Work Text:
He told Peter first.
He couldn’t bring himself to actually call. His fingers were too heavy over the numbers, and he had forced himself to key them in one at a time, rather than just sifting through his contacts and hitting the call shortcut over Peter’s name. Tapping in each number felt more deliberate, more symbolic. But every time he’d completed the string, his hands trembled, his vision swam, and his throat was like sandpaper. He couldn’t bring himself to call.
Hey Pete, I’m back!
Harry sent the text three weeks after Norman had brought him out of the stasis chamber. It had taken him every one of those twenty one days to regroup his thoughts (and decent control over his body) to come up with those four words. To send them. The exclamation point felt hollow and forced, and Harry had hated using it, but ultimately it had felt necessary. He told himself it was because he didn’t want to come off as too serious or dramatic. Casual. That he didn’t want Peter to worry. Unaffected. The exclamation point was the most minuscule coping mechanism for months’ worth of intensive treatments and tests, for the voice inside his head that wasn’t his, but was at the same time. A voice that told him the exclamation point was fine, because he was fine. Because they were fine. He’d heard Norman mention the existence of this presence several times throughout testing. Harry hadn’t completely gotten used to it, but he had accepted it.
He had lost his hair during the rounds of treatment, in the stasis. And while many other things transpired around him unnoticed, afterward Harry was aware that the thick auburn was growing back exceedingly quickly. It was almost as long as it had been before Norman first put him into the chamber. The voice said it was because he was fine.
When the tank was drained and the tubes disconnected, and Harry took his first steps in months, he had almost vomited from the sheer physicality of it. Of standing and remaining upright. His father rushed to him with a bundle of clean clothes, and Harry put them on gingerly, feeling as though he had lived an entire century in the process of slipping on a pair of pants.
Norman was like a man taken back in time after he brought Harry out of the stasis. His father wasn’t wearing a suit, just a cotton jacket and an old pair of sweatpants. That was the first thing Harry truly remembered as he stepped out of the chamber and into the small lab. His dad—hair mussed, no suit, worry lines wrinkling his face—looking like a dad. He’d put both hands on Harry’s shoulders and looked straight into his son’s eyes. Norman’s face was sharper and softer all at once. Harry recognized it as the way his father often looked at old photographs of his mother. And Norman had hugged him then. Protectively, as though he were still a child. And his father cried. The voice in Harry’s head laughed, but Harry did not. With his arms still around him, Norman had whispered, “Oh my god. My boy. My boy is back.” But Harry wondered if Norman was actually hugging Emily.
He patted Harry’s shoulders (they were so much thinner) in an affectionate fatherly way that was unfamiliar to both of them. It was so unlike Norman, the pretense of it, but it was also necessary. The falsity of it somehow genuine, like the exclamation point.
Neither of them had known what to say then, Norman looking awkward but still with that faraway look in his eyes, and Harry smiling sheepishly, feeling out the muscles in his arms and flexing his fingers tentatively. The voice in his head that was his and not his was not nearly as shy. Food. It said. We are starving.
“Are you hungry? I’ll call the kitchen downstairs and see if they can put together a menu for us.” But Norman’s voice trailed off then, which was also very unlike him. To be unsure about anything, in any way. He waved his hand absently. “Forget downstairs. How about we do what we used to do when your mom was around? Let’s order a pizza.”
“Sounds great.” Harry spoke quietly, the sound of his own voice foreign to him. His ears felt so warm. “Thanks, Dad.”
When Norman smiled at him, the skin around his eyes crinkled, and his eyes themselves were dark like the coffee Emily used to pour him in the morning before he went to work, the coffee six-year-old Harry would wake up to the smell of on school days.
“I ran into Peter the other day.” His father paused. “He says Eddie’s Pizza is the best on the island.”
Peter. The voice said, as if grasping at the name. Pulling it apart and putting it back together. Peter Parker.
“Well, if Pete says it, it must be true.” Harry had felt the familiarity slip back into his voice around Peter’s name, and it seemed as though Norman noticed as well—glad that Harry’s memory seemed to be intact.
“I’ll go order it right now.”
