Heart of the Storm (Part 14)
Title: Heart of the Storm
Authors: lizynob and lorafantastory
Pairings: Oscar/Block as the Anna/Hans dynamic
Characters: Oscar Schlumper, Wayne Schlumper, Dr. Block, Dr. Tease, minor mentions of Party Mania characters
Word Count: 47,002
Warnings: Descriptions of anxiety, some bullying, angst, references to death
Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8, Chapter 9, Chapter 10, Chapter 11, Chapter 12, Chapter 13, Chapter 15, Epilogue, Bonus Content
First Time In Forever
Wayne took a deep breath before walking through Oscar’s doorway. Unlike his own, the door to Oscar’s room was almost always left wide open. It didn’t surprise him, really. Oscar almost always left himself wide open too. But something had changed between them, and he couldn’t help but wonder if he was still as welcome in that room as he had been before.
When he did step in, though, he nearly dropped the pair of plates. Oscar’s eyes were closed and he was lying limply back against the pillows, looking so, so much the way he had up on the ridge. Panic welled up inside Wayne, lightning hissing up the sides of his wrists. Had something happened while he was in the kitchen? Had his heartbeat faltered again? He hurried to drop the plates to the nightstand. Don’t let him be dead, don’t let him be-
Oscar’s eyes opened at the clatter of dishes and Wayne’s own heart started back up again. His brother’s eyes were clear and alert, as they should be. He’s okay. He’s fine. Wayne let out a long breath, the lightning easing once more as he assured himself of that fact. Calm down. He’s fine.
He gathered himself as quickly as he could, righting the overturned chair. “Hi again. I, um, brought some water. I’d get you coffee too, but I’d rather not put any undue stress on your heart just now.”
“Hi…” Oscar answered back, looking like he’d almost been asleep and was trying to wake back up. “Water’s fine. Sorry for dozing off there. I just...felt tired.” He sounded embarrassed.
“Don’t be sorry, that’s normal after what you went through,” Wayne said before offering out a plate of tuna and a glass of water to his brother.
After his first poor attempt at getting vertical again, Oscar almost wasn’t sure he could. But the dizzy haze he had initially woken up to had passed, and he found it wasn’t so much of a struggle to sit himself upright against his headboard, though he tried not to move around too much.
He gingerly accepted the plate Wayne held out and set it in his lap, then accepted the cup and took a long sip.
“This is fine,” he said. “Thank you. I honestly am hungry. Then again, like you said, it’s been…a while since we’ve eaten.” Oscar didn’t trust himself to keep speaking and cut himself off by taking another drink of water, which he then moved to set aside on the nightstand. But his hand hovered in the air as he looked down at a blackened mark, one that was in the form of a palm print. Oscar stared down at it for several long seconds but eventually set his cup down on top of it and turned his attention back to the food in his lap, making no mention of it out loud.
Even though he’d known he was hungry, he hadn’t realized just how hungry he actually was until he began eating. Every bite made him realize how woefully empty his stomach was, and he gratefully ate up what Wayne had brought.
Wayne downed his meal almost as fast as Oscar did, feeling much less self-conscious about scarfing the tuna when his brother was doing it too. Neither one of them had had anything decent to eat in over thirty six hours, and both were perfectly fine with everything else taking a backseat to food for the moment.
The companionable lull couldn’t last, though. Food could only take up so much time, and there were still things that needed to be addressed.
When his plate was empty, Wayne sat back in the chair and cleared his throat awkwardly. “I, um…” There were a million things he should probably say, but none of them were coming easily to his mouth. “I’m sorry, for one thing. I’ve made an awful mess of both our lives, it looks like. I almost...almost lost my chance to apologize. I’m sorry for pushing you away and for…” He waved a vague finger at his heart. “I’ve held back on so many things that I...I honestly don’t know where to start. I know you’ve always had a thing for questions so…” He spread his arms helplessly. “Ask away, if you like.”
Oscar set his fork down, wondering if he’d heard right. Wayne was actually inviting him to ask questions? About...anything? About everything?
For a minute, he could only sit there gaping at the opportunity Wayne was giving him. It was an offer he knew could not possibly afford to be wasted, and his mind scrambled to gather his most burning questions lest Wayne ended up changing his mind.
He had countless questions about the lightning itself and Wayne’s experiences with it, but after a bit of thought he realized those weren’t the answers he wanted most just yet. Curious as he was about the topic, it didn’t take Oscar long to decide what he really needed to hear.
“How long was I dead?” he asked softly.
Wayne’s throat tightened. “A few seconds, I think. Any longer than that and I don’t think I’d have been able to bring you back.” He ran a hand through his hair, static twisting the already-disheveled strands. “A few seconds, was that it? It felt so much longer.”
“I’m still trying to wrap my head around that,” Oscar admitted. “Dying, I mean. Not you defibrillating my heart. Well, that a little bit too I guess, but mostly just…knowing I died. I don’t remember thinking much about it at the time. I remember being sure that I wasn’t going to make it, but the only thing I could care about was getting back up that stupid ravine.” Oscar looked down slightly. “Not that I made much of a difference I suppose. My memory of that part is fuzzy, but I’m sure you could have handled yourself.” He looked back up and made an attempt at a smile. “You do have a pretty good means of self-defense.”
Wayne winced. “In all honesty, I didn’t have things in hand at all,” he replied sheepishly. “With practice maybe this could make a decent defense, but I don’t know how to fight. I was facing two people and I sure as hell wasn’t thinking clearly. I was so focused on What’s-her-face with the gun that I wasn’t paying attention to Block. It was your intervention that kept me from getting hit with her projectiles.” He looked his brother in the eyes. “You really did save my life, Oscar. No matter how many times I’ve pushed you away, you’re always there when I need you most. I...I think I’ve misjudged how much I really depend on you.”
Despite that fact that Oscar greatly appreciated those words, the air threatened to turn awkward again for the simple fact that it was so strange to hear Wayne say something like that.
“You haven’t always made it easy,” Oscar confessed. “But we are still brothers after all. I’d never forgive myself if you needed me and I wasn’t there.”
