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Rating:

Teen And Up Audiences

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No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

Gen

Fandoms:

Parahumans Series - WildbowSpider-Man - All Media TypesSpider-Man (Comicverse)Marvel (Comics)Marvel 616Marvel

Relationships:

Taylor Hebert | Skitter | Weaver & Peter ParkerPeter Parker/Mary Jane Watson

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Cross-Posted on FanFiction.NetCrossoverAction/Adventure

Language:

English

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Published:2026-05-07Updated:2026-07-30Words:60,582Chapters:14/?Comments:255Kudos:390Bookmarks:136Hits:13,101

Tangled in a Stranger's Web

CHPrime

Chapter 8: Chapter 7: Peter

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

Through the window, I saw Taylor get into Danny's car. She had the same eerily blank expression on her face that I saw when I first met her. Danny tried to talk, but Taylor just stared ahead at nothing until they drove off.

At the edge of the windowsill, I saw a few wasps furiously wriggling in a spider's web. They were ripping the arachnid apart, limb by limb, completely unconcerned that their struggles were only wrapping the silk tighter around them.

The spider didn't even flinch as it was torn into pieces.

"Mister Parker, can you come in for a few minutes?" Blackwell's voice drifted through the room. I blinked away and entered her little office, just as the Hess girl's case worker walked out, mumbling something under her breath.

What greeted me was an office like any other. A desk, a computer, some diplomas on the wall. I had only been in Blackwell's office twice before, and while it was well cleaned, it always felt like it was dusty. Probably the shag carpet that looked like it was from the 60's.

Blackwell herself was finishing an email when I sat down in an awful plastic-molded chair, the kind with three slits on the back. She brushed her dirty blonde hair out of her eyes and looked at me a bit like I was one of the kids that got sent to her during class.

I stared back. She clearly wanted me to be the one to break first, but I refused to give her the satisfaction.

Blackwell clacked her press-on nails along the cheap plywood of her desk exactly four times before sighing and reaching down. In one swift motion, she pulled out two plastic cups and a bottle of alcohol.

Cheap rum, from the smell. She poured herself a generous amount before hovering the bottle over my cup.

I graciously declined. "Don't you have to drive home?"

Blackwell snorted. "God. Don't remind me. I only get the pleasure four hours from now." She brought the cup to her lips and drank.

Damnit. "Those girls are bullying Taylor. They've been doing it for a long time."

"And they have been punished." The bottle was about two-thirds empty.

"Two weeks' suspension? For that?" I glared. "I looked at some of the things written in that collection. If even half of that is true—"

"Miss Hebert has a history of claiming to be bullied without evidence."

I stared. "What the hell do you call all of her notes then? Creative writing?"

Blackwell nursed her plastic cup in one hand. "Wouldn't be the first time a kid has pulled that stunt."

"And that locker? Apparently, she was trapped in it for over an hour and had to go to the hospital. What about that?"

"The police investigated." She took another drink. "No one saw anything. The cops didn't even register it as a crime, from what I am told."

I tried to keep my jaw from tearing itself off my face. "The emails. They tell the whole story. They can't be faked. It would be easy to figure out when they were sent and by whom. I can do it all myself over the weekend."

"I'm sure you can." Blackwell took another swig. "But you can't prove who was controlling those accounts—"

"I know how to get the metadata." I interrupted. "It will tell us everything we need to know. Where they were sent from, and the exact time of each message. If we line it up with those three's schedules, they'll prove everything."

"I didn't have to take this meeting, you know." Blackwell grunted. "I'm busy enough trying to stop kids from openly murdering each other during this gang—"

"And you already have three kids who are already doing a pretty good job of making another wish she was dead!" I snapped.

Blackwell was glaring at me over her cup. I'd seen that look on more than a few supervillains promising to kill me before, so I assumed this was the point when she'd throw me out on my ass and threaten to sue in a vain attempt to hide whatever it was she was trying to hide.

Except she didn't. Blackwell's expression relaxed back into apathy, and she took another swig. "Hmm."

In the distance, I heard a siren starting up. But I refused to back down. "Well?"

"Have you ever read The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas?" She asked out of the blue.

I stared for a second. "...I think I've heard of it."

"I used to teach it as part of freshman English." Blackwell's expression was wistful. She briefly glanced out the window, towards a little patch of blue in the sky. "They always enjoyed the book, probably because it was so short. Still, I could always get a good lesson out of it, and then…"

Her face clouded over, and she took a long sip.

I leaned forward. "Is this going anywhere?"

Blackwell's lips pursed. "It's a thought experiment, a parable. Omelas is a perfect city, full of everything anyone could ever want. It is clean and safe, full of happy, educated people who want for nothing."

She was going to make me ask for it, wasn't she. "But…?"

"But for the city to work, there has to be a sacrifice. A single child must be locked away in a dark cellar, left alone and abused." Blackwell finished her drink and set the cup back down on the table. "Some citizens are disgusted by this. They choose to leave." She fixed me with a piercing stare. "But most don't."

