Spider-Who?

Chapter Five

.

.

.

Chapter Five

.

.

.

Like a finely sprung coil that was triggered to snap in release, the tension in his chest eased as Tony finally breathed a sigh of relief. He had Peter... safe in his arms. He had waited until the red-headed girl had closed the hinges to her apartment door before he had finally turned to the door right next to it...

To think, Peter had been missing in the apartment next door this entire time. It would have been funny in its irony if Tony and May hadn't been so worried about him.

Adjusting his hold on the teenage hero, Tony walked up to the Parker's door and somehow managed to open it on his own with his arms full. He entered the apartment without any preamble and May Parker was just as he had left her - pacing and biting her thumbnail in her acute anxiety. But that stopped as soon as she noticed Tony standing in the open doorway, with a spider-clad superhero draped over his shoulder...

"Oh, thank God!" May exclaimed, stepping forward immediately, as though she intended to steal Peter right out from Tony's arms and into her own.

"Careful," Tony warned as he retreated back a step, the warning in his gaze combined with his words effectively cautioning May to pause. With his foot, he kicked it back against the modern-style wood slab as he closed the door behind him. May hovered fastidiously as he proceeded to walk forward toward Peter's bedroom, and noting her confusion, he went on to explain, "Apparently, he's hit his head... He might not be fully healed, yet."

With a sweep of her eyes over the unconscious boy, May seemed to be looking for any visible sign of injuries. Not seeing any due to the suit covering every inch of his body, May finally conceded as she nodded in a jagged sort of manner before she hastened forward to get the door open to Peter's bedroom. The gesture was appreciated, as it made it so that Tony wouldn't have to deal with the hindrance of a doorknob again. Without the aid of his Iron Man suit, Peter's deceptively lean form was actually rather straining on his arms, the muscles that Peter had secretly packed away underneath his skin made it so that he was a lot heavier than he looked.

The room was a mess... just as Tony expected any teenage boy's room to be. But that hardly concerned him now as he side-stepped any debris - a stray Lego here, a discarded shirt there - littering the floor in order to set Peter down onto the single-mattress bed.

"Do you know what happened?" May asked anxiously behind him, hovering quite close over Tony's shoulder. As soon as Tony settled Peter gently onto the mattress, he proceeded to hit the spider-emblem on Peter's chest, loosening the fabric of the suit so that he could strip it away.

"Well, a girl had found him unconscious in an alleyway... She told me that a building exploded and that she saw Spider-Man hit his head on a metal dumpster before falling to the ground. He must have been thrown through the air by the impact of the blast," Tony slipped the loose red and blue material off of the teen's body, leaving him clad in only his boxer briefs. A quick scan of Peter's body told him that the girl had been right that he had only a few scrapes and bruises. There had to have been a real nasty bruise on his left side, right over his ribs, but it was now a dark, yellowish color... meaning that it was almost healed.

Peering downward, Tony turned the spider-suit inside out and took inventory of the damage. There were a few wires that were frayed. Minimal scorch marks from the flames of the explosion... but all in all, it could've been a lot worse. It was nothing compared to what happened to Peter... or what could've happened.