Natasha didn't show up for my training. She had been permanently reassigned to another mission, and in return I got...David. The creepiest son of a bitch I have ever met.
I still remember the day I met him.
I was waiting in the boardroom of the bunker when the elevator doors opened and a buff black man stepped out. He looked mean, tough, and serious. He looked at me and glared at my feet resting on the desk.
"If you're going to be an agent of SHIELD, you will come to represent us in everything you do. Meaning this," he knocked my feet off the table, "is not appropriate."
I raised an eyebrow. "Hi, I'm Peter. And you are?"
He grunted. "David."
"Just David?"
"Yes," he nodded, sitting down next to me. "Agent Romanoff has informed me of your training. Frankly, it's appalling. You take everything as a joke and you lack focus."
"I'm a 15-year-old genius, give me a break," I huffed.
"Your intelligence is the only reason I even have hope of turning you into a proper agent," David grunted. He opened my file. "You have disobeyed orders, gone rogue, tried to post a video of a corrupt senator on your Twitter account, and have insulted the Director several times."
I shrugged. "And?"
"And the only reason I'm even here is because I obey orders," he snarled. "I don't like you, Parker, not one bit. But I'll train you, because that's my job. And when we're done, hopefully I can make an agent out of you yet."
I raised an eyebrow. "I'm going to enjoy making your life hell."
He just glared back. "I'd like to see you try."
I smiled back. Oh, did he come to regret those words.
The months quickly went by and I continued my life as a crime-fighting badass. I was super active online — my Twitter was always blowing up, and I kept posting the most amazing pictures of the city on my Instagram that no one else could get.
People were backing me up online. Every time I stopped a criminal, I would report it to the NYPD Twitter account. My pictures brought out the artistic side of me, and people were genuinely surprised that a superhero had such a normal hobby. I guess that humanised me a bit.
Eventually, though, I had my first encounter with JJJ and the Daily Bugle. All this time they had been silent on the Spider-Man front, but one day I woke up to find #FakeHero trending, with people linking me to it.
JJJ had gone on a rant the night before, saying I wasn't a hero — just a glory-seeking kid. He wrote:
BugleJJJ: The day we glorify a teenager with a camera and ropes coming out of his wrists is the day we fail as a nation.
And I, of course, replied:
TheAmazingSpider: Yeah, I'm not listening to advice about being a hero from a guy with a Hitler moustache. @BugleJJJ
And people went nuts.
BURN!
Dude, you just pissed off a guy who tries to be nice to everyone — how big of a douche are you?
This just in: for the first time ever, the Spider crushes the newspaper.
That last one really made me laugh. I even retweeted it. Yep, the 21st century really was a place of wonders. Someone was nasty to you? You could talk to them directly and in public. It was genuinely amazing. JJ did reply something back, but I never really bothered reading it.
I did spend some time getting used to my new powers. The bio-electrical blasts I could now produce were amazing, to say the least. It was like my body was a living conductor. I even modified my suit so that I could transfer energy from the Parker blood directly into me from the suit — or vice versa.
I found I could vary the intensity of my electrical output. I could stun someone, shock them, or supercharge it enough to blast people clean off their feet. And if I really wanted to cause damage, I could fry them from the inside out, just like Electro. I even found that I could absorb a certain amount of electricity into my body without much harm — it even replenished my energy levels a little.
I also worked on my pheromones. So far, I could only detect and identify them, not produce them the way Jessica Drew could. Maybe I needed to keep working on that, but I was treading new territory here.
Apart from my powers and training, I also worked on my tech. The Chitauri were coming — I didn't know exactly when, but I needed to be ready, and that meant upgrades.
The first thing I did was make the entire suit system voice-activated. I configured it to respond only to my voice and linked it to all the suit's systems. I could have gone further and built a full AI for the suit, but I wasn't confident enough with software for that, and the last thing I needed was a snarky digital assistant yelling in my head while I was fighting crime.
