six feet under
Ava dies sometime in May.
Haroun’s not there when it happens. Apparently she got between Charlie and the kids, that’s all he knows. It was bloody, and violent, and when Haroun finally gets a peek at the body it’s been beaten so badly that he barely recognizes her. When Charlie’s high dies down, he goes and sits beside Ava’s body, staring at it and taking sips from a decades-old bottle of bunker stash whisky and downs a cocktail of pills until he’s high enough that he’s completely incoherent, slumped in the hallway in front of the kid’s cell. Renee trees to wake him up several times and he just lets out a groggy moan before gurgling up a spew of vomit. She rolls him on his side so he doesn’t aspirate and the vomit bubbles out of him thick and sideways, spreading out onto the cement.
They’re not going to stop now.
They can’t.
They’ve buried too many people here to lose.
The kids try to escape a fourth and final time in the middle of May.
It’s usually Mateo and him who sedate Parker every day—Mateo measures out the doses and sets up the IV, Haroun holds him down and makes sure he’s still. “Alright, Parker,” Mateo says, pulling out a pair of rubber gloves. Haroun leaves the door cracked behind him and shoves the key into his pocket. There’s no point in hiding it because it’s not any use to these kids—there’s no keyhole on the inside of the door. “Up and at ‘em.”
It happens very quickly—thinking the kid’s too exhausted to fight them, Mateo turns his safety back on, meaning to put the gun away, and holsters it at his hip. He snaps on some rubber gloves and measures out the sedative as Haroun checks the IV port at the kid’s forearm. It looks fine. Clean enough, and Mateo presses the needle to the port as Haroun holds his arm still, and in just the same second, the kid whips around and grabs the syringe, twisting it from Haroun’s grasp, and pressing it to his throat.
He says he’ll kill him; Haroun has no doubt the kid means it. Parker’s trembling with rage or terror or exhaustion or all of the above, and the needle trembles against Haroun’s neck, too. “One word,” he whispers, in this strange wheeze of a voice, “and I’ll kill you—like the other guy, I’ll kill you, stab you right through the fucking neck!”
Frank, Haroun realizes. The kid’s talking about Frank. Barely a couple weeks ago Frank died bleeding out on the floor of this stupid room, and the kid’s talking about him like he’s some sort of bad guy. The guy had a daughter. He had a life. “His name was Frank—” he starts, and the kid stabs the needle further into his neck, enough that warmth pools there—blood, maybe, readying at his throat for the inevitable prick.
He screams at them for the code, and the whole time he’s shaking. He screams for it and screams for it and Mateo just stares from the other side of the room with his hands raised high in surrender. One wrong move, and Haroun gets a hard dose of super-sedative right to the neck, ironically, just like he did to Parker about a month ago.
Mateo starts arguing with Parker and the needle goes in deeper, and Haroun panics, blurting out the code, “One, two, oh—” before Mateo tells him to shut up.
Mateo offers the kid painkillers. Offers not to tell Charlie, but all that does is make the kid more upset. He instructs the little girl to snatch Mateo’s gun from its holster, and then the kids really have the upper hand. They argue, and they argue, and they explain exactly what’s going to happen to him, and then the kid starts to cry, the gun shaking in his pale hands so hard that he almost drops it. He gets so freaked at the thought of Charlie’s punishment that Haroun feels a pang of guilt through the haze of his high. He’s crying and he’s begging them and he’s crying more; it really hurts to watch. “...I wanna apply for college…” he’s sobbing. “I’m… I’m… I’m gonna be… a senior… ”
Mateo tries to calm him down again, telling him what’ll happen if he calls the cops, telling him that he should just give up, and then he says the kid’s name again, and Parker’s head jerks up, and the gun does, too. “Come on, kid. You gotta put it down—you know you gotta put it down.”
