Memories of Home

𝔛𝔦𝔦. 𝔊𝔩𝔞𝔰𝔰 ℭ𝔞𝔤𝔢𝔰

MJ hadn't come home the last two nights.
So Peter hadn't slept the last two nights.

Wherever she was, Peter was terrified that she was lost to him. And it had all been his damn fault. She hadn't shown up to work either.

How could he have been so stupid? He had been replaying every word he said to her, every moment of that night. Especially after they'd kiss it was like...some type of recognition flashed in her eyes. 

But he couldn't hold on to any semblance of hope after how he'd left things. The way she had looked at him as he left.

"...you told me a lot of things out there could hurt me..."

The words haunted his ears. How badly he wanted to tell her he was trying to protect her.  That he was only going to ever cause hurt between them. That this was the best he could do for her. 

He squeezed his eyes shut as he shook the tears threatening his vision.

A stranger. She had called him a stranger. Even as he remembered the map of every curve of her body. He was dying to tell her she knew him better than that. And that he knew her more than anyone in the universe. More than he knew himself.

And yet...as close as he had come to getting her back, she was farther away than ever.

As he swung through the streets, a lone figure against the expansive skyline, he wondered what it had all been for. The deal he made, seemed to have been one with the devil, and he was in hell.

He did all he knew to do. He kept swinging, slinging web after web.

Since that night, his spidey senses seemed to be going off non-stop, and partly he blamed it on the effect she had on him, but otherwise something had felt...off...about that group the other night. He had been trying to do recon work to follow the trail of the drug that had been spreading like wildfire the past few days.

The robberies had stopped since that night, but there was an increase in reports of those found around the city in a state of distress...for lack of a better word.

There had been attacks that started stemming in the downtown clubbing district. Which seemed like an almost normal thing for this area...or something darker hiding in plain sight.

Bodies had been found in the early morning hours. Some had just been strung out and others...inciting attacks with what seemed like superhuman force. A man's body had been found hanging over a power line 50 feet up in the air.

What they all had in common was two things.

1) They were on some unidentified drug, potentially what that woman had slipped to MJ that night.

2) All of them seemed to work for clubs down there, as waitresses, bouncers...other types of entertainers.

He had done a few illegal things to obtain the info from the detective's office...as well as the fact that he had been starting to do some work at the Daily Bugle, and his new boss J. Jonah Jameson, was not a soft spoken man.

"The Drugs & Debauchery Ring! That's what we should call the story. New York going down in flames again! I wouldn't be surprised if that Spider Bozo is pumped full of this shit - no wonder he's crawling on walls...or maybe we're all high off our mind!"

Peter rolled his eyes more times than he could count since he started at the paper...only one person here sounded like he was high out of his mind.

Between all that, Jameson had missed the actual missing piece to the puzzle.