The Harley Keener Villain Complex

Knock Knock- wait why are you pointing a gun at me?

Nobody would be doubting or questioning that, if you lose someone who is truly important to you, getting over their death, their erasure from existence is most certainly not easy. It is a long, ever ongoing process and it is painful.

Accepting Abbie's father leaving was not difficult, it had been a fact that was in need of acceptance and not in need of sadness, he never had the very best relationship with Mihai either way, barely even remembered him, so just continuing his life was not easy but not awful either. At first their mother had tried her best but of course that did not last long. And he understood, stepped up and did his best, men came and went, but that was just how it was. Bruises healed, memories faded until new ones were added. It was just how it was.

Losing his real dad had been a different story, loss overshadowed by the loss of his first love. His first real love. He had not much cared about him and whilst the circumstances had been unfortunate. Had been bad. Had been horrifying even, it hadn't been traumatizing. It had been nothing short of perfectly irritating and inconvenient but not painful.

Tony on the other hand- Tony had always stayed. Stayed through the good, the bad, the ugly, the particularly ugly and whatever worse came after that. He stayed through that and through and all the inbetweens, something that could be said about very, very few people, one other person to be exact and an honourable mention who was his sister who barely knew half the story.

Tony had been nothing less than family. He had also and predominantly been his mentor and his person of trust, a person he could rely on, perhaps a much, much older brother. A constant in his life if you so will. For Harley the one constant of his life was taken. If he wasn't so reluctant to allow people to take on parental roles perhaps he would remember Tony as a father, but he forced himself to push those feelings away. Tony had been his mentor, his uncle, brother, - not his father. It was a question too painful to entertain for him considering that he would never get an answer anyway.

Well- not anytime soon anyway.

Whatever he had or hadn't been to him didn't matter,- not anymore anyway. What mattered was that he was in free fall now that he was robbed of the person who gave him stability in his life by existing.

Meeting Peter Parker was in a way the worst thing that could have happened. He had heard so much about the golden boy, the genius Tony had so eagerly adopted as his science child. Harley by no means was jealous, Tony hadn't been his father and the actual amount of fucks he gave about how much he cared about who was unsurprisingly nonexistent. There was an unspoken bond between them, they had been treated similarly by Tony and as per social obligations Peter probably thought he and Harley could be friends, Gods know Tony was sure they would be. Whenever he had tried to convince Harley of moving to New York where he could attend a STEM school to match his intellect he would always mention Peter as an additional perk because they would get on so well. Harley of course had always denied the offer because his sister needed him and he couldn't abandon her for school. He spent late nights questioning that decision of course but it was in the past. Everything was in the past, his conviction that he and Peter could get along was among those things. He saw just about no way in which them colliding would end well.

He wondered if things could have been different, if he could have ended up different, better. But what had been done had been done.

He was Just 'the other kid' that people remembered faintly in the back of their minds as a child, he had burned many of the bridges he had had during the time of the sokovia accords and the bridges he hadn't burnt were- gone, fallen to dust and into the roaring waves due to a lack of maintenance. In his mind and probably the mind of many others he was just the child who showed up to the funeral with nothing to offer. He was just Harley who had proven to be useless in the fight. He had no powers, nothing but a smart mouth and an attitude. A good for nothing arrogant brat who froze when he shouldn't have. Realistically he knew he had much more than that, held more power. But that power relied on other people and he had learned that power drawn from working with and relying on others was no real power. He was the bad guy, had always been, would always be. He had accepted his role, and the others would learn to do that too.