Peter Parker and Meredith Stacy (A Spider Man Story)

Part 3: Posession

PETER

I vomited into the trashcan and my brain felt like it would swell beyond the capacity of my skull and now my dehydration was too obvious to ignore. I was standing where the dim light oozes through a narrow gap and into the alleyway, somewhere in the Bronx. I couldn't remember how I got there, but it was the prospect of danger; sombre and unpleasant. I just 'woke up' as if out or into a dream, and were sitting on a street corner. Litter was dumped on the street and birds nest amongst the sprawling rot. I heard a muffled, indistinct scream behind me, but my head was filled with images of blood, and of teeth scraping through metal... claws scraping through skin... I shuddered.

Suddenly, a noise caught my attention. I turned to see a big man walking toward me.

"Hey, kid! I don't know if your momma would want you hanging out in our alleys!"

The man pulled out a small pocketknife and jabbed at my pant's pocket. After growing custom with my spider senses and inability to get taken off guard whenever anything was thrown my way, I hadn't even flinched or batted an eye when this mugger attempted to threaten me with his harmless dull knife. As drugged as I felt with blurry vision and numb senses I feel around to see if I had any pockets, or if I was in my suit, and that was when a strange sensation shook through my body, and I felt the hairs on my skin stand up and the images I had been seeing so faintly before grew larger, louder, and bloodier than ever...

"Come on, kid! Peter? Peter Parker, from the Daily Bugle, is it really you?" He cackles. "Well, brave man. Or are you a moron? Hand me the money, and I'll let you go. I mean it! Now! Right now! Come..."

The man stopped as I got up.
I felt even more surprised when the man dropped his knife and started to run away. Then, as I began to chase the man, all I felt was anger... The streetlights flicker on and off and screams filled the night's silent skies like a melody of the urban shadows playing its eerie song.

...

I walk these streets my whole life, I know them just the same as if they are etched in my head with a sharp knife, scored in deep like some strange work of art. These are the streets I grew up on and for the most part I'm calm here, at home, on the down low with a steady heartbeat. Not tonight though. Tonight my heart wants out of my chest. It wants to beat free of its cage as the memories and visions of what feels like a dream start pounding against my skull, making it throb, and that's how I know it can't be a dream. A dream can't make you feel every cell in your body like you experienced it firsthand, pounding like it's going to crack a rib. My senses are on high alert. Every colour is brighter, every noise louder, every stranger and detail, simply the scratches on the brick walls and the oil spills cause to make my heart beat more fiercely still. So now the dark, hidden streets that were my salvation spike my adrenaline as good as a shot to the arm. But it isn't fear responding to the familiarity of these streets, it is the feeling of being out of control. Though everything is familiar, the one thing unfamiliar to me was myself in these memories. But how could they be my own? When I feel like I'm both running away, and running together with the threat in my mind.