Peter woke up and checked the laptop before he’d even fully opened his eyes.
67%.
He sighed, rubbing a hand over his face, and set it aside.
Whatever was in the rest of those files would have to wait a little longer.
He went out to the backyard for his usual workout — nothing flashy, nothing testing limits today, just push-ups and pull-ups and stretches, the same routine any ordinary kid might run through before school.
It wasn’t about seeing how strong he’d gotten anymore.
It was just about keeping a habit, something normal to hold onto in a week that had stopped making sense days ago.
After, he came in for breakfast, where May and Ben were already at the table.
They’d asked him yesterday, right after everything, if he was okay — and he’d assured them he was, same as always.
This morning, over eggs, Ben brought it up again anyway.
“Just keep your eyes open out there, kiddo,” Ben said, not quite looking up from his coffee.
“City’s not exactly calming down.” “Take care of yourself,” May added, quieter, but no less firm.
“Please.” “I will,” Peter said, and meant it as much as he could, given everything he wasn’t telling them.
Before he left, he caught May on her way upstairs.
“Hey — can you not touch my laptop?
It’s still running something, downloading a big file for a project.
I don’t want it to get interrupted.” “Of course,” May said easily, already moving on to the next thing on her morning list.
Peter felt a small twist of guilt at how easy the lie had been.
He shook it off and headed out, deciding on a whim to take the bus to school for once instead of walking.
Only Felicia and MJ were on the bus when he climbed aboard, sitting together near the back by the window.
Peter dropped into the seat beside Felicia, and she glanced over at him — just a flicker, there and gone, before she looked back out the window like she hadn’t.
“Hey,” Peter said.
“Room for one more?” “Depends if you’re gonna talk the whole ride,” MJ said, though she was already scooting over.
“No promises.” MJ launched into an update almost immediately, phone in hand, scrolling through some article.
“They still don’t know why those guys hijacked the bus.
No demands, nothing.
Cops think Spider-Man showed up too fast for them to even ask for anything.” “Efficient of him,” Felicia murmured.
“That’s exactly why I took the bus today,” Peter said, deadpan.
“Personal security detail.
Figured you two needed the extra protection.” MJ snorted.
“Sure.
You’re real intimidating, Parker.” “Oh, my hero,” Felicia said dryly, not even looking at him, though there was the faintest twitch of a smile at the corner of her mouth.
Gwen climbed on a few stops later and squeezed in across from them, and the four of them — well, three of them and Gwen shouting commentary from the aisle seat — kept the conversation going the rest of the way.
Flash was nowhere to be seen, which nobody seemed particularly bothered by.
By the time they reached school, Harry was waiting near the entrance, and the six of them fell into their usual rhythm heading to class together, the whole ride already fading into background noise against the start of another ordinary day.
Biology that morning felt strange in a way it never had before.
Peter sat through the lecture only half listening, his mind drifting toward his own blood, his own cells, wondering exactly what a microscope would show if he ever got the chance to look.
When the lab portion of class finally arrived and the teacher stepped away to help another table, Peter didn’t hesitate.
He pricked his own finger with the lancet meant for the class exercise, smeared a drop onto a slide, and slipped it under the microscope before anyone was paying attention to him at all.
What he saw made his breath catch.
At first glance, his cells looked mostly ordinary — the same basic shapes he recognized from every diagram he’d ever studied, red blood cells drifting past in loose, familiar clusters.
But something was off almost immediately, something he couldn’t have named if the teacher had asked him to explain it out loud.
The cells were moving differently.
Everything under the lens seemed subtly more active than it should have been — cellular structures pulsing with a faint, rhythmic motion, membranes flexing in ways that felt less like biology at rest and more like biology working hard at something, even sitting still on a glass slide.
It reminded him, uncomfortably, of watching a muscle twitch after exercise, except this was happening in every single cell in view.
Then he noticed the tint.
A faint, almost imperceptible dark thread traced along the outer edge of each cell membrane, something that didn’t belong in any diagram he’d ever seen.
