Re-l

​JADE LEECH

the look on your face destroying angels sundo psilocybin and honeycomb schism i can’t stop the loneliness in all my dreams, i drown soul to soul (ft. malleus draconia) laboratory love the lost art of keeping a secret got you (where i want you) (as heard in the movie disturbing behavior) rest my chemistry & chick habit

FLOYD LEECH

everybody loves a clown viscera in all my dreams, i drown arnolfini portrait the lost art of keeping a secret narc monkey bite & sweet cream, wet dream & deja vu

last midnight & making moves, moving in & deflowered

AZUL ASHENGROTTO

in all my dreams, i drown

TWST STORY PLAYLIST

back to chest (soul to soul)

INVINCIBLE

mx. sinister (alternative # 16/sinister! invincible)

1. back to chest (soul to soul) & it’s expansion dabble

((can faithfully say this is my favorite of the bunch, ‘tis spooky 👻 and has some of my fav similes in it. floyd’s the only competent one in this))

2. narc & it’s expansion dabble

((strong opening and strong ending; we drag in the middle sure but the train makes its stops at its designated stations. also, theater script style experiment))

3. in all my dreams, i drown

((scottish folklore married to twst, never thought it would’ve worked but it did. not glaringly mysterious, like i’m not trying to hide what mc is at all, but still an enjoyable? read))

4. the lost art of keeping a secret

((life lessons in the fishboy fic ™; good audience reception, lil cliffhanger ending never hurt no one, the art it’s based off of CARRIES, it’s an enjoyable? story))

5. viscera

((everything u could want in a floyd leech fic. needs a bit of spit and polish one day but still …

we’re out of the top 5 so we’re getting into some real stinkers.

6. sundo

((drags like a dead body through a haunted house but jade gives very manipulating ™ loverboy ™ at the end to make up for it; also i got mouthwatering fanart for it, if u see this love u pookie))

7. destroying angels

((needs a remastered version ASAP but i do like two crazies meeting and falling in love coworker style))

8. got you (where i want you) & dabble & dabble

((minus points bc i’m still working on chapter three. i’m really working to refine my interpretation of jade leech which i neurotically do with each oneshot i write of him. personally, i think he’s his Most jade here.))

9. psilocybin and honeycomb

((boy meets girl. girl is village sacrifice. boy kills everyone girl knows and keeps her for himself phantom of the opera style))

10. schism

((pushed the boundaries of what makes jade jade and i don’t think it works well here at all. that said, sexy usage of the ghost camera))

11. laboratory love

((should make the top 10 bc of audience approval but i CANNOT rank it higher than an eleven. real diverse jade characterization which is the only thing holding it up on its two legs))

12. scream of a butterfly

((so far removed from canon, you would assume i’m writing a different fandom. even for my multiple AU oneshots, this is too far out there))

13. the look on your face is thrilling, and i can’t take my eyes off it

((

It is really hard to keep track of what is going on. What with the fact that you are approximately forty-five meters in the air, constantly being maneuvered back and forth like a water hose mapping out all the area of a garden, being bombarded with the piercing sound of people dying, guns blasting, hearts pounding, and, lastly, the mere fact that you are blindfolded as all this cacophony happens underneath you both.

You are trying your best to do your job but there are so many variables you did not anticipate. 

There are hundreds upon hundreds of systems of circulation that you must read. Each one has a rhythm specific to itself, increasing in fortissimo if adrenaline is active or decreasing if they are bleeding out from an injury that has been sustained. Every discrepancy has to be scrutinized as a single system yet juxtaposingly melted into the group as one paramount system. The identities of these venous systems are inconsequential; all you see behind the black of the blindfold are a thousand red glowing systems of veins pumping blood like a field of flowing spider lilies. Any of these hearts could belong to one of your comrades and then you would majorly be a screw up and all your privileges would go revoked and then —

“The Flaxan population is currently at approximately nine hundred and thirty individuals. The current antecedent of how many the Teen Team and Invincible is subduing is eighty percent equal to the current consequent, the rate at which they emerge from out of the portals. Cecil Stedman has informed me that your limit is a thousand?”

His voice startles you so much that you almost fall off his lap. You settle back, skittish in a seat that is only a shell of hard metal, no blood circling to track. Eyes aflutter behind the blindfold, you respond diligently to Rudy Conners, “Yes. I have not gone above a thousand before.”

“But, there is a possibility that you could,” Robot questions, more talking aloud to himself to catalog this untested probability. 

Should you answer that? Obedience gets you more rewards so you open your mouth to answer, “It is certainly something I could attempt to do.” as he says over your answer.

“After I dismiss Teen Team and Invincible from the area, you are going to count down from exactly five Mississippi before doing your job.”

You nod in understanding, remember you cannot see if his robotic optics are looking at you, and hastily shout, “Yes, uhm, of course!”

His vision is not zeroed in on you; the verbal confirmation was a smart move. From the aerial view of a little less than half the average height of a skyscraper, he keeps count of the dwindling than growing Flaxan militia, watching droves die in pieces and watching droves emerge full-bodied from the portals. He steers the hovercraft from sector to sector, each of the Teen Team members locked in position as Invincible jumps from sectors and interferes with his count.

So filthy, so unconventional, new baby superhero on the scene and he is already moving like he has been making bloody messes since diapers. He strikes perfectly yet deliberate, leaving them legless on the ground before hopping to the next hoard. Doesn’t finish his plate, leaves leftovers, inefficient in the plainest term. 

Invincible smiles wide with each blow, despite the fact that his comatose father is in the stomach of the G.D.A, despite the fact that the Guardians of the Globe were killed two days ago.

“Wh-When will I know when to start counting,” you pipe up nervously. 

Robot naturally cannot feel it but he is not ignorant to your fretful shifting, arms looped around and caressing his neck relocating to his shoulders then back to his neck, never quite comfortable. His venous system of circuitry makes you feel like you are sitting on a cloud despite his callused metal. Both of you are experiencing something uncomfortable with this proximity but making it work for the sake of the job.

Descending by two meters, Robot says, analyzing the scene closer up, “once I have placed the noise-canceling headphones over your ears, you may start counting down from five.” Where his orange digits are enclosed around the hovercraft’s handles, the pair of headphones are held tight too.

Below, Invincible raises his leg like an axe and slices a Flaxan in half. Below, Dupli-Kate hammers her fist through a Flaxan’s face before popping like a zit. Below, Rex Splode throws coins engraved with Franklin D. Roosevelt and George Washington’s side profiles at Flaxans. Below, Atom Eve shields herself from multiple gun blasts with a reinforced pink wall.

The ratio between the Flaxans dying and the Flaxans arriving won’t stay even for any long, fluctuating the odds against them.

You say nothing so Robot fills the space by ordering, the speakers of the hovercraft carrying his voice, “Teen Team and Invincible, clear out immediately. Clear out immediately from the Zone.” 

Then, your world goes blank into nothing, headphones set over your ears, eyes already covered. Five Mississippi, you start diligently.

A lot happens below you that you are unaware of during that precious five seconds. It is all white noise to you — not even white noise to be honest, more like silence — as Robot shouts orders at Invincible to leave as Atom Eve scoops up Rex Splode and Dupli-Kate. Completely ignorant to it all, you count down.

A heart does not beat like a metronome. 

An organ moving to its own tempo and whims, the heart is not a steady thing. To the philosophers, to the whimsical, to the literary poets, a heart is an idiosyncratic thing, changed evermore once it has experienced something ‘life-changing’ — which is partly true in the lens of cardiology. Outdoor factors alter it; a dosage of fear causes it to speed it and a dosage of happiness causes it to slow down. Unlike a metronome which can click-click-click away in the same fixed BPM, hearts shift around due to physical activity, substances ingested, affiliations like diabetes. However, as a conductor, you direct the orchestra so each heart within a radius of twenty-two meters starts to involuntarily change its BPM to match yours like one grand metronome. Each swinging click of the inner pendulum is a cycled circulation that, despite injuries or adrenaline, starts to follow along to your own beat.

The space behind your blindfold starts to glow red like someone is trying to shine a flashlight through the skin of your eyelids. Each spider lily is caught in a dance with one relaxed breeze. 

“One Mississippi,” you whisper underneath your breath, unheard in your own ears and unheard over Robot barking at Invincible to move, fly, get out of there.

It happens simultaneously. Rather than happening in intervals or one by one, it is one massive explosion of sanguine. In a very personalized way — all his horrible thirty years of being a living mummy of metal — it reminds Robot of bad bulbs exploding when overloaded with too much electricity. 

For each heartbeat, electrical signals are conducted; we know this through the use of pacemakers and how defibrillators work. The rudimentary teachings of the nervous system explains how essential all these electrical impulses are. Sparks travel in the human body like wired circuitry in a house. 

If you sharpened your superpowered abilities towards the cardiac conduction system, you might be able to hold your own against someone like Rudy Conners and his gundam-esque flesh, but your powers are not honed towards electricity; it is the blood that influences you. It is the blood that explodes underneath you and him. For one Mississippi, there is activity of individuals and, another one Mississippi, the head of each Flaxan bursts open like an overfilled balloon stretched too thin with water pressure.

Your nails tremble and scrape his orange neck, hands shaking with the jolts of blood rushing in your fingers. Robot analyzes, surveying your BPM which passes the summit of 180, the number of beats after orgasm, before slowing down to your normal resting rate.

Methodically, he removes the device over your head as you breathe heavily in his lap, trying to keep yourself out of the grave and smother down the riptide of cardiac arrest which licks at your flesh.

The world is a ringing bell to you, so the removal of those bulking noise-canceling headphones does nothing. Ears not picking up the praise of Rudy, “That was impressive. I had my doubts – what with the population density – but you were extremely efficient in your reach.” Just like how you do not hear the agonizing screams of the sole survivor below. 

Well, not agonized, but certainly frustrated. Holding his temples like he has got the world’s worst brain freeze, Invincible is huffing through gritted teeth at the pain between his eyes and yelling at each Flaxan who does not respond to his kicks, both variables putting him in a very bad mood.

“Get up! Get up! Get up!” He barks, a dog on repeat. He is still barking when Robot lands the hovercraft, crushing alien goop on the underbelly of his precious machine, and you reach to untie the blindfold. “I’m not done! This isn’t over — get up!”

You are not expecting a survivor when you pull off the blindfold; what you are anticipating is mass homicide, undisputable, a field of dead spider lilies that have wilted forever. Something that could resemble hope or relief from old shackles blooms in your chest when you see a sole survivor. His strong heart beats in the streets of your ribcage like a neighbor. It does not feel like you are talking, muscles feeling so airy and light, when your lips form around, “You’re alive.” like he is someone precious to you, like he has been dead for years.

He turns on you two sharply, eyes bloodlust. Despite the rage brewing in those brown eyes, his voice takes on a whine, “What the hell was that! You guys said this would last a while, that was so quick! Why was that so quick!”

Robot nudges you off his lap, down the steps of the machine, and stands while reiterating, “The protocol for this mission was to stop the Flaxan invasion as quickly as possible, with minimal damage or casualties. We try to finish things swiftly and efficiently here.”

This is inconsequential to Invincible. He is still wearing his skin of bloodlust, taking deep breaths and wincing every so momentarily at the pinch between his temples. Dangling from his fingerless gloved hand, the arm he took off an alien hangs limply; he tore it off hoping to get a reaction, to summon a scream from a headless body. 

Thus, Rudy adds, trying to appeal to his human nature, that receptiveness to praise, “You were extraordinary in your speed, Inv–.”

“I could care less! It took my Dad a whole day to defeat them! This should have lasted!” This barely took up an afternoon, felt to him like mere Mississippi seconds. Mark’s so pissed he does not even hear Robot’s droning voice anymore, ears ringing.

“What even was that? Did you do something!” His attention turns to you.

Yes, you did. Among the thousand and twelve dead Flaxans — a total that once counted will disconcert Cecil Stedman and intrigue Rudy Conners — you have just exercised a dormant power and sparked a chain reaction, caused an overflow of blood in the branches of internal carotid arteries that arise from the neck into the brain, conducted multiple vasospasms within the system, essentially pinched a hose at the end and leading to a burst. But, this is something you cannot explain to him because your jaw is still dropped in awe.

You feel the pulse of breath in your open mouth, trying to formulate words, but nothing comes. All it does irk Mark.

“Answer me! If someone doesn’t tell what is going on, I’m gonna,” he raises the Flaxan arm as his brain pauses, stumped on exactly what he is going to do. He is so ineffably bored now. Cravings for bloodshed and violence are not yet satisfied. He could go for a second helping, eyeing you and Robot.

“There is no need to –,” Robot steps forward, hoping to corral the baby superhero, when you suddenly grab his arm and step two steps in front him, moving closer to danger. He stops in conciliating with Invincible because you shout out. 

“Who are you,” you gasp, sweaty and breathless because you are on the cusp of a panic attack, thoughts discord and words more so, “How did you survive that! I haven’t – How can you even stand after that! No one’s ever survived that! Do you have a metal plate in – I don’t understand … I don’t understand how you could possibly be alive!” 

You shake like a soaked puppy, acutely feeling the blood drain out of your face. Terrified for his sake, you want him to live a long life more than anything in your life.

You did all this? He can’t really wrap his pounding head around all the gibberish that you were spilling out. The itch for that elongated fight is present under his boiling skin, fiddling with the possibility that you could be his new opponent. So, loopy and excited, Mark decides to answer your first question, might as well introduce himself to the human he is going to battle. 

“I’m –”

A perfect streamline of blood leaks out from underneath his eye, trailing down like a tear until it is absorbed into the yellow of his mask.

“Invincible,” he finishes in a weak wheeze, collapsing in a heap along with the bodies of Flaxans.

The ‘you’ now has never lived such a life. 

And even if you did have these memories, transcribed over into your hippocampus like text translated language from language, alternative person to alternative person, it would not be a big concern to you. The paramount strife in your life is the closed titanium doors of Guardians of the Globe HQ which you wait patiently yet anxiously to open, counting your eight multiplication tables in your head to stop yourself from passing out on the floor.

This suspicion of an upcoming fainting spell is not from cowardice; you are running on fumes, burnt down to the last centimeter of your body’s metaphorical candle wick. Working since 03:00 then working since 10:00 when clones of Invincibles split open the skies yesterday, it is 14:00 on the second day of Armageddon and you need sleep like oxygen.

But, you could not lay down guiltlessly unless it is an involuntary loss of consciousness. Thus, you volunteered for the medical squad to clean up after Darkwing II’s sacrifice that happened less than five minutes ago. The world is moving fast, rinsing and recycling heroes.

When the doors slide open with one loud vacuum-suck sound, you pause to take it all in. Slow down, smell the roses. Roses of blood, that sharp metallic stench of liters upon liters drained. It is such a soothing and familiar scent that you let the other doctors rush past you, each racing to attend to one of the Guardians that are splattered and smeared across the floor, checking vitals.

Just from where you are standing, you can feel each of their heartbeats, knowing instinctively those that are off and those that are slowing down. 

‘Samson,’ you access, opening your eyes to see nothing but blurs of the HQ. You are shaking like a soaked puppy, so fatigued that both your speech and vision are under strain. 

Still, you hurry over because he has a hemorrhage in his skull, face previously punched and brain rattled just enough to rupture a blood vessel. Or, it could just be his nose bleed, jaw and cheek slick with red. You are too out of it to tell, enough to be confusing the proximities…?

All the same, you rush to the doctor attending to him, flashing a penlight in his one working eye, tools laid out to stitch the gash in his left shoulder. Like a drunk raccoon, you stumbled over just in time before the stitching could begin.

“Do-Don’t you dare stitch him,” you snap, climbing and fumbling over fallen metal, suitcase hugged tight to your chest. Both doctor and superhero give you matching confused gazes. Sweat glistens on your face. “You’r-eee-e ‘bout to, a hemo-hemorrhagic stroke,” you inform the superhero, perhaps making a false claim, still so uncertain. 

Black Samson opens his mouth, “Miss, I think you should sit down”, taking a step to altruistically help you over the hurdle of rebar you are struggling to cross. He goes to assure you of his regenerative ability but only stumbles, left leg failing and bumps head with you. You both end on your knees, groaning.

“Ugggh.”

You recover faster, your head not a slowly rising pool of blood. The world is still a blur but you can still sniff out the injury like a bloodhound. “‘cuse me,” you say before taking two fingers and sticking them in his open wound.

“Jesus! Mother fuhh –!”

You ignore him, ignore everything, even your own tiredness, trying to scrub the smell of others' blood out of yourself so you can focus on his blood alone. 

O positive, common blood type. He has a closed head injury; his skull is not broken which is truly a relief, the spread of visible blood over the right side of his cranium gave the impression that he might have a penetrating TBI. But, he’s not out of the woods; a blunt TBI is still a possibility. You close your eyes as the image of a crude map of the brain’s blood vessels print itself to the skin of your inner eyelids. Unconsciously, you lick your lips — in the manner of a lion salivating at the hint of a wildebeest stepping out of the herd. 

Two essential blood flow circulations connect at the base of the human brain. Named Circle of Willis, its anatomy is familiar and intimate to you. The shape of the Circle of Willis is one that could be crudely described as a human stick figure; complete with noodle arms and noodle legs, little filaments stretching from the spine like ribs, and that oval head, it resembles a standing man.

It has been a companion to you more than a foster parent, captor, or co-worker. In a way, Willis is like your childhood best friend. 

Willis is fine though. No injuries to be found. You recheck him thrice like a fretful mother patting down her son, seeing a spill of blood on his shirt but no pinpointed, bleeding area in sight. Each artery is a limb you pat in a wellness check, accessing blood flow through the tips of your fingers.

‘Where is it?’ You are almost positive Samson’s brain bleed would be in the subarachnoid area of the brain, directly on the level where the Circle of Willis is located. After physical trauma, the subarachnoid area is the common floor of the house of the brain layers to find broken blood vessels. 

‘Into the basement or attic?’ You think to yourself, eyes shut and racing along the multiple other highways of arteries, checking each one. You do not get to decide because there is suddenly a rumble in the floor of the HQ. And two new , erratic heartbeats are pounding like the drums of war.

