Chapter Text
Keith crawled across the exterior wall of the abandoned building, straining his enhanced senses for signs of life. His heart thrummed in his ears, both from the speed of his pursuit and the anticipation of battle. But he tuned it out, listening instead for voices or human footsteps or anything besides the rats and birds nesting in broken windows.
Kidnappings were tricky. It wasn’t always an option to go in swinging when there was at least one civilian who might become a hostage or even get killed by their panicking captor. In this case, the stakes were even higher, or at least more personal.
The sounds of a scuffle reached Keith’s ears: muffled grunts and shoes scrabbling on a concrete floor. He ran up the wall, following the noise to one of the upper windows, ready to assess and intervene as quickly as possible.
But when he looked in, the “victim” wasn’t the one who appeared to need saving. Lotor wore handcuffs, sure enough, but he had the chain of those handcuffs wrapped around his kidnapper’s neck and was garroting him into submission.
“Uhh…” Keith said, trying to decide the best way to intervene and on whose behalf he should be intervening.
Lotor’s gaze shot his way. Keith had thought that “I’m at least twice as smart as you and know it”-Lotor was intimidating, but it turned out that “feral and literally choking a bitch”-Lotor had him beat. But the wild, fierce cast to his eyes eased when recognition kicked in.
“Spider-Man,” Lotor greeted tersely, fending off one of his captor’s desperate, clawing hands by biting a finger hard enough to draw blood. “Do you plan on making yourself useful, or are you just here to gawk?”
The would-be kidnapper seemed torn between clawing at the chain on his neck, flailing at Lotor, and reaching out to Keith - currently in his superhero guise - for salvation. While Lotor seemed to have the situation mostly in hand, there was still a chance he might be hurt by the man’s flailing and, well, Keith figured it would be best if this whole thing concluded without any corpses to show for it.
“On it.”
He caught the bad guy’s arms and neatly webbed them to his body. At his nod, Lotor loosened his grip, and the bad guy gasped in a series of deep, gulping breaths.
“Crazy son of a- gah!”
Keith spun him around and webbed him to the wall with more force than was strictly necessary.
“Must you be so rash?” Lotor asked crossly. “He has the key in one of his pockets,” Lotor raised his cuffed wrists pointedly.
Keith’s webbing covered the kidnapper’s entire body, pockets included. Both Keith and Lotor knew - Keith from experience and Lotor from experimentation - that the stuff was damn near impossible to deal with until it degraded naturally after a couple hours.
Lotor had been working on a solvent for emergencies, but last Keith heard, it was still a work in progress. (The phrase “violently corrosive” had been involved.)
“Don’t worry about it,” Keith said, inspecting the cuffs. Metal, well-made, unpadded, and maybe just a little too tight.
“Some of us have things to do today, hero,” Lotor said with the kind of venom that suggested he was more distraught than he wanted to let on. Over the last few months, Keith had learned that Lotor was actually quite diplomatic most of the time, if a bit caustic. He was only outright insulting when he was worried.
Keith had always had slender fingers. He’d never thought much of it, but he was grateful now as he worked them into the scant space between Lotor’s wrist and the cuff, one hand on either side of Lotor’s bound one, and pulled. The metal whined and deformed and then snapped apart like cold taffy.
“Like I said,” Keith reiterated, a bit smugly, “don’t worry about it.”
For a brief second, Lotor looked stunned, and Keith gave himself a moment to revel in it before working his fingers into the other cuff and snapping it off just the same. Some of the vitriol seemed to fade from Lotor’s countenance as he rubbed the feeling back into his hands.
From behind him, Keith heard the kidnapper mutter an unsteady, “Holy hell.”
Reminded of his presence, Lotor shot the man a glare and took Keith’s arm.
“A word, Spider-Man?” he “requested” as he dragged Keith out of easy earshot.
“It took you long enough,” Lotor scolded once they had a little privacy.
“Your message wasn’t exactly clear,” Keith shot back. Hadn’t he earned a better reception than this?
“What’s so unclear about ‘Kidnapped. Grey sedan. Rusty license plate. Southbound on 4th’?”
“It said ‘*Sloth bun* on 4th’.”
“…Oh.” Lotor had the decency to look chastened. “I probably should have disabled autocorrect.”
“You didn’t notice?”
“I’m sorry, but I was being kidnapped at the time,” Lotor snapped. “I had to type behind my back.”
