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“Pete…I need that suit back.”
He wishes we died in that zoo, that voice rumbles in his mind. Since Doctor Connors revealed that the life-saving goo was an alien of unspecified origin, it’s chosen to be louder. Nuzzling into the crooks of his fractured mind like an old friend and seeping down, across, everywhere, until he remembered he was whole again. Not something tainted, not in need of purging.
But this city had gotten used to seeing Spider-Man suffer. Connors, MJ, Miles, Harry. He became who they needed and they hated him for it.
Peter stares down at Harry, his jaw twitching.
With everything that gets thrust into his shoulders, day after day–
We are strong enough to bear it. But they should be grateful.
Yes. They should.
“This suit’s the only reason I’m still alive.”
“Without it, I won’t be much longer.” Harry reaches a shaky hand out to curl around the top of his cane and manages to stand. “Please.” Slowly, he begins to close the distance between them. Peter doesn’t move a muscle. His symbiote attempts to nurse the string of betrayal. “Please, Pete…we can figure this out. Tell me what you learned from Doctor Connors.”
The doctor wanted to split us apart. We should have killed him for suggesting it. Calling us a thing.
We didn’t need to kill him. There’s nothing he can do to hurt us. You saw him.
Yes. He was afraid.
And pathetic. But not the problem right now. Kraven is.
We should be going after him.
But we feel something.
There’s a pause in his head. An other-worldly hum.
You don’t want to leave.
We are. We’re going to leave. Harry’s the one making this difficult.
Then why do we stay with him?
So he can understand.
He will not.
Then we’ll make him understand.
Hmm. We are listening.
No. YOU’RE distracting.
His mind quiets. Peter can feel the symbiote’s impatience, the threads of his faux sweater loosening and tightening and loosening again, like it’s hauling in frenzied breaths. Calm down. We’re leaving soon.
“Peter?”
Those green eyes have pestered his dreams for years. Against the spill of sunrise through the penthouse windows, they implore him for more than what he’s already given. There was a time when he would have conceded, his stomach jellified, his thoughts a puddle of stupid affection.
“Connors said there was nothing he could do,” Peter lies. No. It’s the truth, really it is. If Peter had deigned to waste his time and stand around being the washed-up geneticist’s test monkey, all methods of experimentation would’ve slammed the brakes at dead ends.
The man had said it himself. A symbiote. Not a parasite.
A partner.
A solution, it echoes with promise.
Harry frowns. The information’s slow to register and Peter doesn’t see the point in sweetening it.
“Nothing?” His hand flexes around his cane. “No…no, he’s studied it for years. If anyone could fix this–“
“Fix what?” Peter asks, his voice deceptively soft. “Me? Maybe you thought he’d shove Kraven’s knife back where it belonged?” He steps closer and Harry inches back warily. “Make you the hero?“ The symbiote rumbles its amusement, but Peter is rigid. His emotions are an acidic vat bubbling over and he’s past caring about who gets burned. He’s been burned aplenty, he’s lived each time. Harry will, too.
Not for long. He is dying.
His dad’s got a plan.
Harry will not forgive us. But we are better alone.
It’s not his forgiveness I want.
No. Not forgiveness. But…something.
An ominous tone from the alien making a home in his body should be reason to divert the argument. But Peter ignores the voice. Ignores so-called sense because maybe all that really means is holding himself back. Maybe he doesn’t need to anymore.
And if that leaves no one left standing with him in the aftermath, it’s just as well. All the more time to be Spider-Man.
“I’m not sorry that I saved you,” Harry hisses. “But I thought–I thought–“
“You thought I’d hand it over, no questions.”
“I–“
“You talk,” Peter continues quietly, “like you’re so different from your father. But if I don’t give up this suit, what are you going to do, Har?” The nickname, rich with history and steeped in Peter’s challenging tone, draws a furrow between Harry’s brows. “Will you let it go?”
“No,” Harry whispers. He doesn’t even give it a thought. Osborns never roll over. And Parkers don’t give up.
“No,” Peter agrees. He backs Harry up with purposeful, slow steps, right into the edge of his desk. “You can’t, can you? You and Norman, you’ll destroy this city before you ever admit that what’s best for it might be a world without the Osborn legacy.”
He’s trying to make a point. But his anger is less of a carefully placed button and more of a motion sensor in this suit. The slightest flutter triggers a wave, but Peter supposes it’s a price worth paying if it’s him standing firm in the ruination and his foes left swallowing dust. It’s how the spider gig was always supposed to go. He, the infallible hero. New York’s only hope.
Because he has to be. Because no one else is capable of it. Maybe not even Miles, who Peter thought understood this job like he did, and yet he eyes Peter’s new suit like it’s something perverse. Like it isn’t the answer that they’ve tried to conjure from web-based gadgets and physics equations and combat tactics.
Devil’s Breath brought the city to the brink. You ask a New Yorker who was there for it, you ask them how the pandemic hadn’t led to full and irreversible collapse, and they’ll tell you it was because of Spider-Man.
They’ll never tell you it was because of May Parker. That she paid the price.
