Hospital

  I wanted to get out. I wanted to scream too. But I couldn’t. My mouth couldn’t open so, of course, no voice or sound could come out. I cried though, that was one of the things I was able to do. My tears tasted funny, salty but weird. I got tired of crying after a while and then I just feel asleep. When I woke up, some doctor was poking at the machine that was connected to my body. He didn’t even look at me, as if I wasn’t there. He just wrote some things on a note pad and then left, leaving me trying to ask what had happened.

Because, no matter how much I tried, there was no way I could remember what had happened. I was certain I had been sick for a couple of days at home, some kind of flu or maybe a virus inside the stomach. It was awful but not strange, nothing out of the ordinary. And suddenly, one day, I woke up in that hospital feeling as if I had been beating up by someone. From the first moment, I wasn’t able to speak and whatever the put in my veins was making me doubt every single thing that I thought when I was awake.

 My body always felt awful. I was hurting too much every day and it felt there was something strange. One would think I would feel better as the days went by but I didn’t. I was feeling just as bad on day one as on the other ones. I don’t even know how long I was there. One night though, I heard something odd. Someone was crying very loudly and then she began to scream. She screamed for a long while until the voice stopped. Somehow, hearing her had made me feel a bit better, as if I could finally step out of that bed.

 But I didn’t do that. I glanced at the machine that was connected to me and realized it was probably telling the people in that place how I was feeling and maybe even what I was doing. If I disconnected it, maybe they would notice it in a few minutes and I would be caught before I could imagine a plan to get out of that place. I had to be smarter than them; I had to really think of a good plan to run away, to escape what was most likely some kind of prison or mental hospital. An awful place in any case.

 They kept injecting me with the same drugs but, luckily, I realized they really didn’t work anymore. My sore legs and arms where fighting the poison they were pumping in my veins. I felt better by the hour and they had no idea. I was tempted to smile but I still couldn’t do that. For some strange reason, I wasn’t able to speak yet. I couldn’t make any sounds but I had grown accustomed to that. In my head, there was only the idea of escaping that place and talking had nothing to do with that. I had already come up with a plan and didn’t even care if it could be successful.

  That very night, I stood up for the first time in a long time and I grabbed the machine to avoid getting disconnected from it. I then peaked through the nearest window, which was almost impossible as it was a bit higher than me. I had to stand on the tip of my toes in order to look down at a large yard made of stone. It had been raining. There was no one outside and the place looked as if it wasn’t precisely populated by many people. By the look of the place, it seemed to be far away from any city or town.

I then walked to the down and realized it wasn’t locked. They didn’t have a reason to lock the doors as they kept me, and probably all other patients, too drugged up to even walk around the room. I have to confess that I wasn’t feeling perfect right then, but I had to do something soon because I didn’t know why they were keeping us there. Maybe the final step in their “care” for us was to kill us. So waiting forever was not really the best choice. I just had to do something, no matter the result.

 I opened the door a bit, enough to look outside. It was very dark and even colder than inside the room. I couldn’t hear any sound, not a voice or anything else. I closed the door and faced the biggest problem I had: the chord in the machine was not long enough for me to parade around the hallway outside without the nurses and doctors noticing I wasn’t in my bed anymore. So I had to make a choice. It didn’t took me very long to decide to rip off the thing that was loading drugs into my system.

 The moment I did it, my body felt a little bit weaker but I had to go out soon and run down the hallway, hoping the nurses and doctors were kept away from the rooms outside of their working hours. It seemed I was right, because I didn’t see any of them as I descended to the ground floor. It was only when I got to the yard I had seen from above, that I actually saw a group of them running up the stairs, probably going to my room. I hid in the shadows for a bit and then stepped outside, in order to find an exit.

 It seemed nature wanted me to be successful because a storm begin brewing in a few moments and then rain came down hard. The water and the mist caused by the cold was enough to hide my body from my captors. I stepped out into the garden and tried finding a way out. But there was a tall brick wall all around the compound. So I had to make an effort, I had to make myself feel like shit once again, swallow all the pain in order to finally escape. I jumped many times until I finally got a grip and then my muscles ached as I hoisted my body to the other side of the wall.

