Riley hated that her nemesis knew who she was underneath the mask.

It felt violating, somehow, that he (or she, although she presumed Boltslinger was a man — and what kind of name was that, anyway? It sounded like a bad crossover between a Western and a shitty sci-fi movie from the 80s) knew everything there was to know about her. It was all just one Google away, a quick search of ‘Riley Kissane’ that would expose every part of her life, every unflattering detail, to a man seemingly hellbent on becoming her archrival.

Home state: Maryland.

Alma mater: Stanford (BS in Biology, Honors, thank you very much).

Family: illustrious. Rich. What Forbes called ‘a family tree of industry magnates with a legacy to marvel at’. What the New York Times called ‘soulless exploiters of the working class’ (before the family lawyers got involved, at least). 

Parents: loving, if distant. Also two years into the decomposing process.

Love life: both tumultuous and widely publicized, because America apparently derived a great deal of pleasure from knowing that rich heiresses with fancy degrees struggle to navigate the dating scene just like everybody else.

Powers: borne of a freak lab accident, scientifically anomalous. Very strong, according to the multiple cartels and assorted supervillains she’d managed to take down over the last year. Not invincible, judging by the number of times she’d wound up in the hospital anyway.

It made for harder fights. If there was one thing she could credit Boltslinger for, it was that he knew how to do his research. He knew all her weak spots, could anticipate her usual moves, and it infuriated her, even moreso because she knew he was making her a better fighter. And they did end up fighting, more days than not: because where there was a conflict, there was Riley, and apparently where there was Riley there was him.

(God, she hated him).

“You’ve been working on your attack maneuvers,” he noted approvingly one night, even as he scrambled to pick himself up out of the pile of bricks that she’d just flung him into. They’d been tossing each other around the abandoned warehouse in the middle of who-knows-where, Nevada, for something like ten minutes and the only thing he had show for it were the slight scratches on his armor— his voice was as cheery and annoying as ever. “Extra hours at the gym?”

“Oh, shut up, Slinger, and give me the blueprints,” Riley said, preparing for another attack. Her powers were, as one villain had put it a few months ago, Frankenstein-esque— willing her arms to elongate into long, fibrous stretches of skin and sinew, her nails to extend into piercing talons, was not a pleasant sight to behold, but she’d grown desensitized to it. Boltslinger, though, trapped in his suit, seemed to watch it with a perverse mixture of fear and delight.

“The nickname. I’m not a fan. I put a lot of time into coming up with my hero name, y’know,” said Boltslinger, waiting until she’d begun to wrap her deformed limbs around his hulking metal figure before using a light energy blast to temporarily dislodge her.

“Hero?” Riley laughed. “Now that’s cute.”

Somewhere behind her, a government official sighed gruffly. “Just get the prints, Prometheus.”

Riley arched a brow at Boltslinger, who had now drawn himself up to his full height. “You heard the man. Why don’t you just make it easy on the both of us, and accept the inevitable?”

The blueprints still clutched tightly in his hand retracted into the metal cavity in his suit’s chest. “Come and get it, kid.”

(Oh, she hated him so, so very much).

Trying to figure out who he was became a game she couldn’t resist playing, and she hated herself for it almost as much as she hated him for worming his way into her mind until he was all she thought about. When she was in the line at the grocery, her mind was trying to place his accent through the modulator he ran on his voice. At the gym, her normal singleminded focus was disrupted by her need to run through every snarky conversation they’d ever had, searching for any sort of clue as to who he was below the metal. Even when she was dreaming, he would hover over her, reaching for the mask but never quite managing to take it off before she woke up, drenched in sweat and completely annoyed.

It was getting to be something of a problem.

“You know, this really isn’t fair,” she admitted to him once, too worn out to care about her pride. Her skin was sticky with perspiration and with blood, every muscle inside of her ached, and there was a headache building behind her eyes that she would later blame for her moment of weakness. (The thing about being evenly-matched with someone is that, statistically, you lose about half of the time. And in their line of business, losing hurts like a bitch.)

“What isn’t fair?” Boltslinger said sweetly, hopping over to her with as much grace as a man in a three hundred-pound metal suit could muster up.

Riley just stared at him. “The fact that you know everything about me, and all I know is your stupid superhero name. Hell, I don’t even know if you’re a man or a woman.”

Boltslinger let out a rumbling sound that Riley thought might have been a laugh. “I’m a man, I can assure you that.”

“Great. So now all I know about you is that you’re a man with a stupid name.”

“Diss the name, why don’t you.” He lowered himself to the ground with difficulty, eventually finding a position that was both balanced and, Riley presumed, somewhat comfortable. And a few months ago being in such close proximity to him would’ve been unthinkable, would’ve made her scramble to launch herself at him and go for the jugular, but— well, she couldn’t explain it, how she hated him but knew that sitting down with him to have one of their banter-filled conversations after a long drawn-out fight wouldn’t blow up in her face. Intuition, some might say. “And it’s not my fault that you were in the paparazzi before you could even spell ‘paparazzi’.”

Riley looked at him reproachfully. “Not mine either. So why don’t you just level the playing field?”

He hummed. “And make it easy for you? Why, I thought you were up for the challenge, kid.”

“You keep calling me kid,” said Riley, in a moment of inspiration, “but my guess is that you aren’t much older than me. I’d put you at, what, mid-twenties?”

It was a stab in the dark, but she knew it’d landed when he took his time to answer, picking his words out carefully when he did. “And what makes you think that?”

“You’ve been on the scene for, what, eight years now? And no grown adult calls themselves Boltslinger.” She got to her feet and sprouted wings to fly her away before the man could even begin to protest.

The thing is, he wasn’t evil.

She wished he were, sometimes. Not that the world needed any more supervillains, of course, and definitely not ones with his skills— but it would’ve made hating him easier, if he was one of those vile, wicked men who were merely hungry for money or for power.

No, Boltslinger was definitely not a bad person. That was the crux of it all, really: that the comic books she read as a kid made it out to be all so black and white, but in real life every battle she fought was in shades of gray that even she could barely tell apart. She thought she was doing the right thing. Of course she did, or else she wouldn’t be out there every day, fighting every night and patching herself back up in time for the next— but so did he.

He wasn’t evil, and neither was she, so what did that make them? Superheroes? Supervillains? Just regular old people with more power than they really deserved?

She didn’t know. And she was willing to bet that he didn’t have a clue either.