Chapter 21
The pool of redness surrounding Peter is slowly growing larger and larger, the thin carpet unable to soak up the evidence of what has occurred there. The green of Harry’s shoes are becoming streaked with red too, but it’s not Peter’s blood. Harry sort of wishes it was. A much darker crimson is flowing from the hole in his chest, fragments of bone and flesh sitting in the pond that’s forming beneath him. He watches the blood flow outwards and outwards until the flow of blood from both their bodies pools together, only stepping closer where blood has spilled. He has always only ever been an extension of Peter. If Peter is to bleed, if he is to suffer, Harry should too. He should only touch where their agony has bled together, live as an extension for as long as he can.
The intensity of the pain from his chest is enough to bury most of the despair he felt seeing Peter ripped apart like practice for an amateur butcher. He has torn away the source of his pain, the part of himself that makes caring hurt, his own half decayed heart clutched in his hand, fragile muscle slowly shredding in his grip. He doesn’t want it. The organ is useless to him if it makes him feel like this.
But with the despair gone, the odd disconnect between his mind and body, feeling like he’s tethered to his body only by threads and watching his life like a meaningless little popcorn flick, his mind is left empty. The anguish has flowed away, leaving him hollow, but there’s much to take its place.
He kneels beside Peter, feeling something odd bubble inside him when he stares at his split open torso. The broken ribs poke through his flesh on either side of where his gutted body splits open like arms offering an embrace. Harry wants to pull the organs that haven’t fallen out of the body away and accept the offered embrace, crawl into Peter’s skin and pull it around him like a blanket, stay there until his body finally ceases to function and let them be buried as one. He wants to die a piece of him. He can’t live without him. He can’t. A branch can’t live disconnected from its tree.
Harry doesn’t. Despite how he craves the embrace of his flesh, he knows well enough by now that his body refuses to die. He would simply be desecrating Peter’s body with his filthy, cursed existence. He would be carrion trying to find comfort in the tomb of Christ.
Unfair that Peter should be the sacrificed one. Unjust he should be the martyr. But Harry wasn’t clean enough to take that role for himself, not blemishless enough to serve as a scapegoat, so it’s him, the undeserving one, who dies with their sins. And Harry is left half a person. He is incomplete without Peter.
He reaches out and touches one broken rib with a hesitant finger, almost expecting it to burn him like holy water on the skin of a heathen. It doesn’t, so he gently pushes the wound further open and peers into his chest at the layers of now useless organs, frozen in death, but all the same the red of that flesh is far warmer and healthier than the dark, partially decayed flesh of his own body.
Harry became the Mantis because he so desperately wanted to be good. To cleanse himself of his sins in the blood he’d spill for others. Because Peter is good and Peter is half of him, so he followed what he did that made him so good. And now only one of them remains, the one incomplete without the other.
An indescribable yearning fills Harry, a need to keep Peter with him, to rebuild the part of him that has just died, to continue to be an extension of Peter. To serve as his hand from beyond the grave. To somehow be able to drink or inherit the goodness that’s always been out of reach for Harry.
He leans further over Peter’s gutted body, drinking in the iron rich smell of his blood, and reaches in, gently pulling Peter’s unbeating heart free. The organ is firm, far sturdier than his own. Perhaps that’s how Peter survived this long when the smallest losses break Harry so easily. He holds Peter’s heart far more delicately than his own, like it’s precious, a divine relic, carefully maneuvering his hand in between his own broken ribs that reach out to blemish the flawless piece like claws, and sets Peter’s heart into his own chest. His body had reconnected his organs after his autopsy. Perhaps if he’s lucky, his body won’t reject this piece.
The heart is warmer than the rest of him, heating his frigid body from the inside out. He knows it’ll lose that heat soon, snuffed out by the frozen tundra of his unliving flesh, but for now he cherishes the feeling, grasping at some sense of purity from his surgical sacrament.
A frown crosses his face when he looks back into Peter’s body. Incomplete. Wrong. But he can’t bring himself to give the little piece he’s taken to remember Peter by back. Instead, he looks down at his own fragile, rotting heart. The idea is an insult and he knows it, but he can’t resist the idea that some piece of him will have gotten the precious chance to crawl into the embrace of his ribcage and be buried with him.
