Chapter Text
As a child, Felicia thought her father held some kind of magic. Light on his feet, he would always appear behind her without a sound the second her hand would reach for chocolates he’d brought back from Paris or Milan or Tuscany or wherever he’d been on ‘business’ that week. His voice would startle her, low and warning; ‘A thief who lived on the wrong side of indulgence is a thief that got caught, and what are we?’
‘Better than that.’
‘What are we?’
‘Smarter than that.’
It was a lesson that he drilled into her from the moment she could walk, encouraging her to keep herself upright and waiting for her to pick herself up when she fell - ‘no one else is going to do it for you’ - but it went ignored when one of those chocolates would appear on a small dish by her bedside later in the evening. There were no signs of footsteps, no plush toys moved from their place, and the small sheet of paper she wedged in her doorframe as a test had never fallen to the floor. Only her father’s wry smile as he walked past the hall told her that it’d been him who’d left her the treat.
Two.
As an adult, Felicia knows that nothing is ‘magical’, skills are earned; her father’s footsteps were easy to mimic having spent time and time again to best him and watching him closely on missions. She knows that people don’t always remember the lessons they’d tried to teach; her father’s tenure as the infamous ‘Black Cat’ was brought to an end all because he’d double-backed for a souvenir - chocolates are fine for ten years olds but eighteenth birthdays are better marked with something shiny.
Better and smarter aren’t little anecdotes but are necessary for survival because the world isn’t fair nor kind. If it were then her last words to her father wouldn’t have been said through plexiglass. Playing by other people’s rules never did anything good for her, so she needed to be above them all.
Mostly, she has learned that value and worth are mostly decided by scarcity and opinion.
“Mmm.” Felicia hums, nails slowly dragging along the glass. Her eyes remain fixed to the painting behind it; Edwardian, arrived from a private collection in England three weeks ago, and currently held in storage, set to be sold at auction for fifteen million. “Gaudy.”
Money never seemed to account for taste.
In Felicia’s mind, it only felt fair for her to make a few reacquisitions to ensure that the good people of New York weren’t wasting their money. Her buyer was paying handsomely for such charity work.
Catching the light shift in the glass, Felicia smirks; right on time.
Three.
Feet land heavily on the ground behind her - he wanted her to know he was there - that was part of the fun. That was part of her plan - he always thought he could talk her out of this, send her on her merry way with a smack on the wrist and promise to do better.
This was an old game they’d been playing, back and forth over the course of months almost since she’d stepped foot back in New York and taken up her father’s title, Spider-Man had been there the entire time as if trying (and failing) to prove that she was just a girl playing dress-up in someone else’s clothes.
“Just window shopping tonight, Cat?” An exasperated voice asks, Felicia turning to smile at the squinted white lenses.
“Something like that.” She grins, dropping her hand and letting her claws catch the light. Spider-Man could never make the first move, either too righteous or requiring a defense - the Bugle would be right to call him a menace if he was webbing up any old girl in a catsuit - it would certainly make her feel less special.
Felicia faints a strike, dodging and ducking, teasing him until her opening comes and they are both sent crashing through the glass.
“Thanks for the assist, Spider.”
With a taser to his neck, an arm around the painting and a laugh, she’s off.
Better. Smarter.
It was sad when they made it too easy - usually Spider-Man was better too.
Shame.
Sometimes Felicia wishes she could paint.
Of all the many talents she’s accrued over the years, unfortunately painting was never one of them. She can disable a car alarm in five seconds flat but give her a blank canvas and a paintbrush and she wouldn’t know what to do with them.
It’s not because she doesn’t have the ability— she can do absolutely anything she sets her mind to, and that’s a fact, not an affirmation—but it’s because she doesn’t quite have a painter’s patience. Painters are good at painting because they can sit still. They can sit in one place and turn a blank canvas into The Birth of Venus, no matter how many years the process shaves off their lives.
Felicia doesn’t quite know what stillness is. For as long as she’s been able to stand on two legs, she’s been in perpetual motion. She can’t stop, lest she get thrown over the handlebars of her own life.
She finds her ‘stillness’ in the three seconds of respite she gets before police sirens enclose, or in the half a second of silence that passes before she hears the thwip of Spider-Man’s web.
