Thank you for the reviews! :-) Again, if anybody has any ideas for the story, I'd appreciate it. ;-) I'm trying to update pretty often, tell me if the chapters are too short (my goal is to make them around 1,300+ words, as much as possible, basically, but sometimes they do end up shorter than that...). There have been lots of views, so thank you everybody who's reading too! I've had 23 US visitors, 2 Australian visitors, 3 German visitors, 3 visitors from the UK, and even 1 visitor from Malaysia, so thank you all for reading! :-)

Chapter 4: S.H.I.E.L.D

"How ridiculous and how strange to be surprised at anything which happens in life."

-Marcus Aurelius

Peter's POV

Of course, it takes them just about forever to get over here. As soon as I've shouted some sort of half-explanation over my shoulder, I open the door and am about to dash out when Ava slams it shut in front of my face and steps in front of me.

"You do realize this is probably a trap, right?"

I shrug indifferently. "He's our friend, Ava. We've got to go help him! We're just wasting time here!"

"And I'm guessing that you've forgotten we've technically been outlaws ourselves since, oh, three this afternoon and there's no way we can go out in public? And that now, S.H.I.E.L.D.'s tracking us down?"

"Yeah, S.H.I.E.L.D.'s tracking us, so therefore, since they know where I live, we should probably get moving and throw away our coms!"

Ava just stares at me like I've lost it. Then she pulls out her com and throws it to the ground, crushing it with her foot. I realize I should do the same, except when I try to crush it with my shoe, it explodes over the carpet. "Owie owie ow!" I holler, hopping around on one foot as Luke stamps out the little flames that are beginning to creep across Aunt May's best carpet. Sam snorts, rolling his eyes and crossing his arms. Once Sam and Luke have (much more successfully) destroyed their coms, I start talking again.

"We're just wasting time, standing here, when she could be about to kill him!"

Ava puts her hands on her hips. "Who exactly is she? How do we know anything that she said was even truth?! This is a total trap, and we're walking right into it!"

"Well, yeah, but I don't see YOU coming up with any ideas!"

She pauses. "Fine. But if we die, I'm so blaming you. Now, web brain, how exactly are we supposed to get to her 'secret hideout'?"

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Emma's POV

I yawn, settling down in the armchair for some real sleep. I feel terrible for not being awake for Danny, but he's actually sleeping really well right now, not the tortured half-sleep of before, but a real, deep sleep. So I guess I can't really do anything for him right now. Plus I can't go forever without any sleep, or else I'm just going to collapse. It doesn't take me long to fall asleep, happily greeting the blissful state of rest.

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Peter's POV

This is not going so well. First, we took a taxi to central park. Actually, we were stuck splitting up into two taxis because we couldn't all fit in one. Ava and Sam were in one, and Luke and I in the other. We arrived at Central Park pretty easily, but everything after that it has been downhill. First we walked three blocks one way, but that brought us to some fancy office buildings- no apartments. We realized she probably meant the other direction. "Duh," Sam said to everybody. "Told you so."

He didn't.

Now, we have about five dingy apartment buildings in front of us. They're all great places for a kidnapper to hide with her victim, but that still doesn't help us figure out where to start. So we do the obvious thing, and pick the first one and go from there. We take the elevator to the eight floor and- viola! There's an excellently dumpy, filthy hallway with a door at the end of it. I resist from telling my teammates 'I-told-you-so' as I cautiously knock on the door.

No answer. Typical. Ava smirks at me. I try again. Knock knock knock. Again. And again. "I'm going to break this door down if you don't open up right now!" I imagine how embarrassing this will be if there's just nobody home, or if we walk in on a little old lady doing her knitting. Just then, a man walks out of one of the rooms on the side of the hallway.

Sam uber-politely asks, 'Excuse me sir, but who lives here?"

The elderly man begins to howl with laughter, tears running out of his eyes. "Live- live there?" he manages between chuckles. "Just old Mr. Broom and his friends."

We exchange glances, then Ava whips open the door to find-

A janitor's closet.

Biggest. Fail. Ever.

Once we're done shouting at each other, we check the next two buildings. One of them doesn't have an eighth floor (more embarrassment there) and the other- well, let's just say that it had surprising similarities with my nightmare of walking in on a little old lady with her knitting, except with a middle-aged man and a towel.

By the time we get to the eighth floor of the fourth building, it's eleven at night. Everybody is tired and disappointed. Ava hasn't even bothered to gloat. Luckily there's an eighth floor in this building. It's just really, really broken down. Half of the lights in the hallways flicker, and the other half just don't work at all. Weirdly, at the end of the hallway on the eighth floor, the light above the doorway is on, and it's not flickering. We exchange looks again. Luke knocks loudly on the door. It's a really beat up door, made of flimsy, cheap, dented wood.

Inside, I can hear rustling, and the sound of muffled footsteps approaching. There's the sound of a lock clicking, then-

"Who's there?"

