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Shapesmith hadn’t yet forgotten that very angry man.
How could he have? He’d been given a serious run for his dollars by the guy when he was holding up that street, yammering on about wanting Invincible! Earth superheroes tended to have superpowered rivals, too — something he had learned in “Comic Books” and found on old broadcasts on the first Guardians of the Globe — but he’d never once heard Invincible mention being given a run for his dollars by anyone other than a Viltrumite. And this man, sure as cheese, was not a Viltrumite, or if he was he was a very bad one! He didn’t even have the mustache, nor the still, dead-eyed stare! A grumpy one, but a very much alive one.
Never before had there been a call to Guardians HQ for Shapesmith and Shapesmith alone! Well, they’d thinned out their numbers lately — status-quo was very important for growing humans, and Shapesmith found himself saddened by the sudden lack of noise and roughhousing that came with Rex and friends’ departure — but still, Shapesmith was the Guardian one of Cecil’s secretaries had called in for, in a voice that wasn’t soft but… unsure, somehow.
At first, Shapesmith thought little of it. He tended to make people unsure, try as he might’ve to play his role. The Guardians of the Globe’s darkly-colored farm animal, made even more apparent by the fact he was surrounded by four very competent and very weathered and very angry individuals. But the angry man holding up a street in Chicago didn’t need Dupli-Kate’s Dupli-Kating, Black Samson’s strength and heart, Smaller Darkwing’s shadows, or the Immortal’s, um, whatever special quality he had yet, Shapesmith wasn’t really sure, but he was a “good chum” all the same — he needed someone with a soft, stretchy touch, who would approach with a palm before a fist.
Shapesmith remembered the martian who came before him, remembered what he put himself out there on Earth to do, and beamed.
…they also, he was informed, just needed someone on speed dial, and Invincible wasn’t answering his phone.
Well, Shapesmith was glad to be in the same category as Invincible!
Properly containing the very angry lightning man was more of a challenge. Sadly, he was not as receptive to Shapesmith’s efforts at kind talking-downing, but he supposed a very angry lightning man didn’t like the idea of going to prison for shooting police cars with very angry lightning without meeting his favorite hero. Fans, right? Invincible had fans — none of these people, not even the afraid ones being shielded from very angry lightning, even remembered Shapesmith’s name! Seemed he still had a long way to go before Martian Man.
The man blocked more than he hit back, Shapesmith’s very large and very heroic fists only meeting dull thuds against the other’s arms. He didn’t seem to have all that much combat experience, nor really know what he was doing beyond repeating the same question as if the severalth time would make it come true. It wasn’t like they were hiding Invincible — geeze, the guy had a lot to do in a day, he probably had pizza to eat, of course he couldn’t drop everything and speed over here! But the man didn’t seem to understand. Well, phooey to him, Shapesmith didn’t get news stories and very angry lightning man didn’t get Invincible, but you didn’t see Shapesmith throwing people into buildings about it!
And then, then, he wasn’t done! He made a mess of the Chicago memorial — which even Shapesmith knew was a huge no-no. Everyone had been so afraid a year ago, they didn’t ask to come to the same spot and be afraid again! But there were a lot of words Shapesmith’s fellow heroes threw around about him — institutionalization and reformation and incarceration and a lot of other -ations, at which point Shapesmith started adding in his own and Dupli-Kate just kind of gave him an uneasy nod while Smaller, Purpler Darkwing looked grave and agreed, yes, if he resisted, they would be forced to agglutinate his red blood cells, to which Black Samson just asked “what?” and Cecil promptly told them to stop “eff”ing around and just get this guy locked in a loony bin before he causes another Chicago.
Cause another Chicago, he didn’t — but cause another tragedy? Well…
Scott Duvall was his name, Cecil informed him. Shapesmith couldn’t help but think he didn’t look much like a Scott, but then again Shapesmith didn’t look much like a Rus either.
“Killing your kid is a step above pleading insanity, unfortunately.” Cecil deadpanned, scrolling through the man’s documents on some high-tech-y tablet or other. Shapesmith peered closer — it felt strange, seeing an old photo on file. He always had a bit of a haggard look to him, but never as angry as Shapesmith had seen. But perhaps that was just the lab coat… that was classic Rational-People-Wear. “He’s locked up and God willing won’t hurt anybody again. Full-body restraints. Farthest we can get without pushing cruel and unusual- I for one argue what he did to his family is both, but who’s to say.”
One of the things Shapesmith had learned intently on Earth was to be silent when Cecil spoke and nod at the correct intervals. It was that kind of good behavior that won him a racecar bed. Now was no different.
“Everyone’s calling him more of a tragic loon with a nuclear-grade taser than a supervillain, though. I know Mark has a soft spot for the guy. Eve, too. I may not work with them anymore but I’m not interested in getting on their bad sides.” At this, he gave Shapesmith a look — one that seemed appraising. Paternal? Approving? He had gotten a racecar bed, after all. “And you know I’m not one to waste good talent.”
“You are not, sir!” Shapesmith chirped.
“Would you mind babysitting him on your offtime?” Cecil asked, in the way that made it very apparent it was more of an order than a question.
…and that was what led Shapesmith here, smiling with a tray in hand, skipping towards a heavy door, behind which held one of America’s biggest news stories. Powerplex — Killcannon, Mauler Twins… Why did they insist on giving supervillains such cool names? Wouldn’t that just make them want to supervill more? The thought made Shapesmith frown. In the picture of them on the news, in the files, the Duvalls looked like a happy couple. They were at an outdoor restaurant having lunch with Scott’s sister and her daughter — the picture taken, smilingly, by the girl in question, an act Shapesmith remembered Rex calling a “self-E”. The sweatshirt Scott wore, (which, despite the text on front, was not, in fact, a “Plain White T”, how embarrassing for him!) was a far cry from the flimsy cartoon-orange prisonwear Shapesmith could make out through the glass.
His head was low, his hair unwashed — his arms were encased in thick, properly thick, cuffs, built into the heavy metal of the wall closer resembling a mechanical throne, wrenched to either side of him. Restraints forced him into a sitting position, one he slumped from to the best of his ability, legs pried apart, practically nailed to the ground.
If Earth superheroes had superpowered rivals, and this was now their third time meeting like this… Well, hm!
“Hallo!” Shapesmith greeted, pressing himself against the glass, waving one hand and precariously balancing a tray of varied mushes in the other. The eyes that met his, heavy and reddened, had nothing Scott left in them. “We got off on the wrong toe, you and I, but I am a kind Earth superhero and friend to all living creatures! Believer of forgiveness and second chances I am, my superior, Cecil Stedman, asked me to entertain you with games and prizes — and also!!”
