Heart of the Storm (Part 8)
Title: Heart of the Storm
Authors: lizynob and lorafantastory
Pairings: Oscar/Block as the Anna/Hans dynamic
Characters: Oscar Schlumper, Wayne Schlumper, Dr. Block, Dr. Tease, minor mentions of Party Mania characters
Word Count: 47,002
Warnings: Descriptions of anxiety, some bullying, angst, references to death
Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 9, Chapter 10, Chapter 11, Chapter 12, Chapter 13, Chapter 14, Chapter 15, Epilogue, Bonus Content
Letting Go
Wayne had lost all sense of minutes and hours by the time he finally collapsed under a tree to catch his breath. He had never been the least bit athletic and the climb up the side of the ravine was exhausting. Fear had been the only thing keeping him going, and even fear could only push him so far when his muscles gave out.
He rubbed his sleeve across streaming eyes as he tried to gasp oxygen back into his lungs. What had he done? The atmosphere around him still hissed and popped; bolts still split the air nearby. It was still spilling over even after all that. He couldn’t go back now, not ever. All the cover he’d tried to build for himself had been blown wide open.
It was all gone. His life, everything he’d worked for, everything he’d accomplished, gone.
His brother, gone.
Pained anger burned in him and he slammed a palm into the tree. His bare hand left a blackened scorch mark in the trunk the size of a basketball. Wayne gritted his teeth as the electricity coalesced into a sphere in his hand. He staggered to his feet and, with a futile cry of rage for everything that had been taken from him, hurled the lightning ball at a nearby poplar. The poplar exploded.
Keep the gloves on. Keep to yourself. Hold it back. Hold it in.
He’d tried for so many years to hide it. He’d worked so hard.
The hand that still wore the glove was itching something terrible. Lightning fizzled at the edge of his skin with nowhere to go. What was the point of containing it anymore? There was no use in keeping it hidden if everyone already knew.
He slipped off the insulated glove and let it drop to the ground. Electricity hissed as it zipped across his skin, released at last into the night air. The relief was immediate.
He watched it sparkle and crack around his fingers. There was no reason to contain it now. He looked back over the ravine, out at the stormy sky, at the distant flashes of light flickering in the clouds a long way off.
There was no one around to hurt. Nothing delicate around to break.
Wayne closed his eyes, tilted his head back, and let go. The lightning flowed from him, bathing his whole body in charged ions. He let it do what it would, slipping through the air around him and flying away in all directions. It nipped at his clothes and raised the hairs on the backs of his arms.
He just stood there, letting himself just feel it for once in his life. It tingled across his skin. It was almost…pleasant. Static swirled around him, playing with his hair. It felt…nice. A weight was slipping off his chest as he stood there amidst the storm. It was as though pressure that had been building up for years was finally getting a release.
Time slipped away again as he gave himself over to the sensation of holding nothing back. Perhaps he was there for seconds, perhaps minutes, perhaps hours. Wind rustled through the fabric of his lab coat, jostling the sleeves. The warm air slid over his bare hands, and after so long of keeping them covered, God that felt good. Thunder rumbled somewhere off in the distance but it was far away.
He’d dreamed of doing great things. Even when he was a child fooling around with a junior chemistry play set, mixing up harmless glow-in-the-dark concoctions with his little brother as they called each other sciencey nicknames. Insano and Linksano, ready to take on the scientific world: explore everything there was to explore and invent everything there was to invent.
He chuckled humorlessly. Insano. That name seemed oddly fitting somehow. Wayne Schlumper was dead. Why shouldn’t he be Insano now?
He opened his eyes and watched the bolts of light dance around him. Despite the fact that they singed the grass and chipped bark from the trees, they somehow seemed more…graceful to him. He raised an arm and moved it out to the side and the lightning followed, spiraling off to his right before dissipating a few feet away. He repeated the gesture with his other arm and got the same result. He stretched out a hand in front of him and watched the bolts flow off his fingers, sizzling away into the night. Curiously, he gave the energy in his fingertips a little push and the bolts flowed stronger. He pushed harder, watching the streams of light make it farther and farther away before vanishing into the air and the ground. He tried his other hand to similar effect.
