Chapter 17
This evening is the coolest in a series of progressively chillier evenings. Peter has spent every night straight of the past several evenings out here, hidden in the nooks between sections of roof or shadowy places between buildings, watching like a gargoyle over the often significantly shorter buildings that house morgues and funeral homes. How has he only noticed the gradual spread of yellow and orange across the trees now? Peter has spent all this time out here, basically every night since that… argument, and it still occupies so much of his mind. Even while he’s trying to investigate goddamn body snatching, the thoughts refuse to release their talons from the grip they have on his mind. So much stress over some petty spat.
That's the issue, huh? It’s not a petty spat. Harry hadn’t even looked so… enraged with him, so upset and betrayed by what Peter did behind his back since when he’d pulled Peter’s mask off with a goddamn dagger in his hand. So much hurt expressed just through Harry’s eyes, so much expressed that Peter wonders to himself if the pain was more potent because he only had his eyes to express it through, because the rest of his face was too mangled to contain any of it. So it was all held in his eyes.
He and Harry have fought before, but it feels like ever since everything has gone back to normal, ever since Harry came back, they fight constantly. Peter doesn’t understand it. He’s trying to do all of what he thinks Harry wants, or at least trying to do what’s best for Harry, but even things that seem like they should obviously make him happy just seem to irritate him.
His legs are beginning to cramp up from his unmoving shadowy perch. Maybe he should leave, find another morgue to haunt for a few hours. But he’d probably just end up leaving right before something happened, running off trying to escape his thoughts.
He doesn’t understand it. Even the simplest thing, the thing he’d most confidently thought Harry would receive, Harry seems irritated with.
But that might not even really matter anymore. That might be the thing that Harry can’t ever come back from. That might be the end of it, for all he knows. That trust might just be severed forever now. That’s probably why he can’t face Harry about it, isn’t it? He just can’t stand the thought of his fears being confirmed true, being thrown out the door by him again. It feels a bit better to live in a space where things could still turn out positive, even if the reality is misty rather than live with a negative outcome set in stone. Especially with how, as much as Peter’s chest seizes at the thought, he was the one in the wrong.
He knows he was. He knows. Regret floods his chest like an aquifer at the thought of it. He hadn’t meant… he wasn’t trying to hurt Harry by forcing him to rest or webbing him down or the… everything else, he just—
When Peter had seen Harry’s body shattered and bloody on the pavement, he’d thought that Harry was gone again. That by allowing and even encouraging him to participate in the same dangerous lifestyle that defined Peter’s life, he was responsible for its end. Again.
He’s been given a second—not even a second, a third—chance and he’d taken it. It doesn’t matter if Harry hates him as long as he’s safe and alive. That's the responsibility he takes on.
Peter shouldn’t have done it. He just wishes Harry understood why he had to, that things could have gone back to normal and Peter was the only one doomed to a life that can’t be ordinary no matter what. Peter knows that pain. Peter knows better than anyone that even when he’s figured out the balance, there were still so many sacrifices to be made.
The image of cold, uncaring metal piercing Harry’s chest flickers through his mind. Harry seems to have picked that part of the job up faster than Peter did.
And yet, knowing that protecting him was the best thing for them both, Peters mind wanders off to a world where he wasn’t sitting in the dark until his legs went stiff alone. Sure, his legs would probably be stiff, but it would be less unpleasant if there was another person, one far better at vanishing into shadows than him, teasing him for trying to be stealthy in red and bl—
There’s quiet cursing just below the roof. He whips around, taking in the sight of a small trailer truck and a pair of people standing around it. How the hell did he not hear that truck pull up? Those sorts of vehicles aren’t quiet. Was he actually that distracted? Maybe this has affected him more than he’d thought.
Creeping closer, the soft cursing disturbing the night air originates from a person sitting just inside the lip of the ramp, a mess of finely crumbled ashes and unrecognizably burnt herbs in front of them. But Peter finds his assessment distracted by a setup deeper in the trailer.
Body bags are piled in one corner, next to a makeshift surgical setup, the steel of tools and tables glinting despite the darkness surrounding it. Crimson pools beneath a metal operating table, a completely still person strapped to it. Not a person, he gradually realizes, a corpse. Blood drips ever so slowly from the body, its lifeless eyes half opened, skin bruised from decay. Its chest is pulled open, skin pulled to the side, chest cavity hollow. Jars of organs are stacked in a corner or lie on tables, bones sitting in bowls, entire severed limbs piled on a table. His skin prickles at the sight. He’s delivered people with all manner of deep, gorey wounds to ambulances before, he’s more than once only been able to retrieve someone’s top half from a collapsed building. He’d thought he’d grown desensitized. But this, this makes his stomach turn more intensely than the first time he’d needed to help someone hold their intestines in as he swung them out of danger.
