Chapter 4
Peter can’t breathe. He’s trying, he’s trying so, so hard, but every inhale fills his lungs with less oxygen. He struggles against the darkness, but he can’t open his eyes. He can’t move, he can’t breathe. He’s suffocating, and the worst part is that he can’t possibly call for help.
The Iron Man blanket is a familiar warmth over his body. Generally, it’s comforting, but now the added weight is holding him down. It’s like he’s on the bottom of the ocean floor. He can’t see, can’t move, can’t breath. Can’t make a sound besides desperate attempts to suck air into his hollow chest.
Peter’s fists curl into the mattress as if he can pull himself back up to the surface, but nothing helps to relieve the growing pressure in his chest. He can’t breathe and he can’t move and it’s becoming harder and harder to think about anything else.
He knows, rationally, that he’s in his bedroom, but the inability to move his arms and legs convinces him that he’s not. He’s on a table, tied down, waiting to be tortured or experimented on, or who knows what. The impossibly large ball in his throat grows, as he can feel wet tears falling down the sides of his face.
It’s unnaturally dark for an apartment in Queens, and Peter really, really hopes his eyes are closed, because the alternative is that he actually truly can’t see. Maybe he’s blind. Maybe whatever fucked up in his brain and caused him to pass out and seize in front of all his classmates also led to permanent optic damage.
Shit, that would suck. It would suck almost as much as slowly suffocating to death in his bedroom.
But not quite as much. The suffocation is definitely still worse.
“Peter?” Aunt May’s voice is distant and echoing, like he’s hearing it through the other side of a closed window. He wants to answer her, to cry and scream for help, but nothing besides desperate wheezing escapes his mouth.
There’s no sound after that, and for a moment, Peter is afraid she’s left. He can’t call out to her. He’s going to die here alone and it’s utterly terrifying. He doesn’t know if he’s locked his bedroom door, but if he has there’s no way for May to get to him.
But then she’s talking to him again, and while the words “Oh my God, Peter! What’s happening? Peter! Peter, can you hear me!?” aren’t exactly reassuring, at least he knows he’s not alone anymore.
There are hands on him, checking his temperature, turning his body onto its side. It’s not ideal, but his lungs suddenly open just a little bit more and he finds himself able to whimper. It makes him feel pitiful, he can’t do much but cry and it makes him feel like a child. Superheroes don’t cry. Adults don’t cry. He’s fifteen for God’s sake, and he’s panicking over a little bit of breathing trouble.
“I’ll be right back, baby, I promise,” Aunt May says, from somewhere in front of him. He tries to reach out, but he can’t. He doesn’t have the energy, doesn’t have the ability, can’t see her through this all-encompassing darkness. He doesn’t want her to leave. She’s just found him, and he’s so scared. If she leaves, who knows what will happen. He’s going to die the moment she steps out of the room, he knows it. He knows he’s going to pass out at some point, and these may very well be his last moments with her.
He just wants her to stay. If she sits by his side, everything will be okay. He can hold onto her, she can pull him up. He has to, he can’t leave her.
“It’s okay, Peter! It’s okay! Just take deep breaths, like you used to do with me. Just focus on your breathing.” He loses contact with her, can’t sense where she is anymore. It’s easier said than done, if he could take deep breaths they wouldn’t even be in this miserable situation.
Suddenly, there’s something small being nudged into his mouth and May tells him to inhale slowly. Although it’s not very good, he does his best. The bitter taste of medication fills his mouth while his aunt depresses the inhaler.
It takes three puffs, but Peter is coughing now, instead of just wheezing. May props him into a seated position with a pillow, his body pliant in her hands.
Peter hasn’t had an asthma attack since he was almost thirteen. He thought it was over, that the spider bite had somehow cured him. But even then, it had never been this bad and it had never come on so suddenly. It’s not getting any better, and as hard as Peter’s trying to remain calm, he can feel his heart thumping in his chest. Can hear the voice in his head whispering that he’s going to die, that he needs to act before it’s too late.
But May is on the phone now. Peter doesn’t have the energy to decipher her words, but she’s yelling, and she’s scared. He knows that he should feel guilty for worrying her yet again, but all he can think about is the tightness in his own chest and the narrowness of his throat.
She doesn’t hang up until there’s somebody knocking on the door. Suddenly, the apartment is flooded with paramedics and he can’t see his aunt anymore through the blue uniforms. They’re lifting him onto a stretcher, running him down the stairs and into the back of the awaiting vehicle, all the while yelling words that Peter has trouble understanding.
“Push one of epinephrine!” One woman’s voice yells, directly besides his ear, before there’s a pin-prick stab in his arm. Nothing happens. Nothing gets clearer, or brighter, or more stable. He’s still gasping like a fish out of water, and it just seems to be getting worse.
There’s another injection, or two, or three, and there’s a mask on his face, but Peter’s returned to wheezing. He can’t speak and his fists go back to clenching and unclenching. It’s all he can do, all the power he has left over his own situation. But then there’s something soft in his hand, and it refuses to let the boy go.
“We need to intubate! His consciousness is deteriorating too quickly!”
“But he’s still awake!”
“You want to wait for him to stop breathing first?”
“Ma’am, step back. He’s too tired to keep this up on his own, he’s going to go into respiratory failure,” Commands a voice, and the soft warmth leaves his hand.
“Sorry, kid,” The voice is there again, “This ain’t gonna be very pleasant, but you’re not responding to our sedatives.”
