Photos of a Hero

Jennifer Whitlock, also known as her secret alter ego Synapse, hustled through her bedroom, picking up her clothes and shoveling out the trash from under her bed.

She grappled an armful of red Chunky Bar wrappers and stuffed them into the garbage can, her face burning red at the idea of her fiancé Ted or anyone else seeing the mess. Chunky Bar had sponsored Synapse months ago, sending her boxes of Chunky Bars and a fat check for wearing a Chunky Bar logo on her cape for a week.

She’d been glad to do it—she loved Chunky Bars, as well as being able to pay her rent. New York apartments weren’t cheap. The only reason she was able to help clean up the streets as often as she could was because of sponsors like them.

Ten years ago, her integrity probably would have objected to wearing a logo on her cape. It was one thing to star in a commercial or two, but wearing the logo seemed to taint her hero identity itself.

Times had changed. Money was tight.

These days, it wasn’t often that her pink and black cape was blank. It usually had a collection of logos, arranged like badges on a scout’s sash.

And she really had to learn to put things in a trash can instead of kicking them under her bed! Her mom would give her hell if she ever saw this.

She tugged out a box to see what it was, opened it up, and grinned.

Ah, her scrapbooking stuff. Polaroid photos, lace, and rhinestones she had meant to stick in one of the albums gathering dust on her stuffed bookshelves one of these days. Maybe when her fiancé Ted came over in a few hours, she could sucker him into helping her finally put it together.

She frowned as she flipped through the photos, then glanced at her hanging memory board. Nah, too full. It was filled with pictures, awards, and memorabilia from her childhood and collectible cartoon character pins—particularly mermaids. She’d always had a thing with mermaids.

She picked up all of the photos and newspaper clippings, organized them neatly, then got distracted looking through them, the crisp, soft newspaper and too-smooth polaroids making a variety of textures for her fingertips to brush over. She spotted a newspaper clipping of her younger days as Synapse, a front-page article with a photo, her brown hair tied back in a ponytail, complementing the pink of her form-fitting outfit, her cape, and her lipstick.

Those were the days—she hardly had the patience for makeup in costume anymore, unless she was doing a press conference.

In the photo, she was shaking the mayor’s hand, her eyes bright and her smile the biggest it had been since. She’d just saved the Brooklyn Bridge and the people on it from being destroyed by a squid monster.

She missed squid monsters. People were so much worse.

But, she had to do what she had to do, because she was a hero. It was just her job.

She shuffled through the pictures, inhaling the old newspaper smell indulgently. She spotted another newspaper clipping of her punching a freeze-ray-weilding gangster in the nose.

She still wasn’t sure how Ted got that shot—that was back in the day before she started recognizing that cute, snoopy little photographer and started dragging him everywhere. She realized about a year into superhero work that she couldn’t just punch and tie up people and let the police take them in. She needed evidence to keep them in jail, which was where snoopy photographers came in handy.

She hadn’t known it then, but that gangster was a member of the Daggers, an expansive group whose factions stretched across the East coast. They were involved in drug trade and human trafficking. They had friends in the police, high governments of office, and CEOs with more money than they had time to spend.

Images burned into her mind forever of exploring the darkest parts of the city, the underground abandoned subway tracks and sewers, the crumbling buildings in the depths of the under-city.

She remembered finding captured men, women, and children covered in shadows and chains.

Taking them home.

Taking their captors down.

Burning that building to the ground.

Her psychic powers involved being able to empathize with people’s emotions intensely and manipulate the emotions of others. It took concentration, training, and energy, but she was able to weaken others just by depressing or amping up their emotions. Depression made for lousy fighters. Heightened anxiety and fear meant they were more likely to surrender. Crippling guilt could make the worst villains help her.

She could also make others feel the emotions of other people. It was helpful in conflict resolution—from getting people she was on teams with to empathize and work together to finish a mission, to getting an armed man holding people hostage to feel bad for his victims and give in to negotiations.

When she saw the women in cages, their emotions radiated into her skull—deep, horrifying trauma, darkness, terror, pain—and she redirected every ounce of that pain, drilling it into the hearts of the men that busted into the room, splintering the wooden door open, trying to keep their property from being stolen. They barely had time to recognize her pink outfit before they collapsed.

