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Otto paced the small place he inhabited, staring intermittently out at the three teenagers keeping him trapped in some basement. All the company he had was some lizard beast, snarling occasionally if he stomped too loud in his shoes. It was hard to breathe with such a large part of himself under the control of another person, every breath was laboured, inhaling smoke that wasn’t even there. There was nothing here, nothing at all. He tried the entrance barrier again. Nothing.
There had to be a plan to get out of here. The one who claimed himself as Peter Parker, a gross miscalculation of how well-mannered and advanced Parker actually was, talked too loud and too excited. How old was this kid? The others looked as though they could be in college, but he looked young, skinny and tiny in their wake. If Otto did not know better, did not know just how much this child could fight, he would be impressed with his valour. He just sneered.
He honestly wanted to sit down, admit defeat and at least rest for a while until whatever this was all for actually happened. He had to admit, he wasn’t as spry as he was in his glory days: achieving greatness in university labs and running around carrying the equivalent of a cinder block in books. Otto rolled his shoulders, his actuators mimicking the movements, bobbing slightly as if they weren’t under the command of someone else. He supposed something so attached to his spinal cord couldn’t shrug their alliance off so fast.
Sighing, Otto decided to go half way and leaned against one of the sides of his containment cell. The creature stared at him with the one part of its face not shrouded in darkness. Its eye had a glint to it that rang familiar, but Otto had no call to say whether it was good or bad. But as long as this thing stayed entranced by him, he would find entertainment in captivity by watching it’s every move. Maybe then he would understand his friend’s strange fascination with reptiles.
He smiled to himself. The ideas one of his oldest friends would have running through his head right now at the sight of this thing were so palpable that Otto could predict his words even without him in the room. Or the universe, apparently. He could imagine the soft smile, the licking of his teeth as he concentrated. His fascination fuelled many unnecessary trips to a nearby zoo that pulled Otto away from his equations.
The creature tilted its head. It blinked, and the 3am rants about how fascinating geckos were with their lack of eyelids came tumbling back to Otto. They didn’t even share a dorm, but somehow, he would always show up when he finally decided that sleep was something he needed. Panicked, or just excited, with notes and presentation slides on every lizard imaginable. He had listened to extracts from every herpetology textbook ever written in the dead of those nights.
Sometimes, he had wished they kept in better contact. The passion came and went, and his dear friend settled down into a teaching job after he acquired a second PhD. It was a feat Otto had been tempted by, but he had all he needed in grant money without spending whatever was left on even more education. But he revered the ones who could. Even if they didn’t end up teaching a biology class similar to those he sat at dawn.
Otto sighed, and ran a hand down his face. He checked to make sure the kids out in the open were distracted before he took in the creature before him with more intensity. It was a silly thing to do, talking to a reptile, but Otto needed something to do while he was waiting. Boring a creature with his petty, yearning words could definitely fill up time. They had kept him up even more than the lizard lectures.
“I know someone who would find you fascinating,” he said quietly, “he’s quite the charmer, highly intelligent with an affinity for reptiles. I miss him.”
The creature moved its head closer into a spot of light, so Otto could make it out clearer. It kept its attention on Otto, as if understanding what he could say. An old friend of his would laugh, stand too close and tell him that, of course he can understand you, Otto, he’s alive. Otto simply sighed.
“I don’t suppose you even know what I’m saying, do you?”
“No, I understand you well,” the creature said, inexplicably British. Otto stared at it - him? - with a gaping mouth. He almost seemed to laugh at Otto’s reaction, readjusting himself to get a better look through the clear barriers. “What’s his name?”
“Curtis Connors,” Otto said and the creature recoiled slightly, “he was once a very dear friend of mine. If things were different, I wonder if he would have let me end up in this situation.”
Otto gestured to the actuators, hanging on invisible hooks in the air, otherwise limp. The lizard admired them with yet another familiar glint in his eye, staring at each extra arm at a time. He nodded and then refound his focus on Otto’s face. It was as if he was staring at something past the eyes he had met. Otto was a second away from breaking out in an awful sweat with the attention that had found itself on him.
“I’m sure something could have been different, had you taken the other fork in the path,” the lizard said, as if he was some profound philosopher staring at an apple in a statue he had ordered to be built of himself, “what led him to leave?”
“His family found out,” Otto said and bit his lip at the memory, “not about me in particular, but he never liked women, and they caught on to that. Even at his age, he was too scared to face them. So one day he’s gone, nine years later he arrives at my door with a pregnant wife.”
“I’m sorry to hear,” the lizard said, and he did sound it. Or as sorry as a giant, humanoid lizard could possibly appear. There was a tone of recognition in his statement, too. Empathy, perhaps. Either that, or Otto was truly becoming Curt and was reading far too into lizards than he actually cared about. “Humanity is a fickle thing when it comes to even the slightest abnormality. That’s why I suggest we skip a step in evolution, become the truest higher being.”
“And that is?”
