Chapter 28
Harry stumbles from the impact, his heels digging into the earth as he skids to a stop. A whoosh echoes in the cave, hidden beneath the low tones of the rumbling cave floor as white threads that glisten in the dim light of the cave secure themselves to Wade’s raised shoulders, yanking him backward despite the movement of his legs with an chilling crack in his back, throwing him down with a groan.
The quaking grows more intense as the ground begins to crack beneath his feet. He turns on his heels towards the nearest growth of colorful tree sized mushrooms and, like a loyal hound greeting its owner, breaks into a sprint, heels pounding into the ground like the vibrations can be used as weapons against the subterranean creature. His feet leave the ground just as the earth bursts again, fingers digging into the squelching fiber of the mushroom stalk, the texture that slides between his fingers uncannily similar to flesh and just as sticky.
He thrusts the sword into the fungal flesh for support and turns, taking in the battleground. Half of the creature’s body remains beneath the disrupted earth, but the half above the soil is enough to give him an idea of its wretched appearance. It lingers in the limbo between mole and massive worm, with a body covered in large plated scales perfect for the deflection of rubble and, frustratingly, most weaponry, and an enormous, flat head, bearing a circular mouth full of pointed teeth.
Behind the muscled length of its body, he takes in the sight of Wade, struggling against Peter’s webbing as Peter attempts to coil him beyond movement against the stalk of a mushroom like a fly to devour. Wades body twists, bones seeming to wrench themselves out of their sockets in sickening movements that raise his arms behind his head to grasp what Harry realizes are the hilts of his own blades.
No fair. He’s copying Harry.
The blades shred the webbing, the man completely disregarding Peter in favor of pursuing Harry once again. Harry takes the cue to leap off the tree, his feet meeting the back of the tunneling creature and propelling him further until they clash in the air, the acid of Harry’s blood bubbling against the twin swords. The metal tarnishes, coming away with craggy dents where his blood-coated blade kissed them.
The force of their blows send them toppling over to one side of the creature, hitting the solid, stone ridden ground with force that knocks air from their lungs, that odd pressure in Harry’s chest growing more and more suffocating at the space his empty lungs provide. Oddly, the dense feeling seems to provide him with energy, his body feeling closer to alive than it has since his revival.
He grins, his teeth flashing, as he leaps from the ground to collide with Wade once more. The burst of emotion coursing through his body is intense, his fingers still buzzing and mind still flashing with images of earth crashing over his head as he tries to claw himself free.
Funny how something that so intensely reminded him of his death could make him feel so alive. It would be self deception for him to act as though the red hot aggression that had propelled him to vengeance had disappeared with his heartbeat, but there’s less of a sting of guilt when it’s directed towards someone deserving. At least he can say he was provoked.
“Nothing personal. Just the job, you know? You seem nice enou—” His cockiness, irritating enough to make Harry’s skin prickle, is cut off by the satisfying crack of a fist against Wade’s jaw. An eye for an eye.
“Fuck you.” He spits. It feels like a dam has broken, like all the anger at mistreatment he swallowed because he knew he didn’t have the right, at all the times he’d been tiptoed around like a sleeping bear rather than have anyone listen to him, the pain of knowing he’d only ever been born as a means to an end, at having his life sold away before he was even born, at Peter’s control, at, even before his death, the isolation of having the one person he had left abandon him after he was orphaned at 17, at the lies, the fucking lies! And it feels so, so good to treat this bastards face like it’s a punching bag, to see teeth and blood fly from his stupid, constantly moving mouth and seek out the crack of a breaking jaw.
“Christ, and after I told you I’m just doing what old bossman asks.” Wade prattles on in a rare lapse between hits. “People aren’t lying when they say the Mantis is brutal.” His grin is more tolerable when it’s laced with the cathartic sight of how many teeth he’s knocked out of his ugly mouth. Or it is until sharp pain jolts through his side just beneath his ribs and he registers the feeling of blood down his side.
Strange, how the wound is almost pleasant. The ache grounds him, focuses him, and only propels the fury that makes the mental image of this man with his head caved in so pleasant.
The blade in his side shifts as he reaches for his own sword, fallen above Wade's head, and the lowered guard offers just enough of a chance for the sword for be yanked free and driven straight through the space beneath his sternum, the tip emerging from the skin of his back. He can’t help but laugh. His body has endured and healed from infinitely worse and feeling metal pass straight through him is no unfamiliarity, only unexpectedly funny when it touches an area far less vital.
