Peter woke up to a world without color.
Everything around him existed in stark shades of black, white, and gray — his ceiling fan, his desk, the posters on his wall, all rendered like an old photograph.
For a groggy moment, he thought he was still dreaming.
Then he registered the ceiling was less than a foot from his face.
He was lying flat against it.
Not falling.
Not floating.
Stuck, spread-eagled against the plaster like it was solid ground beneath him.
“What—” The word came out strangled.
Peter’s heart slammed against his ribs, adrenaline flooding his system as his mind scrambled to process a physics problem with no solution.
He was on his ceiling.
He was on his ceiling.
Panic surged through him, his breathing turning ragged, hands instinctively gripping at the plaster— And then, strangely, he didn’t fall.
His fingers had sunk slightly into the surface, holding him fast without any real effort at all.
The panic hit a wall of confusion, and somewhere underneath the fear, a smaller, steadier voice cut through the noise.
The same voice that had aced every AP science exam he’d ever taken.
Okay.
Okay.
Think.
Observe first, panic later.
Slowly, deliberately, Peter forced himself to breathe.
He peeled one hand free — easily, like pulling off a piece of tape — and lowered himself down the wall in a slow, controlled crawl until his bare feet touched the floor.
He stood there a moment, chest heaving, staring at his own hands like he’d never seen them before.
Black and white.
His vision was still drained of all color, sharp and high-contrast, every edge in the room impossibly crisp.
He could see the individual threads in his bedsheets from across the room.
He could hear the faint hum of the refrigerator two floors down.
He moved to the mirror on his closet door, and what looked back at him stopped his breath entirely.
His eyes were pure black — no white sclera, no brown iris, nothing but a deep, glossy black from lid to lid, except for a thin ring of stark white where his iris should have been.
No pupil.
Nothing human in them at all.
“Oh my God,” he whispered.
He gripped the edge of his dresser, forcing himself to breathe slowly, deliberately, the way he did before a big test.
Focus.
Just — focus.
Try to see normally.
Try.
He stared hard at his own reflection, concentrating on nothing but the idea of normal — his own brown eyes, the ones he’d had for sixteen years — and felt something shift behind his face, subtle and strange, like a muscle he hadn’t known he had.
Color flooded back into the room around him first, and then, a heartbeat later, his eyes did the same.
Brown.
Familiar.
His.
Peter exhaled shakily and sat down hard on the edge of his bed.
That was when he noticed the second thing.
He didn’t fit in his own room the way he used to.
His head nearly grazed the top of his closet door.
He stood, and had to duck slightly under the ceiling fan blade he used to walk beneath without a second thought.
He crossed to the mirror again, this time measuring himself against the faded pencil marks on his doorframe that May had made when he was twelve, marks he’d occasionally checked out of habit.
He wasn’t five-foot-eight anymore.
He was five-foot-ten.
Maybe more.
“That’s not possible,” he muttered, running a hand through his hair, “That’s not — that’s not possible, overnight, that doesn’t—” His hands were shaking now, more from adrenaline than cold, and he reached for the drawer of his dresser to grab a hoodie, needing something, anything, to feel normal again.
The drawer came off its rails entirely.
The handle snapped clean out of the wood, and the whole thing clattered to the floor, sending balled-up socks rolling in every direction.
Peter stared down at it, then at his own hand, then back at the drawer.
“…Okay,” he breathed.
“Okay, that’s — noted.” He dug through his closet instead and found a pair of old gloves shoved in the back from a long-forgotten camping trip.
He pulled them on carefully, testing the fabric against his palms, and reached out to tap one knuckle very gently against his desk.
Crack.
A thin fracture spread across the wood.
He winced and pulled his hand back immediately, staring at the tiny splinter of damage he’d caused with what had felt like the lightest possible touch.
He tried again — softer this time, barely more than a whisper of contact.
Still too much.
The wood groaned.
He kept at it, adjusting, recalibrating, tapping and pulling back, tapping and pulling back, until he found something that felt closer to how a normal touch should feel — slow, deliberate, a fraction of the force he apparently now had without even trying.
Satisfied, or at least less panicked, Peter dropped into his desk chair and pulled his laptop toward him, fingers flying across the keyboard with more care than usual.
Radioactive spider bite symptoms.
Enhanced strength sudden onset.
Color blindness ultraviolet vision.
Oscorp attack explosion aftermath.
Article after article filled his screen — grainy security footage of the Oscorp explosion looping on a news site, a growing casualty count, a statement from Norman Osborn promising a full investigation, absolutely nothing about spiders or symbiotes or a black-eyed teenager climbing his own bedroom ceiling.
