Chapter Text
Peter is squinting at the brightly lit phone screen being held only a few inches from his face. The dark of the room makes the device look like a flash bomb when it lights up, and his eyes water trying to take in the image in front of him.
The time in the corner reads 3:54am.
Miles’ name is at the forefront—that much Peter can tell—but it doesn’t look like the normal format of the call screen.
After a little more dead staring, Peter realizes with dawning exasperation that this is a video call.
Miles is horrible at video calls.
Now, it’s not like Peter is so inept with modern social media that he can’t work one. He got the hang of it like, two years ago!
The first time he used the function was when MJ video called him trying to show him some dresses she’d seen at the mall. Peter ended up hanging up on her by accident (it wasn't his fault!) and didn’t know how to call her back on video. He didn’t have to, thankfully, because she called him (normally) about a minute later from the dressing rooms, the thin stalls doing nothing to muffle her angry voice from the rest of the store, laying into him before he even got a chance to speak.
After he’d learned from her, Aunt May had found out and asked Peter to teach her how to use it so that she could ‘see her nephew even when he’s ghosting her’, and she’d abused that function up until her app updated and she could no longer figure it out. In those few months Peter would get random video calls from her in antique shops and thrift stores so that she could show him something she thought cool or nice, and when at home she would prop up her phone and they’d have hours long conversations with each other face to face.
But Miles?
God, it’s hopeless with him. The boy has zero awareness of the phone’s camera when he’s speaking, leaving Peter feeling dizzy and lost as he tries to explain something that Peter can’t see on the screen.
And it seems like the boy only videocalls when he’s in an energetic mood, meaning he’ll get distracted by every little thing and constantly switch between the front and back camera. He finds great pleasure in sharing with Peter every single thought that steps foot in his mind, making it rare for him to finish a sentence, which normally wouldn't be a problem if it weren't for the other factors.
And it’s because of that energetic mood that he's probably videocalling as a spontaneous, middle of the night decision.
Taking a deep breath and not at all prepared for what might appear, Peter swipes the green button and answers. Because what if it’s something important? No matter how much he just wants to go back to sleep, he could never just ignore the kid like that.
Miles’ face immediately takes up the entire screen, and it’s distorted by the dimly lit shadows of the room.
“Pete, I am freaking out man,” Miles rushes out. His voice is hushed, but not actually quiet, making it harder to understand.
Peter groans and attempts to sit up, rubbing at his eyes. “What is it, Miles?” He asks in a hoarse voice.
The camera does somersaults and comes in direct view of the overhead light for a split second, painfully flashbombing Peter, then faces the ceiling. He sees the pretty chandelier that he knows is in Miles’ dining area.
Why is he in the kitchen at 4am?
“I’m, like. I can taste the strawberry shortcake. The strawberries, the flour, the butter, everything.”
Peter is so, so tired. His eyes are becoming heavier by the second. His chest aches with the desire for proper rest. “Mmm… what do you mean?”
There’s a loud shuffling sound, and Peter winces, pulling the phone from his face at the scratchy interference.
“I’m making strawberry shortcake for the anniversary of my mom’s decision to run for councilwoman.”
…Huh?
“Miles… Wha— Why? Why are you calling me? Why are you telling me this?”
“Because—” The phone switches back to Miles’ face. He looks horribly distressed—eyebrows knitted and mouth downturned. Peter focuses a bit harder at that. “Because I got some on my hand, some of the frosting, and like. I tasted it. Like, my finger tasted it and it tasted good.”
Peter blinks.
He blinks again, this time slower.
Fuuuck. There goes the hope of this just being a quick question.
What the hell even… Peter just wants to sleep.
He hasn’t slept in three days. Two all nighters in a row, every minute spent endlessly working. He only just got to sleep two hours ago—and only because he’d begun to see hallucinations in the corners of his vision, started getting these weird, foggy, fake spidey-sense alerts on patrol. He went home after a pigeon shapeshifted into a cat and started dancing on two legs, figuring that it'd be dangerous to stay awake any longer.
Not that Miles knows any of this, of course. Right, he doesn’t know how much Peter needs this sleep. He’s not doing this on purpose.
“Miles, I want to help you, I really do, but I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying… and I… I just really can’t right now, you know? ‘Cause work, and… sleep…”
Theres a silence on the phone, and Peter focuses back on the picture, despite his eyes trying to do everything but. Miles is looking at the camera with a sad look on his face, even more distraught than before.
