Chapter Text
1994
“So…”
“So?” Walter asked, grinning at his girlfriend. They were lying in his bed in his apartment, or at least the closest thing he had to an apartment. It didn’t really feel like his, but it was his, and it wasn’t on a military base, so it was close enough.
Walter and Carol were just kind of lounging. The TV was on, but they weren’t really watching it. Or, Walter had been, but Carol wasn’t, apparently, and now he was curious about where this was going.
“This is going to be our first trip together,” Carol told him, and that wasn’t what he expected her to say.
“No, it’s not,” he responded, and he doubted himself for a moment, but he pulled the right memories quickly. “We went to Pasadena and Cambridge last year.”
“Those were work trips. And Pasadena was before we became a couple.”
True on that last point, but the first raised some questions. “This is a work trip.”
“Yeah, but we’re not going to be working.” Walter stared at her for a moment, and she continued, voice taking a different tone. “It’s for the researchers. We’re basically just there to watch them talk to each other.”
Walter felt a stab of guilt. “I’ve been emailing one of the Tinkers and a couple of the folks that work in the garage. The PRT’s been working on some new jets—you know, because we think Behemoth is going to keep attacking cities—and Ben and I wanted to take a look.”
Carol looked disappointed, and lying down facing her like this, Walter could see every detail of it on her face. She wouldn’t say it, though. “It’s fine. It is a work trip. It’s good you’re taking advantage of it.”
Walter still felt bad. He shouldn’t, but he did. “There will be downtime. We should get one of those books for tourists. We could do some half days or something.”
Carol agreed, and Walter thought she seemed appeased, but there was still a bit of a shift in the energy in the room. He didn’t completely understand why, but he made a mental note to start looking at some vacation spots. If Carol wanted to go on a trip together, they could afford to step away from work for a week or two.
There were over twenty of them making this trip from New Mexico to New York. Walter thought six non-scientists would be enough to wrangle the researchers, but it was still a struggle to get there. How all these people held doctorates or had gotten into PhD programs was beyond him.
But when they actually got to the PRT Headquarters, and Walter saw them in their element, he got it.
“The Interdisciplinary Parahuman Origins Research Project,” Ben told the Tinker he and Walter had managed to get some time with, as if she didn’t know why they were here. “You shoulda seen Reed when Scion first showed up! I’m telling you, this man loves astrophysics more than anything, but I think that if he’d known the direction the world was going to take, he mighta studied something else.”
“It was my understanding Dr. Richards believed our powers came from space,” the Tinker clarified, and Walter jumped in.
“He wants to explore cosmic radiation as an answer, but he’s smart enough to know not to put all his eggs in one basket,” Walter explained. “Science is all about growth. You have a theory, and you find the evidence to confirm it, but that doesn’t mean you completely understand it. There’s always ways to learn more about something, and that’s the idea behind this project. Say the answer is cosmic radiation. We still need to understand the effect it has on the body, and that’s where people like Dr. Storm and Dr. Pym come in.”
The Tinker hummed in agreement, seeming satisfied with the answer, and the conversation drifted toward the more technical side. Ben and Walter were engineers, not scientists. Military too. They were there as consultants and liaisons, but also to ensure the scientists had some of the physical items they’d need for their work. And for Reed’s dream project, that meant building a rocket.
None of them was naive. It was a massively ambitious project. It cost billions of dollars just to go to the moon the first time, and it was a gross underestimation to look at cost alone. Going to space would take years, and it wasn’t like they’d just be waiting during those years. They’d be working every moment of it, which was why getting to talk to a Tinker like this was so exciting.
Walter had thought about what kind of powers he’d get if he got them. Of course he did. He was an adult, but he’d been a boy once, and what little boy didn’t like playing superhero? When he’d been a child running around with the neighborhood kids, flight, super strength, and energy blasts were always his go-tos, but now that he was older and superpowers were real, Walter knew he’d want to be a Tinker.
It wasn’t as cool or flashy, but despite his time in the military, Walter didn’t particularly want to fight. It wasn’t why he was an engineer, but being a Tinker wouldn’t change his lifestyle too much, he thought. He’d still be working and building. He’d just have more options about what he could build and work on.
He didn’t think he was an insecure guy. Engineering just didn’t seem like much compared to the people he was around every day. These guys were real geniuses, even the students. Once Ben and Walter were done with the Tinker, Walter knew he should go find Carol and spend some time together like she’d wanted. He couldn’t just ignore the researchers, though.
