Water Tower
He'd been checking the water tower every night for two weeks and she was never there.
The ladder rungs had the same grime on them each time. Same pigeon shit on the tank rim, undisturbed. Felicia Hardy wasn't coming back to the spot where she'd kissed him and then said it didn't happen. Not yet.
So he checked anyway. The way you check a mailbox you know is empty. You walk past it, you glance, you keep moving.
Sunday night. Cold enough that the web-fluid was thick in the shooters and his breath came out white and the wind tore it apart. His fingers were stiff inside the gloves by the time Chelsea was below him and the water tower on West Twenty-Third was ahead and the ladder rungs were dark and the tank rim was dark and there was a shape sitting on the edge of it.
White hair. Legs dangling. The grappling hook coiled on the tank beside her, set down, not held.
She'd been here a while. Long enough to put the grappling hook down. Long enough that the coil had left a rust ring on the surface, visible from thirty feet. Felicia Hardy didn't set things down unless she was staying.
He landed on the far side of the tank. The metal hummed under his feet. She didn't turn around.
He walked around to her side and sat down. Left about a foot of space. His legs hung over the edge next to hers, his boots and her boots, and Chelsea was rooftops and fire escapes and yellow apartment windows below them.
She didn't say anything for a while. He let her not say anything. The wind was cold and a car alarm was going off south of them and nobody was turning it off.
"The appeal was denied."
The Black Cat voice was gone. No purr, no performance. What came out was flat and young.
"Walter's lawyer filed six months ago. Full appeal. Procedural errors, new evidence, character testimony. He submitted a hundred and twelve pages." She was looking at the rooftops. "The judge denied it last Thursday. No hearing. A hundred and twelve pages and the judge didn't even schedule a hearing."
Peter's hands were on the tank edge. The metal was cold through the gloves.
"He had a seizure last week." Her voice was smaller. "In the cell. When they brought him around he looked at one of the guards and said 'Are you new here?' A man he's known four years. He looked at him and didn't recognize his face."
The car alarm stopped. The quiet after it was louder.
"I'm sorry."
"Don't." She said it fast. Then again, quieter. "Don't do that."
He didn't say anything else. A pigeon landed on the tank rim behind them, walked three steps in one direction, turned around, walked three steps back, and flew off without committing to anything. Peter watched it go. Felicia's hair blew across her face and she didn't push it back and after a while the strands stuck to her mouth and she still didn't push them back.
"He taught me to pick locks when I was six."
Her hands were on the tank edge. The white fur trim on her gloves was dark with grime from the metal and she was gripping hard enough that the seams pulled.
"He put a padlock on the kitchen counter next to my cereal bowl. Before school. He gave me two bobby pins and said 'Figure it out' and went to make coffee." She was talking to the city. "I had it open by lunch. My thumbs hurt from the tension wrench and I'd bent one of the pins and I didn't care. He picked me up off the stool and put me on his shoulders and carried me around the apartment saying 'That's my girl' to every room." A pause. "To the cat. To the bathroom mirror. 'That's my girl.'"
Her grip on the tank edge had tightened.
"When my mother left, he danced with me. In the kitchen. I was eight. He didn't explain where she'd gone. He didn't say she wasn't coming back. He was wearing his brown work shoes, the ones with the scuff on the left toe. I was in socks. The linoleum was cold. He held my hands and we moved around the kitchen and there wasn't any music. He just held my hands."
She pulled a strand of hair off her mouth. Put her hand back on the tank edge.
"He said 'You're worth more than any diamond.' And I believed him because he was my father and he danced with me when my mother left and he put me on his shoulders and told the cat I was his girl." Her jaw was working. "Two years later he got arrested stealing one."
A siren passed below them, blocks south, rising and falling until it faded east. Her breathing was steady. Controlled. Working at it.
"He's the best person I know." She stopped. Started again. "And the worst person I know. And he's dying in a cell and I can't-"
She stopped.
She didn't cry. Her jaw was locked and her shoulders were shaking and behind the domino mask her eyes were dry. Her gloves pulled tight at the seams where she gripped the tank. A muscle in her neck stood out.
He sat with her and didn't say anything because there wasn't anything to say.
His fingers went numb in the gloves. Apartment windows below went dark one by one. A bass line thumped from a bar on Ninth Avenue and someone laughed on a sidewalk somewhere and the laugh carried.
