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icyspicy4u · 8 months

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wading my way through this neighborhood (chapter one)

i literally don't know what to say about this one. i banged out like 10k of an anarcia spider-man au in mmm about two days. so. enjoy!! playlist linked here. ao3 link here.

Anetra is a friendly neighborhood superhero trying not to fall headlong into New York City's tangled crime web while also trying to avoid falling head over heels in love with her roommate. She doesn't really do a good job at either.

Although she’s typically winningly optimistic, Anetra is forced to admit that she might really be in deep shit this time.

She dives to the ground to dodge a punch from one of the men blocking her exit from this alley, and just as she hits the asphalt her phone begins to ring, loudly, because she definitely didn’t need another thing to worry about.

Whenever she wears her suit, she keeps her phone tucked in her bra, against her chest, safe from prying eyes or a damaging fall. Crucially, she also always silences it when she’s out on these little suited-up webslinging jaunts.

Except for this jaunt in particular, apparently.

This time, Anetra forgot to turn her ringer off before leaving, and the ringtone Marcia gave herself (Boss Bitch, by Doja Cat—Marcia swears it was worth the dollar Anetra had to cough up to buy the song) starts to echo through the slim space of the alley she’s been cornered into.

The man in front trying his best to pummel Anetra into the brick walls on either side of him pauses at the sound of the music.

Everyone does, honestly, including Anetra, standing in a defensive position and blinking a little in disbelief behind her mask as Doja spits out lyrics about high-heeled shoes.

“Um,” Anetra says, heroically. The man in front offers up nothing but a threatening crack of the neck, and then he’s lunging for her again, followed by his buddies.

Normally, Anetra would just throw a web up to the sky, land it on one of the roofs of the buildings forming this alley, and neatly pull herself out of this situation. Easy money. However, this alley is barely wider than her wingspan—she’d need more room than she’s got to effectively aim.

Also, with the way these dipshits have been bearing down on her, she barely has enough time to throw her arms up and block the punches, let alone take a step back to use her webshooter.

She doesn’t know who they are, or who sent them, or why they are so intent on rocking her shit.

Over the past six months of being the Spider, she’s made a fair few enemies from sticking her nose where people think she shouldn’t be—she’s learned most of the hallmarks of the underground’s major players that way.

But these don’t look like any of the lackeys she’s used to. They don’t bear the MIB branding across their chests that Mistress’ henchmen are required to wear or the LaDuca crest on the lapel that all of Loosey’s guys have.

It’s disconcerting—Anetra continues running through her mental list of people who most likely want her dead, and these men don’t seem like they’ve been sent by any of them.

With the same repeating thirty seconds of Doja’s voice as a backing track, Anetra drops to a low squat as the man in front swings another wide hit at her head. She takes advantage of her new position to lunge for his knees, then shoves her shoulder into him and wraps her arms tight around his calves to force his legs to buckle—the man’s now-overloaded weight brings them both crashing to the ground.

Anetra rolls away easily from the tackle, gets to her feet to try and assess the situation, but the space she’s clawed out for herself is gone as soon as it was made when the rest of the men charge at her.

“Jesus, guys, can I catch a break?” she asks breathlessly, throws one hand up to catch the fist flying at her face as another guy goes for her ankles and she has to leap out of the way. “I’m serious, here. Could use a breather. What about you?”

“Smart-ass spider,” one of them grumbles, finally breaking the professional silence the whole group has been keeping up until now, and Anetra flashes him a winning smile that she only wishes a little bit that he could see as he tries to headbutt her against the wall.

She’s lucky that these men don’t seem to be actually combat-trained in any way. They’re moving the way most hired muscle does, bear-like and unpracticed, the style of brawling that’s borne out of being consistently bigger than your opponents. They’re used to steamrolling people Anetra’s size easily, so they’re throwing punches that Anetra can block without thinking while she tries to formulate her escape plan.

Her phone has finally stopped ringing, but it chimes to signal a new voicemail as she triangulates a gap to slip through in the wall of muscle.

A brief sting of guilt passes through Anetra. She’s been missing a lot of Marcia’s calls lately.

She’s rarely home now—when she’s not working, she’s out being this strange masked vigilante, and these days it seems like every small crime that she stops leads to another, worse one cropping up a few blocks down.

She already had the suit on under her clothes when she left the apartment earlier, shouting a goodbye to Marcia with some lame excuse about covering some other dancer’s shift at the bar—she was actually headed to an abandoned studio space downtown to fuck around with her web calibration for a while. She’s managed to master some kind of formula.

Again, the suit was already on under her clothes. What was she supposed to do when she heard a scream from the alley, ignore it?

Yes, she thinks to herself bitterly, pinning herself against the wall to barely avoid getting kneed in the ribs.

What had started as an easy job—it was a simple mugging, she could shoot a few webs the guy’s way and leave him strung up easily, let the victim get free—had suddenly transformed into a much bigger problem when several of these men had showed up. She should’ve been home an hour ago.

The guilt twists, intensifies. She’ll buy Marcia dinner later this week, or something. They can get takeout like they used to, when Anetra was fucking normal and couldn’t walk on walls.

Hey, wait a minute.

Anetra scans the too-close walls on either side of her. It’ll be a hell of a Hail Mary jump, but maybe—

While she’s distracted, a meaty fist makes contact with the side of her face, hard enough to make her ears ring. She stays standing, years of practice from gone-wrong taekwondo fights keeping her feet under her, but just barely.

She spits some blood from her mouth against the fabric of her mask, tries to let her vision right itself, but then another hit catches her in the gut and her breath leaves her.

Okay. Okay, shit. She’s kind of losing control of the situation, here. She needs to get her half-formulated plan back on track.

She narrowly dodges out of the way of a third punch, throws a clumsy kick that she feels make contact with flesh, then stumbles backwards until she can feel the bricks of the alley’s back wall against her back.

Her head is spinning, but she tips her head back, ignoring the awful sensation of the blood from her nose and mouth running down her throat.

She assesses the slice of sky between the buildings. Her heightened instincts do the math for her on just how precise her jump needs to be to get her to safety—if she misjudges this, she’s either going to slam herself against the wall and do the henchmen’s job for them, or she’s going to fall right back down to earth. Also probably doing their job for them.

Speaking of which, over the distraction of their second fallen companion, the three remaining men begin their charge towards her. They’re each sporting a grin that says they think they’ve won, probably elated at the sight of blood staining Anetra’s mask and the heavy breaths she’s taking.

Anetra kind of admires the confidence.

With a clumsy wink that they can’t see, she crouches low, and then when they’re almost on top of her she leaps straight up into the air, her best shot, sticking her arms out in the cramped space to hopefully catch on the walls of the building. Pleasepleasepleaseplease—

It’s a near thing. She’s not capable of jumping all the way to the rooftop, but her fingers graze both walls thirty feet up. Just barely, but it’s enough contact to give her purchase on the surface. The invisible hook of her wall-clinging ability catches her on each side, keeps her bracketed between the buildings and out of reach of the men below.

The resulting giggle from her is a little delirious to her own ears, but she hopes it sounds victorious to them.

