Intermission I
There are dried leaves scattered across the path, crunching pleasantly as he and Peter walk. The night air is cool and moist, with the moon illuminating the world around them to a remarkable extent. They can’t possibly be in New York right now, and all the proof Harry needs of that is the sheer amount of stars that illuminate the sky, almost so many he can barely see the black of space behind them.
Peter huffs lightheartedly behind him. “Wasn’t it you who told me to give her a spider in a jar freshman year?”
“Hey! I’m terrified of spiders and I would have thought that was cool!” He would have thought it was cool because it was Peter. An implication that will never be able to do much more than bounce off the surface of Peter’s MJ-obsessed brain.
“Yeah, but like… you’re a guy! A girl isn’t going to like something like that.” Peter says, voice strained. He kicks one of the rocks several feet ahead of them. “Like… you’re friends with her! What do you think she’d like?” He pauses. “…that I can afford.”
He laughs. “Did you think I was going to suggest you give her tickets to broadway?”
“I don’t know! I just… well? What would she like?”
Briefly, he wonders if it’s selfish he’s considering telling him something absurd so he gets turned down, or if it’s just genuinely the best way to spare his feelings. “Well, to start, actually talking to her.”
Peter makes a vaguely negative groaning noise at the suggestion.
“Pete, buddy, I don’t think there’s an item that can make her fall wildly in love with you when she knows absolutely nothing about you. Especially when it’s because—“ he pokes Peter in the back of the head. “—you won’t let her.”
“I can’t just… talk to her! That’s… I wouldn’t know what to say! I’d probably make a fool of myself.”
He can’t convince himself not to say it before the words are spilling out of his mouth. “Well, maybe if you can’t get yourself to talk to her she’s not actually that important to you.” And maybe the person who’s right for Peter isn’t who he thinks! Like maybe the person he’s walking with right now!
Peter looks at him like he just said he likes eating kittens. “You don’t just…talk to someone like her! That would be like… like trying to just talk to an angel!”
He grasps Peter by the shoulder. “Actually, I think I know what MJ would like.”
“What?”
“If you never, ever, said that to her.”
Peter blinks, seeming bewildered. “What? Why wouldn’t she like that?”
“As a rule, most girls are going to prefer being seen as people.” He teases.
“You don’t know what girls like any better than I do.” He’s flushed with embarrassment.
Don’t really need to know that. That thought needs to remain in his head. He doesn’t think Peter would care, but he really can’t take the risk. “And yet… I’m friends with MJ.”
Peter’s not moving, staring ahead at something and squinting.
“What’s up?”
“Does that deer look strange to you at all?”
He looks to where Peter is facing, eyes landing on a large deer standing between two trees about eight feet away, staring at them.
That’s when it all comes back to him, body physically jolting as hard as it would have if he were in a traffic accident instead of standing in a forest. He remembers this. They’d been just about to go into junior year and Ben and Peter had taken him camping with them. He and Peter had been unable to sleep and had, very stupidly, chosen to wander down one of the shorter trails in the middle of the night. It had been too dark to make out the deer then.
He blinks.
This is his own memory, and yet he retains the changes of the goblin formula, considering the improvement to his eyesight. He looks over at Peter, a Peter about six years younger than his, who appears almost frozen as he squints at the deer.
He can make it out clearly now. And he almost wishes he couldn’t.
Sprouting from the bottom of the things face, completely devouring its jaw, is a mass of slimy, twisting tentacles, dripping something clear and viscous onto the ground.
Before he can even open his mouth, it feels like a hand has wrapped around the bone of his sternum and pulled him backwards, the world going white behind him.
He’s in Central Park with MJ, sitting at a pavilion for lunch.
“We’re both 18. I don’t think they’re gonna—“ His body says without a command, feeling like his mouth is piloted by a puppeteer. He begins attempting to move, to turn and look around, but his body refuses his commands. He’s a passenger in the backseat of his own brain.
MJ interrupts him by holding up two small pieces of plastic. “Got you.”
“Are those fake IDs…?”
She nods. “They’re not super strict. They won’t notice.”
“It sounds sketchy.” He picks at his salad. He remembers, he’d thought if Norman found out he was trying to sneak into bars—a gay bar no less!—he might as well tell MJ what flowers he’d prefer at his funeral.
“It is. A little. But come on, you have to agree it’s hard to find people to go out with naturally. I can’t flirt with a girl without her just thinking I’m being friendly.”
“And I can’t with men without probably getting beat up.” He says sullenly.
