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The first time Peter Parker is bitten by a radioactive spider, he’s 14.
The school trip goes towards Oscorp. Peter and Ned walking side by side, best friends forever, smiling and laughing and being overly, inhumanly, nerdly excited over all the tech and cool experiments happening all around in them in the overly clean labs.
The first time Peter Parker is bitten… it’s an accident.
He doesn’t realize he’s been bitten before later. The red, itchy mark on his neck says everything he needs to know. The small bit marks where the fangs have gone through his skin. But it’s just a spider bit, right? Nothing dangerous in that.
Only that night, during dinner, Peter get’s sick. Really sick. He’s dinner - the lasagna that May has made and is more burned than most things she makes - raises up through his throat. His stomach convulsing, craping, sending extreme pain down his abdomen. He throws up on the kitchen floor once, and twice in the hallway on his way to the bathroom. A bathroom, which he won’t be leaving any time soon.
And while it just starts out with vomiting, the symptom of illness grows fast.
The headache betting throughout his head, making everything much brighter, and much louder than it should be. The sweating down his back, dripping in big drops towards the bathroom floor. Echoing in the small room every time another one drops. A fever for sure.
Only, he knows he has a fever, but he doesn’t feel hot. Instead, his body shakes, and every few minutes a chill is sent down his back that makes him flinch violently.
He falls asleep on the bathroom floor sometime during the night when the vomiting finally stops. Not because his stomach is empty, because it’s been that for a long time. But because his muscles are too tired to fight him anymore.
He falls asleep right there, Ben brushing his hair back and humming a small kind melody. Soft tones reaching Peter’s ears in the darkness. Bringing in a little light.
He wakes up, over and over with Ben by his side that night. His head in his uncle’s lap, a blanket draped over him. He wakes up, over and over again, gasping for air. Ben waiting patiently as he attempts to get a good puff from his inhaler, only it isn’t asthma, and the next time he wakes he still can’t breathe. The strain in his chest is painful.
He wonders for a moment if he needs to go a hospital. If he is going to die here, in a pile of his own vomit. All because of some stupid spider bite that he didn’t ask for.
Only… when the sun rises the next morning, he wakes up on the couch. Ben is no longer in the apartment; May is sitting in the kitchen writing on her laptop. And Peter? Peter isn’t sick anymore. No headache, to vomit, no sweat, or fewer or chills. He feels fine?
The first time Peter Parker is bitten by a radioactive Spider he’s 14. It’s an accident on a field trip with Midtown High School of Science and Technology, that leads him to Oscorp. Own by Norman Osborn himself…
The first time Peter Parker is bitten by a spider, he wakes up with superpowers.
***
The second time Peter is bitten by a radioactive spider, he’s 21 - 26 if he counts the years, he was dead. The second time Peter is bitten by a spider, it isn’t an accident.
He notices, some time after he starts on MIT, that his powers are disappearing. Or… at the very least weakening.
It starts out small. He’s a little extra tired in the morning when he rushes the class, he’s a little less hungry, and a little less sharp. His instincts, the spider once grows weaker. He barely dodges a bullet on patrol, that he usually wouldn’t have a problem with. He loses his grasp on his webbing and crashes three stories down towards the ground. He heals in a weak instead of two days…
Then he wakes up one morning, laying side by side with MJ under the covers, and they’re just gone. Completely and utterly gone.
He has Bruce run the numbers, he has Red Richard run the numbers, he has Karen, Friday and Edith run the numbers. He even runs the numbers himself. He analyses his blood over and over. And… and the mutation that made him Spider-man is just, gone…
The suit has changed a lot since he started being Spider-man though, so powers isn’t a problem. He wonders only shortly if he’ll be able to keep doing what he loves. What matters to him. He can.
Then the asthma attack comes…
Suddenly it isn’t something Peter can deal with, because Spider-man can’t be weak like that. Spider-man can’t get sick like that, when people out there depend on him.
So, he does the only thing he can do. He reaches out to Norman Osborn and his sun Harry Osborn. He reveals his identity to them, he tells them the problem. He tells them everything. Together they recreate the Spider that had bitten him so many years prior. Together they work for months on getting his powers back. They have a breakthrough.
They get a breakthrough; they find a solution. And along the way, Peter gains a friend.
Only… just days before they’ll go through with the testing of the new serum, the Green Goblin attacks, and Peter finds Norman Osborn behind the green skin. Harry slams the door in his face that night, blaming Peter for his father fall to the dark side. And Peter… Peter can’t say anything against it.
So, Peter goes through with the final experiment on his own.
He’s alone in his apartment that night, MJ working late and Ned out of town to visit some family. He doesn’t tell anyone of what he’s about to do. There’re no warnings for anyone.
He doubts they’d let him.
He holds the spider in his hand that night, watching it as it crawls over his skin. Hoping and waiting for the little creature to bite. And it does. It’s large fangs digs into the back of his hand, leaving big head holes that starts itching, and hurting, and swelling up within seconds.
And at first… everything seems fine.
He ends up in the bathroom much the same way as he’d done the first time around. There’s no Ben and no May to sooth over him as he throws up, or as he losses his ability to breath. Nobody who comes with pain killers for his hurting head, or water when he get’s dehydrated.
There’s nobody’s soft lap for Peter to rest on, and no blankets covering he’s freezing body.
He falls asleep alone, and he wakes up alone. Fully expecting the illness to have gone away, and his powers to have returned. Only… that doesn’t happen.
He’s still sick.
Sicker, really.
Because from his nose the blood runs down his face, dropping down onto the bathroom floor. Staining the white tiles crimson red. Pain filling his head as he pushes himself over the toilet bowl, his head spinning dizziness making his falter and shake. As he resumes the throwing up that he thought had stopped earlier that night.
He can feel the metallic taste of iron in the back of his mouth, and as his stomach empties into the bowl, red splatter into the water too. Red, dark, blood…
The bit on his hand is surrounded by slowly dying, black tissues. Purple strokes over his hands… up his arms, towards his chest.
Peter tumbles onto the floor, unable to get back up as darkness overtakes his vison.
He’s a scientist… not stupid.
He knows the signs of radiation poisoning…
He knows he won’t live through it.
So that last thing he does, is wonder about who might find him.
He hopes MJ won’t be the first… he hopes… he hopes they’ll forgive him.
He hopes they’ll forgive Spider-man.
Peter falls asleep.