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“Spider-Man, on your left!”
Kamala was moving even as she shouted the warning, thrusting out a giant fist towards the agent about to take a potshot at Peter. The glowing limb swept the woman off her feet, leaving her in a tangle of limbs that could be sealed with a web shot. “Thanks, Ms. Marvel!”
“No problem.”
“Actually, yes problem, lots of problems!” Kate’s voice rang in her ear. Kamala raised an instinctive hand to adjust the earpiece as she raced across the marble floor of the atrium, until she was side-by-side with Peter. “More incoming. Tons more. Where the hell did they come from?”
“Beats me.” Peter let Kamala tug him to his feet. “Thanks again.”
“Any time.” Kamala took in the webbed and unconscious bodies around them. There was a ruckus near the entrance to the building; more already approaching.
“We’ll be ready.” Peter straightened up, web-shooters at the ready.
“And who are these guys again?” Kate asked.
“Maybe a HYDRA revival?” Kamala suggested. “Or Ross trying to enforce the Accords again. Trying to send us to the Raft. Not like any of us are exactly registered, or—what?”
Peter was staring at her. “You sound way too excited about the prospect of being sent to the most secure prison in the world.”
“What?” she protested. “That’s a classic fanfic storyline. So much angst and hurt/comfort potential. Or maybe it’s one of the previous Avenger’s villains coming after us, I mean we are basically the new versions of some of the originals—”
“Incoming!” There was a curse on the other end of the comms, abruptly cut off by a shout.
“Hawkeye!” Kamala readied herself, fists glowing. “Are you okay? Do you need backup?”
“I’m not the one about to need backup. Get out of there—I’ll try and buy you some time.”
“Roger that, Hawkeye. Hey, you guys want to get tacos after this?” Peter threw a web behind him, ready to swing, when every door in the atrium burst open at once.
No one entered though. Instead, several canisters rolled into the room, filling the room with a pale green gas.
“Time to go!” Peter shouted, already using the web to swing higher even as the gas climbed at a terrifying pace.
Kamala was right behind him, creating glowing platforms to use as stepping stones to the second-story balcony, wrinkling her nose. “Is that peppermint— Spider-Man!”
Her concerned shout was echoed by Kate’s in her ear, demanding what was going on, but Kamala was far too preoccupied with the sight of her friend tumbling out of the air to answer. She shot out another glowing fist to catch him, only for the room to explode with activity. Just as the crystal-like fingers created a cushion between Peter and the hard floor, a small army of black-clad people with guns exploded into the room, and pain erupted in her right side.
The platform beneath her flickered and then vanished. Pain and panic fought for attention, but instincts borne from hours of training with Bruno won out, and Kamala managed to summon a landing mat for herself barely an inch from the floor below. It still hurt, a lot, and a cry slipped out when she rolled onto her side. She clutched at it, trying to feel the damage. Her hand came away red.
“MM, check in!” Kate was saying in her ear. “I’ve putty arrowed their vans, but who knows how long that will hold them. You two need to get out of there, now!”
“We’re trying.” Kamala was distantly aware of more weapons being aimed her way. She needed to throw up walls, give herself some protection, but she had no idea where Peter had fallen and she couldn’t just leave him out there.
“Try faster—damnit!”
“Hawkeye?”
She didn’t get a response. The comms had gone quiet.
Kamala forced herself to breathe, feeling the comforting weight of the bangle around her wrist. She could do this. She’d fought as many before, that night she’d helped Kamran get away. She’d had backup then, and she had backup now, and that was before she had trained with other heroes. She had this, she—
“Stand down, Ms. Marvel.”
Something in the authority of the voice—the familiar voice—made her freeze. No more bullets came her way. The guns weren’t lowered, either. She rolled onto her uninjured side, not taking her hand off the wound in her abdomen. It felt white hot, and she could feel the dampness soaking into her costume, but the blood had slowed and she could tell it wasn’t as deep as she’d feared. A graze then, probably. Hopefully. Still a problem to be dealt with sooner rather than later. Right after she dealt with the image of Peter writhing and gasping at Agent Sadie Deever’s feet.
