When he woke from the nightmare, he found he could not see anything, and panicked. He moved his hands to touch his face and felt something tug in his arm.
"He's awake," a disembodied voice said from somewhere to his left. "Doctor Octavius, please, don't move. You'll rip out the IVs. Calm down. You've been in a serious accident." Otto let out a deep, guttural moan, all the pain slowly beginning to throb through his body.
"What happened to me? What happened in the lab?" he managed, laying his arms back by his sides. He heard someone else shuffling around the room, and then someone touched his brow with something cold. It stung, and he flinched, turning his head sharply to the side and gritting his teeth. There wasn't a part of his body that didn't ache.
"There was an accident at the lab last night, Doctor. You sustained chemical burns all over your body. Thankfully, we were able to treat most of them. Your eyes, I'm afraid, took a lot of the damage. You should be able to see, but not without some form of eye protection at all times. I'm going to remove the bandages now. Do not open your eyes until I tell you to," the voice explained. Otto felt a release of pressure around his head as the gauze was removed, and another stinging sensation as the air hit his closed eyelids. He fought the temptation to rub at his eyes. Someone slid a pair of silver-black sunglasses over his face.
"Alright, doctor. See if you can open your eyes." Otto did, and was pained to see everything was blurred and strangely gray. He blinked several times and leaned forward, cupping his forehead in both hands. His eyes itched something fierce.
"It's blurry. Tell me this isn't permanent." Otto tried to imagine what life would be like seeing everything as though it were some kind of gray and black negative. The doctor to his right cleared his throat before answering.
"You've just suffered extreme eye trauma, doctor. Give it time. Your eyes need time to readjust, and to some extent, heal." He didn't sound optimistic. Otto's fear was beginning to turn into another emotion, burning deep inside, beneath the pain of his burns. It was anger.
Someone else was responsible for this.
Sour grapes, Otto.
No. This is worse. This…this is mutilation. Intentional. Otto clenched his jaw tightly.
Suddenly he felt something else. A foreign sense. He wasn't sure at first, what it was. But then he remembered the sensation. All the blood seemed to drain from his head and pool in his stomach as he looked down and slowly pulled the hospital sheet down, past his chest, to reveal heavy pink scarring all along his abdomen. Below that was the belt section of the device he had been using at the lab. The arms…were still attached to him? Oh Jesus…it had melted into his flesh. Otto's mouth worked but nothing came from his lips.
Finally he got the words out.
"Why….why are these still on me!? Get them OFF! I…I can't believe you left them on me! Get them off now!" he demanded shrilly, aware of every movement the arms made. One slinked along the wall, seeming to examine the electrical equipment stacked on the floor. The others snaked around in the air, wavering and unsure, flexing the clawed fingers one at a time. The two doctors in the room exchanged nervous glances as the nearest doctor crossed his arms.
"We, uh. We couldn't remove them, Doctor. By the time the medical team reached you in the lab, the electrodes in the metal spine had already fused to your own spinal cord. Removing it would kill you. Perhaps in time, we may figure out how to remove them…" Otto stared out into the room in disbelief.
"I…can't believe you. You left these on me. You intentionally left these on me!" he said, his voice cracking despairingly. He heard a voice from the side of the room and twisted around violently. It was a man dressed in a fine looking suit, holding a cell phone and wearing an Oscorp ID tag on his breast pocket.
"Doctor, please, calm down. We all understand you've been through a lot. But this is a great opportunity for the other scientists to study how the arms can be used for purposes other than mixing volatile chemicals at a distance. We wanted to test them, you see, and now it seems the perfect time to do so." Otto felt like his entire world was crashing down around him. Everything he'd ever done was burning away into this nightmare. Test them? They wanted to TEST them?! He reached over and grabbed the lapels of the man's jacket, pulling him closer.
"Do you know what you've DONE? You've RUINED my life! Did your superiors even consider that? You're the ones who did this to me! You put those chemicals in with my experiment! Is that how far you're willing to GO?! I wouldn't hand over the official plans for the design, so you decided to test them out on a human being?!!" The representative pushed himself away from Otto and brushed his jacket off smugly, backing away from two of the arms which had seemingly focused on him, glints of light flashing from the center of their claws. The snapped open and shut menacingly.
"Doctor, you yourself are a man of science. Of course you can understand the pursuit of knowledge in this field. Imagine how many tasks dangerous to people could be done using these arms? We simply wanted to test –"
Suddenly enraged, Otto managed to rock forward to his knees in the hospital bed, blinding pain ripping through his entire body at the sudden movement. The sensation of the metal spine fused tightly to his back was terrible, and he faltered for a moment before spreading his arms wide, letting the metal appendages stand out from his body in wide arcs.