He tries to push the wound shut, tries to close the embrace of shattered ribs, but Peter’s body is so broken that the muscles and bones refuse to fully close into the state they’d sat before. Really, it just makes the torn Spider-Man suit slide further and further off his body, exposing more and more blood streaked skin. He frowns at the sight. Peter didn’t like it when other people would see his bare skin. He used to wait for bathroom stalls to be empty when he changed for gym classes. He would hate being seen so exposed like this…
Harry unstraps his various belts and lays them along the ground, gently lifting Peter onto them, taking the delicate edges of his torn suit in his hands and holding them shut as he tightens the belts, at long last holding the suit and the wounds shut enough Peter almost looks human again. That is, if it weren’t for his head…
He’d been avoiding looking at Peter’s face. His skull has been split into shattered corners, a gorey cross brutally carved into his face, the upper half of it exposing a soft looking gray substance that had splattered across Harry’s skin along with the blood. The mask is torn beyond salvageablility, one final glance at Peter’s terrified eyes frozen in death.
He stands from his vigil at Peter’s side, approaching one of the many fallen puppets responsible for this, ripping a sizable piece of fabric from its clothing to drape over Peter’s face. Peter cared so much about the secret of his identity, so devoted to the idea it protected others. The least these horrid things could do is help Harry provide him with a way to keep that.
The red oozes through the yellow fabric immediately, the world refusing to just allow solace from the bitter truth of the situation for even a single moment. But it’s enough of a shield he can reach and stroke Peter’s cheek beneath the cloth. The idea it might be the last time he ever touches his skin only serves to disconnect that has formed between him and his body.
MJ is waiting. The concept seems foreign right now, any person existing besides himself and Peter. An odd impulse fills him, to hide Peter’s end from her for this night, to take Peter home, to keep the isolation between himself and Peter intact for the night and only inform others once the night has passed. But he knows the pain of having death hidden from him far too acutely to consider it for more than a brief moment, as tempting as preserving his and Peter’s seclusion is.
He allows himself only a final few moments alongside Peter alone, feeling a kinship with the stories he’d heard of dogs refusing to leave their dead owner’s sides, returning to gravesites and the locations of their master’s deaths until they starved. Of course, there are just as many stories of trapped hounds devouring their dead owner’s flesh in starved desperation. Harry hates the part of him that lights up at that, that intensifies the urge to steal Peter’s body away to the manor for purposes far less savory than his initial thoughts. But all the same, if the roles were reversed, if Peter and him were stranded somewhere, he’d gladly let Peter do the same. With the odd purgatory between dead and alive, the inexplicable ability to survive anything he’s gained, he wouldn’t even need to die to let Peter devour him. That thought stirs something deep in him, a feeling that frightens him too much to look at further.
Harry lifts Peter into his arms, careful to keep the belts holding his wound shut undisturbed. He can just pretend Peter’s asleep if he wants to, right? Everything feels so distant right now, so meaningless. The only real difference between sleep and death was permanence, really, so why not pretend?
He wonders if exposing the body to the performance enhancers would bring Peter into the same purgatory Harry is trapped in. Doing so feels disgusting, a greater desecration than when he’d torn into his very organs just to provide himself a macabre reassurance. A disrespect to force Peter to endure the same hell Harry is trapped in. Harry loves him, damn it, he loves him; he won’t inflict that torture upon him just so Harry can feel whole.
MJ is in the foyer, leaning against a yellow wall like she’s trying to blend in like a chameleon. The sight almost makes him laugh, but he can’t really understand why. She rushes towards him, but freezes in her tracks when she sees Peter’s body, her eyes traveling up and down the scene before her, taking in the broken body he carries and the hole in his chest, her expression distorting into shock. “Tell me he’s not…” He can’t muster out a response, just looking at her with blank eyes. “Oh, god.” She raises her hand to her mouth, tears immediately beginning to fall. “I was scared he’d be hurt when I found out, but I never thought he could…” She chokes on a sob. “He felt immortal.”
He nods numbly, similar emotions just simply out of reach. “I’m taking him home.” He says simply.
Her mouth moves wordlessly for a moment. “Shouldn’t we call an ambulance? Or someone?”
That idea fills him with an odd dread, the source of which he can’t find enough care in him to find the source of. “I’m taking him home.” He says firmly, clutching Peter tighter. “Need to figure out the Spider thing.”
