I Know a Guy

Metro General is bustling, but then, it's always bustling. Of all the things that it's got to offer, scattered teeth, bloody 'wet floor' signs, and used latex gloves are by far the most abundant and the easiest to find. Another object of interest that's fairly abundant and moderately easy to locate is the spectacle of another one of those damn 'gifted' wonders trying to save the world again with the help of shit medical care.

The 'abundant' part is probably subjective. The 'easy to locate' bit is true; if there's a wannabe superhero in this hospital and you want to find him/her, just look for Claire Temple and you can be sure to get a sporting chance.

Claire's juggling one fracture, seven broken bones, and a scissor wound, and that's all on just the right; the left-handed juggling act is dealing with several other levels of crises. It's been a long night and an even longer day before that, and she's beginning to forget what the softer side of a bed even looks like these days. The sound of those dreaded double doors bursting open for the millionth time is an added bonus to her jolly mood.

The guy laid out on the gurney is convulsing rapidly, emitting steam or maybe actual smoke, and has apparently taken on a pleasant shade of blue in place of a skin tone. The weird thing is, he's shouting "No hospitals, no hospitals!" and is wearing a striped leotard.

Of course, Claire would never call it a leotard out loud. These hero types get really picky about their costume terminology.

All of the other staff seem to be either incapacitated by indecision or held spellbound by the heroism that reeks off of the strange leotard man. Luckily, Claire's worked up a sort of tolerance to the stuff and so she finds herself approaching the gurney.

"I can't be here, I've gotta leave–" Leotard guy seems like the determined sort. Claire rolls her eyes and snaps another pair of gloves into place.

"What's wrong with you, stripes?" She goes over the vitals, checks for surface wounds and then preps a syringe with expert efficiency. The guy stops yelling about the hospital thing for a second, frowning sweatily at her.

"What's wrong with me? Well, if you hadn't noticed, I'm smoking and slowly turning blue."

Wonderful, a cheeky one. Claire prepares to inject this one with a little more satisfaction than completely necessary. "You don't have metal skin or anything, do you?"

Leotard looks almost affronted, except that the smoke has started pouring out of his ears now and it's not in the least bit comical. "Why on earth would you–"

The needle is two inches deep in vigilante skin before that sentence is complete. "Good."

The affront returns. "Ahh, ow – this is why I said no hospitals!"

"Well, aren't you the whiner," says Claire lightly as she simultaneously checks her watch, measures Leotard's pules and disposes of the now steaming/smoking syringe. "What happened?"

He clenches his blue jaw and squeezes his blue eyelids shut. "I…was trying to stop this – um, this guy. He's a really bad dude, with really evil plans. It turns out that he also has really bad manners… and really good aim with his death-poison-gun…thing."

"Huh," murmurs Claire, frowning as she administers an adequate-sounding depressant. "Sounds pretty tough."

Leotard starts convulsing a little less violently, peering at Claire through sweaty, steamy, baby blue eyes. It sounds a lot better than it actually is. "…you say that in the same way that most people would respond to being told about a moderately difficult algebra exam."

The depressant isn't really depressing, and Claire's gloves have officially started decomposing. She peels them off, scowling at the dripping plastic. "Yeah, well, I was always good at algebra." She really hopes that the trash bin doesn't catch fire too, because she's pretty sure that they ran out of fire extinguishers the day before yesterday. "Also, bad dudes with evil plans, bad manners, and good aim are sort of common around here."

He still looks suspicious, and Claire shrugs. "Look, if you want someone to gasp in shock and look awed, have somebody call over a receptionist." She pauses for a moment, chewing on her thinking lip, and then speaks up before Leotard passes out. "Y'know, the whole poison-death-gun thing does sound mildly concerning, though. I don't know what your partner policy is, but I do happen to know a guy…"

The passing out bit happens next, but not before Claire and Leotard can exchange information.

