Otto was sitting on a wooden crate in a puddle filled alley in the upper part of the city, holding the lifeless tentacle across his lap. There was a row of dumpsters against the other wall, piles of rotting garbage overflowing onto the ground around them. Someone had ditched a sofa. A lamp. A broken mirror.

A shard of the mirror glinted at him from across the alley and he glanced at his reflection. Caked blood decorated his upper lip and puffy bruising had set in along one cheek and along his nose. How he had managed to keep his sunglasses on his face he wasn't sure.

Wincing, he looked away. The last time he'd looked anything like that he had still been in high school. He pressed himself up against the wall behind him and closed his eyes.

"Come on you punk! Get your ass up and fight me!" the blonde haired football jock had yelled, shoving Otto back against a Jeep parked in the nearly empty lot. The usual posse had circled around their leader and were goading him on, screaming nonsense and hollering all sorts of expletives at Otto. Being shoved and kicked was nothing new; he could handle that.

Thanks, Dad. Thanks for something.

Suddenly there was a sharp explosion of pain across his face, and Otto stumbled back, an arc of crimson blood flying from his busted nose as he fell against the Jeep, his hands immediately flying to fold against his nose as a cry of pain escaped his lips.

"Son of a bitch, get up! Get up and fight me!" he yelled again, preparing to kick the stout man on the ground. Otto did get up, perhaps faster than any of them, including himself, expected. He swung back and hit him as hard as he could directly in the face, feeling the sharp cracking of bone against bone as his fist landed in his eye. There was a shriek of surprise and pain and he stumbled back again, staring in disbelief as the muscular jock in front of him fell against his friends, too stunned to react. Otto felt his skin crawl as his adversary slowly touched his fingers to his eye, which was already beginning to puff up. Blood trickled from his nose, matching the mess on Otto's face.

His father would have been proud.

"Hey, that actually hurt. You got any more of that in you?" he said, and before Otto could react, breathe, think…do anything, they fell on him like a pack of wolves. He never uttered a single word the whole time. His silence continued. For years.

Never spoke to anyone outside of necessity in school.

Blended in with the walls at college.

Crept silently inside the halls of the university where he got his Masters.

There was no reason to invoke a reaction from anyone. They weren't worth it anyway.

He blinked and found his image staring back at him again from across the alley. Growling, he chucked an empty bottle lying by his side at the broken mirror, knocking the remaining shards to the ground. He looked down at the tentacle lying across his lap and inspected the clawed fingers. The joints were clogged with dirt and old dried blood, and he mindless dug his fingers in and out, picking it clean while he thought.

I need to find a way to protect the electrodes inside the spine. I can't risk losing another arm. How am I going to fix what I can't see?

He sat back against the brick wall again, feeling that sharp needle sensation in his spine, his lip curling involuntarily as he gazed down at the foreign thing in his hands, extending each claw until it was completely fanned out. It was foreign. It was a cold, mechanical, lifeless thing, only reacting to his demands based on calculated synaptic firing, a complex relaying of reflex messages sent down his spinal cord and into the relays of each arm.

A cold, lifeless thing. Just like me. Suddenly furious, he gripped the claw in his hands tightly, feeling it twitch once again in his grasp. If he wanted to he could rip it out. He clenched it tighter. The clawed fingers flexed slightly again. Rip it out.

Just rip it out.

The urge passed as suddenly as it had appeared, and he loosened his grip on the metal arm, letting it fall slack again. He stood up, keeping the other three arms retracted under his coat as best he could while holding the other in his hand beside him. He could not tear it from his body. No more than he could tear his own flesh and blood arm off. He looked down the alley to the street beyond, his focus shifting.

To all the rest of the world he was a nameless no one. Achievements on paper. To all the people whom he had stopped trying to impress when he had realized how futile an effort it really was, he was but a flicker in one of the thousands of images one sees everyday. He slowly came to realize that his anger towards Spiderman was merely the bulls-eye, the culmination of nearly four decades of resentment. His contempt for the masses and their inability to recognize things greater than themselves had all converged into one target.

No matter. Once Spiderman was out of his way, he could move on.

Making his way down the city block proved easier than he had imagined. No one questioned him. No one even glanced his way. There were still cop cars on the scene where they had destroyed the diner. He stopped and stared at the news reporters and policemen as they talked with one another, groups of bystanders all pointing and taking pictures of the wreckage. And no one looked his way.

No one notices me even now. Even after what I've done here. He turned and looked up the street. What point would there be to go home? He would not be any better off sitting there than he had been sitting in the alley feeling sorry for himself. Turning, he gazed in the other direction, towards the Industrial Park where Osbourne Industries manufacturing plants and chemical warehouses were located. He briefly thought of Julia and how she had held him, dismissing the thought quickly. The frantic whispering continued in the back of his mind and he began walking.

How he made it to Oscorp's chemical warehouse undetected, he'll never know. It wasn't difficult to elude the sleeping guards in the watchtower, but no footmen had seen him either. Breaking open the back door of the service entrance in the rear of the huge building was just as easy, and he slipped inside as quietly as he could. He was well aware of all the security cameras situated around the warehouse, but he was also aware of where the video feed was routed and recorded. Moving in the darkness, he glanced up at the wall next to the service entrance where he saw the narrow metal box connected to the wiring system along the first ledge running the perimeter of the warehouse. He reached up with one tentacle and snipped one of the fine wires leading to the camera. A small red light began blinking on the camera as it stopped its slow oscillation. Across the warehouse he saw the other cameras stop moving as well. With any luck, the idiots working security wouldn't notice they had stopped until he had already left.

