In this unfortunate memoir, it was mentioned that Tobias MacClain would be disoriented a certain number of times. By the final time, this day, in this developing denouement, he would no longer be afraid. With his powers confined in his head, Tobias was prone to vulnerability. Tobias was even more prone to vulnerability when he believed there were better ways to win a battle than hitting the opponent hardest. But, Tobias had been afraid for long enough that he had at last learned that he did not need to be. Despite the overwhelming confusion of disorientation, his heartbeat was steady.

In the history of heroes, perhaps he was not the greatest; unable to work well with his team and constantly struggling with his personal image.

In the history of villains, he was no better; opposed to throwing a punch, even in defense. His last action before apprehension was not to save himself but to save his hostage, which... in all of my time reporting, I have never seen a villain do. Even heroes rarely put hostages above their own wellbeing.

In my conclusions I have decided that the latest version of Tobias MacClain, Doctor Chance, is neither hero nor villain, but the overlap of their Venn diagram. An antihero, with a drive for vengeance now quenched and morals mostly intact.

His eyes creaked open a crack to nothing but the black fuzz of his eyelashes and the blur of his exhaustion. All the wrong questions spiraled in his mind, disordered and incoherent like runaway trains. All the train cars jostled, confusing ideas and concepts into nonsense.

No visions graced his emptied mind, all reduced to static and blurriness in the borders of his consciousness. He could not call to them or clarify them. He could hardly form a sentence in his head.

Everything was broken and disordered. Pain throbbed on his scalp and over his body. Nausea overwhelmed his chest. Very vaguely, he sensed a seat against his thighs and back. A muscle on his neck pulsed angrily, holding his heavy head against gravity with much protest. His shoulders ached and his wrists felt as if they were being sawed by hedge trimmers.

One moment, he thought, Dizzy.

The next, his brows sunk and his eyes closed firmly again. Where did I leave my robe?

Did I hit my head?

I want to sleep again.

My tummy hurts.

"He's waking up." Viola... traitorous... Mae.

"Good," Benjamin Jones barked in his other ear. "I want him to be awake."

Tobias let out a soft groan as he wearily tilted back his head. His eyes fell open as if on hinges, like an old-fashioned doll. He blinked a sticky blink, unable to see anything but light and fuzzy colors and shapes. Recognizing the place, he became aware of its vibrations and volume in an instant.

Loud. Rattling. Humming. Quaking. Rocking. The narrow cabin of a seaplane.

Bright yellow belts swayed on the empty seat across from him, coming in and out of focus.

Tobias tried to rub his eyes, but his wrist screamed at him. Confused, he tried again, and received the same tortured response. He looked up to see his limp hands hung over his head by shiny shackles, which sunk into his bruised and swollen flesh. His gloves were gone, his watch gone, his cloak gone. He stared dazedly up at the shackles until his head moved too far back and he jolted forward at a spark of pain felt through the bandage around his skull. His vision sharpened for an instant, but blurred again as he blinked.

Fingers grabbed at his jaw, squishing his cheeks uncomfortably over his eyes. He felt the grip against his teeth. Square fingers forced his jaw to turn until Tobias was looking straight into angry hazel eyes. Despite the deathly appearance of Jones's face, his gaze was thriving with life and loathing. A shine like the sun off the executioner's axe. Sharp, boding ill.

"You are despicable," he growled. "You disgust me."

Tobias looked numbly at his own cheeks, which uncomfortably took up most of his vision.

Benjamin Jones shook the man by his face until the Tobias's wide eyes returned to him behind his skewed spectacles. Focus came and went in a hazy struggle.

"We are on our way to the PENThouse," Jones continued in a low and supercilious voice, "where you will spend the rest of your miserable life paying for what you have done. You won't have to pretend to be friends with us ever again. Won't that be pleasant for you?"

The words echoed in his skull for moments that felt like eternity. Tobias narrowed his eyes and inhaled, then wryly returned, "It will be."

"Bastard!" Jones threw him against the back of his seat.

White seared his eyes at the contact, but it was only enough to stun him for little more than a second. Jones was weak, still. Jones was weaker than a doe. Viola Mae cried out on Tobias's other side.

Tobias began to laugh, quietly at first, over a lopsided curl of his lips. Who was she to show concern all of a sudden?

He's weak. His laughter transformed, rising in volume and flooding from his lips to his chest to his gut until his whole frame shook. She's concerned. Unexplained amusement tickled his spine and sparked in his brain, guffaws spilling out easier and more heartily than ever before. They rasped over the burns in his throat, cutting a crowing laugh to a grating whisper until he drew breath again and repeated.

Knuckles pounded against the black half of his face, but Tobias's laugh hardly faltered. Even as a tooth wobbled loose and rode his tongue out on a stream of crimson ooze, Tobias merely spat and continued harder. Though his gum throbbed, he was so accustomed to pain that it was more pleasurable in that moment than debilitating.

Benjamin Jones's furious roars only made things funnier, sending Tobias keeling over until he was gasping for air, choking on his own blood. Red stained his tunic and his chin. His spectacles sat so far askew that he could only see out of one eye. The other was starting to swell.

Benjamin grabbed him by the fabric of his tunic and pulled until their noses were an inch apart and Tobias could taste the acrid volcano on his breath. The sulfur sting clung to him and rubbed off like static.

"Leave him alone, Ben," Viola Mae warned.

Tobias sneered and wiped his chin on his raised shoulder, his gaze locked with Jones's. He elbowed Viola Mae back as soon as he felt her light gloves touch his chest. Her arm retreated with a sharp breath.

"Vee, let Ben do what he wants," said Poppy Tris. "He deserves it."

"The testosterone in this cabin," muttered Viola Mae with disdain, "is suffocating."

