Hunter of Marvel - Chapter 16

Chapter 16: Friends

The bass from the living room speakers was so loud it rattled the ice in Veer’s plastic cup.

Flash Thompson’s house was packed. It was a sprawling, suburban two-story colonial that had been entirely surrendered to the chaotic, hormonal frenzy of the junior class. The air was thick and hot, smelling of spilled keg beer, cheap body spray, and desperate teenage energy.

Veer stood near the edge of the kitchen island, nursing a generic lager. He kept his shoulders slightly hunched, playing his part, but beneath the oversized hoodie, his skin felt too tight.

It was the Aura.

Having thirty-five thousand points of raw, untamed life-force surging through the prime, biological vessel of an eighteen-year-old boy was an absolute nightmare. It didn’t just enhance his muscles; it flooded his endocrine system. It acted like a massive, unrelenting overdose of testosterone. His blood ran hot. His senses were constantly red-lining. He caught himself staring too long, feeling sudden, violent spikes of aggression and an equally aggressive, maddeningly distracting libido.

He spent every waking moment brutally suppressing those sexual urges. But the discipline was exhausting. It was lonely.

He needed this. He needed the mindless noise, the bad music, and the beer. He needed a tether to humanity.

Mark used to be that tether, but the dynamic in their rundown apartment had irrevocably shifted. Mark had met Hina at the gym. Now, his roommate spent every spare second glued to his phone screen, a goofy, love-struck smile plastered across his face. Veer was genuinely happy for him, but it left a quiet, hollow space in his own life. He needed a friend. He just needed someone to talk to.

“Hey.”

Veer turned. Flash Thompson was standing there, holding a fresh plastic cup. The varsity jacket was gone, and with it, a lot of the aggressive, territorial posturing. When Veer had first walked through the door, the entire party had frozen, expecting Flash to violently throw the “pathetic scholarship kid” out onto the lawn. Instead, Flash had nervously handed him a drink, a bizarre public display of appeasement to the boy who had secretly shattered his friend’s ribs.

But now, an hour in, the alcohol had softened the sharp edges between them.

“It’s suffocating in here,” Flash muttered, wiping a sheen of sweat from his forehead. He gestured toward the back of the house with his chin. “Come on. Let’s get some air.”

Veer followed him through the sliding glass doors and out onto the back patio. The crisp, autumn night air was a massive relief. They sank into a pair of wooden lawn chairs, the heavy thud of the party muffled behind the glass.

For a long time, they just sat in the dark. It was a strange, fragile peace. The undisputed king of the high school hierarchy and the boy at the absolute bottom of it, sitting side by side, bound by a violent secret.

Flash took a long, heavy pull from his cup. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, his eyes fixed on the grass. The alcohol had stripped away the bravado, leaving behind a vulnerable, stressed teenager.

“I gotta ask you something, Singh,” Flash said, his voice low, lacking any of its usual abrasive volume. “And I just… I want the truth. No bullshit.”

Veer rested his cup on his knee, the cold condensation bleeding into his jeans. “Ask.”

Flash swallowed hard. He didn’t look up. “Did you really write that letter to MJ?”

Veer didn’t hesitate. He didn’t tense. He just looked at the massive, conflicted boy sitting next to him and gave a slow, definitive shake of his head. “No.”

Flash let out a breath he sounded like he’d been holding for a month. He leaned back, running a heavy hand over his face. “Yeah. Yeah, I figured.” He let out a dry, humorless laugh. “You just don’t fit the profile, man. You look at her like she’s a math problem you don’t care about solving. You don’t look at her like… like someone who cares.”

Flash turned his head, his eyes slightly glazed but intensely focused. “So who wrote it? Who were you covering for?”

Veer thought of Mark, safely tucked away in his room, entirely oblivious to the bullet Veer had caught for him.

“It’s in the past, Flash,” Veer said, his tone gentle, shutting the door on the interrogation without a hint of hostility. “It was a mistake made by someone who had too much to drink. It doesn’t matter anymore. Let it go.”

Flash stared at him for a moment, searching Veer’s calm, impassive face. Finally, he nodded, accepting the boundary.

“I really love her, you know,” Flash said quietly. The confession slipped out of him, raw and unguarded. “MJ. It’s not just some high school status thing for me. I really, deeply love her. She’s smart, she doesn’t take my crap, she makes me want to be better. I just… I want it to work out.”

