No More Heroes
A somewhat alternative-interpretation character study of Maria Torres, with some platonic Hank thrown in for flavor. It's been a while since I've played Trauma Team (or written anything, really), so forgive me.
The news was all over it when the story first broke: the orphanage in South Portland, you know, the one that huge bigwig CEO just recently gave a million dollars to, consumed in a raging inferno. The scene could have been ripped straight from a cheap horror flick; leaping flames, screaming children, the works. Film at eleven.
Maria Torres blinked through the glassy smoke, trying not to vomit.
A camera-toting crowd jabbed at her face, hungry glass-eyed beasts clamoring for a speech. Maria swallowed, trying to keep the bitter ash from going down her throat and the words she wanted to say from going up. No. I'm not your goddamn hero. I was just an idiotic underage asshole who forgot to put out my cigarettes in the toilet before throwing them in the trash.
Amidst the glare and glitz, she turned an ashen cheek to the lenses and retched the blackened remains of her breakfast and lunch onto the ground.
The cameras misread her violent release as shell-shocked modesty, which elicited a standing ovation from all present.
Behind the applauding throngs, a lavatory and a young girl's innocence smoldered into the dying sunset.
It isn't that Maria's always wanted to save people, as much as she tells people otherwise, and as much as Hank listens sympathetically and nods.
Yes, he'd happened to be there in the right place at the wrong time that day, but Maria's never thought highly of long, heartfelt talks. If she had, she'd probably have been out of the orphanage by nine, and probably wouldn't have burned it down by fourteen, either.
The more she thinks about the episode, the more convinced she is that Hank, being Hank, was trying to help her save face, trying to help her in a moment of what could only be perceived as weakness.
Idiot, she rages silently, directing the word towards Dr. Freebird for being so candidly, earnestly honest, and towards herself as well, for the same reason. Maria's always hated being honest, because when she was growing up, honesty meant vulnerability, and vulnerability meant being the weakest person in an environment that refused to tolerate weakness.
Heroes. The word resonates in particular, even more so with the gravity of Hank's voice; the moment he'd said that was the moment he'd sounded the most genuine, as if he were revealing a secret compartment of himself that had been walled off for ages, and Maria was the counseling psychiatrist. She grimaces at the thought; she's become adept at spotting other people's weak spots only because she's been exposed herself so many times.
What did Hank know about being a hero, anyway?
Yeah, he might have been in the Special Forces. He might have popped off a few caps. But from her point of view, there was no glory in a mere human finger pulling a trigger to extinguish a mere human life. You can't be a paramedic, not even a lowly junior responder, without having even the slightest romantic notions of violence beaten out of your mind. It's an occupational hazard.
Maria's heroes were of a different age, at once more physical and yet less tangible, who existed only within dreams and several yellowed pages that had once been tucked away in a nondescript shoebox underneath her bed.
The comic books had never been an easy habit to reconcile.
For one thing, distribution had always been a huge problem. Initially, she'd salvage ratty, foul volumes from the district dumpster three blocks away, sneaking out the window like a bandit twice a week, but the biggest opportunities were always the orphanage's monthly outings. Those required careful planning and budgeting: a faked injury, a careful inventory of scavenged change, wadded in a square of fragile tissue, and a rapid jaywalk across the Portland Interstate to the grungy convenience store at the truck stop. Once, she'd misjudged the width of the last carpool lane, and almost ended up with tire treads on her leg.
More importantly, though, comics were an indulgence condemned from both sides by authority and her peers. Predictably, the convent sisters labeled them "immoral", but she'd seen worse sins blithely committed in the communal bathrooms daily, under the watchful, glazed eyes of the Virgin Mary statuettes mounted above the shower heads.
What truly irked her were the reactions from the others: low, mocking ("nerd…") to downright hostile ("I bet you're a fuckin' faggot, getting off on Wonder Woman, aren't you?"). Never mind that she'd punched three of the "faggot" kid's teeth into the back of his throat the next day; the sniggers still lingered, springing up like weeds, sotto voce, whenever she turned her back.
In her world, when you ran to tell the nuns of the Mother Superior that someone had called you an unholy word and then pushed you down the double flight of stairs, the ones with the jagged stone steps, all that gained you was an uncaringly mild admonition and the behind-the-back title of "cowardly snitch". You had nothing to hide behind except the yellowed lessons of the Scriptures and the taffeta hems of the nuns' habits, and Maria knew perfectly well how effective those were at stopping the constant stream of blows.
