Down Came the Rain
Being a hero has its ups and downs.
Lately, it’s had a lot of downs, which is why Peter Parker finds himself scrambling out of a toxic pool of green sludge in some cave somewhere. The sludge burns his throat as he hacks it up, the rough stone that makes up the whole space digging into his hands and knees. When there’s nothing left to cough up, he collapses on his side by the glowing puddle, breathing in harsh wheezes. His breaths echo through the cave, deafeningly loud in the otherwise silent space. The pool of green goo at his feet is the only light source, casting the whole space in sickening green and deep, dark shadows. He shivers.
How did he even get here? There was an explosion, all typical blinding lights, deafening sounds, and resulting fires and collapsing structures. He’s not sure who set it off, or why, and he’s certainly at a loss for how it dropped him in glowing cave goo.
Regardless of how he’s ended up in this mess, he’s in it.
And he needs to get out of it.
He cranes his neck, twisting his head around to see if he can spot an exit from his place on the floor. All there is is stone and harsh green, so either there’s a hidden tunnel somewhere or he’s trapped underground. So there’s a hidden tunnel somewhere. He just has to find it.
Peter pushes through the residual nausea and soreness and gets to his feet, only to be hit with a wave of vertigo. He squeezes his eyes shut, jamming his palms into his eyelids and trying to breathe through it. When the world stops spinning—or maybe when he does?—he cracks a single eye open. Something’s off. Something besides the clearly evil, mutated glow stick juice. He peels his other eye open and blinks his vision back to normal. It’s bugging him, an itch at the base of his skull that he can’t scratch. It can’t be anything in the cave because he doesn’t know the cave well enough to know if something’s off, so it has to be him. He frowns, going over a mental checklist. All his limbs are accounted for and in their correct places, as proved by a quick wiggle from his head down to his toes. There’s no unexplained aches or pains, no extra limbs or eyes or anything else. He huffs, glaring down at the rocky cave floor and—
—ah. That’s the issue. He’s shorter. And did he mention younger? Because holy shit. He yanks a glove off his hand—suddenly both thankful for and baffled by the fact it still fits him perfectly—and yup. Yup, that’s a small, little child’s hand. It’s a minor relief that all of his scars are still there, not that there are all that many due to his healing factor, but if he’d lost what he does have he’d…he doesn’t know. Scream, probably. Have an existential crisis, most likely. Well, he’s still going to have one of those, but he’s still him enough that he can neatly shelve it and focus on getting out of here.
It takes a few wobbly steps for him to adjust to his new (old?) body and he can’t help being frustrated by it. After all his years as Spider-man, after everything he’s survived, fuck, after clawing and fighting his way to adulthood, all it takes is an explosion and some bullshit green goo to set him back this far. A growl starts up in the back of his throat as he slaps his hands against the rough stone walls and starts searching for an exit.
His search takes him around the whole perimeter of the cave until he’s back where he started. With a shout, Peter slams his scratched and bloody hands against the wall. Cracks spiderweb out from where they hit, dust drifting to the floor. There’s nothing. No small space between rocks, no hidden trigger, no illusory walls. Nothing. No way out. He’s going to fucking die down here. After every single goddamn thing he’s survived, it’s a cave that kills him.
He hits the wall again, teeth gritted so hard his jaw is starting to ache. A small rock bounces off his head and he turns his glare to the ceiling, mentally cursing it out. As he glares, his eyes slowly adjust to the darkness that clings to the uppermost part of the cave and a small pinprick of orange light comes into focus. Squinting doesn’t make it any more clear, and it’s too faint to be some kind of light installed in the ceiling. On a hunch, he moves backwards towards the roiling pool of toxic green, keeping his eyes trained on the light. About two thirds of the way back, it disappears. He takes a good few steps to either side and it remains hidden.
There’s a ledge up there. A ledge with light that might be from a human source.
