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The first time we crossed paths, I hadn’t realized Bitch was a villain. It seemed more and more obvious in hindsight, but at the time she was just a girl and her dog limping down the street.
Three fifteen on a cold April morning, and I had been more than ready to head home. The past four hours had involved a whole lot of shivering and precious little else. I knew, intellectually, that a quiet night was a good thing, but it didn’t make it any less boring. Next weekend, I had resolved, I would head closer to the water and into the Docks proper, not just circle around the same couple of neighborhoods. I could only walk past the same flickering streetlight so many times before going crazy.
The complete lack of anything going on made it easier to notice when the stranger staggered around the corner. She walked up the street with a bundle slung over her shoulders and an exhausted dog loping unsteadily by her side, and for a second I had thought it was just some lady out walking her dog. Kind of crazy to do all alone at three in the morning, but this was Brockton.
When I brushed a handful of gnats across the bundle she was carrying and pieced together the outline of another dog, not breathing, I started to get a little worried. When my bugs felt the burns on the other, limping dog, I started to get very worried. I half-jogged down the street towards the girl, and as I passed beneath a streetlight maybe fifty feet away she glanced up and saw me. Through my bugs, I felt her tense.
I tried not to let it bother me. Running into a strange, costumed figure at night? I probably would have been a little paranoid too. Instead of getting any closer, I stopped, and bit my lip. I didn’t want to fuck up my first time interacting with anyone in costume, but this also didn’t seem like the right time to worry about appearances.
I waved. “Hey! Are you okay?” Even barely raising my voice, it sounded deafening after getting used to the silence. The girl stared back at me blankly. For a moment it was just the two of us on this little strip of suburban road, flanked by the shadows of houses and the faint buzz of the streetlights. Her dog pawed at the ground uneasily, stepping out in front of her to place itself between the two of us.
“I promise I’m not a bad guy.” Even as I said it, I had cringed. Apparently, that was the best I could come up with. The kind of thing every single actual bad guy said right before they went on to poison the water supply or something. I already wished I could start the conversation over, but I was just going to have to roll with it.
“My name is Myrmidon.” I punctuated the name with a burst of white moths fluttering around my outstretched hand. “I saw you looked hurt. Do you need any help?” There. Simple, straightforward, to-the-point.
The other girl bristled. For the first time, she finally spoke.
“Fuck off. Don’t need your help,” she growled. Her dog echoed the sound, baring its teeth. First off, wow, talk about a thing to say to the person trying to be nice, but I had to remind myself that she had clearly gone through something.
“Alright, well, what about your dog? I’m not a vet, but I have some bandages and gauze.” Her dog looked… rough. I was trying not to think about it too hard, but a part of me was wondering what exactly they’d been through. A house fire? Maybe it was a bit judgmental of me, but frankly, she looked homeless. I did know that fires weren’t exactly uncommon in the abandoned warehouses by the water—they popped up in the news every few weeks, brief blurbs about the increasingly-stressed fire department and budgets and other city politics.
“What do you want?” The girl pulled me back to the moment.
“…What?”
“What do you want? Why the fuck do you care?” Of all the questions I’d been expecting, that had not been one of them. I was torn between annoyance and just plain confusion.
“I don’t want anything,” I finally said. “I’m doing it because I can, and because I want to. Look, do you want the bandages or not?” The girl stared at me for long seconds. I actually thought she was going to say no.
“…Fine,” she gruffly conceded.
I wish I could say I helped bandage her dog, but from there on out the girl did pretty much everything herself. We worked together in almost-silence for a few minutes, as she methodically disinfected, swabbed, and wrapped the burns running up her dog’s legs, and I stood there and passed her various bits out of my first-aid kit as she grabbed for them. I very deliberately didn’t bring up her other dog’s body when she set it down to work. When it was finished, she gave me a long look, and then limped off down the road. I watched her go for a minute, and then made my own way home.
The next morning, there was an article in the news about a group of small-time villains losing a bad fight to Lung down at the Docks.
The second time we crossed paths, I hadn’t actually been in costume. I wasn’t even out doing cape stuff—at least, not directly. I was downtown at the library, holed up in a corner away from prying eyes, where I could research capes with some amount of privacy. It was late, maybe thirty minutes before they closed, and I had a pile of homework spread out across the table in case any of the librarians came over to check on me, but for the past hour nobody had bothered, which suited me just fine.
I think this was the first day I started to realize my powers were… different. Well, not my powers themselves, really, but the way I got them. It sounded crazy—tens of thousands of parahumans out there, and I was the odd one out?
There was a lot of conflicting information about how people got powers. Apparently genetics wasn’t a factor, which was news to me, and kind of hard to believe considering Brockton’s very own New Wave, but the paper I had skimmed seemed pretty adamant on the topic. A dozen other pieces mentioned a dozen other hypotheticals, all generally trending towards ideas about ‘surpassing human limits’ or other vague platitudes.