He raised a small container of something green to the door, making sure Scott’s gaze followed it.
“Bestow upon you this cup of Green Gelatin. And, just so you know, in case you are unaware, because I’ve been told you have a few ‘screw’s loose’ and I want to clarify just in case, humans die if they don’t eat their food after a few days, so, like, that’s pretty important.” He smiled, placing the jelly cup back in its rightful place, fingers hovering over the keypad to the door. “Anyway- can I come in? Shapesmith come in?”
The most withered-looking man Shapesmith had ever seen said nothing. But his chest rose and fell, which was a good sign. Tended to be so for babysitting.
Letting himself in, another question came to Shapesmith, perhaps a bit too late.
…how did he eat without arms?
“Um.” The martian thought aloud. “Well, hm.”
He supposed the logical thing would be to, like… puuush the tray right under his chin and watch him gnash at it like a dog? Give him the mama bird-baby bird treatment? He curled an eyebrow over at the disillusioned Powerplex, who gave no answer. It felt wrong being the talker between the two of them — the villain he’d fought was a screamer, a ranter, a frantic rambler. Now, no one was there to listen but Shapesmith, and he couldn’t imagine Scott especially wanted to see the guy who’d given him trouble last. Much less be fed by him like a baby bird. Have his jaw be moved around in his fingers.
Geeze. Geeze! Talk about cruel and unusual — this was cruel and unusual!
Shapesmith scrunched up his face in thought, then twisted his hand into a thin, flat shape. Scott’s eyes bulged and he wormed his way back, caught by the metal. A sheet of martian-flesh pushed itself up behind him, earning a rasped yelp as it shimmied from side to side, hooked its way into his restraints, and began to pry.
“Wh- what the fuck are you doing?!” Powerplex hissed through his teeth.
“I’ll put it back!” Shapesmith cheerfully insisted, quickly drowned out by the horrendous sound of metal prying off metal. His body wasn’t exactly meant for, um, carving or hacking or blade-ing, but it got the job done. Soon, Scott’s shoulder and arm restraints had fallen away with the ugly clangor best comparable to that of an engine collapsing in on itself. He flexed his limbs in disbelief, no doubt having gone numb with strain, the poor thing!
Wide, bloodshot, harrowed eyes darted from his hands to his savior. His fingers already cracked with disuse as he bent them. Shapesmith only beamed, schlorping his arm back into its rightful shape, then presenting a plastic-wrapped plastic-fork towards the other.
“There you go! You eat with utensils, silly- I guess even Cecil’s forgetful someti—”
Before he was even done with his sentence, Scott had torn the fork out of its wrapping and driven it into the meat of his own forearm. The pain of the first strike propelled his muscles forward in the second — they were weak, after all, but only weak enough to breach with one, two, three hearty stabs, each one making the fluorescents overhead flicker faster.
Shapesmith had not missed the resulting lightning strike, nor did he miss the resulting feeling of being flung directly into the wall and his weird, slimy martian-bits narrowly managing to avoid cooking him alive. Not in the least. Zero out of ten sensation.
“...I’m gonna have to share a few words with our boys about the kind of metal we work with around here.” Cecil had muttered into his hand, sparking (heh!) back into the scene as guards wrestled another set of restraints onto Scott’s upper body. Much scratching and biting was to be had, but if nothing else, the fork had flown out of his reach with the force of his lightning, so his power had a limit on it, no matter how hard he thrashed and screamed.
Shapesmith, meanwhile, had gotten away with a bonk on the back of the head and some weird skull-innards splattering the wall. Cecil made a face at it, then peered down at the cup of jello, looking a little more queasy at the world than usual.
Contrary to what Shapesmith was imagining, “babysitting” Scott-”Powerplex”-Duvall did not involve games, toys, or prizes.
“Babysitting” Scott-”Powerplex”-Duvall mostly just meant trying to get him to eat food. Which, pointedly, he was much too very angry and very sad and also very restrained to pull off. Unresponsive to silverware getting poked into his face — and yes, Shapesmith had learned his lesson and kept his stab-proof spoons and forks at a solidly un-eye-gougable distance — most of the fifteen-minute stretches of breakfast, lunch, and dinner were spent just kind of feebly nudging the other. Zipped lips, that Scott-”Powerplex”-Duvall.
“He’s not eating,” Shapesmith told Donald, and “I’ll ask to review his medical records,” Donald told Shapesmith.
“He’s still not eating,” Shapesmith told Cecil, and “Well, he’d better if he doesn’t want a tube in his throat,” Cecil told Shapesmith.
“Yeah, Powerplex isn’t eating,” Shapesmith brought up to Invincible, and Invincible only gave him a harrowed look as Eve squeezed his hand and quickly changed the subject.
“Um, how do you get a prisoner to eat?” Shapesmith raised his hand and asked the Immortal, who mulled over it for a long time before describing the 29th General Assembly of the World Medical Association in strange, unsettling, and ultimately pointless detail.
So… phooey. Ultimately, starvation wasn’t good for humans, wasn’t good for any life form, Shapesmith knew that much. He didn’t know if he was more saddened to think Powerplex was too busy thinking about screaming and yelling and lightning and all those other things he liked to eat, or to think he just didn’t want to, in the same pressing, mundane way any creature who lived could decide to simply quit.
Cecil wasn’t one to waste talent… but he wasn’t the sentimental type, either. He’d drill that sound into Invincible’s head as much as he needed to until the boy stood down and listened — if it took his ear-bits and brain-bits dribbling out the sides of his head to do it, Shapesmith was sure Cecil would only wrinkle his nose at the smell of bloody wax and chide him for wasting both of their times. So if Powerplex died in jail — well, it was probably a benefit to society and science both. If nothing else, the GDA could get their materials back.
But that didn’t sit right with Shapesmith: no, surely, that wasn’t what Martian Man would have done.
So he stayed at Scott’s cell, kept bringing him trays he would only stare at with an empty disappointment. Disappointment Shapesmith wasn’t sure how to make go away… for sure, Invincible’s head on a pike would’ve been a great start, but that being a good pal of his aside he wasn’t sure a Viltrumite head could even be removed much less fit on a pike, but all Scott Duvall had lost funneled deeper than a one-sided rivalry. Like those discs, the needles had burrowed themselves deep, borderline one with his nervous systems. When a creature was angry, hurt, enough… well, that just became part of its being. A sad truth of nature Shapesmith didn’t like to think about often.