Eyelids wrenching open, you turn sharply away. The entire world tilts and your vision swims like a shaken snow-globe, whitening out as artificial flakes swirl round. Concrete is not a soft pillow.

You come back into the land of the living with a penlight shined in your face and a mammoth hand propping you up by the shoulder. Red is slick on your index and middle, coated to the second knuckle. The tongue in your mouth is heavy like a cinder-block as you wag it to tell the superhero and GDA doctor fretting over you that you are fine. What comes out is a jumbled alphabet soup.

Black Samson holds his index finger, a motion that your unseeing eyes do not catch, to his lips and knocks them against the surface twice to tell you to shush.

Uncooperative, you wrench your unsteady head from the hold of your fellow GDA employees. That awful penlight is finally out of your eyes. Sections of the demolished Guardians of the Globe control room come back into focus. Limp hands resurrect and search for your briefcase – a bloody caricature of Velma from Scooby Doo , momentarily helpless like a newborn. 

Cold against your fingertips, you touch the combination and latches just as Darkwing II screams. A flinch causes the briefcase to rattle. Alert and vision unfogging, you look towards where those two new heartbeats … no, just one now, beat. 

As previously established, you have been working since 10:00 yesterday. You were in the midst of pipetting when the skies split with green anuses and green mouths, shitting and spitting out fake Invincibles. It was 10:01 when the Global Defense Agency was renovated with a new skylight ceiling even though those portals opened over Poland and your workplace was in Arlington, Virginia. It was fucking, aggravatingly bad luck when it was the science wing that the now dead fake Invincible dived through first; you lost your sample to the linoleum floor, the pipette squeezed in surprise.

You’ve seen those Bizarro Invincibles up close and personal before — the Invincible dressed in Flaxan attire and your coworkers' blood held your face in his unrelenting hands, leaving you purse-lipped and silent to hear his forlorn whisper of, “I can’t believe this is really your face. I didn’t think – It’s been years,” he paused and somewhere even softer than a whisper said, “It’s been years.” — but that does not lessen the tension that coils through you at seeing another.

He has Darkwing’s intestines gripped in his hand. He circles his wrist once, twice, and thrice, wrapping the thick muscle in a bundle around his fist, gathering them up like they’re a string of Christmas lights to be put away. 

“Hahaha, so much for that sacrificial shit, huh! Guy gets just an inch of guts taken out and cries Uncle. What a pussy!” He pulls the last of the coiled small intestines out; dripping red, they spin around in a loop down the length of his arm like a snake twisting on a branch. 

It is so outlandish that you aren’t entirely sure if what you are seeing is reality. The HQ was already clear; you wouldn’t have to face a second helping of emotional turmoil dealt at the hand of a human-Viltrumite hybrid; you were sent in here for cleaning up messes only because the coast was clear, moved to the medical staff; you are not a fighter but a cockroach. These contrasting variables and unforeseen circumstances ping-pong in your rationale. This is so far from being a cleared out, neutral territory. 

It took thirteen screeching ReAnimen to take down that last fake Invincible. Even when ReAnimen fell upon him like a pack of hunting dogs, he picked some of them up like they were stuffed animals and lobbed them across hallways and into walls. This new fake Invincible just survived an unprecedented amount of time in the Shadowverse.

Maybe, it is finally time to cut your losses.  

It’s not like you are head over heels for this place. The Global Defense Agency is simply a well of resources, a fountain of blood; your hematology research has flourished with such versatile samples. All of those strictly classified blood bags can only be assessed with a fancy little GDA badge, that very one that hangs on the lanyard around your neck. But, you are certainly not loyal to them.

Unlike that little puke who makes the ReAnimen and Darkwing II, you have nothing incriminating in your history that keeps you stuck here, no leash to Cecil Stedman’s finger — not in the way that Flaxan Invincible made it sound like. 

You grasp your dangling ID badge just as the fake Invincible turns his body, light and enthusiastic as his eyes set on the doctors, paralyzed in fear, rebuilding the Immortal and scooping up Shapesmith. “Stedman sent in the cleanup already, huh? I’m pretty sure I already killed that guy. I don’t think you’re gonna get anything else out of him.” 

There is that floating lab in the Pacific Ocean working with Atlanteans, another option is that Arctic outpost with ossified bodies of alien shapeshifters, and you could even be reassigned to the space satellite where that young hero Zachary Thompson works; the world is full of escape routes and you are no coward when it comes to change.

“Man, they work you guys to the bone!”

It really is time to cut your losses.

You bring your briefcase to your chest, heartbeat irregular and fluttering. It is your life-perseverer that you hold so tightly and it is the only belonging you need to survive. Watching this new Invincible stride over to the trembling doctors, Darkwing’s guts swaying in his hand, you make the decision to get the hell out of dodge.

Straining, you try to get your legs up from underneath yourself. The briefcase in your hand feels like trying to lift a boulder and the dizziness in your head is debilitating. Still, you push yourself to hobble on uneasy legs. You are crouched, legs bent, heaving like you ran a marathon, but you manage to stand. It is a victory you cannot even bask in because you collapse a millisecond after. Loudly, you groan. 

“Huh?”

The effort of standing plunges your blood pressure down and alerts the fake Invincible of your presence. … well, not the sound of your knees hitting concrete or the involuntary sound that slipped from you in agony. 

What alerts him to the presence of the other remaining survivors is the incessant alarm of your wristwatch – “low blood sugar warning, refuel, low blood sugar warning, refuel, low blood sugar warning, refuel.” The fake Invincible turns towards that sound, analyzing your group, as this strange look comes across his face. 

His face muscles are untrained for this.

Which is such an odd word — untrained. Never once would he think to use it for himself. Since he graduated crawling to mere waddling on two legs as a toddler, Mark has been put through a training regimen that has developed his physical abilities beyond human standards; yet, he still cannot figure out which ways to mold his expression into one that shows he’s listening.

Facial emotes are a fickle thing on Viltrum; his real people communicate with actions rather than worrying with morphing their lips and brows into a passage to be read. His father, Nolan, never broke his poker face. A concept that is surreal to humans who use all sorts of micro-expressions, little involuntary twitches, or sometimes break out in unexpected bouts of laughter, a permanent deadpan is possible if you are only of a superior race — as Nolan reiterates. 

His mother is often used as an example of that human ineptitude to interface with another without falling to the folly of emotions.

Mark only sees his mother on Sundays. She smells like a plum freshly bleeding, has much better food in her fridge than the one at his house, and is always smiling at her son. 

Not immune to other emotions, she will sometimes look at him sadly when he leaves bloated with good food on Monday mornings; she will sometimes have a crease in her brow when he says certain things too, but most of the time, she smiles. It is her most common face. Pink, moisturized lips will lift, causing both the corners of her mouth and corners of her cheeks to move. To the outside observer, mostly Mark, one can see how Debbie Grayson smiles unconsciously with her eyes. Genuine joy is found in her duchenne smile as she greets her son, making grand gestures like bringing him to zoos for the day or purchasing ice cream cones with three scoops whenever she gets to have momentary custody. It is the face of an alien. When asked once by a curious young Mark, aged at the age where he would’ve began elementary school if he was raised like a normal child, why she did that face, Debbie Grayson crouched down, hair swaying on her shoulders and face doing it again, and said it was because he made her so happy. 

Mark mimics his mother’s smiling face. He hopes it is enough for Cecil Stedman to stop being such a hard-ass with his debrief-slash-lecture. Dear old Daddy’s lectures were always with fist, which Mark appreciates, so all this wordy talk is really grating on his nerves. Safety protocols mean shit to Mark; he could care less about listening to his mission leader Robot; he wants to know something.

“Hey,” he interrupts, “Hey. Where did that other leader end up? That chick, I wanted to talk to her.” 

He cannot remember a single faucet of you — other than your voice sounding feminine enough, he cannot describe your hair or body type or anything when Cecil asks ‘whom?’ — because all he can remember is that thrilling sensation of a hemorrhage in his head, the loss of gravity and thoughts. 

It takes a lot of convincing. Mark has to play nice, basically stepping into the too small shoes of a child who learns to make friends on the playground. Aiding Teen Team comes off with the payment that he is gaining Stedman’s dubious trust. The Guardians of the Globe tryouts are held and his father sleeps through it on ventilator calibration. Eventually, for all the metamorphic gold stars he earns, Mark gets to cash in his reward. 

You are housed in Payton Penitentiary. When he was working hand in hand with all those superheroes, he never caught wind of you even once, ears strained to see if that voice might be among his team. Apparently, they don’t let you out unless you’re really, really good, or if the world is ending.

It makes you similar to him; he also isn’t allowed to go out unless he has been obedient too.

Through a plated sheet of glass, you two met again. You are kept on a cocktail of drugs; a low dose of halothane here and a high dose of calcium channel blockers there and so many other things that he does not recall. What Mark remembers most is that first look you gave him, his mind crystal clear while you were lethargic, hardly able to construct sentences without gasping for breath between each word, when you finally managed to summon the strength to lift your drooping, bowling-ball-heavy head up from your shoulders, and you blinked lizard-esque at him. 

You have the (eye color)-est eyes.

Deer in headlight eyes are the eyes of someone going to die. 

Mental paralysis is a killer that tips a battle faster than a well-timed punch or quick reaction time ever could. It is why both you and Mark shudder and shed off any acute shock that tries to subconsciously bubble up, staring at each other across The Guardians of the Globe HQ. 

The world falls away around the two of you for entirely different reasons. The emotions inside of you could not be any more different from the emotions inside of him. 

Paralyzed, the group of three – Black Samson, the surely underpaid GDA physician, and yourself – watch the fake Invincible’s right hand move. Fingerless, pallid fingers curling, thumb set on the outside, yellow fabric creasing over a mountain valley of knuckles, he has made a fist, terrifying all of you with its presence. Then, he punches himself. It is a jarring motion. If he aimed that punch at any of you three, the muscles of your face would cave in like a deflating cherry pie. All it gives himself is the little drip of a red icicle falling from his nose, and, apparently, clarity. 

“Huh,” he remarks, straightening his head and squinting, “guess this isn’t a hallucination.” He stretches out the ache in his jaw through a lion-esque yawn. “Though, you could just be a concussion … Never know, with how much I’ve been knocked around today …” He laughs airly, his brutalization a sweet memory.

While he is at ease, putting languid hands on his hips, the three of you have only tense more at his carefree words. The superhero wants to move to protect the civilians, the doctor wants to exit to protect himself, and you … want to keep fighting and abandon both of these loose ends behind you but the blaring repetition of “low blood sugar warning, refuel, low blood sugar warning, refuel, low blood sugar warning, refuel” ensures that any move you make will be fruitless, even a move without your hypoglycemia flaring up would be like an ant trying to take down an elephant. So, all of you sit in wait, trying to predict someone who is unpredictability’s personification.

It is worse that his gaze is directly planted upon you and he hasn't broken eye contact since the punch. 

“You’ll check out my head, right?” He points at it, unmistakably the face of Omni-Man’s son who no longer works with Cecil Stedman, where a thin paper-cut injury and nosebleed lies. “Make sure it’s not too bruised like last time.”

That was directed at you. No mistaking it, his brown eyes have not diverted their attention elsewhere. 

“Not from this distance,” you say, distractedly mapping out your escape plan without taking your eyes off him.

The fake Invincible is in front of you in a blink. Since you didn’t dare to blink, you find that your limited human vision can hardly track the motion; almost as if he phased from point A to point B with nothing more than a teleportation watch.

“How about now?”

Angling your neck, the dimension of his muscular thighs, that ridiculous jockstrap, his sinewy abdominal and pectoral meat come into slow focus. This is a question you are more hesitant to slip up on. Tilting more obtusely, the imprint of your larynx stretches your skin as once more eye contact is reestablished. He has irises like the rings of a tree, a brown that is so deeply brown . A ball of spit is swallowed in the tight space of your throat and the fake Invincible watches the swallow with rapture.

“What, cat got your tongue?” He smiles boyishly down at you, buzzing with energy from head to toe. His grin falters as his gaze descends to your screeching wristwatch. “God, that thing is annoying. What’s it for anyways? I can barely hear myself think over it.”

You are hauled to your feet. Forearm grasped, he pulls you up as easily as lifting a sheet; his grip is sturdy yet not bruising as you fumble to plant not quite sturdy feet. The fake Invincible exhales on your face, leaning in close to observe your foggy eyes with private objectiveness. When his attention turns to your watch, maneuvering your limp wrist sideways to view, you find your voice.

“It tracks my blood sugar.” No shit, it’s screaming out a warning about it now. “I-It’s like an uh-advanced CGM.” A nervous drop of sweat rides down your neck into your uniform collar.

“Do you like it?”

“Wha?”

“Do you want it on you?” 

Yes, you want it attached to your wrist as much as you want this lunatic to take his hands off you. He has his dominant hand cupping just below your wrist on your lab jacket’s sleeve and his other hand gently pushed on your left shoulder blade to keep you stable. The words won’t come out though. Whatever leaps and bounds have been made in his decision-making, or maybe he simply hates the noise, the fake Invincible inches his hand up to the leather strap in a move to tear it off. 

“Wait … Wait.” You jostle, unable to pry with your other hand on your briefcase and unable to wrench your wrist away. “I – uh. I.” Butterflies rattle around in your stomach.

“Low blood sugar warning, refuel, low blood sugar warning, refuel, low blood sugar warning, refuel.”

Earth spins. Earth always spins but now it really pirouettes. As bile rises in your throat and the briefcase cracks on the pavement, you watch sheets upon sheets of merry-go-round colors move across your eyes, unable to see straight as vertigo clamps on your senses.

“Didn’t I kill you? Still up and attem unlike those chumps? Heh, you sure are strong. Good, I’ll save myself a snack for later.”

Fresh blood, you can smell it. It floats into your nostrils like the scent of barbecue shimmering on a grill caught on a breeze. It reminds you of thick globs of sauce, a red paste even thicker than mariana, almost like paint. ‘A snack?’ You cannot comprehend his meaning.

Feet are swept up and out from underneath you. The fake Invincible rids you of the burden of having to balance but worsens your chance of escape by holding you so completely, a small pet scooped up without strength to escape. “Sorry ‘bout that. I’ll come back and beat these Guardians to death in a few, promi-sss-e! Let’s get you out of here, huh, (Name)?”

Vertigo overtakes and swallows you.

No one comes after you. There is no one left to pursue you. Mark didn’t think that guy in the purple was going to get back up, but, now, he is definitely not going to come chasing after the two of you. Aiming for the head is not exactly Mark’s strong suit. He likes to dawdle. But, with you in his arms, it felt right to direct that punch at the side of Black Samson’s head and feel a part of his skull cave like an egg tapped against a frying pan’s edge.

That bothersome wristwatch is still going off but it is background noise in the wind rushing past Mark’s ears; the whole world is simply background noise in your presence. For a few moments, he simply flies through the atmosphere with his brain only focusing on the weight of you.

He only stops in his mindless flight, landing on one of Arlington’s metropolitan building roofs, because he needs to check your heart.

Grown so used to a still chest, Mark basks in the way you are heaving. Each rise and fall of your front is volcanic like a geyser just about to burst. He has to lay you down on your back because you are not coherent enough to stand. If you are drugged again, he is going to find Cecil Stedman and pick him apart in the way grade-schoolers rip legs and wings off dragonflies.

He straddles and leans over you. Lucid enough to analyze his motions but not to protest, you look up at him from beyond eyelashes. He flashes you what he judges is a charming smile. Wasting no more time, Mark makes haste to put ear to ribcage and listen to that … lub-dub lub-dub lub-dub lub-dub, swift as rushing wind. The alarm warning is inconspicuous to him.

“Ah, you have n-ooo-no idea how much I needed this, (Name).”

If there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, it is this. No human tradition or ritual embodies this sentiment he feels, so it must be his Viltrumite side reigning supreme, but he wants to build a place for himself within your ribs. With just a little bloody force, he could make himself a hibernation cave inside of you, lay his head on a heart-pillow.

“I love the way you have a head on your shoulders,” he muses aloud, still laid on your chest. “There are other things I really like about you but that one is my favorite. What do you like about me?”

When Mark pulls back to see your face, you have your eyes closed and lips parted. ‘Aw, cute.’ How he missed you. Sure, there were always other enemies to fight against and eventually kill, but when you went away, it was like a rabid fan’s favorite MMA fighter announcing their retirement from the ring. Mementos were kept but it could never compare to the real thing. 

He hasn’t felt this warm and fuzzy feeling in his heart since you’ve been gone. It must be your powers. That disruption of blood vessels and arteries, leaking out like radiation from your dormant abilities, speeding up his heart.

It slows when he notices what lies over your chest.

In fingerless gloved hands, coated with the blood of so many that red has eclipsed the yellow fabric, he picks up and thumbs the ID badge. Even he cannot summon any vitriol for the item because it has your face on it. Something like that would never make him angry. It is a simple identification: (Name) (Last Name), Affliction. Employee, Agency Department. The G.D.A Science Foundation, Expires. 2027SEPT10. He makes sure to keep the blood staining plastic lower so it does not obscure your photograph. 

In the top leftmost corner, you do not smile. In it, you wear a simple white button-up with the top button undone. You are not following laboratory regulations because (your hair is down/you wear a necklace with a large aquaprase stone hanging from it). Mark’s eyes follow the curve of your lips where a poker-face resides. You look to be about fifteen in this photo.

Mark’s lips are a dead line as he looks at it, not comprehending it. 

“Whatever. It’s lame anyways.” He yanks the lanyard off your neck, the buckle snapping open. It is like pulling the starter cord on a lawn mower because you start to have a seizure almost instantaneously. 

PANIC.

There is a giant robot above you now. It is not a robot that you can see but you can hear it. About the size of Mount Fuji or the Burj Khalifa, you can tell it is a behemoth structure because of the sound of its stomps. Hissing pistons lift its gargantuan feet with thunderous booms. Despite the obvious weight of it, maybe a thousand elephants or hundred naval ships equivalent, this robot is moving swiftly, almost running; it raises the question: how can something that large move that fast?

The answer involves the fuel being used, PANIC: People Anxiously Negating Intelligence, C’est-la-vie. 

