Chapter Text
Trinity had been on the apartment roof for the better part of forty minutes, which meant the roof tiling had long since stopped being merely uncomfortable and had progressed into something closer to a grievance. Sitting on uneven tiling trying not to fall off for so long now brought a dull ache working its way up through both knees no matter how she shifted her weight.
She'd learned, over the past month, that this was simply the cost of doing business the way she'd decided to do it.
Some nights, the radio handled things for her, spitting out addresses in a flat, static-chewed voice that she'd trained herself to understand. Other nights, the good ones, the ones she actually preferred if she was being honest with herself, the job was just this.
Sitting still.
Waiting for something to happen.
She liked the stillness more than she would ever admit out loud, to anyone, under any circumstances, and she liked it best like this, with the sky doing something slow and complicated over the rooftops and nobody around yet to ask her to be anything other than quiet about it.
There was a different, quieter part that had only ever shown up here, alone, watching mornings like this one arrive over a city that had no idea it was being watched, and she'd stopped trying to reconcile the two of them months ago. It seemed like a waste of time. She had actual crime to solve. Eventually. Just not yet.
Below her, four blocks of residential street were just starting to surface out of the dark, porch lights clicking off here and there like the sky had finally agreed to take the job over itself. The horizon at the end of the block had gone from deep violet fading up into pink and then a thin, promising gold, and Trinity let herself watch it a beat longer than she probably needed to, mask pushed high enough on her forehead that she could feel the cool morning air directly against her skin, autumn doing what autumn did.
She scanned the block out of habit anyway, because old habits didn't take holidays just because the view happened to be nice.
A garbage truck grinding through its stops two streets over.
A bakery van idling outside the corner shop while somebody wrestled a delivery of bread trays through a propped door.
Nothing that needed her yet. Nothing but the color climbing steadily over the rooftops and a whole street's worth of nobody in particular starting their day without her.
Until.
It was the pacing that caught her attention first. An old woman, cardigan buttoned wrong by one hole, moving in anxious circles under a maple tree two houses down from the corner, wringing her hands together.
Trinity followed the woman's gaze up into the branches and found the source of the problem almost immediately. Fat, orange, wedged into a fork about twenty feet off the ground, yowling with a kind of aggrieved fury that seemed, frankly, unearned, given that the cat in question had almost certainly put itself there.
Free one. Easy one. Hers, if she moved now.
She was down off the garage in under ten seconds, along the fence line in another twenty, and had hit the pavement feet first when something dropped out of the sky directly in front of her and landed under the tree like it had been personally invited.
Trinity stopped with a groan. Not again.
The suit caught the streetlight first, black and white with a hood instead of a full mask, fabric pulled taut across the shoulders as the figure straightened up out of the landing crouch, purple threading through the trim of the collar and down along the sleeves where the light hit it just right, some kind of stylized mark stitched across the chest that Trinity had never once gotten close enough to properly study and had, absolutely, spent more time than she'd admit trying to make out from a distance.
Spidergirl.
…
She'd have known that shape from twice this distance by now. There was a particular confidence in the way she moved, like she'd never once considered the possibility of losing at anything.
Trinity thought she was full of it.
…
She watched her go up the tree without hesitation, and come back down in a controlled drop that ended in a crouch, cat clamped against her chest like an angry, furious little football.
Even from afar, Trinity could notice Spidergirl smiling like the little goody-two-shoes she was.
Trinity thought several things, none of them generous, and climbed up onto the roof of the neighboring house instead of walking the rest of the way like a person with somewhere better to be.
If she was going to watch herself get beaten to a cat rescue for what had to be the fourth time this month, she intended, at minimum, to do it from a height.
~
"You have no idea how long I've been trying to get him down from there," the old woman was saying, laughing now, sleeves shoved up to the elbow as she took the cat back into her arms and it went instantly, infuriatingly boneless against her, purring like the last five minutes hadn't happened at all.
Spidergirl said something in response, low, that Trinity couldn't quite catch from the roofline, and whatever it was made the woman laugh again, warmer this time, and there was a version of Trinity, buried somewhere she resented having to acknowledge existed at all, that felt something sharp and unflattering at how easy he rapport looked.
Eventually, Spidergirl straightened up, said whatever final, charming thing she was going to say, before she turned to scan the rooftops and found Trinity precisely where Trinity had not wanted to be found.
She was up on the roof with a quick swing.
"Spiderman,” The word came out slow, delighted, entirely too pleased with itself. "Pleasure to see you up and at it so early.”
Spidergirl paused, her mask moving in a way that Trinity knew she was smirking. “Sorry, did you want to be the one to save that cat? Or..."
"It's a cat." Trinity dropped off the roof in one clean line, no wobble, because if there was exactly one thing she was never, under any circumstances, going to hand this woman, it was an ugly landing witnessed. "I genuinely don't know why I bothered showing up at all."
