With great power comes ..... a need for solitude

The road was poorly lit.There were a couple of street lights but none in working condition.There was a stillness to everything, like it was a picture and not a frame out of real life.An occasional wind was the only change in status.
He looked out the car window. He liked it like that.Once the dust that his wheels kicked up would die down, the place would look like it always had.People were terrified to walk that road in the day leave alone the night.That served him well. He wanted time alone.He didn't need the thousands of voices around him telling him what to do.He came here to listen to his voice, his only way of safekeeping it from being lost in the overcrowded mass that was around him.
No one would be able to single him out from the crowd.They felt he was one of them.He sniggered in contempt.He, one of them, that would be day. Even before the thought faded, he remembered the days when he tried with all his might to be one of them, to fit into them, ever worried that someone might stumble over his secret. Forever safeguarding it.He had never been able to shut it out.That he accepted defeat to.He learnt to use it to his advantage, he learnt to use it such that no one ever caught a whiff of it.
He could hear people's thoughts.
Not much, one could think. Imagine when every moment of your life was crowded with voices. You would try to see who spoke, but there would be no one whose lips were moving, but you could hear it.Imagine walking down a road, a million thoughts crisscrossing the air and all of them telling your brain that it was a sound.He couldn't shut it out.He hadn't found a way to do that.Yet.
So,once in every while, he would come to this run-down supposedly haunted place just to appreciate silence.To look at life like it should have been in his head.
Feeling like a misfit all his life, until the day he realised he was gifted in this special way.His contempt for would never let anyone know of this. The Power was all his to wield.