Work Text:
The sun is just starting to rise over the harbor. Down below, the bellow of traffic has already begun, the rumble of construction trucks and taxi horns blending into a gorgeous cacophony. Vi can hear it, even from here, because Vi can hear everything. She’s used to it, now. The beginning was rough. Like, really rough. Sensation overload for a solid week before she started figuring out how to tune the useless things out and the important things in.
“Do spiders have super hearing? Did we ever figure that out?” she asks, peeling her mask up to take a bite of the cream cheese danish she snagged from the corner bakery. Her coffee balances precariously beside her, not inches from a thousand foot drop.
“They use hairs to detect vibrations. Or something.” Jinx sounds distracted in her earpiece.
“Do I use hairs?” Vi asks, pausing on her way to another bite, trying to remember what hearing things felt like before she’d been bit. She stills, trying to feel into her own ear canals.
“I don’t know, and I’m not gonna find out, so don’t ask.”
Vi listens a little longer. It doesn’t sound like hairs, but would she know the difference at this point? “Hm.” She takes a bite, and a sip of scalding coffee. “One of life’s great mysteries I guess.”
“Have I mentioned how much I love it when you chew in my ear?” Jinx mutters dryly. Still distracted, but always ready to remind Vi that no matter how many super hero-y things she’s ever done, she’s still only Jinx’s sister.
“A few times,” Vi hums, stuffing the rest of the danish into her mouth and washing it down with the rest of the coffee. The bitter dregs make her taste buds go funny and a chill runs down her spine. “So!” she says, mouth still full. “What do we got?”
“All quiet so far, just putting the last touches on this new slinger.”
Vi pulls her mask down over her mouth again, and Jinx’s words click.
“Jinx.”
No response.
“Jiiiiinx,” Vi says, drawing out the name with only a hint of a threat.
“Yeeeeeesss?” Jinx sounds bored, but Vi knows a bluff when she hears it.
“You didn’t sleep last night, did you?”
“Okay look, I was going to, but then I realized that the issue with the last model was that the recoil system had too much tension, cause remember how I told you that I thought that there wasn’t enough? But I had an epiphany in study hall that ratcheting the tension up was actually putting too much strain on the web, so of course I had to–”
“Stay up all night and shoot your sleep schedule completely to hell to work on it?”
“Exactly.”
Vi sighs. “I’m only as good as the little voice in my head, Jinx.”
“Bull shit, I’m barely here. I’m not even at sidekick level.”
“You’re underselling yourself.”
“Well, look, I’m a college student anyway, we’re not supposed to sleep.”
Vi stands, her toes pressed against the precipice of the building. She crumples the danish wrapper and stuffs it into the coffee cup.
“Can’t argue with that, I guess.”
Then she dives.
The wind rushes past in a roar. Her body angles on the edge of the air, and it’s taut and alive against her chest, her arms, as she leans into the fall. The windows flash in the early sun. The ground rushes up to meet her.
She flings an arm out. Her fingers fold, activating the motion sensor on her webslinger. The web ejects, catches, and she drags her body out of freefall, the G force of the arc making her short of breath for a second. Then she’s peeling out of the arc, the G force releases, momentum takes over, and she flies.
She’s learned not to let out a howl of exhilaration every time, but if she was less worried about being called the Whooping Spider or something she’d probably have less self restraint. When the press asks, she tells them that the best part of being a superhero is being able to help people. And she does love that part, she really does, she wouldn’t be here if she didn’t. But that part is more of the ‘great responsibility’ portion of the whole gig. The fun part is the web-slinging, and that’s God’s honest truth.
The wastebasket nearly goes flying as she lobs the empty coffee cup into its opening on her way past, and she has to dodge a pedestrian with headphones on, her feet catching the ground for a step and a half before she gets a web off and she’s flying again.
“Oh, hey, happy two years, by the way,” Jinx says in her ear.
“Jesus, two years already?”
“Yep! Two years of being the…what is it this week? Spider Lady?”
Vi groans. “Spider Gal.”
“Oh, that’s way worse.”
“Yeah, don’t remind me.”
“You know the papers would bust a metaphorical nut to get your official statement on your name, right? Why don’t you just tell them?”
“Cause it’s none of their business!”
“Um, it’s sort of their business.”
“My name isn’t important, what I do is important.”
“Vi.”
Vi doesn’t answer, pretends she can’t as she whips herself at what feels like the speed of sound around the corner of a building, but she can’t escape the look she knows Jinx is giving her on the other end.
“Viiiiiiiiiiii.”
Vi stifles another groan. What goes around, comes around, or something annoying like that.
“Whaaaaat.”
“You still haven’t figured out your superhero name?”
“I’m working on it, okay!”
“You’ve been working on it for two years.”
“It takes time.”
“It doesn’t for other superheroes. Hell, every villain of the week has their name locked and loaded and they’re only around for a week!”
“Give me a break, alright? It’s not as easy as it sounds.”
“I’m just saying, the sooner you have a brand, the sooner we can drop some merch, and you know how much money we could make–”
“We’re not dropping merch, Jinx.”
“Maybe you’re not.”
“Are there any crimes for me to fight yet?”
“Glad you asked! Just got a ping on 82nd and Jefferson. Mugging, sounds like.”
“Greatthankstalktoyoulater.”
The muggers on 82nd and Jefferson don’t know what hit them til after they’re in custody, when the precinct officers are laughing about that spandex spider hero coming in like a fuckin’ comet. Never seen anyone move that fast, they say, rolling the muggers’ thumbs over the ink pads. Seemed like she had something else to avoid.
***
The name thing isn’t a big deal.
Really. It’s not.
Sure, it’s like a whole thing that every superhero has their superhero name, and that every supervillain has their supervillain name, but that doesn’t mean she has to have one.
Right?
Right.
It doesn’t bother her, anyways. She doesn’t spend all of her time on patrol trying to think up a suitable name for herself.
It should be easy. The spider part writes itself - she was bitten by a spider, she’s got spider-esque powers (although she still hasn’t figured out that hair-hearing part). The press seems to understand, given how they’ve run with it in pretty much every spider-themed direction imaginable.
Maybe it’s her suit that’s the problem. Ever since Jinx first saw Vi’s spray painted sweatsuit ensemble and nearly blew a gasket ( “Leave it to you to have the most swagless superhero suit imaginable.”), she’s been obsessive about getting Vi upgrades, and that means Vi has gotten a new suit every few months for the past two years of her super-spider-hood. And with the new designs, there have always been new names.
Spider Woman and Spider Girl have always been the most popular, which Vi hates with a special kind of loathing she’s never been quite able to articulate. Jinx had gotten experimental on the second or third suit iteration, putting dark threads leading away from the eyes – utilitarian, radio frequency transmitters – and they’d earned Vi the title of Weeping Spider. That one she hadn’t minded too much til she’d gotten knocked down in a fight with a villain and he’d growled, “That’s right, baby, cry for me.” Jinx had gotten her a new suit within the week.
The other names have run a gamut of okay – Spider Fang – to completely fucking awful – Eight Legs. (Jinx had alternated between fits of glee and fits of rage over that one — “You literally only have two legs.” ) Vi and Jinx have a leaderboard going in Jinx’s room of the worst ones thus far. At the top of the list are Spider Femme, Web Girl, and, the new leader as of last month, Spider Gal.
That’s the name that echoes in her ears now as Vi plunges from the heights of the nearest apartment building toward her foe. He looks like a dick in a monkey suit, but based on Jinx’s quick-fire info docket in her ear, he’s a hybrid – half-man, half-gorilla, a science experiment gone wrong. This ugly-ass excuse for a monkey’s uncle seems barely sentient and yet he still manages to bellow, “SPI. DER. GAL.” as he swings massive fists in her direction.
“Oh my god, who even says gal anymore?” Vi shouts as she slings a web, catching the hairy, meaty fist and tethering it to his chest as she swings past. “I mean do you even have a name?” she yells, back-springing out of range of the shockwave as the beast slams its free arm into the concrete.
“Me,” he booms, “Gor-Kill-A.”
“Okay,” Vi mutters under her breath, slinging a chunk of broken asphalt at his lumpy head. “That’s pretty fuckin’ cool actually.”
