Spider-Man: VENOM

Sleepless In Manhattan

"Gwen!"

Peter Parker awoke in a cold sweat and sat up starkly in his tiny twin bed and the springs in the mattress groaned at the abrupt motion. Strips of busy light from the city that never sleeps shone into the room through thin cracks in the rugged blinds, one such strip falling across a small pile of red and blue discarded haphazardly on the floor with the rest of the 20 year old's dirtied clothes as if it held no special significance among the shirts and mismatched socks. Peter's eyes found the suit subconsciously and he began to calm. He ran a clammy hand through his hair and tried to control his breathing and slow his rapid pulse, beads of shiny sweat still speckled his forehead and bare chest. It was only a nightmare.

A brutal all-too-recent memory burned forever into his mind like a branding iron. He'd tried many things to forget this one but no matter what, it would dominate his subconscious in his waking hours and his whole being while he slept. And he didn't sleep much anymore. He traced a strip of light with his gaze to the analog alarm clock sitting alone atop his dust-covered dresser. 2:01 AM. No way he was getting back to sleep now.

Peter tossed off the thin sheet covering his lower half and swung his legs over the edge of the bed, planting his feet on the cold apartment floor, and stretched. He cracked his neck and aching upper back and winced with familiarity when rotating his left shoulder joint. A years old injury from a fight with Doc Ock that would probably never fully heal and yet another constant reminder of the heavy toll the spider patterned spandex crumpled across the room was steadily extracting from him every day he chose to put it back on. He picked it up and put it on.

Spider-Man leapt gracefully through the small apartment window and spun onto the side of the building, effortlessly sticking to its surface. He breathed in the cold New York night and slid the glass pane shut behind him. A low cacophony of noise echoed through the city as it always did, but still he noticed it felt unusually quiet. He squinted slightly, the mask's lenses often produced a glare when he was this close to the street level and so he crawled upward, mantling up onto the edge of the roof before springing from it and angling his body down into a dive. He pointed himself aerodynamically as he plummeted, gathering more and more speed as he approached the ground. At almost the last second he flicked his wrist out in the signature gesture and pressed the sleek button on his palm with his two middle fingers, sending a tensile thwip of white webbing to attach itself firmly to a nearby overhang. The web pulled taught and he swung, Tarzan-like, over the brightly lit streets of 5th Avenue.

Even through the refined fibres in the suit, he could always feel the sting of the wind as he flipped and twirled between buildings. Part of him knew that was probably an intentional choice he made every time he redesigned, he loved the feeling and if the suit was ever too thick or armoured he knew that he would miss it; it was freeing, as if he was swinging naked, fully exposed and with nothing to hold back the raw power he had honed from the spider bite 5 years ago. Sometimes the bite still itched. The air on his face, as much as the sounds of the city or the beauty of the skyline from this height, gave Peter what he so desperately needed and couldn't get from anything else in life: an escape. Room to think. When he was younger, more naive, it had been room to clear his head, to focus on the central goal at hand, but now there were always so many things to think about he could hardly keep track of them, let alone clear them from his mind. Gwen was always with him, for one. Her death haunted him worse than anything had, even Ben, and it was precisely because there was nobody to blame but himself. Osborn may have dropped her but he had failed to catch her, and that was undoubtedly worse.

He startled suddenly, and his stomach jumped into his chest. A familiar feeling advising him of danger abruptly came over him and his head snapped around, searching for whatever had set off his senses and halted his train of thought. There. A dark opening at the base of a tall building in the distance caught his attention, partially because it was one of what must be hundreds of Oscorp-owned buildings throughout the city, and Peter swung closer to get a better view, he kicked off of a closer building on his right and backflipped to land on the side of a building to his left. He clambered around the corner of it and got a better view of what he could now see was a dark open doorway to a warehouse or storage unit of some sort. A small Oscorp logo was embossed into the thick metal door that hung above the opening and Peter's chest got tighter. He swallowed his anger, shot a webline to an adjoining construction cat walk and swung himself down, landing gracefully just inside the mysterious unit. It was still too dark to see much anything and his eyes had yet to adjust but his spider sense was going wild. Could it be Norman? Here? What if he's waiting for me? He stepped further in and activated his night vision lenses, his surroundings lit up in infrared and Peter found himself in a shockingly small and even more shockingly empty storage unit. His initial hunch had been right, but only partly and his senses still hadn't subsided in their assault but there was only so much he could find in the bare space. It looked like the unit had been completely cleaned out, stripped of all its contents but nondescript scraps and dust along the concrete floor.