SPIDERMAN: Mary Jane, Midnight Avenger
For gen_remix.

Title: Mary Jane, Midnight Avenger
Author: Alara Rogers
Fandom: Spiderman (movieverse)/BTVS
URL of story that was remixed: Compatibility
Author of story that was remixed: M. Scott Eiland




So I'm at a frat party, dressed to the teeth and looking like I'm having the time of my life. See, I *am* a good actress – take that, reviewers. Not that this isn't fun, but, well, it's not actually all that fun. I have to pretend to be living it up, laughing and drinking and having a good time, while in fact I am dumping my beer in potted rhododendrons, the bathroom sink, and drunk people's cups, surreptitiously, *and* keeping an eye out for every woman at this party. This is not easy, believe you me. In fact it'd probably be easier to go swinging around the city on a strand of webbing trying to find bad guys to punch out.

But my guy's got that covered. So this is what *I* do. Today I've got my hair Manic Panic'ed bright green with reddish-yellow highlights, and I've got it up in this spiky 'do that I absolutely cannot wait to wash out tonight because it itches like anything, and I've got the best fake tan $8.99 can buy at the Rite Aid, and brown contact lenses because most of the time, no one notices your eye color, but I naturally have green eyes and believe me, people notice that. Okay, it's not exactly a spandex costume, but on the other hand, no one would have let me into a frat party dressed like Spider-Woman… or the Invisible Woman or one of the black-leather mutant brigade or Elektra. Okay, I'm wrong, they totally would have let me in if I dressed like Elektra, but a girl's got to have standards. Admittedly green Manic Panic isn't *up* to those standards, but it's not as far below as Elektra's getup.

I notice the girls who pass out. I don't help take them up to the bedrooms to sleep it off, but I check to make sure that the guys who do come back down quickly. And every ten, twenty minutes or so, I disappear upstairs to do the rounds and make sure they're all still okay.

The fourth time I do it tonight, there's a guy in there with one of the really wasted ones. I hear his voice – "This'll be great, baby, I've been waiting all night—" and that's all I need to hear. I open the door and stick my head in.

He looks up, startled and angry. "Hey! A little privacy, please?"

His pants are down around his ankles. The girl is laying on the bed with her head to the side so she won't choke if she throws up. So far she hasn't, but she's drooling. Her eyes are half-closed and I'm pretty sure she's too drunk to have any clue what's going on.

"A little privacy for a rape, buddy? I don't think so." I step in the room, cell phone in hand. It's in silent mode, so he can't hear me hitting the speed dial for Peter's number, but he might be able to see the camera lens that's facing him, and I'm pretty sure he can see the flash as I take his picture.

"You fucking bitch! What did you do that for?"

"What, you didn't want a commemorative picture of the time you raped some drunk freshwoman to hang on your wall? Only $5.99, no tax! We do enlargements, too." I smile prettily at him. "You're Steve Bronson, aren't you? Jeff introduced us a few minutes after I arrived."

"You better give me that fucking camera."

"Dude, that's my cell phone. I'm not giving it to you. I *am*, however, texting 'Steve Bronson' onto the caption for the picture before I post it online, so can you tell me if that's with an O or a U?"

"Give me that!" He lunges at me. I duck. He lunges at me again. I dodge. So slow! It's still a trip to me every time I get into a fistfight of some kind, how slow everyone is now. Then he swings at me. I block it – with the camera hand – and take a picture of his arm coming straight for me. Then I grab his arm with the other hand, and flip him.

"You fucking *bitch!*" This is the problem I get. My bad guys can't even manage a level of banter like "I'll squash you like the insect you are!" No, I get "fucking bitch" a lot. It gets old, really. He lunges at me again, *and* swings. So I punch him in the face, hard enough to knock him into the wall. Then I grab him by the shirt – good thing for him he never took it off – and shove him through the window.

We're on the third floor of a four-story brownstone. Not a skyscraper, not even the size of my apartment building, but tall enough to splat him if he falls. I say, "Oh, my God! I'm so sorry – I saw him trying to rape this girl who was so drunk she was unconscious, and I took a picture of him with my camera, so he ran at me, and I dodged, and he fell *right through the window!*" He's screaming – mostly incoherently, but with some "Let me go!" and "Pull me back in!" and "You bitch!" mixed in – but I'm pretty sure he hears me.

"You can't do this! My dad's a top-rated lawyer! You'll be arrested for murder and thrown in jail for the rest of your life!"

"Murder? Who's murdering anyone? You fell out the window. Do you think anyone's going to believe that a li'l girlie like me held a big strong guy like you out a window with one hand and threatened to drop him? I mean, get real."

