OOO
When he woke up, Harry found that the nausea had cleared and the dizziness he'd felt before collapsing had fled. In fact, he was seeing much clearer than before. This sharpness of perception didn't stop with his sight, either: all of his senses seemed heightened, the sensory input hitting him like a strike to his head. Disoriented, he attempted to sit up and clear his head - only to be stopped by the metal braces around his arms. A panicky moment passed the recollection of the previous night came to him in bursts of remembrance.
The gas. The bit. His father. His father had done this.
Throwing all of his weight against the bands, he tried to sit up.
"Don't bother. They'll hold." The clipped voice of Norman Osborn echoed in the lab.
"What did you do!"
"Do try to relax." His face came into view and he patted Harry's shoulder. "You're throwing off the machine's measurements."
"Get me out!" He pushed again but the bands failed to budge. He didn't understand quite what was happening and his brain seemed to refuse to process the fact that his father was looming in front of him, happily accepting responsibility. His mind had, however, gone into overdrive with the desire to escape and, inexplicably, find a dark corner in which to hide.
"You see, Harold, this has always been your problem. Such a whiner." He looked at his son distastefully, as if seeing him was enough to remind him of what a disappointment he was.
And despite the circumstances, despite the inherent worry that should have accompanied the entire situation, the look he gave his son made Harry quail and turn away shamefaced.
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be sorry," he snapped. "Do what I need you to do!"
The demands of the previous evening came to the forefront.
"Peter?" He asked uncertainly.
"Peter," came the vicious echo.
"But he's my friend! He hasn't done anything!"
"Besides steal your girl?"
"That's not a reason to kill him!" Harry pressed against the bands, less fervently, though his eyes grew wider. "It's just a... a misunderstanding! Besides, you were the one who was upset I was with her in the first place!"
"With all of those statements showing how much of a naive child you really are. It's not about the girl - it's about you getting what you want. You will never be anything in this world if you let people simply come up to you and take what you have away from you. You need to hold on to it, clutch it to you and refuse to let it go. And for those who cross you," he leered, "then they should learn to never do it again." He turned away sharply to another machine and glanced at the readout. "Besides, this isn't always about you. He refused me, refused the chance I gave him to stand at my side."
"You've killed people," Harry whispered. "At the fair. You killed people!" Nearly including me, his thoughts added silently.
"Oh please. Spare me your moralizing. If you think even one person who's gotten to where I have has lily-white hands then you really are too stupid to deserve to survive in this world. Sadly, Parker is of the same mold and refuses to see reason. You I can at least pity - it was my failure to bring you up properly that has made you so blind and obstinate. Parker however... no, I cannot change him. All I can do is eliminate him."
He sat down on the metal slab and looked down on his son. "Which means you luckily get a chance to redeem yourself. Make up to me all those years of failure, the shame of watching you drop out of school after school, of knowing you'd never be able of following in my footsteps. You can finally make me proud of you."
His finger traced the length of Harry's newly muscled bicep, causing the boy to shudder and turn away.
"I... I can't. Pete's my buddy, I can't!"
The saccharine coaxing expression crumpled into a mask of rage.
"Very well. I have tasks I must attend to." He stood up abruptly and strode towards the exit. "We'll see if perhaps some time alone to contemplate will help you to see reason."
OOO
Even when the overhead lights were shut off the lab was not completely dark. Instead, the glow from the machines cast weird shadows and, as his eyes adapted to th dimmer environment, Harry could see weird shapes, wires and metal racks, out of the edges of his vision, granted a particular strangeness in the half-light he'd been left in that they didn't have when fully lit.
Norman had been gone for ages - hours, at least, though he couldn't say how long as, despite the myriad technologies in the place, a clock was not within his line of vision however he turned. The time in the dark seemed to distort as well and he drifted into sleeping now and again to make the time pass. It didn't seem to matter, however. No matter how long he waited, his father never came.
Time elapsed, however much it was, and Harry began to feel hunger tickling at his stomach, gradually overwhelming the lingering nausea he'd been trying to suppress. As soon as he started to think about how long it had been since he'd eaten, his mouth grew dry as well. The lab even seemed to become colder, as though his body was failing to warm the metal and it was instead chilling him. He wished he'd had a blanket and would have wished for clothing as well, save that the whole 'being undressed' situation was another facet of the entire weird experience that he chose not to focus on, for the sake of his own anxieties. He would have had to go to the bathroom tooe, save for a catheter - another humiliation, Harry felt, that he didn't wish to consider.
His limbs were becoming sore, a feeling that gradually spread throughout his body. He wasn't sure whether it was from the lack of anything to eat or the inability to shift into a more comfortable position or the cold or...
Or whatever was happening to him.
