Karma
Hallie didn’t like this. Hallie really didn’t like this. Hallie did NOT like this.
She hated the idea of bringing strangers into her home, no matter how recent. She barely knew them. The time she spent with them was minimal aside from the detective and, though her first impressions weren’t bad, she knew better than to go by them.
But what other choice did she have?
She couldn’t talk about this back at the precinct when there wasn’t a nifty spell for camera and listening devices detection to assure her of her safety and she couldn’t exactly blame the men and the kid for not wanting to lead her to their homes when she was the one needing to talk to them for ‘ultra-secret reasons’.
She understood.
And she couldn’t simply pretend like she’d never met any of them. It would have already been bad enough if it were just a crossing paths thing. She’s had people she talked to once getting the brunt of her stalkers before and if Jet managed to get away (AGAIN), she was sure they would be his first targets.
For all that she understood Voldemort, he never truly understood her. He used the fact that so many people she loved had died for her to torment her, especially during the final battle. What he didn’t understand was that she would have still suffered for any innocent dragged into their battle because of her, not just her loved ones. He had access to so much ammunition all that time but didn’t use it because he didn’t know. Hallie was sure her mind would be in much worse stated if he had, for example, decided to publicly kill a person a week, or even a day for however much time she was in hiding (now after over a decade of hero work was so much easier to come up with scenarios that were gradually worse than the previous each time she thought of it).
Honestly, she suspected Voldemort considered ‘loved ones’ in the same category as his trophies. To a certain extent he understood that they were important to the other people, but not quite why. He rarely strayed from the idea of using loved ones as a bargaining tool because of that.
Hallie was pretty sure that, during the chase of the seven Potters, he wasn’t even the one to come up with the idea of using an imperiused Stanley Shunpike to find her through her mercy. Heck, he probably didn’t even know she knew the guy. It was likely a Death Eater who had that idea, she just wasn’t sure which one. She would have liked to point the finger at Malfoy Sr. since the minister had known about her ‘adventure’ of running away from home and would have told him about it, but it was likely one of the people chasing her as well that night since the man had given his wand away and couldn’t have been there.
So no, Voldemort never understood her. And he never really understood people either. He understood how to appeal to their baser urges and their ambitions, because he knew how to appeal to himself, but he never understood people betraying him for their children like Narcissa Malfoy did. Never understood loving someone so much that their own personal desires mattered not. He logically knew that some people acted like that but he didn’t understand them.
Jet wasn’t Voldemort.
Jet grew up in a household with people who made a living out of understanding other people and how to best approach them. Jet had come prepared to take hostages. It wasn’t just a spur of the moment thing. He’d already had the ‘accomplice’ imperiused well in advance (she hadn’t noticed him… why hadn’t she noticed him? she needed to get better!). He already had a plan in mind. He had to. His choice in hostage and how to position himself was too deliberate not to.
Two hostages, too far apart for it to be impossible not to have to make a choice on who to save (which he knew she could never do in the first place), an adult with a kid (it didn’t matter that they weren’t blood related, as she later found out, they showed obvious care for each other and that would be enough to make the situation even worse for her), back protected so that she couldn’t take him out from behind using her cloak and crowded enough that she couldn’t make a way to him without him noticing people being pushed by an invisible force. Immediately having her drop her wand since he ‘knew’ she couldn’t do wandless, soundless magic.
He'd clearly studied her somewhat. Not enough, of course. Her continued studies at home and secretly in the room of requirement, away from nosy reporters, her reactions to the love potions and the long hours she spent learning all that she could so as never to be coerced into a marriage, her time learning quirkless fighting… None of that he’d known about.
He’d thought only about the golden lioness of the Gryffindor, too noble and selfless to let things go wrong for others, because that was what was most known about her from all the rumors and crap flying around about her in school. He never knew how much of her ‘saving the day’ was because she had sneaked around looking for answers so she wouldn’t be caught completely off guard again. The only time people actually thought she might have some Slytherin in her was when everyone found out she spoke parseltongue and, even then, it was mostly thought of as a fluke and forgotten about as soon as she was cleared. Even with the DA under her belt, all the sneakiness was attributed to Hermione being super smart and thinking ahead.