“Oh... I get it. Sorry for disrupting you, Peter.” The boy lets out a quiet sigh and looks away, blinking heavily.
Peter stares at it for a second longer before scooting up against the wall, bringing the phone to eye level and rubbing at his eyes, trying to wipe the drowsiness away and drag his attention back to the forefront.
“No, no, it’s okay. Tell me what’s going on. Why are you upset?” Peter asks, his throat feeling like dust and gravel.
Damn, a water would be great right about now.
Miles drops the act immediately, going back to his energetic self and walking over under the kitchen light. “I’ll show you!”
Peter just huffs a weary laugh. That little brat, using his powers for evil.
The phone switches to the back camera—and onto an absolute mess of a kitchen counter. There’s flour everywhere, concentrated onto a piece of parchment paper that obviously didn’t help contain the spill at all, and there are various bowls piled around. Miles’ hand goes to swipe a finger across the biggest one and comes to the camera with a glob of white tacked onto it.
“Look…” he whispers conspiratorially.
Peter looks. “Mhm…”
“Do you see?” Miles asks insistently.
“I see your finger.”
“And?”
“And… the frosting? Is that frosting?” Why is Miles playing these games with him? What does he want from Peter? “Do you want me to tell you what I think it looks like to me?”
Miles seems to ponder this for a second, as if he hadn’t thought about it. Then, unsurely, “Yes…?”
“It looks like you have a piece of frosting on your finger.”
Miles doesn’t say anything—doesn’t move the camera other than its perpetual shakiness by his unsteady hand.
“I can taste it,” he repeats.
“What do you mean, Miles? Did you eat some of it?”
“No. I mean I can taste it with my fingertips.”
Instead of answering this time, Peter thinks for a moment.
Hm… “Is it the same for your entire hand? What about your palms?”
There’s a loud thud—ow, his ears—on the other line as Miles sets the phone down on the counter, the screen growing dark.
“Um, yeah…” he replies hesitantly.
“Okay. Now can you tell me what it feels like? Or, um—tastes like?”
Peter has a theory, which is probably more than likely going to be the case here.
Unless Miles is on some kind of a hallucinogenic trip, which would be a different problem entirely—and one Peter isn’t going to think about right now.
There’s a shaky inhale on the other end, and there’s a brief moment of silence before the kid speaks up again. “It’s… sweet? And it burns a little, maybe because of the salt. And the butter. It’s gross and tastes bad.”
“Thought you said it was good?”
Miles sounds indignant. “Well—it is! But it’s all separate, only one part tastes good, and the rest tastes weird and bad and chemical–ly and––”
“What did you mean when you said it burns? Does it hurt?”
“I–” Miles starts, before seeming to remember he was on video call and switching to the front camera, “It doesn’t hurt. It burns like how sugar and salt burns.”
Peter scrunches his face in confusion. “What?”
“You know! Like, some sugar tastes hot, like how cinnamon is hot. And sometimes it burns in the back of your throat, and salt can make it burn more.”
“No, I don’t know. Are you allergic?” This sounds pretty concerning. Peter remembers this one girl in his high school freshman class who said she didn’t like bananas because of the way it ‘scratched her throat’ and made her lips ‘feel tingly and swollen’.
“No! You know, Peter!” Miles says insistently, apparently offended by Peter’s lack of understanding. “And the butter tastes sick. I hate when you can taste butter in something. Now it’s separate, and the sugar and salt makes it warm and gross.”
Oh, dear. Maybe it’s not what Peter thought it was after all.
“I’m sorry, but you’ve been feeling this way—about salt and sugar—since…before, all this?”
“Yeah, I—” Miles cuts himself off to look at the screen intensely. “What’s that on your wall?”
Oh—Peter hasn’t even noticed his image showing on the bottom right corner. He’s only being lit up by the dim light from his window and his phone screen. The wall is barely even distinguishable in the background of the picture.
“What are you talking about?”
“There’s a thing behind you—on your wall.”
“No, there isn’t. Stop it.” Peter resists the urge to look behind him, tensing ever so slightly. He’s not afraid of the dark, that’d be stupid.
“I’m not playing, look!”
“No.” Peter can see that there’s nothing on the screen—His spider-sense would’ve told him if something was there! But the sudden miniscule shift in tone has his exhausted brain dump a fresh bout a paranoia over him, and the back of his neck starts prickling for no good reason.