This he tried to ignore as well, though his father's own obviously altered body (and mind?) and, apparently if his father's assertions were to be believed, Peter's made it frighteningly clear that something was going to happen. Every so often, even when his father was not present, the machines would beep as if to remind him of this fact, that his body, fast or slow, was changing.
His senses had changed, that much he knew, and his wrists tingled, not quite an itch but enough to be annoying. If he was stronger, he couldn't tell - the bands never gave no matter how much he pressed and he wondered how long his father might have been planning something like this, for him or for Peter, if such restraints were at the ready. Yet he knew his muscles were more defined, that there was shape and definition where there hadn't been before. He recalled seeing shots of Spider-Man twisting and leaping and wondered if he could do that well. His muscles burned as though they wanted exercise and he longed to try.
There were other, deeper aches and sensations as well, but Harry closed his eyes against them and tried to sleep, tried to have another few hours in which he wouldn't have to think about the sudden, sharp turn his life had apparently taken.
While he fitfully slid to get as comfortable as he could, the minutes and hours ticked on.
OOO
"Are you ready to cooperate now?" Norman looked at Harry with the same contempt he'd worn three nights ago.
By then Harry was pale and the cold seemed to have gotten worse. He wondered if his father had lowered the temperature deliberately to increase his discomfort but he was too exhausted to be angry. His skin was paler and Harry, who'd never gone without a meal in his life, felt as though he were starving. He remembered Peter telling him something about survival rates without water being a week and without food even longer, but he felt this couldn't be true; his body was surely going to pass out or die if he went much longer.
Peter... Peter. A complicated thought.
"Please," Harry begged. "Can I just have something to drink? Or a blanket? It's cold in here."
Norman sighed, exasperated. "As I said, always whining." He looked at Harry's wrists and frowned. "Chaffed. You've been trying to escape." Harry made no reply. "If you had agreed to do what I asked in the first place, this wouldn't be happening."
"If I agreed...!" He turned in spontaneous anger, momentarily outraged at the gall to blame him. Accusations that Norman was the one who'd decided to use him as fodder for an experiment were on the tip of his tongue, but he silenced them when he saw Norman's expression.
As ever, his father held all the cards and getting angry at him would only exacerbate the situation.
Leaning down Norman hissed into his son's ear.
"And if your so-called 'friend' had cooperated, I wouldn't have a need to use you."
There was no logic to his manipulations, Harry knew in the back of his mind. It was all blaming the victims for his own cruelty.
But he was his father. And he held the power. And it was nearly easier to be angry at Peter or himself, displace the anger in the interests of escape.
"You know he hasn't even asked for you. Probably with Mary Jane. He probably doesn't even notice you're missing."
A lie. Peter had come around twice, but there was no reason to let Harry know that.
"How long have I been here?" Harry asked in an uncertain voice.
"Long enough." The less information the better. Let him be disoriented. "I can see you're suffering," Norman's voice dripped with faux-sympathy. "But I am not indifferent to my own son. You needed chastisement - it was for your own good. Agree to be obedient though, and I will undo those and help you to be stronger than ever before, become a man and take your place next to me."
Harry's body convulsed, from cold and from hunger. "I just want out," he begged.
"Promise me Harry," he hissed, his mood abruptly shifting. "I will do nothing if you do not. And do not make an empty promise to get out of this. If you lie to me... if you lie to me boy, I will find you and take you down. And the next time things will be even rougher for you, I promise you that. And I keep my promises."
The danger in his words paled, at least seemingly, to the suffering Harry felt he was going through. "Fine!" He gasped. "Just let me out!"
His father gripped his arm like a vice and Harry felt his nails dig into his arm.
"You'd better not be lying."
The bands snapped open and Harry tried to sit up, yanking out the various tubes and wires connected to him with a jerk. As he did, however, his muscles wobbled and black specks crowded the edges of his vision. Forcing himself upright, he passed out only to be caught by Norman, in whose arms he found himself moments later. He stared up at his father through bleary eyes, contrite when he saw how disgusted his father looked yet again.
"I'm sorry," he breathed. "I haven't..." His head lolled to the side and Norman heaved a sigh, as though it was nothing more than what he'd expected.
"Where would you be," he asked the unconscious boy, "without your father to look after you?"
He stretched him out on a cot, and looked at him with guarded approval. Perhaps he was finally coming around and would prove himself useful. He pulled a blanket around the boy and lowered the lights again, casting him one last look from the doorway, smiling as he shivered under the cloth.
Such potential for perfect genetic combinations, he thought. The serum that had shaped him and the spider that had affected Parker... the delicate features of the only woman he'd condescended to marry and the image he so admired of himself... such scope for narcissism, such possibility...
"You had better not disappoint me again." The warning disrupted the silence as he shut and locked the door.
OOO
