seriousfic

Title: The Cost of Wearing Masks
Fandom: Spider-Man movieverse
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,326
Author’s Note: Betaed by

htbthomas. Takes place after the events of Spider-Man 2, assuming Spider-Man 3 never happened.
Previous Part: Chapter 1
Next Part: Chapter 3
Characters/Pairings: Peter/MJ, Harry Osborn, Otto Octavius
Summary: Peter tries to ease Otto’s guilt and Harry makes a new friend.

Harry didn’t know how long he sat where he had fallen. He didn’t remember sitting up. He just sat, motionless, curled up on himself like he had regressed to a fetal stage. The portrait of his father had fallen sideways across from him, but the frame was empty. Its emptiness seemed to speak to him.

”Harry...” the Goblin said.

”What do you want?”

”Me? I'm a friend of your father's. He sent me to take care of you. So that you... can take care of Parker.”

Harry searched his memory. Everything was filled with smoke, billowing, confusing him. How could Peter be his friend and yet kill his father? How could his father be the Green Goblin? It made no sense.

”Why... why should I hurt him? My father was a...”

”Your father was a great man, Harry. He was like a brother to me. Spider-Man took him from you. Just like he tried to take your place as the firstborn. Is that your friend?”

Harry pulled in tighter around himself, trying to shut out the voice. ”No, stop, you're confusing me!”

”This is what you wanted, Harry. Avenge your father. Take his place. Become your father's son!”

Harry shrieked, hands flat against the sides of his head as if he could shut in the madness that was struggling to get out. His eyes were a sickly color, fluorescent and demonic and green.

Harry screamed again, the preverbal onslaught only marginally resembling the denial he was trying to voice. That primal scream was still ringing in his ears hours later, as he sat in his study.

The tribal masks his father had collected over the years were laughing. Harry ignored them, finally grinding his fists into his ears in an attempt to shut them out.

With another outcry he pulled out a small silver box from his pocket. Inside were half a dozen small syringes, each filled with a green fluid. The laughter grew louder and louder. Harry pulled up his shirt sleeve and found a vein. Nearly hyperventilating, he injected himself. The laughter died down along with Harry’s breathing. He found a Zen-like state of calm.

For a moment, all was quiet. Then a sharp buzzing noise caused Harry to nearly jump out of his seat. But it was only the buzzer. He calmed himself again and pressed the button, now in full captain of industry mode.

”Yes?”

It was Bernard on the intercom. “Sir, Peter Parker is here to see you.” A bomb-blast sneeze came over the channel in confirmation.

“I don’t want to see him.”

There was a pause as Bernard passed this along. “He says he just wants Otto Octavius’s research.”

“Let him have it. Let him have everything he wants. My father, my girlfriend… just make him go away.” Harry shut off the intercom. A failed experiment. Was that what Pete wanted now? There was a certain symmetry. Harry felt like a failed experiment, but he didn’t know who was making him the lab rat in that maze. Was it his father, still, one last test from beyond the grave? Peter? Or maybe fate, cruel, capricious, like the gods in a Greek tragedy.

The intercom buzzed again. Harry stabbed the talk button with his finger. “I told you—!”

“Mr. Parker has left, sir. Mr. Kingsley is here to see you.”

Harry breathed in through his nose. ”Send him in.”

”Yes sir,” Bernard’s voice crackled. “Shall I serve refreshments?”

”Certainly.”

A few moments later, Roderick Kingsley entered. He was a thin-built man in his forties with impeccably-cut blonde hair and small, prescription eyeglasses. ”Mr. Osborn, nice to meet you,” he said, extending a hand.

Harry gazed at it with a certain amount of disdain. ”Mr. Osborn was my father, please, call me Harry.” After a sufficient wait, he shook Kingsley’s hand.

“Pleasure to meet you, Harry.”

”Likewise. So, what’s a fashion magnate like you doing in the corporate world?”

Kingsley pulled up a chair to face Harry. ”To put it bluntly, none of the others at the Brand Corporation quite knows what to make of you. With your wealth and the shares you own, you’re probably the most powerful man in New York. And yet… Well, I don’t have to explain to you how you’ve been acting.”