Granted, Hermione was all that, but Hallie was still the one that could have ended up in Slytherin.
Still, it was good that somehow the wizarding world at large was convinced she was brash and didn’t think ahead and was still terrible in all the classes she took with Snape teaching and dismissed her as just that. She doubted Jet would have been as ‘easy to defeat’ if there wasn’t that misconception.
(She also doubted he bothered to find out what she did as a hero, if he wasn’t counting on quirkless, magicless fighting to be a part of the deal.)
All this led to a very simple conclusion: If Jet somehow managed to escape the consequences, he knew the best way to get at her would be going after the civilians.
Sure, he knew that Teddy would affect her more (much like Voldemort would have), but he would also know that Teddy could and would fight back. The hostages, however, didn’t have magic. They were, in his eyes, the easier targets and also plenty of effective to bringing down her morale.
So no, Jet was no Voldemort. Jet was sadistic and observant and far more capable of analyzing what was in front of him and planning ahead.
That meant Mr. Yagi and the kid weren’t safe.
Which meant she would have to stick around at least long enough to make sure they knew how to fight back and get to safety.
And all of that that was without counting with the bloody glass having been involved.
But it was.
And she was now married to a man she didn’t know the first thing about.
She acted nonchalantly about it so far. She was anything but.
She knew the risks when she exchanged the blood. But it was better to rely on someone that had a chance of being a decent human being than accepting the union to one who was definitely the personification of something worse than radioactive waste. It was hasty and brash, but she hadn’t been seeing any other way out of the corner she’d been stuck in.
She exchanged the blood, praying that the blond man in front of her was a decent person at least, and hoping that if he wasn’t, the fact that he was likely a non-maj meant she could find either a way to overpower him, or a loophole he didn’t think to cover due to lack of knowledge on magic.
She was pleasantly surprised that he used his command over her to free her.
So far, he had proven to at least be decent while in the public eye. That didn’t mean anything, though. Her Uncle and Aunt where also ‘normal decent folk’ as far as the neighbors were concerned.
She’d had to explain the glass to them. She knew from the start there weren’t a lot of ways to escape that. Lying was something she made sure to do very sparingly because finding loopholes through logical reasoning wasn’t her forte. (She hadn’t ever been much of a liar before the Quill, anyway.) Also, using that tactic sparingly meant that no one would see it coming when she did.
She still left a lot of loop holes she could use if he proved to be a bad bet before she could crack the code to the glass and break the bond.
If nothing else, she could trust Teddy (and, through him, Hermione and the Weasleys) to do something about it (it would also be much easier than dealing with her being bound to Jet).
She would be ready for all the bad things that could happen, because that was how she’d lived the past several decades. (It’s not paranoia if they are out to get you.) But she would still give him a chance because, if there’s one thing she learned, it’s that sometimes you can be surprised by the unlikeliest of people, like when Draco lied about not being sure if she was the real Hallie or not, or when Dudley apologized and thanked her when they parted ways.
And because of that (and because she was a bloody decent person, goddamit!) she knew that she needed to explain to him the exact danger he was in. The kid had to come as well because, while she now knew they weren’t related, it was clear they were pretty close, so he would inevitably be involved too. The detective was just there to be the impartial person to make sure neither of the sides trampled over the rights of the other.
She hated it. She’d just gotten this house mostly settled and ready to be properly lived in! But it was necessary.
The trip to her house had been just as awkwardly quiet as the one to the station and they were now standing in front of the spacious apartment she’d rented. (She was used to small spaces, was perfectly content on living on such spaces, but she would not let her kid have to get used to them like she did. And he was a grown up now. They might live together for safety, but she understood if he wanted to bring his one night stands over some times. She respected his privacy even if he hadn’t done anything like that so far. She wasn’t about to go prying.)