Well, that made se-
“Wait, how were your hands behind your back?” Keith asked. “They were cuffed in front.”
“No,” Lotor corrected, expression taught. “They weren’t.”
“Then, how…?”
“I dislocated my shoulders.”
“Oh.”
Ouch.
“It looks like you managed to… re-located them,” Keith said, giving Lotor a closer look. He was more disheveled than usual, and there were bruises forming on his wrists and left cheek bone, but other than that he seemed healthy.
“I did,” Lotor said, “but this isn’t what I wanted to speak to you about. How fast can you get me downtown from here?”
“Thirty minutes, I think?” Keith guessed. He could do it himself in fifteen, but passengers slowed him down. Not just the weight, but the need to take care with his speed. He’d learned from experience - messy, vomit-related experience - that most humans couldn’t take the kind of g-forces that his enhanced biology could handle.
“Good.” For the first time, Lotor looked genuinely relieved. “I have a meeting I need to attend in…” He checked his watch. “…forty-five minutes.”
“A meeting?” Keith echoed, dumbfounded. “Lotor, we need to call the police to arrest this guy. You need to go to a hospital and get checked out. A meeting can wait.”
“My father’s unavailable,” Lotor said, tone snappish again. “He expects me to conduct this meeting in his place.”
“You were just kidnapped. You could have been killed! You’re dad will understand if you have to miss some meeting.”
“No. He won’t.” Lotor’s tone was frigid, his jaw set.
Lotor could be caustic when irritated. He could be harsh and snappish when he felt out of control. But this? This was something else. There was genuine fear in Lotor’s eyes. He wasn’t lashing out because he was shaken from being kidnapped; he was lashing out because he was afraid of his father.
Well, that was a whole tractor-trailer full of red flags.
“Okay,” Keith said at last. “Just tell me where you need to go. You’ll be there on time.”
Some of the tension eased from Lotor’s shoulders.
“It’s an office building on the north side of downtown: greenish-grey with large windows, next to that post-modern brick monstrosity.”
Leave it to Lotor to criticize architecture while giving directions, but Keith could at least picture the area. He was pretty sure he’d swung past it before.
“I think I know the place. You can guide me in when we get close.”
They walked back to the window where Keith had entered, close to the webbed-up kidnapper.
“Hey, wait!” he called, sounding panicked as the two of them approached the window. “You’re just going to leave me here?”
“The webbing will wear off in a couple hours,” Lotor assured him smoothly. “And the police will be here long before that. I’m sure you’ll be well taken care of at the county jail while you await trial. I look forward to seeing you again in court.”
Keith waited, crouched on the windowsill, letting Lotor have his moment.
“Now…” Lotor turned to him, pulling his hair back in a ponytail. (Where did he get a hair tie?) “How does this work?”
It took Keith a moment longer than usual to reply. He’d never seen Lotor with his hair up before, and the sight was somehow… distracting. The ponytail made Lotor look different, softer somehow. Keith shook off his errant thoughts and focused on the matter at hand.
“You put your arms around my neck, I put an arm around your waist, and we swing.”
It had taken a little trial and error with an assortment of criminals and civilians - with varying degrees of cooperation - to figure out the best method. His earliest attempts had been a bit uncomfortable for everyone involved.
“I see.” Lotor hesitated briefly, and Keith could see him pushing his reservations aside as he stepped in close and put his arms around Keith’s neck.
Normally Keith was considerably shorter than Lotor, but his perch on the windowsill put them at almost the same height, standing chest to chest. It didn’t normally feel this intimate when he carried someone, but it was hard not to think about the heat and solidity of Lotor’s body against him.
“My grip may not be what it should be,” Lotor cautioned, voice quiet in Keith’s ear.
“That’s fine,” Keith assured him, grateful the mask hid his blush. “It’s just for stability. I won’t let you fall.”
To emphasize his point, Keith wound an arm around Lotor’s waist, holding him firmly against his body. With the crazy strength boost from his mutation, he honestly had to worry more about accidentally breaking Lotor’s ribs than losing his grip.
“Ready?” Keith asked. This part tended to startle people, and Keith hated when they shrieked in his ear. That sort of thing was bad enough without enhanced hearing.
“Ready.”
In spite of Lotor’s assurance, the moment Keith leapt up and out of the warehouse window, Lotor gasped sharply and almost let go. Keith tightened his grip on his passenger and lined up his first web shot to an adjacent building. As he reached the height of his jump and started to come down, the webshot pulled him in an arcing swing, and Lotor’s grip tightened sharply on his neck. It was probably only the fact that Keith was “super” that kept that his air supply from being cut off entirely.
