Chapter Text
“Hey Mom, Dad,” Morgan begins. They’ve all set up camp in the kitchen to do work together—stocks and product development versus multiplying and dividing polynomials, but still, work—and Morgan has some suspicions she needs confirming from two people she knows have an absurd amount of business resources and know-how. “How do you guys feel about Wilson Fisk?”
Her dad pushes his reading glasses—his use of which Morgan has been sworn to secrecy about—up his nose as he squints at some report or another. “He’s definitely a criminal, but it’s hard to pin anything on him. He’s into organized crime, probably. Not my area of expertise.”
Her mom raises a brow. “I don’t know how you would know that,” she muses, shooting a quick glare to her dad, who does an admirable job pretending like he hasn’t done some probably-illegal research, “but I am inclined to agree. He does lots of philanthropy work, but he’s never left a particularly warm impression on me.”
“That’s because he’s a crook,” her dad offers helpfully.
Her mom swats him on the arm, but her eyes are kind, if a bit curious, when they turn back to her. “Why do you care?”
Morgan shrugs, circling her answer for a problem. “I’ve been tracking Black Cat, and it seems like he might be a viable target.” Instead of copying down the next equation from the textbook, she starts on a list of names to back her next point up. “Some of her victims have already been under public scrutiny, but other ones are kind of off the radar. No matter what, people are usually able to dig up something corrupt about them to explain why she’d go after them.”
“Hasn’t Peter met her a few times?” her dad asks, leaning in to see what she’s writing.
Morgan shrugs, not wanting to confirm or deny. “I think so? I’m not sure, honestly. He runs into a lot of people on patrol—I lose track.” If Peter were there, he’d be very, very irritated at her feigned ignorance, and that makes Morgan feel all warm and fuzzy inside, so she continues. “But basically, I think it’d be fun to predict where she’ll go next. Fisk is in her price range, so as long as he’s doing something to warrant getting robbed—” She trails off, and her parents look intrigued.
“Should I be doing something about that whole mess?” her dad wonders aloud, and Morgan’s stomach swoops because no—no. She’s thought about robbing SI to avert suspicion in the past, actually. If she tries, she can outperform her dad here and there, but he’s very smart and has been in the game a lot longer than her. Black Cat does not need Iron Man—even retired—keeping an eye on her, and Morgan prefers to not get her ass handed to her, which will be inevitable if her parents ever find out about her little hobby.
Morgan laughs and hopes it doesn’t sound too nervous. “I mean, only if you want to be lame. She’s not so much a criminal as a vigilante, you know, and it’s not like she’s attacking people.”
(The numerous security guards she’s tranquilized probably wouldn’t agree with that, but that’s neither here nor there.)
Her dad opens her mouth, and Morgan continues to offer her two cents. “And rich people don’t count. We’re, like, evil mostly.”
Her mom raises a brow. “Your dad is a retired superhero.”
“And a former war profiteer. So are you, by the way. Black Cat has a point about all of this,” Morgan insists. The whole warmongering thing is a touchy subject, but her parents haven’t shied away from telling her the details of their past; if they remember its impact, Morgan should too. “You should let her do her thing. You’re reformed, now, anyway, so she shouldn’t target you. It’s nothing you guys need to worry about.”
A pause, and then Morgan’s mom hums, tucking a lock of silver-streaked ginger hair behind her ear. “I do like it when things aren’t our problem.”
Her dad nods, going back to his paperwork, and Morgan thinks that’s the end of it, except—“You know, honey, if you think she’s hot, you can just say it.”
Update: Morgan would take having her ass handed her over dealing with this.
“I do not!” she shouts, but her parents just side-eye each other and giggle like kids on the playground.
“Whatever you say,” her dad drawls, unswayed, and while Morgan is going to lose her fucking mind, more importantly, she promises herself that Riri is never going to find out about this conversation.
//
After getting her parents’ input, Morgan does her research, looks into police records and even some stuff from the FBI, and starts finding a trail of laced drugs, fucked-up debt collection, and in some cases, bodies. At the time, it seems exciting, but she knows MJ and Peter won’t approve and censors her reasoning for going after him. A little. A bit.