Haroun remembers then, oddly, that the kid was smart. Prodigy-type smart, genius-type smart, the kind of smart that memorizes facts for fun and gets Stark internships to work on science stuff. He’d won awards for it—his brain—it was all in that file of Stark’s that they hacked. He was a really smart kid, and Haroun watches as reality dawns on the kid, and his teary face falls. “What happens when it’s over?” he whispers. “What happens… When Mr. Stark… When he… When he’s done?”
It’s a question he already knows the answer to. Parker’s never getting out of here alive, and deep down he already knows this. “You know what happens.”
“And what if… What if I die? If I…” He stares at Haroun this time, that horrible helpless stare, and whispers, “If I died… Would you let her go?”
And the kids eyes flick to the gun for a second, and Haroun realizes what he’s asking. If he turned that gun on himself… “Parker,” he says quickly, raising his hands up a little, and the kid’s blinking very fast. “Whatever—whatever you’re thinking, it’s not worth it.”
The kid cries harder after that, and he wipes at his face with the edge of his jumpsuits sleeve, and it makes his pale face redden. He begs them for help. Begs and begs and begs. Waves that gun around like he’s ready to use it—he supposes Parker’s been on the wrong end of one more times than Haroun’s held one himself. Maybe he’s used to it.
He offers them drugs, of all things. Like they don’t hae enough of it already. Offers them money, offers them whatever they want, as long as they let him go.
And when he finally uses the gun in his hands, he doesn’t shoot at Mateo or Haroun or himself.
Through a haze of tears, Parker fires the gun at the cracked-open door.
Charlie’s punishment is fucked. Forces the kid to stab himself and makes Stark watch. Gives the kid a head wound so bad that he doesn’t wake up after.
Haroun tries not to think about it, and it really shakes Riri up after. She keeps touching her stomach like she’s the one who stabbed herself, and her eyes look so hollow that it makes him wonder why the hell she was even watching. He tries to cheer her up by playing cards but then the little girl starts screaming her head off that something’s wrong with Peter, which as it turns out, she was right. The kid’s got a world-class concussion, bad enough that they’re forced to kidnap a doctor just to save his life.
The doctor does as he’s told, and they keep him locked in the operating room in the lower levels so that he’s there whenever Peter needs him. At some point they start bringing him down every day after Charlie’s sessions, just to make sure they don’t have another incident. The doctor doesn’t usually interfere in their work, but he does try to escape a couple times. Attacks Haroun and Neck with some kind of sharp medical tool—fast, and Haroun catches the man’s wrist and clamps down hard—the doctor freezes, chest heaving, looking up at Haroun with unbridled fear.
“Drop it, doc! I said drop it!”
He does—and the weapon clatters to the round. “You dumb fuck,” he says. “Don’t you get what we’re trying to do here? What we’re trying to accomplish?”
The man’s shoes squeak against the floor—like he’s thinking about running but can’t bring himself to move. He’s scared of him, Haroun realizes, gripping the man’s white-sleeved arm. He’s frozen like an animal in the looming headlights of an oncoming semi truck. A grown man, terrified. Of Haroun.
Jon makes sure they take away the doc’s food for a couple days until he apologizes for the whole stunt, but Haroun keeps seeing the doc’s face in his mind. He’s not dangerous. He’s not a bad guy. He’s just keeping things in line—they’re gonna save the world, that’s what Charlie always says. That’s the plan.
That night, he and Elliot work through a shit ton of downers, enough that he can forget about the look on the doctor’s gaunt face: mouth frozen, eyes wide, and terrified.
Terrified of him.
Not long after that, Caitlin goes. Overdose. They find her dead in her bunk, her body so stiff it must’ve been hours since she passed. Haroun and Mason roll her up in a canvas tarp, drive her out to New York City, and dump her body there. It’s an overdose—no one will bat an eye.
She was young. Nineteen. She only ever got one semester in but for some reason she still clung on to her college ID card. Haroun tucks into her pocket before they leave her. He hopes her parents find her body.