He picked at Scott’s tray. A pitiful waste of perfectly good prison-mush, in Shapesmith’s opinion. Food loved to be colors and textures. That was how you knew it was food! He took a bite out of one of the shapes, an overly, almost chemical-sweet brown thing covered in… um… sugar? Sugar was sweet, that he knew. It may have been chocolate, it may not have been. Scott just glowered at him — somehow, probably, this too was Invincible’s fault. Shapesmith swallowed.
“I was told about your circumstances.” He said, with his best sympathetic frown, one he had spent hours emulating off a DVD cover for some morose-looking romantic drama. “I’m not very good at conversing with my fellow humans. But it’s, um…” Slowly, the frown came easier. “…very sad, and I understand why you are the way you are. I, um, I don’t have… a wife and child to accidentally turn into ash, but I imagine I would also be very sad if I did.”
Powerplex’s glare didn’t change, barring a twitch of the eye. The pupils themselves didn’t move. Sweat and grime stuck thick strands of dirty blond together.
Shapesmith stretched out his fingers a safe, un-hand-biteable distance towards Scott’s mouth, the little brown prison rectangle resting on their gloved tips. What should have been teeth marks, he realized, looked more like a big, perfectly-smooth semicircle. Oops.
“It’s probably very hard to eat food when you’re thinking about your wife and child who you accidentally turned into ash.” Shapesmith said, quite profoundly by his standards.
Scott only worked his jaw, like he was chewing something tough. Shapesmith double-checked the tray: everything was present. Hm. He scratched his cheek.
“And it’s probably harder when you have to look at the superhero who was bothering you that day with the police cars. But I promise you this!” He smiled, brandishing the brownie(?) between his fingers like some kind of badge, “I only wanted to do good then and I only want to do good now, and I mean as well for you as any hero would for, not a villain, but a troubled and very sad man who needs help he’s never been provided. All three chambers of my heart are vast with kindness and understanding, and I—”
Scott’s cheeks bulged as he coughed on something. A faint spurt of blood, with a sound like a roughly deflating balloon, flew out from between pursed, dry lips. Yellowed teeth exposed, then, found bits of pink-and-gray flesh between their grooves. A river of red pooled down the meat of his tongue, then dribbled down into his restraints. Something bright and snappy started to dance on the liquid’s thinning surface— oh no. Shapesmith’s arms flew up into a block, where white-hot coils already began to pool and crackle out of Scott’s nostrils, between his teeth.
Shutting his eyes, Shapesmith braced for impact.
“—I-I just wanted to say I’m sorry about Becky!” He blurted. “And Jack, and Jessica, and, um, Gretchen! I think it’s really sad, and you’re right, it’s really unfair!” His voice pitched. “So you can be mad but pleeeeaaaase not prison-escape-where-you-fry-all-my-skin-off mad!!”
The crackling slowed. Peeking through his limb-cage, he noted the least bit of life returned to Powerplex’s eyes — or perhaps that was only the pain beginning to register as he coughed again, let out an involuntary moan with no rush of cathartic lightning with it, and spit out more blood all over himself. He winced, rolled his tongue around in his mouth, yet glared no less as Shapesmith lowered his guard. “Do you have any idea what it’s like…?!” Scott demanded.
“Not really!” Shapesmith squeaked, heart still pounding. He tried to shake the fear out of his hands. “But I’d like to know, because as a beloved Earth superhero, I want to do what I can to make someone who is hurting feel better! That’s another thing that connects people, I think…!”
“They were all I had!” Scott wailed, and — yes, he was wailing now, Shapesmith realized. Sweat and tears were nigh-indistinguishable on the man’s face, but the martian at least knew a broken voice when he heard one. “What connections? What connections do you get to talk to me about? You’re a Guardian of the Globe…!”
“Well, I have friends—” Shapesmith scrambled to answer, “—who I think I would also be quite sad if I lost. And I did have a mother and father as a baby. And I would be sad if I lost them, or- or did anything to hurt them, too.” He fidgeted with his fingers. Scott really did love the hard questions, didn’t he?
“I’m stuck in here! While— while Invincible gets t’ keep parading around… while the people he hurt, they get a memorial if they’re lucky…” His voice cracked, then softened, and here Shapesmith knew he would have been shaking if his restraints allowed it. It struck him, the indecency of being unable to wipe your tears, your snot.
Blinking, Shapesmith reached a hand towards the other, and patted his head with a mechanical, yet sincere as he could, “there, there.”
Tear-filled, bloodshot green eyes scrunched up at the touch. There was the faintest jolt against Shapesmith’s fingers, a pathetic tickle more than anything. Shapesmith instinctively drew back. The other’s shadowy glare wasn’t all that intimidating, rather something Shapesmith didn’t want to hurt.
“‘s not fair.” Scott murmured. “No one’s gonna remember them for anything but what that monster made me do.”
Heroes and villains alike, this Shapesmith knew, loved to have tragic, horrible losses. Things that kept them moving, people to see standing wistfully over their shoulder when they looked into the mirror or a particularly shiny puddle. A head stuck in a fridge of someone you loved. The Guardians were no different — there was Dupli-Kate, who was significantly less dead than they thought but their weekly psych evals couldn’t tell the difference. There was Invincible’s father. There was the smear on the wall, slightly before Shapesmith’s time. Everyone had lost something. It was sad to think, in this line of work, that kind of terrible loss wasn’t all that special.
“Um.” Shapesmith thought — really thought. Sent his brain a-churnin’ as much as it could. “…I can remember things!” He offered, then plopped himself down on the floor next to the big chunk of metal cocooning his new prison-buddy. “You can tell me about them. The, um, real them, not their… sad and scary dead bodies.”
For a long time, Scott stared, to which the most Shapesmith could offer was a smile and a nod. A more real smile, he hoped. Real enough for Powerplex — though Cecil would probably say nothing was real enough for Powerplex.
And he wouldn’t entirely be wrong. But it was worth a try, wasn’t it? That was why he’d put him up to this to begin with.
“Jessica was my sister.” Scott finally said, head uselessly cocking to an angle in an effort to dry himself. “It was hard on us both. People would always joke, we looked nothing alike, but… ‘s not just blood, is it? Family.”
Black Samson liked to call the Guardians family. Shapesmith supposed he had very little room to judge.
