Chapter Three:
Checks and Balances
Hemlock Potter's P.O.V
Hemlock Potter didn't want to change the world. She thought, maybe, that was best left to someone who knew what the fuck they were doing. She only wanted to make it a bit better, a little sunnier, a little softer.
Death wasn't concerned with preserving life. Only that it was fed-
Again, and again, and again, and again.
The sad truth was people, concepts, societies and nations needed to die. The flower bed, once in a while, needed to be pruned for the new buds to bloom. The trick, however, was trying to figure out which flowers needed to be cut off and in what seasons.
The ledger she mentally carried around was riddled in red.
If Hemlock saved the wrong person at the wrong time, he or she could go on to kill twenty, and their children and grandchildren and great grandchildren, who were meant to be born, who would become doctors or the next Stephen Hawking, or a fireman or teacher or even a shop clerk that pulled a person back from the edge of a road as a car came careening around the bend. Thousands of lives that would bleed out and touch and shape a thousand more could go out in a pitiful fizzle and a pathetic puff of silence if the wrong stem was cut.
Saving one life could mean damning the world.
Saving one life could mean having a world not worth saving.
Saving one life could mean killing a million more.
Death wasn't concerned with saving lives or saving worlds or keeping the web intact. It only ever wanted to be fed. Hemlock Potter didn't want to change the world either, had her fair share of trying to do so in her early teenage years. She thought, maybe, that was best left to not one single person.
Hemlock only wanted to keep the scales balanced.
That was her job. Pruning the spider's web. To keep the world spinning. To keep the young growing. To prune that flower bed to let the buds' bloom.
Hemlock, and perhaps Death, was not a hero. Death, and perhaps Hemlock, was a banker. An accountant. A financier who counted the numbers, put interests on life-force loans, who tallied the numbers and went collecting on debts that were long over-due, and everybody was overdue in the end. It's how the stock-market known as life worked, when you were born you took out a life-mortgage where the cosmos had given you too high interest rates that you could never hope to pay off in time, and Death, and maybe Hemlock, were simply the repo-men of the universe.
No one blamed the liquidator for that, did they?
Yes.
Yes they did.
All the fucking time.
Hemlock Potter's P.O.V
Hemlock melted further into the bookshelves of the local library on her day off from the retirement home, running her finger across the broken spines of public donations, tatty paperbacks and scuffed hardbacks and waterlogged magazines. She liked the library, more than she should or ever had from… From the before, and definitely not for the reason many others did.
She liked the library because of how much life it bore, and where life went death was always close behind.
People came, people went, and when they left that slightly askew door, when they stepped out into the big wide world, they were all a little changed, a little new, a little better. A library was a maternity ward for ideas, and like babies one was never sure just what they were getting. Curly-haired, blue-eyed, twins, short, long, pink or plump.
Ideas were born and bred in more than one mind. They were nurtured by millions, cultivated across national borders, propagated across sea and time and space. And like everything else, ideas and concepts had their own lifespans. A birth, a life, a death.
A sparse few Hemlock had already… Pruned off the tree.
The world was better for it.
Kinder.
The woman two shelves over, Junko, came in for a romance book, one of those paperback-paranormal-paramour things that left a tacky taste in Hemlock's mouth, but left knowing how to make a bookshelf. She would build that bookshelf. Akihiko, a little girl with pigtails, had come in to read in a beanbag about kittens. When Akihiko would leave her new favourite animal would be pandas. Issey had come in to study for his physics finals at high school. Though he felt like he was going to fail, he would end up scouring the highest in his class, going on to get a doctorate in aerodynamics.
Hemlock knew these things because in seventy-three years a nail in that bookshelf would buckle, and it would come crumbling down on Junko's grandson. He'd die from the blow to the back of his head. Akihiko would live to the ripe old age of one hundred and one, where she would die by her sons side wearing panda-coloured slippers. Issey would make a minor miscalculation, the one and only mistake he would ever make, in one of his designs for an aeroplane. No one would spot it. The maiden voyage would end with the death of fifty-three passengers as the plane came down over the pacific. He'd hang himself in his studio apartment seven days later.
Hemlock's hand stopped, pausing on one thin, glossy book.
"Bingo."
She pulled it free.
She didn't understand the Japanese writing sprawled across the front in vibrant red. Nor would she understand the kanji in the pages. She could speak Japanese, better and better as of late, but she could not read it yet. Nevertheless, she wasn't here for the writing, like a child she was here for the pictures.
Pictures or seeing made sensing easier.
It was her first day off in over three months, Hemlock wanted to enjoy it, and this was her favourite game to play to whittle away the time.
Hemlock Potter's P.O.V
Hemlock sat down right in the middle of the isle on the floor, crossed legged and ready. She began flicking through the pages of 'Pro-Heroes!', or at least that's what the singular English line said.
