Phia's Fragile and Fantastic Fingers || ONC 2023

Burnt

My fingers burn. I try not to scream as I rip and claw at my supposedly fire-proof gloves. There's a tumble, a crackle and John's in front of me. He's not who I want but his cool hands on my wrist and his actually fire-proof gloves are doing what I can't. He rips my gloves off. Burnt flesh and the smell of sticky melted plastic assaults my nostrils. I have goosebumps.

"Sit!" 

Another hand— not John's— grabs my arm from behind. I twist, flail, and get pulled into a chair.

It's fine. The hand belongs to Mercy. Her supersuit is still perfectly in place. Her rippling blue  halo of powers sparkles around her. She's not who I want either.

"Freaking Kicker," John growls as he pours something over my fingers. It's cold. Aloe vera at the least, something the girls in the lab cooked up at the best. It's soothing, but my brain is still short circuiting. Pain pain pain.

Pain

Superheroes are supposed to be invincible. I never really felt like a superhero, and none of us are really invincible. Penelope wasn't invincible. 

"We need an extraction." John is overreacting because he knows we're not invincible.

"No we don't," Mercy disagrees. My eyes click to her, but what I see feels off, like I'm a computer with weak ram and the graphics are lagging.

"Slow extract then," John says, "but we lost the target and I'm not staying here."

 We were the dream team once but everything is messy now. John gives Mercy a look that I hope's not "we'll make out about this later", and then he comes back to me. I can hear Mercy calling for a bug out. Another mission down the drain.

"You with me?" John's smile is fake. It's his death bed smile, and it makes me shiver, right before I barf on his shoes.

* * *

They bandage up my hands. I obviously don't die. John gets clean shoes and the night off from babysitting me. Mercy takes me back to our shared room and fourteen hours later I wake up in the bunk bed I used to share with Penelope. The world is sharply colored and my fingers are tightly bandaged. I don't feel right, like my mind has been shoved inside out. 

Mercy's not in her bed on the other side of the room. Through the small strip of a window at the far end of our long skinny room I see that the world outside is grey and dull. 

I sit up, feeling every new bruise and the tail end of a sandpaper dehydration headache. Our room is efficient, just enough space for two bunk beds, our desk, and the dangerously overstuffed closet. You don't get much when HQ has to fit you in a shoebox, but we do get three meals a day, healthcare, and something like an education, so I'm not complaining. This room is way better than a sleeping bag under the ripped awning of Tucker's Diner.

I look at my hands, they feel funny in the same way the walls of my room look funny. The contrast is too high. The color is blown out. The gauze is pearly white and underneath, my fingers tingle. There's a swaying in my brain that makes me want to rip the gauze off and see what's underneath.

I'm going to rip the gauze off. 

I rip at the tape on one hand with the gauzy nubs on my other. When that fails I tear with my teeth. Strips of puffy white cotton stick to my tongue and between my teeth, but eventually my right thumb is free.

It's not right, and I stare until my eyes start to water. There's a metalic sheen on my otherwise pink and bubbly skin. Or at least I think there is metal there. It's something that I can only almost catch in certain light. It's definitely not supposed to be there. When I tossed that flaming beaker of chemicals out of the way and my gloves caught on fire I was sure I just burned them. Maybe something else— something worse— had happened. Our line of work is strange and terrifying. Metal fingers aren't out of the question.