Against My Will 12

…goddamn, this is good.

It might have just been the long-term starvation talking but it was definitely top-tier.

Third one of the morning and Orin was absolutely wrecking it, neon yellow mustard and crisp diced onions vacuumed up with each bite. He’d never tasted a hotdog this good before but maybe New York was just like that.

On the other hand… could be rat meat.

Somehow, that still didn’t do enough to make him want to put it down. Hell, he was halfway to eating the paper boat it came in. He’d honestly even considered eating the paper boat it came in two bites into hot dog number two, but the guy with the cart had already been eyeing him like a weirdo and he didn’t wanna scare him off.

“You good, boss?”

Pale green eyes blinked up towards a rough voice, the pale jowly face of the cart guy still aimed his way. The man was turning a row of franks with a pair of tongs but those eyes were still on him, instead of his work. “You want a fourth, tell me now. I’m about to put the onions on again.”

“Yeah, I’m…” He swallowed another mouthful, taking two fewer chews than he probably should have. A lady walked past, clutching her purse tight as if Orin was in any mood for crime. “I’m good, man.”

A second of thought had Orin reconsider his state of hunger. “Maybe. If I’m down for a number four, I’ll let you know, but extra onions this time, though, for real.”

“There is such a thing as too much onions, kid.”

“I’m a trailblazer.”

The man just blinked his way like he had a medical condition.

…Not like he’s wrong. Orin turned back to the window of the electronics store, red vinyl letters printed on glass — BRYMAN AUDIO VISUAL — but all he could see at first was that gaunt sunken face staring back at him. 

His own. Jesus Christ… 

A gloved left hand trailed down his face, Orin barely able to believe how he looked. And this was just the part that he bothered to let show. They fucked me up, man.

Thankfully, he fucked them up back, but that still wasn’t going to get him back to full form any time soon. Even seven days out of his escape and Orin barely looked any better from the point he crashed into Manhattan again. Getting there, though.

An onion-heavy sigh freed itself from mustard-stained lips and Orin Hunter Kelly let his eyes glaze past his starved-ass face and land on the wall of TVs behind the peeling letters of the video store. Eight of them, all stacked in a grid for some reason, and every single one of them fat.

Like fat fat.

Big curved glass faces sticking out of fat-backed plastic boxes with the picture on each screen a little fuzzy at the edges. How did people live like this, man? Just looking at the fossils was almost enough to make him cry and, before this, it took torture to get that much out of him.

And, apparently, these were considered flat-screens from the sign beneath them.

ON SALE

20 inch Sony FD Trinitron WEGA: Flat-Screen CRT  

$450

Orin wasn’t sure what was flat about a space deep enough to hide a small child in, but what the TVs were was less important than what was on them. The Hulk thing…

Apparently, the Hulk had attacked Manhattan last week and he could thank that exact attack for why he hadn’t been caught so far. Eight hundred people dead in Manhattan and entire blocks wrecked, ruined, or damaged meant that it was hard to find one person bundled up under baggy clothes.

“How am I feeling?” A banged up face behind a blue mask with a big white ‘A’ at the top of it stared at him with a voice so old-timey Brooklyn it almost hurt to listen to. “Well, my ribs are cracked, nose broken, and my left arm is only dislocated—”

Only. Orin almost felt an eye twitch as Captain America spoke, the blue-white chyron beneath him scrolling past with ‘Morning after Manhattan’.

“—nothing which shouldn’t fix itself in a day or two, ma’am.”

The cut on the screen was as stark as the man it cut to, a smiling black-haired bearded man with a drink in his hand and his arm in a sling, the caption underneath him reading: ‘STARK ON NEAR-DEATH: NOT THE FIRST TIME’.

Okay, that’s funny. Orin took another bite. Fucking crazy, but funny.

It wasn’t Robert Downey, though.

He could tell that much the first time he saw him. This guy was smooth with it, voice slower and calmer and definitely someone that came from money. Taller and leaner and more polished than RDJ’s former cokehead energy, this guy was like a Bond villain but good.

It was weird enough the first time he saw it and it only got weirder when he realized Cap definitely wasn’t one of the Chris’s either. Not Evans or Pine or any of them, this guy was bigger and broader than any of those with a face that looked more like that guy from Reacher.

…Reacher.

