Chapter Text
As life typically goes before everything caves in as though it’s been caught in a sinkhole, the morning that precedes the horror is boring, mundane.
A bit more stressful, but it’s college. What college student isn’t continuously crushed by expectations and class assignments and exams?
Not anyone Harley Keener knows, that’s for sure. Especially not at MIT.
He wakes up like he always does: miserable and tired, his comforter half off the bed and caught around his ankle. Drool crusted in the corner of his mouth, eyes clenched against the one stubborn beam of sunlight that somehow manages to hit his pillow every single morning without fail. Snooze button once, twice, three times before he drags himself out of the tomb he wishes he didn’t have to dig himself out of.
His only saving grace is that it’s a Friday, the anticipated end to a very long week.
Yanks the blackout curtains open with disgust, until his dorm room is bright enough to see but not enough that he has to blink away light residue from his corneas. Picks through his clothes to find something that can pass for clean, because it’s been two weeks since he’s done laundry and he keeps putting it off.
Clothes for the day procured and carried to the bathroom, yank of a stubborn handle and a hiss of displeasure from reluctant machinery. Relatively hot water propelled through the shitty pipes and out the shower head rains on the mat in a pathetic dribble because the water pressure in this place is ass. He brushes his teeth in the shower to feel like he’s accomplished some modicum of self-care.
Thin towel, wet to damp to dry skin. Slips on clothes, laments about the moist state of his shirt collar from his towel-dried hair though he has little motivation to do much to resolve the issue.
Glances at the clock— shit, must’ve been longer in the shower than he thought— tugs on beat-up sneakers, and barely manages to unplug his laptop from its charger and throw it in his bag before he’s stumbling out the door.
His first class, Computational Cognitive Science, would be more interesting if it wasn’t at eight in the morning and he didn’t usually pass out for the night until after three. He tries his best to pay attention and take notes, but he’s relieved when the class finally lets out at noon.
An hour to grab lunch with friends, and he’s in his second (and final) class of the day for another four hours. At this school, everything in your life revolves around education and classwork. As much as he loves it most of the time, he’s fucking tired.
The trek back to his dorm takes ages in the frigid December cold, a dusting of snow over the campus like a snow globe. He’s wearing a zip up over a long sleeve shirt; he briefly resents his past-self for not grabbing the warm winter jacket hanging on his bed post. With finals and the end of the semester approaching with a speed only dreaded events seem to do, he really should know better.
By the time he gets back to his dorm, the thought of going outside is so abhorrent that he resolves himself to doing homework in his room. Usually he’ll go to the library or a study room with Elliot and his boyfriend if they’re free, or over to one of the other dorms to meet up with Logan and the rest of his small friend group.
Although he doesn’t know it at the time, this decision is the first, crucial event in a long line of them.
Harley’s two hours deep and three-quarters through a research paper when one of his professors email him feedback on an assignment. Normally he’s not a fan of criticism, but this school’s definitely made him get used to it fast.
So, instead of ignoring it, he clicks on it like the good student he aught to be.
He’s wincing from his own academic decimation by harsh commentary when another email sent a minute earlier catches his eye.
It’s from Tony, which is odd. Why send an email when he could just call? Better yet, text? It’s rare that Harley checks his email to begin with.
Marked as important with the subject line: Classified— Do Not Open
No other text, no explanation for such a cryptic headline except for a video attachment.
It’s not a news report, not even a YouTube video— just a plain black screen, unassuming. It’s suspicious, but whatever. Tony wouldn’t send him a goddamn virus or anything.
Harley has too many things to worry about—this paper, finals coming up, a presentation for his psychology class to prepare for, a meeting with his college friends tonight when they get off work. He really shouldn’t, he doesn’t exactly have the time.
And yet—
He checks the clock— he can spare a few minutes, it’ll be a nice break from the work he’s been doing for hours. He’s exhausted, needs a hiatus from the monotony.
The college student clicks on the thumbnail, pulls the video to full screen.
The camera’s set up in a bedroom— a teenager’s, it looks like.
Judging by the general Star Wars theme, Harley would guess that it’s Peter’s. There are scattered LEGOs on the floor, stray pieces of salvaged electronics on the desk. Despite the mess, the place is clean, organized. The bed’s got blue sheets— different ones, not the ones he had at the Tower.
Harley’s never been to the Parker’s apartment, but he’s got a growing suspicion that this might just be Peter’s actual bedroom.
