song for isabelle
“she looks up to me and whispers, I wont be here in a year.”
parksborn - word count - 548
TW - SELF HARM, ANGST
-
It’s his. Everything becomes it eventually, his.
His thumb brushes the underside of his jaw. He has himself now. The embrace of his fingers curling into his stubble. The stubborn edge of a blade slicing through his cheek.
All his. A living thing. He is alive, yes, but barely. Tearing around in his fucking collared button up, blood stained; careless as the nicotine allows him to be. But at his best, at least he is not sad.
He washes the blade off in the water. Watches with bated breath as the petals of blood flurry sultrily into the drainage. It stains the stage red, but he wipes it off with his hand and the cut has stopped bleeding and there's no reason to pretend anymore.
Osborn imagines for a moment that the hand at his cheek is not his own at all. He doesn't think too much on whose it might be, but he leans into it all the same.
He imagines it's Parker’s. The tap runs cold. He keeps his hands under the faucet, as if it could deluge whatever’s been keeping him up at night, (he knows exactly what, he just doesn't voice it- hands wrapped around his throat).
It burns. The cold water feels like shrapnel over his skin. But he’s grown used to it; doesn't try to dodge his fathers punches anymore. He’s not an Osborn for nothing.
He doesn’t try to fight him. Doesn’t try to fight himself when he dresses, hands still shaky and blood-covered, buttoning his shirt.
It reminds him of when he was a kid, struggling to tie a tie around his neck. When his father helped him strangle himself. Harry never knew if he did it willingly or not.
It was a memory Osborn knew he could never get back. He knew a lot of things he stubbornly clung too- and still, could never get back.
Like-
No.
Peter is dead. Peter Parker is dead.
And with it, Harry Osborn has died too. Barely pieced together.
Osborn knows it, a vestige somewhere in the vat of his mind. He does not acknowledge it. The rotting skin at his forearm, the scabbed over, burnt flesh.
He lights a cigarette. Peter used to tell him to stop smoking, and he had, for a good while. But the hoarseness of his voice disproves any of those old ambitions. And his Father hadn't known enough to care.
Harry taps the ash on his forearm, watches it form a divot. He’s next to the Hydrangeas and Tulips and whatever other memoriam flowers oughta be in there. The cheap bouquet he got with half of a working mind before it rotted on the shelf.
It burns. This time like fire. And Peter tastes like the soot, the aftermath.
Harry exhales. Smoke curls lazily from his lip. It covers his face, his nose. He can barely see himself from within the grey shroud.
Osborn supposes it is better like this, as the divot forms pus. He deserves this. He’s been a bad kid. He still is, sneaking out to Peter’s grave, to which his father wholly disapproves.
He doesn't mind. It's the punishment before the remediation. And with that, he taps the ash, closes the door behind him, and heads to the corpse of Peter Parker.
