Chapter Text
The sky is a fiery orange with the new dawn. He looks up and it’s Lady Liberty in the sky above him, no scaffolding in sight. There’s Peter as he just saw him; 40 years old, in a dust-covered suit and clutching a bleeding wound at his side. There’s Otto across the way, watching them with three white-light optics hanging over his shoulders and one severed tentacle at his side.
It takes Peter a moment to look up and notice them.
“Oh, shit,” says Peter, and he moves towards Norman, stumbles, and falls to the ground. Norman, deliriously in pain, thinks, That doesn’t feel right, Peter shouldn’t curse. There’s Otto running towards them, and Peter looks from Norman to Otto and back as he sinks to the ground.
“You guys aren’t supposed to be here.”
- - - - -
He sends Otto to retrieve Marko from the top of the Statue of Liberty, and Otto returns helping support a weak, flesh-and-blood Marko, seemingly unused to the weight and solidity of a human body but re-learning with every step.
Peter puts the mask back on.
“Alright, team,” he says, “We gotta get off Liberty Island, pretty sure at least three of us need medical attention. And we gotta do it without anyone noticing Doc Ock and Norman Osborn in the Green Goblin gear. We got this.”
Peter lays on the ground until two of Otto’s claws gently pull him back up.
- - - - -
They sneak on to the first ferry, and Otto raids the lost and found box for them. It’s hoodies over the Spider-Man costume and the Goblin armor, and another for a shivering, T-shirt clad Marko. Otto drapes a blanket around his shoulders and the tentacles fold away, except the severed one that won’t stop twitching and flailing.
Norman sits by him and brushes his hand against the cut. He remembers the construction of them, titanium-steel alloy, impressively strong and lightweight. There are very few things that could cut through them so cleanly.
He thinks of the Glider, the pinnacle of Oscorp technology, seemingly left behind in the other world, broken and battered. Its blades were always impressively sharp.
“Is it okay?
Otto places his hand on top of his. “It’s alright. Nothing I can’t fix. Their brains are along the spinal column. Just need to build a new face and optic.”
“But is it okay?”
The tentacle keeps twitching, more restless than its siblings.
“It’s… scared,” Otto admits. “Blinded. I can hold it steady if I focus, but most of its sensory input came through the claws.”
“Most?”
“I think you’re helping it,” says Otto, and Norman rests his hand against the metal the rest of the trip.
- - - - -
The woman who answers the door has the look of a woman who’s seen it all. In a moment, her eyes sweep over them: Peter at the front of the pack, with a claw at his back holding him up, and Norman and Marko leaning on a tentacle of their own. Her eyes pause on Otto—rake over the tentacles—before she opens the door and says, “What have you gotten into now, Spider-Man?”
“It’s okay; they know,” says Peter, and he pulls the mask off again for a breath of fresh air. She helps him to a seat and starts lifting away the hoodie where the blood has started to bleed through.
One of Otto’s claws deposits Marko to a chair to the side, while he then helps Norman sit down. The hoodie comes off, and then the Goblin armor is thrown to the side.
“Who are you supposed to be?” says the woman looking Otto up and down. “Doc Ock, Jr, or something? And you!” she says to Peter. “Someone has been ringing my phone nonstop wondering where you are.”
“I lost my phone,” Peter admits, hissing when the cut is cleaned.
“Call. Your. Wife,” she says, and tosses her phone to Peter while she considers the other three.
- - - - -
“Where have you been?! I’ve called everyone! No one’s seen Spider-Man in two days, you couldn’t find two minutes to call me—”
“No, seriously, MJ, I couldn’t—I couldn’t call—” says Peter, and they listen while the shouting on the other end of the line gets quieter, but no less angry.
“Are you at Dr. Palmer’s—? Have you been at Dr. Palmer’s? Is everything all right? Why didn’t she call me—!”
“That’s an anger born of love,” says Otto to Norman, and they watch Peter hunch against the onslaught.
“No, really, it was insane—I have so much to tell you—I’m fine, really—Well, I was stabbed—No, lightly, it’s fine—No, no, I… will be home… soonish, I—have to figure out something real quick, I’ll tell you all about it later, it’s just one of those things that like, I gotta tell you about in person—I gotta—I gotta go—I love you, too—”
The phone call ends, and Peter regards the phone in his hand with a smile.
The woman—a doctor, presumably—shakes her head at the sight and starts looking at Norman. She flashes a penlight in his eyes, and says to Otto, “Seriously, what’s going on with you? You a fan of Doc Ock or something? Haven’t seen anything like that in years.”
