Chapter Text
In typical Parker fashion, Peter discovered the mutation flaw like discovering the front fender of a runaway semi.
And, okay, in hindsight letting Ned talk him into testing the elasticity of the new web formula under cold conditions by way of the Floor 12 Chick-fil-a walk-in freezer maybe wasn’t the best way to approach the Scientific Method. But Mr. Stark had commandeered the whole floor of the private lab for “potentially fatal nano nonsense” and pushed both boys into the elevator with a firm “Go chase girls or cars or whatever it is you young bucks do to keep entertained and out of my firing range for the afternoon.”
They made it thirty minutes into Treasure Planet before Peter went “Hey, wanna check out the new web mix?” and everything just kinda spiraled from there.
Next thing he knew, Peter was standing in a frankly claustrophobic, surprisingly well-lit steel room. His breath fogged constantly, curling around his jaw and cheeks, and even through the heavy door his keen ears picked up Ned’s half-shouted instructions as if he were yelling right next to him in the freezer.
Peter’s fingers were already numb after a few moments in the icy air, and he quietly berated himself for not grabbing a second hoodie before stepping in.
It had taken five minutes to set up the series of threads, another five to let the silk fall to local temps, two minutes to celebrate the very insignificant measured loss of flexibility in the polymers, and three minutes for the excitement to slip into alarm when it turned out the goddamn web dissolvent had a much stricter working temperature range (somewhere north of a frozen chicken club patty) and maybe this was something they should have confirmed before Peter anchored the webs from door to floor from the inside.
They were lucky there had only been enough room for Peter in the freezer; if Ned had also been locked in there with him it probably would have gone monumentally worse, and even then it was something of a close call.
It took Ned nearly ten minutes to convince FRIDAY that yes, this is very much an emergency and please, please, please call Mr. Stark but maybe like can you frame it like an accident because it was definitely an accident and really not our fault— before Tony finally arrived, armed in the very nanobot gauntlet he had been working on when his stupid kid managed to lock himself in a cafeteria walk-in freezer, and set to subtly unlocking said freezer by applying about 20,000 degrees Celsius worth of concentrated argon plasma arc to the doorframe.
By the time the repulser torch finished shearing through eight inches of insulated metal, Peter was totally unresponsive; a ball of scrunched up hoodie and curls flopping over tucked knees and scarily cold skin.
He doesn’t remember being lifted from the gap between the boxes of waffle-cut French fries and the shelf he’d wedged himself into. Has faint glimpses of being pulled into a warm chest, his head tucked beneath a chin as someone rubbed painful bursts of static and heat back into his arms, frantic voices dipping in and out of his hearing.
He kinda remembers briefly blinking awake to the familiar clinically white ceiling of Med Bay, the room dark and soothingly quiet, save for the soft whoosh of an IV line and the slow heartbeat of someone asleep in a chair nearby. Then the faint scent of warm saline and a familiar mix of motor oil and coffee dragging him back under the warmth of sleep.
He definitely (unfortunately) remembers the verbal dismemberment Mr. Stark treated him to when Peter was finally lucid enough to comprehend the thesaurus of synonyms for ‘foolish’ and ‘reckless’ the man had felt prudent to put together. Listed by ascending severity and alphabetized, of course.
Thinking about it now is still enough to make him want to pull his head into his hoodie and hide for maybe just a smidge over forever, even if the hug Tony dragged him into once the tirade was over was a nice surprise.
Suffice to say, finding out that Peter lost the ability to shiver really, really sucked. (On the bright side, at least they were pretty confident now that the webs would hold up astoundingly well even under an average New York snowstorm).
Which is why Peter couldn’t for the life of him figure out how he managed to get into this situation again.
“Why exactly—” Peter pauses to adjust his grip on the heavy heater unit, “Remind me what this has to do with National Geographic?”
“It's the experimental phase, dude. Nat Geo was just preliminary research.” Ned seems extra excited this morning, tapping away at his laptop perched precariously on one knee while he perches even more precariously on the edge of Peter’s bed. The desk’s holoscreen projection next to him flicks through the pages of rough notes they’ve so far clobbered together on the shared Word document, in time with his scrolling.
