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Otto hadn’t known what to expect. When the purple skies faded, there was a moment of peace, a moment where everything felt just right. That was before he had come to in his own time, gasping for air as he threatened to disappear under the water rolling in from the Hudson, pieces of rotting wood obstructing his movements. His back felt eerily numb, and something inside him was screaming to move, just move, before it is too late. Panicked, he reached for the back of his neck, checking that the inhibitor chip was well in its place. That everything was right again.
“Dr. Octavius?”
Dazed, Otto gazed up at the brown-haired figure standing in front of him, up to his middle in the water, looking as disheveled as he felt. A boy, really. Spider-Man. There had been three, before. One of them had even fixed his chip. He must have seen this man before. And yet, for the life of him, he couldn’t remember. Not his name, not his face. Just a churning sense of wrongness in his gut.
“Look at what’s happening,” the boy said. “We must destroy it.”
The power of the sun, in its full glory. He could remember it now, so vividly. Now the actuators were silent, or at least subdued, there was space for his own memories. The demonstration. Rosie. Everything that had happened after. And yet there were gaps too. A meeting he couldn’t quite remember. Some details from the last two days. Memories he knew should be there but just weren’t. It frightened him more than he cared to admit.
“You once spoke to me about intelligence. That it was a gift to be used for the good of mankind.”
“A privilege,” Otto said, not sure where the words had come from. He had said this before, surely, to many a student. But this boy wasn’t one of them.
“These things have turned you into something you’re not. Don’t listen to them.”
There was a desperation to the boy’s plea that startled Otto out of his own world. This boy, whoever he was, clearly wasn’t one of the men he’d left behind on the Statue of Liberty – or at least, not yet. Otto turned towards the fusion reaction, its brightness hurting his eyes even from behind the tinted glasses. There would be no way to stop it. He had made sure of that. They had made sure of that.
“Sometimes, to do what’s right, we have to be steady… and give up the thing we want the most. Even our dreams.”
“You’re right,” Otto said, even though all things considered it seemed quite an odd thing to say. Then again, nothing was as odd as travelling the multiverse. Which apparently existed.
Still, the boy seemed relieved. “Now, tell me how to stop it.”
“It can’t be stopped,” Otto said. “It’s self-sustaining now.” Unless… the river.
“Think,” the boy urged, and Otto was once again struck by how young he looked. Younger even than – no, he couldn’t remember.
“Drown it,” Otto said, and the actuators whirred around him. Back in the lab he would have used water to stabilise the reaction, and there was more than enough of it here. He looked at the fusion reaction, his son, and then at the boy. There was no other way around it. He couldn’t let this boy die for his sins. Not when he reminded him so much of the one who’d sacrificed everything to save a bunch of strangers who didn’t even want saving. Not when he had so much to atone for. “I’ll do it.”
Then the girl screamed, and the boy was gone. Mary Jane, his brain uselessly provided. Why her, and not him? Still, Otto moved. There was no time to lose – not for them, and not for the rest of the city.
Rosie, our new friend thinks I’m going to blow up the city.
Otto averted his eyes from the light, moving steadily towards his creation as he heard the boy scream behind him. You saved me, he thought, as he used his actuators to destabilise the structure that he had built, burying his machine in the cadence of the river, dragging it down with him until there was nothing left but the sound of his wife’s voice beckoning him closer. Let me save you in turn.