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“Who am I then? Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that person, I’ll come up: if not, I’ll stay down here till I’m somebody else”

- Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Earlier This Morning

Oswald Cullen Dimico, AKA “OCD,” didn’t feel well today.

His sinuses ached, probably a warning sign of an unseen infection which was slowly killing him from the inside out.

He found himself breathing too heavily, which could indicate chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

His skin felt blotchy, which could be an allergic reaction to something he’d touched and which would soon cause his throat to close off, asphyxiating him.

And the air in this bar was filled with cigarette smoke, which he could feel filling up his lungs with carcinogens and tar.

Oz was sitting at a table inside Joe Chester’s Bar, in an area of the city which smelled more like urine than most outhouses.

The light overhead was lit and sputtering, despite the fact that it was still sunny outside, and the faint electric buzzing sound mixed quite well with the buzzing of flies, which filled the space.

His feet were sticking to the floor, and he hoped it was due to remains of spilled alcohol, rather than blood or semen.

With this city, you could never quite be sure.

All told, this was Oz’s absolute nightmare. It was dirty, disorganized, and crawling with bacteria.

He didn’t like it.

Oz was the type of person who listened to the flight attendant’s safety talk every time he was on a plane. He even read along in the emergency checklist guide from the seat pocket in front of him, just to make sure they covered everything.

Not that he really was on planes a lot, as he didn’t like them.

Planes were unsafe, obviously, but they were also hotbeds of germ infestation.

The recycled air meant that you were basically breathing in a hundred other people with every breath.

Their sweat and their skin and their bacteria.

Microscopic bits of their last meal and their foulness and the unspeakable things they did to each other.

Tiny bits of their excrement were landing on your tongue, filling your nose, and being inhaled into your skull.

Strangers’ feces were touching your brain. Right now.

You were tasting it all. Breathing it in. Making it a part of you.

It was revolting . Like putting a hundred people in a blender and then drinking them all down.

Oz was the kind of person who, after leaving his apartment, would return to check and double-check that he had turned off the oven, despite the obvious fact that his apartment didn’t actually have one.

And then he’d check and double-check that he had remembered to lock the door, always pushing his body against it in the same way, and attempting to turn the knob three times: first clockwise, then jiggling it counter-clockwise, then a more forceful turn clockwise accompanied by bumping against the door with his shoulder to check to see if it was secure.

It was the only way to be absolutely certain that the door would remain closed and the outside world could not infiltrate his one sanctuary.

At the moment though, Oz was really more concerned with work.

Oz was currently taking part in a Consortium of Chaos operation to figure out what the hell was going on. His employers were forced to have missions like that a lot, because they were, for the most part, staggeringly incompetent.

They were morons.

It was a sad fact of his new life.

He worked with idiots who focused more on crime, sex, and talk shows, than they did their jobs of protecting the city. Which wasn’t too surprising, given the fact that they had only stopped being super-villains nine months ago.

There were some strange disappearances of late in the city though, and so Oz had been dispatched along with a couple other coworkers to see if he could discover the whereabouts of the citizens, and what was causing them to vanish.

Once upon a time, Oz never would have taken this mission.

Once upon a time, Oz had been a part of the Freedom Squad, a superhero group dedicated to protecting the city from the scourge that was the Consortium of Chaos.

Then things got weird and his former coworkers went off the rails, and so Oz had been forced to switch sides in order to help save the city from them.

And almost died himself in the process. So, now Oz was a former hero, joining up with former villains, to be…

something. At best, they rarely achieved higher than “anti-hero,” but Oz hoped that with his patient help, they could all make it 24 hours without committing some fresh atrocity.

But more than likely, his coworkers would get him killed long before that happened.

Or kill him themselves, either deliberately or in a “childish prank gone horribly wrong” sort of situation.

It was inevitable, at this point.

He had resigned himself to it.

He shifted in the wooden chair, saying a silent prayer that it wouldn’t crack through.

