Chapter Four:
Run You Off A Cliff
No One's P.O.V
Upon that windy night in the midst of the grey swathes of the broad avenue, sandwiched between the towering buildings, the girl on her walk appeared to have kept something of summertime about her despite her dreary scrubs, as if her soul were a bright firefly zipping across a frozen grey lake.
She stalled mid-step on the side-walk, yellow boot raised precariously, paper grocery bag clasped underneath one arm, and seemed, for all intents and purposes, as if some fluttering butterfly had snatched her attention.
There was no butterfly on that road that windy night. The moment, however, was gone as swiftly as it came, and on the girl walked with a disappointed tut of her tongue.
The smile inching across her cheeks was, undeniably, sorrowful.
Hemlock Potter's P.O.V
Hemlock Potter stopped at her apartment door and stared down at the little wilted sunflower in a plastic pot balanced on her welcome mat.
On any other day she might have grinned at the sight. She might have picked it up, gave a delicate sniff to its petals, and she would have taken it into her residence with a merry little bounce in her step. She might have found it a nice home in her humble abode, perhaps on her bedroom window sill where the sun could reach it most. She would have rushed home from work tomorrow, just to catch Jin on the stairs, her odd-ball neighbour, before he left to say thank you for the kind gesture, the first she had received in… In years. She would have-
This is how all your friendships end, 'Lock. You should know this by now.
She did none of that this night. Instead she sighed, and bent down to place her bag of groceries against the wall of her door, the brown paper crinkling and sagging. She plucked up the pot, and rolled it between her gloved hands.
Stain hadn't figured it out yet, and if he hadn't the other's wouldn't have either. Some two-bit felon on the side-road should not have been able to get the upper hand against the vigilante. Even in control of the poor sod, if left to her own devices Hemlock was no swordsman.
Her scar from the basilisk proved that enough.
Yet… She could see death.
She had seen all of Stain's killing shots to the man long before they had come. Knew how to side-step them.
One more blow would come.
Another side-step.
It was… Precognition.
Of a sort.
It was pretty hard to win in a fight against a girl who had unlimited lives and the cheat bar loaded up, even for someone like Stain.
And so he had lost.
Lost and went wondering off before I could get that bastard to keep him down, right into the door well of-
Well.
As with all of Hemlock's galaxy-brain-brilliant plans the end result wasn't nearly as flawless as she first hoped it would be.
Potter luck and all that.
Now instead of dealing with one vigilante, she had an apartment full of se-
Hemlock's finger's clenched on the flowerpot, threatening to crush it beneath her grip. She did not care about that. Five, six, seven, eighty, a thousand… Number's didn't matter.
Hemlock would win.
The sad, pathetic truth was Hemlock… She was lonely, and she had truly, honestly believed Jin could have been a friend of a sort, as close as she allowed anyone to her these days, and she understood his own loneliness, understood what it was like being achingly tugged between the light and dark and dark and light, understood-
They shared the same scars, she saw. Mentally and physically.
Hemlock spun and faced his door, dead flower in gloved hand.
The flowerpot had been put on her welcome mat just as she had seen coming down the road.
She knew what came next.
One last chance, as fruitless as it will be.
Let no one say I don't play fair.
Hemlock Potter's P.O.V
Hemlock knocked on the door in a bout of three, and Jin Bubaigawara opened it a fraction too hastily.
He had been waiting for it.
Hemlock smiled brightly, and held out the flower between them.
"I'm guessing it was you who left this at my door?"
At least they were playing it a little bit neatly.
Jin was in a pair of worn jeans, a blue shirt, blond hair mussed from where he had clearly whipped his mask off-
He reached up and rubbed bashfully at the back of his neck, blue eyes light and breezy in the dim dark of his apartment, one hand stationary on the handle.
He's keeping the door at a forty-five-degree angle. It's version forty-six or one-hundred-and-two.
"Saw it from my way in from work and thought you might like it. It goes with all the other green bullshit you seem determined to block up our hallway with."
Hemlock turned the flowerpot over in her hand, a single petal fell down to her feet, a dank and shrivelled yellow.
"Are you sure you want to do this, Jin?"
A flicker of a frown, a tinge of pink on a strong cheekbone.
