A/N: PLEASE, go back and read Chapter 15 before this one. Due to an issue with this site, so many stories have had invisible chapters for a week, and Chapter 15 is no different. I loved writing it and it was a big one for plot, and I would LOVE if people are able to go back and read it/review it before they do this one too.
Anyway, this chapter might surprise a few people but I wanted to address something I've been teasing in the background during all this and bring in a few more people to boot. Hope you enjoy!
(***)
"You know, Hitoshi, when I said I was coming to collect you from class and show you something special, I thought you might be a little more positive than usual."
Hitoshi Shinso refused to look up as he stood outside the door of the auditorium with his mother, instead fixing his sullen gaze firmly on the floor. "I'm sorry, next time I'll bow at your feet to express my gratitude."
She tutted, and tried to fix his messy hair and button up his collar, deliberately ignoring his growl of protest. "You could have at least made the effort to look nice for this. This is supposed to be a great day, a chance to show the board my finest achievement and a chance to show off what we've been working on for years. I would have hoped you could make the effort for me."
"Why? Nobody in this place ever makes an effort for me." Hitoshi jerked away from her and tried not to look at the kids from the other training class who were walking by, all to used to the murmurs and weird looks he was getting from some of them. "I'm just the kid with the villain's Quirk, I'm just your son. Nobody sees anything past that."
She sighed, exasperated. "Really? Can we not do this now? It's not the right-"
"Time? It never is," he snarked back, in a dark tone, shaking his head to allow his messy purple hair to stand up as he liked it again. "You don't even make the effort for me because you always say you're too busy. Any time I try to talk to you about it is a bad time. I don't want to be here and I don't want to do this-"
"Please, Hitoshi, we can talk after this," she said, grabbing his sleeve with a pale hand. "The President is coming to see this, our best Pro Heroes are coming. This is the big day where we show them the way to get society back under control-"
"You really don't see it, do you? You alienated half of society by trying to take too much control, and now you wanna take more? Whatever you're planning, they won't accept you."
"Hitoshi." She bit, and inside he smirked at the small victory. "I gave you the best chances I could, to be here and achieve your goal. And that's how you repay me? With comments like that?"
"If you don't see the truth, that you only brought me here so I didn't get in the way of your successes, then there's no helping you." Hitoshi rubbed at the bags under his eyes with his free hand. "Don't act like you care."
"That's not-"
"Don't worry, I won't mess up your big speech," he replied, snatching his arm away and pushing at the door. "They're all here for you anyway. They won't care about me whatever I do."
"Hitoshi, I-"
"Relax," he called over his shoulder as he slunk into the auditorium, ignoring the looks on the faces of the gathered bureaucrats. "You won't even know I'm here."
God knows he wished he wasn't there. The Commission was a hellhole and he was lost in it. Anywhere but there would be better.
Incident Zero had changed things for many people. Many had lost parents, siblings, children; many had found their dreams crushed and their livelihoods destroyed. Hitoshi Shinso had grown up in Saitama Prefecture relatively untouched by the effects of Incident Zero. And then, as it looked like Japan was just about to start its recovery and move on, the Hero Commission had completely overhauled the whole of Hero society to the tune of fervent protest; Hitoshi had just been dragged along for the ride.
One way or another, he blamed his mother. Haruga Shinso was a Pro Heroine who had been kept relatively underground by the Commission; with a Quirk like hers, she had to be kept out of the limelight and allowed to do the dirty work, because it would scare anyone and everyone if the public learned the truth of her powers. She was a Commission darling, and so when the announcement was made that the Commission was gathering its own force of Heroes, training its own future Heroes in house, she made sure that he came along with her. It wasn't enough for them to take in the likes of Hawks, Wash, Death Arms, Crust and more; in the wake of UA refusing to bend to their whims, they had to build their own hero academy.
Hitoshi didn't get a say in the matter when his mother asked him to come along and become one of their own recommended students, and his dreams of going to UA hadn't been realised; instead, he was one of a hundred trainee students directly working at the Commission's facility outside of Tokyo, learning to fight first and ask questions later in their vision of a brave new world. It wasn't what he wanted to be, and yet he couldn't talk to her about it because she just wouldn't listen. He was lost in the crowd to her, just another problem child.
He barely ever saw his mother, wrapped up in her missions she couldn't talk to him about or whiling away her days in a laboratory on some project for the President. Hitoshi had just been thrown to the wolves to become one of the Commission's many future investments, subjected to their harsh training regimes and made to feel as if he was part of some military boot camp. And it wasn't just bad enough that being the son of a Pro Heroine bred resentment among some of his peers; the other kids would never see any merit, and would only see a boy who they felt had used the family name to get a leg up in life. No, everything was made worse because of his Quirk.
