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There was something about web-swinging that always made him feel better.

 

 

 

“…arker!” the voice screamed — loud, distant. Familiar. “Sta…wi…me!”

 

 

 

The feel of the wind rushing through his lungs, the air howling past his ears; a moment, a breath in a heartbeat suspended within time itself where he felt completely weightless.

 

If he didn’t know better, he’d say it felt like he was flying.

 

 

 

  “I sai…sta…me!”

 

 

 

 

       “…puls….crash…!”

 

 

 

 

“Pe..!”

 

 

 

The web snapped taut behind him, flinging him forward; a slingshot loosened from the tallest skyscraper in the city.

 

 

No strings, no chains, no weight.

 

 

Just him, and the golden sprawl of Manhattan dazzling below, each high-rise structure brushing up against his waist as he twisted his body midair, spinning through the yawning spaces between each building — his pulsed thumped high in his throat, each beat a violent spark against his ribs.

 

 

 

He didn’t fight it.

 

 

 

“Squez…aline…stag…ock….!”

 

 

 “..ony!…eed…to…!”

 

                                                                                                                                                                                “PET—

 

—ER!”

 

Pressure suddenly grabbed at his cheeks.

“—Peter!” One hand forcibly clenched at his jaw, shaking his face with urgency, all while the other pried his eyelid wide open. “Stay with me, Parker! I said stay with me!”

A ringing cut through his ear, sharp, blaring. The lights burned into his retinas. All as the grip on his face tightened, fingernails clawing beneath his cheekbone with a thumb digging painfully into the underside of his chin —

— silence shattered as voices crashed in all at once.

“Squeeze that saline, he’s in stage four shock—!”

“Pressure’s bottoming out — diastolic’s forty and falling!”

“Tony, you need to get out of the wa—!”

“—get every ounce of phenylephrine and epinephrine pumped into—”

“Peter! C’mon, kid!” Tony’s face, blurry and distorted at every angle, hovered over him with a voice that tore straight out of his throat — yet barely got into Peter’s ears, the words burrowing through a cotton-wrapped fog that swaddled his mind. “You’ve survived too much to die on us now! COME ON!”

Every syllable struck him like a slap, yanking him up from the darkness with the blunt force of panic.

Then—

“Peter!” A hand sharply slapped at his face. “HEY!” Again. And Again. “Listen to me, kid! Peter! PE—

—TER!”

 

 

 

 

 

He surrendered to the pull of gravity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                  …Thwip!

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                                                                             …Thwip!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 …Thwip!

 

 

A streak of motion flew by him, the buildings blurring into one, the colors morphing into a tie-dyed rainbow. Each swing tilted the world a little more than before, each strand of webbing stretching before he let it go; flipping and spinning in the air until his wrist shot out another anchor to the sky above.

 

Momentum cradled him, unpredictable and precise; a pendulum of red and blue set loose.

 

The free fall down to the streets below sent a surge of adrenaline through his very core, dropping his stomach to the toes of his feet, plunging him through the city that rose straight up to meet him — windows flashing like strobe lights and horns screaming from the veins of traffic.

 

Web-swinging always did make him feel better.

 

 

It was a moment where he always felt the most alive.

 

 

…Thwip!

 

 

 

                                                  …t’wip!

 

 

 

                                                                                                                                                   …t’w…

 

                                                                                                                                                                                                        ….

 

 

 “..ambu…bag…reath…!”

 

There was no more web.

 

 

 

“Cap…wheels…’ast…ough!”

 

No more tether.

 

 

 

“Ta…him! TAKE—

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

 

—HIM!”

 

The hallway tilted.

Lights from above flickered past in staccato bursts, stabbing through the haze coating his eyes. Sound hit him all at once — alarms blaring, metal clattering, voices shouting over each other.

“Use the ambu bag, help his breaths—!”

“—squeeze those fluids!”

“Pressure collapsing! We’re losing it—!”

“Cap, the wheels aren’t moving fast enough!” Tony’s voice broke through the noise — ragged, frantic — somewhere among the blur of hands and motion on either side of the gurney. Peter’s head tilted, and for a second he caught the blur of Mr. Stark’s goatee. Something achingly familiar in the chaos. “Take him! TAKE HIM!”

A large shape, a glisten of red, white and blue, a brick wall stepping in — a strong brick wall.

A gleam of silver broke through the haze, the light touching down on the star that didn’t come from the sky.

There was motion, so fast, so jarring, that his body rocked with it.

Peter’s gaze was unfocused and drifting. His limbs didn’t belong to him anymore. They bounced, dragged, hung weightless against the broad chest of Captain America; the solid weight carrying him fast, while the rest of the world fell away.

 

Boots hammered against the floor.

 

White walls quickly flashed past.

 

Something else was moving him, carrying him, dragging him forward. The air wasn’t free anymore, wasn’t calming. It suddenly felt thick, like syrup — bright and golden and brightbrightbrIGHT!

The heat of an orange glow pressed hard against one side of his face, intensifying with each jolt of motion as his head flopped and bounced, helpless to the rhythm.

 

And then, suddenly —

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Silence.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

No more sound.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

No more air.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Just a thick, velvet black.

 

 

 

 

 

Peter heard himself exhale. A breath too thin to catch.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He fell until there was nothing left for him to fall into.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“…’ead man.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A sound tugged at the edge of nothing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Soft, at first.

 

 

 

 

“……he’s…dead.”

 

 

 

 

 

Then louder.

 

 

 

It cracked, rumbled — the distant scrape of someone’s voice dragging him up by the collar of his own coherency; his eyelids far too heavy to lift past the anchors that weighed them down.

 

 

And yet still, he heard it.

 

 

 

Dead?

 

 

That didn’t make any sense.

 

 

 

 

Who was dead?

 

 

Was he dead?

 

 

 

Did he die? Again?

 

 

And if he was dead, how was he able to web-swing?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

…was he still web-swinging?

 

 

 

 

“I’m goin…ill him.”

 

 

“No…ou’re not…”

 

 

Voices sounded, floated. Some far out of reach, some close enough that he could taste them.

 

 

They tasted like smoke — ashy, burnt.

 

His throat tasted like fire.

 

 

That wasn’t a feeling that came from web-swinging.

 

 

 

“—arton, if you…’on’t thin…or one second—”

 

 

“You know…ou don’t …et to make…kind of…cision. It goe…rough Steve.”

 

 

A beeping monitor pulsed in the background, too slow. Too uneven.

 

Every pause between beeps hung in the air.

 

 

“..hat’s rich, Romanoff. Gues…at? Rogers…out. So I’m…’n charg…”

 

 

The weight on his chest refused to lift. Something pressed against his face — a mask? It hissed every time he inhaled, sinking deep into the hallow space within his core, cooling the inflamed tissue inside his lungs.

 

His ribs fought to rise, with something that wasn’t even there feeling as if he were pinned down. His body refused to obey — too heavy, too slow. Far too weak.

 

 

“Tony—”

 

Another voice broke through, tighter, steel-wrapped.

 

It was the last thing Peter heard, before he heard nothing at all.

 

“—telling you…I’m

—going to kill Osborn.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For the longest time, it was quiet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The silence stretched beyond any strand of webbing he could sling into the sky. Even his hearing had dimmed somewhere along the way, as if his body had stopped trying to stay hinged to the world.

 

Consciousness crept, slowly, pulled in with the drag of his next breath. A heavy ache stirred beneath his ribs, dull pressure gradually blooming behind his eyes.

 

His fingers wouldn’t move, his toes wouldn’t twitch — but his eyes did.

 

Barely.

 

 

But they did.

 

 

It took monumental effort to pry them open; each lid sealed shut, the crust along his lashes turned to glue. His vision returned in broken fragments; jagged and dim, with each slow, resisting blink reaching for clarity.

Shapes around him looked blurry, formless. The lights were too dim, and the curtains on the windows were drawn too tight with thick, heavy fabric that shut away the outside world.

Still, there were gaps that let in shards of pale blue light, the soft and cool tone of an early sunrise filtering in gently through the glass.

His head sank into the pillow, his body reluctant to obey; his gaze drifted aimlessly toward the curtains, where faint light slipped through and washed over the quiet hum of monitors and life-support machines — the kind he’d only ever seen in hospitals.

The machines alike gave out a quiet noise, until finally, his sight settled to rest on a solitary figure at the foot of his bed.

Peter blinked again, even slower this time.

A sharp, electric blue glow clung to the folds of a wrinkled, white button-down shirt; drawing Peter’s eyes to the device planted center on the man’s chest — casting a fractured cyan color straight ahead, right at him.

Through the fragile crack of his heavy lids, his gaze locked onto that shirt. The collar was undone, and there was an absence of any tie hanging around his neck, with both sleeves haphazardly rolled to his elbows.

It wasn’t the disarray of clothing that caught Peter’s attention.

It was that strange, blue glowing device. One that looked oddly like an arc reactor.

But somehow different.

“…wh’a…?” his voice croaked, barely more than a whisper. There was an exhaustion in his bones heavier than anything he’d ever felt before. And he had actually died once before — Peter squeezed his eyes shut tight, fighting through the cobwebs that muddled his ability to think clearly.

If he’d died once before, that meant he was alive now.

Dead people never felt this tired, did they? Peter had never felt so tired before in his entire life.

But life meant he was alive.

Holy shit, was he alive?

“Shhh.”

Tony’s whisper broke through his haze, drawing his attention.

Peter lifted his head from the single pillow behind his neck, his vision going in-and-out of focus as he watched the man press a lazy finger to his lips.

“Don’t wanna wake your plasma partner over there.”

Without much effort, Tony nodded his head off toward the side.

With every ounce of effort Peter could muster up, he turned his head that way — his eyes heavy with exhaustion, fighting to make sense of the blurred, indistinct shapes around him.

The teal glow of Tony’s arc reactor, mixed with the hushed sky working its way through closed curtains, left shadows across the multitude of medical equipment lining the space between two beds.

Slowly, Peter realized there were two beds in the room, each sitting side by side.

Slowly, he realized he was laying in one of those two beds.