She was built for a life on the run. She hadn’t known that at first—back when she was a child. Back when ballet lessons at the local community centre were just for fun, before she’d realised that her father’s commitment to making her learn the skill was less about his love of the dance and more about making her into a person who was light on her feet.
She wasn’t built for the life of a painter. And too damn bad. Because as she studies the painting standing before her—the newest addition to her collection—her only thought is that if she could, she’d have painted something much better than this. In the dim light of the gallery yesterday it’d looked gaudy, in the clean white of her penthouse apartment, it’s downright dreadful.
If Felicia Hardy had been the kind of person who could sit still, maybe she’d have been a painter—the kind who made dreadful works of art that were valued in the hundreds of thousands or even the millions.
As it happens, she can’t sit still. So she dances instead, in and out of galleries and banks and jewellers, and it’s a different kind of art. She supposes it’s the superior kind—since all that those years of painters’ patience have led to is the growing collection in Black Cat’s Manhattan penthouse.
“Hmm,” she hums, smirking as she leans over to inspect the brushstrokes of her newest edition. Her eyes roam across the layers of colour, the tiny cracks in the canvas—
“It’s called craquelure,” her father says, hand tight around hers as they stand in front of the painting. “Those tiny little cracks in the artwork, they appear over time, you see. It’s like a painting’s fingerprint. The patterns, the direction…it’s almost impossible to replicate that.”
Felicia’s brows furrow as she thinks through his words. She knows there’s something she’s supposed to be getting from his sentences, there’s a test here and she’s determined not to fail it. She looks up at him.
“That’s how you know if it’s real?” she asks, holding her breath and hoping she’s right. A smile melts its way onto her face when her father looks down at her with a wink.
“That’s how you know it’s real,” he repeats. “If you look under a microscope and those cracks are missing or the pattern ain’t right? You know you have a forgery.”
“Hmm.” Felicia nods, storing the information in that corner of her brain where she puts all the pieces of facts that she doesn’t know what to do with just yet. “Can we get ice cream now?”
“Only if you’re paying, little cat.”
“I don’t have any money.”
“You sure about that?”
Felicia giggles when her father flicks his fingers around the back of her right ear and produces a five dollar bill. She squeezes his hand, running along after him as he sweeps through the gallery—
Felicia inhales sharply, the sound of her own breath echoing around her apartment. It’s quiet. Too quiet. In these moments of silence, her memories are always loud.
She clears her throat and reaches for her phone, connecting it to her surround sound speakers and pressing play on the first song her thumb hovers over. She makes her way to the kitchen as the sound of Lenny Kravitz’s guitar fills the hollow silence of her penthouse.
There are still eight bottles of wine left, stacked in a crate in the cabinet beside the fridge. Her father had a taste for expensive wines, collecting them from one country to the next on his escapades, building a collection that would impress the most refined connoisseurs.
They’re Felicia’s now. And there are eight left.
She reaches for a bottle and pops it open, letting it breathe before pouring herself a generous glass and making her way to her bedroom. She drops her towel down onto her fur-lined rug and slips into her comfortable long t-shirt.
She touches up her bleached blonde finger waves, using the tips of her forefingers to smooth down her edges and tuck a few stray strands in place before painting her lips with her favourite dark brown shade of matte lipstick. She draws her cat eyes sharp and bold, her warm breath leaving a small, fleeting cloud of condensation on her mirror as she leans in close and concentrates.
“Perfect,” she breathes, as the apartment buzzer rings through the hall right on time.
She presses the button on the elevator and waits.
“Good evening, Miss Hardy,” the concierge says with a nervous smile as the elevator door opens. “Your delivery?”
She collects the bags of Chinese takeout from him and passes him a folded up fifty dollar bill in return. “Thanks, Jarret.”
“Have a great night, Miss Hardy.”
Felicia saunters into the kitchen after the elevator doors close. She turns the music up louder, loud enough that she feel the vibration of the bass beneath her bare feet as she pours herself another large glass of wine and cracks open her takeout boxes.
She moves her body to the music, her limbs falling into familiar patterns—chin up, shoulders back, neck elongated, toes pointed. The movements are fluid, but not easy—they’re never easy, but the best dancers are the ones who make them look that way.
And Felicia knows how to make it look easy, as she holds an arabesque, body still as a statue as she reaches for an egg roll with her chopsticks.