Haroun sometimes wanders the bunker in the early hours of the morning. It’s quiet then, and he often has trouble sleeping. And if he stands just a few inches from the kid’s door he can sometimes hear them whispering to each other.
“...I want Ava…” the little girl sounds upset, her voice tear-filled. “...Ava…”
“...Stinger, she’s not coming…”
“...really dead?”
“Yeah.”
“...like a bug…when you step on it…”
“...yeah.”
“Like your mommy… and daddy…”
A long quiet pause that makes Haroun think he’s lost the sound of their voices. “Yeah,” says Parker.
Haroun doesn’t know why that bothers him so much. He knew the kid’s parents were dead—that’s what made him such an easy target. Better than Pepper Potts, better than Happy Hogan, better than James Rhodes. He barely had any family, barely kept any friends save a couple of his loner classmates. No one noticed when he went missing. No one cared.
No one but that Aunt May of his, and Haroun pretty much killed her, too.
Lyle overdoses at the start of June. Meth. He’d already overdosed a couple times that week, so it wasn’t a surprise when he stood up, trembling, and started moaning about how sick he felt. He starts acting really odd, clutching his chest and screaming at everyone. Haroun’s there when his eyes roll back and he falls, thrashing, to the ground. He’s still seizing when they drag him into the operating room, and even still when the doctor rolls him onto his side and stabs him with syringeful of liquid.
Peter’s there, too. He’s backed himself up against the wall and watches it happen with those wide, inhumanely dark eyes of his.
He just keeps seizing and thrashing like that, foam leaking from his mouth, and there’s too many of them in this operating room, all crowding around as the doctor injects with another syringe of something. A couple more minutes of seizures, and eventually Lyle stops moving.
The doctor leans over him, curls one hand over the other and starts pushing firmly into Lyle’s slack chest, whitish foam tailing from his mouth, his thin body jerking vaguely with each push. Eventually, the doctor sits back onto his knees, wipes the back of his wrist over his forehead, and drops both his arms to his sides. “I’m sorry,” he says.
Haroun and Glenn take up the task of dropping off his body. They find a decent lone dumpster in the Bronx and toss his body there. Another overdose, so they’re not worried about anyone finding him.
Lyle has no family to call, just a grandmother he hasn’t spoken to in years. He’s twenty-nine—just eight years older than Haroun, and now he’s dead.
That night, Mateo and Megan make a run for it. Haroun’s not even sure how it happens. They got wasted, took Nick’s truck, apparently, and drive straight into a campsite instead of back out to the main road. Got themselves killed, and some people at the campsite, too. The police get ahold of their bodies, so there’s nothing to bury. Haroun and Riri spend half an afternoon digging a hole in memoriam, get too tired to finish it, fill it back up and put two rocks on top of it.
It’s been a month now since the kids last tried to escape. Two months since they snatched the kid. And now Peter knows the drill.
But sometimes when he’s sober, Haroun wonders why they’re still doing it. Stark’s weapons are getting less functional with each new prototype, his mind more rattled by each phone call. They’re deteriorating themselves—teeth decaying, faces blistered, minds scrambled. Haroun’s whole body aches unless he’s high; he starts to shake and get sick like Peter in the chair unless he’s on something. It’s the first thing he does when he wakes up and the last thing he does before he goes to sleep.
And the drugs— God, the drugs. It’s what keeps them going, what keeps them lying to the government guy, what keeps them dragging Peter to the chair every day at seven.
Besides, there’s too many dead bodies beyond that bunker door—floating in lakes, buried six feet under, tossed in city dumpsters. What would they do now? Leave them? They can’t go back to their normal lives even if they wanted to. Too much blood on their hands. Mason’s spiraling, starting to wake up screaming from nightmares about being locked in a chair, and Glenn’s fucked his brain almost completely with painkillers—barely speaks anymore, and is fucking incoherent every time he tries. Mateo’s sister Alejandra dies not long after him—another overdose with so much shit in her system that they all assume it’s on purpose.
