Chapter 2
Above Parker's head, John Singer Sargent's Madame X glanced over a nearly bare shoulder. After an outry at the 1884 Salon Sargent had repainted the strap so that it no longer dangled salaciously from her shoulder, but Stark Industries' patented X-ray tool could clearly show the original iteration on a hologram readout, like a ghost of intent. Naturally Stark preferred the original. If it'd been him, he'd have hung it from his mansion door to scandalize all the Gilded Age passerby.
At the time that Sargent had sold the painting to the Metropolitan, he'd confessed to the museum director that he supposed it was his best work. But was he referring to the painting as it was, or what he'd originally intended it to be?
Back when Parker was a more conciliatory man (and he had been, once) he'd expressed understanding of the societal pressure which had forced Sargent's hand. Tony used to think that was the difference between him and the kid: Tony flaunted his defiance and Parker made amends, even at the cost of their self-respect.
Maybe, at some point, Tony came to take that for granted.
Parker stood in the center of the gallery with arms folded. He looked like a movie prop in this Spider-Man getup. Today he wore the black suit emblazoned with a white spider, which Tony hadn't seen in years.
“What happened to the old red-and-blue?” asked Tony with a sideways look. He still just wore his Tom Ford suit. Its gold Iron Man helmet-shaped cufflinks had been a present from the Secretary of State. The current one.
“It's in the shop,” Parker said cryptically, yawning to pop one ear. “Cosmetic repairs.”
“You look like the American flag gone outlaw.”
That had sort of been the point, Tony recalled now. If suits were moods, the black one represented Spider-Man in an uncommonly vigilante state of mind.
“Don't read into it,” said Parker.
Nearby, one of the museum curators flitted nervously around, sneaking covert looks at them.
Easier said than done. Spider-Man hadn't been seen wearing the black suit in a long time. Its flat, intimidating silhouette tended to unsettle people; it reminded them what a person with Spider-Man's powers could become if they chose. It even unnerved Tony a little, because he remembered a black suit from another time when Peter Parker wasn't entirely himself.
The kid might have adopted the arachnid as a kind of moniker, but had never really taken it to heart in a way that alienated the squeamish. The usual red-and-blue was sanitizing, making him accessible and friendly; or at least it kept the idea of real spiders, sneaking in dark corners, at arm's length.
“You back up your hard drive, but not your suit?” Tony said out the side of his mouth.
Parker rolled his eyes. “I've been kind of burning through suits. Give me a break. What's the big deal? Black is slimming.”
Yeah, he'd look great for the evening clickbait. Tony glanced back at the hovering curator.
“What's even the point of stealing a Botticelli now?” wondered Parker, letting his gaze roam around the gallery and its adjoining rooms. “Don't most art thefts end in a ransom or finding the painting in some farmhouse? Fencing art isn't as easy as people think it is.”
True—forgeries tended to yield more profit than did theft, at least until less invasive carbon dating had gradually emerged—but it also wasn't quite as impossible as other people thought it was. Those who would steal works valued at a high dollar would usually settle for selling them at a lesser amount, the kind of price someone who didn't feel the need to flaunt their wealth or collection could be willing to pay. The Botticelli might be worth a hundred million, but plenty would easily be willing to steal it for half or even a third of that.
There was also the possibility of a ransom, though no demands had been made by the thief as yet.
“Can we see the conservation lab?” Tony asked the curator, a small, round man with a deceptively low timbre. “...um, Jim?” He'd been making an effort to remember names lately.
“George,” corrected the curator automatically, before he remembered who he was talking to. “But Jim works too. It's an underrated name, don't you think? Classic. Um, this way.”
He gestured for them to follow. Parker trailed them like a wraith. In the wake of the theft the museum had restricted its hours for the remainder of the week, and they mostly had the place to themselves.
Too innocently, Parker asked Jim—that is, George: “How's the Degas?”
“The Degas is fine,” the bespectacled curator said fitfully. “The ballerina remains in arabesque.”
