"Well Mr. Not Ned, this is clearly Ned's number, so if you could just, not," Peter informed the man.
"Are you high?" Tony asked incredulously.
"On life," Peter replied automatically. Then frowned. "Rude."
The man said something else, but it sounded off to the side, quiet. Peter could still hear, of course, thanks to his handy dandy enhancements, so his frown deepened into suspicious confusion when he heard, "FRI, you get a ping yet?"
"Who're you talking to?" Peter asked.
"Nobody," Tony dismissed, squinting at the screen that FRIDAY projected in front of him and zooming out on the map while still keeping it centered on the blinking, red dot.
Peter's arm was going a bit achy from holding it out so stiffly, so he brought it closer again, hiking his knees up and cradling the phone against them with one hand while the other cupped his side. He glanced down, wincing at the blood that continued to pulse out. A veritable lightbulb went off in his head, and he almost let out an audible groan as he moved his hand off and quickly thwipped a web over the wound, staunching the flow. Better late than never, he mused.
"Kid-"
Peter startled, momentarily having forgotten his apparent company, before righteous indignation set in. "Hey!-"
"-Why the fuck are you in Nigeria?"
Peter snorted. Clearly, Ned's set up worked - anybody trying to track him would get a pin of some random location out of the country. Hence, the current situation. "The real question is, why are you not in Nigeria, my good sir," Peter replied jovially, and, he belatedly reprimanded, "Language."
Tony groaned. "This is not happening," he muttered, typing away at his keyboard.
"I can assure you that it is," Peter refuted. "And I'm not a kid."
Tony scoffed. "'Not a kid' my a - butt. Your voice cracks harder than an old man at a chiropractor - or a prepubescent teen." he pauses. "Please tell me you're not a prepubescent teen."
"You'd know all about being an old man, wouldn't you," Peter snarked, and then, "And I have very much gone through puberty, thank you very much!" he shot down indignantly, flushing red when his voice broke near the end. He continued, purposely pitching his tone lower, "I am an adult man."
Tony sniggered "You keep telling yourself that, kid. Maybe, in a few years, it'll actually be true."
"I am very offended right now," Peter commented idly, grimacing at the sensation of his hoodie clinging to his skin, damp and tacky from the blood that'd soaked into it.
"Get in line," Tony retorted, only half his attention on the conversation now. The remaining part was flitting through a series of algorithms and codes, the hologram splaying the numbers and data in front of him in a series of blue lines and optics. With every second he continued, his frown deepened, and he worked faster, swiping away one screen just for another to pull up.
"Well, it was nice talking to you and all-" Peter started.
"Wait!" Tony practically yelped. "Nu-uh kiddo. You are an enigma - or at least your technological presence is. Obscenely so," he muttered.
"That's sorta the point," Peter told him.
Tony squinted at the holograph, which now proudly displayed the kid's location as being in… some ridiculously long named place in Wales. "You can do this," Tony said, gesturing at his screens despite the fact that the kid couldn't see him, "but you somehow click the wrong number?"
"H- wh- those two have got nothing to do with one another!" Peter spluttered.
"Uhuh," Tony hummed dubiously, reclining in his chair. The holographs continued to flicker through a series of location pings. "Do you have something against saving contacts?" he passively questioned.
"I didn't have it! - it's not like this is my phone," he rebuked.
Tony sat up a bit. "What?"
Peter froze. Then shrugged. Eh, why not. "It's some guy's," he admitted to him.
Tony blinked. Sighed. Dragged his hand down his face. "So you stole it," he clarified bluntly.
"No! He dropped it!" Peter denied vehemently. Then paused. A very self incriminating sounding pause. "I just… borrowed it. Temporarily. Until I can return it. Yes."
"Well that wasn't suspicious at all," Tony drawled sarcastically, snorting when the holograph pinged on the location, 'Shitterton Creek, UK.'
"I'm gonna get it back to them," Peter insisted, a small pout that he very much did not acknowledge tinging his tone. "'s not like he's gonna be able to use it anytime soon anyways," he pointed out pettily.
Tony tilted his head to the side, highlighting several of the map's previous pings and starting up on a code to determine a potential center of convergence for them. "That sounds pretty suspicious," he commented.
"No, no!" Peter shot down, waving his free hand around wildly and then hissing through his teeth when his side twinged, the webs covering his injury gaining a faint pink hue. "He's just probably in jail by now," he managed to grit out, somewhat evenly.
Tony was buried nose deep into the holograms and only took note of the words themselves several moments later, at which point his head snapped up, a kernel of a suspicion forming in his mind. "And why would that be?" he questioned.
"He was a mugger," Peter told him easily.
Tony's brows shot up, and the whole reason the call was happening in the first place hit him like a brick to the head. "Is that how you got shot?" he asked sharply, hands now veritably flying over his keyboard.
"Uh -um shot?" Peter laughed, high pitched. He spent a couple of moments floundering uselessly. "What's a shot?" he blurted, then smacked a hand against his face. Godammit, Peter.
"Kid…"
Peter threw his single arm up. "Fine. Yes. Sort of," he bit out, exhaling loudly.
"Allow me to reiterate: hospital."
"Allow me to reiterate: no," Peter fired back.
Tony muttered under his breath, then, to the kid, "You didn't say that."
Peter thought back. Shrugged. "Well, I did now."
Tony resisted the mild urge to slam his head against a wall. "Why."
Peter flapped his hand around. "Um, just - cause -"
He was interrupted by a smooth, monotone voice from his own end of the line that announced, 'Location triangulated. Terminating call,' followed by the connection ending with a click, and Peter shot straight up, then doubled over as his side seared in agony, the phone crunching like a tin can in his grip. He took a few deep, gasping breaths, forearm clutching over his stomach as he barely managed to keep himself from retching at the sensation of the bullet shifting in his abdomen.
It took several long, painful moments, but he managed to somewhat righten himself, and he stared down at the crumpled device in his grasp with a somewhat detached, mournful air. I guess the owner won't be getting it back after all, he mused. And, hopefully, whoever was on the other end of the call hadn't managed to get an actual pin on his location.
He peered at the phone a bit closer. "Score," he whispered to himself, noting that the SIM card's position hadn't been damaged. It took him a few moments to finagle it back out of the mugger's device, and he pocketed it.
The SIM came from his own phone - which he'd accidentally shattered earlier on patrol, and he'd switched it out into the mugger's when he made the call. It had all of his and Ned's souped up screening and firewall services so that their calls and messages couldn't get hacked or traced.
Well, Peter thought to himself wryly, stumbling over to the edge of the roof. Shouldn't be able to get hacked or traced.
.
Meanwhile, in a tower not too far from where he stood, the drone of the dial tone became background noise as Tony stared down at his screen.
What was displayed wasn't a completely precise location, but it shocked him into stillness all the same.
Blinking innocuously back up at him in the same highlighter blue as the rest were the words, 'Queens, New York.'