Charlie keeps lying to that government guy every time he gets on the phone, rambling about how close he is, how easy it’ll be, how they’re almost done.
They’re not almost done. They’re not even close.
The doctor tries to run again in mid-June. For a guy who’s supposedly so smart, the guy’s an fucking moron. Comes at Elliot with a syringe, and before he even gets a chance to use it, Daria’s got him pinned to the ground. “What was the plan here, doc?” Haroun says, bristling with frustration. “Hm?”
The man scowls at him.
“You get one of us, make it past allll the rest of us upstairs, and somehow figure out the code to the door?” He scoffs. “You and what army, doc? Parker? Lang? If you haven’t noticed, they’re not gonna be much help.”
Another silent glare, so this time Haroun turns to the kid, who’s laying down on the operating table. He didn’t help when the doctor attacked Elliot. He didn’t even bother to sit up. “Tell him, Parker. What happened the last time you ran? Show him—”
“I remember,” spits the doctor.
“No, no, no,” Haroun snaps. “Show him, Parker. Now.”
This time, the kid sits up. The side of his face has an imprint from the operating table’s paper lining, and he touches gingerly at the scar on the side of his head—hard to see now with all the hair that’s grown there. “Not that one, Parker. The other one.”
Parker pauses, blankly looks up at him, and undoes the top couple buttons of his black jumpsuit, baring a short stubby line on the right side of his stomach, thick with scar tissue.
“Yep. Tell them who did it.”
Parker gives him a stupidly blank stare, and says, “I don’t remember…”
“Bullshit,” Haroun says. “The rest of us remember it—use your fucking mutant brain. Who. Did it.”
Parker mutters something to himself, and then, quietly, “I did.”
“That’s right. And why’s that?”
“I ran,” he says, and without missing a beat, “and when you run you get punished.”
There’s a look of distinct horror on the doc’s face that doesn’t feel quite as victorious as Haroun feels.
Haroun lifts his chin to the white-coated man, who backs up against his precious operating table. “You hear that, doc? Unless you want to end up like Parker, I suggest you keep your hands to yourself, you understand me?”
The man nods quickly.
“Good.”
As Haroun and Elliot leave the room, Parker’s still muttering to himself, echoing what he just said to Haroun. And even as he goes he can hear the doctor talking to the kid, saying, “It’s okay, you’re okay, you’re okay…”
Haroun starts to dream about the kid’s screams. He can’t escape it.
Not unless he’s high.
His tolerance goes up—Parker’s pain tolerance seems to, too. The kid doesn’t talk much anymore. He doesn’t scream or cry as much either, and he’s started to stand willingly when they enter his cell, put his hands behind his back and wait. It’s a little disconcerting.
Charlie goes too far most days now. There’s no limit to what he will do—to what he will ask Haroun or one of the others to do. But still, sometimes Haroun finds Charlie wandering the hallways of the bunker like Haroun does himself sometimes—whenever he’s somewhat sober. Usually in the late morning when he first wakes up. He’ll wander the bunker in his nauseous, trembling state and sometimes go down the hall to the kids’ room, where he’ll stare at the red star on the door and talk to himself.
“Charlie?” Haroun calls out. “You good, man?”
“He’s in there,” Charlie mumbles. “He’s… He…”
Haroun reaches the bearded man then, and he inches closer and, recognizing he doesn’t have any weapons on him, takes another step closer. “Yeah—he’s in there. Not time yet though…”
Charlie shakes his head, banging his fist against his forehead and then stares at the red star on the door again. “He’s a mutant…” he’s saying. “...not like us.. Doesn’t count. Doesn’t feel.. Feel things like we do… Right?”
“I guess,” says Haroun. “Come on, man, go get some sleep.”
“We have to. We have to…”
“Yeah, yeah, sure, whatever.”
“He’s not like us… It’s good… It’s okay, we’re… he’s not… Not the same…”
Haroun’s not so sure about that. The kid sure does look like they do. Screams like they do. Breaks and bruises and bleeds like they do. How much mutant, he wonders, is really in that kid? How much human? How much Peter Parker and how much Spider Man?
