Bells and Aftershocks
The final bell at Midtown High sounded like a distant, ceremonial gong to Tommy Jarvis. It was bright and banal, the sound that ended algebra and started whatever came next: practice, homework, the toothpaste-tasting ritual of bedtime. Today it fluttered against his ears with the same hollow cheer as always, but underneath it, something else hummed. The moment the bell chimed, the world shifted by increments too small to name. A new frequency threaded into the old: sharper edges on the air, a brightness keyed a fraction higher. Tommy rose with the wave of students, backpack strap grinding into his shoulder, eyes scanning for Maya and Liam.
Maya found him fast. brown curls, bright grin, elbows deep in a discussion with a teacher. "Tommy!" she called, already moving. She fell into step beside him, fitting like the missing beat of a song. Liam ambled behind, shoelaces touching pavement rhythmlessly. "So?" he asked, the question thin with friends' curiosity. "Oscorp. We gonna be famous?"
Tommy wanted to be flippant. He wanted to answer in the old voice; light, practiced, the one that fit with pizza and old cartoons. Instead, the edge of the sidewalk pressed into his soles like a memory of a thousand small pricks. He felt the city underfoot as if it were a living map. Voices separated. The confident swagger of the passing varsity kid home from practice was a separate instrument from the conversation two blocks away about weekend plans. He had always noticed the city's noise, but now every thread in the clamor was distinct, readable. He tasted the iron of the cold day in his mouth as if the air itself were metallic.
"Tommy? You okay?" Maya's face was close. Her voice felt like a hand bracing him from falling into the sudden vertigo. He blinked. "Yeah," he lied, the word thin. He could not explain that his right hand seemed to hum, the skin at the webbing between his fingers pricking awake.
They threaded down the block toward the metro. Tommy told himself he'd be fine by the time he reached the subway stairs. He postponed the admission of fear the way other kids postponed homework: by believing time would make it go away. He ignored the tiny pulses in his wrist and the way the traffic light's hum sounded like a different animal. He walked with his friends, smiling when they joked. Inwardly, every step was a negotiation with a body that felt borrowed. He made a silent promise he would not mention the bite. He would figure it out alone, privately. That last bell had rung, and with it came the arithmetic of what secrecy would cost: sleep, normal conversation, the small, bright ease of being nineteen and ordinary.
The Long Walk Home
He didn't take the subway. He said he needed air. He said he needed time to think. Truthfully, he needed a place where nobody could touch him, where the changes could be measured away from prying eyes. Tommy turned his usual route into a circuit down the avenue, past Mrs. Alvarez's bakery that smelled of yeasty sugar, across the little park with its crooked swings. Everything was too close, too clean. A pigeon's wing flashed like a silver blade when it launched; he could sense the down-draft as a distinct vibration beneath his feet. The city was a tapestry of motion, and he had learned, by accident, to read one new thread.
As he walked, he tested himself in small ways. He jogged a block and found himself breathing easily, lungs taking in more than they had a morning ago. The bench where an old man fed crumbs to the birds was a tableau of motion; Tommy watched the birds with a clinical attention that shocked him. each tilt of head, the way claws folded over bread. observations that had always been idle now felt like data. He flexed his fingers under the table and felt the faintest of sparks, a prickle traveling up the tendon as if someone had run a loose electric current along the bone.
A delivery truck backed up two blocks away, its reverse alarm staccato and antagonistic. Where before it had been a background nuisance, now it rang like an alert pistol. He turned automatically to look. An elderly woman stumbled on the curb, a bag of groceries pinwheeling toward a gutter. Without thinking, before fear or calculation even lived in him, tommy lunged. He reached, and his hand closed on the handle of her grocery bag. The motion felt like the answer to a question he had not yet asked. The bag stopped midair, the woman's jaws slackening in gratitude. "Thank you," she breathed. Her face registered him as a blur of motion more than a person. her brain still catching up. Tommy felt his pulse knock against his ribs; he didn't smile. He thanked her, and when he moved away, he recognized the taste of adrenaline: sweet, metallic, addictively precise.
He turned toward his building with the practiced gait of someone who should have been steady but wasn't. It occurred to him, with a casual horror, that a life could tilt on a single precise moment: the bite, a woman's scold, a bus's honk, and that the future had rearranged itself with no permission asked.