Fine it would remain, if the bulked-up security was anything to go by. Out of a desire to placate the Met, Stark had lent their security guards “neutralizing agents” that could suspend would-be Thomas Crowns in midair if they so much as coughed in a painting's direction.
Purely to annoy Parker, Tony folded his hands behind his back and wondered aloud: “You think the Degas theft was a distraction for the real heist?”
George wrung his hands and kept glancing over his shoulder to address the billionaire. “The insurance detective says it could have been a crime of opportunity, but that's an awfully weird coincidence, isn't it?”
Tony felt Parker glaring at his back. MJ had given Tony a Cliff Notes rundown of the Other Prowler's role in that evening, but Parker had yet to sit Iron Man down for a postmortem on what had happened since. Tony did not seriously suspect Davis had anything to do with the Botticelli, but he knew Parker would be sensitive about his part in the fiasco and it'd been too long since he'd riled up the kid just because he could.
Part of Tony still had trouble believing Spider-Man was really in the same room, cooperating. Prodding at the kid was one way to confirm he was still there.
“I mean, one idiot in a cape couldn't have stolen both paintings at the same time,” the stressed George continued to muse.
“No, I think at least two idiots and a cape were involved,” drawled Tony.
Against Parker's near-silent padding across the stone floor, Tony's handmade shoes clicked with reassuring authority. George led them around galleries and through primly industrial sets of doors, down a flight of steps to the Met's cluster of conservation labs.
Someone would have had to be lingering in the vicinity, to get in and out in the space of time the Prowler had the Degas hostage. “Don't you need security passes to get through here?” Tony asked as George fumbled for his own badge and held it to the black blister flanking one set of doors.
“Yes, but whatever knocked the cameras out did the same for the locking systems,” said George. He looked upset. “They all defaulted to an unlocked state. Only the security alarms functioned. Even the registers in the gift shop went down.” Doubtless George had to answer for that too.
Tony dropped behind and murmured to Parker, “Was that on purpose?”
Parker squirmed. “The AnVoid is still a work in progress, okay? Maybe the virus got ahead of itself. But I definitely didn't think both the camera and locking mechanisms were on the same system—”
“The AnVoid?” Tony whispered as scathingly as he dared, with George so near. “You call it the AnVoid?”
Defensively, Parker said: “MJ gets it. And I was only trying to knock out the cameras so it's kind of your fault too, Mr. Security Contract, for bundling all the systems together on the network—”
He stopped short as George peered back at them, before Tony got the chance to shoot back that he hadn't bundled the systems, Parker's virus had just leapt from one network to another like electricity firing between neurons.
On some level Tony was actually impressed. He'd assumed Parker had let his tech skills go to seed as much as he'd let everything else.
Tony didn't know what conservation labs generally looked like but he assumed the antiseptic block George led them to was state of the art. Two of the techs were present. One woman dabbed at an Impressionist work almost tenderly, while the other, a man, stepped back to scrutinize a painting Tony couldn't place but had the vague look of something from one of those wild-eyed Rococo artists.
“Sotheby's outsources some of their conservation work to us,” said George gloomily, holding the door open. “Not sure if they'll keep doing that.”
If Sotheby's thought their security system rivaled the Met's, backed by Tony Stark, they were kidding themselves. Freak crimes of opportunity might expose cracks in the foundation, but they didn't bring the bridge down. The Met's conservation lab was hardly short of a vault.
Both the techs turned, interested by the newcomers. George motioned to them. “These are our chief conservators, Wendy Jeong and Martin Koppelman. They had been working on the Botticelli, but they were off the clock that night.”
“We were at the party,” said Wendy, peeling off her gloves to shake their hands. She had a neat bob, and her reading glasses dangled from a stylish strand of small pearls. “All in all, the hors d'oeuvres weren't worth the fuss.”
Tony grinned but possibly George thought it too cavalier, because after catching his eye Wendy and Martin quickly adopted funereal expressions.
