Peter felt sick as he sat on the off-balanced, scuffed, peeling, red, three-legged stool that occupied all the desks in the chem lab.
His stomach was twisting and turning, thrashing as if attempting to escape the cage of flesh and skin that it resided in. It birthed a pressure in his core that suddenly made him hyper-aware of each and every hollow breath that entered his lungs. Every involuntary twitch of his hands that rested against the cool surface of the lab desks.
The teacher's voice rang in and out of focus, so he could only catch certain words like “reaction” “isotopes” and “cobalt mixtures” without actually comprehending what they meant together. His eyes burned as the mundane colors of the schoolroom lit with mid-afternoon sun became increasingly bright, sickeningly vibrant in its off-tone hues that made it impossible to see the scratches of whiteboard marker on the wall in front of him, detailing the process they were supposed to perform.
All of this and the heavy weight of normality still rested upon his shoulders.
How even though it hurt to breathe, his stomach was threatening to upheave, and his hands shook with no repentance, his entire existence within that room still had to ooze of nothing but his usual lackluster fever towards his chemistry class. Even Ned sitting next to him, pencil occasionally scratching on the sheet Peter couldn’t remember receiving, had no indication that he realized what kind of internal battle his friend was facing.
Peter had gone through the checklist early on, debating what could be the cause of his sudden affliction.
It brought him back to the early days of his transformation when his senses would be so dialed his skin would burn to the slightest touch, but the buzzing in his head wasn’t loud enough for that. Maybe it was just the flu, or he was once again the unlucky individual who had food poisoning. There was no tell-tale sign of a fever if he had the flu and not eating anything since dinner two nights ago wouldn’t explain food poisoning (it wasn’t that he was avoiding food, Peter insisted, he just never had the time).
Whatever the mystery illness that decided to possess him at that moment was, Peter couldn’t help the childish thought from entering his mind for half a second that he’d give anything to have Iron Man bust through his school window and carry him away from all the useless words being thrown at him by a teacher he couldn’t care to listen to.
Frustrated with himself, he shook his head and rested his face in his palms, fingers pressing against his closed eyes. Fully tuning out the teacher, Peter pushed the rest of his quickly diminishing energy towards clenching his hands into fists to stop the relentless shivering that didn’t seem to want to leave him alone. His stomach was still in knots but there wasn’t much he could do about that besides running to the bathroom and forcing himself to throw up, which wasn’t a very comforting idea to Peter.
“Hey man, we should have finished the first data box and graph by now. Where’s your paper?” Ned’s voice drifted through the murky cloud swimming around him and Peter couldn’t help the shaky breath that slipped past his chapped lips.
He could practically feel Ned’s incredulous stare as his throat locked up and he felt like he was trying to breathe through wet cotton.
Shit. Maybe he should have left to see the nurse.
“Just gimme a sec,” Peter rasped. The words were spoken before his brain could finish deciding whether or not he wanted to release them. His voice sounded to him as if it were coming from another person, or he was listening to the muffled conversation of people in a different room.
His head became almost weightless in his hands, as if all the oxygen he was desperately trying to bring into his lungs decided to travel the opposite direction instead. It didn’t even feel like he was physically sitting on that crooked stool that made his butt sore, or that someone was definitely speaking to him but he couldn’t give the energy to try and understand them.
The surreality of it made him question for a split second if this was even real at all or if he had fallen asleep and was dreaming this whole time. Did dreams really feel like this?
Like a moment suspended in time. Or more like he knew everything was moving and flowing around him but he was stuck, melting into a state of semi-awareness as his perception of the world began to darken at a faster and faster rate.
Stuck. Stuck. Stuck.
A hand grasped his arm.
Peter gasped.
He was suddenly pulled from that vapid reality and into the one of the present with ringing, high-pitched voices and the unbearable scratching of pencils assaulting him from every direction. Peter looked around furiously trying to identify the source of the burning touch that had shaken him from his in-between state, sucking in harsh breath after breath as if he hadn’t inhaled oxygen in the last 100 years.
He didn’t realize he was standing, stool on the floor beside him with a bang, 48 eyeballs staring at him dissolve into himself, unblinking, until Ned was there in front of him, the grip on his arm becoming steadily tighter.
Choking him.
“Peter, what the fuck is wrong with you?”
Why did they sound angry. Why did they sound angry.
Peter blinked, eyes burning but still his brain could not make sense of the overwhelming colors and shapes closing in on his vision. This wasn’t right. He should’ve called Happy, gone home.
“PETER”
“PETER”
“PETER”
“PET—“
If he was in his right mind, he knew he probably would’ve been able to convince himself his own name wasn’t currently trying to suffocate him, but at that moment all he wanted in the world was the hand on his arm off and the voices to stop. He shoved the hand away as hard as he could, closed his eyes, and screamed.
And then he blinked.
“Hey man, we should’ve finished the first data box and graph by now. Where’s your paper?” Ned’s relaxed gaze bounced off Peter’s in a way of familiarity that jolted Peter back into a wave of such sudden stillness, he felt like he could hear his own heart beating much too slowly within the room of students talking to each other lightly as they finished their assignment.
He squeezed his eyes open and shut, bringing his hand down to where his blank paper rested beneath his elbow, pencil rolled almost to the very edge of the desk. His hand slowly pushed the paper towards Ned in a motion that he did not consciously register because his mind was still reeling in the utter chasm of stillness he found himself in.
It was like dunking your head underwater or closing the door to a room of violent chaos and hearing the muffled screams fade away.
His fingertips still trembled against the desktop.
“I’ve gotta go.”
Peter stood up from his desk, and walked towards the door at the front of the room, not bothering to ask his teacher for permission as he quickly opened the door and left down the hallway, floating within each echoing step against the tile, desperately hoping he would last long enough to make it home.