Chapter 9
Peter hasn’t held Harry as they slept since that first night.
He still insists on keeping Harry warm, despite the fact that maybe on a logical level, they both know heaters exist. They don’t talk about it and neither have done anything to change the new routine that’s Peter slipping through his window. Harry hates it happening as much as he would hate it if it stopped happening. It feels like becoming worse again. And he can’t even pinpoint what exactly it is that would be getting worse.
Just like he doesn’t know why Peter doing this every night makes him so angry.
There’s still a part of Harry that resists admitting Peter does this because Peter cares about him, because in Harry’s mind he’s destroyed too much to still be cared for. Forgiven, maybe, but forgiven doesn’t mean that Peter and MJ have to still be around him and act like he’s their friend when he’s proven time and time again he’s not, even if he wants to be.
Don’t you get to be angry too? Peter lied repeatedly to you, ignored you for years when you needed him most, blew your face off, and MJ cheated on you and they both talked about you behind your back for years!
Don’t be entitled. He tells himself. Sure, maybe Harry doesn’t yet understand what he did to warrant most of that, but Harry has spent most of his life wealthy and spoiled. With who he is, it’s more than likely that he was so focused on himself he didn’t even notice anything he’d done to upset anyone. And MJ and Peter are good, better than him. They wouldn’t do things like that for no reason.
Besides, the irrational anger that sharing a bed with Peter causes isn’t worth addressing or voicing. He knows that Peter is sleeping and he knows that Peter is eating at least one good meal a day. And having Peter around frequently is way more convenient for trying to organize bug vigilante things.
They have radios now. Simple ones Peter stitched into his own mask and helped Harry wire into his. It makes the patrols where they split up less boring, but conversation is still more tense and stiff than not. It’s getting better though. Slowly, but it’s getting better. And it’s not Peter who’s the problem, he’s asking the same questions and making the same jokes that Harry would have known exactly how to respond to before he died. Harry is the issue.
Harry Osborn did die when the glider punctured his chest. And maybe the person walking around in his dead body has his memories, but it feels disingenuous for Harry to say he’s the same person as the man who died in Peter and MJ’s arms watching the sunset. Whoever the person in this body is now, he’s not funny, he’s not charming, he’s not extroverted, he's not anything, even if Harry doesn’t know how much of dead-Harry’s personality was self-manufactured. Harry really isn’t anything anymore. The idea that he’s a dead body possessed by the last remnants of a dead man is fitting. He feels hollow. He feels like half a person, like all the parts of himself he can’t find anymore have just been lobbed off with nothing to fill the gaps.
He’s become a bit of a distraction for the Bugle from Spider-Man. The money that their old “masked menace” got them was only going to last so long, especially with their formula being to provide weekly doses of libel against a man who’s increasingly loved by the city. But now, well, they’ve lucked out. The Mantis is more brutal than Spider-Man. It’s not killed anyone yet, but the Mantis injured far more people far more directly than Spider-Man ever is. Spider-Man is a literally colorful, good hearted, talkative, quipping figure. That’s all humanizing. The Mantis is quiet, stealthy, fast, often cruel when Harry doesn’t check himself, and it doesn’t speak. The Mantis never speaks, unless the other bug is around. And even then, it avoids speaking around civilians. The Mantis is a far more appealing and deserving target of criticism than Spidey will ever be. Besides, Harry is more than happy to pose for Peter’s camera. Make himself look menacing to draw more negative attention off Spider-Man. So it works out.
Really, it’s probably his own fault that those morticians don’t want the thing that is the Mantis around their potential corpse snatching. But once again, that works out.
They’ve begun organizing it so Mantis is on the streets while Spider-Man hangs around one of the locations where bodies more frequently go missing, watching for any strange occurrences but often failing at being in the right place where anything happens. Harry chooses to believe this is because trying to be stealthy in a brightly colored suit seems like a fool's errand. He doesn’t offer to try and stake a place out himself, telling himself it’s because anyone knowing that the Mantis knows will make things worse, and not just because he finds the idea of Norman’s inevitable involvement being enough for Harry to see him terrifies him. He thinks it might make him have another breakdown, and Harry has ample evidence that breaking down makes him destructive.
