Disclaimer: Spider-Man characters are property of Marvel. Phantom of the Opera themes belong to LeRoux.

Author's Note: Ah… now that I have the rough draft of my term paper done, I can relax for about a week and get some fan fiction done. Assuming I can fight off this new bout of Writer's Block. Grr… this chapter didn't turn out how I'd hoped. But, with a little luck, I'll at least be able to resume my Sunday updating schedule for "Moonlight Becomes You." For now, though, enjoy this. And yeah, I know, I know… another rain scene. What can I say? He's cute when wet!

Musique de la Nuit

Five – Ghost

A peal of thunder woke Otto, and he uncurled from his fetal position. His limbs ached, and he wondered how long he'd been hiding on the rooftop. Moisture from the puddles had soaked into his tattered coat, and he shivered as a cold wind cut him to the bone. The actuators informed him that it was after three in the morning, that there was no one on the street below, and that another storm was about to break. Otto stood, wincing as pain shot up from his ankle and the throb in his forehead intensified.

The actuators slipped from his coat, carefully walking him to the building's edge and moved with uncharacteristic silence as they climbed down the side. The first drops of rain began, cold, heavy drops that bore little resemblance to the pleasant rain of the night before. Otto shivered; his scorched, threadbare coat afforded little protection from the downpour. Sensing his misery, the actuators tore a black awning from the building closest them. The heavy cloth flared around him like tattered black wings before enfolding Otto completely. Because he no longer relied on sight, they covered his ruined face, completely shielding him from the rain. Then, resting on his shoulder where it was mostly hidden by a fold of cloth, the upper right actuator fed its camera image into Otto's brain.

Slipping from shadow to shadow, Otto made his way back to his home. His head began to throb in earnest as the strain of seeing the world through the actuator melded with the pain of the blow to his head, but he refused to close off the link and let the actuators lead him.

But he couldn't stumble around blindly anymore, either. Otto respected those who had overcome their sightlessness and become independent, and he wished he could be like them, but his life forbade it. One stumble could result in discovery. He'd already come close to being found out, and all he'd done was go to the mailbox. He needed to be able to see for himself, without exposing the actuators. He needed it, because he couldn't spend the rest of his life hiding himself away.

And he wanted to see Rosie again, despite his decision that she was better off without him. Maybe she didn't need him in her life… but he needed her in his, even if it was just to watch her from afar. She was the light to his darkness… even though he could no longer see her light with his own eyes, he could bask in it, feel its warmth, let it fill him and banish the darkness. Assuming the darkness within him hadn't grown deep enough that it would swallow the light and leave him feeling colder than he had before…

As he entered his cold, lonely stone haven, casting aside the soaked awning and severing the link with the actuator's camera, it occurred to him that seeing Rosie without being able to touch would be torture, but he didn't care. Pain had become a faithful companion; what was one more wound to one so damaged?

XXX

The ESU campus was bustling, now that the rain had thinned to a drizzle; it was that time of year when the fall semester begins and there is a flood of new students. The culling of the poorer or less dedicated students hadn't yet begun, and Rosie had to weave through crowds of students laughing or complaining about how they had to write a term paper already or planning parties… It brought back painful memories, and suddenly Rosie wondered if she'd even be able to teach again. It seemed that everything was fated to remind her of Otto.

Rosie ducked through the door of the building that held the science classes, pausing to orient herself by the numbers on the doors. The office she sought should be on the next floor, directly above these classrooms. She found the double doors leading to the closest stairwell, fighting the flow of students coming down as she ascended to the next level.

The door to Curt Connors's office was two doors away from the stairs. A few students stood in the doorway talking, likely the tail end of a frantic questioning session – Rosie knew Curt's assignments could be a real bitch, and there were always students dropping in on him. She smiled at them as they turned to go, and they returned the expression weakly. Clearly, Curt had only managed to confuse things for them further. His enthusiasm for science could run away with him if he wasn't careful, a trait he had shared with Otto. Whenever they'd had dinner together, their conversation always went over her – and Martha Connors's – head.