Something familiar whispered inside of him. Curiosity. The urge to experiment. That same little niggling desire in the back of his mind that had been there since as far back as he could remember. The urge to try and see what could happen.
Slowly, carefully, he began to bend his fingers. He watched to see how the shape of his hand influenced the lightning, the direction, the intensity of the energy, trying to memorize positions that offered a more direct stream versus ones that hindered the flow. But as many mental notes as he made, after a while it all came down to feel. Some shapes of his fingers just felt right while others were uncomfortable. He let his hands fall into the positions that felt the best, still overwhelmed by the feel of the sensory input that he had tried to crush for so many years.
The bolts were bright in the darkness, blindingly so. A weight in his fluttering coat drew his attention to his pocket and he realized with faint surprise that his goggles were still there. He slipped them on and the filtered spirals immediately dispersed the light emanating from his fingers without darkening the woods around him, letting him see everything much more clearly.
Curiosity taking him over more and more, he focused the electricity on his right hand. The sparking around the rest of him ebbed away as the air around his hand glowed bright. He curled his fingers inward just a bit and watched as the lightning coalesced into a sphere about the size of an orange that hovered an inch or so above his palm. He widened the curl of his fingers, focusing harder, and the sphere grew. Tighten his fingers, pull back on the intensity just a bit, it would shrink.
The corners of his mouth pulled upward. There was a splendor to it, really. It was hot, it was dangerous, it was terrible, but with no one around to be hurt, there was a beauty too. He hefted the sphere slightly - there wasn’t really weight to it, but there was some form of volume - and, on a whim, tossed it away into the trees. It dissipated after perhaps fifty feet. Wayne focused the energy into another ball and tried again, putting all of his meager arm strength behind it to make it go as far as he could. It flew for several dozen yards before it finally smacked into the side of a large oak.
He couldn’t help the smirk that pulled at his lips. Heaven help him, but with nothing left to lose it was almost…fun.
He hurled another ball off in the opposite direction - and it crashed hard into something metal.
He hissed a curse and dropped down to one knee as the electricity died and plunged the woods into darkness again, praying that metal didn’t necessarily mean people. He waited in silence, listening for movement or the sounds of voices.
After several seconds of nothing he crept forward, natural curiosity taking over again. What metal was out on the far end of the ravine slope? The leaves above thinned out as he approached the edge of the tree line. Dark, hulking shapes stood out against the night sky but he couldn’t tell what they were. Whatever the metal was, it was clear there were no other humans around.
Wayne hesitated for a moment, then slowly raised a hand. He took a deep breath and, for the first time in twenty years, deliberately called forth the lightning into his palm. It slipped from him easily, forming a bright mass at the edge of his fingers to illuminate the space around him.
Headlights peered out at him from the darkness. Cars. Frames and tires and every imaginable piece of automobiles sat in rows throughout the clearing, piled on top of each other and looming above in stacks. The grass was high around the ones on the bottom, proving that none of them had been moved in quite some time. Some were rusty, Wayne observed, though most looked decent enough. A scrapyard of some kind, then.
A small building not much larger than a shed sat off to the side, but the windows were busted out and the door hung open off its hinges. It hadn’t been inhabited in some time, by the looks of things. Wayne relaxed, assured that there hadn’t been human activity in the area for a long time. And if things were that overgrown, it was likely there were no more people around for miles.
Wayne glanced around, more out of habit than anything else, to reassure himself that he was alone. He had multiple materials to experiment on now. Why the hell not?
He took a step back, settled his legs a few feet apart to brace himself, and thrust both hands out in front of him. Lightning exploded from his palms, channeling in a concentrated burst to crash into the stack of cars in front of him. Windows shattered, tires blew, and the car on top burst into pieces. The door separated itself from the rest of the frame, flying down at him and he jumped back with a cry, throwing up his arms to shield himself.
The car door stopped in midair.
Wayne looked up slowly, watching in fascination as it hung suspended, surrounded by a crackling glow. Wide-eyed, he lowered his hands and watched as the door lowered too until it settled gently to the ground.
It took him several seconds to process what had just happened.
Curiously, he held out a hand and sent a gentler flow of energy out to the broken metal door. Once the crackles surrounded it, he pulled back his arm and lifted-
The metal rose about two feet off the grass, and Wayne giggled in amazement. He wondered if the power that had ruined his life had perhaps given him something incredible in return. Could he do it with everything or…?