I glanced past her face to look at something other than her insufferably bored face. All I saw were her bumpy walls, painted eggshell white with just a hint of vomit green. "Winslow is no paradise."

"I'm glad you noticed."

My eyes narrowed. I wanted to say it just in anger, but I was also confused. "So what's the point of bringing it up?"

"I'm afraid you misunderstand, Mister Parker.The child is a metaphor. It isn't any singular, specific person." Blackwell tilted her head. "It can stand in for a lot of people. A lot of little things in the same rickety boat."

I couldn't stop my eyes from rolling. "I know that. And there is a real kid, suffering right now, that you—"

"I don't know what you are talking about." Blackwell interrupted blandly. "Perhaps I didn't make myself clear. Did you notice anything strange about your onboarding, Parker?"

My frown narrowed. "...It was oddly simple."

"You were the most qualified applicant we found, despite your complete lack of work history, references, and credentials." Blackwell said. "That's a bit more than odd. And yet, you are allowed to keep your job here. Because the board needed a position to be filled."

She glanced down at her cup. A little bit of gin had stubbornly clung to the plastic. "And despite my reservations, you do seem to genuinely care. And so you remain gainfully employed."

My fists curled in my lap. "Are you threatening me?"

"I wouldn't dream of it." Blackwell's tone was bland as always. "You're one of the few people here who is actually doing his job correctly."

"And you aren't!" Another siren roared by the school. I did my best to repress my urge to chase after it. I still had a crime to solve as Peter Parker.

Blackwell poured another thimbleful of gin into her cup. "No. I'm afraid I am." She paused to look at her reflection in the glass and smooth down a few hairs. "That's the way this school works."

"What the hell are you talking about, Blackwell?!" I stood up so fast my chair creaked. "You give the little psychopaths a slap on the wrist! Don't tell me that 'it's just the way the world works!' That's the biggest load of shit either of us has ever heard! You can fix this, so do it!"

"I've made my decision. I've already wasted enough time on it, and I still need to put in two hours of calls with the truancy department after you leave." She stared at me with glassy eyes."While it might not look like it, I have done what I can for Ms. Hebert."

I was honestly shocked. Was she still going on about that stupid book? How could anyone act this way? "That's it? That's all you have to say for yourself?"

She barely even reacted. "I was like you, once." The cup was downed in a single swig.

"Then be like me again, or get out of the way of someone who will do something!"

Blackwell sighed. "Peter. I've sat in on too many PTA meetings where the parents smile and nod just long enough to make sure we keep their hellspawns out of their hands for eight hours a day. I've bored the city council to tears. I have spoken exhaustively to three different mayors. Once upon a time, I even managed to get a hold of the governor." Her eyes wandered over to a diploma on the wall. A Master's in English Literature. "It cost me the only job I ever cared about."

"That doesn't—"

She slammed her hand down on the table to cut me off. Her drink shook along with the plywood. "I've said all that I am legally allowed to say." She quickly finished off the last few drops in her cup. "The following, for your information, is only an opinion. One I have overheard from people who no longer work here, and in no way is my own."

"Legally…?" A numb feeling ran through me.

The woman tossed her cup into a trash bin without trouble. "Winslow is a bad school. It serves the poor parts of a poor city, and employs the teachers who are too much trouble to fire or have nowhere else to go. It was like this before Brokton's ports died, only got worse afterwards, and will continue to be a shithole until someone pushes it into the ocean."

She drooped forward, catching her jaw in her hand. "It is like this because the powers that be wish it to be like this. Not for any malicious reason, but because we matter less than the schools that service their children and their donors' children." Another sigh escaped her. "My job, as I see it, is to minimize the harm, however I can. Every day, I try, I fail, and I try again."

Blackwell exhaled sharply. It was the first genuine emotion I had seen out of the woman. "But sometimes, my hands are tied by events beyond my control. I have long since learned when to give up. The fights are simply not worth it." She glanced at me again. "Do you understand, Peter?"

More police sirens were starting up. I wanted to scream at Blackwell, to rip out her hard drive and go through every email she had saved on it, and then rub the smoking gun she had been stupid enough to leave in my reach.

But I could already hear another siren, and another, and another, all getting quieter as they sped away.

"You disgust me." I spat.

The woman seemed surprised. Her mouth opened, as if to say something—

Then her eyes fell down to the bottle and her reflection. She frowned. "I suppose I would."

"Every kid here deserves better than this." My voice growled. "Even the Hitler Youth."

"They do." Blackwell poured herself another cup. "It seems you've made your decision. Let me know when you're ready to make it official."

"You'll hear about it." I swore.

As I rushed out the door, more sirens were sounding off as smoke rose in the distance. Briefly, I saw the dust trail of the Protectorate's speedster whiz by Winslow, not even glancing in its direction.

