BlockFixation

-

Skizz Lehman is six and he is the only survivor of the car crash that kills both of his parents.

"It's a miracle," the doctors tell his Granny, "not a scratch."

"The lord works in mysterious ways," she tells them, and takes her grandbaby home as soon as she is legally able.

-

Skizz Lehman is seven and he is learning how to grieve and grow and live in a world without the people he thought would be with him forever.

His Granny teaches him about loss, and about going on, and remembering. She lets him cry.

"Tears are not a weakness, Skizz," she promises him. "and anyone who tells you they are is crying on the inside because they don't know how to do it right. No one ever taught them."

-

Skizz Lehman is eight and he is taking his Meta Registration test.

"I can see in the dark!" He proudly tells the proctors, because he can, because his father could, and because that is what Granny wants him to tell them.

They hem and haw and test the light levels in the special room at the town office complex, and Skizz Lehman leaves with his official Meta registration- Dark Vision. With potential for public service or at least use in the mechanical and industrial sector, it's a D class ability.

"E would have been better," Granny tells Skizz, "but we take what we can get, dear."

-

Skizz Lehman is ten and he staggers home, shaken, triumphant. When he tells his Granny he needs to take the test again, that he'd fallen off his bike down the ridge and his elbow had been bent funny but then it had fixed itself, she bursts into tears.

"I know, baby," she sobs into her bewildered grandson's shoulder- he's already so tall. "I know."

-

Skizz Lehman's mother's maiden name was a lie.

Granny shows him pictures, of a woman who looks so much like her.

"My sister Marie," she says. "The tests weren't so specific back then, but they asked her to retest. They called and she never came home."

A year later, when it was her turn to test, Granny's mother had kissed her on the forehead, put her on a train, and lit the house on fire.

"you have a gift, baby," Granny tells him, holding his hands tight at the splintered kitchen table, "and there are people who will take you and that precious gift and never let it breathe. No one can know, Skizz. No one can ever know."

And because Skizz is a good boy and he loves his Granny, he promises her.

No one will ever know.

-

Skizz Lehman is fourteen and he has met his best friend in the entire world.

His name is Impulse, and he likes drumming and all the same music and games. He doesn't laugh at Skizz's hand me downs, and he wants to go to the basement shows for real, not just to drink beer because whoever's working the bar doesn't care about how old he is.

Impulse fills a place Skizz had not known was empty, and he's so cool and he's so smart and he can bottle time.

Well, something like it. He has to check in with the Meta Registry every six months, "Maybe more or less depending on what job I get in the future," and he talks about things that make no sense but that's okay because he listens when Skizz talks about things that make no sense, too.

-

Skizz Lehman is seventeen, and his granny is dying.

"I can't stop it," he sobs beside her bed. "why didn't you try?"

And she cups his face like when he was small and says, "some things, baby, you can't fight. Some things you can't change. It matters that you tried, and trying is worthwhile, but it doesn't always work out."

"Besides," she says as she takes his hand in hers, "I did try."

Granny has been dying for seven years.

She will not live another two.

-

Skizz Lehman is nineteen, and the woman who raised him has been reduced to a fake jade urn- her favorite color.

Impulse takes him on drives. It doesn't matter where they go. They talk, and they ride, and they sing, and Skizz cries and Impulse lets him and sometimes Impulse cries with him.

Skizz has his final lesson in loving and letting go.

-

Skizz Lehman is twenty three and Impulse is dying.

The car is a twisted wreck, the driver in the vehicle that hit them surely dead, and there's so much blood but Skizz is fine, of course he's fucking fine, why wouldn't he be FINE!

And he can't. He knows he promised, he knows, but if the price of that promise is Impulse cold and gray on a slab like Granny it isn't a price he is willing to pay damn the Meta Registry damn the secrecy and damn this FUCKING SEAT BELT-!

when the emergency crews arrive, they find two young men unconcious outside the wreck of a car, one clearly having dragged the other to safety.

One is seemingly untouched. The other has minor injuries.

The driver of the other vehicle, cushioned by his air bag, is airlifted to the hospital, where he will pass in the ICU three days later without ever regaining consciousness.

-

"Skizz?"

Skizz stares at the river, at the ducks on the far side.

"Skizz," Impulse sits down beside him, looking pale. "I just saw the police report on the crash."

"The other guy died, didn't he?" Skizz asks, non-commital.

"Skizz I should be fucking dead."

There is a silence that is somehow loud and filled with buzzing.

"Skizz? Why am I not dead?"

Skizz looks at the ducks.

He looks at his best friend in the entire world. Impulse can bottle time. Impulse has to check in with the Meta Registry twice a year. Impulse had been interviewed extensively to see if he had done something to prevent further physical damage to himself in the crash.

"Skizz?" Impulse asks gently, and Skizz Lehman begins to cry.

-

It all comes out, there by the river.

The original crash, how his ability- stronger than his mother's, like his Granny's- had kept him alive. The broken arm after the fall off the bike. The fake name, Great Aunt Marie, who her sister never saw again.

Granny, dying by inches, trying her best to stay alive long enough to see her grandbaby make it to adulthood safe and secure in his D rank dark vision, the best gift his father had ever given him.

"..is this why you never got sick?" Impulse asks, and Skizz cannot help the bark of laughter as he clings to his best friend's shoulder, feeling heavier and lighter and new and old all at once.

