AN: No, I don't own Ock. I do, however, own Kat.
This was my favorite chapter before I started writing Mindless (it's on my DA page). Then I started writing Mindless and it wasn't as exciting. Ah well. Angst warning.
And this is dedicated to Santanico because BESIDES writing one of THE best pieces of fanfiction I have EVER READ (top five), which is called Freak Like Me, she also helped me rewrite this chapter, because it previously sucked. I :heart: Sant.
Our Future
koD.
Octavius came through the upstairs window, glancing around. Kat was no where to be seen, and he had the flitting fear that she was going through his things. He did not want her making him remember anything. Remembering was painful.
He walked down the steps absent-mindedly on his own two feet, glancing around. His face wrinkled in confusion as he noted the coffee table that was set up near his steps had been moved. And there had been something on it, but he couldn't exactly remember what…
CRIINKNLLE.
"OW!" He cursed, looking down. Small shards of glass littered the bottom of the stairwell and he walked straight into them. The arms immediately moved him over the remainder of the glass and sat him down in a nearby chair.
The doctor cursed his bare-footedness – he had lost the shoes in the mad dash between the hospital and here, one of them being torn by a rampant scalpel in the hospital room, the other being caught by Spiderman, though the rest of his body got away. He looked at the bottoms of his feet to see little drops of blood in various spots, some of the spots twinkling with glass clearly stuck into his skin. One of the tentacles pulled out a miniscule claw and pecked the shards out, despite his wincing. Glass was sharp. Sharp enough to cut him. Probably to kill someone.
…to kill someone……
His mind was wrenched back into that time. He saw the glass coming toward her. Saw it flying towards the woman he loved, all razor sharp edges and crystalline deadliness. Saw it crash into her; saw her fall to the ground, lifelessly.
"Rosie!"
Stop that!For once, he was grateful for the AI of the tentacles. They did not want him to remember it.
He didn't want to remember it either.
But even so, the arms' voices were muffled against her scream. She couldn't scream anymore, not with the shards of glass in her larynx and throat. Cut her jugular vein. Cut everything. He could hear them shouting to him, for him to wake up. Though it almost felt as if someone had gagged that voice in his mind, hidden the meaning, the words even, from him and leaving only the noise of knowing that they were saying. But he couldn't figure out what exactly it was.
Pain.
The electrical shock that had fired through his spine, through his vertebrae, through the arms and the inhibitor chip and everything else, was dulled in his mind. Pain did not repeat itself so much, not unless you managed to shock yourself twice. It was nothing to him. It was the ticking itchiness of a bug on his skin, no real pain.
But her scream, then silence, hurt. It showered acid upon his bare skin, forced poison down his throat, brought knives and cut him everywhere possible. The sheer, wretched agony of the decibels Rosalie Octavius couldn't reach anymore, the noise had stopped so abruptly, the silence in itself, set him in agony. A burning, blistering pain that seared his marrow and inflamed his nerves so terribly it felt as if he had been dropped in a volcano, an exploding demonstration of horrific and destructive power. He had, almost.
Was this why the actuators had kept the memory from him, guarded it with such power that he could barely even discern it had happened? Was this antagonizing, horrendous pain why they had hid it?
He could only think on the question for a second, before another force hit him.
The force of terrible, complete and incredible loss.
Inside Octavius' mind, he may not have known it, but he staggered back. Staggered back to the stairwell. More glass cut his feet. But this, he didn't know.
He could only feel that which was not there.
His Rosie was gone. Dead. Deceased. Passed away. The empty space that he had hidden under a thin layer, the gap that he had pretended to fill in had been suddenly ripped open again and widened.
How he missed her. How he missed her warm presence, her soft smile and exotic face, her gentle touch and even gentler voice. He missed the poetry that she would read to him before they fell asleep. He missed the even rise and fall of her chest as she slept.
Everything about her....
Gone.
Wait...wait, was that her? Right in front of him? Sure, she was a little shorter, a little younger looking, but it had to be her. Rather then moving his flesh and blood arm, he felt it move, almost like it was disconnected from his shattered mind. Shattered like the glass. His arm gingerly caressed her hair. She must have changed her hair style as well...
"Otto? Otto, snap out it! You're stepping on the glass! And for the love of---"
...that wasn't Rosie's voice...
"OTTO!"
definitely...not.
He had a sickening feeling in his stomach. As if someone had reached down his stomach, pulled all of the organs out, and thrust them into his hand.
On the bright side, when he looked in front of him, he didn't see the shattered glass, the broken metal flying into his fusion reactor, didn't see the fallen body of his wonderful wife….
Instead, he saw a figure that it took him maybe twenty seconds to figure out exactly who she was. Her name. Almost as if he was shuffling through an unorganized file cabinet. Katarina Morrigan. College student. Met only recently.
He opened his mouth to speak. His tongue felt like a slab of metal, "Kat?"
"Otto!" Her face was wrinkled in concern, "Otto, are you alright? You went REALLY creepy before. Maybe you should lie down. In fact, you SHOULD lie down. Tentacles, take this man to a nap. He needs one, badly."
