Chapter 30
It’s been a long time since Harry went out at night in just street clothes. He’d intended to allow himself the time to stitch up the multitude of holes in his costume before he went out again, a priority taking second fiddle to stitching his own body shut and trying to get some rest, something that should have been, by all means, easier with Peter’s warm, alive body next to his.
It hadn’t. Peter’s back pressed to his had been comforting in a way he couldn’t entirely describe, but it hadn’t been enough to quiet his whirling mind. There are diseases in him that even Peter can’t cure, it seems.
But now that he’s sought out the siren song of the docks like a moth to a flame, he wants to retreat back to him more than anything. To wrap his arms around Peter’s sturdy torso and squeeze like a child with their favorite plushie. Call it a consequence of his wealthy upbringing, hands that aren’t able to stop grabbing the iron until it burns him, never knowing what’s good for himself.
And Christ, he suspects his palms will be scorched down to the bone tonight.
The sight of the crumbled warehouse makes him queasy. It must be all too easy for Peter to dig his own claws into himself in blame for what happened here, the Octavius’s dying on the same ground mere days apart and the destruction that occurred. Perhaps that’s just another in a long list of burdens that lay on them both. Burdens Peter seems desperate to shoulder alone. It was Harry who funded it, after all. There was a reason that damage fell on his shoulders both financially and in the eye of the public.
As much as a shallow, childish part of him has it’s pride aching from some irrational perceived insult, the money isn’t what was important. Two people died. That’s on him too. Otto never liked him and he only met Rosie a few times, but he’d made a habit of keeping fresh flowers on their graves once he’d come back from his own, regardless of the reality Otto’s was always going to be empty.
If it weren’t for the fact Harry is now equipped with evidence to the contrary, the idea Rosie lies without her husband after his passing would make his stomach turn. It doesn’t seem right to separate them, but the improbable life in Otto’s body makes that separation less sickening. Or maybe Harry’s just a romantic.
Peter, Otto, himself. So much impossible life. He wonders if it’s spreading off his cursed body like a disease.
There used to be more of the warehouse left, even if it was so damaged it was doomed to be condemned. He’d seen it after the initial accident, its roof collapsed and its walls threatening to do the same with each wind through shattered windows. He’d never gone to see it after Otto had died here. It’s hard to really tell the heap of rubble had once been a building; there aren’t any walls to constantly threaten a collapse, no roof to quiver in howling riverside winds.
Just rubble, a heap of collapsed wood, metal and pride. More than one Icarus flew too close to this false sun, it was just Otto’s wax wings that melted.
He steps onto a board that creaks under his weight, splintering with an ugly crunch. He shifts his weight carefully from foot to foot as he moves forward, finding his eyes drawn downwards. He can see the metal beams the fusion ball had formed between lying collapsed on their sides, the broken outsides of the windows that had killed Rosie Octavius. The metal slabs he steps onto from the board were once this places roof, shattered by the force of the incident.
He approaches the dock where he’d thought, the same as anyone else, Octavius had drowned. By all means, it’s unlikely he’ll even find Otto on this particular dock when all their prior encounters have both been elsewhere and seemingly been coincidence, but there’s no better place to start than where this all likely began. The quiet of the night is only interrupted by cicadas, the water undisturbed by riverside equipment; if someone else is here, it will be more than self-evident who it would be.
Once the creaking boards, broken metal and shattered dreams hang over the water like a torn spider web, he sits, staring into a particularly large gap in the rubble within which murky, clouded water is visible. This place is folly, a dirge to the pride of many laying in a broken heap of rusted steel claws and rotted wood teeth.
The surface tension of the water breaks in a cascade of droplets that are as much filth and pollution as water. The actuator that emerges shows the toll of years beneath the river, the flexible, spine-like structure of the metal base struggling to bend and move amidst the layers of rust that cake each plate and the barnacles that have only begun their development. The tip of one claw is missing, providing a brief glimpse of the red glow within before it opens, snapping roughly against the rust in its gears, creating a pathway for the mechanical eye to peer at him, still functional against all logic. The clawed head of the arm lowers, the scraping of rusted metal against rusted metal echoing in a screech that he can feel in his teeth.
“Where’s the rest of you?” His lips move on impulse with that red glow boring into him, taking every detail of his face, seeming to slow to take in the changes, the toll decay and time has taken on him and the scars few had ever seen before his life was cut short.
