Variant Strain

- - -

Peter went up the stairs uncertainly.

He needed a little time. A little space.

He needed to get out into the fresh air a bit.

No matter how much he normally hated to do so. Uncle Ben had always considered going out to be good for you.

He wasn't so certain, but it would beat walking in very small circles around the bathroom.

He didn't know which door was which, so he knocked on the first one at the top of the stairs.

His Aunt's voice called out, "Yes? Peter, is that you?" Her voice sounded strained. Tense.

Peter licked his lips once more and called back, "Yes. It's me. I just wanted to let you know I was going to go out for a walk."

There was a pause and Peter imagined Aunt May mulling that over. "A walk? Are you sure?" Her voice sounded closer and the tone of disbelief was very difficult to miss.

He sighed and jammed his hands into the pockets of khakis. "I just... I need a little thinking room."

The door cracked open and May looked out, with concern and worry plain on her face. She looked him in the eye, as though trying to gauge why he would actually need to go out at all before nodding. "Alright. Give me a call if you're going to be late for dinner, alright?"

"Yes, ma'am." He said respectfully, ducking his head.

She opened the door entirely and wrapped him up in a hug. He didn't need enhanced senses to tell him she had been crying. He hugged her back before she reentered the room.

Peter realized that she really must have been distracted. His cellphone was still back at home. Well... there were payphones in the neighborhood... he wasn't planning on staying out too long anyway. He'd planned on being back well before dark.

He sniffed at the air, having caught a whiff of an unfamiliar scent. Bactine and lilacs. Anna Watson's shampoo, but the undertones of scent were completely different. Fresher. Keener. Something sweet and light. It wasn't quite the same, but it made him think of waffles.

He glanced over his shoulder at the other door across the hallway. It had opened a crack while he was talking with Aunt May. Probably why he hadn't heard it.

He caught sight of a brief flash of a hoodie and about half the face beneath it. Pale was the major impression that had been left. Almost bloodless, framed by shockingly red hair. She'd had pretty, even features and he caught a glimpse of a striking green eye.

MJ, he guessed and was surprised even though he probably shouldn't have been. Obviously looks ran in the Watson family.

She startled at his glance and turned away, slamming the door hurriedly as she did so. He caught a glimpse of the other side of her face as she moved. There was a mass of unhealed bruises on the left side of her face. She'd had a black eye, almost, but not quite swollen closed. Her lip on the left side was cut, but it had already scabbed over. More bruises on her cheek.

"Arguing with her father again" Uncle Ben had said.

"A matter of life and death." He'd said.

No wonder Anna had been in such a hurry to pick her up. Going so far as to wake up her neighbor to borrow her to drive the car. Peter started down the stairs. He felt bad, but there really wasn't anything he could do about that situation. He had his own problems to worry about and at least MJ Watson was here and away from whatever her original situation was.

He got to the door and realized it would be brisk outside. Did that matter to him anymore? He didn't have a jacket... Aunt May had mostly picked up indoor clothes during their shopping run. He glanced up the stairs, taking a deep breath to assure himself neither his aunt nor MJ were out where they could see him, he shifted clothes, putting himself into Cletus' hoodie. He kept the khakis, but swapped Cletus' heavy boots for his sneakers.

He opened the door and stepped out, before hurriedly jamming his hands back into his pockets.

The wind pulled the hoodie off his head. He reassured himself that it was, in fact, his face by his reflection in his aunt's car's windshield.

He smiled tightly and began to walk.

He had no real idea of what he wanted to do. Or where he wanted to go. He'd just felt... restless. Closed in. Sometimes, a man just needs to prowl, his voice drawled up. It was strange enough hearing his thoughts... Cletus's thoughts coming to his attention. It was even stranger having thoughts in his own voice doing it with the Carnage Killer's accents and inflections.

He'd let his feet move him on automatic and found himself right outside their back yard. The waist-high wooden fence was more of a mildly worded suggestion than any real deterrent.

Peter looked and thought. Well... he did need to have some other clothes to show Aunt May since he'd eaten all of his new ones. It was late afternoon, but too brisk for most people to bother with staying outside. People were either at work or staying in. Peter let his senses range out. He wasn't sure how well he could trust his newly expanded senses, but he felt... safe.

Or at least he didn't see, smell or hear anyone out on the street at that moment. He was pretty sure no one was looking out their window at the moment.