She's in the middle of trying to sedate a very angry mobster/drug dealer/really-who-even-knows-anymore when a ground nurse comes rushing in, spewing gossip. "You'll never believe what just stumbled into the lobby…"

Usually gossip is quite literally at the bottom of Claire's interest list, but the nurse sounds not only intrigued but also a little rattled. That usually qualifies the gossip to count as possibly useful information, so she lends half an ear to the conversation.

"What is it this time? Another one of those idiotic superheroes?"

"Bingo. Well, I think. This guy doesn't look smart enough to even try to be a vigilante…"

Claire rolls her eyes and sighs. The patient, laid out on a gurney and swearing loudly under his stinky breath, glares at her and jerks his arm away again. It doesn't help Claire's disposition.

"Oh, for God's sake, act your age," reprimands Claire as she brusquely grabs the burly man's arm and stabs him with the syringe.

With that having been taken care of, Claire rips off her gloves and strides towards the elevator. In the lobby, she finds a remarkably large crowd of nurses attempting to wrestle a tall, rather wiry but powerful-looking guy out into the hallway. The guy is wearing an array of dark-colored combat clothing and has a large, squarish, alien-looking mask thing locked around his head, and it isn't remarkable at all.

Claire walks over to the gathering and calmly pushes the other nurses out of the way, before grabbing hold of the guy's arm and, with the help of another sturdy-looking nurse, frog-marching him away from the curious lobby. He's not very receptive, but Claire isn't very surprised either.

"Hey! Look, cut that out – I didn't even want to come here, all right–" His voice is weirdly muffled but somehow still audible. She can't see even a little bit of his face, but she'd bet anything and a half that he's wearing a guilt-ridden frown on his face just about now.

"Yeah, yeah, I know," mutters Claire, glaring at the guy out of the corner of her eye. Her glare doesn't really hold any heat to it, but she's completely void of sympathy on the matter. "You don't want to be here, I don't want you to be here, nobody wants to be here but here we are. Now let me get this thing off your head before it explodes or something."

"Explodes?! Wait, has that – has that happened before?"

"No," says Claire briskly. She glances over her shoulder at the others trailing behind. "Someone go and find some wood to knock on for me. How the hell did you wind up with a robot mask thing on your head, anyway?"

The vigilante sighs, shaking his very heavy head. "It…it's complicated," mutters the man, and his words are very nearly swallowed by his weird mask. Claire raps the metal robot mask with her knuckles a few times to tell him to speak up. He obliges.

"Okay, fine! Fine. It's…well, I had this friend – sort of friend – well, nowadays the best I've got for a title is scumbag, but anyway – there's this dude, and I thought he was trying to help people, but long story short he was actually trying to create an invincible cyborg army and I decided to stop him and then he tried to stop me stopping him by turning me into a cyborg. And, um – it didn't work. Entirely."

Claire stops nodding along halfway through the story, and is now decidedly frowning. "…and now you have a metal robot appendage attached to your head."

"…yes."

They're approaching the urgent care ward at that point and Claire still has a few things to clear up before getting down to business. She blows a sigh through her lips, biting the inside of her cheek. "…So I'm assuming that the cyborg army dude is still going strong, huh?"

The guy lets out a strained, echoed laugh. "Oh, yes."

"Hm." Claire grimaces, tilting her head up at the guy (even though he almost definitely can't see a thing that's going on around him). "Think you could use some help with that?"

The next time it happens, Claire's actually on her way home from the hospital. It had been a long day with a large number of criminals being wheeled in through the emergency room doors, and Claire was craving the sight of a bed. She'd just walked out the back way and is attempting to burrow further into her coat when a pair of hands grab her from behind, spin her around and slam her back against a vertical and very solid surface.

It's a woman this time, tall and slender beneath an oversized hoody that hides her face in shadow, and Claire greets her with a complaint.

"Ow – go easy, would you?" says Claire crossly, reaching up to rub a hand over her right shoulder. It stings a bit. "It's just that I've spent the past ten hours working my ass off trying to patch up the people that you probably helped mess up in the first place."

The woman scoffs, and beneath the hood Claire can see the hint of a smirk. "…Helped?" she says quietly, in a voice that's noticeably strained (or at least, noticeable to Claire because she knows what to look for). "Nah, that was all me. Glad to see that we're on the same page though."

