“Before you start, no, this is not a case for Spider-Cop. I don’t want him anywhere near this. I need the real Spider-Man.”
“You act like they aren’t one and the same, Yuri.”
“Good god.”
“Spider-Cop and Spider-Man share a heart, a soul.”
“I’m about to just call Jessica Jones.”
“Jones? Are you kidding?”
“You’re right. Never mind. But seriously, get to Midtown. We have a unique problem that requires your…talents.”
Spider-Man sighed through the phone. “You want me to climb something tall.”
“I want you to climb something tall.”
Wind noise overtook the call, Spider-Man’s voice drowned out by the whooshing of him swinging through the air. “It’s never, ‘Hey, Spidey, we’ve got donuts and coffee for you here at the station. Why don’t you come by and take a load off?’ It’s always, ‘Hey, Spidey, come risk your physical wellbeing by scaling something very, very high in the sky and then use the very expensive webbing you created to take down some unreasonably large bad guy! ”
Yuri stepped out of her car at the base of the Baxter Building. She weaved through the crowd of police and SWAT and concerned pedestrians at the bottom so she could make her way closer to the admin van angled strategically at the northwest corner. A black SWAT helicopter made slow, wide circles around the block, trying to survey the situation from every possible perspective.
“Anything changed?” Yuri asked her second in command.
“Nothing yet,” Rodriguez confirmed. “I’ve been coordinating with SWAT. They want to move in but I told them it would just make things worse. It’s already…Volatile.”
It being what eyewitness reports claimed to be a humanoid lizard creature terrorizing the neighborhood. The lizard smashed storefront windows up and down the street, caused a bus crash, and took a hostage before scaling the Baxter Building and barricading itself on the rooftop.
The crowd let out a collective gasp and Yuri turned in time to see a looming figure lean over the edge of the skyscraper. The fact that she could tell it was a moving figure was testament to its size. Sorry, Spider-Man. I guess it is always an unreasonably large bad guy.
Rodriguez’s shoulder radio fizzled to life. “NYPD, this is SWAT Air Anit 1. Hostile has moved to the building ledge.”
Rodriguez rolled her eyes and replied with, “Yeah, we gathered that, thanks.”
“Hostile is now dangling the hostage over the building ledge.”
“Whoa, whoa. Hold on.” Yuri stepped forward and grabbed one of the spare handheld radios from the van. “SWAT Unit 1 this is Captain Wantanabe, please repeat?”
“I repeat, Hostile is holding the hostage by both legs and is dangling them upside down over the side of the building.”
“Shit. Shit shit shit.”
“Can you tell him to hold off on dropping the innocent bystander for, like, one second? Traffic on Fifth is terrible.”
The gruff voice from the helicopter took over. “Captain Watanabe, was that you?”
Before Yuri could hit the talk button someone else took over the line.
“Not even close. But I’m flattered that you think I sound as authoritative as Miss W.”
Yuri groaned. Spider-Man was a great asset, and most of the time, the inappropriate banter was a nice icebreaker. But right now, with a civilian hanging over the street thirty-five floors above, the humor was grating her nerves. “This isn’t the time, Spider-Man.”
“Spider-Man? How does he have access to this channel?”
“You don’t have to talk like I’m not here, Mr. Swat Man. In fact, I’m right around– oh, for christ’s sake, seriously? Lizard dude again? I thought I took care of this guy!”
Yuri’s memory flashed back to a few months ago, an evening spent stitching up a very young man in his Chinatown bathroom. Her, sat on the edge of the bathtub, hands shaking as she helped Spider-Man tend to his wounds after a tussle with lizard dude and his nasty claws.
Their dynamic had been different after that. Not on the surface; Yuri still called Spider-Man when she thought he’d be of use, Spider-Man showed up and helped out and cracked stupid jokes, and once the problem was solved, everyone went home and did it all again the next time some Big Bad came to New York.
The difference between before that night in Chinatown and after was that now Yuri knew who was behind the mask. A kid who, at the tender age of twenty-three, was out fighting crime simply because he thought it was the right thing to do. She didn’t know his name and she didn’t want to. He spent so much time and effort protecting his identity for a reason and she respected that. Not to mention she had been enabling vigilante behavior for years now and didn’t want the legal liability that came with an ID.
Yuri and Spider-Man hadn’t mentioned that night since it happened. At the time, Spider-Man was unemployed and facing eviction. Yuri didn’t want to ask, didn’t want to pry because it was none of her business, but she thought about him sometimes. Hoped he was sleeping in a bed in an apartment and not on a street corner or a park bench.