Come on Jin, just tell me the truth. Don't-
"Uh, it's… Uh, it's just a welcoming gift, if you don't like it I can find another-… you can shove it up your-"
Hemlock swiftly cut him off, dropping the flowerpot, letting it tumble away, soil spilling and stem breaking.
Chance over.
"That's a shame. For what it's worth I really did like you. I truly did think we could have been friends. I hope your original copy back in your headquarters knows that too."
Finger's tightened on the door.
"What-"
But Hemlock's own were raising, and-
Click.
She snapped her fingers.
Jin Bubaigawara exploded in a hailstorm of plasma and guts and locks of short blond hair, blood that splattered across the planes of her face, warm and wet and-
Feeling like a caress from an old friend by now.
Hemlock was in the apartment, wand out, hexing, before the four crouching behind the door, waiting for the ambush, could leap. She stood before the cursing, confused forms of the Body-bind pile, head cocked, arms crossed, drumming her fingers across her bicep as she twirled her wand over the juts of her knuckles.
"Now what do I do with you lot?"
Hemlock Potter's P.O.V
The sound of bottles clinked; the small kitchen illuminated by the fluorescent glow of the refrigerator door that was open. Hemlock slunk back from peeping inside, and held up a bottle of cheap beer to the small gathering she had placed around the kitchen table like a child's tea-party. Wonky and tilting, and a hair breadth away from being put in time-out.
Hemlock doubted any of them would like her version of time-out.
"Doesn't Jin having anything stronger?"
Jin's kitchen table was a small thing, one broken leg stacked up with a pile of waterlogged magazines, and Hemlock had to conjure the respective four other chairs as he had only owned one.
Four for them, one for her. Fair.
Balanced.
The first one was a rather tall fellow, the tallest of the bunch, a pale young man of a slim but somewhat lanky build, perhaps in his early twenties. His hair was as black as her own, though hers was curly where his jutted out in sharp spikes, and unfortunately, his most striking feature was the patches of gnarled, burned purple skin that covered much of his lower face and neck, all the way down, as far as Hemlock could see underneath the coat, to just past his collarbone and up to below his eyes, attached to what little healthy skin he had left by the multiple, crude surgical staples and hoop piercings.
That one's… Dabi? Dabi.
The one she had placed next to him, bound in a chair magically as all the others, was another slim, pale man. She had to take the hand of his face in the beginning, a real hand by the give of decay underneath her gloves as she had yanked it off, only to reveal a face not much older than the first mans, marred with chapped skin around his eyes and lips, the latter dotted with a scar underneath. His hair was messy, a strange greyish-blue like an ocean in a storm, hacked in varying lengths, the longest of which reached sloping shoulders. His eyes were red, Hemlock saw in the brighter light.
Tom's eyes had been red once, before she had put him in the ground.
Shigaraki. That one was easy.
The next one was the most… Flamboyant of the lot. Hemlock could not see his face, had left him with his mask firmly on, and adorned in a dark orange shirt, green striped bolo necktie with an oval-shaped azure brooch, a black waistcoat and black slacks, boots and plain dark gloves below a high top hat spotted with ribbon and a feather, he almost looked like a fairy-tale character that had spilled out from his own pages.
This one goes by… Compress?
The last of their little gathering was the only other girl around, petite, fair-skinned, her cheeks were blushing a delightful pink. She was pretty, cattish too, with steep and sleek yellow eyes, and perhaps the closest one to Hemlock's own age. When her top lip snarled, Hemlock could see rather pointed canines. Her hair was dirty blond and wrangled into two messy buns, of which wisps of pale hair had escaped.
Straightforward. Toga. The one who gave me the jump.
And it was this last one that answered her.
"Twice doesn't drink anything else."
Hemlock shrugged and flicked the cap off the beer, hearing it bounce somewhere away on the floor, down a cupboard nook or a cooker crevice.
"Maybe we wouldn't have been such good friends after all."
Taking a sip, the beer was still warm from the refrigerator on its last legs, weak on her tongue, and Hemlock swirled the bitter taste around her tongue as she turned, propping one shoulder against the wall, kicking one leg over the other, eying her sudden influx of… Hostages?
Were these her hostages? Captives? Detainees? Victims?
No… They weren't dead.
Yet.
"What are you planning to do to us?"
It was the one known as Shigaraki who brokered the question, jinxed against his chair that had once been a coaster. Hemlock huffed in return.
"Nothing less than what you were going to try and do to me, Eczema boy."
