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If someone had told Peter, at the start of the Midtown Tech decathlon field trip, that he’d end the day playing field medic to Flash Thompson in a collapsed parking structure, he would have assumed it was some kind of extremely specific curse.
And yet.
“Okay, okay, I need you to stop moving your head like that,” Peter said, keeping one hand braced against Flash’s shoulder while the other held a strip of his own hoodie against the gash above Flash’s eyebrow. “Concussion protocol, man, work with me.”
“I don’t have a concussion, Parker, I have a scholarship application due Friday and a bus that apparently drove into a sinkhole-”
“You have a head wound and you called me by the wrong name twice, so yes, you do.”
The field trip bus had hit a sinkhole outside a construction site – freak accident, nobody’s fault, structural failure from an old subway tunnel nobody flagged – and the chaperones had gotten everyone else out in the scramble. Everyone except Flash, who’d been thrown against a support pillar in the initial jolt, and Peter, who’d doubled back the second he realized someone was still inside and gotten a slab of collapsing concrete between himself and the exit for his trouble.
Karen was still online, thankfully, which meant Tony was very much online too.
“Vitals check, kid,” Tony’s voice came through the earpiece, calm in the specific way that meant he was working very hard to sound calm. “Talk to me. Pulse, breathing, pupil response if you can get a look.”
“Working on it,” Peter murmured, low enough that Flash – half-slumped against the rubble, dazed but conscious – wouldn’t clock it as anything but muttering to himself. He checked Flash’s pupils with the flashlight function on Flash’s own cracked phone. “Pupils are even. That’s good, right? That’s a good sign.”
“That’s a good sign. Pulse?”
Peter pressed two fingers to Flash’s wrist. “Little fast. Not crazy fast.”
“Adrenaline’ll do that. Keep him talking, keep him upright if you can manage it without moving his neck too much, and for God’s sake don’t let him fall asleep. What’s his other damage look like?”
“Head’s the main one. Maybe a wrist – he’s not putting weight on it.” Peter glanced at the makeshift dressing on Flash’s forehead, already soaking through. “I don’t- I don’t have a full kit, Mr. Stark, I’ve got half a hoodie and a water bottle.”
“Then half a hoodie and a water bottle are what you use. You’ve patched up worse with less. I promise you this is not your hardest triage, this is just your most personally aggravating one.”
That, unfortunately, tracked.
“Who are you talking to,” Flash said, squinting at him with the particular suspicion of someone whose brain wasn’t running at full capacity but was still, on principle, opposed to whatever Peter was doing.
“Myself. Head injury coping mechanism.” Peter readjusted the pressure on the wound. “Try not to talk, it’s gonna reopen if your face does too much.”
“You’re being weirdly competent about this,” Flash said, ignoring the instruction completely, because of course he did. “Like, suspiciously competent. You once got sent to the nurse for fainting during a blood typing lab.”
“I have a very specific phobia of needles, that’s not the same as not knowing first aid.”
“Since when do you know first aid?”
“Deflect,” Tony advised in his ear, sounding entirely too entertained given the circumstances. “Or tell him you took a class. Kids take classes.”
“I took a class,” Peter said. “Over the summer. For, uh. Reasons.”
Flash squinted harder, which had to hurt given the state of his forehead, and then apparently decided it wasn’t worth the effort of following up, because he slumped back against the rubble with a groan instead. “Okay. Fine. Whatever. Just- don’t let me die in a parking structure, Parker, that would be a genuinely embarrassing obituary.”
“Believe me, I’m equally motivated,” Peter muttered, and meant it more than he expected to. Two years of Flash needling him in the hallways, of Penis Parker and fake internship jokes and a hundred small cruelties that had genuinely stung more than Peter liked to admit – and none of it seemed to matter even slightly right now, with Flash’s blood on his hands and Flash’s scared, concussed eyes trying to track his face in the dark.
“How you holding up, bud?” Tony’s voice again, gentler now, the teasing dropped.
“I’m okay. It’s- it’s weird. I kind of hate this guy most days, and I still don’t want anything bad to happen to him. Is that dumb?”
“That’s not dumb, that’s just what caring about people looks like when you don’t get to pick who needs it. Doesn’t mean you have to be best friends after. Just means you’re a decent person in a crisis, which, for the record, is not a surprise to me even a little bit.”
Something in Peter’s chest loosened at that, warm despite the dust and the dark and the increasingly concerning way Flash’s eyes kept drifting shut. “Hey- hey, no, eyes open, we talked about this.”
“‘M tired,” Flash mumbled.
“I know, but you gotta stay awake for me a little longer, okay? Tell me about the scholarship thing. The application.”
“Why do you even care-”
“Because it’s keeping you talking, and talking’s keeping you conscious, so humor me.”
Flash, groggy and disoriented and clearly too far gone to summon his usual defensiveness, actually did – some rambling, half-coherent explanation about an engineering scholarship and a personal essay he hadn’t finished, and Peter kept nodding along and asking follow-up questions and pressing steady pressure to the wound until, twelve increasingly long minutes later, he heard the scrape and clatter of rescue crews finally breaking through the collapsed section above them.
“Down here!” Peter shouted, and for the first time in twelve minutes let himself feel how badly his hands were shaking.
“Good work, kid,” Tony said quietly in his ear, once the paramedics had Flash on a stretcher and Peter had been wrapped in an emergency blanket by someone who clearly thought he was in shock, which, fair. “Genuinely. That wasn’t easy, and you didn’t hesitate once.”
“He’d have done the same for anyone,” Peter said, watching them load Flash into the ambulance, still woozy but talking, definitely going to be fine. “I don’t actually think that’s true, but I want it to be.”
“Maybe not two years ago. You might’ve just changed his math on that a little.”
Peter thought about the way Flash’s hand had gripped his sleeve, once, in the dark, tight and scared and not remotely something either of them would ever bring up again – and thought maybe Tony had a point.
“For what it’s worth,” Peter said, pulling the emergency blanket tighter around his shoulders, “I’d still rather not get trapped in a collapsed anything with Eugene Thompson again.”
“Duly noted. I’ll add ‘no rival triage’ to the list of things we’re actively trying to avoid, right under ‘no more sinkholes’. You did good, Pete. Get checked out, then come home. I’ll have the good hot chocolate ready.”
“...The good hot chocolate?”
“The good hot chocolate.”
Peter, watching the ambulance pull away with Flash inside it, let himself smile, small and tired, and the sound of that word – home – sitting so easily in Tony's voice, like it had always belonged there.