Chapter 10
Harry’s on the ground. When did he stop falling?
There’s still just white hot numbing pain around his face, but it is strange that the rest of him doesn’t hurt too. It would hurt if he’d fallen all the way down, right? But he doesn’t remember much after Peter pulled him out of the Vulture’s grasp.
It’s really very dark.
He can feel footsteps through the ground. Someone’s touching him now, holding him tight, arms around his chest. His head falls limply backwards. He feels too weak to support it, even when he tries. Being touched is nice, though. It always makes his cold skin buzz. The touch grounds him, makes him feel a little more lucid.
A hand reaches to hold his head up. The fingers feel a little sticky as they bury themselves in his hair. They’re shaking too.
Does the damage make him look monstrous? Is that why? The damage from the bomb is already hard for people to look at, they always do double takes or stare or avoid touching him or walk around him like it’s a disease they can catch. He tries to tilt his head away, or raise his hand to hide his face, but finds himself only managing to twitch a few fingers. A sense of anxiety settles in his chest.
Not dead again. Right now, he sort of wants to be. If he could just pass out, like when he cut the arm, then nobody will have to see him.
That is, if this comes back like that did.
The idea makes him feel nauseous. Before all this happened, all he had to offer were his appearance and his money. That’s already been reduced to his money, but he can’t imagine living when his money won’t be worth being forced to look at him.
Is someone shouting? Everything feels sort of quiet and explosively loud at the same time. Like he’s hearing everything with his eardrums filled by water. But there’s someone shouting his name.
Peter.
“Harry!”
He sounds like he’s in tears.
“Harry, please!”
Harry doesn’t understand why he seems so upset. Peter knows he doesn’t stay dead.
Peter takes one of Harry’s hands in one of his, holding to his chest. “I can’t do this all again. Please wake up…”
He is awake. Can’t Peter tell? It’s just really dark. Maybe that’s the pain. Or… oh. His eyes are shut. How couldn’t he tell that his eyes were shut?
The moment he pulls them open, blood floods into them. Oh. That might explain it. He lets the weight behind them pull them shut again, choosing to go back to the void he’d seen before.
But it’s still enough for Peter to notice. “Oh my god, Harry.” He pulls him upright to embrace him, the forced twisting of torn muscles sparking intense enough agony that he instinctively almost cries out in pain. But he’s still silent no matter what he does, choking on his own blood.
His mind is growing foggy again. Peter’s apologizing, but the strange muffling is back again. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I nearly killed you again.” He’d appreciate the hand on his cheek if it didn’t make the pain all the more intense, increasing the speed at which cloudiness overtakes his thoughts. “I shouldn’t have let you start doing this.” That makes him faintly agitated. It would have been worse if it happened to Peter. But that thought soon falls away into the pit that’s appearing rapidly in his consciousness, a black hole devouring all of his thoughts.
Peter takes a shaky breath. “I’m sorry. I l—“
Harry isn’t awake to hear the rest of it.
The first thing that comes into his mind when he wakes up again is that his face hurts less. He reaches up to feel for his jaw, attempting to see if it’s regrown, but the gap remains, and it occurs to him that of course he can’t feel it, he can’t feel anything. Even if he’s moving his hands, they’re so numb that he’s not sure, based on inability to pick up texture or moisture, if he’s just shoved his hand into his own exposed flesh. But, when raised to his eyes, his hands have come away dry. He lets the appendage fall back to his side, the movement feeling like he’s run a marathon.
He lets his eyes shut again. Weird. It's not easy to get painkillers strong enough to make his whole body go numb. He thinks. He doesn’t know much about painkillers. But most of the strong ones he can think of are like, illegal, unless it’s a hospital. Did Peter take him to a hospital? That’s the only place this grade of painkiller would be available, probably. Why does the idea make him unea—
His heart isn’t beating.
They would think he’d died. His eyes shoot open again. His body is moving, and there’s too much light to be buried again, there’s time to make himself known.
He summons the energy to sit up, fearful that he’ll look down and himself set on a metal table with his chest cavity hollow all over again, but he’s not in any sort of medical environment. He’s in bed. At home.
Sitting up like this is making him nauseous. He’s beginning to think he’d rather have been completely comatose for the weeks it would take to heal. He hates feeling this weak.