So why not? He reached around for the gate latch and found that against all odds and prior experience that someone had locked it.

Probably the cops. Or whoever those clean up specialists Detective Stacy had mentioned were.

He was pretty sure no one was around. Peter tried to clamber over the waist high fence. He was all set to plant his faux work boot covered feet in the gap between wooden posts and try to use that extra bit of height to lever himself up and hopefully not hurt himself too much when he stumbled down on the other side, but it hadn't quite worked out that way.

As soon as he's planted his hands on the top of the fence and began to lift his feet, he realized that he could support his weight entirely on his arms. With grace and motor control that Peter had never had before in his life he'd easily tucked his legs in under him, vaulting up and over the low fence with ease. Peter whirled and stared at the fence.

He looked up and down the street once more, planting his hands on the fence one more time and repeated his feat, landing on both feet solidly back on the sidewalk without any difficulty at all. He grinned.

It wasn't that he'd been clumsy or anything, but Peter had always been distinctly nonathletic. PE was the only subject that actually threatened to ruin his grade point average. So... on top of the strength he had... perfect muscle control as well? Some sort of enhanced proprioception? All his other senses seemed to have undergone a sharp enahncement, why not his kinesthetic sense and his sense of balance?

He grinned, then looked up and down the street one more time. He grasped hold of the wooden fence, then kicked up, shifting and folding his body easily into a handstand. He kept grinning as he smoothly and easily did a push up from his position. Once he'd straightened up, he released one hand, his body immediately shifting his balance to accommodate.

Easy.

One hand hand-stand atop a three-foot high fence. No difficulties. No strain. This wasn't bad at all. What memories Peter still had of Cletus told him that the man hadn't been able to do any of this. On the other hand, Ed Whelan hadn't looked particularly athletic to Peter, but what did he know? Was the man perhaps some sort of closet gymnast? Was that a thing?

Or this had nothing at all to do with either of them, but was simply the consequence of having better control over his body now? Control Cletus hadn't had. Then again, Cletus hadn't been able to eat people and keep their memories either... he had a vague, sickening memory of a meal the Carnage Killer had had after his transformation.

Then Peter realized that perhaps these sorts of things were not really best contemplated upon while doing a one-handed hand-stand on top of a fence out on the sidewalk where anyone could come across you.

He smoothly flipped down and rolled to his feet on his back yard, the springy grass was starting to brown and Peter remembered Uncle Ben had had plans to get some fertilizer over the weekend.

He took a sharp breath and berated himself.

What the hell was he doing? He didn't need to be there. Hell, Detective Stacy had told him the crime scene hadn't been released yet, so he was pretty sure he was going to get in trouble if anyone caught him, but still... here he was.

The clothes were an excuse. He needed answers.

From across the yard, he eyed the tree that was next to his window. It's lowest branch was ten feet off the ground. Higher than Peter could ever jump before. The window to his room was around fifteen feet off the ground and the branches were widely spaced enough that he'd practically have to go halfway around the tree to make it from the lowest branch to the branch closest to the window he wanted.

Perfect muscle control. Strength. Running.

Peter took off at a flat-out sprint, shocking himself with his own speed as he crossed the yard in barely any time at all. He leapt and badly miscalculated as he took off like a rocket, completely overshooting the branch he'd aimed at. He yelped, extending his hands desperately. His fingers caught on the rough bark of a higher branch and he allowed the momentum of his leap to swing him almost entirely around it while his fingers gouged a furrow into the branch.

He sat on the branch, a good twelve feet or so off the ground. He was panting, but not form exertion. The run, the leap, the swing and the smooth, easy grace with which he had done these things hadn't tired him at all. His breath came fast from the exhilaration. His heart raced with excitement. He'd never been a very physical person. But that... had been simplicity itself.

Peter stood up, balancing on the branch without the slightest difficulty. He could feel the bark against his feet and he realized that the work-boots had vanished and he was now barefoot.

Well, that made it easier to stay on, he guessed. He hopped from branch to branch, moving with the easy grace of a man who was making his way up a flight of stairs and found himself without any difficulty at all at the window to his room.

The window was still open and he let himself in, feeling a strange sense of deja vu.

He glanced to his side, to where his bed was and remembered the small tangled up lump on the bed that had smelled familiar.

His jaw clenched and he forced himself to calm down again. Ed Whelan had come through here.