She slips and slides around the apartment, sipping her full-bodied red wine as she twists and turns, sweeping herself into a pirouette, the room blurring in her vision as the wind of her swift motions blow across her face.
And when she lands, perfectly poised and still, not a drop of wine has been spilled.
She hears the telltale banging of a broom coming from downstairs and ignores the familiar noise complaint, turning the music up even higher as she laughs.
She laughs, and laughs, and drinks, and eats, and dances across her penthouse.
And it doesn’t matter that there are tears streaking her cheeks.
“I’m a little disappointed.” The spider says. His expression doesn’t change. That damn mask never moves, but Felicia has always been a quick study and the man gives away more about himself than anyone would expect from someone determined to keep their identity so secret. His tone, his body, even the jokes, they all tell a little story. Tonight’s chapter proves something she’d been entertaining for a while; he likes her. “It’s never this easy to find you.”
“Yet you manage.” Felicia replies. Her mouth, all red lips and white teeth stretched up into a taunting smile. “Don’t worry. Spending a considerable amount of time thinking about little old me is an affliction many face. You’re not alone.”
“I’d believe that.” She tilts her head, staring him down and waiting for a stammer to follow. When it doesn’t come, her smile broadens; the spider wants to play just as much as her. “Should I be worried you’re going to use me as a battering ram again?”
She isn’t the only one who has been paying attention during their encounters.
Felicia isn’t sloppy. Precision, practice and patience had been forced into her skillset. Even at her worst, she was still a cut above the rest when it came to the art of the theft.
If she’s caught, it’s because she wants to be.
“It wouldn’t be fun if I was predictable.” Felicia tuts, chin lifting and catching her own reflection in the white, unmoving eyes of the spider’s mask.
Felicia was a spitting image of her mother.
She saw pictures of her mom’s youth as reflections of her own face- that was, of course, before the albums were packed away and shipped across the country; ‘The city is suffocating, I need the air’ as if they hadn’t lived amongst the towering skyscrapers for years before her father died.
There is irony that out of everything, the only thing that a master thief cannot steal is more time, and that because of her father’s crimes, it was the very thing they were robbed of with him before he died. Her mom blames Walter for that, blames his choices rather than the people that had let him rot inside that prison. In turn, she’s begun to condemn Felicia’s choices too, but continues to live on the comfort that those decisions afford her; the ‘space’ she desires so much, the wine and the lodge.
With how shockingly similar she was to her mother, it only felt fair that she took after her father, followed in the footsteps he had left. Her mom never laughed at that joke, so Felicia is sure to say it as often as she can. With the distance between them now, the few times she phones, static fills the silence instead of any laughter and it’s the closest they come to being honest with each other without it devolving into a fight.
It didn’t matter.
Felicia wasn’t much of a talker anyway. She preferred action. Or at least convincing herself of that made it easier to swallow around her tightening throat.
“Is that so?” Spider-Man challenges.
“Catch me and you just might find out the answer.”
Tonight the Spider isn’t a nuisance. He isn’t a tool in her plan, not when she could so easily finish this job alone– no.
He’s her distraction.
The downside of the job is the fact that it’s a job.
Which means, at times, she has to work alongside other people. For other people. And Felicia knows by now that she's much quicker and much more efficient when she’s working alone.
But it’s a job. Which means she’s spending her Friday night breaking into a penthouse to steal a single porcelain antique on behalf of a petty ex-spouse as a ‘fuck you’ in the midst of a messy divorce. Some people just have too much money and too much time on their hands, it seems.
It’s not a glamorous job but the ornament must be worth a lot because the payout is good, and she guesses she can’t complain.
It wasn’t always this way, it wasn't always a job. When she was seventeen and just starting out it was about the thrill of putting her feet into the footprints left behind by her infamous father. About living up to his legacy, trying to make him proud.
Back then she was obsessed with what she stole and who she stole it from. It always had to be the best thing, always had to be the most challenging target. There was always something to prove.
But then he died. And there was no one left to impress. But Felicia had soon realised that she wasn’t equipped for anything else. Her hands weren’t built to create, or care, or any of the other things that hands did in the regular fields that regular people worked in.
Her hands were made to steal. And now, it’s a matter of survival. It’s a job. It’s about doing what she has to to get by in the world, and sometimes she still loves it. Other times, like tonight, the thrill doesn’t quite reach a low simmer.
“You almost done in there, Cat?”
