What In The World Has Come Over You?

The first time it happened, Peter thought nothing of it.

He was doing pretty mundane maintenance work for his landlord. The guy was kind of sketchy, and definitely an asshole, but he didn't pry into why an 18 year old with no ID, no parents, and no legal existence wanted to rent one of his shitty apartments. And he gave Peter a break about late rent in exchange for free maintenance. So the fact that Peter's senses all went haywire on a random Tuesday afternoon while doing some work on a busted pipe with his landlord looming over him didn't worry him too much.

His senses all dialed in on the guy: his breathing pattern, his heartbeat, the smell of the shampoo he uses, exactly where he was standing in relation to Peter- just out of arm's reach and leaning against the wall of the tiny bathroom where Peter was fixing the sink.

All Peter would have to do is turn around and take one step and he could have him pinned before he knew what'd happened. Or he could use his web shooters, which he rarely took off anymore, and stick the guy in place without moving. Or even-

"Hey, kid, you about finished or what?" The question jolted his mind from running tactics, but didn't pull his body from fight-or-flight mode.

"Oh, uh, yeah, I should be. Let's just turn on the faucet and make sure," Peter said, reaching to do just that. The water spluttered for a second, then ran perfectly fine.

"Great. Thanks, kid," his landlord said, clapping Peter on the shoulder as they made their way out of the bathroom.

Peter had to force his body not to move, not to snap and throw the guy off him, while his spidey-sense screamed so intensely that Peter felt the sense of Wrong! Danger! burn through him. He grit his teeth so forcefully that he was sure he heard one of them crack, and he pulled himself together enough to get out from under the hand on his shoulder and out of the apartment without snapping.

The tension didn't bleed out of him until he'd collapsed into bed in the wee hours of the morning, exhausted from a particularly rough night of being the neighborhood's (admittedly somewhat less than) friendly spiderman. He chalked the whole thing up to stress and sleep deprivation and promptly forgot about it.

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The second time it happened, it's in the middle of a fight and Peter doesn't even connect it to the first time until much later.

Peter's in the middle of breaking up what looked like an arms deal gone bad, webbing up men and guns left and right and trying not to get shot anywhere important.

"For arms dealers, you guys kind of suck at shooting," Peter quipped as he used a web to pull a gun away from a particularly pissed off guy. "But hey, good way to drive off suspicion," he finished as he webbed the same guy up in a cocoon and stuck him to the ceiling.

In the time it took Peter to drop from the ceiling back to the floor, his senses had expanded out from the fight.

Suddenly it wasn't just the sounds of six sets of footsteps in the warehouse; it was also the sound of a baby crying a block away, and the salty smell of the harbor near the warehouse, and the individual bits of dust that he could see floating through the air.

His body moving on autopilot was the only thing keeping him from getting shot square in the chest. Still, the bullet caught him in the shoulder.

The shock of the pain blossoming out from his left shoulder brought him back and he managed to focus enough to web up the guy who shot him.

He took down four of the remaining five guys from a distance, not trusting himself to pull his punches now that he was only barely hanging on to his focus. The last one, however, managed to get the jump on him while Peter was distracted by the sound of a kid screaming several blocks away. Luckily for Peter, he was unarmed, so all he managed was a solid punch to Peter's gut. He doubled over, agitating his injured arm in the process.

Without even thinking, Peter tackled the other man to the ground. There was a crack, as his head hit the concrete floor. Still, Peter laid into him, survival instincts driving him while his mind and focus were elsewhere.

Sirens, six or seven blocks away but moving closer, snapped him back to himself.

He froze, mid-punch, as he realized that the guy he was on top of wasn't moving.

He couldn't dial in his senses enough to hear if he was still breathing.

Peter was dizzy and covered in blood that mostly wasn't his, and he could hear the police radios underneath the sirens. The cops were responding to the shots fired during the fight. If he didn't want to be here when they arrived, he needed to leave now. He pulled himself up, and he was shaking so hard that he almost couldn't swing himself out of one of the building's upper windows.

Peter couldn't remember how he managed to get home that night, but he could still smell the blood in his suit for weeks, no matter how many times he washed it.

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By the next time that it happened, Peter had already figured out that something was wrong with him.

It'd been a couple of weeks since the last... incident, when it happened again.

He'd been pushing himself to work more, spend more time out being spiderman. All while keeping himself on a short leash. He was determined to sweat, bleed, and suffer the guilt out of himself.

The man hadn't died, Peter checked.

But he could have.

And that scared him.

The cops were more hostile to Spiderman after finding his mess, and Peter didn't blame them. Hell, he almost seemed to be torturing himself in solidarity- listening to JJJ's podcast calling him a scoundrel and a menace, working himself to death, barely sleeping.

Tonight was the first time that he had managed to get more than a couple hours of sleep in over a month. And, as soon as his guard was down, his senses ripped him from it.

Peter sat up, going from deeply asleep to alert in a matter of seconds. He pulled himself up so he was sitting flush against the wall, guarding his back. His eyes flickered around as he grabbed his web shooters from the nightstand, determined to find the threat that had violently pulled him from his sleep.

There was nothing.

His windows were locked, there was no one in his tiny one-room studio or the bathroom. Peter couldn't hear any yelling or fighting from the neighboring units, couldn't smell any smoke from a potential building fire. His spidey-sense seemed to double-down against his logic, screaming at him that there was danger.

It was so intense that it actually hurt.

Peter wanted to brush it off, maybe it was a bad dream, but his body wouldn't let him.

Even when he closed his eyes, trying to focus to figure out if he was facing something like Mysterio again and his other senses were being tricked, he couldn't pinpoint any specific danger. Instead, he felt like he was drowning in a pool of paranoia and fear, his mind was screaming at him to protect himself from all sides.

Peter stayed like that, curled protectively around himself and pressed against the wall, waiting for something to strike, for hours. By the time that the feeling had finally begun to fade, it was early afternoon and he hurt all over from the constant tension that his self-protective position had caused.

Peter had no idea what the fuck was causing his powers to go haywire, but he did know one thing. Something was wrong with him, and he had no one to help him figure it out.