Spandex
(or, Alter Boy and the Cortexi-Kid)
A/N: This story made possible by the generosity and fabulous prompts of lj user sdsantina.
It was three years since Olivia had turned off the lights at the top of that building, with Peter behind her though she was sure she'd heard him turn and go.
"Don't you think this is a little...excessive?" she asked, hard to understand through several layers of spandex. Peter watched her squirm around inside the costume until she said, "Peter, I can't find the fucking head-hole," and he had to peel back the cape to show her.
"You okay in there?" he asked.
"Ugh," she huffed, red-faced and claustrophobic, as she sucked in air and got herself adjusted.
"You know, you don't have to do this," Peter said. She frowned and tugged at a weird crease across her shoulder, where the cape was sewn into the neck. "Walter's birthday isn't an excuse for him to do whatever he wants."
"Yeah," she said. "I know." She pulled the last of her hair free and ponytailed it. "I can't possibly explain to you why I thought this would be in any way fun." Falling irritatedly silent, she stared at him for a moment. He stared back, through his stagecoach-holdup mask.
And they couldn't not laugh.
It was two years since Olivia had re-learned what she'd known how to do as a child.
There are three parts to the typical hostage situation: hostage, bad guy, and negotiator.
In an atypical hostage situation, that list can change, and then you might end up with something a little weirder: a hostage, a bad guy, some superheroes, and an old scientist overlord in the corner who just likes to watch.
This was the setup Walter had chosen for his birthday show ("Cheaper than Benihana," was what Peter had said), so there they all were in the big, dark lab: five people, four costumes, and one prop.
Brandon, that Gentle Ben of lab technicians, was planted by the permanent Bunsen burner setup in a mean-spirited suit. On his arm (or more literally, in his arm, as it was fashioned into a weak half-nelson) was a beautiful woman in a lovely dress that she'd just bought last month for kind of a lot of money and really, really didn't want to ruin.
"Walter, when you said 'dress nicely,' this wasn't what I had in mind," Astrid said. She glared toward Gene's stall, in which Walter had set himself up (where had he gotten the chaise lounge?) behind a plexiglass panel. Walter pretended not to hear her.
"Am I supposed to be doing something?" Brandon said, to everyone and no one.
Walter hushed them from his spot, scuffing a foot in the hay. "If you don't listen," he advised, "you won't hear them coming!" The them, of course, being Peter and Olivia - Walter's personal A-Team, X-Men, whatever - who were waiting on Walter's cue to save the day in the most dramatic method possible.
Astrid was uneasy. It may have been Walter's excitement, which was usually inversely proportional to the safety of the thing he was excited about, or it may have been that Brandon's arm around her neck was cinching tighter as he got more anxious.
"Hey," she whispered, tapping his elbow. "Easy, there."
"Sorry!"
They fidgeted around uncomfortably for a minute, getting his elbow away from the beakers and the table's edge out of her ribs, and apparently that wasn't enough action for Walter.
"Brandon!" Walter yelled. "Don't just stand there! Do something!"
Brandon looked around, confused. "Like what?"
"Use your ray gun!"
Brandon took a moment to recall the curio Walter had clipped onto his belt. It looked like a prop from Star Wars - not the remasters but the old, dusty ones. It was, at best, less than fear-inspiring. But he sighed, drew it and aimed it at the ceiling anyway, like a cowboy.
"All right...little lady," he said, shaking his gun arm toward the sky in a way that was mildly threatening, maybe. What was more threatening was the way Astrid looked at him when he called her 'little lady.'
"Now see here," he drawled on, "I'm in charge, and you're going to do..." he thought for a moment "...whatever I say, when I figure out what that is." He turned away. "Walter, what do I want her to do?"
"Why would that matter?" Walter called.
"Okay," Brandon sighed. "Well." He looked down to Astrid for inspiration, but Astrid was having some kind of staring contest with Walter and didn't look happy about it. "Fine," he said. He glanced up at the clunky gun and wondered if it were a cap-gun. He'd loved the smell of spent caps as a kid: spent caps and fresh comic book ink. He clicked off a few plastic-sounding shots over his head, hoping he might smell that burnt sour sourness again.
Instead, he smelled ozone, which coincided with an odd bright light and Peter and Olivia saying "whoa," in unison from their hiding spot.
It took Brandon a dumb second to figure it out.
"Wait," he said, staring at the gun. "This thing is real?" It was warm in his hand.