By the time Orin shook his head, the camera cut to Thor and Thor was…

Whatever he was, he definitely wasn’t a Hemsworth. Orin could tell that much as his eyes tracked the big guy walking around rubble with a bunch of firefighters and rescue guys in orange vests, helping pull a slab of concrete up off something. Mjolnir looked… off, but the guy still had the hammer and the hair — facial and otherwise — so even if his suit looked weird and glowy, he couldn’t call this guy anything but Thor.

He even talked like Thor too, even if he also kinda sounded like he wanted to talk to you about seed oils at the same time.

The screens cut to a blurry clip that was definitely off a news chopper, super zoomed in to show the girl with the wings on the team flying in the middle of the street with rain coming down as her hands went to her shirt.

The censor bar was there by the time she opened anything but Orin had already stopped chewing as he took it in, the caption at the bottom clear with a joke: WASP’S WEAPONS OF MASS DISTRACTION. One of the hosts on the news said something, the man laughing as he made a cupping motion with his hands, and the other two just howled while one of them even slapped the desk.

Huh… He was still blinking as a commercial for Lunchables came on the screen, the news taking a little break. “Bro… y’all would get so canceled.”

Like, not even a little. Orin had been nine when one friend’s dad lost his job over a tweet from 2011. And here was Mr. News Anchor making tit jokes at nine in the AM.

But that was a different time… apparently.

One hand went up, mustard-free fingers pulling the cap brim just a little bit lower. He never paid much attention to sports but he hoped the Yankees were good for camouflage, along with the sunglasses and the jeans and the big stupid white I ♥ NY shirt.

All of it had come off a spinning rack in a gift shop somewhere with the front blown in and no lights on with nobody behind the counter. Thank you, Doctor Banner. That night had needed him to make some important moves and with all the stores empty and half-wrecked, he’d been able to grab some clothes, food and money before running off into the night.

The shirt, especially.

It was a Large.

He’d been a Medium before.

At this point, he didn’t doubt he’d be fine with a Small.

Either way, the Large was the whole point because the same night he landed, he’d caught himself in another window and seen exactly what Fury and SHIELD had done to him. His wrists were thin enough to fit a thumb and forefinger around them easy, collarbones sticking out and all the rest of him just as sad.

He knew he was one-sixty-five at one point, all dressed up, but whatever he weighed now…

Yeah, maybe a fourth hotdog before I think about that. At the very least, he was sure he wasn’t dreaming anymore. Even with the ring or the lantern or falling from orbit, none of that managed to convince him. No, it was Nick Fury that did it.

Samuel L Jackson’s face but smoother and airbrushed and younger, with that eyepatch there like he remembered. Nick Fury sitting across from him and getting pissed as all hell when he heard the name ‘Peter Parker’. There was no way his brain would have made that up because why would it?

So, the only real answer here was that he’d drugged and dunked and zapped for three whole months inside the Marvel universe.

By SHIELD.

The ones who were supposed to be the good guys. Sure, fuck it, whatever…

He could work with that, or try to at least, but the problem was that none of the parts he thought he knew about Marvel lined up with anything.

Like the date — 2002.

That first night down, crouched behind an alley with sirens going everywhere as smoke and lightning filled the sky, a Daily News was clutched in his hand and a half-dozen others were at his feet.

All of them read the same date under the light of a burning car; JULY 10, 2002.

He’d read through the whole newspaper, hoping there was some kind of dumb explanation for the date. Maybe it was a reprint or some anniversary thing because it couldn’t be a prop, not when he pulled all these papers from a busted blue box.

It all kept saying the same thing on every paper, on everything he could look at, and it only continued the more he tried to prove it wrong.

I’m not born for four more years.

Four.

That was…

The thought wouldn’t sit down no matter how much he tried to put it away, because this wasn’t just the past. It was a whole different past for a whole different world, and the only thing it had in common with the one he knew was that some of the cars and buildings looked familiar.

Anything else was just crazy.

Hell, even the MCU hadn’t started until what, 2008? Yeah, he was pretty sure it was definitely 2008 because Iron Man had come out the same year Obama won. Iron Man.

And that had been Downey.

Thing was, Downey wasn’t here.

And nothing else matched up.

For a couple days, he’d even wondered if this was in the comics — the actual comics — but then he just had to shrug because… I never read those fucking things. He’d only ever touched comics for DC and even then, mostly just Green Lantern.

Which was… funny.

A lot less funny when he remembered that he was completely alone here, no identity and no family either. Green eyes stared at himself again in the window, TVs still going strong. Even if his parents were alive here, they still weren’t his parents. 

