Collateral Damage
Mark Grayson x Superpowered!Reader
Enemies (ish) to Lovers | One Shot
The first time you met Invincible, you broke his nose.
To be fair, he'd thrown a bus at you.
To be less fair, you'd thrown the bus first â but that was beside the point. The point was that three city blocks of downtown Chicago were currently a smoking crater, and the guy responsible for at least half of that damage was hovering across from you looking infuriatingly, stupidly good while bleeding from his face.
"You ready to stop?" he called out.
You tilted your head. Spat out a chip of tooth â your own, annoyingly â and felt it regenerate in the back of your mouth like a small, humiliating miracle.
"I was born ready," you said. "Unfortunately for you, I was born ready to keep going."
He made a sound that might have been a laugh, might have been a groan. Hard to tell from forty feet away. He was floating maybe twenty meters up, the sun hitting his ridiculous little cape in a way that made him look like a movie poster, and you hated that you'd noticed.
You hadn't wanted this fight.
You'd been on a job. Simple retrieval â a bioweapon prototype that a very stupid, very rich man named Gerald Holt had decided to auction off to whoever had the deepest pockets and the least moral fiber. You'd gotten there first. You'd secured the case. You were literally walking out the door when a multicolored blur had hit you like a freight train and sent you through four floors of concrete and rebar.
So now Gerald Holt's facility was rubble, the bioweapon prototype was somewhere in the wreckage (contained, you'd made sure of that, you weren't a monster), and you were bleeding from your eyebrow while he stared you down from the sky.
"You were stealing," he stated. It wasn't a question.
"I was relocating," you corrected. "To somewhere it couldn't be sold to people who want to dissolve cities."
"And I'm supposed to just take your word for that?"
You spread your arms wide. "Sweetheart, you literally tackled me through a building. We are way past the part where you get to have standards about trust."
He dropped down to street level, landing in the rubble with a crunch that would have been terrifying if you hadn't just survived him dropping a structural beam on your shoulders. Up close, he was younger than you'd expected. There was something almost annoyingly earnest about his face, even now, even bruised and dusty. Brown eyes that looked like they were still working something out.
"Who are you?" he asked.
"Impressed you waited this long to ask." You wiped blood out of your eyebrow. "I've had a whole branding conversation with myself while we were fighting."
"I'm serious."
"I'm always serious. That doesn't mean I'm not also entertaining." You looked him over â cataloguing, purely professional, nothing else. "You're Invincible. I know who you are. The question is whether you're going to keep being stupid about this or whether we can both go home."
His jaw tightened. "Where's the case?"
"Somewhere in that rubble, shielded, locked, and keyed to my biometrics. So unless you're planning to drag me around that wreckage by the wrist â which, to be clear, I would allow â you're going to have to trust me that it's contained."
The pause that followed was long enough to be interesting.
"That sounded like flirting," he said, slow.
"Did it? Nothing gets passed you." You smiled slyly at him. Just a little. "Huh."
The second time you met Invincible, it was his fault.
You were three weeks later, different city â Seattle, grey and wet in the way Seattle always was â and you were in the middle of disabling a tracking device that the GDA had embedded in a shipping container full of people they were quietly pretending not to know about.
The crunch of a familiar landing on the roof above you was really not what you needed.
"Don't." You didn't look up from the device. "I'm working."
"So am I." His voice came from the skylight. Of course he'd come through the skylight. "You want to tell me why your face keeps coming up in GDA case files?"
"I want to tell you a lot of things," you said. "Most of them would make you blush, Pretty Boy. Right now I'm going to tell you that if you don't give me ninety seconds, thirty-seven people in this container are going to have very bad nights."
Another pause. Then: "Fine. Ninety seconds."
He waited.
It was, genuinely, the most surprised you'd been in a year.
You finished the disable, popped the container latch, and started moving people toward the rear exit with the calm efficiency of someone who'd done this before. When the last person was out and you turned around, Invincible was standing in the doorway of the shipping container looking at you with an expression you couldn't quite categorize.
"You could work for the GDA," he stated flatly.
You laughed â a real one, surprised out of you. "Oh that's rich. That's absolutely rich, Grayson."
He stiffened slightly at his name. You watched him decide not to ask how you knew it.
"I'm serious," he said, and there it was again â that earnestness, like a bruise you kept finding in the same place.
"I know you are," you said, more gently than you'd meant to. "That's the thing about you." You tilted your head. "Has anyone told you that you're very easy to read?"
"Has anyone told you that you're exhausting?"
"Constantly. Though it's usually after a few rounds with me." You walked past him, close enough that your shoulder almost brushed his arm. "Same time next month, Grayson. I'll buy you a coffee."
You were gone before he could answer.
The third time, you started it.
Not intentionally. But when a Viltrumite sleeper agent (an actual one, not a charming smartass with a secret identity) started leveling a hospital in Denver, you'd made a choice about collateral damage, and that choice had apparently tripped every alarm Invincible had in his vicinity.
He arrived while you were still in the middle of it â the sleeper agent down but not out, the hospital structurally compromised on its east side, and you holding up approximately three stories of collapsing masonry with your bare hands while screaming at a nurse to move, move, I can't hold this forever, MOVE.
The pressure released. You looked up. Invincible had his hands beside yours on the concrete, and together you were holding fifteen hundred tons of building while the last of the ward evacuated below.
