A/N: Professor Oleck, and the descriptions of the legal system Yuri relates, both originated in Kurt Busiek's comic Astro City.
The year was drawing to a close. Wild Tiger had returned from retirement, publicly revealing the duration of his powers and giving interviews about standing up for justice and protecting the people of Stern Bild.
The man's naivete didn't rankle at Yuri as it once had, and his idea of justice didn't seem so strikingly idealistic; he wasn't alone among the heroes, clearly, in his dedication to some idea of justice. And the fact that he kept going head-to-head with Lunatic seemed to have more to do with luck and circumstance than with some singular fixation on stopping Yuri's alter ego. Clearly he rejected Yuri's own ideals, but so did Nathan Seymour, and so might many of the other heroes.
Wild Tiger's insistence that murder was not justice might seem black-and-white, compared to the fairly nuanced arguments Nathan Seymour had managed to present in the midst of a literal firefight, but Yuri was willing to give the veteran hero credit for more complex views than he'd managed to articulate so far. Still, he couldn't shake the feeling that Seymour was both one of the most intelligent and one of the most thoughtful of the heroes. Even without the evidence of his civilian accomplishments, it was an unavoidable conclusion.
Which made his rejection of Yuri's methods all the more maddening. Yuri had prided himself on the care with which he approached his task. The justice and logic of his mission should be evident to anyone who considered it at length.
What was your real goal, at the beginning? He'd wanted to make everyone — the citizens, activists, the heroes themselves — confront how hollow and corrupt the pre-packaged justice delivered by Hero TV truly was. He hadn't suspected the depths of the corruption, with Albert Maverick's confessed involvement in organized crime, but he'd been only too aware both of the ways traditional law enforcement was suborned by the demands of its celebrity-fueled competitor, and of the way that spectacular crime-fighting displays blinded citizens to the ordinary failings of the police and the courts.
And so, yes, his earliest killings had resembled a spree more than the measured justice he'd delivered since then. He'd killed the three men in prison at once, an opportunity he couldn't ignore, and then a fourth to clear Seymour. He'd deliberately eliminated the syndicate at the moment of one of Hero TV's more ambitious planned stunts, because he needed to make his point to as wide an audience as possible, as quickly and dramatically as possible. Since then, he'd been painstakingly precise as he selected, tracked, and eliminated each target.
Yet Seymour's argument was that precision and care and even a different set of powers entirely would not be enough, and Yuri found this far harder to dismiss than Wild Tiger's devout and simple proclamations about justice had always been. Seymour's claims, and his control over his powers, had been evolving, and he'd clearly devoted a great deal of thought to these questions since they'd begun this strange debate of theirs. It wasn't a pat refusal to listen to Yuri's views, it was a reasoned rejection of them.
From a man he'd come to respect.
Not just respect. Yuri respected Wild Tiger, as well, for his dedication to his beliefs, however wrongheaded. But he'd been genuinely concerned when he realized Fire Emblem was still fighting crime despite the injuries Yuri himself had inflicted. Yuri continued to play out his role in their fights, but he had less desire than ever to actually defeat his opponent. And yet the idea of canceling or forfeiting these matches, simply failing to show up, was also unacceptable.
The first full moon of the new year arrived, the moon hanging low and red in the sky, and despite their lack of any agreement to meet again, Yuri donned his costume and made his way to the abandoned power plant again. Seymour had left his own costume behind, this time. He stood on the roof of the abandoned plant, looking at the scars their earlier battles had left, wearing a stylish and expensive but sober three-piece suit, and an impeccably tailored, no doubt very expensive, double-breasted wool overcoat which would have been unremarkable on anyone Yuri might meet in court save for the fact that it was a vivid shade of fuchsia.
"You're hard to miss," Yuri commented as he alighted, and Seymour responded with a peal of delighted laughter.
"I do try," he said, still smiling.
"Is there some meaning to the change in costume, Fire Emblem?"
"Oh, please. You know my name. Why should I bother with the mask if I'm not aiming to fight?"
"If not to fight, why meet me here?"
"We've been talking more than fighting for a while now." Seymour put his hands in his coat's pockets. "I'm curious. Why do you keep coming here? What's in it for you? Why'd you answer my challenge at all?"
Yuri stood inside his cloak, not quite sure what to do with his hands. He'd debated whether or not to bring the crossbow; he was glad, now, that he'd left it behind. "I am not immune to curiosity."
"That accounts for one out of four. Five, now."
"And to the impulse to win arguments," he added. "I believe these reasons should be familiar to you."
"I suppose you could say that." Seymour turned and began walking, slowly, toward the edge of the roof. Yuri watched until he reached the low wall at the edge, brushed it off, and seated himself. After a moment, Yuri followed, stopping a yard or so away. He hadn't seen Seymour often in civilian clothing — he didn't make regular appearances in court, for property damage or any other reason — and he found himself studying the man's face in the half-light. The feminine arch of his eyebrows did most of the work of rendering his face androgynous; in the partial light it didn't appear that Seymour was wearing much makeup beyond the obligatory light-colored lipstick. His features were striking, perhaps handsome, though the effect he cultivated was more feminine than Yuri preferred. Yuri wondered at the reason for that. He didn't pass as female in the slightest; it wasn't as though there was anything feminine about his build. But then, some would have identified Yuri himself as fey or effeminate, a description he'd never understood.
