Oscorp
“I hate you; I hate you. You’re the worst. I’m going to make a fool of myself in front of everyone and my face will go red and you’re totally allowing this to happen! Stop laughing!” Peter leaned over and smacked the back of Tony’s hand, the permission slip he had been about to sign fluttered to the floor quietly.
“Oh, come on, you’re gonna be fine,” Tony insisted, picking the page back up calmly. Peter vibrated as he made a swipe for the page again.
“You think you’re being funny, but I will literally walk into another glass door in front of everyone.” Tony chuckled aloud at the memory. “Please don’t sign it, please, please, ple –”
“Calm down, Pete,” Tony muttered as he scrawled his name at the bottom of the permission slip. “It’s part of your curriculum, so even if you weren’t worried about embarrassing yourself in front of someone,” he arched his brows. “You’d still have to go.”
Peter groaned loudly as he reluctantly accepted the signed permission slip. “You should be excited,” Tony pointed out.
“Excited to give Flash more of a reason to humiliate me?” Peter asked bitterly. Tony rolled his eyes and waved his hand lazily.
“You have two days before the trip, just take a breather.” Peter sighed and leaned back against the couch, so he could rest his head on Tony’s shoulder.
“What if Norman sees me? What if he’s giving the tour or Ned is sick that day and I’m on my own –”
“You’re thinking of the worst-case scenario,” Tony pointed out, resting a hand on Peter’s head. “And I think the only thing keeping Ned from touring Oscorp would be a real nasty sickness. He’s just as much of a nerd as you, kiddo.” Peter pouted, folding his arms across his chest and facing the wall.
“Rude,” he huffed. “Well don’t blame me when something goes totally wrong.”
----
“Why’re you so jumpy today? Dude, chill out.” Ned frowned, nudging Peter as he stared out the window of the bus.
“I don’t know, I just… I’m over excited I guess,” he said weakly. Ned scoffed.
“You’re a terrible liar,” he complained. “We’ve been looking forward to this for months, how come you’re acting all off now?” Peter squirmed in his bus seat as the vehicle began pulling over to the side.
“I don’t know, I really don’t. I’m getting nervous jitters, you know?” Ned nodded in understanding, but he still leaped up out of his seat along with everyone else.
“Come on! I wanna go through the spinning doors!” He yelled over the crowd of their peers. Peter sighed as he walked down the steps of the bus. “Peter stop moping,” Ned pressed, grabbing his arm and tugging him to the front of the line where he yanked his phone out and took a selfie. Peter grimaced and gave himself a double chin, making Ned laugh.
“I’m not moping,” he mumbled as Ned bustled him through the spinning glass doors and into the building. “I’m blending into the background and trying not to break anything.”
“Okay, yeah. Fair enough, man.” Ned turned, glancing over his shoulder to take note of Flash and his friends coming through the rotating doors after them. “He’ll probably leave us alone today though; he wouldn’t want to get kicked out of Oscorp.” Peter shrugged in response.
“Anyways,” he began. “Do you think the tour guide will let us take photos of the new cross-species experiment?”
“Uh, I dunno Pete, I heard they crossed a rabbit with a goat, and it coughs up grass hairballs.” Ned waggled his eyebrows comically and laughed as Peter elbowed him in the side. “What? Surely they’ll at least let us look around the labs.”
A woman with dark hair in an uncomfortably tight looking ponytail stepped in front of the Midtown students who milled around the lobby looking excited.
“Alright, those of you here for the Midtown School of Science tour – please gather around.” Her voice was nasally but she seemed energetic enough to handle the crowd. “You’ve all been given access to specific floors based on what subjects you take. Please find your nametag on these four benches over he –”
Her voice was quickly drowned out as the school group rushed over to find their nametags and figure out if they had the same floor access as their friends. Peter knew he took physics, chemistry and decathlon with Ned, so they would probably have the same access. “All of you have floors twenty to twenty-three, and your supervisors will have hopefully organised an area to regroup for lunch. Please don’t touch anything and refrain from using flash on your phones. Enjoy.”
Ned threw his name tag over his head and around his neck before holding it up and fist pumping when he saw all the same floors printed on Peter’s.
“Oh sweet! We get to spend the whole trip together.” Ned babbled. Peter smiled and raised his hand for their handshake.
