#kamiles

“I can’t believe he thought we’d just join him,” she finally says. Beside her, Spider-Man sets himself down on the other corner of the rooftop, away from the street.

“A lot of these guys are talkers,” he says casually. “They get it in their heads that they can do whatever they want so long as they tie it to some…some philosophical higher purpose. Psychos with dictionaries, y’know?”

Kamala ponders the mad scientist’s schemes, furrowing her brow and wondering not for the first time that night, how such an altruistic goal—curing sickle cell disease—could demand such awful means—kidnapping terminal patients, loading them up with experimental drugs and harvesting their organs when some of them died for later study.

And while there’s a firm line between she and Maelstrom, between dubious conduct and outright evil behavior, Kamala’s thoughts drift to more familiar things despite that unambiguousness. Things like hardened vigilantes brutalizing others in the name of justice. Rampant insecurity driving other costumed peacekeepers to prove their worth by the specks of blood tacked against their knuckles and caked into their fingernails.

Her thoughts drift to cruelty, cut from the cloth of righteousness, and finally the flicks of red speckled across her hands.

It’s stupid. Miles isn’t even looking, but she picks at them anyway, eventually drawing the cuffs of her dark blue sleeves down entirely.

“You don’t think someone can do bad things for a higher purpose?” she asks before she can help herself.

He answers candidly when she settles down next to him, cutting through the fog between right and wrong in a way only a superhero can. “Nah,” he says. “Doesn’t mean anything.”

Kamala doesn’t argue, too distracted holding up her sinking heart. It isn’t long before a soft, delicate sound exits her lips, underlined by a cloud of vapor.

“Why?” she whispers. He only shrugs.

“When push comes to shove, you aren’t what you say, what you think, or even what you feel.”

The weight of his gaze, even behind the mask, strikes her like a spotlight. She braces herself for what he has to say next and reminds herself that he isn’t even looking at her fully.

“You are what you do.”

It’s a simple proverb, one he could’ve easily read off a fortune cookie…but it knocks her off her feet all the same. It strikes every tentpole of doubt furrowed in the folds of her mind like the dusting of a crop field. Inexplicably, she tries to ground herself by her inhibitions at first—by the certainty of knowing what she is as a fish knows the shape of the current. That she is, ultimately, an opportunist. A bully. A fangirl with a chip on her shoulder and a penchant for dress-up, serendipitously given power she doesn’t deserve.

She resists the temptation of a more positive outlook—disappointment and compromise is all she knows—and yet, ultimately gives in to that hopeless part of her that dares to dream, and has heard the words she didn’t even know she yearns to hear.

Kamala curses the small knot that settles itself behind her throat, and thinks of everyone in Brooklyn that may have been granted the rest of their lives by that monster’s incarceration. The darkness casted over her recedes bit by bit, like the beginning of a new dawn.

“Yeah, well—“ she says, breaking his gaze and staring at the twinkling labyrinth of brick and concrete before them. “Guess that’s a given.”