Stranded

The next several minutes passed in a muzzily panic-hazed, numbed blur that flickered in and out in flashes: he kept dragging himself forward. He threw the entire weight of his numbed fist against the bottom of the vent. He utterly failed to catch himself as the metal and drywall crumpled open under him like wet tissue. He screamed through his teeth as his head collided with the floor and his ankle did the same. He blacked out laid amongst the rubble, skin warming ever so slowly in the empty hall.

-

He came back to himself with a pained, raspy hiss as a chunk of debris that’d been digging uncomfortably against his spine shifted and scraped against his ribs. 

His eyes felt sore and dry as he wearily blinked then open, peering at his still somewhat blurry surroundings. 

It was relatively silent except for the wind whistling quietly through the torn open vent above him, and he swallowed with a parched click, hissing through his teeth as he slowly maneuvered himself upright. Finally starting to come into awareness, he castigated himself for having passed out in the first place - despite how entirely out of his control that’d been. Now, it wouldn’t do any good to sit around any longer than he already had been… however long that was.

His skull gave a pounding throb of disagreement, and he groaned, clutching at it. If it’d felt like a nail had been wedged through his brain before, now it felt like a whole jackhammer had a party with it. 

He managed to stagger mostly upright with liberal aid from the wall to his right, leaning himself against the surface and keeping his bad ankle elevated, and then he began hobbling… in a direction. He was pretty confident it was the opposite way to where he’d had his altercation with Bucky (if that’s what it could be called), so that’d have to do for now, even though that also meant he was headed towards where Clint, Sam, Steve and Natasha had been. Which was less than optimal. 

Well, it wasn’t like anything about his situation didn’t already fit into that category, so there was no point in worrying about it past the nearly crippling amount he was already! Yay for optimism, he thought to himself with sardonic, pained cheer, keeping one hand braced over his ribs while the other supported him against the wall in his slow and unsteady trek to wherever in this tower of fricking hell he was going.

A shiver wracked down his spine, jarring his menagerie of injuries, and his teeth gave an echoing chatter when he tried to clench them. 

Oh, well that was just… great. Just great. Exactly what he needed.

A quick glance at his fingernails confirmed that they were still a rather strong shade of purple-blue, but there wasn’t much he could do about it now. It wasn’t like he could go and take a lukewarm bath to slowly acclimate himself to acceptable temperatures, nor could he huddle in a pile of blankets to do the same. 

No, it was best if he kept moving, and he’d just have to have some faith that his healing - as bogged down as it already was - would make sure that he wasn’t more permanently affected by his bout of borderline hypothermia. He wasn't going to be trapping himself in another room unless he had to.

He kept on as he was for several more minutes, keeping a dulled-down ear out for anyone coming near, but he eventually gave up on the notion that Tony had someone coming after him. That wasn’t to say he held out hope that Tony had a sudden change of heart or anything - ohhh no, definitely not that - and he was pretty sure that there was no way that Tony, out of all of the Avengers, had flushed the drug out of his system first considering that he was one of the three base-line humans among them.

It was just that Peter more analytically reasoned that Tony’s whole ‘flushing him out’ was a lot more generalized than he previously considered. Cause Tony clearly had somehow figured Peter was in the vents, but that didn’t mean the man knew where in them. Which probably meant that he really was just trying to get Peter to freeze to death, but the less thinking done about that little nugget of thought, the better. 

He noted that the cameras in this hall seemed dead, as their lenses were drooped down  to face directly at the ground, and the red dots that were usually in the corners of them weren’t blinked on. That was a bonus for Peter since it both supported his theory about Tony and meant that the man couldn’t spy on him or send another suit after him either. Peter shuddered, wincing. He’d be a lot worse off trying to fight off anything now that his body was basically all one big injury.

All in all, though, it’d make sense that Tony didn’t have full access to the system with the state he was in. A lot of controls were speech-powered - verbal or written - and Peter was pretty sure that the Avengers weren’t able to perform the former, so it wasn’t that far of a stretch to assume the same for the latter. So, basically, whatever Tony could do was probably limited. Which. Yay for Peter! The - INarguably - smartest man on the entire planet - if not further - didn’t have full access to his cognizant abilities that would otherwise enable him to make more precise attempts on Peter’s life!

Whoopee.

Maybe Peter was being excessively cynical, but he was pretty sure he was entitled to that kind of thinking considering literally everything.

God, he was gonna buy himself the biggest tub of choco ice-cream if - when, when - he got out of this.

The thought of food had his stomach give an audible grumble, and Peter groaned quietly. He resisted the urge to knock the side of his head against the wall; his pounding migraine was debilitating enough as it was, thank you very much. 

His fingers caught on a crack in the wall, and he slid his gaze to the side. Huh. A door.

The sight of it had an ominous shiver run down his spine, and he had to once more withhold the urge to smack himself repeatedly. The back of his neck was still pulsing with a low throb of warning that ached dully against the fading bruises forming a collar around his throat (thanks Clint), but he wasn’t getting any spike from his senses by standing in front of the nondescript, lone door. 

Oh. Just a trauma response to doors. Of course. Exactly what Peter needed.

But he really did need to get some food in him sometime soon if he wanted to up his chances, and that'd require looking for it. In rooms. Which were preceded by doors. (The horror).

He ignored his heartbeat that was pulsing insistently in his ears, took a second to fumble with the handle, and turned the knob. 

Salvation. 

Peter gaped. He could’ve sobbed in relief if his eyes weren’t already burning from how dry they were. He flung the door wide open and stumbled into the room, barely stopping himself from landing his weight on his bad ankle through some liberal use of his sticky powers on his good foot. 

He let out a bleat of only slightly maniacal laughter and spread his arms out wide. “Yes,” he whisper-shouted, pumping a fist.

Because somehow, out of all the rooms in the tower, Peter had stumbled upon a communications unit. And yes, that was a surprise - finding the place, that is. Even though Peter halfway lived in the tower at this point, it didn’t mean he had explored the majority of the place. He knew his room and floor, the Avenger’s common room, Tony’s lab, and the training quarters. That was about it. So happening upon a literal communications center of all places was pure, dumb luck of which the chances of occurring were astoundingly low, especially for Peter, who was a Parker and thereby cursed with his family’s peculiar form of luckiness: as in, the unlucky kind.

Peter made sure to close the door behind himself before slowly making his way over to the hub, dropping his weight down onto the wheelie chair in front of it and letting out a sigh of relief even as the chair underneath him squealed in protest. Finally, he thought, nose burning as a thin shimmer of tears finally managed to film over his eyes. He had a chance.

He scrubbed roughly against his face and blinked rapidly, wincing at the sensation of a multitude of his injuries tugging and shifting against his flesh, expression rapidly setting into grim determination. 

There was a frisson of dread in him that the Box-In protocol would restrict him completely from accessing even a single strand of code from the massive computer in front of him, but he crushed the feeling down without mercy, giving a shake of his head. It was a useless worry. He’d push his way through. He had to. He was well aware that he was nowhere near Mr. Stark’s level in any sense regarding technology, but he had to trust that even though this was a system the man built, it wasn’t the man himself. Peter had a chance to break through it. Even if he couldn’t get all systems fully functioning again - the optimal scenario that would enable him to view the Avengers’ positions and lock them in until he could escape - it was possible he could send a message out. He could contact Bruce or SHIELD or… or Aunt May, and he could finally get help. 

He’d… he’d live. They’d all live.

Peter cracked his knuckles, squared his bruised and bloodied shoulders, and set his stiff fingers onto the keyboard.

Time to get to work.