“Marathoning David Attenborough is research?”
“Conducting a deep analysis of primary source documentation is research, even in a British accent.” Ned corrects, then pauses mid-keystoke, “And David Attenborough is BBC anyway, not Nat Geo. But that’s a good point; they probably have loads of spider documentaries we should check out too.”
Peter huffs. “Okay. But I thought we said we wouldn’t be messing with any temperature stuff again. Remember what happened last time? Mr. Stark was upset.”
“Nah.” Ned shifts his laptop to the desk, still typing, “Mr. Stark was livid. But that’s only because you got yourself locked in a restaurant freezer, not because we were doing temp experiments. We’ll just make sure not to accidentally lock the door.”
“Just to be clear, you got me locked in a freezer.”
“I may have played a little part.”
“Dude. It was your idea!”
Peter glowers over the top of the heater where he’s sitting and messing with the cable wires, daisy chaining the machine with the other three already set up (Mr. Stark would be appalled if he was here). He can’t really hold the glare though when Ned ducks his head, grinning sheepishly.
“Yeah okay, sorry. A bigger part. But at least we learned something important! Hey, if you can’t shiver, does that mean you can’t get fevers anymore?”
“That’s— huh. I don’t actually know. Haven’t gotten sick since being bit.” Peter finishes knotting everything into an entirely unmanageable mess that he definitely looks forward to unraveling later.
“Wow, man. That’s gonna be a pain to untangle later.”
“There’s only one open outlet.”
“Bro. Won’t that overdraw the circuit? Start a fire or something?”
“Not on tower outlets, dude. They’re rated, like, a hundred amps or something. I dunno. Might take a while for them to individually heat up though, since they’re pulling on the one outlet.”
“Mmm. And Mr. Stark called us reckless.” Ned adds another note to the document while Peter slides the last plug into place.
The heaters thrum, the resistance coils inside beginning to whine with the first spots of warmth. For a moment, both boys watch the four machines’ UI screens blink as each ‘CUR. TEMP’ slowly crawls up.
72.3F
…
Ned hands Peter the ear-thermometer, which he promptly begins fiddling with even though it’s already been calibrated. He sticks it in his ear, again, for another baseline, because why not? The device beeps and spits out: 94.2°F.
Zero-point-one less than ten minutes ago. Still really weird to read, even though he feels fine.
72.5F
…
A few more notes get added to the document, then deleted, then added back.
Peter checks the taped edges of the plastic sheeting they’ve hung around their little ‘lab’.
72.7F
…
Ned types random gibberish to see if the autocorrect software will play ball. He gets a “nucamentaceous”, two instances of “ashfall”, and a whole lot of red squiggles for his troubles.
73.0F
There’s no breaks in the sheet liners, so the insulation will hold fine. Peter adds more tape anyway.
“So… where exactly did you find a bunch of portable heaters again?” Ned asks, as the feeling of watching paint dry begins to sink in.
Peter shrugs. “Just around the tower.”
“Mr. Stark’s lab didn’t have anything better?”
“Nah. Nothing that would fit a person anyway. ‘Cept the kiln, but that only heats to a minimum of, like, sixteen-hundred so…”
Ned snorts. “I don’t think FRIDAY would let you climb in an oven anyway.”
“Maybe to teach me a lesson.”
“About getting into industrially rated kilns?”
“Okay, maybe not. She’d probably just rat me out to Mr. Stark or something. Lock out the controls so it couldn’t turn on.”
“You wouldn’t have to worry about the kiln, dude. Mr. Stark would roast the frick out of you himself.”
Peter lobs a pillow at his head, but he’s laughing so Ned just grins. The thought seems to sober him though.
“You don’t think she’ll do that now though, right?”
“What, lock us out of the kiln? I think FRIDAY knows we’re just joking. We’re not even in the lab.”
“No, dude, like– tell Mr. Stark what we’re doing.”