Poppy's shape slouched behind a seatbelt in the corner of the cabin. Her long blonde hair flowed like a flag at half-mast. The color blurred into the belts and Tobias could make out little more than a mass of different shades of yellow. She wasn't moving, which meant she must still have been paralyzed.

Tobias frowned and tilted his head in thought. If she was still paralyzed, then he must not have been unconscious for very long. His pressure point practices tended to be very temporary.

Her head lifted and she stretched a brown-clad arm outwards, moving her fingers stiffly.

Aha, she's recovering. Noting the residual lethargy and stiffness, Tobias estimated that he had been out cold for a half hour or so. Hair fell away from the woman's face and red color mixed with the yellow blur. Red.

"If you had not brought..." Tobias's voice slurred noticeably as words sluggishly formed in his brain and tripped out. He smeared his chin over his shoulder again, breathed, and continued with his head hung. "If you had not brought Spectre... I would not have... had to... use the weed killer..."

Poppy snarled. Hair fell from her welted face as she straightened. "You didn't have to do anything, Dr. Chance."

Benjamin forced Tobias's face to move again, and their brows came so close that Tobias almost went cross-eyed meeting his former partner's gaze. "Weren't you always the one telling me to 'take responsibility for my actions'? You burned my partner. Apologize to her."

Tobias's lips parted.

Benjamin hardened his grip, forcing Tobias's cheeks inwards, between his teeth, before he could say anything. His fingernails dug into the man's skin and pulled his lower eyelids down like hammocks. Benjamin seethed animalistically, muscles standing out on his neck and quivering. His teeth bared, lips curled so tightly back that his gums showed.

"You murdered the love of my life. Apologize to me."

Tobias stared, the color draining from his slackened face. Jones threw him back and his shackles cut deeper into his wrists. Tobias hung, slumped. He shook his head.

"I didn't..." he whispered.

Benjamin's fists pummeled his nose in a flash, spurting blood from his nostrils on impact. Not strong, but well-aimed. "You killed her! Say it!"

Tobias spluttered over the stream that shot from his nose. He sat forward, letting it drip onto his tunic, hung between his legs. "Stop hitting me, dammit!" he shouted. He lowered his voice, "I am sorry to hear that the lawyer is... the lawyer is dead. But that would not have happened if—"

Benjamin clapped his hands around Tobias's shackles and forced them to close so tightly that blood stopped flowing and Tobias was reduced to shaking out the 'f' sound over a bitten lip. His gaze gaped up at his wrists, red bubbling over his lips and lenses hanging off his face by his one ear.

"I didn't mean to!" Tobias whimpered. "It was an accident!"

Viola Mae's black leather gloves appeared in his vision and he looked away. Both shackles loosened, one came off. His arms fell to his lap, heavy as lead, and he rubbed his pulsing wrists without sparing his savior a glance. He pressed the back of one hand against his running nose.

She had condemned him, already; it was too late for an act of kindness to make a difference.

If his instructions had been followed and Mr. Might and Vine Voodoo had gone to the volcano alone, then Tobias would not have panicked. Tobias would not have triggered the weed killer to find Viola Mae's shape on the platform, or stumbled against the control panel and accidentally pushed a critical lever in his frantic scrabble and hence he would not have sent Mrs. Jones over the lava. If Viola Mae had not hit him over the head, he could have stopped everything.

I went to the lair in my investigation. Though it was difficult to navigate and dangerous; overrun with bubbling magma pools and basalt tripping hazards, it was clear that the control platform was not damaged in the eruption.

I swam into the docking bay, left open by a teenager with more important things on her mind at the time than remembering to close the shuttered door. From there, I climbed into the living quarters—the downstairs portion of the volcano lair—and wrung myself out as I squelched through the warped hall. The ceiling hung in a parabola, forcing me to duck. The kitchen was entirely blocked, and the basalt that burst from it blocked the hall outside. I had to squeeze through a small hole to reach the elevator shaft. I am of sleight size and shape, which is often handy.

The elevator was stuck at the upper level, so I peeled off my soggy socks and wiggled my toes and leapt for the thick steel cord that it ran on. I had to climb, shimmying upwards in a spy-like feat that reminded me of my days running from the angry dog next door and up to my secret treehouse hideout.

By angry dog, I mean my bitch of a neighbor at the time. A cop. What can I say? I was twenty-six and she was a mid-life crisis. Incompatible.

Still, fifteen years later, I climbed with the ease of a primate and squeezed my scrawny, slippery, wet-suited frame through the gap between the elevator and the wall. My chest screamed at me, but pain is part of the job. I weaseled through the doors with the help of my trusty crowbar and scrabbled onto the control platform to find...

Enough dust to trigger the asthma I had left behind when I was ten. Otherwise, the platform had survived the partial collapse of the lair. Therefore, if Tobias had left Mrs. Jones and Poppy Tris on the platform as per the initial plan, both would have lived to see their rescue.

Alas, Mrs. Jones was buried in basalt far below in the hero lobby, where she would never be recovered. I know not where exactly, though I have marked possible locations with red X's, drawn in lipstick. Whose fault it was that Mrs. Jones fell to her death is debatable.

Tobias MacClain brought her there, but he argued that he had never in sober mind wished her any ill intent. Spectre appeared when she was asked not to and did not give him a chance to speak for himself and express the delicacy of the situation. Their short-lived, one-sided fight—an act of violence that Tobias, some would say stupidly, refused to take part in—led to the loss of the lawyer.

There is a fine line of judgement on this case, and I, myself, choose to remain on my own side. I understand the two. I am a reporter, and I look from both sides to report what I see. I see a two-sided knife and a national mystery; a battle unrecorded, yet reported by the news to be between heroes and a villain. They reported it wrong, as they tend to do.

There was no villain.

There were no heroes.

And the battle was, in fact, recorded.