“I’m going to rob Wilson Fisk for having shitty business policies,” Morgan tells them, staring at her phone so she can’t crack under the pressure of eye contact, though in all fairness, Fisk does exploit his employees, too.
“What’s the plan?” MJ responds.
“Who the fuck is Wilson Fisk?” Peter asks.
Morgan spares the energy to think yeah, that’s on-brand, and then proceeds to seriously downplay the severity of Fisk’s crimes.
In her defense—and really, she shouldn’t be blamed for her actions because it runs in the family—she’s a genius, but she’s also really stupid. And by that, she means while she makes it to the hall after robbing Fisk’s absurdly large safe, she isn’t quite expecting the amount of security that greets her, armed to the teeth and tragically unfriendly-looking.
“Hey guys,” she tries, waving her inconveniently slow-to-activate claws, and just before something connects with the back of her head, she muses—not for the first time and, given her track record, certainly not the last—wow, she’s fucked.
//
Morgan wakes up bound with rope to a chair which, frankly, is lacking in style and creativity.
“If I’m coming up with gorgeously designed cat suits, you’d think someone could put in the same level of effort,” she mumbles, mostly to herself, as she tries to make sense of her pounding head and the harsh white light coming from overhead. She scans the room she’s in and finds it rather bare—another cliche, and honestly, is she the only one even trying—save for her chair and the cameras in the corners of the ceiling.
The back of her head feels wet and sticky and itchy because of it, and with a supremely displeased scrunch of her nose, Morgan realizes that not only is she incapable of scratching it, her wig’s probably been ruined with blood.
“Oh, fuck this,” she announces to no one in particular.
Should she have expected a little more from who she’s pretty sure is a mob boss? Yeah. Is this still annoying? Double yeah.
“Come on,” she yells, “can I at least get some company? Know who’s taken the liberty of tying me to a chair?”
She thinks that’s fair, and though it takes a couple more minutes of shouting—“This is boring!” or “You fuckers are so unoriginal,” to name a few of the things she comes up with—she’s eventually rewarded with the sound of approaching footsteps, which reminds her—
“Activate alert 17-A,” she mumbles, barely audible even to herself.
She’s, like, eighty percent sure she’ll be able to get out of this on her own—she’s been giving herself a wrist cramp by using her claws to slowly saw through the rope—but a little backup never hurt anybody.
(And if it’d be kind of cool to kick ass with her older brother, that’s a thought that is never leaving Morgan’s head.)
The footsteps come to a head, and the door slides open to reveal a genuinely enormous man.
Morgan’s seen plenty of pictures of Wilson Fisk in her research, but despite seeing him dwarf everyone he stands next to, she wasn’t prepared for his full presence, solid, a wall of muscle and man and beady eyes that are burning as they stare at her.
When she pushes down the fear from the pesky things called her survival instincts, Morgan’s kind of flattered she pissed him off that much, honestly.
“So, Black Cat, is it?” he says, and his voice is gravelly, though still more composed than the irritation simmering in the hard lines of his face.
“You got it,” she admits, not seeing the merit in lying. The whole point of her costume design was to make herself recognizable, anyway. “Now, I realize there might be some hard feelings about that little episode back there, but I want to assure you, I only tried to rob you because you’re a huge dick.”
Fisk does not appear to be a happy man in the first place, but his thin lips manage to press themselves into an even more unimpressed line than before. “Chatty,” he rumbles.
“Ominous,” Morgan comments in turn. “Believe me, you can’t be better at the silent treatment than my m—” Wait, wait, that’s incriminating. She clears her throat. “Than someone I know, so it’d probably be better to just give up now.”
He walks closer, his footsteps deliberate and somehow thunderous in their stoic, unyielding trek to stand closer to her—to tower above her, more accurately.