”My father is dead. My mother died of a drug overdose when I was eight. She bought the drugs with my father’s divorce settlement.” Harry slumped back in his chair. “How exactly do you expect me to act?”

”Like an Osborn. I knew your father. We were members of the Century Country Club together. And I think he would be disappointed with you for scurrying away at every shadow of an opportunity…”

Harry crossed his legs and steepled his fingers. “Unlike you. You drove quite a few European cosmetics firms out of business to make your own foothold possible. You hired a disfigured model to say that Bella Donna facial cream had caused her deformity.”

”We all have skeletons in your closet. I wouldn’t fall in love with the notion of revealing any of that to the public. It’s so easy for illegal material to fall into the hands of bright young men. And the police are ever so adept at finding them with it.”

”Oh, give the veiled threats a rest, Kingsley. I just like to know who I’m dealing with. For instance, you appreciate other cultures. Nicaragua, Iran, North Korea, Haiti… your vacations sound like a list of global hotspots.”

”Anarchy has always been an interest of mine,” Kingsley said warmly.

”Right. And your service in the military had nothing to do with it? It’s still classified, but I did a little digging. Central Intelligence Agency back in the eighties when they had their fingers in every pie worth eating.”

”What can I say? I served my country.”

”If that’s the way you remember it…”

”That’s the way it happened.”

”The fact remains that you still have some connections to the Company. Including a vested interest in both Quest Aerodynamics and Oscorp. So I won’t take your word that you were the only one brave enough to try to get a fix on Harry Osborn. You’ve been behind this merger from day one.”

Kingsley stood, his shadow falling over young Osborn. “Harry, Harry, Harry… guess there’s still a little of the old Osborn magic left. What can I say? I have an eye for winners. And I see Oscorp going places.”

”That makes two of us.” Harry put out his hand for a shake, which Kingsley gave him. “Pleasure talking to you, Mr. Kingsley. Bernard will show you out.”

”I would like to have Oscorp’s records before I leave. I like to do my homework as well.”

”Certainly.” Harry smiled. “I’ll fax them to you as soon as possible.“

***

The papers he’d retrieved didn’t exactly fill Peter’s heart with glee. Things were still on thin ice with Harry. Maybe it’s just take time, like it had for Aunt May to accept his role in… maybe if he waited a few more days, Harry would get over it. Yeah. And maybe he was a Chinese jet pilot.

Since he’d last been to the hospital, the press of… well, the press… had forced the administrators to clear the hospital of all reporters, photographers, correspondents, paparazzi, bloggers, and a very confused Dan Rather. So when Peter flashed his press pass, a security guard took a break from doing his impression of a wall to glower. It was a rather impressive glower, all told. There was no chance Peter would mistake it for an intermittently intense stare or a friendly beaming.

“No press on hospital grounds.”

“I was invited by Dr. Octavius.”

The rent-a-cop guffawed very well. There was no way you could mistake it for a laugh or a snicker. He was good. “You and half the New York Times.”

“If you could just—“ Peter paused as he felt another megaton sneeze coming on. He got the tissue up just in time. “AH-CHOOOO!”

The security guard stared at him, disgusted, as Peter wiped his nose.

“Sorry, sorry, ever since I got back from Malaysia I’ve had this wicked cold.” Peter snuck a peek at his tissue, then trashed it. “Is mucus supposed to have blood in it?” Peter asked innocently, before miming another sneeze aimed right at the guard’s face.

“Maybe you should go on up,” the guard said quickly, getting out of the way. The guy did that best of all, in Peter’s book.

“Thank you,” Peter said in the clogged-drain voice of one who had been denied a proper sneeze.

On his way to the elevator, he faked a landmine sneeze that made the guard jump ten inches.

***

The guards on the high-security floor weren’t hospital. They were police, elite Blue Shield agents with hardware to match. They carefully sifted through Peter’s backpack of documents to make sure it wasn’t a cleverly disguised gun made out of paper.

“What are you looking for?” Peter asked on minute six. “Typos?”

“Anything that could be used to effect an escape,” said a senior Blue Shielder, quite possibly promoted for the degree of gruffness in his voice.

Peter held up his hands jokingly. “Alright, you got me, we’re planning to fly out on paper airplanes.”

