Chapter Text
Let the record show that Peter Parker, at 15 years of age, wakes up in a hospital today.
He blinks his eyes open with a calm slowness. With the motion, his vision clear to rest upon the first thing since his consciousness. Hospital equipment.
Turning his head to the side, he sees a thin layer of dust on the dull gray plastic side table. The harsh sunlight coming through the window illuminates the imperfection clearly. Resting on the table is a vase of assorted flowers: Roses, tulips, and hydrangeas. Which would have been a beautiful sight to see...if they weren’t brown and wilted.
He tilts his head, curious at the sight. He then adjusts his body to his side to lean in and look at them closer when he feels a sudden, sharp pain in his side. He lets out a small groan of pain and clutches his hand to the spot on his stomach right below his ribs. And his head, oh god, his throbbing pounding head, feels like someone hit him over and over with a hammer. Turning his attention to his stomach, he lifts the pale blue hospital gown. He lets his eyes rest upon a large, white, gauzy bandage that isn’t completely white. Smack dab in the middle is a large conglomeration of muted crimson, burgundy, and brown.
He takes in a sharp breath.
What happened to me? Where am I?
Letting himself fixate on that question for only a few moments, his racing brain makes a decision. Adjusting his body to a sitting position, Peter gets up and walks towards the door. Every step sends a jolt of a dull pain from his toes to his head. His eyes drift up to see a gurney in front of the door. Peter places a curious stare at the gurney.
What is a gurney doing there?
He moves the gurney to the side with a soft grunt. With nothing in his way, he rests his pale hand on the door’s cold metal handle, and the hairs on his arms stand straight up. But he can’t stay in this dusty old room forever, right?
So, he opens the door.
He’s hit with the stench of anesthesia and death. Unfortunately, he knows what death smells like. An odor 15-year-old boys should not be familiar with. He starts to step out the door when unaware, he trips over his first body.
He stares down at the body for an inordinate amount of time. The body is a combination of lifeless gray and pale yellow. Patches of skin are open on the body, overflowing with dried pus and crusted over blood. He stares at the body for a minute, and then takes another step forward, this time stepping over the body. He turns his head to the left, and glances down the expanse of the hallway, and lets out a slight gasp.
There’s not only one body. There have to be 30 or 40 bodies laying there.
He takes several steps forward, feeling like he’s walking through sticky tar. The bodies all look the same. He wanders more throughout the hallway in this slow, dream-like state. Until he glances upon one particularly gruesome body.
Or rather, half of a body.
Without warning, he feels the dormant sickness in his stomach rise to his throat. Peter, panicked, runs to the nearest open room. He finds a toilet and places both hands upon the seat to brace himself as he vomits out watery bile. He grips the sides of the toilet hard, and grimaces, panting. He lifts himself to the mirror to get a good look at his face.
Under his brown eyes, are sagging, purple-tinged bags. His face is pale and thin. His cheekbones and jaw protruding out, much more prominent than they usually are. He glares at himself, frowning. He knows he hasn’t seen himself in a while, but he begins to think that this is not what he normally looks like. No one should look like this, he thinks.
He takes a paper towel to wipe off the vomit dripping down his face. The texture feels like sandpaper as he drags it across his chin. He crumples up his paper towel into a ball, looks at it for a second. As if he was playing basketball, shoots it into the garbage can.
“He shoots, he scores”, he mumbles to himself, with the hint of a tired grin on his face.
Parkers are nothing if they’re not positive.
He drags his gaze away from the garbage can and down to the moldy grout between the pale blue tiles. He takes this moment to recompose himself, and quite literally, shake off the horrors he gazed upon.
He then turns around to walk out of this foreign hospital room, and back down the hallway of bodies.
God, that’s a sentence in his head now.
He tries to keep his gaze forward, but his eyes keep betraying him. They give him blurry glimpses of the corpses littering the hallway.
Damn you, peripheral vision.
His legs take him to the end of the hallway, where he pauses, but his peripheral vision doesn’t betray him this time. Instead, it shows him a way out. He turns his gaze to a set of heavy gray doors...that is bolted with a rusty chain and lock.
From the inside? Why?
He narrows his eyes at the lock like it’s a problem to solve. Before what happened to him, well...happened, he would have spent time attempting endless combinations until acquiring the desired result. But now...it’s just physics. Between a rusty lock, and a 15-year-old mutant. He stares at the lock for a few seconds, then takes a deep breath. With a quick shake of the head, he readies himself for what he’s about to do.
He places both of his hands, firm around the lock. Then, he stretches himself out until he’s looking like half of the letter V. He then uses that momentum to place his bare feet on the door. He takes a deep breath and gives a giant tug with all his strength. Like he thought it would, the lock snaps, and Peter flies backward and lands harshly on his back. He lies on his back for a moment, breathing heavily, and letting his eyes rest to softly focus on the flickering lights above him.