Tony was used to this kind of attitude reversal upon an Avenger's arrival on the scene. Whatever Parker's accusations of years past, Iron Man actually tended to diffuse the problem. Earth's Mightiest Heroes had saved the world enough to merit a little street credit, and when the Avengers' gazes dropped to street-level concerns, everyone accepted their involvement with the relief of people who considered their hands washed of the problem.
The curator's phone buzzed. He examined the caller ID anxiously before muttering, “Oh, I have to take this... so help me God, I would have thought his voice had gone hoarse by now...”
The curator ducked through the double doors in search of better reception, reminding Tony uncannily of the white rabbit from Alice in Wonderland.
Both the conservation techs' sympathetic gazes followed George out the doors.
“It was due to go on exhibition next month,” said Wendy conspiratorially, clasping her hands. Tony knew this already and strolled around the perimeters of the lab. Most of the tech was stuff he'd lobbed their way. “Just for a few weeks, give the donors a sniff before it went to auction at Sotheby's. That's why they keep calling to scream at George.”
“Auction?” asked Parker, taken aback. “A Botticelli? Um—I thought he was a pretty big deal? Isn't it, I mean—”
“Gauche to action off an Old Master like cattle stock?” Martin supplied with a frank smile.
Parker scrambled for something more tactful. “Well, wouldn't it normally just...hang in a museum?”
The balding tech smiled more broadly and adjusted his thick-rimmed glasses. He had a wide, stretching mouth with lines etched permanently at the corners, as though chiseled there by grimaces and smiles in equal measure. “People can and do pay a lot for the plaque, but there are some who want to have more than a footnote in the painting's guest registry.” He rolled his eyes. Clearly he considered his job to revolve solely around the art itself, and not the high rollers who had the most access to it.
Wendy nodded and brought her glasses back up. Tony got the impression they enjoyed the gossip. A lot of people who worked in glorified basements did. “A lot of buyers now want legacy items,” she said, “you know, paintings they can pass down through generations. The Botticelli generated a ton of interest, because it didn't surface until the 1970's. And it only became available last year.”
“Botticelli destroyed a number of his own works at Savonarola's bonfire of the vanities in 1497,” added Martin. His tone was dry. “An infamy which struck down many paintings of the time. The bonfire was where 'decadent' works went to die. You know the Birth of Venus, yes? His most famous. Intended for a marital bed. The ones he burned all had some mythological subject. This stolen painting escaped the fires, making it one of his last surviving secular works.”
“And you're sure it's real?” said Tony. He waved his hand. “It was definitely authentic? Because if I'm actually covering security for hack jobs over kindergartners' finger paintings...”
It was his security contract, the artworks had damn well better be legitimate.
Martin gave a wide, wry smile. “Yes, thanks to you, in part. It's difficult to carbon-date paintings,” he told a Spider-Man he didn't realize knew all this already, “because it has historically required far too much product to sample. Authentication mainly relied on expert opinion and testing the support materials and pigments for period accuracy. But now we can get a reliable radiocarbon date with microsamples, and with the Stark Industries x-ray—other models can't penetrate the paint layers past a certain degree, not without incurring some damage—we can look all the way back to a painting's birth.”
“Here,” Wendy said brightly, beckoning them over to a side room. She held her pass up to the door and they entered an outer observation room looking in at a booth, where an abstract painting was propped up like a forgotten picture left up in the attic.
Wendy tapped at the monitor station and stood back as the machine pointing at the painting hummed as if in thought, then projected an image of the canvas in perfect detail. “And here,” said Wendy, adjusting her glasses on her nose, “is a previous iteration.” She tapped at a button in the air and a layer of the image stripped away, as though peeling back the skin. Streaks of paint suddenly shifted, revealing a version of the canvas which had been repainted. She tapped another, and the paint shifted again, to an even earlier version.
