Chapter Text
Seriously, fuck New York.
It's one thing to have to deal with things one normally deals with in big cities, like crime rates, and pollution, but someone or something has to be taking the piss here, because how come everything weird happens in this godforsaken place?
First it was the lizard guy, then the living short-circuit – who happened to be her classmate – then the rhino dude, then the sand person, and now some stupid gang or something breaking into a mega-corp lab and stealing something that appears to be highly confidential and probably dangerous, and of course Spider-Woman has to intercept the truck in the middle of the street while Shauna just happens to be walking on the sidewalk, and she has to duck behind a random car which had been parked there, because fuck New York and fuck supervillains and honestly, fuck Spider-Woman sometimes, too. Couldn’t she pick a better place to fight these clowns other than a busy avenue full of pedestrians and civilians?
She frowns at the morons nearby taking pictures and videos with their mouths agape like there aren’t bullets flying everywhere, like Spider-Woman isn’t webbing random manhole covers and street signs and empty police cars to fight them – seriously, how much property damage has this lady been responsible for in the last year alone?
She spots Jeff Sadecki and Randy Walsh on the other side of the road, watching the chaos unfolding in front of them while taking cover behind a bus stop, with big dopey smiles on their faces.
Idiots.
Shauna jumps when a shot hits the car she’s hiding behind, sees the gas begin to leak next to her feet, and, okay, shit, it might be time to move.
She barely manages to sprint away, avoiding the shots as best she can by staying behind any inanimate object she can see, when she hears crackling behind her, and, looking over her shoulder, sees the car beginning to catch fire.
Well, fuck.
She covers her head with her arms when the stupid fucking thing explodes several meters away a few minutes later (why the hell would it explode?! What the shit is this, a movie?), feels the heat wave wash over her even at the tree she’s taken cover behind, the glass in the nearby store fronts shattering in unison, raining shards on the sidewalk, and, to her left, she sees the gang’s truck tumble, turn over from the explosion, the back of it opening and the several cylindrical containers inside it falling over, and, fuck, they are pretty goddamn huge, and the only thing Shauna can think as she’s about to get crushed under one of them is 'ugh, fucking seriously?' when she closes her eyes and prepares for impact.
It comes, but not from what she was expecting – instead, a blur of light pink and purple slams into her, knocks her out of the way, and the container crashes onto the asphalt where she’d been standing a fraction of a second earlier, cracking open and spilling some black goo that looks like some sort of tar all over the road.
Spider-Woman puts her down safely a few meters away, dusts off Shauna’s shoulders and arms.
“You alright?” She asks, voice muffled behind her mask, and Shauna has to crank back her head a whole deal to look at her face.
“Yeah,” Shauna says, a bit grumpy. “Thanks,” she adds, and she means it, because Spider-Woman did save her life even if she had to make a mess of the avenue in the process.
“Don’t mention it.” Spider-Woman is practically nonchalant, cheerful, as she catches a stray street sign that had been flying in her direction without even looking back, and Shauna feels like her voice is familiar somehow, but she doesn’t have time to dwell on it before the superheroine adds, “You should probably get out of here,” and leaps away from her, back to the eye of the storm, kicking the shit out of the few gang members who are still up and unrestrained by webbing.
‘No shit, Sherlock,’ is what Shauna thinks of saying, but she elects not to, instead sprinting to hide behind yet another car, this one further away from the action.
The fight only lasts a few minutes more before Spider-Woman has contained every gang member and secured the truck, and before the cops finally arrive, because for some reason they seem perfectly content on letting the one girl in a pink and purple unitard and a webbed mask do everything they should be doing; though, to be fair, Shauna supposes Spider-Woman is much more competent than them anyway in stopping bad guys, even if she does always seem to demolish her surroundings in the process.
Some things can’t be helped, she supposes. It’s not like the villains are cooperating much in keeping public and private property intact.
(Has she ever had to pay for the damage? Or did everyone just collectively decide that saving lives is compensation enough? Oh, well.)
It’s only when the area’s been cleared out and she’s halfway back home that she notices some of the black goo spilled onto her arm and stained a small bit of her jacket.
*****
She doesn’t sleep well that night.
Well, to be honest, saying she sleeps at all is a gross overstatement. She feels like every time she she closes her eyes and manages to drift off, her mind is filled with flashes of violence, and red, and black goo, and teeth, and she awakens with a startle. Before she knows it, her alarm clock is blaring in her ear, and she doesn’t even bother shutting it off before stumbling into the bathroom, picking up her toothbrush.
