Archive of Our Own ^beta

Ray has only ever known how to love like a child. Somewhere inside he’s still eight years old, the same old scars from scraping his knees in the yard and his father’s utter obsession with his experiments leaving him unattended more often than not.

The point is, he loves like a child, greedy and insecure.

His ninth birthday was no grand affair. His father presented him with a uniform made of thin neon green polyester. The cupcake had been an afterthought and had been consumed as such. With icing still smeared at the corner of his lips Ray had taken down his first criminal, knuckles stinging and then the pain was gone.

Everything was like that; fleetingly real. His father’s attention would whisper away with every experiment meant to test the limits of his indestructibility.

It’s hard growing up knowing you’re loved and not liked. Ray’s jokes were met with disappointment and his laughter with dismal silence. The Father’s Day card he made when he was twelve was left in the trash can. 

In a way, Ray was his father’s greatest creation, but only for the unblemished skin and the way even an oxygen deprivation chamber only left him sobbing with the agony of suffocating eternally.

By the time he was fourteen Ray had learned that after a certain point reacting to pain only made it worse.

But, Ray loved his father, and trusted the scientist who had taught him everything he knew. He would do anything for him. And, when it came time that Ray’s father decided that his rivals were getting a bit too close to outpacing him, well.

Ray nearly killed a man for the first time at seventeen. Maybe that’s what broke him really. The thing with indestructibility is that there’s no reason to stop punching, not when the sting of your knuckles is barely background noise after years of testing and training.

Ten years after he cursed himself to become what he is his father brings in a genius. The short, stocky thirty-something introduces himself with a heavy accent and a strange smile, and he avoids causing Ray unnecessary pain. His partially bald head is far from the only remarkable thing about him.

And the first time he walks into Ray’s father burning his son alive he throws up on his own shoes.

It doesn’t take long after that.

Thunder Man arrives in a rush of super powered  bravado and harried concern. He doesn’t seem to get that Ray is perfectly capable of looking after himself.

Schwoz and Thunder Man set Ray up in a little apartment in downtown Swellview and they take his weapons and give him the store below and an employee who’s more like a boss. Gooch is kind and understanding and whenever Schwoz disappears wherever Schwoz disappears he teaches Ray how to identify the most valuable of junk.

Thunderman visits once a week, and then once a month, and slowly he doesn’t visit at all. Schwoz disappears more and more often and Ray gets bored.

He’s not used to the lack of pain, of action. He’s twenty-one and he stumbles across a man getting mugged. The man is tall, curly-haired and shaking, his button-up is a size too big. He’s mumbling desperately.

“Please, I just got an interview. I’ve got a wife and a kid and oh god don’t kill me.”

Ray steps in between the man and mugger before he can really think about it.

A burst of pain across his shoulder and then a dull satisfaction as he stares down at the bent blade of the mugger’s knife.

He thinks drowning was always the worst, the pressure all around him, liquid in his lungs, the low pulsing ache. This, where his skin is the impenetrable force that no blade can match, was never that big of a deal. His father grew tired of it quickly when even white hot iron did nothing more than make him cry.

The mugger stumbles back, staring at his knife on the ground stupidly. “Woahhh, dude, you’re insane.”

Ray fights the urge to scoff. His control has slipped in these years away from his father and he exhales sharply, annoyance curving the corners of his mouth down. 

“Get outta here, dude,” he barks, pushing at the mugger’s shoulders when it takes a moment for the man to take off running. (That’s, of course, the first time he meets Jeff.)

When he turns around the man is shaking still. They stare at each other for a long moment. The moment stretches like over-chewn bubble gum, pops.

“What are you?” Terror, plain and simple. The man’s eyes are fixed on the mangled knife still laying on the dirty concrete. 

Ray stumbles, surprised by the question, the fear. His father had only ever viewed his power as something extraordinary, Thunder Man and Gooch both didn’t seem to care, and it fascinated Schwoz to no end. Fear was something reserved for the people he fought, the ones he saved.

When he used to dress up in that stupid green suit nobody cared who was pulling them from burning buildings or out of car wrecks. It was the smaller interactions where they would stare in horror. A little twelve-year-old taking down a man three times his size after getting thrown through a wall is not, apparently, the norm. 

The man is gasping, barely breathing. “What the hell?”

Ray stares, maybe just as scared as him. 

