Wednesday. Room to rooftop to research bench, in that order.
Six thirty in the morning, Peter's alarm went off before actual sunrise.
He ran through chemistry flashcards while getting dressed, then ran through them again on the walk to school because repetition was cheaper than confidence.
Third period, his phone buzzed under the desk. A calendar reminder.
Stark Industries, power grid failover review, four o'clock, cannot reschedule twice. He silenced it and kept copying the day's lab notes with one hand.
Four o'clock, he sat across from a Stark engineer twice his age and caught two errors in a redundancy model before the man finished explaining it. The meeting ran long. He left with a headache he did not have time to deal with.
Six o'clock, patrol. Nine minutes, one attempted mugging outside a bodega, handled clean.
FSIS confirmed no footage survived the encounter. He was back on a rooftop three blocks from home before the adrenaline had even finished leaving his system.
Seven o'clock, homework at the kitchen table while Aunt May asked if he was eating enough and he said yes without checking whether it was true.
Nine o'clock, an update from FSIS on Oscorp's power signature, unchanged since Monday, filed and set aside.
Ten o'clock, he opened his exam review folder and made it through four pages before the words stopped meaning anything.
He went to the dimension too and worked from there. There was no day to spare this week, only hours, and every one of them already belonged to something.
'This is fine,' Peter thought, not quite believing it. 'It's one week. I can hold all of it for one week.'
---
Thursday. Hallway, between fourth and fifth period.
Felicia fell into step beside Peter without announcing herself, which was normal, and didn't say anything for almost a full minute, which was not.
"You're quiet," Peter said.
"Studying does that to a person."
Her phone buzzed in her bag. She didn't reach for it. Peter noticed that, but didn't pay much attention to it.
"You good?" he asked, already half a thought ahead, running through what he still needed to cover before the physics final.
"I'm good." A beat too long before she said it. "Just tired."
It was the same answer she had given him at the side entrance the week before, word for word, and Peter's memory usually flagged that kind of repetition without him having to try. This time it slid past.
"Okay," he said. "Let me know if you need anything."
"I know where to find you."
She peeled off toward her next class before he could ask anything else, and Peter kept walking, already three steps into the physics final instead of the girl who had just answered the exact same question the exact same way twice in a row.
---
Friday, after school.
In the library...
Exams started Monday. All four of them had claimed the same corner table for the week, an arrangement nobody had actually proposed out loud.
Gwen had color-coded her notes by subject, a different highlighter for every discipline lined up along the table's edge.
MJ had abandoned her notes twenty minutes ago in favor of quizzing everyone from memory, which she was somehow better at than the notes themselves. Felicia sat across from Peter, working through a practice set slower than her usual pace, but steady.
"I won't be around this weekend," Felicia said, not looking up from her page. "Visiting a relative. Out of town."
"Which relative?" MJ asked, still scanning her flashcards.
"Does it matter?" Felicia said it lightly, almost bored, and turned the page before anyone could decide whether it did.
"Have fun," Gwen said, already back in her notes.
Peter meant to ask something. A follow-up. The kind of question he would have asked without thinking two weeks ago.
But his phone buzzed with a calendar reminder from Stark Industries, and by the time he looked up again the conversation had already moved to the next practice problem, and the moment to ask had closed itself without him noticing it happen.
'She'll be back Sunday,' Peter thought. 'We'll talk then.'
He went back to his notes.
The weekend started like any other.
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