Wayne turned his gaze down to his lap. “I’ve always cared about you, Oscar,” he admitted quietly. “I love you; I always have. I’m just...astoundingly terrible at showing it.” He rubbed one hand absently. “I told you before, fear makes the lightning worse. Anger does too, though I think I can deal with that a little better. So many strong emotions will bring it out and until now I’ve done everything I could to suppress it. When it got to be too much...when I was afraid it would get past the gloves...I’d lock myself in my room.”
He brought his eyes up to meet his brother’s once more, silently pleading for Oscar to understand. “I haven’t told you nearly enough but I have cared. So much. I’ve just never let you see. I love you more than anything else in this world and I’m sorry that I made you think I didn’t, I’m so sorry. I want you to be happy. You have no idea how much I do. But I also don’t want you dead. Cutting you off from me was the only way I could think of to keep from killing you.”
Oscar suddenly became very self-conscious of the bandages wrapped around his chest. Wayne had done what he did to try to keep him safe and alive, and, well, he’d gone and ruined that plan entirely. “I understand that now,” Oscar said. “But I’m glad I know the truth because...” The small smile he had managed to give Wayne disappeared and his expression turned into one of hurt. “Where you really never going to tell me? Ever? Just have our whole lives be like it has been for the past twenty years? How could you do that to me? How could you do that to yourself?”
Wayne’s heart sank down into his shoes at the pained accusation in Oscar’s face. He’d seen betrayal there many more times than he’d ever wanted to. “I was eight,” he tried to explain. “Oscar, I was fucking eight years old. The first thing I ever saw the lightning do was put you in the hospital. I was sure that I’d killed you! I was so...I was terrified. I couldn’t...couldn’t go through that again.” He fidgeted under his brother’s eyes as old shames were dragged to the surface. “I’m not proud. I just...I was eight. I was sure that Mom and Dad would hate me if they found out, or that you would hate me. After enough time went by, I couldn’t just admit it several years too late. Not when everyone had put it behind them.
“I never wanted this-” he nodded down at the sparks that had begun to flow gently off his fingers. “I tried so hard to crush it, to just have some semblance of a normal life because every aspect of it just terrified me. I was afraid of being regarded as an even bigger freak in school than I already was. I was afraid of becoming someone else’s science experiment or just having my whole life upended because suddenly someone else found out about this. So I just kept it secret from everyone. Call it cowardice, if you like. It wasn’t at all fair to either of us, you’re right. I just...I didn’t know what else to do…”
Oscar listened to Wayne with a heavy heart and let out a long sigh. “I don’t suppose I can sit here and judge you too much,” he said as he watched the small sparks of electricity roll off Wayne’s hands in delicate arcs. “It’s not like I can pretend to know what life has been like for you, or say that I would have been any less scared and confused if I was in your shoes. I do wish things had been different. I wish a lot of things had been different. But there’s nothing that either of us can do about what’s already happened.”
He looked up and stared hard into Wayne’s eyes. “I don’t want to be mad at you, Wayne. I don’t know if I can just forgive you for everything all at once right now, but I don’t have it in me to hold a grudge against you over this. We can deal with it together. I don’t really know how yet, but if you’d just let me work with you, I know we can put together some sort of plan. We’re brothers, Wayne, and I want us to be brothers. I don’t want us to just keep being polite co-workers that happen to live under the same roof.”
Wayne nodded quietly. “I’d like us to be brothers again too. That would...be nice. I don’t quite know what we could possibly come up with, but I...I’d like to have a brother again.” He sighed, leaning back in the chair as the electricity faded to nothing once more. “This is going to take some getting used to, I’m sure. On both our parts. It’s already strange to just be letting the lightning happen and not trying to contain it all the time. I’m sure it’s going to be even stranger to try and open up a bit more to you. It’s been so many years...I’m not sure where to start, to be honest.”
“It can’t be that strange, can it?” Oscar asked. “I mean, we’ve already kinda started. We’re not...that distant, are we?”
He paused in thought, as if he were trying to determine the answer to that himself, but he quickly broke into another small smile. “But if it’d make you feel better, we can always just start from the very beginning I guess.” He sat up straighter and gave Wayne a small wave. “Hi, Wayne. I’m Oscar. I’m your brother.”
Wayne laughed, he couldn’t help it. Of all the ways to approach their particular problem, leave it to Oscar to come up with one that was both utterly ridiculous and - secretly - one that he felt he might just need. He waved back. “Hello, Oscar. I’m Wayne. I was born three years before you.”
Oscar laughed a bit too. “It’s nice to meet you, Wayne,” he said before automatically sticking his hand out as one would normally do in a formal greeting.
His hand stayed out there between them for a few seconds while the lighthearted mood came to a quick end as Oscar saw Wayne staring, and he realized his obvious mistake.
“Sorry,” Oscar said quietly, awkwardly pulling his hand back a bit.
Before he could take it back entirely, though, Wayne had grasped it. The two of them stared at the clasped hands for a long, long minute, both looking equally shocked.
Wayne’s thought processes had ground to a halt. He was holding his brother’s hand. After so many years of pulling back, of keeping his skin covered and insulated, of moving his chairs an extra inch or so away, he was holding his brother’s hand. It was warm and gentle, with writing calluses and little rough patches here and there from ages of working with science equipment and chemicals.
His skin was pressing against Oscar’s, and for once in his life there was no fear involved. There was no frenzied life-saving to be done. His brain hadn’t caught up with the possibility of delivering a shock yet. It was just...contact. Human contact. With his brother.
Slowly, he shook Oscar’s hand. “It’s...nice to meet you,” he whispered.
The sensation of touch was staggering. It was something so small, but those few square inches of skin overwhelmed his perception.
And through the skin, if he focused, he could feel the electrical signals of his brother’s heartbeat.
His vision blurred and Wayne realized distantly that he was crying.
Oscar panicked for a moment as tears started streaming down Wayne’s face. He very nearly pulled his hand back simply because the moment had obviously upset Wayne. But Wayne didn’t waver in his tentative hold and so Oscar didn’t move. He did however, try to calm his brother down.
“Hey,” he said softly, trying to get Wayne to look at him. “It’s okay. It’s okay, Wayne.” He tried to keep his voice even and not let his confusion make anything worse.