Harry didn’t linger by the chamber. He followed his dad out into the penthouse living room, chasing the ghost of his mother, and settled himself on the sofa. He buried his face into the fluffiest boa throw pillow and felt like he was home. He heard his dad placing the order in the kitchen. His dad—using not a smooth and practiced politician’s voice, but the unassuming good-humored voice of a man ordering a pizza for him and his son. It was so surreal yet so normal at the same time. The exclamation point. Harry didn’t even question it.
He lay there, warm and sleepy and exhausted and glad to be out of the stasis, done with the treatments. The voice sounded sleepy too when it finally spoke again.
Peter Parker. We miss him. Don’t we?
“Yeah.” Harry mumbled out loud against the pillow. “Yeah, I do.”
And so Harry spent his first night back in the world watching TV and eating pizza in the penthouse with Norman, Norman wearing sweatpants with a hole in them and fuzzy socks. They watched an old Steve Martin stand-up and they laughed when it was funny, laughed when it wasn’t. Norman told Harry about how he and Emily had met him and Chevy Chase once, at the premiere of Three Amigos.
His father ordered two pizzas, because the voice insisted one wouldn’t be enough. The voice had also insisted that one of the pies have black olives, because Harry liked those now. We’re fine now, Harry. The voice wasn’t wrong. Harry’s appetite was insatiable and he had never loved the salty taste of black olives more in his life. Norman was surprised but impressed, not one to question such a positive and healthy development so soon after terminating the stasis.
The significance of Eddie’s Pizza was not lost on Harry. Before the text, before the exclamation point, Peter had found a way to be there in some form to welcome Harry back. The thought of it, the feeling of it traveled straight to Harry’s core, so that when he licked the sauce off his fingers it nearly made him blush. The voice had purred and laughed at this revelation all at once.
We miss him bad, it teased.
And it wasn’t wrong.
—
The next day was when the nature and results of the treatment itself had to be addressed. Harry and his father stood in the converted lab, tuning equipment and sterilizing instruments. This Norman wore khakis and a lab coat, and Harry vaguely wondered just how long he’d been wearing the sweatpants before that.
Harry put a hand on his neck, beneath the collar of his button-down.
What’s this? The voice asked. There was a clear smirk in the question. You want a piece of me?
“Quite literally, yes,” Harry laughed, coaxing it out carefully. “Just some quick tests.”
“So it can communicate with you, then?” Norman readjusted a microscope.
“Yeah, it’s uh,” Harry faltered as the black ooze departed his neck and latched onto his fingers, “we have the same thoughts, feelings, impulses. More or less. It’s kind of like… if a neurotransmitter could talk.”
Asinine. The voice hissed. I am so much more.
Harry deposited the sample of slime onto a slide and refocused the microscope’s lens. “So… what exactly is it, anyway? Some kind of organism? Bacteria?”
“Well, it’s inorganic,” Norman started uncertainly. “Dr. Michaels and I introduced it to a strain of the refined GR-27: GR-28. The ‘symbiote’, as Michaels calls it, absorbed the serum into its genetic constitution.”
“It seems to have a pretty stable chemical makeup. A little erratic, but…” Harry alternated between flipping through Dr. Michaels’ reports and looking closely through the eyepiece. “…I guess that’s to be expected from a non-terrestrial chemically infused life-form.”
“We’ll have to keep a close eye on the trajectory of your symbiosis,” Norman told him with unmistakable concern. “All bets are off if it starts hurting you.”
Harry had signed up for this, before going into the stasis chamber. He had understood the risks and the wildly experimental nature of what the treatment might involve. The results were much different than he anticipated though. He had not at all expected the use of an alien symbiote (how could he?), which seemed to serve both as an administrator and suppressor of the GR-28 it had absorbed. Norman had told him before he went under that they were developing a new serum engineered from Devil’s Breath, the original GR-27. Granted, it had only been a day since he’d been out of the chamber, but the sheer fact that his body wasn’t aching or spasming violently was a significant improvement for Harry.
“All done for now.” He returned the sample to the patient black stain upon his neck.
“Yes, we’ll do some more tomorrow.” Norman closed a kit on the table. “Unfortunately, I have to be at a board meeting.”
“That’s fine.” Harry touched his neck again. “That’ll give me a chance to rest. Catch up on everything that’s happened over the last few months.”
“Right, well.” Norman very pointedly did not meet his gaze. Harry knew the suits would be back soon. “I’ll see you later tonight.”
