All Capes are Bastards

I came into this world kicking and screaming, covered in red, and I’m pretty sure I’ll exit the same way.

The alley reeked of rain-soaked trash and stale sweat. The mack daddy's joints rattled, his muddied feet sliding to a stop against a dead-end brick wall. He wasn’t out of breath yet, but I could hear his heart hammering through the quiet. They always run. Maybe he should have hesitated to lay hands on women working the corners and taking a major cut.  

I owed a favor to a few women and a couple of nonbinary folks who worked the night. One evening, they found me where a switchblade left me—folded on the corner like yesterday’s paper. They were used to the city’s rough edges, the way it chewed people up and spat them out, but even they stopped and stared. Good Samaritans came in all forms.

They remembered me when I handed out clean needles under a busted streetlight or sent a few bad-tempered clients of theirs to get an x-ray instead of letting them go home with a busted lip. “It rains on the just and the unjust,” the street preacher used to say, and he wasn’t wrong. Trouble’s got no favorites. Not here.

His revolver slithered free from his backstrap, waiting. A magician’s trick. A death sentence for me. Maybe this will be the bullet that makes the voices stop.

The doctors say my brain only sees in black and white when it comes to right and wrong.But when you pull a gun on me, I start to see red.

An ignition. A haze of orange and yellow spat from the barrel. Thunder without rain. The gunshot’s smoke curled through the alley, but the fog from Oakland Bay swallowed it whole.A shape in the corner of your eye after 13 hours of no sleep. The kind of shadow your brain dismisses until it’s too late.

The kind of shadow that leaves clawprints in your sleep.

Out of Dantes ninth circle the devil wanted his dues.

The wings sprawled from the shadows. Black as an oil spill, stretched like the membranous skin of a starving bat. They blotted out the streetlights, turned the world into a silent film. Then the cord, snapping tight like a noose. The perp didn’t have time to mutter those sunday school sparknotes before he was ripped from the ground, dragged towards the nightsky by the uncanny.

I fired my own line, the hook catching above a fire escape. My body lurched, boots skimming rooftops slick with the city’s filth.

The wraith perched on the beams. Waiting. Watching.

When the fists came, they didn’t come clean. They crashed hard. He wasn’t throwing haymakers for the cheap seats; every blow was a symphony of pain. Those next-generation gauntlets created heavy hands. It was composed by someone with all the time and money to perfect his craft.

I wasn’t fighting a kid pushing some white crystals from Oaklands housing projects. That wouldn’t even pop on my rader, I’d go after his landlord first.

This city didn’t belong to capes like me. It belonged to haunts like him.

The black belt counts for very little once you started to see starts and by the second round bell hit youve been demoted to blue belt.

He wasn’t scrappy like me. Scrappy’s for people who can’t afford to lose. This guy? He could afford everything. Time. Training. The best teachers money could buy. He swept over me like a wraith, calculated and cold, letting his fists do the talking because words were beneath him. I was a dog in a street fight; he was a scalpel in a tuxedo.

My lungs burned, my vision swam, and the taste of blood filled my mouth like cheap whiskey. The weight of him pressed down, not just on my chest, but on everything I thought I was.

That’s when it hit me—the real divide between us wasn’t in strength or skill. It was in the world we lived in. He fought because he wanted to. 

As the darkness swallowed me, I realized one thing: guys like him don’t lose. Not unless someone makes them. Even a pebble moved Goliath

 And if I didn’t get back up, no one else would. He thought this was a hunt. But what he didn’t know was that I’d been the mouse before—and I’d survived. Sometimes the mouse bites back.The rain washed the foamy red liquid that ran from my nose back into the gutters, but the bruises stayed.

Deep ones. Ones that didn’t just hurt—they humiliated. And that’s when I realized this wasn’t some haunt in a mask looking to bust corner-store perp. He wasn’t throwing Judo moves on poor kids smashing an ATM. A guy wouldn’t have even bothered; those crimes were behind him. But it was only a matter of time until they caught his ire.

This was a message.

callgirls spun words about an apex predator, a bad dream made of shadows. They whispered it like it was a ghost story, like saying it out loud might conjure him out of the rain.

You don’t leave a body on a corner like that unless you want people to see it, to feel it. You don’t beat someone to a pulp and then walk away unless you’ve got no fear of consequences.

He wasn’t cleaning up the streets. He was claiming them.

The women weren’t afraid of much. Not knives, not the patrolmen asking for free samples, not the monsters who came with money in one hand and fists in the other. But they were afraid of a haunted house.

 The worst part was knowing he wasn’t finished.

