I have to shut my eyes to keep the monster in.
It's late morning, and I grip the sides of the sink. I try to pace my breath, inhaling and exhaling in ragged rhythm, and pressing my forehead against the cool of the marble. My blood is pumping fast, and my brain sending warnings throughout my body – my muscles to not let go, my lungs to keep going, and my eyes to stay shut, no matter how much it aches.
Last month, they opened too soon, revealing a startling shade of green – followed by an inhuman scream clawing its way out of my chest. Rage burned through my consciousness like battery acid, and I remembered grabbing the mirror with green hands before blacking out. The nine o'clock news and the acrid stench of smoke filled in the rest.
"You have so much power," my psychiatrist whispered to me later at the hospital. "So much power."
Horror is what created me, and horror is what keeps me going every day. This isn't a time-of-month thing, as badly as I wish it were. Maybe then there would be pills for that. I don't know. What does work is memory; memories of Bruce and I as children, smashing bugs and watching flowers grow. Eating cookies with his mother. Me, kissing his cuts and scrapes, and making up stories to cheer him up. Him, trying to out-jump me on the backyard trampoline, and pulling me into the closet to hide when we would hear his dad's truck come up the driveway. We were a team, and dreamed of how tall we'd get, where we'd go, and how we'd leave our footprints on that big, wide world. And we promised that we'd never leave the other behind.
Bruce always kept his promises. Always.
I focus on the kid Bruce was, and the kid I was. And what's worse than watching my skin splinter into green muscle, worse than feeling my brain corrode into berserker rage, and worse than waking up with no idea what I've done or even what city I'm in, is the very real chance I am killing that little child inside me every time I change.
A wave of nausea hits me, and I nearly tear the sink dials out in reflex.
This isn't power.
Hurting people and destroying things isn't power – any lawyer will tell you that. I've seen so many women want a man's ability to control things, and so many men wanting a woman's ability to stand back and let others take care of problems. Each desire is an illusion, a false reality. I've had control and I've lost it, and neither feels very good. I broke up with a sleazy boyfriend and cried for weeks over it. I got assaulted in an alley and ended up destroying two blocks of the New York Financial district. Which was control, and which was the lack of such?
For years, I've been Jennifer Walters, a mousey, brown-eyed district attorney who didn't let anyone get in her way – not even the hardest judge in Hell's Kitchen. For ten months, I've been the She-Hulk, the green-eyed cousin of the Hulk with a temper to outdo his. Never have I been so angry, and never have I been so afraid of what I can do, or can't stop myself from doing. I had power when I was human. Susan B. Anthony never tore her jailers limb from limb. Harriet Tubman got what she wanted through wit and cunning alone. And Gloria Steinem…well…actually, let's not talk about that.
I had what I wanted, and I didn't need anything else. There is a time to get angry, and a time to act on such. My suit was my cape, and my glasses my mask. Green skin didn't get me there, and it sure as heck won't get me to leave.
The strain releases, and relief floods my body. I dare to open my eyes. Just barely.
There's no raging green. Or calm brown.
They're hazel.