Chapter 26
“This is where the Vulture was?” Peter chirps, carefully tiptoeing his way forward on the fragile and slippery roof towards the chains that still dangle from the front door after Harry’s excursion with the girls. “Looks… old.”
Harry’s pointe shoes slip against the crumbling shingles, unintentionally spraying rain water over the lip of the roof. The rain has stopped, leaving the sky a thick, cloudy gray that threatens to begin pouring again at any moment. “I think she said it’s condemned.”
Peter cocks his head. “I don’t understand what’s so fun about a condemned building.” His tone is more earnest than backhanded.
“If it’s reassuring,” Harry responds, “it wasn’t all that fun. Might have been preoccupied, though.”
The warmth of Peter’s body alights his heart once again, making his lips quirk upward subconsciously as Peter’s shoulder presses to his. Peter’s fingers grip his bicep with a pressure that borders painful, but Harry can’t bring himself to mind the ache. At least it means he can feel something. “Well, you all left us a pretty easy way in!” He chirps.
“What can I say? I was thinking ahead.” Despite his hesitancy to loosen Peter’s touch, he steps forward and drops off the roof to the overgrown lawn below, the sharp claws of weeds that have long snuffed out the grass clawing at his shins for their next victim.
Peter’s knees bend to absorb the impact as he lands beside Harry, his feet on the firm concrete instead of within the plants. Harry untangles himself from the hungry plant life and strides forward, Peter’s body moving nearly in sync with his own until they stand shoulder to shoulder by the door.
Harry’s the one that opens the door, but Peter is the one that steps in first. Harry appreciates the unknowingly given chance to breathe and pulls air into his withered chest, steeling himself for the wave of something dark and awful that overwhelms his senses the moment he steps inside.
Basil coils tighter around his shoulders, six eyes casting an unreadable expression upwards. He does his best to mimic it, resulting in the snake ramming one of its heads against his neck.
“Oh.” Peter’s faint words echo from deeper in the network of rooms, provoking Harry to dart in after him. His bug is crouched over the scorched ground, fingers pressed to where Harry’s birth date is etched into the dirt. “…Maybe it’s just when he died?” He says when his eyes flick back up to Harry.
He huffs out a breath, somewhere between a laugh and a sigh. “Sure.”
Peter frowns, standing and approaching Harry’s side. His hands twitch, his tongue darting over his teeth. “Look on the bright side, at least it’s probably not a reincarnation type thing!” He says with a smile. “You’re way too tall.”
“Thanks for putting the thought in my head.” Despite the words, he’s very much smiling.
“Is this where you found the Vulture?” He looks around the decrepit room. “This place makes my apartment look like a penthouse.”
The mention of Peter’s apartment puts a frown on Harry’s face, but he pushes away his thoughts of how very easily solved that whole problem is. He steps down creaking floorboards towards the hallway, the pointe shoes already on his feet making the process to open the hidden room much easier. Peter rises to his feet to watch, watching the dance with fascination.
When the wall slides open at his final step, it seems for a brief moment that Peter is about to say something. He doesn’t, simply staring at Harry with his mask lenses wide. An odd blend of bitter self consciousness and sweet affection burns his throat like stomach acid, leaving him all around a bit red-faced flustered. “It was back here. MJ was gone by then, it was just me and Gwen who saw it.” He says quicker than he should.
“You said that.” Peter says, before reaching and taking one of Harry’s frigid hands in his own, weaving their fingers together into layers of bony and cold between warm and lively. “We’ve got this, right? Shouldn’t be too much of a learning curve between the natural and supernatural.” His voice is a forced sort of upbeat, a positivity pulled from a vessel in his heart that’s been near empty for years. He’s just as creeped out by the sticky shadows of this place as Harry is.
He squeezes Peter’s hand. “You’re actually super experienced. You’ve already defeated two goblins.”
“I didn’t defeat one of them! He’s on my side now.” Peter’s voice is filled with pride, but he ends up sort of smacking his head into the side of Harry’s, seeming to forget there’s a layer of latex between his lips and Harry’s cheek.
Harry snorts. “Don’t be humble. You were wiping the floor with me. Twice.”
Peter seems to bristle with offense on his behalf. “That’s not fair to you! You held your own against me while I was going nuts off some alien goop. That’s impressive.”