"I saved someone once," Peter said. "My uncle."
She didn't look at him. But the shaking stopped.
"He was at a store. Late. He was always at the store late because he liked talking to the guy behind the counter about baseball and the guy closed at ten and Ben never checked the time." Peter was talking to the rooftops. "Someone came in with a gun. I got there and I-" He stopped. The web-shooters, the mask, the guy's hand shaking around the grip, Ben's face in the fluorescent light when Peter came through the ceiling vent. He couldn't tell the story without telling all of it. He told the edges. "I almost wasn't fast enough. Another couple seconds and he would have been gone."
Felicia looked at him. Under the domino mask, the skin around her eyes was red.
"But he's alive?"
"He's alive." Peter was looking at an apartment window across the street where a woman was standing at her kitchen sink, alone, washing something. The water was running. "He does crosswords. He drinks coffee from a mug that says World's Best Uncle and the letters are chipping off. He signs his name in blue ink, every letter separate, like somebody taught him penmanship when he was a kid and it stuck." His voice went quieter than he meant it to. "He's alive."
"Then you were fast enough."
"For him."
The woman in the kitchen turned off the water. The window went dark.
"I'm not fast enough for everything."
She was looking at him. He didn't need to turn to know.
Their shoulders were touching. He didn't know when that had happened. The foot of space he'd left was gone and his arm was against hers through both suits and she was warm and neither of them moved.
"This is a terrible meeting spot," she said.
"You keep showing up."
She didn't answer. The wind blew. Her shoulder was warm against his.
Her pinkie finger hooked around his.
Her gloved finger curling around his gloved finger on the tank edge. The slightest pull. Through two layers of fabric the shape of her finger was there, cold, the pressure barely there. She didn't grip. She just held on. The contact was so small that the wind almost mattered more.
He kept his hand still. Let her finger stay where she'd put it. The metal was freezing under his palm and her finger was cold through the glove and the only warmth was the pressure. Barely a touch. He looked at the rooftops.
Five seconds.
She pulled it back. Her hand went to the tank edge and the cold where her finger had been was bigger than the finger. His hand kept going back to the spot like a tongue finding a missing tooth.
"I need a real lawyer." Her voice was steadier. "Not a court-appointed suit who submits a hundred and twelve pages nobody reads. Someone who looks at a judge who won't grant a hearing and makes it his problem."
Peter thought about it. He was fifteen. His legal experience consisted of watching Law & Order with Ben on Thursday nights and Ben pausing the show to explain why the defense attorney was right even though the show wanted you to think he was wrong. He didn't know any lawyers.
But the MCU was in his head. Half-remembered, unreliable. And there was a lawyer in there. Tall. Green. A woman who-
He'd come back to that.
"I'll ask around."
"You know lawyers?"
"I know people who know people."
She looked at him. Under the mask, her mouth twitched. Left corner. The Black Cat trying to come back.
"Spider knows people."
"Spider knows all kinds of people."
She stood up. Brushed the grime off her gloves. Picked up the grappling hook. The coil had left a rust ring on the tank, darker than the last one. She'd been here a while before he arrived.
"Same time." She said it to the skyline.
She fired the grappling hook. The cable caught the building across the street and she stepped off the tank edge and the cable went taut and she swung out over Chelsea, legs tucked, hair streaming behind her, the catsuit catching yellow light from the apartment windows still lit below.
She looked back.
She'd never done that. Through every rooftop and fire escape and dock, through the claw marks and the headbutt and the kiss that didn't happen, she had never once turned around.
Tonight she turned her head over her shoulder while the cable carried her and the distance was too far to see her eyes but her face turned toward him. Then the building took her.
Peter sat on the water tower. The spot where her shoulder had been was cooling. His right pinkie still felt her finger like a sound that had stopped.
An orange tabby was sitting in a window across the street, watching him. Or watching nothing. Cats were hard to read.
Five seconds of her finger around his. Biggest thing that had happened up here.
He thought about lawyers. He thought about tall green women from movies he'd seen in another life and whether any of that was real in this one.
He swung home. His right hand was warm where her finger had been. Just the pinkie. The rest of him was freezing.
He landed on his bedroom windowsill and pulled the mask off and the room was dark and the ceiling crack was above the light fixture, forking toward the window.