fearless || peter parker

nineteen || death wishes, and criminal cannibalism

I wanted to skip school on Monday so bad. But I knew if I did, Madison would get a call, I'd get detention, and all because I didn't want to see a certain somebody.

It wasn't worth the trouble of dealing with the repercussions just to avoid Peter. I had one lie, and that was I was late and missed attendance, which would only fly with Madison once. So, in the grand scheme of things, I decided it would be better to save that one for a rainy day when I really needed it.

As it turned out, the universe was working in my favor. Peter wasn't in Chemistry that day, so I took his absence to mean he wouldn't show up for Yearbook at lunch.

Peter had definitely talked to Ned, though, because our only conversation that day were awkward hellos as we passed each other in the hallway on the way out of Chemistry.

I was heading straight for Yearbook, and felt pretty good about showing up with the Decathlon pictures, until I passed the Home Ec room and Nitara jumped out in front of me.

"Woah," I said, startled. "What are you doing?"

"Waiting for you," Nitara said, slightly more hyper than usual. "Have you seen the news?"

I studied Nitara's face. Her eyes were wider than ever, and she gripped the sides of my shoulders with a surprising amount of force.

"No," I said. "From the five minutes since we were in Chemistry, no, I can't say I've seen the news."

Nitara yanked me into the Home Ec room.

I had been in here more than my fair share of times, because Nitara always wanted an opinion on this, or my thoughts on that, or whether I thought this pattern was best with these colours. I much preferred photography. I was fine with us doing our own things at lunch, because clothing and design had never struck a chord for me in the tens of times Nitara forced me to evaluate her work.

The room had sewing machines all along the wall in the back, and the teacher's desk sat in the front corner, vacant as always. But that wasn't what caught my attention this time. On the projector screen was a news channel, which wasn't uncommon for the room to have. The shocking part was what was happening on the news.

"The Staten Island Ferry?" I questioned, watching the breaking news coverage. "Wait-"

On the large, albeit fuzzy, projector screen, the ferry was shown nearly falling apart from a helicopter camera, and there was a commotion on the deck.

"It's Spider-Man," Nitara gasped, staring at a quickly moving red and blue flash on the screen.

That, I could care less about. Spider-Man worked the day shift around Queens, that I knew. I was more concerned about the second, darker flash on the screen.

"It's Vulture," I seethed. "Shit! What if Spider-Man is trying to catch him?"

If Spider-Man did catch Vulture, I wouldn't get my perfect takedown and lock the only person who can connect me to Nightmare away for good. If Spider-Man didn't get Vulture, he would probably go down trying, which would also stop me from getting my perfect takedown, since Spider-Man himself was sort of an integral part of the plan. Find the warehouse, wait for Vulture to leave it, take Spider-Man with me to take Vulture on, beat him, then use the warehouse as evidence to lock him up for life.

This was bad.

"It's fine," Nitara said. "It's fine. Um... it's not fine."

I had to get over there. I was out of the door in a flash, and I could hear Nitara shout as I bolted down the empty hall at top speed. I had to intervene. Now was too soon to put the plan in action. It was premature, and details were still all over the place. We didn't even know what kind of arsenal Vulture had since we hadn't found the warehouse. And now Spider-Man had put that all in jeopardy.