𝓈𝓊𝓃𝒻𝓁𝑜𝓌𝑒𝓇 | p.p. x reader | book one.

𝓈𝒾𝓍✓

I stood, frozen, in front of the mirror, staring in the eyes of the reflection that looked back at me. As the second passed, the blue hue in my eyes slowly faded, eventually returning back to their normal color. I looked down at my hands, turning my shaking palms over as I stared at the skin.

"What. The fuck. Was that?"

I didn't have time to process it before the front door to the apartment opened, my mother calling out my name to get my attention. I hurriedly covered up the scorch mark on the wall with one of the hand towels and bolted towards the living room, hiding my hands behind my back, afraid something else would happen unintentionally.

"Hey sweetheart. How was your day?" My mom set her bag down next to the couch, shrugging her jacket off her shoulders and offering me a small, tired smile.
"It was, uh, good. I went out to Central Park with some friends."
"You know, I'm dying to meet these friends of yours." She started to walk towards the kitchen, rummaging through the refrigerator until she pulled out a bottle of water. "When are you going to introduce me?"
"Soon. I just...I don't want to get ahead of myself. I need to get used to having friends again, after everything that happened."
"Y/n, I know it's hard to trust people after what happened back home-"
"Mom, I really don't want to talk about them, okay? If they were really my friends they would have stayed." I saw my eyes droop a little in sadness. After my brother died, a lot of the 'friends' I had back home had decided I was too much to deal with and moved on, so since then it was a little difficult to make friends and trust people.
"Okay. How do you feel about lasagna for dinner? I ran to the store and bought some garlic bread, too."
"That sounds great Mom, thanks." I flashed a smile her way, a gesture she returned, and turned to head back down the hallway, the sound of my mom's voice stopping me before I could make it back to my room.
"Are you feeling okay? You look a little pale."
"Y-yeah, I'm fine. Probably just the lighting."

I slipped through the doorway into the room and shut it behind me, taking a deep breath before walking up and down the length of the room. I began to run through the events of the day, trying to figure out if I ate some bad food or got slipped something that would make me start seeing things.

"Okay, so I stayed here all morning, grabbed some leftover pizza from the refrigerator, went to the park with Peter and Ned, and then came straight back here after. What the hell could have made me see that? The only possible thing I can think of is that when that stupid motherboard shocked me it made me see things but that's not possible, right?" I stopped for a second and stared at the ceiling, finally grabbing my laptop and sitting down on my bed. After opening up the search engine and typing 'symptoms of electric shock' into the search bar, I began scrolling through all the articles I could find to hopefully find some sort of explanation.

There was no way the voltage would be high enough to cause any sort of hallucinations, so it had to have been something that I'd eaten. My next search in the bar was 'can bad pizza cause hallucinations', but that also turned out to be a dead end. After hitting the button to go back to the homepage of the browser, I sat back sighed, an article in the corner of the screen catching my eye. The headline read 'Reports of Illegal Weapons Derived from Alien Technology Being Investigated by NYPD.' I clicked on it and started to scroll through. About halfway through, I hung my head and let out a breath.

"Fuck." The words written in the article stood out like big block letters, explaining that over the past few years, more and more criminals have been appearing with strange pieces of technology that people were suspecting was made from leftover technology from the Battle of New York with the Chitauri. Pieces of the weapons had been found scattered throughout back alleys and side streets, which made it likely that the piece I had picked up on my way home was a part of one of those weapons.