He turns and walks away, leaves the alley and the man behind and vows that he’ll never turn into what his father wanted. Two days later he pulls a child from a collapsing apartment building deemed too unsafe for the rescue workers. 

The child is clutching a Captain Marvel action figure, the plastic warped and sticky from the heat. Fire rolls across Ray’s back in thick waves, his cotton t-shirt is long a lost cause. He nearly drops the kid. She’s small for her age he imagines, her eyes shining with an awareness he didn’t remember possessing at that size. 

She frowns at him when they stumble out into a side street, safely out of view of the cops and first responders. Ray’s focused on how to get her medical attention without letting them see him. 

“Cap’in Ma-” she tries and pushes the action figure up into his face, soot-covered curls bobbing. Her frown deepens, glaring at Ray like her inability to pronounce Captain Marvel is his fault somehow. Ray bites down on his tongue to keep from giving into the urge to stick it out at her. 

She brightens suddenly. Captain Marvel sways in the air, her joints melted into a stance that would mean her shoulder was broken. 

“Cap’in Man!” 

Oh. Yeah, he could make that connection too. Captain Marvel probably pulled people out of burning buildings too and she was a woman. According to this tiny child since he was a man he was Captain Man.

A woman screams. Again, Ray barely keeps from dropping the girl when he’s rushed by a sobbing set of parents too overjoyed at their being safe to pay any attention to the fact that the man who seemingly pulled her out should be really dead.

He ducks away, hurrying back to the store and Gooch’s unphased stare when he walks in with his clothes half-melted onto his indestructible skin.

Thunder Man visits one last time a week later. He looks at Ray like he knows how he’s been spending his nights recently. 

“You’ve been saving people.” It feels like an accusation. Maybe it is.

Ray shrugs, all of twenty-one and scared of becoming exactly what his father meant for him to be. Thunder Man hums under his breath. 

“You know, I’m supposed to be retired?”

Ray blinks. Thunder Man smiles, like he’s explained everything.

“I’m just saying, I get it. It’s hard to leave this behind.”

He doesn’t stay long after that and when he does leave Ray can’t find it in himself to expect him to come back. 

Schwoz finds him a month later and pushes him into the old elevator that leads down to a dusty unfinished basement. Or, used to lead to a dusty unfinished basement.

And Ray, Ray knew how to do this. This made sense, becoming the hero Schwoz seemed to want him to be and Thunder Man had assumed he was. 

For a long time it was enough. Ray learned how to be a person, achingly alive and dramatic and someone that his father would be so fucking disappointed in. He blew up the first Man Cave with Schwoz one late night where the nightmares built to tantamount and no amount of quickly vanishing pain and arrests could take the edge off.

He makes bad puns and stays up too late with Schwoz and even gets a girlfriend that likes him despite his random disappearances and inexplicable behaviors.

Drex crash lands into his life with all the bravado of a stupid teenage boy. Ray is also stupid, just twenty-four instead of a teenager. He takes the kid under his wing, teaches him to fight and lets him stay in the spare bedroom downstairs whenever his parents fight.

And he trains him, he really truly trains him. He teaches him when to pull his punches and how many hits a person can take before it’s fatal and resolutely doesn’t give in to Schwoz’s demands to test Drex’s pain tolerance.

Ray introduces him to his girlfriend Gwen as his sidekick and Drex scoffs.

Ray promises, “When you’re ready.”

But, there are some things that can’t be taught. Empathy, compassion, and selflessness, Drex struggles with it all. Ray is the first to acknowledge that he’s egotistic and oftentimes a prideful bastard, but he’d die for this city. It’s something you need, you have to have to wear the uniform.

And just months after he showed up, he’s gone. Behind bars at seventeen and the second Man Cave in ruins. Ray wakes up the next morning and lays there. He failed him, he realizes. He failed that boy. And then, Ray takes the guilt and locks it up in the furthest corner of his chest and keeps moving.

His father would be proud of that, he’s well aware.

The villains of Swellview don’t let up, but violent crime rates have started to go down since he started his tenure as Captain Man. Ray’s doing something right for once. So, he doesn’t let himself even consider stopping.

When he’s thirty Gooch stops him as he’s heading down to the Man Cave. Ray’s pinned under the older man’s gaze for just a moment, suddenly achingly aware of just how long he’s been here, away and free and happy. Gooch stares at him and murmurs quietly, “Don’t go down there, Ray.”

