Chapter 3
Awaking to the blackness of the backs of his eyelids, Harry momentarily fears the past couple of nights had been a hopeful, desperate little dream and he remained in the prison of the grave he dug himself from. But there is a weight on either side of him, warm skin pressed to either side and a web of limbs that prevent him from sinking back into the earth, holding him securely to the surface. The light of the setting sun beams through the windows, warming the tatters of his skin and bathing the sickly paleness in a warmth that makes his skin look warm, lively. Not the paper white that he knows it's become.
The sunlight drew him out of bed like a moth to a flame, blindly following it until he sits before a window, back turned to the dark tones of the manor so he may purify himself in the vivid colors that paint the sky. Seeing his skin bathed in orange, it was easy to feel human again, to be a soul in a body, ignore the various pieces of metal shoved that were shoved into his body on an autopsy table, the staples that pinch the skin in his chest, the needles and wiring in his gums that hold his mouth shut. Harry knows there’s something inhuman about him, so deep that death refused to touch him even when he laid, chest cavity hollow, on a cold autopsy table, in so much pain that for brief moments his goals shifted from signaling his life to welcoming his death. But even after that his ribs snapped back together and his organs reattached themselves to each other, insistent on living even after actions taken to form records of his death. He wonders how much sooner he would have been able to move and live had he not had that damage to repair on top of it all. If there was not a faint but massive red Y of scar tissue on his chest, held together by staples and thread. A dead body cannot heal, and yet this one did, sealed that hole in his chest, healing with that which held his chest shut as an irritating obstacle.
And an obstacle they remain. With that thought, he turns towards the bathroom. The gentle support and care of the morning was appreciated, making a body colder than winter warm with affection for the two that remain asleep, but Harry, feet finding the icy tiles of the bathroom, finds that there are some results of what he endured he would rather deal with on his own. In front of the mirror, he takes in his sunken in cheeks, hollow eyes, the mere fuzz that remains on his head, and the topography of a mountain range that makes up the scars he learns even eat into the little hair he has, and realizes this is the first time in many years he has not looked into the mirror and found his father staring back at him, a stream of insults ready to be thrown at Harry.
He is staring at a face so pale and sunken, riddled with scars, so starved of food and sun that anyone who saw him asleep must assume his death, and it’s the closest to recognizing his face as himself he’d ever been.
Harry blinks after several moments, shaking his head and knelt to retrieve a washcloth. Leaning toward the mirror, he lifts his lip with one hand, though he already knows the broad strokes of the situation. The ends of two needles are visible in the highest part of the gums of his upper jaw, similar in his lower, wires on the ends neatly twisted together to prevent his mouth from opening during his viewing. He pulls the gnarled ends of the wires out of his mouth, untangling the two strands slowly. When untangled wires dangle from his mouth, he loops them around his fingers and pulls, raising the washcloth to his lip to catch the crimson that flowed from the hole the needle had punctured in his mouth, dropping the stained metal onto the counter surrounded by drops of blood he hadn’t managed to keep restricted to the towel or the pool that was beginning to form in the back of his mouth.
The process slowly repeats, leaving him with a series of gore covered needles on a crimson splattered counter, a once-white washcloth in his hands, and his mouth filling with blood faster than he can spit it and drench his sink the same red that everything from the towel to his own teeth is becoming stained with. The chemicals in his body, the very same he dosed himself with in a fool’s revenge quest, the very same that make him so wrong that death will not touch him, stop the blood flow faster than it would in any other, but not so quickly that he hasn’t stained all that surrounds him in blood. Though he supposes that’s no unusual behavior from him.
