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Harry Osborn used to think that he'd spent his entire life trying to gain the affections of someone who did not (seem to) love him.

It's easier to explain, with his father. He used to agonize over it, over the way Norman Osborn seemed to vary between being entirely indifferent to and actively disliking his only son. But the truth, when he finally figured it out, is actually quite simple. His sin, such as it is, is both as inescapable and as unasked for as the very fact of his own flesh. Harry is, quite visibly, his mother's son, rather than his father's son. And yet he is not his mother. He has only a few vague, dreamlike memories of Emily Osborn - honey-colored skin; dark, soulful eyes; a cloud of riotously curly dark hair; a soft-spoken, gentle, slightly husky voice; a sense of safety and warmth; and the sweet scent of dying violets and lily-of-the-valley - but even he knows that there's no denying he takes after her and not Norman. (The only things he seems to have inherited from his father are his height and his capacity for obsession.) So whenever his father would look at his son, he could not help but to see the beloved wife he'd lost, whose already fragile health had been so severely impacted by the tumultuous pregnancy and difficult birth of their only child that she'd lived for only a few years, afterwards. He may not have exactly hated their son (for how could he hate anything that came of Emily?) or even precisely blamed him for Emily's death (for it had been her stubborn insistence that they have a child, despite what the doctors were all advising, that resulted in the pregnancy), but it would always cause Norman pain to look on Harry and see Emily in him and so remember everything they'd lost when she died, and so, to protect himself, he'd gotten into the habit of simply avoiding looking at Harry whenever possible. That avoidance in turn led to a certain apathy, which in turn made it far too easy for Norman Osborn to neglect Harry. And that neglect eventually, in turn, made it increasingly easy for him to feel free to deride his son for his apparent failures, whenever they'd be brought to his attention.

It's all quite logical and easy to understand . . . in the abstract, from the vantage point of experience and an age of twenty years plus. But it's not at all something that a child would suspect or even a teenager would accept, and so Harry has spent most of life desperately trying to find a way to earn the love and approval of or even just a bit more acceptance from his father. In the pursuit of this goal, he spent nearly a decade working his hardest to be the smartest, most accomplished, most popular, and most praised of students, in the hopes that this might win his father's respect. Alas, the fact that he is his mother's son also became painfully evident in his scholastic aptitude quite early on. He loves reading and writing, is fascinated by history, is good at languages, and can sketch (and even, eventually, paint) anything he lays eyes on or is able to imagine. He and numbers simply do not get along, though, and so he and the sciences don't get along very well, either. He managed to hide it until nearly the fourth grade, when hints of geometry first began to surface, and then his inability to keep up, no matter how hard he would study, finally managed to gain his father's attention, when some shockingly low test scores necessitated the hiring of a private math and science tutor. (The memory of his father's sheer inability to believe, at first, how any child of his could fail to understand something so simple as a little bit of basic beginners geometry is one that would still have the power to make Harry blush and duck his head down in shame over a decade after the actual event.) Afterwards, he managed to struggle on for another four years, with the help of first one and then another and then finally two private tutors at once, before he finally reached trigonometry, chemistry, and biology, all at the same time, and hit a wall that he couldn't seem to find a way through, over, or around, no matter how hard he tried or how often his tutors would explain the same things over again.

By then, though, Harry was nearly thirteen, had suffered through almost a decade of his father's increasingly obvious neglect, and was sick and tired of working so hard for his father's attention when the only time he ever seemed to get any of that attention was when he wasn't even trying, when he'd done something that Norman Osborn considers to be wrong or disgraceful in some way. So he did what most privileged, preteen boys would do. He started doing everything he could think of that would be guaranteed to get him some of his father's attention. To be quite frank, he rebelled and started modeling his life on as many of the gossip-repeated tales and tabloid stories he'd heard about Lex Luthor (who's two and a half years older than he is) and Bruce Wayne (who's about three years older than Lex) as he possibly could. By the end of that school year, he'd managed to cultivate a reputation so bad and grades so all over the charts that there wasn't a single private school left in the state of New York that would agree to take him on without significant amount of extra compensation, either monetary or through some kind of use of the influence of the Osborn name. His father, who by then was quite certain that the private schools were charging entirely too much when their teachers were evidently so incompetent that it was necessary to hire tutors on the side to explain what they couldn't seem to teach to his son, unsurprisingly balked at that. He dug in his heels and, as a sort of punishment for Harry's excessive partying and the dozen and a half close calls he'd managed to have with bad publicity over said partying, instead of allowing Harry to be home-schooled by some other, somehow better lineup of private tutors, did the one thing Harry wasn't expecting. He enrolled Harry at the nearest local public school (which, thankfully, happened to be fairly safe as well as pretty well funded), in the process seeing to it that Harry would be placed in the eighth grade even though he'd been taking what would mostly be considered high school and even upper level high school courses for the past two years.

Harry was so furious that he immediately resolved to flunk out within the first quarter. That resolve managed to last right up until his first day of classes, when, as a new student, he found that he'd been assigned a sort of combination school guide and mentor/study-buddy by the name of Peter Benjamin Parker, and so found himself, for the first time in his life, helplessly plummeting headlong into love, with all the violent speed and inevitability of an angel thrown down from the heavens.