She looks in the mirror.
God, she looks like shit.
Her skin is pale, making the dark circles under her eyes from a poor night’s sleep stand out even more. The whites of her eyes are red as she pulls down one of her lower eyelids to take a better look at them.
She brushes her teeth with the sound of the alarm clock still going off in the background.
She thinks of the black substance from yesterday, thinks of how she immediately yanked off her jacket, hiding the sleeve where it had splashed, and practically sprinted home in a panic, slammed the door on her way in without even bothering to say hello to her mother who had been sitting on the couch, watching some reality show Shauna really couldn't care less about. She only really got into bed at approximately three AM, after she’d been sure both her parents were asleep – she’d sneaked off to the back alley then, where she improvised a fire pit and threw her jacket into it, and then had to get rid of all the evidence so her mom wouldn’t ask her why the fuck she’d decided to light a fire in the back alley in the middle of the night.
Should she have said something?
She’s pretty sure she’d have been quarantined and possibly executed if she had told the police.
Would Spider-Woman have told the police? She hadn’t seemed to notice the goo on her sleeve.
(How the hell hadn’t she noticed?)
The alarm clock is still blaring.
She looks at herself in the mirror again, breathes deeply as she finishes brushing her teeth, tries to make her hair look less shitty without much success.
Should she even bother going to school today?
Would people notice if she missed class?
The girls would definitely notice if she missed practice, though. They noticed when Lottie Matthews grew more absent, and started coming to school and practice late, and Shauna has no idea what the fuck is going on with that; she would have blamed it on the fact that her girlfriend died – pretty violently, if what she heard is true – only eight months ago, but Lottie had been distant for a year now. The only person she seems to actually hang out with these days is Natalie, and even then Shauna's pretty sure they’re dating; she’s never seen Natalie look at anyone else that softly.
Ugh. She feels awful.
She splashes some cold water onto her face, rubs her eyes with it.
Christ, that goddamn alarm clock-
She storms out of the bathroom and into her room, slaps the top of the clock with the intention of shutting it off.
It shatters into several pieces under her hand with a sad shower of sparkles.
She freezes, stares at the pile of broken parts that used to be an alarm clock until a second ago, eyes wide.
Fuck, had that thing been that old?
Actually, now that she thinks about it, she did buy it quite a while ago – it was probably in need of a replacement.
Hell, she could just use her phone instead. Who even uses alarm clocks these days, anyway?
She’s not sure how well she’s managed to convince herself that what just happened was totally normal as she gets dressed, grabs her bag and leaves for school.
The fact that she can’t get her mind off of tar-like goo the whole way there tells her she wasn’t very successful.
*****
“Hey, Shipman.”
Shauna breathes in deeply, tries her best not to lose her shit as she addresses Randy Walsh for the fourth time today, without looking at him.
“What?” She asks, in-between gritted teeth.
“So, like, I wasn’t sure if I made it clear earlier today, cause I kinda think it sailed over your head, but I was thinking maybe we could go watch a movie this Saturday? I dropped hints, but I think you didn’t notice.”
She had.
“Yeah, um,” she tries her best not to sound annoyed, trying to act like she’s deeply invested in the equation written down on her notebook, “I don’t think so, Randy. I, uh, have plans this Saturday.”
That’s a lie.
Her eyes drift over to Jeff Sadecki a few chairs away. He’s still looking at Jackie with those stupid, puppy-dog eyes.
Hadn’t he gotten the hint when Jackie dumped him? They are over, have been for months, now-
“Oh,” Randy’s unfazed voice from behind her is like nails on a chalkboard, “no problem. Sunday, then? Or maybe next weekend?”
The bell rings. Jeff gets up and walks over to Jackie. Shauna stays glued to her seat, watching him like a hawk.
Randy’s still talking. She’s not hearing a word.
Jeff bends over, tucks a stray strand of Jackie’s hair behind her ear, touches her shoulder, lightly.
A loud snap from just under her head startles her into looking down.
Her fountain-style pen, the one she’d been writing with, is now in two separate pieces in her hand.
A quiet gasp escapes her lips.
Had she been holding onto it that hard? Even then, that pen is sturdy, shouldn’t have broken this easily – Shauna always makes sure to get pens that can withstand a lot of punishment because she tends to grip things more tightly when she’s angry, which is, as much as she hates to admit, annoyingly often these days.