Even with blurry vision, certain details pushed through — a sleeveless white tank top, dark blue combat pants, black boots planted loosely at the foot of the bed. Those were the clearest things he could grasp, anchoring the silhouette beside him.

It wasn’t until Peter’s eyes drifted away from the neighboring bed that he noticed it — propped up against the wall, half-lit by the pale spill of morning light.

Captain America’s shield.

Steve’s shield.

The star center of that shield was charred black.

“…ah’h…?” Peter tried again. His vocal cords barely opened, his eyes barely blinked through the cotton that had planted itself firmly in his throat.

Everything sagged under the weight of his fatigue.

At first, he couldn’t quite place the shape beside him; just a broad figure slumped against white sheets, nearly taking up the entire size of the bed he laid in. Machines stood between them, but his eyes still caught the steady rise and fall of a chest, the familiar slope of a shoulder, the faint outline of a jaw he’d seen on pages after pages in many of his history books.

Peter’s brain fought to piece together reality as the realization dawned on him.

By the time it clicked, he already heard Mr. Stark’s voice slipping in through his ears.

“We all took our turns. Obviously,” Tony’s words cut the air, heavy and spent. Peter was just awake enough to notice how exhausted the man sounded. “It was this or nothing, a hail Mary if I’ve ever seen one before. They had to pump you full of enough plasma to run the banks dry.”

Peter couldn’t summon the strength to look back at Tony. His eyes stayed forward, lids drooping under their own weight, fighting to remain open.

Through the haze, he still managed to catch sight of Steve’s motionless form in the bed beside him, framed by the quiet pulse of machines casting muted red and amber glows.

Steve.

Captain America Steve.

Peter’s one eyebrow furrowed — all his strength could afford to spare.

“It’s impressive,” Tony started to say, as if understanding Peter’s confusion from a mile away. “Us Joe Schmoe's, we gave what we could. Hit the wall, tapped out.” He cleared his throat. Hard. “Cap wouldn’t stop. Downright refused. He’s been at it close to…”

Tony’s voice trailed off, just briefly, as if he was looking somewhere to check the time.

“Twelve hours.” An exhausted exhale followed, close to sounding like a whistle. “Pretty sure he’s given you his body weight in plasma by now — twice over. Double that, even. Hard to say, lost count somewhere along the night.”

Each breath slipped through the small gap between Peter’s lips — warm against the plastic mask pressed to his face, cool and steady when it filled his lungs. Almost enough to soothe the burn deep in his chest.

The same burn crept into his eyes, where moisture clung to the red veins branching out from the dark center of his pupils.

He blinked, once.

It did nothing to help.

“Erskine was a genius, no argument there,” Tony’s voice came low and hushed, blending with the steady beep of machines Peter couldn’t place. It filled the silence that came with his dull confusion. “Four liters down and he’s still letting them take more. That’s past dead and still going for anyone else. Even with the serum, Cho’s not sure his heart can handle that kind of stress. Already had one episode of near-fatal arrhythmia. She swears the next time he won’t bounce back.”

Too weak to close his mouth, Peter’s jaw hung slack as he stared ahead. Each breath came shallow and dry, the cold air dragging against the back of his throat and settling like dust on his tongue.

The room wavered at the edges of his vision, refusing to sharpen. Still, his gaze stayed settled on Steve — seen only in spots of color morphed together.

A broad chest rising. The slope of his shoulder. The lower half of his face, darkened with soot, half-hidden beneath the plastic mask secured over his mouth and nose. His eyes and hair remained untouched, spared by the helmet that now rested off to the side next to his shield — both littered with blackened flakes of fire.

Tony’s voice pressed in, low and steady, like he had been speaking for a while.

“…then again, what do I know. She along with everyone else was already putting a toe tag on you the second we got you back here,” he muttered, tired enough that he barely registered past the hum of the monitors when he let out his sigh.

Peter’s eyelids drooped shut, peeling open again in time to see the fog of condensation cloud the mask on Steve’s face. It was the same mask Peter wore; each exhale a thin wisp of proof that they were both still tethered to something.

Tony sighed again, the sound landing closer than before. Peter caught the faint shift of movement from the corner of his eye.

“To be honest with you, kid… I…” His words faltered for a moment, his chair squeaking as he leaned further forward, practically touching the foot of Peter’s bed — his gaze fixed hard on him. “I thought… hell, part of me thought she might be right this time.”

The scent of antiseptic prickled behind Peter’s nose, sharp and sterile behind the oxygen mask. Yet it couldn’t drown out the smoke still etched into his sinuses; bitter and acrid, the phantom scent of flames that hadn’t quite let go.

His focus dragged back to Steve’s face, blanched beneath layers of soot. The dark streaks looked more like cracks than dirt, carving jagged lines across his jaw and staining his skin a harsh, dark gray.

It took a moment, maybe longer, for Peter’s fogged mind to connect the dots.

The streaks of soot.

The smell of smoke.

The fire.

“Pete.” Tony’s voice pulled him back in. Peter managed to shift his gaze just enough to catch the faint lines etched deep into his expression — drained. Defeated. “You haven’t looked that pale since the night you died.”

The steady beeping of machines chimed against his ears, filling the room with a constant rhythm.

Peter all but forced his lips to split apart.

“…h’uh…” he got out.

The next droop of his eyelids brought his gaze downward, his eyes shifting low, briefly catching sight of the bandaged arm pressed firmly against his chest.

A faint crease formed between his brows, a tired V etching deep into his forehead. The limb was completely immobilized — bound tight with medical restraint, held firm against his body. His arm sat cradled in a sling, the swathe immobilizer wrapped snugly around his chest and drawn behind his back.

The steady hum of machines filled the silence of his weakness, their rhythmic beeps mingling with the gentle rush of oxygen flowing in and out of his lungs.

Peter’s gaze stayed fixed — half-lidded, unfocused — but the burn behind his eyes wasn’t just fatigue anymore. He wasn’t even sure his heart was beating right.

Slow…

Then too fast…

…then slow again.

“Forty-three percent blood loss.” Tony somehow answered the question that Peter had never asked. “Nothing short of a miracle that you still had a pulse when we found you.”

Peter couldn’t even see the fingers of his immobilized arm, each digit sluggishly twitching within the sling that held it in place. All he could make out was the char-black debris packed tightly under his fingernails, staining them with a story he didn’t want to re-live.

He forced himself to clench his eyes tight in hopes of finding some coherence. When he opened them again, everything was still blurry, if not worse than before.

Pain flared in his shoulder — slow, thrumming, relentless. It crawled down his spine and hooked a nerve in his neck.

While the room stayed out of focus, the memories stirred with perfect clarity.

“Blood transfusions were off the table,” Tony didn’t need to explain what Peter had come to realize. Looking down at the band on his wrist, bold yellow plastic screamed ALL BLOOD TYPES — SEVERE REACTION, wrapped just above the gauze covering his damaged skin. “Not sure if you remember, but that spider-bite did more to your genetic make-up than just give you super sticky powers and a suspiciously convenient sixth sense.”

For as nonchalant as Tony tried to sound, there was clear tension in his voice.

When Peter’s eyes lingered on the yellow band around his wrist, the quiet strain he heard in Mr. Stark’s words started to make sense.

Piece by piece — the morning light through the windows, the birdsong beyond the walls, the quiet hum of the med bay. All of it wove itself around the slow, sinking realization of what had happened.

His head rolled to the side, more from inertia than intent, and his chin dipped into the aching slope of his broken shoulder— gravity and the absence of strength bringing his gaze back to Tony, still seated in a chair at the foot of his bed.

“…he to’k…my bl’od,” the words tangled weakly, barely a whisper, escaping his lips as his mind drifted where he didn’t want to follow.

The room spun, the edges of his sight dimming. Even as the weight behind his eyes pulled him under, Tony’s voice managed to cut through.

“Yeah…” he eventually managed, no more than breath. “Yeah, he did.”

The quiet that followed wasn’t true silence. Not really. The monitors kept their rhythm. Oxygen threaded through the mask fit snugly around his mouth. Somewhere beyond the window, a bird called out; light and consistent, filling the space between each trembling exhale that fogged the inside of his mask.

Though daylight pressed at the windows, the room remained still, caught in its own quiet pause of time.

Steve laid unmoving. Peter too.

And Tony — elbows digging into his knees, shoulders slumped, spine curled. He sat still at the foot of their beds, stuck as if gravity pinned him there, keeping him nearly as motionless as those he watched over.

“..he…to’k…” Peter’s chest heaved up as he inhaled. “…he to’k…Oz.”

The words hung in the air, thin, weak.

Once again, Tony’s voice barely registered as sound.

“Yeah,” he murmured, nodding slightly. “Yeah, he did.”

For once, it wasn’t silence that followed. It wasn’t the lack of questions, or any answers that came with them.

It was the aftermath of it all.

Peter’s blinks came slow and uneven, each one heavier than the last. When he tried to open his eyes again, the effort failed halfway. The world pressed down against his lashes, his body made of lead, his chin sagging deep into the hollow space of his broken shoulder — as if his muscles had given up completely on holding him upright.

Exhaustion pulled at him, heavier than death ever felt.

In the lingering quiet, he swallowed hard, the lump in his throat tightening until it burned — a quiet war between breath and breaking.

“…he killed…‘arry.”

The words had to crawl their way out — torn, broken. They clawed past the knot in his chest, over frayed vocal cords, and fought against lungs too weak to do anything more than breathe.

And though he got the words out, they were left without any response.

Peter barely managed to peel his eyes open. Just an inch, just enough to see blurred shapes and color. He couldn’t be sure if Tony noticed. Couldn’t even tell if his gaze had found its mark.

A tremble wove through his lips. It caused his voice to shake as he choked out,

“…’mr. ‘ark…I thi’k…I think…he killed Harry.”

Peter didn’t have any say in the exhaustion that took over, no control in how the final phrase left his lips — how he collapsed into himself as his thoughts dimmed and slipped away.

One blink, and he was out.

 

The lounge was quiet first thing in the morning.

It had been all night long.