Felicia rolls her eyes as she stuffs the ornament into a small cloth bag. One of the things she hates about working as part of a team is that she can’t work on her own damn time. She has to answer to a number of other people, the most irritating of those being the overly anxious lookout.
She presses her middle finger up against the earpiece in her right ear as she speaks. “Just making sure everything’s the way I found it,” she says, glancing around the room before slinging the bag over her shoulder. “Why, you getting scared of the dark, Kaplan?”
“No. I just have this crazy feelin’ I’m bein’ watched.”
Felicia snorts out a laugh as she winds elegantly around the furniture in the dark, making her way back to the living room. “You should see someone about that,” she says. “Ryder, can you hear me?”
“Go ahead, Cat.”
“I’ll be out in thirty seconds.”
“Got it. I’ll put the security cams back on.”
“Perfect. Kaplan, how’s the coast?” Felicia asks as she makes her way back to the window she came through. She frowns when she gets no answer. “Kaplan?”
“Nope, sorry. He’s…a little tied up right now. Can I take a message?”
Felicia stops walking at the sound of the familiar voice that isn’t her colleague’s. If it weren’t for the reality that he’s lately become the only source of consistency in her life, Felicia would start to get sick of the fact that Spider-Man just can’t seem to leave her alone.
She adjusts her earpiece a little, taking a step back from the window as she glances around the room for something inconsequential.
“You know,” she says casually, reaching into the bag and pulling out the porcelain antique, “anyone would think you’re obsessed with me, Spider-Man.”
In a few swift motions she hides the figurine in her suit and stuffs an old candle from the mantelpiece into the bag. She has just about a second to spare before Spider-Man swoops through the window and into the penthouse apartment.
She hears the snap of his web and before she knows it, the bag has disappeared from her hand and has materialised in his. She fights the urge to smirk.
“I could say the same about you,” he says, crouching as he clutches the bag in his hand. “I mean, this kind of thing feels like the little leagues for you. Either you’re really bored or you just wanted to see me.”
Felicia laughs as she slinks over to him, watching as he stands slowly to his feet. “Maybe it’s a bit of both.”
He doesn’t respond, and his expression is inscrutable under the mask, but in the quiet of the apartment she can hear him breathing, can hear the way it’s slightly escalated, getting shallower and quicker with every disappearing inch between their bodies.
And if she listens close enough she thinks that maybe, just maybe she can hear the quickened beating of his heart. Oh. Oh. This should be fun.
Felicia steps closer to him, squinting her eyes inside the leather frames of her mask. “You caught me, I guess.” She shrugs her shoulders. “I just missed you. But we’ve seen each other now, and I’m sure you have my friends webbed up against a wall somewhere, so I guess we can go our separate ways?”
She feels gloved hands lock around her wrist and for some reason she holds her breath.
“You think I’m just going to let you go, Cat?”
Felicia hums softly. “I think so.”
Again, he doesn’t see the taser coming, and something about that makes Felicia smug—who knew that all it would take was a little close proximity to make him drop the ball. His body spasms under the voltage and he drops to his knees, his hand still clutched tightly around the bag he took from her.
Felicia tucks the taser back beneath her belt as she leans down with a smirk. “Little leagues, huh?” she breathes in his ear. “Hopefully I don’t disappoint you next time.” And she doesn’t know what possesses her to press a kiss to his masked cheek, but she does it anyway.
With that, she wedges open the window and climbs out the way she came in, exiting out into the night with the antique figurine in her suit and two less people to share the payout with.
Mission accomplished.
(She doesn’t think about the fact that long after she’s home and showered she can still feel the phantom touch of gloved fingers around her wrist.)
“Here already?” She laughs, feeling a presence behind her and turning to see Spider-Man looming at her shoulder. “I haven’t even done anything yet.”
“‘Yet’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.”
“And you’re here to help me carry that load, I suppose?” Felicia asks, head tilting and hand reaching out to squeeze his arm. His chin lifts and chest fills out more. Changes in his posture that she might have missed if they hadn’t been playing this game for a while by this point. She has been watching him, studying him, knows that he is preening under her touch ever so slightly - hoping that this ends the way so many of their other encounters have.
Felicia has always been aware of the finer things in life. Disapproving as she might be now, her mother had grown accustomed to the treasures and luxuries her father brought home, and in turn, so had Felicia.