The black ink spills out of it, down onto her notebook, ruining her notes, and it runs over her hand, in-between her fingers, staining her skin just like the tar had yesterday-
“Fuck,” she gets up, hurriedly, gathers her things as best she can, trying to avoid any more damage, and hurries off towards the door with the pen still in her hand.
“Uh, Shipman, you okay?” It’s Jackie’s voice, now, and when Shauna turns to look at her, she’s studying her with those stupidly pretty big doe eyes, Jeff doing the same with that same dumb expression he always wears on his face.
“Um- yeah, it's just- my pen, see,” she raises the object so Jackie can see it, ink dripping down from it onto the classroom floor. “Accidentally broke it.”
“Oh, shit,” Jackie frowns. “Need some help cleaning up?”
The thought of being alone in the bathroom with Jackie makes her heart race as it usually does, but this time, there’s something else underneath it, and she feels this hunger, feels the strange, sudden urge to sink her teeth into her friend’s neck, and pull, rip apart until she sees red and consume her until they’re one single entity-
“I, uh- no, I’m fine,” she mumbles, hurriedly. “Thanks, Jax.”
Without another word, she turns on her heel and storms out of the classroom.
The bathroom is, thankfully, empty when she gets in there, and she stops in front of one of the sinks, studies her reflection in the mirror, her breathing shaky, uneven.
What the fuck had happened back there?
She’d be lying if she said she’s never had violent thoughts before – most of them aimed at either Jeff or Randy – but they had never been directed at Jackie, and they had certainly never been that violent, that vivid, to the point where she could taste the blood on her tongue, in her mouth, feel her teeth digging into flesh and tearing it apart, ripping it-
She presses down on her eyes with her clean hand, and, when they open, they drift down to the pen still in her hand.
It’s split into two jagged halves, the ink no longer flowing from it, having ran out a while ago. Her hand is painted black.
She glances back up at the mirror.
Her reflection changes, then, out of a sudden, and just for a second, it morphs into something else, something that looks like it’s covered in tar, with a row of sharp, monstrous-looking teeth splitting its face in half in a mockery of a grin, and the tar is moving-
She gasps, stumbles backwards, collides with one of the stalls and barely manages to steady herself by grabbing the open door before she falls on her back inside it.
There’s a black handprint on the door when she lets go.
She tosses the broken pen in the trash can, washes off her hand with probably more violence than would have been necessary, and all but sprints out of the bathroom.
She thinks she sees her reflection change again when she catches a glimpse of it from the corner of her eye on the way out.
*****
A voice calls out to her in the corridor while she’s putting her stuff in her locker.
“Hey, Shipman, wait up.”
God fucking damn it.
She locks her jaw as she turns around to face Randy goddamn Walsh again.
She stares at him, waiting for him to continue.
“You were distracted back in the classroom, so you never answered me.”
Shauna blinks.
“About what?”
“The movies? Sunday?”
“Oh,” Shauna inhales, slowly. “Yeah, no, Randy, this weekend’s really not good for me-“
“Next one, then? There’s this really good Tom Cruise flick on, they say it’s got awesome effects-“
Fucking action movies, because of course. Shauna hates them.
“Look, um,” she presses the bridge of her nose with her thumb and index, in-between her eyes, “Randy, you and I would never work out. We’re too different.”
“I bet being in bed with me would change your mind,” he smiles, lazily, and no, Shauna decides, fuck this.
“Ugh,” she slams her locker door, turns her back to him and starts to walk away.
“Hey, come on, baby, give me a chance-“ his hand is on her shoulder.
His fucking hand is on her fucking shoulder.
She moves before she even knows what she’s doing, spins around and fists her hands on his shirt, registers the startled look in his eyes before she lifts him by the collar like he weighs nothing and slams him against the wall, and suddenly everyone in the hallway is backing away from her, murmuring with scared, hushed voices.
‘Do not call me baby,’ is what she intends to say, but the only thing that comes out of her mouth when she parts her lips is a growl, low, animalistic, and she's got her teeth bared in a snarl, and suddenly, something is whispering in her mind, something that sounds hoarse and beastly and like more than one voice at once:
‘Tear him apart, rip out his throat with your teeth and paint the walls red with his blood so nobody else will have the audacity to touch us, feast on his entrails-‘
“Shauna!”
There’s another hand on her shoulder, this one much lighter, and it doesn’t bother her nearly as much as Randy’s had, and even if she hadn’t said anything, Shauna would have been able to recognize Jackie’s touch on her, because she knows its weight and its grip by heart by now.