Something is coming.
He slides into a shadow closer to the edge, the darkness eagerly enveloping him, watching a door swing loudly open and an additional two people haul another body bag towards the lip of the truck. One individual lays eyes on the ashes and herbs and groans. “What did you do?”
He can’t hear the response. The person in front of the ashes is shoved roughly aside. “It’s the easiest possible… my god…”
Up . The sense goes off again, drawing his eyes upward to the latch that holds the door of the truck up. An odd gold mist shimmers over it, as if beckoning, an incorporeal cat darting around metal legs. The glow is more intense around one specific joint of the latch, as if telling him…
Peter thrusts one hand forward, flinging a small ball of webbing at the shiny spot. Sure enough, the latch snaps and the door slides down, the two, for lack of a better and more dead body oriented term, robbers inside barely having time to look up in shock before they end up sealed inside. He takes a leap onto the roof of the trailer, muscles singing at being moved at long last.
The body bag falls from one’s hands in shock, the robber who’d been carrying it freezing as their gaze follows the arc of his jump. The other that remains untrapped seems to have much better reflexes, immediately turning on their heels and making a mad dash for the drivers side. “Leave it!” They bark at the frozen one, who shakes his head and makes a run for the passenger side.
Are they really planning on just driving off with him on top of their truck? For people so hard to track down, that feels uncharacteristically stupid. And very easy to prevent.
He secures two thicker ropes of webbing to the edge of the building, bracing himself for when the lines are pulled tight. But it never comes; instead when the wheels begin to move Peter’s back hits something harder than stone, like the vehicle had accelerated through a tunnel and he’d been hit by the metal side of a bridge. The impact is enough to knock his feet loose from the truck, throwing him from the trailer, but he still catches himself with a web. That didn’t even set off his sense. What the hell?
He spins the swing so he can redirect his movement, but the scene before him has him questioning if he hit his head harder than he thought against the air-wall. His sight of the truck is blurring, twisting into itself like a rose shaped implosion. Blinking only worsens the sight, tightening the space the spiral of metal occupies in his vision. When his eyes finally stabilize, there’s nothing. And not enough time has passed for them to actually get away.
He drops to the ground, looking around for any sign of their presence. The only one he finds is one he does not initially see. It’s one he hears.
A slow scratching, something clawing slowly but loudly against vinyl. The only thing left to prove their presence is a very much filled body bag lying discarded on the pavement. He steps closer, startling when the vinyl suddenly shifts violently, pressing outwards and twisting, more desperate than a fox struggling to be free from a hunter's cage in the moments before its teeth will pierce its own skin.
The body. The person. His heart leaps, an unexpected optimism rising in him. Maybe Harry’s return after death wasn’t the formula. Maybe another person has come back! One who won’t need to struggle through isolation and soil because Peter helped them, Peter saved them.
It’s like his entire mind lights up from the mere thoughts of his name. God. This is worse than MJ, like all romanticism in him begs for obsession, and conflict just gives him more to think about, more moments with his beloved to study with the intensity that a priest studies the Bible. No matter how impersonal he tries to be, no matter how much he tries to focus, there’s a perpetual flickering of him in the back of his mind. Harry. Harry. Harry. As he approaches the shuddering shell of vinyl, the only thoughts in his mind are of him, being able to pull him free like this like he should have been able to before he’d ever been buried, finding another person like Harry. Harry has seemed so melancholy and quiet lately, so unlike himself. Would it be easier to reach that again if he knew he wasn’t alone? Would normalcy for everyone be more obtainable if Harry felt more normal?
Eager for the brighter reality this might bring, he eagerly unzips the bag. “Hey! I’m here to help, it’s all gonna be alright!”
The first thing he notices in the bag are a tangle of shiny gold ropes, the ends of which snap into the air instantly until the entire length is pulled taut. A hand snaps out of the bag, pulled upward by the rope, fingers slowly hooking before the hand swings at Peter’s face, blunt fingernails suddenly razor sharp enough to rip right through his mask and take chunks of the flesh of his cheek with them. The warmth of blood stings where the autumn night chill has begin nipping his skin, creating ever so slightly darker stains in his mask.
