Chapter 7
When Harry leaves for the night, Peter finds he feels far more at ease. It wasn’t the most sensitive thing to say, though Peter’s never been the best at figuring out how to say those sorts of things without hurting feelings. But privately, alone, in his own mind, Peter can admit one thing is true: It really had felt like he’d forgotten how to be Harry’s friend.
Before Harry had died, he’d barely spoken to the man for almost a year since he’d learned Peter was Spider-Man. And before that, well, Peter himself kept their interactions far between after Norman’s death, even as he saw Harry grow increasingly desperate for some time with the person who was the only one he had left, desperation he’d only realized hadn’t been platonic hours before Harry had died, and all he could do to show he knew and it was the same for him was kiss him as he died. And before that… Peter can admit that he does feel quite a bit of guilt about choosing to ignore the man after Harry had told him he was the only family he had left.
Maybe things would have gone different if he hadn’t left Harry when he knew he needed someone. But it’s easier to push that to the side now. Considering every possible moment where he could have changed the outcome was a daily occurrence during the six months he’d thought Harry was dead. Or maybe the six months in which Harry was just actually dead. He’s not really… asked what actually happened there, though he likes the idea of Harry returning to life instead of being in a weird coma significantly less. Just has some implications for anyone else he might consider dead that he’s not totally ready to unpack.
Damn it. Think about anything else.
Harry’s alive now, for reasons Peter doesn’t like not knowing. And now Peter is realizing that when you take the concept of starting over literally it has his disadvantages. Not that he and Harry… discussed or agreed to it at all. Peter just assumed they were doing that when weeks kept passing and they acted more and more like strangers. No, he didn’t ask. Why would he do that? The idea that he doesn’t really know how to talk to him right now is too honest, he’s not going to ask about something like that and make it worse. He just has a lot of questions that he has no answers to and a Harry Osborn he’s hesitant to ask for them. Besides, returning from the dead has to have some existentialism attached, and he’s hesitant to worsen that by prodding at the topic of why Harry isn’t dead.
For quite possibly the hundredth time, his mind is drawn to the delusionally hopeful idea of things he’d had in the first days of Harry’s return. That they’d be able to pick up with feelings neither knew the other had until the moment before Harry had died, ditching any relationships one of them may or may not have begun in the other’s absence and living with no problem with whatever traumas had occurred healed by the power of love. That it would just work out. But he should have learned by now, learned from MJ, that just loving each other wouldn’t be enough.
But with Harry, the road of how to work on even something platonic isn’t so clear. And Peter’s not making anything easier in that regard.
Peter lands himself on a rooftop, watching the hot pink beginnings of the sunrise appear over the horizon. He’s been out almost all night, ignoring his morning classes. It’s not the first time he’s done something like that, it’s an event he’s used to, so he takes a short walk down the side of the building and goes looking for a coffee shop seedy enough to be cheap.
“Hey! Spider-Man!” A hand grasps his shoulder so suddenly he nearly leaps onto the wall. The hand slides off his shoulder as the woman who grabbed him stops to catch her breath. “God, you’re hard to get a hold of.”
“That’s me.” He glances longingly down the road, yearning for the energy of six espresso shots.
The woman straightens up, trying to organize her curly hair. “I need your help.” She waits only a moment to hear a response before launching into an explanation. “We’ve talked to police and everything but we’re sort of just ignored or they come in and tear the place apart and call it a day--” Her words spill out like boxes in an overstuffed closet.
“Calm down ma’am. I’ll do what I can to help.” He promises, stunned by the speed at which she speaks.
The moment he stops speaking, she picks back up again, no more calm after his words. “I work at a mortuary, we keep having bodies go missing. For the past couple months. I’ve called around to other mortuaries around the city, other funeral homes too, they’re experiencing the same thing too!”
The Peter Parker who’d been hanging around with his buddy Harry has left. Spider-Man takes his place. “Do you have any more details?”
She nods. “I’ve been working with other morticians to gather information for you. We counted almost eighty bodies disappearing. The vast majority have been from morgues rather than funeral homes. We don’t have a lot of specific theories, a couple people think this is another of your weird superpowered dudes in funny costumes. A lot of the ideas seemed insane until that Osborn kid showed up alive after his grave was dug up.” She laughs an uncomfortable laugh. “I really hope they’re not just getting up and walking away. It would make our jobs a lot harder.
He scrambles around for some concept of what he should ask about, desperate to shove any thoughts of the suddenly alive Harry out of his mind. “Any specific ages?”
“We looked at that. It’s not one age group, but it’s almost entirely bodies under sixty years of age.”
“Is there a particular cause of death that…” Oh god, what are words? “Leads with this bodies?”