When it was done â when the structural emergency teams arrived and you could carefully, carefully set the section down â you turned to look at him and found him already looking at you.
"Thank you," you stated breathlessly.
He looked startled. Like you'd said something unexpected.
"You're welcome," he managed.
And then the sleeper agent got back up, because of course they did.
The fight was ugly.
Viltrumite-blooded fighters hit like locomotives and they didn't stop, and this one had twenty years on you in terms of sheer practice. You'd been holding your own â barely â when Mark appeared at your left and the dynamic shifted enough that you could breathe.
You'd never fought with someone before. Not like this.
He was reckless in ways you weren't, and you were precise in ways he hadn't learned yet, and somehow between the two of you it worked, the way two people finishing each other's sentences works... surprising and a little alarming and more satisfying than it had any right to be.
It still almost wasn't enough.
The sleeper got you with an elbow to the throat that should have killed someone who wasn't you, and you went down hard, and you heard Mark make a sound that didn't belong in a fight â something sharp and involuntary â before he went in harder than was smart and took a hit to the ribs for it.
"Mark," you said, and your voice came out wrong â rough and urgent and too honest.
He glanced at you. Split second. Like he needed to check.
The sleeper used it. Grabbed him. Slammed him downward.
You were moving before he hit the ground.
The sleeper was down. Unconscious... and it would stay that way.
You stood over Mark's considerably battered form while he sat up and winced and touched his ribs with a look that said cracked, maybe three, nothing new.
"You called me Mark," he stated.
"I call lots of people things."
"You called me Mark." He looked up at you, and there was something in his face that wasn't quite a question, more like a door he was standing in front of, deciding.
You sat down on the rubble next to him. Your lip was split. Your shoulder was dislocated â you shoved it back into place with a sound that made him wince sympathetically â and you were tired in the deep-down way that had nothing to do with the fight.
"I look up people I keep running into," you said. "Professionally."
"Uh huh."
"It's reconnaissance."
"You said you'd buy me coffee."
You glanced sideways at him. He was watching you with those stupid, readable brown eyes, and he wasn't smiling but he was close, and you thought, not for the first time, that Mark Grayson was a genuinely unfair problem to have.
"That was a trap," you reasoned with a grin.
"To get you to have coffee with me? Elaborate trap."
"I specialize in elaborate." You looked back at the wreckage. "I'm not good at the things you're good at. I don't do teams. I don't do organizations. I've operated alone for six years because it's cleaner and nobody gets to make choices about my risk tolerance except me."
"That sounds lonely."
The quiet landed.
"It has its moments," you admitted.
He was quiet for a second. Then: "For what it's worth â and I know this is going to sound insane given that we've destroyed, like, eight city blocks combined â I trust you. I think you're trying to do the same thing I am. Just differently."
"That's very generous of you."
"I'm a generous person."
"You're a menace," you said, but it came out fond, which was a problem. "You fight like you can take any hit, and one day you're going to be wrong, and you charged in there because I went down and that wasâ" You stopped. Tried again. "That was stupid."
"You would have done the same."
You thought about it. "...Yeah," you nodded. "Probably."
He smiled. It was different from the expression you'd catalogued in fights â open, unguarded, a little crooked. It did something structural to your chest that you decided not to examine right now.
"Coffee," he said.
"Coffee," you agreed.
The coffee shop was called Grounds & Pound, which Mark thought was a terrible name and you thought was the funniest thing you'd seen all week- especially after the day you had. You ordered black. He ordered something with so much caramel it was basically dessert, and you filed that away in the section of your brain you'd labeled him, which had more entries than was strictly safe.
"You know," he said, three coffees in and two hours later, "when I first saw you, I thought you were a villain."
"To be fair," you said, "you had a very bad angle."
"You threw a bus."
"You threw it first!"
"You threw it at me!"
"You were in the wayâ"
He was laughing. You were laughing. The coffee shop was empty except for the bored barista scrolling their phone, and outside the sun had set somewhere in the middle of the conversation without either of you noticing.
"Hey," he said, quieter.
You looked at him.
"I'm glad you didn't let me win," he said. "In Chicago. You didn'tâ you just dug in. Even when it was bad."
"I told you," you said. "You weren't winning that fight."
"I wasn't?" He raised an eyebrow.
"I don't lose gracefully. I take people down with me. Ask anyone."
"I'm asking you," he stated with a brow rasied.
And his hand slid across the table, and his fingers found yours, and you looked down at it and thought: oh. Just: oh.
"Coffee," you said finally. "We agreed on coffee. This isâ"
"Past coffee," he agreed. "Yeah."
You turned your hand over. Held his.
"You're a problem," you told him.
"I've been told," he said. "You're exhausting."
"Oh, I will show you exhausting," you quipped, and grinned at him, and meant it.
Later â much later, in a timeline measured in months and catastrophes and at least two more situations where one of you held up part of a building while the other one got people out â someone would ask Mark how it started.
"She broke my nose," he'd say.
"He threw a bus," you'd say, from wherever you were in the room.
"She threw it first!"
"You were in theâ"
And you'd both start laughing before you finished the sentence, which was, if you were being honest with yourself, probably the most accurate summary of how anything between you had ever worked.
Neither of you won.
That was, it turned out, exactly right.
