Containment Six…. affectionately known as ‘Deep Six’. The most secure facility in the world. It is a prison for containing the worst, most powerful, super powered people in the world. It is on the ocean floor, almost a full mile below sea level.

Every cell is equipped with power dampeners. They don’t just suppress your powers, they feed off of your powers. You spend all day doing nothing but you are exhausted like you used your powers all day, everyday, non-stop. They literally suck your will to live…. to power the lights.

Down here, there is no sun rise, no sun set…. They cycle the lights randomly to keep us from getting into any sort of routine, from being able to measure time or days or figure out guard rotations. Some ‘days’ have two hours of light, some have twenty six hours of light, and, of course, we have everything in between…. Just an extra layer of punishment to our days in solitary.

I don’t know how long I have been here. I don’t belong here, but the courts said otherwise.

There was a fight between two supers. They were tearing apart the city trying to kill each other. One of them crashed into the high rise I was in, right at the base of the building, taking out a structural pillar holding the whole damn place up. The building began to lean, she was going down, so I did the only thing I could think of…. I stood where the pillar was and held up the building.

I was shouting for everyone to evacuate, but it takes time to evacuate ninety floors of office space. I started to sweat. The strain of holding ninety floors up is more than I have ever experienced. The building was slowly crushing me. I could feel my muscle bulge and ache under the strain.

The longest minutes of my life passed as I struggled to hold that building up. The fighting supers came back this way and hit the building again. They took out a second support pillar and the building came down.

I was buried in ninety stories of rubble. I dug myself out and walked away unscathed. One hundred and fifty three people made it out while I held that building up. Two hundred and thirty three died when it came down. The supers kept fighting like the lives didn’t matter.

A rage I didn’t know I possessed washed over me. I watched the two supers flying and fighting, ignoring the carnage and the lives they were destroying and that rage became a fire that I could not contain.

I leapt into the air and crashed into one of the supers flying over head. I wrapped my legs around him and started punching. He couldn’t get away and he couldn’t shake me and by time we crash landed there was only a bloody stump where his head should have been.

The second super landed near us as I screamed at the bloody corpse of the first super.

“Thank-you citizen! I will” #BAM

Fuck him. I hit him with everything I had in an upper cut. I found out later that I knocked his body into orbit. They never found his head.

I collapsed and cried for people lost that today. For the senselessness of it all.

The courts didn’t care about the people who escaped from the building because of my efforts. The courts didn’t care about the people who didn’t escape. The courts didn’t care about the supervillain whose head I pulverized. No… it was city’s hero, one man, that they cared about. I was charged and convicted of knocking the strongest man in the world into orbit. What a farce.

It was decided that I was a threat. That I couldn’t be trusted walking the streets. That I could snap and start punching people into orbit at anytime. I was sentenced to life in solitary at Containment Six.

There were memorials built in his honour…. There was nothing built for regular people that died that day. The world was in love with superhero’s and it didn’t matter how many people they killed, injured or maimed…. As long as it was in the name of the greater good.

Fuck the greater good.

“Open twenty-two!”, a voice yelled. My door slid open. A man in an expensive black suit stood outside my cell. “You look bigger than when you were locked up.”, he said to me.

I shrugged. “I think it is the dampeners. It is like they are forcing me to use my strength non-stop. I might as well be at the gym twenty four seven. This place has made me stronger than I could have ever been on the outside.”, I said.

“Dampeners!”, he yelled. I felt my strength return in an instant. It was like a breath of fresh air. I flexed my muscles and stretched. I haven’t felt this good since I have been down here.

The man in the suit smiled. “I have a proposition for you.”, I raised an eye brow at him, “I am looking to put together a team.”, my face dropped into a scowl. “A team that will stop supers…. Heroes and villains. I don’t care about good and evil. I care about saving lives.”, he said. He was watching my face closely. Reading me. “I watched your trail. I watched the footage of you holding up that building. You cared about the people…. Not the other supers. Not the press or fame… you cared about the people. Join my team and help me put an end to threat the supers pose.”

“Who are you?”, I asked.

“I work for the government. The people maybe in love with the supers but the governments of the world aren’t. They have created a NATO task force, in conjunction with every government in the world, to deal with the super threat.”

“You are going to stop supers with supers?”

“How else?”, he said simply. I shrugged. “Will you join my team?”

“No stupid spandex suits. No cheesy names.”, I said.

“Agreed.”

And just like that I joined the team that hunted down supers.