The friendly Neighborhood
Spiderman x Black Cat/Felicia Hardy
Chapter Two: A Lady's Secrets
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Hey so here is Chapter two of the Fanfiction, hope you enjoy it, chapter 3 is already finished, I will be posting that soon.
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The jewels looked better by lamplight.
Felicia sat cross-legged on the floor of her apartment with a jeweler's loupe pressed to one eye and the piece turned slowly in her fingers, and she let herself enjoy it, because enjoying it was the only part of the job that was ever really hers. A brooch, technically, though it was more a small architecture of gold than anything you'd pin to a coat, Baroque, extravagant, a cluster of old-mine diamonds set around a central sapphire the deep blue of a bruise. The kind of thing that had been made three hundred years ago to prove that someone was more important than everyone else in the room. She could feel the weight of all that intention in her palm. She always could.
"You," she murmured to it, "are going to buy me two months of quiet."
Her apartment was quiet already, a good apartment, a real one, high enough up that the city noise softened to a hum, with actual furniture and actual art on the walls and a kitchen she never cooked in. It was the one thing she let herself spend money on. Everything else in her life was borrowed, temporary, in transit; the apartment stayed. The apartment was proof that she'd landed on her feet. She always landed on her feet.
She set the brooch down on its bed of black velvet, snapped a few photographs under good light, and picked up her phone.
The buyer answered on the second ring, which told her plenty. Eager men were easy men.
"Miss Hardy." His accent rolled the words out slow, swedish, cultured, a voice that had never once in its life had to hurry. "I trust you have good news for me."
"I have your brooch," she said, and let a smile into her voice even though there was no one to see it. She'd learned a long time ago that people could hear a smile. "Verified. Papers in order. Ready whenever you are."
"Wonderful. Wonderful." A pause, warm and pleased. "Then we should celebrate. There is a restaurant, I will send a car. Tonight, if you are free."
I am never free, she thought. That's the whole problem.
"Tonight's perfect," she said.
Getting ready was a kind of armor, and Felicia put it on the way a knight might.
She sat at her mirror and did her makeup slowly, deliberately, watching a different woman assemble herself in the glass. Not the woman who'd walked out of a warehouse the night before with an alarm shrieking behind her. Not the girl who'd aged out of foster care with a duffel bag and a chip on her shoulder the size of a city block. Someone smooth. Someone soft-edged and easy to look at, whose eyes said tell me more and never said what she was actually thinking. A liner along the lash, a wash of something smoky, a red on the mouth that was really more of a dark wine, striking without being loud. She lined her pale eyes until they looked less like a cat's and more like a woman's. It took work to look that harmless.
She slipped into the dress last. Black, of course. It was always black. Sleek and long and cut to move, the fabric skimming down her frame like water; nothing gaudy, nothing that shouted, just a clean dark line that made the white of her hair look almost deliberate, almost styled that way on purpose. She stepped into the heels and grew four inches and studied the whole effect for a moment with the flat, professional eye of a woman checking a weapon.
Magnificent, she could already hear him saying. They always said magnificent. As if she'd done it for them.
Into the small black clutch went the brooch in its box, the false papers folded neat, her phone, a lipstick she didn't need and, tucked flat against the lining where her hand could find it without looking, the small snub-nosed pistol she carried the way other women carried an umbrella. Not because she expected rain. Because you never knew. She'd been doing this long enough to know that the men who sent cars and ordered white wine were exactly the men you never turned your back on.
She checked the safety by touch, closed the clutch, and went downstairs to meet the car.
He was waiting for her outside the restaurant.
The driver came around and opened her door, and Mr. Svenson stepped forward before she'd even moved, offering his hand, a big hand, manicured, a watch on the wrist that cost more than most people's cars. Felicia laid her fingers in his and let him help her out of the car with a practiced, unhurried grace, rising to her full heeled height and gathering her clutch into her other hand in a single smooth motion, as if the whole thing had been choreographed.
He was, she had to admit, good-looking. Older than her by more than a decade, broad through the shoulders, a jaw you could have used as a level, dark hair going elegantly grey at the temples. The son of somebody, she knew, somebody important enough that his name opened doors and closed investigations. He wore all of it with the careless confidence of a man who had never once been told no and expected the trend to continue.
"You do look magnificent," he said, in that deep, rough-edged voice.
There it is.