To Tony's eye, whatever effect the abstraction had from one version to the next looked about the same and he couldn't see why the artist had bothered to repaint. Pepper might have understood.
“Most of the Old Master paintings have a bunch of layers,” said Wendy with satisfaction. “Artists recycled their bases all the time. They changed compositions, lighting, even subjects. One of the Vermeer portraits has got a half-finished still life beneath. You can see a lobster beneath the guy's ruffles.” She bounced her hands around her neck to indicate a lacy, frothy collar. “If a painting supposedly from the Early Renaissance were to show no previous work on the canvas or board, if it was just a perfect single layer, it'd be another indication of a forgery.”
“And how many layers did the Botticelli have?” asked Tony, hoping he didn't sound bored.
“Four clearly distinct paintings, in various stages of incompletion,” said Martin. “And the microsamples were bonafide. A genuine Botticelli. It's very exciting.”
Then he and Wendy seemed to remember at the same time that that very exciting Botticelli painting might be rotting in a sewer even then, and all the Avengers and all the king's men might not find that painting again. Their smiles died.
George returned in a fluster once they'd reentered the main lab. “News crews got wind you're here.” He stabbed at his phone and mopped his forehead with a handkerchief. “Mind reassuring them? My job security would thank you.”
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Tony wasn't sure how grateful George's job security would really be.
As he'd predicted, once Iron Man and Spider-Man stepped outside together a gaggle of reporters swarmed up to them from Fifth Avenue. One even abandoned the hot dog cart he'd been about to patronize, leaving the bald, bespectacled cart owner indignantly holding a self-microwaving hot dog in his hand.
There was a time when entertainment news would have paid top dollar for a shot of Tony Stark in the Iron Man suit. But once they'd cottoned on that Tony hatched those suits like eggs and frequently sent them out like drones to do his bidding, the price of eggs dropped.
Tony stopped at the top of a short flight of steps fronting the Met. To his slight surprise, Parker stuck around. He'd gotten used to the kid swinging off at the first chance.
The reporters took notice.
“Are you both investigating the heist?” said one guy. He was practically chewing on the mic. “Why are two of the world's most famous heroes collaborating now, after a decade apart?”
“Is there some mystery to the painting?” asked a woman breathlessly.
Clearly they didn't buy this was a bonafide heist investigation, not when super heroes typically chased chaos on the galactic scale. Another one shouted from the back: “Does the painting have some secret cipher, or like—”
“This isn't The Da Vinci Code,” Tony said scathingly, to no one's interest.
Decades of idiotic schemes had totally desensitized the average person to what was truly ridiculous anymore.
“Does it have some kind of, um, alien pigment in the oils? Is it radioactive?” pressed one reporter breathlessly.
Spider-Man's eyes narrowed and he raised a finger to his chin. “Well, I can't be certain that it's not.”
Was he having fun with this? Tony scowled. Since when did Parker have fun?
One reporter Tony recognized as the Bugle's new shield maiden. Yehia's strong, dark brows and hooked nose lent her an intimidating stare she'd learned to use to her advantage. She eyed the pair of heroes critically, then focused on Parker and asked, “What statement are you making with the black suit? Is this a response to Beatrice Risdall's declaration last week?”
“No,” said Parker, confused, and missing Tony's sharp warning look, he asked: “What declaration?”
Yehia's eyebrows shot up. “That the age of the vigilante is over,” said the reporter blandly, staring up at him.
Parker tensed.
Tony's eyes drifted over the rubbernecking crowds milling on the other side of Fifth Avenue. Even those who couldn't immediately pick out Tony Stark's face from across the street stopped at the sight of the white spider sprawling across Spider-Man's chest. Evidently Parker had caught up very selectively on the headlines he'd missed on his inter-dimensional sojourn.
“The State Assembly announced their intent to introduce a bill limiting the Good Samaritan laws protecting vigilante work,” said Yehia, slowly. She'd lowered her microphone a fraction and was watching him closely. “You must have been really undercover.”
