Rewritten Short Story: I Am No Longer Captain Awesome
August 15th, 2025
Well, hello Teabox readers! It really has been a while since I’ve written anything that’s… Actually meant to be good. I’ve been kinda fixated on writing my silly cat blogs for a while now, and it’s been very much to the detriment of my actual writing skills. Since I start my creative writing MA at UEA in a month (yikes!!!) I thought I should probably get my butt into gear and work on some real projects. Maybe this wasn’t a real project, but you get the idea.
This is a re-write of a short story I wrote back in 2022, during my undergrad years. The original can be found here for your reading pleasure.
I was pretty proud of it at the time, though in hindsight it is a bit pants. My brother says that I don’t really know enough about the superhero genre to be writing in it, let alone attempting to subvert its conventions, and to be honest I’m inclined to agree. But I tried anyway.
I tried to keep the sort of loose, chatty tone of the original. This isn’t a story told within neat, narrative conventions. It’s a guy telling his own story the way he remembers it, and perhaps slightly trying to smooth over the parts he’s most ashamed and embarrassed of.
Expanding the world of the story was interesting, especially elaborating on a particular incident in Captain Awesome’s life. He’s certainly a more complex character now, and perhaps not even a particularly likeable one.
Gotta give a couple trigger warnings for this piece. It contains references to violence, and an instance of violence against a mentally ill person. There are also a few swear words in there, so if I have any younger readers looking at this then you may want to sit this one out.
Without further ado, I give you “I Am No Longer Captain Awesome.”
Oh god, not another one!
No, no. It’s fine. Come in. It’s just you’re the third one this week and I haven’t even lived here that long. It’s making talking to the neighbours really hard.
Really, it’s fine. I… I understand why people are interested in the way that they are. I… I think. I think that if it wasn’t me that this had all happened to then perhaps I’d be the one knocking on doors. I was really big on superheroes, so…
Right. Um… To go back to the beginning. I was all… Cheap plonk and pot noodles. You look like…. You know the sort, right? Undergrad kinda has a way of doing that to a person. Stick thin weak-ass legs, getting all winded just from just walking to class. But also I had a beer belly.
A lot of the kids I knew then were doing medical trials, just to add a bit more month to the end of the money. My friend Trish, she… Uh. She did this thing called flu camp and got more money from it than she did her maintenance loan. And I wanted to do it too, but they wouldn’t let me cos’ I’d had asthma as a kid, but they did say they had this other trial that I’d be a perfect fit for.
I can’t tell you what it was called or how it worked because I signed a non-disclosure, but I’ve been telling people other stuff about it and nobody has sued me yet, so…
So chronic illness has a real impact on the body, doesn’t it? Like, cancer and that. At least some of the battle is just keeping the body from wasting away. So they were working on a drug that helps the body rapidly gain and hold onto muscle, just to like… Hold down the fort so it’s easier to do the hard work of fighting illness. Nothing actually came of it in the end I think, which is a shame, but at the time the animal trial results seemed really promising so they’d started the process of moving onto people. Not sick people right away. No. It wasn’t like… Like experimenting on cancer patients. They wanted people with minor gripes just to prove the concept.
Except… Um… As I understand, it didn’t seem to work. The subjects would receive the drug, and just sit in the observation room for a few days no better or worse for wear. I knew a guy who did it, even. “Easiest six-hundred quid I’ve ever made,” he told me. So I thought it would all be a big load of nothing.
I arrived at the clinic on a Saturday, was injected on the Sunday morning once all the health checks came back clean, and was then just… Left. To my own devices. Well, they’d come along once every few hours to prod at me or take some blood. But they didn’t give me as much as a book to entertain myself with. And of course, I forgot to bring anything.
I sat there in this hard-ass beige chair listening to the doctors talk to each other. They just said things like “Another one not taking,” while tutting and such.
Sunday night was… Rough. All chills and aches and pains in my limbs. I just kept waking up and tossing and turning and feeling really…. Strange. The morning came and I told them all this, and they got really excited. Wheeled me off into this whole other ward where I got a far more comfortable chair and some books to read and everything. They were running bloods hourly so my arms ended up just covered in these nasty prick marks. And I felt… I dunno. All gross and sweaty, but also… Raw, if you know what I mean? Like an animal.
And then Monday night. It was better. I felt wretched, but I slept through. And then, the next morning, I woke up…
And it was like… My god. Before I was built like a toad, basically; skinny limbs, big fat belly. But I woke up and I looked like… Like a model in a fitness magazine. Everything was so firm, I couldn’t believe it!