“Spider-Man!” Kamala went to push herself to her feet, but Deever placed an over-shined shoe on Peter’s chest in warning. Peter scrabbled at it as his breathing turned even rougher, but the attempts were weak and ineffective. “Get off of him!”
Deever peered down at Peter, one eyebrow arched in mild disgust. “Huh. The peppermint worked.”
“Peppermint?” As carefully as she could, Kamala untwisted herself, even as she didn’t dare to stand up just yet.
“It’s poison to arachnids. Is he really part spider then, under that mask?”
“He’s a hero,” Kamala countered. “We all are, why can’t you get that?” She took in the full extent of the armed forces surrounding her, weapons at the ready. Which, yes, scary, but she could shield herself from them if she needed to. Just not Peter, not yet, and leaving him exposed wasn’t a risk she was willing to take.
“You are threats,” Deever countered, pressing a little harder into Peter’s chest. “Ones my new boss is a lot more open to eliminating if it will mean the people of this city are safe. She’s dying to meet you, although I don’t think she’ll have you working alongside US Agent. Locked away in a prison without a key, maybe.”
Kamala was only half-listening, attention grabbed by the way Peter was still fighting for air as his airways swelled shut. Whatever she was going to pull to get them out of this, she was going to have to do it fast. “Huh,” she mused, trying to disguise how fast her heart was pounding. “New generation of Avengers. New Ross. Figures.”
“Ross? That dinosaur? Please. But I’m not here to talk politics.” Deever reached into her pocket, bringing out a tiny vial. “And I’m sure you’ll be much more interested in hearing how you can get this antidote into your spider-pal.”
Kamala’s breath caught in her throat, focused on nothing now but the thumb-sized piece of glass in Deever’s hands. “I’m listening.”
“First rule—none of that voodoo stuff,” Deever warned, moving her foot over Peter’s throat instead. Peter spasmed below her as she applied pressure, a ragged, cut-off gasp filling the room.
“I won’t!” Kamala scrambled to her knees, the hand that wasn’t pressed against her bleeding side outstretched. “I won’t do anything. Let him breathe, please!”
The boot lessened just a fraction. “Good.” Deever nodded in approval. “Not that I will need to trust your word for long.”
The closest agents parted, not lowering their guns a fraction as a squat man dressed head-to-toe in body armor approached. He slid a small briefcase across the ground to her, not daring to get close. If she was feeling naive, Kamala might be flattered that they considered her powers great enough to take such elaborate precautions, but her encounters with Deever when she had first gained her gifts had proved otherwise—the real reason they were so wary of her. Both Peter and Kate had been working New York long before she had joined them, and she’d never seen a battalion of mystery agents sent after either of them.
But she could lament the unfairness of it all after Peter was safe and she was back in contact with Kate again. She flipped open the briefcase, heart sinking when she saw the pair of reinforced handcuffs inside.
“Put them on,” Deever ordered her. “My boss’s orders are to take you in. The spider is inconsequential.” She nudged her shoe a little harder into Peter’s Adam’s apple. “If he dies, it’s no skin off my back.”
“Don’t.” The word barely sounded like Peter, and Kamala hadn’t missed that his squirming had died down to weak twitching. Even so, he pressed on. “Don’t, Ms. Marvel, I’m not worth—”
He cut off with a flinch and a cry as Deever shifted her weight until her boot was pressing under his chin. Peter’s arms jerked as though trying to fight back, but he was too weak to shift more than an inch off the floor before he collapsed back again.
“Alright!” Kamala threw both her hands up now, only to flinch back as every person in the building with a gun tensed. “Wow, okay. Calm down, everyone.”
“Put them on,” Deever ordered her. “Last warning.”
