Captain America's new directive felt like something pulled straight from a Cold War spy thriller. Cut the heads off from the shadows. Before the titanium blast doors of the Avengers penthouse had even retracted, Steve Rogers had laid out the new rules of engagement. Every Avenger was tasked with building their own localized intelligence network to root out Hydra's infiltration of the United States infrastructure. More importantly, there was to be absolute operational compartmentalization. No cross-chatter. No sharing investigative data. If Hydra managed to compromise one Avenger's network, the rest of the board would remain entirely hidden.
As for their other looming geopolitical problem, Tony and Steve had surprisingly reached an immediate consensus regarding Sergei Kravinoff. Steve, a man who had spent his formative years fighting alongside the Red Army in the freezing mud of Europe, harbored zero residual animosity toward Russians. Tony, meanwhile, was entirely motivated by the sheer, petty joy of giving the Pentagon a massive bureaucratic migraine. The formal invitation had already been dispatched to Kraven. Now, they were just waiting for the hunter to accept.
For the time being, Peter was off the clock.
He didn't exactly have a massive spy ring to deploy against Hydra. If he needed to push for information, he had a few reliable assets: the street-level grit of the Defenders, Felicia Hardy's sticky fingers, or his own top-tier security clearance at Oscorp.
Oscorp was the most likely candidate for a Hydra parasite, given the company's heavy involvement in military bio-engineering and the Super-Soldier programs. But Peter's instincts told him that if Hydra was operating inside the company, they were buried deep in the sub-basements. Despite Norman Osborn's ruthless corporate nature, Peter highly doubted the billionaire knew a Nazi death cult was using his labs. Norman was a control freak; he wouldn't share his toys.
All of that high-stakes espionage, however, was currently taking a backseat to a much more terrifying crisis.
It was Saturday afternoon, and Peter Parker was trapped in a high-end Manhattan boutique.
"Absolutely not," Peter said flatly, sinking deeper into a plush velvet sofa. "You look like a piece of chewed bubblegum."
Harry Lyman stood in front of a three-way mirror, nervously adjusting the lapels of a blindingly bright pink tailored suit. He frowned at his reflection, turning side to side. "You don't think it pops? I want to make an impression."
"You're going to make an impression, alright," Peter deadpanned, rubbing his eyes. "The impression that you're about to aggressively sell someone a timeshare in Miami."
Ever since Harry had scored a formal dinner invitation to Liz Allan's house for tonight, he had been operating at a state of frantic, vibrating panic. He had dragged Peter out of Queens at nine in the morning, and they had already cycled through red, yellow, and deep purple suits.
"What about the suit I wore to the Homecoming dance?" Harry asked, shedding the pink jacket and tossing it to a highly judgmental store clerk. "You know, the green one?"
"The green one makes you look like a supervillain, Harry," Peter sighed. "Just dress normally. Black, charcoal, navy blue. Standard human colors."
Harry walked back over to the rack, his shoulders slumping. "Did you... I mean, do you know anything about her family? I really need to make a good impression on them, Pete. Liz thinks my fashion sense is 'eccentric but cute,' but parents are different."
"What did Liz tell you about her dad?" Peter asked, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees.
Harry pulled a dark navy blazer from the rack and inspected the stitching. "She said her mom passed away a long time ago. Her dad raised her all by himself. He works crazy hours to keep his business afloat, but he always makes time for her."
Harry's voice softened, losing a bit of its frantic edge. It was a stark contrast to his own father. When Emily Osborn had died, Norman had turned into a block of ice, looking at Harry not as a son to be nurtured, but as a disappointment to be managed.
"Liz says he pays extreme attention to detail," Harry continued, slipping his arms into the navy jacket. "He notices everything. She complains sometimes that he's way too overprotective, but she loves him."
Peter nodded, connecting the psychological dots. A single father. Blue-collar background. Hyper-observant. Deeply protective. "Okay," Peter said, standing up and walking over to his friend. "That means you need to put the man at ease. You need to prove that you are reliable, grounded, and absolutely not a threat to his daughter's stability."