Homefront Acts and Small Lies
The apartment door was the threshold of normalcy. If he could convince his mother that nothing was wrong, perhaps the lie would become truth. The hallway smelled of old paint and the day's last garbage. He could hear the tv downstairs through the thin wall. someone laughing at a rerun, and the sound put a small, domestic comfort into his bones. He told himself that when he walked into the kitchen he would take a deep breath, sit, and be his old self: available, mild-mannered, unremarkable.
Dinner smelled of garlic and tomatoes. His mother, gentle-eyed and practical, moved with the rhythm of someone who stitched other people's problems back together for a living. She asked about the trip in that soft, meditative way parents ask about the weather: small scaffolding for conversation, testing the surface of a child's life for cracks. "Did you see anything neat?" she asked, an automatic question filtering through the steam, the clatter of plates.
Tommy answered it with small pieces. "We saw spiders, and..other cool insects They were… engineering on." He chuckled a little too loudly, a brittle sound. His mother raised an eyebrow at the mention of spiders and especially insects. she'd never liked them, and in that instant, her face compressed into the map of mild worry. "Just be careful, ok?" she said, sliding a plate of pasta in front of him. "You youngsters don't know how messed up those labs can be. So..disgusting too.." The words were the sort of admonition that can be both protective and claustrophobic.
He ate mechanically, fork scraping against ceramic, mouth registering salt like a distant sensor. Each bite felt enhanced; flavors slammed into the roof of his mouth with an intensity that left him reeling. He put his fork down before finishing and blamed the early start. "I'll finish up later," he said, and left the table. A lie like a small pebble began to roll down the slope of his day.
Upstairs, in the safety of his room, he flung open his window and let the evening air fan his face. Moonlight filtered through city haze and a car alarm bled somewhere below. In private, the tremoring in his digits was undeniable. He peeled back the adhesive bandage on his thumb, the bite site barely there, already scabbing over, then pressed the pad of the thumb to the webbing between index and thumb. Under the surface of his skin, some new current hummed. a warmth that was not illness exactly, but a living, generalized hunger for movement. He realized the bandage hadn't been to cover blood so much as to hide the mark from prying eyes.
He breathed. He told himself small rational things: venom doesn't reinvent you overnight; it mutates, usually slowly, usually into things that clinical trials can measure. He counted the number of breaths he took and tried to feel the world pull back to ordinary weight. Nothing worked. The city was still ringing like a bell at different frequencies, and he alone was tuned into a frequency that hummed with possibility.
Mirror Work and Private Measurement
Mirrors are cruel things. In Tommy's reflection were familiar bones and a slightly older jawline, but also something else: a hunger in the set of his eyes, a brightness, as if the cornea had been sanded smooth and shone like glass. He flexed his fingers slowly and watched the sinews ripple under the skin. Reflexes ran like short currents up through the arm. He clapped. just once, and the sound seemed to multiply, echoing far more precisely in his head than it should have. When he closed his hand and opened it, the motion was snappier than yesterday, like a rubber band stretched further.
He began experiments because that is how people like him; boys who read too many manuals and imagined improbable outcomes managed the universe. He started with lifting. A stack of textbooks, his entomology volume, a calculus packet, a tattered copy of a superhero anthology, came up without complaint. The weight was normal until he tested it in a different way: a single-finger lift. He hooked one finger under the edge of the top book and straightened his arm. The book rose as if on a small elevator. His throat hummed with disbelief.
He tried jumping next. He stood by his bed and bent, measuring the arc in his head. He sprang and landed with the ease of someone descending a stair. It wasn't that his legs were stronger: though they were..it was the timing, perfect and automatic. Muscles webbed together in sleight that had nothing to do with training and everything to do with a nervous system that had been reprogrammed. He caught himself before he could grin too widely. This wasn't a party trick. This was a catalog entry for a life removed from normalcy.
Fear snaked alongside awe. The two did not cancel one another. They braided, and the braid tightened as night fell and the city kept its varied song. He took notes in a little spiral notebook, times, sensations, a list of what worked and what failed. and underlined each entry like an incantation. The boy who had spent his adolescence cataloging insects now cataloged the ways he had changed. He wrote until his hand cramped.
Fevering Images
Sleep did not come easily. When he finally drifted. an exhausted, thin sleep that felt more like a pause, his dreams were vivid and dangerous. They were not simple night terrors. They were suggestive: scenes discussed by some other mind just beyond his comprehension. He dreamed of descending through layers of the earth: from asphalt to concrete to glass and finally into a room lit by blue LEDs where figures in lab coats moved like shadow puppets. The figures spoke in a language of probabilities and futures. One said a phrase that opened in him like a cut: "Adaptive pathways are self-limiting until introduced." The sentence rung hollow but meaningful; he woke with it sitting in his mouth like copper.
