I'm about to call it a night when I find you. From a mass of angry zombies, your pain calls to me as I fly overhead. I wheel in air and focus my senses on you; there are too many of them, and your life is ebbing away. Will you break and run to save yourself before I can reach you? I land lightly behind you, close enough to see the arrows that stand from your body, slowing you as the dead things shamble onward. I ignore your swarming enemies; my gifts are not for the likes of them. My senses reach for you alone, and I unleash the full flood of my power upon you.

In a flare of green light, we are made one. I pour my strength into the gaps of your life, and like a riptide your pain returns to me down the channel of my power. Now it is my body that shudders with pain, my shoulders burn with zombie acid, and my traitorous hands clutch at my undamaged armor above the arrow wounds that pierce my guts.

-----

They say Paragon City is beautiful, but I wouldn't know. The inside of the Intensive Care Unit looks the same as every other one I've been in. The doctors here think they might figure out what's causing the pains that have twisted my body since I was fourteen. A lot of heroes live here, and almost every week one or another comes to visit the poor kids in the ICU. They leave us with autographed photos and strange stories of their adventures in the outside world. That's me on the left, the skinny kid with the white-spotted face. These stupid things become precious to me at night, when the pain has me crying to the darkness for mercy.

Doctor Mitchell is checking my EKG when it starts. There's a thud, like freight cars coupling, and the building trembles a little. Then it happens again, and again. Doctor Mitchell's pager beeps a code I've never heard, and he drops the tracings all over my bed in his hurry to leave. The other doctors' pagers are going off too, one by one.

After they've all left, I expertly shut down my monitor and slip out of bed. I shuffle down the hall on aching limbs. The doctors and nurses running past are too busy to tell me to get back to the room. I follow the crowds, the shouting and the faint smell of smoke as the hallway rocks with distant thunder, and then I turn the corner to the ER.

The bodies of heroes are everywhere, on gurneys shoved into every space, and more are coming in as I watch. Cops and firefighters and ordinary citizens carry brightly colored forms on makeshift stretchers and rescue blankets, laying them wherever they can find room, and the reek of blood and burnt flesh is shot through with a fresh blast of smoke every time the big doors roll open, and they just keep coming and coming... The ER looks carpeted in flowers of every color, and the doctors rush frantically among them like bees in a summer garden.

Right in front of me Doctor Mitchell stands, shaking his head, and a masked figure lies still at his feet. I stumble forward, drawn by a compulsion I can't begin to understand. What am I doing here? Am I going crazy? But the hero's brilliant leathers are sticky with blood beneath my shaking hands, and the raw power rips through my body like a river in flood. Doctor Mitchell is shouting something that I can't hear over my own screams. The pain, the pain is like nothing I've ever imagined, but I'm not crying for mercy now. My flesh tears itself wide with terrible wounds, my bones shatter themselves, the eyes in the masked bloody face open and stare into mine... and it all becomes clear to me, oh, so very clear.

-----

Pain holds no mystery for me anymore, and I refocus on my target, chiding myself for my foolishness. You can't spare a glance for me, but you know I've got your back. Your claws flash in the morning's sun, driving into rotting flesh, landing blow after raking blow, spending my gifts with reckless abandon. Your tormentors don't realize they are fighting the strength of two heroes in one body. Their blows seem to glance off you as I let the shallows of my power wash over you, healing the wounds almost as they arise, and one by one your enemies fall beneath our onslaught until you stand alone in a pile of those who sought to bring you down.

We shout our triumph, you and I, and you turn and look on my face for the first time. We salute each other as comrades, and then you are off and running on your interrupted journey. Back on my rooftop, giddy with our victory, I laugh with the joy of being alive, of facing Death and spitting in his eye. The fine new sun touches the tenements with gold, and a stranger's wounds are healing beneath my armor and a stranger's pain is melting to nothingness like a sandbar in the tide.

I startle to the sounds of a battle to the north, the crack of guns and the sizzle of lightning finding flesh. It's been a long night, but the river runs high in me and I'm already moving. I leap from my rooftop and charge down the sky, all my senses bent on the pain that calls to me. Who are you, I wonder. You are almost in range, and my hand is steady on the floodgate.

I am Spackle the healer, and I have come home.