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Breathless, Johnny watches Peter swipe a hand across his sweaty forehead and shake out his hair. Johnny shivers when they make eye contact and contemplates his existence, wondering if it’s worth it to just tip his head back and call it a fucking day.
Tip his head back into the terribly rocky ground he’s sprawled on – a horrible place really, for Johnny Storm to kick the bucket.
“Deep breaths, Johnny,” Peter says, shifting from his crouch to sit alongside him. He’s close enough that Johnny briefly imagines tilting his head into Peter to breathe him in with those deep breaths he’s asking for.
Peter lightly touches Johnny’s chest. He coaxes again, “C’mon, deep breaths with me.”
Johnny shivers again and lets his eyes flutter closed, but he takes in an extra deep inhale for show. Behind his eyes he can still sense Peter’s form, the fuzzy outline of his body heat calling to Johnny’s depleted inner fire.
“Good,” Peter says, and it’s in a softer voice than Johnny expects. “Just like that, hot stuff.”
Johnny gives a weak snort and thinks to himself, Not the hot one at the moment. It’s true. Obviously so, as shivers intermittently run through him.
It’s normal, as far as Johnny can be “normal” these days. It’s normal for the shivers and lack of oxygen after he goes nova, and he’s come to expect it for the most part. He’s a little surprised to be awake and mostly conscious.
“Just a recon mission,” Reed had said.
Yeah right.
Though it’s almost lucky Johnny lost the straw pull to see who went, as it was exactly his type of problem. Some idiots on an empty rock of a planet fucking around to see if they could create a … What did Pete say? Solar-fueled bazooka? There was already evidence of a couple of mishaps – massive craters – elsewhere.
They’d barely been there long enough to snoop around when Peter’s mask eyes widened and his voice cracked, “Holy shit, that’s gonna blow.”
Johnny didn’t pause long enough to ask him if it was his freaky senses or his freaky smarts telling him that. He was blowing his way past the morons to their work station where they had a bank of massive, oddly-shaped solar probably-batteries.
He heard Peter’s familiar thwips and, “Hey, watch where you point that thing!” behind him as he absorbed the energy that was… that was pulsing alarmingly quick now that he was in the thick of it. Johnny winced and tried to pull it all in faster, cramming every bit of energy into his measly 5’10” frame. The pressure was so intense, each bit pulled in like another centimeter gone from a short fuse and his concentration shifted to, Keep it in, in, in.
Johnny wasn’t sure if he got it all, but it had to be enough because he physically couldn’t take another particle. He was a balloon already stretched thin and someone was stepping on him.
He aimed his flight to the stars, and the amount of power he was releasing to fly wasn’t nearly enough, he needed to- to-
One moment he was thinking, Just a little further, and the next he’d already lost control.
The relief from letting go of the insane pressure was so intense that he was weightless, vaguely aware of the space around him dazzlingly bright. Johnny floated in his beam of light, head back, and he was the universe and the universe was him and there are no thoughts when there is only peace and comfort and relief and-
Then he fell.
Johnny’s not really sure how Peter caught him, but he appreciates it.
He’s always appreciating Peter – his brain, his time, his dorky smile, his voice, his weird spider-y-ness, especially when it saves Johnny’s bacon.
His voice is the point now though, walking Johnny through deep lungfuls of air. Focus on that dingus. Johnny takes his slow breaths, and tries to ignore the heat.
It’s not the heat in the air. Peter must have taken them back to where they’d dumped their stuff because the air is cool, or at least as far as Johnny can tell. It’s Peter himself, rolling the heat off his shoulder like the little radioactive bug he is, putting it out where Johnny can see it behind his closed eyes.
There are tendrils flickering off of Peter as his body cools and Johnny can’t keep his mind’s eye off them. They’re just little fizzles and he wants them so bad. Christ, he just literally exploded from too much heat and energy and his pathetic body is already craving more.
“You feeling alright?” Peter asks.
Johnny lets out a long groan.
“Oh no, a death cry,” Peter teases gently, “stay with me, firefly.”
Cold is usually easy for Johnny to forget, but right now his tank is empty. His heat’s all escaped, and it broke all the barriers he created to keep it in. He’s cold – shivering cold.
Johnny reaches out.
He doesn’t mean to do it, but… Peter’s sweating, isn’t he? He’s hotter than normal, Johnny thinks, though he can’t be sure with all his senses off track like this. But Peter’s sweating, so it’s fine. It’s fine.
As slow as he can with his wrecked control, Johnny pulls gently on just the edges of Peter’s warmth. Just a little sip from a cup of steaming hot cocoa. He’s so cold . Peter won’t even notice.
“I called Reed, and they’re on their way back, but it’s gonna be a bit still.” Peter reaches out to adjust the pack Johnny’s using as a pillow for something to do. He’s never been good at bedside sitting. “Do you need anything? I know you usually recover on your luxury mattress with your bajillion thread-count sheets, but if you think of anything…”
“Peteeer,” Johnny moans, and gives Peter a grumpy look. He’d taken his mask off at some point. “I’m cold, and my muscles are sore.”