“It’s not.” Wayne shook his head slightly, voice cracking. “This is...Oscar, you don’t understand - before this whole mess started, the last time I touched anyone I was eight years old.” He moved his free hand to his mouth, eyes never straying from where his skin met his brother’s. His cheeks were slick with salt water. “My God… It’s been so long… I’d forgotten so many things and I never even realized…” He tightened his grip. “It...it is like meeting you for the first time. I...I can’t even explain it, it’s a million things...and I can’t put it into words but…my God…”
The sheer wonder in Wayne’s voice would have been endearing if the reasons behind it weren’t so horrifying. Oscar couldn’t even fathom what it would be like to not touch anything or anyone for one year, and Wayne had endured it for twenty. Oscar had stopped giving any thought to Wayne’s gloves long before he had even finished grade school. It had simply been something that was, and while growing up he had never thought of it too differently than boys who always wore blue jeans no matter what or girls who wore hair barrettes every single day. Sure there were occasional instances when Oscar wondered why Wayne would never take them off when wearing them seemed uncomfortable, cumbersome, or just plain odd. But it never occurred to him that Wayne’s gloves were a prison. Given his unrelenting insistence upon wearing them, Oscar had just sort of accepted that Wayne, for whatever reason, wanted things to be that way.
Knowing the truth, Oscar honestly could not imagine how Wayne had lived like that. Seeing his overwhelmed reaction to such a simple thing was enough to make his heart ache.
Tears of his own started welling up and he was powerless to hold them back. He slowly reached out his other arm and very carefully, very gently, rested his left hand on Wayne’s shoulder.
“I wish we had met a lot sooner,” he said in a cracking voice, completely serious.
Finally Wayne dragged his eyes away from the handshake and up to meet his brother’s. “Me too,” he whispered. The touch on his shoulder was unfamiliar and he had to fight the instinct to smack it away. Hesitantly, he brought the hand from his mouth down to rest on top of Oscar’s. It was such an alien sensation but...it was a nice one.
It was his now, he realized in surprise. However long it had taken them to come to this point, the sensations were now his to keep. He never had to give them up again. His fingers tightened as his brother’s heartbeat came at him in stereo, then loosened as he released the shoulder touch and very, very carefully brushed Oscar’s tears from one cheek. There was no reason those should be there.
“But we have met now. And there’s no taking that back.” He sighed and scrubbed at his eyes with the heel of one palm. “I’m sorry. I’ve had a bit of a day.”
Oscar laughed shakily while a few more stray tears slipped out and he had to remove his hand from Wayne’s shoulder in order to wipe them away. “You’re not the only one.”
Wayne released Oscar’s hand hesitantly, reassuring himself with the thought that he could take it again anytime he wanted to, and ran a thumb over his bare palm. “I’m not going back to those,” he murmured quietly. At Oscar’s questioning glance he elaborated. “The gloves. I’m not going back to them, not after that.” He let sparks dance over his fingertips once more. “It’s like...having lived all your life in a stuffy little box and then all of a sudden the lid opens and you can breathe.” The sparks were the graceful kind at the moment, falling through the air like little embers. “It’s not just the touch. For the first time, up on that ridge with no reason to hold back...I was free. I could play. I never knew I could do all these impossible things. I had no idea I could weld, much less build a fortress…”
His eyes snapped wide open. “Oh God. The fortress. It’s still up there.”
In an instant, the two were forced to confront the fact that not only had the recent events affected them, but also dozens of other people. All the newfound emotional connections between them didn’t change the fact that Wayne had heavily damaged a conference room full of witnesses, set off a fiasco that ended up blocking out a whole road, and created a sizable building structure where there previously was none.
“Oh…” Oscar suddenly wasn’t sure what to say. “Uh...well…”
Wayne slumped back in the chair as the consequences of what had happened occurred to him for the first time. “Fuck, I’m going to jail,” he murmured in disbelief, electricity zipping lightly up his arms. “Destruction of property, theft, attempted murder, probably manslaughter too, whatever building a castle on someone else’s land counts as, and probably a few other things I’m not thinking of. I’ve got to have an arrest warrant a mile long.”
The thought of Wayne being carted off right after they’d finally opened up to each other wasn’t something Oscar could handle. “We could...perhaps we could leave town?”
Wayne stood, pacing to the wall and back again as possibilities ran through his mind and were dismissed just as quickly. Tiny bolts hissed through the air around him, but he didn’t seem to notice. “No,” he muttered breathlessly, “I don’t think you’re up for that yet. I don’t want to risk forcing you into anything like that this soon. You still need to recover.” His fingers twitched and Oscar could feel the static from several feet away. “I can’t go to jail. I will not be stuffed back into that box.”
“Wayne...” Oscar said warily as the crackling in the air grew louder and his hair began to stand on end. “Wayne, you need to try to calm down. We’ll figure something out, okay?”
Calming down was the last thing on Wayne’s mind. “Oh God, if they take me to jail and I start sparking, I’ll get put into a lab for sure,” he rambled. “I won’t have any rights and the state will take over and oh no, no, no.”
“That’s not going to happen, Wayne,” Oscar hurriedly tried to reassure him. “Please, just breathe for a minute.”
“Maybe...maybe I can leave now and you can follow later. No, I won’t leave you in this state, that’s no good.” The edges of Wayne’s clothes swirled in invisible currents that were especially jarring to see indoors. “I could try to fight - no I can’t, I’d be up against police and SWAT teams and who knows what else; there’d be way too many…” His pacing was growing more and more frantic as no solution presented itself, electricity spiraling sharply up and down his arms. “But I can’t get arrested, that would be the end of me-”
“Wayne!!” Oscar cut him off sharply, needing his brother to stop talking himself into hysteria before he did something regrettable.
His shout broke through a little too well though because Wayne jumped in surprise and a thin bolt of lightning arced off his hands and over to Oscar’s desk lamp where a burn instantly appeared at the spot where the cord connected to the base.
All at once he realized just how much electricity was flying off of him, and his eyes widened in horror. “Shit!” Not now, not now, stop it- not inside where things could break and people could be hurt. Wayne pulled back as hard as he could but the lightning refused to lessen.
Cold fear gripped him. “Oh no…” It was getting out of control again. He’d let it go too far and he could no longer reign it in. He jammed his hands into his armpits but the lightning was already all over him, spitting out to bite at the desk and anything else nearby. Hold it in, hold it in!
