Chapter Text
Your name is Purpled.
You don’t have a family name. You don’t have a family at all.
It’s short and sweet—unlike you.
Purpled had spent a good majority of his life being able to see people’s true colors. That’s why he was called Purpled. I mean, it was in the fucking name, right?
At first he'd ventured to say that Ponk was easier to figure out than most people were, and pegged him as a yellow for the lemon tree in his garden. Simple-minded, warm, mellow. Easy-to-please. Way too fucking eager to help people, considering the amount of pro-bono work he used to do stitching Purpled up after whatever shady enterprises he'd undertaken in the past.
(Because while he was probably the most dangerous mercenary in L’Manburg, getting hurt was still an inescapable part of the job, and it paid to have a doctor on your payroll.)
Then he’d ventured too far into one of Ponk’s backrooms and stumbled across his dubious hydroponic experiments, found a little more blood on the walls than he was comfortable with, and quickly switched out the color Ponk was assigned to in his head for a darker shade of orange.
Back when he and Tommy were still talking—before Raccoon Innit had gone on the straight and narrow, joined up with the HERO program to take his vigilante operation to the legitimate level—he’d thought of him as red. Willpower, compassion, ferocity—he’d possessed those in spades even before he’d blown up in the public eye, before he’d become L’Manburg’s mascot/figurehead/Peter Parker success story, back when they were all part of the same ethically dubious underground circuit of lesser heroes and villains.
He hadn’t changed at all with the celebrity status. From what Purpled could see on the rare occasion he’d catch his interviews, Tommy was still the same vulgar, loud-mouthed, brilliant trailblazer he always was underneath that dumb-ass raccoon mask. He was lighting fires underneath the feet of media executives, burning the notion of televised action sequences to the ground, reminding the general population that heroism was civil service and not an aspect of the entertainment industry.
It was a strange feeling, seeing Raccoon Innit’s name rise in the popularity polls. It was a good feeling.
It was a fucking suspicious feeling, considering how little trust Purpled had in the HERO program as a glamourized extension of the police force, or the general public’s ability to think critically about the media, or Tommy’s ability to withstand the pressures of fame, but he supposed he wasn’t a mercenary because he was good at untangling the emotional slinkies of watching a (Friend? Associate? Enemy?) rise to the levels of success everyone around him had ever dreamed of—or because he was supposed to care about what happened to said associates when they’d burnt themselves up on the torch they were trying to pass to the people.
Or because he was supposed to care about anything at all. The most thought he should have been giving Raccoon Innit’s rise to fame was whether or not he’d let him go if they ever saw each other in person again.
( Yeah, look at who’s fucking talking , he’d thought to himself. I’m sure the person who kills other people for a living has a right to say what’s good or bad, and that was that. He’d resigned himself to being a slave to the coin forever, and tried to have fun where he could.
It was why he was Purpled, and not Red. )
Ranboo was more difficult to figure out. You’d think it would have been easier for Purpled to pin his colour down, considering they were both mercenaries with a level of mutual understanding in their line of work, but the guy was an amalgamation of contradictions on the best of days and a nervous wreck clouded by memory issues on the worst.
(That was also why the title of L'Manburg's highest-paid mercenary belonged to Purpled, and not Ranboo. Score.)
Ranboo was noble enough on an individual level to be good at hero work, but chose to be a mercenary because he needed the paycheck. Ranboo was smart enough to excel at mercenary work, but not enough to get it through his thick skull that he shouldn’t trust people while doing it. Ranboo was too soft to accept jobs that involved killing. Ranboo was tough enough to let Purpled hide underneath his floorboards during a hero chase. He was morally righteous, he was involved in a corrupt line of work, he donated his extra money to charity, he funneled blood money into nonprofit accounts.
Purpled thought of him as, in short, an incomprehensible mess, so he gave him two colors: black, for every moral wrong he’d ever committed, and white, for every moral right. Secretly, he hoped Ranboo survived long enough for one colour to outweigh the other.
Openly, he declared it probably wouldn’t happen if Ranboo continued to dip his toes into the water of sin.
