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Peter spends most of the day sleeping while MJ is at work. It’s unusual, but not entirely unexpected: he does patrol as Spider-Man almost every night, and in between preparing for job interviews and helping to get F.E.A.S.T. back on its feet, he’s had a lot on his plate recently. So when he wakes up to his phone alarm at five in the evening, hot and sticky with sweat, head feeling like his brain has been replaced by a helium balloon, he’s not particularly worried. All he needs is a shower, some coffee, and he’ll be good to go.
The shower does help to clear the cobwebs, but the coffee settles like sludge in the pit of his stomach, threatening, in waves, to make an appearance out of his convulsing throat. There’s a vise closing around his head, he’s shivering even in costume, and the world’s spinning enough that he falls back on his bed trying to tug on his boots.
Wow, he must really be tired.
Still, much like last-minute term papers and anniversary gifts, crime doesn’t care for his exhaustion or rambling emails begging for an extension, so he pulls his mask on and swings out the window.
For the first couple of hours, it isn’t even so bad: he even thwarts a couple of muggings while feeling like his stomach is lurching out of his mouth with every steep swing. He’s done more with worse, and he even manages to vomit on one of the muggers, so that’s definitely a plus, right?
It isn’t until he starts noticing something following him out of the corner of his eye that he thinks something might be really, really wrong.
It’s white, and it doesn’t swing or fly so much as it flits—and every time Peter tries to get a good look at what it is, it disappears. There’s a slow building unease in his gut that’s nothing like the hair-raising panic alarms of his Spidey Sense. Well. It’s not altogether strange that his Sense has gone offline, particularly given how wiped he is, but still—
There’s a buzzing in his ear, and Peter jumps three feet before he realises it’s MJ calling him.
“Hey,” MJ says when he answers. “I thought you’d still be here.”
“Why would I?” Peter thinks if he remains absolutely still, he can trick whatever’s following him into moving out of his peripheral vision. He crouches on the nearest roof, muscles coiled, waiting.
“After what happened last night? And how shitty you felt this morning?”
Peter wipes his brow; it’s weirdly muggy tonight for the middle of November. “When has that ever stopped me from going out on patrol?”
“Peter, you’re sick—”
He blinks. Sure, he’s been stabbed, shot, thrown, skewered, even chewed on, but one thing he can reliably say he hasn’t been since… well, being bitten, is sick. He remembers—abstractly, intellectually—cycling through a parade of colds and fevers through the year as a kid, but that’s all behind him. He’s fucking Spider-Man, and Spider-Man doesn’t catch the flu. That’s just a fact. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Never felt better. Bring on the Sinister Six, is what I’m saying. Or the Slightly Evil Seven. Or even the Acrimonious Eight. Wait, shit, that’s not an alliteration—”
“I’m being serious, Pete.”
“Well, I’m serious too,” he snaps back, suddenly angry. He can’t believe he’s wasting time like this—he hasn’t spotted the thing that’s been following him for over five minutes. “I need to go. See you later.”
“At least tell me where you are—” MJ says, but he cuts the call before she can finish. His body is aching with how tightly he’s holding himself, watching, waiting, but there’s no sign of whatever it is. The unease hasn’t gone though, and worse—he’s sure he’s being watched. Maybe even being listened to—what if the reason he can’t see it is because it’s gone after MJ instead? God he’s so stupid—
He takes off swinging to the next building, but it undulates before his very eyes, windows floating like stars on a black wave. For a long moment, he hangs suspended at the apex of a long, graceful arc, then he’s plummeting, the cold air tearing through his suit. He reaches desperately, pressing the release on his webshooters over and over again, but all that comes out is dust, glittering weirdly as he falls.
Peter lands at last on the roof of a car that crumples on impact, and rolls to the ground, wheezing, white-hot agony seizing every muscle. He stays there for a long minute-hour-day, struggling to draw breath. More white things flit around him now, teasing, mocking.
Worse, MJ’s voice floats to him on the wind, scared, desolate: Peter, please—
He struggles to his feet, spitting blood, feeling his bones shift sickeningly beneath his skin. Whatever it is, it’s already got MJ, and it doesn’t matter if it feels he’s leaking his organs out through a hole in his chest (blood foaming at his mouth, popping like bubbles), he cannot add her to the long, long list of people that he’s failed—
A menacing finger lands in front of him, all black and red with a white gash of a mouth spitting teeth and venom, and Peter snarls even as he stumbles. It reaches out to him, arms twisting like tentacles, and speaks: “Pete, please. You look—god. It’s Miles, Pete, you gotta let me help you—”
Peter twists, trying to get past this creature; he doesn’t have the time!
It catches him anyway, holding his body gingerly to its chest, still talking: “Whatever you exposed yourself to yesterday? It’s fucked you up; you saved the city, Pete, but you gotta let us save you—”
Peter drives his elbow into the creature; it lets go with an oof! but the reprieve is short-lived. It grabs him again when he tries to stagger away; all Peter can hear over the roaring in his ears and the distant whirr of an approaching helicopter is the creature saying I won’t let you fall even as he screams and screams and screams.