So his shirt is thrown to the side, the dozens of staples that sit in his chest, pinch at his skin to remind him perpetually of their presence, reflecting only the slightest bits of light. The skin around the intrusion is perhaps the skin on his body that has retained the most color, a blistering red from irritation, pinched up into an awkward mishealed point beneath the arch of the metal that once held him together. It is beyond its use. And so his hands grasp the lowest of the staples, centered between where his hips jut out, and pull. The tiny piece of metal sticks stubbornly for a moment, clinging to his flesh like he’s pulling a shovel from mud, then freeing from his skin suddenly, taking strands of muscle and skin with it, the sound of it almost like a wetter form of a zipper. He presses the washcloth to the small tear of aching red disrupting the sea of aching skin, staining his skin with red even as he stops the flow of blood. As he moves slowly up his abdomen, he develops a pattern of deep breaths, pushing all air out of his ribcage before he tears the next free, the dotted line of patches of torn skin and raw flesh traveling up his ribcage and splitting into two branches to travel to his shoulders. When the last falls into the pile of bloodstained metal, he stares at the heap briefly, before quickly batting a hand out to shove the horrible things into the trash, as if removing them from his sight will purge the memories of what put them there.
He raises his head, catching glimpses of the mirror, suddenly processing the pajama clad figure of Peter Parker standing in the doorway, watching him like he’s an angel appearing to him. Or perhaps a devil. The look in the man’s eyes dances on the line that separates that, the space between love and fear, admiration and regret, honor and horror.
“Peter.” It makes sense that his name would be the first word to pass through his lips with his jaw freed. His existence has as good as revolved around Peter’s since the very moment they met, as if Harry was simply a rocky, uninhabitable planet revolving around the brightly glowing sun of Peter Parker.
“What happened?” Peter approaches him like he’s a wild animal that might either bolt or attack him at any moment. He decides he hates it.
He forces a smile. Ignored the feeling of scuttling somewhere in the muscle of his shoulder. “Got some up close and personal experiences with mortuary science.” It’s meant to be a joke, but his voice was grating to his own years, harsh and quiet, fueled more by his breathing than by any movement of vocal chords, worn and hollow from disuse, just like any other part of him.
Peter laughs despite that, but it’s short and awkward, like he doesn’t know if he’s totally allowed to despite the obvious joke. But he steps closer more confidently now, not so scared and hesitant, until his hand hangs hesitantly before the pinched up scarring from the autopsy. Harry’s own presses it onto his skin, the warmth of the contact making his skin buzz and warm like an electrical current flows between the two of them. He finds himself staring at the contact, that warmth spreading to his face, but Peter’s face contorts into an agonized regret after a few moments. He breaks the contact and takes the warmth with him.
“What about the needles?” Peter’s whispering.
He hesitates to respond. “They need to keep your mouth from falling open if you’re having a viewing, so…” The look on Peter’s face prevents him from elaborating further, so pained he seems to be suffering as much from simply receiving the information as Harry was when he endured experiencing it. Peter doesn’t seem to be planning on breaking the silence, so Harry brings a question of his own. “How long has it been?”
“...Six months. Two hundred and five days.”
His fingers grasp the edge of the counter to support himself as the weakness in his legs rears its head, his field of vision blurring at the edges at the very same moment a dizzyingly cold wave travels down the length of his body. So long. So many days. He’s stunned his own mind is as intact as it is. How much has he missed? Six months. So much could have happened, Peter could have been caught up in another villain and died before Harry had crawled out to find him.
He leans more of his weight against the heft of the countertop, exhaling slowly in a poor attempt to soothe himself, turning slowly to stare at Peter. “What’s happened?” As much a breath as a question.
Peter’s mouth opens and closes for a moment. “I… I have a staff job with the bugle. Finishing up the bachelors. Uh, MJ’s got this big acting job, got a girlfriend…” He pauses for a moment. “I’ve also been seeing someone…” He trails off, looking at Harry with that not-startling-the-wild-animal look, but it’s gone from looking at a fox in a trap, in need of help but still willing to use it’s teeth on anyone that approaches to looking him like he’s a fawn standing for the first time, unsure if it knows to run from humans yet or if it will allow his presence out of innocence.
Despite expecting it, Harry’s stomach sinks a little. He forces a smile regardless. “I figured.” No reason to lie. “I could tell when people were around. So when there was footsteps I didn’t recognize…” He trailed off.
Peter stares for a moment, brow tensing, head tilted, before nodding, stiff and mechanical.
“Do they make you happy?”
His response is fast, an autopilot of deeply ingrained scripted words, a response spoken many times. “Of course. He’s a wonderful guy.”
