Marvel – I am Spiderman

The alarm was still going when he got there. Past one, Tuesday. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, east wing, the sound cutting through the quiet on Fifth Avenue and bouncing off the park across the street. Peter landed on the roof and the spider-sense was already active, a low steady pulse that said people inside, not safe, go.

He went.

The skylight was unlocked. Someone had been here before him. The glass was clean-cut on one side, a circle the size of a manhole cover, professional tool work. He dropped through and caught himself on a web-line in the dark and hung there.

Three floors below, Egyptian wing. Dim emergency lighting, the kind that made everything look orange and underwater. Three men. Two of them were at a display case with a glass cutter and what looked like a velvet bag. The third was by the service entrance with a gun holstered at his hip and a radio in his hand. All three wore dark clothes. None of them wore masks, which meant they were either confident or stupid. The holstered gun said Maggia. Low-level, crew work, the kind of job that got contracted out to guys who owned one suit between them.

The fourth person in the room was on the second-floor balcony.

Black catsuit. White fur trim. White hair pinned up. She was crouched behind a pillar watching the three men below, and from the angle of her crouch and the grappling hook already in her right hand, she'd been planning to go through them alone.

Three armed Maggia goons. Just her.

Peter dropped from the skylight and landed on the balcony rail ten feet from her. She turned fast, claws out, and stopped when she saw him.

"Spider." Whispered. Not happy about it.

"Cat."

"I had this."

"You had three guys with guns and a plan that starts with 'jump off a balcony.'"

"It's a good plan."

Below them, the guy with the radio said something into it. The other two were working faster on the display case. Sirens in the distance, getting closer.

"Cops in four minutes," Peter said. "You want to argue about the plan or do the plan?"

She went over the balcony rail.

He'd seen her move before. The chase in Chelsea, the rooftops, the grappling hooks. This was combat. She dropped fifteen feet, caught the edge of a display case with one hand, swung her body horizontal and caught the first guy in the chest with both feet. He went into the wall. She landed in a crouch, pivoted, and swept the second guy's legs before he could get the glass cutter up. Fast and precise. No powers. Just a body she'd pushed past what most bodies could do.

The third guy pulled his gun.

Peter's web caught it before the barrel came level. He yanked it out of the guy's hand without looking. The web-line was already attached to the ceiling from his entry, and the gun swung on the end of it like a pendulum, spinning away into the dark.

Felicia was on the ground with the second guy, her knee on his chest, her claw pressed into the soft skin under his jaw. She was looking up at Peter. At the web. He'd fired it while looking at her, not at the gun.

"How did you-"

"I pay attention."

The first guy was getting up. Peter webbed him to the wall. The second guy under Felicia's knee made a sound and she pressed harder and he stopped making it. The third guy was running for the service door.

Peter caught him at the door. One web to the ankles, one to the wrists, pulled in opposite directions. The guy went flat on the marble floor and slid into a sarcophagus display. The sarcophagus rocked. Didn't fall. A security guard somewhere in the building was yelling into a walkie-talkie.

"We should go," Peter said.

"We should go," Felicia agreed.

Six blocks north, running on rooftops. Her grappling hooks and his web-lines, parallel tracks through the cold, and somewhere behind them the sirens converging on Fifth Avenue. She was fast. He was faster but he stayed at her pace. She pushed harder, her boots hitting the gravel rooftops at a sprint, her breathing sharp and controlled.

They stopped on a rooftop on East 88th Street. Residential building, nobody up here, a water tank and a brick chimney and the sky clear enough to see a few stars past the light pollution. March cold. His breath made clouds. So did hers.

She sat on the edge of the chimney. Her chest was moving with hard breaths and her hair had come loose from the pins and it was in her face and she pushed it back with her forearm, the claws on her gloves catching in the white strands.

"You're not bad," she said. "For a hero."

"You're not bad for a thief."

"I'm a great thief."

"That museum had three Maggia guys in it with guns. You were going to fight all three by yourself."

"I was going to rob the place before they finished robbing it." She crossed her legs on the chimney edge. "They were slow. I would have been fine."

"The guy had a gun."

"I know what a gun looks like, Spider."

He sat on the water tank across from her. Eight feet between them. The leather smell was in the air, mixed with rooftop tar and cold and the particular nothing-smell of a New York night in March. A plane was blinking its way across the sky. Red light, white light, red light.

"You should stop," he said.

Her chin came up. "Excuse me?"

"The stealing. The breaking in. The-" He gestured at the catsuit, the mask, the claws. "This."