Morgan’s not that tall regardless—5’5” isn’t bad, but it’s nothing to write home about—but she especially resents having to look up at her kidnapper when she has rope burns and a wrist cramp. His jaw clenches, and something is going on behind his eyes that Morgan isn’t privy to and isn’t sure she wants to be privy to. She finds that she has much more courage when she isn’t intimately aware of how much her captor wants to physically harm her, funnily enough.
“I recognize this intimidation tactic,” she begins, “and it’s not going to work because I don’t want it to. Mind over matter and all that.”
“Aren’t cats supposed to be stealthy?” he hums in that same low, foreboding tone.
Morgan rolls her eyes, though she realizes the action isn’t visible behind her helmet. “Aren’t mob bosses supposed to be better at scaring people?”
Fisk cracks his knuckles, chuckling like something straight out of a movie. Morgan’s halfway through forming an insult about overdone tropes when he speaks again. “And what’s given you the idea that I’m up to anything like that? I’m just a businessman, Cat. If you were just a little less involved in my private matters, I think we could come to an agreement.”
He leans in, his face inches away from Morgan’s and oddly open after his offer for someone she can see weighing the pros and cons of beating the shit out of her.
She hums. “First of all, I think we both know that mob bosses and businessmen have about the same levels of integrity.” Yeah, her dad typically uses that lack of discipline to find out classified information and fuck with the government these days, but she knows how these things go. “Second of all—” She leans back as much as she can in her chair, and when she comes forward, she uses the extra momentum to put more force behind the spit she aims at Fisk’s face. “—like fuck would I ever stoop to working with someone like you. You suck. Remember what I just said about robbing you? I thought guys like you were supposed to have better memor—”
His fist cracks across her cheek hard, knuckles splitting open the skin there, and Morgan cries out. The chair rocks with the force of the blow, making her scared, for a moment, that it’s going to fall over, but it just skitters a few inches to the side, along with her.
“How disappointing,” Fisk says. “I was hoping a woman as smart as you obviously are would have more sense.”
Morgan hates that she’s a little flattered she has the skill to convince someone out to kill her she’s a woman, not a girl, but she makes herself focus.
“Yeah, because it makes so much sense to work with people who have the means to kidnap you. Shut up, dude. I’m not buying what you’re selling.” The snark rolls off her tongue, now with a touch of real irritation from the pain she was just put through. There’s a moment and only one moment—because Morgan has a personal policy against these things—where she reminds herself of her dad because of it, but she shoves off the thought, especially because her aunts, uncles, mom, brother, and sister-in-law would all crow with delight to see her admit it. “Why don’t you let me go now, before this has to get messy?”
Fisk laughs, and the sound is grating, the amusement of a man who doesn’t believe he’ll lose. “Your hands are bound, Cat, literally. Ever since you first appeared to terrorize my city, I’ve kept tabs on what information about you has been available. You may be smart, but you’re not enhanced. The ball is entirely in my park, but I appreciate you trying to play. It’s entertaining.”
(“Girls just don’t get this kind of thing.”
“The diamond’s an investment—”
“What, did I offend you?”)
Well, it just fucking figures that the reason for her starting all this would come back around. Morgan’s skin crawls with the dismissive, pleased way he’s looking at her, as if she’s a problem already settled, and she promises herself that she will personally be clawing his smarmy smirk right off his face.
“I’m sure you’ll be very entertained when you have to go to the hospital for facial reconstruction surgery,” Morgan agrees, ice crept into her tone. Her previous good humor is rapidly evaporating, leaving behind a stony rage that’s not at all unfamiliar.
More than anything else, Morgan hates being underestimated, so now she’s obligated to prove Fisk wrong.
“Silence, Cat,” he orders, holding up a hand, and Morgan bristles in her chair. If she was the literal version of her namesake, all her hair would be puffed up in offense.
“Did you just fucking command me—”
“I’m not interested in empty threats. Now, what I’d like to know is who you are under that helmet. It’s one thing to pin you like this, but I’m not going to kill you this time—not when you have so much potential and several of your heists have been . . . disadvantageous for people I’ve had falling outs with.” He stares at her, and it occurs to Morgan that he genuinely thinks she’ll cave.