There is obviously no ‘robot’ above you; this world may be full of kaijus, superpowered men and women, and other ridiculous things, but a giant gundam is a little too far-fetched — something that should stay in fiction like Pacific Rim and 20th Century Boys . No, that noise is the noise of those who are running for their lives. The heavy cacophony is a symphony orchestrated by PANIC.

Payton Penitentiary is packed full of panicking people. 

Hah, say that seven times fast. You probably could not in your state. In such a nebulous state, you could not possibly sniff out even a single heartbeat. It has all blended together into pounding, thunder-after-lightning booms. Hidden below the ground and below even the basement, you lie untouched by mass hysteria, drool on the corner of your lips. You do not even hear the hissing.

Vents align the walls of your prison cell like family portraits. From them, halothane seeps out and cascades downward like miniature Niagara Falls in transparent waves. Wall to wall, ceiling to floor, the room is flooded with this potent halogenated anaesthetic gas. Designed to decrease your blood pressure and slow your heart rate, it keeps you on the constant threshold of respiratory depression. You haven’t died yet so they haven’t stopped pumping your cell full of the anaesthetic. 

But, outside, someone has put up a beaver dam to halt the flood, momentarily turning off the pour of gas into your room. Motionless, you lie untouched by these changes. You breathe in air that is so clogged that you do not even notice the thinning of it as your cell door opens minutes after.

Mark strides in. He crosses his blood-stained arms over his chest in a self-assured manner and inhales deeply the scent of your room. Sweet like fruit, the scent of chloroform-like odor seeps into his nostrils. It would knock anyone else out in seconds but only tickles Mark.

“They rea- lll -y got you locked in deep down here. For a moment, I thought I missed a turn or something; thought you might have been up on the top floors with the rest of them. But, nope! I just had to keep digging a little deeper. Then, bam, you’re right here.” He plants his rear on the edge of your mattress. “You know, I’m kinda like a prince saving the princess from the tower and an evil dragon. Pretty cool, right?”

Like a dead person, you lie without reacting to your environment.

“Hey!” Mark barks at you. “Hey, cut the shit! What the – What’s wrong with you!” Steadyfast, you keep seizing all through Mark’s initial panicking. “(Name)! Hey, (Name)! Cut it out!” 

Intelligence evaporated out of him – not that there was much there –, Mark uses an atom’s worth of his Viltrumite genes to restrain you. He grips the biceps of both your arms, digging nails into cotton sleeves, and pushes you as flat as possible on the PVC rooftop. It worsens your erratic jerks, kicking them up by several degrees. If you weren’t thrashing like a furious bull before, you are now.

“Hey! (Name), cut the bullshit!” He pushes down harder, eyes flying to your wrists wondering if those are better to grab or if he should just engulf you in a bear-tight hold until you cut it the fuck out. The longer it goes on, the more his tone grows desperate. “You’re scaring the shit out of me, (Name) – just stop it!” 

Has he said or done something to upset you? You two were getting along just great before. Mark has never seen you do this before; he has never even seen something like this in general! Uneducated in human nuance, he puts an iron-flesh hand to your chest, feels the stomps and firing pulses of your heart, and pushes down so ribs and the cardiovascular organ kiss together. 

Coincidentally, the seizure subdues with time. A puff of air escapes Mark’s lips in relief. He should have known it had something to do with the heart – it always does when it comes to you. Satisfied that he figured it out, a smile quirks up his lips as you slowly wrench yourself into consciousness. You wake up to the face of Omni-Man and Debbie Grayson’s twenty-one year old son, Invincible, that bumbling superhero who has no idea what the real world is like. 

For a moment, you misjudged that he above you is the one from your universe. You only remember the time you were standing over him, helicopter wings causing your labcoat to rustle, as he laid smashed into the side of a mountain, a single glimpse of a black eye visible due to a broken lens. Lens?

No, a pair of brown eyes is arrowed down at you, absent of any goggles, displaying relief yet smugness too. 

You do not care anymore. His mouth is forming around benign words that you are deaf to. Though the ringing of your ears blocks it out, you are positive that your wristwatch is shrieking unless this brute has smashed it or removed it. You are on a tightrope that has long since burnt at both ends, leaving you with no route to escape. If there is nowhere left …

“Juh– J – hng –Juh-s – sa –Juh-ice,” you choke around too heavy words.

“Huh,” the fake Invincible leans in, “didn’t catch that.”

“Juice.”

At Dad’s house, Mark only got water. Mostly from the tap and on rare occasions bottled if they went somewhere new for training, the water never came with a straw. Mom’s water came with straws, bendy ‘crazy’ ones, straight ones, striped ones, colorful ones. His Mom’s house also had enough flavors of water to make a little boy feel like he was on a booze cruise. Of course he never was as Debbie Grayson would always tell him that he could not have any of her ‘adult juice’; even though he did sneak a sip when her back was turned at fourteen, sticking out his tongue in disgust mere moments after.

Mark Grayson knows what juice is. If you want, he could name all the labels that were in his Mom’s fridge from the Welch’s Mango Twist to the Hawaiian Punch Polar Blast. But, he is not sure that is what you want and you freaked him out enough where he is compliant to anything. “Do you want me to get you some juice,” he asks, hesitant to remove his hand.

The pressure from his palm is too suffocating to spit out any more heavy words. It feels like a peine forte et dure . You need to save your breath so you only nod your confirmation.

Vaguely, he does remember where to get juice. This universe has got to have a Trader’s Joe or Krogers somewhere. Mark’s not sure but he is sure as hell not going to leave you here. As he picks you up, supporting underneath the knees and spine, squinting at you, he seems apprehensive. “You’re not gonna do all that freaking out again, right?”

His hand may be off your chest but you are so utterly weak. You shake your head, not really comprehending. 

“‘Kay, good.” He takes off, you secure in his arms.

This is the end of the world. 

And, you do not mean that in a pessimistic and wave-the-white-flag way. Nor is your statement one of hysterics. When you internalize that is in fact the end of the world, it is in a solidification of the tightrope burnt at both ends. Even with devastating death tolls, there has always been something to rebuild from. With approximately more than fifteen invincible Viltrumite-human hybrids roaming the planet, with no idea of how long their visit will last, you are certain there will be no way to salvage this planet.

They are humanity’s equivalent to the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. You knew this was the end of the world when that Flaxan Invincible, attempting to gather you in his arms, said,  “I have to get you somewhere safe.”

“Somewhere safe?” You are in one of the safest places in the entire … hm, there is that light breeze coming through the new hole in the roof. Dropping your gaze back to his black lens, you assert, “if I am going anywhere, it certainly will not be with you.”

Mark drops his arms as soon as he feels the invisible puppet strings in his circulatory system tighten up. He forgot your powers were like that, or is this special to this specific version of you? He has no time to dawdle with the semantics. Both of you need to turn tail and leave right now.

“We don’t have time for this, (Name). The world is going to burn to a blaze. I need to keep you safe, no matter the cost and no matter the repercussions.” He is as grim as a reaper. “This is the end of times.”

You had not taken him seriously, who possibly would! Now, the stench of fire and blood has painted the inner walls of your nose. Soon, you will have another seizure, then another, and another until you slip into a coma, fallen from the tightrope. You are coming to reckon with the death of humanity when apple juice hits your lips.

You suckle like a famished newborn. Apple juice glides everywhere, across your neck and into your coat collar, rolling down your cheeks to soak into your hairline, cresting over the mountains of your ears, but most importantly, it glides down your throat. Choking and sputtering on the end of it, you combat whoever is trying to momentarily lift the plastic rim away from your lips by seizing the bottle. The last glistening pool of yellow tornados down into your eager mouth as you sit up, denting plastic with your fingers. How could you possibly forget? You are a cockroach, not human.

“Low blood sugar warning, refuel, low blood –.”

“Geez, not a sharer much? Heh … Wow … You’ve really got the (eye color)-est eyes.” The very thing that Mark calls attention to turns to analyze him. He stops from saying his next sentence, staring back like an entranced cat. 

Ignoring him, you take a look at your wristwatch, the sleek face reading out your glucose levels and vitals. 53 mg/dL, your watch informs you. “No,” your lips form the word in disbelief. There is no way it could have dropped so drastically below seventy; you would have to be hospitalized by now. 

Caught in a state of perpetual shaking, you hit the palm of your jittery hand against the side of your watch. The two, pencil lead-sized needles shift to the right underneath your skin, straining from the hit. This ridiculous device is constantly embedded in your skin, siphoning blood out in three minute intervals. That must be the old reading … why hasn’t it updated!

“See, I knew you didn’t want that stupid thing on. Don’t worry. I got ya,” the fake Invincible assures. He sure is a yapper when attention is not given to him. “You’re just out of loop like you were last time. Can’t believe-eee-e I’ve got to come to your rescue again.”

“Please, don’t.” It amazes you that your small, shivering hand eased onto his wrist is enough to stop his advances. Brown eyes carry their attention from your wristwatch to you. You two are giving each other the same look that you gave in the Guardians of the Globe HQ just as the very device caught between you two started its wailing alert, realizing who stands before them as the metaphorical fog lifts.

“I need this,” you try to talk him down. You are skilled enough to get through this with half your vision and hearing dwindled to nothing.

“That’s what you thought last time too.”

“Well, I was wrong that time but I’m right this time.”

“I don’t know, (Name) …”

“I know some other things you can help me with. Rescue, is that what you said? These things would rescue me.”

“Hm,” he seems to be really deep in contemplation, like he is making the decision whether to take someone he loves off life support or not, but that heavy cloud clears off his face with nothing more than a cheery, “‘kay!” 

“Can you get me —”

You give him a list. What you recite is a long-winded grocery list of everything that you know has fast-acting sugar that has helped you out of numerous tight spaces. Then, for extra measure, since your wristwatch has not changed from that stagnant 53 mg/dL, you add pumpkin seeds, fruits, and anything that might relatively refuel you and might keep him away from you, just so you can formulate and think up escape plans.

Blinking, Mark finds his lips twitching up into a smile. He stayed sitting to absorb all the requests you threw at him, but you really are an odd one. If blueberry yogurt covered pretzels paired with jelly-beans and washed down with mandarin Jarritos is what you want, he will deliver. 

“Is that it,” Mark questions after you finish such a lengthy list. Once he’s got verbal confirmation, he springs up to his feet light, swaying on the balls and wiping bloodied hands on his spandex tights. “All of that, coming right up.” Just as he is turning to speed off to grab a cart, he tacks on, “Don’t get any funny ideas about leaving, (Name). You wouldn’t get far anyways.”

Your heart only pulses once nervously before you manage to subdue it. You had not estimated someone so rash to be observational. Well, he does know your name; but, that could simply be related to your missing ID badge.

Taking it in stride, you answer, “I’ll be right here waiting for you, Inv – Mark.” It is the truth. 

The section that the fake Invincible deposited you at is side by side to many refrigerated doors. From the closet one that you scoot over to, you grab the first juice carton that you see on the bottom row and tear it open at the top to make a beak of sorts. You chug Peach Punch like a college senior celebrating their last days before graduation. 

Down aisles, you can hear Mark wheel a cart, laughing to himself as he crashes into collapsing walls of food and chatting with himself about the list you gave him. Whatever grocery store chain he dropped you in, you are not sandwiched between two aisles. There may be a wall of doors on your right but the left is all open space.

There are separate tables loaded high with pies, danishes, cupcakes, and various other bready sweets. Past these tables are another wall of refrigerated doors. Between this square of tables are freezer display cases, shaped like boats almost, of yogurts, cream cheeses, butter, and various other cool foods. 

You grab the first plastic box your eyes fall on, tearing off the seal reading 10.99 and the expiration date July 09. The pop of those plastic divots unlocking motivates your ravenous hunger. The pastry package you hold contains six cupcakes, three vanilla and three chocolate, all of them topped with plastic rings. Sitting back down, you slide a Fourth of July themed ring on your index finger, a flat circle with an eagle and American flag behind it, and remove the wrapper. It is finished in three gaping bites, blue frosting left on your lips. Without hesitation, you reach for another and another, wearing rings and discarding wrappers, until the box is empty.

Rested uncomfortably against the table leg, you try to regain your sense of identity. Since fourteen, you have worked for Cecil Stedman; you are not trapped in some complex scheme or doing against your will like keeping a watch on. Now, you no long work Cecil Stedman because it appears to be the end of the fucking world. 

‘Where am I going to go,’ you think to yourself, fourth cupcake consumed. ‘I’ve only worked for the G.D.A before and the United Nations and Russia are a bust now.’ You saw that pink, torn-skinned one on a scene demolishing Moscow before stepping out the control room. ‘A moonbase? No, I’d have to really go deep into the solar system to escape this.’

There are no worldly attachments keeping you anchored here. The only confounding thing is your lack of means to get the fuck out of here … unless this Invincible is on your side. He is too unpredictable for your taste. 

“Hm.” You knock your head back into the table’s edge. “Guess I got to go with the flow.” But your hand outstretching up to grab a container of strawberry danishes tells a different story.

You are on your first mouthwatering bite, sinking teeth in heaven, when you see it. A floating orb of metal, circuits, and a single red eye. A scowl forms and your taste-buds go rotten. You fucking hate robots. The orb’s face parallel to your face switches direction, seeming to have caught a glimpse of you but not caring, and moves east to where Invincible is making a ruckus.

The torn off pastry starts to melt underneath your fingertips, squeezing the bread and glaze flat. “I have a bad feeling about that thing,” you whisper; no matter your aversion to the robotic laboratory, you can tell that is not one of the G.D.A’s. 

Mark is in the candy section when Angstrom’s little orb finds him. This version of you must have one crazy sweet tooth because half of the items you wanted were in this one aisle. He imagines prison slop is as decent as Dad’s homecooked venison, so he’s been grabbing a variety of flavors per item even if you didn’t ask for them. Pinched between thumb and index, he holds onto a stack of Kit Kats , each plastic a different color for the flavors; he drops them in the carriage as Angstrom’s little orb floats down to him. No sweets taste as good as blood though. 

The orb bumps Invincible’s shoulder, causing the package of Skittles to slip out of his grip in his calm. He turns, sharp and ready to kill, before recognition washes over him. “Hey! It’s you!” Mark exclaims as the orb shakes itself back and forth in an ambience of disapproval. 

Jumping to his first assumption, because Angstrom did say he would send a message to collect him and his variants when the job was done, Mark excitement quickly flips to panic, interrogating without breathing between each sentence, “Wait, it’s not already over? Wait, wait, wait. It can’t possibly be over already ; I’ve only been here for maybe a day and you’re just gonna call it off like it’s no big deal!”

He only got one good fight in with Immortal; he still has to go back and fight Black Samson if he is still alive. In the cockpit of Angstrom’s ship, Mark wrote himself a whole bucket list of all the superpowered individuals he wanted to pulverize in a fight again. He has barely gotten a fourth of the way through the list!

Angstrom’s robot moves forward, punching him twice on the side of his skull. “Hey! Quit it!” Mark starts to swipe at it like it is one giant, metal gnat, growing furious as it bumps into the lower part of his back, into his shoulder, even into his chest. “I’m not going back when I just barely got started.”

That is not the intent of the orb’s prodding. Levy Angstrom did not incorporate a microphone into the design of them because it would serve no purpose in a spying device. It is an oversight because all the pushing does not translate over to ‘get out there and kill more people’ but to ‘mission over’ which leaves Angstrom at no surprise or shock when a bloodied hand comes down and cleaves the orb right through the center. Well, he knew from the start that not all Mark Graysons were the sharpest tool in the toolbox. It is no big loss to let this one roam this universe’s Earth evermore and die on it eventually. 

Glaring down at the cut sphere, blue sparks of electricity buzzing from its innards, Mark picks back up the Skittles and spits in the direction of the orb. He cannot stand robots. As he crouches down while retrieving the candy, he notices a brand of sweets that catch his eyes on the bottom shelf: Ice Cream Chews . 

The first date Mom and Dad went on was to an ice cream parlor. It was one of the most concrete proof that there was once amicableness between them. Both talked about the memory fondly and both talked about it without any juxtaposing details when comparing their stories side by side. 

It is something that he wanted to do with you before things turned out how they did. Freed from imprisonment, wouldn’t that be the best treat ever, to sit across from each other, no glass dividing you two, so you could share spoonfuls of ice cream with each other?

With a speed that could rival a pure-blooded Viltrumite, Mark starts to locate and toss the other hard candies that you asked for into the awaiting mouth of the carriage. It is a rapid flood of smacking candy and rustling plastic as he flings jelly-beans, suckers, and chewable candies in and swings the cart in the direction of where he left you.

“(Name)’s gonna love it. Who doesn’t like ice cream,” Mark wonders aloud. 

You are thinking of literally everything else but ice cream right now. Finally, your watch is reading 68 mg/dL. The normoglycemic levels of glucose is 72 to 108 mg/dL, meaning you are just on the border where you need to be. Ice cream is not exactly the ideal food to quickly climb up those blood sugar levels. As your cheeks puff out with the cheesecake filling, resembling a chipmunk, you are thinking about seeing if you can find yourself some honey-doused deserts or grabbing another pint of juice.

In your go-with-the-flow panic, you are really only thinking of the singular word, refuel .  Reiterated so much from your watch, you seek to finally be back as full power like a declawed cat regrowing its hooked, sharp defenses. 

You almost choke on graham cracker crust when the phone miraculously still in your pants pocket starts to vibrate. Fumbling, you reach to quickly turn the blasted thing off before it attracts Invincible’s attention. The only reason you pause a hovering thumb over the decline button is because the top line reads: GDA Director, Stedman. 

Cecil is staring at you like he is afraid. It is jarring. You have been so, so scared of him since your height was at his hip, since before you knew the fucking times table, since you were pulled from elementary school — taken from hand-turkey drawings, snacktime with animal crackers, hopscotch at recess — and thrown into the most secure prison on the planet.

“You’re terrified of me. I can hear it in your heartbeat.” Your articulating tongue can almost lick at his lub-dub lub-dub lub-dub like catching a whiff of greasy pizza in a supermarket and recalling the taste.

His heart rate accelerated as soon as the door creaked open, you and Mark stepping in. As your head cleared of a halothane-fog, the chatty Invincible revisited old conversations you two had through plated glass, teasing the surprise that he had at his house for you , a kind of Welcome Home gift. 

