Indomitable - Dispatch SI

[Arsenal597]

We are who we choose to be — that is a line that's resonated with me for years. It sounded clean. Noble. Like something you'd stitch onto a pillow or carve into a wooden sign and hang above a door you never planned to walk back through. Choice. Responsibility. Accountability. All the right words, lined up the right way.

In practice, though? I was better at deflecting. Better at shrinking away from my own reflection when it got uncomfortable. Better at pushing people out of reach before they could decide I wasn't worth the effort. It was easier to blame timing. Stress. Miscommunication. Them. It was harder to admit that a lot of the damage had my fingerprints all over it.

I lost some good friends that way. The kind you assume will always be there because they always have been—until one day, they aren't. I don't know if I'll ever make that right.

The last thing I remember clearly is sitting in my room with the lights off, phone glowing faintly in the dark, scrolling through an old group chat that hadn't felt alive in a long time. The room was quiet in that late-night way, where even the house feels like it's holding its breath. My fan hummed in the corner, pushing warm air around without really cooling anything.

I told myself I'd just look for a minute. One quick glance. Harmless.

That was a lie.

The chat was a graveyard of inside jokes, late-night plans, stupid memes that only made sense if you were there when they were sent. Names I almost never spoke out loud anymore. I scrolled back farther than I should have—past the slow fade, past the awkward pauses, back to when replies were instant and effortless. When nobody had to wonder if they still belonged.

My mood was already unstable enough that night. It felt like every thought in my head had sharp edges. One second I was numb, the next I was simmering with something I couldn't even give a proper name to. Restless. Heavy. Too full and too empty at the same time. I kept telling myself to put the phone down. I didn't.

I stopped at a message I hadn't opened in months. I tried to pretend it didn't exist, like the conflict that had caused our rift had never come about. I remember exactly where I had been when I got the message. Mom's foot had been bothering her. It was swollen on the top, making it nearly impossible for her to wear a croc, let alone an actual shoe. I'd gone with her just to make sure she wasn't alone. Got a message from one of our mutual friends and thought it was time to reach out.

And then the message came through.

It's not me you need to apologize to…

The message stared at me for what felt like hours. I stared right back at it until my eyes burned. Until the edges of the screen blurred and my grip on the phone tightened without me realizing it.

Discomfort bloomed in my chest, slow at first, then sharper, like something expanding where it didn't fit. I took a shallow breath. Then another. It felt like my ribs were shrinking inward, compressing around something that was trying to push back out.

I swallowed and scrolled a little, then scrolled back. Read it again. Like maybe the meaning would change if I stared at it long enough. Like maybe it would hurt less on the second pass. It didn't.

Eventually, my arm grew tired. I let the phone drop onto my chest, its light still on, screen dimming slowly as inactivity set in. The ceiling above me was barely visible in the dark—just vague shadows and the faint outline of a crack that ran from one corner toward the center. I'd told myself a hundred times I would fix that someday.

Someday had a habit of never showing up.

I lay there for a while, listening to the house settle around me. Pipes ticking. A car passing somewhere outside. The distant, lonely sound of something moving in the night that had nothing to do with me and never would. My thoughts kept looping back on themselves, replaying conversations I'd had, then rewriting them in ways that would never actually happen. Imagining apologies that were too late to matter. Imagining forgiveness I hadn't earned.

At some point, the screen went dark completely. I didn't turn it back on.

I rolled onto my side and set the phone on the nightstand, face down, like that might keep the words from following me into my dreams. The sheets were tangled from a restless day I couldn't even remember properly now. I kicked one leg free, then pulled the blanket back over myself, trying to get comfortable and failing in all the small, familiar ways.

Sleep felt far away.

My mind kept drifting—back to the chat, back to the silences between messages, back to the version of myself who thought avoiding the problem was the same as solving it. I told myself I'd do better if I ever got the chance. I told myself a lot of things when the room was dark and forgiving.

The fan kept humming. The air kept circulating. The world kept moving without any input from me at all.

