The woods were beautiful, in a way. Mostly scary.
Peter could hear vague animal noises he couldn't identify- yelps, growls, birds screeching.
At least, he hoped they were birds. He might have known if he could hear better. His eardrums hadn't healed yet. Nothing had healed yet.
He couldn't shake the feeling of being followed, somehow- but the woods around him were completely empty. Nothing moved between the trees.
He'd been used as bait .
It said a lot about their team dynamic, if you could call it that- he wasn't really on the team. It was nice to think that they'd care that much, but it wasn't realistic. They knew he could fight his way out of just about anything - or, that he should be able to.
Maybe the Vulture was right. Maybe the Avengers would have gotten him, scooped him out of a situation he wasn't actually able to handle. Maybe he was being egotistical; maybe he wasn't that good.
He had fought superhumans before, though- in Germany, and a handful of his own enemies. Vulture shouldn't have been able to chase him off, or to hurt him so much. The fight was massive underperformance on his part. It would have been inadequate six months ago. Something was wrong. He'd made too many mistakes.
He was still bleeding. His entire body ached. The stab wounds were burning, now, worse than before- like they'd been packed with molten metal. His ears were still ringing. It was getting harder and harder to breathe.
He should have been healing . He desperately wanted to be healing. Why wasn't he healing?
His spider-sense hummed in the back of his head, like it always did when he got badly hurt.
Or maybe it was just the forest. He didn't know. He didn't understand anatomy, not well enough to know exactly how much he'd fucked up. He could only be certain that he had .
He was probably the loudest thing around for miles. Twigs snapped under his feet, smothered by the damp leaf litter. Anything around would be coming towards him.
The air smelled odd. Like rot, damp. The tang of something animalistic, like cages at the zoo. All massively overscored by the smell of his own blood.
He felt awkward, out of place among the trees in his shredded stark-tech; the coolness of the forest floor seeping through the thin soles of his boots.
The woods seemed to go on forever.
He just had to walk in a straight line. He'd get to the compound and patch himself up if he wasn't healed by then, and leave. Nobody would ever have to know. This wasn't outside his skillset; he'd been stabbed before and gotten through it just fine.
This sort of thing would have never happened to Captain America.
Captain America could actually do his job.
He looked up to chunks of starry sky, which could have been the same sky he'd been looking at when he started. At least the sky was pretty.
He was still bleeding. He shouldn't still be bleeding.
It was scary, in a distant, dulled way. He needed to be able to heal. He wasn't sure if he'd bleed out from this- probably not- but he wasn't exactly living the safest life possible. His sparse medical knowledge was built around a body that didn't work like a normal one.
He didn't have the energy to be anxious about it, not properly. Being in so much pain was tiring enough, but his breath still caught in his throat.
He could feel his heartbeat, thrumming in his chest, a dull throbbing in his ears. He didn't know when he'd get out of the woods. But he knew it had to be soon.
The Avengers probably wouldn't be pleased with Tony's pet project breaking into medical and stealing all their antiseptic wipes, but he was still vulnerable to infection even when his healing factor was actually doing its job. And he didn't like the idea of leaving a trail of blood all the way back to Queens.
Peter had upset the team dynamic, he'd upset it a lot . They were still recovering from the civil war when he'd shown up out of nowhere and been annoying and needy and half of them probably hated him by now. Of course the Vulture would take him. He was the tag-along kid at best . The weakest link, because some of the Avengers had more experience in combat than he had experience being alive.
He was lucky Tony Stark liked him.
Maybe he'd help. He'd probably be annoyed, with the timing and how easily Peter had been beaten and everything else. But Tony Stark was...something else.
He seemed almost like a god, a miracle, who'd whirled into Peter's life and made all his dreams come true.
Peter was starting to feel woozy, like everything was not quite real.
It was probably the blood loss.
There wasn't enough air in the air. Peter could breathe , mechanically, technically. He was getting air into his lungs. He was also getting blood into at least one lung, but the air was physically there.
Maybe this was what drowning felt like.
He might die out in the middle of nowhere, with nobody knowing he was there. He hadn't brought his phone out spider-manning.
Nobody would know, not for days at least. Aunt May wouldn't.
He kind of understood, now. Why she was so overprotective. Why she wanted to know where he was all the time.
She probably wasn't worried about crazy bird-men specifically, but it made sense.
It'd be really ironic, to die within walking distance of one of the only medical centres in the world that understood his body enough to treat him.
He pressed on.
The first of the animals he picked out properly weren't really animals at all. They were fireflies. Tiny sparks of light, breaking up the monotony of the forest. Dancing through the trees, in twos and threes.
He'd caught fireflies in jars, when he was little. Or, his parents had. He hadn't been very good at it. He'd tried to build a colony of fireflies, to breed them brighter.
They'd all died.
He stopped, for a second. Stood perfectly still, one arm out.
A firefly landed on his bloodied fingertip. Its wings fluttered, then, to his horror, stuck , trapped in the congealed blood. He panicked and flailed his hand around until it was flung free. So much for the moment.
At least he was bleeding out somewhere pretty.
He lost track of time, after that. The world was fireflies and trees and blood on his hands and so, so much pain . And it didn't stop .
There was a strange euphoric edge to the agony. Something with neurotransmitters? Endorphins, maybe.
He reached the compound, after a time. The grounds seemed endless, cropped grass going on forever between him and the building. The sky was vast and beautiful, in a mind-blowing way. Some of the stars were already dead.
There was movement behind the glowing windows, a figure
Shit.
He might not get caught.
Peter backtracked towards the treeline. Maybe he could get... around.
The figure tore out of the compound and across the common. Peter froze.