“I’ve stopped trying to understand Spider-Man’s methods, SWAT 1.”
“Guys, is it just me, or is lizard guy getting seriously close to dropping our friend up there?”
Yuri looked up again and low and behold, the figures at the top of the Baxter building were swaying and moving more than before.
“SWAT 1 confirmed, Hostile is now holding hostage by only one foot. Scratch that, Hostile is— oh shit, hostage’s shoe is slipping off– I repeat, the shoe is– oh fu–”
Yuri’s heart stuttered in her chest. Civilians on the ground were screaming. She didn’t take her eyes off the roof, or off the figure now plummeting from it. She wanted to do something, anything, but couldn’t convince her brain to move her legs.
“Spider-Man’s here!” Someone from the crowd yelled. “He got her!”
“Seriously, Yuri, what would you guys do without me?”
Yuri’s neck spun at breakneck speeds. Faster than anyone could really process Spider-Man was grabbing the hostage mid-fall and swinging her around and up, the momentum of the catch forcing them to land on another nearby rooftop instead of the ground.
Yuri tried to collect herself. “Spider-Man, is the hostage injured?”
“Ma’am, are you okay? Are you hurt?” The genuine concern in Spider-Man’s voice was simultaneously disconcerting and entirely on-brand.
Yuri heard a faint, “I’m okay, I’m okay, Spider-Man, wow,” from the walkie.
Yuri saw Spider-Man before she heard him as he hopped off the rooftop and made his way back to the Baxter Building. “Hostage is safe, she should be coming down the fire escape.”
The radio crackled and popped– Spider-Man hopped off the feed and called her cellphone. It’s what he did when he had something to say and didn’t want to share it with the entire police force. “Yuri,” he said from the new line, “I need you to do me a favor.”
Rodriguez gave Yuri a curious look, but she just shook her head and walked to the other side of the van where she wouldn’t be overheard. “Which is?”
“The mailbox on the corner two blocks North of here. The one with the…phallic image spray painted on the side. There’s a syringe taped to the bottom.”
“Why are you taping mysterious syringes to city property?”
Yuri heard a faint roar. Spider-Man must have just landed on the Baxter Building rooftop. “It’s an antidote for our friend here. I made it after things went south the first time and stocked some around major landmarks incase he came back. Very convenient that he chose to target the home base of the Fantastic Four who are, also conveniently, out of town.”
“It’s an antidote? You’re telling me that’s a person up there?”
“Yes, and I can give you all the nitty gritty details later, but for now, I really need that syringe— whoa, buddy, hey, keep the claws to yourself. Remember me? Your good friend Spider-Man?”
The lizard roared and the line went dead. Yuri didn’t bother telling anyone where she was going before she started running northward, looking for Spider-Man’s mailbox. She redialed him as she ran and felt relief flood her lungs when he picked up.
“Whew! Sorry about that, Yuri, big guy hit me in the head and knocked my comm. We’re good now. You got the syringe?”
“Working on it,” she heaved, finally coming up on a mailbox with a definitively penis-shaped image on the side. “Why didn’t you use this last time you fought him?”
Spider-Man grunted as he took some sort of impact. “I didn’t know I’d need it last time. Hadn’t exactly fought a lizard mutant before.”
Yuri cringed at having to run her hand beneath the dirty, gum-covered mailbox, but low and behold, there was something cylindrical duct-taped to the bottom. She ripped it off and tucked it into her jacket pocket before sprinting right back the way she came.
“He’s—” A deep breath from Spider-Man, a reptilian screech, “He’s less human now. First time around he was talking, coherent. This is something else.”
The Baxter Building’s ground level came into view and Yuri skidded to a stop outside the police barricades. “I’m here. How am I getting this to you?”
“Put it in the service elevator, back left corner of the main lobby past the bathrooms, and hit the thirty-fifth floor. I’ll come grab it and carry it to the rooftop.”
Yuri flashed the badge clipped to her jeans and pushed through the barricades. The lobby was empty, having probably been cleared once the police arrived, so no one stopped her as she sprinted to the nondescript elevator and slammed the up button. “Wanna tell me how you know the exact location of the Baxter Building Service elevator?”
“I always run out of webs eventually, Yuri. Sometimes I gotta take the hard way down.”
“I bet the doorman loved that.”
“He threw a muffin at me. Blueberry. Delicious. Ow, lizard man, that one hurt. Maybe you need a muffin– shit! Yuri, is that syringe on the way yet?”
The elevator dinged and the doors opened.
