Chapter Text
When Chizome Akaguro was young, having just recently graduated from a hero course in the United States, he was naive.
He doesn’t blame himself, much, everyone is naive at the ripe age of seventeen as he was.
Sometimes when he looks back on it now he cant help but wish that everything had managed to work out, that he hadn’t fallen between the cracks, been banished into the shadows of society as he had been. Graduation, even now, feels like yesterday. Seventeen year old him had walked out onto his high school’s stage with his head held high, clothed in his hero costume and being called by his recently chosen hero name Stendhal. His principal, who Chizome had formed a mentor, mentee relation with after his years at the establishment and getting into a few too many brawls outside of class times, handed him his diploma a huge grin splitting her face. A moment of joy and excitement pulling the two into a tight hug where she whispers in his ear how proud she is of him.
Sometimes Chizome wonders how devastated she was when he left. When she turned on her television, as he had, to see her past pupil branded in such a damning way. Maybe she didn’t care at all.
A week after graduation Stendhal started his job working as a sidekick at one of the agencies in the town where he was living. The people there were nice enough, there was no grand welcoming but they would bring him into their conversations and offer helpful advice. He was content to exist in the loose family created at the agency, even if many of the other heroes didn’t even know who he was for the first year. A few years went by and Stendhal became mildly known outside of pro hero circles, as he started rising in the rankings, even if he was still somewhere on the lower millions for the country though middle of the rankings in his state. So all in all not doing terrible. Even when everything seemed bleak and terrible and the flashbacks from times he has failed while working haunt his every step for weeks, he thought that his future would be bright and filled with victories. His apartment was shitty, and sometimes he had to skip a meal here or there to make rent but it was all fine because eventually he would be able to afford a better apartment and everything would become better.
He just had to be patient, things would get better, he’s a hero after all. This was his life long dream.
Things would be fine.
Just a little bit longer and things will take a turn for the better.
By time he was twenty he couldn’t do it anymore.
Things weren’t fine, they hadn’t gotten better.
He had just finished fighting his second big time villain, when everything went wrong, the crowd wasn’t clapping or cheering for his victory. The screaming hadn’t stopped, even with the villain laying in the rubble strewn ground defeated.
Something was wrong, but the growing throbbing pain across Stendhal’s face was starting to be too much. His vision was starting to tunnel and he was really hoping that the other pro in this area would arrive soon.
Something was wrong.
Why was there so much blood?
Later looking back Chizome recognizes that he must have passed out from blood loss and shock but all he remembers is the confusion of suddenly jolting awake on a clinical white hospital bed.
He immediately regrets it, his entire body protesting the sudden movement with a deep burning ache across all of his joints and muscles.
“Whaa”
Chizome tries to look around the room he’s in by turning his head but has to settle for just moving his eyes as his muscles immediately protest again.
This is a hospital, that much is clear after Chizome notices the IV drip beside the bed he’s sprawled on. He reaches his left hand slowly over to the call button as he always does when he ends up in the hospital, it will be a couple minutes before someone checks in on him. So for now Chizome can go back to thinking.
The next question is, how did he end up here.
This wasn’t Chizome’s first time in the hospital, far from it actually. His youngest memories are of the hospital when his mom was sick. Then as he got older his visits happened because of work related incidents. Usually smaller things, broken fingers, fractured leg, bruised and cracked eye socket, third degree burns, all very normal injuries when you’re a hero.
But that doesn’t explain why he’s here now, the last thing he’s remembering at this second is comforting a civilian after someone had attempted to mug her and Stendhal took down the would be mugger.
So what happened exactly?
Thankfully he isn’t left with his muddled thoughts for long as someone, a nurse from the looks of him, walks into the room with a soft knock on the door frame.
“Hello Mr. Akaguro, it’s good to see you awake. Is there anything you would like?”
The man seems pleasant enough.
“Could-“
Immediately his body is wracked with coughing as he tries to clear his throat, but it’s too dry and every movement hurts so much it’s like getting beat up all over again.
A firm hand pulls Chizome’s aching body into a seated position and a cup of water is held up to his mouth.
