A/N: Yet another Static Shock oneshot from yours truly. Don't fret about the OCs. She isn't all that special, and he isn't even named.
Warning: Mild language, slurs toward homosexuals.
This is not how Arianna had planned on spending her Saturday afternoon.
This was not how she had planned it at all.
She was supposed to be writing an article for the paper, right now. She was supposed to be emailing her boss, telling him to that she had the biggest story of the century sitting on the memory card of her camera. She was supposed to be calling her scumbag boyfriend and telling him to get his own damn apartment because she was going to be moving up in life. She was supposed to be on her way to the top of the ladder as the reporter who found out the truth of the two men beside her.
She was not supposed to be caught in her shifted form. She was not supposed to be caught in a sneak attack on the headquarters of the super duo. She was NOT supposed to be strung up beside them, awaiting her doom at the hands of a madman.
Yet, here she was. Dangling. Being accosted by insane gangbangers and wondering why the universe thought she needed this as her punishment for outing the superhero and his sidekick. It wasn't even like she planned on printing the names that she heard them call each other –presumably their actual names. Plus the picture she was going to use didn't show either of their faces, just the costumes. It wasn't even one of the really good pictures.
"Shit!" She was jerked out of her temporary lull by the maniac suddenly hitting the wall beside where she was hanging.
"Now that I have your full attention," the madman started, "how's about telling me what I want to know before I let all three of you drop for real?" The man leaned in close to her, and she couldn't help but pull away from his breath. It reeked like a week-old gym sock that had been left to rot in a toilet. The lunatic laughed at her and demanded once more, "Where is the cure for the cure?" He turned toward the two men on either side of her, "I know one of you knows. How else could all three of you have your powers when everybody else's have disappeared?"
"We've tried to tell you, man, you've got it all wrong," Static tried. "We don't have the cure any more. All of the Big Bang Gas is gone."
"Don't lie to me, Static. I know you and Gear, here, lost your powers like the rest of us. But then you got 'em back. Only you, and now this chick. If she hadn't shown up, I might've believed you. I've never seen her before, though, and I've seen every Bang Baby my age that this city has to offer. So tell me: if there is no gas, how'd she get powers?"
"I'm—," she cleared her throat, "I'm not a Bang Baby. I've been able to shift since I was twelve. I didn't need the gas; I have natural ability. I never told anyone because I was afraid, especially after the Big Bang, that they would reject me. That would explain why you've never seen me. I—"
"Shut up!" The madman pulled out a knife and pointed it toward Arianna, "What you're telling me is that I spent all of my time and money—my hard-earned cash—on fixing this place with anti-metapower gear without the Wonder Twins over here noticing, and now I'm not even gonna get what I came for? I don't like the sound of that."
"C'mon," Gear started, "just let us down from hear, let the lady go, and we can all just forget this whole mess happened."
"Nuh-uh. No, sir, that's not how this is gonna go. I'm not leaving here empty-handed. Alright," the man menaced toward Arianna once again, "you're going to tell me what's on that pretty, little camera of yours, now. Tell me what you've figured out since you've been stalking my man Static."
"N-nothing! Really! I haven't been stalking them," if she weren't so scared witless, she probably would have insisted that she had been researching, "for—for very long. I really haven't found out anything that the public didn't already have suspicions of. It's not even that surprising, honestly. I mean, they're two young, attractive, male superheroes; yet, neither is usually seen without the other, much less with a woman. It really only makes sense that they would be in a relationship together. I was only here looking to prove what the public suspects, and—"
"Wait!" Their captor cut off her rambling, "You two are queer? Together?" Too late, Arianna realizes that it might have been a bad idea to tell that particular part of her investigation. "Man, that's just sick! What d'you mean 'it makes sense?' That kinda shit don't ever make sense. Men don't chase after other men. That's just wrong! I oughta just get rid of all three of you for being snitches and homos."
"Listen, man," Gear tried again, turning the maniac's attention toward himself, "there's no need for all of this. Just walk out. Leave. Forget this ever happened. Forget about us and this place. Just leave and everything will be okay. We can all go back to our normal lives, and we'll never see each other again. But if you kill us, that won't happen. We'll be dead, and you'll be hunted. By the police, by the FBI, by the Justice League. They won't stop until you're behind bars or dead. But if you just let us go, you can walk. We won't come after you. We won't send anyone. We're free; you're free. Deal?"
Arianna held her breath as the man crossed the short distance to Gear and pressed his knife against his throat. Without the helmet there to block his face from view, she could see tense fear written in his eyes. She could hear Static quietly struggling to loosen his bonds. "How about this, fag? I'll kill you, then your little boyfriend. Then I'll move on to the reporter. I might even have some fun with her, first. After that, I'll burn this place to the ground so that there'll be no evidence. The world will be better off, and no one will ever know it was me that did the good deed. Deal?"
She could see the lunatic's knife start to draw a line of blood across Gear's neck. Her heart was pounding a river dance in her chest. This was NOT how she'd wanted to spend her Saturday afternoon.
