The Demon Awakens
Peter had never woken up hungry like this before. It wasn’t the “ran out of cereal again” hunger. Not the kind that gnawed gently from beneath a hoodie and some spider-themed pajamas. This was deeper. Older. It was in his teeth. In his bones.
And his tongue was wet with blood. He sat up in bed too fast, clutching his mouth, heart punching his ribs like it was trying to escape. The taste—metallic and raw—coated his tongue, thick and warm. A cut? A nosebleed in his sleep? He stumbled into the bathroom, flicked the light on—
—and froze.
The reflection was entirely wrong.
His eyes, once warm brown with teenage guilt tucked behind spider-cracked humor, were rimmed in deep, bloody red. Not just red around the edges. The entire sclera had darkened, like crimson rust bleeding into white linen.
He blinked. Once. Twice.
They stayedred.
And then he opened his mouth.
The scream didn’t come. Just a strangled breath that stopped short in his throat. His upper canines had lengthened—slight but sharp, gleaming with something unnatural. They hadn’t grown like that overnight. This wasn’t braces gone wrong or sudden puberty 2.0. These were predator’s teeth.
Meant for puncturing.
He ran his tongue over them and sliced it open again.
Blood pooled in his mouth.
For a long moment, he simply stood there. Breathing. Watching himself. A thing in a mirror. Something not quite Peter. Something changing.
He told no one. Absolutely not a single soul.
He couldn’t.
Because if he said it out loud, it might be real. So he suited up. Patrolled. Caught a mugger by instinct more than intent. Snapped a few jokes that didn’t land, like his voice had taken a wrong turn in his throat and come out off. Wrong cadence. Wrong pitch. Everything was too loud. Every smell made him nauseous. And when he caught his reflection in the glass of a passing building, he nearly missed his swing.
The fangs were still there.
By nightfall, black spider-veins bloomed up his arms.
They weren’t tattoos. They pulsed. Spread across his ribs and chest like ink spilled through capillaries. Crawling. Claiming.
Peter’s breath started hitching. Panic at first. But then—
Rage.
Hot. Sudden. Indiscriminate.
It was as though someone had lit a fuse behind his eyes and whispered burn it the fuck down.
x x x x x
When he stumbled into the Sanctum, Stephen Strange was already descending the staircase in a blur of blue and concern.
"Peter?"
The kid looked like he’d crawled through hell backwards. Blood on his tongue. Eyes burning like coals. Hands shaking as he peeled back his sleeves to show the webbing of dark veins beneath. "I—I think something’s wrong," Peter rasped. His voice was lower. Hoarse. "I...I can’t stop tasting blood." Stephen’s stomach dropped. He wasn’t a man prone to fear. But this—this reeked of arcane infection.
He crossed the space between them in two strides, ungloved fingers already weaving a diagnostic spell. It shimmered in the air, a golden lattice forming around Peter’s body.
The pattern distorted immediately.
"No..." Stephen breathed. "This isn’t just physiological."
The spell sparked and fizzled.
"This is metaphysical contamination. Something’s rewriting your structure on a fundamental level."
"That bad, huh?" Peter croaked, managing half a smirk.
Then he staggered. Gripped his head. A low growl escaped him, and that—that wasn’t Peter’s voice. That was something else.
Stephen didn’t hesitate. One portal. One sharp word.
x x x x x
Stark Tower. Sub-level 4. Containment Med Bay.
Tony dropped the tablet when he saw Peter.
"Jesus Christ—"
Peter was swaying in the middle of the med room like a puppet whose strings were fraying. Shirt off, black veins coiling up his abdomen like vines. The fangs visible now. Stark’s diagnostic system pinged anomalies like it was detecting a brand new fucking species.
“He’s running a fever of 108,” Bruce muttered, eyes wide. “But his organs aren’t shutting down. They’re...adapting?”
Stephen took Peter’s jaw gently, forcing his face to tilt toward the overhead lights.
“Let me see,” he murmured.
Peter resisted at first. Then gave in.
Stephen leaned closer. The fangs were real. Bone. Smooth. Just barely protruding. But lethal. Not surgically added. Grown.
“His pupils are vertical slits,” Tony said quietly, reading from the scanner. “And there’s a secondary pulse source in his thoracic cavity. Like there’s something else growing a heart.”
Peter was no longer really listening.
His heartbeat was deafening in his ears. The lights burned his retinas. He could smell the iron in Bruce’s blood, the ozone on Stephen’s skin.
They were too close. They were looking at him like he was a patient. Like he was something broken.
“I said I was fine,” Peter snarled.
“You’re not,” Stephen said sharply. “Peter, listen to me—whatever this is, it’s accelerating. If we don’t get ahead of it, you may not come back from it.”
“I am me!”
“You were,” Stephen countered. “Right now, I’m notso sure.”
The room went cold.
Peter’s body shifted before thought. He launched toward the ceiling, sticking effortlessly, body contorting like a cornered animal.
“Peter!” Tony barked.
Stephen moved faster than thought. A containment ward—six layers deep—exploded around the ceiling, locking the boy in mid-leap. Peter shrieked. Not yelled. Shrieked. The sound scraped down Tony’s spine. It wasn’t human. It was something else entirely.
Then he collapsed—body twitching, limbs jerking like a spider freshly poisoned. Stephen muttered something under his breath, and Peter finally stopped thrashing.
x x x x x
He woke hours later in a Stark-tech medical bed. Arms and legs restrained in insulated magnetic cuffs. A heart monitor beeped steadily. Blood bags hung beside him—his blood. Darker now.
Less red. More black.
The voices came from behind the curtain.
“I’ve ruled out known hexes,” Stephen said. “This isn’t just a magical infection. It’s...primal. It’s rewriting his instincts. He’s losing empathy. Replacing logic with urge.”
“You think it’s something parasitic?”
“I don’t know. Could be a curse. Could be his spider DNA mutating. Could be...” Stephen hesitated. “…a fated tug.”
Tony scoffed. “The hell is that? Sounds like a magic STD.”
“It’s a theory,” Stephen muttered. “A soul-level pull toward something inevitable. Power, person, place...or purpose. Usually catastrophic.”
There was silence.
And then—
“What the hell...is a fated tug?”
Peter’s voice. Hoarse. Barely audible.
The curtain peeled back.
He was awake.
Eyes glowing faintly red in the dark.
Stephen looked at him, and for the first time, his expression wasn’t sharp. It was tired.
“You really don’t want to know.”
And Peter—tied down, fevered, veins blackened and pulse erratic—began to smile.
But it wasn’t his smile.
It belonged to whatever, or whoever was waking up inside him.