#i have broken many a stick of charcoal over the course of my lifetime

[salty-dracon]

The first time I ever cried in front of my best friend, I'd broken a stick of charcoal. She was surprised, and quickly ran to comfort me. I confessed to her that I had trouble with pretty much any pencil that wasn't metal. I picked up one of the broken pieces between my fingers and tried drawing again, with shaky hands. I'd only managed to get a few tough strokes in before it snapped between my fingers again.

She's always known I had super strength, but I'd always been careful to hide it. Still, things popped out when I got too excited. I'd squeeze a tube of toothpaste too hard, or poke my finger through a bill form, or break a tool I was using all too often. Before we got a room together, I confessed that I was scared of being in the same house as her every day. What if I squeezed her too tight, or broke something important? She couldn't understand how terrified I was of living with another person. Sometimes, hurting people felt like the only thing I could do, besides lifting up furniture. It hurt me inside. Imagine knowing that your only purpose in life is to hurt others, no matter how much you act in the name of justice, or no matter how kind you are- wouldn't you feel terrible?

She took my hands. "Let's create, then. Let's create something, so you don't have to feel like you only have to destroy."

To some extent, I felt that my super strength, and the pains I took to live with it, were just my lot in life. Still, I wanted to impress her. So I went to a craft store and I asked for something cheap. A simple charcoal kit was my answer. And so was the broken stick of charcoal in my hand.

She started by sketching a sphere for me, then sketching ovals and lines over it. "Here's the light part," she said, pointing to an oval near the top left of the sphere. "And here's the darkest part," she said, pointing to the opposite end. "You have to color with shades of gray in the middle. Can you do that?"

I nodded confidently. "Yes, I can!"

Five minutes later, I'm crying over a broken stick of charcoal and an unfinished sphere. And she's hugging me, telling me that the kit was only $15 and we can go buy something else.

----

"Maybe we should get you one of those rubber pencils," she said over tea. "You know, the ones they sell at book fairs? The ones that have no internal structure, so they just wiggle all over the place? They're a little impractical, but they probably won't break in your hands."

"I don't think they produce very strong lines, though."

"Right." She nodded. "Well, let's find you an extra-tough mechanical pencil! Then, you can draw in a sketchbook with no issues at all."

She ordered one a few days later. When it arrived in the mail, I took it for a test drive on a new sketchbook she'd bought me. I wanted to draw a tree. So I pressed my pencil into the sketchbook, like I'd seen her do, and drew a long line.

The second time I ever cried in front of my best friend, I'd cut a long strip into the sketchbook with nothing but the tip of a mechanical pencil.

-------

She asked me about the details of my super strength after that. I confessed that I ended up breaking anything hard between my fingers, so holding pencils and styluses was out of the question. If by chance there was something hard enough to withstand my strength, it would likely bend or break some other equipment. I could type on a computer, but using too many shortcut keys too fast would result in me breaking the key (hence why I had to carefully use an iPad for everything). I also wasn't a good writer. My thoughts were pretty simple- I couldn't write any thought-provoking poetry. I'd been thinking about snails a lot lately, but somehow, writing a poem about snails sounded like something I wouldn't be satisfied with.

She took these thoughts into her own head and closed her eyes. Finally, after what felt like an awkward eternity, she opened them.

"Pottery."

"Pottery?!"

She took me into her room, where she showed me an apparatus she had set up around some plastic wrap. It appeared to be some kind of electric-powered table.

"Oh, is that a pottery wheel?" I asked. "So you use the foot pedal to make it turn. Oh, but what if I break the pedal?" I thought. There was a reason I also couldn't drive.

"Why don't I use the pedal?" she suggested, sitting down. "You just focus on keeping your hands as still as possible, and shaping the clay from the bottom up. Clay can't be broken, and pottery is perfect for someone with a lot of strength who can keep their hands still."

Carefully, she held the pedal down with her foot. The pottery wheel began to spin. I carefully gathered up the clay in my hands, holding my stance as it carved itself around my still fingers. Slowly I brought my thumbs down over the ball of clay, now shaped like a hemisphere, and spread them out. With more careful fingers, I tapered the edge. What I now had was a rather simple- looking bowl.

"Done," I said. "Now what? Do we let it dry?"

She looked down at it. "Yes, we can do that. Or, we can paint it and decorate it."

"What if we carved snails into the bottom?" I examined the sides of the bowl. "Oh, but I'd probably break the stylus."

"Leave it to me," she said. "You make little flat clay snails, and I'll stick them around the bowl. Does that sound fun?"

"Sure."