His words are ignored by the machine, which instead lowers to gently fasten itself to his ankle and tug on his leg briefly before releasing him, raising itself to examine his reaction. He meets it’s robotic stare, standing straight as it tilts its head at him, then points down at the water where it emerged from, snapping itself open and shut.
“Yeah.” He nods slowly. “He’s down there, right? Since you’re connected to him.” It feels a bit stupid to refer to the arm as an independent entity, but didn’t these things have some sort of insane, complex AI? Harry can remember something along those lines in words Otto had spoken with clear reluctance, a lot more private about this particular project than the one he was being paid to perform. Harry had been far too young and dumb to look any deeper. Perhaps if it hadn’t been him, freshly nineteen when those events had occurred, if it had been someone wiser, closer examination could have lessened the toll.
The arm points itself towards the water, then nods at him.
“Yeah.” He agrees, nodding once again. “I want to talk to him. Not gonna try anything.” He raises his hands. “See? No weapons.”
The arm nods enthusiastically and promptly fastens itself to his ankle once more, biting down with a much more secure grip on this second nibble, and yanks him into the murky water.
Filth floods his mouth, coating his teeth and tongue in layers of nauseating grime that he can’t force out of his mouth. A panicked inhale only draws it deeper, his lungs filling and weighing him down further, a liquid anchor. The moonlight is disappearing through the murky water as he’s dragged deeper. How is the arm this long? Or is it not this long, and he just can’t see the body of the man controlling it through the mud?
It ends with his shoulders scraping against the narrow gap he’s being yanked through, his free dangling foot knocking against a stone as he jerks it upwards, figuring it’s safer to comply. He shuts his eyes and pulls his body into as little space as he can until he feels cool, moist air against his soaked skin and solid ground beneath his back.
He opens his mouth to expel the grime, his lungs feeling as like a soda can crushed in someone’s over enthusiastic fist down to what feels like sharp metal digging into his chest from within, seizing to expel the liquid. He hacks, doubled over on slippery stone, his eyes blurred and watery from the suffocating sensation. He wants to collapse once his lungs have been emptied, the entire cavity of his ribcage feeling rubbed raw, an internal road rash that leaves him gasping for breath despite the lack of necessity. His chest aches full and it aches empty, air and the lack of only making his chest more sore.
“Harry.”
He pushes himself onto his knees, leaning against the nearest surface as he looks up at the speaker. “Doctor Octavius.” Harry’s eyes drift over him, seeking the grotesque sight he knows awaits him, almost desperate to prove it not another trick of his mind. The heavy fabric of the layered trench coats that conceals him, eaten away by water and mold and weighed down onto his skin by the weight of the same liquid that makes it shine, isn’t enough to cover the gorey turmoil that lies beneath. It’s as if the space below his waist had been shredded by the reactor like cheese through a grater, the fleshy, bleeding strands that remained not allowing him the freedom of death that Harry himself craves and instead healing. But not healing how they should. It’s like the filth of the water corrupted the exposed gore, mutating any attemp at healing into misshapen lumps of meat that are healed in name only. Fitting that they’ve managed to resemble tentacles, even with the odd desperation that the mass of thick coils curls into itself, almost trying to return to what it once was. “You’re supposed to be dead.” He’s unsure of what else to say; it seems as good a start as any.
Despite it all, Otto’s face looks as good as the same, with only the expected results of three years of time passing. Though it’s not too much of a shock he’d fare better than Harry; he must have some form of access to food, to water, to the sun. “If the news serves me correctly, you should be too. I’m quite interested in why”
He stands, choosing to look Otto in eyes still concealed by sunglasses. An odd choice for such a dark area. His mouth hangs, lips parted, for long enough for him to be uneasy before he can place speech on his tongue. “Why?” His water-numbed skin prickles. “You seem to be doing just fine keeping yourself alive on your own.”
One of Otto’s eyebrows quirks upwards. “Are you aware your father is alive?” He moves closer, something about the style of the locomotion chilling; the familiar bobbing of most normal, human movement is gone, a fact only emphasized by the sound of moist flesh over moist flesh. It’s almost nauseating to see; something so uncanny his mind cannot register it as anything but completely unnatural. Is that how other people see him?
The question doesn’t alleviate the itch of dread beneath his skin. So many wounds, barely scabbed over, that he finds he’s terrified will be clawed back open by investigating them for infection, bruises to his heart that might burst if examined. “Barely.” He mumbles, feeling oddly seventeen again when confronted with Octavius, an effect he’d always had. “I’m not—my father hasn’t even spoken to me, if that’s what you’re asking.” His lips twist against his will, contorting between shapes that couldn’t form language if he tried.