The body inside is still lifeless, eyes half opened and rolled back, skin unnaturally pale from whatever was put onto it or injected into the body to hold off the beginnings of decay. They are pulled to their feet without any movement or weight put on their legs, dragged upwards by their shoulders by the yellow strings, yanked around against any conscious will that they might have.
The second hand is tugged towards Peter, pulled in a broad, mechanical arc that gets only a couple inches away from ripping into his shoulder, fingers slowly and individually uncurling at the miss, legs only shifted to use for balance or to stabilize their position, footing awkward and uneven, ankles twisting in ways that look painful. The momentum of the impactless swing gives him the opportunity to attack, the opportunity to fight back like he would with anyone else.
He can’t. Despite the proof his optimism is misplaced, the hope that control could be restored to the original occupant of the body has seemingly sunk its claws deep and refused to let go since he first saw the Vulture. There has to be a way. The idea of hurting this person feels viscerally wrong to such an extent that the mere thought of laying a hand on someone like this, who’s family and friends would probably do anything to restore to life, who’s an innocent involved unwillingly in the strongest capacity someone could possibly be unwilling, feels like the gravest sin he could possibly commit.
He raises his hands, his only movement being to step to the side or backwards to avoid being hurt. “Not going to hurt you. See?”
The strings yank stiff limbs at him all over again.
“I’ll help you. You’re gonna be alright. The strings, whatever it is that’s controlling you, do you know what it is? Is there any way you can tell me something?” Logically speaking, he knows that it’s a very real possibility that he’s talking to a body without any sort of will or sentience beyond the ropes that puppet it. But is it a crime to be hopeful? It doesn’t just feel like hope, either. It feels like there’s something. The unseeing eyes don’t feel empty. Harry’s eyes seem more lifeless now, and he’s completely conscious and himself!
When they attack him this time, he does the only thing he can justify doing. He catches their first punch, gritting his teeth when their nails dig into the back of his hand, and wait for their second unfocused swing, catching the other hand with ease before forcing both together and looping them in a thick clump of webbing, their wrists firmly secured together.
Their hands struggle against it, arms moving so harshly in protest he thinks they might have dislocated a shoulder. Then they freeze completely mid movement, as still as if he were looking at a photo, holding the position for what has to be close to a minute. He stands, approaching slowly, waiting for the slightest movement or the faintest twinge of his sense. When it doesn’t come, he reaches for one of the odd ropes that puppets the person. His fingers pass through it like it’s fog, the only noticeable sensation being a faint warmth while his fingers are inside it and a foreign sense of fear that takes an intense root in him and is pulled from the soil of his emotions when he’s no longer touching it. Are they afraid?
Then their head jerks upward stiffly, followed by the ropes puppeting them to turn the opposite direction, completely ignoring Peter. Though its ability to walk or stand is as awkward as it was before, the direction it goes is a confident one, like it follows a map etched into its mind.
Hope soothes him like the fastest acting drug on the planet. “Yeah! If you can show me something, that’s great!” He encourages, not sure why he’s shocked when the person doesn’t even acknowledge him. Doesn’t matter. He can help, he can help, anywhere they want to show him will help him learn how he intends to do that. He’s sure. It has to.
The strings seem to prefer alleyways over open spaces, pulling the person through much longer back alley routes over any open and visible shortcuts without a lick of hesitation. There's no doubt, no pause to remember a direction. They’re more confident than a homing pigeon who’s been following the same route for years. The path it walks stretches for miles, the sky beginning to lighten by the time it begins to slow.
They have lead him to a small theater, an older one as well by the looks of it, but a well maintained and fancier one. The signs on the front of the building are the sort that need the letters manually slid into place, but the spacing is bordering on perfect, the sign’s glow not so overpowering it’s unreadable like so many he’s seen.
THE KING IN YELLOW
ONE NIGHT ONLY
OCTOBER 13th 8PM
The name lights something in his mind, but he can’t tell where he’s heard that before. Doesn’t matter. Not why he’s here. The person is standing frozen in front of a side door, body so straight and perfectly aligned with the door that all Peter can picture is a soldier in one of the war movies he watched with Ben as a teenager. He creeps closer to them, ducking just below a window to take a look through the blinds.
His vantage point gives him a view of an office from behind. The room is largely brown, but the decor is just a barrage of yellow. Yellow dresses, cloaks, and masks set on tables sorted into piles, a thick book bound by gold leather the only one on the shelf, the rest of the shelf space occupied by dozens of the same featureless puppets. An inexplicably familiar person sits at a desk, a duplicate wooden puppet held by its strings in one hand. The stranger has black hair perfectly smoothed back, dressed in formal clothing as he always had. But no suit coat like his brain bafflingly insists, and the vest is yellow, not black. Wait.
