Chapter Text
It’s no longer light out when you leave to save the world. There was a time during the lovely summer months when you could depart the relative safety of WCKD headquarters and still find yourself in the last vestiges of golden hour. It was easier to believe in the cause then, somehow, as if even the idea of a billowing honey-colored curtain of light could shine down on the blood you’ve shed and make it better, make it all better. No pain is too terrible if it is dragged out for a good cause.
Now that the days have veered past autumn and towards the start of winter, though, you no longer have the comfort of light to protect you. Your shifts are at night, always; no hero will be discovered and no rest will be yours. The moonlight, although sparkling, lacks the strength of sunlight in its ability to ease your conscience.
You knew this was coming, though, it happens every year. You were young when you decided you wanted to change the world, we all are. Only the naivete of youth lets you believe that you can do something about the terrors of the city around you. Once you grow up, you realize there’s no point and you stop trying.
While you’re young, though, you think there’s still a chance. That’s how they get you. That’s how WCKD got you, to be specific. They still have scientists and soldiers believing in that greater cause, but the heart of their crusade is carried on by the kids. They say that’s the way it’s always been. Perhaps it’s true. How would you know otherwise?
The secret is always kept pristine behind glass. WCKD said no boundaries, no lies, so they told you everything from the moment you joined. You were young and foolish; they said jump, you asked how high. It made perfect sense to you. There is a problem in this city, in this world. You could fix it. Why wouldn’t you?
You were one of the first to join. Teresa was the very first, if you’re going by technicalities. The two of you believe in it the most. Even when the others started having their doubts, when Thomas gave up his shield and ran away, when Minho let the civil war of heroes get in between himself and his desire to protect the world, you and Teresa were the ones who stuck with it.
It’s worth it now. It always has been. Times are getting darker, villains more treacherous. Mutants appear out of the woodwork like flies, and it’s your job to cut them off before they can grow too powerful. Every night, you stop mass robberies, save lives, confiscate stolen tech. The city walks a narrow line between peace and destruction. You’re there to keep winning the war.
That’s why you agreed to the experimentation in the first place. Admittedly, it wasn’t WCKD’s finest moment when they asked young teenagers to step into their labs for the greater glory of the world, but it’s worth it now. They injected you with radioactive spider venom and you were the best fit for the program, or so they tell you. If you were to guess, though, you’d say that you were the only subject who survived. Now, you get superhuman abilities and a cool moniker: Spider-Woman. Isn’t that worth the blood you shed in a pristine white cell?
Teresa was never a subject like you were. Instead, she was trained in the deadly arts as a Black Widow. The two of you are sent out on missions together, but not as often as you’d like. Instead, WCKD always seems to keep one of you behind while the other is out there in the world, supposedly for security reasons. If two of its finest soldiers were taken out in the same doomed-to-fail mission, who would carry on the cause?
No, it’s better if you do it alone. You saw Teresa today, at least, running through some surveillance footage from a few nights back. There’s a Right Arm stronghold somewhere nearby, you can tell because some of the inhumans you leave for dead have started disappearing before the WCKD research division can collect their bodies, but you just don’t know where they’re sent to. If you can cut off the head and do it cleanly this time, perhaps two more won’t grow back in its place.
That’s the WCKD rhetoric, at least. Do the job properly and you won’t have to do it again. Repeat trials are cumbersome, and often fail before they can reach their true potential. If you do what must be done, no matter the cost, everyone will benefit. Not just the city this time, but the country. The world, even. Crime and violence only strengthen in numbers. If you can purge this city of its sins, perhaps the rest will follow suit.
Darkness has its biggest stronghold here, though, which is why WCKD set up headquarters. It’s why you have a specific time of day to leave behind the white polished walls and piercing fluorescent lights of the WCKD facilities to go defend the night against itself.
Tonight begins like most others. You don your armor and take the elevator to the top floor of WCKD’s skyscraper. From there, you stand for a moment on the darkened roof, buffeted by the strong winds that only circulate when you’re this far removed from the streets below you, then dive off the edge in one simple motion.
You were scared of heights the first time you did this, as anyone would be when faced with the task of jumping from a skyscraper. Even though you knew you would be able to catch yourself, you’d never done it before so you weren’t one hundred percent certain. You’d asked to start off on a lower level so you could get a better feel for it. Instead of answering your plea, the head of your little operation, Dr. Ava Paige, pushed you from the roof herself. You can still remember how it felt, tumbling through the dark night sky, watching her foreboding silhouette disappear the further you dropped.
That night, you had learned to trust only yourself. You had also learned that WCKD wants what’s best for all of you, and even if you cannot see the silver lining at the moment, it’ll come to you eventually. As you fell, mind wracked with terror and betrayal, you first learned to do what has now become reflex: you flung out your arms and made a web.