Jackie’s voice is concerned, shocked, and when Shauna turns her head to look at her, her big amber eyes are boring into hers with worry written all over them.
“What the fuck is up with you?” She says, hushed, low so that only Shauna can hear, and Randy is still staring at her, his hands clutching hers, futilely trying to pry them away from the collar of his shirt.
Fucking idiot, she should kill him right now and get rid of one more problem in her life by hanging his limbs from the ceiling-
“Shauna, let him go,” Jackie’s voice is firm, and she grips her shoulder more tightly, and, gradually, that awful fucking urge in Shauna quiets down; as it does, she slowly lets Randy down.
His feet touch the floor, and his knees buckle when she lets go of his shirt; he stumbles down on all fours, and unceremoniously crawls away from Shauna in a terrified manner, breaking out into a sprint when he manages to get back to his feet. Such a sight would have normally made everyone witnessing it break into racuous laughter, but the hallway is dead quiet.
They’re afraid of her.
So is Jackie, she realizes, when she looks into those amber eyes that have been haunting her dreams and her every waking moment for four years, now, but she’s better at hiding it.
Shauna can tell, though. She knows her too well, for too long, not to be able to.
“Shauna, what the hell was that?” Jackie’s voice is still quiet, almost a whisper.
“I don’t- I-“
“You fucking busted your locker to shit!”
Shauna’s gaze drifts towards said locker.
The door is bent, ruined, hanging from the one intact hinge left. Her things inside have fallen down to the floor from the force she slammed the door with.
“Seriously, what is happening to you?”
Shauna gulps, unable to meet Jackie’s eyes, and a container full of black tar flashes into her mind, along with a jacket that’s been long since reduced to ash.
‘As if ridding yourself of your jacket would rid yourself of me.’
The thought startles Shauna, because it isn’t a thought, it’s a voice, the voice again, and nobody else seems to hear it.
‘They can’t hear me. I am one with you, and you alone.’
Shauna’s eyes dart around her. She spots Lottie Matthews staring at her with concern from the end of the hallway, Natalie by her side with a wary frown on her face.
“Maybe you should take the day off,” Jackie says, more softly. “Skip practice today. I’ll talk to Coach.”
She wants to protest, wants to tell Jackie that really, she’s fine, but she knows it’s a lie, and everyone’s staring at her like she’s suddenly morphed into Beelzebub in the middle of the hallway, as if she’d snap at them like she did at Randy, and she can’t find her voice.
‘Good. Let them fear us. They should fear us.’
‘Shut up,’ Shauna thinks in return.
‘They are weak. Inferior. We could easily tear them to pieces if we wanted to.’
‘Fuck off,’ Shauna almost says, and, suddenly, she just wants out of here because she can somehow taste blood in her mouth again, so she nods at Jackie.
“Yeah. Okay,” she breathes, quietly, trembling, and, without saying anything else, begins to walk towards the door that leads outside.
(She hates how Jackie seems to flinch when she moves.)
(She doesn’t hate it as much when everyone else parts to let her pass, fear plastered onto their faces and visible in their eyes.)
She looks down at her hand on her way out.
It’s still stained in black ink.
*****
Shauna doesn’t immediately head home.
She normally does, but not today, not after what just happened – she doesn’t want to think of her jacket, or her alarm clock, or her stupid pen, and she definitely doesn’t wanna be in her mom's near vicinity because she doesn’t feel like herself, and she knows something is wrong with her no matter how much she tries to trick herself into thinking that’s not true.
What the fuck did she expect, anyway? The goo thing came from a goddamn hush-hush mega-corp facility, they were definitely not playing with Play-Doh in there.
Fuck, she probably should have told Spider-Woman.
She loses track of time as she wanders the streets of New York, and, before she knows it, the sky has darkened and the buildings and street lamps have lit up.
She isn’t entirely aware of where she’s ran off to, but it doesn’t look like one of New York’s most friendly neighborhoods, that’s for sure. A lot of shops are run-down, and she passes by several sketchy-looking characters on the way.
She’s uncomfortably aware of people's eyes on her, no doubt wondering what the hell a high school girl is doing around these parts this late at night, and, wanting to escape their curious gazes, she ducks into a convenience store.
It’s empty, the slightly annoying buzzing of the fluorescent lights creating background noise as she walks in, past the half-asleep cashier on the counter and down the drinks aisle.
She shouldn’t drink.
She picks up a beer, anyway.