“I see. Pardon my caution, I worry about what I might risk if things find unwelcome ears.” That uncanny, eerie locomotion pulls Otto towards the smooth, hollow metal of a pipe through which a torrent of water flows, slithering—Harry can only describe it as slithering, really—towards a broken in hole in the steel. “Let’s talk somewhere a bit more comfortable.”
‘A bit more comfortable’ is very much only a bit more comfortable. He recognizes many of the contents of the makeshift living space from the house he’d found, old lab equipment and simple living materials that carry the tears and blemish of little use, limited food, and, once he takes in the space, a monstrous form that his brain lights up with unwanted familiarity at the sight of.
His legs seize on instinct, his jaw aching with phantom pains at the memory. “You have that thing?”
The deformed, stitched together form of the Vulture raises its eyeless head at the noise, a dry trill echoing in its throat. It sniffs the air, jaw clicking open and shut for a few moments before it raises itself onto its poor proportioned limbs, ramming its head into Otto’s hip not in an attempt to tear away his flesh, but instead in some imitation of affection. “I suspected you’d encountered it.” As if the world is toying with him in some failed attempt at comedy, he pats the damn thing like a dog.
His teeth grit, fingers itching with a thin scar near his elbow. “Yeah. Took my damn jaw off.” The words echo, bitter enough to taste.
Otto’s body folds to sit on the bed, the Vulture sitting beside him like a household pet begging for food. “Animals often resort to violence when scared and confused. I feel I owe it to your friend Peter to attempt kindness where I can.” He looks up from the ugly creature. “I imagine you’d know that better than anyone.”
Harry tries not to bristle at that. His heart curls in his chest, snarling with the desire to tell Otto not to compare him to that thing, not to call him an animal, regardless of if everyone else alive seems to agree with him. “How are you still alive?” The redirection seems as good a shift as any.
The man across from him seems to notice that, but he doesn’t comment on Harry’s avoidance. “I’m not sure. I know I feel unconscious at some point, perhaps just drowned. Most of what I remember is what the actuators have told me.” The arms raise slightly at the acknowledgement, twisting to look towards Otto. “I sunk pretty far, almost entirely to the bottom. But at the bottom—well, even they couldn’t entirely pick it up. And what little memory I have is impossible to fully comprehend, foggy like whatever it is doesn’t want me to remember it. But there’s something at the bottom of the river. Something that did this to me.”
His blood burns again at the mention, an image flashing into his mind, shapes and colors and textures he doesn’t recognize and yet he knows. That’s becoming a trend with him, isn’t it? “What was that about my dad, then?”
Otto leans back, the metal of the arms and his own back both cracking audibly. “It’s odd for a billionaire industrialist to raise from the dead and make no attempt to re-establish himself, no attempt to contact his living family, especially when he put so much value on what he built in life, is it not? Especially if in his life, that man might have been a masked terrorist.” He looks up, face clear with the intent to gauge if Harry had been aware it was his father, his only blood relative, who had been beneath the sleek yet distorted mask of the Green Goblin. “Even more so with my friend here having his serum in any tissues I could coax out of it” He pets the vulture.
“It would be.” His face is not as easily controlled as he wishes, his lips and brow twitching with unconfined feelings.
“So, Harry, how is it that he returned from the dead? Because I imagine it’s the same way you did.”
He approaches a fragile looking chair, placing his weight on it with a slow gentleness—though, all things considered, he’s probably light enough now that it doesn’t matter. “Well, you already know. It’s that serum stuff that he made before he died. I don’t know how, but it’s keeping me… not alive, I’m not alive, but I’m aware, I’m moving.”
“You’re not alive?” The look on the older man’s face isn’t concern or confusion, but fascination, making Harry feel a bit like a dissected frog or a preserved, pinned butterfly. Dehumanized, an object of study or medical fascination. A lab rat.
His feet twitch with the urge to push himself away. “My heart’s not beating, I don’t need to breathe, and my body is rotting…” he shivers, “I think I’m just healing myself faster than I can decay. But I am decaying. I’ve seen it beneath my skin.” His nails dig into his forearms, reaching towards the decomposition within.
“Fascinating.” His eyes glitter when he looks at Harry. “It’s likely the same for him, I’d imagine.” He approaches some of the rusted equipment that sits on his table. “I’m looking to create something that could reverse it’s effects, specifically whatever stasis it causes in living organisms.”
It clicks easily. “You’re looking to kill him?”
