Misfire || Spideypool

Chapter 1: A Glitch in the System

A/N: WARNING: This is a MATURE fic. It will involve violence, gore, strong language, gratuitous sex, dubious consent, and BDSM themes. 

Peter is well and truly doomed if not even the snow can smother the growing ache. It fills the empty spaces of his skull with static, bouncing off the soft tissue of his brain with a prickling that's too sharp to be comfortable. It leaves him feeling overstuffed, pushing at the seams of his head and bleeding excess fluid out of his ears.

Once upon a time, the snow would've only messed with his senses, smearing them like paint across a child's canvas, leaving him disorientated and aching for a bottle of Tylenol. Relying on his reflexes as much as he did, he used to despise it, hating the way it muddled the world around him. Now, though, he'd do anything just to get a taste of that drunken confusion again.

Now, his brain is too full. Too laden. Too much. It plants a headache so deep into his brain, rooting behind his eyes and growing like a tumor, that he feels less like a human being and more like an organism attached to a one-sided symbiote—just along for the ride, but suffering all the consequences.

Even as his head is bursting at the seams, and his senses are the equivalent of a drunkard trying to dance the Tango, the world is still frustratingly, painfully sharp.

Tires screech against the asphalt. Cars honk and veer. A mother screams.

Peter shakes his head hard and crosses the street without looking for oncoming traffic. There is none. At least, not for him. Cars zip in front and behind him, honking their horns as they narrowly miss his leg or arm, and he closes his eyes, massaging his temples in an attempt to alleviate the ache as images and impressions push against his brain, heavy with unwanted precognition.

A cabbie getting distracted on his phone, veering too close to the sidewalk. He will not see the little girl stopping to pick up her fallen glove. Her mothers' shriek pierces the air, shrill and horrified, as blood paints the sidewalk.

Peter sees it all like a movie playing behind his eyelids. The world, already moving at a snail's pace, becomes even slower as the events begin to unfold like the butterfly wings of Edward Lorenz's chaos theory.

He rubs his temple harder, narrowly missing a truck's headlight, and pauses to let a car zoom past. Down the street to his right, the cab is already veering towards the sidewalk just as a little girl in a bright pink raincoat stumbles and drops her mitten. Peter groans, pinching the bridge of his nose, as he makes it to the other side of the street and curls his hand in the collar of her coat, and pulls her away just as the cabbie curses and yanks on the steering wheel, coming up on the sidewalk and jerking back down, narrowly hitting another car. The people on the street jump back in panic, some scream, some curse, and the mother, realizing how close her daughter was to losing her head, gathers her into her body with wide eyes, hand splayed over the girl's pigtails. Her face drains of color, her mouth is open in horror, and her eyes flicker to Peter—he also knows this, despite his back being turned. He's already seen it.

"Thank you," she calls after him, gratitude puffing from her lips in a warm cloud of condensed breath that is snatched up by the cold greed of the winter wind, but Peter is already gone, engulfed by the multitude of people crowding the street.

His headache swells, throbbing now, and his face scrunches in discomfort. He digs his nails into his head until his fingers turn white.

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He doesn't know why he keeps coming back to New York City. He's tried running from it; rinsing off its stench, its filth, its life, like a layer of grime, but it's sunk too deep into his skin to ever truly be clean. The city dug its hooks too deeply into the meat of his body to ever truly free him, tethering him to its concrete floors and blood-mattered walls like a hog for slaughter.