Chapter Text
[𝙔𝙊𝙐𝙍 𝙉𝘼𝙈𝙀]
"..."
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“…Invincible.”
“Yeah, you think I should go with that name?”
It was cool inside Mark’s bedroom. The kind of late afternoon chill that drifted in through the half-cracked window, carrying the smell of grass clippings and someone’s backyard barbecue. We lay stretched out on our stomachs across his beige carpet, a chaotic spill of capped and uncapped markers surrounding our elbows like a melted rainbow. His sketchbook sat open between us, filled with costume concepts in pencil and ink, some crossed out, others circled twice in enthusiasm.
Mark flipped through the pages with the focus of someone trying very hard to make this all feel real. I watched his eyebrows furrow in concentration as he studied each page, lips pursed, squinting like it was life or death instead of tights and logos.
“I thought you were dead set on something like… what was it? Titanium Titan? The Steel Kid?” he asked, bumping his shoulder lightly into mine.
I let out a half-asleep laugh, propping my chin on the back of my hand. “Don’t forget Unbreaka-boy. That was a real low point.”
“Oh, come on. You liked Unbreaka-boy.”
“I liked making fun of you for it. That’s not the same thing.”
He made a wounded noise and flopped onto his side, nudging me. “So what changed your mind, huh?”
I reached over and lazily flipped through the sketchbook until I landed on a drawing with streaks of bold yellow, black, and blue. The lines weren’t perfect, and the proportions were a little off, but something about it felt right— like it actually belonged to someone.
“Because,” I said, a soft smile pulling at my lips, “it sounds cool. And you can do something with the ‘i’ in the beginning.”
He blinked. “The letter?”
I plucked the yellow marker from his fingers, turning it around so it sat correctly in my own grip. “Yeah. Watch.”
I drew a circle that framed the figure’s head and collarbone, then a tall, narrow rectangle that stretched down the torso—simple, clean.
Mark squinted, then slowly lit up. “Ohhh. Oh, that’s good. Like, really good. That’s clever.”
“I know,” I said, too pleased with myself, handing the marker back.
He rolled onto his stomach again and started sketching with renewed energy. His strokes were more confident now, decisive. The corners of his mouth twitched with focus.
“I think I love it,” he muttered.
“Yeah?” I asked, voice quieter now.
Mark leaned in closer, tongue poking out the side of his mouth in concentration as he carefully outlined the rest of the emblem. “Yeah, I mean, that actually works. If I mirror it on the back, too, then the rectangle kind of makes it look like armor. Or like… a spine.”
“Ohhh,” I said dramatically, flopping onto my side with a grin, “So poetic. ‘Invincible: backbone of humanity.’”
He chuckled, nudging me with his elbow. “Better than ‘Indestructo-Man’ or ‘Captain Can’t-Be-Hurt.’” He raised an eyebrow, half-mocking. “You seriously tried to sell me on that one yesterday.”
I groaned, covering my face with both hands. “Okay, fine. But in my defense, I was running on two hours of sleep and half a gas station donut.”
“You said it was gonna be retro!” he teased.
“It was! Like an old comic strip from the fifties or something! Vintage is in, Mark.”
He snorted, shaking his head fondly as he flipped back a few pages in his sketchbook, revealing a mess of half-finished logo designs and cape variations. “I can’t believe I ever let you talk me into those dumb eye goggles.”
“I can’t believe you let me talk you into anything,” I shot back with a sleepy smile, propping my head up on my arm. “You’re usually the one giving the motivational speeches.”
Mark paused, marker still in hand, and glanced over at me. His voice came quieter, more thoughtful. “Yeah, but… you’ve always been better at the details.”
I blinked at him, caught off guard by the softness in his tone. My eyes drifted back to the drawing. “Okay, but,” I silently breathed, fingers fidgeting with the hem of my shirt, “Someone’s gotta make sure you don’t end up fighting crime in bike shorts and sandals.”
Mark laughed— really laughed this time— and the sound bounced off the walls of his room like sunlight refracted through water. He fell back onto the carpet beside me, hands flung above his head, the sketchbook tossed to the side.
“God, I can’t believe this is actually happening,” he said, looking up at the ceiling. “Like… real powers. Real name. Real suit. Feels like I’m making myself up.”
I turned my head to look at him, our shoulders just barely touching.
“Well,” I murmured, “if you’re making yourself up… I think you’re doing a pretty good job so far.”
He tilted his head toward me, just enough to meet my gaze. There was something different behind his eyes for a moment— something unreadable and warm— but it passed before I could name it. He just grinned.
“Thanks,” he said. “Seriously.”
