The boy who asked for it

Erik grew up loved, son to Melvin and Michelle Turner and older brother to Trine and Ava. Variants had already surfaced across the planet by the time the three of them were born, and Erik spent his childhood on comic books and on praying, seriously and nightly, to wake up with one. His father tried hard to talk him out of it. Nothing good comes of making yourself a target of other people, or of the government. Erik heard none of it.

Kids from the neighborhood started moving away without a word. A friend here, a friend there, no goodbye. He was sad about it and thought nothing more of it. Then, at midnight on his thirteenth birthday, the wish was granted.

The scrap yard and the table

He kept it to himself. His father’s reaction to the dream had told him enough about what the reality would get, so for three years Erik trained alone. The old scrap yard after school, his bedroom late at night, lifting and turning objects until control came. His parents saw a boy who had finally grown out of a phase and started leaving the house. His teachers saw a kid asleep at his desk who somehow never dropped below a B.

At sixteen he told them he was staying at a friend’s, put a costume together out of whatever he had, and went looking for crime. He found it in Pewter Valley, a family being worked over by street thugs. He threw the thugs into a wall from across the street. Then the family looked at him exactly the way they had looked at the thugs, and ran. He was an Outlier. That was the whole of what they had seen.

Walking back, he realized he was being followed. Then he didn’t see anything at all. He woke strapped to a table with his powers dampened, in a row of others just like him, while a voice on the intercom explained that they had all been judged too dangerous to leave unattended. The people holding them called themselves the Balancers, later and more formally S.T.A.N.D. They had been doing this for years with the government’s blessing. Erik thought about the friends who had moved away, and about his father, and felt thirteen again.

The girl strapped down beside him said her name was Marie Diez. She was in exactly the same position he was and spent it trying to make him less afraid. When the facility, a mobile one, was attacked in transit and the dampeners failed, he got her out first. She made him go back for the rest. On the way clear she told him she had reached into the minds of everyone they had passed and taken their faces out. It bought him his life back and it killed the dream. He kept training after that, but only so no one could ever put him on a table again. Junior year, a new student transferred in. It was Marie.

Reborn from tragedy

They married a few years out of college, engineering for him and social science for her. They had told each other what they could do by then. Marie was a telepath, and she promised never to go looking inside him. If she wanted to know something she would ask, and trust the answer. She spent her time in hospitals quietly taking pain off people who had no idea she was doing it, and told him they didn’t need costumes to be useful. He thought she was already more of a hero than he would ever be. He took a job at Axxis Corp, where he had interned, and started climbing, because within the first year she was pregnant.

She was three months along and making rounds at Prism City Medical Center, siphoning the pain off a sick child, when three points in the city were hit at once. It was a coordinated strike, laid at the feet of the men who would become the TriFold. S.T.A.N.D. had been drawn out of Prism City that day. The hospital went up in the middle of the chaos. Marie was not physically hurt. What reached her was everything else, hundreds of people’s fear and pain and dying, all arriving at once in a woman built to absorb it. They lost the baby.

She blamed herself. He held her and told her it was not hers to carry, and blamed himself for not being there. When the grief finally moved, what was underneath it was a conclusion. The Fold were not Prism City’s heroes. They were on a leash, and the next time that leash pulled them somewhere else, whoever was left here would be on their own. Every ecosystem has something at the top of the food chain, and Erik decided that would be him. He also knew what he was, and that he could not be trusted with it alone, so he asked the person who had been talking him down since he was sixteen to do it professionally. They went out as heroes together.

Crash and burn

For years they were Prism City’s foremost heroes and, as far as anyone watching could tell, unbeatable. Every threat answered, every villain put down. So the villains stopped coming one at a time. A coalition formed around a single shared objective, the deaths of Apex and Foresight. The two of them fought it to a standstill and then well past one, and the waves kept coming, and eventually they could not fight anymore.

The city that had never sanctioned them mourned them anyway. It raised a statue, and it marked the anniversary every year.

Seeing ghosts

Five years on, on that anniversary, a man in an unfamiliar costume came down into the heart of Prism City hard enough to crack it. He said he was Apex. Everything anyone could test said he was telling the truth.

He cannot explain why the world believes he is dead. He cannot explain the statue. Hardest of all, he cannot picture the wife everyone tells him he had. He is putting the missing pieces back with help from Zhali, his friend and his doctor and one more person he does not remember.