FicWad

Harry instantly started planning ways to arrange for various business and class or research related trips to various far-flung locations during as many of the holidays and scheduled school breaks as he possibly could, to make sure that Peter would be able to compile a wide variety of different portfolios to draw from, for those books. Columbia University was widely known for its prestigious research and famous for attracting international funding and arranging internationally staffed projects (or projects that were shared among the research facilities of several different universities and institutions, some of them in the US and others of them elsewhere, at so-called "sister" colleges that fostered exchange programs with Columbia University), so its highly placed staff and their research assistants often traveled to and presented papers and research findings at various universities scattered across the globe. Unknown to Peter, Harry gave Dr. Connors a call to see just how serious he was about making Peter one of his research assistants, and they ended up having a good long heart-to-heart conversation about Peter's many talents and his intentions, including the best way they could support and expedite his education and get him into the field, researching, while also cultivating Peter's growing fame and the clout, in terms of both money and power and eventual political cachet, that this fame could and would bring not just to him, personally, but to anything and everything that he lent his name and support or approval to. Peter likely would've been a bit horrified, to know that they were making detailed plans to smooth the way for him for as thorough and as quick an education as possible and as lucrative and famous a career as possible, all at the same time, but in their own way they both just wanted the very best for Peter (Harry because he loved Peter, and Dr. Connors because he was incredibly impressed with Peter's potential and he wanted Peter working in his field), and they knew that most of what they were planning were things that Peter would've probably done, anyway, on his own initiative, given the choice, so they didn't let Peter's probable reaction to finding out they were actively plotting out part of Peter's future for him bother them very much.

And then one night when Peter was out late, literally taking a swing up over the edge of the city, where it started to melt into suburbs, he accidentally spied two thieves in the process of trying to steal a car by threatening its panicky driver (a young woman waiting to pick up her son from the library) with guns, and used his new abilities (and the concealing hood of his jacket) to stop the criminals before they could do more than shoot up into the air, catch them, and tie them up for the cops to come find, and things started to slew sideways, in danger of spinning out of control. Uncle Ben had raised Peter with the belief that great power always brought with it great responsibility, and it had been ridiculously easy for Peter to stop those car-jackers. Peter instantly started wondering if maybe he hadn't specifically been meant to be bitten by that spider, so that he could use the powers he'd gained, thus, to fight crime and wrong-doing and evil, in general, and make the city of New York (and, thus, the world) a better place, and for a while it looked as if nothing that Harry could say to him about how they lived in the real world and not some movie or comic book or how many arguments he offered up as proof of the dangers of vigilantism and the demonstrably poor way in which the people of other cities all around the world treated their heroes and crusaders for justice and safety would be able to sway Peter from choosing to throw away his future to become some kind of costumed vigilante like Gotham City's Batman. The fact that New York City had an enormous law enforcement community and that its police especially tended to take crime fighting very seriously but that they weren't exactly known to play well with others, even when they were legitimate members of other law enforcement agencies, likewise seemed to make little to no impression on Peter, and Harry had seen far too much footage - from other cities, like Gotham and Metropolis, as well as from New York, itself - showing how local cops often ended up shooting at vigilantes (costumes or not), so at that point he started to panic.

In the end, Harry had to play dirty and point out to Peter that, first of all, while just about anybody could go chasing after bad guys, Peter was the only person both intelligent enough and altruistic enough to honestly make Harry believe that humanity had a fighting chance for finding and sharing with everyone an eventual cure for such diseases as cancer and AIDS, and, second of all, New York City kind of already had some costumed (and sometimes caped) crusaders of its own - the so-called Avengers - who might not particularly appreciate having to share the city they worked out of with a teenager who was only able to be a vigilante in the first place because he'd accidentally been bitten by a genetically crafted and apparently mutagenic super spider. He felt a little bad about essentially implying that heroes aren't very bright and Peter was better then and had a vastly different and far more important destiny than such crusaders, but Harry would have done a lot worse than just implied, if it would've kept Peter from being reckless enough to decide to do something that likely would end up with him getting shot at by a trigger-fingered and not too willing to share cop or some overeager concerned citizen. He tried to soothe his slightly twinging conscience by focusing on the fact that he'd agreed that if Peter ever saw or accidentally came up on a situation like the one with the car-jackers again and there were no cops or other law enforcement officers around to take care of things, then, as long as Peter was sure he could help without getting hurt and was extremely careful to make sure that no one could ever identify him, that he should do whatever he could to stop the criminals before anyone could get hurt. Unfortunately, though, that particularly concession had led to Peter gleefully embracing the notion of designing himself a costume all of his own, as a way of keeping his identity a secret, so it tended to just make his head hurt and his stomach churn nervously instead. He was bound and determined that Peter wouldn't resort to wearing some kind of silly cape and half mask and Peter was just as determined that his costume needed to be in primary colors (since the spider that had bitten him had been blue, with red markings).