“So you agree then?”
He lets out a long sigh. “Fine.” His eyes aren’t on her anymore. A pair of individuals in yellow masquerade masks sit beside them, both in formalwear. He nods in their direction. “Do you know what theatre production they’re from?”
She tilts her head. “I don’t recognize the costumes. Maybe Comic Con is this week?” She points to behind Harry. “There’s more of them. Probably Comic Con.”
There’s a table of at least six directly behind him, none eating or drinking anything. It looks like they’re staring.
He lowers his voice as he speaks to MJ. “They’re watching me, I think. It’s kind of creeping me out. Can we get out of here?”
What his past self had noticed when he and MJ had left was that suddenly, most of the pavillion seemed to be filled with people dressed similarly, staring at him.
What he notices now is the way the masks seem fused to their faces.
And once again, an unseen hand pulls him from this moment, intent on forcing him to relive something else.
He is sixteen years old, on a trip to some beach in Massachusetts, and he is swimming on a nearly abandoned beach, going further out from shore than is probably safe.
The trip was unusual to begin with. It had been, in retrospect, a bribe. Norman had gotten drunk at his sixteenth birthday party and said some things Harry would be lying to say he hadn’t carried with him since.
“I look at you, Harry, and I see myself at my age… without the potential for greatness.”
Norman had been present, and kind and in good spirits for the first few days, and it had been wonderful. To Harry’s shock, he’d even found a more private beach and allowed—encouraged even!—Harry to wear t-shirts in the water if it would make him more comfortable. It had seemed like he might actually be starting to accept it, support him. But around the second to last day, his father, ever unchanging, had gone down to some Internet café in the nearest town. He’d left at 8AM sharp and sworn up and down he’d be back by noon when Harry had pointed out his old bad habits.
Harry had given up when the clock hit 2 PM.
And he’d recalled earlier in that very week a peculiar event in which he’d asked about an rather secluded beach about a mile away, one that had always been near empty when they’d passed it. His father has always operated on a bit of a short fuse when it came to Harry, but he couldn’t help but think that maybe, just maybe the way his body had sort of jerked suddenly, like the simple question had given him whiplash. His head has snapped toward Harry with an expression like he’d just said something outrageously stupid, lips curled like he was about to shout at him, before he’d sort of… swallowed it and said he’d just thought it was best to not go somewhere completely private, just in case something happened and they’d need help.
Harry had the distinct impression that, despite the statements' plausibility, he wasn’t being truthful.
So at about 2:30, a spiteful part of himself won and began walking down the road.
The beach had been completely ordinary on surface level, with Harry finding himself quickly being reminded of the flaws of showing up to a beach alone without much of anything to do. But he’d been determined to not give up on the forbidden fruit that had won him over so easily this quickly, and so he had stepped into the unexpectedly warm water.
He’d swum out to an area perhaps a little too far out to be safe, where he’d seen a large rock poking out from the surface of the water, finding a nicely shaped spot to sit near the base of it as he put himself up to the slightly unsafe task of seeing how long he could stay underwater at one time.
The area of the sea floor he could see was occupied largely by massive rocks, pieces of driftwood wedged in places, and large growths of sea plants that hid most of the actual bottom under at least a foot of rubble, possibly more. The tips of the sea grasses brushed against the bottom of his feet, hands kept firmly against the stone for the illusion of a safety he’s already abandoned.
He’d been there for maybe an hour, probably a little longer, when he spotted two pinpricks of yellow in the sea grass on his way to resurface.
He’d gone back far more eagerly that time, just in time to watch a strange humanoid fish creature emerge from the sea grass, looking at him with just as much curiosity as he looked at it. It’s roughly the size of a person, if a bit smaller, with a round head, stout body, and frog-like limbs. It has large, sort of bulging eyes, a misshapen but rather human looking nose, and a mouth so wide it sort of cuts into his cheeks. And it wears both clothing and jewelry, the clothing made of plant fibers and patterned with dyes, the jewelry intricately engraved.
The fish person’s expression shifts in a way he can’t really identify, and then it reaches for a gold ring on its webbed fingers, one constructed so the ring doesn’t completely close so the webs of the hands can slide through while still remaining in place, and removes it, before holding the hand that holds the ring out to Harry.
The idea that he should be anything other than completely calm is foreign to him at that moment, so he reaches his own hand out and accepts it, hand brushing against slimy, scaled skin as he accepts the token.
Only then does he snap out of it, jolting backwards and flinging himself towards the surface as the fish person darts off into the sea grass, perhaps snapped out of the same trance he’d been in.