From between the locks of his shabby hair, the man glared in crimson but that was all he could do. All Hemlock allowed him and the rest to do. No movement. Not even a neck roll. The extent of their movement was to yap their jaws.
Imaginably she really was lonely if she was willing to give these fuckers the chance to talk. Merlin knew she had seen far too much of each and every one of these bastards when sensing in her Gift in the last three months alone.
Hemlock gestured to the blond girl with a tilt of her chin.
"She's the one who gave you away, you know? She was planning on cutting me up for what I did to Stain. She wanted me dead."
Shigaraki's glare made the short trip over to burn a hole in the side of the blonde's face, but he did not reply to Hemlock. It didn't matter.
The reaction was enough.
She chuckled wryly.
"So Stain is awake then. Given your response to the word dead, he told you all about what he had pieced together about my…"
Hemlock paused before she snapped her fingers loudly, idly watching as black and purple flinched at the noise, likely remembering what had only just happened to Jin's clone.
"What's the word you lot use here? It's something silly, isn't it? Peculiarity? Oddity?"
Compress's voice was smooth, even from underneath his mask, slow too, slackened in slight confusion.
"Quirks?"
Hemlock beamed.
"Quirks. Yes, Quirks. I always forget the new slang for it. I'm guessing Stain woke up not to long ago, let slip about my Quirk, and by only four of you being here I'm guessing Jin and your other merry band of fuckwits are waiting back at HQ. Honestly, I don't know whether to be insulted you thought you could take me with four, or mightily impressed by your obvious lack of combined braincells that you all made it here across the road safely."
Shigaraki hesitated before he, anew, tried to bridge the gap.
"We-"
He rather pointedly let his gaze linger on Toga.
"Didn't come here to fight. I wanted to talk."
Hemlock struck off from the wall, dragging the spare chair over to the table where she came to sit, the legs squealing on the tacky linoleum.
"By tricking me."
Her smile was gone, the beer in her hand sloshing up its thin neck as she slammed it down onto the table between her and her guests, nothing but fatal gravity remaining. Her voice was soft and dark and deadly.
"I don't do well with people trying to lie to me. Not anymore."
Let them take that as they will.
Shigaraki, however, did not try to answer this, he did not try to refute it or accept the accusation.
He diverted course.
So that's how you want to go about this.
"You have more than one Quirk."
Hemlock snorted and sagged back in her chair.
"No. I have my full Quirk. You lot just have… Lesser."
It annoyed him that word, lesser, Hemlock saw. A thinning by his eye, a curl to his top lip. Gone as swift as it had come, but not so fast for Hemlock to miss.
Yet, it was true.
These four before her were lesser. So were the Gifted outside these walls, in the city, in this country, in this god forsaken world. All Might and Eraser Head and all the other's who thought themselves Heroes and Villains.
Lesser.
They were reduced because of what Hemlock did back in Ward 13, when she-
Not now. Never
Hemlock bounced up from her chair at the push of the memory, just as Shigaraki tried to push.
"What do you mean-"
"Doesn't matter. You won't be here much longer to enjoy the answer-"
No more games. It was time to get it done. Hemlock was tired.
Tired and wretched and alone in the world, and needing to learn to stop playing with her food.
If death was forever hungry, Hemlock was starving.
She began to weave back into her web, soldiering into her sense, and-
"Wait! Wait!"
Hemlock halted and cocked a sharp brow at the pitched plea. Shigaraki, if he could have moved his body, might have sagged a little at the respite when Hemlock made no further move.
"I did come here to talk."
Hemlock scowled.
"Then talk because you're starting to piss me off."
Shigaraki sighed.
"You're clearly not a Hero-"
He suddenly appeared as if he wished to look behind him, although he could not, and Hemlock supposed it would have been to the blood stain, now burgundy, spread out by Twice's door, where his body had once been.
Perhaps even to the splatters of it up the walls.
Instead Shigaraki needed only to look at Hemlock's face to see what remained of the clone.
A red comet across a green, green eye.
"If you bother to listen for longer than two seconds, you might find we have a common goal-"
Hemlock rolled those green, green eyes and shook her head.
"Me and you, Tenko Shimura, have nothing in common."
That got him. That made him freeze. That swept the rug from underneath his feet.
Hemlock lazily wondered how long it had been since he had heard that name. His own name. Maybe as long as it had been since Hemlock had seen Hermione's smile or Ron's freckles.
