When Spidey Met Oracle

He was J. Jonah Jameson... and he knew everything.

He knew what people whispered behind his back... That he was a cantankerous crumb-bum... That he was a cheap skinflint... That he had an unhealthy bias against that dog-fucking wall-crawler... Well fuck 'em. He was a "cantankerous crumb-bum" because somebody had to ask the hard questions about this flawed, woe-begotten world. He was a "cheap skinflint" because he grew up before the goddamn internet bubble boom after which yuppie scum thought it was completely acceptable to leave their half-drunk five dollar froufrou coffee drinks behind while they ran off to spend twenty bucks on a movie. And he was against the web-head because Spider-Man was a goddamn menace, dammit!

And J. Jonah Jameson knew who worked for him. He'd sussed out that crooked Parker kid had doctored that photo of Jonah fighting the Vulture to clear those ridiculous TMZ reports that he was in league with that weird winged freak. Parker thought he was so smart, but J. Jonah Jameson could see into that little punk's goddamn soul. Peter fucking Parker had no secrets from J. Jonah Jameson. Neither did Ashley Moon. He knew the shameful truth about her from the beginning. There was no way some damned masked crusader was going to work right under his nose and he wasn't going to know who she was.

When he saw Moon's resume in his search for a lead investigator for the Mayor's office, he'd been impressed, and that alone had been enough to get him suspicious. Joe Robertson had been the best hire Jonah ever made, and Robbie's resume had been a goddamn mess. Good workers had this stupid assumption that the god's honest truth would get them that job. Ambitious social climbers and sociopaths knew they needed to play their potential employer. Jameson had learned over the years that a good manager hired a balance of saints and sinners to ensure the workplace hummed with just the right amount of controlled chaos.

So he decided to meet with this Ashley Moon, and the second she marched into his office, wiggling those tits under her smart little business suit, he knew exactly who he was dealing with... the goddamn Black Cat. She could cover all that crazy white hair with a ratty brown wig, but J. Jonah Jameson was a newspaperman, and a newspaperman never forgot a face. And he certainly never forgot a pair of tits.

He decided to interview her for a bit -- just to break up his day at first, but the longer the interview went, the more qualified he realized she was. And then it occurred to him that if he had her on the payroll, he might just manage to get some crucial information on that blasted Spider-Man. He knew the two of them had been involved at some point...

"You're hired!" he found himself announcing. "Welcome to City Hall!"

She smiled then, positively beaming, and when his heart skipped a beat it briefly occurred to Jameson that someone might need to warn her about flashing that sexy little grin in the presence of someone who'd recently survived a severe cardiac event. "I should tell you, Your Honor, I'm not exactly who you think I am," she said. "My name's really Felicia Hardy. I'm also the Black Cat."

And that's when J. Jonah Jameson realized he wasn't talking to just another mask trying to pull a fast one. Because, again, Jameson wasn't anybody's fool. He knew that Spider-Man's actions tended to do more good than harm. But if it was as simple as that, then why did the wall-crawler hide behind that ridiculous mask? If he was really as good and as true as his actions seemed to indicate, then why not tell the world who he was? Spider-Man had to be hiding something... and it had to be something so terrible and evil that it'd obliterate all the good he'd supposedly done. It was the only explanation...

Despite Jonah's earlier suspicions, the Black Cat was a different case entirely. She worked around going through the proper channels, assuming she didn't have a shot otherwise, and when her subterfuge seemed to work, she'd come clean. That was exactly the type of devious morality he wanted in his investigative department... but he needed to know the truth.

"Who is he?" he asked her flatly. "Who is Spider-Man?" She had to know who he really was. And if she was looking for a job with him, he had to assume she was willing to give the web-head up.

"I don't know his real name," Hardy told him. "He was always just The Spider to me."

J. Jonah Jameson knew a falsehood when he saw one. He was a goddamn human lie detector. She wasn't lying. Which meant Spider-Man was just as depraved as he always suspected. He'd heard the stories. He'd seen the pictures. What kind of man carried on a sexual liaison with a woman without telling her who he was? A predatory deviant like that web-slinging fraud, that's who!

