Modes of Persuasion, Chapter 1/?
“What have you done?”
Harry’s words, laced with anger and fear, are explosive in the quiet dark of his father’s study. It only takes him a moment, a breath’s span, to pull out the gun stashed away in the drawer. It’s a costly moment. Hammer cocked, the barrel of the revolver levels at the empty space where Spider-Man stood.
Harry sweeps the gun around the room, terrified eyes scanning the shadows for figures waiting to ambush him. There’s no one. No one except his father.
A breeze rolls in through the open window leading to the balcony, a sweet, cool whisper across his heated skin.
Spider-Man is gone.
The sharp bite of panic which spiked through him when he entered the room buckles underneath a crushing, black wall of fear. The gun falls to his side. His fingers scrabble frantically against the wall until they trip across the light switch. The room ignites with awful clarity. His father’s face, the familiar, deep wells of his eyes and the sharp, proud peak of his nose, springs into vivid relief.
Harry drifts across the room, reeled in by sight of the unnaturally still body lying on the ottoman.
He knows it’s his father, but at the same time, logic hiccups, and he can’t reconcile the gaunt, lifeless man before him with the Norman Osborn of his memories. The businessman who terrorizes his staff and the aloof father who never hesitates to hurl a cutting remark Harry’s way, neither of them are here. Instead, there’s only a man, a haunted-looking man whose features, though lax in death, are aged with some unknowable pain.
His father died in pain.
The thought brings Harry to his knees. He falls beside his father’s corpse, presses a limp hand against his cheek, eyes squeezing shut, and quakes. The faint trace of his father’s cologne mingles with the smell of blood seeping through the blanket wrapped around his body. Harry’s breath snags in his throat. His stomach clenches and he pitches forward, dry heaving. He hasn’t eaten, not able to put anything down since that morning when he walked in on Peter with MJ in the hospital. That little heartbreak seems so trivial now, a pittance compared to the vast hole his father’s death has torn into his life.
Harry’s eyes squeeze shut, and his breathing grows shallow and rapid. Crying is a weakness his father stamped out of him at an early age. But his father isn’t here now to see the wrecked man his son has become, so Harry gives in to the writhing knot of fear, rage, and anguish tightening in his chest, clutches his father’s hand, and lets out a broken, keening sound, like someone who forgot how to cry and is trying to remember.
“Dad,” he says. His tears sink into the Turkish carpet, a hand-woven masterpiece his father brought back from Istanbul when Harry was only seven. If his father saw him now, the first thing he would do is scream at him for soiling it. The thought makes Harry’s lips twist into a tight, delirious smile which he presses into the blue veins of his father’s wrist.
“I’m so sorry, Harry.”
For a heartbeat, Harry sits frozen with disbelief.
Peter?
Confusion crowds out his grief. Harry jerks away from his father’s body, his head snapping up and around.
There, in the center of his father’s study, Spider-Man stands in all his garish glory. But no. Not Spider-Man. Through the ragged, gaping holes of the Spider-Man’s mask, Peter Parker’s sad eyes peer back at him.
Harry disgraces himself by whimpering, “Pete?”
Harry had thought that with his father’s death, his entire world had been blown apart and he had been left with nothing to salvage among the ruins. He had been wrong. The end of the universe as Harry Osborn had once known it lay in the blue rings of Peter Parker’s eyes.
For one wavering moment, it looks like Peter might bolt again. But then something settles in his eyes. Slowly, he brings his hands up and begins to roll up the remnants of his cowl. His grimaces as he pulls the mask over the cuts and bruises quilted across his skin.
Without the mask, Spider-Man loses his menace. Peter’s face, though it had hardened considerably over the past year, still bears vestigial traces of puppy fat around the cheeks and chin. Not to mention his eyes. Peter’s eyes haven’t changed since Harry met him in Mr. McGrady’s fourth period science class. One glance at Peter’s eyes had convinced Harry that this was the sucker who going to help him con his way through senior year chemistry. But then those eyes had lit up when Harry pulled out the latest issue of Hell’s Bane, had lowered shyly as he opened up his binder and showed Harry page after page of graph paper crammed with sketches of super heroes. That’s when Peter Parker had become more of an ally and less of an unwitting accomplice.