In the windowsill, the wasps were trying to chew their way out of the web, desperate to escape the mess they had been forced into by an uncaring master. It wasn't going to work. Not with both of them blindly thrashing around, making the knots even worse. They might have been able to work together at one point, but they were too entangled in the dead spider's web to escape now.

"So, Spider-Man, you've made quite a name for yourself. Saving the city from a mad bomber is an amazing debut. And as an independent cape too!"

"All in a day's work!" I smiled under my mask. The rooftop had a nice seabreeze, which made things comfortable, if a little chilly.

I was talking to a woman named Linda O'Neil, a reporter for the Brockton Bay Bulletin. She had a decent number of articles under her belt, including a number of cape profiles whose webpages were always full of comments, and several very well-sourced articles about city hall that no one read.

"Are you a local? How long have you been a cape?" She flashed a plastic smile at me that screamed, 'I would rather drink a gallon of liquid soap than write another goddamn puff piece about the newest costumed dumbass.'

"Miss O'Neil, I would love to answer that, but before we get started, I have one little ask."

Her expression strained. "Of course. What can I do for you?"

I shrugged. "Well, I have a friend of a friend of a friend, who knows a kid who goes to Winslow High. You know it?" O'Neil nodded uncertainly. "Great. They say there's something strange going on there. Something illegal."

"It's no secret that Winslow has gang problems." My new reporter friend replied. Her tone was cautious. She was trying to figure me out. Apparently, the PRT and New Wave didn't throw her many curveballs. "And even if it's different, there's enough going on in the latest gang war to drown anything going on in the school out—"

"See, that's the thing. This isn't about kid gangsters. At least, not the ones in Winslow." O'Neil's brow rose at that. "The story goes that a few months ago, there was a girl who had to be rushed to the hospital…"

I didn't have time Monday night to do anything. Or Tuesday, for that matter. I just barely managed to make this appointment early Wednesday morning.

I had pored through the Bulletin's website before contacting them. They were a decent rag, as far as I could tell. Desperate after the internet had come and destroyed their classified page, just like every other paper, but they managed to hold onto their integrity. They weren't afraid of pissing off the mayor, the cops, the city council, the PRT, and sometimes their own readers, given an editorial or two I saw.

Robbie and Jonah would say that was how you knew they were doing it right. And as I described what a layman might know about the locker incident, I could see O'Neil's eyes lighting up. She was hungry for a chance to prove herself, and she could smell the blood.

"But when I looked the case up in the police's records, it didn't show up. At all." Blackwell had been correct, it really didn't. "I thought that seemed strange. Especially for a crime that went unsolved, right? It feels like someone, somewhere was trying to keep whatever this was under wraps, don't you think?"

O'Neil's fingers were hammering against her phone's retractable keyboard. She wasn't even sideying me. "I do indeed."

"Ah ha, I knew I wasn't crazy." Even if I was only a part-time photographer, I knew what made newspeople tick. "So, I was hoping in exchange for my exclusive, you could look into this for my friend of a friend."

There was something wrong with the cops in this town beyond the surface. The obvious crime without a report proved that. All the teachers and students seemed more than happy to pretend not to see things in front of them. The evidence didn't exist because no one wanted it to exist. A good strategy, when no one was looking for anything.

But if you dug, the rotting caracasses would still be there. All someone needed to know was where to start. Even if the paper's editorial was in on it, I could work with O'Neil myself. The shiny new hero who had saved the city would give me more than enough clout to start the ball rolling.

"Of a friend who knows a kid. Yes." O'Neil was positively glowing with the righteous anger all young reporters dreamed of having. "Let's get this piece of shit interview in the can so I can go do my real job."

I could already tell I was going to be late for Winslow. More sirens. More screeching tires. More questions I was supposed to answer with a smile and a pep in my step, before doing my seven hours and then jumping back into this gang war. No time to deal with the disaster that was the school administration.

But I had been in the superhero game for a while. And though I started out thinking it was me versus the world, that I was the proverbial Atlas holding up the world as everyone else ignored me so they could go slack off and rest easy, I knew better now.

People wanted to help people. They didn't always know how, but if you showed them a way, they would spit in your expectations' face and seize the gold medal faster than you could blink.

I had found the time to flip through Blackwell's book recommendation. Le Guin knew something or other about that whole 'writing' thing, but the ending was stupid. Live with the knowledge that your happiness relies on someone else's misery, or walk away from everything? There are never only two choices.

Save the kid, no matter what it took, or what the consequences were. Then build something better. That was my answer.

Notes:

Learned helplessness is the phrase of the day.

Despite it being the go-to explanation in fanfics, not a single word of canon supports the idea that Backwell is personally getting kickbacks because of Sophia.

And so, I have attempted something I don't think I've ever seen before: a Blackwell who isn't rubbing her hands together evilly as she cackles on top of the thousands of dollars she is embezzling, and is maybe, just maybe, a little sympathetic. Let me know if I succeeded.

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