Conference I
The world is soft and orange.
The breeze off the water caresses the two boys on the bench in a happy sigh.
Peter very purposefully dips his thumb into his vanilla ice cream, which he’s finishing for Harry (who never finishes anything he starts), and moves it toward Harry’s face. Harry watches, sees what’s happening, but doesn’t stop it. Peter keeps going. Slowly and with great care, he boops the tip of Harry’s nose, wiping a healthy dollop of ice cream on it. Now Harry has a white nose with one singular sprinkle on it.
Harry keeps still. Blinks. His face doesn’t change at all except for underneath his expression. Peter knows how to look for that by now. Peter knows when Harry’s… happy, as insufficient as the word is.
Peter, now with a goal in mind, lets his artistic whim take him where it will. He dips his thumb back in again and pulls three deliberate sticky streaks across each of Harry’s cheeks. Now Harry has an ice cream nose and ice cream whiskers slowly drying in the sunset on his face.
“And what have we accomplished with this exercise?” he asks curiously.
Peter shrugs. “I dunno, but I feel better.”
Harry nods and then gestures for Peter to hand over the ice cream, which Peter’s hand provides automatically. Harry keeps talking while he drags his long thin fingers up the sides of the cone, saving the drips and his lap by extension. Peter takes a second to look down and- yep, his shirt and pants are a lost cause. Ice cream everywhere. Awesome.
“We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit,” Harry recites, making sure he’s got every drop back into the ice cream and it’s as clean as anything Peter’s touched is gonna get. “E. E. Cummings said that. And I wonder, when he said that, if he was thinking of you, Pete. You, shoving your dirty thumb into melted ice cream, and making me an ice cream cat.”
He tops off this comment by rotating his grip on the cone and deftly, swiftly, damningly shoving the ice cream part directly into Peter’s nose.
Peter gasps, feeling the cold drip over his face, but Harry’s not done. He uses the cone like a glue stick, painting it across his cheeks, his lips, his forehead, sparing nothing, and keeping a completely straight face all the while.
“The world is– mud-luscious and– pud– puddle-wonderful,” Peter quotes between shockingly cold, wet strokes across his mouth. “That probably extends to ice cream.”
Harry finally sits back and looks at him with something like resignation wrapped in unending fondness.
“That’s so stupid,” he stutters breathily, poker face crumbling, giving in and cracking up with Peter not far behind him.
They laugh until tears mix with their ice cream facials, until they actually can’t look at each other without losing it all over again to the chagrin of their aching stomach muscles.
“What was it? What was it? Pete-” Harry wheezes, slapping Peter’s arm wildly.
“Mud? Mududdle- pud-”
“MUD–” Harry doubles over and stamps his foot like a bull, losing whatever slim hope of coming back down to earth he might’ve had, his wheezing doubling in strength as he curls over and ends up basically head-butting Peter’s stomach, holding himself up with Pete’s elbow. Peter falls over him in equal parts. His eyes light up as he sees an opportunity and he takes it, smushing his entire ice cream drenched face into Harry’s nice white shirt, right where it’ll be hard to reach.
A surprised-indignant-beyond this plane yelp launches out of Harry where he’s still heaving laughter into Peter’s lap. Pete keeps it up, dragging his face along as much of Harry’s back as is readily available.
“Pete, Pete, stop, oh my god,” he cackles, voice muffled in Peter’s shirt.
“But I loooOOOOooove you Harry! Don’t you wanna be puddluscious with me?”
“THAT’S NOT THE WORD! PETE–!” Harry whistles like a tea kettle, slapping growing weaker until it’s just absent flailing.
There they are, a shaking, dripping, mud-luscious mess on a park bench as the sun goes down, clinging to each other to make themselves a whole thing, and Peter feels whole, too.
Yes, happy is definitely insufficient. There is no word for this.
-~o~-
Peter slams through the door to his room shoulder first and falls in, his momentum throwing him all the way into the opposite wall, which he curls into but can’t bring himself to slide completely down. He pulls his arms into himself. Throws his fist into a wall. Another death rattle cough claws violently out of his ruined throat and he squeezes his eyes shut against it. Jesus Christ, is he crying? Is he actually? Come the fuck on.
He throws himself through his sheets instead, tears his blankets off until he hears his phone thud against the floor. It feels like a thunderclap. He scrambles to pick it up, bloody teeth gritted.
Peter, very messily, with the last vestiges of himself he’s still holding together, makes a call.
Three rings, and she picks up.
“They know. They know, MJ. Everything’s terrible,” he blurts thickly, swallowing coppery vomit. He starts pacing.
“Who knows? Peter? What does who know? Full sentences.”
“They know, they found out, my team found out, I had an attack, I meant- I meant to take my medicine, but I didn’t, I haven’t, they found out, they saw the whole thing, I threw up, there’s blood–”
“-eter, Peter, you need to calm down first. Are you hurt? Listen to me, are you hurt?”
“What?” he breathes out distractedly, whipping around in circles, throwing his hands around behind his head, unsure what to do with them. “No. They know, MJ!”
“Okay, okay, then tell me what you can see. Five things.”
“Five- uhm,” he spins around wildly. “Blanket. My blanket. ‘S red. The, the sh-sheet. S- Beaker. My beaker. Ben’s w-watch. Is that five?”
“One more.”
“Um, um… lamp. There’s a lamp, my lamp.”
“What colour is it?”
“Blue. The bottom’s white but the top is blue.”
“You’re in your room, Peter. Lovely place, even though it’s a mess. It’s not a bad place to be. Do you still have that Star Wars calendar up?”
Peter checks. “Yeah. Yeah. It’s on…” he swallows painfully. “It’s on the ewok page.”
“Cool,” MJ says. “Alright. Feeling a little calmer now?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Do you have your medicine?”
“No.”
“Okay, start making that. I’m coming over.”
“Don’t hang up,” Peter blurts fearfully.
“No, I won’t hang up, I’ll stay on the whole way. Look, I’m grabbing my keys and I’m leaving now. To Pete’s, dad," she calls away from the phone. "Bye. Okay, I’m in the hallway, I’m on my way. What are you doing?”
“I’m, um,” Peter mumbles, taking a deep breath and starting to gather ingredients. “I’m getting the solvent.”
“Good. Good. Talk me through it. I’m on my way, Peter. I’m on my way.”