(Dive into the deep end or get out of the pool, right? If you get a few blood splatters on a white T-shirt, you have to bleach it off or dye the entire thing red.)
Tubbo was one of the few people whose colour had actually changed over the years. Admittedly, he had never gotten to know him that well even when they were all still part of the same weird unofficial network—but he’d overhead stories from Tommy back in the day, and continued to overhear the pulse in the wire on the guy’s eighteenth birthday when he’d run for mayor.
Then again when he’d won for mayor, with the promise that his advisory cabinet from his father’s incumbency the prior term would be serving alongside him.
From the snippets Purpled had caught from Tommy and Ranboo, Mayor Schlatt and his son had a complicated relationship. Schlatt was not a good father. Schlatt was a good mayor, and that was enough for Tubbo to give him his begrudging respect as an heir, if not enough to earn any form of affection or endearment as a son. Schlatt was constantly overworked by trying to get the seeds of the HERO initiative he’d planted to bloom, which made him turn to the bottle to keep his sanity balanced on a wire, which led to some unfortunate liquor-induced outbursts that Tubbo faced the brunt of.
(Or didn’t face the brunt of, because he’d elected to stay the hell out of his stately residence hall when the guy was drinking. That’s how a privileged fuck like him ended up falling in line with degenerates like Tommy, Ranboo, and Purpled in the first place.)
Purpled wasn’t going to pretend like he knew Tubbo as well as Ranboo or Tommy did.
(That would have been daft, right? And hypocritical, considering how often he’d… drawn boundaries, between them. There was Tubbo, Tommy, and Ranboo. Then there was him, Punz, and Ponk.
Especially considering how often he’d categorized them into subdivisions based off of where alliances and bonds were forged between whom, codified the subdivisions into subdivisions of people he could trust to have his back during a police chase and people he’d written into his will and left offshored trust funds to for when he died.)
No, he didn’t know Tubbo that well. But he’d fucking liked him, and he could tell he’d changed after the Mayor of L’Manburg had been shot in a hit-and-run assassination attempt. Considering his entire personality up until Schlatt’s death had been a defense mechanism, Purpled wasn’t surprised.
Considering Tubbo had been at the epicenter of an event that made ripples in hero-villain-executive politics up to national governmental levels , Purpled continued to be completely un-fucking-stupified when Tubbo’s face became plastered over every news outlet in the city. He continued to be astonished by how unastonished he was when Tubbo’s name was printed over with “Heir to the HERO Program” in bolded, sans serif font in tabloid headlines about the headlines following Schlatt’s death.
And considering Tubbo was Tubbo , who’d shared Tommy’s propensity to make the decisions he felt was right but not the total lack of acumen when making those decisions (nor the opposition to stepping on toes to climb the proverbial political ladder), he’d made the choice to sober up after Schlatt’s death and take over his father’s seat in office come election season.
(Colour Purpled fucking surprised.)
Whether this was the best course of action for Tubbo or L’Manburg at large was yet to be seen, but the truth of the matter was that Tubbo and his cabinet had campaigned upon the promise of getting rid of the corruption that had become rapidly-entangled with the fledgeling HERO program.
Tubbo and his cabinet had promised to orchestrate legislation, both to protect heroes from law enforcement and to protect the general populace from heroes, and his campaign had brought to light issues the press wouldn’t cover—forced the people to reconsider the HERO program and the power it held and the power the media had over it and where the citizens of L’manburg really stood in the democratic process.
The other truth of the matter was that Tubbo was an emotionally-tormented eighteen-year-old holding a gross amount of political power, and that stepping into the shoes his father once filled was either going to turn him into Schlatt, or turn him into everything Schlatt never was—good and bad. Maybe he’d finally recognize that it was difficult to pull oneself up by the bootstraps when he was finally wearing the shoes.
Tubbo had once been a pleasant spring green. But red had been seeping into the mixture like wine slowly bleeding into a carpet, and he’d ended up as a dark maroon—a little duller than Tommy. A little too close to the colour of dry blood and alcohol to be purple. He was everything Tommy was but dialed down a few knobs, the engine of social change with the maturity Schlatt gave him to succeed in the political sphere. Tubbo was risk, ambition, bloodshed, reward.
