1969.

Tommy waited until Shirley said she was done eating to rise from his chair, pull a small box from his pocket, and present it to her, on his knees. She squealed in delight and threw her arms around him, shedding and wiping away tears. Then, after they cleared the dinner table of his small apartment and washed and put the dishes away, they retired to bed, calmly and quietly. 

As she lay nestled in her ruffled nightgown, Shirley asked quietly, “Are you sure it’s okay that we still don’t just yet?”

“What? Of course,” said Tommy.

“I didn’t know if you wanted… since you proposed…”

“And you said, ‘yes.’ Nothing could make me happier.”

Since they first met, he had found her shy modesty endearing. It reminded him of life back home, before he traded cornfields stretching almost to the horizon for the crowded streets of Titan City. Somewhere in the sweetness of her smile, he could almost see those Sunday potlucks and quiet nights at home that he used to think he hated. Shirley had even gotten him going back to church, and Tommy hoped that somehow her innocence might cleanse him, free him from the desires that now shamed him. 

He fell asleep peacefully enough, but another nightmare awaited, another fractured impression of his capture by Doctor Oblivion and the psychedelic torments he received. 

The  doctor’s bespectacled face floated into view, red hair blazing upward from his high forehead, and he said in his strange, sing-song voice, “We have great work to accomplish, you and I, work that may someday save the world! Now, I will be counting down now from five… Five… Very relaxed… Four… Extremely relaxed… Three… Your limbs feel soft as sand…” 

Tommy could feel the ropes that bound him to the chair in Doctor Oblivion’s hidden lair, then the breathing mask covering his nose and mouth, and the cloyingly sweet scent of the gasses he was forced to inhale, each one a different cocktail than the last — one making him feel as tiny as a grain of sand, another making all sound seem to come through water, and the next sending electric shivers down his limbs.

“Today I’ve prepared something quite special for you…” said Doctor Oblivion.

A pair of headphones enshrouded Tommy’s ears, and he heard the clucking of a packed chicken coop as black and white footage of an old football game was projected onto the wall opposite. A John Phillips Sousa march followed,  blaring over images of children spinning on a merry-go-round, intercut with farmers slaughtering their hogs. Then President Nixon could be heard addressing the nation on the Vietnam war as a pair of snakes writhed in slow-motion mating.

As suddenly and unexpectedly as always, sometimes erupting before his eyes in the middle of images he had already seen before,  a white skull blazed against a field of red, accompanied by clanging alarm bells.

Tommy awoke with a scream, and Shirley was quick to comfort him. “It’s okay,” she said, resting a hand upon his back. “Just another nightmare.” 

But something about what he had undergone made human touch unbearable. Tommy took her by the wrist and, as though she were either  very delicate and fragile or a trap from which he must cautiously extricate himself, he pulled her hand away.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It just never…”

“You don’t have to apologize,” said Shirley. “No one can control what they dream.” 

In the dark, Tommy saw care glinting in her eyes, but she could only offer compassion without comprehension. Shirley did not understand that the things he dreamed were things he had truly seen because Tommy had chosen not to burden her with the knowledge of his life as a costumed crimefighter’s sidekick.

He slid out of bed. “I’m going to get some fresh air.” 

“How about a little company?”

“No, it’s okay. I don’t want to keep you up. You’ve got another long day at the secretarial pool.”

“I don’t mind, really,” she laughed softly. “I’m awake now.”

“No, please stay.”

“Okay,” she said with a disappointed pout and apologetic smile. He could feel her eyes on him as she returned her head to the pillow and he closed the bedroom door.

Being on the eighth floor, Tommy’s apartment offered a view that felt so familiar. How many times at the Crimson Wraith’s side had he gazed down upon Titan City to follow the trail of some supervillain’s henchman? They made themselves easy enough to spot, often dressed in costumes as ridiculous as the one he himself had been convinced to wear. 

Looking back, it all felt so unreal, just one big game, like school kids dressing up and chasing each other around a playground in a never-ending period of recess. 

In every memory of it, Tommy felt himself smiling and hated himself for it. His was a joy born of ignorance, trusting that the man he loved had it all figured out. He had felt safe at his side and safe in his arms — a thought that now made him shudder.

Sometimes from his balcony, instead of looking down, he would look up and across to the other rooftops around, where he would feel compelled to peer into this or that patch of darkness and wonder if he were hiding there, watching, taking that license he felt entitled him to observe the private doings of all Titan City’s citizens to spy upon Tommy after their separation. 

Almost every time he felt this urge, he was right. 

Edward spent more nights than he cared to count watching Tommy live a life that seemed as strange and fantastical to him as his own must have appeared to the typical Titan citizen.

The ache of losing Tommy drove Edward just a little mad. For days, he could not sleep more than a few minutes at a time because the bed they had shared seemed too cold and too empty. Maybe this was why his father never seemed to show interest in any kind of romance before marrying Sylvia. Had he not been shot in the ribs on the very night she returned to his life, ending his career as the Crimson Wraith, William might have discovered he was unable to balance romance and crime-fighting either.