But the horrified shout that pierces the air indicates that Peter might not quite agree with that particular assessment. “Harry!”
He looks up to see Peter, feet dug deep into the rocky ground with webs wound tight around the subterranean monster, torso slightly curled with the effort to keep it still. His masked eyes are clearly trained on where Harry twists in combat with Wade, the sight of the sword piercing his belly being slowly processed. His body shudders, doubling over and arms clenching close to his body as his fingers twist, the threads slipping out of his hands as a pained groan rattles his chest. The creature takes the opportunity to dive back beneath the ground, the frayed ends of webbing fluttering in the air like the end of a scarf, but Harry’s far more occupied by the grotesque distortions of Peter’s body.
His back arches suddenly, his chest erupting as four of his ribs burst free from the confines of his skin, coating his surroundings in a layer of blood and chunks of torn free muscle and skin as his freed ribs inexplicably length, stretching out proudly. A violent snap rings out as his head twists, the red mask ripping with ease as his jaw snaps in two down the middle, contorting the skin that covers it as fangs spring from the center of the bone, settling into tooth lined mandibles with the torn mask poorly stretched over it. He stumbles, the ribs seeming to move on instinct as they catch him before he drives his body face first into the ground and lifts him off his leg.
The rumbles of the subterranean creature approach Harry once again and he seizes his chance, gripping the blade that impales him between his hands, gritting his teeth at the sensation of pain blooming along his fingertips and palms. Air hisses through his teeth. He drives a knee into Wade’s chest to press him into the ground as the rumbling approaches, the head of the creature bursting forth once again, jaws gaping open.
Harry slips his body off the blade with a gush of dark blood, a cacophony of lively red and decayed purple that remains on the metal as it leaves his body. Wade’s body makes a more than adequate springboard as he propels himself into the air in a motion that accomplishes his true goal: flinging the asshole into the open mouth of the tunneler.
The jolt of spider webs pulling him backwards is a relief for perhaps the first time in his life, a lifeline that pulls him to safe, stable ground by Peter’s side. The harsh sandpaper of exposed bone rubs against the small of his back as Peter shifts to face him, mandibles clicking together as he makes his best efforts to speak. Realizing his words are unintelligible, he places his hand against the entry point of the wound through Harry’s sternum before tilting his wrist upward to utilize his webbing as a makeshift bandage.
Peter raises his hands to cup Harry’s cheeks but has his attention directed elsewhere by a shout of pain. From the waist down, Wade’s body is wedged in the jaws of the creature, his hands frantically maneuvering a sword through its vulnerable mouth. “No way am I spending the next decade stuck in this thing.”
Christ, he never shuts up, does he?
It appears Harry isn't the only one tired of the constant monologue. The creature seems to have no regard for the danger of swallowing a sword, only a desire to consume whatever it has trapped in its jaws. But as determined as the tunneler is to feed, the man it preys on is just as determined to escape its jaws. Wade wrenches his body upwards with all his might, the sword functioning as leverage, but it’s not enough to save him entirely. Teeth shred through his body, cleaving him in half with ease as he falls from the creature's mouth.
To Harry’s shock, he’s still somehow moving despite the way the end of his spine is sticking proudly from the torn meat of his abdomen and the way his intestines trail behind him in an arc. Wade pulls himself up onto his hands and begins crawling, only allowing more and more organs to escape from the prison of his body.
The sight isn’t as chilling as the unexpected cruel, gleeful glint in Peter’s eyes. It’s not like Peter to delight in the harm to others, even someone who had done harm to his loved ones. Really, that mentality is more of Harry’s domain, and the display of flayed flesh and organs strewn about like some depraved modern art piece is too much for even him to find satisfaction in. The catharsis of beating his face in has vanished.
The monster is still hungry, unsatisfied with half a body. He watches its body with interest, noting how the plated armor on its back has begun to shift, the scales sliding across each other. Even with the movements and the way the plated scales shift to allow them, there’s no area that’s truly left vulnerable, each scale shaped to compensate for each other. Except for the vulnerable, soft flesh of its mouth.
