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Two years. It’s been two fucking years since she first put on the suit that Huckleberry had poured himself into making. Granted, that specific suit has long since been destroyed.
(Getting—
stabbed,
slashed,
shot,
blown up,
tied up,
thrown off buildings,
thrown into buildings,
etc.
—will do that to your shit, no matter how well-constructed.)
Still, with Abbott’s connections and Huckleberry's tenacity, they’ve managed to stitch together significantly improved iterations. It’s actually kind of amazing.
Nevertheless, it’s still been shoved unceremoniously into her backpack, which was in turn jammed into her locker next to a box of Monster and an assorted collection of shelf stable snacks when she arrived this morning. And it’s not like the suit wrinkles. Or that she would even care if it did.
It’s a strange, late morning lull for an early December Tuesday. If she has learned anything the past two years —besides how to stay on top of her charts or fake some sort of bedside manner even when the patient is an idiot— it’s that lulls are definitely a trap. Especially in December when there’s snow and ice and cold, as well as holiday decorations, family gatherings, and any one of the other innumerable seasonal stupidities.
Trinity still takes the opportunity to hang out in the security office.
She leans back in the chair opposite Ahmad’s desk, one ankle hooked over her knee, badge clipped, sleeves shoved up as she uses the toe of her sneaker to spin in slow circles. The space is tiny and cramped with its own distinct sights and sounds from the rest of the ED. Monitors cycling feeds, radios crackling softly but in truth, oddly quiet. The late morning light pushes through the high window, flat and unbothered.
Ahmad is halfway through a candy bar, eyes flicking between screens more out of habit than need.
“You’re telling me,” Trinity starts, gesturing lazily toward the wall where the whiteboard lives. “That you’ve got Nurse Olive in the lead for Spider-Woman?”
Ahmad doesn’t look up. “Odds shifted last week.”
“Because she twisted her ankle?”
“Because Spider-Woman twisted her ankle,” he corrects. “Saw her limping on the ten o’clock news on Friday. Correlation.”
“Correlation is not causation,” Trinity says, immediately, instinctively. “Also, Olive is like five-five on a good day. Spider-Woman’s at least, what, five-ten? Five-eleven?”
Ahmad finally glances at her, unimpressed. “You’ve been measuring vigilantes now?”
“I have eyes,” Trinity says. “And Huckleberry said she was tall.”
Dennis absolutely did not say that.
She pushes out of the chair and crosses to the board, scanning the columns:
WHEN
HOW
WHY
INJURY
+1 if she brings a patient
Names, dates, crude tallies. An array of sticky notes.
“Okay, first of all,” she says, grabbing a marker. “You’re overestimating frequency. She’s not that injury-prone. I bet she doesn’t show up until after…” She checks the date on the corner of the board. “The twentieth.”
“You said I was underestimating frequency two weeks ago.”
“Data change,” Trinity says with a shrug.
“I do not understand you.”
“Unsurprisingly, you are not the first person to tell me that,” she murmurs, scribbling ‘2+ WEEKS’ under WHEN. “Second of all… mechanism. You’ve got ‘blunt force trauma’ at thirty percent? That’s lazy. She’s acrobatic. If anything, we should be weighting—”
Ahmad’s radio cracks to life, and Trinity clamps her mouth shut. It’s just static, but then—
“Possible weapon. Fourth floor.”
Ahmad is already moving, hand on the volume, eyes snapping to a different bank of monitors.
Overhead, the hospital PA clicks. “Code Silver, Surgical Floor. Code Silver, Surgical Floor.”
The room seems to tighten around the sound. Ahmad’s posture goes rigid, attention splitting between radio traffic and camera feeds. His half-eaten candy bar is forgotten on the desk.
Trinity is on her feet before the second announcement finishes.
“Hey—” Ahmad starts, distracted, already reaching for another radio.
“I’m going to—” She gestures vaguely towards the door, already backing away, not completing her sentence.
He nods without looking at her. “Get somewhere safe.”
“Yeah,” she says.
And then Trinity’s gone, heading straight towards the lockers. She moves fast but not too fast, not enough to draw attention, weaving between bodies easily.
