Everyone wants powers when they’re growing up—to fly, or lift a car, or blink themselves across a room—but no one ever talks about the moment the body decides to change its job description. The moment it does something you didn’t authorize. Those messy not-so-little consequences of a body revising itself mid-function, mid-thought, mid-you.
It never starts with a spectacle, or great feat. It starts with a sensation you can’t place. A warmth under the skin that isn’t tied to fever. A pulse that doesn’t quite match your heartbeat. A joint moving a fraction of a second before you tell it to, like it’s anticipating you, or worse, correcting you.
At first, you blame sleep.
You blame stress. Caffeine. That new vitamin your mom bought because the label promised clarity and delivered nothing but expensive urine and a thinner wallet.
But then your hand tightens around a glass before you mean for it to. You can feel exactly how fragile it is. You can feel it beginning to shatter in your palm—the tendons in your wrist pulling like cables under strain. Just hard enough that when you try to relax, your fingers hesitate.
The warmth spreads in small territories. Behind the knees, along the spine. At the base of the skull, where instinct lives. It feels less like gaining something and more like being slowly sublet. Like your body had taken on a tenant that doesn’t pay rent but keeps rearranging the furniture.
You tell yourself it’s adrenaline.
You tell yourself it’s just a new threshold. Strength always feels like strain before it feels like power.
The glass doesn’t explode. It collapses. There’s a difference.
It gives way in your grip with a soft, crystalline sigh, and for half a second you feel every fracture travel through it like a map. You feel which shards will break free. You feel where they would cut.
For a moment, you can’t unclench. The muscles in your palm hold their shape, a perfect mold of the glass that isn’t there anymore. When your fingers finally ease open, it’s not because you willed it. It’s because something inside you finished what it was doing.
The glass falls away in glittering pieces. Your palm is intact. A few shallow cuts bead red, but nothing deep. Nothing catastrophic. That somehow makes it worse. For a moment your hand stays half-closed, remembering the shape of it. Your fingers know exactly where the glass failed. The thinnest point. The place where pressure turns structure into collapse.
Behind you, a chair leg scrapes against tile. The sound is abrupt. Close. Your body reacts before you identify it. Your spine tightens. Shoulders lock. Your center of gravity drops half an inch.
Your little brother is standing there, barefoot, hair still flattened from sleep. He’s holding his phone in one hand, rubbing his eye with the other, confusion written plainly across his face.
“What was that?”
You open your mouth to answer, but you never get the chance. It’s too late. Your hand flies out to stop him, a nudge to keep him at bay, to keep him away. You’re too fast. Too... strong. And that’s when you feel it.
You feel just how fragile he is. How breakable he is.
Your palm meets his chest and in that instant your body understands him the same way it understood the glass—density, tension, that latticework beneath the skin. You feel the shallow rise of breath under your hand. The small, rhythmic expansion of lungs. The hollow, protective curve of ribs built to bend before they break.
You mean to stop him.
Just stop him.
His feet lift off the tile. His body travels farther than the distance between you ever required. His back strikes the edge of the kitchen island with a hard, blunt impact that echoes through the room. The wood dents. The sound that comes out of him is short and involuntary, all air leaving at once.
His phone slips from his hand and skids across the floor.
He tries to inhale but can’t seem to draw anything in. His arms twitch once at his sides as if he’s deciding whether to brace himself or reach for you, and then his legs give out. He slides down the cabinet and collapses onto the tile.
You’re next to him immediately, moving faster than you intended to, forcing yourself to slow down before touching him again. His eyes are open. He’s conscious for a second, confused more than hurt. His mouth moves but no sound comes out. His chest doesn’t rise.
“Breathe,” you tell him. “Come on. Breathe.”
You roll him carefully onto his back. You place your hand against his sternum as lightly as you can manage, just to feel for movement.
There isn’t any.
You press harder, trying to find a heartbeat you must be missing. Your palm settles against the center of his chest and you push down gently.
Something gives immediately.
Not the way a ribcage should. Not the firm resistance you’re supposed to compress against. His sternum dips too far beneath your hand, cartilage folding like softened plastic. You pull back on instinct, but your fingers don’t obey fast enough.
There’s a sharp crack. It travels up your wrist like feedback.
His mouth opens wide in a silent reflex. A thin string of saliva clings between his lips. His eyes are still open, but they’ve lost focus.
You try to adjust. You spread your hands, telling yourself to use less force. Less. You press again.
This time the ribs don’t just bend—they split.
The sound is wet and fibrous. Bone doesn’t shatter outward. It fractures inward, collapsing toward his lungs. You feel each break distinctly through your palms, a series of small internal snaps. You can feel his fluids rushing, gushing, spraying in every direction.
The second compression forces the air out of him in a violent, bubbling expulsion. Blood surges up his throat and bursts past his teeth in a thick spray that spatters your face, your shirt, the cabinets behind you. It’s bright at first, arterial, then darker as it keeps coming.
You don’t stop. You’re trying to be gentler. You are. But your arms lock and drive downward again.
Blood pools beneath him and spreads until it reaches the grout lines in the tile. It slows there, filling thin channels and turning them dark. Your hands are still suspended over his chest, fingers curled slightly, as if you’re waiting for the next instruction.
Nothing comes.
You lower your hands carefully and sit back on your heels.
The warmth under your skin is still there, but it has changed. It no longer pushes at your joints or tugs at your tendons. It settles evenly through your limbs, steady and contained.
Your adrenaline flushes out, leaving only clarity, and one thing is clear enough.
The change is finished now.
And the first thing it did was kill him.