You are Spider-Girl, daughter of the one true Spider-Man, and as it turns out, that little blinking light on your web-shooters meant they were running low on fluid. You silently scurry up to the window of your Forest Hills home, grumbling to yourself. Your adorable, spandex-covered ears are still ringing with the cackles of Funny Face escaping into the night. Hmmph.

Small mercies, though, at least your parents are sound asleep – If there's one benefit to having younger siblings, it's that they keep your parents nice and exhausted. You manage to shut the bedroom window behind you and swap your spider-PJ's for your regular PJ's without incident. Once the costume and web-shooters are safely hidden beneath that patch of loose carpet under the bed, you climb under the covers. Tomorrow's a school day, after all…

Two minutes later, you climb out of the covers. There's gotta be a way to get more web-fluid. What's a Spider-Girl without webs? God, you're stupid. You were so caught up in the rush of being a superhero that you'd subconsciously assumed you had infinite ammo. Maybe making that webbing-snowman hadn't been the greatest idea after all. But even if your dad keeps more fluid just lying around (which, let's be real, he doesn't), you can't keep stealing it from him – He'd catch on eventually. No, no, what you need to do is make your own web-fluid.

Surely your dad keeps the formula around here somewhere. Surely.

Soon enough, you find yourself sneaking into your dad's study. The room used to seem gigantic when you were little, but now it seems kinda silly, really. The desk is absolutely covered in random machinery and half-finished chemical experiments. Every so often, your dad will lock himself away in here, convinced he's stumbled onto the next big thing (cough cough mid-life crisis cough). Usually he just ends up making some new kinda glue… which, in hindsight, might be exactly what you're looking for.

You creep over to your dad's desk, pick the lock with a knitting needle (Thanks, Cassie's dad), and then start your snooping. Hmm, you've always been deathly curious to know what's in this drawer, but it doesn't look like anything super interesting. There are some faded old Valentine's Day cards, a couple, tiny little spider-shaped gadgets whose purpose you can't discern, and a notebook. That last one gets your hopes up, but all you find in there are some sketches of Spider-Man costume designs, all rejected. Some of the pages have little notes in the margins in a feminine handwriting that's not your mom's (though you guess it's possible hers has just majorly deteriorated now that nobody uses paper anymore). On one page, the notes have been aggressively scratched out, and above them is handwriting that's definitely your dad's, reading, "The web-armpits STAY."

You're just about to close the drawer back when you catch it poking out beneath the notebook – a flash drive. Bingo. Immediately, you run back to your room, sit up in bed with the laptop on your lap, fire it up, and plug in the drive. Your enthusiasm fades, though, once you realize there's nothing on here but video files. Okay, still, maybe your dad once recorded himself mixing up web-fluid? For posterity? It's- It's possible! And you need that web-fluid to defeat Funny Face, so this is for a good cause. You're definitely not just making up excuses to snoop on your fascinating parents who've been keeping major secrets from you your whole life.

Without further ado, you slip in headphones, then click on a random, untitled video file. Onscreen appears a cellphone video. That twenty-tens quality gives you a headache, but you can still make out two teenage girls sprawled across a queen-sized mattress, the both of them wearing short shorts and t-shirts that, err, aren't exactly baggy. One girl is blonde, the other a redhead. The redhead could not possibly be mistaken for any other human being on the planet except your mother, albeit a teenage version of her. And as for the blonde… she's come straight out of the old photos on the living room shelf.

"You're filming this?" Teenage-Mom says, eyebrow cocked, lips curled upwards.

"C-C'mon," says a higher, shakier version of your dad's voice from behind the trembling camera. "For all I know, this could end up being, like, a once-in-a-lifetime thing…"

"It's okay, Peter," the blonde says with a giggle. "We know all about your photography fetish."

At this, Teenage-Mom gives a dramatic flourish of her arm as she adopts a higher voice: "Ohhh! The mood lighting! The shot composition! It's all so… so perfect. AAAAAAAUUUUUUGHHHH!"

…You could've gone your whole life without hearing your mom feign that noise.

"Oh, shut up," Teenage-Dad says, his voice peppered with laughter of its own.

"Yeah?" Teenage-Mom retorts. "Why don't you come over here and make us?"

There are more giggles as the camera moves closer, but then the blonde girl gets all nervous and starts hugging herself, and so Teenage-Mom murmurs reassurances as she… rubs the girl's shoulders.

"Look, there's nothing to worry about," Teenage-Dad says. "I turned off cloud storage. No one's ever gonna see this…"

And that's when you make the mistake of hesitating a couple more seconds before slamming the laptop lid shut.

Almost the moment you do, your bedroom door explodes open and your non-teenage parents burst inside, the both of them wrapped in bathrobes. "What is it? What's wrong?"

It takes you a moment to realize you've been shrieking your head off.

Your dad's eyes fall on the laptop. "May, it's the middle of the night. What are you-?"

"What the hell?" The words escape your mouth entirely of their own accord.

"Hey!" Your mom starts forward. "You watch your language, young l- Where the hell did you get that?" The next instant, she's diving for the flash drive poking out your laptop. "Nothing on there is any of your business. I'm sorry if you saw me giving birth and freaked out, but maybe that'll teach you not to steal our-"

"No," you stammer out, the words more forceful than you'd meant. "No, I did not see you giving birth. That was- I just…" You trail off.

Your mom's interest has been peaked. She wrenches the laptop from your hands, then opens the lid to glance at the screen. A second later, your mom shuts it back, then scurries over to your dad's side to whisper something in his ear.