“Fuck all of you,” she shouts, grinning, curls her knees up to her chest and pushes off to hop up onto one of the roofs—made accessible with the minimized distance—and peer down at them from there. “Tell whoever sent you, they aren’t gonna get my ass that easy!”

Instead of being frustrated at her cockiness, as she would’ve expected, they’re all unnervingly calm. One of them tilts their head like they’re studying her.

“She won’t give up, you know,” that one says. “It’ll end in a lot less pain for you if you come with us now.”

“Hang on, it really doesn’t seem like we’re on the same page here, guys,” Anetra shouts, trying to sound breezy even though the ominous words send something skittering down her spine. “Who is she?”

The man who spoke grins crookedly. Maybe she didn’t sound as breezy as she thought.

“You don’t need to know,” he yells up at her. “All you need to know is that this won’t be over until she has you.”

“Don’t care!” Anetra chirps, maybe a little frantically, and casts a web to a billboard on an adjacent rooftop so she can swing away from the scene as fast as possible.

As the wind whips at her, a little abrasive against her tender bruises and scraped skin under the suit, the threatening words echo through her head.

This won’t be over until she has you.

She’s certainly had to develop a thicker skin since becoming New York’s resident superhero. Between the death threats and the unflattering mid-swing pictures people post online (the latter might genuinely be affecting her more negatively than the former), she’s had to figure out how to shove all of this Spider stuff into a big ol’ box in her brain and leave it there while she lives the rest of her life so that it can’t get to her.

This threat feels too real to put in that box, though. The way it was delivered, the way that man had looked up at her with something like pity in his eyes when she refused to bend—it makes her breath come a little shallower than is comfortable as she thinks about it.

Her heightened senses that came with that stupid spider bite don’t just help her assess the situation in fights, they also tell her when something’s wrong. If she doesn’t attend to the feeling and follow her instincts, the sensory overload of it all usually triggers a migraine.

She wouldn’t be too worried about this mysterious she that sent those men to collect her, but the hair on the back of her neck is standing up and she’s clenching her teeth without thinking about it.

Something about this is wrong, her body is telling her, and she has no idea what.

Suddenly desperate to stop thinking about it, she swings herself to a somewhat secluded rooftop, free from prying eyes, and pulls off her mask to give herself a second to breathe.

The sun is starting to set. She’s chosen one of the taller buildings in the area to rest on, so she can really take in the view, the pink-orange-gold-yellow tone of light shifting every hard angle of the city to something softer and sweeter.

She can see lights turning on in people’s apartments as the daylight fades, can see a few different rooftop bars start to fill up with patrons from up here. It’s a nice reminder that even with the isolation of her extremely unique life experience, she’s not alone. Someone’s always awake, someone’s always looking at the same skyline you are.

With her legs swinging off over the edge of the roof, Anetra pulls out her phone to finally listen to Marcia’s voicemail.

“Hey, it’s me!”

Despite her heart hammering around anxiously from both leftover and still-present adrenaline, Anetra manages a smile at that.

“Who else is it going to be, you dumb bitch?” she mumbles, rhetorical and fond.

“I’m figuring you probably just got caught at work and that’s why you’re not home. I was going to hold dinner for you, but I’m starving, so you snooze, you lose, Neech. Don’t know what to tell you. Your tacos are definitely going to be cold when you get home, and that is karma, is what that is.”

She pauses for a second. Anetra listens to her breathe, think about what she wants to say next. Her nose was probably all scrunched up when she recorded this like it gets when she thinks too hard.

“I miss you,” she says, and then the evening is quiet again, excepting the buzz of voicemail static. “Um. Anyway. Taco meat will be waiting when you get home. Please eat it. Or—just eat something with a modicum of protein. I’m begging you.”

Anetra has a full grin on her face when the message beeps, signaling its end. She swipes over to Google and searches up “modicum”, relying on autocorrect since she has no idea how to spell it, then sends Marcia a screenshot.

TO: marcia 🌸💖💫🧚💕🌷💗✨💝

(The emojis weren’t Anetra’s idea, believe it or not. Marcia gave her very specific instructions on which ones she wanted next to her name.)

[Attachment: 1 Photo]

You had to use this word right

Like needed to

You couldn’t have said “a little bit” or any of the various synonyms available to you, you needed to use that one

FROM: marcia 🌸💖💫🧚💕🌷💗✨💝

AHAHAHAHA

so sorry

Anetra smiles, but it slips from her face quickly as she realizes the fast response time is most likely worry-based.

I’m headed home now, she texts, wanting to quiet Marcia’s anxieties. Only a few minutes away :)

ok yay, Marcia sends back. The bubble appears, then disappears, then comes back again, indicating some rethinking. did the dancer shift end up ok? u just had to stay late?

Yeah

It’s all Anetra can really give her, even though the single-word response will only further Marcia’s suspicions. The doubling up on questions is already enough of an indication of her doubt.

Yara was on my ass tonight, she texts to try and cover. Yara Sofia is the manager at the bar, who lets Anetra come in for a dancing shift once or twice a week after her waitressing hours, and she is on Anetra’s ass all the time, even though it’s always out of love. It’s a real half-ass of a redirection, but Marcia, always graceful and always sweet, follows her lead anyway.

omg what did she do

Anetra takes some time to craft a decently wild story about Yara’s unorthodox marketing methods (she mentions Yara’s vibrant Onlyfans career, which is very real) to provide some scaffolding for her lie about her whereabouts.

Once she’s sent it, she gets to her feet, pulls her mask back over her face, and stretches, taking in the last of the sunset as the colors bleed out of the sky. The artificial lights have flickered on all around her now, doing their best to replace the sun’s warm glow and coming up just a little bit short.

She sends a web out to a streetlight on a parking garage nearby and hops off the roof. Since she’s still a little shaken, it takes her longer to find her rhythm than it normally does.

Cast out the web. Feel the resistance when it catches on a building or a lamppost or a tree. Swing from that node forward, let your body hurtle through the air, almost freefalling but not quite. Release, then cast again.

Cast, feel, swing, release. Cast, feel, swing, release.

She won’t give up, you know.

Cast, feel, swing, release. Definitely don’t think about the person with a vendetta against you who tried to get you killed earlier today. Cast, feel, swing, release.

“It’s Spider-Man!” she hears from below a few feet ahead of her, bringing her mostly out of her head. Within the crowds on the street, more than a few people have their faces upturned to gawk at her, but that exclamation in particular came from a little girl on her dad’s shoulders.

Anetra waves at her as she swings by on a streetlight, and the kid waves back, practically a caricature of cuteness sitting on her dad’s shoulders with her missing teeth and pigtails. Not a man, she wants to correct sunnily, but she stays mute. The public’s general assumption that she’s a dude keeps her cloaked in an extra layer of secrecy, and she can’t afford to shed any of those.

Sometimes she wants just a little bit—a modicum, one might say—of recognition. At least a small sign, somehow, that people get what she’s putting herself through, that what she’s doing isn’t for nothing.

But she understands that that’s not worth sacrificing her identity and her safety for, even if this life feels like it’s grinding away at her slowly. The isolation of it all is hard, but it’s for a reason. She can’t risk any of the Spider’s shit finding its way into Anetra’s life, because then that endangers all the people who know Anetra, tangles them all in the Spider’s web.

