Chapter Text
All mornings are more or less the same.
You get up. Resist hitting the snooze button on your alarm. Ten more minutes now is ten minutes you won’t have for grooming, which is an absolute necessity. You shower, blow-dry, wax your hair and comb it the way you want it, slick the dark, straight locks into black armor that won’t budge unless you get seriously roughed up.
You get your outfit together, underwear, red turtleneck, black hakama. You pick your weapon of choice up in one hand and your phone in the other, and apparently the Hero Association has had their faces all up in one of those. Unfortunately, not the bat. Five messages, several more calls, text alerts. Fuck, don’t these guys know when to quit? Some people like to sleep . Seven to nine hours. That’s healthy. Calling at three in the morning? There’s a reason you keep your phone on silent when you work for the HA.
You toy with the grip of the bat. It’s the same old bat as always. It just has a few new enhancements, which is only fair considering the other S-class heroes have firepower that can decimate entire city blocks. What the hell does a bat (wrapped with titanium barbed wire or otherwise) have against that? Enough to set its owner squarely at Rank 3 with no sign of moving out. It isn’t as high as you want, not yet , but you’ll get there, and when you do, vicious teenage determination will defend its rank with tooth and claw and barbed-wire bat.
In the main room, the TV is on. The announcer lady seems pretty upset. Must be some kind of serious nuisance, something that needed Metal Bat’s attention and isn’t getting it unless it’s at the hero’s leisure. Garou the human monster is here, looking more like a human housecat, lazily eyeing the TV over a bowl of rice and vegetables. The guy either has no clue that you don’t eat leftover dinner for breakfast, or he just doesn’t care. It’s probably the latter. He’s the only person you consider to be family, aside from your sibling. No mothers or fathers on either side; the three of you are, were, always will be the Family Unit.
“What’s going on out there?”
“Hmn.” The bristly white-blonde of Garou’s hair tips over the back of the couch along with his face, upside-down cat eyes searching. He turns over, rests his elbow where his head was a moment before, and makes an odd gesture, smiling, but covering it with spidery fingers. “Nothing they need you to handle. They’ll find some other S-class. Aren’t there, what, twenty of them now? Nobody needs number three out there.” He slumps in some way that is as feline as his eyes, which fall half shut as he appraises the government-sanctioned upholder of justice, bat in hand with full confidence, hakama cinched tight around the ankles and slender waist. They’re a little long on their new owner, but he’ll be damned if he’s going to comment on something like that.
“ Really takin’ this thing for a ride, huh? You look just like your brother.” Nicer hair, he thinks, but she wouldn’t take it as a compliment, so he leaves it out.
“Oh? Good.” The façade falls, then, just for a moment, and Zenko looks like Zenko. She has that smile full of child-confidence she used to show off when she placed in piano and violin competitions, when her brother would surprise her with a new dress, when Garou would agree to let her do his nails.
Those days are long gone, and smiles like that are remains of something mostly-forgotten in a beautiful dream. But Zenko’s teeth in two neat rows somehow make everything else fall into place, make it all seem right again -- until a disturbance outdoors makes the whole building shiver, like thunder through the ground. Then the stoic hero returns once more, nothing left of the defenseless little sister for whom a pledge against violence had been taken nearly a decade ago.
“Nobody needs number three out there,” Garou reminds, feebly, but the dark eyes of Zenko and her predecessor are compass needles, and nothing can dissuade their direction. Right now, they’re focused toward whatever has decided to create a ruckus far too close to her home, her brother’s former home, and the last surviving member of the only family that matters.
“Yeah, well.” She’s on her way to her shoes, hastily tugging the unassumingly tiny martial arts slippers onto her feet. “You pick a fight in the wrong neighborhood, you end up with angry neighbors. Stop eatin’ dinner for breakfast. I’ll fix you an omelet when I get back.”
The door opens and shuts, and the Hero Hunter turned house-pet is left alone again with his thoughts. He sets his bowl down on the coffee table, next to where he’s propped his feet up on it. Alone again, sure. But at least it's come with the promise of a decent breakfast.
Metal Bat (the original) died on a morning just like this one and just like every other morning. It was cool, bright springtime. The sky was blue like printer cyan. Garou remembers this distinctly because Zenko had her sunhat on, tilted uselessly backward, and she was working on a picnic basket. They, all three of them – the hero, his sister, the pet monster – had been planning a day trip to some park in some mountain he has since forgotten the name of.
The location he does remember is the intersection of blocks 3 and 5 in a certain ward of City C. Half an hour before, Badd had said (he recalls the words precisely, the last the two of them ever heard from him), “Hey, kiddo, Garou, looks like they can’t handle this on their own. Useless bastards. Be right back. I promise. ‘S just a jog away.”
The door opened and shut.
Just a jog away.
Tightness is curling in Garou’s stomach, needling its way into his chest. It’s only been four months. Or six? He doesn’t know. The door startles him, and Zenko is back, safe and sound, relatively speaking. Some black ooze is spattered across the red turtleneck, and gore clings to the barbed wire around the bat.
“Useless bastards,” she brags. She blows an orb of pink bubblegum and bites it so it pops in her mouth. “What kinda omelet you want?”