"You bothered," Spidergirl said as she followed after her, hands tucked behind her back, "because you're down for the week, and it's only Tuesday."
"I am not down," Trinity muttered.
"You're significantly down,” Spidergirl giggled. “It's not an insult, Spiderman. It's just a fact.”
"You don't have my numbers." Trinity crossed her arms. She was starting to get hot under her mask. "Nobody has my numbers. I don't share my numbers, that's the entire point of being good at something, you don't need a public scoreboard when the results speak for themselves."
"Well, I post mine." Spidergirl tilted her head, the hood shifting just enough that Trinity caught a flash of dark hair underneath it before it settled again. "Dated. Organized. Fully public. It's on my Instagram page if you ever wanted to take a peek."
“Okay, nerd.” Trinity huffed. “Anyway, I don't need to have a public spreadsheet to know how many saves I have this week.”
“Then how many saves do you have this week?”
Seven.
Trinity narrowed her eyes. “You first.”
“Twenty.”
What a load of bullshit.
Trinity scoffed. "Whatever. I don't need documentation. Everyone already knows."
Spidegirl tilted her head. "Everyone already knows what, exactly?"
"That I'm the best thing swinging around this city."
"You just lost this cat rescue and it's only 6 in the morning," Spidergirl said, “I also found a missing person yesterday in under an hour, and still had time to file my nails before you'd even landed and realized you'd lost. Yet again, by the way."
"You didn't win. What the fuck? You didn't win, and you definitely didn't file your nails.”
"I absolutely did. I have a whole thing."
"That's not a flex. That's weird."
"It's confidence. Justified confidence, I'll have you know.” She eyed Trinity up and down. “My competition isn't exactly stiff.”
Trinity opened her mouth, found nothing immediately useful loaded there, and recovered by going for volume instead of substance. "I already cleared a robbery on Centennial before the sunrise. Guy's zip-tied to a bike rack right now, crying, probably. Beautiful work. Some of my finest."
"You're claiming a robbery you haven't finished processing," Spidergirl said. “That doesn't count unless you've fully reprimanded him and returned the cash.”
"He's tied up. That's finished. That's the finish line."
"That is not how finished works.”
"It is for me." Trinity shrugged. "I decide a lot of things. It's part of my whole thing. It adds to my character anyway. The people on Twitter love it."
"Your whole thing is being second best to me, sorry to say.”
"My whole thing," Trinity huffed, eyes narrowed, "is being better than you and not needing a highlight reel to prove it."
Spidergirl broke into a laugh that would be probably sound warm and endearing if not so annoying right now. "Says the woman who tracks my highlight reel. Don't lie, I've seen your profile in my views."
Trinity flushed. “I don't stalk your stupid highlight reel. That must've been a mistap or something."
(She totally stalks her stupid highlight reel.)
"And if you want to go head-to-head with how many fans we each have, I'll have you know I have fourteen thousand people on a subreddit devoted entirely to me," Trinity added, for good measure, because if she was going to lose an argument she intended to lose it loudly.
"A subreddit," Spidergirl snorted. "Impressive."
"It's a very dedicated subreddit!"
"I have sixty thousand people watching me in real time on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Tumblr.”
"Quality over quantity."
"Says the woman with a subreddit."
A soft electronic chime from Spidergirls wrist cut through the yard before Trinity could find the next line, and Spidergirl's whole posture changed at once, shoulders drawing tight, weight shifting toward the curb before the sound had even finished.
"Shit. I have to go."
Trinity snorted. “What? Are you late to school or something?”
Spidergirl scoffed. “No. Work. I'm sure you'd know the feeling if you had a job,” She shot a web to the top of the nearest building before she did a little salute. "Maybe I'll see you the next time I beat you to another save?”
Trinity sputtered. “I— Next time?”
Spidergirl giggled one last time before she swung away. “Bye, Spidey."
And.
Oh.
The nickname was such a small thing, but it landed noticeably softer than anything either of them usually traded, and it hit Trinity somewhere she hadn't braced for.
It didn't feel quite like her spidersense. Something adjacent to it, maybe. It was the same sudden prickling awareness, except this version ran red and hot and settled low in her chest instead of up the back of her neck.
Trinity pressed a hand flat against her chest without quite meaning to, like she could locate the feeling that way and reason with it directly, and got nowhere. She glanced upward at the white and purple shape clearing the first rooftop, taking the feeling's only explanation with it.
She stood there a beat longer than the moment really required, then muttered something about there not being a next time.
~
It was competitive.
It had to be the reason why she had felt that way. Yeah. That’s it. That was the whole of it, start to finish. After all, she had built her entire personality, since she was old enough to understand what winning felt like, on being able to tell the difference between wanting to beat someone and wanting something else entirely.