Their eventual compromise (such as it was) did not particularly please or reassure Harry. Head to toe form-fitting red and blue lycra, with stylized black webbing on the red bits, a big red spider on the back of his chest, a smaller black spider on the front, and, the stocking-like mask, a pair of oversized, vaguely insectoid, black-rimmed white eyes. God help him. If Peter hadn't been so darn proud of himself for coming up with a costume that he not only felt was appropriate for a mutated spider-man (which was, after all, what he was) but was made of a sufficiently light-weight material for the microscopic barbed hairs on his fingertips and the soles of his feet (rather like scopula pads on a tarantula, or so Peter explained them, anyway) to work, allowing him to cling to and climb even sheer, smooth surfaces, such as the largely glass surfaces of a skyscraper, Harry would have either laughed his head off or sat down and cried. Inconspicious the costume most definitely was not. However, it did at least cover Peter's entire head (even if it covered his body so closely that it left very little to the imagination), and it was, thank goodness, complete without a cape, so at least Peter would (hopefully) be able to avoid becoming entangled, hung up, or otherwise snagged by anyone or anything dangerous by a part of his costume. If Peter had tried to insist on some kind of webbed cape, Harry would've had to have had a fit, and then they never would've gotten anywhere, because it likely would've been back to square one with the argument and Peter insisting that his great powers gave him a greater amount of responsibility for the lives of people around him and that he needed to be able to help people and the costume was necessary to accomplish that without exposing his identity to the world at large, and et cetera. Still. By the time they were finally done with that particular conversation, Harry was seriously beginning to wonder if arguments about costumes and potential sore spots like capes that seemed designed to strangle their wearers weren't a big part of the reason why most vigilantes seemed to work alone.

Of course, later, he would wonder if part of the reason why he hadn't caught on to the fact that something was seriously wrong with his father any sooner than he did was because he'd been so caught up in mentally shaking his head over Peter's extremely bright (and rather tight-fitted) costume that he hadn't even noticed what was going on right under his nose at home. By then, though, it was already too late to really do anything about it. By the time Harry really noticed that something was wrong with Norman Osborn, a maniacal, costumed villain known as the Green Goblin had bombed Quest Aerospace and killed several high-ranking military officers and Quest scientists, viciously attacked the World Unity Fair, (literally) disintegrated all of the OsCorp board members except for Norman, tried to attack Harry but been foiled by "Spider-Man" - though in retaliation the lunatic nearly managed to kill MJ (who had been invited to attend with Harry, since Peter had been planning on staying with the crowd and hopefully getting some good pictures), forcing Peter to "rescue" her and, thus, initiating what would become a fairly painfully obvious crush on her part for the costumed hero - declared (roared, actually) a vendetta against Spider-Man, somehow figured out that Peter was Spider-Man, attacked Uncle Ben and Aunt May (in the process giving Uncle Ben a nasty concussion and nearly frightening Aunt May to death), kidnaped MJ and tried to rig an impossible choice so that Peter either had to "let die the woman you love" or "suffer the children" by allowing either MJ to fall to her death or a tram car full of children to plummet into the river (neither of which happened, due to the interference of a crowd of onlookers who didn't take kindly to Green Goblin's proposition), somehow figured out that Spider-Man didn't love MJ the way that MJ loved him and that Harry actually meant much more to Peter than MJ did, and kidnaped Harry in an attempt both to punish his son, for being a stupid weakling and siding with Peter against him, and to hurt Peter (Spider-Man), too, by exposing Harry to the same experimental performance-enhancing drug that had made Norman Osborn into the Green Goblin, thereby dooming Harry to what the Green Goblin was sure would be either a painful death or else homicidal insanity. Either way, Green Goblin thought he was going to win.

He was wrong.