“I, uh… I wanted to be there as much as I could. The moment I couldn’t, that was when Invincible and his father came.” His voice snagged on the recollection, to the point where Shapesmith prepared himself for another round of rants and lightning, if not tears and electrified snot — instead, the man steadied himself with a breath. “But she loved us so much. Her ex was kind of an ass, so when it came to Gretchen, Becky and I stepped in. And Jess helped us with Jack, too, she had experience with me, and- Gretch was really looking forward to meeting him. It always felt like one of us was struggling, but it was never… a chore. You know? It’s playing with your niece. It’s making a child you care about happy. It’s knowing they think you’re cool and important. It’s… getting to be a shoulder to cry on. Becky and I always had that.” Scott sniffed. “We were kind of wrecks on our own.” He swallowed self-derisively. “…definitely wrecks on our own.”
Shapesmith nodded.
“I hate how small it all feels.”
“Well…” Shapesmith mumbled, tracing circles in the floor with his fingers. Rus Livingston had a family, too… er- probably, anyway. He had neighbors. He certainly had coworkers. None of which had kicked up enough of a fuss to really compromise Shapesmith’s moral integrity. But he supposed that, too, was sad in a way. As lucky as it had been in the end. “It’s not small to you. Or anyone else who cared about them. …Or me, either, because caring about them is something I also do now.”
“Becky and I made a petition for people to sign. To look into what happened at Chicago, like, legally.” Scott huffed. “Of course nothing came of it. No one wants to mess with the GDA- I felt like shit even working there.”
“…you don’t work there anymore.” Shapesmith offered, then began to waver. “…because of the, um, stealing and the prison, but… euh…”
…he was quickly running out of silver linings, opting to stare at the grooves in the floor instead as the silence passed. Scott blinked at nothing. Bits from the tray had scattered all about in his panic — a haphazard trail of powdered sugar led him to the partially-eaten rectangle, face-down. Another “brown-food”, similar but different, that looked like it came from a can. More of a slurry than anything else.
He bunched up his fingers, gave the restrained Powerplex another look. Despite himself, he was afraid. Not in the way he had been afraid of the sequids, or when the second Viltrumite came to Earth, but — what was the expression? Poking the bear? Sometimes he looked at Scott, watched the tensing of his face, the thirst for something more and horrible almost full-to-bursting beneath his skin, anything to make Invincible feel a fraction of what he had… and his innards still tingled, like a zapped frog. Responses Rudy had tried to program out. Feeling Martians hadn’t been foreign to, but — well, they were a species that managed to tame the brain-controlling parasites scuttling around their planet. They certainly didn’t come often.
Still, there was something important Shapesmith had wriggled his way out of Rus’ apartment for, and he didn’t earn a spot on the Guardians by playing it safe.
Amassing a forkful of the slurry, he held it up to Scott’s face. The man pursed his lips, cheeks twitching at the sight of it, then shut his eyes and tried not to be watched as he took a bite. To no avail, of course, as Shapesmith was honestly kind of astounded by this accomplishment. His eyelids and lips all scrunched up in a look of the universally-recognizable emotion to all living beings, ‘this is foul and I want it out of my mouth but don’t want to be impolite by throwing up.’ For someone who seemed to tackle big feelings by slamming his head into the wall, the fact he didn’t was monumental.
“...guh.” Scott winced, even moreso with his tongue’s efforts to swipe the mess from his lips.
“Wow— mm-mm, that sure is a texture!” Shapesmith encouraged.
“Please don’t make this any weirder.”
Well, he was eating, which was a good sign. An even better sign was the fact he managed to survive the sheer embarrassment of the whole affair. Shapesmith made a point of talking all throughout, yammering on about his day with the Guardians or the documentary he’d watched or the mission he’d been on or the bird he saw on the way here — words kept it from really settling in. The embarrassment and… well, the disgust, too. He’d liked to pretend it was sweet, a motion of platonic wholesomeness between two recently-reformed chums, but, uh, well, spoon-feeding someone prison cafeteria beans was really not a preferred bonding activity among Earthlings. Or Marslings. Or anyone in the galaxy, really.
All the same, their little friendship ritual was as odd as anything else about Shapesmith. Cecil seemed honestly surprised he’d gotten Powerplex in line, as if part of him had been expecting to just lock the martian in a cage with the guy until he said enough stupid things that he exploded into a pile of electrified green goo. But Shapesmith knew that a little bit of kindness went a long way. And, of course, promising to take the fact you spoon-fed someone prison beans every day to your grave.
(“All done!” Shapesmith clapped his hands.)
(“The commentary really isn’t necessary.” Scott had said, in a manner that made imagining him in that stuffy-looking lab coat feel less faraway.)
But what Shapesmith valued more were the opportunities to actually talk with the guy. Despite Eve’s optimistic assessment, the “help” Powerplex would get in prison didn’t seem to be much. With a pang, Shapesmith supposed they couldn’t exactly be blamed — there was too much damage he could do without complete immobility, and people in that state tended to not care much for government psychologists trying to pick at their brains. Really, the only concern the GDA seemed to have was getting their discs back, and the only concern Powerplex had was revenge.
Underneath that desire, though, there was a human person. And Shapesmith wasn’t the best with human people, but a little grease turned the squeaky wheel, right?
“So what mysterious industrial accident did you get your powers from?” Shapesmith asked, having formed a little chair out of his bodily tissues to sit eye-level with Scott, something the man himself tried not to look too hard at.
“Nah,” Scott huffed, amused, “I was born with ‘em. Used to be a bit of a party trick. I always dreamed of doing pyrotechnics at concerts with ‘em but I could only make little sparks.”
“Concerts!” Shapesmith parroted. “You know, I never could tell if you had bags under your eyes or some form of ‘Rock Star Make-Up’.”
“Both?” Scott said. “I-it, uh,” his voice grew quieter, “it’s eyeliner. Makes the lack of sleep look more like a choice.” He smiled, in the way you told a joke you’d told a million times before. “Becky and I were really into that kind of music. Used to joke that Jack would know Alice in Chains before a lullaby.”
“I see, so that’s why you’re always screaming!” Shapesmith said, and Scott full-on laughed. A raspy bark of a sound, not hysterical, or mad. It was strange: Shapesmith hadn’t meant to be funny. But he couldn’t imagine Scott had laughed like that in a long time.
He was keeping Earth safe. And he supposed an Earth where Scott Duvall smiled was safer than one where he didn’t.
The news cycles loved that name. Did you know there was a word for murderers who killed their relatives? Earth truly was a frightening place, to need words for such things. “Family annihilators”. A very aggressive term, though cynics said the bodily frying of Rebecca and Jack Duvall was perhaps the cruelest and most direct use of it yet. How did it happen so frequently, Shapesmith wanted to ask, were humans so cruel?
