So… hi.

I am very sorry about this. Very sorry. I don't even have an excuse. I mean it's almost comical that I dropped off the face of the earth after this cliffhanger, but I'm not asking you to see the comedy in it. I had some drafted chapters written, but if I remember correctly, there were a number of reasons I stopped writing this, including:

- I had begun to move on to different fandoms

- I hate writing action sequences with a Burning Passion

- I made Flash an absolute asshole and I actually kinda like Flash in FFH

-I honestly can't believe that I had him say that thing about Peter giving the Avengers sexual favors, that makes me so uncomfortable, and I think I just did it 'cause other fics did

- My writing makes me angry

- Just general Writers Block things

- So much school stuff, especially this year

- and of course, No Way Home pretty much changed the foundations of the entire fandom, and i needed to recover

But anyway, I'm picking it up again. I've got nothing to do over spring break (a genuine miracle) and so here I am. Re-reading my writing from like two years ago. For y'all.

Without further ado, I present to you…

Chapter 13

"Peter, are you okay?"

The boy's eyes shot open and he looked at his friend.

"Run!"

"What?"

"Down the hall into the last bedroom, now! Into Morgan's room in the back, it's the safest place in the building! Go!"

"Wait, what's going on?" MJ had been standing nearby

"Yeah, what's happ—".

His friend was interrupted by a series of noises: First, a bang, from inside the elevator, loud and clear and it made Peter flinch. Second, the reactions of various people in the room, ranging from confused to vaguely alarmed. This was followed by Friday announcing that the lockdown protocol was over. And finally, the sound of the metal protective doors being lifted.

And then there was Peter's voice.

"Run! And lock the door behind you!" He looked at Ned and MJ, both who looked reluctant to leave him there but frantic to get away.

"This way!" Ned shouted, and the class was quick to follow, Meghan and the teachers right behind.

"Peter, come on!" Mr. Harrington yelled at the boy.

"Just go! I'm coming!", Mr. Harrington, as it turns out, did not need that much persuading. Peter turned his attention to the elevator doors, once he was sure his class had made it down the hall completely. He grabbed the red mask in his pocket and pulled it on just in time for the doors to open.

The first thing Peter noticed was the guns. They were definitely not normal guns. Peter had seen plenty of guns before, and while he was not an expert, he could recognize advanced weaponry easily. They had some sort of glowing chamber attached to them, and glowing, from Peter's experience, generally meant dangerous. Right then Peter realized a few things, first being that these guns were not present during the original attack downstairs because Friday would've picked them up. Also that whoever this was able to hack Friday's lockdown protocols. And somehow evade the Avengers. Basically what all of this meant is that these intruders are more of a threat than Peter had thought. Great.

The guns were followed out by their owners, three figures in all black, up to the ski masks they were sporting, in true villain fashion. They parted as they walked out of the elevator, making way for a woman with jaw-length hair to walk forward and survey the room. She wore a leather jacket and black pants, with some sort of utility sash that held a walkie and a handgun, as far as Peter could tell. She was also holding one of the aforementioned guns. All in all, it was like this group had walked straight out of a spy movie, an aesthetic that Peter would have appreciated in literally any other crime-fighting situation.

"Hey, Spider-Man! Move aside." Her order was so confident you might have thought she had some sort of authority in the building she was breaking into. Her smile was almost patronizing. "I've got no reason to fight you."

"Aw, no can do, sorry, although I'm touched." He took a step forward.

"That's fine by me, too." She snarked, pointing the gun at Peter. He could sense the upcoming blast and jumped on to the wall before it could hit. The glowing substance inside the gun hit the wall that was behind him, disintegrating a large cavity in thick concrete. Peter was right and woefully unsurprised.

"Ooh, what is that? Some sorta acid gun? Fancy." The man with long blonde hair beside her aimed a gun at him. This time Peter shot a web towards the man's ankles before jumping to the ceiling and crawling above them. "So how exactly did you get past the Avengers?"