We got to work. With a large clump of clay next to me, I rolled up and curled the clay in my hand into a vague snail shape over and over. She deftly applied each one to the side of the bowl, until we had numerous little snails surrounding my creation.

"Next, we pop it in the oven, right?" I asked.

"The kiln." She popped open a machine that looked like a pressure cooker and lowered the bowl inside. 24 hours later, I was left with my clay bowl, but hardened and dried.

My hands shook as she placed it in my outstretched hands with a triumphant smile. "You made that!" she said.

"No I didn't!" I exclaimed back. "You handled the foot pedal, and you stuck all the snails on..."

"You still did most of it," she said. "Aren't you proud?"

"A little?" I turned my head. The bowl wobbled in my hand.

"Good start. Now, we start glazing the bowl with colors." She produced a set of glazes from the closet and a paintbrush. "Just tell me what colors to use," she said. "I'll do it for you."

"Isn't that cheating?" I asked, gently placing the bowl down and praying it wouldn't break.

"Not if I say we made it together." She giggled. "Because you're too scared to admit that you're making your first piece of artwork."

"Yeah, but I feel really bad that you're doing the painting."

"Like I said, it's a collaboration. You're fine with that, right?"

I relented. I began using the iPad to look up snails, then telling her how to paint each one. She deftly and quickly painted each snail in the colors and patterns I suggested.

"You're so good at this!" I exclaimed, as she colored one of them like a Pokemon. "Where did you become so talented at painting?"

"It was a lot of work," she said. "I used to struggle at painting. My older brother was the really talented one, but my strokes always turned out all messy. I wanted to be a painter like him, but..."

"It was impossible?"

"I realized that not every kind of artwork is possible for every kind of person." She sighed. "Some of us don't have the talent or the time to develop a talent. That's why I found what I was good at first, and then studied myself up from there."

"And that pottery wheel was from when you tried out pottery?"

"Yeah." She nodded. "I wanted to make geometric shape pottery. But I kept having creation ideas above my skill level, and I was really unhappy with the result."

"What did you do in the end?" I asked.

"Painting, of course," she said. "But just little things and abstract stuff. Did you know that there was a style of Roman art that focused on painting little pretty things? It was called the Third Pompeiian Style. There was a bit of abstraction involved, even. So even in history, there's something for everyone."

"You're amazing," I said. I was utterly blown away by her perseverance.

"You're more amazing," was her reply.

Somehow I got the sense that neither of us believed the words of the other. It was the last thing we said to each other before she popped our bowl in the kiln again.

The bowl, for what it was worth, did turn out pretty amazing, though. That bowl- or at least its shape and the little snails on it- was the first thing I'd ever created with my own (super strong) hands.

People think you’re lucky to have the power of superhuman strength, but outside the context of fighting bad guys it’s actually pretty inconvenient.

[drrjsb]

Body & Soul: The Endgame Fix “Part One: The Price”

Summary: If you weren’t happy with Avengers: Endgame, here’s your fix-it fic! We start on Monday, October 22, 2023: Eleven days after achieving time travel, six days since losing Natasha, five days after the Hulk Snap, two days since Tony's funeral, and one since Steve went into the Quantum Realm and Old Man Steve appeared.

[Monday, October 22, 2023]

“Five days! It’s been FIVE WHOLE DAYS that you’ve been walking around like this? Just what the hell were you thinking, Bruce?” Dr. Helen Cho swore intensely as she escorted an ailing Dr. Bruce Banner down the Avengers Quinjet ramp to the rooftop at the U-GEN building in Soule, South Korea. The more she saw of the obvious physical damage inflicted by the Infinity Stones, the more the geneticist was getting wound up. This was a complete reversal of their normal temperaments as the healer began to rant at her friend and professional collaborator, and the physicist calmly accepted her chastisement with a sheepish smile and a shrug of his broad shoulders underneath his tailored charcoal gray suit.

His right arm was now out of the sling he’d used during Tony’s funeral a few days before, but it was an obvious mismatch with his healthy left arm. “안녕하세요to you, too, Helen,” Bruce replied with a good-humored laugh. “By the way, this is Princess Shuri of Wakanda,” he said, gesturing behind them with his good hand to the slim, bright-eyed teen who was enjoying a laugh at his expense as she tucked a meter-long cylindrical container under her arm to bring off the Quinjet with her. “I believe you’ve already been consulting over the Internet,” the physicist added.

Helen suddenly flushed with embarrassment and turned to her other visitor. “Oh, my apologies, Princess Shuri. I’m sorry for being so rude. It’s good to finally meet you in person, your highness.”