Harry still nearly died, though, from shock and the strain that the transformative effect of the strength- and intelligence-enhancing drug had on his heart.

And, in the course of the fight that followed, Peter had to leap out of the way to avoid being impaled by the Green Goblin's glider, which then promptly impaled the Green Goblin.

Norman Osborn died almost instantly - though not without begging Peter for forgiveness, for condemning his son.

Harry, though, wasn't quite condemned. Just - changed.

He still came away from it all feeling rather as if his chest were exploding, though.

And there was that whole thing about being terrified of turning into a raging sociopath.

And his father was dead.

And Peter looked half dead, his costume shredded so badly that Harry's first instinct was to try to carry him out of the thoroughly demolished remains of the OsCorp laboratory - an attempt that made Peter flinch away from him and Harry's chest hurt so badly he was sure, for a moment, that he was going to die after all.

And then Peter began to cry, because Harry's father was dead because he'd jumped out of the way and, "I wanted to save him, I truly did, I just couldn't move fast enough! Harry, I'm so sorry! Please, don't hate me!" And Harry knew he wasn't going to die after all, because it hurt so damn much that he knew he couldn't possibly be lucky enough to be dying.

And then he wanted to strangle his father with his bare hands, for making Peter hurt so much . . . and instantly wanted to die, as he was sure he must be going mad, to hate his father so, and that meant that the Green Goblin had won, after all, and he just couldn't face the possibility of causing Peter as much pain as he inevitably would, if he had become like the Green Goblin.

Instead, he surprised himself by crying for the first time in years, prompting Peter to rush awkwardly to comfort him . . . and culminating, eventually, with them in a frantic clench, Harry brokenly forgiving Peter, insisting that it wasn't his fault at all and that the Green Goblin had really done it to himself, and then stammering out his fear that he was going to be just like Green Goblin now because he hated his father for doing this, hated him, hated him! And in reply, Peter whispered to Harry over and over that anyone human would be angry with Norman Osborn for what he'd done and that it didn't mean Harry was going to go insane, like Norman had, and that Peter loved him, and they'd find a way to deal with it and fix it, if anything were wrong with him now, and he would never, /never/, leave Harry or give up on him or believe that he could ever be like the Green Goblin, and that he knew they would find a way to make things alright, as long as they were still together.

And Harry had to agree with the sentiment.

Eventually, they managed to get themselves back together well enough to figure out what to do about the fact that the Green Goblin, an unmasked but otherwise still costumed Norman Osborn, was lying in the middle of the now thoroughly destroyed laboratory, quite dead. Even though Harry wasn't sure that Norman deserved it, they finally decided to take Norman out of the rest of the costume and use the rest of the Green Goblin's pumpkin bombs to blow up the lab, thus protecting Norman's name by destroying the evidence linking him to the Green Goblin. The suit and the glider Harry insisted on taking with them, though he gladly allowed the rest of the experimental drug to be destroyed in the explosion and resulting fire, because he could tell that Peter was intrigued by the technology, and he himself rather thought that, if the glider could be modified, it might provide Spider-Man with an alternative mean of transportation. Harry found Peter a spare pair of scrubs and a lab coat to change into, and they proceed to "escape" from the Green Goblin and the laboratory, Peter casting one web so that they could swing away while he turned at the last moment to throw a pumpkin bomb back onto a whole belt of them, so that they would all explode behind them as the safety doors sealing off the laboratory from the rest of the complex slammed down.

The bottom of the lab coat caught fire and Harry ripped it off of Peter so violently, when they touched down again, that he almost knocked Peter down. Otherwise, they managed to get away alright. The laboratory was far enough underground (and deserted, to boot, given all of the recent upheavals within OsCorp and the illegal test that Norman Osborn had performed upon himself, not to mention the way he'd taken the complex over as a sort of base, following his transformation into Green Goblin) and isolated enough that no one even noticed the explosion. There was a car with keys in the ignition still, parked near the doors. Harry was fairly sure he recognized it as having belonged to one of the now deceased board members, so, figuring that no one would miss it, they managed (after some creative wrestling with the trunk that finally got the back of the backseats collapsed away from the rest of the trunk) to get the glider and most of the suit into the trunk, with the rest spilling over into the backseat. And then Harry drove them home.

