#quick clockwork

“You can take my power from me,” Feinberg groans, each word dripping like thick molasses from his tongue. “But you can’t take everything.”

“You’d have to…” Feinberg staggers to his feet, leaning almost his entire weight against the telephone pole behind him. “Kill me.”

The final sparks of Feinberg’s strength crackle in his fingertips, the rest depleted by the device clasped around his wrist. Feinberg can’t summon electricity at will anymore, but he can still direct it. It’s innate to his very atomic structure. To rid Feinberg of his ability to heal, one must eliminate him from the face of the Earth.

“Don’t worry,” Feinberg slurs, his eyes slipping shut, his muscles too weak to hold them open any longer. “I can help you with that.”

Feinberg raises his arm to the sky, his grip on his stun-gun slackening with each passing second.

He takes a breath.

He pulls the trigger.

Feinberg drops to his knees instantly, spent, praying his aim is good enough. He didn’t get a chance to double check.

The answer to Feinberg’s prayers comes in the form of white-hot adrenaline surging through his body, accompanied by pain so intense his brain blocks most of his senses entirely to escape it.

“Each person is made of a couple billion tiny batteries called neurons. They carry seven-tenths of a volt at rest,” Feinberg grits out behind clenched teeth, the blood rushing in his ears too loud to hear himself. “Power lines in this city carry—“ a break in Feinberg’s voice that could be anything from a whimper to a scream cuts him off. “Twenty-four thousand.”

After a moment of searching blindly, Feinberg’s hand finds Couriway’s arm. Feinberg knows it’s Couriway’s arm because every sense in his body is suddenly screaming it at him. A ceaseless stream of information runs parallel to Feinberg’s thoughts. Heart rate zero, pulse ox unknown, thirty trillion cells still clinging to life.

“Technically, I’m not powerless,” Feinberg croaks to assure himself more than the villain undoubtedly watching him. “Right now…” A gasp punctuates Feinberg’s words. “In my frail, useless body runs the power of six-point-eight million lightning bolts.”