I closed my eyes.

At first, nothing changed. My body stayed tense, every muscle half-expecting another spike of thought to jab into the dark. But eventually the edges began to soften. The weight in my chest dulled from a sharp ache to something heavier and quieter. My breathing slowed without me meaning for it to.

The last thing that drifted through my head before everything finally slipped out of focus was that incomplete sentence from the screen, hovering somewhere just beyond conscious thought—unfinished, unresolved, stubbornly alive.

Then the darkness settled in fully, and I let it take me.

---

Pain drags me out of the dark like a hooked chain.

It starts everywhere at once—white-hot and immediate—racing through my body before I even understand that I'm awake. Static skitters across my skin in frantic, crawling lines. Every hair on my arms stands at full attention, like my body knows something is wrong before my mind catches up. My veins feel like they're full of molten wire, heat flooding through paths that were never meant to carry it.

I try to inhale and choke on the scream instead.

It tears out of me raw and uncontrolled as something rips into my skin. The sensation is invasive in a way that makes my stomach lurch blind with panic—pressure and slicing and an awful, wrong tug deep under the surface. My back arches on instinct, every muscle in revolt, but the movement goes nowhere. The scream echoes off hard walls I can't see, rebounds into the ringing building in my ears.

Voices bleed through the noise. Distant. Warped. Like they're coming to me through thick water.

"I'd like to know more about your condition…"

The voice cuts clean through the chaos—cold and mechanical, filtered through something that strips it of warmth. There's something familiar about the cadence, the shape of the words. My mind brushes against recognition and slips right off it. I can't hold onto it. Not like this.

"Fight through it," the voice continues, emotionless. "The pain will subside shortly."

That almost breaks me.

Shortly.

As if this is an inconvenience. As if my body isn't being set on fire from the inside out.

The pain crests in a violent, unbearable peak—and then, just as promised, it begins to pull back. It doesn't vanish. It recedes, slow and reluctant, like a tide that doesn't want to let go of the shore. My scream collapses into hoarse, broken gasps. My chest heaves like it's forgotten how breathing is supposed to work.

For a single, fragile second, I think it might be over.

Then I try to move.

Nothing happens.

My arms don't answer. My legs might as well not exist. There's pressure along my wrists, my ankles, across my thighs and chest—unyielding and absolute. Restraints. The realization hits with a shock of icy dread that floods where the heat just was. I tug once, weakly. The metal doesn't even pretend to give.

Panic surges up fast and violent, a wild animal slamming against the inside of my ribs. My pulse thunders in my ears. I try again, harder this time. The restraints hold. Of course they do.

No. No, no, no—

The singular light above me burns into my vision, bleaching the world to harsh whites and shifting shadows. It's too bright to look at directly, but the rest of the room is swallowed in darkness so thick it might as well be solid. Figures move at the edges of my vision—just silhouettes at first. Tall shapes. Controlled movements. People.

My breath comes out in shaky bursts. My throat feels scraped raw from screaming. Every nerve in my body still hums with leftover static, like the afterimage of a lightning strike that keeps flickering behind my eyes.

"Where…" My voice cracks immediately. I have to swallow once, twice, before I can force it out again. "Where am I?"

The words feel stupid the second they leave my mouth. Small. Useless. I should have been in my bed. I was in my bed. Fan humming. Phone on the nightstand. The crack in the ceiling. Darkness that was familiar and safe and mine.

This place is none of those things.

A shape steps closer into the halo of the overhead light. Just enough for edges to sharpen, for surfaces to reflect. I still can't make out a face—only the suggestion of a mask, smooth and featureless in places where there should be something human. The light glints off metal threaded through gloves and tools and things I don't want to recognize.

"Vitals stabilizing," someone says from somewhere to my left.

Another voice answers, quieter.

"Neurological response confirms successful integration."

Integration?

My stomach drops.

