It was far enough into the early hours of the morning that not a single soul saw Petra Parker crawl down the wall of the white stone mansion: only the drunks were still out, and they kept their heads to the ground or in their hands. She had received a tip off from a contact - now a friend, maybe? - about a robbery that was meant to take place tonight. She still wasn’t sure whether the information was reliable, but there was no harm in checking it out, right? Not like she was going to be sleeping either way.
Petra hung upside down, clinging to a web suspended to the top of a first floor windowsill. Her back was silhouetted by the moonlight, making the eyes of her suit glow with a dull bone-white as she swept her gaze carefully across the room. Her movements were calculated, but guarded, a tension in her body as she rotated herself to perch atop the windowsill in a crouch.
Inside, the room was arranged into a kind of private art gallery. Large paintings covered each wall and glass cases displayed various small sculptures. Small plaques next to each work of art provided information about their creator, the year of their conception. In large, bold letters, the purchase price of each item from auction or sale was included. Everything was covered in a thick layer of dust.
Petra snorted, shaking her head. “Vanderbilt didn’t even care enough about this enough to maintain it after he curated it - or paid somebody else to.” She sighed wistfully. “Any one of these could pay off my university loans in a heartbeat. Not to mention the money that I keep having to put into modifying my suits…”
“Who said crime doesn’t pay, huh?” A clear, musical voice rang out from the shadows like a bell, jolting Petra from her thoughts. She spun, nearly falling from the windowsill. Petra clenched her fists, anxiety rising in her stomach. She should have been able to sense another person in the room; the problems with her powers were getting worse. Petra only spoke aloud to herself like that when she knew that nobody could hear; that someone had, no matter how innocuous the things she was saying, was violating.
A tall, slender figure dripped out of the darkness, resolving into a young woman wearing tight black military gear, her long hair pulled back into a precise ponytail. A thick black bandana had been pulled from her face and now lay draped lazily across her neck. She moved with confidence; the dust was silent around her. She looked deadly. She looked - wait, was that-
“Felicia?” Petra cocked her head.
“Hi, Spiderman. Long time no see.”
“I thought - weren’t you abroad?”
“I came back, idiot. University only lasts three years, you know?”
Three years. Had it really been three years? The time felt like a blur. Petra remembered her own first year of university, the way she had begun to fall in love with her biochemistry lectures even as she had started to feel too anxious to attend them. The night she spent coming home from patrol exhausted at 3am, then staying up until the sunrise to finish an essay. The fury at herself for not being able to keep it together. The way her dysphoria had worsened, creeping up on her slowly, then all at once, like falling asleep to the same old nightmare you’ve had since you were a kid.
During the pandemic, studying with others had become studying alone, in her room. But when the world went back to normal, Petra couldn’t quite bring herself to go back with it. She woke up one morning to find that she had slept in her mask, and it was the first time in a long time she hadn’t hated herself looking in the mirror. So she dropped out of university, and poured herself into her real work, her work in the costume. Her studies became unstructured, experimental: researching herself, the way the spider had altered her neurochemistry, the way she had changed. But it couldn’t have been two whole years of that, could it?
Petra shook her head, snappping out of her reminiscing. She felt so slow today. “Okay, so maybe I lost track of time a little bit…”
Felicia’s eyes narrowed, and for a second there was a harsh expression on her face. “You can’t have missed me that much then, clearly.” Quick as anything her smile returned, wide and toothy like she was thinking about how best to devour Petra. A smile that said - I know more than you, or I’m pretending I do. Don’t you want to find out which it is?. “Well, that suits me just fine anyway - in fact, why don’t you do me one better and forget I exist for another few hours while I crack the safe that Ron here keeps behind his Da Vinci, okay?”
“You know I can’t let you do that, Felicia.” There was no hesitation in Petra’s voice. This game, she still knew how to play.
“And why would that be? You know, I’m not sure that you’re as much fun these days as you used to be, Peter.”
Petra flinched. It had been a long time since she heard that name - longer than she had realised. It had been about a year since she had begun to come out as trans to the people in her life: her aunt May, the rest of her family and the few friends she had kept from uni. She told them slowly, nervously, apologetically - she had thought that none of them would understand. But in the end, though there were some difficulties, they had adjusted more quickly than she had thought they would. Nobody had spoken her deadname in months. Realising that, her distress at hearing it again took on a subtler quality, but the anxiety in her stomach remained.