The Spider doesn’t have friends who can get hurt. Anetra does.

That man’s crooked smile shines in her mind like an afterimage of a bright flash. She lands hard on her feet in the alley behind her building, his words biting at her heels and hounding her.

Nothing from a fight’s ever stuck with her like this before. Chills travel down to the very ends of her extremities, and sparks scatter across her vision, the very first warning sign of an oncoming migraine.

Something is coming for her.

She zips up her sweatshirt so her suit is hidden, rips her mask off and stuffs it in the pocket, tries to shake off what’s left of the Spider unsuccessfully.

One shuddering breath is all she has time for before she’s cramming her key in the lock and opening the door, shoving it hard with her shoulder because it always sticks in its frame in the summer with the New York heat.

“Hi!” she shouts. It’s late, but Marcia doesn’t go to bed for at least another hour on weekends, so she’s loud just for the sake of it, just to jog loose the calcified anxiety in her mind.

“Hey!” she hears yelled in a singsong reply from the front room. After quickly making herself a taco from the ingredients Marcia left out, she heads that way with her hands in her pockets, a little more urgency in her step than usual.

On days where she spends more time in the mask than out of it, when the mental box she’s forced around her little vigilante hobby won’t stay closed and terrifying images flash through her mind every time she closes her eyes, she needs to get back to herself again, and Marcia’s always been her key for that.

She knows Marcia inside and out. Marcia knows her outside and in. They’ve been roommates since they both moved to New York, connected through one of those terrible Facebook groups that every desperate person moving to a big city joins on some wild hope that they’ll be able to find everything they need to survive in the posts there.

Anetra didn’t find everything she needed (no one on Facebook knows where to find good Puerto Rican food), but she did find Marcia. On her sappier days, she’ll say that that’s about the same thing.

Marcia is facing away from Anetra when she comes into the living room, sitting on their saggy old couch with her feet tucked up against herself and her laptop balanced on her knees. When she hears Anetra’s footsteps on their creaky-ass floor, though, she tilts her head all the way back over the arm of the couch so she can see her, and then she smiles.

Anetra feels her shoulders relax, and lets out a sigh under her breath. She’s okay, she’s here. Everything is well.

“Hi,” she says again.

“Hey,” Marcia says, repeating herself as well to go along with the bit. She’s still smiling, a few veins in her head popping with the upside-down position. “Oh, good, you found the tacos. You gonna say ‘hi’ again, or can I ask you how work was?”

“Work was fine. Now, sit your ass up or you’re going to pass out with all that blood rushing to your big head,” Anetra warns, hopping onto the other side of the couch and poking Marcia’s calf with her foot.

“Just fine?” Marcia asks once she’s readjusted into a normal seated position, ignoring Anetra’s jab about her head. Usually she’d make a bit out of it, act all wounded and everything. It makes Anetra a little nervous.

“I mean, yeah,” Anetra says, shrugging to sell it. “What, you want all the gory details of how my pelvis got a lot closer to a lot of old men’s faces than I ever wanted it to?”

“No, ew, no,” Marcia replies, scrunching her nose up in disgust. She’s wearing her glasses, so the gesture is a little funnier than it normally is. “No, I just—they’ve been asking you to take a lot of extra shifts, is all. Waitressing and dance. Is that okay? Are you… is, um. Is money okay?”

It’s a clunky way to ask a sensitive question, but it’s always been a clunky topic between the two of them. It’s very simple, really. Marcia comes from money. Anetra does not.

As far as how much rot generational wealth can cause in a brain, Marcia’s on the good side of things: she’s fairly aware of the privilege she’s held and continues to hold in society, lives modestly on her own teacher’s salary without help from her parents, and challenges her peers from youth on their wealth and what they’re choosing to do with it.

However, she still grew up a rich kid, and that’ll fuck a person right up.

There are things she’s never even had to begin to conceptualize because of the many layers of plush societal protection she was swaddled in from birth. It makes her a little dense on certain topics, like service jobs and financial etiquette, even after almost ten years away from her parents’ lifestyle.

“Money’s fine,” Anetra assures her, a little tightly. Marcia knows she’s very lucky to have a gold-lined safety net at the ready whenever she needs or wants it, and she consistently reminds Anetra of its application to her as well.

Never mind that Anetra would maybe rather die, eat shit, and give herself over to the mysterious woman that wants the Spider dead before she accepts help from Marcia’s parents.

Growing up poor’ll fuck you up too.

“Good,” Marcia says, equally tense, sensing she’s overstepped. “Okay. Yeah, that’s good.”

Anetra feels a little guilty. Marcia can be naïve when it comes to money stuff, but she would have good reason to believe Anetra’s hurting for cash right now, with how many times she’s said she’s covering a shift or dancing late when she’s really out tangling webs all over the greater metropolitan area.

“It’s not the money,” she says, gentler now. “I, um. I’m putting in the hours to try and get a better time slot when I dance. Kind of want to go for a more respectable crowd than the ten-to-midnight folks.”

Marcia nods, slowly. She takes her glasses off and stares at them intently while she polishes them with her pajama top.

“Dick move on my part, bringing up money,” she says quietly. “I’m sorry.”

“Hey, no, it’s all good,” Anetra says easily, because it really is. Marcia never means any harm. Her parents are assholes with no intent of ever redistributing their wealth outside of their family tree, and Marcia’s entire adult life has essentially been an exercise in atoning for that in any way she can think of—including offering trust fund money to her club dancer/waitress/general service worker roommate.

Anetra understands making what you can out of your shitty upbringing, she really does. She just tends to prickle at the slightest insinuation of charity. And Marcia is anything but subtle.

“I—You would tell me, if something else was going on?” Marcia asks, gaze still fixed on her lap, her voice a little faint. Her eyes flick up to meet Anetra’s, just once.

Well, Marcia, there was this spider in your coworker’s girlfriend’s lab that we toured that one time, and it bit me, and now I can traverse walls like gravity isn’t even real and I have superhuman reflexes and I can sense oncoming danger and I built myself these gadgets so I can swing all around the city and I’ve been using all these aforementioned abilities to fight crime—

“I would,” she says, cutting off her train of thought as she tries to get Marcia’s eye contact back. It’s a lot simpler than all of those other things she wants to say. It’s also a lie, or a partial one.

Not if it’s going to hurt you.

They don’t lie to each other if they can help it. But Anetra can’t help it, not in this circumstance, not if she wants Marcia to stay safe, so she meets Marcia’s eyes and compels her to believe her answer.

She sells it at least enough to get Marcia to relax, and she smiles again, a little wearier this time than before.

“Well, if stuff does come up, you know you can talk to me,” she offers, putting her glasses back on. “And I hope you get that evening gig. It sounds classy.”

Anetra snorts. “Nothing at Piranha is ever going to be classy.” She’s eager to move away from the topic at hand. “What are you working on?”

Marcia grins, and turns her laptop screen to face Anetra. “Just the choreography for the recital,” she says, the anxiety starting to fade from her posture as she sits up excitedly, shifts so that they’re sitting right next to each other. Anetra can feel the warmth of Marcia’s body through the layers of her sweatshirt and her suit.