Well, at least he can make noise now. That he learns after his body hits the mattress and he groans faintly in frustration. The sound is muffled sort of like he’s screaming into a pillow. He feels around the area once again. Probably bandaged. He rolls over, facing the doorway to the attached bathroom, overcome with a need to assess the damage privately and for himself. The idea of being upright isn’t appealing, but he sees no reason why he shouldn’t be able to walk all of five feet. He hauled himself to bed with half his face burnt off, he can do something this simple.
He forces himself to sit up and swing his legs off the side of the bed, shoving the nausea down with each breath. He takes a deep breath as he eases his body weight onto his legs.
And he immediately collapses.
Distantly, he hears rapid footsteps. Peter. At least it’s nice that he didn’t leave him alone like this.
Peter is at his side the moment he enters the room. “I didn’t realize you were awake. Listen, I know you won’t like this, but can you at least let me help you out for the next few days?” He pleads, hitting Harry with his big blue eyes. “This isn’t a sprain or a fracture or anything. This is really serious.”
Those eyes would work normally, he can admit that, but something about them now just… pisses him off. Is Peter doing this intentionally? Has he realized? Is he doing that deliberately to get Harry to agree?”
He finds himself nodding along despite the suspicion. It’ll make it easier to see, anyways. He looks Peter in the eyes, which makes the other man flinch, and points to the bandaged bottom of his face, then to his eyes, and then to the bathroom. Let me see. I want to see.
Peter’s expression becomes visibly strained. “I’m going to carry you back to bed. You’ll heal faster if you rest. Come on, Harry, you can’t deny that’s true.” He says.
Harry’s brow furrows. Let me see. I know you saw my motions. Let me see.
Peter scoops him up, the movement effortless with Harry’s bony body, moving back towards. “It’ll be easier if I just carry you.” He says, attempting to sound casual.
A burst of anger explodes in his chest, making him twist and kick wildly. It’s my body! Just let me go look at the damage! The unexpected resistance nearly has him slipping head first out of Peter’s grip, but reality is that even if he was fully healed, Peter would still be stronger than him.
The demonstration of that fact that follows, the sudden tight, firm clenching of hands and arms around his body like a vice, making it impossible to move, startles him into a complete frozen silence. His whole body just feels blank as Peter lays him on the bed. Unmoving, shocked into stiffness. Because there’s no way.
Peter wouldn’t force me. He wants to think, but Peter did. He can’t make himself move. The realization feels like thorns wrapped around his brain, digging in to prevent him from losing the anxiety: Peter is stronger than him, stronger than anyone. Nobody but Peter even knows what happened to Harry and Harry doesn’t even know if or what anyone has been told. Peter could do whatever he decided, whatever he wanted, regardless of what Harry felt on the matter, and there would be nothing he could do to stop it.
Peter sits on the bed, looking stunned himself. See? He tries to tell himself. He didn’t mean to. He won’t do it again. But the thorns have dug in deep. The anxiety won’t leave. Peter wouldn’t do that. Peter wouldn’t do anything like that. Sure, Peter is self righteous and has a bit of a savior complex, but he doesn’t… force people. He let MJ date him when she told him the risk was her choice. He wouldn’t force Harry to not look at his own injury.
Peter takes several shaky breaths. “Sorry. I don’t… I don’t know what came over me. I…” He shuts his mouth and takes another breath, voice much more steady. “But you shouldn’t have been moving around. And I can take care of your… jaw. You don’t need to look. And you really shouldn’t. You don’t want to see it. Just trust me. I shouldn’t have… grabbed you like that. But… you’d said you’d let me help you around, right? And you just woke up… I just freaked out. You get it, right.”
It just unsettles Harry further. He doesn’t move, doesn’t try to signal an opinion.
Peter sighs. “I can explain it when you’re better. Just… trust me.”
Harry isn’t sure he does right now.
Peter looks at him for a moment. “Please just rest. I’m gonna go out and buy some broth so you can eat something.” His hand brushes Harry’s, like he’s trying to soothe him. It doesn’t help.
I don’t need to. But honestly, he does want Peter to leave for a while right now.
Peter looks at him, saying nothing else, before leaving the room. Harry lays there, doing not much else other than blinking, until he hears the front door close. That’s when he gets angry.
He saw. He saw that Harry was trying to communicate. He did, right? Harry saw that he was looking at him. If he didn’t understand, he would have just… tried to figure it out. Asked him questions. Right? But he just ignored it. Acted like Harry wasn’t saying anything. He saw. There’s no way he didn’t see. He just ignored him.
