A/N: Thank you so much to the guest reviewer who made me aware of the issue with the first chapter! All fixed now and I hope you enjoy :D
The school day was a never-ending nightmare for Peter and during lunch he had only one wish, for it all to be over. Ned and MJ had tried their best to cheer him up, talking about the new 10,000 piece Lego Star Wars kit his mother had bought him the previous evening that they could build together, and MJ showing off her people in crises drawings. A collection she had added to massively after another week of stints in detention. He tried his best to pay attention to them, they were good friends and he was lucky to have them, they didn't deserve to be ignored just because he was tired. It wasn't working however, his eyelids kept drooping and a yawn was threatening to break through any second. He shifted on the uncomfortable lunch table bench to wake himself up, it was strange, he had never felt like this before. All of a sudden he was burning up, his blood boiling through his veins and lighting streams of fire under his skin. Skin which was beginning to go red and blotchy, he scratched somewhat desperately at the patches and his breath began to come in pants.
"Peter are you alright?" Ned asked in concern, leaning over the table to peer into his best friend's face. "Your eyes are all strange"
Peter gave a nervous laugh, heart pounding at a mile a minute within his chest. "I'm fine, nothing the matter with me at all"
"By strange what the nerd really means is that you look like someone has been stabbing pins into your eyeballs, they're that bloodshot. And your face resembles a sunburnt tomato" MJ scoffed from beside them, unable to completely hide her concern underneath her scathing words.
"I just didn't get much sleep last night, I told you that earlier!" He exclaimed, just wanting them to leave him alone to slump over the table and die in peace.
A cool hand was pressed against his forehead, the icy feeling a stark relief, and he couldn't prevent the comforted sigh that slipped from his lips.
"Jeez Peter!" MJ exclaimed loudly, drawing the attention of the students near them, "that's not just no sleep, you're on fire!"
"MIchelle, is there a problem?"
Their conversation had apparently not been as subtle as they had thought it was, enough so that MJ's cry had alerted the lunch monitor to the situation, and the kindly older lady had come to investigate.
Now Rose Connors had many years of experience under her belt when it came to dealing with children. It had taken all the tricks in the book to wrangle her four boys into any sort of order, and when any of them were feeling under the weather it was impossible to get them to admit it. You would have thought they would have jumped at the opportunity to play up an illness and miss a day of school but it was quite the opposite, that was how she could always tell when they were faking it to try and get out of a test, only then would they moan and complain about a sore throat or headache. She had known Peter for many years, and he was the sweetest boy she had ever met, but he was almost too sweet, she had seen him so many times in the lunch hall drooping into his soup or sniffling pitifully. No matter how many arguments his friends threw out, he would always shoot them down and struggle through the rest of his day.
"No, no problem" was MJ's reply, before she turned a narrow-eyed glare on Peter's trembling form, "this stupid idiot is just on fire and refusing to admit that it's anything serious!"
"Peter is this true?"" Rose asked softly, reaching out to gently press a cool palm to the young boy's forehead. Internally she cursed, his temperature was way too high to be healthy, if it wasn't over 98, she would eat her own hat and if that damned nurse didn't call the ambulance then she would herself. "Okay, Mr Parker, let's get you to the nurse's office" she clasped him gently under the arm and wrapped her other around his shoulder in a supportive embrace. "And no arguments out of you, young man" she continued as Peter opened his mouth to argue pitifully.
She deposited him gently on the starch white sheets of one of the beds in the nurse's office, rummaging in the draws for a thermometer and sticking it carefully beneath his tongue. Giving him a loving tap on the chin she ordered him to stay put for five minutes while she fetched the nurse for him.
Not ten minutes later she had given up on finding the ever elusive, lazy lady, and so she returned to Peter who in the meantime had slid down into a half lying position against the pillows. "Peter sweetie, is there someone I can call to come and get you sweetheart?"
His only response was a moaning mumble and a weak flap of his arm in the general direction of his pocket. Assuming that was all the permission she needed, she pulled out a battered and incredibly cracked smartphone from his slacks and flicked open his contact list, scrolling through to try and find one marked Mum or Dad. After failing at that, she decided her best course of action was to just look at who was the last person to call the boy and go from there, so that would be a Mr Stark, how odd she thought briefly, but it can't be any relation to that Stark. That would be ridiculous.
Pressing call, she waited and waited, after five rings she was about to give up and try the next name on the list when a click sounded as the call connected. Before she had a chance to say anything at all, a male voice sounded from the speakers.
"Underoos, this had better be good. First you ignore me yesterday, and now you call me when you know I'm at a very important meeting."
"Um, is this Mr Stark?" she asked hesitantly, glancing back over at the young boy on the bed.
"Yes, this is he. Who might you be, and why do you have the kid's phone?" all of a sudden, the tone of the man on the other end of the line had shifted enormously, from slightly irritated yet fond, to icy cold and promising death in seconds.
"This is Rose Connors, I work at Midtown tech. Peter is extremely unwell and needs someone to come and pick him up, take him to the doctors. I tried to find his emergency contact in his medical records, but I couldn't, so I just called the last contact in his phone, you." She couldn't quite manage to keep her tone even as she explained the situation, despite being many miles away from each other, she still felt vaguely threatened. Thankfully that explanation seemed to appease the other man.
"I will make sure that never happens again, put my number down as his emergency contact. Ring me whenever there's a problem, I'll be there in ten, maybe twenty minutes depending on traffic."
With that he hung up and she stood there for a moment, mouth slightly open in consternation. While waiting, she kept herself busy, dampening cloths and bathing Peter's forehead to keep him cool.