Nobody talked about holes in reality, islands of red crystal hovering above a bottomless abyss. Nobody talked about catching sight of your own broken reflection and feeling like your head was going to explode. The longer I searched, the more I felt like I was walking through the woods at night with a too-bright lantern, unable to see anything through the foliage but shining like a beacon for anything out there in the dark.
Thoroughly unsettled, I had just logged out of the computer and started packing up when my bugs picked up a commotion a block away, behind the back of the library. Their rudimentary instincts spurred them out of the way of something racing down the street, oversized footfalls smashing chunks out of the pavement.
I latched on with whatever fast-moving bugs I had within range, building a kind of mental outline in the space where my bugs weren’t. The strange outline revealed something big. Bony plates, wet muscle, and spikes.
Bitch raced down the street atop one of her monster dogs, chased by a jagged blob of sharp lines that shredded my bugs to pieces the moment they got close.
Fuck.
That was Hookwolf—just one of Brockton Bay’s honest-to-god local Neo-Nazi supervillains. One with a bodycount. I sent a continuous stream of sacrificial bugs into his blades to keep track of him; he loped after Bitch almost lackadaisically, stopping to smash a pair of parked cars into each other. Something in the way he moved tickled the back of my skull. He didn’t look like he was trying to catch her. He looked… expectant.
I launched my bugs at full speed in every direction. Ahead of Bitch, at the very edge of my range, they landed on two figures huddled behind a van. They weren’t hiding in fear.
For half a second, I hesitated.
Technically, a fight between villains wasn’t something I should get involved in, unless I thought I could take both of them. And as wonderful a fantasy it was to walk up to the PHQ with Hookwolf in tow… that wasn’t happening. The Protectorate published entire book’s worth of guidance for independent heroes, and a lot of the time the advice ended up being ‘let villains fight amongst themselves, and focus on keeping the civilians safe.’ Especially against capes like Hookwolf.
I thought of Bitch, limping down the street with her dog at her side.
Damn it. Villain or not, I wasn’t going to leave her to the Nazis.
I strained, pulling clouds of bugs together into a giant “X” in midair, flying alongside Bitch as she bounded down the street. There weren’t any other side streets between her and the two figures laying in wait; I wasn’t sure what to do, how to convey that she needed to do… something, anything except keep going straight ahead—
My bugs showed me how her head turned, catching sight of my flying sign. Mid-sprint, her dog-monster’s muscles clenched—
Bitch flew through the air, leaping straight from the ground to the third-story roof on the opposite side of the street in one gigantic bound. Even Hookwolf seemed flabbergasted by the way he stumbled straight through a mailbox on the sidewalk. I tracked her for another half minute as she sped out of my range, and then she was gone.
I made my own escape as surreptitiously as possible, out of the front of the library and onto the first bus I could find.
The third time, they say, is the charm. The third time Bitch and I crossed paths, I was very glad to see her.
“I’m seeing nine men on the first floor,” I told Gallant and Aegis over the earpiece that the heroes had generously lent me for the duration of our little team-up. I was loitering on the sidewalk, half a block away from a nondescript row house downtown. The two Wards had crept around to the back of the building, one block down.
They were being cagey on details, which I guess made sense since I wasn’t properly ‘one of them,’ but from the Wards were willing to share, Armsmaster and Miss Militia were currently going toe-to-toe with Kaiser, Hookwolf, and both of the blonde twins on the other side of downtown. With a solid chunk of the Empire distracted, our job was to turn over a couple of pre-identified safehouses before anyone figured out what was going on.
Everything was going great until a whole section of my bugs dropped right out of the sky.
A directionless wave of nausea hit me like a truck—my stomach suddenly started doing flips out of nowhere. Through my increasingly-disoriented bugs I felt two figures climbing up the stairs from the basement. I recognized one of them; he’d been hiding behind the van back at the library.
“Two capes in the basement,” I groaned into my earpiece. “Tiger mask, and…” Was that another man? No. “A woman with a buzz cut.” I had to pause and breathe, fighting to keep my lunch down.
“Stormtiger and Cricket.” Aegis didn’t swear, but I could tell he wasn’t happy about the news. I was a little too preoccupied to pay much attention. The Wards sounded fine—was it something to do with my powers? I pulled all of my bugs out of the building in a rush, blinding myself, but the gut-churning nausea died down from ‘imminent vomiting’ to only firmly uncomfortable.
My lack of vision made for an unpleasant surprise when the buzz-cut cape burst out the front door. Cricket whipped her head over towards me before I even had half a second to duck into the alley. Judging by the sudden commotion over the earpiece, the other Nazi found my backup.
Cricket held one hand against the base of her throat. Her voice came out scratchy and distorted.
“You’re new,” she rasped.
Instead of answering, I swarmed her with bugs.