The usher at MJ’s play and the host when he’d tried to propose to her. Him. Both times, that was him. Why was it constantly him Peter ran into?
There’s a polite, soft knock at the door at the front of the office, causing the man to set the puppet in a stand identical to the ones on the shelves and slide something Peter can’t make out in the middle of his desk into the central drawer. “Come in!”
A woman in a bright yellow ball gown cracks the door open. Though her makeup and hair is near perfect, her voice is grainy with sleep. “Quentin, Miss Watson is here. She was asking about her costuming—and about what madman would begin a rehearsal at 5 in the morning.”
The man, Quentin it seems, laughs lightly. “Let her know the madman in question will bring it over shortly. Slipped my mind, with all the preparation necessary.”
“Don’t I know it. Let me know if there’s anything I can do. You’re taking so much responsibility for it onto yourself—more than usual.” She lowers her voice. “I know neither of us want to disappoint.”
With that, she’s gone. Quentin briefly looks down at whatever it is he hid in his drawer and turns towards the back wall, finding Peter between the slits in the blinds with unnatural ease. There’s no visible negative reaction, instead just something between a smile and a smirk crossing his face as he raises a hand to wave. “Don’t be shy. You’re already on our list, Peter.”
His name. Peter is in the mask, one only torn a few inches and he knows his name. And MJ…
A faint swishing pierces the silence behind him, Quentin whipping around in his chair as the strings of his little wooden puppet snap spontaneously, the doll itself dropping splayed onto the desk at the same moment a loud thumping echoes to Peter’s left.
The gold strings have broken, slowly vanishing to gold mist atop a collapsed corpse, limbs arranged in the same awkward pattern as the fallen puppets.
An insectoid mask peers at him from the rooftop next door, the individual wearing it waving a hand at him to come. “Ladder to your right. Come on.” That’s a voice he knows well enough to listen to, but he chooses the far faster web option over the ladder.
“New mask!” Peter does his best to keep his voice cheery as he lands behind Harry. As he looks his friend over, he realizes it’s more of a new everything. The top is cropped and constructed in thick leathery panels, his upper arms exposed with similarly leathery but light gauntlets over his forearms, his little arm knife things strapped over him. His pants are… wow. Really, really tight. Hard to look away. He’d be upset or anxious about the lack of protection if it wouldn’t make him a hypocrite. He’s enjoying looking a tad too much, a sort of too much where his mind is drifting to other sorts of protection that might be more necessary. Peter’s not super sure what the sort of shoe he has on is for, but he appreciates it greatly in that Harry is sort of walking on only his toes right now and it’s making his legs look longer and all nice and Jesus is Peter distracted.
“Needed a new one.” His tone is icy enough to snap Peter away from thoughts that could make him regret wearing latex. And he’s immediately glad he did. As much as he’s enjoying seeing Harry’s waist, it’s hard to ignore a very deep, very new looking, and very unusually shaped scar in the skin of his stomach. Harry seems to notice his eyes, but doesn’t bother explaining. Peter can’t find the right words to ask him.
Desperate for something else to look at, his eyes land on the sword clutched in Harry’s hand. Something rather dark is coating the blade. Something that looks similar to a cut he feels suddenly aware of on Harry’s upper arm. Peter feels confident to assess that Harry had cut himself before he cut the strings on the dead person puppet, but why would he even think to do that?
“That dude, he’s doing something. Some theater performance that MJ is in—“ Harry is turning and walking to the other end of the roof, but he doesn’t seem irritated when Peter follows. Peter can’t say he minds either. Damn, to think he’s just been getting excited about his midriff and how good his legs looked—focus. “And he was controlling that body, he had a puppet. And you’ve got a weird scar now, and you cut that down with your blood? And—and we saw a bird made of dead people!” Well, that’s a whole lot of words that mean nothing. “I don’t totally know what’s going on.”
“I know the feeling.”
Okay. Ouch. Peter was just trying to protect everyone best he could. “Don’t be—ugh. Listen, you clearly know more than me if you knew your blood of all things would make the odd puppet strings go away. Those people doing the play are clearly involved in whatever weird… horror movie type things the bodies are going missing over. And something bigger’s got to be going on. And they dragged in MJ!” He pleads. “At least tell me so we can help her!”
He spins on one pointed foot, smoothly falling into a seated position. “I know. Let’s talk.”