Chapter Text
Okay, let me tell this story one last time.
My name is Omega Fett. I was bitten by a radioactive spider. And for the last…several months, I’ve been the one and only Spider-Girl. You might know the rest, but just in case, I’ll tell you.
I ran away from the orphanage I was left at as a baby, and in turn, ran right into some men who helped me when I needed it most.
I saved a bunch of people.
Made a new family.
Got to have a real teacher for once, which is pretty neat.
Fought a lot of bad guys.
Was given a lot of hugs.
I got hit by a drone (Tech says I still have a concussion).
Kissed a boy.
Rescued a brother I didn’t know I had.
And I don’t feel alone anymore. Because I’m not the only one like me.
Not by a long-shot.
“Omega, you’re not seriously leaving.”
Omega Se stuffs her last article of clothing in the single bag she’d acquired sometime in the eleven years she’d been living in Lama Su’s Home for Orphaned Children. It’s a pair of leggings, ones she usually only wears to bed, but she doesn’t want to go without them in case she’s ever able to wear them in a safe location again.
She pushes the folded leggings between two books, one about fairy-tales and another she uses for school. “I am. Seriously.”
Benni Baro’s eyebrows knit together. He shifts on her bed, crossing his legs beneath him. Aside from his shoes falling apart at the soles, they’re caked in mud, smearing across her bedclothes. It doesn’t really matter; she won’t be sleeping there tonight. “You’re gonna get caught.”
“No, I won’t.” She picks up the last piece of clothing she owns—a dark crimson tunic that faded into a bland red over time—folds it, and sticks it in the bag with everything else. Which isn’t much. “I won’t let myself get caught.”
“That doesn’t exactly mean much,” Benni says, not unkindly. “If one of the…dem…demo—“
“ Demagolka ,” she finishes for him, smiling to herself. She’d been calling the orphanage staff “monsters and war criminals who commit atrocities” in her native tongue since they were toddlers, and her best friend still can’t pronounce the word on his own. She’s going to miss having to correct him.
Just like that, the last bit of light left inside her snuffs out. She’s going to miss Benni terribly. And the worst of it is, there’s no way for her to know if she’ll ever see him after her escape. It’ll be difficult enough getting herself out of here; getting Benni out with her would guarantee failure. She can come back later—she will come back later, but even then, she’s not entirely certain she’ll succeed with that, either.
She can make herself disappear, cloaking herself within the rest of the world’s space. She can sense things before they happen, feel the presence of a person before they walk in a room. She can strike someone dead with just her fingertips if she so wishes. Which, really, she doesn’t very often. Maybe Lama Su, but she’d end up somewhere far worse than the Home if she ever went through with that.
But Benni can’t do anything like that. And as different of a person as she is compared to everyone else in the orphanage, she doesn’t know if she has what it takes to keep them both safe during an escape.
He’s skillful and stealthy, too, and had evaded their caretakers’ wrath on numerous occasions. Choosing the path of a thief had shown him all the right methods of making himself mostly unnoticeable. But that doesn’t mean he can get himself out, and as awful as this place is, she would rather have him be here and be safe than try to flee and be punished for it.
Master Su’s punishments hurt . She doesn’t want Benni to hurt just because he wants to be free. That’s not fair.
Benni has been protecting her since they met. Always standing up for her when other kids pick fights with the “witchy girl”. Bringing food back from the refectory for her when she’s not allowed to leave her room. Sitting with her when she’s sick, comforting her when she’s upset. His hugs mean more to her than anything; strong but not restricting, firm but not unloving. She can’t survive without them. Without him. Even through all the protection he’s been giving her throughout their friendship, she’s been subtly doing just the same for him. Watching his back, returning his hugs, telling him stories and nurturing her affection for him little by little, until their relationship felt more profound than just friendship.
A world without him in it seems too pointless to let the Home subject its horrors on him. She never has, and she’s not going to start now.
“If one of the Demagolka catch you,” he continues, “you know they’re not gonna be happy.”
