Otto was plastered against the wall of the bank building, still blinded by the intensely bright light of the morning sun. News crews were fighting the police to get a good shot of the scene while the screaming and hollering increased. They'd never seen Spiderman swing away from a criminal like that. Otto tried desperately to open his eyes, shielding them from the intense morning sun as he looked down. Hazy images of gray were moving about below. It was like watching a negative of a film.

Policemen were yelling at him to come down slowly and keep his hands where they could see them. Otto had to smirk. His hands were the least of their problems. They continued to shout orders as they waved their guns in the air, doing their best to take control of the situation. Julia was screaming for him to come down as a policeman held her back from the group of police cars circling the bank. Unexpected, an image of his mother flashed through his mind, and he flattened himself against the building, surprised to think of her after so long. The cop was holding Julia and shaking her now.

Holding her back. Otto sucked in a sharp breath, realizing what it was he was seeing.

There she was, trembling in his father's grip. He backhanded her across the face. His mother fell, crying out in pain as she covered her busted lip, but he grabbed her arm again and hoisted her up, slamming her repeatedly into the wall as he yelled incomprehensibly about something. Otto stood in the doorway to the kitchen, shaking. He said something.

Otto shut his eyes again, welcoming the darkness. The vision stayed. The sirens turned into screams.

It was his mother. He heard his mother screaming for him to leave her boy alone. Leave him alone! His father towered over him, his entire face enveloped in a twisted snarl. Otto recoiled, backing away as the stench of alcohol overloaded his senses. It burned his eyes, his nose.

"What was that, you useless little shit? What did you say to me!?" he snapped, shoving his son back. Otto tripped over his own feet and scurried into the wall on his back, his throat closing in on him in fear.

"I didn't say anything! I didn't say anything! I swear!" he yelped. His father hefted him into the air with both fists.

"You fat little bastard! Don't you lie to me! I heard you! Don't you TELL ME what to do! I swear to God, Otto, I swear to God if I ever hear you tell me what to do AGAIN, I'll beat you bloody! Do you hear me?! I'll beat you till you can't SEE straight!!!" he roared, throwing the young boy down again. His mother was screaming again. Otto lay still, afraid to move, crumbled against the old family room couch. The screams continued. Sharp sounds of shattering glass exploded from the kitchen as his father threw an empty bottle into a wall.

Stay away from me. More screaming. Leave her alone. Leave me alone. More shattering glass.

STAY AWAY FROM ME!

Otto flinched and opened his eyes as something zipped by his head and exploded into the brick beside him. Immediately sorry he'd opened his eyes, the blinding shock of the intense light stabbing at him again, he squinted down at the crowd. It wasn't shattering glass anymore. Bullets. He looked down, still disoriented. They were shooting at him! His body was numb for a moment, and he screamed in his mind to move. His legs and arms did not respond. Fear raised the hair on the back of his neck. Another few bullets exploded against the bricks beside him.

MOVE!

The tentacles finally reacted when his body did not, violently heaving him up the building side and racing for the roof. The screaming and hollering continued, but this time it was from the crowds below.

Dodging the gunfire that shattered the bricks around him, he fled across the rooftop, half-blind, carrying himself on the tentacles and feeling as if his body had been drained of life.

Stay away from me. Don't touch me! Leave me alone!

Moving faster than he ever had, he raced across the city. Where was he going to go from here? Peter was nowhere in sight. Probably was doing the same thing he was. Running and trying to think of what he was going to do next. It didn't matter. He would eventually have to come back.

Feeling sick and exhausted, he ran across the buildings until he found himself standing weakly atop his own apartment complex in the upper city. As quietly as he could he climbed down the side of the building and forced open one of his windows. As he slipped inside, he thought that maybe it was a bad idea to return here. Would the police look here? He doubted it. Oscorp would do anything to cover up a mistake. They wouldn't involve the police. Not yet.

Otto sank to his knees on the floor of the living room, staring out at the relative darkness of the room. His entire body was trembling with the stress of carrying and moving the arms. They wavered silently around him, a constant reminder that everything that he once was known for…was gone.

Everything he had worked for to make something out of himself.

Did it matter? Did it make your day? Made your mom real proud, didn't it?

Stay away from me. His stomach churned again and he leaned forward, sweat beading along his forehead.

The scientist in him knew that repressed memories could be dredged up from the darkest depths of the mind when a person was subject to extreme trauma. Remembering these things now…when he was least prepared for them…it was tearing him to pieces. He squeezed his eyes shut and brought his hands up to his head, pressing in on his temples and letting out a long hiss of breath.

And what was that infernal SOUND? He could hear it in the very back of his mind, something like quiet static on a television and at the same time, like the deafening silence of an empty room.

Voices, but indiscernible. Whisperings. Otto groaned in agony. The arms clamped onto the sparse furniture around him and stiffened, holding him up. The pain of the burns had dulled, but another more excruciating pain had taken over. Like a needle was weaving in and out of his spine. Like he was being sewn up from the inside.

Voices.

Otto cringed; clasping his head tightly between his hands.

Whispering voices.

"Oh God…stay away from me," he moaned, shutting his eyes again. The arms beside him thrashed wildly, frantically, as if they were anticipating something. Otto wiped his hands down his face and leaned against the couch.

"I'm…I'm losing my mind," he whispered, his parched throat seizing on him. Thirsty. Without another thought, he saw one of the arms whip across the room and into the adjacent kitchen, where it ripped open the refrigerator door violently. It snatched a bottle of water from the shelving and recoiled back into the living room, holding the bottle in front of Otto. Astonished, he could only stare at it. The claws were crushing the bottle.