He'd been the source of Peter's running dream... but... where had the man gone? He'd left Peter a few vague memories and the abilities that had led to last night, but that didn't answer the question of what had happened. For instance: why had Ed's run led him here?

The vague impressions Peter had gathered told him that wherever it was the man had run from, it had been somewhere in Manhattan. Why come to Queens? Why to the Parker residence? Did that tie back to Whelan's memory of his mother in a coma?

The room smelled... of him. There was a definite... Peter-ness to his room. His territory. He glanced around slowly. He'd woken up too quickly last night and hadn't really had a chance to see if anything had been disturbed during the night. He realized that was probably why his glasses had been so blurry when he'd tried to put them on when he'd woken up. His eyes had already changed. Or begun changing.

Nothing out of place. The piled up laundry was where it had been before. The books on his shelves and desk. The little terrarium with it's plethora of interesting bugs next to the ant-farm were untouched. Even his posters were in their proper spots. Nothing.

He took another deep breath, trying to get a sense of what was there. Cletus remember Ed Whelan's scent. Or was that something else?

Peter caught a whiff of it. It was faint. The sickly-sweet carrion-rank that had clung to Cletus Kassidy. It was subtle, almost gone. He walked a slow circuit around the room, until he realized that it was coming strongest from outside the window. He stuck his head back out and noticed those rust-colored stains he'd seen that morning.

They were barely visible, but something about them made them stand out to his eyes. The smell was coming from the stains. He scraped at a bit of it with his fingernail and brought it back up to his face to see it better.

Up close gave no further revelations. It was crusty, whatever it was, and up close the smell of it was strong. He tried to roll it between his fingers, rubbing it off his fingernails when his fingers blurred into tendrils and absorbed the material. Hungrily. Greedily.

Peter blinked and felt the sick realization of what exactly the stain was. He looked back out the window. It had dried overnight, but there was still quite a bit of it caked down the wall.

He was sure he was looking down on all that remained of Ed Whelan. Peter bit his lower lip. That made no sense to him. Whelan had come to him in his sleep and somehow... somehow, what? Fed himself to Peter? Then threw the rest of himself out the window?

Peter clung hard to the wooden windowsill. The alternative, he realized, was that somehow Ed had eaten him as he slept. He gulped nervously. And he wasn't Peter Parker... not really. He was ratty old Ed Whelan, with his inane little status updates and lonely self-portraits... deluding himself that he was Peter Parker.

If he'd been Whelan, Peter probably would've killed for the chance to be someone else.

Well? Had he?

Peter pulled his head back and set heavily in his bed. His entire body was trembling. Did that make sense? Logic, follow the steps. He didn't have enough information to follow the chain.

He didn't know enough yet. He didn't have enough information.

The answer was obvious. Get information.

Peter went to his desk. He grabbed his phone and stuffed it hurriedly into the pocket on his hoodie and tried not to think about how strangely... fleshy... the interior of his pockets felt. He rooted around his closet and pulled out a small backpack that he'd stuffed full of a random assortment of clothes, a small plastic case that had once been a first aid kit, and a pocket-tool.

The case was where he kept small empty baggies, among other things. It was just the right shape and size to carry conveniently when he'd gone on bug-collecting sessions with Uncle Ben when he'd been younger. He unfolded a knife from the pocket-tool and scraped samples of the rusty stains into a baggie and sealed it. There was a small package of alcoholic handwipes on his side table that he opened and used that to wipe the knife clean before putting it away.

He stuffed the baggie into the case and pushed that into his pocket. Peter had a... vague idea of how to do DNA testing. He ducked out of his room and into the upstairs bathroom that had been entirely his and fished out the hair clogging the shower drain. There. Older DNA exemplar for Peter Parker.

Now he just actually had to get access to a place where he could actually do a DNA test and check. That should be easy right? He could prove to himself that he really was Peter Parker.

Y'know what? That's the easy part, His voice drawled in his head. We find someone who can do DNA tests, eat him and we're golden.

He allowed a sickly grin to surface. That was actually sort of funny in a ghoulish sort of way. He could quite literally be anyone. He just had to eat them first.

He looked up at his reflection in the small bathroom mirror and couldn't quite meet his eyes.

Okay, maybe it wasn't that funny, he flushed.

- - -

He stepped onto his bedroom window sill with a deceptive ease. It was skip to the branch, then from there, a hop, another hop and a sort of half-step to get back down to the lowest branch.