***
“Maybe if they didn’t know I was a girl, that would help,” she suggests casually as Jinx fits her for the new slinger model. She’s sitting in Jinx’s dorm room, straddling a beat up rolling chair as Jinx bends over her wrist. Shitty punk music blares from a nearby speaker to drown out their voices to any potential eavesdroppers.
“Maybe if you gave them a name you’ve actually picked for yourself, that would help,” Jinx says.
“Okaaay, but if I still don’t know what to tell them…?”
Jinx lifts her head to look at her flatly for a second.
“Come on, Jinx,” Vi sighs. “I’m fresh out of ideas. And would it be such a bad thing if someone else chose my superhero name for me? That’s been done for lots of other supers.”
Jinx blows the curl of hair out of her face, focusing on the slingers again. “Fine. So, what, you want a neon projector that says ‘I’m not a girl’ coming out of the back of the suit or something?”
Vi feels her stomach drop. “I didn’t say I’m not a girl, I just said if they thought I wasn’t.”
“Well what are your ideas, genius?” Jinx asks, unclipping the slinger and turning back to her workstation.
Vi only just holds back a sigh of relief that Jinx isn’t more investigative. “I don’t know. Maybe something not so form fitting. I think it’s my boobs that everyone notices.”
“Spandex kind of just does the form fitting thing, and looser fabrics will get caught on buildings and enemies and shit.”
“I know.”
Jinx is quiet, fiddling with something that sparks every few seconds. Vi looks down at her hands. Her knee is bouncing. She plays with her fingers. Jinx turns back around and clips the slingers back onto her wrists.
“Give these a try for the next hour, let me know how they feel. They’re good, but I want to know if they can be better.”
“Sure.”
Vi feels really small. She stands to leave.
“I’ll be working on the suit thing tonight, so you’ll have to man the police scanner yourself,” Jinx says, not so much as glancing at Vi.
Vi grins, shrugging out of her jacket, pulling her mask on. “You’re the best of the best, Jinx.”
“Yeah, well, we gotta get rid of that ,” Jinx says, gesturing at the scrawled Spider Gal at the top of her corkboard.
“Believe me,” Vi says, the web already singing from her slinger, “I know.”
***
It only takes Jinx three days, cause she’s a fucking miracle worker. Vi tries on the new suit behind their makeshift curtain partition as Jinx gives her the new-gear spiel.
“I thought about a compressive element, but looked a little more into that and saw it could cause rib fractures and muscle spasms, so that’s a no-go. So I went with a semi-hard polymer sheeting. Adds a little structure to the suit without risking it jamming or pinching anywhere.”
Vi steps in front of the mirror. Miracle worker isn’t a strong enough term for what her sister is, actually. Jinx has somehow managed to make Vi’s chest all but invisible, partially due to the sheeting that fits her like tactical gear instead of spandex, and partially due to the new color scheme and webbed design of the fabric. It makes her look broad in the shoulders and narrow in the waist, and it’s like her boobs aren’t even there.
“Well?” Jinx asks, folding her arms and looking critically at the suit, a little frown mark appearing between her eyebrows.
Vi slides her hands over the barely-there slope of her chest that now looks more like pectorals than anything. “Well,” she echoes. “I need to give you a fucking raise.”
“Oh, are we paying me now? Cause I want health insurance.”
“Health insurance is a three-year-anniversary gift, don’t push it.”
Jinx opens her mouth to respond but Vi sweeps her into a huge hug, lifting her tiny frame off the floor, trying to make sure she doesn’t squeeze hard enough to break.
“I love it,” Vi mumbles, her face partially buried in Jinx’s jacket. “You’re the best sidekick a spider could ask for.”
“Okay,” Jinx wheezes. “You’re welcome, whatever.”
Vi puts her down and she sees a little bit of a blush in Jinx’s cheeks.
“Seriously, you’re fucking amazing, Jinx.”
“Yeah, I know I am,” Jinx says, waving her hands. “Don’t you have a city to save, Spider Whoever You Are?”
“Sure do,” says Spider Whoever You Are. “Gonna go save the city with the best tech made by the best super gear gal I know.”
“Oh don’t you fucking start–” Jinx begins, but Vi is already out the window, and beyond the skinny middle finger flipped her way she sees the smile on Jinx’s face before she swings out of view.
***
Vi pushes her way into the campus science lab, eyes still fixed on her phone.
“Are you seeing this shit? The Spider Web? I mean who is paying these guys?”
The ‘these guys’ part of her sentence gets suddenly drowned out by Jinx all but shouting, “OH HEY VI,” and Vi looks up, startled and almost about to strip down to her suit again, when she realizes that Jinx’s elaborate text of “lab 2nite, come by” had failed to detail that Jinx is not at the lab 2nite alone.
Next to her sister, who looks completely fucking tiny by comparison, is a very tall, very beautiful woman with midnight blue hair pulled up in a ponytail, little wisps of it hanging free around her forehead.
“Oh,” Vi says, stopping in her tracks, putting her phone away like it has ‘I’M THAT SPIDER HERO EVERYONE IS TALKING ABOUT’ printed on the back of it. “Hi.”
“Hi,” the woman says with a quiet laugh, and Vi feels like she just jumped off the Empire State Building.
“Caitlyn, this is Vi, my sister,” Jinx says. “Vi, this is Caitlyn, my lab partner. Well. Kind of. She’s a grad student, but we work together.”
“Pleasure,” Caitlyn says, and Vi thinks it’s kind of funny that she hasn’t really known the meaning of the word til now.
“Yeah,” she says. Nice. Good. Eloquent. “Um. What are you guys working on?”
“Oh, well,” Caitlyn hesitates, looking at Jinx as if for confirmation of something.
“It’s okay, she knows,” Jinx says. “Just some new tech for The Spider Web.”
If Vi’s eye twitches, she sure as shit hopes it doesn’t show. “Oh, cool, super cool. What is it this time?”
It turns out to be some new upgrades to the nanographic visor on her suit’s eyes. Heat-sensitive and night vision modes. Neat.
Not neat enough, of course, to keep Vi from reaming Jinx about Caitlyn once Caitlyn has taken her leave after several agonizing hours of lab work. Vi does her best to keep her voice low, doesn’t want to disturb the quiet of campus as they walk together back to Jinx’s dorm.
“What were you thinking?” Vi hisses.
“I was thinking," Jinx hisses back, "that I’m smart, but I was stuck on the night vision thing,”
“Did you just forget that I already have night vision?”
“It’s going to make it better, okay? It’ll be like you don’t have the mask on at all. Plus, the zoom-in feature was making it act all funky–”
“Don’t you think you should’ve checked with me before bringing in some rando on your spider projects?” A hot rando, like a super fucking hot rando, but Vi isn’t gonna say that part out loud.
“This isn’t just you, Vi,” Jinx says sharply, her gaze snapping to Vi’s face. “I want to help, but I can’t do it alone.”
Vi blinks. Looks away. Shoves her hands in her pockets. “You know, if it’s too much–”
“It isn’t.”
They walk in silence. Vi wordlessly takes Jinx’s backpack, loaded up with her lab supplies and so many books Vi wonders how her spine hasn’t snapped by now, and shoulders it easily. Jinx lets her.
“I should tell you. She’s been funding your upgrades for a while now,” Jinx says.
“What?” Vi says, startled.
“You think I’ve been getting the materials for all that tech on my internship income?”
“You said you were using spare parts that the university was going to discard anyway.”
“I was, for a while. But it wasn’t enough, and the parts weren’t always reliable, and when Caitlyn noticed me scrounging for scrap in the refuse pile, she got curious. Offered to help.”
“Jinx—“
“I was going to tell you, okay? When I had the fucking time, or brainpower, both of which have been in mighty short supply lately.”
“I know, I—”
“What do you want from me, Vi? I’m good but I’m not good enough to build a time machine to go back and fix all of this. You know now. That has to be enough.”
Vi steps in front of her sister, grabbing her scrawny shoulder to stop her in her tracks.
“What I want, ” Vi says firmly, gently, “is for you to let me finish a sentence.”
Jinx has tears in her eyes and she blinks, looking away from Vi’s face.
“Okay, go for it, what do you wanna say?”
