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“Spider-Man, come in.”
“Where are you, Spider-Man? We need you.”
“Spider-Man, what the hell happened? Are you okay?”
“Peter?”
“Peter!”
Are their words slurring or is that in Peter’s head? Everything’s just a bit blurry right now, so it’s hard to tell what’s real and what he’s imagining.
He doesn’t know where he is. He doesn’t know what happened, either. He doesn’t know if he’s okay.
He’s thinking maybe not. His head hurts.
Peter groans, slowly pushes himself upright, gravel digging into the palms of his hands. The pain in his head sharpens as he does, vision going spotty around the edges, and he brings his fingers up to touch his forehead.
His fingers come away bloody.
Huh.
Peter blinks quickly in a futile attempt to clear his vision. He feels wobbly. Dizzy. Has to lean back on his elbow to keep from pitching over.
People are still shouting at him. For him? At him? Either way, the overlapping voices are getting kind of annoying.
“M’here,” Peter says, and his tongue feels heavy. His words are definitely slurred and he thinks perhaps he should be more concerned about this. “I, uh...I don’ know where I am, but I th’nk m’okay.”
Instead of quieting the voices, this only serves to make the noise louder. Which only serves to make his head pound harder. Peter groans again, but it comes out more like a childish whine. “Sh...shut up.”
He’s fairly sure that taking his mask off is not the best course of action here, but he does it anyway, tugging at the base of it until it finally comes off. And then he takes stock.
Okay.
His head hurts. That’s hard to ignore.
He’s bleeding. His eyesight is not exactly at its peak. He’s more than a little woozy.
Are those signs of a concussion? If he was a little more lucid, he could say for sure, but as it is, he can’t quite remember. There’s ways to test for a concussion, aren’t there? But do they all involve another person?
Fuck. He needs to do...something. Put the mask back on and call for help? Probably, but that sounds so incredibly unappealing. Wait here for someone to find him? Maybe, but then he has to sit here with this damn headache for who knows how long. Get up and try to go find someone himself?
Hm.
Yeah. That sounds good.
Peter shifts around carefully until he can get his hands and feet under him. The first time he tries to push himself up, he gets about two inches off the ground before his head
swims
and he drops back down. Swearing under his breath, Peter resets, giving himself twenty seconds to just sit and breathe and then trying again.
Halfway and then toppling over.
Third time’s the charm?
It actually is, in Peter’s case - the third time around, he pushes up first into a squat, pauses to move his hands in front of him, then slowly rises up the rest of the way. He sways, equilibrium completely thrown off, and comes closer to throwing up than he has since the bite, but stays upright.
Brilliant. He can work with upright.
He wonders, vaguely, if his powers are what’s keeping him from totally collapsing. Because the events of the last few minutes are very hazy, but he does recall being thrown into a wall a lot harder than a regular human could handle. It’s lucky, he figures, if he comes out of this with just a concussion, seeing as most other people probably wouldn’t have even come out alive.
But shit, this hurts. The ache in his head seems to have spread down his body, into his chest and his legs and his hands. Every bone in his body screams when he takes a step forward, and his brain feels like soup in his head.
...Maybe this is what Tony was talking about all those times he said he didn’t want Peter to get hurt. All those times he talked about protection and recklessness and safety and a bunch of other things Peter didn’t listen all that hard to. He regrets it now, but, well. Sucks to be him.
God, it kind of does suck to be him. Even barring the almost-definite concussion, he’s been through so much that he’s pretty much resigned himself to the fact that God just really fucking hates him.
His parents. Ben.
The Hudson River. The ferry. The warehouse.
Toomes.
Wait, no, shit. Don’t go there. He can’t go to the bad place mentally right now, because he’s already in the bad place physically, and that’d be two too many bad places to be in.
It’s not that Peter’s never had a concussion before. It’s highly likely that he has, what with how many times he gets tossed around on the daily, but he figures they’ve all been mild enough that they didn’t hinder him too much and they healed quickly.
This, on the other hand? Terrible.
He’s just about ready to give up on trying to stumble along when he hears repulsors.
Oh, good, someone’s here to make sure he doesn’t die.
Tony lands in front of him, hands already held out toward him even before the suit opens up to let him step out. Peter squints at him, head tilting slightly to the left, and slurs, “T’ny?”
“Hey, kiddo,” Tony replies, a strained smile on his face. “Scale from 1 to 10, how bad is it?”
They always do this, when one of them is hurt. So long as the injured on is relatively lucid, the first question asked is always scale from 10 to 10, how bad?
Peter considers. “...Six?”
Tony nods, and then Peter shakes his head and says, “No, no…sev’n. Seven, final ans - ans...answer!”
Tony presses a button on his wristwatch, then says something into it that Peter doesn’t quite catch. And then he starts toward Peter.
As soon as Tony’s hand touches his shoulder, Peter passes out.