Despite knowing he’s never seen it, there’s something off about the room, but the teen can’t figure out what it is.
A young boy— Peter— slinks into the room, gaunt and pale. He pauses in the center of the screen for a moment, and his pupils dart around, nervous.
Standing by himself in the middle of the room, he looks like a ghost; out of place, as if he’s occupying the scene of a crime that hasn’t been committed yet.
A time stamp in the corner displays 19:37, dated 11/15/2016.
Eight years ago. Right around the mess of the Accords, the Avengers cracked and splintered into a civil war and a traumatic trip to Siberia. A fight at an airport, a recently-mutated child recruited far too young for a fight against trained soldiers.
Which means—
This kid can’t be more than fourteen.
He clenches his eyes shut, throat bobbing around a rough swallow. Stilted steps towards the bed; he clambers up and perches on the edge, facing the camera.
He must spot the recording device, because something dark passes through his gaze, there and then gone in a moment. His jaw clenches, relaxes. His muscles roil under his skin, jerking his shoulders up to his ears and back down. A turbulent ocean contained within the confines of his flesh.
Something’s got him terrified, knee jerking in place under the stress of his sitting position. His face twitches, quick flash of irises as his attention jumps rapidly from one thing to another. Possibly searching for a defense or weapon, more likely an escape route. The rest of him is still— too still.
Peter can barely sit without moving on a good day, but this kid is strung like a taut rubber band: tight and careful, a projection of calm and stability. A facade.
Confused, Harley goes to click out of the video. He doesn’t know what weird prank this is, sending him a younger version of the teen he thinks of as his brother, but he wants no part of it.
(Although he loathes to admit it, he didn’t have the best relationship with Peter when they first met.
He’d come to the Stark’s with the last tatters of his life back in Tennessee clutched in his bruised fists, searching for the superhero whose life he saved— hoping beyond hope that that superhero would return the favor. And instead, he’d walked into a bright-eyed kid who’d all but replaced him in Tony’s life, a billionaire with none of the harsh edges and emotional ineptitude that he’d first met, and a fiancée that intimidated him more than she didn’t.
Parker was a whetstone; sanded Tony down and sharpened him up, carved him into a father and mentor and—
Harley didn’t even know who the older man was anymore, could recognize hardly anything of the pretentious asshole that crash-landed in the middle of the south. Couldn’t figure out how the country boy— sharp-edged and angry and so so lost— fit into his life anymore.
Peter was everything he was, and even more that he wasn’t— the kid was smart as a whip, interested in physics and chemistry and robotics, had all of the sass but none of the malicious intent. He was kind where Harley was brash and rude, had more faith in humanity in his hair follicles than Harley had in his entire body. And better yet— the younger teen was a goddamn superhero, out there with Iron Man instead of just watching him on the news.
He’d hated him on principle, hated him more as he’d gotten to know him. Jealous and angry and bitter, he’d been an asshole to the kid, resented him for existing, for stealing his mentor away from him. Had brushed off every peace offer, every opportunity to improve their tedious relationship.
Harley had been angry and hurt and betrayed, and he wanted to stay that way, thank-you-very-much.
It wasn’t until after The Blip— until the kid had come back from the dead, and Tony had almost died on a decimated battlefield, and despite every reason he had not to, Peter had sobbed into Harley’s shoulder in a cold hospital waiting room— that the ice around his ribcage had thawed and given way to warmer waters.
Five years of watching his dad grieve and the birth (and subsequent toddler years) of Morgan, and Harley finally figured out how to share the attention with another kid and understand that that didn’t make him less of a priority to either of his parents. He just wished that he’d realized it sooner.
And Peter, as he would later confess, understood Harley a little better too— introduced into a completely new dynamic, unsure of his place in the family that he had been ripped away from. They reached an understanding, and were learning to navigate a new relationship.)
It’s the first time he’s been able to call Peter his brother without feeling like he’s lying through his teeth.
Even still, seeing this version of his brother— an age where he remembers nothing but a haze of layered hurt and an anger so vast that wading against the current seemed to do nothing but carry him downstream— makes some of that old resentment pool behind his sternum.
More prominent is the realization that this child is so so tiny, trembling with a poorly-concealed fragility that he’d done everything to look past the times that he’d ground the glass fragments of Peter’s altruism under his heel.
He doesn’t know the purpose of this home-video, and he wants no part of any attempt their dad has to solidify their relationship. The two siblings can work it out themselves; Harley’s not incapable of repairing damage, he doesn’t need help.
