Protect Ya Neck (Part One)

The craziest part about winter break was that only one bit of trouble occurred, and it had been at the beginning. Nothing else happened after my little detour to Genosha. Once Quire had been placed back into the tender mercies of the school, I was able to get out with my vacation at home with nothing but a day or two lost as a result. And that was it. For a few weeks, I wasn't an X-Man, I was just some rando high school kid at home from boarding school.

There was no one dropping in to try and kill me and my family, no venturing off on a crazy adventure, no evil plots putting countless lives at risk to thwart. It was peaceful.

...It was terrible.

I mean, yes, it was nice being with my mom and dad without someone pointing deadly weaponry in my general direction, but as the days dragged on, I found myself getting bored. I could feel myself getting out of shape. I knew when I got back to school, I would have to go absolute jackhammer in the gym and in training to get my edge back.

More importantly, I wanted to get back to campus so I could see Laura again. We'd spoken on the phone a lot during winter break, but there had been times when I couldn't get in touch with her. Right before I'd headed back to school, I'd brought it up to her during a video call.

"Logan says I should not tell anyone what we are doing, for their own safety," Laura told me. Plausible deniability. Right. I couldn't even make out the background of wherever she was.

"Okay, so that means you're doing some probably illegal black ops shit," I said, reading between the lines. She didn't deny it either, "I hope you're at least enjoying your time with him."

"Yes," Laura confirmed for me, "I... do not get to spend much time with Logan, just the two of us. He usually has too many responsibilities to dedicate time solely to me," I could see from her pensive expression, having all of anyone's attention was clearly something she was still getting used to, even after dating me for a month. She definitely wasn't going to go and seek it out, even if she really wanted it.

I had to find a way to pressure Logan into doing more with her when he was around the school. I could probably do it. He might draw his claws out on me for pissing him off, but people being mad at me was common enough by now that it didn't bother me. For the greater good, as it were. In the meantime, however, she needed to take every bit of quality time that she could get.

"We'll fix that later," I promised, "For now, you monopolize his time. And if he gets testy about you being clingy, just give him your doe eyes."

"Doe eyes?" Laura repeated, her features scrunched up in confusion.

I tried my best to fix my face to demonstrate what I was getting at, "You know, that look you always give me that's like, 'Oh, I'm so cute and earnest. You know I'm too sweet to actually get mad at,'" I said, turning my voice high-pitched for a moment to inaccurately mimic a girl before going back to normal, "That shit. Just think about any lame-ass, meaningless disagreement we've ever had where I end up caving in. That's the face that makes me give up."

A flash of realization moved across her face, "I think I know what you are talking about."

I really didn't need to be teaching her how to weaponize her genuine charm. Laura was already attractive enough when she utilized the tactics she'd learned from The Facility to draw people in. That she also had no small amount of natural allure in her own right should not have been lost on her, and yet the girl possessed self-worth issues that could have been considered worse than mine.

"Anyway," I continued, "Try to enjoy your... could we consider this daddy/daughter time?" No matter what, that was what I was going to call it, "Try to have some fun, and I'll see your gorgeous self when you get back to school."

"We should return soon, Bellamy."

"Alright. I'll catch you later then. Bye, Buzzsaw."

I had not told Laura that I loved her yet. I hadn't told Megan back when we had been together either. I just wasn't the kind of guy comfortable with throwing words like that around. Love and hate were powerful sentiments, and I didn't feel like using them in regards to my own feelings very easily. Love especially, and most definitely when it came to romance.

Besides, I was a goddamn teenager. What did I know about love? I'd spent enough time watching my idiot friends and classmates throw the word 'love' around, then have their relationship crash and burn in a matter of weeks. While I made plenty of mistakes for others to learn from, I could also observe and learn from the mistakes of others. If I was in love with a girl, I wouldn't have to think about whether or not I was right to feel that way or not. Being with Laura was never a drag, even when we did the most mundane stuff. I felt good when I was with her, always. That was what mattered. Hopefully, she felt the same way too.

Either way, I honestly couldn't wait to see her again, even knowing that I would beat her back to campus by at least a day or two. When I landed back in New York, I had to find my own way back to Salem Center. I was coming back so early, there were no student shuttles.

