Normal on the Outside

[zanseattle]

He would have made quite a sight, if anyone could have seen him; he was perched high atop the Caprice building, his hand absently curled around the transmission antenna to steady him. His body was wrapped in a high-tech, skin-tight black and red costume that showed off his physique and was emblazoned with a red star. The costume was new, and maybe a little cheesy, but he liked that he looked like a superhero now. More like the others he'd met, and less like some Infernal they'd battled.

Onyx looked out over the city below, with all its citizens going this way and that, and tried to remember what it was like when he was one of them. Not that he was ever really one of them. For one thing, he didn't grow up in Millennium City, he'd lived in Red Bluff, Iowa, population 1042.

If his parents had been surprised when his mother became pregnant, after years of trying to conceive and finally giving up entirely, they were shocked when Onyx was born. They hardly expected their Christmas Miracle to be born with deep red skin, red eyes, and a spiked tail.

Some babies are born with tails, he guessed. He'd heard urban legends about that. But unlike them, he'd been able to keep his.

But other than that, little James Morgan had been just like these citizens. He'd watched Sesame Street, carved pumpkins at Halloween, skipped school, tried smoking, sneaked on to his parents' computer to look at "adult" websites, volunteered at a food bank, been bored, been horny, been... normal.

At least he thought he'd done all those things. Some of them he remembered and some of them he only knew from his (painfully badly written) journal entries and the things his family and friends told him. He'd lost a lot of stuff when he turned 18.

His parents could only manage to call it "that".

"It was so difficult when 'that' happened," they would tell their friends, who would nod in sympathy while morbidly curious for more details about Onyx's "psychotic break" and memory loss.

He'd spent two weeks in a mental hospital, his parents frantic, while they tried to figure out what had triggered his breakdown. He appeared to be losing memories, forgetting people and placed that he knew, and was exhibiting strange behavior. Speaking in tongues, uncontrolled angry outbursts, cruel words.

It was as if he was becoming a demon inside as well as out.

It was only the intervention of a gifted sensitive located by the Champions that halted the process and let Onyx return to a semblance of a normal life. He retained enough memory to allow him to function, but everything seemed slightly... off. He had lost a lot of the emotional connections-- even sometimes the concepts of certain emotions-- and was going through the motions more than actually living his life.

One of the things he lost was his name. He became downright hostile to people calling him "James" -- or "Jimmy" as his mother and some close friends did-- and insisted they call him Onyx, after his birthstone. He'd been given a small onyx necklace at some point and the psychiatrists said he'd gotten fixated on it during his time in the institution. Onyx could tell that this upset his mother, and it made his home life even less bearable.

So Onyx headed off to Millennium City at the urging of the psychic he'd worked with, who told him there were bound to be more heroes there who could help him regain his memories and his humanity. So he went. And he discovered that his memories weren't the only thing different about him.

He started conjuring dark clouds, then shooting bolts of darkness, then seeing lifeforce auras, then -- accidentally -- pulling that lifeforce into himself. (The city bus driver who was his first victim tried to be forgiving about it, having experienced stuff like that before.) Onyx was both horrified and apologetic and intensely curious at the same time.

The rest was the usual superhero story. Man finds powers, man puts them to use helping people as a superhero, superhero makes hero friends, superhero gets into S&M relationship with demon-tinged human man, superhero's demonic father appears and demands loyalty...

(Oh, wait, that wasn't the usual story at all. It was so hard to remember what was normal.)

Onyx had been curious about sex, so he'd "hooked up" with a hot guy he'd met at Caprice. His first time was intense, so intense in fact that he inadvertently triggered a demonic marking ritual at the end, leaving his new friend in a semi-enslaved state.

When Onyx realized what he'd done, he apologized and released him, but not until his demonic side got the best of him and he'd put his slave to use one more time. He remembered how good that felt, and how horrible it made him feel afterwards, especially seeing the man curled in the fetal position, trying to endure the pain of such an intimate, though unwelcome, bond being ripped from his soul.

Not long after that, an Infernal appeared and told Onyx he was his true father, and that Onyx was meant to give up his humanity and join him in conquering the human race. This enslavement of a human wasn't a fluke; it was his destiny to do this again and again, and to do so at his father's side.

The demon was lying, Onyxwas pretty sure. All demons did was lie, especially when they knew it could cause pain and confusion. But the part about his own true nature rang true, and it terrified him.

These are the kinds of things that make you re-examine the path your life is taking.

He'd been presented with a choice: continue to walk the line between demon and human or pick a side and stick with it. So here Onyx was, wrapped in high-tech, spandex-like fibers, looking out over the city for citizens in trouble. He looked like a normal superhero now, if there was such a thing. He'd be normal on the outside and hope that he'd relearn what it meant to be human and be normal on the inside as well.

His sensitive hearing picked up a bank alarm several blocks away. He summoned the flames that would carry him through the air, and shot down from the spire like a rocket falling to Earth.