Poor Backdraft. Ironically, he was going to die by drowning.
Mr. Plastic was going to melt away in a house fire he would go running into headfirst because no one else would be there to take the heat.
Ectoplasm would live long, but he'd hate it when he was retired. So much so the shotgun he kept in the basement safe would begin looking mighty tempting.
Selkie was going to get a dagger to the heart trying to save a child.
Slugger was going to accidentally take one too many of those sleeping pills he so loved one night.
Unceremoniously, Hemlock slapped the book shut, eyes slipping closed. She held the book in her hand, closed, waiting. A deep breathe in, a deep breath out, following the scarlet threads back, pluck, pluck, plucking on her web, twisting and weaving and-
Hemlock opened the book anew.
A shiny fresh set of stories awaited her.
Backdraft dying by a car collision.
Mr. Plastic getting decapitated in a falling elevator.
Ectoplasm would burst from a well shot exploding bullet.
Slugger would change his drugs for alcohol, and the liver would end up the same.
Selkie suffocating in a gas bomb.
Hemlock could read this book forever, read the stories only she could see, and each time she opened it the tale would be unique. Again, Hemlock closed the book. Again, she breathed. Again, new stories to be read. She'd put their deaths back to what they had been at the end. She wasn't meddling. Not truly, and not for long. She was only having a bit of fun. Her kind of fun, yes, which wasn't everyone's cup of tea, granted, but if the pieces on the board returned to their home squares what harm had she caused?
None.
The page flipped. Hemlock froze at the image that greeted her in red, blue, and blonde. She traced the face with the pad of her index finger shielded by leather.
The one person she would never touch much more than she was now.
All Might.
Not yet... Maybe.
Hemlock Potter's P.O.V
Eleanor Roosevelt once said to do one thing everyday that scares you. For a girl who sees how all things end, a girl stuffed with spoilers and finales and season climaxes, not many things scared Hemlock Potter. She could count them on one hand.
Going back to the white-room Ward. Slipping and ending the world in an outburst again. The day All Might would die.
Everybody died, including the Symbol of Peace, and when he did…
It wasn't going to be pretty.
Hemlock had seen every way it had, would, and could happen, searched another million more. Panicked in the beginning, despondent by the end. one million, three hundred and forty five thousand, six hundred and twelve different endings for one lone man.
She had only seen two renditions where it had not been her tightening the hangman's noose around All Might's neck.
Somehow, someway, those realities had been worse.
Hemlock, sour-tongued, slapped the book closed and stood, shoving the tome back into its little slot on the bookshelf, mentally fixing the death's she had intruded on for a little while. Determinedly, she walked away from the whole lot of it. She would figure a way out of it.
She always did.
There was plenty of time to think of something before that day came crashing down upon them, time to figure out why she would ever feel the need to kill All Might, because though she can see death, intention and reasoning behind murder was never so clear cut, and-
Another time.
Hemlock shoved her hands deep into her jean pockets and strolled down the isle to the far wall in her yellow wellies, where a little window shone out into the streets. She leant against it by her shoulder, glancing to the side street across the way.
There was less time to deal with her little tag-along, however.
He was getting impatient.
Flustered.
He didn't do well when he was flustered.
Hemlock wasn't worried about what he had heard back in that alley. It wasn't this mans modus operandi to go around sharing. He wouldn't tell anyone. However, he would keep following until he had answers.
He wouldn't try to kill her.
Not yet, and not for this.
Hemlock Potter wasn't a Hero, and she sure as fuck didn't pretend she was. She wasn't his natural target.
He was curious, nevertheless, and he was digging, and that caused a whole other set of problems.
Stain.
His name was Stain, and he was living up to it, stubbornly sticking around no matter how hard Hemlock scrubbed.
For a moment, more than slightly exasperated, she pulled on the web in her mind, watched as his foot lifted from the corner of the curb in the shadows, readying to cross the road, just as a lorry was coming around the corner.
There would be no store clerk for him.
Immediately, Hemlock tugged on the web again, watching as his foot retreated, a moments confusion before his death was rewritten and he didn't remember lifting his foot at all to cross the road because he hadn't now.
Killing him wasn't in her plans currently. Annoying he might be, her sudden shadow, but that did not mean he deserved immediate death.
He had many deaths to cause himself, and many more to inadvertently save.
Checks and balances. It was always about the checks and balances.
Maybe another time.
Hemlock turned from the window. Nevertheless, a warning shot might be in order. If Stain were to simply follow her around Hemlock could take that. It would be annoying, frustrating, downright infuriating to be tailed every side-lane she took, given what type of... work she did outside the retirement home, but it would cause no harm in the end.
Stain would not simply follow though. He was getting impatient. He would do something drastic.
