The Marvels

Ep. 40 | Demon Spawn

There were footsteps just outside.

Lady Marvel grabbed the flash drive and ran into the hallway. Juggernaut had already passed by, but he glanced over his shoulder when he heard her behind him. She stared at him, and he turned all the way around to face her, growing mildly alarmed by her wide-eyed silence.

"You didn't fly into that windmill by accident," she said. "You flew into it out of spite. When you were a child."

The alarm turned into shock. Juggernaut went still, eyes widening slowly. Then he turned to glare at Emika, who stood there with a hand over her mouth.

"We didn't tell her!" she exclaimed.

"Somebody did," he said coldly.

"Nobody told me." Lady Marvel held up the flash drive and tossed it. "That was sent to my private mailbox. We've got a security leak."

Emika caught it and looked between the two of them, conflicted. She mumbled something under her breath that sounded like an apology and left, probably heading for Fox or Michael, but taking care of the security leak was the last thing on Lady Marvel's mind, and she didn't go with her.

Juggernaut was shaking his head at the floor. He looked at her, sighed, and gestured down the hallway. Come on. So Lady Marvel followed him to the Marvels' meeting room, gathering the door handles on her way in and pulling them closed. She stayed there for a moment, facing the wood and rethinking what she'd just done.

"Listen," she said softly. "You...don't have to tell me anything."

"Yes, I do," he snapped, "because if I don't, you're never going to look me in the eye again."

Lady Marvel suddenly heard the laugh. Vengeful and bloody. There would be no forgetting that.

They turned their chairs to face the window, slightly angled toward each other. Juggernaut watched the city, sparkling in the nighttime, and Lady Marvel watched him. She could recall a thousand moments exactly like this, when they'd sat here silently looking out the window, but this was the only time they felt like strangers.

"When I was a kid," he said finally, "supers weren't a thing. There were no resources like ASPA to help parents, so when your six-year-old son accidentally lasers the car in half, you go a little crazy. My mom was convinced I was some sort of demon spawn. She pushed me off the roof, and I was fine. Then she pushed me off a cliff, and I was fine. Somehow this small, unknown company got word of me, and they came around and bought me from her."

"How do you know that?" She didn't doubt the roof, or even the cliff, but the word bought twisted her stomach. "You were only a kid."

"Goodman told me later."

"And you believed him?"

"Of course not," he laughed. "So I looked into it myself, and it turned out, they were telling the truth. She sold me off and disappeared. I was raised in a top-secret facility in upstate New York and trained to be a perfect superhero, and when everything was ready, they faked the lab explosion and put out the story. And here we are."

"Why the elaborate lie about the lab?" Lady Marvel asked.

"To take credit. It was their amazing technology, their loyal intern, that created the world's first and foremost superhero. And it worked out for them, didn't it?" He gestured to the window, to Celestro's view, towering God-like over the city. "Look how far they've gotten."

All those burns, the switchboards, the monstrous machine. A story, not history. Lady Marvel leaned forward with her elbows on her knees, staring at the floor. "So, my procedure..."