Oddly enough, it was as simple as that. He drove them home - not to the apartment, but to his father's home, which was, he supposed, technically his, now. The parked the car in the garage, got the glider and the suit out and into the house, into one of the panic rooms where they knew the equipment would be and remain safely hidden until one of them keyed the room open again, and then they called the chauffeur who happened to be on shift (it was John Tyers, luckily, a man he knew was trustworthy), gave him the keys to the car, told him to take it to the parking lot at OsCorp's headquarters downtown so that it could be found and eventually passed on to its inheritor, and informed him he could take the rest of his shift off, though he would of course still be paid. Harry had been rather spectacularly publicly kidnaped by the Green Goblin - snatched up off of the stairs leading up to OsCorp headquarters, literally plucked out of crowd of corporate lawyers and investors (all of them invited there by Norman Osborn for a meeting that they'd been told was in response to the tragic deaths of the board members at the World Unity Fair, a week previously) - so it wasn't that hard to figure out what they needed to do next. They got their story figured out, Harry called the Osborn's private doctor to come tend to Peter, and, after Dr. Wier had arrived and tentatively proclaimed himself satisfied that Peter hadn't sustained any major damage, went and claimed one of his father's cars to drive himself down to the police station. The next day, the headlining story for all of the local papers was all about how Spider-Man had saved Harry Osborn's life from the Green Goblin, who had been kidnaped so that the Green Goblin could kill him, as he'd laughingly told Harry Osborn he'd done to his father, Norman Osborn, and to the other board members of OsCorp, just like he'd done to the Quest Aerospace scientists working for the US military.

The Green Goblin, it was presumed, had a beef with the military, and had been striking out against corporations and individuals with ties to the military. Spider-Man was reported to have rescued Harry Osborn "at great personal risk to himself, sustaining several injuries" in a battle that had, according to witness Harry Osborn, ended only when the Green Goblin's glider was struck, mid-air, over the East River, by a missile the Goblin had fired at Spider-Man, who avoided being hit by diving down into the water. Goblin and glider had exploded hundreds of feet above the river, presumably killing the Green Goblin instantly, and, though Harry Osborn had waited to try to thank his rescuer, he had not seen Spider-Man resurface from the river. He went on record, though, to say that he was sure Spider-Man had survived, despite the injuries he'd taken saving Harry's life and fighting off the Green Goblin, blaming the hero's apparent failure to resurface on the river's current, which was strong enough that it had likely washed him down the river too far for Harry to be able to spot him when he surfaced and swam to shore. It was an opinion that was eagerly embraced by most - including the reporters for the Daily Bugle/. Thanks to a quick personal interview with Harry Osborn, the /Daily Bugle ended up with enough material to run a whole series of articles about the Green Goblin and his vicious attacks, Spider-Man's attempts to foil those attacks whenever he could, and Harry's kidnaping. This was mostly due to Peter's earlier insistence that the newspaper would become the New York newspaper to carry original pictures of Spider-Man, despite publisher and honorary editor-in-chief J. Jonah Jameson's avowed distrust of anyone who wore a mask in order to do good - a stumbling block that Harry and Peter had gotten around through a combination of guile, honestly, and open appeal to the man's business savvy.

Basically, Harry had arranged for one of the Daily Bugle's reporters - a man by the name of Paul Goodman, who just happened to be the older brother of Terry Goodman, the young man who'd taught Harry everything he knew about hacking into computers, and someone Harry knew and trusted - to have an exclusive interview with Spider-Man, where it was revealed that Spider-Man was a young college student and native New Yorker who'd grown up perfectly normal and had recently been accidentally infected by a manmade mutagenic retrovirus during a tour of a research laboratory; that he had been made very ill by the infection and had discovered, on his recovery, that the retrovirus had changed him, giving him a certain skills and abilities as well as a great deal of increased strength and flexibility; that, though he had not asked to be made into what he now was, he had been raised with the belief that power and responsibility are meant to go hand in hand, and so he wanted to use his powers, if he could, to help keep the people around him safe; and that, because he was still a very young man (and he'd confirmed, then, that he was attending a New York university, though he'd implied that he was in his early twenties, not just seventeen) and he had certain prior responsibilities - to his family and friends, who counted on him to be there for them; to the school he was attending and the professors who were teaching him, to whom he'd entered into what he thought of as a binding contract, requiring him to be there for his classes and work hard for the education he was paying to be provided with; to the people he worked for, who relied on him, too - he'd decided that he would always try to help save people who were in danger when he could, but that he wouldn't deliberately go looking for trouble, and that he would always wear a disguise or at least cover up his face whenever he used his powers to help others, so that no one would know who he really was and be able to try to use his family and friends or his coworkers and acquaintances against him, either as a way to hurt him or as a way to try to blackmail him into using his powers for evil.