A few seconds, and the kid flinches back, head snaps towards the entrance of the room.
A shadow slowly wells up under his gaze, cohesion of ink and mounting tension swells and slips closer to the bed. The monochrome chalk-outline silhouette of a larger body, distorted and languid in its gradual expansion.
It pauses in the doorway, just out of frame. Contemplating, perhaps.
Broad shoulders through the threshold, ash grey suit jacket and soft thud of expensive dress shoes. Tony saunters on screen, unhurried and peering around with a disdain he doesn’t even attempt to conceal. A king visiting a lesser, underwhelming dominion.
Harley isn’t sure why he’s surprised, why he expected anyone else. Maybe because the circumstances are strange, maybe because he’d never really asked how the two superheroes had met. Maybe because this part of their relationship was theirs, sacred and unaltered by outside perspective.
It still stops him, piques his interest enough to pull his thumb back from the space key. Something about the rigidity of his father’s shoulders, the smarmy air of a businessman walking into a room like he owns it.
He’s never seen the superhero so obviously supercilious and hungry; radiating this authoritarian power, every sharp edge a serrated blade. The man comes into frame like a loaded pistol, like a shark hunting fresh blood in the water.
It’s everything that he hates about Tony’s professional colleagues— reflected at every gala and charity event, every business meeting Harley attends with his parents as the heir to Stark Industries— superimposed onto his father like a warped mirage.
Peter’s small, too small, against the bedsheets. His eyes are downcast, fingers twisted in the blankets with a loose fist. His eyes flit over to the camera, up to his mentor, then back to his knees. “You’re recording?”
Tony stops in front of the boy, back towards the camera and face hidden in shadow. He’s towering over Peter, still sitting on the bed with his feet tucked up under himself. A child awaiting punishment for a well-intentioned wrongdoing.
“It’s just insurance, Petey,” the man reassures, all rough gravel under an eighteen-wheel semi-trailer. A palm settles down on the kid’s shoulder, kneading at the muscle even as the recipient squirms at the contact. “Like last time. I’ll delete it when we’re done, ‘kay?”
Last time?
Something sick takes root in his sternum, writhing with unease. Tony doesn’t do tactile displays of affection, and Peter has a blatant aversion to unauthorized touch. The fact that the mechanic has a bruising grip around his collarbone is unsettling, not to mention that the kid is letting him do it even though he looks profoundly uncomfortable.
It’s a jarring sight; his adoptive father is many things, but he isn’t this. Never this egotistical, never machiavellian.
Tony shows up to business meetings in sweatpants, for god’s sake. He detests the inherent sovereignty that comes from the life he was raised into; he loves the attention, yet despises the control of decision-making. The influence over others, knowing that some people will do what he says because they’re afraid of what will happen if they don’t.
Watching him use it, now, on one of his children—
Peter’s brow furrows, no less suspicious; he’s not mollified by the half-assed explanation. The apprehensive glint of his eyes reveals thinly-veiled skepticism— whatever was recorded on the other video, the teen didn’t believe it had been erased.
The billionaire laughs under his breath, hand creeping up a pale column of throat to stroke at the thready pulse. It’s possessive, the way it lingers for a beat before ghosting up to caress Peter’s jaw. “Oh, relax. It would be a shame if I got rid of it. I’m doing us both a favor.”
When Tony reaches up to thumb at his lips, the young boy’s mouth parts with little resistance. The digit slides in, worms its way to rest between Peter’s front teeth. “‘Sides, you’re so pretty like this. Could be a little whore with these lips.”
Oh.
Oh fuck.
Harley punches the pause button so fast it makes him lightheaded, dizzy. A distant nausea settles in his abdomen, the sharp tang of bile at the back of his throat.
The abject horror has started to exponentially multiply somewhere in his chest, vile disgust at even the insinuation of the scene in front of him, the words dropped no less palatable than an atomic bomb in the couple feet between Harley and his laptop screen.
He can’t watch this. He can’t fucking watch this.
It has to be some sort of joke, though anyone would have a substantial amount of trouble finding any humor in such an accusation.
There has to be a reasonable explanation for this other than the obvious. There has to be.
The college student isn’t sure what compels him to keep watching— perhaps some morbid curiosity; oil, slick and slipping through the crevices in his brain matter.
