Chapter 84: Harry and Peter, You Two Should Just Date
Peter came home feeling lighter than he had in days.
The fire rescue had gone well. The press attention was — okay, extremely enjoyable, not that he was going to admit that to anyone. He was in the middle of convincing himself that the whole hero thing was coming together naturally when his phone buzzed twice in quick succession.
He checked it.
The first message was from MJ.
Hey. You free this week? We should hang out.
Peter read it three times. His face did something embarrassing. He put the phone down, picked it up again, read it a fourth time.
The second message was from Harry.
Come over tonight? Been a while. My dad's not home.
Peter felt the warmth settle in his chest that Harry's messages always produced — easy, uncomplicated. Harry was his oldest friend, and visiting the Osborn house had never required any particular thought. It was just something they did.
He looked at both messages again, doing the mental scheduling.
Harry first, then figure out the MJ situation when his brain was working properly.
He pocketed his phone and headed out.
The Osborn house was dark.
Not evening-dark, not someone forgot to turn on a light dark — the kind of dark that meant every single light in the building was off, on a floor where someone was supposed to be home. Peter stood at the front door for a moment, telling himself there were a dozen reasonable explanations.
He tried the handle. The door swung open.
"Harry?"
His voice went into the dark and didn't come back with anything useful. He stepped inside. The living room was disheveled in the specific way that suggested urgency — things knocked over, a chair at the wrong angle, a lamp on the floor.
Peter moved toward Harry's room, his spider-sense humming at a low, steady frequency that he was learning to trust.
He pushed the door open.
Harry was suspended from the ceiling, wrists bound, head lolling. Still breathing — Peter checked that first, the relief arriving before conscious thought — but pale and unconscious.
Okay, Peter thought, with the particular focus that arrived when things became very bad very quickly. Okay, he's alive, find something to cut the—
The cold hit him from behind.
He spun.
The figure in the green armor materialized out of the shadows like something the moonlight had made — angular and coiled and wearing a smile that had nothing kind in it.
Peter was already moving when the first strike came. He ducked under it, felt it graze his shoulder, came up with his feet and got some distance.
"Who are you?" He put himself between the figure and Harry's suspended form. "Why did you touch him?"
Green Goblin tilted his head, seemingly amused.
"Disciplining my own son," he said. "Is that a problem?"
Peter stared at him. "You're — you're Mr. Osborn—" Then something clicked. The wrongness of it. The way this man's eyes had none of the weight that Norman Osborn's had carried in the hospital. "No. You knew who I was before I got here. You're from another universe."
"Sharp kid." Goblin's smile didn't change. "But I'm not that waste Osborn. I'm the Green Goblin." He spread his hands, almost welcoming. "And you, little spider, are someone I've been looking forward to meeting."
He attacked without the sentence quite finishing.
The fight was fast and brutal in the way that fights in enclosed spaces always are.
Goblin had the glider, which meant he controlled the angles — coming in from above, from the side, using the ceiling and walls as edges to redirect off. Peter was faster on his feet, and the spider-sense meant no hit landed cleanly, but almost landing was enough when the force behind each swing was that significant.
And then there was Harry.
Still bound. Still unconscious. Directly in the middle of everything.
Every time Peter found an opening to push back, the calculus included and where does Goblin go if I hit him and is the trajectory clear of Harry and the half-second that cost him was enough to eat up the advantage. By the time he'd gotten his hands on the rope and cut Harry down — covering him during the drop, taking a knee across the back in the process — he was already running out of clean options.
Harry came to blearily in Peter's arms.
He looked at the man on the glider. Looked at Peter. His face ran through several emotions in quick succession and landed on something desperate.
"Peter." His voice was rough. "Get out. Leave me. Don't — just go."
"No."
"I'm serious, I'll be—"
"Harry." Peter looked at him directly. "You're my best friend. I'm not going anywhere."
Something moved across Harry's expression. He opened his mouth, closed it.
Goblin watched this exchange with the particular contempt of a man who had expected fear and gotten loyalty instead. The contempt curdled toward something harder.
"Touching," he said. "Genuinely. I had something more interesting planned for you, little spider — a bigger stage, a better audience." He shrugged. "But since you've decided to be sentimental about it, you can both die here."
He reached to his belt and came out with a handful of pumpkin bombs.
Peter pulled Harry close, instinctively putting himself between his friend and whatever was about to happen. He could see the trajectory. He was doing the math. The math was not good.
Harry's hand found his arm and gripped it.
The bombs left Goblin's hand.
"You two should just start dating."
The voice came from the doorway.
Ethan Cross leaned against the frame with his hands in his pockets and the expression of a man who had arrived at a party that was going exactly as poorly as he'd expected.
The pumpkin bombs detonated.
Against nothing.
The blast folded into itself — compressed sideways, contained — and the force of it went somewhere else, somewhere that wasn't the room, gravity doing something it wasn't supposed to do.
Goblin's glider jerked in the sudden pressure differential. His eyes went to Ethan.
Ethan looked back at him without particular urgency.
"Hi," he said.
☆☆☆
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