She was not about to lose that particular skill now, over some egotistical woman with sharp comebacks and an infuriatingly good sense of timing and a habit of landing the last word right before disappearing.
She'd had this argument with herself before. She had it again now, standing alone on somebody's front lawn at 6:52 on a Tuesday, and made exactly as much progress as she had the last four times.
Her watch buzzed against her wrist, just as it did Spidergirl’s.
She looked down and swore. She did so sharply in Tagalog, because some sentiments simply required the extra syllables to do them justice, her mother's voice supplying the words automatically in the back of her head, the way it always did whenever English felt insufficient to the crisis at hand.
Six fifty-five.
And her shift started at seven.
As she was running across the rooftop, she was already calculating the fastest possible route across the seventeen rooftops she needed to run across and/or swing across.
The commute was not as manageable as she wanted it to be, but she had made it on time.
(She caught a grapple wrong on a gutter two blocks in that had clearly never been rated for the abuse she was putting it through, lost four full seconds untangling herself, and spent the remainder of the run thinking of an excuse she was going to deploy if she walked in late.)
She'd changed in a stairwell two blocks from the hospital, suit balled into a bag she kept stashed behind a loose panel for exactly this purpose, scrub top yanked on over her shoulders while she was still catching her breath, badge fished out of the bottom of the bag with fingers that hadn't fully stopped shaking from the run.
In the stairwell door's narrow window, she caught a glimpse of her reflection. Her hair was a mess, the color was high in her face, and nothing about her looked remotely like a person capable of holding a professional conversation in the next ninety seconds.
Good enough.
~
She hit the ambulance bay door at a full sprint and collided almost immediately with someone coming the other way, hard enough that they both had to catch the wall to stay upright, badges clattering against each other between them.
Victoria Javadi.
A thoroughly wrecked version of her, anyway, ponytail half surrendered somewhere around her left ear, badge clipped on crooked, chest heaving in a way that suggested she'd run at least the last block flat out.
"Jesus, Crash." Trinity eyed her up and down, and snickered when a bead of sweat dripped down the side of her face. “What happened to you?"
Victoria narrowed her eyes, still huffing and puffing. “Speak for yourself, Santos. Your face looks like a ripened tomato.”
“I wanted to take the long way and run. Get my endurance up and save the environment,” Trinity said, slightly out of breath. “What about you? Care to explain why it looks like you've just ran a marathon in your scrubs?"
"I was with my mom." Victoria's eyes darted sideways, searching visibly for an answer that clearly wasn't there yet. "Because my mom's off today. I mean my dad. My dad's off today, I meant to say my dad. My mom's actually working, obviously, she's downstairs, in surgery, because she's a surgeon, which you know, so I wasn't with her, I was with Cassie. We got coffee. And the coffee was hot."
"Cassie," Trinity repeated. “I thought you said you were with your dad.”
"I meant Cassie.”
"Cassie McKay."
"Mm-hm.”
"Who I personally watched come in from the parking lot just 2 minutes ago? That Cassie McKay?”
"...Small hospital," Victoria said, the sentence audibly dying somewhere in the middle of leaving her own mouth. At that, Trinity had to bite down hard on the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing outright, because this was, without any real competition, one of the worst lies she had ever personally been on the receiving end of.
"Whatever you say, Crash." She held both hands up, backing off, letting her have it, whatever it turned out to be. "Coffee with Cassie. Got it. Very believable."
"I— It was at that place on the corner of—"
"I don't need the receipts for whatever secret thing you were doing,” Trinity chuckled, punching her lightly on the shoulder. “I've got better things to interrogate you about later, okay? Go clock in before Robby has both our asses for this."
Victoria's face fought with itself for a moment before she finally went, still muttering something not having a secret thing.
~
The board was already ugly by seven fifteen, the way it usually was, two traumas incoming from what dispatch was calling a multi-vehicle out on the parkway, and a walk-in with chest pain insisting the whole time that it was probably nothing while sweating clean through the collar of his shirt.
As much as she liked quiet, she liked how her job was loud too, especially when she was trying to keep her mind off things. The constant moving and working didn't leave room for anything except the next decision directly in front of her, and for the better part of the first hour she managed, almost entirely, not to think about a maple tree and a cat and a girl too egotistical for her liking.
(In trying to keep her mind off of this morning, her mind had drifted elsewhere toward the far side of the board where a familiar purple hoodie stood, ponytail still not fully recovered from whatever it had been through earlier, before she scowled at absolutely nothing the second she registered what she'd been doing.)
…
It didn't mean anything.
It was just a strange kind of morning, one rooftop's worth of nothing and one hallway's worth of something, and she had a board to help clear and no real intention of sitting down and sorting out which of those two things was actually the one keeping her attention.
Later. There would be time to sort it out later.
There was always, apparently, more work to do first.