Harry forces himself to breathe. He’s working on it. He didn’t lie. He’s not been lying. Don’t get angry.
But he’d ignored you.
He was just doing what he thought was best.
He forced you. He ignored what you wanted. He forced you. He could force you to do anything, really. He’s stronger than you and he’s the only person who can tell other people where you are and what happened to you. He could do anything to you and you couldn’t stop it.
He raises a weak hand to slap himself, scolding himself for being paranoid and resentful, when after everything he’s done he has no right to be angry at anything anyone does to him.
But still, it’s unsettling. And he can’t shut the voice up that insists he should be able to look at his own injuries, that it’s his body and he should see whatever is going on.
He begins to shift, only then realizing. A hole forms in the pit of his stomach as he looks, body growing ice cold.
A clump of webbing is holding his hand to the bed.
He wouldn’t. But he is. But Peter wouldn’t do that. But he just did.
In anger, he decides in this moment that he’s looking. Fuck Peter and his good intentions. He won’t listen.
He awkwardly throws himself at that edge of the blanket, pulling with all of his admittedly muted strength until the fabric comes free in his hands. Dragging the blanket with him, laying at the edge of the bed, entire body burning, head beginning to ache.
So he takes a few breaths that his conscious mind knows are unnecessary and sits up, holding himself still until the world returns to being steady. His attempt to lower himself off the bed gently just results in him nearly slamming his eye into the edge of the nightstand, but he ultimately still ends up on the ground, crawling over to the wardrobe door, resting his head on it and forcing himself to breathe until his vision stops blurring.
His head is pounding. Briefly, he considers just listening to Peter and looking later, but the anger at being intentionally disregarded and forced wins out, his shaking hands reaching towards the bandages that begin below his nose. He feels around for a moment, for the first time feeling any actual pain from the area, finding the end of the bandages and beginning to unwind it.
At first, Harry wonders if Peter just thinks Harry doesn’t know the flesh beneath his skin is half decayed and wanted to keep it from him. But the unraveling bandages soon reveal that he was only looking at the upper layers of tissue. It’s worse. It’s so much worse than he could possibly have imagined. How did he just… not notice? He should have felt some of this!
He reaches up, bringing his fingers behind the initial few layers of decaying flesh to brush the strands of moss that have grown off of the decaying muscle within, somehow lush and green despite a complete lack of sunlight. Lichens coat the lining of his throat, almost soft to the touch. They don’t even hurt. The lack of pain is upsetting, the fact that his body isn’t even rejecting this is upsetting. His body has just accepted this, because his body is dead and decaying and his brain just hasn’t gotten the memo. Roots dangle from the back of his mouth near the base of his half torn tongue, having simply grown through the muscle of his palette like it was soil. How had he not noticed that? How had he not felt that? He feels a vague sense of dread towards the idea of what those roots might belong to, what might be growing in his own skull without his knowledge.
He reaches an unsteady hand deeper, touching a small growth of what he believes to be oyster mushrooms, like those that would grow on the side of a log. His touch disturbs a beetle, which scuttles deeper into his throat. He wishes it bothered him, that the feeling of their movement still hurt instead of being a neutral sensation, like his brain processed it as belonging there and tuned it out. Like every other thing that’s been growing inside his own goddamn body without his knowledge, these mushrooms are lush, vibrant in color, and feel remarkably solid and healthy despite no contact with the sun, like his own flesh is some sort of miracle soil. He grasps one of the caps in his weak hands and pulls.
To his shock, he jumps forward in pain. And not… the sort of pain that would be expected, not pain in the lining of his throat. It’s sort of like how his awareness of any dubiously intact internal organ would only be limited to pain whenever he was ill. No sensation in his stomach unless he was having a stomach ache, but instead, he touched that fungus and only felt it in his fingers, but when he pulled the chunk of one of the caps off, he felt it like the mushrooms were some strange limb or organ, like they were a natural part of his body and not proof of decay. And what’s worse, in the mirror, the fucking fungus is bleeding. He feels bile rise in his throat, swallowing it down the best he can. He begins to unsteadily rewrap his throat, no longer able to handle the sight of what’s growing inside his body and compulsively compelled to live in denial of it, to block it so he doesn’t have to look and see and feel that, that his brain has chosen to wire the fungus as a strange body part instead of attempting to do anything about what are, as far as he can tell, dozens of parasites living inside his decomposing body.