And the doctors just all go mental. Just barely-concealed delight because it was way more than they had expected. They had me running on a treadmill and lifting weights and it was all just so effortless. Even as the weights they gave me got heavier and heavier. Felt like nothing at all. I don’t think they were supposed to do it, but one of the doctors took me out back. Showed me to his car. I stuck my arms under the back bumper and just… Lifted it. If it wasn’t so gross and oily I probably could’ve picked it up and carried it over my head.
It was a big thing in the medical journals for a while. I got a lot more out of it than the initial six-hundred quid because the reaction I had was so unusual, and I was sent all over the place for all sorts of different tests. But it wasn’t ultimately replicable. They ran so many more trials at a whole bunch of doses but I was the only one it ever worked on, so it never really hit the mainstream press.
No, tell a lie, there was one article. In the local paper. Oh god, I remember there was just this awful photo op. Me holding a heavy steel girder in one arm while shaking hands with the mayor with the other. Cringe. Just awful.
So yeah, that was me. Super strong, and a couple grand richer. Just… Just left to go back to my halls and finish my degree. There’s no real instruction manual on how to deal with sudden super strength, and I always assumed that it’d just go away, so I just got on with things.
The… Uh. The superhero thing didn’t start until after I graduated. The job market being what it is I just couldn’t find a place to work, so I was just lost and adrift. Back in my childhood bedroom with my comic books.
And it was really egotistical in hindsight. My girlfriend calls it the “male saviour complex.” I just bought this halloween costume on Ebay and started hanging around outside the clubs late at night looking for trouble.
I did good at first, I think. A little bit of good, and the good stuff wasn’t like… The superhero theatrics. Keeping drunk girls company while they waited for their taxis to arrive, just to make sure nobody took advantage. Helping them to get out of a back exit if their dates went badly. But anything that involved breaking up drunken fights went so, so wrong.
I think it was just… I had been so pathetic before. Never a part of that normal, neurotypical party stuff that you’re supposed to do in your early twenties. So I felt… I felt like suddenly being so strong and masculine made me entitled to enter that scene. There was an awful lot of resentment there, so in hindsight I think I was the instigator of some of those bar fights. Or I made them worse. And being really strong doesn’t mean that you know how to fight. I got my ass handed to me so often.
After this really bad time where I got my lip split open I decided just to step back for a while. I wanted to do some martial arts classes, but it turns out that it’s hard to find ones that aren’t for children. I wasn’t gonna beat up on twelve-year-olds. I ended up taking krav maga in this personal defence class meant for older women. Really fun, not gonna lie. And those ladies knew what they were doing. I got humbled so many times before I was ready to get back out there.
The halloween costume ended up getting tatty, and then it just sort of disintegrated in the wash one day, so I had to make my own. Made Mum really cross as spandex does not play nice with sewing machines and I ruined a lot of good needles.
That’s kinda when the whole “Captain Awesome” thing became my identity. It was written across the chest of the halloween costume, and when I made my own I really could have picked anything else, but I guess I was already attached to the moniker. And it’s so lame, right? Like, if that was in a comic book then nobody would buy it. No wonder everyone just called me “Cap” most of the time.
And then… I dunno. The hanging around outside nightclubs thing got a bit cringe, so I guess I just started broadening my horizons regarding the type of situations I was willing to stick my nose into.
Muggings were a problem in the area at the time, and I really didn’t help. You’d think that… They actually happen so fast. It’s not like the comic books. When a twat in spandex jumps into the middle of it all…. Well, for the perpetrator it's just sort of confusing, and for the victim it’s perhaps even more traumatic. Sometimes both parties just ran away. I still have a drawer with a couple of phones in it. They’d just get dropped in the scuffle, and I tried to give them back. The idea of throwing them away feels wrong somehow.
I got arrested one night, caught red-handed with a man’s stolen wallet, and that’s sorta when my involvement with the police started. I remember being sat in this cell, still in this profoundly stupid costume, just…. Scared out of my wits. Every police officer who walked past would just crack up at the sight of me. Thank goodness the victim spoke up for me because I don’t think they would’ve believed that I wasn’t the thief otherwise, but just the vigilante stuff would’ve caught me some serious charges.
And yeah. I really was scared. I think… My body was stronger, but deep down that weak little kid hadn’t gone anywhere. So when they cut me a deal, I couldn’t say no.
This was where a lot of the more well-known stuff happened. The stuff that’s actually remembered fondly. They had me do tours around the schools, giving riveting talks about… Um… Well, a lot of them were about the importance of high visibility vests when riding your bike home from school in the winter. No idea what that had to do with me. Just… Road safety. They tried to make me do anti-drug presentations and stuff for the older kids, but those guys weren’t nearly as receptive.
And then there was the Make-A-Wish kid who’d asked to spend a week with a superhero. Aw man. Dropped everything else I was doing to drive him around town in the Awesomobile.
The Awesomobile! I still have her; she’s on bricks round the back. Do you… Do you wanna see?