She unlocked the door. It was a magical lock, so that gave her some measure of safety, even with her house now being known.
There were still some boxes on the living room, but it was mostly put together now. Really, the only things left to unbox was what remained of the knickknacks to decorate the living room and some of the kitchen supplies (another reason they’d been living on take out).
Even with the boxes still there, the living room was already looking quite homey. Magic was a wonderful tool for moving around without having to get rid of less important things, so there was a lot of sentimental things she’d gathered through the years of traveling through multiple countries and a lot of gifts that had been sent her way that found their place in the living room, making it feel lived in.
She invited them in and to sit on the couch.
“I would ask if you would want tea but… well, I’ve not managed to do my groceries yet, as you can see.” Hallie commented wryly.
After a brief chorus of ‘it’s not necessary’s and ‘it’s ok’s’, everyone settled down on the couches (she had plenty in case some of the Weasley’s tracked her down for a surprise visit and there were even more still tucked away in case it was the whole extended family).
“Ok, so… I’m guessing that by now everyone is already aware of the magical communities, correct?” She’d heard Mr. Yagi trying to catch Izuku up on the whole shebang and had to actually help out with it while waiting for Mr Tsukauchi to make a copy of file 47 so she knew they were all caught up at least with the basics. “The magic humans were supposed to be quirkless. In fact, some historians even proposed that quirks started coming into being as a reaction to magic. Wixen had an unfair advantage and, while for the most part they didn’t lord it over those who didn’t, there is always someone willing to ruin it for everyone, so it is likely that it started as a defense mechanism.”
Both of the adult men were looking confused by the sudden history lesson which… fair. They’d already had quite a few of those today. Izuku, on the other hand, was starry eyed about it.
“The first quirks actually showed up before the glowing baby in China. Way before that, actually. When they first started showing up, the magic folk thought it was a different manifestation of magic they had never seen, so they bloodadopted quite a few magicless quirked people by accident. Blood adoption is much different from normal adoption. It mingles the blood of the parent into the blood of the child. It’s normally done between people with magic and it was a way to bring fresh blood into an old bloodline. But those people didn’t really have magic. They had something different. By being bloodadopted, the magic in the blood mixed with their quirk and changed it. It didn’t give them magic in itself. They were still incapable of using it. But it made it so that the quirk they held became attached to the magic and both got passed down onto their children.”
“Does this have to do with the fact that you have a quirk despite having magic?” Mr Yagi asked.
“In part. I’ll get to it later. Like I was saying, there were quite a few quirks that ended up intertwined with magic. My kid is actually one of them. He is what we call a Metamorphmagus, which is in essence a shapeshifter. Like with any quirks, there are drawbacks, mostly to do with the mass having to be maintained, never increased or decreased and not being able to fully transform into an animal, even if it has the same mass as him. Eventually the wizards wised up to the fact that quirks weren’t magic and stopped bloodadopting anyone with odd abilities. Instead, they decided to try and mimic the magical quirks through magic alone. Several branches of magic grew from that desire.” Polyjuice was, in fact, a potion made to mimic Metamorphmagus, and legimency and occlumency were created to mimic the real legimency and occlumency through magic. Snape had actually been a Quirked Occlumens from his mother’s side, which was why it was impossible for Hallie to learn from him. He could naturally do it, whereas she would have needed to learn the fully magic version. (Granted, Snape should have more than known about it. After all, he’d had to learn fully magical Legimency at some point and both subjects walked hand in hand in most books and addressed the quirk part of it.) “That didn’t stop them from being fascinated by quirks, though. Which is where the quirk I have comes in.”
Both adult men were serious, having felt like she was finally reaching the crucial point of her explanation. Izuku merely looked like he wanted to start taking notes, vibrating in place. It almost reminded her of Hermione, actually. It was cute.
