Webs We Weave



Chapter Fifteen

DISCLAIMER :: This tale blends together aspects of Peter Parker/Spider-Man and Gwen Stacy/Ghost Spider/Spider-Gwen from Marvel Comics, Marvel Television, and Marvel Studios. Fanfiction? Sort of. The world and characters are mine, but they may seem familiar.

Author's note: A little late in the day, but posted on schedule! This chapter has some heavy content about sexual assault, rape, violence, and suicide. If that's a trigger, then maybe skip this one, message me, and I'll elaborate for you without the triggers included.

(( Chapter Theme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxGKmHXP8VE )) [RIP Brad]

I ate the cookie. It was pretty good. Whilst sitting atop the arch at the 5th Avenue entrance to Washington Square Park that's basically a miniature Arc de Triomphe, I did wish that I had a little milk, though. It really would have helped me feel right as rain.

After helping the woman with her groceries, there were a couple others that needed a little helping hand. For some reason, somebody’s cat had made it out onto a ledge and was calling frantically. It was apparently not fond of the ground being nine stories below it. I was able to safely scoop up the kitty and walk it down to its owner on the sidewalk. Before finding a perch atop the arch, there was an older tourist couple that didn’t understand the navigation instructions to the Comedy Cellar over on MacDougal Street. They literally only had to walk half a block through the park and down almost two blocks.

Sitting on top of that arch, I could see most of Washington Square Park and the New York University campus that surrounds it. Generally speaking, I’d ended up there entirely by accident. I had swung in from the north and landed nicely on top. It wouldn’t be difficult to simply climb up the side, but swinging was more fun. The goggles were doing the work of keeping the wind from affecting my eyes enough that I couldn’t see without them. I knew I still had to work in the shutters. The light bouncing off some of the buildings was starting to get to me.

My thoughts were instantly interrupted by a blood-curdling scream coming from somewhere near the center of the park and under the trees. I didn’t hesitate. I hopped onto my feet and jumped toward the trees. There were probably a few short swings I could accomplish under the canopies, but it wouldn’t result in sustained momentum.

Once under the tree canopies, I spotted what appeared to be a young woman smacking some guy with her purse and desperately trying to get away from him. For as long as I could, I zipped out short lines and cruised along like a jungle monkey. When that wasn’t viable anymore, I released and started running. The young woman had been forced to the ground and was obviously crying out through tears of panic. That urged me forward.

When I was within a few meters of the man, I rounded off into some handsprings and threw my feet into him at the end of the series. He went flying from the impact while I positioned myself over her body in a crouching ready pose. What I hadn’t noticed was some guy toward the street who was battling two other guys in an outfit that looked like a dime-store Captain America, shield and all. That was interesting, but my main concern was the guy that I had kicked. A moment later, he got on his feet and looked at me with malice. He pulled a machete from behind his back.

“You should’a minded your own fuckin’ business!” He shouted at me as he advanced.

My eyes narrowed on him even though he couldn’t see it. “And you should’a known that ‘no’ means ‘no’.” With a flick of my wrist, a line shot out and actually latched onto the machete. One more flick and the weapon was dislodged from his hand, whipped past me, and stuck into the ground behind me. “You also learned the wrong lesson from Crocodile Dundee.”

“Who da fuck are you s’posed to be?” He tried taunting me.

“Right now, your worst nightmare: a girl that’s about to kick your ass.” Quickly, I turned to the terrified face of the girl beneath me locked in a phantom scream. “Stay here. They’ve got dangerous weapons. I’ll keep you safe.”

With a small nod from the college girl, my focus returned to the guy that attacked her. I leapt into the air and terribly choreographed a punch. Those things work in the movies. In the real world, he grabbed me midair and literally threw me to the side. Thanks to my senses, I was able to physically recover. He got me when he tried to charge me. It almost succeeded, but my powers locked in. Avoiding him was easy and so was kicking him in the chin as he rolled by. He fell face-first into the grass. Making use of a good opportunity, I moved over to him and flipped him over. He didn’t look conscious.

“If you know what’s good for you, stay down.” I growled in a not-so-intimidating manner.

With sounds of a struggle still in the background, I crossed back to the young woman and offered to help her stand. “You okay? He didn’t hurt you, did he?”

She was only a couple of inches taller than me. Shaking like a leaf, she shook her head. “No, but he really wanted to. I’ll have bruises, but I think I’ll be okay. Are you gonna be okay?”

“Yea. I’ll be fine. Why?” She pointed at my waist. When I looked, there was a small gash. He must have had another knife on him when I jumped at him. “Oh. Well, that sucks.” My eyes met her again. “I heal pretty quickly. I’ll be fine. Get out of here and call the cops.”