At the same time, Peter - who'd created a somewhat involved but surprisingly convincing story to explain how he'd accidentally become friends with and eventually the photographer for Spider-Man, by needing to be saved from certain harm and perhaps even death three times in a row (from a drunk driver who'd nearly run over him; from muggers one evening when he was walking back to his apartment late, after staying out to take pictures of the sunset over Central Park; and from a pair of inept, trigger-fingered, would-be robbers in a photography store that he'd happened to enter at the wrong time) by the hero - had offered to let the Daily Bugle have photos he took of Spider-Man, absolutely free of charge (though the newspaper would, of course, have to credit Peter as the photographer), so long as the editors of the newspaper promised that they would not print any pieces (with the possible exception of any letters sent to the editors, of course) that were not fair and unbiased in tone towards the masked hero. Harry had helped Peter set things up (with the aid of lots of webbing, timers, and Harry himself, who'd tagged along and hidden in the shadows to snap backup pictures with another one of Peter's cameras) so that he had a whole stack of both color and black-and-white photos - some of them absolutely gorgeous, with an almost unbelievable (if quite typical of Peter) clarity and perfection of pose and timing - of Spider-Man in action. Since Spider-Man's interview with Paul Goodman had been conducted with Spider-Man speaking through a mild voice distorter, Harry had arranged for Peter to meet Paul later, after he'd had a day to organize his notes into an actual story, so that Paul and Peter could approach the Daily Bugle's other editor-in-chief, Joseph "Robbie" Robertson, together, with the story and photos offered in the proposed deal. Robbie had gotten to read Paul's story and listen to his accounting of the interview, look through the rather large collection of photos Peter was offering (all of them either clearly showing Spider-Man in action, as he stopped crimes or getaways and saved people from potentially dangerous situations, or else showing him as he traveled among the city's skyscrapers, swinging like an acrobat from his webs) and hear the offer as well as Peter's accounting of how he'd met Spider-Man and become his photographer and what he thought of the masked hero.

Robbie had determinedly gone into battle with Jameson, steadfastly arguing in favor of the deal and insisting that the deal was really nothing more than a request that the newspaper do what was morally and ethically right in the first place. It had taken three days of arguing, but Jameson had finally come around after Spider-Man heroically saved a toddler from a blazing building and a competitor ran an article with a badly blurred picture snapped by a passer-by who'd stopped to gawk at the burning building and happened to be carrying a cell phone with a built in digital camera. Jameson was a reluctant ally at best - delighting in pontificating at great lengths, at the office, as to the dangers of vigilantism and so-called heroes who really wanted to have revenge, not justice, and the possibility that some impressionable young star-struck, hero-worshiping kid would try to be like Spider-Man and get killed - but his reporters and the rest of the staff mostly seemed to like the masked hero, and they made sure that Jameson and the paper kept up their end of the deal. It was mostly because of their efforts and the favorable light that the Daily Bugle's articles consistently cast Spider-Man in that public support for Spider-Man had been so high when the Green Goblin exploded onto the scene, during the World Unity Fair (an event that Peter and Harry had, between the two of them and with the help of video monitors that OsCorp always had up on the balcony, for the safety of the Osborn family, the board members, and other high ranking guests, managed to get some pretty decent stills of for the newspaper). After that attack, Jameson had vented the full measure his virulent and righteous fury against the Green Goblin and started a campaign against what he referred to as "that clearly insane green menace," one in which he actually deigned to (begrudgingly) praise Spider-Man for his stance against the obviously deranged killer. Jameson was so thrilled to learn that the Green Goblin had managed to get himself blown up that he managed to overlook the fact that there hadn't been any other witnesses to the fight Harry described between the Green Goblin and Spider-Man over the East River, and since the Daily Bugle was, by then, known for its scrupulously fair and truthful stories on Spider-Man and unflinchingly accurate (if vitriolic) accountings of the Green Goblin that no one else noticed it either.

Harry's story about what had happened was, therefore, accepted wholeheartedly by the public - including the police, whose captain, George Stacy, actually went on record to thank Spider-Man for so selflessly choosing to use his powers in the defense of the city and its people.

