Chapter Text
Being transported from one universe to the next is not as painful as Otto had expected, but it is confusing. He would liken it to being gradually pulled in by the gravity of one massive object, and then suddenly finding oneself hurled toward another, distant and unrelated body of mass. The whiplash might give him back issues (ha) if he wasn’t pretty sure that he does not, in fact, have a physical body at this very moment.
When Otto feels the world around him again, and opens his eyes, he is not surprised that the first thing he sees is a miniature sun. His sun. Otto had no idea what exact moment he would return to, and while returning in the middle of his second failed fusion experiment is far from ideal, it isn’t surprising.
He can deal with this. He has to; the alternative does not bear considering.
What he hears next, however, makes Otto lose track of any plan he had been formulating: it is a woman’s scream, and the sound chills him to the bone.
For a heartbeat, Otto is frozen in sheer disbelief. A logical part of Otto might assume the voice belongs to the red-head he kidnapped to lure Spider-Man to him, but that possibility does not even cross his frantic mind.
Otto knows that voice. It is the voice that has haunted his dreams every night since the accident; his subconscious reliving the moment everything fell apart, even though the actuators’ influence stopped him from grieving or even remembering it while awake.
He would know that voice anywhere.
“…Rosie?”
Otto doesn’t have time to confirm it, or even turn around, but he doesn’t need to look behind himself to picture what is happening. This is the moment his mind insists on replaying every time, the moment he regrets the most (although stopping Spider-Man from shutting down the reactor moments earlier should probably be at the top).
Protect my Rosie!
The actuators are fully under his control, and Otto can feel them as they spring into action. It’s like a reflex, reaching out to guard, to protect, that which matters most.
Otto’s shift in focus is so complete that his visual input shifts with it: he sees through one of the actuators’ cameras. To his wonder and utter horror, the feedback is exactly what he would have expected: Rosie is screaming and a shower of glass shards is flying towards her.
Time seems to slow down as the shards close in. For a terrifying, heart-stopping moment, Otto is sure he won’t reach her in time; that again, he’ll be too late to change anything.
But the actuators are incredibly fast, like coiled snakes lashing out. They reach for Rosie, move between her and the danger, and…
Otto’s visual connection is abruptly snapped back to himself as a wave of pain hits him. It isn’t the all-encompassing pain of getting electrocuted, but rather a dozen small pains all over his back and side.
Too surprised to even feel worried, Otto glances down at himself and notices several small shards of glass jutting from his body.
Of course, Otto thinks to himself, absent-mindedly. His outstretched mechanical arms had focused on protecting his wife, and although the sheer bulk of metal on his back had protected Otto from some of the debris as well, it could not protect him from all of it.
Otto looks up and is faced with a sight that very nearly stops his heart: Rosie is lying on the ground, unmoving. Her hair covers her face, and Otto can't see if she's hurt, if she's conscious, if she's breathing…
Otto tries to take a step towards her, only to find that his human legs are too shaky to carry him. The only reason he hasn’t toppled down already is because his lower right actuator has planted itself firmly on the ground to counterbalance the three that shot out to shield Rosie.
Otto opens his mouth to call out her name, but he is stopped by the feeling of thousands of volts of electricity coursing through him, stealing his breath away.
The last thought in Otto’s head, before the darkness overtakes him, is that if this is afterlife, he cannot tell whether it is heaven or hell.