“Thank you. For all of this. And for saying yes to Caitlyn. I know how stubborn you can be, you get it from me. I’m glad that you have help. And the tech is amazing, so I’m not complaining about that either, okay?”
Jinx sniffs. “Okay,” she says, her eyes still pointedly averted.
Vi lets her go, and they walk in silence for a long time.
Then Jinx says lowly, “I haven’t told her anything about who you really are, or anything personal about your spider self. She knows the tech specs, and that’s it. She helped with the new suit design, actually. It was her idea to use the polymer.”
“Hm,” Vi says. “So I have both of you to thank for The Spider Web ?”
Jinx elbows her in the side, and Vi barely feels it, but she folds a little and huffs out a breath like it hurt, and Jinx laughs quietly.
“It’s better than Spider Gal.”
“Yeah, yeah it is.”
***
Caitlyn turns out to not be so bad. Jinx gets better at telling Vi when Caitlyn will be around, so Vi doesn’t make any dumb mistakes, and Caitlyn falls in with their dynamic so easily it’s like she’s been here the whole time. Watching her and Jinx work is like watching a river flow, or a timelapse of a skyscraper being built. Two pieces working like one, building on each other, new ideas springing out of nowhere and blooming into something close to fully fleshed within minutes.
It’s not all smooth sailing. Some nights they spend working for hours on one problem that’s giving them trouble. Those times, it’s like Vi’s not even there, and more than once she’s fallen asleep on Jinx’s bed to the murmur and hum of them trading theories and possible solutions.
It’s nice, actually. Jinx seems more well rested, and Vi’s tech has never been better. Caitlyn is a good conversationalist, too, which is just a bonus. She talks with her hands, and tucks her hair behind her ears a lot, even when there’s no hair to tuck. She asks Vi about herself, what she does for work, how she spends her free time.
Volunteering, Vi says. Lots and lots of volunteering.
“That’s great,” Caitlyn says, and it seems like she means it. “I think it’s so admirable when people give of their time so freely to help others.”
“It’s nothing,” Vi says, but the way Caitlyn looks at her makes it feel like it’s not nothing.
Vi asks Caitlyn about herself too, cause she’s not an ass, cause she wants to know. Caitlyn’s in her doctorate program for engineering.
“Mum wanted me to be a politician, but it’s not for me. I like fixing things. Making them better. Everything politics isn’t, you know?”
“I know, believe me,” Vi says, memories of her conflict with the mayor flashing behind her eyes.
“It’s why when Jinx asked for help with this, I jumped at the chance. I think The Spider Web…” She wrinkles her nose, laughs. “God that’s a clumsy name, isn’t it? I thought the Bugle would’ve come up with something better by now. But I think what the spider hero is doing is admirable. They don’t wait for the red tape to clear, they don’t take years and years to deliver on promises and help. They’re just there. Keeping people safe. And if I’m helping them, I’m helping their cause, too, aren’t I?”
Vi’s is only half listening. Caitlyn’s words seem to echo, bouncing around until they start resolving into something close to clarity. Not even the part where she’s talking about the spider hero being so amazing, but the part where the spider hero doesn’t have a gender. Not she, but them.
“Yeah,” Vi says, feeling a little strangled. “Totally.”
“Are you alright?” Caitlyn asks, her brow furrowing.
“Yeah, amazing,” Vi says. “No, I’m fine, I just think you’re right. About…the spider hero. They’re just trying to help, right?”
“Right,” Caitlyn smiles. “My mum isn’t a fan, which maybe makes them all the more appealing to me.”
Vi just laughs, because everything feels big, and the laugh helps relieve some of the pressure.
“You have family in politics?” Caitlyn asks, turning her eyes to the diagnostics screen where a 3D model of the web slingers rotates. “Jinx mentioned something about a family member in high places.”
“Oh, um,” Vi clears her throat roughly, trying not to choke on spit. “Yeah, we have a…cousin? In politics. Not here. Somewhere else. We don’t talk much.”
“Oh,” Caitlyn says, her brow furrowing, looking at Vi with those blue, blue eyes. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Nah, he was a dick. It’s no loss, really. Republican.”
Caitlyn smiles a little. “My mum too. Pity, that.”
“Right,” Vi laughs. “Pity.”
***
Vi makes a list in her phone. Titles it ‘Possible Names.’ When she’s not fighting villains and stringing up muggers, she’s thinking about the list. Adds a name or two every few days, takes some off, turns them over and over in her head, catches her reflection in the mirror of the windows as she swings by buildings, tries the names on just to see if any of them fit.
She can’t tell if it’s because of what Caitlyn said, but she starts noticing that when people talk about her now, the she and her of it all has gone away.
“It’s the Spider Web, they’re here!”
“Their webs electrify now, don’t let them touch you.”
“They’ve got this, get out of the way!”
Vi tries that on in her reflection.
“It’s Spider Bite, they’re the city’s greatest hero.”
She doesn’t know how to feel about it. She tries not to think about it instead.
She saves a kid and his mom from a fire. They were holed up in a back room, behind a closed door, and the window was jammed. Vi unjammed it, ripping the fucking thing open with sheer force of will after she heard the crying coming from inside. But the kid was scared. Vi couldn’t blame him, the fire was so loud, and his mom had tear tracks through the soot on her face. He jumped out of his mom’s arms, hid under the bed, and Vi was three seconds away from just webbing him out of there, but the mom said, “Come on honey, he’s here to help, he won’t hurt you,” and it took Vi a good few seconds to realize that the mom was talking about her . Thank god the kid listened, and Vi bundled them both out the window and to safety, but the whole rest of the day she couldn’t stop thinking about it.
He’s here to help.
He, him, Vi. She, her, Vi. They, them, Vi.
It feels like a merry-go-round and she wants off.
She throws herself into her spidering, going on patrols back to back. She eats on the fly. She naps on skyscrapers, making sure her earpiece is turned all the way up so she won’t miss the next call. She dreams of drowning in newspaper headlines that blare SPIDER WHO? and WHO IS SHE? DOES HE EVEN EXIST?
She wakes up and feels like she still hasn’t resurfaced.
The weeks flash by, and she’s Jumping Spider and Silk Spinner and Spider Guy.
She sees Jinx, sometimes, when Jinx insists that she come pick up her newest upgrades cause they’ve been ready for days. She sees Caitlyn, sometimes. Caitlyn brings three coffees when she knows Vi is coming. Caitlyn asks Vi how the volunteering is going. Caitlyn doesn’t seem like she believes it when Vi says it’s going great.
Caitlyn meets the city’s resident spider hero.
It’s not planned. Vi comes by for a new suit fitting at Jinx’s dorm, and a text comes in last minute from Jinx: CAITLYN IS HERE. Vi can’t cancel, it’ll look too suspicious, so she comes in the window with her mask on, and Caitlyn is standing there looking awestruck. Vi feels brand new nerves all over again, but she shakes Caitlyn’s hand and pitches her voice down and does the fitting. Then she swings out of the window, changes, and comes into Jinx’s room through the door and Caitlyn says, “Vi, the spider, they were just here, you just missed them, I’m so sorry,” and Vi waves her off, and wonders if she just ruined so many things by letting Caitlyn meet her other self.
Vi is fine. The work is good. The fact that she hasn’t slept in her own bed in weeks is a non-issue. New York is a big city, and there’s always someone to help, even if it’s just getting kittens out of trees and hauling trash to the street for an octogenarian.
Jinx asks her to help test a new bot, a little spider-shaped thing that shoots electric bolts, but when she shows up to Jinx’s dorm (and thank god she came through the door), Jinx isn’t there. Caitlyn’s sitting at her work station instead. She looks up, lifts the goggles from her eyes, says “Vi!” with a bright smile.
Jinx had an exam to get to, one she almost completely forgot about. “So it’s just me tonight, I’m afraid,” Caitlyn smiles sheepishly.
“Just you is okay,” Vi says. “I mean you’re great. It’s great.” Her words are just as tired as she is and she can’t figure out how to make them work right.
But Caitlyn doesn’t seem to mind.
“Great," she says, her eyes twinkling just a little. “Here, put this on, please. I hope it fits okay, you may have to adjust a little so the eyes are in the proper place.” She hands Vi a spider mask.
