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When Spidey Met Oracle	By : littleblackduck Category: zMisplaced Stories [ADMIN use only] > Spiderman Views: 37996 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 4
Disclaimer: The Spider-Man universe and characters are owned by Marvel. The Oracle universe and characters are owned by DC. I make no profit from this work. This is a sequel to "When Spidey Met Batgirl." I think you should read that first, but that might just be

Chapter List
- 4
- 5
- 6
CHAPTER FIVE: The Other Women
Mary Jane Watson had come so close to becoming Mary Jane Parker she'd printed up business cards. Actually, those cards -- which were stashed away in a box she hadn't opened since her wedding day that wasn't -- read "Mary Jane Watson-Parker". She was a professional after all. The Mary Jane Watson brand meant something. Right now it meant "recovering supermodel/poor man's Heidi Klum as the hostess of Sewn Up, a third-place reality TV fashion design show," but the devil was in the details, wasn't it?
What was really weird, though, was that there were times when she almost answered her phone as Mary Jane Watson-Parker. It wasn't something she'd ever explained to anybody -- not even to a certain Mr. Parker -- but it happened enough that sometimes she wondered if this was all a strange, lingering sign of some cosmic mistake. Even now, almost a year after she'd broken things off with Peter. It tended to happen when she wasn't thinking… when she felt relaxed. Like now, when her semi-unwanted roommate, Harold T. Osborn wasn't lounging around her Brooklyn apartment. Here she was, stepping out of the bathroom after a nice, long, hot shower -- one in which she'd had the luxury of using her pulsating showerhead for one of its non-factory intended purposes -- and as she padded her way to her bedroom, drying her hair, her cell phone rang. Actually, it didn't ring so much as it started up a jazzy rendition of "Anything Goes", but that wasn't important. What mattered is that she totally would have said "This is Mary Jane Watson-Parker," if she hadn't been cut off.
"Hey, MJ," greeted the vaguely muffled, yet all too recognizable voice. "It's me." Thank God she hadn't said "Watson-Parker" this time. She never would have heard the end of it...
"Hey, Pete, I was just thinking about you," she said, blushing at the memory of her showerhead. "You sound funny," she blurted, frantically trying to cover what she later realized wasn't that much of a slip-up. "Wait. Are you wearing the mask?"
"Do you really want to make this a whole 'what are you wearing' kind of call?" he asked. "It's perfectly fine with me if you do..."
"Damn it, Peter," Mary Jane groaned, switching the phone to speaker. "I really need you to stop calling me every time you think you're going to die."
"I'm not about to die," he assured her, "but I can see how that can be frustrating. It's not really all that often, though, right?"
"It's every other Wednesday!"
"Oh."
"For once, it'd be nice if we could talk about something other than your insane double life."
"That's fair," he conceded. "So, um, what are you wearing?"
"Not a stitch at the moment," she teased, dropping her towel in a hamper on her way to her dresser to choose a pair of underwear. "I'm getting dressed for dinner with a co-worker of sorts. We had a guest judge on the show today. Kind of an up-and-coming journalist for a major metropolitan newspaper. Bit of a fashion plate. Says he wants to pick my brain for an article he's writing for the Planet's Sunday edition."
"Wait, the Daily Planet?" he said as she stepped into a lacy pair of lavenadar blue bikini briefs.
"That's right," she told him, sliding the cool silk up her thighs until they nestled over her freshly shaved mons.
"Who's the guy?" Peter asked, although she could tell he already had his suspicions.
"Jimmy Olsen," she said, confirming his worst nightmare while she leaned over so her pendulous breasts could settle into the cups of the matching periwinkle bra.
"Oh my god, MJ!" he yelled. "I hate him!"
"I know you do, Pete," she sighed, rolling her eyes and fastening the clasp at the back. It was a ridiculously one-sided rivalry. Peter had met Olsen maybe once in his life and from what he'd told her back then, the two of them had actually hit it off. But over the years, as he watched Jimmy's rise, Peter started to get jealous. "It's not a date or anything, it's just a work thing," Mary Jane assured him, tugging the straps to her shoulders so her tits lifted. "But even if it wasn't…"
"I know, I know," he said. "It's none of my business… but, come on! Olsen's a total hipster doofus! 'Duh, look at me in my ironic bowtie! I'm Superman's pal! Taking pictures is boring me now, can I be a cub reporter instead?'"
Mary Jane had moved to her expansive walk-in closet during Peter's petulant rant where she picked out a tasteful pink cotton blouse and charcoal wool knit skirt that came down to her knees. It was an ensemble she was sure said this is a professional business engagement, but damn, girl's got curves!