Staying in the relative shadow of the chemical storeroom, he could see through the windowed wall of the first lab. Inside Julia sat hunched over a tray of vials. He could not see if anyone else was in the room. Otto paused for a moment and looked down at one of the arms that had snaked around his body. Perhaps…the arm slowly extended into the room, slowly lifting its clawed hand up to peer in the glass window. It darted back to Otto after a moment, and the quiet, frantic whispering in his mind continued without interruption.

She was alone.

Probably continuing his research where he had left off. Osbourne wouldn't let Otto's "accident" set his research back, certainly. Not when he could smell how close they were. He knew just how much something like the Spiderman serum would go for on the market. Otto rounded the corner into the lab and shut the door behind him. Julia did not turn around.

"Henry, what were the results on station three?" she said, continuing to flip through the pages of a huge textbook at her desk.

"When he gets back you can ask him." Julia stiffened at the sound of the gruff voice and then turned, her mouth open slightly.

"Otto, Jesus…what happened to you? Oh my God…what have you done to yourself?" she cried, jumping from the chair and clasping him on both shoulders, her face contorted with fearful concern. Otto shied from her touch instinctively and Julia retracted her hands quickly.

He held out the dead arm and let it drop with a dull thump against the carpeted floor.

"I need your help. I can't fix this myself," he said, offering no other explanation. Julia fell silent as she gazed down at the tentacle.

"Alright, Otto. I suspect you're not going to share the details of what happened today," she said stiffly, "although your face tells me quite a story." She turned away from him and covered her mouth with her hand, closing her eyes as Otto touched his fingers to his swollen lip, feeling the roughness of his unshaven face as well as the dried blood caking his upper lip. He sighed, aggravated with himself. With everything.

"Julia, I ask that you not question my motives. I have reasons for my actions. Will you help me or not?" She kept her back to him for a minute, finally sighing and wiping her hand over her hair, finally letting her hand drop to her side.

"I'm not trying to question your motives. I just don't understand why you're bothering with him at all. You've the most brilliant man I've ever met, and you're out there acting like that other crazy guy. What was it? The Green Goblin?" She stared at him, aggravated she could not see through his sunglasses to know if he was looking directly at her or not.

He was silent.

"I'll help you if I can, Otto, but I want nothing to do with your problems with Spiderman," she said. Otto shifted his shoulders and dropped the trench coat down to his elbows to expose the metal spine fused flush against his skin.

"Spiderman is no longer a problem," he said roughly. She swallowed, not knowing what to say to that.

"You didn't…" she started, but stopped when he turned over his shoulder and smiled wickedly.

"No, I didn't."

"Not yet, anyway," she thought to herself. It was obvious he wasn't going to say any more on the subject.

Her eyes fell upon the foreign metal thing, curling up his back like some kind of horrible, mechanical parasite. His entire back was bruised horribly and she reached out to brush her hand across his skin. Pausing, she pulled her hand back and sighed.

"I don't know anything about electronics; I'm a chemist, not a mechanic," she said, shrugging her shoulders.

"Tell me this; is there any visible damage?" Julia leaned closer, inspecting each individual segment that made up the flexible spine.

"None that I can see," she remarked after a bit. She could see his disappointment. It meant the damage was probably internal. "But I think I know someone who might be able to help you." Otto abruptly yanked his arms up, pulling the trench coat back up and over his shoulders.

"I don't trust anyone else with this," he said curtly, one claw reaching to pick up its lifeless mate while another reached to open the door. Julia put a hand on his arm and he stopped.

"You've trusted me with it."

"Not that I had too much of a choice." Julia clenched her jaw at his frosty reply.

"You didn't have to let me in last night."

A moment of weakness.

"True enough. I also didn't have to let Spiderman live."

"So what is this then? Some kind of game? A cat and mouse type of deal?"

"As I already said, I have reasons for my actions. I have given the subject a lot of thought, and lets just say I have … a new agenda." She folded her arms.

"What is that supposed to mean, Otto?" she said. He pushed his glasses further up his nose and regarded her calmly.

"I really must be getting along, if you'll excuse me." He opened the door, the limp arm cradled by one of the other tentacles under the back of his coat.

"He's looking for you, you know; it's posted all over the place in here. Osbourne's got some kind of personal SWAT team or something out there right now," she said quickly. He stopped in the doorway but said nothing. Julia lowered her head.

"She's not going to run to the police and snitch on you, Otto. She's something of a rogue. Someone … someone in a similar predicament as you," she said quietly. "And she's a brilliant young girl. Please."

Otto stood in the doorway, considered his options. Julia had been trustworthy thus far. But he was not inclined to let his life become an open book for her to page through. He had revealed far more of himself to her than he ever thought he would. He straightened, the cold blank expression adorning his face once again.

"I will decide for myself whether she is brilliant or not," he said, walking out the door. Julia reached back and snatched up her coat, running for the door. Why she was still helping him, she did not know. She knew she could be in serious trouble if they were caught. Caught helping a criminal. She fought back the sour taste in the back of her throat.

He was worth it, wasn't he?