I also worked on the helmet, adding a zoom function to the lenses — I'd definitely need that later on.
I decided to take a few pages from Batman's playbook and create gadgets I could carry into the field. The first challenge was designing a utility belt that wouldn't get in the way when I was swinging or fighting. It was tricky, but I managed it by sewing the compartments directly into the lines of my suit.
I made a few shurikens shaped like eight-legged spiders, coloured red. Johnny really didn't understand why I'd need those, but I ignored him. They just made me feel cool.
I made a few more items I knew I'd need: a gun that fired pellets of liquid nitrogen, a spray gun loaded with expanding foam, several bugs for surveillance and tracking, a couple of smoke bombs, and — just in case — a scaled-down EMP emitter.
Unfortunately, I couldn't fit anything more into the suit without throwing off my balance.
So then I moved on to my final project: Doc Ock's arms. By this point, Otto had patented his design, so I couldn't just copy them outright — it would make me look bad, and I didn't like copying someone else's work anyway. I decided to build my own version from scratch.
Using the basic principles of Otto's tech as a foundation, I began developing my own set of arms. They would fit onto my back like a pack. I had Reed help out with the initial structural designs, but the rest I handled myself — thank God for Parker's genius.
The suit would house two pairs of arms: one set on top, one below. Each arm was triple-jointed and capable of rotating a full 360 degrees. I designed them for two purposes: attack and defence. The arms were constructed from reinforced titanium, letting me use them to block incoming attacks as well as pierce ten feet of concrete if needed. I also hollowed out the interior slightly so I could launch web lines out of the tips, allowing me to swing using the arms instead of relying on my real hands.
Getting the arms to collapse back into the pack was the hardest part, but geometry came to my rescue. I was able to get each arm to four feet in length before the pack could no longer contain them — hopefully that would be enough.
I integrated the pack directly into my main suit. Now, instead of hanging loose like cloth, when the arms weren't in use the suit would collapse into the arm pack, forming a compact bundle of fabric and machinery. All I had to do was activate it and the costume would explode outwards, ready to wear.
I worked on the outside of the pack as well, allowing it to change colour — it went black when inactive, red when active. It looked fairly ordinary from the outside, so I decided to make it functional as one too, adding a zip and a collapsible strap so it could be worn like a messenger bag. An unusually large messenger bag. But since I never really used my school bag for more than a few books, it would do fine.
Funding all these upgrades did cost money, of course — money I luckily made from the sale of the SA and PB on the open market.
While the SA wasn't exactly flying off shelves — mostly due to the price point and limited interest — I was making some revenue from it. But the real windfall was the PB. When it was introduced to the market, Stark Industries, Oscorp, and a large number of major tech firms sent their representatives to the Baxter Building to negotiate licensing deals.
Sue was genuinely tempted by Oscorp's offer — twenty million a year for exclusive rights was serious money. But I warned her about Norman, told her I didn't trust him, and that Reed and I had found evidence of him being involved in some shady dealings connected to Hammer tech.
So Sue, reluctantly, turned down the offer. Instead, she allowed the technology to be licensed to multiple companies simultaneously. The individual offers were significantly lower — everyone always wanted the competitive edge — but it was more than enough to fund the Baxter Building's operations and my suit upgrades.
And my suit wasn't the only one I was working on.
A week after the child kidnapping and experimentation mission, Fury sent me a care package. Inside was a women's SHIELD-issue tactical suit, along with a note:
Don't make me regret this.
Sadly, I was one hundred percent sure he would.
I upgraded the suit straight away, adding an extra layer of protection by isolating the lining and fitting it with suction gloves and soles that replicated my wall-crawling ability. I also built a grapple gun and threw in a couple of smoke bombs.
For the domino mask, I went a little overboard and fitted it with night-vision lenses, a zoom function, and UV detection. It came out as a thick pair of cat-eye shaped goggles — opaque from the outside, perfectly transparent from within.