"What's your problem, Parker?" Mary Jane asked, buttoning the blouse. "You only get petty like this when something's bothering you that actually matters."
"So now it's okay to talk about my insane double life?"
"If it ends this conversation faster," she sighed, wriggling to shimmy that tightly-fitted skirt up over her ass.
"I'm in the middle of a team-up," he told her, "and this guy that I'm working with knows everything about me, but I don't know anything about him. And based on what just went down between us, I don't think I can trust him. Hell, I don't even really know if it is a him. But Felicia's in trouble and I can't find her on my own. I don't know what to do…"
Mary Jane laughed.
"What's funny about this?" he asked, understandably miffed.
"It not funny, really," she apologized, slipping her dainty feet into a nice little pair of slingback pumps she'd picked up that afternoon. "In fact, it's anything but. It's just that, well… One of the things that always drove me crazy when we were together were all the times I had to watch you take on more than I thought anyone could handle at once, and you'd just absolutely refuse to ask for help. Now, after a little more than a year with the Avengers, it's like you're worried you can't do anything alone."
"I'm just trying to be a team player," Peter protested, "but this Oracle's leaving me out of the loop."
"Then who needs him, tiger?" MJ asked. "Are you honestly telling me that the Amazing Spider-Man can't save the day without some jerk's help?"
Peter didn't say anything for a while, but Mary Jane could practically hear the gears grinding in that webbed head of his. "You're right," he finally told her. "I really haven't even tried yet."
"That doesn't sound like you, does it?"
"No," he said. "It really doesn't."
"Then I guess I'll let you go, and you can do what you have to do."
"Mary Jane," Peter said, "you really are the best of my exes."
"You only say that because I'm the only one you think hasn't slept with Flash Thompson."
"Think?"
"Goodbye, Peter," she sighed, hanging up.
She turned to survey herself in the mirror and that's when she noticed just how hard her nipples were. They were poking right through the thin fabric of her shirt, starved for attention. Mary Jane was all for a little titillation when she made the scene, but she didn't want to give young Mr. Olsen that much of a thrill. She returned to her closet to find that thick forest green cashmere sweater vest that both set off her eyes and should hopefully keep her stiff little bullets out of the line of fire.
What is it about arguing with Peter that always gets me so horny? she wondered as she slipped it over her head. It probably didn't help that she hadn't had sex since she'd returned to New York. She told herself she'd been so busy with the show, what with all the rehearsals and tapings and promotion, but that wasn't the whole truth. The truth, Mary Jane realized as she brushed her long crimson hair, was that she was scared of putting herself out there again. How could she? Her rebound fling in L.A. with thirty-something "teen heartthrob" Bobby Carr had been an absolute disaster.
She'd been attracted to Bobby because he was everything Peter wasn't: impulsively brash, always up for a good time, and confident to the point of cockiness. He never would have chosen "the weight of his responsibilities" over a night out on the town with a gorgeous redheaded bombshell. And considering everything she'd flown to Hollywood to get away from -- all that craziness with Peter and the Avengers that ended with the Kingpin sending hired guns to kill her and Aunt Anna after they'd put poor May Parker in intensive care -- a guy like Bobby was exactly the kind of fun she needed... She never would have guessed it would end with a narrowly avoided assault from White Rabbit, Bobby's crazy costumed drug dealer. Mary Jane decided to head back to New York, but beyond that, she didn't really know where to go from there. She'd tried things with Peter and it hadn't worked and she'd tried it with his polar opposite and it was even worse. What was left after that?
She was starting to think that her mistake had been trying to make all that reckless fun with Bobby into an actual relationship. If she'd still been the goodtime girl she used to be, she probably could have pulled it off, but while Mary Jane still knew how to party, she was about more than that now. Being with Pete for so long had changed her. It made her grow up. And Bobby Carr just didn't have the substance she'd come to expect from the man in her life. Maybe if his lack of character had been the only way he came up short in comparison to the Sensational Spider-Man, she could have stuck around, but that hadn't been the case.
After all, it hadn't been Bobby's name reverberating off the bathroom tiles while she pulsated herself to orgasm with a steady, throbbing stream of water no less than fifteen minutes ago.
Was that what she was really worried about? Not that she'd never find someone who fulfilled her emotional needs, but that she'd never find a better lover than Peter Parker? The idea that the best sex of her life was behind her now? After her first time with Bobby had failed to provide that wow factor she'd grown accustomed to, she told herself that it took time for two people to really find their rhythm. But as the months wore on and things between the sheets still hadn't heated up, she remembered that sex with Peter had been pretty great from the start.
