Chapter Text
Turns out, worldwide terrorism doesn’t account for overworked college students taking naps.
Somewhere, most likely under you, your phone vibrates, then abruptly stops just to start back up again in a continuous loop. You briefly consider blindly searching for it to shut it up, but the second of quiet each round has you knocked back out. The noise level upstairs bumps up to an easy eleven with waves of recurring stomping and thumping. It sounds like every student on floor four decided to start the morning off by jumping up and down in place. It steadily morphs into background noise, completely ignorable, so you fall back under.
The phone buzzes to life again. How many times is it now? The fifteenth, sixteenth call? Your manager can’t be that desperate. It’s half past ten in the morning, and you’re fresh off the early morning shift. Legs dangling off the bed, too tired to strip from your work uniform but not willing to forgo a speedy forty-five minute nap before class, you’re ready for the day to be over with.
You barely register the sound of your roommate bursting into the room, slamming the door closed behind him. The TV clicks on and you try to burrow deeper into your shitty, thin mattress when he settles on an action movie and cranks up the volume to the max. Odd. William’s been on a big reality show stint as of late.
“Dude. Turn it down,” you grumble, slapping your hands over your ears.
There’s no response.
Now that’s really odd.
You peel an eyelid open and flip onto your back. William stands less than a foot away from the TV screen, phone held up to his ear.
“Shit. Shit. Shit!”
He rounds on you with the mortified look usually reserved for when he spots one of the pet-sized cockroaches the dorm can’t seem to permanently exterminate. You’ve slipped off a work shoe in response when his hands wrap around your forearms in a death grip. Wordlessly, he points to the TV. There’s a tremble in his hands that chokes out whatever remnants of drowsiness still cling to you. The thought of sleeping easy at all blows away in the wind when you realize the New York skyline getting leveled on TV isn’t from a high-budget action movie, but on the news channel.
“Rick's not answering.”
The video feed switches to San Francisco, Paris, Tokyo, a half-dozen other places on your ‘dream travel destination’ list, all smoking and crumbling like half-finished cigarettes. You watch on as a crowd of people splatter under raining debris in Moscow before the feed can cut.
The spandex-wearing culprits shoot through buildings like they’re made of eggshells and toothpicks, too fast for you to get a clear look at no matter the location. The banner near the bottom of the screen spells it out for you: ‘Invincibles’ causing widespread destruction. Death tolls expected to reach the hundreds of thousands.’
“No shit,” you mutter.
The footage gets local, too local, and you fumble off the bed, your phone sliding off alongside you. It hangs an inch off the floor from the charging cord, still buzzing. The buildup of missed calls from friends and family both stresses you out and keeps you from freaking out more than you already are. If they can use a phone, that means they’re still alive.
You console your family over the phone, subconsciously counting the voices in the background while watching William pace the room. He mutters wildly under his breath, glancing every so often to the television as you switch channels robotically. Without fail, every channel broadcasts the same gruesome scenes.
You drop the call when William shoots for the door.
The next thirty minutes are a blur. Villain protocol is that everyone on campus picks the nearest safe room and waits. It shouldn’t be hard to get to one, the nearest being just a level below the first floor of the dorm you’re in. That’s the thing, though, it shouldn’t be hard. With a hysterical friend worried to death about his boyfriend and growing increasingly irrational by the minute, it gets hard.
“I need to go find Mark. Seriously,” William grits out for the sixth time while you bodily block the open door. He pushes at you with his shoulder, and your fingers grip ever tighter around the door frame.
“How the hell is finding Mark going to help us find Rick?” You grunt when William’s elbow accidentally clips your ribs as he tries to climb over you.
Behind you in the hall, students sprint past, screaming and dragging their friends along in a horde of moving limbs. You try not to let the noise freak you out, but you can feel the fear-fueled irritation hum hotly in your chest.
This is seriously, seriously happening. You can hardly believe it.
“Just cause both aren’t picking up their phones doesn’t mean they’re together!” You holler over the noise, voice tight. “They’re probably hiding out in a safe room, like we should do before one of those Invincibles gets any closer.”
He shoves at your shoulders, trying to bulldoze over you, but pulls back when you don’t budge. “That,” he waves angrily towards the TV screen, face red hot in indignation, “is not Invincible.”
“Whatever,” you concede, “the Not-Invincibles, then.”
He scoffs, all throaty and dramatic-like, but his attention diverts from rushing you back to his endless pacing around the cramped dorm room. You take the break for what it is and catch your breath, closing the door he’d forced open once more to gain back an advantage.
William’s harder to keep locked up than expected. You've only ever seen him this motivated when he’s systematically tearing you apart at the bowling alley on Wednesday nights or skimming over four screens to snatch concert seats from the pre-sale queue on Ticketmaster.
He makes two laps around the room before turning on you again, face pinched and eyes relit with frustration. You’ll never understand where he gets all that energy to argue from.