No? Okay.
The Make-A-Wish kid was kinda the peak of the actual good I did. After that, well… That’s when it all went…
You know what? I don’t wanna go through all that again. You know enough about me to come here, so I’m sure… You know what went down. There’s nothing remarkable about hearing it from me.
Right.
Okay.
My deal with the police… It wasn’t all just community service. After all, I genuinely did have the power. And I was just this… I thought at the time I was hot shit ‘cause it built my confidence all the way back up, but in hindsight they used me the way they did because I was just sort of hapless. I’d go somewhere, and they’d have me do things to people, but all the news would see is “look at the wacky superhero man!”
The campus riots. Or protests, rather. That was the first one. The way they had me pushing the people back. Breaking the signs across my knee. “Cap squashes spoiled students.” Remember the headlines? It was all like that. As soon as I turned up it was all a farce and nothing mattered for anything.
“Cap battles thieving thugs.” “Cap versus cheating chavs.” “Cap strikes the strikers.” You can see how this was all sick, right? I can’t even look at the clippings anymore!
Everything I thought about the nature of good and evil is just… Gone now. Evil isn’t a man in a mask rubbing his palms together in a volcano lair. It’s… A sort of hunger. The ravenous, desperate starvation of poverty on one end of the spectrum, and the gluttony of suits and ties and business deals on the other.
And there’s no good, either. Not particularly. As long as a person is fed and comfortable and has something entertaining to keep an eye on then most of the time they’re just… Passive. Not even the people I love the most are good by any real metric.
No. There is hunger and there is satiety. That’s about it. Perhaps the only realistic measures are the things one hungers for, in what quantities, and the lengths in which one goes to obtain them.
Sorry. Yeah, I know that sounds a bit edgy from a guy who used to make a living running around in spandex tights. But these days it's what I spend a lot of my time stewing on ‘cause I don’t have a whole lot else left to do.
So they had me sent out to all these… These skirmishes to do what they want me to do, and then…
And then one day I killed someone.
He, um... It was a home intrusion. Broke into this family’s house in the middle of the night, but got so spooked when the dad confronted him that he shut himself in one of the children's bedrooms with a kid. Eleven hour hostage situation. He had a knife.
I’m not exactly clued up about hostage negotiation, right? But obviously sending in a guy in a cape and leotard is only gonna make things worse. And it did.
Do you… Do you know what internal decapitation is?
They sent me in, and he lunged for me. Or… Or for the door. I don’t… Uh… I don’t really know.
I grabbed him by the neck and just… My heart was racing. I couldn’t… There was no way I could restrain myself ‘cause he had a knife.
Like crumpling an old tin can.
I dropped him and the light was entirely gone from his eyes. The little hostage kid was wailing his heart out. The policewoman who came in after me was trying desperately to do CPR, but it was only the skin still holding his head on.
I was resistant to even thinking about it for ages. I thought… It was me who did it, undeniably. It was my fault he was dead. That if I looked at the post-mortem or the investigation I’d… Then it would stop me from fully taking accountability for it.
But… Eventually I felt I kinda had to.
This guy, this intruder. Only twenty-one. Lived with his mum. And he was really, really sick. Mentally, I mean. Not evil sick. For months his mother had been begging the council to get him some help. But they did nothing. It was either go on the NHS waiting list, which can take years and years apparently, or pay something ridiculous like twenty thousand pounds for a bed in a private hospital. And this was a single mother! She was actually in the process of getting the story to the press when the incident happened, and I reckon it would’ve gotten some real traction if… If things hadn’t gone down the way they did.
The guy believed that the family in the house he broke into had a machine that was sending out psionic waves that gave him migraines. That’s why he broke in; the pain just got too much, and he wanted to go in there and find the thing and turn it off. But of course they knew nothing about this, and the guy did have a knife. The negotiations went nowhere because all he could talk about was this damned machine, and he just got more and more frantic when they insisted there wasn’t one.
When they did the post-mortem they found this… An absolutely miniscule brain lesion. A thing the size of the head of a pin. Would’ve given him agonising migraines, and also what they call “transient psychotic episodes.” It would’ve been treatable, if not for… If not for what I had done.
And… Um… It turns out the council was getting some kind of kickback from the private hospital for mental health referrals. Quite a lot of money, actually. It’s so sick because things could’ve been done for this guy. I’ve talked to nurses and social workers and… They knew exactly what emergency care plans needed to be put in place. But they weren’t.
If this had gone public then… Well, who knows what might have followed.
But that’s not how it went public. It went public as “Heroic Cap bravely bashes burglar.” All people could see was the silly superhero man in the silly cape and silly mask. And he didn’t steal anything so he wasn’t even a burglar!
So, um… That was kind of it for me, after I figured all that shit out.
