Abomination

There are things that people want so badly they stop thinking about whether they should have them.

Emil Blonsky had a list of things he wanted, and near the top of that list was power. Not ordinary power — the kind of power that changes everything about you, that makes you something no one else on Earth is, that puts you beyond the reach of ordinary fears and ordinary limits.

He had heard about Dr. Bruce Banner and the accident with the Gamma Bomb. He had learned what had happened. And instead of feeling horror, or sympathy, or even caution — Emil Blonsky felt something else.

He felt envy.

Blonsky was an agent — calculating and cold, with the particular kind of intelligence that comes from spending years learning to watch people and find their weaknesses. He was not reckless. He planned. He waited. He chose his moment.

He found his way to a gamma radiation facility. He found the equipment. He exposed himself to a far higher dose of radiation than Bruce Banner had ever received.

It worked.

But not the way he hoped.

He became the Abomination. And the Abomination was not magnificent. It was monstrous in the way that things go wrong when you rush toward power without understanding it. His skin turned to hard scales, rough and dark green, ridged along his skull like the armor of a crocodile. He was enormous — larger even than the Hulk, in the early days — and the radiation had locked him into that form permanently. There was no waking up the next morning as Emil Blonsky. There was only the Abomination, always. Forever.

But Blonsky's sharp, cold mind survived the transformation. He remembered everything. He knew tactics. He knew pressure points. He knew how to take apart an opponent's spirit before he took apart their body. And he marched into combat against the Hulk not just with his muscles but with his intelligence, taunting, calculating, pressing on every vulnerability.

"You don't even control yourself," Abomination snarled, during a clash that sent shockwaves through the ground like earthquakes. "I chose this. I planned for this. You just — happened." CRASH. A building's corner crumbled. "You're an accident!"

The Hulk said nothing. The Hulk didn't say much. But the Hulk listened.

And the Hulk got angrier.

This is the one thing about the Hulk that no tactical mind can fully account for: the angrier he gets, the stronger he gets. Not a little stronger. Enormously, incomprehensibly stronger. The rage feeds the power in a loop that has no visible ceiling. Every taunt, every calculated cruelty from the Abomination, was — in practice — helping his opponent.

Abomination was designed for combat. He started stronger. His armor was harder. His strategy was better. For the first stage of their battle, he was winning, and he knew it, and he enjoyed it in his cold and calculated way.

And then the Hulk's power surpassed the point where strategy matters.

BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. Each blow from the Hulk now hit with the force of something geological. The Abomination's hard scales — his pride, his protection, the thing that made him feel invincible — began to crack. CRRRACK. Hairline fractures in the reptilian hide. Then bigger cracks. Then the Hulk gathered every ounce of his rage and his grief and his terrible, lonely power and struck, and the Abomination was sent crashing through mountain range terrain, end over end, silent.

He did not get up.

The Hulk stood in the sudden quiet and breathed. Heavy breaths. Deep ones. The rage was beginning to ebb, the way a storm ebbs when there is nothing left for it to feed on.

He looked at his hands. Green and enormous and shaking slightly with the aftershocks of what he had just done.

He had not wanted this fight. He never wanted the fights. He wanted to be left alone — in a quiet lab, with a quiet computer, working on the quiet problem of gamma radiation, and maybe one day finding a way to be only Bruce Banner again. That was all he had ever wanted.

But when the Abomination came for the people around him, there was no question of what happened next.

The Hulk always came when they were needed.

The Abomination would come back. He always came back — it was the nature of a rivalry between two forces that had come from the same source, shaped by the same energy, pulled in opposite directions by the difference in what lived inside each of them.

One had been a scientist who jumped in front of a bomb to save a stranger.

The other had been a soldier who walked into a radiation chamber to satisfy his own hunger for power.

Gamma radiation does not make you something new. It makes you more of what you already are.

That was the lesson. That was always the lesson.