“I have the rarest kind of quirk in existence. So rare that I only ever heard of two quirks that do this, and one of them is in me, so… I’ve never heard of this kind of quirk being publicized in the no-maj world, which is why I’m being extra-cautious about it. Unfortunately for me, there was well-known records of the quirk I have in existence way before I was born and when I first manifested it, I had no idea I even had it and it happened very publicly. Because of all of that, I couldn’t hide it from the public. And because so many people were already interested in me, I was quite literally hunted down for it, as you can obviously tell.”
“You called your quirk ‘Karma’ right? Likely emission type? It doesn’t sound very rare. There are a few that can do similar stuff, though not as strongly as you implied yours to be.” Izuku commented.
“That’s because that is not the rare part. It’s how you get it that makes it rare.” She commented. “It’s one of two transmissible quirks that I know of.”
Total
Silence.
“Transmissible?” Mr Tsukauchi asked at the same time as Mr Yagi coughed out blood. Izuku merely looked at her with wide eyes.
“It sounds unbelievable, right? I didn’t believe it either at first and I quite literally used it to end a war.” She commented.
“How… how does that work?” Mr Yagi asked after wiping his mouth.
“Honestly, I’m not completely sure either. It wasn’t originally named Karma. I decided to change the name because its effects are far too extreme for something called Judgement and, pardon the language, but I’ve always heard Karma is a bitch, so…” Another cough and more blood as Mr Yagi blurted out a laugh at Hallie’s english expression that she didn’t bother to translate. Mr Tsukauchi was unimpressed and Izuku merely blushed at the foul language. “But as for how it came to be and how it ended up in someone with magic, I have no idea. It could have been handed out to someone magic through transmission, or it could be that the person who had it was bloodadopted. Hermione is leaning more to the blood adoption theory and she would better explain why that is if you really want to know. Be that as it may…” She looked at them unflinchingly to demonstrate just how serious she was. “It’s a powerful quirk. When I activate it and look at someone I form a sort of link with them that allows the quirk to judge them on their past actions. Depending on how bad, they experience some level of retribution. Most often it’s psychological in kind when I’ve used it, though I’ve had some become physical as well.”
“How so?”
“From the five times I used it, the first one was on Voldemort himself and forced him to experience regret for all of his misdeeds and he couldn’t handle any of it, so he ended up self-destructing using his own magic just to make it stop.” And wasn’t that a doozie. The man most terrified of death running screaming to its embrace just to avoid feelings.
Hermione theorized that despite feeling what was needed to reconstruct his soul according to the books, because all the other shards were gone and what was left was such a small percentage, that he ended up joining them instead. All that Hallie knew for sure was that she didn’t want to see something like that ever again.
“The second time was accidental. I didn’t know how to control a quirk I’ve just received without even knowing, so when I was assisting in a trial and got angry, I ended up being judge jury and executioner by mistake. He was a man who enjoyed biting kids and turning them into werewolves. I’m pretty sure he also got a taste for cannibalizing his victims some if he could get away with it. He almost killed a classmate of mine during the final battle by biting her. Karma made it so that his muscles locked each time he transformed. He’ll still transform and if someone gets close enough they can get bitten, he just wont be able to run and attack.” Fenrir had really bloody ticked her off with how, when he realized he definitely wasn’t getting away from a long jail time, he started going on and on about the flesh of his victims, taking a particular pleasure in reminiscing on Lavander’s and how it was such a shame he didn’t get time to savor it mid battle.
The girl, who had been in attendance, broke out in cold sweat and was shivering, almost having another flashback right there with the elongated gory details he was giving of something that lasted mere seconds. Hallie had already been on edge over the mess with the goblins earlier that day and had yet to start training her quirk (she was still in denial over having it because ‘merlin, please, please, not another bullshit McGuffin to wreck her life in some way she’d yet to see so far’). In her anger at what she’d been witnessing, the quirk activated and … well… nothing had happened. Not at the time because his punishment would only be revealed under the full moon.