Again, Hitoshi blamed his mother. After all, her Quirk's worst elements had fused with his father's Quirk to give Hitoshi his Brainwashing ability, an ability which caused all the other students in the Commission's training program to whisper about him when they thought he couldn't hear. In the beginning, it had hurt him to hear their names for him; the villain in their midst, the B rank, the freak. All of this because his Quirk could do stuff they were scared of, because it didn't look as heroic or noble as some of those possessed by his bitter and mocking peers.
Several fights later, and several tellings-off from their teachers after he had Brainwashed classmates into embarrassment as revenge, Hitoshi had decided to just grow a shell to deal with it all. It still hurt when he heard them, and Hitoshi was sick of it, but he had grown tired of the lack of response when he showed weakness and adopted sarcasm and apathy as a means of respite. If they didn't think he was bothered, they wouldn't bother him.
He would show them, one way or another. He would succeed, however much he hated being there, and he would show them that he was more than his Quirk. That he could be a good Hero, whatever they said.
If only to get back at his mother a little.
As he slumped down into an empty chair in the auditorium on the end of a row near the front, he didn't pay attention as to who he'd sat down next to until they spoke up. "I know these things are usually dull, but they've gotta be better than class, right?"
If it had been anyone else asking Hitoshi would have considered activating Brainwashing and asking them to vacate the seat next to him, but this was someone he could actually tolerate and someone he recognised. The Hero Commission's pride and joy, the Number Two in all of Japan, their project for the last few years and a shining example used as a stick to beat all of their new recruits with, was sat right next to him. With wings that wide, none of Hitoshi's peers could ever hope to get out of his shadow, and Hitoshi had his own doubts as to whether he would have a Hero career even a tenth as successful as the young man besides him; even despite that, Hitoshi respected him as one of the few people who had actually spoken to him like a human in this place, and hadn't tried to force the Commission's ideals down his throat at any given chance.
He turned to look at the young man beside him, and while he had been starstruck the first time he had met him, now he could talk to him like any normal person. That was a rare quality within this place. "You say that, but it's not your mom who's presenting it."
The Wing Hero Hawks had wrapped his fierce red wings around him like a blanket as he sat in the chair, and he shot a small smile at Hitoshi. "I did ask myself how a student got out of Combat Training to come and see the show here. Perks of being Sway's kid, huh?"
"I wouldn't describe them as perks," Hitoshi muttered, sinking further into his chair at the mention of his mother's hero name. "How come you're here, Hawks? No other Heroes are here."
"Aw, no sir?" Hawks asked, but when Hitoshi didn't respond to the tease he just flashed a peace sign and the wide smile he had become known for on the front page of every newspaper in Japan. "Nah, the President asked me to come down. Apparently Sway's got something exciting planned that she wants me to see."
Hitoshi looked behind him to the back row, to see the stern and immediately recognisable President talking to two of her close advisors with a very deliberate poker face. One of the most powerful women in Japan, rarely seen in public these days, had made it to this event. "God, I feel out of place."
"Wanna know a secret?"
"Huh?"
Hawks leaned in and raised an eyebrow at him conspiratorially, his blonde hair wafting with a blast of air-conditioning as he whispered. "So do I."
Hitoshi tried not to smirk and looked away, rolling his eyes. "Try telling that to me when you're not their favourite hero. They raised you here, didn't they? You can't feel out of place."
"It's true." Hawks lifted his feet up to rest his black boots on the seat-back in front of him, and stared at the stage with its small podium. "It's not like how it used to be. Sure, they were strict on me when they were teaching me, but the world back then was different, right? More hopeful. I believed they would let me out there and I could join All Might in making people happier."
Hitoshi almost forgot that the Pro beside him wouldn't have been old enough to make his debut when Incident Zero happened. All of Hawks' career had been in the shadow of a world without its Symbol of Peace. "And now we're all just filling a gap."
"They're trying their best," Hawks said, looking back over at him. "They just can't get it right all the time."
Hitoshi didn't believe him that they were doing well at all, and opened his mouth to say so, but at that moment the lights dimmed and his mother strode through the door to walk down the steps to the stage. He hated how obvious the family resemblance was with him and his mother; even though her hair was straight and cut short, it was still the same recognisable shade of indigo unlike anyone else in the room, and he had her purple eyes, just with permanent bags underneath his. If he had any say in the matter, he'd invest in a lot of hair dye the second he left the Commission's training programme.
