IronDad/SpiderSon One-shots

I'm not letting go

Third Person POV:
Trigger Warning: Description of injury/Mentions of possible death/Anxiety/Fire
Word Count: 4,910

Peter's lung's burned. Well, not just his lungs. His whole body was on fire (quite literally), but he couldn't get out of the flames yet. He wouldn't. Rather, he ran further into them. He ran up the stairs of the apartment building. He would swing, but he didn't have the energy in him. He wasn't strong enough. Burns covered his arms and shoulders, as well as almost the rest of him. Still, he refused to stop going. He still had two floors to cover, and he would not miss the fourth floor. He couldn't. He wouldn't.

He wants to laugh due to the irony of the situation. Just last week, he and May were talking about how their building seemed indestructible. Just last week, they were laughing saying that if the end of the world came, their building would be the last one standing in the city. The groans of the structure starting to give out signaled Peter that they were wrong. They had been very, very wrong. He wouldn't laugh though. There was nothing funny about this situation. There was nothing funny about having to pull his friends and neighbors out of the flames and away from their very homes. There was nothing funny about the knot his gut was in because he knew his aunt was in their apartment.

The urge to throw up overwhelmed Peter enough that he had to slow down as he reached the third floor. He stumbled out into the hall slowly. It was so hot. He lifted up his mask to try and breathe better. Instead, he vomited over in the hallway. It didn't help anything. His breaths were short and he definitely wasn't getting enough oxygen to his brain. The vomiting only made him pant more. He wanted to give up right there. He wanted to just fall over and give up, but he knew that there were still people in the building. People he knew. People he had been living beside since he was four years old. People he grew up around. People he cared about. People he couldn't just let die. People he wouldn't just let die.

He pulled his mask down and started moving as quickly as he could down the hallway. He was going to ask Karen to scan for life forms, but it would be hard to do that. She typically reads with a thermal scanner. The thermal scanner would just pick up all the flames. It wouldn't be very helpful. Rather, it would just throw off signals for everything in the room. That wouldn't be very helpful. "Karen, what's the ETA on the fire department," he asked in an extremely raspy voice. He had started coughing on the first floor. This was the third floor and his seventh trip inside.

Karen's response was almost immediate. "Traffic due to a wreck is blocking the way for the fire station. Neighboring fire stations are on their way, but it will still be at least another seven minutes until their arrival," she answers. There's a moment of silence before she continues. "Peter, you have severe burns covering your entire body and you are suffering from smoke inhalation as well as dehydration. If you stay in the fire much longer, the results can be grave and even fatal. Would you like me to call Mr. Stark for back-up?"

Panic traveled through Peter's chest. The last time Tony had come to something that had been this extravagant was the Great Fairy Disaster. Things didn't end so well there. Logically, he knew that it wasn't like that and that Tony wouldn't be as mad as he was then, but the fear that he might be was enough to almost paralyze him. "Just tell the fire company to hurry, please," he said. He was desperate. He was already so tired, and he still had the fourth floor to go. He just had to make sure that the third floor was clear before he headed up there.

As Peter stumbled down the hallway, he was screaming out. "HELLO? IS ANYONE HERE?" He hollered into every room and scanned it. He didn't see anyone and he couldn't hear anyone's heartbeats on this floor, so he started to quickly make his way up to the fourth floor.

The world was spinning a lot more than it should have been as he made his way up to the fourth floor. He was forcing his body to move each limb just to climb the steps. He might have given up if there weren't people up there. He would have just layed on the staircase and let the flames take him; he could hear their heartbeat beating in his skull like a cursed metronome. Badum. Badum. Badum. He couldn't let those people alone upstairs. He wouldn't.