It had always been my dream to become a hero.

It’s not an uncommon wish, given how much kids are exposed to superheroes on a day by day basis. We’ve all seen the daily news where the members of the Justice League save the Earth from a meteor or alien invasion or a Lex Luthor presidency. Every kid wants to be able to put on a cape and fight crime for truth, justice and the American way.

But, of course, there was always the crushing reality that most people just aren’t going to get superpowers. Only a fraction of a fraction of the population will ever be able to put on tights and fight crime. No matter how hard you wish and hope and pray, you most likely aren’t going to suddenly transform into a Kryptonian or get handed a Green Lantern ring or become a metahuman. If you lost the superpower lottery at birth, chances are that your superhero career was over before it started.

Yes, you could become a superhero without powers, like, say, Green Arrow or Batman or the others, but it was still going to be an uphill battle. Without money or resources to build an arsenal of arrows or a Batmobile or a super-suit, becoming an A-list superhero was absolutely impossible. 

If you weren’t born with the superpower of fabulous wealth or government funding, it was the final nail in the coffin for your future hero career.

So, most kids grow out of their phase of wanting to become a superhero. They settle down and become accountants or bus drivers or librarians or whatever. They learn to watch the capes soaring above them from afar as an unattainable dream. They learn to accept that heroes are always going to be this distant existence on the other side of the glass. You can look, but never touch.

But I never accepted that.

I couldn’t. 

I had to believe that I was different. Nothing else in my life felt more real and tangible to me than the dream of becoming a superhero. No matter what the odds were, I was going to become a hero. I wasn’t like everyone else who was destined to be ordinary. 

When I was young, maybe six years old or so, I remembered seeing the Batplane.

We had been on the playground, all pretending to be superheroes of course. Until one of the kids stopped and stared at the sky. We all followed his gaze and saw the same thing. A black, bat-shaped slice of night soaring lazily over us. I found out later that Batman had been tracking an escaped convict who had slipped out of Arkham, north of us, and had made a break for it. While I had heard it on the news countless times, that singular moment where I stared into the sky and saw that it was all real… that was when everything changed for me.

I might have grown up, but I never forgot that moment of clarity. I want to do that, too. And nothing is going to stop me. 

I was awkward, I was quiet, I always had my head buried in a comic book. I wasn’t dumb or anything, but I never could understand why people invested so much in stupid stuff like getting good grades or baseball or whatever. I couldn’t live in that world. I didn’t fit in.

I didn’t belong in the ordinary world… so I had to believe that there was something special and miraculous about me.

I knew I was different… I just had to show the world that.

I took martial arts classes. Aikido, muay thai, kendo and MMA. I was a scrawny and geeky kid at first and I regularly got my ass kicked. It was a painful process to become stronger, but I eventually learned to shut out that pain and keep pushing. Did Batman ever throw in the towel because he went to bed with his body aching for weeks on end? Did Superman retire when he got a few broken bones? No… and I wasn’t about to either.

And with the work, there eventually came progress. Falling became less painful. Training became less exhausting and when I looked in the mirror…

Well, I wasn’t particularly handsome, in my opinion, but I looked like a threat.

I was ready to graduate from sparring in the gyms to applying my skills to the criminal scum of my hometown. 

I spent my birthday money to buy a long leather coat, hat and scarf as a costume. I picked up a set of sturdy tonfa clubs. I looked more like a detective from one of those old comics from the 1930’s than an actual hero, but nobody could look at me and call me ordinary. It was a start.

I pushed the window of my room open and, dressed and armed, leaped out into the night. The black leather jacket of my costume blending into the dark, moonless night. The red scarf at my neck trailing after me as I rode off towards the city center on my bicycle.

With my costume, my ride, my weapons and my training, at the age of fifteen, I ran out into the night to fight crime for the first time.

And was met with absolute stillness. A handful of late night barhoppers or people walking their dogs, but nothing criminal and worthy of justice.

Nothing happened that night. Or the next one. Or the next one.

Three days of wandering close to my reasonably affluent suburb wasn’t going to offer much crime to fight. So I biked out further into the city. Over the “wrong side of the tracks” and I finally found my first criminal. 