Of course, superheroes didn't need to do any of that. Superheroes weren't scared of insults or punches or fireballs to the face. Superheroes didn't need to pray to the gods at their bedsides every night, fingers crossed, hoping that nothing bad would happen to them the next day.
No, Maria thought: superheroes were the gods, smiting evil and upholding moral justice with impunity. They were as much an icon as Christ on the cross, a symbol of suffering the greatest trials in silence for the greater good of an undeserving population.
Because, in the end, superheroes weren't perfect. They could suffer, physically or emotionally. They could bleed, and they could mourn. But no matter what, they would never show fear or weakness to the enemies that sought their demise, or to the people that needed them. Their greatest skill lay in projecting the illusion of invincibility, even when they were broken.
Ultimately, heroes were what Maria wanted to be; heroes who refused to flinch before blows, heroes who could be feted by society while bending its rules, heroes perched on the fringe of a humanity that worshipped them. Heroes were what Maria thought of as she fought her tormentors in God's twisted arena, fighting for justice where justice never existed in the first place.
After all, Batman and Superman were orphans. Never stopped them.
The one aspect of the superhero persona that's appealed most to Maria is the mask: the trademark of any hero, a paradoxical combining of instant recognition with anonymity. For over half a century, Batman's cold visage managed to strike fear into petty thugs while simultaneously camouflaging the face of industrialist playboy Bruce Wayne. Hell, Superman was the master of the art; all it took to transform the face of America's most beloved super icon into that of mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent was a single pair of glasses. Genius.
By fourteen, Maria's become an expert at wearing masks. She's had to; the orphanage demanded a delicate balancing act between visages, changing expressions hourly to suit the circumstances. You had to nod subserviently, blankly, as you listened to the daily sermons preaching God's unconditional love. You had to pucker and swell your cheeks on the rare chance that a potential parent actually visited the orphanage. You had to grit your teeth and steel your emotions for the inevitable fights that resulted when somebody else called you a fucking faggot for hiding comics under your bed. Or for any other reason under the sun, really.
You had to pretend you liked smoking cigarettes, even when the ashen taste made you gag and spit watery, black ichor into the sinks at night.
(The experience was a strangely satisfying, cleansing one, in its own way; every foul, tainted retch and cough was like spitting in the face of the other children and nuns who hated her; like spitting in the face of the very Almighty who had taken away her parents and locked her up in his prison.)
Cylinders of white-tipped orange were as much a part of Maria's mask as fists and four-letter words, another layer of artifice spread thin over the face of someone hollowed-out by their own insecurities. A person who needed to overcompensate for any flaw in their character, real or imagined.
Maria can't handle being imperfect, even while she knows she is. Growing up, she's been beaten, preyed upon, for the smallest tics in herself. She's had to fight for herself: against the near-fanatical indoctrination of her superiors, against the dog-eat-dog cruelties of God's other abandoned children, but most of all, against her very human weaknesses.
She hates the taste of smoke, but she's hated the taste of blood even more.
Teamwork is the one part of the superhero ethos that Maria's loath to embrace.
Yes, Superman had the Justice League, and Batman had his little family of Bat-fetish-freaks, but she's never seen the utility in it. Other people were baggage. Other people slowed you down, if they didn't outright get in your way. Other people were the ones who stood around and panicked and mashed 9-1-1 on their cell phones ad infinitum while she knelt down on bloodied pavement and got things done.
Maria's never been able to ingratiate herself with others, and rightfully so. Open diplomacy's never your strong suit when you grow up in an environment just waiting to explode into hostile anarchy, when you coexist with people that'll seize any chance to bring you down, any reason at all. Punches for meeting someone's gaze the wrong way. Low kicks for rumors that never existed, fabricated as another excuse to get blood on someone's knuckles.
There were alliances at the orphanage, of course, twisted parodies of high-school cliques: "jocks", "nerds", "emos". Stupid things like that. Maria used to find herself jostled between the groups, revolving between their unstable fringes, before she found it was simply easier to beat all of them up.
It's always been easier that way.
Maria's always thought of herself as a lone wolf; she can't bear the thought of herself being dependent on someone else, not simply as the stereotype of a "weak girl", but as someone who's alone and who's always been alone.
As a first responder, she's not stupid. She knows there are legitimate reasons paramedics always travel in pairs and she knows her partner is as much a certified EMT as she is and she knows Chief Patel's busted at least three capillaries repeating all this to her over the years in increasingly frustrated tones, yelling until all the blood rushing to her head colors her temples a nice mauve.