He lifts himself back into bed, trying to stop shaking by the time Peter gets back. How much more is there? Does he even still have organs, or have they all liquified and left his chest cavity open for whatever wants to grow and live inside of it? He begins to shiver. At what point does he die? Is his brain decaying? Will he die when it does?
Peter didn’t want you to see that. Even with the shock and fear, the thought is still angering. If this is going on, if there’s a chance the decay will cause his body to collapse, he deserves to know.
It’s then he realizes it’s not really the lying that makes him angry. It’s that if Peter thinks something is right, nobody else gets a choice.
It’s tense.
There’s a point at which Harry just gives up trying to communicate, because Peter’s just going to do what he thinks is best regardless. And he had good intentions, and Harry can tell, but it honestly just makes him so much angrier. At least most of the time, Peter tries to justify his overriding of Harry’s opinion, but Harry quickly realizes that neutrality will get the same end result as going through all the mental effort of trying to communicate an opinion.
Peter’s being a bit strange, though. He can admit that. He’s neurotic, anxious, bordering on paranoid. He seems almost desperate to convince Harry that his opinions are in fact what’s best, almost like he’s trying to convince himself. His care is suffocating, insisting he needs to stay in bed after enough time has gone by that Harry spends his time pacing the length of his room when he’s not around just to have something to do. He panics easily, fussing whenever Harry experiences the slightest pain or side effect from the injury. And he’s, for lack of a better descriptor, spacey. Harry keeps catching him staring at nothing with this look of anxious horror on his face for minutes on end, not moving until Harry snaps his fingers at him or touches him.
At one point, Harry let him stand there just to see how long it would last. It was nearly an hour before he moved.
If Harry tries to focus on the positives, his jawbone is beginning to regrow. The ramus of the bone is beginning to jut out from some newly regrown muscle, like a bony insectoid mandible. He won’t be living the rest of his life with the bottom half of his face a torn bloody mess.
Eventually, Peter stops being so pushy about insisting Harry not walk. And despite how often Harry was insisting he could, the man is still shocked when Harry immediately walks to the study to get his phone, left charging for god knows how long, with no issue.
Peter’s still spacey and anxious, but he’s leaving more often. Which he words as trusting Harry to be alone without issue. As glad as he is for the space, it feels infantilizing.
After so long confined to his room, he’s found himself anxious for literally anything to do. But when so much of his time prior to the injury was spent either out as the Mantis or sitting around his house in weird, exhausted stupors he still can’t completely explain, Harry doesn’t have a ton of things around the manor meant to be used for recreation or to kill time.
His quest for something to do leads him to the bedroom he’d used for much of his teenage years, one of the smaller bedrooms on a part of the house Norman rarely visited with a door that didn’t lock. He figures his best bet is whatever his teenage self was hiding in the back of his closet.
It’s mostly boxes, things he shoved in right before moving in with Peter. He pulls boxes from the closet, with barely legible labels scrawled on. Most just contain boxes of his teenage selfs half finished paintings, most scrapped out of the kid’s mortification at creating anything that wasn’t perfect and shame at the prospect of doing something his father found unworthy of focus. But looking at them now, Harry finds himself with a new perspective. They’re imperfect. Some of the colors are muddy or blotchy and there are spots where he can tell a fleck of paint got somewhere by mistake and he rushed to correct the color without thinking. Some of the objects are misshapen and the lighting is unnatural. But some of the most recent ones he can find in these boxes, he rapidly realizes, are some of the last things he did just for himself before falling down a hole of grief, vengeance, and anger. His younger self didn’t think he was good, didn’t think it was worthwhile or worthy of praise, though in retrospect many were really good for the work of a 17 year old. But… younger Harry did it because he liked it, because it made him feel fulfilled and was an outlet. It made him feel closer to a mother who passed before she even got to look at her child. Harry painted for himself. The shame was worthless. That enjoyment meant everything, not whether or not it was productive.
Harry shifts those boxes out into the hallway intent to look through the collection later. Behind it is another stack, one much taller and much more lacking in stability. He hears something fall from the top when he begins to shift it, making him sigh through the bandages. Most of these are labeled as books, which he knows privately means books and the video games he’d hidden from Norman and exclusively brought to the Parker residence for any use. Meaning most are multiplayer and therefore not useful to the quest. He shifts the stack away from the wall to see whatever it was that fell, finding a small, long white box. He doesn’t immediately recognize it, but the moment it’s open the memories come flooding back.