You had forgotten about the concept of a surprise because you were enraptured at him telling you about childhood stories, how he could raise his hand like an axe and cut a log in half to use when building his and his Dad’s cabin, how he could outrun a pack of wolves and wrestle with bears; Mark was fascinating because he was the only one to talk to. Now, all your attention falls to Cecil Stedman. The director sits tied to a chair. Ropes are too tightly fastened and cut off most of his circulation; his big toe is already starting to go dead without any blood, discolored purplish-blue.

“Haha! Isn’t it great! Look at him, shakin’ in his boots,” Mark meanly bites. His arms come around your neck in an amicable hug, resting his chin on your shoulder. “I was never one for neatly wrappin’ up a Christmas present but I think I did pretty well!”

Is it near Christmas? You caught sight of white snow while being flown through chilly air in Mark’s grip. It amazes you how many seasons have come and gone without you knowing, trapped underground where spring, summer, autumn, and winter do not exist. 

“It’s really a great gift,” you say with a gentle smile, the devil on your shoulder laughing. Not knowing what to expect when Mark took from Payton Penitentiary, this unexpected sight is better than feeling the sun on your skin once more after months of nothing. 

“You did this for me?” Quickly, you check that you are not being too conceited. He said this was for you, but so many of your past rewards were more for the tasks you had done than your actual sentient flesh and blood. 

“Yep! My Mom says you should, um, do unto others as you wish they would do unto you, or something like that. And, I really like killing and fighting, so you must too ! We have so much in common.” He laughs, proud of himself.

You could live with or without killing and fighting. What you really care about is securing a place for yourself, moving onto new opportunities. Killing Cecil Stedman will be burning a bridge long overdue for demolition. 

Shifting your stance, you gently press your hands over your ears, creating a firm suction to block out sounds. Eyelids fall close like clouds over a sun. When you open your eyes, the color of them bleeding with vibrancy, there is a flower imprinted on the log walls of Nolan’s cabin and the petals drip like red nectar as gravity pulls them down, Stedman’s headless body slumped drunk-esque in the chair.

“So fucking awesome!!”

You are being corralled out the cabin. “Wait, where are we going?”

Mark’s smile is a sunbeam, brighter than the color of yellow on his suit. “Anywhere we want to go!”

You power off the device, mid-ring, just as Mark comes around the corner. He eyes all the empty plastic containers at your feet as your attention is fully devoted to him. 

Involuntary, your heart starts to speed up. The sensation is something you loathe; you are unwilling to participate in anxiety but always your anxious heart betrays you by accelerating in pulses, racing fruitlessly when danger is in sight. There is nothing that innate fight-or-flight response can do for you in such a situation, so you just wish it would go away.

Mark is holding your glucose tablets in hand, shaking the bottle and pointing it out towards you as he suggests, “Me. You. Us . Ice cream date. What’d you think?” 

You had no idea what position you held in this fake Invincible’s universe; you could not even write a rough draft of what you suspect you might have been doing in an alternative universe, not with all the previous words said and assumptions made. So, smiling happily, you respond, “I’d love to.”

The shelves of ice cream and popsicles stretch the length of about twenty-five see-through doors. Whatever town or city or part of Virginia he flew to, the blackouts have not reached here yet. Each container has a layer of icy crystals growing on it like moss. Mark presses his hand to the tempered glass, feeling the cold kiss at his fingerprints, and goes down the line of ice cream, reading each flavor.

Unlike Mark, you stand a reasonable distance back, not pressing your nose and forehead up to the glass like he is. It feels like a millennium since you ate any ice cream. You cannot even recall if you have ever had Talenti before, simply letting the superhero corral you to the shelf he abruptly stopped in front of. Arms crossed and brow furrowed, you do not even gaze at the door, attention locked on him. 

He is a confounding individual. 

Right now, he is giving you a rundown of what his yesterday looked like as you fought for your life against that Flaxan Invincible. “So, me and him are coming across this like h- uuu -ge desert. And, like, his punches are so! weak, like c’mon, I’ve barely worked up a sweat and you’re gonna punch like you’re tired out? Lame! But, then, finally, he hits me with something with a little oomph ! And I go flying down into this underground grave place –”

Part of you is worrying over what your tomorrow is going to look like. Do you even get tomorrows at the end of the world? You are positive that a cockroach like yourself will survive whatever, be it a scolding desert, be it a fake Invincible, be it the end of the world, but maybe you should indulge yourself in a sweet treat before this all goes to shit.

Just as you take your eyes off the back of Mark’s hair, a pint of see-through ice cream is being shoved in your face. You blink down at it. “Here. For you,” Mark informs, finally done with his story and finally making his choice. What he holds is gelato layers of mint fudge cookie. 

It (is/is not) your go-to flavor which you suppose is telling of how much he knows about you … at least, you think it might. As you accept the pint, you cannot help but to ask, “Who are you to me?” He tilts his head like a curious puppy. Perhaps that is the wrong question. “Who am I supposed to be? I’m not exactly sure anymore.”

His smile shows off his teeth. “You’re just supposed to be you.” 

What a confounding and unhelpful answer.

As he springs up to his feet, Mark tosses his pint from left hand to right hand, back and forth, while saying wistfully, “Though, I suppose you don’t really like know- know me anymore. This is a fresh start. I mean, it’s super freaky you work for G.D.A ‘cus those guys ruined your life where I’m from.”

“Ruined my life?” Are you an outlier in your universal relationship with the Global Defense Agency?

“Threw you in jail all because you killed a few thousand people. Total bullshit. It was self-defense anyway, so it wasn’t even a crime.” He starts meandering away so you follow. “If someone picks a fight, you fight back; you don’t just lie down and take it.”

“A thousand people?” You don’t think you could even kill two people, much less a thousand. 

“Or something like that. It was some ridiculous high number. And then, you killed all those Flaxan soldiers and that was another thousand-something. You’re s- uuu -per powerful where I’m from. I was kind of hoping you would attack me when we met again but then you passed out on me.”

Everlastingly curious, you want to pry for more but you miss your opportunity when Mark exclaims. “Gnarly!! I t- ooo -tally missed this when I walked in! Damn,” he laughs. What he stands over, both of you having made your way to the front entrance by the registers and cafe, is a dead body.

A body of a superhero to be exact, and not even really the body but simply the head. The helmet with the silver claws rising up from the eye-slits, making almost a metal-replica of a raccoon’s patterns, identifies him clear enough for you. That is ShadowHawk’s head, absent from its host body therefore leaving it as vulnerable as any other human’s. 

Underneath the head, a blue spandex-coated shoe comes to jostle it. Your eyebrows shoot up in surprise when Mark starts to treat it like a soccer ball. He bounces it on the tip of his foot, the metal clanging with each ascending jump, before moving onto his knees and ankles. Up and down, up and down, ShadowHawk’s head is moved by the fancy footwork of a sadistic Invincible until he sends it rocketing through the front’s ceiling tall windows like a football player kicking a field goal.

“He shots … He scores!” ShadowHawk’s head sails until it blinks out of existence. “And the crowd goes,” he turns to you, mirth in those gleaming brown eyes, and the smile drops off his face, “and the crowd is unimpressed. Boo.” He pouts. 

You manage to pull a half-smile to your features. Pointing in the direction of the cafe, you say, “Let’s go eat. I’m starving.”

His good mode resurrects easily. “Haha! I could tell! You were stuffing your face like a pig back there!”

They are tiny plastic spoons in a sleeve of plastic abandoned and ready for use. Chairs are pulled back to allow both of you to sit down, pints unlidded. Knowing that you and Invincible are most likely going to be the last one eating, sitting, and enjoying this cafe makes you loiter while removing your red spoon from its plastic. You even do a little, “Cheers”, and tap the curve of your utensil against Mark’s in a toast. 

This is the first date of your life. Too busy to entertain while working with the G.D.A, you never really sought out companionship before. As your mouth melts mint gelato, you try to comprehend another version of you who would do this sort of thing. Your spoon slices through green gelato, creating a divot.

‘The work I do. I never thought I could give it up before.’ You used to look at your research as part of your soul. Once you could walk into the laboratory, gesture to each testing sample and full culture tubes, and say with full confidence: This is my flesh and blood. This is my list of ingredients. 

You are a horse having run out of its stables. Where do you go now?

“Aaaaah.”

Startled, your eyes bounce up to see Mark leaning over the table, tongue out on display. “Aaaaah.” he goes. You blink in surprise, watching that pink appendage wiggle back and forth before asking indignantly what he is doing. 

“Um, waiting for you to feed me obviously. I wanna bite,” he sings, letting his tongue roll just back out after talking. He puppeteers it up and down in wet flicks. It looks more like he is trying to do an elaborate dance with his tongue rather than accept a spoonful of your ice cream.

The obscenity and absurdity of him causes your first genuine laugh since the skies split open with portals. He really is a character. Surely, textbook-level evil but with those boyish charms that come with a highschool romance. Digging down your utensil to scoop up layers of mint gelato, fudge bits, and chocolate syrup, you decide to appease his whims if only because that little act brightened your mood slightly.

As you pull your spoon back, green and brown streaks racing across the surface, Mark keeps this ridiculous eye contact with you, moaning around the bite in his mouth. Once you free your utensil, he latches right back onto it. His brown eyes wide like twin suns, staring you down and waiting for a reaction, as he clenches the plastic in his teeth. Challenging you like a dog.

Once you wrench it out, almost flying off your chair when his teeth suddenly lift up, you whack him on the nose swiftly. Dreamily, he giggles and blushes at the abuse.

“Alright, your turn. Say ‘aaaah’,” Mark instructs. You do no such thing but still open up to accept the spoonful he feeds you. It is sea salt caramel and he is surprisingly gentle as he removes his spoon, watching your mouth intensely. 

You still haven’t been able to make a solid impression of him and yourself. As you dig into the fudge layer of your gelato, you cannot help asking hesitantly, “In your universe, did we …?” 

Something flashes in Mark’s eyes. It is like watching a lighthouse’s illumination fall over a specific spot of the water, creating a shiny reflection, but it is gone as soon as it appears. His smile is strained, unable to commit to a frown, as he answers.

“We made a good team.”

It was supposed to be a quick in-and-out. Kill the new Guardians of the Globes. Catch up with Dad/Nolan after all was done so the Viltrum invasion could quickly begin. The thing is the headquarters had lit up, a thousand or so robots powering on at once like sleepy bats’ eyes opening simultaneously in a dark cave.

The collar suddenly latched onto your neck like a cobra creating a quick scarf around its prey. It moved so fast that it did not register in Mark’s vision which is so much superior than human or machine. Despite his biological preeminence, it did nothing to halt the collar from beeping a singular conformation and blowing your head clean off your shoulders. 

Like a wave, your blood splashes over his face, streaks getting in his brown eyes, sticking in his hairline and eyelashes, and even a bit landing inside his agape mouth. Slowly, almost mechanically, he closes his parted lips. The taste of your blood is swallowed. It is sweet, not metallic like others would have you believe.

Mark guesses it is time to leave. You have eaten enough to where you are refueled, seemingly happy when you check the numbers on the face of your watch. Those twin red spoons are touching the bottom of empty Talenti containers, left on the single table. Another copy of Angstrom’s floating red eyes is sure to come around and piss him off some more. He is angsty to get out there and kill some more people and superheroes too. 

Yeah, it is definitely time to head out.

Over the awaiting cooler bag, he tears into plastic and lets ice cubes cascade down into the open mouth. “Boom, done.” He looks towards you, who walks towards the cooler with multiple things in your arms. 

“Thank you.” 

You deposit jars of honey, apple juice boxes, Jolly Ranchers, glucose tablets, and a variety of your favorite fruits. It is an amateur replica of your suitcase with scientifically engineered glucose tablets that would raise your blood sugar back up to normal in mere seconds. If only you took one sooner at the HQ, you would not be in this situation with this person. But you are just glad to have something , even if it is …

“You got me a tangerine instead of an orange.” 

“What?” He snatches the fruit from your hand, rolling it in examination. “Nah, I got the right one. It’s orange.”

An involuntary chuckle slips out of you, warmed. “Well, I can’t deny that, but …”

“But what? An orange is an orange.”

“A tangerine is much different from an orange, even if they’re in the same class.”

“‘Kay, smartie. What’s the difference? How is that not an orange?”

You catch the tangerine like a softball when Mark throws it to you. As you peel off the skin, you begin to explain, “First off, there are many different variants of oranges. Even those ones have subgroups within each class. This,” you hold your peeled tangerine on display, “It’s honestly an entirely different fruit.”

When you hand off Mark’s share of the tangerine, he flips a slice back and forth in his hand as if he is going to find some hidden message written within. “Mmm, tomato to’mato.” He eats his slice.

Ah, no, he doesn’t eat it. When he pulls his lips back into a smile, it is wedged between his teeth like an orange rind. Sharp and startled, a “Ha!” escapes you. Mark swallows, your little astonished gaze much sweeter than any citrus. He could eat you alive, starting with your tangerine heart and sucking out the juice.

“How’s it different,” Mark inquires after a moment. 

From past conversations, you have been able to deduce that this alternative Mark Grayson likes a little verbal teasing, nudges with sentences, like the jabs thrown before the start of a real impressive boxing match. You are establishing a connection and extending an olive branch when you say whimsical, “I’m not telling you. You’re gonna have to figure it out.”

“Boo.” His pout is almost endearing. 

You roll up your button-up’s sleeves, cuffing them at the elbows. Zipping the cooler close, you sling it over your shoulder and start to make your way over to the register, hiding your smile from view. Mark watches confused as you put some money onto the conveyor belt of a 15 items or less register. 

When Mark questions what you are doing, you reply, “This is human courtesy.” 

Human, huh? He didn’t get to learn a lot about that.

The realm of a human upbringing is completely alien to him. What he received about the human consciousness was fed to him through an embellished perspective; his mother’s bottomless happiness and the ways she spoiled him never managed to help click in place the values of humanity. His culture is brutalization which he holds dearly to his soul like one might a religion or ‘words to live by’ framework.

Still, Mark snatches all the coins out of the take-a-penny & leave-a-penny tin. He drops them all in a noisy clatter on the buck and three nickels you fished out your pants pocket. In the end, it equals a buck and ninety-one cents, far too little for what you are leaving with but it is the gesture that matters in the end of the world. 

You are ready to step back into that blaze, moving down the registers when the sliding doors open to the presence of another.

Out of all the probabilities in the world, the person who walks in is Mark Grayson. ‘What luck,’ you think, halting your steps immediately when the lensless fellow beside you is slow on the uptake. However, you suppose the probability would be in favor of that. There are sixteen Mark Graysons on Earth right now and only one of every other person. Of course it is more likely for Mark Grayson to walk in than any other person.

He is not your dimension’s Mark Grayson. Yellow ditched from his color scheme, that alone is a big hint that this isn’t the Invincible who wears black and blue solely. The bigger hint is the two swords strapped to his back, hilts peeking over his shoulders.

He does not notice either of you for a blissful second or two. When he does, it is you – why is it always you – who his attention falls upon.

“(Name) …,” this new fake Invincible says softly in a stupor. His brows pinch together like two fighting caterpillars. “(Na-Name)! 괜찮으세요?” He asks, desperation in his voice. “널 해치지 않았지?!”

Neither you or Mark answer, clueless about his sudden anguish. Instead, you two stare as his mouth opens to reveal gritting teeth and wet salvia where inside his language is jumbled on his despairing tongue. It is an almost constipated look that passes over his taut features. 

You are glad for the unattached, robin egg blue lens covering his sad eyes. 

After a few tense moments, Invincible stables his heart enough to find the words to the question he yearns deeply to have answered. He does not see any Jopok marks on you, but they could be hidden from elbow up in this universe. His dimension’s you went down to your wrist with the needle in your loyalty, decorating skin with the symbol of your gang, all those dragon scales and rising waves. “A- Ah, are we allies in this universe?”

You contemplate that. Thinking about your Mark Grayson who’s falling out with Cecil Stedman wrecked eighty-two ReAnimen and has caused your coworkers nail-biting strife, you answer, even though you are no longer with the G.D.A, “No. I don’t think so.”

Pain flashes across his face as if you managed to physically injure him. His head bows so you cannot see the tears slipping past his lens and across his cheeks. “I see. That makes me sad to hear. I am sorry that I have failed you in another lifetime.”

Empathy is not something that the selfish possess; empathy is not a trait that aligns with your morals and emotions. Impassively, you watch him for any hint of hostility, knowing how unpredictable these Invincible variants are. A man whose entire body is a weapon carrying a weapon on his back? It turns your stomach.

Composing himself, Invincible lifts his head. He has stilled the involuntary quiver of his bottom lip and settled it into a scowl. It causes him insurmountable han to find that one of the universal constants is that you two stand on opposing sides. He wants nothing more than to stand side by side again. But first …

Invincible points his attention towards Mark’s figure. Whatever was unsteady in his heart falls to a calm rhythm, confidence in each beat. When he removes the two shiny swords from the scabbard sheath strapped to his spine, Invincible metamorphoses into a man devoid of any emotions, that stone-faced killer he was born to be.

“Still … it is unwise to be around me. Double-crossing was not something that Angstrom outlined to be frowned upon. Prostrate yourself and accept your death. I might just make it quick if you don’t fight back.” 

“Prostrate myself,” Mark mocks in disbelief. Involuntarily, he starts to laugh, throwing his head back with the fizz of bubbling giggles. “Can’t you believe this guy, (Name). Prostrate myself?”

“If you value your tongue, do not talk to her.”

“Oooh, I’m gonna have a fucking time killing you.” Mark throws a few loose combos in the air, readying his fist for a fight. Ah, he is so happy to fight again!

“I assure you that it is not me that is going to yield.” You can tell just from the mere confidence and maturity in his voice that it is a true statement. “Though, I am sure there will be some internal self-searching to do after killing myself. I eagerly anticipate it.”

 “D- ooo -n’t care. C’mon, let’s do this. C’mon! C’mon!”

You cannot let this fight commence. 

