KitCat Tries to Get Her Mojo Back
'ello.
Been a minute.
It hurts me more than it hurts you. I promise.
Anyway. Hang in there with me as I try to function through the madness of my life, while suffering through one soul crushing event after the next.
It's been a minute. I know it has. So If I'm gunna be a little bitch and write at the pace that movies pump out their sequels, than there's no harm in giving up the first scene of the next chapter.
You guys deserve it.
(kitcat will get her mojo back. she hopes)
Identity Within: Part I︱Chapter 16, Every Flame Leaves Ash (PREVIEW #2)
There was something about web-swinging that always made him feel better.
“…arker!” the voice screamed — loud, distant. Familiar. “Sta…wi…me!”
The feel of the wind rushing through his lungs, the air howling past his ears; a moment, a breath in a heartbeat suspended within time itself where he felt completely weightless.
If he didn’t know better, he’d say it felt like he was flying.
“I sai…sta…me!” “…puls….crash…!” “Pe..!”
The web snapped taut behind him, flinging him forward; a slingshot loosened from the tallest skyscraper in the city.
No strings, no chains, no weight.
Just him, and the golden sprawl of Manhattan dazzling below, each high-rise structure brushing up against his waist as he twisted his body midair, spinning through the yawning spaces between each building — his pulsed thumped high in his throat, each beat a violent spark against his ribs.
He didn’t fight it.
“Squez…aline…stag…ock….!” “..ony!…eed…to…!” “PET—
—ER!”
Pressure suddenly grabbed at his cheeks.
“—Peter!” One hand forcibly clenched at his jaw, shaking his face with urgency, all while the other pried his eyelid wide open. “Stay with me, Parker! I said stay with me!”
A ringing cut through his ear, sharp, blaring. The lights burned into his retinas. All as the grip on his face tightened, fingernails clawing beneath his cheekbone with a thumb digging painfully into the underside of his chin —
Silence shattered as voices crashed in all at once.
“Squeeze that saline, he’s in stage four shock—!”
“Pressure’s bottoming out — diastolic’s forty and falling!”
“Tony, you need to get out of the wa—!”
“—get every ounce of phenylephrine and epinephrine pumped into—“
“Peter! C’mon, kid!” Tony’s face, blurry and distorted at every angle, hovered over him with a voice that tore straight out of his throat — yet barely got into Peter’s ears, the words burrowing through a cotton-wrapped fog that swaddled his mind. “You’ve survived too much to die on us now! COME ON!”
Every syllable struck him like a slap, yanking him up from the darkness with the blunt force of panic.
Then—
“Stay with me, Peter!” A hand sharply slapped at his face. “HEY!” Again. And Again. “Listen to me, kid! Peter! PE—
—TER!”
He surrendered to the pull of gravity.
…Thwip! …Thwip! …Thwip!
A streak of motion flew by him, the buildings blurring into one, the colors morphing into a tie-dyed rainbow. Each swing tilted the world a little more than before, each strand of webbing stretching before he let it go; flipping and spinning in the air until his wrist shot out another anchor to the sky above.
Momentum cradled him, unpredictable and precise; a pendulum of red and blue set loose.
The free fall down to the streets below sent a surge of adrenaline through his very core, dropping his stomach to the toes of his feet, plunging him through the city that rose straight up to meet him — windows flashing like strobe lights and horns screaming from the veins of traffic.
Web-swinging always did make him feel better.
It was a moment where he always felt the most alive.
…Thwip! …t’wip! …t’w… ….
“...ambu…bag…reath…!”
There was no more web.
“Cap…wheels…’ast…ough!”
No more tether.
“Ta…him! TAKE—
—HIM!”
The hallway tilted.
Lights from above flickered past in staccato bursts, stabbing through the haze coating his eyes. Sound hit him all at once — alarms blaring, metal clattering, voices shouting over each other.
“Use the ambu bag, help his breaths—!”
“—squeeze those fluids!”
“—squeeze those fluids!”
“Pressure collapsing! We’re losing it—!”
