Author's Note: I realize that I might have gone too far with Peter's torture. I don't even feel good doing this to Peter. I'm still going to finish the chapter and post it.
Reader's discretion advised. Decided to make it an omake. Semi-canon if you want.
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Things go wrong when you leave them unattended for long; Peter Parker belatedly reminded himself in the lively routine he always did when said unattended problem swings back and smacks him across the face with twice the consequence. It had happened to him too many times, with a harsh lesson on pain accompanying every reminder, that one had to wonder when his purported genius would pick up the heavy hitting context clues and fix that bad(currently suicidal) habit.
Now if Peter Parker was a normal kid, the excuse of tests and exams – along with the surprising acquisition of a girlfriend in one Gwen Stacy(along with subsequent public envy), a fellow academic magnate – would have been a moderate excuse for why he tended to forget incredibly important details that usually had dire effects on his personal life. For fortunate and unfortunate reasons, it was not so.
Peter Parker, in his bare early teenage years, fresh off puberty, a localized rebellious phase and fresh off a mutated spider bite(which could've easily been super cancer), decided to take up heroics for extracurriculars.
There was no adult supervision or consent or anything of the sort. Nothing. Just the rabid decision of a yeeway teenager high off super venom juice and an unnatural sense of responsibility and empathy. It was coronated with him jumping out of his window and running on rooftops at 1am.
To summarize, Peter Parker, despite his upright qualities, was usually in the bad situations he was prone to finding himself in due to one bad life-structuring decision and his penchant for forgetting long-term details. For someone with predictive foresight senses, he was a sucker for consequences for his forgetfulness that lacked the highlighted foresight.
With all that said and done, he was partially to blame for relaxing when the Green Goblin suddenly stopped his participation bonus of weekly terrorism and went quiet for almost a month. No maniacal laugh, no exploding pumpkin, no hostage situation. Nothing. The Goblin went complete radio silent for a month.
In Peter's defense, he had remained in a high state of alert after their last scuffle, expecting the green tinted villain to show up at any time and wreck up the day but he didn't.
He had been contemplating the likelihood that the Green Goblin was improving his gear like he seemed to do after every encounter but unfortunately for him, his single-minded focus disintegrated when he suddenly found himself with the status of being Gwen Stacy's boyfriend.
Through a series of coincidences, she had not only figured out his secret identity(thankfully not telling her father) but had also discovered Mr. Isaac's shop and the real purpose of it.
After a lengthy awkward loop of teenage explanations, a berating lecture where he subscribed to the titles of 'webhead' and 'idiot', innocent flirting and personal opinions, and a few days of processing, they had joined lips for some reason and then followed it up by doing something incredibly risqué in school, in front of other students to boot; they had held hands to lunch.
It was a whole week of confusing events and a major highlight in Peter Parker's life that he slowly started relaxing, especially with Gwen's insistence and help, and could finally go about his day in a normal pace that he also stopped paying focus to just what the Goblin was getting up to on his sabbatical.
If he had done that instead of enjoying his time as a normal high schooler(which he made an express decision not to be when he picked up heroics) and having long hours of sleep and long minutes calls with his girlfriend, then he wouldn't have been so shocked and horrified when the Goblin finally showed up and brutalized his whole body with mocking ease.
His punches had done practically nothing since the Goblin just laughed out loud every time he punched him.
"Put your back into it, Spider-Man, or I'll be tempted to take it." He had said that while stepping on his spine and pulling on the left arm until it was dislocated at the shoulder.
"Hmm~" he had sniffed the air deliriously when Peter finally cried out in pain, taking sadistic delights in Peter's torture.
"Cry more! Cry more!" He howled as he kept pulling on Peter's arm, making the young hero scream out in greater pain.
If that had been it then Peter would have licked his wounds, crying alone in his dark room as his shoulder slowly healed.
"Hahahahaha! Do you like it? I call it my Nightmare Gas. I made it just for you, you know."
Never in his life would he have thought that this level of fear was something that the human brain could handle. It did not matter if he knew he was hallucinating as his mind and body were gripped tight with terror.
His eyes were bubbling with hot tears while his spider senses went haywire, registering phantom sensations and screaming at danger that wasn't there. Fear clogged his throat so much that he couldn't tell if the exposed face behind the Goblin mask was a real face or a hallucination. The unnatural glowing eyes and sharp fangs plagued his mind with vivid scenarios that paralyzed his limbs with fear.
The nightmare and the ghoulish laugh had warped his head so much that he didn't even know when his left knee was crushed.
"Oh puny Peter Parker. How sad." The jeering gargle punctured his ear drums. "Don't break now, Pete. Believe me there's a lot I haven't tried yet. We'll be playing together for a long time."
He cried and rejected the nightmarish scenes of similar plays in his scarred mind, not knowing if his mouth even made the words. If this was what awaited him every time he would fight the Goblin then he wouldn't leave the house.
"And if you don't come out to play…" he laughed. The sound had already become something Peter dreaded. "I'll come and drag you out from your house. And maybe your Aunt May too."
