Yuri left the crossbow behind. He'd hoped to approach the roof without the use of his powers, but he wasn't trained as the heroes were, and couldn't safely make the leaps across buildings they seemed to manage so effortlessly, especially not when most surfaces were thick with the drifting snow that was still falling. He had to settle for the semi-flight he'd worked out long ago, propelling himself through the air with blasts of flame.
Seymour was waiting, hands on hips, a splash of bright color against the snow, as Yuri landed and walked towards him. The sound of traffic was muted and far away; closer at hand, all Yuri could hear was the crunching of his own footsteps. Seymour didn't move, but when Yuri drew close enough, the other man called out, in a voice seeming curiously muffled by the falling snow or by accumulation of it around them, "Justice Department, hmm?"
Yuri stopped. At least his mask gave no other indication of his surprise. But he felt he owed Seymour something after a month of that mystery, so he said, "Yes. What led you to that conclusion?"
"My name, and your certainty that you were right. It didn't take me much further."
"Did you believe I would be so transparent as to only attack those sinners whose cases I had handled?" Yuri asked.
"Hope springs eternal," Seymour replied, in that light, feminine tone Yuri typically only heard on the news. "Maybe I can get close enough to keep you from killing, at any rate."
Yuri felt a twinge of annoyance that he hadn't done away with Kincaid already. "You are not close enough yet, Fire Emblem. The demands of Thanatos are—"
"Drop it," Seymour interrupted. "It's not 'Thanatos.' You have some reason for doing this. You didn't come in fires blazing, for once, so tell me."
"My reasons?" Yuri asked. He thought of rolling his head on his shoulders, reverting to Lunatic, saying a hero could never understand his reasons. "The system fails, Hero. The system fails all too often."
"You mean the system failed you."
Under his cloak, Yuri folded his arms. "In the sixties," he said, "if the police were called for a domestic dispute, they would make no arrest unless the victim specifically requested it." He's going through a rough patch. He just lashed out, but I'll be fine. It looks worse than it feels. Saymour shifted, his hand going to his chin - he was thinking.
It had been an accident, everyone had agreed. Nothing about self-defense, about defending his mother, even though one eye had swelled entirely shut before the police even arrived, even though there were still bruises in the shape of his fingers around her throat from the incident the week before, when Yuri had called the police, and they'd once again left after urging his father — they'd called him "Mr. Legend," and "Sir" — to take a walk around the neighborhood to cool off. It had been an accident, and the circumstances were rendered even more hazy in the news reports, for the benefit of a grieving city. They'd lost their first and greatest hero, after all. "My father would have killed my mother before the year was over, if my powers had not manifested when they did."
His mother had watched the memorial service on TV.
"You killed your father deliberately?" Seymour asked, his voice betraying no sign of shock.
"No!" Yuri shouted, then fell silent, surprised at his own vehemence. "It was an accident. I had no idea I had powers until I tried to stop him. I only wanted to stop him." He put one hand to his face, to the scar, a reflex he could never quite stop. "But it was right."
"Why continue, then? Why make it your mission?"
He'd vowed never to use his powers again. To serve justice, to stop evil, in an entirely different way than his father had. But years of work had made it abundantly clear to him how little power he truly had, how little right and wrong and fairness had to do with justice. "An eye for an eye," he said. "A life for a life. Stern Bild has forgotten true justice."
"That's not an answer," Seymour said. "True justice isn't an agonizing death. What you do is get revenge — whatever the victims or their families might want."
"Do you think the murders I punish are humane and painless, Fire Emblem? Do you think there was no suffering in my house beyond physical pain?" His mother cowered not just from his father's anger, but from any loud noise; they'd walked on eggshells, never knowing if he'd content himself with a muttered curse or if he'd want to take his anger out on someone. Usually on his wife. Yuri received the occasional cuff, dodged a thrown plate or bottle from time to time, but the bulk of his father's fury was vented on his mother. "Do you think multiple stab wounds are a quick death? That victims have no time for terror?"