“Why can’t you just take what I say at face value? Huh? Would it kill you to move five inches to the left?” He points a thumb at himself and digs it into his puffed-out chest. “I have a right to leave my dorm when I want, asshole.”
You cross your arms, trying to keep a cool head. Your patience lasts as long as it usually does when the two of you argue. “How about no! Man! If you want to die so badly, go drown in the bathtub or something!” Your voice rises steadily in frustration at about the same rate as the death toll on the screen behind him.
William flicks his arms in the air like you’re the one being ridiculous. “Stop yelling at me!”
You copy the motion. “You started yelling first!”
“My god! You’re insufferable!” he hollers, voice exasperated.
“Oh yeah? Well, you're stuck with it! How about that?” You lean back on the door, fixing your eyes on the wall across from William. He scoffs once, then a second time, louder, when you don’t take the bait. Ignoring him, you try your luck with an early game Hail Mary and call the only hero you know, Eve. It goes straight to voicemail.
When it comes to Eve, if she doesn’t pick up the first time, she’s not picking up for a while—spam calls or not. William lobs a snide comment about ‘wishing he’d thought to try calling her first’ at you.
You won’t let him bait you into letting him kill himself, but you do consider tossing him out the window for a split second.
Sighing, you tap your phone to your forehead, eyes closing. Any irritation directed at him drains out of you because, really, you get where William’s coming from. His boyfriend’s missing. Just that is enough reason to freak out. Then, right after, he finds out his best friend is too. But, Rick’s smart and level-headed. He’s the resident designated driver and straight-A student of your friend group, and the most well-equipped for surviving a situation like this. Well, best equipped for surviving as a civilian. Eve takes the cake for overall survivability but not everyone can pull a pink machine gun out their asshole so what’s the point in comparing?
There’s also the possibility that Mark’s the safest in the friend group—a perk of being the boyfriend of a superhero. Mark and Eve are on month three of the most sappy, sickening honeymoon phase you've seen in your whole life, and you’ve worked the Valentine’s Day shift for three years now. Minute one of the invasion, and high chance Eve whisked him off into the sunset to some ultra-mega-supreme-safe-bunker in Antarctica.
If not, may god bless his poor soul. He’d be taking the top spot of your ‘I’m extremely worried about’ list.
Mark is more of a friend of a friend, considering he’s flaked on more group plans than you can count, but he’s a fun guy to hang around when he does show up to the bowling alley, dorky as he is. He put you on Seance Dog, lets you have first dibs on his mom’s leftover takeout at the end of the week, and holds back when you lose one too many rounds of Super Smash Bros, so you’ve grown attached enough.
William whips out his phone and starts calling numbers again. Rick or Mark, you don’t know. Mark rarely picks up the phone on a normal day, so you don’t hold your breath if it is him. He can be air-headed at times, so really, you get why William wants to make sure he’s not wandering around the city trying to take selfies with the Not-Invincibles or something equally ridiculous. But, spam calling is one thing, and running out into the middle of a war zone on the off chance Mark is out there is another.
“William, seriously, work with me here,” you sigh, eyes flicking to the carnage on TV. The Big Ben in London gets chopped in two and slops off to the side, flattening a double-decker bus like an empty can. You flick your eyes back to William. “Chances are, they’re safe and they want you safe. So, let’s go downstairs.”
He just tenses up further, clicking away at his phone.
“Put some trust in them,” you push further, not sure if you're trying to convince William or yourself.
You don’t say, chances are, if they aren’t in a safe room, they’re probably dead. There are a million and one ways to die outside at the moment, you've seen about fifty or so ways on TV, so you aren't positive anywhere but on the moon is safe. Regardless, a Not-Invincible’s on the other side of the city at the moment, and you can’t afford to get William riled up by talking possibilities. You can’t afford to get yourself riled up, or you’ll start making stupid mistakes.
You tell yourself freaking out and leaving William to fend for himself would be a huge, stupid mistake. You don’t want to lose any more friends if the other two are dead.
“Fucking shit!” William’s phone gets Mark’s annoying fake-answer voicemail again, and he chucks it at the TV, which cracks, flickers, and finally goes dark. He drops heavily onto the end of his bed and places his head into his hands.
Five more minutes. You’ll give him five more minutes, and then you’re dragging him down all three flights of stairs in a chokehold if that’s what it takes.
Time passes in tense silence while William breathes steadily, in through his nose, then slowly out through his mouth. You consider following along. You’re feeling a little lightheaded yourself.
“I’m not asking you to come with me.” You can just barely see William staring at you from under his fringe, voice strained and quiet. “I just—I just have to know.”
Your heart thumps in your chest, feet feeling flighty.
“William, please.”
He watches for a minute more, assessing, weighing his options. Then, he drops his head back into his hands and screams into his palms. The muffled noise makes you flinch, regardless of the noise outside the room, but you collect yourself when he makes eye contact once more.
“Fine.”