It was barely nine in the morning and Darren already regretted being alive.
He trudged across the Trinity College courtyard with his hoodie pulled down low and earbuds jammed in, trying to pretend he wasn't walking through the epicenter of an internet hurricane.
"Story of My Life" by One Direction was playing. It helped calm the buzz in his head. Barely.
The cobblestones were still slick with leftover rain, the sky a typical Dublin grey, and everything smelled like wet stones. coffee and piss. His eyes flicked everywhere, faces, phones, posters, one guy wearing a hoodie that looked a little too familiar with White-lensed eyes and a spray-painted Celtic knot on the hoodie's chest.
Darren looked away.
He'd barely slept. Too busy doomscrolling the endless stream of hashtags, reaction videos, and conspiracy threads trying to figure out who the mysterious vigilante was. "Sentinel." The name had officially stuck. Some Reddit lad named McPunchington had basically branded him.
Cheers, McPunchington.
Everywhere he went, people were whispering about it. Joking. Speculating. The campus radio did a whole segment this morning: "Saviour or psycho? You decide."
He reached the Arts Block and slipped inside. The halls buzzed. Trinity in January always felt like it was trying to decide whether to be Hogwarts or a public toilet. Stone pillars, peeling posters, and half-functioning radiators.
A girl in a drama hoodie walked past him mid-conversation:
"Did you see the clip where he jumps over the van? I swear he's doing parkour or some shit."
"My cousin thinks it's a Government agent," her friend replied. "Y'know, like their version of Spider-Man but Irish."
He was everywhere
On the front page of The Irish Times.
Trending worldwide with #Sentinel.
The subject of a Vine with over 3.5 million loops titled "Me walking into the club after 3 pints and no fear".
Now here he was, trying not to scream, sweat, or spontaneously combust as he ducked into the lecture hall and made a beeline for the back row. Where he could think. And hide. And maybe process the absolute chaos the internet had turned into overnight.
His brain was already spiralling:
Did anyone see my shoes? Shit, I wore these last night.
That girl just looked at me weird. Oh God, what if this hoodie's in one of the vids?
I need a different hoodie. I need five different hoodies.
I need to delete my Facebook. I need to fake my death.
He dropped into his seat. Hood up. Leg bouncing. Tap. Tap. Tap. Off-beat. Double-tap. Faster now. Too much. Can't stop.
The lecture hadn't even started yet, but already, he could hear whispers. Not just your average "who's hungover" or "do we have a quiz today?" whispers.
These were specific.
"Did you see the CCTV footage? He ripped the door off that van—"
"—superpowers or steroids, there's no way—"
"—nah, mate, he's like Ireland's answer to Spider-Man—"
"—reckon he's some failed Military test thing, like Rogers' sloppy seconds—"
Darren buried his face in his sleeve.
Breathe. You're fine. Just a sleep-deprived, over-caffeinated ADHD uni lad. Who definitely didn't go viral for kicking someone through a wall last night. Definitely not.
The lecturer walked in. Medieval Irish Literature. Darren normally liked it. Mythology, kings, prophecy, stuff he could get lost in.
Not today.
Today his brain wouldn't shut up. Every time the prof mentioned Cú Chulainn, Darren winced. Someone had posted an article comparing Sentinel to the warrior of Ulster. Some bloke had even drawn fanart of Sentinel in a damn wolfskin cloak holding a spear.
The professor's voice was a distant murmur, drowned out by the cacophony of thoughts and the faint buzz of his headphones. Too many other noises.
Buzz of the lights. Fingers tapping keyboards. Whispered jokes. A Vine playing too loudly on someone's phone two rows down.
His phone buzzed. New notification.
A meme. Sentinel photoshopped standing beside Iron Man, mid-pose. Caption: The world's newest Avenger?
He locked the phone and shoved it deep into his hoodie pocket.
He sighed. Stared at the ceiling.
Still not listening.
Darren hunched over his notebook, doodling spirals. Big, dark, angry spirals. The kind that swallowed the margins.
He filtered through the layers of sound bleeding in from the world outside the lecture hall. A door creaked open five rooms down. Someone dropped their phone in the courtyard. A girl was laughing at a Vine.
"...did you see that slow-mo vid? The way he moves, like full-on superhero. And the mask? It's kinda hot, not gonna lie."
He scribbled harder. The spiral darkened.
"...some people say it's staged but then someone found old footage — like, grainy shit from 2011 — guy moves the same way. Cracked ribs with one punch."
"...they're calling him Sentinel now, yeah? Better than Mask Lad, I guess."
