TONY
'Kid, I need you to work with me on this.' He sits with his legs stretched out, back against the door. I squat down to get to eye level with him but he stares straight ahead.
'I'm sorry, I don't know what I'm supposed to do.' He says, his voice still so young, nothing changed from when I last saw him.
'Please just keep thinking, keep looking.' I ask.
'Looking for what?' He asks back.
'Anything, absolutely anything.' It's silent for a moment, but soon his eyes focus on something behind me.
'There was a container there.' He says, standing up.
'A what?'
'A container. Just there.' He points to an empty space.
'Clearly not.'
'I've been here a long time. I know this place. There was a box here...and a door over there. I could never open it but there was a grey door with a small window in the top just over there.' He moves over to. Black piece of wall.
'Carol said...she said if we were here too long our world would start to collapse. It'd lose detail till we were effectively just in a white abyss. We'd be trapped here.' I look at Peter, 'Kid I need you to work here. The key pad, just type in dates, any dates. Anything you think might work.' He follows me to the key pad and after a moment starts typing in numbers. One after the other declines, birthdays, death of his parents, death of his uncle, day he caught his first bad guy. Civil war fight. Anything and everything.
I look away from him and see that the room was little more now than four walls with a door and keypad.
'C'mon Kid.' I say, thinking of Pepper and my son. Thinking of how I promised May I'd bring him back. 'C'mon.'
'Maybe...' He says under his breathe and an anticlimactic click follows, a green light. 'The day the spider bit me. I'm surprised I remembered that one.'
'We've got to go, Pete, c'mon.' The world starts losing shape as the door starts to rise. We wait till we're able to duck through it before we manage to escape the world before we lose the exit forever.