“I did not hold my own.” His hands twitch with the desire to touch the scar on his face and his voice wavers despite the determination to keep it steady. If it weren’t for the serum, he’d not have survived that encounter. If he’s being honest, there have been nights where he wondered if he’d actually died that night, with that horrid cracking he’d heard when he’d hit the ground head first, flung by the bomb, and his body had simply found a broken skull easier to passably stitch together than a hole through his heart and both lungs that soon became every single organ he possessed being ripped out during an autopsy. Regardless of if he had died then, he knows with no shadow of a doubt that he’d probably have died then without the serum, especially without the serum. “You basically just threw me around for a little until I stopped being able to fight back. It was pathetic.”
The word comes out harsher than he intends, carrying memories of the mocking whispers from his father’s voice he’d heard when Peter gleefully told him his father despised him, his eyes dark and manic. Something about it pulled him back to seventh grade, pulling himself off the bathroom floor at his frustratingly all-girl boarding school with hair cut short in a tiny pocket mirror and a skirt he’d stitched into pants himself, hearing the word dyke applied to him for it before he was old enough to understood what it meant and before he had Flash to introduce him to all manner of similarly colorful words. In neither of those moments had he known what was good for him and both had him picking fights he couldn’t win. He’d only won an expulsion Norman had been particularly displeased with and burns marring the one thing about him with any worth.
“It wasn’t that bad! And you were able to beat me pretty bad when I wasn’t… gooped.” Peter swings their interlocked hands, not seeming to notice where his thoughts have traveled to.
He draws their hands to his chest. “You,” He trails the fingers of his free hand down from the fingertips of Peter’s fingers down to his elbow, extracting an odd, giddy little sound from Peter, “were going easy on me.”
Peter clears his throat. “I was actually distracted by how nice your butt looked in those pants. I’m glad you committed to the leather. It’s flattering.”
“You were ogling me while you had a girlfriend? You player!”
“Well, you made sure I didn’t have one for long.” His expression contorts in confused horror. “Why did I say that?”
At least he can share the guilt. “Let’s not worry about it.” He says, feeling a bit meek as Peter eagerly takes the exit of the room behind the wall.
Peter frowns once he’s pulled Harry in with him, eyes roving the space. The wooden floors are decayed, the paint on the walls is peeling and torn by massive claw markings, but it’s been emptied. The dust on the floor carries boot prints and talon marks, a signal beam of recent presence, but they’ve cleared out fast.
“How could someone get something as big as that bird out without someone noticing?” Peter mutters behind him, footsteps light and careful not to disturb the already present dents in the dust. “I don’t even think that door is wide enough to get it in or out.” He comments, then cocks his head. “We should start looking.”
“Huh?” Harry turns away from empty tables.
Peter is beginning to pace the perimeter of the room, head turning like an owl. “Well, if that’s too small to fit the Vulture through, there’s probably another way for it to get in or out, right.”
“Right.” He echoes. “Any ideas, then?” In another world, they’d be spending tonight curled together in the back of an empty movie theater. A real date, instead of whatever this is. He begins opening drawers, a lackluster attempt to contribute to the search. “Hey, Pete?” He calls over to the man, who’s now knocking on the walls and listening for the echo of a hollow space. “Let’s go out.”
Peter’s mask lenses narrow when he looks back. “Leave? Already?”
He shakes his head. “No, no, I mean, let’s have a date. A real date, sometime. Hopefully soon.”
Peter's entire demeanor lights up as he turns, his footsteps light and no longer so careful to avoid the marks in the dust as he prances over, taking Harry’s hand once again and resting his free on the curve of Harry’s hip. The curve of his pecs slots just beneath Harry’s own perfectly. He lifts his chin, letting Peter rest his head against his neck. “I like how your sweat smells.” Peter declares with an uncomfortable level of pride, Harry startling backwards in response, sputtering in confusion. “I do!” Peter insists, as if that’s even remotely the issue.
He shakes his head, but laughs despite himself. “I believe you, just—what?!” He covers his mouth with a hand despite the mask already covering it in a poor and halfhearted attempt to muffle the sound. “God, how—why do I still want—god!”
Peter scratches the back of his neck. “You still wanna go out, right?”
“Think there might be something wrong with me, but yeah. I still like you, you loser.” Their hands remain linked, Peter’s hand nervous despite how tightly it grips Harry’s, his body language more shy and nervous. And Harry’s heart still flutters at it, his cheeks still warm at his shy, awkward Peter. It doesn’t feel like Spider-Man and the Mantis in this moment, it feels like Peter and Harry, with lingering high school awkwardness they never grew out of in the torment filled years that followed their eighteenth birthdays. Just two boys, who belonged far more in a college dorm reading comic books together than they belonged here.
