The lock clicks into place behind Happy, and it gets harder for Peter to breathe. The cannula in his nose isn't pushing out oxygen anymore. May stirs in her sleep, but she doesn't wake up.

He wants to follow. Any other time, he would ignore Happy in half a second, but now just sitting up without the cool air pushing steadily toward his lungs is making his head start to float. He lays back and tries to focus on breathing, his eyes tracing the sterile white ceiling tiles as his chest heaves.

There must be an emergency generator, because after what feels like eons the room is bathed in soft yellow emergency lights. The oxygen tank hums back to life. Around the lights, a hazy fog begins to form. It builds and starts to sink down to him.

Peter feels detached from himself as he starts to breathe it in. His limbs float on the bed, and even though he can feel the sheets and blankets against them, they still feel like they belong to someone else. Like they're releasing from his body to find their true owner.

The fog keeps coming, filling the room. He wonders briefly if he should be breathing it in. But it smells just a bit sweeter than the oxygen, and it goes straight to his head. He looks back to May, tries to say her name. It doesn't work. She's asleep still, anyway, and she looks more peaceful than before. He thinks joining her sounds nice. Calm. Easy.

His hand moves out toward her, but it doesn't make it more than a couple inches past the edge of his bed. His eyes close.

Happy has heard more gunfire in his life than he ever would have cared to, so he knows that whatever that noise was, it wasn't a gun. At least not a normal one. It came from the first floor, so that's where he goes, sprinting down the stairwell. The backup lights come on halfway down, and F.R.I.D.A.Y. crackles to life in his earpiece.

"There are five intruders currently in the lobby attempting to commandeer the elevator," she says. "There is also an unknown gas being pumped into the top floor by an external mechanism, concentrated in the lab and Mr. Parker's room."

"Fuck," Happy huffed to himself. He paused at the door from the stairwell to the lobby, sneaking a look through the small window on it. F.R.I.D.A.Y.'s assessment is correct. One man has pulled apart the elevator panel and is fucking with the wiring. Three men guard him, and one taps his foot impatiently to the side. They're all in black tactical gear except the last. Justin Hammer.

Happy is outgunned and outmanned. The tight security revolving around Peter—and even the fucking building—was entirely built on secrecy and stealth. Usually, the kid could protect himself much better than a security team could, but now he is left vulnerable to attack and whatever concoction Hammer was pumping through the vents.

Happy formulates a plan, a way to take them down one by one. But as soon as he cracks open the stairwell door, he's hit by a blast of gray haze, and his mind melts.

He hits the ground hard.