Work Text:
Reed stared. And stared. And then stared some more, just for good measure, hardly believing what he was seeing.
The tiered computer screens in front of him shone glossily and cheerfully back at him, reflecting their contents on the surface of his tired-looking-but-still-bright eyes and across his face, illuminating the slightly manic grin that was now spreading across said face.
“It worked.” Reed said aloud, although there was currently no one around his lab to hear it - he’d been burning the midnight oil for this one over the past few weeks, and burning quite a lot of it, given how extensive and involved this project had been.
Well, on that note, of course it had worked. He’d known it would work - eventually - of course. But still, just knowing was one thing, having proof in front of one’s eyes was another thing entirely. And now he had proof.
Reed’s grin grew, and he reached a finger out to tap at one of the screens, right under a chunk of text and code that was more or less the most important bit of proof on it.
“It worked!” Reed said again, though again, there was no one there to hear it. Not that he particularly cared if there was anyone. This was his moment. After a minute or so more of staring and grinning at the screens in something like rapture, he pushed up off his chair and away from the wide desk, rising to his feet and turning on his heel, setting off into the depths of his lab with a spring in his step, his lab coat flapping behind him.
If there had been anyone in the lab with him, they might have heard him contentedly hum a line or two of some poppy song.
Right there near the back of the lab, gleaming peacefully in its cradle of metallic supports, hooked up to the bank of miniaturized fusion-adjacent generators powering it, was Reed’s latest project, a proto-transwarp-engine. The verdict was in, and it was, as of right now, a fully functional proto-transwarp-engine, thank you very much.
“Hello,” Reed crooned when he was within arms’ length of it, still wearing his - frankly, somewhat goofy - grin. The proto-transwarp-engine, being inanimate, did not respond, although it might have gleamed with more intensity than a second ago. To Reed’s tired eyes, it certainly had.
Reed didn’t care either way. He took a circle around the setup hosting the engine, considering. The engine itself wasn’t very big, being a silver contraption roughly the size and girth of a toddler, which was, in fact, one of its main draws. Things like it tended to be big, bulky, and rather inconvenient on all accounts to work with. This one, well. It could be lifted with ease - relative ease - and could fit in the backseat of a car. Hell, it could fit into a car.
Hm.
Now, there was an idea. As soon as confirmation of success had popped up on his screens, Reed’s mind had shifted on to his next project - what exactly he should test the engine out on. A car was a rather good first option, if he did say so himself. And besides that, infinitely safer than the numerous other things one could use it on.
If Reed had been slightly less tired, he might have ran off to do something rather unadvisable. Being tired, more than he’d admit to himself, he simply circled the engine, thinking, and occasionally reaching out to tweak or adjust something in the setup here and there; a power cord out of alignment, a dial turned too much to the left or the right, a suspect blinking of a light diode. There was nothing wrong - of course not, it worked - but there was always a bit of room for improvement, after all.
After fussing around for sometime, he came to stop in front of the engine, staring at it some more before leaning over the main railing around it to better be able to reach over and bother some switches that were completely minding their own business.
In that position, his back was turned towards the rest of the lab, and by inference, his desk and his computer screens. Had he been in any other position, he might have seen when the screens changed from their pleasant white-blue to a more sinister red, and furthermore, might have even seen the light of the alarm klaxon as it began to flash warningly.
He might have heard it too, but Reed had disabled the actual alarm after it had sounded one too many times that day and interrupted him in an important bit of tinkering. He hadn’t needed to attend any of the skirmishes that had broken out that day before that, as that was all they had been, skirmishes, so he had no qualms about muting the alarm and going about his scientific business; leaving the business of the city to his teammates.
Thinking back on it later on, he’d think those infamous five words to himself: I shouldn’t have done that.
But he had, in fact done that, and so his only warning about the intruder in the building - the intruder that was heading up towards his lab and closing in rapidly - came when the intruder in question burst across the threshold of his lab in a cacophony of destructive noise that was impossible for Reed - as preoccupied as he was - to ignore.