Oscar could see the panic building in Wayne’s eyes as the storm in the room grew steadily worse. “It’ll be all right!” he insisted, though the platitudes were empty in such a situation. “Just calm down-”
“I can’t!” Wayne cast up at his brother desperately, terror pounding through him. Every bolt that split the air made him acutely aware of just how confined a space the bedroom was. His eyes flew immediately to the blonde streak in the younger man’s hair. In order to get to the door he’d have to pass by Oscar, and the thought of striking his brother yet again only made the panicked surges come stronger. “I - I can’t stop it!”
Oscar’s heart was also pounding as he desperately tried to think of what to do. If either of them tried to move, the lightning was bound to hit him, and he definitely wasn’t up for getting struck twice in a row. Maybe if they could get it to hit something else instead, he’d have a few seconds to get away while it was channeled elsewhere? Oscar swiftly looked around his room. Where would it hit first? Electricity took the path of least resistance, right? Whatever conduit was easiest to get to the ground.
The ground. A thought hit him. That was it! Not even the ground, just a ground.
“Wayne!” Oscar yelled. A wild idea was forming and he didn’t have time to spell it all out. He looked down for just a second and grabbed the fork on the plate Wayne had brought earlier. “Catch!” He threw the metal utensil at his brother who reflexively grabbed it. Oscar pointed over at the wall. “The third hole in the outlet. This can work, trust me!”
“What?!” Wayne couldn’t think straight at all, nearly blinded by the fear of killing his brother all over again. He pressed himself back against the far wall as the lights flickered erratically. “No, nonono-”
“Stick it in the outlet!” Oscar ordered. “Give it a ground!”
Wayne fumbled with the utensil, unable to reason clearly enough to do anything but follow directions. The fork, being a fork, was nowhere near the right shape to fit inside a power outlet. Without thinking, he sent a pulse of heat through the metal that fused the prongs together, then jammed it into the third hole.
The lightning raced for the new path of escape, flowing hot and strong down his arm and into the wall. The crackling in the air around him faded and after a moment the lights stabilized once more.
Wayne gaped, speechless as the roiling energy inside him moved outward and away. Fear and confusion pulsed through him but it was not escaping through his skin. He was, quite literally, grounded.
The static-heavy air began to return to normal, and the two of them watched all visible trace of electricity vanish from the room.
Wayne’s mind was spinning but without the traction to really grab onto anything. He could ground himself. He could give the lightning an avenue to escape and it would leave him. True, he would keep generating it as long as emotions kept riding high, but he could release it in a safe way.
The fear was draining away to be replaced by astonishment.
“I…” Words were failing him spectacularly as he finally let go of the metal connected to the outlet. “We...I think we’re going to need a new fork.”
Oscar wanted to laugh, but his breaths were coming out in pants. His heart was hammering like he’d just run a mile, and a burning pain was all over his chest and shoulder. He slumped back against the headboard of the bed as a dizzying weakness overcame him.
The blood drained from Wayne’s face as he caught sight of Oscar and all at once the shock was gone and he was scrambling over to his brother’s side. “Oh God. No, no not again. Did I hit you?!” He pressed a hand to Oscar’s chest, observing quickly that there were no singe marks on the pajama shirt. The electrical pulses of the heartbeat under his fingers were quick, though, and just a little bit erratic, and it was all he could do to hold the fresh wave of panic down.
“No...you didn’t...hit me,” Oscar said in between shallow gasps of air. “I think I just...got a little overexcited there…” He tensed up, momentarily gripping the bedsheets against the pain. “And I think I….twisted around too fast...God that stings…”
“Your heart shouldn’t be under this much stress.” Wayne struggled to get himself under control even as he worked to figure out what exactly Oscar needed. “Not so soon. Lie down.” He helped his brother to lie back against the mattress. “Take it easy for a moment. I think...I think we both need to calm down.” He forced himself to breathe deep in an effort to follow his own advice, but he still kept a light touch on Oscar’s chest, listening intently to the beats to make sure their pattern wasn’t beginning to break down again.
Oscar found it difficult to keep his eyes open once he’d been settled back down against the pillows. He felt unbelievably exhausted, and he still hadn’t so much as tried to get out of bed since he’d initially woken. It began to dawn on him that maybe he wouldn’t be leaving his bed for some time.
It was difficult for him to react to that thought, though. Reacting to anything at the moment was painful, and it was all he could do to catch his breath again. Not moving helped to lessen the ache on his shoulder. It still hurt, like the worst possible sunburn, but fatigue was doing its job to help numb him to the worst of that as well.
It was clear to Wayne from the exhaustion on Oscar’s face that any more immediate strain on his brother’s body would be a very bad idea. He debated fiercely with himself over the myriad things that were fighting for importance. They shouldn’t stay here, or at least he shouldn’t. He didn’t know where he could go, but incarceration was not an option he could deal with. Oscar’s condition, though, was tenuous. Wayne had no idea how long he would need looking after. Could he really risk staying to be arrested for that long?
A good look at Oscar’s tired face made up his mind. Yes, he decided. Yes he could. He had only just met his brother again. He could not afford to lose that connection so quickly.
The blonde patch in Oscar’s hair stood out at him, as it always did.
He had a lot to make up for.
“You know what?” he murmured. “You should rest. I’ll deal with this. I don’t know how, but I’ll find some way.” He tugged the blanket up over Oscar’s shoulders. “You’ve been through a lot. You need to heal.”
Oscar smiled slightly, not knowing if Wayne genuinely believed things would be okay or if his brother was only saying so for his benefit, but the words were comforting nonetheless.
“We’ll find some way,” he corrected. His breathing was still slightly labored, but he was calming down and allowed his eyes to fall shut at Wayne’s insistence of rest. He could do rest.
Wayne kept a hand on Oscar’s chest until the younger man was asleep, something that didn’t take very long at all, and then for a time after. Heartbeat and breathing rhythm and the natural warmth of homeostasis assaulted his senses, combating the fear of a clouded future and - somehow - winning. The sensation engulfed him and kept the lightning at bay. He held onto it like a lifeline as he tried to work out some kind of solution to everything. He couldn’t see one yet, but he had Oscar depending on him.