He couldn't've explained it, if asked. Harry was actually the right age for the eighth grade - thirteen going on fourteen - and Peter wouldn't even be thirteen until 31 October. He'd been skipped a year - going from the second grade to the fourth - and likely would've been skipped more after he completed that year, but his small size and meek manner had made him a target for bullies and, to be honest, his genius hadn't seemed to extend past fields that required the use of maths, and so his Aunt May had been able to argue the school out of the decision. Instead, he'd been placed in the accelerated program for the year he ended up in (and all the years afterwards) and eventually given the opportunity to pursue certain extracurricular studies first in math and then, eventually, chemistry and biology, with physics and calculus to be added to the list as soon as he reached high school. Peter was small even for his age - short of stature and slender enough that he might have been considered a victim of malnutrition if not for the fact that everyone who truly knew him also knew what an excellent cook and baker Aunt May was and just how much food the almost shockingly slight boy could put away, given half a chance. But he was shy, pale, not at all inclined towards athletics (and, in fact, could be almost ludicrously clumsy, when his awkward shyness got the better of him), and not particularly well-armored against the everyday cruelties either of his peers or of other human beings in general. With the possible exception of his mother, Peter Parker was the first absolutely genuinely good person that Harry Osborn had ever met, and that basic quality of character, in addition to his extreme tendency towards shyness and a certain abstracted dreaminess, as of someone who often lived within the confines of his head and so was generally quite busily thinking of everything but the other people and events going on around him, mantled him like a cloak. He wore his shy good nature and his dreaminess like a proverbial heart on a sleeve, and that, in combination with his far greater than average intelligence (and a complimentary apparent lack of common sense), his youth, his smallness, and the somehow almost elfin cast to his features (maybe it was the ever so slightly prominent ears and general sharpness in features in combination with his smallness and paleness that made him seem somehow puckish?) made him a very vulnerable target in a public school environment.

Harry was small for his age, too, back then (something he personally took as yet another one of his many personal failings, though the butler, of all people, had once told him, with quiet earnestness, that Osborn men tend to come late to their growth), but even so, when he'd been doing his best to make his father notice and love him, he'd always been one of the most popular boys in his class without even half trying. And it hadn't just been because of his name, because just about everyone at the private schools came from money or fame if not both, and many of them were being reared to wield power as though they were modern-day princes. He might've been small, but was also smart without ever quite being smart enough to be perceived as a threat, funny, charismatic, a natural athlete who excelled at every sport he'd ever tried, and, as the older boys had always told him, the fact that he was an artist was something guaranteed make the girls all swoon. He'd never been quite sure he approved of the notion of a bunch of dizzy girls mooning over him, but he was lonely enough at home that he'd taken to the comradery and friendship of his peers like a proverbial duck to water. Harry had liked being popular and having friends, though he'd never quite managed to make any really close friends, mostly because he'd always been afraid that his schoolmates' opinions of him would change if anyone ever really knew the truth about his father's opinion of him. That particular fear had given Harry all the reason he needed to essentially becomes chums with just about everyone and fast friends with no one, to the point where he hardly ever invited anyone home to visit or play. When he'd decided to rebel, one of the first things he'd done had been to stop playing sports for his class, and his popularity and the easy acceptance his classmates had all had for him had melted away with surprising swiftness, like handfuls of sugar scattered about on pavement in a hot summer rain. He'd missed the acceptance, a little, but he'd gained another sort of companionship through his partying, and the goal had been to get his father's attention, not to make himself feel or look better, so he'd thought it was a fair tradeoff.

Harry had been perfectly prepared to do without so much as even a single truly friendly acquaintance, at this new school, but then Peter was waiting for him when the driver (who, embarrassingly enough, had been ordered to escort him personally to the school's office, to see to it that he would be properly looked after, on his first day of classes) handed him over to one of the secretaries. Peter, with milk-pale skin and eyes like two bits of heat-suffused, color-leached summer sky behind slightly overlarge black-framed glasses (not so much because his family was poor - back then they'd been fairly comfortable, with his Uncle Ben working as an electrician - but because, as he would later so unselfconsciously explain it, they needed to be large and a dark color for him to be able to find them, once he'd taken them off), sandy hair that seemed darker than it was (though, to be fair, it was darkening up some, as Peter grew older) because he was so very pale, slightly overlarge, inexpensive clothes, overstuffed backpack, and a smile so sweet and earnest that Harry could feel all of his plans and his resolve to remain solitary and to flunk out of public school as quickly as possible evaporating like mist under that slightly absentminded, open warmth. Peter didn't know him from Adam, couldn't have cared less that he was rich or whose son he was (though, when he eventually figured it out, he would launch into an excited ramble on Harry's father's research in nanotechnology that would leave Harry completely lost but grinning like a loon over the way Peter's voice kept squeaking with enthusiasm), wouldn't have been bothered by his recent bad reputation even if he'd known about it (because Peter had been raised to judge people by their actions, not by their reputations), and, when he would eventually find out about Harry's plans to make his father notice him by flunking out, was honest enough that he'd tell Harry to his face what a dumb idea that was for Harry to ruin part of his life in an attempt to punish someone who wasn't behaving the way Harry thought that he should when all that would do would be to prove to the person he was trying to punish that he'd been right all along about Harry not being worth his time or attention.

That particular conversation wouldn't come until after Peter's birthday, though. At the time of their meeting, there was no easily definable reason to explain either Harry's unexpected, sudden attraction to the pale, bespeckled, puckish Peter - easily small enough to fit into a full-sized locker, and with an air of meek good-nature and vulnerability that all but invited bullies to toss him into such confined spaces - or the undeniable urge to trust and try to connect with Peter as a real friend. It might've been a cliche, but the simple truth was that they were from different worlds, and Harry's plans most definitely didn't involve gaining a reputation as a protector of shy, painfully vulnerable, nerdy school outcasts. There was just . . . something /about Peter, a feeling almost of recognition, of kinship, like finally catching sight of home at the end of a long and terrible journey. When he found out about Peter's fascination with the shockingly red-headed girl next door, Harry would bite back his jealousy to remark, in a completely serious tone, that /Peter was the real angel - Harry's own personal guardian angel - and would, for the first time, give voice to a sentiment that would become so oft-repeated that even Harry's father would eventually pick up on it, one day: "Thank God for you, Peter. You're the only real friend I've ever had. You're my real family." That particular conversation, though, wouldn't come about until early December and the first run of the school's winter play (in which a certain Mary Jane Watson would play a surprisingly dark and complex Snow Queen). On the day when they first met, there was just a blinding rush of warmth (affection and attraction all mixed up together, so much so that Harry would be able to tell himself, for months, that he hadn't just really fallen in love with Peter at first sight, and would even be able to convince himself of it, at least part of the time) and trust and an inexplicable sense of familiarity, like he'd known Peter all his life (even though he knew he'd never seen that face before, would've remembered that face if he'd seen it before) and had just somehow forgotten, until that moment, that they were inseparable. True friends. Brothers. All of that and more. Soul-mates.