Peter pauses, looks at the four space heaters crammed into corners of the half of the room they’ve taped off. One of the devices has given to the occasional spluttering whine, like its heating coil isn’t pulling enough charge. The screen says it's lagging behind its sisters by about 0.3F, but it’s still climbing.
“I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure we’re not doing anything dangerous,” Peter looks up to the ceiling, and says again, “Hey, we’re not doing anything dangerous, are we, FRI?”
“I do not detect any injuries in you or Mr. Ned Leeds, and all vitals appear normal, Peter. Would you like me to call Boss up? He is currently in the automotives workshop, and can be in the penthouse within five minutes.”
“No, no. I think we’re good. It sounds like we’re okay.”
“The ambient temperature of your room appears to be rising beyond the penthouse set temperature of seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit.”
A soft whirring sound rolls through the walls, as if the increased AC was punctuating the AI’s statement.
The problematic space heater gives another petulant buzzing cough, then promptly decides to give up, a bright white ERROR replacing the output readouts.
“I knew we should have just tried the Subway bread proofer.” Ned gets off the bed so he can crouch by the dead heater, poking the screen.
“I’m pretty sure we’ve been banned for life from Floor 12, and from touching any food stall appliances.” Peter unplugs the riot of cables from the single outlet, then shoos Ned out of the way so he can undo the graft and pull the unhappy heater from the chimeric mess. When he plugs the monster back into the outlet, the heaters proudly announce only a point-and-half degrees lost. They happily pick up their charge and go back to waging war with the penthouse AC system, one comrade less. The three musketeers.
“FRIDAY, can we uh, can you set my room’s temp to, I don’t know, say eighty-five degrees?” He feels dumb for not thinking of it sooner. Could’ve skipped lugging around the heaters.
“Seventy-six degrees Fahrenheit or higher is considered an excessive environmental temperature for humans and may be detrimental to your sleep quality and comfort.” Okay, a little less dumb.
“Yeah, okay. Can you just turn off the AC then? For like, an hour?”
There’s a pause from the ceiling, and then, sounding almost disapproving for a disembodied artificial voice: “Certainly, Peter.”
The wall whirs fade, and almost immediately the three heaters shoot up in output, pushing by a half degree instead of a quarter with the next sensory cycle.
76.4F…
76.9F…
77.3F…
Peter sticks the thermometer in his ear, holds the button: 95.4°F. Weird. Ned peers over his shoulder to read it before making a note. He doesn’t even look up from the screen to swat away Peter’s hand when he tries to stick the thermometer in his friend’s ear too.
“Gross, dude! Keep your nasty earwax away from me.” Ned laughs, then goes a full 180, “Hey, wait a second. Isn’t ninety-five really weird?”
“Skirting the upper limit of hypothermia range is pretty weird, dude, yeah.”
“No, I mean—” Ned scrolls up the document and clicks a link buried in the cluttered list of doi urls. The holodesk shows a crisp photo of a lithe, striped spider, the article title below displaying “Field Observations of Body Temperature for the Wolf Spider” in a bland academic font. A few more links pull up a few more articles, all diving into thermal stress, physiological responses, environmental cues; from wolf spiders to tundra spiders to even some desert variety called Carparachne aureoflava.
“— spiders can’t thermoregulate. Well, most can’t, and they really can’t. Like, their core temperatures are gonna basically always match the ambient temperature, one for one. So they have to find an environment that works with them, or they just like, shut down.”
“Huh,” Pete peers closer at the article on the desert spider, the holodesk helpfully scrolling automatically through the introduction. There’s a picture of one half curled; its little golden legs evenly spaced like the spokes of a wheel as it tumbles down some sand dune. It's a great shot, surprisingly high-quality, and quite silly. It’s also hitting something just shy of deja vu in the back of his brain. Weird.
The article drones on about behavioural thermoconformation and something called diurnal tunneling.
“The room was seventy-two like the rest of the penthouse, but my baseline was ninety-four… You think I might still have some form of thermoregulation?”
