Chapter Text
Jisung yanked the doorknob off his bedroom door.
He held it up to his face and squinted at it through groggy eyes.
"The hell?" he muttered. He let it drop to the floor with a clang. He stared at his knob-less door, annoyed he'd have to stick his hand in there to get it open.
Trudging down the hall to the bathroom, he groaned at the massive headache pounding behind his eyes.
"Did I get wasted last night?" he tried to remember as he entered his bathroom. Nothing out of the ordinary came to mind as he picked up his toothpaste. He was about to shrug off the headache as unusually early caffeine withdrawals, when he managed to squeeze the tube so hard that toothpaste sprayed all over the walls, mirror, and his shirt.
He stood frozen for a moment, his eyes wide in surprise. He looked down at his toothpaste-covered t-shirt.
"That's never coming out," he sighed before scooping a bit off with his toothbrush.
A little more alert, he stepped back into his room to change into more professional clothes. But when he tried to take off his t-shirt, it nearly split in two in his hands.
"What the hell!?" he yelled in frustration, staring at the tatters in his hands. He hung his head with a groan and threw the toothpaste-stained rags to the floor. "Am I on some kind of prank cam?" he asked nobody, buttoning up a dress shirt with hasty fingers. He was late as it was, he didn't have time to worry about his ruined shirt.
"Intern," one of the employees at the research facility called, snapping Jisung out of his memories of that morning.
"Yes?" he answered, wiping his glasses with his shirt. They were so dirty he could see better with them off, but as much as he wiped they weren't getting any cleaner.
"Did something happen yesterday?"
Jisung tilted his head at her. ‘Something’ could have meant anything from the chief of his division getting his coffee a degree colder than he would’ve preferred to the lab rats staging another uprising.
"In the botany section?" she prompted at his confusion.
Jisung tried to think back to the other day. His superiors had sent him to take measurements of the experimental GMO'd plants like they did every day, and nothing unusual happened. He measured the height of about a dozen tea plants, noted them on his clipboard, and then went back to his desk.
Except… if he really thought about it, it didn't go quite like that.
When he stretched the measuring tape from the base of the tea plant to the top of its highest shoot, a spider crawled up onto his hand. He gasped, frantically shaking his hand to try and fling it off.
"Get off, get off, get off," he muttered nervously.
When he chanced a look back at his hand, the spider was gone, but it had left behind a purple bite mark. Jisung grimaced, a hiss escaping his teeth from how grotesque the wound looked. He gave his hand a final disgusted shake, before gathering his tape, pen and clipboard up in his arms and leaving the encasement as fast as he could.
That had been his final task that day.
"Did something happen after I left?" he asked.
The employee winced. "Sort of." She escorted him down the hall, and Jisung gaped at the destroyed greenery inside the roundabout encasement. So did the rest of the employees in his division.
It looked like a cloud of locusts had descended upon the site and then left without a trace.
"How did this happen?" a woman remarked in disbelief.
"Ask the intern," a man scoffed in reply.
Jisung looked over at them. Apparently they'd all heard he was the last one in there, and decided to pin the devastation on him. He looked back at the sight. "I didn't- What would I even- I have no idea what happened," he stuttered, wandering into the encasement. He ogled the destroyed plants, chunks taken out of almost all of them. On the floor, in the midst of all the carnage, something bizarre caught his eye. Crouching down, he saw that it was the spider that had bit him, purple and bloated to the point of bursting.
"What's he looking at?"
"I can't tell."
"He's seriously screwed," a third person cringed on his behalf.
Jisung glanced back at the murmuring crowd before picking up the spider between two fingers. "I think..." He swallowed, rising to his feet again. "I think this thing did it."
"Do you expect me to believe that?" the division chief later asked monotonously in his office.
Jisung knew he was so fired. "It- I mean, look at it," he said, signaling to the dead spider on his superior's desk. "That doesn't seem very natural to me."
"And you saw nothing else before you left?" Jisung shook his head. "Nothing?"
