Chapter Text
I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
-----
The nightmares were inevitable.
Whenever he closed his eyes, he could see the bright light, blinding, could feel the intense heat, burning, could hear her screaming, could see her falling, and despite all that, the raging joy and excitement of having completed his life’s work, his greatest desire. It was shameful, a bitter acidic roiling seeping into his chest when he tried to reconcile what happened.
The power of the sun, and he was Icarus, flying to close, melting under his own hubris.
As a scientist, he was used to odd hours: quiet evenings stretching late into the early hours of the pale gray morning, hours without thought of physical needs. But even with the actuators, the constant thrum of conscience brushing against his mind, his body was weak. Even pushing at the boundaries of what was possible [always reaching, always grasping, but never finding, never keeping], he would eventually find himself drifting off, slowly succumbing to rest.
The past, his future endless with possibility, slaving endlessly over his equations and his blueprints, broken only by the sunshine smiles of Rosie, dear Rosie, always soft and always gentle, but always demanding in her care, shining with joy and laughter, blazing with mischief and teasing, the light of his life, the power of the sun in the palm of his hands as he held hers and slipped that ring on her finger -
And then she was slipping from him, hand sliding from his, disappearing into the inky blackness as the reactor pulsed beneath the waves, fiery orange consuming them all as they sunk further, drowning in the depths of nothing, an unfathomable void with its gaping maw eating them alive as she screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed -
“Otto?”
Peter’s voice filtered through the fog of his mind, and he felt the everlasting buzzing beneath carrying him back to reality.
He had fallen asleep at his makeshift desk once more - an old fashioned oak roller, crammed up in the corner by the large window that illuminated the entirety of the loft. He had several notes plastered to the glass, standing out stark against the gray thrum of rain outside. His back ached something terrible, but the ache in his chest was subsiding as the overlapping memories retreated.
A mug of tea was settled before him, a warm hand pressing it into his own.
“Come to bed.”
He sighed, back twisting uncomfortably as he stood and followed the young man across the room. The actuators helped him cross, though it hardly helped the blow to his ego - even without the twenty years impacting his return, to acknowledge his age and his human frailty -
“You need to take better care of yourself.”
Don’t burn yourself out, love.
And yet that had been exactly what he’d done: set fire to his world, set fire to his dreams, incinerating all that he had been and was and could be, one simply mistake of ego -
“Otto.”
A hand brushed against his arm, insistent in pressing him down onto the bed. He sat on the edge, stubborn even now, and wasn’t that the crux of things -
“Hey.”
He finally looked up, a spark of shame flickering at the worry bleeding across Peter’s face. He knew Peter had plenty of nightmares of his own - Norman hadn’t returned to their timeline, even though they had been so sure he was their Norman, and he had learned the awful deaths of the two Osborne’s had still left their mark on this world. And Otto saw it when Peter’s eyes dimmed, when a certain listlessness settled into his bones and his overeager excitement would dull.
“Good morning,” Otto finally responded, exhaustion marking his attempted smile. The weak grin he received in return settled his heart, knowing at least they were trying.
How are you?
Trying to do better .
“It’s a morning, alright,” Peter joked half-heartedly, slouching down beside him. He took a slow dreg from the mug, breathing in deeply. “You doin alright, Doc?”
“One step at a time,” he said gently. At least the nightmares this time had been of Rosie, of something that was real, and not the ones where it was Peter instead of her, Peter begging for his life instead of Rosie screaming in terror.
It wasn’t much better, but the sheer terror of that being the reality he would wake to when he’d already lost one love to his failures already -
It felt traitorous that it was more painful, in its own way.
“We should take the day off.” Peter grinned, a genuine smile gracing his face. “We could do something fun.”
“And what, exactly, is your version of ‘fun’?” Otto prodded teasingly.
“Oh, you know, the usual - fighting crime, falling off buildings, unlocking teleportation. The little things that get the blood flowin.”
The actuators plucked the tea from their hands as Otto turned on him, tossing him back onto the bed with ease.
“I think there are far better things that get the blood flowing, don’t you?”
Peter snorted, before devolving into all out laughter. It was a beautiful thing that took his breath away: a ray of sunshine in the barren chaos they were slogging through, a piercing moment of happiness where everything else faded away. He smiled, using the long arm behind him to pluck a book from the shelves across from them, another planting itself on the ground as he maneuvered to the head of the bed, a third playfully wrapping around the young man to drag him up as well.
“Like poetry.”
Peter’s reflexes were inhumanely fast as he tried to snatch the book away. The actuator dangled it just out of reach, though they both knew Peter was more that quick enough to do something about it if he actually tried.
“I think we can make our own poetry, don’t you?”
“My dear boy, surely you know how to make a more convincing argument than that.”
When they lay down, spent, he could feel himself drifting off once more, lulled by the soft patterns Peter was tracing along the threaded Lichtenberg figures spiraling out from the metal infused around his waist. It was - peaceful, perhaps, and while fleeting, he would revel in it for as long as possible.
He wrapped his arms around Peter, holding him close. It was a barren thing, the endless infinite of the future stretching before him now like a desert. But even in such hard conditions, life could thrive - and he would do his best to nurture that, this time giving it time and space to grow.