"And you think the only justice is punishment in kind?" Seymour's arms were folded over his chest, now. He was done, it seemed, with pondering, and Yuri tensed, almost welcoming a chance to fight again. "That's not just inhumane, it's impossible."
"No more impossible than protecting every citizen from danger," Yuri retorted. "Than driving the streets, hoping to disrupt fights and assaults as they happen."
Seymour ignored that. "You can't have believed you could kill every murderer who wasn't behind bars," he said. "What was your real goal, at the beginning? You hoped to make people question the heroes? Or question what justice meant?"
He'd investigated, using his own access, the police reports on his own father's death. He'd waited until the police officers who'd investigated it had retired, because they'd be sure to remember his powers. He'd had so little control over them then that the flames had still clung to his father's remains and flickered on the oil stain on the garage floor when the police had arrived. Once he knew they were gone, that no one who'd witnessed them before was still active in the police force, he'd begun to prepare, to practice his control of his powers, to compile his lists, to determine what circumstances merited his intervention. "I learned long ago never to turn a blind eye to evil," he said. "Evil must always be punished, even if the penalty comes too late to save its victims."
"Fine," Seymour said, "Don't answer," flames flickering around his hand.
"I thought I was the one who only understood violence?" Yuri said, unable to keep the sense of triumph out of his voice.
"Maybe if I put the question to you another way, you'll answer it," Seymour snarled, the flames lashing out, and Yuri jumped back, away from them. His cloak began to disintegrate, slowly, around the spot where they'd touched.
"Tell me, Fire Emblem. If you attempted to research my background, did you ever research the sinners I have punished? Which of them did you feel deserved a kinder death than the one I provided?"
"It's not about them."
"If you feel what I am doing is wrong, what punishment would you have for me?"
"I'm not the one to decide that." Another lash of flame, like the crack of a whip; Yuri blocked it with his forearm, but he felt the heat through his sleeve. "That's why we have courts. That's why we have a system."
"A system rotted at the core."
"A system we can allow to handle things so we don't have chaos." Another stinging stripe of heat. Yuri blasted back, a wave of flame. Seymour stepped out of it, glowing with orange flames like a forcefield, but Yuri could see spots of his own blue-green fire clinging to the man's red suit.
"You think you can idealize about our system of law to one who knows it as well as I do?"
"At least I don't spit in its face."
"We could return to that old debate about the respect you heroes show for both justice and the law," Yuri noted, layering the sarcasm heavily. Seymour was trying to look unmoved, but there were lines of strain around his mouth. On impulse, Yuri reached for his flames and pulled; from what he could see, Seymour might have burns on his right side, just above the hip in a trail leading down to his knee. "Tell me. Why such compassion for murderers? The most brutal and remorseless of killers, yet you express more concern for their sufferings than those of their victims."
"Oh, you can read minds now? You know how much compassion I feel?" Seymour snapped his fingers, and another lash of flame shot towards Yuri, stopping just before his mask. "It's not any specific murderer, or even all of them. It's not even that you're using the evil twin of my powers. It's the fact you're doing it. You decide who's brutal enough to be killed and who doesn't quite make the cut. You decide who got off because of his flashy lawyer and who was really innocent. That's not justice. It's dictatorship. It would be even if you were killing them painlessly."
Yuri didn't speak, or turn. He simply went away, dematerializing in a gout of flame, reappearing several buildings away, blocked from Seymour's sight. Or so he hoped.
At home, he treated the lashes on his arm with the leftover ointment from his earlier wound. Seymour didn't know, he raged to himself. He reviewed every case, individually. He watched courtroom footage and parole hearings. He probably knew his quarry better than their own defense lawyers had by the time he was ready to strike. It wasn't an arbitrary decision. It was just, and it was fair.