“It’s pretty even. Though one of us has noted that no body that’s disappeared has sustained major bodily trauma, though trauma victims have been taken. It’s usually just head trauma when that’s the case.” She explains. “There’s no patterns with race, location, or anything like that. It is usually poorer people, though. People who’s families can’t do much once they’re gone. The most notable thing to us is that it’s usually people who’ve died the most recently.” She jerks suddenly, reaching for her bag. “We wanted you to take this seriously, so we made this.” He finds a stuffed manilla folder shoved roughly into his hands. “All the information about the people who’ve vanished we could get consent from family to include, maps, everything. We’ve also heard about a couple bodies who were freshly buried disappearing, but that was only early on. It’s not happened for weeks. Except for that Osborn kid.” She raises a hand to her temple. “This explanation is a mess, isn’t it.”
It absolutely is. “No, it’s not. I promise I’ll do what I can.”
She pauses. “Do you trust that Mantis guy?”
“Of course, he’s--” He clears his throat. “I do trust him. I’ve fought beside him, he’s proven himself to me as trustworthy. He’s a good man.”
She frowns, scraping one shoe against the ground. “He comes up during a lot of meetings with me and my coworkers about this.” She explains. “He appeared around the time that Osborn's kid's grave was vandalized and he reappeared alive, right? That happening was the start of all these bodies going missing.” She pauses, looking away, then back to him with an intensity. “I don’t know how often you work with him or interact with him or whatever, but we don’t think it’s a good idea you tell him. In case he’s related to it.”
A sense of frustration fills him at the fact the universe is once again asking him to lie to Harry. Though with how little the two of them have been talking, this might not be hard.
The minute he thinks that he feels guilty. “Of course.”
Who knows if he’ll keep that promise. It didn’t do well the last time he agreed to not telling Harry something.
She glances at her watch. “My shift starts soon, but on the back of that there’s a list of numbers for all the mortuaries who’ve had bodies go missing. Good luck, Spidey.”
Looks like he’ll be disappointing Dr. Connors once again, he thinks grimly as he crawls through his window twenty minutes later, sipping a cup that’s as good as nothing but espresso shots. It tastes horrific but it’ll keep him conscious. Though opening the folder only to see a bunch of dense text, he thinks to himself this might be more like that class than he expected.
He begins skimming for anything he can use as a lead. Eighty-three bodies across eight mortuaries, four funeral homes, and one cemetery. Fifty eight of the families have given permission for identities to be disclosed. As she said, only three bodies have been over sixty, but none over seventy. He begins to take notes. Most died of unintentional injuries, which the file notes is the leading cause of death for people 1-45 in the first place. No bodies with extensive bodily damage or decay have vanished. Most bodies had been dead for under three days. He notes down whatever information he thinks has a chance of being even slightly helpful, but no likely theories for what could be happening pop into his head. However, once he reaches the past few pages just before noon on his first read through, he can’t help but notice something that makes his body go cold.
He knows the name of that cemetery. The only cemetery bodies have gone missing from is the same cemetery that both Osborns and his own Uncle Ben had been buried at. Scanning the list, he’s grateful to not see his Uncle's name, but that relief soon is overwhelmed by an anxiety that sits tense in his chest upon seeing Harry’s name at the bottom of the list, along with notes about him being an outlier. Harry had indeed been buried for more than six months when he, as Peter knows, pulled himself out of his grave and he was not the beginning of a trend of the dead rising across New York, only a strange sole example of Norman Osborn’s troubled son being, as it was told to the public, killed during that incident with Sandman and Venom, an unknown second captive to the broadway star Mary Jane Watson, only to reappear alive six months later and begin living in an agoraphobic isolation that would make Emily Dickinson proud and make people post conspiracy theory videos on YouTube.
But Peter can admit, with him not knowing many details of Harry’s un-death himself, that the whole situation is a little strange with him being the first person to be an instance of it. Still feeling guilty about the idea of lying to him again, especially about another thing that could very well involve him, Peter resolves to ask Harry about what the hell happened to make him mysteriously return from the dead before he decides to tell him. Not breaking his promise and not technically lying.
But ignoring Harry, this is his lead, isn’t it. Might be a good idea to go check out that cemetery.
He makes a quick list of names, leaving out Harry’s for his own sanity, before pulling his suit on and making his way outside, once again silently apologizing to Dr. Connors.
The first thing he realizes is this cemetery is fucking huge. It takes him almost an hour to find the first of the graves. It looks as close to a normal grave as anything in his opinion. The difference between the plants around the grave and the plants growing over it is slight, but he can still make out the long rectangle space in which plant life is slightly sparser. It does tell him one thing: any digging that had occurred here was fully digging up an entire coffin, not the smaller, messier hole that he theorized would have occurred from Harry digging himself out.