Vi puts it on and hopes she makes it look like it doesn’t fit that well. She runs the tests with Caitlyn for a while – the idea is to make sure the mask eyes are synced with the spider bot’s camera, so that she’ll be able to control it remotely. Caitlyn makes idle conversation in between entering her data.
“Have you been keeping up with the spider hero?” Caitlyn asks.
“Ah, on and off, I guess.”
“What are they being called these days? Web Slinger? Don’t the papers know it’s in poor taste to name a hero after their tech?”
Vi tries at a laugh. “Guess they don’t.”
“What do you reckon?” Caitlyn asks, her tone light as she jots down some data points in her notebook. “Will they ever figure out a name?”
The question takes Vi by the throat, and she’s suddenly choking back tears, pulling her breath in through her teeth like she’s been punched in the gut. She drags the mask off, drops it on the desk.
“Sorry, need some air. Be right back,” is all she can manage.
Then she’s out the door, up the stairs three at a time, bursting onto the rooftop, and she heaves out a sob like she’s drowning, like she can’t get enough air, like she’s just a little kid again and Vander’s about to come save her from a nightmare. She has to prop herself up against the roof’s low brick wall to keep from collapsing, and she cries, and cries, and cries.
The squeak of the roof door jars her out of her breakdown, and she shivers a sodden inhale, scrubbing her cheek on her shoulder to clear away evidence of tears.
“Vi?”
Caitlyn sounds worried. She doesn’t need to be worried. Vi is a superhero. Vi can heal any hurt fifty times faster than the average human. Vi is fine. Vi is always fine.
Caitlyn touches her shoulder, and Vi turns and this time she does collapse, right into Caitlyn’s arms, and she’s crying again, trying not to, crying anyway, holding onto Caitlyn, and it’s embarrassing, but then Caitlyn is holding her, too, and she cradles the back of Vi’s head, and Vi can’t remember the last time she was touched like this, and she isn’t drowning anymore, even as the tears pour out and her body shakes. At least she isn’t drowning.
When she stops crying, it feels like an hour has passed, or maybe a year. She stumbles back and Caitlyn lets her go.
“Sorry,” Vi mumbles. Wipes her nose on her sleeve. Caitlyn hands her a tissue from her pocket, and Vi laughs, watery and thick, and takes it, and says, “Do you think you could be less perfect for like, half a second?”
Caitlyn laughs too, just a little. Then her expression sobers, her eyes deep and worried. “Are you alright?”
“Never better,” Vi says, and even she can admit how pathetic it sounds when her voice is still raspy with tears.
She sits heavily on a nearby ventilation block, and a moment later Caitlyn sits next to her, and Vi feels distantly glad that Caitlyn just does it. That she doesn’t ask, she doesn’t make it a thing. She just comes after Vi, and touches her shoulder, and cradles her head, and gives her a tissue, and sits next to her. She just makes it easy.
They sit there for a while, looking out over the trees of the campus, the city glittering beyond them in the fading light of the sun.
“I’m tired,” Vi says. She closes her eyes, presses her thumb and middle finger against the lids til the tears slip out, and she wipes them away. “I’ve been having…a pretty hard time lately.”
“With work?”
“With me. With my…my volunteering. With everything, I guess.”
“You haven’t been sleeping much.”
Vi laughs, startled. “Is it that obvious?”
“You’re not as good a liar as you think you are.”
Vi scrubs at her eyes, letting out a long breath. “Well. I sure hope that’s not true.”
“Listen, what I said in there, I didn’t mean to offend–”
“It’s fine,” Vi says shortly, shorter than she means to. “They…I’m…it’s complicated.”
Caitlyn is quiet for a long moment, but the quiet doesn’t hold anything inside it, nothing to trigger Vi’s sense that danger is coming, that she has anything to defend against.
“Jinx said she’s been talking to the spider about their name,” Caitlyn says finally. “She’s of the mind that they need to just choose one and move on.”
“Yeah, so I’ve heard.”
“I understand her sentiment.” Vi tries not to flinch, looks away. Caitlyn says, “It can be frustrating for the public, I think, to see someone who is so undefinable. We like boxes. We like rules and order. We like to categorize each other and call that familiarity.”
Vi’s skin prickles. She almost stands up. She almost walks away. She rubs her palms on her jeans. “So you think they should just pick one too.”
“No,” Caitlyn says. “I think it doesn’t matter one way or another. What’s a name going to change? They’re still saving people. They’re still doing what needs to be done. Not overthinking, not second-guessing, not letting their state of being unnamed hold them back from being a hero. The name would be an accessory, a bit of flair maybe. Like all these suits and tech. Take it all away, and they still exist completely as New York’s resident friend and hero.”
“It’s not that easy,” Vi says, and her voice feels hard and weak all at once. “It’s been really confusing for them. I keep trying to help them but I can’t figure it out either. They just…they just want someone to do it for them, just give them a name and be done with it, and I can’t, and no one else will, and it makes me feel like shit.”
Caitlyn holds her hand, and it’s the most natural thing in the world the way her long fingers fold over Vi’s knuckles, cradling her palm like she cradled her head. Vi exhales unsteadily, shouldering away a few rogue tears.
“It must be hard,” Caitlyn says gently. “I can’t imagine that it’s easy at all to watch someone close to you struggle with their identity.” She gives Vi’s hand a careful squeeze. “But they’ll figure it out. And so will you.”
“What if I don’t?” Vi blurts, and she feels so childish, but Caitlyn is looking at her so gently it almost hurts.
“Would it be the worst thing?” Caitlyn asks.
***
Maybe if she’d slept more than three hours last night.
Maybe if she’d grabbed some breakfast on her way to the call.
Maybe if she’d picked up the newest tech from Jinx, or had her upgrade the suit a little sooner.
Maybe if she’d picked her own fucking name already and gotten on with her life.
Too many maybes. They’re distracting. Her nerves are stretched to their limit, her instincts firing in such rapid succession it’s a cacophony in her brain, howling, making her skin burn and her muscles throb. She follows their every order, like her body doesn’t belong to her. And maybe it doesn’t, anymore. Maybe, after she was bit, it never did.
Earth Breaker is his supervillain name, which Vi would give a 7 out of 10 on a normal day, but today she doesn’t have the time, because today Earth Breaker is in the process of collapsing downtown Manhattan, and Vi hasn’t stopped him.
Yet. She hasn’t stopped him yet.
She’s busy webbing a skyscraper that teeters on the edge of its very own sinkhole, tethering it to the buildings nearby, and flying through the levels once it’s stable-ish, gathering people by the web-full, tossing them to dangle from streetlights and market overhangs. The tether job is sloppy, some of them will fall probably, but a drop of seven feet is better than a drop of fifty, or a hundred. Vi hopes it’s enough. She hopes, hopes, hopes.
She’s starting on the lower levels, and she can hear and feel and almost taste the shuddering of the ground as Earth Breaker starts on his next round of shockwaves. He got the tech from Oscorp, Jinx told her through her earpiece. Stole it, modified it, went to town. Vi’s too out of breath to suggest that they should work on getting Oscorp shut down next. Way too many fucking problems coming from that direction.
A firefighter barrels past her, carrying two people over his shoulders.
“Hey!” he grunts, his voice rough and winded as he keeps sprinting. “We’ve got this. You get that motherfucker.”
Vi blinks, takes stock. The first responders are swarming, carrying people to the exits, helping them out of the windows to waiting fire truck ladders and emergency trampolines. Right. They have this.
“I’ll be right back,” she says, and she slingshots herself from the window, spinning headfirst to increase her momentum.
Earth Breaker is easy enough to find – he’s the asshole in the big metal suit who’s planting his massive robot hands in the concrete like the world’s worst deep tissue masseuse. He’s the one the National Guard is firing at with all the enthusiasm of ten year old boys in a nerf gun fight. The bullets glance off the metal like gnats. Vi swings close, feels a buzz in her senses that she can’t respond to, then a sharp sting, and she yelps – doesn’t mean to, can’t help it, her body is dancing on a razor’s edge of adrenaline and exhaustion.
She looks at her arm where the sting is, sees a small bleeding hole. She’s been shot.
No.
She’s been caught by ricochet.