By this point, everyone seemed to be used to the idea of Nathan covering up when he was training. He still missed showing his tattoo, but the scar on his shoulder was an ugly welt, still. The new burns on his leg were nothing in comparison. What struck him was that trick Lunatic had pulled, withdrawing the fire; it was the reason he hadn't burned more seriously. He'd known the vigilante's control over his powers was impressive, but he hadn't known he could do that.
The other question, of course, was why he'd done that.
In the realm of information he actually had, Nathan was inclined to believe the vigilante's story about his family. It was no excuse, but maybe it was an explanation.
But he was also wondering why he was so willing to believe. Why he was ready to accept Lunatic's explanation, without investigating it, looking for the holes, seeing if it held up. It was near-impossible to truly check out. He had only the vaguest of timelines, a story of unreported beatings, and a cause of death. He could probably, given enough time, investigate every death by burning during the 60s. He wasn't sure he could even get access to police reports that had never resulted in an arrest. Yet he believed the serial killer who'd told him the tale.
He resisted, for a while, researching Lunatic's victims. But, fine, he could accept a challenge; he asked Veronica for the list and took it to the Justice Tower library. He collected the profiles mechanically, his mind barely registering any details beyond matching the names and the death dates, thinking about other things. What punishment would you have for me?
He'd asked Lunatic what he'd hoped to accomplish at the beginning, what the mission had been before continuing it had become a goal in itself. So it was only fair to ask himself what he had hoped to accomplish by challenging the vigilante?
It had little to do with clearing his name. He hadn't been under suspicion, to anyone save a handful of nutjobs on the internet, in over two years. It hadn't had much to do with justice, because he'd given more thought to what justice meant to him in the past few months than he had in years prior. It wasn't that he hadn't cared about justice — in its way it had been one of his motivations to become a hero — but he hadn't defined it to himself, and couldn't have described it if asked, until this ongoing fight of theirs had begun.
It was pride, in part. Lunatic had put him under suspicion, killed in front of him, but then turned to a grudge match with Tiger and Barnaby, like Nathan was beneath his notice. Lunatic had Nathan's powers, but a stronger, more versatile version of them, and Nathan hadn't loved that. He would have enjoyed bringing Lunatic in, where the golden boys hadn't. Performance as a hero wasn't Nathan's top priority. His power was too dangerous for him to risk going all-out in most situations. That wasn't an issue for him. He didn't have a boss, pressuring him to perform, like so many of the others did. He had his own niche within the heroes — no one was ever going to forget he existed — and he didn't need affirmation from the rankings or the card sales. But sure, he would have liked to have made a splash. To avenge his grudge and bring in the top prize.
So no, his motives hadn't been pure. He'd been much less interested in defending the murderers of Stern Bild than in his own ego.
The murderers and kidnappers and the organized crime enforcer linked to eight shoootings but serving time for an illegal gambling ring. The angel-of-death nurse who'd been convicted of killing three patients but suspected in dozens of deaths. Nathan had never had much of a taste for lurid crime stories, but his sister loved them, and some of the names he saw were familiar from her phone calls, despite the colorless descriptions of the crimes in the dossiers. "Convicted in the deaths of three members of the Morris family" brought back phrases like stabbed thirty times and somehow the oldest daughter made it out even though they set the house on fire with all of them dying inside. She always wanted to know if he helped arrest any of the worst criminals. "So what you're saying is you don't watch the show," he'd tease, but he was beginning to see how it worked. She wanted to see these stories of horrible suffering, empathize with the victims, and then know the people responsible had been punished. Ideally by her baby brother.
So of course Lunatic's victims were the sadists, the ritualistic serial killers, the mob figures. Of course there were horrific stories if he decided to look them up in the news archives rather than the Justice Department files. Lunatic had probably intended for him to do just that. It didn't change the facts.
But it made it easier to understand. And if it made someone like Nathan, who'd been thinking about this incessantly for the past four months, feel a twinge of sympathy, Lunatic would walk away as a folk hero from a jury trial.
What punishment would you have for me?
Guilt, Nathan thought.