Spiderman Oneshots

Spider Army: Origin Story

My oneshots are of course all standalone except when they are not. This one exists in vaguely the same universe as Haunted House and very much the same universe as Fools.

"What are you working on?"

Peter startled, crushing the delicate metal in his fingers with unnatural strength and promptly ruining the morning's work. He really should have heard Tony coming, but he'd just figured out how to joint the robots so that they could fold up into little needles for storage and was too engrossed in his project.

"Just messing around," he said, pulling a steel splinter from his palm with a wince and watching as the small wound healed.

Tony frowned at the broken pieces on the desk. "Sorry, I didn't mean to ruin your work."

Peter waved him off, "it's my fault, don't worry about it. Just a prototype, anyway. A bit of fun."

Tony acquiesced and went back to the main area of the lab, and Peter relaxed when he heard the man's signature music start to play. He'd given Peter permission to use the room whenever once he discovered Spider-Man wasn't just a nerd, but had the smarts to back it up. If you'd told the Peter Parker who'd just come home to find The Tony Stark talking to Aunt May that in less than two years he'd have claimed one of the tech genius's lab's side rooms for himself, he would've laughed. But here Peter was, with a whim and a way.

Now humming 'in the jungle' under his breath, barely audible beneath the Metallica, Peter swept the metal shards from the table and set to work constructing another spider robot.

The idea had been forming for a while. He'd heard about Antman's ability to control actual ants, and he watched Redwing follow the Falcon around the battlefield, and he began to consider. He joked with Wanda about a spider army after they watched a horror movie together, and then lapsed into contemplative silence.

Peter's first spider robot designs began not long after that. He spent a significant portion of his free time tucked away in his little side room, sometimes listening to Tony's music and sometimes alone. Tony showed no more than idle curiosity in his work, and Peter was too unsure of such a crazy project working to admit to his intent so he remained evasive.

It took almost a year to perfect the prototypes and get them responding smoothly to the telepathic communicator. Tony would sigh if he heard Peter calling it that - technically it tracked minuscule eye movements and micro expressions and translated them into instructions for the robots to respond to, but if that wasn't telepathy Peter didn't know what was. It was inspired by (and a lot of the software copied from) the systems inside the Iron Man helmet that allowed Tony to give short commands to FRIDAY and pull up information in the HUD without speaking. Which was totally telepathy, but the point was that Peter's spider army was ready and now he needed to, firstly, train with them to make sure he could actually control them and function at the same time, and secondly, think of a way to introduce them to the Avengers that was worthy of the time and effort he'd spent creating them.

Life went on. On Halloween, he pretended to be a human spider as part of the Avengers haunted house. He hadn't mastered enough control of his spiders to use them yet, but it went just fine without them. It freaked a lot of people out and social media absolutely loved it. An idea began to crystallise. Then Tony presented Peter with an iron spider suit featuring bonus spider legs and sealed his own fate.

In the meantime, Peter had become used to controlling the spiders, and had a few of the robots on him at all times. He'd built a small transmitter - only good enough to deal with 6 spiders at a time - into some glasses so that he could keep track of them at school. The constant exposure meant fielding their inputs and giving out signals became instinctive, and he could move on from letting them crawl around inside his schoolbag all day to learning how to spin webs with them. He could make some pretty cool structures with the delicacy of the tiny spiders and the intelligence of a human mind combined. He could send them out (not too far with only the glasses) to listen in on school gossip in other classrooms (as if he couldn't hear it through the walls anyway) and report back on what would be served in the cafeteria for lunch so he knew how quickly to jump up when the bell went.