She blinks several times, tears streaming down her face and staining it with the various colors her eyelids have been painted with, every movement seeming like it takes the same effort required to run a marathon. “Okay.” Her voice is unsteady, then shaking her head. “Can I stay with you? Don’t know if I can be alone…”
There’s a surge of disappointment at the reality he won’t be alone with Peter, but his ever distant rational mind is correct when it chimes in that might be a good thing, considering the increasingly extreme impulses beneath his surface might be things he’s unable to resist if left alone. The brief fragments of thoughts rapidly shooting through his head in the hundreds are beginning to toe past the already extreme impulses towards devouring him. He hates himself for it.
“Yeah.” He says. “Should be a guest room clean.”
She nods, tearing her eyes off Peter. “How do you plan to get him back?” She whispers, briefly reaching for Peter before her hand falls to her side.
He stares for a moment, the idea not having been important enough to even consider prior to now. “I’ll summon the glider.”
She takes one last glance at the body, expression growing somewhat nauseous. “I’ll taxi over then. It’s hard to be around…” She trails off.
“Yeah.” Words seem so meaningless and brittle.
It seems like MJ considers saying something more to him but can’t, shaking her head for a moment before moving in shaky steps out the front door, leaving him once again alone with Peter. He chooses to find a back door, to take yet another opportunity to obscure Peter from any view other than his own, cradling his head so he can remain completely supported during the journey.
He doesn’t remember much of the way home, only remembers the texture of latex against his fingers as he slowly pet Peter, trying to provide comfort to someone who no longer can receive it. He steps off the glider onto his balcony, entering the connected study and gently lying Peter onto a nearby lounge.
It really does just look like he’s sleeping.
He doesn’t realize MJ is beside him until his brain suddenly processes that the noise coming from behind him is words, words growing increasingly loud from his lack of response.
“Harry!”
He raises his head slowly, as if it’s a whisper and not a shout.
“I want to look at him.” She says, voice shaky but determined.
His back does uncurl at that. “MJ, it’s… are you sure? It’s bad. Much worse than I was when…”
“I need to.” She says firmly. “Harry, I might not love him the same way you do anymore, but I still love him. He’s important to me too. I need to see him one last time before people take his body away and… and if it’s as bad as you say, they probably won’t let us see him again at the funeral…”
That thought has his fingers digging into his thighs. “Okay.” He chokes out, glancing away as she pulls the cloth from Peter’s face. He doesn’t think he could brace himself in any way that would be enough to resist falling apart at the awful, pained cry she lets out at the sight of him.
The odd disconnect that the overwhelming wave of physical pain from his chest has formed can’t drown the agony that sound evokes in him. He could have been faster. If only he hadn’t frozen. It should have been him going like a lamb to the slaughter, at least he would be able to stitch his body back together after. His failure has cost everything.
Out of the corner of his eye, he can see MJ bend down and press her lips to Peter’s forehead. When her head raises and turns back to him, the despair on her face has turned to bitter, determined rage. “If you find Quentin,” Her voice trembles, “and you aren’t going to kill him, bring me along so I can do it.”
“Peter would…” He begins the sentence, but rapidly realizes that he, in reality, simply doesn’t care what Peter would want them to do. His jaw sets. “Let’s make it slow.” His own cold tone shocks him.
MJ’s face is darker than he’s ever seen, eyes so vicious it frightens him on Quentin’s behalf. “I'm so tired—“ She spits, but the sentence doesn’t continue. Her shoulders slump, head suddenly falling towards her chest as a fire she seems to cling to suddenly dissipates. “I’m tired.” She says simply. She sounds the part. “Need to get this stupid dress off.” She mutters, tearing the yellow fabric in her hands with her last shreds of anger. “I’m borrowing your clothes.” There’s not room for opposition in the sentence, not that either of them have the energy to argue to begin with.
He's not sure if it takes her a minute or an hour to come back. Every moment is spent staring at Peter’s newly uncovered face regardless, each streak of gore and each jut of shattered skull engraving itself into his memory, a guilt he knows will puppet him for the rest of his life. His fingers dip into the hole in his own chest, tips pressing gently to the warm muscle his body didn’t grow. Purify me, he begs it.