“Hey! Hey, enough! Stop firing!”
She swings low, lands behind the firing circle, finds the sergeant in charge.
“No more, cease fire,” she pants. “I have to get to him.”
She waits for a fight, for the sergeant to tell her to kick rocks. Instead he pinches his radio, calls cease fire.
“Get out there,” he says to her. “Hurry.”
She hurries. No fanfare, no nothing, just slings a few webs at Earth Breaker and launches herself at him.
“What do we got, Jinx?” she asks the little voice in her head as she lights on the massive suit, feeling kind of like a gnat herself. She activates the scan in her visor and the sensors on her suit fingers and feet.
“It’s coming up, hang on,” Jinx says, and her voice is tight.
A few seconds pass, a few precious seconds. Vi spends them looking around, taking stock of the suit. There are no weaknesses that she can see. Not even a glass ‘head’ for the Earth Breaker himself to look out of. He came here to do one thing, and that one thing sure as shit wasn’t to have a conversation.
“Fuck me,” Jinx says, which is really bad.
Vi fires two weblines at the nearest stable building, planting her feet against the front of the robot, and shoves. She’s gotta get his hands out of the concrete, that she knows. The high whining hum beneath her feet tells her that she has some time before the next shockwave is ready, but not much.
“Okay, he’s pretty fucking watertight,” Jinx is saying, “but he’s a guy in a robot suit. Electricity will weaken him. He’s using plasma pulses to make the shockwaves.”
“And what does that mean?”
“I don’t know, okay?” Jinx sounds panicked, and Vi’s heart breaks a little. “I don’t fucking know. Stall. We need to look into this more.”
We.
“Is Caitlyn there?” Vi asks, and she shouldn’t, it’s stupid, it’s really stupid, but she can’t help herself.
“Yeah, she’s here,” Jinx says, and Vi can hear her fingers flying over her computer keys. “We’ll figure this out, give us some time.”
“I can give you time, honey.”
Vi’s shoving is working, a little at a time. The Earth Breaker has pistons to keep him balanced, but Vi has proportional spider strength, which is a hell of a lot, and she hears the concrete start to crunch behind her as she drags his hands out a little at a time. A sudden shift, and Vi turns, webbing the hand that has popped free, looping the web around the other planted arm, and using that as a fulcrum to pull the first arm out further.
It’s hard.
This robot suit feels like it’s made of concrete for all it moves, and she can still hear the charging whir in its depths.
“Hey, let’s just talk, huh?” she shouts, not sure if this guy has any way to hear her but hoping desperately that he does. “What are you after? Money? Fame? For your mom to tell you she loves you?”
There’s no answer. Vi deploys her spiderbot, and it skitters to the ground. She doesn’t have time to pilot it, but it starts firing little electric bolts at the robot anyway. The arms and body twitch at the shocks, so that’s something. Not much, but something.
She gets to work, leaping into the air and swinging herself wide. She fires electric webs at the places in the armor that look like weak points. The blue of electricity is beautiful the way it crackles up and down the limbs, making the Earth Breaker shake.
Earth Breaker moves, pulling his arm free of the confining web, snapping the fibers like thread. Vi dives, landing on the concrete beneath the looming arm, catches it as it comes back down.
Fuck.
It’s heavy, and strong. Her whole body trembles with the effort of keeping the arm off the ground as it presses down against her, inexorable. The asphalt cracks beneath her feet. She can feel as much as hear the charging hum, louder now, radiating down her arms, into her bones. The shockwave is almost ready. Vi can see the glow from the underside of the hand, a near-perfect white. She still needs to get the other hand out of the concrete.
Like Earth Breaker can hear her thoughts, the other hand rips from the ground.
Great.
Then it wraps around her torso.
Not great.
It throws her.
She hits a building and she thinks something breaks. She can’t tell if it’s her or the building. She collapses to the ground, her head ringing.
Get up. Get up getupgetupgetupgetup.
Vi gets up in time to see the National Guard tanks fire a volley of missiles at Earth Breaker. They land, and they don’t do damage, but they make him stagger back, off-balance, and the shockwave goes off with his arms flung up in the air.
It hurts. Windows shatter in every direction. But the ground stays steady, doesn’t tremble. That’s good.
Vi’s body screams as she webs herself back across the intersection, and she ignores it. The next passage of time is the world’s shittiest game of tag, where Vi swings through the air, webbing up the palms of Earth Breaker’s massive hands, stringing up his arms to keep him from burrowing them into the street again, and Earth Breaker alternates between ripping the webs off and swinging at Vi. He makes contact more than once, and it hurts, and Vi isn’t sure how many broken ribs she’s working with at the moment but she feels pretty positive it’s not less than three.
“What do you got for me, Jinx?” she shouts, dodging another of Earth Breaker’s swings and firing off a web.
“Best we can tell,” comes the answer, and Caitlyn’s voice is like a balm, slipping into all of Vi’s broken parts and making them better, “is his charging tech is in his limbs. If you can get past his armor, you can do some real damage in there.”
“You can also just rip the shit off,” Jinx chimes in. “Whatever works.”
“Great. Fuck up his arms. Got it.”
“You can also use his plasma ag–”
Caitlyn never gets a chance to finish that sentence. Or maybe she does, and Vi just doesn’t hear it as she swings too far into Earth Breaker’s range and he hits her. Hard. Catches her head and shoulder hard enough to snap her web and send her crashing across the ground, the world turning into an agonizing tumble of concrete and sky.
She skids to a stop and the world looks funny. It hurts. Her ears are ringing. Then screeching. Then crackling with electricity. Her earpiece. Her mask is broken. She drags it off without thinking.
Pants up at the sky. Body hurts. Bones hurt. Everything hurts.
Someone kneels next to her, someone she doesn’t know. A woman, older, gray hair and glasses smudged by dirt and smoke. Vi should panic, probably. Her face is exposed, they can see her.
“I’m so sorry, sweetheart,” the woman says. She leans over and ties something around Vi’s face, covering her nose and mouth, leaving her eyes free. A scarf. It’s soft, and red, and old, and smells like the kind of perfume someone’s grandma would wear. “You have to get up,” says the woman. “It’s not fair. But we need you, Red.”
Red. That’s nice. Feels like a hug.
The woman sits Vi up, and Vi is brave, she doesn’t cry. Just huffs a little against the pain, clutches her ribs.
“Sorry,” she gasps.
“That’s alright. You’re doing so well.” The woman tightens the scarf, makes sure it won’t fall off.
“Get somewhere safe,” Vi says. “I got this.”
She takes a breath, then she gets up, and she swings into the air, back to the Earth Breaker.
The pain doesn’t sing to her. It sits, heavy and angry in her bones. She’s angry, too, she realizes. She’s so angry. She’s angry at herself for being so tired. She’s angry at this stupid motherfucker for tearing up her city. She’s angry that she hasn’t just chosen a goddamned name. She’s angry that her mask is broken, and that now she’s missing the little voice in her head that kept her going.
Bad luck for Earth Breaker, really. She’s angry, and she lets him know.
Her fists go numb after a few blows against the paneling near his shoulder joint, and that’s just as well. She hits, and hits, and hits, watching the metal begin to crumple beneath her blows. When it’s crumpled enough, she wedges her fingers under the metal and rips it away. She’s making noise, she thinks, angry grunts and short yells, because there’s no other way for the pain to escape. She reaches into the arm, sees the glowing plasma piping, webs it as a buffer, and grabs it even as the webs begin to smoke from the heat. She yanks, and it holds steady, and she reaches in with both hands and pulls. It creaks, gives a little. She moves on, reaching beyond it to rip into the wiring.
Someone’s yelling. A megaphone. It’s the National Guard sergeant. He’s telling her to get clear, that the shockwave is about to go off, that they’re going to fire a volley of missiles to throw Earth Breaker off balance.
“Do it!” she yells at the top of her lungs, gesturing her arms in a come on motion. Then she gets back to work on the arm.