Instinct made him turn. He looked out in the direction of the Anna's house and noted MJ's hooded form watching him through the second floor window.

He blinked in surprise and not knowing what else he could do, he waved to her.

She waved back before disappearing into her room once more.

Well... that was progress at least? He mused.

Now self-conscious, he lowered himself gingerly and noted that the ground was still almost four feet below him. That wasn't that big of a drop, he told himself and let go.

It really wasn't that big of a drop. He took it easily, barely flexing his knees. Peter looked around the back yard and out to the street. The coast seemed clear once more so he grinned and allowed himself a bit of fun. He shot forward at a run, then leapt, clearing the low fence like a hurdle.

He glanced over his shoulder and found several large black vans beginning to pull up to their driveway. The 'specialists', Peter was sure. He watched the men as they began to unload their equipment, setting up a larger perimeter around the house.

They moved slowly. Almost tripping over themselves. There was a definite note of exhaustion to their movements, Peter noted. Almost like they'd been running around all night.

He frowned and counted a dozen of them. He was fairly sure they were all men. Or he hoped they were all men. They were all built like linebackers, but really, Peter couldn't tell and anonymous behind their bright yellow Hazmat gear. Their helmets looked incongruously like a bee-keeper masks. He also couldn't help but note that the outfits also seemed to include some sort of torso body armor given how stiffly the material seemed to move.

He could overhear orders being issues to secure the perimeter and Peter took that as his cue to leave.

He began a leisurely jog away from his home as the men set up strange equipment... the activity seemed to be centered on the rose bushes, which if Peter really thought about, he realized he could catch just a faint trace of the same scent coming from that direction. He had a feeling these men knew exactly what that was. He wondered if they would be checking the back of the house and realized it would definitely be better for him to not be anywhere near the men.

He pulled his phone out and glanced at the time briefly. Hours to go before dark.

More time to kill. He lowered his head and ran past the Watson house trying to see just how fast he could actually manage.

He skidded to a halt at an unoccupied park a few minutes later. He felt slightly winded, but there was no feeling of strain in his body. No fatigue. Not even any difficulty breathing. Given how his heart rate had been spiking whenever he altered himself, he found it odd that it hadn't wavered. The beat was steady... there had been no change at all. Almost as though his run had been absolutely no difficulty, but changing underwear required a massive adrenaline boost.

He did the math in his head and stared at the route he'd taken, dumbfounded. If he assumed that he'd been going at a steady speed, he'd just clocked in at roughly forty five miles an hour.

He looked around and shook his head. He hadn't even really felt like he'd pushed himself. Peter was certain if he'd had a bit more room he could easily top that.

Another interesting data-point... but ultimately, not too useful in the grand scheme of things.

He walked to one of the park benches and sat, leaning back as he did so.

There really was just... so much to deal with. Too many questions. Not enough answers.

He closed his eyes and allowed his mind to drift. Breathing slowly through his nose.

That was when the sickly-sweet carrion stench hit him once more and he opened his eyes.

The smell was coming from above him and that made no sense. He couldn't see anything in the open sky... no... he squinted and actually felt a sharp pain as his eyes adjusted and began to zoom in on a speck in the distance.

High above, something glided past. Peter had no real idea how far up that was... or how big it was, but whatever it was, it had set off whatever tracker senses he had "inherited" from Cletus.

Something else like Cletus Kassidy. Like Ed Whelan. Like him.

It was too far for him to pick out any details, but whatever it was, it glowed with a faint red haze and had a bird-like silhouette. Its proportions were all wrong for any bird he could think of, but the extended neck it sported reminded him of a buzzard... or a vulture.

He froze, wondering if it could sense him back, but it kept going in the same direction, the stench fading as it moved outside of whatever range he had. He blinked and his eyes snapped back into close focus with another sharp burst of pain.

He got up quickly, taking cover under a tree in case it circled back. Was that another Runner? Or a flyer in this case. Or was it another tracker?

He hadn't really been thinking about it, but those men had seen him. Smith and Jones knew what he'd done and it wouldn't have been difficult for anyone to deduce what had happened in the Parker home.

He ran a tongue across suddenly dry lips. Was he putting Aunt May, Anna and MJ in danger by being there?

He cursed to himself. More. Damn. Questions. He was sick of them.

- - -