Felicia frowned, tilted her head. “What’s wrong, Spiderman? You’re acting a little weird right now… have you really forgotten about our history that easily?”
Petra and Felicia - Black Cat - had first met in a mansion much like this one, on Felicia’s first solo assignment without her father. Though Felicia was young, she was already calm and composed, in stark contrast to Petra, who crashed onto the scene wearing that first hoodie-and-sweatpants Spidersuit that she had sewn together only a few days prior, still maladjusted to her new strength and changing body. They had gravitated towards each other immediately, two abnormal teenagers trying to figure out how to survive. Although Petra had ended the encounter victorious, with the cat burglar strung up to the wall and the police phoned, it was Felicia who got what she really wanted. Upon returning home, Petra had found a crumpled-up note stuffed under the back of her mask. There was no name writen on it; only a phone number, and three small ’x’s. Felicia picked up on the second ring. What - you didn’t think a girl like me was going to sit around and wait for the police to come, did you?. On the phone Petra spoke with frustration, but secretly she was relieved. Maybe she hadn’t tied the other girl up quite as tightly as she could have. Relunctantly and excitedly, Petra agreed to coffee out of costume that weekend.
She arrived at the coffee shop feeling anxious and exposed. But Petra was still figuring out how to be a superhero while navigating her studies. In truth, she had no idea how to manage it. She felt like she was drowning. And so, against her better judgement, she had decided that she would take any lifeline handed to her - even when it was a criminal holding the other end. It wasn’t anything to do with the butterflies she had felt when seeing Felicia for the first time - of course not. But anyone would admit that Felicia was… well, she was amazing. She aced her exams like it was an afterthought, bragged about the bruises she had picked up during the seemingly endless martial arts training she did in the evenings, and still found time to have coffee with Petra on the weekends. To Petra, who was caught in a perpetual feeling of her life falling apart, it was magical.
But for Felicia it quickly became stifling. Her life, too, felt like it was balancing on a knife’s edge. Perfect student, perfect child. Perfect criminal. She had no friends at school; when she had tried to bring some home with her as a child, her father had scared them half to death, screaming at them until they fled the house, sobbing. And now that she had failed her first solo mission, her father was even more furious at her than he had been then. He knew that there was something she wouldn’t tell him, and he would stop at nothing to get it out of her. But what could she say - that she was hanging out with Spiderman, the very superhero that had stopped her that day? He would murder the both of them - her figuratively, Peter literally. Initially, though, it was worth it for a chance to figure out the superhero that had beaten her. All that training, and he had foiled her with ease. She wanted to figure him out. But while she enjoyed helping him, teasing him, it quickly became clear that he didn’t even have himself figured out. He was just a kid. And all she could do was watch as he turned from the rival she had always craved into an impressionable boy seeking advice on how to exist. Peter idealised her, but in his puppy-dog affection he missed all the hints that she, too, needed support. Really, she should have known from the moment that he introduced himself that it was never going to go how she wanted. ‘Peter Parker’ - where’s the danger in that name?
It was only when they were both under the mask that she felt truly seen by Peter. Only when she was acting as the Black Cat would Peter criticise her, challenge her actions, her morals. Only then would he fight her. So she begun to pull away from their coffee dates, preferring to meet him on the streets. When she did, he was angrier. More hurt. More dedicated to stopping her crimes. Finally, she thought, he was starting to see her. She loved it. He would be fine on his own, she reasoned: he was a good kid. Wasn’t it okay to think about what she needed, once in a while? She wasn’t quite sure why she never told him that she was travelling to the USA for university. Maybe it was that, by that point, they never saw each other out of their costumes, and they weren’t really on speaking terms when wearing them. Or maybe it was that she wanted to hold onto him, didn’t want to admit that she would lose him. She thought he would move on, that he would go to university himself, make lots of friends. He was a good kid, after all.