She manages to pull a few more wires free before the missiles hit. Dead on, center-of-mass. The explosion is hot and blinding and Vi is thrown free, vaguely stunned. Her body does its thing, slinging a web, swinging her out and back around to land on the damaged arm even as she blinks stars from her eyes. The shockwave releases, but Earth Breaker’s hands aren’t in the concrete, and the earth doesn’t shake. Vi’s insides do, feeling the blast rip through the robot body beneath her feet. The open part of the arm sparks furiously, and as Vi gets a better view of the inside she can see the plasma boiling in its tube, the residuals of the shockwave pulsing back and forth, making the whole robot shudder.
You can use his plasma against him.
That’s what Caitlyn was going to say. Or, at least Vi hopes that’s what she was going to say. Everything depends on her being right.
She has to stall a little longer, wait for the shockwave to power up again. She sends another spiderbot into the gaping hole on his arm, and gets to work swinging and webbing, dodging his powerful arms as they grab at her on the way past. She manages to web the hand of his damaged arm to his chest, and she thinks maybe it’ll hold, but he rips free a moment later, cause everything has to be hard apparently.
The whine of the charge grows louder, and she knows the clock is ticking down. She gets in close, webs up one palm, keeping hold of the line, dodges a hit, manages to web the other. She shoots webs in rapid succession, building a thick layer on each palm until the glow of plasma is barely visible. Now to web the hands together.
But Earth Breaker isn’t stupid. He seems to understand what’s happening now, and he begins to thrash, pulling hard against the restraints. Vi pulls back, inching his hands closer together, trying to get them close enough to connect.
The whine grows louder.
Her heart sinks.
There’s no time.
She thought she had time.
With a furious yell, she plants herself in the center of Earth Breaker’s two massive arms and heaves. The plasma glow is hot and angry, even through the webs. The palms are aimed at each other now — Earth Breaker’s greatest strength is also his weakness — but they’re also aimed at her.
Spider sandwich.
She holds steady, panting, straining. Everything is agony. She thinks she can feel herself snapping into pieces on the inside.
She drags the hands closer. Just in case. She wants them to have a clean shot at each other.
Earth Breaker is panicking now, but his weak arm is giving. He can't escape.
Well. That makes two of them.
The whine is so loud, Vi can’t hear anything else. The white glows bright and blinding. She wishes she had a little voice in her head to say goodbye to. She wonders what the papers will call her after she’s dead.
The shockwave hits in a flash of light.
It goes through her chest. Everything vanishes.
***
Vi wakes up.
She wishes she hadn’t.
There are faces, voices, but those are distant. Mostly there’s pain. Pain. Pain. Pain.
Then, panic.
Is their face visible? Is the scarf there still?
He touches his face. Feels soft, red. He can smell the perfume.
“Lie still, now,” a voice says. “You’re hurt. The EMTs are on their way.”
No. They’ll see her. They can’t see her. She’ll be fine, she just has to move.
Vi gets up. The voices tell them not to, but they have to. They don’t have time to say sorry. They don’t have time to explain that they wish they could’ve stopped all of this. That they didn’t mean for anyone to get hurt.
His body knows what to do. Fling a webline. Leap. Sail. Scream. Is that him screaming? He’s trying so hard not to.
They must black out. They can’t remember how far they’ve gone, only that they’ve crash landed somewhere. Back alley. Dark. Empty.
She can’t hear the sirens anymore, or the worried crowds. She’s gone far enough.
He drags himself behind a dumpster. That’s as far as he can go. Tucks himself into the shadows, the dark. Wishes his head would unfold, feels like it’s all collapsing.
Too much. Too much. She closes her eyes.
They dream of Jinx. Soft and scared and crying and trying so hard not to, like she always does. Always hated crying, that sister of theirs.
“Keep your eyes open, okay, Vi? Can you hear me? It’s gonna be okay.”
He dreams of Caitlyn. More steady, but scared, too. He wants to tell her it’s okay. He wants to tell her the truth.
“It’s me,” they try to say. “Caitlyn, it’s me. Vi.”
“I know,” Caitlyn says. “I know. You stay with us, Vi, alright? Promise me.”
“With you,” Vi says. “With you.”
She hears another voice, a man she doesn’t recognize.
“Don’t,” Vi mumbles. He tries to find his scarf, but his arms won’t move anymore. “Don’t let him. See.”
“You’re safe,” Jinx promises her. “You’re safe, Vi.”
Vi believes her. Vi closes their eyes. Vi lets the dark take him.
***
Vi recovers. That’s what her body is built for. She’s never been very good at dying.
It’s sheer dumb luck, really, that Caitlyn’s dad is a doctor, and that he’s also not interested in the kind of money that exposing a superhero’s identity could get him. Vi is upset at first, and Jinx gets angry – “I wasn’t just gonna let you die, okay? I’ll do a lot of shit for you, Vi, but not that.” – but Vi finds out that the whole medical team signed NDAs at the behest of Doctor Kiramman, and that eases her worry a little. She apologizes to Jinx. Jinx cries, but she covers her face with her hands, like that’ll make it so Vi doesn’t know.
She asks about what happened after she passed out. Her plan worked, Caitlyn tells her – the shockwave turned on itself destroyed Earth Breaker’s suit, nearly killing Vi and the villain in the process.
“Should’ve fried him,” Jinx says to no one from the corner of the room.
“He’s in maximum security on The Raft now,” Caitlyn concludes.
Vi nods, tries to let it be enough, but the fact remains that if she’d been more ready, if she hadn’t been so distracted lately, this wouldn’t have happened. She would’ve been on the scene sooner, she would’ve been able to work faster. No one would’ve died. Downtown wouldn’t have sustained billions of dollars’ worth of damage. The people of New York City wouldn’t have a need to doubt their resident superhero.
It only takes a few days to get back on her feet. Doctor Kiramman is in awe, and Caitlyn has to shuffle him from the room more than once as he gets on rambling tangents about the absolute miracle of Vi’s body and her healing abilities.
Vi gets up early one morning, just after the dawn light has begun leaking in through the window. If she tells anyone, they’ll no doubt try to stop her. Try to tell her she needs more rest, when that’s the last thing she needs. She’s just finishing pulling on her suit, laying her note on the bedspread for Jinx.
“Are you sure you’re ready?”
Caitlyn’s voice doesn’t startle Vi; she’d already known she was an early riser. She should’ve also known that she’d have some kind of Vi Is Sneaking Out sixth sense, too. Caitlyn holds a cup of coffee in one hand, her blue eyes a little bleary as she leans against the doorway, but her expression is concerned, attentive.
“Sure I’m sure,” Vi says. “My body’s ready to rumble again. Right as rain.”
It’s the truth. Her body is in perfect condition. The concussion, skull fracture, ocular bleeds, snapped ribs– well, it’s a laundry list, but now it’s all nothing more than a bad dream. A really bad dream. The kind that stays with you after you wake up.
“But are you ready?”
That’s Caitlyn. Always asking the questions that mean something. Saying the things Vi can’t.
“I have to be.” Vi looks down at the mask in her hands. “I have a lot to make up to them.”
“Maybe less than you think.”
“Maybe. Miracles happen every day, right?”
Caitlyn only smiles a little.
Vi pulls her mask on, and she feels safer like this. “Tell Jinx I’ll be back tonight, okay?”
“I will.”
Vi leaps from the window, her heart in her throat, and the feeling has nothing to do with the drop.
***
She can’t help herself. The first place she goes is the site of the fight – downtown Manhattan. She perches high, high up, out of tomato-throwing range, and surveys the damage. And there’s lots of it. A few of the buildings still sit lopsided. Hundreds and hundreds of boarded up windows. The whole block would look like a celebration if yellow caution tape counted as birthday streamers. Every inch of it is a memorial to her failure. Maybe she should’ve died, just to make sure everyone knew how sorry she was for all of it.
She thinks about the scarf, back in her room, tucked into the bag Jinx had brought from her apartment. She should find the woman who gave it to her, give it back. God knows Vi doesn’t deserve to have it.
When the construction workers begin arriving a short while later, Vi takes her leave, swinging away before anyone can see her and start hurling insults.
Maybe she shouldn’t be out here after all. Her body is fine, sure, but her stomach is in knots. She wonders if she’ll get mobbed if she makes the mistake of being seen on the ground, or if the New Yorkers will go easy and just shout horrible truths about her failure until she’s truly nothing. Either way, doesn’t matter. Either way, the people will decide what she deserves, and she’ll accept it.
