Chapter Text
Mysterion lay on the roof of the South Park Gazette. Waiting. Watching.
He looked at the analogue watch on his wrist. The offender he’d taken down a week ago had told him there would be another hookup today, but he hadn’t said what time. Mysterion had been waiting for over two hours now. His hand habitually reached for a cigarette in the loops of his worn-out belt, fiddling with the lid of the box. He thought about lighting one, just to fill time, before deciding against it. Instead, he put his hands back on the roof in front of him, letting himself feel the coolness of the tin–even through his gloves–and sighed.
A rustling sound caught his attention. His neck snapped to the bush that it came from, just opposite the Unplanned Parenthood building. He stayed silent, watching, waiting for the sound to repeat. When nothing happened, he figured it must have been a small animal that had squirrelled out of sight before he could spot it. He looked at his watch again: 4:25 a.m. If this guy didn’t show up in the next half hour, Mysterion would be going home with nothing achieved. At least it was a weekend; if he’d needed to go to his daytime work in the morning, he would have gone home at two a.m., but on the days he didn’t need to get up at eight in the morning, he gave himself another three hours.
Mysterion was dragged out of his thoughts by a voice. He craned his neck to try and see where it came from, but the source was out of his line of sight. Still, he listened, taking mental notes of what he was hearing to tell the police. Two voices, both male. One was slightly higher pitched, and over-pronounced his R’s. The other was lower, a bit gravelly, and it sounded like he had a light accent. Portuguese maybe? Mysterion wriggled into a position where he could easily jump off of the roof when it was time. He listened to the conversation between the two men, adding some key points to his mental list.
“How much is in there?” Asked the lower voice.
“Fifteen K’s,” replied the Portuguese man. Mysterion wasn’t sure if he meant kilograms or thousands of dollars, and he didn’t know what was in the case, so he had no clue how much it was actually worth, but he took note of the number nonetheless. Mysterion sat through listening to the small talk about the new mall being built in town before he heard anything else of value.
“God, this is heavy,” the lower voice groaned.
“Heavy? You are weak. It is only fifteen kilos,” the Portuguese man said. Mysterion edited the mental note. Fifteen kilograms of… something. And the one who was receiving this something was weaker. He would be the one to go for when they split. Another point to add to the note.
The exchange lasted just under ten minutes, and when the air was filled with no sound but footsteps, Mysterion shifted his weight to the edge of the building and started climbing down the wall. There had been a few times doing this self-assigned gig that Mysterion was thankful for his uniform choices; climbing up and down walls was often one of them. He wondered how quickly his friends would have figured out his secret had he not chosen to wear gloves. How callused his hands might be from the rough walls, how scarred they might be from all of the times they would have bled from getting rough with criminals.
When he saw the ground only a foot below him, he jumped off of the wall. He landed with his knees slightly bent—something he’d learnt from his elementary school gym classes—the ideal position for stability and safety. Mysterion skulked around the corner of the building, going towards where the voices came from. He stuck to the building like gum on a shoe, only separating from the wall when something got in his way. He caught sight of a briefcase swinging in a hand and froze. He thought about his next move for a half a second, but he had to act fast before the man rounded the corner and saw him.
Mysterion swung his right fist towards the man’s head, and he felt the stranger’s face on his knuckles. He recoiled as Mysterion shook his fist out, dropping the briefcase. He moved to hit back at Mysterion, but having been part of many a fight in the past, Mysterion saw the move coming. He dropped to the floor in time to duck, and picked up the case while he was down. He used the briefcase and struck the back of the man’s knees with it, taking his legs out from under him. He landed on his stomach on the pavement, with a loud thud. A broken stream of red dripped out of his nose.
Mysterion took the opportunity and put his left foot on the man’s back, preventing him from getting up.
“What’s in the case?” Mysterion growled, his voice steady. The weight of the hood reminded him to keep it low and gravelly; the hood coming off was usually a signal to his body to return to his natural, high-pitched voice. The criminal stayed silent and Mysterion pressed his boot onto his back harder. “I said, what is in the case?” He repeated, shaking the handle of the black box. The man underneath him whimpered and answered.
“Coke! Don’t hurt me, please! I have children,” he begged. Mysterion realised he had taken down the man with the lower voice, and wondered how the other man would have held up in a fight. He lifted his foot, but only enough so the man could still breathe. If he delivered him dead, the police would definitely break their unspoken truce.
