Stranded

Peter blearily opened his eyes as a shiver wracked harshly through his frame, lighting up his nerve endings in every injured place on his body and acting as a very efficient, visceral wake up call.

He was in a slight fetal position, curved in on himself as much as he could be in the tight vent, and his hands were clutched to his chest, fingers bent halfway so that they were held almost like claws, numb.

Numb.

Why the frick were his hands numb? 

Peter jerked his head back, trying to look around himself, and only succeeded in slamming the back of his skull into the side of the metal vent. He made contact with a jarring bang, and his headache returned with a vengeance, pulsing with a heavy throb that echoed in his ears and made him let out a quiet, pained groan.

His fingers twitched slightly, the motion stiff and disjointed, and he was harshly reminded of the most imminent issue at hand.

From his side that was pressed against the bottom of the vent, cold seeped into his skin, chilling him and causing goosebumps to rise across his neck and torso.

A steady breeze ruffled through his hair, pushing the strands into his eyes since the wind was coming from ahead of him.

Peter’s brain took a pause.

Breeze?

Wind?

Another harsh shudder jarred down his spine, reeling him back to the present. 

No, it wasn’t actually wind since Peter was very much still stuck in a vent by his own design. It was a current, though. A fast flowing, nonstop current. Frigid air was being blown through the vent, which could only mean one thing: the AC was on.

Now, normally, this wouldn’t be an issue. It wouldn’t even register as having the potential of being an issue. Air conditioning was a thing; so what? 

However, Peter was currently in the ventilation system where said airflow was being blasted through, the temperature that he was being hit with - in a way that felt like ice needles pricking at his skin - was, or at least felt, substantially lower than normal, the metal of the vents was absorbing the chill and enhancing said coldness, and Peter was very much still highly susceptible to low temperatures thanks to being part spider and thereby lacking the ability to properly thermoregulate. 

Shit.

With an intensity he hadn’t expected, the thought brought up a memory of him and Ned hanging out right after Peter had admitted as much to his friend with a jarring clarity.

-

Ned gaped at him, incredulous for more than a moment, before snapping his jaw shut, gesturing abruptly at Peter’s closet. 

“You have like, zero actual winter clothes!” Ned accused, jerking his other arm up to gesticulate more strongly at Peter’s wardrobe as if just in case his point hadn’t been clear enough to get across.

Peter huffed out a half amused, half defensive laugh. “I technically haven’t been through winter since the bite yet,” he pointed out.

Ned’s eyes squinted. “It’s October, Peter. It’s basically here already,” he deadpanned.

Peter flapped a hand at him, waving him off. “I’ll get a hoodie or something,” he dismissed.

Ned gave him a deadpan look, slapped a hand over his own eyes, and then dragged his palm off his face, giving Peter a still very distinctly unimpressed look, eyebrows raised and expression pointed.

“And a jacket,” Peter hastily tacked on, hands raising in a gesture of peace.

Ned snorted, then straightened up suddenly enough that Peter jerked upright as well, Ned’s expression lighting up. “Ooh! You should get one of those heated blanket things!” he exclaimed. “My Lola got my one for Christmas a couple years back; it caught on fire while I was sleeping and I got some first degree burns,” Ned reminisced.

Peter stared. “Very good review, Ned. Totally makes me wanna buy one,” he said blankly.

Ned nodded along happily enough, and Peter resisted the mild urge to register his friend for a CT scan. 

-

Now, Peter shook his head slightly, snapping back to the situation at hand.

As much as he’d’ve enjoyed letting himself fall back on his memories to ensconce himself away from reality, he clearly didn’t have that as an option at the moment if he wanted to get out of his current predicament as able-bodied as he could manage to be.

Already, he could feel his eyes beginning to droop; it was honestly somewhat of a miracle that he’d managed to wake up in time to catch on to what was happening at all.

He wasn’t sure whether he was feeling the dredges of slumber begin to pull at him again because he was genuinely still exhausted or if it was because of the cold, but the latter definitely had him forcing his eyes back open. He’d read more than one story of people falling asleep with the beginnings of cold-affected tiredness and never waking back up. With his spider abilities, Peter hadn’t yet been able to test if he was affected the same as normal people in that regard or if he’d fall into a spider-like cold coma first, but that was definitely not a risk he was willing to take.

So he shifted onto his stomach - onto his seared torso and aching ribs - and forced his stiff fingers to unbend, planting his hands onto the freezing metal of the vent’s walls, face twisting as the cold of it literally felt as if it was burning his palms.

He clenched his teeth and ignored it as best he could as he started dragging himself forward again, keeping his head ducked down so he didn’t get the full blast of cold air to the face, scalp tingling at the nonstop, chilled current.

He’d like to be able to simply punch his way through the vent and onto the floor below him as he’d done last time, but his keen ears were able to sense through the vibrations around him that, in his current position, that wouldn’t be possible. He was located above a thick ceiling of metal, likely one of the testing labs that were constructed to be able to withstand more or less the force of a literal bomb, mostly considering that that was something that’d been tested in them at least once or twice.

