POST SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME
'I get, you know, the whole pressure thing. I mean, you're the good guy, the superhero, every little kid's role model. There's thousands of people out there that would kill to be a couple feet away from you. You're...
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[ 0004. chapter four ] *♡:｡.｡ fuck spider-man ｡.｡:♡*
iv.
"You were right."
Elijah's eyes moved from his almost-finished essay to meet those of his best friend, who was sitting across from him. The two of them sat in a quaint pastry shop with blue coffee cups set beside their hands and school bags carelessly rested at their feet. There were skeletons and wizards and vampires littering the walls of the bakery, beckoning the arrival of All Hallows' Eve.
"About what?" asked the busy boy. His focus went back to his essay as he began to type once again. "I'm right about a lot of things, Sumi."
At this, his friend rolled her eyes, opting to ignore his comment instead of feeding into his surprisingly inflated ego. He wasn't wrong, per say; there had been many instances in their past where Lakshmi was proven wrong by the uttering of a simple sentence. That didn't mean she wanted him to boast about it.
"There's a new bad guy," she informed, carefully watching his reaction to her statement. "He's a pumpkin."
Almost too excited, his ears perked up and he all but threw his laptop to the side, almost knocking his coffee off the small table. Lakshmi gave him a nervous stare as she inched her own coffee cup closer to her side of the surface.
"Is it strange to say 'I told you so' even though we're probably in a shit ton of danger?" When she nodded, he shrugged. "Well, I don't care. I told you. I knew this would—hold up. Did you just say he's a pumpkin?"
Protecting her paper cup from potentially spilling with one hand, she tilted her laptop so he could see the picture on her screen. An article with the image of a flaming pumpkin head with the body of a human popped up, the headline claiming it called itself a—
"Jack O'Lantern," she read, pulling her screen closer to her so she could read off it; "he calls himself Jack O'Lantern. Apparently, he submitted a video of himself to The Daily Bugle taunting Spider-Man. He basically just said he's mad about his glider being broken and he'll be waiting for their next fight. Besides the obvious pumpkin thing he's got goin' on, he looks so familiar for some reason. I guess he's been waiting until October to come out and terrorize New York. Maybe he's one of those seasonal bad guys."
She spoke of his villainousness as if it was a well-established career, at which Elijah raised his brows. "Seasonal bad guys? That's a thing?"
"Well this guy exists, so if they weren't a thing before, they're definitely a thing now." They both took a second to ponder over the idea, imaginations running wild at the possibilities of the next supervillains that could come their way. "I wonder what we're gonna get next month. Maybe a turkey goblin."
