Spidey & Speedy - Starling City Storm

Chapter 4 - Try And Try To Crack The Shell

***BARRY***

Super speed gives me a super metabolism. Super metabolism makes me need to raid Ollie's fridge after everyone else is in bed. God, I thought those days were long behind me, back when I was a lanky, awkward young dude who routinely ate Joe out of house and home and never, ever gained weight. Not that I hadn't tried - I used to hate being so skinny. Teen me looked like a starving, overgrown bird. Or like that guy who plays Tris Prior's brother. Now that I've had a chance to fill out some, though...

Inside the fridge is a wide variety of food and drink to be had. I'm delighted to discover among them a case of Ianto's Soda, a Starling-based brand that used to be sold in Central City but is now very hard to find. Shame - I used to drink their stuff all the time when I was a kid, because they came in fun flavors you literally couldn't find anywhere else.

"Couldn't sleep either, huh?"

Thank God I didn't pick up the soda bottle - I would have dropped it for sure, Peter's surprised me that much. I whirl around and see him standing on the other side of the kitchen island, rubbing his bare forearms and shivering.

"I think your hoodie should be dry by now," I say, pointing to the improvised clothesline Ollie created for us after he brought us boys to his place. During and after our encounter with Malcolm on Salish Dam, some of us had our outer layers get snowed and rained on like nobody's business, so Ollie got a fire going in the fireplace and used the heat to dry our clothes out.

Peter crosses to the clothesline and selects his charcoal-gray hoodie, zipping it up tightly to ward off the chill seeping into the apartment from the rainy night outside.

"Yeah, sleep is pretty hard to come by for me too," he says. "Blame it on my age, or lack thereof. Even when I was normal and powerless, my circadian rhythm had a seriously irregular time signature. Like a Rush song."

"You didn't always have powers?"

"Yeah, yeah, sure. Perish the thought."

The fridge is still open, releasing cold air behind me, so I quickly grab two bottles of Ianto's and pass one across the island to Peter. "You want it?" I ask.

He turns on a single light above the island and then looks askance at the bottles and the fluorescent green liquid within. "I'm not a Mountain Dew kind of guy, sorry."

"This isn't Mountain Dew," I laugh. "It's green apple soda. My old favorite."

Intrigued, Peter approaches the soda tentatively, like it's a pitbull or something. He opens the bottle, takes a sip, then smiles. "Mmm. Delicious."

"They make it organic and all-natural," I say. "100% fruit juice, real sugar, and clean Washington spring water."

"Why does this not exist in New York?"

"Guess it's just a West Coast thing." I take a seat across the island from Peter. "So, you were saying?"

"What about?"

"About not always having your powers?"

Peter's eyebrows draw together for a moment. "Not much to tell, really," he says. "Basically, what happened is, I went to Oscorp Tower and got myself bitten by a spider one day."

"Not just any spider, was it?"

He shakes his head, "They were using them for all sorts of experiments. Genetic engineering, mostly. And a bunch of cool real-world applications that, for whatever reason, never really got beyond the concept stage." He bends back two fingers on one hand, touching the webshooter that's always clipped to his hoodie cuff. "Such as."