Edward knew that spying on Tommy was disrespectful to his former lover and bad for his state of mind. If he had a close friend with whom he could confide such things, he would have been ashamed to confess it, and surely such a friend would plead with Edward to stop. But he had no such friend, and Edward did not know to be that friend to himself. So, over and over again, he spent some part of his evening patrol watching Tommy’s apartment.

Then Edward saw Tommy propose. He watched the boy who brought him more joy than he ever imagined get down on one knee after a home-made dinner of spaghetti and meatballs to offer that young woman a small box and the ring it held inside. 

Edward saw her face light up and tears shimmer upon her cheeks, and tears began to drip down from his domino mask because he had known that exact same happiness too. It was hers now.

Doctor Oblivion had not been the first villain to capture Tommy. Edward had been held prisoner enough times himself to expect it as part of the role of the Wily Wisp. 

It was the role of the Crimson Wraith to come to the rescue, knowing his sidekick was held as bait for some kind of trap. But, when, after five days, Edward finally found the location of Doctor Oblivion’s secret laboratory, the condition in which he found Tommy was unlike any he had ever seen.

Doctor Oblivion’s voice had rung from speakers surrounding the room where he found Tommy blindfolded and bound to a chair. “Here he is, your faithful companion!” 

Red light filled the room with a bloody haze, and a spinning disco ball sent disorienting sparkles swirling through clouds of a strange, sweet-smelling mist that hung in the air.

“Now let us observe your heartfelt reunion!” 

An electronic throb replaced Doctor Oblivion’s voice as Edward rushed to untie his young lover. But as soon as he removed Tommy’s blindfold, he saw a frenzy overtake him. Foam bubbled at the edges of Tommy’s lips as he  leapt from the chair to attack.

Edward fought to control him, turning away from blows and trying to grab Tommy’s arms. But even though he had trained his Wily Wisp in martial arts, he had never seen the young man fight like this before, like an animal fiercely defending its life.

Doctor Oblivion’s voice returned. “Success!” he shrieked. “Here we have achieved profound psychological transformation with no consent from the patient required! No longer will they joke that, for a psychiatrist to change a lightbulb, the lightbulb has to want to change! Now we can save our victims from themselves whether they desire it or not!”

Edward pleaded with Tommy as they struggled, “Snap out of it, dearest friend! You know me! You don’t want to hurt me! And I will not hurt you!” 

But Tommy only answered with sputtering screams of primal rage, until Edward could pin him down. “If you can’t hear my words, then, please, hear this.” And he leaned down to kiss his beloved sidekick.

It took a kiss to break the spell Doctor Oblivion had placed Tommy under. He kissed Edward back, and then, as groggy as a waking dreamer, Tommy said, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Please, get me out of here. I want to go home.”

They had not seen Doctor Oblivion enter the room, mouth agape. “Can it be? Is this the Crimson Wraith’s secret? That he is afflicted with the mental disease of homosexuality?” And he giggled maniacally. “What a profound perversion! Such a deep-seated sickness of the mind! How delightful!”

Edward had relaxed his grip on Tommy, thinking his sidekick calmed and safe, so Tommy easily pushed him away to launch at Doctor Oblivion. “You sick son-of-a-bitch!” Tommy shouted. 

He began viciously beating the sadistic psychiatrist, before hurling him into the chair where Tommy had been kept a prisoner. The gas mask still hung at its side, a canister of psychotropic drugs attached. 

“How about a taste of your own medicine, Doc?” Tommy forced the mask over his captor’s face and twisted the canister’s knob all the way open. “Choke on it! Choke on it and die!”

Edward came quietly behind him. “That’s enough, dearest friend. He’s had enough. You need to let him go.” He placed his gloved hands on Tommy’s shoulders. “This isn’t you. This isn’t justice.”

Slowly, Tommy relaxed his grip on Doctor Oblivion. But it was too late. Already he had been made to inhale far more of the mind-altering chemicals in one sitting than he had forced Tommy to take in all the days before combined. 

With a faint melody, almost like a children’s nursery rhyme, Doctor Oblivion murmured, “I know the Crimson Wraith’s secret…” But no one would ever be able to make much sense out of anything else he said ever again, neither in the institution that would hold him for a time nor on the streets where he would find himself following incarceration.

It was not long after that Tommy left Edward, Finn Manor, and the Wily Wisp as well. Having finished his degree at Titan University, he took a job as a stocks trader. His number suffered as he struggled just to make it through the day without a debilitating crying fit. But he earned enough for a small apartment of his own and, eventually, a ring for Shirley, who worked as a typist at the same office.

The night that Shirley accepted his proposal, having woken screaming from his nightmares once again, Tommy looked out from his balcony and, for the first time since he moved there, he did not sense the night was looking back. 

It wasn’t. It hadn’t been since Shirley had said “yes.” Edward never returned to watch Tommy again.