"Can we just get this over with?"
"...Excuse me?"
Jisung could have argued how stupid it was to act like it was somehow his fault. What were they even suggesting, that he'd planted some bug to sabotage the chamomile plants? Or even that he was the one that had gotten snacky on the job? But he was constantly getting shut down and silenced at this internship anyway, like that time he'd told the head researcher he was assisting that his proportions were off.
'And that's why the acids aren't reacting.'
Famous last words, before he'd gotten the upbraiding of a lifetime for being "disrespectful" and "undermining my intelligence."
So, he decided to take the situation as a blessing in disguise and say: "Tell me I'm fired so I can go home already."
The division chief smiled without his eyes. "You think it's your time that's being wasted? You have any idea the resources that were being used on those things?" But he seemed to think better of lecturing Jisung on the intricacies of genetically modified chamomile plants and sat back. "Fine," he barked. "Get out of here. And get this off my desk," he said sharply, brushing the spider onto the floor.
Jisung didn't stand, eyeing the dead spider.
"Oh my God. Do you want it?"
"Yes, sir."
He looked him up and down with disdain. "Just take it, you little..."
Jisung scooped it up in cupped hands and hurried out of the room.
When he trudged up the steps to his apartment later Jisung sighed, tucking his permanently smudged glasses into his pocket. Obviously he didn’t like that internship much, but it had been something to do, and might have even helped him get a real job.
"Like a real adult," he mumbled to himself as he unlocked his front door. But when he entered, his natural instinct took over— namely, to not think about responsibility. Undoing the top button of his dress shirt, he collapsed on his couch with arms sprawled in opposite directions. His eyes drifted shut, and he had the thought it was far too early to be this tired already.
Reluctantly, he got to his feet again and started to unbutton his shirt, figuring he should at least change before he fell asleep in his work clothes. But when he drifted into his bedroom and saw his door missing its knob and his t-shirt a mangled, toothpaste-stained mess on the floor, the memory of his random burst of strength that morning slammed into him like a cold bucket of water.
"How did I even do that?" he said to himself incredulously, glancing between his door and his shirt. He really should have been more concerned at the time, but that headache had seriously clouded his priorities.
Could it have been because of that bizarre spider?
It was a strange thought. But he'd had a weirdly hard time getting that tape off his fingers, too, almost like his hands were even more adhesive than the tape was. He looked down at his hands and jolted.
While absentmindedly unbuttoning his only white dress shirt he'd ripped it at the chest. "Oh come on," he groaned. "That's not work appropriate at all.”
He shoved it off for a clean, non-toothpaste smeared t-shirt he'd scooped off the floor. Careful to pull it on slowly, he didn't breathe until his arms were completely through the sleeves.
That stupid spider.
He grabbed a cloth off his cluttered desk, went to go run it under hot water, and started scrubbing at the toothpaste-stained tile of his bathroom.
“Enhanced strength, sticky fingers… My vision,” he realized with a start.
Looking at his hand, he was amazed that he could see practically every hair, wrinkle, and scar on it without his glasses. He tapped his face, making sure he really wasn't wearing his glasses. "Huh," he let out. Maybe it wasn't that they were dirty.
He took them out and, gently, slid them over his nose.
"Woah." They really were making his vision, for the first time, worse.
"Okay..." he said to himself. Going to his room he picked up a pen and pad. "Super strength, adhesive fingers..." he scrawled, "and 20/20 vision." He clicked the pen closed.
"Cool." He threw his glasses back on the table and ran out the door.
-
"Pick up, pick up, pick up!" he yelled at his phone. He redialed the apathetic number as he ran down the sidewalk, uncaring about the looks he drew.
"Sorry, your call could not be completed,” the robotic voice said as he stepped onto the crosswalk.
As quick as a bolt of lightning, Jisung instinctively turned to his left.
A car was about to hit him.
He sat back on the asphalt, dazed and breathless.
The car had hit him.
He blinked up at the headlights that shone directly in his eyes.
