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Ravencroft Institute, New York
The light above them flickers as flies buzz weakly around the dim bulb. It’s distracting, especially with Harry’s augmented senses, but not nearly as much as the gaunt figure in front of him. The prisoner is clad in an institution-grey jumpsuit, head bowed in his chair. Harry’s gut twists painfully, a nauseous pull – it was never supposed to end like this.
All in all, he thinks he deals with it pretty well. Until Peter lifts his head and hollow brown eyes meet green through the gaps in the cell bars, and Harry crumbles.
There are still patches of sickly green on Peter’s neck, Harry thinks deliriously, stepping forward involuntarily. It’s been five months and the effects of the venom still haven’t worn off, which is tragic, but a part of him can’t help but glow with vindictive joy. Namely, the spider part of his psyche that fought the Goblin to the near-death.
A larger part of him still longs for the familiar comfort of his best friend, despite the spider’s instincts. Harry’s pale fingers grip the bars. “Peter.” The name comes out colder than the metal under his hands. “You look great.”
Peter doesn’t flinch at that, but it’s a close thing. He takes a slow breath that doesn’t sound too steady. “Yeah, it comes and goes. Sorry about the whole,” he gestures vaguely, and Harry’s eyes can’t help but catch how his fingernails are still unnaturally sharp, “almost killing you thing.” The mocking laugh Peter lets out at that is pure Goblin in its menace and self-deprecation, and Harry looks him over with raised eyebrows. Somehow there are no traces of his best friend in this body, in the once-earnest face now set in lines of pain. “What do you want, Harry?”
A realization hits Harry with the force of a bullet, and the vigilante wonders how he’s still so blind. He’s confronted dozens of villains, laughs in the face of danger on a daily basis, and always finds a way to save the day. Then again, there had always been something about Peter Parker that made him weak.
The steel under Harry’s fingers bends under the pressure. “Maybe I missed my best friend,” he grits out, and the prisoner recoils.
Peter – doesn’t know how to take that, Harry Osborn giving him the benefit of the doubt. He isn’t sure how to take that from anyone since he had his mental breakdown and terrorized the citizens of Manhattan for a month, but least of all from Harry. The city’s now-worshipped hero. That word still feels wrong in his mind; none of them knew Spider-man when he was seven and terrified of arachnids. Peter had always been responsible for killing them.
“He’s not here.” Harry’s eyes pinch shut like he’s in pain, and Peter revels in a silent victory. “I’ll ask you again. What do you want?”
Harry tries for a smile, because he’s good at faking it, a decade of prep school ensured that, but it comes out strangled anyway. “I bet the inmates love your sparkling personality the most, Pete.“ He can’t help the reflexive snark, its part of his spider-persona, part of Harry’s best disguise. Sucking in a deep breath, he cuts right to the chase. “I need to know how you got access to the venom. Only half a dozen people have the clearance for Oscorp’s maximum security vaults—“
“You’re asking this a little too late,” Peter points out, arms spread to signal to his emaciated frame. “It doesn’t matter! The venom worked its magic on you but it did this to me. No need to rub it in more, pal.” He spits the last word, like he’s choking.
Harry spends the following seconds searching Peter’s exhausted face, and apparently finds what he’s looking for. “It does, so we can make sure it never happens again.” Lately people have been making their own homemade spider venom with disastrous results. As the CEO of Oscorp and the one doing villain clean-up, Harry knew he’d have to make this visit sooner or later. He’d be lying if he said he hadn’t held it off for as long as he could. “So. If you tell me how you found the original formula, I’ll answer your question – why it works on me, and no one else.”
To Harry’s slight surprise, Peter takes the bait with no hesitation. Though he evidently doesn’t have much to lose, and everything to gain. He’s stewed over the properties of the venom for the past five months, cursing the “unfairness” of it all. “It was a class field trip, to Oscorp. At the time I was pretty close with Gwen Stacy, and that almost, we, but we never…” Peter’s throat swells up, and the next words come out thickly. “I was into someone else, anyway. She was interning there and took me to a few restricted areas. Doctor Connors trusted her with the key to literally everything, so I saw the prototype armor and the—the venom. Gwen told me about what they were trying to do with cross-species genetics. The reflexes, the healing. It sounded too good to be true.” Peter looks down, swallows, and looks back at Harry with a thousand things Harry can’t deal with. He fidgets on the thin mattress, as uncomfortable as ever in his own skin, and it makes Harry feel drunk, the dizzying rush of familiarity.
Maybe, underneath layers of scar tissue and a damaged psyche, his childhood best friend is still in there.
“A few months later my Uncle Ben died. It was horrible. And it was my fault, and I had to stop the guy who killed him—short of killing myself, that is. But he was in a gang. They had guns, and the police wouldn’t do anything. I had to take matters into my own hands. So I—I used the passwords I memorized, the ones from the field trip, and got back into Oscorp’s basement.” Peter shrugs, trying for nonchalant, but his jaw is locked. “The rest is history.”