"I completed my homework assignment," Seymour added, his tone light and slightly teasing in the silence.
"It's always good to have such diligent students," he replied. "Of course it didn't make a difference to you."
"Did you expect it to?"
"Have you never felt the desire to punish, not merely to arrest? To avenge some crime that... I believe you used the phrase 'hits close to home'?"
"I believe you know the answer to that," Seymour retorted. "Even if I couldn't fault a victim for wanting revenge, the right thing to do is to resist the urge, and it's not my job to take it for them. Take Maverick, for instance."
Yuri had wondered if that might ever come up. "You would have permitted Barnaby Brooks Jr. to kill the man?"
"I couldn't have faulted him if he'd wanted to. Even if I couldn't imagine him killing someone in the state that Maverick put himself in. I doubt I would have stopped him if he'd tried, though Tiger might have." Seymour stretched his legs out, powerful muscles still visible through the drape of his slacks. The shoes he wore were some dark, conservative color, but they still had heels that would be pronounced even on a woman's shoes. It wasn't as though he was a short man without them. "Handsome could kill someone in a rage, no question. I'm not sure he could do it as calmly as you do."
Handsome? "You felt that Maverick should have escaped justice?"
"All right, now you're asking the tough questions." Seymour's pale mouth quirked into a smile. "Your kind of justice, possibly. Even if it couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. What Maverick pulled on Barnaby was obscene, and it took everyone a while for that to sink in. I don't know if it's just to punish him for it after the brain damage, self-inflicted or not. I don't know if the law could do anything to him for some of his worst crimes."
"You consider his mental manipulations worse than his corruption and murders, then. The crimes he coordinated."
"You were just looking for proof I can be biased. There it is." He drew his legs in, crossed one over the other. "I know the blood on his hands is worse than the mind control, but I can see the damage to Barnaby. He's a friend. Yes, we all have biases."
"Handsome," Yuri repeated, and he heard Seymour chuckle.
"It's a nickname," he said. "Surely you know by now I like men, darling. It's another of those things that's hard to miss."
True. But interrelationships among the heroes had never concerned him. "Indeed," he said, finally.
"Do you ever feel guilt?" Seymour asked.
"Rarely. I did feel regret for the guards I had to fight to reach Albert Maverick. And I feel some sympathy for any family the sinners may leave behind. Most did not choose to love murderers."
Seymour sighed. "You're a lawyer, presumably. You work with the law, at any rate. Surely you know this isn't about individual cases."
Yuri had been thinking for some time about the story he was about to tell, refreshing and rehearsing it in his mind. But he hadn't foreseen, and couldn't explain, the sudden urge to take off his helmet. A desire to signal the significance of what he was about to say, perhaps, to let Seymour see his face, not the bared teeth of his mask. He should have a secondary mask, he thought. Like Wild Tiger. As if that did anything to conceal his features. A cowl, perhaps, like Fire Emblem's own. He had neither, and he left his helmet in place.
"When I was in law school, one of my professors told me about something he'd learned when he was a student himself. He said that one of his own professors told him the law was beautiful, that it operated like a machine. That it didn't matter who was on trial, the system would work if everyone did their jobs." Professor Oleck. He'd specialized in criminal law. "My professor said he thought of it more as a dance. The participants can work in new steps, or make adjustments. The law is always evolving. But his conclusion was the same — that the system was more important than any individual... missteps."
"That's the nature of any system," Seymour said. "Your solution is to personally take over all sentencing?"
Yuri paced away, toward the back of the Helios sign. "Did I say I agreed with him? Did I say I thought this was the only long-term solution?" He felt the anger as hot pinpricks beneath his skin, a restless itch on the verge of eruption. "My solution is to destroy the evil I see in front of me! You heroes speak of protecting the city, but you protect the handful of individuals you can personally rescue or shield! You can no more eliminate terrorism or crime or danger than I can eliminate murder!" He turned to glare at Seymour, but at the sight of the man, calm and unruffled, still seated, he felt his eyes blaze and flames forming in the palms of his hands, and he turned away again, fighting back the urge, as sudden and powerful as the desire to reveal himself had been, to just set the man aflame now, and consign all of his questions and prying and interference to ash. "Unlike you, I can never turn a blind eye to wrongdoing!"
Seymour's call bracelet sounded. Yuri whirled to face him. The man was standing, looking at him, still showing no signs of fear. "The difference is that we're not committing terrorism as we say we fight it," Seymour told him, in quiet, measured tones, and then he turned his back on Yuri and walked away.
Yuri watched him go, vanishing into the stairwell that led down into the plant. His fists wouldn't unclench, his heart wouldn't slow, and for once his eyes felt hot from the flames, until he turned and drove one flaming fist into the tale of the Y in the Helios Energy sign. Seymour was wrong, and he wouldn't even stay to hear the reasons why.
Yuri went to find William Kincaid. He watched the man's house, looking in through his windows, and longed to kill him. To show Nathan Seymour that Lunatic still believed no matter how many questions the hero might throw at him. That he held to his principles.
In the end, he spared the man, because if he killed the sinner now, the motivation would be anger, not justice. He wasn't sure if Seymour would have guessed at that — probably so — but even if not, Yuri would have known.
Instead, he made a point of monitoring Hero TV's targets. He planned, and waited. When they finally selected a criminal with a likely history, a drug dealer with a history of violent offenses and an acquittal for second-degree murder, he was ready.