Curt was grading exams when Rosie opened the door and entered, and he didn't look up. His battered oak desk hadn't changed; there was always at least one of stack of papers cluttering the top, the photo of Curt and his wife and son was still sitting on one corner, opposite a real lizard skeleton with its head angled so those blank eye sockets seemed to be staring at whoever sat across from Curt. It had always creeped Rosie out. "The paper is due Tuesday; I am not granting you an extension," he said in a resigned voice.

"Is that any way to greet an old friend?" Rosie teased. Curt's head snapped up, and his eyes widened, and the blood drained from his face. "You look like you've seen a ghost."

"Rosie?" He got quickly to his feet, nearly tripping over his chair in the process. His eyes didn't leave her face as he circled his desk to stand in front of her. "My God, it is you!" He pulled her into a hug, then pushed her away to examine her. "Everyone said you were dead!"

"A part of me is," she said softly. Curt winced and suddenly couldn't seem to meet her eyes. "I'm adjusting," she told him. "Recovering has been painful for me…" She unknotted the scarf around her neck, letting Curt get a look at the scars on her neck and throat. The scientist examined them, his expression sympathetic. "I live with my brother Michael and his family. They… they've been very supportive." And they lied to me…

"I wish you'd contacted me sooner," Curt said. "You must come over for dinner some time; Martha will be thrilled to see you again."

"I'd love to," Rosie smiled. "I just… It didn't feel right, talking to you, after… after what happened. But Michael won't tell me anything, and I need to know the truth." Finding out the previous morning that her husband had survived the accident to become a criminal had almost broken her. Otto, her Otto, would never have done such a thing! But he had, and Rosie needed to know why. Had her husband always had a darkness inside him that had been freed by her death? Or was this all some sad, horrible misunderstanding? "I have to know if he was really a… a monster." The last was the barest of whispers, but Curt heard her.

Curt brushed past her, shutting his office door and locking it. He pulled out the chair in front of his desk for her, and she sat, fidgeting under the skeletal lizard's baleful gaze. Curt settled into his own chair and stared down at the pattern of wood on his desktop for several moments, as if he found it fascinating. "You must understand," he said finally, "I hadn't had any contact with Otto after the accident. When I saw the news that you'd died and Otto was in the hospital, I went to see him. I knew he'd need someone to be with him when he woke up." Rosie's throat closed; at least someone had cared enough to be there for Otto. "While I was waiting, the doctors explained to me what had happened to Otto. There was an electrical surge that passed through the harness of the smart arms. The harness itself was relatively undamaged, since Otto made it heat resistant, didn't he?" Rosie nodded. "However, the nanowires in his spine weren't. They melted, fusing to the vertebrae and the spinal column itself."

Rosie felt the gorge rise in her throat; the articles had said the actuators were welded to her husband, but she hadn't quite believed it. The pain alone would be enough to drive Otto mad… Curt saw her anguish and hesitated, but then plunged onward. "The doctors were going to give him a laminectomy. There was the possibility that he would have ended up crippled."

Poor Otto… She tried to imagine him crippled, widowed, with his dream dead. A sob rose in her throat, but she fought it down. She'd had enough of crying. She wouldn't cry again until she knew the whole truth. Besides, Otto hadn't ended up crippled. "But they never performed the surgery."

"No. I don't know the details of what happened, but next thing I knew, I was being questioned by cops about Otto's criminal history." Curt kneaded his forehead as if talking about this pained him. Perhaps it did. "That was the last time I was even in the same building as Otto. After that, I heard he robbed a bank, then he disappeared for about a month and resurfaced to attack a coffee shop and battle Spider-Man atop one of the el trains. There was also something about rebuilding his failed experiment and using it to destroy the city, but details about that are scarce."

Rebuilding? Realization hit Rosie."Curt, did the doctors say anything about the inhibitor chip?"