People panicked around him.
He managed to rise to his feet, just as the driver of the car stumbled out of it with profuse apologies.
Jisung looked down at his body. He kicked his legs out. He flailed his arms. "The hell?" There was no soreness, no bruising, no pain.
“Shouldn’t someone call an ambulance?” someone cried.
Only searing embarrassment.
"I-I don't know what's wrong with me,” the driver stuttered, scared out of his mind. "I have no idea why I did that, please just-"
"No, no, it's okay," Jisung said, looking up at him.
The man stopped in his tracks, only now realizing the guy he'd hit with a car was perfectly fine. "What?"
“How is he standing?” someone in the crowd of onlookers asked.
"I'm alright," Jisung said, before turning around to push through the bystanders that had coalesced in the few moments since the car had hit him.
“Rea-Really?” he gaped.
-
"Minho!" Jisung yelled, banging on his front door.
The door yanked open. "What, what, what!?" his friend yelled with equal force.
Jisung looked at him with comically wide eyes. "What do you have a phone for?" he asked much more quietly.
"I threw it away," he deadpanned.
"Just let me in," he groaned, shoving past him into his apartment.
"What, what is it?" he asked, shutting the door behind him. "Did your washer explode?"
Jisung looked at him for long enough to visibly weird him out.
"I got fired."
Breaking out of whatever weird hypnotism the both of them were in, Minho opened his freezer. "Why?" he asked, lifting a water bottle too frozen to drink out of to his mouth.
Jisung had decided—after being hit with a car and emerging without a scratch on him—he would maybe keep the superpowers to himself for now. The last thing he needed to throw on his best friend's plate, already full of cover stories to write and important people to interview as the star reporter at the Blazoner, was all… this.
"I poisoned the tea plants,” Jisung explained.
Minho snorted.
"I'm a murderer."
"I can see it in your eyes," he said with a laugh.
Given what he'd been through in the past 10 minutes, that statement made Jisung uneasy.
"What?” he asked with a small, suspicious smile. "I just meant about you being a plant murderer."
Oh. So he'd made that face out loud. "Ah. Yeah no, I know what you mean," he said, consciously pulling the corner of his mouth into a pseudo-smile.
Minho sized him up for a second over his frozen water bottle. "So what are you gonna do now?" he asked, putting the bottle back in the fridge.
"Gosh, I don't know," he said, slowly pushing his arms across the table. "Maybe I'll…” He planted his face on the table. "Keep my options open for a while," he said vaguely.
"You can't stay jobless," Minho said bluntly, still looking through his fridge for something that was actually drinkable.
"No that's not what I meant," he said, shooting his head up to meet Minho’s eyes.
"Then?"
Jisung glanced away, thinking of how to word it. "Something came up."
-
Super strength, adhesive fingers, 20/20 vision, enhanced durability, he ran over in his head when he got home. That is, after getting dragged into listening to Minho's rant about his brother's impossible work schedule. Somehow, he'd never even said what his brother did for living.
Jisung gasped, his mind jumping to the spider he'd kept in his pocket all day. He scrambled to scoop it out, worried he'd managed to squish it with all the running around he'd done. But when he placed it on his desk with cupped hands, he was relieved to see it was still all in one piece.
One fat, bloated piece.
"Gosh, this thing ate a lot," he muttered to himself, examining the way its abdomen bulged out abnormally. But something else was strange. Squinting down at it, he saw there were little red dots, standing out all along its abdomen. Their distance from each other wasn't evenly spaced out, as if they were brought on by some external force.
"It's not like any spider I've seen before," he noted. Maybe it was brought in from some foreign country? Or maybe it was sick, and that's why it looked and acted so unusually.
"Then-" He looked down at himself nervously. "Did it infect me with something!?" he yelled with a jump. He pulled his laptop out from under his bed and searched for 'spider disease.' But nothing aligned with even one of the symptoms he'd experienced; nothing about super strength or sticky hands or perfect vision. Definitely nothing about walking away from a car crash unharmed. He sat back with a huff.