“Right,” says Peter, remembering them. “Right.” He regards Otto and Norman contemplatively. “You two. Right.”
- - - - -
“Look, I’ll admit, I only barely care what’s going on here with Doc and Osborn, but do you want to explain to me what’s so wrong?” says Marko. The doctor gave them all once overs, and they’re all sore, but nothing broken, and a couple day’s rest should leave them all fine. Marko is coming back around the best, finally catching his second wind and flexing his hands as he re-learns what bones feel like. “I mean, the other Spider-kid was pretty torn up about them dying if they were sent back, but they’re not dead. We’re all fixed. What’s the big deal?”
“Uh… How should I explain it?” says Peter. He looks about the room, and hobbles to stand against his doctor’s hissed warning to grab a dry erase tablet off the table. He draws a line across it in black marker, and then adds three dots along the line and labels them A, B, and C.
“So, this is time. You and me were always going to come back to Point C, a timeline where Dr. Osborn and Dr. Octavius are dead, because that’s our past, and you can’t change the past. Dr. Osborn and Dr. Octavius were going to go back to Point A and B respectively, and that would have created two different timelines branching from those points. Whatever happened there, their futures would have been different.
“The problem is… they missed those branches. They came back with us to our universe, where a Doctor Octavius and a Doctor Osborn have already died—”
“Meaning we are little more than ghosts,” says Otto quietly. It’s a somber moment for Norman.
“Weird,” says Dr. Palmer while she cleans up her workstation.
“It’s not like they had any turn here signals on the way back,” Norman mutters. All he remembers is the light and the after-image of kaleidoscopes in his eyes when he tries to think back on how he got here.
Peter considers his board. “Now… there’s a timeline where the Goblin—and Norman Osborn—just mysteriously disappeared one day, and another where, presumably, I die shutting down the Fusion Reactor after Doc Ock just vanishes.”
Otto frowns at that, and murmurs, “Sorry?”
Peter shrugs, and winces when it pulls at his stitches. “Don’t be; multiversal theory, there must be thousands of dead Peter Parkers out there.”
Marko looks about the room, frowns, and nods thoughtfully for a moment. He considers Peter’s diagram and the branching timelines and then shrugs.
“Yeah, I still don’t get it, but I… also really don’t care. Is it going to affect me?”
Peter waffles for a moment, before settling on, “You? Personally? …Not really, no.”
“Good. Am I free to go then?”
If Peter is disappointed in Marko’s lack of scientific interests, he’s at least learned to hide it better over the decades. He waves a hand and says, “Yeah, go. But Marko, if you ever start to feel sick or… sand-y again, I want you to contact me, okay?”
“Yeah, yeah,” says Marko, but he takes the card Peter gives him and goes on his way.
Peter watches him go and then, after a moment, regards the floor beneath his feet.
“What am I going to do with you two…?”
“Can I go home? Can we call Harry?” says Norman. “Please? I mean, we can explain it to him, I just—I need to talk to talk to him, I need to tell him—”
But Peter… just looks up at him, a wounded deer about to take another hit.
And Norman thinks, Oh.
- - - - -
Is he the Goblin now, or is he Norman? The line is blurry lately, but it’s important to hold the Goblin back right now, because Norman has to get this right. For once, he’s going to get this right.
Harry is looking up at him, heartbroken, and Norman feels like two people shoved into a head too small, but Norman is going to get this right.
I’m sorry…
I haven’t always been there for you, have I?
I’m proud of you.
Eighteen years, and he finally gets it right, his son in his arms, and he’s going to be there for him from now on, he’s going to get this right.
- - - - -
It figures, doesn’t it, that he broke another promise.
- - - - -
Harry is four-years-old and he won’t stop screaming.
“What do you want? Just tell me, Harry, anything—please,” says Norman. He hovers uselessly at the edge of the room.
He doesn’t know what he’s doing.
Emily knew. Emily always knew what to say and do, and Norman knew all along he wasn’t cut out for this. He tried to tell her, but she had just held his face and looked at him with such confidence, that for a moment, Norman believed her when she said he could do this.
But Emily is gone, and the truth eventually came out. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, what Harry needs, how to make him stop crying, what to do to make it better.
He calls for Bernard.
“Just—help him, please. I don’t know. I don’t know,” says Norman and he runs, because sometimes the best thing you can do is just get out of the way so better people can fix it.
For what it’s worth, the crying does stop, and Norman sits in his office and listens as Harry is coaxed away to play as if he was never crying at all.