After getting through security and claiming my bags, I wandered through the terminal, nose in my phone. I had to be able to grab an Uber or something to get me back to the school. In a place like NYC, there had to be some drivers up for that kind of trip. It wasn't that long of a ride; two hours with the city traffic.

The moment I stepped outside to wait on my summoned transport, I looked up when I heard someone yell my name over the sounds of people milling about and traffic passing by.

"Bellamy Marcher!" A guy in a black bodysuit with a bunch of white 'V' designs all over shouted. He stared at me from behind his visor, then looked down at his phone before turning the screen toward me, "This you?" I couldn't tell, seeing as how he stood across the street, but apparently, he'd gotten a good enough glimpse of me to make the decision himself, "...Yeah. Yeah, it looks like you."

He pulled a boomerang from his back, but seeing a loony in a supersuit gave me enough early warning that I was ready for it. By the time he'd started to rear back to throw it, I'd already Frogger'ed a concussive shot across the street, shooting through moving traffic to nail him right in the head. He dropped like a stone. I didn't know if he was a superhero or a supervillain, and I didn't care. He yelled my name and pulled out a weapon; that was all I needed to know. It had been low-key enough of a shot that people who saw it barely stopped and simply went about their business. Queens would probably see weirder shit than that three more times before sundown. Just another day in New York City.

The guy was still on the ground, limbs twitching when my Uber pulled up. I didn't spare a second glance at him and threw my stuff in the trunk before climbing in.

"What's that guy's deal?" The driver asked.

"I dunno," I responded, not quite lying as much as I was omitting what little details I had, "One second he was yelling something, the next he was on the ground."

The driver scoffed and shook his head, "This city, man. Nowhere like it."

Right. And I couldn't wait to get as far away from it as possible. The sooner the better.

He got us right onto the highway, but in the middle of the day, it was sheer gridlock in some places. At the rate we were going, it would have taken a full hour just to get to Manhattan. I occupied myself by trying to figure out just who the loony was that tried to take a shot at me at the airport.

Boomerang – Fred Myers. A former baseball player from Australia turned career criminal that had been in the game for quite some time. He had an extensive list of heroes he'd tangled with over the years. Guys like Spider-Man, Daredevil, and more. He'd even fought the Hulk, and the fact that he wasn't a stain on the pavement somewhere after the fact reflected well on him. Still, none of that explained just what his deal with me was.

It also didn't explain why we came to a dead stop on Robert F. Kennedy Bridge. We hadn't made it to the toll bridge yet, as I could see the traffic around us moving and hear them honking. I could also see an inexplicable shadow looming over the car. I looked up from my phone to see the girthy stomach of an obese man wider than the car I was in, clad in a black onesie. Not a pretty sight.

The massive man lifted the front of the car as though he were preparing to vacuum under a couch. He peered through the windshield, squinting as he tried to make out my form in the backseat, "You Bellamy Marcher?" He asked, checking the phone in his other hand to confirm, "...Yeah. Yeah, it looks like you."

Was that the Blob?

The driver looked back at me with wide eyes. Poor guy. I had no idea what was going on, but at least I was better equipped for whatever this was. If nothing else, I could keep him from getting hurt, maybe make sure his car remained in one piece also if possible.

I made eye contact with the Blob and did my laser pointer move, "Gah!" He dropped the front of the car back onto the ground and stumbled backwards a few steps. I quickly scrambled out and the driver took his chance to peel off.

I was glad to see him get away, until I realized my luggage was still in his trunk, "Aw! Aw! Come on! All my fucking stuff! My Switch was in there!" As well my laptop and two weeks' worth of clothes.

That dude was definitely getting one star if he didn't find a way to get me my belongings later. To be fair, I was also probably getting one star as a passenger for getting him dragged into a super-fight.

Following the sound of my loud complaints, the Blob took a blind swing at me. It took a concerted effort even then to keep his tree trunk of an arm from swatting me across the East River. It took even more to keep from getting turned into roadkill by a box truck that rolled by in the direction I dodged.

The driver honked and flipped me off. Did he not see me being attacked by a bad guy? If I hadn't been busy fighting for my life, I might have shot out his tire just to be a dick. Priorities though. Instead of the passing truck, I shot at the Blob.