“I say we start at the highest floor and go down from there, so it’s quieter,” Peter pointed out. Ned nodded and the two of them clambered into an elevator before anyone else could squeeze in. “Okay, so we swipe these,” he mumbled to himself as he tried to navigate the card scanner in the elevator which gave them access to certain floors.
The scanner made a small beeping sound and then the entire elevator started rising up to the highest floor both Peter and Ned had access to, number forty-nine. “Woah, dude…” Peter mumbled as the elevator doors opened into a hallway of glass windows looking into labs and experimental rooms.
“Oh, they’re making tech up here!” Ned exclaimed excitedly. He was right, the rooms were filled with different sized tech equipment, some technicians were soldering on a multi board and others were carefully assembling different sized devices.
“I wonder if this is all for show, like maybe they have a back room where they’re actually assembling the new Oscorp branded phone.” Peter smirked and watched Ned rolling his eyes. “What? S.I. phones are way better and you know it.”
“Flash just posted on the class page, there’s a dude in a full-on hazmat suit on floor thirty-six.” Ned arched an eyebrow at Peter, his face said he wanted to go to floor thirty-six. Peter sighed.
“Okay, fine,” he grumbled without heat as Ned walked back to the elevator. “There better be some cross-mutation thingies,” he said as Ned rolled his own eyes and swiped his key card.
The elevator beeped and Peter jumped in quickly, holding onto the bar and pointedly not swiping his own keypad because Ned already had.
“…ease step back, this is a quarantined area, please step back, boy.”
The door opened to reveal Flash stepping away from a man who was indeed wearing an all-white hazmat suit. In fairness, Flash was standing over a red and black line of tape which read ‘quarantined area, do not cross.’
“The rest of this floor is open to the public, just not this area. Please go entertain yourself with our other exhibits.” The man in the suit seemed to have no patience left, and he ignored Flash as he huffed and stepped back to join the small huddle.
“This floor sucks, lets go check out the tech labs,” he complained as the group piled into the elevator. Peter and Ned slipped their way out before the doors closed; they were in time to see the man in the hazmat suit retreating back into a lab within the quarantined zone.
Peter jumped slightly when Ned elbowed his arm with wide eyes. They looked at each other and wordlessly took a few steps backward.
“That hazmat suit dude was intense,” Ned muttered as they turned on their heels to walk down the hall in the opposite direction. “I bet there’s something awesome in that tab,” he pressed, looking over his shoulder before shooting Peter an overly excited expression.
“You reckon? I totally just wanna peek through the window a few feet past the tape… I think they’re doing something cool in that lab.” Peter said as he examined some mediocre animal skulls in display cases.
“You should, I reckon there’s probably more interesting stuff in the biology labs, cus y’know, cross-species experiments…” Ned touched his pocket, frowning slightly as he began to fumble. “Oh dude, I think I left my nametag scanner card thingy in the elevator!” He sighed loudly, “that tour guide is gonna rip me a new one, I totally need to go grab it, maybe nobody’s taken it.”
“That sucks man, I’ll wander around for a bit and then probably check out the floor below us.” Ned nodded, making his way back to the elevator and giving Peter a fake salute.
Peter could hear the elevator give a distant ‘ding’ in answer before Ned was shooting off to one of the higher floors to assumingly ask some of the other groups if they had found his card.
The rest of the floor was empty aside from a sign pointing down to the next floor with a bathroom sign attached. Peter looked back to see the quarantine tape. His spine tingled with rebellion as he thought about how cool it would be to know what the people were working on in there. He wouldn’t even need to get into the lab to see, he’d just have to peek quickly through the window and that was it.
Peter couldn’t help the temptation, plus the fact that if he found something cool, Tony would probably roll his eyes and go off on a tangent about Oscorp’s work ethic, which was always fun to listen to. “Screw it,” he murmured, stepping up close to the line and checking up and down the hallway before passing right over it.
He bit the inside of his lip as he scurried past the door into the lab. He could hear muffled voices through the window, they sounded like scientists judging by the long words they were using which he was pretty sure didn’t actually mean anything that interesting.
He gingerly smoothed his hair down, hoping he wouldn’t give himself away by the fluffed up messy hair he had going on. Peter crouched slightly and tilted his head until he could see through the glass window with one eye.
The lab was grey and white, it had several benches with metal surfaces and a few different sheets of presumably research papers spread across them. The man had stepped out of his hazmat suit, there was a woman in a white lab coat and a second man in a suit. They were having a conversation, the man in the suit had his back to the window and seemed to be directing the conversation.
