Work Text:
She had tried so hard to be a hero.
She didn’t ask for powers and she got them at an older age than most. Most of the heroes you hear about get their powers when they are young or teenagers; she was an outlier in that she got them when she turned 20.
At first, she didn’t even want to attempt to be a hero, there were already so many in the field, they didn’t need her. But with these powers, she couldn’t just ignore all the small injustices. Let the more experienced heroes take care of the big threats, she was good enough to take care of the smaller ones.
So, she tentatively started her career of being a hero to stop the small things. It was so weird and surreal to her just figuring out a disguise in general.
Being a hero was hard. The other heroes made it look relatively simple besides the fighting, but she had taken kick boxing since she had turned 18 so it wasn’t too bad for her to be thrown into fights.
But there were smaller things the normal public didn’t really know about that she had to learn.
First of all, it was downright exhausting. She was luckily in her last year of college when she finally decided to start helping. She refused to drop out or fail college, so a lot of the time she was studying. That wasn’t taking into account though that she had a part-time job.
From just college and working she was exhausted, but adding vigilantism brought on a new degree of exhaustion. That wasn’t taking into account that she was eating way more than she used to so her budget was even tighter than usual.
Honestly, graduating college couldn’t have come any sooner. But this brought on the new problem of she was going from part-time to full-time in the work. She could breathe a little easier though, because with just work, she didn’t have to really bring any of it home and thus she got relatively more ‘free time’.
As soon as she had found a great balance for all of it though, some of the villains took notice of her. It was probably the worst thing that could have happened to her.
She wasn’t one of the big impressive heroes. Sure, with training she could have become one, but that wasn’t her goal. She wanted to help in small ways and definitely couldn’t go around the country or even internationally like the others.
But they easily took notice of an unknown hero that was helping in a small way. This brought more strife to her area and she was starting to regret her actions in becoming a hero.
This is where things started to get complicated though.
With all these villains, the other heroes took notice of her. Thankfully she could go back to part-time and they were willing to pay her bills as they trained her.
Months past and she finally had to change her work into freelance work because she couldn’t afford the strict hours. She had also started to branch out a bit but she never strayed too far from her city.
But she got a name for herself. They were talking about her in the news!
One of the times though that she was helping a fellow hero though, she took a second to ask what they were actually doing. She had never really questioned it before, as she grew comfortable being a hero, she just assumed they had good reason to take down some of these enemies.
To her surprise, the villain actually answered her in a civil fashion. They were defeated and handcuffed and they were just waiting for the authorities, she had been left alone as the other hero had already been called away.
She didn’t know how long they civilly talked, but for a second she hesitated when they were hauling the villain away.
Before it had been easy to take down the bad guys because they were clearly doing things that were wrong, such as stealing, kidnapping, and other things. And when she was shoved on to a bigger stage, she had just assumed that all enemies were like though, that there was a clear sign of what they had done wrong.
It left a bitter taste in her mouth though as that villain was taken away. She didn’t agree with the villain’s methods, but the villain had brought up some real problems.
And so, she had gone home. But when she was helping other heroes, she started to take a step back to find out exactly why she was fighting them. The enemies in her town were still pretty straight forward, but on the bigger scale, the lines became blurry.
Well, maybe she could actually show the villains that while their ideas were correct, the execution was wrong. So, she started to speak out more about different issues, and she started directly helping in those issues.
They instantly started to shun her.
She was a bit taken aback just by how vicious the backlash was. She wasn’t doing anything wrong; she was just trying to make life better in general.
Her city wasn’t as quick to condemn her, but the people that actually agreed with what she said was a minority.
She had stepped up to the challenge of helping others by making personal sacrifices. Surely, it was much more painless for them to provide some funding to things that could make life better in general? Plus, wouldn’t this also bolster their popularity?
They didn’t see it that way. They saw it as her actively condemning them for mistakes that weren’t their fault. She was baffled how they had that jump in logic from asking for a little more funding in shelters became her saying the government was nothing but lazy and unhelpful.
Even if she was starting to agree with what they said she was implying. She didn’t understand what was so wrong with helping making lives better for others.
And then they started condemning her acts of kindness.
It had started simple enough. They didn’t like that she had built an overhead shelter for the homeless in a lot that had been left barren for decades.