His father gathered his things, but stopped in the lab doorway. He did not turn around, and his voice was pale. “I wish your mother were here, Harry.”
“I know.” Harry felt something in his stomach twist. “Me too.”
—
It didn’t take long before Harry had discovered the full extent of the destruction brought about by Otto Octavius and Devil’s Breath. All of New York had been in crisis, sealed under martial law by one Norman Osborn. This wasn’t exactly shocking to Harry. He knew how his father was, all crowd-pleasing sentiment in public and total self-preservation behind closed doors—outside of those rare moments when Emily haunted him and Norman truly believed he possessed some semblance of a family.
Harry was halfway through dialing Peter’s number for the first time when he scrolled past a headline regarding May Parker’s death.
When he was eleven years old, he had spent the night at Peter’s house and she had made them both peanut butter and sliced strawberry sandwiches to take to school for lunch.
‘I’m sure it’s nowhere near as fancy as anything you’re used to,’ she had said to him, ‘but I hope you like it.’
It was the only thing he had wanted to eat for weeks afterward.
‘She just makes these for you any time you want?’ He had asked Peter that day in awe. ‘You have the best aunt ever.’
‘You have no idea,’ Peter had beamed at him.
‘I’m going to ask my mom to make them every day.’ And he had. Emily had made him one almost every day for lunch for the next three months. Even Norman had asked her to pack him one a few times.
‘Your mom is kind of the best too.’ Peter took a bite of his sandwich.
‘Yeah.’ Harry found himself staring hard into the lunch table. ‘I want to eat peanut butter and strawberries forever.’
But the words came out in a strange tone, with a weight he was too young to really understand, and they made him feel shy, separate from himself.
‘Who says you can’t?’
At the pure impetuousness of it, at Peter’s big brown eyes trapping the summer light from the cafeteria windows, Harry felt like his skin was suddenly too small for him, his fingers too clumsy, and his heart a little too fast.
Harry. The symbiote interrupted this memory. I want one.
“You want one what?” Harry’s voice came out thick and cracked, and he realized he was crying.
One of those sandwiches. They sound good, and we’re hungry.
“You’re always hungry.”
We both are.
“I guess,” Harry sighed shakily.
Don’t. The symbiote whispered, and a thin black appendage curled out from under Harry’s ear to gently wipe the tears from his face.
One week later, Norman was dressing in three piece suits, mixing dirty martinis, and berating business associates over the phone again. Not long after, Harry had wandered into Norman’s home office and saw that his father had left his laptop open. On it was an electronic invoice for Sable International’s retainer fee. There were two printed files sprawled over the keyboard. One belonged to Otto Octavius. Beside the laptop, the framed picture of Emily had been turned face down on the desk.
—
Another week after Norman had donned the suits and quietly slipped back into his pre-symbiote-bonding routine, Harry was utterly stifled by the penthouse. He’d started to spend more and more time at the condo he was forced to abandon when the symptoms of his condition had grown too severe for him to be able to live on his own. Towards the end, right before Norman had taken him back to the penthouse, there had been days he had lain in bed for more than 24 hours, with muscle spasms so painful he’d been physically unable to move. He remembered those days so vividly still, looking at the ceiling with a slick layer of sweat coating his skin as his heart rate spiked viciously and a low-grade paralysis settled in over his arms and legs. His fingers. He thought about his mother a lot during those episodes. He thought about Peter. Because there was nothing else he had even been capable of doing (and even then his mind would sometimes betray him, scrambling and erasing thoughts before he could form them), he thought about Peter a lot. His most prevalent thought was how glad he was that Peter believed he was in Europe. How glad he was that Peter couldn’t see him twitching and sweating like a thing waiting to die. He thought about the exclamation point before he even knew he would use one.
It had seemed then, that although Norman had reverted to his old schedule, quite a bit of paternal concern for Harry still remained.
“You’ll be at your place—how long did you say, Harry?” He’d asked one day while on hold with someone from his campaign office. “Three days?”
“Something like that.” Harry had taken up thumbing through his environmental law books, trying to refresh his memory after his ‘vacation’. “I’ll probably head out to a few of the research stations too. I want to make sure the back-up drives are working properly.”
“Still with those?” Norman chuckled, but it wasn’t derisive. There was, even then, something doting in his tone. “Your mother would be so proud of you.”