It's the same girl's voice that I heard over the telephone, except sleepier this time. Well, I guess we can establish that she has normal sleeping times and is therefore not a vampire nor a zombie.

Ava looks at me, obviously expecting me to answer. "Uh... Peter?" I manage.

"Peter who?" She doesn't sound sleepy anymore. Now she's suspicious sounding, and nervous. The door itself is starting to quiver, and we back away.

"Peter Parker," I say, unafraid.

The door opens to a, a- teenager around our age? Not what I was expecting. She looks really worn out. Like, worn out to the point of collapsing. There are dark circles under her bespectacled brown eyes, and her hair looks as if it may once have been in a long braid, but now it's sticking out at strange angles. At least she's dressed normally- jeans and a stained purple tee shirt, although she is barefoot. I can tell she doesn't trust us from the way she's standing- stiff and nervous. "What do you want?"

Huh? She's the one who called me, not the other way around. She should know why we came. "Uh... to see our friend?"

Her eyes narrow. "What friend?"

I gulp. I've got a really bad feeling about this. "Danny... er, Daniel Rand..."

She visibly relaxes, and moves aside to let me in. When Ava, Luke, and Sam step forward, though, she looks suspicious again. "Who are you?"

Ava casts a glare sideways at me. "I'm Ava, a friend too. And the tall guy is Luke. The buckethead over there is Sam." The girl looks over them, uncomfortable.

"Fine." She lets them in.

The room is small, dark, and cramped. There's another door across the room, an itsy kitchen, and an armchair beside a bookshelf. She leads us over to the armchair and sits down on the floor. When we just stand there staring, she tells us to sit, as she flicks on a dim lamp. Carefully, I sit down on the worn rug, and look around for any kind of weapon or trap. There isn't any. Actually, it kind of looks like the sort of place Danny would hang out, if it wasn't so, well, dingy.

"Where's Danny?" Ava demands. The girl glares at her.

"He's sleeping. Shush." I see her eyes wander over to the other side of the room, where I can make out the vague outline of a bed.

A faint sense of relief comes from us. "He's alive?" I whisper. The girl turns and looks me in the eyes. I squirm a bit- it's kind of discontenting, the way she seems to peer right into my mind. Then, slowly, she nods.

Danny's alive.

"There's other things you should worry about, though. Danny's alive... right now. But S.H.I.E.L.D.'s not going to leave you alone. The government knows your secret identities. There's nowhere for you to hide anymore."

Hide? As if! And what does she mean by, 'right now'?! Sam opens his mouth to protest, but Ava and I shoot glares at him, and he shuts up. Good.

Ava, instead, asks, "How do you know that? It's not like you know our secret identities."

The girl just looks at her. Then, slowly, she points to each of us in turn. "Spider-Man. Nova. Power man. White Tiger. And Danny's Iron Fist." We stare at her.

"How long have you known?"

"Years."

This girl really creeps me out. I'm just waiting for the Goblin or Doc Oc to jump out and yell, 'Boo!' I can tell Luke and Sam agree with me, from the way they're looking forbiddingly around the room. Ava, though, has a look of enlightenment on her face. "What's your name? Why'd you take Danny?"

The girl looks at her for a long time. "Emma. And I did what I thought was right at the time. I still think I did the right thing."

No last name? Really? I don't think this is the whole story, either. My spider-sense isn't going off, though- funny, if this is a trap, it should have been. But it hasn't, not this whole night.

"By taking our friend?!" I exclaim. Emma looks at me. I'm starting to really hate when she does that- it's creepy. Like she knows something we don't, and she's not going to tell us.

"I didn't take him, I told you. I found him lying underneath a tree, bleeding because he was stabbed. You left him behind. I saw you leaving. All of you. Nobody came back for him. I thought he was going to die. So I figured it'd be better to have him die here than with his enemies."

Creepy. This girl's a nut job. "Die? You said he's alive! But now you say he's dying?!"

"We're all dying. That's how life is. You're either dead or dying. Everybody dies."

"Fortune cookie number two, and a nut job also," Sam hisses in my ear.

"Shut up," I whisper back, even though I agree.

"I can hear you. I'm not deaf or blind, you know."

Again: Creepy.

"You can't move him. You'll kill him if you do. The hospital's and S.H.I.E.L.D won't take him. You know that. Just like you're going to be stuck here."

What the-? I knew this was a trap! Come on, Spidey-sense, you're letting me down here!

But Emma just shakes her head. "Good luck leaving. The government will track you now. They know." She gestures to the TV, which I didn't even notice was on until now. "They know your secret identities. J.J.J. just said so. They'll follow you back to your Aunt's house, and then they'll arrest you. And your Aunt. You can't go there now."

We stare at her. Then we realize she's right.

I hate how right this girl is.

How was it? I don't think I did a very good job capturing Peter's voice, but hopefully I'll do better next time... Practice makes (almost) perfect, right? :-) I'll probably update again tomorrow or tonight (maybe both). Please... if you have any ideas, tell me! ;-)

-F.F.S.