“Oh, shit, yeah. Landed on a theme yet?” Anetra asks, clicking through the different tabs Marcia has open.

“Nothing’s good enough,” Marcia sighs, shaking her head and taking back control of the cursor to navigate to the document where she has all her brainstorming laid out. “I don’t want to do another recital where the teacher makes all the little girls dress up like flowers. That’s been done. It’s tired.”

“Oh, for sure,” Anetra says with mock seriousness, and then starts giggling when Marcia shoves her.

Anetra doesn’t really understand this whole world of dance that Marcia moves through with ease. She was a taekwondo kid. This is not her lane.

Obviously, that doesn’t stop her from attending every recital with a bouquet to throw at Marcia when the curtain falls, making it her personal mission to cheer the loudest for the kids out of everyone else.

She also likes to put in her opinions when Marcia brings her work home, like here, now, helping her decide on whether her middle-grade students’ suggestion of “Night of 1000 Beyoncés” as a theme is realistically going to work. Anetra sketches out a few test costume ideas while Marcia searches up some different medleys she can choreograph to.

Eventually, while they’re working side by side, as one in the morning comes and goes and two A.M. swiftly approaches, Anetra feels herself starting to drift off. Her body feels as if it’s melting into the couch, and without the adrenaline from earlier her bruises are really starting to ache. Her jaw feels tender where the guy clocked her with his fist, and she tried to clean off her nose but there’s definitely some dried blood up in there that’s making breathing uncomfortable.

She yawns widely, sticks her tongue out like a cat. That’s usually a surefire way to get a giggle from Marcia, but when it’s met with silence Anetra glances down to her side and breathes out a quiet laugh.

Marcia is slumped over, asleep, her head on Anetra’s shoulder. She’d been silent for a while, but Anetra hadn’t thought much of it, perhaps a little too singularly focused on the Destiny’s Child costume design she was working on instead of her overtired roommate next to her.

“Alright. Bedtime,” she murmurs, mostly for herself, not expecting a response.

First, she has to slip out from under Marcia without waking her, which she manages with a considerable amount of effort. She eases the laptop from the other woman’s lap, then plugs it in and lays it to rest on the coffee table. She moves to the kitchen to put away the tacos Marcia left out for her, feeling a delayed wave of tired gratitude at the gesture as she does, and finally sets the dishwasher to run as wipes down the countertops.

When she goes back to the living room, picking up pieces of paper and assorted trash as she does, Marcia is still out for the count. Her often-worried expression is always smoothed out when she sleeps, the normally constant lines of anxiety at her brow or temples thankfully absent.

Anetra stands there paralyzed for a second.

Something warm and sacred, a feeling that outpaces verbalization, beats in her chest.

Before she can let herself really feel it, Marcia is blinking awake, slowly, stirred by some invisible force, and whatever was striking through the lightning rod of Anetra’s body vanishes, renders her mobile again.

“R’you watching me sleep?” Marcia mumbles, teasing, stretching her body out long from the tightly curled position she had fallen asleep in.

Anetra tosses one of the crumpled pieces of paper she grabbed off the floor at the blonde’s head to take some of the weight out of the air between them. “Obviously,” she says, lobbing the joke right back. “How else am I finally going to achieve my mission of killing you after all these years?”

Marcia catches the paper ball out of the air easily, yawning as she does so. “Playing the long game, I see,” she replies. The bit isn’t worth entertaining further, so Anetra doesn’t try, instead goes to grab Marcia’s arm so she can haul her up off the couch.

“Come on, bed,” she coaxes. “You hate sleeping on the couch. It’s a bad couch, we should get a new one.”

“Nee-trah,” Marcia whines, gone childish with sleep, and Anetra just shakes her head and sighs before bending at her knees to throw Marcia over her shoulder like she weighs nothing.

She does this all the time, it’s a bit between them, but it used to be harder, before superstrength. It seems like an obvious statement, but it speaks to something she’s learning over and over again: her life has been irrevocably changed. She is different now, as much as she doesn’t want to be.

Marcia shrieks out a surprised laugh and flails wildly for a minute, like she always does just to be funny, but then she goes limp so it’s easier for Anetra to carry her.

“Should fall asleep on the couch more often,” she muses appreciatively, her voice getting raspier as she lets her drowsiness creep back over her, and Anetra snorts, jostling her a little bit to at least keep her awake until she can toss her on her bed. “What time do you have to get up tomorrow?”

“Not till nine or something,” Anetra replies, punctuating her statement by throwing Marcia over her shoulder onto her crumpled bedspread, then launches herself into the air to land hard at her side, giggling at the way the mattress momentarily buckles under her. “I don’t work tomorrow. What about you?”

Marcia flops over on her stomach and groans against the fabric of her quilt. “Seven. I don’t have class till nine, but Jan wants me in early so we can talk logistics for the recital at the end of the week.” She turns her head to smile beatifically in Anetra’s direction. “No chance you wanna go in my stead? Deal with Jan’s mania?”

Anetra winces and shakes her head vigorously. “Nope.” She stretches her arms long over her head, then looks over to where Marcia’s pouting and laughs. “What if I bring you lunch? We can eat together after your class.”

Marcia visibly brightens and nods. “Yes, please. Suki’s?”

Anetra hops up off of Marcia’s bed and salutes. “Tomorrow at noon,” she promises.

“It’s a date,” Marcia answers, yawns. Her eyes start to fall closed with the end of the conversation, and Anetra stands in the doorway for just a moment.

She had a crush on Marcia, way back when in those early days, debilitating and whole-heart-seizing. Her mouth went useless whenever her roommate asked her a question, and her heart would pick up to a terrible, pointless speed whenever the other girl leaned over her to plug in her phone or to grab the last egg out of the fridge.

Recognizing immediately that falling for your roommate is a terrible cliché at best and severely endangering your living situation at worst, Anetra never gave the feeling air, since it would’ve been more than a little stupid. She put her nose to the ground and worked her ass off, waitressing at the bar during the day and dancing at night, and eventually, with no time to dedicate to it, the crush died off like an uncared-for plant.

Marcia’s her best friend, and she wouldn’t trade that for anything, but sometimes that crush wakes up a little bit, shifts and rumbles around her chest.

Maybe it was never really asleep. Maybe, by not giving something air, all you do is make it writhe around and become more stubborn, more insistent.

Well. Whatever. She never told Marcia then, and she certainly can’t tell her now. It would be foolish to think something ever could come of it besides losing the closest person in her life.

She’s been working to get over this feeling for years—for years—at this point. She will, she can.

She leaves the doorway and goes down the hall to her room, slamming a mental lid shut on her waxing nostalgia as she does so.

As soon as her bedroom door falls shut behind her, Anetra shucks off the top layer she has on, her sweatshirt and pants discarded so that she’s just wearing her suit, then shrugs her way out of that too. She shuffles down the hall to their shared bathroom just in her bra and underwear, and sits heavily on the toilet lid to assess the damage from the fight earlier.

She sighs as she probes her various bruises with light fingers, flinching at the deep pain she can feel beneath the faintly tinged skin. Tomorrow, they’ll all be vibrant and awful and hard to explain, but for now all she’s got is a terrible ache, with no evidence of its presence. It’s kind of infuriating.