He hadn’t been much of a criminal. More of a nuisance, than anything else. A drunken college kid who wouldn’t stop screaming at his ex-girlfriend’s apartment from the street below. She shouted at him from her window to leave her alone. His response was to heft a half-filled beer bottle up and aim it at her.

I had been moving like lightning the moment I heard the screaming and shouting. I had leapt off my bike and dashed over to them.

I had reached out and I caught his wrist in mid-throw of another bottle. He looked at me in shock, but only for a moment as I twisted my body and threw him over my shoulder onto the cracked sidewalk. He cried out and moaned pathetically as the beer bottle clattered from his grip. He was too drunk to even get back to his feet.

His ex-girlfriend seemed more alarmed than gratified, but my job had been done. I tipped my hat to her with a slight incline of my head and ran off into the night..

I had done it. I had actually stopped a crime. My heart pounded in my chest with both the exertion of pedaling my bike and with pride. I realized that I had made a difference. I had, in some small way, changed the world.

And I wanted to keep doing it. 

But, of course, martial arts and the willingness to intervene were only half of the equation. I had to develop a mystique, too. It’s not enough to just be some weirdo in a costume. You had to build up lore and mythos and a reputation. You have to have a style or a brand or nobody is going to take you seriously.

Becoming a hero is only half the job… you’ve got to be able to market yourself, too.

So, I styled myself as the mysterious and stealthy hero, Cross.

It lent itself to some memorable banter such as, “You’ve been crossed-out” or “I’m going to cross you off my list, scum”. I remembered writing out my dialogue during study hall. The name Cross came with a habit of spray-painting a small, red + on defeated criminals and at the scenes of my work. It was cheap and it was a bit of a gimmick, but it was a good one. It was memorable.

Yes, I know The Red X… that villain the Teen Titans tangled with a few years ago kind of did the same thing, but it worked for me in my suburban prison. It wasn’t like I could afford an endless supply of cross-a-rangs or something. I hoped that my work, as cliche as it might be, would get people talking.

In the moments where I could go out and fight for justice, it felt like the world of Superman and Batman was all so tantalizingly close. Gotham City wasn’t even that far away… maybe a three-hour drive from our sleepy suburb, at best. I didn’t think that my age or lack of powers mattered in my pursuit. I read stories of other people who beat the odds and become recognized heroes just by taking up the mantle and standing up against injustice against all obstacles. I knew I could do the same.

It was difficult to connect foiling an occasional purse snatcher or scaring off some taggers to anything really incredible. I did, however, do something I never thought possible.

I was able to make friends by being a hero.

The first other person I met as a hero was Kyle. Of course I didn’t know that was his name at the time.

It was a strange meeting, to be certain.

I had spotted a grizzled and desperate burglar in the process of robbing one home in the wealthier part of town. I dove in after him to skulk in the shadows and corner him for a beatdown. I was just in the process of giving my menacing speech from hiding when the burglar’s flashlight levitated out of his grip and started belting him over the head of its own accord.

I took the opportunity to sweep him off his feet with a well-aimed kick, as I wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth, and the burglar went down without further incident. I looked around to find another hero, a shorter, rounder teenager with a bowl cut and dressed in a white doctor’s coat and swirly-eye glasses standing outside the window. His face was contorted in concentration as the flashlight levitated itself in front of him.

He brought it around to illuminate the house like a spotlight and the beam suddenly froze on me.

There was a brief moment of awkward silence as we decided how to handle the standoff, but I decided that I would accept the would-be-hero’s help in tying up the burglar for the police to find.

He watched curiously as I spray-painted my “+” symbol on the bad guy and I explained my gimmick. He seemed impressed.

As we left the house, after tying and gagging the burglar for easy arrest, we had the chance to talk a little. He scooted along on his skateboard with the help of his telekinesis and I pedaled my bike alongside him.

He called himself Psychodude. A telekinetic terror with the gift of moving objects with his mind. Kyle was, like me, desperately wanting to become a real hero.

I couldn’t help but be shocked that he wasn’t one already. Telekinesis was a powerful ability to be born with. But he seemed fairly humble about his metahuman ability. As he wobbled a little on his skateboard, he admitted that he was still trying to figure out how to use his powers properly.

He also said that was trying to become a hero whose costume didn’t come from a bargain bin at the Halloween store. I could sympathize. Mine came mostly from thrift stores. The scarf had been knitted by my grandma.