Then I made a few aesthetic changes to the costume itself. I couldn't help it — I really, really loved the classic Black Cat look. When it was ready, I swung over to Felicia's place to surprise her, knocking on her window.
Felicia looked up from her computer and blinked when she saw me waving at her from outside. She quickly opened the window and let me in. "Tiger? What are you doing here?"
"I came to give you this," I said, handing her the black briefcase.
Felicia looked surprised. She carefully opened it and gasped at what she saw. "Peter, did you make this?"
I took off my mask and shrugged. "More or less. The base suit came from Fury, but I tricked it out and gave you a few extra toys."
"Oh my God, you shouldn't have!" Felicia cried out, lifting the costume and looking it over. "It's amazing, Peter! It's — it has white fur around the neck."
I blushed. "Yeah, I, uh, kind of got carried away. Figured you should lean into the whole cat theme you have going on. Go on, try it."
Felicia nodded as she set the case down and began to change. I smiled at the sight of my girlfriend as she slipped into the costume and zipped herself up.
"Wow," she breathed, looking herself over. "This is incredible!"
And it was. The suit hugged her impressive figure, accentuating her curves while subtly concealing the tactical armour built into the lining. There was a strip of white fur around the neck and her forearms, but nothing excessive.
"Peter, this is amazing," Felicia said, looking at herself in the mirror. She turned to check the back and stared. "Peter...did you make it tight around my backside on purpose?"
I grinned. "I was going to deny it and make up some excuse about how the suit came that way...but yeah, I totally did. Sue me."
Felicia rolled her eyes. "Horny bastard."
"Indeed I am," I smiled. "Here, try these on." I handed her the goggles.
She slipped them on and blinked in surprise. "Cool."
"Yep, and I'm not done." I took out the last piece of tech — a black clip that fitted snugly over the top of her head.
"What does it do..." she stopped as her silver-blonde hair suddenly turned pitch black. She gasped. "What?"
"It's something I had Sue help me build. It basically makes people perceive your hair as black," I explained.
"But...why?"
I smiled, running my hands through her now-dark locks. "Kitten, I love you, and I love your hair. But it's iconic — really iconic. I figured out who you were because of it, because of how distinctive it is. And if you're going after your mother's clients, it's only a matter of time before they figure it out too."
Felicia's eyes went wide. "You're right. Oh, how could I have been so careless!" She threw her hands up. "I knew I should have worn a wig, but it was impossible to keep in place while moving!"
I laughed. "Relax, Kitten — nobody's got a decent photo of you yet. Everything's fine. You just need to 'accidentally' let yourself be photographed with dark hair, so the idea of the Black Cat being a brunette takes root. If you want, I can even post a picture of me chasing you on Twitter."
Felicia blinked as it slowly sank in. "Yeah...yeah, that could work!" She jumped at me. I caught her as she wrapped her legs around my waist and threw her arms around my neck, kissing me deeply.
She pulled back and whispered, "This is incredible, Tiger. Thank you."
"You're welcome, Kitten. Happy Valentine's Day," I smiled.
Felicia's eyes went wide. "What?!" She snapped her head toward her calendar and found it was still a week before Valentine's Day. "But there's a week left!"
I shrugged. "I know. Just wanted to give you your gift a little early, lover." I smirked and kissed her on the lips, lifting her onto the bed and climbing on top of her.
"Oh, you are so going to get some tonight," Felicia purred in my ear.
I bit her neck. "Damn right." My hands moved across her, and I reached up to slowly pull down the zip of her suit, stopping halfway and taking a moment to appreciate the view.
February came and went. On Valentine's Day, Felicia surprised me with a trip to Disneyland — a place she knew I had never been. I was thrilled and she knew it. She ended the day with a quiet evening at her place, where we cuddled, talked, and later decided to make the most of the night on our own.