Your web shooters work well, they always do. WCKD tech doesn’t fail. You don’t have to see the synthetic web latch onto the spire of a nearby building to know that it will be secure enough to hold your weight as you swing from one towering skyscraper to the next. It’s a far faster method of transportation than just walking, and it gives you a better view of what’s happening down below you while you’re at it.
Your brow furrows beneath the protective cover of your mask, looking for something, someone causing trouble– there, down an alley, a shadowy figure looms over a terrified couple. You disengage the web you’d been swinging from, hurtling towards the alley like a dart. You land easily on a nearby roof, rolling for a moment to disperse the energy of your impact before dropping neatly into the alley.
You wait a moment before stepping out from the shadows so you can best gauge the situation. The thing you’re fighting– it’s not a man, not really, although it stands on two broad, muscular legs and gestures at the mouth of the alley with a dark, clawed hand. It seems more like living tar, a roiling mass of shadow and ink somehow made muscular. It’s a monster, to put it plainly, and you kill monsters. You’ll kill this one.
You lunge out from the shadows, grabbing the couple around the waist and pulling them towards the entrance. They sob in relief when you’re in between them and the dark thing, and immediately start running once you put them down again.
Now that the innocents are safe, you turn back to the monster. Massive white eyes split its skull, and a long, blood red tongue peeks out from rows of jagged teeth. It stalks towards you, each footstep sounding like a crack of thunder, and says, in a grating tone like a thousand earthquakes, “I saved them already.”
You stare at it. The monster doesn’t attack, strangely enough. In fact, it comes to a stop once it’s a few paces away from you. It’s just looking at you, although it keeps twitching as if it would like to do more than just stand around.
“No, I did. I got them away from you.” You tell it.
You spit the last word out like a curse. You’re supposed to be emotionless while you do this, cutting away at the city’s lost souls with a surgeon’s unsympathetic precision, but WCKD taught you its prejudices early, and it’s a difficult habit to shake.
The monster, however, doesn’t take kindly to being insulted. “Already saved them. You only took the credit.”
It gestures back towards the alley behind it with one massive hand. You follow the direction with your eyes to see the slumped forms of what appear to be gang members. You recognize their faces from a news broadcast a few days ago; the police have been unsuccessful in tracking them down despite a warrant being out for their arrests regarding a string of murders. They must have been ready to add that couple to their list of victims, but this thing got in the way of that.
You stare back at it, confused. “If you saved that couple, why were they screaming?”
This time, when the monster speaks, it sounds a little less monstrous and more almost like a young man. “I tend to be a little frightening. I’m sure you can understand.”
You draw back, one hand on your belt. You can use your webs to attack and defend, obviously, but WCKD policy states that killing is best done cleanly. That would involve the guns and knives they ply you with before every patrol. “I understand how this usually goes.”
The monster leans towards you, bleached-white eyes leering. “Are you going to kill me, Agent? You’re one of those fanatics from WCKD, aren’t you? That’s what you all usually do. Are you going to kill me without even bothering to ask why I saved them? Or who I am?”
You meet its gaze coolly, but on the inside, your entire mind is at war. This is not the way it’s supposed to go. You’re meant to eliminate a threat and move on. This is a monster. It doesn’t get more simple than that. Except– except usually, the shadowy demon creatures don’t save lives like you do. Except they usually don’t try to appeal to your morality, because most, including you, assume it’s already gone.
“Fine,” you say slowly, “Who are you? Answer quickly and honestly, it’ll be better for you.”
It makes a sound that could be a laugh, but it’s broken over with a deep roaring sound, almost as if there are two creatures laughing at you right now, a human and a monster. They’re not entirely in unison, not anymore, which gives you the impression that they could be separated.
And, before your eyes, the inky blackness starts to peel away just a little bit, revealing a boy’s face within the monster’s skull. It’s supporting him, you realize, giving him strength and power. Only half of his face is visible right now, and when he speaks, you can see a normal human mouth moving on one side, grotesquely parodied on the other with that horrific fanged mouth.
“If I give myself away, you’ll kill me, won’t you?” He asks. “Isn’t that what WCKD’s toy soldiers do best?”
You scowl at him. “Depends on if you make me.”
“Well,” the boy says frankly, “I don’t want to die. Let your conscience be clear for a second and don’t shoot me in the head, now, will you?”
You nod once, before you can stop yourself, and he seems to take this as a good sign. The rest of the shadow pulls away from him, and then it’s all gone and there is a blond boy standing in front of you, idly brushing dust off of his hands as if he’d been taking off a heavy coat instead of a monstrous shield.
“Who are you?” You ask weakly.
The boy grins. “Name’s Newt. Though I’m assuming you’ll find that out soon enough. WCKD’s always particularly good at their research, aren’t they?”