Public perception varied. Scott Duvall was a lunatic, this the world knew. Sometimes Becky was his victim, sometimes she was the real monster. There were killers in the world who had turned to darkness because they knew they would never be caught, knew they outranked every being on this planet — such was the way with many supervillains, and with Viltrumites, but not with the Duvalls. Mad incompetence, if you ignored the petition. An infuriating tragedy, if you didn’t. Either way analysts adored the last hours of Jack’s life. Shapesmith would rather not tell Scott his son hadn’t been fed before the kidnapping. Or how neighbors had always seen the boy in his mother’s arms over his father’s.
The effort of learning how to use a computer was a monotonous and ultimately very distressing one. “Training”, Rudy had called it when the Immortal asked what they were up to. Which wasn’t technically wrong. Shapesmith needed to actually know how to operate GDA tech instead of screaming when he heard Cecil’s voice and trying to get what his fear interpreted as a very small version of his boss out of his ear, at which point Cecil asked what the hell he thought the back-and-forth with Invincible had been about, at which point Shapesmith answered that he thought Cecil had put some kind of parasite in the boy’s brain, and to be completely honest the non-answer of “well, some could say so,” didn’t soothe his nerves very much.
All of that to say, Shapesmith could operate a search engine. His primary interest was of cars and space, and games about such. And moving pictures of small animals — wow-ee did the Internet have a lot of those, no wonder Rudy was always tucked away in there! — but he found himself looking up names. He found he himself didn’t have a Wikipedia article yet, but the Mars mission did, and the computer didn’t like his addition about the very cool awesome martian they saw there who was not at all related to beloved Earth superhero Shapesmith but was very equally cool, because when he refreshed the page it was gone.
But Scott Duvall did have a Wikipedia article. Rather, Powerplex did — and rather, more specifically, it was a subpage beneath the Chicago massacre, and a point on a table of familicides in the US, as well as one on documented villains in the state of Illinois. An active talk page went back-and-forth on whether to give the murder of Rebecca and Jack Duvall its own article, or a heavily-”Down-Voted” request to redirect it to Invincible’s page. Looking at it too hard made something squish inside him, and not in a pleasant way. Perhaps the Internet wasn’t so fun after all.
There was no point in telling Scott what he already knew, that for all he hated Invincible — and really, Shapesmith thought, if they sat down and talked to eachother, Scott would probably find him perfectly enjoyable company, perhaps even a shared taste in music that made you feel bad about yourself — all he ultimately did was make the world pity the guy more. Did a young superhero need more blood on his hands, to be blamed for something a fanatic ultimately did to himself? That didn’t feel productive for either of them.
But… and this was funny, when he was with Shapesmith, he thought about other things. Of course, there was only so much one could think about when shackled to a wall. But Shapesmith grew to know the Duvalls like his own family — Gretchen’s birthday, the kind of animals she liked. She was at the age where you didn’t question your place in the world, where happiness came easily. Something Scott and Jessica never had, but there was no sadness in watching it, only pride. Of course Scott liked music. Becky liked art galleries and horror novels. He’d started work with the GDA out of an innocent curiosity with his powers… and, well, the money was a factor, too. It had been tight for both sides of the family, so Scott had always wanted to make something of his powers.
Telling Scott about himself, meanwhile, was… euh… …more difficult! Humans, Shapesmith learned, had more varied lives than martians did. Comic book heroes tended to be very small, something that had first perplexed Shapesmith, but after a point in a human’s life it was hard to make one universally relatable. Humans developed quirks, they lived and loved at different paces to one another, they had different interests, different jobs… the most Shapesmith could offer was tales of how he dreamed of traveling when he was small, wanting to go to grand, faraway, wet places that promised more than he’d been given. He thought with a pang, then, that sad and stuffy lives spent stuck underground hadn’t left him with Mars. Powerplex couldn’t even look at the sky.
But there was a lot on Earth that Shapesmith was excited to share, and a lot of it that Scott missed greatly. He was lucky to find the other was, too, invested in the littler things in life. Sentimental at all he had lost — if Jessica and Gretchen’s deaths hadn’t taken his opportunity for a normal life away from him, this certainly had. So Shapesmith’s disproportionate enthusiasm for different colors on the soda can that came with Powerplex’s lunch on occasions wasn’t all that odd. It gave him a surge of pride, even, to think he was giving the other something to look forward to.
He supposed he could never fully understand that mundane personhood. He’d never been raised to regard it with importance — sure, Shapesmith was happy when his fellow heroes were happy, and happy when the people he saved were happy, happy to taste new foods and have new experiences, but ultimately he was a tourist. His time as Rus Livingston wasn’t spent smelling the Earth roses as much as it was spent feeling like- well, an alien in a man’s skin. The spongey gap between the “I” and the body the “I” belonged to. He could open his eyes to a trashed apartment and see the slivers of person he was burying beneath unpaid bills he didn’t register as anything but decoration.
…thinking of it, he could probably apologize to the guy, though he knew he wouldn’t be happy to see him. The pain felt faraway. He didn’t know Rus like he knew Scott. Any identifying knickknacks or family photos were things Shapesmith didn’t properly recognize as such until it was too late, you should have seen him try and learn where the house’s “Food-Place” was. Mass trial and error had been taken in the effort to find the script that unlocked his vast wealth of boxed fridge-pizzas.
“So what’s your real name?” Scott had asked, when their conversations shifted, when the visits became more than just routine.
“Er…” Shapesmith had responded, twiddling his thumbs, “well, I don’t know if I’m allowed to say… secret identity, as heroes are wont to have.”
Lying didn’t usually make him feel bad.
How can you not give your name to the man you feed every day? How are you not willing to provide him the same intimacy you fret over as often as you do? Shapesmith never reached out to touch him, but he thought about it: how easy it could be. How feared Powerplex had been… now, the most he could do was bite Shapesmith’s fingers if he really wanted. Nothing could be done if Shapesmith decided to stroke his hair, or tweak his cheek. Why would he want to do that? Well, he could. The same curiosity that had landed him on Earth to begin with.
It was interesting, how angry Scott Duvall was, for someone who really didn’t want to be. Petitions turned down. Calls going nowhere. Invincible had been on too tight of Cecil’s leash to really do much in the ways of investigation after Chicago. That was best for the boy’s heart — not so for everyone else. Shapesmith curdled a little: he hated to think poorly of any of them. But it was unfair, wasn’t it?
Surely there was more that could be done than sitting by the man’s side and feeding him. He didn’t actually know what Scott’s sentence was, nor how long it would be.
Granted, taking life by the spoonful was a very slow way to take it.
With a clangor, the shape the Shapesmith took upon hitting Guardians HQ’s floor was closest comparable to a pancake…
…dropped off a ten-story building.