When she reached the podium, with a small cough she announced her presence, and the murmurs of discussion in the room died down. With one last look over Hitoshi, as if imploring him to keep quiet and not ruin the moment for her, she began to speak.
"Thank you all for coming today. For those of you who aren't familiar with me, my name is Haruga Shinso, although you may have heard whispers about me under my hero name of Sway. I've been here with the Commission for a fair few years heading up the Underground Heroics team, although in a world like this pretty much everything is underground these days."
As a few polite laughs rang out across the auditorium, Hitoshi tried not to groan loudly and lamented not bringing earphones to drown out her awful self-serving jokes. One of his idols growing up had been the underground hero Eraserhead, the teacher at UA who basically fought Quirkless; when he found out that his mother was also technically an underground hero, the idea had lost its lustre a little.
"My work has to take place underground because of the nature of my Quirk. It's been a closely kept secret through most of the Commission, but my Quirk has a number of ways you can refer to it. Suggestion, Hypnotism, Influence..." Her gaze drifted over Hitoshi, and he made a point to look away, "and even Brainwashing. I prefer to call it... Trance."
Of course you do, Hitoshi thought. Anything to play it down.
"Put simply, my Quirk allows me to place an individual into a state of mind in which I am able to influence them. This can be immediately, depending on what I command the individual to do, or subconsciously, to allow for a delayed reaction from the individual at a time I desire."
He yawned. He basically had her Quirk after all.
"In the hands of a villain this Quirk would be devastating. In the eyes of the public, a Quirk with such drastic effects would be far too dangerous to be allowed to be wielded by a Hero. What kind of Hero would a person be if they could totally bypass a sense of liberty, remove a person's freedom of choice even just for a second?"
"I'll show you," he muttered under his breath, not catching the look from Hawks besides him. "Just watch me."
"As such my work with the Commission has, until recently, been limited to underground work on missions where there is no risk of a public reveal. Besides this, I have had ample time to research the limits of my Quirk and perfect its mastery, consider fully how best I am applying it. Such a power would only be deployed to be used to its full potential in the darkest of times." His mother paused, and adjusted the thick-framed glasses that hung around her eyes. "These are dark times."
Hitoshi felt it, then. He had had a lifetime of exposure to his mother's Quirk to recognise when it took effect, to pick up on the tingling on his skin like goosebumps that she was layering her voice with it when she said that phrase. Unlike him, she didn't need to get a response from her intended target for her Quirk to activate, but it was a lot less successful if it didn't get a response. Next to him, Hawks stirred, but Hitoshi only had eyes for his mother at that point. Why was she trying to deploy her Quirk here? And who was it on?
"We find ourselves surrounded by threats on every level of society." His mother looked up and Hitoshi had no doubt that she had nodded towards the President, sat tight-lipped in the back row. "We struck a deal to allow some of the Heroes to remain private, out of fear of backlash if we brought them all in. By doing so we have divided society, so that some of our Heroes end up obstructed by those independent of us. Private Heroes pick and choose where they want to enforce the law and where they want to turn a blind eye, leaving us with the clean-up duty in the end. The Yakuza are profiting more and more, and the extremist groups are shouting louder. Criminals aren't afraid of us."
There it was again. As Hawks leaned forward to listen more, a frown on his face, Hitoshi felt the wave of suggestion that he knew came from her Quirk. That last phrase was heavy with the feeling, the emotional and psychological equivalent of a fishing hook. His mother had a target in mind for all of this, but who?
"The worst of all, though, are the vigilantes." His mother paused as there were some murmurs of assent in the audience. Not from Hitoshi, who frankly couldn't be more grateful somebody was actually doing the job the Commission were supposed to do, instead of sitting in their towers trying to make a political statement. "The ones who think they can act with no consequence, the ones who think they can be heroes with no moral code, the ones who pretend that the law doesn't matter and that they are above us. We have allowed them to survive unchallenged for too long."
Was this what it was about? All of the issues in the world, and the Commission remained fixated on stamping out the competition? On punishing people trying to do the right thing, rather than commending them for helping to tackle the criminals the Commission kept missing? And why could Hitoshi still feel the waves of his mother's Quirk reaching out in that last statement?
"It's time, we decided, to take a stand. To not tolerate these vigilantes and their mindless acts of violence any longer." His mother banged the podium, unconvincingly in his mind. "We have been letting them grow unchallenged for too long, and haven't worked decisively to rip the weeds out as they sprouted. Now, finally, we have a way to deal with them once and for all. We must wipe them out for good."
The force of his mother's Quirk in that last statement made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up, and he could have sworn that even Hawks beside him flinched. Who was she directing it at?