Cathexis, some might have said. But Peter was always so much more than that!

Harry had never believed in fate or destiny, before Peter. A genuinely blindingly bright, honestly happy to see him (and for no real reason, either. /Just because/) smile, as Peter looked up at him from scribbling something in a blue hardbacked composition notebook, peeping at him almost shyly over the upper edge of the still open book, their eyes met, and something in Harry's heart and mind tipped over and clicked, irretrievably, irreversibly, and it would be most of a month before Harry would surface enough from the deliriously happy daze brought on by the sudden feeling of truly belonging, for the first time in his life, to realize he'd just handed the whole of himself over to a virtual stranger, making gifts of his heart and soul. The school was a fairly large one, with a couple hundred students in the eighth grade alone and twenty-nine other new students coming in the class that year at school. Peter's name had been chosen from a long list of possibilities by a computer program fed certain criteria about grades and attendance and matched up with him, with Harold Osborn, and the sheer randomness of that likely would have been enough to convince Harry that they were destined to meet because fate had something special in store for the two of them, even if he hadn't eventually (inevitably) had to face the fact that he'd fallen for Peter, /hard/, even as he first met him. He was so caught off-guard just by the fact of meeting (and falling for) Peter, though, that it would take a while for all of that to occur to him. And, in the meantime, Peter would grow, so naturally and irrevocably, to become the center of his life, filling holes in his life that he'd never consciously realized were even there, that Harry would have a whole list of other reasons, by then, to believe in fate and destiny.

That list would begin and end with completion, complementation, the way their lives, their talents, their personalities, matched up with and fit together and filled in all the blanks and holes in each other - Harry: virtually orphaned by his mother's death and his father's indifference towards him; born to privilege, to power and money, because of his father's name; his mother's son, in both looks and interests, in love with words and ideas and beauty, artistic by both nature and desire, despite an honest aptitude for all kinds of athletic exertions, and having no aptitude whatsoever for maths or the sciences. Peter: orphaned by the deaths of his parents, Richard and Mary Fitzpatrick Parker, and taken in by his father's much older brother and his wife, Benjamin (Ben) and May Reilly Parker; born to love, to goodness and decency, his adoptive family not exactly poor (at least not at first - not until after Ben's company fires him with less than a year until his retirement, with all the troubles that follow on the heels of that), but not by any stretch of the imagination monetarily wealthy, either; extremely bright, especially in areas involving maths and science, but also shy and sweet and dreamy-eyed, tending to live inside of his head, with very little to no aptitude whatsoever (beyond an inborn ability to recognize and appreciate beauty) for the arts or even much for words at all. Harry conquered part of Peter's clumsiness by coaxing him into becoming more active, first teaching him how to swim properly, and then how to skate, how to surf, and eventually, even, how to play one-on-one basketball well enough to (eventually) be something of a challenge for Harry. Peter defeated Harry's inability to understand basic geometry or trigonometry first by explaining the basic arithmetic behind the formulas that actually made them work and then by finding or creating working models of several basic types of shapes and visually showing him how and why each one of those individual formulas worked. Harry decided to reward Peter for that by sharing with him the beauty of art - painting, sculpture, photography, anything and everything visual and beautiful - and Peter, shocked at what the ritzy people at the museums considered food, took Harry home and recruited Aunt May to help him teach Harry how to cook and appreciate real food.

And that's basically how it would go with them, turn and turn about, endlessly prompting each other into sharing the things they loved with one another. Peter would manage to surprise him a couple of times when Harry would try to sound him out for the purposes of sharing another thing he loved. The most memorable of these occasions was probably when Harry found out that Peter was a pretty darn good musician - half of that a legacy of Aunt May's, who probably could have been a concert pianist if she hadn't married Benjamin Parker, and half a legacy of a guitar his mother had left behind among her things when she and his father had died, which Peter had eventually taught himself to play, after mastering Aunt May's piano. Harry expected him to make some quip about the music all being numbers - something he'd heard several times before, but never really believed - but Peter's love of music had been tied to the love of his family. To Peter, it was as natural as breathing, and he was good enough at it that he could hear something on the radio or walking down the street, remember the sounds, mentally map the progression of notes, and be able to recreate it on the piano or the guitar again, later. He never even saw the numbers in it, until Harry brought it up, and all he did then was to smile and shake his head and remark, quietly, that loving the music was a better reason to play than wanting to transform repetitive, balanced mathematical equations into sound. Harry actually ended up learning more from Peter, in this case, than Peter did from him, and in the end they fused their love of music into endless, random sessions of jamming on Aunt May's old upright and the baby grande in one of the drawing rooms of the Osborne mansion. To balance that out, Harry used part of his allowance to buy electric guitars and some newer, differently shaped acoustic guitars, and Peter painstakingly taught him to play the second while he figured out the depth and range of sound of the first, that first summer they spent together, between eighth grade and high school.