We laid there a while longer, listening to the gentle hum of cicadas outside and the occasional creak of the house settling around us. The sun dipped lower. The markers sat forgotten in a halo around our limbs, streaks of color left behind on the pages and on the pads of our fingers.
“Invincible,” he repeated under his breath. This time, he didn’t sound uncertain.
Just proud.
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“Invincible.”
For a split second, I thought I'd gone insane.
That couldn't be Mark. It couldn't be.
Sure, the man floating there in the broken skyline wore the same grin. Sure, his jawline was sharp enough to cut through steel, and the rain streaked across his face in the same way it always had— like he was born to be seen through chaos.
But Mark— my Mark— was good. Naive, maybe. A little too obsessed with his comics. But good. He wanted to help people. He still flinched at roadkill. He apologized when he bumped shoulders. He grinned with his whole face.
The man floating there like some uninvited god looked just like him, but none of that warmth was there. Just the shape of it. The mask of it. The uniform was wrong, too— black and yellow, not blue. Like a wasp instead of a robin. A warning.
I stared. For a second, I told myself maybe it was someone else with the same name. Maybe that's why Sam had said it.
Just a coincidence. Just a shared persona.
But when I looked again— really looked— I saw it. That smile.
The same one Mark had given me when he slid into the lunch table that day like he'd been meant to sit beside me all along. The same smirk he wore when he nailed me in the face with a mop bucket at BurgerMart and yelled "technically that's your point."
That same smirk.
Now stretched across a monster's face.
My head shook without permission. Whether I was trying to deny what I saw or keep myself from falling apart, I couldn't tell.
And then Sam moved.
A flare of pink screamed through the sky— sharp, jagged shards of matter hurling toward him like desperate prayers. She fired again and again, gritting her teeth with every shot, her shoulders rising with each pull of power. I'd never seen Eve like this— so relentless. So angry. Desperate.
Robot's voice rang out beside her. "Pattern suppression—now, Rex!"
"I got it, I got it," Rex grunted, pulling a glowing canister from one of his cargo pockets. "But this bastard's floating twenty feet in the damn sky!"
"Adjust for vertical trajectory," Robot snapped, shifting a panel on his shoulder and charging up a beam.
The man— he— he didn't even flinch. Didn't blink.
He just stared down at us all as if he were watching crazed apes at the zoo. Amused. Detached. Cruel.
"Wow," he said finally, voice slow and relaxed, like this was just another Wednesday. "What a total wreck."
He craned his neck, eyes lazily dragging over the crumbling infrastructure, the shattered cots, the people huddling in corners like prey that had already given up.
"I don't even know why you all wasted so much time hiding this shithole from me. Seriously—" he gestured broadly with his free hand, "—This? This is what you were protecting?"
He hoisted Angstrom Levy higher into the air by the neck. The man's legs dangled, twitching faintly, his hands clawing uselessly at the vice grip wrapped around his throat. Blood— dry, dark, and crusted—cracked along his jawline. But his eyes were wide. Alive. Burning.
"...How... did... you get here?!" Sam yelled again, throwing another barrage of pink shrapnel toward his side. The bolts dissipated the moment they touched his strong, immovable body. "How?!"
Finally, the floating figure turned his gaze to her. The slow rotation of his head made my skin crawl. Like it took effort to pretend to care.
"Oh-ho-ho, that?"
His smirk curved wider, and I felt my gut twist.
He turned his eyes to Angstrom, still gasping in his grip. "Well, I think poor Angstrom here definitely knows the answer to that question."
He loosened his grip— not enough to let him go, just enough to let Angstrom suffer. The older man's hands shot up to his throat, dragging in a ragged breath.
"You... monster!" he choked out, spitting the word like it burned.
But the not-Invincible just chuckled, low and soft, almost kindly.
Mark's brows lifted slightly, almost amused. "Aw," he cooed, his tone lilting like a lullaby. "You say that like I didn't warn you."
And then he started to rise higher— dragging Angstrom up with him— slowly, with intention, like he wanted every soul below to witness it. To burn it into their memory. A warning. A sermon. A show.
And I... I couldn't move. I didn't even know who I was looking at anymore. But deep down, I already knew the name.
It was Mark. Somehow. But not my Mark.
Not anymore.
I saw it.
The way his thumb barely twitched along Angstrom's neck. Not hard enough to snap— Not yet. But like a child running their finger along the rim of a glass, circling and circling, waiting for it to sing, waiting for the tension to break. He wasn't angry. He wasn't merciful.
