Chapter Text
Peter felt sick. He didn’t know if he was hungry or nauseous or nauseous because he was hungry or if it was just his every day autism-fueled anxiety. He wondered if he should go to the nurse, he felt so warm and he thought he might’ve even been sweating.
The bell rang and Peter wanted to scream and puke at the same time- why was it so loud ? And why was it going off anyway, hadn’t class just started?
Visibly shaking, Peter stood and pushed his chair in, not realizing how heavily he was leaning on it until it made that awful screeching sound on the tile. He winced and clenched his hands around the plastic until the skin crawling feeling faded. It really wasn’t his week, was it?
Usually when he was having a bad day- sensory, anxious, focus, or otherwise -Peter would skip lunch and find a calm space in the library or the lab. He would try and trick his mind into being comforted by the routine of an experiment while doing something that both relaxed and stimulated his brain. Today, though, Peter didn’t think even that would help.
The problem was he didn’t know what was wrong. Well, he had some probable guesses, his leading thought being that he must be losing his mind. How else would he have thought he jumped onto the ceiling and stuck there? Either he was crazy or his warm skin was a symptom of some really bad fever.
Peter didn’t even know how he got down from the ceiling (really, how on earth did he even get up there!). One minute he was plastered on his ceiling like one of those sticky hands, and the next he was laying on his back on his bed.
And that wasn’t even the only mystery of the day.
Everything seemed to break. He had snapped a shoelace and broken three pencils so far, not to mention all the holes he tore through his papers when writing what must’ve been too hard. But that’s how he always wrote, wasn’t it?
And then there was the issue of his senses. Of course he had always dealt with sensory issues, but this was like an overload on steroids. It wasn’t just that everything was loud, it was like it was amplified, made clearer and crisper and louder. Normally, it was just loud . Voices sounded like screams and laughing hurt his ears, the sound of a pencil scratching was like nails across a chalkboard and made his skin prickle painfully.
But this was different. He didn’t feel so much like he was drowning in painful noise but as if he had been given magical hearing aids or something. He could hear the hinges of the locker squeaking down the hall and winced as it slammed against the metal, the crack as a girl’s phone slipped out of her hand and down the steps, the whisper of turning pages inside the open classroom.
Peter didn’t know if this was better or worse than before, it still made his head ache and it still hurt to hear, but at least it wasn’t pure noise. He could pinpoint exactly where each noise came from, his head twisting and turning to try and see everything in the hallway.
And it wasn’t just his hearing that seemed to get an ‘upgrade’ but every other sense, too.
His vision was sharper than he’d ever remembered it being before, the slight blur that usually shadowed letters was gone and Peter stared in wonder as he read everything on the message board from ten feet away.
Peter gasped, jumping as someone brushed his shoulder. But when he looked, he saw they were still an inch away. But it had felt real, the same pressure and heat that came with real physical contact.
What was going on?
Peter was utterly exhausted by the time the day ended. Physically, mentally, and emotionally drained. His brain hurt from being around so many people but more so it hurt from trying to function while being so overwhelmed.
After he skipped lunch, Peter had had gym class. He wasn’t surprised that he was picked last for the team, but shocked everyone including himself by how well he had done. He had made it to the 35th lap in their warm ups, and only stopped because he didn’t understand how he was able to keep going. Even after the set of push ups, sit ups, and two dozen jumping jacks they did, Peter was able to do better than he ever had in basketball (although his actual skill in the sport still was bad).
He had spent his last two classes going over everything that had happened to him in the last few days, trying to come up with anything that may have caused his new abilities. The problem was that Peter liked to keep to a routine, and routines meant that hardly anything was out of the ordinary. And that was how he liked it, that was why he kept his routines.
The only day in the past three weeks that Peter could think of that he hadn’t pre-planned was the field trip yesterday, which when he thought about it made a lot of sense. Most of the day had been kind of a painful blur before he fell asleep, something he was too exhausted to realize was weird for him.
Peter tried to push through the fog and remember if anything important had happened, anything strange. He was beginning to think it must have been radiation on the floor where he fell when suddenly his wrist hurt. Peter wanted to hit himself, he was so stupid . All day he had been scratching at his wrist and he hadn’t even bothered to look down at it, used to his fiddling, scratching hands.
There were two puncture wounds where the spider had bitten him, small specks that sat raised on his veins, the surrounding skin a bright pink. A glowing spider bit him, and Peter had completely forgotten. How aunt May could ever call him smart was behind him.