Like throwing a man off a roof to see if she would save him, just to see her powers in action, to see if she were a hero like the rest, save her secret, or the stylized one he believed everyone should be, out herself to save a man she did not know.
It was a good plan, she would give him that.
A good useless plan seen as Hemlock could see it coming a mile off due to the death surrounding it.
The man he would use would be Higashi Dai, who, if left alone, would go on to get a grant for the local orphanage through less than... Legal means, but money all the same, money that could become electric and gas and food for a group of children who had nothing else.
A group of children much like she had been once upon a time. Two of the children wouldn't last the winter without Dai's donation.
Hemlock couldn't let that pass.
So... If Stain wished to see her powers in action, he could.
He could and he would regret it.
Ah.
There was a serial rapist off Takoba Municipal park out on the prowl. Seven suicides in the Kamino district of Yokohama city going down very that night.
Hemlock began stitching and snipping on the web in her mind.
Perfect.
Twice's P.O.V
Jin Bubaigawara stood at window of his small apartment, lit cigarette in hand, face free from his mask. He took a lingering drag, exhaled into the dusk outside, watching the smoke blow away in the breeze of the inner-city streets.
It wasn't the only thing he was watching.
Twice was waiting for the tell-tale sight of green scrubs and yellow boots coming down the road.
She's not coming back you moron. She's dead in some ditch. Likely a mugging gone wrong. No, that doesn't sound right. Who would want to mug her?
Irritably, he flicked the butt of his smoke, watched the ash fall to the sill disintegrating on impact, a lot like his current mood.
Bitter and fragile.
The potted plant on his ledge, a stooped, pitiful little sunflower with the tag still peeling on the pot, something he had picked up that very day when he had spied it walking down the road, seemed contrary to his sparse, barely inhabited room.
He was already ten minutes late for the LOV meeting at HQ, had still not dressed in his uniform, left it crumpled on the end of his bed as if he had shed his skin like a snake, and would still be thirty minutes late if he set out right then and-
And he waited for the girl who lived in the apartment across from his own.
Number four.
She had moved into the vacant studio apartment, which had been left to rot for its unfortunate door number, three months ago. Twice had not seen her for the first month. Not a hair or heel or waft of perfume.
She worked at the local retirement home he later discovered after google searching the emblem on the breast of her scrubs. Two weeks later he had her routine mapped out.
She typically left early in the morning with the rising sun, and came back just as dusk was setting.
Twice only came out at night.
He first met her in the flesh when they crossed paths, one heading in, the other out. She had had been carrying a fern in a terracotta pot, a big thing, bushy, green. It matched the myriad of plants she adorned her door in, hanging baskets of flowers and a little dragon tree by the welcome matt.
It was nothing compared to the green shade of her eyes under a crown of black curls.
He had been in a rush that evening, had meant to only say hello with a nod as he set out.
Twice never really only said what he meant to.
"Hello-… Get the fuck out of my way."
The girl in the yellow wellies had not jerked back on the stairs when the other voice came, as most other people did, she had not so much as blinked.
She had smiled.
"Good evening. And I think you'll find you're in my way. It's common etiquette to keep to the right on stairwells."
Her Japanese then had been poor, stilted, her European accent bleeding through quite heavily-
It had been shit. Complete and utter shit. Hardly better than a toddler.
Twice had made a dash to leave, slipping passed and heading down the stairs.
"Sorry! Tsk. Bitch."
Her chuckling had followed him out into the falling darkness.
He ran into her the next night too. She had spotted him first at the top of the stairs on her way up to their shared floor.
This time she had been carrying a money plant.
"I see you're on the right this time?"
His steps had faltered, thankful he had kept his suit in his bag, ready to get changed when he got closer to the LOV HQ and found a dingy alley way to squirrel himself into. Best not to have those hero bastards follow him home and discover who he was without the mask.
Twice had smiled back this time.
"Old dogs can learn new tricks! They also get taken out back to be shot."
Anew, it had not bothered her, this duality of his, not a flinch or grimace or even a befuddled brow lift. That had been… Strange. Strange and… And something else Twice could not name.
The truth was there was no place for insane guys like him in society. Other's made it so. Heroes mostly. They liked to talk the big talk, walk the big walk, but at the very end of the day they only ever saved to good, virtuous ones. The rest, people like him, like apartment four in his studio complex, were left to rot in the dark.
It was why Twice had joined the League of Villains. Because he wanted to be okay with…
With being him.
All of him. The good. The bad. The batshit.
He had never thought of having other's be okay with the way he was before the girl with the yellow wellies had moved in next door.
Chick was likely crazy too. Who kept so many plants, anyway?
"Well, if I ever take a shot I promise it won't be with a gun."
There had been a double-edged sword there, lurking between her words and dimpled grin, a blade he couldn't see, but-
Well, the woman was tiny.