She gave him a small smile, the shy one, the one she kept in a drawer for exactly this. "Thank you. I hoped it would be something you'd like."
Inside her own head she was already rolling her eyes so hard they ached. Outside, on the surface where he could see, she was luminous, and grateful, and just a little bit dazzled. It was a performance she could do in her sleep. The trick of it was never letting the two versions touch.
He offered her his arm. She took it. His skin was warm and she wanted to let go of it immediately, and didn't, and they walked inside together looking for all the world like a couple who belonged there.
The private room was all dark wood and candlelight, the kind of place designed so that money could talk to money without anyone overhearing. They ordered, he ordered, really, for both of them, which she let slide because arguing would take longer than the meal, and the server melted away and pulled the doors closed behind him, and then it was just the two of them and the wine.
Felicia took a slow sip of her white and let the quiet stretch, because she'd learned that men like this couldn't tolerate quiet for long. They had to fill it. They had to perform.
Right on schedule, he leaned back and studied her over the rim of his glass.
"So," he said. "You have to tell me. Where does a beautiful woman get her hands on such beautiful jewelry?"
She lowered her lashes and gave him the almost-shy smile again, the one that promised a secret and delivered nothing.
"Oh," she said softly, "here and there, you know. A lady doesn't reveal her secrets."
She winked. He smiled back and this time there was something behind it, a slow, appraising warmth in his eyes that had nothing to do with the brooch, and it put the faintest cold prickle at the base of her neck. Her danger-sense, she sometimes called it, half-joking, the little instinct that had kept her alive on more rooftops than she could count. It wasn't screaming. It was just noting. A man like this, alone in a room with her, thinking of her as one more thing that could be bought if the price was right.
She overplayed it before it could show. Warmed her own smile a degree. Made herself soft and unbothered and easy.
Then she reached into her clutch, set the box on the table between them, and opened it, and the candlelight caught the sapphire and turned it into something alive.
"Verified and checked," she said, her voice low and smooth as poured cream. "With perfectly legal papers, in case customs should ever decide to make a fuss."
That got his attention where it belonged. He leaned in, lifted the brooch, turned it in the light with a connoisseur's care, and for a few blessed seconds he forgot entirely about her and looked only at the thing she'd brought him. She watched him fall in love with it. She always liked this part, the moment they stopped seeing her at all.
He set it into a small case of his own, satisfied, and closed the lid with a soft, final click.
"Well," he said, and the warmth came back into his voice, and his hand drifted across the white tablecloth toward hers. "Now that we have finished the business part of the evening-"
She had her wineglass in her hand before his fingers reached her. She lifted it, tipped it back, and finished the rest of it in one smooth swallow, an ordinary motion, nothing rude in it, nothing he could point to, and set the empty glass down and rose to her feet all in the same breath, so that by the time his hand arrived where hers had been, there was nothing there but tablecloth.
"It was nice doing business with you, Mr. Svenson," she said, and gave him one last bright, empty, dazzling smile.
And she walked out.
She didn't look back to see his expression. She didn't need to. She could feel it on her spine all the way to the door, the surprise of a man who had never been left before, who had genuinely believed the evening was going somewhere, who had mistaken a transaction for a courtship because women had spent his whole life letting him.
Out in the corridor she let out a breath and felt her real face come back onto her real skull.
Finally.
She could flee, now, from that great dumb handsome slab of a man. And he was handsome, objectively, she wasn't blind. But she'd known men like him her whole life, and she knew exactly what they wanted, and it was never her. Not the actual her. Men like Svenson didn't want a woman with a mind and a temper and a past; they wanted something quiet and decorative they could rest a hand on at charity galas, something that looked expensive and stayed silent and made them feel like the most interesting person in the room. She was many things. She had never once in her life been quiet or decorative, and she was never going to learn.
At least the food had been good. She'd give him that. It had been a genuinely excellent meal, and she'd eaten every bite of it while he talked about himself, and that was as much as she wanted from any of them.
She told the driver her building's address and settled into the back seat and went quiet for the whole ride home.
Out the window, the city she'd grown up in slid past and dissolved into the dark, the same streets, the same skyline, the neighborhoods that had shaped her and the ones that had chewed her up. Somewhere down there was a courthouse where she'd watched her father put on a brave face while they led him away. Somewhere down there were the foster homes, and the group home, and the fire escape where she'd figured out at seventeen that she could fall three stories and land like it was nothing, and had understood, in that one weightless second, that she was not going to be ordinary and she was not going to be saved and she was going to have to do the saving herself. She watched all of it go by and felt nothing she'd admit to.