“…thing’s wrong… shouldn’t be out until… radiation stabilises itself.”
“Well then… is your job to get it back in the containment sector… where it can’t hurt anyone.”
Peter ducked down as the man in the suit turned to stare directly at the two doctors. Shit. Shit. Shit – oh shit.
It was Norman Osborn.
“For christ’s sake, there’s a field trip today, and I’m not getting my ass sued for one of them getting radiation poisoning.” He snapped, running a hand over his forehead before stopping at his hairline and turning towards the door. Peter startled, backing away from the window and desperately looking back to the tape line which he would never make it to before Norman opened the door.
Behind him, at the opposite end of the corridor, there was a door. If he ran, he could get there in time to see whether it was locked and he was screwed, or if it was unlocked and he could thank whatever cruel god was out there.
Norman was reaching out for the door handle and Peter was tearing down the hall and yanking the handle of the opposite door.
The door swung open so forcefully that Peter was almost knocked back on his rear. Nevertheless, he threw himself into what looked and smelled like a storage cupboard right as he heard the tell-tale ‘click’ of the door to the lab opening.
Expensive sounding dress shoes clicked against the linoleum as Norman walked away from both the lab and the storage cupboard Peter was huddled away in. The teen let out a long breath before stiffening up as the hazmat suit man and female scientist’s shoes tapped against the floor.
“We’ll need to get security to lockdown this floor, revoke the students’ access and find this thing before we get another lawsuit.”
“Another…?” Peter repeated to himself quietly as the voices in the hall retreated. He wrinkled his nose unhappily; the storage room was stuffier than anything he had been prepared for.
Stepping back out into the hallway was a relief Peter didn’t think he disregarded. He knew he needed to get down to the next floor before the floor he was on got locked down. As he walked back down the hall, he couldn’t help but rest his forehead against the glass and peer into the lab properly. He could see the shelves of microscopes and odd-looking machines he probably didn’t know how to use.
He was so enraptured by the new equipment that he ignored the tickle against the back of his hand for a moment too long.
“Ah!” He yelped, wincing at the sudden itch which stung sharply until it felt like he had been jabbed with the end of a pin. “What the hell,” he mumbled offendedly, rubbing the back of his hand and missing the small arachnid scuttling back across the floor and beneath the door to the storage cupboard.
Peter held the back of his hand as he walked, elbowing open the door to the staircase and stomping down the steps like a scolded toddler. “Stupid Oscorp field trip,” he muttered. His hand stung worse that it had in the beginning, he could practically feel his heartbeat thudding against the red and shiny skin which seemed to be swelling up like a lump.
Peter groaned, wiping his sleeve over his face as he was struck with a hot flush which washed into a cold sensation. “Ughh hhng,” he whined, pushing the door open to the next floor and stumbling over the last step. Everything swung around him, the floor shuddered beneath his feet and everything was too hot, too cold, too feverish and too hypothermic.
Peter closed his eyes for a moment, trying to seize control of his stuttering breaths again. His chest was tight, and he could feel sweat beading against his temples. Everything felt wrong, he was about to puke or pass out, and he could feel it. His mouth flooded with dryness; his stomach seemed to be filled with cotton balls.
He opened his eyes long enough to catch sight of the nearest bathroom, his throat was too tight, and he needed to douse himself in water.
He squeezed his eyes shut again and almost immediately walked into a wall.
Except walls don’t say oof.
“S’rry,” Peter croaked, squinting wide enough to skirt around whoever he had collided with but still staying on his beeline course to get to the bathroom.
The tiles were cold beneath his palm. For a split-second Peter legitimately considered pressing his face up against them to chill his burning cheeks and forehead before the logical side of his brain rebooted and he realised it would probably result in about a hundred people’s germs smearing across his skin. “Oh, god…” he mumbled, rushing to the sink and bending over it as he shuddered in time to another hot flush.
A tap turned on beside him, and without thinking Peter jerked his head up.
“Hey,” the someone said softly. Peter blinked as he focused in on light blue eyes framed by dark hair. “You look like shit.”
“I… y – yeah,” he choked out. “Sorry.”
Harry smiled sympathetically, he was dampening paper towels under the cold water with one hand, the other rested against the countertop between the sink he was standing over and the one Peter was stood in front of.
“You okay?” He asked, handing the damp paper towels to Peter and leaning against the sinks as the shorter teen wiped his brow and sighed contentedly as cold water dripped down his neck.