Claire doubts that it was all her, seeing as how there seems to be a half a dozen more superheroes in this city than she originally thought, but attempting to knock down a strange vigilante's ego is also a thing that one should never do (if they want to stay healthy), so she keeps quiet on that subject. Instead, Claire looks the woman up and down, trying to locate the problem. It doesn't present itself.

"Well, go on then," prompts Claire, looking back up at the woman with raised eyebrows. "Why are you here?"

The hooded vigilante hesitates. "It's…well –"

"Complicated?"

She lets out a short sigh, and Claire has to resist the urge to smirk. "Yeah, complicated, but it basically boils down to this." The woman squares her shoulders and takes a breath. "In about five minutes time, I'm going to pass out and what happens after isn't going to be pretty. I need help to get through that, and there's no one else. I've heard that you can be trusted. So…will you help me?" As she finishes her uncertain speech, she reaches up to tug her hood back from her head. It reveals a pale and slender face with grey eyes and a completely bald head.

Claire holds her breath for a long moment, frowning at the woman and silently kissing goodbye any chance of sleep in the near future. "…you already know what I'm going to say, otherwise you never would have come." The bald woman looks immediately relieved, and Claire raises a hand to stop her from interrupting.

"I get that we're probably on a bit of a timeframe, so I'll save most of my questions for later – such as how you 'heard of me' – but for now, I just want to ask: is there a particular reason why this is happening to you?"

The woman scowls at the question, and Claire can see that the expression is not directed at her. "…yeah," she mutters in a low voice. "And when this is over, I'm going to make him pay."

Claire nods slowly, pursing her lips. After a moment of silence, she straightens and claps her hands, smiling. "Well! I can help you with at least one of your problems," says Claire. Her smile widens. "And with the help of a friend, probably both."

She's at home, just thanking her lucky stars that no wounded vigilantes managed to grab hold of her services today, when her window explodes. It emits a lot of glass and a scrawny, blood-flinging, red-and-blue spandex-clad, mask-wearing person. Claire stares, making connections one by one.

Vigilante. Wounded vigilante. Wounded Spiderman. Wounded Spiderman in my living room.

Claire doesn't really feel like being witty at that precise moment, so she doesn't bother. "Uhhh…"

Surprisingly, her reaction is very similar to what Spiderman has to say. "Ughh…ow…"

What's also surprising is that Spiderman's voice sounds like that of a twelve year old.

Spiderboy rolls over, crunching over shards of glass, and springs up onto his haunches. He somehow still appears agile even while hunching in on himself, obviously in pain. "Uhhh…um, hey, Cla – I mean. Nurse. Hey, nu – oh, crap, I mean, not-nurse. Hello. Stranger. You don't… happen to be a nurse…do you…?"

His voice tapers off into sheepish oblivion as he visibly and audibly gulps. Claire, meanwhile, finds a new height of incredulity for her eyebrow to perch on. Spidey only sits frozen for a moment before launching into another speech given at the speed of light. And accelerating.

"Okay. So you obviously know that I know who you are – please don't freak out about that. But I um sort of really need your help. And a lawyer. And probably a small army. But, no, for now, just your help would be great. 'Cuz, see, I sort of have this really big problem and one of the results of that problem was my skin being embedded with several thousand very small needles and I've already started healing around them and I would really like them to not be in my skin anymore and for that I need a nurse or doctor or something and apparently you're a really good one and so…um…I thought you could…help me out…maybe?"

Through the mask, Claire thinks she can make out the impression of a hesitantly hopeful grin. Claire's eyebrow inches higher.

"…you're Spiderman," says Claire slowly, and she silently swears that she is going to get her mind out of this rut. "Shouldn't you be in school?"

He tilts his head back as if he's rolling his eyes, and groans again – half out of exasperation, but also half out of pain. "Seriously, that's beside the point –" Spidey pauses, coming to a belated realization. "Oh. I mean – no. Absolutely not."