Omega’s hands freeze, ice traveling through her veins. “It’ll be worse than that.” She can remember the last time one of the kids tried to make a break for it. They’d crawled out a window in the middle of the night, tripped on the windowsill, and landed on the ground below, limbs splayed in all the wrong directions. The precise shade of blood that had pooled around his head was a color Omega has never expunged from her nightmares.
But that’d been an accident. When a kid is caught, they’re oftimes never seen or heard from again. She’d lost many of the people she’d come in contact with because of their doomed attempts to run.
“ Exactly ,” Benni agrees. He pinches the skin of his throat, curling in on himself. “I want you to get away, Meg. But I don’t…I don’t want to lose you.”
His fear is so palpable and so raw, it soaks into Omega from their four or five foot gap. She doesn’t know what she would have done without him all these years, and she will never recover if anything happens to him because she is reckless and foolish. If he can’t lose her, then the feeling’s mutual. She doesn’t know what she’ll do if she loses her best friend. She doesn’t know what she’s going to do for however long they’d spend apart once she leaves.
She sets her bag to the side and walks over to him, holding out her hands with her palms up. Benni eyes them with confusion, his face reddening, but he gives in and places his hands in hers. “I’ll find a way to get you out, too,” she promises. “So that there isn’t a chance of either one of us losing each other. Okay?”
The corner of her friend’s mouth curls upward. “Okay…but at least be careful, please.”
“I’ll be as careful as I can be.” And that promise is just as real as the previous one. She’ll be as careful as she can, taking all precautions and making no irresponsible decisions. She’ll come back for him. She isn’t going to let him suffer here alone. Reaching forward, Omega plants a kiss on his cheek, gripping his hands tighter. “I’m not going to abandon you, Ben.”
“I-I know that.” His voice is shaky, and when she pulls away, his entire face has become one huge splotch of scarlet. She’d never kissed his face before—she’d wanted to more times than she could count, but was too afraid she’d make it weird and damage their friendship somehow—and she kind of regrets not doing so before if this is the reaction she could have received. “I know, Meg.”
“Good.” Omega lets go of his hands. “I hope I can do this before I lose my nerve.”
“Yeah,” Benni agrees, seemingly at ease, but his clenched fingers are giving himself away. “And…I’m gonna do this before I lose mine.”
She doesn’t get to ask him what he’s talking about as he jumps up from her bed and lurches for her. He takes her face in his hands and gently tugs her closer, letting their lips meet in the middle. It’s so brief that Omega barely has a chance to register what’s happening, but her heart ricochets and her knees go weak and she can’t believe he’s doing this, but she couldn’t be happier that he was. She reciprocates the kiss, and it lasts for one, two, three— and then he draws back, looking her dead in the eye.
“I love you,” he whispers. His tears glisten as he traces a small circle into her cheek. “Please, be careful, alright?”
She nods, her own tears beginning to well. If he keeps being so sweet, she’ll be tempted to forfeit her plan and stay. And she can’t stay here anymore. She won’t survive if she does. “I will, Ben. Wait for me? I will come back.”
“Are you kidding?” he teases, watery but tender. “I won’t get any sleep till I see you again.”
“Yeah,” she laughs bitterly. “Me neither.”
Benni scoops her up in a hug, wrapping his arms around her shoulders. “You got this,” he says. “Just use those magic powers of yours and you’ll be okay.”
Those “powers of hers” are her ticket out of here, and she would have shared them with him if it meant they could both escape together. She squeezes him tighter. “I am really gonna miss you.”
There’s pressure at her temple; a fleeting kiss, she thinks. “Then come back soon, Sunflower.”
After several tearful goodbyes that poke painful holes in Omega’s resolve, Benni leaves her to prepare herself for her escape. She clasps his hands as roughly as she can until she can no more, and lets him kiss her one more time, with a softness that spell out feelings he’d kept hidden for years at a time. She so very nearly gives in and stays at the Home, just so that she doesn’t have to be away from him. But though her resolve is crumbling, it’s not completely destroyed, and she has just enough to remind her that deciding to remain at the orphanage will make her more miserable than she already is.