He scribbled harder. The spiral thickened into a pit.
The buzz wouldn't stop.
His stomach twisted.
He was too aware, of everything. Too aware of the room, the air, the way people's voices blended with the constant hum in his skull.
He was trying to listen to Mr. Moriarty talk about Yeats but his brain kept running off to chase audio from ten different conversations at once.
[ S.H.I.E.L.D. SURVEILLANCE ARCHIVE, BERLIN]
A dark room. Rows of CRT monitors flickering in low light. An agent, thin, focused, wearing gloves even indoors, typed furiously.
"Cross-referencing enhanced movement patterns across European footage archives. Filtering anything tagged 'vigilante', 'masked', or 'unregistered combatant' between 2011 and 2013."
A video clip loaded. Grainy street cam. Rain. A teen skinny, younger, punching a man so hard he went flying into a shop window. The force was too much. The glass shattered wrong. The kid stumbled back, holding his hand like he'd broken something.
The agent hit pause. "Incident 09-Gamma. December 2011. Strength output unstable. Striking power inconsistent."
Another screen. 2012. A shaky phone clip: the same hooded figure, dodging two attackers in an alley. His form was sloppy, wide swings, too many wasted movements. But strong. Still strong.
Then a third clip. From just last month. A security cam above a warehouse loading dock. The figure again, now slower but more stable, more controlled. He dropped the three men in about a minute. The last guy tried to run. A leg swept under him, clean and fast. Muay Thai? Judo? Hard to pin down.
"Muay Thai?" the agent murmured. "Bit of judo. Still rough. But practiced."
Agent Kwan entered. "Still no face?"
"Nope. Blind spots. Reflections. Motion blur. It's deliberate. He knows how we watch."
Maria Hill stepped into frame. Coat still wet from rain. "Compare movement signature. How much has he improved?"
"He's not pro," the analyst replied. "But he's not raw anymore either. No formal training, just two years of trial and error. He's adapting."
Hill stared at the paused footage, Darren's silhouette flickering under sodium lights, slipping behind a stack of crates mid-fight.
[BACK TO TRINITY – 11:42AM]
Darren blinked.
"…Wait, what page are we on?"
"Jesus, Ward," the guy next to him whispered, sliding his notes over. "We're on Act III. Yeats is dying again or something."
"Cheers," Darren muttered, scratching at his neck.
He tried to focus, really tried. But then...
Outside the window: voices. Not loud, not even clear. But sharp in his ears. Clear as crystal, cutting through every other noise like glass.
Two tech bros, hunched over a laptop, rewatching the Vine. His Vine. The slowed-down one. The kick. The crunch. The rain.
"See that knee strike? Bro, that's Muay Thai 101."
"Nah bro, that's just a knee. Look at the punch though. That's boxing."
Another voice jumped in, behind them. Loud jacket. Louder opinions.
"Can't it be both?"
"The guy's a hybrid fighter."
"Oh, and he's Irish. Don't forget that part. Irish lads fight dirty."
Darren pressed his fingers to his temple. Hard. Like he could squish the noise out of his skull. Like he could just press pause on everything.
Too much. Too fucking much.
The room was boiling, buzzing, collapsing in on itself. Chairs scraping. Someone coughing three rows down. A pen clicking on repeat like a machine gun. The goddamn radiator gurgling like it was trying to vomit steam.
His hoodie itched. His headphones buzzed even on silent. Every movement around him felt like it came with a pressure wave. Like the air changed shape when people breathed too hard.
And the professor—still talking.
"…Yeats wrestled with the myth of heroism, and the burden it places on the individual…"
Oh, great timing, Yeats.
Darren's knee bounced like it had been turbo-charged. His grip on his pen tightened. The spiral he was doodling morphed into a deep, aggressive gouge. He didn't even realize he'd torn the paper until it split under the nib.
He blinked. Again.
Focus.
But he couldn't.
Someone behind him whispered, again, about that Fucking edit with the Irish flag. Someone's ringtone went off. Someone crinkled a crisp packet. Someone dropped a highlighter and apologized too loudly.
His hearing was a curse today.
He clenched his jaw. Every sound echoed like it was happening an inch from his ear. Everything in the room was turned up to eleven and none of it was important. Except all of it felt urgent.
He was drowning in voices.
"...Sentinel's definitely not human, though—"
"Could be some kind of Secret agent or something. Or maybe he's an experiment gone wrong y'know like in the comics. Or maybe he's a feckin' Mutie for all we know"
"Would bang."
Darren stood up.
Too fast. Chair legs screeched across the floor like a scream. A few heads turned.