The energy is already shifting, and the ED reflects it. Doors close. Voices drop low and purposeful. Someone starts killing the lights across the department.
She reaches her locker, taps her code, and yanks the door open, grabbing the backpack before shutting it. It’s easy to slip out the side exit into the stairwell when everybody is hurried and distracted. Understandably afraid. She goes down rather than up, taking the half-flight to the little maintenance alcove nobody uses.
(Except her.)
Scrubs off. Suit on. Mask in hand as she hears the page again, louder this time as it echoes through the empty stairwell, bouncing off concrete and not much else.
“Code Silver. Surgical floor.”
She pulls the mask on, tugs the hood over her head, and fires webline after webline, zipping upwards until her feet hit the fourth floor landing.
When she steps onto the actual floor, the hallways are dark and still. Not entirely dark, at least. Emergency lighting casts everything in a dim, sickly glow. It’s enough that the usually bright sterility of the surgical wing feels wrong, hollowed out and uneasily foreboding.
Everything is quiet except for one angry voice. It’s sharp, bouncing off tile and glass, shouting words that Trinity doesn’t need to understand yet. She just wants eyes on them.
The doors to OR 3 are cracked open, just slightly, just enough for the frustration to leak into the hallways for Trinity to follow. Inside, everything is wrong.
Her heart hammers in her chest.
Because this is her hospital. These are her people. She’s a third year resident, now, and as much a part of its fabric as Robby or Dana or, hell, even Gloria.
There’s a patient on the table, already splayed open, draped in a field of sterile blue. Instruments are laid out, gleaming under the harsh surgical lights that are now the only real source of brightness in the room.
Anesthesia is frozen at the head of the bed. Scrub nurses stand off to the side, hands gripping whatever they last grabbed, faces ghost-white and terrified. Dr. Miller, standing just behind the primary surgeon, gowned but observing.
And then—
Garcia.
She’s at the patient’s side, gloved, gowned, hands still inside the sterile field. Her face is composed, controlled, but her eyes stay locked on the man across from her.
A man, maybe mid-forties, eyes blown wide, standing with a gun in his hand. He sweeps it through the air as he gestures in jerks that are a little too fast, a little too frantic. His hand shakes all the while.
“—told me —told me she was stable—” He’s rambling, voice cracking on the words, not quite completing a thought. “You said— you said she w— you said!”
Trinity’s chest tightens as the scene unfolds before her. She could end this. Web the gun. Yank it away. Be done with it, with him, and know Yolanda’s safe.
She’s done it before.
(Minus Yolanda. She hasn’t lived this particular nightmare yet.)
But the man’s grip is unstable, and his finger is too close to the trigger. If she’s off by even a fraction, somebody’s gonna get shot. It could be anybody. It could be Yolanda.
She can’t risk it, can’t risk her.
So Spider-Woman crosses the threshold and steps fully into the room, slow and deliberate. “Hey,” she says as gently as she can.
His head snaps towards her first, then his body with the gun, and for a second nobody breathes.
“What…” He’s disoriented, brow furrowing even as the gun oscillates between her and the rest of the room. “Why the hell are you here?”
Spider-Woman stands, hands open and visible. “It’s okay,” she murmurs, just loud enough for him to hear. “I’m not here to hurt you.”
“No,” he snaps. “Stay back!” His voice cracks again. “Don’t— don’t come any closer!”
“Okay. I won’t,” she says easily, even as she takes a small step forwards anyways.
His eyes flash and his attention turns fully to her. Away from the table. Away from Garcia.
“Stop,” he tries again, and she does this time. “You shouldn’t be here. You shouldn’t— they said—”
“I know,” she tells him. “I know something terrible happened to you.”
“You don’t know anything,” he spits. “You weren’t here! You didn’t—” He chokes a little as he gasps for oxygen through the snot and tears now streaming down his face.
“My wife died in this room,” he finally says, the words tearing out of him like a wretched, violent thing. He jerks the gun towards the table before leveling it back at her chest. “Right there. On that table. Dr. Shamsi— Dr. Mosley— they lied to me. They said she— said she had a chance! They said—”
The gun dips a hair, falling as his voice does.
