Remember that time we both decided we were going to try and become vigilantes? We spent months joking about our superhero nicknames and what our costumes would look like. I always thought it was benign banter until that day you showed up round mine with those two costumes. You had nicks and cuts all over your fingers from where you'd spent the last fortnight working on them, sewing them together, patching them up. When we put them on, we thought we looked like real heroes. Okay, so looking back, I guess we looked a bit fruity, but come on, we were young, we didn't care. It was those costumes that really struck home the idea for us, and it was from that point forwards we both vowed we'd at least give it a shot.
We spent the next two months looking on YouTube at 'how to fight' and 'self defence' videos, thinking it'd prepare us for the streets of our corrupt city. We should have known better, but we were so young, so eager. You even bought those weights, telling me how it'd only take you a month or so to put on seven pounds of muscle. I remember the nervousness in your eyes as we first stepped out of my apartment in those costumes. You were the mastermind behind this whole idea, yet there you were, standing in your spandex yellow-and-red number, more akin to a newborn baby than a street wise vigilante. I remember you turned to me, and I just smiled. I don't know what it was, but there was something in my smile that just washed all the nervousness out of you. You returned the gesture in kind and took your final step out of my door as plain, blue collared Tyler, and took your first step as a knight of the street.
I remember the first 'crime' we saw being committed. Those two kids, no older than fourteen or fifteen, spray painting the side of the corner shop with racist slurs. You were the one to take the first action, you always are. You let out a cry of "stop", and the kids turned round fully expecting to see a police officer or something, and when they saw two fruity looking wannabe heroes standing there, all proud with their arms on their hips? Well, they laughed their bloody heads off. I remember we slinked away back to my apartment that night. But we weren't defeated. You kept our spirits up with your joyful banter, about how no hero gets it right first time. Look at Spider Man, you said, he still doesn't get it right.
The second night went much the same as the first, our efforts at heroing merely being laughed away by the criminal society, but it was that third night where we discovered what it meant to be heroes. I remember the look on the young lady's face as we handed her the red handbag back. She wasn't sure if she should cry with joy at being saved from the dirty hands of that ruthless mugger or laugh at the fact he'd been thwarted by two fruits-in-tights. We were elevated. It was like no feeling, no high that we'd had before. We were successes, bonafide heroes.
And it's from there it all went downhill.
Word got out about the two spandex clad warriors of the twilight, and before we knew it every tosser was after us. We were the first of our kind out on the streets, and as such we had the biggest target of all painted on our backs. The heads of the crime business didn't want copycat spandex-clads out on the roads, ruining their income, so they ordered we be taken down.
It was the eighth night they got their wish.
They set a trap for us, and we fell into it like the naive idiots we were. It was another mugging, but the woman wasn't really in peril, she was merely in cahoots with the mugger. And when we rushed to the rescue, our heroic battle cries booming over the thick sound of nighttime in the city, they surrounded us. We never managed to count how many there were exactly, but the police estimates fifteen to twenty of the bastards came down on us like a hammer of injustice. The next thing I remember is waking up in a hospital, you sat by my side, asleep, with your head bandaged and your nose broken. Turns out I'd received the worst of it. Five broken ribs, a fractured skull, a punctured lung and a dislocated hip. When you finally woke up the tears were still fresh in your eyes and all you could say was how sorry you were that you'd gotten me into such a mess. You told me how you were planning on just going back to a normal life after all this. I told you to shut the fuck up and you just stared at me like a hurt puppy. I explained to you that I knew what I was getting into, that I'd expected this to happen sooner or later. I told you I hadn't said anything because it was the first time I'd felt so alive, and that I wouldn't have given it up for anything. The broken bones, the concussion, it was all bloody worth it for the feeling I got from being one of the only good things in a city full of filth. And I knew you felt the same way.
We returned eight years later, no longer as the fruits-in-tights, but as true heroes. We'd spent every day we could in the gym, or in the boxing ring. We'd learned the basics of so many different martial arts I couldn't remember half the names. We no longer wore the stupid outfits, we kitted ourselves out in real gear, with real weapons. You had that baseball bat you'd had signed at Yankee stadium, I had those two telescopic police batons. We were the real fucking deal, and my God did we let the criminal world know it. Newspaper headlines called for us to have a holiday in our name, children dressed up as us for Halloween, fuck, there was even talk of a movie at one point, but it didn't matter to us, all we cared about was revenge for what had happened eight years prior.
We found the guy responsible for our ambush. Mister Michael Harris, scum of the Earth. He had more pies than his fingers could be in. Prostitution, drug trafficking, smuggling, contract killings, he was the guy that was going to make our careers set in stone. I remember how shocked we both were when we found out he had a normal family life, a quiet, clean house in the suburbs, a loving wife, two loving kids, they even had a tyre swing in the front fucking garden.
That wasn't going to stop us though. This man was nothing but dirt.
We followed him home, broke into his house, tied him up and beat him to a state of near consciousness. Then we made him watch as we beat his wife.
And it was here that we realized, he had made us just as bad as he was. We dropped our weapons and ran, leaving Mister Harris and his perfect wife to their perfect life with their freshly made imperfect scars.
We ran, and we never stopped running, Tyler.
And one day, who knows, we might find our way back home.