“At least a little. It’s a difference of, like, twenty degrees. That’s not one-to-one.”
“Okay, so, what now? Maybe I actually can shiver, just not a lot? Would that even explain how I survived a full winter Spider-manning in the snow without even a cold, but basically went comatose after half an hour in a walk-in freezer?”
Ned frowns in a way that says that probably doesn’t explain very much, contemplating. Peter mulls it over as he sticks the thermometer in his ear. It beeps with a 99.9F.
Peter blinks in surprise, and glances over at the heaters merrily displaying 82.7F, only two degrees and some change off from the set temperature goal.
Weird, he thinks, for the third time today, as Ned goes, “Oh wow. Wow, that’s weird. That’s like a big jump. That’s almost a one-to-one change. Do you feel any different?”
“I don’t– I mean, I feel fine. I think.”
“Okay, but, like, ninety-nine-nine is basically a low grade fever. You don’t feel sick do you?” Ned leans away, like he expects Peter to just start vomiting then and there.
Peter shakes his head. “Nope. Not even dizzy.” It’s mostly true. He doesn’t feel sick or tired, like how he remembers he’d normally feel under a fever.
But there is this weird pulse that’s started in the base of his skull, behind his eyes and, weirdly, the joint of his jaw. His eyesight goes a little funny too, like it's sharpening even more than usual. He could already see the little drops of sweat starting to bead along Ned’s forehead, but now when he squints at his friend, he can even see the tiny, thin hairs of his follicles, the different fractures of skin texture between nose and cheek.
The dust motes caught in the beads of sweat stand out in 2K, and Peter has to blink and refocus on the swirling grains of his wooden bedframe.
“Actually, um. There is something. My eyesight seems to be uh, extra hyper. There’s a weird sensation in my, uh, mostly just my neck. But I think it’s spreading? Yeah, it’s definitely traveling a bit.”
Peter shoves the thermometer in his ear and turns it to Ned to write down before he can forget again: 100.8F. The heaters read 83.6F.
“Spreading? Uh, that doesn’t sound good. Are you— should we maybe stop?”
“No, no. It’s not. It doesn’t feel bad— just… weird? Yeah. Weird I guess.”
The sensation shifts, morphing into almost an itch, and becomes a steady hum that runs down his spine. It’s incredibly strange, but not exactly unpleasant. A pseudo shivering in his central nervous system.
“It’s definitely gotten… stronger? It’s like. It’s like… you know those ASMR videos MJ keeps sending? And sometimes you watch them and you get like this weird tingly jolt?”
Peter realizes suddenly that his sense of smell has gone out abruptly. Like a light switch. He’s about to panic about it, but the sensation really is like ASMR, thrumming in his joints and chest now, and it’s like a blanket falls over his brain. A comfortable static of relaxation. He’s not drowsy or anything; can still think. But it’s like there’s something important he really really needs to remember – something he was supposed to be doing…
Peter doesn’t remember sticking the thermometer in his ear, but he does hear the beep of the device reading his temp, and the louder chirps of the heaters finally reaching that desired temperature output and idling. The corners of the little lab space sharpen and lighten intermittently, like someone fussing with the exposure in a photo.
The hum becomes a buzz, and he can’t stop flexing his wrists for some reason, rolling the joints over and over.
There’s something… Something—
Peter realizes Ned’s been talking while he was spaced out, trying to remember what he forgot to do, and lets him stick the thermometer in his ear. Beep.
“—razy. Pretty sure anything over one-oh-six is, like, hospitalization. Are you sure you feel okay? Dude, you’re not even sweating.”
Peter hums noncommittally, then calmly remarks, “My nose stopped working. Like, a couple minutes ago. Longer? And the shadows look weird. Like, uh. Like in a low-graphics game. Like they aren’t fully rendering in.”
He pauses, furrowing his brow. “Also I gotta go.”
“You what?”
“Sorry, but uh, can we continue this experiment later? There’s something I gotta do.”
“Huh?”
Peter gets up, turning in an oddly graceful circle, eyes open and jaw set in concentration.
