"Good exercise, team," I say as we leave the training room, "I think we're improving."
"I think so too," I look up to see a familiar face...or mask...in the hallway.
"Spider-Man!" Sam rushes over to him and hugs him.
"Hey, kid. Nice to see you again."
"You didn't tell me you were coming by," I say.
"I was in the neighborhood, thought I'd SWING by to check up on my favorite team. I brought pizza, it's waiting upstairs."
"Mine!" Sam takes off, flying (literally) down the hall.
"Not so fast," I pull out an ensnarement arrow, notch it, and release. As it makes contact, it wraps him up in a cable and he goes down.
"Gotta love ensnarrows," Spidey laughs.
"Ensnarrow. Clever. I like it."
"Really? Your dad always hated it."
"Yeah, well I'm not my dad."
"So I've already met all of you, except for you," Spidey says, pointing across the table to Kate, "You're Katie right?"
"Yeah," she smiles.
"So, Katie, what can you do?"
"That," she says, now standing next to him.
"Oh, cool, you can teleport?"
"No," she giggles, "I just run really fast, thanks to these boots I invented. I also made these gloves, which let me do this," she says, as she levitates Sam's slice of pizza out of his hands and into her own.
"Hey!" he complains, as she takes a bite.
"You invented those yourself? That's amazing!" says the Webhead.
Kate blushes.
"Alright," I say, "well, thanks for stopping by-"
"Now it's MY turn to show YOU what I can do. Wanna go for a swing through New York with your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man?"
"Really?" replies Kate, who can't stop smiling.
"We should probably get back to..." I start, but they leave anyway, "...training."
I turn back to the rest of my team and see they're all grinning.
"What?"
"You're jealous," Emily says.
"No, we just need to train some more."
"So jealous," Bobby says.
"Trust me, I'm not jealous."
"Sir, I'm picking up signs of distress from somewhere in the area," JARVIS informs through the base's audio system.
I stand up and grab my bow.
"What is it!?"
"It appears to be extreme jealousy of Spider-Man, sir."
The team laughs.
"I'm leaving."
"Aww, come on, we were just having fun!" Sam laughs.
Finding a nice spot on the roof, I sit and try to convince myself I wasn't jealous back there. I was...worried, that's all. Yeah, I was just worried...that she'd be into him... Fine, I was jealous.
"Am I gonna have to keep finding you sitting alone, and making you feel better?"
I turned to see Emily standing there.
"If I didn't know better, I'd think you were TRYING to get me alone," I reply with a smile, "I'm sorry about storming out. Usually I can take a joke, I swear," I tell her.
"I get it. You've been alone most of your life. Other than JARVIS, you haven't really had anyone. You obviously like her and when it seemed like she might not feel the same way, you needed to protect yourself from being hurt."
I hadn't even figured that out yet, and she already had...
"How did you-"
"It's natural. Happens to everyone," she says as she sits down next to me.
"How do I deal with it?"
"Depends. Do you like her a lot?"
"I don't know. When I comforted her on our first night here, she just sat and hugged me and...I don't know, from there I guess I had a crush on her."
"So maybe you just fell for the first girl you had a real interaction with, instead of someone you actually feel something for."
"So what do I do?"
"You figure out if you really have feelings for her. Then you keep trying, or...you find someone else."
Is she trying to...no, she's just really nice.
"How will I know if I really have feelings for someone?"
"You'll know," she puts her hand on mine and smiles at me.
Okay, maybe I'm just bad at social interactions, but she definitely likes me. Right? This is so cliche. I feel like I'm in a movie. But I think I like her too. She IS beautiful. I definitely like her.
I take my hand out from under hers and hold her hand, interlocking my fingers with hers. Her smile gets bigger. Then, out of nowhere, she kisses me.
Wow. I take back what I said before, THIS is the best night of my life.
For the next minute or so, we just sit and smile at each other.
"We should go back inside or the others'll get suspicious," she says.
"Let 'em." I say with a smirk.
She smiles and I kiss her again.
"Sir, it seems there's a problem inside," JARVIS interrupts.
"Not now, JARVIS, I'm sure Bobby and Sam can-"
"Jett, Emily, we need you downstairs NOW!" Bobby's voice blasts through both of our earpieces.
"We're on our way!" Emily replies.
As we get back inside, we see the problem. There's a gaping hole in one of the walls. And the reason is standing in the living room, twenty feet tall... A sentinel.
"Mutant detected. Searching."
Mutant? I didn't know we had a mutant on the team...
"JARVIS, try to shut it down or at least scramble its tracking system," I say, as I shoot a Starktech hacking arrow into the sentinel's head. "If someone on the team is a mutant, we don't want it identifying and killing them."
"Mutant detected. Searching. Mutant detected. Malfunction. Malfunction. Mal...func...tion..." The sentinel's glowing, yellow eyes fade to black.