….
[Next Day | Noon]
The coffee he was carrying had been cold for forty minutes.
But Dabi held it anyway, because he wasn't in the comrcial district to have a coffee.
From the third floor railing of Kiyashi Ward Shopping Mall he had a clean sightline to the food court below, where Class 1-A had scattered across half a dozen tables.
Midoriya was currently being dragged toward a clothing store by Uraraka; Iida was saying sothing to Tokoyami that was almost certainly schedule-related.
I am either the most dedicated teacher in Japan, Dabi thought, or I need professional help.
The answer to his own question.
Do I really stalk a bunch of teenagers on the off chance a mory from another life cos true?
He had apparently been yes, because the alternative was doing nothing and doing nothing was worse.
….
He had been surveilling Midoriya for a couple of days.
The plot had changed because of his involvent.
Butterfly effects he couldn't fully map, variables shifted by proximity, and most importantly his not so strong mory.
He wants to account for any of these reasons for his failures again.
The sequence that hadn't happened already happened; the growth of the students was fast forwarded.
The Koji Koda incident was the perfect example of how things could change drastically, and even his own house getting attacked had confird it.
Honestly, he never bet things on his mory or plot from the beginning.
Anyway, coming to the present situation, and what was about to co; he has quite a few things he is uncertain about.
All he knew was that it was supposed to happen sowhere around the last episode of the first season, and it was supposed to happen in a shopping district.
The second, and first one-on-one eting between the successors of One For All and All For One.
It was ant to happen today.
However, will it happen?
He would be pretty disappointed, if it didn't.
I an, the chance of eliminating the villain once and for all. He couldn't ignore the scenario even if those chances of success were almost non-exist, and for the rat to get away again.
Still Dabi's worries of Tomura Shigaraki not coming were not without any reason.
In the first place, the proceeding of their eting was triggered by a specific chain of circumstances that no longer happened in this world.
…and it's all linked to Stain.
More specifically, it had required Stain's ideology.
The particular mythology the Hero Killer had generated in the original tiline; the way his actions had crystallised sothing in the public consciousness that Shigaraki, for all his destruction, had never managed.
Stain had never been part of the League of Villains' relationship with Tomura Shigaraki; that was a dia invention, a speculative connection that had calcified into assud fact.
In reality Shigaraki hated Stain, his resentnt was due to jealousy of soone who had worked harder and received less attention, the tantrum of a child who couldn't understand why his destruction was invisible while soone else's was legendary.
The question it had driven him to ask Midoriya:
What is the difference between and Stain? - was the question of that resentnt looking for an answer it could use.
But Stain had never beco the Hero Killer here.
Dabi had changed that.
Shigaraki had no mythology to envy, comparison to make, or a particular reason to seek out All Might's successor beyond the basic fact of succession.
And yet Dabi's gut said the confrontation was coming anyway.
He had learned, through considerable personal cost, to trust that.
….
His phone buzzed.
[Kamui Woods:
[In position. East entrance.]
He pocketed it, the confirmation was sufficient.
Despite his doubts, the preparations had quite through from Dabi's side.
He contacted the heroes who were already accustod to his style of functioning, and who he had built so level of understanding from his Underground Hero work.
Kamui was one amongst them.
The Pro Hero had agreed based on Dabi's track record and a donation to his agency that had been generous in the way that made questions unnecessary.
Clean arrangent, and nobody had asked what they weren't being told.
If nothing happened today he was a paranoid teacher with too much money and a surveillance hobby.
He could live with that outco.
….
Dabi's eyes moved across the shopping district.
The students from class 1A had arrived at the location…
On the east side of the food court was a lone person, amongst the people who were walking in pairs or more.
Also he has dark hair, his posture is slightly hunched and he wore a simple t-shirt and pants.
Dabi recognised the profile a full second before he registered why.
He smiled at his cold coffee cup.
Stain had no idea he was being smiled at, which was fine. He was busy scanning his surroundings, while making sure he was not seen.
He had been told by his boss villain attack was possible… and apart from that nothing else, which from anyone other than Dabi would have been sufficient reason to leave the mission imdiately and possibly leave violently.
Instead he was in a shopping mall watching teenagers talking about boring stuff.
'Tsk… Is this how the present generation shops?'
He couldn't help but wonder.
….
Stain's mind drifted to his past, more specifically his childhood; that is he could actually call it as one.
Growing up, he didn't spend much ti being a child.
More like, there wasn't much worth spending ti on, nor the luxury of having to stay immature.
It was the sa traumatising upbringing, the usual catalogue of things that happened to children when the adults around them were operating at their worst.
A younger sibling who hadn't made it, days that ended with hunger, and the gradual construction of a self from whatever materials were left over after everything else had been taken.
All Might had been the constant through all of it.
Not on a personal level.
Stain had never t him, had no particular claim on him as anything other than a symbol. But the symbol had been real and it had been enough, for a long ti, to keep him from crossing a line he had been approaching for years.
He had been very close to that line when Dabi found him. He still wasn't entirely sure how to characterise what had happened in that first conversation.
He had said what he believed.
The frawork he had built his entire understanding of himself around, the philosophy that justified what he was and what he intended to beco.
Good and evil are different sides of the sa coin. Whatever I am doing is necessary evil.
Dabi had laughed at this statent of his.
…and it was the most sinister laugh he had seen even worse than his.
When it finished he had looked at Stain with an expression, a disappointnt of soone who had expected better and was genuinely let down by the gap.
'That soone being ', Stain had thought at the ti, which had not made sense and had lodged itself in him anyway.
"That's a bit disappointing." Dabi had said. "I thought you at least were living in the sa world as . Instead you've built yourself a cage and decided it's a worldview."
Stain had said nothing, which was the response of soone who was listening despite themselves.
"The coin thing." Dabi continued. "I need you to understand that so second-rate villain made that up so they could sleep at night. It's not philosophy but a permission. The distance between good and evil isn't the thickness of a coin; it's the distance between the sky and the ocean floor. Between a cloud and the ground. There's no in-between. Evil is evil. A motive doesn't reclassify it. An ideology doesn't reclassify it. Nothing does."
Stain had looked at him carefully after that.
The words themselves were unambiguous.
The moral structure behind them was clear, the logic internally consistent, and the person delivering them fully aware that none of it absolved them personally.
There was no performance in it, no attempt to preserve a cleaner self-image, just soone stating a truth while understanding exactly what it cost to say it aloud.
A hypocrite, technically.
Except that didn't fit either.
Hypocrisy required pretense, and this was sothing else: a person who understood the full weight of what they were, chose it anyway, and refused to soften the choice into sothing easier to live with.
The clarity wasn't absolute.
It was simply clarity, existing beside the thing it condemned without trying to resolve the contradiction.
For reasons Stain found deeply irritating, that felt more honest than most things he had encountered.
Which was why he was now sitting in a shopping mall food court in civilian clothes, monitoring for a villain attack on a tiline he hadn't been told, waiting for signals from a man who had smiled into his coffee cup from three floors above.
He hated this.
And he kept watching anyway.
.
….
[To be continued…]
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