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In the distance hails a city built on three levels, looming over the trees around him in a brilliant spectacle of nighttime lights. He’s not been this close to it for a long time—but on this day of Christmas Eve, Barnaby feels that his presence is an imperative. So closes the twenty second anniversary of the one source of grief that’s been plaguing him so, that he’s been absolutely unable to shake, that he feels he’ll never truly be able to.
In the past year he has been everywhere and nowhere at once; radio silent, kept from the public eye he had so adored in his time as a hero.
As Maverick’s pawn.
...
A sigh. That’s not what he’s here for.
Kneeling before a frosted grave, witnessed only by the creaking branches of the tree behind him, Barnaby lays a bouquet of white, pink and yellow before it.
This is the grave of his parents. He knows its location better than he would his own apartment—so much so that even the snow obscuring their names does not for a second leave him wondering, perhaps it’s the next one over.
Breath misted, his knees start to sting against the melting snow as it pushes a biting dampness through his jeans. Hands, too, for Barnaby had forgone gloves this day—not through lack of memory’s grace, of course, for he prides himself on efficiency , organisation. He could not forget to keep warm in the winter’s cold if he tried.
No, he simply wished to feel the bronze plate of their grave for himself after so long away—feel the crusted moss colouring its granite like cracked paint against the pads of his fingers.
He says I miss you, and it still stings as hard as the first time—more so than his pale, shivering fingers as he brushes away the snow from their names, more so than his sodden, freezing legs as they struggle to keep him upright.
Each tear falls as bitterly as the last.
There’s a heart inside him, still—beating, pulsing, rippling and cursing and shredding itself asunder, reaching desperately towards the blame he knows that man deserves, yet being torn back by a feeling so irrational it shames him to even feel it.
Even now, he can’t help but miss him. Sometimes. Maverick.
But there are calloused hands which still cradle his cold heart after all this time, with the warmth of a blazing fire, yet all the delicacy of a sledgehammer as it’s brought upon a watermelon—it is these hands which offer Barnaby solace and the deepest confliction, holding the fractured pieces of him together, ripping them further apart.
When he looks to the sky his eye catches a distant blimp, and Barnaby sees those hands in the last place he could have imagined a mere week ago. He sees a man in reinforced rubber armour making a fool of himself—truthfully, Barnaby can’t quite tell whether it pleases or infuriates him. He grasps at the glories of the past in much the same fashion as he clutches Barnaby’s heart; it is the gentlest of vice grips.
He’d seen a broadcast but days prior, of the man far past his prime still possessing the boundless enthusiasm of an amateur—truthfully, Barnaby’s returned to Sternbild for more than one reason.
That reason runs boundless through the streets of the Silver Stage, clumsy mannerisms and catchphrases that never quite catch serving as little more than an amusement to many (or most ) of the citizens of the city. But he serves with beard trimmed and head held high—knowing that he’s there, knowing that he can still keep trying.
This hadn’t been the plan, originally—he meant it when he left the hero business!—but there were only so many days he could take vegetating by the TV, on lazy days that never seemed to end. Wondering if he’d spent his time already, if he was to just sit and wait for something that was never coming.
Even Kaede was starting to complain! And that was the last thing he wanted!
But he’d been wracked with a doubt so poignant that by the time he’d quit it was at the back of his every thought, scolding his every move—the lingering, inescapable truth that Wild Tiger was, well and truly, past his prime. That he was simply no longer fit to save people. It wasn’t so pressing when he had his partner there to clean his messes— fix his blunders , more like. Each second he lost, though, brought him back to a time when his own daughter lay beneath the falling debris of a crumbling ice rink—five minutes hadn’t been enough to save her, let alone three, two, one . If his partner hadn’t been there…
Well.
Five minutes never was enough time; ten years was far too much.
In the dumpster of a stormy morning, the news of the murder of a criminal dubbed The Lady Killer—who he’d failed to apprehend that very night—hitting his ears like an alarm, he came to realise that the dead weight he’d become was lethal.
The one thing Kotetsu couldn’t stand was being a burden to people. And so, he bowed out.
(For a time, at least.)
He shakes the doubt from his mind like a dog would a flea and continues his chase of the thief on the run—you’d think a guy dressed like Santa would be giving his loot away, not keeping it!—and, ever-closing the distance, wishes only that he hadn’t already used up his powers.
It’s in moments like these that he comes to realise a new truth: Kotetsu’s limits are set only by himself. Five minutes or one, he’ll be helping nobody if he doesn’t even try!
Resolve strengthened, and criminal cornered on the top of a glass roof, Kotetsu— Wild Tiger —advances with a decisive determination, foot strong and firm as he steps on the glass—
—and breaks through it.
Oh, brother.
The scream that follows is totally unbecoming of a hero, and in between the shattered glass raining around his face and the car below that he soon realises is coming right at him there’s little more that he can do but cover his face and hope it doesn’t hurt too much.
A man catches him suddenly; it’s with such perfect timing that he could swear it was planned.