Blinded by the light

Peter benjermin be jermininin

The first thing Peter feels after falling back into his own dimension is relief.

He slides into his smoggy, damp, colorless world like a well-worn glove and he can't help but sigh at the feeling of being able to look around and not have a stabbing headache. Of being able to close his eyes and not have that bright colored light stream through his eyelids.

The wind wips and wraps around him like a greeting from an old friend.

The second thing the spider does is getting back to work. His little trip to another world having had no affect on his own. After everything he had experienced New York hadn't changed at all. He doesn't know why he expected it to, it's stupid honestly, thinking that maybe the monsters lurking in the dark would have gone away.

Besides,
Fighting is what he was made for.

———-

It's easy, really, falling back into his old routine. He stops holding back his punches and keeps his guns on him and it's like the collider never happened. Like he never met the others who were so similar and so different from him. He wonders, sometimes, if he really did meet them, or if he finally lost his mind and visions of colors were just created from his broken brain. He doesn't know what he would do if that were true. Probably nothing.
———-

Peter is wiping rain from his goggles when it happens again. The only warning he gets is the spider whispering in his ear before he's once more plummeting through a tear in his world. Color—purple, maybe?—pours out like water, and he instinctively squeezes his eyes shut.

Peter shoves down all his shock and confusion, there is no time to adjust to the new environment and new people.

(It doesn't matter that many of them share his face or that the brilliance and color of everything burns his eyes.)

He goes along with all of the change and doesn't ask questions as he's handed a watch and told about anomalies and unchangable events. He chokes down the frustration he feels when they half-heartedly attempt to teach him what a telephone is when explaining to him what all of the watche's functions are and they refuse to listen when he tries to tell them that he already knows.

(They take him to a large room filled with computers and gizmos. In the center of the room is a circular platform with a giant spider suspended above it. Its legs jut out at harsh angles from its pale, bloated body, and its eyes stare blankly forward, corpse-like as it dangles from the ceiling. The hair on the back of his neck stands up, and for a long, awful second, all he can think of is the god he left behind in his home dimension.  Phantom breaths echo in his ears and the smell of rain clogs his nose.

He does his best to never enter the room again.)

——

In a place where all realities converge and intertwine, individual identity pales in comparison to actions. Peter Parker is just one among thousands, his face warped and spattered across every crowd and realizes that if he were to disappear there is a good chance that no one would notice.

He keeps his mask on and remains silent when people call him "Noir" instead of his name; it must be complicated keeping all the peters apart as it is.

What ultimately sets him apart from the other Spiders is his willingness to kill.

In a society built on shiny morals and heaps of responsibility, it is important to keep those willing to get their hands dirty in your back pocket. As a result, Peter often finds himself summoned by Miguel to neutralize various "anomalies."

He... doesn't mind as much as he probably should, as much as he would have only a few years ago when his vision was constantly clouded by anger. He's mostly just tired now.

——

Now that Peter no longer has to worry about painfully glitching out of existence, he can fully appreciate how advanced the technology is around him.

He ends up mostly teaching himself about all the new doodads. He watches the others tap away on sleek, smooth screens, everything so bright and glowing, filling every nook and cranny with light. It hurts his eyes, but he can't bring himself to look away.

Peter occasionally manages steals some of the less essential items, bringing them back to his shabby apartment. Even when turned off, they seem to cast a glow onto the dull world around him. He disassembles them, studying their insides and trying to piece together how they work. Wires and gadgets lay scattered around his room.

Once, he asks another spider to explain how the watches work. He decides never to ask again after they condescendingly explain what a watch is, as if they weren't invented hundreds of years before his birth, instead of telling him how they are capable of dimension travel. They speak slowly, asking if he knows what electricity is, and then tell him not to worry if he doesn't understand when he tries to leave the conversation.

It becomes clear that they know little about where he came from and that few of them care to learn. Anger bubbles beneath his skin, pooling in his knuckles and teeth. He wants to break something, to yell and punch, but instead, he grinds his teeth and presses crescents into his palms every time they tiptoe around him, treating him like an invalid. They are all so sickeningly kind as they use baby talk to educate him on things he already knows.

And god, the colors certainly don't help the situation.

He wants to scream as they smile, as if proven right about him being a naïve idiot, every time he mixes up the names, trying to tell blue from purple from pink. His face burns under his mask as they gently correct him, often with an amused chuckle, explaining that he got it wrong again.

That, or they're frustrated because they've already told him about the colors, never mind that there are millions of shades and hues and they hurt to stare at and why in the world would they ever have to explain it again?

Peter finds himself in an odd limbo, torn between the relief of no longer having the spider constantly breathing down his neck and the peace of avoiding interactions with the less tolerable members of the spider society.