Norman Osborn’s second attempt at a cure has made its way into Peter Parker’s life by force yet again. And this time, he’s holding onto it. He’ll make sure the only ones who pay for this city’s sickness are the ones who deserve it, the ones who feed it into it like poison flows through the Hudson.
Harry looks up at Peter. Refusing to be cowed, even now, but a tremor gives him away. Something always does. “What are you saying?” He inhales through bared teeth, and the words come grinding out, “do you want me to die?”
He still doesn’t understand, the symbiote’s voice wraps around Peter’s thoughts, a frustrated gurgle in his mind.
“We won’t let you die,” Peter utters with conviction no bullet could penetrate. “But we–I won’t let you destroy us.”
“Us? You do this, you leave here with the suit, and we’re already done, Pete. There’s nothing you can…” Harry pauses. Gauges him like he’s the deceptive shadow one finds in the corner of a poorly lit room, the makings of a monster. “You’re not talking about you and me.”
He is afraid.
Most people fear what they don’t understand.
He misunderstands our bond and yet he still craves it.
Yeah. There’s also another funny little saying, about wanting what you can’t have.
The allure of the forbidden.
Something like that.
“Call Connors if you want, Harry,” Peter says dismissively. “He’ll tell you the same thing he told me.” He leans in, close enough to taste the stutter in the air between them. “The suit chose me. But if you still think this city’s better off when it’s with you?” He curls over Harry like a serpent, fists the desk on either side of him with enough strength for the wood to bend in his fingers. Only time will tell if Harry Osborn will bend, too. Yield under the inevitable or push and kick and bare his teeth until new odds chart themselves in his favor.
“Try and take it.”
Part of Peter wants the fight. Part of him just wants his stubborn best friend, his girlfriend, for everyone to realize they don’t need to fight this hard. Maybe before, when he was lacking. Falling through fiery, crumbling apartment buildings and saved only by the snag of a web strand. Struggling under the weight of a collapsing coaster, about to doom civilians to death. Taking the cure back from his mentor too late, always too late.
Saving mere parts of this city while it floundered for the pieces of itself he failed to retrieve in the debris.
Why don’t they see who he is now?
Maybe we haven’t truly shown them.
And–never needing explicit prompt from Peter, because if his oldest friend can’t see him, refuses to know this side of him, the symbiote understands, barely needs to read him because he’s pre-written–tendrils unwind at his back. Extending from his faux sweater, reaching around his torso until it’s got the symbiote’s prior host walled in on all sides. A cocoon containing the two of them, shutting out the penthouse, the Osborn-gilded cage.
His fist tenses around his cane, knuckles pulsing white, right before Harry lets it go. Clatters to the floor, echoing through the room. His hands find purchase on the desk behind him, but even that bit of support, he doesn’t need. Peter’s on him, around him, from every angle, and his self-control is at the end of a withered rope.
Harry tracks Peter with a stubborn lock to his jaw. Still, it’s there–that ever-so-slight quiver along his bottom lip. Uncertainty, flickering in those emerald eyes–trying to determine whether Peter is more predator than friend now.
But hunger starts to blaze through the surface.
“You’d make me fight you for it?” Harry whispers.
I’d make you beg, given half the chance, Peter thinks vehemently.
You toy with him, Peter. With us.
I know what I’m doing.
Bartering with our bond.
Proving a point.
“I’m not going to fight you. If you want the suit, at the expense of this city, take it.”
“We…we already tried–“
“No, I tried. I gave it my best shot. It didn’t work then, and Connors was useless, but all you’ve done is watch.”
Harry bristles, a scowl forming. Peter can’t get pricked, but he wants to nuzzle into those sharp edges, show him the symbiote can adapt to anything. That it was made for Peter, practically. And maybe Harry was, too.
You love him.
Of course I do. He’s my best friend.
No. You love him like you love Mary Jane.
Stop talking.
We feel what you feel.
And you’re an alien, so you might feel but you don’t understand. Not really.
The symbiote hisses in warning. We do understand. And we are wasting time. We must feed.
Feed?
Find Kraven. Make him pay, and then they will understand. They will understand how well we fit each other.
A tendril strokes Harry’s cheek, and Peter’s mind is too tangled to discern if it’s him or the symbiote the makes that first move. Another strokes up the thin material of Harry’s tee shirt, thinner strands sticking over his heart. And Peter can feel it racing. It vibrates down the symbiote and into his ribs.
How we’ll heal this city together.
Peter presses his forehead to Harry’s, eyes shutting.
Leave them needing for nothing.
Harry’s breath shudders and Peter can taste it, nearly presses his mouth fully to smother the oxygen between them, until he feels a hand digging into his chest. Knotting through the tendrils that have gave up the guise of a knit sweater and swarm over Peter’s skin like insects.
“Harry,” Peter rasps, reveling in the sensation of Harry’s cool palm finding his bare chest.
The symbiote had skittered out of his fingers, never letting its previous host gain too much leverage, and Harry scratches at Peter’s skin in frustration, a grunt in his throat. The symbiote grumbles and Peter dismisses it, let him try. He’ll give up eventually.
He wants to separate us.
I won’t let him. But he needs to see for himself.
