Archive of Our Own ^beta

You’re wearing a white button-down and a blazer. You’ve got a gun strap, but no gun in it because you were never issued one and you didn’t feel like nagging anyone about it. You’ve got a badge in a leather wallet identifying you as a Special Agent (In Training) of the Bureau of Hero Management. You also have an undergraduate degree in sociology. 

Thus equipped, you sprint towards the sounds of fighting. 

One of the city’s newer supervillains (Doc Ock, if you read newspapers, or Dr. Otto Octavius, if you read newspapers a month ago) is flinging cars at Spiderman, and Spiderman is using webs to catch them and keep them from doing too much property damage. 

You pause to examine the way Doc Ock moves - you watched a lot of videos of fights as part of your training, looking for gaps and weaknesses. Guiltily, you find yourself thinking that he should be doing a lot better, with four giant mechanical arms against one scrawny teenager. For one, he seems to be overacting, pantomiming with his flesh arms the way he wants the robot arms to move. It makes you wonder if he’s having trouble controlling them. Whether he’ll get more dangerous with experience. 

And though throwing entire cars is undeniably physically impressive, none of them are landing anywhere near Spiderman. Surely if Octavius was so committed to killing him, he could just grab him in an actuator and crush him like a bug. Or actually hit him with a car rather than haphazardly tossing them at walls. 

You think of who he was before. An academic. A man disinclined to physical conflict. You wonder if he really lacks the aptitude for murder, or if he really doesn’t want to kill Spiderman. 

Spiderman retreats, to within shouting-distance of you. “Are you okay?” you yell, hands cupped around your mouth. “Do you need backup?” 

Doc Ock turns to face you, and you feel like melting into the sidewalk. “Who the fuck are you? A high school intern?” His actuators carry him closer, so he looms, suspended over you like the revenant of a hanged man. 

“I’m twenty-three!” you say indignantly, not taking your eyes off him, hoping he won’t look around and see Spiderman creeping closer behind him, about to nab one of the bags of money with a web. 

He snorts dismissively. “Do you need someone to rent a car for you?” 

Spiderman gives you a thumbs-up, and yanks one of the bags of money out of Doc Ock’s hand. He whirls around, leather coat swirling. “Hey!”

–

The next time you see him, you’re off the clock. You’re enjoying the first cool day of fall on the fire escape outside your apartment window when his actuators lower him down from the roof. 

“I thought I recognized you,” he says, and you’re vaguely flattered. “Where’s Spiderman?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t you work together?”

“I don’t know his address. Or his real name. Superheroes tend to be private people.” 

He looks over your shoulder into your apartment. “Then I’m sure you won’t mind if I take a look around?”

You do mind, actually, because you haven’t swept the floor of your studio apartment in a hot minute. You live in a poorly-ventilated shoebox, essentially, so your bedding is always suffused with the smell of whatever you’ve cooked most recently. And right now your bed isn’t made. 

“Not without a warrant,” you say. 

“I’m not a cop! And if you don’t tell me where Spiderman is, I’ll kill you.”

“Like, kill me? Or are you just gonna throw a car at me?” 

“I could kill you.”

“Why do you like throwing cars so much?”

“You think I'm going to tell you information that you can use? For strategy?” He pushes past you and into the apartment. It doesn’t take him very long to case the joint, such as it is. He sorts through the pile of junk mail on the kitchen table, flips through the magazine rack on the floor by the couch, and crouches down to see the plastic bins full of winter clothes under your bed, but doesn’t examine them. 

He stops in front of the tofu you’re pressing, cushioned with paper towels between two plates with a saucepan of water on top to weigh it down. “What’s this? You’re pressing tofu?”

“Yup. I like to coat it with corn starch and pan-fry it.” 

“You know it’ll crisp right up if you put it in the air fryer.”

“Do you see an air fryer in here?” 

He laughs shortly. “I guess not.” 

For a moment he watches you hurriedly trying to make your bed. Then - 

“Let me,” he says, gently, and uses the actuators to lift up your mattress and fix the fitted sheet where it’d come untucked. Another actuator picks up the junk mail. “Are these recycling?” 

You nod. 

An actuator carries them out the window and (presumably) deposits them in the recycling dumpster in the alley. Although he is a villain, so he could have put them in the trash. 

“When I was a kid…” He flexes his wrist. “My old man wanted me to be an athlete. He spent hours in the front lawn trying to teach me how to throw and catch. He wouldn’t let me go inside until the street lights turned on. Now…” The actuator moved with his arm, miming an overhand toss. “When I throw cars, I hear his voice in my head. In a memory way, not a hallucination way. Maybe now he’d be proud of me.”

“He wasn’t proud of you when you got your PhD?”