So Mayor J. Jonah Jameson hired the Black Cat. And she did good work. When Jonah asked her to look into Dexter Bennett, that smarmy smug bastard that managed to snake the Bugle out from under him, the Cat managed to save hundreds of lives when she uncovered one of Bennett's shady construction deals mere hours before a building collapsed. And while Spider-Man had clearly been involved in her investigation, he let it slide. It was better if he got that wall-crawling whack job comfortable with her. Maybe one day he'd slip up enough for them to finally nail him!

So no, Jameson wasn't the monster everybody assumed he was. Jonah was willing to dole out a second chance to someone who deserved one. But he couldn't excuse laziness, and he wouldn't put up with a no-call/no-show.

He knew Felicia Hardy, or "Ashley Moon", or whatever the hell she wanted to call herself hadn't produced anything worthwhile for days. And that wasn't acceptable. At all. He stormed his way into her office to tell her just that, but when he pushed open the door, he found the room empty.

It was very possible that she was off working a lead or following a hunch -- one of the things he loved most about Felicia working for him was that it was the closest his duties as mayor came to feeling like working back at the Bugle -- but the old newsman in Jameson's heart told him she hadn't been here all day...

And it told him something else: Spider-Man was hiding in the room.

J. Jonah Jameson had spent the last ten years of his life dealing with that web-slinging menace... both by revealing his high-flying scandals to the world at large, as well as suffering Spider-Man's childish attempts at retribution afterwards. Jameson had developed an ability to tell when that wall-crawling weasel was around that bordered on extra-sensory perception... and his menace-sense was jangling.

"I know you're in here, you dog-humping piece of shit!" he announced to the room. "And I know exactly where you're hiding! I'm not like the punks and thugs you pull your little flimflams with! J. Jonah Jameson's got the good sense to look up!"

At that, Jameson reached for the light switch and scanned the ceiling frantically...

Nothing.

"Damn," he muttered quietly.

He shrugged as he stormed out of the office. Jonah was only human. He made mistakes just like anyone else. Maybe one of those mistakes had been hiring Spider-Man's slacker ex-girlfriend in the first place. It was clearly making him edgy.

Okay, he told himself, command decision time. If Hardy wasn't in tomorrow, he'd call out the National Guard. And if she showed up without a good excuse, he'd just dock her pay. Spare the good people of New York City her exorbitant hourly rate for a few days. Seemed fair.

Goddamn, it was good to be king.

*

"Jeez Louise," Spider-Man grumbled, crawling out from under Felicia's desk once the old bastard was safely down the hall. He'd actually had to tuck himself up into the corners and cling there just to be sure Jameson couldn't see his feet through the gap.

"Find anything useful?" Oracle chirped.

"Not sure," he said, stretching his cramped back for a moment. "She had a pile of files on her desk. City records of all of OsCorp's New York real estate holdings... If you want I can grab them and take them to you..."

"Don't bother," Oracle said. "I've just downloaded everything in the City Hall records regarding Osborn's holdings."

"Of course you have," he sighed, climbing out of Felicia's office window. "Anything promising?"

"Hard to tell," Oracle admitted. "Osborn has a lot of property in the area."

"Start with the most obscure buildings in the seediest neighborhoods," he suggested. "Norman's always buried the worst of his crap as deeply as possible."

"Great," Oracle said. "Did you find anything useful that was offline in Hardy's office?"

"The last date in her appointment book before she texted me said she ordered car service to Grand Central Station," he explained, swinging away from City Hall.

"So she could have gone anywhere after that," Oracle concluded.

"Osborn's still our best lead," he said.

"I guess you're right," Oracle sighed.

"But he's in jail," Spider-Man said. "Right?"

"I'm looking at surveillance footage of him right now," Barbara assured him a hundred miles away up in her tower, where in the upper right hand corner of her holographic heads-up display, she was watching Norman Osborn read a book in his cell at the Raft. This wasn't any techno-trickery on her part. GBS had been running a live-feed of Osborn ever since he'd been incarcerated. "The little dictator's right where he's supposed to be."

"I didn't know you had eyes on hell," Spider-Man muttered. "So what's with this grudge against Osborn, anyway? I mean, the more people keeping tabs on him the better, obviously, but everyone else stopped worrying once he got locked up..."

Barbara sighed. This was essentially the same question Batman had asked her yesterday, and if she hadn't wanted to talk about it with Bruce, she definitely didn't want to talk about it with Spider-Man...