She cries when Benni goes back to the boys’ dorms. Some of the other girls ask her what’s wrong, why she’s shedding mournful tears when the boy who’d been joined to her at the hip from now all the way back to their early years had finally kissed her and told her he loves her. She ignores them. She’d never been friends with any of the girls, anyway, and she doesn’t much want to explain to them how it is to be both elated and grief-stricken over the whole thing. She doesn’t care for their opinions, either. Let them think whatever they want about her and Benni. She’ll be gone in a few hours and they’ll be none the wiser.
She climbs into her cot and pulls the covers over her head, sobbing into her single pillow. She sobs for so long that she feels empty and dry as she lies there, contemplating her plan of escape, working out any of its flaws that come to mind. It hardly feels real, that she’s about to leave. It feels worse that she’s about to go and leave Benni here, where he has no one to eat lunch with or talk to or play games with. Nobody but the other orphan boys, but he doesn’t really like them. They don’t like him, either. He’d allied himself with the “witchy girl” and that had made him a social pariah among the other kids, just like her. How is he going to endure this place on his own? She’s such a bad friend for leaving him.
No matter what happens, Omega has to break him out of here. She’ll go, get some money together, find a place for them to lay low, and she’ll come back for him, just like she promised him. She will not abandon him. She can’t. He’s her only friend, her best friend, and if Omega has no one else in the universe, she has him. She can’t lose him.
She waits for a long time before she concludes that she’s ready to get going. She lifts the sheets from off her head, breathing in the air of the girls’ room. It’s musty and smells of old wood, but it has a better odor than the sweat and salty tears her bed-clothes are drenched in. She stands from the bed, setting up a row of pillows covered by her sheet to resemble a sleeping girl, retrieves her cloth bag set next to it, and slings it over her shoulders.
The girls’ quarters are quiet, apart from some snoring or tossing and turning. The lamplights are turned down low, casting a dim, yellow glow over the rows of beds lined against the walls. It should be peaceful. Perfect for putting a stubborn adolescent girl to sleep.
But Omega has never seen it as peaceful in any sense. Actually, she’s always found the sleeping chambers eerie, like the jaws of a beast remaining open for the hours in which its prey slumbers. Going to bed every night is like putting her faith in a rabid animal, trusting it not to devour her once it tasted her and she was helpless to save herself.
The whole Home resembles a monster to her. The chambers are just its mouth, and Omega is weary of retiring among its teeth.
She has no goodbyes to say, so she says none. She tiptoes across the wood floors, wary of the spots that could creak and wake one of the other girls, and reaches the other side of the room to the door with all possible haste. She gives the room one last look, committing to memory all of the good things that have occurred here.
There aren’t many, admittedly. But there are some. Like the time Benni sat with her all night, cleaning the cuts and abrasions Omega had obtained from a couple of the boys who were trying to get her into trouble with their guardians. He’d let her grip his hand as he held a chunk of ice wrapped in cloth against her swollen eye. She’d came away with purple-black bruises later.
Or when she had let some of the younger children crawl into her bed as she read them tales of heroic knights and fair maidens and bloodthirsty dragons. They’d hung on her every word and had thrown question after question at her, most of which she hadn’t been able to answer. Her favorite one had been, “If the dragon wants the princess to himself, why doesn’t he just marry her?” Omega spent days hatching a story that went like that, and gleefully told it to anyone who’d listen. She’d captured the attention of almost every child in their room.
It’s not home. It’s never been home . But it had housed her, brought her to Benni. And she is eternally grateful for that.
Omega twists the doorknob and pulls the door open just so far as she can slip her body between the crack. Once on the other side, she shuts the door closed and stands with her back against the wall, blowing out a sigh.
