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...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
[ 0010. chapter ten ] *♡:｡.｡ the wrong hands ｡.｡:♡*
x.
Elijah sat at the end of his bed beside Sumi, his laptop on her lap and a tight-lipped frown on both of their faces. He watched as she sifted through files silently, nothing but the click-click of her nails against the touchpad filling the silence. There was a moment where their breaths collided, enveloping the air in a familiar warmth just in time for Sumi to locate what she was looking for.
Prior to turning the laptop to Elijah, she paused at the same picture she'd seen weeks prior—the aforementioned "ugly, dark, thing"—and the cursor lingered over the Delete button. Not too soon after she'd done the unspoken and stolen these files, she'd overheard a conversation between the lawyers at the firm she was interning at. Curious, she'd pressed her body against the wall and strained her ears to try her hardest to listen:
"If this information gets into the wrong hands, we'll have an all-out war in New York. Again. And if we can't even explain what's going on in this picture, what makes you think the public will? It'll be chaos..."
Lakshmi missed the rest of this sentence due to her atrocious balance, as she'd almost tripped over her own foot and made her presence known to the three standing in the lobby. With a sheepish smile, she'd scurried back to her superior's office, burying her head in a file from a pile on the desk.
Now, she had a chance to actually mull over their words. Is this all really worth it? —Keeping this ugly... thing on this laptop for the foreseeable future? Is this helping anyone? Sure, information of this "Unknown" would surely make the news at some point, but was it really an advantage to have a random picture of an alien life-form on her teenage best friend's laptop, ready for his dads to see? For Arjun to see? Lakshmi wasn't so sure.
Are our hands the "wrong hands?"
This final question hung over her head, and she quickly clicked the button and moved on, landing on what she was looking for. Elijah, oblivious to what she'd done, finally leaned in closer as she tilted the screen to face him.
"I was going through these files the other day, when I borrowed your laptop 'cause mine was getting fixed, and I found this."
Initially, he hadn't been able to make out what was in front of him. It was a picture of someone's home after what one would assume to be an armed robbery; it was ransacked, chairs knocked over, picture frames broken on the ground, spray paint on the walls. There was a caption to the photo: Irvine, CA. 10/24.
That wasn't the only thing to catch his attention, however. What stood out to him next were the red, bold words splattered across the wall: CATCH ME IF YOU CAN. A bold statement from whom he'd initially assumed to be a burglar, but the flaming pumpkin drawn beside it caused the hairs on the back of his neck to rise.