The lizard glared at him, and Otto let out a short ‘ah’ in understanding. His maw grew into a smile, nodding in approval once he figured out what he was hinting at. So this thing was not always like this, it appeared. Otto knew enough about becoming a monster in your own wake to judge it too harshly. The constant static at the base of his neck was something he was so acquainted with now, an accumulation of his hubris. He simply wondered, instead, what procedure this creature could have undergone to end up in the state he was in.
Otto readjusted his glasses as he tried to get a better look at the lizard, in hopes to answer his own useless little question. But the lizard shifted along with his movements, as if anticipating every left step he took. It was almost thrilling, to have someone read him so accurately like that again that he could predict every slight shuffle. It was Curt, who his mind fluttered to, as it often did when he had no other thought occupying it. He understood him so intimately that if he so much as walked in a different manner, he would know.
His hands curled into fists. He looked over his glasses at the creature.
“How did you end up like this?” He asked, deciding his games of figuring it out himself weren’t leading him to a solid answer. The lizard paused, eyes still on Otto, before humming slightly.
“I was intending to work on helping amputees, using lizard DNA - some of them can grow back their limbs, you know - and instead… I discovered that as a human, I was deeply flawed, and that this,” the lizard may have pointed at himself as he spoke, but the shadows surrounding him were too difficult for Otto to see through, “was the state of being that saved me, and could save everyone. I tried to share my discovery, but not everyone was all that appreciative of the gift I had to offer.”
Otto quirked an eyebrow as he asked, “you tried to turn other people into lizards?”
“As many as I could,” the lizard said knowingly, “it was what would have accelerated our survival rate as a species. So many terrible things would not have happened had we had been lizards.”
“I suppose so,” Otto said, not truly understanding this lizard-man’s intentions, but deciding it was easier to go along with him than argue against someone who could speak so eloquently. He would take offence himself if anyone questioned his own motives with the actuators, the reactor. When you do something horrendous to yourself, you accept it in any manner necessary, even if it is a manner full of excuses and desperate claws for answers. “You were a scientist, then?”
“Yes, at Oscorp,” the lizard said, a fond ring to his words, “I was highly acclaimed, you know.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
“I had interns, awards, the whole bucket! I was mentoring a young Gwen Stacy, a truly brilliant mind. That Peter Parker, too,” the lizard spat out Parker’s name as if it was a hair he had stuck on his tongue.
“The one out there?”
“No, he was very different. He was years above his age in some aspects, but in others…”
“Brilliant but lazy,” Otto said, whimsically, a smile stretching on his face at the few times he had seen the student before everything went flipside, “that’s what his teacher - Connors - described him as.”
The lizard stayed silent for a hot minute before nodding in assent. It was as if he knew Otto wouldn’t respond if he said anything, letting the thoughts pass over himself before he spoke a single word. Over their straight-backed lunches with their wives, neither of them knowing the history, they had discussed work in curt, polite words. Parker was so incredibly unique in his intellect that Curt thought him something of a prodigy. After meeting him, Otto couldn’t say he disagreed.
Every meeting since he had returned from wherever on Earth he had disappeared to was manufactured. As if they couldn’t meet each other’s eyes without every single emotion from university and the few years that followed overspilling from their mouths. It wasn’t like either of them could walk separate ways, either, Otto had told Rosie so much about his old college friend that it felt wrong to leave him so very soon after his return. Otto didn’t even want to turn him away, he could never do that to Curt, even if he barely recognised the eyes that looked at him across from the dinner table.
“You care a lot about this Connors,” the lizard said with a curl to it’s jaw, “does he care for you?”
“I don’t know, he has Martha, and the boy…” Otto said and started to pace once again, a watchful look feeling all encompassing on his body as he did, “even if he still did, he would have too much to lose if I come admitting my feelings like I was a little schoolgirl. I really did love him, and perhaps I do now, too, but it’s not something I should act upon in a situation like ours.”
It was hard to admit, but Curt had such a wonderful life that Otto found it hard to insert himself back into it. He refused to hurt people he cared about like that ever again, he couldn’t tear down a man’s life for his own selfish feelings. The one person he had left, since Osborn’s death, and Rosie’s too… if he were to go home and be face to face with him, then there would be no words to say. No words he could think to say.
Talking to Curt was hard enough without this bubbling under his metallic casing. Otto stared at a scratch on the floor.
“You mentioned earlier that he’d like me?”
“Well, yes. Reptiles were his thing, too, you see. He might not have been entirely on board with the experimenting on yourself thing, though, which is why I’m sure I would be safe in a universe where he stayed with me.”
“I’m sure he would understand, if you were forced to experiment on yourself.” The lizard sounded borderline defeated at his statement. Otto paused his walking circuit to look at him, staring at his clawed hand with what might have been resentment in his eye. “I don’t regret this, but that…”
“I understand. The actuators, the arms, they’re part of me, they’re my power. I wanted nothing more than to get that machine built, I let it go to my head. They are the best and worst thing to happen to me.”