She saw no harm in indulgence.
There were people that did more for worse. Greater problems in the world than a few extra missing jewels or cases of wine. It was only fair that the rich who extorted people for their wealth had their comeuppance somehow and why shouldn’t she be the one to dish it and claim the rewards?
It was all a grand circle.
The trick was knowing when to stop. No reward came without risk. Pure greed and desire were the tipping point for when a job could turn bad. They were a sure fire way to get caught. Restraint was key, and for all the shiny things she surrounded herself with, Felicia thought herself to be someone that had decent control of herself.
Her own problem was that she liked to push; whether it was her own luck or the people she surrounded herself with, she liked to toy with chance and stand on the precipice of the consequences, knowing that she was smart enough to dart away when it got too much. There was so much that could be learned when someone was pushed back against a wall, and that information was power.
It shouldn’t have surprised her as much as it did when things between her and the spider escalated; lips over a masked cheek had evolved to lips over his mouth. Being caught in the middle of jobs had changed to her leading him on wild goose chases to end up on a roof together, using her free time to see what she could learn about him and see how far he would let her sink her claws into him.
He became less of a nuisance and more of a curiosity. He couldn’t be there to stop her if she was never doing anything to begin with. Whenever he voiced his suspicions of her motives they sounded like as much of an excuse to spend time with her as her own thoughts did.
Remove all of the crime and the fighting and they were two people in suits, chasing each other over rooftops. Felicia was neither sentimental or naive enough to call that a friendship , nor did she want to, happy enough with her own isolation to dare seek out his type of companionship, but the spider was– a steady variable in her hectic life.
And that was something she wanted to push further.
“Not sure everything requires super strength. You could just work on showing a little restraint,” Her Spider points out, causing her to snort at how similarly their minds had drifted.
“And you know all about that, don’t you?” Felicia hums, dragging the tip of her pointed finger across to the center of his chest. “You hold back in fights. Hold back with Jameson–”
“Wouldn’t exactly win a defamation case.” He mumbles, swallowing as her finger slips up, finding the seam between his mask and his suit.
This is a terrible, terrible idea.
Awful. Truly.
This is the type of idea where she should step back, run for the hills and take cover until the smoke has cleared.
Yet.
She has to know how much of the hero standing in front of her is actually a man. She wants to know if he’s human enough to give into the same temptation that is licking the inside of her stomach or if he manages to stand above her on that moral high ground as well.
Felicia wants, no, needs to know that he has flaws too.
“You hold back when we play.” She whispers, leaning closer and carefully lifting his mask to reveal his mouth. He twitches, hands coming to touch her wrist. His hold on her isn’t as tight as she would suspect for someone so precious about this secret, foolishly trusting her– the idea causing further warmth to pool in the pit of her stomach. “Is there anything that you do?”
Her words brush his lips, only a breath between them until he closes the space.
Her mouth forms a victorious grin against his, nails digging into his arm as he licks into her mouth.
Sometimes the added risk was well worth the reward.
The first time Felicia hooked up with a guy it was raining outside.
Seventeen and dumb and in the back of some idiot’s car, the rain had pelted down on the roof like a bad sign from a deity she didn’t believe in.
It had been fun, but unremarkable. And what she’d realised was that, more than the act itself, she’d enjoyed watching someone else lose control beneath her. The power of it gave her more pleasure than the boy’s disjointed rhythm and unsure hands did.
That first time had set somewhat of a precedent. In the years since, her experiences, though objectively much better and more satisfying, have always been about chasing the high of that power trip.
Most of them, anyway. The only brief encounter that felt like it really meant something had been those few months she’d spent with Jade—until Felicia’s father had been incarcerated and she’d had to refocus, re-centre, realign herself with her goals and what was important.
All this to say that Felicia is still chasing the high of the power trip. It’s what she’s doing right here, right now, just minutes after kissing Spider-Man and then leaving him to stew in his own confusing, contradictory feelings.
The time that set the precedent, it had been raining outside.
And it’s raining now.
Felicia feels there’s something almost poetic about it.
The wind whistles through the cracks in the den as she sits on the edge of a creaky desk and waits.
She waits and waits for the inevitable.
She waits for her victory.
She’s never lost a challenge a day in her life and she’s not about to start now.