Their first time had been during her last semester at ESU. She'd already gotten a few modeling gigs and had gone on a few auditions for acting jobs. The first one she actually got was a role in a fairly schlocky documentary called The Silver Age of Superheroes. It was mostly supposed to be interviews with historians and celebrity "experts," as well as any superheroes they could actually get to show up, but they also wanted to re-enact a few scenes, which is one of the parts Mary Jane had tried for. She'd auditioned to portray Wonder Woman, but the producers said she didn't have the right look… like it would have been impossible for her to wear a wig or dye her hair. They'd offered her another, smaller role, though. She only had one line, but she was actually going to be on camera. It was enough to get her SAG card at least.
She was even allowed to invite Pete to watch some of the filming. They'd only been dating for a few months, but that had certainly been long enough for MJ to know he didn't really have any interest in seeing an actual film crew at work. What hooked him, however, was the fact that the director had convinced Dr. Ray Palmer, the Atom, to sit down and talk about the early days of the Justice League. The way Peter explained it, Dr. Palmer was "the foremost authority on the manipulation of mass and density," whatever the hell that meant, and the young science major absolutely jumped at the chance to meet him.
Mary Jane had been getting into wardrobe when there was a knock at her dressing room. "MJ, it's me," Peter said through the door.
"Come on in, tiger," she said. "I'm just putting on my costume."
He carefully entered the room with his hand over his eyes.
"Come on, Pete," she sighed. "Are you really that scared of seeing me naked?"
"May and Ben Parker raised a perfect gentlemen," he informed her.
"You needn't have bothered, Mr. Bashful," she said. "I'm all dolled up for my big debut. And this little outfit's got me covered head to toe." Peter peeked through his fingers and his eyes went wide. "Although I suppose it doesn't really leave much to the imagination," she admitted.
"You're Batgirl?" he gasped.
"Hopefully a reasonable facsimile," she smiled, striking a heroic pose in her bat-themed outfit, complete with cape and cowl. Gotham's Dark Damsel had never been photographed, so the wardrobe department had to base their effort on eye witness accounts. Mary Jane had worried someone might think a purple micro dress over a pair of matching tights and thigh high black leather boots was ridiculous, but if Peter's reaction was any indication, it didn't make her look silly in the slightest. "What do you think?" she asked, twirling around as if she didn't already know.
Peter just gulped in response as she sauntered toward him, taking care to sway her hips just enough to get the brass-plated belt around her waist to slip down a little.
"Bat got your tongue, Pete?" she asked, playfully poking him in the gut with a finger.
"You look incredible," he said heavily.
"You're not just saying that to get in my bat-panties, are you?" she asked, as her glove-covered digits itsy-bitsy-spidered their way up his chest. "Because…"
All these years later, Mary Jane still couldn't remember what she was about to say when Peter started kissing her. At the time, all thoughts of flirtatious patter flew right out of her head when he grabbed her ass and drew her toward him.
While things hadn't progressed too far in their physical relationship, they'd certainly made out before. Peter was always so sweet and gentle, and after years of being the party girl everybody lusted after, it felt pretty amazing to be the woman someone genuinely loved and cared about. But MJ could always tell by how softly he kissed her and how carefully he held her that a little light petting was as far as things were going to go... But this wasn't that. His tongue swirled in her mouth as she unbuckled his pants, and she could feel his urgency… his need… his desire…
There was only one way this was going to end: with a bang.
Mary Jane had imagined what sex would be like with Peter for some time now, and she had pegged him for a strict "making love" kind of guy. That was great, but a girl didn't want to make love every time. Sometimes a girl just wanted to get fucked. Mary Jane had been looking forward to coaxing the animal out of him in the years to come. But as she broke away from him to kneel and tug down his trousers, she suspected she may have been wrong about a few things.
"Oh my, Peter!" she squealed, hopping back up in surprise when his throbbing, blood-engorged cock popped out of the flap in his boxers. "What's gotten into you?"
"Nothing," he said, his fingers tracing the outline of the big yellow bat-symbol spread across her satin-covered tits. "You're just so sexy, Mary Jane. I've wanted this for so long…"
"Me too, Tiger," she cooed, reaching for the clasp on her cape as he fondled her breasts over her batsuit. "Just let me slip out of this crazy get-up."
"No no no. Leave it on," he whispered, brushing her hand from her shoulder. "Turn around." Before she could respond, he spun MJ roughly and bent her over the dresser.
