fearless || peter parker

two || battle scars

In a flash, I turned and ran the way I came. Everything was so much more prominent, more visible, and I had no problem sprinting my fastest down the uneven alley to safety. I ran for three, five, ten seconds, and just a little more time would allow me to possibly be out of range.

But my dreams were shattered like broken glass when the wind brought to my ears the unmistaken whirring, the same whirring I heard just moments before that man's death. It sped up, quicker and higher, until all of the energy it had built up was released in one giant wave that met my skin in seconds.

I collapsed in a heap, and I couldn't keep a scream from my lips as the pure charge of energy consumed me from head to toe. It shook me to the core, rattled my skull, and I curled into a ball the best I could. It hurt. Not like a paper cut or stubbing your toe or falling on uneven cement hurt, but being sliced with a thousand white-hot knives and not being able to breathe hurt. What I had just witnessed was happening to me. My skin was slashed and my limbs were shook but unlike the man, who only lasted a minute under the gun, this pain didn't stop.

Instead, it calmed down, only a little bit. I was still on fire in the rain, which was my only source of coolness at all. But my back was still being electrocuted, and my fingers were still being torn from their joints. The buzz went up and down my hands, and when the rest of my body fizzed out like a sparkler, my back, my hands, still burned in agony.

Through all of that, I could still hear the footsteps of the devil clanging through the alley, and the closer they got, the stiller I became. This was my last shot. Play dead, and make sure the robot man didn't need to use a plan B.

He must have only been ten feet away when he slowed down. My ears told me everything. My eyes, on the other hand, were squeezed shut. I didn't want to risk him seeing me blinking or something else that would clumsily lead to my doom. But when I heard creaking, like he was turning, my curiosity got the best of me as I ever so slightly looked past the wavy chestnut brown hair covering part of my face.

I did not expect what I saw. Everything, everywhere around me was pitch black dark. Any light that had come from inside the warehouse or the pathetic streetlamps on the walls had been somehow shut off, but the weirdest thing was that I could see just fine. It was like when your eyes adjust to your bedroom light being turned off and you stare into nothingness until that nothing becomes something. It was dark as night, but I could see clear as day.

And what I first saw was the bird guy towering above me, staring straight through my soul. Except he didn't look like he knew I was here.

I decided that if he were going to find me, I was still in the same general spot he had last seen me in, so as silently as I could, I rolled over the rocky pavement against the cool warehouse wall. This turned out to be a good decision- not a minute later, metal man powered up his gun and shot the same bone-chilling wavey violet sparks I had seen twice already at the very spot I had just been laying.

Reluctantly, I ignored my body's cries and used the wall to help me stand. It was almost amusing to watch him look around in confusio into the endless darkness that cloaked his vision.

"Hey, bird brain," I practically whispered, snapping his attention to my location. "Over here."

I dodged out of the way like a bullet as he fired his next shot at the warehouse, the whips of the royal violet cracking against the wall. I was relying on fumes and a leg and a half, but I managed to slip far from my previous spot. A crack was left in the warehouse exterior, but I had to snap my focus back to the wing thing approaching my side of the alley. I took this as my cue to leave, and stumbled away from him in a sort of zig-zag pattern. Mainly because my foot was holding me back, but I also wanted to avoid any possible random hits my chaser could retaliate.