Another dream bent the city into a gigantic web. Buildings were nodes and streets were threads. He was at the center but also at a distance, watching himself move through the threads with a speed that made the world blur; he saw the future versions of himself as well..darker, clothed in a suit that was not cloth but living material, reflective in the night and sharp in the eyes of the citizens who would one day know him as something else entirely.
He woke with the taste of iron, hands sweating, pillow warm with the impression of skin. The sunlight cut a strip through his blinds like a blade. He lay very still. The dreams had the logic of prophecy: they were not instructions but teases. He could not tell if Oscorp's labs were providing glimpses or if his own mind was inventing scenarios to corral what it couldn't yet grasp.
Great — I rewrote Sections 6 and 7 to be much longer, richer, and tightly connected so they flow cleanly into Sections 8–10 you already approved. I kept the same cinematic tone and continuity: Tommy's private testing, small acts of mercy, the dawning scope of his change, then a deeper, slower look at Oscorp's internal response—bureaucracy, analysts, and a watched list that points toward the notification he later receives.
Below are the expanded versions. They're intended to drop straight into Chapter 2 where your earlier draft left off and to lead naturally into the check-in, dreams, and cliffhanger sections.
Test Runs and Accidental Mercy
Tommy's afternoon became an experiment in small margins and large risks. He moved through the city like a thief in daylight, stealing time from the ordinary for the sole purpose of measuring how far his body had changed. The roof of his building was a practice range: low parapets, mismatched drainpipes, a scattering of spent cigarette butts that looked like spent artillery. He climbed at first because he wanted to prove to himself that he could, edging his toes into tiny ledges and feeling the microscopic nubs of brick under his boots with a clarity that was almost obscene. Where before roughness had been texture and texture had been shape, now each chip of masonry reported a distinct personality. grain, slip, the faint give of old mortar.
He tested jumps with a scientist's patience. Start small, test the boundaries, record the results. He marked distances with a piece of chalk: left hand, right hand, both feet. He leapt and felt the time of his muscle fiber shorten and the soft landing of tendon and ligament contract with mathematical neatness. The thrill was immediate! not the giddy leap of a daredevil, but a clean professional satisficing of parameters. After ten repetitions, his lungs were warmed but not taxed; breathing no longer felt like an effort but like an instrument bringing air to a perfectly tuned engine.
Yet it was not only the gifts he cataloged. Each success brought new, tiny alarms. A jump that felt free left a ringing in his ears: a high, thin whistle that faded too slowly to be natural. After one particularly high leap he discovered an odd appetite: not hunger for food, but for motion. He wanted to move again and again, like a runner chasing an endorphin he couldn't quite name. That craving made him anxious, like an itch with the shape of a question.
In the shadows of a narrow side street he tested other things. He flexed his grip on a rusty drainpipe and held himself out horizontally, back parallel to the wall, and felt the web of muscles in his forearms sing. It wasn't brute strength so much as coordination rewired: a handshake between perception and action that happened before thought. He measured the time between seeing and moving and wrote numbers into the back of his notebook. His handwriting jittered with the same tremor he'd felt when he'd first sat down to write earlier: the tremor of a nervous system retuning itself.
The city offered unpaid lessons. A bicycle messenger swore as a teenager misjudged a curb and the bike toppled; instinct took Tommy before he could think. He snatched the bike frame with a motion that was too clean to be luck and steadied the messenger's weight with a single palm, the handlebars not even skittering. The messenger looked as if he'd seen a phantom, gratitude and caution colliding in his face. "Man, thanks, dude." he breathed, eyes wide. It was one of the few times all day that Tommy felt the act of helping register as something beyond an experiment. The relief on the messenger's face was real, uncomplicated: a small, perfect transaction.
Another time, a toddler barreled from between shopping carts, a stroller wobbling dangerously near the curb. Time slipped into a slow-motion parade in Tommy's head—the mother's scream, the toddler's three frantic steps, the horn from a car. He reached the stroller in a blink, braced his shoulder, and kept the child from pitching forward by catching the frame with both hands. He felt every wire, every threaded bolt, as if he could map the stroller's engineering by touch. Afterwards he stood in a corner, pulse hammering, astonished at how ordinary the gratitude that followed felt. It introduced a strange sense of moral gravity more intense than any he had felt in class or at church: the idea that his quickness could mean the difference between a scraped knee and a catastrophe. The weight of that trivial truth settled on him quietly but with teeth.