She doesn’t take it to the register, instead standing where she is, staring at it.
The cashier seems to wake up and actually notice her presence.
“Ey’,” he mumbles, groggy, “what you got there?”
She gives him a sheepish look, raises the beer in her hand to show it to him. He narrows his eyes.
“How old are ya?”
“Twenty-two,” she lies through her fucking teeth; she’s not gonna be nineteen until November, and he sees right through it.
“Nuh-uh, you’re not,” he straightens up, and Shauna gets a better look at him. He’s around forty, and he looks as tired as she feels on a daily basis. “C’mon, kid, what are ya doing here?”
She opens her mouth to reply, not entirely sure what she’s gonna say, if she’s gonna try and bullshit him again or just be honest, but before she can decide on any course of action, two men bust through the door, wearing heavy jackets, ski masks, and gloves, clutching a pistol each and pointing at the cashier, who goes white as a sheet.
“Hands up, right fucking now!” The first man yells, and, even though the cashier complies, the robber still whips him with his pistol, an ugly bruise beginning to form on the man’s cheekbone. “All your cash, in the bag!”
The second man steps up to the counter, holds open a bag, hands shaking. There’s a look in the cashier’s eyes, behind the fear, something that tells Shauna this isn’t the first time this happened to him.
She’s seen it in Natalie’s eyes in the few occasions they’ve talked, whenever Nat drunkenly confessed her dad was being a complete waste of a human being again.
The first man seems to notice her presence, turns his head to look at her. The gun follows, while his partner’s remains trained on the poor cashier.
“You too, princess!” He yells, storms closer, and she freezes, eyes widening. “Empty your pockets, everything you got!”
He presses the gun to her forehead, the cold, hard metal making her flinch. Her heart skips a beat. She’s still gripping the beer in her hand.
“Hey, come on, man,” the cashier protests, shaking as much as his voice, “she’s just a kid, leave her alone.”
“Shut the fuck up!” The second man shouts at him, hits him again. His mouth starts to bleed.
“I said, now!” The first man cocks his gun, tries to reach for Shauna’s pockets. Something in her snaps.
Before she even realizes what’s happening, something moves inside her, angry, violent, and she watches in equal parts rage and horror as black tendrils begin to seep through her sleeve and cover her arm, which shifts into a pointed, jagged edge and lodges itself right in the middle of the robber’s chest, running him through, a curtain of crimson hitting the floor with a sickening splash. His hand loosens around the gun, which falls to the annoyingly bright floor tile, uselessly.
She stares at him in horror, already aware of how the gurgling sounds he’s making and the way the blood is gushing out of his mouth are going to haunt her every waking moment from now on; sees the exact instant the life leaves his terrified eyes - amber, she notices, like Jackie’s – before he slips off of her arm, collapses in front of her, in a puddle of his own blood.
The cashier is staring at her with wide eyes, scared, much, much more scared than he’d been of the muggers. The first man’s partner lets out a strangled, mortified, anguished sound which Shauna doesn’t think she’s ever heard coming from another person before, and his shaking hand moves to point the gun at her, his panic clearly visible on his face even under the ski mask.
He begins to pull the trigger.
Shauna catches a glimpse of tears shining in his eyes before her body moves on its own again, and she fucking lunges at him, her hand morphing into a blade to slice his head clean off his neck, washing the store counter, and the cashier, in his blood. His head hits the floor with a horrifying, haunting thud before it rolls to the side and ends up stopping at the foot of the candy aisle.
Shauna stays frozen in place, barely breathing, as the floor tiles get gradually painted in scarlet.
She gasps as she looks at the scene around her, at what she’s done, without really meaning to, even realizing she was doing it, and it looks like a fucking horror show, like a scene from a B slasher movie, the perfectly ordinary background of a convenience store late at night absolutely covered in human blood and housing two fresh corpses.
A choked sob from her left makes her move her head. The cashier is standing exactly where the robber had left him, the blood making the bruises on his cheek look even worse and complementing his own, still running from his busted lip, like some sort of sick color combination. There are tears streaming from his eyes, clearing a path through the gore staining his face, and he’s staring at her like he’s seen a monster.
The red in the store screams at her, draws her eyes to it, and maybe, she thinks, that’s exactly what she is.
She notices his eyes briefly flicking to her hand.
She’s still holding the beer. What’s left of it, anyway, the can now crushed between her fingers, leaking the liquid inside all over her hand to mix with the blood on the floor.