Besides, they have the radios anyways. If something happens, he’s hearing about it as soon as Peter’s hand can reach his mask. He just won’t be seeing it, which is the best decision for both of them. And being the one out and about once again draws attention off Peter. It gives them an excuse to talk too, for Harry to learn how to pretend to be the dead man Peter knew and for Peter to learn how to pretend like any slip ups don’t make him uncomfortable. Harry teases him for how talking probably isn’t helping with the stealth and Peter insists he’s oh so very stealthy and Harry almost feels alive again. It’s fantastic! Basically perfect, other than the nights that Peter ‘calls off’ to go on dates. It’s harder to feel alive then. It’s lonely, so very lonely. Maybe that's why Harry won’t stop sleeping with another man’s boyfriend, because he’s lonely and that’s pathetic and maybe Norman was right when he called him weak.
Maybe that’s why he hates this so much. Because it somehow feels like being ‘the other guy’ again.
He chooses not to think about it once again. A new habit of his.
“This feels pointless.” Peter’s staticky voice grumbles into Harry’s ear.
Harry impales a paper bag on one of the spikes on the glider. This vigilante shit is basically his full time job with oscorp sold off. And full time jobs come with lunch breaks, even if they’re at 1AM and you’re taking them on a glider parked about a hundred feet above the closest rooftop. He draws one knee up onto the glider, careful not to fall backwards. He’s done that about three more times than he’ll ever admit to Peter, which is really to say he’s done it three times.
“You tell me that every night.”
“It’s always pointless!”
Fuck yeah. Sandwich time. He’s pretty sure he doesn’t need to eat, but he’s not about to rob himself of one of the few joys in his life.
“Are you eating right now?” Peter sounds wistful.
“Mhm.” He doesn’t say anything beyond that, but he thinks Peter is used to him not saying much by now. “Passed Katz.”
“Katz?! Lucky, I can’t even afford that. And I’m actually Jewish.” Peter groans. “Can’t leave. That’ll be the time something actually happens, huh.”
“Probably.” He nods, knowing full well Peter can’t see it. “Be good and stay there and I’ll run you some. Sandwich from the world's coolest delivery driver.” There’s a trash can on the roof below him. He wonders if he can land his wadded up trash in it from this high. “When we went to that one deli in high school, you always got Pastrami, right? Removed onions and always got red wine vinegar and olive oil when they had it.”
“You remember that!” Peter sounds impressed, but Harry doesn’t think he could forget if he’d been underground for six years instead of six months. He’d clung to that. When they’d started doing that, Harry had been 15, newly legally Harold after a breakdown to a well meaning but confused school counselor had resulted in Norman finally letting him be his son even if only to prevent Harry from embarrassing him in front of the press. That compromise had come with needing to be good enough and be man enough for Norman, and he’d clung to the boy in his chemistry classes who helped him study so his grades didn’t slip below B’s and result in him coming home to find his binders destroyed on his bed, who’d split cheap cookies with horrid textures with him in that deli and made him feel seen for the first time since the blonde girl in his ballet class who helped him lop his hair off when he was 8. He doesn’t remember what he ordered all those years ago, but he remembers that.
“We did it every day for like three years! That’s more deeply ingrained than how to ride a bike.”
“MJ converted me to getting the turkey for a while.” He can practically hear Peter crank his brain into reverse to clarify. “We started going again a lot after…” He trails off, knowing they both know what he’s talking about. “And it felt wrong to get that without you there, and that’s what she liked so I just started…”
“Oh.” He doesn’t know how to feel about that. He should be flattered, feel a bittersweet sort of flattery, take it as proof he’s important, but it instead just activates this weird sort of fear. Did they sit at the same table he and Peter used to, with MJ in his old spot? Did they split the cookies too? It should be flattering, but it activates a very old fear, the same fear he felt whenever Peter talked too much about MJ, the fear he felt after the strange attraction of watching Peter dodge Flash wore off, the same fear he felt when the only family he had left wouldn’t ever return his calls. Being replaced. Being no longer necessary. It should be flattering, but it feels like the hole his death might have torn in Peter’s life was smaller than he thought. Easy to just patch over or sew shut with other friends or his new pretty not a corpse barista boyfriend. Whatever gap is left isn’t the correct size or right shape for Harry to try to slide back in. He should have realized that by now.