“Oh right.” Peter pulls his bag to him and digs through it. “I forgot you’ve said that. That you get cold after. Uhhhh – I have a flannel.”
Peter drapes his opened shirt over Johnny’s torso, and Johnny thinks petulantly that it’s not nearly as warm as it’d be if Peter had been wearing it first. Peter’s body heat is like a siren call, Johnny just has to figure out how to get it closer to him.
He knows what he has to do.
“Peter.”
Johnny gives him a grave look.
Peter responds to his tone, and looks at him seriously. “What’s wrong Johnny?”
“I need you to cuddle me,” Johnny says. “It’s the only way.”
A blush blooms across his cheeks, and he gives Johnny a pointed look. “Johnny, be serious.”
Johnny folds like a sheet of paper. “Please,” he wheedles. “I’m cold and you’re the only warm thing around. Don’t deprive a man.”
Peter rolls his eyes. “I think you’ll live until the others get back.”
“Aren’t you like, really hot though?” Johnny blurts, and then wishes he’d put something other than his foot in his mouth when he hears how that sounds. He’s heard better lines in actual porn.
Luck is on his side apparently, because Peter doesn’t seem to notice. He wipes his forehead, which has slowly been accumulating sweat still, and dark patches have appeared on his suit where it’s come through. He might as well be steaming, with the wisps of warmth Johnny can sense coming off him.
“Yeah, which is why I don’t really want to get close to you. My body is cooking itself a bit right now.” Peter laughs, and touches his temple the way he does when he’s reaching for his glasses and remembers they aren’t there. “I’m trying to cool down, not snuggle up to another furnace.” He pointedly gives Johnny’s shoulder a little poke.
Abruptly, Johnny comes to two realizations. One, Peter is in fact, too hot, and it’s because of his silly little "spiders and temperature changes don’t mix" thingy. And two, there is a simple answer to both of their problems.
He’s been ignoring that he’d been gently, unintentionally, corralling the little fizzles coming off of Peter to himself. No need, when the solution for them both was clear.
Johnny locks in on Peter’s heat signature. His senses are still pretty skewed, so he can’t tell exactly what either of their internal temperatures are like he’d be able to normally. But now that he knows Peter is firmly in the “Too Hot” category, he can probably dial in on something more comfortable.
“Hey,” Johnny says seriously, and Peter shifts toward him. “I got this. I’ll help.”
Peter raises an eyebrow, amused. “Help with what flamebrain?”
With gargantuan effort, Johnny snags Peter’s hand. “C’mon. Come here already.” Then he tugs firmly on Peter’s hand and on the cloud of warmth around it, drawing them both toward him.
“What– Johnny–” The pull has Peter sprawling into him, and Johnny draws on more of his warm aura where they touch. “Whoa, how are you doing that?”
“Just trust the process,” Johnny says and absently pats him with closed eyes, focused entirely on the soothing transfer of energy between them. “Now cuddle me.”
“This is bizarre,” he says, even as he does shift to lay on his side facing Johnny. “My skin is cold where you’re touching me. Like a breeze.”
“Am I giving you goosebumps?” Johnny snickers, and moves to mirror him, pressing his face against Peter’s burning forehead.
If the release of going nova is an indescribable relief, then replenishing his inner flames through Peter is like a comforting fireplace in the winter. Tucked this close, he wraps Peter’s warmth around him like a blanket against the creeping post-explosion cold.
After a few minutes Peter says, “This feels … odd. Are you manipulating my body temperature?”
“Mm-hm.”
“Huh… I have a million questions.”
Johnny giggles, a bit dopey, “I try not to think about it myself.”
They stay like that, with Johnny feeling almost… meditative, his focus dialed in on equalizing their body temperatures, until they hear the approach of the ship carrying the rest of his family.
They slowly separate without a word, and gather their things. While Johnny still feels shaky, and moves around cautiously, he feels miles more even-keeled than he usually does this soon after going nova.
“Alright down there? ” Sue’s voice crackles into his comm as the ship comes into range.
“Just peachy,” Johnny replies. A wave of dizziness hits him as he watches the ship land, and he leans on Peter for support.
“Okay peachy, let’s get you to bed.” Peter nudges him up into the ship.
Then comes the appropriate mix of fretting and chiding from Sue, a brief recall of events by Peter, and finally Johnny’s in bed.
He’s quickly losing the will to stay awake, but he’s aware enough to feel that Peter is tucking him in. Their internal temperatures still match, and he feels an unusual sense of pride that it’s because of him.
“Thanks for catching me,” Johnny says.
“What?”
“You caught me. I just remembered.”
“Oh that.” He says, and he sounds surprised. “Of course, don’t worry about it.”
Johnny peels his eyes open to catch a soft look on his face. A look that emboldens him to ask, “Stay with me?”
The soft look returns as Peter indulges him with a smile. “Sure, pretty boy, I’ll stay. Why don’t you rest now.”
His eyes slip closed, and he hears the metal of a chair scraping across the floor. As he drifts off, Peter twines their fingers together, their hands flush and warmth equivalent.