Parker, caught off guard, struggled to sound nonchalant. “The mask,” he said meaningfully, waving his gloved hand over the span of his head, “helps with that.”
The reporter pressed, “Since Matt Murdock unmasked five years ago, Spider-Man has operated as the principal solo act in New York City."
"Well, it helps he can be his own legal counsel."
"Vigilantism has substantially dropped in practice. You're about the only anonymous crime-fighter left.”
“What about Deadpool?” wondered one cameraman aloud.
Yehia spared him a haughty look. “He's not a vigilante. He's a miscreant.”
“I'll say,” muttered Parker.
She turned her attention back to him. “Do you feel this legislation is targeting you specifically?”
“Don't flatter me,” said Spider-Man, with unconvincing cheer. “Who'd go to all that trouble for lil' old me?”
Yehia said, “The state representatives.”
“Spider-Man offered his assistance,” Tony interrupted with a thin smile, gesturing to the friendly neighborhood menace. “Why turn it down?”
The reporter did not appear convinced. “So right before Burns's Avengers retrospective is supposed to come out, you two just happen to show up to the same crime scene and make nice?”
Tony scoffed and said scornfully: “Don't overestimate how much TV I watch.”
Of course, she probably underestimated how much TV Parker watched. As long as the retrospective didn't interrupt pro wrestling or nature documentaries, however, Parker was likelier to miss it.
Tony then employed several of the deflective conversational maneuvers he'd developed over the years to wiggle out from press, and steered Parker away from the growing throng. He wished he could duck his growing foreboding so easily.
“Gee, I'm gone for a few days and everyone's ready to dropkick me into the Hudson,” complained Parker. “I've been at this twenty-two years and now it's trendy to complain about the mask again?”
That trend had been gaining traction ever since the last unmasking, Tony could have told him. Spider-Man had intentionally kept himself out of the loop by keeping his head down and sticking to bodega patrols and Goobers. But Tony didn't want to disrupt whatever fragile equilibrium their partnership had found in the last couple of hours.
The Accords had not lasted that long as originally written, but a more sprawling reconstruction of hero work had replaced them. Formal agencies, government contracts, and public opinion had chipped away at previous incentives to remain a vigilante. Why swing around in a mask, risking your neck, when you could do it with premium health insurance and paid benefits? What the Accords had not managed to force, convenience and practicality had overcome.
Ahead, Tony's Lamborghini idled in a VIP spot.
“What, you didn't take the suit?” shouted a distant reporter, who'd glanced back on the way to his own news truck.
“Yeah, how's its gas mileage nowadays?” asked Parker.
“Something tells me you are not taking this seriously,” said Tony.
“C'mon, man. How often do I get to deal with something like this? I never get to have fun anymore.” Parker waved his hand around and shrugged. “No one's dead, no one's hurt.”
“Truly a departure in tradition," Tony said dryly.
They'd stopped shy of the sports car. It was dark now. The lights of midtown Manhattan reflected off snow rendered technicolor by Christmas decorations.
What was Parker's angle here? And Tony was putting off everything he knew he needed to say.
Probably he felt like the kid had beaten him to the punch. Tony had achieved the high ground by reaching out first, but Parker had disappeared on some mysterious adventure and returned with a peace that trumped whatever Tony could bring to the table. He felt obscurely as though he'd lost some advantage.
Parker crossed his arms and slanted a look at him. “This retrospective thing bugging you or something?”
“What? No. I'm not watching it.” Tony was completely disinterested in arrogant pundits dissecting his life's work.
What if Parker assumed the upcoming documentary, and whatever it'd stirred up, was the real motivation behind Tony's call? What if he didn't understand that it was a decision years in the making?
Parker studied him, frowning. “This stuff wouldn't have bothered the old you. Twenty years under the belt and now you care what people say about you?”
