Hi, My name is Paul, and I am a god. A god of death, to be exact, or at least that’s what I thought at first.

Maybe it’s closer to the god of misfortune, though, because while my powers didn’t always involve someone dying, they always involved something incredibly fucked-up happening to someone, or lots of someones, and usually the most fucked-up thing that could happen involved a lot of dying.

Louis got all the brains in the family. Up until Junior high school, I was the one that got the rest of the good stuff. I was pretty good at sports, I wasn’t smart but I could still pull off a solid B average while Louis drifted from subject to subject, pulling straight A’s when he was interested and then pulling D’s out when he wasn’t.

It wasn’t that he was stupid about things, it was just that when he got interested in something, he would go all-out, research the subject, practically become an expert overnight, and then get bored when he felt he has explored and learned all he could.

He couldn’t stick to what he was good at, because when he got focused on something he got incredibly good at it, and then when he felt he’d learned all he could about the subject, or accomplished some goal, he’d get bored and move on to the next thing.

It didn’t help that for a while, he worshipped the ground I walked on because when I got interested in something, such as roleplaying games, drawing, coding, or even learning to play the piano, he would throw himself into it, shoot way past my talent levels, produce something somewhat amazing, and I’d ditch it because it wasn’t my thing anymore, I could never catch up to him, and when he noticed I’d lost interest he’s count it as finished and move on to something else. The only thing he was never really interested in was physical activities and sports.

He was a total scrawny beanpole. Taller than me when we both hit our teens, I tried to be the responsible big brother, kicking his ass when he’d ditch something he was amazing at, and encouraging him when he found a new interest I thought he’d stick with, especially when we got word that Dad died. I will admit I was a little jealous at the ease at which he mastered things, which might have led to the ass-kicking, especially when he got into my stuff, but I still wanted to be the best brother possible.

Our stepmom didn’t help much. I never told him, he’d grown up with her as his mom and didn’t know she’d adopted us when dad married her, he was too young to remember getting shuffled around between friends and relatives before she came into our lives. I didn’t even realize it myself until I got into our teens and dad finally confided in me, and asked me not to tell Louis. Our mother was a woman he’d met in the sandbox who’d unceremoniously ditched us on him when Louis was finally old enough to eat solid food.

Once dad died, she doted on the son she’d had with dad, our half-brother, and pretty much forgot we existed. I’d been 15 and Louis was 12, and tried for three years to play dad to Louis, mostly unsuccessfully. He was smart enough and knew a ton, but didn’t have any common sense. I was pretty good with girls, and watched with horror as his own interest in girls turned into exactly the kind of kid girls would rather vomit than say hello to.

He was arrogant about what he knew, and he knew a lot, but not everything. If you misused a word or even a figure of speech, he would be quick to correct you no matter how stupid it was. I think the only time any girl ever touched him was when the fat one in a lunch line got mad at him and punched him in the balls hard enough to get him sent to a nurse.

Dad could have handled him, maybe. He listened to dad when he was around, which was surprisingly often when we were growing up. He was part of training command, and we had a surprisingly stable childhood, right up until he got sent to one of those desert shitholes to train local goatfuckers how to kill other goatfuckers for whatever reasons the military wanted, and extinguished himself.

And then, when I was 18, my life turned to hell.

It was nearly two weeks after my Birthday. There was no way I was going to college, I knew it, mom knew it, and everyone else knew it except my little brother. I had done pretty well in ROTC, and as much as I hated it, the Marine corps was looking more and more like my future. Maybe someday I could look forward to eating an IED just like dear old dad.

I had a nightmare, a really vivid one involving my then-girlfriend Nicole. Yeah, I know, a white dude dating a black girl in Fairfax was setting himself up for a world of shit, and I caught plenty of crap because she was an absolute stunner. Light mocha skin, amazing body, really smart, part of the drama club, and likely to move on to better things.

I was the not very bright fullback that everyone knew would consider high school his glory days and spend the rest of his life either in the military or selling used cars and reminiscing about being a sports star that was not quite good enough to get a football scholarship.

Her dad liked me because we had a lot of similarities. He was white also and worked at the pentagon, and the few times I had talked to him we had a lot in common, especially since he sort of reminded me of my dad. He knew I was planning on enlisting, and supported me in doing the ROTC thing because it meant I might be able to advance to corporal quickly, and from there potentially move into OCS.