Jennifer shook her head. Woof, such dark memories. Her fingers quivered as she put the photos down.

It didn’t matter anymore. She had taken the Daggers down. It had taken years of following dead-end leads, but she had gotten every dirty cop and Mr. Moneybags on their side arrested. The gang was no more, the streets cleaned up.

She had to do what she had to do, because she was a hero. That was all over now.

She heard a knock at the door.

Ted was early. She got to her feet and went to the front room, a bounce in her step. Morning light from her large windows splintered around the room accentuated in honey yellow and royal blue, and illuminated the whole place. She opened the door and beamed.

“Babe! You’re early. You don’t have to knock anymore, you know. I gave you a key.”

“Right.” Ted nodded, his hands stuffed into his pockets and his camera, as always, draped around his neck. She frowned and gestured for him to come in.

“Something wrong?”

His eyes darted across the floor and to the couch, his freckled cheeks puffing as he walked briskly towards it and grabbed the remote.

“Ted?”

“Jennifer…”

She started. He normally called her Jenny. Or Jen. Or babe. Or beautiful. He never used her actual government name.

“Something kind of...unsettling is trending online right now.” His eyes remained on the floor. He hadn’t even looked at her.

“What?”

He flicked on the television, went over to the news channel that he always watched. She recognized the blond anchorwoman who normally grinned with big, white teeth, but wasn’t grinning now.

“Viral footage leaked on social media of superhero Synapse’s attack on Jeffery Grey, a local restaurant owner who died in the hospital last month after their encounter.”

Her heart stopped at the name.

A video began playing on the screen. It was vertical and cropped at the sides, as if someone had recorded the video on their phone. Through a window, she saw herself in her suit, her eyes glowing red and her teeth gritted as she stomped towards her victim behind a booth in some tiny family-owned restaurant. The man was helpless, shaking with fear, crippled by her power.

"TELL ME.” She grabbed his polo shirt by the collar and yanked him close to her face. The tiny, potbellied, balding man sobbed and twitched, trying to shrink away.

“Let me go. Please. I don’t know anything about the Daggers.”

“I KNOW you do. One of their members is your brother. Give me his location.”

She could hear panting from the other side of the phone. A woman’s voice.

“What is she doing? That couldn’t be Synapse.”

Synapse grit her teeth, growling something inaudible to Jeffery, the darkness and shadows of the small restaurant clinging to her. Her red eyes pierced through the man, then darted to look straight into Jennifer’s soul. She’d caught the person holding the phone.

The woman clad in pink shoved the man against the wall and stalked toward the window, the light in her eyes flaring across the lens. The woman holding the phone began to scream hysterically and the perspective shifted and blurred. The video suddenly showed tennis shoes scraping against the blurring ground as she took off down the street.

The video cut and minimized into the corner of the screen, showing the blond unsmiling news reporter again. “The person who filmed the video and sent it to us has asked to remain anonymous, saying they also sustained injuries from the attack. Synapse is known for her iron fist when it comes to taking down the Daggers, but has she gone too far this time? More at 8.”

The television flickered off.

“Jennifer,” Ted’s voice shook. “What the hell was that?”

She looked at him. Tears were streaming down his face, his fists clenched and white around his camera, like he was ready to take a photo if she made a move. “I knew you were trending, and it wasn’t good. I knew there was a video. But I didn’t...I didn’t think…”

“I know how it looks,” She shook her head. “But he wasn’t some innocent old man, he was withholding information on the Daggers. He knew about the locations of more captives and he wasn’t telling me.”

He stared at her for a long moment, taking her in like he had never quite looked at her before.

“I was hoping you would say it wasn’t you,” Ted said, his voice shaky. “I thought you would say that it’s…like, it’s really good CGI or…or you were brainwashed by some super villain. I wanted you to say that. Please tell me that’s what it actually is.”

“It’s not,” she admitted, her throat constricting like she was swallowing a rock. She wished she had lied. “It’s me. But I was just doing what I had to do.”

“You’re not the FBI, Synapse!” Ted stood up. “You can’t interrogate people who haven’t done anything into tears! He was protecting himself and his family—he might know information that would get him killed. And look, he did get killed! But it wasn’t because of the Daggers. It was because of you.”

“That video makes it seem worse than it was!”