“Drink, it should help with speaking. Be careful though, you just underwent surgery on your air ways and must be careful.”
Surgery?
Thankfully the water does help, Chizome tries to be cautious while drinking as he was instructed but he doesn’t really know what he’s being cautious of.
After he finishes off the water, the nurse pulls the cup away and steps back to a polite distance.
“Are you feeling better now?”
Chizome clears his throat quickly to test it out before talking.
“Yes, thank you. Could you tell me why I’m here? I’m having a hard time remembering the details right now.”
The nurse doesn’t look troubled by this at all, instead smiling.
“Of course! You were admitted by your agency after you passed out from blood loss from wounds sustained during a villain battle against Checker.”
“What were my injuries?”
At this the nurse states that he will have to go get Chizome’s doctor in order for him to have his injuries explained for him. After agreeing that he doesn’t need anything more that the nurse can help him with, the man excuses himself go find Chizome’s doctor.
Left with his thoughts once more Chizome wonders at what he’s been told so far. He is vaguely remembering getting into a fight with the villain Checker, but again the details are fuzzy at best. The nurse mentioned that Chizome had surgery on his air ways. But what exactly did that mean?
Slowly pulling his gown up and away with his right hand away from his check Chizome observes some wraps around his lower sternum but nothing that indicated surgery, meaning that there was no direct surgery on his lungs.
That means the only places the surgery could have taken place was his throat or face.
Nothing feels particularly off at this second, but it’s a bit difficult to tell the difference between different types of pain at the moment.
He guesses he will just have to wait for his doctor to get here.
In the meantime Chizome closes his eyes which are starting to feel especially bruised and beat up. The relief is instant though slight.
Just resting his eyes for a minute, the doctor will be here soon.
It turns out that soon is actually hours away, but Chizome blames that more on him falling asleep than on the doctor.
The next time Chizome wakes up he’s less confused and his fight with Checker is a lot more clear. His stomach is starting to swirl with dread, he remembers his injuries now, but he’s not sure how extensive they actually were so he’s trying to not jump to conclusions.
Thankfully when he pressed the call button this time the doctor appears.
She’s a tall woman, though fairly dainty, with bright blue eyes and dark hair pulled away from her face.
“Good evening Mr. Akaguro, I popped by early but you were resting. I heard you wish to hear the run down of your injuries? Is that still true?”
“Yes please.”
With that she grabs his chart and begins to explain all of his injuries, starting with the minor ones and their treatments so far and working her way up to the more extensive ones before getting to the most major one.
“Your biggest problem when you came to us was an injury to your face which was affecting your breathing as well as was the main reason for your blood loss.”
Chizome just maintains eye contact with the woman.
“Checker, the villain you were fighting with could create shields made from energy during the fight he used one of these shields to smash in your nose in what seemed to be an attempt to kill you. While he obviously did not succeed, he did impact your air way immensely when he broke your nose in such an extensive way. It was deemed necessary when you came in to preform surgery and your agency signed off on the amputation of your damaged tissue.”
She pauses to let all that she had said sink in. The dread in Chizome’s stomach hardens.
“The surgery was successful and your nose was cosmetically sewn up so that there would be minimal scaring as well as only necessary open space. I reassure you that everything we could do to minimize the damage was done.”
Now that he knows Chizome can feel the absence, something had felt off but he just couldn’t tell what with all of the pain meds and with his aching body. But his nose was missing, when he turns his head he can feel the bandages held there with surgical tape which pulls at his tender skin.
No wonder his eyes felt so bruised.
“There are many more extensive cosmetic procedures which you can look at in the future. For now though, if you continue to do well you will be discharged tomorrow evening.”
And so that’s what happens.
Being discharged hadn’t taken long, and soon Chizome was taking a taxi back to his neighbourhood and climbing up a couple flights of stairs and into his apartment.
The apartment itself wasn’t much of anything, the water pressure sucked, the floor boards all creaked, and the walls were all discoloured from dirt and cigarette smoke.
It was all Chizome could afford, even as a noted up and coming pro hero in his state.