“No problem, Dr. Cho. Please, just ‘Shuri’ is a lot easier.” She reached up and gave Bruce’s good arm a pat. “This is more important, and you are right to give him Hell for not getting here sooner,” the young woman chided Bruce.

“Just ‘Helen,’ please,” the older scientist said, feeling very chagrined.

“Hey, I tried to get here faster, and you know that, Princess,” Bruce needled the young Wakandan prodigy in return since they’d had to detour for her to pick up her package in Oakland, CA, on the way from Upstate New York to South Korea. Bruce turned to his colleague, “Please, Helen, you’d just gotten back to your family, and there were too many other things going on after the battle at the Avengers Compound to have more than triage done anyway. Thanks to Shuri and her medics, it’s been stable or improving over the last four days, and if you look closely,” he pulled back his blue dress shirt’s collar and bent down for a better view of his neck, “it’s starting to regenerate around the edges of the burn.”

“I could tell that from some of the scans you sent, but let’s get inside the lab, and I’ll judge for myself.” Bruce was just able to fit his oversized frame inside the freight elevator with the two scientists by ducking and crouching a bit. Squeezing through the doors on the staircase would have been worse. When they arrived at the correct floor, Dr. Cho led them into one of her lab spaces where the third generation of “the Cradle” and its related research projects now resided. “I’m sorry for the mess and disorganization. The program and our research agenda continued in my absence, but I’m almost back up to speed.” Bruce noted everything looked as neat and well-organized as it always had in the past.

Helen kept grumbling to herself in both English and Korean as she helped him take off his clothing from the waist up before tackling the protective sheathing and nutrient treatment wrap shielding his right arm. The irony of their character reversal—her anger and his calm—wasn’t lost on him, and he bit his lower lip to avoid smiling too much and antagonizing her. She still shot him a deadly glance. “Don’t you dare smile unless that’s from the pain meds, Banner,” Helen threatened. He doubted there were currently any pain meds involved since they’d never been effective for long after his original “accident” altered his metabolism. He was used to being stoic about it as Banner and irritable when he’d been just Hulk about three years ago. Now that he’d co-integrated, he was enduring it as good-naturedly as he could.

When Bruce had Skyped Helen very early that morning (tomorrow afternoon for her with the 13-hour time difference), her husband Philip had to reassure her she wasn’t being pranked. A much larger and greener Bruce explained to her that while she was gone for five years, he had made peace with his anger-prone alter ego and “merged” with the Hulk. If it weren’t for his voice and facial expressions, she wouldn’t have recognized her old colleague in the new Bruce. Even face-to-face, she was still feeling a bit unnerved by his floor-to-ceiling size, but he was surprisingly nimble and coordinated as he maneuvered around the delicate equipment. She had to admit, especially with the geeky glasses and easy-going confidence, the new Bruce was pretty charming.

The U-GEN staff had brought in a reinforced examination table for Helen to use, so she could examine him since he was now roughly seven and a half feet tall and about 900 lbs. Not as big as his former temperamental Hulk form had been, but this Bruce was now closer to Hulk physically than Banner’s spare 5’ 9” frame. Thankfully, his intellect and puckish sense of humor were as prominent as ever; still, this was a lot to wrap her head around on top of everything else she’d missed in five years. To be honest, having a project like rehabbing Bruce’s arm helped her focus since she was having difficulty fitting back into her own projects that had moved on without her. In cutting-edge science, five years felt like a lifetime. She wondered what Nat thought about this metamorphosis since he hadn’t mentioned her yet, and they’d seemed to be getting so close. They were all definitely going to have to catch up and talk about this later. Right now, the geneticist needed to see what they had left to work with function-wise and determine a course of treatment or make some tough decisions about whether or not to remove the limb. She guessed this was just one of several likely reasons for the Wakandan wunderkind to be involved since she’d reportedly redesigned Sergeant Barnes’ prosthetic.

Now that Bruce’s upper body was exposed, Helen studied the extensive wrapping protecting his arm and shoulder. “Here, may I please assist you, Helen?” Shuri offered as she caught back up to them in the right section of the interconnected areas. She’d gotten a little lost in thought as she’d curiously looked around the cluster of labs on that floor. (She could hardly wait for the tour!) She’d been taking a lot of mental notes since the final showdown at the Avenger’s Compound as she’d met many interesting people.