Because her passion for all of this was driven by one simple fact: Barbara was pretty sure that Norman Osborn had killed Gwen Stacy.

There was a lot of confusion surrounding the Green Goblin. There were at least four different people who'd reportedly assumed the identity, to say nothing of the Hobgoblins, Demogoblins and other related menaces that had appropriated the same M.O. through the years. Norman Osborn had certainly done everything within his considerable power to plant an astonishing amount of misinformation to confuse the matter even further. So much so that even Oracle couldn't sort everything out. She was 80% certain that Norman had been wearing the costume when the Green Goblin had thrown that beautiful blonde girl she used to babysit off the George Washington Bridge.

Barbara's only lingering doubt about this was Norman's son, Harry. While all evidence seemed to indicate that the younger Osborn hadn't taken the Goblin mantle until well after Gwen died, it seemed to her that Harry, Gwen's classmate in both high school and college, was far more likely to have some motive to murder her than Norman ever would. But there was no accounting for the intentions of madmen.

If there was one lesson Barbara had learned in her life, it was that.

This all might have been easier to figure out if she had known about Gwen's death when it happened, but it'd been almost an entire year before Barbara's father finally told her. If she hadn't asked if he'd heard from her lately, she doubted Dad ever would have. She could tell from the way he looked at her when she asked after Gwen that something terrible had happened.

"Gwen died, Barbara," he said finally. He went on to explain the few circumstances he knew of her death. How he'd taken the trip to New York on his own for the funeral. He'd paid his respects to Gwen's Uncle Arthur and her cousins. "I even had a brief word with Gwen's boyfriend," Jim said. "Pat Palmer or some such. Poor kid looked like his whole world had imploded. Wish I could say I'd never seen anything like it before, but I've been a cop for the last thirty years."

"Why didn't you tell me?" Barbara asked. "I would have gone with you..."

"It was a while ago," Jim said. "Right after your accident."

It used to infuriate her when he called the Joker's assault her "accident". There hadn't been anything accidental about it. But eventually she realized that he had to call it that. Otherwise, he had to face his own guilt about what happened to her. The Joker hadn't been gunning for Barbara because she'd been Batgirl. He'd been after her dad and she just happened to be there. She'd just been another one of his casual casualties. An after thought.

Eventually, she even understood why her father probably thought it was best not to tell her about Gwen's death when it happened. Barbara was still in the hospital, recovering, after all. And the two girls only knew each other because their dads had been partners years before either of them had been born. It wasn't as if Gwen had ever been Babs' best friend. The five year age difference between them was part of it. They'd practically lost touch well before Barbara went to college. In fact, the last time she'd spoken with Gwen was when little Miss Stacy come to Gotham University for a campus visit several years back. Gwen had called to ask if Barbara wanted to catch up over coffee, but it had been in Barbara's early years as Batgirl, and she was busy with that and her job at the library. And Barbara had figured there would always be time later. Because she was young and so was Gwen and they had their whole lives ahead of them...

Looking back on it now, Barbara realized that the night Gwen Stacy died had been a big moment for her. Learning that someone she'd known had been killed so soon after she'd been paralyzed put some things into perspective. She remembered that Gwen's father, George, had passed away a few months before Gwen -- another funeral she missed because she'd been busy. It was then that Barbara realized she didn't have a monopoly on personal tragedy. A lesson she probably should have remembered considering she'd once stood shoulder to shoulder with Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson, but she had been so mad at them both at the time.

Loss does funny things to people...

"Oracle?" Spider-Man said.

"What?" she snapped, ripped from her reverie. Would he ever shut up?

"I, um, I asked about Osborn," he replied. She could hear the surprise and hurt in his voice. "I just, uh... never mind."

"Sorry," Barbara said. She was so tired. "I'm just... frustrated with this."

She knew that thinking about Gwen Stacy would only complicate working with Spider-Man further. Gwen, a cop's daughter through and through, had been very careful to keep her personal information off of the internet, so Barbara had never really been able to get much sense of her social life. But it was common knowledge that Spider-Man had been involved somehow. It wasn't just the fact that he'd been there fighting the Goblin when it happened -- just like he'd been there when George Stacy died -- or the coroner's report which implied that it'd been Spider-Man's attempt to save Gwen that had been the cause of her death. Barbara didn't blame him. She knew enough about him to know he wasn't a killer. No matter what she'd read in the Daily Bugle. But she also knew he could probably answer some of the questions she had... if she could only ask them, but she couldn't. Not to him...

