Frostbite

Flicker

Peter sighed as he dragged himself into the apartment at a quarter past eight. Weasel finding out about his other "part-time job" was already a lot, and adding Wade into the equation...

No one says a thing for a long while.

Which is troubling, because that meant Wade hasn't said a thing for a long while. He's just standing there with a web on his face, Peter's wrist in a loose grip, and the silence in Sister Margaret's slowly growing thicker and thicker.

Then.

"I thought the webs came out your butt."

All the tension flees out Peter's body as he pulls his arm back and braces himself on his knees.

"... Yeah, I also thought the webs were butt-made," Weasel agrees apologetically.

"Can—Can we just take care of these guys first? Please?" Peter pleads. He picks the two bodies back up as Wade struggles to scrape the synthetic web from his mask eyes. "I'll tie them up and put them in the back and, Mr. Weasel, can you make the call? Wade, don't pull so hard you're really going to hurt yourself—"

Wade took it really well. He pulled a Ned and asked if he laid eggs or ate bugs for breakfast or if he secretly had six other arms that he was hiding and it'd be the wildest thing if he did, and Peter had been so relieved that Wade was someone he could trust that he readily agreed to the man's request to dangle him from the ceiling before the bar opened for the night.

Peter closed the front door behind and tossed his backpack on the couch as he made a beeline towards the kitchen. Wade might not have known how old he really was, but he couldn't hide how young he looked and yet, there was no judgment. Just like Weasel.

That alone warmed his chest like nothing else.

He dug around the fridge. It would just be a sandwich or six for dinner tonight, not that he was complaining, and after he made the first one he balanced his butter knife on the open mayonnaise jar and wandered back into the living room with one hand full of bread and the other slung in his hoodie pocket.

May wouldn't be back for another hour, maybe? And it was Tuesday so she'd get dinner with some of her co-workers, so she wouldn't be hungry when she got back. Not that he knew how to cook all that well, but Granny Sal sometimes wrangled him into being her sous chef when the bar was at its busiest, and he knew a thing or two about how to keep tortilla chips from getting too soggy.

He plopped down on the couch with a sigh and took a bite of his sandwich. The black of the TV screen stared back at him, as do all the pictures that line up on the shelves. Him, May, Ben, Dad, Mom... Their stares were heavy, frozen in moments that he'd half almost forgotten and half he tried to remember on the days his broken bones hurt a little more.

His gaze drifted back to his perfectly normal hands.

"What the heck did I do that night?" he mumbled.

He didn't imagine the blue. He didn't. He'd been dead-tired and it was three in the morning but he knew what he saw and he knew what he felt.

And in that moment, his hands didn't feel the winter cold.

Whatever happened to him wasn't an effect of the spider bite. Spiders were cold-blooded creatures that lessened their activity to dormancy when temperatures dropped. And for a while, that was true for him too. Since the bite he'd taken to wearing layers upon layers in the colder months, making sure to never stay outside for too long unless he passed out and went into hibernation in the middle of the street.

Peter narrowed his eyes.

Maybe it was... sometime after the Vulture incident that things started to change? From the instance atop the ferris wheel in his old jumpsuit covered in cuts and scars and burns, the cold hadn't bothered him as much. Did it? The three layers he usually wore in the apartment in the freezing, heater-less months started to get too warm for him and the five layers he squeezed himself into whenever he went into the snow were scaled down to two, or three if he counted the short sleeves under his hoodies.