[for Felicia] he wore black and I wore white

[daretodo]

On those nights I go out in costume, not only am I careful to stick to low traffic areas, but I'm more careful still to make sure I'm not followed. Without my spider-sense to warn me, I can't rely on instinct alone to ensure I don't give myself away, but given that I tend to spend most of my nighttime 'training' high up in the trees, there's not much risk of being spotted until I inevitably have to make my way back to the ground -- intentionally, or otherwise.

Losing my footing on a branch slicked with ice as I head on down, I save myself from a concussion with a well-timed -- if not especially well-aimed -- webline shot up into a neighboring tree, sending me swinging just a few inches above the ground, my feet grazing untouched snow for the few seconds it takes before my webbing snaps, and I land on my back in an extraordinarily cold heap.

With a groan and a few choice muttered curses, I roll over to get up onto my knees, surprised to find an audience, though the glimpse I catch Cat's familiar white-blonde hair reflecting under the low light of the moon sets me at ease enough that I don't immediately make a bolt for it. Other than Mary Jane, there's no one else who knows I've started doing this again, and I'd really like to keep it that way, for her safety more so than my own.

Brushing myself off -- and boy, that's gonna hurt in the morning, I'm telling you now -- I do my best Alec Guiness impersonation by saying, "These so aren't the droids you're looking for."

Comments

[crossyourpath.livejournal.com]

"That's not the line and you know it, Spider," Felicia says with a laugh. There's a roll of the eyes too, but everyone knows that line so her slip of geekery is nothing to make a fuss about.

It doesn't surprise her to see him out and about like this. The restlessness is something she can relate to. Maybe it is the snow, maybe it's the lack of crime to fight and cheating spouses to keep tabs on, but there are times when she's pretty certain that she might just loose her edge all together. That feeling had gotten worse since Halloween when one of her big secrets, one of the fears that woke her up in the middle of the night had been laid bare for a stranger to see. Couple that with the fact that her one year anniversary had just past and she's amped to a level akin to a cat on a hot tin roof.

Tugging on the edge of her gloves before reaching up and switching her earrings on, she smiles. "It's a good night for this."

[daretodo]

"What, almost breaking my back?" I quip, jumping up to catch a low hanging branch to pull myself up onto. These booties of mine really don't offer much protection against the elements, and I'll be a whole lot warmer if I don't have to stand around in the snow. "Yeah, the moonlight would've made all the pain totally worth it, you're right."

[crossyourpath.livejournal.com]

“Well,” Felicia starts as she stretches her arms above her head, rocking onto the balls of her feet. This sort of weather has a way of making her appreciate her choice in footwear. When not breaking into vaults or other laser-guarded things there was no need to run around in slippers. Imagine the damage that could happen if something fell on her feet. That’d put her out of business in a way that being on an island hadn’t quite managed.

“It does add a sort of romantic tint. Through in some wailing, operatic score and you’ve got all the makings of an award-winning crisis. It’d be a heck of a film, especially if you did the long-stare, single tear thing.” A grin spreads across her face. “I’d watch it. Heck, I’d even pay.”

[daretodo]

"To watch little ol' me shed a single tear?" I ask, pressing a hand to my chest in an appropriately dramatic fashion once I'm properly seated on the branch, my legs swinging. "Why, Cat, I'm touched."

[crossyourpath.livejournal.com]

"As you should be. I only break out the good stuff for you Spider," she says with a grin and a wink before running and leaping to grab a lower branch. Felicia knows that she's out of practice and she has no one to blame but herself. Swinging herself up so that she can rest on the branch, she swings her legs and cracks her knuckles. "So what brings you out and about? Are you sleep walking?"

[daretodo]

"Might as well be, for how slow it feels like I'm moving," I say, shooting her a wry grin that goes unseen from under my mask. For a second, it feels like old times again, but the dull ache resonating throughout my body reminds me in no uncertain terms that that is decidedly not the case. "But no, I've been, uh, picking up some old habits again, I guess. It seemed... prudent."

[crossyourpath.livejournal.com]

"You know what they say about old habits..." Felicia smirks slightly, still swinging her legs. She's got her mask on, less out of a need to hide her identity and more for the added bonus of being able to see where she is going in the dark. The island doesn't have nearly enough light that would keep her from unceremoniously tripping over a branch or something.

"But yeah. I feel you on that."

[daretodo]

"After the year I've had, I'm probably due for a break from the universe, but I'm the sort of optimist who packs an umbrella," I say, fingers curling around the branch so I can lean back a little, stretch. "What about you -- just feeling nostalgic, or what?"

[crossyourpath.livejournal.com]

"Isn't that a realist?"

Felicia is not that sort of optimist. In fact, she's not much an optimist at all. She's a realist to the core. She knows that it might rain, she also knows it might pour, so she takes the time to know the weather and still turn out prepared. There's nothing wrong with that. If anything, it's the sort of thing that more people might benefit from doing.

"Nah, just antsy. I can't sit still for that long. I'd go out of my head."

[daretodo]

"Don't I know the feeling," I say, a little wry and a little weary. I've really had one heck of a long year -- not the busiest I've had by a long shot, but maybe that makes it all the worse, knowing that all that downtime I had to recover from both Osborn and Stark had been a necessary part of the process instead of a perk.

"But it's great, getting out again. I mean, I'd take a concrete jungle over this Whoville stuff any day, but this sure as heck beats reading in the clinic for months on end."

