"I'm going to need you to wake up now," I heard someone tell me.

My head was resting on a cool metal surface as I grimaced and tried to bury it in my arm’s crook. I had no desire to listen to what they were saying right now, since sleeping was the only thing that made my headaches any better. The migraines had gotten worse as the chemicals Wonder Boy infused me with wore off, leaving the blaring tinnitus as the sole thing keeping me distracted.

How I had gotten here was hard to remember. After I finished the fight against the rampager, I walked as far as I could before passing out on a park bench in the shade. Normally, I tried to sleep in a locked room so that nobody would mess with me, but with half the city abandoned and my body collapsing from exhaustion, compromises were made.

"Adrian, you've been asleep for sixteen hours already. I know you're tired, but we really need to get this debrief done, because the management is breathing down my neck over this whole shitshow. Do you want coffee? I can get you some coffee."

Slowly, I rose my head and looked at the woman across from me at the table. The light of the interrogation room was blinding, but I could see her well enough. She had olive skin and brown hair, with just the faintest pink of a scar running up her left cheek. Her face was hard. Though she couldn't have been older than thirty-five, it was a rough thirty-five for sure.

For all I cared though, she could have been a playboy bunny stripping right in front of me. Call it a sexist analogy or a grossly unnecessary bar to set, but I was simply not in the mood to pay her any attention.

My first instinct was to use my power to make her ignore me, but I doubted that it would work given that this was not somewhere you could blend into the background. Her focus was not split, but wholly on me, making any such push nearly impossible. Besides this fact, I wasn't about to gamble my health and cause any further nausea. I had been throwing up on and off now since the battle ended, and my power was threatening me with violence if I even looked at it the wrong way. They'd have to put me on an IV if I became any more dehydrated.

"Adrian," she repeated, becoming terser. "We've done this twice already. I've tried to give you all the time you need to recover, but our medics say that you're in the clear now. There are some serious issues we need to discuss."

"Okay..." I said, giving a thumbs up as I did. "I'm l-listening."

"I need your full attention. Last time you fell asleep."

I gave a heavy sigh and neglected to respond. Though I knew I was being immature, I added it to the list of things that I could feel bad about later. Murder aside, I had just saved the city, hadn't I? Surely, I deserved infinite grace and patience for that.

My interrogator had different ideas.

She slammed down something on the table, causing me to sit up and wince. There was a brown stack of files there, easily a foot thick and full of tabs, staring me in the face. Her glare was full of daggers as she asked me, "Do you know what this is?"

"No," I replied.

"It's all the cases that we've been collecting over the last three years on you. Literally countless incidents of trespassing and robbery, sometimes multiple reported in one day, and they're all right here in my files. While none of them constitute a serious offense on their own, they add up to millions in damages altogether."

She had successfully captured my attention.

"I see," was all that I could think to say.

"Do you want to take a closer look?" She slid the file forward, inviting me to peruse through various reports and pictures taken of the crime scenes. "These have been popping up on my desk like clockwork and I cannot honestly begin to tell you how frustrating it was, Adrian. Do you know that we set three different traps for you at locations we thought you were frequenting? Three."

As she repeated herself for emphasis, I looked down at my hands to avoid her gaze. I noticed then that they were clean. My clothes were missing, as was the hospital bracelet that I always kept on me. Worrying now about where it was, I gave a halfhearted excuse. "I just g-got bored."

"Oh, I know. We collected fingerprints, pictures, and DNA samples at thirty different locations. You sure did get around. It was always the same story, too. A shopkeeper notices something big and obvious missing, like a new TV or a pile of games that they couldn't remember selling, and they go to check the security footage. Lo and behold, you're there just walking out with it, bold as could be. Did you really need so many laptops? I have to ask."

"I kept losing them."

"Right. Gotcha. Still, I never did succeed at convincing the management to give me a full taskforce. After the third failed jump on you, they told me to focus on other cases and stop wasting resources. One super with the power to make people ignore him was not our top priority, they said. We had fifteen active villains in the city, they said, and many bigger fish to fry. I never did stop thinking about you, though. I was just wondering when you'd choose to come out of hiding, or if you'd live your whole life parasitically."

Okay, I thought, that was a bit harsh. No one ever missed a bowl of breakfast cereal or a handful of candy bars, and all the stores were insured for theft. There were countless shoplifters and muggers in New Marion, but it was somehow different in my case just because I was better at it?

I didn't want to be petulant, however. I knew that what I had been doing was wrong and self-absorbed. It would have seemed fake to go out and apologize now, but I tried to nod and show understanding anyways. "I was in a b-bad p-place." It came off as just another excuse once I heard it out loud, unfortunately.