His footsteps are silent—almost silent—unlike the loud, jarring entrances he likes to make when he’s showing up to foil her plans. This time it seems he’d rather not be perceived, maybe even just by his own conscience.
She’d made sure to leave the shutter open for him. So when he comes into view, a red silhouette in the entrance of her hideaway, all she can do is grin triumphantly.
“Uh oh,” Felicia tilts her head a little, her voice taking on a melodic quality, “there's a spider in my hideout.”
The spider looks around briefly, settling his hands on his slim hips as he shakes his head. “Not very impressive.” He swipes a finger around the small warehouse. “Could do with a bit of paint. Better feng shui. You know? Though I assume this isn’t your main hideout. Probably isn’t even in your top five—”
Felicia remains quiet, watching as he walks in circles and talks in circles. She studies him, studies the slight edge to his tone that she’s never heard before. He’s playing a bad version of himself, wearing that cocksure attitude that usually comes so naturally to him—but beneath it is tension, anxiety, maybe, she’s not entirely sure without seeing his face. Though Felicia has always been good at reading bodies.
“—probably got at least fifty of these places scattered around the city,” he continues, “divide your assets. Don’t put all your faberge eggs in one basket, or however the saying goes. Most likely you…” he trails off, his feet coming to slow halt in front of one of her most prized recently acquired paintings.
Of all the moments she wishes she could see his expression beneath the mask, this one comes in first. She smiles a twisted smile, crossing one leg over the other.
“Oh, yeah, that’s one of my favourites. It’s an oil painting. A spider gets tangled in its own web,” Felicia says. “Reminded me of someone. Thought it was cute. You like it?”
She hears him take in a sharp breath, his shoulders hitching a little as he does. And then he’s clearing his throat, turning dismissively away from the painting.
“It’s no Van Gogh, but if you like it I love it,” he mutters with a shrug. He’s looking at her now, the eyes of his mask reflecting the flickering off the old buzzing lightbulb hanging from the peeling ceiling between them. “What do you want, Cat?”
Felicia quirks a brow. “You came to me.”
“You led me here,” he shoots back.
Felicia shrugs a shoulder, the corner of her lips pulling up into a triumphant smirk. “You followed.”
And she senses now more than ever that his mood is off. The quips are gone, levity has disappeared. If she focuses enough she can just about see a twitch in his jaw beneath the mask.
In her experience, people tend to get unnerved and angry when they can’t figure out if they’re the good guy or the bad guy. Felicia is a step ahead of those people, and knows there’s no such thing as either. Heroes and villains are myths. The sooner people realise that the better the world will be. A loving parent can be a renowned cat burglar. A career criminal can cherish her wife.
Spiders and cats can have dalliances.
She gets the feeling that the spider is still trapped in the belief that good guys exist, and he’s trying so very hard to be one of them. Which explains the frustration he feels that he’s standing in her lair, every urge in his body compelling him to fuck the ‘bad guy’.
She hops down off of her perch and walks slowly towards him, thrilled by the way he cowers just a little, just for a second. “What do you want here, Spider?”
“I came to tell you that what you did on the roof can’t happen again,” he says.
It occurs to her that he’d been the one to close the gap between their lips, but he seems to be so desperately hanging onto the shreds of his morality that she lets it go.
“I’m serious,” he says, despite the fact that she never implied the contrary. “This cat and mouse thing you’ve roped me into—” he gestures between them with a gloved hand— “it ends here.”
“Then leave,” Felicia says. As much as she loves the game, it’s never fun when the other player is constantly threatening to flip over the board.
The spider doesn’t move.
“Go on,” she steps closer to him, lowers her voice, “show me some restraint.” By the way his hands clench into fists by his sides she can tell that her double entendre doesn’t go unnoticed.
He rocks toward her a little, like some kind of magnetic pull. He lets out a breath that’s close to a whimper and Felicia has never seen someone torture themselves this much. It’s kind of fascinating to watch.
“It’s all right,” she says softly, reaching out and digging a fingernail beneath the hem of his mask, “consequences don’t exist, I promise. That’s a lie that regular parents tell their kids to stop them from having fun.”
And perhaps she convinces him because he lets her lift the mask this time, rolling it up and letting it rest in the notch beneath his nose. His chest is heaving with heavy breaths as she trails her fingers over his lips, his cheeks, his jaw, angular and clenched.
