A/N: ... Hi.

So, you guys are all really nice, and you wanted me to update again, and... well, I tried to resist. I had convinced myself that I was not going to update again. Nope, Nopedy Nope. Heck, I even deleted the other chapters from my files. Didn't do much to stop me.

Well, don't expect updates to be fast. Once a month, or once a fortnight, at most. I don't think my writing style has changed much. The story is incredibly bad, the plot and actual writing (and Lord forbid, the A/Ns...) even more so. But I'm gonna follow the original Plot-line anyway. I hope you're happy now.

Um, enjoy.

When he first awoke, the world around him was a sea of blurred shapes and unruly colours. He barely registered the person kneeling beside him before he fell back asleep.

The second time he woke up, he was alone. His vision swam like a shoal of agitated fish, and he felt like he was floating on a fuzzy, blue cloud. He fell asleep.

The third time he came back to the world, the shapes had fuzzed back together and the colours had found their place, although it looked strangely red-tinted, as though he was looking through an autumn coloured lens.

There was someone next to him again, but whoever they were, they were nothing more than a shadow. A silhouette. His eyelids slipped closed, and once again, he fell asleep.

The fourth time he found his consciousness, he stayed awake for longer. The colours were their normal selves again. There was someone by what he recalled seemed to be a door. There was an orange-yellow glow coming from behind it. There was murmured talking- or was it loud? He couldn't quite tell, but everything sounded strangely blurry, as if he was under water.

Then the door slammed shut and suddenly all of his senses were awake and alive, bleating danger like a hyper-active rattlesnake... until it went away.

The person- an elderly woman, by the looks of it, had an old face, but the spark of youth was in her eyes. She had tired wrinkles under them, but her smile was just as warm as always. For a moment, he thought her to be an entirely different person, but her eyes were entirely different... Mrs. Mason?

He croaked out a strange noise, spindly and wretched, but his message seemed to have been conveyed easily enough.

A dab of fondness creakily joined her welcoming grin, well-worn and kind. "Would you like a drink, dear?" Peter nodded weakly.

She took a jug and a plastic cup from the night-stand that he had not noticed before. The cup was and ugly, unreasonably bright mustard yellow. He squinted at it, but drank from it when she helped him sit up. It felt like holy water on his sandy-textured throat.

He paused when the cup was half empty, and turned his eyes to Mrs. Mason's glittering ones. "Better?" She asked, and he nodded again.

"Wh-... Wha-...t?" He managed to hack out before his throat gave out to the burning heat of flickering pain.

She seemed to understand, but grimaced. It was a strange look on her face. He didn't like it.

"Well, the other morning, we were kind of surprised... Tommie came down and said that you were still in bed." She folded her hands. "I was used to not seeing you in the mornings, so I didn't really think anything was wrong until he told us that you were twisting and turning and boiling to the touch. And you wouldn't wake up... I knew something was wrong."

Peter took a drink as he mulled the information over. He always thought that his increased healing rate would prevent any more illnesses... was something wrong? Had he missed something? Was he losing his powers?

He thought back to when he was Spider-man, the other night. He had been shot by an arrow... the arrow! After he was hit, he had felt strangely sluggish and weak. What had been in that arrow? Why had it taken so long for his body to work out all of its remnants? Pesticides, he joked to himself.

Mrs. Mason poured herself a drink too (this cup was an unattractive, grey-blue-purple colour. Interestingly, both looked well-loved and looked after despite their ill-favourable colours) and took a sip herself.

"It was obvious you were ill. I thought at first that it was a cold, or maybe the flu, (I've seen my fair share of those), but you definitely weren't waking up, and I was a little worried. I called a doctor..." Peter tensed, but if she noticed, Mrs. Mason didn't comment. He wasn't a fan of doctors. Too risky. "... He took your temperature, did some things with those clever little modern contraptions, and told me to just wait it out." She chuckled. "He said it was just some kind of flu, or you had the symptoms of it, anyway." She took another drink. "He told me to give you painkillers if you need them when you wake up, but otherwise you'd be alright in a few days. And you are."

"H-how... long-g?" Peter stammered over his unused words.

Mrs. Mason sat back, thinking. "A few days. Three. Or four. We called school, if that's what you're worried about."