 Everything hurt, but I knew I couldn’t just stay there complaining. I ran through some fields of wild flowers and then deeper into a forest. I had no idea where I was; I wasn’t able to recognize anything about my surroundings. But I was certain that no hospital of that kind could be too far away from some town or city. They probably needed a supermarket for groceries and pharmacies to get some of the drugs. At least I hoped that’s the way it all worked, because I had no other thing to do.

 The forest was rough and I had to stay there overnight. It was too dense and there was nothing I could grab to eat, but somehow I felt much better there than in the hospital. I felt all the drugs coming out of my body as I peed and sweated, feeling much better by the next morning. I walked even more that day and was lucky enough to find a small village. I got there walking by the road. I hoped not to look too scary, but there wasn’t a lot I could do related to that. I just needed to do something, to take the final risk.

 The first person that saw me was a little boy and that wasn’t probably the best thing ever. He got scared and called her mother, who came by very fast. I tried to talk again, but I couldn’t. She screamed and said things and I felt very dumb for not realizing that it would be very hard to communicate with others without being able to talk. So I just knelt in front of them and tried to show them how defenseless I was and how much in need of their help I was. I stayed like that for a while, until they left.

 I thought they had been scared and had just run away, but they did come back in a few minutes with a policeman. I was glad to see someone that could actually help me. I knelt again and put my hands together, trying to make him understand that I couldn’t talk. He apparently understood. He asked me to come with him and I nodded. He put me inside his car and we then rode for a while, until we got to the police station. There, some doctor checked on me, which made me feel awful but I knew it was necessary.

 Luckily, I still remembered how to write. My hands were not very ready to do it, but it was clear enough for the cops to understand. They sent patrol cars to the hospital and freed many people that were being submitted to experimental drugs of many kinds. None of them could talk either.

 I eventually realized I wasn’t in my own country.  I couldn’t remember everything from my past but it was clear I was completely out of my element. I had to learn to be unable to speak and it took me a while to get to the memories that would help me getting back home.

Vigilante

   A skin tight suit might have been her best choice for the work she had ahead of her, but it wasn’t the kind of clothing she would use in her daily life. God knows that Clementine Avery would never wear such a scandalous piece of clothing and that’s not even considering the fabric! It was a kind of leather that molded itself to her body, which made her very self conscious but, again, it came in handy for situations that involved a lot of physical activity and the like. It was just what she needed, even if it wasn’t really her.

 Walking around in alleys and rooftops, Clementine eventually grew accustomed to her new skin and also to her newfound sexuality. She would hide her body before, but the suit had granted her an unexpected weapon and that was her own body and what she could do with it. Men would look at her ass and boobs for a bit too long, and she would take that time to tackle them, put them on a headlock and submit them, to ask a few questions or maybe to make them see who was in charge at that moment.

 However, and mostly during the day, she would still be Clemmy for her grandma and grandpa, the people who had helped raised her. Her parents had died in a plane crash years ago, and Clementine had been the only survivor. She was still called a “miracle baby” by some and she hated it. From a very early age, she understood that it was best to go unnoticed, and that’s why her sexuality was not something she explored until she was an adult and realized that she needed to do something to help people.

 When she first donned her uniform, Clementine was investigating the lawyer firm that wanted to take her grandparents house from them. True, they weren’t as liquid with money as they were in the past, but her grandfather had always paid the mortgage. She knew about this because she helped pay every single month, with the various jobs she head during her teenage years and then when she went to college. Her parents had saved for her education and wellbeing but her grandparents refused to use that money to pay anything for them.

 There were always long discussions about that subject with them and would always end up in hugs and kisses and possibly some ice cream, without them really acknowledging how much they actually needed that help. So Clementine worked hard, in part for them but also to have some money for herself and start saving for the unforeseeable future. She had no idea what to do in the future but she was aware that her parent’s money would not last forever. And problems always arose for people like her, so it was a good idea to work. And after that, it was a good idea to do more.