Whatever the reason, on the day that Petra found out, Felicia was already halfway across the world. Petra cried for hours. She called the number that Felicia had given her on that first day, only to find it disconnected. She knew that something had changed between them, but she felt that she had had no opportunities to make it better. She had been waiting for the chance to ask Felicia directly what was wrong; a chance that now would never come. Petra was heartbroken, but she knew one thing for sure. She would never let anybody in like that again.
And now, Felicia was finally back. Three years. But God - did it have to be right now?
“Spiderman?” Felicia repeated. “You seem off… Sure you didn’t pick up some brain damage somewhere since we last spoke?” Her grin faltered. “Is everything okay?” Her flickering voice betrayed a genuine concern for Petra, just for a moment.
But Petra was panicking. Her voice felt dry in her throat. Spiderman. Spider man. That was her! Hah.
“I’m fine. Just- just surprised to see you again.”
Felicia snorted. “Well, come on, you’ll have to do a little bit more than stand there gawking if you want to impress me. I am here to rob a poor innocent multi-millionaire, after all. Plus, I’m eager to find out how we’ve both changed. Aren’t you, little spider.”
In that moment, impressing Felicia was the farthest thing from Petra’s mind. Beneath her mask, Petra’s head was swimming. She knew that the longer a fight with Felicia dragged on, the more likely she’d be to notice how far she really was from 100%. Petra sighed. It was better to end this quickly.
Without warning, webs shot from Petra’s wrists straight towards Felicia’s face. Cat-like, Felicia sprang from the ground and twisted, webs tracing a path just below her head, and landed back on the ground in a crouch, grin wide on her face. But Petra was already on the move, firing again on either side of Felicia and pulling herself along the ground feet-first at a violent speed towards Felicia. At the last moment, Petra curled in and sprang up, legs outstretched in front of her, boots aimed directly at Felicia’s centre of mass. But Felicia had already flipped, twisting over and above Petra, who continued on her trajectory below the woman. Too slow. Felicia’s fingers grazed along the back of Petra’s mask; soft, almost tender. And then, her trap snapped shut as her grip hardened, elbow wrapping around Petra’s throat as Petra’s momentum continued to pull the two of them through the air, further increasing the pressure against her neck. Felicia’s grasp adjusted expertly, gaining ground, so that by the time they had fallen to the ground and skidded to a stop there was an elbow firmly around Petra’s throat and two knees digging tightly into her hips. Petra gasped, bucking wildly, but Felicia held on tightly, muscles toned by years of training. After a few moments, Petra’s gasps grew quieter and turned to coughs. She stopped struggling.
Concerned, Felicia loosened her grip, eyes narrowing in surprise. She had never been able to overpower Spiderman like this; she had always won their previous encounters through tricks or traps - of which she had many, set up and waiting. He couldn’t be this rusty - right?
“Peter, what the fuck is wrong with you today? You’re barely even trying.”
Petra snarled, pulling Felicia’s arms roughly from around her neck and sprang away, before collapsing in a heap against one of the ornate stone pillars in the centre of the room. She wretched, doubling over. Her vision was swimming.
“If you have to know,” she coughed, “I’m still trying to figure out the dosage on the hormones I’m taking. It’s been fucking with my powers like crazy.”
“What do you mean, the hormones that you’re taking? What are you-” As Felicia spoke, she noticed the tight fabric of Petra’s suit. The way it clung to her hips and waist in a way it hadn’t before. The curve of her chest, rising in and out with Petra’s laboured breathing. “Oh.”
Petra looked back at her, tense like a wound guitar string ready to snap. “Oh,” she agreed.
Felicia exhaled, walking slowly over to Petra and lowering herself to the ground shoulder to shoulder with her.
“Well, how much are you taking?
“Right now? Well, it’s not that simple. If you had to convert it to a normal oestrogen treatment, it would be about 15 times the recommended dose, but that’s not-”
Felicia turned and punched Petra on the shoulder, hard. “What the fuck do you mean, 15 times the recommended dose!”
“-the whole story, okay!” Embarrassed, Petra began to ramble. Just like Felicia had known she would. “Look, I got fed up of waiting for something to happen, alright? It’s not my fault my stupid body won’t listen when I try gentle parenting. I was on a normal dose of E for months, nothing was happening, so I started looking into it. It turns out I’m producing way more testosterone than I should be. So I got really freaked out, like, am I just roided out all the time, is that why I’m so strong?”