"What the hell am I?" he asked nobody.
-
"What are you doing back here?"
"Heyy, sunbae," Jisung said cheerily to the employee at the research facility trying to go home. "How have you been?"
"It's only been a day since we last saw each other," the man said suspiciously.
Jisung rebooted.
"Right, and has it been a good day?" he asked, his tone and gestures far too animated.
"Are you trying to get your internship back already?"
"Oh, no, no, not at all. Actually I was just thinking about what a big help you were while I was here," Jisung said with a smile. "I wanted to let you know."
"Oh,” the man said. Jisung’s already phony smile turned awkward with the two of them standing around in silence. "Okay," the employee said at last, putting away the last of his supplies.
Not even a 'thank you'?
"And, you know, I wasn't here long." Jisung watched the man for any sign of a reaction, but he wouldn't even look at him. Tough crowd.
He looked off wistfully to the left. "There was this one machine, it was," he shook his hand in the air, "so cool."
He glanced back over at his superior—his former superior, he corrected—who was still competing for the title of worst brick wall.
"I never got to see it in action," Jisung said mournfully. "So… do you, you know, think..."
"Do you need to check if your weed is laced or something?"
"What!?" he choked, in genuine shock that the employee even knew what any of those words were. "No," he coughed, "no, it's not that. Well it is the composition machine, it's just..."
The employee held up a hand. "I don't care, as long as it's not something that will get me in trouble," he said, standing and walking in the direction of the machine in question.
"Thank you, sir," he said politely as he followed behind him.
On the other side of the facility, the employee unlocked and opened the door to the composition room that housed the machine. Jisung had really never been there before, but the roundabout style of the room was familiar to him. "This lab really likes its circles," he said to the employee.
The man looked back at him expectantly.
"What?"
He gestured impatiently to the machine.
"Oh, right, right, right," he said. He gently pulled the spider out of his pocket, half-terrified he'd squished it for real this time and blown his chance of figuring out what was happening to him.
But just like before, its fat, purple little body emerged intact.
"That's… disgusting," the man said, opening the little chamber where materials were placed to be analyzed for the chemicals they were made of. Jisung dropped it inside, wondering if it should be stood up on its legs.
It probably didn't matter, he thought as he stepped backwards.
He went back and corrected its position anyway.
The employee glanced at him, before coding the commands into the machine's input panel. "You want to see what this thing's made up of," he prompted.
"Yes."
"Only this thing."
"Yes."
"Okay, it's starting."
Jisung peered inside the chamber, the employee's eyes on him judgmental.
"Do you think this is like a microwave, man?"
Jisung glanced at him, then back at the spider.
"It's not gonna spin around like a TV dinner. Just relax," he said, opening the door that led outside.
"Where is, wh-where are you going?" Jisung stammered.
The man pulled a face. "Home?" Jisung must have looked worried, because the man added, "I'm gonna lock the door and leave it open. Just close it when you leave. And you know your way out of here.”
"And the… thing?" he gestured at the spider.
"Whatever you want with it," he said. "Just don't leave it in there," he called, already halfway down the hall.
"Right," Jisung breathed, looking back at the chamber.
He didn't know how long it would be, but he didn't think he'd be able to concentrate on anything else either way.
After a few minutes of sitting and nervously picking at his teeth, his nails, his thumb, the machine beeped.
A little like when your TV dinner is done.
When the control panel flashed a list of materials and percentages, Jisung jumped up from his seat to read it. Lots of carbon, obviously. But there were also strange combinations of … chemical cocktails.
Jisung stopped breathing. They looked like man-made poisons.
But when he read further on, there was also an unnatural amount of testosterone. And though the list of toxins was long, the strange and haphazard combinations they were bound in would have practically every toxin canceling out at least one other.
Jisung sucked in a breath. Whoever had tried to pump the thing full of fatal amounts of poison hadn't done a very good job of it. It seemed like he'd be okay.