"The inhibitor chip?" Curt repeated blankly.

"Never mind," she sighed. "I had another question," she said after a moment. "Do you have Peter Parker in any classes this year?"

Curt looked surprised at this change of subject. "Yes, I have him in a class tomorrow, when he deigns to show up."

"Does he work as a photographer for the Daily Bugle?"

Curt looked thoughtful. "One of his excuses for being late was that he was taking pictures for the paper. He never said which paper, but it could be the Bugle, I suppose."

"Do you think you could set up a meeting with him? He takes the best pictures of Spider-Man, as if he actually knows Spider-Man. Maybe… maybe he knows something more about what happened to Otto."

"If he shows, I'll see if I can hold him. The class gets out at 1:40, meet us by my office then."

"Thanks, Curt," she said. She leaned across the desk and gave him a kiss on the cheek. "I'll take you up on that offer of dinner," she told him. "Michael's away this week, and I get depressed when I'm left alone."

"I'm sorry this happened to you, Rosie," he said sadly.

"Don't feel sorry for me, Curt," she answered. At least she hadn't been the one who'd been abandoned, hurt, and alone… "My pain is nothing compared to what Otto must have gone through."

XXX

The pale mask was smooth under Otto's fingers, and he ran the damaged digits over the edge of the eye socket, testing to see if the glue had hardened. The mask was a relic from a masquerade he and Rosie had attended, a fund raiser run by Norman Osborn. Rosie had chosen for him an elaborate creation of green and gold, and for herself had selected a beautiful dress of red and silver, creating a striking contrast. The only simple part of their outfits had been their matching masks, blank white ovals with eyeholes and narrow slits for their mouths. The costumes had gone back to the rental place almost as rapidly as Otto could extract himself from his, but he'd left the mask at Osborn's and had been forced to buy it, since Osborn hadn't returned it until a week later.

Otto had banished the mask to the back of his closet, and hadn't thought about it until that morning. It would cover the worst of the damage to his face, though the molten skin at his temple would remain visible. But that wasn't why Otto had thought of the mask; it was sturdy enough that he could fix a camera over the eye socket. The setting he'd glued in place seemed to be holding, and Otto set the mask aside to move on to the next part of his project. The upper left actuator obligingly lay atop the table before Otto, and the lower right and left curved around to give him a view of the opened pincer. The upper right unfolded its smaller inner pincers and plunged them into its sibling's delicate circuitry, very carefully disconnecting the miniature camera and setting it to the side. Then it began to extract the wire that hooked up to the camera, a painstaking job of inserting the fine pincers between segments closest to Otto's body and pulling at the wire, drawing it free from the actuator's tubular inner cavity. The camera was reconnected, and Otto quickly switched his link to see through that camera, making certain it hadn't been damaged during the extraction.

He hadn't wanted to use the actuator's camera, but the sockets on the harness where he'd once been able to plug in other attachments had melted, and he had no way to repair them. The upper left had volunteered to sacrifice its eye so Otto could see, a gift that had shocked the scientist – he hadn't expected such concern from machines.

The camera was disconnected, and Otto carefully fitted it into the setting glued to the mask's eye socket. Then Otto placed the mask over his face, making certain the setting didn't chafe against his skin. There was a slight rubbing, but nothing he couldn't ignore. He nodded in satisfaction and set the mask aside, atop the folded black awning. The wire, still connected at one end to the harness, Otto draped over his shoulder. Later, when he wore the mask, he'd tape it the wire to his skin so it wouldn't shift.

Tonight… Tonight, when the hour was late, or early, depending on one's point of view, Otto would go out, the awning draped around him like a cloak, the mask fixed firmly in place. He'd see how far he could go before fear sent him haring back to his hiding place. Maybe the mask would embolden him enough that he could finally snatch some sorely-needed money.

Maybe he'd even find the courage to see Rosie…

To Be Continued…