Salt on wounds is perhaps one of the least pleasant feelings an already suffering person can endure. For example, the papercut I received this morning thumbing over a letter from the hero Spectre caused me great agony. The pain of not getting my words onto the page was far more agonizing than the pain of clacking my wound against the keys, but when I paused to investigate a shred of forest-green fabric pertaining to the events of this chapter, the saltwater that had washed the scrap to the volcanic shore seemed to explode my poor pinky with a most unpleasant prickling. The dried salt nearly had me driving to the hospital.
It drove my inspiration for detailing the resourcefulness and bravery of Tobias MacClain. I hope that my readers may sympathize as deeply as I do with the pain of salt in wounds as Tobias pulled himself deeper into the blackened sea. With one leg and one hand, the man haggardly dragged his broken body through the ash-thick air, over the bubbling magma crevices and jagged terrain, down to the beach, into the water.
He left his bag on the shore and fell into the gentle waves. Bloody scissors trembled in his hand, piercing the sand like a mountain-climber’s pick. The thick sea around him turned to red. Grey and crimson tears streaked over his cheeks and pooled in the expanse. In the suffocating smog, the murky water seemed to stretch forever.
It attacked his wounds like the leeches of Lost Lake, the salt gripping each micrometer of flesh and sucking the strength out in puddles of red. Tobias sunk lower in the water, shuddering, eyes wide, and shaking hand still gripping the scissors without awareness, knuckles white. He swallowed and inhaled a long breath, then took off the melted mask.
Ash caught in his throat as he lowered the plastic to the beach. With one last rasping gasp, he slid his head under the water. Ears, cheek, nose, scalp. His goggles constricted against the swelling of his damages, and with a shout of bubbles and much thrashing, he tore them off and hurled them to the dry land, where months later, they would fall into my hands.
True to Snowpea’s statement, they were labeled with his initials, and his hero alias. One lens was cracked and both were caked in blood, salt, and ash. The lucky thing about these goggles, though they caused him pain and discomfort in the water where he thrashed, was how they saved his eye. Though the right half of Tobias’s once friendly-looking, ordinary face was mottled beyond saving or recognition, his right eye was at the very least functioning. Even with the swelling of the fresh wounds, the eye worked well enough in the water for him to make out the thinning of the red wisps surrounding him and he burst from the water to gasp in the unsatisfying air.
Blindly, he put on his mask, clicking it into place and adjusting to the oxygen supply. The bleeding was slowing, the wounds cleaning, and the adrenaline was weaning. Blackness clouded the edges of his vision and with his last trace of energy, he lugged himself one meek armlength further up the shore and lay with heavy breaths on his tortured back. Water lapped at his waist and he let out a long sigh, eyes rolling back. There was nothing left to do but embrace the peaceful inevitability of the black.
The day washed over him like the tide. It came and went just the same, and Tobias dozed deeply through it. Water rose to his chest and receded quietly over the hours to his toes. By the time he awoke, it lapped at his ribcage once again and the salt no longer so much as tickled. He stretched out and groaned, grabbing a fistful of his brittle brown hair.
Every ounce of flesh seemed to throb, sending a powerful ache throughout his being. As much as he desired to lay there forever, to give up, to let the tide sweep him away to somewhere peaceful, a much more powerful desire drove him to turn towards the medical bag and pull out his glasses case. He slid the circular spectacles up his nose, briefly lifting his mask, and carefully sat up. The taut skin of his better half wrestled with the sluggish, soft mush of his right. He winced and pulled the medical bag nearer.
There wasn’t enough of the burn gel to cover his entire body. In every future that he saw in which he applied the gel, he ran out. So, Tobias took one sparing coin-sized helping and rubbed it over his hand; its second helping. His hip, he figured, or his ribs, would not be so useful to him as his hand in the long run.
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The orange sky filled his mind with remembrance of the heat, the magma, the lava, and in the evening light, he turned to look at the slow, pulsating streams that trickled gently to the sea around him. A cool salty breeze mixed with the sulfur and caressed his raw skin. The ashen snow had thinned, and far on the horizon, he could just make out the shoreline of West Benediction, if he squinted.