Veer looked at Flash, and a profound, quiet ache of pity settled in his chest.

It was a tragedy. Flash was pouring his soul into a relationship that the universe itself had already condemned. In the grand, inescapable script of this world, Mary Jane Watson belonged to Peter Parker. They were a cosmic inevitability. No matter how hard Flash fought, no matter how deeply he loved her, he was just a temporary placeholder. He was destined to lose her.

“Love is complicated,” Veer said softly, looking up at the stars. “Sometimes you do everything right, and the variables still just don’t align for you. Don’t lose yourself trying to hold onto something if it’s meant to slip away.”

Flash frowned, kicking at a loose pebble on the patio. “You sound like a middle-aged guidance counselor, Singh.”

Veer actually smiled—a small, genuine break in his armor. “I read a lot of psychology articles.”

The heavy emotional weight of the moment naturally dispersed, replaced by the easy, meandering conversation of two guys sharing a drink. They talked about the party, about the people inside, and eventually, about the terrifying cliff edge of the future.

“I want to go to college,” Flash admitted, crushing his empty cup in his hand. “Penn State, maybe. Play football. But my marks… man, my marks are absolute garbage. If I don’t get a sports scholarship, my dad is going to kill me. I look at Calculus and it just looks like a foreign language.”

“Math is just logic,” Veer said, the beer warming his chest. “It’s a system of rules. Once you understand the rules, the numbers are easy to manipulate.”

They sat on the patio for another hour. There was no posturing, no fear, no bullying. Just two guys, dealing with the pressure of their respective worlds, finding a moment of actual friendship in the dark.

—

It was past two in the morning when Veer finally climbed the stairs to his apartment in Queens.

The alcohol in his system was actively being incinerated by his massive Vitality stat, leaving him with a pleasant, heavy buzz rather than a sloppy drunkenness. The apartment was completely silent, the only sound the faint, rhythmic snoring coming from beneath Mark’s closed door.

Veer kicked off his shoes and walked down the narrow hallway to his own bedroom. He pushed the door open, the hinges creaking softly.

Moonlight spilled across the cramped room, illuminating the bed.

Gwen Stacy was still there.

She was fast asleep in the center of the mattress, the heavy quilt pulled up to her chin. Her blonde hair was a messy halo across his pillow.

The accelerated cellular regeneration of her spider physiology was nothing short of miraculous. The dark, swollen bruising that had covered her cheekbone just that afternoon had completely vanished, leaving her skin pale and flawless. The cut above her brow was just a faint pink memory. She looked entirely peaceful, completely divorced from the terrifying, superhuman violence they had inflicted on each other earlier.

Veer rubbed the back of his neck, feeling the crushing weight of the day finally settle into his bones.

He was bone-tired. The physical toll of the fight, the massive influx of energy from the level-up, and the emotional drain of the party had hollowed him out. He looked at the lumpy, spring-shot couch in the living room, and then back at his own bed.

He was too tired. He was too buzzed. The surging hormones of his eighteen-year-old body, combined with the sheer exhaustion, completely overrode his usual rigid logic. It was his bed. He just wanted to sleep.

Moving silently in the dark, Veer pulled his hoodie off and tossed it onto the desk chair. Wearing only his t-shirt and boxers, he went to the far side of the mattress. He lifted the edge of the quilt with painstaking care. Gwen didn’t stir.

He slid into the bed, pressing his back against the very edge of the mattress to leave a wide, respectful chasm of space between them. He stared at the cracked plaster ceiling, his body aching for rest. Within seconds, his eyes slipped shut, and the heavy, dreamless dark pulled him under.

—

The morning sun hit Gwen’s face, warm and insistent.

She groaned, her heightened senses slowly booting up. The world rushed in—the distant blare of a taxi horn, the smell of old coffee in the kitchen, the soft flutter of a pigeon outside the window.

But the most immediate sensation wasn’t a sound or a smell. It was touch.

Gwen opened her eyes. The room was bathed in golden light, but it took her brain a fractured second to process where she was. The fight. The paper mill. Veer’s apartment.

She tried to stretch her legs, but she couldn’t. She was pinned.

Gwen froze. Her breath caught sharply in her throat.