Blue Shield stopped what they were doing to glare at him suspiciously.

“Tough crowd.”

“Don’t mind them, ‘boyo,’” said Captain George Stacy. He had been a bulky wrecking ball of a cop once, but age had shrunken and thinned him into a gentleman. But the old steel was still evident in his steam shovel face with its strong jaw, hard eyes, and weathered lines. “They’re paid not to have a sense of humor. George Stacy.”

Peter shook his hand. For an old-timer, George had a hell of a grip. “Peter Parker.”

“Yes, from my daughter’s science class. Gwen’s told me about you.”

“She has?” Peter knew of Gwen, of course. They’d teamed on a few projects and of course a girl with a face like Gwen’s was hard to forget, but Peter hadn’t considered he was worth mentioning.

“Oh yes. Describes you in glowing terms. Brilliant, creative, smart… but there’s a big difference between a wise man and a smart one.”

Peter brought his hands up from his sides to rest on his hips. “Oh?”

“Octavius hasn’t been getting many visitors.”

“Shame. He’s a sparkling conversationalist.”

George grabbed the upper part of Peter’s arm and squeezed with tendons of iron. “Listen here. I know you think I’m some flatfooted softhead and you’re probably right, my IQ can’t even see yours from where it’s sitting, let alone your friend’s. And I get that those tentacles were messing with his mind. But I’ve been a cop long enough to know you don’t do the things Ock’s done unless you’ve got some darkness in you to begin with. Maybe his pops didn’t hug him enough, maybe his mom hugged him too much, maybe he got picked on at school. But he’s got a dark side and if you ignore that, you might as well be tussling with a wild animal.”

Peter looked at the captain blankly. “I was picked on at school.”

One of the Blue Shielders brought the backpack to George. “It’s clean.”

George offered the backpack. “Stay smart, Parker.”

Peter took it. “Always.”

He walked into Otto’s room.

***

Otto fanned the papers across the desk like Tarot cards predicting his own fortune. Hero or villain. Monster or victim.

“This is splendid, Peter! You even managed to get some of Oscorp’s internal documents on the disaster! Maybe some of Osborn’s men worked out why the reactor went critical.”

“I wouldn’t count on it,” Peter said, apologetic. “Most of them were happiest just scapegoating you.”

Otto chuckled harshly. “Yes, that’s to be expected.” He stopped poring over the files to hover over to Peter. His eyes were mournful, from what little Peter could see of them through the black eyeshield. “I know this can’t be easy for you.”

Peter shrugged. “It was nothing. Harry handed them over without a sour note.”

“I’m not talking about that. I know I was like an idol to you.” Otto’s voice filled with the sluice of sarcasm. “A brass ring, if that’s not too egotistical,” he spat. “A loving wife, a promising career… I must’ve seemed like everything you ever wanted out of life.”

“Not everything.” Peter had one or two things he would never get out of life ever again. Not without a time machine.

“I know what it’s like to find your hero has feet of clay. As a boy, I worshipped my father. But he turned out to be…” again, like a computer stalling, Otto’s eyes were lost behind the opaque shields. “A very cruel man, my father.”

“You’re not like that. You’ve made the right choice, you’re getting your life back on track. You’re earning people’s forgiveness.”

Like a switch had been thrown, Otto jolted back to life. Not frenzied, not berserk, but deep within him there was churning and loathing and hellfire. “What if there are some things for which there is no forgiveness?” he hissed.

“Come on, Otto,” Peter said, taken aback by the harsh words. “It’s not like you killed anyone. Not on purpose…”

”Didn’t I…? My hubris killed Rosalie as surely as pointing a loaded weapon at her and pulling the trigger.”

Peter had no idea, absolutely no clue, what to say to that. ‘Everybody makes mistakes—that’s why they put erasers on pencils’? He knew nothing would assuage Otto’s guilt because nothing had eased his guilt over Uncle Ben’s death. It still stayed with him, like a shadow in his heart, cast by the void Ben’s passing had left.

“She wouldn’t want you to spend your life in grief over that. She’d want you to learn from it and move on.” Peter said it because telling himself that about his uncle had kept him sane.