The man tumbled over and Peter shot a couple more webs at his arms. The woman ignored her companion on the ground, but signaled the other man to stand down with a wave of her arm.

"You know, I've heard a lot about you, Spider-Man." She was watching him bounce from wall to wall with a calculating eye.

"Oh yeah? Where? Criminal's magazine?" He aimed another web towards her feet, but she dodged it with a casual step to the side.

"Spider-Man the swift, the evasive. It's all quite fascinating." Her hand idly calibrated the sight on her "acid gun".

"You say I'm evasive, but I've yet to hear how you got past the Avengers." She gave him a wry smile at that.

"Oh it was easy. It's a bold move to have an AI run your entire building. Especially one that was so easily compromised. Granted, I'm rather good with computers." She was pacing now, and Peter stopped moving for a moment to keep a steady eye on her movement. "And your Avengers, they're so quick to fight. So really all I needed was inside access and… a distraction."

Ah. There it was. That made more sense. The intruders seemed a little too easy.

"What inside access?" He didn't really expect her to tell him, his life was rarely that easy.

"Let's just say, I have my ways." She stopped moving and smiled at him, before checking her watch and saying: "Right then, well we'd better be going, so really I'd appreciate it if you'd just move so we could avoid this whole fight."

"Yeah… that's not going to happen, clearly." Peter was back on his toes, ready to strike. The woman shot first, aiming a hissing bullet of the "glowing acid stuff" at his head, which he dodged and returned with his own webs. The un-webbed man aimed as well, and several holes were burned in the wall at the places Peter ducked away from the acid.

"You know, you never told me what you're here for." Peter called out, mid-swing, in his classic conversational-combat-style.

"You never asked." She retorted, casually, albeit a little more frustrated than before. They came to a stop, all three standing at each other. Peter was just about ready to strike again, when he sensed a shuffle in the hallway.

The woman heard it too; they both looked to see what had made the noise.

Head peeking out from behind the doorway, looking effectively terrified and shocked, was Flash Thompson.

Well, shit.

The boy had stormed out of the room before this had all happened, Peter realized all at once, which meant he'd seen all this fight, which meant he'd probably figured out Peter's secret. Shit, indeed.

He didn't have time to dwell on it, however, because the woman took Peter's momentary shock as a chance to fire again at him, and this time due to lack of attention, Peter only barely slid out of the way. He felt the bullet graze his shoulder with an agonizing blaze. The smell of burnt fabric reached his nose, but he didn't have time to examine the damage made, because the un-webbed man had suddenly sprinted towards Flash and in a couple of seconds he'd restrained the boy.

Flash's face froze the huge arms of the man. His eyes darted to Peter, pleading and desperate.

"It seems we have a visitor." She smiled and walked calmly over to where the boy was held. She seemed entirely confident that Peter was compromised now, that he wouldn't do anything to risk Flash's life.

And she was right. No matter how much of a jack-ass, problematic bully he was, Peter couldn't just let Flash die. He stepped back and put his hands in the air.

"Okay, fine, fine. I'll back off, just... don't hurt him."

"Right then. My associate and your friend will stay here while I take care of some business real quick." Peter didn't want to let her do this, obviously, but he wasn't in the right place to disarm the man quick enough. And so he watched as the woman walked past him to the private elevator that connected the top floors and stepped in. Peter turned back to the man and Flash. They stared at each other like it was some bizarre staring contest, as Peter attempted to discreetly move closer inch by inch. Now that he had time to think, he knew where to hit the man that would render him unable to shoot.

He waited a moment, still staring intently, before raising his arms and shooting a web right at his forearm. The man reacted too slowly and the web pinned his arm before he could shoot. Peter moved in a matter of seconds to pull Flash away, and web the man up entirely. Flash started to say something, but before he could Peter took off to the elevator shaft. He wrenched the doors open and pulled himself up to a panel on the floor of the elevator itself. He pulled himself into the elevator and opened the doors to the personal labs of Tony Stark.