"So finally we have a way to tackle them, to do whatever it takes to end their activities. Madam President, I am truly grateful that you allowed me to remove the shackles and set to work, because now, we can tip the balance in our favour once and for all. We can beat the criminals for good." She raised a pale hand, and Hitoshi finally realised with horror what was going on, as her purple eyes glowed to finish the job. "What are you going to do, Hawks?"
All that time, the Wing Hero had been leaning forward in his seat, and finally Hitoshi got a brief look at his face before Hawks sprang forward with a flap of those mighty red wings. What he saw confirmed every terrible thought that had run through his head, when he looked into those avian yellow eyes and saw nothing but clouded acceptance; Hawks wasn't there in that moment. The cheerful, bright-eyed youth of the Number Two had been overridden into blind subservience by his own mother, and from the gasps he heard in the crowd he wasn't the only one blindsided by this.
Hawks landed beside his mother on stage with the lightest of touches, and she gestured to him with a proud flourish. "I'm sure all of you in the room are familiar with our favourite son, Hawks. Taken in and raised by us at a young age, he's been a loyal ally as we try to deal with the changing world. But the problem with a hero like Hawks is... inhibition."
"All of those impulsive decisions a hero has to make when they're faced with the worst possible outcomes, all of those moments that hang in the balance and decide the fate of an ordinary citizen or the freedom of the most cruel of villains? They are what defines a Hero, but in times like these... they can obstruct. Crises of conscience allowing vigilantes to get free because we fear they may have helped? Moral uncertainty because we believe the villain has a motive we can understand. These are not luxuries we can afford, these shades of grey."
She waved a hand in front of his face. "My Quirk allows for temporary control, but over the last two years I've been given access to Hawks to work on a more regular basis. Months and months of daily exposure to my Quirk has allowed me not just control for an impulsive action, but the ability to access his subconscious as I have never been able to do so before. All those self-imposed limits, all those moral hangups and emotional traumas... I can overcome them. Black, and white."
"Key phrases layered with my Quirk act as a trigger to activate a separate persona built into Hawks' subconscious, of my own design." She nodded, smirked to herself. "Say them, and I can bring him around into the state we desire. I can create our own weapon, a tool with no second thoughts and no aversion to doing whatever it takes to achieve our goal of a just society for all. Under this control, he is ours to command for the good of all."
Behind her, two Commission lackeys brought in someone who appeared to have been drugged, and Hitoshi's eyes widened at the sight of the man, dropped to his knees and allowed to remain there whimpering. "This is Teruo Hazukashi. His Shame powers him up through his Quirk. He lost his job after Incident Zero and decided to take that news by stripping naked and putting nearly twenty of his former colleagues in the hospital. Two of them have died, and he would have otherwise serve life in prison to this date. But if we feel that justice is not done..."
She turned to Hawks, stiff as a board under her command, and Hitoshi's eyes widened. "Deal with him."
He barely even had the chance to blink before the Hero moved, and the ripple of gasps across the room followed as Hawks sprang forward with one mighty wingbeat, pulling a sharpened feather from the end of his wing and plunging it into the man as some kind of sword. He had seen Hawks use the Feather Blade technique once or twice before on television, usually to defend himself against villains with blades, but he knew the Wing Hero had publicly vowed in interviews to never use it as an attack on someone. Now, as Hazukashi's body crumpled to the floor, he saw the horror of it all; the looks on the faces of almost everyone else in that room were looks of approval.
Months upon months of daily sessions of hypnotism and brainwashing at her hands, to override any subconscious urge to disobey, had turned a proud Hero into her plaything, their plaything. They had actively sat by and encouraged her to take a man they had raised from childhood, who trusted them with every last fibre of his being, and split his personality, to turn him into their killing machine to act as they pleased. He would obey every order they gave him unquestioningly and immediately, to the detriment of anyone who stood in their way. He gave the Commission their chance to act as judge, jury and executioner with no regard to his freedom of choice or to fair process.
And they applauded it.
"Kneel and face them." His mother... no, Sway, she didn't deserve that title anymore, stood there beside the Hero and turned him to kneel before the Commission, staring straight ahead. "You see what we can do? For years they have stood against us and got in our way. All we have wanted to do is police effectively and clean out the rot in our society, and they do everything in their power to sabotage us. He will not hesitate."
"Now we can finally begin to truly deal with the threats our society faces. Dark times call for desperate measures, but this, this is calculated and true. We can permanently neutralise the most dangerous and violent of criminals, we can triumph against the Heroes who pretend to stand for justice, and we can ensure that the criminals who claim to be vigilantes are purged. That they never obstruct our judgment again."