My blast hit him directly in the stomach, after all, it was the easiest target. Crazily enough, he returned my concussive shot to sender. When I blasted him, he flexed his belly and redirected it. It was slower and weaker and he couldn't aim it, but the fact that he did it at all was a sight to see, "That the best you got, you X-Baby? This is gonna be easy money."

The next one got him in the head. There wasn't any fat up there to catch a shot. It rattled him for a second, but he shook it off and kept coming at me. Trying to hurt the guy was starting to look like an exercise in futility. I couldn't even budge him with my normal offense, and there was way too much traffic on the bridge for me to just cut loose.

Warning bells started to ring, and I nearly lost my balance when the portion of the bridge we were on started to raise from the rest of it. Great. So now I had to fight on a vertical-lift bridge, "I'm too out of shape for this!" I complained aloud. The Blob started laughing, "Shut! Up!" I shot him with an explosive blast. When the smoke cleared, he didn't have a scratch on him.

"Hit me all you want, you little shit! Don't you get it!" The Blob shouted at me, thumping his fists off of his blubbery chest, "As far as you're concerned, I'm fucking indestructible!" While he boasted, a cocoon of webbing started to wrap around him. In a matter of seconds, his entire body was engulfed from the neck down, "Oh, no... not this guy."

Just within my peripheral vision, a figure swung into sight, landing smoothly on one of the bridge supports, "Aw, I promise, I'm just as happy to see you, as you are to see me, tubby."

The man's outfit covered him head-to-toe. It had a red and blue color scheme with white web designs covering the suit. The mask that covered his head had large white eye patterns that somehow seemed capable of changing expressions. Emblazoned right across the chest was a white spider emblem.

"Spider-Man?" I said aloud, "What are you doing here?"

Spider-Man stood up full, despite standing sideways on a vertical surface. He pointed to the scene before him matter-of-factly, "Well... you guys are having a giant fight in the middle of the RFK. Not really that hard to find."

Okay, that was fair.

"Considering that guy's involved, I'm amazed there isn't more property damage, honestly," Spider-Man continued.

I was inclined to agree, "Yeah, seeing as how he's trying to kill me, I'm kinda surprised he hasn't thrown a car at me yet either."

The large eyes of Spider-Man's mask seemed to go wide at that. He turned his attention back to the Blob, "Wow. You used to run with Magneto, and now you're picking on kids? How the mighty have... well, I never really would have considered you mighty enough to fall too far in the first place."

The Blob seethed, "That's it..." With a mighty flex, he ripped through Spider-Man's webbing, "I'm gonna smush both of you together!" He ran over and grabbed an occupied pickup truck that he hurled at Spider-Man.

"You just had to give him the idea!" Spider-Man said as he jumped into action. He quickly spun a literal web that caught the truck between the suspension cables of the bridge, "It's alright, I'll get you guys out of here!"

While Spider-Man worked to get the people in the truck free, I tried to buy him some time by taking the Blob on again. At the very least, I could stay close enough to him that he wouldn't think to throw more vehicles as a method of offense. That didn't change the fact that I couldn't seem to hurt the fucker. I couldn't even make him stumble.

"Hold still!" The Blob demanded, taking wild swings at me whenever he could. It wasn't a very polished method of fighting, but it didn't have to be. One decent shot from him would probably break a good portion of the bones in my body, "The bug's over there already! I don't need two of you pests jumping around!"

"I wish I could jump around like that," I said, grunting as I back-rolled out of the way of one of the Blob's punches, "All I've got are commando rolls and a few flips. Oh, and this!" I blasted the ground to shoot myself into the air over the Blob's head and out of his line of sight.

He turned around as quickly as he could, only to find nothing waiting for him there, "Huh? Where the-? Did he just disappear?"

Not quite. I just bent the light around myself. It wasn't a perfect invisibility cloak. But for a dunderhead like the Blob, it gave me a momentary edge. At the very least, it bought enough time for Spider-Man to get himself involved again.

The Blob took a few knocks from Spider-Man and failed to retaliate fast enough to hit him, "Come down here and fight like a man!"

"Ooh, sorry," Spider-Man quipped, "I'm afraid I'm only half a man. It's all in the name, get it? Can you guess what the other half is?"

