Catalyst - 1; the first law

The first time I was shot, hurt.

Hurt bad.

Really bad.

Really fucking bad.

And every waking moment since that fateful day has been spent lost in rumination. People call me a hero. I call myself a weapon.

My mother calls me Alex and pretends every night that scar tissue is just scar tissue and that scars fade. My counselor asks me to imagine forgiveness. My reflection asks me how to forgive becoming something I never intended to become.

An eidolon. Definition: idealized person or thing.

You don’t get shot in a clean, cinematic way. You don’t dramatically fall in slow motion as a choir envelops you. You don’t get any last words. There are no white doves flying in every direction as you die a noble death.

You get shot trying to offer someone a hand up off the ground, because that’s the decent thing to do, and your body slumps on a tiled floor that smells of feet, dirt, sweat, and now blood.

Your blood in fact.

I got caught in a shitty scenario. Wrong time, wrong place. It was the first day of school. First day at a new school, actually. And I was late.

So, like any teenaged dumbass, there I was; sprinting through the hallways with a crumpled-up paper map trying to find my first period class. I was completely unaware that people were underneath desks, cowering for their lives in barricaded rooms. Hell, I was probably the reason why some doors were suddenly locked and blinds were pulled down.

I was completely unaware that fate was a cruel mistress who had plans for me.

Or maybe Steve moved a chair again. Either way my life was set into motion.

I slammed, at full-sprint, into a kid, probably my age, with a gun.

Lo-and-behold, a shooter.

I slammed into him on pure accident, and he hit the ground. Hard. I heard something clack on tile flooring. I was too locked in on being late to notice the sci-fi kind of gun that had clacked on the tile, or the fact that he’d recovered it pretty quickly after he fell.

So, naturally, being a good Samaritan and all that, I offered him a hand up.

No good deed goes unpunished as they say.

A depleted-uranium bullet pierced my skull moments after he took my hand.

I would’ve screamed if I could, if I had enough time to. It felt raw. Raw and white hot. A burning sensation, I can’t properly put into words. As if, every nerve ending in my body fired off at once. The sensation of warmth you’d get from drinking a cup of hot chocolate on a cold day, but turned up to one-thousand, in a bad way.

Everything went into slow-motion for a few seconds. I saw the flash of light at the end of the barrel marking my death, or rather, the death of a normal life. The very moment that bullet tore through flesh and bone, burying itself into my brain, was the moment I was reborn. And it was blinding.

My world stopped and started up again a month later; wrong.

Doctors couldn't figure out how I lived. They were baffled. The internet filled the gaps with theories: miracle, medical anomaly. Regardless, my survival made headlines, most of them local, a silver lining to a tragedy.

“Alex Carter, Heroic Bystander, Lives”.  

Hero.

The word felt wrong, wrong like a rotting wound, festering maggot-y meat on my tongue. I dry heaved when I read the headline.

I wasn’t a hero. I did not tackle the shooter. I didn’t save anything, let alone anyone. Two kids died in that hallway. Two actual people with names and futures and phone numbers that got disconnected when they should have still been buzzing with the voices of friends and families. I kept having flashes, sometimes I still do, flashes of faces I never learned, screams that belonged to other mouths. The days since have been a war between what happened and what people decided happened.

God.

Mom cried on the stairs for two days and then started smiling in public again because smiles were what people do when they're handed an eidolon to hold onto. Strangers shook my hand and said thank you like I'd done them a favor.

That polite gratitude suffocated me.

A month. Roughly a month since I woke up and everything was strange, since my head stopped feeling like it was full of sand and started feeling like it had been hollowed out and replaced with something that ticked. A month of tests and needles and questions. A month of strangers in lab coats saying words like neuroplasticity and survivor’s guilt. A month of me catching myself staring at everyday objects the way other people stare at guns.

Because there was a rule. A rule I’d discovered on accident and learned to fear.

Touch something with intent, anything, and it breaks the sound barrier, cracking and whizzing and whipping, flying, no, soaring through the air like a bullet.

What a sick fucking joke.

There are more rules, rules I don’t entirely understand. I can’t just point at the world and send it flying through space. I have to willingly intend for something I touch to shoot. That mental switch. Intent.

My ability is both miserly and literal with its metaphors. 

I could make a pencil fly and imbed itself into solid concrete, I could make a baseball rocket through a wall. But, I couldn’t will whatever I launched to be gentle, to be soft, to do no harm.

There is no in-between.

Anything I touch with the intent to fire, does so, at lethal speeds.

Alex Carter’s first law of motion: An object propelled by my hand will fire off at a killing velocity, no matter what.