She raised one pale hand to the back of the room, pointing to the President as if with a final flourish. "Finally, Madam President, we can tip the balance. We won't stop until every last vigilante is hunted down and removed from our crumbling society, and until the villains fear us once again. This is now our fight to win."
Sway smirked, and Hitoshi found it alarming how awful her smile looked on her face. "For the good of all?"
What left him sat rigid in his chair and utterly broken by the whole thing wasn't the proud smile on her face in that moment, searching him out in the crowd for his adulation. It wasn't the speed at which the President rose from her chair to begin clapping, or how immediately the rest of the bureaucrats joined her in a rousing wall of approval, lapping up how the liberty and morality of one of their own had been so brutally stripped away as if it were necessary in this new world.
No, what left Hitoshi Shinso broken was Hawks.
All the while that Sway had been speaking, Hitoshi had watched the face of the Number Two, how glazed his eyes were, how obvious it was that her Trance Quirk had taken complete control of him. But as the President rose to her feet to clap, and as blood dripped from the tip of the razor-sharp feather still in his grasp, that look had flickered if only for a second, and he had seen the look in his eyes change. The emotions that had passed in those yellow eyes in a brief moment, the horror, the fear, the disgust, and the absolute sense of helplessness at not being able to break free.
Hawks was still in there in some way as they used him. They were breaking him for their own gain.
Hitoshi Shinso stared at the stage, at the Wing Hero, at Sway, and made up his mind. This was over every moral line he was aware of. Good vigilantes who tried to do their best to help would be murdered if the Commission carried on. A good Hero was being turned into a brutal predator to eliminate as they pleased, entirely against his wishes. People needed to know that this was how far the Commission had fallen, that this is what they were willing to do to one of their own, that the Commission would come for them and wouldn't stop until they used Hawks to wipe them from the face of the earth.
He had to warn people. He wouldn't be part of this. If he wanted to be a Hero...
He would have to do it himself.
(***)
Barely a few hours after fleeing from the Commission compound, Hitoshi found himself cursing his complete lack of a plan and how he had ended up lost in the middle of Japan's largest city.
In his head, the plan had been simple. Make an excuse to dip out of the meeting and head back to his room in the Commission HQ to gather his belongings. Use the fact that his mother and her cronies were distracted with their new project, and the fact that the teachers in the Commission's training classes thought he was with her, and get out of the compound on the outskirts of Tokyo, sneaking through the hole in the fence that the other recruits used to head out to watch movies and go to bars. Head into the centre of the city and disappear into the back alleys and the shadows, and from there once he had disappeared, find a way to warn people what they were planning.
All of this sounded very simple in his own head before he arrived in Tokyo, and became completely overwhelmed by the sheer amount of traffic and people, the scale of the buildings. Every time he had been into the city, he had been with other Commission students who knew the area or with his mother, who had arranged for someone to drive them around. On his own, and faced with his own paranoia that sooner or later his mother would send someone after him, he was struggling.
Finally though, he had found a lead of sorts, as he stuck to the shadows of a dark alleyway in the Naruhata district and waited for a police car to crawl on by. The area had been infamous in the past as the haunt of the Naruhata Vigilantes, a group shrouded in notoriety whose rates after Incident Zero had been somewhat varied. PopStep was a name of the past, and The Crawler seemed to pop up here, there and everywhere across the country, but the one name which seemed to remain present in the Naruhata area was Knuckleduster, a Quirkless vigilante with a violent streak and a reputation among the Commission as someone they wanted to deal with sooner rather than later.
Probably because he was so good at actually being a hero, compared to so many of their kind, Hitoshi thought to himself.
Hitoshi had heard the name mentioned by one of his mother's bureaucrat colleagues before that horrible meeting. As such he had no doubt that if the project with Hawks was really going to be their way of going after the vigilantes, then Knuckleduster would be high on their list of targets, up there with the Hero Killer and Gentle. If he wanted to warn someone of what was coming, he would be a good start, and if he could convince someone like Knuckleduster to take him in, he would have good protection against anyone who came after him. Hitoshi had a plan, and a good guess on where to start looking.
As the police car turned the corner, he slinked across the road to the alleyway on the other side, trying not to grimace at the smell of trash and someone's piss against a wall. There was a sign down here sticking out from the wall, above the door of a seedy back alley bar, exactly the sort he wouldn't want to go into on any other day. But Knuckleduster had a reputation for being a brawler, and for frequenting fight clubs to take on challengers; judging from the ripped posters on the alley walls giving the details for one or two streets down, this bar looked to Hitoshi like the right sort of place that people would go to sign up. Either he would sign up, or he would find someone who knew how to get him to a vigilante.
