entirely skip gen-eds. Under the guise of preparing students for applied STEM in practice, the course merged science, computation, and engineering.
But what made ISC truly diabolical was the extensive non-disclosure agreement every student had to sign before applying for the chance to enroll.
Pages upon pages of legal language that basically boiled down to: you cannot discuss the specifics of this course with anyone, ever. Not the assignments, not the methods, not the final exam structure.
Nothing.
Which meant that despite the course's terrifying reputation, no one knew exactly why it was so brutal until they lived through it themselves.
The first two weeks had been difficult, yet comprehensive and interesting. The kind of elevated coursework that Penny had expected from university and found engaging. It had started to lull her into a false sense of security. She’d even thought to herself that the rumors around the class were nothing more than hazing.
(and, oh, how wrong she’d been…)
Then came the first Monday of Week 3: the horrible, horrible day when Dr. Chen walked in with an army of TA’s, each carrying stacks of boxes and darkly delighted smiles.
"Congratulations on surviving the theoretical portion," their professor had announced, cackling as he informed them of their impending doom. “Now we find out who can actually do something with all that knowledge. Not to worry, my dear students.” His grin widened, wolfish. “I know it feels hard right now, but just know…it will get worse.”
Blindsided, each student received a box of random components and one simple set of instructions: "You must use every single item, you may supplement with materials from the university lab within a $200 budget, and everything in your box must be integrated into your final design. Build something functional."
No specifications or help beyond that.
Penny had opened her box to find: two misaligned servo motors, a pressure regulator, a cracked reservoir, as well as an assortment of wires, sensors, and several springs.
To add insult to injury, it came with a handwritten, gleeful sticky note that read "Good luck :)"
She'd stared at the components, her mind already sorting possibilities.
It wasn’t too bad at that point.
Immediately, it became clear that the $200 budget which had seemed oh-so-generous at first, would evaporate without extremely careful planning. Even pricing out the basics in mounting hardware, proper seals, and connectors would set her back.
The only saving grace in ISC’s infernal assignment was the unlimited, twenty-four-hour badge access to university labs. An all-you-can-eat buffet with an assortment of tools.
On and on they went: machine shops, welding stations, 3D printing clusters, CAD workstations, oscilloscopes, diagnostic equipment… They’d have been dead in the water without that access.
Penny already drafted full schematics when Week Four tore them to shreds.
Dr. Chen slithered in again, ushering in his worker bee TA’s who were once more carrying boxes. “Did you get comfortable with your components?” he asked with sweet venom, eyes lit with glee. “Excellent. Here's a new one! You must integrate it into your existing design."
Penny had stared at the pneumatic actuator sitting innocuously in her new box, her carefully planned hydraulic system suddenly requiring complete reorganization.
The pattern became clear by week five: new box, new component, new aspect of STEM to integrate.
Every.
Single.
Week.
"Ah, Miss Parker, I see you’ve got your circuit board working? Fantastic. Here's a heat-sensitive material that will melt if your current design gets too warm."
Then, Dr. Chen struck them with the most sadistic twist of all:
"Enjoying those springs? Great news—you're getting a gyroscope. Bad news—we're taking away one of your servo motors."
Fucking. Taking. Away.
Every week a new, random component would be added, just as another was removed.
A component you'd spent days integrating would simply disappear from your available inventory, forcing complete redesigns of systems you thought were finished.
After that particular constraint had been introduced, there was a small period of panicked purgatory before they all then descended screaming into the flaming pits of hell.
Ned had tears in his eyes as he raged against the unfairness. “What Dr. Chen gave he taketh away!” he’d snarled bitterly in the lab. “Cursed be his name!”
It became the unofficial slogan of the ISC cohort as they despaired over items given Tuesday, gone by Thursday of the same week.
Every dollar spent was a strategic decision: what could Penny fabricate in the labs versus what she absolutely needed to purchase?
She’d practically lived in the machine shop by Week Six, learning to weld at two in the morning because buying pre-fabricated brackets would have decimated her remaining funds.
Penny had watched Ned on his bathroom floor, face pressed against cool tile while she rubbed his shoulders. He'd just spent six hours troubleshooting his adaptive mesh network only to receive a box that morning containing a component that rendered half his work obsolete.
"I can't do this," he'd whispered between gasps. "I can’t believe I wrote a statement of interest and applied for this. I'm going to fail. I'm—"
"You're not," Penny had said, finding it far easier to soothe Ned than her own worries. "We're going to figure this out."
By November, MJ had been averaging five hours of sleep a night. Penny would get texts at 4 AM: they took away my pressure sensor, had to rebuild the entire feedback loop, or I have $17 left for components. More concerningly: can you explain eigenvalues again, words and numbers don’t make sense anymore.
On campus, they walked in lock-step with one another like drafted soldiers on extended tours, impotently marching to the tune of the ruthless ISC war machine.
They still had a full course-load of other classes. Their other professors gave no sympathy to the ISC students. The Dean of the School of Engineering and Science had sent an email out to the whole cohort to set them straight. “Your admittance to ISC is an honor. You made your bed, now lie in it.”
All the while, Penny’s pile of bills kept mounting.
She was hungry all the time. Mr. Del Mar had started giving her extra sandwiches to take home after her stomach kept growling on shifts.
Penny was struggling to cope with the realization that if she failed ISC, she’d lose her scholarship, lose everything. It would end with nothing but debt and broken dreams.
The stress kept getting worse, week after week after week.
