Do or Die

Do or Die. Right.

Son Boy had been watching the people around him immediately launch into their attacks and get flung around like they were nothing more than cat toys. Some had even wound up petrified. This was real. He was in the midst of a life-or-death battle with a giant, evil, three-headed cat monster. And he had done nothing.  It’s not that he didn’t want to, it was…just that he knew that he only had one shot. He wasn’t blessed with a form that gave him wonderful abilities or a stunning new look. His only powers were vile to look at and painful to use, so he refused to use them until the time felt right. And now that people were dropping like flies and the Sneercat had focused its attention on him, it felt like now was a good a time as ever. With a sigh, he pulled down his hoodie to reveal his half-humanoid face. 

“Makes sense. A disgusting form for disgusting powers.”

Looking into its giant eyes, he thought of how he must’ve looked to the telemon that were broadcasting the fight to all of the concerned folks back home. He wondered if his dad was watching. He hoped not. This wasn’t something anyone should see, which is exactly why he lied about coming here and made Wynn swear to keep it quiet. Nobody should watch their kid get eaten on live TV.  Son Boy sighed one more time as he began to channel the powers that the seal gave him. His bad eye illuminating with a rosy hue, he began to feel the metal parts of him creak and give way as magic began to pry them from where they rested on his body. 

The amalgamation of metal and plastics wrapped around his human arms shifted and moved as he channeled all his strength into using the abilities granted to him by the awful seal on his eye. Slowly, painfully, they shifted and writhed like metallic rat king, inching their way bit by bit from his wrists to his arms, from his elbows to his shoulders, and finally, they extended from his back like a tangle of lethal springs. The tips of each metal appendage began to glow red-hot, burning with the same fiery red magic that emulates from an activated seal. Like a flower's bloom, each pointed tip opened to reveal red pointed gems, similar in shape to that of Son Boy's dowsing pendulum. However, these were not just gems. As Son Boy clenched his fists, wincing at the pain of his transformation and the sheer scale of what he had become after all of this, the gems began to open and close. They were not gems--they were claws. The scrap metal encasing his arms had bloomed into a tangle of iron tentacle-like horrors. As they slid across one another, moving independently, they made a terrible screeching sound. They coiled around one another like a nest of snakes. 

His right arm could control one half of his tangle of metal, and his left, the other half. Like a twisted form of puppetry, he directed the coils like a conductor in front of an orchestra. As he clenched his hands, the gem claws opened and closed. He had become the master of a furious metal hydra, and the monstrous feline in front of him was the target at which the hydra would be unleashed. It was a horrible sight. 

And it was unequivocally, unavoidably, the last form he would ever take before the giant monster before him would snuff him out. On live television. 

“Hopefully, Dad’s not watching…”

Raising his hands to his chest, palms facing out, Son Boy looked almost like he was offering himself to the Sneercat.  He was dwarfed by the thing, but in the moment, he felt no fear. As usual, he didn’t feel much of anything. Well, anything but pain, really. Despite it all, he felt numb. 

“They’d expect that out of me, wouldn’t they? Joining the fight and doing nothing but offering myself up without so much as a struggle?”

“Yeah, they would. I would too.”

Son Boy looked up at the monster that absolutely dwarfed him, making eye contact as it leered down and snarled at him. It looked hungry. Son Boy was hungry too. He hadn’t eaten the food that the cake—no, Chiffon, had given him for the trip. 

“If I get out of here in one piece, maybe I’ll eat it. Maybe I’ll cook something for her, too. Maybe--”

The Sneercat broke Son Boy out of his own head, snarling and swatting at him with one of its paws, narrowly missing him and creating a giant gash in the ground that left an imprint of claws. He managed to move out of the way, which was something he would never have had the agility to do without a seal. And that frustrated him to no end. Under this flesh and bone, he could feel the scraps of metal lingering behind creak and groan as he moved. It was a miserable, fragile existence. He gathered himself, anchoring his shoes in the dirt where the Sneercat attacked. Why did it take an ugly, evil seal for him to be able to function like this? 

Why was he so broken? Why couldn’t he just be like everyone else?

“It’s not fair!”