“He stumbled into the hospital with broken bones and busted organs. He was hospitalized for weeks.” Ted shook his head. “The video didn’t show the worst of it. He died nearly a month ago, and you never even mentioned any of this to me.”

Jen stared at the floor, her fists shaking. She remembered grabbing that man, she remembered pouring her rage into him and shaping his emotions into pure, dark, sharp fear.

She remembered the women she found, the darkness of the room they were trapped in, then harnessing that darkness and pouring it into every punch her fist could stand. She remembered bandaging her knuckles that night, satisfied with the information he’d given her. Ready to take down the last of the Daggers so that they would never breathe again.

She hadn’t wanted to kill him. She just wanted the information. It was a sacrifice for the greater good.

She had to do what she had to do, because she was a hero.

She was a hero.

“It was necessary,” she said, the coolness of her tone settling in the base of her neck. “I needed the information he had.”

“How can you say that?” His voice constricted, like he was choking.. “He died. His family needed him. He was a person, and you just took his life away like it was nothing.”

“I didn’t want to!” She shouted. “He wasn’t telling me what I needed to know, so I had to push him. It wasn’t my fault!”

“And the person with the phone?”

She glared at the floor. “She was in the way. I didn’t even hurt her that much. It was a warning that obviously didn’t work well enough.”

She didn’t have to read him to know what he was feeling—Ted was an open book, his body tense like a coil and flinching away from her, tears welling up in his wide, green eyes.

He was looking at her the same way the people on the Brooklyn bridge gaped at the monster attacking them. Like she was one of the men trapping women in their basement. Like she was a villain.

“You didn’t see those people, Ted. You didn’t see the children. And everyone was protecting them—they were hardly a gang anymore. They were a secret society, with people in every police precinct and every senate,” her voice was ragged. “And I took them down. Me. I had no choice.”

“You’re a superhero, Synapse!” He shouted. “You have power over everyone else, and you are supposed to use it responsibly! You aren’t supposed to be like them, you’re supposed to be good!”

“Oh, fuck you,” she growled. “What the hell is even good anymore? What does that word even mean? You don’t know what I’ve been through! You don’t know what I’ve seen. Jeffery Grey knew about all of this—he deserved everything I gave him.”

“You don’t know that! You didn’t know that for sure, back then—you can’t do this!” Ted shrank away from her, as if he was afraid. “And I’m a journalist. I’ve seen a lot of what you’ve seen.”

She was a hero. A hero. He needed to see that, even when no one else did.

Ted stood up, wiping his face and walking away from her.

“Ted! Come on. Please—”

“No—I—”

She grabbed his wrist. “Ted, please. Please, let’s just talk this out. I—I didn’t want him to die. I just wanted information. I was desperate. It was a mistake.”

The weight of a city was on her shoulders. The weight of countless men, women, and children who had been taken from their families.

“A mistake?” He blinked at her. He shook his head. “That wasn’t a mistake. That was a deliberate choice. One you made over and over again, everytime you laid hands on him. You’re just like every dirty cop you’ve ever hunted down.”

Tears blurred her vision. She squeezed his wrist, rage and desperation sliding together. “How could you say that? After everything we’ve been through!”

“Get off of me! I’m—I’m going to tell everyone who you are if you don’t!”

Her secret identity.

He was going to tell the police her secret identity—her real name—and get her arrested.

There was only one thing she could do left.

Before she could stop herself, she reached out with her mind, feeling his red aura of fear and anger and betrayal. Purple and blue sorrow and guilt shifted through the mix, creating a unique canvas of emotions.

One she didn’t like anymore.

She tucked and primped and primed each emotion, adjusting the shades of the colors to her liking. His anger at her would become anger for her. His sympathy for the man would become sympathy for her. His love for her would overwhelm it all, the canvas becoming monochromatic shades of pink.

“I don’t deserve this,” she whispered. “Everything I’ve ever done was to help the city. Clean up the streets.”

His eyes glowed red for a moment, and he shook his head, blinking it away like he had woken from a dream. “You’re right. I don’t know why I was so angry at you. All you’ve ever done was serve the city.” He reached out and took her hand. “I love you, Synapse. You’re my hero.”

“I love you, too, Ted.” She smiled and sat beside him on the couch, kissing his cheek.

All was right.

She just needed to convince the rest of the world, too.