In the simplest terms, you need to establish a team. The world is ending and you need strong players on your side. What you do next is survival — after all, you held down that Flaxan attired Invincible, made the blood in his system gain sentient mass, restricting him from defending against each blow, kept that hold apathetic even as his eye looked at you betrayed through a cracked len, firm on your winning position in the G.D.A until the scoreboard read Invincibles: 1 and Earth: 0 — and you already have stock in Mark who stands besides you now.

You start to raise your dominant arm, attention drawn to you like a magnet. 

“Please don’t do this, (Name). It’s not you that I wish to fight.”

“Do it! Do it! Do it!”

The sound of your own personal cheerleader locks your decision into place. You hope you won’t live to regret it. You hold up four fingers, thumb tucked. Skin un-moisturized, decorated with Fourth of July plastic rings, and nail plates uneven on each end, they stand up like growing weeds. Both Invincibles watch enraptured like waiting for a little league pitcher to throw, anticipation in both their eyes while unsure of what to be anticipating. You drop your middle and ring, making bull horns. 

Where children drew stick figures of family members, you surprised your foster father by being able to perfectly draw a Circle of Willis. He thought it was an imaginary creature, all wiggling ribs and filaments standing out like a bacteria’s ring. At least until he poured over anatomy textbooks and found Willis within it. 

You know acutely where those limbs are placed.

The first thing that falls in his right-held sword; then, his entire body follows after like a tree. This new fake Invincible screams in pain as the stumps of his right arm and left leg pour generously into the sanguine puddles below him. He collapses on his single remaining knee and palm, yelling at the top of his lungs in unprepared agony.

“Let’s go,” you urge, snapping Mark out of his stupor. Already, you are popping a Dum-Dum into your mouth, rolling the hard candy around on your tastebuds to patch up your powers with cotton candy-flavored sugar. 

“Huh?” Mark blinks at you, a little slack-jawed, feeling like he might start drooling. Those are your powers? The blush on his face and the size of his pupils only grow in intensity. 

“I rather not wait for the time that his pain settles into rage,” you state. That cold detachment melts from your face as you turn towards Mark, wearing a manipulative smile and speaking saccharine from your sugar-high, “you said that we should get to know each other better. I think we would make a good team. Let’s walk and talk?”

The words drop the heart of the Invincible bleeding on the ground into a pool of acid and light a fire under the heart of the Invincible standing before you. 

Mark, eyes eclipsed by his pupils, teases, trying to be lighthearted when his pulse is electric under his skin, “Wherever you go, I’ll follow.”

He has never broken a sweat before in a fight. Fighting Flaxans, fighting superheroes, fighting his Dad – none of those things have ever exerted him to spring a leak. During battles, the most water that has ever covered him was the blood of others (or his own). Mark glistens with sweat.

His heart is roaring from a multitude of factors. Red blood cells are like F1 drivers in his veins, pumping at a speed that is inhuman. It causes his useless left stump to spew all over the floor of the Guardian of the Globes HQ, leaving glutinous puddles – a party girl bent over the toilet who just cannot stop vomiting.

With a drenched face, he overlooks the ocean of dead Robots. The count does not really matter to him; all he knows is that at one point that overgrown Fanta can stopped sending in reinforcements and he eventually got to dig the wires out of his original’s neck, pulling them like sparking guts from a pumpkin. Mark is not the brightest bulb in the drawer but he knows that won’t stop Robot. He will have to destroy all of Earth until he tracks whatever shapeless thing that controls these drones.

He’ll enjoy the chase. He always does like the hunt and kill methodology of Viltrum customs. But, there is no excitement coursing through him now, no premature battle high anywhere to be found, just a desolate confusion.

“Weren’t you supposed to be strong?”

His shadow eclipses over you like a tree’s shade. Where there is nothing past your shoulders, the folding blanket of his dark silhouette has left the dimensions of his own head, leaving you like a Frankenstein stitched back together with two vastly different dolls, one made of flesh and the other made of shadow. He waits very patiently for you to rise, to twitch, to seize, to do anything a dead body cannot.

“I mean, you injured me before, so this is kind of underwhelming.” Mark crouches down, running his fingers under the damp fabric of his mask, those thin yellow arrow-points running across his cheekbones. The sweat on him is salty. “All it took was that stupid thing to take you down.”

You two conversed for months, separated by a paper-thin sheet of bulletproof, plated glass that would crumble under a punch from him, and he thought he was painting a good picture of you in his mind: a powerful foe and a powerful friend. Neither of you learned anything serious or below the surface about each other, but it was still one of the most meaningful connections of Mark’s life. Mark really liked talking with you. He wishes you would come to your own defense but your lips, tongue, and teeth have been blown into chunks of red and red-covered white. 

“Get up,” Invincible says, voice so defeated that he can't put any energy behind his plea or reaching hand. “Get up.” The jostle to your shoulder shifts dead flesh that falls back where gravity placed it. “Get up. Get up. Get up.”

Mark wants to go with you to a zoo … He thinks he will turn his back on Viltrum as long as he gets to experience the humane mundane with you … Mark wants you to get up so you two can go somewhere together, anywhere but here, anywhere you want to go. So …

LAST MIDNIGHT. floyd leech

requested by: anon / cake details: red velvet cake (royalty AU) with buttercream frosting (mutual pining)

Third time's the charm is how the saying goes. If you last through the first and second tries, there is sure to be good fortune on the other side. All you have to do is see it through until you reach the metaphorical pot of gold at the end. However, by all accounts, the third time is not the charm for you. 

The deal is that you only get three nights. Nights full of ecstasy and delight, void of any punishments. Nights where you could live in the shoes of everyone else, nameless and chesired, void of your identity.

Your fairy godmother had raised up her spindly index, middle, and ring fingers. Skin peeling away to reveal jagged bone, she dropped each from right to left as she narrated how your temporary reprieve was secured for three blissful times until the last midnight passed. At the third break of dawn, you would depart from the prince you sought for company or she would collect your soul as punishment for a broken deal.

The first two nights were wondrous!

There are so many experiences that were virgin to you, that he opened up the gates to. The world previously known seems like a drop of rain in an ocean now. With the prince, you feel like you are on another planet entirely; he alters your gravity and messes with your perception in irrefutable ways. His presence is as life-changing as the diagnosis of a deadly disease or the birth of a newborn.

When you are on your deathbed and memories start to fade, sunken and molting into the mattress like fungus, you know that you will be able to perfectly and thoroughly recall these moments with him in your mind.  

Watching Floyd now, your hippocampus stores everything like a camcorder, passive and open. 

He is barefoot, hair askew, a damp white button-up clinging to his back. He is going around the shoreline of the beach to collect stones, expressing unrestrained displeasure or joy at the ones he picks up, cradling them in his palms like a squirrel trying to stuff as much food as possible in his mouth. He is the type of muse that would not be limited to one art medium; there would be sculptures, poems, paintings, and music in memoriam of him.

You can only record him in memory, like a souvenir shelved in your brain. It is impossible to banish the light smile off your features at the mere sight of him. 

“Shrimpy,” he calls, though your attention is already on him. You do not move until he starts to wave. Liking to physical evidence he wants your company. “Come here!” His gesturing causes a few stones to slip out his grasp.

No sand miraculously stains the expensive silk of your outfit. It must be a touch of fairy magic, allowing you to make your way over to the prince without having to worry about any annoying sediment ending up where it shouldn’t be. Just as you come shoulder to shoulder with him, grainy rocks are being guided into your hand.

“Ya ever learn to skip stones?”

“I cannot say I have.”

“After tonight, ya can say it,” Floyd grins.

Here it is — you observe and take a picture of the three stones in your hand, flat and smooth; they remind you of full moons — yet another experience he has the keys to. Before, you knew little of what was beyond the walls of your imprisonment. There is a younger version of you that could never fathom getting to see or smell the ocean. 

The prince nudges your shoulder, wetting the area. Seaweed hair is flopping over his eyes, dripping pins of water over his nose and stretching dimples. Earlier in his hunt, he dove into the briny waves to retrieve some of these stones, submerging and sliding yards away from shore before he emerged victorious, rock raised in the air, shouting his glee as you laughed on the edge of grass and sand at his ridiculousness. 

Skipping stones in hand, you laugh again, “I’ll be positively bragging about it tomorrow!” You have to keep this affair a secret, magic rules and all that, but you can still appease his ego.

“It’ll only be worth braggin’ about if you can beat me,” he challenges just as his left arm comes up in one snapping pitch. Your heart follows along with each bounce it does across the water. It finally sinks into the ocean at a grand twenty-eight. “Though, I don’t kn-ooo-w, I think I got ya beat, Shrimpy.”

Floyd’s fingers enclose around your dominant hand before you can respond. The touch is welcomed easily — after all, for the past two nights you have danced, played instruments together, and walked hand in hand to secret places — thus, you take the backseat, pupils like lens, to watch him maneuver two stones out of your hand so only one remains. 

He instructs you by starting with the position of “Ya thumb goes … here, and ya wanna put your index on the edge like this” and then, hands on your waist guide to move “Then, you wanna stand like this. And, start pullin’ your arm back to prepare to pitch it.” as he guides you into a demonstration of the throw, he adds pressure on your hand to ensure that “when ya let go, snap your wrist forward like that.”

“Like this?” You keep the stone in your hand, only miming your future throwing posture. 

“Like that, Shrimpy,” the prince affirms, beaming with pride.

Straightening up, you tighten your hold on your stone even though you are supposed to have a loose hold or risk messing up the shot. You do not want to disappoint him by being a terrible stone-skipper. Why does even the miniscule seem so important in his presence? 

It’s probably because he’s staring at you. 

His eyes are incredibly soft. He is giving you the kind of look that could translate to I’m happy to share this moment with ya. Though you told yourself you were going to absorb everything tonight, document it in your hippocampus down to the last color, you find it hard to raise your gaze and meet his burning stare.

So, you release the stone. It skips twice before drowning on the third. Plu-nk! 

“Damn, I thought I could,” you mumble off, jaded. You were expecting a better outcome.

“Hey, you skipped it,” the prince cheers with enthusiasm, smothering out your negativity. “I didn’t skip mine on my first try.”

“Really?” You find that hard to believe; he seems like a natural at everything he’s shown you, talent in his bone marrow.

“Really. Threw ‘em too hard each time. Got really frustrated and didn’t pick the habit back up ‘till I felt like it.”

Before you were temporarily released from your imprisonment, you had heard about the twin brothers. Heard about the left-handed prince with the attitude like a cloud, causing storms one minute or simply harmless fluff the next. He is volatile. Likely to change for the worse if circumstances bore or vex him. 

“Do you get bored easily?” 

You imagine he does, traveling through life on whims, never content.

“Nah,” he disagrees blatantly with your assumption. He skips one of his own stones, left hand as confident as ever. “I just get bored when I get bored.” 

With each jump across the waves, your heart beats rapidly. 

It isn’t such a sentimental sentence. Hell, he is outright disagreeing with you. But his words still plant a seed of appreciation for the time you two have spent tonight. No ties of obligation keep him with you; no sudden kinks have caused him to deviate from your side. It causes your eyes to slide to the sand, face burning with no sun to blame it on. 

You have to calm your skipping heart.

Later in the night, you are climbing back up to the edge where sand and grass intersect to head back to the castle with the souvenir conch shell Floyd has given you when he pipes up next to you, “Will I see you again tomorrow night?”

Neck snapping up, you look at him in muted surprise. Eyes wide and shiny. Smile slow to emerge but certainly emerging.

You really are so captivating. It’s why he’s been staring all night. Focused on you like an artist mapping out his still life sketch. 

He’s been thinking about getting commissions from those court painters to capture your likeness. Apprehensive at the possibility that you might just vanish into the dawn one of these nights, he’s been debating it seriously. Scared at the notion of never getting to get to see your face again. He can barely sit through the things – always shuffling his feet, biting different areas in his inner mouth, jittery all over – as they put paint to canvas. 

On a sympathetic level, he doesn’t want to put you through that. On a selfish level, he wants a museum, wall to wall, of portraits depicting you, the stranger he’s been lucky enough to see three nights in a row. 

Third time’s the charm, right?

Time has slipped between Floyd’s fingers like sand. He has been simply having too much time and forgot to mention earlier how he wants to return the exchange, to enter your world. 

The palace is s-ooo-o boring! But, it has been altered by your presence. Floyd has been a soaked match, unable to burn, until you came along. He is positive that your world, beyond his imprisonment, is just as captivating as you are. You are the key to his gates. 

God, you really are so beautiful.

But when you smile?

It could rival even the rising sun.

Floyd watches with a smile on his face —- awaiting your answer, as orange bleeds out onto the water and dawn starts to rise over the horizon — the light in your eyes dim before you collapse in a heap.

MAKING MOVES, MOVING IN. floyd leech

requested by: @clowning-constant / cake details: marble cake (NRC) with buttercream frosting (mutual pining) and sprinkles (specific to requester)

“Hey Sealie,” Floyd says, tone light but not entirely friendly.

He’s not exactly thrilled to see the little fur ball, but it’s not too bad to see him either. His presence implies the fact that you could be nearby. That knocks him just a little bit out of his funk.

The basketball ricochets off the backboard, not even close to the hoop.

Hm, not enough to knock him out of his funk completely.

“What’s up with ya,” he prompts, reaching out sideways to scoop back up his ball. The little dire beast is an interloper on Floyd’s Alone Time after he skipped out on his afternoon classes, so it better be worth his time.

Grim has been searching for the eel-mer for the whole day. Sevens, it shouldn't be so difficult to find someone so tall! Hunger pangs are gnawing on his stomach — he just ate maybe an hour ago — so excuse him if his next words,

“My Henchman wants ya to come live at Ramshackle with us!”,

don’t come out so elegant.

The basketball thuds against the backboard so hard that it looks and sounds like the plexiglass is going to break just down the center. It is also another shot missed.

“Na-aaa-ah.”

Any other time, Floyd would be tickled pink and about to burst into sea foam. 

He’s a bit too rough around the edges, all thuggish and gangster-esque, but he metaphorically kicks his feet like a schoolgirl at the mere mention of you. A grin wide enough to split his face would be emerging at the idea, him hosted up in Ramshackle with his Shrimpy; even if Grim’s words aren’t true, he would tease you to an early grave with the notion.

Instead, he reaches out his leftie, scoops up his bouncing basketball one handed, and dribbles it in front of him.

“Thanks for the offer, though.” 

Bang! Everything but net.

“Wha!”

It’s not what Grim is expecting at all.

Because, Floyd is always hanging around Ramshackle. Where it once started out as Malleus Draconia’s hole in the wall, the second years becoming third years and the graduation of the third years led to this natural transition of loitering and, quite honestly, trespassing to transpire!

Grim starts listing his very persuasive reasoning:

“Ya already have a toothbrush there!” Not that special, so do Deuce and Ace.

 “And, you’re over for dinner every other night.” Only because someone eats without limits unless there’s a big eel-mer blocking the fridge door.

“It would make everything so much easier if ya just moved your stuff into a spare room.” It would also lessen up the chores on Grim’s end. “Then, finally, my Henchman would stop talking about you so much!”

The shot that Floyd was lining up suddenly, hands held out, moving the basketball left and right to find the correct flight path, is suddenly realigned; all his attention arrows down to Grim.

“Shrimpy talks ‘bout me?”

Inside Floyd, a switch has been flicked. Grim can tell, animal instincts prickling his skin. It is especially evident with the way Floyd’s eyes shift, pupils dilating and the rings of yellow and olive shining like plugged in Christmas lights.

Grim is scrabbling to backpedal, weighing who’s going to fry his tail more — you or the immediate threat. “Well, they, um, they just talk. They talk about Ace and Deuce all the time. They complain about the Headmage. They name drop. They talk in general, so! Eek!”

The hard maple floor of the court ripples with the effect of Floyd’s bounce, deliberately aimed at Grim’s feet. With his height, it’s like an earthquake to the dire beast.

It resets him though, stops his yammering, s-ooo-o. 

“What kinda things,” Floyd drawls, all peachy-keen now.  That glowing yellow eye is like a sun flare.

“Well, just, uuum, just,” Grim’s stuck between keeping his Henchman’s secrets and keeping his head.

“If ya tell me, I’ll pack my stuff tonight.”

Which equals no more chores for Grim.

“They like how sweaty you get after basketball.”

Not exactly the most charming thing to be taken away from lengthy, lengthy talks but it’s the first thing that comes to his mind.

Floyd pauses like a buffering DVD, ball still in his hands. Not perturbed by the information in the slightest; he likes when you’re sweaty too, always playing tug-of-war with animal pleasure and human decency to not take a giant, sweeping lick from your clavicle, across your neck, and end at your ear. You doing P.E. is just as charming as you doing anything else.

“Reall-y, what a weirdo,” but his dumb grin says otherwise, “they’re always so squirmy ‘bout it,” he’s been punched enough in the ribs to know to stop draping himself over you when a game or practice is finished but now?, “Got anythin’ else?”

“Myah, I don’t know!”

Grim’s ready to turn tail. If you find out about just that one sentence being said, he’ll be doing dishes for months until his paws wash right off.

Floyd smells the hesitation in the water.

“C’mon, don’t leave me high and dry. Ya want me to move in right? Gonna need some motivation to help me start putting all my shoes in a suitcase.”

Well, now Grim’s not so sure about the whole moving in part. Floyd can definitely reach high up places for dusting, but he’s also Floyd Leech.

“Ya know, I think we’re too crowded in Ramshackle. Plus, all the ghosts haven’t been told about this yet. Squatter’s rights, and ummm… I’ll go debrief with them then I’ll come back to- y-ouch!!”

Held between Floyd’s hand is Grim’s trident-shaped tail. Crouched down to his height, the brute rests the basketball under his knee so it doesn’t roll away. He smiles a smile that is too toothy.

“Don’t ice me out, Sealie, c’mon. I just wanna hear what Shrimpy's gotta say. How about this, for everything you tell me, I’ll buy ya a jar of tuna.”

Floyd doesn’t fish — a little too existential for his taste — but he knows when he’s got them hook-line-sinker.

Grim shuffles on his hind legs but it is already clear by his pursed lips that he’s gonna spill some more stuff. 

Floyd listens, rapted, as both the double doors and Grim’s mouth open.

“My Henchman thinks you look real sexy when your cleavage is showing in your uniform!”

In such an empty gymnasium, the sound travels well.

