Spooktober 10: Hypothermia

⚠️TW: drowning⚠️

New York was going through a harsh winter. The cold came strong, whipping winds, biting air, snow that was more ice than powder. People bundled in layers, sprinkled salt on the roads and their sidewalks, and held their hot coffees to their noses as they walked to work.

Peter has had better winters for sure. Especially before he was bit.

Here were his most pressing problems, starting from number three to number one.

Number three: When he was fourteen, he was bitten by a radioactive spider. This spider altered and rewrote entire strands of DNA, and instead of killing him, he woke up with spider-abilities. This is where his problems start, because having spider-abilities aren't all what they're cracked up to be.

When Peter was first bitten, after he had woke up and after he had gotten over the initial freak out of how he could hear everybody in his apartment, after he had moved on from the fact that he accidentally broke his door handle and computer mouse with nothing but the touch of his hand, he had been doing frantic research into the creature that had decided to so generously replace his DNA. This leads us into Problem #2.

Number two: A subsection of number three. The Arachne as a species are cold-blooded animals. This means, while comfortable in cold weather, they also have a mechanism to better survive the cold temperatures their bodies are built to be more comfortable in.

Rapid Cold Hardening, Peter learned, is the process that animals such as spiders go through to cope with harshly frigid environments. After several minutes of being on Bing, he could basically chalk it all up to: Spiders get cold. Then they get sleepy.

He was lucky enough to not be too bothered by this particular detail of spider anatomy if he made sure to bundle up extra on cold days, and Tony Stark had been kind enough to put a heater in his suit, but today specifically, he was not wearing his suit. This brings us, finally, to number three.

Number three: Peter was slowly sinking into the Manhattan River, his arms going numb as he tried and failed to punch through ice that had floated over him. He was more cold than he had been in his entire life, and he could feel his body start to slow itself down.

How he had gotten here was a question Peter couldn't really answer himself, and not because he was convinced his brain and cerebral spinal fluid was slowly freezing over just to spite his efforts to get out of the river. He vaguely remembered jumping in without the suit on because he didn't have the time to save the kid who had fallen in, pulling up the kid to the surface and things got blurry from there.

Water soaked through his clothes and dragged him further down. He could only hold his breath for so long, and black spots were dancing in his vision like some messed up interpretation of the Sugar Plum Fairy. A pressure was on his throat, the burning kind that filled his lungs and begged him to take a breath.

On the contrary, falling asleep didn't seem like a half bad idea. He was so tired, the bitterness taking over his body like a blanket of the softest snow, and then the weight of water and burning of lungs melding together made him force his eyes shut.

His body slowed to a stop before he could gasp for breath, so if he ever did inhale a mouthful of water, he wasn't conscious of it. Whether this was a blessing or a curse is up to debate, but now Peter slept like the dead in a river of ice-cold water, so he didn't mind either way.

A rumbling mechanical noise was what woke him up, followed by the hissing of steaming wet clothes as they were heated on his body.

Peter turned to his side and started coughing up water, spewing it as it came out of his throat. Despite the spider-DNA in his blood, he knew he was cold, he shivered and shook and his teeth chattered in his skull.

The Iron Man suit standing beside him flipped the mask up, revealing Tony's worried face. His palms were up, repulsors apparently heating Peter back to life. "Kid?"

Peter, unaware of what to do, his whole body still quivering and unconsciously leaning towards the warmth, gives Tony a rattly smile and a thumbs up.

The eye roll in response doesn't match with Tony's obvious wave of physical relief, but Peter doesn't comment.

"Didn't anybody ever tell you not to take ice baths in the Hudson?" Tony bites in a scolding tone only reserved for the parents of self-sacrificial spider-children. "I don't even know how you're alive right now. It's a miracle. Who even are you?"

"S-Spider-Man," Peter says, his teeth still chittering against each other. "Somet-times more s-spider than m-man."

Tony didn't know exactly how true that was until the next day, a fully recovered Peter returned to the lab to explain exactly how he managed to cheat drowning and get by with a mild case of hypothermia.

Apparently, Peter hypothesized, Rapid Cold Hardening slowed down his heart and lungs and mimicked the low metabolism of a spider and allowed him to remain in the water longer without dying of asphyxiation.

When Tony asked him how Peter was able to prove this hypothesis, Peter suggested going to the Hudson River again with a heart monitor, to which Tony replied:

"Absolutely no way in hell. People really will say anything to the guy with a heart condition."

The hypothesis remains unproven. Tony makes sure it stays that way.