“I’m glad.” He tilts his head, trying to make eye contact that Peter deftly avoids. “I hope it works out. You deserve something nice. Think that I’ve been enough of a thorn in your love life, I’ll try not to blackmail this one or anything.” He attempts to joke. Peter turns away at that. Suddenly desperate for Peter to just look at him, he continues. “It’s… nice that everything’s been so good for you two.” Makes sense that their lives would turn around the moment he wasn’t in them. How long has just been a shell filled with bitterness and anger, a cluster of wrath masquerading as a friend? Has there ever been a time where he wasn’t that? Hell, who was he before that?
Peter still isn’t looking at him. If Harry thinks about it, he’s tiptoed around him since he found him, a balance between hesitance and obligation to the man who died for him. Like he realized what Harry has, that he’s only ever been a poison in the lives who surround him, best kept away from, or perhaps best left buried. Like the reason he backs away, rarely approaches, is that he’s afraid of catching whatever it is that’s wrong with Harry.
Harry would rather not infect him with it either, so he slips past him to be drawn like the moth he’s becoming to the sunset, sitting and watching, knowing that ten feet away Peter still stares at him. Perhaps he knows what is it that makes Harry so diseased even when he himself hasn’t found it. Maybe he can tell him how to cut it out, how to amputate the diseased limb that makes him poison in other people’s lives.
He doesn’t ask. He doesn’t even look at him. He just watches the sun.
MJ takes a similar vigil to Peter once she awakes. He still doesn’t turn back. He briefly wonders if she knows what’s wrong with him too, but dismisses it. MJ wouldn’t sit and watch him poison people. She would either cut the infection out of him herself or hand him the knife and make him do it. She wouldn’t allow him to drip poison into her life for so long if she knew he was doing it.
The yellow has vanished from the sky, leaving reds and purples, by the time the silence is broken. MJ shifts, taking a step to the side, then pivoting on one foot. “I’ll be right back. Cat needs fed.” And then, directed very clearly to the hunched shadow staring out of the window. “And so do you. I’ll pick something up.”
“I can go!” Peter blurts out so eagerly that it stings. “I’ll be faster with the swinging. And just give me your keys, I’ll feed her too.”
MJ’s questioning eyes flick between them before there’s the jingle of keys exchanging hands and the faintest soft exhale from Peter, then MJ is whispering. But not quietly enough. “No detours. No long routes. No distractions. Make sense? I’m not going to watch you avoid another problem.”
His attention becomes internal at that, dread settling over him like a weighted blanket composed of thorns. It’s not just his own paranoid, shattered mind insisting Peter’s desperate to leave. She noticed too. And each of Peter’s rapid, enthusiastic departing steps just feel like nails pushing that reality into his head.
MJ settles beside him, their shoulders touching. Instinctively, his head is laid on her shoulder, both settling into the easy platonic affection that permeated their friendship even after so long, her hand stroking the back of his head gently.
“I’m sorry.” He doesn’t need to say why.
She smiles. “I think I’ve had more than enough time to forgive you.” She understands. She’s giving more changes.
“Pete said you had a girlfriend now.”
She nods, smile growing wider. “Gwen. She’s Peter’s lab partner in some of his classes. You’d really like her.”
He’s suddenly aware of how much of their lives he was distant from even before the burial, how many pieces and people he just doesn’t know exists. He’s never even heard of this person, and yet MJ is involved enough in Peter’s life to meet her. Add that to the ever growing pile of things wrong with him. Things to regret. Things to feel guilty about.
“Bet I’m going to give the press a field day.” He comments. “Trying to get records of my death undone right after it looks like something tunneled out of my grave.”
She laughs. “Knowing you, you’d be excited to have conspiracy theories about you.”
“Well, with this it’ll be interesting to see if anyone gets close to the truth. For all I know, they might not be technically wrong if they start saying I’m a zombie.”
“Just don’t start trying to eat my brain and I’m okay with it.”
“Promise.”
The hues that paint the sky are all blues and purples now, dark hues that give off a sickly glow from the light pollution of the city below. The room is growing dark. As it grows darker, more and more anxiety settles like a hefty stone in his chest, making him jolt up suddenly to make his way to the light switch, anxiety evaporating under the now glowing overhead light.