Experimentally, Black Samson furrowed his brow and stared down at his hands — then at the too-green-to-be-fully-human smear on the floor. A few months ago, this would’ve caused an uproar. Now, it was just another part of training with Shapesmith: “The Goo”. Rex had encouraged it as some kind of intimidation tactic, gross out the opponent! Rudy, meanwhile, urged him to exercise caution. Shapesmith leaned towards that. Exploding into mush wasn’t exactly an enjoyable experience for him, either.
“You good, man?” Samson asked.
“Yyyyeh.” Shapesmith managed, pushing himself back into place with an elastic, boneless pop!
Concern glinted in the other’s eyes — not the kind of concern Shapesmith used to inspire in him. Taking his hand, Samson brought him to his feet as Shapesmith tried to remember the number of bones that went inside them.
“Somethin’ on your mind, martian?” Samson asked, palm settling on the other’s shoulder. “Y’seemed distracted.”
Something on his mind? Yes. A mentally unstable blonde thing, to be precise.
Distracted? Yes. Hard to live your life when someone close to you can’t — an emotion he imagined Scott knew intimately.
Something even someone as socially inept as him was willing to divulge to a coworker? Absolutely not.
Forgive Shapesmith for the thought, but after the “bazillions-of-scary-Invincible-s” debacle — why did all the crazy things happen to that guy? — Scott was one of the last things on his mind. Now he got a taste of Chicago, the cleanup the senior Guardians had griped about. The world buckling under a Viltrumite’s foot: he didn’t dislike Invincible, not even after being on the end of all Scott’s rants, but… well, Shapesmith began to understand how he must have looked to Rus’ loved ones. The person you knew, but not quite… he already didn’t like the idea of being on the boy’s wrong side, and being viciously rent apart asunder by another him only put a face to those worries. A manic, horrible face, nothing like his Earth friend!
Another gruff old man lingered around the GDA — did that place just collect them? — one that tugged Shapesmith aside and informed him that Powerplex 1) broke out, 2) got knocked around a little, but nothing horrific, 3) had been promptly relocated to another, higher-grade facility, given 4) Payton Penitentiary exploded. To which Shapesmith did his best listening-and-learning impression, if this one was anything like Cecil, and tried his absolute darnedest to not sound as freaked out by this information as he was.
By this point, Scott Duvall was a friend, just one of strange circumstances. Those were a dime a dozen in the Guardians of the Globe — did you know that Rex Splode and Atom Eve used to be mates? Shapesmith didn’t! — to the point where… heck, had he done the nebulous Big No-No and gotten attached? Softened up? Forgotten who he was talking to? He didn’t think so… but at the same time, he found himself surprised that the same man he’d talked about everything and nothing with, more or less three times a day every day between getting kittens out of trees and stopping bank robberies and whatnot, had been given the chance to step out of prison, feel the blood flowing through his muscles again, move his hands, his feet, again, see the sky around him again… and relapsed.
Tunnel-visioned into red and screamed and thrashed and spittled about Invincible and injustices and blood on hands all over again. In a sense, maybe a bazillion scary Invincibles were the perfect thing for Powerplex. Stick them all in a cage with him like a rage room, he’d defend Earth lickety-split. The thought was funny, but the kind of funny where you couldn’t laugh. It was just too easy to picture, and something in the back of Shapesmith’s head protested, however true it may have been, at the mental image of the layman’s Powerplex. The frothy-mouthed, miserable lunatic who would have blamed Invincible on gas prices going up.
The restraints were higher-grade. He’d behaved briefly, so the old man said — more useful out of prison than in it, with how stretched their resources were. Was given his old suit for the first time in months, helped out with blowing away debris and pulling bodies out of wreckage. Seemed to make an honest living for a bit.
And then he saw Invincible again.
And now he was here, and so was Shapesmith. Prison food was the same no matter where you went, more or less, or maybe the ones overseen by the GDA were all funneled through with the same ingredients. Didn’t eat unless it was from the stretchy Guardians guy, a worker had rolled her eyes and said, probably convinced anyone on the side of Big Superhero was slipping sedatives in his salad or something.
(Was Shapesmith not considered a Big Superhero? He was a Guardian of the Globe, for goodness sake!)
For a moment, life returned to Scott’s eyes when he saw him. Then, the circumstances seemed to set in for them both.
“I got out.” He said, like the kid with a hand in a cookie jar.
Awkwardly swaying where he stood, Shapesmith nodded, finding eye contact with the puck of grilled chicken easier to manage than anything else. “Uh-huh… um. Don’t do it again?”
“Don’t intend on it.”
His voice was hoarse, unreadable. Whether he was sincere or just mulling something over in his head he didn’t want to say, Shapesmith couldn’t tell.
“…I thought about it for a long time, though. Invincible visited when I was first put away. You have no idea how much I wanted to hurt him. And you.”
“…hey, now, you don’t have to tell me that just because I’m the big bad hero keeping you in line!” Shapesmith chuckled.
“What?” Powerplex sounded a little legitimately affronted. “No, I’m telling you because I… mm.”
More mulling. Despondent green eyes drifted down to his restraints, his jumpsuit.
“I don’t know where I would have gone. That… smarmy, cartoon-colored piece of shit, changed so much of me. I don’t know what’s left. If anything is.” What little slivers of his shoulders were movable stretched and strained in their cuffs. “He’s everywhere, Shapesmith. I saw him and I saw Jessica again. Holding her arm like some kind of fucking trophy for his fascist bastard Dad.” His gaze fixed on him, hard — but Powerplex’s anger always fizzled out, and what was beneath it was, in Shapesmith’s opinion, even harder to look at. “And the people out there, they looked at me like I was the crazy one. I don’t— I don’t know if I can live with that.”
Shapesmith set the tray aside, and pretzeled himself onto the floor. In the human definition of the word, mind you. Twiddling with his digits, he thought about it. Would it be an insult to say he understood? Shapesmith had friends to rescue him from the angry martians' clutches for his insolence — Scott had no such thing.
He thought about it for a long time, enough so that Scott began to recede into himself as much as his position could allow.
“Fuck, I—” he mumbled, “I'm sorry, I...”
“I'm glad you didn't break the rules. I think that’s very big of you.” Shapesmith finally said, trying his best to adopt the encouraging tones he recalled from his fellow heroes. Spiritually pat the other's back, skin sickly beneath the lights. “But I would have let you stay with me, were the opportunity to arise!” He balled his fists, suddenly brightened by the idea, then leaned in as if this sweetened the deal. “My bed is a racecar, you see!”
