5 Years Ago
I sat with my legs up on the expensive solid oak conference table in the board room of labcorp international. To be honest the value had likely dropped with the fresh coat of blood and visra that now adorned it. The meeting room itself was also covered in the remains of the departed board members. Turns out twelve gauge hollow point slugs make a hell of a mess. I had planned this day for years. Every step and contingency planned and manipulated until fate itself decried these men as dead fools. I looked at the sleek semiautomatic shotgun that had fallen into my hands as I walked through the door. I knew that I couldn’t keep it, no trails leading back to me and all that, but it was a very nice gun with exactly the capacity necessary to finnish the job. I looked into the eyes of Jerimiah Renner, the former CEO and man who had killed my family with the stroke of a pen. A long chain of negligence and greed starting at this very table. I looked out at the New Harrisburg skyline from a penthouse view. Marring the landscape was a blue man wearing a cape.
“Oddball, your time has come villan”
Oh Barry, if only you knew. My brothers sense of melodrama aside this was still mostly to plan. I could see the look of conflict in his eyes as he stared at the mutilated corpses of the men who orphaned him. For a very brief moment he even looked relived that someone had done the hard job for him.
I looked out of windows, my eyes hidden behind my mask and I waved. That look of conflicted emotion washed away as his certainty of purpose returned. He flew through the window like it was tissue paper. Half of me chuckled at the thought of him bouncing off of it. The other half was already in motion.
His large blue fist blasted past my face at nearly the speed of sound. Screams erupted from the few office workers who had chosen to shelter in place rather than flew my earlier rampage. Barry blasted past and arrested himself midair before the back wall of the room could suffer the force of his anger. I had of course already dropped backwards out the now empty window frame.
I free fell for what felt like an eternity until I started to fly. I soared past the towering walls of the city’s glass moments to hubris and greed. I swooped through the openings between the buildings and still came face to face with my brother dearest.
“ There’s nowhere to run, this day has been a long time coming” He rubbled. Barry only used that low dangerous tone when he was doing his best to be too angry to have to think of wider implications.
I wasn't where I needed him to be yet. So I took off on a pattern that never gave him a clear shot with his neutron beam. The great downside to an ability that powerful is that the collateral damage is almost never justified. We flew at just below the speed of sound. Without the adjustments I'd made to my own biology I would have died to the G-forces alone as I wove and wound my way to the next part of my plan. As we approached the landfill I dove sharply.
Barry remained in hot pursuit and saw his chance for his shot with no civilians in the line of fire. His eyes glowed the fiery blue of cherenkov radiation before unleashing a pair of pinkie finger thin lines of atomic annihilation. They blasted right though my form, destroying the illusion of myself and detonated the core of a Malevolent Bot laying around to be scrapped. The ensuing explosion neatly wound around my invisible form defying all odds. Barry was tossed ass over teakettle into the sky.
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
As he broke the sound barrier heading back to strike my figure now standing in the crater he found his powers of flight failing. He struck the earth head first creating a man sized divot in the already compacted earth. I quietly lowered the odds of anyone seeing or recording this moment to zero. He looked up at me perplexed and I finally spoke while removing my mask.
“ Now would be a good time to talk about how your powers work”
“Odd! You’re Oddball!” The mixed look of shock, confusion, and horror on his face made me feel my first trace of guilt that day.
“ Yes” My reply was short because all there was to say was already spelled out by my actions.
“Why? Why would you have done all of this?”
Okay, maybe my brother who couched the world in black and white wouldn’t be able to read into it.
“ Because you’ve dedicated yourself to protecting the system that exists to protect the people who are a part of it. I’m going to bring it down and light it on fire with the assholes who built it still inside.”
I paused both for dramatic timing and to let my brother soke that in.
He rose to his feet and charged at me. I lowered the oxygen going to his muscles in his legs causing him to collapse.
“ How? I have a probability shield from my powers?”
“ No Barry, you have a probability shield from my ability.” Barry can’t play poker, the dawning realization that many of the ways his power worked despite not making sense started to click and showed clearly on his face.
“ My flight and my strength , is that you too?”
“ No, the day you unlocked your powers is the day I unlocked mine. I saw what was happening and desperately wished not to lose the only family I had left.”
“ Your powers changed me so I wouldn’t die from the radiation. You gave me the power to harness the thing that would have killed me.”
“ Not on purpose. I didn’t even know I could until it happened.”
” They say that the first expression of a person's powers are the benchmark for how powerful they will be. You overwrote my entire biology into something novel in an instant.” He looked scared now. It broke my heart to see him look at me with fear. I sat down in the dirt next to him, willing the dirt not to stick to my suit.
“ Mine too actually. I caught nearly as much exposure as you did. I don’t age now, I’m stronger than I have any right to be and more durable to boot.”
“ So why let me try and stop you? Why not just take me out of the fight? “
“Because the people you protect still deserve your protection. They are part of the system, not its architects. You’re not my enemy Barry. You’re just in the way… and you're still my Brother. I’m never going to try and take you out.”
“ Mr.Phantasm, you killed him!”
“ He fucked kids Barry. I wasn’t going out of my way but I definitely didn’t think twice or feel bad about it”
“oh” came his deflated replay. I felt horrible, Barry Idolized Mr.Phantasm.
“ When the Butcher of Black street disappeared, we always suspected you.”
“ Yeah that was me. Corporate scumbag that liked hunting the homeless for sport. Killed him for being a dick in his day job, the other thing was icing on the cake.”
The grim acceptance on his face as he reconciled one of his greatest foes and his only living family being one showed that he was starting to understand.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“ I just did. We didn’t have to have this chat.” Left unsaid was that now he got the benefit of knowing our parents were avenged and not sharing any guilt from aiding and abetting.
“ All this time.”
“ All this time, yeah.”
His fist flashed towards my face.