Chapter Text
The Pitt on a Monday morning was typically busy, but for once, it was manageable.
Trinity was restocking a supply cart by the centre of the ER, counting gauze packets more out of habit than necessity, when she caught motion out of the corner of her eye that made her pause entirely.
Victoria was sitting on the edge of the nurses' station counter, a nail file going in slow strokes against her thumbnail, humming something under her breath that Trinity couldn't place. Probably Olivia Rodrigo.
"You're staring," Victoria said all of a sudden, without looking up.
Trinity looked away immediately. “No. I just spaced out.”
"You've recounted that same stack four times. You're definitely staring.”
"It's important work, Crash. Some of us take inventory seriously."
Victoria finally looked up at that, mouth curving, and tilted her head—the kind of tilt that came right before something egotistical left her mouth—and said, "You jealous?”
Something in Trinity's chest did a strange, small lurch, sideways and fast, gone before she could catch hold of it. “What? Why would I be jealous?”
“You keep looking at my hands like you're jealous. Did you want to borrow my file afterwards or something?”
"I’m a lesbian.” Trinity huffed. “I don't need to borrow any of your nail files. My nails are perfect as they are.”
"I don't know… They're looking pretty rough…" Victoria went back to her thumbnail, unbothered and infuriatingly pleased with herself. "Denial is a whole stage of grief, Santos, I'm told."
Trinity opened her mouth to fire something back and found, for one disorienting second, absolutely nothing there. Just the tilt of Victoria's head, replaying, sitting close to a memory of a rooftop and a cat and a really annoyingly witty woman who was really admirable and witty and…
Trinity shook it off. Hard. So many people filed their nails. Clearly, she was losing her mind from sleep deprivation.
"Whatever, Crash." She dropped the gauze count entirely and leaned against the cart. "What’s up with you? You've been in a weirdly good mood all week.”
Victoria shrugged. "I'm always in a good mood."
"You're really not. But what was it you said again? Denial's a whole stage of grief?”
Victoria rolled her eyes and set the nail file down. “Fine. Whatever. I’ve just had a good week.”
"Define good.”
Victoria stared at Trinity. Her face was scrunched up in confusion. “Since when do you care?”
Trinity furrowed her eyebrows, leaning against the counter. “Since always. Can't a girl ask about her favourite med student?”
“If you really want to know…” Victoria grinned cheekily, cheeks pink. “I went on a date last night.”
Trinity’s eyes went wide.
…
She felt kind of sick to her stomach.
Why did she feel sick to her stomach? No. Actually, better question: Why did she even talk to Perlah and Princess if they weren't telling her anything useful?
…
“With Mateo?” Trinity started slowly. “Because I thought we were over that.”
There was a short moment of silence before Victoria burst out laughing. “Im kidding, I didn't go on any date,” Victoria said, still giggling at Trinity's expression. Trinity had to hold back a breath of relief. “I've just been winning a bet I made with annoying guy. That's all. This guy is like, crazy annoying so even just thinking about it just makes me happy.”
"You're so mean,” Trinity muttered.
"You wound me." Victoria hopped down off the counter, brushing invisible dust off her scrub pants, and something about the effortless motion—snagged at Trinity's attention again before she physically made herself look away.
"What about you?" Victoria asked, tilting her head, furrowing slightly at whatever expression Trinity was apparently making. “How are you doing?”
Trinity rubbed her temples. She'd been out late last night, fishing more cats out of trees. If anyone were to ask her why… she wouldn't say.
…
(Spidergirl is up 30 saves. Spiderman is down 15.)
...
"M’fine…” Trinity yawned. “Just really fucking tired. There was a cat that wouldn't stop meowing outside my window. Fucking hate cats.”
Victoria made a face, eyebrows all scrunched and nose all crinkled. “Ugh. I should've known you would be a dog person.”
Trinity made a face back. From Victoria's expression, it wasn't pretty. “And I should've known you would be a cat person. You seem the stubborn fussy type who'd save all cats out of all trees.”
Victoria studied her for a second, curiously, like she might say something else, before the watch on her wrist started to buzz.
She glanced down and sighed.
"Gotta go take a phone call," she said, already moving. "Try not to miss me too much, Santos."
"I will do my absolute best only for you, Crash.”
Victoria was already halfway down the hallway that led to the ambulance bay doors, ponytail swinging, when Trinity's own watch buzzed too—separate, but close enough in time that her stomach did something unpleasant and dropped a little.
Never mind that.
She looked down at the display.
***
Multi-vehicle incident. Transit line. Immediate response required.
***
Her stomach dropped the rest of the way.
~
She made it two blocks before her suit was on, and another six before dispatch's flat, static-chewed voice confirmed what she already knew from the smoke climbing over the rooftops to the east.