He held his other hand over a nearby rock and did the same thing, but the rock refused to move. The grass stayed where it was as well. Only metal then. He toyed with the car door for a bit, and though it would have been heavy to pick up with his hands, it might as well have been made of cardboard to the electricity. Adding movement from his other hand allowed him to bend the metal, much to his surprise, and clapping both hands together ended up snapping the door in half.
Oops.
On a whim he brought both halves back together, testing to see how well he could make tiny, accurate movements with the metal. The snap had twisted both pieces quite badly, but a little bending of his own got them back to more or less their original shape. They fit together quite well, actually.
An idea struck him. Holding the two pieces close together, he sent a round of lightning into the gap between them. Hot. Make it hot. The edges of the metal glowed orange and Wayne could feel the heat radiating out. The two halves welded together before his eyes.
A grin slowly crossed his face. He wasn’t doomed to destroy everything he touched. He could build things too.
He set the car door down and knelt in the grass, searching out the tiny metal fragments that had scattered when the door had snapped. A hand that sparkled with static was enough to warp the magnetic fields around it, apparently, because even the tiniest shards rose into the air from where they had been hiding in the dirt. He fused them together, pulled them apart, sent them spiraling up and around in the breeze. He rounded off edges and sharpened others, separating the shards into individual slivers while he pondered the different sorts of things he could probably make.
Inspiration crept up slowly as he played with the pieces, lining up the slivers and fusing them and bending them in just the right places until he had formed letters.
Insano.
He glanced down at his lab coat, bringing the metal letters down to cover the name Schlumper, forcing the edges of them through the fabric, bending them over, and sealing them there.
It was official. Doctor Schlumper, who spent his whole life terrified and trapped behind gloves, who burned his research papers and had blown more fuses than he could count, was gone. Doctor Insano, who channeled the electricity instead of suppressed it, who could arrange and alter and create things, out here far away from anyone who could be hurt, would take his place.
He stood and turned to the stacks of cars and discarded metal things, sparks flying off his fingertips in anticipation. A high, giggling laugh tore out of him.
Time to see what he could really do.
Authors: lizynob and lorafantastory
Pairings: Oscar/Block as the Anna/Hans dynamic
Characters: Oscar Schlumper, Wayne Schlumper, Dr. Block, Dr. Tease, minor mentions of Party Mania characters
Word Count: 47,002
Warnings: Descriptions of anxiety, some bullying, angst, references to death
Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 9, Chapter 10, Chapter 11, Chapter 12, Chapter 13, Chapter 14, Chapter 15, Epilogue, Bonus Content
Letting Go
Wayne had lost all sense of minutes and hours by the time he finally collapsed under a tree to catch his breath. He had never been the least bit athletic and the climb up the side of the ravine was exhausting. Fear had been the only thing keeping him going, and even fear could only push him so far when his muscles gave out.
He rubbed his sleeve across streaming eyes as he tried to gasp oxygen back into his lungs. What had he done? The atmosphere around him still hissed and popped; bolts still split the air nearby. It was still spilling over even after all that. He couldn’t go back now, not ever. All the cover he’d tried to build for himself had been blown wide open.
It was all gone. His life, everything he’d worked for, everything he’d accomplished, gone.
His brother, gone.
Pained anger burned in him and he slammed a palm into the tree. His bare hand left a blackened scorch mark in the trunk the size of a basketball. Wayne gritted his teeth as the electricity coalesced into a sphere in his hand. He staggered to his feet and, with a futile cry of rage for everything that had been taken from him, hurled the lightning ball at a nearby poplar. The poplar exploded.
Keep the gloves on. Keep to yourself. Hold it back. Hold it in.
He’d tried for so many years to hide it. He’d worked so hard.
The hand that still wore the glove was itching something terrible. Lightning fizzled at the edge of his skin with nowhere to go. What was the point of containing it anymore? There was no use in keeping it hidden if everyone already knew.
He slipped off the insulated glove and let it drop to the ground. Electricity hissed as it zipped across his skin, released at last into the night air. The relief was immediate.
He watched it sparkle and crack around his fingers. There was no reason to contain it now. He looked back over the ravine, out at the stormy sky, at the distant flashes of light flickering in the clouds a long way off.