I got barely a dozen good bites and stings in before the jackhammer wave of nausea returned, stronger than ever. Even my bugs themselves seemed to be affected, lurching through the air like they were drunk. Because of course the first proper villain I ran into was one who could shut down my powers. Vision swimming, I saw her sprint at me.
I turned and ran. Maybe it wasn’t very heroic, but I knew my strengths and knife fights weren’t one of them.
The moment Cricket started running, the pounding in my head dipped to an almost-manageable level. I didn’t know if it was a concentration thing or just something she could only do for so long, but I didn’t want to waste the opportunity. As I darted down the alley and she closed the distance I gathered all my surrounding swarm. The second wave of bugs I sent almost blacked out the sky. The buzz sounded more like a roar. As long as I could get to her before she—
Cricket stopped on a dime, face screwing up in concentration. An audible blast of sound exploded out from her and smashed me over the head like a wrecking ball. It was too much—mid-sprint, my legs turned to jelly, I smashed face-first into the ground, and was promptly sick all over the pavement. My swarm disintegrated, bugs fleeing in every direction. Through the remaining handful I felt her striding closer, running the tip of her finger down the blade of some kind of miniature scythe in her hand—
Her head snapped up and to the side just in time to take a couple thousand pounds of dog monster to the side. Her last-second acrobatic twirl out of the way was the only thing that kept her limbs free from a pair of snapping jaws. Forget chasing bumpers; I had never been more grateful to see a slavering pair of fangs that looked like they could chew through an engine block.
“…you,” the Nazi’s voice crackled out. It sounded almost intimidating, echoing in the confines of the alley. And then Bitch’s dog growled, so loud and low that I could have sworn the whole street shook. Cricket seemed to suddenly realize what, exactly, she was up against.
She turned and sprinted full-out for the nearest doorway. Bitch swung off her dog, and then whistled.
“Angelica, attack!” The monster was off in a single earth-shaking leap.
I stumbled to my feet, spitting to clear the taste from my mouth. Bitch glanced over, wrinkling her nose, and I was suddenly and very painfully aware of how I looked. I could only hope the darkness hid at least some of the absolute wave of mortification. If I could have spontaneously vanished into a cloud of bugs, I would have.
“…Hey,” I said awkwardly. “Thanks for the save?”
“Bug girl,” Bitch said. “You were the one warning me the other day.” I couldn’t tell if she was upset. The words were matter-of-fact, and yet she sounded upset. Or… angry. For a girl roughly my age, she wasn’t anything like the people I went to school with. It was hard to get a read on her.
“Yeah, that was me.” I settled on the truth, for however much good that would do. It wasn’t like I could really deny it. “Hookwolf was chasing you into some kind of trap. There were other capes laying in wait further down the street—” I jerked upright.
It was about then I remembered my teammates. My teammates that were right this very moment up against the other Nazi cape—
“Gallant, Aegis, do you need help?!” There was a moment of silence. Bitch stared at me.
The earpiece crackled before it could sink in that I just radioed the heroes directly in front of a villain. I think the sheer stupidity, or audacity, stumped even Bitch.
“Myrmidon, are you okay? Stormtiger slashed himself up and ran the moment Gallant hit him with a strong blast—hold tight, we’ll be right there—”
“I’m okay!” I interrupted Aegis. “I managed to… deal with Cricket.” Bitch folded her arms. There was silence on the other end of the line. It deepened into something incredibly awkward.
“…Got it,” Aegis finally said, deciding not to ask any questions and instantly becoming my new favorite Ward. “I’m glad you’re okay. Do you need anything? There weren’t supposed to be any capes here, so console is pulling us back before reinforcements show up. We’d love for you to come back and debrief with the team.”
Damn it. Any other day, and I would have been jumping at the chance. Right now? I glanced at Bitch.
“Can I take you up on that another time?” I’m sure I was tanking all sorts of protocol, but Aegis seemed pretty chill…
“…Of course,” he replied. “We’ll see you around?”
“Yeah, absolutely,” I said, struck by a wave of relief. “See you around.” Slipping the earpiece into my pocket, I faced Bitch properly. She looked like she hadn’t decided what to make of me.
“You’re a hero,” she finally growled out, accusingly.
“Well, yeah,” I admitted. “At least, I want to be. But I met you first. And besides, you did just save me.” I didn’t know how to phrase it. Maybe I was just too used to the ‘good guys’ at school being a bunch of assholes. Maybe it was something about Bitch specifically. I’d never be a villain, but talking with her? That first night we’d met, she had felt like looking into a mirror. The version of myself before I got powers, trudging down the street all on her own.
Bitch stared at me. Behind her, Angelica trotted back empty-pawed, a hulking behemoth of muscle and bone making the alleyway seem downright cramped. And yet, for a multi-ton murder machine, she looked almost… forlorn.
“…What do you want?” Bitch finally asked. I shrugged.
“Honestly, I hadn’t really thought about it,” I admitted. “I’m starving. Do you want to go get a burger or something?”