-

They both forget, for a time.

They grow, get new jobs, learn new things. They make music and they love it but it doesn't pay; Impulse gets a degree and so does Skizz, though he hates every second of it.

When he graduates Impulse gets lots of offers but he winds up going with GOAT Labs, because 'at least they don't work directly for the Registry and I get to use the real big kid equipment'.

Skizz floats from job to job. He's good at just about everything, a people person, a problem solver.

-

There is a fire and Skizz Lehman, thirty one, sees the vigilante with the ice powers get thrown.

The blockade does not cover the alleyway she was thrown into. No one is looking for her. They are cheering on the Registered Hero who showed up a few minutes ago.

Skizz gets down the alleyway. He finds her curled up on top of a dumpster. She's still breathing, but he can see gray matter.

He rubs his hands together.

She wakes up at the end of the alleyway, with a minor headache.

Skizz explains his unfortunate odor of burned trash and pennies away with being trapped in foot traffic around the fire to his officemates.

He'd left his blazer as close to the burning rubble as he'd dared. Too much blood on it.

-

Skizz Lehman is about to turn thirty two, and he takes a job working on accounting software. The hours are flexible, the pay is good, and he can work from home. They want results, not to see his face. It's boring and it's draining and he knows his way around a computer now, better than he did when he was a kid.

He spends his mornings at work.

He spends his nights in the city.

It's easy to find the vigilantes at their work- he doesn't need light to see by.

It's harder to follow them but a man who can heal himself has a much easier time than you'd think.

-

Skizz has been shot four different times when Impulse says, "There has GOT to be a better way," and then provides one.

It's a personal project, a complicated thing involving black holes and time compression and all sorts of things that make Skizz's head spin but what matters is that he has a big mason jar full of little black marbles.

"I've been calling them pearls. You think of where you want to go, or you get one that is sort of keyed to where you want to go, and when you break it, you're there."

It's highly experimental. It's dangerous. It isn't as expensive as it would be if Impulse couldn't do what he does, and more importantly the boss doesn't look into personal projects all that often.

"I can make these in bulk forever. Now we just have to distribute them, and key them somewhere safe- and get these people OUT safe. No more getting shot, Skizz. Promise?"

Skizz promises.

-

Skizz Lehman is thirty five, and his dark basement clinic has been open for about a year when a surprise shows up.

"Well," says the man Skizz can see perfectly fine, and who can probably see him just as well, if that whirring red mechanical eye is any indication, "this is a surprise."

"You don't appear to be in need of my services, sir," Skizz says calmly, thinking about the bat under the table behind him and the loaded shotgun on the cabinet above.

"I don't. Yet. I cannot promise I never will. I was curious, mostly. Healing physical damage on a subatomic level, with seemingly no limits. Intriguing. Valuable."

"How long ago did you lose your real eye, Doc?" Skizz asks, because there's no point in pretending he does not know who this man is.

"Oh, years. Why?"

"Well, I can't do much about the arm. Limbs are tricky. A day or two, three max, so you're stuck with that. The eye, though. Eyes are squishy. They're malleable. They come back easy."

"Oh?" the man sounds intrigued. Amused.

"Imagine how it'll feel," Skizz says, "growing back around all that hardware in your head. Fresh and new and stabbed with all those precision wires and pins and fiberoptics. Imagine the feedback. The agony. Imagine how it would feel if I did it over and over and over again."

A moment of long silence.

"You are a very brave or very stupid man," the Doctor says. "I am not sure which."

"Tell you what," Skizz says, "next time you come here, you need my help, we'll try and figure it out together. But you don't need my help, and I don't want what you're selling, and I won't want it tomorrow or the day after that or the day after that so with respect, get gone."

"but would you?"

"Would I what?"

"Help me. If I needed help."

"I help everyone," Skizz says.

The Doctor nods once.

"I believe you," he says, and crushes a new pearl in his palm.

-

Skizz calls Impulse the second he's gone, hands shaking so badly he messes up the number twice.

Impulse keeps his job. His boss never asks about the pearls again.

"Honestly? I think you impressed him."

"Oh, good. Because I definitely pissed my fucking pants."

-

Skizz Lehman is thirty six and there is a goddamn building on top of him.

It isn't crushing him- the edge has been caught by the pylons of the next building over- but the Registered Hero who is breathing shallowly across his chest was not so lucky.

Hawkeye. Of course it had to be Hawkeye, public darling, charming face of the Meta Registry. Nobody doesn't love Hawkeye.

Love won't do much about that massive chest wound.

Skizz eyes the thin sliver of light. He can get out. But he'll be seen. At least his back will be.

He gently eases Hawkeye off of him, wincing at the state of the other man's high-tech leg braces. Oh those are gonna be expensive to fix. At least none of the exploding arrows were in his quiver when the building fell. Did his mission partner get the villain? Are they moving the rubble now?

"Don't," Skizz says to the hazy-eyed man, "make me regret this."

-

Hawkeye's miraculous survival under the edge of the collapsed bank is milked for publicity for a solid month. He tells all the doctors he sees the same thing- 'it was an angel'.

They think he's delusional.

He doesn't try to convince them otherwise. He knows what he saw. He knows what a halo looks like, and he knows the shape of an angel's wings.

-