The metal was cold against his skin.  It was always the first thing he noticed when he woke up.  As the day wore on, he grew accustomed to it, or they warmed, perhaps.  He wasn’t sure.  But first thing, every morning, all winter, he noticed the cold.  And it bit especially deep this morning.  Christmas morning.  

He let them push him up, lift him out of the tangle of tattered blankets on the cardboard pallet that was his bed, hardly noticing the movement.  His thoughts were cast back to this time, a year ago.  He’d been warm, curled around Rosie, delaying waking up until the last possible moment.  The house, his lovely stone house with “Nosce te Ipsum” carved over the door, had smelt of the gingerbread that she had made (and burnt) the night before, and her hair had smelt of tea and spice.  For a moment, conjuring the scents in his mind, he could almost feel her warmth, feel her shifting against him in her sleep, and he reached out.

The air was cold against his hands, and empty.  They carried him out of the alley where he slept, seeking food on some unconscious urge of his.   He pulled his coat tighter around himself, but he couldn’t keep out the cold that crept in on the metal.  It chilled his spine, sapped his strength, made him ache.  He remembered before, the cold hadn’t affected him.  Every winter, Rosie had bundled up in scarves and gloves and rolled her eyes whenever he turned the thermostat down so he could sleep under the quilts with her.  He could almost hear her voice.

“Otto, not all of us are insulated like polar bears.”  Teasing and light, and his own response, a deep rumble.

“Mm, you need someone to keep you warm.”

“Why do you think I married you?  Otto, stop that, your hands are cold!”

The wind was cold against his face, and the voices of the past faded into the crunch of the ice in the gutters.  He looked up, finally registering where he was.  They had brought him over the roof-tops to the place he remembered so well.  He looked down at his house,  and for a moment, he didn’t see the broken windows, or the dead leaves that choked the narrow balcony.  His mind painted lights into the windows, and he watched a memory of Rosie decorating their tree.   She’d always insisted on a tree, a real tree, and last year, she’d prodded him into driving out into the country to cut their own.  He didn’t have a saw, so he, foolishly, took one of the laser cutters that he’d been using to cut the metal for them.  She laughed at him, rosy-cheeked in the snow of the tree farm.  The man at the gate had given him a funny look and a saw.  He’d stared at the crude tool, and it had seemed huge in his hands.  He was used to the tiny, infinitely precise instruments of his craft, but they looked like toys compared to this.  He’d wrapped his fingers around it and grinned, and proceeded to wreak havoc of on the trunk of the tree they chose, a beautifully symmetrical Douglas Fir, until Rosie laughed again and took the saw away from him before he hurt himself, completing the cut herself in neat, sharp strokes.

“That’s not fair, Rosie,” he’d laughed.  

She’d smirked, and cocked the saw over her shoulder, beautiful in her long green coat and russet scarf.  “You are such a city-boy, Otto.  Look, you’ve got sap all over your hands and needles all through your hair.”  She’d stepped close, and plucked the offending needles out with her sap-free fingers.  And he, careful not to touch her, had leaned that tiny bit closer and kissed her.   That day, she smelt of pine and wind and cider.

His tears were cold on his face as the lights faded from his once-upon-a-time home.  He could see into their kitchen.   This time a year ago, he’d been making their breakfast, waffles and eggnog.   He’d brought it to her in bed, and she’d sat up, brushing her hair back and laughing.  God, she was beautiful when she laughed.   He’d used too much vanilla in the waffles, but she laughed and said they were delicious and she kissed him and made him go get her tea so she could wake up properly.

“And make it right!”  Her voice, amused and sleepy, had followed him back out to the kitchen.  “No boiling it to sludge like your coffee!”

And he’d laughed, self-conscious because he was always self-conscious about his laugh, and made her tea the right way.  Water at a running boil straight into a cold cup, tea-bag for absolutely no longer than thirty seconds, dip, dip, swirl, and two scoops of sugar from the tiny golden sugar bowl that she’d brought back from Morocco in college.  He’d seen her make it so many times.  He took a sip before he brought it back to her, and hissed when he burned his tongue, and didn’t tell her.  The flavour stayed in his mouth all morning, a heady, citric taste that refreshed him and made him feel awake and alert despite the fact that he was most adamantly not a morning person.  Rosie joked about him, that he was some sort of nocturnal creature and how fortunate it was that they had ever even crossed paths.  She had quoted some poem about the sun and the moon, and how they never would have met but for a happy chance when the moon couldn’t sleep.  And he had nodded, tasting her sun-bright tea in his mouth and quipped back something about metrological conditions and they’d both laughed until they kissed and she tasted like vanilla and he tasted like tea, which was entirely a switch.  So much laughter that morning.

The air was cold in his throat as he gasped, startled by them as they suddenly jerked him around so he could see what they had seen first.  He’d shut them out of his mind today, and he could tell they resented it.  Or was that merely him projecting emotions onto metal, anthropomorphizing them?  It didn’t matter.  Spider-Man, Peter Parker was clinging to the wall of the next building, watching them through that damnable mask.  When he saw that they had seen, he flipped onto their roof top and came over to stand near them, staring down at the house.  He pulled off his mask and scrubbed his hair into peaks.

“What are you doing here?” Otto asked warily.  Parker didn’t look at him, just stayed staring down at the empty building.

“I’m just checking that everyone’s having a quiet Christmas,” he said, rolling his shoulders in a joint popping stretch that made Otto ache just to see it.  He looked back at the scientist.  “But I guess you’re not really in a mood to be festive."   He didn’t wait for a response, but pulled his mask back on and swung away, silent for once in the cold air.  Otto watched him go.  He wasn’t the only one alone this Christmas, he realized.  Parker’s vigil over the city was taking him away from what was undoubtedly a warmer place than the alleys and rooftops, away from whatever family he might have had.  But Parker had made that choice himself.  Otto looked back at his once-upon-a-time home.  Choice had been taken away from him.

He remembered choosing the perfect gift for Rosie.  More than one, of course.  The grant from Oscorp had just arrived, and it was going to be a rich Christmas indeed.  But this was the gift.  He’d had his eye on it for more than two years, just waiting for the perfect time.  He remembered walking into the dusty little bookshop.  He’d been to see this gift-to-be so many times that the bookseller, a little man older than his wares, greeted him with an ironic smile.

“You’ll be wanting to see it again, Mr. Otto?”

“You haven’t sold it yet, have you?”

“No, no, don’t you worry.  I -”

“Good, because today’s the day.  I want to give it to her for Christmas.”

                Cloudy eyes had blinked behind thick, dusty glasses, and the wrinkles had creased into a smile.  “At last, eh?”

At last.  Too energized to catch the train, he’d walked home with the brown-paper-wrapped package heavy under his arm and his heart butterfly-light in his chest.  Checking that Rosie was still out, he’d wrapped it carefully in dark gold paper and tied it with a white silk ribbon, his fingers lingering on every fold and knot.  He re-tied the bow eight times (For luck, he’d thought to himself.) before he was satisfied with its loops and curves, and then he set it carefully under the hand-cut tree, propping it up against the tree skirt so the wrapping caught the lights.  And the next morning, the paper had refracted those lights in crazy directions, crumpled on the floor and forgotten, shoved aside as Rosie hugged first him, then her new framed, original manuscript of “Mr. Mistoffelees,” her very favorite of all of T.S. Elliot’s poems, and then him again.  Her hair had still smelt of tea and spice and the tree.

His voice was warm in his ears, tender despite the rasp of disuse.  “Merry Christmas, Rosie,” he murmured to the once-upon-a-time home.