She's just not ready- ready to interact meaningfully, ready to stretch out a hand and expect a hug in return.
It's always seemed to work that way in the comics, but Maria also knows that real life isn't painted in ink, and that friendships aren't set in stone with the stroke of an author's pen. She isn't ready to stop shouldering her burden, because letting go of it would mean letting go of the strength she's been trying to cultivate in herself thus far.
After all, Maria's spent her entire adulthood saving others' lives. She doesn't need anyone to save hers.
The next time her path crosses with Hank's, Maria's careful to arrange the meeting on her own terms.
She invites him to the corner café on Desmond and 42nd for lunch, except it isn't so much an invitation as a brusque huff during the lull between patients, and it isn't so much a café as a single scrap-iron table outside a dingy storefront, and it isn't so much lunch as it is two paper cups of the overbrewed coffee that Medici's is (in)famous for.
Still, Hank's gracious enough to show up on time, and to drink the brackish coffee that Maria lets dwindle to a tepid simmer on the table. He drains it in record-time, with minimal gulps, seemingly oblivious to the steam that rolls off its surface in volcanic plumes.
Maria sits in silence, watching Hank through coffee-haze. She still isn't sure why she's asked him to meet him here now, as if she were getting revenge for that time he'd dropped in on her reverie. Like so many things in her life, it had seemed a good idea at the time.
For a moment, she's fourteen again, staring blankly at a forbidding entity through a hot, glassy lens of smoke, wondering just what exactly to say.
Seeing her mostly-untouched cup, Hank drops the mother of all rhetorical questions. "Is everything okay?"
Maria sighs. At least he's spared her the discomfort of opening the conversation. "Oh, no…yeah, I'm fine," she lies, which she guesses even he can see through because Maria Torres doesn't invitepeople to lunch out of nowhere, but he does not let on.
"Is that a magazine you're holding?" She jabs a finger at the glossy bundle under his bulky, white-sleeved arm, more to break the silence than anything else.
At this, Hank's face reddens, as if Maria's caught him pawing the latest Playboy. "Oh…yeah, this." He flips the magazine onto the rusted iron, upending his empty cup; Maria scans the headline, Eagle Man's Fourth Appearance At Robbery, with mild interest. Eagle Man's figure is blurred and tilted, courtesy of an amateur photographer, but Maria still makes out the helmeted, caped, red-booted silhouette without trouble.
"Looks kind of like Captain America, doesn't he?" she comments. "I never knew you had an interest in that sort of thing, Hank."
Hank's complexion deepens another hue. "No, it's just…well, now that you mention it," he continues, face still beet-shiny, "I did have a lot of old Captain America comics when I was a kid. They were my father's…I mean, they were popular in his day, but…heh, you know, I wonder if America's outgrown its superhero complex in this time and age."
"Lucky they have guys like this hunk running around to take care of everything," Maria mutters; she's too caught up in her own memories to notice Hank's cheeks turn their deepest shade of red yet. "You, um…you wouldn't happen to have any of those old Captain America comics lying around, would you?"
Hank's lingering embarrassment melts into surprise. "Of course! I've got stacks of them lying around…why do you ask?"
"Oh, no reason." Maria sidesteps the query without hesitation. "I was just curious, you know. Those old things…it's a miracle anyone still has any of them these days."
She's lying, but she's found it easier to keep certain truths from him- like how she, of all people, cares about an twentieth-century comic book icon, or how she figured out Captain Eagle's real identity a long time ago, or how she's never learned to let herself go and trust anyone with her secrets, her imperfect self.
Her reverie is shattered by the heavy-handed thrum of Hank's pager. The cold air reverberates with the sounds of Esha shouting about schedules and tardiness and shattered clavicles.
Hank stands. "Please, allow me," he interjects, before Maria can do or say anything- and the next thing she knows, he's running down the street, doctor's coat billowing like a white cape in the wind, as she stares down at a haphazard pocketful of change coming to a tinny stop on the table's sheet-metal surface.
Maria's eyes follow his retreating silhouette through the lingering steam of her lukewarm coffee, but the only thing she sees is a forgotten shoebox, black with flames as a girl's hurried footsteps fade into the unknowable distance.
She's tired of running, of hiding behind masks and saving enough lives to forget about her own. But Maria is no longer a child, and the world has no more heroes for her to be saved by.