Hi Evie!
There’s character death, though you don’t see it happen and I’m not sure I’d categorize it as a proper ‘wham!’
[…]
The dust hadn’t settled yet.
Is it about Pancake Lex?
Even for him, the dust made it hard to see. Bits of lead were scattered amongst, well, quite literally everything else.
No, something else…
He’d endured through the thick blackness of space and he’d hit the asteroid exactly on target.
Oooohhh… the title is a riff on All Shook Up.
The two major meteors that he’d created by splitting the original had hit the planet the hardest.
And they’d decimated it.
Didn’t you say it’s not a WHAM? Because that’s the sound-text in the comics, when a hard object slams into another object. See Batman, when he hits a bad guy.
But then, when Asgard failed, they’d waited until the asteroid had nearly been on top of them all before sending him, Earth’s last line of defense.
Sounds like a weird plan. Must have been the politicians in charge.
How did you tell time when there was… nothing?
You check the relative movement of the stars.
Maybe the darkness had been why he hadn’t healed more quickly. Nevertheless, that one unsteady but unwavering beam had fallen across his face.
That’s kind of sweet!
His was the only heartbeat left.
Awwwwww
He wished he hadn’t. He didn’t want his last image of her to be dusty, buried and broken, even if she had been huddled close together with Perry and Jimmy.
Now he hung here, immobile above the Planet, tethered to the stratosphere, neither able to drop down to the doomed planet that he couldn’t save nor travel upwards to the lost planet that had sent him here in the first place.
The silence was loud.
Beautifully sad!
Another graveyard planet.
[…]
The concrete was bisected by wrecked, twisted metal rods that had once been the globe of the Planet’s masthead. The remnants of the broken metal globe surrounded him.
Great imagery
He wondered if falling into the sun would hurt. Or would it merely charge and recharge him, healing him instantly to keep him from suffocating in the airless vacuum of space, and trapping him in a bright but unending stasis of misery – without her?
Maybe it’s like Prometheus. Living forever in pain. He gets burned, then heals, burns again, heals again,…
A whirring noise broke the silence.
He couldn’t quite connect it to the reality of it at first.
It was disorienting, to hear an intentional, mechanical sound after so long, outside of the erratic winds and distorted ebbing tides.
HGWells?
He blinked as a little man in a smudged brown coat and beaten bowler hat
I did wonder since it’s an IBM.
He finally came to a stop facing Clark, and his expression withered further, turning to sympathy.
“Oh, dear,” he said.
Yes, ‘oh dear’ indeed!
This was a great ficlet, Evie! Sad, with hope, and wonderful prose
Michael
