Xara's Guide To Befriending Superheroes (Not Clickbait):-
Rule 1: Call him a serial killer.
Rule 2: Blackmail him.
Rule 3: Be in love with his alter ego.
MCU!Peter Parker story.
Book [1] of the Paracosm series (but can also be read as a stand-alone).
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⋆ twenty-seven ⋆
Mom once told me that life flashes by in the blink of an eye.
It wasn't something we always took literally, but it was like our family motto. Mom and Dad quoted it on a daily basis, we'd remember it whenever we had a happy family dinner that seemed to whiz by, it was even on our floor mat.
We stopped saying it when Mom died, because it suddenly became real. A blink, life ends, and then they don't blink again. Every blink we took after was another blink without Mom, another reminder of what she left behind, and how she wouldn't be able to come back again.
Mom was something we needed to survive, and something we took for granted. I guess that's what blinking is like – when we open our eyes, we expect everything to stay the same. We don't expect accidents to happen or to get the news that life's changed around us. We don't assume anything except the next happy moment, but life is rarely that kind.
I blink.
Suddenly, I don't recognise the area I'm in. It's the playground, but it's not the same. The trees aren't withered and dying, the sky isn't darkening and grey.
Instead it feels like the ivy over the fences have grown, overtaking the nearby swings, the swings Mom and I used to sit on. The sky's bright, far too bright for winter, as if morning instead of late afternoon. The trees are dropping golden-brown leaves, the colour of Peter's hair, mounds of them by the roots waiting for the crunch to sound when someone steps in them.
"What the hell..." Alex's voice beside me proves that I'm not the only one seeing all this, not the only one hallucinating, but how can two people be hallucinating the same thing? I glance down at my ice cream, wondering if someone put drugs in there or something, only to realise it's gone. There's an empty paper tub that's been crushed into the ground, dark and soaked and far beyond destroyed. If I tried to pick it up now, it'd tear in my hands into a thousand pieces.
Alexandros turns to me frantically. "I didn't take heroin again, did I?"
"Alex, you've never taken heroin in your life."
"Oh." He sighs in relief. "Good, that was just a dream, then. I got worried. But still, it doesn't answer what the hell's going on here. Is it a side effect of what happened in New York? Is it like Minecraft Story Mode season two when the snowman has a clock that changes the weather and time of day?"
"I think this..." But I trail off, having no idea what I'm thinking, what I'm about to say.
Alexandros clears his throat anxiously, shifting his weight from foot to foot, then clears his throat again. "This... This is global warming, right? All those protests and stuff about the sun going wild and the Earth getting thrown out of whack. It's just global warming."