He was waiting. Like this wasn't a murder— just the last five seconds before the trailers ended and the real movie began. And I knew then. He was going to kill him. Not for justice. Not even out of necessity.
But because he could. Because he wanted to.
And then I moved.
I didn't even know what I was doing until I was already doing it. It wasn't a strategy. It wasn't bravery. It was instinct.
The worst kind. The kind you regret just one second too late. Why the hell would I make myself a target? My powers weren't exactly offensive. Not like Sam's. Not precise. Not overwhelming. I'd been training to wield them, sure— just like I had against Doc Seismic not too long ago. But that had been a lesson. A villain-of-the-week. A cartoon bad guy with enough ego to be predictable.
This? This wasn't a lesson. This was Mark Grayson's shadow come to life.
And yet I moved anyway. I stumbled forward— over broken chairs, over rusted beams and dented cans, over the crushed skeletons of tables that had probably once served food or conversation or comfort. Over people. Still people. Crushed beneath debris.
My breath came sharp and fast. Heart pounding against my ribs like it wanted out. I sucked in air like it was the string of a bow and pulled it back as far as it would go.
"Stop!" I screamed.
It tore from my throat, raw and messy and desperate.
It hurt.
It hurt.
And he turned.
Not-Invincible's head tilted slowly in my direction, Angstrom still twitching in his grasp. His eyes didn't widen. His mouth didn't even part in surprise. Something changed in his face, though— not dramatically, but enough. His eyebrow ridges drew in through the mask. There was no rage. No confusion. No mercy. Just... calculation.
Recognition.
Then he dropped Angstrom. Just opened his hand and let him fall, like a used tissue. A broken toy. A discarded body.
Angstrom hit the ground with a crack and a pained grunt that echoed through my spine— but I couldn't look.
Because now he was moving. Descending. Hovering just above the cracked tiles, so close I could see the rain beading on the sickening yellow of his boots. Every inch he came closer, the air seemed to shrink. Tighter. Colder. Like even oxygen knew to fear him.
Robot aimed his blasters with the precision of a surgeon, but held fire. Rex kept one hand tight on whatever was buried in his jacket pocket— his jaw tight, eyes unreadable. Sam shifted beside me— half a step forward, half a step back. Her arm lifted, trembling slightly, laced with pink energy she didn't dare fire.
And I— I couldn't breathe.
He landed. Softly.
Like a feather. Like a ghost. Like a god who didn't need to touch down at all but chose to. His boots hit the tile— one, then the other. His arms still folded across his chest. His cape flicked behind him like the last breath of a storm-torn flag.
He lifted a finger. Then he pointed at me. Like he was picking something off a shelf.
"Hey," he said, tone twisted with something almost...offended. "Didn't I already kill you?"
I didn't answer. All forms of protest, of distraction— died in my throat along with all of whatever hackneyed version of a plan I had working up in my head.
He stepped closer now, the rain trickling off his jaw in silver threads. He tilted his head slightly, eyes scanning over my face through black goggles, squinting like I was a problem on a test he didn't feel like solving.
"I mean, don't get me wrong," he added, his tone almost conversational, as if we were old friends catching up at a funeral, "I kill people all the time. So it gets kind of hard to keep track. But I'm like... ninety percent sure I've killed you before."
Then he tilted his head slightly, like he was reading the fine print of something on my skin. His finger hung in the air between us. Still pointing. Still certain. My eyes stayed locked on it. That hand could tear me in half like wet paper if I were any other ordinary human. But I wasn't. Hopefully he didn't know that.
He didn't strike. Only... stared. All of us did. We weren't frozen in a fight-or-flight kind of way. No, that would've been mercy. We were frozen like animals watching a thunderhead drift overhead.
Too big. Too loud. Too inevitable.
Then the lightning cracked again— it's thunderous roar louder this time. Echoing through the station like the world had split in half above us.
And he sighed. A deep, annoyed, almost childlike sound of disappointment.
"Whatever. It's alright," he said, pushing slowly back into the air again. Effortlessly and morbidly casual. "I can just do it again."
He floated higher, now just above the ruined rafters, the yellow of his suit glowing like a warning light through the storm. His eyes drifted to the people gathered below. Mothers clutching children. Teenagers holding each other like sandbags against a flood. Old men on crutches. Sick people. Weak people. Hunched bodies crouched over mangled forms.
People who had survived—but only barely.
He smiled again.
"Although..." he said with a crooked grin, "Your little friends here? Definitely an added bonus."
We all watched as he held his hands out and laced his fingers together, rocking them backwards all before applying enough force to completely sever someone's head from their body.
A deafening pop rang through the damp room as he cracked his knuckles.
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