 Of course, the whole suit thing didn’t happen overnight. It was an idea she ultimately had after watching one of those vigilantes save some people from a fire on the news. Some people were not really into them but their grandparents were absolutely thrilled that some people had taken it upon themselves to help others, even if it was when wearing a mask and some other ridiculous attire. All of that gave her the idea that she could sneak in places and talk to people in order to really know what was happening with her grandparent’s house.

 At first, she only used clothes that hid her identity, but after a while it felt a little bit too silly to wear a hoodie and sunglasses. Eventually, people would find out who she was, if they had a brain. So she decided to wear a mask she had personalized herself and then came the first uniform and eventually she got to put on the skintight suit, which wasn’t her idea. Actually, it wasn’t her idea either when one her best friends discovered what she was doing.

 Adele worked with her and they had always been closed, or as close as you can be when you’re working and doing things at all times. Nevertheless, it wasn’t too hard for her to decipher Clementine’s secret identity. Clem was scared of her reaction but her friend just wanted in an all of the “nighttime fun”. She explained that it wasn’t something funny or enjoyable, but her friend was too over the moon to listen to anything she said. So Clementine told her everything about her first, and so far, only mission.

 It was Adele’s idea to change the outfit, to make Clementine more agile when encountering foes and also much more effective when avoiding people. The costume was completely designed by her friend, who had realized what Clem was doing precisely because she saw the same clothes her friend wore one day on the news the following night. She could be a little bit distracted and dense, but Adele understood the position her friend was in and swore to help her in whatever way she could. She felt very excited.

 Clementine had gotten a lot of paperwork that revealed something was wrong but she didn’t understand all of the terminology. Adele tried to help, but neither of them was a lawyer or anything close to it. It was Adele’s father, a retired public official, that checked the papers without them knowing and just asked his daughter about them. He explained that those papers basically gave properties away to that law firm by bypassing several laws with a special close that had not been revealed to the mortgage payers in the first place, as the law firm had bought the contracts illegally. It was surprising for the girls to hear it all in such a simple way.

 Eventually, Clementine got more evidence and she was able to put the law firm in very big legal troubles. They were forced by a court to give up all the contracts they had acquired illegally and an investigation was started to clarify how it all had happened. Her grandparents were beside themselves with happiness, and so were so many others of their neighbors. Of course, none of them ever knew what had really happened behind the scenes or how the evidence had really appeared in the judge’s private office.

 Some people did associate the vigilante they had seen in the news a couple of times with the case of the law firm, but that was it. Clementine felt really stupid for that because her other persona was not supposed to be known at all, but she had felt, at times, the need to help others and that’s why she had gotten to the news. It was kind of fun for her when, at the start, only drawings from the witnesses could be done and she looked like a very sexualized superhero. She thought it was fun and also good they were way off.

 In time, someone actually came up with a recording of her saving some people from getting mugged and there were even some pictures from security cameras of her entering the law firm’s building, and that’s how everything got tied up. After her grandparents’ problem ended, she decided not to wear the mantle ever again, which Adele thought was a mistake. She didn’t understand that it was something dangerous and potentially deadly. Clementine could get killed or someone could get killed because of her.

 For Adele, it was all just fun and interesting. She explained to her friend that she was now someone important in the community, someone that looked after the ones that no one cares about and that’s way she was such a key part of what was going on in the city. But Clementine decided not to pay attention because she knew that not much was required for her to become addicted to what she had done before. She had felt the rush going through her body and just knew that it could be something too attractive.

 Trying to get away form all of it, she went back to her studies and her work but something always bothered her. It was as if she had a fly or a bee inside her skull and it wouldn’t stop annoying her unless she thought about how exhilarating it all felt when she uncovered the truth and she fought injustice.

 When you’re hooked, you just are. So when a young woman was about to get raped near Clementine’s house, she put on her costume and kicked that man’s ass like there was no tomorrow. She saved the girl, who asked who or what she was. Clem then realized she had never decided on a name for her other self.