Here was the rundown, according to her watch: Elevated transit line, brakes gone somewhere on the downhill grade, no functioning override, six cars packed with a morning's worth of commuters hurtling toward a curve that hadn't been engineered for the speed they were carrying.
Trinity hit the rooftop overlooking the tracks at a dead sprint and skidded the last few feet on her heels, and had approximately one and a half seconds to take in the scale of the problem before something white and purple dropped in beside her, breathing hard, hood already pulled tight.
"Tell me you have a plan," Spidergirl murmured.
"Working on it. You?”
Spidergirl tsked. “No. Not yet.”
The train screamed past below them, metal shrieking against metal, sparks arcing off the rail in a long orange smear, and Trinity watched it take the first curve at a speed that made her queasy by just looking at it.
"There's a hard curve two hundred meters ahead," Spidergirl said, already moving toward the edge of the roof in a crouch, "Not at all rated for this speed. If it hits that at current velocity it derails into the next platform. Which is going to be full, unfortunately, because it's 8:00 am on a Monday morning."
“And then?”
“And then it kills everybody.” Spidergirl snapped. “What do you mean ‘and then?’”
Trinity huffed. "Okay, Jesus. So we slow it down."
"There's no time to slow it down conventionally, the grade's working against us the whole way…” Spidergirl muttered, then snapped. “Okay, here's the plan. I go in first, ahead of the train. I anchor my webs to the concrete supports underneath. Then, I plant myself against the front of it. Brace, dig in, let the webbing take the load through me. Then you can take the back. Web the last cart, plant your feet behind, and brace.”
“So what, you're going to act as the fucking brake?”
“Yes…”
Trinity sputtered. "Absolutely not!”
Spidergirl’s eyes narrowed. "—it's the fastest option, we don't have time to debate this—"
"You're not putting yourself in front of a runaway train." The words came out louder and harder than she meant them to, firmness rising up underneath the panic. "Listen. We web the wheel assemblies so the wheels stop rolling. Then both of us will split the load and act as resistance at the back of the train. Jesus, Spidergirl, we don't need either of us standing in front of six giant blocks of moving metal to make this work."
Spidergirl shook her head. "That won't generate enough resistance fast enough. There might not even be enough room for both of us at the back! I've done the math, I'm telling you, I go in front—"
"I heard you the first time and the answer's still no. So.”
Spidergirl turned to look at her then, mask unreadable, but her whole posture had gone tight and defensive. "You don't get to just say no to my plan because you don't like it—"
"I get to say no when your plan gets you killed. I don't want to drag your dead body off the train tracks today.”
"It won't—"
"You don't know that!" It came out sharper than she meant, edged with something that wasn't about the train at all. The anger, the fear, it felt so familiar to the first time she'd lost someone. Too familiar. "I’m not doing this with you. I'm not risking any of our lives more than necessary. We're doing my plan or I'm not fucking helping you.”
The air filled with the shriek of the train.
Trinity watched something flicker behind Spidergirl's mask, hesitation, maybe, before the train screamed past below them, moving faster and faster.
"We don't have time for this," Trinity said instead, voice rough, already beginning to take a running start, "We go to the back after we trigger the brakes. Both of us. Now."
Spidergirl held her ground for one more second, jaw tight even through the mask, and then nodded once.
"Brakes, then back," she repeated, voice tight. "Fine."
And so they went.
~
It should have worked.
That was the part Trinity kept circling back to later: it should have worked.
It was a perfect plan. Split the load, web the wheel assemblies front and back, web the train and act as a brake so that the whole train slowed before it crashed.
It should have worked.
It was working, too, for the first hundred meters. After shooting webs on the brakes, her and Spidergirl made their way to the back of the train.
They hit the wheel assemblies together, webbing thick and fast, and the train's shriek started to change pitch almost immediately—it was working—before they broke off to anchor drag lines like they'd planned.
Except at the back of the train, there was nothing to anchor to except the tracks behind it.
There were no more support columns holding up the track in sight—this particular stretch of the track seemed to cross open road below, nothing but empty air between the rail and the ground.
Before Trinity could come up with a different plan to hold the train back, Spidergirl was already moving, climbing forward along the side of the car. "There's no more columns back here! I'm going closer to the front, hold back and--"
"So we shoot more webs at the wheels!" Trinity snapped. "We do something else, we don't go in front!"
"We can't wait, the columns start again up ahead, I can see them—that's the only place I've got something to anchor to. You be an anchor for the back, and I'll slow it down near the front, okay?"
"That's not the plan—"
"The plan didn't account for an open stretch with nothing to grab! We can't take any chances!"