She made it. She actually made it. She’d had her doubts about even making it out of the girls’ quarters without waking up one of them, by stepping on the wrong plank of wood or causing the door’s hinges to squeak. But neither had happened. She doesn’t know if she owes debt to her own powers or a higher power for it.
In any case, she sends out a quiet, “Thank you” and begins to scan the hallways for any of the staff. They don’t usually patrol the corridors whilst the younglings slept, but she isn’t about to court disaster by assuming no one will be doing so tonight.
She waits for about a minute, counting to sixty in her head, checking with her strange…senses to see if they will alert her of anyone nearby. The pulsing of intellect and impulse that buzz at the back of her skull and skitter down her nerves tell her no one’s within a worrying proximity. She can get down this hallway without being detected, at least.
Omega tightens the straps of her bag around her. She’s so close now. So close, her longing increases the longer she stays rooted to the ground. But she can’t bring herself to take a step forward. To walk down that hall, take the stairs to get to the middle level, and finally exit out the humongous red door that had barred her off from the outside world for eleven years. She’s in the home stretch, but it’s as if her legs simply denied working for her. Like they’d decided they’d had enough of getting her into trouble as much as they had, and are holding an intervention to keep her from getting into any now.
Frustration brewing, Omega pinches the hem of her sleeve and yanks it back, letting it fold over in the crook of her elbow. She glares at her forearm, refusing to fear what it’s covered with.
Long white scars snake up her skin, twisting around newer, redder, fresher ones that still sting sometimes. They thin out and thicken in areas, darkening or lightening as their sizes differ. Her stomach roils at the sight of them; taking the time to ogle the marks of her misery isn’t a particularly entertaining hobby of hers.
Taun We gave her some of these. So had Lama Su, and a number of the other stewards who’d been “taking care of her” all this time. She’d get into some kind of trouble, play a prank or stand up for Benni or not complete a chore the exact way she was supposed to, and one of them would hunt her down with a thin metal rod. They’d take her to the Punishing Room, the darkest and emptiest room in the entire Home in the basement of the building, and they’d smack her arms with the rod until they burned and bled.
Omega would cry and struggle to get away, just to get the constant striking to stop. To get the pain to stop. If she’d been really mischievous, whoever had punished her would make her stand at the far end of the girls’ room, her arms dripping with red fluid, as a warning to all of the other girls to not do what she had done. The girls would scrunch their noses up at Omega, and many even left the room to let her bleed all alone.
That’s why she’s leaving. Because minor mistakes have her walking away with wounds that will never fully heal. Because the older boys and some of the older girls will mock and taunt her for being “strange”, for having abilities no one else in the Home does. Because Omega has no friends but Benni, and she isn’t even allowed to see him as often as she likes.
Benni’s the only thing left for her here, but the Orphan’s Home is not the place for either of them to remain. She has to liberate herself in order to liberate him. She can’t do that if every little wayward action is met with scratches and scrapes and tears.
Her stupid feet will not limit her now.
She tugs the sleeve back down her arm, hiding the array of disfigurements beneath the fabric. She needs no more incentive than these. These, and the ones on Benni’s arms. And the ones she might gain if she is to continue to cross her caregivers.
Omega takes a breath. This is it. Stop being afraid.
She takes off in a silent sprint down the hall. She turns into the long staircase carved of ancient wood at the end, taking the steps two at a time as she watched her footing so she didn’t trip. Her blood is singing and her excitement is alight, steps passing below her in a blur as she races onward.
Just a few more steps and she’s back on the ground level, cold drafts of air wafting in from the high windows kept open unremittingly. Just a few more steps, and she is standing in front of the towering claret-red door, her powers assuring her that there is not a soul around to drag her back into the bowels of this nightmare.
Just a few more steps, and her fingers are brushing the rusted metal doorknob, trembling with anticipation. And possibly fear, Omega thinks, as they curl round the curve of the latch.