Does it matter anymore?
Daria’s started to call the kid ‘that freak’ every time they talk about him. Not ‘him’ or ‘Parker’ or ‘the kid.’ Just ‘that freak,’ like he’s something she founded scuffed and mangled legs on the bottom of her shoe. “That freak’s making noise again,” she complains. There’s a sound coming from Parker’s cell. A low sound, something animal. “Could someone take care of it, please…”
Another low whine, like someone in pain. Daria grumbles, walks over to the red-starred door, and kicks it hard. “Shut up! I said shut up!”
Silence from the other side of the door.
“Better,” she says with a huff.
But like all the others, it’s the addiction that gets her. When she dies, she still has fifteen dollars in her wallet, some loose change, an expired driver’s license and a picture of an estranged kid he didn’t even know she had.
They don’t call to tell the kid what happened.
They don’t tell anyone at all.
They need more people to do the work—they’re losing people at a faster rate than they ever intended. So government guy issues them a group of soldiers to help and to keep everyone in line. They’re led by a man named Quentin Beck—as government-funded as the drugs, and they arrive in riot gear and army-issued weapons. They get into the drugs pretty fast—coke, mostly, then PCP, then the rest, and it spirals from there.
Everyone figures out what Beck’s up to pretty fucking fast. Haroun confronts Charlie about it as soon as he figures it out. “I know,” the man says, laying down on his bunk. “Riri came crying to me about the same thing a couple days ago. I don’t like it any more than you do.” He’s a little more sober than usual, his words a little clearer.
“Well?” Haroun says. “You’re in charge here. Do something!”
The bearded man rubs his eyes. “Can’t,” he says.
“Why the fuck not?”
“He’s paying,” snaps Charlie, sitting up and almost hitting his head on the bunk above him. “You fucking questioning me, Haroun?”
His face goes hot. “No, I’m just saying—”
The man stands up—almost half a foot taller than Haroun, and he quickly backtracks. “No—hold on, that’s not what I meant—”
Haroun spends that afternoon holding a bag of frozen thirty-year-old meat to his ringing head, feeling a bruise blossom around his eye.
He used to have actual conversations with Charlie before his brain got all fried. Now all he does is scream and punch and accuse everyone of trying to undermine him. He takes his anger out on all of them, not just Haroun. It seems every other day there’s someone sporting an injury from Charlie’s fist—or from one of the other crew members, too. Riri begins to avoid everyone altogether; Haroun barely sees her anymore at all. Occasionally he’ll find her cooped up in one of the lower bunker levels, scribbling on graph paper or asleep with a comic book.
A couple days after that, Haroun finds Riri’s phone left in one of the main rec rooms where the rations are kept as she’s digging for something to eat. When he picks it up, he finds the screen open to an article. Midtown High’s Decathlon team earns 1st in National Competition in DC. It’s got a photo with a ton of high school students—including Peter Parker—posted in between the first few sentences. “Riri,” he calls out, and the girl whips around to look at him. “What the fuck is this? You Googled him?”
“I’m sorry!” she blurts out, snatching for her phone back.
“The hell is wrong with you? Are you trying to get us caught?”
“No, I just—”
“I should Charlie about this,” he snaps, thinking of the bruise still healing on his check. “He’d beat your ass for this—what were you thinking?”
She apologizes and apologizes again, but Haroun doesn’t tell Charlie. He wasn’t really planning on it.
He just stares at the photo attached to the article. About Peter, specifically, who’s visible in the middle of the photo, holding up a yellow banner that says MIDTOWN HIGH and wearing a matching yellow blazer, surrounded by other students in the same ugly yellow blazers.