"Oh, brooooother!" she gasped. Peter Benjamin Parker, the "sensitive young gentlemen" Aunt Anna tried to fix her up with for years, had just manhandled her for fucksake! And he could be kinky, too?! She looked back at him over her shoulder to watch him flip her short cape to the side and pull her tights down just enough to expose her ripe pussy. He seized her hips then and she reached back to help guide him into her when he stopped.
"Huh-hold on," he said, straining. "I… don't have a condom…"
"Pleeeeease Peeeete," she begged, caressing the crown of his cock with her fingers, pre-cum oozing onto the velvety glove. "We've been tested… I'm on the pill... It's fiiiine." She wiggled her ass to entice him. "Don't you want me?"
He didn't say anything. He didn't have to. He just slowly shoved himself into her. Mary Jane's purple pantyhose were tangled up at her thighs, so she couldn't spread her legs too much, but that just made him feel bigger.
"Oomph!" she groaned as he filled her. "Haaaahn!" His grip on her hips tightened as he pulled back and pushed in again, harder. "Ahhh… GAWD, Peeeeeter!" She screamed louder as he started pumping in earnest, his pace increasing.
"Shh… shh… shh…" he hissed, punctuating each shush with a thrust. "Someone's gonna hear you…"
"I -- OH! -- don't -- AHH! -- caaaare…" she cried, rocking back into his dick as he fucked her forward, squashing her big, bouncy boobs into the dresser. And she didn't. She didn't care if the whole damn studio heard her. "Fah-fuhn-finally!!" she screamed, her pussy juicing his cock with her girl cum. "Finally fucking…" One of Peter's hands left her waist to clamp over her mouth as she continued to moan in delight. Her screams were muffled but no less noisy as she pushed back onto that thick, hot cock plunging into her.
"Hmph, Piduh," she whimpered into his palm when his other hand slipped down to rub the top of her pussy as he continued to fuck her. Mary Jane's knees went weak when his thumb grazed her clitoris and she grabbed hold of the dresser, waves of heat spreading within as her looming orgasm threatened. One moment she felt like limp rubber, the next she went rigid, tensing when it finally hit her.
"Muh cumfim!" she squealed. "Maaah cumfiiiim!!" She doubted he knew what she was saying. She barely understood herself, but her spasming muscles and the wet flush on his dick when she bit down on his hand made it clear.
"Oh! Bah -- uh -- baby!!" Peter moaned, still thrusting even while her pussy convulsed around him. His hands left her mouth and her pussy so he could grab her hips again, pulling her back as he shoved his cock as deep as he could over and over. Mary Jane had come down from her blissful high, only to find herself rising again. Burying her face into the crook of her arm, muffling her cries of ectasy. She came two more times before he exploded inside her, flooding her cunt with his spunk. She shuddered with each throbbing eruption as Peter plastered her pussy.
"Ah fuuuuck," she panted, still splayed out on the counter, trying to catch her breath, as he finally withdrew his spent manhood. She felt a trickle down her thighs in the absence of his thick cock.
"Shit, sorry," he apologized, grabbing some tissue from the dresser so he could wipe up the juices oozing from her pussy. "It's getting all over your tights…"
"With the cape, no one's gonna notice," Mary Jane murmured, just mustering the strength to lift her head so she could watch him try to sop up their cum. "Yowza," she purred. "That wasn't your first time..."
It was a statement but Peter took it as more of a question. "Of course not," he said, pulling her tights back up over her ass as she pushed herself up into a standing position. "But I guess it's been a while," he admitted, tucking his wet dick back into boxers and tugging up his own trousers. "I'm sorry if this wasn't the most romantic move on my part..."
"Romance is overrated, tiger," she said, turning to kiss him. "There's plenty of time for flowers and candy later..."
At the time, when Peter told her that it'd been a while, MJ assumed "a while" meant the year that had passed since Gwen Stacy died. There were a lot of things about that first time I didn't learn until later, Mary Jane realized as she left the apartment to head over to the restaurant where she was meeting Jimmy.
Just a few months before she left for L.A., Peter had told her that in all his time with Gwen, the two of them never had sex. Gwen hadn't been ready, and Peter -- perfect, patient Peter -- had been willing to wait until she was. When Mary Jane asked him how any red-blooded American college boy had managed to do that without losing his mind, he admitted that Gwen had a fairly liberal definition of what sex wasn't that included a whole carnal carnival of activities to satisfy his manly urges. Even so, Mary Jane realized that hers had been the first pussy Peter'd parked that pecker in over three years. And the first he'd ever rode bareback.
It was a memory MJ was always very careful to consider. And not just because even after all this time, it could still get her a little wet. She also had some lingering doubts about just what had brought them together.