Son Boy clenched his fist as he reflected on his sad situation and felt something shift inside of him. Something…snapping? Almost like someone twisted a key inside his chest, unlocking something that had been sealed away under iron and plastic for so, so long. Instead of feeling emotions naturally, coming and going as they should, Son Boy had welled them all up inside. But now, every emotion just poured out of him at once. Anger, sadness, pain, elation, fear…it was all so much. His one good eye glistened with tears, overwhelmed with so much going on inside his mind. His heart felt like it was going to burst. But not before he could do what he came here to do. 

“It hurts. Everything hurts. I can feel. And it hurts.”

He raised his arms once more, with the tangle of metal and claws followed, swaying eerily as they mimicked his gestures. Then, with an uncharacteristically swift motion, he thrust his arms out to make a grabbing motion—and the hydra followed. A mess of metal springs, glowing gems, and coils of plastic lunged at the Sneercat, wrapping it in what seemed like the world’s thickest barbed wire. As the monster hissed and tried to rip it off, Son Boy raised his hand into the air, palm open, and the coils mimicked once again.

He clenched his fist, and the gem-like claws gripped onto the face of the Sneercat, digging into the eerie black fur and causing the Sneercat to let out a fury of swipes. As its claws scraped against the metal, it made a dreadful tearing sound. He knew he couldn’t do much to this thing, but that wasn’t going to stop him from getting a bit of catharsis before it could pry his tangled web of nightmares off of it. Raising his clenched fist up to eye level, the metal coils dragged the Sneercat’s face up into the air. 

“This is for all the feelings I’ve hurt--!”

He thrust his closed fist downward, and the coils lurched back at him, pulling the Sneercat’s face downward and hitting the ground with a vicious -CRACK!-, making a small crater around where the impact was. It hurt like hell for the tangle to move at all, and this was absolutely excruciating. But he knew this was coming. Not giving the Sneercat time to recoup, he raised his hand again.

“This is for all the times I was a bad person ‘cuz I didn’t know what else to be!”

Forcing his arm down even faster this time, the Sneercat’s face followed with another earthy thud as it hit the ground.

This is for my dad, who wouldn’t have to see this if I wasn’t so stupid!

I’m sorry, okay!

He couldn’t explain why tears were streaming down his face. He was in the middle of battle with a giant, disgusting cat creature. And yet he couldn’t stop. His whole body felt like it was burning with every single emotion all at once, and each time he slammed the creacher’s face into the dirt, it released some of that energy. Pain be damned. So over and over again, he pummeled the Sneercat as hard as he could. 

I’m sorry for everything!

I’m sorry, Dad. I’m sorry, people at school. I’m sorry, Wynn. I’m sorry, Eli, I’m sorry, Chiffon.

The Sneercat began to struggle, so Son Boy began using both arms instead of one, the tangle now fully encasing the Sneercat’s face in what looked like a painful, bejeweled mask of barbed wire. With all the anger he could muster, Son Boy slammed the creacher’s face into the ground so hard that there was a sizeable crack in the cat face-shaped hole that had formed there. 

I’m sorry that this is what it took for me to finally be a good person!

Son Boy could feel his energy draining with each attack, his body growing weaker until becoming so fatigued that he could no longer raise his arms. With his feelings spent, the numbness began to return—a cold feeling began to creep up his body and as it set in, it siphoned away his ability to fight back. The coils began to pull away from the Sneercat, gradually returning to their position behind him. His legs becoming shaky, he could do little else but look on as the cat raised a paw to strike. 

It missed.

The weight of his feelings, the weight of his tangled metal hydra, and the weight of an imminent end had all become too much. Falling to his knees and narrowly avoiding the swipe, Son Boy stared ahead of him. His vision blurry, he couldn’t tell if the darkness in front of him was the Sneercat or an incoming blackout. Son Boy didn’t even have the strength to lift his arms to brace for impact as he fell forward, causing him to hit the ground, falling face-first into the dirt. In his final moments of consciousness, he hoped that….maybe something he did mattered. Listening to the sounds of battle going on around him, all he could do was close his eyes. 

Maybe, just maybe, someone could be proud of what he did.

Proud of what he could do.

Proud of him.

And then…nothing.