- - - - -
“This is my friend’s house. She’s away for a trip to Europe for a while and said I could have a couple of friends stay here, but keep a low profile, okay?” says Peter, and Otto leads Norman through the door.
Norman has no memory of getting here.
He looks around while Peter talks, lets his eyes drag over the room, tastefully decorated, the new modern, Norman assumes. Whoever lives here is reasonably well-off, pictures on the walls of happy people.
He shrugs off Otto’s hand and the tentacle that tries to catch him when he stumbles. There’s a door to the left and made-up bed behind it, and he crashes onto it and sleeps.
- - - - -
Days pass.
He and Otto are ghosts to each other.
There’s food on the bedside when he wakes, steadily replaced with new plates of food, or cups of tea that are left to grow cold. There are bottles of pain meds that he ignores and he lays in bed in quiet agony instead. He only hears Otto: the steady clicking of the tentacles as they move, and the pads of Otto’s feet on the floor outside the door.
Norman lays in silence, eyes closed, and when a tentacle tries to slip into the room to carry away the old plate of untouched food, Norman’s hand shoots out of the blankets to catch it. It shrieks a bit in surprise, regards him with its white optic, and Norman says to it, “Come here.”
Otto is hiding at the door, but peers around the edge, as if all six-foot of him can hide behind the door jamb. The claw that Norman holds calls to Otto pitifully—not trapped, because Norman has no illusions he could restrain any one of them on his own, but because it is allowing him to hold it in place.
“You’ve been avoiding me,” says Norman, and knows he’s right when Otto won’t meet his gaze.
Norman narrows his eyes. “I did something… I know I did. And you’re afraid of me asking about it.” The tentacle twitches in his grip, a stifled desire to flee. For what it’s worth, Norman grips it tighter, even when it clicks irritably.
“You’ve been through a lot. I didn’t think you needed more to deal with—” says Otto and something inside Norman snaps.
“Do not. Hide things! From me!” he screams through clenched teeth.
Everything freezes. The antsy movement of the tentacles still, and Otto’s head jerks up to look at Norman in guilty horror. He crosses the room in a few strides, kneels next to Norman in the bed and takes his hand in his.
“Don’t need someone else telling what I do and don’t need to know,” says Norman.
“I’m sorry,” says Otto. His eyes are wet with shame. “I didn’t mean that. I didn’t mean to do that... Of course. What… What do you remember last?” he says, and Norman laughs.
“Ha! Ha. Heh… I remember… the anti-serum was almost done. The Goblin wasn’t happy.”
Otto nods. “Peter sensed something was wrong. The Goblin convinced Max to fight, and then everything fell apart. Everyone was fighting. I was knocked out a window… and ran. I had to find out on the news that May… died.”
“You mean I killed her.”
“No—”
“I did. I killed her. After everything, it was me, I killed her—”
“No, it was me, Norman,” says Otto, and he grabs Norman’s head to face him. There is a deep shame in Otto’s eyes, and Norman realizes that Otto wasn’t just avoiding this conversation for his sake. Otto shakes as he whispers, almost to himself, “It was my fault. Not yours. The Goblin took over and… I got scared. And I ran. Like a coward,” he hisses.
His hands slip from Norman, falling to his lap, while the tentacles curl and shriek lowly to themselves. “You needed me. I was supposed to be there. For you. My second chance to get it right, and I still got it wrong. It’s not your fault. Okay? It’s mine. There’s no inhibitor chip malfunction to blame it on, just… me. I ran when you needed me. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Norman takes a shuddery breath. He knows a thing or two about cowards, he thinks. He reaches out, and touches Otto’s shoulder. He waits for Otto to look up, even if Otto won’t quite meet his eyes.
“I need you now. Will you come to bed?”
It’s a learning process, figuring out how to share the space with the tentacles. They have to hang over to the right of the bed, and Otto has to lay on his stomach to make it even work, but he gently wraps a flesh-and-blood arm across Norman’s chest and Norman thinks he can get used to it.
- - - - -
The severed tentacle is fixed. Otto lays on his stomach, head pillowed on his hands, head turned to the side. There’s a scar where the new metal meets the old, and it hovers over the bed to inspect Norman, clicking questioningly as it looks him over. Norman's stomach and chest and face are mottled with bruises, and it hangs over his face, chittering quietly.
“It’s worried about you,” says Otto. “It hasn’t seen you since I repaired the optic.”
“How do I look?”
“I’ve been hit by a train, and you somehow look worse.”