“Grim!!”

“Shrimpy!” Floyd greets you jovially, letting go of your cat’s tail and standing up. He’s pleased as punch, ready for the entertainment of a lifetime.

His hand coming up to unbutton his third button is inconspicuous.

DEFLOWERED. floyd leech 

requested by: anon / cake details: red velvet cake (royalty AU) with edible flowers (fluff) and citrus glaze (smut)

It all starts with him insulting your father. 

A bizarre thing. 

However, you cannot help that it has you biting down on your index, lungs quivering with concealed laughter as deeper and deeper, this fearless jester twists the knife of comedy into your father’s stomach. Insults about his latest failed crusade, jabs directed toward his growing weight, and well-timed criticism about his inability to rule a kingdom. One joke has you contorting in your seat, throwing an arm over your face and squeezing tight into your chair with bouncing shoulders and quivering legs. He leaves you gasping for mercy, stop! stop! hehe!, as your grin spreads ear to ear. 

He is perhaps the only man in the world who can achieve such a feat. Gasping for mercy that is.

For your own pride, you would like to say you do not how this situation came to be. You would pledge to the court that your jester is a disguised fae, seducing you with witchcraft and making you do unholy things. Usually, there is more sense in your head; Floyd happens to suck it all up with a straw, a vicious butterfly on top of a delicate flower.

Sex in the botanical gardens? Surely, you should know better. There are only so many flowers to cover the scent, only so many plants to cover the sight, and nothing to cover the sound as you gasp wantonly.

“Fuh-Floyd! Ah – augh. Fuh-Fl–!” When you throw your head back, it bounces off the gazebo’s floor. Tears prick like thorns in your eyes. “Ehhh–Enough. I … eugggh.”

“One more. One more.” Floyd encourages, looming over your body. He kneels between your thighs, straddling around the right thigh while the other shakes and seizes over his left thigh. Relentlessly, without a shred of any mercy, he pumps himself into you.

You cannot see it given the ruffles of silk and taffeta that flow from your waist. Your tailor would be double-over from a heart attack if he knew you allowed his masterpiece, designed specifically for today's upcoming tea party, had been shoved aside by Floyd’s hands like those intricate laces were nothing more than lousy wrapping paper to get to the valuable present underneath. 

You had told Floyd, pulling the hair underneath his monk cowl like horse reins to get him to pay attention, to be careful but you think you heard a tear all the same. The absolute brute.

However, his brutish attributes are usually what calls you back to him. It is certainly brutish now. The girth of his cock oscillates back and forth like a wild pendulum, pulling himself back only to return with added vigor in each thrust. His pressure suffocates you like he is atmospheric. He is the air you need to breathe in a way. 

To be drowned in him is an eudaimonia summit that you can only reach with his help.

As if reading your mind, Floyd bends down closer to you. Balls slapping hard against your leaking pussy, sending juices ricocheting into a messy puddle around your combined sex, he leans down to get a better look at your face.

With the way you two are positioned, there has mostly been constant eye-contact between the two of you. You love his face. This is the hardest part of being in love and needing him like oxygen. When his nose crunches as he laughs, when his eyes gleam as he looks, even the miniscule flop of his tongue as he talks and talks, it makes everyone else seem ugly.

His handsome face leans down to grin at you; you choke out a loud, bashless moan. On the gazebo floor, you press your check down hard, jaw hanging open involuntarily and eyes squeezed tight as his cock gives a particular hard punch to just the very gated edges of your cervix.

To be under his gold eye feels like being burnt by a sunbeam.

Floyd plants a tiny garden of kisses on your face, moving from forehead to cheek to ear to chin to nose to lip. Mouth already limp, he meets no resistance when he sticks his tongue into the embrace. You try to kiss back as well as you can with your soul being fucked from your body.

He is so greedy. Knowing exactly which way to slip past your defenses with a correctly timed joke, he managed to go from simply his knuckles up inside, from his tongue lapping up the first orgasm, to have you contorted beneath him, trying not to burn out from your third.

Hummingbird heart going wild in your chest, you lift your head up to engage deeper into that kiss. Sliding and mashing tongues together as your genitals do the same in a much more lubricant setting. Sevens, you feel like a swamp down there, drenched enough by bodily sweat all over but rivers soaked on your inner thighs. 

Floyd adjusts your position, slowing down his thrusts, resting your spine on the gazebo and sliding back in missionary. Air breezes underneath the skirt of your dress. He leans up to his full height as he guides your legs around his waist. 

He’s making these hisses with teeth between his grunts. His stomach clenches with each strained effort to keep in his noises. He’s usually so loud?

“Buh-Bite your index finger.”

You don’t even get to move your hands, the right one curled into your chest and the left one limp above your head, before he plows into you like a drill. 

Phap, Phap, Phap, PhapPhapPhapPhapPhapPhap —!!!

Your legs literally shake like they’re trying to come off, rattling bones going crazy. Eyes saucer wide, you go noiseless, mouth open in an O. It’s a telltale that you’re going to start grunting like a pig, moans spilling out an involuntary volume as your orgasm hits the top and crests downward.

He falls into you in a millisecond, chest to chest, orgasm starting to arrive at the top, one white droplet leaking out before the flood, and kisses you as hard as he can. 

It’s more like jamming his lips against your teeth and cracking his skull against your skull, but it is over-washed by the warmth of him spilling into you, deep and fast. Before you can start, Floyd bites your lips together quite unceremoniously and breathes hard through his nostrils. Euphoria hits you both, his cum squirting and your hole milking. Still, the both of you are silent beyond heavy, thunderous breaths.

His hips do phantom thrusts, weak ones that are lingering sensations, as you flutter around him like a suckling mouth. Fuuuck. You feel like buoyant jelly, limp and warm, both of your hips rolling lazily and slower into each other with passing moments.

“Did you hear that?”

“I think it came from this direction.”

“It better not have. We have to set up the chairs in the gazebo for the tea party.”

Whatever ease those three orgasms did, those voices undo them in an instance. Your head snaps towards Floyd, who pulled back on his elbows to rest his face in the lifted cleavage from your bodice. You feel his smile against the top of your breasts instead of seeing it, watching his rise and fall with each volcanic punch of your oxygen-deprived lungs.

Despite how many times the two of you have said goodbye, he is still not leaving. You have managed, wrestling with him metaphorically and once a literal shove that did as much as dust hitting concrete, to corral him to the threshold of your parents’ home. Still inside, door ajar behind him, he crouches and continues planting kisses on your ragdoll cat who leans into each one like a plant turning towards sun.

“And you’ll miss me when I’m gone, wooon’t you? Yes, you will! You’re gonna miss your daddy.”

If your eyes could roll any further, you would be staring at your brain. Instead, the view you are confined to is the one you’ve been imprisoned to passively watch for the last honest-to-God ten minutes. Like a prisoner in your own home.

Some distance between the two of you is what you need. Not relationship distance, not the distance between his and your house on intersecting neighborhood blocks, not even the mere distance found from where he crouches languidly and you stand firm. The distance you are talking about is an outstretching length, as far as him on Mars and you on Earth. Enough space to soon forget the color of his eyes or the sound of his voice. 

Coffee eyes flicker up to scrutinize. Between each long forehead kiss or enthusiastic rub, Mark has been making sure you know he knows you are standing there and waiting for him to leave. Sailing past cat ears, his vision sinks its teeth into you before his eyes shut, cooing, “Whooo’s my good boy!”, as Dexter purrs under the affection of his second parent.

It honestly surprises you that Mark is capable of this. Unsure as to why he showered the ragdoll in such ardent embraces, all these smooches and scratches are outliers to his overall attitude. Kindness is rare for Mark to pass out; the only receivers are Dexter and, sometimes, you.

Finally, after so much deliberation, he stands up. Putting his thumbs into his pockets, Mark sways once on the balls of his feet playfully as Dexter rolls with his tummy exposed up. He ignores how Dexter claws on his gray trousers in a plea for him to stay and never leave. Almost all of his pants are scared by those feline hooks. Gone instantly is the high-pitched baby talk and his playful demeanor like it had never been there to begin with.

He says as monotone as a dead ocean, “If you come running for my help, I won’t answer.”

The airy affront caught in your throat twists and molds itself into, “Is that as Invincible or is that as my boyfriend?”

His facial features change. It is like watching a low timelapse of a fruit going bad and attracting flies. Pale lips peel, revealing those thicker than human canines and molars that metamorphosis into an award winning smile. “I guess you’re just going to have to find out.”

Exhausted and weak from the previous back and forth, you simply exhale out your frustration and say, firm and pushing, “Bye Mark.”

No matter how you slice or dice it, Mark has always had an air of superiority — that cocky male confidence that keeps his chin up steadily — about him when things are going his way; it is written in the very skeleton of his being. What makes you simultaneously nervous and disgusted is that he still has that smug assertiveness, lingering after the breakup. It has not waned once and it only seems to preen under you bidding him a harsh goodbye.

“See you around,” he affirms to you.

When the ajar door finally closes behind Mark, the first thing that happens is your eyelids droop, fast. You are tired like you have never been; you are sure you are going to sleep like a rock.

That breakup drained so much energy from you. Even the mere epidermis on you feels heavy like a coat’s layers. Such a proof of human stamina, Mark light on his feet as he walked out the door and you now trudging to collapse in your bed. Just minutes ago, you stood in here, yelling and stomping, exerting yourself down to the last reserve, and he stood still, took it all without really contributing any energy, seeing your anger as pointless. Like a chalk outline crime scene, this bedroom is forever stained by the memory.

At least neither of your parents were home to hear it. One works the graveyard shift from 7pm to 6am and the other is always staying at their second lover’s, no divorce or even breakup-esque argument finalized. You couldn’t be like that, staying despite the awfulness, ignoring things.

You loved Mark, but it didn’t feel right.

‘...’ you stew in silence.

Great, now you’re getting sappy. 

The feeling plants itself inside you as you tuck yourself into bed, Dexter curling up at your stomach. Introspection’s a fucking bitch. Being stuck in your head is the last thing you want right now, falling into a labyrinth of excuses and heartbreak. So, you try to alleviate that by pulling out your phone, screensaver of Mark flashing, only for it to lead you right to your photo gallery. 

That planted feeling starts to grow little cacti pricks as you scroll through each photo – him with a baby Dexter crawling up his sleeve like a spider, him waiting with an umbrella at the end of a street corner for you to catch up, him preparing for a yard sale of his childhood comic figurines, him shirtless on the beach and flashing one of his infrequent smiles that rivals the entire galaxy in your eyes – and it turns into a poisonous organism when you finally reach the very top of your gallery, back when you got this phone at sixteen. 

You scrolled so far that you have come across the origin of your love story. Well, it is certainly not the very start; the start is before either of you had a phone, bike ride on the street leading you to find a boy on the other street rolling a baseball over antholes like a bulldozer. This picture is from after the first date.

Eyelids grow heavier, your limp wrist holds the picture slightly parallel with your vision. It is a shot of you walking up the cobblestone path to your house’s front door. Back to the camera, completely unaware that it was taken, this is the only evidence of your first date besides memory. It is the kind of photo taken by freelance photographer who might have been paid to follow someone, but —

“I wanted to make sure you got home safe.”

You look up from his phone that you had stolen, utterly famished to know what he kept in his photo gallery now that you have crossed into intimate boundaries. Such a considerate answer makes you pause, your previous question answered. 

“But I live a street away,” your laugh is strained.

Mark looks up from his homework, Dexter sitting on his spine and leaving white furs on his black button-up, his hair horns free of gel after a shower, and says quietly, “That doesn’t mean I don’t want you safe.”

What an interesting introspection to stumble back upon sleepily in the aftermath of him turning out to be Invincible and the words he departed on today as you two officially stepped out of your relationship. How safe are you even with him? Especially after… but before you can remember the reason for the breakup, hand flaccidly releasing your phone on the charging pad, you are falling into sleep with a simple blink.

The first date you and Mark went on, you had lobster. 

Really pulling out the metaphorical red-carpet, Mark grinned that toothy leer as you stumbled through earrings and outfits and overall preparing for your first date at sixteen to be at an impossibly fancy seafood restaurant – that requires reservations in advance. How he was so confident you would be free, you’ll always be at a loss. 

Vomiting words and more words, you drilled through a one-sided conversation most of the night, helplessly wondering why you were invited here if Mark didn’t seem interested or entertained enough to talk to you. Your stomach was empty of colloquial bile by the time the lobsters arrived, bright red and steaming. In the same instance where you reached for the pliers, Mark moved your plate over to his side. You stared, surprised. 

“I’m going to show you a trick,” he says, friendly enough that you sit back to listen. He picks up the body of your lobster, twisting off the tail from the body, doing the same with the claws. “You don’t need pliers for this part. If you find the correct seam, you can break it like a cracker.”

He digs his thumbnails into the top of the claw. Along the seam of the curling pincher, smaller claw dangling below, his thumbs give one forceful push in. The exoskeleton comes off like a mere accessory, breaking along the curve and opening like a clam shell.

“Here,” smug satisfaction and teasing, “you try it.” He hands over the second claw of your lobster.

Dubiously, you eye the pincher once it is in your hand. Flipping it over, you put your thumbs where you saw Mark’s thumbs go. Hard and resilient, the exoskeleton gives no show of damage as you drive down your thumbs. You wrestle with it for one embarrassing minute. 

Is this some kind of humiliation ritual? Feeling like a fool but not stopping, you try to break traffic-light red armor with your feeble hands in such a fancy restaurant with such fancy waiters and such fancy decor. Skin burns under makeup. The only part that seems to be retaining injury is your nails which ache with each dig and push. It’s not impossible though, because Mark did it; you try harder. The smooth nail palate of your right thumb breaks under the pressure, chipping off rose gold paint and leaving a jagged edge. 

Mark laughs boyishly, unable to keep it in. Before you can even access the sound, he is stealing the claw from you and breaking it down the middle with the ease of a regular person snapping an apple in halves. “There’s a finesse to it.”

He starts talking more after that, like that display had put him in a good mood. Despite it, you enjoy his company – after all, there was a second date, a third, even a fourth. Underneath the scent of vanilla and whatever soft jazz the restaurant had playing on a live stage, you two dipped cleaned lobster meat into butter and found yourself falling into something that didn’t have any identity, even when you two put up weak labels like boyfriend and girlfriend.

Now, you are having a dream that you are a lobster.

You have had many strange dreams in the past. Stuff that you have woken up from that doesn’t have a relevance or makes sense is natural to a stressed or bored mind. There have been dreams where you were nailed to a pool’s plastic lining, green water and leaves floating on the surface all you could see, and there have been dreams where you were in a volatile panic, heaving and close to vomiting, due to not being able to find garlic chips in your pantry. Dreams seldom make sense. All you can do is accept the current reality, tell yourself to breathe water and guide yourself to the next shelf. Right now, you are, without a doubt, a lobster.

It isn’t such a bad life to be imprisoned in this lobster purgatory. You are almost passive in all aspects of living as you have already boiled and plated. There’s not much to do except accept the abuse sure to come. A lobster is made to be eaten.

Which is why you stretch out your spine in bed, shirt riding up and blanket riding down, as two hands eclipse around your figure, twisting in opposite directions and segmenting you into two parts, the body and the tail, feeling in your asleep own figure like a rock has settled in your stomach. Like peeling a tougher version of an orange, the shell on your tail is broken down the middle and stripped off to reveal meat. A tickle runs up your spine. Tail meat, vibrant white and rose, is dipped in a cup of hot water. In a circular spot, you feel a dull ache on the side of your inner thigh, deep, as if being consumed.

Warmth is not hard to find in this dream. As more of your exoskeleton is removed, appendages slowly sink one by one into that murking water, shaken and jostled to clean them thoroughly. Even when you shift, limp-limbed in bed, and a sock falls off or a sleeve rides up, there is still heat nearby. Dreams that are stranger are the warmest too.

Claws are broken from knuckles, snapped like twigs. With a petite, invading hook that scrapes, the slim piece of meat in your tinier pinchers is slowly wrenched out. Arms limp and bent like an abused Barbie in the waking world, your pinkie gives a tiny twitch at the sensation. Warmth dulls that restlessness and your pinkie falls still. 

But, the most harrowing part is the unknown hand on your throat. With lobster anatomy, your brain is in your throat. A brain consists and categorizes all measures of living, manufacturing the dreams that you experience. The pressure is suffocating. You are being choked out of breath and choked out of thought simultaneously. 

If you are ever going to die, it is going to be done by this hand.

So much of yourself is floating away from you, essential oxygen and rationale out of reach. There is still the warmth that coats you like a temperature-crafted exoskeleton. Even when your shorts bunch up with each toss and turn and even when your blanket is maneuvered around by twitchy motions, that sensation never wanes; it would stay with you permanently even if you did try to kick it out like a bad dog. 

Red and hot, your consciousness burns like the cherry pit center of the Earth. 

You wake up with the sun, body temperature high. No longer a lobster. 

Stretching out all your knots, you reach for your phone at your bedside to see what time it is. Your fingers miss it by inches and only when you heave a sigh of aggravation do you feel it, the rawness of your throat. Like all the water and oxygen was fucked out.

The bathroom mirror reflection confirms its existence concretely. 

Standing in loose workout shorts and a band tee, you access what you speculated upon, never imagining it could be as bad as this. 

In your turbulent experience with dating, you have experienced a hickey here and there. Left like leopard spots, Mark always enjoyed planting those reminders of himself on your neck, even if they only came from second base rather than a home run. Those were easy to cover up; you even helped Mark with some of his. There is not enough concealer in the world to make this one disappear.

There is a handprint on your neck. Not just simply five fingers, the palm too. Cauterized into your skin through mere pressure alone, the rough, prickly red shape of four fingers on the left side of your neck, cupping palm directly over your thyroid bone, and one thumb on the right side of your neck is a heavy stain. When you go to match prints, because obviously you would assume this is a self inflicted wound, the size is wider and thicker than the limits of your hand. 

Dominant hand holding your throat, your eyelids go up in slow understanding. You really couldn’t say it was your first thought because why would you ever jump to such conclusions. Someone else had their hand around your throat.