That pattern continues to be the case. Clear signs of unearthing a whole coffin rather than the idea of other people digging themselves out being the case. So, that would mean these bodies are being stolen rather than the dead starting to get up and walk away. Additionally, most of these graves have deaths listed as less than around several months ago, around the time Harry reappeared.
On a whim, he decides to try and visit Harry’s grave for comparison.
He knows the location well. Despite that, he’s left lost and confused around the normal indicators of its location before he realizes the headstone is gone. Alarm courses through him for a moment before logic overpowers it. He can’t know for certain, but he can imagine Harry would have the thing removed.
A couple of the flowers he and MJ had planted are still present, though only the ones that would have been near the foot of the grave. The earth is uneven and disturbed near the head of the old gravesite, encouraging Peter’s ongoing theory. The patterns of earth and plant life from Harry’s gravesite don’t match any of the others.
But out of the corner of his eye, he catches sight of something strange.
The Osborn family’s graves are all but contained to this part of the lot, with names of relatives he’s never heard going back almost a hundred years surrounding Harry’s old grave. Norman’s grave is directly behind his sons, and that’s the exact thing that he notices.
Well, it’s nothing new, but it’s only strange to him now.
He distinctly recalls noticing, during the first few occasions he’d visited Harry’s gravesite, that the earth near the headstone of Norman’s gravesite was upturned and disturbed. The gears in his head begin to turn as he steps towards the site. He hadn’t thought anything of it. It had been raining, storming constantly, a lot of plants had been washed off of graves, even if the extent was more severe on Norman’s than any other. And there hadn’t been any sort of hole. But looking now, it’s remarkably similar to Harry’s. He steps closer to the tousled earth just beneath the headstone. It’s been more than six months since that happened, and yet nothing has grown there. The soil is no longer freshly moved and muddy like when that had initially happened either, now dehydrated by the sun, rocky and dusty. Like… like Harry’s was better concealed because someone had come back with the intention of covering it up, while whatever happened to Norman’s was… covered up in the moment by someone who didn’t want it known.
He feels sick. Why wouldn’t he have made himself known if that was the case? Sure, reappearing from the dead is strange, but Harry had managed it. It would have been the perfect time to do so. After losing so many important people in such quick succession, a power vacuum had opened in the company. It would have been a great opportunity to take control. And a legally dead person wouldn’t have much in terms of money or somewhere to go. Why not say something? Why not reveal himself? It wouldn’t have been hard to figure out that nobody knew he was the Goblin other than Peter and maybe Harry. And at that point, Harry had been buried. Fairly easy for two people to keep a secret if one is dead.
But that offers the idea that both Norman and Harry had been able to dig themselves out of their graves after their death. Harry had very clearly taken whatever it was that Norman had that caused the abilities the Green Goblin possessed. Did one of those abilities, unknown to either Osborn at the time, include this sort of supernatural healing? But if that was the case, it wouldn’t provide any sort of explanation for what happened to any other body. Unless Norman was the one doing it. But why would that happen? Sure, rising from the dead is a bit… zombie or vampire-ish, but to Peter’s knowledge Harry wasn’t having any sort of… cannibalistic urges or whatever that would lead to digging up graves and stealing bodies. But Harry hadn’t developed any sort of goblin identity either. So maybe Harry’s just weird. Hell, maybe Norman is the weird one, if Harry’s only experiencing the intended results of the serum with only the unexpected result of returning from death to speak of. And if the timeline is correct, then Norman would have spent roughly six months simply not stealing bodies if he had some sort of dead people related thing he needed to do.
Maybe Norman was intending to start raising the dead with the serum? But that leads Peter back to the fact that at that point, Norman has no reason to not reveal himself along with the drug that had brought him back, making millions off the old military project that had made him into Lazarus. Then maybe someone else knows? Maybe someone else had discovered this before he had. Maybe someone had found him before he could establish himself again. The Osborn manor had sat empty for a full six months before Harry had come back. It wouldn’t have been super hard for someone to slip in and steal the performance enhancers if they knew where they were. And if someone had found Norman and forced him, or made some sort of deal that would have benefitted the old money-hungry Osborn more than simply making an appearance that revealed his life and probably brought him millions in interviews alone. But that still has so many holes in it. How would anyone know he would have been Norman, and not some random guy who looked like him? How would they have known something that specific had been responsible for his return to life?
Either way, he’s already lied to Harry enough. He may be unsure on telling him about the rest of what’s going on here, but he can’t have his friend walking around unaware of something like this.