Peter doesn’t have the eyes of a killer, but his father’s mutilated body speaks differently.
Harry lunges for the gun he had set on the floor, but it springs out of his reach. The string of webbing that shoots past him and deposits the gun in Spider-Man’s-in Peter’s-hand is almost too fast for his eyes.
”What did you do to him?” Harry’s asks, his voices shaking with fury.
Peter opens his mouth and then shuts it. He gives Harry a calculating look, one that makes his insides roil with rage. His father had looked at him the same way, as if he going under some test of character-and failing.
“Harry, I didn’t mean for this to happen.” Harry can see that the words are coming out of Peter’s mouth but the voice is still jolting with the suit.
Harry rises to his feet. “You did it, didn’t you? You killed my father,” he hisses.
Peter flinches. “I-“ He falters, looks away, unable to hold Harry’s furious gaze. “It was an accident.”
“Accident?” The words are torn out of Harry’s lungs. He grabs the crystal ashtray sitting on a nearby table and hurls it across the room. Peter sidesteps it neatly, which only enrages Harry more. His long legs eat up the space between them, and he pulls back his fist and swings. He connects with Peter’s jaw, but pain sets in like splinters in Harry’s hand. It’s like punching a steel beam. Peter’s head flies back, but he doesn’t give an inch.
Harry screams, a wounded, animal sound, pushes past the pain shooting up his arm, and throws himself at Peter. They topple to the ground, Peter’s head hitting the floor as Harry scrambles on top of him. His hands wrap around Peter’s neck, clamping down, constricting.
Peter’s eyes are blown wide, the dark of his pupils devouring the blue. “H-Harry,” he chokes out.
Harry knows Peter is letting him do this. Spider-Man could fling Harry off of him with the ease of a cow shrugging off a fly. But Peter’s choosing to allow Harry to punish him, and Harry takes the opportunity with relish, a dark, malicious corner of his soul aching to make his betrayer of a best friend suffer, to make Spider-Man bend to his will. He bashes Peter’s head against the ground, enjoying the sickening thud, all the while crying out, “What did you do? What did you do?”
Peter gasps for breath. He catches Harry’s wrists in his hands but doesn’t buck him off. “Harry. Harry, listen to me. Please.”
Harry laughs, a sick, raspy snicker that bubbles up from the dead space in his heart where Peter and everything he believed about Peter-their trust, their friendship-used to live. “Why? So you can tell me more lies?”
He thinks back on all the times that Peter had skipped out meals, had dashed out of their loft without so much as a goodbye, had left him alone. Harry had pushed his father to that get that place. It was where they were supposed to inaugurate their first year as college students by eating Chinese takeout around the foosball table, getting drunk while playing beirut, throwing parties that lasted until the cops busted them, cramming for exams, being together. It had hurt, more than Harry cares to admit, when Peter had started going AWOL, dodging Harry’s calls and questions with apologetic smiles, shrugs, and averted eyes. But Harry hadn’t probed Peter for an explanation, figuring his silence was a fair trade for stealing MJ from Peter. He had never imagined that Peter was capable of leading a double-life, never saw the secrets lining every hesitation, bracketing every delayed smile.
“Harry. Stop!” Peter slowly begins to pry Harry’s fingers off of him-God damn, the fucker is strong. “I’m your friend. You have to listen-”
“Fuck you, Parker!” Harry snarls. He releases his hold on Peter neck, fists one hand in the front of that hideous suit, and uses his other to throw a clean punch. The impact causes Harry’s vision to spark red with pain. If his right hand wasn’t broken already, it is now. Harry couldn’t care less though and pulls his mangled fist back again.
The blow never lands. In one fluid motion, Peter’s reaches up and catches Harry by the wrist. The gentleness of the touch causes Harry to still. For a moment, the only sound in the room is Peter’s harsh, rattling breath.
“Don’t,” Peter chokes out. His face is a mess. There’s grit all over, stuck to a sheen of sweat, buried in the cuts scoring his skin. His entire face is swollen, the flesh a mottled purple-green. A twinge of horror pierces through Harry’s red haze.
What the hell happened?