His mouth twitches subtly.
“I’m faster than you,” he reminds her, his voice low and breathy.
And while she knows it’s a mild threat—don’t lift the mask, don’t try any funny business—she chooses to deliberately misunderstand him, narrowing her eyes and glancing pointedly down his body.
“I hope not,” she quips.
Seconds pass that feel like minutes in the charged heat between them. The sounds of heavy, stuttered breathing echo and mingle with the pitter patter of rain beating down outside, ad-libbed by the constant dripping of water from the pipes inside.
And then his lips crash into hers.
It’s not like the one on the rooftop earlier. This one is messy, all tongue and teeth and bad coordination and it’s infinitely more passionate. His hands find her waist as he walks her backwards and Felicia grunts when she feels her back hit the wall, feels his body press up against hers.
She rakes her nails down his chest, hearing the subtle squeak of his suit and drawing a low desperate whine from the back of his throat as he slips his thigh between her legs.
A sound so desperate leaves her lips that it makes him jump, his lips jolting off of hers briefly as he pants, leaning back just a little and blinking as if just about going back down to earth.
She watches his throat move as he swallows, his body still pressed against hers, his desire evident.
Felicia huffs out a laugh, her thumb grazing his swollen bottom lip as she lifts a brow beneath her mask, challenging.
“That all you got, Spider?”
He unzips her suit.
(She lied about the consequences thing. They do exist. One just has to be quick enough to never get caught by them.
She hasn’t been caught yet.
But she’s getting a little tired of running.)
This is a familiar dance now.
The way her nails rake down his back as his teeth sink into the soft skin of her shoulder. His hands all over her body as if he can’t get enough of the feel of her skin, the way their lips press messily together, their teeth clash, their tongues lick and slide and taste.
Long gone are the days when he’d clung to his own sense of goodness, when he’d fought tooth and nail against every urge to give into temptation.
As much as Felicia enjoyed the chase, she enjoys this version of him better. Now that he’s finally unclutched his pearls he’s even more fun. The last couple of weeks have passed seamlessly by like a well-made montage of bad decisions. In her dens, on rooftops, in alleyways—anywhere that works.
Felicia had thought that the sex would cure her somehow of this mild obsession she’s finally admitted to herself that she has for him. That’s how it usually works—people are like trick boxes, once she finds out how to open them up she loses interest.
But the effect of the spider bite has been quite the opposite.
She’s more intrigued by him now than ever. She’d never really been concerned before, about finding out who he was beneath the mask. She was curious, but at the end of the day it was Spider-Man she was interested in, that was enough—she didn’t need to know about the likely unremarkably normal man wearing it.
But now, with her legs hooked around his waist and his bottom lip caught between her teeth as he, very thrillingly, very humanly, sweats through the edges of his mask—she can’t stop thinking about who he might be.
And it’s not just when she’s with him. Every time she walks in the street she thinks about it. On the subway, or in the grocery store, she considers every guy she sees, every man she brushes past, wonders if one of them might just be him.
It’s driving her just a little out of her mind.
Well, more than she suspects she already is.
Her nails dig into his shoulders like claws as he fucks her, panting beside her ear, sending electricity shooting down her spine right down to her toes.
In the thrill of the moment she makes an unexpected move in this game of chess.
Her hands slide up to his face, fingers running across the hem of his mask, rolled up just above his nose. She fiddles a little with the edges of the spandex, where his sweat has turned it from red to maroon.
His hips stutter.
Felicia smirks.
She won’t lift the mask. Of course she won’t. But some menacing part of her wants him to know that she could. She wants him to be self reflective about the power he’s affording her. About the fact that she could wait, and watch, for the moment his hips accelerate, and his grip on her tightens, and impending release robs him of all cognitive ability.
She could wait for that moment and pull the mask off. She could meet his face for the first time as its twisted in ecstasy.
But she doesn’t. And she won’t. His mask stays put and so does hers and she fills in the rest of his face with bits and pieces of knowledge she has and faces she’s seen before like Frankenstein’s monster—though, hopefully a hot version.
In one swift movement he collects both of her hands in one of his and stretches them up above her head, holding them there. Felicia laughs deliriously, every nerve ending tingling.
She’s close. And so is he. She can tell by the sound of his grunts, the speed of his hips. Her hand twitches in his grip, and he reads her body with impeccable accuracy, wriggling his free hand down between their sweaty bodies and applying pressure just where she needs it.