Sleep had long since been traded for the cold glow of screens, faces lit in shifting shades of blue while shadows flickered across tired eyes. Some hunched over laptops, others curled up on couches; a few sat motionless between dim monitors, bathed in their pale light, each one caught in the same slow-burning urgency that refused to loosen its hold.

It had been quiet all night long — right up until a frustrated sigh abruptly cut through their constant pace of work.

“I’m calling it,” Clint’s voice rasped, dry and rough as his fingers delivered a final strike against the keyboard. “Nothing north of us. Everything up to Maine’s clear.”

The screen’s artificial blue light carved out the exhaustion beneath his eyes. He didn’t need the skylights to tell him the night was ending, his body had made that perfectly clear to him.

Still, he pressed on, relentless even as dawn began to seep through frosted windows. Not a minute had been wasted on his end; he’d been the first in the lounge, locked into the rhythm of work. Within hours the rest had trickled in with him, gathering one by one as the night pulled them together.

The medbay’s waiting rooms were never an option to them. Too bright, too clinical. Too tense. The air was always suffocating, pressing down on them.

When one of their own was hurt, it wasn’t the waiting rooms where they gathered.

“Anything from Air Forces, Rhodey?” Natasha tilted her head from the couch, legs folded loosely beneath her. The laptop balanced lightly against her thighs, a faint glow catching on the black leather still clinging to her from the night before. Over it she’d thrown on a soft gray hoodie, half-zipped and sliding from her shoulder, the casual layer failing to disguise how little she’d paused to change.

Though quiet, her voice still carried across the room — just enough to reach Rhodey. Any softer, and the TV’s low hum would’ve swallowed it whole.

“Absolutely nothing,” Rhodey answered without ever glancing up. He sat at the table opposite of Clint, nearest the kitchen, having claimed every inch of surface with five open laptops and a tangle of cords. “My contact at NORAD’s been combing radar grids since oh-two-hundred. Not a blip. If Norman’s moving, it’s not through the skies. I can promise you that much.”

“Then where the hell could he have gone?” Sam’s thumb stilled on the remote mid-switch through channels, the bite in his tone sharper than the glare against his face. The light from the screen caught on the bandages winding his forearm and the row of stitches across his bruised eyebrow. “There’s no way that thing just vanished into the ground.”

From across the way, Clint huffed. Loudly.

“You saw how deep that crater went. That thing punched a hole straight through the New York zip code.” Clint’s eyes flicked to his empty coffee cup, his jaw tight with irritation. He shoved his chair back hard enough to rattle the legs, rising with a noticeable limp to his step as he headed toward the kitchen. “And anything that can WWE body slam Thor of Asgard isn’t something I care to know is wandering around freely downtown.”

Sam noticeably rolled his eyes as Clint walked past, heading straight for the kitchen and — to no one’s surprise — the coffee pot that had been finished off only a short while ago.

It had been a long night for all of them, clear in the sharp, almost angry motion from Clint as he tossed soggy coffee grounds into the trash. The heavy thwack! of stale residue hitting the bin sounded like the brew had somehow offended him.

Without hesitation, he set about making a fresh pot.

Rhodey raised an eyebrow at the dramatics, but otherwise didn’t address the archer’s temperament.

“Nothing’s come up all night,” his voice carried across the room as he rolled his head from side to side, trying to ease the stiffness that had settled in hours ago. “No radar pings, no satellite drifts, no data feed corruption. Not even Tony’s tech can pick up a trace.”

Rhodey let the silence stretch before finally lifting his gaze, his eyes drifting past Natasha and Clint in turn. “It’s obvious that wherever he’s gone, it’s somewhere we can’t detect.”

The aromatic scent of freshly brewed coffee began to waft into the sitting lounge as the hot steam from the machine hissed in the air, filling the space where there would’ve been any silence — that, along with Clint impatiently tapping the side of his spoon against the kitchen counter top.

“What if that’s it?” Natasha’s question broke through the lull like a brick to ice. She made sure to direct her gaze to the others when asking, “What if we can’t detect him?”

The question settled over with an undeniable weight, pressing into the space with a coldness that nearly felt too brutal to bear.

“Figures.” Sam frowned, lowering the remote to the TV with a tight clench of his jaw. “The one time I’d actually tolerate Stark’s technobabble.”

The scrape of chair legs across the floor cut through the low murmur of the TV.

“Think about it,” Rhodey said, rising up from his seat. “This Oz thing — according to its documents, it’s what the symbiote was modeled after. Same genetic framework and all.” He leaned over the table, dragging one laptop closer while nudging another aside. “And when Peter had that infection going on in the jungle, we couldn’t track a damn thing on him. No heat signature, no biometric readings, nothing.” He unplugged one thing only to plug in another, all while directing his attention to the center of the room. “Maybe that’s why we can’t find this….green thing either. The similarities have to be there, right?”

As Rhodey settled back down into his chair, so did Clint; bringing with him the pot of coffee that he placed squarely next to him on the table.

“Yeah,” Clint scoffed, scooting forward and nearly splashing the pot along the way. He pulled his laptop closer to him once settled in place. “It’s a big giant demonic monster that nearly killed us all — the similarities are definitely there, genius.”

Rhodey watched wordlessly from across the table as Clint’s typing resumed, relentless with harsh clacking showcasing his frustration — fast, steady, and startlingly audible. Though he kept his thoughts to himself, the expression that followed certainly said more words would’ve.

Clint, too focused to notice Rhodey’s silent judgment, lifted the coffee pot to his lips and drank straight from it. His free hand never slowed on the keys, each strike loud and harsh.

“Just give it a chance—!”

The sudden commotion stirred the room.

“Now’s not the time to be risking anything with him,” the voice that followed sounded along with footsteps, multiple sets walking up the staircase leading into the lounge. “We don’t even understand the full risks of exposing him to that volume of Steve’s plasma yet—”

“—which has clearly worked,” Bucky’s voice became louder as he entered the room, finishing the staircase first while also making his presence audibly known. “So let me give some of my own to the damn kid! I can go longer than the others, I can help more than they can! You’re being stupid about this, you’re being overly cautious—!”

“No, no, we’re being just the right amount of cautious with this,” Bruce’s presence was made clear once Bucky had taken the final step into the lounge. “You weren’t here when we first dealt with Peter’s mutated anatomy—”

“Okay, great, got it,” Bucky snapped back. “I’m here now, and I’m watching you drain Steve dry—!”

“Hey—what’s going on?” Natasha was the one to interrupt, her voice cutting through the noise as she twisted around on the couch. The laptop slid from her lap onto the cushion beside her as she craned over the backrest, sharp eyes narrowing toward the commotion at the stairs.

Bucky lingered where he stood, his arms locked tight across his chest and over-top the zipper of his jacket, unwilling to move any further.

Bruce, by contrast, kept ascending — his white lab coat trailing behind him with each step.

“Peter woke up,” he announced, the words leaving him in a rush before anyone had the chance to imagine anything else. Moments later, he sank onto a nearby barstool, his posture folding in on itself. “Tony said he came around for a few minutes. Even managed to talk a little.”

The relief seemed palpable. Even Bruce seemed lighter than he had hours before; his arms still folded across his chest with a hold across his body — yet loose now, more weary than wound tight. Fatigue showed where dread once had, and that alone felt like hope for them.

Bucky, however, wasn’t soothed.

“And it’s possible that Steve’s plasma is the reason for that,” Bucky shoved off the railing, boots striking the floor with purpose as he went straight for Bruce. “So why not double down? Why not give the kid every damn chance to make it through this—!”

Bruce dropped his arms, quickly. “James, for the final time, it doubles the risks—”

“Risks? Really? You wanna talk about risks?” Bucky’s voice sank low as he closed the distance, pressing a finger hard into the front of Bruce’s lab coat. “Steve shouldn’t be the only one risking his life here. You take any more from him and he’s going to die—!”

“—Steve is the one insisting on it, he’s made that very clear to everyone.” Bruce shook his head, firmly, while slowly pushing Bucky’s non-vibranium hand away from him. “I’ve warned him multiple times—”

“Man, think about it for a second,” Sam’s voice cut him off, steady but edged from where he sat on the couch. He didn’t even bother to turn towards them, the remote dangling loosely in his hand before he pointed it half-heartedly in Bucky’s direction. “What happens if all that Captain America stuff in Steve — the serum, his plasma, all of it — ends up hurting Pete even more? You really wanna contribute to all that?” He shook the remote like a punctuation. “I get what Bruce is saying — they really don’t know what they’re doing right now. For all you know, you’re just throwing more fuel on the fire. And me? After last night, I’ve had enough fires to last me a lifetime.”

Bucky’s glare was lethal.

Sam’s total lack of awareness to him was the only reason he survived it.

“Steve’s running himself into the ground and none of you are stopping him — you’re letting him kill himself!” Bucky snapped, throwing his arms up in a way that caused the lights from outside to reflect off the shining black metal of his Vibranium limb.

That reflection of light hit the screen to Clint’s laptop, bringing a scowl to his face as he scooted further down the kitchen table to avoid the interference.

“You really think we’re letting him?” he bit back, sharp with irritation. “I thought you knew him better than any of us did. So much for ‘ol pal Bucky.”

Natasha’s gaze lingered on Clint from where she sat, her eyes narrowing, her lips drawing tight. Her face, normally neutral to expression, showed a flicker of concern at the sudden bout of hostility.

That concern hung in the air unspoken while Clint kept hammering away on his laptop, unaware of the judgment around him.

Just as Bucky’s mouth dropped open with words he clearly wasn’t going to hold back —

“Enough.” Natasha rose from the couch in one fluid, deliberate motion. Her hand lifted, palm outward — slicing the tension between them. “Cut the doom spirals, both of you. They won’t do Steve or Peter any good. We just heard he woke up — that’s progress. That’s good news. We know Peter’s strong, we’ve seen it firsthand. Right now, we need keep our heads clear and stick to what’s real.”

Though Clint had no interest in engaging any further, Bucky’s boots struck the floor in heavy, uneven steps — the sound of a man too exhausted to hide his fraying state of mind.

