Icy Quills
Between the frost giant waking up and his reaction to perceived danger, there’s a bare instant, and all Tony knows of that instant is being yanked back into Peter’s arms as a thousand ice shards erupt from Frostbite’s body like a lethal sculpture of a frigid hedgehog.
In the long, frozen moment that follows, Tony belatedly realizes that his legs are cold. Moving as little as possible, he glances down, and swallows when he sees that his lower pantlegs have been sliced to ribbons.
Through the rushing in his ears, he begins to hear fast, choking breaths, and it takes him too long to realize that they’re not coming from him—if anything, he’s been holding his breath. But the body barely visible beneath the ice is writhing, fighting, struggling to get free, its frantic whimpers more animal than human.
“We’ve gotta get him out of there,” Peter blurts, already in danger range before Tony can think to stop him, Tony stumbling backwards at the sudden loss of support and off-balance enough that he can’t keep his feet and winds up on the floor, jarring his hip—
—but then Peter’s pulling back from the shards with a hiss, blood dripping through the cut in the palm of his glove.
A quick glance around and Peter grabs a panel cover and wrenches it free, ignoring Tony’s “Peter, don’t—” as Tony struggles to get to his feet but Peter just rushes back in, smashing the ice away—“It’s okay, I’ll get you out of there, I’m coming, it’s okay”—rapidly making his way toward the frantic man within, as Tony watches helplessly, sure that he’s seconds away from seeing his protegee get skewered through the gut—
—and suddenly the frost giant erupts through what’s left, spraying shards in every direction, panting desperately and glaring out at them with blood-red eyes.
“It’s okay,” Peter repeats, dropping the panel and holding up his hands, showing that he’s unarmed, not a threat. And Frostbite’s still panting, head lowered, arms raised in anything but a harmless display, and Tony wants to rush in and grab Peter and push him out of the way, behind him, but that kind of sudden move might make the frost giant take defensive action, and that could skewer both of them, maybe before Peter’s spider sense could even react.
“We’re not going to hurt you,” Peter says, and Tony hopes to a god he’s never believed in that Peter’s spider sense and inhuman reflexes are fast enough to get him out of there.
But Frostbite just stands there, in the midst of the shattered ice, staring down at his own hands, beginning to whimper again. Then his hand flies to his own neck, feeling at the dark purple bruise, and a complicated set of emotions play across his face: horror, surprise, relief, confusion, fear.
Then startlement, as he looks up again, as if only now realizing there are others in the room. His gaze zeroes in on Tony, and his eyes widen, then narrow.
And then the guy takes a step forward.
“Don’t tell me I need to shoot you.” Nebula’s voice comes from the side, and Tony only now realizes that she’s been standing there. Startled anew, Frostbite turns, and his eyes go wide again as he steps back, hands up, shoulders hunched defensively. Strained, garbled sounds come out as he tries to talk; it’s nothing even resembling a human language.
But then, as the guy takes one more step back, his foot catches in his own ice sculpture, and he tumbles backward toward the shards.
Peter’s webbing catches him in time, but Frostbite instinctively tries to escape the web and his struggles send him careening off to the side anyway, smashing straight into what’s left of the ice.
There’s a moment of horror, Peter’s eyes wide and his hands over his mouth, before Frostbite, groaning, rolls over onto more shards, his lacerated shoulder dripping rich blue blood as he opens up even more cuts on other parts of his body. A couple attempts to get to his feet simply slice those open as well, and then he just crawls, whimpering again, ignoring Peter’s “Stop! Don’t move! You’re gonna hurt yourself—”
By the time Peter has thought to bring over his (thankfully sturdy) emergency blanket and lay it over the bed of ice shards, Frostbite is lying face-down, motionless except for shuddering breaths, still bleeding from every surface and turning the slowly melting ice into a river of deep blue.
With Nebula keeping her blaster trained on the frost giant, Peter tries to coax him into rolling over to safety. It takes a bit, but eventually the guy musters what’s left of his energy and manages it, three weak flops before he’s staring up at them, blinking sluggishly and clearly in no shape to move any further.
While Peter hunts for a first aid kit, Tony takes the chance to retrieve his gauntlet and double up the number of weapons in the room, just in case. But even he’s gotta admit that the guy no longer seems like a threat… aside from the ice shards, which, in retrospect, are pretty clearly defensive. Not that they couldn’t be used offensively (there’s always a way to turn a defense into an offense), but the guy just got throttled nearly to death; his powers might be trying to protect him without his conscious control.
Which doesn’t make Tony any happier to let Peter get close to the guy, but it’s not like the guy’s wounds are going to close themselves, or at least not as fast as he needs. And of the three of them, Peter’s the one most likely to survive any unexpected attacks; Tony doesn’t have a working suit or a handy spider sense to get him out of danger in time. Besides, getting in range himself would reduce the number of effective weapons trained on the threat, so the best thing to do is to stand back and let the kid do what he can.
After all, Tony’s no stranger to getting freaked out and defensive, and he’s not the type to let a guy bleed out just for trying to protect himself. And while Peter’s ministrations make Frostbite hiss and writhe a little, at least the guy no longer seems to be in a fighting mood. He even, at Peter’s coaxing, rolls over one last time, letting Peter get at the lacerations that run down his back and all four limbs.
Once the bandaging’s done, Peter backs away, continuing his one-sided conversation with no indication that Frostbite is even paying attention to the words, much less understanding them. The blue guy lies there in a pool of melting ice and his own blood, breathing shallowly with occasional shudders, for long enough to make Tony’s arm ache at having to keep his gauntlet at the ready.
Eventually, though—surprisingly, before Peter’s actually run out of comforting words to babble on about—Frostbite weakly pushes himself up to hands and knees, and then glances around, finds the nearest corner, and crawls through the bluish slush until he can turn to sit there, propped up the best he can, glaring at the others as if daring them to attempt to get closer.
Peter retrieves the blanket from the puddle and then, ignoring the glare, brings it over to cover the guy up; Frostbite flinches, but warily allows himself to be tucked in.
“Geez, that’s a lot of blood,” Peter says, looking over his own hands and making several abortive attempts to wipe them on his suit before just wringing them together as if to keep him from touching anything else. “I, um, I don’t suppose there’s any way to wash up. I guess there wouldn’t be, would there? No fresh water.”
Nebula rolls her eyes and introduces the kid to some sort of sonic cleaner, while Tony keeps his eyes on their guest. Soon enough she’s back with some device to move what’s left of the clean ice into the reservoir, and then wordlessly vacuums up the watery blood before returning to the controls.
Not twenty minutes later, Frostbite has fallen asleep in the corner, head leaning back against the metal paneling, knees tucked up tight and arms limp beneath the blanket. Evidently out cold.
Well. Probably less cold than when they retrieved him from the vacuum of space.