Neither says anything for so long that Harry assumes Peter has clicked his side of the radio off until he hears. “If you do go back, I prefer their Salami.”
But even that doesn’t feel good. It feels like coddling. He doesn’t want to watch anyone tear their stitches open just so the carved out piece of flesh that he is can fit back in the place it once occupied. The cells are dying. It won’t heal, it’ll just necrotize itself and the flesh around it. And he’s tired of poisoning other people. He’s an adult. Is he really so melodramatic that people think it’s necessary to lie to him to spare his feelings? Over a goddamn type of meat? Harry would like to think he’s not that unstable, but he did try to kill Peter, so it might be best to keep his mouth shut. Aggression won’t help here.
So he forces out a light “Gotcha,” and attempts to land his trash in the bin a hundred feet below him, failing miserably and watching the paper fall into an alleyway and disappear from sight. “I’ll grab a couple, send you off with a bag lunch every morning like I’m your housewife.”
“You don’t nee-“ It doesn’t sound like the radio cutting out, especially with how the perpetual grating background static insists on remaining.
“Pete?”
The tension only lasts a good ten seconds before Peter takes a hatchet to it. “Sorry, just got startled.”
“By what?” Could be someone. Could be a door or window opening. Could be a drill taking one off it’s hinges. Could be someone’s body being pulled out of a mortuary cabinet. Peter could just be ignoring it because he’s experienced one too many noisy raccoons and thing that were just wind and has stopped being vigilant and-
And Harry could just be paranoid.
“I think a bird might have gotten stuck in one of the screen windows.” Peter describes. “Poor thing…” Harry hears a faint shifting, probably Peter getting up to try and free it.
That is, admittedly, a little harder for his brain to twist into something that will doom them. Harry looks downward, realizing he’s lifted himself into a standing position on the board without noticing. He remembers where Peter is hiding out tonight. It wouldn’t be hard to just… patrol around there for a couple hours. He starts moving slowly, as if he’s scanning from above. So it sounds normal, like he’s just back on patrol and not like he immediately panicked and started trying to find his way to Peter.
He can hear Peter’s faint footsteps. “It’s not stuck anywhere on this building. I know I shouldn’t leave but I can’t just let the thing die.”
Harry makes a hesitant groaning sort of noise with his exhale. “Someone else would probably find it in the morning.” He tries.
“But it could die sooner! Or it could hurt itself flapping around!” He’s not going to listen. But that means Harry also doesn’t have to listen and can head close to Peter all he wants.
Entitlement. This is why you deserved what happened.
That thought makes Harry stop for a moment. “Just try to be fast.”
“Kind of weird to have like, a tennis court like twenty feet from a morgue.”
The absurdity of the statement briefly snaps Harry out of his anxious paralysis. How long ago did the static from the radio get so loud? He can barely hear Peter over it. “I guess they get bored on their breaks.” He can barely hear Peter over the static, but still he can hear a desperate, noisy, prominent flapping, almost louder than the static. Like whatever damn bird he’s saying is flapping away next to his ear, or beating it’s wings against the inside of his skull. “You better have found it, I can hear the thing through your mic.”
“Really? I haven’t seen-“ the static drowns Peter out. It’s beginning to give Harry a headache.
“Think you cut out, Pete.” He should get lower to the ground, just in case he loses his balance.
The static feels like someone has shoved sandpaper into his eardrum.
“Pete?” He braces his own head with his hand, shutting his eyes to try and ease the pain behind it. “Not funny.”
He hears the faintest traces of Peter’s voice, still sounding casual, beneath the static. Pain spreads through his head, from there his jaw connects to his skull to behind his eyes, then through his brain until is trickles down into the brain stem. The pain rocks him so harshly he nearly steps off the glider while he tries to stabilize himself. “This better not be a prank.”
Then, clear as day, drowning out even the hellish white noise behind it—“What is that?!”—and then something that’s not the damn radio screeches.