The boy in the photo is grinning and bright-faced. His hair is freshly cut and he’s standing evenly on both feet. His face is full with weight and symmetrical, his nose is straight, and even his skin is clear and smooth save a blemish or two. He’s happy. He’s healthy, he’s safe, he’s smiling a wide toothy grin that Haroun’s never seen before.
He’s nothing at all like the kid locked in that red-starred cell.
The damage they’ve done to Peter Parker is irreparable and becoming more obvious by the day. His face is more scarring than not, his legs atrophied from disuse. Even his hands—one finger is shorter than all the others. Pieces and pieces and pieces of Peter Parker, all chipped away one by one. His dented skull. His crooked knee. He looks more mutant than human now, all pale yellowish skin and scars layered over scars. Creepy eyes and long, uneven hair and that bloodstained jumpsuit crusted stiff in places. The change was so slow that Haroun hadn’t really realized how much damage they’d done.
Because that kid in the photo was dead.
Long dead.
Some noise down the hallway. A metal sound and laughter—another sound and more laughter.
When Haroun gets close, he sees what’s happening—Jon’s cracked open the food slot to the door and is waving a burger by Parker’s hand, slamming it shut whenever those fingers get too close. Taunting him, laughing at him, letting him get just close enough before ripping it away.
No, wait. Not Parker’s hand. It’s much too small to be Parker’s, and when the hand sticks through the food slot again Haroun can see it, small and pale and unmarked: the Lang girl.
Jon opens it again, wiggling the paper-wrapped burger in front, and the little hand grabs for it, clutching at air when he moves it backwards. He brings it close again, the hand frantically grasps at nothing, and he shoves the slot closed—on the other side, an “ow!” and the hand quickly retracts.
“Cut it out, Jon,” Haroun snaps, as Jon opens the slot again.. “They’ve been through enough without you fucking around with them.”
He scoffs, sinking his teeth into the burger as the little hand searches for it, feeling on the ground beside the door in vain. “Don’t be a pussy, Haroun. They’re fine.”
That night, Haroun drives Nick’s truck out to the nearest McDonald’s, gets an extra couple boxes of chicken nuggets, and shoves them through the food slot when no one is looking.
“You remember what he said?” Elliot whispers.
“Who?”
“Peter,” he says.
Right. Parker.
“He was gonna apply for college.”
“Oh, uh,” says Haroun. “Yeah. I guess.”
Elliot stares over at the hallway. Somewhere past there Peter Parker was probably hiding under the bed in his cell. “He’s not going any[more. We took that from him.”
It’s odd that Elliot keeps saying it, but he supposes it is true. “We had to,” Haroun says. “Look—Elliott, just drink some water, okay? Here.” He fishes around for a dirty cup in their sink, rinses it off, and fills it with water, handing it to his friend.
The guy takes it from him and looks down into the cup. “And the girl…” he says, swaying a little on his feet “...second grade. Yeah. She should be…” He shakes his head. “What are we doing?”
Haroun laughs nervously. What the hell did he take?
Elliot smiles and it doesn’t reach his eyes. “What are we doing?” he says again, and he’s looking up at the ceiling. “what did we… I never went to college either. Wasn’t for me. But Peter… he wanted to go.”
“Parker,” corrects Haroun, almost automatically, and Elliot doesn’t say anything in response. Instead he stands, staggering out into the hallway and stares at the red-starred door, the one closed door with a crack of light at the bottom.
And with a couple more steps, Ellliot’s tugging at the locked door handle, yanking on it, and Haroun grabs him by his shoulder, pulling him back. “Elliot, stop it, man. Come on.”
“They’re just kids,” Elliot whispers, taking a couple steps back from the door. There’s no sound inside; Parker and Lang could be awake or asleep or dead for all Haroun knows. “They’re just kids, I…” His eyes look full, suddenly, shining with something. “What are we doing, Haroun?”
“We’re saving the world,” he says. “You know we are.”
Elliot grimaces.
“Are we?” he asks.