He withdraws his hand when MJ returns, sitting beside him across from the lounge that Peter’s body rests on. They sit rigidly side by side for some time until the side of MJ’s head tilts and presses against his. He returns the gesture, their temples pressed together as they both stare out the window at the full moon that’s bathing Peter’s body in silver, slowly rising into the starless sky. Eventually, MJ shuts her eyes and he allows her to slide her head down to his shoulder, her fingers lacing with his in an attempt at mutually needed comfort. It appears far more effective for her than for himself. Eventually she’s sleeping, but regardless of the soft couch he’s pressed against he doubts he will sleep tonight.
Once enough time has flowed past them that he’s certain she’s asleep, he picks her up, careful to be delicate enough to avoid disturbing her rest even if it means staying unflinching as her shoulder jabs into his broken ribs. He lays her in a bed that he hopes can provide her the rest he envies before returning to his vigil at Peter’s side.
Now alone with him again, it’s a relief his unsavory impulses have passed him by and confirmed themselves as mere impulses. Instead, the deepest, most aching desire is to simply curl beside Peter on the empty side of the lounge and take his limp, cold hand in his own, clutching it like a drowning sailor clutches at something meant to pull him from the ravenous ocean. How bitter, that he can only receive the sweet little actions of affection he’s craved from Peter for so long without the ache of coming second best when Peter is dead, when it’s quite literally impossible for Peter to mindlessly say another few words that will cut him more deeply than the other man will ever know. All the same he’ll treasure the feeling of Peter’s hand clutched in his and their fingers threaded together for the last and perhaps only time, try to memorize how their hands feel against each other. He raises their bundled hands, pressing them to his forehead.
He wants so badly to think this is a dream, a disturbed illusion concocted by his own mind of the worst case scenario, but the cold stiffness of Peter’s hand is an undeniable reality the same as the blood now staining the lounge and the firm organ shoved into his chest. The idea makes him sick. He wants to step onto the balcony and scream at the heavens that they don’t deserve their newest angel, that Peter is a more worthy divinity than the forces he knows toy with this world. But he’d need to let go of Peter’s hand. So instead he remains curled like a fetus, crushed by the weight of how real it all is, the very sudden reality of how uncaring the world and the forces who control it are. There’s no good divinity, there’s no benevolent god protecting the world like it seems every religion clings to. Harry’s benevolent divinity is dead, because the world doesn’t care.
Exhaustion drags him into unconsciousness eventually, but he’s not quite sure when. The darkness of sleep is a relief, but a double edged one
There’s nobody standing guard to protect when the deep shadows in the room begin to reach for Peter.
The very first thing that Peter notices when he wakes up is that he is unfathomably, immeasurably hungry like nothing he’s ever experienced before. The second thing he notices is that something very, very close to him smells absolutely divine, like the enticing aroma of the little cafe beside his apartment that bakes pastries he can’t afford every morning and wafts out the smell to attract a morning rush at the exact hour Peter begins his trek to class. Oh, how much more appealing something is when you know you can’t have it. This mouth watering smell is what feels like hundreds of times more intense than buttery croissants and fresh muffins in the early morning, however, and if his nose doesn’t deceive him, decidedly meatier.
The third thing he notices is Harry is lying beside him, curled into the c shape his chest and legs are forming and clutching one of Peter’s hands. A small smile crosses his face, brushing Harry’s hair, stiff and crunchy from something dried into it off his face and revealing those pretty scars of his.
Normally, he feels sort of odd and guilty for the attraction he has towards Harry’s scars. His mind understands the wrongness of deep down seeing it as something akin to a brand, this permanent visible mark that Peter put there, a permanent ode to how their connection with one another is something so intense it’s marked Harry physically. Their relationship, troubled as it is, stands a permanent fixture of Harry’s skin. Normally, there’s a constant and intense shame towards those possessive feelings. It seems like those feelings have evaporated. And it feels good, if he’s being honest, to be able to feel every last emotion he has towards Harry, even if rationally immoral. It’s not like it’s that possessive. Peter still carries scars from that bladed gauntlet ripping across his chest and that dagger digging into his stomach. He feels the same pride in having them he feels seeing Harry’s burns. It’s not some weird one sided desire for Harry to be his object or whatever. He’s sure Harry feels the same. He has to.