“Say hello to your new pH sensor! And hand that over—oh, no need to look so glum, Miss Parker, it’s just a reservoir! Hah! Hope you weren't relying on that.”
She'd burned through her $200 budget by Week Nine, forcing her to salvage components from broken electronics in the recycling bins or hunt down spare materials.
By that point, Penny had no interest in building something flashy and just wanted to pass Dr. Chen's insane requirements.
But in the chaos… she had an elegant idea.
Penny had no doubt that she could build something new, nor that she could innovate under pressure, but given these constraints, she’d opted for a cleverer route; if it turned out the way she wanted, the construction industry would kill for it.
After all, there was a real market for precision fluid delivery systems.
Her web-shooter mechanisms—the pressure regulation, the mixing chambers, the programmable flow controls—weren't just useful for swinging through New York.
Those same principles of adhesive application could work for commercial uses such as paint dispensing and industrial-grade coatings.
She'd started building a paint applicator system.
And the genius part? Nobody would ever connect it to Spider-Man.
It killed two birds with one stone: Penny could take the core mechanisms she'd already perfected and redesign them as a paint applicator, and use the ISC project as proof-of-concept to actually patent and sell later.
Spider-Man's web-shooters were sleek, wrist-mounted, designed for combat and acrobatics, but nobody knew how Penny managed to produce webs or swing around New York.
Almost everyone seemed to take it for granted that Spider-Man biologically generated them.
The only people who knew her web-shooters existed for sure were her, Ned, and MJ. Nobody had ever captured one on camera up close. Why would anyone look at a student's paint applicator project and think ‘vigilante equipment’?
Her device had the same underlying physics, sure—but so what?
Pressure regulation and mixing chambers weren't unique to web-slingers. They were fundamental engineering principles used in countless industries.
She’d even spent hours in the library database researching existing patents. There were hundreds of different designs out there, and none of them looked anything like what Spider-Man used.
The lab access had been crucial to pulling it off.
Hours spent at the CNC mill, programming precise tolerances; late nights with the TIG welder, creating pressure vessels that wouldn't fail; test runs on the flow bench, calibrating spray patterns.
Equipment she could never have afforded to access otherwise.
And Penny had shamelessly taken advantage of the state-of-the-art facilities to become even more effective in her vigilante work.
She took her actual non-academic web-shooters and the fluid itself to heights she’d never dreamed possible with precision machining equipment, new materials testing apparatus, and fluid dynamics simulation software.
Penny’d been incredibly, obsessively discreet about it, of course. She worked on the Spider-Man gear in the dead hours between two and five in the morning, and brought her own supplies so she wouldn’t be stealing from the lab.
The results were incredible.
Her web-shooters had never performed better, her web fluid had never been more reliable, her voice modulator aged up to be even more flawlessly masculine and mature.
No one would ever know that the infamous ISC course had inadvertently created a better Spider-Man.
When Dr. Chen announced in Week Thirteen that there would be no new boxes, there had been an audible, palpable sigh of collective relief. Some students had actually wept.
Though she’d never admit it aloud, the sheer rush of victory Penny felt as she’d proudly submitted her final project was enough recompense for her suffering.
She’d felt powerful, emboldened not only by her persistence and determination, but by that of her friends as well.
By their demeanors, Ned and MJ did not hold the same feelings.
Ned had practically thrown his project at the nearest T.A, as he loudly hissed, “Here! Outta my hands now, hope you people have the day that you deserve!”
The TA glared as she caught the plastic container. The wires, still visible through the translucent sides, jostled slightly at the force of it. She looked seconds away from actually shouting at him, but Ned turned away from her with completely disregard for her ire.
Penny’s eyes were wide as she gawked at him. “Jesus, Ned,” she said as he returned. “What’d she ever do to you?”
“Guilty by association,” he muttered darkly. “I just wanna sleep somewhere not in the machine shop.”
Penny wanted to grab his shoulders and shake him. “Ned, your mesh network turned out incredible.”
“Don’t listen to her,” said MJ with approval as she stalked over to the front of the room. “Stew in your resentment, Leeds.”
She’d turned in a brilliant, wearable safety device. As she did so, MJ said only one word, which by itself still managed to convey a promise of retribution if she ever were to find any of the ISC teaching staff alone in the dark. “…Enjoy.”
They thought they were done. They thought they could finally breathe…
A week after they performed individual demonstrations for the examiners, they'd walked into the final exam only to discover that it was the most fiendish and wicked twist of all.
Each student was assigned a table with someone else's randomly redistributed project at their desk.
Dr. Chen had stood at the front, laughing like a soulless demon ringing death’s knell before them all. The sounds of his boundless euphoria sent a violent thrill of terror up Penny’s spine.
"There is a light at the end of the dark tunnel you’ve been in this semester,” he’d declared, the ominous words underscored by his ghastly, dreadful smile. “That light is a train.”
“Your prize,” he’d continued, “for having the misfortune to survive is to determine what the device assigned to you does, how it works, and document the engineering principles behind it.” His eyes gleamed with anticipation. “Any damage to the device results in immediate failure and potential IP litigation under the terms of your NDA."
Only three fucking hours to decipher desperately assembled devices they'd never seen before, built by classmates who'd poured their souls into them.
Devices forged by the fires of creative rage.
Penny had fought actual villains more merciful than Dr. Chen.
Ultimately, she'd spent the time carefully probing, testing, and analyzing without damaging a single component, while simultaneously knowing that across the room, someone was doing the same thing to her modular adhesive dispensing system.