I twist my head as far as the restraints allow, trying to track the voices. The room feels larger than it should be, sound stretching and warping against unseen walls. Machines surround me—or at least, I think they do. I hear the steady, invasive rhythm of beeping. The low electric whine of something drawing power. Every noise feels too close and too far away at the same time.

"What did you do to me?" I manage.

The words tremble on their way out. I hate that I can hear it. I hate that they don't.

There's a pause—a small one, but deliberate.

"Your condition required extensive augmentation," the mechanical voice replies at last. Calm. Unbothered. "The procedure was successful."

Procedure.

The word lands like a blunt object in my chest. Memory slams into me in disjointed flashes that don't fit together yet—darkness, pressure, the sense of being held down even before I'd woken up. The feeling of something being forced into me instead of drawn from me.

"I didn't consent to any procedure," I say hoarsely. My hands curl uselessly against the restraints.

Another figure steps into the light now, standing opposite the first. This one is bulkier, broader in the shoulders. I can't see eyes behind the reflective surface of whatever covers their face.

"Consent is irrelevant in this context," the first voice says. "You were selected based on compatibility metrics. The outcome validates the choice."

Every word feels like it strips another layer off me, reduces me to something printed on a screen. Panic claws higher, filling every hollow space the pain left behind. I pull against the restraints again, harder, desperation lending me strength I don't actually have.

The metal doesn't budge.

Static dances across my skin in response—sharp, reactive, like my nerves are wired directly into the room. The figures around me tense visibly. I feel it before I see it: a subtle shift in the air, the pressure changing around my body like the atmosphere itself just took a breath.

"Elevated output," someone mutters.

"Suppress it," the mechanical voice orders.

Something presses into the side of my neck.

The world tilts violently as a new, numbing sensation floods my system. Not pain—something worse in its own way. A heavy, sinking weight that drags at my thoughts and limbs alike. The static falters, sputters, then dims to a faint, irritated buzz under my skin.

"Don't—" I start, but the word dissolves halfway out of my mouth. My tongue feels thick. Slow. Every movement suddenly costs twice what it should.

I'm still awake. Still aware.

Just… muted.

The figures lean in, their outlines sharpening as they observe me with clinical interest. I feel like a specimen on a slide. Pinned. Catalogued. Dissected by eyes I can't quite see.

"You will remain restrained during the acclimation period," the voice tells me. "Resistance will only delay stabilization."

My heartbeat pounds against the metal across my chest. I can't tell if the tightening in my throat is from fear, fury, or both. Probably both.

"Let me go," I whisper. It doesn't sound like a command. It sounds like a plea.

No one answers.

---

Consciousness doesn't come back all at once.

I surface for seconds at a time, dragged upward through heavy fog only to be pulled back under again. Each time I wake, the world feels different—too bright, too close, too loud, too quiet. The light above me blurs into a dull star. The machines never stop their steady, tireless breathing. Neither, apparently, does the fire under my skin.

Sometimes there is pain.

Sometimes there is only pressure.

Sometimes there is nothing at all.

In the in-between, I drift.

Voices bleed in and out of the dark. I catch pieces of conversations without context—numbers, readings, fragments of observations that mean nothing to me but everything to them.

"—stabilizing—"

"—output spike—"

"—unprecedented density—"

Gloved hands touch me at intervals. Careful, but not gentle.

Once, I surface just long enough to feel something deep inside my chest shift. Not cut or pierced—adjusted. As if whatever was placed there is being nudged into alignment. The sensation is nauseating, intimate in a way that makes my skin crawl. I try to jerk away. My body doesn't listen. The world goes gray at the edges and folds back in on itself.

Another time, I wake to voices.

Not the mechanical one—different voices. Human. Muted by distance and equipment and the thick fog in my skull. I catch pieces of them, never whole thoughts.

"—still drawing—"

"—stabilizer's holding—"

"—no signs of rejection—"

Something cool slides along my ribs. Something warmer follows. I smell antiseptic. Ozone. That sharp, storm-aftertaste that makes the inside of my nose sting. Static crackles faintly along my skin in protest.