A dull thud awoke her to the fact that she had closed her eyes. "Backpack!" That was Gear's voice, definitely not dead. She peeked to her left to see Gear fall to the floor, freed, next to the body of their captor.
"Is—is he—?" A thud to her right jerked her attention to a now free Static.
"No, Backpack didn't hit him that hard. Right, Gear? Here, I'll catch you when the little guy cuts you down, Miss…?"
She forced her eyes back to Static from where they had wandered to the madman's form, "Oh! Um, right, Arianna. My name's Arianna Blackwell." She felt herself fall and was relieved when Static kept his word about catching her. When he sat her down properly, she offered her hand. They shook briefly, and then Static asked her the one question she had really hoped to avoid.
"What are you doing here, Arianna?"
"I'm a reporter," she decided she might as well tell the truth, since they already knew most of it. "I've been following you to try to get a good story. God knows, you two are always up to something. When I followed you here one day, I realized I'd hit the proverbial jack pot. I knew this had to be your headquarters, so I decided that I'd just wait for you both to come back here to get a good scoop. What's a better way to get insider information than to hear an inside conversation, right?"
"So, you know about us, about me and Gear, because you hid in here somehow? How did you even get in? That's what I don't get."
Arianna swallowed hard a few times, "I can change shapes. I can shift into whatever animal I want. I became a spider and just walked in with you."
"Alright, you're a shape shifter, and you became a spider to spy on us for some newspaper. Was a fly on the wall just too obvious?" He paused to let some of the tension in the room disappear. Arianna was pulled away from wondering about the hand signals Gear was using to communicate with Backpack when Static asked another question, "Where'd you hide the camera?"
Silently, Arianna pointed to her hiding spot across the room in the crook between the TV and the wall parallel to the old couch. Trash had already been piled there. All she had needed to do was arrange it so that the camera didn't stand out, and the two men never noticed. Static told her to stay put, and he crossed the room to go get the camera. When he turned it on and started looking through it, she started to protest. She thought better of it, and instead she started to watch Gear and Backpack.
She was surprised to note that the insane man had been tied up since the last time she had cared to look. Gear was now moving to look at the pictures with Static. His neck was bandaged. When did that even happen? Backpack was scuttling back and forth. Every so often they could hear a tinkling, followed by a short vacuuming noise, before Backpack would scurry away to another spot. She supposed it was looking for the "anti-metapowers gear" the lunatic had installed. She wondered vaguely about how it worked, and how the man had gotten it inside.
"Arianna," Static called, "c'mere for a second." She joined the men where they stood with her camera. "You have to understand that we can't let you have these pictures. They would cause all of us a lot of trouble. You get that, right?"
Arianna nodded, and Gear continued, "You're going to have to find a different story. If you still want to do a story on us, you could interview one of us."
Static cleared his throat and added, "Just, not right now, okay?"
"Right," she nodded her head again. Suddenly, an idea struck her, "I think I'm just going to do a story on today. There's nothing like being an eyewitness to help a story sell."
Gear and Static immediately looked at each other. "I'm not sure that's such a good idea, uh, Arianna," Gear chimed in.
"Yeah, I mean, what would you say set him off," Static asked, pointing a thumb over his shoulder at their assailant.
"He just misunderstood," Arianna smiled. "I said that I was trying to find proof of whether or not you two were together. Your fans really do want to know. He just thought I meant that I you were together. Or, something like that, anyway." The heroes still looked skeptical, so she assured them, "The public will eat it up, especially if you let me take a picture of you with the suspect."
Grudgingly, the two accepted it and turned to different matters. "What else have you found out about us?"
Arianna laughed, "Nothing, really. I know that you call each other 'Virg' and 'Rich,' but other than that I haven't found out anything." The two superheroes stepped back and huddled together, so Arianna politely pretended not to hear them discussing whether or not they could trust her.
After a few minutes of heated discussion, Static and Gear turned back to her. "Okay, we're going to take the memory card from your camera, just to make sure that the pictures never get published," Gear started. "It's not that we don't trust you. It's just that we don't trust reporters in general." Then, he took out the memory card and pocketed it.
She took the camera back, sighing about all the lost work. "Here, we'll escort you home. No reason to risk another attack, right?"
When Static flies her to her apartment, she is relieved. When she walks in and notices the note on the counter from her scumbag boyfriend, she picks it up and reads it. She grins and does a celebratory dance. He was gone, and she didn't even have to get a restraining order this time! She then decides to put off writing the article until Monday. She still has a week until the deadline, after all. She spends the rest of her afternoon soaking in a nice bath.
Arianna spent the next few weeks noticing Static, Gear, and sometimes Backpack patrolling her area more often than normal. She waves to them, now, whenever they fly by to "check on her." She feels like she has the right to do at least that, since they did derail her climb to the top of the Famous Reporter Wall at work.
A/N: Review and tell me what you thought?