As she spoke, Petra was gesturing with her hands, moving them back and forth in the moonlight. It was captivating.
“But it’s way more complex than that, actually. My adrenaline levels are also off the charts, all the catecholamines actually. Kind of explains why I’m in overdrive all the time, right? Anyway, it turns out testosterone doesn’t have even have much to do it, it’s mainly just a side effect of the other upregulations. Weirdly validating to find that out. But the point is that it’s all connected in weird ways, so you can’t just flood the system with oestrogen like you normally can and expect the spider architecture to understand what’s going on.”
Petra took a breath. “So I started experimenting with different compounds, figuring out what worked and what didn’t. Right now I’m on a kind of… proteins cocktail, I guess? That was meant to teach my body to be okay with the oestrogen. It works, but it’s not perfect, so I’m finally synthesising the E but I have all of these side effects, I’m dizzy all the time and my spider senses aren’t working properly and, yeah, it’s… a lot.”
Felicia waited patiently for Petra to finish speaking before opening her mouth. “Firstly,” she said, calmly, “you know I have to tell you off for complaining to me about how hard it is not to have your poor little powers working properly, don’t you?” Petra glared at Felicia. “But secondly… yeah, that does sound tough. I had been wondering for a while if your hormone regulation was all fucked up, given your reflexes and the stuff you can do, but I hadn’t considered how it would interact with… yeah. But still, you know what you’re doing is mad scientist levels of irresponsible, right? I mean, for fucks sake, Parker, you’re synthesising this stuff yourself and trialling it on yourself? Please tell me you’re at least injecting a few mice with this stuff to see what happens before you shove it straight into your own body.”
“I know, I know I should be more careful. I’m just… You don’t know what it was like, Felicia, I needed something to change. I couldn’t stand looking at myself in the mirror every day and seeing the same person staring back at me. I needed to do something about it.”
Felicia sighed, appraising Petra. “Well, look, it’s definitely doing something now. I mean, other than making you fight like a baby. You look…” Felicia looked at the shapes of Petra’s body under the suit, the way she had changed since the last time the two women had laid eyes on each other. Petra had grown into herself, certainly. She was no longer a teenager. But she also looked… fuller, more like herself. “You look different. I like it.” There was a pause. Felicia’s cheeks went ever-so-slightly red. “I mean, not that I can see much under your stupid costume, anyway.”
The mask of a superhero is worn for many reasons. To prevent persecution, to protect their identities and to stop harm from coming to those that they love. But right now, Petra’s mask had only one purpose - to stop the Black Cat from seeing the blush lighting up her own cheeks, which would easily put Felicia’s to shame.
“R-Right. Thanks.”
The two women sat shoulder-to-shoulder on the ground for a few moments in the silence; charged, but not uncomfortable. Then Felicia began to speak.
“Look, I’ll leave the place like I found it this time, okay? To be honest, I was only robbing it cause I hoped you might still be in town. But it’s no fun when you can’t fight back.” Felicia continued, undaunted by the stare that Petra gave her under the mask. “Plus, did you notice that the alarms haven’t gone off yet? Some guy sold me a zero-day for the Vanderbilt’s security systems and it works like a charm, I’ve been tinkering with it since I got back. I modified it to auto-erase after a couple of hours, they won’t even notice anything was wrong.”
Petra shook her head, bemused. “You could do so much good if you weren’t hell-bent on robbing people, you know?”
“Hey, I tried the academic life for the last three years. I liked it, I learnt a lot, solved a lot of fun problems. But it’s just… cerebral. And slow. And boring. The more I learn, the more I want to put it into action. Find me a job that lets me do that, and we can talk.”
“You could help me, you know? Join the good guys for once?”
“Hah! And what’s the pay on being your little sidekick? You got a place of your own yet, Peter, or are you still slumming it with Aunt May? Maybe when you-” Felicia realised what she had just said. “Wait, fuck, sorry, I didn’t mean to…” Felicia’s hands balled into fists. She was so careless sometimes. She had just been trying to cheer up a friend. “Um… So, what should I be calling you these days?”