Other than her for-now-invisible bruises, her nose is tender from the hit earlier, but otherwise seems fine, and even though she sustained a few really rough hits it seems like she didn’t break any bones.

Once it’s established that altogether, she’s fine, she exhales, heavy. Heavy enough that her shoulders start to curl inwards with the deflation of her lungs. Her neck goes loose, and her head slumps forward over her chest.

She’s so tired.

It’s a kind of tired that has settled in her bones. She can’t sleep this off, she can’t shake this easily. The only way it feels like she’d be able to rest again, really rest, would be to hang up the mask, sitting in the pocket of her hoodie down the hall, for good.

She’s in too deep with this whole flip-side world to even entertain the idea of doing that.

For a while, she stares blankly at the tile at her feet—it’s cheap New York apartment tile, unevenly discolored and easy to stare at while you get lost in thought—but eventually, her aching body necessitates getting up from the uncomfortable toilet lid and picking her way back down the hall.

As she walks through her bedroom door, she strips off her bra and throws on a shirt to sleep in (it says EVERYBODY GET FOOTLOOSE! in egregiously large letters on the back, leading Anetra to believe that one of Marcia’s show shirts might have found its way into her laundry) before hauling her pained, overworked body into bed.

She’s exhausted enough that her eyes fall closed automatically, but then that memory from the alley today flashes behind her lids like a vision.

It’s the not knowing that kills her. The first few weeks of having powers was like this, too, a whole new world of danger where every other step was a stumble, but there were no consequences then. If she trips up now, with this mysterious woman on her tail, then she’s just going to fall and fall.

She needs to get her feet under her before that happens, she thinks to herself, turning over in bed and yanking the covers up to her chin. She doesn’t work tomorrow, so after lunch with Marcia, she can throw the mask on and snoop around under the radar, see what she can find out about this person who wants her dead. Once she has something like a plan in place, the anxiety’s clawed grip on her neck and chest relaxes slightly, allowing her to slip out of consciousness.

It doesn’t leave Anetra in complete peace, though. Her dreams are flashes of pure horror, painted in wailing, assaulting color, and she jolts awake soaked in sweat and pinned to the mattress with fear.

Her alarm clock reads 8:48. She knows she won’t get back to sleep, so she peels herself out of bed and walks out into the empty apartment with some half-baked idea of making some breakfast. She catches her sallow-looking reflection in the hallway mirror on her way to the kitchen, and points some finger guns at it.

“Lookin’ good,” she jokes softly, for absolutely no audience but herself, and tries to smile. It’s kind of freakish with how bad her eye bags have gotten, so she just stops looking. She makes a mental note to ask Marcia if she can raid the huge tub of different skincare products she has going in the bathroom, see if anything will fix the skin issues brought on by becoming a neighborhood superhero.

Because she has the morning free, she uses the time to take care of business.

First, she dunks her whole suit in a bucket and scrubs at the bloody patches with hydrogen peroxide until the water runs clear, then goes downstairs to the laundry room to chuck the whole mess in a washing machine. While she waits for the cycle to be done, she turns on some mindless show and cleans out the gunk from her webshooters, meticulously picking at the mechanisms with a bobby pin. Once she’s moved the suit over to the dryer, she folds herself up all wonky on the couch and searches up some variation of “femme mob boss new york” for at least an hour until she gives up because she realizes it’s pointless and at this rate she might end up on a watchlist.

She doesn’t have a guy in the chair, okay? It’s just her stupid ass stuck with trying to figure out all this shit. Sometimes Google has answers.

After her pointless search, it’s just a matter of finally changing out of her pajamas, getting her suit out of the dryer and putting it in her backpack, and then hauling ass to Suki’s so she can beat the lunch rush and make it to Marcia’s studio in time.

They’re regulars here. It’s an oft-established pattern at this point, really. Whenever Anetra comes in to pick up lunch, Suki is usually there, and will try to engage Anetra in a conversation in Japanese, which Anetra definitely can’t speak. Then she inevitably switches to English, and asks after Marcia and what bullshit their neighbors are up to this month.

“When are you going to make that girl stop eating only vegetables?” she asks ruefully now, packaging up their order behind the counter. “Not healthy.”

“She’s vegetarian, Suki,” Anetra tells her with a snort, filching one of the mints from the register dish. “It’s a moral choice.”

Suki just clicks her tongue. “She needs meat,” she mumbles stubbornly. “Twig of a thing. You are certainly a bad friend if you aren’t making her eat meat.”

“I’ll let you know how me telling her that goes over,” Anetra replies, rolling her eyes good-naturedly, and opens her phone to check Marcia’s location. She’s on the north side of the building, so she’s still stuck in her first-grade class. The parents are probably bugging her again.

“Oh! I have news,” Suki says eagerly, interrupting Anetra’s idle scrolling, and Anetra locks her phone and puts it to the side, giving the older woman her full attention. “That Spider? On the news? I saw her.”

Anetra feels her body temperature shoot up exponentially, then plummet. She shivers without being aware of it. “Come on. What?” she scoffs, knowing she’s laying on the disbelief a little thick.

“In the alley outside of my apartment a week ago,” Suki says, and nods seriously. “With my own two old eyes. These two fuckers—” Suki prioritizes learning curse words in practicing her English—“were in the alley, breaking glass of my building, spraying paint all over the side of the wall, and then before I could even turn from the window, there she was! Immediately!”

“Everyone thinks it’s a man,” Anetra says carefully. Her throat hurts suddenly. She remembers that day. Two little racist shits, spraying awful words on the wall, a bruised old man slumped against the side of the dumpster who had probably tried to stop them earlier. “Did you see the face?”

“Ah, no,” Suki says, and Anetra’s heart only calms a tiny bit. “If everyone thinks it’s a man and it isn’t, then I can be the only one who is right.”

“It’s probably just some dude trying to be a hero,” Anetra says dismissively, and Suki raises an eyebrow, shakes her head vigorously. “He’s probably already tired of it.”

“Sophie, in my kitchen, she also saw the Spider in an alley. Last night! Last night, she saw her! Sophie, come here!”

A girl in an apron and a hairnet pokes her head through the swinging kitchen door, a fresh black eye ripening on her face, and Anetra’s eyes widen before she can stop her reaction.

The fucking girl from last night.

“Sophie, you saw the Spider! Right?”

“They saved me,” Sophie says kind of quietly, not coming any farther into the restaurant. “Some guy pulled me into an alley when I was walking home, and they—they got him off of me, I was able to run.”

Anetra swallows hard. “Wow,” she says, tries to nod. She’s never seen anyone she’s saved after the fact before. It makes her chest tight, her eyes burn. “That’s—I’m glad you’re okay.”

“See? She saw the Spider too! She is helping us,” Suki says determinedly, jabbing a finger against the countertop. “She is real.”

She’s holding the order in one hand, so Anetra grabs it from her quickly, stumbles backwards a little bit. “I. Um. I have to get this to Marcia, Suki. Sorry. Bye, Sophie.”

Suki eyes her a little too closely for comfort. “Okay,” is all she says. “Have a good day, Anetra. Say hello to Marcia.”

