(Quick warning to the reader: If you're looking for a quick story to wank to, you should look elsewhere. I didn't mean for this story to get so long, but the characters are in a particular set of circumstances. Said circumstances take a long while to set up. Short-changing the story would have meant that when the characters get together at the end, there's not much reason for it. Anyway, just so you know what you're getting into, the sexy stuff starts in Chapter III, about 13,500 words in. I'm currently working on a sequel and in that one, the sex will arrive earlier, I promise.)
CHAPTER 1 -- DANIEL'S BIG SECRET
My name is Frank Dexter Williams. I'm 43 years old, stand 6'1', have brown hair and brown eyes. I'm fairly average-looking, though I exercise a lot so I'm in great shape. I don't show it off though, favouring flannel shirts and looser jeans most of the time. To look at me, you wouldn't know that I'm one of the costumed crimefighters you hear about on the news. Truth be told, I don't always wear a costume anyway. You see, my body can generate an energy field that appears to be hundreds of arcs of blue lightning cascading around my body. It obscures my features while not hindering my senses or actions in any way. It also protects me from injury when it's on, so I've trained myself to activate it as soon as I'm startled. Unfortunately, if I'm attacked by surprise, I can be knocked out or injured like any normal man. The field also redirects the kinetic energy of my punches, making them pack quite a wallop. It's why the press dubbed me "Thunderfist" when I first started.
The lightning field obscures what I'm wearing so if I get caught in an emergency and I'm out of costume, I just generate the field and you can't tell if I'm wearing a three-piece suit or a speedo. I do have a blue and white costume I wear when I'm on patrol or attending a Guardian Society function. The Society is the team of heroes I've been a part of for the last two decades. I'm now considered one of the team's elder statemen, and I never really seriously considered hanging up my costume. I love the hero life too much to give it up. Costumed heroes have all kinds of reasons for getting into the "business". Some do it out of a sense of duty, guilt or responsibility. Not me. I did it for the thrill.
It was that attitude that attracted me to my late wife Angela, who was known as Shrieker. She was a beautiful heroine who could emit a loud cry that would wreak havoc on anyone unlucky enough to hear it. She was already in the Society when I joined and just as much of a thrill-seeker as me. We hit it off from the start and it didn't take long for us to become an item. Our parents thought we were both too reckless for our relationship to last but less than a year later, she left Bay Town to come live with me across the country in Crescent City. It was clear things were becoming serious between us and on the one-year anniversary of our moving in together, I popped the question. She said yes, we spent seven months planning the wedding and she became Mrs. Angela Baxter Williams in the early summer. We'd wanted a wedding in late spring but had to postpone when an alien race called the Taraxians tried to invade Earth and the Guardian Society spent a few weeks fighting them off. Even then, signs that I'd never have a normal life were apparent.
Despite the hiccup, Angela and I settled into domestic life fairly well. Neither one of us held a full-time job (I'm a writer, she was a marketing consultant, both of us freelance) so we could indulge our adventurous urges whenever it pleased us. Please note that by "adventurous", I mean as regards superhero adventures. Our sex life was what you would call "vanilla" and we both liked it that way. We made love quite often but only to each other and with very little kink. I know there are rumours that we super-types get into some pretty wild shenanigans but that wasn't the case with Angela and me. A few years after we were married, we decided it was time for us to bring on the next generation so Angela got pregnant and gave birth to my son, Daniel Alexander Williams.
Superheroes have been around since the late 1930s and my wife and I were not the first superhero couple to procreate. Studies on the children of super-powered people have shown that most of the time, they too develop powers. Said powers usually manifest as the child enters puberty but very rarely match those of their parent or parents. In that sense, Danny was typical and atypical at the same time. His power to transform his body into whatever animal he could visualize manifested very early in his life (far earlier than I was aware of, it would turn out, but more on that later). To say that this presented a challenge as a parent is an understatement. When Angela and I dropped him off at kindergarten, he had explicit instructions not to turn into anything. It can be hard to keep your temper in check when you're trying to lecture a moody child who keeps turning into a giant cobra. Admonish him for being too lazy to clean his room, find yourself facing a giant sarcastic sloth the next time to you see him.
After Danny started transforming at four years old, Angela and I did our best to raise him as normally as possible while teaching him to control his powers. In that, we were helped by another member of the Guardian Society, Spellbinder. She's a French sorceress who claims to be over 450 years old, despite still looking like a gorgeous fashion model. She's not as active a hero as other Society members because she acts as a den mother to her colleagues and is very involved in training younger supers. When I was accidentally electrocuted in a factory when I was 17, she was the one who showed me how to use the powers the accident gave me. Most of the members of the Society have similar training experiences with her so whenever we come across anyone who needs help with any sort of super ability, she's usually our first call. Actually, she tends to show up whether we call her or not.
Spellbinder took charge of teaching Danny various forms he could turn into. She visited us a lot during Danny's elementary school years and she became as close to Angela and I as I've seen her get with anyone on the team. When Danny started referring to her as "Aunt Marie" (Her real name is Marie Delacroix), we didn't correct him and Marie just seemed to accept it. Still. she's got a lot of weird habits which she's picked up in her very long life so she's not always the warmest person. And I noticed her looking at Danny sadly sometimes when she thought nobody was paying attention. At the time, I just shrugged it off as Marie being Marie, but it turned out that she was seeing something nobody else could.
Because Danny's powers had manifested so early, he was very experienced in using them by the time his eighth birthday rolled around. As a birthday present, Marie gave him a special outfit that could change shape along with him and inducted him into Youth Force, a team of young heroes she was mentoring. He took on the name "Were-Kid" and became the youngest member in the team's history. Angela and I were proud as Hell. Although I got my powers a little too late in life to be a member of the team, Angela had been a member as a teenager (as "Tantrum", which I occasionally bugged her about) and most members of the team usually joined the Guardian Society when they reached adulthood. I worried a little about how well Danny would fit in, seeing as he was younger than the others. But the members of Youth Force were good kids and they treated him like an equal in their adventures together.
A few years later, disaster struck. A giant mystical portal appeared in India and thousands of mindless super-strong creatures poured out. The Guardian Society had four members on a press tour in Japan and Angela was one of them. Starblazer, the veteran hero on the scene, decided the four should go in without waiting for the rest of the team in order to blunt the horde's advance and save the thousands of people it threatened. Unfortunately, the four were overwhelmed before the rest of the Society could get there and they were ripped to shreds. When the Guardian Society finally arrived to take on the army of creatures, I fought like a madman while hoping Angela had been taken prisoner and could be rescued. But by the time we'd beaten back the invaders, other members of the team had found what was left of her. I know sometimes we super-types are written off as dead and then we find a way to pop back up again, but this wasn't the case for my poor wife.
The funeral for her was a big deal. The President stood next to Danny and I when her casket was lowered into the ground at Heroes Hill. I was in bad shape emotionally, as you can imagine, though I kept it together for Danny's sake. Marie visited often in the months that followed, helping guide the two of us through our grief. Like her, I became a semi-active hero at best for a while. Danny, on the other hand, kept on going on adventures with Youth Force without much of a pause. Marie assured me this was part of his way of dealing with the loss and that I shouldn't worry about him. I eventually rededicated myself to my heroic career as well, though it took me more time than it had Danny. Marie still came by at least once a month to check up on us.