That meant that he couldn’t smash his way through, and, if he tried, he’d only have a broken fist to show for his efforts.

He couldn’t punch upwards either, for obvious reasons. Those being that he very much did not want to bury himself alive if and when everything collapsed on top of him.

His ankle throbbed at the thought, the sensation slightly numbed from the cold - the only thing Peter was currently thankful for the chill over.

But God, was it freezing. He wished he had enough space to turn around so that his back was at least towards the flow instead, but there wasn’t any way he would be going towards the direction Bucky was in even if he could manage to contort himself around with his burned flesh and broken bones.

He dragged himself forwards again, stomach scraping against his bloodied shirt from the shards of glass still lodged in his skin that kept the small wounds from fully closing, burns stinging through their bandages and broken ribs feeling like they were shifting inside him with every movement. 

At least his shoulder was dulled to mostly an aching throb at this point. It would’ve sucked harder if he had to rely on it to pull him along if the wounds to it were still fresh. As it was, his arms were already shaking while he forced them to bend at the elbow, his chest dragging against the freezing metal below him as glacial air whipped across his face. 

Already, he could feel his strength sap out of him with every second that passed, and he had to remind himself that he just had to get past the lab and then he’d be free. That’s it. The length of a lab and then he’d be out of this horrible vent that was blasting air that was way too damn cold to be normal.

His head nodded sluggishly.

Yeah, it was… way too damn cold… to be normal.

He swallowed thickly, fingertips trembling and no doubt blue under his nails.

It was… it felt too cold. To be. To be normal.

He kept dragging himself forward.

Why was it so cold, if it wasn’t… normal?

He accidentally let his ankle drop back down onto the vent from where he’d been keeping it slightly elevated, and a strangled scream tore out of his throat and past his chapped lips as he jolted it back off the ground. Fuck, that hurt so bad; it felt like he’d forced the bone to pierce back out of his skin at an even worse angle, warm blood trickling up his calve. 

And it was all so unnaturally COLD. 

He clenched his teeth hard and pulled forwards again, listening closely to the vibrations; still too solid to force his way through.

There had to be a reason, for the temperature drop.

Tremors were wracking through his frame, though his fingers had lost the same sensation, eerily still and… and almost warm. He’d watched something about that before. How, when someone was so, so cold for too long, they’d start feeling warm again. He remembered that that wasn’t a good thing.

Why, though? Why shouldn’t he be feeling warm? Why was it so cold in the first place? It just didn’t happen naturally. They were in the Tower, for God’s sake. It was regulated - 

He barely managed to stop himself from freezing in place, instead forcing his arms to pump faster, to pull harder, uncaring now of the piercing pain in his sternum and in so many other parts of his body.

It was regulated. The systems were regulated. Of course they were. They were in Stark freaking Tower. The question was: who was regulating them now?

His arms were shaking so hard at this point - despite the warmth slowly creeping up past his wrists - that he had to exert an actual mental effort in continuing the process, unable to solely rely on the motions since he couldn’t feel them fully, hands numb despite the heat he could swear he could feel in them.

His mind snagged back on the room before Thor. The one with the Iron Man suit. How the door to it had seemingly opened for him. How there’d been an unmanned suit lying in wait for him. How someone must have activated it. Must’ve activated both mechanisms. 

“Tony,” Peter rasped, eyes squeezing shut and lips twisting as he kept moving sluggishly, nose and cheeks no doubt red from the biting chill. 

It had to be him. The reason for the suit’s attack. The reason Peter had been trapped in there with it. Why the air was now turned down to as cold as it could go while Peter was stuck in the vents with no immediate way to escape. There was no other plausible explanation. There couldn’t be. If it’d been just the vents alone, maybe, maybe Peter could’ve believed. But there was only one person who had full access to the Tower controls even while it was on lockdown - of whatever kind. Even this Box-In Protocol, apparently. It didn’t even matter if the man could talk right now; hell, he wouldn’t even need to put in a password to gain access. He had plenty of control from facial and fingerprint recognition alone. 

Which meant that Peter - mind blaring and desperate to escape the vents that seemed to close in on him with every second as they threatened to encase him in a freezing grasp that’d never release its hold - was either being purposefully flushed out by his mentor or being put to death by the same cause.

Maybe Iron Man thought either option was viable. Maybe it didn’t matter which way. So long as the end result was the same.

A quiet whimper strangled its way out of Peter, and he slammed a fist into the side of the vent, denting it and listening desperately for the responding vibrations.

His fingers nearly lost their numb grip on the metal panels as he sensed it.

Up ahead, so close and yet seemingly endlessly far, it finished.

Just drywall and empty space below.

A way out

Unbarred.

Unblocked.

Breakable and usable and holding who knows what lying in wait for him to come barreling straight through without any chance to prepare, his skin feeling like ice as his mind turned fuzzy and his tremors faded into warmth in a way that meant nothing good at all.