“Alright. Fine,” he bit out, voice sandpaper-rough. “What’s real is—”

“—I know you want to do more, Bucky,” Natasha sliced through his anger without hesitation, her eyes staying fixed on his, the contrast between her stillness and his outrage nearly sweeping the lounge. “But you don’t go throwing a Molotov at the one thing that’s working just because you’re worried.”

For a moment, Bucky didn’t speak. His jaw worked, the muscle in his cheek ticking like it was trying to hold back the quake building beneath his skin.

“I’m doing the exact thing Steve would do — I’m thinking ahead,” he shot back, his voice dropping low, the words heavy in his throat. “What’s the plan when he crashes, Nat? Huh? What happens when he pushes himself so damn far even these doctors can’t patch him back together — what’s the play then? Any of you got something? Anything?”

A silence snapped tight around them. Bucky’s chest rose and fell too fast, his metal fingers twitched twice; like muscle memory was fighting instinct.

Natasha noticed.

“Steve made a decision,” she finally answered, quiet enough that the others barely caught her voice. It didn’t matter — her stare stayed on Bucky. His stare stayed on hers. “Not because it was safe, and not because it was easy. But because he weighed every consequence and still knew it was the right thing to do.”

Something in her stare loosened, enough to lessen the hard lines around her temples.

“You know better than anyone that when Steve plants himself somewhere, he doesn’t move. He knows that’s where he’s meant to be. And I know you’re just trying to protect him…” Natasha’s features carried a faint shift of familiarity for the situation at hand, a subtle softening that held more comfort than any words she could offer. “But you gotta let him do what he’s chosen to do.”

Bucky’s breath pulled in tight through his teeth, his jaw set as he turned his back on the room.

Nothing else followed.

It left Bruce standing in full view of Natasha, his arms drawing in a little more, as if to hold himself together.

It was saying the obvious, but once looking him over, a deep feeling settled in Natasha’s stomach. One that only grew with the passing silence.

The worry he showed had wound tight once again.

“What is it?” she finally asked, never needing to direct the question with his name.

He lifted his head, almost like he’d felt the question before she’d even spoken it.

By the time his eyes met hers, a few others had turned towards them, their curiosity growing as the seconds went by without an answer.

“It’s— it’s what you said,” Bruce eventually managed, the words halting, dragged down by his exhaustion. A hand scrubbed at his face beneath his glasses before he continued. “Peter’s strong. Mutatedly strong. I just-I keep thinking…if Norman really did take his blood…and if he’s used that blood on himself—“

The sharp CLANK of a keystroke broke through the air like a gunshot.

“You could’ve jumped in at any point during that fight, you know,” Clint shot back, his tone rough and edged. A final, heavy hit on the space bar landed like punctuation. He didn’t bother to look up, but the glare off his monitor said enough. “Would’ve saved us all a world of trouble.”

Bruce sighed with a heavy frown, his hands reaching for his lab coat pockets and digging deep into the fabric. “It wasn’t my choice. I’d been saying all day that it was asinine to even have me there—”

“Oh, sure!” Clint finally snapped, his voice hoarse as it cut across the room. “Because an archer shooting at a ten-foot, fire-breathing goblin demon makes so much more sense!”

His chair creaked as he leaned forward, his eyes still intently locked on the screen in a way that made the bags under his eyes stand out all the more. His fingers hovered midair for a moment — trembling — before falling back into the rhythm of angry keystrokes.

Bruce shook his head, the motion tight, the frustration etched deep into every tired lines of his face.

“Hulk wasn’t coming out,” he apologetically stressed, his voice rough and cracking under the strain — the kind of strain that only intensified when no one jumped in to respond. “He wasn’t coming out. There was nothing I could do! Trust me, I think I would know best when it comes to something like this.”

With each passing second, the clanks between Clint’s frantic keystrokes started to stretch further apart — until they finally came to an abrupt stop, his hands reaching for his face and rubbing harshly at the skin around his eyes.

“I’m just going to say it. I’ll be the one who says it,“ he muttered through a breath that came out more like a groan, dragging his palms over tired eyes one last time before he quickly dropped them to the table. “We reacted, we weren’t proactive. This is all on us.”

From across the table, Rhodey groaned. “Clint, man—”

“No. No, we didn’t protect him. Period,” Clint carried on despite Rhodey’s protest, his hand firmly pointed at the stairs like he could somehow reach the medbay from where they were at. “We knew Osborn was after him. We knew taking him out in public was a risk — and still, we brought him to Tony Stark’s wedding— of all goddamn places, we brought him to Tony Stark’s goddamn wedding—”

“Yeah, and you know what?” Sam twisted around on the sofa, gesturing the TV remote with a firm attitude at Clint. “That’s past tense. I’m not about sitting here and reliving it. That doom and gloom shit doesn’t do any good for anyone—”

Clint huffed, crudely. “History is doomed to repeat itself if you don’t—”

“You’re being pessimistic—”

“Realistic—”

“—both of you. Stop it. Now.” Natasha loudly cut in, raising her voice to be heard over theirs. A harsh V creased at her brow as she switched glances between where Sam sat on the sofa, and where Clint sat at the kitchen table.

The air tightened as her words echoed the lounge, until eventually only the hum of the TV remained.

“We’re not doing this,” she kept her voice low this time around — but managed to cut through the tension with stern leadership. Even she felt how foreign it was on her tongue. “We don’t know how long Steve will be out for, Helen says this could go on for days. On top of that, with Norman still on the loose, that means Peter is still in danger. You all saw what he’s capable of. We can’t start fighting each other now, not with so much at risk.”

Her words hung in the air, heavy and weighted — no different than the silence that followed.

No one argued.

Sam, reluctantly, turned back to the TV while slumping deeper into the couch.

Clint went back to his work — producing little results, but desperate for a task — as the weight of exhaustion pressed in like a second skin, heavy on their shoulders. Slowing every movement.

“Anyone know if Pepper and May are still under protective watch?” Natasha asked quietly, moving to her feet. She stepped around the sofa, coming to stand beside it as her gaze cut across the lounge and toward the kitchen where Rhodey sat.

He leaned back in his chair, arms folding loosely over his chest as he answered.

“May, absolutely.” The slight huff that followed carried into the faint twitch of his lip. It almost looked like a smirk. “Happy isn’t letting her go anywhere anytime soon. I’ll be amazed if she’s able to use the bathroom without him watching over her.”

“What adorable puppy-dog love,” Sam muttered, his thumb absently flipping through the channels. “I’m sure May’s just thrilled.”

“Pepper was escorted back to the compound a little over an hour ago.” Rhodey gently closed one of his many laptops, powering it down while keeping his gaze strictly on Natasha. “Tony insisted on it. I’m not worried  — she’ll be safe here, she’s staying in his quarters for the time being. And until May can travel again, she’s receiving direct updates from Helen and Tony himself.”

Pepper might have been settled safely in his quarters, but everyone knew where Tony’s place was. He hadn’t left Peter’s side in the medbay since the moment Helen allowed him within reach.

They hadn’t expected any less.

For a moment, no one spoke. The reminder of Tony’s absence from the room hung over them like a shadow they didn’t want to acknowledge.

Natasha let the silence stretch, then drew in a slow breath of her own.

“That’s one thing under control, at least,” she murmured, though her tone didn’t carry much relief. Pivoting slightly, she looked toward the kitchen. “What do you think, Bruce? Will Peter be okay after this?”

All eyes shifted to him at once.

Bruce leaned against the barstool to the kitchen island, his shoulders sagging beneath the weight of his lab coat, his fingers picking at the seam of his pocket like he could dig an answer out from the coat itself.

“Honestly? I—it’s impossible to say,” Bruce eventually answered, his gaze drifting somewhere past all of them. He wasn’t about to meet anyone’s eyes. “Helen’s shocked he woke up at all. I mean, forty percent blood loss, that’s… that’s catastrophic. Even with the small amount of his reserve we saved for emergencies — it wasn’t meant to cover something like this.”

A long breath pushed into his lungs, lifting his shoulders before the exhale dragged them down again — heavier than before.

“His healing factor is beyond the point of burn out, with all he’s lost he’s barely sustaining himself through fumes.” Bruce dragged a hand over his mouth, fingers tapping against his cheek bone before he let his arm fall down to his side. “How he stabilizes from… from that level of depletion — if he can — well…there’s no medical precedent for it.”

The only sound that followed was the low drone of the muted television.

Sam, mid-motion with the remote, froze when the channel flipped. His brows perked up as the bright red Breaking News banner flared across the bottom of the screen.

“Hey, guys,” he called out, his thumb tapping the remote to increase the volume while he leaned forward on the couch. “Looks like someone’s finally covering it again.”

The room’s focus shifted as one. Even Rhodey and Clint pulled their eyes from their screens, their faces bathed in the flicker of light as every gaze fixed on the TV across the lounge.

“—reporting live this morning following the destruction of OsCorp’s newly acquired and privately funded biomedical research facility…” the voice of a male news anchor carried over aerial footage from a helicopter circling the site. The camera drifted over weary firefighters still on scene, their silhouettes moving through waves of gray smoke as they doused the last stubborn embers that had refused to go out.

Bucky rotated slightly at the noise, his head following first, his arms crossed tight against his chest before he finally moved to stand beside the others — all of them showing some sort of interest at the news channels broadcast.

“…authorities are attributing the explosion to a faulty gas line buried beneath the construction’s foundation. The explosion took place at roughly seven thirty-six p.m. last night, causing surrounding infrastructure problems and temporary power outages across several neighboring communities. Witnesses described a thunderous blast that sent debris raining down into the Hudson River and the surrounding mileage of Pebble’s Island in Troy, New York. An event like this has officials investigating why those live gas lines remained active in a facility that was supposed to be shuttered.”

In similar stance next to Bucky, Natasha folded her arms across her chest; the sleeves of her hoodie tugged halfway up her forearms as her eyes stayed intently locked on the footage.

“In response to the scale of the destruction, Troy fire officials called in mutual aid from departments across the state, including specialized units from New York City to assist with hazardous materials.”

The camera jolted briefly as the feed cut to reveal the reporter himself — the name Mark Mitchell scrolling beneath him all while he adjusted the aviation headset place around his ears.

