FIREWEAVER | A Spiderverse Fanfic

Chapter Seventeen

"Why did you come to America?"

"Hmm?" Esme's lips pressed to the sweet rim of her mug, steam wafting above and filled with the scent of coffee.

"What made you move to New York?" Gavin asked again.

Esme paused, the hair on her arms lifting as she remembered.

"Do you know where the U.S. deported convicts to when the prisons were overflowing back in 2045?"

When Gavin didn't respond, she answered.

"To Central America. Specifically, El Salvador. Ten years later, what once was a flourishing country was a crushed economy rampant with corruption and crime lords... I left because the place I loved ended up taking the one I coveted most. My brother."

Esme looked down at her hands, the mug transformed into the ball she held, as vivid as it was that very day.

The black and white checkered pattern, tossing it in the air before her delicate leg ushered forward and kicked it with velocity. Running through the grass alongside a small boy a few years younger than her, their wide eyes following the orb obediently as it was whisked across the field.

The giggles that swayed with the grass that surrounded their feet. The little boy reaching the ball before she could and kicking it again- watching it soar over the wooden fence.

Her reassuring voice that told him to stay while she climbed over it. How she found it behind a dumpster and had to climb over the large black bags to reach it.

How her whole body froze as she heard loud booms echo down the alley. Her body hiding against the wall as more of the noises burst down the street, heard the sound of screeching and the smell of burnt tires. Then a scream.

Her body moving before her mind did, crossing the alley and climbing up the fence to catch the blur of several cars racing away. Her eyes searching the field before she saw the blue and yellow form lying in the grass.

Fear thudded louder than her feet as she fell from the fence. Horror shrieked from her lungs as she felt the hot liquid on her fingertips. And pain filled her soul when she turned the familiar boy to be met with foreign dull eyes.

"No!" Esme shrieked but her voice sounded so small. "No, it was supposed to be me! No! ¡Despierta Gio! Por favor! Giovanni wake up! Wake up!"

"WAKE UP!"

Esmerelda gasped awake, lungs pierced with ice-cold air. It felt, thin. She blinked her eyes rapidly at the glare that burned her retina. As her vision adjusted to the purple light above her, she felt fabric flutter between her hands. She could see her mask winding in the current above her, and she flexed her fingers and managed to grip it. The purple light- the vortex, ebbed and pulsed in front of her- or more so above her. Had it spit her back out?

Her mind swirled as she tried to process what happened- being in the city street, fighting Halcón and Roulette- then the appearance of that strange lady with extra arm-like tentacles, the device that beamed and summoned the vortex- a portal maybe? Question was, a portal to where?!

It didn't seem to matter. Seconds after she caught sight of it, it groaned and released a low noise, before static clouded her vision and it blinked away like a television screen, leaving the sky to fill its phantom embrace.

She pulled her mask back over her face and turned her body, hands and legs outstretched wider than her eyes as she met the view above.

The ground wasn't even visible below the clouds that rolled and folded in a cotton sheet with towering spires piercing through its veil.