Spiderhead

Part II

The bats start bringing him smoothies when they have a designated meet up. They watch in fascination as he takes off his gloves and spin the cup around and around with his webbing until only the straw pokes out.

"Where does the venom come from?" Batman asks one day, glancing at where Peter's mask is lifted just above his mouth on a rooftop. "You don't have fangs."

He happily slurps away at the smoothie Nightwing had gotten him before being called off for something or other. It's mango flavoured. "Don't need 'em," he says cheerily. "Comes out from one of my salivary glands—and only when I want it to, or if I'm, like, starving. I actually did do a lab on them once," he mentions thoughtfully. "It's a weird cocktail of several types of venoms—both cytotoxins and neurotoxins. I hail from a strange mix of spiders."

Batman pauses. "Are they lethal?"

Peter shrugs. It's not like he's ever tested it out or anything. "Yeah. From what I've found through, like, humane experimentation—the neurotoxin comes first. That's what floods my mouth, sometimes." It tastes a bit—almost soapy? It's not unpleasant, if a little alkaline. "The cytotoxin only comes out when I bite."

He sucks on the straw, hollowing his cheeks, a deep purr emanating from his chest. If mango-flavoured bugs existed, then Scott's friend or not, there would've been nothing holding him back from a life with an arachnid diet.

"When you said you had some more off putting spider behaviours, I wasn't quite expecting this," Batman admits. "I assumed they'd be more... personality traits, or your creeping movement, instead of biological and dietary differences."

Peter grins at him, showing his teeth. "You've actually taken it a lot better than I thought you would," he compliments. Even if he still gets noticeably unsettled watching Peter sometimes. "I mean, even in spider terms, I'm weird. I freaked myself out with some of my powers, even."

Batman jerks his head slightly. "When you said you were genetically modified..."

Peter bites his lips as he smiles, cheeks dimpling in the night. "I'm a mix-and-match of like a dozen different spider species, and something completely different," he explains, in further detail than he had previously. "The spider that made me like this was part of a cross-species genetics experiment. Lots of splice-and-diced DNA, and lots of radiation. I mean, I've been experimented on a few times, but I've never actually seen what they came up with."

"Is that why you hid your traits for so long?" There's a firm set to Batman's jaw, and he seems even more tense than usual.

Peter chews on his bottom lip. "Where I come from, people like me are kinda frowned upon," he reveals. "Metas can be locked up, experimented on, tortured—all legally, by some very powerful people. I never had too much of a problem as Spider-Man—I had a high up figure looking out for me," he says wistfully, thinking about Tony. "And I was pretty low-leagues, most of the time. Just trying to do my part on the ground, you know? But if my civilian identity was found out as Spider-Man or even just a meta, I would've been thrown to the pits."

There's a deep sense of fury radiating off of the bat that Peter takes care to ignore. "And where is this?"

Peter huffs a laugh. "Not telling you that," he snorts. "And don't worry about the metas—last I heard, there was a huge prison break. But that's why we never looked into my genes all that much. I mean, I wanted to—I'm kind of a nerd," he admits, embarrassed. "But it was one thing for my mentor to shield me from metahuman rights politics, but in case I was arrested, he needed to be able to have a strong defence. Couldn't do that if he knew the exact numbers of how not human I am."