All it really did was make everyone shut up at the display with fear crossing their faces before she got it back under control. And then the full moon came and the very next day the newspapers were crawling with her ‘judgement’ on Greyback. He couldn’t even do part-way transformation without his limbs locking up until the partial transformation was gone.
She had well and truly defanged him.
“Now the third one I’m not proud of. It was back when I was still learning to control the quirk and I caught someone innocent with it. It led me to realize some serious drawbacks from using it, even on innocent people, which was helpful long term, but I still don’t like that it was used at all.” She hadn’t meant to use it on George. She really hadn’t.
She’d been trying to practice on her own when he walked in and got hit with the full force of it activating. To this day she thanks whatever being in charge of fate that loved screwing her over for George having been the one standing there. He was the one hurt the most, having lost his twin, and that counterbalanced the Karma. It didn’t leave him completely untouched, though. He’d had some rather mean-spirited pranks in his past and that affected his toll. Luckily, that toll only ensured that any prank creations he made were done so without the intents of being used maliciously. That mean that all his prank products now had a cap on how long they worked and what effects it had to make sure no one really got hurt. And his good karma ensured that he kept having good idea for products, whereas before his imagination was flagging a bit due to his depression.
Still, not the best way to find out how exactly the quirk enacted its justice on someone she considered innocent.
It was lucky that George was the one. Hallie did not want to know how the quirk would react to Ron’s jealousy on the fourth year or Hermione’s dismissiveness of Hallie’s concerns or Percy’s general sheeple-ness.
“The fourth time I lost control again. I had already trained a lot with the quirk and could tell when I was about to lose control of it. But the woman who I hit it with… she was the one behind the scars in mine and many other kids’ hands and many other things and was going to get away with it and had the gall to lord it over me while making some subtle threats towards my kid, so I don’t feel too guilty about it.” If there was someone who deserved Hallie ‘accidentally’ activating her quirk it was Umbridge, not that she’d tell either of them that.
Hallie hadn’t considered Umbridge to be particularly smart while she’d been a teacher at her school. Ambitious, yes. Sadistic, yes. Smart? Not at all.
Any smarts the woman might have had were buried six feet under her bigotry and blood purism and fanaticism, so Hallie had never noticed just how deliberate she was in her actions.
The only reason she’d been so brash on Hallie’s fifth year was because she was fully aware she’d had the backing of the ministry. Yet, she’d moved things around so that Scrimmgeor didn’t fire her when he took to power and dismissed Hallie’s hate for her when he least could afford it.
And whatever she’d done back then, she did it again. She made sure there wasn’t any evidence leading to her and she claimed to have done all the things she did because she was protecting herself and didn’t want to seem dissident to the new leader.
It was all a load of bullshit and she still got fired by Kingsley, but she got away without being charged as an accomplice.
And then she’d had the nerve to gloat about it in front of Hallie when no one was around.
Hallie could have refrained from letting Karma activate. She’d by then trained extensively with it. While she still couldn’t say she had complete control over it and knew how to use it, she knew how to keep it from activating with her emotions.
She just didn’t bother to for once. No one could prove her intentions regarding the lack of control. They mostly considered Umbridge foolish for trying to taunt the Potter girl when she had no control over the quirk yet.
Hallie got away with it and now, every time Umbridge tries to write something, it carves itself across her skin, though not necessarily on the back of her hand. Hallie didn’t even know if the quirk would make it so that if a scar was left behind, she’d be bound by a promise, but it would have been deserved. Last she’d heard, Umbridge had taken to only sign her name and never writing anything else.
“The last one was a demand from the Hero Commission. They wanted proof of my quirk in exchange for me to keep the description out of most of my files and the freedom to go where I wanted. So, they brought in a prisoner from Tartarus. They never told me what were the consequences they got from Karma, but it must have satisfied them enough that they followed through with their side of the deal.” Hallie had not liked the questions the commission asked her regarding her quirk.