He grabbed his phone next, thumb hovering before he dialed.
Gwen’s phone rang out to voicemail.
Then MJ’s.
Then Harry’s.
Peter frowned at the screen, chewing his lip, before the realization hit him with a small, guilty jolt.
He glanced at the clock on his nightstand.
1:47 PM.
They were at school.
He wasn’t.
“Right,” he muttered to the empty room.
“Right, obviously.” “Peter!
Breakfast!” May’s voice floated up the stairs, muffled and warm, achingly normal against everything else that morning.
“Coming!” he called back, and immediately regretted the volume — his own voice sounded strange in his ears, too loud, too clear.
He made his way downstairs carefully, one hand braced against the railing more from habit than need, his legs still adjusting to a strength he didn’t yet trust.
Every stair felt lighter under his feet than it should have.
He stepped into the kitchen — and stopped cold in the doorway.
Uncle Ben was sitting at the table.
Coffee mug in hand, reading glasses pushed up into his graying hair, the newspaper folded open in front of him exactly the way he always used to sit before heading into the city.
He looked up when Peter came in, and something in his weathered face was warm, and steady, and quietly proud.
“There he is,” Ben said.
Peter’s throat tightened instantly.
“…Uncle Ben.” “You gave your aunt quite a scare, kid.” Ben set the mug down, his voice gentle but firm, the way it always was when he had something real to say.
“Running into a collapsing building.
Pulling people out.
Brave thing to do.” “I couldn’t just leave them,” Peter said quietly, sliding into the chair across from him.
“I know.” Ben’s eyes held his, steady and unflinching.
“Brave.
And reckless.
Both things can be true, Peter.” Peter looked down at the table, throat working.
“I know it was reckless.
I know I scared everyone.
I know I could’ve—” He stopped, swallowed hard, then looked back up.
“But if it happened again, right now, I’d make the same choice.
Every time.” For a long moment, Ben just looked at him.
There was no anger in his face — only something aching and complicated, pride and fear tangled together in a way Peter didn’t fully have words for.
“Yeah,” Ben said finally, quiet.
“I know you would.” May appeared behind Peter, setting a plate down in front of him with hands that trembled just slightly, like she still hadn’t quite let go of the fear from two nights ago.
She pressed a kiss to the top of his head before sitting down herself, and for a moment none of them said anything at all — just the three of them, together, in a kitchen that felt more fragile and more precious than it ever had before.
Peter reached for his fork with gloved hands.
May’s eyes caught on them immediately.
“Why are you wearing gloves at the breakfast table?” Peter’s mind raced for half a second.
“I— started feeling really cold this morning,” he said, forcing his voice to stay even.
“Like, weirdly cold.
Figured these would help.” May frowned slightly, reaching over to feel his forehead with the back of her hand.
“You do feel a little clammy.
Maybe you’re coming down with something, after everything you went through.” She sighed, brushing his hair back the way she used to when he was small.
“I’ll get you some soup later.” “Thanks, May,” Peter said softly, and meant it more than she knew.
Breakfast passed quietly after that — comfortable, achingly normal, Ben stealing bites off May’s plate the way he always did, May swatting his hand away out of habit.
Peter ate carefully, testing the give of his own grip against the fork, relearning his own hands one bite at a time.
When he finally excused himself and made his way back upstairs, his legs felt steadier than they had that morning, though his mind was anything but.
He shut his bedroom door behind him and stood in front of the small whiteboard tacked above his desk — a leftover from a group project months ago, still faintly smudged with old equations he’d never bothered to erase.
He picked up the marker and wiped it clean with his sleeve.
Then, slowly, he began to write.
Oscorp.
Explosion.
Attack.
Spider bite Enhanced strength.
Enhanced senses.
Wall-crawling??
Black/white vision — infrared?
UV?
Eyes — black, no pupil.
Controllable??
He stepped back, staring at the scattered fragments strung across the board, lines connecting one word to another in a web of his own making.
Pieces of a picture that was almost — almost — starting to take shape.
He could feel the outline of something enormous circling just beyond his reach, something about that laboratory, about the spiders in their glowing enclosures, about the attack that had come far too precisely timed to be a coincidence.
But there were gaps.
Whole sections of the board sat blank, waiting for information he didn’t have yet.
What exactly had bitten him.
Why it had happened at all.
Whether anyone else — anyone at Oscorp — already knew.
Peter chewed the end of the marker, frowning hard at the board, feeling the shape of the truth just out of reach— His phone buzzed sharply on the desk beside him.
Harry.