She nodded and spun around, not needing to be asked twice. Once she was out of hearing range, I inhaled a hiss because the gash stung a little bit. Unexpected wounds always seemed to hurt after you’ve noticed them. Life is weird. I knew the cut would heal faster than wounds have ever healed on my body, but that didn’t make it hurt any less. The fact that I didn’t even see the second knife worried me. I had no idea it was even there and then I got a cut near my waist. It went right through the dance gear. My mind was already formulating how to solve that particular problem.

My eyes drifted back to the other two assailants. The guy fighting them looked to be somebody of lesser means. He was wearing a hazmat suit he’d dyed midnight blue. There were a few black armor bits on various parts of his body. The hazmat hood was up and his face was covered by what looked like a paintball mask with colored lenses. Strapped to his arm, he wielded a hand-crafted circular shield that almost looked older than I now appeared to be. He used it for defense and offense. He looked as competent with the thing as Chris Evans’ stunt double without the improvised frisbee moves.

He was fighting two guys, though, and looked a little tired. Before jumping in to help, I checked on the fleeing young woman and the third guy. The girl was far enough away to be safe and the guy was still napping. Satisfied, I rushed in and did a little hop. My feet rushed toward each assailant while performing a midair split. Both kicks hit and the two were knocked off balance.

“Need a hand?” I asked the guy in the hazmat suit with a shield.

His gruff, older voice scoffed. “Looks like you brought two feet.”

“Did you just ‘Dad Joke’ in the middle of the fight?” I smirked, though he couldn’t see it.

He swung his shield into the face of one of the assailants with a grunt. “Less talking, more fighting, please.”

Rolling my eyes, I let out a groan. “Fine. You’re no fun.”

Grabbing the guy that didn’t get the shield to the face, I attached a web line and spun him around a few times. It took a little doing, but he was detained pretty well afterward. I let him fall to the ground and struggle against his binding in an exercise in futility. In the next few moments, I did the same to the other guy battling with Dime-Store Cap. Once he was secure, I repeated the process with the guy I’d knocked unconscious. I came away from the situation with a grin on my face. Dime-store Cap advanced on me.

“Are you special or just stupid?” He growled.

“Whoa!” I objected. “No need to be ableist, my guy!”

“I’m not. It takes a special kind of person to leap into a situation with no intel. You came in blind as a bat and could have gotten someone seriously hurt.” He scolded me.

My arm extended and a finger pointed at the girl off in the distance, hysterical as she talked to the 9-1-1 operator. “I saved her, didn’t I?”

He pointed at my waist. “Without paying attention and protecting yourself, too. You haven’t been at this long, have you?”

I hung my head. “Not really, no.”

“Kid, I’ve been at this since 2009. There are ways to do it right, ways to do it poorly, and ways to get yourself killed. Right now, you’re leaning toward those last two.”

“I’m not a kid… for the record.”

He laughed sardonically. “Yea, okay. Sure.” He rolled his eyes. “Honey, I’ve got two girls and a wife. I know the difference between a teenage girl’s voice and a mature woman’s. You’re a teenager and that makes you a kid.” He took a deep breath. “Which is why you should go home and hang up that ski mask. One: I can barely understand you through it. Two: you’re being a stupid fucking kid. There’s a reason the RLSH community discourages anyone under 18 from doing this work. You’re stupid and impulsive.”

“RLSH?”

He groaned. “Real Life SuperHero. It’s been a whole movement since the 1970s. There was a documentary in 2011. You’ve really never heard of us?”

“Nope. All I know is you look like a figurine of Captain America from Dollar General.”

His body slumped. “Ouch.” He started walking toward the middle of the park. “Seventeen years of work for no fucking reason.”

My heart sank in my chest as I followed him. “It’s probably not for nothing. Just because I haven’t heard of you—whatever your name is—doesn’t mean nobody has.”

“The name’s Aegis. I’ve been out here longer than you’ve probably been alive.” He let out a sigh as he seemed to keep a casual pace. “I thought the whole powers thing was a joke. Here you come out of nowhere throwing actual webs and jumping around like a floor routine at the Olympics.” Behind the mask, his eyes seemed to focus on something in the distance. “Maybe it’s a sign I gotta spend more time at home with my kids. I’m getting too old for this shit, anyway.”

His pace was such that I trailed behind him a little. “Wait, what do you mean ‘the whole powers thing’? I thought it was just me and that girl in Chicago?”

He scoffed. “Yea, no. It’s all over the internet. People are showing encrypted videos and such. Maybe they’re not as captivating for the press as the possibility of Superman with tits, but they exist.” He glanced back at me. “You were the one they caught swinging down Varick, weren’t you? It’s funny how many are really convinced that’s AI video.”