In return, Harry, who by then either was fluent or else was pretty damn close to fluent in seven languages besides English (Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, German, Greek, and Japanese, in that order), taught Peter Latin ostensibly to give him an edge in his biology classes and help him get ready for the high school requirement of a second language, but honesty more to give him a reason to hear the music of another language (and all language, to Harry, had the potential to be music) coming from Peter's lips. Harry's gift with languages was one of the few things about him that his father actually grudgingly approved of - mostly for business purposes, of course - but to him it was mostly about art, about being able to read things in the language they'd been written in originally, about the sound of different things in different languages. He'd actually been wanting to add an eighth and a ninth - Mandarin and Cantonese - to his repertoire, but the reward, about two months down the line (Peter was good at languages, too, once he was given a reason to learn and had also had all of the basic rules explained to him by someone fluent enough in the language to know all kinds of shortcuts to learning it, especially for somebody who, as it turned out, was able to easily memorize lists of hundreds of new words and their meanings every single day), when they were able to have a conversation pretty much entirely in Latin with no one around them being able to understand what they were saying, had more than made up for having to put that particular goal off for awhile. (Though Peter's impulsive hug - tight enough to send the air whooshing out of his lungs - would be a source of and inspiration for torment for many nights to come, afterwards.) Shakily, in an effort to hide his reaction, Harry went to search out an old camera of his, in order to (as he explained it to Peter) properly commemorate the moment, and Peter's fascination with the thing, as Harry went about setting the camera up on its tripod, ended up being the lead-in for the next round of their endless giving.

Harry, thrilled with the idea of finding yet another way to share his love of art with Peter, eagerly taught him how to shoot pictures with a real camera - not one of those ridiculously easy, disposable digital monstrosities - and even how to develop his own film. And so Peter - who turned out to be even better at developing film than Harry because of his extensive knowledge of chemistry - invited him over one day, broke out some of his old home chemistry sets, let Harry pretty much blow his eyebrows off, and promptly got him hooked on the more magical aspects of basic chemistry, after which he deliberately used the chemistry - just like he already had used or would end up using pretty much anything and everything in life that he could that Harry liked and that also had to do with numbers as a sort of less than immediately obvious teaching tool - as a way to slyly teach Harry even more about maths and how numbers really work. And even though Harry would never come anywhere near Peter in subjects involving numbers (with the exception of history, which they were both very good in - Peter because he could always remember when something happened and where, and Harry because he could always remember the reasons why those things had happened and to whom - and economics, at which Harry, surprising even himself, was quite simply without a doubt better than Peter), his understanding of all of the basics became sound enough that, pretty soon, he was consistently making higher than average marks in classes that he never would've believed himself capable of even passing under his own steam. Peter, who could read, process, and retain information at a rate that was nearly equal to Harry's not quite eidetic speed-reading ability (about 10,000 words per minute, when he really pushed, something he knew because he'd timed himself more than a few times) but who had always simply been uninterested in what he rather dismissively termed "made-up stories by famous white dead guys" when there were chemical equations to balance and math problems to solve, soon found his writing abilities and his literature scores skyrocketing, as it was impossible to be around Harry and all of his headlong enthusiasm for great stories and for talking about great stories without some of that energy and a lot of that knowledge rubbing off.

Harry even eventually deliberately managed to trick Peter into developing first an affinity of science-fiction (based on his insatiable curiosity over the probability of the science involved, of course!) and then a love of mysteries (based again on his insatiable curiosity), for which in return Peter passed along his fascination with things like Star Trek (especially the original series) and Star Wars and some other, slightly more current sci-fi movies and shows, which led Harry to start comparing them to Kirk and Spock until one day a customer at a comic book shop they were in overheard one of his only partially joking comparisons and for some reason felt the need to volunteer the information that a lot of serious fans of the original Star Trek series were fans because they were fascination with the homoerotic undercurrents of the relationship between the two men. Peter, being Peter, had instantly laughed it off, shaking his head and claiming that Kirk and Spock were t'hy'la - friends and brothers by choice, just like they were - but Harry (who by then was fifteen and painfully aware of his rather unbrotherly attraction to Peter) stopped making the jokes where anyone else might hear, afterwards. For him, the experience was mortifying precisely because it was the "lovers" part of the possible definition for t'hy'la (and not "friends" or "brothers") that Harry almost always had on his mind, whenever he'd make those jokes, and he was mostly just grateful that Peter's Aunt May and Uncle Ben hadn't been around either to hear that stranger's lecture or to see the thoughtful look in his eyes when Harry had blushed like a schoolgirl and stood there with his mouth hanging open and his eyes glazed with shock, guiltily looking everywhere but at Peter, until Peter had finally reacted by bursting into laughter and the heart that had frozen with panic in Harry's chest had abruptly restarted.

Aunt May treated Harry almost like a second son from the moment she first met him (thank all that's holy! He'd been terrified that she wouldn't like him, wouldn't approve of him, wouldn't want him hanging out with Peter and teaching him things like how to play basketball and how to enjoy a good story that wasn't on tv or film. Harry could and he did quite gladly put up with her slightly overprotective mothering and the occasional obvious look of pity in her eyes - even though normally he would have either balked at or had an absolute fit over the idea of anyone pitying him - just because she was Peter's aunt and the pity she felt for him and the instinct to mother him that it prompted in her gave her an excuse to accept and even to love him that wasn't just a show of emotion she conjured up for Peter's sake), but every now and again he would look up to find Uncle Ben giving him an odd look or a considering glance that couldn't easily be explained by anything obvious he'd recently said or done, so Harry had quickly grown terrified that the usually gently tolerant and surprisingly accepting older man might be growing suspicious about the true nature of Harry's feelings for Peter. Not (if he were being perfectly honest with himself) that he could've blamed the man. He was so desperately in love with Peter that he would've gladly sold his soul to the devil just to get Peter to look at him with the same dream-dazzled expression that he so often reserved for Mary Jane, when he thought no one else was looking or could see him. It felt like a little piece of his heart was being chopped out of him, without an anesthetic, every time Harry saw Peter give her that look. He would've gladly given anything - absolutely /anything/, without question or hesitation - to have Peter stop looking at her like that and to look at him, instead, so he'd stop feeling like his heart was being ripped apart one tiny little strand at a time. It was hard very not to just hate the girl. After all, Mary Jane Watson hadn't done anything to deserve Peter's attention or his love and loyalty, not like Harry had.