Norman lifts a hand to touch claw and lets his fingers brush against the metal casing. It’s rougher than its siblings, a simple white optic light and fragile pincers.
“Looks different,” says Norman, while he pets the side of claws.
“It’ll take a while to completely fix it,” says Otto. “Peter has come by while you were sleeping. The materials he had on hand are a bit… subpar.” The tentacle shrieks a little, and Otto adds, “Sorry.” To Norman he says, “Larry is a little… sensitive about it. I forget.”
“Larry…” Norman murmurs, and the claw sits in his hand for a moment. “They get sensitive, now?”
“They’re nothing but,” says Otto serenely, and huffs a laugh when the tentacles all hiss.
- - - - -
Norman finds Emily in her studio, the room half destroyed with tarps laid down everywhere and a paint-splattered toddler with her on the ground.
“Excellent, Harry, really feel the art, feel the expression,” says Emily, arms wrapped around Harry’s stomach to hold him in place in her lap while he smears bright paints across a canvas. They’re both absolutely splattered with paint in their old clothes. There has to be a cleaner way to do this, he told Emily once. She simply smiled and said, “My studio, my rules.”
She presses a kiss to Harry’s cheek and says, "Beautiful!" Then she notices him and smiles mischievously.
“Aww, look, it’s Daddy, go give him a hug!”
“No…” Norman murmurs, but a paint-splattered toddler hugs his legs anyway. Hands hover for a moment, before looking to Emily, for the confidence to pat Harry’s head.
- - - - -
“How long has it been, since Rosie… died.”
“From my perspective…” Otto murmurs. The tentacles slink back from their explorations of the room, creeping in like guilty puppies, or frightened children. “It’s been… two months. But I couldn’t really feel it until a week ago.”
Norman lays on his side, turned toward Otto. His fingers trace the metal curve of Otto’s spine, trailing along the scars that fused the rig in place. One of the claws watches him, curiously.
“The inhibitor chip…”
Otto nods. His eyes are closed. “The AI did not understand grief, so it tried to fix what it could. We could not bring back Rosie, but we could rebuild the Sun.”
The claws cry quietly, low clicks and whirs. Otto opens his eyes to watch them from the corner of his eye, and to Norman he says, “Rosie was right about one thing. She said they could learn, if only we did not keep them cooped up in the lab all the time.”
Otto lifts a hand to smear away a stray tear. “I think they’re learning grief.”
- - - - -
Otto goes on walks sometimes, while Norman should be sleeping. Norman takes the time to lay in bed, instead, to feel the guilt alone, where he won’t have to fight Otto for the ownership of it.
“I’m sorry, May,” he says, and puts her with the rest of his ghosts.
When Otto comes home, Norman catches his hand and says, “I want to see Harry.”
- - - - -
They bury Emily on a beautiful summer day. It’s impossible to explain it to Harry, too young to understand, but old enough to feel it all happening around him, and Norman leaves Bernard to mind him.
The Octaviuses come back to the city. Norman hugs Rosie when he sees her, and Otto holds them both. They stay for a few days, an indulgence Norman allows himself.
They can’t stay forever though. He sends them back to their lives with a kiss and a promise he’ll be okay. He just wants to be alone.
He has a son who won’t stop crying and a company that’s breaking apart. He has the tools to fix one of these things.
He has so much work to do.
- - - - -
Norman has been to Emily’s grave only a few times since she died. It’s a beautiful spot, for what it’s worth. He thinks she would have liked the sunrises there, can imagine her perched on her own headstone, sketchbook in hand.
Now there’s his own grave beside it, and he stands on it contemplatively. Who is buried next to his wife? Norman? Or was he the Goblin at the last moments? He digs his boot into the ground and regards the grave hatefully. Just some rotten bastard, anyway.
He sees Otto wandering the rows of headstones while he searches for Rosie’s grave. He has his trench coat on, and it’s a cold enough November to justify the blanket he has thrown over his shoulders. The tentacles poke their faces out sometimes, mindful of any watchers, but it’s a quiet day. They study the graves with open interest as they pass, little children finally seeing the world.
Norman lets his hand trail over Emily’s headstone. “I told you I didn’t know what I was doing,” he says. Guilt swallows him whole. “I didn’t even try. I’m sorry.”
Harry’s grave isn’t far.
It makes Norman feel better to think she might at least spend eternity near better company than him.
The ground is cold when he sits down, a brief balm to the bruises he has, but he knows will make it murder to stand back up. He leans against Harry's headstone and stays there until Otto comes to find him.