Somewhere out there, he was still watching, like a raptor on a perch. waiting for me to make the next move. And when I did, I wouldn’t be facing just a man. I’d be walking into the maw of something older, something colder, something that didn’t care if the rain fell on the just or the unjust—so long as it washed them all away. 

The specter crawled out of a place that mimicked the devil’s shadow, a rage hotter than the fires of the ninth circle fueling him. You could see it in the way he moved, the way his silhouette clung to the night like it was part of him.

It wasn’t just the gear, though that was unsettling enough. His glider cape unfurled like blackened wings, jagged and sinewy, fluttering in a way that felt alive.

It caught the wind too perfectly, hovered too still, like it was watching you as much as he was.

The lenses in his cowl weren’t just red—they glowed with a searing gaze, two burning pinpricks cutting through the gloom-like eyes that didn’t belong to anything born of flesh. They didn’t just reflect the world; they seemed to pierce it, strip it down, peel it back.

When those lenses fixed on you, you felt bare, exposed, like the sum of all your sins had been laid out for judgment.

The way he walked towards me it was, fluid but wrong, his joints bending just a little too far, his frame too quiet for someone so heavy with armor.

The sound of his steps didn’t match the rhythm of his body. Sometimes, you’d swear he was closer than he should’ve been, or farther, like the space around him didn’t obey the rules of the world.

And the voice—when he spoke, it wasn’t a growl or a bark. It was cold, clipped, and utterly devoid of mercy. It wasn’t a man talking. It was a verdict being read.

Streets whispered he made a deal. Not with the serpent in the garden, but with something deeper, something older, something the devil himself wouldn’t look in the eye. Whatever it was, it didn’t just take his soul. It twisted him, remade him into something that didn’t belong in the realm of the living.

The cops weren’t going to book him. He saved them the trouble of booking addicts, of filing reports on broken bodies. Every strike broken, every pusher silenced, was one less headache for them. He wasn’t their problem. He was their solution.

And the Silicon Valley landlords, the ones who’d swooped in like vultures to buy up everything worth less than a Tesla, loved him even more.

To them, he wasn’t a vigilante—he was an eraser. Clearing the streets of anything that might make a renter think twice about that skyline view.

But the fear... the fear was different.

It wasn’t the fear of a masked man handing out beatings. It was the fear of something older, something primal. The way they talked about him wasn’t the way you talked about a person. It was the way you talked about a storm. Unstoppable. Indifferent.

One woman, a street medic with a busted hand, said it best:

“He doesn’t fight for justice. He fights for the city. For his city. And we’re the rot he’s cutting out.”

I Knew the withdrawal of trying to live outside the suit and bleeding under a mask, it drowns out the little voices of polite society. It strips you down and rebuilds you into someone singular, and elemental. The world outside, all its static and weight, disappears.

The suit and the streets don’t ask you to remember birthdays and sports scores. The five senses collide at once when a carbon steel hammer of a glock is pointed at your face. The powder and sweat ignite inside your nose. The caritidge hits like a baseball bat against yout protection suit.

You won’t hear anything after the first brass shell leaves the ejection port. What’s left is just you, your hands, and the work. The people you hunt aren’t your enemies—they’re the only ones who understand you. Everyone else is background noise, a blurry smear of obligations and distractions.

He couldn’t see what I imagined. He was too busy staring through a veil of blue-blooded privilege—high-rise windows, high-priced cars, high walls. The real view—the one buried beneath the shiny coat of this place—was waiting to be bulldozed. Redlined housing, and the forgotten tracks, were going to be buried under iron gates and glass facades. But the street never forgets. It just gets pushed into the cracks.

And there he was, like the city’s ghost. A gargoyle, one of those shadow people that only show up when the world gets hazy. The kind you see when you haven’t slept in days, or swallowed too many purple capsules from the Tenderloin. Always just out of focus, on the edge of your vision, but you know that thousand-yard stare is drilling holes into you.

I knew him—he wasn’t just some ragged soul drifting through the night. If I was right, if my hunch was worth a damn, it wasn’t just a junkie’s hollowed-out eyes staring at me. It was a rich kid in crisis, drowning in all the things money could buy but not the one thing it couldn’t—meaning.

The parties on the piers, the nights tangled in the sheets with influencers who don't even know what they’re selling... None of that would quiet the noise inside. Not for him, and not for anyone who thought the bottomless pit could be filled with excess. That’s the thing about the elite—they don't belong in the word.

Elite is for people who don’t wake up in the middle of the night with a hunger they can't shake, no matter how much gold they shovel into the hole. They’re just chasing ghosts in the rearview.

“Hey man, you got it all twisted! I pay ‘em a fair day's work!” His voice, low and steady, came from behind me.

