Hollow Man (ficlet covering Tuesday night and Wednesday)

[abetterlie]

Somewhere, sometime, in one of your lives, someone told you a story. You cannot remember who anymore, or which life. Sometimes, these things run together. It is a story about a man who hands over his heart to be eaten, bit by bit, by someone who uses a spoon, and when it is all used up, the hollow place inside is filled with glass.

You don't remember who told you, but you do remember the feeling.

It is not there yet on Tuesday night. You find a hotel, and then, while you check in, Harry gets a phone call from Kara. He doesn't talk about it when he comes back to the hotel room, and you don't ask; it occurs to you that you haven't told him why you went to Boston yet, as Kara hasn't given you the liberty to do so, and maybe that's redundant now. So many things are. You don't say something about that, either. Neither of you says much during the first hours or so, you just hold each other, and you remember Boston, arriving there after weeks on the run. He held you like that then. At some point during the night, he starts to talk about Bailey and daily walks and having forgotten to sent those flowers to Elizabeth for the Saturday outburst and where to buy them and which flower. Little things. It's everything. That's when the feeling starts. Of course, what the story doesn't say is that the man gives his heart to be fed on from his own free will. Give me your pain, she had said, and your wounds had appeared on her skin. You wish you could do that for Harry, but you can't, and so you give your replies and promises and those bits and bits from your heart instead, and hope it will sustain him, and most of all you hope that somehow, it will be enough to make him change his mind.

All the arguments he used why this was necessary are true, but you were always better at believing lies.

The reality you want to believe in changes after the early morning hours, after you make love, when you are in that strange state between utter awareness and utter exhaustion and think that maybe you have learned how to do Jasmine's trick after all because you aren't quite sure anymore where your skin ends and his begins. In your reality, the two of you decide that Peter Parker can deal with Green Goblin on his own and that whatever poison runs through Harry's veins can be dealt with without any outside interference, and you take the car and drive north together and abandon it somewhere in the New England woods. In your reality, you find a place where no one can track you down, and it isn't a slaughterhouse, and it isn't a Greek Island, and it isn't another dimension. Just a place were you are able to keep your promises and protect him, always.

In that other reality, you watch him make phonecalls which usually have him handing over the phone to you sooner or later on Wednesday morning, and then there are papers and websites advertising what looks horribly like vacation resorts but were prisons, no matter how sugarcoated, and he and you both know it, and by the time you bring him to Silver Hilll, just an hour away from New York, and they tell you to leave in that ever so practiced gentle manner doctors have, that place inside is nearly all hollow and ready for the glass.

There are certain advantages to being an automaton, and you remember them well by late Wednesday afternoon. You're back at the penthouse, you tell the staff what needs to be said because an automaton can do that, you take Bailey out for a walk, and you think. Without any fears, without any sorrow, without anything but that icy, cold rage that is the last thing to go. When you're back from the walk, you suit up. With weapons; you certainly have no intention of playing any more games involving masks.

Fact: as you now know, your possession or hypnosis theory in all likelihood is wrong because otherwise, Harry would have been used for the second Goblin attack, and he wasn't anywhere near the Daily Bugle office. Fact: that means whoever is behind this made a personal appearance there. Fact: that someone is in possession of not only the Goblin Glider, suit and mask, but various pumpkin bombs, all items that had be procured and produced anew as those manufactured by Norman still are safely entombed in cement in what used to be Norman's secret lab in the penthouse; you checked. Fact: these items also have to be stored somewhere.

Now, the OsCorp building is an obvious choice, except that Peter Parker has searched that from roof to lowest basement when looking for Harry on Saturday. Still, there has to be an OsCorp connection for a successful framing, and the storage couldn't be far away, either, not when whoever was behind it needed to check on Harry being unconscious at OsCorp before starting the attack on the Daily Bugle, but you have to take into account that the glider allows for flying.

You start asking about rented places where one can store chemicals. Huge storage rooms. Soundproof walls. And soon, "ask" becomes the wrong term for what you do. You think the creature who ends up with one of his arms torn out is a halfbreed demon, but you're not sure, and you don't check anymore. The woman who turns out to have wasted your time and ends staked is a vampire, but the guy who loses his right ear and actually provides a lead is human.

Finally, you have it. Some bomb shelter, a gigantic panic room build by someone after the 9/11 attacks who then promptly had a heart attack and died in bed, with his family moving to Florida and not bothering to sell it. It's not rented, either, according to the papers, except that, well, things were delivered, trucks were seen unloading in recent weeks. Christmas business, people explained. Surely. You're there, and you recognize the smell at once, that scent from the Greek island and from the lab in the penthouse, only not stale, no, not at all. Sharp. There is someone there. Someone who rather obligingly has just suited up as well, only in his case literary, in green, which makes identification easy. Same height as Harry, same build, but this close up, you who have tracked and hunted all kind of beings through most of your life are certain even if you didn't know Harry was currently facing the worst fear of his life, the horror of having committed himself to an institution, you would know it is someone else.

You don't waste time on opening quips or insults. You just charge.

The amused, laughing sound he makes when he spots you lasts about as long as it takes for you to make physical contact. Then there is silence from his side as well, except for quick breaths, trying to avoid your vicious blows, landing some of his own. You didn't have that narrow a vision, that much focus on destruction of just one individual, since beating the man who kept Emily prisoner to death. And so when he seems to come to the conclusion that hand to hand won't do and tries to reach one of pumpkin bombs, you miss entirely that you two aren't any longer alone. You hurl the axe you brought along, a throw aimed to slice of, not his hand, not his arm, but his legs, and a web shoots out and interrupts your axe mid flight.

You whirl around, and sure enough, there he is, Spider-man, come through the door you had kicked open, head tilted in your direction as if he's staring at you in disbelief. It doesn't occur to you until later that Peter probably still assumes at this point it is Harry beneath the green suit. At this moment, you just think, in as much as you think anything, that he has stopped you from finally getting the bastard who is the cause of all this, and in that heartbeat, you don't know whom you want to kill more.

The Goblin, whatever else he is, isn't stupid. He uses the distraction to do what you have successfully stopped him from doing so far, gets on the glider, presses a button and escapes through the window that suddenly reveals itself when a wall starts to part, shattering glass and cement in the process. It takes Spider-man, staring at you, some seconds to realize this and to shoot another web, but this one misses its aim. He runs in the direction of the window, jumps and follows the fastly dissappearing glider. You can't swing between skyscrapers, so you remain where you are. Maybe Peter will catch him, but somehow, you doubt it.

You sink to the floor, look at the splintered glass, take one of the shards and for a moment wonder just where they come from.

Then the hollowness you feel reminds you the glass inside is still there.

Comments

[original-goblin.livejournal.com]

The temperature by the fireplace drops considerably even after Connor has lit the fire. Bailey doesn't seem to mind the cold, but she suddenly jumps up from her place laying at Connor's feet to bark at thin air. She can't see Norman, nor can Connor, but he's smirking at the pup trying to defend her bruised and brooding master. His son is so fond of the puppy that sometimes Norman feels the slightest twinge of guilt for denying Harry a pet when he was a child.

"My first impression of you, after believing that you were merely latching on to Harry for his trust fund, was that you were a fighter. You didn't put up much of a fight to keep Harry out of that institution." Norman says, as he stands behind Connor. "What was it that you told him? You'd do anything but leave him?"