A part of him burned, silently (well. At least mostly silently, though he found himself an unlikely ally, both when it came to indignation over MJ's failure to do anything other than take Peter for granted and when it came to disapproval of Peter's tendency to romanticize Mary Jane's life as if she were a storybook heroine: Uncle Ben didn't approve of the way Peter had put MJ up on a pedestal either, surprisingly enough) enraged by her indifference towards Peter (at least in public. She was more than happy to preen and posture for him and use him as a prop for her ego, whenever it was just them in the confines of their adjoining yards, with no one else - except maybe Harry, to whom she wasn't quite as indifferent, in public, as she was to Peter, though she mostly behaved as though she thought that his connection to Peter outweighed any advantage she might've otherwise gained from being publicly connected to someone with his last name - there to witness her making nice with the class pariah) when Peter was never anything but absolutely supportive and nice and perfectly gentlemanly towards her. The rest of Harry, though, simply silently counted his blessings every day that MJ remained essentially as oblivious of the basic fact of Peter's continued existence and his overwhelmingly obvious good points as well as of his fascination with and devotion to her. He was determined to always be happy for Peter's sake, even to the point of being supportive of Peter's fascination with Mary Jane Watson, if anything should ever come of it, but he'd also become convinced, quite early on in their friendship, that if the two ever did really get together, that he would probably have to break things off with Peter. He simply didn't think he could take it, seeing them together. He just wasn't quite that selfless. Or that able to ignore his own pain.

MJ was pretty much the only sticking point in their relationship. Harry tried as hard as he'd ever tried to do anything to do for Peter what Peter had done for him - tried to get him to understand that it was just as much a waste of time and effort for Peter to devote so much of himself to someone who only ever deigned to notice he was alive when she wanted something from him as it had been for Harry to be willing to throw away a part of his life just to win the attention of someone who would've used that ruin as an excuse to justify the way he'd been ignoring Harry - but Peter only smiled sadly and insisted, in that endearingly earnest way he had of talking whenever he was speaking of something or someone important to him, that MJ wasn't a bad person and that she didn't really mean to hurt him. She just wasn't like them. She didn't have their resources or their support systems, and her popularity at school meant everything to her because it was the only thing she knew of, the only armor she had, to use as a shield between her and the awful slurs and insults her alcoholic, mean drunk, increasingly verbally abusive dad so often hurled at her. Peter claimed that he didn't mind, that he didn't really want anything else of her aside from those occasional cross-fence talks, that just knowing she was there, right next door to him, and that there really were people in the world like her, was enough for him. And he was so much of a romantic, at heart, that it very well could've been true. Peter certainly never seemed to have any dreams about her like most normal adolescent boys would have, at least not that Harry ever noticed (and Harry spent enough nights sleeping over at Peter's or with Peter sleeping over at Harry's that he's honestly pretty damn sure he would've noticed, if Peter actually had a lot of dreams like that), and in fact his attitude towards the idea of sex could pretty much be encapsulated by two words: embarrassed semi-indifference. Unless it was thrown up in his face (as in the love-scenes in movies or tv shows), sex and Peter never really seemed to exist on the same page - a fact that probably gave Harry more hope than it should have.

Things kind of came to a head when Peter turned sixteen. Harry had this big, important chemistry paper due the week before Peter's birthday, and he sort of tricked Peter into agreeing that they could have a second birthday celebration for him at Harry's home, the weekend after the party that Aunt May and Uncle Ben were going to have for him, complete with whatever kind of entertainment Harry wanted, if only Harry got at least an A- on the paper. Harry, with Peter's help, got a solid A on the paper, and so when Harry announced, the Friday after Peter's birthday, in the car on the way to his home, that he'd decided he was going to teach Peter how to drink properly, so that no one would ever be able to take advantage of him and he wouldn't get into any kind of trouble when he finally went to college, and that Peter could either learn what he liked and how much he could safely hold while playing a tried and true teenaged drinking game of his choice or else they could simply work their way through the hundred or so different mixed drinks that he knew they had all the ingredients for, between the kitchen and the constantly restocked bar, there wasn't a lot Peter could do except grouse about the fact that he should have specified that the bet excluded illegal activities. Peter, unsurprisingly, went for the drinks by recipe, but he also (again, unsurprisingly) had never had anything stronger than a glass of wine with a fancy dinner or champagne at a celebration before, and after the first dozen drinks decided that maybe "I Never" would be a fun way to pass the time while they were mixing. An hour into the game, Peter had been so sloshed that he hadn't even noticed when Harry switched over (mostly) to the nonalcoholic versions of the mixed drinks, and Harry had started asking him questions designed to lead to a conversation about attraction and sex and Mary Jane Watson (not necessarily in that order). Twenty minutes or so after that, a thoroughly drunk (and prone to mostly random fits of giggles) Peter had been peering at him over the rim of a martini glass, nose crinkled up in a combination of abject confusion and utter amusement.