Reed stopped short, nearly electrocuting himself on a power line he’d unplugged for whatever reason. For a moment he stood frozen, listening. Then he sprang into action, jamming the end of the power line hastily back where it belonged before straightening and spinning around to face whatever had entered his lab.
Dr. Otto Octavious, colloquially known to his rivals, the press, and the newspapers as Doc Ock, stood in the doorway. Or what remained of the doorway, anyhow. In each of his trademarked tentacles, the doctor held a piece of the lab’s double blast doors, which had been ripped off their hinges as if they were little more than paper. In skintight green and yellow from head to toe, and an eager cast to his face, he presented a rather terrifying picture.
“Shit,” said Reed as he took this picture in, and resisted the urge to rub his eyes. It was so very tempting to try and write the scene off as a hallucination of a sleep-deprived mind, his sleep-deprived mind, but the mute alarm klaxon - that Reed saw now, much too late - said otherwise.
“Shit!” Reed said again as a piece of his lab’s door - one of them - came hurtling across the air towards him, and he threw himself out of the way with seconds to spare. The chunk of metal came crashing down right where he stood, a few scant feet away from the proto-transwarp-engine.
“Hey!” Reed snapped, glowering across the lab, incensed on behalf of the engine more so than he was for himself. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Doc Ock smiled, and was not a very nice smile, in Reed’s opinion.
“Oh, excuse me, I didn’t see you there,” he said, voice heavy with mockery. “I just came to-” a nod over Reed’s shoulder “-pick something up.”
Reed glanced sharply over his shoulder at the engine, then let his gaze snap back to Doc Ock.
“I don’t think so,” Reed said through gritted teeth, his eyes narrowing. “Get out of my lab.”
Doc Ock’s eyes narrowed in response, his mouth morphing from its rictus-smile into a overblown fake-pout. He clicked his tongue.
“Is that any way to treat a guest?”
“Not a guest. Out.” Reed ordered, monosyllabic. He was too tired for this. And he didn’t like banter. Never did well with it. Was not a fan.
“Fellow doctor, then?” Doc Ock prodded, his smile forming again, too threatening to even appear genuine.
When all he got in response was a put-upon sigh from Reed, he shrugged.
“Fine, have it your way,” he said, and flung the remaining pieces of the blast doors he was holding in different directions across the lab, aiming none of them at the other doctor. He was intending on dealing with him personally.
Reed’s eyes flicked between the door chunks on instinct as they landed, watching as they crashed down, destroying or maiming key components in the lab, forgetting Doc Ock for a split-second.
In that split second, Doc Ock moved, launching himself across the lab, propelled by his tentacles. The ones not propelling him snaked out towards Reed with all the swiftness of, well, a snake, and before Reed knew it, one had wrapped itself around his waist and had started to lift him up.
Reed snapped back to himself as his feet began to leave the ground, and immediately, his legs began to lengthen, allowing him to plant his feet back on the floor and brace himself to try and break Doc Ock’s hold on him.
Wrapped like a belt around his waist, that hold immediately proved quite hard to break. Not to be daunted, Reed switched tactics, and began to lengthen upwards, intent on thinning himself out enough to slip from Doc Ock’s grasp.
In response, the tentacle around his waist tightened.
Reed hissed, and kept on lengthening, his face set in concentration from the strain of stretching so quickly.
Another of Doc Ock’s tentacles moved towards him at that second, cutting through the air with a swish. Not a moment too soon Reed ducked his torso - now double its length - to the side, twisting away from a potential impact with the tentacle. And then kept on twisting, as another tentacle followed the first, and then another, and for the span of a few minutes, Reed was engaged in the world’s worst game of dodgeball.
A particularly sharp twist to the left caused two of the tentacles to collide and tangle with each other, forming a knot that made Doc Ock swear under his breath as he worked to pull the tentacles apart, his attention momentarily diverted from Reed.
Reed seized his chance, letting his legs slide out from under him as he extended his torso in one last stretch, and felt himself begin to slip from Doc Ock’s grasp.
But not for long. Above him, the tangled tentacles broke free, and then a pressure crushed in around Reed’s waist. Then, he was being hoisted high into the air, and the hoisted higher and higher.