There was no one around to hurt. Nothing delicate around to break.
Wayne closed his eyes, tilted his head back, and let go. The lightning flowed from him, bathing his whole body in charged ions. He let it do what it would, slipping through the air around him and flying away in all directions. It nipped at his clothes and raised the hairs on the backs of his arms.
He just stood there, letting himself just feel it for once in his life. It tingled across his skin. It was almost…pleasant. Static swirled around him, playing with his hair. It felt…nice. A weight was slipping off his chest as he stood there amidst the storm. It was as though pressure that had been building up for years was finally getting a release.
Time slipped away again as he gave himself over to the sensation of holding nothing back. Perhaps he was there for seconds, perhaps minutes, perhaps hours. Wind rustled through the fabric of his lab coat, jostling the sleeves. The warm air slid over his bare hands, and after so long of keeping them covered, God that felt good. Thunder rumbled somewhere off in the distance but it was far away.
He’d dreamed of doing great things. Even when he was a child fooling around with a junior chemistry play set, mixing up harmless glow-in-the-dark concoctions with his little brother as they called each other sciencey nicknames. Insano and Linksano, ready to take on the scientific world: explore everything there was to explore and invent everything there was to invent.
He chuckled humorlessly. Insano. That name seemed oddly fitting somehow. Wayne Schlumper was dead. Why shouldn’t he be Insano now?
He opened his eyes and watched the bolts of light dance around him. Despite the fact that they singed the grass and chipped bark from the trees, they somehow seemed more…graceful to him. He raised an arm and moved it out to the side and the lightning followed, spiraling off to his right before dissipating a few feet away. He repeated the gesture with his other arm and got the same result. He stretched out a hand in front of him and watched the bolts flow off his fingers, sizzling away into the night. Curiously, he gave the energy in his fingertips a little push and the bolts flowed stronger. He pushed harder, watching the streams of light make it farther and farther away before vanishing into the air and the ground. He tried his other hand to similar effect.
Something familiar whispered inside of him. Curiosity. The urge to experiment. That same little niggling desire in the back of his mind that had been there since as far back as he could remember. The urge to try and see what could happen.
Slowly, carefully, he began to bend his fingers. He watched to see how the shape of his hand influenced the lightning, the direction, the intensity of the energy, trying to memorize positions that offered a more direct stream versus ones that hindered the flow. But as many mental notes as he made, after a while it all came down to feel. Some shapes of his fingers just felt right while others were uncomfortable. He let his hands fall into the positions that felt the best, still overwhelmed by the feel of the sensory input that he had tried to crush for so many years.
The bolts were bright in the darkness, blindingly so. A weight in his fluttering coat drew his attention to his pocket and he realized with faint surprise that his goggles were still there. He slipped them on and the filtered spirals immediately dispersed the light emanating from his fingers without darkening the woods around him, letting him see everything much more clearly.
Curiosity taking him over more and more, he focused the electricity on his right hand. The sparking around the rest of him ebbed away as the air around his hand glowed bright. He curled his fingers inward just a bit and watched as the lightning coalesced into a sphere about the size of an orange that hovered an inch or so above his palm. He widened the curl of his fingers, focusing harder, and the sphere grew. Tighten his fingers, pull back on the intensity just a bit, it would shrink.
The corners of his mouth pulled upward. There was a splendor to it, really. It was hot, it was dangerous, it was terrible, but with no one around to be hurt, there was a beauty too. He hefted the sphere slightly - there wasn’t really weight to it, but there was some form of volume - and, on a whim, tossed it away into the trees. It dissipated after perhaps fifty feet. Wayne focused the energy into another ball and tried again, putting all of his meager arm strength behind it to make it go as far as he could. It flew for several dozen yards before it finally smacked into the side of a large oak.
He couldn’t help the smirk that pulled at his lips. Heaven help him, but with nothing left to lose it was almost…fun.
He hurled another ball off in the opposite direction - and it crashed hard into something metal.
He hissed a curse and dropped down to one knee as the electricity died and plunged the woods into darkness again, praying that metal didn’t necessarily mean people. He waited in silence, listening for movement or the sounds of voices.