Harry, though, was too preoccupied with convincing the lawyers to let him take control of the company and start searching through all of the various OsCorp lands and holdings for his father's remains to really notice, much. He was glad the story had been accepted and he thought it was nice of Captain Stacy to acknowledge the fact that Spider-Man was essentially doing the job of a policeman with none of the training, pay, or other benefits, really he was, but he felt like crap (his entire body ached, just a little, a sort of low-level, full-body pain, as if he were suffering from the flu), he was still worried about turning into a psychopathic killer, he was anxious about Peter's injuries, and he just wanted the damned lawyers to cooperate a little, for once, so he could get this over with as quickly as possible, go about the process of making sure that anything of his father that might've survived that blast would be recovered so he could be properly laid to rest later on, and then go home to be with Peter. He just wanted to be with Peter.

Harry soon lost patience with the lawyers and excused himself from the proceedings, pleading a need to visit a doctor and make sure he really hadn't taken any permanent or otherwise noteworthy damage from his ordeal. He ordered the lawyers to let the police handle the actual searching of the various OsCorp holdings, reclaimed his father's car, and drove himself home - where exhaustion finally caught up with him and he barely managed to crawl into bed beside Peter before sleep overcame him.

He didn't wake again until almost thirteen hours later, when Peter's shocked exclamation, "Holy moly!" startled him awake to the realization that he was starving but that he otherwise felt better, physically, than he could remember feeling in . . . well, ever.

The surprised cry, as it turned out, was in response to the fact that Peter had woken up not just feeling better but actually physically/ better/ - completely healed from his extremely nasty, very long fight against the Green Goblin, from what he could tell - something that shouldn't have been possible. The fateful spider bite had made Peter stronger and more resilient - he was much healthier, faster, more powerfully built, and a hell of a lot harder to physically hurt - but he hadn't been rendered immune to pain or given the ability to miraculously heal himself whenever he was hurt. Adding to the general confusion was the fact that Harry - who'd been banged about a good bit, himself, and should have had a spectacular shiner, not to mention bruises around his wrists and ankles, from being restrained - was just as perfectly healed as Peter was. And then, too, there was the fact (unnoticed before, in the midst of everything else) that Harry seemed to have spontaneously gained almost as much more obvious muscle mass as Peter had after being bitten by that spider - though Harry, at least, seemed to have gotten all of his new muscles in places where people normally would just by working out a lot more comprehensively, rigorously, and consistently than Harry had ever had the time or inclination to.

The expanded muscle mass wasn't all that surprising, all things considered - the drug had been meant to boost intelligence and strength, and so result in super-soldiers for the US military, after all - but the spontaneous healing was/, and /especially for Peter. Peter wanted to know every single thing Harry could remember hearing his father and the other board members say about the government contract that this drug had been created for, and everything Harry could remember hearing the Green Goblin claim about the formula and its effects, when he'd kidnaped Harry and taken him to that underground laboratory. Harry, in turn, wanted to know what his father and the Green Goblin had said to Peter, when they were fighting, since he'd been fading in and out of consciousness during the first fifteen minutes or so and could only remember hearing fragments of the conversation (mostly consisting of Goblin's gloats). They finally decided that the healing must be either a side effect of whatever in the formula was supposed to enhance intelligence or else a regenerative effect that the scientists who came up with the formula were aiming for, since the drug was supposed to be creating super soldiers and logically it would be an enormous plus if said super soldiers could heal themselves super quickly and survive wounds that would've killed an ordinary person. But of course, that still didn't explain why Peter was showing signs of having been given the drug, since he hadn't been the one strapped down to the table in that glass box and gassed with the viciously green stuff. Peter had shattered two of the walls of that chamber, which had vented some of the vapor out into the rest of the laboratory, but Harry distinctly remembered being given a shot of some kind of secondary, liquid drug that was meant to act as a catalyst that would allow his body to metabolize the actual super soldier formula. Peter hadn't been injected with anything, so it didn't seem like the gas should've affected him. It wasn't until Harry finally tentatively asked if maybe the combination of Peter's altered, no longer entirely human genetics and revved-up metabolism might not have been able to initiate the kind of reaction that the serum would cause a normal human to have to the gaseous super soldier formula that they finally came up with anything like a rational explanation.

