Invincible

Trigger Warning: This story contains references to mental health struggles and emotional vulnerability.

The hallway was in flames. The heat of them had sucked all the oxygen from the air, and now the flames were eating up the walls, roaring, blackening the pictures in their glass frames. A crash somewhere. An explosion. Glass and wood fragments raining down.

And a little girl screaming.

He crouched at the mouth of the hallway and waved a hand before his face, trying to clear the clouds of black smoke that choked the air from his lungs. The heat was all around him, a living thing, and already he could feel the flesh on his body—those small parts the costume left exposed, his hands and the back of his neck—beginning to bake. He coughed. Smoke got into his mouth beneath the mask and made him cough harder. But he set his teeth and moved on, grim and resolute and as invincible as he'd made himself out to be, as the world had made him out to be.

It was like moving down the throat of hell, he thought. And with the devil waiting for him at the end. The costume was burning into his skin. His hair sizzled as a few loose strands caught on fire, singeing the scalp beneath. He screamed.

Somewhere in the inferno ahead of him, the little girl screamed too.

Dying, he thought through his agony. Suffocating.

I must get to her.

The adrenaline needles were in easy reach by his utility belt. He pulled out two, plunged them into the burning flesh of his neck. His pulse quickened, doubled. Immediately his skin began to heal itself.

He stood and sprinted down the hallway.

Senses boosted into overdrive. Calling out for the child. Smashing into burning rooms and flinging rubble away as he moved. He impaled his hand on a nail jutting from a smashed wardrobe. Snagged his shoulder on a piece of burning wood that jutted from a bathroom doorway and cut deep into his flesh. He pulled away hissing and snarling. His wounds stitched themselves closed.

He found the little girl at the end of the house, in the last room down the hallway. Lying on her back in the bathroom and passed out from fatigue and smoke inhalation. A wet teddy in her hand. Cuts on her face where the bathroom mirror had shattered in the heat, expelling shards of glass like glittering razors.

The tap was running. He leaped to the bath and soaked the entire drape of his cloak in the warming water. He wrapped the child up in the wet fabric, teddy bear and all, and hoisted her up in his arms like a cocoon.

"Stay with me, darling," he whispered. "I can't fail now, so you've got to make it out alive."

Blood a pounding, rushing torrent in his ears. His hair was on fire. His scalp burning. But his body was healing itself already, repairing even as it broke down, and he shouldered through the pain and sprinted back for the hallway.

Back up the throat of hell.

**

Outside.

The ambulance sirens screaming through the air and a collective gasp like the crash of a wave as he kicked down the front door and swaggered up the drive. Firemen around the house and police officers checking the swell of the crowd. Smoke in the sky, rising. And the house groaning behind him as the fire ravaged its wooden bones.

He nodded to a group of firemen as he passed and they acknowledged him with awe plain on their faces, behind the transparent gas masks they wore. Beyond them, in the streets, and from the balconies of nearby houses, adoring crowds of people stood pointing and cheering his name. Waving. Shouting his praises like an anthem to high heavens.

Invincible.

That's what they needed him to be. And that's what he had to be. Over and over again.

He laid the child in the grass. Unwrapped her gently, like something precious being born into the world. She was grimy with ash and her face riddled with cuts, but she was still breathing, and he gave out a little breath of satisfaction at that. Good. He'd succeeded again.

The mother saw him first. She screamed in relief, jumped out of the ambulance, and ran to him crying. The rest of the little girl's family followed her lead. He turned as they rushed forward, casting off their blankets, tears streaking their ash-covered faces.

They dropped to their knees before him, all of them in unison—father, mother, and older daughter—sobbing their thanks and reaching for his damp cloak in gratitude.

"Peace," he said, feeling strong and whole with his wounds healed completely and the adrenaline still a raging current like a storm in his blood. "Worry no more, for I am here."

**

The firemen battled the inferno on all sides. But his work was done now, and he turned away from the still kneeling family as the paramedics lifted the little girl into another nearby ambulance.

In the street the crowd chanted as he moved slowly and with purpose through them, like a man on a mission:

"Invincible! Invincible!"

Smiling and waving, reaching out to grasp proffered hands, acknowledging the ones that threw themselves prostrate at his feet.

Receiving their adoration like a god.

"Invincible! Invincible!"