“Harry.” Peter voice steadies. He fingers close, careful, over Harry’s hand. Distantly, Harry registers the texture of the gloves, the cheap, mundane feel of spandex, the rougher parts where the fabric has been worried away. “I didn’t mean to kill your father.” Peter says.
The words feel far away, ringing out across a vast void. Peter killed his father but says he didn’t mean to. Peter is Harry’s best friend but he lied and kept him in the dark. Peter is Spider-Man, and Harry fucking lived with him under the same roof and didn’t know, didn’t have clue.
His father is dead and his best friend is a liar.
He’s alone.
Harry’s fury and his wrath empties out of him, until nothing is left but cold certainty. He slumps forward, and it’s as if all the strength has been pulled out of his bones. His forehead comes to a rest on Peter’s shoulder. Except for the rise and fall of his chest, Peter doesn’t move, doesn’t shove Harry away and reject him for this shameful show of weakness. Harry takes in a long, shaky breath.
Peter smells of sweat and asphalt and car exhaust, of night in the city. And blood. Sharp, piercing metal and broken skin.
It’s the blood that draws Harry up to his feet. He turns away, walks to the wall, holds out a hand-the one that’s not busted to hell-so he can steady himself because he can’t seem to stop the slight tremors running through him.
He hears Peter rise behind him, the whisper of fabric as muscles uncoil and shift. He doesn’t approach though, and Harry is thankful for that small mercy because he doesn’t know what he’ll do, if he’ll throw punches or vomit all over his boots-he’s not sure Spider-Man’s suit can take any more damage tonight.
“Get out, Parker,” he says softly. He doesn’t turn around, doesn’t want to look at Peter as he leaves.
His life has been defined by the absences of others. His mother. His father. Now Peter.
There’s a long silence. Then Peter walks towards the balcony, the sound of his footfalls unnaturally soft. Harry’s one good hand curls into a fist against the wall.
Everybody leaves.
“I want you to know something,” Peter says, “because I think you deserve to.” He’s far enough away that Harry has to strain to catch his words. “I wasn’t the only one with secrets, Harry.”
Harry whirls around. But Peter is already gone.
Harry’s words, laced with anger and fear, are explosive in the quiet dark of his father’s study. It only takes him a moment, a breath’s span, to pull out the gun stashed away in the drawer. It’s a costly moment. Hammer cocked, the barrel of the revolver levels at the empty space where Spider-Man stood.
Harry sweeps the gun around the room, terrified eyes scanning the shadows for figures waiting to ambush him. There’s no one. No one except his father.
A breeze rolls in through the open window leading to the balcony, a sweet, cool whisper across his heated skin.
Spider-Man is gone.
The sharp bite of panic which spiked through him when he entered the room buckles underneath a crushing, black wall of fear. The gun falls to his side. His fingers scrabble frantically against the wall until they trip across the light switch. The room ignites with awful clarity. His father’s face, the familiar, deep wells of his eyes and the sharp, proud peak of his nose, springs into vivid relief.
Harry drifts across the room, reeled in by sight of the unnaturally still body lying on the ottoman.
He knows it’s his father, but at the same time, logic hiccups, and he can’t reconcile the gaunt, lifeless man before him with the Norman Osborn of his memories. The businessman who terrorizes his staff and the aloof father who never hesitates to hurl a cutting remark Harry’s way, neither of them are here. Instead, there’s only a man, a haunted-looking man whose features, though lax in death, are aged with some unknowable pain.
His father died in pain.
The thought brings Harry to his knees. He falls beside his father’s corpse, presses a limp hand against his cheek, eyes squeezing shut, and quakes. The faint trace of his father’s cologne mingles with the smell of blood seeping through the blanket wrapped around his body. Harry’s breath snags in his throat. His stomach clenches and he pitches forward, dry heaving. He hasn’t eaten, not able to put anything down since that morning when he walked in on Peter with MJ in the hospital. That little heartbreak seems so trivial now, a pittance compared to the vast hole his father’s death has torn into his life.