Miles squints in concentration and brings the phone all the way up to his face, then brings it back abruptly and continues on as if nothing happened. Promptly distracted, then back to focus a second later. Typical. “Anyways, butter has always tasted bad to me, and salt and sugar only taste good when it’s hot, because artificial sweeteners aren’t hot, they’re just cold and chemical-ly, and that’s why I like salt chocolate and salted caramel, I don’t like shortcakes because there’s no salt in them and it makes the sugar tastes colder.”
…Oh. Okay. This is probably just a Miles issue, then. Nothing to worry about there.
Peter hums affirmatively. “That’s a, um… really interesting way to think about things, Miles. It’s very creative,” Peter says in a way that he hopes doesn’t come off as sarcastic. He isn’t sure if he succeeds, because the boy adverts his gaze for a moment and his face falls.
“Yeah,” he mumbles dejectedly. But before Peter can even interpret that, he’s perking up again and staring at the screen with his previous expression of worry. “Am I going crazy?”
“No, you’re not. I…” Peter thinks about the best way to put it. “Here, go wash your hands and sit down somewhere. Or—wait, are you done baking?”
Miles looks behind him at the counter. “No…”
“Go finish, first. Then I’ll tell you.”
Miles whips his head back around. “Wait, you know what this is? Like, actually?” he exclaims with no small amount of relief in his voice. “I thought I was dying, dude—I half thought I was calling you to tell you to come collect my body before my mom wakes up. Really, I thought you were going to tell me to drop everything and call 911... wait, it’s not a medical emergency, right?”
Peter frowns. “No, it’s not. There’s no need to worry about it right now, just put the phone down and finish what you were doing.”
Miles mumbles some things in exasperation before laying the phone down with another loud thud—ow—and walking away. Peter can only hear the faint sound of the water running, but otherwise Miles really is being quiet so as to not disturb his mom.
Peter doesn’t like when Miles talks about dying. He’d said it so casually, too, and Peter really can’t tell if he was joking or not. He swears, the youth’s humor today is too… different. Well, it was like that when he was a kid too, but it's somehow gotten even worse since then.
Had he really been that panicked? Had he really been so concerned that he thought he was dying—and even more, decided to call Peter of all people? What if he hadn’t answered? What if Peter had actually hung up on him like he kind of wanted to?
If Miles ever felt like he was in immediate danger, Peter didn’t want him to spend his last few moments of consciousness attempting to call him. Well, he kind of did, but Peter’s too unreliable! What if he wouldn’t be able to save Miles like the boy thought he could?
Shit, why had Peter been so dismissive of him at first? Of course Miles was serious, why wouldn’t he be? What kind of mentor just disregards—-
“Peter!”
Peter heard Miles’ whisper shout before he even turned up on the screen. The boy leans over the phone instead of picking it up, once again casting the shadows, the poor video quality making him look like something from The Blair Witch Project. “Can’t you just tell me while I’m doing this? I can listen while you talk!”
“No, your gift for your mom is the priority right now. If you get distracted during this conversation then you might not want to finish afterwards,” he explains calmly. And he speaks from experience. Too many times has he started a project on an adrenaline induced whim, only to lose it after becoming distracted by something menial.
He can hear Miles grumble as he walks away. “But I’ll be listening! Ugghhhhh—”
Peter huffs a laugh at his antics.
While he waits, Peter tries to check his notifications. He’s a little hesitant to click the home button, afraid that it’ll disconnect the call, but is relieved when it just minimizes in the bottom left corner. He checks the news, his emails, his messages.
Nothing but silence on all ends.
After only a few more minutes, Miles is back. He picks the phone up and balances it against something on the table, sitting in the chair readily and propping his chin in his palms.
“I put it in the oven—can we talk now?” he asks impatiently.
“Hmm… How long do you have until it’s done?”
“Uh… ten minutes?” Miles answers, his voice cutting out at the end as he looks over his shoulder towards the oven. “Yeah, ten.”
“Alright then,” Peter says, straightening from how he’d started to sink back into the covers. He needs to be awake for this. “Tell me, were you feeling anything before this? Like in the days prior?”
Miles hesitates, frowning. “...Yeah. My hands were tingly and stuff, and they kinda kept spasming throughout the day. Really sensitive, too.”
Miles looks away—out of guilt, probably. Peter sighs and tries to school his expression.
“And how long has this been happening?”