The next moment I'm gone again.

I drift.

In the dark, memories try to surface. The crack in my ceiling. The hum of my fan. My phone on the nightstand. The unfinished sentence. They feel distant now, like someone else's life being played in a room I've already walked out of.

Then—

I wake with the sickening sensation that the world has tipped sideways.

My body lurches, instinct screaming that something is wrong, and pain flares immediately where metal bites down into my arms. The sudden resistance snaps me fully awake. My breath punches out of me in a startled, broken sound.

I'm upright.

The realization hits in waves. There's no pressure at my back anymore. No cold surface beneath me. Instead, something braces my spine from behind, rigid and unyielding, holding me in a standing position whether I agree to it or not. My wrists are locked high and wide. My ankles aren't touching the ground.

I'm suspended.

Restrained.

My head droops forward, heavy as if my neck has forgotten how to carry it. The world sways nauseatingly. Light spills across the room in a wide, sterile wash, revealing just enough detail to make everything worse. Hard metal surfaces. Darkened consoles. Figures standing at calculated distances from me.

I try to lift my head again. It takes far more effort than it should.

The mechanical voice returns, closer now.

"You've recovered quicker than anticipated," it says. "There was a ten percent chance that you'd acclimate in less than a week. Your condition expedited your recovery."

The words slide past the surface of my thoughts before they sink in. Recovered. Acclimate. None of that feels like it belongs to me.

"Let… let me go," I murmur.

My voice barely makes the air near my mouth move. It sounds frayed. Used up.

"I'm afraid that's not possible," the voice replies. "You came to me, remember?"

The fog in my head ripples uneasily.

"I didn't," I whisper. The sound comes out dry, scraped raw. "I didn't come here."

A pause follows.

Not silence. Just a measured absence of reply.

"Temporary disorientation is not uncommon following the acclimation period," the voice says at last. "Memory distortion, confusion, false resistance. These are expected side effects."

False resistance.

My fingers twitch helplessly against the restraints. I feel the faint static under my skin stir in response to the movement, like something attentive just beneath the surface.

"Curious," the voice adds, almost to itself. There's a faint huff of breath through the filter now. Something bordering on interest. "Regardless, it's time to show you the fruits of your labor."

Something rolls forward into my line of sight.

At first it's just a pane of reflected light, warped and indistinct. My eyes struggle to focus on it. The image swims like it's underwater. I blink rapidly, fighting the sluggish drag of whatever still clouds my system.

The reflection sharpens.

My breath catches so violently it hurts.

The person staring back at me is not me.

The difference hits in layers. Width. Height. A frame built from years of physical strain instead of the body I recognize as my own. Shoulders broader. Chest thicker. The man in the mirror looks like someone pulled from wreckage and reinforced rather than repaired.

My heart stumbles.

Scars mar the reflection's torso—old, ugly stories carved into flesh. Parallel claw marks rake across one side of the ribs, pale and jagged. Burn scars bloom across the other in dark, uneven patches that look like they were never meant to heal cleanly. Each mark feels like an argument against the life I remember living.

My gaze climbs higher.

A beard shadows the stranger's jaw—patchy, unkempt, clearly neglected rather than styled. Long hair spills to the shoulders in uneven strands, tangled and careless. The face is gaunt in a way that speaks of exhaustion rather than starvation. The eyes, though—

The eyes are mine.

Wide. Disbelieving. Terrified.

"That's…" My throat tightens. "That's not me."

The words sound absurd the moment they leave my mouth. Denial shoved clumsily into the open.

Then I see the center of the chest.

Metal is embedded where skin should be unbroken.

A device sits fused into the stranger's sternum, its edges disappearing seamlessly into healed flesh. It pulses faintly with a cold, electric blue glow, each throb of light synchronized with the frantic rhythm of my heart. The illumination spreads just under the surface of the skin in branching lines, like energy testing its own boundaries.

The room seems to tilt.