She doesn’t know what the outside world is like. She barely knows what it looks like. She had a window to contemplate the streets and city lights and skyscrapers from the inside, but a window can’t accurately draw an illustration of what Earth is really like. What if it isn’t everything she’d ever dreamed it’d be? What if she gets out there and endures more agony than she had in the Home?
What if running is the mistake, and she’ll find nothing out in the labyrinth of Coruscant that is any better than all that went on in Lama Su’s?
She only has two options: run or stay. No one was going to adopt her; she is fourteen, has almost no practical skills, and is tainted by rumors the other kids had spread around. No one will want to adopt her if they know she can electrify whatever she touches without having to think about it. What would the rest of the world do if they discover her powers? Would they treat her as an outcast, like everyone in the Home? Or would they think of her greatly, like the men and women who protected the city with their powers?
Don’t be afraid, she tells herself. She closes her eyes, gripping the knob. Don’t be afraid. This is your chance. Get out while you can, come back for Benni later. You’ll regret it if you don’t.
And yet, her hand will not turn the knob. Just like her legs, it refuses to work. A shudder races through her fingers, into her knuckles and up her wrist. She inhales shakily through her nose to calm herself, but the lawless earthquake in her chest doesn’t cease. What is wrong with me?
She has no more time to lose. It has to be now.
Pushing down her fears, Omega rotates the knob to the right. The hatch clicks, she gives it a hard yank, and the heavy door cracks open, moonlight streaming in through the thin aperture to bathe the floor and her feet in a silvery-white glow. It’s ethereal and bright, its beauty pure and absolute rather than obscured through a cut pane of glass. It takes her breath away. She’s never known light can look so…mysterious. Sacred.
She gyrates her foot in the moonbeams. Stretches her fingers, light gleaming against her nails. Steps fully into the pearly shine as an astonished laugh falls out of her. She has never seen so much natural light in her life. How had she gone without it?
Omega twirls, her skirt billowing out in a small circle around her legs. She giggles, steadying herself again, and raises her face to the sky. Stars glitter against a backdrop of endless black. The moon, a round and silver sphere, sheds its light into the darkness, casting out the shadows surrounding it.
She has never seen something more beautiful in her life.
Though she can easily stand here and contemplate the heavens forever, she doesn’t have much time to waste. On the off chance that one of her caretakers inspect the girls’ quarters and notice her gone, she won’t have very long to get away from the hounds they set after runaways. She’ll be caught and pulled back into her world of torment before she can ever see proper sunlight.
Just as Omega starts forward, pacing briskly up the streets in search of an alley to hide in, something in the air changes. The back of her neck tingles, her eyes water, and the essence of another being filters through her senses.
Someone’s coming. Someone who…isn’t normal.
She looks for the closest hiding spot on the wide, vacant road and finds a gap between two buildings that will fit her, if only just barely.
She cringes. She hates tight spaces. Crawling around in the vents of the Home is a nightmare, and any chore that involves cleaning the cramped fissures around the Home always have her near tears and shaking.
The new presence nears— above her, for some reason—and Omega bites the bullet, surging towards the small, dirty gap and wedging herself in. Her sole consolation is that there’s a sliver of moonlight there to illuminate the black, helping to subdue her.
Omega listens and waits for the strange person she feels from far away. She keeps her head bowed, but casts her senses upward, tracking down the malice attached to their will. She doesn’t sense others’ feelings very often, not unless they’re intense or volatile. And the other person almost has to broadcast them, make them extremely evident, for Omega to notice them. People frequently don’t know they were doing it.
Fear swells. She pushes her back further into the wall behind her, whispering, “Please, don’t let them see me.”
Just as her request lapses, Omega hears footsteps above her. High above her. So…the rooftops? They’re quick but measured, and when Omega looks skyward, she catches a glimpse of a figure, feminine and lithe, jumping across the short rift between the structures. She’s dressed in all black, an intricate braid of raven hair flying behind her.
Omega stifles her gasp. One of the villains. Her stupid city is overrun with evils in human bodies, and there are just a few who use their powers to fight back. The “spider heroes” Omega calls them. Protectors. Peacekeepers.