And, well, it’s something to do. He shuts the pointe shoe box and leaves the bedroom. Many of the rooms in the manor are unfurnished after he stripped the place, there should be a decent railing somewhere…
In the loosest pair of sweats he owns and a tank top, he tries to recall the normal barre warm ups that he would have done in the classes he’d taken as a child, before Norman had decided that if Harry was going to be a man, he’d have to be what Norman defined as a man. They don’t fully come back to him, not the specifics at least, but he remembers the positions, remembers the basics, and finds going onto pointe, well, manageable once he remembers the shoes just aren’t broken in. And that wearing these things hurt.
He undoes them, actually bothers to stretch this time, and breaks the damn shoes in before attempting again.
It’s all much easier than he expected. Muscle memory, he supposes. There’s no old variation or piece that comes to mind to attempt to practice with, as poorly as that would probably go, but something else digs itself out of the recesses of his brain.
He doesn’t recall any formal choreography, but he recalls nights spent when he was a much younger kid. A girl, a friend from his dance classes. She was blonde, he remembers that. He’d go over after class and her dad, she only lived with her dad, had Gatorade and they were kids, so even after class they had energy and I they’d go to her room and put on her newest CD and dance. Not any sort of variation, not anything practiced or controlled. Just for fun.
He doesn’t remember any variations, but does that actually matter? He remembers the basics. Everything is muscle memory. Improvisation is there, the ability to make this an outlet and have no obligation to to learn the things he used to or really train seriously. And realistically, the whole practice of ballet is very… gendered, and he probably doesn’t have much of a chance to get back to practicing formally when he’s a man who’s developed only the needed muscles and skills of a female dancer.
Does he need to learn what another person would choreograph, or is it just as okay for him to just create his own, even improvise? Is it degrading the art form to make it his own?
It feels wrong. It feels like disgracing the dignity of that art form, but what else can he do?
He goes to fifth position, going on pointe before attempting to assess the quality of his arabesques. Difficult without mirrors, but he’s surprised by how decent they look after so long out of practice. They’re not incredible, but they’re passable. Though they’d probably be horribly off beat if he tried to do this to any sort of music, his echappés look good. The fact he can even still do a pirouette on pointe is a shock to him.
Emboldened, he attempts some of the simpler jumps he can remember, about as messy as he expects, but being simpler, his ciseaux looks fine and though more difficult than he remembered, he thinks brisés are shockingly good for how long it’s been. But he’s always been pretty good at those. Maybe cocky, or maybe thinking he needs to be humbled, he attempts to see how many turns he can manage, rudely interrupted by the sound of something crashing to the ground upstairs.
Peter’s not supposed to be around right now, last he checked.
He bolts for the source of the noise, growing paranoid when he realizes the source of the noise is extremely close in proximity to the mirror that hides his equipment. The room is empty, untouched, so he shoves the mirror to the side, stomach dropping when he charges down the hall and sees that the majority of his equipment is missing, entire suit gone, masks gone, dozens of bombs gone. A figure is sitting in the middle of the room, picking something off the floor. His hand shoots out at the same time their head jerks upward, seizing them by the collar and throwing them against the wall, pressing them against it with his own body.
And Peter Parker looks like he just got caught with his hand in a cookie jar.
“Hey, Harry…”
He lets go of him, fury slowly rising. You didn’t. Harry's shocked he even feels betrayed. It’s almost stupid to feel betrayed, considering that this is really Harry’s fault for trusting him over and over no matter how many times Peter proves that he really shouldn’t.
Peter glances around and winces, taking a breath, shoulders shifting in discomfort. “Listen, it’s for the best.”
You motherfucker.
“You… literally died for me, and the next time we deal with something big you… it tore your jaw off. That’s a pretty big deal, Harry.”
His hands begin to shake, and soon his entire body is.
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but maybe this just… isn’t for you?”
You think I’m weak. His blood is boiling. He wants to punch him. Maybe if he feels that Harry’s not weak, maybe if Harry forces him, he’ll actually listen.
Peter’s dodging his eyes again. Coward. Having the fucking audacity to look away and act all guilty when he chose to do this. When he chose to keep making Harry’s choices for him. If you actually felt guilty, you wouldn’t do this over and over and over. You don’t give a shit. Don’t act like you do.
