The bus back to Queens was a sweatbox on wheels.
Peter leaned his head against the window. The glass was warm. Everything was warm. The seat, the air, his own skin. The face reflected back at him was white as paper. Sweat ran down his temples and left dark patches on his collar.
His veins felt wrong. Not painful exactly. Just hot. Like someone had swapped his blood for something thicker, heavier, running a few degrees too warm.
"So hot," he mumbled. His voice sounded far away even to himself.
The bus hit a pothole and his stomach lurched. He pressed his forehead against the glass and focused on not throwing up.
It was just a mosquito. People don't get this sick from a mosquito bite.
Do they?
A hand pressed flat against his back. Warm. Steady.
The Omnitrix pulsed under my cuff.
[Warning: Target biological enzyme activity exceeding critical threshold.] [Cellular fission rate: 500x normal human baseline.]
I kept my hand on Peter's back and watched the numbers climb. His body temperature was past fever. Past dangerous. Heading toward numbers that should've had him in an ICU.
It was starting.
"Hold on, Pete."
He didn't answer. Eyes half closed, jaw clenched, sweat running off him like he'd just stepped out of a shower.
The bus stopped. I got him up, got his arm over my shoulder, and half carried him down the steps.
The evening air did nothing. Peter shivered anyway. Full body, teeth chattering, like someone had dunked him in ice water while his insides were on fire.
"Don't tell May." He was hanging off me, barely standing. His fingernails were digging into my arm hard enough to hurt. Way harder than Peter should've been able to grip. He didn't notice. "She'll freak out. You know how she gets. She'll want the hospital and they'll do tests and it'll be this whole thing. Just. Don't."
He's burning alive from the inside and he's worried about scaring Aunt May.
I didn't answer. I just gripped his wrist tighter and walked faster.
The Parker house was just ahead. Warm orange glow in the windows. The smell of May's meat rolls drifting out through the screen door.
Peter gagged. His whole body clenched and he bent over, hands on his knees, dry heaving.
"The smell," he choked out. "Everything smells so. I can smell the. Why is everything so loud?"
He wasn't making sense. I waited until he caught his breath, pulled him upright, and we went in.
"Oh, you're finally back!"
May was at the stove, apron on, soup spoon in hand. She turned around smiling. "Ben was just saying you two probably got kidnapped by Osborn to be lab rats."
Dad was on the couch with the newspaper. He took off his reading glasses and looked over. "Just worried you lost track of time. So how was the exhibition? That gene thing worth the hype?"
"It was great, Dad." I answered before Peter could. I was standing slightly in front of him, blocking most of his body from their line of sight. "Peter's stomach is messed up though. Caught a chill. He's running a fever."
"A cold?" May's smile dropped. She was across the room in three steps, hand already reaching for Peter's forehead.
Peter flinched when she touched him. His skin was so sensitive now that even May's hand felt like sandpaper. But he held still and let her feel.
"My God, Peter!" Her hand jerked back. "You're burning up! This isn't a cold. This is a real fever."
"I'm fine, Aunt May." Peter's voice was wrecked. He tried to smile and it looked like he was about to cry. "It's probably just the flu. It's been going around school. You know Flash Thompson passed out in the gym today."
I backed him up. "Yeah, that guy went down hard. Peter was probably right next to him when it happened. You know how viruses work. They go for the weakest target."
"Hey," Peter mumbled. "I'm not the weakest."
"You literally can't stand up right now."
"That's. That's circumstantial."
Dad put the newspaper down. "Should we take him to the hospital?"
"No!" Peter's voice came out way too loud. He caught himself and dialed it back. "I mean. It's not worth the trip. I just want to sleep. Seriously. Sleep and I'll be fine."
I got my arm under his shoulder and steered him toward the stairs. "I got him. Mom, save us some food but I don't think Pete's gonna be handling those meat rolls tonight."
May watched us go. The worry on her face didn't budge, but she nodded. "I'll bring up some fever reducers and an ice pack. Leon, make sure he takes the medicine."
"I will."
I got Peter up the stairs. He kept his head down the whole way, biting his lip so hard it was white, swallowing every sound before it could make it out of his throat.
We got to his room. I shut the door. Locked it.
The second I let go of him, he dropped.
Peter Parker hit the floor like his bones had dissolved. He curled into a ball, fingers clawing into the carpet, and a sound came out of him that wasn't a scream and wasn't a groan. It was low and raw and animal. The sound of something being torn apart from the inside.
His vision was going. The room was spinning. The wallpaper patterns were crawling, multiplying, turning into shapes that moved and skittered. The ceiling was bending. Gravity had stopped making sense.
"It hurts." He squeezed the words out through his teeth. "Leon. It hurts."
His left hand. The bite. It was swollen and purple now, dark veins spreading up from the wound along the inside of his forearm, branching and splitting, a web of poison racing toward his shoulder.
I knelt down next to him.
The Omnitrix lit up under my sleeve. The scanning beam swept over Peter's body and the data started pouring in.