Her cry echoes off of the old walls of the hideout, bouncing off the steel of rusted pipes and the shutter. His lips find hers, swallowing the sound.
And she’s too caught up in bliss to notice that the hand that’d been holding her wrists has loosened, his fingers softly entwining with hers instead, holding on like a lifeline as she snaps, pleasure pulsing through her body.
She goes limp beneath him, heat prickling all over her skin as he keeps up his stuttered, messy movements for just a few more seconds before following her off the edge of the cliff.
Mouth open, body tense, hips flush against hers…for a brief moment, Felicia feels an almost overwhelming sense of affection for him.
She shakes it off just as quickly as it came.
She chuckles as she tries to catch her breath after he’s rolled off of her, landing with a thud on his back against the floor.
They don’t talk, just breathe. The silence is comfortable as it can be between two people who don’t really know each other.
“Is that new?”
Felicia hadn’t realised she’d let her eyes fall shut until the sound of his voice makes them flicker back open. She hums, turning her head lethargically to see what he’s looking at, snorting out a laugh when she sees him fixated on the marble bust standing on the floor beside him—the one she’d made off from a museum with just last night.
“Are you keeping an inventory for me now?”
“I’m serious.”
“What does it matter?”
He turns his face back towards her. “What does it…?” he trails off with a heavy sigh, sitting up quickly and pulling his mask back down all the way over his face. He reaches across the floor and snatches up his suit. “What am I doing?” he breathes—seemingly to no one but himself as he dresses.
Felicia follows his lead, albeit slower, pulling her suit back on and doing up the zip at the front, watching with intrigue as he paces up and down, hands on his hips.
“What’s the problem?” she asks, though she knows full well what his problem is, what his problem has always been.
“You’re still stealing.”
“Of course I’m still stealing. That’s what I do,” Felicia reminds him. “Did you think you could fuck me into a lifestyle change? I mean, you’re good but you’re not that good, Spider.”
“Cat —” his voice breaks off, his head tilting to the side a little in that way that dogs do when they’re hearing something strange. “Shit.”
Felicia frowns, takes in the way his body seems poised defensively in a way it wasn’t before. “What?”
“Does anyone else know about this place?”
“No. Just me…and you.”
“Well,” he says, “make that you, me, and the NYPD.”
Felicia sucks in a breath. “What?”
He tilts his head again, listens before elaborating, “I count six sets of boots. You’re about to be raided.”
“I don’t hear anything…”
“No, you wouldn’t,” he mutters.
“Fuck.” More of an inconvenience than anything else—this isn’t Felicia’s first time having a hideout raided and it most definitely won’t be the last. But she’s usually one step ahead and manages to clear out as best she can beforehand.
She’s been a little…distracted, lately.
She thinks fast, grabs whatever she can run with, tucks them beneath her belt, before pushing a large wooden bookcase out of the way of the wall behind them.
“What are you doing?” Spider-Man asks, watching as she clears the tunnel that leads to the sewer—her escape route.
The sound has finally caught up to her ears now—booted officers slinking around the perimeter of the hideout, waiting for the signal to enter. “Leaving,” she says. “Why? You gonna try and stop me or something?”
It’s a joke—she doesn’t expect him to do it. And perhaps that’s why for the first time since she met him, his actions genuinely surprise her when he reaches out and grabs her wrist, holding her in place.
She holds her breath, and so does he, it seems, because she can hear the sound of a crowbar jimmying the shutter and if Spider-Man doesn’t let go of her in the next ten seconds she’ll probably spend the rest of her life in a cell.
They stand there, locked in a stalemate, Felicia’s heart beating in her throat as she suddenly starts to reevaluate everything she thought she’d known about him.
The disjointed screech of the shutter fills the room as it begins to lift and Felicia realises she can’t fight or outsmart her way out of this one.
The only way out is mercy—and for once her fate is out of her hands.
“Spider…” she breathes.
His grip on her tightens briefly—
“NYPD!”
—and then he lets go.
“Fuck. Leave. Quickly.”
He doesn’t have to tell her twice, and she doesn’t have time to process the implications of it all before she turns and bolts through the entrance to the sewer.
In mere seconds she’s cloaked in darkness as the entrance is quickly sealed behind her.