MJ rises to her feet slowly. “Too dark?”
He grits his teeth as he nods, not liking how pathetic it seems to be twenty-two and scared of the dark, but finding himself unwilling to lie about something so trivial. He tries to piece some explanation together, something that rationalizes how a large, densely decorated room could ever resemble being buried in a coffin. But there is no rationality, just the anxiety that fills a mind that crumbled under six feet of dirt.
“Do you think it was the performance enhancers that brought you back?” She asks, taking on hints of that approaching a wild animal look Peter had had earlier. It’s not any better on her.
“I don’t see what else it could be.” He raises a hand and drifts his fingertips over the scarred side of his face, ravaged by his own mistakes. “I think it’s also what healed this so quickly.”
“You didn’t change them, did you?”
He shakes his head, brow furrowed. “You and I both know I barely passed chemistry. I barely figured out how to even use them.”
“Do you think that this could mean that your dad…?”
It feels like he’s been shoved into a frozen lake, so cold even his thoughts are frozen. He would have gotten out already, wouldn’t he? He wouldn’t have been one to hide his presence either, especially when Harry had so many years where he’d be so eager to return anything he could want to him. Just when Harry’s begun to escape his shadow, carve some semblance of personhood from the clay of his life, the shadows grow just large enough to begin to devour him. And he wants to believe he can continue to be better despite whatever opposition, he wants to think that seeing his father again wouldn’t send him spiraling, but his morality has proven itself to be a fragile, easily altered thing. Can he really trust himself to remain steadfast to a shift so fresh? Can he trust himself with much of anything?
A door is thrown open somewhere downstairs, a cheery distant cry of “Pizza time!” echoing from it.
From the first moments he breaks free from the soil, he knows that the insects remain beneath his skin, trapped by the skin and muscle forming over the openings to the tunnels they’ve dug inside him. The bastards no doubt remain alive by consuming what little muscle mass he has left, constantly scuttling, needle legs digging into parts of his body far beneath the surface.
The first one that actually breaks out of his skin manages to do so during a meeting with his lawyer, mid conversation on the hearing to have his death records expunged. He can tell that whatever it is beneath his skin is a little closer to the surface than they ordinarily are, the faintest of lumps visible in the skin just below his ribcage, but he did not expect it to be that soon that it freed itself from the confines of his skin.
“Your life being so high profile is a double edged sword. People have good reasons to impersonate you, but there’s equally good reasons that someone might have filed fraudulent claims of your death. You also have accessible dental records and blood work, so we can also rely on that once your new blood work gets in…” He’s paying attention to the man’s explanation of where things stand until there’s a sudden jolt of pain in his waist that makes him hiss in a sharp breath, warmth of blood trickling down his side, and something beginning to scuttle its way up his chest.
Suddenly very lucky that his lawyer is blind, he reaches a silent hand up his shirt to grasp the large beetle journeying up the ladder of his ribs. He reaches and grabs a tissue, keeping his eyes straight forward as he wraps the insect in it and gently tosses the bundle into a trash bin sat beside the desk like it’s nothing more than a gum wrapper.
The meeting wraps up soon enough that he doesn’t have to concern himself with the stain on the side of his shirt growing large enough to be visible beneath his suit jacket. But he can’t be much more eager to depart from that room than he is, doing everything to control the impulse to clasp his hand over the hole in his side that he can.
“Mr. Osborn,” The voice nearly makes him jump out of his skin. “If I may say something before you leave.” Mr. Murdock strides closer, standing to his side by the door. “I have heard that beetles are repelled by lavender.” And he promptly opens it and steps past Harry.
Harry is left standing in the doorway, feeling like his soul has just left his body.
The hearing is a week later. Harry walks out of it alive, both physically and in the eyes of the law.
The first thing he does is make sure that every share of OSCORP that he owns is promptly sold. He nearly died. He went through something that would have killed any other person and lost six months of his life to it. He has no plans to continue spending his life on things that he knows he doesn’t care about, that he knows make him miserable, that he knows aren’t his own desires, even if he’s slowly come to realize that he does not necessarily know what his own desires are. He figures he’s just given himself all the time in the world to learn what he wants.