And then quiet. Complete quiet, with even the hum of static completely erased. All the pain leaves his head in that moment, giving him the chance to stabilize himself as he tries to process it. A wind rustles what little of his hair he’s regrown, and he can hear it.
His head feels the clearest it’s been in a while, like the noise had scrubbed it clean.
Peter.
This better not be a damn joke.
He kicks the speed up and speeds in the direction of the morgue Peter had been staking out. In Queens… he feels slightly sick when he realizes it’s proximity to where he’d once been buried, angling his head so the hills of the burial ground are safely kept on the side of his damaged eye. If this is a prank, he’s injecting Peter with the performance enhancers just so he can strangle him without feeling bad for it.
The deceivingly ordinary looking morgue is devoid of any distinctly red and blue suits, signaling that Peter has indeed left. And just a couple buildings down, he can see the very weirdly placed lone outdoor tennis court. A good enough place to start.
When he passes it as he lands, the torn up edges of the net drift upwards for just a moment, tricking his eyes briefly into not noticing the hole until the disturbed air settles and lets the edges of the gap fall pathetically back to the ground. Chunks of torn net are scattered, one of the poles that supported the net bent to almost a full ninety degrees. He’d say Peter wasn’t lying, but he’s pretty damn sure that Andean Condors getting loose in New York would be on the news. And those birds still don’t have claws like that.
There are scratches in the concrete around the hole, tearing even a couple inches deep, pebbles of painted concrete scattered everywhere. Approaching further, he can see a couple of feathers lying around the torn net and scratch marks. There’s no consistency to size or color, massive black feathers almost as long as his forearm sitting beside brown tipped white ones that aren’t any bigger than his pointer finger.
And there’s a bit of webbed red fabric stuck in one of the furthest claw marks. And a complete lack of Peter. There’s not blood, but that’s not reassuring.
Harry begins fiddling with the radio, hoping to be able to connect to Peter, even for a second if it’ll help him figure out where he’s at.
Nothing comes through the radio. Instead, a sound like thirty metal trash cans being dumped into a car crusher makes him nearly leap out of his skin. He summons the glider to him, hopping on and bringing his left hand to the knife strapped on his hip as he follows the sound.
What the fuck.
It’s hard to tell what it is and what body parts are attached where and how many limbs it has, with it still having something he thinks is probably a wing and maybe a leg-ish thing still tangled in bits of net. Peter sits on the wall above it, the thing scrambling up at him like a dog barking up a tree.
The thing is a bit larger than a human. Its limb proportions are vaguely humanoid, the only thing making it larger is its unnaturally long, bent spine. Wings sprout from its back—though not even remotely symmetrically attached—that are mostly black, but contain many solid patches of any color he could imagine on a real bird. It looks like someone had been attempting to stitch together a pair of all black wings for a highly elaborate Halloween costume, but run out of the one color and began using colors close to black until they ran out over and over and eventually ended up giving up and filling out thin areas with reds and yellows that had no right to be there. It’s arms seem human, though devoid of things like skin in a lot of places, but the exposed bone of the wrist is quite literally tied, with twine, to eagle-like talons. Its back legs are similar, but they appear to be coated in a quilt of decaying human skin and the scaly skin that covers a bird's talons, draping off the limbs like a poorly designed cover for the bones that once again are tied to bird talons. Its chest is devoid of muscle, just semi translucent skin stretched so taught over bone in some places that it’s torn, letting a very foul smelling liquid drip out. It reveals its head as it rears back—trying to tear the net that binds its wing without snapping the bones in the foot that’s trapped in the net—revealing a patchwork of sewn together bits of fresher looking human skin over a massive skull from an unusually large bird of prey. It has no eyes, the skin stretched over it not being opened to allow room for eyes, but massive holes in the sides where the openings of ears might be. The sight of blank skin over a bird skull immediately evokes images of Vultures, and so it is named.
Peter gives a small wave, a movement that makes the Vulture lunge upward and snap its beak just a couple inches below his lowest foot. “You weren’t supposed to come around here.”
Harry isn’t listening. He’s caught a better sight of one of this thing’s arms. It’s thinner than the rest of its limbs that are more clearly sewn-together spare parts. The skin is only moderately blotchy, unlike the rest of it, which seems either relatively fresh or actively liquifying based on how chunks of muscle just fall off the thing.
