Chapter Text
He could not remember.
He could not remember how he ended up in this white padded room.
His mind was a mess of fragmented memories, most of which he was suppressing. Consciously keeping his mind as blank as possible.
He could not remember when his routine, as irregular as it was, became nothing but a strip-down, hose-down, a meal, and metal tables.
He tries not to remember what happens on those metal tables, but pain is a difficult thing to forget.
He could not remember the last time he had the strength to even dream of escape.
He could not remember when his everyday clothes had become a straight jacket, shock collar and muzzle, modified with a metal plate between his lips so he wouldn't be able to bite his tongue.
He could not remember... His name... He has been subject 0801 for too long.
He could not remember whether there was anyone who would be looking for him.
There must not be. They must have forgotten him the way he had them, or... he vaguely recalls a thundering gunshot and the overpowering smell of blood. There must not be.
ALONE. alone. alone.
He pushed the thought away violently. He was shaking again.
He could not remember, retracted deep into his mind as he was. There was nothing but darkness.
The darkness was safe; it was a quiet embrace. Better than the blinding light and screaming pain outside.
He wanted to keep remembering once. Tried to hold on to memories of a worn smile, a quiet laugh, but the harder he held on, the more quickly they faded. It was better this way. Better to feel nothing at all, better to not feel relief in memories, because coming back to reality hurts worse every time.
He sat curled up in himself in his usual corner of the cell in an attempt to make himself as small as possible. As though maybe if he was small enough they would forget about him. They never did. They always came. Eventually.
When they came he almost always ended up on that table.
He was sweating, the jacket clinging uncomfortably as shivers wracked his body. His thoughts fuzzy and harder to control.
Cold steel. Vibranium cuffs. Drugs. Scalpels.
He was losing the careful control he kept on his thoughts, and he realised distantly that he probably had a fever.
At first his advanced healing had excited them. They would often test how far they could push his body. Any experiments they could conjure up from the most rotten parts of their brains, justifying it for the advancement of science. Their greed to be remembered as pioneers outweighing the lives lost under their scalpels. The satisfaction and the delight that their quest for knowledge gave them have shifted to other areas. The lab rat was no longer performing the same way. His physiology was regressing. He could feel it approaching.
His body was no longer a miracle to study, he was just a discarded experiment to get stripped for parts. He has lost count of how many organs they have harvested. They grew back, slower each time, like his body was giving up.
How could he blame his body when he himself has given up? It was only a matter of time before they came to remove his heart and brain. There would be no coming back from that.
Death. He has smelled it before, and he reeks of it.
A fever was not a good sign.
When they came to him and it wasn’t to take him to the table it was worse.
He remembers the first time it happened.
It was one of the scientists, a pudgy man with thinning hair. When he was strapped onto the table the man would always leer and pat his cheek in a demeaning way. The smell of antiseptic barely covering the scent of blood and stale coffee that clung to him. One day he came back, after the table, after he was thrown back into his cell. The man had pressed him down, smiling all the time. He had begged, even though he had told himself he would not beg again -but that was for the table. Begging had not worked on the table and it didn’t work then either. He had cried, but that had not stopped the man. In fact he seemed to enjoy it more.
The next time it happened he had ripped out the scientist's throat with his newly required fangs.
That's when the muzzle became standard.
Even though that man was gone, others periodically filled the gap.
The subject shuddered and banged his head against the padded wall, once again suppressing, willing for silence. Adrift in an ocean of darkness.
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A slow tingling started down his spine and he stirred.
With sudden and violent force his senses screamed at him, different from the half hearted stirring that came when the guards or people with the lab coats came. Stronger than it had been in a long time.
His head snapped up to where the air in the centre of the room was vibrating slightly. Alive. The shimmering air is stirring in a strange way.
His head snapped to the camera where he knew they were watching and back to where the air seemed to be collapsing in on itself. It was dark and light all at once. Flashes of colours he once knew but could no longer identify. His person began glitching. Being made and unmade at impossible speed. His body, somehow his and not. Pieces of him and others like him, pieces of his past he barely remembers. Hadn’t dared think of it for years maybe.
Gravity became non-existent as he lifted off the ground.
He did not fight it as he was pulled by the vacuum, did not even attempt to stick to the floor, having long since lost the will to fight anything.
He disappeared through the swirling black hole like tear just as guards armed with cattle prods burst through the door but the portal closed with a woosh as soon as he was through it.
He was yanked, being dragged by a force he could not name.
His senses pulled taught, connected to a web of seemingly endless lives.
Him but not.
Snapshots of lives so similar to his. Lives that could have been his. People who are him, all their lives achingly familiar and yet so different. The same spider-bite, the same life-altering deaths, familiar faces he feared to recall.
