Peter landed on the Parker house roof at 11:43 PM.
He stayed there for a moment. Crouched. Suit still on. The neighborhood spread out around him in every direction. Quiet streets. Lit windows. The distant sound of a television somewhere down the block.
Queens at night felt different from up here. Smaller somehow. More fragile. Like something worth protecting precisely because it didn't know it needed protecting.
He dropped to his bedroom window. Eased it open. Slipped inside without a sound.
The room was dark. Everything exactly as he'd left it. His desk lamp off. His laptop closed. His bed with the covers pulled back from when he'd gotten up in a hurry two hours ago.
Two hours. That's all it had been.
Peter stood in the center of his room and let the suit retract back into the dimensional storage point at his wrist. The dark blue material shimmered and vanished. Suddenly he was just a teenager in jeans and a grey t-shirt standing in his bedroom at midnight.
He sat on the edge of his bed. Looked at his hands.
Normal. Completely normal. No sign of what they'd done forty minutes ago. No web residue. No marks. Nothing.
'Four seconds,' Peter thought. 'Four suspects. Zero injuries.'
He waited to feel something dramatic. Relief or pride or the weight of consequence. What he actually felt was quieter than any of those things. More like the feeling after finishing a very difficult exam. Not elation. Just the clean absence of tension that had been there so long he'd stopped noticing it.
'Okay,' he thought. 'So that's what it feels like.'
"FSIS," Peter said quietly. "Full debrief. Everything you recorded."
"Compiling now." FSIS's voice came through the small earpiece Peter still wore. "Total mission duration from roof entry to rooftop exit: eleven minutes, forty-two seconds. Active engagement duration: four point three seconds. Web fluid expenditure: twelve percent of left cartridge, nine percent of right. Suit integrity: one hundred percent. No damage sustained. Police arrived six minutes fourteen seconds after your departure. All four suspects currently in custody."
"News coverage?"
"Local news has picked up the story. Three eyewitness accounts posted to social media in the last thirty minutes. Video from the employee's phone is gaining traction. Current view count: forty-seven thousand and climbing. The footage shows approximately two seconds of action from the store floor. Your suit is visible. The spider symbol is clearly identifiable. Your face is not."
Peter nodded. "And the web analysis?"
"NYPD forensics has collected samples. Standard procedure for unknown materials at crime scenes. Analysis will take twelve to eighteen hours through normal channels. However." A brief pause. "Stark Industries maintains a consulting contract with the NYPD's materials analysis division. Tony Stark will likely have access to preliminary results within the hour if he's monitoring."
Peter was quiet for a moment. "He's going to know it's synthetic spider silk."
"Almost certainly. His own research into similar materials over the past year makes him uniquely positioned to identify the composition. I estimate a seventy-three percent probability he has already begun running his own analysis based on the social media footage alone."
"And a hundred percent probability he texts me about it."
"I would not dispute that estimate."
Peter lay back on his bed. Stared at the ceiling. The glow-in-the-dark stars Uncle Ben had put up years ago had long since stopped glowing. Just small plastic shapes now. Barely visible in the dark.
He thought about operational protocols. Rules. The framework he'd promised himself on that rooftop.
If Spider-Man was going to exist in public, it needed to exist deliberately. Not reactively. Not because FSIS happened to catch a police scanner alert at the right moment. That had worked tonight. It wouldn't always work. Reactive heroism was how people got sloppy, got caught, got people they loved put in danger.
He needed rules.
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