After he’d swum back to the beach, he actually takes a decent look at the ring. Shaped like a long, snakelike sea monster, the fangs in its mouth are so long and exaggerated that he’s sure they’d puncture his skin if he tried to put it on.
Norman had returned by the time he’d gotten back, not even really looking at him. Not apologizing for being late. Harry had gone to take a shower without his father speaking a word to him.
The next morning, Norman had woken him bright and early and told him they needed to go home early. Company emergency. They needed him back, that’s why the call had been so long. He’d not been able to find the ring when he’d been packing, and it had been so easy to assume he’d just dreamt it as a result.
But living through it a second time, Harry finds himself able to notice how jumpy and paranoid his father had seemed that morning.
The invisible hand pulls him away again.
He’s seven, playing in the backyard alone. And he spies a snake in the grass, one so small that his child brain had concluded it must be harmless like the ones he’d read about in his Nat Geo books, because obviously only the big snakes could be the venomous ones.
When he’d gotten closer to the critter, he noticed a first tiny little scaled head wiggling through the grass, and then a shifting in its body as a second head peaks through, and then a third.
And he’d been a kid. He’d assumed that a snake with three heads wouldn’t be able to survive without help, which might or might not be true, but more importantly he hadn’t understood why it wasn’t such a good idea to try and take care of it his seven-year-old self.
The snake had been shockingly docile though, willing to curl up in his hands as he brought it inside.
He’d kept the tiny creature in a shoebox for several weeks, his ability to hide it a testament not to his ability to be sneaky but instead to his father’s lack of attention paid to him. In retrospect, most parents would probably figure out if their child was trying to secretly raise a three headed snake.
And maybe he was setting himself up for heartbreak, Harry doesn’t think it was likely that an animal like that would survive a long time, but his younger self had gotten very, very attached to the snake.
Which made it all the more worse when the consequences came in the form of Norman barging into his room unannounced as he was trying to feed the tiny snake a collection of bugs he’d found under the planter boxes on the porch.
Experiencing it again now, the ache is still strangely present. But he’s able to notice how pale his father becomes as he sets his eyes on the animal.
The first thing his father had done after he snapped out of that pale, horrified stupor, was shove Harry to the side in a manner that could almost be seen as protective as he dove for the snake, seizing it by the base of its left head. The thing had immediately become so aggressive it could barely be seen as the same animal, the body thrashing, the squeezed head hissing in anger, and the right sinking shockingly long fangs into Norman’s forearm. Norman cursed, grasping Harry’s wrist in his other hand and tugging him out of the room.
He let go off Harry in his study, a room he’d been scarcely allowed to enter as a child, throwing the snake to the floor roughly, Harry crying out in horror as his father began to stomp on it, intent on crushing every bone in the poor creatures body, driving the heel of his expensive loafers into its tiny body repeatedly until desperate thrashing stopped and blood began to seep into the carpet. Once Norman was confident it was dead, he walked over to his trembling child and grasped Harry’s shoulders firmly.
“Listen. When strange things like this happen, or strange looking things like that… thing find you, you need to leave, and if you can’t leave, you need to do whatever it takes to make it stop. Whatever it takes. Promise me.”
Norman eventually manages to extract the promise out of his sobbing child, only then pulling him into an embrace.
The hug soothes the pain as much as it can, but his tears only fully dry up when Harry sees the snake over his father’s shoulder, suddenly inexplicably whole and healthy again, slithering off towards the doorway, all three heads healthy and moving, body uninjured, even if the blood stained that carpet for years.
Harry is nine years old, and the street his dance studio is on had these little fire pits they light over the weekends during winter holidays. He was sitting in front of one, knees pulled up to his chest and tucked under his winter coat to keep warm. He had gotten the sense Norman forgot to tell the driver to pick him up… again. But he didn’t want to endure the embarrassment of having someone at his dance studio call his dad to remind him, so he’d waited in front of one of the fires instead. Waiting til his dad or someone in the house staff realizes he’s missing and that they forgot to pick him up.
He’d hoped it would be quick, though. His hair is starting to feel crunchy from the cold.
The fire is nice though. Ballet tights are thin, very thin. Even his coat couldn’t completely keep his legs warm, and without the fire he thinks his feet would be bricks of ice by now. Maybe they’d stop forgetting if he lost a toe or two from frostbite. Well no, he’d probably have to quit dance, and then there’d be no remembering to be done.