There was no way I was getting into the academy, but officer candidate school for a third-generation marine with a colonel as a potential father-in-law was more than possible. I worked hard, and he said that was all it really took. Hard work and basic common sense could pave the way to being an NCO, and from there OCS was just a recommendation away.

In my nightmare, she was yanked out of her car by a fat white guy as she left the Pentagon and then forced to go down on him. He was enormously strong, and when he finished in her mouth she turned into crystal. It was pretty fricking horrifying, enough that I asked to go with her when she dropped her dad off at work.

After dropping him off, we were in the parking lot when a fat white guy approached the car. I pushed her into the driver seat and closed the door, and was heading to the passenger side when something slammed into my back.

I couldn’t move, I couldn’t even breathe, I was completely frozen, and I got to watch in horror as the guy ripped the driver’s side door off, pulled Nicole out, and proceeded to do exactly as he had done in the dream. After he finished inside of her mouth, he sneered at me and pushed her over to shatter into several large, disgusting chunks. She looked at me accusingly, unblinkingly, from her broken-off head and I could only hope that she was already dead.

He was buttoning up again as he stepped towards me, and said, “Nothing is more fun than cucking a stupid mudshark.” before nudging me over.

My hand snapped off at the wrist where I was holding the passenger side door handle, and I hit the ground. I could hear myself breaking into pieces and could still see the parking lot, and I realized in horror that Nicole was probably still alive when she was broken. It took me almost 15 minutes to die.

I woke up after the nightmare, and tried again to rescue her, and again. Each time that same smirking mother fucker found us and killed her, and me. No one remembered anything, I was trapped in a horrific version of groundhog day until I finally just gave up and let it happen.

I discovered that her father blamed me for not protecting her, and there was no way I could join the service with a command colonel that wanted me dead. What was worse, when I finally decided to try to hook up with a girl, the moment I touched her I had a horrific vision of her death.

I had nightmares of people dying or getting royally screwed by metas nearly every night. It didn’t always involve death, sometimes I got to watch someone getting maimed or beaten mostly to death, often women, but it always seemed to involve a metahuman. Sometimes it was even the meta getting screwed over.

I also discovered that while I could never directly affect the outcome of my dream, I could affect peripherals. I couldn’t keep a job, inevitably I would come into contact with someone that was about to have something horrible happen to them, and it would screw me up so much I would get fired.

If I managed to change reality enough that there was no chance of what I saw occurring, like the one time I hijacked a plane that was going to go down in a ball of fire before it took off, reality reset itself. Groundhog-day style.

Every once in a while, if I got very lucky, there was a little flexibility in the dream. I actually considered becoming a superhero for a bit, and did a heroic thing or two, but is saving someone from certain death to only be trapped in a coma until they died, or protecting them from a broken spine only to watch them break their neck supposed to be rewarding? I came up as a big fat zero on the metahuman test, which was weird, but I did learn something the hard way.

That peripheral awareness of tragedy allowed you to profit off of that tragedy. If a guy was going to head into an alley and get mugged and murdered, lifting his wallet first would go unnoticed. It let me bring in a little extra money, and I helped out with my family as much as I could. I was careful to never touch them, though.

I had some troubles, but I discovered that I healed stupidly fast. The only way I could get sleep without dreams was to drug myself into insensibility. Alcohol proved too weak to be effective, and eventually, I turned to harder and harder drugs just to get a decent night’s sleep. Even Echo was a minor blip on the radar, and the one time I managed to OD despite my stupidly fast healing, I woke up the same morning again.

A few years later I knew it was time to go. I was barely sleeping there anymore. I seemed to be immune to most poisons, diseases seemed to slide off me, and with enough drugs, I could even occasionally tolerate a hooker, if I were sauced enough I could ignore the vision of her getting beat to death by her pimp or OD’ing in an alley in a few years.

Then I had a dream. My family dying in a wreck due to some fucking superhero using traffic as a projectile weapon.

I tried. I really tried. I knew it was doomed to failure, but I even wrecked the car and they still wound up being where the ‘hero’ could kill them, or I had a reset. The probability was a bit fluid, sometimes Louis died and sometimes he was in the hospital for a while and hated me, and I decided that even though mom and Bobby were toast, at least I could try and save my brother.