“According to NYPD’s Captain George Stacy, who arrived on scene early this morning to coordinate inter-agency support, ‘The priority remains ensuring structural safety and accounting for every responder working within the debris field. We’re treating this as an active investigation until proven otherwise.’ When asked about OsCorp, the New York–based corporation, Captain Stacy — himself from NYPD’s Manhattan division — declined to respond.” He spoke directly into the lens, his expression drawn tight beneath the roar of rotors overhead. “While Fire Chief Tomas Garret of Troy New York hasn’t dismissed the possibility of foul play, preliminary findings indicate the blast was accidental — and residents are grateful the damage wasn’t greater.”

It wasn’t the first time they’d seen any news on the incident — what little of it the networks were actually showing. But it wasn’t the lack of coverage that caught their attention.

One glance at Natasha was all it took for Bucky to recognize the look in her eyes; she was already searching for the cracks in their story.

He turned back to the TV, his reflection in the glass just as intent as hers.

“The Bio-Labs facility, recently bought out by OsCorp, was supposedly set to be in early stages of renovation starting next month. Fortunately for all involved, the building was unoccupied at the time, as Bio-Labs had officially ceased operations there six weeks ago following a full corporate acquisition by OsCorp Industries. And now with OsCorp involved, that’s drawing some scrutiny from the general public and township of Albany County — with residents vocalizing their concerns over undisclosed testing taking place in unstable facilities. Ones that can cause the harm we’ve seen take place today.”

The camera shifted, focusing on shots of hazmat teams in sealed orange suits, their outlines blurred by smoke and flashing sirens.

Rhodey pushed back from his chair and stood, the muted clank of his leg braces following as he rounded the table, keeping close to the kitchen. The same heavy clouds that had been making their way over the compound already stretched across the scene on the TV. It was impossible to tell what was smoke and what was an approaching storm.

The reporter’s voice carried on for a moment longer beneath the whirring of the helicopter blades before the feed cut back to the studio, the image changing into a different backdrop once the newsroom came into focus.

“That’s right, Mark,” The anchor, a composed woman seated behind the desk, glanced briefly down at her notes before meeting the camera again. The lower-third identified her as Kelly Ramirez, GNN News. “Last night’s events occur only eight months after the damage sustained at Troy’s Collar City Bridge, where OsCorp was similarly connected to the investigation.”

She shifted slightly in her chair, the paper in her hand rustling faintly. “A spokesperson from OsCorp released a brief statement this morning saying, quote: ‘We are cooperating fully with local authorities and had no personnel on site at the time of the incident.’ They declined to elaborate on what Bio-Labs may have left behind or what, if anything, OsCorp had begun to install. Nor did they provide a list of names for those with access to the facility before the explosion. The investigation, at this time, is still ongoing.”

The live feed cut to helicopter footage circling the smoking ruin, emergency lights flashing crimson against the early morning skies.

They watched the coverage the way people watched weather that couldn’t be changed.

“Convenient,” Rhodey said at last, exhaling through his nose, the sound sharp enough to cut the quiet. He gave his head a slow shake, the faint clink of his leg brace following as he rounded back to the table. “Real convenient.”

“Too convenient,” Natasha murmured, squeezing s tight until her hands tucked against her ribs, as if holding her temper in place.

Clint’s scoff sounded like gravel against the otherwise still room.

“Why are we pretending to be surprised?” he asked, voice coarse, the cynicism baked into his tone. “It’s Osborn. He’s had every network in the palm of his hands since OsCorp went public on the NASDAQ. You control the stock tickers, you control the story.”

The words hung there, heavy and jagged, their truth too close to the bone for anyone to challenge.

“Stay with us after the break as we take a closer look at OsCorp’s recent acquisitions and the growing debate they’ve sparked around regulation of private research facilities—”

Sam muted the TV before the anchor could finish the sentence, a sharp click cutting through the room. The sudden quiet hit harder than the noise. He tossed the remote onto the couch beside him, not even looking back when it bounced to the floor.

“I can’t stand those two,” he muttered, arms folding as he slumped further into the cushion, his eyes sliding close for a brief rest while the tension in his shoulders made it clear he wouldn’t be going to sleep anytime soon.

The silence that followed felt heavier than the smoke curling on screen, until finally —

 

Bzzzz. Bzzzz.

 

Bzzzz.

 

— it cracked with a vibration, joined with handful of sharp digital pings, each sounding one after the other.

It took time, but eventually, a few heads swiveled in Clint’s direction — silently watching as he dug into his back pocket for the cell phone that laid tucked away. Carelessly, he let it drop on the table and quickly swiped the screen, his frustration showing in every twitch of his hand.

Both Rhodey and Natasha exchanged a glance as he all but growled at the text messages that greeted him.

It was when Clint reached for the half-consumed coffee pot that Rhodey finally intervened.

“Man, stop it with the caffeine already,” he insisted, fighting the coffee pot out of the archer’s grip with a stern look. The look alone should’ve been enough, but he still added, “You’re fried, Barton. Go sleep.”

Clint’s jaw flexed, the muscle in his cheek jumping as he locked his eyes right on Rhodey — not backing down until he had the coffee pot back in his hands.

“Sleep isn’t going to change any of this.”

The words came out rough, more gravel to his voice than normal, coated with the kind of simmering ire that spoke a little too close to home of his assassin days.

Hearing that, no one dared to respond.

“Maybe not,” the voice that followed was the one exception, along with the single hand that touched down on Clint’s shoulder — grabbing it a little too firmly, as if knowing he’d try to pull back back. “But you still need it.”

The gentleness in Natasha’s voice only seemed to wind him tighter; his shoulders pulled up hard beneath her touch, the muscles in his neck bunching as if the smallest kindness threatened to break him more than any blow ever had.

It wasn’t until he looked over at her that his next breath hit rough.

“Clint,” Natasha’s voice landed with quiet finality — a warning, a reassurance. Both at once.

He finally looked at her — really looked — and the edge in his eyes dulled just a fraction. The smell of smoke still clung to them both, mixing with the scent of burnt coffee.

Her grip clenched, and he turned away; his shoulders rigid beneath the half-zipped tactical vest still strapped over his sweat-stained T-shirt. Soot streaked up the sides of his neck, fingerprints of ash pressed along his forehead from where he’d wiped at his face hours ago.

The scrape of the coffee pot against the counter filled the empty air no one dared to touch; the steam steadily rising up between them, curling and catching on the deep lines around Clint’s mouth.

He stared down at the table, watching the dark liquid within the glass tremble faintly as his grip tightened, knuckles whitening under the strain. The silence pressed in around him, the kind that came from shared exhaustion more than peace. Everyone wore it differently.

Sam sat slumped on the couch, eyes half-lidded, barley paying attention to the TV in favor of rest. Bruce kept rubbing at the bridge of his nose where his glasses had left red marks. Rhodey’s exoskeletal braces clicked every time he shifted, his movements slower now, deliberate.

Clint wasn’t any exception to them all, no matter how hard he pretended otherwise.

He finally released the handle, the pot settling with a soft clink as the coffee’s surface stilled.

“Fine,” he muttered, drawing in a shallow breath that almost got caught on the way out. “Fine, you’re right.”

Natasha, as usual, kept her expression neutral. Still, something in the way she exhaled — slow, almost imperceptible — told Clint all he needed to know about her response.

The chair scraped harshly across the floor as he pushed to his feet.

“I, uh…I need to stop and talk to Wanda first,” he muttered, unenthusiastically, gesturing to the doorway with his phone in hand. “She wants me to meet her in the medbay after she says her goodbyes…go over a few things before she leaves.”

That seemed to stir something awake in Sam — literally, as his eyes shot all but wide open, his back quickly turning to reach over the sofa.

“Hold up,” he barked, lurching upright as he craned over the couch. Clint didn’t break stride, just shot him a quick, tired look in passing. “Those two are still taking a leave? During all this? The team’s gunna be down those two?” Sam paused with eyebrows raised high. “During this?”

Clint didn’t bother to stop walking.

“Yep. Plan still stands,” he answered, his eyes dropping to the notification still glowing on his phone. “Take it up with Steve. He’s the one who insisted on it.”

His fingers curled once around the phone, knuckles blanching — the stiffness in his jaw, right alongside the tight set of his mouth, made his opinion clear long before he let the words out.

No one asked for further clarification. They didn’t need to.

The frustration rolling off him said enough.

“Oh, hey, look — another one of Steve’s dumb decisions,” Bucky muttered, all while reaching for the stairway banister behind him, dragging something into his clutch from where he’d last left it. He tossed it across the room without so much a look at the object or a warning to the others. “Here. Take this.”

Mid-step and Clint caught it against his chest with an annoyed grunt, the motion jolting his sore leg as he shifted his weight.

“Give it back to Stark. Or the punk. I don’t care,” Bucky said, twisting his Vibranium wrist once like he needed to shake something off.

Clint didn’t bother with words; the stare he gave Bucky said enough. One that carried all the irritation of a man running on caffeine fumes and zero sleep.

“You know Tony bought that, right?” Rhodey mentioned, finally glancing up from his maze of laptops. “It wasn’t a rental. It doesn’t need to be returned.”

“Don’t care,” Bucky didn’t miss a beat, leaning his hip against the banister railing behind him. “Just get it off my hands.”

“Why do you even have it?” Sam asked, turning halfway on the couch, remote dangling from his fingers. “Who the hell ran out of there with the kid’s jacket? With all that crazy shit going on, who thought it was important to grab his goddamn jacket?”

Bucky gave a painfully apathetic shrug.

“Bug lady says the tree wrapped himself in it,” he muttered, voice so dry it scraped. “Stopped him from going up like kindling.”

A unified grimace swept the room — a beat of silence where, collectively and unintentionally, they all seemed to picture the same thing. And immediately wished they hadn’t.

Clint threw the jacket over his shoulder with an exasperated sigh.

“Great. A botched wedding memento,” he drawled out, the grip on his fabric staying a little too tight. “I’m sure this is going to make Stark’s day.”

As Clint went to leave, Sam turned to look at Bruce instead, his attention snapping away from the doorway just as the archer’s boots carried him out of reach.