Of the many problems she had in her relationship with Peter, none of them had been in the bedroom. Or on the dining room table. Or pressed up against the blackboard in his classroom. They had a great sex life because they both knew variety was the spice of life. But there were two things Mary Jane had never considered doing with him. First, she had no desire to bring a third person into the mix. She'd had enough of that kind of thing in her callow youth. Second, despite the proliferation of sexy superhero costumes that flooded the market every Halloween, she never dressed up like Batgirl again.
Peter hinted about it once. Shortly after they moved in together, that documentary she'd been in eventually came out on DVD, and they both sat down one night to watch it. Just the sight of Mary Jane in that sparkly violet leotard sparked something in them both. They didn't bother watching it through to the end.
"Whatever happened to that costume?" Peter asked, kissing her thighs as he worked off her pajama bottoms.
"They don't let girls with one line take wardrobe home," she giggled just before his tongue found her clit.
"Damn shame," he mumbled into her pussy.
That's when she started to wonder.
One thing Peter hadn't known back in that dressing room was that Mary Jane knew he was Spider-Man. She had known since she saw him climb out of his bedroom window in Forest Hills the night his uncle was murdered... since the beginning of his life as a superhero. So by the time they got together, MJ had to figure Peter spent a lot of time in the company of other costumed crime-fighters… and there was something funny about the way he'd reacted to the sight of her in that cape and cowl…
Mary Jane had learned to accept that Peter would never love her the same way he loved Gwen. He couldn't. The same way, she now realized, that she would never love anyone else the way she'd loved Peter. It was impossible. That's just how things are with your first love. In the years they'd lived together, Mary Jane eventually came to understand how Peter could still be best friends with Betty Brant despite their sexual history, or swing off to help the Black Cat while MJ sat at home, waiting. She knew that none of those things meant that he wasn't devoted to her. And now that they weren't a couple, she was braced to accept the all but inevitable relationship between Peter and that cute Carlie Cooper. Hell, she'd do everything she could to help them figure it out if she had to, because she wanted the best for him. Always.
But the thought that the moment Peter decided he just had to have her hadn't really been about her and only her was just enough to break Mary Jane Watson-Parker's poor heart.
Dammit. She'd done it again...
*
Consciousness came to her slowly. It started with brief catches of his murmuring, followed by the cold, hard concrete beneath her. Part of her strange, ever-mutating powers afforded the Black Cat a bit of feline-like night-vision, so the figure of her tall, powerful captor came into focus rather quickly. The tangled red and black corn-rows. The grey coveralls. Those shrewd blue eyes.
Felicia Hardy didn't have a lot of history with Norman Osborn, but she recognized the man when she saw him. His face had been plastered all over the news non-stop for the last several months. But he was in jail, wasn't he? Hell, last she checked, GBS had a little box in the bottom right corner that was nothing but a live feed of Norman Osborn sitting in his cell. But here she was, laid out on a cold cement floor while he stood over her.
When the Black Cat first hooked up with the Spider, the first Green Goblin had faked his death and was hiding out in Europe, biding his time and scheming or whatever the hell these rich sociopaths got up to after they faked their deaths and hid out in Europe. She remembered helping Spider-Man break Osborn out of prison a couple years back under circumstances too convoluted to go into -- so convoluted she couldn't really remember -- which of course led them right into an ambush when Norman double-crossed them. The whole thing went down within the space of two-hours, and she'd been unconscious for half of it, but that was the most time she'd ever spent in the man's presence.
So what Felicia knew about Norman she only really knew by reputation. Of course she'd recognized him on the roof. Sure, she was used to seeing him in twelve-thousand dollar custom-tailored suits, but there was no mistaking that improbable haircut. Even if he was wearing a drab, grey janitor's uniform just like the one she was wearing now…
Oh god! she realized. She was in different clothes. The sick fuck had undressed her! She felt nauseous as she wondered if he did anything else while she was out…
"You changed my clothes," she said as steadily as she could. "Why?"
"Your attire contained a number of concealed pouches and pockets fitted with lock-picking tools and related equipment," Osborn said. "It seemed pertinent to remove it to prevent your possible escape. You were placed in the spare maintenance outfit for your comfort and modesty."
The one thing the Spider stressed the most in the many times he'd railed against the former Director of H.A.M.M.E.R. since they'd started fucking again in the last few months was the threat Norman represented to the women in Spider-Man's life. At the time, Felicia had thought it was one of his little ploys to get her to admit to feelings she may or may not have felt for him. But now, she was far less than sure. This clearly wasn't a game or fun sexy roleplay. She was in legitimate danger here…
But Felicia Hardy wasn't a victim. Maybe once, but never again.
