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Peter woke up to two things: a ceiling he didn’t recognize, and the immediate, bone-deep certainty that something was wrong with his arms.
He tried to lift a hand to his face – reflexive, the kind of motion you don’t think about until it doesn’t happen – and it didn’t move. Not hurt-and-couldn’t-move. Restrained. Something wide and padded pinned his wrist flat against the mattress, and when he yanked, harder, the fabric held with an efficiency that told him it wasn’t hospital-standard.
The panic arrived before the thought did.
“H- hey-” His voice came out wrecked, throat raw in a way that suggested a tube had been down in it recently. He yanked again, both wrists this time, and the restraints didn’t so much as creak, which was somehow worse, because Peter Parker did not have things that simply didn’t creak under his strength. “Hey, what- get this off, get it off-”
“Peter. Pete, hey, look at me, you’re okay-”
Tony’s voice, close, and then Tony’s face swimming into view above him, and Peter’s brain – still fogged from whatever anesthesia they’d used, still catching up to itself in stutters – latched onto the familiar shape of him like a lifeline even as his body kept pulling reflexively against the restraints.
“Why can’t I move,” Peter said, and heard how thin and scared it sounded, hated it, couldn’t stop it. “Why am I tied down, what happened, what’s-”
“You’re not tied down, you’re restrained, there’s a difference, and I need you to breathe before you tear your own stitches trying to fight a strap you could probably rip through if you actually put your back into it.” Tony’s hand landed on his shoulder, grounding, and his voice had gone into the low, steady register Peter associated with the absolute worst moments of the last two years. “You had surgery. Six hours ago. You’re at the compound med bay, not a hospital, and the restraints are precautionary, not punitive, because you came out of anesthesia combative twice already and put a fist-shaped dent in a wall panel the first time.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“I know you don’t, that’s kind of the anesthesia’s whole deal. You’re safe. Nothing bad is happening to you right now. I need you to hear that part specifically.”
Peter’s chest was doing something too fast and too shallow, air catching wrong, and some clinical, distant part of his brian recognized the shape of it as a panic attack starting even as the rest of him was too far gone to do anything but ride it. “I don’t like this,” he managed. “I don't- I don’t like not being able to move, please, can you-”
“I can’t take them off yet, bud, not till Dr. Cho clears it, and I know that’s a terrible answer right now, but I need you to trust me on the timing.” Tony’s hand moved from his shoulder to the side of his face, thumb brushing along his cheekbone in a gesture that was more instinct than plan. “What I can do is stay right here and not go anywhere, and walk you through breathing until this eases up. Can you do that with me?”
“Why,” Peter gritted out, eyes stinging, “Why do I keep- coming out of anesthesia like this, why is this the second time-”
“Because your body metabolizes most sedatives about four times faster than a baseline human’s, which means you’re coming up out of the deep stuff while there’s still a lag on how your brain’s processing input, and that combination produces exactly this – confusion, panic, occasionally violence toward wall panels. It’s not a you problem. It’s a spider-metabolism problem, and it’s one we are absolutely going to fix before this ever happens again, but right now, in this exact minute, I need you breathing with me instead of fighting the straps.”
“I can’t-”
“You can. In for four. With me. One, two, three, four.”
Peter tried. It came out ragged and short, nowhere near the four counts, but Tony didn’t so much as flinch at the failure, just kept his hand steady against Peter’s face and repeated the count, patient, unhurried, like he had nowhere else in the world to be.
“Again. In for four.”
It took six tries before Peter managed something close to the full count. It took another eight before the room stopped swimming quite so badly, before the restraints against his wrists stopped registering as an active five-alarm emergency and started registering as, simply, uncomfortable – an important distinction, even if it didn’t feel like much of one yet.
“There you go,” Tony murmured. “There you go, kid. You’re doing so much better than you think you are right now.”
“What happened,” Peter asked again, quieter this time, some of the raw edge gone out of it. “Before the surgery. I don’t- the last thing I remember is patrol, and then it’s just gone.”
“Building collapse, partial. You got three kids and a security guard out before the last section came down on you. Cracked ribs, punctured lung, a laceration on your side that needed more stitches than I’m comfortable thinking about. You did good, Pete. You did really, really good, and then your own body tried to finish the job the collapse started, which is a phrase I never want to say again in my life.”
“Punctured lung.” Peter’s breath hitched again, differently this time – not panic, something closer to the delayed weight of oh, that could have actually killed me. “That’s- that’s bad, right? That’s a bad one.”
“It was a bad one. You’re stable now. Cho got the repair done clean, your healing factor’s already doing something faster than she’s ever documented in a human patient, and by tomorrow she thinks you’ll be well enough to actually argue with me about how long you have to stay in bed, which I am personally looking forward to, because normal Peter arguing with me is a massive upgrade from panicked-anesthesia Peter.”
That got something close to a laugh out of him – small, wet, but real. “I really hate this.” Peter said, glancing down at the restraint on his wrist, some of the earlier panic replaced now with a tired kind of resentment. “The- the not being able to move thing. I know it’s for my own good, I get it, logically, but it still feels-”
“Like the worst thing in the world. Yeah. I know.” Tony’s thumb kept moving, slow, absent, against his cheekbone. “For what it’s worth, you don’t have to like it. You just have to survive it for a few more hours until Cho’s comfortable clearing you, and I promise you the second she gives the word, I’m the one taking these off myself.”
“You could take them off now,” Peter tried, without much real hope behind it. “I’m not gonna hit anything again, I promise-”
“You said that the first time you came out of it too, right before you hit the wall panel.” Tony’s mouth curved, not unkind. “Nice try, though. Very convincing tone.”
“Worth a shot.”
“Always is.” Tony shifted, pulling a chair closer with his free hand rather than letting go of Peter’s face, settling in like he had every intention of staying exactly where he was for however long it took. “Talk to me. Tell me something boring. Give your brain something to chew on besides the straps.”
“Like what.”
“I don’t know, decathlon. That thing with the trig identities you were complaining about last week. Anything. Doesn’t have to make sense, you're still half sedated.”
So Peter talked – rambling, disjointed, half a sentence about a practice problem bleeding into half a sentence about MJ’s opinion on a documentary neither of them could quite remember the name of – and somewhere in the middle of it, with Tony’s hand still steady against his face and the restraints finally starting to feel less like an emergency and more like a temporary, tolerable inconvenience, the last of the panic finally, fully drained out of him.
“Better?” Tony asked, once Peter trailed off midd-sentence, eyelids heavy again, exhaustion catching up now that the adrenaline had nothing left to run on.
“Better,” Peter mumbled. “Don’t leave though. Even if I fall asleep. Just- stay.”
“Wasn’t planning on going anywhere,” Tony said, quiet, and meant it with the particular weight of a promise he minted to keep down to the letter. “Sleep, bambino. I’ve got you. Straps and all.”
Peter’s eyes slid shut, breathing finally evening out into something slow and unafraid, and Tony stayed exactly where he was – chair pulled close, hand steady, watching the monitor tick along steady besides a kid who’d nearly punctured a lung saving three strangers and a security guard, and hadn’t complained about a single part of that until the part where he couldn’t move his own hands.
Fixable, Tony thought, already running the specs for a sedative recalibration in the back of his mind. That part, at least, I can fix.