Spider-Woman moves. Just another step. Just a little bit farther to close a little more distance. All the while, she says, “They didn’t lie to you. They told you what they knew and what they thought they could do.”
“You don’t know that,” he says, but there’s less force behind it now. She can see the weariness in him, and other alarm bells start to go off in her head.
“They did everything they could,” she says again. “And now you’re here, pointing a gun at people who are trying to save someone else.”
The wave of guilt that washes over him is visible as the words land.
Behind him, someone shifts. A shoe squeaks on tile. He startles and the gun jerks again, but he keeps his eyes on her, weapon dipping again.
Trinity’s focus narrows. “That’s it. You don’t want anyone else to get hurt.”
“I don’t—” He swallows hard. “But my wife— but I don’t—”
“Then let me take that,” she says, nodding at the gun.
He hesitates. For one heartbeat and then two— His grip loosens and Spider-Woman closes the last step in a blur.
Hand on the barrel. Twist. Disarm clean, controlled, the weapon out of his hand before his brain fully catches up. He stumbles back, empty hands coming up in shock. She binds his wrists with a quick burst of web fluid before allowing her eyes to scan the room.
“Can I have one of those?” she asks, pointing towards the metal basin on the mayo stand. “Obviously not that one but a basin big enough for this.” She lifts the handgun she has pinched by the barrel between her thumb and forefinger.
It takes a second, but one of the circulating nurses answers, “Uh. Yeah,” and grabs one not in the sterile field to hand to Spider-Woman.
She drops the gun into the basin right as police and security burst in a second later, too late to matter but right on time for containment.
The room exhales collectively.
The man is hauled away in restraints. Spider-Woman holds out the basin to a passing cop. “You guys might want this.”
The officer blinks, looking at Spider-Woman, the gun, and then back to Spider-Woman. “Right…” she says, a little dazed. She pulls a plastic glove from her pocket and slips it on, mindfully taking the metal basin away.
The PA overhead clicks. “Code Silver, all clear. Code Silver, all clear.”
Trinity’s eyes go straight to Garcia. She wants to go to her.
Fuck, she wants to go to her, ask her if she’s okay, hold her close and make sure for herself…
But she doesn’t. She can’t. She’s Spider-Woman, right now, not Trinity Santos, girlfriend of Yolanda Garcia.
Instead, she turns just slightly, addressing the room in a clear and calm voice. “Everybody okay?”
Dr. Miller finally moves a little, and he looks around the operating room, taking in every one of his people. “We’re okay,” he says after a beat. “Thank you.”
“Good.” Spider-Woman nods, her eyes never leaving Garcia. “I’m glad.”
She waits another moment before she blows a raspberry and finally tears her gaze away from Garcia. “Keep up the good work!” she says cheerfully, giving a double thumbs up before backing out the OR doors and slipping away past the cops as quickly as she can.
Her phone vibrates as she takes the stairs back down to the Pitt. It’s thankfully a less-used stairwell given its right next to one of the elevator bays. She can’t hear anybody else in the stairwell, so she pauses to check her phone.
‘Found your bag in the stairwell. I’ve got it with me. Also Robby is looking for you.’
He moved it? Why the fuck would he move it?
She forgoes the rest of the stairs and uses gravity for the last two floors, brain working overtime to try to figure out how to play this.
Even in the hallway outside the ED, she can already hear the whispers.
“Spider-Woman was here. Took down the Code Silver.”
“How’d she know?”
“Has anybody seen Olive?”
Welp. Guess she’s just gonna do this. And by this—
Spider-Woman strolls into the ED as if it’s no big deal. She ignores the gaping and wide-eyed faces, sauntering right up to the hub where Dana is staring at her with a raised eyebrow.
“Need something, Spider-Woman?” she asks, smacking her nicotine gum.
Trinity hates the smell of it, but it’s started to remind her a little of safety, of this dysfunctional family she’s chosen; it gives her comfort instead of revulsion.
“Is there an exam room I could use for a sec?”
Dana glances at the board over her shoulder before hitching her chin. “Central 11.” She points. “Just over there.”
Spider-Woman nods. “Thanks,” she says, and jogs into the exam room. She shuts the door, yanks the curtain closed, and immediately texts Huckleberry to tell him where she is. Outside the room, she can hear Dana shout something about not bothering the nice spider lady.