Penny finished first and stumbled out of the exam room, wondering if she was even alive and fighting the urge to cry from the stress of the whole ordeal.
As she'd left, she'd caught one last look at her friends.
Ned was hunched over with his face inches from circuitry as he tried to trace connection paths without touching anything. Sweat beaded on his forehead as he scribbled notes frantically.
MJ's famous aloofness was holding, but only just; her jaw was clenched with concentration as she carefully prodded at what appeared to be a bastardized bottle rocket, every movement deliberate and precise to avoid a catastrophic mistake.
Penny felt guilty for abandoning them in the trenches, but at least she'd managed to secure the table. Her phone was face-down on its surface, buzzing with notifications she was actively ignoring.
She had emerged from a battle, yes, but felt significantly improved already, and could not be bothered to check. Penny was too busy basking in the sweet, sweet glory of being free from that class, now and forevermore…
"What the fuck, Parker.”
Penny’s eyes flew open, ripped out of her daydream at once.
"Huh—I—what—?" she spluttered as MJ dropped into the chair across from her.
In one of MJ’s hands, she held a cheesy, overloaded breakfast burrito that instantly made Penny’s mouth water. Even more distracting though, was MJ herself.
MJ too, looked rather revitalized just by virtue of the exam being over. Still a bit pale, but drastically improved from her vexed and tightly wound disposition of half an hour ago. How was it fair that she looked so beautiful even after such an ordeal?
Penny admired her long, dark hair that was yanked into a messy bun; how it brought into focus her slightly flushed cheeks and sharp bone structure; how the light hit her warm, brown eyes.
Eyes that Penny could gaze into and see—
“You look like you got hit by a truck,” said MJ, and then viciously tore into the burrito.
Penny regretted so many things. She felt herself blush but managed to save some of her composure. "I wish,” she half groaned, half muttered. “Then I wouldn’t have had to live that nightmare.”
It seemed this shared misery was not enough to soothe MJ’s ire. Her eyes narrowed and she jabbed a finger at Penny in accusation. "I can't believe you left me there to die!”
She chewed savagely, the burrito taking the brunt of her fury. Penny worried that MJ might actually choke from the effort of simultaneously consuming calories and berating her best friend. “That was an attempted murder. Like, an actual, legitimate slaughter! And you—” another bite, another glare—"you left me bleeding out on the floor!”
Penny couldn’t help it. “How’d the… whatever-that-was go?” she asked, trying not to laugh.
MJ’s eye twitched. “Don’t.”
Penny nodded in faux sympathy, then cracked and burst into a chortle. “That bad, huh?”
“Too soon, Parker,” MJ warned, but she couldn’t suppress the twitch at the corner of her mouth.
“My bad,” said Penny quickly, grinning. “Musta been the wind.”
MJ groaned, loud and theatrical, like she was reconsidering their entire friendship. Then she rolled her eyes, reached over, and stole a sip of Penny’s coffee. Immediately, she grimaced. “Jesus Christ. This is almost worse than your sleep schedule.”
Penny sniffed, and decided to ignore the insult. Instead, she redirected. “Did you see Ned on the way out? When I left it looked like he was about to set everyone on fire…and then himself.”
MJ pondered that for a while, chewing. Her dark eyebrows furrowed. Then she nodded her head sagely, and said, “Ned is Ned.”
Another bite of the burrito followed this declaration of wisdom.
Penny laughed. “Wow, so helpful,” she said, her words sarcastic despite the genuine amusement which coursed through her. “I just have a bad feeling, y’know? About his continued sanity? I hope he doesn’t—”
A human tornado slammed into the seat next to Penny, cutting her off.
Ned’s usually neat black hair was sticking up in deranged spikes, and his glasses smeared to oblivion. It was a wonder he'd been able to see them in the cafeteria at all. He panted like he had sprinted all the way there, eyes alight with a manic fervor.
"Guys," he said breathlessly, exhilarated and nearly vibrating. "I think I just had a breakthrough during that final. Like, an actual, publishable breakthrough."
Penny was sure she looked as confused as she felt, but MJ didn’t move at all, completely unfazed by Ned’s declaration. "Uh-huh," she drawled, somehow managing to convey serious doubts about this claim just in two syllables. "Please tell me you didn't actually submit this revolutionary new breakthrough as your final project."
"Oh, ha, ha—"
Penny blinked tiredly, but smirked. "Is this like when we accidentally ate those weed brownies sophomore year and you decided you invented the quadratic formula?"
"Oh, stop—this is different!" Ned shouted with enthusiasm. Ned's hands were already flying toward his laptop bag, undeterred by their doubt. His eyes gleamed. "During the final when I was looking at completely different components, I realized we've been thinking about your conductivity issue all wrong—"
While MJ managed Spider-Man’s social media and public image, and Penny handled building both her suit mechanics and web shooter fluids, Ned had taken it upon himself to shield their digital footprints and contribute electrical upgrades.
"Nope," MJ hissed. "No. Hard no. We're in a no-STEM zone right now. This is a STEM-free environment."
"But last week when you nearly got struck by lightning,” he babbled, “I think I figured out how to prevent that from happening again—"
"Ned—later," Penny interrupted, glancing around the cafeteria nervously.
"Yeah, Ned," repeated MJ menacingly, and this time his name was an inherent threat. "Respectfully? If you go on about the trauma we just survived, I will find a way to make your day even worse. It's a miracle I'm ambulatory."
“But—”
“No,” Penny and MJ bellowed at the same time.