My city, she thought, and couldn't have said if it was affection or a grudge.
Home was better than any of it.
She let herself in, kicked off the heels the instant the door shut, and felt four inches shorter and about ten pounds lighter. She peeled out of the dress and hung it up with more care than she'd shown its owner, stretched until her spine crackled, arms overhead, up onto her toes, that deep, feline pull through every muscle that felt better than almost anything, and then stood under the shower until the last of the evening's performance ran off her and down the drain. The soft woman with the shy smile went with it. What was left when she stepped out, hair wet and face bare, was just Felicia.
She climbed into bed with her phone and did the thing everyone did, the thing that was somehow the loneliest and most comforting part of the day at once: she scrolled.
Reels. Little videos. A dog. A recipe she'd never make. A girl her age in a city she'd never been to, laughing at something off-camera with people who looked like they loved her.
And then, because the algorithm was a stranger who somehow knew her better than anyone alive, him.
A shaky, blurry clip, filmed from a sidewalk by someone who'd gasped audibly at the end: Spider-Man, mid-swing, arcing between two buildings against a bruised evening sky, the line snapping taut and hurling him up and out over the traffic in a long, impossible curve. Someone had set it to music. It had four million views.
A small, involuntary smile tugged at the corner of her mouth.
She'd left him on his knees, last night. She kept thinking about it. Not with guilt, exactly, she didn't do guilt, guilt was a luxury for people who could afford it, but with a kind of nagging curiosity that wouldn't let go. She'd only set off the alarm to buy herself a lead. She hadn't expected it to fold him like that. One second he'd been quick and quippy and unfairly graceful for someone in that ridiculous suit, matching her step for step; the next he'd dropped like she'd shot him, both hands clamped to his head, and something about the way he'd curled around the pain had looked less like a hero and more like a person in genuine trouble.
She tapped his name into the search bar. She told herself it was reconnaissance.
She watched more than reconnaissance required.
Spider-Man helping an old woman with an armful of groceries across a flooded intersection, the two of them talking the whole way. Spider-Man crouched down to the eye level of a kid in a homemade version of his suit, giving a thumbs-up while the kid's mom cried behind the camera. Spider-Man perched on a streetlight at three in the morning, apparently just watching the block, saying something to the person filming that made them laugh. Photo after photo, clip after clip, and in every single one of them, underneath the mask, he was so obviously, achingly kind that it did something strange and uncomfortable in her chest.
She didn't know men like that. She wasn't sure men like that were real. In her experience the ones who wore masks were the ones with something to hide, and here was one wearing a mask apparently just to be gentle at people without getting a name for it.
Careful, Hardy, she told herself.
She put the phone face-down on the nightstand, turned off the lamp, and lay in the dark of her good, quiet, lonely apartment, and fell asleep, and did not entirely stop thinking about him.
Across the city, Peter Parker was not sleeping.
He sat hunched at his desk in the dark with the glow of the monitor turned all the way down and an ice pack going soft against his forehead, and he tried, and failed, to make a person out of a ghost.
He'd been at it for hours. He'd trawled every corner of the internet he could reach, police reports, insurance filings, grainy security stills from four separate robberies, forums where rich people complained about their stolen art, and come up with nothing but the same impression he'd had in the warehouse: a shape in the dark, a laugh, a white braid. A woman-shaped hole in the record where a name should be.
"Peter." Eve's voice came soft, so as not to make the headache worse. "I found something."
He straightened. "Go."
"There was a prolific art thief, active roughly twenty to thirty years ago, who operated under the name the Black Cat. His real name was Walter Hardy. He was arrested five years ago and is currently serving a lengthy sentence." A pause. "There is a record of a daughter. Felicia Hardy. Twenty years old. She competed in gymnastics as a child, regionally ranked, by the looks of it. After her father's incarceration she entered the foster system. She aged out of it. I can find no current documents matching her name, no lease, no employment, no enrollment at any school or university. As far as the paper world is concerned, she stopped existing at eighteen."