"What, me and MJ? Are you kidding? Did you have more of these while I wasn't looking or something? She's - she's - she's beautiful/. What would a girl like her ever see in a guy like me? And what could I /possibly/," Peter asked, carefully articulating (and incidentally stressing) each syllable of the word, "give her? She's like - she's like an angel, Harry. My own personal angel of beauty. Something to aspire to be good enough for. Not something to really possess. It's like - like an artist with his muse. The idea is to create beautiful things in the name of your muse. Right? Am I right? So what would an artist do, if he ever actually /had his muse? Not create art. I bet you anything! There'd be no reason. The muse would be right there, all beautiful and - and - musey and everything. What would be the point of trying to make beautiful things or of trying to be better than you are, of being good enough to prove yourself worthy of somebody wonderful, if the somebody wonderful is right there with you all the time? No, man. She's like . . . my idol. My own personal idol. And you know what they say about idols, right? You're the one who made me read that one really horribly depressing book with the line about idols, so you should remember. 'Idols are not meant to be touched; their gilt comes off on our hands,'" Peter solemnly proclaims, nodding firmly and making a huge, sweeping gesture with his hands that nearly sends the martini glass sailing across the room.

"I remember the book, Pete, but I don't think I quite get what you're saying. What're you trying to tell me? That you don't even really like her that way? You just want to, what, put her up on a pedestal and stare at her?"

"Not stare at her! Gee-whiz, Harry! I'm not a painter like you are. I just - she's so pretty/, Harry! All that red hair. I /still wish she hadn't cut it all off, back before high school," Peter sighed then, staring with an almost brooding expression down into his empty glass, remembering, again, what he'd seen as the tragedy of the pixie-inspired haircut MJ had gotten late in the summer between eighth grade and high school - cutting hair that had been literally down to her knees in a bob so short that her hair had only recently grown long enough to touch her shoulders, again - before finally shrugging and setting the glass aside. "I would've thought you'd get this, seeing as how you're a painter and all. Don't you have a muse?"

Not about to admit that his muse had been Peter ever since he'd met him, Harry shrugged lightly, came out from behind the bar, strolled over to the leather loveseat Peter was curled up in, and replaced Peter's empty glass with a new, full one. "Muses can vary, Pete. I thought you loved this girl, though - seriously loved her, like the kind of love where you'd daydream constantly about what it'd be like to marry her."

Peter stared at him for awhile, goggle-eyed, before bursting out laughing and actually exclaiming, "Pshaw! Me? Marry MJ? Please! I'd have to, like, become Superman or something, for that to ever happen. She's embarrassed of me, Harry. It's like you're always saying. She doesn't mind us being friends as long as nobody else at school really knows about it. And it's like I blame her, or anything. I mean, look at me! I'm this scrawny, runty little, pasty-skinned, under aged, four-eyed science freak who can't even talk to girls without stammering and saying incredibly stupid things. I'd be embarrassed of me too, if I were her!"

"Peter! Dammit, you're not a freak! I wish you wouldn't say things like that! You're no paler than MJ is, and I bet you're probably at least as tall as she is now, since you started getting your growth-spurt at the end of summer and you're noticeably taller than your Aunt May, now, so I hate to break it to you, but you're not that short anymore, buddy. And you're only, what, fifteen months or so younger than MJ? You're not that much younger than the rest of us! Besides which, you're shy, not stupid, and - "

" - and all of that doesn't add up to a pile of beans, because I'm still just a goofy-looking science nerd, Harry. And I know I am. I don't mind it. It'd be nice not to be so scrawny, but it's not like I think it would really matter. Everybody at school knows me as the geeky little kid who has to chase after the bus half the time because the driver's a jerk and he'll stop and wait for MJ and the other kids who live up from her on the block but he skips my stop down at the end of the block because I'm the only kid who lives on that half and he's an ex-jock and friends with Flash and he thinks it's funny to make me chase after the bus, for some reason. Don't worry about it, Harry. I know who and what I am. I don't really care what they think. I mean, sure, it all kind of hurts my feelings, but I don't take it all that seriously. It's not like I'm going to be stuck here with these people forever. High school will be over with and we'll be in college, two years from now. And I'm one of those people who come into their own in college," Peter airily declared, only just managing not to spill his new drink as he gestured with the glass with emphasis before taking a long drink. "Mmm. This one's good. We should make a note."

Staring over the counter of the bar at him intently, his hands automatically moving to make Peter another one of the drinks - only this time with more alcohol in it - Harry replied by demanding (shocked to hear how calm and even his voice sounded), "Pete. Buddy. Focus here a minute, alright. I'm trying to understand something important. Are you saying you don't really love her? You don't daydream about being with her?"

"I don't really know MJ, Harry. So how could I love her?"

Hands shaking to throw something, Harry sat the shaker down gently on the bar before letting himself reply (part of him cringing at how loud his voice was), "Well, you give a pretty damn good impression of it!"

Peter instantly burst into a fit of giggles that ended only when he stuck his nose back into his drink, draining it. "I love the idea of her, silly! She's my angel, my geeky-scientist version of a muse, after all. I don't know why you don't get that. Hmm . . . okay, lemme try to explain it this way. If I were a knight, then she'd be like my queen, the one I'd fight fights for and do good deeds for and I'd carry a favor, like a ribbon or something, of hers with me, but I'd never expect anything of her because she's my queen and I'm her knight. Like Lancelot and Guinevere, only, you know, without all the adulterous crap on the side," Peter snickered, slapped a hand over his mouth, peeked up at Harry as if to see if he'd heard the laugh, and ducked his head down like that might somehow keep him and the muffled giggling from behind his hand from being noticed.

The shaker got slammed down, this time. "For Christ's sake, Pete, you stare at her like she's your own personal holy grail! Are you telling me you don't even like her at all?"

"Angel-muse, not grail!"

"Peter - !"

"What?"

"Can you just answer the question, dammit!?"

Eyes wide as saucers behind his glasses, Peter stared at him, not quite drunk enough yet to miss the snarl in Harry's voice. "Geez, Harry, touchy, much?"