Why would they be laying here together, though? He frowns, laying his head back against the lounge they lay on and trying desperately to recall. He’d followed that weird body and then found Harry, and Harry had danced for him. He can’t help the smile that crosses his face and the recollection of what happened after that. Harry had fallen apart so much easier than he expected. He feels a distinct spark of pride at that, that he could make someone so clearly out of his league beg for him. And damn if that whole thing didn’t confirm that the forbidden fruit tastes so much sweeter.
After that he’d gotten that invite to MJ’s play and he’d seen Harry there and Harry had been all angry because he was Peter’s side chick now or whatever. He doesn’t understand that. Thats how people do things, isn’t it? You’re allowed to stay with someone until you’re sure you found someone else. At least… well, that’s how MJ did it. She was kissing Peter when she was still with Harry and Jameson’s son. And she’d been mad when he kissed Gwen, sure, but she hasn’t been like, cheating mad. MJ is the most normal one of them, so… that’s just how people do it, isn’t it?
It suddenly occurs to him how inconsequential his former reasons for staying with John seem now. Maybe that’s why Harry was mad.
After that, they’d watched some of the play until those weird golden strings started holding everyone to their chairs, so Harry had freed him and given him that knife and he’d begin getting people out while Harry ran off to do… something. That actually wasn’t super clear. And then after that… after that…
This smell, this hunger, is making it impossible to focus. He sits up with a frustrated groan, looking around the room for what could possibly be the source of something so intense and appealing. There’s absolutely nothing that has the slightest change of being the source of this until the moment he looks down.
One of Harry’s hands is painted with thick layers of dried blood. Peter clasps that hand in both of his own, raising it to his nose. That’s it. There it is. Not just Harry’s blood. Harry. Harry’s the source of this smell, it’s him he’s hungering so desperately for. The idea should repulse him, and yet it only entices him further. Vampires are hot now, aren’t they? What he hungers for isn’t that much different than a lust to drink your lovers blood.
On a quick impulse that he simply acts upon without a hint of resistance, he swipes his tongue along the blood coating Harry’s forearm, the dried substance coming free on his wet tongue and dragging an eager, starved sound from his throat. It’s not as bitter with the tang of iron as he expected, oddly sweet and enticing from what he chooses to dub as fermentation, tasting more of wine than metal. The taste is so alluring that he can’t help himself, lapping at the skin of Harry’s hand and forearm like a dog licking peanut butter out of one of those hollow toys, losing himself in the fruity sweetness, his motions only becoming more and more frenzied as he tastes more of Harry’s dried blood. He’s not satisfied with the mere drops he can collect with his tongue, and, he thinks as red tinted saliva pools in his mouth, he wants something more substantial.
There’s no conscious, no anxiety, no guilt, no control in his mind that can pull him back to reality and prevent his next act, every ounce of restraint gone without explanation. He follows each whim and impulse he feels, and they all demand for more of Harry. Unburdened by his own self denial, he sinks his teeth into the edges of Harry’s forearm, only intending to take the smallest, unnoticeable chunk away.
The joy he feels at the fresher blood filling his mouth and the smallest strand of flesh he claims is cut short by hissing.
The tiny black head of a snake is hissing at him, neck arched and fangs extended in preparation to strike him. Then another head pokes out from beneath Harry’s sleeping body, then another, all enraged and hissing at him.
“Calm down, I only took one bite.” He mumbles around the tangy, sweet, flesh in his mouth, completely distracted by the pure ambrosia he’s tasting, uncaring of how odd it is to talk to the animal. The impulse to just toss the reptile aside and continue feeding makes his hands twitch, but…
He looks down at Harry’s unaware form. It would be more fun if he was awake. Not because he wants Harry to be hurt by him, but because Peter wants him to like it. He wants Harry to want it too.
“Fine.” He mutters bitterly, as the snake continues to hiss. “I’ll ask next time.” The hunger only intensifies when he’s gotten a taste of what he wants to fill himself entirely with, angry at the denial. He stands, sauntering across the room and peering down the hall. Does he remember where the kitchen is? Shrugging, he sets off to find it regardless. He supposes he can sustain himself on bacon and eggs for now, as boring and unappetizing as it sounds. If nothing else, he has cause to want to put some meat on Harry’s ever visible ribs…