The cashier stares at her, unmoving, unblinking, shaking violently. Trying his best not to openly sob, as if making a sound would make whatever was in her come out again and butcher him next.
She gulps.
Her other hand, caked in the first man’s guts, trembling, reaches into her front pocket. She pulls out the first thing she feels, a wrinkly twenty-dollar bill, numbly sets it on the counter in front of the cashier.
His eyes don’t leave her face.
Blinking away her own tears, she turns to the door, and, still not letting go of the empty can in her hand, dazedly walks out of the store.
*****
People watch her as she walks.
Turn to look at her when she passes, still covered in blood, with shocked, frightened looks on their faces, and it’s strange, she thinks, how she’s never looked particularly intimidating, with her high-school-nerd look at roughly a bit above five feet tall, but people somehow always knew to avoid her even when she wasn’t wearing another person’s guts as body paint.
She wonders what they must be thinking, now that she is.
‘They fear us.’
It stops Shauna dead on her tracks. The voice, the goddamn fucking voice, it echoes in her brain again, and it sounds satisfied, and she starts to hyperventilate.
“No,” she grits her teeth, “shut up.”
‘It is fine. It is as it should be.'
“Go away!”
People gradually stop, begin to back away from her, watching her. She sees a few phones being whipped out.
‘I cannot. I am you, as you are me.’
Shauna shuts her eyes, tries to control her breathing. She fists her hands in her hair.
‘I told you. They would learn not to touch us.’
No. This is not happening. She’s going insane, she’s finally fucking snapped-
‘How did it feel? To taste power, to bathe in their blood?’
“Please-“
‘Admit it. It felt good. It fed the hunger in you.’
“Shut up!”
‘It is not mine, you know. Not entirely. That is why I stayed. I could tell you needed me, Shauna Shipman.’
“I don’t-“
‘This is you. This has always been you. I just gave it an outlet, and you enjoyed it.’
“Please, stop,” Shauna’s voice is a whine, pathetic, quiet, shaky, and she feels the tears begin to flood her eyes.
“Miss, are you okay?” There’s a delicate hand on her shoulder, and Shauna barely registers the voice behind her before she’s snapping around, roaring like a goddamn animal, punching away the poor bastard who thought touching her was an even remotely good idea, and the man flies backwards, the small crowd that had gathered around her parting, screaming, startled, and he’s about to very violently hit the nearby post sign when a pink and purple figure catches him, secures him in her arms.
The crowd murmurs, relief beginning to settle over the nervous tension as Spider-Woman gently lets the man down, checks him over for injuries.
“Sorry, my dude,” she says, apologetically, “came as fast as I could. How bad is it?”
“I think-“ the man gasps in pain, clutches his chest, “broken rib-“
“It’s alright,” Spider-Woman reassures him. “Can someone call the EMT, please?”
Several people immediately take out their phones, dial, Shauna presumes, the emergency number, and she sees it, the way the people are looking at Spider-Woman, like all was lost before she showed up, like she’s hope incarnate, like they’re no longer alone with a monster. She hears it in her voice, the gentleness and reassurance and confidence she can somehow transmit even when her words are muffled by the mask, she remembers how Jackie gushes over her, how cool she thinks she is. How nobody these days looks at her with fear in their eyes, anymore, only admiration, and gratitude, and awe.
For an awful moment, Shauna envies her.
Only a second later, though, she almost feels thankful, because she has no fucking idea what’s going on with her, has no idea how she’s gonna deal with the fact that she just murdered two people, and if anyone in this stupid piece of shit world can possibly have any hope of helping her, it’s the silly-looking superheroine who has saved lives by the dozens, by now.
Spider-Woman gently, carefully steps closer, takes a closer look at Shauna, and, somehow, Shauna can see the recognition in her face, even under the mask and the hood, sees the way her body only slightly tenses.
Spider-Woman slowly points at her, tilts her head, drags out the first word a little, as if remembering her:
“You were at the Life Foundation incident yesterday,” she says, trying to sound as jovial as always, but Shauna can tell she’s nervous, can hear it in her voice, can somehow hear her heartbeat.
‘She’s afraid.’
'Shut the fuck up', Shauna snaps in her mind, and, for once, the voice seems to actually listen as it quiets down.
“Yeah,” she mumbles, hugs herself, takes a step backwards.
The people behind her do, too.
“Uh... what happened?” She’s never heard Spider-Woman sound so unsure before, and the crowd must hear it too, because they begin to murmur again. “Are you... okay?” She gestures to the whole of Shauna, shaking, tearing up, soaking in blood.