They were talking to the PRT power testing staff, mostly. There were others, but Walter hadn’t identified who they were, and he didn’t really care. The main groups on the project were cellular biology, physics, genetics, and environmental influence, and Walter only had a cursory understanding of any of those things, but it was enough that he could really understand how high-level the conversations in this room were.
Carol didn’t really have an appreciation for it, which Walter normally didn’t mind all that much. She was real military. A real fighter. Walter didn’t think he could do that, but he liked that about her. She just had this whole different way of approaching life. A little more direct, a little more courageous. She saw things as they were, not as what they might be.
It meant she was good at her job, but she also knew how to live. She was fun. She made Walter more fun. He didn’t think he was boring or obsessed with work or anything, but she was fearless in a way Walter wasn’t. She was the kind of person who would fly out of state for a weekend trip and leave the house past seven p.m. Which, when Walter tried to articulate it, didn’t sound all that crazy, but it felt crazy to him, and he was crazy about her.
This trip was an opportunity to show her how true that was.
“I’ve got this whole plan,” Walter told her the morning after that first day in New York. Ben hadn’t minded Walter wanting to run off with Carol, but he still expected Walter to work the rest of the trip, so Walter was going to make the most of today.
“Oh?” She looked intrigued, but also a little like she was humoring him. Walter didn’t mind. “Care to share?”
Walter reached for the hotel’s bedside table and pulled out a plastic bag. It was the kind you got at a grocery store, a thin and flimsy thing. He had better bags, of course, but this felt right.
“In this bag, I have two bottles of water, an orange, a banana, a map, and about a hundred dollars in small bills and coins,” he told her. She cocked a brow, and she still looked a little like she was humoring him, but her interest was genuine. “We’re just going to walk out of this hotel.”
“And?”
“And that’s it. That’s the plan,” he told her. “We’ll figure it out once we’re out there.”
Nervousness thrummed in Walter’s stomach, but it faded as Carol’s grin widened. She got up in the blink of an eye, taking Walter’s hand and pulling him toward the door. “Let’s go!”
Walter laughed and let her pull him up. “Let me put on my shoes first!”
They didn’t run right out. Walter wanted to be spontaneous for her, but part of why they worked was the fact that he slowed her down. They got the hotel’s free continental breakfast, and then they were off.
The novelty of just running around wore off pretty quickly, and they gave in and hailed a taxi pretty quickly. That was part of the fun, though.
“Where to?”
“Got any recommendations?” Carol asked the driver, and Walter submitted himself to Carol’s whims.
Walter wasn’t sure he’d call it a car crash because that would imply the taxi hit something.
In the moment, Walter hadn’t been able to figure out what happened. Later, he’d figure out that the Hulk had landed on the front half of the car, poorly aiming one of his leaps and utterly crushing the driver. The metal had twisted around the impact point, and the force of the Hulk coming down had destroyed the road and sent the cars around them spinning out of their planned trajectories.
But right then and there, it was just chaos. One second, Carol was chatting with the cab driver, and the next, pain was rippling through his body.
He reached for her. He couldn’t see her, and he didn’t know why, but even through his haze, he knew he needed to find her.
He felt his fingers make contact with skin, but they slipped, wet with blood. He tried again, but they just kept slipping and slipping. He couldn’t even begin to figure out whose it was, though, because the sensations of his body were suddenly so impossibly distant.
It was dark. He hadn’t really been able to see before, but darkness and absence were different things. There was movement, he could see. Tentacles, or maybe a tail. But mostly darkness. Then, as soon as it arrived, there was this brilliant light, and Walter could see again. See the destruction around him.
He was still in the car. It had sunk into the earth, breaking through the concrete, and Walter fumbled for the seatbelt, freeing himself quickly. He pawed the seat next to him, the spot where Carol had been, but he felt nothing. She wasn’t there.
There was something wrong with his hand. He knew it when he looked at it, but the shock still flowing through his body just wouldn’t let his mind figure it out, like the synapses of his brain just weren’t connecting.
He needed to get out of here. He got up with surprising ease and started to pull himself out, and the metal of the taxi door bent under his weight, making him fall face-first into the dry, earthy material that normally lived under the asphalt. Part of him wanted to lie there for a bit longer, but he forced himself up, and that was the hardest part. It was surprisingly easy to crawl out of the hole he’d ended up in. He chalked it up to the shock making his body feel all weird and distant.