“I don't care. And it's not the same,” snapped Tony. He didn't mean to say more, but more kept coming. “Criticism meant jack shit when I was doing everything I could think of at the time. It's different when they're conducting a post-mortem on my career and wondering if it was all worth it.”
Gone was the nonchalance he'd been affecting whenever this subject came up. And it'd come up a lot lately. When he'd first heard Matthew Burns was doing a documentary on the Avengers, for which he'd surely get another Peabody or whatever, he genuinely hadn't cared.
He couldn't pinpoint the moment it started to bother him.
But milestones were like that. They unearthed memories and regrets, and scrutinized them with the delicacy of paleontologists scraping carefully in a desert. Regrets Tony had in plenty; for every dollar to his name there was a regret to match, and he was a billionaire.
And the biggest regret had nearly dissolved into trillions of pieces, in a universe he couldn't reach.
Tony suppressed a sigh. A critical review had been bound to happen, sooner or later. They were far enough removed from the inception of the Avengers that it was easy for people to forget what a saving grace the Avengers had felt like the first time. They'd come together in the exact moment of the world's greatest need, evolving from fighting their private, independent squabbles to combating an invasion. It was their All Star moment, though they'd go on to have plenty more.
And now it felt like that memory, which had preserved Tony's reputation in a state of amber gratitude for so long, was getting weaponized against him.
If it weren't for those fucking Accords, their legacy might still be intact.
Parker yawned, which always created a bizarre maw in the center of his mask. “But you know it was worth it, so who cares?”
Yes, Tony did know that. Usually. It was just hard to always believe it.
“Has it occurred to you,” he asked, with the flippancy that always edged his barbs, “that you might get name-dropped in this documentary too?”
Finally Parker paused. “Well. They, uh, did ask for an interview.”
Tony silently turned to face him.
Immediately Parker's hands flew in the air. “I turned them down, duh!” he said defensively. “Like I wanted to get dragged back into all that? I was never an Avenger. They just wanted, like, outsider opinions.”
So he'd known this was coming. Somehow Tony didn't think Burns had expected anything complimentary from the vigilante, who'd fallen out with the Avengers in spectacular, public fashion a decade ago.
“What?” said Parker, self-conscious, unnerved now. “I don't know anything else. It still doesn't sound like a big deal; it's not like anyone's waited this long to have an opinion. Jameson shredded me for years on the air, and I didn't have a PR team to throw slander charges around. I just moved on.”
“Perks of vigilantism,” muttered Tony.
“Well, you had the chance.”
Tony rolled his eyes. How many times had he heard this? “Of course! Why didn't I try that? Of course no one would have noticed that the guy zipping around in a suit of armor, which nobody but Stark Industries could have invented, never happened to be in the same room as Tony Stark. All I did was throw the sheet off a secret that would have lasted like two seconds anyway.” His scorn wasn't actually directed at Parker. It was just all the contempt he'd felt for all the people who'd second-guessed his reasoning.
“Geez, what's the matter with you?” Parker demanded. “Do you plan on actually being nice to me anytime soon?”
Tony threw his arms up. “Me? Me? You almost dissolved in a parallel universe and you're asking me what's wrong?”
“Oh, that? Well, yeah. But I mean,” Parker gestured to indicate the universe at large, “is the world that much crazier than it was a couple of weeks ago? Maybe this stuff would freak out someone who wasn't on the calamity payroll. Not us.”
When had Parker gotten so desensitized to the insanity? He'd always held up people, places and things to a standard of rationality that Tony once found frankly naive.
However, Parker also didn't hold his personal safety in as high a regard as did others around him. It was the idea of colliding universes he thought Tony had a problem with. Of course he thought that. His obliviousness was astounding.
Tony huffed. He shook his cuffs out, a habit his father had developed in moments of stress. “We might inhabit the same universe, kid, but we haven't lived in the same world for a while. My world isn't the Avengers anymore. It's not space or Life Model Decoys and it was never Spandex. You, disappearing?” Tony jabbed a finger in the direction of Parker's chest. “That was about the biggest deal going on in my world before you hijacked my elevator.”