Peter sat with it. The Black Cat. A daughter who'd learned to fall before she could drive. A kid handed off to strangers the same year her father got a number instead of a name. A young woman who'd simply erased herself and started climbing through skylights instead.
He thought about the way she'd walked toward him. The way she hadn't been afraid.
He wasn't sure what he felt. It wasn't the clean, simple thing he was supposed to feel about a thief. It was more complicated than that, and complicated was the last thing his splitting skull needed.
"Okay," he said finally, quietly. "Thanks, Eve."
He got up. His whole body ached like he'd been beaten, though he hadn't been touched. In the bathroom he shook three Advil into his palm and swallowed them dry, caught his own reflection for one unkind second, hollow-eyed, grey, older than twenty-something had any right to look, and went to bed and dropped into sleep like a stone into water.
The next morning he sat in the third row of a lecture hall and let Dr. Bruce Banner's voice wash over him.
Banner was a good lecturer, calm, dry, genuinely delighted by the material in a way that was contagious and for ninety minutes, Peter got to be an ordinary bioengineering student and not a man with a second skeleton trying to grow in behind his eyes. He liked this class. He liked the version of himself that existed inside it.
When it ended, he waited for the room to empty and then went down to the front, where Banner was packing his notes into a battered leather bag.
"Dr. Banner? Can I ask you something about your inhibitor?"
Banner glanced up, unsurprised. He pushed up his sleeve without being asked, exposing the slim device seated against the inside of his forearm, a piece of tech that was, Peter knew, the only thing standing between this soft-spoken man and something the size of a building. "Sure," Banner said. "What do you want to know?"
Peter picked his words carefully. "Could the same principle apply to other kinds of mutations? Not just yours. Something more targeted."
Banner considered him for a moment, and there was a shrewdness in it that made Peter suddenly aware of how visible his exhaustion probably was. "In theory," Banner said. "It's not magic. It works by suppressing a very specific expression...you'd have to find the exact strand of DNA and RNA responsible for whatever you were trying to shut off, and target it precisely. Miss by a little and you shut off the wrong thing." He zipped the bag. "It's dangerous work. Genuinely. The body doesn't sort itself into good parts and bad parts for your convenience."
"I only want to switch off the bad parts," Peter said.
Banner looked at him, really looked, the way DeWolff had on the loading dock and asked, without any unkindness at all, the question that would follow Peter down two flights of stairs and onto the subway platform:
"And what, exactly, are you going to count as bad?"
Peter didn't have an answer. He said something polite and left, and the question came with him.
His wrists itched the whole way to the station, a deep, crawling, burning itch under the skin, in the same spots the web-shooters sat, like the tissue there was trying to become something new whether he wanted it to or not. He rubbed at them and it didn't help. He got on the train and stood in the corner with his hood up and his eyes half-closed against the fluorescent glare, and rode it out.
He bought the flowers at a bodega near the cemetery. White ones. May had liked white ones.
He walked the familiar path between the stones and knelt in the grass in front of hers and set them down and, for a while, didn't say anything at all. Then, because that was what you did, because there was no one else, he told her about his week.
"I asked Dr. Banner a question today," he said. "You'd like him. He's-he's kind of got the whole thing where he's scarier than he looks, but he's actually the gentlest guy in the building." He picked at a blade of grass. "Class is good. I'm keeping up. You'd be...I think you'd be proud of the keeping up, at least."
He ran out of things to say after that, faster than he wanted to. That was the part that always got him, standing here. He didn't have much else to fill the air with. His old friends, ned and MJ, the ones from before, from when his life still had people in it, he only knew about anymore through a screen. He watched their lives happen at a distance: someone's engagement, someone's new apartment, a group of them at a rooftop bar he hadn't been invited to and wouldn't have been able to go to anyway. He contemplated liking their posts but never did. He never commented, he never shot them a DM. He didn't know what he'd say or rather, text. Hey, remember me, I'm the guy who disappears and who you have no recollection of ever knowing. His whole life had narrowed down to his suit and his grief and his quiet, asbestos filled apartment, and he told himself it was worth it, it was worth it, and mostly he believed it, and here in the grass in front of his aunt's name it was harder to believe than usual.
"I miss you," he said, finally, which was the only completely true thing he had. "That's...yeah. That's the update."
He stayed until the cold came up through his knees, and then he went home.
He'd barely gotten his shoes off when Eve broke in.
"Peter-there's a bank robbery in progress, two blocks down."