Anetra scrambles out the front door, bag clenched tightly in her fist. The box she keeps the Spider in in her head breaks open, bursts free, spills webs and fear and responsibility all over every other thought in her head.

She’s kept the two parts of her life separate for months now, she’s been okay, but now they’re coming together in a way that sets her teeth on edge. Is Suki in danger now? She’s unknowingly closer than a lot of news outlets to guessing who the Spider is. What about that girl, Sophie? Will she be all right? Did saving her once mean that she’ll be a bigger target later?

The streets seem too fenced in by the lofty skyscrapers on all sides all of a sudden, and Anetra feels trapped. She bows her head and walks faster, tucking her chin closer to her chest.

Marcia’s studio building comes rising into her periphery, all light metal and huge panes of glass, but the gorgeous design doesn’t soothe Anetra like it usually does. All she can think is how exposed that building is, how anyone could look in and see her with Marcia on almost any floor of the studio.

When she walks in, though, the panic abates slightly. No one here is talking about the Spider. It’s a uniquely focused atmosphere, the way taekwondo tournaments were for her back in the day. No one is talking about anything but the thing they came here to do, from the tiny six-year-olds enthusing about pliés to their beleaguered parents to the sharp-featured prima ballerina running through her fitness program with her teacher.

Anetra maneuvers through the herds of different layers of tulle to get to the front desk, where Robin, the desk receptionist, hands over a guest pass badge without asking for Anetra’s ID and gives her a tired smile.

“Hard day?” Anetra asks, and it’s settling, to go through this familiar exchange.

“It’s the first day of a camp week,” Robin says dryly. “A million little kids, all sprinting around this huge studio space, and all the upperclassmen think that it’s suddenly my fault that these children are underfoot even though this happens every single fucking year—sorry,” she edits herself, not sounding sorry at all. “Every single year.”

“Yikes,” Anetra says, laughing a little bit.

“Go give Marcia her lunch break, she needs it,” Robin tells her dismissively, waving her hand in the direction of the elevator. “Everyone gets fucked over on a new camp week. She definitely hasn’t sat down all day.”

Anetra gives a little salute. “Will do,” she confirms, tapping the top of Robin’s desk to punctuate her statement. “Good luck not getting fucked over.”

“Honestly, I fucking wish I could get fucked over—I won’t get to see my girlfriend until next week at this rate with the overtime hours they’ve stuck me on,” Robin mutters, slouching in her chair.

Laughing at the other woman’s exaggerated pout, Anetra begins to mime obscenely making out with the back of her hand until Robin screeches at her to stop, and then she hightails it to the elevator while giggling as the other woman readies to chuck something at her head.

She just barely wedges herself into the packed space, and her phone buzzes as the doors close.

FROM: marcia 🌸💖💫🧚💕🌷💗✨💝

SOS!!!!!!!!!

The nine exclamation points are honestly pretty typical for a text from Marcia, but the all-caps is a slight flag for alarm—when the elevator doors slide open to the sixth floor, Anetra steps with a quick pace past all the other open studios to get to the one at the end of the long hall.

“I’m sorry, but I really believe—” is the first thing Anetra hears, Marcia’s voice sounding more than a little exhausted. Marcia is sweet, the sweetest person Anetra knows, but she’s not a pushover, and her voice has taken on that edge that it does when you’re about to cross her line.

“I don’t care,” a woman’s voice interrupts. “You don’t bring this shit into a classroom. That’s for whatever you do at home—Lord knows I don’t agree with that, either, but you will not get my daughter involved in this life you chose.”

She pauses, likely about to barrel into an even more fervent tirade, but that’s when Anetra makes her entrance, unaware of the exact circumstances but ready to roll with pretty much anything.

“Marcia?” she asks, schooling her face into a pout of concern as she pokes her head into the studio space. “Sorry to interrupt, I just thought your lunch break started a few minutes ago.” She holds up the bag from Suki’s, then cuts her gaze pointedly to the clock above the door.

Marcia’s posture noticeably relaxes at the sight of her. A tiny smile flickers across her face.

“Yeah, I’m sorry, ‘Netra, I’m just wrapping up here,” she says sunnily, then turns back to the woman who has a blood vessel popping in her forehead. “I’m so sorry, but as I said, the Pride parade march was a clearly labeled part of this week’s camp, and if your child showed distinct interest that comes from them, not from me. If you’d like for them not to attend, that is between you and your kid and I don’t get involved. If there’s nothing else—” Marcia tilts her head and beams, her eyes flashing dangerously—“I only get an hour for lunch, and I’m going to spend it with my girlfriend.”

It’s a joke, a bit, and one they’ve done more than a few times to get out of sticky situations like this, actually, but Anetra’s cheeks never fail to warm at least a little bit when Marcia calls her that, even if it’s to make a point to a bigoted woman in a kid’s dance studio.

“This isn’t over,” the woman in question grinds out through a clenched jaw, crossing her arms over her chest. Despite her words, she thankfully abandons the conversation and stalks over to the other side of the room where her kid has been chatting with their classmates.

Anetra waves brightly at the woman’s retreating back. “Have a nice day,” she chirps, and Marcia barely manages to suppress a snort of laughter at the false tone as she walks over to meet her.

“Hey,” she says softly, her posture sloping forward into Anetra’s orbit, reaching out a hand to tug at the sleeve of her t-shirt. She’s like this, always; she needs to touch things to get herself back. Anetra has never once minded. She mirrors it and leans in right back.

“Rough morning?” Anetra says, keeping her voice low so the kids still packing up across the room won’t hear their conversation.

Marcia rubs her temples and manages a dead-eyed smile. “No. Why do you ask?”

Anetra slings an arm around her shoulders and traces a soothing pattern with her thumb. “I’ve got an order of veggie rolls with your name on it,” she says sweetly. “Plus we have a whole hour of your break for you to rant about everything that went wrong with camp today.”

“I don’t want to waste your time…” Marcia protests feebly, but it’s just noise and she knows it, knows that they both understand the entirety of lunch will be spent with her complaining and Anetra nodding along gamely. A grin breaks through, a real one, and she rests her head on Anetra’s shoulder happily.

Anetra is watching the last of the kids trickle out the door, waving to the few that are return dancers from last year that recognize her as Marcia’s roommate, when she feels Marcia stiffen next to her.

“Wh—” she starts asking, beginning to turn to check in, but then there’s the light touch of fingers on her cheek that finish the job for her and she’s looking right in Marcia’s eyes, inches away.

The prickle she’s been growing resignedly used to over these past few months skitters up and down her spine, the one that tells her pay attention or something’s up. The noise of it, the feel of it folds easily into the whole-body hum that’s happening under Marcia’s focused gaze, until everything in her is tuned towards the blond standing at her side.

“Trust me,” Marcia whispers, so quietly she barely moves her lips, and then when Anetra has nodded without even entirely being aware she’s done it Marcia is leaning in, kissing Anetra square on the mouth.

They’re two queer roommates. They’re open and generous with sexuality, that’s kind of in the handbook. They’ve made out when they’re drunk before on a dare, Marcia kisses Anetra on the cheek when she gets home sometimes. Casual intimacy is nothing new for them.