“I’m fine with people thinking the video is fake. I’m not doing this for the fame.”

He abruptly halted. “Let’s be clear: you shouldn’t be doing it at all. Today, it was a scratch in your side. A graze, really. Tomorrow, it could be a bullet between your eyes. You have no idea what you’re getting into, little girl. You need to go home and hang up the mask until you’re eighteen, at least.”

My blood was coming up to boiling temperature. “Let’s get one thing settled between the two of us: I’m not a child.” I hung my head a little and looked at my hands. “These powers came with a cost. In reality, you’re only one to five years older than me—depending on if you started at eighteen or as old as twenty-five. I’m old enough to remember the release of the Nintendo 64 because I was a kid. The Power Rangers were my jam. I remember the Towers. I remember sitting down on the couch, watching Spongebob when it first came out, and laughing like an idiot. I remember Hannah Montana because Miley was only a year younger than me. I wasn’t even a teenager when Tobey Maguire put on a red and blue suit and took the world by storm. I lived a life before this happened.”

He let out a heavy breath, but he didn’t say anything for a long minute. “I’m thirty-seven.” He said plainly before taking a moment to choose his words carefully. “Let’s entertain the idea. I’ve seen the webs and the crazy acrobatics. Have you got the senses, the ability to climb sheer surfaces, and crazy strength, too?”

I tilted my head a little, curious where he was going with the question. “According to my experiments, yes.”

He shook his head. “I saw somebody who could fly and shoot lightning from her hands online the other day. With special effects being what they are, is any of it real? How did any of this even happen?”

“I can’t speak to the validity of anyone else online. I can only talk about my own experience.” I crouched down and launched myself into the air about thirty meters. It wasn’t as frightening as it had been the first time because I’d been able to practice. I landed in a certain pose that allowed my body to absorb the energy of the fall, then stood up. “I’m real. When’s the last time you saw someone free jump the height of a rowhouse in Brooklyn?”

He simply nodded, trying to process the whole thing, no doubt. “How did this even happen? One minute, superpowers are stuff you see in the movies. The next, some kid’s climbing the side of a skyscraper and another’s flying through Chicago.”

“Best guess is that pulse thing from April 29th. That’s when everything changed for me. I’m pretty sure that’s when it happened to the others, too. An unclassified astronomical phenomenon filled with energy signatures and exotic particles that science can’t yet explain passed through the planet and changed our world.” At the unasked questions written on his face, I shrugged. “I’m a mechanical engineer that dabbled in astrophysics in college.”

“Smart kid.”

I groaned. “We’ve established that I’m not technically a kid.”

He turned and started walking again. “Whatever. So, you’re basically Spider-Man’s little sister—”

“I’m not that, either,” I interrupted while following him.

“Whatever you say doesn’t really matter. Unless you claim a name, everybody’s going to call you that. It’s an easy association.”

“A cease and desist from Sony and Disney is really the last thing I need.”

“Right. Might as well nip that in the bud.” He held up his shield. “I’m Aegis. It’s because of this shield and my promise. My mission is to be the protector of women, like the one tonight, from being attacked or assaulted. I did my research. I looked at crime statistics and maps to determine where I would patrol. I learned that from D3V1L. It’s why I’m here near the college because it’s a hot spot. I also learned about New York Penal Law 35.15 from him. It says you can use force if it’s in the defense of another person. If you’re curious, read the whole law. There’s a lot there. I use it to defend women, specifically, from people who want to hurt them like I did tonight. I’m the protector, never the one that incites the violence. My weapon is a defense because I don’t actually want to hurt anyone, but I can if I need to.”

“All that makes a great deal of sense. ‘Aegis’. It’s not just your name but your creed. It’s kinda poetic, if you think about it.”

“So, what do you want to be called? What’s your mission?”

The questions made me stop and think for a few moments. “Well… there’s people that call me Seda, for a start.”

He chuckled. “Silk. In Spanish. Cute. With the webs, it works.”

I rolled my eyes. “Not so much. That name by itself is taken. Marvel Comics.”

“Fine. Workshop it. You didn’t answer my second question: what’s your mission?”

The question recalibrated my mind. We were walking past an area with aluminum barricades. I hopped up on one and started walking the line like a tightrope. It was aiding the thought process and gave me a break from feeling like the shortest person in the room again.

“I experienced something like what that girl was going through tonight,” I admitted in a low tone. “I know the fear that was running through her. The difference is that I have these powers, so I could fight the guys myself. I feel like…” I let out a heavy sigh. “...like if bad things happen it’s kind of my fault because I have these powers and I could do something about it. I wanna help people. I wanna protect them.”