“Well, he was dead by then, but he wouldn’t have been. He didn’t want me to be a poindexter. My mama was proud, though.”

“Should I get a PhD?” you say, suddenly. 

He removes his sunglasses to blink at you. He has dark eyes, with dark, expressive eyebrows. “How should I know? I don’t know you.” 

–

All the conference rooms in the BHM office have two doors: one opening into the office, where you have your cubicle and the senior agents have real offices, and the other opening onto the roof, so the superheroes can get in for meetings without having to show their ID to the security guard at the main door on the ground floor. 

The conference rooms also have opaque shades on the windows, which you’ve never felt the need to lower, but you know some agents do prefer more privacy while meeting with their heroes. 

Spiderman is already there when you arrive, doing origami with a Post-It. It doesn't look very easy with his gloves.

“Hey, Mr. Spiderman.” He’d laughed the first time you called him that, and now it’s his regular title. You slide a mug of coffee across the table to him. 

“Hey.” He peels his mask up to his nose to take a sip. “Some weather we’ve had recently, huh?”

“Yeah.” 

“I don’t want to ask this. But I guess, you know, as a hero I have to do difficult things, and this is… arguably less painful than being thrown off a roof.” He’s stumbling over his words a little, and his shoulders rise and fall as he takes a deep breath. “Doctor Octavius asked me if you were supposed to be a honeypot agent.” 

“ What?” 

“I was horrified! I know, Agent Stern would never… and I told him that, and he said ‘great, so I’m just being a creep all on my own.’”

You sit in silence for a moment. You’re vaguely embarrassed that Octavius thought you were flirting with him, not that you wouldn’t hit on a charming, handsome older man, but that you might do it because you’d been put up to it…

“I just thought you should know. Has he done anything to make you uncomfortable? Because I could be doing more to keep him away from you.”

“No, no. I feel like I’ve gotten some good intel out of him.”

“Yeah, you have. I mean, this is going to sound horrible, but I was thinking about it. He is a guy of a certain age, right?”

You nod. It’s funny, with superheroes. You’ve never seen under Spiderman’s mask, but you were assigned to him because everyone could tell he was young, like you. 

“Maybe becoming a supervillain is kind of a… midlife crisis? I mean, living in New York, it wouldn’t exactly be convenient for him to buy a sports car. Dating someone half his age could be… another option.”

You burst out laughing. 

“I’m sorry! I know I shouldn’t have said it.”

“No, no, it’s not that. I do… like talking with him.”

Spiderman pulls a piece of paper out of his pocket. “I do have his phone number. From… nevermind how I got it. But if you’d like to see him more often…”

A knock at the conference-room door makes you turn around. Your boss, Agent Stern, is standing there white-faced. You leap up and open the door, crumpling the phone number into your pocket. 

“What’s wrong?” you say. 

“I’m so sorry.”

“What? What’s happening?” 

“I… I just found out that our grant funding from the defense department has been cut. The department is going to have to lay off thirty percent of our staff.”

“And I’m the new guy,” you say, numbly. 

He nods. “I’m sorry. You’ve been a wonderful agent. I wanted to tell you as soon as possible so you could spend the rest of the day updating your resume. And if there’s anything I can do, anything at all…” He trails off, and then turns to Spiderman, who’s slumped in his chair. “You will be assigned to another agent. But they definitely won’t have as much time to devote to you.” 

“Understood, sir,” says Spiderman. “I don’t suppose there’s anything I can do to… appeal?”

“In your civilian capacity, you could call your elected representatives and tell them you’ll feel less safe with superheroes receiving less support,” Stern says bitterly. “What you can do as a hero is your own business. But Washington, D.C. is lovely this time of year.” 

–

Doc Ock finds you sitting on the fire escape again. It’s a beautiful evening. The kind of day you’ll miss when you have to move away. The air is crisp, the sky is blue, and you can smell your downstairs neighbors cooking something delicious. 

“Still don’t know where Spiderman lives,” you say by way of greeting.

“He told me you got laid off.”

“Yeah. DOGE canceled the grant that the state was using to fund the Bureau of Hero Management.”

“That doesn’t seem legal.”

You shrug. “Sit with me?”

He sits. “I got you something. I guess it’s not technically bribing a government agent anymore.” He pulls a blue drawstring bag out of his coat pocket and hands it to you. 

You recognize the logo. “A Jellycat?”

“I saw you had a couple of them on your bed when I was here before,” he said sheepishly. 

You open the bag. It’s an absolutely adorable cream-colored bunny rabbit. You rub its soft fur against your cheek. “Did you steal this?”

“Nope.” He puts a hand over his heart. “Scout’s honor. Went down to FAO Schwarz this afternoon and stood in the checkout line with everyone else.” 