"You don't know anything about this."

"I know you're good at it. I know you're also going to get caught."

"I'm not going to get caught."

"Tonight you almost got shot."

She stood up. The Black Cat voice was on, the purr, the performance, louder than usual. "I didn't almost anything. I had it handled."

"You didn't."

"Don't." She pointed at him. One claw, extended, catching the ambient light. "Don't tell me what I can and can't do."

"I'm not telling you what you can do. I'm asking you why."

It landed. The finger lowered. The purr died. The Black Cat voice fell away and what was left was quieter and younger than the costume suggested.

She sat back down on the chimney edge. She pulled one knee up. She looked at the rooftop between her boots.

"My father is in prison," she said. No purr. No performance. "Walter Hardy. He's... he was the best. At what he did. He was the best."

"What did he do?"

"What do you think." She picked at the fur trim on her wrist. "He has pancreatic cancer. Stage four. They found it eight months ago and by the time they found it there was nothing to find that wasn't already everywhere." She pulled a thread loose from the fur. "His appeal is in four months. The lawyers want money I don't have. So."

So she put on a costume and started stealing.

"The museum tonight wasn't random," Peter said.

"Egyptian scarab. Private collection piece on loan. The insurance payout would have funded six months of legal fees." She let go of the thread. "The Maggia got there first."

The plane crossed behind a cloud and came back out the other side. Peter's breath made a cloud. Felicia's didn't. She was controlling it. Shallow, steady. Trying not to shake.

"Then let me help."

She looked at him. Green eyes through the mask, and they were different than he'd seen them before. Her eyes were wet at the bottom, the lashes dark, and her jaw was clenched and her mouth was a flat line.

"Don't be kind to me."

"Or what?"

"Or I'll do something stupid."

"Like what?"

She stood up. Walked toward him. Stopped when her knees were against the water tank between his legs and she was close enough that the leather smell wasn't mixed with anything else anymore. Just leather and cold skin and the perfume he still couldn't name.

"There's a man," she said. "Wilson Fisk. He has a penthouse on the Upper East Side. He controls the Maggia, the docks, half the judges in Manhattan. He's the reason my father is in prison, he's the reason the appeal keeps getting delayed, and he's the reason three men with guns were in that museum tonight." She looked at him and her eyes were dry now. "If you want to help me, help me with that."

Wilson Fisk. Peter knew the name. Kingpin. Big guy, white suit, Daredevil's problem. Except Daredevil wasn't operating yet, not that Peter knew of, and Fisk was sitting in his penthouse running New York from the top floor and nobody was doing anything about it.

"That's not a small ask," Peter said.

"I know what it is."

She was still standing between his knees. The cold was making her breath visible now. She'd stopped controlling it. The clouds hung between them, hers and his, mixing in the foot of space between their faces.

He reached out. Slowly. His hand found the side of her neck, above the collar of the catsuit, where her skin was bare and cold. She didn't pull away. Her pulse was fast under his thumb. Her jaw was still tight and her eyes were still on his and neither of them was breathing right.

She put her hand on his chest. Over the spider. Where the claw marks had been, where she'd traced the symbol.

Inches between them. Leather and cold and her pulse under his thumb. Her hand on his chest. Green eyes through the mask. Close enough to see the mascara she wore under the domino. A small scar above her left eyebrow he'd never noticed.

She headbutted him.

Not hard. Hard enough. Her forehead cracked into his and he jerked back and his hand left her neck and she was already moving, two steps back, grappling hook in her hand.

"Sorry," she said. Breathing hard. Not sorry.

"What was that?"

"That was me not doing the stupid thing." She fired the grappling hook. It caught the building across the alley. "One more second and I was going to do the stupid thing. So."

"So you headbutted me."

"You're welcome."

She jumped. The grappling line caught her weight and she swung across the gap and landed on the opposite roof and she didn't look back. Her white hair caught the streetlight for a second, then she was gone over the far edge.

Peter sat on the water tank. His forehead hurt. The spot where her hand had been on his chest was warm through the costume. The spot on his neck where his hand had been on hers was cold without it.

He rubbed his forehead. Grinned.

Claw marks. Traced spider. Headbutt.

He sat on the water tank for a while. A taxi honked on the street below. Someone in one of the apartments across the alley had their TV on too loud, a late-night show, canned laughter bleeding through the window. The cold settled into his costume and he didn't move.

His forehead was going to bruise. Spider healing would take care of it by morning but right now it was warm and tender and he kept touching it.