He kept track of the cost of each miracle, muscle tightness after extended climbs, joint soreness that settled in places athletes told him to ignore, sudden headaches that arrived like trains. He began to notice that his body responded to stress not by flinching but by sharpening: heart, vision, thoughts, each dialed up a notch (bars). Social conversations became more like background radio. He resented it. He resented that he still wanted to hear his friends laugh, to joke about tests and sports, and that his body would not let him stay ordinary even if his mind begged it.
By late afternoon he found himself on the roof, under a sky that bruised toward evening. He sat on the parapet and watched the city fold. His hands were ink-stained from notes, and the bite mark on his thumb pulsed faintly, a tiny red satellite against pale skin. The notebook lay open in his lap like a small map of discovery: times, task results, diagrams. He imagined, briefly and vividly, a ledger somewhere at Oscorp where lab technicians annotated a similar list. readouts, anomalies, a missing line that might correspond to a name.
The thought darkened his mood. Oscorp was not only a place of wonder but a place of advantage. If they realized tonight that something had been released, would they be searching? For containment? For public relations? For scientific curiosity? In the half-light of the city he played scenarios and they each ended the same way: he was alone, and someone else had the leverage.
He climbed down from the roof at dusk not because he was tired but to see if he could still move like a ghost among people. In a bodega near the corner he bought a soda and two donuts. The clerk blinked at him like at reflexive youth and asked, "You okay, kid?" Tommy smiled and said yes. He made it home under a thin dusk veil, the city lights flickering on like small, watchful eyes. The tests had proven things: he could protect, he could climb, he could move with purpose. He had also discovered something bleaker and perhaps truer: he could be found.
When he reached his doorstep his phone buzzed twice with casual messages: Maya, Liam; check-ins that felt suddenly precious. He turned the phone over in his hand, aware, for perhaps the first time, that the ordinary webs of friendship were the only webs that still held him. He put the phone in his pocket and walked into the thin domestic light of his kitchen to face his mother, who asked how his day had gone with a kindness that felt dangerously fragile. He lied again. softly, carefully, because everyone else's peace at the table mattered more than his immediate need to air panic. He would tell himself the truth only when he had to.
Oscorp's Quiet Watch
Oscorp's machinery was designed to make huge things happen as quietly as possible. Down in the analytics room, banks of monitors blinked and sighed, displaying columns of data that, to an outsider, looked like a world of static. Inside, however, the tiny anomalies stood out like bruises on pale skin. The footage from the afternoon's field trip was the center of one such bruise. A grainy clip, recorded at low resolution, showed a figure moving near a bank of specimen chambers in a way that made the motion-tracking software briefly hiccup and flag the frames. The quickness registered not as a single bright KPI but as a pattern: a flank of unaccounted-for velocity between two secure perimeters.
Dr. Eliza Forrester's lab had a tone of professional restraint. Forrester herself was in the room that evening, sleeves rolled, fingernails nipped down to work, eyes that counted in decimals. She watched the footage with a kind of cool attention that made the junior analysts rearrange their chairs in empathy for their own nerves. On a whiteboard to the side someone had scrawled "Subject Arachne" in block letters, then beneath it a set of times and scanned badges. A young security analyst tapped a key and brought up the roster of the field trip: faces, names, school IDs. When Tommy Jarvis's photo came up next to a badge timestamped from the maintenance exit, there was a small, almost microscopically human intake of breath from the analyst.
"We lost a contact window here," he said, pointing at a gap in the frame. "Clearance logs show someone exited through service at 14:15. But the badge readout shows him present at 13:57. The door log gives us a fifteen-minute window. It's not a long window, but-.." he let the unfinished sentence hang like an arrow.
Forrester had a habit of not making large motions. Instead she steepled her fingers and said, "Run facial recognition across the external cameras. Cross-check public transit logs, hospital ER admissions, and student attendance sheets. Quietly. No broadcast. We do not need a PR panic." Her voice had an edge that suggested she knew exactly which alarms to pull and which to hide. She pushed a thin stack of plates off to the side, revealing a small, annotated notebook open to a page about adaptive neurobiology. possibly her private thinking?, possibly salvage for future grants..