No, that wasn't what Peter was worried about. How many people had seen Spider-man get shot by an arrow? How many people hadn't seen him for the past few days? Who had made the connection? Who thought he was injured? Vulnerable?

The Avengers. They had to know. They had to be searching for him right now, thinking that they could get him while he was at a low.

But, he had to remind himself, they didn't know about Peter. They only knew about Spider-man. If they did know about Peter, they would have come knocking immediately, he was sure.

"N-no... 's fine." He sighed and pushed his head further into the soft and slightly squished pillow. "'M gonna sleep now." He said, before slipping into a deep, mostly undisturbed sleep.

.o0|O|0o.

Two weeks earlier

"Thor!" Steve greeted, as the Asguardian landed (perhaps a little too elegantly for a massive hunk of a man his size) on the Avengers' tower roof. (Last time he had collapsed through a window, which Tony had not been happy about, and had given Thor a thorough berating for it. Thor had looked surprisingly akin to a kicked puppy).

Thor had been in and out of the Avengers' tower a lot recently, as he had been searching relentlessly for his brother. Loki had been eluding them for weeks, (or months, in Thor's case) and they were determined to catch him. But this time, Steve hadn't called him back from some far off African country to talk about his progress... it was about the lead he had come across not too long ago, at the burned down apartment building.

"Captain!" Thor puffed out his chest slightly, showcasing muscles similar to Steve's own, despite being kitted out entirely in Asguardian armour, as usual. "It is good to see you, my friend!"

Steve smiled. "It's good to see you, too, Thor." He gestured to the roof's only exit (apart from flying off the edge). "Would you like to come in? We... we need to talk."

Thor smiled brightly. "Of course! At your leisure."

Steve guided the way to his own floor, and to his rather large room, which was extravagantly decorated, as per Tony's request. It was a little difficult for Steve to get used to, but he knew that Tony meant well, even if he was a little upset at being charged with monitor duty.

Steve sat on one of the chairs in the room, which was directed to face a massive TV, next to another chair, and a sofa between them. It was a sort of sitting room inside of his bedroom, and one he preferred much more to the actual sitting room, up on the 'Family floor'. Thor followed his lead.

There was a silence, not quite uncomfortable, but not very pleasant, either. Any normal person would have tread carefully around such a delicate silence, but Thor never really was normal.

"So!" He exclaimed boisterously. "What was it you wished to speak to me about?"

"W-well," the words came warily as he tried to build sentences to describe his thoughts. "I found... well, there was a fire." Thor nodded. "And it had... some strange witness accounts surrounding it. A ball of fire..." Thor nodded again. The serious look his face had morphed into made him seem more like the battle-worn warrior that he was. "Well, I went to investigate, and... I think it was created by... magic."

.o0|O|0o.

Peter had decided that humour was bad for his health.

He had slept for an entire ten hours after that encounter in the evening; a lot more than he was used to. (He got up this afternoon, good as new, but then started to frantically worry because what if the arrow scratch from his shoulder had been seen? … And then he remembered that he had super-healing). After being force-fed last night's dinner and reassuring Mrs. Mason (and, surprisingly, Thomas) that he was fine, he headed out.

The idea had been to go and find the arrow that had hit him, but he didn't have high hopes. The police, or perhaps some curious soul, or maybe even Hawkeye himself had probably picked it up. He hadn't been told anything about the situation, and the news hadn't reported on it, so he didn't think anything was up, really. But, as it happened, there was police surrounding the entire fight scene. (He briefly wondered if this happened at every one of his skirmishes, or if this one was special, but cast the thought away for later).

Then he had the bright idea to go look for arrows where he had first been spotted by Widow and Pigeon-Boy. They had probably been shooting the same arrows, right? Hopefully. (Actually, he couldn't quite remember if arrows had even been shot there. Everything was a bit blurry).

Well, eventually he had found one, so he decided not to worry too much about it. He had always thought that arrows were kind of expensive, and that Hawkeye would go and collect them, but... he supposed that they had all of the money they needed to craft new ones. Peter snorted to himself.

Inside of the arrow there was some kind of phial, with clear liquid inside.

The next day, just after school, he had observed the mysterious liquid (that was obviously not water), and lo and behold... insecticide.

… Fantastic.