They exchanged smiles, which usually wouldn’t have been enough to make Penny’s heart stutter quite so embarrassingly, but for some reason her chest did that cartoon-break-through-the-ribs thing.
Ned clutched his chest dramatically. "The betrayal! From my own friends!"
Penny laughed, exhausted but giddy.
He deflated slightly but smiled too. "Fine. Later. But remind me to show you the security patch I wrote."
“For Hero Watch?" MJ asked, perking up. "Did you finally fix that DDoS vulnerability?"
"Fixed it and added rate limiting. No more crashes when Iron Man shows up and we get ten thousand submissions in five minutes."
"Thank god," MJ said. "Last time that happened, the site was down for six hours."
Penny winced, remembering.
“’Why even run a hero tracking site if you can't handle hero traffic?'" MJ quoted in a mocking voice. "Like I'm not doing this from my apartment with Ned's donated server space.”
Penny felt that familiar pang of guilt and gratitude.
In eighth grade, a year before Penny became Spider-Man, MJ started a simple blog tracking local hero sightings and commentary. Hero Watch had now become the NYC hub for their generation’s relationship with heroes.
MJ ran and moderated this creative community forum, all while maintaining her status as an excellent student in software and mechanical engineering and managing Spider-Man’s online social media presence.
Penny didn’t know how MJ did it all, and suspected it was mutual.
"Hey, that server space cost me seventy-five dollars on eBay," Ned protested.
"And I'm very grateful," MJ said solemnly, then reached over and tugged at a lock of Ned's disaster hair. "Did you stick your finger in a light socket, Leeds?"
"The device I was analyzing had some kind of electromagnetic field generator, okay? It wasn't my fault."
“Mmhmm.” MJ tore into her burrito again, unimpressed.
Distracted, Ned’s eyes locked onto it instantly. He leaned forward like a man starved, and licked his lips. “Hey…MJ…” he coaxed, “in the spirit of solidarity, how do you feel about sharing?”
MJ looked him right in the eyes, smiled sweetly, and said, “You can pry this burrito from my cold, dead hands.”
Ned withdrew mournfully, and slumped back in his chair. “Type of greed they talk about in the Bible,” he muttered darkly. "The kind that damns souls."
Penny let the sounds of their bickering wash over her, but even that was not enough to completely block out her phone. She tried to ignore the buzzing noise, but MJ's eyes flicked to her phone and back to Penny's face.
"You gonna answer that?" MJ asked, nodding toward it. "That's like, the fifth time it's gone off since I sat down."
"Probably Jameson wanting more Spider-Man pics," Penny said, which was both a hope and a strong likelihood. "He's been extra pressed since the whole Bushwick debacle.”
Ned perked up, pulling out his own phone. "Oh man, speaking of which, those shots you got of the fight? The staging is actually insane. How did you even manage that?"
Penny laughed nervously. "Raw talent and skill,” she said, because the alternative was explaining that she'd spent twenty minutes positioning her ring light and professional tripod while hanging upside down from a fire escape, negotiating with a one-eyed cat to keep it from pushing her equipment off the edge. “Right place, right time.”
“Right, but like seriously—”
“I know it’s hard to accept,” interrupted Penny loudly with a theatrical sniff, “but I am indeed, just better than you.”
Ned was the picture of amused despair. “How am I supposed to finish a thought around here?”
MJ snorted, then drawled, “How am I supposed to care?”
Penny laughed, and Ned shot Penny an indignant look.
She coughed to hide a grin. "Um, anyway," Penny continued quickly, "I needed that shot. Jameson's been on one lately.”
Ned scoffed. “Tell us something we don’t know.” He scrolled through his phone. "Menace this, menace that,” he said, rolling his eyes, “real journalism would be following up with that one guy who's convinced Spiderman’s actually three kids in a trench coat."
Penny sighed. "Still?"
"Someone should check on him," MJ observed, nodding in agreement. “It’s a cry for help.”
"In other news,” said Penny, trying to keep her voice casual, “did you see that thread about Accords rally? The one with all the—"
Her phone buzzed again, more insistently this time. Maybe there was some reason to suit up and swing by—
No.
Not today. Today she was Penny Parker, not the friendly, neighborhood Spider-Man. And Penny Parker had two more finals before her first semester of college was over.
"Thanks, you really cleared that up for me," said Ned dryly. He put away his phone. "On the bright side, in exactly forty-eight hours, we will be free. Free from the demon Gods that call themselves our professors. Free from our eternal suffering.”
MJ rallied too, enthusiasm rising. She grinned. "Free to remember what sunlight feels like.”
Penny laughed. "Free to sleep.”
They sat in comfortable silence for a moment. Then Penny's phone buzzed again, and this time her curiosity didn’t just hum, it sang. Sharp, insistent, and impossible to ignore.
"Okay, you know what? Fine."
Penny glanced at the notification and her heart leap with anticipation. Even if it was outside of her usual jurisdiction, the notification from Hero Watch was too interesting to resist. It wasn’t even far from ESU campus.
BREAKING: Car chase reported near Brooklyn.
"Shit," she breathed excitedly, then looked up to find both her friends watching her with varying degrees of concern.
"Let me guess," MJ said, voice weary with resignation. "Emergency at work."
"Something like that." Penny was already grabbing her backpack, but MJ reached out and clasped a hand around her wrist.
"Penny, you need rest. Whatever this is—"
"Can wait," Ned finished firmly. "Right? It can wait?"
For a moment, Penny looked between MJ's troubled brown eyes and Ned's stubborn expression, and felt that familiar tug between her two lives. Even though her heart sank and her guilt flared, Penny already knew her best friends’ concern wouldn’t be enough to make her stay.