Miles is even more hesitant to answer now. “Umm… like, give or take a week or so? Probably?” he mumbles away from the mic.
“Mhm. Try again, but this time about ninety-nine percent more specific.”
Miles groans in response, as if Peter is the weird one for questioning him. “It was small at first! It only started getting really bad around three days ago, but before that it was pretty manageable—”
“When did it start?”
“I don’t know—”
“When, Miles?”
“Like—I don’t—ugh! Last last Friday!”
The Friday two weeks prior. 13 days ago. Okay. “And how bad was ‘pretty bad’?” Peter asks.
“...I couldn’t hold my pencil at school yesterday. My nerves felt like they were on fire, and when I touched something it felt like millions of tiny explosions. My hand kept cramping up because of it.” The boy absentmindedly traces designs into the table, brows furrowed as if annoyed. “It was really overstimulating,” he mumbles finally.
Peter wants to be mad that Miles didn't tell him sooner, but mostly he's just worried. And disappointed in himself because Miles felt like he couldn't come to him sooner.
Even still, everything that Miles has said tracks with what he’d gone through at his age, so he feels confident that the worst of experiences is over for him.
“Thank you for telling me,” Peter says quietly.
Miles just hums in response.
He continues, “Why didn't you let me know sooner? It had to have been affecting you on patrols, right? That could’ve been dangerous.” And how hadn’t Peter noticed? Was he really that unconcerned about his protege’s health?
Miles gives a noncommittal shrug, and Peter thinks he’s just going to leave it at that. He seems determined to make this as difficult as possible.
Thankfully, after maybe a whole minute of silence, he says quietly, “I didn't know if it was something I needed to tell you or not. I thought it would go away on its own.”
…Alright. Peter can work with that. “I can relate to that last part. After years and years of having a superhuman healing factor, I just kinda assume that my body is always fine on its own. And I still believe that, even as I’m entering the early stages of arthritis at the ripe age of twenty-four.”
Miles blinks, considering. Then, he looks back at the screen in suspicion. “...Arthritis? Really?”
Peter huffs a dry laugh. “Yup. Chronic pain in alot of places—mostly my poor back—but nerve damage too. All from injuries that I never took care of properly when I got them. Remember right after that final battle with the Sinister Six? I never went to a hospital after you guys helped me at FEAST. Fourteen broken bones. I was lucky I even had MJ to stitch that nasty exit wound on my back, otherwise I would've been—”
“I’m sorry, exit wound? Were you impaled? Shot? When?” Miles cuts him off to question in horror.
Oops. He forgot Miles didn't know about that.
Peter waves him off, “Don’t worry about it—point is, I have mild to severe nerve damage right there that’s cost me tons in battle. Missed swings, missed hits, missed dodges, lots of things that wouldn’t’ve happened had I gotten the proper help back then.”
Miles gapes. However, just as he’s about to say something the oven goes off with a very, very loud beep. The sound is amplified over the phone because of the high frequency and Peter has to distance himself from the speaker—ow—but Miles has a much greater reaction, and is vaulting out of the chair in an instant. Peter can ever so slightly hear him muttering “Shit, shit, shit, be quiet shut up shut up—” as he rushes to turn it off.
He smiles in tired amusement.
He hopes that Miles takes him seriously, but he also doesn't want to make that happen by just needlessly scaring him. He wants Miles to want to tell him, not just because he’s more afraid of what would happen if he didn’t.
After a few more moments of silence, Miles is back and scooping the phone up once more. Peter catches a glimpse of several circular pans in the background.
“Pete! I’m going to go do this really quick and then I’m gonna come back, okay? Don’t go anywhere.”
Peter laughs at that—the fact that Miles felt he needed to tell him to stay put. Where is he gonna go?
Peter has since put his phone down beside him, not seeing the point in having his face on screen the entire time. He’s about to reply, but Miles doesn’t seem to appreciate his brief absence from view.
“Peter, come back! I literally just said to not go anywhere! Say ok if you understand,” he whisper yells in reprimand.
Peter can’t hold back a snort at the urgency in the boy’s tone. Nevertheless, he picks the phone back up. “Okay. I understand, and I won't leave. Go ahead and finish.”
Without another word, Miles turns his camera off and drops the phone onto the table—ow.
And, uh, hypocrite much? What was the point in grilling Peter about the camera if he just turned his off? Tsk. Double standards have really gotten out of control these days. At least it'll help him stave off the weight trying to force him into laying back down.