And well, the idea of knowing something like the back of your hand sort of implies that you have to know the sight of your own hand pretty well.
He feels sick.
Peter’s calling his name. Getting louder.
Something is tearing.
The net.
Snap out of it.
The Vulture’s wings unfurl with enough force that the gust of displaced air nearly knocks Harry over, snapping him out of the stupor. The thing immediately lunges at a startled Peter, who begins to jump away just a few moments too late. The Vulture doesn’t manage to grab him like it seems to intend, but the talons still carve through his arm like a stick of room-temperature butter. The creatures spine bends unnaturally as it slams into the brick wall.
Before Harry knows it, he’s on its back with the knife on his hip gleaming in his hand. But before Harry can try and strike, the Vulture recovers, completely ignoring the weight on its back and snagging Peter's wrist in one taloned hand before beginning a lopsided and rough take off.
The movement has Harry slipping off his back, then jamming his heels into some of the tears in the skin of its torso to secure himself. Ignoring the liquid seeping into his boot, he fiddles with the glider controls on his wrist before twisting to face Peter.
“Harry, don’t k—“
“The glider is beneath you.” he loops the dagger into the literal twine holding the talons to the stump of the arm and cuts.
The talon withers the moment it’s attachment is severed, dropping limply off the falling Peter’s wrist. Fortunately, Peter listens to him, webbing himself towards the glider and then staring down at it.
The Vulture’s head turns in sync with the path of Peter’s decent, tilting its wings to begin a path towards where he stands motionless on the glider.
Move, damn it! But, Harry realizes moments later, Peter doesn’t really know how to use the glider.
The talon clearly stopped functioning as a part of this body when it stopped being attached to it. Maybe… He looks down at the neck. He doesn’t know why this thing is just ignoring him, but it's seeming like he might be able to use that to his advantage. This thing seems like it has the normal organs in its chest cavity, considering Harry thinks he's got his feet shoved into several of them. So it’s a fair guess that if the head comes off, the thing is dead.
He grips the narrow neck in one hand, the Vulture’s focus remaining on the frozen Peter. The way skin stretches tightly over bone does have one benefit—it’s far easier to tell where the bones are. It’ll probably be easier to cut through at a joint. Not enough time to saw through the bone.
He tightens his grip just below one of the vertebrae, doing his best to wedge the blade in the gap between bones.
The Vulture screeches at that, but only pays him any mind for as long as it takes to flip itself upside down. The movement catches Harry off guard, his feet slipping out from within the chest cavity, leaving him hanging by a knife that’s only an inch deep in this things neck and rapidly slipping out, barely holding his weight on a thin layer of skin.
Before he can actually fall, he feels something on his back, and then a strong tug sends him through the air, eventually caught by Peter on the glider, who takes the impact against his chest relatively in stride, holding them both onto the glider.
Immediately, Harry pushes Peter in front of him. “You don’t know how to use this thing, do you? Have you ever snowboarded?”
“Maybe once when I was a kid.”
Checks out. “Okay. Well, you’re learning now.” In reality, steering the glider is sort of similar to the Vulture’s flying, but with everything being in the angling of hips and legs rather than the angling of wings. But it’s approaching fast, so there isn’t as much time to explain as there is time to show. Harry’s hands land on Peter’s waist, trying to bend his legs to match the positioning of his own and give him some sense of how this works.
The first direction he can get Peter to actually follow on is down. The patchwork wings of the Vulture guide it close behind him, no amount of loops and turns made all the more difficult by the person Harry’s trying to instruct, gaining them any space.
“Did you see the way the talons sort of withered when I cut you free?”
“Yeah, unclenched too. Why?”
“Maybe all of it will do the same if we cut the head off.”
Peter stands up straight so suddenly he nearly gets himself flung off the board, twisting to try and look Harry in the face. “You can’t just—that used to be a person!”
What? “Well, don’t know if it’s one anymore.”
Peter looks completely incredulous, like Harry just admitted to being a serial killer. “Still! We might be able to save—“
It’s Harry’s turn to look at Peter like he’s insane. “Peter, the human pieces are decaying. They’re dead.” And probably multiple people, if his own fucking arm is anything to go off of.