Only a superhero

   I could see the city, all of its lights moving beneath me. The avenues looked like serpents, wiggling about in all directions. And people were undistinguishable in the darkness of the night. Street lamps illuminated some of the areas but not all of them, so it was pretty obvious that there were patches of greater darkness within the city. In one of those, I had been caught and brought to that place, to the highest point of a tower that overlooked everything, like the mighty lair of some comic book villain.

 But the person that had brought me there was not exactly that. He was actually one of the people you might call “a good guy”. It was me who was being thought of as a villain. According to him, and to the organization he worked for, what I did could be understood as an act of treason against my own country, for which I could be detained and processed, ultimately landing in some awful prison where my fortune would be sealed. I had already gone through it in my mind, again and again.

 However, I hadn’t predicted him to bring me to that place. True, the building held several offices for his government entity, but ordinary criminals would never go there, least of all to be incarcerated there temporarily. It was obvious that something else was going on and I had no idea what that was about. So I had to pretend I was very certain of everything and the best way to do that was avoiding answering questions that could let them know how much I didn’t know. It was some sort of cat and mouse game.

 Him and his partner, a younger woman, tried to interrogate me for what seemed like hours but I was too good for them. They couldn’t get anything from me, nothing more than what they already knew. I couldn’t pretend I hadn’t been the one to hack into many of their offices, but I wasn’t going to tell them anymore than that. After all, I lived in the shadows; I knew how to move among the scum of the Earth. They just thought they knew how, but they had barely seen a glimpse of what the world hides beneath the surface.

 They left me alone after a couple of hours. They held me in a room that overlooked the city. It must have looked like a normal office from the outside but from the inside it was pretty much like any other cell. It had bars and a bunk bed and somewhere to piss if I wanted to. It even had that kind of door that has the little window in order to pass food through. That reminded me I was very hungry, but I didn’t ask for anything because that could be used by them to try to pull things from me. So I decided to take a nap instead, trying to take advantage of the lack of sound around the cell.

 It was the next day when his companion came and brought me something to eat. She was very nice, very cute, obviously with no experience whatsoever in her field. Maybe she had passed the tests and all of the training, but it was obvious she wasn’t exactly the top agent around. As I grabbed the tray with food, she sat on the other side of the bars and told me that some others had been captured. I just ate, pretending I hadn’t heard her. But I did and I wanted to know everything. It was important to know.

 She told me about the raid on the warehouses we operated from and how many of our computers had been seized. Yet, she knew very well no one would get one document from all of those. Of course, we always knew when they were close and our systems would erase themselves in an instant if that were the case. But it was intriguing that she knew so much, for such a rookie agent. I kept on eating; it was toast and scrambled eggs with a small yogurt and a glass of orange juice. Much like a plane meal.

 I drank a bit of juice as she stood up and got closer to the bars, just looking at me. I looked back at her, defiant. I didn’t trust her at all and it was obvious she was posing as this silly little woman, when in reality she could be even more dangerous than the guy that had actually caught up with me. So I finished my meal as soon as I could and then just put the tray on the place in front of the little window. She looked at me for a bit longer and then grabbed the empty tray and left. I could hear her heels walking away.

 Lying on my back, I wondered what she could be up to. Maybe she had been set by her partner to intimidate me in some way, but it didn’t make any sense. He was the one with the experience to do so. Even if he wanted to throw me off, I believe he was the kind of man that wants recognition for getting things done. Besides, it was obvious he had a certain obsession with the whole case. There were men and women killing and raping all over town and he was obsessed with a few hackers trying to make things a bit better.

 When I began hacking computers, I did it for fun of course. In order to help friends get better grades in school or maybe just blackmail someone in order to give me some money. Yes, it was illegal and wrong and stupid. And I will never say those were my best moments. However, I discovered another layer to the whole thing when this chick in college introduce me to several of her friends and got into the real hacking world. Big bank accounts and the most private and so-called safe websites in the world. And we could just enter and take whatever we wanted. Just like that.