Yuri could put the syringe down, send the car back up, and let Spider-Man handle the problem. He did it before, he could do it again. He was good at this sort of thing. Not to mention he had superpowers, something she was obviously lacking. He was built for fights like this.
Then Yuri remembered the pictures on Spider-Man’s wall of him standing with friends, family. She remembered the bills stamped with final notice scattered across his floor. She recalled how it felt to pop his arm back in the socket without the help of someone qualified to do it because he couldn’t afford a trip to the hospital, and his hesitancy was about more than just money.
Maybe, physically, he was better equipped to handle giant lizard men terrorizing Midtown than someone like her. But no one was built for it. Some people, people like him, were just more willing to put themselves on the line because they knew they had a chance to help.
Yuri stepped into the elevator and looked at her reflection in the doors as the car ascended. “I’m almost there. Floor sixteen, seventeen, eighteen…”
“Hold on, what? Yuri, no, you can’t—”
“How do you expect to get the syringe, huh? You gonna tell the lizard to wait patiently while you hop down a flight of stairs and grab your toy from the elevator? I’m bringing it up to you. Keep him occupied for a few more seconds.”
“Seriously, it isn’t safe, just go back down!”
“I’m a cop, Spider-Man! I’m not standing aside while you get your face bashed in!”
The elevator shook to a stop and the doors popped open. Just outside the car was a short hallway, a set of concrete stairs, and a shut metal door that Yuri knew would lead to the roof. There were suspicious thumping and shouting noises coming from the other side.
“I’m about to open the roof access door. Be ready.”
She took off for the stairs, hopping them two at a time.
“No, no, wait, don’t come out here, he’s—”
Yuri finally reached the top of the stairs. With no time to waste, she flung the access door open.
And suddenly, there was a scaled hand around her throat.
The syringe bounced out of her unzipped jacket pocket and rolled out of sight as the lizard carried her to the other side of the roof by her neck. She choked on an exhale and clawed at the fist cutting off her airway, but the creature didn’t even budge. He barely seemed to notice the way she thrashed in his grip.
“Alright, man, take it easy.”
Spider-Man’s voice was less tinny. She wasn’t hearing him through a phone anymore. Where was her phone?
Spider-Man was a few yards away, slowly working a wide half-circle around the lizard. He moved in that vaguely unnatural way he always did, toes pointed out, crouched low and slinking with an inhuman precision. For the first time, Yuri’s oxygen-deprived mind truly compared the man in the suit to a spider and noticed some similarities.
Being as close to the lizard as she was, Yuri heard a deep rumble start in its chest and work its way out. It was confused, wondering why Spider-Man wasn’t attacking after they’d been going back and forth for the last few minutes.
Yuri had just enough breathing room in the lizard’s clutch to stay conscious thanks to Spider-Man, who was still taking careful steps around the lizard. She had enough presence of mind to wonder what he was doing, then realized he was going for the rooftop door.
What the hell? Is he leaving me here?
She might have missed it if she wasn’t so focused on him, his every maneuver. His right hand was in the air in a gesture of calm surrender. His left hand, elevated but less than the right, bent at the wrist. The thinnest gossamer strand of webbing shot out and toward the access door.
Not at the rooftop door, but next to it, where the antidote syringe had rolled to a stop against a monstrous air conditioning unit. The vial swooped into his waiting palm. “We’re all friends here, right?” Spider-Man risked a step forward. The lizard stepped back. Yuri felt the wind whipping her hair. She tried to keep her eyes trained on Spidey. She didn’t want to see over the side of the rooftop and realize how far she’d fall if this lizard decided she wasn’t worth the trouble.
“You know, I had a lizard in middle school. Named it Rasputin. I thought it was funny.”
Yuri would have laughed if it didn’t hurt to breathe. She’d stopped kicking; it would just draw more attention to her and the suspiciously short safety rail running along the edge of the rooftop.To which, sadly, the lizard was inching closer and closer.
“That nice lady you’re holding? That’s Captain Yuri Watanabe. She’s pretty cool, honestly. Doesn’t even try to arrest me most of the time. That’s really saying something, considering a lot of people want to arrest me.”
Spider-Man’s left hand bent and crooked ever so slightly as he worked the syringe from the middle of his palm to be gripped by every finger, thumb on the plunger. He was poised to strike.
But Yuri was too close to the ledge. He couldn’t go for the shot just yet.
Her neck was starting to really, really hurt. Her lungs burned. A couple minutes of basically breathing through a straw was getting to her. Spidey was blurry around the edges.