At the mere thought, she tosses her head back and cackles, her anger temporarily overpowered by the sheer hilarity of that assumption. “Oh, fat chance. I’ve never said anything I didn’t want to in my life, and I’m not about to start now.”
Fisk’s expression, then, turns sourer again, less assured, even as he begins to slide his sleeves up and clench his fists. “Don’t make this more difficult than it needs to be, Cat. You’re a hard woman to unmask, true, but all technology caves to force eventually.”
Morgan thinks of several examples off the top of her head of situations where that’s not true—Chinese finger traps and oobleck, to name a few—but she keeps those to herself in favor of rolling her eyes. The second time, she makes sure the action, even unseen, comes through in her voice. “Yeah, no shit it’s hard to get this thing off me. It has touch ID, among other things, dickwad. Who do you think I am? An idiot?”
Morgan’s kind of thinking that she’s an idiot right now, to be perfectly honest, but that’s not the point.
A muscle in Fisk’s jaw twitches, and Morgan has to say, she’s really enjoying pushing this dude to the brink. He’s used to sly smiles and people trying to manipulate their way into gaining the upper hand, not pure obnoxiousness, which Morgan can provide in spades—thank you Peter and her dad for teaching her how.
“I think you are testing my patience,” he replies, voice roughening, and Morgan’s grin is wicked as it carves into her face, sharp as daggers at its corners and winking in the fluorescents like the finest of silver.
“Yeah? That’s a shame. You should try and show me why that could be a problem,” she challenges, and as Fisk cracks his neck, she lets one claw hover centimeters over the last threads of rope keeping her restrained.
One meaty fist rises for a crushing blow, and Morgan slashes her hand across his lips.
He stumbles back, howling, and she pounces, propelling herself forward with claws out and ready for their prey. She scratches across his cheek and forehead when he gets too close, grabs him by his tie when he stumbles in her direction in an attempt to land a blow. The blood dripping into his eyes screws with his trajectory, and she catches him across the chest before prepping a tranq dart.
Morgan’s honestly not a very violent person—frankly, she’d much prefer to watch someone burn at a distance, which is definitely evidence that Pepper Potts, CEO of Stark Industries, is her mother—but when she’s pushed, she can find herself taking a lot of joy in absolutely annihilating someone.
Exhibit A, using over a decade’s worth of combat training from her family and the equivalent of ten hand-held knives to make Wilson Fisk bleed.
“Don’t fucking tell me what to do,” she snarls, and when she’s sure he’s in too much pain to substantially fight back, she grabs him by the lapels of his shirt. “Where’d you put my loot?”
“My men will kill you,” he spits with no small amount of blood dribbling down his face. “They’ve been instructed to check in after ten minutes of our conversation.”
Morgan’s eyes narrow, and she presses her fingers together and holds them to Wilson’s throat to create what is essentially one very long, sharp blade. “And? Maybe I’ll kill you to make it even,” she hums, and a sliver of dangerous glee has leaked into her voice. She’s most likely bluffing, but Fisk doesn’t know she’s a sixteen-year-old girl whose parents would be very mad if she caught a murder charge. She is the thief that’s gleaned a hundred million from New York’s wealthiest, that has a highly weaponized suit with generally unknown capabilities at her disposal, that escaped Fisks’s clutches with minimal effort and has his blood dripping from her claws. “Where is my loot?”
Morgan is way too close to an old rich dude that’s not her dad for comfort, and he stares at her, his breath hot and puffing up at her face, crimson splotches spreading across the stark white of his button-down, a glare full of nothing but deep-seated hate emanating from his pig-like eyes.
Then, he caves. “Two halls to the right and in the first door on the left, but you’re dead if you go for it,” he growls.
“Don’t get involved with my business again if you’d like to keep your assets,” she hums back, voice gone eerily level and downright glacial, and then she sticks the tranquilizer in his neck.
//
When she stands up, her wig is bunched awkwardly under her helmet and already stained with blood besides, and she discards it on Fisk’s shoes before she leaves the room.