“Thank you.” You put the Jellycat carefully inside the window, safe from outdoor grime, and then hug him. For a moment he freezes, and then hugs you back. You sit down next to him again, not quite able to make eye contact.  

“How are you feeling?” he says, gently.

“I’ll be fine. I can just move back in with my parents. I’ll have to, unless I can find a new job, while competing with everyone else who also just got laid off.”

You draw the vape pen out of your sweatshirt pocket and take a drag, turning your head as you exhale to blow the smoke away from him. 

He watches you. “You really shouldn’t do that, you know.”

“Don’t you smoke cigars?” You’ve smelled them on him before.

“Yes, but it’s a nasty habit. I should never have started.”

“Like robbing banks?”

He freezes, and for a moment you think he might hit you, but his scowl fades into something more mournful. “I’m choosing to let that go.”

You take another drag, and feel his gaze on your hand, on your mouth.

You hold it out to him. “Want a hit? It’s got THC in it, but not very much.” 

He takes it, turns the shiny black pen over in his hand. “How does this even work?”

“You press the button while you breathe in.”

He does. He holds the white smoke in his lungs for a moment, exhales it through his nose, and then starts coughing. “That’s foul.”

“It’s a nasty habit,” you agree. “But easier than rolling a joint.”

He shakes his head. “Kids these days. It’s like writing in cursive. What do you even learn in school?”

You lean over and kiss him. 

For an instant he’s frozen. And then he’s almost on top of you in his eagerness. Kissing you, shoving the vape back into your pocket.

“Are you sure about this?” he says without taking his hands off you. 

“Yes. It’s not even a conflict of interest, since I got laid off. Are you sure about this?”

“I’ve done so many things in the past few months I’d never thought I’d do. This doesn’t even top the list.” He kisses you again, pressing you backwards until your legs are almost in the air. 

“Should we take this inside?”

“Yes, please.”

He uses two actuators to lift you, which makes you yelp. 

“Okay?” says Otto, about to pull them away.

“Yeah, yeah,” you say. “I’m just not used to… anyone being able to lift me like that.”

“Oh.” He looks confused. Of course he doesn’t get it. And you’re not about to harsh the vibe by explaining the effect that being unable to imagine yourself being swept off your feet has had on your ego, and so you just kiss him again. 

Your bed is made this time, the sheets freshly laundered, and not quite wide enough for both of you, which suits you just fine. 

“Hold me?” you ask. “Or is that too sappy?”

“I’ll hold you.” He opens his arms, lets you crawl into them, and holds you tightly. He smells faintly of smoke, and machine oil, and sweat, and man. Outside the circle of his arms, your life is crashing down around you. 

“I do want to have sex,” you say finally, when the physical closeness gets to you and your clit is reminding you that it exists and would like attention. “I have condoms.”

He mercifully doesn’t comment on how the box is unopened, or ask if you bought condoms just for him. Instead he kisses you, kisses your chest, your hips, your thighs. “I’ll make it good for you, I promise.”

“I’d expect nothing less, from someone with your years of experience.”

He turns pink at that. 

“You’re very handsome when you blush,” you say, kissing him. 

“Oh, you. You’re very handsome yourself.”

“And you’re very progressive.”

“Bisexuality wasn’t invented in 2015,” he replies, peeling off his leather gloves. 

You lie cradled together in your too-narrow bed, his hand between your legs, fingers slipping against your clit as he kisses you, and you grind on his hand, trying to find a rhythm. “Want your cock, please, want to feel it,” you gasp.

“Alright,” he says, breathless. 

He slides into you. He’s big. The pleasure of his slow thrusts is compounded by the weight of his body pressing you down into the mattress. He’s here. Inside you, on top of you, his mouth covering yours, breathing the same air. 

“Fuck, you feel good,” he’s saying. “I- you’re going to make me -”

You feel him go stiff as he cums, and then he slowly pulls out, your arousal still smouldering. You put your hand over his, his fingers on your clit. You can hear his breath, feel his arm flex as he works his fingers. 

“Like that. Yeah. Oh, fuck.” You close your eyes and lose yourself in the moment, letting a tidal wave of pleasure crash over you. 

The noise that comes out of your mouth is satisfaction mingled with grief. Moving back to your parents’ house will be even more miserable now, now that you know what this feels like. 

Still, you pull him back up the bed to cuddle. 

“I think you should be on top of me,” he says, and your limbs tangle as you rearrange yourselves. Finally you lie with your head pillowed on his chest, his hand on your shoulder. You screw your eyes shut again. 

In the morning he might do something terrible, or get himself killed or arrested. And you have to look for a new job. But for now, you’re here, and it’s perfect.