Someone in the room asked about the odd spider strain, whether it had expedited neurochemical changes in trial subjects, and a chewed pencil across the conference table tapped. "Our protocols dictate containment, idiot." a security chief said in a blunt voice. "But containment can blow up into headlines. We prioritize research integrity and discretion. If there's a chance a subject was exposed and isn't in standard medical channels then a watch protocol starts. Low profile. Quiet outreach." He grimaced as if the words themselves were a bad taste.
The research assistants bent over their keyboards and compiled a small list. The first step afterward was not to call the police but to run discrete background checks: social media, school rosters, medical records where available in partner health systems. A junior analyst, more used to parsing genomic sequences than human drama, compiled a list and fed it into a private watchlist system used for mitigating lab exposure events. The system was dry and bureaucratic: names, phone numbers, match confidence. Tommy Jarvis's entry came up with a 78% match from external cameras and an 86% match on an attendance roster; his name had been flagged as "Unverified Movement. possible exposure?. N/A."
The analyst sent a soft ping through an internal channel: Flagged: Jarvis, Tommy. Recommend: field follow-up. The message hit the inbox of a man who lived less like a scientist and more like a problem-solver. an operative with a private security firm Oscorp used for "sensitive" incidents. He had a modest office with a single plant and a row of technical reports that smelled faintly of old coffee. His fingers moved over the keyboard in a rhythm that suggested practice. He did not need Forrester to tell him to move; the watchlist itself was the instruction.
The operative initiated a quiet chain of events: request approval from legal (already pre-cleared for "non-public safety checks"), a brief on-site observation that would not require badge access (use unmarked vehicles, non-uniform agents), and a small secondary web-scan for social media posts referencing the field trip. All of it was designed to be invisible unless visibility was required. The operative added a note. single words typed with care: Steady. Observe. Do not engage unless necessary. The request auto-generated an internal ticket and then an email, the tiny bureaucratic paper-trail that had the effect of delegating human focus to a name on a list.
At 6:02 p.m., the system returned confirmation: External camera match confirmed. 78%, Attendance roster match 86%, Field trip roster verified. The analyst closed the file but not before adding an extra notch. an instruction to cross-check local hospital ER admissions and urgent care logs that evening in case the subject presented with anything odd. "We don't want an unexpected variable," she said.
Meanwhile, down in an operations center that hummed like a sleeping beast, an offsite private operative watched street-level cameras of blocks near Tommy's apartment building. He watched for movement patterns that suggested unusual activity. someone avoiding cameras, someone for whom pattern recognition failed because the motion was too fast. The operative had been watching similar cases only as numbers and outcomes until tonight; now a name appeared on his screen, and he felt the small human drill of curiosity sharpen into professional focus. He slid on a plain coat, checked a list of legal permissions, and thumbed his phone.
The email that would later find its way into Tommy's inbox was drafted in this calm small world of watchlists and quiet checks. It read in clinical terms: "UNIDENTIFIED SUBJECT Must be a potential exposure! Match: Jarvis, Tommy. Recommended follow-up: Discreet contact and observation." The sender attached camera stills and a single page of annotated time stamps. The message was terse, careful: not a demand for immediate capture, but a flag, a nudge toward attention.
No alarms were sounded that night in the city. The watchlist did its job: it turned an unstable moment into a file that could be revisited, a name in a ledger, a dot on a map that might one day matter. For the people in the room? it meant absolute little. another task, another data point. For Tommy Jarvis, unknown and at home downstairs, it was the first time a corporation's quiet gears began to grind in response to him. In the operations room the operative closed his laptop and opened his phone, adding a small note into the secure app: Observe. Report. Maintain discretion. He started the car.
Back at Tommy's block the evening deepened. On a window above, tiny lights blinked on like a field of fireflies. Inside, a boy cataloged his powers in a notebook, unaware that, beyond the safety of his curtains, the machinery of a corporate behemoth had quietly cataloged him back
The Check-In
Maya texted him twice that evening. Her messages were the small bright arrows of normal life. "Hey, you ok? You seemed pale today." Then a photo: a silly selfie with Liam pulling a face beside her. Tommy stared at the image until the pixels blurred. He typed back an emoji and a joke about late buses. He didn't say anything about the way the shadows had whispered in his ear all afternoon.
Liam called instead, which was easier. "Dude, you're being weird. Spill. Or I'll tell Maya something embarrassing." Liam's tone was half tease, half serious. "You know how we said being famous would be lame? We're not actually prepared." Tommy smiled into the phone, thinking of Liam's easy grin. He wanted to share the truth: that he had the urge to climb walls, that his hands now felt like instruments, that strangers had become crystal clear. Instead, he told him he was tired, that the school trip had been "intense," and some parts of Oscorp were spooky. It was a partial truth, and the words felt safer.