The world felt impossibly loud around him when he emerged. He couldn’t pinpoint what it was, though. Something far away, maybe, or perhaps just the normal hustle and bustle of New York City. Things around him didn’t feel normal, though. There were wrecked cars all around him, and there were people all around, all in different states of panic. Some were helping others, some were running, and some were just… there. Frozen, like they didn’t know what to do.
Walter didn’t know what to do either.
“Help!” he shouted, and several people looked in his direction. “I was- There were two people in the cab with me. A blonde woman and a bearded man. I don’t- They’re not there!”
He kept shouting, kept asking if anyone had seen Carol, but no one was answering him. And when they finally did speak, Walter couldn’t make sense of the words. “The Hulk went that way!”
“What?” The Hulk? Oh, the Hulk had done this presumably. That was good to know, but it really didn’t help Walter. “I need to find my girlfriend!”
“Is she another cape?” someone asked, and again, Walter just couldn’t make sense of the words. Individually, he understood them, but he couldn’t fathom why they were being directed at him.
“What?” Walter asked, and the people looked back at him, just as confused. It took him a beat to realize they weren’t looking at his face. He followed their gazes, eyes traveling down to his own chest, and he saw yellow, blue, and red.
Not his clothes. Not his chest either, actually. He was wearing some kind of costume. It had a yellow symbol on its chest that looked a little like a star, placed right between two pecs that were too big to be his. His shoulders were broader too, and his stomach was more flat than it’d been in years. What was going on?
He looked like a superhero, he realized. These people weren’t helping him because they thought he was a superhero. But he wasn’t a superhero. He was just Walter Lawson. He tried telling them this, that he wasn’t a parahuman, but his words seemed to fall on deaf ears, and people kept shouting at him to go in the direction the Hulk was.
He gave in eventually. Not because he wanted to find the Hulk, but you could only listen to people telling you to do something for so long without doing it. Besides, if people thought he was a superhero, that meant a superhero could probably help him, or at least recognize that he wasn’t a superhero, and all the superheroes were presumably where the Hulk was.
Somewhere between the car crash and the battlegrounds, Walter realized he did, in fact, have powers.
It was an odd moment. He’d been running, and then he’d had the thought he wasn’t getting tired, so he tried to slow down, but couldn’t, and when he looked down, he realized he’d been flying.
He was flying.
He flailed a bit, hands nor feet touching the ground, and that just made it worse. What was going on? How was he supposed to get down? What if he started going up? He had no idea how to fly!
To his credit, he didn’t scream, but he had gotten stuck, so it wasn’t like screaming was much worse.
He did, eventually, find another cape.
“You there!” a man with long blonde hair and some kind of armor called. “Are you a member of the Protectorate?”
“No!” Walter almost wailed. “I just ended up like this! I don’t know what’s happening.”
To his surprise, the other man understood. “Me too! There was all this fighting around me, and I fell, and when I stood up, I was like this!”
He gestured at himself when he spoke, and Walter understood what he meant. This man was big, bigger than he was by a good amount. Walter had thought his new body was unusually muscular, but this guy was packed with muscle. Walter had thought he looked like a superhero, but this guy was something else entirely.
It was almost exactly what happened to him. There must be something going around. Or… This was a man before him, but he had long yellow hair, so… “Carol?”
The man shook his head. “Donald.”
Not Carol then. Wait. “Donald Blake?”
The man—Donald—looked surprised and then asked, “Walter?”
This was one of the guys on the parahuman project. Walter wouldn’t call Donald a friend, but he was a medical doctor, not a researcher, and there was a sense of solidarity among the non-researchers. The important thing here was that he’d found someone he knew.
Walter liked Donald, but he wouldn’t be shy to admit the guy was kind of wimpy. It wasn’t his fault. The guy had a limp bad enough he needed a cane to get around. The- The viking that stood before him stood in stark contrast to him. Now that he was looking at another person who’d gone through what he had, it was a little more obvious that they’d undergone some kind of transformation. Some kind of Trump power that turned people into cape personas, maybe?
“They said the Hulk is attacking New York,” Walter said because he didn’t know what else to say. They knew each other, and they were together in this strange new world, and that made Walter feel a little better, but he was still feeling pretty shaken.
Donald nodded. “I was going to go see if I could help.”
