Connor Temple was a superhero. Maybe not in the terms of having x-ray vision, super strength, or flight. No, he wasn't anything like that, not one to be found in the comic books. His superpower was all his own. He didn't realise that normal people didn't experience things the way he did until he was seven years old. Until then, he'd always thought that everyone saw the halo of colours around other people, that everyone could taste things doing math and heard machines singing when they ran, that it was nothing extraordinary, nothing uncommon. It wasn't until he was seven and refused to go to class in primary that he realised just how uncommon he was. He had refused to go to class because his maths teacher was, as he'd stubbornly insisted, "too grey." He couldn't stand to hear it. It'd drive him crackers, and then he'd end up having strange little fits.
His mum had taken him to see a doctor after the headmistress called home out of concern. After a series of irritating tests that'd pushed the limits of his childish patience, the doctor was able to put a name to his condition—synaesthesia. The official diagnosis of it consisted of a lot of big long words he didn't like to hear because they were far too grey, but Mum had explained it to him much better: part of his brain was cross-wired. He was a synesthete. His senses were linked up to each other in ways nobody else experienced.
When he did science, he could hear music, specific pieces of music. Chemistry was Bach, but biology was Mozart. Doing maths, however, that made him taste things, usually breakfast, like eggs and toast and hashbrowns and orange juice. And technology sang to him. Some machines, like cars and planes and ships and even guns, they became a little more than machines, gained personality of their own. He could hear their song, the heavy clatter of gears clanking, the high counterpoint of electricity through wires, the percussion of pumps working, all of it mingling together in a song that was all their own. He had an eidetic memory, sometimes mistakenly called a photographic memory. He remembered things with clarity, but not as a fresco, merely images painted on the wall, but also with sound and texture and smell. It was important to him. People thought it was weird, but it was instinctive and habitual of him to sniff something new, even taste it, provided that it wasn't another person or something gross. But it also came with a whole new problem—sensory overload. If he became overwhelmed, if there was too much, then he would get twitchy, or he couldn't stand to be touched, or he would just shut down entirely, withdrawing into himself. He refused to go to a psychiatrist—he wasn't crazy—but his mum was a better therapist than any shrink.
That wasn't the only thing, though. There were the colours, too.
Everyone had a colour. It was like an invisible halo of colour surrounding a person, bleeding out of their skin. He could see it when nobody else could, and that colour told him more about a person than anything else. He knew that seeing the colours wasn't really synaesthesia, that it really was a peculiarity unique to him and him alone, so he always kept it to himself. Nobody was ever just one colour. There were others, ones that came and went and changed with moods and thoughts, but there was always one base colour, one that dominated. Connor would call it an aura, if he believed in that sort of thing. It was really the only term that properly described it.
People had the strangest ideas about colour. They didn't seem to understand that there was no such thing as just when it came to colour. There was no such thing as just a colour. Like red. There was no such thing as just red. There was cherry, crimson, fresh blood, scarlet, burgundy, ruby, cerise, salmon, garnet, claret, dragon's blood, maroon, watermelon, cranberry, rose, the list went on and on. Just like red, there was no such thing as blue. There was no such thing as just blue. Connor found that he hated the words 'blue' and 'red', hated how they were so…plain. There was cerulean, azure, cornflower, sapphire, cobalt, navy, indigo, Prussian, peacock, steel, ice, lapis lazuli, but there was no just blue.
By the time he went to college at Central Metropolitan University with full scholarship, Connor was able to control all of his unusual senses, able to filter so he wasn't constantly overwhelmed. He never told anyone about it. He kept it his own little secret and allowed people to think that he was some kind of freak whenever he hummed along with the songs of machines or absently noted he tasted eggs and toast during algebra class. Not even Tom and Duncan ever knew. He didn't know why he didn't like telling people. Maybe it was because, when he was seven, he liked to think that he was some kind of superhero with his own special powers, and he had to keep them secret from the rest of the world so his archenemy didn't discover his true identity.
Not even when he became part of the anomaly project with Abby and Stephen and Cutter did he reveal his synaesthesia. Just like everyone else, they thought he was odd, and he let them think that. It didn't matter how they saw him because he knew what he really was. Connor Temple was a superhero with his own super-senses.