“Think you could get that thing webbed back up? I have an idea.” Harry says, and Peter responds with a nod and a series of clicks. He doesn't even attempt to speak. “Okay. It clearly likes me, so let me lure it out. Grab me when it does, like you did when…” He motions in the vague direction of Wade’s gore.
With the plan boiling at the edges of his brain, he dives from the mushroom stalk, leaving the relative safety of the stalks to run across the hazardous ground. When the rumbling begins, he freezes in place, hoping his trust isn’t misplaced.
A void of teeth appears beneath him once again and his body freezes, waiting for either the feeling of those teeth shredding his body or the jolt of a web being yanked against his back.
Peter doesn’t fail him. He doesn’t know why he thought he would.
The pull is harsh, nearly enough to rip the flesh from his bones as it yanks him up and onto the top of the mushroom Peter perches on.
“Keep its mouth open.” He whispers to the other man when he lands. Peter hesitates for a moment, a cautious glance aimed in Harry’s direction, before he nods with a couple clicks and attaches two webs to the monsters, securing them to the mushroom before swinging off, the motion looking rather awkward with the dangling bone legs.
His path revolves like he’s the hour hand on the clock of the tunnelers body, shooting webbing from every direction and securing the strands to mushrooms and columns alike, looping around its head and tugging hard until its mouth remains agape.
The monster writhes, its movement rapidly becoming restrictive and panicked as Peter circles it. Peter lands on the cave wall, looking down at Harry with a question in his eyes. Harry extends a hand in request for webbing, confidence growing as a new thread meets his hand and the free arm searches for something he’s used so little he’d nearly forgotten about it.
He swings off the mushroom, twisting his body and wrapping his legs around the strand so he faces downward, his free hand drawn back with a solid and familiar weight within it.
Once he dangles over the worm, he lobs the pumpkin bomb into its waiting mouth.
The creature’s body explodes in a burst of fire and gore, coating the surrounding mushrooms—and Harry—in blood and flesh, chunks of worm falling from the sky like rain. Peter catches him, holding him tightly to his chest, the ribs carrying him in an odd embrace as they watch together as the monster’s body flops over, completely headless.
Peter hops down from the cave wall onto the mushroom, mandibles snapping together violently as he brings his hands to his split open jaw, attempting to force it back into place. His shoes stick to the mushroom as he steps over to Peter. “Hey, now, forcing it isn’t gonna fix it, bud.” He pulls Peter’s hands away, reaching towards the other man’s mouth with his own hands, inspecting one half of his mandibles.
There's a slot on the internal side of his jaw where the large fang on the end would likely fit in place if it was to curl backwards. He presses a finger into the moist sinew holding the fang in place and presses, feeling it swing backwards into the slot in his jaw, he repeats the process, then assisting in lining up the two shattered halves of jaw as they swing shut, retracting into the mess of skin and muscle that stitches itself back together. Peter’s hands raise to his jaw, trailing over the impossibly perfect surface of where his face stitched back together. “And you think you’re not smart.” His mouth forms a wide smile.
He lets out a harsh sounding half chuckle, still caught up in the pounding feeling of his chest seeming to spasm constantly and the odd burst of aggression towards Wade. “We should get out of here.”
Peter’s eyes flick towards where Wade’s ripped upper half lays, still visibly moving despite the many, many ways that blood loss and paralysis should be setting in. His eyes darken with something cold and cruel, something distant from Peter, a foreign force distorting his gentleness before it fades. “We should.” He agrees. “Grab on to me, we can move faster if we swing.” He extends a hand.
Harry takes it, their palms warming each other, and steps up to Peter’s chest before their arms tangle with each others bodies and the ground kisses their feet goodbye.
—
The lack of sun above their heads soon takes its toll. Neither has much of a clue where they are or how long it’s been since they entered, but exhaustion is beginning to weigh on their bodies, perhaps the crash of adrenaline, a theory that grows more likely with the pain that begins to shoot through Harry’s torso.
“Land. Land.” He prods at Peter’s side. “Need a break.” He can’t help but double over slightly as they land, now contained in the chilly air of a lifeless, monotonous sea of craggy gray stone. The ground approaches with a low swing, Peter’s feet meeting the solid surface before Harry has a chance to lower himself and setting Harry against the craggy wall.
“What’s—oh.” Peter’s eyes lower and he feels fingers carefully prod at the webbing over the wound through his abdomen.