His eyes go wide. "Oh," he says. "Ohhhhhhhhh." After a deep breath, your dad turns to face you. "May, listen, your mother and I… there are things in our past, in our private lives, that are behind us now, and-"

"Oh my god, I don't want to talk about it." On sheer impulse, your hands clamp down on your ears as you bury yourself in your pillow. "I think I'm gonna throw up. My parents are perverts. My parents are gross, disgusting perverts."

"Whuz a pervert?" asks a squeaky voice from above.

"Annie!" Now your mom is forced to pry a redheaded toddler free of the light fixture. "Go back to bed, honey. And get down from there. I just mopped the ceiling…"

After that, your mom has to guide your sister back to her bedroom, leaving you alone with dear old dad. He bows his head and takes another breath. He looks like he's aged a million years since he entered this room.

After an eternity, he simply says, "We loved her. You don't have to understand it or like it or think it's right, but we're not apologizing for it. It is what is is."

You pull the covers tighter over yourself and say nothing. Your brain's kind of in the middle of a system wipe.

"Now why did you take that drive?" your dad asks.

"I dunno," you say.

He folds his arms. "What were you looking for?"

"I dunno," you say.

"You know, you can't keep this up much longer. Sooner or later, we'll find where you're hiding the costume and web-shooters."

"I dunno," you say.

His brow creases. "Young lady, if you don't change this attitude-"

"You'll what?" you snap. "Ground me? Yank me off the basketball team? Oh, wait, that bridge has been burned."

After that, your dad gives up, yanks out the flash drive, and storms off, muttering to himself.

…He totally forgot to take the laptop, though.

The desk drawer slammed shut with a click, hiding the flash drive from Peter's sight. He was sulking out the study when he found his wife waiting on the stairway.

"I'd completely forgot we'd recorded that," Peter says, monotone. "Guess I can't get rid of anything with her face on it…"

"It's okay." Mary Jane leans in for a hug. "I've still got this extra bottle of nail polish she gave me. It's probably fossilized by now."

The hug was held a long while. "You think, if things hadn't gone… the way they had…" Peter struggled to meet her eyes. "…the three of us would've still…?"

MJ could only shrug her shoulders. "It was only one crazy, stressful week in our lives. We were horny teens who thought robots were gonna exterminate humanity. Maybe it never woulda worked out in the long term."

Peter's gaze drifted to the stairs beneath him. "May and Annie and Benjy wouldn't exist."

That brought the most pained of smiles to Mary Jane's lips. "Yeah. So it's not all bad. But…" Hesitation. "…you know, if Gwen came back, like, right this second…"

"I know." Peter returned the expression. "Nothing's changed."

The hug didn't end for minutes to come.

Finally, though, the two pulled back, and Mary Jane asked, "Why'd May take the drive?"

"She wouldn't say."

"Was there anything Spider-Man related on there?"

Peter started to shake his head, but then he caught himself. "Actually, there was that one video where I recorded myself making web-fluid to help teach you how-"

"Oh yeah," MJ said with a laugh, "the web-fluid cooking show."

"-but, I mean, ninety-nine percent of the stuff on that drive is like the videos of you giving birth and… y'know… stuff that'd make her want to bleach her eyes out. She'd never find it."

The moment your dad's out of the bedroom, you reopen the laptop lid. "All files successfully copied," the onscreen popup says. You let out a sigh of relief.

But your next breath is less relaxed. You still don't know which video file, if any, contains the knowledge you seek. And you know now what ungodly horrors might await you. But Funny Face must be brought to justice, and that can only happen if you know how to make web-fluid. There's no choice, you realize as you bring a trembling mouse to another random file name. You have to do this.

For justice.

You'd never closed out of so many tabs so fast in your life… but by the end of the night, it's paid off. During lunch the next day, you slip away from Midtown Magnet for a quick little shopping trip.

"Excuse me, I'd like to make a purchase." You set a bag down on the countertop. It's quite heavy – or so you imagine. "Heavy" has become something of an alien concept to you.

But just as you're going for your debit card, the wrinkled old shopkeeper cries out, "AHA! I knew you'd return someday!"

"Uh, what?" You stumble backwards, disarmed.

"You can't fool me by growing out your hair!" the man proclaims in a scratchy, airless voice as he pointed a withered, trembling finger at you. "You've got the exact same chemicals in the exact same quantities. Even got the twenty-pound cement sack. It's a dead giveaway!"

"What are you talking ab-?"

"Too late, I'm already calling the police!"

Half an hour later, you're being escorted back to school in the passenger seat of your dad's cop car. You scowl at him, arms folded.

"Trying to hit up the old Chemistry Emporium, eh?" Your dad smirks at you. "Nice try, kiddo. I already thought to tip Bruce off."

"Punish me all you want," you mutter. "If I can stop Funny Face, then I have to do it. I've been told you used to get that…"

"Yeah," says your dad, eyes on the road, "back before they integrated metahumans into the NYPD. I think we can handle some punk in eyeliner now."

"Right, cuz you've been doing such a great job of it so far."

At this, your dad lets out a huff. "Fine. If you don't respect me and your mom, then you'll just have to get a lecture from someone you do."

The man looks otherworldly standing in the middle of your family's messy old kitchen, hands on his hips. Must be the bright red, white, and blue he's wearing.

"Hi, May." Somehow, his massive, blinding grin comes off as completely sincere. "I'm Captain America, and I'm here today to talk to you about the importance of obeying your parents."

"Daaaaaad…" You bury your face in the kitchen table. "Can't you just make me watch more videos of Mom giving birth?"