“Ghehwhat—”
“Yes! Racecar bed, racecar bed.” He stood, rocking on his heels. “Someday you’ll be the one visiting me, and it’ll be so much better than these weird metal things.” Thinking about what he’d seen of Invincible and his friends, bowling or seeing movies… “We could engage in the time-honored Earth tradition of ‘hanging out’ and racing ‘Go-ed Karts’. I think that’s something to look towards—”
“Stop, no, no, please don’t.” Scott softly bit. Shapesmith held his tongue. “Don’t- lie to me like that.”
…?
He hadn’t…
Shapesmith deflated a little (literally). “Oh, uh. I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry.”
Scott just sighed. “I know.” Shapesmith didn’t know how it made him feel, that someone who’d once flung him through a building seemed so hurt to snap at him. “But there’s not much out there for me.”
“Hmm.” Shapesmith hmm-ed. “Did I ever tell you where I really come from?” He whispered very secretly and conspiratorily. “This may be a ‘hard nut to swallow’—”
A dissatisfactory noise was made at that.
“—and I am very sorry for that, but I am not an ‘Earth-Human’ like I once implied, nor do my powers come from a mysterious industrial accident, but I was born with them! As a baby Marsling on the planet Mars.” He clasped his hands. “I know it’s very unkind of me to deceive a friend, but I hope this will add another layer to our—”
“Yeah I kinda figured.”
“What!!” Again? Was he that bad at lying?
“I mean, no offense, but you’re really weird.”
“All humans are weird!” Shapesmith insisted, now tickled with embarrassment. “Superheroes teach you the importance of ‘being yourself’!”
Scott laughed. By now, a not unfamiliar sound, but one that still always took Shapesmith aback a little. It made him smile, in what he imagined was the same way Martian Man smiled to help people.
Still! Still - Shapesmith had fretted over this for ages, and here the wind was being sapped out of his sails! “The point of this inspiring superhero pep-talk being, if there is a place on Earth for a martian — t-two, in fact, actually, so, y’know — then there is a place on Earth for a very angry lightning man. My superior Cecil cares a very big amount about reformation, and, um, reprogramming and, all of those words. I’m sure if I asked very nicely he might even put us on the same team!”
Shapesmith and Scott, working as a team… What an idea! News articles, with the benefit of morbid hindsight, called Scott Duvall a ‘Powdered-Keg’ waiting to explode, mopey and temperamental… but Shapesmith knew from his time on the Guardians that explosives weren’t a bad thing! The other’s powers — he had fun with them once, didn’t he? Showing them to Gretchen? The party tricks and pyrotechnics? Heck, Shapesmith had seen another lightning-hero on the GDA’s payroll! It was possible. And more than anything, he wanted his friend out of this stuffy cell and seeing the stars, no matter what it took… some would say he hadn’t learned his lesson since the sequid mission. But Shapesmith reckoned this was less selfish…
…no matter how much the mental image made him smile, okay?
The magic faded as Scott recoiled.
“I’m not working with Invincible.”
“Oh no, not with Invincible! He works very solo-like these days. He’s not even with Cecil anymore—”
“No, it-” Scott’s eyes shut as he sighed. “Our laws just don’t apply to people like that. All these people lose so much, while heroes like him get to sit on their asses and think about how sad it makes them. This- this stain on their name. Their brand, their costume.” He spat costume like an insult. “But they get to take it off. Wipe the blood off their hands and go home to their families.” Shapesmith’s heart curdled. “What about the people who can’t? Just another casualty, right? Another reason we should feel so bad for poor Invincible?”
Scott sniffed. Like clockwork, this conversation went. Banging his head against a wall over and over. How much Shapesmith wanted to soften the blow with something, anything, but a three-chambered heart just wasn’t built for that. He picked at one of his tissues with a finger, not expecting Scott to wait for a response. “N-no? I think, um… I think he’s sad, too. I don’t know him that well but he lost family too, I think…”
“He can wipe his tears with Cecil’s money while the rest of us rot.” Scott spat, and that angry rasp to his voice was back. His lips twisted into a grin, but not the happy kind Shapesmith had grown to know. There was joy in it, yes, but a cruel kind of joy, laughing with bared teeth at the audacity of the world. “He’s not a person. He doesn’t know pain. All he has to live with is guilt. Not real grief, not real loss- do you think I like being angry? I didn’t. He could be as sad as he wanted if the GDA gave half as much of an ass about helping people rebuild as they did about making him their goddamn mascot.”
Shapesmith flinched — that breathless, frantic fury never ceased to make the thin membrane over his tissues run cold. A dark part of him offered, for half a second, that with such an unstable source of such a vast amount of power, the accident with Jack and Becky had been bound to happen somehow. To the crumbling building that crushed Jessica, Scott Duvall had been small, an ant in an elephant’s stomping ground like the rest of Chicago. Now, he had two bodies beneath his belt already: all because Mark Grayson couldn’t lay down and die. He was in prison for two, and Invincible flew freely for two thousand, was that it?
Shapesmith hadn’t thought Earth would be so sad. But that made the happier parts sweeter, didn’t it? How happy everyone had been when Dupli-Kate came back…
“Y-you could help rebuild, though!” The martian blurted, not entirely sure of what he was saying at first, “I mean, I dunno if that’ll stave off the, erm, aching-yawning-pit-for-revenge-in-your-soul, but… you can fly!” He clasped his hands and wriggled them upwards, an uneasy smile returning to his face. “That’s more than most humans can say. And it’s not like we get chances because people like us more. We get them ‘cause there’s not really that many of us. Why else do you think the old Guardians were replaced with a bunch of teenagers and also a me?”
To his surprise, Scott’s gaze traveled to the floor, pupils flitting around in furrowed thought as his chin dipped.
“It wouldn’t be right.” He said, after a tense stretch of silence. “They all know what I did.”
Shapesmith’s smile faded into one of sad understanding. Nuances of the face were often lost on him. He cocked his head, pointing an appendage towards himself. “They all know what I did.” He echoed. “And they all know what Smaller, Purpler, Younger Darkwing did. I-Invincible and Cecil — well, everyone I know, really — got into a big fight about it a while back. Because Cecil’s helping people change. He gave me the stuff to help me change. I don’t say it just ’cause I get to live, but I think second chances are really important, and…”
Usually Shapesmith’s words meandered, rolled around, never quite falling into step the way others’ did. Now, his throat closed up. Why was such a nice thing so hard to say all of a sudden? Why did doubt start to boil and bubble up, all about and under his skin? It was supposed to be impenetrable!