Tobias lifted his watch and tapped it timidly with his welted, blistering hand. The shield flickered outwards and hardened, one long, curved rectangle of translucent octagonal lattices, his motto emblazoned on the front. He lodged it into the ground, swept up his bag, and heaved his limp body upwards.
Snowpea, he remembered, had mentioned that the side of the island that he was on was more dangerous, which implied that the other side was perhaps safer. Further, the other side of the island faced onto East Benediction, which contained much more pleasant things to think about than West Benediction. As opposed to the Penitentiary for Estranged Non-Typicals—the prison for wayward folks with superpowers, often called the “PENThouse”, and a place his future self would get to know intimately—of the West, the East district was home to things that people loved to love, such as the schools, the hangars of Peregrine’s Flight Services, the largest standing forest in the nation, and most importantly to Tobias, East Benediction was home to Viola Mae Reed.
The long, tiring, and precarious trek around the beach taught Tobias how challenging it was to use a shield as a crutch, and how much more challenging it was to use a shield as a crutch on shifting black sand with only one foot, while holding a fairly bulky, rectangular bag, and having markedly low stamina left. Eventually, he came across a little nook of old basalt that made for a perfect place to shelter on the beach. Away from the tide’s reach, away from the streams of lava, Tobias lowered himself gratefully into the small crescent of rock and stared out into the dark.
Benjamin Jones, he thought, was likely to be tucked comfortably under his covers. Tobias blinked down at where his leg should have been and could not help the turning of his gut and the boiling that followed. Meanwhile, his tunic hung off his body, burnt away on his one side, leaving him feeling exposed, awkward, and watched. His jaw clenched.
When their team had first formed, officially, Tobias had been naïve enough to believe that Benjamin’s failures to listen to his advice were just rookie mistakes that he would grow out of. Benjamin Jones never did grow out of those mistakes, just as Poppy Tris never grew out of her ability to stand by and let those mistakes happen. She had used her vines in the past to pull Tobias back and give Benjamin the room to “do his thing”, and it had saved him a few times. But Tobias had a problem with standing by, and in his stubbornness and burning need to do the right thing, sustained multiple injuries over the years among Defiance.
Once, Benjamin Jones swung a streetlamp around and around, preparing to throw it at a supervillain, and Tobias had shouted at him to put it down, for it was destined to land on top of a packed school bus. To stop the oh-so-heroic Mr. Might, Tobias had had to dive at him and swing on his arm, causing the post to fly off in a safer trajectory, while simultaneously scraping a large gash across his chest. Another scar from Benjamin Jones was one on his now missing right foot, which had permanently crooked toes from the time Tobias had broken his entire foot trying to slow and stop a grand piano from toppling over a building onto innocent passersby far below. He’d chased down grenades, he’d herded the public away from danger zones, he’d been bruised, beaten, battered, and even bitten in his countless and determined efforts to protect the people from Benjamin Jones and Poppy Tris and their daftness, and he refused to return to it. He never wanted to feel so powerless again.
Even after Tobias had been hospitalized for saving that bus of children, it was Benjamin Jones, Mr. Might, that received the love and attention, as if he hadn’t nearly murdered hundreds of the city’s future denizens. Even after Tobias served his duty for weeks with a moonboot cast, it was Benjamin Jones who pinned down the villain, it was Poppy Tris who bound him in vines, and it was Pajama Boy who remained ridiculed. No matter how much good Tobias did, he was never seen as a hero because he had little to no strength or speed and lacked dashing good looks. He wore a tunic instead of spandex because he didn’t have a “good” body. His nose was just crooked enough to look out of place, his eyes unremarkable and brown, his ears too big and too round and always sticking out. When he walked the short distance from his property to the university where he worked outside of justice, he was seldom recognized. When he was, it was only as the one guy that knew Mr. Might and Vine Voodoo. It was never as their teammate.
Well, the world would soon see how Benjamin Jones and Poppy Tris fared without him, wouldn’t they? And when he got off the island, they would see even more than that. They would see him, one day, when he was strong enough, and regret their ignorance.
One day, Tobias swore to himself. “I’ll show them exactly how it feels to be powerless.”