Peter couldn't even pray for it to end because the prayers too turned into nightmares.
It was so bad that he didn't know when the nightmares stopped. All he knew was that he was trying his best hobble away from the laughing demon that was taunting his broken form.
Its curved talons gripped his face with beastly sadism. He could no longer make out what words were being said, only trying his best to push the demon away. He succeeded some times, forcing him to push out every pint of his strength to shove the thing off him, but it never lasted as it came back to grab and drag him down into the sea of screaming dismembered bodies while laughing maliciously.
Peter did not know how long the nightmare had lasted. His mind felt as his days had passed but his body did not feel the same way.
Slowly, as time went by, he started feeling himself breathing and then started feeling his limbs as well as the searing flashes of pain from the broken limbs. In fact every part of his body was sending signals of pain to his still-clogged brain.
His face was filled with tears and snot while his heart kept hammering blood to his body despite the weight of fear that was gripping it.
"W-wh-ere," his limbs, fingers and vision were all shaking as he slowly turned his head to find out where he was. It was already dark out and his vision was heavily blurry from the tears, dirt and the nervous breakdown his whole body was slowly recovering from.
As if to spite him for one more laugh, his vision cleared enough to catch the person that was leaning on the wall a few meters from him.
"Fi-finally b-back… idiot." Gwen said weakly, smiling despite the blood dropping down her face.
His breath caught. Despite the trauma that his body was still submerged in, his cursed sharp mind instantly put together what happened, earning him a sharp headache that he failed to react to.
"M-me… I d-did tha-that…"
"Who knew," she hissed sharply and grabbed her side tightly, "who knew a big boy like you was afraid of a needle."
The smile on her face was brittle but it was aimed directly at Peter for him to see. "Don't worry, it's mostly cosmetic. You are much worse."
His vision started blurring and his breath came out in sharp stops, his entire body hurting as a panic attack set in.
"Peter!" Gwen hissed but gritted her teeth through it. "Peter, look at me! Look at me! I'm fine. I'm fine."
"Gwen, I'm… I'm…" The words couldn't form no matter how much he tried to force something out, anything out. It felt like the weight of the words was suffocating and strangling him.
Gwen shook her head softly as she fought back the tears from her brimmed eyes. "I'm fine. You should worry about yourself, Peter."
She took a steadying breath. "You're much worse, Peter. Oh my God… Peter, oh my God."
She couldn't hold them back so the tears flowed as she continued staring at Peter who looked much much worse that she feared he would stop breathing if she took her eyes off him for an instant. Seeing him as badly injured as he was made fresh tears fall, and him still worrying more about her than himself made fresher tears fall.
They remained like that for quite some time, silently watching the other as myriad thoughts went through their heads prompted by the state of the person in front of them.
"W-What happened?" Peter asked softly, breaking the long silence, still a timbre of fear stained his voice.
"He left." Her voice was so faint as if she was trying not to remember the scene of her words. "You were… you were screaming and crying when I arrived. You… you were screaming so badly Peter. You were haunted. You kept screaming about demons and people dying."
Her voice broke as the scene replayed in her head despite her efforts. Her hiccups grew stronger while Peter could only stare silently as tears started running down his face.
"You couldn't hear me and I couldn't move you away. You almost even webbed me up, idiot." She chuckled amidst her tears and made the futile effort of wiping her tears but they just continued flowing. "I figured you were hallucinating but what could I do about that?"
Peter had already seen the broken injection that was lying near him and had understood what had happened but he still kept quiet and let Gwen speak freely.
"I remembered you always talking about Mr. Isaac selling any type of item you'd ever need, even magic amulets. It was either that or taking you to a hospital, and by everything in me I wanted to call an ambulance, secret identity be damned. I had to run all the way there."
She sighed and this time she didn't wince in pain, which was a vast improvement to before, Peter noted. His eyes went to the empty injection and he couldn't even figure out what was going on in his head.
"I simply told him I needed something that'll stop deep hallucinations. He gave me something called Fear Toxin Antidote, I think. Now that I'm thinking about it, he did make the vial appear in his hands." She shrugged noncommittally, making Peter mentally relieved as her condition truly wasn't as bad as he thought. Not that it absolved him of the guilt sitting on top of his heart.
"I think I threw my wallet at him as I ran out. I hope he isn't mad." She shrugged again. "Anyways, I ran back here and then I had to struggle to get you to take the shot with how you were kicking and screaming. Big baby." She scoffed.
He shouldn't have laughed, not with the confirmation of what he did and especially not after said confirmation, but he couldn't help it. They broke into each other's laugh as they laughed awkwardly in a way that released everything they were currently feeling to the wind.
It would come back, they knew. The fear and trauma and nightmare would come back but still they laughed in a broken sound at an abandoned rooftop.
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A/N: So….. How was it? I wanted to make it canon but the reactions have been equally different. Maybe I went too far?
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Patreøn*com/1stDepth
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