Aegis chuckled from the firm sidewalk a little below me. “Great power… great responsibility… sounds like a movie thing. It’s the kind of quote everyone would expect from someone with your powers.”

“Yea, it does. I still feel it, though.” I smirked. “They really don’t sell the thrill of swinging through Manhattan enough. It’s such a rush.”

“I thought Andrew Garfield did a pretty decent job at it.” He shrugged. “Regardless, you want to be a helpful protector, right? That’s your whole mission?”

“I mean, yea. I want to protect the people of New York, specifically women. You should see the crime statistics against women and girls in the five boroughs. It’s more than a little frightening.”

“I have seen those stats.” He diverted his gaze toward something off in the distance in front of us. “It’s one of the reasons I decided to do this. I had a really good friend who went to college here at NYU. She was so excited about being right here in the middle of the buzz of Manhattan.” He got a little choked up. “She was attacked in this very park. The guy who raped her got off scot-free. It destroyed her. She was never the same. She… she jumped off the George Washington Bridge in 2008. I made a promise to honor her legacy and make sure it never happened to someone else on my watch.”

The story took me back several steps in my mind. “Wow. That turned into a genuine disaster.” My voice dropped a few decibels. “I’m sorry about your friend.”

He turned to face me. Neither one of us noticed we’d stopped walking. He was on the concrete of the sidewalk while I was up on the metal barricade. “I turned a tragedy into a mission statement. While I’m out here, that won’t happen. I’m just one guy, though.”

I nodded softly. “I see what you’re saying. The mission is a promise to yourself as well as the people who might never hear you state it.” My head turned so that my eyes met his, even though his were behind yellow mirrored lenses and mine were behind the goggles. “They’ll never see your face and they’ll never know your name. Putting yourself behind the mask says that anyone could do these things with enough conviction. You don’t need fame or recognition. Just to know people are safe. How am I doing?”

He chuckled. “I put on the mask because people might file false reports if they get upset that I beat them up for acting like an asshole. In recent years, it’s because of facial recognition software. I use the superhero name that’s easy to say and it keeps my family safe from retaliation. The mission still drives my actions, but some things are just practical.”

I rolled my eyes. “So, I wax philosophical and you’re basically telling me ‘You know nothing, Jon Snow’. Wonderful.”

“There’s a lot you don’t know, kid. I’m going to keep harping on the fact you’re under 18 and shouldn’t be doing this at all. If it’s a goal, then you should learn to fight, first. Then, you’re gonna need a suit of some kind. The dancer lycra is cute and all, but it’s thin as hell. It tears easily and cuts get through. It’s meant to breathe in, not fight. Then, you’re gonna need to learn some math to collate some data and work out patterns. You’ll need to work on some crime maps that inform your patrols.” He chuckled. “Whatever you do, don’t depend on police scanners. That works in the movies. In the real world, the NYPD isn’t going to use the radios for major actions. That’s all coordinated behind the scenes. For spur of the moment stuff like a bank robbery, they use code.”

“Thankfully, I’m really good at math.” My cheeks flushed a little as he mentioned the scanner. “I figured out the scanner was a waste of time. Movies lied to me.”

“Movies are supposed to lie. They’re fiction.” He shook his head.

Another sigh escaped my lips. “Look, the reality is that I don’t have a blueprint for any of this. I can reference comic books, TV shows, and movies all day long. Even in the short time I’ve been trying to do this, it’s readily apparent it’s not always going to be sunshine and rainbows. I’m living my truth the best way I know how because when I go home and take off this mask, everything is lies. This is the true me. I wanna help and use these powers for something that makes a difference.”

His vocal inflection sounded like he was smiling. “It’s a good motivator, but this isn’t like all that pop culture mush in your brain. Do you know what I do when I’m not beating three guys to pulp for trying to harm that girl tonight?”

“Not a clue.”

“I’m out here with hand warmers, socks, first aid supplies, a few bottles of water, and outreach information. There are at least eight homeless people that sleep out here most nights. I do what I can to make their lives suck a little less after they encounter me. That’s about ninety percent of my patrols. That stuff doesn’t make the news. Ever. Those are the small acts of kindness that make life worth a shit. You gotta take care of the community, not just beat up bad guys.”

My shoulders slumped. I’d been classifying those things as the boring parts. “Yea. I guess you’re right about that.”

“I don’t guess. I know. If you wanna be a warden of New York, you gotta look out for the people.”

Electricity sparked in my body at the utterance of a single word. “What’d you just say?”

“A warden of New York? It’s being the protector or the guardian. It goes back—”

“I think that’s it.”

“What is it?”

“My name.” The lenses of my goggles met his. “I’m Silk Warden.”