He actually showed a lot of respect for my skills, which instantly made me like him. A hero with real powers, even an amateur, still thought I was on the same level. While I tried to exude confidence, it was affirming to have someone else’s praise. My hard work and practice was finally beginning to pay off. 

I awkwardly offered to team up with him for patrols and he agreed. We both knew that working solo was asking for trouble. And while I didn’t realize it at the time, I hadn’t just gotten a partner in heroics.

I’d made a friend, too.

To be fair, I had tried to make friends as a civilian. It just never quite worked out. People reached out, sure, but I didn’t have time to play nice with people who weren’t willing to dream big or just going to laugh at the person I wanted to be. I would talk about heroes and villains and they would just talk about meaningless nonsense like reality shows or school gossip. Kyle was the first person who not only didn’t laugh at my passion, but shared in it.

Eventually, after about a month of working together, we bit the bullet and revealed our secret identities to one another. We couldn’t keep pussyfooting around it and we needed to be able to trust one another. I knew he was around my age, but I was grateful to find that Kyle was actually a classmate with me in high school. He was, like me, another outcast hanging out in the corner of high school society. We had simply not seen each other for who we really were until that moment.

And of course, while it made hanging out and planning our patrols a whole lot easier, it also made the experience of school just a little more bearable. 

We thought that we were being reasonably sneaky about planning our heroic work at school, whispering in hushed voices at lunch, texting during class and passing notes. But apparently we weren’t as clever as we thought, because our next team member essentially ambushed us after school and asked to join our team.

Jared had transferred in during sophomore year, and while he seemed a nice enough guy, me and Kyle were a little wary of him. He was taller, wore a pair of glasses and had hedgehog-like spiked hair. He was attractive and reasonably well-liked which made us hesitant. We didn’t know him beyond his general friendly demeanor and he didn’t really read as the superhero type to us. He was popular, not loners like me and Kyle.

And it was possible that he was actually trying to get us in trouble. Being a hero was still illegal, unless you had proper permission from the Justice League or acceptance from the local police, at least. We had neither. The idea that our cover had been so easily blown set us on edge with the newcomer. 

And the bigger issue was that Jared didn’t have any powers either.

I asked him point blank if he had any kind of real skills he brought to the team, and he told us to meet him in the woods after school and he’d show us. We did so, warily of course, if it happened to be a trap. But when we met him at the expanse of woods outside the local park, Jared had a bow in hand and a quiver of arrows strapped over his back.

Me and Kyle exchanged glances. I had to admit that archery was a useful skill, if he was any good.

Jared shot an apple out of a tree from 50 meters away. Without even looking at his target. We instantly agreed to let him join us, as the heroic archer, Snapshot. Granted we had to do a little more thrifting and scavenging to get him a proper costume, but we were grateful for his assistance.

So, at that moment we were a true team of heroes. Kyle/Psychodude the telekinetic, Me/Cross the stealth and martial arts expert and Jared/Snapshot the eagle-eyed archer.

For the rest of that semester we had a blast both on and off the patrol. We took down bad guys by night and by day we’d hang out and play games. My hero obsession had connected me with other people who felt the same way I did.

Others came to follow. 

We ran into another hero that spring. He had been on patrol in golden, engraved armor who could shoot energy blasts out of an ancient Egyptian staff. Some criminal gang had bitten off more than they could chew as this hero scattered them with his powers. It was more than a little terrifying to see someone, to my mind, who looked like a legitimate contender for an A-list superhero.

I was floored by the scale of power that he wielded but he immediately set me on edge as soon as he spoke. His golden armor was gaudy and clashed with my preference for stealth. His energy blasts didn’t help my desire for subtlety either. And when he spoke, it was with an imperious and know-it-all tone that seeped into his words. He was a person who had to have everything his way. Scarab (eventually to be known as his real name, Gary) was a contentious addition to our group, one that I wasn’t particularly fond of. Unfortunately, I was outvoted.

As we worked together, I was certain that he had no intention of treating us as anything but glorified sidekicks. And I thought he would never share his secret identity. But when all of us confronted him on the fact that three of us had already “come out of the phonebooth” to one another, it didn’t give him much of a leg to stand on.

If we were going to work together, we needed trust, and begrudgingly, Scarab agreed. He shared his real life name and phone number.