But he was also solicitude and warmth—just dulled by continuous strikes against cynicism and time, and darkened by a lifetime of mistreatment from his father, from heroes and villains, and from the media.
Then there was Punz.
Punz was…
Actually, you know what? Purpled didn't want to address Punz right now.
And then there was purple, for him.
The colour of royalty, opulence, intelligence, arrogance. Mystery, wealth, corruption, power. He’d chosen the moniker on a whim back when he had taken the plunge into contract work, and found it increasingly more befitting of his nature the longer he spent doing it. He had the mystery part down—there were approximately four people in all of L’Manburg who knew of his civilian identity—his dead civilian identity—and only one who even had the vaguest notion of how to contact him.
He had nailed the intelligence portion, up until now—granted, the only people he had to compare himself to were other mercenaries, but he was smart enough to keep his head above the water when his jobs made the evolution from profitable to absurdly lucrative . Kept all of his accounts balanced to avoid audits, took payment in cash alone, the whole nine yards to avoid arousing suspicion from the IRS and then some. This, in turn, paved the way for the opulence category, which he was admittedly still working on.
In short: Purpled was kind of living the dream, so to speak. (He was only seventeen and had his own apartment—what were you doing with your life?)
In length: Purpled had watched a hero beat the everloving shit out of his father on live television when he was nine. It wasn’t a staged event between her and a small-time supervillain on the network payroll, with collateral damage that would be recompensed by the very corporations that had built her costume.
But she hadn’t known that, and neither did most of the public after the deed was done, and his father had died in the hospital from internal bleeding just hours later.
She had shown up to the hospital room in tears. At least, that’s what he heard from her and her agent when she’d paid the second-rate, one-room apartment Purpled had lived in with his father a visit. He wouldn’t know if that was a lie concocted by her handler to beget sympathies for his father’s killer or not, because local law enforcement had barred anyone—family or press—from entering the room.
Sitting across from the young hero and her bespectacled handler, though, he thought he had gotten a good read on her. She certainly looked fucking sorry.
(Actually, she looked like she’d be traumatized for life, but not in a way that was too obvious to be real. Her civilian clothes were immaculate and formal enough for a funeral, and there wasn’t a hair out of place on her pink head—but there were bags under her eyes large enough to warrant their own area codes. Her face was flushed in the way that people who were trying to hide the fact that they were crying in the car on the way to their destination often were.
In his memories, or maybe the memories of those memories, she’d looked like she’d grasped the concept of what she’d done to him with far more depth than he had at the time. She looked genuine. She looked like she gave a shit about what happened to him.)
The handler had asked if he, the hero, and Purpled would mind having a chat across the kitchen table when they’d showed up at his door. He’d let them in, of course, because he was a child who trusted people in positions of authority and power. Namely: HERO operatives, and their cousins, the police.
The man in glasses had offered his most sincere condolences for what had happened to Purpled’s father. He’d promised that civilian casualties were treated with the utmost priority by the HERO program, and that it was a gruesome atrocity that should never happen again.
Then, he’d handed Purpled a bouquet of white lilies, ruffled his hair, and gently explained that Purpled’s father, as a mercenary in the business of killing people—something Purpled was already well-aware of—if Purpled or his family ever tried to give any publicity to the event, civilian jury would probably be more sympathetic towards the traumatized young hero than towards the seedy family of a murderer living paycheck-to-paycheck when one of the many corporations funding the HERO initiative sued them so hard they’d be living in a cardboard box owned by said corporations, under a bridge; which said corporations would also own.
(Not in those exact words, of course, but when the lawyerspeak written on the contracts he’d abused his authority to dupe him into forging his father’s signature on was translated, that was the gist of it.)
The man had also promised enough financial recompense to pay for his future college fund and then some, and in his defense, the organization he was speaking on behalf of followed through.
But it was doled out month-to-month, and it was , actually, only enough to pay for a bachelor’s degree, and the living cost of a city where square feet were a resource scarce enough for people to physically fight over was higher, and the forty-thousand ran dry after eight months and two weeks.