And he would not let Oscar down.
Authors: lizynob and lorafantastory
Pairings: Oscar/Block as the Anna/Hans dynamic
Characters: Oscar Schlumper, Wayne Schlumper, Dr. Block, Dr. Tease, minor mentions of Party Mania characters
Word Count: 47,002
Warnings: Descriptions of anxiety, some bullying, angst, references to death
Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8, Chapter 9, Chapter 10, Chapter 11, Chapter 12, Chapter 13, Chapter 15, Epilogue, Bonus Content
First Time In Forever
Wayne took a deep breath before walking through Oscar’s doorway. Unlike his own, the door to Oscar’s room was almost always left wide open. It didn’t surprise him, really. Oscar almost always left himself wide open too. But something had changed between them, and he couldn’t help but wonder if he was still as welcome in that room as he had been before.
When he did step in, though, he nearly dropped the pair of plates. Oscar’s eyes were closed and he was lying limply back against the pillows, looking so, so much the way he had up on the ridge. Panic welled up inside Wayne, lightning hissing up the sides of his wrists. Had something happened while he was in the kitchen? Had his heartbeat faltered again? He hurried to drop the plates to the nightstand. Don’t let him be dead, don’t let him be-
Oscar’s eyes opened at the clatter of dishes and Wayne’s own heart started back up again. His brother’s eyes were clear and alert, as they should be. He’s okay. He’s fine. Wayne let out a long breath, the lightning easing once more as he assured himself of that fact. Calm down. He’s fine.
He gathered himself as quickly as he could, righting the overturned chair. “Hi again. I, um, brought some water. I’d get you coffee too, but I’d rather not put any undue stress on your heart just now.”
“Hi…” Oscar answered back, looking like he’d almost been asleep and was trying to wake back up. “Water’s fine. Sorry for dozing off there. I just...felt tired.” He sounded embarrassed.
“Don’t be sorry, that’s normal after what you went through,” Wayne said before offering out a plate of tuna and a glass of water to his brother.
After his first poor attempt at getting vertical again, Oscar almost wasn’t sure he could. But the dizzy haze he had initially woken up to had passed, and he found it wasn’t so much of a struggle to sit himself upright against his headboard, though he tried not to move around too much.
He gingerly accepted the plate Wayne held out and set it in his lap, then accepted the cup and took a long sip.
“This is fine,” he said. “Thank you. I honestly am hungry. Then again, like you said, it’s been…a while since we’ve eaten.” Oscar didn’t trust himself to keep speaking and cut himself off by taking another drink of water, which he then moved to set aside on the nightstand. But his hand hovered in the air as he looked down at a blackened mark, one that was in the form of a palm print. Oscar stared down at it for several long seconds but eventually set his cup down on top of it and turned his attention back to the food in his lap, making no mention of it out loud.
Even though he’d known he was hungry, he hadn’t realized just how hungry he actually was until he began eating. Every bite made him realize how woefully empty his stomach was, and he gratefully ate up what Wayne had brought.
Wayne downed his meal almost as fast as Oscar did, feeling much less self-conscious about scarfing the tuna when his brother was doing it too. Neither one of them had had anything decent to eat in over thirty six hours, and both were perfectly fine with everything else taking a backseat to food for the moment.
The companionable lull couldn’t last, though. Food could only take up so much time, and there were still things that needed to be addressed.
When his plate was empty, Wayne sat back in the chair and cleared his throat awkwardly. “I, um…” There were a million things he should probably say, but none of them were coming easily to his mouth. “I’m sorry, for one thing. I’ve made an awful mess of both our lives, it looks like. I almost...almost lost my chance to apologize. I’m sorry for pushing you away and for…” He waved a vague finger at his heart. “I’ve held back on so many things that I...I honestly don’t know where to start. I know you’ve always had a thing for questions so…” He spread his arms helplessly. “Ask away, if you like.”
Oscar set his fork down, wondering if he’d heard right. Wayne was actually inviting him to ask questions? About...anything? About everything?
For a minute, he could only sit there gaping at the opportunity Wayne was giving him. It was an offer he knew could not possibly afford to be wasted, and his mind scrambled to gather his most burning questions lest Wayne ended up changing his mind.
He had countless questions about the lightning itself and Wayne’s experiences with it, but after a bit of thought he realized those weren’t the answers he wanted most just yet. Curious as he was about the topic, it didn’t take Oscar long to decide what he really needed to hear.
“How long was I dead?” he asked softly.
Wayne’s throat tightened. “A few seconds, I think. Any longer than that and I don’t think I’d have been able to bring you back.” He ran a hand through his hair, static twisting the already-disheveled strands. “A few seconds, was that it? It felt so much longer.”
“I’m still trying to wrap my head around that,” Oscar admitted. “Dying, I mean. Not you defibrillating my heart. Well, that a little bit too I guess, but mostly just…knowing I died. I don’t remember thinking much about it at the time. I remember being sure that I wasn’t going to make it, but the only thing I could care about was getting back up that stupid ravine.” Oscar looked down slightly. “Not that I made much of a difference I suppose. My memory of that part is fuzzy, but I’m sure you could have handled yourself.” He looked back up and made an attempt at a smile. “You do have a pretty good means of self-defense.”
Wayne winced. “In all honesty, I didn’t have things in hand at all,” he replied sheepishly. “With practice maybe this could make a decent defense, but I don’t know how to fight. I was facing two people and I sure as hell wasn’t thinking clearly. I was so focused on What’s-her-face with the gun that I wasn’t paying attention to Block. It was your intervention that kept me from getting hit with her projectiles.” He looked his brother in the eyes. “You really did save my life, Oscar. No matter how many times I’ve pushed you away, you’re always there when I need you most. I...I think I’ve misjudged how much I really depend on you.”
Despite that fact that Oscar greatly appreciated those words, the air threatened to turn awkward again for the simple fact that it was so strange to hear Wayne say something like that.
“You haven’t always made it easy,” Oscar confessed. “But we are still brothers after all. I’d never forgive myself if you needed me and I wasn’t there.”