"You can't do this! Let me back in! Please!"

"So you can rape some more drunk girls? Suuuure."

"She wanted it! I wasn't raping her, she wanted it!"

"She can't want anything, bozo, she's asleep. Even if she said 'yes' she was probably saying 'yes' to the chocolate-covered clone of Brad Pitt or something. Newsflash: unconscious people can't say 'yes' to sex. Therefore, you were trying to rape her."

"You must be some kind of feminazi mutie bitch!"

"Buddy, since you obviously never saw 'Thelma and Louise', I'll give you a hint. Do *not* call a woman a bitch when she's thinking about killing you for trying to rape somebody. God, you'd think that would go without saying, wouldn't you?"

"I wasn't going to hurt her or anything! Please, please, pull me back in!"

"You were so going to hurt her, dude. You were going to *rape* her. It hurts. Trust me on this."

"It wasn't really rape or anything – we were just going to have sex! She was into it, I swear! Yeah, I didn't realize how drunk she was, but she wasn't passed out when we got started!"

"She was passed out when I checked on her twenty minutes ago. People don't magically become sober enough to have sex and *then* get drunk again enough to pass out again in the space of five minutes. Stop trying to tell me, or yourself, that it wasn't rape. You're a rapist. Or a rapist wannabe, at least. Admit it."

My phone beeps a few bars of 'Can't Get You Out of My Head.' This is my cue. I just need Steve Bronson here, frat boy rapist wannabe, to cooperate.

And he does. "I don't have to admit *anything* to you, you bitch!" he screams.

So I drop him. Okay, kind of shove, because he's clinging to my arm for dear life and I need to kind of shake my arm hard to get rid of him.

And then Peter swings in and webs the guy to the wall.

"She's fucking crazy! She tried to kill me! Web *her* up!" Steve is screaming.

I lean my head out the window. "Spider-Man! Thank God you were here! This guy, he just tried to rape this girl? And I took a picture of it with my cell phone, so he'd leave her alone? And he tried to rush me to take the phone? And he fell out the window!"

"That isn't what happened! She threw me!"

"She threw you, buddy?" Peter does his best sarcastic voice. "*She* threw *you*? Out a window? Listen, I've seen a lot of weird in this city, but frankly, now I'm just wondering if you've been hitting something a little stronger than the booze."

"I didn't rape anyone! She threw me out the window!"

"I've got pictures of him trying to rape this girl. She's totally passed out, and I found him on top of her in his underwear," I say.

"Oh," Peter says. "Well, I thought I was going to be a good Samaritan and all, just saving some poor schmuck's life, but if he's a rapist, I guess I better let the cops know."

"I'm *not* a *rapist!* I swear it!"

I email the pictures to the police department, anonymously, attached to a note saying that Spider-Man caught a rapist, and the address. I love my cell phone. It's actually got a full keyboard, so I can type on it – with very tiny keys, natch, but still, I don't have to hit 2 2 2 to get the letter C. Then I leave Peter to argue with the guy about whether he's a rapist or not, and I leave the room, first checking on the drunk girl, who still hasn't vomited but is still wasted enough that she hasn't woken up with all the commotion.

I head downstairs. "Hey, Jeff!" I find the host of the party. "Spider-Man's outside! He caught Steve trying to rape that freshman girl, you know, the one with the short curly brown hair and the green handbag?"

"What? Steve's not a rapist!"

Most of them say something like that. I don't know whether they're really that dense or whether they, like their rapist pals, just don't get that having sex with an unconscious woman is in fact rape. "You can ask Spider-Man about it. He's in the back yard."

And then, when a significant number of party-goers have stampeded to the back to see Spider-Man – everyone's seen him swinging through the city, but up close and personal appearances are still pretty rare for most people – I leave the party and head back home. I deliberately take a route through the most dangerous neighborhoods I know of on the way, patrolling. But nothing else happens. Nothing happens on patrol most nights.

When I first got these powers, I was told that I was one of the Chosen, a Potential Vampire Slayer. Apparently there are hundreds of women, worldwide, who have these Potential abilities, but no one over the age of 20 ever manifests them – if you're not the Vampire Slayer (and there used to be only one) by 20, you weren't ever going to be. This is not something I was aware of before I turned 20, of course. I can honestly say that I never, ever expected to magically get superpowers.