Underneath the helmet, he was a smaller kid our age, with a mop of untidy and unkept hair. His face looked like it was set in a permanent pout sometimes, but I had to admit that he seemed to appreciate our company in some twisted way.

He was also a classmate of ours, but refused to associate with us and plan together at school, and while he claimed it was to keep others from catching onto our heroic side gigs, personally I think he was just embarrassed about being seen with the “nerdy” kids like me and Kyle. He tended to spend more time orbiting the “popular” kids.

Riley came next. He was a late transfer student during junior year, but exactly what we needed for our team. We met him zooming around town in his prototype rocket-boots and while they had been impressive, they had become less impressive when they malfunctioned and dumped him into the reasonably soft grass of the local park. As we helped him to his feet, we told him that we were the local hero team in town. He had seen himself as more of an inventor than a superhero, but he had to admit that the best inventors tended to be heroes too.

He asked if we could help him “stress-test” his work and in exchange, he would join our team. We happily agreed. Riley had short-cropped brown hair and a manic grin permanently plastered to his wild face as he always seemed to be thinking about his next big project.

Riley offered a lot to the team with his technical prowess, offering Jared some nice “trick” arrows, offering Kyle some reinforced plating on his doctor’s jacket or offering me an electrified upgrade on my tonfa. In costume, he was the makeshift hero, Scrapyard, as his suits always came off as a little ramshackle from their scavenged parts, even if they worked perfectly.

The last member of our team was Casey.

He was a shy and reserved freshman, with long, black hair he tended to hide behind. We had seen him around the school, but never would have pegged him as a metahuman at first glance.

We ended up running into him entirely by accident when we got word of a wild animal running around the local shopping mall. Animal control wasn’t our usual job, but lacking anything else to do that night, the four of us jumped into the mall to try and track down the animal. What we found was a scared, shaggy, dark-furred wolf in the tattered remains of cargo shorts and a Zelda t-shirt.

We managed to get Casey to safety and with some careful charades, we were able to understand that the “wild animal” was intelligent. By the next morning with the sunrise, Casey had turned back into a human and (after offering him some intact clothes) he was able to explain to us that he had been bitten by a dog of some kind last month.

With a quick reference to the calendar, we were able to figure out that last night (and the night of Casey’s bite) had been the night of the full moon, leading to the realization that Casey was a werewolf. With a little help, Casey was able to learn to change shape on command (with the caveat that he was stuck in wolf form for the duration of the night of the full moon). And so, our last member, Wolfsbane, joined our team.

We hadn’t been able to come up with a superhero name for our team. There weren’t any other heroes in town to compete with, so we simply stuck with “The Team” if anyone ever asked who we were. Working together, we had a niche following of people who recognized us, but it wasn’t as if we were outrunning trains or leaping over buildings or doing anything particularly impressive. We were, at best, a curiosity of our hometown.

We stuck with the small scale crimes, and hung out socially, but the longer we worked as heroes, the more we longed to do something grander. We wanted that “big win” to push The Team into the big-leagues.

We eventually found our moment of triumph before we graduated. 

We had stumbled upon a drifter who had been harassing a woman who clearly wasn’t interested. We had hoped that a show of force and a stern talking-to would dissuade him and make him leave. We outnumbered him six-to-one. Nobody would be stupid enough to take a swing at us… we were certain that he would listen. Unfortunately, the moment he spotted us as heroes, the drifter decided that he wasn’t interested in having a conversation.

He roared and doubled in size as his body covered itself in a stony skin. A rocklike shell encased him and accumulated until he was a ten-foot mass of pure juggernaut, ready to crush us like bugs. He slammed his fists into the asphalt, cracking it beneath his feet. We were stunned. 

For the first time, we were facing down a real, superpowered villain.

I won’t say it wasn’t hard, because none of us had prepared to face someone like this. But, the alcohol in his blood and the combination of our teamwork eventually won out as we took him down. He had been too heavy and clumsy to stop us as we weaved in and out, attacking and retreating with hit-and-run tactics. He eventually collapsed and reverted to his human form.

As we tied him up, we shook him down for information on why he was here at all. Someone of his power had no place causing trouble in our sleepy suburb. And then he dropped a bombshell.

He said that he was invited to town by the largest business around us. The same company that employed my parents and the parents of Jared and Kyle. The business that essentially made us a real city at all.