Maybe the blanket of disbelief, tucked around a shrieking hope that’s desperate to prove his deductions wrong. If he keeps watching… there’s still time for this to slip into something safe and familiar and not—
The young boy jerks at the touch. The offending finger slips out; content, it seems, to curl back around the jut of his chin. He tenses, a coiled live wire, a rabbit poised and ready to bolt into the underbrush.
Harley feels something in his chest shrivel when Peter forces his body to relax one muscle at a time. The motions are stilted, unnatural. He might not know much about Peter’s enhancements, but he knows enough to recognize the shiver of alarms shrieking danger and jolting down his brainstem from his sixth sense.
He looks past Tony’s shoulder towards the door, irises glazed over like corrupted film. “May—“
”—is at her hospital shift for another couple hours. You think I’d be doing this if I knew she would be here soon?” Sardonic, teasing. The older man leans forward, drops his voice into a crooning whisper. Like a secret, “Not like she’d care much anyways— Einstein.”
The kid’s face goes blank and any visible color drains from his cheeks, hollow absence under a wax paper mask. “How— how do you know about t-that?” Though his eyes are vacant, his lip quivers, breaths shallow as concrete rattling around in his chest.
Harley’s never seen someone dissociate in real time, and the back of his throat burns with rising acid. It’s going to be his own personal shadow, his own ghost haunting him whenever he feels his own mind slip into something just left of present.
He’s going to picture this moment, this expression, for the rest of his life.
“Please,” he scoffs. The superhero waves it off like an errant gnat, deems the question unworthy of his attention. “I research the people I associate myself with.”
Tony seems to take a moment to reconsider, rocks his head back and forth like he’s trying to crack his neck. ”Gotta say, I expect a better performance this time, now that I know you’re an expert.”
Peter’s shaking his head minutely, stiff features giving way to mounting terror. His eyes are shining, wet and glossy in the lowlight of the room. “You— you said I wouldn’t— I didn’t have to— again?”
“I know I did baby, but…” Tony’s fingers tighten on his jaw, thumb caresses his cheek in some sick imitation of affection. “That was before the ferry incident. I’m still not convinced you’ve earned it back.”
Peter’s face crumples inward, and the tears— suspended by nothing but sheer willpower— don’t so much fall as they do break. “But I— a-and you said I was— was good—“
A weighted pause as he visibly tries to wrangle in the emotional display, a show of weakness in the presence of a greater threat. Hesitant, like he knows better than to say anything but can’t help himself:
“Sir, I—“ He shirks away, but the billionaire’s firm grasp hasn’t left his chin. His broad shoulders are still to the camera, but whatever expression he makes pins the teen in place.
A deer in the headlights, a young boy at the bottom of a flooding well. The tipping point, suspension over canyon, running straight over the edge right before you look down— the moment right before all hope is lost. “Please, please don’t, I don’t— didn’t— want it— and, and it was an accident I swear, I didn’t mean for—“
The backhand is loud, a gunshot in a stagnant forest. It cracks, harsh and fast, and Peter topples over like a waterlogged tree trunk. His lips are crushed between his teeth, bloodless, and not a single sound slips past them.
Harley startles with it, feels the phantom sting as if it’s his own cheek. His own bloodied tissue, his own choked back whimper.
Tony drags the boy back into place by his hair. Heavy and metallic, dangerous: “This isn’t a punishment, it’s a privilege. You get to earn it. Do you know how many people would kill to be where you are right now?”
Hiccups and strangled breathing, darkening skin and wide, wide eyes. Peter’s a new shade of unresponsive now; learned slack in the rope, familiarity with taking punches.
This isn’t— right. Not that any of this is, but… this kind of reaction, it’s taught. How many times has he—?
Tony sighs, tension draining from his back as he slumps forward a bit. He tentatively prods at the reddening of the teen’s cheek with a thumb. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have hit you.” Soft, condescending, the way he knows Peter hates: “But it just doesn’t seem like you’re very grateful for everything that I’ve given you. Do you know how many whores I’ve paid less than this? They were much more appreciative of the gifts I gave them.”
Peter’s shoulders hunch up around his ears as he’s chastised, soft keen in the back of his throat. Even as he collapses into himself, he’s trying to assure his mentor: “No— of course I— thank you, thank you for the suit, I didn’t mean to—“
”It’s okay, baby.” The billionaire soothes, traces his thumb over Peter’s eyebrow and down under his eye to wipe some of the moisture off of his face. It’s an intimate gesture, and Peter nuzzles into the touch like a dog starved for gentle comfort, whimpering and eviscerated in an alley. “I forgive you. You just have to do something for me, and this all goes away.”