She bristled as Norman approached her, bracing herself as he bent down over her. Her skin crawled as his fingers brushed her cheek and the hollow of her breasts as his hands settled over her face and chest.
"Whuh-what are you doing?" she asked, trying to fight back the panic. And it actually wasn't that hard to do. There was nothing lascivious in his manner. Felicia had been groped before. This wasn't that. This was almost… clinical.
"Checking your pulse and temperature," he replied. And there was something about the way he said it that almost... gave her comfort. "Seventy beats per minute and 98.8 degrees Fahrenheit. Your heart rate is slightly elevated, but you're in perfect health."
"What are you going to do to me?"
"In accordance with H.A.M.M.E.R. sanctions, you will be detained in this facility until the Administrator assesses your threat level."
"Are you crazy?" she asked him. There was something off about all this. She may not have spent too much time with Norman Osborn, but she'd seen enough of him in the news over the last several months to know this wasn't like him at all. Of course, this was a guy who'd just had a big, messy, public meltdown. What'd she expect? "H.A.M.M.E.R.'s gone, Osborn! How'd you get out of jail?"
"I have no idea what you're talking about," he replied simply. "I must complete my work."
"And what are you going to do with me?" she asked defiantly.
"Sedate you again, of course," he murmured. She felt the pin prick before she had the chance to respond. She wondered where he had been hiding the needle as she watched him walk away.
This wasn't really Norman Osborn. It couldn't be. And just before she passed out again, Felicia vaguely remembered the Spider telling her something else about his greatest enemy. Norman Osborn had funded some research in cloning…
*
Of the many misconceptions people had about Victoria Hand, the one that bothered her most was this commonly held belief among her peers that Steve Rogers had taken pity on her and given her some kind of amnesty for the crimes she'd committed while working under Norman Osborn. Part of what vexed her about this was how patently ridiculous this notion was: Steve Rogers had fought the Nazis. Actual Nazis. Not just neo-Nazis or white supremacists -- though he'd certainly fought his fair share of them, too -- but real, Third Reich, goose-stepping, D-Day Nazis. The man had actually punched Hitler in the face! Hitler's fucking face! There was a picture of it and everything! So, no, "I was just following orders," wasn't the kind of argument that was going to win him over. But what really bothered Victoria about it was that up until recently, she'd never committed a crime in her life.
She'd been very upfront with Osborn about this when he'd appointed her Deputy Director. She'd told him directly that she would not break, bend, or even work around the law under his command. And during his time as Director of H.A.M.M.E.R., she'd honored that commitment.
Afterward was a slightly different story, and if there was one thing that bothered Hand as much as this belief that she had broken the law while working for Osborn, it was the small fact that she had done so while working for Rogers.
There had been a bottle of scotch that Norman kept in his office. A Glenfiddich single malt, aged 40 years and worth somewhere between two and three thousand dollars. In the brief transition period between Osborn's meltdown at Asgard and Roger's appointment, after she'd been cleared of any wrongdoing, Victoria had gone into Osborn's office and taken it home.
She knew that if anybody found out, nothing would really come of it. She'd worked her ass off for that man. She'd faced down the fucking Molecule Man in her underwear for petesake! Anyone else would have called it a fair trade for all those months of insanity. But deep down, Victoria knew what she'd done had been wrong. The first crime she'd ever committed in her thirty-one years. And it weighed on her.
It weighed on her, but every Friday night since, she'd come home from another week on the job and pour herself a tumbler of her ill-gotten Glenfiddich and sip it on her balcony while she looked out over Central Park. And it was always the highlight of her week. One bright spot in a sad, dark existence. And on this particular Friday night, a bright spot abruptly dimmed when Spider-Man dropped down beside her.
"Park Avenue apartment with a balcony," he remarked. "Nice. Selling your soul to Satan himself really paid the bills."
"Correct me if I'm wrong, but haven't you spent the last few nights in a mansion on the other side of the park?" she pointed out. "Did you make a deal with the devil?"
"As if," he scoffed.
"What are you doing here, Spider-Man?" she asked.
"I need a hand," he said. "The name on the mailbox said this is where to find one. Heh. See what I did there?"
"You're a real wit, alright," Hand muttered. "You want a drink?"
"I'll pass."
"Suit yourself," she said, sipping her scotch. "I'd ask how you know where I live, but you've been sticking your little spider-tracers on me every chance you get since I showed up at Avengers Mansion."