Walking further into his apartment after kicking off his boots Chizome opens his fridge door, the annoying buzzing sound of the light bulb immediately fills the space and casts his shadow across the room like some grotesque monster.
Chizome can’t help but stare at his shadow, the face doesn’t look like a face, it’s flat and misshapen.
He slams the fridge door closed again without looking at the contents even once.
He looks like a monster…
Sucking in a ragged breath Chizome stumbles back out of his tiny kitchen and back into the living space. Maybe some television will take his mind off of everything, because there was a lot to think about and none of it was very appealing.
The blank screen blinks to life and Chizome immediately clicked the channels over to some news, he had to catch up on important things happening after being in the hospital without any news for almost three days.
His breath catches in his throat as a picture of himself fills his television screen.
“- Many are calling for the once promising York Hero course graduate to be held criminally accountable for the death of a young boy, whose name is being kept out of the media until further investigations can be done into his sudden death. This tragedy occurred at the site of this young “pro hero’s” fight today with the infamous villain Checker.”
The news lady shifts in her seat, before continuing, Chizome’s heart was pounding out of his chest. What was happening?
“Witnesses at this fight between Stendhal and Checker report that the young boy who died was left in the middle of the battle area and that due to the gross negligence and bad temper of Stendhal was not removed from the area. The young boy was left in the line of fire where he eventually was crushed by falling rubble caused by the villain’s quirk… In other news, the York High school is releasing a statement later tonight in regards to their former student’s behaviour and -“
The screen goes dark, he can’t breathe, which of course he can’t breathe he has no fucking nose because Checker was a fucking villain Chizome knew he wasn’t ready to fight yet. But there he fucking was, he had called for back up multiple times, he knew he didn’t have it handled. Where the fuck was his backup when he needed them? Why the fuck did it all end this way?
Why were they calling HIM the villain?
A kid had died?
Has he killed a kid…?
Chizome sat on his beat up second hand couch in the darkness of his apartment for what feels like hours his breathing ragged and his fingers digging into his sides as he tries to calm down.
A kid had died?
Why hadn’t his backup shown up?
He can’t fucking breathe.
After hours of drowning in his thoughts Chizome’s thoughts start to circle one single thought.
Hero work is bullshit.
That was the realization twenty year old Chizome Akaguro came to sitting in his shitty apartment, on his shitty couch with bandages wrapped all around his body and missing his fucking nose, listening to hundreds of news channels calling him a murderer and villain.
Hero work was worse than any other kind of work in the world, most heroes barely make enough money to survive. Only those in the top one hundred get paid enough to live lavish lives and even that was outweighed by the constant risk to your life and the constant injuries they sustain while working.
Most pro heroes don’t get to see their fiftieth birthday, actually after a bit more searching Chizome realized that majority of heroes were either forced into retirement due to major injuries or died by time they were thirty.
Nothing was okay, when he was younger being a hero meant helping others and protecting his mom. But Cancer killed his mom when he was just eight and none of his foster parents wanted him due to his quirk or attitude problems. He had no one to protect anymore, and now society was branding him a murderous villain.
What reasons did he even have to continue being a hero?
Chizome knew that he wasn’t in the hero game long, barley four years, but it felt like a life time and nothing had gotten better like he had been promising himself it would. Actually if he was being honest with himself, everything had only gotten worse after graduation.
A month after his fight with Checker the agency he was signed on with dropped his contract with them and no lawyer in the country would defend him in court to contest it.
Civilians in the street would yell at him and attack him once they recognized him, mothers would huddle their kids in close and cross the street as though he himself had attacked that young boy who had been crushed to death during that fight.
It was unfair.
It was unfair that the fucking negligent mother of that boy who passed, Stevie Mason, was allowed to walk free and be seen as a victim who faced her sons killer when she took Chizome to court.
It was unfair.
When SHE was the one who ran and left her five year old in front of a famous and feared villain.
Chizome remembers it clearly as day now, even years and years later, the way she dropped Stevie onto the road and bolted with the rest of the crowd away from his and Checker’s fight.