I'd seen plenty of crappy web videos of Spider-Man in fights, but they never did him justice. Shaky-handed camera-people barely able to point their phones in the correct direction didn't show just how fast he moved. He didn't just swing around the city on his webs at the speed of a moving motor vehicle, when the guy wanted to cover a lot of ground quickly, he could shoot himself around as fast as a bullet... which was what he did, directly into the Blob's head. He bounced off, much like an insect hitting a windshield. It looked like it hurt; hurt Spider-Man, that is.

"You're wasting your time, web-head!" Blob boasted, arms high above his head triumphantly, "As long as my feet are planted on the ground, you ain't moving me an inch!"

I went to Spider-Man's side and pulled him up to his feet, "Well, this is going great," I said sarcastically, "Any ideas?"

Spider-Man could clearly take a hit, because once he was upright, he seemed a-okay, "You heard the man. We've got to get him off of the ground somehow," He turned my way when he heard the low whirring of one of my light blades forming, "What are you going to do with that?"

"Uh..." I didn't know how to answer one of the most notorious good guy heroes on that one, "...I definitely wasn't going to try and cut his legs off at the cankles, if that's what you're wondering," I lied. I wasn't even sure if it would work, but I still wanted to try it.

Spider-Man seemed a little put off that an obvious teenager was willing to maim someone so casually, "That's a little extreme, don't you think?"

Maybe it was, but the Blob was trying to kill me in broad daylight, so screw him, "I'm only doing the job diabetes will probably finish sooner or later," Spider-Man wasn't amused, "Fine. New plan. Get him good and pissed."

That new plan consisted of an old plan, shooting the Blob directly in the face. His head snapped back and he coughed at the smoke it created, but was otherwise unaffected, "Are you an idiot, kid? I told you-!"

*BOOM!*

"Yeah-yeah-yeah," I cut him off shooting him in the face again, "I can't knock you off your feet, or hurt you, or blah-blah-blah!" Another shot to the head to further antagonize him, "I know! I've run simulations against you more times than I can count! It got old!"

Granted, I had a whole team with me when I did those, never soloing any of them, but he didn't need to know that.

"You're like a three out of ten in the Danger Room," I continued, punctuating with as many annoying shots as I could muster, "The only reason I didn't just leave and let Spider-Man handle this himself is because I'm not the kind of guy that lets other people clean up his garbage."

"I appreciate that, you know," Spider-Man chimed in, by this point swinging around the Blob, just out of his reach, "Your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man isn't above picking up trash, but I love it when citizens do their part to keep our city beautiful."

"I'm not trash!" The Blob shouted, focusing his full attention on Spider-Man's petty little hit-and-run blows. I took the opportunity to cloak myself and creep as close as I could. When I was close enough, I dropped my disguise and jumped onto his back, "Hey, what the hell?"

Before he could reach behind himself to pull me off, I slapped my open hands over his ears as hard as I could and blasted him in the earholes. The force of the blast sent me flying, but Spider-Man was on-point, catching me out of the air and getting me back to the ground safely.

While any blow to his body didn't budge him, head shots had seemed to affect him, if only a bit. That was better than nothing, so I took a chance. It didn't matter how fundamentally indestructible someone was, getting your brain rattled around your skull was bad news.

Powers or not, the Blob's natural equilibrium had to be obliterated. He stumbled around on his feet for a moment, a blank look in his eyes, before he fell onto his ass and didn't get back up. The road cracked underneath his weight.

I took a moment to observe my handiwork as Spider-Man lowered himself upside-down on a web next to me, "Great, Jameson's probably going to blame me for that one too. 'That menace tied up traffic on the RFK again with one of his freak fights!'" He complained, momentarily mimicking someone's gruff voice, "At least you didn't have to cut his legs off."

Maybe, but now there was a pretty good chance that the Blob would be deaf when he woke up. Whatever. He could enjoy that permanent tinnitus for all I cared.

Spider-Man webbed the Blob up in a cocoon to try and hold him in place, just in case he woke up anytime soon, "So, what was that about anyway?"

"I dunno," I replied honestly before focusing on what was my most pressing issue at the moment, "Hey... you wouldn't be willing to give me a ride to Salem Center, would you?"