“I don’t...” Shauna breathes, swallowing a sob. “I don’t know, I- there’s something wrong with me, I-“
“Why’s that?” Spider-Woman's voice is kind, patient, cautious, as she takes another careful step closer. “What’s wrong with you?”
“I just- there’s just so much hunger and anger,” a gasp crawls out of her throat. “I can’t, I...”
“Hey,” she’s closer, still, “why don’t we get out of here so we can talk in a quieter place, huh? That blood, is it yours?”
The blood, all of it, so much of it, coating the floor, the walls, the shelves, gushing out of a dead man’s neck-
“Stay away from me,” Shauna growls, tearfully, and she’s terrified, she’s terrified of what’s happening to her, and what’s going to happen to her, and what she might do to people-
“Okay,” Spider-Woman assures her, hurriedly, raises her hands, “okay, I’ll stay right here. Not going anywhere, see?”
“Stay away,” she repeats, weakly, clutches her own head which is suddenly pounding, bends over with a groan.
Before Spider-Woman can respond in any way, though, the sudden sound of sirens breaks the nervous, tense silence that’s hanging in the air, and several police cars pull into the road, officers getting out of them with their guns drawn and pointed right at Shauna.
‘Kill them.’
“No!” Shauna’s looking at the ground, trying her goddamndest to ignore the voice, the urge to kill and tear apart and bite and eat-
‘Let me take over.’
“Fucking stop it-“
“Hey,” Spider-Woman raises her voice, alarmed, gestures towards the cops, “guys, I got this one, okay? Just leave it to me-“
“Freeze!” One of the cops is shouting into a ridiculous fucking megaphone, and it makes Shauna’s head throb. “On the ground, now!”
‘Get rid of them.’
“Please-“
‘They are a problem. They will continue being a problem.’
“Look, officers, seriously,” there’s a tone of alarm in Spider-Woman’s voice, now, and it scares Shauna, because she’s clearly scaring her, and it scares the crowd, too, and some of them begin to scatter, run away, while others remain planted on the spot. “Just let me deal with this, okay? There’s something-“
‘They know what we did.’
What you did, Shauna wants to say, but the thing in her head growls at her, and she just groans again.
“Hands up, down on the ground! Now!”
“Seriously, you don’t know what you’re dealing with here-!”
‘They are going to kill you.’
She grits her teeth.
“I’m not gonna say it again, down, now!”
‘If you die, I die.’
The cop is yelling, Spider-Woman is yelling, the voice in her head is yelling, and Shauna doesn’t know what to do, so she just stands there, panting, with a dozen guns pointed at her, a superheroine trying to get them not to fire, and a mass of scared people watching it all unfold.
A cop throws a smoke bomb at her feet.
It happens again, like it did in the convenience store, with her arm, but, this time, it’s her entire body, and she shouts as she’s consumed by the same black tendrils from head to toe, feels her body grow, stretch, as if the thing covering her was an extension of it, and as it engulfs her head, adorning it with a row of sharp teeth she knows are there, feels there, she loses control of her movements.
All hell breaks loose as the thing – she – leaps towards the cop who threw the bomb, wraps one huge, clawed tar-black hand around his neck and tosses him away like a ragdoll. The crowd finally breaks into a panic and begins to sprint away as the cops begin to open fire, and the bullets bounce off of her as if they were airsoft pellets. She somehow hears and feels Spider-Woman move behind her when her own mouth parts and a long, monstrous tongue stretches out of it and licks the blood off her fingers, and, for a milisecond, the awful hunger inside of Shauna is subdued – she wants more of it, wants to bite their heads off, wants to consume their flesh and feel warm blood running through her teeth and down her throat, and when she opens her mouth again to scream, what comes out instead is a beastly roar.
Stop, stop hurting people, please-
Something wraps around her – its – wrist, then, pulls it back, and the thing controlling Shauna turns to see Spider-Woman flying at her, trying to pull her away from everyone else.
‘Move, or this is going to bruise.’
Shauna can’t even begin to question what the fuck it means by that before Spider-Woman’s boot is hitting her square in the face, knocking her back several feet on the asphalt.
From being saved by Spider-Woman one day, to being kicked in the face by her the next.
What a life.
‘Why the fuck didn’t YOU move?’ she thinks, angrily, as the thing gets her to her feet as if she hadn’t just been sucker-kicked by a superheroine, and the area where she’d connected with her face only hurts for a second before the pain gradually fades away to the point where it feels like it had never been there at all.