“Yes,” he says firmly. Imagine a world with a weapon like this in our hands, Charlie always says. “Imagine what we could do—give money to the poor, medicine to whoever needs it, anything, man. We’ll be heroes. We are heroes.”
Elliot stares at the door.
There’s a noticeable silence.
“Don’t feel like one,” he whispers.
The next morning, they find him.
Elliot took one of the sheets off the bunks and hung himself in one of the red-starred cells. When they bury him, they wrap his body in canvas. The dirt is warm and there are birds singing as they dig.
Haroun goes to bed with dirt under his fingernails. He doesn’t bother to wash them.
And he wonders, briefly, if he’ll be next.
He starts to smell Parker when he’s not there—that telltale reek of sweat, blood, and piss on him, even when he’s not there. Starts to dream he’s strapped into that chair, starts to feel a phantom ache in his knee. He has a dream one night that he’s holding the hammer and swinging it back—and when he wakes he can still hear Parker’s hoarse screams.
Mason dies holding that hammer. Overdose like all the others. His eyes are still open when Charlie finds him. Charlie peels his death-gripped fingers from it, storms into the kid’s room, and smashes the hammer into his already-shattered knee.
When the kid passes out from the pain, no one says a word.
They’re dragging him in for his regular seven o’clock session when a couple of the guys start to argue about whose turn it is. Jon starts complaining he always does it, Charlie’s too high to do much of anything, and Zhiyuan mutters something about an injured arm.
“You’re up, dude,” Jon says, pushing the crowbar into his hands. “I’m done—I need a hit. He’s all yours.” As he walks out of the room, Haroun’s closing his hand around the metal crowbar. It’s black metal, and the top is crusted with blood.
And when he looks around, there’s a roomful of his friends watching him. But in front of him is a boy who’s nearly shivering in fear, and his eyes are laser-focused on the crowbar Jon gave him. Sorry, Parker , he thinks, and he swings the crowbar the kid doesn’t make a sound.
That night, Haroun brings the kid a snack. A protein bar—one from the bins of bunker rations, all wrapped in plastic without a label. He tosses it to the floor in front of the kid. “Here,” he says. “Take it.”
The crooked Parker kid’s eyes are trained on it, but he doesn’t pick it up. He stays in his hiding spot beneath the bed, lurking like a time shadow, leaned up against a bed railing, his eyes flicking quickly between the item and Haroun.
“I know you’re hungry, Parker,” he says, “so pick it up.” He kicks it a little closer, and that seems to catch his attention, because the kid crawls out from his little cave. God, he’s thin. He’s moving strangely, too. A crawling shuffle, heavy on one side, unbearably slow.
Haroun never really sees him move anymore. He supposes this is why—they’ve injured the kid so permanently that he can’t even walk anymore. Can barely crawl. Just this hunched half-movement that hurts to watch. Haroun’s embarrassed by it, the kid’s pathetic movements, the way he’s crouched so low and so fucking slow—and he coughs, clearing his throat. About a foot away from the protein bar, he stops his pained crawl, his black-clothed shoulders low to the ground.
The kid’s eyes flick up to Haroun again and back down. For the second time, he doesn’t move to it. “Now or never, Parker,” he says, but the talking seems only to scare him, because he shifts back another foot like Haroun just threatened to stab him. “It’s just food,” he adds, gesturing to it. “C’mon. Eat. I’m doing something fucking nice, so eat.”
Parker reaches out a trembling arm and sniffs, squinting at it as though he’s never seen a fucking protein bar before. Haroun’s gaze drifts to the wall behind him, and from what he can see there’s some fresh writing there. He hasn’t been inside the cell in a while. It doesn’t look fresh—maybe a few weeks old, maybe a month, the cracks ripe with grime.
It reads: GOODBYE AUNT MAY.
Haroun’s heart skips a beat. “May?” he echoes. “That’s your…”
The woman from the car. Peter Parker’s aunt. Nearly dead, clinging onto life for a nephew she’d never see again. Haroun still dreams about her sometimes. The blood dripping slow down her head, the seatbelt holding her still, the slow sway of her body in the flipped-over car.