“Well that worked out surprisingly well,” he mumbles to himself.
He then lifts himself to a seated position, then uses his hands to push himself up gracefully from the floor.
Tentatively, he walks towards the imposing doors. The only thing separating him from the great big city he calls home. After stopping a moment, he huffs out a breath, and pushes the doors open to see…
Bodies.
Even more bodies than the hospital hallways.
Some sprawled out on top of each other, some isolated in corners of their own. Some curled up on their sides, a callback to the fetal positions they lay in before life on earth. Some lay on their backs, arms out by their sides, with eyes grey and glazed over, as if gazing at the sun for warmth in one final act of personhood.
Peter couldn’t help but whimper at the sight. He drops to his knees in terror, letting the upper half of his body go limp, folding over himself in disbelief.
This can’t be happening. But what is this? Where has he been? When did this happen?
He picks himself up again and walks in a daze for an indeterminate amount of time.
Surely, this all must be a dream.
Yes, whatever happened to him at the hospital is making him see things that aren’t there. But the sparse hairs standing straight up on his gossamer-thin arms are telling him otherwise. No, this is entirely too real.
He continues to walk down the gray sidewalk of the city he has always called home until he turns into a fenced-in backlot. After giving it a hard look, it seems to be the parking lot to the back of a tall building.
Seeing no bodies in this area, Peter gives a hard tug at the lock and lets himself through.
There are no doors on the side he is currently on, so he ventures to turn the corner to the other side of the building. If he could just find a door in this strangely isolated building, it would lead him to shelter. And shelter would give him a place to sort out this goddamn mess he’s found himself in. But he stops cold in his tracks when Peter lets his eyes rest upon the body of a small little girl.
Her gray, frail body is speckled with bursts of broken blood vessels of all colors, blue, purple, pale yellow...even black. The pink gingham dress she wears is smattered in dirt and blood. Her small fingernails have a thick coat of grime over them, but her eyes...well, they’re alive. She moans a guttural sound, one that should never be escaping a little girl’s throat. But Peter, he could only fixate on the fact that oh my god, it’s a real live person, not a corpse. So, his feet take over before his brain could, and take him to the little girl.
“Hey, hey, hey it’s okay, do you need help?”
He crouches down and leans forward to get a better look at her.
But during that split second of silence, the hairs on his arms stand straight up, and before his brain could catch up with his body, he scrambles backward at the same time the little girl on her stomach shoots her arm forward to grab his foot. As he backs away in terror, Peter realizes her eyes aren’t quite right anymore. They shine with something Peter knows all too well.
Hunger.
A cry of terror escapes his throat as he attempts to scurry away backward. The girl lets out more moans, increasingly urgent, as she drags herself towards him steadily. Peter backs away, still seated while using his hands and feet for momentum. Until he came to a stomach-sinking realization.
His back ran straight into the rusty chain-link fence that surrounded the building.
Before he could even come up with another thought, such as climbing to perch himself on top of the fence, another person appeared.
Now, this happened all too quickly. This man moved in a way that was nothing like the unusual girl as he rounded the corner. His movements were fluid and swift as he made his way towards the two of them.
Before Peter could even comprehend the situation, the man let out a gruff grunt as he effortlessly picked the girl up by the neck, and snapped her neck with a single…
metal hand?
The girl’s head went limp. Peter watched the hunger from her eyes fade as the man dropped her to the ground with a thud.
Now after all that, he couldn’t help it. Frozen in place with his body plastered against the fence, Peter let out a little squeak of disbelief.
The man’s piercing eyes shot to Peter. This man’s eyes weren’t filled with hunger. The heavily lidded ice blue eyes contained an infinite amount of unadulterated rage.
The man took heavy strides over to Peter and before Peter could even react, a hand enclosed around his throat, lifting him off the ground.
“Did it touch you?” He growled.
“What?” He managed to squeak out.
The man just rolled his eyes.
“Are you deaf? I said, did it touch you, bite you, scratch you, anywhere?”
“No, no, no, I got away before she could, I swear,” Peter uttered out.
The man’s eyes softened by a slight fraction and flexed his flesh hand to release Peter from his iron grip.
Peter sputtered out a gravelly cough, placing his hands on his knees with his back still against the fence, trying to regain oxygen again.
The man gave him a calculating stare, looking him up and down.
“Huh. I guess you’re one of the lucky few. You better come with me then.”
The man started walking away, and Peter stared at him, unable to move. The man turned towards Peter, stopping in his tracks.
“You really want that to happen again? Get your ass over here, last time offer,” he drawled, fixating Peter with a bored glare.
Peter then, magically, removed himself from the fence and held eye contact with the man until he inclined his head towards him softly in agreement.
The man gave him a terse nod and then moved forward with languid, effortless strides.
And as the hairs on his arms seemed to rest flat, he let himself take a deep breath, letting his feet take him the only direction they’ve ever known.
Onward.