“Yeah, I guess I have a sudden onset fever or s’mething stupid like that.” He groaned, accepting the dryer paper towel that Harry handed him to wipe away the excess water from his hairline, which had begun to curl up from the humidity. “What about you?”
“Not much,” Harry answered as he swept the paper towels into the trash. “Worrying about you I guess,” he smirked. Peter leant the back of his head against the mirror and shot his friend a glance. “Why’re you here, anyway?”
“Stupid field trip. Not like I’ve seen it all before at home or anything…” Harry punched his arm and Peter managed a weak laugh. “You’re telling me if you had to come to S.I. for a school trip you wouldn’t complain?”
“Depends if you were there or not,” Harry retorted. Peter huffed exaggeratedly, lifting a hand to drag it through his hair. Harry’s eyes tracked the movement before they narrowed. “What happened to your hand?” Peter froze, tilting his hand to look at the back of it curiously.
There were two small red dots on the back of his hand, the skin around them was tinged pinkish, and to be honest – it hurt more than it looked. Peter could still feel his heartbeat within the wound.
“I uh, dunno?” He answered meekly.
“I’m gonna get you some anti-inflammatory meds and an ice pack,” Harry said quickly. He jerked his head towards the door as Peter’s cue to follow, which he did.
----
“Dude, you will not believe what I saw after I got my card back! There was this floor with all these microscopes and one of them had a DNA strand of a successful cross-species hybrid. It was so cool,” Ned hurriedly explained as the two of them walked towards the buses. “Oh I can’t believe Happy’s picking you up, I wanna tell you all about the stuff we saw!”
“Yeah, I know, but the tower’s like… a ten-minute drive from here, so what’s the point in Happy just having to drive all the way to school to pick me up.” Peter shrugged, distractedly running a finger over the line of cloth Harry had gently wrapped around his hand, he hid a small smile.
“Okay well I’m definitely spamming you with all the pics I got,” Ned promised as he clambered up the steps onto the bus. He was holding up the queue but still had time to lean over and give Peter a fist bump.
----
“How was the trip?” Tony asked without turning around from whatever project he was currently elbows deep in.
“Eh, pretty much what I expected,” Peter sighed as he dropped his bag and slumped into the office chair next to Tony. “I kinda have a headache, and I’ve already had like… an entire bottle of water so that’s not it.” Tony laughed from beside him, finally spinning around in his chair.
“Yeah, you look a bit pale, huh?” Tony mumbled, he reached out to rest the back of his hand against Peter’s forehead before flipping it back over and pushing the fluffy mess that was Peter’s fringe up out of the way again. “You need a rest, kid. A whole day of staring at shitty tech will do that to you.”
Peter scoffed lightly, trailing after Tony as he walked down the hall and pulled the covers back on Peter’s bed. “Here, kick your shoes off, I’m gonna get you some water anyway.” Peter rolled his eyes but slipped his shoes off anyway. He changed quickly and slipped into bed, his head hitting the pillow as Tony pushed the door back open and held up a glass of water with a smirk on his face. “Gotta stay hydrated, Pete.”
“Thanks, every doctor I’ve ever met in my life.” Peter muttered as he reluctantly took the glass and set it down beside his bed. He looked up at Tony, a more sincere look on his face. “I saw Harry,” he admitted.
“Was that before or after you walked into a glass door?” Tony asked, feigning seriousness.
“Oh, let’s see,” Peter said, pretending to think. “No, actually it was around the same time I took a corner too fast and ran right into him.” Tony barked a quick laugh before it dissolved into a cough as Peter shot him a look.
“What a cliché meet cu –”
“Ughhh!” Peter groaned, rolling over as Tony laughed to bury his face in a pillow.
“Okay kiddie, you get some sleep, I’ll stop teasing,” Tony promised. Peter felt a hand scratching through his curls and a quick kiss pressing over the crown of his head before soft footsteps receded from his room. The door clicked shut and Peter listened to his father’s footsteps echoing down the hall, all the way until he was back in the lab downstairs. He heard the squeak of his chair as he sat.
Huh, he thought to himself through a yawn. Normally these walls are sound-proofed… But the reality was, Peter was too tired out to think seriously about why he could listen to his father’s heartbeat from several sound-proofed rooms and two hallways away, so he simple closed his eyes and let the gentle thump, thump, thump of his father’s heart lull him to sleep.