She hears the first shout as she swings over 9th and Broadway, the morning crowds beginning to fill the sidewalks. Her gut twists, and she wants to make a break for it, but she pretends she didn’t hear. Which is silly, cause she can hear everything. The shout doubles, then triples, then ripples out through the crowd like a wave, and it’s joined by another sound, sharp, staccato…clapping?
Vi lands on a wall, turns and looks, and the whistles start in, then the yelling. No. Not yelling. Cheering.
Cheering?
“There you are!” someone cries. “You made it! They made it!”
“That’s my Spider,” someone else cheers.
Vi doesn’t understand. She scans the crowd, and every face she sees is smiling. She spots someone wiping tears away. Tears? For her?
She stares for what feels like forever, taking in the street full of faces turned up to her. It doesn’t click. It doesn’t make sense. She descends, just in case the crowd has forgotten that they want to tear her apart, and having her at ground level will remind them of what she owes them. Someone touches her. A firm pat on the back. Someone else squeezes her arm, someone else takes her hand, shakes it. Someone else catches her in a big hug, and she startles, then hugs them back. She’s drowned in a sea of applause and whistling and whoops and loving jostles and words of affection, gratitude, recognition.
“Thought we lost you, kid.”
“So brave, so brave.”
“Kept our city safe, we owe you.”
No, Vi wants to say. No, no, no. I fucked up, you don’t owe me, it’s the other way around.
But she can’t say anything because she’s trying so hard not to cry. The tears are leaking down her cheeks without permission, but she’s got a mask on, so no one knows but her. She presses a palm to her chest, hoping it’ll relieve some of the pressure.
Then she says, in a burst, her voice wobbly, “But you don’t even know my name.”
A roll of laughter goes up, and Vi laughs too. It’s such a cliche. That’s usually what the rescued civilian says to the noble hero - but I don’t even know your name.
“Who needs a name!” someone hollers, and the crowd cheers in agreement.
“You’re ours, who cares?” comes another voice, and another ripple of affirmation follows.
The whoop of a police siren echoes down the block. The crowd shifts to look toward the sound, then looks back to Vi.
“Gotta go,” she says.
She webs herself into the air to the sound of another round of cheering, and she slings her way across the buildings, lifted on the wind, and she thinks the flying feeling in her chest has nothing to do with the webs this time.
***
The list doesn’t go away, not completely. It still hangs out in the back of Vi’s mind, floating around, nudging her every so often. It bumps into her memories from the day she fought Earth Breaker, from that floaty, dream-like state while she was busy dying. How it felt. How she felt. How she felt like a she, and a he, and a they, all at once. It’s like a nosy little dog, always there, keeping her company. And it needs a name, too.
“I want to figure it out.”
She’s high above the city, legs dangling from the shoulders of a gargoyle. Jinx is off tonight. Vi and Caitlyn insisted she get some sleep after she’d been pulling all-nighters for final exams and working on Vi’s tech. So it’s Caitlyn in Vi’s ear tonight, the little voice in her head.
“What’s stopping you?”
Vi shrugs, even though she knows Caitlyn can’t see her.
“Cause what if I get it wrong, you know? What if I pick something and I like it for a while but then I hate it, but it’s the name that everyone knows me by?”
“You can tell the press you changed your mind, let them spread a new name around for you.”
“Well what if the name I pick is stupid, and people make fun of me for it?”
“Do you really want to live your life for the people who are determined to be unkind to you?”
Vi frowns. She doesn’t answer.
“Only you know what you want, Vi.”
“Well, that sucks, cause I don’t know what I want, actually.”
“Maybe you don’t know what superhero name you want, but surely you know something else you want. One other thing. Tell me one other thing you want.”
“I want…” Vi thinks. “Tacos for dinner.”
Caitlyn laughs, and Vi closes her eyes, smiling.
“See? You know what you want,” Caitlyn says.
“Wait, wait, I’ve got more.”
“Go on.”
“I want Jinx to pass all of her classes. And I want your dad to get that promotion he’s after.” And I want you to be my girlfriend. Vi feels like she’s in freefall, and she hasn’t even jumped yet. “And I want to use different pronouns. Maybe.”
“Really?” Caitlyn’s voice is soft and careful and Vi is suddenly wishing that this was happening in person, just so she could see the expression on Caitlyn’s face. Vi did this on purpose, because she was so fucking nervous to have this conversation face-to-face, but she can imagine Caitlyn looking at her, gentle and sweet and a little awed, like Vi is the most amazing thing she’s ever seen, and she wishes Caitlyn was here.
“Yeah, I don’t know,” Vi says, tilting her head back to look at the sunset-pink sky. “Just. Change things up, a little, you know? I’ve heard people talk about me with different pronouns around the city, and it’s nice, I think. It’s different. To know that I’m not just automatically a girl to them. That there’s more to me. I don’t know if that makes sense.”
“It does,” Caitlyn says. “Perfectly.”
And it’s like Vi can feel her holding his hand.
***
Jinx is practically vibrating, Vi can feel it even without being able to see the gleeful expression on her face. The bandana isn’t very tight around his eyes, he feels pretty positive he could at least get some context clues if he opened them and peeked out of the gaps, but he won’t, cause he doesn't wanna ruin the surprise. And it’s funny to have Cait and Jinx both holding his hands, practically tripping over themselves as Vi walks steadily even though he’s the one blindfolded. They all pass through a set of doors, and then another door, and one more for good measure.
“Okay, you ready?” Jinx asks.
“Maybe. Probably.”
Jinx whips the bandana from over Vi’s eyes without further ado.
Vi blinks at the contraption in front of him. Caitlyn and Jinx grin at him, and he glances between them. “What am I looking at here?”
“Well this,” Jinx says, prancing over to the laptop attached to the very intricate-looking machine, caressing the edge of the screen, “is what folks these days are calling a computer.”
“Okay, smartass,” Vi says, and Caitlyn laughs.
“Show him, Jinx.”
Vi can’t help the butterflies he gets over the sound of his pronouns out loud. He wonders if he’ll ever stop feeling this giddy about it.
Jinx sits down at the laptop and starts typing away. Over her shoulder, Vi can see a complex screen layout that looks familiar. It has a digital readout, and a box for 3D imagery, where many a tech and suit prototype has rotated before. There’s an image of a suit there now, but it’s blank, nothing more than a t-posing humanoid figure rotating on the spot.
Then Jinx turns back to Vi. “Welcome to your very own build-a-suit workshop, Vi.”
Vi blinks, looks at Jinx, then looks at Caitlyn.
“We thought it would be nice for you to pick how your suit looks this time,” Caitlyn says. “We built this machine specially. It’ll let you try the suit on, so to speak, before we manufacture the suit physically. It’s a boon for all of us. It’ll make getting you upgrades a much faster and smoother process, but we wanted to give you a chance to help with the maiden voyage. Just so you can be sure the suit is completely to your liking.”
“You’re kidding,” Vi says, looking between them both, then at the machine in question.
“We are definitely not,” Jinx says. “Now are you gonna stand there grinning like a maniac all day, or do you wanna build this fucking suit?”
Vi builds the fucking suit. It takes hours. Jinx has to go and get them some snacks to tide them all over, but Vi barely notices the passage of time. He’s too busy having the time of his life designing the perfect suit. Jinx and Caitlyn are extremely accommodating too, doing all the coding while he switches colors and patterns and designs, adding features and tech to his heart’s desire. When he steps into the machine to see how the suit looks on, a smile that feels broader than the Brooklyn bridge stretches across his face.
“Yeah,” he says. “That’s the one.”
It fits perfectly, and after pulling it on faster than he’s ever put on any piece of clothing, he admires himself in the mirror. The suit is a black and red design, a change from his usual white, red, and blue ensemble. The polymer sheeting hugs his chest, flattening the curves. A long, angular spider is emblazoned down the center of his torso, its legs arching up and over his shoulders, around his ribs and hips, where they trail into the web-pattern that encases his whole body. The black of the suit covers his arms, feet, and shins, shearing away at the shoulders and thighs to give way to a radiant red. The mask is his favorite part. A nod to that woman who gave him her scarf when he needed it the most. It covers his eyes, nose, mouth and neck, but the top is open, letting his shock of red hair float free. Red, the woman had called him. Red, the first name he’d been given by his city that had felt like his.