Wayne turned his gaze down to his lap. “I’ve always cared about you, Oscar,” he admitted quietly. “I love you; I always have. I’m just...astoundingly terrible at showing it.” He rubbed one hand absently. “I told you before, fear makes the lightning worse. Anger does too, though I think I can deal with that a little better. So many strong emotions will bring it out and until now I’ve done everything I could to suppress it. When it got to be too much...when I was afraid it would get past the gloves...I’d lock myself in my room.”
He brought his eyes up to meet his brother’s once more, silently pleading for Oscar to understand. “I haven’t told you nearly enough but I have cared. So much. I’ve just never let you see. I love you more than anything else in this world and I’m sorry that I made you think I didn’t, I’m so sorry. I want you to be happy. You have no idea how much I do. But I also don’t want you dead. Cutting you off from me was the only way I could think of to keep from killing you.”
Oscar suddenly became very self-conscious of the bandages wrapped around his chest. Wayne had done what he did to try to keep him safe and alive, and, well, he’d gone and ruined that plan entirely. “I understand that now,” Oscar said. “But I’m glad I know the truth because...” The small smile he had managed to give Wayne disappeared and his expression turned into one of hurt. “Where you really never going to tell me? Ever? Just have our whole lives be like it has been for the past twenty years? How could you do that to me? How could you do that to yourself?”
Wayne’s heart sank down into his shoes at the pained accusation in Oscar’s face. He’d seen betrayal there many more times than he’d ever wanted to. “I was eight,” he tried to explain. “Oscar, I was fucking eight years old. The first thing I ever saw the lightning do was put you in the hospital. I was sure that I’d killed you! I was so...I was terrified. I couldn’t...couldn’t go through that again.” He fidgeted under his brother’s eyes as old shames were dragged to the surface. “I’m not proud. I just...I was eight. I was sure that Mom and Dad would hate me if they found out, or that you would hate me. After enough time went by, I couldn’t just admit it several years too late. Not when everyone had put it behind them.
“I never wanted this-” he nodded down at the sparks that had begun to flow gently off his fingers. “I tried so hard to crush it, to just have some semblance of a normal life because every aspect of it just terrified me. I was afraid of being regarded as an even bigger freak in school than I already was. I was afraid of becoming someone else’s science experiment or just having my whole life upended because suddenly someone else found out about this. So I just kept it secret from everyone. Call it cowardice, if you like. It wasn’t at all fair to either of us, you’re right. I just...I didn’t know what else to do…”
Oscar listened to Wayne with a heavy heart and let out a long sigh. “I don’t suppose I can sit here and judge you too much,” he said as he watched the small sparks of electricity roll off Wayne’s hands in delicate arcs. “It’s not like I can pretend to know what life has been like for you, or say that I would have been any less scared and confused if I was in your shoes. I do wish things had been different. I wish a lot of things had been different. But there’s nothing that either of us can do about what’s already happened.”
He looked up and stared hard into Wayne’s eyes. “I don’t want to be mad at you, Wayne. I don’t know if I can just forgive you for everything all at once right now, but I don’t have it in me to hold a grudge against you over this. We can deal with it together. I don’t really know how yet, but if you’d just let me work with you, I know we can put together some sort of plan. We’re brothers, Wayne, and I want us to be brothers. I don’t want us to just keep being polite co-workers that happen to live under the same roof.”
Wayne nodded quietly. “I’d like us to be brothers again too. That would...be nice. I don’t quite know what we could possibly come up with, but I...I’d like to have a brother again.” He sighed, leaning back in the chair as the electricity faded to nothing once more. “This is going to take some getting used to, I’m sure. On both our parts. It’s already strange to just be letting the lightning happen and not trying to contain it all the time. I’m sure it’s going to be even stranger to try and open up a bit more to you. It’s been so many years...I’m not sure where to start, to be honest.”
“It can’t be that strange, can it?” Oscar asked. “I mean, we’ve already kinda started. We’re not...that distant, are we?”
He paused in thought, as if he were trying to determine the answer to that himself, but he quickly broke into another small smile. “But if it’d make you feel better, we can always just start from the very beginning I guess.” He sat up straighter and gave Wayne a small wave. “Hi, Wayne. I’m Oscar. I’m your brother.”
Wayne laughed, he couldn’t help it. Of all the ways to approach their particular problem, leave it to Oscar to come up with one that was both utterly ridiculous and - secretly - one that he felt he might just need. He waved back. “Hello, Oscar. I’m Wayne. I was born three years before you.”
Oscar laughed a bit too. “It’s nice to meet you, Wayne,” he said before automatically sticking his hand out as one would normally do in a formal greeting.
His hand stayed out there between them for a few seconds while the lighthearted mood came to a quick end as Oscar saw Wayne staring, and he realized his obvious mistake.
“Sorry,” Oscar said quietly, awkwardly pulling his hand back a bit.
Before he could take it back entirely, though, Wayne had grasped it. The two of them stared at the clasped hands for a long, long minute, both looking equally shocked.
Wayne’s thought processes had ground to a halt. He was holding his brother’s hand. After so many years of pulling back, of keeping his skin covered and insulated, of moving his chairs an extra inch or so away, he was holding his brother’s hand. It was warm and gentle, with writing calluses and little rough patches here and there from ages of working with science equipment and chemicals.
His skin was pressing against Oscar’s, and for once in his life there was no fear involved. There was no frenzied life-saving to be done. His brain hadn’t caught up with the possibility of delivering a shock yet. It was just...contact. Human contact. With his brother.
Slowly, he shook Oscar’s hand. “It’s...nice to meet you,” he whispered.
The sensation of touch was staggering. It was something so small, but those few square inches of skin overwhelmed his perception.
And through the skin, if he focused, he could feel the electrical signals of his brother’s heartbeat.
His vision blurred and Wayne realized distantly that he was crying.
Oscar panicked for a moment as tears started streaming down Wayne’s face. He very nearly pulled his hand back simply because the moment had obviously upset Wayne. But Wayne didn’t waver in his tentative hold and so Oscar didn’t move. He did however, try to calm his brother down.
“Hey,” he said softly, trying to get Wayne to look at him. “It’s okay. It’s okay, Wayne.” He tried to keep his voice even and not let his confusion make anything worse.