The pimp, never rattled. Never bothered. He didn’t have W-2s for his workers. Hell, he didn’t even need 'em. His mind was a steel vault—too tight for paperwork, too cold for sentiment. In another life, he might’ve been an econ professor at Cal State, explaining supply and demand to kids who would never understand. But right now, that didn’t matter. He was in this world, and in this world, you made your own rules.

His eyes shifted, calculating. And then he did the math: Could he say the Lord’s Prayer before he hit the surface?. That was the only kind of countdown that mattered in this city. Maybe he was already meeting the devil.

How many times would I be asking for forgiveness If I didn't intervene? I mean, taking a beating for sex workers was one thing but their bosses, I’m sure it was easier to fit a camel in the eye of a needle.

“You feed off the vices of lesser people,” the marauder said, his voice a low, venomous hum from behind the mask. “It’s a gangrene that spreads.”

The words dripped out slowly, like poison slipping down the edge of a blade, deliberate and cold. He didn’t need to raise his voice; the contempt was thick enough to cut through the air, to twist the silence tighter than the chokehold of this city. He was a shadow, wrapped in a slick coat, eyes hidden behind the blackened steel of his mask. The kind of face you don't want to see when the world’s gone sour.

The pimp didn’t flinch. Didn’t even twitch. The man’s words weren’t new. He’d heard it before, from men in suits and from men who’d never taken a step out of the gutter. He was used to being called the disease, the rot that clung to the bones of the city, but he wasn’t here for redemption.

He was here for power. And the city? The city wasn’t a place to be saved; it was for consumers.

The marauder continued, his words sharp like nails on chalk. “It’s why we need bigger walls. And hands to build 'em. It's why we need fists to keep it in check.”

There was a certain rhythm to the thing he was saying, like an old mantra. A justification for all the iron gates and reinforced glass that were sprouting up like weeds in the wreckage of what used to be neighborhoods.

The pimp leaned back, slow as a predator. He was no stranger to walls. No stranger to gates. Hell, he might have built a few himself, in a different life. The world had its balance, and it was always shifting—some built walls, others tore them down. But the city had a way of reminding you that no matter how high you built, the real battle wasn’t against the walls. It was about who owned the key.

“Ain’t no fist gonna change anything,” the pimp said, his words casual, but heavy, like the weight of a man who’d lived through too many wars to care for a new one.

“You can put up all the walls you want, but you’ll just be building more prisons for your own kind.” His smile cracked, a flash of teeth in the darkness. “The real power? It’s in the hands that tear 'em down. And I got mine busy.”

The marauder didn’t respond immediately. Instead, his masked face seemed to linger on the words, turning them over like a stone. In this city, everyone was trying to own something. Power, safety, control. But it was always a game of inches, a tightrope walk between keeping the walls up and keeping them from crushing you under their weight.

There was a crackling silence between them, the kind that said everything without a word spoken. The kind you get in this city when you know the only thing that matters is who’s standing at the end of the line, with blood on their hands and nothing left to lose. I launched myself at the phantom. Before he could decide to drop the man, I moved.

Capes make corpses if you don’t time it right. My arms slid across his windpipe like a serpent slipping low in the garden of Eden—smooth, inevitable. A compliment from the Japanese Judo team.

We don’t get to choose the background of the people we die for. It rains on the just and the unjust.

The phantom rasped against my grip, but his voice stayed steady. "How many broken homes did this man create?" His breath was ragged, hot against my face. "How many broken noses? Cracked lips?"

His hands found leverage, palms digging under my arms, fighting against the blackness closing in around his eyes. It didn’t matter. We were both going down.

All those years of training, all the gear in the world, and we were still gonna die like this—another grim headline in Gotham’s long obituary. I could already see the future: the grainy black-and-white security footage, the breathless news anchors, the documentaries dissecting his twisted mind, inspiring an army of disenfranchised young men to take up his crusade.

But not tonight.

The city screamed past us in a blur of neon and rain—then impact. But not the pavement.

Something coarse, something frayed, something that groaned beneath our weight but held.

For a long second, I thought we were ghosts. But the pain in my ribs was real. The phantom wheezed, coughing against rusted fibers. I twisted, my fingers sinking into old mesh, brittle and rotting from years of neglect. A suicide net—long abandoned, sagging between the buildings like a forgotten promise.

Above, the city blinked, indifferent. Below, the streets swallowed the chaos whole.

No scream. No impact.

Just the wind, the distant howl of sirens, and the endless hum of the city.

I stared down, eyes searching the swirling mist, but it gave nothing back. No shape. No sound.

Maybe he was down there, broken and bleeding. Maybe the streets had caught him, chewed him up, and left nothing behind.

Or maybe he was still falling.

I almost left into this world kicking and screaming, covered in red.

And for all I knew, so did he.