“You know, he’s outta line…but he’s right,” Sam said, twisting around on the couch so he could see Bruce clearly, his brows drawing together. “What the hell happened with you back there?”

Without any hesitation, Bruce shot up from the barstool, the legs scraping against the floor. He didn’t bother with an answer — just shoved his hands deeper into his lab coat pockets and made a beeline for the stairs.

“I’ll give Tony that jacket for you, Clint!” he called out, voice pitching up a notch as he hit the first step, not waiting for a response before jogging further down the rest.

A quiet breath slipped from Natasha as she wordlessly watched. For a moment her gaze lingered on Bruce’s retreat, then on the empty space Clint had left behind — two absences settling into the room with their own sort of gravity.

The weight of both exits lingered as she reached for the half-consumed coffee pot on the kitchen table, carrying it with her on the way to the kitchen sink.

 

---

 

“We had a deal, Smythe.”

The voice on the other end cut sharp through the line, low but unmistakably seething.

Spencer pinched the bridge of his nose and leaned back in his oversized leather chair, eyes fixed on the muted television across the room. The live feed still ran in endless rotation — aerial footage of smoke, twisted steel, and flashing lights spreading across the walls of his office. 

A chyron scrolled beneath it, NEWLY ACQUIRED OSCORP FACILITY DESTROYED IN EXPLOSION.

The reflection of the burning debris on the TV flickered across the glossy black surface of his desk, casting warped shadows over the rows of neatly aligned prototypes and polished steel paperweights.

“And a deal is precisely what we still have, General,” Spencer kept his tone level but clipped. One hand hovered near his temple, thumb pressed against his brow as if he could squeeze the tension out through his skull. “That guarantee has never gone away.”

Behind him, floor-to-ceiling windows framed the skyline of Manhattan like his very own audience, the city glinting off the cold chrome accents that filled his space — every surface immaculate, every object placed as if expecting a board of directors to walk in at any moment.

Men in his position didn’t get the luxury of disarray, after all.

“What happened at Bio-Labs is unrelated to our work,” Spencer rotated his chair toward the wall of glass, the city’s steel-and-light horizon reflecting across his lenses. “We have that situation contained—”

“Contained?” Ross’s voice blasted through the receiver, loud enough to cut through the low hum of the OsCorp executive floor. Spencer grimaced, easing the phone an inch from his ear as each shouted syllable jabbed at his eardrum. “Half the state’s newsfeeds are showing live coverage of that crater, and I’ve got senators calling my office demanding to know if my project is about to blow up next! The same project that you’ve stalled for a sixth time! Sixth!” Ross didn’t give either of them a pause before continuing on, “You promised me that formula two goddamn years ago! If you and Osborn have to prorogue this one more time—!”

“Norman is working to a grueling extent, as we speak, to iron out the final kinks in—”

“Bullshit,” Ross snapped. The man’s contempt ripped through the speaker, landing like broken glass. “Osborn is sitting on the beaches of Hanalei Bay sipping Bahama Mama’s while I’m left—!”

“General,” Spencer stressed. Setting the handset between his shoulder and jaw, he freed up one hand to straighten his tie. “OsCorp is as eager as you are to start this partnership with the United States Armed Force. We will provide you the best weapons we possibly can, I still promise you that.” The images of fire-retardant foam and hazmat teams continued to flicker silently, casting his reflection in fractured, shifting light. “And I assure you, we will deliver nothing but our greatest achievements — something that requires patience, if we are to provide the best. After all, Project Rebirth didn’t happen overnight. Neither will this one.”

Spencer’s eyes flicked sideways, catching the muted television in the corner of his vision. The image stuttered through another loop of the smoldering ruin, the aerial camera sweeping past the fractured crater with mechanical indifference.

For a brief moment, the warped reflection of the flames shimmered across his lenses, painting him in a flicker of orange he didn’t turn towards.

The silence on the line stretched — long, brittle, and edged with heat so hot that he could hear Ross breathing through his his teeth.

Spencer waited, patient and poised, as if he had all the time in the world.

“You best guarantee,” Ross finally bit out, “that if Osborn’s name is brought up in court one more time, and I don’t have what I was promised — I’ll be more than happy to help escort him off to my Raft.”

A soft vibration buzzed against Spencer’s palm.

He lowered the phone just enough to glimpse the screen, catching the contact photo first — before his eyes immediately narrowed to the name, the incoming call flashing brightly over Ross’s tirade.

His jaw locked. His pupils constricted.

“Speak of the devil — that’s my good friend on the other line right now,” he cut smoothly through Ross’s rant, already shifting his chair back toward his desk with a push of his heel and dragging his thumb across the screen to redirect the call. “I’ll be in touch with details, General Ross.”

“I want results, Spen—!”

Spencer rose from his chair with a sharp exhale, the leather creaking in protest as he stood. The glow of the televised ruin lit the pinstripes of his suit in harsh, broken lines.

“It’s been days, Norman,” he said without amble, tension coiled so tight it scraped the edge of every word. “Do you have any idea what you’ve put me through? Do you have any idea what the fuck has happened!? You ready to tell me what the hell is going on!?”

For a moment, all Spencer could hear was the low hum of faint electricity within his office. The city lights behind him flickered faintly across the glass, throwing fractured reflections across the corners of his suit.

“Shit — it happened again?” He pinched his eyes shut hard, free hand pressing firmly to his forehead as though he could physically hold back the rising pressure behind his skull. “I assumed with the explosion…shit. Alright…alright.” His voice steadied, cooling as quickly as his mind recalculated. “You made it out, yes?”

A pause.

“Good. Good. Okay, well…silver linings.” Spencer shifted his stance, tightening his grip on the phone as he exhaled through flared nostrils. He rolled his shoulders back, a near-invisible attempt to steady himself. “We lost one thing, but…you gained another.”

With his cell pressed so firmly to his ear it could’ve merged in with his skull, he walked away from his desk and toward a far wall.

“Are you at the penthouse now?” He pivoted slightly, scanning the office with a practiced, clinical sweep — an inventory of what remained controllable. His grip tightened around the phone, knuckles paling. “Good. How long will it take you, now that you have the DNA to fix it?”

Spencer crossed back to his chair and lowered himself into it with deliberate care, spine never touching the backrest. He set one foot on the floor with precision, anchoring himself, using his free hand to flatten on-top the armrest. The leather was cool and polished beneath his palm.

“Okay…alright. I can prolong until then. Make it happen, and make sure to call me with an update. And Norman?”

There was a beat.  Spencer let it hang, staring at his own reflection in the darkened television screen. His tie, pressed neat, combined with his taut, composed expression — all of it covered with the smoke-lit sky dancing over his features. When he spoke again, every syllable landed with precision.

“I suggest you don’t fuck this one up.”

Spencer ended the call with a single, decisive tap.

 

---

 

Bright white walls gave way to rows of glass-panel doors, each room offering brief flashes of movement as Helen and Stephen made their way through the medbay.

“So? You tell me,” Helen started to say, the glow from her tablet strobing across her face without disturbing the steady calm she wore. “Is this science, or is it magic?”

Steady noise flooded the corridor with an unmistakable blend of antiseptic filling the air, carried downward from the ceiling vents on a stream of recycled airflow that Stephen could recognize from miles away — punctuated by the low, unbroken murmur of monitors humming in his ears.

“Neither,” he simply answered, watching the rooms they passed with distant interest. They moved in quiet sync down the corridor, her crisp white lab coat a sharp contrast to his jeans and cardigan. “There’s no principle in all physics that makes any sense of this. I’ve watched universes fold, seen spells bend causality, patched up timelines right before they catastrophically misbehaved...”

Turning a corner together, Stephen’s brow lifted high with a blend of awe and irritation. “And yet somehow, the greatest anomaly in my life has proven to be this sixteen-year-old kid.”

A pair of nurses walked past, each with their own rolling vitals cart, the wheels clicking over the tile with urgent rhythm. The group thinned as one nurse peeled away, falling into step beside Helen and offering her a tablet without a word.

Helen skimmed the readings in a single practiced glance, her thumb flicking across the screen before she handed it back.

“Yes, there’s an increase, but the fluctuation’s still too unstable to call it regenerative,” she firmly stated, already resuming her pace as she called out behind her, “He’s barely out of hypovolemic shock — keep the fluids running and don’t stop the transfusions. Treat him like any other critical patient until I say otherwise.”

The nurse hesitated, brow pinching low. “But if the donor’s levels drop any further—”

“That’s the Captain’s call,” Helen said, cutting cleanly through the doubt. “Transfusions stay on until he stabilizes.”

The nurse nodded, clutching the tablet closer to her body as she hurried off.

As they both proceeded to turn a corner together, Stephen picked up on the subtle break in Cho’s pace. The medbay noise softened the further they went, a brief lull of shuffling footsteps and distant beeps making hallway feel narrower than before.

She brought the tablet closer to her chest and the screen timed out, going dark.

“He shouldn’t be awake so soon,” she murmured, almost to herself. The harsh fluorescent lights stripped her expression down to its bare, tired honesty. “He shouldn’t even be alive.”

Stephen surveyed the hallway, taking in the polished floors along with the familiar sting of antiseptic hanging in the air. All of it was far too ordinary for the kind of situation they were walking into.

“Are we looking at any adverse reactions from the infusions taking place?” he asked, his voice low. The sterile normalcy of the medbay almost felt insultingly small after what they’d endured. Let alone the situation for the very kid he spoke about — one who, he was inclined to agree, shouldn’t be alive.

“Hard to believe, but none so far,” Helen answered, resuming her brisk pace when suddenly, another nurse passed her a tablet mid-walk. She scanned it quickly, exhaling through her nose. “For the amount we’ve cycled and re-cycled into his system, his panels should be a disaster, but they’re coming back normal. Aside from what happens to a body after being wrung out like a sponge — metaphorically speaking, of course.”

One last turn and Stephen found that the corridor ahead of them was bottlenecked with SHIELD agents, four on each wall, two stationed directly outside the singular medbay room at the far end.

Down that hall, the unmistakable sight of Thor stood out among the blue and black uniforms — his back was turned to them all, standing sentinel before the observation window, still armored from the night before. His cape hung heavy over one shoulder, a torn edge singed from the battle.