“Uh-huh.” Harry threw a few of the books and some binders into a box. “I’m going to take these back to my place.”
“Can you be back here on Friday for some blood work? I just want to make sure—”
“Yeah, Dad. That’s…” Harry balanced the box on his knee as he opened the door to the outside hallway. “…that’s fine.”
He left his father standing by the bar.
We’re fine.
—
One week after moving out of the penthouse, Harry sent the text. He sent the exclamation point. He told Peter first. Technically.
He had waited for all of twenty seconds after hitting send before he couldn’t stand it. The small illuminated speech bubble on his screen, the silence in his condo, the soft whirring of the melding of the symbiote with his own thoughts. He needed air.
On a bench in Central Park, he switched his phone off silent so he had no reason to check it compulsively. The symbiote relished in keeping time.
It’s been 35 minutes.
“I know,” Harry started, “but Pete’s terrible at checking his phone.”
And here you are, glued to yours.
“Shut up.” Harry furrowed his eyebrows. “Can I just read for a—”
“Harry? Oh my god. Is that you?”
Harry looked up, almost right into the sun, the sun blocked out by a small and very familiar silhouette. Under the light, MJ’s red hair was like a match struck in the dark. It made her face, her whole body, seem to glow.
“Hey.” He stood up, his hand absently brushing against the phone in his pocket as she ran up and hugged him, pressing very close. Harry hugged her back with the same intensity. There was something determined about the way she held him, like she wanted (needed) him to know that after everything that had happened, some things were still the same. They were still best friends. He could smell her perfume. Something like cherries and melted ice cream.
They finally pulled apart when a soft whine sounded between them, and Harry realized she had a dog with her.
“Did you get a dog?” He knelt down to pet the fluffy white spitz, who wagged a curled tail and licked his hand. “What’s its name?”
“Oh, uh. Her name’s Triangle. I’m just, just house sitting for a neighbor. She’s not mine.” She looked at him then. Really looked at him. “Harry.”
“Well, she’s beautiful.” He couldn’t acknowledge it. “Europe was great. Mostly just business stuff. Visiting partners, you know, sponsors…”
Harry felt it then. He couldn’t explain how he could tell. But she knew. That he hadn’t really been in Europe. That meant, of course, that so did Peter. He wished he could’ve burned the exclamation point out of existence.
“Norman sent us your letter.” She lowered herself beside him. “You should have told us sooner.”
“I wanted to.” Harry’s fingers were still buried in Triangle’s thick fur. He couldn’t imagine his father sending either her or Peter anything, but the truth of it no longer mattered. “I wanted to. You have no idea. I just—”
“Hey.” She put a hand over his and squeezed. “You don’t have to explain. I’m sure that’s the last thing you want to do right now. I’m just glad you’re back. How do you feel?”
“A lot better, actually. Still a little tired, but I think that’ll wear off eventually.”
“Have you told Pete?” She asked. “I wish he’d come with me today. He does sometimes. Triangle loves him.”
“Oh. You guys… come here a lot?”
Together? The symbiote seemed to tremble, and Harry hated how quickly it resonated with him. The jealousy.
“Well, when’s he’s not busy. What happened with Dr. Octavius hit him pretty hard. And May…”
“Yeah, I…” Harry couldn’t stop picturing Peter’s eyes. The summer light. The cafeteria windows. “I heard.”
“So, it’s been…” She swallowed. “It’s just been a lot. For both of us. But the grant committee’s letting Peter finish up the lease on Otto’s lab, at least. I think it’s kind of an escape for him.”
“So you’re living together?” He willed his heart from his throat.
“Uh, well.” She tilted her head, and there was a vague look in her eyes. Like a secret that Harry could see, but couldn’t understand. Her hand was still fluttering over his. “We’re figuring it out. But, no. We’re not really living together. Not really. There was this—I don’t know. I don’t…”
Harry pulled her into another hug then. It was a brace against the rest of the world, a promise that he had no place to make. It was the same way Emily had hugged him after she’d found out she was dying. MJ didn’t cry, but she breathed very deeply against his shoulder, and he felt the sun move around them as they huddled there. Triangle nuzzled her face in-between them, and they hoisted her into their little circle, where she curled up and then licked their faces until they couldn’t help but laugh.