A couple weeks later my so-called nemesis The Deathly Demon turned up and bumped me off. All staged obviously.
Don’t look so shocked. Obviously The Deathly Demon wasn’t real! He didn’t even have a homemade outfit; Mum had me banned from her sewing machine when I almost broke it the first time. He was a shop-bought costume. A plastic mask.
He was my friend Davie. He’s a gymnast. He helped me out with performances while touring the schools, and when it all got real we kinda fell out over it for a while. But he wanted me to get out of it, so he helped me.
If you watch the footage back… Not the real famous news camera footage of it, but the one someone took on their mobile phone, you can actually see the edge of the plastic blood pack when he stabs me with The Deathly Lance. But it did fool people.
Okay, probably it didn’t.
But I did get left alone, and that’s what I wanted.
I’d been subtly pushing back against my police handlers, you see. Just sort of… They knew that I knew. That I’d gotten wise. It was for the best that they left well enough alone.
I’m sure you’ve seen the video of the funeral. Closed casket of course, ‘cause it wasn't like I was even in there. For a while I’d toyed with the idea of laying the suit out in the coffin and having it buried, but cemetery plots are really expensive, and I wasn’t gonna waste all that money on a symbolic gesture. No. It’s in a box in the back of my wardrobe. I’d get it out to show you, but there’s so much stuff on top of it and I just can’t be bothered.
After the funeral… Well, I was no longer Captain Awesome. But that didn’t mean the powers were gone.
My god, I tried everything. Starving myself didn’t work. Neither did overeating. Just… Sitting around all day to make the muscle waste away. All the stuff people usually do on accident that harms their bodies. Except it wouldn’t budge. Months and months of the slobbiest life imaginable, and I always looked like I’d stepped straight out of the gym. My body seemed to deny like… Basic thermodynamics?
But I couldn’t stand it anymore! Every time I looked down at my hands. It was the sense memory of that poor guy’s throat. This awful, crawling feeling of wrongness. Like my body itself was immoral.
I managed to get back in touch with some of the scientists who ran the clinical trial, but they’d all moved onto other research projects and weren’t all that keen on helping to fix what they’d done to me. But I was a persistent beggar and eventually a couple of them were on board.
It took a while, and a lot of the science went far above my head. The solution was… Well, it was a drug that rapidly degraded muscle tissue. Made under utmost secrecy because if it ever got out it could be used for the most awful torture. Believe me.
It had to be given to me in stages, only a minute dose at a time. Because I still needed muscle to live, obviously, and since it couldn’t really be tested it was the only way they could keep a handle on the damage it would do.
And… I don’t really remember much of the process. The pain was just… After the second dose I just kept screaming and screaming for them to put me under, so they did. And when I woke up… Well…
I was me again. The pain was horrendous, and the loose skin means I have to live in tracksuits all the time to cover it. But it’s a good body. A body that can’t hurt anyone.
Three months of physio, I had. It wasn’t like I had to totally re-learn to walk, but a lot of stuff wasn’t effortless anymore.
Once I was discharged that very same doctor led me out to the car park to try and lift his car. When my hands just strained against the bumper I cried with happiness.
That awful chapter of my life is over, and it’s never coming back. I am no longer Captain Awesome. I will never, ever be him again. Just saying that out loud is a relief.
These days? Well, uh… I guess I’m a bit of a recluse. I work fully from home and my girlfriend is on a sort of part work from home system, so I guess we’re both sort of homebodies. And I look so different from the way I was back then, so it’s very rare that I get recognised. It’s only the… No offense intended, of course. It’s the hardcore fans that recognise me and come to my door and stuff.
No, no. I don’t… Okay, maybe it annoys me a little, but it’s fine. When it’s the good stuff, like the old school presentations and stuff, I really don’t mind talking about it. That’s what a lot of the fans like, I think. The kids who grew up with my safety presentations. But some of them? My god.
Only kicked one guy out so far. Just kept asking me questions about how it felt to take a life. Real in-depth shit about my police work that I really don’t wanna be talking about. Like he got off on it.
Don’t worry, I’m not gonna kick you out. If you’d like a sandwich or a cuppa tea then…
No? Okay.
Look, before you go can I just ask you for one thing? If you have like… A few quid to spare, then just go online and search for a charity called “Ben’s Memory: Helping Hands In Crisis.” Ben was… That was the name of the home intruder that I… It’s his mum’s charity. I give whatever I can, anonymously of course.
Good and evil may not really exist, and the idea of a hero is just a sort of sick joke really. But… But it’s the little things that really matter. Ordinary people making little breaks away from their lives of complacency to work for something bigger. Teamwork. Incremental progress. There is more true heroism in choosing each day to do the right thing than all the acts I did as Captain Awesome.