He remembers how Stevie’s legs had buckled and bent the wrong way upon impact with the dark uneven road.
The kid hadn’t had any chance of survival the second his mother dropped him.
Yet the news always painted her as a victim, as a piller of strength for charging Chizome with the murder of her son and other things like emotional distress, negligence on the job and a litany of other charges.
And since he wasn’t able to get a lawyer Chizome was found guilty on all counts.
It wasn’t fair.
The day that they announced the final verdict Chizome didn’t arrive to the court house. He wasn’t dumb and he knew what the jury and judge would decide.
The thing is, and as much he grieves for the loss of that boy, Chizome was also losing everything, the only difference between them was that Chizome was being forced to watch his life burn down around him and Stevie was treated with care and got to escape this pain.
So while the world listened to the announcement of Stendhal’s guilt, Chizome was already gone from the country.
Life wasn’t fair, but being a hero was closer to being in hell than most people thought.
“Here’s the money as promised. When can I expect to get my end of the agreement fulfilled?”
Chizome, now known as the Hero Killer Stain raised one bored brow at the impatient pro hero, Helios. He felt for the young man, he did, but it’s not like he was on a count down to death…. Well not literally at least.
“It’s better you don’t know exactly when, can’t expect you to not freak out and act weird right before.”
The young pro makes an offended sound in the back of his throat.
“You have the next two weeks to discreetly get any assets you want to secure to your new identity in place as well as any other arrangements you want made. If anyone asks why you’re creating a will so suddenly say you realized how high the death rate was for pro heroes and it seemed smart. Even if we all know smarts isn’t your thing Helios, but don’t worry people shouldn’t find your epiphany too shocking.”
Stain smirks at the offended blond.
“They’ll probably just assume someone with an actual functioning two brain cells suggested it to you.”
“I’ll have you know I graduated top of my course in academics!”
“From what school? Xenia? Because that’s not impressive Sunny, they have the lowest academic average in the country.”
Done with the conversation Stain begins to walk away from the slack jawed pro, briefcase of money in hand.
He knows that he’s grown a bit rough around the edges since coming to Japan but how could he not. His entire native country had turned its back on him and he had, had to start all over under his new identity as Chizome Akaguro.
Besides, he was mostly messing with the hero, life got boring sometimes when your entire life is just your job and at that job you never get to chat much.
Chizome has only ever gotten more sarcastic with each birthday that passes, keeps those he works with on their toes.
Young twenty year old him had arrived in Japan a week and a half after leaving America, having to be smuggled by an underground connection he had made in high school. Smuggling Chizome had learned, can be a very tedious and long process. Actually if anything it sucked ass, the rides were often cold and cramped. Food was sparse too since they didn’t tend to go anywhere close to a town and thus couldn’t go shopping for meals.
When he eventually arrived in Japan with his new identity he had realized nothing had really changed. The hero industry was the same or worse even in Japan than in America. The only difference was, now Chizome wasn’t directly a part of the hero industry.
It honestly wasn’t all that much better than being directly in the hero world, the main difference now was that rather than helping people he was expected to cower in the face of conflict and ignore people in trouble.
It made his blood boil to watch a whole crowd ignore a crying child as they wailed that they couldn’t find their mommy the first week he was in Japan.
Even worse, that same crowd immediately paid attention and cheered when a hero, a young side kick from the looks of her, came prancing up to the child dressed in florescent colours and asked if they needed help.
It made Chizome feel ill.
For the first year Chizome tried to lay low, he applied to a plethora of jobs offerings around where he had secured another shitty apartment.
Usually he got to the point of an in-person interview before being turned down. The scars covering his body and his fucked up nose made most civilians blanch and later he would receive a call or email saying they were looking at more promising candidates.
He knew what they actually meant.
After a month or two of this process Chizome had, had to get even lower. He started applying to odd jobs in the underworld market, usually transport or protection for anyone who didn’t seem like the absolute shittiest person in the word and would pay okay.
It hurt his pride, to stoop so low, but he needed to survive. Though the bitter irony was not lost on him that during his time as Stendhal he had arrested and taken down people doing exactly what he himself was now doing for similar reasons.