"Need the loo," he muttered, already slinging his bag over one shoulder with trembling fingers.
Nobody asked. Nobody stopped him. Thank God.
He shoved his notebook in with one hand, the cover now a warzone of deep spirals, some torn right through the paper. He didn't even remember drawing half of them.
And then he walked.
No... he ran.
Fast. Too fast. No eye contact. Don't look at anyone. Don't give anyone a reason to see you.
Just get out. Get out.Get out.
The hallway hit him like a brick wall of sound and light.
Fluorescent lights buzzing like a swarm of angry bees.Echoes of footsteps bouncing off stone.Conversations—hundreds of them—all blending into a chaos soup.
"Yeah but the punch was clean, like, that's not some rando—""I heard it was The American's.""Nah, Russian clone. Gotta be.""Bro moves like a comic book panel""Did you see the fan edit with the rain and the Irish flag? Gave me chills."
Darren flinched. Physically flinched. His shoulders hitched up toward his ears. His fingers curled tighter around his bag strap.
He passed a vending machine. It thunked. Loud and sudden. He nearly jumped out of his skin.
Heartbeat in his mouth now. Legs moving on instinct.
Another voice, way too close:
"I swear my cousin said Sentinel's from Galway—"
Nope.
Didn't wait. Didn't listen.
He burst into the stairwell, shoved the door closed behind him with too much force, BANG, and bolted down the steps. Two at a time. Hoodie up. Shoulders hunched. Mind roaring like a crowded stadium.
He pushed into the first floor men's loo, slammed the stall door behind him, and locked it with shaking hands.
He sat. Pulled his knees up. Elbows resting on them. Bag on the floor beside him.
Headphones in.
Volume up.
No searching. Just muscle memory.Thumb jerked to the right playlist. Scroll, scroll, tap—
Fall Out Boy."My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark."
Play.
The world snapped off like a switch.
Static gone.Voices gone.Lecture hall, hallway, memes, headlines — gone.
Just this.
"B-B-Be careful making wishes in the dark…"
Boom.
"Can't be sure when they've hit their mark…"
Boom.
That line hit like a warning shot.Like it was aimed straight at his ribs.
He needed it loud.Louder.Louder.
"I'm just dreaming of tearing you apart…"
His breath came fast and shallow.Chest tight.Throat dry.Fingers twitching against the fabric of his hoodie, against the fabric of his pants.His fidget ring spun so fast it burned.
"I'm on fiiiire!"
He clutched tighter.
The music wasn't background anymore —It was scaffolding.It was armor.It was the only thing keeping him from unraveling.
He didn't want silence.Couldn't handle silence..Silence meant hearing everything else again.The hallway.The whispering.The edits. .The fucking Vine loops with his silhouette synced to memes and martial arts breakdowns and the voice in his head saying:Everyone's looking. Everyone knows.
But here...
Here the chorus hit.
"Light 'em up, up, up…" "I'm on fire!"
The words didn't feel like lyrics anymore.They felt like fists.Like barricades.Every line another brick wall between him and panic.
He rocked gently.To the rhythm.To the beat.To the pulse of the bass crashing against his bones.
This moment.This song.This fire in his ears.
It was louder than the world.
It was the only thing louder than everything else.
He buried his face in his hoodie sleeves, hands pressed over his headphones like he could crush the chaos out of his brain if he just pressed hard enough.
His breathing came in short, shivery bursts. Chest tight. Arms trembling. Knee jackhammering the tiles.
He tried to slow it. Couldn't.
His leg was going a mile a minute and his hands wouldn't stop fidgeting and his ears were still ringing with every voice from the lecture hall and the hallway and the goddamn internet.
He tried to stop.
He couldn't.
His ears still echoed with everything from outside.The voices.The theories.The pressure.
"Just a student," he whispered.
Didn't feel like one.
Felt like everything was too fast. Like he was holding his body together with frayed string. Like if someone knocked on the stall door, he'd explode.
The music pulsed through his skull. The beat became a wall. And for a second, a brief, blessed second, the world outside dulled.
He curled tighter.
Eyes shut.
Still shaking.Still overwhelmed.Still him.
But quieter now.
He whispered again.Like it was prayer.Like if he said it enough, it might come true.
"Just a student. Just a student. Just a student."
He curled tighter into himself.
Eyes closed.
Still shaking.
Still overwhelmed.
But quieter now.
He kept whispering to himself, like it might help anchor him:
"Just a student. Just a student. Just a student."
But the world outside kept chanting a different name.
Sentinel.