Best odds, his mom was still some twenty-something nursing student in Boston or Galway or wherever she’d been in 2002 anyway. She definitely wouldn’t know him. Neither would his dad either.

And, even if they did exist, depending on how different this world was… they might not even have met yet. He sucked in a low breath, the smell of someone’s cigarette almost forcing a cough out of him. They could never even meet anyway.

“Yeah, no.”

He took another bite.

The story on the news changed, something with a flag behind the anchor who’d made the boob joke, a graphic across the screen for a moment — MUTANT RESPONSE: CONGRESS CHANGES STANCE — before footage of some kind of purple robot the size of a building flying through the air faded in and out.

Mutants? Orin had seen Brand New Day, with Jean Grey doing her creepy little fuckshit all movie, so he knew mutants were coming. But this wasn’t coming.

This was here, and it’d been here long enough for anchors to be talking about mutant attacks and Magneto and the Brotherhood the way a weather guy would talk about windchill. 

And the big purple robot—

Sentinels, I… A long breath came out through his nose. “That’s just… just not right.” Sentinels were the big giant mutant-killing monsters that just killed people in the street. They were like the endgame of anti-mutant fascist fuckery. “That’s crazy.” 

The man next to him at the window glanced over his way; thick mustache moving as his nose wrinkled up.

Orin didn’t look back at him, barely able to even track that by the time the next story came up on the TVs; four people in blue standing on the steps of a skyscraper as flashbulbs went off in front of them. The graphic said ‘FANTASTIC FOUR’ and Orin knew that name.

Hell, he took his little sisters to the movie last year cause they begged him. It wasn’t his favorite but it had a robot and a lot of retro stuff and a chrome lady people had gotten mad over online for some reason.

The one who had to be Reed Richards stepped forward, looking even more off than Cap and Iron Man. For one, he had glasses on and, for another… why is he my age?

Truth, the familiar-looking dude standing up at the podium looked no older than nineteen or twenty at most, and could easily have been anyone three rows down from Orin in a freshman intro-to-CS lecture with a digital notebook.

The pretty blonde next to him — who also looked familiar — was definitely the same age as she stood next to someone who was a straight up kid, no more than fifteen as he threw up a peace sign at the camera.

But here was the thing…

He looked about the same.

Yeah, this ain’t First Steps. The rest of the hot dog disappeared in just two bites. “This definitely ain’t that.” It was like every day he woke up to a little more craziness; little silver flip phones people kept snapping shut, payphones on corners people still used, fat TVs, so many people fucking smoking…

And then there was SHIELD with energy rifles and super soldiers built like offensive linemen and bootleg Iron Mans.

It just didn’t fit.

Nothing fit.

Twenty years behind on phones and twenty years ahead on weapons.

CONTINUING COVERAGE: GREEN LANTERN

Orin went still as the video on the TVs changed to a grainy clip; something far off, shot all the way from the Brooklyn side maybe as the whole thing went under green light.

“-ost-human suspect SHIELD sources identify as ‘Green Lantern’ remains at large following a violent incident at the Triskelion facility that left multiple personnel dead—”

Orin’s eye twitched.

“—xtensive property damage utilizing unknown energy technolog—”

His other eye twitched.

“—nsidered armed and extremely dangerous.”

…I mean, they’re not wrong. That was pretty much it, though. Every single sentence in there was technically true. He had killed a lot of people and blown his way out, no argument to even be made there. Putting a hole in the Triskelion roof hadn’t been where he’d stopped, another one made in the side, and he couldn’t even count how many he’d put on the inside.

They just seemed to do a real good job at forgetting those three months (?) where SHIELD used him like a punching bag to test out torture techniques.

“Oh, fuck you.” The man with the briefcase shuffled off pretty quick and Orin just stood there for about five seconds, letting himself picture it. Going back out there, flying over the harbor in broad daylight and blasting the whole thing in the water.

And then the other part of his brain came in and sat down next to him and pointed out that he’d tried to fly out of New York a few days ago and ended up in a tree. Yeah. Maybe later.

Definitely later.

His eyes fell down to his right hand, a pair of leather gloves — in July — hiding his tiny little green secret; a little hard shape he could feel every time he made a fist.

One hand pushed the sunglasses up his nose as he lifted the other, lips kissing the middle finger right on the knuckle through brown leather. 

“Just you and me, huh, lil guy?”

[AGREEMENT]