Claire gaps at him. "You are?! You're in high school?!"

The gangly child vigilante hangs his head. "…I didn't know you were only joking."

Claire smacks a palm into her forehead, blinking forcefully. "Okay. Okay. Enough time for that later. First things first." She frowns at him, then smacks her forehead once more for good measure. "Okay. C'mon, let's get you off all this glass before you pass out."

She does her best to navigate Spiderboy and herself around the remnants of her window and towards her couch. It's surprisingly and also disturbingly easy to do so, because Spiderboy seems to weigh about as much as a swimsuit model. Claire frowns down at the 'superhero', trying to see the super as she lays him out on the couch.

"I've got to take your suit off to do this, and that includes your mask. You okay with that?"

He sighs with his whole scrawny body. "Yeah, but…don't laugh."

When she carefully pulls off his mask, she sees what he means. She doesn't laugh, and it's not in the least bit funny. Instead she swears under her breath and stares at the kid, biting her lip. "…You said you needed a nurse, a lawyer, and a small army?"

He nods slowly, and Claire forces the phrase 'puppy eyes' out of her head because it won't do either of them the least bit of good. "Well, you've definitely come to the right place."

She'd been expecting it for a while now, so Claire's not really all that surprised when a familiar hand grasps her by the shoulder and firmly yanks her into a secluded hospital corner. It's Matt all right, thankfully in regular dress and not anything more vigilante-like, and he's not looking very happy.

Claire folds her arms across her chest and tilts her head up at him, raising an eyebrow. "Please tell me that this is just a social call."

He grimaces, lips thinning as he grips the top of his cane in a way that says he's about to give Claire an earful. It always takes him a moment to get started, though, and Claire scratches her ear as Matt glowers at her for few seconds. "Why have you been sending me pretend vigilantes?"

Claire lifts a finger and points at Matt in protest. "I haven't been sending them to you," says Claire. "And what makes them pretend?"

Matt's glower intensifies. "Is there another nurse named Claire who secretly takes care of vigilantes?" asks Matt in a low voice, raising his eyebrows in an attempt to emphasize his seriousness. "If not, then your method of 'not sending them' is fatally flawed."

"I don't send them," Claire says calmly. "I just recommend that they seek out the help of someone who can actually help."

"And that someone is Daredevil?"

She spreads her hands, shrugging. "Isn't that the whole idea?"

"I help people. Innocents, victims, those who really need help. Not wannabe superheroes who throw themselves into harm's way so that they can try to save the day." Matt's expression is divided between earnest and firm. Claire looks past both.

"And what exactly makes you different from them? 'Wannabe superhero who throws self into harm's way' sounds pretty familiar. If you ask me – which you won't but I'm going to tell you what I think anyway – I think all of you vigilante types should really work together. Corroborate. Set up a schedule. You might even get a night off." Claire rests her hands on her hips, wishing that Matt could see her imploring face. It usually works.

"I don't want teammates."

Claire raises a slender eyebrow. "You might even wind up with some new friends."

"I definitely don't want friends."

"Shocking," mutters Claire, eying Matt tersely. "Either way, you just so happen to own me a whole heap of favors, and I will happily cash one of those favors in to get you to help these people. I know you can, and you know you can, and if you help them then they'll all owe you a favor too and the entire arrangement should work out perfectly in the long run. Oh, and if I end up with a sudden shortage of injured vigilantes who want me to cure them so they can go back out and get hurt all over again, then – well, god damn, if that happens then I might just sing."

Claire raises her eyebrows at Matt to match his incredulous expression. He ducks his head before she looks away, reaching up with one hand to straighten his already-straight tie. "Some of their problems are kind of out of my league."

Claire sighs, rolling back on her heels. "Yeah, I know," she says, pointedly not helping. "So, why don't you start with Spiderman? He seems like the fastest sinking ship."

Matt pinches his nose between his fingers, sighing in defeat. "I still don't get how you wound up treating practically every known vigilante in New York."

Claire tilts her head and flashes a toothy smile. "Apparently I know a guy."