Peter woke up before his alarm and headed straight to the backyard to work out.
He moved through push-ups and pull-ups on the old bar Ben had rigged up years ago, his body barely straining where it used to be gasping by the twentieth rep.
Ben stood on the back porch with his coffee, watching his nephew move like he’d been doing this his whole life instead of just a few days.
“Kid’s turning into a machine,” Ben muttered, half to himself, a small proud smile tugging at his mouth.
May appeared in the doorway behind him, arms crossed loosely, watching the two of them — Ben grinning like a proud father, Peter oblivious to being watched at all, focused entirely on his reps.
She smiled too, quiet and warm, and didn’t say anything to interrupt it.
After his workout, Peter went upstairs to get ready for school — and stopped dead in front of the mirror.
His body had changed again.
What used to be an average build now tapered into a sharp inverted V, shoulders broader, waist leaner, muscle visible in ways that hadn’t been there even yesterday.
He grabbed the measuring tape from his desk drawer with slightly unsteady hands and checked his height against the wall.
Six feet, exactly.
He stood there a long moment, just staring at himself.
This isn’t possible.
His scientific brain scrambled for an explanation and came up empty every time.
He’d read about growth spurts, about muscle development, about every kind of biological change a human body could go through — and none of it, none of it, happened this fast.
Not in humans.
Not in any multicellular organism he’d ever studied.
He shook his head slowly, grabbed his marker, and added a line to the whiteboard.
Oscorp, he wrote, underlining it twice.
“Can’t forget the mystery of my powers and abilities,” he muttered to the empty room.
Another mystery he didn’t have an answer for yet.
He capped the marker and set it down.
In time, he told himself.
In time.
He went downstairs for breakfast, where May said something warm about how good it was to see him up and moving on his own again, and Peter decided, on a whim, to jog to school instead of taking the bus.
He arrived earlier than he expected, not even slightly out of breath, and had to force himself to slow his pace walking up to the front doors so he didn’t look like he’d sprinted the whole way.
Inside, he found his usual seat in class, and Harry gave him a small nod from across the room.
A couple of girls glanced his way and smiled — nothing new, exactly, but something in the way they lingered on him a beat longer than usual.
Peter brushed it off and sat down.
The day passed normally after that.
He answered when called on, took notes he barely needed anymore given how easily things seemed to him like always, and made it all the way to lunch without incident.
He was sitting with his friends, halfway through his sandwich, when he felt it before he saw it — some new sense flagging movement half a second before it happened.
He tilted his head just enough, and a crumpled paper ball sailed past exactly where his face had been a moment earlier.
Then came the voice he’d been dreading.
“Puny Parker…” Peter groaned and turned in his seat.
Flash Thompson was strolling over with the easy, smug swagger he always had, dropping into an empty chair across the table.
“Eugene,” Peter said flatly.
“When’d you get back?
I figured the government wasn’t exactly lining up to spend millions on rehab for underdeveloped kids.” Flash’s face went red.
“Hey, man.
Not cool.” Peter just chuckled.
“You started it.” “Yeah, but you’re actually puny.
I’m not lying.
What you said isn’t even true.” “Oh, sure,” Peter said, deadpan.
“Keep telling yourself that.” Flash huffed but dropped into the seat next to Harry anyway, grabbing a fry off someone’s tray without asking.
That was just how it worked with Flash — he’d been Peter’s friend once, a long time ago, before something shifted and the teasing turned sharper, meaner, the kind of thing that used to actually get to Peter back in middle school.
Peter had never let it push him away, though.
If anything, he’d spent years quietly chipping away at whatever insecurity Flash was covering up with all that bravado, helping him back onto his feet more than once when nobody else bothered to notice Flash needed it.
Flash had gotten better.
Mostly.
He just couldn’t seem to let go of the nickname.
So Peter had stopped fighting it and started giving it right back.
Lunch went on, the conversation drifting the way it always did lately — toward graduation, barely a month away now, and the terrifying blank space waiting on the other side of it.
“I’m thinking army,” Flash said, mouth full.
“Figure I’m good at yelling at people, might as well get paid for it.” “That tracks,” Peter said, and Flash threw a fry at him.
“Oscorp, probably,” Gwen said.
“Their research division has an internship track straight out of high school if your grades are good enough.
Mine are.” “Obviously,” MJ said, smirking.
Felicia shrugged when it got to her.
“Haven’t decided yet.
There’s time.” “There’s a month,” Gwen pointed out.
“There’s time,” Felicia repeated, unbothered.
Harry gave a small, tired shrug when his turn came.
“Not like I really get a choice.
Oscorp’s kind of already decided for me.” Nobody pushed on that one.
They all knew better.
“I might do music,” MJ said, when it got to her.
“Or acting.
Or modeling, maybe — I saw this workshop over the summer that looked interesting, and there’s also this photography thing I’ve been wanting to try—” “MJ,” Gwen said, not unkindly.
“What?
I’m keeping my options open.” “Your options are the entire alphabet,” Harry said, and MJ threw a fry at him too, though she was laughing when she did it.
Nobody pointed out that her list had been growing longer every time this conversation came up for the last year.
It was just MJ.
They’d all made peace with that a while ago.
“What about you, Parker?” Harry asked, turning to him.
Flash leaned in too, clearly expecting some kind of easy joke to land, and for a second the whole table was looking at Peter, waiting.
Peter took a moment before answering, turning his water bottle slowly in his hands.
“I want to be a scientist,” he said.
“So, college, obviously — most of us are doing that either way.
But lately I’ve been thinking about something bigger than just working under someone else’s name.” He paused, then said it plainly, testing how it sounded out loud for the first time.
“I want to start my own company, eventually.” “Doing what?” Gwen asked, immediately interested.
“Tools.
Research.
Medical and bioengineering stuff, mostly.” Peter shrugged, like it wasn’t as big a thing to admit as it felt saying it out loud.
“Something that actually helps people.
And—” He hesitated, then added quieter, “Something that could take care of May and Ben properly.
Give them an easier life than the one they’ve had scraping by for me all these years.” MJ tilted her head, considering him.
“That kind of sounds like Oscorp.” “Yeah, no,” Harry said immediately, pointing a fry at Peter.
“Absolutely not.
Peter is not going to work for my dad.
He’d probably just disown me and adopt Peter instead at that point.” The table burst out laughing, Flash nearly choking on his food, MJ wheezing into her hand — and Peter laughed along with them, easy and genuine.
But underneath it, the joke sat a little differently than it should have.
Peter found himself turning the idea over long after the laughter died down, thinking about a name on a building someday, a lab that was actually his, work that meant something beyond just keeping his own head above water.
Whatever he was becoming, he thought, at least it wouldn’t be for nothing.