 At the start, they only wanted to go in for the money. And yeah, as a kid that had no money to pay for a decent school, I wanted to have my pockets filled with bills and coins. But then, I realized I could do so much more with all my skills. My first move was to get rid of my money problem, and I did that in a semi-legal way. I hacked into several stock market systems and found out the best way to make money in there. So I invested some money and saw it flourish in a few days. I can say I’m rich now, but I don’t.

 Because my next step was the one that got me where I am now. It was the step that made me run away from home and live with a bunch of strangers in filthy storage warehouses. I decided it was time to give something back to the community that I had use in my advantage. So I grabbed my keyboard and started going around the dark web, taking jobs as a hacker for hire. I would only do things that I thought were “good” or that they will make things fair and make justice prevail above all.

 I guess you could call it my Batman phase or something. The point is, I did that for at least two years. I helped parents get the men and women that had assaulted their children, I helped children find their parents in the midst of war and I even helped people get out of very difficult situations. I couldn’t be with them the whole time but it was my job as a hacker that saved their lives. I cannot shy away from the truth: I did save lives and made the world a better place. And yet, I end up in a cell.

 Maybe my earlier mistakes are too serious or maybe they just don’t like people being better than them. However, none of that explained why I was in that building or why was it taking them so long to send me to an actual jail. I was getting impatient and that’s not good for a person that expends his days sitting down in front of a computer, playing superhero on the information superhighway. When I heard the heels again, I stood up in a second and waited to see her face, her voice taunting me again.

 But she didn’t. She opened the door and asked me to step outside. Then, she asked that I follow her. I could have overpowered her but there were so many agents around, it would have been impossible to escape. I was free from shackles or handcuffs, but I was still a prisoner walking who knows where.

 She brought me in front of a bunch of people, mostly men, lead by the agent that had caught me. He was looking very pissed. It was the woman who talked. She said they were offering me work, in exchange for not putting me in jail. My reaction surprised more than one person there: I laughed out loud, proud.

Humble beginnings

   It started only a few years ago. I was about to turn seventeen years old but my body and my mind were years beyond that. From the moment puberty hit me, I had a very pronounced urge to explore every part of my body and my sexuality. Of course, I was too young at first so I did all of that exploring by myself. It was a great moment for me, because I discovered that I could learn who I was and what I liked in the privacy of my own room. Masturbation became something that made or broke my day.

 I wouldn’t say I got obsessed with it, I just thought it was fun to do it and try different things, with oils and stuff like that. From that young age, around twelve years old, I started watching porn on my parent’s laptop. It was our first computer and not even my parents knew a lot about the Internet or how to use it, so it took them a while to discover what I did with it. But when they did, they sent me straight to a shrink. That’s the type of parents my parents are, very nervous and prone to freaking out for nothing.

 The expert told them it was normal for a boy my age to explore his sexuality, but as most adults and people in general; they refused to believe I had any idea of what I liked at that age. They thought I was basically going insane because of bad influences around me. They forbid me to play more videogames, as well as watching any TV. I also was forced to interact more with people in school, only because I had few friends and none of them really ever had any kind of relationship outside of school.

 Weirdly enough, it was not long after that, between the shrink and my paranoid parents, that I met this new kid at school. We were a little bit older and hit it off right away. I had been forced to enter a sports team, so I was playing football with other guys, but I never really played. They all knew I hated being there so they left me be. But this new kid really loved to play but he also like talking to me when he was waiting for his turn to chase after the ball. He was very kind and funny and I liked that he didn’t pretended to be an adult.

 That year and the next one, we spent them together. I stopped that football nonsense but we stayed great friends. So much so that we went out for ice cream together, we would go to the movies and he would even come home and talk to my parents for very brief periods of time. And they loved him, even if I had left the team and I didn’t really have any other friends. They thought everything with me had gone back to normal and they were very eager to see the next step in my growth, the moment were I would decide my profession and go on to college to meet the woman of my life.