And then, of course, they had to deal with the fact that Harry and Peter had both been exposed to the same drug that had turned Norman Osborn into a what had appeared to be either a schizophrenic sociopath or else a psychotic killer with multiple personalities, at least one of which had been a psychopath. Either way, the results had neither been good nor very pretty.

"Do you feel any different?" Harry finally asked, desperate to stop Peter from panicking.

"Well, no, not really, aside from feeling better and being hungry. But then, I'm usually hungry, anymore. Which is neither here nor there, really, because honestly! How the hell are you supposed to be able to tell if you're losing your mind? If you're the one who's going crazy, then you're going to be nuts, and that means you're probably going to be too screwed up to notice!"

"You're no crazier than I am - and don't you dare laugh, dammit! You said my father spoke of Goblin as if he were an entirely different person, right? Well, Goblin told me that he was born when Norman took the drug, and his first act was to kill the scientist who'd initiated the test, because he was the one who'd claimed that the drug wasn't ready for human testing yet and that they needed to take the whole project back to formula and start over again - which was what drove my father to test the drug on himself in the first place, because he was afraid of losing the super soldier contract to Quest Aerospace and General Stromm was threatening to pull OsCorp's funding on the project. We haven't heard any voices in our heads yet and it's been most of a day since we were exposed to the drug - that has to count for /something/, doesn't it?" Harry asked.

"But how would you really know for sure? If the drug made you crazy and you blacked out while you were asleep and the second personality took over then, how would you ever know?" Peter only demanded to know, his voice loud and rising with frantic worry.

"Peter - Peter/! /Calm down. You're worrying too much. If you want to approach it like that, there's really no way to prove that either one of us was sane to begin with. It's just like that question that drove me nuts in our philosophy class - you know, the one about how it's not really possible to ever definitely prove that anything is real, once you start questioning reality? Some things you just have to accept. The drug affected Norman instantly, once his body started reacting to it, and the Green Goblin was born of that. We both show signs of having metabolized the same drug, and yet neither one of us has exhibited any signs of manifesting a new personality like the Green Goblin. It only makes sense to accept that if we haven't done so yet because of the drug, then we aren't going to. Even if the overall effectiveness of the drug has been weakened by a lower exposure, we've already got the other physical symptoms of exposure. If we were going to have psychosis, too, we'd already have shown signs of it. No - wait, don't interrupt, yet!" Harry insisted, cutting Peter off before he could interrupt to protest. "Just think about it for a minute! The formula wasn't quite right, yet, but it has to have been mostly right, or else they would have given up on it already. The test animals can't all have had psychotic reactions to the drug, or they would've taken the formula back to the drawing board long before it got to the point where that Stromm guy could raise a stink about it. Most of the animal test subjects must have reacted to the drug like they wanted them to. It's the only logical explanation. My father wasn't a very nice man - he was reckless, arrogant, ruthlessly ambitious, and he always thought that he knew best - but he was very smart, and he wasn't suicidal. He wouldn't have taken the drug if he hadn't honestly thought that it worked and was ready for the next level of testing. Just because he was wrong about the drug being ready for human subjects, that doesn't mean that the formula couldn't still work like they wanted it to on some subjects."

Peter frowned, clearly unconvinced, his hands clasped together so tightly that they looked as if they were trying to strangle each other. "I don't know, Harry. I don't like this. The odds are too high against us both coming out of this alright."

"So after the lawyers have stopped interfering and the cops have found the destroyed lab and declared that my father must be dead and we've managed to have a funeral for him, we'll find a shrink we can trust. It's the first today. The term's over with the thirteenth of December. From the fourteenth until the twenty-first or whenever you decide you're convinced the shrink is correct and we really are alright, we'll hole up here and have round the clock supervision to make sure we aren't having fugues while we sleep while insane second personalities take over our bodies and make us do crazy things. Alright?" Harry finally offered, feeling slightly desperate.

Peter was quiet for a long time, brow furrowed in thought, clearly thinking hard about the proposal. Finally, though, he looked up at Harry with a tremulous smile, and told him, "I - I think I can live with that plan."

A breath Harry hadn't realized he'd been holding whooshed out of him then, leaving him feeling dizzy with relief. "Oh. Good. That's settled, then. Come on - let's get showered and get dressed and go find something to eat. Then we can call Uncle Ben and Aunt May and let them know we're both alright, and give that nice Captain Stacy a call and see if there's anything he can do to make the lawyers stop lawyering and start cooperating with the search efforts. Alright?"