And suddenly he had a name… a past.
Peter Parker.
Spiderman.
That was who he was once upon a time, but it was distant. He hasn’t been that in a long time.
The dragging stopped with a jolt and he felt a cold thrill through his body, muscles spasming. Breath through his nose coming in desperate gasps. His heart felt like it was being gripped, torn apart, inspected.
His mind still felt fuzzy and disconnected.
Time suspended.
Was it a fever dream? Or was this death?
Then the force was back with sudden explosiveness, different this time.
Where previously he was getting pulled towards something this was a push.
It felt like a rejection.
And in the depths of his mind he understood, he wasn't Peter Parker anymore. He wasn't Spiderman. Not in the same capacity those others had been. He cannot answer a call directed at someone who didn’t exist anymore.
He was subject 0801. Nothing but a lab rat to get visected over and over. He was reduced to a glorified science experiment. There was just a hollow shell left where a person and symbol used to be.
He vaguely wondered if he would forever be in this in-between space, another more loud part of him screamed for anything, anything other than going back where he came from. A quiet place where he can finally rest.
The fear still gripped him violently as he was seemingly pushed toward where he came from and he whimpered.
His eyes were squeezed shut before he felt himself get violently expelled from the web of worlds.
He rocketed through the sky clipping a building with enough force to snap bones. Despite that he could not help but sigh in relief because he was outside. Now he could remember that there was a world outside the walls he had been trapped in.
His relief did not last long.
He had forgotten, as isolated as he had been in the labs, how loud the outside world was. There had been sound in the lab, the soundproofing of his cell had been good for average individuals, but he had still been able to hear the movement of the staff in the underground lab and the screams of the other subjects. He had known they were deep underground because of the pressure and density of the earth around the lab. Somewhere mountainous, if the wildlife was any indication. There had also been an underground river. He would use the sound to lull himself into some semblance of sleep more often than not.
So the sudden influx of city life was too much for his senses and his already fragile mind state.
He could not cover his head with his arms as he crashed through the glass of a giant clock face.
The sound of the glass shattering was deafening.
Too much
He hit the opposite wall with a dull thud, his head ringing from the impact, the fever, the overwhelming overload on his senses.
He could almost feel his mind cracking under the pressure of stimulus he had been deprived of for years.
Sirens wailing, guns firing, electricity, shouting, a symphony of noises that made a city.
Vibrations... the world around him was vibrating. Moving to a rhythm he had long since lost the beat to. Shaking in his skull.
He could not breathe the air, feeling suffocating with exhaust fumes, alcohol, urine, pheromones, gunpowder, explosives and blood. The city was drenched in the smell of blood and death.
He was whimpering again, banging his head into the floor begging some unknown entity to make it all stop.
His focus was drawn to a nearby presence, the sound of cursing and scuffling movement and he finally opened his eyes, his senses trying hard to lock on to a woman in a wheelchair. She had a baton in each hand, arms raised in defence. Her heart was pounding, or was it his?
The environment was still too loud her lips were moving but he could not lock in to what she was saying. The wall of monitors behind her were screaming too loudly. Why was there so much electricity in this building?
He banged his head on the floor again.
She shifted toward him, her combat readiness shifting towards concern.
He realised he was crying, drool pooling in the corners of his mouth from the metal plate shoved between his jaw where the muzzle kept his mouth firmly locked in place.
He was still banging his head and the lady was still speaking, rolling closer now, it grated against his senses.
His danger sense had not stopped buzzing since he had landed but now they were screaming again. A figure appeared through the broken clock face almost melting from the shadows.
It was so hard to focus.
A tall and intimidating figure, face obscured by a cowl and a cloak fluttering behind him in the gentle breeze that felt like stinging sand to his enhanced senses.
The figure’s entire focus was on him, scanning for a threat as he moved towards him to place himself between the woman and him.
A door to his other side banged open and he whimpered again at the sound echoing in his head.
Another man stood there, escrima sticks buzzing with electricity. He could not help the whimper that escaped him. Flashes of phantom pain shuddering through his body. Fear that they had already found him, ready to herd him back to his cell. He could already feel the cattleprod pressing firmly against his ribs.
Subject 0801 was shuffling himself backwards into a corner trying to make himself as small as possible.
He registered that he was leaving smears of blood behind him but he didn't feel anything, his senses still scrambling at all the new inputs, the bodily pain more familiar than everything else going on.
He could feel himself shutting down.
The noise became a one-tonal scream, the world around him bleeding into an image he cannot comprehend, slowly fading, his senses shutting down as he lost consciousness, and blessed darkness embraced him once more. He silently hoped forever.