“I’ll be fine. I don’t die easily.” It feels more than a little stupid to say, what with the fact they should both be very familiar with that fact, but it eases some of the tension on the others face. Harry reaches a hand down, his fingers curling around his abdomen and the blood soaked webbing. He pulls it back with a grunt, tearing free the sticky threads that cling to the hole through his torso.
What emerges is unexpected. One wave of poorly absorbed blood later, a cluster of thick, tangled vines dotted with emerging flowers eagerly surge through the newly available space, eager to no longer be restrained by the webbing. He stares, stunned to silence, at the clusters of tiny blue forget-me-nots, half bloomed daffodils and goldenrod that have apparently been sitting, poorly restrained behind his fragile skin. Each blossom is surrounded by the tangled mass of vines that seem to have been shoved into his body more haphazardly than his intestines were on the autopsy table.
Peter reaches for the flowers, his fingertips gently tracing the soft petals, a look of awe in his open expression. Harry jolts, an instinctual response to the foreign sensation that is being able to sense the touch to the delicate petals like they’re his own skin. He feels the touch across his whole stomach, in places in his abdomen he didn’t know could feel sensation, feels it even a bit lower than he can think about without his cheeks growing warm.
“Sorry.” He withdraws his hand with reddened cheeks.
Harry shakes his head. “Didn’t hurt. It’s just a bit sensitive.”
“You can feel it?” At Harry’s nod, Peter’s face is taken with the same adorable gleam of curiosity that had made Harry grown oh so distracted whenever they’d studied together as teenagers. “Can I touch? I should have asked, sorry.” Even after Harry nods, he looks perturbed.
But all the same, he carefully lifts a bloom away from its brothers, investigating it. The sensation makes Harry jolt all over again. “Looks like any other I’ve seen.” He comments.
Harry barely hears him. When Peter touches a lone flower, he feels the sensation in every other plant, a vegetative hivemind that’s formed and somehow connected nervous system right under his nose. The small sensation of Peter’s fingers coasting over flower petals seems to unwittingly give him a map of his body; he can feel roots sunk into every muscle in his body, from those stubborn enough to plant their roots in the soles of his feet to the delicate, tiny vines that coil around and over the ligaments of his fingers. He can feel the way they tighten and twist with each movement of his fingers, pulling his fingers into place at the requests of the signals he puts out. His nerves are long dead, his organs motionless. He’s suddenly more aware of the fact that regardless of consciousness, he should be motionless. The only reason he isn’t is these things, which have made their home in his body and in return burrowed their way into muscles and joints they command on his behalf. The largest roots are those that have sunk into his spinal cord, his brain stem, a presence the touch makes him aware of and the main roots that allow these organisms to grant his wishes for movement.
But beneath those realizations, beneath the sensation, he finds himself more present in his body then he’s ever been. The startling realization fades into the background as he finds himself aware of every inch of himself, every strand of muscle that has flora buried in to allow its movement, every firm bone, every shifting joint. Every piece of him intended to have a nerve has a vine, blossom or root in its place, and each of those can feel, and for this brief moment his mind doesn’t repress those sensations like it had been designed to. He is completely aware of every part of the body his mind had been so desperate to be away from.
And then the feeling is gone. Peter removes his hand, his gaze lingering on the flower. “That didn’t hurt, did it?”
Harry shakes his head, still dazed from the rush of sensations and new knowledge of his body. “It was good.” He admits. “Weird, but good.”
The array of spider-eyes on Peter’s face flick upwards at the cave ceiling. “We’ve been here for a while. Do you think it’s night?”
“It was already pretty late in the day when we got down here. It’s probably a bit later than just night.” He points out, but doesn’t hesitate to shift and make room when Peter draws his body up to lay beside him. “If you’re saying we should rest, I agree.” He can’t help the small smile on his face when his fingers find Peter’s hairline. He settles his body lower, trying to find in a crag in the rock to sink his head into. Peter’s eyes flick up and take in the motion, a sound of displeasure emerging from his throat. He surges to his feet, wrists raised as he hops up onto the cave wall, stringing wider webs together in a motion that seems practiced until he’s completed his web hammock.
He extends his hands to Harry, helping him into the makeshift hammock. “Can I see about doing a better job holding that injury shut?” He says with a sheepish smile.