"Look what you've DONE to me!" he yelled savagely, snatching the doctor to his left with one of the arms. The man screamed and his hands flew to grab at the metal arm, but it did no good. With a sharp twist, the mechanical arm easily snapped the doctor's neck and let him fall to the floor, immediately turning its attention on the other doctor. Terrified, the doctor standing near the door turned to run and found himself skewered by one of the arms. Otto ripped the arm free of the body and watched it slump to the floor.
Blood trickled down the arm and dripped onto the floor and bed. The other three arms seemed to be looking at the fourth curiously, focusing on the blood running in rivets along the edges of each segment in the arm. Then they all focused on the agent, who was standing, too shocked to move, at the other end of the room. Otto swayed forward on the bed, looked at the mess on the floor beside him, and slowly wiped his hand across his face, his expression confused, as if he weren't aware of what he was doing in the room.
His hand came back streaked with the doctor's splattered blood. His stomach churned and he clenched for his belly, only to feel the foreign metal belt encasing his flesh. Whimpering in pain he doubled over, retching onto the floor. The representative was plastered against the far wall, his eyes wide with terror as he babbled to barter for his life.
"Please, we can work this out, please – " Otto looked up, wiping his mouth with the back of his bloodied hand. His expression was one of a man who had snapped.
"Be quiet. You just…shut…up. You have absolutely no idea…what you've done." Slowly he clambered off of the bed, stepping in the blood pooling on the hospital room floor. He stumbled closer to the man, slipping in the crimson puddle, leaning on two of the arms for support as his legs gave out. The other two tentacles looked at the agent, their slight swaying motions vaguely reminiscent of a cobra about to strike. Otto reached up and slowly pressed the sunglasses further up the bridge of his nose.
"You wanted to see what they could do, didn't you? Isn't that the point of this? Wanted to see just what kinds of new tasks they could perform?" he growled, slowly looking up into the eyes of the terrified man who flinched under his gaze. One tentacle suddenly snapped out, clenching the man around the neck, and threw him across the room, his body slamming into the curtained window. Glass shattered as he fell to the floor with a muffled scream. The man tried his best to scoot further away from the arm, which was watching him. He was whimpering now, touching the back of his head and staring in horror at the blood on his fingers. Otto's face had lost all emotion as he stared down at him.
"Please, please don't…I have a wife…" he blubbered. In a flash of silver, one of the metal arms shot out and grabbed his head, slowly crushing his skull, silencing his screams. Blood ran down the arm and dripped on the floor. The tentacle held the man against the wall a moment longer, then let him slump to the floor. Otto turned his head away from the corpse, staring at the crimson mess spreading across the tile floor until his eyes glazed over. Slowly he clambered out of the room, still feeling disoriented and sick.
Every twisting motion of the arms sent pain up and down his back, and he ground his teeth against it.
He made his way down the hall of the deserted hospital wing built into the laboratory. He stopped when he came to the billboard posting news articles and topics of interest. There was a front page of a newspaper pinned on the corkboard. Otto leaned forward to examine it. The top-most two arms also peered at the photograph. He was beginning to see a little clearer now.
It was Spiderman.
The teenage boy who had acquired amazing powers when bitten by one of the test tube spiders in the chemlab. It was kept under wraps and only a select few had been partial to the confidential information on the situation – the last thing Oscorp wanted was the news crawling all over his manufacturing plants and chemical warehouses. Everything from DNA samples to what kind of shampoo this kid used was put under lock and key. Osbourne himself had demanded his team find a way to duplicate the effects, but they hadn't been successful. In fact…that was what he had been working on when the explosion occurred.
Spiderman.
He reached out and touched the photo of Spiderman, who was captured mid-swing over a street in the lower city. With one swift motion, he ripped the page from the wall and crumbled it in his fist.
"Spiderman. He was a victim too. But look at this. He has a secret identity. No one knows what he really is. Myself, however. You can't hide something like this, can you?" One claw snapped shut as if to prove a point. Otto started to laugh but stopped as he felt the dull throbbing pain intensify. He gripped the belt around his abdomen and hunched over, ready to become sick again. "No. No, I'm afraid you can't really hide this. Not like Spiderman. No one knows what he is. He doesn't have to worry about that, does he?"
Otto carried himself down the hall, leaving prints wherever the claws touched down on the tile floor. He continued to mutter to himself until he was out of the building, looking first to the parking lot, then out towards the lights of the city glittering in the earliest light of dawn.
"I know who you are, though. I remember you, boy..."
Otto started towards the city, moving slowly at first, tentatively carrying himself on the tentacles before swiftly moving across streets and quiet alleyways before finally scaling buildings and going from rooftop to rooftop. The pain was still there, but fading now. It was a strange feeling. Every time one of the arms landed a foothold, he felt more aware of every sensation and movement. He pushed his sunglasses further up his nose.
"Fascinating…" he murmured, a strange smile curling his lips.