“Let me take you out.” Harry fluffed up all of Triangle’s fur as she lapped at his nose.
“Are you asking my neighbor’s dog on a date?” MJ’s eyes were so blue.
“Well, I have to, don’t I?” Harry teased. “You’re too complicated.”
“Hm, well,” she nodded, smiling, “and just where are you taking Triangle this fine evening?”
“Well, I was going to take Triangle to get some ice cream,” he said thoughtfully, “and then maybe stop by a cart and get a hot dog for her sitter. You know how bad ice cream is for humans.”
MJ rolled her eyes. As she stood up and held a hand out to him to help him up, her smile was like a memory.
“Buy me an ice cream, Harry Osborn.”
—
Now, after Harry drops MJ and Triangle off at their apartment complex, he turns on the car radio. He’s not using a driver, for once, and he has no idea where he’s going. It’s dark out, and he’s vaguely aware of the neon lights of the city passing by, oblivious to the traffic. He stops flipping through the radio when he hears an interviewer talking with John Jameson about his recent space mission.
It was a nice flight. The symbiote grins through its voice.
“You were there when I read the files.” Harry is not taking his cue to be intrigued. “Interesting how you hitch a ride on a spacecraft and my dad somehow gets a hold of you.”
Norman Osborn appropriates many things, the symbiote sounds like it’s testing him. It’s mirroring his deepest thoughts, as you’re well aware.
“Did you bond with him? While I was in stasis?” This is something Harry is curious about.
For a very short time. The symbiote tells him. We were not compatible. I was bonded with a sample of your blood first, so Norman could be sure I wouldn’t hurt you. Or kill you.
Suddenly, Harry’s phone chimes, and he has to pull over to even be able to process the fact that it made any kind of noise at all. The screen illuminates his face in the car’s shadows as he pulls it out. He reads the message nearly two dozen times in his head before he can comprehend it.
Harry! Where are you right now? I can swing by!
These exclamation points aren’t hollow or orchestrated. They are just Peter. Harry’s smiling like a fucking idiot and the symbiote is absolutely reveling in pointing it out.
“Where are we right now?” Harry’s smirk is dripping mischief and so is the symbiote’s.
Otto Octavius’ lab isn’t far from here, it announces, like an enabling extraterrestrial GPS.
—
The idea is to surprise him. Harry acknowledges as he enters the corridor that there’s a possibility the symbiote might be altering his personality, if only just a little. But he’s having fun, and even enjoying how out-of-character sneaking into his best friend’s lab would normally be for him. It’s been months since he’s seen Peter, so it feels justified.
“It needs a key card.” Harry frowns at the inner door to the lab. “I don’t suppose this is something you could handle?”
Of course. Harry feels the symbiote melting away from him, becoming a black pool on the floor that slides through the undercut and disappears on the other side.
“Don’t take your time though, okay?” Harry tells it nervously. “I kind of need—you’re kind of my life support right now.”
After a drawn-out pause, the symbiote answers coyly: I need you too, Harry.
In a few seconds, there is a clicking sound and the door swings slowly open. The slime of the symbiote perches on the door handle, and rejoins with Harry’s arm as he enters the lab.
“That is incredibly useful.” Harry rubs his fingers around his wrist. “It’s a good thing we’re not criminals.”
Yet.
The lab is mostly dark, but there are a few desk lamps here and there that have been turned on, and a portable radio near the back is playing barely audible jazz. It smells dusty inside, and slightly like oil. There’s something very soothing about the space. Harry can understand why Peter spends so much time here, even though Otto is no longer around.
Open cardboard boxes are scattered around the floor and on some of the workspaces, and it looks like Peter is incrementally packing things up for when the lease ends. One of the boxes Harry passes close to is clearly full of Otto’s things. There are awards made out to him for advances in robotics, and old photos of him and Norman from back when they both still worked together at Oscorp.
As Harry absently rifles through a few of the papers, a small newspaper clipping catches his attention. The article is dated a few years ago, and Harry reads the headline aloud.
“‘World-Renowned Chemist Mendell Stromm Arrested for Embezzlement’. Why does that name sound so familiar?”
The other file on your father’s desk, the symbiote reminds him. It was Stromm’s.