"You noticed those, huh?" Spider-Man asked.
"It's just become another fun routine in my sparkling new life," Victoria replied. "After a long, strange, dangerous day of working with people who openly hate me, I come home and sweep myself for bugs. Then I start drinking."
"I don't trust you," he told her.
"Well thank you for that," she responded, "but the distrust and hostility part of my life is usually limited to my day job now that I've given up on relationships, and I'm off the clock…"
"That came out wrong," Spider-Man sighed. "What I meant is, I'm trying to find some reason to trust you, but I haven't yet."
"Yippee."
"Osborn was working on something," he said. "Some secret project so important he was working on it right here. You were his right hand. You have to have some clue what his left was doing…"
"Like I've told everybody who's asked, I wasn't involved with any of his off-the-books operations," she told him, "and he damn well knew not to let me know anything about them."
"There wasn't anything that struck you as odd?" Spider-Man asked. "Anything out of the ordinary? Some lead I can check?"
"I don't know," Victoria said with an exasperated sigh. "He got his hair done twice a week... Is that worth anything to you? He also fired every blonde female secretary I hired for him, no matter how competent. Oh, and I guess one of the LMDs was never accounted for."
"LMD?"
"Goddamn life model decoys," Victoria spat, taking a healthy gulp of scotch. "Androids designed to stand-in for an agent in potential danger. They're usually reserved for command-level personnel, like the Director. Back in the day, they were the great scourge of the S.H.I.E.L.D. accounting department because Nick Fury loved his little tin men. He had hundreds built and he was always losing track of them or getting them blown up…"
"Oh, right," Spider-Man said. "He used one of those instead of showing up for that thing with the Latverians that got him fired."
"That was Fury for you," Hand muttered. "Never do yourself what you can send a five-million dollar robot to… and I know you don't want to hear this, but whatever his faults, at least Norman Osborn understood the value of a dollar. I didn't even have to convince him that we only needed fifteen Osborn-LMD's at the most. He came to that conclusion all on his own. He even saved on parts by modifying old Fury droids."
"So there were fifteen robotic duplicates of Norman Osborn, and one of them's missing?" Spider-Man said. "How do we know the Osborn in jail's really Osborn?!"
"He was scanned and examined in every conceivable way," Victoria told him. "And when we were done with that, we called Reed Richards and he came up with some new ways to scan him. We tend to check that type of thing pretty thoroughly, Spider-Man. Not exactly anybody's first rodeo."
"But just so I'm clear: after the secret invasion with the Skrulls brought S.H.I.E.L.D. down, you H.A.M.M.E.R. guys thought it was a good idea to have 15 copies of the Director walking around?"
"They weren't just walking around," Hand insisted. "They were deployed for specific managerial purposes. Mostly meetings with various politicians or agency representatives who insisted on face time with Osborn. Do you have any idea how many appearances he had to make every week? How else could he possibly have been everywhere at once? That's why we re-designated them Administrative Substitution Modules."
"And one went missing."
"Not missing," she said. "Unaccounted for. It was last logged as shipped to one of the OsCorp subsidiaries for routine maintenance about a month before the siege on Asgard. No one's been able to track it down since the legal status of Osborn's holdings are still in flux."
"Which subsidiary?" he asked.
"A company called Multivex, I believe," Hand told him. "They've got a processing plant in Newark, but their corporate headquarters are on the 71st floor of the Chrysler Building."
"Of course," Spider-Man muttered, shooting a webline to the next building over. "Multivex." Hand saw him shiver when he said it. "Thanks, Vicky."
"Victoria," she corrected. "Don't you want to call in the other Avengers?"
"No time to coordinate a whole formal plan with all that red tape," he said, swinging off. "Especially if this is just a dead end. Luke hates New Jersey."
"That's stupid!" she shouted after him. "You're being stupid!!!"
But of course, he wasn't listening.
It was a pretty thin lead. Part of Spider-Man wondered just how much trouble one missing robot could really cause, but then he remembered who he was dealing with. And this wasn't the first time Osborn used Multivex as a front. The last time was during that whole clone mess with the Jackal. It made a sick kind of sense that Norman would use the same company to deal with his own man-made doppelganger... Especially if Felicia's disappearance really was all part of some twisted revenge plot.
Spider-Man was going to find out one way or another.
*
Oracle had been very careful this time to check for worms or viruses or any other kind of malicious programming, but Waller's files were surprisingly clean. There was the expected amount of spyware, but Barbara suspected Amanda had put it in place just to keep up appearances rather than actually trying to trick her. It was as close to a sign of respect as Waller was capable.