“How do I look?” Vi asks, turning to Jinx and Caitlyn. He’s preening, he knows it, and he doesn’t even try to stop.
“Fuckin’ baller,” Jinx says.
“Like you,” Caitlyn says, and her smile goes all the way to her eyes.
***
Vi lights on the rooftop behind Caitlyn silently, perched just above her on a concrete column. They don’t say anything at first, just watching Caitlyn. Her hair blows a little in the night breeze, wafting the scent of her shampoo through the air, making Vi’s heart tumble over itself. Vi swallows, straightens their posture as much as they can while still crouched.
“Bit late for a young lady like yourself to be out,” they say, making their voice as low and gruff as they can.
Caitlyn doesn’t startle even a little, and Vi wonders if they surprised her at all. She just turns, an eyebrow raised, a small, coy smile on her face. “Could say the same to you, Red Web.”
Vi grins, and they’re glad that Caitlyn can’t see it – a shit-eating grin isn’t very gruff and macho superhero of them. But they can’t hold the facade anyway.
“Whaddya think?” they ask, feeling all fluttery.
“I like it,” Caitlyn says sincerely. “But what do you think?”
“Yeah, it’s not bad,” Vi shrugs casually, trying not to give their excitement away too much. They have a feeling Caitlyn can sense it anyway. They leap from their perch, moving to lean against the low wall, folding their arms as they face Caitlyn. “The reporter I told looked like she was about to wet her pants, she was so excited. First one to hear the hero’s official name.”
“Little does she know,” Caitlyn laughs.
“You think it’s still a smart idea?”
“I think it’s perfect,” Caitlyn says. “It’s you, isn’t it? Lots of things all at once.”
Vi feels like the sun. “Yeah. It is me, huh?”
Caitlyn looks at them fondly, tucks a hair behind her ear. “When will you announce the next name?”
“Once the new suit is ready.”
It’ll be a sleek, deep-maroon thing. Full coverage mask, no hair showing for this one, but a design on the face that looks like pincers. Perfect for a hero called Spider Bite.
They’ll let that one sink in, and then launch the final name. Red, orange, gold suit, with two varieties of mask that they can change out depending on their mood – one that will let their hair out, one that’s full coverage – and the moniker Sun Spider.
It feels good. More than just a smart idea, but the right one. The kind of idea that makes Vi feel like their skin sits right over their bones. Like they can be anyone, whoever feels right, just depending on the day. And maybe more names will come, and they’ll retire older ones. They can almost see the future if they close their eyes, and it looks like a tapestry, a web, intricate and always changing, sometimes added onto, sometimes pulled down and replaced. Same threads, same strokes, same weaver, but different shapes, new patterns, new ways of being, new ways of becoming.
It makes Vi want to laugh and cry all at the same time.
“I wanted to ask,” Caitlyn says quietly, leaning her forearms against the wall. Vi drops their attention to her, watches as she plays with her hands a little. “If you were feeling the same about your own name as you have been about your spider name.”
Vi is quiet, turning her words over in their head. Caitlyn lifts her hands.
“Not to say you need to, not at all. I only wondered, since you wanted a change in pronouns, whether Vi felt too confining– I’m sorry, I know it’s not my place–”
“It’s okay,” Vi says, touching her arm, stilling her words. “If it’s anyone’s place, it’s yours.” The words feel like Vi is admitting something big. They can feel the blush heating their ears. God bless masks. “Um. No, Vi is good. It is. It’s my anchor, you know? Reminds me who I am. Maybe that’ll change later, but for now, it’s what I want the people close to me to use. Like, loved ones only. Jinx. My brothers.” Vi takes a breath. “You.”
Vi’s heart is racing. They wonder if Caitlyn can hear it, or see it beating through the thin layer of their suit. Caitlyn is looking at them, and her expression is searching, and there’s a beautiful pinkness high in her cheeks that Vi can’t look away from.
Caitlyn steps closer.
“So,” she murmurs, the word is liquid heat in Vi’s veins. “If I wanted to kiss this city’s resident superhero, what name would you suggest I use?”
Caitlyn’s fingers are at Vi’s throat, peeling the mask up, away from Vi’s mouth—
“Would Red Web be the most appropriate?”
—their nose—
“Or Spider Bite, perhaps?”
—their eyes—
“Or Sun Spider?”
—til the mask comes away completely, and Vi is looking at Caitlyn and it feels like they’ve never really looked at her before.
“Vi,” they murmur, their throat suddenly dry. “Vi is fine.”
“Oh, no,” Caitlyn says, her voice velvet as she leans in. “Vi is perfect.”
***
Vi slings her way across the city. She rolls into complex flips, a torpedo dive, a heel spin, slinging and catching and swinging, whipping around corners, throwing herself hundreds of feet into the air and leaning into the freefall, feeling the wind ripple through her hair. Still the best part. The flying and the falling and every bit in between.
He stops by a hot-dog stand, picking up three dogs with all the toppings.
“Hey, Red!” a voice calls from the corner.
Vi tips the hot dog man, turns toward the voice. It’s no one she knows, a stranger, but who’s really a stranger in a city that she calls hers?
“What’s the name today?” he asks.
Vi walks over, carefully and intricately webbing the hotdogs for transport. Caitlyn had a craving today, and Vi wouldn’t be a hero if he let his girlfriend go hungry.
“Guess that depends on who you ask,” Vi says.
“Well I’m asking you, ain’t I?”
Vi muses. Webs the packaged hotdogs to their belt. “I’m feeling Sun Spider today, I think.”
The man grins. “I love Sun Spider. That one’s my favorite. Gimme five, Sun Spider.”
Vi holds his hand out low, and the man slaps it like it’s the best five he’s ever had, and hey, maybe it is.
“Call me if you need me,” Vi says, and then she leaps from the ground, slinging a web and whipping herself away down the street.
“That third hot dog is for me, right?” Jinx asks through the earpiece.
“Of course it is, I’m not a monster,” Vi says, arching over the top of a building and webbing themself forward at what feels like Mach 2.
“Relish?”
“Always.”
“You’re the greatest Red Web around, you know that?”
“Yeah, I think I’ve heard that a few times.”
“Oh, hey, happy three years.”
“Jesus, three? Already?”
“Sure enough. You owe me health insurance.”
“Health insurance! Right. Totally. Gonna get right on that.”
“You’re a terrible employer.”
“And yet, here you are.”
“Don’t push it. Lots of people out there would love to hire me. They’d give me all the health insurance I want.”
“Well you can’t quit, we’ve still gotta get you a sidekick name. I was thinking something like The Little Voice, or Tech Mania.”
“You’re hilarious.”
“I’m serious.”
“Go ahead, start calling me that, see what happens.”
“I think Tech Mania is cute,” Caitlyn chimes in.
“I don’t remember asking— ”
“Ha!” Vi crows. “Two against one. You’re outnumbered. Tech Mania it is.”
“I’ll show you tech mania, you eight legged fu–”
Jinx’s voice is muffled suddenly.
“Get here with those hot dogs quick, Vi, Jinx is getting hangry.”
Vi makes it back to Jinx and Caitlyn’s personal lab, lovingly named The Spider’s Web, before Jinx can wreak any havoc. The hot dogs are only mildly squished from their journey, and the three of them eat together on the roof in the light of a brilliant spring sun. When he finishes the last bite, Vi lays back and basks in the warmth, feeling the solar tech in his suit humming as it soaks up the rays. Caitlyn and Jinx talk shop about their next patent release for night vision driving glasses. When Jinx first told Vi about it, her phrasing was, verbatim, that it's "gonna revolutionize the game for bitches with astigmatism."'Vi thinks it sounds great.
“Hey, Red,” Caitlyn says, nudging Vi gently, planting a quick kiss on their cheek. “What do you think we should call them? Night Eyes, or Dark Vision?"
Vi shrugs.
“Don’t, don’t say it,” Jinx says, her tone a warning.
“Why not both?” Vi says with a grin.
Jinx lets out an exasperated groan. “See? I told you he’d be no help.”
Vi just closes her eyes and laughs.