They’re clear and focused, not distant, but his pupils are rapidly dilating and pinning in a very not human manner and he only manages a mild, “Sorry. Could you move please?” Before Peter reaches down with one hand and shoves the entire Queen-sized bed, mattress and Ned included, to the side like he’s pushing a book on his desk out of the way.
“Woah, dude, what the heck?! Chill! Chill!”
The heavy bed groans, grinding sharply against the hardwood floor and scrunching up the thick throw rug, as it comes to a halt on the other side of the room, a good ten feet from where it started. Through the torn opening of the plastic sheeting, Ned can see Peter kneel over the now bare spot the bed had sat over, cocking his head like he’s appraising it.
Without even looking over to his stunned friend, Peter mumbles a “Sorry, dude. I promise we’ll hang out later, I just need to– just—” then punches down into the floor.
Ned yelps as the hardwood panels splinter under the first blow, then shouts an indignant “Hey! NOT cool, dude!” as Peter tears the broken panels free and tosses them over his shoulder, cocking back his arm to punch again.
The underlying paper mat tears easily, giving way to heavy foam; the sound-proofing insulation layer easy-enough work for an enhanced teen.
“Dude, hush. You’re so loud.”
The insulation rips away in chunks, revealing the four-by-fours below. Peter reaches both hands in, halfway up his forearm, and cracks the posts at the edges of the gap he’s opened, dragging the chunks of lumber out and casting them aside.
He has to lean over now, just past his elbows, to place a palm against the concrete that was braced under the posts. The rough surface is grainy with old sawdust and wood splinters and flecks of insulation, cool to the touch. The buzz along his spine blooms with excitement as he pulls back to throw another punch straight down without thinking. He can hear the sound of Ned scurrying somewhere behind him, vaguely hears the sound of resistance coil whines fading out and the whirring in the walls, but Peter doesn’t really have time to hang out with Ned right now (and besides, his friend’s been over to the tower enough times to know his own way around, he’ll be fine) because the first strike to the concrete subfloor has cracked the slab but also maybe his knuckles because there’s a terrible throbbing that kicks up in his right hand immediately after.
Peter frowns at his hand, squeezing the fingers into a fist that sparks with bright pain. The skin along his knuckles is deeply split, blood already leaking in rivulets across the back of his hand.
“Well, shit.” He thinks, then says aloud.
Mr. Stark is definitely going to kill him; he gets upset when Peter gets hurt. Likes to complain when he gets blood on the living room carpets after patrols. Peter’s pretty sure he’s only joking since he always helps him clean up anyway, but then again he’s not exactly a full hundo-percent sure.
Maybe Stark’ll let him off easy, since it was just an accident.
He peers down into the gap, the concrete slab dented with the fractured impression of his punch. The cracks are wide enough that maybe he can just…
Peter reaches in with his good hand, digs his fingers into the widest gap, and yanks hard. The concrete breaks away in a manageable chunk that he sends skidding to the side while he reaches back in, again and again, until the gap has become a hole almost two feet deep now and he can dig past the bent rebar to hit the steel joists of the floor.
For a moment, his good hand scrabbles along the smoother surface, but he can’t really find a grip and a small part of him nursing his right hand knows better than to try that little trick on solid steel.
Two feet and some change deep. It’s… frankly pitiful.
It dismays him, makes the buzz in the back of his neck itch, but then he feels how cool, nearly cold, the surface of the joist feels, sees how condensation is already forming in the shadowed edges, and it mellows the hum.
Okay, well. Deeper would be better, because shallow isn’t safe.
But Mr. Stark is nearby – he can hear the man’s signature heartbeat and gait only three, sorry, four floors away. He’ll be safe enough.
It’ll have to do for now, anyway, it’s already too late in the morning to start again elsewhere.
There's blood dripping to the floor, dried tracks of scarlet already flaking along his palms and raw knuckles that he only vaguely notices. Peter scratches roughly at an empty wrist for a moment, absentmindedly, then gets back to work.