“Well, Colin, see you tomorrow.”
Outside the Daily Bugle building, Smith scratched at his thick beard and threw Colin a lazy wave, a yawn cracking his jaw halfway through.
“See you tomorrow, Smith.”
Colin nodded back at the cameraman, the gesture flat, automatic.
No energy left to dress it up.
News never sleeps.
Neither did they.
Standby since sunrise, chasing whatever broke first — and by the time the sun dropped, both men had nothing left.
Just the bed waiting at home, and the blissful idea of collapsing into it.
Colin lifted a hand and slapped his own cheeks twice, hard enough to sting, hard enough to drag a little focus back into his skull before the walk home.
The original Colin hadn’t come from money.
He’d worked nights and weekends through school, propped up the rest with student loans, and dragged himself across the finish line by the skin of his teeth.
And like most of his graduating class, he walked off that stage and straight into debt.
Grow old still paying off your degree — that’s not a joke here.
That’s just Tuesday.
Everyone told him: get the degree, land the job, and the debt takes care of itself.
Nobody mentioned the part where “taking care of itself” meant your forties.
Fifties, if the economy decided to kick you while you were down — which it had, a few years back, and Colin’s job hunt still hadn’t recovered from the bruising.
Transmigrate into a superhero world and I’m still doing math on my paycheck.
How much longer does this paper even have left in it?
The acquisition rumors had been crawling through the newsroom for days now, and every time they crossed Colin’s mind, his skull throbbed a little harder.
Maybe it was the acquisition talk eating at him.
Maybe it was something else entirely.
Either way, J.
Jonah Jameson hadn’t set foot in the office in weeks — long enough that Colin, since the day he’d woken up in this body, still hadn’t laid eyes on the man signing his checks.
That one stuck with him.
Somewhere under the exhaustion, it actually bothered him that he’d never met his own boss.
Jameson, whatever else he was, counted as a genuine ‘celebrity’ in this superhero world.
The particular bug destined to crawl into his life hadn’t shown up yet, as far as Colin knew, but that didn’t kill Colin’s curiosity about the man — especially not when the guy currently signed his paychecks.
Assuming there were paychecks left to sign, once the acquisition went through.
…
Dragging that tangle of thoughts behind him, Colin hopped off the bus one stop early and cut into a narrow alley, footsteps quick against the pavement.
A rookie reporter’s salary didn’t stretch to anywhere nice.
Colin’s current place sat on Second Avenue, the kind of marginal apartment that ate almost an hour of his day just getting to and from the office — and that was assuming traffic cooperated, which in downtown New York it rarely did.
Head down, mind on his own apartment, Colin missed it completely.
Two figures at the intersection swayed toward each other, exchanged a glance, then peeled off and followed him into the alley on unsteady legs.
“Hey, man, stop!”
A Black man cut across the alley’s mouth before Colin could reach the far end, blocking the exit.
Tattoos crawled over every inch of visible skin — so much ink packed together it looked less like decoration and more like performance art.
A gun came up, and his voice came with it, ragged and mean.
“Hand over the money!”
Colin’s eyes dropped to the pistol, held there a beat, then he reached into his jacket and produced his wallet without complaint.
“No problem.”
He wasn’t stupid.
Transmigration had dropped him into a superhero world, not turned him into one.
Nearly a week in this reporter’s skin had taught him plenty about American “freedom” — and exactly zero interest in becoming the cost printed on the back of that freedom’s receipt.
Especially not now, watching the loose, unfocused sway in both men’s eyes.
High.
Obviously, embarrassingly high.
“Man, the hell — that’s it?”
The tattooed man snatched the wallet open, thumbed through a few sad bills inside, and his face soured on the spot.
“Don’t fuck with me!”
His partner leaned in from the side, took one look at the thirty-odd dollars, and grabbed a fistful of Colin’s collar.
“Believe it or not, we’ll blow your brains out right here!”
The collar cinched tighter, and Colin’s throat closed with it, his expression twisting into something halfway between panic and pain.
He looked up at the two of them — agitation written plain across both faces — and forced the words out anyway.
“Trust me, man.
I’ve got no reason to lie to you right now…”
Whether it was the logic of the thing landing, or just the confidence a loaded gun gives a man, the accomplice’s grip loosened.
He let go, unwilling but resigned, and Colin’s hand shot to his own throat, a string of dry coughs tearing loose.
“Cough — cough, cough cough…”
Neither of them spared him another glance.
The robbery, apparently concluded, and the pair turned to leave the alley behind.
“Hold up…”
Mid-turn, one sharp eye caught on a flash of blue poking from Colin’s pocket.
“What’s that in your pocket?”
Shit.
Since when—
Colin’s hand moved before his brain caught up, clamping down over the pocket on reflex.
Wrong move.
Dead wrong.
“The hell — you lying to us this whole time?!”
“Man’s tired of breathing, I think!”
The tattooed man closed the distance in two strides, face twisted ugly, and ripped Colin’s hand away, dragging the lanyard and its contents out with it.
“The hell is this?!”
He turned the card over.
Read it.
And something shifted in his face — the anger cracking, just slightly, around the edges of surprise.
“Colin Luper.
Daily Bugle…
a press pass!”
His partner leaned in, reading the print line by line, and whatever calm had been holding him together came apart with it.
“Fuck — you’re a reporter!”
“I can explain, I’m brand new, I just started—”
Both men’s faces had gone past agitated now, sliding into something worse.
Colin’s hands came up fast, words spilling out ahead of him, but he never got to finish the sentence.
Bang—
The shot tore through the alley, flat and vicious, swallowing everything after it.
Pain bloomed in Colin’s chest, sudden and total.
He folded around it, hand clamping over the wound, and went down like something had cut his strings.
“…The fuck — who told you to shoot?!”
“You didn’t see it?
Guy’s press.
He saw both our faces—”
Concrete met his back, cold soaking up through his shirt fast as the blood soaking out of it.
His body was going numb from the outside in, and somewhere in the middle of all that dying, there wasn’t a shred of fear in him.
None.
He lay there and listened to the two of them tear into each other at the mouth of the alley, voices climbing, panic feeding panic.
And then, right on the edge of it all going dark — a thread of green light closed over what was left of his vision.
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