“I know you’re going to be mad at me, but I can’t just sit and watch you get hurt over and over for me. This is for the best. I need to protect you like I do everyone else.”
And because you’re stronger than me, stronger than everyone, what you think is best goes no matter what. Maybe he was right to be scared earlier on. Maybe he should be scared right now. But he’s not, he’s angry that Peter is acting oh so holier than thou and oh so patronizing like all his lying and making Harry’s choices for him wasn’t the thing that really killed Harry.
“Listen, someday you’ll get wh—“
He shoves Peter into the wall, grabbing his face in one hand and forcing him to look him in the eyes. He points at the empty space below his upper lip, then jabs Peter in the chest with that finger. You did this. This was you. That thing wanted me intact, and I had a plan. You pulled. You were the one that pulled. Not it. He keeps motioning, forcing Peter to look, not letting him avoid it. You did this to me. You. Not it. Because you didn’t trust me. Because you thought you knew what was best. Pain enters Peter’s expression at the idea it was his own fault, and it feels good. It feels good to have any power here.
You took my voice from me. How ironic that you benefit oh so much from getting to avoid what I’m saying? What I want?
Maybe Peter meant to tear it, give himself a way to execute what he thinks is best for weaker people like Harry without having to hear his pesky little thoughts and opinions.
Harry has to be really stupid to keep trusting him. Fuck it, no more. This is the last time he’s being stupid enough to trust someone who does nothing but lie and betray him every time he does.
He grasps Peter by the front of the shirt.
“I know you’re angry, but you’ll understand why someday. You will. Listen to me. You will.”
Why the hell would I listen to you when you won’t listen to me?!
“You don’t get it. It’s my responsibility to keep bad things from happening. At any cost.”
You stole my chance at redemption from me.
“Harry, listen—“
He forcefully shuts his mouth, getting a vindictive joy out of the way he panics when he can’t get words out. How does it feel? But eventually, as Harry opens the front door, he wrenches his mouth open. He sounds actually panicked.
“Harry, you can’t just stay here on your own!”
My choice.
He tosses him onto the porch, shutting and locking the door before he can try to rush back in. He can hear fiddling with the door, which makes his heart jump into his throat—he’s stronger than you. He could tear the lock out. Force you. Force you. But his shoulders finally lose a bit of tension when he hears Peter walk away.
Despite that, he locks every window.
Are you only now realizing I was right?
It’s not his voice. It’s not his conscience. The moment he realizes who it is, his legs feel as unsteady as the day he pulled himself from the ground. His body is stiff, cold, as if he’s been carved from ice, throat beginning to swell as he tries to force his body to move. It’s like if he looked down, he’d see all his organs spilling out from the way hearing that again guts him.
I told you he cannot be trusted. His father’s voice spits. How many times have I told you that? How many times have I told you that you trust and forgive too easily? How many times has he stabbed you in the back? How many times have you forgiven him? You’ve always been a little slow, but even this is impressive.
He feels like he’s breathing through rubber, but he forces his frozen stiff body to move, heading upstairs. He forces his eyes shut as he does. If his eyes are shut, he can’t see him. It can remain just hearing things. If he sees him, he’s really losing it. And how can he trust anything if he’s seeing things?
I always knew that you needed to be hurt to learn, but really, I thought dying would be enough for this one. But you always go running back like a dog. Intelligence of an animal. Everyone around you knows it. They treat you like one for a reason.
Shut up. He wishes he could shout. Not that the voice would listen, but there’s a scream in his ribcage that’s been building since he lost his jaw and it’s a bit too much to contain right now. He forces himself to move faster, irrationally convinced that when he gets the presence of another, it’ll be quiet again.
His father’s voice is suddenly soft, almost soothing. You’re right to kick him out. Right to cut him off. He betrayed you, like he always does and like he always will. You can still become strong, Harry. You must only rely on yourself. Everyone else has always betrayed you. And you still stick by them. You still pretend like you’re the person they knew despite having done absolutely nothing to you that would warrant that.
Guilt and uncertainty floods him, like a thick lake that he finds himself drowning in and unable to swim, unable to even tread water. Had he been over reacting? Peter thought he was doing the right thing, he always had been. And he doesn’t understand why Harry wants to keep doing it so badly. Peter doesn’t even know that it seems like Harry can heal from anything.
You can only trust yourself. It’s the only way you won’t be betrayed.
At long last, he stumbles into his room and grabs his phone, texting MJ a plea to come over.