“He was Director of Medicinal Chemistry at Oscorp.” Harry reads through the article. “It says Dad brought forward evidence of company theft from as early as six years ago. And this is two years old, so eight years ago now. That was when Mom died.”
A little late to be surprised. The symbiote is unimpressed. You know what Norman is capable of.
“Yeah, but what happened?” There is nothing but surface details in the short article. “Was he working on Devil’s Breath too, or was there something else—”
Harry’s phone blares into his train of thought. It’s Peter calling. He doesn’t think about the exclamation point, so he answers right away.
“Pete, hey!”
“Harry, I can’t believe—” His voice is oddly muffled. “—I can’t believe you’re back! Where are you? I can stop by wherever.”
“Well, um, actually…” Harry carefully folds and slips the Stromm article into his pocket. “Actually, I’m not anywhere yet. Just driving around. Did you want to meet up somewhere?”
“Of course I do!” Harry can hear the summer lights from the elementary school cafeteria in Peter’s voice. “Seriously, I can meet you anywhere. Just let me, uh, get changed first, and I’ll call you right back.”
“Actually, Pete, I…” He hesitates just a bit then, because he can’t fake the exclamation point this time. And again, he hesitates, because he hears footsteps getting closer in the corridor and the electronic ping of the lab door opening, and he finishes, like it’s some kind of lifeline, the last thing he’ll ever say: “I know you read my letter.”
And as the figure on the other side of the door walks into the lab, there is too much red and blue for him to possibly, ever, be Peter, but Harry isn’t in his direct line of sight, and so the figure says, into some kind of comm system built into the mask, “I should have known sooner, Har. I should have figured it out.”
Harry realizes all his weight is pressed back onto his hands, white-knuckled against the workbench, and for just a moment he feels like his sickness is coming back. He’s dizzy and the dark lab is suddenly far too bright. But the words, Spider-Man’s words, leave no room for doubt. No denial. No exclamation point. He pushes himself away from the bench and into the half-light of one of the desk lamps.
“Peter?”
The figure lurches like the name is a bullet. “It’s not… it’s not what you…”
But he stops, sighs, and pulls the mask off over his face. “Harry, I…”
Harry can’t do anything. Or he can do so many thousands of things that he can’t possibly decide which one is worth doing. The symbiote undulates in his mind. They are perfectly in-sync, and it’s letting this choice be all Harry’s own.
So he walks over to Peter, who’s standing there so unsure of himself, like he’s trying not to be Spider-Man. Harry stops in front of his best friend, and Peter’s brown eyes are just the same. His hair is sticking up everywhere and he has a fresh bruise on his cheek. That used to worry Harry. It still does. But now it makes so much sense. He takes the mask from Peter’s hand, who’s still holding it dumbly, and their fingers touch.
He studies the mask too intensely, like he’s genuinely interested in it. Turns it over, feels over the lenses, stretches it. Then he looks up at Peter again, who’s looking back at Harry like he’s the next step in human evolution. Harry wonders if his eyes look just the same to Peter. He hands the mask back. He grins. “Nice spandex.”
Normally, Harry thinks, this is something that Peter would laugh at. Instead, his whole body is tense and frozen and his eyes are burning a hole through Harry like he’s the last thing he’ll ever see. Then, Harry’s thinking absolutely nothing, because Peter throws the mask to the floor and pushes the Osborn heir up against the table behind them and kisses him like Harry is oxygen and he’s been drowning for weeks.
All things are poison. Harry feels the symbiote pool into his hands, which are clamped in Peter’s hair. He feels all of Peter’s weight against him, all his warmth and muscle and the heat of his heartbeat.
Both he and the symbiote writhe as Peter’s tongue pushes into Harry’s mouth, catching his teeth, stroking the recesses. Peter’s hands are like claws on Harry’s hips, having lifted him urgently onto the desk, anchoring him, rocking him, testing him.
You should show him our tongue, the symbiote gloats obscenely, and Harry shivers. The magnification of his bond with the life-form and the fact that at the same time, Peter bites down on Harry’s lip and licks a tender stripe over the same swollen spot is too much for him at once.
But then, Peter pulls away, brushes a hand over Harry’s thigh as he does it. The cruelest way to make him whimper, which Harry does. The symbiote utters at the periphery of reason, nothing is without poison.