He tried not to roll his eyes as he pushed the door open and heard the jingle of a bell above the door, and tried not to meet the gaze of a trio of shaved-head thugs who barged his shoulders on their way out, instead walking straight up to the bar. It took more of his willpower than he expected to not cough at the stench of cigarettes, or spilled booze, and instead he just slid himself into a stool, noting that there was only one other person besides him and the bartender, shrouded in shadow in the corner of the bar.
The bartender, a hulking man with massive biceps and a third eye in the middle of his forehead, looked him up and down. "Don'tcha think yer a little young to be in here, kid?"
"Funny," Hitoshi said, forgetting to rein in the snark he was so used to deploying, "this didn't look like the sort of place you'd care about ID."
For a moment the silence hung in the air, before the bartender snorted. "Huh, kid's got balls at least. Whaddya want?"
"I don't want a drink," Hitoshi replied, looking up and struggling for a moment to pick two eyes to meet the gaze of. "I'm... kinda lost."
"Most people go to the police if they're lost, son," the barman said, pouring himself a glass of something unrecognisable and amber. "Unless yer not being truthful with me."
"Thing is..." Hitoshi paused, as he evaluated how much he could say. "I'm looking for a vigilante."
This was met with a stony look. "And what makes ya think ya could find one in here?"
Hitoshi waved back at the door. "Underground fight club banners outside in a district where Knuckleduster runs around? Either you've seen him and others around, or some of your regulars could point me to one."
The bartender took a swig of the liquid, eyes not moving from Hitoshi. "Certain types of folks come in my bar and start askin' about vigilantes. Not many are kids."
He put one beefy fist down on the bar besides Hitoshi's hand, who tried not to flinch. "In my experience, a kid like that is either very naive to be askin' those sorts of questions, or the kid ain't what he seems."
Hitoshi knew he was being tested, and he couldn't back down. Not with what he knew or what he needed to do. Instead, he moved his hand away from the large fist and wiped it on his trousers, to get the sticky spilled alcohol off of it. "I'm not naive, sir. I need to find one of them, as soon as possible. Knuckleduster, Gentle, Stain, anyone of them-"
"Yer seriously coming into my bar and asking about the Hero Killer?" The bartender sounded incredulous. "Ya must think I'm stupid, kid. What are ya?"
"It's been a long day. Trust me, I know what I'm asking."
"Attitude won't getcha nowhere-"
"Now come on, Inamura," a loud voice rang out from the shadows on the other side of the bar, and Hitoshi remembered suddenly that they had company. "You're not harassing my new recruit, are you?"
Hitoshi didn't turn yet to see who was calling; the reaction of Inamura behind the bar to freeze and stiffen up was far more interesting. "Ah shit, he's one of yer kids? I didn't know-"
"No no, forgive me." The voice was raspy and drawling, well-spoken but with something in it that sounded almost a little sleazy. "I should have told you I changed the code phrase. From now on, if anyone comes in and tells you 'it's been a long day', just assume they're with me."
Hitoshi hadn't yet looked left to see the individual in question, but whoever it was had saved him from a potential confrontation with the three-eyed Inamura. Whoever it was could have been very dangerous but for now, he had to play along with the save and trust that Brainwashing could get him out of any sticky situation in the near future. "Sorry about that. Should have led with it to avoid the confusion, huh?"
"You're new on the job! Everyone makes that mistake at some point." The man in the corners had got up now, walking across the bar; Hitoshi could tell from his footsteps that he was wearing smart and expensive shoes. "You mind leaving us to talk business, Inamura? Got to keep customer confidentiality, after all."
With a nod, the bartender set a glass of whiskey on the side for Hitoshi, and stepped back. "That one's on him, kid. Look after yerself- he's a tough boss to please."
As the bartender squeezed out from behind the bar and through a 'Staff Only' door to a backroom, Hitoshi breathed a sigh of relief, feeling some of the tension release. "Thanks. I didn't want to cause a fuss."
"Usually, you can achieve that by not wandering into a back-street bar and asking for introductions to the Hero Killer or any old vigilante." His saviour slid into a stool besides him, and Hitoshi resisted the urge to turn yet. "Although, when a kid comes knocking with questions like that, well, consider me interested."
"Yeah, bad approach, I know." Hitoshi sagged. "I just... don't know what else to do."
"I understand. They probably don't teach you about stuff like this as a Hero Commission trainee, do they?"
Hitoshi paused, the glass of free whiskey halfway to his mouth. "How did you-"
"Well, you kinda confirmed it to me by not denying it there." The man chuckled as Hitoshi stiffened. "But honestly, I see what you're wearing. You've turned it inside out, but that's a Hero Commission trainee jacket you've got tied around your waist."
