skulls

005, THE CITY!

SKULLS / CHAPTER FIVE
THE CITY!

———

SILAS EXHALES AND PULLS HIS MASK down over his face, shakily standing up on the corner of the building and pretending like he isn't only eight feet off the floor.

"Skullrider, Skullrider, saves the city better than Spider... Man." He sighs, giving up on the song before jumping off the corner of the building and starting to run down the street, darting through drunken couples and late-night shoppers towards nothing in particular.

"I'm sorry, excuse me, coming through!" Some sort of excuse or apology forms itself as Silas completely ignores all the protests and fades into a walk at the end of the street, staring out across the road and to the wilderness beyond.

There's the faint sound of voices from somewhere below the bridge, and Silas being the morbidly curious and screwed-up teenager he is, he instantly starts to jog directly across the busy road towards where the voices seem to be coming from.

A faint scent of fire and smoke is the first thing the boy notices, even before the familiar kid crouched in the shadows.

"Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man?" Silas hisses, and he jumps before slicing a hand across his neck in an attempt to indicate silence.

"Yeah, yeah, Skull... Whatever your name is. Get down, these are the bad guys." He waves his hand up and down wildly, looking almost like a bad imitation of a dying bird.

Silas rolls his eyes at the boy, but crouches down anyway, leaving just enough room to see over the ledge and down onto the floor.

"What's happening?" He whispers after a few minutes of watching absolutely nothing happen, and Friendly Neighbourhood Spider-Man shrugs.

"Weapons deal, I think. I don't know, I'm bored." He bounces on his heels, humming gently along to the tune of some distant song playing out of a car.

Silas jumps a little as Spider-Man's phone begins to ring: he's sure he's heard the song somewhere before, but dismisses it as people being too lazy to change their ring-tone.

"Who's that?" One of the people below shouts. "Did you set us up?"

The spider laughs nervously, before grabbing Silas' wrist and jumping down from the bridge. Thankfully, he has the foresight to not let Silas smash his beautiful face on the concrete, and fires one of his web things to stop most of the pain.

"Why did you drag me down here?" Silas shouts, pressing his eyes shut as he tries to focus enough to throw one of the henchmen away from him.

Silas' new least favorite person ignores him completely and instead gasps loudly. "You can do that telekinetic thing? That's so cool!"

"Shut up and fight, goddamn it!" He screams back, throwing a hand forwards to stop the guy about to attack Spider-Man and feeling the sheer, unadulterated power flow through his fingers and vibrate across the air particles between them. Almost as soon as it happens, Silas can feel exhaustion seep into his bones, and has to fight not to collapse on the spot.

To be honest, he isn't a hundred percent sure why he's defending the person who literally took his job and caused Silas to fall back into his horror video addiction. The darker, more morbid side of him keeps thinking about how easy it would be to just sort of let him fade away and forget about it all. After that, he could go back to saving people and being sarcastic to anyone who thought Skullrider was him.

That's the point at which the stupid boy decides to open his mouth again, and Silas ends up with that goddamn awful tightening in his chest he usually only gets from watching the Sabrina trailer and interviews with twenty one pilots. Yes, he knows it's unhealthy. No, he doesn't care.

During Silas' few moments of self-reflection, he realises that even if he doesn't like Spiderguy (or whatever the hell his name is) for stealing his job, it's kind of anti-hero-like to let him die. And so, as he snaps back to reality and realises that he may or may not have allowed one of the bad guys to steal Friendly Neighbourhood Spider-Man from the battle scene, Silas curses violently - a string of words far too explicit for a PG-12 film - and begins to run.

word count: 732!
thanks for reading!