Thus commenced two years of him barley scraping by and learning so many new things about the world he lived in.
One of those things was that pro heroes weren’t happy here, oh sure the ones in the top one hundred or so were happy for the most part and so we’re fresh graduates. But everyone else? They were bordering on suicidal or were about to be bordering on suicidal.
They wanted out, just like Chizome had wanted out.
It wasn’t until the middle of his third year in Japan that he smuggled his first pro hero out of the country.
It was for an old friend who knew the pro hero and knew that Chizome was still alive and in Japan. They had contacted him randomly one day begging for him to take a job for him.
Before he knew exactly what it was he was already emailing back that he would help. This friend had helped him a lot in the past and Chizome owed him at least this.
Later that week Chizome was pulling strings in the underground world through the connections he had been making while working to create a new identity and past for this young pro hero Helena, also known as Songbird.
A few days after that Chizome met the young woman for the first and last time. She was an unassuming woman, shorter than he was with black hair and dark eyes.
According to Chizome’s friend, Helena had graduated from a pro hero course two years ago, the similarities were painful.
“Here’s all of the papers and documentation you will need. Dont lose it. I will not get you more copies. There are typed instructions on one of those papers, follow them to a T and you’ll be fine. If in the future you need help, contact the person you contacted to get in touch with me. Do you understand?”
The woman nods, taking the offered documents silently, her dark eyes determined. She’s about to hand over her payment when she pauses and asks.
“What’s your name? My contact never said.”
At this Chizome pauses, he had never thought of a need for another new alias. Those he dealt with in the underground always referred to him as Red due to his red scarf, his only direct connection back to his time in America and as Stendhal. Though now the scarf didn’t hang around just his neck but covered the bottom half of his face. He was still a bit sensitive about his missing nose.
This was another new chapter, and he didn’t want some of his connections in the underground world realizing that he was helping pro heroes, not all of them were neutral connections.
He’s been an American hero called Stendhal, he’s been a Japanese civilian named Akaguro Chizome, he’s currently Red the mercenary for hire, and now he’s what?
Why can’t he ever seem to know who he is?
Sighing Chizome quickly thinks of what name he should offer this woman or if he should just tell her to fuck off and hand over his payment.
For a second he considers it, but looking into her eyes a woman so much like him when he left behind being a pro hero he can’t be so callous.
“Call me Stain.”
He’s been many things, but now he’s going to be the stain that doesn’t come out, every hero he helps flee their profession and the HPSC is another drop of blood from the wound he’s trying to inflict on the system which branded him a killer. Even worse, that branded him as a child killer.
“You can call me Stain”
All he receives back is a tight nod before she hands him his payment and disappears back into the shadows of the space around them papers clutched in hand.
That was the start; he honestly hadn’t thought that this type of job would ever happen again but soon enough that same connection was reaching out again begging for Chizome, or Stain as his connection had picked up on calling him after hearing it from Songbird before she quit the country, to help another pro hero like he had helped Songbird.
This time he wanted Stain to help an older pro hero fake his death to finally retire before he actually kicked the can. The man was only twenty eight, but that was almost ancient in the hero world as a semi known pro.
Chizome was more hesitant at this, last time it was just pulling strings and setting everything up, Songbird was new enough to the scene that her disappearance only upset a few boats. But this time he was being asked to fake the death of a semi well known pro hero.
The risks were a lot larger this time round, but there was also a spark coming to life inside Chizome’s chest that he hadn’t felt since first graduating.
A stain created with the blood of the Hero commission every time he helped their soldiers escape the system.
A day later Stain emailed his connection back saying he accepted the job.
After that things changed a lot, Stain was slowly becoming a well known name in police stations and in the news outlets.
This was both a good thing, as more people knew how to contact him if they needed his services, and a bad thing, as people other than his clients actively sought him out to try and apprehend him.
It was so different from the first time Chizome found one of his identities being slandered on the news. Now it filled him with joy, another hero escaped from the HPSC and one step closer to his goal of taking down the HPSC and fucked up hero society.