"And yet..." Hitoshi said, warily, "you still stood up for me. Why?"
"Easy. You're not wearing it proudly and you've come running into a bar like this, which suggests to me you're a runaway. And if someone runs away from the Commission and starts asking about vigilantes, well, I'm all ears."
Hitoshi didn't know what to say to begin with. "You..." He couldn't hide it. "Yeah, I ran away. What they're planning to do to vigilantes and ordinary people isn't heroic. I wanted to warn people."
"So you're a kid with morals, huh?" There was a clink, and with horror Hitoshi saw the man set a pistol down on the bar. "At least that makes one of us."
Now Hitoshi turned, and he saw the man for what he was. He was middle aged, with tufty grey hair swept to the side in a parting above squinting pink eyes that peered at Hitoshi through tinted spectacles. He was dressed immaculately in a purple suit and a crisp white shirt with no tie, and the things that drew Hitoshi's eyes were the glimmering gold necklace he was wearing, and the expensive watch on his wrist. All in all he looked like a rogue, but one who was very well off indeed; if he was a criminal, then he was the sort of person who made a lot of money from others doing his work.
Hitoshi ground his teeth a little, but didn't yet activate Brainwashing, his ace in his sleeve. Only if absolutely necessary. "What does that make you then?"
The man chuckled, flashing a smile which had a tooth missing. "I'm just the guy who gets people what they want. People pay quite well for it, in this day and age."
"You're... a broker?"
"Bingo!" The man slapped a hand on the side of the bar. "Name's Giran, kid. Whatever people need, I get. They want information? I know people who can track and hack and get whatever you need, for a price. They want gear? I know a few people on the darker side of the Internet, and know when stock goes missing from a Detnerat warehouse. And I, my young friend, can help you here."
"You... want to help?" Hitoshi gestured weakly at the gun on the bar top. "But-"
"Oh, that?" Giran chuckled again, picking it up and to Hitoshi's horror pulling the trigger; Hitoshi was not expecting a little flame to pop up from the tip. "Consider that my party trick for any customer I'm not happy with. Really I'm just a terrible smoker. You want a cigarette?"
"... No thanks."
"Right answer!" Giran used the pistol to light up a cigarette he had pulled from his blazer pocket. "If the buyers don't kill me, this habit will."
"Anyway..." Hitoshi tried to shake himself out of the confused state he was in. "You... supply people? Black market gear?"
"Some of it is legitimately sourced, but where's the fun in all of it being traceable?" Giran shrugged in a cloud of second-hand smoke which made Hitoshi cough. "The Commission tighten their fist, and now everyone wants gear to protect themselves. It's not just villains in the underworld these days- a lot of the vigilantes want stock, too, and it's not like they can get it through normal means with the Commission trying to get them at every turn."
"And now there's you, young..."
"Hitoshi." There was no point in hiding his name. Someone would find out sooner or later. "Hitoshi Shinso."
"Shinso..." Giran frowned. "Sway?"
"My mother." Hitoshi grimaced. "Half the reason I ran."
"Can't say I blame you. That woman has it fierce against a lot of my contacts." Giran turned to look at him. "If you're Sway's kid, then you really don't have any connections. You've run away and you're now in the underworld, sure, but if you aren't careful you'll end up in a hole somewhere. That usually happens when someone without allies comes into this part of society and starts asking the wrong questions."
Hitoshi smirked. "But I do have allies. I have you now, don't I?"
"Ha! Very quick." Giran let out another puff of smoke. "You have information on the Commission you wanna share to the right people-"
"To anyone who will listen," Hitoshi interrupted. "But I need protection."
"So you give them your information and in return they let you go with them?" Giran paused. "I've seen worse barters. Hell, I've made worse. It's probably even enough to secure my support. But not many of the vigilantes I know will take that trade. How far are you willing to go with this?"
"All the way," Hitoshi replied without hesitation. "Why?"
"If it's information about the Commission... then I guess it's something about Heroes. And if you're absolutely sure you wanna spread the news, and want to fight the Commission..." Giran looked at him thoughtfully. "How do you feel about the Hero Killer?"
"You supply Stain?" Now that was a name Hitoshi recognised with a shiver, and one he hadn't been expecting.
"Someone has to. The man gets through a lot of knives. And blood bags, apparently." Giran shrugged. "If you've got news on Hero Commission strategy which will change the game, and want to warn people what they're up to so they can plan a counter, I can't think of anyone better than the man they hate most. How about him?"