My stomach drops straight through the floor.

I focus on it with a kind of horrified fascination. The glow. The fact that it's inside me. That it moves when I breathe. That it doesn't look foreign anymore—it looks installed.

"Your energy reserves should be exponentially higher now," the mechanical voice says from somewhere just beyond my sight. "But it'll have to wait until you're ready to move."

The words land hollowly. All I can see is that blue light, steady and patient, quietly proving that something fundamental about my body has been rewritten without my permission. My hands tremble against the restraints.

And beneath the skin that no longer quite feels like mine — the fire in my veins stirs.

---

Time doesn't feel like it holds meaning anymore. It comes to me in pieces—thin slivers of awareness drifting through long seas of dark. Surfacing from the darkness of slumber is the closest thing to this experience — dragged just high enough to register the world before being pulled back down again. Hunger becomes the only reliable marker that anything is passing at all. A dull, persistent ache low in my gut that eventually sharpens into something sharp enough to slice through the fog.

That's when they feed me.

It's never gentle. Never cruel either. Just efficient. A mask presses over my mouth and nose while I'm too weak to fight it, cool air flushing through my lungs first, followed by the taste of something thick and metallic and faintly sweet. It slides down my throat whether I want it to or not. I cough. I gag. My body takes what it needs anyway.

Afterward, the hunger quiets. The fog rolls back in.

Sometimes I wake with dried residue at the corner of my mouth. Other times with the faint ache of a needle site in my arm or neck. I stop trying to keep count of how often it happens. The word days feels like a guess more than a certainty.

In one hazy stretch of wakefulness, I realize the restraints are different.

My arms aren't spread as wide now. My wrists sit closer to my sides, the angle less punishing. There's padding where cold metal used to bite directly into skin. My legs are still held fast, but I can feel the tension has been recalibrated—enough to prevent real movement without forcing my muscles into constant strain.

They're not just keeping me here anymore.

They're making me comfortable.

That might be the worst part.

The fire in my veins never quite sleeps. Sometimes it's only an ember, a low electric thrum beneath everything else. Other times it flares without warning—static rippling across my skin in visible waves, light flickering in the seams of the metal embedded in my chest. Each surge leaves me shaking and exhausted in its wake.

I don't scream anymore.

It stopped feeling useful after the second or third time no one reacted.

The next time consciousness finds me for more than a few seconds, the room feels… quieter. The machines are still there, still breathing their mechanical rhythm into the space, but the background noise has softened somehow. My head feels clearer than it has since I woke up here. Heavy. But definitely clearer.

A moment passes, then the mechanical voice speaks.

"How are you feeling?"

The tone is different, softer around the edges, like something has been dialed back. The tension that's lived under my skin for what feels like an eternity loosens just a fraction at the sound of it.

"Tired," I groan.

The word barely makes it out of me before my throat protests. My eyelids feel like they've been weighed down with lead.

"You've been kept in an isolated chamber where interference wouldn't complicate the procedure," the voice explains. "Unfortunately, it means you're experiencing more fatigue than normal. We can correct that in a few minutes—depending on whether you're compliant."

The word lands wrong.

"Compliant?" I repeat slowly.

"You injured four of my men the last time you woke up," he says calmly. "It appears your temper got the better of you."

"How…" I pause, blinking hard as I try to force my thoughts into something resembling order. "How could I have— I'm not able to move."

There's the faintest hesitation in the voice now.

"It appears the disorientation is more severe than initially projected," he says. "The dumbasses must have screwed up. Did you know that permanent brain damage occurs when the brain is deoxygenated for more than four minutes?"

"What-what the hell are you talking about?"

The voice sighs.

"I suppose we'll need to take this nice and slow."

Light shifts.

Footsteps follow.

Something about the cadence of them feels different from the others I've heard—unhurried, confident, unafraid of my restraints or whatever I might be capable of. A figure steps forward from the edge of the light at the far end of the room. As he moves closer, details bleed out of shadow.