“It’s not.” Wayne shook his head slightly, voice cracking. “This is...Oscar, you don’t understand - before this whole mess started, the last time I touched anyone I was eight years old.” He moved his free hand to his mouth, eyes never straying from where his skin met his brother’s. His cheeks were slick with salt water. “My God… It’s been so long… I’d forgotten so many things and I never even realized…” He tightened his grip. “It...it is like meeting you for the first time. I...I can’t even explain it, it’s a million things...and I can’t put it into words but…my God…”
The sheer wonder in Wayne’s voice would have been endearing if the reasons behind it weren’t so horrifying. Oscar couldn’t even fathom what it would be like to not touch anything or anyone for one year, and Wayne had endured it for twenty. Oscar had stopped giving any thought to Wayne’s gloves long before he had even finished grade school. It had simply been something that was, and while growing up he had never thought of it too differently than boys who always wore blue jeans no matter what or girls who wore hair barrettes every single day. Sure there were occasional instances when Oscar wondered why Wayne would never take them off when wearing them seemed uncomfortable, cumbersome, or just plain odd. But it never occurred to him that Wayne’s gloves were a prison. Given his unrelenting insistence upon wearing them, Oscar had just sort of accepted that Wayne, for whatever reason, wanted things to be that way.
Knowing the truth, Oscar honestly could not imagine how Wayne had lived like that. Seeing his overwhelmed reaction to such a simple thing was enough to make his heart ache.
Tears of his own started welling up and he was powerless to hold them back. He slowly reached out his other arm and very carefully, very gently, rested his left hand on Wayne’s shoulder.
“I wish we had met a lot sooner,” he said in a cracking voice, completely serious.
Finally Wayne dragged his eyes away from the handshake and up to meet his brother’s. “Me too,” he whispered. The touch on his shoulder was unfamiliar and he had to fight the instinct to smack it away. Hesitantly, he brought the hand from his mouth down to rest on top of Oscar’s. It was such an alien sensation but...it was a nice one.
It was his now, he realized in surprise. However long it had taken them to come to this point, the sensations were now his to keep. He never had to give them up again. His fingers tightened as his brother’s heartbeat came at him in stereo, then loosened as he released the shoulder touch and very, very carefully brushed Oscar’s tears from one cheek. There was no reason those should be there.
“But we have met now. And there’s no taking that back.” He sighed and scrubbed at his eyes with the heel of one palm. “I’m sorry. I’ve had a bit of a day.”
Oscar laughed shakily while a few more stray tears slipped out and he had to remove his hand from Wayne’s shoulder in order to wipe them away. “You’re not the only one.”
Wayne released Oscar’s hand hesitantly, reassuring himself with the thought that he could take it again anytime he wanted to, and ran a thumb over his bare palm. “I’m not going back to those,” he murmured quietly. At Oscar’s questioning glance he elaborated. “The gloves. I’m not going back to them, not after that.” He let sparks dance over his fingertips once more. “It’s like...having lived all your life in a stuffy little box and then all of a sudden the lid opens and you can breathe.” The sparks were the graceful kind at the moment, falling through the air like little embers. “It’s not just the touch. For the first time, up on that ridge with no reason to hold back...I was free. I could play. I never knew I could do all these impossible things. I had no idea I could weld, much less build a fortress…”
His eyes snapped wide open. “Oh God. The fortress. It’s still up there.”
In an instant, the two were forced to confront the fact that not only had the recent events affected them, but also dozens of other people. All the newfound emotional connections between them didn’t change the fact that Wayne had heavily damaged a conference room full of witnesses, set off a fiasco that ended up blocking out a whole road, and created a sizable building structure where there previously was none.
“Oh…” Oscar suddenly wasn’t sure what to say. “Uh...well…”
Wayne slumped back in the chair as the consequences of what had happened occurred to him for the first time. “Fuck, I’m going to jail,” he murmured in disbelief, electricity zipping lightly up his arms. “Destruction of property, theft, attempted murder, probably manslaughter too, whatever building a castle on someone else’s land counts as, and probably a few other things I’m not thinking of. I’ve got to have an arrest warrant a mile long.”
The thought of Wayne being carted off right after they’d finally opened up to each other wasn’t something Oscar could handle. “We could...perhaps we could leave town?”
Wayne stood, pacing to the wall and back again as possibilities ran through his mind and were dismissed just as quickly. Tiny bolts hissed through the air around him, but he didn’t seem to notice. “No,” he muttered breathlessly, “I don’t think you’re up for that yet. I don’t want to risk forcing you into anything like that this soon. You still need to recover.” His fingers twitched and Oscar could feel the static from several feet away. “I can’t go to jail. I will not be stuffed back into that box.”
“Wayne...” Oscar said warily as the crackling in the air grew louder and his hair began to stand on end. “Wayne, you need to try to calm down. We’ll figure something out, okay?”
Calming down was the last thing on Wayne’s mind. “Oh God, if they take me to jail and I start sparking, I’ll get put into a lab for sure,” he rambled. “I won’t have any rights and the state will take over and oh no, no, no.”
“That’s not going to happen, Wayne,” Oscar hurriedly tried to reassure him. “Please, just breathe for a minute.”
“Maybe...maybe I can leave now and you can follow later. No, I won’t leave you in this state, that’s no good.” The edges of Wayne’s clothes swirled in invisible currents that were especially jarring to see indoors. “I could try to fight - no I can’t, I’d be up against police and SWAT teams and who knows what else; there’d be way too many…” His pacing was growing more and more frantic as no solution presented itself, electricity spiraling sharply up and down his arms. “But I can’t get arrested, that would be the end of me-”
“Wayne!!” Oscar cut him off sharply, needing his brother to stop talking himself into hysteria before he did something regrettable.
His shout broke through a little too well though because Wayne jumped in surprise and a thin bolt of lightning arced off his hands and over to Oscar’s desk lamp where a burn instantly appeared at the spot where the cord connected to the base.
All at once he realized just how much electricity was flying off of him, and his eyes widened in horror. “Shit!” Not now, not now, stop it- not inside where things could break and people could be hurt. Wayne pulled back as hard as he could but the lightning refused to lessen.
Cold fear gripped him. “Oh no…” It was getting out of control again. He’d let it go too far and he could no longer reign it in. He jammed his hands into his armpits but the lightning was already all over him, spitting out to bite at the desk and anything else nearby. Hold it in, hold it in!