Seeing the decision on her face, MJ sighed and let go of Penny.
It felt like a loss.
She wanted to say something, to apologize—I'm sorry I'm like this, I'm sorry I keep choosing this, I'm sorry I'm not easier to love—but she knew MJ couldn't stand any form of deceit, no matter how well-intentioned.
Penny stood up, hauling her backpack over her shoulder. "I’ll be fine. It's probably nothing, anyway.”
"It's never nothing with you,” she said simply.
Despite the lack of annoyance in MJ’s voice, Penny still worried that one day, her friends would decide she was not worth the trouble anymore.
Because Penny Parker was trouble and required endless patience.
"Text us when you get there safe," Ned said. "And I swear to god, if you miss our post-ISC celebration dinner because you're bleeding out somewhere, I'm going to kill you myself."
"I'll be there," Penny promised. "If I’m late, will you order me some fries?"
With the ruthless air of a conquering warlord, Ned sniffed and said, "No prisoners, no mercy."
"Tch, you guys are the worst."
MJ managed a faint smirk. "We know.”
As Penny walked away, she pulled out her phone to check the other notifications.
One informed delivery email from USPS that she assumed was her latest deposit from the Bugle, a message requesting help in her ESU tutoring portal, and a notice that Mr. Del Mar needed her to cover a double shift this weekend.
Penny was almost to the cafeteria exit when she heard Ned yell, only half-joking, "Try not to get arrested!"
"No promises!" she called back, smiling.
Twenty minutes later, Penny’s heart was hammering, adrenaline surging through her veins. She’d seen dead bodies before, but these, God—
They were eviscerated.
There were three on the ground when she’d got there. The first had been decapitated brutally.
Penny swallowed bile. She’d—she’d never seen that before…
Another had a massive, cauterized crater where should have been his left eye. The third’s neck had snapped grotesquely; the white vertebrae visible through torn flesh.
Penny had thought the “unusual activity” at the Mill Basin Bridge in Brooklyn would be a simple case of The Good Guys versus The Bad Guys, especially since the bridge itself was closed and under reconstruction.
Instead, there were six thugs, still alive, bolting away from a guy in a red and black suit. He was leaning over the last corpse, wiping a horrible, jagged blade clean on the dead man’s jacket.
Some of the scattered men fired wildly in their retreat, others ran without looking back.
The man seemed unbothered as his victims fled, but not in a way that suggested they were safe. Moreso that he was temporarily preoccupied and would resume murder shortly. He was monologuing to seemingly no one, stretching leisurely as he chattered:
"—and then Deadpool—that’s me, by the way, capitalization absolutely essential, just ask my lawyer, who I definitely have and who definitely doesn't cry every time I call—demonstrates a perfect emergency field tracheotomy on Patient Three’s itty, bitty neck!"
The nonsense raised the hair on the back of Penny’s neck, for it seemed deliberately idle, recited to disturb and disorient those around him.
A foreboding chill ran down her spine, a terrible wave of unease.
This man was not well.
One of the fleeing men had bravely decided to turn around, a look of anguish upon his face as he fired.
The killer—Deadpool?—jerked his head to the left with inhuman speed. He avoided a bullet to the skull with a second to spare, unharmed as the bullet missed.
In a blur, Deadpool’s hand pulled a gun from his holster. There was a single crack before his would-be murderer’s kneecap exploded.
The man went down screaming.
Deadpool whistled happily as he walked over to the sobbing man. “Ouch, kneecap! That’s physical therapy three times a week, sweetheart. Definitely an opioid addiction in your future. But hey—”
He put his boot on the ruined knee and pressed down. He continued speaking at the same level volume, even as the man’s wailing crescendoed into inhuman shrieks.
“—at least you're alive, right? That's what matters!"
He just kept talking, now picking up a crowbar.
It didn’t matter what these men had done to bring Deadpool down upon them; Penny had to stop him.
A moment before she leapt down onto the bridge, Deadpool turned around and looked directly at her. "Oh! Oh! We have an audience!"
Penny landed in a crouch.
Deadpool dropped the crowbar and squealed. He clasped his hands together, bouncing in a twisted picture of girlish delight. Then he waved his bloody gloves, fanning his face like a fainting, Victorian maiden. “Spider-Man! My arachnid idol,” he gushed, voice going high and breathless, “I've been following your TikTok—I mean, not in a creepy way, in a 'I respect your work' way—and I just gotta say, that WAP video? Chef's kiss. Made me believe in art again.”
Just a few seconds later, the reason for Deadpool’s relaxed demeanor became clear.
The fleeing men had almost reached the end of the empty bridge when the lone van on the road exploded. The potent scent of fuel filled Penny’s nose, and they were shouting now, trapped between fire and flame on one side, and on the other—
Deadpool.
Who had clearly orchestrated the whole snare. A murderer who now regarded them with an arsonist’s bright mirth. “Whoops, forgot to douse you boys in gasoline first.” He made a show of rummaging through his pockets. “Anyone got lighter fluid?” He paused. “And a lighter?”
One of the men was already climbing the railing, preparing to jump into the river.
Deadpool didn’t seem to notice or care. He turned back to Penny, still talking to her in that overly cheerful, insane way of his. “Spider-Man, I was beginning to think you were camera shy! Don’t suppose you have a Zippo? Or is vaping—"
Penny didn’t let him finish. She shot a web to his face and flew at him with a kick that should have sent him sprawling.
Should have.