So it was understandable, when the HERO initiative had silenced him with hush money and forgotten about him now that he was no longer a publicity threat, when the paperwork pertaining to his father’s death was conveniently lost somewhere along the bureaucratic chain alongside the paperwork on the paperwork on the idea that maybe the HERO initiative was responsible for pleading his case to a foster agency, when the only person in the world who’d remembered him was his landlord (and only on the days that his rent was due); that when his father’s old clients who hadn’t caught wind of his death began to show up at his door, Purpled began taking jobs from them in his father’s place.
Because he was ten, and out of money, and no one would hire him above-board because child labour laws prevented businesses from giving him a paycheck but not from trying to exploit him for child labour anyways. Because the opportunity to make more money than he’d ever even dared to think about had, quite literally, walked through his fucking door and he was too young to know better.
(Not that he knew any better now. What else was he going to do? Without a high school diploma? Without any other previous salaried work experience?)
Because if living in L’Manburg had taught him anything, it’s that human lives had values that could be roughly estimated at the dollar sign. His father’s was forty-thousand and some, and then thirty-four more for the lily bouquet. The people he’d been hired to put into the ground had started at fifteen thousand, but now he rarely accepted anything below ninety-thousand or so per mark.
Purpled was fucking stacked. Gone were the days when he’d lived off of rice and cup noodles and stale loaves of plain bread, or worried about whether or not he’d make rent without having to cut his internet bills. His only concern now was when—not if, but when , because that was how mercenary work always went—the law caught up to his operation.
Purpled was rolling in cash. He was dangerous, powerful, and he didn’t need to use his superpowers as a crutch like Tommy or Ranboo did because he didn’t have any. He was untouchable. He was paranoid. He knew getting caught would be a death sentence and that it was also probably inevitable, but when he died, his death would be worth more than forty-thousand dollars. Maybe more than ninety-thousand, too.
The one constant between every citizen of L’Manburg was that everyone seemed to think the HERO program was a net positive or a net negative. What set Purpled apart from the other contract killers, who claimed to be free agents (but usually had their own agendas anyways), was that he held no illusion that the HERO program was a net anything , or that the good it did for L’Manburg would ever outweigh the bad, or vice-versa.
The truth of the matter was: the HERO initiative was a dramatized police force that amalgamated the worst parts of parasocial celebrity relationships with the worst parts of law enforcement. It was stipping police officers and reality television show hosts of their jobs alike, it was creating an entirely new industry that begat new ones, it was saving the lives of everyday people and raising city morale and it was also swinging its newfound power around to silence the people who it robbed of their fathers at the age of nine and then weedling them out of all of their money with the end objective of making them just another member of L’Manburg’s homeless population.
The truth of the future was: the city would adjust to it, and once it spread the world at large would adjust to the problems and consequences it raised, and it would ultimately probably cause just as much harm as it did good.
The truth about Purpled was: He had no right to comment on the morality of the HERO program in the first place.
Maybe he did, eight years ago, when his record was spotless and his hands were still clean—but the past was in the past, and he had been too busy trying to survive in a concrete jungle surrounded by strangers doing dangerous work for the past half-decade or so to even begin to think about whether or not bureaucracy and government had given him the short end of the stick.
If he wanted to be haunted by the notion that human lives couldn’t have a price tag attached to them (namely, his father’s), then what did that make his line of work? Isn’t that the axiom his father had lived by, anyways?
The truth Purpled told himself was: He didn’t need to think about it, because nothing he ever did would ever be able to break through the yellow-tape chains locking him out of or tripping him up on bureaucracy and government and law enforcement’s inner workings.
Because he would never be able to make a real difference in the way things were anyways, so why bother? Why not just try to have fun? Why think about anything aside from how he’d go about tackling his next job at all?
Factoring out morality from his worldview altogether was what he was best at, anyways.
It’s what made him purple, and not orange, or red, or maroon, or black-and-white. It’s what made him the highest-grossing mercenary in L’Manburg, and it was also what was going to carry him through his next hit.
And then the next, and then the next.