"Peter Parker, I have watched you stare at that girl like she was the be-all and end-all of your world and I've heard nothing from you but praise and defense of her for over three years/, now, and you're only just /now thinking to tell me whether or not you even really like her? You'd better just spill it and pray I don't come over there and beat it out of you!"

Making a pacifying gesture with his empty hand, as though smoothing down ruffled fur, and ruining the soothing gesture with an obvious eye roll, Peter once again replied without really answering the question. "Okay, okay, geez-louise, Harry! You know, all you ever had to do was ask, right?"

"Peter - !"

"Alright, alright, don't get your boxers in a bunch, geez! I like her fine, okay? I mean, when I actually get to talk to her, she seems like a pretty nice girl, all things considered. But I don't really know her, Harry. I love the idea of her - the angel she looks like, to me. I don't love her because I can't actually love her, seeing as how I don't really know her. And it's not like I want anything from her, because I really don't. I just - I feel bad for her, Harry. The real her. Not the angel-muse idea I have of her in my head. Her dad's an awful person. Seriously/, Harry. He's /not a good guy. He drinks just way too much and he yells at her and makes her cry and more and more often lately he's gotten nasty enough that I've started to worry that maybe I ought to call the cops on him, because he sounds like he might actually be thinking about trying to take a swing at her. I worry about her, about the actual MJ. I'd like to help her, if I could, or at least give her somebody safe to talk to, a reason to stay out of the house and away from her dad. Mary Jane is my angel. MJ is just the girl next door to me, the girl who always looks like she's one reason to flinch away from crying her eyes out, who's nice to me when nobody much is looking, and who I worry about because her dad is a mean drunk. MJ and Mary Jane aren't really the same person, Harry. Not to me, anyway. And I'd as soon try to get MJ to date me as I'd try to get a date with whoever the next Miss America happens to be. I'm waiting for college, okay? I'm a late bloomer, Harry. Besides, it'll be safer and easier there. I won't have to deal with any of the stupid labels I've had hanging over me since I basically started school. I'll find somebody in one of my science classes who won't think I'm a geek for loving science and numbers and who won't be bothered by what I look like, and I'll be fine. Or else I'll find someone in an elective I have to take for my degree who won't understand numbers or science all that well and who'll find out that my major is in sciences - I'm thinking probably biochemistry, since I like chemistry and biology so much and biochemistry would be like the best of both worlds, though I'm really liking the advanced physics course that they're letting me take through the local community college and I might get a minor in physics, if I can - but anyway, the point is, this person will somehow find out that I'm a science whiz and ask me for tutoring, and it'll be just like with you, only better, because this person will actually love me and won't just think of me as the geeky little brother he never had, and we'll be actual lovers and not just friends and brothers, and - "

Harry lurched and nearly spilled the entire shaker, he was so shocked. "Wait a minute! What did you just say?"

Peter just gave him a wide-eyed, somehow doe-eyed (even with those blue eyes) innocent look. "That I'll probably major in biochemistry and find somebody to date who'll love me for who and what I am and not care that I'm a science geek when I go away to college?"

Slowly, Harry said, "No, the bit after that. About finding somebody like me, only better."

Wriggling a little, as though suddenly uncomfortable, Peter looked away, directing his response to the door instead of to Harry. "Oh. Well. You know. T'hy'la in every sense of the word. I figure that's the best model to go by, when you're looking for somebody to be your other half. The best kind of relationship would have two people who're as honest as friends, as close as siblings, and who have the passion of lovers. Right?"

Actually sputtering a little bit - not so much in shock as against the urge to ask something that would give him completely away - Harry woodenly started to move out from behind the bar towards him. "Peter, why would you - how could you - ?"

"Eh?" Peter frowned as he turned back to look at him, puzzled, before his eyes widened in a show of sudden, horrified understanding. "Oh! Oh, well, you know, I don't really think it'll be somebody better than you, Harry. There's nobody who's better than you/. You're - /Harry. You're my Harry. You're Kirk to my Spock, remember? Only, you know, a guy'd get awfully lonely, Harry, and Aunt May really wants me to find somebody who'll love me for forever, like Uncle Ben does her. And it'd be so nice to find someone like that. Being picked on or ignored all the time gets old, after awhile. You know, you were the one who was really the godsend, Harry, not me. I was having a harder and harder time ignoring them all back, when you showed up and you didn't care that I was all pale and funny looking and a science geek too smart for my own good and all that other crap that's all anybody else at school ever seems to see when they look at me. You know, you were the first person to smile back at me that day, besides my aunt and uncle. I try to smile at everyone because, well, it's the polite thing to do, right? But you were the only one who smiled back at me. Some days you're the only one besides my aunt and uncle who does. Even the teachers don't, some days. Aunt May says she thinks I intimidate them, a little, though I really don't see how I could. I'm just," Peter paused, frowning searchingly, gaze turned inwards, before finally shrugging and making a slight circling gesture with his empty hand, "I'm /me/, you know? I have no idea why you like me, Harry, but I'd rather be your friend and honorary geeky little brother than anybody else's real brother. Or boyfriend, for that matter. Yes, even MJ's! And before you ask again, yes, I do care about her. Of course I do! Just not quite like that, is all."

"I don't think I understand."

Peter just stared at him for a few seconds then, blank-faced, a lost look in his eyes, before finally, hesitantly, asking, "What's there to understand?"

"If you care about her so much, why don't you want to be with her?"