“Cap, the wheels aren’t moving fast enough!” Tony’s voice broke through the noise — ragged, frantic — somewhere among the blur of hands and motion on either side of the gurney. Peter’s head tilted, and for a second he caught the blur of Mr. Stark’s goatee. Something achingly familiar in the chaos. “Take him! TAKE HIM!”
A large shape, a sharp glisten of color, a brick wall stepping in — a strong brick wall.
”
A large shape, a sharp glisten of color, a brick wall stepping in — a strong brick wall.
A gleam of silver broke through the haze, touching down on the star shining over blue and red.
There was motion, so fast, so jarring, that his body rocked with it.
Peter’s gaze was unfocused and drifting. His limbs didn’t belong to him anymore. They bounced, dragged, hung weightless against the broad chest of Captain America. The solid weight carrying him fast, while the rest of the world fell away.
Boots hammered against the floor.
White walls quickly flashed past.
Something else was moving him, carrying him, dragging him forward. The air wasn’t free anymore, wasn’t calming. It suddenly felt thick, like syrup — bright and golden and brightbrightbrIGHT!
The heat of an orange glow pressed hard against one side of his face, intensifying with each jolt of motion as his head flopped and bounced, helpless to the rhythm.
And then, suddenly —
Silence.
No more sound.
No more air.
Just a thick, velvet black.
Every heartbeat sounded miles away.
Every breath, borrowed.
Peter heard himself exhale. A breath too thin to catch.
He fell until there was nothing left for him to fall into.
He never remembered landing.
“…’ead man.”
A sound tugged at the edge of nothing.
Soft at first.
“……he’s…dead…”
Then louder.
It cracked, rumbled — the distant scrape of someone’s voice dragging him up by the collar of his own coherency; his eyelids far too heavy to lift past the anchors that weighed them down.
And yet still, he heard it.
Dead?
That didn’t make any sense.
Who was dead?
Was he dead?
Did he die? Again?
And if he was dead, how was he able to web-swing?
...was he still web-swinging?
“I’m goin…ill him.”
“No…ou’re no…”
Voices sounded, floated. Some far out of reach, some close enough that he could taste them.
They tasted like smoke — ashy, burnt.
His throat tasted like fire.
That wasn’t a feeling that came from web-swinging.
“—arton, if you…’on’t thin…or one second—” “You don’t …et to make…kind of…cision. It goe…rough Steve.”
A beeping monitor pulsed in the background, too slow. Too uneven.
Every pause between beeps hung in the air.
The weight on his chest refused to lift. Something pressed against his face — a mask? It hissed every time he inhaled, sinking deep into the hallow space within his core, cooling the inflamed tissue inside his lungs.
His ribs fought to rise, with something that wasn’t even there feeling as if he were pinned down. His body refused to obey — too heavy, too slow. Far too weak.
“..ich, Romanoff. Gues…at? Rogers…out. I’m…’n charge.”
The sound lanced into the fog, cutting through the haze in his mind, slowly wrapping around his drifting consciousness.
“Tony—”
Another voice broke through, tighter, steel-wrapped.
It was the last thing Peter heard, before he heard nothing at all.
“—telling you…I’m
—going to kill Osborn.”
For the longest time, it was quiet.
The silence stretched beyond any strand of webbing he could sling into the sky. Even his hearing had dimmed somewhere along the way, as if his body had stopped trying to stay hinged to the world.
Consciousness crept, slowly, pulled in with the drag of his next breath. A heavy ache stirred beneath his ribs, dull pressure blooming behind his eyes.
His fingers wouldn’t move, his toes wouldn’t twitch — but his eyes did.
Barely.
But they did.
It took monumental effort to pry them open; each lid sealed shut, the crust along his lashes turned to glue. His vision returned in broken fragments; jagged and dim, with each slow, resisting blink reaching for clarity.
Shapes around him looked blurry, formless. The lights were too dim, and the curtains on the windows were drawn too tight with thick, heavy fabric that shut out the outside world.
Still, there were gaps that let in shards of pale blue light, the soft and cool tone of an early sunrise filtering in gently through the glass.