The lights to the studio flicked off. Anxiety sits in his gut. Are they leaving? Even if he doesn’t want to call someone, the idea that he won't have the option scares him a little. The street was pretty empty too, nobody to ask to call…
He looked towards the lively oranges of the fire, a jolt of color to the dreary white and gray landscape. The only warmth in more ways than one.
At the same moment he raises his hands to warm them, the flames go from bright, warm, and lively to a sickly shock of green. His hands jolted back—the flames were suddenly emanating subzero cold.
As his mind slowly comprehended what had happened, panic bloomed in his chest, recalling what his father had said.
He stumbled off the bench, scooping up snow to heap into the fire pit in an attempt to smother it. He supposed he shouldn’t be shocked that cold snow would feed this weird cold fire, but when he glanced desperately around, there’s nothing else he could see he can use to try to put it out.
A firm hand lands on his shoulder. “Is everything alright, child?”
Harry’s body quivered. “Yes. I just…” he looks up at the stranger.
None of this person’s features are identifiable beneath layers of heavy cloaks, the hand on Harry’s shoulder gloved too. Not a single inch of skin is visible. The only indicator of anything about him was that his voice seemed lower, making Harry guess this was a man. Perhaps stranger though, was that he felt relaxingly familiar. Enough so that his father’s warning exited his thoughts. He felt like Harry had seen him dozens of times before. Harry had never had much of an extended family, but the familiarity towards this man feels similar to how he imagines he should feel about an uncle or cousin he particularly likes. And that’s why the truth comes out.
“The fire here got really weird, turned green and felt… cold? Like when you open a freezer sort of cold. And dad told me that when weird things like that happen to me I need to run away or make it stop and I need to stay here to get picked up so I tried to put it out—“
The man’s hands grasped both of his shoulders as he kneeled down to Harry’s level. “Calm down, it’s alright. There’s nothing to fear.” He makes a motion like shooing someone away at the fire, and it flickers back to orange with a sizzling noise. Harry blinks up at him.
“How did you do that?”
The man’s hooded head tilted to one side. “These strange things happen to you a lot, don’t they?”
Harry nodded.
“There’s no need to fear when they do. You are far too young for any of them to find purpose in doing you any harm.”
By all means, it shouldn’t be comforting to hear, but against all logic it still is. He nods at the man. “Promise.”
“Promise. No need to worry until you’re a grown man.”
That wording had confused him when he was younger. Oh how the tables turn. And, once again, a phrase far too ominous to be at all logically comforting, but it had been in the moment.
He looked out into the street. “He forgot to pick me up again.”
“I know.”
He tried to catch a glimpse of the man’s face. “I knew I’d known you from somewhere.”
“You don’t.” The voice is smooth and completely neutral. Harry’s confusion must have shown on his face, so the man followed up with, “You haven't met me yet, and you won’t meet me again for many years, but I’ve met you many times before.”
“Woah. Are you a wizard?” Excitement filled his voice. “Am I a wizard?!”
“Not a wizard. But it’s too early for you to learn.” The man looked down. “Let’s get you home.”
He took Harry's hand, leading him to the end of the street, and when they’d turned, despite the over ten miles sitting between the two locations, they’d been right in front of his home.
“Are you sure you’re not a wizard?”
“I’m sure. Head inside, Harry. Warm up.”
His younger self had been confused by that too. “Who’s that?”
“Spoilers.”
And then Harry, the present one, remains in place as he watches his younger self run inside.
“It’s been quite some time, Harry.”
He jumps when he realizes the figure is speaking to him. Him. Himself. His actual self. “Yeah. Yeah.” He laughs, voice sounding strained. He doesn’t understand any of this. What’s the point of all this? “I don’t understand…”
“I know. But for your sake, you needed to see it all again. Have it refreshed.” The man says, then pauses. “You know, Harry, I often wonder if you’re better off in the worlds where you die. It’s the peaceful end for you.”
The sentence startles him into strangled laughter. “Yeah. Yeah. Probably am. Aren’t I. Probably am.”
“You’re going to wake up soon.” The figure breezes past his pain with a complete lack of care. His voice is suddenly stern. “When you do, you need to shut your eyes and turn around, and walk out of the room.”
“What?” The interaction has gone so quickly. What the hell is going on? He’s so confused, he can barely comprehend—
“Leave the room empty for the next 24 hours. Do not let anyone else go in. Once that time elapses… treat it like nothing happened. There are some that you do not want the attention of any more than has already been put on you.”
The world blinks out before he open his mouth to respond.