You narrow your eyes. “How would you know?”
His smile slips, gone in an instant. His eyes go unsettlingly dark, and you realize that, although he may have taken the monster away, that doesn’t mean it’s not inside him still. “I had a friend, once. His name was Alby, and you took him from us. He was only eighteen, and WCKD decided he should die because he committed the grave sin of not entirely being like the rest of you. You hunted him down and slaughtered him. We never even had a body to bury.”
Newt stalks forward as he says it. You’ve faced down far more intimidating threats, but you can’t help inching back in the face of this boy’s fury. You can handle someone trying to kill you, or a thug shooting at your head, but Newt’s grief is a far more palpable weapon than anything before it.
“Did you know him?” Newt asks in a harsh, shuddering whisper, “Were you there when he died?”
“No,” you whisper, and you couldn’t be more grateful for the truth. “That was someone else. Really, it was. They told me about it afterwards.”
Specifically, Teresa had. You remember the ways her hands didn’t stop shaking for hours afterwards. She’d hidden in a corner of the WCKD base, and you only found her because you had the benefit of years of friendship telling you where to look. When you stumbled upon her, she was curled up into a tight ball, repeating as a whispered mantra, “WCKD is good,” as if saying the torturous phrase even one more time might make it true.
Afterwards, though, Teresa was more focused than you’d ever seen her. She was determined to make the ends worth the bloody, bloody means. Anything for the city, or so she’d tell you. Anything for the world.
“It wasn’t me,” you repeat. “But you haven’t always been like this, have you? The monster. It came afterwards.”
Newt nods, a tight and barely controlled jerk of the head. “I needed help. I found Venom.”
“Venom,” you whisper cautiously. Black ink flashes across Newt’s eyes all of a sudden, disappearing through his veins just as quickly. It makes you flinch. He seems almost glad of it.
“I wanted a way to keep the rest of us alive. Venom makes me strong. It’s in me. It is me.” Newt’s words grow in intensity until he’s almost shouting.
Shouting you can handle, though. It’s easy to break down the pieces of Newt’s argument like that. He’s furious that your organization is responsible for the deaths of his friends. He’s taking it out on you because you have their logo on your shoulder, because you were going to kill him like the rest. Are you now, though? How can you murder this boy like the rest?
Newt must see the war going on in your head, because he smiles again, sickeningly slow. “Are you going to do it? Are you going to kill me? I don’t even know your name, but you know mine. Are you going to shoot me before you tell anyone who you are?”
“Y/N,” you force out through lips pressed thin.
His smile grows lighter. “Y/N. Pretty name. Pretty girl.”
Is it madness to call your would-be killer a pretty girl? Is it madness to let a monster into your skin, to embrace it like this? Is madness thinking that you have ever had any other choice but this.
“I don’t want to,” you murmur, “Kill you.” The killing is the worst part. Always has been. You lack Teresa’s stomach for it. That’s why they made you the lab rat. WCKD knew they had to rearrange at least a few of your parts to make you more willing to complete the tasks they assigned you, and it still didn’t even work all the way.
Newt considers this for a second, his head tilted to the side, then holds out a hand. The contrast of his pale skin against the darkness of the alleyway seems to stand out to you like a neon sign. “You don’t have to do it. You can still leave them, you know.”
This makes a thousand walls slam down in your head. “I can’t,” you grit out, the product of years of trying, “There are too many people they could hurt. I can never leave, Newt. Never.”
Something almost like pity touches his eyes. You decide you hate it. “You know,” he says softly, “That is the worst part of the monster, I think. I asked for it. It might not leave me if I tell it to, but in the beginning, it only came for me because I wanted it. You know what that’s like.”
“I do,” you tell him.
Newt nods. Smiles again. You’ve stopped seeing the flash of his teeth as a terrible thing. The likelihood that he could sink them into the soft skin of your neck before you even had the chance to blink is alluring. It does not seem like as much of an undeserved punishment as before.
“You can always find me,” he tells you. “If you need help, you can find me. I have friends, good ones. They could get you out of there. We can pull you out. It’s never too late.”
This makes you draw back in earnest. “It’s already too late.”
You want to scream it at him. There is no going back for you, not now. Not after all you’ve done. Newt has the luxury of thinking he can fight back. For those of you on the inside, though, the only way any of you will be freed from the burden of your work is when it finally kills you. Teresa knows that. Even Dr. Ava Paige knows it. You will all shoulder the mantle of your twisted crusade until it drags you under.
You turn and vanish back into the shadows before Newt can stop you. You wait for a moment, crouched on the rooftop out of his sight, and listen to the even rhythm of his breathing before finally turning away again. This is the first time you leave him.
Somewhere inside your head, within the last vestiges of pinkish matter that still belong to you, a voice whispers back: It won’t be the last.