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Olivia Octavius, Doctor Octopus to her foes and Doc Oc or “Liv” to her friends, was in a staggering amount of pain.
Amazingly, this was an improvement. Mere moments before, she had felt nothing at all, her consciousness suspended in a strange, frozen place where she could neither move nor think.
This, she learned very soon after she began properly feeling the staggering amounts of pain, was what the unconsciousness after being hit by an interdimensional bus felt like.
Eventually, her awareness expanded from “pain” to “I’m in a bed.” This realization happened to coincide with her regaining a measure of control over her own body, and she opened her eyes to familiar curly hair. The themed outfit today was, some distant part of Liv noted, octopodes.
“Hello!” a familiar voice said. “It seems you still talk in your sleep.”
“Frizzle?” Liv asked. “What are you doing in my bedroom?” The premise of the question was flawed, but it would still hopefully be sufficient to learn what her old friend was doing.
Frizzle smiled. “This isn’t your bedroom, Liv, it’s a hospital.” She moved out of Liv’s line of sight. “You were pretty badly hurt in the explosion. Thankfully, I managed to convince the authorities that you were just an in-over-your-head scientist caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, or else you’d be cuffed to the bed.”
“I feel like you’ve been hit by a bus,” Liv said, finally able to put the staggering pain into words. She also felt somewhat like she’d been hit in the face with a baseball bat, but she always felt that way when she encountered May Parker.
“That’s because you were,” Frizzle said. “If you weren’t oped up to your eyeballs, you’d also feel the number all those dimensional energies did on your whole body.” Liv heard a sigh. “I know you’re fascinated by the result of different laws of physics on the atoms of living things, but I didn’t think you’d go in and test it out on yourself.”
Liv didn’t dignify that with a response. Figuring out how much she could move without her body screaming at her was much more important.
Her mind was moving at an alarmingly slow pace, but she couldn’t imagine the agony Frizzle hinted at would allow her to think any clearer. She was just going to have to recuperate like a normal person. How absolutely disgusting; she really did need to work on that healing serum.
“How long have I been out?” Liv asked.
“A week,” Frizzle said. “And when school is in season, no less. I have taken sick leave to stay by your side, I can only imagine what sort of horrifying substitute my poor students are contending with.”
Liv would have sat up at that, if the idea didn’t immediately make her entire upper body howl with protest. “You, taking sick leave?”
“You are hurt,” Frizzle said. “I had no other choice but to pack the bus with a few essentials and come to the city as fast as I could.”
“You drove the bus here?”
“Of course,” Frizzle said. “I can’t exactly leave it behind, now can I?” Liv heard another sigh. “You’ve really made a mess of the city, you know. You’ll be helping with the repairs, of course.”
“Excuse me?” Curse her confinement to the bed, a statement that ridiculous deserved a much more emphatic refusal.
“When you’re better,” Frizzle continued. “Again, I understand completely your fascinating with this sort of thing, but you really ought to be more careful.”
“You can’t make me,” Liv said sulkily. “I’m a mad scientist. Even you call me Doctor Octopus, sometimes.” She really liked that name.
“No,” Frizzle said pleasantly. “I can’t. She can, though, or I have vastly misunderstood our relationship these past decades.”
A second face appeared in Liv’s (irritatingly confined) line of vision.
“Hello, Liv,” May Parker said. “It’s the least you could do after you killed my nephew.”
Fuck, Liv thought, before promptly passing out again.
--
Liv woke up again to slightly less pain and equally excellent drugs. She could now sit up, and move her arms, and do all of those wonderful things, but anything more intricate than holding a cup hurt and apparently standing up was right out. Being hit by a bus in the middle of a portal really did a number on the body, apparently.
She also woke up to May Parker still there.
“If you were wondering,” May said, “I haven’t been glaring at you the whole time you were out. I have a life, you know, even if it is primarily managing the image rights of my dead nephew.” The emphasis she put on the word dead was not lost on Liv at all.
“How long was I out this time?”
“Just a day,” May said.
Liv noticed the empty chair next to the one May sat in. “Where?”