Harry sits there on the desk and Peter stands in front of him, panting softly and staring at the floor. “I didn’t want to tell you because—”
“That’s why you stopped?” Harry finds the energy, the circulation, to laugh. He feels the blood in the peaks of his ears. It’s so stupid. It’s such a stupid, noble, Peter Parker thing to do. “You could’ve been the goddamn Rhino, stomping in here and kissing me like that—why you didn’t tell me wasn’t exactly one of my first thoughts.”
“Yeah… yeah. Touché.” Peter nods, and laughs. But it’s tired. It’s so tired. “But you not telling me was one of mine.”
Harry realizes, as he’s cornered by Peter’s gaze, pained and dark, that this moment was exactly what the exclamation point was supposed to prevent. As he moves to get up, Peter has a hand on his chest, gentle but firm, and he pushes him back further onto the table. This time he leans over, eclipsing the light of the desk lamps with his broadness. Harry feels very small, just like in the cafeteria that day over twelve years ago.
“I missed you, Harry.”
His eyes are faintly red and wet, and Harry can’t imagine what he’s seen over the past few months, much less over however long he’s been doing this, as both Peter Parker and Spider-Man. Harry feels an immense pang of guilt, like dying is suddenly a poor excuse to have left Peter alone for so long. Like he doesn’t deserve him. He doesn’t. But he doesn’t say that.
“Well, I’m right here.” He smirks, very near in Peter’s space. “I even, you know, snuck into your lab to be right here.”
“Yeah, and how did you manage that, anyway?” Peter kisses the skin below his eye. Presses his nose there. It’s so overtly pure and devoted that Harry can’t help the barest gasp of a moan. But he wants to play along, so he licks his lips and smiles.
“I don’t know.” He shrugs, reaches out to swipe the bruise on Peter’s face. “What about this, huh? How’d you manage that?”
“This,” Peter whispers obnoxiously, like he’s telling some kind of secret, “was from Taskmaster.”
“Wait.” Harry leans back, not missing the way Peter’s pupils dilate when he licks his lips again. “Is that the guy with the pumpkin head? You got a bruise from the pumpkin head guy?”
“What? No, not the—that’s Jack O’Lantern. Taskmaster. The… skeleton in a hoodie.”
“‘The skeleton in a hoodie’?” Harry is howling now. “Well no wonder you didn’t want to tell me you were Spider-Man. You’re getting beaten up by Halloween decorations in the middle of June. I wouldn’t be telling anyone either.”
“Hey, Jack O’Lantern had a gun, okay?” Peter’s voice is strained, like he can barely get through this sentence with a straight face.
“Oh yeah?” Harry raises his eyebrows in pretend distress. “What were the bullets made of? Candy corn?”
“That would’ve been amazing. Totally suggesting it the next time he breaks out of Ryker’s.” Peter’s face is so pink. But his eyes are still wet.
“Hey.” Harry takes his hand with both of his own and presses it up against the side of his face. “We’re—I’m fine. I’m not going anywhere else.”
Harry draws him closer, arms around Peter’s neck. He can feel the symbiote on his fingers, carefully staying out of Peter’s sight. He doesn’t want to explain that now. There will be time for it later. But Peter doesn’t respond this time, though heat radiates from him. His eyes are vacant, staring through a cork board on the wall behind Harry’s head. So Harry says what he knows he’s thinking.
“You keep too many secrets from the people you love, Pete.” He doesn’t let his hands fall away. He feels strangely responsible for keeping Peter grounded in this moment, even though he has very little right to.
Only the dose makes a thing not poison. The symbiote’s words are in his brain, and Harry recognizes the presence as the reason he doesn’t feel guilty about what they’re doing. In a fleeting moment, he wonders again what Mendell Stromm worked on while he was still at Oscorp. He remembers flashes, flashes of green in the stasis. Glass breaking outside. Norman shouting.
“MJ knows I’m Spider-Man,” Peter says softly.
“That’s not what I meant.” Harry doesn’t understand why everything was so green.
“There was some stuff… I had a few run-ins with Felicia and it just…” Harry watches him, watches Peter come down from this high. Back into his dual life. “It just made me realize I don’t know what I’m doing. And I need to, Har.”
“It’s not a secret, Pete.” Harry feels somehow offended. “It’s just us. What do you want?”
