The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

A hero cleans his own messes.

That thought landed somewhere between my chest and my stomach as I pulled the Range Rover into the parking lot of Consolidated Hardware on Sixth Street, a two-story concrete building that looked like it had been standing since before Aspects existed and would probably still be standing after whatever came next. The signage was faded yellow on brown, the kind of color combination that communicated we sell things that work and have never once considered hiring a graphic designer. I liked it immediately.

The real reason I was here at seven-oh-four in the morning instead of calling Dale back and eating the six thousand dollar bill was simpler than any heroic philosophy. The man I was before this body, before this System, before Diane and Sloane and the whole insane architecture of my current existence, would have chewed his own arm off before paying someone six grand to fix two holes that he could learn to fix himself. That wasn’t Lukas Belmont talking. That was me. The original me. The guy who grew up in government housing and learned to unclog his own toilet at eleven because the maintenance request line had a three-week backlog and his bathroom was starting to smell like a war crime.

Six thousand dollars. For drywall. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝚠𝚎𝚋𝗻𝗼𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝚘𝐦

Over my dead body.

The automatic doors wheezed open and the smell hit me first. Sawdust and metal and that particular chemical sweetness that comes from fifty different types of adhesive sitting on shelves in close proximity. The store was cavernous, with aisles stretching back far enough that the fluorescent lighting created a haze near the ceiling. This early on a Saturday, the place was mostly empty. A woman in paint-stained overalls examined color swatches near the entrance. A skinny teenager in a store vest restocked something on a shelf with the enthusiasm of someone counting down the minutes until his shift ended.

And behind the main counter, leaning on his elbows and reading a newspaper with actual paper pages like some kind of relic from a history museum, stood the largest man I had ever seen who was not actively trying to kill something.

The guy was enormous. Not tall, exactly, though he was at least six-four. The enormity was all width. His shoulders looked like someone had installed a second set of shoulders on top of the first ones and then added a third layer for structural reinforcement. His arms were thick enough that the store polo he wore had surrendered any pretense of containing his biceps, the sleeves rolled up past elbows that were bigger than my thighs. Dark brown skin covered in a light fuzz of hair that, combined with his heavy brow ridge and the way his jaw jutted forward, gave him the unmistakable silhouette of something that had evolved to rip bark off trees and wasn’t embarrassed about it.

Branded. Had to be. The kind of Branded-type whose Aspect had decided that baseline human was a suggestion rather than a requirement and had rewritten his biology accordingly.

He looked up when I approached. His eyes were a warm amber brown, surprisingly gentle for a face that could have been carved into the side of a mountain, and the name tag pinned to his straining polo read GERALD.

"Morning," I said. "I need to fix two holes in a gym wall and ceiling. One’s about the size of a basketball. The other’s where a chain mount ripped out of a ceiling beam. Also I’ve never done this before."

Gerald folded his newspaper with the slow care of someone who had all the time in the world and wasn’t about to let an eighteen-year-old’s emergency change that. He set it on the counter and regarded me.

"Aspect damage?"

"Something like that."

"Hm." Gerald reached under the counter and produced a clipboard with a pre-printed checklist. "Been getting a lot of that this time of year. Kids coming up on academy enrollment. Testing their powers in rooms that weren’t built for it. Had a boy in here last Tuesday who melted through his garage floor. Acid secretion. His mama was not pleased."

"I can imagine."

"How big’s the wall crater?"

"Basketball. Maybe a little bigger. It went through the drywall and I could see the studs behind it."

"Studs cracked or just exposed?"

I thought back. "Just exposed. The impact dispersed across the surface before it hit the framing."

Gerald nodded with approval that I found unreasonably validating. "Good. Means we’re doing surface reconstruction, not structural repair. What about the ceiling?"

"Chain mount for a heavy bag. Ripped clean out. Left a hole about six inches across and I think it pulled some of the surrounding drywall with it."

"Lag bolts or toggle bolts?"

"Toggle, I think. They failed under load."

Gerald’s lip curled. "Course they did. Who installs a heavy bag mount with toggle bolts? That’s asking for exactly what happened to you. Should’ve been lag bolts into the joist from day one." He shook his head with the genuine offense of a man who took fastener selection personally. "All right. We’re going to do this proper. Follow me."

Gerald came around the counter and I followed him into the depths of Consolidated Hardware. Walking behind Gerald was like following a delivery truck down a narrow road. He occupied the entire aisle width and moved with the unhurried confidence of a man who knew where every single item in this building lived and felt no need to rush toward any of them.

We stopped first at the drywall section, where Gerald pulled a full sheet of five-eighths-inch drywall from a stack and leaned it against the shelf like it weighed nothing, which for him it probably did.

"Five-eighths, not half-inch," he said. "If this is a training space, you want the thicker stock. Won’t stop another hit like whatever you threw, but it’ll absorb casual impact without denting."

"Makes sense."

"You’ll need backer board too." He grabbed a piece of cement-fiber board from the next shelf. "This goes behind the patch. Creates a solid surface for the new drywall to attach to. Most people skip this step. Most people’s patches crack inside six months."

I wasn’t going to be most people. Not for three hundred dollars. Not for three thousand. Not for any amount of money that could be spent on literally anything else, up to and including gacha pulls.

Gerald loaded me up methodically. Joint compound in a five-gallon bucket. Mesh tape. Corner bead for the ceiling repair. A drywall saw. A utility knife. A six-inch taping knife. A twelve-inch taping knife for the finish coats. Sandpaper in three grits. A T-square. Drywall screws in two sizes. Two tubes of construction adhesive. A package of lag bolts in heavy gauge for the replacement ceiling mount. A stud finder. A drill bit set rated for overhead work.

"You got a drill?"

"Diane has one."

Gerald paused. "Diane Fitzgerald?"

I blinked. "You know her?"