The tiredness didn't matter. It never mattered. He was in the suit and out the window inside forty seconds, swinging low and fast down the avenue, and he dropped through the shattered front doors of the bank into a scene that made his stomach turn: three men, ski masks, and in their hands something that very much should not have been in their hands, sleek, humming, alien, the unmistakable purple-white glow of scavenged Chitauri tech, the kind of weaponry that turned an ATM into a crater and a bystander into a memory.
"Okay," Peter breathed, "that's new."
They were already firing. He moved.
For all his exhaustion, his body knew this, this was the one language it still spoke fluently. He webbed the first weapon out of a shooter's hands before the man had finished turning, yanked a second gunman off his feet mid-blast so the shot went wide and blew a chandelier instead of a teller, put himself between the third and a family flattened against the far wall and took the hit meant for them across the chest, which hurt, which knocked the wind clean out of him, but which meant nobody else got hit at all.
He got two more good shots to the face for his trouble before it was over, a fist, and then the butt of one of the guns-but by the time the sirens were close enough to hear, he had all three of them webbed to the marble floor in a neat, groaning row, and every single person who'd walked into that bank was going to walk back out of it. He waited in the rafters until the first officers came through the doors and saw the situation was handled, and then he slipped out a high window and swung home with his ribs aching and his lip full of blood.
Back in the apartment he ripped the mask off and hissed at what the cold air found.
Split lip. A shallow cut high on his cheekbone. Another through the tail of one eyebrow, sluggishly bleeding into his eye. He caught his reflection in the dark window. Great, that's a good look. he thought to himself and got the skin glue out of the drawer where he kept it next to the ice packs, and pinched the cuts shut one at a time with the steady, unbothered hands of a man who had done this far too many times to feel anything about it anymore. The eyebrow stung worst. He blinked the blood out of his eye and dabbed the last one closed and told himself he'd feel it less in an hour.
Then he sat down at the desk, pulled the half-finished device toward him under the lamp, and got to work.
He'd been building it in his head since the moment he left Banner's lecture. Find the exact strand. Target it precisely.Not the whole mutation, he wasn't stupid enough to try to switch off what he was. Just the savage part. The rising part. The thing that was flooding his system with more and more of what he already had and drowning him in it, the surplus that had turned every siren into a weapon and every fluorescent light into a migraine and every crowd into a wall of noise. He didn't want to stop being Spider-Man. He just wanted to stop hurting. He told himself those were different things and tried not to hear Banner asking what are you going to count as bad.
He worked for hours. He soldered and tested and swore and rebuilt, and somewhere past midnight, with his eyes gritty and his cuts throbbing, he held up the first prototype, a chip smaller than his thumb, a dull little wafer of everything he understood about himself.
"Okay, Eve. Get monitoring going. Keep an eye on my heart rate and my hormone levels. All of it."
"Monitoring active," she said, and then, gently, because she was always gentle: "Peter. Are you certain?"
He wasn't. That was the honest answer. He thought about the grave, and the itch under his wrists, and nine days of getting worse, and a warehouse alarm that had put him on his knees in front of the most interesting person he'd met in a year, and he pressed the chip to the back of his neck before he could talk himself out of it.
It stung for a moment, a sharp, bright bite of heat, there and gone.
And then, slowly, like a hand unclenching after gripping too long, the pressure behind his eyes began to let go.
He hadn't realized, until it started to leave, how much of it there'd been. It receded by degrees, the constant grind at the base of his skull, the low electric hum under his skin, the feeling of being one loud sound away from shattering, draining out of him and leaving something almost unbearably quiet in its place.
"Vitals within normal range," Eve announced softly. "Arachnid hormone levels dropping toward baseline."
Peter let out a breath that seemed to empty him completely.
"This feels so much better," he murmured, to the dark, to no one, his eyes already closing. "Wow. This feels...this feels so much better."
He meant to celebrate. He meant to run more tests, to check her numbers, to be careful the way Banner had told him to be careful.
Instead he sat back in the stool with the quiet washing over him for the first time in weeks, and exhaustion came up over his head like warm water, and Peter Parker fell asleep sitting up, cuts glued and mask off and the whole aching weight of himself finally, mercifully, still.
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Hey so here is chapter 2 for whoever is reading this, thanks <3
Hope you enjoyed it so far. :)