And "magically" is the correct term here. Magic is real. So are vampires, demons and all kinds of things that go bump in the night. The Slayer was supposed to use her power to protect humanity from supernatural predators. But the last Slayer, some girl named Buffy, had a friend who cast a spell that made *every* Potential into a Slayer. Now there are a few hundred women, worldwide, who are faster, stronger and harder to kill than any other human being, with the exception of modified humans like Peter and mutants like the X-Men.

So I think there is plenty of coverage for supernatural bad-nasties. There are other Potentials here in New York. Let them slay vampires. Plus, the Big Apple is crawling with superheroes – not just Peter, but this guy Daredevil, and the Fantastic Four, and occasionally the X-Men have been seen around here. Honestly I don't know how anyone ever gets away with a mugging in this town anymore.

The violence didn't move indoors. It was always already there. But before the superheroes, there was enough violence outdoors that I might have done what Peter did, if I'd gotten these abilities earlier. I might have run around fighting guys who turn into sand and guys with metal tentacles and your basic garden variety mugger. Or I might have fought vampires and evil magicians. I don't know, because that's not how it happened.

See, I'm a party animal. And I have a lot of friends. And being a woman, who parties, who has lots of friends who are women, and party, I know about the dangers that happen inside. For a woman, danger isn't the guy who steals your purse on the street. That happens and it sucks, but it's not what we're afraid of. Rape, mainly, is what we're afraid of. And while we are afraid of the stranger who jumps out at us with a knife or the home invasion when we're alone in our apartment, the statistics say, that's not where the danger is. The danger is the guys we think we know and trust.

I can't be everywhere. There are women being raped by their boyfriends and their husbands and some guy they invited over for drinks, all over the city. I can't do anything about that. But I can go to parties. In particular, fraternity parties are infamous for this kind of thing. I have walked alone in dangerous neighborhoods every night, "patrolling", for the year and a half since I got these powers, and I've only stopped one attempted rape, plus taking down guys who thought I'd make a good target on two separate occasions. Whereas when I go to frat parties, I stop a rape every three parties or so.

You'd think they'd learn. But they aren't set up to keep out hot female strangers – the whole nature of these parties is that young women that none of the hosts know show up all the time. And the guys who are inclined to rape people underestimate women (and a lot of them are absolutely convinced that what they're doing isn't rape anyway), and the guys who aren't inclined to rape are sure there won't be a problem because they think their buddies would never do such a thing either. And the great thing about not wearing spandex is, everyone would expect that a *superheroine* could shove a guy through a window or beat the holy hell out of him, but no one thinks a superheroine could possibly have come to their party, so no one believes these guys' stories, and most of the time, they don't even tell the truth when they tell the story. They blame Spider-Man for breaking in on them (which happens fairly often, because if I'm going to throw a guy out a window, I'm going to wait until I'm sure Peter's there to catch him), or some other superhero if I didn't involve Peter. They don't always admit that a woman who wasn't an obvious superhero beat them up.

I get home, wash the color out of my hair with a really long shower, and head for bed. I know Peter will be out patrolling the city until very, very late, and it's just as well, because I kind of want to be alone. I know this stuff happens, it's why I do what I do, but every time I see it it makes me wonder why my half the human race puts up with the other half. Why haven't we killed them all yet? Yeah, yeah, most men aren't rapist scumbags and we love them. I love one. I couldn't really get to hate men, I enjoy their company too much and Peter's such a damn good person. Except, that time when he had the black parasite costume and he got really assholish and really scary. And I'm full circle, because it's lurking inside all of them and why do we put up with it, really? Why do we let ourselves live as prey?

I don't know. But I've been kidnapped and threatened with death by men with weird superpowers more times than I want to count, made totally helpless and dependent on Peter to save me. I don't want to be going and getting into punchups with these kind of guys – I could, now, but I see what it does to Peter. I have family to protect, too – my mom, mostly – and I have a life, and a job, and anyway Peter is already doing that part. And he's not alone, either. Whereas there are no other superheroes putting Manic Panic on their hair and going into frat parties to try to stop rapes. At least I'm pretty sure I'm the only one.

I don't have a superhero name. When I went to the party tonight, I was "Suzie." I use a different name every night. No spandex means no need for a cool name. But if I did have a superhero name, I think I like the sound of "Midnight Avenger" (although it's just as often 2 am when I have to go into action.) Not as descriptive as, say, "Invisible Woman" for a woman that turns invisible, but, you know, "Super-Strong Woman" would be lame, and "The Rapist Defenestrator" kind of cumbersome. And I don't have some kind of totem animal to name myself after. So yeah, "Midnight Avenger" would be cool. If I needed a superhero name. Which I don't.

I think I did a good job tonight.

I go to bed.