"Pauchok, if you're dead, I"m going to kill you."

There was a groan on the other side of the line, at least confirming signs of life, but it took a minute for him to respond. "Nah-" he grunted in pain, "I"m good."

Katya craned her neck, but even her vantage point from the bench she was standing on wasn't letting her pick out a clear path through the chaos. She had to get to the monument, but emergency personnel were everywhere, and news vans had begun to swarm. "Are you really? Like, really really?"

"Like really really."

Katya jumped down from the bench and started to weave between people as best she could. "You can move and everything?"

"Yes- ouch- Myshka, I'm fine."

"Okay, good, because you gotta get out of there." She glanced around, and there just seemed to be more people appearing, instead of clearing out. "There's press everywhere."

Katya heard him curse to himself and some shifting. "Do you see anywhere where I can?"

Katya stood on her tip-toes, as if that would help, but between police, EMTs, Fire rescue, and press, and worried civilians, she herself could barely move. "No, but- I have an idea. Go find a bathroom or some place where you can hide, in case they come looking for you."

"A bathro- okay, fine." He sounded resigned.

Katya managed to wedge herself out of the throng with a few well-placed elbows, and took down sprinting down the lawn, retracing their steps to get there in the first place. It was much more crowded, so she had a lot of dodging to do, but what she was looking for should be right around…

There.

Katya lunged for the backpack that Peter had ditched as they'd ran, which held his civilian clothes and some other shit she wasn't sure of. But the clothes were the important part. She heaved it on and ran back to the monument, taking advantage of her distance to see if there was a less chaotic spot she could enter from.

The back of the monument had a lot fewer people than the front, but still enough that she could probably slip through unnoticed. After all, she just looked like another student, of which there were plenty of.

She managed to slip in through the lobby's back entrance. "All right, I"m inside. I've got your backpack with your clothes, where'd you go?"

"You found my backpack?!" he asked incredulously. "I"m in the men's room on the fourth floor."

"Okay, let me just find the stairs." Obviously the elevator was out of the question.

It was a bit trickier to slip into the stairwell and head upwards, as emergency personnel were trying to evacuate everyone from the premises, so she had to move slowly through the groups of people so as to not catch anyone's attention that she was moving in the opposite direction.. She made it, finally, to the fourth floor, which by now was completely deserted, and located the men's room easily.

"Pauchok, you in here?"

One of the ceiling tiles slid to the side and Peter repelled down on a web, upside down, before somersaulting into a standing position. "Yeah, I"m here." He ripped off his mask and Katya began to tug open the backpack, handing him his clothes as he began to shimmy out of his Spiderman suit. He hesitated, and it took Katya a second to connect why. She turned around so he could change,but she didn't see what the big deal were bodies.

After a moment and some shuffling, Peter cleared his throat, which Katya took as her signal to be able to turn back around. "You sure you're okay?"

Peter placed his hands on his lower back and bent backwards, cracking it. "Yeah, I"ll be okay. I heal fast, remember?"

Katya poked him in the abdomen and he winced. "What the hell?!"

She shrugged. "Just assessingt the damage. Not going to make you train while your spine is still putting itself back together."

"Aw, thanks." Peter sounded genuinely touched, though they both knew it was a joke.

—-

It was a wonder that Mr. Harrington didn't notice her slip back onto the bus as the rest of the team began loading up, shaken and shellshocked, to head back up to Queens. Katya figured he had a lot on his mind, and was grateful for it. Still, she sat in the back, slightly slumped, just in case.

The ride back was much quieter than the ride down, at first, before everyone seemed to explode at once.

"And then he was screaming and I was screaming-"

"Definitely thought I was going to die, look, I got a cut on my hand from the glass-"

"At least my trophy made it out okay." Flash was hugging it like a teddy bear.

The only few who weren't exchanging war stories- as if they hadn't all been in literally the same place- were Michelle, whose nose was in a book as usual, Peter, who slept through most of the ride, and Liz, who sat up front, staring at seemingly nothing. Mr. Harrington, too, was quiet, but with a static sort of sense about him, as if he were frazzled enough to give off electricity.

Katya sat up a bit so she could talk to Ned in front of her. "So how did it go?"

"Other than the almost dying?"

Katya rolled her eyes. "Yes, other than that."

Ned shrugged. "Well we won, so that's good, but Peter's going to have a lot of explaining to do when he wakes up." As they'd loaded, Mr. Harrington seemed more concerned with checking everyone off of the attendance sheet than interrogating him, so he'd managed to avoid too many questions. Katya was brainstorming a few alibis in the meantime to help him out, just in case.

It was weird. She'd rappelled down heights higher than that- once a Trainer had simply thrown her off the edge of the Academy's tarmac, into the freezing air, and she had to improvise with her gauntlet before she fell out of the clouds- the other two girls he'd also pushed off didn't make in time. Katya had no clue where their bodies were, as Dreykov made sure that none of them knew at any time where in the world they were. And she'd been scared, sure, she'd been eleven, but whether it was the chemical conditioning or sheer psychological wherewithal she'd managed to keep her head, and that's why she survived. That's how she always survived.

But knowing Peter was falling from such a height- even with that super human strength of his- had done something weird to her chest, seized her heart in a way that felt like a clamped fist, and it was only after he'd finally answered on comms that the grip managed to relax. It's not that she didn't trust him- she'd seen him in action, sorta, and could tell he could hold his own for the most part- but she still worried, for some reason, which was new. She'd always been able to shove aside fear. Fear was a weakness that wasn't to be tolerated. So why was it beginning to creep up behind her ears whenever he was in danger?