It's not that they were very pointed at one particular topic. Most of them were perfectly inane, the sort of thing that would be asked of any quirk or psychological profile for a hero. But some, while still being the sort of question asked… the expressions on the commission guy’s face was off. Hallie wasn’t still quite sure on how off it was, but it reminded her of some of Dumbledore’s expressions when he asked her certain things, except devoid of any kind of grandfatherly niceness.
They were definitely trying to figure out in what ways they could use her, specifically if they could use her for something in particular. What that something was, Hallie still didn’t know, though she’d gotten some suspicions along the years. Nothing she could ever prove, but still right there, in front of her very eyes.
It reminded her of sixth year, when she was sure Draco was inducted into the Death Eaters and was plotting something, but didn’t have proof of what exactly, only suspicions of what it might be about.
The man was especially interested in knowing if she would ever use the quirk as a preventive measure on a hero if she knew they were corrupt of using their influence for bad deeds, to which she’d said no because that sort of person needed to be brought to court publicly to show the world that the commission would not stand for anyone trying to use its system to commit villainous acts.
That had managed to kill most of the interest in her from the guy’s part, which was a relief, though not enough that they completely dismissed her from getting a license. The quirk was still a very powerful one, after all, and they would want to keep an eye on it and her getting a license was the easiest way to go about it, even if she went independent rather than working directly for the commission.
Oh, they could still send missions her way. She told them she was willing to help out so long as it was within her set of rules. She had a kid, now. She couldn’t go anywhere willy-nilly and disappear for months on end. They understood. They still called her for major missions that needed a lot of man power and she still managed to complete them all without using Karma (which she bet they didn’t like) with almost no casualties.
“I’ve not needed to use Karma since then.” She said proudly. “But it doesn’t change the fact that I still have it and it’s still transferable within a few set of rules, which is why so many people are interested in acquiring me. And it’s also why I’d rather the no-maj population not know about it either. But as I was saying, there are of course drawbacks to the technique, which is the major reason why I can’t just hand it over to someone and call it a day.” She stated.
“What sort of draw backs?” Izuku asked.
“Well, for the quirk itself, it relies on the moral compass of the person who holds it instead of what is truly right and wrong. And moral compasses are very fallible. For example, there are certain spells that have an immediate prison sentence where I came from. Mostly because they are used for very bad reasons. Yet, while I was on the run from a government that was taken over by Voldemort, I did end up using two of those spells. One was the one used on the man that was holding Izuku-kun. I had to use it to infiltrate a bank during the government takeover because there was something there that needed to be destroyed to win the war. My moral compass views using that spell to control people into horrible acts as bad, but it also views using it as the means to save a lot of people as forgivable. Other people would have a more black and white view on it, immediately condemning its use, while others, like a Death Eater, would not care at all about its use because it’s perfectly fine in their moral compass. Meaning that if someone truly horrible were to get this power and considered the death of a whole population, like, for example, all the quirked people, as righteous, then anyone that commited murder of a quirked would be instantly forgiven. But that’s not all.” She stated before the others could get any more horrified. “A great part of this quirk’s function is based on me, as in my moral compass for my own actions, instead of just of other people, as well as my mental health. With this I mean that, for example, if I saw Tsukauchi-san here failing to save someone because of impossible circumstances, I would be quick to not judge him for it because I know that sometimes it’s just not possible to save everyone. When it comes to myself, however… I’m always blaming myself for failing to save someone, even on those circunstances. This means that if I were to use Karma on Tsukauchi-san, even if I myself would never judge him for that, Karma would judge him like I would judge myself, therefore, give him some sort of punishment for it. I’ve been trying to curb this way of thinking and going to therapy for it just to mitigate the potential effects, but it’s a pattern of thought that I fall down into occasionally. I don’t know if therapy has done anything to curb it quirk-wise because I’ve not used Karma since the license exam. As for mental health, whenever I use it, it makes me have symptoms similar to a specific type of Dissociative disorder for a while, depending on the number of bad things the target did. More specifically the Depersonalization-derealization disorder.”
