Part 2
In between the extended periods of darkness, there was only pain.
It was odd, honestly. He had a hard time understanding what was going on, between the pain and the dehydration and the fact that everything was just generally hazy. How long had he been here? He had no idea, now. He had no basis of where to even start counting hours, what with him having been knocked out immediately upon Tony leaving, and the extended amounts of time he was unconscious for all the time now.
And yet, what they were doing to him seemed… different. The first time was painful as hell, yes, but… it made sense. He'd been injected with things, subjected to crazy tests to figure out if their experiments had worked, but there was a purpose to all of it.
This time, the pain just seemed… senseless. It was near constant, and they didn't seem to have any goal in mind. There was no reprieve, nor any pattern, unlike the last time. The only real thing he could count on was the pain, and whether that was real or not was hard to say sometimes.
But all he could do was lay there and take it.
Tony hadn't slept.
Letting Peter go had to be the worst decision he'd ever made. Worse than abducting him, worse than deciding to do that first poor attempt at raiding Hydra, worse than anything he could think of.
The kid's face haunted him constantly. He could sense the moment he'd realized that his parents weren't there - and for whatever reason, they weren't. Tony had noticed a split second after he did, and by that point, it was too late. They were surrounded, and the realization only seemed to make Peter more determined.
Leaving him was the hardest thing he'd done in... years.
The moment he'd realized Peter's parents were nowhere to be seen, he realized the kid was right. He was going straight back to Hydra. Whatever their motives were, Tony had no idea, but Peter hadn't seemed very convinced that he would get out, and… well, he'd been right up to this point. He didn't doubt the kid's abilities, but if he was sure he wasn't getting out, then Tony wasn't going to sit around and wait for him to try before doing something.
And so he hadn't slept. He went to work immediately upon returning to the tower, trusting Steve and the others to deal with Wanda.
He hadn't been able to figure out before — where Hydra was hiding, what their motives were — but now he had all the information he'd had to work with before plus some, the knowledge of all the places they weren't, and a suddenly much more personal motive.
He cared about both of them, so he couldn't fathom why it being Peter made this so much more… personal. He couldn't fathom, even still, why he cared about Peter so much, nor when it had happened. But somewhere along the way… it just had. There was no explanation for it. And yet, he found that he didn't mind it. It just felt natural. And the feeling was further intensified by the fact he was sure he wasn't the only one. The whole team seemed to have been touched by him in a way that they couldn't explain, even if they'd only met him once.
It helped, having the whole team back. Nat and Clint were back in the game, whether they were really recovered enough to be or not, and Wanda, whenever she recovered enough to tell them what she knew, had a gold mine of information, at least when it came to rescuing Peter. They wouldn't be taking down Hydra as a whole with what she knew, but they had a fair idea of the conditions Peter was facing, and even a little of what it looked like inside.
It took days to compile the intelligence they already had with what Wanda knew, and to give Nat and Clint a chance to do their own work. Over a week, counting the time they were able to put everything together and come up with a decent plan. He left Peter in that hellhole for over a week. The knowledge killed him, but there was little he could do. They could be hasty and try to attack immediately, sure, but even if they had all the right information and the right location, if they went about it the wrong way, he would slip right through their fingers the same way Wanda had the first time. And then that week and some change could turn into weeks or a month or more and he just could not allow that, so he waited.
They waited and planned and worked better as a team than they probably ever had before on anything. They pulled out all the stops in preparation, and when it came time to make their move, they did. And this time they weren't going home without what they came for.
He saw them, once.
Well, not saw. Heard, was more like. But his dad was there, he was sure of it. Helping them, it seemed. His mom, less so — she'd come in to talk to him, for a brief time, and no one had been hurting him at the time, so… maybe she wasn't in on it? Maybe she was just there? Or maybe he'd just dreamed the whole thing and that was why. That was probably the more likely explanation, even if he didn't really want to accept it.
He still didn't know how long he'd been here. By now even his sleep schedule was so whack from the pain and constant darkness and the fact that he was in and out of consciousness all the time that any measure of it he had was long gone. It could have been a day or a month already and he wouldn't know.
To think he'd hoped that Tony would rescue him. It had been foolish, he knew. He should have seen the Avengers kindness for what it was, should have realized that whether he was Spider-Man or not, they really had no connection to him and no reason to care about him. Why would they waste their valuable resources coming to rescue him? He'd already been nothing but trouble, and they got what they came for, so why risk anyone else over him?