Something twists in Ray’s gut and he hurries past Gooch, ignoring the lump in his throat. The elevator doors open to Gwen and Schwoz. What he sees will never bear repeating but it ends with Schwoz tossed out on his ass. Ray’s hands shake, his throat closes. 

That night he dreams of being young, tucked away in his room. His grandparents would come to visit on the odd occasion, bringing instruments and workbooks and, once, they even drove him to the auditions for the local kid’s theater’s winter musical. But, somewhere along the way their attention stopped feeling like relief from the loneliness of his training and his patrols. And it felt like this, someone taunting him of what he could have had if only he was normal.

Ray wakes in a rush. The third and fourth Man Cave go down violently and the fifth is only saved from Ray’s wrath by Gooch rushing downstairs. This is the closest he ever gets to having left a mark. This destruction of the world around him is the only sign he has ever existed.

He sleeps through the next day and dreams of his sixteenth birthday. His grandmother presses a set of keys into his palm, grinning. His father is frowning over her shoulder. That truck is one of the few things he’s gotten since he was eight that was for Ray not the superhero he was trained to be.

This time he wakes up crying. Ray lays there for a long moment in this fresh new Man Cave tears silently rolling down his cheeks.

He keeps dreaming like this, always flashes of being younger, but he never dreams of the Before. In the daylight, he’s not even sure he remembers what it was like Before his accident. The only clear memory he has is the terror when his playhouse had been tagged, the helplessness.

In Schowz’s absence the loneliness festers. Gooch’s network of contacts slowly becomes his own and yet, and yet he’s still alone. There are few and far between who he looks in the eyes, who he doesn’t paste his father’s smile over his own face for.

The years pass by dully, more of a distant thought than something to worry over.

Laylani arrives in a warm rush, so different from every other person in his life. And she doesn’t care about it, any of it. When she touches him it’s kindness and gentleness despite how her nails can leave no marks. She teaches him how to exist as Ray for just a moment longer. But, that warmth is slippery. Laylani isn’t someone used to staying. So, he clings just that bit harder.

On the worst nights, he doesn’t sleep, instead taking to the skies in the Man-copter. Swellview curls beneath his feet, long trailing lines of fear in the alleys and the occasional convenience store robbery. 

He does what he knows how to do. He stays who he knows how to be.

And the loneliness builds, he gets older, and the pain is harder to ignore, and the old fears are seeping back in. 

Ray is rebecoming somebody, maybe just a reflection of his father, selfish and obsessed with his own accomplishments. Ray cannot do this alone anymore. The pain has started to linger as a long, low ache, not a mark on his skin but deep below, his body remembers.

Perhaps, if he wasn’t a foolish, foolish man he could find the will to return to normal. He barely sleeps anymore. His nights are spent far from the Cave, taking on what few criminals still dare to roam his streets.

It feels like Swellview is beginning to outgrow him. Yes, kids and adults alike still rush him as Captain Man, but the little fights are growing fewer and farther between. His reputation spreads, and villains with bombs and plans of world domination have started to come out of the woodwork.

What does he have to offer, really? He might be indestructible, but he is still just a man. He can’t fly, he can’t control the world around him with a thought, his punches are only as strong as his training is grueling.

Gooch puts up an ad without asking and they fight about it for a week straight. The older man is concerned, says, “Ray, it was never like this before Schwoz left,” adds, quieter, “before Drex.”

Ray bites his tongue so hard he knows if he was normal he would have gone clean through.

Little Henry Hart comes bounding in through Junk n’ Stuff’s doors after five applicants are turned away before they ever reach the elevator. Ray stares at the monitors scared out of his mind.

Ray inducts a thirteen-year-old as his sidekick scared out of his mind.

Ray might not know it, but this moment right here, is the beginning of the end. 

He fears he’s doomed to repeat his father’s mistakes, again, and again. And, somehow, he finds himself going soft. Criminals don't quake at the mention of his name. He doesn’t send grown men to hospitals anymore and doesn’t break bones quite as often. Henry gives him something that he knows sets them hurtling down a path he can’t correct: adoration, just as Ray once gave the man who raised him.

Five years later with the wind biting into the long claw-marks down his face and the tears building in his eyes and every damn mistake he’s made with this kid of his tearing his throat to sheds, Ray thinks he finally understands how to love someone selflessly. And in the end, the very end, it doesn’t matter.