And suddenly they needed it? They needed it for something apparently important, so they demanded she tear down what she made.
But she knew for a fact that nothing was planned to go there. And it wasn’t hurting anyone, just providing some shade and shelter from the elements for the homeless. So, she refused to do so.
Media exploded with her denial of tearing down what she built.
And the one time she was out of city to help another hero, they had viciously kicked out the homeless and broke down the structure themselves. Not before fining all of the people that had lived on that land as living on government property; some were even arrested.
She came back devastated. The most vexing thing was none of the other heroes she had interacted with cared.
Ok, so she couldn’t do it freely, well she made enough money from being a hero to buy land.
So, she bought another plot of land. As soon as the deed was signed over to her, she built the same exact thing, but with a few additional features she hadn’t considered the first time.
She was instantly hit with lawsuits and fines as soon as they registered what she had done. It was her land, why did they care?
So, she had to hire a lawyer to fight, but refused to kick people off of her land.
As that lawsuit and fines were going though, she had hired contractors to make a proper apartment building in a different area. She kept that as quiet as she could and as the legal proceedings continued, her apartment complex continued to be built.
She honestly could see no end to the legal proceedings just because she offered up her land freely to those struggling. So, she quietly opened her apartment complex and started personally seeking out families in need.
She knew alone in her apartment complex, there was a minimum 6 families that were struggling to make rent constantly and always had the worry of being evicted at any moment. So, she quietly went to each family, in her civilian persona, and offered them a new place to stay.
The new complex wasn’t relatively too far from where they were right then. And she assured them that not only were the places bigger, but the rent was less than what they had to pay now.
They were obviously skeptical, nothing that nice was free or cheap and there were always hidden things likes fines. She calmly weathered their apprehension and showed them the place.
After they had talked to the management she had hired, and discovering that everything she was offering was legitimate, they quickly signed onto a new lease.
She didn’t advertise her complex or even post up indications that they were taking tenants. She just waited for those to walk in and if they needed it, she would offer them a place.
Management was wary but ecstatic to be doing such a thing. It didn’t hurt that she was paying a living wage to everyone who worked in the complex.
While her hero persona was still getting grief for the rough shelter she had made, and she was fighting enemies, her complex was slowly filling up. Those that entered her complex kept it as quiet as possible, because they had seen what happened to acts of kindness like this.
Unluckily, half a year later, a journalist got information about her hero persona building an apartment complex and that the rent was way lower than it should be.
The media had been dying down about her shelter, immediately exploded with this new development.
There was uproar about her complex. Just as she had won her shelter, she was now fighting for her complex.
To her it was simple; yes, she had to maintain the building and make a bit of profit, but there was no reason for her to mark it so high. She was doing just fine, and even if she had a bad time, she had more than enough money to sustain the place.
She couldn’t understand the hatred. She couldn’t understand the rage at her helping others, though what they called her tenants clued her in to why they hated them.
As time had gone on, she started to really question villains more and more.
A good chunk of them had legitimate problems that they wanted fixed but were doing it through brute force. One of them was building a forcefield over acres of land to let the land grow back, but they didn’t own the land.
Another had taken over the water system to hopefully force the government to redo the pipes.
There were of course the villains that were just evil for no good reason. But she had to admit that a good chunk of them had legitimate concerns.
She had initially agreed with them about these problems and had figured that she could fix those through legitimate resources.
But the more they painted her as a villain for what she was doing, the more she started to understand.
She had stopped asking her fellow heroes a long time ago. She still fought the enemies, but sometimes she would let them somehow escape because she wanted to see their plot through.
The more they called her evil, the more she wondered why that was a bad thing. If she was evil simply for helping others, or caring for the environment, then was evil really so bad?
She moved around her money and left it relatively self-sustaining so that her complex wouldn’t be shut down for any reason as she distanced herself.
She had signed away the rights of the building to her civilian persona. She started to show up at protests and sit ins. She started to help regardless of what they ordered from her.
So yeah, she had tried so hard to be a hero, she really did.
But if it is a villain, they want her to be so badly, just for simply wanting to help others, well it’s a villain they had created. If having compassion and empathy and the want to help other people just to help them, was evil, then maybe she had been a villain all along.