//
To what she feels is her credit, Morgan gets to the room with her haul fairly easily, and that’s mostly because she both takes the ceiling and tranquilizes anyone who gets in her way. When she enters the room, however, she encounters some issues. Namely, the gunmen in her way.
“Fuck,” she says eloquently.
A second, maybe two, passes, and Morgan is running different outcomes in her head, hoping against hope that just maybe she’s not going to, like, straight-up die.
Then the eyes on her shift just to the side, and their owners match the sentiment she expressed a moment ago: “Oh, shit,” the man closest to her mumbles.
Morgan finds out why a second later when a red and blue shape barrels past her and throws him into a wall, quickly followed by the three other men in the room, and sticks them there with a series of well-placed webs.
Peter turns toward her, and his voice is less-than-pleased filtering from the mask covering his narrow-eyed, gritted-jaw face. “Hey, Black Cat,” her brother seethes, and Morgan tries to play it cool.
She waves, skipping forward to collect the duffel bag and backpack left against the back wall. “I was wondering when you were going to show up,” she chirps. “If you don’t mind, I’m just going to collect my things so we can get go—”
“Why the fuck did I have to find you with four guns pointed at you?”
“You know, I’ve been told I can be a little irritating from time to time, but aside of that, I can’t say.”
“You said he was a businessman.”
“First of all, we should probably start heading out before more of his men find us. Second of all, he is! He’s just not super, like, ethical about it, and he sells drugs along with stocks. No biggie!”
Morgan is of the opinion that she’s being very diplomatic about things; she hasn’t even mentioned the murders Fisk is probably responsible for, but even with his mask, Morgan can feel Peter’s eyes bugging out of his head.
“Drugs?” he hisses as they run for the door. “You robbed the mafia?”
“Just a little?” she defends herself. “In the scheme of things, I didn’t take that much because I’m limited to what I can carry. Fisk just got all bent out of shape about it. Oh—head’s up.”
A man rounds the corner of the hall they’re charging down—Morgan doesn’t really know where she’s going, but that’s why she has Peter—and when Peter swerves to the side to make room for her, she automatically flings a tranquilizer the man’s way. His knees buckle, and his jaw makes a satisfyingly solid thunk when it hits the ground.
(Black Cat’s never been in a fight before. It’s not quite her style, blood and bodies slumping to the ground in place of a velvet tread and shadowed handiwork, but God, it feels great to let loose.)
“Is that what I looked like when you did that to me?”
“I think you need to get over that.”
“Just so you know, I’m going to tell MJ everything about this.”
“Jerk—fuck you too.”
“You deserve this one, sorry,” Peter replies, his voice not at all apologetic. “Also, you really shouldn’t cuss.”
“Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
“I’m going to let them shoot you.”
Morgan ducks behind Peter as he says as much, letting him web up another gunman. “Where’s the window you came through?”
“How do you know I came in through a window?”
Morgan rolls her eyes. “What kind of lame-ass superhero takes the front door?”
“Touché. It’s just a few more halls over. The concrete in this place threw off your tracker, but I got in and followed the sounds of you beating Fisk’s ass.”
“You know, I’ve been told that people really shouldn’t cuss.”
“I am breaking my moral code to aid and abet a criminal, and this is the thanks I get.”
In her stomach, Morgan feels a twinge of guilt. For obvious reasons, she appreciates having Peter come, but she genuinely does feel bad about what she’s asked of him. Spider-Man doesn’t need a man like Wilson Fisk on his back, and Morgan also knows he tries to follow the law, which she is inarguably on the wrong side of.
She bares her claws menacingly at a guard with his shaking hands up, who drops his gun and runs at the sight, and then clears her throat. “Well, thank you for coming for me. And for the suit updates. I would’ve been screwed without your help, and—uh—” She has to say it. A bit of gratitude isn’t going to cut it here, and with effort, she gives him an extra inch or two. “—this is fun. So, you know, I’m glad you’re here.”