There wasn't time to argue it properly, so all Trinity could do was give her partner a nod before she watched her climb further up the moving train.
(Something cold settled low in her stomach.)
...
Spidergirl had started climbing on the side of the train when a switch came up that neither of them had accounted for, an old maintenance spur jutting into their path that hadn't shown on the mechanical plans Spidergirl had shown her, and Spidergirl—out of Trinity's sightline for one critical second—didn't move herself out of the way in time.
Trinity heard the impact before she understood what had happened. A loud crack, and then Spidergirl wasn't against the train anymore, no, she was falling, and every plan Trinity could have formulated went out the side of her skull entirely.
Shit.
She didn't remember deciding to move. She had shot all the webs she could, trying to slow the train down, before she shot a web toward Spidergirl's flailing body. Her web caught a hold of Spidergirl a half second before she would have hit the ground, and swiftly, Trinity yanked the web to pull Spidergirl's body close to hers as they tumbled toward the ground.
They hit the sidewalk ground together, hard, rolling, and the train slowed enough now, finally, mercifully, below the speed threshold that would have taken the curve wrong. It screamed onward, but slower this time.
Slower.
Safer.
For one long, ringing second, that was the only thing Trinity's brain could process.
Nobody in it was going to die today.
Then, Spidergirl made a sound in her arms.
A small one, thin and pained and trying very hard not to be a sound at all, and it did more to Trinity's chest than the entire runaway train had managed. She quickly pulled her away from the open and laid her down.
"Hey." Trinity was at her side before she'd finished the thought, hands already moving, careful, checking all over her body. "Hey, look at me, where does it hurt—"
"I'm fine." The words came out through gritted teeth, unconvincing. The tightness of her tone made Trinity's stomach turn. "I'm fine, it's just my arm I think, God, I just need a second… Holy shit."
"What happened back there? And don't say that, because you're not fine, like at all. You look like shit."
“I don't know what happened. My sense didn't kick it till it was too late.” Spidergirl huffed, then winced. "Your caring act is sweet. Do all the ladies get to witness it or is it just me?"
"The eyes on your mask are bugging out like crazy,” Trinity muttered. There was blood soaking dark through the fabric at her side, more than a scrape, and Trinity felt more sick now than during any operation she’d done at the Pitt. "I need to get you somewhere safer, okay?”
"I'm a doctor,” Spidergirl sputtered out, before crying out. “I– I can assess my own—"
"You can barely hold your arm steady.” Trinity interrupted. “Slow down for a second. Where did you say it hurt?”
"It's– It's just my shoulder. It's dislocated, I can feel it. But I can fix it. I've relocated dozens of these—"
"You are not popping your own shoulder back into socket here, are you insane?"
"I've done it before!"
"Not like this you haven't." Trinity's voice cracked, more than she meant it to, and Spidergirl went quiet, watching her, eyes still twitching. "Please. Just—let me get you somewhere safe. Please."
A beat. The train, in the distance now, finally grinding to a full stop at the platform, sirens rising to meet it.
Spidergirl laughed softly. "Oh. It stopped. We did it."
"We did. So can I take you somewhere safer now?"
"Okay," Spidergirl said, quiet. "Okay. We can go somewhere else."
~
She knew the hospital's blind spots better than almost anyone alive, which was, in this exact moment, the most useful piece of knowledge Trinity thinks she could have ever accumulated in her life.
There was a service stairwell on the east side that fed into an old physical therapy wing that hasn't been too crowded since the new wing opened two years back. She swung them both in low over the loading dock, dropped through the access hatch she kept propped, and got Spidergirl down onto an old exam table shoved against the far wall.
"Okay," Trinity said, already reaching for the first aid kit stashed in the wall panel. "Let's get you looked at properly. I know a doctor two floors up who—"
"Shit, are we at the PTMC?" Spidergirl was already trying to sit up, waving her off with her good arm. "I can't be in here. I can't. Fuck."
"You're bleeding. Bad. You really need a hospital or you won't make it.”
"I told you, I'm a doctor. I can handle a laceration and a shoulder, I've done it a hundred times for other people, I can do it for myself." Spidergirl swung her legs off the table, wincing hard. "I just need to get home. I have a whole kit. I'll be fine."
“Seriously? You're not going to make it home before you pass out from blood loss. Stop being stubborn."
"Watch me,” she snapped, standing up.
"You can barely stand, Jesus Christ.”
"I can stand fine—" Spidergirl insisted, then proved it, badly, swaying enough that Trinity's hands shot out on instinct to steady her, and Spidergirl shrugged the help off the second she had her balance back, jaw set in a way that Trinity recognized somewhat vaguely. "I need to go home. I have a kit. I really can't be here.”