He kept backing up, enough that if the lizard went for a sudden punch he’d be completely out of range. A bit more, and Yuri and the lizard were finally, more or less, far enough from the roof ledge that she wasn’t at immediate risk of becoming sidewalk jello.
Spider-Man seemed to note this, expressionless mask lenses aimed somewhere over her shoulder.
“Look, Freaky Cool Lizard Man, I’m gonna give you one chance to put my friend down and let me help you. You hear that? I can help you. Just let the lady go.”
Yuri didn’t know why he was still trying to reason with the beast. He’d said it himself — something was different about the lizard this time. He wasn’t all there mentally, was less coherent. More animal.
But Spider-Man wasn’t trying to reason. He was buying time.
Spidey’s fighting style had always seemed sporadic to Yuri. Just a bunch of acrobatics and superpowers mixed with good reflexes. That paired with the witty banter was why it took her so long to see him as the asset he was. He was unpredictable, and it made Yuri nervous.
Little did she know, the moves she thought were random or simply a response to a threat were calculated. He analyzed each situation as well as he could in the time he was given and acted accordingly. There was a science to his madness, and it usually ended with him coming out on top, if not a little bruised and battered.
The lizard was frozen, probably trying to determine what the hell Spider-Man was going on about. It gave him just enough time to shoot a web at lizard’s arm and yank. He was forced to loosen his scaly grip, which scared him and ended with Yuri being tossed several feet to the side where she collided with the air conditioning unit and promptly slid to the ground.
Her entire body was one pulsing ache. She tried to ignore how the pain was concentrating harshly in her left forearm, the one she’d used to protect her head before hitting the AC, and instead focused on the way Spider-Man was using his webs and general stickiness to scale the lizard like a tree. He scuttled over and around the creature, leaving webs in his wake that he then secured to the rooftop itself. Once lizard was secure enough to not be an immediate threat, Spidey found an exposed piece of scaled skin and injected the serum.
For a moment, nothing happened. The lizard continued struggling within his binds, jaw grinding and snapping more and more as the webbing gave out.
Just as Yuri was about to tell Spider-Man to reinforce the restraints, the lizard started to...crumble.
Like logs in a smouldering fire, layers of reptilian skin peeled and flaked away, carried off the rooftop by the wind. Yuri watched in disbelief as he shrunk in on himself, green skin giving way to pale, freckled flesh, blonde hair appearing atop his head. By the end of the process there was a human man sitting in a pile of his own sheddings.
Spider-Man was standing by with his hands on his hips, empty syringe in one hand. “Wow,” he said blandly, “That was pretty gross.”
He seemed to remember he wasn’t alone when Yuri tried to stand and groaned when her vision blinked out on the way up. He was at her side in an instant, her good arm thrown around his shoulders for support, other held close to her chest so it wouldn’t be jostled. She tried to object when he wrapped an arm firmly around her waist.
“I already sent a message to your Second, Rodriguez and the squad are coming up in the elevator. I don’t really wanna be here when they arrive.”
“Then leave me. I’ll be fine.”
Spider-Man just looked at her. Beneath the spandex she imagined his bowed mouth frowning at her. She’d never loved how unrevealing his mask was; the blank lenses, the lack of any discernible features. It was sort of ghostly. She understood why he did it, though, aside from secret identity purposes. Keeping emotions hidden from the enemy was an effective intimidation tactic. Never show fear.
He started moving them toward the roof ledge. She dug her heels in and held back a groan at the shockwave of pain it sent through her legs. “Spidey, seriously.”
“I swear to god I’m not trying to make this weird, Yuri, but please grab onto me. We’re going to a hospital. You’re hurt.”
“I’m fine.”
“I can hear you wheezing.”
A remnant of the lizard’s clawed grip. “It’s not that bad.”
“Yuri. Please. For me. Let me get you some help.”
He sounded earnest. Like he was actually concerned that she’d gotten knocked around.
Her arm really hurt.
“Okay.”
“Yeah?” He asked carefully, looking for hesitation.
Someone jostled the handle of the rooftop door. Yuri heard shouting.
“Yeah. Let’s go.”
Spider-Man must have had plenty of experience evading the authorities, because before Yuri could process the way his arm wrapped further around her they were flying off the edge of the Baxter Building and down the street. Pedestrians shouted toward them as they swung from building to building, keeping just above the line of evening traffic clogging all inbound and outbound lanes.
“Holy shit! Oh, fuck! Oh my god! How do you do this all the time? This sucks!” As scared as she was, Yuri couldn’t look away. This was a view of New York City only Spider-Man was privy to. Her eyes were drawn to the reflection of the evening sun on skyscrapers as they breezed past, how the dip in the middle of each web swing seemed to make the people and cars shrink and grow with every new perspective.