The two arms that weren't supporting Oc glared at her.
"THAT is an order, Tentacles #1 and 2." She narrowed her eyes mockingly at the pair of mechanical actuators, who didn't move a circuit, "Alright. Don't you, like, WANT the guy you sort of live with to be in a LITTLE better health?! He looks like he's gone through hell and back."
Sleep. Please. Rest.
At this point, the actuators really did begin to worry. Their father didn't often speak so simply.
They had tried to hold back that pain from him, tried to tell him that they didn't need her, and all he needed was them, but to no avail. Had he not been interrupted by Miss Morrigan, the tentacles' AI had no doubt he would have continued being blasted by feelings they had tried so hard to keep out of his mind. They were making him upset. He couldn't be upset – they wouldn't let it happen.
They were noticing very, very strange activity in the man's muscles. They'd only seen this one before – right before he had removed all the water from the Hudson River from his system, through his mouth. He called this 'throwing up', though they weren't quite sure why.
Regardless of which, the arms did not know what to do. They had been so weak before, they couldn't have done anything anyway.
"Otto!" They heard Katarina's voice filter through the human's system. They quite preferred the nickname the woman often used, because it put more emphasis on them, but couldn't tell her this, unless of course, Otto spoke for them. And he did not often do so when it was something trivial like that.
The tentacles, as of recently, had been searching through Octavius' brain in their own way. Although they were only connected to his lesser brain functions, the inhibitor chip's removal had opened up several gateways. One of them was to his ears and eyes, allowing them to see through his eyes and hear more what he could, or increase both of these senses.
Only recently they'd found his motor functions. This had been a great discovery, but they realized he could sense when they were doing this, and therefore, it could only be accomplished while he was unaware – asleep or unconscious in any form. But the part of his brain that controlled his voice was still elusive to the ambitious AI. And on occasion, there were few things they'd wished more then to find it.
But they pushed that aside and dealt with their host's current situation. His stomach was still tossing, his muscles still spasming. The girl was standing above him, looking down at him with concern.
"Can't you IDIOT MACHINES see he's about to hurl?!" She glared at them, "Do something! Take him to a bathroom!"
Hurl?
Vomit. Otto's mind weakly injected, Throw up.
The actuators DID respond to this. Otto was going to expel something (what, exactly, was beyond them) and Katarina suggested the bathroom probably because of the tiled floor, making it easy to clean. The tentacles picked their symbiote up off the ground, and brought him to the bathroom.
They didn't care much for his bodily functions. And if the actuators could have been, they would have been completely disgusted as Octavius emptied the contents of his stomach onto the tiled bathroom floor.
But there were more important things then that. Right now, the current issue was the bite from the mutant spider Otto had given himself for the blood transfusion. The power of the actuators had managed to suppress it, but they couldn't forever, that much was clear. If a tentacle was destroyed like had happened with the saw, the human would realize he had acquired the powers. They needed a permanent solution to this problem, preferably fast.
They pondered on this while picking Otto up, so that he didn't collapse in his own vomit. They took the man to the other side of the bathroom, where he curled up into a ball. They were curious - he had never done this before.
Otto? Father? You are unwell?
Rosie……
The actuators sighed with irritation. What did he have with this other human, this Rosie? She was in many, many of his memories, and all of them made him sad. He couldn't be sad. They had been working on eroding the memories, so he didn't become so sad but this glass had reminded the man so forcefully of Rosie, their work on his memories had been crushed by the sheer power it was assaulted by.
Needless to say, they weren't pleased.
You don't need her, Otto, our Father. You have us now. We can be more then Rosie. Rosie was only human.
You...you hid her from me.... His mind-voice was bitter, accusing.
There wasn't much they could do besides admit it. Only to make you stronger, Father. The memories make you weak and sad...and we cannot have that.
I need them. I need Rosie. She's dead, isn't she? He was pleading now. Pleading to them. And they were concerned for him.
She lives within you, just as we do. They thought upon the next words, forming them carefully, You, us, and her are all parts of you. But a line with three endpoints is an impossibility. If you try to be such a line, you will fall. Fall to enemies like Spiderman and the hostile public. Instead, we have made it so you will be a perfectly normal line, with only two endpoints.
You...
What do you wish of us, Father? We are at your command, as we always are... They hated being his little servants...but that is what he needed to become stable. Instability in him worried them. When he was unstable, his concerns became less apparent. He was harder to manipulate when he was so out of it, as an added problem and reason to help.
Rosie...take me...to her grave...
If the arms could snort, they would have. They also almost WISHED for Katarina to come. The LAST thing they needed was Otto getting emotional over this woman again, standing in front of some tiny marble pillar and her dead body decomposing under the ground.
Take me there.
Father...
Take me there, damnit! I am your father and your creator and you will listen to me! This is an ORDER!
Father...there must be some other way we can please----
NOW!
Miss Morrigan is here.
After she goes.
....Yes, Father.
We obey.
We are good children.
We will listen to you.