Tempest ━ Peter Parker

02 | patrick-peter parker

"Okay, deep breath," he said, but she wasn't sure which one of them he was talking to. "Hold on tight. Uh, sorry if this is scary. Or weird. This whole thing is weird. Sorry."

A strangled noise came from the back of her throat. A sting ripped through her, making her grit her teeth. She was deathly annoyed and even more embarrassed that she wasn't alone right now. "Right, I'll stop talking—aand up we go!"

With a grunt, there was a thwip of a web. And she was up.

If her vocal chords worked she would've screamed, but something that sounded like a dull chainsaw scraped out of her instead. "Oh my God!"

"Hold on!"

She pressed her face into the shoulder of the Spider-Man suit. Her eyelashes were wisps as the city blurred past her, seeing so little yet so much all at once. She shut her eyes to ward off the dizziness and only clung tighter, trying to take deep, even breaths so she wouldn't shock Peter (SPIDER-MAN!) to death in midair. Her heart was still racing, booming in her ears. This was the strangest feeling in the world. Everything was speeding past her. She was barely clinging to sanity, flopping around like a rag doll, and here she was with New York's most infamous vigilante whom she only met two minutes ago. She was holding onto a stranger, a concept, yet the person beneath it had lived down the hall from her this whole time.

Her eyes opened again and she was assaulted by wind. Honks and tire squeals and rumbles of her pulse blended inside her. She clung tighter to Peter-Man's (oops) shoulders and hoped she could crawl away into herself again. She tried her best to be gone, to slip through the crevices of noise and fall into her heartbeat forever. Let herself go back to her cold, hard bed, the steel walls, the shackle around her neck, the bandages on her arms, the memory of her heart beating so intensely in her that it blew out all the lightbulbs and the scientist convulsed.

It's okay, Wanda said. You did good.

It didn't feel good.

"Almost there," Peter grunted. He whipped up again and she yelped for a second time. There were moments where she thought he was going to drop her, but she almost found herself enjoying when they dipped again. Her hair blew in front of her face and turned the city black.

Peter asked her apartment number. She wasn't sure if she told him or not. Her voice was lost in her, even more than it usually was.

Her stomach was dropping every time she heard the flick of a web. Peter was holding onto her so tight she thought she'd be crushed, but she really didn't mind considering she was a second away from cooking herself on a skewer. The wind barrelled across her face and the noise of it burrowed into her ears. There was so much going on up here, going on inside her, that the dips and rises blended together and she couldn't tell if she was falling or flying. And she couldn't find it in her to care. She shut her eyes and focused on the blackness and the burning under her skin.

"You got a fire escape, right?"

She nodded, coughing, "Window leads to my room."

Peter-Spider-Parker-Man (dear God) dropped down abruptly, tangling Levina's entire stomach. Everything melted down inside her and she was a dream, a ghost, slipping through Peter's grip and becoming intangible. It was a horrible feeling that she kind of liked. It felt like she wasn't here. Like she would wake up somewhere, go through layers and layers of dreams, until she faded into herself without memory.

The sound of a latch popping open. The slide of a window. Levina was not away, she was not dreaming, she was here and it was miserable.

Peter helped her through the window and jumped in after her, webbing the frame and yanking it down to close it. Levina barely noticed. The smell of burnt paper and Boddy's cologne reached her, whispering that she was safe. That this would pass.