"What a relie-'' he started, but when he tried to let go of the panel, he almost took it off the wall.
"WOAH, woah woah, stay," he panicked, pushing back at it. He tried to slowly peel his fingers off the panel, but they were practically glued on.
"Come on," he whined, resisting the urge to shake his hands off of the panel. He breathed in, trying to relax and focus on getting them unstuck. "I'm gonna be fine," he reassured himself. "I don't have a spider disease." His hands slowly came off the panel.
"I'm just gonna live with super strength. And maybe my hands will never stop being sticky." His hands stopped moving again.
"Please!" he yelled in frustration, on the brink of rattling the analyzer. He huffed in a breath. Only happy thoughts.
"Kittens, cotton candy, uhh," he screwed his eyes shut, "Iced americanos, baggy shirts." He snapped his eyes to his hands.
"YES!" he cheered at seeing they were his own again. Fighting the urge to run, he shut the door to that room behind him and took his normal shortcut off the grounds of that facility.
The thought of coffee subconsciously guided him to the nearest cafe.
"Iced americano," Jisung told the pretty cashier taking his order.
"Size?" she prompted.
He stuffed his hands in his pockets, deep in thought as he ran through every pro and con of each size.
"...Medi- no, small. Um." He shifted his weight to his other leg. "Large?"
"Is that a question?" she asked.
"No, no I'll have a large."
"It'll be ready in a moment," she said before turning to the equipment behind her.
Drifting away from the counter, he nodded slowly.
Should he be a cashier? Going back to retail sounded like hell… but there was no way he was getting a job in science like he wanted anytime soon. He sat down in the closest booth with a thump. Maybe he should've tried harder to keep that internship.
He sighed. Not to mention what he was gonna do now that he was Superman. Maybe he'd be a bodybuilder. Or a rock climber.
"But I hate exercising," he muttered to himself as he tried to stand to go to the restroom, before colliding directly with some guy too plugged in to his phone to realize Jisung was there.
Of course, Jisung was the one in the wrong. He could tell when he started angrily: "Dude! What the-"
But he cut himself off.
"Dude," he said in an awed hush. "What the hell?"
Jisung had caught the guy’s phone, earphone case, and stylus before they hit the ground.
"How did you do that?" he asked, meekly taking his things back.
"I don't… know," Jisung said honestly.
"Iced americano," the cashier called.
Jisung glanced back at the guy—his face still pulled in awe at his reflexes—before stepping towards the counter.
Super strength, adhesive fingers, 20/20 vision, enhanced durability, and perfect reflexes.
He bounced his leg under the table.
He guessed that would explain why he could quickly tell that car was coming at him, even if he’d been too shocked to act on the reflex.
Jisung took a pensive sip of his coffee before scrawling something on the back of the cafe receipt.
"Skater." He shook his head. "What? I can just do that."
He hummed to himself, pressing the end of the pen to his teeth.
"Bodybuilder?" he seriously entertained, typing the word into the search engine. But looking through the pictures of guys who could bench press ten of him, he grimaced. "Definitely not." He typed in Olympic sports. Being an Olympian sounded like too much work, but maybe the list of sports would give him an idea of something he could do to earn money.
Jisung quickly scrolled past all the winter sports, not wanting to do anything that would make him have to stand out in the cold for hours on end.
"Swimming, boxing, rowing," he read to himself as he scrolled along. "BMX, horses, archery." He wasn’t particularly impressed by any of the ideas. He sighed; maybe he was being too picky. It didn’t help that he’d never liked any sports to begin with. Couldn’t that spider have bitten some gym junkie instead?
"Tennis, gymnastics, bik-" He sat up straight. "Gymnastics," he punched into the search engine. It was perfect, he thought to himself, scrolling through pictures of Olympians flipping and flying, some of them even suspended upside down, midair.
He swallowed. That part wasn’t as exciting a prospect, but if he could tank a car, there was no reason a fall from that height should do any more damage.