Maybe, just maybe, like her he had forgotten quite what it had sounded like outside that murky thing known as memories, as Hemlock had nearly neglected what her friends had looked like before-
"Oh yes, I know all about you. I know as a child you looked up to Heroes. I know when your abusive father found out he threw you outside in the rain and the cold after a good beating that nearly left you crippled. I know your mother and sister and grandparents watched on and did nothing. I know you went to your family dog for comfort, and you huddled in his doghouse to keep out of the rain. I know that's when your Quirk first activated, and you caused your first death. You could do nothing as the only thing you had left shifted to dust in your hands with a whine and a pained yelp."
Her tenor was as soft as downy feathers, as light as them too, despite the severity of her words.
"You panicked when your sister came out to investigate the noise. Your Quirk lashed out. No one and nothing survived. That's all you've been doing since. Making dust that will fall through your fingers because you can't hold onto anything."
Hemlock shook her head regrettably.
"And that's all you'll ever do. You may say you want All Might dead, you may preach about equality out from under corrupted Heroes… But you're still that little boy locked out in the cold kicking over other people's sandcastles because you never got one."
Red clashed against green, blood and summer and something infinitely bleak igniting in that little, hazy kitchen.
"Change your name all you wish, Tenko. Be Tenko or Shigaraki or Future King, The Worlds Symbol of Terror, Leader or Boss or Eczema boy. It matters not to me. Hide your face in the last hand that held you, and grow your hair to hide your eyes... But I see you… And I've seen plenty of people just like you come and go and come again. You aren't all that special, kid. Huh-"
Now she smiled, now she nodded, now Hemlock understood.
"Maybe we do have something in common after all."
And they did have something common in a way. In a twisted, tragic, horrible way. He had his father. Hemlock had her uncle. He had his touch, and Hemlock had her sense.
And dead things couldn't hold you back.
Dead things were never warm.
Dead things were silent when all they wanted to do was scream.
Shigaraki simply went careening down a darker path before she, herself, had. And maybe she still would go spiralling down into the dark, given what she knew of All Mights' fate.
Your past and memories was much like a pair of feet, Hemlock realized. They could keep you grounded, and they could also run you off a cliff.
Shigaraki was obviously discomforted by this, but, for once, managed to put on a brave face.
If brave face meant a scornful frown.
He'd learn soon enough. People like them didn't get the happy ending.
"My death told you all that, did it?"
Hemlock sighed deeply. They still didn't get it. They likely never would.
"Talking to you for five bloody minutes has shown me that. The trail of destruction and death you leave in your wake every fuckin' day simply gave me a clearer picture."
Shigaraki thought it over, a pucker by his red eye.
"So you refuse to join us."
It wasn't a question, and Hemlock let the lingering silence respond plenty enough for her.
"Then if you let us leave we will not bother you again. Your warning has been heard loud and clear. We won't set foot in this area or near you again... And you offer us the same respite. We leave each other alone."
Hemlock laughed.
Loudly.
She had to give it to the young man, he had balls.
"You're really trying to haggle while strapped down in a kitchen chair with your Quirks locked out of your grasps? I didn't think I needed to tell you that you have nothing to offer, but there you go. You have nothing that I want, and I could just kill you all, re-write your very existence, and I won't have to worry about you keeping up your side of the bargain that presents me nothing. See? I much prefer my plan."
What Hemlock wasn't expecting, however, was for Shigaraki to smile back in return, voice pitched to an almost ebbing song.
"But you won't keep the balance."
Hemlock closed in on the table, head cocked, tone biting.
"Excuse me?"
His grin grew wider, teeth white and wolfish.
"That's your thing, isn't it? We all have one. Yours is balance. The thing people forget about death is it goes hand in hand with life. It's why you haven't intervened between Heroes and Villains before, why you've taken yourself out of the equation entirely. Why you keep to this tiny area in Musutafu pretending to be like everyone else with a nine-to-five. Why you haven't already sunk this city or burned this country down to the ground. You want to keep it all as balanced as possible… And you can't keep the scales level by dropping an atomic bomb on them."
Being equated to an atomic bomb was hurtful, Hemlock would admit.
True, but hurtful.
Clearly, while Hemlock had been watching and pinning down Shigaraki's character he had been doing the same to her.