Fields Consolidated Insurance. One of the biggest insurance companies in the United States. With the era of superheroes in full swing, insurance was a big business. After all, someone had to cover your car, house and/or life when a villain came knocking.

And the nationwide insurance company had its headquarters right in the center of our city. They basically employed half of the adults who lived in our town.

We learned that Fields Consolidated Insurance was looking for villains for hire. Obviously off-the-books. And after we did some further investigation, we found out that they were using those villains to target their competitors’ clients. They were trying to use villains to bankrupt the opposing insurance companies with large-scale damages so that they could buy them out and essentially have a monopoly.

We tried to go public with the info, finding a local journalist willing to publish the story, but someone at the local paper also tipped off Fields of what we were trying to do. So Fields sent their entire retainer of villains to squash the story. And us.

The newspaper building had been hit first. A freak windstorm shattered the glass panes and forced us to flee, with the journalist in tow, his laptop clutched under his arm with all of the incriminating evidence.

We found ourselves cornered in the parking garage and forced to brawl with the team of villains sent by Fields.

It was definitely a climactic battle. A huge and dangerous fight that would haunt my dreams for years to come. It was one of the most dangerous fights we’d ever faced up to that point and the villains were professionals.

We were facing a pyrokinetic drag racer, a hydrokinetic exile of Atlantis, a woman who was possessed by a wind demon (the one who had created the tornado) and a grizzled, ex-military hit man, armed to the teeth. They had better skills and more power than us, but we had the home field advantage. We knew the city better than they did, we had worked together longer and we were fighting to protect our home.

It wasn’t easy, but in the end, we won. The city had been turned into a warzone, and there had been some close calls, but we defeated them and the story was out. We actually had beaten honest to goodness supervillains and saved the city. The story was published and our pictures were in the paper and it was, I hoped, the origin story for a brand new career.

And it was, for some of us.

Jared got picked up by the Green Arrow in Star City and began a career as the Grey Arrow.

Casey, while still in high school, used his werewolf powers to join some other ecologically conscious heroes to fight crimes against the Earth with some team called Gaia’s Avengers.

Kyle and Gary got scouted by the Justice League and put in their Young Justice training and placement program.

Riley got an internship at Star Labs with his prototype suit designs as soon as he graduated.

But as for me?

Nobody seemed to remember I existed or recognize what I had done. I got pats on the back and was told by people that they would keep an eye on me and keep in touch, but they never followed up. My origin story had ended before it began. All that work, and I still wasn’t good enough.

I was once again alone and forgotten. I promised myself that I would change that.

I dropped contact with my friends after everything settled. For one thing, they had their own futures to look after, but I had to admit to myself that I was more than a little bitter that none of them had been able to vouch for me. Maybe they didn’t have the pull to get me onto a hero team, but I still felt like they had abandoned me and there was nothing more I had to say to those traitors.

Life moved on normally for me. Or, as normally as could be expected, given the circumstances.

My parents weren’t exactly thrilled that I was applying to go to Gotham University. It wasn’t that it was a bad school or anything, but when they found out what me and my friends had been doing after school was not, in fact, the quiz bowl club, but was actually unlicensed vigilantism… they wanted to put me on a tighter leash. 

As part of the big insurance scandal, I had been forced to reveal myself to my folks as Cross, a member of The Team that had essentially turned the entire city upside down. After all, I had technically used their credentials to dig up key evidence for our case, so I had to have a good reason for it when they found out I’d “borrowed” their work IDs.

They said that they were proud of me stopping their evil employer, but they were nervous about the fact that I’d been lying to them and getting into danger the whole time. The final battle had ended in a hospital stay for me, with some still-visible scars. Their concern wasn’t exactly unreasonable.

They wanted me to go to school locally, and not get caught up in the superhero antics in Gotham City. They said that things in the big city were much more dangerous, and after what I did for this town, I should just retire and live a normal life. I had to promise them that if they let me go to school in Gotham, that my hero days were over.

I promised them that I’d stay safe.

And so they kept up their end of the deal and let me leave for Gotham and paid for my schooling.

But I didn’t follow suit.

For what it was worth, I really tried to keep myself focused on schoolwork from day one, but it was agonizingly dull. I felt restless and desperately wanted some kind of action. Everything crawled at a snail’s pace, and every time I turned on the news, there were more stories of villainy and heroism.