Spider-Man had the audacity to laugh. He shouted over the wind noise, “You get used to it! And it’s way quicker than the subway. See? We’re already here!”
True to his word, Spider-Man shot one web lower than the others and they took a controlled downward plummet that landed them directly in front of the Mercy Medical Center emergency department. Spider-Man cushioned their landing with a bounce and made sure Yuri wasn’t jostled too much with the motion. He immediately let go of her once they were firmly on the ground. “I vote we never get that physically close again. Agreed?”
Yuri nodded, then winced at the way it pulled at the sore muscles in her neck. “Agreed. That was like cuddling my baby brother.”
“Aww, Yuri, you see me as a brother? Awful sweet of you.”
She was already halfway through the Emergency Department doors. “Thanks for the lift, Spidey.”
He threw her double finger guns. “Don’t mention it, Captain. I’ll see you later, alright?”
“Later? What’s later?”
Spider-Man was already gone, a strand of webbing and a really confused nurse coming back from a smoke break left in his wake.
The evening ended with Yuri in a hospital bed, her diagnosed broken arm plaster-casted, and an IV of some fancy pain medication in the crook of her good elbow. She tried watching TV to pass the time, but her room only had five channels, and three of them were playing Downton Abbey.
“Well, Misses I’m Fine. This doesn’t look very fine to me.”
She felt a breeze. Spider-Man was perched in her open hospital room window.
“The nurse will freak if she sees you here.”
“It’s okay. I’ve been caught worse places.”
Yuri would have rolled her eyes if her head didn’t hurt so badly. “And I am fine. They just wanted to keep me tonight for observation.”
“And why’s that?”
She cleared her throat. Fiddled with her bed sheets. “I’ve got a bruised spleen. And bruised vocal chords. Doc wants to make sure there’s no hidden lacerations that could lead to internal bleeding.”
“So that’s why you sound like you smoke a pack a day. Are you even supposed to be talking? Jesus, Yuri.”
“How many times do I have to tell you I’m fine?”
“I told you I had it handled! You didn’t need to come up there!”
“Yes, you did have it handled. After I brought you the syringe. What was that stuff anyways?”
Spider-Man shrugged and swung himself fully into the room, sitting on the windowsill like a chair and kicking his legs against the wall. “A little cocktail I mixed up. I kept one of his nasty little skin flakes from our last fight and analyzed it at the lab. It had lizard and human DNA, so I figured someone did some whacko untested science and mutated themself into a lovely lizard man. I did some whacko untested science to reverse it. Yay! Go me!”
Yuri blinked. “You brewed an anti mutation cocktail? By yourself? In a lab?”
“Hey, don’t act so surprised.”
She wasn’t. Not about his intelligence, at least. But she wondered how the hell he had access to an advanced lab.
“Well whatever you did, it was effective.”
“Of course it was. I’m awesome.”
“I’m trying to say thank you without actually thanking you.”
“I know. And I’m saying you’re welcome without giving you the satisfaction of a real response.”
“You’re an asshole.”
“It’s why you keep me around.”
Yes, it was. His approach to crime fighting wasn’t traditional, or even legal a lot of the time, but it was refreshing. And she’d never admit it to him, but he was probably one of her closest friends, as sad as that was. Not much time for a social life as a police caption in a city like New York.
“How...How are things?” Yuri asked him.
He tilted his head. “Things?”
“Your, uh, home situation.”
“Ah. You’re asking if I got evicted and am living out of a garbage bag and sleeping in Central Park.”
She didn’t mean it to sound so demeaning. She was worried about him. “I guess so.”
He turned back around in the window, face aimed out. “I’m okay, Yuri. Got a new job. I actually like this one.”
She didn’t expect her muscles to relax so quickly. Just knowing that Spider-Man wasn’t giving his heart and soul to the city for it to bite him in return was a tremendous relief. “Good. Good, that’s good.”
“Yes, I guess it is.” He threw once last look over his shoulder. “I gotta bounce. Don’t get choked out by any oversized reptiles, oka— oh shit, wait, Nevermind.”
“You’re a menace. Get out of here.”
“Alright, fine, fine. Have a good night, Yuri.”
“You too, Spidey.”
And then he was gone, window shut behind him. Yuri looked around the bed for the remote to the television, which she’d muted when she saw Spider-Man scaling the side of the hospital.
It was webbed to the wall beside the window, completely across the room. “You son of a—“