Stranded

Peter set his jaw and used his good arm to tear a thick strip of his shirt off from the left side, which was still largely unburned. 

He wasn’t getting out of the tower - not from the roof exit, at least - and that was that. Might as well be productive. He didn’t have time to wallow, and that was a mantra echoed by his inner thoughts as well as the increasingly frustrated noises and thrashing that was coming from two floors and much further below.

He reached around - ignoring the screaming pain it sent arcing up him - and pressed the center of the cloth against his bleeding shoulder. He wrapped the strip around it a couple of times before tying it into a tight knot around front.

It’d probably bleed through, but it was a temporary fix, at least, and hopefully his healing would kick up soon.

Thundering footsteps barreled towards the staircase and Peter only had a moment to spare in jumping up on the ceiling - hissing through his teeth at the wave of pain that crashed through him and the way his left arm held on weakly in comparison to his right - before the stairwell doorway to the 96th floor slammed open hard enough to embed itself into the wall with a solid crack and the crumbling of drywall .

Peter could see Steve from between the large gap that split the left and right sides of the stairways, and he could do nothing but watch as Steve’s head snapped up, and their eyes met.

Peter’s gut sank at the man’s expression; it was even worse than when he saw him before. If he looked livid earlier, now he looked completely feral with rage. 

His hands weren’t fisted; they were held stiff and claw-like at his sides, twitching like he wanted to grab Peter, to break him, and was impatient to do so.

His eyes were shadowed by his heavy glower that set his brows low above them, and his lips were twisted in a hatred filled snarl, nose furrowed with lines like a rabid dog’s.

“Shnaptain Shmamerica!” Peter cried with false joy, sending out a couple of webs that Steve just. Batted away.

Well, more like the webs didn’t carry enough strength behind their momentum to push him back and pin him against the wall behind him, so they instead just stuck to him like annoying, sticky bracelets. Which was fine. Great.

Steve gave a low rumble - one that Peter was hesitant to call a growl but definitely couldn’t be classified as anything else - and started forward.

“Down, boy,” Peter tittered nervously, fidgeting with a heady cocktail of anxiety induced unease and adrenaline. He was definitely not at a secure enough height if Steve climbed up the stairs.

Sure, he was on the ceiling, but that didn’t matter much when it couldn’t be more than eight or nine feet off the ground, and Steve could definitely make up the two or three foot difference from his base height with a solid, super-serumed jump.

As if having the same train of thought, Steve strode up the stairs, taking them a good five at a time, and Peter coiled up like he was about to spring at the man - attack him - and Steve reacted in turn, stilling momentarily to be in a better position to face the incoming dispute.

Peter propelled himself off the ceiling but twisted at the last second, so instead of heading for a collision course with Steve - which, come on, he’d have to be a complete idiot to do that - he shot through the gap in the stairwell sides.

He flew right past Steve - who’d only been a couple steps below the top floor at that point - and came within a hair's breadth of the vicious swipe the man sent his way.

He spared a glance through the very broken door of the 96th floor and caught sight of Clint working on a very nearly free Natasha’s webs. Huh, so that’s why it was only Steve, he thought somewhere in the back of his mind, air whistling past him as his momentum increased and he continued to hurtle down the very long way to the first floor. Or the very quick way, he mused faintly.

Not a great idea. 

Steve at least still had enough sense to not try the same maneuver, but he was clambering down the stairs at a faster-than-Peter-would’ve-liked pace. 

The floors continued to pass by Peter at a dizzying speed, each level just a blur in his sight as he hurtled towards the ground.

This was a very, very bad idea.

He didn’t have room to slow his momentum gradually - to do a pendulum-like swing - like when he was in larger spaces such as the streets of Queens.

He didn’t have room for much at all - the gap he was falling through only being about three-by-three feet.

But gravity wasn’t feeling particularly law defying or friendly, and Peter wasn’t feeling particularly like going kersplat, so he squeezed his eyes shut, braced himself, and flung out his arm to catch on a passing railing.

His arm - fuck his arm, the one that’d already been aching to move from his maimed shoulder - wrenched out of its socket, tearing a ragged scream from Peter’s throat as he clung onto the railing with sheer force of will, the sound of his joint popping out of place seemingly echoing in the corridor and his skull along with the grinding of metal being crushed in his white knuckled grip.

His eyes burned, and he kept them shut so no tears could spill out as he threw his other arm up to grab the heavily dented rail and pull himself over it. 

His left arm dangled uselessly, and Peter wanted to just scream and cry, punch something, curl up in a ball, hide, anything, to let out the veritable ticking time bomb of emotions and built up agony that he’d been storing for what probably hadn’t been more than a couple of hours but felt like a veritable lifetime. A horrible, twisted lifetime. A nightmare, really.

But Steve was still rushing down the stairs, several others sounded not far behind, and Peter had to get fucking somewhere before any of them got to his current floor so that he could fix his floppy limb - god, he never wanted to ever call any of his appendages ‘floppy’ ever again - and find somewhere to rest and recoup.

So he grit his teeth, and, though he didn’t grin, he bore with it.