Peter doesn’t say anything for a moment, barrelling towards one of their opponents and tossing him over his shoulder and into a wall. Then, as he stands in front of the open window the man was trying to keep him from, a light exhale that’s Peter-typical levels of annoying before he speaks: “Aw, you do care.”
“You have no evidence,” Morgan growls, and as they go back and forth about suit recordings and AIs, Morgan climbs onto his back and they swing off into the night.
//
“Okay, first of all, you can’t kill me because my mom and dad would get really mad at you.”
“Under the circumstances, I’d think they’d understand,” MJ hisses, even as she paws through the bag starting to tear with how full Morgan stuffed it with cash. “Tell me why you lied to me, your sister-in-law-in-the-chair who so graciously covered your ass and risked Pepper Potts’s wrath in doing so, and went after the mob.”
“I mean, I didn’t really—”
“Ned’s in town. We were having best friend night, and my husband had to get his leotard on—”
“My leotard?”
“—and leave to go save you. Do better.”
From the couch, Ned looks at Peter impishly before covering what Morgan suspects is a smile with the back of his hand.
She sighs, and MJ starts counting bills with a steely glare. “I knew he deserved it, okay, but I knew you two wouldn’t let me go after him if you knew everything he got up to, so I left out a little information.”
“Like that he’s literally gotten people murdered?” Ned exclaims incredulously from the couch, and it just figures that he’d side with them.
“Come on, Ned. You can’t even try to back me up here? Fisk thought I was useful, so he didn’t even try to kill me. Peter was way closer to dying with the Vulture at fifteen, and I’m sixteen! This is a generational improvement.”
“I retract my previous statement,” Ned backtracks quickly upon being faced with MJ’s warning stare. “Please leave me out of this.”
“You helped MJ ditch the Hammer diamond! You’re already in!” Morgan protests, then winces when a hand she uses to gesture flings back too far and hits the bruise left where Fisk hit her.
Ned shakes his head, but his hand has fallen to expose that oh yeah, he’s definitely grinning now. “One and done, Mo.”
“Hey, quit bothering Ned and put this on your face,” Peter interrupts them two seconds before an expertly-thrown ice pack lands in Morgan’s lap.
“He bothered me first!”
“Put it on your face before my wife kills you.”
“MJ threatens to kill me all the time; the fear factor is wearing off.”
Peter raises his brows at her in a challenge, and Morgan brings the ice pack on her cheek.
“Anyway,” MJ begins again, looking up and directly at Morgan, who shrinks from her gaze, “while I think your dedication is great, if you ever try to deal with someone you know is going to try and hurt you without telling us again, your parents are going to find out about Black Cat.”
Morgan studies MJ’s features, their severe cast, the subtle but immovable downturn of her lips, and decides not to pick that battle. Truth be told, she does feel bad. Spider-Man is now, on some level, associated with a criminal, and that’s going to be inconvenient for him. On top of that, she probably gave MJ a heart attack, and she told her back when this started that she wouldn’t lie.
“Alright,” she concedes, far softer than normal. “And I already told Peter, but I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you worry.”
“Well, you did. Your vitals shouldn’t be allowed to do that, and it freaked me the hell out that you need to call Peter in. You scared the shit out of me,” MJ snaps but, afterward, takes one deep breath, then two, then three before she eyes Peter. “What do you think?”
“Think of what?” Morgan asks, lost.
Ned giggles, and though Morgan squints at him, he offers no hints, only a stupidly pleased grin. “Someone’s in trou-ble,” he hums, and Morgan barely has time to be annoyed before Peter speaks.
“Two weeks.”
MJ whistles. “Damn, you’re nice. I was going to make it three.”
“Could you guys be more cryptic?”
“We’re discussing how long you’re grounded for.”
A beat.
“What?”
“No Black Cat for two weeks, and not just going out,” Peter explains, crossing his arms, and despite how uncomfortable he looks with taking on some authority in the situation, Morgan doesn't see how she’s going to get out of this one. “No hacking, scheming, thieving, or any other feline-adjacent activities.”