Once the data was secure, all that was left was for Babs to sort through it… all 500 gigabytes. She was more than willing to check every scrap of data if that's what it would take to track down the Black Cat, but it certainly wouldn't hurt to try to narrow things down programmatically first. She coded an indexing engine to comb through the most recent surveillance picture and video files for Felica Hardy's face.
It was going to take at least half an hour for the system to crunch all that data, so she rolled off to the bathroom to take a shower. She hoped it might prove refreshing, but who was she kidding? She was running on maybe three hours sleep in as many days. She actually dozed off in the middle of washing her hair.
She returned to her system an hour later than she intended with a fresh set of clothes and a newly-brewed pot of coffee. There were two candid shots up on screen of "Ashley Moon" entering and exiting an office building in midtown Manhattan six hours before she'd made her fateful text to Spider-Man. Barbara checked the source of the image, and it was part of a data-set culled from a stakeout of the corporate offices of Multivex, an OsCorp subsidiary.
She scanned through the rest of the images. According to the accompanying notations, Brady O'Brien, Waller's agent in the field, had been careful to photograph everybody who'd gone to the 71st floor of the Chrysler Builder both as they entered the building and when they left. There was one exception. Five weeks ago, Norman Osborn had entered, but there was no photo of him leaving. This had happened approximately thirty-six hours before he launched his assault on Asgard.
There were a couple of reasonable explanations for this. It was completely possible that O'Brien had simply missed Osborn leaving, but considering how thorough all of this work was, that seemed unlikely. It was far more probable that Osborn had simply left the building through less conventional means, like, say, that repulsor-powered suit of armor he'd stolen off of Tony Stark.
She ran a search through the rest of Waller's files for any other Osborn sightings around that time and came up with something weird. About twenty seconds after he'd been photographed in midtown Manhattan, Norman was also reportedly attending a security briefing in Washington. She knew StarkTech was supposed to be fast, but she hadn't heard that they'd broken the laws of physics recently.
So there she had it. Photographic evidence that Norman Osborn -- or someone who looked remarkably like him -- had been at Multivex roughly a day before he'd been arrested in Broxton. And the Black Cat had looked in on him. That was as good a lead as she could have expected. And lucky her, she had a bona fide superhero just waiting for her to tell him what door to bust down.
If only she actually wanted to talk to him…
She was just about to reengage Spider-Man's communicator when a call came in from the Aerie One. "Oracle, this is Huntress."
"Go ahead, H," Barbara sighed.
"We're flying home now," Huntress reported. "Sorry I haven't been in touch. You were right. Osborn converted his Halifax facility into a Stark Tech rendering plant. Everything was ready to start mass-producing Model 29 Iron Man armor. I had to use that EMP you whipped up. Fried the communicator."
"Any other problems?" Barbara asked.
"Just some AIM scavengers," Huntress replied, "and you know how much I love beating up nerds."
Barbara tried not to take her comment personally. "You up for a rescue mission, H?" she asked.
"Depends on who needs rescuing," Huntress sighed.
"Black Cat's missing."
"That's the feisty blonde in the leather and fur, right?" Lady Blackhawk asked. "I like her."
"I can handle it, O," Huntress yawned. "It's the least I can do seeing as I'm the one who suggested her for this."
"Because you, too, wanted to stick it to Catwoman?" Barbara asked.
"Because I, too, wanted to stick it to Catwoman," Huntress confirmed.
"Zinda, how far out are you from New York City?" Barbara asked.
"I can get there in twenty minutes," Lady Blackhawk replied. "What's the flight plan, skipper?"
"I'm getting you clearance to land at Newark Liberty Airport," Barbara said, accessing the FAA mainframe. "I need you to fly over the Chrysler Building as you make your descent. Make sure you activate the Kord Industries stealth tech before you enter Manhattan airspace or there's going to be a panic, because I can't hack the radar tower and convince air traffic control the sky isn't falling. Helena's going to have to parachute down."
"Great," Huntress muttered.
Barbara felt a small pang of guilt as she made the proper arrangements, but what was more important: sparing Spider-Man's feelings or saving the Black Cat? She could work with Helena. She trusted her. Working with him had just been one blunder after another. Even he'd have to admit that. Besides, he probably had his hands full with Doctor Octopus and his crew right then. Calling him now would almost be a waste of his time at this point... right?
Sorry, Peter, she thought. The Birds are back in town. Looks like the new Oracle/Spider-Man team's calling it quits.
NEXT: ~~Sinister / Secret~~ Tinker, Tailor, Huntress, Spider
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When Spidey Met Oracle