"That thing is real?" Astrid said, from below Brandon's chin. She'd hoped to be more of a femme fatale in Walter's little story, but working in this lab, she rarely got exactly what she wanted. Still - having her head next to a working ray gun was a little too much, even with the trust she had in Peter and Olivia. "Walter!"
"With all due respect, sir," Brandon said, "that's something you probably should have told me before we started."
"Massive Dynamic doesn't deal in toys, Brandon," Walter said. "You should know that better than anyone."
Astrid was trying to extricate herself, tugging Brandon's forearm away from her neck. "That's just wrong," she said. "Birthday or not, Walter, ray guns pointed at my head are my limit." Brandon let her go, pretty sure that ray guns were his limit, too.
"Oh, don't go, dear," Walter pleaded, but Astrid went straight for the safety of Walter's hideout. She stood next to him behind the shield, arms crossed, and told him that if he really wanted a hostage situation, he'd better get himself out there and play one himself.
"But..." Walter said, almost to himself, and then he stopped, realizing that it might be the most fun he could possibly have. Why hadn't he set it up that way from the start? "Oh, my!" he cried.
He raced out (on tiptoes, how else?) onto the cleared space on the lab floor and insinuated himself into Brandon's clumsy embrace, nestling into the elbow Astrid had vacated. Brandon was immediately ten times less comfortable with the situation.
"I feel strange about this, sir," he said.
"Is it a good strange or a bad strange?" Walter asked.
Brandon sighed.
"Now, restrain me!" Walter ordered. Brandon looked hopelessly around the room, settling on Peter, who had come out of the shadows by the door and was waiting at the edge of visibility with Olivia, adjusting his mask.
"Makes you wish you took that position at the USDA, doesn't it?" Peter said. Brandon frowned.
"Restrain me!" Walter demanded, trying to wriggle free so violently that Brandon almost lost him. After a few minutes of wrestling, Brandon became significantly less patient. One nice, solid elbow to his gut and he found himself much more willing to threaten his boss: it wasn't like Walter hadn't asked for it, after all.
He surreptitiously dropped the gun into the pocket of his lab coat and pulled out a blunt-tipped pen, pressing the nib firmly against Walter's temple.
"Cut it out," he said. "Sir." Walter grinned messily.
"Perfect!" he cried. "That's perfect! Now, Peter! Olivia! Save me!"
It was one year since they'd found that the fabric of space-time was a quilt that Peter could shake out whenever he pleased, and that the physical world was Olivia's own set of Legos.
Astrid took over Walter's viewing area eagerly. Even with that left-out feeling she sometimes got from working with them, she'd never stopped seeing the magic in what Peter and Olivia could do. They were very...watchable. She put her feet up on the chaise and waited.
They came out of the shadows together, Peter slightly behind. Astrid understood their strategies almost better than they did, concretely instead of instinctively: telekinetic to the front to clear the way, human time machine to the rear in case something went wrong.
Of course, none of their abilities were really needed here. Brandon was as threatening as a teddy bear and would give up just as quickly. And it wouldn't be because he was a coward; no, it would be because he didn't have the faith in Peter and Olivia that he should. He still really believed he could get to them, injure them accidentally, hurt them somehow. That made Astrid want to laugh.
Astrid had faith. Astrid knew. And while she would never trust Brandon - or maybe anyone, for that matter - to point a laser at her head, she felt a twinge of regret for having left the scene. Brandon made a terrible villain, holding that cheap little pen like a weapon. He wasn't even going to try.
Indeed, the closer Olivia got to him, the weaker he seemed to get; his pen hand dropped like he was holding a ten-pound pail of water. Poor Walter, Astrid thought, watching the old man's excitement wane as he realized there wasn't going to be much of a struggle at all. If Walter'd wanted a real fight, he should've given her the gun. She knew their capabilities. She'd know how to push them.
But it wasn't too late for that, now, was it?
Astrid got up.
Maybe all that musical theater in college wouldn't go to waste, after all.
"Well Jesus H. Christ on a pony," she crowed, strolling out from the blind. "I guess this is the kind of labor you get when you hire sidekicks off the soupline."
Peter and Olivia stopped mid-approach. Walter stopped mid-struggle. Brandon stopped mid-nelson. To Astrid's delight, four pairs of eyes, for a second, were glued only to her.
"Gimme the pistol," she demanded, sauntering forth and holding out a hand, into which Brandon sheepishly placed his pen. She frowned. "This ain't a pistol, you flat tire. Now hand over the real McCoy before I have to use it on you."
When he proved too slow for her taste, Astrid reached into his pocket herself and took it. He blushed.
