TASM Peter Parker Imagines

Waiting For It

You are waiting for an event that hasn't happened yet. Technically, you shouldn't know about it at all. You have never been one to stumble for long in the unknowable dark, though; not for lack of trying, not for any particular hatred of ignorance, but for something utterly out of your control.

You first read someone's mind when you were about ten or eleven years old. You were young enough that it didn't seem strange, just another part of growing up. It was silent, and then you heard someone speaking, the words floating to you as if over radio lines. It would have been perfectly normal were it not for the fact that no one had ever opened their mouths to breathe a single syllable.

You caught on to the fact that this was unusual soon enough. You kept it to yourself, having read enough comic books and seen enough movies to know that such secrets were best hidden from any and all grown-ups in sight. You still can't decide if that was a good decision or not, but it feels too late to suddenly confess to your parents that you have been able to tell everything they're thinking for years now.

Besides, it's not just telepathy anymore. A few years after that first mind reading incident, you started to notice more anomalies. You can levitate objects with your mind, crumple soda cans from across the room, and flick off your lightswitch with a single thought. At first, it was confusing, trying to keep straight everything you did with your hands versus the background tasks you could conduct with your mind, but practice enough times and you can do anything.

Control came frustratingly slowly, but at least it came. You've learned how to put on the blinders regarding telepathic communication, what it feels like to carefully block out everything but the words rattling around your own head. You're never quite certain that the inner monologue wending its way around your senses is one hundred percent your own, but it's the closest you've ever come, so that must count for something.

The same thing goes for telekinesis. Sometimes, when you get angry or hurt or experience some other tidal wave of emotions that makes it difficult to keep such a tight lock on your mind, your control slips and the objects around you start to go a little haywire. The radio in your car starts to switch rapidly between stations whenever your knuckles go tight on the steering wheel. The lights flicker when someone says something a little too cruel.

Still, no one's figured you out yet, so you mark that down as a win. You think that might be because you found a rather unusual extracurricular. It won't be going on your college applications anytime soon, that's for sure, but it does let you have an outlet for all the otherwise pent-up mental activities that aren't suitable for normal eyes.

Your city tends to frown upon vigilantes, especially the police and newspapers, but you'll be damned if they don't need you like crazy. It feels like there's a robbery happening on every street corner, a mugging in every alleyway. You've certainly stopped enough to make it seem that way, at least. The first time you put on a mask and decided to put a stop to all the wrongdoings to cross your path, you thought you'd never rest. Every time you dropped your fists, someone else showed up to try and ruin the city all over again.

You've learned how to rest since that first day, though, and that also comes with practice. You know when enough is enough, how to drag your beaten body back to bed for a good night's sleep before school the next morning. Part of that is a need to maintain some kind of work-life balance, but another reason is your favorite of all, and that would be your partner in anti-crime.

You had never intended to work as a pair of heroes instead of just by yourself, but Spider-Man surprised you. You can still picture the first time you saw him, how he came swinging down out of the dark nowhere of night to save you along with the most recent smash-and-grab victim. You'd chewed him out for ruining your perfectly good heroism, of course, but both of you knew you'd been outnumbered anyway.