Ned wheezes on the couch despite the unappreciative looks Peter and MJ throw his way, and Morgan thinks she hears him garble something like “Did you just say feline-adjacent activities?”
Morgan throws her hands to her sides. “You two can’t ground me! You’re not my parents!”
MJ smiles, a cool, unsympathetic thing. “You’re right—we’re just the people covering your ass to them.”
Now, this is why Morgan hates arguing with MJ—how is she supposed to come up with something to refute that? Instead of trying, she visibly pouts, and she does not crack a smile when Ned gets off the couch, puts her headband on, and pulls it into her mask, except he looks at her and does a little hand motion, and—
“You think it’s funny,” Ned teases.
“Fuck off,” she replies.
“Language,” Peter and MJ chastise her at the same time, and a moment later—
“Oh my God,” Peter says with dawning horror, “we sound like Tony and May.”
And as Peter and MJ press their hands over their mouths in despair, Morgan is vindicated.
//
Morgan listens to the rules Peter and MJ set. Mostly. Mostly!
She’s a teenager—she should and does allow herself one exception: she orders a new wig for when she’s unleashed again. Actually, she orders two because if she has more issues with blunt force trauma in the future, she doesn’t want to have to wait for another one to get in. Aside from that, though, she behaves.
Being Black Cat might be Morgan’s favorite pastime, but it’s not so great for her grades, even if she hates Shakespeare—no matter how cool her English teacher tries to make him—and hates writing her paper over A Midsummer’s Night Dream even more. Regardless, it has to get done if she’s going to get a pedicure with her mom, so she makes something up about symbolism and turns it in.
She ends up getting her toes painted purple, and her mom gets blue, although it takes her a long time to decide what shade: “Morgan, honey, should I do navy or a pastel? Don’t look at me like that! I’m going to Aruba next week, and I’ll be in sandals—answer the question.”
She settles on a powder blue to Morgan’s lavender, and while they sit and get back massages from the salon chairs, they show each other cat videos, which is a whole other layer of irony Morgan isn’t touching with a ten-foot pole—she got enough of that in the English paper.
As for her dad, the driving lessons he forces her into whenever she hangs around the house for too long aren’t exactly fun—he’s so dramatic; if she can drive a motorcycle around NYC and not die, there’s no reason for him to grab the ceiling handle in an Audi—but the waffles they get afterward at their favorite hole-in-the-wall are divine, even if he does give her shit about eating praline syrup.
“What are you? An eighty-year-old man?” he mumbles through a mouthful of food.
“Nah, that’s you,” she snarks back, and he nearly chokes.
It’s solid, a nice breather, but by the end of the two weeks, Morgan is out of her mind with the urge to get out of the fucking house and cause some mayhem, which she starts by finding Peter on patrol—he put a tracker in her suit, so she thinks it’s only fair that she returns the favor—and showing him the two cartons of eggs she’s carrying in her bag.
To his credit, he doesn’t ask if she paid for those, which is nice because the answer would be no—she picked them up from the convenience store she robbed a few weeks back because reviews on Google say the owner’s still being the fucking worst to women.
“Please tell me you’re giving those to a family-owned restaurant or something,” is how he greets her, and Morgan smirks with a toss of her new wig.
“Not quite. How do you feel about practical jokes?”
“I would rather get stabbed than hear Pepper’s reaction to the Tower getting egged, and I’ve already purposely pissed Sam and Bucky off this week.”
Morgan snorts. “What you lack in creativity, you make up for by being able to keep pace with me. Come on. I just want to pay a friend a visit.”
“What friend?”
“You’ll find out,” Morgan promises, already using a mixture of the adhesive abilities and repulsors of her suit to make her way back to the ground. “Hurry up,” she calls, “unless you want to be the lamest superhero in this city.”
She gets to the seat of the Mayflower Junior, also known as her motorcycle, and takes just enough time starting it to hear Peter call her a not-very-nice word. Then, she revs her engine and is on her way to harass the Hammers one last time.