Harry’s eyes squeeze shut, and his breathing grows shallow and rapid. Crying is a weakness his father stamped out of him at an early age. But his father isn’t here now to see the wrecked man his son has become, so Harry gives in to the writhing knot of fear, rage, and anguish tightening in his chest, clutches his father’s hand, and lets out a broken, keening sound, like someone who forgot how to cry and is trying to remember.
“Dad,” he says. His tears sink into the Turkish carpet, a hand-woven masterpiece his father brought back from Istanbul when Harry was only seven. If his father saw him now, the first thing he would do is scream at him for soiling it. The thought makes Harry’s lips twist into a tight, delirious smile which he presses into the blue veins of his father’s wrist.
“I’m so sorry, Harry.”
For a heartbeat, Harry sits frozen with disbelief.
Peter?
Confusion crowds out his grief. Harry jerks away from his father’s body, his head snapping up and around.
There, in the center of his father’s study, Spider-Man stands in all his garish glory. But no. Not Spider-Man. Through the ragged, gaping holes of the Spider-Man’s mask, Peter Parker’s sad eyes peer back at him.
Harry disgraces himself by whimpering, “Pete?”
Harry had thought that with his father’s death, his entire world had been blown apart and he had been left with nothing to salvage among the ruins. He had been wrong. The end of the universe as Harry Osborn had once known it lay in the blue rings of Peter Parker’s eyes.
For one wavering moment, it looks like Peter might bolt again. But then something settles in his eyes. Slowly, he brings his hands up and begins to roll up the remnants of his cowl. His grimaces as he pulls the mask over the cuts and bruises quilted across his skin.
Without the mask, Spider-Man loses his menace. Peter’s face, though it had hardened considerably over the past year, still bears vestigial traces of puppy fat around the cheeks and chin. Not to mention his eyes. Peter’s eyes haven’t changed since Harry met him in Mr. McGrady’s fourth period science class. One glance at Peter’s eyes had convinced Harry that this was the sucker who going to help him con his way through senior year chemistry. But then those eyes had lit up when Harry pulled out the latest issue of Hell’s Bane, had lowered shyly as he opened up his binder and showed Harry page after page of graph paper crammed with sketches of super heroes. That’s when Peter Parker had become more of an ally and less of an unwitting accomplice.
Peter doesn’t have the eyes of a killer, but his father’s mutilated body speaks differently.
Harry lunges for the gun he had set on the floor, but it springs out of his reach. The string of webbing that shoots past him and deposits the gun in Spider-Man’s-in Peter’s-hand is almost too fast for his eyes.
”What did you do to him?” Harry’s asks, his voices shaking with fury.
Peter opens his mouth and then shuts it. He gives Harry a calculating look, one that makes his insides roil with rage. His father had looked at him the same way, as if he going under some test of character-and failing.
“Harry, I didn’t mean for this to happen.” Harry can see that the words are coming out of Peter’s mouth but the voice is still jolting with the suit.
Harry rises to his feet. “You did it, didn’t you? You killed my father,” he hisses.
Peter flinches. “I-“ He falters, looks away, unable to hold Harry’s furious gaze. “It was an accident.”
“Accident?” The words are torn out of Harry’s lungs. He grabs the crystal ashtray sitting on a nearby table and hurls it across the room. Peter sidesteps it neatly, which only enrages Harry more. His long legs eat up the space between them, and he pulls back his fist and swings. He connects with Peter’s jaw, but pain sets in like splinters in Harry’s hand. It’s like punching a steel beam. Peter’s head flies back, but he doesn’t give an inch.
Harry screams, a wounded, animal sound, pushes past the pain shooting up his arm, and throws himself at Peter. They topple to the ground, Peter’s head hitting the floor as Harry scrambles on top of him. His hands wrap around Peter’s neck, clamping down, constricting.
Peter’s eyes are blown wide, the dark of his pupils devouring the blue. “H-Harry,” he chokes out.
Harry knows Peter is letting him do this. Spider-Man could fling Harry off of him with the ease of a cow shrugging off a fly. But Peter’s choosing to allow Harry to punish him, and Harry takes the opportunity with relish, a dark, malicious corner of his soul aching to make his betrayer of a best friend suffer, to make Spider-Man bend to his will. He bashes Peter’s head against the ground, enjoying the sickening thud, all the while crying out, “What did you do? What did you do?”