My usual response, escaping into comics or TV or video games didn’t help either, as all I would see were more heroes who had answered the call and stood up to evil. Whereas I was hiding in my room like a loser.

Something just kept boiling up within me and I couldn’t stop it.

After nearly getting into a fistfight with someone after class over something stupid, I realized that I needed an outlet. I had just about punched someone’s lights out because he said that my analysis of Shakespeare was “insipid”. I was legitimately going stir-crazy being cooped up in my schooling like this.

So, despite the promise to my parents, the costume went back on, my tonfa came out of the closet and into the wilds of Gotham I went.

______________________________________


And, of course, I immediately got my ass kicked.

I had tried to start small and take on a single purse snatcher, just like the old days back home. And while I had managed to easily take him down with an ambush and flurry of moves, I hadn’t realized at the time that criminals here in Gotham always came in swarms.

A whole host of crazy people in costumes had honed the petty criminals of Gotham into serious contenders who had gotten their crime down to a science. And while I had skills to take down even more of them as they joined the fray, in the end, their sheer numbers won out and overwhelmed me.

I was left laying beaten and bruised in a trash-filled alley. My aching body throbbing with pain from uncountable kicks and punches. I heard them laughing at me, spitting on me and as all of them swarmed around me, I knew they were intent on offering the finishing blows.

It was only the intervention of another hero that kept me out of the morgue. A girl around my age.

She wasn’t exactly the statuesque build you saw from heroes like Black Canary or Wonder Woman, but she was a thick and well-toned girl. Her costume was a sort of short dress with leggings, all of it glittering with some kind of multicolored rhinestones. Even her domino mask, with her platinum blonde hair spilling over it, shone like crazy in the dim light of the alley. The girl looked like a disco ball, but damn if she didn’t have an ace up her sleeve.

She just reached out her hand and suddenly, the broken windows, beer bottles and every shard of glass around us began to melt and float through the air and into a ball in her hand. Hot molten glass floated in a ball above her outstretched palm.

The criminals were too shocked to respond at first. Right up until one of them took a ball of molten glass to the chest, sizzling and burning him on contact as he screamed and collapsed onto the ground. The others moved to avenge their fallen comrade.

Unfortunately for them, I found my second wind.

I swept the legs out from one of the goons who had pulled out a gun, sending his shot wide. As he hit the ground with a grunt, I used a second kick at his hand to send the gun flying. The girl used the opportunity to glass him as well, trapping his arms to his sides as the molten glass cooled in a band around his arms, pinning him down.

We worked with each other, and with our combined efforts we managed to take them all down systematically. 

The girl, Crystalline, as she called herself, wrapped up their bodies in glass cocoons to keep them in place for the GCPD to pick them up. I leaned down to check their vitals to make sure that we hadn’t killed anyone or put any of them at risk of death. Save for some nasty burns from molten glass, they would live.

While we waited for the cops to arrive, we got the chance to make conversation. 

She was surprisingly social for a masked hero.

Apparently she hadn’t had any other heroes to talk to before this moment. Before coming to Gotham, she was some girl from some country town in the middle of nowhere. She’d barely fought any kind of crime before and was still trying to get a grip on her powers. She grilled me about how I pulled off all my moves and what kind of training I had. She wanted to know if we could team up for the long term.

That was something that gave me pause. I was trying, desperately, to get out of the shadow of other heroes. Being around Crystalline, another hero gifted with powers by the luck of the cosmic lottery, was only going to make my climb to fame more difficult. I could already see how she would use her powers and me as a springboard to a better career and leave me behind. Again.

But… there was also the fact that she was going to get eaten alive in Gotham. She was too green and too inexperienced. If I hadn’t been here, she would have gotten shot, powers or no. And the power to control glass was an incredible gift that I didn’t think that she fully grasped the applications for. 

And I was clearly not going to survive in this city alone. The aches and pains of my bruised body made that clear. This was far beyond my experience in the suburbs, and while I was more than willing to learn to fight better and smarter, I needed to keep alive long enough to learn. 

The combination of her powers and my experience would probably go a long way for keeping us both breathing. 

So… I agreed to train her and she agreed to cover my back.

And once again, I was part of a superhero team.