Slowly as he became better and better at faking the murders or deaths of pro heroes his commission rates also went up and finally Chizome was able to live in an apartment that didn’t smell like mold or where you could hear every time your neighbour had sex. The irony that it wasn’t until he became a so called villain that he was able to live in luxury, was not lost on him at all.
Of course some part of Chizome, the part that still missed his old life in America before everything blew up, was distressed by all of the violence and hearing his identity slandered in the news. It brought up many painful memories of Stevie and Stendhal’s death, but that part was ignored. He was finally doing some actual good, even if only those he helped knew, he couldn’t let some old squeamish part of him get in the way.
The first time he faked a death he didn’t pretend to be the pro heroes killer, instead faking a medical emergency which supposedly killed the pro. This thankfully was an easy enough process with the help of his own quirk as well as a drug from the underworld.
Sadly, for some pro heroes anything short of murder by a villain wouldn’t work. It was his fourth time faking a death when he got a more famous pro hero who was nearing the end of their prime that refused anything short of dying in a way which would leave him a legacy in Hero society. Chizome wanted to roll his eyes, but he also understood after having such an ending ripped from him when he was younger.
Thus Hero Killer was added on to Chizome’s new identity Stain by the media.
At first the title was only for clarity and click bait but as more and more of the faked deaths became faked murder scenes Hero Killer : Stain became his official title both by police and by the news and public. He honestly didn’t mind, at least this time he understood why people were calling him a murderer and hero killer was world better than child killer.
The faked scenes took a lot of effort and every once in a while he even got into an actual fight with a pro hero who thought they were avenging the murders of their so called fallen comrades.
So Stain made sure to train more, he had almost been subdued by a top one hundred pro hero weeks ago while leaving the scene of one of his clients. He hadn’t been working out and training like he used to as a pro hero, instead mostly just doing the jobs he did was a workout enough to keep him in shape. But he used to be better, so he started training again.
This presented the perfect opportunity for Chizome to finally pursue his desire to wield knives. Before, as Stendhal, his agency wouldn’t allow him to use more than one small dagger for fear of how the public would take a pro hero with a bunch of knives and swords who drank blood.
After a month of training with a mentor he found in the underworld, Stain wished he had never allowed his handler at the agency to stop him from picking up swords as part of his hero costume.
He was absolutely enthralled.
Sadly, a supposed killer who uses swords is expected to leave a very bloody murder scene and the faked deaths became more and more violent and bloody looking. The one benefit of this was that he could charge more money for his services as there was a lot more effort out into murders when he had to also create fake but accurate crime scenes filled with blood and body parts. With some of this extra money Chizome could also finally afford to buy a cat, it really made his apartment more homey, but that was neither here nor there. In short, more bloody meant more money for him, so as much as he wanted to complain, he really couldn’t.
Most of the time he actually had to fight these pro hero’s a bit before they would seem to make an accident or be over powered and he would start the act of faking their deaths. This alone was tedious and another reason his rates had to hike upwards, it was a lot getting into actual fights every couple nights with pro heroes and having to be careful not to actually kill them.
His quirk actually made faking their deaths a lot easier. Forcing them to be so still made it a lot easier to convince pesky hidden cameras and witnesses that they had just watched a pro hero die and not simply be paralyzed. The rest was the use of a system of connections he had in the underground which helped him fake entire bloody, body filled murder scenes good enough to trick police stations and morticians.
None of this is what Chizome thought his life would turn out to be like, seventeen years old him would probably be appalled if he saw what he ended up doing. But life is life, and it’s far from rainbows and butterflies, it throws curveballs and chain saws at you.
Honestly though, he was happy that his life got so fucked up, if it hadn’t he never would have moved to Japan and he never would have started on his mission. Stain would have never been born and hero society would be even more fucked up than it is with Stain here to help cut away the HPSC’s soldiers from under their grasp.
Still, sometimes life catches him by surprise. Like right now, as he stares into the angry eyes of a young teenager dressed like a hero.
“Stain, you ruined my brother’s hero career! I’ve come to avenge him and kill you!”
Well this was new.