Harry chuckles bitterly. Yes, he remembers Peter telling him about both the field trip and Uncle Ben, the death that eventually drove Peter off the brink of insanity. Once upon a time the Goblin had confronted Spider-man about helping him. Something about finding and killing a man with long blonde hair and a star tattooed on his wrist. Harry, of course, had refused on his principle of no killing. Goblin’s resentment from then on narrowed to focus on Spider-man specifically, rather than the general population of New York City.
The irony lay in how neither of them knew the other’s secret identity. While Goblin and Spider-man were throwing each other into skyscrapers, Peter Parker and Harry Osborn were rekindling a friendship that withstood the test of distance and time. Harry doesn’t know if he wants to laugh or cry. He settles on a wavering grin.
“Turns out we’re not so different after all, Pete.” He runs a hand through his lemon hair, violently smothering the nostalgia that threatens to overwhelm him. “A little before you were on that field trip, I was training at Oscorp. My father was ill, and they wanted to make sure I knew how to run things.” Peter’s eyes begin to glaze over. Harry snaps, a sharp sound in the otherwise silent cement box, and Peter’s eyebrows narrow but re-focus. Harry can’t help the twitch of his lips; some things never change.
“They were still developing the venom, and the spider’s bio-cables… long story short, I stumbled into the spider room and was bitten. I didn’t know about the properties of the venom. Just noticed the improvements, and took advantage of them in… unwholesome ways.” Harry faintly remembers doing a lot of drugs (because his body always healed him by the next morning, anyway) and getting into fights for the fun of it. That phase lasted until he beat up a group of college guys hassling his old friend, Felicia. The righteous path was a lot more fun than he originally thought, he’d realized. Heroism would always be more fulfilling than deadly amounts of cocaine.
“My father died soon after. On his deathbed, he said that the disease he had was genetic, but for some reason I hadn’t been shown any symptoms. I figured the spider bite had cured me somehow. Months later, I tested my blood. Turns out the spiders were created using my father’s DNA. If only they’d realized the venom had purposes outside biological weaponry,” Harry says, voice stuttering over the last part.
Maybe it’s unfair to compare Uncle Ben’s death with his father’s, since the latter seemed to take pleasure in ignoring and verbally degrading his only son. But even Harry can’t deny that Norman’s death had left a similar hole in him, one that quickly became filled with a swelling sense of responsibility towards the city.
And Peter had filled his with hatred and a need for revenge that took root and never quite let him go.
Both of Harry’s hands grasp the bars by his head. For a maximum-security prison, this place sure seems easy to break out of.
I wonder if I could…
No. The spider stops the wistful thought in its tracks. These are long-buried feelings talking, not the confident, sarcastic hero.
When he thinks about it, the reason the Goblin had always been the hardest to defeat wasn’t because he was necessarily the most powerful—Electro alone could’ve taken him in terms of strength. No, it was the boy behind the crazed green eyes that made Harry put his guard down. Because how could he ever be guarded around Peter Parker, the one who understood his anger towards his parents, who loved science and always killed the spiders.
Even when Harry returned to New York City as a seventeen year old, Peter was there to welcome him home with open arms. Harry dragged him to parties and Peter taught Harry how to skateboard. Sometimes they’d laze around at Harry’s, sprawled across endless leather couches with x-box controllers tucked under their thumbs, piles of food on the coffee table.
He didn’t think on it at the time, but now Harry realizes that Peter always looked at him like he was searching for something he knew he wasn’t going to find, always tried to hold something back. He later justified his best friend’s emotional distance as a side effect of Peter keeping so many secrets from him.
Harry didn’t dare hope that Peter was hiding something else, that anything as precarious as love could survive in the harsh world of heroes and villains.
Numbly, Peter stands. The jumpsuit hangs off him in all the wrong places, his lean frame reduced to protruding bone, and Harry aches.
The way Peter approaches him is almost predatory. His hands somehow still look and feel remarkably normal as they fall on the same bars as Harrys’, their fingers occasionally brushing and overlapping. Peter shudders with it, inky eyes hooded. He draws in a breath, leaning forward to rest his chin on the metal, a breath away from Harry’s lips. Was Pete always so blatant? Harry wonders, his breathing shallow. Even the villain who keeps his heart so close couldn’t hide this from him.
Then again, Harry was preoccupied with swinging from buildings, but.
Their foreheads touch, an awkward reach between the shoebox-sized spaces in the gate. Peter purrs and twines his fingers through Harry’s, the spider screams get out of here change Oscorp’s passwords never come back, and Harry recoils like he’s been burnt.
No matter what his old longing tries to tell him, Peter is more than unstable. His wry grin and raspy, “Can’t say I’m surprised,” are evidence enough. Harry tries to convince himself that Peter’s dismayed frown is imagined, a trick of the light. That the furrow between his brows and his sudden slouch are signs of fatigue, not emotional distress.
The Goblin doesn’t feel things outside of whatever fuels his manic sadism and need for revenge. He is cruel, psychotic, the enemy—
Yet Harry feels physically ill as he shoves himself through the door and barrels past two unsuspecting guards, and he can’t begin to understand why.