"Because I care about her so much." Peter shrugged as though the meaning behind that should be self-evident. Harry's blank face made him sigh and add, "MJ's always gone to the same school I have. Her family moved next door the summer I was six. She was nice enough to me, but she already had a lot of friends, even then, and I don't even think she noticed I wasn't in her class until they skipped me ahead, after second grade. Her mother waited until the summer that MJ turned ten, and then she just got up and left. Without a word or a hint or anything but a letter saying she was leaving and that she was sending in the divorce papers to be finalized. MJ's dad signed the papers thinking he was signing some kind of insurance policy - he ranted and raved about it for days, and I don't think MJ was back in that house more than half a dozen times that summer. She mostly stayed with her friends. And he might not be so obviously dangerous now, but in a way I think it's probably even worse, because other people have stopped worrying so much about what he could do to her, if he ever got angry enough and drunk enough at the same time to actually go after her. Why do you think she has so many friends or is involved in so many extracurricular activities at school? It's to get away from that house and that man, Harry. Flash isn't her boyfriend because he's the best athlete or most popular guy in school. There's like half a dozen others in our class alone who're at least as good if not better than he is at sports - including you, if you'd ever bother to try out for anything. MJ would go for you in a heartbeat, pal, if she thought she could keep your attention for more than a couple of days or you ever did something that'd make you more popular, like joining one of the school teams, like Flash - and he's really only treated as if he's popular because he makes the school look good and he's with MJ and people love her and he's a bully so people are afraid to cross him. But he also comes from one of the wealthiest families in our grade and he lives practically the furthest from MJ's house. He's a potential ticket out of this place, if she's ever desperate enough to take it. And it looks good for the head cheerleader and the most popular girl at school to be dating a jock like Flash. It makes her even more popular, and she wants that, Harry. She needs the attention she gets from being popular. It's the only way she knows of reassuring herself that she's not really the worthless piece of trash that her dad's always telling her she is. She makes the driver stop the bus for me because it makes her look softhearted and good and people love her for being good like that, but if she ever really associated with me, it would probably lose her some of that popularity, because I'm Puny Parker, remember? Her friends think I'm a nerd and a loser and they wouldn't want to be associated with me, so they'd stop hanging out with her so much, just so they could avoid me. She might even lose her boyfriend, if the idea of her hanging out with me made him angry enough - which is might, since Flash has a rotten temper and he doesn't like me and he really doesn't like to share. Flash's dad has been having some kind of business problems, lately, so he's gotten a lot meaner this past year, and he might even hurt MJ, if she tried to stop him from kicking my ass. And what could I ever give her that'd be worth that? I live right next door to her, Harry. I can't give her a way out of here like Flash potentially could and I can't even give her as much of a safe haven from her dad as her real friends can, because I live right next door to her. Her dad could chase her down without even half trying, even as drunk as he usually is anymore. Besides which, there's the whole thing where she barely knows I exist and only ever notices me if I'm being nice to her or somebody is being extra mean to me. Sure, if you asked her, she'd probably say that we're friends. But then, she's one of those people who thinks that she's friends with pretty much everybody. We're not really friends, though. Not like how I think of real friends, anyway. MJ's just my neighbor."

"And Mary Jane is, what, just a talisman you hold onto, to remind yourself that there's people out there who're beautiful and - and angelic, or whatever - and that you'll be able to find somebody like that when you get out of here and into college? And that's why you love her? Because of the idea she represents to you?" Harry slowly demanded, eyes narrow with suspicion.

"Bingo! See, I told you you'd get it. Aunt May doesn't. She thinks we really are friends and that I want to go out with MJ because she's my angel. But then, Aunt May's kind of an incurable romantic, you know? The idea make her so happy, though, that I let her keep thinking it. It's easier that way, because then she won't feel the need to worry about me being too alone and not wanting to be with somebody and I won't have to worry about making Aunt May worry."

Scowling, Harry retorted, "I don't think I do get it, though. Why wouldn't you tell me all of this, before? Why let me assume you were madly in love with the girl next door? Aren't we real friends?"

Peter was shocked enough to just gape at him for a few silent moments before finally indignantly sputtering, "Of course we're real friends! You're my /best friend/, Harry, my best friend /ever/! How could you even ask that?"

"How could you keep something like this a secret?"

"Keep it a - ? Harry, you never even /asked/! And when have I ever told you I was in love with MJ or wanted to date her? When have we ever really even talked about girls or dating? Ever since sophomore year, you've had a new girl on your arm, at your beck and call, like clockwork, every single time your dad's come home or there's been any kind of school dance or something, and the only thing you ever tell me is that they're an insurance policy against your father!"

"That's because they are, alright?" Harry instantly snapped back. "They're to keep him from coming up with any excuses to go poking around in my life and start ruining things again. As long as I don't do anything too potentially embarrassing, he'll keep leaving me alone, like he has been. But God forbid Norman Oswald's son might have a problem getting a date to a lousy school dance or to the latest movie on a Friday night, because that might cause others to talk, and gossip like that might reflect badly on Norman, and that might lead to bad press, which would make the board unhappy, and if the board's unhappy, then Norman has to actually come out of his lab and placate them, and he hates having to do that, more than just about anything. He hates the OsCorp board. The mere thought that he might have to deal with an unhappy board if I kept on the way I was and caused him some kind of bad press was enough to make him enroll me in public school, for pity's sake! He thinks he's exiled me far enough away from the people who might talk that he doesn't have to worry about me anymore. You've no idea what he might do to me, if I managed to cause a big enough stink that it could reach him and the board members, somehow, all the way from a nowhere little suburban public school like ours!"

Quietly, seriously, almost solemnly, Peter only declared. "He can't do anything to you that you don't let him, Harry."

"He's my /father/, Peter. There's plenty he could do to me to hurt me that I'd have no say in, because he's the famous rich scientist adult, and I'm just the eccentric slacker son. But that's beside the point! This discussion isn't about me, Pete, it's about you! You and MJ and this secret of yours that you've kept by mooning over her like a kid with a crush for years!" Harry snarled.

Finally starting to sound a little bit angry himself, Peter only demanded, "So what? Did you ever bother to ask me, before now, if I really had a crush on her?"



TBC . . .