‘Of course, they did. Do you even see how huge it is? How deep it is? I couldn’t remake this if I tried,’ you think to yourself, but denial is such a thick clog in the brain that you keep rotating and maneuvering your hand to try and make it fit the bruise’s shape.

Eventually, you drop your hand on the sink, stickiness from old toothpaste gluing them together. Paralyzed, you keep staring at the discolored skin as if expecting it to be a trick of the light. Attempts to recall your dream are fruitless; you have been awake so long that it is hopeless that the fabricated reality has floated away like a bubble caught in the wind. All you have left as a reminder is the hickey-handprint of — you shudder in realization — a stranger.

Spiraling, it takes a while for you to realize that is not the only pain. All your attention has been focused so intently on your throat that it doesn’t dawn on you until much later you have another sight of injury on your body.

You touch between your legs; that too feels like a bruise.

Try as you might, and sincerely you do, you cannot cover the handprint completely. It is like attempting to cover up a tattoo that has been inked into your skin. The majority of it is covered, concealer caked on like frosting, but even just the slightest motion makes it noticeable if someone looks close enough.

Which is exactly what Amber does, suddenly gasping in her dorm bed when you turned your neck in response to the buzz of your phone, screen lighting up with Mark’s face and a text message bubble. 

The text is forgotten as she asks horrified, “Oh my God, what happened? Who did that to you?”

You really should change your screensaver, you think. Needing something to do with anxious hands, you adjust the collar of your jean jacket, spring far too warm to wear a turtleneck but you tried to suck it by bringing a jacket as coverage. It almost gives you a few seconds to plan a response which is still a lackluster, “oh um, things got too wild last night. It’s really nothing. I didn’t notice till —”

“Mark did that.” 

Uh-oh, the vitriol in her voice is enough to make you want to change your made-up answer. You’re still toying with the denial that you might have done this to yourself, developed epileptic seizures or some movement disorder overnight, a health-related explanation that might make more sense to you. In the moment, it was the only thing you could think of. The breakup is not known in your circle of friends and Mark didn’t show up to Upstate today.

It was definitely the wrong thing to say because now Amber Bennet, number one hater of your ex-boyfriend (boyfriend in her perspective), looks like she wants to track him down and fight, which would end very badly for her.

“It’s alright – It’s alright, we talked it over and it’s total water under the bridge. Forgive and forget, you know? I wouldn’t just let this happen unless it was consensual of course,” as soon as the words are out, you want them back in.

“Forgive and forget, Jesus; how many times are you just going to forgive and forget? With how many dates he’s skipped out on, how many times you’ve been made the blame for his problems, how long are going to keep forgiving when he gives you the cold shoulder for –”

“Amber, please,” you plea, grabbing her arm to stop her gesturing. All day, you have been stumbling along like a zombie, exhausted still from the one-sided screaming match. “I know and it’s been getting better. We’re figuring stuff out.”

It feels so weird, saying the direct opposite of what happens in the last twenty four hours. You two haven’t been ‘figuring stuff out’; you refused to bend your morals and values to fit within his own and broke up. It would probably overjoy Amber to hear the truth about last night, but with this new, unknown development, your nineteen years of life has no guide for what to do in this situation. 

Mark would not do this. You know intimately what he is capable of, but he would not deliberately harm you. Not unless something pushed him beyond his limits.

After so much back and forth, the subject is finally dropped – forgiven and forgotten. By the time you are walking home from Amber’s dorm, violet and rose gold lighting up the twilight skies, you surmise it would have been better to simply skip classes today. Unintentionally dragging your feet, a supernatural bloodlet has emptied you of any vigor. Weary eyes find the darkening sky. 

Mark used to fly you through that very kaleidoscope of warm and cool colors – orange and blue light bleeding into the same clouds for a half an hour – and return both of you from Upstate University to your joint neighborhood blocks. Now, here you are walking an hour journey that you used to travel in a quarter of that time. There are so many quotidian parts of your life that you are going to have to get used to being different, now that Mark is gone. Maybe he really has gone to Mars like you were hoping yesterday, the distance between the two of you now planetary. 

He’s been stuck in your head all day though; there is no withdrawal of him there. You knew he never wanted to go to Upstate, human education a pointless endeavor for a superpowered alien, conceding only for your sake. Still, you cannot help wondering where he has gone. Free from a romantic relationship, the Earth is his oyster.

‘What did I limit him from,’ you think, then immediately try to dismiss such a volatile rabbithole. 

To ignore that Mark might have never loved you at all and was staying just to sate boredom, you pull out your phone with the intent to see what that text message from earlier was. Having to steer Amber off the bruise and resume essay workshopping, you forgot to check it again after that. It’s an unknown number, notification reading 1 Image, printed over the screensaver of Mark, which you click on.

Your phone almost ends up cracked on the pavement.

Fumbling with it in shaky hands, you squint at the image to make sure you’re seeing it right. 

It is a slightly aerial shot, taken from the height of someone at least moderately tall or planted on a ceiling. This vantage point allows the photograph to encompass your body and mattress fully, no details cut off. In the sent image, you lie under covers, lips parted in deep sleep and oblivious to your picture being taken. 

Like a rollercoaster cresting the other side of a hump, your heart races down to your feet and splats on the cobblestone pavement. 

Trying to smother out panic, you click the off button, feeling like you have ants tiptoeing down and up your veins. As soon as your phone is off, you click it back on and unlock it – a hundred percent positive that you saw wrong. Your sleeping face stares back at you. 

Panicked even more, you click the off button and shove your cell into your jean jacket pocket, immediately wrapping your dominant hand around your bookbag strap. As long as your hands are occupied, you can ignore it. It’s probably nothing, just like the handprint, just like …

Your ears pick it up languidly. Someone is walking behind you, maybe a yard or so back. Crunching gravel underfoot gives them away crystal clear. How you had not noticed it before; at such a late time, no one walks these sidewalks besides you now that you have dumped your personal air travel ride.

Now, you walk on an obscuring path, lack of light starting to make the edges of stone, pavement, and grass blend together in similar colors, clueless about when this person started walking behind you but certain that they are too close for comfort unless they plan to overpass you. Testing, you slow your gait. They slow theirs. ‘Fuck.’

How could you possibly not have noticed someone following behind so closely? It is as if they have suddenly appeared out of thin air. Were you purposefully ignoring the sounds of footsteps until the photo of you in bed resurrected your anxiety?

‘This sucks,’ your blood seethes, footsteps returning to a normal pace. You survey the front yard gardens and parked cars you are walking by just to take your mind off all this spiraling disaster.

A thought peeks through the tornado of inner discord and enters without any foreword. Those mimicking, identical footsteps are steadfast, following. Your brain absentmindedly plants the seed of walking straight to Mark’s house, a very small detour from your place, and see how quickly this creeper becomes harmless in comparison to a vexed Invincible. 

It hits you quite quickly, yesterday’s reminder of how he wouldn’t save you ever again. Teeth grit. 

In your jacket, your phone buzzes once. Curses play around on your tongue, groaning or mumbling in your twitching mouth. More than anything, you wish Mark was here right beside you and not however far away he has gone. Head down, you keep walking even when your legs feel like flimsy jelly.

All you have for self-defense is the pepper spray at the bottom of your bag, but if the stranger wrestles the bag out of your hands before you reach it, it's nothing more than a fancy nicknack. The kubotan on your house keys ring is in your jean jacket pocket; your phone –buzzing once more to let you know two minutes have passed since you received a notification – is in your other jean jacket pocket, available to dial 911.

Like colors trying to retain their vibrance in a cup of mixed paints, the last shreds of rose gold and violet are starting to turn ebony with the approaching night sky. There are only five more blocks you need to tread down, taking memorized turns at each specific stop sign. It is too early to book it, too much distance left between yourself and safety.

Then, a breath is blown on your neck. Goosebumps rise like dough on the patch of skin. Thoughtlessly, you have pivoted and grip your kubotan tight by your thigh. 

No one is standing behind you. 

The entire block is empty, deserted. The sight of peopleless sidewalks and a stretching, carless road does not quell you; if anything, you feel as if all your arteries are pinched by invasive lobster claws, causing your heart to skip a vital beat. Paranoia is really starting to seep in. That breath was no trick of the wind.

‘Put your head down and head home,’ you order yourself, electing to not acknowledge that there was obviously a person behind you a second ago. Picking up pace but refusing to sprint, you take the right around the stop sign, moving from Pendergast Road to Logan Ave.

These were the streets Mark and you used to ride your bikes on. Teaching him the ropes of bicycling because neither of his parents would spare effort, you two raced each other on these same sidewalks, Mark attempting to knock you into the grass or a post and you attempting to knock him off balance by hitting his back wheel with your front one. Two little devils always scraping with one another, always at each other’s throat in mutual romping, until a time it was taken too far and —

The retreating bumper of the car that mangled the front of your bicycle and almost tore your head from your shoulder shrinks and shrinks as the driver speeds off. Palms dripping with blood, all you do is stare in stunned understanding.

Your stupor does not last before you turn, head whipping, in the direction of Mark. Who, steady upon his parked bicycle, is laughing like a pleased hyena. “What an adrenaline rush, huh!” he exclaims through his cheerful giggles. 

Reasonably, you should be furious at him for endangering you then basking in your fright. That day, you should’ve taken your bike home and refused to see the weird kid down the block again. However, you didn’t. Bleeding and bruised, you sat and listened. Never before had he laughed in your presence. You took time soaking in the sound, his mirth wilting down your annoyance until it was water under the bridge. 

The incident had not made a difference in your friendship. You told him, “I’ll get you next time,” as he disinfected your palms. The next time involved you driving Mark off his bike, straight into a mailbox, leaving him with a shiner the size of a tennis ball. 

These streets are full of such good memories; now, you are tainting them by swiftly walking as that pair of footsteps seemingly appear out of thin air and start to follow you again.

Everything you have been trying to keep at equilibrium is starting to gain speed. One by one, your body accelerates: sneakers squeaking as you ascend from speed-walking, jogging, to sprinting; a once steady heart rate rising in beats per minutes, pumping blood faster to your limbs; inhales and exhales growing taut, intervals between them shortening as you gasp for breathing, running for your life suddenly because the person behind you is running at you.

Not expecting the almost instantaneous shift, your brain is adrenaline-empty, the kind of death of rational thoughts that animals experience. You swing yourself into Hillcrest Street, gravel kicking up at your heels, and run. An obscured rock almost trips you but you upright and continue, arms pumping and eyes circular with fear, bolting towards safety. 

Whatever is behind you is gaining and gaining fast.

Kubotan already in hand, you jostle the ring of keys in your palm and find, without looking, your house key. If you miss the lock, you are certain that you are done. ‘Fucking Christ,’ you can feel their acrid breath closing in, readying to ensnare you. No matter your speed it feels like they are already on top of you.

Hyperventilating, you crash straight into your front door, stabbing the key in the first try. You can almost taste them resting upon you, yards having close to mere centimeters. They are in your fucking skin. They have already found a way in your house. The door unlocks in your unsteady hand and you push it inward mindlessly, the start of tears beginning to bubble up.

Then, a hurricane rips through the atmosphere, forceful air pushing you inside on your hands and knees and slamming your door against the side of your house. Scrambling, you turn to make a grab for the doorknob, only to pause, hair messy and eyes wild. There is no one standing at the front entrance threshold. No one was behind you.

Wheezes rattle your bones. On the ground, you sit confused, terrified, suspicious, and in denial — a deadly combination. In front of you? A quotidian, calm neighborhood with sleeping houses, enshrouded in darkness but void of any boogeymen. Rapid, your chest goes up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down.

Once you gather your bearings, locking the door and pulling down all the shades, you will realize your phone has fallen out of your jean jacket.

It was airborne from the spontaneous hurricane, landing inside by the front threshold.

Mark’s eyes are hidden behind the notification: new message, unknown number, 1 Image attached.

It is a picture of you, back towards the camera, walking down the same sidewalks you always walk on your way home.

Like all bruises do, it fades. Decreasing in size, fingerprints losing length, the loss of distinctive features makes the blur of a palm indistinguishable from just a simple bruise. Day by day, it takes less Sephora concealer to hide. It becomes possible to ignore and file in the back of your head, forgotten.

You fall into normalcy. Glued to your computer, you finish your essays and you study for your final exams. Instead of walking on those familiar childhood streets, you take a bus to shorten your commute, even if it is a slight hit to your sparse savings; you will replenish with a summer job.

Despite this, you cannot completely shed off the feeling of something closing in. Skin has become a network of ant tunnels, a honeycomb route system for bees, a swiss cheese structure creeping and crawling with termites. You itch persistently with the sensation of stalking eyes. But even the worst itches do not need to be scratched, it is only a simple trail of mind over matter. The sight of glowing white scleras and blown pupils peeking through a crack in horizontal blinds can be ignored and seen as a mere trick of light, if only one tries hard enough. 

When you arrive home for your last final, you go from room to room in a practiced routine to draw all the timber blinds down. Tonight, like every night since the breakup, you are alone. On the stove, in celebration of a finished semester, you pop popcorn while rifling through pantries for alcohol. 

You’ve been lonely without Mark, a kind of loneliness you were not privy to before. The lack of his presence feels like a phantom limb. The two of you shared solitude, no siblings and shitty parents combo truly a lifeline between you both.

As the cork to the wine bottle pops off, you stare into the black-red liquid, trying to think about anything else but him.

‘...’ you stew and fail.

The day before Mark’s eighteenth birthday was the first time you drank, was probably the first time for Mark too. You have never known Mark to be an openly expressive person; all of his emotions are tablespoon measures of a normal person. Thus, his exhilarated anticipation for his eighteenth was such a surprise – that wide grin, endless comments about his Dad’s ‘gift’, his teasing touches, like a cat knowing tomorrow he would get the cream.

When he found your parents’ case of Smirnoff Ice, a single glance between the two of you sealed the deal. Bottlenecks grasped in erratic hands, you two spent the entire night in an empty house dancing like it was your last day on Earth, TV playing funky new wave music from the 80s and washing the living room in colors of electric blue and cherry red. His hips twitched and jerked along to the beat and your shoulders bounced and jerked along to the rhythm, both of your heads nodding along and swaying hair, utterly lost in bliss and alcohol. 

His mood did a 180 the next day, leaving you sober. Not once did Mark smile through the entire day, face like stone even while receiving Dexter’s kitten licks, as if a promise ensured to be fulfilled was broken. 

Now, you stand here about to pour yourself a drink, tampering the only experience you have had with alcohol by making the second drink of your life so utterly depressing, a half ass celebration that you are spending alone. 

The bottle finds your lips easily. 

Your cat has largely been an indoor cat most of his life. He finds comfort in the familiar couch cushion and familiar silk pillow, too pampered for the hardened life of outside. 

When your parents bought this house many years ago with a freshly eight month old you on their hip, upgrading from their condo, they never had a keen foresight for the unpredictability of the world, such as things like their marriage growing stale as old bread or to ever own a family pet. At least not until Omni-Man, known exclusively to your parents as Nolan Grayson the author, found a kitten on a classic save-people-from-a-burning-building day with no family to go back to. You fell in love instantly with the white bundle of fur and they all elected you as the prime caretaker. The only concern became the pet door on the backyard door, which would have been thought to be largely used by an adventurous kitten, only for Dexter to turn out to be very domesticated. You are pretty sure Dexter is not even aware of the pet door’s existence. 

The only reason that Dexter acknowledges it now is because there is a hand sticking out of it, a petite pile of brown cat treats in the palm. What causes him to go near it — ears and head perking up in recognition — is the voice on the other side.

“Dexteeer,” it croons, sweet and soft, the pet door almost appears as a sentient being with the hand being a hungry tongue, “Dexter, come here boy. Come to daddy. Dexteeer.”

It’s been a while since he has heard the voice, but the ragdoll knows who it is instinctively. It is the male bi-pedal creature who feeds him and gives him sweet pets. The scent of his cologne and that charcoal undertone of his natural skin is even more enticing than the smell of treats. Dexter hops off the couch armrest, padding over.

“That’s a good boy. Closer, Dexter.”

Dexter knocks his nose sweetly against the hand’s knuckles, rubbing up against the pet door’s tongue taste-buds. His secondary master has finally returned from exile. Lovingly, the ragdoll cat runs his tongue over the male’s wrist, ignoring the treats in favor of his presence. He is close enough now.

Like a frog tongue sucking up a fly, the hand swiftly encloses around Dexter’s head and pulls him into the mouth.

With one arm secure around the popcorn bowl and your separate hand gripping the neck of the wine bottle, you make your way into the living room. The moping around the kitchen ended when the smell of burnt popcorn filled the room. You decided to turn off your phone, knowing for certain that no one would call or text. The only company you can really rely on is Dexter’s, who you call out for in sing-songy curiosity.

He is a pretty obedient kitten, so the longer he goes without bounding in the room, knocking affectionately at your ankles, the more concerned you become. “Dexter, honey, come here.” You shake the bowl of popcorn, hoping to entice. 

Only setting the bowl on the coffee table when it proves fruitless, oddly unsettled. 

It is only when you hear a knock upon it do you remember the pet door. 

You jump out your skin, wine still in hand, eyes gone circular. Guests are not part of your lifestyle; no one at your college knows your address and why the fuck would they ever think to use the back door? ‘Mark,’ you think, because he is your constant companion despite everything.

Looking at the knob, you think you could forgive and forget if Mark is on the other side. So utterly famished for that familiar company, you think if he came back with the answer to your original question that you could bury the shovel and truly start again. You miss him like an amputee misses a limb.

Company that you know well is on the other side of the door, just not Mark. You stare at Dexter’s body, neck snapped in a full 180 degree, miniscule blood staining the porch. Your mouth twitches: into a half-smile of disbelief, into an empty gag that stirs your alcohol heavy stomach, into a grimace of remorse and grief, then finally into one long, aching scream. 

The bottle rolls heavy on the ground, soaking Dexter’s fur in ruby. 

Your brain melts like one glutinous, red candle. 

If there was ever a straw that broke the camel’s back, the death of your cat shatters your body into fragments. 

