“Hey, are you feeling okay? You’re not looking too good…” Harley asked his best friend, Peter Parker, as he sat in an empty boardroom in Stark Tower doing his homework.
Peter swallowed thickly before plastering on a particularly fake-looking smile.
“I’m fine, Harls, why’d you ask?” Peter said, clearing his throat before pulling his hoodie even tighter around him.
Harley raised an eyebrow. “Well for starters, you’re paler than a damn ghost, even more so than usual. You’re shivering, even though its 65 degrees out, and I know you, Petey, and I know when you’re sick but too stubborn to admit it.”
“I’m not sick,” Peter said, feigning surprise at the accusation.
“Oh yeah?” Harley asked with a smirk, “What did you have for dinner last night?”
Peter swallowed harshly as he paled. “Um… uh… Chinese food,” he mumbled.
“Ooh, nice, we had seafood again, all that raw fish-”
“Harley, stop,” Peter mumbled, an arm snaking around his abdomen.
“But I thought you weren’t sick?” he asked innocently.
“I’m not, but…”
“Hey, completely unrelated topic here, you remember when we accidentally made that tiny explosion in the lab?”
Peter’s eyes widened as he realised what he was doing.
“And I cut my leg open,” he continued, “and then a couple of days later it got infected?”
Peter fidgeted uncomfortably in his chair.
“And then that led to blood poisoning? And I almost died? Do you remember that, Petey?”
“Uh-huh…” he mumbled, jaw clenched as his forehead glistened with sweat.
“Do you remember how it looked before I went into medical? With those red lines of infected blood trailing up and down my leg?”
Peter didn’t reply.
“All that black blood caked around the open cut… And all that pus-”
“God, I hate you,” Peter mumbled, hand shooting to his mouth as he launched himself from his chair and to the bathroom across the hall.
“I told you you were sick!” Harley called after him, pulling his phone out to call Tony.