It worked too, it sucked but it worked. I had miscalculated a bit, though. I had gained more than a few contacts among the drug-dealing set, and getting out of the hospital in a little over a month from injuries that should have left him in a bed for at least six months and possibly in a wheelchair forever let me know that we had something in common. The Cartel boys kept an eye on the hospitals, though, and Louis, like the fool he was, decided not to go to the DMA.

The Cartels were always on the lookout for rebellious metahumans that they could use. Sometimes they could be turned into enforcers, especially if they could be addicted to something, or used for other purposes, like couriers or even sources of new weapons or drugs.

My idiot mom had decided to change her will to give everything to Bobby. That meant that when Louis got out of the hospital, he would be locked into a probate battle, and I could see he was going to lose the house and any money from it to lawyer fees, and then he’d be stuck with not only his school debt but an enormous medical bill that would make his life a living hell.

So I ripped him off.

I used my contacts to make a fake will. He was a bit naive, and if I made it out to him, he would lose the house in no time to the second mortgage mom had put on it. I stole it right out from under his nose, faking up a will and then selling it, and using what small amount of equity was left to pay off his hospital bills. He was going to lose the house, but I had enough leeway to make sure he could finish school under a cloud of debt without the medical bills hanging over his head forever.

I was right about him hating me, though.

The cartels were keeping an eye on him, and I managed to worm my way into their good graces by promising to be their eyes. He started to get swoll after he got out of the hospital, but his grades suffered. He got a shitty job at a home workshop, but something about him had changed. Pretty soon he was as big as a fucking house and even started dating the hot redhead that worked there.

I satisfied the cartels by painting him as a regular brick. Metahumans had different classifications, and someone that’s just stronger and tougher than other people wasn’t the most valuable, and might not be worth pressing into service. The stupid shit kept casually using his powers, though, carrying huge loads of wood without getting tired, and that mercenary, Copperhead, had directed his attention. My interference was not enough anymore.

And then he got up and went into a spar with a meta chick! Callie something. By this point, I knew Copperhead taking him was a foregone conclusion, but there were worse fates than playing strongarm for the cartels for a few years. I had seen lots of them. I had gotten arrested a few times and had seen, firsthand, what the cartel did to those it considered a threat. It’s amazing, however, how easy it is to commit suicide and force a reset when you are surrounded by cops or about to get eliminated as a loose end.

Yeah, it fucking hurt. Every single time.

But he fights this woman. He’s holding back, but I knew there were at least three watchers at the gym, and he was fast and effective, and it was obvious he was holding back too. She pounded the crap out of him, and while anyone else would have been sore or even laid up for a week, the very next day he was back at work, hauling and tossing huge weights around like it was no big deal.

I had another dream. This one had split potentials.

In one dream, he was taken from his apartment, and Copperhead found something that excited him enormously. In that dream, he was taken as a cook and forced to work until he finally broke. He spent 5 years creating shit that would either melt people or turn them into meta slaves for the cartels and then, finally, willingly worked for them until something horrible happened that ended my vision, something I couldn’t see past.

The other potential was a dream I was actually in. In it, I talked him into giving me money. That changed the dream potential, and he went for a run where I broke into his house, opened his safe, and took something. I turned some of it over to the cartel and then turned the rest over to the DMA. I even saw the right combination when I opened it, and memorized the numbers. Was that paradox? I think it might be a paradox, or maybe my power had grown to the point where it knew I would blow my brains out often enough to get it right.

In this dream, he was only forced to cook for a little while, before the DMA raided the place, specifically because he was there and whatever I turned over to them was valuable enough to make them work the system. I couldn’t see what happened after that, but considering the endless tortures he endured at their hands, it had to be better.

The next day I discovered that Copperhead had put a plant where he worked. The plant was an ex-con and had turned over on one of the cartels. He would be either made an example, or he would do a big favor, and he had elected to do Copperhead a favor.

It took 5 tries, but I finally got Louis to agree to give me… 5000 dollars. I had to wonder if there was a meta out there somewhere who could look through my resets, and see me blow my own brains out with a shotgun each time he turned me down? That would have been interesting to watch.

My life sucks, and maybe, if I am lucky, my brother will someday end it for me.