Oscar could see the panic building in Wayne’s eyes as the storm in the room grew steadily worse. “It’ll be all right!” he insisted, though the platitudes were empty in such a situation. “Just calm down-”
“I can’t!” Wayne cast up at his brother desperately, terror pounding through him. Every bolt that split the air made him acutely aware of just how confined a space the bedroom was. His eyes flew immediately to the blonde streak in the younger man’s hair. In order to get to the door he’d have to pass by Oscar, and the thought of striking his brother yet again only made the panicked surges come stronger. “I - I can’t stop it!”
Oscar’s heart was also pounding as he desperately tried to think of what to do. If either of them tried to move, the lightning was bound to hit him, and he definitely wasn’t up for getting struck twice in a row. Maybe if they could get it to hit something else instead, he’d have a few seconds to get away while it was channeled elsewhere? Oscar swiftly looked around his room. Where would it hit first? Electricity took the path of least resistance, right? Whatever conduit was easiest to get to the ground.
The ground. A thought hit him. That was it! Not even the ground, just a ground.
“Wayne!” Oscar yelled. A wild idea was forming and he didn’t have time to spell it all out. He looked down for just a second and grabbed the fork on the plate Wayne had brought earlier. “Catch!” He threw the metal utensil at his brother who reflexively grabbed it. Oscar pointed over at the wall. “The third hole in the outlet. This can work, trust me!”
“What?!” Wayne couldn’t think straight at all, nearly blinded by the fear of killing his brother all over again. He pressed himself back against the far wall as the lights flickered erratically. “No, nonono-”
“Stick it in the outlet!” Oscar ordered. “Give it a ground!”
Wayne fumbled with the utensil, unable to reason clearly enough to do anything but follow directions. The fork, being a fork, was nowhere near the right shape to fit inside a power outlet. Without thinking, he sent a pulse of heat through the metal that fused the prongs together, then jammed it into the third hole.
The lightning raced for the new path of escape, flowing hot and strong down his arm and into the wall. The crackling in the air around him faded and after a moment the lights stabilized once more.
Wayne gaped, speechless as the roiling energy inside him moved outward and away. Fear and confusion pulsed through him but it was not escaping through his skin. He was, quite literally, grounded.
The static-heavy air began to return to normal, and the two of them watched all visible trace of electricity vanish from the room.
Wayne’s mind was spinning but without the traction to really grab onto anything. He could ground himself. He could give the lightning an avenue to escape and it would leave him. True, he would keep generating it as long as emotions kept riding high, but he could release it in a safe way.
The fear was draining away to be replaced by astonishment.
“I…” Words were failing him spectacularly as he finally let go of the metal connected to the outlet. “We...I think we’re going to need a new fork.”
Oscar wanted to laugh, but his breaths were coming out in pants. His heart was hammering like he’d just run a mile, and a burning pain was all over his chest and shoulder. He slumped back against the headboard of the bed as a dizzying weakness overcame him.
The blood drained from Wayne’s face as he caught sight of Oscar and all at once the shock was gone and he was scrambling over to his brother’s side. “Oh God. No, no not again. Did I hit you?!” He pressed a hand to Oscar’s chest, observing quickly that there were no singe marks on the pajama shirt. The electrical pulses of the heartbeat under his fingers were quick, though, and just a little bit erratic, and it was all he could do to hold the fresh wave of panic down.
“No...you didn’t...hit me,” Oscar said in between shallow gasps of air. “I think I just...got a little overexcited there…” He tensed up, momentarily gripping the bedsheets against the pain. “And I think I….twisted around too fast...God that stings…”
“Your heart shouldn’t be under this much stress.” Wayne struggled to get himself under control even as he worked to figure out what exactly Oscar needed. “Not so soon. Lie down.” He helped his brother to lie back against the mattress. “Take it easy for a moment. I think...I think we both need to calm down.” He forced himself to breathe deep in an effort to follow his own advice, but he still kept a light touch on Oscar’s chest, listening intently to the beats to make sure their pattern wasn’t beginning to break down again.
Oscar found it difficult to keep his eyes open once he’d been settled back down against the pillows. He felt unbelievably exhausted, and he still hadn’t so much as tried to get out of bed since he’d initially woken. It began to dawn on him that maybe he wouldn’t be leaving his bed for some time.
It was difficult for him to react to that thought, though. Reacting to anything at the moment was painful, and it was all he could do to catch his breath again. Not moving helped to lessen the ache on his shoulder. It still hurt, like the worst possible sunburn, but fatigue was doing its job to help numb him to the worst of that as well.
It was clear to Wayne from the exhaustion on Oscar’s face that any more immediate strain on his brother’s body would be a very bad idea. He debated fiercely with himself over the myriad things that were fighting for importance. They shouldn’t stay here, or at least he shouldn’t. He didn’t know where he could go, but incarceration was not an option he could deal with. Oscar’s condition, though, was tenuous. Wayne had no idea how long he would need looking after. Could he really risk staying to be arrested for that long?
A good look at Oscar’s tired face made up his mind. Yes, he decided. Yes he could. He had only just met his brother again. He could not afford to lose that connection so quickly.
The blonde patch in Oscar’s hair stood out at him, as it always did.
He had a lot to make up for.
“You know what?” he murmured. “You should rest. I’ll deal with this. I don’t know how, but I’ll find some way.” He tugged the blanket up over Oscar’s shoulders. “You’ve been through a lot. You need to heal.”
Oscar smiled slightly, not knowing if Wayne genuinely believed things would be okay or if his brother was only saying so for his benefit, but the words were comforting nonetheless.
“We’ll find some way,” he corrected. His breathing was still slightly labored, but he was calming down and allowed his eyes to fall shut at Wayne’s insistence of rest. He could do rest.
Wayne kept a hand on Oscar’s chest until the younger man was asleep, something that didn’t take very long at all, and then for a time after. Heartbeat and breathing rhythm and the natural warmth of homeostasis assaulted his senses, combating the fear of a clouded future and - somehow - winning. The sensation engulfed him and kept the lightning at bay. He held onto it like a lifeline as he tried to work out some kind of solution to everything. He couldn’t see one yet, but he had Oscar depending on him.
And he would not let Oscar down.