He didn’t move. Just stared inside with the kind of rigid stillness that spoke louder than anything verbal ever could.

Helen tapped her approval onto the tablet with a practiced flick of her thumb, the faint chirp of confirmation cutting through the low hum of the corridor. She handed the device back to the nurse with a brief nod, already shifting her weight as her body angled toward the observation window.

“We’ve done all we can,” she murmured, her eyes drifting to the glass where Peter and Steve lay side by side — and where Tony sat hunched between them, elbows on his knees, arc reactor casting a dim glow across the quiet vigil he refused to abandon.

Stephen followed her gaze, his own features tightening as he took in the strain carved into Tony’s posture.

“The rest is on them now.”

Without waiting for a response, she stepped away and resumed pace to her own destination; her lab coat trailing in a controlled sweep behind her.

Stephen watched her go, at first hesitant on if he should follow, eventually coming to the decision of continuing his stride towards the singular room at the end of the corridor.

His hands shoved deeper into his jean pockets and he stepped forward, closing the distance with deliberate strides.

“Didn’t realize you had grown so fond of the boy,” Stephen said, tilting his head slightly as he came to stand beside Thor, shoulders loosening just enough to make the comment seem casual — though his eyes were anything but.

His gaze slipped through the glass, catching the rise and fall of Peter’s breath beneath a web of wires and rhythmic whisper of the oxygen. A sight far too familiar for him this year, and that thought along was far too disturbing for someone Peter’s age.

For a moment, Stephen felt the echo of every impossible battle the kid had survived. It was almost impressive how he couldn’t catch a break.

“Hm?” Thor blinked, finally glancing his way. His chin lifted a fraction as though pulled from a far-off thought, shoulders rolling back stiffly as he straightened. “Oh, yes — the tiny Midgardian. He seems to be quite… quite periled, this one.”

His voice, far quieter than average, dipped even lower as his gaze drifted back to the window, softening as he took in the sight ahead.

“But he is protected.”

His words sounded as if his conviction came from centuries before anyone’s time, a surety in his tone that spoke f the hierarchy he once held, and the battles he once led armies into fighting.

Stephen cleared his throat as he shifted his weight and angled slightly toward Thor.

“I take it you’re okay?”

Thor looked to him again — this time slower, as though weighing the question. His fingers flexed at his sides.

“Ah. Yes. Yes…the beast is frighteningly immune to many powers, disturbing as it be. Not even the strength of Mjölnir could bring him to his knees,” he said, jaw tightening as he lifted a hand to rub at the back of his neck. “I have battled creatures forged in realms of fire and shadow, but this… this foe burned with something darker. Something I could not quell.”

Stephen’s expression tightened, the smallest crease forming between his brows. His shoulders drew in, spine straightening to its full height.

“Believe me, I felt it too,” he said quietly, head dipping as one hand slipped free to gesture vaguely in the air — a movement equal parts frustration and grim admission. “I’ve never seen a creature absorb so many spells without faltering. Whatever this man has become… we’d be foolish to think we’ve seen the worst of it.”

A weighted beat passed between them.

Thor gave a weak smile, though it barely lifted one corner of his mouth.

“The battle burned hotter than Muspelheim itself. We have faced fire and ruin today, more than most realms could endure,” he said, offering a thin but earnest smile. “But we are still standing. A feat we must be proud of.”

Stephen drew in a slow breath, arms crossing over his chest as he shot Thor a brief look before turning his eyes back to the window.

“And yet,” he murmured, tone quietly sharpening, “you don’t sound like a man who believes he’s truly fine.”

It wasn’t a question.

Thor’s posture stiffened, freezing as hard as the lull that fell between them. Eyes still looking ahead, he fixed his gaze on the window with a heaviness that could be seen without using words.

“That locator spell you spoke of earlier,” he began, his voice dripping low, his words careful. “You said it will not work for anyone not of blood.”

A taut silence pulled between them — heavy, unmistakable. The air itself seemed to brace, as if even the hallway understood what Thor was truly asking for.

Stephen did too.

“It can, yes,” he corrected softly. “But it takes a great deal of time, and effort, to perform.”

His shoulders shifted, a small, controlled readjustment. Stephen’s fingers curled once against his side before he deliberately slid his hands into his pockets, posture settling into something steadier.

“Especially if the individual is using methods to keep themselves from being found.”

Stephen took a deep breath in, shoulders lifting beneath his cardigan before easing back down. With that, he placed both hands into the pockets of his jeans and left them there.

“Someone like Loki, I can’t guarantee getting through his magic with my own,” Stephen said. “Especially with him not being of blood.”

Thor didn’t look at him — his eyes were still fixed on the window, expression darkening with a quiet, aching honesty.

“He’s not blood, no…” he murmured, his posture giving way — a subtle, aching tilt of the shoulders, as though he were looking at something he desperately wished he could reach. “But he is family.”

Stephen turned slightly, trailing Thor’s gaze one final time. The heavy stillness of the corridor lingered as it bled into the dim, quiet room up ahead.

Inside, Tony had long since given up on the idea of sleep.

In the wake of the night’s carnage, the day collapsed into a strange, muted stillness — not rest, not recovery. Just an absence of screaming alarms and racing hearts.

Monitors ticked in steady intervals around him, the overhead lights nothing but a soft clinical glow that stretched thin shadows across the walls. With the curtains still drawn, he couldn’t even tell it was morning or afternoon outside. Tony preferred it that way.

With just the pad of his thumb, he turned the next page of the book in his hands, the soft rasp of paper slipping in like a sound the room hadn’t ever heard before. It grounded him in a way nothing digital ever did.

No holograms, no touch interface — just a block of paper and old ideas pressed between two covers, all of it stubbornly analog. His fingers kept waiting for the familiar hum of circuitry that never came, leaving him hyper-aware of the grain between the pages, the bendy give of the spine, the way the ink pressed slightly into the fibers.

It required a different kind of attention. A slower one.

One that Tony was strangely — maybe desperately — willing to give.

A shadow shifted over his shoulder, slow at first, steady once it settled. Before Tony could turn around, an arm appeared in his peripheral vision, extending a small paper coffee cup into view.

He blinked at that cup, then at the hand holding it.

“Something to take the edge off.” Pepper stepped into the slanted lamplight, her expression a perfect blend of exhaustion and worry, softened by a practiced warmth she seemed to save only for him.

He looked at her over the rims of his black-framed glasses, one single brow arched high.

“Come on.” Pepper’s mouth twitched into a half-grin. “You were planning to drink after the wedding, anyhow.”

His glasses slid to the bridge of his nose as he leaned in, giving the cup a long, searching stare — one the exhaustion hadn’t managed to dull. Whatever was inside wasn’t coffee. The soft curl of champagne hit him first, threading through the sharp antiseptic that saturated the room.

Looking up from the cup, he was quick to notice Pepper’s once-curly hair was pulled into a loose ponytail, her pale blue button-down half-tucked into dark navy jeans — a sharp contrast to the wedding gown she’d worn only a day ago.

He couldn’t help but think she looked just as beautiful now as she had then.

“Fair point,” Tony murmured, settling the book between his legs so one hand could remove his glasses and the other could take the cup; though not without a smirk too dry for his own good. “Would you look at that — third time’s the charm for us all. Guess that earns us a toast.”

He lifted the cup halfway to his lips, and suddenly stopped.

“Third time we’ve tried for our wedding…” he muttered, voice thinning into something rougher. All the while, his gaze locked intently on Peter, unmoving from the bed. “Third time the kid’s been knocked down like this.”

For all the impossible things Peter had survived, the pallor clinging to him now was something different. His skin looked emptied, leeched. As if someone had drained all his color and took more than he had left to give.

Tony’s chest tightened, a slow, building tension causing his fingers to curl around the cup.

It wasn’t just someone.

He forced the champagne down in one swallow, the burn a poor substitute for anything that would actually numb him.

“Really killing it on the consistency front,” he said under his breath, gaze pinned to Peter like he could hold him together just by staring hard enough.

It had been a hell of a night. They’d gotten back to the compound by the skin of their teeth, even magic barely doing the trick in time. After the blur of chaos, panic, orders being shouted and decisions being made in haste — now, the fallout came in slow motion as the team splintered away in exhaustion.

Leaving Tony alone in the quiet hum of machines, with the single book in his lap.

Behind him, in the bed placed just adjacent to Peter’s, he could hear Steve’s steady breathing continue on in its slow, even rhythm. The kind that didn’t belong to rest so much as sheer physiological, serum-fueled grit that kept him going long after his body should’ve forced him under.

The transfusion line connecting the two beds glowed faintly under the low lights, an unbroken lifeline running from one super-soldier to one kid who should never have needed it.

Even unconscious, Tony had noticed that Steve looked like he was standing guard — jaw slack with exhaustion, but shoulders still set in a soldier’s refusal to quit. For a flicker of a moment, he wondered what he must look like to someone now; what Pepper saw when she looked at him — hunched, sleepless, frayed at the seams, pretending he hadn’t run out of adrenaline hours ago.

Her perfume drifted into the space between them, gentle and grounding, the only thing that felt remotely human after hours of chaos and destruction. He wanted her to stay; selfishly, stupidly, more than anything —

— which, of course, meant he was about to do the opposite.

“Has Rhodey found anything on how Norman got to the chapel?” Pepper’s question reached him from across the room — soft, but loud enough to cut clean through the spiral he’d been sinking into. She shifted into that subtle, wordless rhythm saved for the moments when she could sense he was close to cracking.

She knew him too well.

“Nothing past the FEAST shelter from last week,” Tony sighed out the words more than anything. “And May has no security of any kind in the building. Not a single camera, not a—”

He cut himself off with a groan, the sound dragging out of him. His fingers found the bridge of his nose and pinched hard, wondering how much more pressure the bone could take before breaking.

It was a moot point. As of eight hours ago he’d called in every favor, burned through enough on-hands Stark tech to wire the whole building like Fort Knox. May Parker’s place of employment now had better surveillance than half the Pentagon.