Though he hesitated, Tony strongly suspected the kid might be smiling beneath the mask. “Aww,” the jackass said. “You could have led with that.”
“No. You are not allowed to enjoy this.”
It was amazing how well Parker could roll his eyes in that mask. “I'm not going to sit on my hands in grave respect for whatever vigil you kept, Tony. I had to suffer my absence too.”
Putting his personal welfare on that pedestal would have been more credible if Tony hadn't seen him throw it down the toilet so many times. When Parker suffered, his natural instinct was to find someone who suffered more. Nobly glitching to death in another universe, he would without a doubt have felt worse for what he was putting others through.
A glimmer of that Boy Scout had to have survived the last decade, or the age of the vigilante would have ended a lot sooner.
As though on cue, Parker hesitated, then muttered: “Sorry. I know you guys were upset.”
Guilt was the only bone the kid ever kept for himself.
Tony sighed. He reached forward and the Lamborghini unlocked after identifying his fingerprints. It beeped to attention.
Parker didn't move to get in, but still lingered. Tony glanced his way.
“You drink yet?” he asked.
“No,” said Spider-Man. He'd never taken to alcohol. Once, he'd told Tony it took an awful lot of concentration to rein in his super-strength already, and he worried that if his metabolism wasn't up to the task of keeping him sober, he'd pop some crook's head right off with a finger flick. Like a lethal game of paper football.
Tony turned to the car.
“I still eat pizza, though,” said Parker.
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Half an hour later, they lounged in the upper floor of a pizza joint in the Lower East side. It was pretty sparse inside and Parker had felt comfortable enough to change into street clothes. There was a time when he wouldn't go near Tony in public, barefaced. He'd worried it was too easy to connect him to Spider-Man. Tony got it, even though it'd always felt a bit like a snub.
The large window overlooked the snowy street below. The pizza place sprawled onto a second floor because it was about the width of a broom closet and it was the only way to keep a lot of elbows out of a lot of eyes. It suited Tony's mood.
Parker mopped at his mouth with a napkin. He'd hosed down an entire pizza pie in about the time it took Tony to shave. “I guess we should actually talk about the Botticelli,” he said laconically.
“Uh huh,” said Tony.
Parker caught his tone and frowned. “What?”
Tony pinched his chin in mock contemplation. “Gee... who do we know who could seize upon a perilous moment of opportunity to steal an Old Master from the Metropolitan Museum, during a glitzy gala? Who, I ask you? Who?”
The kid's face drained of color.
For the first time since Parker had crossed the threshold of his office, Tony Stark cracked a grin.
“She's retired,” Parker said defiantly, though with a definite edge of anxiety. “She promised!”
He sounded a little panicked. Tony welcomed this first departure from the weird zen Parker had shown since getting back.
“How many exes do you plan on reuniting with this week?” Tony said insouciantly. “Should we stop at the florist on our way over?”
“I don't know where she lives now,” Parker insisted. He seized his phone and drew it out. Scrolling through his contacts, ears red, he stopped at a entry. “I don't even know if she's still got this number.”
Tony sipped his beer. “One way to find out.”
The kid stabbed the phone in agitation. Tony glanced around, and saw they were still alone on the second floor. “Put it on speakerview,” he said.
“You've never met her.”
“Oh, but I'd love to,” Tony said, the picture of innocence.
This represented one of the more incongruous elements of Parker's history. Tony definitely got the appeal, but not for someone like Spider-Man, whose old-timey chivalry was a recurring joke on talk radio. What had possessed him to take up with her?
With a glaring look thrown his way, Parker activated something on his phone. The call rang twice before being picked up.
The image was deliberately scrambled. All Tony saw was an amorphous mass of pixelated squares. He raised an eyebrow at the kid, who'd activated the scrambler, as the shifting image began to speak.
“Well, hello Spider,” said the Black Cat.
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