Just two boys.
Peters head snaps away from him, looking past him. “Oh, what’s that?” He reaches into a drawer Harry had pulled open, extracting a small key that had cloaked itself in the shadows at the back of the space. He inspects the cobweb covered piece of carefully cut metal, scraping the clumps of web off with the edge of the drawer. He hums. “Know what this goes to?”
He shakes his head, but directs his attention downwards. Logically, he might be able to follow these footprints in dust to find where their owners went. His shoes tap against bootprints and talonmarks, following them in a massive arc that leads towards where the cot had been set up before. He frowns. The boards here are covered in an untouched layer of dust, a perfect, flawless coat undisturbed by touch…
Except for the edges of the boards, which have circular blots of removed dust framing them. He wedges his fingers beneath one board and lifts it, uncovering a stone staircase, nearly flawless save for deep scratches that mar their perfect polish. “Pete, help me get these up.” He calls to the spider. If Peter is stunned by the sight, he doesn’t say anything.
Stacks of floorboards pile up beside the wall, leaving them with a hole wider than Harry is tall. The stairs descend deeper than Harry can see, the walls perfectly smooth to the point they almost look like steel. The fabric of his shoes slips against the smooth surface as he descends.
Basil’s scales slide against his neck as the snake raises its heads curiously, turning in every direction to examine the walls with curiosity the monotonous stone shouldn’t warrant as Harry descends beyond the point light can reach. Can the reptile see something he can’t?
As the darkness grows so deep that he realizes he is simply trusting there will be stone for his land on, the sound of Peter’s breaths behind him is unexpectedly reassuring. His breaths sync with Peter’s without much effort, an oddly relaxing feeling. He hadn’t ever thought in his life that he’d grow to enjoy the feeling of air filling his chest, the reassuring pressure against his ribs, but the sensation has become pleasant.
His foot hits something, a pebble dislodged by the same talons that scraped up the stairway, and he hears it hit an opposite wall, then bounce, the echoes growing more distant until there’s nothing more to bounce against.
“Hole.” He contributes helpfully.
Peter steps down the few steps between them. “Hold on, I’m gonna…” He carefully steps down beside Harry, his shoulder ending up pressed to Harry’s bicep. He hears an airy but wet hiss as a web attaches itself to the ceiling. “Grab on to me.” He whispers.
His chest presses to Peter’s back, the bump of his sternum against the bones of Peter’s spine audible in the space, his mask brushing awkwardly against Peter’s shoulders as his arms find purchase against the muscle, fingertips traveling more than they really need to. If Peter notices, he doesn’t comment, and it’s exactly that which prevents Harry from commenting when Peter’s hand firmly grips his thigh and pulls it onto his hip, sliding against the pieces of letter before using his knee as a handhold.
Peter’s feet leave the stone, leaving them both suspended in air as he lowers them into a dark tunnel of stone. Harry can hear distant water and even see dim light below them. Their descent is interrupted as the web attaching them to the ceiling snaps, the pair dropping towards the floor. Harry tightens his grip and presses his legs closer to Peter, shutting his eyes on impulse until they’re both tugged upwards by another web, swinging in a wide arc around whatever space they’ve entered and finally dragging Harry's eyelids upwards.
The cavern is carved from shiny, smooth obsidian that glitters in the light of lamps built into the walls, four massive pillars stretching from floor to ceiling in the center, in the middle of which a bright light flickers and the shadows of other humans flick around and briefly obscure it.
“Woah.” Peter’s head shifts. “Shouldn’t this be causing like, sinkholes?”
“Magic?” He suggests.
“Guess so.” He lets Harry off his back, tilting his head at the sight of the setup between the pillars. “Woah. There are people.” He looks to Harry, pointing as if Harry doesn’t also see it. “Dunno why, but I didn’t think we’d find people. Should we talk to them, or are they like… evil killer cult people?”
“Let’s find out.”
There’s a tent set up between the pillars in front of a roaring fire, the whole area set up into a functional and very lived-in campsite. The area is occupied by a single human man, bald headed with his entire body covered in crater like scars, and about a dozen or more odd froglike fish people who bring to mind images of the one who’d given Harry the ring as a teenager. The largest fish man, who seems to be almost entirely clothes in gold jewelry, is locked in a conversation with the human, speaking in a squelchy accent, something Harry didn’t know existed.
“Yeah, I was gonna do that, but then I was attacked by a rat.” The human says, lounging in a cheap camp chair with its Dicks Sporting Goods tag still on it.
