Kiara wonders, sometimes, how the Fantastic Four felt in the immediate aftermath of gaining their powers. Well, after any immediate illness, which isn't really the point. And presumably after skipping the step where you look up information about spider bites and then radiation sickness online and try to figure out whether you're about to drop dead (without telling your sister or your brother-in-law, because the idea that a radioactive spider bit you and conferred serious radiation sickness on you that's going to cause you to drop dead without warning is almost as insane as the idea that it bit you and conferred superpowers on you, and you don't relish the thought of looking any more insane than you already do).
Anyway. She wonders how they felt about their powers, once they realized they had them. Really felt, you know, not what you tell yourself about it later, after you've smoothed out the memories to better fit the path you've decided to walk.
She feels like the superhero thing wouldn't really have been an obvious path to her if someone else hadn't thought of it first. It's, you know, a little crazy. Maybe not quite as crazy as having superpowers in the first place, but pretty crazy. But the Fantastic Four are smart, in addition to being powerful and cool, and they're presumably aware of this, and they concluded that it was the best thing to do with themselves.
It's not like she hasn't thought about it. She's thought a lot about it. She's catalogued her powers in private - strength, the... wallcrawling thing... and the webs, which come in sticky and non-sticky. She bought a sewing machine and made a costume, and then made a full ski-mask style face covering to go with it, which was maybe a little stupid, because heroes aren't really supposed to wear masks, right? But the idea of being scrutinized the way the Fantastic Four are... she doesn't know if she could do it. She doesn't think she could even write a book under her real name, even under normal circumstances, because if the book was good it'd lead to lots of people looking at her, and she doesn't want anyone to look at her.
She did put the costume on in private, to see if it fit. She tested whether her wallcrawling still worked through the fabric she picked when it was made into gloves. And she's been keeping it in her backpack, just in case she ever needs it.
She hasn't used it. She's run into situations where she could have. But - serious criminals have guns, and the cops also have guns, and she's not actually Sue Storm, you know, there's nothing in her power set that lets her defend herself from bullets. So the end of the day she's still just Kiara Teller, sixteen-year-old black girl who fades into the background and calls it being sensible, who barely scrapes through her classes even though her family keeps telling her she's so incredibly smart, who wants to be a writer and never finishes anything, who fundamentally floats through life putting the minimum possible effort into everything, because that's the kind of person she is, and it turns out that radioactive spider bites don't change that. So when she runs into violence, or theft, or anything that anyone really ought to do something about, she does nothing.
The option keeps sitting there, the costume and the powers and the knowledge of her potential all weighing much heavier than it feels like they should.
Two months into this new brand of navel-gazing about her fundamental inadequacies as a person, her brother-in-law is shot during a robbery. Not even a robbery of their place, a robbery of some random corner store he was shopping at. But her brother-in-law was no coward, not ever, and never one to let a terrifying situation make him back down from doing what he thought was right. You could say a lot of other things about him. He got her sister pregnant when she was only a year older than Kiara is now. He was a musician, the kind that says he's gonna make it big and who actually makes his money working at Taco Bell. He used to quote great thinkers and pretend he'd come up with everything they ever said himself. "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." (John Stuart Mill, paraphrased, sometimes more tenuously attributed to Edmund Burke.) "Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do." (Voltaire, in loose translation.) "With great power comes great responsibility." (Winston Churchill, sort of, although versions of the saying date back, again, at least to Voltaire.)
The suspect in her brother-in-law's murder is a man she recognizes; she saw him mugging someone in their area a few weeks before. She didn't do anything about it. Now the bravest person in her family is dead, and she has to live with the weight of that, too, knowing that every time she didn't act there was, actually, some real cost, that the consequences of her actions are hitting her in part because they've come back to hit many people, none of whom realize that she is doing nothing, squandering her power, abandoning her responsibility, guilty of a great many goods left undone.
She wonders why radioactive spiders can't preferentially bite people who are noble and brave and deserving.