“They do suit you, if I must say. I may not know my version of you personally, but I do know you take on the look where I’m from, too.”
“What happens?” Otto asked, expecting a run down of his power spree, the adrenaline-fuelled run in which he did whatever he pleased to get that machine working again. His life’s work. He needed it finished. He needed to get it back. “Do I get the fusion reactor running?”
“You do indeed, with the help of Oscorp, actually. You’re something of a celebrity in that place, at least you were before I left.”
Otto smiled, the rush of knowing that it could be done, that it will be done, filled him from his toes upwards. Then he hesitated, and gave the lizard a slight glare.
“Why didn’t you mention you knew who I was earlier?”
“I was scared it would put you off talking to me, you’re good company,” the lizard said with a little groan, “you would ask me who I was, and I didn’t want to put you in that position.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Otto said as he scowled, “who are you, then?”
The lizard paused. Finally, he pulled himself into the light, so his whole self was on display. Scales, green and glistening, covered every inch of him. He was luminous under the new-shed light. The lizard raised one of his clawed fingers and tapped on the barrier that separated the both of them, and both pairs of eyes watched as it ricocheted off of it as expected. Otto lowered himself slightly to get on eye level with the creature, who had been hunched down the entire conversation.
If he had to guess, the reptile was at least the same size as himself, if not probably bigger. Right now, under his eye, he was miniscule.
“Well?” Otto demanded. “I don’t like guessing games.”
“I’m sure you don’t,” the lizard said, “you know, I’m sure there’s a world out there where things work out for you.”
“You’re deflecting.”
The lizard shook its head, staring intently at Otto. There was something about it, it was as if he was pushing the conclusion out of Otto’s mouth as if his teacher. Or, maybe not a teacher. More an enthusiastic biology student knocking rapidly on his dorm room door, one arm hooked over half of the library’s stock, his wrist weighed down with a plastic bag of Chinese food from the nearby restaurant they would frequent.
There was something about the glint to his eyes that was akin to a man who had stayed up all night to see a comet fly overhead on a hilltop, watching the man beside him with all the admiration Otto was giving the navy expanse above them both. There was something about the gentleness to the beast, so familiar, as if he was about to brush a strand of hair out of his eyes as he strained them too hard to find the spectacle that never appeared.
Otto swallowed. He had no words to say.
“Curtis,” he breathed out instead, taking quick steps away from where he had landed in his recent pace to rejoin the closeness they had created, “Curtis Connors.”
“Yes,” Curt said, sadly yet so overwhelmingly relieved in the way he breathed, “yes, I’m sorry, Octavius-”
“No, no, I understand,” Otto said, unsure of what else he could say to the man he had just unknowingly confessed his love to. They stared at each other in a lingering silence. “I… you…”
“I should have said something earlier, really, but it was nice to be talked about like that, especially by-” Curt stopped himself and shook his head slightly. But Otto knew what that meant, even if he didn’t finish his sentence. It was like the two of them were back in college, that night behind the bleachers, with their worlds ahead of them and a bottle of chardonnay between them.
Otto wished he could just offer Curt a drink now and have him tell every word that had flickered behind his eyes for the past however long they had known one another, as he did that day. With their hands too close, heads on shoulders. Already so blatantly in that space that they had nothing else to say. Just feelings left to cling to the oxygen around them. Perhaps that’s how it would happen, if he ever saw Curt again.
“Perhaps there is a world it could work out in.” Otto mimicked Curt’s words. “Were you trying to hit on me?”
“No, I was simply- I don’t have time for that,” Curt said thickly, and Otto laughed.
It was a strange feeling, realising he’d been talking to Curt so similarly to how he would. It was nice. This Curt was different, in many, many ways, but he was so undeniably him that Otto was genuinely surprised it took him so long to put two and two together. It really was like the days he treasured so dearly.
“It’s good to talk to you again,” Otto said to let out the air in his chest, “any version of you.”
“Of course,” Curt said, “it’s nice to get a word out to you without my brain messing over my bloody tongue.”
“I’m sure I find it endearing,” Otto said, now knowing what a lizard looked like flustered. “When you get back, give it a go for me. Tell me everything.”
“You too, you know. I do tend to gravitate to you, don’t I?” Curt said then paused yet again. “I know I’d stop you, somehow, if I was there.”
“There’s a world out there where we would have stopped each other, and a world where we’re both simply too stubborn to listen to anyone that it leaves us stranded in another.”
“I’m not so sure that’s a quality I possess,” Curt said as he tapped the barrier once more, “but if it was, would we have worked out in that world?”
Otto paused. He smiled, tapping where Curt’s claw just was. At that moment, there was commotion out of their cells, and the reality of their situation came crashing down. It was loud, stupidly so, but it wasn’t loud enough to cover his words, nor to distract him from the sharp grin that made even the most terrifying of teeth look soft.
“I’m certain of it.”