Peter nodded. "I'm with you."

The crisis passed then, though they wouldn't be sure of it until, on December fifteenth, the team of three psychologists they'd hired to test them and keep watch over them (whose work had begun on the eleventh with a battery of tests, since that Harry and Peter had both had their last final for school on the tenth) had declared themselves completely satisfied that there was absolutely nothing neurologically or psychologically wrong with either of them.

They celebrated by ordering in enough food for roughly a dozen people (most of which the two of them ate over the next few hours), breaking out all the reports on OsCorp's current holdings, projects, grants, employees, shareholders, and backers, and plotting how best to make sure that Harry ended up firmly in control of the company and the company stopped doing semi-legal things for the US government and started doing things that could help the world at large. Peter thought that Harry needed to hire most of the professors of the various science departments at Columbia University to work for OsCorp, and Harry agreed that he probably should - but not until Peter had at least gotten a chance to finish his undergraduate degrees, first. So they got out the various possible class schedules that Peter had worked out for himself, and started trying to figure out how long it would take for Peter to take all the undergraduate courses he really wanted to, if he took the maximum amount of classes he thought he could fit in and handle taking at the same time instead of just the amount of classes he wanted up to the credit limit that he could take as a full-time student without being charged extra for taking more courses than a single student was supposed to. Peter had been a genius with an almost eidetic memory and a strong affinity for science before his exposure to the super soldier drug, and he'd noticed a marked increased in both his reading speed, his memory, and his creativeness since then. With Harry's permission, he'd taken the Green Goblin's glider apart and, in the process, learned enough about it to create a sleeker, faster, more responsive, and better armed version, all in less than a day. Neither one of them truly doubted that Peter could handle a much more rigorous schedule of classes, not if he really give the work his full attention. And as for Harry, well . . . he'd always been intelligent, just not in the fields that his father wanted him to excel in. For the things that Harry loved and wished to study, there were ways around having to actually attend classes. And most of the things that Harry felt he needed to know, to better run the business of OsCorp, could be gotten out of the books just as easily as they could be gotten out of class lectures. Really, it was more a matter of arranging things with the various professors and departments so that he wouldn't be required to attend classes, but would be allowed to submit papers, take supervised tests, and complete any other required projects or work for the classes in question, after he'd finished all of the necessary readings - a fact that was true even of some of the classes Peter wanted or needed to take.

And Harry was, of course, well practiced at and very, very good at arranging things.

Between the Osborn name and fortune, Harry's ability to finesse things, and the obvious admiration and affection that Peter had already garnered for himself in most all of the different branches of the science departments at Columbia University and Empire State University, Harry was certain that he'd be able to make things work so that they could both get their degrees in record time, and Peter was pretty sure the professors at both universities would do their best to make the whole thing as easy on them as possible. Spider-Man might not show up in public as often as he had been for the past half a year or so, and he might just gain a masked accomplice ("But not a damned sidekick!" as Harry insisted), who'd keep up with him as he swung through the city by gliding along on an updated, modified version of the Green Goblin's old glider, but in the end, they agreed that they should have their first round of degrees by the summer, and Peter should be finished with his undergraduate work by next December.

The celebration, after that, quickly retired to the bedroom.

So as it happened, even though Harry Osborn quite often used to think that he'd spent his entire life trying to gain the affections of someone who did not (seem to) love him, when he was legally confirmed to have inherited control over OsCorp exactly one week before his eighteenth Christmas, he knew, without a doubt, that he had the love of the only people who mattered to him in all the world - the Parkers - and that the man he was in love with loved him back with all of his heart and soul.

The following Christmas, Harry knew what he should get for Peter, and didn't hesitate to buy or to give it. The ring was meant to represent neither a new promise or vow nor any new sense of belonging or togetherness, but was intended, rather, as a sign of the many promises they had been keeping to each other for many years and the togetherness that had required no vows to be or to remain true.

When he found a ring from Peter in his own hands, at the opening of his present, Harry knew without a doubt just how wrong he had been, to ever assume himself unworthy of love.

And if the rest of the Christmas presents had to wait until the next day for their opening, well, their givers knew that those receiving said gifts were a young couple in love. They certainly would not have begrudged the delay while the two indulged in more intimate celebrations.