“Back to her students,” May said. “She has a real job, after all.”
“I have a real job,” Liv protested.
“You’re a mad scientist, dear, you have as much a real job as Peter did.”
“I wasn’t planning on killing him,” Liv said. “I knew he was your nephew, that was all Kingpin.”
May shook her head. She looked absolutely immaculate, as always, and it really was unfair how hot she looked in a grey cable-knit sweater. These also weren’t the things Liv needed to be thinking about in that moment, but in her defense, the drugs were really good. “You should have known working for the Kingpin would not end well.”
“What can I say, I’m a sucker for a sob story?” That and Liv was, unfortunately, quite human, and money and threats were always good motivators.
“I’ll choose to believe you, so I don’t undo all the work the poor doctors Frizzle terrorized on your behalf have done,” May said. Despite her words, Liv noticed her glancing at Liv’s hands. “May I?”
“Of course.”
May grasped Liv’s left hand tightly with both of hers. “You are a profoundly intelligent woman, and also the stupidest person I know,” she said. “You will help clean up New York City, after you recuperate, or so help me God I will also make sure you are the most miserable woman I know.” She smiled warmly.
“You were nicer when Ben was alive,” Liv said.
“You are a sociopath who, I hear, was quite excited at the prospect of my nephew painfully disintegrating,” May said. “And you wrecked my house. I feel as though we are long past nice.”
“I’m hot, though,” Liv said blithely. That didn’t usually get her out of trouble, but it couldn’t hurt to try. She usually wasn’t this blunt about it but see above statements about both pain and drugs. “And he wasn’t your nephew.”
“It was close enough,” May said wryly. “You also tried to kill a child. Multiple times.”
“That child was trying to sabotage my plans!” Liv protested. “You can’t fault me for that.”
“I can, and I will,” May said. “You are a super-villain, my dear, I understand that, but your plans have been thwarted and, unless you want the brand of your company to be irrevocably destroyed, you are uniquely qualified to fix the problem.”
“Because I created it?” Liv asked tiredly.
May smiled. “Because you created it,” Liv answered. “Now,” she said, “it would horrify the new Spider-Man to find you in my house, and I have not yet forgiven you for the several holes in my roof, so I fear, once you get out of here, you will be spending your recovery at Frizzle’s house.”
“Oh, no,” Liv said. “Her house makes me look organized.”
“I know, I know,” May said. “Fear not, I will visit you frequently and once you are more recovered, we can get back to the fun.”
“Oh no,” Liv said. “You have an evil glint in your eye. Can’t you see I’m wounded?”
“Yes,” May said. “Now hurry up and recuperate, I need a super-villain I can trust to manage all the other, evil ones.”
--
Liv was discharged after two more weeks. She was not as injured as she could have been, and the doctors seemed surprised at how quickly her pain had diminished to being much more manageable. She tried to explain about the dimensions, but it seemed most medical doctors were not also astrophysicists, and she quickly gave up. At least she had a female doctor, which meant her care was merely incompetent instead of an utter disaster.
The most grievous injury was that the bus had absolutely shattered the side of her body it had hit, or at least it felt that way. While she could now walk short distances, she apparently should not do this, and Frizzle wheeled her out of the hospital in a chair Liv had her various underlings at the lab create for her; she mistrusted hospital chairs even more than she mistrusted your common or garden variety of medical doctor.
“I can’t imagine you’ll be taking much time off,” Frizzle said. “Now that you are out of that dreadful place, but I do hope you will at least give yourself time to recover.”
“I want to reinstall my arms,” Liv said. “As quickly as possible.”
“When you’ve healed more,” Frizzle said. “For the moment, I can’t imagine it would be good for your back.”
“I don’t care,” Liv said miserably. She liked her arms. She wouldn’t have made them if she didn’t.
“When you’ve healed more,” Frizzle repeated, the edge in her voice more noticeable this time.
Liv ducked her head. “Fine,” she said. “You’ll pay for that, later.”
Frizzle smiled. It was mostly teeth. “I hope so,” she said.