Peter takes a running start he doesn’t need and jumps, sticking to the shear rock and scuttling up it, not caring to limit his movements to ones more human while there’s no one to witness him contorting in ways humans shouldn’t. He pulls himself up onto the ledge, relieved that it’s actually there and that it wasn’t just a figment of his fear. The orange light comes from an old oil lamp that sits on a wooden crate. There’s rope, a spike, and a hefty looking hammer surrounding it. Someone knows this cave exists, and based on the fact that they left their lamp on, they’re probably intending to come back. The knowledge that he wouldn’t have actually starved in the cave isn’t as comforting as it would’ve been, before he discovered that there’s a way out.
He stands there for a moment, green ooze still dripping off of him, and eyes the lamp. There’s no way he should’ve been able to see it from that far down. There’s nothing weird about the lamp itself, besides the fact it’s outdated and still on. Peter stares at it until his eyes start to water and the light is burned into his vision, then decides, as he’s shaking his head to un-fuck-up his vision, that this a mystery that will have to go unsolved. Infinitely more important than a minorly odd event is the majorly odd event that got him here in the first place and is only continuing.
So, with one last shake of his head and some rapid blinking, Peter sets about walking down the tunnel the ledge connects to. Every so often there’s another lamp, some candle and some oil, all mounted in the rock walls and only some lit. Try as he might, he can’t find a pattern to which are burning and which aren’t. There’s a stretch where it looks like it’s simply every other lamp that’s out, then only the candles are burning, then a stretch of pure darkness that has Peter once again scratching his hands on the rock as he tries to make sure he doesn’t get lost or smash into a surprise wall or something. After the darkness is a single lamp, much like the first one at the edge of the ledge, though this one houses a candle instead of oil. The candle’s nearly burnt itself out, the flame spluttering and flickering in and out. Peter empathizes.
Just beyond the dying candle is a door. Just a plain, stone door set into the rock walls of this horrible awful cave. There’s a circle about the size of a standard doorknob carved where a doorknob would go, so Peter reaches out an only slightly hesitant hand and finds that it is, in fact, a button. He presses it until it clicks and pulls his hand away as the door starts to move. With a grimace at the green goo his hand left on the button, Peter steps out of the godforsaken cave.
And into a tomb. It might be a mausoleum, actually, but Peter’s not sure of the difference and it doesn’t matter. It’s just another place to escape from. Fitting that such a creepy cave is under a bunch of corpses, though.
Luckily, because this tomb is meant to be visited and not a weird haven for toxic waste, he doesn’t have to parkour his way across the ceiling to the door.
Now, standing in a graveyard full of yellow, drying grass and staring at a faded, peeling billboard that tells him to tune into Gotham’s best news channel, he’s really feeling the weight of that incoming crisis. It’s not even an existential crisis anymore, it’s just a crisis. He’d love to just let the tsunami of terror and suffering wash him away, but despite being de-aged and, apparently, thrown into another dimension (where the frick frack snick snack even is Gotham??), Peter is still Spider-man, and Spider-man has a job to do.
So, he shoves all the impending crisis warning signs into a box and shoves it into the attic of his mind and resolves to get back to his correct age and dimension and punch that explosion in the face. Or whoever caused it. That’s probably more achievable, but he’ll find a way to punch the explosion anyway. For therapy.
First things first, he gets the feeling you don’t want to be out at night in Gotham, which means he need somewhere to hole up.
Which means he has to leave the graveyard. In his Spider-man suit, minus the mask. In what’s not exactly broad daylight—due to the, frankly, insane amount of smog in the sky and the fact that he’s pretty sure the bright red on the horizon is a sign of a sunset and not a major fire—but feels enough like it that he’s feeling very exposed.
Whelp. He doesn’t have extra clothes or anything but the suit, so he’ll just have to deal. Maybe people will believe he’s just cosplaying. That is, if there’s a Spider-man in this universe. He should find out, maybe they’ll know how to toss him right back to where he came from.