He and Harry work as one to carefully press the surge of plant life back into his body, tucking flowers and vines back into the safety created by his skin. Harry’s fingers hold the opening together as Peter carefully winds webs over it, gripping his skin like external stitches. Harry is rendered quite a bit less helpful when he closes the exit wound. “Thank you.” He murmurs as he settles back into the hammock, once again providing space for Peter to curl up beside him. “Think those things might be the reason I’m still alive.” He remarks, unsure of how much he cares to elaborate.
“Don’t sound so much like it’s a bad thing!” Peter’s smile twitches for a moment. “A second chance, right? That’s a good thing.”
“Yeah. Should be, at least.” The constant emptiness is back, not quenched by that which occupies his body. “Sort of feels like I’m wasting it, sometimes.” He doesn't know why he admits that.
The hand on his cheek is warm and comforting. The warmth he finds in Peter's eyes is even better. "You aren't. I'm sure of it.” He says confidently.
“How are you so sure?”
Peter pauses, his optimistic expression lapsing before he plasters an almost grotesques smile back on, one that looks like plastic. “Well, you’re doing this.” He motions to the mask that lays above Harry’s head. Harry catches the way his lips quiver at the sight of his webbed-shut wound. “That’s the furthest thing from a waste.”
He lays his head back, noting the way that motion manages to pull Peter’s eyes away from his injury to his neck and the slight movements that have Peter’s lips pulling back from newly sharp teeth that he has clenched against each other. He looks starved, his eyes momentarily seeming far more arachnid than ever. “Well, I’m not doing it all the time. And when I’m not I just… lay in bed. Half the time I don’t even sleep. Oscorp is out of my hands, not that I’m yearning for it, exactly, the place made me miserable, but nothing really makes me… happy. Don’t paint. Hardly dance, even after I told myself I’d get back into it. Can’t bring myself to give a shit about basketball anymore. Everything I used to care about feels soulless and now life just feels… empty.”
There’s a brief burst of regret-filled panic in Peter’s eyes, his voice weakened by a slight quiver when he speaks. “Well, you might be overworking yourself. I felt just as bad when I wasn’t balancing the hero stuff. It’s probably just that.” He concludes his statement with a desperate finality.
He can’t help but laugh. “Right. Because when you were doing that, you spent sixteen hours a day in bed. I’m caught in the opposite of that.” He can’t look Peter in the eyes. “Sometimes it feels like I should be dead. Like I’m laying there because some part of me knows I should be buried and motionless.” A pause. “Nothing feels totally real. It’s all so empty. Like I’m… caught in an elaborate dream as I die.”
“W-well, you’re not! You saved me. I’m okay. You’re okay. You came back to me after…” He doesn’t seem like he’s looking at Harry, distant as he swallows. “Things get better, don’t they? You’ll find things to make it feel full again.”
“Does it get better?” The statement is as much plea as challenge.
Peter rocks slightly. “It always does.” He says, his voice quiet. For Peter, it always does. Always just works itself out. He feels like they’ve had this conversation before, a conversation just as fruitless as this one. Where thing work themselves out for Peter, who’s infinitely lucky, they get worse for Harry. The reassurance sounds like ‘no’.
“You’re behaving weirdly.” He says instead.
“I’m…” His teeth show again, his shaky words renewed with some verbal adrenaline. “You died for me! Because I asked you to come and you did even after everything that happened. And you died. I watched you die. And I went six months, half a year, thinking I’d killed my best friend-“
“You didn’t. I died because of Venom. Because I was reckless, even.”
“But I did!” Peter says desperately. “I could have stopped it and it was meant for me, and maybe you could have avoided getting thrown off your glider in the first place if I hadn’t ruined your eye-“ Harry can’t help but flinch at that. “-or if I’d just been strong enough to rip my way out faster or something. You died because of me. But you’re back now and everything is fine.” His words are growing manic, loud enough that a piece of Harry that hasn’t escaped his father’s hostile presence wants to cower. “It’s fine.” He repeats, perhaps in reassurance to himself. “I should just be able to forget about it, it shouldn’t matter anymore, right? Everything is back to how they should be, back to normal. But things keep changing! Keep. Changing. And I can’t forget. I can’t forget about watching you die, Harry! I could forget if things were the same but things keep changing. You keep going and changing, and…” He swallows. “And so do I. And I keep waiting for things to get better and go back to being the same way they should I be so I can forget and I’ll stop feeling like something is rotting inside me when I see how withdrawn and quiet and changed you are. It has to go back. And it will, right?”