One of your parents comes home in the dusk from their lover’s or the graveyard shift; so out of it, you could not remember who you conversed with, only recalling the feeling of their icy knuckles pressing to your forehead to check your temperature, petting your hair afterwards. With a face of dried tears and melting hot skin, you manage to get halfway through the explanation about Dexter’s mutilated body on the back porch before your eyes roll up into your skull, grief suffocating. When you wake up on the couch, sweating gallons, it is twilight and the house is once again empty. The only sign of you living with another person is the little cup of 20mL, violet nighttime Tylenol on the coffee table.

Swaddled in a cape-esque blanket, you stumble over to the back door with a grape-flavored moustache, tongue heavy in your mouth. Deliberately, you open the door. The only remaining evidence of Dexter is the patch of darker wood compared to the rest of the porch.

Something must’ve come in the night, dragging him off to enjoy a meal despite not doing so when he was a fresh kill.

At a tortoise pace, you trudge to your room. You plant yourself on the mattress; a tree that can never be uprooted and a boulder that can never be rolled, you transform into this immovable object and fuse into the bed, staying in the exact position you fell into. Heat engulfs you, blood alit. 

Time moves simultaneously as slow as molasses with minutes moving as fast as seconds. Fever ablaze in your immune system, you have no recollection of the days anymore. Puddles of sweat mark your restless nightly turning, tattooing new positions into the duvet. The only slight semblance of knowing that time is actively moving are the cups of children's Tylenol by your bedside, water always refilled when you open your eyes, apple or orange slices on a plate, a note — that doesn’t look to be written by either of your parents’ hands — telling you when it is safe to take your medicine, all left on your bedside table. You are grateful now for never throwing out your digital clock.

The textured ceiling is your solace. Body too cumbersome, you do not reach for a remote or cellphone, not like you could focus long enough to locate them. You survey each swaying paint texture, finding patterns then losing the patterns in the next hour, rinse and repeat until finally your warm eyelids drop close into sleep.

The reason you ended things with Mark was because of a bank robbery.

Really seemed insignificant in the grand scheme of things. For a couple of years, you have known about Mark’s powers and his job, recognized that behind the yellow cowl and bug-eyed, ebony lens that that was your boyfriend and childhood playmate. His superhero endeavors are no longer off-putting, just a part of Mark Grayson.

Besides a few bystanders’ live streams and a helicopter’s vague footage, a lot of the battles go undocumented and swept under the hyperbole rug until the next cataclysmic event ruins another city. 

You cannot remember much of the bank robbery; most of it has been latently repressed, panicked brain putting it under lock and key in the vault — the place where all the stuff you do not want to remember goes. What bled out through the cracks was enough, vivid enough, detailed enough. Just a mere snapshot of it floating up from the Davy Jones locker of your subconscious causes you to be overwhelmed with grief and terror, planting you right back in that moment. 

He was like a vexed wasp.

Moving so swiftly that you almost thought you and the other hostages were being saved by Red Rush. Landing hits in quick succession but nothing that would keep them down for long. Playing with the two super-villains as if coordinating his movements for a bigger predator. Reveling in this the sensation of fire and blood underneath his fists.

The wreckage only stills for a tense moment when Mark cups his hands on his side of the man, whose body is rolling and living lava, and crushes it. Rivulets of fiery blood collapse and grow the sizes of sizzling magma pools at their feet. 

You do not hear the words that his mouth forms, but you close enough to catch the sight of his lips wobbling with a restrained grin, his face washed warm and bright with the sunrise yellow light flickering from the lava.

Like a rubberband, he snaps towards the other robber, face determined and emotionless. The robber — less anthropomorphic than his partner, wearing civilian clothes even with that odd, bubblegum pink, pulsing thing strapped to his chest, but with human features under a wool watch cap — barely has a moment to adjust before his wrist is cuffed. His arm comes off as easily as a doll’s, used as a katana to slice through his body twice in a X-shape, breaking the device above his ribcage, shredding flesh until only bone was left.

The blood splatter had hit you. As you lean closer to the fight, separating from the cowering huddles of people, you manage to stumble out from behind a desk, coming in direct crossfire of the violence. Painted diagonal across your face, the warmth of it sinks in your pores.

He is shaking, barely able to obstruct his mirth. “(Name),” he breathes, curiously looking to see which hostage was emerging first. Under lashes pricked with sanguine, your wide eyes soak it all in and commit it to memory. 

“Your heart is beating out your chest,” Mark smiles, one of those rare smiles.

The heat lingers on your face. Instead of being freckled with blood, waking skin is wet with sweat. 

As time passes with each dose of medicine, refilled Tylenol being the only way you have been able to keep track of hours, your core temperature has decreased significantly for the past three 20mL shots. A lingering dizziness still shrouds you yet with a dimmed intensity. Disoriented from sleep, you lean over pillows to check if your parents have set up another charcuterie board to ward off illness. 

Instead of any refills or new slices of fruit, your eyes take in the sight of Mark’s broad shoulders and that long yellow cape. Held in his glove is one of the three framed photographs you keep on your dresser.

Instead of asking why he is in your room, acknowledging his unusual presence so you can get straight to the root of the problem, you inquire softly, coming out of sleep, “Why are you in your suit?”

Still holding and analyzing the framed picture, Mark soliloquies aloud, “I thought you would have told me. Not right away, of course, you had to process what happened, but I was certain that I would get a text message or call eventually. Kept my ringtone on this entire week, waiting. I exercised the patience of a saint and didn’t even get rewarded for it.”

His mask is on; it obscures his facial emotes slightly. Mark places the frame back into its spot, the taut scowl on his face visible but his creased brows indistinguishable. He moves his head just slightly, a minor adjustment so his chin is a little bit over his right shoulder; even without knowing where his eyes are pointed towards, you can tell it is you he is hunting. Your own eyelids drop close.

“Why didn’t you tell me Dexter was dead,” Mark asks you. 

So irrevocably ill with grief, a tiny moan escapes your lips and seeps into the plush of your pillow. It hurts your stomach to simply recall your cat’s name, much less his passing. Since no answer is given besides an absent-minded back and forth shake of your head, your ex-boyfriend continues on.

“When my Dad rescued that stupid thing, I couldn’t wrap my head around everyone’s fascination with it. Couldn’t understand why you of all people looked at it and decided it was worth your time and effort. Where was the benefit of its existence,” the rhetorical spins off his tongue. He sits himself on the mattress edge by your shoulders. “Then, I started to sympathize with you. Because Dexter was a pet. And, sometimes, we care too deeply for our pets.” 

Gingerly, he rests his spandex-clad hand over your temple, starting to brush and pet your hair. It is twisted with neglect and shining with grease but each stroke of his is impeccably delicate.

Head pounding like a gong, feeling all the white blood cells squirm and pulse in your blood, you manage to mumble through the thudding assault, “Why are you Invincible?” You meant to ask ‘why are you dressed in your Invincible outfit’; it came out wrong, his touch lulling you to sleep.

The side of Mark’s mouth twitches into one of those scarce half-smiles. Even when you are being difficult, he gets so much enjoyment out of your presence; the place you occupy in his world is irrevocable, a cater on the face of the moon or a star vital to a constellation, permanent.

“Come take a bath and I’ll tell you,” Invincible bargains, canines agleam. 

Even while fatigued, you still succumb to his prods and pokes, only slightly groaning low when he helps you out of bed. Mark plants kisses under your neck and works his way up to your chin to corral you into lifting your own head, autonomy slow to wake up. 

“Maaarrrkkk,” you sob, pained, when he turns on the bathroom’s lights. He shushes you gently, orchestrating a barrage of kisses to fight away drowsiness. His hands swoop and dip, aiding in the removal of each article of clothing. Calloused fingers press and rub circles on areas that he instinctively knows ache, easing you into the waking world. His touch is laced with the breed of affection he showed the night before his eighteenth birthday.

Anticipation is brewing in those coffee eyes, you realize, watching speckles of amber and hazel burn an electrifying gold under the light.

The palpable sense of excitement radiating off him makes you want to slow everything down, bare toes stumbling on linoleum in an attempt to stop as he starts to guide you to the miraculously already filled bathtub. ‘Did he already prepare this,’ you think, thoughts occupied with the soapy water, too narrow-minded to see the bigger picture, the bigger preparation. 

A toe goes in then a leg follows. Once you are fully seated in the tub, you have officially crossed over the bridge, shedding off the soporific clog of grief and emerging into the clarity and alertness of thinking consciousness. It is both the perfect and worst time to absorb Mark’s musings. 

“You know, I couldn’t decide whether you should live or die at first. After your little tantrum, I was in this volatile and tortured headspace, tearing myself apart with what ifs and hypotheticals. I threw around the thought of your death for hours, rehearsing it, nailing down the practice. Got so deep inside my head, I popped out the other side. I went looking for clarity.”

As he’s been talking, the Viltrumite has been dragging his gloved index through the buttery water, cutting the floating bubbles in half and rotating around in lazy figure eights, like a brightly colored fish bait. That dominant hand pulls back from the water; he cements it over your sweaty throat. “I found it,” Mark states. The spandex of his glove wrinkles as he gingerly gives your neck one squeeze. “Realized just seconds after that I didn’t want you dead.”

Inside your trachea, there is a tiny marble of carbon dioxide paused, a held breath that you do not know when it would be appropriate to release it. When Mark finally drops his hold, you start to heave violently like he held your head underwater when the ring of water is only at your belly button.

“Mark.”

“Let me wash your hair.” Ignoring your words as you were once doing to him, Mark stands.

It pleases him to have all your attention on him again. You watch him like a frightened prey watches their predator approach, measuring each muscle’s twitch as he removes his elbow length gloves, flinching at the snap of the opening shampoo bottle. Your own muscles turn to stone when he maneuvers behind you, out of sight. Hands lathered with shampoo touch the top of your canium. “Your heart is beating out your chest.”

“Don’t touch me,” you snap, twisting out of his reach. 

“C’mon, don’t be like that. I’m being honest with you for once.”

A tiny flare in your chest speeds up your heart. “You need to get the fuck out of my house.” Distance is what you crave.

Before you can even attempt to leave the tub, hands are back in your hair, twisting in suds and an iron hold. His strength whiplashes you; you are yanked back so violently that you fear he might try tearing your scalp completely off. Never before has he utilized his superhuman strength on you. 

It settles that you two are completely different legions, on completely different planets in a different type of physical way.

Still, your brow pinches. Upside down, Mark’s face hovers over yours, analyzing each hint of aversion and disgust etched in your demeanor, a kind of presence that is absent from his mother or his father. Eye contact electrifying his body. Sure, his sinister modus operandi unsettles you, but at least you acknowledge it, don’t turn away when he is acting out. He used to act out all the time as a kid and never got a fucking response. 

“Christ, (Name), don’t look at me like that!” He scolds with a laugh, but all he wants is for you to keep looking at him like that. “It’s me, Mark! – the guy you’ve known since we were eight! You can’t just turn around and pretend it was nothing. Talking to me like a goddamn stranger is going to get us nowhere. So, just stop.”

“I don’t know you anymore.”

“That’s fine – we can get reacquainted.” 

According to his father’s teachings, he has thousands of years to live. Which is why he is so deliberate with his hands, watching each leisurely touch ripple through you and birth a shudder. He has all the time in the world. According to his father’s teaching too, he was conceived to only conquer. 

Mark still remembers the day on top of Mount Everest’s peak. His decade old lungs familiarizing themselves with air that should have been too thin to breath and his decade old skin prickling with goosebumps but resisting against encroaching frostbite, powers awakened. His father had strategically taken him to a place where the ears and eyes of Cecil Stedman did not exist. As Nolan explained the truth of Viltrum, the white skies and snowy mountain tops stretched out before Mark became things he would soon inherit. Words like the ‘empire’s glory’ did not interest him; the idea of ‘improving civilization’ bored; in a very Lion King-esque moment — a movie he watched with his mom before she started looking at him he was a bug wearing her son’s skin, then all together completely ignoring him — where he soon realized he was to have everything in the palm of his hand.

And, here, his hands rest. Lathering shampoo in greasy hair, they caress gently, scratching his nails behind your ears and stroking it down the length of your hair. The scent of coconut wafting in the air, the sight of your ablaze scowl, the taste of acknowledgment in the air — he is thriving underneath it.

“Should we revisit conversations about my dear old Ma and Pa? What about reopening the can of worms that is me being Invincible?” You do not question him about either or so, “How about that fight we had a month ago, where you were just itching to know one thing: why.”

Despite how your heart is beating out of your chest, there is a desensitization in your body against Mark’s prodding. Minor childhood abuse disguised as horseplay left you with a thicker skin, thick enough to implore steadily, “Alright, Mark, tell me. Why were you smiling when you killed them?”

Mirth is a rarity for Mark. It has never come easily to him to display his contentment, some of his facial muscles withered with underuse. To you, it was never a strange element, rather just a fact of his character. Mark Grayson did not hand out smiles easily; it left with you a sense of pride as a child then a sense of love as an emerging adult when you managed to get him smiling. 

Now, that ear to ear grin is something laced — a candy with a razor inside, a pina colada spiked with a date rape drug, happiness with sadism underneath. Maybe, his euphoria has always been from that.

“I was smiling because … I was saving people.”

“Please,” your tone is flat, even in such a terrifying situation.

Ah, you really are annoyed with him.

His grin grows and he explains, “Because I was testing my strength, seeing what works and what doesn’t. You ask around, all heroes know they need to be stronger than the foes they face. Develop a sense of identity in the hierarchy. Climb the ladder of the food chain. I’m an adult now, so I have to start carving a place in the world for myself, (Name), you know?

“The reason I was smiling,” his coffee eyes haze, dizzy with the fantastic memory of it all, “is because it’s all becoming so easy — I’m getting stronger.”

Like a scar in the hippocampus, some movie scenes will stick with a person. Most films do not linger with Mark, easily thrown out from his memory, but there has been one that stuck with him since childhood. That simple death in the Lion King, a fall from such a great height known as the top of the food chain, a scene in which a king was betrayed by his own blood and tossed into a herd of stampeding wildebeest,  — dethroned. It has been his favorite since six. 

“To be stronger? But, you’re already … oh, Mark.”

Of course, you would come to a semi-correct conclusion. You know him better than anyone else does or will. Mark cannot wrap his head around why that bank robbery display set you off, made you adverse to him, when so many other facets of himself you have fallen in love with. This is not a setback however, simply an opportunity to bridge the gap of miscommunication.

Still, the pity in your voice makes him pull his hands away, soap thick. Mark grabs the nearby bathroom pitcher that is kept in line with the bottle, fills it, and dumps it over your head. You are left spluttering, coughing up water that was not graciously poured, as he gathers his thoughts, enjoying the sound.

“Mark, you ass!” Then, suddenly, you are standing. Water at shin height, you snap around quickly at him like a dog annoyed at being poked. Your glare, looking down upon him with a creased nose and curled lip, is like a sweet suck to his dick.

“That bitch,” Debbie, he means; he only calls one woman a bitch, “is always scared of me. Walks around on eggshell and the slight hint of discontentment in that house causes her to drink herself dumb. I despise cowardice. So, don’t you dare retreat behind your fear; if your eyes so much as glaze over with terror, I’ll pop them out as easily as cherries.”

The fists at your side travel up to cover your breasts out of sight and cross your arms in vitriol of his words. You know that you are certainly not his equal but you refuse to be his playmate anymore. “I want you out of my house right now. I don’t care what you do anymore. I’m not part of your life.”

Mark disagrees. Mark could not imagine a sweeter bonding exercise in your relationship. The two of you will grow from this; when couples fight against one another, the resounding effect is that their connection will dive deeper, interlinking them. 

“You’ll always be,” he contends, still lounging on the tub’s edge.

“Out.”

When it becomes clear that he will not move, you turn to step out of the tub. This breakup has already happened once; well-versed in how this battle is going to go, you know when to retreat and when to attack. This verbal sparring is not where it needs to happen. You lift a toe out of water to relocate to the threshold of the house’s front door before an arm around your waist stops you.

The spandex of his Invincible outfit is cold against the dorsal side of you, but it is combated by the fiery touch of his dominant hand enclosing around a breast and his chin resting on a shoulder. His exhale is acid across your skin, breathing out, “Why do you never notice it, that I could do worse but I never do? Why can’t you for once appreciate it?”

Staying silent is the wrong yet only move you have left to play, the sole weapon. Experienced, you know how deeply Mark despises being ignored. Which is why he slides his caress down from your breast, slick with cold water and shampoo, and sits his fingers at your belly button. Your stomach curls like a pillbug. 

Spine straightening, you stare down at his fingers like they are the crawling legs of a black widow. Death is a touch away, poison is a bite away. Abdominal muscles rippling uneasy, you soak in each light rub and light step of his wandering fingertips. Like a pianist stabbing a dark melody into keys, he walks those venomous fingers down to the mound of your vagina, the callous touch a threat.

If you are going to die by any hand, it is going to be this one.

“You know what it is like, don’t you?” His voice startles you in a stupor. “That loneliness that is so deep in us that it’s our skeleton, our blood. But, still you extend your hand to those who suffer, to those who know what it really feels like, to those who’ve had a taste, like that means something. And oh, so sick am I. And maybe I don’t have a choice, and maybe that is all I have. Maybe this is a cry for help.”

Defiant, you stay silent, throat under lock and key. 

Mark wraps you up in a hug from behind, moaning low at the twitch of fear that unconsciously ripples throughout you. His hand is gone from that sensitive spot. Relocated upon the churning surface of your neck, tracking each swallow and each inhale, he rests it there without any pressure.

“Talk,” he orders. 

You do not yield. 

He chokes you, void of any seductive sentimental, like he really does want you dead. Drops of soapy water leaps around your kicking feet. He lifts you, still embracing you from behind while cutting off your air supply, nuzzling his cheek into your shoulder, mask rubbing. “C’mon, say something. Talk to me.”

Your mouth is open, oxygen and rationale gone, unable to say a word.

He sets you down after thirty dark seconds. Your vision blurs, unable to tell ceramic from tile from water, falling to your knees on white nothingness. Shoulders pulse with each deep inhale you take. Subconsciously, ignoring the fact that he was just choking you seconds ago, you lean into Mark’s steady touch as he rubs your back.

“You sought me out. You asked to play. You do not get to back out because of one mistake.”

You refuse to look at him, sucking in desperate oxygen, twitching like a cat trying to puke up a hairball.