“Petra.” Petra swallowed, tense. It’s fine if she hates it, it’s fine if she hates it, it’s-
“Huh, I like it! Mysterious” A slight smile flicered across Felcia’s lips. Then her mouth tightened, serious for a second. “I really like it, actually.” She rolled her eyes. “Peter was a shit name anyway. Didn’t suit you at all.” Petra leaned back against the pillar, relaxing a little. Felicia noticed, unclenched her hands. Perhaps she hadn’t fucked everything up forever after all. “Anyway, call me when you can actually pay me, Petra, and we’ll talk. For now, I’ll keep on living my life of luxury, thank you very much. Plus, you won’t be complaining when I foot the bill for our coffees like always.”
Petra knew Felicia well enough to see her jab as what it was: an olive branch, extended from behind the veil of plausible deniability that Felicia wore always, like a winter coat. She took it gratefully.
“Yeah, yeah. We’re not kids anymore, Felicia. I know now that if I accept another free coffee from you you won’t shut up for a week. Maybe I’ll buy you one instead next time?”
Felicia just grinned, jumping up lithely and dusting herself off. She started walking towards the open window. “Looking forward to it. Anyway, I should be going… I’m late for a dinner date with a very lovely man who’s going to give me the keys to a very expensive car - though he doesn’t know it yet.” Petra started to stand up too, but she was slow, still weak from the fight. And Felicia wasn’t slowing down for a hug.”
“And Petra? Be careful, okay? Next time it might be somebody who really wants to hurt you. It’s okay to take some time to become who you’re meant to be, you know? The city can handle itself for a little while. And for fuck’s sake, please figure out how to be safer with your hormone trials before you kill yourself.”
Petra finished standing up, groaning. “Hey, wait, I don’t have your number anymore!”
Felicia winked. “Yes you do.” She twisted, head over heels, and vaulted smoothly out of the window and into the night.
Petra’s eyes rolled. “Try doing that from a 10th floor window and then I’ll really be impressed,” she muttered. “What a show off.” Petra reached her hand up, lifting the stretchy fabric of her mask and feeling for something underneath. Sure enough, there it was. A small, crumpled, paper note, with a telephone number and three kisses.
Petra scoffed. How the fuck had Felicia managed to pull the same trick on her twice? She really needed to sort herself out if she was still falling for this bullshit.
A few hours later, on a rooftop overlooking the city, a phone began to ring.
“Petra! You got my present?”
“You know, the note was enough of a callback - you didn’t need to call the police on me, too,” Petra huffed. “I barely made it out without being noticed.” Her voice sounded different now, smoother, in the way that rocks are smoothed by the beating of the waves. It was nice.
“Now now, Petra, where would be the fun in that?” Felicia looked down at the streets below and grinned. “Anyway, coffee this Saturday at 11? The usual spot?”
“If you’re lucky,” Petra grumbled.
Felicia’s smile danced in the fluorescent lights as she hung up the phone. She had been nervous about coming back to London after so long away, about coming back to the pressure of her family trying to constrain her. The vacuum that her father’s death had left, and the schemes to fill it again. But you know what? maybe it wouldn’t be so bad after all. In fact, Felicia, mused, it was possible that she had been so disappointed by Peter when they were younger because she could see straight through him. But Petra? Well, maybe Spiderwoman had finally grown a spine.
Firstly - yes, I made Petra (and Felicia) British. It doesn’t change much about the story, but I just know more about the British school and University system. Inevitably, I would have gotten something (or many things) wrong if I had made them American. If you’re American and it’s jarring, oops! Sorry.
Secondly, it’s probably best to think of my Felicia (and Petra for that matter) as pretty loosely adapted from the source material. I’d like to read some Felicia comics (let me know if people have recommendations!) but currently the extent of my knowledge is the Black Cat Wikipedia page. That said, I like coming up with new characters and motivations and Black Cat was really just an existing framework to fit those into. It’s not really meant to be a faithful take on the character.
Okay, that’s all. I hope you enjoyed my little foray into the Petraparkerverse. I hadn’t written fanfic in a looong long time, but Petra gave me brain worms big time and I couldn’t help it!! Always happy to take feedback, and please let me know if you read this and enjoyed it:)