five.
"How did you escape?"
The pair rounded a corner. "That's not important. What's important is that I got you out of there before any of your parents showed up."
"Did you kill them?!" Peter threw Wade up against the nearest wall and Wade put his hands up in defense.
"Woah, hey, no! No, they're all totally alive. I mean, they were when I left! I left them all alive." Peter's chest was heaving. The thought of losing another set of parents angered him to no end.
Wade gently grabbed onto Peter's wrist and tugged until he released Wade's collar. "Your parents are fine."
Peter leans closer, voice dropping an octave. "They'd better be."
Wade would be lying if he said that Peter's defensiveness of his parents (and the way he looked when he was pissed) didn't get him a little turned on.
----
New York was large and full of way too many people to count. New York City was even worse. People lined the streets, packed in close to each other and spoke loudly over the roar of the city.
But it had really fucking good food stands. Hot dogs, tacos, snow-cones, you name it. Wade, had an endless appetite, and Peter hadn't eaten since the day before. He let Wade buy him a snow-cone.
Peter settled for a simple wedding cake flavor but Wade got an ungodly mix of coconut and watermelon and pineapple. Wade insists that if Peter winced any harder, he'd break something.
New York City had a lot of one other thing: construction.
Forklifts and bulldozers and cranes lifting hundreds of pounds of metal and cement slabs way above the heads of the city-goers.
Peter made the mistake of looking up next to one of these construction sights. Flashes of being back in that building came to Peter's mind. Flashes of being trapped.
He felt suffocated. His own voice echoed in his ears. "Hello? Hello! Please, hey! Hey, please! I'm down here! I'm down here! I'm stuck. I'm stuck! I can't move!"
He could hear his own desperation, playing back on a loop inside of his head. "Hello! Please, hey!"
"Peter!" He blinked and saw that he was pressed between Wade and a concrete wall. Wade's eyes searched Peter's face. "Petey are you with me?"
Peter nodded and Wade hesitated before letting Peter go.
Peter didn't miss the somehow comforting grip Wade had on his shoulders or anything. Not at all.
Even once he let go, Wade didn't move away from Peter. He didn't stop being concerned. "That was a flashback, wasn't it?"
Peter swallowed, then nodded. "Yes."
"I was like that when I first had my traumatic flashbacks too... Was it what you dream about?"
Peter, who had zoned out again, blinked. "What?"
"Your flashback. Is it what you dream about?"
Peter thought about it for a second. Had he dreamt about that night?
"Only sometimes."
Wade seemed lost in thought for a minute. "Do I need to take you home?"
Peter frantically shook his head. "I can't... Not yet. They'll ask about the fight, and-"
"Hey, Petey, hey." Wade grabbed onto his shoulders again to stop the boy from panicking. "It's okay. We don't have to go back yet."
Peter was short on breath. He could FEEL all the rubble on top of him. He could smell the settling dust, the metallic smell of his own blood. He could taste the copper on his tongue.
He could hear the crashing metal that he imagined when he thought of the way his parents died. It'd been a plane crash when Peter was only four. Both caskets had to be closed.
Wade shook him once. "Peter. Peter it's going to be okay."
Peter frantically looked around the alley Wade had drug them into and saw all the people passing out on the street. "I wanna go. There's- There's too many- Wade, I can't."
Wade seemed to understand Peter's babbling. He took off his backpack and helped Peter strap it on, letting the bag act as a weight to keep Peter grounded while Wade led them through the city. Peter's phone kept vibrating in his back pocket and Wade had no problem grabbing the annoying little thing and turning it off completely.
Peter needed time to be alone. Well, alone as Wade would allow him to be right now was as alone as he was going to get for a while. Peter knew it was only a matter of minutes before Tony started pinging Peter's phone off of nearby cell towers and started a search to find him. He'd left the school over an hour ago, but he knew that at least one of his parents was in the area already looking for him.
Which parent, he didn't know. Whichever came to get him when Ned called... Speaking of, Peter needed to have a talk with Ned about that one.