After several seconds of nothing he crept forward, natural curiosity taking over again. What metal was out on the far end of the ravine slope? The leaves above thinned out as he approached the edge of the tree line. Dark, hulking shapes stood out against the night sky but he couldn’t tell what they were. Whatever the metal was, it was clear there were no other humans around.
Wayne hesitated for a moment, then slowly raised a hand. He took a deep breath and, for the first time in twenty years, deliberately called forth the lightning into his palm. It slipped from him easily, forming a bright mass at the edge of his fingers to illuminate the space around him.
Headlights peered out at him from the darkness. Cars. Frames and tires and every imaginable piece of automobiles sat in rows throughout the clearing, piled on top of each other and looming above in stacks. The grass was high around the ones on the bottom, proving that none of them had been moved in quite some time. Some were rusty, Wayne observed, though most looked decent enough. A scrapyard of some kind, then.
A small building not much larger than a shed sat off to the side, but the windows were busted out and the door hung open off its hinges. It hadn’t been inhabited in some time, by the looks of things. Wayne relaxed, assured that there hadn’t been human activity in the area for a long time. And if things were that overgrown, it was likely there were no more people around for miles.
Wayne glanced around, more out of habit than anything else, to reassure himself that he was alone. He had multiple materials to experiment on now. Why the hell not?
He took a step back, settled his legs a few feet apart to brace himself, and thrust both hands out in front of him. Lightning exploded from his palms, channeling in a concentrated burst to crash into the stack of cars in front of him. Windows shattered, tires blew, and the car on top burst into pieces. The door separated itself from the rest of the frame, flying down at him and he jumped back with a cry, throwing up his arms to shield himself.
The car door stopped in midair.
Wayne looked up slowly, watching in fascination as it hung suspended, surrounded by a crackling glow. Wide-eyed, he lowered his hands and watched as the door lowered too until it settled gently to the ground.
It took him several seconds to process what had just happened.
Curiously, he held out a hand and sent a gentler flow of energy out to the broken metal door. Once the crackles surrounded it, he pulled back his arm and lifted-
The metal rose about two feet off the grass, and Wayne giggled in amazement. He wondered if the power that had ruined his life had perhaps given him something incredible in return. Could he do it with everything or…?
He held his other hand over a nearby rock and did the same thing, but the rock refused to move. The grass stayed where it was as well. Only metal then. He toyed with the car door for a bit, and though it would have been heavy to pick up with his hands, it might as well have been made of cardboard to the electricity. Adding movement from his other hand allowed him to bend the metal, much to his surprise, and clapping both hands together ended up snapping the door in half.
Oops.
On a whim he brought both halves back together, testing to see how well he could make tiny, accurate movements with the metal. The snap had twisted both pieces quite badly, but a little bending of his own got them back to more or less their original shape. They fit together quite well, actually.
An idea struck him. Holding the two pieces close together, he sent a round of lightning into the gap between them. Hot. Make it hot. The edges of the metal glowed orange and Wayne could feel the heat radiating out. The two halves welded together before his eyes.
A grin slowly crossed his face. He wasn’t doomed to destroy everything he touched. He could build things too.
He set the car door down and knelt in the grass, searching out the tiny metal fragments that had scattered when the door had snapped. A hand that sparkled with static was enough to warp the magnetic fields around it, apparently, because even the tiniest shards rose into the air from where they had been hiding in the dirt. He fused them together, pulled them apart, sent them spiraling up and around in the breeze. He rounded off edges and sharpened others, separating the shards into individual slivers while he pondered the different sorts of things he could probably make.
Inspiration crept up slowly as he played with the pieces, lining up the slivers and fusing them and bending them in just the right places until he had formed letters.
Insano.
He glanced down at his lab coat, bringing the metal letters down to cover the name Schlumper, forcing the edges of them through the fabric, bending them over, and sealing them there.
It was official. Doctor Schlumper, who spent his whole life terrified and trapped behind gloves, who burned his research papers and had blown more fuses than he could count, was gone. Doctor Insano, who channeled the electricity instead of suppressed it, who could arrange and alter and create things, out here far away from anyone who could be hurt, would take his place.
He stood and turned to the stacks of cars and discarded metal things, sparks flying off his fingertips in anticipation. A high, giggling laugh tore out of him.
Time to see what he could really do.