Nathan was on medical leave from Hero TV, which didn't lessen his duties at Helios in the least, but did give him plenty of time to deal with the worried video calls from his mother, his sister, and the various extended family members who didn't know he was a hero but did know he'd been hurt. A car accident was the cover story; he'd always driven like a bat out of hell, so no one had any reason to doubt it.
His mother had always watched Hero TV through her fingers, sometimes literally, and she'd stopped watching entirely after the Jake incident. He and his sisters had rolled their eyes a little, when she wasn't around — it wasn't like he'd taken the kind of beating Tiger had, after all — but she was marginally happier that way. But it meant when something did go wrong she could imagine whatever she pleased, so he was pretty sure she'd constructed some horrible nightmare scenario where his shoulder was a charred mass of bone. Obviously he'd have to have her flown in soon so she could see he still had both arms, even though he tried to show her on the holo-screen.
His younger sister, of course, wanted to know all about Lunatic. "You were actually in there punching him!"
"You don't have to sound so happy about it, Andrea." She had scarlet and gold braided into her hair as some kind of show of support. It was widely known back home that Fire Emblem was from the area, and there'd be some who remembered Nathan's own powers and connected the dots, but it still perturbed him to see her make the links as openly as all that. Not like it did anyone any good to take issue with anything any of the Seymours did to their hair. Or nails. Or faces.
"Well, I'm not happy you got hurt, but you were face-to-face with Lunatic! Mask-to-mask, anyway. Did you get a look at his face?"
"Not enough to pick him out of a lineup." He didn't think the cameras had even caught the cracks he'd spotted — there was no crew on the ground with them — but maybe she was just hoping something had been edited out of the broadcast. "Believe me, if I had, he'd be in prison by now."
"That's too bad," she said.
"Too bad I can't put him in jail? I thought you were kind of on his side."
"Maybe before he set your shoulder on fire. But no... it was kind of cathartic, you know, when he'd take down someone who really deserved it, but that didn't make it right." If only Lunatic were as easy to convince. "And that boy he killed. 'Associated with known gang members.' Yeah, because in some neighborhooods if you don't, you won't have any friends at all."
Even in a smaller city like they'd come from. "I know," he said. "The media's been pretty good about it, though. So far. Mostly human interest stories about him and his family, not playing up the gang angle." Admittedly, the less said about some of the blogs, the better. But all the photos on TV made the boy look like a smiling, slightly pudgy teddy bear. "The one guy we were really after in that car did have a warrant out for his arrest, but none of the others had done anything. The idea was that we'd catch them in the act, but you saw how that went." And if they'd all been caught in a drug deal, what then? Would the cases be dismissed for lack of evidence, would the dead boy have cut a deal with the prosecutors and emerged shaken but unharmed, or would he vanish into the prison system, only to emerge with no options but a life of crime? His mental voice had shifted to Aunt Cassandra's.
He'd be in prison right now, he'd said to Andrea of Lunatic, but he wasn't sure that was really true. If he managed to turn one of these fights around, peel off Lunatic's mask, and see a face he could describe to the police... what then? There shouldn't have been any question. He was a hero and Lunatic was a murderer. This was why heroes weren't supposed to work freelance. It was one thing to trust the judgment of a uniformed cop and another to trust the discretion of a costumed NEXT. Hell, Nathan wasn't even sure he trusted his own judgment right now regarding Lunatic. If he stopped killing... but that wasn't how these things worked. Criminals needed to be arrested, to stand trial. Pay a debt to society. Atone. Even if he didn't have much faith that anyone did much atoning or rehabilitation in prison, that was how the system he'd been arguing for all this time was supposed to work, even if it often didn't work at all.
A judge would know that better than anyone. A judge who'd worked as a prosecutor since law school; Nathan had looked up Yuri Petrov's short public bio, and the Justice Department CV. There was no mention of a dead father, or the ability to fire rocket fuel from his palms, but Nathan hadn't expected anything of the sort. All those arguments about law and order, made to a judge.
He's got to live with himself, Nathan remembered his mother saying, resigned, shaking her head over some shameful acquittal on the news. If there's any justice in the world... His grandmother would sometimes mutter about judgment day, but never where Mama could hear. She didn't like anyone talking about hell under her roof. He'd absorbed it all, though, growing up; the general idea that there wasn't a lot of justice to be had, so you just sort of hoped it all came out even in the end, on some kind of cosmic scale. That maybe there was judgment waiting, that even if a killer walked, or never even stood trial, never lost his badge or served a day in prison, maybe he'd be tormented in his heart or his afterlife. Nathan still had sleepless nights of his own over power mishaps that hadn't killed so much as a fly.