He’s rattled by the outburst, several moments slipping by before his hollowed out mind can string together a response, his throat closing as he speaks words he knows might break Peter. “I-I don’t like lying, Peter.”
The look on Peter’s face is one of utter despair. “It has to.” He whispers.
“I think I could go decades, the world could start feeling less empty and more real and no need for me to fight could exist and I wouldn’t be the same. How it felt, buried and alone, not moving, just feeling bugs eat away with me and being trapped with my thoughts and regrets, that changed me. In a way that’s never going to go away. I had…” He swallows the lump in his throat, the world going shiny with unshed tears. “I had my entire… grasp on reality and my entire worldview kicked out from under me, I was shown every way I was wrong, that the ways I justified hurting you and MJ were meaningless and completely incorrect. My morals were me lying to myself. Every single mistake I’d ever made was shoved into my face. And I had six months of hell to do nothing but think about that. I would never come back from that and ever be able to be the same.”
Peter is quiet for a moment, his eyes as wet as Harry’s. All he says are two words. “It hurts.”
He smiles at that. “I know. I feel it too. But I think I’m sick of running from it, especially if it’s keeping me from being able to truly get close to you again, and you to me.”
Peter doesn't answer for a while, his head turned to the side, his gaze vacant. Harry is content to simply enjoy the silence, the closeness of his friend, the warmth of his body and the feeling of his heart. “Does it get better?”
“I wish I knew.” He forces a smile onto his lips, feeling his cheeks wet with tears.
A choking sound escapes Peter’s throat, his shoulders falling as his eyes shut and teeth snap together. “Then what’s the point of not running away from it? It doesn’t hurt that way.”
Harry struggles to answer that for a moment. “This.” He says simply, motioning to the two of them. “It’s hollow, whatever we end up being, if I have to swallow everything that effects me. If there’s no honesty with how either of us feel, I think we’re just alone no matter how many people there are around us because it’s hollow without it meaning something, even if it hurts for it to start to mean something.” He pauses, the space feeling empty without words. “I don’t really know what I’m saying. But ever since I… came back or whatever, I…” His head spins, his tongue twisting to form words his mind doesn’t even yet understand. “It was so lonely. It still is. And I don’t know if it’ll ever stop feeling hollow and if I’ll ever stop wondering if I should be dead. Stop wanting it, even, but it’s less lonely for you to know. Isn’t it?”
Peter just stares at him for a moment, his back pressed to the edge of the hammock. The silence makes his heart sink.
“I don’t think we would have become friends if I wasn’t… allowing you to connect to something that I tried to close off, with my academics. And doing that scared the shit out of me, because nobody else had the patience to deal with the fact I’m slow. You were the only one who bothered to help me and not make me feel like shit about it. That’s what made you mean so much to me that I’d…” His voice shakes, a sudden and inexplicable guilt bursting in his chest. “Let myself be an outcast, let myself take blows from Flash for you, die for you. Love you. Wouldn’t have happened if it was something that couldn’t hurt me. And I know I didn’t really give you much in exchange, not like you gave me, but—“
“Yes, you did.” Peter speaks suddenly, cutting him off. “I didn’t have friends before you. Not ever. That’s what you gave me. I was doing the same thing, wasn’t I? You could have fucked me over, spread anything vulnerable I told you around for your benefit, could have stabbed me in the back so many times. You didn’t. That's what you’re saying, right?”
But he had. He’d taken MJ from him, even if Peter never would have done a thing until he suddenly felt threatened in it, even if things between them had been different from what Peter had known. He still had, half because he was jealous that Peter felt about her the same way Harry had wished Peter felt about him. Even in loving, he is destructive.
Peter flops down inside him, arms looping around Harry’s waist and tugging him close. “It will get better. It has to.” He repeats, lifting Harry’s arms to loop them over his ribs. “And it won’t be at the cost of you anymore. I’m not gonna let things get better for me again while—because—things get worse for you and I did nothing. You’re the one who makes me hungry. Swear to god I’ll actually keep you warm this time, and we’ll find your spark and ways to make the world seem full. Even if it means everything changes and it hurts like hell.”