He’s slipping in the rear door a second later, her backpack held tightly to his chest.
“Why would you move it?” she hisses, snatching it from his arms with one hand as she pulls the mask off with the other.
Dennis, already halfway through closing the second door behind him, throws his now free hands up. “Because you left it in a stairwell during a Code Silver, I don’t know— that felt maybe like a bad idea.”
“I had it there for a reason.”
“What reason? So literally anyone could—”
“When you said you’d hold my backpack, I didn’t think you meant literally,” she gripes, thinking back to their first conversation after she ‘came out’ to him. After he saw her land a three-story jump.
Whoops.
“I didn’t mean it literally at the time,” he defends. “But seriously, Trin! You keep—”
The door Dennis just walked through opens and closes, a body stepping around the curtain while looking at her phone. Javadi looks up, and her eyes grow to the size of saucers. To be fair, Huckleberry’s do, too.
“Shit,” Trinity deadpans, watching as Javadi’s boggled eyes move back and forth between her face and the mask in her hands.
The intern’s brain visibly short circuits. “What…”
For one long, suspended second, nobody moves.
Once more, Javadi’s gaze flicks —Trinity’s face, the mask in her hands, the suit, Dennis, back to the mask again —like if she looks fast enough it’ll rearrange into something that makes sense.
It doesn’t.
She pivots on her heel toward the supply cart in the corner like she’s been shocked into motion and yanks the top drawer open so hard it rattles against the stops. Plastic bins jump inside —tongue depressors, gauze, alcohol wipes— everything shifting with the force of it.
Her hand dives in and comes up with a tongue depressor, and the drawer slams shut with a sharp clang. She doesn’t aim, doesn’t even think before she throws it. Hard.
It’s light, stupid, a piece of wood that shouldn’t matter—
Trinity’s hand snaps up and catches it clean out of the air. Too fast and too easy.
“Crash…” Trinity starts.
Javadi stares at her hand then looks to the tongue depressor now neatly pinched between Trinity’s fingers.
“What,” she says again, stronger this time, and it still isn’t exactly a question.
She lunges back to the cart, yanks the drawer open again, harder, like maybe this time it’ll behave differently. It sticks for half a second before giving, plastic bins scraping.
“Okay, Crash, wait—”
Javadi’s fingers scramble, less precise now, knocking things aside until she grabs a roll of gauze. She turns, already mid-motion when she hears Trinity say, “Javadi.”
Too late.
She throws it. Trinity catches that too, the gauze compressing slightly in her grip.
“Would you stop doing that?!” Javadi snaps, voice pitching up, one hand coming up to clutch at her own hair.
Dennis, incredibly unhelpful, gestures vaguely. “In all fairness, you are throwing things at her…”
She whirls on him. “Why are you so calm about this?!” she demands before snapping back to Trinity like she physically cannot not look.
Her eyes track every micro-movement now— hands, shoulders, the way Trinity is standing, the suit, like Javadi’s trying to reverse-engineer what she’s seeing in real time.
“This isn’t… what?” she breaks off, gesturing helplessly between the mask and Trinity’s face.
“Victoria,” Trinity says, soft and soothing, and it’s enough to jar her from her spiral.
She stills, closing her eyes and drawing deep breaths in and long exhales out. A minute passes in awkward silence, Trinity and Dennis shooting looks back and forth, clearly wondering if they broke their precious med student-now-doctor.
Eventually, Javadi’s eyelids flutter open. Her eyes are sharp and focused as she gives Trinity another onceover. Her voice drops, conspiratorial and maybe a little horrified all at once. “… you’re Spider-Woman.”
The room stills again. Trinity holds her hands out, palms up and shrugs. Dennis gives her his best ‘meep’ face.
“Surprise?” Dennis tries for levity.
Trinity sighs and starts taking off the suit because the last thing she needs is Robby finding out. She points a still-gloved finger at Javadi. “Don’t fucking tell anybody, Crash.”
Javadi rolls her eyes. “Obviously…” A moment passes before she tacks on, “WebMD.”
She grins. Dennis cackles.
Trinity flips both of them off.