"I guess Norman Osborn's a bit of a sore subject," she told Spider-Man finally.

"Trust me," he said, "I understand the feeling."

"I bet you do," she murmured bitterly.

"Are you... mad at me?" he asked.

"Perhaps we should maintain radio-silence until I figure out our next move," Barbara suggested.

"So you are mad at me," he insisted.

"I'm not mad at you, Spider-Man," she sighed.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes."

"Really?"

"Really."

"Because I can't shake this feeling that you don't like me for some reason, Oracle..."

"I like you fine, Spider-Man," she said through gritted teeth.

"Wouldn't blame you if you didn't," he mused. "I know I've got a certain reputation -- completely undeserved, mind you."

"You just menaced a cab driver!"

"Accidentally!" he said. "Totally not my fault!"

"Jesus," said Barbara. "Are you always this whiny, Peter?!"

The second she'd said it, she realized her mistake.

"You know who I am?!" Spider-Man cried. "You can't know who I am! Who are you, Oracle?!"

Well this certainly wasn't going to make working with him any easier...

CHAPTER THREE: The Secret Life of the Amazing Web-Slinger

Because of his preternatural senses, Spider-Man wasn't used to being blindsided. It didn't hurt that in his life as Peter Parker, he'd picked up on a fairly common pattern to his day-to-day routine: It's going to get worse. It's always going to get worse.

"Jesus," Oracle had said. "Are you always this whiny, Peter?!"

When he did find himself confronted by an actual, genuine surprise, the web-head didn't always handle it so well. In this case, he miscast his web-line and found himself freefalling a good fifty stories toward the intersection of Chambers and Broadway before he recovered and fired off a safety web.

"You know who I am?!" he shouted on the upswing. "You can't know who I am! Who are you, Oracle?!"

This is bad, he realized. This was impossibly bad.

"I told you, I'm an information expert specializing in the superhero set," Oracle said. "I know the true identities of hundreds of heroes." It was hard to tell with the voice filter, but Spider-Man almost sensed an undercurrent of panic in Oracle's response.

"That's not really an answer," he sulked, as his wild swing carried him to the side of the Woolworth Building where he stopped to catch his breath.

"I... I can't tell you," Oracle replied.

That was definite panic.

"Okay," Spider-Man concluded, trying to get control of his own anxiety. "If you can't tell me who you are, then at least tell me how you know who I am..."

"That's a long story," Oracle told him. "We... we just don't have time..."

"Are you kidding me?!" he yelled.

"No," Oracle said firmly -- in charge once more. "I understand that this might change things for you, Parker, but it doesn't for me. I have a missing operative and I need to find her. Your help would be appreciated, but it's not necessary. I can do it on my own if I have to. It's your decision."

The urge to just cut and run was overwhelming. Spider-Man didn't like working with this Oracle guy to begin with, and now his secret identity was an issue? No thank you. Peter had gone to great lengths to avoid exactly this kind of situation. If he was smart, he'd turn around, head straight for Avengers Tower, and tell Steve Rogers all about this rogue hacker who was playing god with a black ops agenda...

But there was still the Black Cat to consider.

Even if Felicia had gotten into this mess all on her own, she had asked for his help. That meant she was his responsibility... and in the world according to Peter Parker, that meant everything. He had to do whatever it took to make sure she was okay. Whether he liked it or not... especially if Osborn really was behind this. Because Spider-Man had the kind of enemies who would suspend him from church bells or bury him alive to prove a point, and the Green Goblin was the most vicious and depraved of the whole rotten lot.

Norman Osborn had discovered that Peter was Spider-Man years ago and it'd been an absolute nightmare. Norman's mental instability had been a blessing at first, because that whole year after he'd learned the truth about Peter, Norman couldn't even remember that his greatest enemy was living with his son, Harry. But when Harry started up with the drugs and spiraled out of control, Norman just kind of went with him. But unlike his son, Norman never really came back. It was all Goblin all the time after that. Norman killed poor Gwen, then, he seemed to kill himself while trying to kill Peter, only to come back crazier and more devious than ever years later. Eventually the crazy outbalanced the devious, and Spider-Man finally had no choice but to take him down publicly.