He gulped. This was the test, wasn't it? This was where he made up his mind how far he was willing to go with this, where he drew the line. Aligning himself with someone as dangerous and deadly as Stain would send him into territory from which there was very little hope of coming back unscathed, and he had more than his fair share of reservations about the idea of killing a Hero. But he had to get this information out to someone who could stand against the Commission, to someone who wouldn't be afraid to spread the news and to stand defiant in the face of his mother and Hawks and their nightmarish little project. Stain... could be relied on to do that. And even though he couldn't say that he would be happy with all of his mission, he had run away from the Commission because of how unheroic they were being, hadn't he?
Maybe there was some common ground between them, for how much he hated the Commission's corruption of the idea of heroism. Maybe there was a chance this could work.
"... Whatever it takes." Hitoshi steadied himself and made his decision. "If you think he would be my best bet to act on this, then I'll be guided by you."
Something flashed in Giran's eyes; was that respect? "You really are committed, huh, mister Shinso? To go to those lengths to stand against them... he'll like you."
"You think?" Hitoshi asked, trying not to let hope creep into his tone. This was not how he imagined his life would go, but the idea of meeting Stain gave him hope. "Then that's what I'd like to ask your help with, sir."
"Giran is just fine," the broker snorted, stubbing his cigarette out in an ashtray on the bar. "But you know I can't just give that to you for free, Hitoshi. You're my new recruit, after all. Your boss needs to know what he's getting into first."
It took Hitoshi a second to realise what was being asked. "You want to know too. That's what you mean when you said it was enough to secure my support, isn't it?"
"You're not as naive as I feared," Giran confirmed. "It's my neck on the line with any introductions here, and my customer you want introducing to, so I think it's a fair trade. I'll look after you and give you somewhere to stay in the meantime, but... in return, I want to know."
It was only fair, he supposed. He had been lucky enough to fall into the right bar at the right time to find this broker, with his crooked grin and skewed moral outlook on life. Any other bar in the city or any other time, and he may not have found the man who spoke up for him and stopped him being set on by an angry local. Hitoshi would be the first to point out the massive differences between his views and Giran's- a wannabe hero talking to a man who supplied weapons to criminals and Hero Killers alike- but he would also be the first to admit that he was out of his depth and in need of an ally. He could do a lot worse than Giran.
And anyway, whatever place this man had, it probably beat sleeping in an alleyway. He was not keen on that.
"Fine." Hitoshi gave Giran a dark little look. "You might need another drink after I finish."
"Some may say," Giran said, raising an eyebrow, "that those are the best sorts of stories."
"Not this one." Hitoshi took a sip of the whiskey, and tried not to let the bitter sting in his throat get to him as he spoke to Giran. "Tell me... how much do you know about the Wing Hero, Hawks?"
(***)
Hitoshi Shinso. Aged: 15
Keigo Takami, Hawks. Aged: 22.
Kagero Okuta, Giran. Aged: 43.
(***)
A/N: Phew, longest chapter yet. What a ride.
Haruga is an OC, yes. As an aside, Haruga means 'distant or remote', but taken individually the Ha kanji can mean 'supremacy' or 'domination' or 'victory', the Ga kanji means 'ego', or 'selfish'. Thought that one fitted quite well.
Really wanted to set Hitoshi up in a different way; it won't be to everyone's tastes I appreciate it, but I enjoyed it a lot. I wanted to bring in the Commission since they're the one major organisation in my story we've not specifically dealt with in detail, and Hitoshi gave me a chance to explore them in detail and give him a more fleshed out arc. For him, I want his development to be centred around a desire to do the right thing and not let a supposed villainous Quirk define him, while being faced with people who are doing horrible things while presenting as good. Hawks being a Commission baby, and extending the way in which they've raised him to manipulation on this scale, gave me so much of a chance to expand that too. Expect attempted redemption arcs and angst with Hawks.
Anyway, I wanted to thank you all massively for your support. We made it to 500 favourites and the big 250 on reviews which is nuts, especially given the drama over chapter uploads last week. Over 600 of you are now following too. If you want to give me a review for this chapter I'd love one, and as I said at the top, any love you can show Chapter 15 with reviews would go down a storm too since you can now read it. It's a big one for plot and was one of my faves to write.
Finally, I said I'd credit her and I don't intend to back away. This chapter is dedicated to Kim who helped me massively with Nighteye last chapter, and massively with Hawks and Shinso here. She is a confessed Hawks simp and an IRL saviour in my life, so was my first port of call when I came to her with a crazy plan of a chapter. Thank you for putting up with me disappearing from our IG chats for hours to fix writing and for dealing with my shenanigans generally, you absolute gem.
Ya boy, out.
