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She's been trailing after her for weeks now. Ducking away when she's finished her patrol just to see if the trail is still warm. Just to catch a brief glance of pale hair in the moonlight, leaping across rooftops and fire escapes like she's as feline as her name. Felicia's heels never slip, and her claws never miss. She leaps and twists with the grace of a gymnast and she always lands on her feet.
For someone bestowed with the power of luck, she doesn't smile much anymore.
Cindy tracks her in the dark, not smiling much either.
It's just. It's easy, is the thing. To look for her. To crawl up walls and slide into the shadows and watch the Black Cat be the Black Cat. Presumably doing various and sundry Bad Things that she should be reporting to Bobbi on the little SHIELD sanctioned burner phone Cindy still doesn't know if she was supposed to give back. But she just watches, lets the little uncomfortable twinge in her guts turn into a twisting knife, like the one she slid into Felicia's back. Metaphorically speaking. And - well, if those are the metaphors she's using then she really needs to start getting more sleep or Cindy can kiss her job goodbye.
Similes.
Whatever.
Felicia looks up sometimes. Flicks her hair over her shoulders with a deliberateness Cindy couldn't have discerned a year ago, but she's seen Felicia without artifice, now, if not without a mask. She tucks her own more firmly over her nose and launches off the building in the opposite direction. It's a routine. Some people read before bed, Cindy follows her ex-crime lord boss around the New York skyline.
The other thing, Cindy thinks to herself as she tosses her empty coffee cup and begins to swing, is that she never actually sees her do anything. Peter would say plausible deniability and then give her a look that she knows he saves up especially for Felicia-related disasters, but frankly things are awkward enough without getting into how Cindy is just repeating his old mistakes. It's like she's his clone or something.
Point is, once Cindy lands on the rooftops spiralled around Black Cat's old HQ, Felicia is always already running away. Cindy catches on her coattails, certainly looking like she's just robbed one of the most expensive penthouses in Manhattan, but no police reports about missing Cartier watches come out in the aftermath. She keeps checking, when she should be writing articles about actual crimes that are definitely happening. And, in a way, that just makes it easier. It makes it a game of - okay, even her inner monologue is groaning, and that survived ten years of nothing but it's own echo chamber. But it is a game, dealing with her regular patrols earlier and earlier just to sniff out Felicia, just to prove it without uncertainty.
That what they are is incompatible.
Because if she can do that, then maybe she can finally get a decent night's sleep. She's yawning as she lurches from building to building, webs a little slacker than they should be, which is about how she ends up sweeping into Felicia, sending them both lurching off the edge of a fire escape.
Felicia's claws dig into her arm without much sentimentality. "What's the matter, spider, cat got your tongue?"
"Hold on," Cindy says, heart in her throat, grabbing Felicia's forearm with one hand as she fires a web with the other, hauling them both up onto an overhanging ledge. They're poised beside a pair of concrete grotesques, expressions only half as monstrous. "Are you okay?"
Cindy feels like she can't catch her breath, but Felicia is as flawless as ever. "If I wasn't," she says smoothly, running her clawed gloves through her hair until it looks more tousled than windswept. "Yours would not be my first choice of shoulder to cry on." She squints at Cindy. "And believe me, I have plenty of choices."
"I'm—" she doesn't know what she thinks she's going to say. Sorry doesn't exactly cut it, and she's not sure what it means that she wants to say it anyway.
"Save it," Felicia's finger touches her mouth through the mask, like she's shushing her, the steel point of her glove indenting Cindy's top lip. It's sharp, but not enough to break the skin. Not yet. "I was starting to think you were just gonna stalk me forever."
"I wasn't –" The claw presses firmer, a threat.
"I said hush," Felicia says, tongue curling behind her teeth. "You were. Just because you're still green around the gills doesn't mean I haven't been very good at what I do for a very long time. I'm a master thief, you don't find me if I don't let myself be found."
She pulls her hand away and crosses her arms, tilting her head to one side so the moon catches the sharpness of her cheekbone, her jaw. "Tell me, Cindylou Who, did you find what you were looking for?"
Sort of. Almost. Never quite. Cindy presses her lips together and doesn't look Felicia in the eyes. "I didn't find you helping people."
Felicia laughs, meanly, the way she does mid-fight. "Goddamn white hats, you're all the same." She puts a hand on the head of a grotesque, patting it like she might a stray cat. "I'm not a box you can tick, Silk." She tosses a look over her shoulder, her eyes sharp enough to cut. "I'm not stealing from orphans or saving the stratosphere. I'm staying afloat. But you know all that." She faces Cindy then, leaning back against the stone figure. It's not the hip-tilted angle of seduction she knows Felicia likes to play, either. She's looking at Cindy. She's looking straight through her. "You need me to be the bad guy so you don't have to think about what you are."
Cindy fiddles with her mask, loosened from Felicia's touch. "You know, I actually do have a therapist," she says, to say something. "I don't need you to psychoanalyse me."
Felicia smiles ruefully. "I thought you liked our little heart to hearts."
"I did," Cindy says, before she can stop herself.
"I've played this game before," Felicia sighs, standing again, stepping towards her until Cindy can almost feel the tickle of white fur against her nose. "I know how you spiders are, and I'm not going to be dangling —"
Something in her flares. Silk sense or anxiety or sheer frustration. "I'm not him," she snaps, her fingers tight around Felicia's shoulders.
Felicia stills, her mouth slightly open, plush and close enough to…
"Good," Felicia says, slowly, her claws finding the edges of Cindy's mask and tugging it down. "That would just be rotten luck."
Cindy bridges the gap before Felicia can draw in a breath. It's not a game, but she still wants to win it.
It's a little harder than she means, a little firmer, Felicia's hands tightening around her mask just to keep equilibrium, but she pays it back with the tease of her tongue. They kiss until Cindy feels dizzy. Until her knuckles ache from where they're fisted in the fur of Felicia's costume, until her mouth is bruised and her breath is ragged and her legs are a touch unsteady.
Felicia eases back first, almost unaffected if not for the flush riding high on her cheeks and spreading down her throat. She smiles, tilting Cindy's chin up with a steel claw. "If you're sure about what you want," Felicia says, easing back, heels teetering on the edge of the rooftop. "You'll be able to find me."
She steps off the edge of the roof and drops into the night, only the sound of her heels on the metal fire escape of the next building over to let Cindy know she's not still falling.
Cindy likes the sensation of the breeze whipping through her hair, likes watching the lights sparkle and blink beneath her as she swings through the city. There's not much that's felt concrete since she left the bunker, but this part, scouring the night for trouble always has.
It just feels right, following the directions from the police scanner and sweeping criminal's feet out from underneath them, barely pausing to throw a thumbs up at the store owner she's saving from bankruptcy or the huddled kids caught up in a villain team-up gone awry. And it's not a dissimilar feeling, she's starting to find, to the one she gets when she scales the tallest of buildings, catching black leather and a cloud of white hair just ducking away in the corner of her eye.