[crossyourpath.livejournal.com]

Spreading her arms, Felicia falls backwards so that she is dangling from the tree branch by her hooked legs. It is akin to be seven again, except in a tree instead on the monkey bars and surprisingly sans breathing monkeys given the locale.

"Not to mention the part where I am certain that Red and your doctors are glad to not have you wheeling around, sitting still and thinking about things. And then there's the whole 'no broken bones' thing. That's got to help."

[daretodo]

Anyone else might have a moment of panic, watching her pull a move like that, but I'm not anyone else. Even now she's graceful, effortless, making it look all so easy while I can feel my body protest at every move I make. Without my powers, I have to work at being effortless, to being fluid. Muscle memory can only take me so far when those muscles are used to being so much stronger. I'll get there, someday, but it'll take a lot more nights like this before I can hold a candle to what I used to do.

"God, if I never break another bone again, it'll be too soon," I say, wincing with the memory of it. "How you managed back home, 'Licia, I've got no idea. 'Cause, I mean, maybe I wasn't exactly Wolverine, but my even my healing factor was better than none, jeez. Everything's just so... slow, here, even when it's hectic."

[crossyourpath.livejournal.com]

Felicia’s had years to practice this sort of stuff. Before her mutation was activated (and even after it was turned off) she had prided herself on being able to make the hard stuff look easy. Her motivation might not always have been so pure when it to being limber, but right now it was better than being plagued with stiff muscles and joints. This place might be lacking a lot of things that she loved, she isn’t about to give it up so easily.

“Easy,” she says with a wicked grin, hair still hanging in her face as she counts to three before twisting herself around until she is upright once more. “I didn’t break bones. Okay, that’s not true and you know it, but there’s something about women having a higher pain tolerance and...yeah. That. Let’s just go with that.”

[daretodo]

"I was gonna say," I tell her, my expression dubious under my mask, though I'm sure she can hear it, even if she can't see it. I've sat at her bedside more than once, after all, because as skilled as she is, the bad guys we went up against weren't always slouches. There's a difference in watching her play around in the trees than there was watching her go head-to-head with my rogues gallery, an assurance of knowing she'll be alright that wouldn't necessarily be there back home.

"I hadn't broken a bone without my powers since I was a kid before showing up here." I wait a beat, then add, almost defensively, "But my pain tolerance is still perfectly high, thank you very much. It's everyone else telling me it isn't. Only difference from back home is that the pain lasts longer."

[crossyourpath.livejournal.com]

He might be wearing a mask, but Felicia knows exactly which look she's on the receiving end of. There are only so many that Spider has in his arsenal that are relevant at times like these and she's been on the receiving end of them all. But like the saying goes, sticks and stones and all of that. She's a big girl and sure her insurance premiums had been through the roof, she'd survived. The nine lives thing had only been a fortunate coincidence.

"And that, my friend," Felicia pauses for both dramatic effect and to crack her knuckles. "Is the kicker. I've got every faith that your pain threshold is golden, but those lingering aches are where it really sucks. You feel about a hundred years old for weeks."

[daretodo]

"Or most of a year," I admit, huffing out a sigh. Letting my knees do the bulk of the work, I allow myself to fall back so that I'm hanging upside down, then stretch out my arms over -- under? -- my head.

"Strange to think you've been here about that long. Your islandversary's right about... Now, isn't it?"

The exact date escapes me, but in my defense, I had a lot going on at the time, what with Osborn and just getting back together with MJ.

[crossyourpath.livejournal.com]

"Okay, that's just sad."

It doesn't make it any less true, but there is something about thinking of it in terms of a year that makes it just seem bad. She always knew that Spider had this tendency to get his ass whupped with an alarming frequency and still manage to come out on top. Guess it took having powers zapped out of everyone for it to really sink in that he should be living in a wheelchair.

Letting out a low whistle, she grimmaces. "I know, right? I'm supposed to be rolling back in the city right now. Or married with a kid on the way in Portland or something weird like that."

[daretodo]

I almost fall. It's about the last thing I'm expecting to leave her mouth, such a blatant reminder of my first wife, my unborn child. It's hard to think sometimes that I'm not even thirty and already on my second marriage. That I'm not even thirty and already I've lost a baby. I've suffered so many losses in my lifetime, probably more than anyone else I know, but even though I've moved on from them all, pushed through the pain and despair, every last one still hurts when I stop to think of them. Not all wounds are healed by time.

Yet Felicia mentions it so casually that I wonder if she even realizes what she's just gone and said. I'm too winded to ask. And so, caught entirely off guard, I do what I do best -- I make a quick exit. Letting myself drop from the branch, I do a flip in midair, landing in a messy crouch in the snow, and promptly shoot off a webline to get me out of here ASAP.

"Yeah, weird. Look, it's been nice catching up, Cat, but uh, I just remembered something," I say hastily, taking a running jump. "See you around."

[crossyourpath.livejournal.com]

Watching him flee like something has come up and decided to beat him up right then and there, Felicia frowns. This isn't exactly the most unsurprising end of a conversation, especially not between them.

Waving lamely after him, she wracks her brain for what exactly could have set him off. It's a second too late that it clicks how her lame joke could have sounded.

"Well then," she says to herself before jumping to another tree branch. Thankfully she's never been the anniversary celebrating type or this would have wounded her ego.