Clever.
"And you could have killed us long ago. I think you could have killed us before we even decided to come to this apartment. This isn't about death. Like those suicides this is your warning. That's how you work, isn't it? You gave Twice's clone a chance to come clean, and you only struck out after he didn't. What was it you said to Stain? Don't Try To Test Me Again."
Hemlock swiped her tongue over her teeth, and pressed her lips together in a sneer.
"So you lot do have two braincells to rub together. Well done. Gold star for all. Do you want a lollipop?"
Shigaraki ignored her sarcasm, her attempt to deflect.
"You let us leave, and we won't come back unless you contact us first. You obviously know where we operate. The location of the seven suicides was not a coincidence. In return you don't interfere with my plans."
Somewhere in the apartment a clock ticked on. A tic and a tac and a tic and a tac and-
Hemlock grinned.
"I won't interfere unless they're ridiculous plans that get in my way. That's the best you're going to get, and you really have no room to bargain for anything more. You're lucky I'm willing to give you anything at all, apart from a short sharp stop to your heart."
Shigaraki, noticing the honesty in that, motionless, vaulted for the offer.
"Deal."
Hemlock waved her hand. The binding spells loosened and fell in a shimmer of gold and red.
"Well then, off you pop. Quickly. Before I change my mind."
One by one they stood over the other side of the table, Shigaraki reaching for the hand she had taken off his face and left on the edge of the counter, slipping the cool, stiff, severed limb back over his face. Its home.
They began to leave, heeding her warning, and Hemlock shot one last retort.
"Oh, and Shigaraki?"
He glanced over his shoulder, peeping through the fingers of his dead father.
Yeah, they had something in common.
Hemlock could still sometimes feel uncle Vernon's hand crushing her shoulder, feel Petunia's fingers coiled in her curls yanking, feel Tom's nails scratching at her arms. Maybe that was what being an abused kid was. Carrying the grip that had hurt you so much with you wherever you went, even when you were older, even when the grip was gone.
Bruises healed. They faded from blue to purple, to yellow and green.
Trauma lingers more like scars.
Shigaraki only showed his to the world.
Hemlock wasn't smiling.
"If I were you I would tell Jin not to come back here unless you want to be one man down permanently."
Shigaraki, ostensibly not liking taking orders by the way the hand at his side clawed as if he wanted to scratch at something, still nodded.
He turned and they left.
The door clicked shut.
Hemlock sagged, slumping, wilted like the dead sunflower let abandoned outside, alone in the gloomy apartment with blood on her face and a cheap, flat beer left half-drunk on the table.
It could have gone worse.
It really could have.
For them.
Good thing she was in a forgiving mood.
Hemlock gave it a moment, for them outside to leave, before she headed for her own apartment. She didn't know why she glanced down and over, to Shigaraki's empty chair, but she did.
He must have had a pin or needle or something in his hand to scratch into the wood. Even fighting off her binding spell for just the few of his fingers it would have taken to do so was… Impressive, she would give him that much.
Maybe not as lesser as I previously thought, then.
Hemlock leant closer.
He had scrawled something into the arm of the chair.
If you change your mind was followed by a hastily etched phone number.
Hemlock chuckled, and straightened out, heading for the door.
Brave.
Foolish, but brave.
"I won't be needing that."
Hemlock Potter's P.O.V
Hemlock was humming as she showered the following morning, high spirited and relaxed.
It was going to be a good day.
She would be left alone, she would work, come home, eat take-out, pass out on the sofa and-
And pretend to be like everyone else.
It was going to be a good day.
Her humming continued as she dressed in her scrubs and brushed her hair into a bun, stashed her wand in the holster around her ankle, and nibbled on strawberry jam and toast.
It was going to be a good day.
She kept humming all the way to her front door, yellow wellies on, where she would change into the slippers at the retirement home foot lockers, it was rude to wear shoes in doors in Japan, and she would be off and away on a very normal day-
She opened her front door and stalled.
Scowled.
Cursed.
"I thought we had an agreement."
Dabi, grin stretching wide over his scared cheeks, hands in pockets, chuckled back from her welcome mat.
"Good morning to you too, sunshine."
Thoughts?
THANK YOU all for the followers, favourites and the lovely reviews! I hope you all liked this chapter, and if you have a spare moment or two, please drop a review, and I will hopefully see you all soon!