He adjusted the focus, leaning closer, and the thread resolved slightly — not a shadow, not a smudge on the slide, but something structural, something inside the membrane itself, woven through it like a second layer laid seamlessly over the first.
Small, dark granules clustered at irregular points along that thread, dense and faintly reflective under the light, nothing like the organelles he’d learned to identify in any textbook.
That’s not supposed to be there, he thought, pulse quickening.
Cell membranes don’t have unknown particulate matter just sitting inside them.
Not normally.
He forced himself to think it through the way he would any other lab result, cataloging what he was actually seeing instead of just reacting to it.
The strange thread wasn’t damaging the cell — there was no sign of stress, no rupturing, no indication the cell was under attack.
If anything, the opposite seemed true.
The cells looked healthier than they should have, more active, more resilient, dividing faster than any red blood cell had a right to.
It’s not attacking my cells, he thought slowly.
It’s reinforcing them.
Every single one, at the same time, all through my body.
A theory started forming, careful and half-formed, the kind he’d have laughed at if anyone else had proposed it to him a month ago.
What if it’s not really separate from my cells anymore at all?
What if it rewrote the blueprint itself — my DNA, however it works now — so that every new cell my body makes just naturally builds itself this way?
Not a passenger living alongside my biology.
Actual architecture.
Built in from the start.
It would explain why there wasn’t a boundary to find.
Why he couldn’t point to where “Peter” ended and whatever this was began.
There wasn’t a line.
There’d never really been one, not since that night.
He straightened up, unsettled and fascinated in almost equal measure, and reached for the small vial he’d tucked into his bag that morning — a thin strand of his own webbing, fired carefully into it the night before for exactly this purpose.
He prepared a second slide and slid a sliver of the material under the lens.
This one was harder to make sense of.
The structure bore some resemblance to spider silk he vaguely remembered from a documentary — long, repeating protein chains, a certain fibrous regularity to it — but the pattern broke apart the closer he looked, diverging into arrangements that didn’t match anything natural silk should have.
Certain segments of the chain looked almost metallic in their density, tightly coiled in a way that made the strand far stronger than its thickness should have allowed.
Other sections seemed almost reactive, subtly shifting under the light in a way ordinary protein fiber never would.
It’s not spider silk, he thought, turning the focus knob slowly.
Not entirely.
It’s something built to resemble it, structurally, but there’s material in here that shouldn’t exist in nature at all.
Like something took spider silk as a starting template and then…
improved it.
Deliberately.
He was so absorbed in it that he almost missed the teacher’s voice cutting through the room.
“Everyone finishing up?
Let’s wrap up your slides in the next five minutes.” Peter startled, hurriedly wiping down his station and pocketing both samples before anyone could glance over and ask what exactly he’d been staring at for the last ten minutes.
Once the room had cleared out, he lingered a moment by the supply closet, an idea already forming.
I need real equipment.
A proper microscope, sequencing tools, anything better than a school lab kit.
He didn’t have anywhere close to the money for that kind of gear on his own.
But the school lab has some of it.
If I come back tonight, after hours, I could actually run real tests.
The thought led naturally to another one, less comfortable, trailing behind it like a shadow.
May and Ben work so hard just to keep things together.
I need to find some actual way to make money from all this — something legal, something that doesn’t put them at risk.
He filed the thought away for later, another item on a list that seemed to be growing longer every single day.
He got home a while after school, tired in the ordinary way for once, and went straight up to his room.
The laptop screen showed 100% completed.
“I didn’t touch it, by the way,” May called from down the hall, apparently having heard him come in.
“Didn’t want to mess anything up for you.” “Thanks, May,” Peter called back, something warm settling in his chest at that — she never would have messed anything up.
She was always careful with things that mattered to him, even when she had no idea what they actually were.
He shut his door, and, after a moment’s thought, the window too.
He sat down at his desk in the near-dark, screen glow the only light in the room, and opened the folder of newly decrypted files.
What he saw made him go completely still.
The first folder was labeled, in plain block letters that gave absolutely nothing else away: PROJECT SUPER SOLDIER CREATORS’ THOUGHTS Crown_of_thorn oh..boy….!!!