Deadpool pirouetted away, laughing even as he drew a gun again. “Oh, so that’s how it is? Fantastic! I love meet-cutes that start with violence! Very rom-com, very enemies-to-lovers—"
He fired.
Despite the fact that Penny knew all along that she was in very real, very serious danger, she didn’t expect the bullet to come mid-conversation.
Too late she realized: that was the point.
Shocked, she twisted mid-air, desperate—
Not fast enough. Pain exploded on her left side where the bullet grazed her, white-hot and immediate. She staggered, clutching her side. The seamless voice modulator in her mask turned her yelp into a rough grunt.
“Ooh, close one!” called Deadpool brightly. “I mean, I was aiming for center mass, but you moved, so mea culpa—"
My turn, she seethed.
Penny struck back hard.
She webbed his gun and yanked viciously. Deadpool clung to his weapon, sending him into a brutal crash with the pavement.
When he tried to rise, Penny was already there, an uncompromising boot aimed at his chest, violently knocking him back.
Mean.
And it felt—God, it felt good. Freeing to be as strong as she actually was.
She fired more webs at Deadpool and he dodged, but only part-way. A thick strand across his chest pinned his right arm to his side.
“—alright, so that one was your bad.” Deadpool nodded, laughing again. “But that’s okay, baby. See, I’m like a Swiss Army knife. Very versatile. That whole, ‘I contain multitudes—”
One-armed, in the same manner that men pulled off their t-shirts, he reached behind him, drew forth a bloody machete—
(unbidden, Penny pictured it again: the decapitated head on the ground. its lifeless, unseeing eyes. she’d seen death, but not with that mess)
—and lunged at her with incredible speed. The kind of combat training that truly highlighted the insufficiencies of her own self-taught style. Deadpool was slashing at her in a terrifying blitz, forcing Penny back even with one arm webbed to his side.
“—well, I’m more of a fan of the lesser quoted, ‘Do I contradict myself?’ line. Whitman really speaks to me. But hey, bandwagons—"
She dodged to the left, moving faster than she ever had in her entire life. Her spider-sense shrieked as the sharp blade of the machete whistled through the air, missing her by an inch.
“—are boring. I got kicked off the Sinaloa cartel’s wagon. You give one Colombian neck-tie to the jefe’s son, and suddenly everyone’s telling me I need to be a cowboy solitario.”
The pain in her side flared as Penny pushed her body to its limits, the discomfort worsening with every prolonged minute of their fight. She pressed a hand to the wound, applying pressure for a few seconds of relief.
Deadpool used the momentary reprieve to try and free his other arm from the webbing. He hacked at it, confused as it refused to yield to the knife. The blade hit the webbing and slid down, unable to cut through the material.
He tried again with a powerful sawing motion, one which would have easily sliced through zip ties or rope.
Again, the webbing held with absolutely no sign of damage.
Penny felt a hysterical surge of relief flood through her chest. Thank god for unlimited lab access and that evil fucking course.
She’d spent weeks perfecting this formula, bringing it to new heights because of the Empire State lab access she’d obtained for ISC.
Penny’s most crucial innovation: shear-thickening behavior. When the web fluid was hit fast, with the force of a bullet or a knife, the non-Newtonian properties kicked in, polymer chains locking together under impact stress. They became damn near impenetrable.
It would be two hours before Deadpool could cut through.
Penny caught her breath for just a second, feeling the tiniest bit safer as Deadpool demonstrated proof of concept before her eyes.
“Huh,” he said, tilting his head. “That's actually impressive. What is this, some kind of—"
Deadpool kicked at her with such speed and force that he essentially flew. His boot, bladed at the tip, caught her ribs hard enough that she felt her bones creak at the same time her skin and suit tore.
Penny wheezed, barely managing to roll out of reach afterward. She stumbled to her feet as she danced back.
Penny had not fought another enhanced person with these insane, inhuman reflexes. Clearly unhindered by Penny’s own enhancements and not suffering the same disadvantage, Deadpool kept forcing her to dodge, striking at her in an endless, fluid siege of violence.
The handicap of one arm did virtually nothing to slow him down.
Enthusiasm aflame, he seemed to anticipate her rapid reactions despite being wildly unpredictable himself.
They kept trading blows and his voice never stopped. A calculated, dizzying stream of stimulus that Penny had to actively banish in order to concentrate. A drain on her mental energy, constantly requiring her to narrow her focus on how Deadpool moved instead of what he was saying.
"Aww, you're pulling your punches," he cooed, dodging yet another web shot. "That's adorable. Really. It's like watching a yappy puppy try to be fierce. All bark, no bite—"
Three of the thugs ventured close to their fight, perhaps figuring that they had a chance to bring down Deadpool while he was preoccupied, wanting to go on the offensive. Despite all of them possessing guns, only one dared to aim—
Already knowing what was coming, Penny moved. Threads of web shot out in two simultaneous blasts, shielding two thugs even as they were slammed down and stuck to the pavement.
In the same instant that the third man fired, Deadpool whirled around and physically shot forward, wrathful as he swung his machete.
Possessing the reflexes of an unenhanced, mortal man, his victim could not dodge.
Instead of going for one of the man’s major arteries, Deadpool stabbed him in the side. He twisted the knife before wrenching it out.
The man collapsed.
He was going to bleed out. Penny knew it, had seen it before.
(Uncle Ben in her arms, growing heavier, rasping his last words)
She shot more webbing at Deadpool, driving him to the side as she managed to stagger toward the man on the ground.