This is the same as all of that on the surface—Anetra doesn’t know why she’s being kissed soundly under the fluorescent lights of the studio, she assumes it’s for some bigger reason—but this is the first time she’s ever felt Marcia’s lips against hers when she’s completely sober. This is the first time she can taste that stupid expensive chapstick Marcia always buys, a waxy herbal flavor over top the sensation of spit and flesh.

Marcia pulls away, her eyes a universe, and Anetra’s constant crush is snapping at her heels again. This time, though, she can’t push it away—it’s gained sharper, exigent teeth.

She blinks a few times, and the world around them, which had faded into silence, comes crashing back in with sound and color, the studio space now apparently empty and the lights overhead seeming even brighter in the absence of anyone else in the room.

“Um,” is all she can manage. She casts around for a joke to make, something to make it seem like she wasn’t as affected by that as she was. Marcia is just smiling at her like it’s a regular Tuesday.

“Sorry, that fucking parent’s watching us through the window,” Marcia tells her, inclining her head just slightly, and Anetra whips around not-at-all-subtly to see the woman from before duck out of the hallway when she realizes she’s been caught. “Wanted to give her a little bit of a show.”

“Ah,” Anetra says weakly, the realization that she actually maybe never got over her crush on her roommate making her voice shake a little on its way out. “No, yeah, totally. Stick it to the man. Or woman.”

“Anyway,” Marcia continues breezily. “You have Suki’s for me, and I got an hour. Wanna eat up on the roof?”

Anetra just nods, and Marcia pushes off the wall they were leaning against to go grab her bag from the corner. Anetra takes the time to breathe in through her nose and out through her mouth and shut away all of this to be dealt with later.

Being the Spider is hard. It’s the hardest thing she’s ever had to do. But most of the problems that arise from that can be solved with a well-placed punch or a couple webs tangling something (or someone) up.

This isn’t that.

She’s still got to do some reconnaissance on this person who’s got it out for her today. After lunch, she can swing around for a while and hope that a solution to this newly reinvigorated crush appears in the skyline while she does so.

Marcia skips back over to her, smiling wide.

“Ready to listen to me for an hour?”

It was sunny when Anetra left home, but it’s overcast and a little drizzly now. Neither of them mind as they curl up in two plastic chairs sat opposite each other on the roof, the access door propped open behind them with Marcia’s class binder.

Anetra can almost forget the charged moment in the studio, chucking the wrappers of the plastic silverware at each other and laughing at the stories Marcia tells about her kids’ antics.

“Fucking Michael F., then, what does he decide to do? Tries to execute a lift with Marie without telling me first. Not only does that not fit at all with the choreography, they’re also eight. They can’t tie their own fucking slippers up.”

Anetra nods sagely, like she’s also an experienced dance teacher and not some half-waitress half-dancer at a gay bar. “I think—” she starts, but then the access door creaks open.

That prickle, again, at the back of her neck, except this time Marcia shows no signs of suddenly jumping her bones, so Anetra sits up straight, casts an eye around, feels around for her backpack with the suit and webshooters in it.

“Hey,” she hears from behind them, and although her mind relaxes at the recognizable voice, her body stays alert, won’t shut down all her heightened warning systems.

“Hey, Kerri,” Marcia says through a mouthful of sushi, waving with her chopsticks. “Finally got a break?”

“Yes, finally,” Kerri grumbles, shuffling towards them, running a hand over her face.

Kerri is the prima of the company’s production of Swan Lake that they’re putting on this season. Marcia is Anetra’s favorite at the studio, always, unquestionably, but Kerri is raw fucking talent. She’s still young, but moves with the lithe grace of someone with twice her training. She dances so fluidly, all while keeping her eyes locked on some invisible, unreachable horizon. She’s kind of miraculous.

She’s also, at this moment, looking more than a little exhausted when she slumps into one of the vacant chairs by the two of them. Kerri and Marcia continue to chat for a while using dancer jargon Anetra only barely has a grasp of, and Anetra just sits there silently, her whole body ringing in alarm like a sheet of metal someone hit with a hammer.

Her knee jogs up and down anxiously. She has no reason to be afraid of Kerri. She knows Kerri, not well, true, but she’s been in Marcia’s orbit since she was a newbie at the studio. So why is she on high alert?

“You okay?”

Marcia’s voice cuts through the static of Anetra’s overpowered sense input, clear concern coloring her tone.

“Yeah, I—yeah,” Anetra says, shaking her head slightly as if jostling something loose. The ringing in her ears has grown louder. “Yes. Sorry. I just have to get going.”

“Oh, yeah, of course,” Marcia replies, obviously still worried. She gets to her feet quickly, gathers up all their trash. “I’ll talk to you about being a TA for that technique class next week?” she asks Kerri, and when she gets an elegant nod she smiles. “Okay, great. My lunch break’s over, anyway. Let’s get going, ‘Netra.”

Anetra nods a little weakly, almost unable to hear over the buzzing in her ears. Marcia takes her hand loosely, and she lets herself be tugged down the stairwell back down to the lobby. Every sound is grotesquely amplified, every light feels too bright. The months-old bite on her calf pulses and aches.

“Is it a migraine?” Marcia asks softly, and it sounds like Anetra’s listening to her from several feet underwater.

“No,” she tries to say as normally as possible, tries to achieve how she would normally sound. “No, I think I’m fine. I just need to go home.”

“I’ll walk you home,” Marcia tells her immediately, determined, and Anetra shakes her head again, maybe a little too quickly.

PAY ATTENTION. SOMETHING’S GOING ON; PAY ATTENTION. EYES UP, EYES UP, EYES UP.

She only gets this feeling when something’s about to happen. Usually, it’s an attack of some sort. She’s not endangering Marcia, not if there’s even the ghost of a chance that she’ll get hurt.

“I’ll be fine, Mar. I’ll text you,” she says dismissively, and the words sound small even to her, but they get Marcia to loosen her grip on Anetra’s arm.

“I… okay. Text me. I’ll see you at home?”

Anetra hates that she can hear the new uncertainty in Marcia’s voice. She hates that she knows that she put it there.

“I’ll see you at home,” she echoes, trying to put every bit of certainty she has into this one statement.

Marcia swallows, and Anetra can feel her eyes on her back as she all but runs out of the studio.

Once she’s out of sight of that terribly windowed building in an alley a block or so south, Anetra sinks to the ground, pressing the heels of her hands into her eye sockets.

“Ow,” she mutters. “Jesus Christ, this cannot be useful.”

She tucks herself behind a dumpster, strips and then pulls on her suit and mask. Her mind throbs.

She sprints up the wall, gets to a roof, and tries to breathe, gives in to the alarm bells her powers have been sounding off for the past few minutes straight. Her body tenses into a ready position instantly—she’s discerned over the past couple weeks that this feeling is most similar to a panic attack.

The adrenaline spike is overwhelming, but it’s all intentional, directed, pointed towards a prerogative that she hasn’t been clued in on yet. Sometimes, when she’s too scrambled, when she can’t follow the thread being led out for her, the heightened senses misfire and she ends up with a debilitating migraine.