He did not want to touch the floor of this place.

As it was, he was already planning on burning his shoes before he even entered his apartment tonight.

It was one of the reasons why he kept several completely sanitary pairs in the lobby, just in case.

It was amazing the number of people who thoughtlessly walked through all manner of disgusting things, then happily tracked all of it back to their homes without first decontaminating their shoes.

He stared down at his phone, which he cleaned twice a day with disinfectant, and replaced every six months to avoid germs which were resistant to antibacterials.

He was silently debating with himself whether or not he should call her.

On one hand, he wanted very much to hear her voice and make certain that she was okay. But, on the other hand, they weren’t really “dating.” Or, really, even “friends.” She was just a woman who Oz deeply, deeply enjoyed.

Would it be creepy to call up the woman you saw at a department store every day, just because you felt like talking to her?

Oz wasn’t really the best at judging what was “creepy” though.

Things like that mystified him. And he’d been told more than once in his life that almost everything he said or did was creepy or freaked people out.

So, he simply stared at the illuminated screen, which promised that with a touch of the button, he could be speaking to Natalie Quentin.

The world had thrown Oz away several times in his life. Literally and figuratively.

No one in this world had ever wanted him.

His parents had their own dramas. His aunt and uncle viewed him as a scary burden they were saddled with.

His jailors had thought he was irritating.

The Freedom Squad ignored him. The Consortium still viewed him as an outsider.

And there wasn’t a person in this city who could identify him in a line-up, no matter how hard he tried to be a hero for them.

No matter how much pain he endured or how high a standard he held himself to.

Oz was trash. He would never amount to anything and everyone knew it, including him.

He’d wanted to be someone extraordinary his entire life.

But it wasn’t until Natalie looked at him that he really understood what that was.

When he touched that woman, it was like everything clean and fun and pure was washing over him. Cleansing him of all of the trash that had been heaped onto him over the years. Letting him finally breathe.

When Natalie was around, Oz wasn’t afraid anymore. He felt like a hero. Like he wasn’t just something that everyone threw away or unwillingly endured.

She was beautiful in a way that made him want to sit back and marvel at her. In Oz’s mind, she was the epitome of the female form. Every single thing about her was perfect. He could happily spend hours, just looking at her.

Of course, such a thing would be completely against the way Oz lived his life.

It would probably scare her.

But try as he might, he couldn’t stop noticing the gentle curve of Natalie’s hip. Or the way her breasts moved when she walked. Or the way her breathtakingly perfect lips curved at the corners when she was amused or silently laughing at someone.

Every tiny movement of that woman’s body was an erotic daydream.

And Oz treasured each and every one.

But Oz could tell already that he wasn’t going to press the button on his phone. Because… because Miss Quentin was a woman who deserved better than trash. And when you came right down to it, that was all Oz was. Deep down, Oz recognized it.

He’d only pull her down too.

As he was sitting there pondering the Miss Quentin matter and waiting for the bar tender to return from a break, Oz was joined by one of his teammates on this particular mission: Multifarious.

Oz had never had an issue with the masked individual.

Yes, he or she was a deranged lunatic, who killed people like someone else might eat breath mints, but at least he/she wasn’t a jerk about it.

Oz found Multifarious’ brand of crazy… relaxing.

Not that being around someone so unpredictable didn’t also drive him completely up the wall, just that Oz was used to thinking of himself as the craziest person in the room. And he didn’t really have to worry about that when Mull was around.

More than that though, he worked quite well with Multifarious. They almost always went on missions together, probably because they managed to cover all possible reactions to a given situation. Between the two of them, there really wasn’t much they didn’t know how to handle.

Generally, Oz’s rules of engagement on use of force went something like: speak, shout, show, shove, shoot to warn, shoot to kill.

His goal in every situation was to keep it from escalating, while still pursuing his objectives.

If he could get what he wanted without a fight, that’s what he was going to do.