The concept isn’t one that make Otto looks away from him. “Indeed I am. I won’t turn it against you, if that’s what you’re worried about.” His head tilts and bobs briefly before returning to it’s original position. “Assuming you don’t turn to the same acts he does.”
“I’m not like him.” Defensiveness claws at his ribs. “Even with everything with Peter, I never killed anyone.”
It’s hard not to notice the increased attention from the man at the mention of Peter’s name. How is it that after this long, he’s still somehow surprised, or hurt, whatever feeling it is that sits in his stomach like lead, by how many people will so obviously prefer Peter’s presence? Harry can only imagine how much more painful it would be if he didn’t share that same opinion. “I wasn’t accusing you.” He lifts his hands. “But I’d quite like to take samples of your blood. Having more information on how the serum interacts with tissue and blood from someone a bit more… intact than our bird over here—” the Vulture clicks it’s jaw, the sound of bone against bone making him shiver, “—might be able to help me make a breakthrough.”
There’s a tempting whisper in the back of his mind, one who’s words taste as sweet and honey and lure him as easily as a bear. It should by all means be a disturbing thought, a terrifying one, but it sounds so soothing, so peaceful, to finally have it. To finally be able to rest.
“If I help you with this, if you find a way to reverse this,” he musters the will to say it, such a morbid idea that sounds so relieving. “I want you to do the same to me.”
Otto’s taken aback by that, even the actuators rearing back in surprise. “You want me to kill you?” His tone is more measured than what Harry expected, but shock and concern still raises his voice in pitch.
His skin prickles. “You don’t have to do it yourself, as long as you just give me some and tell me how.” He bites down on empty air with such force he thinks his teeth could break, fingers twisting like snakes against each other. “You have to understand it, don’t you? I feel unnatural, I can feel that there’s something wrong with me, that I shouldn’t be alive. It’s haunting me. Every moment I’m alive I feel this distance between everything; it's all so hollow. It’s not some blessing that I have a second chance, it feels like a curse because I can feel I’m wrong.” His shoulders fall, the little passion and energy he could summon leaving him. “I’m tired. I want to rest.”
He can practically see the numbers whirring in Otto’s head, concern and determination, the trade off of Harry’s life to end Norman’s, if he should or will respect Harry’s agency here. Harry wants to shout that he knows what he wants, that he’s not crazy or depressed or whatever he thinks he is, but that sort of outburst would probably only render himself even more incapable of making his own choices in Otto’s mind. “Okay. If that’s what you’ve chosen.”
—
He comes in through the window, following a tradition Peter set years before Harry even knew it existed. But he sits on the sill for a few moments before heading to bed, perhaps the vigilante equivalent of sitting in your car after work.
He’s relieved. It’s been years since he felt this free or peaceful, and it’s at the knowledge things can be over soon. His whole body feels light as air just with that. It’s all over. It’s over. It’s less strained or painful to think of doing what he wants when he knows there’s a way out, less selfish when he’s not taking something forever. Christ, he didn’t think he’d be so happy.
He slides downward off the windowsill, careful to eliminate noise with the carpet as he creeps towards his dresser and changes. His eyes drift over to Peter, asleep in his bed, against his silk sheets, beneath his blankets. It looks right, only made better by the silvery tone of moonlight illuminating Peter’s features. His lips quirk upwards as he slides his body beneath the blankets, seeking out Peter’s body heat like a moth to the flame.
Peter stirs as Harry moves to press close to his body, chest to chest, arms beneath Peter’s, one of Peter’s legs winding up looped over his hip. It’s so much easier to accept, even seek this contact with the previous conversation in mind. It’s all brief. It matters less if he takes when it’s all brief, and yet it makes each moment warm his chest so much more. “I didn’t realize you’d left…” Peter mumbles, his sleep-heavy jaw hesitating to move. “Where’d you go?”
The urge to lie bites at him, but Harry should know better than anyone that it’s more trouble than it’s worth. “I’ll tell you tomorrow. Wanna sleep.”
“Yeah.” He agrees to a question that wasn’t asked. “Better to sleep like this. You’re good to hold.” His arms tighten, leg weighing heavier on Harry’s thigh. “You’re shaped nice.” His voice is heavy with sleep; he probably wasn’t very awake to begin with.
“I’m shaped nice?”
“Yeah. You fit here well…” He feels Peter’s hands tap his back, quickly falling limp as he once again slips into sleep.
He smiles. It feels easier. “Good night, bug .”