“Did you not state earlier that your last venture to the surface was for the sake of assignments given to you by the Crawling Chaos?” He says, tone solemn, something it immediately becomes clear the human doesn’t share.
“Sure was.” He says cheerfully. “And then I got attacked by a rat.”
Harry clears his throat. The fish people whirl, reaching for spears and swords but not moving to actually attack, relaxing when both he and Peter, though there’s something uncomfortable about the way their eyes all fixate on Harry.
“Hello!” The human raises a can. “Want a soda?”
The fish man casts a look at the human. “We will resume this later.” He steps away, returning to the larger group of fish people and turning his back away from the three humans, his eyes lingering on Harry.
“Spider-Man!” The human’s words make Harry jump and turn back, feeling an odd emotion that burns like acid cloud his chest. “Huge fan. Never thought I’d see you down here! I’m Wade.” He eagerly shakes Peter’s hand, looking him up and down in a way that makes Harry feel strangely queasy. “What brings you down to this humble hole?”
“We’re looking for a… big dead bird thing.” Peter explains. “Might have been with a guy. You seen something like that?”
“Is the bottom half of the guy you’re looking for tentacles?”
Peter shrugs, cheeks creasing in a pattern evident of a lopsided grin below his mask. “He might! I wouldn’t know.”
Something dark curls in Harry’s stomach, wanting to elbow Peter and beg him not to tell this stranger absolutely everything about what they’re doing here. He gives him a look that he hopes communicates that, but Peter isn’t looking at him.
“I might be able to show you the direction he went. Normally, I’d try and haggle you to get me something out of it, but you are Spider-Man.” He laughs, standing and stretching. “Think they’ll rip the place apart too much if I leave for a few hours?” He pauses. “Fuck it. Let’s move.”
Wade stands and leads them down the long corridor, seeming to completely fail at ceasing to talk the entire time. It’s reassuring when even Peter seems to grow tired of his chattiness. Harry finds his gaze traveling up and down the man, the way he carries himself, the way his voice rasps, the way his hands move, the way his shoulders roll. Something about him is familiar.
The corridor opens into a cave smaller than the obsidian coated space but still more a room than a tunnel, containing a small grove of unusual fungal growths that resemble trees. The fungus is glowing in an odd array of colors, ranging from the yellow and green of sunflowers to a bright purple that almost burns to look at. Harry reaches out and brushes the tip of his finger along a stalk, the material feeling soft and plush like velvet. The surface of it flutters at his touch.
“Where are we?” He hears Peter inquire. “It’s not possible for a network this big to be built under New York without sinkholes or stuff like that. How does this… exist?”
“Lots of things exist that shouldn’t.” Wade seems satisfied with that as an explanation for the why. “In terms of where, I don’t think I’ve ever heard them called much more than the catacombs. Big ass network full of occult people. Think we’re getting into Shubby’s area, based on the spores.” His face wrinkles.
Another disturbing, unwanted bundle of urges inside Harry bristles at his words, a clear non-devotee referring to her with such disrespect. Something that makes absolutely no sense, what with the fact that Harry has no clue who the her in that thought even is.
Harry's attention is caught by a flash of color in the corner of his eye. Basil is sliding over his shoulder, his body stretching across the room to a small red flower growing on the wall. It looks back at Harry expectantly.
He walks over, picking the flower. The stalk is pliable, bending and curling as he moves, almost seeming to move on its own, like a living creature, though the petals are as solid as paper. Its core opens like a mouth. “Harry.” The voice is feminine, regal but soothing, the voice of the entity he’d been offended by the casual mention of moments ago. He can see why this place is her territory, he thinks, looking around the cavern of glowing colors. The flowers on the walls and ceiling have begun to turn to face him, buds of plants opening to reveal eyes. In occasion, they open to show teeth.
The flower speaks again. “Caution. The one you follow serves the Crawling Chaos and he has been tasked with bringing him your head.”
His brow furrows. “Peter wouldn’t hurt me. Not anymore.”
“Not him. The other.” It whispers. “You must survive, by any means. Do not fear spilling blood if it means your survival, Harry Osborn. This is an order, not a suggestion. Your continued life is imperative, and you will do what it takes to keep yourself alive. Am I understood, my child?"
A lump forms in his throat. He nods.
"Good." She speaks. "May you find favor with the gods, Harry Osborn. May you find the strength to continue."
He tucks the flower into a pocket, then returns to Peter, the one thing that returns to him the shreds of his humanity and makes him feel whole.