Well, at least there wasn’t any screaming.
Keith couldn’t see Lotor’s expression, but he could feel his heartbeat racing against his chest and hear the way his breath caught every time they were briefly weightless at the height of a swing, just before gravity caught them and dragged them back down.
After the first few swings, Keith could feel Lotor start to shift and look around. They came to an intersection where Keith knew they’d be making a sharp turn, and he couldn’t help but grin.
“Hold on!”
Lotor did, and Keith made sure to hit the turn just right to feel as much of the pull of momentum as possible without overdoing it. When Lotor laughed, exhilarated, it felt like victory.
“It’s like a carnival ride, right?” Keith couldn’t help but ask. It was the first thing he’d thought of when he’d started traversing the city like this. It was nothing like driving or even flying. It was a roller coaster or a gravitron or any of those other machines that used raw speed and momentum to give kids a rush.
Keith had only gone to a carnival once with his dad, and the memories had always been bittersweet. But he’d loved the rides then the same way he loved traveling by web now - the thrill and the barely-controlled energy of it.
Had Lotor’s parents ever taken him to a carnival? They didn’t seem the types.
“Like a roller coaster with no track,” Lotor agreed, raising his voice to be heard over the air rushing by them.
The way Lotor laughed - as if startled by his own enjoyment - made Keith want to run up buildings and try other stunts to make him do it again, but Keith knew he couldn’t waste too much time. They had an appointment to keep, and Keith wouldn’t let himself be the reason Lotor got in trouble.
He found the designated building with minimal assistance (that weird brick building really was an eyesore) and swung in for a landing. As he let go of the last strand of web, momentum carrying them to the roof, he swept Lotor’s legs up in his freed arm so they wouldn’t hit before Keith could absorb the shock of the landing.
(The phrase ‘bridal carry’ wouldn’t pop into his mind until later.)
Keith loosened his grip slowly so Lotor could find his footing. Most people were a bit jelly-legged after swinging through the city at high speeds, and Lotor was no exception. He stumbled to his feet like a sailor who hadn’t yet gotten his land-legs back, but there was a grin pulling at his face that Keith had never seen before. He’d seen Lotor smile in pride or when he knew something someone else didn’t, but this was the first time Keith had seen Lotor smile because he was having fun.
“Well, that’s one way to avoid traffic.” Lotor checked his watch, took down his hair, and straightened his clothes - putting himself in order. He tamed his expression as well, that genuine smile smoothing into something more neutral as he cleared his throat.
“If you ever decide to give up vigilantism, you might find a career in private transport.”
Just like that, Lotor was back to his usual self. He’d rolled his shirt sleeves down to hide the marks on his wrists. The bruise on his cheek remained, but doubtless he’d have a ready excuse to dismiss it should anyone ask.
Although… Maybe it was Keith’s imagination, but Lotor still felt a bit… raw to him. More vulnerable. Like there were fragile parts of him closer to the surface than they were usually allowed.
Keith didn’t really know what to do with that.
“Remember to call the police when you get the chance,” he said. “I can keep an eye on that guy in the warehouse for a bit, but I should really get back on patrol.”
“You can’t call them yourself?” Lotor inquired, arching an eyebrow.
“I don’t want them to get my number.”
“Hmm,” Lotor mused. “We’ll have to get you a burner phone. I can’t believe you don’t have one already. Stop by my room this weekend. I should have a workable solvent for your webbing by then, anyway.”
“Sure. I’ll do that.” The offer caught him off-guard. Lotor put up with him in exchange for research samples and information, but Keith wasn’t used to outright generosity.
Lotor, now much steadier, walked towards the rooftop door, but paused when his hand touched the handle and turned back.
“Thank you,” he said, strained but sincere. “For today.”
Without giving Keith a chance to reply, he entered the building and let the heavy door shut behind him.
“Yeah,” Keith said to no one, feeling a bit flustered. “Anytime.”
-
That night, Lotor couldn’t get the exhilaration of swinging through the city out of his mind. Nor could he forget Keith’s voice in his ear saying “I won’t let you fall” or the way his arms flexed when he snapped those steel handcuffs like they were nothing.
The sound he muffled into his pillow was ungodly and utterly ruined.