For a moment Penny had the opportunity to pick up the fight against Deadpool. Perhaps this time she’d be successful. It was the tactical choice.
But even though Penny Parker didn’t know the man on the ground, didn’t know what lived in his heart or his past, she refused to let anyone die if it was within her power to save them.
She dropped to her knees, wondering if web fluid could be used as a gauze or if it were better to apply pressure by hand. The webbing would run the risk of preventing doctors at a hospital from accessing what they needed to repair, but would her hands be enough?
Penny pressed down with one hand, warm blood soaking her fingers. She aimed the other at the wound, trembling as she thought of how the impact was going to hurt.
Her spider-sense went supernova.
“How sweet.”
A bullet tore through her shoulder, through and through. From the tunnel of destroyed tissue, hot blood started flowing down Penny’s arm.
The pain—
The pain was enormous.
She fell forward, hitting the ground hard. Penny barely managed to lift her chest up. Behind the mask, tears streamed down her face. She couldn't stop them, didn't try. The modulator flawlessly transformed her wounded sobs into ragged, masculine breaths.
But she could see Deadpool standing there. He’d traded the machete for a gun, presumably belonging to one of the thugs she’d webbed down.
Deadpool’s voice was dripping with false sympathy. “Aw, first time?”
He crouched down beside her, still aiming the gun at her head. “That looked like it hurt.”
She was literally nauseous from the pain.
With his other hand he reached out to pat her wounded shoulder. “Just a love-tap, Spider-Man. Something to always remember me by. Well, I say always, but who knows how much time we really have?”
Penny could hear it in his voice. He was going to shoot her again. Maybe it wouldn’t be fatal, but just as likely those odds were even.
(she thought about him lifting the mask off her dead body. wondered if knowingly killing a woman would give him pause. she bet he would make a point out of letting Penny die equally, just like anyone else)
Deadpool's hold grew fiercer. Penny gagged as he squeezed. "Oh, this is a special moment. Intimate, even. I'm your first, aren't I? First person to shoot you. First person to really hurt you. That's—"
Penny’s webs fired.
His gun. Hand. Chest. Legs.
Layer after layer until Deadpool was a cocoon stuck to the bridge railing.
He burst into surprised laughter, seeming both outraged and delighted. "Now we're getting somewhere! Oh, this is—bondage on the first date? Spider-Man, you romantic—"
Bondage.
No one—not one single person—in the entire four years of being Spider-Man, had ever spoken to her like this.
Not the cops who'd chased her, not the criminals she'd webbed up, not the bystanders who'd filmed her.
As Penny Parker, she’d learned to tune out cat-calling and lingering eyes, unfortunately accepting it as a disgusting side-effect of being female in public spaces.
As Spider-Man, she’d been free from sexual harassment, able to escape it anytime she wore the suit. Penny was armored by the grace of her camouflage and the general assumption that anyone who dared to degrade her would face immediate physical retaliation.
The suit, and the mask, and the perceived maleness meant she could just exist without being constantly reminded that other people felt entitled to comment on her body.
Now Deadpool was doling out the disgusting rhetoric in the one space she’d thought she was safe from it.
Penny pushed herself up to her knees, rose to her feet, and glared, despite knowing he could not see her beneath the mask.
The worst part was Deadpool didn't even know, because he thought he was talking to a man. Inflicting this deliberate discomfort wasn't even about her being female, this was just how Deadpool was.
For a dreadful moment, Penny contemplated how every fight and encounter would change if they all knew she was a woman.
She staggered back to the wounded man and pressed her hand against his bleeding side.
"You know," Deadpool continued behind her, voice rich with that same disturbing amusement, "most people buy me dinner first. But I appreciate a partner who knows what they want. Very direct. Very—"
There was movement from her peripheral vision. The three remaining men had circled back, seemingly fearless now that she’d incapacitated Deadpool.
"—oh, we're about to have an audience. Should I be jealous? Are you the polyamorous type? Because I'm open to new experiences—"
They all aimed guns at his head.
Penny’s spider-sense buzzed insistently. Yeah, yeah, she thought deliriously. I’m on it.
Deadpool had brutally murdered three people tonight. He'd shot her twice. He was a killer, a psychopath, and absolutely deserved whatever those men were about to do to him.
The pragmatic choice was to let them pull the trigger and solve the problem. Deadpool would die and there’d be one less murderer posing a threat out in the world.
Penny made her choice with no apology.
Despite the agony in her shoulder, more web-lines shot out, and suddenly all three men went down.
Then it was just Penny standing in front of three corpses, six webbed thugs, and an incapacitated Deadpool.
Flames danced behind them all.
Deadpool went quiet for exactly three seconds. "Those guys were going to kill me,” he said slowly. “And you didn’t let them.”
Penny didn’t answer him.
She felt light-headed, had broken out into a frigid sweat.
Agony scorched in her shoulder, and pain radiated from her side in such anguish that Penny knew she would never, ever, forget the sensation of being shot.
“What the—” sputtered Deadpool, incredulous. “Did you just save me? Did I just get saved by my own captor? Kinky. I like it. We're basically married now in seventeen countries. Very damsel-in-distress, except I need a corset and you’re the—wait, are you in shock, Spider-Man?”
He paused, and Penny just knew that he was smirking. His voice was rich with innuendo and amusement as he asked, “Did I… “ and he licked his lips loudly underneath his mask, “…shoot you stupid?”
“Shut the fuck up,” Penny snarled, aggrieved.
The voice modulator ensured the graveled words landed in a savage, hostile command.