The woman across from me let out a deep exhale. She simply smiled as she told me, "I know. I know. It's just... if I'm going to be working with you, you deserved to know that there is some history between us, even if it's pretty one-sided. I spent a lot of time thinking about how I could catch you, and that could come off sometimes in my demeanor. So, I apologize."

"Working with me?" I asked, circling back around.

"Yeah, Adrian. I'm part of the Department of Defense's homeland Hero-Force. I do support work and act as an advocate for newly acquired recruits. My name is, uh, Debra Smith. I should have introduced myself sooner. See, I'm already failing at this, but the boss was insistent that it be me for some reason. Guess he thought I'd know you best."

"You're my... handler?"

She seemed to find that word funny. "Ha. Yeah, I guess I am. I'm supposed to establish a rapport with you and determine whether or not you're mentally fit for duty."

"Well, you've g-got me legally if you wanted, so I guess I'm at your mercy." I had no intention of trying to get out of being a hero; it was what I truly wanted. Yet, everybody knew this was how government agencies went about their recruitment. They flipped you if they could or they put you away if they couldn't.

"Now, please don't see it that way," Debra said. "Despite how it may have sounded, nobody in the force ever bore any ill will towards you, least of all me. I could get caught up in the cat and mouse sometimes, I’m sure you understand, but at the end of the day I always saw that you were just trying to keep to yourself. When you say you were in a bad place, I believe you. We know your story, Adrian. We have your hospital records, and the scars on your torso and arms speak for themselves. It's a miracle you survived either of these events, let alone ended one of them personally. Now, let's talk about that if you're ready?"

Whether they had realized this or not, I wanted to be completely up front with it. "I killed him."

"Okay. Yeah." She flipped through her notes and frowned. "We were wondering what the story was with all that blood. We recovered a body some half-mile away from where we found you and the DNA matched. Can you tell us who that was?"

"It was the rampager," I said. "Didn't Stumblebum explain to you?" Now that I was thinking about it, I wasn't sure that what went down was going to be obvious to anyone involved except me. All Stumblebum had seen was that I got in close and fried the monster with my power. He had no way of knowing what I knew.

"We don't have any official contact with the rogue super you're referring to. The rules of the ceasefire between government sanctioned heroes and all others stipulates that we allow twelve hours for anyone at the scene to go back into hiding, with no attempt to find them on our part. You needed medical attention, however, which is a bit of a loophole if I'm being honest. Tell me about how this went down, though. Can you explain how the body is related to the rampager you helped neutralize?"

"He wasn't related, he was literally the same person. Stumblebum got me close enough t-to see with my power that the monster was just a puppet. He was going to get away if I didn't stop him."

There was a pause as Debra considered what I was telling her. It was her job to assess and be cynical, as it was mine to make a convincing case. She needed to hear something more radically honest if I was going to succeed.

So, I went on, though my stutter was acting up bad now. "Yeah, that’s a... lie. Umm… The truth is that I didn't need to kill him. I don't have to be a psychic to see you're doubting me right now. Practically every super alive qualifies under some type of mental diagnosis. We don't know where powers come from... but we do know they pop up in people who suffer a break from reality, right? So, I can see you're just trying to figure me out. Am I crazy? After I got done helping to save the day, did I go and randomly brain some guy in a paranoid delusion? You're not going to believe that it was just some selfless act of heroism, because we both know it wasn't. Really, I killed him because I hated him, not because I thought he couldn't easily be found later. I'm not lying when I tell you, he really was the rampager though. That much is true."

She had to see that I was lucid and self-critical enough to admit what went down back there. It was clearly outside the realm of heroism, but my suspicion was that this kind of thing was not so alien to them. There were countless videos online of heroes going off the rails, and they were consistently swept under the rug by our government. Beneath this play of mine was a deeply cynical belief, and that was that they were desperate for anyone who hadn't lost their every last marble.

The only people the agency would turn down at this point were those whom they had no hope at all of controlling. But I could be reasoned with, and that was all she had to see.

Debra looked over to the one-way glass at the other end of the room and shrugged. Then, she turned back to me. "Zephyr said you tried to lead her to his location before she left, but she hadn't understood. With that in mind, I'm inclined to believe you. I think you didn't plan to do what you did from the start, but you probably lost control when he put up a fight. Does that sound about right, Adrian? Is that our story?"

"Yes, Debra." While it might have looked like I was getting away with murder, to me it had been more like putting down an animal, because there was no question in my mind that that was what he was. It was hard to understate my feelings on the matter. While I was shellshocked, I kept my resolve no matter what and I pushed down any doubts.

"Still...” she explained, “you do understand that there must be consequences for something like this, right? It’s not like we can let you get away with killing someone, Adrian."

“Fair enough.” I might as well have gotten it tattooed on my forehead, because I was frequently having the same thought these days.

Nothing can be easy.