“…I’m really happy Earth is a place that could bring you a second chance! Er… potentially, i-if you want… I think you can do awesome things — I mean it, the lightning is really cool, and you’re-I-mean-the-lightning-is-really cool, and…”
Something hot and giddy was welling up under Shapesmith’s membranes, intangible no matter how he prodded at it, and frankly beginning to cause quite a bit of concern. He turned to the side and coughed, fanning himself — usually his skin was closest comparable to some sort of clammy fruit… humans were supposed to be the weird warm ones!
“…I want better for you because you mean a lot to me!” He pushed the words out, like trying to expel some form of definitely-stronger-than-a-sequid-but-not-strong-enough-that-it-killed-him-yet parasite from his innards, wriggling and alive. “And it doesn’t have to all be for this! Because many-manymanymany scary things have happened in recent memory and, and we wouldn’t get to live our normal-people-and-sometimes-assorted-alien lives in peace if we didn’t find something to hold onto. And it is, believe it or not, not the immobility and big scary cuffs that made you something I want to hold onto!”
Deciphering the awkwardly-worded metaphors, nevermind the forced confidence they were spoken with, seemed to be the easiest part of processing Shapesmith’s words. Scott stared at him, brow furrowed and lips dumbly parted with the same look he’d given when he first saw the second-rate taffy-man the GDA had the gall to send out over the superhero he’d asked for. Like it just didn’t compute, further evidenced by the apparent overheating of his face.
“Wh— I— huh?”
There was a reason, Shapesmith suspected, the world regarded Martian Man as so gentle. This wasn’t to say he wasn’t, of course, but in a rare insightful observation on the new superhero’s part, it was easy to fill out the box people put you in. Especially when, y’know, you could turn your body into flab and putty to become that box, but Shapesmith didn’t want to get lost in his own metaphor again… point being, an alien was a novelty. An added layer to every action you took, if only because humans didn’t expect you were capable of it. A human saving a human? Kind, of course, but Tuesday, in an ideal world. An alien saving a human? The sight was just strange enough that you couldn’t help but giggle. You couldn’t help but be grateful for something beginning to take the effort to understand you, when, odds were, you were little more than an ant to it. Or perhaps a mildly annoying galactic neighbor.
Some people stepped on ants. Some people simply observed them marching along their dirt railways. Some people left out oversized buffets for them in the forms of dead mice and apple slices.
“Y-you don’t…” Scott made a few more wordless stammers, finding of course no opportunities to cover his face, nor many places to look that Shapesmith wouldn’t be. “You don’t know me like that.”
“I kinda do, though?” Shapesmith said, with the kind of cadence that had earned him getting struck by lightning by the man in the first place. “I mean, you tell me everything. And we kept meeting at pivotal moments all pow-pow-like, y’know like real heroes and villains do? And I know you don’t like plastic straws because you’re weird. And you like rock music, and Jessica worked in an office, and her ex was, your words, ‘kind-of-an-ass’. And you let me hang around. You don’t fry my brains out. You talk to me! Real talking, not, like, ‘Shapesmith, legs don’t go that way!’ or ‘Shapesmith, the shell of the sodie-pop is not part of the eating experience no matter how pleasant the crunch of aluminum feels on the softer, more yielding insides of your mouth lining!’ And I love learning about this planet, but I don’t think I really thought about things until I met you! You, like, know things! Important things! About law and justice and science and how many bones a person has! And whatever that is!” He pointed down to a glob of now-cold sauce on the food tray.
Scott’s breathing softened. Then it wobbled, up and down, then hitched again. His eyes were wet when they opened. Sentences started and aborted, each one thicker yet more fragmented than the last, none of which started with the same words or even syllables. Then those fragments became breaths, and those breaths became shallower until they were barely even that. Cecil would have warned him against getting close, for saltwater conducted electricity far better than freshwater did, but that was the last thing on Shapesmith’s mind. If it came to it, they’d just buy a third set of restraints.
Instead, he pushed forward and engulfed him. A simple Earth hug, at least in theory. But Shapesmith’s arms were pliable around the awkward clunk of heavy clasps and rigid collars, and maybe took a few more turns than they needed to — however many it took to choke the sadness right out of Scott Duvall. Fingers curled enough times to hold his ribcage, then to stroke his uneven, filthy hair, melding into his crevices, sinking into him in a warm entirety. In practice, the most alien comfort anyone had ever been given. But there would be times to try again, at least the ever-hopeful part of Shapesmith thought. The parts of Scott he’d never reached before, by choice or the simple fact of his predicament, he squeezed until his sobs turned into the sounds of a stepped-on dog toy.
“Shapesmith—” Scott croaked. “I know you have a weird fucking martian respiratory system but I still have person lungs.”
“Noted!” Shapesmith said, deliquescing in a slow, tumorous motion that earned a muttered ew. Still, ew was better than sobs, right? On autopilot, Scott’s eyes shut when Shapesmith wiped his face with a ‘glove’. He’d swiped at the other’s mouth a few times when he couldn’t finagle his facial muscles in such a way to clear crumbs or stains himself, but had never touched Scott’s cheeks or eyes, still damp and a feverish warm. The intimacy made Shapesmith jolt, sad as it was… perhaps this was the same instinct that had made Scott’s buttons so fun to push, in the beginning — Shapesmith hadn’t done so to be cruel, of course, quippy, smirked one-liners were just part of the Guardians of the Globe’s job descriptions. Still, here his fingers stayed, rubbing tears from dark circles and smeared eyeliner until they were gone.
…Or, well, translucent, in the latter’s case.
“Am I weird?” Shapesmith asked.
“You’re the weirdest person I know and I was married to Becky for four years.” Scott sniffed. The smile faltered as easily as it came. “I… I appreciate you. A lot.” The breath he took in was quivering. “And I don’t expect you to have an answer when I ask how I can just keep going when they can’t.”
If Invincible couldn’t suffer for Scott’s actions, then Scott would. Shapesmith frowned. Hadn’t everyone in this story suffered enough?
“But I’d be worse off without you here. Maybe that’s a low bar. But…” He couldn’t quite shrug, only tensing and untensing his shoulders, then wincing a little with the strain. “Something to hold onto, right?”
Shapesmith was not proud of the very un-heroic, un-human choked noise he made at that. Nor the way he felt like wobbling into the grooves of the cell’s floors and disappearing into the sewers then and there. And he most certainly wasn’t proud of the way he practically dislocated Scott’s vertebrae with the tightness of the resulting hug.
But he was a little proud of the look on Cecil’s face when he saw him next. Just a smidge.