Mysterion had been helping the force for years, leaving two notes; the first detailing the crimes and the takedown of the criminal–stapled to whichever pole he tied the culprit to, the second slipped under the door of the station telling the cops where to find the pole. In return? The police did nothing. They never spoke of Mysterion during their press conferences, and they never attempted to communicate with him, a perfectly suitable arrangement for the vigilante. They only knew his alias from the notes, signed with the name he had been given by a girl he thought of every time he wrote it.
Mysterion had arisen to protect a little girl who could not look after herself. He knew that if he were to offer her help without a costume and fake voice, she would yell at him to use his money on himself, or that she would get worried that he wasn’t eating enough. With the voice, however, he was able to give her the toys she always stared at when they passed them in the shop, or feed her the home-made bread that he’d made in Home-Ec. She was the one that named him.
The morning after Mysterion first visited her through the bedroom window, she went up to her brother, not knowing that it was him who had given her the doll.
“I met my guardian angel last night! Look what he got me!” She had squealed excitedly. “He didn’t tell me his name though…”
“I guess he’s a mystery then!” Her brother had said.
“Maybe that’s his name! Mystery… On! Mysterion!” The girl had laughed, brushing her doll’s hair with her fingers while her brother combed hers with his. The boy smiled too. He was nine, far too young to be buying gifts for his sister with the cash that he had earned with his illegal job–working as a waiter before he had even begun middle school–or to be worrying about either of them dying from starvation or malnutrition. They were both far too young to be in the situations their parents had put them in.
Mysterion pushed the criminal under his foot so that he rolled over, and forced him to sit up. When the man was sitting, the hero reached into the pocket that was clumsily fastened to his second-hand belt and pulled out three zip ties; one for each hand and one to tie the two together. He tied the criminal to the closest telephone pole, only after patting him down, taking away and smashing the phone he had on him, and knelt down to write his note.
“How much is it worth?” Mysterion asked. If it was fifteen kilos, he figured it should be, at the very least, one million.
Again, the man stayed silent. “Fine, we’ll just leave that for the cops to figure out. You said you got a family? Better get a good lawyer, the way things are looking you won’t be seeing ‘em for a while,” Mysterion said, in the gravelly tone he’d adopted. It often reminded him of Batman when he used it.
He finished the note describing the conversation he had heard–and the takedown that followed–and stapled it onto the pole, with the briefcase just out of reach of the man.
He started to leave before he heard another noise. It came from around the corner, so he put his notepad and pencil back into his pocket and stayed in the shadows as he made his way around the building. He stopped and listened. A bush rustled in his peripheral vision, the same bush that had made a noise as he was on the roof. He started walking towards it before the small watch on his left forearm beeped. It was 5 a.m. Time to go home. Mysterion pressed a button on his watch to turn the beeping off and glanced back at the bush.
“Must be a rabbit’s den down there,” he mumbled to himself, still using his growl. He continued to stay in the shadows as he made his way to the police station. It wasn’t too far away that night, sometimes he would need to go all the way across town to deliver the note before heading all the way back to where he came from to get back to his house. It was especially important to stay in the shadows, it would be sunrise soon. It helped that it was almost winter, the sun was rising later and setting earlier, but even so, he couldn’t risk the public seeing him. He had been doing this for over ten years, too long for him to own up to anything now. Too long for the public to discover him.
Mysterion slipped the note detailing where to find the criminal under the only door of the station with no security cameras on it. His signature noted at the bottom, he leapt through the shadows back to his house. Sometimes Mysterion wished he could fly, and sometimes he could imagine he was flying. He loved the wind on the small part of his face left exposed by his costume, the feeling of his cape billowing behind him.
He made it home and put bread in the toaster. He needed to eat, but nothing too heavy before sleep. After a childhood of being malnourished, he would often throw up if he went to bed too full. As it was toasting, Mysterion took off his boots, gloves and face coverings.
He sat down at the table with his toast, eating like a zombie, barely able to keep his eyes open. When the plate was empty, he took off the rest of his Hero attire and stashed everything in the hole next to his wardrobe covered by a poster, neatly folded for the next night. Without his uniform on, the man was no longer Mysterion. He went to bed a boring twenty-two year old man; Kenny McCormick.