His head sank into the pillow, his body reluctant to obey; his gaze drifting aimlessly toward the curtains, where faint light slipped through and washed over the quiet hum of monitors and life-support machines — the kind he’d only ever seen in hospitals.
The machines alike gave out a quiet hum — until finally, his sight settled to rest on a solitary figure at the foot of his bed.
Peter blinked again, even slower this time.
A sharp, electric blue glow clung to the folds of a wrinkled, white button-down shirt; drawing Peter’s eyes to the device planted center on the man’s chest — casting a fractured cyan color straight ahead, right at him.
Through the fragile crack of his heavy lids, his gaze locked onto that shirt. The collar was undone, and there was an absence of any tie hanging around his neck, with both sleeves haphazardly rolled to his elbows.
It wasn’t the disarray of clothing that caught Peter’s attention.
It was that strange, blue glowing device. One that looked like an arc reactor.
But somehow different.
“…wh’a…?” his voice cracked, barely more than a whisper. There was an exhaustion in his bones heavier than anything he’d ever felt before. And he had actually died once before — Peter squeezed his eyes shut tight, fighting through the cobwebs that muddled his ability to think clearly.
If he’d died once before, that meant he was alive now.
Dead people never felt this tired, did they?
Peter had never felt so tired before in his entire life.
But life meant he was alive.
Holy shit, was he alive?
“Shhh.”
Tony’s whisper broke through his haze, drawing his attention.
Peter lifted his head from the single pillow behind his neck, his vision going in-and-out of focus as he watched the man press a lazy finger to his lips.
“Don’t wanna wake your plasma partner over there.”
Without much effort, Tony nodded his head off toward the side.
With every ounce of effort Peter could muster up, he turned his head that way — his eyes heavy with exhaustion, fighting to make sense of the blurred, indistinct shapes around him.
The teal glow of Tony’s arc reactor, mixed with the hushed sky working its way through closed curtains, left shadows across the multitude of medical equipment lining the space between two beds.
Slowly, Peter realized there were two beds in the room, each sitting side by side.
Slowly, he realized he was laying in one of those two beds.
Even with blurry vision, certain details pushed through — a sleeveless white tank top, dark blue combat pants, black boots planted loosely at the foot of the bed. Those were the clearest things he could grasp, anchoring the silhouette beside him.
It wasn’t until Peter’s eyes drifted away from the neighboring bed that he noticed it — propped up against the wall, half-lit by the pale spill of morning light seeping through the curtains.
Captain America’s shield.
Steve’s shield.
The star center of that shield was charred black.
“…ah’h…?” Peter tried again. His vocal cords barely croaked out of his throat, his eyes barely blinked through the cotton that had planted itself firmly in his throat.
Everything sagged under the weight of his fatigue.
At first, he couldn’t quite place the shape beside him; just a broad figure slumped against white sheets, nearly taking up the entire size of the bed he laid in. His eyes drifted over the steady rise and fall of a chest, the familiar slope of a shoulder, the faint outline of a jaw he’d seen on pages after pages in many of his history books.
Peter’s brain fought to piece together reality as the realization dawned on him.
By the time it clicked, he already heard Mr. Stark’s voice slipping in through his ears.
“We all took our turns. Obviously,” Tony’s words cut the air, heavy and depleted. Peter was just awake enough to notice how exhausted the man sounded. “It was this or nothing, a hail Mary if I’ve ever seen one before. They had to pump you full of enough plasma to run the banks dry.”
Peter couldn’t summon the strength to look back at Tony. His eyes stayed forward, lids drooping under their own weight, fighting to remain open.
Through the haze, he still managed to catch sight of Steve’s motionless form in the bed beside him, framed by the quiet pulse of machines casting muted yellow and amber glows.
Steve.
Captain America Steve.
Peter’s one eyebrow furrowed — all his strength could afford to spare.
“It’s impressive,” Tony started to say, as if understanding Peter’s confusion from a mile away. “Us Joe Schmoe's, we gave what we could. Hit the wall, tapped out.” He cleared his throat. Hard. “Cap wouldn’t stop. Downright refused. He’s been at it close to…”
Tony’s voice trailed off, just briefly, as if he was looking somewhere to check the time.
