There was a mild aching everywhere, but his head hurt the most. Peter groaned as he sat up, his head throbbing in time with his pulse.

"You appear to have a mild concussion."

"Peter!" He'd never heard Katya sound scared before. There was pounding on the other side of the door of…wherever he was. "Are you in there?!" He could hear her both through the comms and very muffled through the doors themselves.

"Hey, what happened to pauchok? We're still on an official mission, you know-"

There was a mighty thud against the door. Sounded like Katya had kicked it. "Get your ass out here, now." She still sounded too relieved for it to be a convincing threat.

Rubbing at his temples, he managed to make his way to the back of the truck and undo the locking mechanisms. The barn doors swung open, and his feet had barely touched the ground before he was engulfed in blonde hair, arms wrapped tightly around his neck.

Then, as quickly as she'd hugged him, she disentangled herself, and shoved him in the chest. "I thought you died."

Peter sent her an insolent grin, even though his hood was still on. "But I didn't."

"-you stopped answering me, and it was a long drive to get in here-" Her eyes narrowed as she watched him rub his temples. "Were you unconscious that whole time?"

"Yes" the suit answered for him.

"Can your suit scan you for brain damage?"

Peter shrugged. "She just said I had a mild concussion."

"Mulitple lesions and an abdominal bruise as well."

Katya held her hand out flat. "How many fingers am I holding up?"

Peter arched an eyebrow. Was she serious? "Five"

"Wrong."

"What?! How can I be-"

"Technically the thumb isn't a finger, so.' Her face broke into a cheeky grin. "You're fine. You shouldn't be with how long you were out for, but you're fine."

"The advantages of being superhuman, I guess." Peter shrugged. "I heal really fast, too."

Katya rolled her eyes and pushed past him, leaping into the storage unit Peter had just burst out of to look at all the collected alien tech. "Whoa….no wonder this is so well guarded."

"What do you mean?"

"You're in the most secure facility in the eastern seaboard. The Damage Control Deep Storage Vault."

Peter grabbed his head in frustration. "No, seriously?!"

"Yeah, and it was hard as hell to get in here. Those doors aren't opening at least until morning." Katya added. She turned her ear piece off, since it was just the two of them now, and Peter did the same.

"How did you get in here?" Peter asked, feeling almost guilty he hadn't been paying more attention to her during their heist thwarting. Katya shrugged.

"I hitched a ride underneath one of the trucks and just kept out of sight as they offloaded these containers." She kicked at the one nearest to her, the metallic thud reverberating around the room. "I wasn't just going to leave you here."

"Even though you thought I was dead?"

Katya's ears turned a very light shade of pink. "Especially because I thought you were dead."

"So now we're both stuck in here until morning."

"Not if we can override the locks somehow." Katya stated simply, "But I don't know enough about how to do that on my own. So it's a good thing you're finally awake."

It only took about fifteen minutes for the two of them to locate and finagle their way up to the locking mechanism that was halfway up the wall near the vault's enormous bay doors. The closest thing they had to a computer was Peter's TI-84, so he jerry rigged that into the system.

"Now we just need to try every sequence."

Katya nodded before waving him off. "I got this. You go play with your suit."

Peter drew back, indignant. "What?"

"We just found out that your suit has all these crazy capabilities that you're unfamiliar with, and this-" she pointed with the eraser end of the pencil she was holding, which she was using to jot down the sequences of numbers she'd already tried. "-is going to take forever. Go figure out how it works before you nearly get yourself killed again by mixing up your webs."

She did have a point. There was no way around the fact that he was probably -definitely- going to miss decathlon, so he may as well use the time as best he could.

Now that they'd turned their comms off, Peter was the only one who could hear the suit. As he started up the refresher course of all the different web options he had, he asked, "Hey, Suit Lady, I feel kind of bad calling you Suit Lady- can I give you a name?"

"You could give me a name if you would like."

"Okay, cool, cool- Web grenade!" He called out for Katya's benefit, who looked over just in time to watch it explode against the vault door. She laughed, and Peter whooped.

"What about Liz? No, no-" he shut himself down before he even finished the thought. "That's so weird, ew. No." He tried a couple more web combinations. "What about Karen?"

"You could call me Karen if you would like."

"Okay cool." He called over to Katya after shooting a splitter web. "Katya! Suit Lady's name is Karen now!"

"Karen? Really?" she called back, judgment evident in the echoes of her voice around the room.

"Yes, really!"

Katya shrugged and typed in another sequence. When it didn't work, she jotted it down. "Okay then."

They continued like that for a while, each of them attending to their own assignments- Katya plugging in never ending sequences of numbers, and Peter running about every refresher course his suit offered. He now had access to web wings, a recon drone that would deploy from his chestplate, and endless web combinations at his disposal. He almost felt like a completely new Spiderman. Or at least, quite the system update.

"Hey Karen," He asked his suit, quietly enough that Katya couldn't hear, as he continued to practice his web combos. "Do you think I should tell Liz that I'm Spiderman?"

"Who's Liz?"

Peter felt his cheeks flush. "Oh, she's great, she-" for some reason he felt the need to glance up at Katya, who had the pencil between her teeth as she punched in another sequence of numbers. When it didn't work, she scrunched her nose, and wrote it down. "-She's just this girl that goes to my I really wanna tell her, but it's kind of weird, you know? Like, 'oh hey, I"m Spiderman….'"

"What's weird about that?"

"Well what if she's expecting someone like Tony Stark? Imagine how disappointed she'd be when she sees me."

"Well if I were her, I wouldn't be disappointed."

"Aw, thanks Karen." That was sweet. But she was a robot.

He heard Katya groan, and take a quick break to stretch her arms behind her head. As if feeling his eyes on her, she glanced over and assured him, "Almost there!"

"Maybe there's something in here we can use." he told her, and headed back into the storage container to check out the alien tech. He didn't really know what he was looking at, but it all looked super cool. He suddenly spotted another power core like the Lite Brite, but bigger. "Oh hey, it's like our Lite Brite." He told Karen.

"That 'Lite Brite' is an explosive Chitauri core."

Peter dropped it like it was on fire. "You mean we've been carrying around a bomb?!"

"What?" He heard Katya call from across the room, as his voice had gotten louder with his distress.

"It would require radiation to transform it into an explosive state."

Peter sprinted out of the storage unit towards Katya. "Karen says the Lite Brite is a bomb!"

"What?!" Katya's eyes widened, and she hesitated, as if she wanted to jump down. Instead she started typing the numbers in faster. "Can you call Ned?"

Good idea- he ran to his backpack and dug through it for his cellphone, but he had no service. "Dammit," he muttered to himself. He didn't know what to do- overriding the time lock was a one person job, but she had to be close, right?

"Can you type any faster?" He called up to Katya, who scowled, but didn't stop what she was doing.

"I"m typing as fast as I-"

Suddenly there was a mechanical whirring, a couple of sparks from the TI-84, and the bay doors began to slowly open. Katya whooped with victory, and Peter joined her, punching the air. "Yes!"