Dangling above his lab, Reed slammed his hands down on the silver curve of the tentacle crushing him from waist to hips, a groan of effort escaping him as he tried exert enough downward force to pull himself up and out. He might as well have been pushing against a mountain, but he kept at it.
Just then, a lurking tentacle rose, wrapping itself swiftly around Reed’s legs, encasing them from knee to mid-calf. Reed let out a yelp that was more surprise than anything, and began to struggle in earnest, straining - rather futilely - against both points of restraint. The struggling soon turned to writhing, Reed bucked, twisted, wiggled, all in ever-increasing efforts to free himself, but nothing gave. The only thing truly free were Reed’s arms, and he used them to slap or punch away tentacles that came diving in to take potshots at him. At least until a tentacle shimmied in with purpose, lassoing his arms above elbows and drawing tight.
Reed would have screamed in frustration, if he was not already busy spitting some rather explicit curses.
He put out a gigantic burst of effort, felt his legs and arms slip a bit from the grip of the tentacles, and then, nothing.
Doc Ock clicked his tongue. Again. Reed decided then and there that he hated that sound.
“This has….actually been amusing,” Doc Ock said, and he sounded amused, the bastard. “But I'm afraid I can't waste anymore time with you.”
Reed eyed him balefully. “Door’s that way,” he said, and jerked his head towards the ragged hole in the wall Doc Ock had come through.
“Why, thank you,” said Doc Ock, sickly saccharine, and raised the only tentacle that was not currently holding Reed pinned. The pincer-like tips at the ends of the tentacle clacked together, meeting with a resounding metallic click, and when they opened, light was crackling between them, blue and crisp.
Reed blinked in alarm, and opened his mouth to scream, shout, curse, or maybe all three at once, but never got a sound out.
The tentacle came down lightning-fast, the pincer-like tips spreading out wide, energy running along their surface, right down onto the middle of Reed’s chest, the crackling, sparkling light burning right through the material of Reed’s blue jumpsuit.
This time, Reed did scream. It wasn't a shrill scream by any means, but through the explosion of pain that rapidly spread through his body, making his vision go hazy as it did, Reed could have sworn he saw Doc Ock flinch, just a little.
Good.
He felt like he was being stabbed by a thousand - no, a million at least - burning needles, and under that, he was feeling the overwhelming urge to both stretch his body and try to make himself as small as possible at the same time, anything to get away from the pain. He could do neither, he seemed to be paralyzed, rendered inert by the flow of electricity being pumped into his chest, a flow that seemed to go on and on.
The pain seemed to go on and on, as well, spreading and spreading, up to the tips of his hair and down to the tips of his toes; and then, like a flipped switch, it was suddenly gone.
Reed drew in a ragged breath, and found himself thinking rather wildly, that this must be what a fried egg felt like. Oh, sure, he’d been electrocuted many times over the course of his life, most of those times in the name of scientific enterprise, but never quite to this extent.
“Ow,” he heard himself say, which was something of an understatement. Hyper-aware that he was still in immediate danger of being shocked, he attempted to move, to do something.
Doc Ock chuckled, his voice seeming to come from miles below Reed. The next moment, the world swayed around Reed, and then blurred, as Doc Ock took a step forward and promptly dropped Reed onto a nearby countertop.
When he hit, Reed heard the breath leave his lungs in a loud oof. And also, for some strange reason, he heard something that sounded more or less like a splat.
“What the-” Reed mumbled, and tried to sit up. He didn’t get far. Didn’t get anywhere, actually, because his body refused to move. He gave it a moment and tried again, no dice. Settling for something smaller, he wiggled his pinky finger, and felt the slightest twitch in response.
Oh. Not good.
Doc Ock’s shadow fell over Reed, the shadows of his tentacles curling and uncurling by it.
Doubly not good.
“Ah,” said the owner of the shadow, sounding much too pleased with himself, “I knew a little shock would limber you right up.”
Reed didn’t like the sound of that. He liked it even less when the shadow advanced, giving way to the real solid deal, and likewise, four real solid tentacles.
“Uh-”
One of the tentacles dove down, closing around his right ankle. And then pulled. Reed watched, in something like fascinated horror, as his foot went right along back with the tentacle, his leg following it, seeming to get thinner and wider as it went.