And suddenly he’s choking. It had been bad before, but this is truly and completely suffocating. There’s something being forced into his mouth and down his throat and God he can’t breath at all anymore. He can’t breath and he’s going to die and he won’t even get to say goodbye or apologize for the trauma he knows he’s causing May right now.
“Fuck, is there anything else we can give this kid? His vitals are skyrocketing, this has got to be torture.” Peter can’t hear a response before the guy speaks again, “I don’t care what we have to do, he’s a kid.”
“Benzos,” A female voice chimes in, “He’s absorbing our drugs too fast, you have to give him double.”
There’s another needle injecting some unknown chemical into his body, and Peter can’t fist his hands anymore. The muscles loosen without his command, but he’s suddenly too tired for the fear.
He can’t breathe, and he knows he’s falling back into unconsciousness, and that can’t possibly be a good thing. But he can’t fight it either, and so there’s no option but to let it wash over him. The world doesn’t need to go black this time, it already is.
…
“I’m telling you, it’s not asthma.”
May’s voice filters through Peter’s hazy consciousness. He can feel his heavy eyelids attempting to stay open, but even when he can keep them peeled for more than a millisecond, the world is still bathed in darkness. There are pockets of light now though, and Peter can see two darker figures in front of him.
They waver and they shift, but the figures don’t really move. They stay in fixed spots in his vision. One of them is May, he thinks. He’d recognized her voice upon waking, and it doesn’t make sense that she would leave so soon. The other could be truly anybody, all Peter can make of them is a blurry shadow.
“Ma’am, I’m telling you there is no other reasonable explanation. Sometimes asthmatics have long periods without any trouble, but the asthma is still there. Granted, it is a little strange that his asthma got so much worse so suddenly. He probably already had some sort of minor infection in his lungs.” Peter assumes the deeper voice belongs to a doctor. Neither adult seems to notice that he’s awake.
“Right, and how many signs of infection did you find when you suctioned?” May sounds angry, aggravated. Peter opens his mouth to speak, to tell them he hasn’t had asthma since he was fourteen, and he hasn’t had an attack since he was around twelve, but not even the slightest sound escapes.
It’s like there’s something blocking his voice. When he moves, he becomes painfully aware of a foreign object taped to the side of his lips. It stretches his skin uncomfortably, filling his mouth. Peter can run his tongue over it, and it’s not thick, but it keeps going and going and it doesn’t end.
It’s not the physical sensation so much as the thought of something going so far down his throat that he can’t even whimper that makes him nauseous. There is something inside of him, something invading his body, and he can’t even gag without feeling like he’s going to choke.
His heart rate must be rising, because in a moment the doctor’s shadow is larger and closer, the echoing voice surrounding him like a bubble.
“Peter, I need you to calm down. You’re in the hospital, you had an asthma attack, but you’re okay now. There’s a tube in your mouth right now to help you breath, so you can’t talk.”
And that makes sense, and at least he knows what’s happening now, but there’s a tube down his throat and that means he can’t breath on his own. Peter tries to calm himself, he really does, but nothing works. He can’t perform the exercise without the ability to work his own lungs, so he closes his eyes (not that it makes things much darker) and tries to gather himself together.
The only thing he can try to do is take inventory of the situation. Mr. Stark had once told him to make a list of good things and bad things in his head. ‘Analyze the situation. Try not to be emotional when you figure everything out, kid. Be emotional after, when you’ve already dealt with the issue.’
And so, that’s what he does. He keeps his eyes closed to the dark shadows that make up his aunt and his doctor, and he starts with the bad things:
1- He almost suffocated earlier
2- He’s not breathing by himself
3- He has no idea why he’s so sick
4- He had a seizure earlier in the day (or was that yesterday?)
5- May has to be worried out of her mind
6- His enhanced metabolism and immune system aren’t taking care of this for him
7- There’s a tube down his throat
8- He’s in the hospital
If he were able to, Peter would pull in a deep breath and convert it into a deeper sigh. Instead, he finds himself gagging on the goddamn endotracheal tube again.
That’s another thing he should add to the list, choking every five seconds isn’t a very nice experience either. Peter knows. But he also knows that if he focuses on only the bad things, it’s only going to send him deeper into a panic.
Good things then, things he can be grateful for:
1- He’s in a hospital, they’ll take care of it
2- May is by his side
3- This is happening to him, and, thankfully, not to anyone else
4- He knows how to deal with asthma, if that’s what this is
5- His enhanced metabolism and immune system will take care of this for him
6- If Mr. Stark probably hasn’t heard about this yet, he won’t need to
7- This is just a fluke, as was the seizure. Nothing to worry about
8- Everything is fine, he’s going to be fine
Okay. There truly is nothing to be concerned about here. Peter knows he’s going to be fine, he’s always fine. This is just a small setback, by tomorrow he knows he’ll be good-as-new. May is going to worry, and yeah, it’s a tiny bit spooky, but Peter knows, rationally, this isn’t as bad as he’s making it out to be in his head.
Everybody has a seizure at some point in their lives, and that’s not a big deal. Having an asthma attack doesn’t mean anything either. People are in hospitals all the time, and people are intubated all the time.
He’s probably overreacting, letting his mind run away on a crazy whim when there truly is nothing wrong. He’s just being paranoid and childish. Because there can’t be anything wrong with him - not really.
There are some advantages of being bitten by a freaking radioactive spider, and his health is one of them. Peter knows he’s sick right now, and that’s not something he can really lie about, but these things only last so long. Soon enough, he will have flushed whatever bug he has out of his system, and everything will return to normal.
For some reason, Peter hesitates. The thought isn’t as confident as it had been before.