Trinity sputtered. “You're so immature. We need to go upstairs now and get you examined."
"It's fine, I'm fine, I—" She cut herself off with a sharp inhale, hand flying to her side, and when she pulled it back there was fresh blood on her glove, more than there should have been.
"Hey—hey, sit back down—"
"Something's—" Spidergirl's voice had changed, gone tight and confused instead of stubborn, and she pressed careful fingers along the wound through the torn fabric, breath catching hard. "Shit. That's not right. There's something in there."
"What?"
"There's something in the wound, I can feel it, it's not just—" A groan tore out of her, low and involuntary, and she doubled forward over her own knees. "Debris. Metal, maybe, from the spur, it must have gone in when I hit it, I didn't feel it until now, adrenaline probably—"
"Okay. That's really, really bad. That's not something either of us can deal with a first aid kit. We need to go into surgery. I told you, I know someone upstairs-"
"I need to go home,” Spidergirl insisted, though her voice was getting more tired with each word. “I have instruments. Just–Just swing me nearby so I can get to my room—”
"Are you serious? You can't dig metal out of your own side alone in your apartment, are you out of your fucking mind—"
"I've done worse.”
"That doesn't matter!" It came out sharper than she meant, panic finally breaking through the training. "You have a piece of debris in an open wound, you are one bad move away from making it so much worse, and you are not doing this alone, I won't let you—”
"You don't get to decide that for me.” Spidergirl snapped.
"Then at least let me help you, please, just—" Trinity dropped to a crouch in front of her, forcing herself to slow down, to breathe. "Whatever you need. A real hospital, if you want it—I don't care what it costs me. I will make sure nobody ever finds out who you are, I swear to you. I'll get you into a private room myself if I have to carry you there."
"No." Spidergirl was shaking her head, more from instinct than reason now, voice fraying at the edges. "No, no hospital, I can't, if someone recognizes—no. I'm serious. I can't be operated on in here. Spiderman. I wouldn't ask if it wasn't serious. Anywhere but here.”
Trinity's gaze was blurry. "Then let me take you somewhere else. Just not alone. Please.”
"I don't—" Spidergirl swayed again, harder this time, eyes twitching even more, "I just need a second, I—"
"Hey.” Trinity gripped into Spidergirl's shoulders tightly. “Hey, let me support you at least."
"I'm fine.”
And then, without any further warning at all, she wasn't.
Spidergirl's whole body went slack at once, weight tipping sideways, and Trinity caught her on instinct before she hit the floor, heart slamming so hard against her chest it hurt, both arms full of dead weight and blood.
"Hey—hey, no, come on—" Trinity's voice cracked wide open, all the careful control from a second ago gone completely. She checked for a pulse with shaking fingers and found one, fast but there, and felt something in her chest loosen in relief even as the rest of her stayed scared stiff. "Fuck. Okay. Okay, you don't get a say anymore. I'm making the call."
A hospital was out—Spidergirl had said it herself, panicked and certain even through the pain, and Trinity wasn't about to override that last request, not when unconsciousness meant she couldn't consent to what came next. But she also couldn't leave metal sitting in an open wound in a dusty stairwell with nothing but a first aid kit.
There was exactly one place she could think of with the necessary equipment, privacy, and zero chance of anyone asking questions: her apartment.
Yes. Of course. Her own apartment, four blocks and one very careful, very slow rooftop route away, where she kept a trauma kit under her bed, something she'd nicked from the hospital as a just in case.
"Okay," she said again, mostly to herself, hooking an arm under Spidergirl's knees and lifting her carefully off the table. "Okay. My place it is. I've got you. You'll be fine. You'll be so fine."
She went slow across the rooftops, slower than she'd ever gone in her life, cradling every landing like the girl in her arms was made of glass, and didn't let herself think too hard about how much this paralleled when she’d tried to save someone else she'd once cared for, someone from so long ago, and failed.
Her window was on the fourth floor, fire escape access only, chosen years ago for this exact reason. She got them both through it sideways, awkward, one arm still locked tight around Spidergirl's back, and lowered her down onto the couch.
"Okay," she said, to herself, "Now the trauma kit.”
Her hands were shaking by the time she got the box out from under the bed, and it took her a full three seconds, kneeling back down at the couch with gauze and forceps and every instinct she owned to realize what came next.
She was about to take this woman's mask off.
Spidergirl's breathing had gone shallow and uneven on the couch, and Trinity needed to see her face to track it properly—needed to check her colour, watch for the gray, waxy look that meant shock was setting in faster than blood loss alone should account for.
Trinity's hands stilled over the clasp at the back of the hood.
Fuck.
"I'm so sorry," she murmured. "Please forgive me."
And then, she pulled it back.