Didn’t change the fact that before last night, Norman had walked in blind. Or worse  — hadn’t needed to.

“There’s no way to see whatever he saw,” Tony muttered, scrubbing at his chin until his hand eventually just decided to settle there. “Something tipped him off to the wedding, it had to have. Just… no way of knowing what.”

He stared straight ahead as he spoke, eyes tracing the lines of tubing that fed into Peter’s arm, the slow rise and fall of his chest. The glow of screens to the monitor cast a hazy glow over the kid’s face, turning him almost translucent — the kind of bloodless white Tony had come to recognize far too often this year.

“As spectacular as Peter is,” Pepper started to say with a small, rueful smile, folding the sleeves of a dress jacket with practiced precision. “He can be a little… forgetful about some things.”

She’d crossed the room almost without him noticing, drawn by the sight of the dark suit jacket draped over the back of the chair — the same one Clint had brought up from the lounge not long ago, smoke still clinging faintly to the fabric.

Her hands were careful, deliberate, smoothing down the lapels like she could iron the night out of them.

Tony hadn’t understood why Peter’s wedding blazer had been returned to him. He also didn’t muster up the energy to ask, or care.

“It doesn’t matter,” he sighed, burrowing his chin further into the palm of his hand. He could tell what she was getting at — the phone Peter sometimes left unlocked, the texts he forgot to delete, the way he tended to overshare when he was excited. The kid was brilliant, sure. But he was also sixteen. Sixteen-year-olds leaked information like sieves.  “Whatever pooch the kid screwed this time, it doesn’t matter.”

He shook his head, his jaw tightening when he reached over to discard the flimsy paper cup on the bedside table. It managed to provide glimpses of both unconscious patients; Peter hooked to a dozen machines just to keep his pulse going, Steve out cold in the next bed, his body giving more than it had any right to.

It all painted a picture Tony had been trying not to look at too closely.

“I should’ve seen this coming.”

His voice went quiet at the end, the air thinning around the words.

Pepper knew — he knew — that he didn’t really blame the kid. Not entirely. Not for this.

Not when the image of that…thing still burned behind his eyes, all teeth and fire and Oz-slick scaled skin.

Pepper finished the last fold, the jacket now a neat rectangle balanced over her arm. She approached him again, footsteps swallowed by the steady machinery, and set the suit on the edge of the side table before resting a hand on the back of his chair.

“They said he woke up.” Gently, she reached down and laid her hand along his forearm — warm, steady, her thumb brushing once in a quiet, wordless check-in.

“Yeah,” Tony swiped at his nose, thumb catching briefly under his eye where the skin had gone raw from too many passes. There was that subtle, wordless rhythm again. She knew him far too well. “Didn’t think he was really there. Almost thought I was talking to myself for a hot minute — kept yammering like an idiot, convinced Sleeping Beauty wasn’t taking notes. No telling how much he actually remembers, what he actually heard…”

His voice trailed off as the memory caught him — the thin, broken whisper from behind the oxygen mask, the way Peter’s eyes had struggled to track anything at all, unfocused and glassy.

Those ragged, barely-there breaths pushing out a truth he shouldn’t have had to hold. How the idea lodged itself so deeply in whatever corner of his mind was still conscious, that it came spilling out of the cobwebs.

 

“He killed Harry.”

 

The words had lodged under his sternum, a splinter he hadn’t figured out how to pull out yet.

“If I had just kept a closer eye on him,” Tony went on, the self-reproach sharpening. “If I hadn’t brought him to the wedding, Osborn wouldn’t have—”

“You’re smart.” Pepper cut in before he could finish the thought, stepping around the chair so he’d have to see her. As she moved, she laid her hand briefly on his shoulder, a subtle anchor pulling him out of the spiral he was disappearing into. “One of the smartest there is, Tony. But not even you can know everything.”

Her tone was gentle, but there was iron beneath it. He’d heard that voice before — in boardrooms, in PR crisis debriefs. But when used with him, Tony was always able to discern more from it. With just a handful of words, she became the anchor that kept him from unraveling any further.

“He was bled dry, Pep.” His voice caught on the edges as he rested his fist against his chin, the bone of his elbow pressed painfully against the armrest of the chair. The reactor’s glow pulsed faint cyan against his shirt, flickering faintly over the back of his hand. “He’s just a kid. How many more times is something like this going to happen to him?”

Three times this year. And all three had one common denominator. 

Tony rubbed a thumb against his lower lip, staring at the kid’s too-pale face. His gaze slid back to the bed, to the too-pale skin, to the yellow band on Peter’s wrist.

“How much more can he survive?”

Tony swallowed, throat working around something that had nothing to do with champagne.

The monitor beeped steadily — infuriatingly steady, like it didn’t understand how close they’d come, just how bad this was. Tony exhaled through his nose, harshly.

He could build a thousand suits, a thousand shields, a thousand contingencies — but none of it ever seemed to be enough to keep Peter out of these beds.

God, he was so damn tired of this view.

Pepper moved in closer, the crease between her brows deepening as she looked from Tony to Peter, and eventually back again.

“If it’s gotta happen to someone…” She slipped an arm around his shoulders, then the other, anchoring him with the full circle of her embrace. “At least it’s happening to someone strong enough to handle it.”

Pepper leaned in and kissed him on the cheek, her lips lingering for a moment longer than usual.

“That goes for you, too.”

He reached back with one hand, fingers closing around her forearm in return — a silent exchange of comfort and steadiness, the kind of wordless promise they’d been throwing back and forth for decades. No ceremony had been needed for them to build that with one another.

For a short pause, he let the weight of everything ease. Let himself breathe in the scent of her perfume instead of smoke and char. Let himself exist in a space where there wasn’t a monster out there wearing Peter’s blood like a trophy.

“Go to Cancún,” he finally said, the words leaving him before he’d managed to make peace with them, though he knew he never really would. “Get away from here — you haven’t had a vacation all year.”

His hand gave her forearm one last squeeze before he let go and reached to the side, placing his glasses beside Peter’s suit jacket and the kid’s face-down phone. The notifications from the group chat SpiderFriends had finally gone silent hours ago — courtesy of his thumb hitting Do Not Disturb before he could break the damn thing into pieces; no repulsors needed.

Pepper scoffed a quiet laugh as she eased her arms from around him, straightening.

“Go on my honeymoon, without my husband?” she asked, one corner of her mouth lifting. She stepped away, the rubber soles of her tennis shoes whispering over the tile — a far cry from the heels she normally wore. “That kind of misses the whole point, don’t you think?”

Tony’s lips twitched into something that almost resembled a smile.

Almost.

He watched her from the corner of his eye as she moved toward one of the unused armchairs against the wall, her posture too alert to pass for relaxed. Everything about the way she eased toward the chair said she planned to stay as long as he needed — and Tony hated how badly he wished he could let that happen.

“I mean it,” he instead insisted, shaking his head, the movement showcasing every inch of his exhaustion. “Take the jet, fly out tonight. The further you’re away from all this—”

“Ah, so that’s why you allowed me back but banished May to Happy’s restraints.” Pepper glanced over her shoulder, a sharper smile cutting through some of the heaviness. “You weren’t ever planning to let me stay.”

“Pep,” Tony said, seriously this time.

She stopped, shoulders drawing in a fraction as she faced him again, the air shifting with the simple turn. A piece of her hair fell into her face, covering the freckles dotted across his cheeks.

Tony straightened a little in his chair, a crease cutting between his brows as the worry he’d been trying to swallow crept into his face.

“With Osborn still out there…”

He didn’t have to finish.

The words frayed and burned out halfway, his gaze dragging back to Peter’s still form as if drawn by gravity. The memory of that thing’s face — what was left of Norman’s face beneath it — flashed hot behind his eyes, with a scream that sounded too much like laughter.

There weren’t enough words in any language to describe it in a way that didn’t feel like he was summoning it back into existence.

His fingers tightened minutely on the hardcover resting in his lap, the board flexing ever so slightly in his grip.

“Whatever we’re up against, I can’t have you near it,” his voice was almost too quiet to hear. His head dropped to the book in his lap, his fingers grazing the spine absentmindedly. “It’s bad enough Peter is.”

He swallowed hard as Pepper crossed back to him, dropping into a low crouch beside his chair so they were eye level.

Once there, she reached up, fingers brushing lightly along his jaw before she leaned in and pressed another kiss to his cheek.

“I meant what I said, Tony. He’s strong.” Pepper gave a ghost of a smile, the kind  that made her freckles stand out like tiny constellations in the sky. “And so are you.”

Tony managed a faint smile in return, something worn at the edges but real enough to reach his eyes, if only for a moment. The hardback in his hands shifted, lifting a little, bringing Pepper’s gaze down to his lap.

She frowned, catching the worn gold lettering stamped across the front.

“Didn’t you say you’d thrown that book out years ago?” Pepper asked, confused.

“Hm?” Tony looked down, blinking, almost as if he forgot he was holding anything at all. He glanced at the hardcover, his thumb resting against the edge where the binding had started to fray. “Oh. Right.”

After a long moment, he gave a small shrug.

“Guess I had a second copy tucked away somewhere.”

She gave him a long, level stare, the kind that told him she’d already pieced together the truth on her own.

“Right,” Pepper drawled out, easily, all while pushing to her feet. “I’ll call you when I land.”

Without moving, she bent down and gave him a brief press of lips. One that tasted like champagne and antiseptic, and everything they’d almost had yesterday.

“Love you,” she whispered.

For a second, Tony thought his sharplnel-damaged-heart was going to punch straight through his ribs.

“Love you,” he whispered back, the words snagging on the way out.

Pepper straightened, smoothing a hand over his hair in a motion that felt almost domestic for the setting. Then she turned, and the automatic doors closed with a soft hiss behind her.

Tony sat there for a moment, the room settling around him again — the steady beep of Peter’s monitor, the low hiss of oxygen, the soft thrum of the transfusion pumps. He blinked once, twice, letting the soundscape of the medbay rebuild itself around the space she’d left.

Then he lowered his eyes.

The open book rested against his legs, the title Art Of War stamped across his vision.

Tony slid his thumb under the next page and turned it.