 Well, as I knew it would happen, I disappointed my parent’s big time. First of all, I kept masturbating and watching porn. I just got smarter than them, so they couldn’t catch me. Second, my friend Caleb (the new kid at school) had been one of the main influences in how to channel all of that that I had in my head and just all over my soul. Because I really thought it was part of me. We would steal porno magazines and we would always check out the ones with men first, because he knew very well that’s what I liked.

He got a girlfriend when we turned sixteen, a girl named Debra who was cool and all but I just didn’t find interesting. He told me he had sex with her several times but I never truly believed that. Not only because she looked too much like a prude, but because everything he said had a bit of exaggeration to it and it was very easy to notice. Anyway, I didn’t care at all because Caleb was a good friend to me, he didn’t judge or anything and we would have long and stimulating conversations about things we actually liked.

 It was just a couple of years before graduating that he came to me all excited. He had come home with his laptop and showed me a page where they announced the search for new actors in the area. It was not precisely for a period drama, but for porn involving younger actors and older actors. I was confused at first, but Caleb was very much excited, telling me it would be a great and fun thing to do, to just try out for a porn film and be able to tell that experience later, even if I didn’t get chosen.

 I wasn’t as excited as him when I saw it. Yeah, I spoke a lot about sex and bodies and all of that but that didn’t mean I actually knew how to do any of that. Caleb knew very well I was a virgin, but he seemed to have forgotten all about that. The other thing was that I had no self-esteem, at all. At that was something we didn’t really discuss because it’s not something very easy to talk to with friends. He was the guy I liked to hang out with to have fun, not to speak about things that made me feel like shit.

 But there was one detail that actually made him stop smiling at once and the webpage was clear about it: the actors had to be at least eighteen years old. They even stated that they would ask for ID before anyone would be able to do an audition. So Caleb’s enthusiasm fell to the floor because we were not even seventeen. He could have passed for older, because he already had some facial hair and he was very tall, but I still looked like a kid and had nothing going on for me to make people think that I eighteen years old. There was no way I could pass for someone older.

 But then, Caleb smiled again, grabbed his laptop and ran out of my room, only yelling he would see me in school after the weekend. There were some weekends we would hang out, but he knew I had to visit my grandparents and that always took way longer that it should, so we just hoped to see each other again the next Monday. During those two days, I did wonder about what idea had passed through his head after I had pointed out the age thing, but it was sometimes better not to dwell too much on things like that.

 I really liked how impulsive he was and how much of a good friend he was. He really didn’t care at all about me being gay and we even did that promise that if we hadn’t married anyone by the time we would be forty, we would marry each other.  It was a silly thing to do but nice anyway. We mocked my shrink and my parents together and how he would always do whatever he wanted whenever he wanted because his parents were hippie vegans or something like that. It was just a very entertaining relationship.

 On Monday, he arrived at school with two fake ID’s. He told me he had grabbed my picture from Facebook, because he thought I looked a bit older in one of them. He had done the same with his and then he had gone to a cousin of his that knew very well how to make fake ID’s. I didn’t even ask anything else because the cards did look authentic, with the proper seals and everything. I asked if he needed any money and he just assured me that his cousin owed him too much to be asking for any money.

 That Saturday, we went out late and told our parents we were going to see a movie. Instead, we went to this gay neighborhood were the auditions would take place. Funny enough, the guy didn’t say a word when he gave him the ID’s. He just gave us a number and told us to wait. That night, we only got checked out by three guys. I was one of the few men there that got selected to actually have an audition.  It would take place right then and there, only a few hours later. I was excited but really nervous.

 Anyway, that’s how it all got started. I have been working in this industry for six years now and, although it was very difficult at the start, I was able to pull through even after people in my first productions learned that I wasn’t as old as I had said I was at first. I was fired and hired in a matter of days.

 As for Caleb, he was just there to support me. He and his girlfriend stayed together even after our prom. Then, he realized that he wasn’t really into her and moved on to guys. He says he’s pansexual or something but the only thing I care about is that a very good friend has my back.