The simple answer was that they wouldn't. It made no sense. Still, he couldn't help hoping, in the beginning, and sometimes even through the haze of pain he was in, that someone — someone being multiple people, as time progressed, but if he was truthful, it was mainly Tony who dominated his hopes of rescue — would come for him eventually.
It didn't help that they Hydra agents seemed to think the same thing. He could hear them, sometimes, when they weren't experimenting with his senses for whatever form of torture was currently their favorite. Talking about what they would do and test to pass the time. What they thought would hurt him most, what they could accomplish before Tony came. What would hurt Tony the most when he found him again.
It was maddening. Every bit of it. Not knowing what was real and what was dreams through the haze of pain, the pain itself, the missing chunks of time… he really thought he was going insane.
The worst pain was his chest. Whatever it was they were doing to him, he was deprived of every sense they could, and then it just… seared. Blazing, blindingly hot, sizzling, foul smelling, and painful. And they did it every day, presumably hoping it would eventually scar. Even when he could feel it starting to, they still kept at it.
It was usually that pain that made him black out for the longest time. Everything else, while it still hurt, was nothing in comparison. He dreaded it every day - or at least what he assumed was every day. If it wasn't… well, then he really had no idea.
He just didn't understand. None of it made sense. What were they doing to him? Why did they want him in the first place if not to continue experimenting on him? And if these Hydra agents were so sure Tony was coming for him... then where was he?
A crash woke him.
Then a shot, another, something that sounded like a devastating impact.
Peter groaned as he started to surface from that blackness that seemed to be constantly surrounding him these days. Whatever the hell this new turmoil was, it was loud and obnoxious and interrupting the closest thing to peace he'd had since he'd gotten here. He just wanted it to go away.
But it didn't go away. It only intensified as time went on. It was torture on his already strained senses, but there was nothing he could do but lay there and take it, and try to block as much of it out as possible.
"Peter?"
The boy flinched. God, it had been so long since he'd heard his own name. Hydra didn't really talk to him, and when they talked about him, it was more of a passing comment, usually referring to him as "it" or some other inconclusive name. But who would be calling his name now? The voice was too loud, and his senses too painfully strained for him to be able to identify it.
"Hey, kid, come on. Can you hear me?" A pause, and then hands brushed his wrist, his throat, and he heard the sound of breath catching. "Stark, I found him, but it's not- it's not good. I'm going to get him back to the Quinjet. You guys finish up here as soon as possible."
If there was a reply, it was indistinguishable from the rest of the background noise to Peter's ears. Hands were on him again, tugging and pulling at whatever was holding him in place, and then he was being moved and oh god was it painful-
"Sorry, sorry, you're okay, kid, you're alright," the voice was murmuring, and then he was being jostled again and something shifted in just the right way and the world was suddenly black again.
He went in and out of the blackness a few times. Each time he woke up, the situation was more and more bizarre and his mind less and less able to grasp it.
The first time there was still moving and noise and chaos and he still couldn't see.
The second time, he'd been laid down on something, and the majority of the noise had faded into the background, though there were still voices shouting and the distant sound of battle in the background.
The third time, the background was quieter, though there was a distinct humming that never seemed to go away, but the voices were closer, and there were just so many of them, all different and all leaving an impression of familiarity but he was too out of it to have any idea why.
"He's in bad shape-"
"I should never have let him do this-"
"This isn't just your fault, Tony-"
"They've made it quite clear whose fault it is, they had from the beginning-"
"Fighting isn't going to help-"
"What are we going to do-"
"His parents-"
"This was a major win, we should be happy-"
"But the kid-"
"Look what they did to him, look at his chest-"
He was out again.
By the fourth time, things had settled down a lot. He was on a bed, he thought, and it was a lot comfier than anything else he'd touched in a long time, and it was completely quiet, no background noise or voices or anything to be heard but the soft thumping of his and one other person's breaths and heartbeats. He was coherent enough — or perhaps just paranoid enough — to realize the second set had to be from someone else, and that person had to be waiting on him to wake up, but he didn't know where he was or what that meant or if he should be terrified by the knowledge or not. It was clear that, at least temporarily, he was away from Hydra; but at what cost? Were his "rescuers" really rescuers at all? Or another evil for him to worry about when he really woke up?
Well, right now he didn't have the strength or mental capacity to worry about it. As soon as the fleeting notion to panic hit him, it seemed to exhaust him completely before it could even fully grip his body, and then he was sinking fully back into the blackness for the last time.