Peter sighs heavily, pushing down his thoughts. He’d just stay here and think if he could get away with it, and he’s decided he can’t. He’ll ground himself or something if he does. With a heart full of anxiety, Peter crunches through the grass and right up to the rusty gate. There’s a chain linking it to the equally rusty fence next to it and a padlock keeping it shut. He debates just jumping it, but it’s too high for a non-spidery person to hop and the metal is definitely not sturdy enough to climb. The streets seem deserted, but there’s a soft vibration of his spider sense—that really should have gone off next to the clearly evil glow stick juice, but that’s something to worry about later—that makes him think he’s being watched.
So, he takes the slightly less obvious route of simply crushing the padlock and leaving it and the chain broken and covered in glow stick innards. The gate protests his attempts to open it without damaging it, whining like a little old dog who really would rather be carried across the pavement, actually. Luckily, this is a gate and not a little old dog, so Peter doesn’t feel too bad about shoving it hard enough that the bar dents, even though it bends way farther than he meant it to. It screeches loudly enough that Peter slaps his hands over his ears until it peters out what feels like ages later. It still echoes in his head as he slips through the newly created opening and stands on the crumbling sidewalk.
There’s a clearly abandoned building right across the street, which is saying something because every building he can see looks abandoned to some degree. Most of them also sport a lot of bullet holes. A concerning amount of bullet holes. An amount of bullet holes that makes him want to simply go back to the tomb and never leave.
He walks across the street and right up to the most abandoned-looking of the buildings. The first two floors are boarded up, but the third is open, though all of the windows are still fully intact. He doesn’t feel like breaking into one, not right now, but rooftops are generally fairly safe places to hide—for him, at least—and he doubts anyone’s going to come searching the roof of this mess. He glances around again and checks in with his spider sense. It’s quiet now, the sense that he’s being watched gone completely. Weird, but he’ll take it. He scurries up the side of the building, careful to be human enough that if someone is watching and tries to bring it up he can try to pass his rapid ascent off as being a really, really good climber.
Peter flops onto the roof in a truly undignified tangle of limbs, which would be embarrassing if anyone he knew was around to see it, but they’re not so he just stays there for a second. What can he say? It feels nice on his sore joints. He eventually untangles himself, sighing as he resumes his mission of finding a nice little hidey hole for the night.
A quick look over the roof reveals a strangely large amount of bricks that don’t have an identifiable source, a giant hole, and, of course, a Peter. He perks up when the hole registers in his brain and he connects the dots to it being a way inside the building, where he’d much rather be. Roofs work in a pinch, but ideally they’re only used in situations where he has his mask, too.
Mind made up, he scrambles to his feet—and almost falls back over. Shit. His balance is still screwed up from his sudden shortening. A quick minute long re-calibration later and he’s practically skipping his way to his savior, the giant hole. He slips into it and lands silently, wincing as his spider sense flares to life in a panic. He stands as still as he can, heart pounding in his chest, and tries to figure out what it’s trying to tell him.
Something shifts in the air and his spider sense quiets down, his body relaxing right along with it. Peter immediately tenses again. What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck. What did he just hop into?
The air shifts again, and Peter refuses to let his body melt into a pile of goo like it wants to. He’s already covered in enough of that, thanks. His spider sense hums contentedly at the base of his skull, not silent like it was in the cave and around the misery juice, but still reacting weirdly. For now, he writes it off as broken.
He looks around the hallway, trying to spot anything out of place. Any sign that there’s someone here that’s messing with him, that there’s a random scrap of weird abandoned tech that’s causing this, anything.
The only thing that stands out is a simple feeling he gets whenever his eyes scan across a door halfway down the hall. There’s something in that room, and he’s absolutely sure that whatever’s in there is what broke his spider sense and fucked up his body.
Whatever the hell is in there is going to wish it was dead.