//
After egging the shit out of the Hammers’ penthouse, Morgan generally returns to her old routine of research, prep work, and robbery. Getting back into the swing of things, she starts small, snatching high-demand products from a warehouse, collectible art pieces from celebrities’ houses, questionably sourced jewelry from a high-end shop. From there, she returns to cyber-attacks and cash grabs, and one Saturday night when her parents and May are out, she has a little incident happen, and by incident, she means she misjudged how much power from one of her repulsors she would need to bust through a door and fell through a window.
“Are you even trying to be gentle?” Morgan hisses as Peter rubs Neosporin on yet another cut. She doesn’t know how many he’s done at this point, but she’ll be confined to long sleeves in the coming days because she has band-aids everywhere.
“If you didn’t put your whole body through a window, I wouldn’t need to be gentle,” he hums in response, smearing another glob of salve on a spot on her back. The suit unzips from behind, and Morgan’s just glad she decided to wear a sports bra tonight.
She grits her teeth against the sting of the cut, her motorcycle helmet sitting a few feet away and the top half of her suit pooled around her waist where MJ isn’t lifting it to stitch tears in the fabric.
“It’s not like I meant to do it,” she mumbles, but there’s not too much heat to the words. Truth be told, Peter and MJ have plenty of experience with this sort of thing and know what they’re doing, even if it does kind of hurt. Besides, they have a while to fix this mess, including sorting out what to do with Morgan’s trusty duffel bag, partially unzipped to expose rows and rows of hundred dollar bills and resting on the kitchen counter.
Her dad doesn’t drink anymore, but he doesn’t mind driving for and otherwise supervising her mom and May. When the three of them get talking, they can stay occupied for hours, and last Morgan heard from her dad, the bartender brought her mom and aunt free tequila shots. They’re out of the picture, but Peter and MJ are very much not and are trying to give her updates on the state of her post-window situation.
“I don’t know, Mo, you might have to keep this here for a few days or just synthesize a new one. This thing got pretty torn up,” MJ muses.
“I feel like it got torn up,” she quips back, closing her eyes to let them work. She’s always tired after a heist, but the window really topped it off this time.
She doesn’t know how long she sits there, only that eventually, Peter hums under his breath. “Well, sounds like some people had a good night.”
Morgan squints her eyes open and finds MJ with her tongue poking out of her mouth and working on a cut on one of the sleeves.
“Did a group just walk in?” MJ asks absentmindedly, and Peter nods, privy to the information with his stupid good spider-hearing. Their collective attention is still elsewhere, but it’s nice smalltalk.
Their attention is elsewhere, anyway, until Morgan hears sloppy, heavy footsteps coming up the stairs, accompanied by a solid amount of whining—“If the two of them don’t agree to come out with us, I’m going to be so sad, Pepper.”—and subsequent caretaking—“May, please watch your step.”
MJ’s hand pauses mid-stitch, Peter drops the tube he’s working with, and Morgan is suddenly much, much less tired.
“Fuck,” Morgan says, and shit, they’re down the hall and getting closer by the second.
“How did you not realize it was them?” MJ hisses to Peter, throwing her hands up as she frantically looks around, presumably for some answer to their predicament.
“I was distracted!” he whisper-yells in return, and now he’s fumbling with the back of Morgan’s suit, trying to find the zipper as they inch closer, stick a key in the door and begin to wiggle it—
“I got it, Tony! You’re in the way—you’re in the wa-ay!”
“Pepp, I can help if you just want to let me—”
Morgan’s mom, dad, and aunt open the door to the Parker-Jones apartment to find nearly a million in cash sitting out, Morgan half in her cat suit and cut to pieces, and MJ and Peter close to murdering each other with a sewing needle and Neosporin, respectively.
For a moment, silence, and in a previously unmatched second of self-reflection, Morgan considers that while her life of crime started at a gala, it’s going to end here and now with her death. Then, at last, as Morgan, MJ, and Peter collectively fail to hide their winces, the voices of the three others in the room ring out in tandem: “WHAT THE F—”