The second order of business is the manor. Some part of Harry is reluctant to sell it, but he knows he cannot live with it the way that it is. In the first few weeks of his life free from his grave, he woke far too many times assuming the dark wood of the ceiling was the lid of his coffin, that the light-consuming dark greens and browns that make up the place were the earth he was trapped beneath. There have been days where he never moved from his bed, paralyzed by memories of darkness and earth, body above the ground but his mind encased in it all over again.
Every room in the place is gutted, every last piece of furniture and every last decoration is stripped away, sold as quickly as he can manage to purge the remains of his father from the place, and then repainted, a variety of colors so bright that his mind cannot mistake them for soil, reflecting even the tiniest shreds of light to make rooms glow, each tone selected with the impulse he fears fuels most of his current actions, but when he looks back on his selections he realizes the colors are the sunset.
And when he guides himself through his newly dusk-ified home, the anxiety that settled in his ribs at the earthy tones is dispersed, yes, but replaced by a new discomfort. One that hates how empty the space around him is, how devoid of simulation. Improved, but still lacking.
He finds himself in the old study, stripped of all the memories he can’t stand reliving, considering the most efficient way to fill the vast maze of frequently unused rooms, phone halfway out of his pocket to ask MJ to accompany him on a noble quest to see what cacophony of the ugliest items known to man they can find to fill the space of the manor with when his eyes catch on something.
There’s a seam in the center of the wall to the left of the door. A small square looking as though it was cut out of the wall and placed back in the hole, just large enough for a person to crawl through without risk of getting stuck. As he approaches, he suddenly realizes exactly the root of his hesitancy towards selling the house. His discovery of the lair behind the mirror should be proof enough that there are spaces in the house Harry is not aware of, no matter how much of his life spent here.
As if to confirm it, the section of the wall he prods at swings upwards when he pushes it, allowing him to begin a slow, dread inducing crawl into a small tunnel, a small room visible at the other end of a six foot stretch of dust, cobwebs, and wooden support beams surrounding him.
The room he discovers is just as thoroughly covered in cobwebs and dust as the tunnel, just as abandoned and unused, though the room is in utter havoc. The walls of the small room are covered in bookcases as high as the ceiling, some books lying in a fallen heap with bent pages below the selves, the ones remaining on the shelves falling into gaps left between them where some tomes had been torn from the shelves, leaving those less prioritized to fill those gaps. A desk sits against the far wall, the same dark mahogany as every other piece of furniture that Harry had just had stripped out of the building. The desk is covered mostly by loose papers with notes in a language he doesn’t recognize, similar pages scattered across the room that clearly originated from the surface. Several books bound in some form of leather that makes some gut part of Harry instinctually nervous sit atop of it, titled either in that same unknown language or simply not titled at all. Within the desk drawers he finds further notes, set with the others on top of the desk, as well as half burnt candles and vials of something black and thick he doesn’t find himself enthusiastic to try touching, and a sheathed dagger he finds remarkably similar to the one he’d held over the unconscious Peter Parker over two years ago
Reaching a hand into the abyss of the back of one drawer, his fingers find something so frigid that his fingers become seared by bitter cold the moment they come into contact with it, barely yanking it into the light before he can’t stand touching it any longer. The tiny metal puzzle box he finds sitting there provides no explanation as to how it could possibly cause the beginnings of frostbite on his fingertips. The largest of the drawers in the desk, sitting across from the two he’d explored already, he finds to be locked.
His body pilots him out of the hidden space, back through the disguised flap to the room, the bright paint doing nothing to soothe him like he hoped it would. No matter whether or not his father pulled himself from his grave like Harry had, the hidden chamber whispers that which he can’t easily admit to himself. The legacy of his surname, the actions of those who bore it before him, are one’s he can’t hide from, even if he is the last of it’s line that he knows to be alive, even if he scrubs the presence of his father from the decor of the house, even if he sells the company that made his name such a weight on his shoulders on his first place.