Desperate to please, the kid practically jumps at the chance to make it up to him. “Please sir, I’m— um, I’ll do any— what do you need— need me to do?”
Harley wants to tear the expression off his face, re-write his muscles until they forget how to make himself look like a willing participant in his own ruination.
Hand tangled in his curls, tugging him down, down— his knees hit the ground with an audible thump, muffled by the carpet. Tony’s a giant, larger than life as he reaches for his belt. He makes quick work of the buckle, deft fingers and pliant leather. “Show me how appreciative you can be.”
The young superhero is trembling, teeth clenched and gaze settled on the ground as fabric rustles, the quiet hiss of a zipper. Peter nods faintly, vaguely robotic. Disconnected, heavy preservation in a thousand-yard stare.
“Open.” Thumb at the seam of his lips, a mockery of earlier, the obedient slackening of his jaw. An appreciative hum, “Good. So good for me, sweetheart.”
As the older man guides his head up, forward, the boy’s hands are fisted around the hem of his sweatshirt— one of Tony’s, from his time at MIT.
That’s his— that’s Harley’s school emblem, the fucking college he chose because it’s his dad’s alma mater.
The college student can’t count on both hands how many items in his own fucking dorm that has that graphic on it, and suddenly the thought of being here for another goddamn second has him desperate to crawl out of his own skin. His very presence here suddenly feels like a cosmic joke, like the universe fucking laughing at him for being so complacent in his brother’s violation.
The sight of it is the final straw; worn and soft and so evidently taken care of. When he realizes what he’s doing, the younger teenager on screen unclenches his fists, smooths down the fabric in silent apology. Even now, careful, cautious.
He’s got that exact sweatshirt tucked in his dresser back at home, used it to comfort himself for the past however-many years.
Harley, sitting at his desk with numb thighs and a foot that feels like television static, registers dimly that he must be in some state of shock; every emotion is muted, just out of reach. The only one he can get a firm grasp on is vehement denial.
There’s still another thirteen minutes, but Harley can’t—
He doesn’t want to see his— his brother—
But Peter— Peter might have lived this. And if that’s true, has to wake up every day with this in his head, in the dark behind his eyelids when he lies in bed at night.
The least Harley can do is stay there with him through it, supporting him through blurred vision. He can’t abandon him like this.
He won’t.
So he keeps watching, listens to the parts that he’s too much of a coward to watch, which is a lot of it. As much as he hates himself for it, the thought of watching, of having to store the visuals in his hippocampus, is something he loathes more.
When it’s over, when it cuts off with a final pained whine and he’s staring blankly at the last sickening image, he slams the laptop shut so fast and violent that the screen cracks.
What a solitary manifestation of atonement— the act of lamenting the state of your own sneakers while collapsed in the skeletal wreckage of a detonated atom bomb.
Singed shoe-laces and scuffed soles. Pristine white canvas polluted with cinder residue, stained with muddy, cloying ash.
A fractured laptop screen encased in a tomb of disheveled blankets. That last irrevocable image of a boy splayed open for an audience, an unwavering decimation by hands far more tangible than any deity.
(It’s not even relevant in the grand scheme of things, but he distantly wonders about the aftermath: did Tony comfort Peter in the wreckage, tug on the puppet-strings to further ensnare the boy in his web of manipulation?
Did he leave him there to clean himself up, used and discarded like an idle plaything, to make himself presentable for his aunt’s arrival?
How long did it take to pretend like nothing happened? That his stomach didn’t lurch with warning bells in the presence of his mentor, forced to shove anything but blind faith and devotion to the back of his mind?
Peter— Peter looked up to Tony, this is his childhood hero, and he used that as an excuse to take advantage of him.)
And then he’s in the in-suite bathroom, coughing up stomach acid and his half-digested lunch. It burns, choking on bile, lungs shuddering in his chest.
It’s been seven years since Harley prayed to god, but this blood rush haze of desperate pleading is the closest he’s come to belief in ages.
His hands are shaking so bad that it throws him back in time— he’s not in his dorm anymore, but a mustard-yellow bathroom in Rose Hill, Tennessee watching his mother’s hands jerk and turn purple while she overdoses on methamphetamine and heroin. He’s watching her fade, shallow breath after shallow breath into numb death rattle.