That…that didn’t look quite right. In fact, if Reed were to say what it looked like, he’d say it looked like melted cheese. Or pulled taffy. Or something with the equivalent stretchiness.
See, Reed knew how he stretched. And this was very much not how he did. He kept watching, and watching as Doc Ock pulled his leg, and kept pulling. And then kept pulling some more.
And not only that, as he pulled, Doc Ock also draped. Draped and wound, more precisely, and Reed was treated to the rather disconcerting sight of his own leg being haphazardly hooked around his own lab like a party streamer.
Ah. That’s what he’d meant by limber. Shit. No, really, shit. Was that what an electric shock could do to him?
If Reed had been less occupied by being literally strung out, he would have been re-evaluating several things about himself.
When Doc Ock had covered the autoclave, a pipette set, computer bank, several overhead lighting banks, and two of the legs of Reed’s desk, he stopped, dropping Reed’s foot unceremoniously to the ground.
For a moment, he seemed to survey his handiwork in silence.
“Hm.”
Reed liked the sound of that hm even less than he’d liked the last words the man had spoken.
The next moment, not one but all four of Doc Ock’s tentacles were flashing through the air towards Reed, who summarily resigned himself to his fate.
Three of the four tentacles seized the remaining three of Reed’s limbs, the fourth seized his head, gripping like a vice. And then all four pulled.
Reed may have yelped then.
The next several minutes were passed for Reed from the perspective of a piece of chewing gum. It did not hurt, per se, his stretching never did normally, but the feeling of being treated as anthropomorphized elastic was not exactly pleasant.
Much less pleasant were some of the places he was ending up in. Or rather, over. Doc Ock seemed to be hellbent on spreading him over every available surface of his lab, and Reed was rapidly becoming acquainted with surfaces he’d otherwise never have reason to contact.
After a while, longer than several minutes, probably, Doc Ock stopped. Maybe he had gotten bored, maybe all the empty spaces in the lab had been exhausted.
Reed waited a moment to see if he had indeed really stopped,, and then started to take inventory of himself.
His head was what felt like miles from his body, wedged sideways into a shelf, each of his fingers had been painstakingly pulled out for a few meters and flung over various pieces of machinery, his feet were nowhere in sight, and he couldn’t tell what were his legs and what were his arms. Just looking at the crisscrossing lines of blue and black hanging across his lab - lines that were himself - was making his head hurt.
He was quite literally, beside himself and all over the place.
As his head was stuck sideways, Reed’s vision was sideways as well, but he could still see with perfect clarity.
Doc Ock came into his field of vision just then, tentacles held akimbo, making his way straight for the proto-transwarp-engine. The engine had been the only thing to escape Doc Ock’s decorating efforts, and as he approached it, Reed understood why.
“Don’t you dare-” Reed started, feeling panic rise in his chest.
Doc Ock waved a tentacle chidingly at him. It really was quite unsettling how much the tentacle looked like a waving finger. Then the same tentacle swung around, and ripped the proto-transwarp-engine neatly from its resting place.
Reed whimpered. And then exclaimed in horror as Doc Ock jauntily flung the engine upwards, where it flipped over itself a few times before being caught in another tentacle, which held it up for Doc Ock’s inspection.
“Fine work.” Doc Ock said after a second or so, sounding pleased. “I’ve had my eye on this since you started making it.”
Well. If that didn’t raise some questions. None that Reed had any chance to ask, because after sending Reed - or rather Reed’s head - one last glance, Doc Ock was gone, ducking under Reed’s hanging limbs or batting them away to get to the door.
Reed was unable to turn his head to follow his path out, or to glare at him like he so desperately wanted to, but he heard him go, and heard when he reached the door. A few crashes and thumps followed, Doc Ock tossing pieces of wall and door to the side to clear his path, presumably breaking even more delicate lab equipment in the process..
The last thing Reed heard before silence settled on the lab - which now held an air of dejection sans the proto-transwarp-engine - was Doc Ock’s voice, floating back to him with vicious cheer.
“Let’s do it again sometime, yes?”