“So are—“ Peter cuts the shout off, but Harry already knows what he was going to say.
He doesn’t even realize how much he’s slowed the glider until four sets of talons descend from above, reaching for Peter, who’s spider sense has him ducking.
And Harry decides if Spider-Man doesn’t want to kill, not even if the thing is already dead, then Spider-Man doesn’t have to kill. It’s just that Harry isn’t Spider-Man. And Harry can guess, based on personal experience, that this thing, even if it regained some sentience, wouldn’t want to keep living as a monster when he—it—should be dead.
And that’s how it’s his forearm that ends up grasped in a clawed grip. His feet are pulled from the board and he doesn’t resist it.
“Harry!”
Being held by one arm is painful, but not paralyzingly so when it once might have. He looks up, trying to plan a route back onto its back. It’s ribcage is relatively vertical in its current position, so if he jams the knife between two ribs and uses the neck as another handhold, it should be enough…
A web secures itself onto the back of his boot, making him groan internally as both his body and the Vulture’s are yanked backwards. The Vulture screeches angrily, upset by the attempt to steal its prey, but not strong enough to snap the web from strength alone and lacking the eyesight needed to find where it should cut. So it just pulls.
Harry thinks he feels something pop out of place in his wrist. And when Peter slings a web onto his other boot, he begins fearing that Peter might be close to tearing his hand off in an attempt to save him. But the Vulture, increasingly angry at the resistance, clamps every other one set of talons onto Harry's body, it’s blind fumbling resulting in massive claws digging into his forearm, shoulder, thigh, and weirdly, the side of his face. It beats its wings rapidly, head flailing about as it roars.
But Peter doesn’t plan to let go any time soon either, and even with the bird’s grip growing more desperate, begins making some progress, the talons beginning to slip from his strength, even through the resistance of the muscle they’re buried in. The bird tightens it’s grip, looking for anywhere it can secure its grip. One fastens itself under one arm, the one on his face eventually digging one talon into his mouth and securing itself into his gums to his irritation.
Attempts to find better places to secure claws around his thigh and forearm have the limbs slipping out of its grasp, leaving most of his body free.
Harry quietly prays to whatever gods may exist that Peter not accidentally rip his head off trying to save him. A concept that seems more and more likely with the grip on his shoulder getting less and less secure as the other two legs flail around for something to hold on to.
In the moment that it’s second leg slips off his shoulder, the last remaining foot secures itself into Harry’s jaw as firmly as it can.
And in that moment, Peter sees the one remaining hold as a reason to pull harder.
A tearing sound like a very moist walnut being crushed echoes through the night air as an explosion of pain engulfs his face, and then he’s falling.
Even as he falls, a rain of blood drops onto his head and body. Which… his head is still attached to his body. That’s a good sign, probably. It’s hard to think through the pain. He’d probably be screaming, but his mouth and throat is filled with a liquid that’s thick and and tastes like… actually, he can’t tell what it tastes like. His entire mouth is just a massive ball of burning agony, nerve endings screaming. Is that where all the blood is coming from?
He hears what might be the most bloodcurdling scream of horror anyone has ever let out and he knows he’s not the person making it. He can’t speak. No sound is coming out even if he wanted it to. And, after several too long moments of processing through the fog of pain, he realizes that it sounds like Peter.
He blinks away the intense fog of pain and black at the edges of his visions for only a fraction of a second to try and catch a glimpse of what’s making him shout like that. That bird better not have gotten to him, he thinks he might pass out and that means he won’t be able to protect him…
But that fraction of a second is enough for him to get his answer. He hasn’t fallen that far, he finds, because he can see, clear as day, grasped tightly in one hand of the Vulture, a torn, bloody mass of skin, flesh, oddly shaped bone and, for whatever reason, teeth. It takes him several moments to realize what the mass is.
He raises a weak hand towards his jaw as the dark vignette around his vision grows more intense, finding nothing but a hole below his upper lip that coats his hand in something viscous and unpleasant.
Oh, he realizes faintly as his vision gives out on him, overwhelmed by pain. That’s mine.