To Rescue a Villain

Chapter 1

"I just don't understand why you read that junk," he told me with a smirk, sliding the comic book out of my hands and flipping through its colorful pages just to annoy me. "And you've marked every single page involving him? That's just weird."

To point this out, my brother held up one of the dog-eared pages and gestured toward the thin, dark haired character standing in one of the panels. He was holding a gun in his hand and using it against the comic's heroes.

"Give it back," I muttered grumpily, yanking it out of his shaking hands. He was laughing so hard he didn't have the strength to stop me.

"You are aware that he's the villain, right?" Joe asked me as I rose from the living room couch and headed toward my bedroom in the hopes of escaping his cruel remarks. "Why are you so obsessed with him?"

Normally, I would have slammed the door in his face and escaped to the welcoming world of my favorite series but this was the third time this week that Joe had bugged me about this. I couldn't stand it anymore.

Feeling my cheeks burn at what I was about to say, I turned my head far enough to glare at him and spoke. "Because if you'd gone through what he went through, you'd act the same way." Actually, Joe would probably act worse.

"Stockholm Syndrome!" my idiot brother called as I gave up and locked him out. Joe wasn't a bad guy, he was just too immature to put himself in other people's shoes. He'd grow out of it eventually, I hoped.

"He has a point though," I muttered under my breath as I sank into the fabrics of my bed. Anyone who looked around at my posters and book collection would know that I cared about the villain of this series a little too much. His face was plastered all over my walls.

"I wonder how much money I would have saved if I hadn't become a fan of his." As I placed the comic back on the shelf with its twenty-four siblings I slid my fingers over the various covers.

"Manica: The Moon Revenge." "Manica: The Adventures of Jala and Ace." "Manica: The Mysterious Stranger."

They were all great books, don't get me wrong, but the most worn book in the series, the one I'd read five times in a row when I'd first bought it, was the one titled "The Origins of Dark".

Dark was the name of the series' most notorious villain, the wealthy, charismatic playboy with a dark past and an unpredictable personality. He became famous for being over the top and acting sweet to cover up his dark intentions.

When I first heard about Dark I didn't think much of him. He seemed like a stereotypical villain and I wasn't really the type to go for the bad boy since I knew guys like that would most definitely cheat on me. It wasn't until I stumbled across the origin book, which I'd found on sale for five dollars, that I started to care about him.

The tale went that Dark used to work with the story's main characters and he hadn't been that bad of a guy. He had a few issues, sure, as he'd been forced to live with his apparently insane grandmother and had an awful boss but other than that he had been somewhat likeable. He had always struck me as the type to cover up his insecurities with humor and that was why he'd become so popular with readers.

The only reason Dark became so evil was because his wife ended up dying and his "friends" later turned against him because he was so unstable from it.

Seeing so much happiness and sorrow come out of the same man, one who everyone hated and loved because of his villainy, struck something in my heart. I'd never been sure what it was about him that turned my heart but whatever it was had been enough to make me fall for him.