In MCU with One for All -Chapter 2

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Disclaimer - All the usual Yada Yada Yada. I don’t own any rights to any characters in this fic save for my OCs. Marvel owns them. Don’t sue m

Earth - 16969 [MCU AU]

Vancouver, Canada [2008]

–Jamie Bell–

His hand shot out of the covers to slam on the heavy duty alarm clock to swiftly shut down the alarm before it moved into the headache inducing category of annoyance. Groaning, he got up and dragged his body to the bathroom. 

Even after a literal decade of being in the workforce and being forced to work on the terms of the psychopaths who liked waking up early, his body still refused to make him feel refreshed when he woke up early in the morning. Part of it was that he woke up at 5 AM but still, he had been following this schedule, like clockwork for the past 4 years without fail, not even a single day missed and yet, his body still failed to adapt to it.

The most adaptive species on the planet, his foot!

Brushing his teeth, he looked at himself in the mirror, finding the same dead-eyed stare with the same slightly muscular arms with the same burn scar he would look at, each and every day of the year. The looks did not matter to him, not anymore but it was always disheartening to see objectively much worse looking people score partners and then get into bed alone every night.

Sighing, he got to his regular morning routine. Shave and then bathe, once done with that, get ready and start running. Breathing hot air into the snowish hellscape that was Vancouver, he began running around the block, taking solace in the fact that he lived in a good part of the city that had decent security everywhere. 

His breathing remained steady as he ran at a steady pace. See, he had figured out a cheat to his CHI healing, or at least as much as he could cheat with his broken powers. CHI healed damage that was removed from his natural state. Well, exercise was something that was out of the norm when it came to the muscles being torn apart.

So, he grinned as his slowing pace returned to what it was in the middle of the run as the stored CHI did its job and healed all the wear and tear done due to the run, what with running in very low temperatures with very cold air being pumped into his lungs.

It boosted his stamina by quite a lot because once he had run all around the city for the entire day and had only come out dehydrated through the entire ordeal, the CHI healed all the little tears in his muscle, making him stronger at the same time.

He could have tried going the bodybuilder route since CHI not only healed muscle tears nearly instantly, it also made it a certainty that he would never have to deal with any consequences of bad form or heavy weight lifting since external injuries were all dealt with by the absolutely bonkers amount of CHI he had stored in One For All.

It was the best thing about his broken powers. His watch beeped as he turned around and began running back to his house since it was now 7 AM. Already people were out and about on the streets as he waved at many of them before entering his house and began stretching. It was not needed but it felt nice stretching all the muscles out and also seeing the progress in real time as he had installed a full size mirror in the living room and watching his body reach the levels of Olympic flexibility was very satisfying.

His little slice of happiness, as he called it, to know that he was an Olympic level athlete in running and stretching was a very nice and very small boost to his ego. A boost that went unnoticed because he did not talk to anyone on a daily basis, save for some of his gaming friends but even that was just a weekly thing now.

Throwing the sweaty clothes into the laundry bin, he hopped into the shower and after making sure that he was ready for the office day ahead, he went into the Kitchen to make a nice breakfast for him. 

Boiling 6 eggs and making scrambled eggs using 6 more, he grinned at the sheer PROTEIN! in his breakfast regime.

See, he figured out pretty early on that protein and all the nutrients were necessary, even for him. No, One For All could not even substitute for the absolute time consumer who was making nutritious food for himself three times a day. CHI could heal damage but it was not a miracle worker.

A stupidly efficient worker, sure but not a miraculous one.

It used his own body’s mass to compensate for the new tissue being crafted to heal major injuries, leading to a sometimes abrupt loss in muscle mass that was hard to explain, or some loss in fat if he only healed muscle fatigue or normal paper cuts and such.

So, in conclusion, he still had to eat good, proper food it he wanted to remain healthy, retain his muscle mass, lead a healthy life and not get abrupt losses in body mass because muscle was much, much denser than fat and it did not show up in baggy hoodies even if he did lose a significant amount of muscle mass if he ended up healing a big injury.

He wondered if Cancer was considered an external injury by his CHI. All these thoughts went through his mind as he ate all the scrambled eggs, packed the boiled eggs into his little tiffin box, and after checking that everything was turned off, closed the door to his apartment. Locking the deadbolt, he whirled around and got into his car. But before that, so began his near daily whining of, “We don’t get earthquakes, we don’t get hurricanes. We don’t get earthquakes, we don’t get hurricanes,” as he cleared the ice off the windshield off his car, a beat up Honda Civic that he loved to death.

Getting into the car, he cold started it while using up the stored tropical heat to ward off the cold as he, spoiler alert, still get cold and no, he could not really purge viruses from his body because CHI could not kill all the viruses in an instant and also because he did not know if it could differentiate between good and bad bacteria and viruses. He did not want to lose his gut microbiome suddenly and then die.

That would be really..stupid.

Shifting the car into drive, he pulled out of the driveway and got on his merry way, at 8 in the morning. His shift didn’t start until 9 but he liked being the first one in the office and start the day with a very slow, lethargic feel to it. It helped later on in the day.

As he drove on the very sparsely populated road, his thoughts drifted back to the one question that he had been asking himself for years now and never really had the guts to confirm it.

Could he heal other humans as well?

Hell, he would even take animal healing because even that would be very popular and very in demand in the agricultural sector, not to mention the exotic pet industry and even wildlife conservation efforts. It would be an all round power that would finally make him feel useful and give some well deserved meaning to his life.

Alas…..

He smiled bitterly as he turned off the Hawaii heat in his body. He was just too scared, too timid to even try it. He couldn’t reveal the ability to anyone, because, HELLO! SHIELDRA lurking in the international espionage space, and what was he gonna do? Sneak into a hospital to heal some unconscious people?

No, he couldn’t take that risk.

Animals were fair game and the last time he touched an injured House sparrow who he nursed back to health, he could tell that he could do something with his CHI but he was not sure if it could heal the sparrow or just suck all the life out of it because he could modulate the CHI extraction if the source was large enough, like in old growth trees, but not when it came from a really small animal.

Before he could even really think of it, the sparrow would be dead and who knows what might happen to it. No, he could not take that risk at the time and chose to let the sparrow heal normally and then let it leave.

He sighed as he parked his car in his spot and then banged his head on the steering. IT had been years since he first got this question. Something that might actually turn him into an actual superhero, something that he had been dreaming of literally before he was born in this new reality.

And yet, he stayed hidden, away from what could be a very real possibility of his entire life changing, from top to bottom. To have a shot at finally mattering.

Come to think of it, what DID he have to lose? Family? Lost that ages ago. No extended family to speak of. Hell, the closest people who he met in real life were probably his coworkers and the tenants upstairs, none of whom would really care much if he dropped dead right now.

“Then why?” He whispered to himself, feeling utterly broken. Suddenly, he couldn’t take it anymore.

Suddenly, the utterly monotonous routine did not appeal to him. The dead end job, no love life, no social life, no real friends, nothing.

Nothing save for his old beat up car, his old functional house that gave him rental income and his powers that kept him in optimal shape.

All things that a normal person would be incredibly grateful for, and yet, he didn't really make that choice to come to the MCU and be a normal person, did he?

No, he came here, to make a difference, to matter, to feel good about himself, to matter.

He slo0wly raised his head, determination blazing in them as he drove out of the bank’s parking lot, tires screeching as he headed straight to the woods. He had stuff to do and doing his job was not going to get him any closer to achieving dreams that died a brutal death at the hands of reality when he was young.