After he hung up, a different muffled sound intruded, the faint click of a notification on his mother's old phone downstairs. He imagined the email that had left the government official at Oscorp's desk: marked confidential, handled carefully. He imagined the spreadsheets, the phone calls, the people who would choose containment over courtesy. He imagined himself through the eyes of men who had never crouched on the ledge of a roof to breathe a city's air.
Dark Dreams and Mapping Lines
The night deepened into a black that felt thick as oil. Tommy lay awake, cataloging the day in slow motion. He revisited each scene in his head, slowing the timeline and pausing on the details: the sting of the bite, the blink of Dr. Forrester's eyes when she'd looked at him, the alarm's sudden staccato. He tried to measure anger at Oscorp in shapes he could live with: negligence, corporate overreach, fate. Each felt inadequate and too small.
Sleep finally came like a soft rope, and it dragged him into images that might have been memories or warnings. In the first, he was climbing a lattice of steel that stretched across the skyline, each bar a line of calculation. In the second, he watched himself in a window of a distant building, the city a stitched web. A figure watched him from across the gap: a silhouette that moved with the deliberate economy of someone who did not care if later heroes were men or monsters. The silhouette's head cocked, and it felt like a recorded program marking him for interest. He woke with his heart pounding and the echo of that observation in his blood.
He felt the weight of a small, private, terrifying truth: power did not make wishes come true. It magnified. It made choices visible.
The Night's Edge
He woke once more to a soft metallic percussion that might have been the city or might have been inside his skull. The apartment was gray with moonlight. Tommy's fingers twitched for no reason he could name. He realized he had been dreaming of webs and that the webs felt like a solution to a problem whose edges had not become clear yet.
At 2:12 a.m., the phone beside his bed vibrated with an unknown number. A moment later, his email pinged. Both blinked the same single message in different forms: an automated alert from a private database confirmation service. Oscorp's internal watchlist had a hit. A human operator had verified an anomaly and added a cross-reference. The notification contained nothing more than a code and a short line: UNIDENTIFIED SUBJECT. Match: JARVIS, TOMMY. FLAG FOR FOLLOW-UP. The screen glowed as if the words themselves were a pulse.
Tommy stared at the message, the blood in his veins loud and insistent. The words meant nothing and everything. He left his room to find his mother's voicemail, the little icon showing a missed call from Dr. Forrester's office. she had left a message earlier in the evening when her team had been calling school administrators for follow-up. It said, "If Tommy needs any help, tell him to call. this may be nothing but in the current climate we need to be careful."
He stood in the hallway, phone in his hand, moonlight on his face. The world felt very thin between him and the rest of it. For the first time in hours, he thought of what it might mean to be found.
On the roof, a figure moved beyond the glare of the nearest streetlight: someone in a slim, dark coat who watched the block with a patience that felt like intent. From below, Tommy felt the hair on the back of his neck rise. There is a different clarity you get when someone is watching you who is not curious and is not friendly. Something in the air tightened, and a small, cold realization formed: the bite was not a closed event. Whatever had happened inside that lab was unfolding.
He slid his phone into his pocket and walked to the window. Across the street he could see the silhouette again, the observer as precise as a camera. His body answered before the thought. He felt the edges of something within him stir like new instruments tuning. It was a readiness that did not belong to his old life. He clenched his jaw and could feel his teeth press hard enough to hurt.
The city breathed a tired, indifferent sigh around him. He thought of his mother sleeping down the hall, of Maya and Liam's oblivious jokes. He thought of the email that had blinked its cold sentence across the screen. He pressed his fingers to the bite mark between his thumb and forefinger. It pricked faintly, almost like a pulse.
Tommy closed the window and drew the curtains. The silhouette across the street bent its head for a second longer and then melted back into the dark. The day had stretched into something impossible. Somewhere at Oscorp, a spreadsheet had his name on it. Somewhere else, a person in a coat had decided to watch. For the first time, Tommy Jarvis understood that the change in him was not a secret that would stay small. He felt the responsibility of it like a weight and a possibility, and both felt heavier than he could lift alone.
He slid back into bed and tried to sleep. The city hummed, and inside him, in the very tendons and nerves, something new and relentless woke and kept vigil.