She can’t afford to be laid up for the rest of the day; she needs to solve this, now.

“Okay,” she mumbles aloud to herself, darting up to the roof easily and casting a long, searching look to the streets below, letting her senses take over. “Okay, what are you trying to tell me?”

She cuts through the ambient noise of the city without effort to zero in on whatever anomaly is present, ignoring yelling children and car horns and—there.

A tug in her lower gut, not dissimilar to the feeling when a rollercoaster is about to drop, as she’s honing in on an alley in Midtown.

She’s swinging her way there before she even makes the conscious decision to do so.

When she lands hard on the ground in an abandoned stretch of sidewalk, she can feel her heartbeat in her teeth, every single cell in her body screaming at her that something is going to happen.

She rounds a corner, makes it to the alley she felt her hackles raise for, and the awful feeling somehow intensifies.

This is the alley from last night. Her blood is still drying on the wall a couple yards down.

Immediately, she’s up on the balls of her feet. If those fuckers from last night are back, she’ll pull absolutely no punches this time. This was a trap, that’s why, that’s why the space behind her eyes feels like it’s imploding.

She runs farther into the alley, fists up and head low, but no one bursts out—she stands there in the wind-whistling silence, tensed for a fight that isn’t coming.

Her shoulders drop. She’s breathing hard under the mask, and a spill of light blooms in her left eye, signaling an impending migraine.

“What do you want?” she screams to no one, and of course no one answers. She whirls around, ready to just punch the wall behind her until her suit tears and her knuckles bleed, but what she sees painted there makes her stop dead in her tracks.

A too-clean, too-perfect graffiti painting of her mask.

COME FIND MOTHER is painted in large, stark, even letters under the enormous paint job, a signature, a command.

Oh, fuck.

The dizziness that comes with all her migraines hits her in a terrible wave, and she has to sit down, staring up at the likeness of her face on the wall as it stares right back, the red slash painted over the left eye of the mask just like it is in real life.

Mother, she thinks through the oncoming fog, racks her brain and comes up with nothing. No one she knows of would use that as their moniker—it’s too old-fashioned, too traditionally powerful.

This development is newly unnerving. The city’s underground power structure is against the Spider, obviously, but none of them have actively singled her out yet besides this new player.

Mother isn’t like the rest of that structure, anyway; Mother is an unknown. Anetra doesn’t know what she’s capable of. And that makes her a hell of a lot more dangerous than the slimy mob bosses she’s used to fucking with, and this callout becomes a lot more fucking substantial.

Anetra stands up, her left eye beginning to black out with the migraine, and she stumbles a little bit. Home. She has to get home.

Unable to brave the subway in this state, and even more unable to walk the many, many blocks home, Anetra hobbles her way to the nearest northbound L tracks, casts a web to swing herself onto the top of the oncoming train and just hunkers down once she’s landed.

The wind is cool through her mask, soothing against the rising temperature of her skin, but it does nothing to calm her thoughts.

She feels stupid and small.

When she was a kid, and she wished for superpowers in the same way that every kid does, it was a fantasy about finally, finally having some control over her little life. No one can tell you what to do if you can punch through walls or fly at the speed of light.

The thing that her child brain couldn’t comprehend, though, is that your problems grow at a speed that outpaces your ability. If you could fly at the speed of light, then some time-space continuum thing would probably crop up that you wouldn’t be able to fix even with that speed. If you could punch through walls, then maybe you wouldn’t be able to punch through walls fast enough to save anyone.

And if you can swing around on webs and have a sense for danger, maybe someone will hunt you down for it, and you’ll have no idea how to stop them or who they even are.

Her migraine begins in earnest right as she stumbles through the front door, managing to lock it behind her as she walks through the house, closing all the curtains before the pain gets unmanageable.

“Suit,” she mumbles to herself. “Suit’s gotta come off.”

She flings it over her chair in the corner, then chucks a blanket over it as an afterthought to keep it hidden. Even that small action makes her head pulse. She grabs Marcia’s pajama shirt she threw on the bed this morning and tugs it back on before falling over top of the pillows, unable to even cross the room to close her own blinds.

She doesn’t sleep—she never can when she has a migraine. She just lays there until it passes. Usually, she feels the warning signs and prepares, grabs a cold rag and fills her waterbottle, but now she’s in the thick of it and all she can do is brace her body and wait for it to end.

Her door creaks open quietly after about an hour, and the small sound may as well be an ice pick above her left eye. She makes a small, pathetic, embarrassing little noise at the sensation.

Once the sharp ache dips back into a dull thud of pain, there’s soft footsteps over to the side of the bed, then the heavenly sensation of a cold towel being pressed to her neck—Marcia, Anetra thinks, and feels her whole body relax, just a little bit.

“You’re okay, baby,” Marcia murmurs, barely a whisper, the noise not aggravating the thrumming pain under Anetra’s skull. “I’m gonna close these curtains, make it darker in here.”

The word ‘baby’ sticks with Anetra for longer than it should.

Marcia closes all the blinds as quietly as she can, Anetra sighing at the slight relief it gives her, and then she comes back over to the side of the bed with Anetra’s waterbottle in her hand.

“You should drink water,” Marcia commands in her soft voice, and Anetra just sits up slowly, trying not to whimper at the pain the movement causes, and lets Marcia tip the bottle for her to drink from.

“‘M sorry,” she manages once she’s had a few sips.

“You don’t have to be sorry,” Marcia murmurs automatically, then chews on her cheek for a second, just watching her. “Just… why didn’t you tell me you were having a migraine?” she murmurs, her expression unreadable in the dark room. “I would’ve walked you home.”

Anetra doesn’t have the brainpower to lie, so she slouches back down among the pillows, curling up on her side.

“I didn’t want you to get hurt,” she mumbles into the fabric of the sheets.

Marcia’s confusion is palpable. “No one was gonna hurt me at the studio if I walked you home, ‘Netra. I—camp is stressful, but it isn’t—you should’ve told me,” she says, then flinches when she realizes she spoke too loudly near the end.

“Yeah,” Anetra whispers. “Yeah, maybe.”

“Tell me next time,” Marcia says, her voice near-silent. “You shouldn’t have to—you have people who will take care of you.”

Anetra says nothing, her words all spent, so Marcia’s footsteps quietly retreat towards the door. The door handle turns softly, and without being fully aware she’s speaking Anetra hears her own voice—

“Stay?”

There’s nothing but the sound of two people breathing for a moment. Then, Marcia’s footsteps start again, this time coming closer to the bed, and Anetra feels the mattress dip as Marcia lays down, her body warm at.

“Is this o—” she hears Marcia begin, softly whispered then broken off into quiet, and instead of saying anything Anetra laces her fingers with Marcia’s and holds their hands together over her stomach.

Gently, Marcia’s thumb rubs over the fabric of Anetra’s pajama shirt, an unconscious, comforting movement.

“You’re okay, baby,” Marcia murmurs again. “It’s all right.”

It’s a running joke between them that Marcia is always right, about everything, for all time.

Everything is not okay, not in the grand scheme of things, but in this present moment, the world shrunk down to just two people, Marcia’s right.

Anetra’s okay. It’s all right.

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