Selfless. Walter hadn’t done that. He’d gone to look for Carol. That was all he’d cared about. But now that he had another person to ground him, Walter was thinking clearly enough to know that he had to go fight the Hulk. If there was even a chance he could do something to stop that monster from hurting anyone else, Walter had to take it.
Donald could fly using his hammer, which meant he had a tool to control his trajectory. He grabbed Walter by the hand and helped him get started, and Walter figured out how to fly himself sooner than later. It felt weird, and he had to go slow because it felt like he was going to crash, but he was doing it and that was what counted.
Walter didn’t know New York well enough to know where they ended up, but he could tell that it had been sort of an open area before it’d been razed by the battle. He recognized Alexandria, Eidolon, Legend, and Hero, but no one else. The Protectorate had a lot of capes, but they were all in New York, which meant Walter never saw them in New Mexico unless they made national headlines, and even then, Walter didn’t look at the paper all that much.
These other capes lacked what the four Protectorate founders had, though. They were mostly hanging back, helping keep the battle contained rather than trying to end it. Alexandria and Eidolon were in the thick of it, using Brute powers to go head to head with the Hulk, while Hero and Legend circled them, Hero on some kind of hover platform and Legend entering and exiting his Breaker state to lay down cover fire.
It made the Hulk look that much more intimidating.
He was in the center of it all, utterly unfazed. He roared wordlessly and punched and battered at Alexandria and Eidolon, clapping shockwaves to knock Hero and Legend down, and stomping fissures to hurt the supporting heroes. With his massive size and the general sense of inhumanity radiating from him as he took this onslaught, he was terrifying.
And Donald just flew right toward him and smacked him with his hammer.
To his credit, it did make the Hulk topple over, but the Hulk was up in a heartbeat, and Donald’s head was in his hand. Donald hit him again, though, which was hopefully a good sign.
Walter wanted to hang back, but he couldn’t right after seeing what Donald had just done, so he flew up to Legend and hoped he wouldn’t accidentally fly right into one of his attacks. “Hi. Um, so the guy with the hammer and I just transformed into, um, this. And that. What do I do?”
Walter had practically thrown himself at Legend asking for help, but he was still surprised when Legend actually responded positively. “It’s very brave that you and your friends went right to join a fight against the Hulk after getting your powers. Looks like Thor’s got the Alexandria package. You might too, but Mover/Blaster’s pretty common if you want to give that a try before getting too close to the Hulk.”
Thor? Oh, Donald. He did look kind of like Thor, now that Walter was thinking about it. He couldn’t completely remember what the Norse god looked like, but Donald matched the image in his head well enough.
Walter watched Legend for a moment as he refocused on the Hulk, watching his hands as the energy beams fired out of them. He glanced at his own hands and inspected the dark blue gloves covering them. He had these thick yellow bands around his wrists, too. He ran his finger along one, feeling the texture. Smooth, not quite metallic but close. He couldn’t begin to guess their purpose.
He extended his arms and put his hands out like Legend had, and focused, trying to imagine energy rushing out of his fists.
It startled him when it actually happened, making the burst of power short and untargeted, but it’d still happened, and that was what counted.
A ball of yellow energy struck the Hulk in the back. Actually, it clipped him more than anything, but it still got his attention. The Hulk whirrled around, eyes falling on Walter, and Walter got a good look at his big, ugly mug. His features were tight, eyebrows knit together and teeth gritted. The picture of anger. He should have realized that was a sign the Hulk was about to attack.
The Hulk leapt at him, and it felt sudden even though it really wasn’t, and Walter wasn’t used to flying enough to really get out of the way. The Hulk crashed into him, and it hurt, but not nearly as much as it should have. He did have some form of the Alexandria package, it seemed. It probably kept him from getting killed the moment the Hulk touched him, but it really didn’t do much for him when gravity took over and dragged the Hulk back down to the ground, Walter going down with him.
He was trapped under him for a moment, and Walter was brought back to the car crash—that sensation of not knowing what was going on around him, but still knowing he was enclosed—but it only lasted a moment. The Hulk picked him up quickly, and then he was grabbing Walter. His hands clasped Walter’s arms, yanking him up and off the ground, and Walter felt those metal bands on his wrists clanging together uncomfortably.
It sent a spike of sensation through his body, a hollow feeling shooting down his spine, and then the Hulk was gone, and Walter didn’t know where he was.