The newscasters were there, of course. All waiting on him and clamoring for his attention. Broadcasting the news of his latest accomplishment to the world. He smiled at one, a young woman in a blue business suit and a microphone, and she burst instantly into tears. He reached out a hand to her. She abandoned her news coverage at once and joined the growing crowd of admirers while the camera swung over to follow him around as he moved. The cameraman, too, was crying. Caught up in the grip of a divine ecstasy that hung thick in the afternoon air like glittering smoke.

"Invincible! Invincible!"

**

Later, he watched himself on the news. Sitting on a couch of bearskin and fine leather. Sipping wine from a slender golden goblet that had been hand-carved by the finest artisans in Europe. His mansion sat at the highest point of the city, massive, four-storied, overlooking the bay and the inland coast. Extravagant, he thought. And why not; he was Invincible, after all. Hero of heroes and mightiest of men.

There was the trick, the sham. People wanted something to believe in; they made gods out of nothing and then ascribed them power. Man was a creature of habit, he knew, and that was how things had always been. He'd simply taken advantage where he could, built the persona brick by brick—even now they still believed he couldn't be hurt, like Superman. What nonsense.

But he was Invincible, and the secrets were his alone to carry.

**

The check came in by evening, after a long and pleasant phone call from the governor. The man was a believer too, and he'd talked at length on building a statue in the town common.

"A large golden Invincible to watch over us all," the governor had said. "What do you think?"

He'd pretended to deliberate on the matter a while, pretended to struggle with the idea. And then he'd warmed up to it at last, and applauded the governor for his fervent and devoted spirit, like a prophet blessing his disciple.

When the call finally ended he'd laughed at the man's stupidity, and laughed even more when the check came in. Public funds going straight into his pocket while the taxpayers suffered. But he didn't think too much on that matter.

He was a superhero, after all.

**

Night.

He jerked awake from uneasy dreams, staring wide-eyed into the darkness of his room, and bathed in sweat despite the cool air. Dread. A hand of fear on his spine. The bedclothes damp where he'd pissed himself in the terror of his dream.

"Mummy?" He licked his lips, looked around. "Daddy?"

A light rain was falling outside. The windows were open, and the night wind stirred the massive pale curtains on their golden rods.

"Mummy?" he whispered again.

But no one came, and he sat shivering in bed with all of his earlier might forgotten. If only they could see you now, a voice in his head whispered. Their superhero, scared of a little dream. And you pissed yourself again, little boy wonder!

"No." A sickness in his stomach. His spirit revolting. 'A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways.'

His mother talking. Her voice like a knife through his memory.

'You can't keep on doing this, son. You're making yourself into some sort of God. And you know what the Bible says...'

He shivered again, shook his head to drown out the phantom voice. His mother now of blessed memory. His father before her, killed by a sickness that slowly wasted his body while he agonized day and night in the hospital. And him kneeling by their graves every week, well wrapped in a disguise so no one could see his pain, his humanity.

The cracks that ran down his facade like fissures in concrete.

He took a deep breath and let it out. He had no fear. He was Invincible. Another deep breath to convince himself, and then he pushed the bed cover aside and rose shakily to his feet in the darkness. He took off his damp pajama bottoms and waddled half-naked to the nearest of the large bedside windows.

If they could look at you now, your precious followers, the voice in his head spoke up again. What would they see?

"A man," he said in the darkness. "A mighty man, a super man; a hero. Invincible, that is who I am."

And what would you be, without your needles? Without your costume and your special drugs and all your lies?

He turned away from the window, from the soft rain, and from the billowing curtains. He moved instead to the ornate bedside table, where the maids had left a bottle of fine wine and a goblet on a golden tray. He uncapped the wine and poured it in the darkness with shaky hands. Some of it splashed down his hands and over the gilded table. He ignored it and poured till the goblet was full and overflowing.

He went back to the window with the bottle in one hand and the goblet in the other. Looking out at his city, the lights of it shimmering like neon jewels through the rain. Feeling the wind cooling the sweat on his face.

He drained first the goblet, then the bottle. He let them fall from his hands, out the window and into the night. His stomach was burning. Deep and harsh. A familiar pain from which his adrenaline needles couldn't heal him from. For when you had an ache in your soul could human medicines cure you then? Could all the love and adoration in the world save you from the brink?

No, he thought. Not even if you were Invincible.

So who are you, then? Who are you under the mask, when the world isn't watching?

He thought hard on it. Shook his head once more against that voice in his mind, that persistent, maddening voice.

"I am...Invincible," he said. And then he staggered and fell, limp, onto the rug.