[Genetic sequence undergoing violent rewrite.] [Current progress: 15%.] [Exogenous retrovirus detected. Eliminating weak baseline human genetic segments.]
I looked at Peter. Curled on the floor, shaking, biting through his own lip to keep from screaming.
My finger hovered over the dial.
The Omnitrix could repair genes. I knew that. One tap and the retrovirus gets wiped clean. Peter goes back to normal. Happy, healthy, regular Peter Parker who goes to college and gets a job and never has to dodge bullets or swing between buildings or watch people die.
And then Thanos snaps his fingers and Peter turns to dust along with half the universe. Or a Chitauri soldier puts a beam through his chest. Or any one of a hundred future disasters kills him because he's just a regular kid with no powers in a world full of things that eat regular kids for breakfast.
My fingers curled into a fist. My knuckles went white.
This is necessary. This is the math. This is the only way he survives what's coming.
It still feels like I'm holding him down while the world breaks his bones.
"Listen, Pete." I pressed the ice pack against his forehead. His skin was so hot it felt like pressing ice against a stove burner. "Your body is fighting something right now. Don't fight back. Let it happen. Let it change you."
No answer. His eyes had rolled back. His body was arching off the floor, every muscle locked tight, and his bones were making sounds. Small pops and cracks, one after another, like someone slowly crushing a bag of chips.
Bone density increasing.
Knock knock knock.
"Leon?" May's voice. Outside the door. Trying to sound calm and not quite making it. "I left the medicine by the door. Are you sure we don't need the hospital?"
I took a breath. Forced my voice level.
"He's asleep, Mom. If you come in you'll wake him." I opened the door just enough to take the tray. Glass of water. Aspirin. Another ice pack. "I'll watch him. You and Dad go eat. He's gonna be fine."
Her footsteps hesitated on the other side of the door. I could hear her standing there, wanting to push past me, wanting to see for herself.
Then she walked away. Slow.
I closed the door and locked it again.
I didn't give Peter the aspirin. Regular medicine was useless to what was happening inside him right now. At best it would do nothing. At worst it would interfere with the rewrite.
I put the ice pack on his forehead. It lasted less than five minutes before the ice melted into a bag of warm water.
His body heat was absurd.
I sat in the chair by the bed. Didn't turn on the light. The only glow in the room came from the Omnitrix and the moonlight through the window, falling across Peter's sweat soaked face.
Time crawled.
The Analysis Module ran continuous updates.
[Muscle density: +300%.] [Neural reaction speed: +4000%.] [Dynamic visual processing: Evolving.]
Hour after hour. His body tearing itself apart and rebuilding. Stronger, faster, harder. Every cell being audited and upgraded or discarded.
I watched it all through green data. A front row seat to the birth of Spider-Man.
Then the Omnitrix did something I didn't expect.
The dial vibrated. Not the warning pulse I was used to. Something different. Faster. Almost excited.
[High-order arthropod genetic sample detected in proximity.] [Analyzing...] [Analysis complete.] [DNA database updated: Fusion Form unlocked. Spider Gene potential catalogued.]
The spider's DNA is so potent that the Omnitrix picked it up just from being near Peter.
I stared at the readout. Filed it away.
Then something caught my eye.
On the roof of the building across the street. A flash. Tiny. Red. Gone in less than a second.
That wasn't a car headlight. That was an optical lens. High precision observation equipment. The kind you use when you don't want the thing you're watching to know it's being watched.
I turned my head toward the window and stared into the dark.
Osborn.
Norman Osborn's people. Tracking specimen fifteen to its host. Following Peter home from the exhibition like a tagged animal.
You're watching him. You knew the spider would escape. You probably designed it that way.
I held the stare for five seconds. Then I pulled the curtain shut.
We'll deal with you later.
Peter groaned. I turned back.
He was thrashing in his sleep, face twisted, muttering fragments of words that didn't connect.
"Get away. Get. No. Get away from me."
His body shuddered. His left hand, hanging off the edge of the bed, clenched suddenly.
CRACK.
The sound split the quiet room like a gunshot.
I looked.
Peter's fingers had gone through the bedboard. Through it. His hand had punched straight into solid oak like it was wet cardboard, and now the wood was splintering outward from his grip in jagged cracks. Chips fell to the floor.
He'd done that unconscious. In his sleep. Without trying.
I stared at the hand buried in the wood.
Then I leaned back in the chair and let out a long, slow breath.
The most dangerous phase was over.
The scrawny, awkward, too smart, too kind kid who walked into that exhibition this morning was gone. He died tonight, on this bedroom floor, in the grip of a fever that rewrote him at the genetic level.
The thing waking up tomorrow would be something else entirely. Something that could stop a train with one hand and stick to walls and feel a bullet coming before it left the barrel.
"Goodnight, Spider-Man."
I settled deeper into the chair and watched the curtain where the red light had been.
The vigil went on.
Until dawn.
Plz THROW POWER STONES.