He feels like that too— his veins are writhing in his wrists like twisted eels, lungs full of dry heat and chemical dependence and slow asphyxiation. He’s trembling out of a cocoon of security and into the thrashing current below.
Collapsing next to the bathtub feels anticlimactic, a moment of weightlessness before the impact that reflects the itch in his collarbones, the deafening humming of his temporal cortex.
Just a minute, and he’ll call someone. Peter, or his mom, or fuck, even Tony. Get some fucking explanation for this.
The ringing in his ears keeps him company while the silence eats away at his certainty like a corrosive acid.
A minute more, he vows.
Just a minute.
As it turns out, he didn’t even need to call anyone: the choice was made for him.
Harley’s phone rings, and it takes a moment for it to even register, a moment longer to pick it up from the bathroom floor and wrangle his fingers enough to accept. The resounding static on the other end threatens to swallow him whole, and he might just let it.
”…Harley?” Pepper’s voice cuts through the white noise, and she doesn’t sound like herself. He listens to her breathe on the other end of the line, a long shuddering exhale. “Sweetie, did you… did you—?”
The words won’t come out the first time, just a scratchy sort-of wheeze. Stale air, cosmic vacuum, migrating glacier— he tries again, coughs this time like that will help anything. ”I watched it.”
For one, fervid moment, Harley wishes that he’d just dismissed the email, kept working on his homework. Never elected to join this monstrous reality in which Tony Stark might be capable of sexually abusing Peter on camera and waiting eight years to send it to their entire family.
Willful ignorance has never been such a compelling siren song luring him out to sea, never tasted so saccharine tucked in his back molars as it does right now.
He’s ravenous for it.
His adoptive mother makes a wounded noise, trapped somewhere between hurt and dismay. Harley can picture her, trying to be professional and distance herself; trying to find the solution, if there even is one. “Okay. I— okay. I’m so sorry, honey. I thought— well. I hoped it might not have been sent to you.”
The world is hazy, doesn’t even feel tangible anymore. Everything’s slipping through his fingers, cracking on the skillet like eggshell and runny yolk. “How— why, why’d he send it? Who would—?”
How does he reconcile Tony— his Tony— with someone who would—
“I know this might be a shock.” She’s got her ‘businesswoman’ voice now, the one she uses when she’s dealing with ambassadors and shareholders about sensitive information.
He loathes that she’s using it on him, that she feels the need to— this isn’t a fucking transaction. “But I need to ask— do you think that he—?”
The young adult can’t get the words out fast enough. “No! No, he… Tony would never do— that. He— Pepper, he wouldn’t—“
He wouldn’t, he wouldn’t, how the fuck could he—
”I know, I know.“ She sniffs, and something rustles near the microphone. “We’ll figure it out, just— don’t delete it in case we need it for evidence. Don’t watch it again.”
A new serrated blade, a new kind of gasoline on a white-hot flame: “We don’t need you here.” Another couple beats of deliberation, then a weak, “Keep going to class and finish your homework, you’ve got finals in three weeks.”
The distant, logical part of his mind recognizes this as a preservation tactic; her own attempt to keep him safe from the explosive like they are’t all frozen watching the timer grow closer to zero.
The rest of him is already in the aftermath of detonation, trying to scavenge for scraps of the life he’s trapped in the ruins of.
“Fuck that, mom.” Harley bristles, outrage just on the brink of his peripherals. The thought of going back to homework after this, taking finals after his entire world just fell into a thrashing ocean, is comical. “I’m coming back home. I can’t just sit here!”
Pepper doesn’t seem very surprised, just resigned. She doesn’t even scold him for swearing. “Fine. You want me to send a suit for you?”
The college student hums, finally wrangles himself into somewhat of a standing position. His voice is leather-tough, hoarse. “Send the suit, I’m not sure I can drive right now.”
”Okay, honey. I’ll dispatch it now.” Keyboard clicking, FRIDAY’s low tenor muffled in the background. “Are you in your dorm?”
He sighs, debates just crawling into bed and taking a nap for the next century. “Yeah. Thanks, mom.”
There’s not much else to say, so the crackle of static whispers its own secrets into the fissure that has opened up in the distance between them. It’s a language he has never learned how to speak.
They exchange their goodbyes as if the parting words are over-produced trading cards, like both participants are pretending like they’re worth something more than loose change and hollow debts.
Harley ends the call, feeling like she’s robbed him of something much more valuable than repetitive sentiment and counterfeit currency.