Chapter Text
Peter was sore. So incredibly insanely sore. He felt like if he tried to get up, he would get a stitch in his side, a Charlie horse, a migraine, and the hiccups all at once. What the hell was the building he must have been holding up? It must have been a freaking skyscraper with how sore he was. Or maybe he was in a full body arm wrestling contest with several Asgardians? He really wanted to find a nice place to make a web and hunker down for a while.
Wait. Make a web to hunker down? That… was not a normal human thought. Sure, Peter had experienced a few spidery changes since he was bitten, but nothing like this. Feeling more comfortable on all fours, preferring high places, and getting pissed at the spiders in his apartment (who didn’t even pay him rent) were all normal. Even an average human could relate to most of those. But nesting? No. Never happened before.
He groaned and opened his eyes, all four of them. Uh oh. What the heck? There was weird overlapping of colors going on, one of normal vision and another of a green-and-purple-washed version. He closed his… inner eyes? Inside eyes? Whatever, Peter closed his human eyes and looked through his others to witness a strange ultraviolet world.
His hands and arms had a spiderweb of patterns. He had seen pictures of humans under ultraviolet, but he wasn’t exactly the same. He could see the normal dark freckles against a slightly glowing background, but he could also see lines of extra bright glowy-ness. He was pretty sure that MJ said dots and stripes don’t belong together, but the way the ultraviolet lines twisted and connected through the maze of dark spots was mesmerizing. Peter could almost imagine prey being caught by the webs on his arms, struggling to escape before he enveloped it in more webbing and—
Hold on. Full stop. He opened his human eyes and closed his spider eyes, shaking his head and dropping his arms. There was something seriously wrong now. He had considered eating the stray insect now and again, but never before did he ever imagine and yearn for it. He felt unsettled. Just as he thought that, his spider sense went off.
It was so much stronger than usual, sending a shiver down his entire spine and raising the air on his arms and legs. He dodged whatever was going to hit him, scrambling away to the edge of the… roof he was on. He hadn’t realized he was on a roof. A few seconds later, someone in a weird suit landed a few feet away from where he was formerly laying.
Peter felt like this man was going to kill him. He was just about to jump off the building and do whatever he could to escape, but a slight decrease in alarm from the sense had him pause. The man raised his hands pacifyingly.
“Hey, hey, it’s gonna be alright. Are you okay? Do you need help?”
Peter didn’t answer, trying to figure out what was going on. The man held his hands out further, walking over to him, and his spider sense decreased again. Peter rubbed his face, coming back with some surprising sticky blood. In the moment he was distracted, his spider sense went off the charts. It was like being electrocuted, shots of adrenaline rushing through his blood and invigorating his panic. Before he even registered what the man had done to deserve the alarm bells, Peter was already a rooftop away and still going.
If he didn’t get away, he was absolutely going to die. No doubt about it. So, he ran and ran, wherever felt like he wasn’t gonna die. He was going way too fast for a human, nearing his top speed, when he finally felt the buzzing stop. Wherever he had gotten himself, it was definitely deserted. The only heartbeats he could hear nearby were small and rapid. Animals. Peter moved further into the abandoned area, staying low to the ground.
There were plants everywhere. They took over the buildings and street, harboring bugs of all sorts as they did so. The air was fresher than before. It tasted good, but there was one problem with that. Humans can’t taste the air. Peter seemed to be able to taste it with not only his mouth and lips, but his arms and legs too. The residual taste of the roof lingered on his limbs, and he brushed it off as quick as he could.
Once the nastiness was gone, he went on the hunt for a good place to sleep. Not only had the soreness gotten worse with his desperate sprint, he was dead tired and just needed somewhere to take stock and rest his eyes for a while. There was a wide tree nearby with lots of foliage and twisting branches, so he climbed it and quickly webbed up a hammock to lay in.
He settled down and looked over himself. He was in his civvies, no wallet in sight. Of course he didn’t have his wallet on him, he had been at home previously! That thought gave him pause, as Peter realized he had remembered something. He had been at home in his apartment, working on a personal prototype spider suit that he would probably never wear. It was supposed to focus on heavy defense, like an exoskeleton, but also be able to fold down enough to easily fit into a backpack. Honestly, Peter had hoped to make the suit transform to be a backpack.
He slowly drifted off to thoughts of the heavy suit, and dreamed of warm purple light. The moon sank below the horizon, unseen through the heavy clouds hanging over the earth. Hours later, the sun rose and shone its merry light at the smog that covered the ground, giving a rare warm glow to the city below it.
Peter rose with the sun, stirring in his hammock as he woke. He turned over and fiddled with his web shooter, only to find that it wasn’t there. Instead, his bare wrist had what appeared to be a short, deep scar that ran alongside the tendons. Through an experimental flick of his wrist, a thin strand of webbing shot out from the scar.
So, not scars. Organic webs. Okay, this was getting into crazy people territory at this point. Not much crazier than two extra eyes, but plenty of people have eye stuff going on. Nobody can spider-shit out their wrists. He slipped out of the hammock, and began taking down the webs. As he bundled the thread silk in his arms, he began to snack on it. Peter paused, though he had been pausing a lot recently. Why the hell was he snacking on his webs? Sure, they had a lot of protein that he shouldn’t waste when he didn’t know when his next meal might be, but he wasn’t actually a spider. Right?
On second thought, that was a question for another day, when he knew where he was and wasn’t utterly overwhelmed. He needed water, food, and information. Not necessarily in that order, but he needed it all the same. Food was… sort of temporarily handled, with the web-eating. That leaves water and information. Information is in libraries and bookstores, and water is in bathrooms! Both of those could be covered relatively soon.
How would he get around, though? Free-running was a no for now, since the soreness was still bad, but that only left walking. Eugh, annoying. Walking is totally overrated, swinging is a lot better, but Peter needed to conserve calories. He looked around, stuffing the last of the web into his mouth. Which way to civilization?