“Twelve hours.” An exhausted exhale followed, close to sounding like a whistle. “Pretty sure he’s given you his body weight in plasma by now — twice over. Double that, even. Hard to say, lost count somewhere along the night.”
Each breath slipped through the small gap between Peter’s lips — warm against the plastic mask pressed to his face, cool and steady when it filled his lungs. Almost enough to soothe the burn deep in his chest.
The same burn crept into his eyes, where moisture clung to the red veins branching out from the dark center of his pupils.
He blinked, once.
It did nothing to help.
“Erskine was a genius, no argument there,” Tony’s voice came low and hushed, blending with the steady beep of machines Peter couldn’t place. It filled the silence that came with his dull confusion. “Four liters down and he’s still letting them take more. That’s past dead and still going for anyone else. Even with the serum, Cho’s not sure his heart can handle that kind of stress. Already had one episode of near-fatal arrhythmia. She swears the next time he won’t bounce back.”
Too weak to close his mouth, Peter’s jaw hung slack as he stared ahead. Each breath came shallow and dry, the cold air dragging against the back of his throat and settling like dust on his tongue.
The room wavered at the edges of his vision, refusing to sharpen. Still, his gaze stayed settled on Steve — seen only in spots of color morphed together.
A broad chest rising. The slope of his shoulder. The lower half of his face, darkened with soot, half-hidden beneath the plastic mask secured over his mouth and nose. His eyes and hair remained untouched, spared by the helmet that now rested off to the side next to his shield — both littered with blackened flakes of fire.
Tony’s voice pressed in, low and steady, like he had been speaking for a while.
“…then again, what do I know. She along with everyone else was already putting a toe tag on you the second we got you back here,” he muttered, tired enough that he barely registered past the hum of the monitors when he let out his sigh.
Peter’s eyelids drooped shut, peeling open again in time to see the fog of condensation cloud the mask on Steve’s face. It was the same mask Peter wore; each exhale a thin wisp of proof that they were both still tethered to something.
Tony sighed again, the sound landing closer than before. Peter caught the faint shift of movement from the corner of his eye.
“To be honest with you, kid… I…” His words faltered for a moment, his chair squeaking as he leaned further forward, practically touching the foot of Peter’s bed — his gaze fixed hard on him. “I thought… part of me thought she might actually be right this time.”
The scent of antiseptic prickled behind Peter’s nose, sharp and sterile behind the oxygen mask. Yet it couldn’t drown out the smoke still etched into his sinuses; bitter and acrid, the phantom scent of flames that hadn’t quite let go.
His focus dragged back to Steve’s face, blanched beneath layers of soot. The dark streaks looked more like cracks than dirt, carving jagged lines across his jaw and staining his skin a harsh, dark gray.
It took a moment, maybe longer, for Peter’s fogged mind to connect the dots.
The streaks of soot.
The smell of smoke.
The fire.
“Pete…” Tony’s voice pulled him back in. Peter managed to shift his gaze just enough to catch the faint lines etched deep into his expression — drained. Defeated. “You haven’t looked that pale since the night you died.”
The steady beeping of machines chimed against his ears, filling the room with a constant rhythm.
Peter all but forced his lips to split apart.
“…h’uh…” he got out.
The next droop of his eyelids brought his gaze downward, his eyes shifting low, briefly catching sight of the bandaged arm pressed firmly against his chest.
A faint crease formed between his brows, a tired V etching deep into his forehead. The limb was completely immobilized — bound tight with medical restraint, held firm against his body. His arm sat cradled in a sling, the swathe wrapped snugly around his chest and drawn behind his back.
The steady hum of machines filled the silence of his weakness, their rhythmic beeps mingling with the gentle rush of oxygen flowing in and out of his lungs.
Peter’s gaze stayed fixed — half-lidded, unfocused — but the burn behind his eyes wasn’t just fatigue anymore. He wasn’t even sure his heart was beating right.
Slow…
Then too fast…
…then slow again.