But they are all men. The lady…well, isnt.
Omega stays hidden, pushing her sense of hearing to the limits to pick up on anything from her. Nothing but more footfalls. She isn’t even panting like most do after physical exertion. Who is this woman?
Finally, the stranger stops. She exhales through her nose, and speaks all but to herself. “I’m here. Once the target’s recovered, I’m to bring her to you?” A pause. “Affirmative. Don’t worry. I’ll find her.”
Oh, stars .
Her .
She doesn’t want to jump to conclusions or anything, but she has to be talking about Omega. Why else would a crazy villain lady in a black suit be staking out a depressing little orphanage in the middle of the night? To go after a random kid who’s smeared honey on their fellow inmate’s bed? And again, no conclusions, but she surely can’t be there to adopt someone. She doesn’t strike her as anything near motherly.
Omega’s different. Mystical and weird and gifted with potential that she’d been knocked around for on countless occasions. Other than Benni, whom Omega is biased towards, there isn’t anyone in the Home that is worth kidnapping.
The woman has to be coming after her .
Well. Her timing isn’t too great then. Because Omega is on her way out and no one—not even a crazy lady in a sleek leather suit—is going to put her off her path.
Omega stays in the too-narrow gap for much longer than she wants, concentrating on the quick footsteps fading away behind her. She doesn’t know how much time passes when they left her auditory range altogether, but she doesn’t care. Now all she has to do is get away without the villain woman spotting her.
Omega wedges herself out of her hiding place, breathing much easier without the pressure against her chest—both from the opposite wall and from her apprehension. She scans the roofs of the apartment complexes and run-down businesses on the other side of the street, remembering what she’d heard about the bad guys sometimes traveling in pairs if the threat called for it. Not that she thinks she’s a threat or anything.
No one’s on that side. And with a brief glance to the structures further down the road that leads to the Home, Omega doesn’t see the mysterious woman either. She is alone, in the dead of night, in an empty city.
She doesn’t let hesitation stop her. She looks down the other end of the road, the tall and frighteningly large rows of skyscrapers glistening in the moonlight, and the noises that a city that never sleeps make, and runs.
Well, this job has been a bust.
The kid is gone. Shand swept through the entire orphanage, pausing by every child’s bed, investigating every room, even taking the time to scan the boys’ quarters just to say she’d done it if her boss asked.
Nothing. Nowhere. The girl is gone, like she’s never existed. She hadn’t known it was possible for a young teenager to vanish into the aether as swiftly as Omega had, but it evidently is. She left behind none of her possessions, however many she might have in this place, and the bed Shand identified as hers had been all but made, apart from a line of pillows wrapped up in her quilt to simulate a child bundled in sleep.
At the very least, Shand has a lead. If she didn’t have one, Mistress Se would have had her head.
The Spiders will know where she’s going soon. Very soon. All Shand has to do is track them down, too, and she’ll have all of them right there in her grasp to bring to Dr. Hemlock. Maybe then he’ll promote her to a higher position than the thief who does his dirty work.
As she makes her exit into the hushed and tranquil nighttide, the device in her ear alerts her to an incoming call. Shand accepts it and greets whoever is on the other side without emotion.
“Did you find her?” Se asks.
“Negative. She’s nowhere in the Home and nowhere nearby.” Shand swallows the lump of nerves in her throat.
There’s a long pause, strained with a tension that Shand tries to avoid in all situations.
“You best have some sort of explanation prepared for the doctor,” Se hisses. She sounds just as agitated as Shand felt.
“I have a lead,” Shand explains, her voice pitching against her will. “She won’t be able to stay hidden. I’ll find her within the week.”
“For your sake,” Nala Se snaps, “I should hope that turns out to be true.”
The call ends as abruptly as it began. Fennec Shand, the Black Cat whom most of Coruscant detests or dreads, stands there, frozen in her tracks, the strange thing she used to know as fear driving down on her harder than pouring rain.