Kamala stared down at the handcuffs. They were massive, weighty-looking things. She had a horrible suspicion that, once they went on, it would be a long, long time before they were taken off again. “You’ll give Spider-Man the antidote?”
Deever waggled the tiny vial tauntingly in her direction. “I will. He’s a bonus prize we won’t mind keeping.”
“No deal. I give myself up, you have to let him go,” Kamala tried. There was one thing worse than letting herself be dragged off into some cell, and that was landing one of her friends in there with her.
“If you don’t put those cuffs on in the next ten seconds, his throat will close entirely,” Deever countered. “Then we’ll shoot you somewhere non-fatal and force you to come anyway. The cuffs are us trying to be nice.”
“You and I have very different definitions of nice.” Kamala swallowed, gathering her courage, then reached for the cuffs. Peter made a kind of cut-off moan in protest, still trying to get her to stop, but Kamala had made up her mind. She tried for a smile. “We’ll be alright, Spider-Man. I promise.”
Her fingers had just brushed the edge of the cuffs when an arrow slammed right through the center of Deever’s hand, followed by Kate’s voice echoing through the building. “MM, catch!”
Kamala didn’t need telling twice. Deever’s awful scream barely registered as she kicked aside the handcuffs and dived forward, creating a long, glowing hand to catch the vial, the other creating a crystal dome around herself and Peter as she skidded to his side. Gunfire exploded around her, but the djinn magic deflected them as she ripped the lid off the bottle.
“Peter, hey,” she whispered as she wrenched his mask up. He made a pitiful sound of protest, his skin mottled and purple, eyes bloodshot. “Drink it, Peter, now.”
It took a couple of goes, his swollen throat working around the liquid. Kamala slipped her hand into his, squeezing it as she added, “You’re alright. Peter, you’re alright.”
He made a horrible choking sound, jerking beneath her. For one, awful moment Kamala was sure that this wasn’t an antidote at all, that Deever had tricked her, when Peter finally hauled something close to a full breath.
“That’s it, you’re alright,” Kamala encouraged him. “That was the antidote, you’re going to be okay now.”
“I need…” Peter broke off in a fit of coughing, eyes streaming as he cast about wildly. “Mask, where is…”
“They can’t see in,” Kamala reminded him, and Peter stilled, taking in the magical sphere for the first time. “We’re safe while this is up.”
“Um, I’m not!” A curse and a zip of an arrow came across the comms. “Sorry team, they backed me into a corner and I had to go radio silent. Is Spider-Man alright?”
“Fine,” Peter croaked, only for his eyes to go huge when he saw the blood staining Kamala’s costume. “You’re hit.”
“MM is hit? How bad?”
“I’m alright,” Kamala assured them, only to wince. “Kind of. It’s a graze, I think.”
“Here.” Peter struggled to his knees, letting Kamala help him. He fired his shooters over the wound, sealing it. “That’ll buy us some time.”
“That stuff isn’t toxic, is it?”
“Let’s hope not.” Peter was still panting, even as his cheeks faded from that ugly purple to red. “You…you planned that with Kate, right? You weren’t actually going to put those cuffs on?” He seemed to read the answer on her face. “Kamala.”
Kamala pressed his mask back into his hand. “Come on, Spider-Man can’t die from a peppermint allergy. That’s so uncool.”
“You can’t do things like that.”
“Well, good thing I didn’t do it, then." Kamala gripped his hand again. “You would have done it for me. You know you would have."
“And I would sacrifice myself for you, and you two for me, and that’s very nice but can you please get out here and help me clear an escape path? Deever does not look happy that she has a trendy new hand piercing.”
Peter’s breathing had evened out at last, though he still looked unsteady. “You ready to fight our way out of here?”
“Um…” Kamala recalled the sheer amount of guns and agents waiting for them outside. She took a deep breath, squaring her shoulders. “Yes,” she decided. “Count of three?”
Peter nodded, wrenching his mask back into place. “Let's do this.”
Kamala prepared to drop the protective sphere. “Three…two…one… go!”