Her face was pressed against something incredibly warm and solid. It was a chest. A wide, densely muscled chest wrapped in soft black cotton. She slowly, fearfully tilted her head down.

Sometime during the cold night, seeking warmth, she had completely closed the gap between them. Her left arm was thrown casually over Veer’s waist, her hand resting flat against his stomach. Her right leg was tangled intimately with his. She was practically draped over him, her face buried in the crook of his neck, breathing in the scent of his skin.

Pure, unadulterated panic exploded in her chest.

She was a seventeen-year-old girl. She had never slept in a boy’s bed in her life, let alone woken up physically wrapped around one like a koala. The sheer, overwhelming embarrassment of the situation was physically painful. A furious, burning flush of red crept up her neck and engulfed her entire face. Even though nothing had happened, the physical intimacy of the pose was staggering.

Her Spider-Sense was completely quiet. It didn’t view the powerhouse sleeping beneath her as a threat; it viewed him as a safe harbor.

Veer’s breathing was slow and rhythmic. His face was relaxed in sleep, the cold, calculating mask he usually wore completely gone. He just looked like a normal, handsome teenager.

Gwen swallowed the lump of panic in her throat. ‘Do not wake him up. Please God, do not make this weird.’

Moving with the agonizing, millimeter precision of a bomb disposal expert, Gwen began the extraction. She utilized every ounce of her superhuman flexibility and balance. She slowly, imperceptibly lifted her arm off his waist, holding her breath until her lungs burned. She carefully retracted her leg, inch by terrifying inch, disentangling herself from the heavy warmth of his body.

Veer shifted, letting out a low sigh, and turned his head slightly into the pillow.

Gwen froze entirely, hovering over the mattress, her heart hammering against her ribs so violently she was sure it would wake him. She waited ten agonizing seconds. His breathing steadied.

She slipped out from under the quilt, her bare feet touching the cold hardwood floor without making a single sound. She grabbed her dusty athletic jacket and her sneakers from the chair, clutching them tightly to her chest.

Her face was still on fire. She just needed to get out of this apartment, go back to her house, and pretend this morning had never happened.

She tiptoed toward the bedroom door, grasped the brass handle, and turned it with excruciating slowness, preventing the latch from clicking. She pulled the door open, slipped out into the hallway, and gently pulled it shut behind her.

She let out a massive, silent exhale of relief, leaning her forehead against the wood.

“Morning.”

Gwen violently flinched, spinning around.

Standing in the small, open-plan kitchen, holding a box of off-brand Cheerios and a bowl, was Mark.

He was wearing plaid pajama pants and a faded gaming t-shirt, his glasses askew on his nose. He froze mid-pour. The cereal spilled over the edge of the ceramic bowl, cascading onto the linoleum floor with a loud, crunchy clatter.

Mark stared at Gwen.

He looked at her messy, sleep-tousled blonde hair. He looked at her bare feet. He looked at the jacket and shoes clutched desperately to her chest, and the fierce, undeniable blush coloring her cheeks. Finally, his eyes drifted slowly to the door of Veer’s bedroom, the door she had just sneaked out of.

The silence in the apartment was deafening.

Gwen opened her mouth. “I… it’s not… we didn’t…” she stammered, her genius-level intellect completely short-circuiting under the sheer weight of the teenage awkwardness. She sounded guilty, even to herself.

Unable to articulate a single coherent defense, she turned on her heel and practically sprinted down the hallway. She fumbled with the deadbolt, ripped the front door open, and slammed it shut behind her, fleeing the scene.

Mark stood perfectly still in the kitchen, cereal crunching beneath his slippers.

His jaw was hanging so wide open it actually hurt.

Gwen Stacy. Midtown High’s brilliant, beautiful, utterly unattainable Gwen Stacy. She had just done the exact same panicked, morning-after escape out of Veer’s bedroom that Felicia Hardy had done a month ago.

Mark slowly set the box of Cheerios down on the counter. His mind was struggling to process the reality of his roommate’s existence. Veer was supposedly a broken, limping scholarship kid who had been publicly humiliated. Yet, somehow, behind closed doors, he possessed a level of romantic magnetism that defied the known laws of physics.

First Felicia. Now the untouchable Gwen Stacy.

Mark stared at Veer’s closed bedroom door. The guilt he had felt over the MJ text message evaporated, entirely replaced by a profound, soul-crushing wave of unadulterated envy.