Like she said: she'd never trust a ray gun pointed at her head. But Peter and Olivia? She could empty any kind of gun at them and it would only make things more spectacular. So that's what she did.
It was six months since they'd become an impenetrable fortress, working together.
The firefight was beautiful, really beautiful.
Astrid stood in front of her hostages (Walter still in Brandon's half-hearted hold) as Peter and Olivia started forward again, in a stance she rarely got to use outside the shooting range.
"Stop or I'll plug ya," she growled. She looked at Olivia and thought intently of the gun going off, of the bullets traveling straight for Olivia's blond head, and Olivia looked back and smiled her permission.
"Aw, hell," Astrid said, "I'm gonna plug ya anyways."
Brandon almost lost his composure when Astrid started firing, aiming straight between the eyes because it was the easiest shot for Olivia to deflect. It didn't even look like Olivia did anything, really, but the flash from the dissipation of the laser was like a mirror held up to the sun. As Astrid advanced and kept shooting, it strobed the room, making little flash photographs of her hostages' faces behind her: one horrified, one in eager awe.
It was a month since they'd really shown what they could do, at a crime scene where the rocket-launching criminal element hadn't quite gone by the time they'd arrived. They'd put so many bodies back together in reverse, it'd been like the bazookas hadn't even been real.
The explosion was an accident, not part of Astrid's plan, though with so many unstable substances in the lab, it wasn't a surprise. In hindsight, Astrid knew she should have been more conscious of the deflection shocks, but hindsight wasn't worth much after the jar of picric acid caught one in the worst way.
Peter reached Astrid right after the shrapnel.
He put his hand on her chest, over the copious blood and glass.
She didn't even have time to be afraid.
Having never felt Peter's ability firsthand before, Astrid almost failed to identify what was happening. There was a haze, like a steamed-up window, and the sense of her limbs being in many places at once without moving at all. And cold. Cold like she couldn't even explain, too cold to breathe or move or even tell Peter that maybe something had gone wrong and she was dying, or dead, or-
"'Livia," she heard Peter yell, and then she heard the explosion again: same explosion, same shouts, except this time the glass bounced off the air around them, tumbling harmlessly to the ground.
"Astrid," he whispered, and she opened her eyes. She was on the floor. His hand was around the back of her neck. She just breathed. All at once, the cold was a memory, and so were her wounds.
"Sorry about that, sweetheart," he said, sincere and almost self-conscious. "I know it's not...pleasant." Sweeping a hand over her unmarred shirtfront as if to verify his work, he helped her up. As her head drew up close to his, he whispered even more apologetically into her ear: "They won't remember. That's just how it works."
Oh, yeah, and it was eleven months, twenty-nine days and two hours since Peter and Olivia had slept together in his little wood-paneled room for the first time.
"You know," he said, peeling the mask from his face, "you look pretty good in spandex." He wouldn't have said it if she weren't surreptitiously admiring herself in their mirror.
"I'm both worried and surprised by how well this fits me," she said.
Peter threw his mask somewhere into the corner of the room, hoping it landed anywhere but on the radiator, and came to stand behind her. "Worried how?"
"Well," she said, leaning slightly backward as his hands slipped around her waist, "he had to get my measurements somehow. I'd hate to think that your father went poking around in my top drawer."
"Knowing what you keep in that drawer."
She smiled. "Indeed."
"Well," he said, "you don't need to worry about that, because I told him your size. Although, if he had gone looking, I think he'd be proud that I handmade you the best vibrator in the entire world." She arched her neck to turn and pin him with an incredulous look.
"Modesty is a virtue," she said.
"So is mechanical genius."
She rolled her eyes, tut-tut-ing through her teeth.
"Hey," he said, "I'm just going by end-user testimonials, here."
"Can't deny the testimonials," she yielded, and he grinned his stubbly little grin against the side of her face as he kissed her. Like a second skin, her costume barely wrinkled as he smoothed a palm over it.
"You know," he murmured, "That old radio I built gets the police frequencies."
She stopped kissing him for a second, then started again. In that pause he saw the trail of her thoughts: the intrigue, the logical rebuttal, the enduring curiosity.
"Don't tell me you haven't thought about it," he said.
She looked demurely at the floor, a response as good as a yes.
"Don't tell me you don't want to try it, just once."
She looked at him, both of them on pause, until some mental starting gun fired and they bolted for the radio together. It was a mad scrabble on his desk for who would get their hands on it first and somehow his hands ended up on her, and hers on him, and the radio fell to the faded rug, losing its batteries, completely and utterly forgotten.