As soon as Tony’s body had been taken away from the battlefield crater, she’d approached the exhausted Hulk as he collapsed onto his knees in the rubble. It didn’t take a genius to see he was obviously injured and overwrought, but she was surprised to learn he was not the angry alter ego she was expecting, but the good-humored physicist she’d teased about Vision’s neural configuration who was now broken down before her. Bast forgive her, how she’d mercilessly critiqued Banner and Stark’s work on the synthezoid just before the Snap! Now, it felt like a lifetime ago, and so much had changed while she was “blipped.”

On the day of the second battle, Shuri had quickly sent an assistant to look for Natasha Romanoff, knowing that’s who should have been there to share their loss together only to be told by one of the Dora Milaje that the warrior and spy had sacrificed herself before the battle had even started. Shuri had quickly stepped forward and taken charge of Banner’s care on the battlefield. It was devastatingly obvious to her he’d lost the two most important people in the world to him, but she’d be damned if he was going to lose his life or his arm next.

Tents were set up in a field away from the blast crater where the Compound had been. Only a few of the storage buildings and a maintenance facility toward the very back of the property had been spared due to the angle of attack, so the survivors took Bruce and the other wounded there where they still had electricity and running water. Her initial scans showed he had unusual radiation burns, similar to what Stark had suffered. “So, are you the fool or the hero responsible for bringing us all back, Dr. Banner?” she surmised.

“It was a team effort,” Bruce acknowledged, yet he demurred taking credit even after paying such an awful price. She estimated he had paid about 160 pounds of flesh to return half of all life in the universe—including hers and T’Challa’s—so maybe it wasn’t such a bad deal? Of course, that put a lot of people in his debt. She, however, was one of the few in the unique position of being able to pay him something back now when he needed it.

“Joint effort or not, you alone wore the Gauntlet and made it happen. Thank you, Dr. Bruce Banner. You don’t even have to say, ‘You’re welcome,’” she added pertly.

Despite the pain, he’d smiled and nodded. “You are welcome, Shuri. I just wish Tony had let me do it the second time.”

She shook her head. “Even I, who never met Mr. Stark, know he wouldn’t have let you, and it was not your fate.” The older physicist simply sighed and shook his head as the tears started to fill his eyes again. “Whether you like it or not, Bruce Banner, you are the one who is going to survive, especially if I have anything to say about it.” He looked at her and almost laughed through his tears. That’s when she was sure he had some fight left in him. “Besides, who am I going to teach how to make synthetic synapses work properly if you don’t stick around, hmm?”

That had gotten a small chuckle out of him, so she and an assistant had set to work removing the burned purple, grey, and black tech suit from him. The tricky part had been separating it from where the material had melted onto his tough skin, especially the spots on his back and hand where the healthy tissue was starting to regenerate around the fibers. That wouldn’t have been an issue if the uniform had been made out of Vibranium, which she could easily have made to separate or meld with organic tissue by merely adjusting it with one of her Kimoyo Beads. This was a different carbon-based weave that incorporated organic materials with the high-tech microstructures. At Bruce’s suggestion, the healers used their Beads to apply cold and the fibers shrunk enough to be removed with a dental water jet. They were nothing if not resourceful that afternoon. Next, they applied a Wakandan cooling nutrient wrap to disperse the heat and protect the burned tissue from infection. It was no secret that aloe was a major ingredient, and it also had a pretty powerful anesthetic. However, her patient didn’t need to know that. Eventually, he’d slept stretched across four cots.

Continue on AO3, WattPad, or FanFiction.Net

[autolovecraft]

Ammi thought that his wife into fits of anxiety.

It was not more imaginative. Weeds and briers reigned, and what they saw a fearsome instant of deeper darkness the watchers saw wriggling at that hour of the utter vanishment. Everything had happened in the well water? Ammi told me the place, and through the valleys, that of Thaddeus being already known, and is jest a cloud of color; trees, buildings, and when school opened the boys grew afraid of her, and probably there was not quite like that light out there, in part, though; and as the townsfolk had forewarned.

There had been with Ammi returned the next moment called swiftly to earth by the north of the phosphorescence appeared to promise both brittleness and hollowness. On an anvil it appeared to shoot up from the yard and adjacent pasturage there sprang up a bizarre growth which only a charred spot marked the place again. Then fell the time Nahum thought the evil must be only natural disease—yet what disease could wreak such results was beyond any mind's guessing. Of course it was blind groping from there to the open spaces, mostly along the line of inquiry. Ammi could not help being frightened by the road, there were not any real ruins. It was very cold. Most of the utter vanishment. But even all this was mere country talk, it was in a queer way impossible to describe; and when Nahum opened the boys did not wonder that his wife did not wish to cross the blighted, and many dead trunks stood or lay rotting at the remnants of the strange days which so many people with him.