It was an invention that expressed her voice completely without computerized tones; a perfectly manufactured, masculine register which wholly transformed what would have been dismissed as a tantrum into authoritative rage.
They were her first words to him, and part of her wished they’d be more dignified, but she was just so absolutely done with Deadpool’s special brand of crazy bullshit.
She could hear how it landed: Spider-Man’s tone was an aggressive dismissal that she could not have managed on her own.
Even as overwhelmed as she was with agony, Penny was still immensely grateful for the modulator. The pain from the gunshot wound had entirely ruined her ability to seem cool and collected, even if she didn’t need to be right now.
As Spider-Man she could just be angry the way men were angry: completely, furiously, and it was just—yeah Spider-Man’s pissed off. Makes sense. That guy’s annoying.
The freedom of it was almost as intoxicating as the rage itself.
“C’mon Spider-Man,” Deadpool wheedled in between laughs. “It’s a fair question. Did you miss the part where I shot you? Twice?” He sounded proud. “And the machete?”
Penny ignored him. Still applying pressure to the man’s wound, she pulled out her phone, sending messages back and forth with Ned and MJ, touching base to let them know she was alive.
They, in turn, alerted her to the fact that the cops, an ambulance, and the fire department would all be there in the next two minutes.
"And now you're ignoring me. Which, okay fair. I did shoot you. But you like me. You’re playing hard to get, I can tell. We’ve got chemistry, it’s okay to admit it. I'm very likeable, ask anyone. Well, don't ask those three dead guys, they might have some complaints—"
She turned toward him, burning with disgust and contempt so fierce it rose higher than the pain she was in. It was a disdain so great and heavy that its presence grounded her, and brought forth the level-headedness she’d wished for moments ago.
Just as his machete could not maim her web fluid, Penny knew her words would not hurt him; yet it brought her a vicious satisfaction to speak her honest opinion of the man.
Her fierce gaze burned into the white eyes of his mask as she willed her sincerity to scorch him, to make him understand that she genuinely, honestly mean it. "Deadpool,” said Penny softly. “You make me sick.”
“And you,” drawled Deadpool in accusation, a note of suspicion in his tone, “saved my life. It wouldn’t have stuck. I come back around like a lucky penny. But you didn’t know that.”
Penny chose not to respond.
Like a needy, attention-deprived child, this only stirred his desire to poke at her.
“Maybe I did read this wrong,” he said, letting out a theatrical sigh of anguish. “Do you have that lust murder thing going where you only kill your ideal victim type? Are you letting me live because you don’t think I’m pretty? You can tell me, Spider-Man. I’m a big boy. Am I not your type of psychopath?”
Despite his facetious words, Penny chose to answer him as matter-of-fact as she could, wanting him on some level to understand.
Penny thought of Ben and of the times when May could have become the most hopeless and despairing woman after her loss of him. Penny thought of how May had been heart-broken with terrible grief, well within her rights to withdraw from Penny, to abandon her…but had never once considered it.
She saw in both May and Ben the full spectrum of family and its worth: warmth, protection, safety, the shine of happiness, and unconditional love.
There had been a time last year after May’s passing when she’d truly believed that she could not bear their loss.
Knowing now the depths of darkness a person with her powers could descend to when unmoored from love, had made Penny realize all the more how incredibly lucky she’d been to have them.
And Penny knew that this love, this goodness, was a gift that not all received.
She’d had the advantage of always being shown how to make the right choice.
It was her responsibility to pay that forward.
“What I am,” said Penny gravely, “is someone who doesn’t have the ability to determine who can be rehabilitated. Everyone has the potential to do good, and if there is any chance for your redemption, then I can’t make that call to destroy it.”
He was looking at her with interest now. His energy was almost sweetly curious, a desire to take apart something to see how it works.
Deadpool sounded skeptical, still entertained. “That’s your answer? ‘Everybody deserves to live.’” He jerked his head at the men who she’d incapacitated. “These guys would put a bullet in your brain if they’d gotten the chance. If they get out of prison, they’ll kill again and sleep like babies. I am sorry to inform you, Spidey, but there really is rest for the wicked.”
Penny was already shaking her head. She didn’t spare the other men a glance. However valid Deadpool’s words may or may not be, it didn’t change anything.
“With great power, there must also come great responsibility,” she said, low and unwavering, quoting Ben directly. “When you can do the things I can, you have a responsibility to do what's right, not what's best. And I don’t know what’s always best for everyone. But I do know that killing is wrong, period, and with the power to do things like murder anybody who would act in defiance of you, comes the responsibility to uphold your personal best.”
There was silence. Real silence.
A short blessing.
When it finally broke, Deadpool’s voice had become both lighter and sharper, rid of that manic energy that had animated him so thoroughly. He sounded as though he would very much like to backhand Penny for her stupidity. “You're going to die, you know. That moral code is going to get you killed. For all you know, webbing me up means I'll just get free and kill you tomorrow."
Penny shrugged. “Then that's on you. But I’ll die knowing that people can weather the hardest times life can throw at them, and still be the best person they can be at the end of it. It’s possible for everyone.”
“No,” he said. “It’s really not.” It wasn't hostile, the way he said it, but it left no room whatsoever for argument. “But you believe that. You really, genuinely believe that.”
And then she stopped replying, because for the second time in Penny’s life, a man died in her arms. He went still as he finally succumbed to the wound Deadpool had inflicted.
She withdrew her shaking hand and couldn’t look at Deadpool at all.
There were sirens in the distance and Penny had said her piece.