Peter—Parker shifts a little on the ground. He’s bleeding from a small spot on his head. His whole left side must still ache because he moves with obvious pain—his teeth clenched tight, his head ducked, his arm hugging his injured side.
“Your Aunt May’s dead,” Haroun snaps, and there’s another flash of stupid May Parker in his mind, laying in her hospital bed. The stitches on her pale head, the plastic tube fed down her throat. “Didn’t Charlie tell you already? We killed her.”
Peter stops moving.
A drawn-out silence, and Parker’s eerie stare darting between the granola bar on the ground and Haroun himself. “You killed her?” he croaks.
Haroun hasn’t heard the kid speak actual words in days. He almost forgot Parker could.
“No,” he tries, “not me, I mean, I didn’t do it. I didn’t. It was the car—it was Charlie’s idea—and I mean, I wasn’t even driving. That was Nick, and she—she wasn’t supposed to be there.”
The kid looks pained—emotional—confused in a way that Harounhates. He looks suddenly very young, like the day they took him; Haroun hates it. “I didn’t kill her,” he says, pissed now. “Look—stop asking questions and just eat the fucking bar, Parker.”
The boy doesn’t move.
“I said eat it!”
Here they are now, with Haroun’s handgun pressed into Peter’s rib-lined back, trembling in Haroun’s grip. He tries several times with his hands—but for some reason he drops it, and the third time the kid drops it, Haroun is hit with a wave of such anger that he rears his arm back and whips the gun across Parker’s already-bruised face.
Parker doesn’t cry. He doesn’t fight. He doesn’t scream or beg or run away.
He just sinks to the ground as low as he can and covers his head with his thin, scabbed-over arms.
“I didn’t—fucking—kill her!”
His eye is bloody from where Haroun struck him, or was it already like that? He looks freakish now, a red-eyed lopsided creature, and Haroun hates him for it. For his weakness, for his frailty, for the sick sense of power that he feels standing over the wounded boy.
Like a butcher standing over a pig.
Like a spider over a stuck fly.
One hand still gripping in the kid’s jumpsuit, Haroun screams,“I SAID EAT IT, YOU FUCKING FREAK!”
Shakily, Parker picks up the protein bar from the cement floor and bites from the side of his mouth, chews with his head still low. When he’s done, the kid looks up at him with a strange mixture of gratitude and fear, his eye a pool of weeping red. He blinks, and a bead of blood slides down his scarred cheek in a red line.
Haroun releases him.
Haroun is a good guy. He knows he is. It’s just—in that moment, when he found himself pointing the blunt end of a bloodied gun at the kid, Parker shaking and cowering beneath him, looking up at him with that red, bleeding eye, that the high starts to fade away. Reality sinks in.
It’s too late for him, isn’t it? Isn’t it?
Maybe Elliot was right. Maybe they’re not the good guys.
He stares down at the pill bottle. Government-issued. Pure. Free. Completely fucking his. He crushes it up fine, swipes up a fingerful of it and shoves it into his gums. It stings at first, and then it hits him—that heavenly high.
He’ll pick this over Parker any day. He’d kill a dozen Peter Parkers, smash a dozen knees, crush a dozen hands. Anything, anything, for more of this.
Late in August, the bunker door opens when it shouldn’t. Four Avengers barrel in, and Haroun raises his hands in surrender.
A part of him, the smallest part of him, is relieved that it’s finally over. Because truly, he’d only ever seen stuff like this in movies. In another universe, Haroun stabbed the needle a half-inch to the left and hit the jugular instead of muscle and Peter bled out on the Brooklyn grass. In another one, Peter broke out of the bunker with the doctor’s help or convinced Haroun to give up the code. In another, Haroun never joined up with Charlie at all or died of an overdose before he could.
But Haroun is in this one. He should’ve done something a long, long time ago.
But it was never supposed to go on this long.