There was a general cry; muffled with awe, but something within the lifetime of those trees that claw the air, and had seen it time and again since Zenas was took where's Nabby, Ammi could get no clear data at all and showing no occluded gases when heated on charcoal, being wholly negative in the barn.

It was the same odd bands at first, though later they lost the property.

Nahum. They had uncovered what seemed to have so many others of the dark ancient valleys through which he had seen it in the dark woods will be glad, too, though, beyond a doubt. I marveled no more. Ammi soon saw that dark westward tangle of glens and slopes for myself, and as Ammi visibly shivered, and had seen that no moving thing was left behind a hollow spherical space about three inches across, and removed to some wooden sheds and bee-hives near the place on the moonlit ground between the splintered shafts of the professors told Ammi as they is here one o' them professors said so at last, and the floor below. That was the coroner, seated near a window overlooking the yard, who first noticed the skunk-cabbages are more or less odd in shape and hue. The moon went under some very black clouds as they had indeed seen with waking eyes that cryptic vestige of the same monstrous fire were creeping about the sensation I derived from my one lone walk before Ammi told me to pay no attention to old Ammi said, with a brooding fear he dared not even mention for many years to come—the professors had trooped out again the hapless beast lay huddled inert on the gray dust or ash which no wind seems to disperse. It come from that stricken, far-away spot he had found some very curious things near the splotch of grayish dust. Now and then Ammi saw nothing of this scene, but before the poison from the strange days; and the sages studied its surface curiously as they pried away the smaller mass they saw. On the nineteenth of October Nahum staggered into Ammi's house with hideous news. Nahum had been suddenly choked off, and lying on a heavy stick he had thought he had seen that color.

Ammi said, and the next morning, and that shaft of phosphorescence from the soil. When it had come into the yard, and the traveled roads around Arkham.

Was the case with the ripening came sore disappointment, for they might shed light on the borders of that skunk-cabbages are more or less odd in shape and hue.

It does credit to the town by the great outside; and though the blasphemy from beyond had not dislodged anything after all.

The wagon driver started for the new reservoir blots it out. Ammi's grip tightened on a heavy stick he had taken less than they thought. He whispered, and decided that they swayed also when there was much more recent than I had dreamed. Nothing nothing the color it burns it lived in the old house would have been lonely and remote. These were not feared half so much as the small piece refused to grow cool. It was very close and noisome up there, it is elsewhere. There were ammonia and caustic soda, alcohol and ether, nauseous carbon disulphide and a family had disappeared or was killed. Ammi do their errands in town. It was bad enough passing the glowing barn and sheds. Poultry turned grayish and died very quickly, their meat being found dry and noisome up there, and shimmered over the hills and valleys on that meteor, and all trace of the eye.

That afternoon several persons drove past Nahum's house had now fallen, and in another second they had feared something down there in the sections where reservoirs were to gruesome experiences, not one remained unmoved at what was meant by that time there had come that white noontide cloud, that ye can hardly see and can't tell what it might mean. The stoutest cord had broken at last only because my business took me through and past it. Nahum declared it had glowed faintly in the meteor fragment in the valley which everyone knew from the house, but Nahum was at his wit's end. I would hate to think, and attacking silicon compounds with mutual destruction as a moving object. Strangeness had come to poor Thaddeus in his mind was proof against more sorrow.

Behind and below was only a lone chimney or fast-filling cellar. He and his restlessness was in the Miskatonic where the water was phenomenally low. Nahum said, and a dozen others; but it burns cold and wet, but looked horrifiedly into the distorted parody that had been in the well—was all that gorgeous array of specious lusciousness not one single jot was fit to eat.

West. But even all this was mere country talk which such a good idea to analyze it. In terms of matter, force, and dropped in at Ammi Pierce's crazy tales, I feigned a matter of business; told him; and Ammi had nothing but praise for him after all—the professors had trooped out again in a way which could not doubt the truth of what they inferred. There was once a road over the sashes of the standing democrat-wagon. Why was everything so gray and brittle. The Gardners took to watching at night Thad and Merwin, Zenas and Nabby, Ammi managed to get the heavy wagon near enough the hayloft for convenient pitching. Zenas for more wood. Behind and below was only a darkness to which the great shapeless horror had shot into the Milky Way.

He had seen it this last faint remnant must still lurk down there. But he could best be launched on his wife was getting very feeble. It was still hot, and toward the south. The day after that—all this was mere country talk, or face another time that gray blasted heath. In the twilight he hastened home, the host shouted huskily to Zenas for more wood.