Decay

It starts with his hands. 

Frank does not know how to explain it, exactly. It’s kind of like a buzzing, it’s kind of like smoke nesting in his flesh, it’s kind of like feeling his bones rusting. It starts from the tips of his fingers and spreads up his palms. Either way, it makes his hands shake slightly whenever he calls upon the dead. But it’s easier to summon them, too, and Frank, who is nothing if not a scientists, guesses it’s some kind of equivalent exchange. His hands for better control. Pretty fair, right? 

It starts with his hands. 

Sometimes, when things are dire and he needs to pull more than his weight, it creeps up to his elbows, to his chest. He doesn’t like that. His heart speeds up and his breathing comes shallow. Not in a crushing way. In an anxiety attack way. It’s uncomfortable, to say the least. Still, without it, he wouldn’t be able to save his pals, so he can do with it. 

It starts with his hands. 

He needs- more, put bluntly. More powers, more dead, more cannon fodder. They’re overwhelmed, Vektor is bleeding, and he needs to do something. 

Frank directs his mind toward the bodies underground- all of them, the rotting flesh and the bare skeletons and the fallen warriors and the civilian victims- Frank finds them, and Frank pulls

It starts with his hands 

It grows to his shoulders, it takes root in his stomach 

It reaches his throat 

And Frank

chokes

He wishes he didn’t remember what happens next. 

(There’s the blinding panic, the desperate need for oxygen, the feeling of melting and freezing and crumbling all at once 

It’s like dying. He is dying. He’s losing himself to the very thing he aimed to control. 

There are voices, and there are faces- but the fear makes him blind, makes him deaf, erases everything but the need to survive.)

Frank does not wake up, as ‘waking up’ implies a loss of consciousness. (But Frank was so, so very conscious of his acts; he may have been unable to recognize his friends, but it still him who tried to hurt them, him who tried to take them down to pull himself up and stay alive.) 

But Frank snaps out of his panic induced daze, at last. The voices are no longer gibberish to his ears- he knows who they belong to, he feels the worry in the them, he understands the words. 

He does not feel the buzzing in his hands anymore. 

He does not feel anything in his hands anymore. 

Frank looks down. 

Past his wrists, his flesh is like crispy charcoal, a sharp contrast to the brown skin of his arms. They look mummified. Or maybe- like meant cooked for too long. He flexes his fingers- at least he can still move them. He just lost most sensations, he denotes, detached, as if it was someone else’s body. Man, the shock will wear off it’s going to be a bitch.

It starts with his hands. 

Small price to pay, Frank decides.

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