But that is not the only reason you are asking him to do this.
Stop.
You hunger for him.
Stop. Talking. Let me focus.
“Stop it,” Harry’s voice breaks, when he grabs for the exoskeleton again and it jerks away from him. “I can feel you fighting it, you’re not giving me a–hnf.” A whimper builds in his throat when Peter noses up his jaw, for he can barely help himself.
“I’m not doing anything.” His forehead taps Harry’s temple and he lets his teeth graze his ear. Bad ideas don’t exist here, just desire, boiling up to the surface and steaming through his skin. “Are you done now, Har?”
“No.”
Fingers claw into the divots by his shoulder blades and with all his might, Harry pulls hard. There’s little give with the symbiote. Strands tighten up and snap back to Peter, furiously seeping back into his skin.
Specimen engages in intracellular bonding; still unknown if behavior can turn parasitic, Connors had written on his white board, deep in that off-the-books lab of his.
“It knew me,” Harry’s mumbling under his breath, raking his hands down Peter’s back and feeling the symbiote unfurl to avoid his descent. He huffs in irritation and Peter’s eyelids flutter; he hopes that despite his fast healing, Harry has the chance to leave marks. Feel how good it is to take, even though what he’s currently after isn’t up for grabs.
“It knew me first,” Harry adds desperately. “For months.”
Trapped in a tank.
We were watched. Studied. Prodded.
That wasn’t his fault.
No. It was his father’s. Those scientists. All wanting to contain us.
Well. Without them, Harry wouldn’t be here.
And I’d never have found you.
The symbiote hisses in agreement. Harry’s hands drag around to Peter’s front, fists balling against his chests, and he pants into the space between them. Gathering himself for whatever’s next.
“Pete…” Harry speaks raggedly, his head turning, nose bumping against his. History courses between them but the future is brittle. “Please, buddy.”
“I can’t,” Peter breathes, his attention honed on the redhead’s mouth. “I need this.”
You are not still speaking of us.
You need to learn to sit in the corner. Let me have this.
You assume your wants are separate from our own, Peter.
Some are.
As he said, we knew him for months. Nursed him in that tank.
Now he reaches for us again.
I told you, he won’t separate us.
He will not. But you misunderstand.
We would like to taste him too.
“Peter,” Harry’s voice curls around his name differently, expresses an ache for something Peter just might be able to give him.
He remembers other close calls. In the Midtown High locker room, studying the split lip Harry sustained from Flash Thompson. On a nearly-emptied street in Greenwich, carting a overly tipsy Harry home after partying and suddenly feeling his mouth at his ear, huffing about how Peter fills out an ESU tee shirt far better than he should.
Here, in the penthouse, surrounded by the symbiote and feeling Harry’s indignation simmer into anticipation, he can’t remember what’s ever stopped him before.
That was before.
Now, we take what is ours.
His spider sense makes a racket around his skull and he wonders if even his body is trying to tell him that Harry Osborn will come with consequences, that even through the symbiote, this could fucking hurt.
“Harry?” calls a headache of a voice from the hall. Peter grits his teeth. Harry’s eyes widen. “Are you awake?”
Norman, the symbiote growls. We do not like him.
No kidding?
We must leave.
If you’re just gonna keep stating the obvious–
Losing patience with him, the symbiote shoves itself back into his skin, threading back into a fully formed sweater and jeans.
“Wait,” Harry whispers furiously, cheeks flushed with more life than he’d seemed to have at the start of this doomed visit. Peter bends a knee, crouched before him. “What the hell are you–“
His hand twists over the walnut handle of Harry’s discarded cane. “Relax.” He stands fluidly, guiding Harry’s fingers to the handle and squeezing meaningfully, before letting go. “Harry, I need to go.”
“Find Kraven?”
KILL Kraven.
Peter skims over the question, for he hears the knob turning at the far end of the room. Backs up a safe distance from the beloved Osborn scion and knows there will come a time when he’s his alone.
“When this is over,” he says quietly, “I’ll find you.”
Harry licks his lips, steps forward as if to say something, or just to touch him once more–
“Harry!” The door bursts open. “Why didn’t you–ah. I didn’t realize we had company.” Norman’s tone takes on a manufactured brightness and Peter wearily turns around. “Peter. I was just going to tell Harry I’m having food delivered in a half hour, why don’t you join us? Absolutely appalling what those hunters did to the foundation, but we can talk about reserving space inside Oscorp until you boys–“
“I can’t stay, Mister Osborn,” Peter says, already making for the exit.
Norman frowns coolly. “Well, I could…call you a car. With the filth set loose in our city lately–“
“I wouldn’t worry about the hunters. They’ll be gone soon.”
Norman sniffs. “The police have yet to dent their ridiculous operation, so I’d say that’s optimistic. Or you’re…putting your faith in vigilante justice, then?”
“Seems like the only place for it these days.” He eases past Norman’s tensed shoulder. “I’ll call you when I’m done, Harry.”
If he needs to feed his symbiote to usher in sanctuary for his city, if it has to be Kraven’s head on the line, so be it.
Why must we stop there?
One thing at a time.