A dark mask. Smooth in some places, angular in others. Twin lenses where eyes should be, faintly reflecting the room's sterile glow. A long coat draped over broad shoulders, material whispering softly with each step.

My vision swims as I try to focus on him. The world still feels a half-second out of sync with itself.

"I was hoping to finally make your acquaintance," the mechanical voice says—closer now. Personal. "I've done some digging. And you, my friend… are a ghost."

He stops just beyond arm's reach.

"Not one single image of you can be found."

The words don't land right away. They drift through the fog in my head, brushing against something that refuses to take shape.

"A ghost…?" I murmur. The sound comes out wrong—thin, uncertain. "What does that mean?"

It earns me a quiet sound from his direction. Not quite a laugh. Not quite a sigh.

"It means you didn't exist in any meaningful system I had access to," he explains smoothly. "No digital trail. No verified records. No history substantial enough to survive even the most invasive search methods."

I shake my head weakly. The motion makes the room tilt.

"That's not— I had a life," I insist, though even to my own ears the words feel flimsy. "I was… I was just—"

Just what?

The answer slips through my grasp like smoke.

"Whatever you were," he replies, "is no longer particularly relevant."

My heart begins to thud harder against the restraint across my chest. The metal inlaid in my sternum glows faintly brighter with the change in my pulse, responding like a living thing.

"What did you do to me?" I ask.

The question trembles despite my attempt to steady it.

He tilts his head slightly, studying me through those glowing lenses. I can feel the weight of his attention like pressure against my skin.

"I gave you a second chance," he says simply. "One you would not have survived without my intervention."

My stomach twists.

"I didn't ask for that."

"No," he agrees. "You didn't... you begged."

Silence stretches between us, thick and charged.

"You will remain here a little while longer," he continues at last. "Your body is still adjusting. But soon, we'll see what you can truly do when the fatigue is stripped away."

Something in his tone tightens at the edges—anticipation, thin and sharp.

"And when that time comes," he adds, "I suspect your confusion will be the least of your concerns."

He steps back into the shadow as the light subtly re-centers on me.

The machines resume their quiet watch, and I'm left suspended in the dark chamber that has become my prison.

---

Hey guys! So this story has been something cooking in the back of my mind since finishing Dispatch a few days after the season finale episodes were released. I will admit, I was torn between doing an Self Insert fic or an impromptu season 2 fic to fill the gaps. I think I found a way to do the best of both worlds with this while expanding on some of what we know.

The MC is going to be named Ryan Harbour once he starts to figure out what's going on. He does have superpowers, and will honestly be a mixture of Cole MacGrath from InFamous and the 2013 Max Steel reboot's powers. He's not going to be a god, but he's definitely going to have a threatening potential to some of the more iconic heroes and villains.

If you are interested in supporting my writing, I do have a Patreon where you can get up to 5 chapters early access depending on the tier. Depending on how popular this gets, I may try to commission some artwork for some of the OC characters. I'll try to update again soon. I do have quite a bit of time off this month so I should be able to knock out a few chapters. In the span of two days I wrote five chapters for this, so there's that. Once I get chapter 6 written, I'll post chapter two publicly. Thank you guys for reading, and I hope to see you in the next chapter.

Ask any questions, I will be happy to answer to the best of my ability.

Want to join the discord server I run and talk about the story with other people? Link is below:

discord.gg/dQkeJPkxdD

https://www.patreon.com/c/Arsenal597

 

[Jamoso]

I was literally just reading Absolute Spider-Man over on Ao3 this morning. Crazy coincidence. Love this though. The world needs more Dispatch fics!

I think the usually unmentioned character trait from Shroud that I like the best is how he looks cool most of the time, and he acts like everything he does is based on calculations, but it's like he never adds the variables of his own emotions lashing out, and he ends up being sort of a coward whenever things don't go according to plan.

Do you have any pairings planned? I think any or none would be accepted at this point since the market isn't yet saturated. To conclude, great work and I would love to see what is coming in the future!