If Lunatic really felt it, saw the full horror of what he'd done, living with his killings might be enough. Enough to satisfy Nathan. But he'd put himself through all this to prove the point that questions like guilt and innocence and punishment shouldn't be decided by just one person. He couldn't be sure that the man would feel guilt, or could. Remorse couldn't be quantified or proven. That was why they had trials instead.
He'd thought he was making the argument that a justice system was needed. That Lunatic shouldn't try to tear down the old one unless he had a replacement in mind. But if his guess was right, Lunatic was working both sides. Nathan wasn't sure what to make of that. Was he supporting the old system until reform happened, or trying to undermine it from within? Or was he killing out of bitterness that he spent most of his time reviewing the damage the heroes did to the city in the name of protecting it, rather than passing judgment on murderers? Did he ever preside over criminal court? That, at least, Nathan could check.
And Lunatic's arguments about what justice should really do had been getting to him. No, he wasn't buying into that eye-for-an-eye code, but he needed to decide all over again what he did believe, so he'd at least know whether he felt justice had been done once Lunatic had been caught and tried and found guilty. It wasn't his job as a hero to determine who was guilty and who was innocent, but he was a citizen of Stern Bild, a member of society. He was a person who believed things about justice and the law. A person who had every right to believe things, anyway, even if he was between certainties right now.
What was it Lunatic had said, about considering his mission a privilege? The implication had been that Lunatic himself didn't enjoy what he did. Fine, then. He should stop.
Lunatic should, by his own standards, burn to death, dozens of times over. But even if the justice system allowed that, Nathan wouldn't sentence anyone to that. Certainly not someone he knew.
Nathan knew Lunatic, now. He might not know with any certainty that Lunatic was Judge Petrov — there might be dozens of tall, lean, extremely pale men with deep voices working at the Justice Department — but he'd come to know the person behind the mask. He'd learned that Lunatic, or rather, the person playing Lunatic, was rational on some level. Despite his rhetoric, he wasn't just some ritualistic serial killer, and while Nathan wasn't certain that anything he'd said had persuaded his opponent, he thought Lunatic was capable of being persuaded. He didn't think he'd wasted the past months, that all of his injuries had been for nothing.
He was trying to talk himself out of arresting Lunatic. He wasn't investigating Judge Petrov, taking his suspicions to the authorities or to Agnes, spreading the knowledge around. He hadn't set out to get an arrest or uncover Lunatic's identity, true; he'd just wanted to win a fight, vent some frustrations, show off a bit, if he was honest. But he'd shifted his mission once, made this about justice and the law. He'd taken a stand and now he was wavering. He had the resources to investigate, to delve into police records — once you had a name, deaths by burning were a lot easier to search — as if he didn't want the proof. He'd let himself come to sympathize with a murderer, and now he was trying to find a reason to let the man escape justice. So what would Lunatic make of that? Was Nathan coming around to true justice, or just as fickle and lacking in conviction as any other hero except for the half of them Nathan knew to be true believers?
And what was he planning to do? Confront a dangerous madman with a hunch as to his identity, and hope Lunatic would turn tail and run rather than killing him to preserve his secret? Keep it to himself, and keep up their monthly appointments, in the obviously deluded hope that he'd emerge as the clear victor one of these days?
The full moon was coming up, and Nathan still wasn't allowed to lift weights. For the first time, he was actually slightly afraid of the next encounter, wondering if Lunatic had decided it was time to finish him off. If he was done with doubts and debates. But Nathan Seymour had never in his life let anyone intimidate him out of doing what he'd decided to do, whether that was taking another boy to the prom or facing down a serial killer who'd scarred him for life. He wasn't going to start now.
He wasn't going to start being reckless now, either. He hand-wrote a letter outlining his suspicions of Judge Petrov, and went in person to place it in a safe-deposit box. He notified his lawyers he'd updated what he called his dead file; they didn't need details. If he died, and he was right, he was going to take Lunatic down with him. And if he was wrong, he'd be dead and wouldn't have to feel foolish.