Chapter 8: The Weekend (Part 4)
Peter managed to find an excuse to leave Harry and Gwen, saying he was heading home. Really though, he ducked into an alley and changed back into his suit, heading over to Avengers Tower. Spots swam through his vision the whole way there. He landed on the glass windows at the top, holding on with his feet, holding his ribs with one hand, and pounded on the glass.
About twenty minutes later, he was sitting in a chair with his hoodie on backwards with the hood pulled up over his face so Natasha could see what she was dealing with on the back of his head.
"Welp, you've got a nice laceration back here. Probably a concussion. I can stitch this, probably. Take it easy though." She spoke, standing behind him. What could be considered the events of Iron Man 2 had just happened, so she was still relatively young at about her mid-twenties. She quickly stitched up his head gash, handing him a pb&j sandwich to fix his blood loss issue, like you do after donating blood or getting a blood test.
He ate silently, his hoodie back on straight and his goggles back over his eyes. His facemask was down so he could eat. He sat there, bored, as both Natasha and Tony from another room lectured about him being brash or whatever. Once his sandwich was finished, he shot a quick splat of webs over both of their mouths to shut them up. "God, I thought you guys would never shut up." He shook his head and climbed up the wall towards an open window, bloody stitches wiggling out of the back of his head as his wound knit itself back together slowly. "I'm capable of doing a lot of good down there in the city. Whether you think I should or shouldn't is irrelevant to me. Go ahead and start taking tallies of how many lives I save and how many villains I put away. Good luck calling me brash then." He was about to swing out, before he turned back to them. "By the way, my webs aren't waterproof yet, so just like, wash them off or something." He sat there awkwardly for another few seconds before he dipped out the window. "Ok byyyyyyyyye!"
As Peter swung away, his mind ran in a bunch of different directions. He seriously needed more reliable webs. The webs he had now were great, they were more than great, but if he shot webs continuously, his fingertips would bleed. He really didn't need that right now. He either needed to build up resistance to that so he wouldn't bleed anymore, or he needed to replace his method of webbing, and use his organic webs as a last line of defense. He decided to just train it, and see if it was even possible to build a resistance to the bleeding fingertips thing. His body constantly produced webs, so he wasn't gonna run out, he just needed to sort of break in the ducts in his fingers that allowed for the webs. Like training a muscle. He went to the ocean, swinging across town. He spent a few hours at the harbor, dumping his webs and whatever blood came out of his fingertips into the ocean. Salt and waves would break down the stickiness produced by the webs and his blood would eventually dissolve in the saltwater. He stopped when the blood stopped, which meant he stayed at the coast until well into the afternoon, about 2 or 3.
He left the harbor, satisfied that he likely wouldn't have to deal with bleeding fingers anymore, as he swung back through the city.
During the study session earlier, Peter and Gwen had exchanged numbers. He was surprised mid-swing when she called him. He posted up on a fire escape and picked up. "Gwen? What's up?"
"Ohh~ Petey really did give you his number." Girly giggling from several sources was heard following MJ's tease. "Gwen chose dare, that's all, Tiger." She hung up, just as Peter heard the rattling of a subway through the phone.
He shrugged and went for a swing, hunting around for any crime-y things to stop. He had just wrapped up, literally, a ball of burglars when he heard an explosion from down the street. He swung there in record time, and perched on a streetlight to take inventory.
'Ok, smoke coming from the subway terminal, people fleeing. Seems basic.' He zipped down into the subway to get people out, finding a small restaurat set up in the actual terminal blocked off by a subway car that had crashed and slid into the doors. Smoke was filling it, and Peter's stomach dropped. Inside was Gwen and MJ, both banging on the glass from the inside. 'Shitshitshit, ok Pete, calm down. Think...' He had two choices: Test out his strength and try to push the subway car away from the doors, or try to break the glass. With the fire and smoke, the subway car would probably burn him, but the seats are still viable leverage. (Lemme a flip a coin: Subway car it is!)
Peter crawled into the mangled subway car, shooting webs out of the shattered windows, and braced his feet against the furthest seat in the back of the car, hoping to pivot it enough that the restaurant doors could be accessed. He wrenched back on his webs, attached to the wall of the subway tunnel some 200 feet away. It took some digging deep, but he did finally manage to push the subway car out of the way of the restaurant doors. The entirety of the doors were metal, so they would probably burn anyone who touched it.
Peter ripped padding out of a subway seat and used it to open the doors, crouched. "Get out! Get out! Get air!" He went immediately for Gwen and Mj, webbing them to his back before he made several long webzips back to street level, immediately handing them over to a paramedic on standby.
Peter cleared his throat. "You ok, ladies?" He put on the fakest New Yorker accent ever.