‘You told me to stop hurting people.’
‘Since when do you listen?!’
‘Duck.’
Shauna blinks and a manhole cover hits her in the head.
‘Fuck, will you DO something?!’
‘Are you giving me permission to do as I wish?’
‘Do NOT kill people. Don’t hurt anyone, just- just get me out of here, please-‘
Spider-Woman webs her again, tries to restrain her, and the creature seems to take Shauna’s thoughts as permission, because it grabs the webbing, pulls on it, uses it as leverage to throw Spider-Woman to the other side of the street, where she crashes against a window and into some poor fucker’s apartment.
‘I said DON’T hurt anyone!’
‘You are truly naïve if you think that even scratched her.’
Sure enough, the heroine leaps out of that same window a couple of seconds later, looking none the worse for wear save for a few glass cuts, and the creature seems to decide that it’s time to move, because it leaps over the cops still firing at it from behind their cars, onto the road behind them, and it takes Shauna away from the action, on all fours, jumping over moving cars and latching onto walls with clawed fingers until Shauna can no longer hear the screams and the gunshots behind her.
*****
Nat is used to Lottie running away out of a sudden.
She knows the gist of dating a superheroine by now, especially one with “spider senses” or whatever the fuck Lottie called it, and she knows sometimes she has to run to get shit fixed and save people. She gets it. It’s what superheroes do, whatever.
She still can’t help but worry for her, though, because she knows the things Lottie fights are pretty fucking far from normal, and she’s scared that one day she’s not gonna hear about Spider-Woman anymore.
And she feels selfish as fuck, because she’s not really worried that New York is gonna lose its protector – well, she is, she’s not an asshole, she can see the good Lottie does for people everyday, and she can see how much the city would feel her absence, but really, her absolute biggest fear is losing the only person she has left.
She knows Lottie well enough by now to know that she wouldn’t hesitate for a minute to lay down her life for someone else, for the greater good, or whatever, especially after what happened with Laura Lee; she knows it well, how it haunts Lottie still, when she hears soft crying in the middle of the night, how sometimes Lottie will jolt awake with a mortified look on her face and tears shining in her dark brown eyes, in the way she’s still wearing a crucifix that doesn’t belong to her, and Nat says nothing, because it doesn’t bother her, not when she knows how much that crucifix means to her girlfriend. She knows she wears it as a reminder of the promise she made to do the right thing, to help whenever and wherever she can, knows that instead of breaking her completely, somehow, the death of her girlfriend motivated her to try even harder than she already did, and she knows that can be dangerous, that willingness to go to the extreme to assure no lives are lost.
She knows Lottie loves her more than life itself, can see it in her eyes when she looks at her, completely smitten, because Lottie wears her heart on her sleeve and can’t really hide anything from Nat, but she also knows Lottie would most likely rather die than watch an innocent person do so.
So, whenever she hears knocking on her window after Lottie has rushed off to save the day, she can’t help but breathe a sigh of relief.
She does so tonight, too, and turns down her music which she knows her mother isn’t hearing because she’s too drunk off her ass to care, before she walks towards the window, and, when she opens it, she feels her heart skip a beat.
“Jesus Christ, Charlotte,” she groans upon seeing the girl standing outside her window, covered in small cuts, glass shards and blood. “What the fuck happened to you?”
“Can I come in?” Lottie’s voice behind the mask is sheepish, apologetic. Nat says nothing as she helps her inside.
“This blood isn’t yours, is it?” Nat can’t stop the worry from bleeding into her voice as Lottie pulls down her hood and takes off her mask, and she winces when she sees the bruise forming over her eyebrow, just below the edge of her scar.
“No, I don’t know whose it is,” Lottie sighs, sadly, and, not for the first time, Nat can see how tired this makes her, how much it drains her, and she’ll still do it, gladly, anyway.
She swears she falls harder for Charlotte Matthews every day.
She tucks a strand of Lottie’s hair behind her ear, lets her hand linger on her cheek.
She sees it in Lottie’s eyes, how something else happened, how this wasn’t a run-of-the-mill bad guy encounter, because there’s worry and anguish shining in twin pools of deep, dark brown, and Nat can’t shake the feeling that this was personal on some level.
“Lottie,” Nat says, gently, tentatively, “what happened?”
Lottie takes a deep breath, her eyes lingering on the carpet before they rise to meet Nat’s.
“I think Shauna’s turned into a man-eating monster.”
