1
THE VOLUNTEER
September 10th,2024
My mum always said that my heart would be my downfall and here I was—making the dumbest mistake of my life. What kind of moron volunteers to track down a supervillain? One of the twenty supervillains running around in this shit show of a city.
He was the one with the strongest moral code, at least. He was probably more of an anti-hero than an actual villain. Still, he was terrifying. Powerful. Ruthless.
Hot as fuck, too. Don’t forget that.
Yes brain, thank you. How could I forget that?
I would love to convince myself that I was doing this because of Scarlett’s sad little face when her doctor said no. That I’d opened my big fat mouth before my brain had caught up because it was her wish.
But the “I will. I’ll get him for you” was selfish. Seven words. Seven potentially-life-ending words. Seven of the stupidest words I had ever uttered. I was doing this for me and I’d been thinking about it for years—ever since my mum died.
I mean, he’d probably kill me either way, but maybe if I managed to get my excuse out first, he’d show some mercy. There were so many videos of him prancing around the city. If he wasn’t killing people, he was posing for pictures. Most of the time it was people pulling out their phones to film him, but every once in a while he would stop running from the police long enough to snap a picture with a kid.
It was adorable—feeding into my crush.
So after my total lapse of judgement, I dove into news stories, social media feeds, and random gossip I heard on the street. Avalanche wasn’t a guy that would take kindly to being accosted in his favourite bar, but it was probably the safest place for me.
Avalanche.
I thought it was a silly villain name. Just because his first act as a villain was an avalanche through City Core in the middle of July. It was the most destructive debut attack,ever. Even though it had been five years, no one had topped it. No one had even dared to try.
But Scarlett loved the snow, and she thought his power was really cool—no pun intended.
“Why Avalanche? What about Superman?” her doctor had asked.
“Superman isn’t real. He’s just on TV. Avalanche can freeze anything, maybe he can freeze my cancer and I can go home,”Scarlett had replied.
I went home and sobbed. She was hands down my favourite kid to work with. We bonded very early on because of our mutual crush on him. She thought he was pretty—true. I thought he was drop dead gorgeous.
One time, my best friend, Amber, caught the two of us whispering about how cute he looked in his costume—black leather pants, blue and white leather jacket, and light-blue mask designed to look like a glacier. She scolded me for ten minutes about how I shouldn’t be talking to a child about my crush on a supervillain—it was setting a bad example or some shit.
I swiftly reminded her about the time she thought her patient was sleeping and went into medium detail about the book she was reading. Luckily April was a teenager. Still, Amber had been mortified when she came back to work the next day to said book in April’s hands.
That’s not the point. The point is, Scarlett was my favourite patient. She wanted to meet Avalanche, so I made it my mission to find him—partly for her, partly for me.
I already kept up with most of his news stories but I’d never actually tried to find him. He was surprisingly easy to track down when I really started looking. He was spotted quite frequently around the city. The man was not camera shy—nor should he be.
Hundreds upon thousands of videos of the lean-built, blond-haired, blue-eyed, six-foot-two man littered the internet.
There were pictures and videos of him fighting the police all throughout the city. Except ten square blocks. He’d never been spottedanywherein that vicinity.
Obviously, that was where I started.
Honestly, the police were stupid. Ten square blocks with not so much as a single sighting of Avalanche since he came on the scene just over five years ago. They didn’t think to check? They didn’t think it was suspicious?
Dumb.
Next level dumb.
It was a shitty area—the scariest district in Rivermount. Graffiti covered every inch of the buildings, drug addicts laid passed out in the streets, copious amounts of screaming filled the air.
It was also the place I called home.