Peter gasps for breath. He catches Harry’s wrists in his hands but doesn’t buck him off. “Harry. Harry, listen to me. Please.”
Harry laughs, a sick, raspy snicker that bubbles up from the dead space in his heart where Peter and everything he believed about Peter-their trust, their friendship-used to live. “Why? So you can tell me more lies?”
He thinks back on all the times that Peter had skipped out meals, had dashed out of their loft without so much as a goodbye, had left him alone. Harry had pushed his father to that get that place. It was where they were supposed to inaugurate their first year as college students by eating Chinese takeout around the foosball table, getting drunk while playing beirut, throwing parties that lasted until the cops busted them, cramming for exams, being together. It had hurt, more than Harry cares to admit, when Peter had started going AWOL, dodging Harry’s calls and questions with apologetic smiles, shrugs, and averted eyes. But Harry hadn’t probed Peter for an explanation, figuring his silence was a fair trade for stealing MJ from Peter. He had never imagined that Peter was capable of leading a double-life, never saw the secrets lining every hesitation, bracketing every delayed smile.
“Harry. Stop!” Peter slowly begins to pry Harry’s fingers off of him-God damn, the fucker is strong. “I’m your friend. You have to listen-”
“Fuck you, Parker!” Harry snarls. He releases his hold on Peter neck, fists one hand in the front of that hideous suit, and uses his other to throw a clean punch. The impact causes Harry’s vision to spark red with pain. If his right hand wasn’t broken already, it is now. Harry couldn’t care less though and pulls his mangled fist back again.
The blow never lands. In one fluid motion, Peter’s reaches up and catches Harry by the wrist. The gentleness of the touch causes Harry to still. For a moment, the only sound in the room is Peter’s harsh, rattling breath.
“Don’t,” Peter chokes out. His face is a mess. There’s grit all over, stuck to a sheen of sweat, buried in the cuts scoring his skin. His entire face is swollen, the flesh a mottled purple-green. A twinge of horror pierces through Harry’s red haze.
What the hell happened?
“Harry.” Peter voice steadies. He fingers close, careful, over Harry’s hand. Distantly, Harry registers the texture of the gloves, the cheap, mundane feel of spandex, the rougher parts where the fabric has been worried away. “I didn’t mean to kill your father.” Peter says.
The words feel far away, ringing out across a vast void. Peter killed his father but says he didn’t mean to. Peter is Harry’s best friend but he lied and kept him in the dark. Peter is Spider-Man, and Harry fucking lived with him under the same roof and didn’t know, didn’t have clue.
His father is dead and his best friend is a liar.
He’s alone.
Harry’s fury and his wrath empties out of him, until nothing is left but cold certainty. He slumps forward, and it’s as if all the strength has been pulled out of his bones. His forehead comes to a rest on Peter’s shoulder. Except for the rise and fall of his chest, Peter doesn’t move, doesn’t shove Harry away and reject him for this shameful show of weakness. Harry takes in a long, shaky breath.
Peter smells of sweat and asphalt and car exhaust, of night in the city. And blood. Sharp, piercing metal and broken skin.
It’s the blood that draws Harry up to his feet. He turns away, walks to the wall, holds out a hand-the one that’s not busted to hell-so he can steady himself because he can’t seem to stop the slight tremors running through him.
He hears Peter rise behind him, the whisper of fabric as muscles uncoil and shift. He doesn’t approach though, and Harry is thankful for that small mercy because he doesn’t know what he’ll do, if he’ll throw punches or vomit all over his boots-he’s not sure Spider-Man’s suit can take any more damage tonight.
“Get out, Parker,” he says softly. He doesn’t turn around, doesn’t want to look at Peter as he leaves.
His life has been defined by the absences of others. His mother. His father. Now Peter.
There’s a long silence. Then Peter walks towards the balcony, the sound of his footfalls unnaturally soft. Harry’s one good hand curls into a fist against the wall.
Everybody leaves.
“I want you to know something,” Peter says, “because I think you deserve to.” He’s far enough away that Harry has to strain to catch his words. “I wasn’t the only one with secrets, Harry.”
Harry whirls around. But Peter is already gone.