Chapter Text
OCTOBER
Scott hasn’t seen Solidarity in a while now, and he’s regretfully beginning to worry.
He doesn’t care about Solidarity, he tells himself. Solidarity ruins everything, Solidarity constantly helps villains escape, Solidarity killed Aeor .
But on the other side of the coin, Solidarity seems to be a little . . . suicidal . And he claims that it’s all accidental. And Solidarity is a victim of the most dangerous villain in the city.
Maybe a repeat victim.
Because if Solidarity is missing (not that Scott knows that he’s missing, not that he checks the neighborhood where he dropped him off those months ago regularly, not that he spent an entire day just scoping the area out to catch him entering or exiting his apartment and saw nothing), there’s three things that could have happened to him.
It’s possible that Solidarity moved. It’s something Scott’s never really wanted to happen—he knows that the media generally portrays him and Xornoth as nemeses, but he’s always considered his nemesis to be Solidarity (until recently). If he moved, Scott’s been robbed of any sort of revenge. If he still wants that. He does. That’s why he’s searching for the man.
Another option is that one of his stupid schemes has finally killed him. That’s just as likely as the first, to be fair. Solidarity has been causing problems for literal years, from meteors to giant radioactive worms. It’s always been only a matter of time until one of those incidents (or accidents?) catches him off-guard.
And the third. The third is that Xornoth has kidnapped him again. The third is that Solidarity is strapped to a table, henchmen cutting into him, Xornoth petting him. And Xornoth has been suspiciously absent as of late.
Stupid sense of duty. Now Scott has to spend time looking for Solidarity instead of protecting the city. But it’s been far too long, and he’s not quite sure but he thinks the last time he saw him was in July, or maybe early August.
It’s October. Late October.
And for a guy who usually has a news team practically trailing him, Solidarity is conspicuously not-here.
The news picked up on that earlier this month. Well, they’d done a small story on it in early September, but it isn’t unheard of for villains—or antiheroes, or whatever grey space Solidarity occupies—to disappear for a little while. Once they realized he’d been gone for longer than a month, some shallow investigations had begun, spawning many online theories about what had happened to the man. Scott himself has been keeping up with r/FindSolidarity, which he hates because it could very well find him maskless and then everyone would know Solidarity’s secret identity, but as the only person who knows what Solidarity looks like under the mask he combs through the subreddit meticulously, zooming in on each blurry photo. None of them are him.
So his best option is finding Xornoth, which is . . . easier said than done.
Scott’s not sure where Xornoth’s set up their lair. The last one he’d discovered he had destroyed entirely, and the villain has been careful since to not expose secrets such as that. But he needs to make sure that they don’t have Solidarity before things get even more out of hand than they already are—the news reports are beginning to hit an international level.
Solidarity has been casually infamous for years, but now he’s becoming a popular subject of hate posts and tiktok villain cosplays and some genuinely funny comedy sketches (including one on SNL) that use him as the butt of the joke. Scott won’t pretend he doesn’t know how the internet treats powered celebrities, he knows that he’s had similar reactions from the public (he once dared to look up his name on a fanfiction website to find thousands of works), but for him it’s been mostly positive. He’s never seen such hate for someone who isn’t really a bad person.
That’s what Scott’s been coming to terms with over the past couple of months. Solidarity has done a lot of bad things, but if the man is to be trusted, it’s mostly been accidental. Scott has gotten to a place where, while he may not be able to forgive Solidarity for Aeor and all the other bad things, he can at least understand that it was unintentional and the man genuinely meant no harm.
So Scott searches. Scott spends ages checking every place he can think of, keeps tabs on all of the villains in the city, does his best to follow Xornoth after their rapidly-dwindling-in-number battles. It’s become an obsession, he recognizes—rest and hygiene are frequently pushed to the backburner, frequently enough that a civilian waves him down one day to ask if he’s doing all right. But Scott can’t focus on himself. Not when Solidarity is missing and it’s possibly his fault.
He’s the one who dropped him off in that terrible neighborhood. He’s the one who threatened to take him to prison. He’s the one who saw his face and possibly spooked him so badly that he was so busy avoiding Scott he ran straight into Xornoth’s lackeys—
Scott shakes himself, narrowly avoiding someone on the sidewalk. He itches to ice skate down the street (his favored form of travel, speeding along on ice that he generates as quickly as he melts it behind him), but he’s in civilian clothes and maskless. Sure, he spends enough time as Major that he might as well not wear a mask at all as a superhero, but it’s nice to be a nobody sometimes.
He wonders if Solidarity has ever gotten to experience anonymity.
It’s been a long day and he’s heading to his favorite deli on the far side of town to grab a sandwich. He rarely makes it there without having to engage in a fight of some sort. Today is no different, he discovers, when his phone tunes in to the police radios nearby. Something’s going on just a few blocks away at the docks.
He thinks about it for a moment. He really truly thinks about it. But the longer he listens, the more scared the officers sound, and it doesn’t seem like anyone else is turning up for battle.
The unidentified villain seems to be doing something with the water. He’s not sure what; the radios are garbled and words are rushed. Scott heaves a sigh, makes a sharp left turn in his path down an alley and behind a building, then down another alley. This may be the best place to change.
Before he can get totally changed—he’s got his mask on, his beanie off, his shirt halfway over his head—there’s a crunch of gravel and whirls around—
The Mad King is there, his trademark crooked grin on his lips. “Hey Major! Don’t worry about this one, yeah?”
Scott blinks. “I’m—”
“I’ve got this, ‘kay?” The Mad King goes to pat his arm but Scott steps back. He turns it into a casual wave. “You can keep looking for your boytoy.”
“I—my what?” Scott splutters, fingers pausing in the unbuttoning of his jeans. What on earth does that mean? The Mad King chuckles.
“C’mon, we all know you’ve been off your game ever since Solidarity disappeared. And you think we haven’t noticed your search? It’s fine, you can focus more on finding your little rival. Blossom’s on her way anyhow, so you can go on with your day.”
The Mad King dashes off and leaves Scott, who suddenly feels some combination of indignation and embarrassment. Is it really that noticeable?
Sure, he tells anyone who will listen that Solidarity is his nemesis, not Xornoth. And sure, he’s been sort of neglecting his duties to search.
He’s spent days, weeks even, looking for Solidarity. He’s entirely wiped out three different gangs during his search. He’s battled Xornoth twice and seen no trace that the villain would have anyone in captivity.
Maybe Solidarity has just left.
There’s guilt that wells up inside of Scott, guilt at the idea of abandoning anyone. But he can’t prove that Xornoth has anything to do with this. Maybe Solidarity has done the smart thing and ran, both to get away from Xornoth and to get away from Scott.
He hasn’t slept right in weeks. His hair is oily from too many skipped showers, his skin itching from too long without proper care. He’s pushing on the edge of a terrible emotional storm if he keeps going like this.
Scott sighs, pulls on his beanie and takes off his mask. There’s nothing he can do, is there?
Unless he sees some trace of Solidarity, he’s going to have to stop looking. He needs a break anyhow.
That sandwich is still calling his name, so Scott moves on his way.
-
A couple of blocks away, at loading dock nineteen, The Mad King sees the most beautiful woman he has ever seen.