“I want…” Peter’s distant eyes refocus on Harry and the summer light returns. He sniffs and then smiles. “I want you to tell me how the hell you got in here.”
Harry kisses him. Really kisses him. Hums into his mouth, and doesn’t tell him anything. Peter moves his hands down, pushing up Harry’s shirt and Harry leans back on his elbows. Everything is electricity and melted heat as Peter touches him and the symbiote purrs. Harry sighs Peter’s name as he unbuttons his jeans.
“No, really,” Harry gasps, and puts a hand on Peter’s to stop him.
“Harry Osborn.” Peter’s eyes are huge and dark and his mouth is bright red and swollen. There is so much pent-up frustration in his voice. There is so much love there. “What the hell do you want?”
“The first night Norman brought me out of the chamber—”
“You want to talk about your dad right now?”
“The first night out of stasis,” Harry laughs on a breath, “My dad got us pizza from Eddie’s.”
“No way!” Peter’s eyes gleam like this is the one thing worth stopping for. “What did you think?”
That we’ll compare when you’re finished, the symbiote growls, more at Harry than at Peter.
“You know, it’s the weirdest thing,” Harry muses. “I can’t really remember.”
“Well, I guess I’ll have to remind you.”
“I’m not talking about the pizza, Pete.”
“I know.” Peter slips his fingers beneath Harry’s waistband. White heat. He smiles so innocently. “Harry.”
The exclamation point evaporates as Peter takes him into his mouth. Everything evaporates. As he rises to lean over him, fingernails digging into the exposed skin at the back of Peter’s neck, Harry sees the ooze on his fingertips, at the point of contact. It isn’t black now, but white. Foaming, seething where it touches Peter’s flushed skin. Like peroxide reacting to an open wound.
What is that? It’s the last rational thought in Harry’s head before Peter takes him in deep, almost to the root. His scream is silent as he throws his head back, but Peter’s name is on his lips at least half a dozen times. Peter reaches up, blindly, and brushes his fingers over Harry’s eyelashes as he winds him down.
Venom. The symbiote answers as Harry’s sweat cools. Thin strands of itself comb through Harry’s damp red hair.
That’s us. Harry is trembling, panting even in his thoughts. Peter’s glossy lips come up finally to meet his.
Yes, Harry. Us.
“So?” Peter’s beautifully wrecked voice brings Harry from this revelation. “What did you think?”
“It was incredible.” He lifts himself up a bit, cradling the back of Peter’s head as they drift together. “Wanna get some?”
“You know,” Peter grins. “It’s the weirdest thing. I can’t… really remember the number right now. Just completely forgot.”
Harry sits up fully, running his hands through his hair, licking his lips again.
“You keep doing that,” Peter’s not playing the game anymore, “and it’s driving me insane.”
“No kidding?” Harry’s smile is absolutely wicked. “What’s the number again?”
“I don’t know.” Peter lifts his eyebrows.
“I’m not…” Harry makes a weak gesture toward the suit, fully appreciating an area of interest it does nothing at all to hide. “I’m not taking this off for you.”
“Well, duh.” Peter says. “I was going to do it. You know, like a demonstration.”
“Will there be science involved?” Harry leans forward, resting his chin in his hands with exaggerated fascination.
“Harry, it’s me.” Peter postures, arms out wide, palms up, body at just the right angles. “There’s always science involved.”
“It’s nice to know some things haven’t changed.” Harry says it teasingly, but he means it. Peter Parker is the only thing he ever feels like he’s completely sure of.
And Peter ducks in, smooth as a cat, no doubt compliments of Felicia, and grabs hold of Harry’s shirt to pull him slowly off the table.
“It’s us, Har.”
Us.
“Nothing’s allowed to change with us.” His lips ghost the side of Harry’s face. “Now, you know, get down here and help me out.”
“Oh, anything for you, Spider-Man.” He snickers into Peter’s hair before he kisses him fully, then dips his head lower, licks the hill of his Adam’s apple as Peter slowly and deliberately peels off the suit. He takes his sweet time as he draws a moan in the shape of his own name from Peter’s mouth.
How long have we wanted this? Craved it?
The symbiote pulls deep at him, twining deftly over his skin. Harry feels the ooze between his teeth, under his tongue. In the back of his throat as he swallows.
At the same time, Peter shudders.