Only Just topping five foot.
Tiny and lithe, and… Brittle looking. Just like that fern she had been carrying the first day. If Twice wanted, he thought he could reach out and one good twist was all it would take to snap.
What harm could she cause?
She had carried on her way afterwards, and so had he, and that had been that. And then he met her on that stairwell the next night.
And the night after that.
The week following that.
They nodded and gave polite hello's and good evenings, which soon bled into idle chatter about weather and hard days at work, of which he told her he worked as a nightshift cleaner for the city.
Close enough.
She gave him her name, Hemlock, and he his, Jin, and-
And they created their own little world on that stairwell in snapshots of ten minutes or so. A place where there were no masks only yellow wellies and two-toned voices.
Twice sighed and flicked his butt out the window, glaring down at the wilting yellow sunflower on sill almost accusatory. Still not back yet? Mmm… Maybe we should go out and have a look.
Twice winced.
It was naturally bad news when the other voice was in any sort of agreement.
He spotted the suit on his bed. Glanced to the sunflower. Shigaraki would be pissed if he missed a meeting…
Especially so, given this one had been made suddenly, a text bleeping on his phone only an hour prior from the big Boss irately demanding his presence at the HQ.
Something about Hero Killer: Stain or something else.
Twice hadn't really been paying attention.
He moved away from the window, away from the waning sunflower, towards the bed and his suit.
Twice's P.O.V
By the time Jin Bubaigawara made it to the HQ in Kamino, Stain was already partially unconscious on the Bar's couch, Kurogiri at his side stitching up the rather impressive stab wound slashed across the lower part of his stomach.
His clothes were in tatters, slashed and soiled in blood.
He was missing his scarf, Twice noticed.
Toga was fretting beside an eerily calm Shigaraki by the adjacent seat, stomping her foot and whining.
"He came stumbling into my apartment like that, barely conscious. I didn't know where else to bring him."
Dabi, kicked back against the far wall, sighed.
"You think a Hero down in Hosu got an upper hand?"
Spinner, crouched at the end of the unconscious swords man, scoffed heartily.
"Against Stain? Not likely."
Dabi glared back.
"Clearly someone did."
Twice slunk into the chaotic room just as Kurogiri pulled back from his work, shadowed hand holding-
A small stack of ripped newspaper clippings.
"I found these in his pocket."
The papers made their short journey over to Shigaraki, who read them soundlessly in the heady-heavy room before flinging them onto the table, papers fluttering across the wood, spreading in ink of black and grey and something red.
Twice leant over to get a better look.
Only the headlines and photos remained from the articles, grainy as they were, punctuated by the mark of a single red circle scribbled on.
Fifty dead in train wreck.
Man mysteriously dies in a locked room.
Ceo found lifeless in private yacht.
Cause of street fire remains unknown.
Gas leak triggers explosion at power plant.
The photos were shots of the crime scenes, back from the tape, taken by excited journalists biting at the bit for a big break. They must have been taken recently on some. The smoke from the gas leak was a murky grey ink spill on the thin paper. The rings, made by a biro, encircled one person in each one.
The same person.
Twice snatched a clipping up and held it closer.
The image wasn't the best, but-
There was no mistaking, even with the greyscale, those eyes.
Those curls.
That scar.
"Same person at all the biggest disasters this city has seen in the last four months. What do you think it means?"
Toga asked, but Twice was already responding before she had finished.
"I know this person. That's my fucking neighbour."
Shigaraki, however, was looking to the TV playing quietly in the back of the room, reaching for the remote on the armrest, barking out a piercing quiet!
He turned the volume up. The news reporter's voice wavered in the crackle of white noise before it levelled out.
"Yokohama was struck this afternoon with a rash of seven suicides. Previously thought unrelated the Police are now identifying the origin as suspicious when connections where made with the suicide notes left behind. Each one contained a single word, which detectives initially found unusual given the nature of the notes, but once together formed a rather puzzling sentence. KY News station has inside information that the notes are as follows, each one consecutive to the victims time of death. Don't try to test me again Chizome. Detectives now believe the suicides are linked, and the police department is requesting for the public to relay any information they might have to their confidential hotline which you can find by telephone or their website which should be on screen right now."
Shigaraki lowered the volume anew, cutting the news reporter off before she delved into the story of a missing dog, pinkie out from the remote, careful of his hold.
The bar was silent until the blue haired man turned his red gaze Twice's way.
"You said you know this woman?"
Boo or Woo?
A.N: And so it begins! Sorry for the long wait between updates, I've been hella busy. Better late then never, though, right? lol
Thank you everyone who has favourited, followed and reviewed! I hope you all liked this chapter, and as always, if you have a spare moment, don't forget to drop a few words over in that box there, and I will, finger's crossed, see you all soon.