Peter grabbed a garish, floral-patterned tie out of Harry's hand and tossed it onto a nearby chair. "Do you think wearing a pink suit or a neon green blazer is going to make a fiercely protective dad feel at ease? You're a billionaire's son, Harry. You already have a strike against you for being rich. Don't add 'eccentric weirdo' to the list."
Harry stared at his reflection in the dark navy suit. A look of sudden clarity washed over his face. "So... I just need to look boring."
"You need to look respectful," Peter corrected.
Thirty minutes later, Harry walked out of the boutique carrying a garment bag containing a perfectly tailored, incredibly conservative charcoal suit, a crisp white shirt, and a simple blue tie. He looked a bit like a guy trying to sell life insurance, but it was infinitely better than looking like a neon sign.
Harry let out a long, nervous breath as they stepped onto the bustling Manhattan sidewalk. He checked his watch. "Since it's still early, what if we head to the base and deploy the Spider Team? Run some drone patrols?"
Peter looked at him in sheer disbelief. "Harry, there isn't a world-ending crime every single day. Take a day off."
"Which parallel universe did you just swing in from?" Harry shot back, gesturing wildly to the chaotic traffic of 5th Avenue. "This is New York City!"
"Isn't there an alternate universe out there where New York can go twenty-four hours without a single bank robbery?"
"If there is, it's probably still called New Amsterdam," Harry joked, the tension finally bleeding out of his shoulders.
They grabbed a couple of pretzels from a street vendor and took the subway down to the Emily Osborn Research Center.
The frosted glass doors of The Web hissed open, revealing the cavernous, white hexagonal lab. The sterile hum of high-end air filtration systems filled the room. In the center of the lab, Dr. Jonathan Drew was standing in front of a massive, climate-controlled terrarium. He was wearing thick safety goggles, carefully using a pair of long, stainless-steel tweezers to drop live crickets onto a massive expanse of shimmering webbing.
"Good morning, Dr. Drew," Peter called out, tossing his backpack onto a desk. "How are the eight-legged nightmares doing today?"
Jonathan pulled his goggles up, resting them on his messy dark hair. He offered a warm, academic smile. "They are doing exceptionally well, Peter. Better than expected, actually."
He tapped the thick plexiglass with the tip of his tweezers. Two massive, vividly colored spiders crawled out from beneath an artificial leaf, their mandibles clicking silently as they approached the crickets.
"You know," Jonathan murmured, leaning closer to the glass. "I've been analyzing the genetic sequence of the original arachnid that bit you. Scientifically speaking, it makes absolutely zero sense that you are alive."
Peter paused, stepping up to the glass beside the scientist. "What do you mean?"
"The delivery mechanism of the bite, the sheer volume of the radioactive venom, and the aggressively re-programmed genome..." Jonathan shook his head, his brow furrowing in deep scientific frustration. "That spider was far too biologically terrifying for the baseline human genome to process. Ninety-nine point nine percent of the human population would have died instantly from total cellular sequence collapse. The rest would have suffered catastrophic, fatal mutations. You are statistically impossible anomalies. It's sheer, unimaginable luck."
Or it's a cosmic choice made by the Spider Totem, Peter thought, the haunting voice of Anansi echoing briefly in the back of his mind. Peter and Jonathan had actually danced around this exact topic before, but Jonathan was a man of hard empirical data. He resolutely rejected any explanation that involved 'magic' or 'destiny.' If a microscope couldn't see it, Jonathan didn't believe in it.
"These new subjects I'm breeding are entirely different from the generation that bit you," Jonathan continued, gesturing to the terrarium. "I'm refining their modified genomes to be infinitely more compatible with human biology. I plan to extract their synthesized toxins, refine them into a stable serum, and utilize Vita Rays to promote cellular fusion."
Jonathan rubbed his chin, staring at the spiders with a mix of awe and exhaustion. "It should be vastly safer and far more efficient. Although, at this exact moment, I have absolutely no clue how I'm going to actually stabilize the protein chains."
He suddenly blinked, realizing he was rambling. He quickly set the tweezers down and wiped his hands on his lab coat.
"Oh, my apologies, boys," Jonathan chuckled, stepping away from the central console to give them space. "I didn't mean to bore you with the genetics. I'll make room. Spider-Man has a city to monitor, right?"