Men.
( updated) 16: Chapter 16: Heh.
Men.
( updated) Let the record show: Trist was no saint.
Right up until Peter arrived, the disaster unfolding across the park had moved him not at all.
If some cosmic meter measured a man’s alignment, his needle sat at a flat zero, neither good nor evil, and his standing philosophy was the old one: what doesn’t concern me hangs high on the wall.
*And yet.* He could not, it turned out, watch Harry die.
Harry had been good to him.
There’d been the comfort after the crash, the shoulder-punch condolences, and then the detail Peter had passed along later: on release day, Harry had walked into a store and bought one hundred copies of Shonen Jump, rich-kid style, purely as support.
Trist turned his head.
“Gwen.
Take Gali and get to safety.
Don’t split up.” Then, down at Gali: “You hear me?” “Fiiine, fiiine.” Listening to that thoroughly perfunctory answer, Trist smiled bitterly to himself, because the framing was for Gwen’s benefit.
On paper he was asking Gwen to look after his little sister.
In practice, the arrangement ran exactly the other way around.
Gwen wrapped an arm around Gali’s shoulders and ran, and at the mouth of the path she looked back once at his receding figure, and something turned over hard in her chest.
In a moment like this, to run *toward* it, without one thought for himself.
She had never personally seen anyone do that.
The man being composed, in real time, into a portrait of selfless heroism had no idea it was happening, and would have objected on factual grounds, because he wasn’t stupid.
The freshly-arrived version of him would never have gone; that version had been powerless, and powerless men who charge into collapsing buildings just add to the count.
This version was different.
This version wanted to field-test Toughness and Monster Strength, because sooner or later he’d be trading blows with superhumans, and a man should learn his own machinery somewhere cheap.
His conscience pushed.
His curiosity pulled.
Between the two of them, he ran.
Through the churning crowds, a body that had been training daily since the day it arrived in this universe carried him to the balcony without incident.
“Harry.
Give me your hand.” He hauled Harry up and over first.
Mary Jane was worse off, half her body already hanging out over the drop, the crack under her widening with every tremor, and pulling a full-grown adult up one-armed was the sort of thing ordinary men strained and failed at.
For a man carrying Monster Strength at Level 1, she weighed about as much as the question.
He got them both over the rail and moved them out of the building at speed, and neither of them said much of anything, because both of them had just watched, from close range, as the Green Goblin murdered two of the company’s shareholders.
Harry especially.
He had been *talking* to those two men, minutes ago.
They were nearly clear of the park when the Goblin noticed them.
The joy of the killing had been swelling in him this whole time, filling every corridor of his head with one warm instruction, *destroy everything*, and inside that glow, concepts like “Harry” and “son” had been thrown out the back of his mind entirely.
He flung a pumpkin bomb at the three fleeing figures.
Spider-Man read it and fired a web to intercept, and the Goblin, ready for exactly that, threw the glider into him and cut the line out of the air.
The three of them heard the whistling arrive.
They turned.
The pumpkin was coming in fast and level, straight at their faces, and Harry and Mary Jane had exactly enough time for despair to finish forming.
Trist’s expression did not change at all.
He stepped *toward* it, turned his hips, and met the bomb with a whip kick.
In front of every stunned pair of eyes in that corner of the park, the pumpkin bomb reversed course at cannon speed, crossed the sky it had just fallen through, and struck the Green Goblin dead center.
The detonation swallowed him whole.
The pressure wave rolled through the armor and into the body inside it, fire blooming across the open air, the glider bucking and wallowing under him like a boat in a storm.
“AAAGH!” The Goblin’s shriek tore out across the park.
The armor had eaten most of the damage, but the concussion had gone straight through, and the pain of it did something nothing else had managed all afternoon: it blew him awake, clean out of the bloodlust, back into a mind that could count.
And the first thing that mind counted was this: he had just very nearly killed Harry.
There was no room left in him for Spider-Man.
He hauled the glider around and fled the park at full burn, and Spider-Man, with a ground full of wounded below him, let the pursuit go and dropped to help.
“Trist.
Trist, you absolute LEGEND.
That *kick*, man!” Harry had come back from the edge of the drop with his whole scalp still tingling, and the awe poured out of him at volume.
Beside him, Mary Jane was watching Trist with actual stars in her eyes, a fangirl at close range.
It had looked like a simple kick.
In fact, Level 1 Monster Strength had met that bomb at a speed the Goblin’s eyes never tracked, and the high-explosive charge inside it, sluggish about its own job, had only triggered on arrival.
“Head home,” Trist said, waving them off.
The two of them, still not entirely inhabiting their own bodies, collected themselves, climbed into Harry’s car, and put the whole cursed place behind them.
Only then did the sirens finally start up around the park’s edges, the police arriving fashionably late, the fire trucks and ambulances rolling in behind.
By the time Trist made it back out to the outer street, Gwen launched off the curb and all but tackled him, hands moving over his arms, his shoulders, his ribs, checking.
“Trist!
Are you okay?
Are you hurt?
Are you hurt *anywhere*?” “I’m fine.
I’m completely fine.” He stood there and let the inspection proceed, grinning, eyes fixed on her the whole while, and Gwen’s face went through several shades of not-quite-composed.
But she was an American, and a top student besides, and shyness had never once been in her curriculum, so she lifted her chin and stared right back, bolder than before.
The air between the two of them went warm and tight, and for one heartbeat, closing the last of the distance felt like the obvious next step, and then the universe cleared its throat.
“Gwen?
What are you doing here?” A middle-aged man in a police uniform came jogging over, worry all over his face, and the charged look between them broke apart as both parties hastily reeled their expressions back in.
“Dad.” The new arrival was the chief of New York’s police, George Stacy.
“Hello, sir.
I’m Gwen’s friend.
Trist.” And off to the side, thoroughly forgotten by everyone, Gali watched the whole performance with a perfectly blank face, and passed her verdict on the species.
“Heh.
Men.”