“Forty-three percent blood loss.” Tony ran a hand over his mouth, somehow answering the question that Peter had never asked. “Nothing short of a miracle that you still had a pulse when we found you.”
He forced himself to clench his eyes tight in hopes of finding some coherence. When he opened them again, everything was still blurry, if not worse than before.
Peter couldn’t even see the fingers of his immobilized arm, each digit sluggishly twitching within the sling that held it in place. All he could make out was the char-black debris packed tightly under his fingernails, staining them with a story he didn’t want to re-live.
Pain flared in his shoulder — slow, thrumming, relentless. It crawled down his spine and hooked a nerve in his neck.
While the room stayed out of focus, the memories stirred with perfect clarity.
“Blood transfusions were off the table,” Tony didn’t need to explain what Peter had come to realize. Looking down at the band on his wrist, bold yellow plastic screamed ALL BLOOD TYPES — SEVERE REACTION, wrapped just above the gauze covering damaged skin. “Not sure if you remember, but that spider-bite did more to your genetic make-up than just give you super sticky powers and a suspiciously convenient sixth sense.”
For as casually as Tony tried to sound, there was clear tension in his voice.
When Peter’s eyes lingered on the yellow band around his wrist, the quiet strain he heard in Mr. Stark’s words started to make sense.
Piece by piece — the morning light through the windows, the birdsong beyond the walls, the quiet hum of the med bay. All of it wove itself around the slow, sinking realization of what had happened.
His head rolled to the side, more from inertia than intent, and his chin dipped into the aching slope of his broken shoulder— gravity and the absence of strength bringing his gaze back to Tony, still seated in a chair at the foot of his bed.
“…he to’k…my bl’od,” the words tangled weakly, barely a whisper, escaping his lips as his mind drifted where he didn’t want to follow.
The room spun, the edges of his sight dimming; yet even as the weight behind his eyes pulled him under, Tony’s voice cut through.
“Yeah…” he eventually managed, no more than breath. “Yeah, he did.”
The quiet that followed wasn’t true silence. Not really. The monitors kept their rhythm. Oxygen threaded through the mask fit snugly around his mouth. Somewhere beyond the window, a bird called out; light and consistent, filling the space between each exhale from his lungs.
Though daylight pressed at the windows, the room remained still, caught in its own quiet pause of time.
Steve laid unmoving. Peter too.
And Tony — elbows digging into his knees, shoulders slumped, spine curled. He sat still at the foot of their beds, stuck as if gravity pinned him there, keeping him nearly as motionless as those he watched over.
“..he…to’k…” Peter’s chest heaved up as he inhaled. “…he to’k…Oz.”
The words hung in the air, thin, weak.
Once again, Tony’s voice barely registered as sound.
“Yeah,” he murmured, nodding slightly. “Yeah, he did.”
For once, it wasn’t silence that followed. It wasn’t the lack of questions, or any answers that came with them.
It was the aftermath of it all.
His blinks came slow and uneven, each one heavier than the last. When he tried to open his eyes again, the effort failed halfway. The world pressed down against his lashes, his body made of lead, his chin sagging deep into the hollow space of his broken shoulder — as if his muscles had given up completely on holding him upright.
Exhaustion pulled at him, heavier than death ever felt.
In the lingering quiet, he swallowed hard, the lump in his throat tightening until it burned — a quiet war between breath and breaking.
“…he killed…‘arry.”
The words had to crawl their way out — torn, broken. They clawed past the knot in his chest, over frayed vocal cords, and fought against lungs too weak to do anything more than breathe.
And though he got the words out, they were left without any response.
Peter barely managed to peel his eyes open. Just an inch, just enough to see blurred shapes and color. He couldn’t be sure if Tony noticed. Couldn’t even tell if his gaze had found its mark.
A tremble wove through his lips. It caused his voice to shake as he choked out,
“…’mr. ‘ark…I thi’k…I think…he killed Harry.”
Peter didn’t have any say in the exhaustion that took over, no control in how the final phrase left his lips — how he collapsed into himself as his thoughts dimmed and slipped away.
One blink, and he was out.