A reflex. A thought.

Don't crush the bottle.

The claw loosened its grip. Otto blinked. He slowly took the bottle from the claw.

His amazement came not from the response of the claw, but the speed at which it responded. There was no delay from synapse to reaction now. It was as fast as one would snap their hand back from searing heat.

Reflexes.

Otto sat against the couch for a while, all the while staring at nothing, unblinking, unfeeling.

Something clinked in front of him. He looked up.

His father was staring at him.

"All you ever do is mope around this goddamn house and I'm sick of it. I work my fingers to the bone everyday for you two, and look at what I get in return," he father slurred. "A son who won't stick up for himself and a wife who won't do anything about it." There was a quiet clinking sound as his mother set her glass down on the table, keeping her eyes on the plate in front of her.

"You're hopeless," he said, pointing a finger at Otto, who sat across the table, staring at his empty plate. "Sitting around all day, crammed up in your room reading those goddamned books. Never do anything else. You're a real freak of nature, you know that? Can't even count how many times you've gotten the snot beat out of you at school. Didn't I tell you, boy? Didn't I tell you to swing back? Be a man and fight back?" he said, slumping lower in the chair and taking a long swig from the bottle. His mother cleared her throat. Otto kept his eyes trained on his plate, silent and unmoving.

"Otto is going to make something of himself one day, you'll see that. He's so smart. You should see what he can do," she said quietly. His father slowly turned his head to look at her. His expression reflected one of complete astonishment.

"Oh. Is that so? I'd pay to see that." He shifted his gaze to the boy at the end of the table.

"You gonna make something of yourself, huh? That it? Well, the only thing you'll ever be good for, kid, is for the world to shit on. You hear me? You hear me boy? That's life. Get used to it. I sure as hell did." He leaned back in the chair and laughed, dropping the bottle to the floor. Otto didn't dare move, moving only his eyes to follow the bottle across the floor where it stopped against the cabinets. Amber liquid sloshed from the mouth of the bottle, rapidly pooling in the corner. He slowly shifted his gaze to his father, who had passed out at the table. Again. His mother didn't move either, but she looked at him.

She smiled. "Don't you worry about any of what he said, baby. Don't you worry about those sour grapes, alright?" she said quietly, her voice barely a whisper. Otto tried to smile back.

But he couldn't.

He sat up abruptly, cold water dribbling from the bottle onto his bare chest. Suddenly angry, he threw the bottle across the room. It thunked dully against the wall and landed on the floor, water spilling across the tile of the kitchen. "QUIET!" he yelled, his own voice sounding foreign to him. He had been fine with his life! He had been FINE!

Liar. You're lying. Even now you're lying. You've never been happy with this life, because what you've always wanted you've never achieved. It was always someone else walking away in the spotlight, wasn't it? It was always the other guy who so easily took what you had pined after for so long.

QUIET! Otto gripped his head in his hands once again, clenching his jaw until it ached.

Force it down. Force all of it down. Lock it away. Your mother. Your father. That son of a bitch who called himself your father.

Lock it away.

He hoisted himself from the floor and wandered through his apartment, finally collapsing on his bed, lying there until the sky had turned orange. He wanted desperately for the whispering to stop. It didn't though, and he eventually he fell into a fitful sleep.

He saw himself wandering down a street, but he could not see well. People were pointing and staring at him. He was younger, perhaps in his early teens. Someone threw a bottle. It cracked across the back of his head and he cried out in pain. Something cold ran down his back along with the sharp sting of needles weaving in and out of his spine. He saw the tentacles everywhere at once, whipping around his body and shoving people around him. Something else hit him in the chest. Another bottle flew past his face. People were all around him now, yanking and tugging on him.

"Your one of those mutants! One of those freaks, aren't you?!"

"You don't belong here! Get him! Rip those things off! Rip 'em off!!!"

"Get him! GET HIM!"

Then he was floating over the crowd, watching everything unfold from above. He saw himself being attacked from all sides, the tentacles still disappearing and reappearing among the crowd as they caved in on him. Suddenly a long, thin crack appeared, running down his face and through his torso.

He watched in horror as the crack split, expanding into a thousand veins across his body before finally shattering. Pieces of the hollow shell that had been his body were flung out into the crowd. But the arms were still writhing, still flailing around in the mess of people. He saw someone being crushed in a tentacle's grasp. A man fell to the street, his head crushed in. Screaming filled the air as more people dropped, crushed and bloodied to the pavement. Blood ran everywhere. He could smell it. Acrid and bitter.

There was a sudden bout of knocking on the door in the opposite room.

Otto awoke with a gasp, the arms already pushing him from the bed as they wildly thrashed around the room, smashing into a lamp and a picture. They fell to the hardwood floor and shattered.

Panting, jerked from his disturbing dream, Otto wiped the back of his neck just above the spine and grappled at the night table where he found his sunglasses. Even in the late afternoon sun his eyes still burned. There was another knock on the door from the living room. He suspected that it was possible Osbourne had sent henchmen after him to drag him back to the lab. To be tested and x rayed and examined. To be put under the microscope and analyzed.

The clawed pinchers flexed open and shut with sharp snapping sounds. They'd never get within ten feet of him.

He slowly carried himself into living space of the apartment, moving about in the darkness. The screaming was still echoing in his head, the blood still ran. Otto shut his eyes.

I'm going crazy…

Another knock on the door. Otto opened his eyes and unwillingly crossed the room. Tossing the green trench coat he had been wearing onto a chair near the door, he peered through the eyehole and sucked in a sharp breath as he saw who was standing there.