And that hadn’t been funny. Voldemort and Fenrir were especially bad, with the number of bad things they’d done. She spent a full two weeks with Voldemort and a week with Fenrir feeling disconnected from the world and just existing. Hermione had thought Hallie was just depressed which… wouldn’t be too big of a leap to take, considering all she’d been through.
“I guess this is all the important things you need to know about Karma. I’m not going to say how to transfer it. Sorry, but I don’t know you. I’ve already said this much because I’m bonded to Yagi-san, otherwise I wouldn’t have. And, even then, I only shared things that are publicly known to some extent, even if by publicly I just mean the magical communities. Which leads us to the most important point of this meeting and why I had to bring you here in the first place.” She said, making them all straighten up. “You two aren’t safe. If Jet ever manages to escape justice, he’d be the sort to go specifically after you. He’d be too afraid to go after my son and he’d consider you an easier prey. That alone puts you in enough danger but… you and I are bonded, Yagi-san. A bond that so far has only ever been broken by death. I am going to try to decode the magic of the glass, now that I have it in hand, to try and break the bond so that we can both go on our own ways and actually marry whomever we want, but up until then you will be in danger. First off, there’s the obvious one. There are still plenty of men who want me at any cost. You being bonded to me makes you an obstacle they’ll want to crush as fast as possible so that I can be available again. And the fact that you clearly care about the kid beside you means he’ll be in danger from that as well. You do understand, don’t you?”
“I… I see. I assume you have some sort of suggestions for that, am I right?”
“I suspect you already know how to fight to an extent. The fact that you had already known about the magical communities, or at least aware of the form I had Izuku-kun fill out, means you are either high-level in the government, high level in the hero commission hierarchy, were a top ten hero at some point in your career, or one of the several ‘clerk-level’ inducted like Tsukauchi-san, since all the information you gave Izuku-kun on us magic folk was too general for you to actually be related to someone with magic, and several of those options demand a certain level of fighting competence, which your awareness of your surroundings confirms. Still, I want to know your proficiency and if there is room for improvement. Izuku-kun doesn’t seem to have much of a fighting proficiency, though he does seem to have a good amount of muscle mass. I’ll be training him too until I’m sure he can dodge spells like the best of them and even overpower wizards and witches.”
“I understand. He’s already undergoing a special training plan I made for him to give him more muscle mass so I’m not sure how much more can be added into his schedule without exhausting him completely.” Mr Yagi commented.
“I’m willing to go over your training plans to see where I can fit myself in and if there are parts of it that can work for both what I want to teach him as well as getting him some more muscle mass. I’m not, however, willing to let this go. I hate the idea of leaving a teenager to deal with that sort of danger while not able to defend himself and brute muscle power can only do so much. Can you agree to trying to compromise with me?” Hallie asked.
“I understand your concerns and I’m sure we can come up with something between the two of us. If you have been fighting mostly quirkless for all of you hero career, you are bound to have a good knowledge on how much the body can take.”
“Thank you for your vote of faith in me. This leads us to you. I want to spar at some point to see where you stand physically. Also, I would like to know more about your condition to see if there’s something that can be done for you using magic to at least mitigate symptoms. Anything that might give you an edge while fighting off any sort of attackers.”
“I can agree to a spar. I’ve done all that I could about my physical condition, but I’m unsure if magic was brought up at some point or not. Regardless, I’m not going to be too hopeful about it for now. I’m still way far down on the list of organ donation.”
“I understand. Positive pessimism, right? Always expect the worst so that if it’s bad news you were already expecting it but, if there’s good news you can be pleasantly surprised. But, with your permission, I would still like to know if there’s anything magic wise to be tried. Even if you signed the forms letting you know about the magical communities, unless you have good connections inside them, you wouldn’t have access to medi-wixen and healers. You gotta at least get something other than paranoia out of this unwanted bond, amirite?”
He chuckled are her wry joke.
“Ok.” He agreed.
“There’s another thing, though.” She stated. “Not everyone coming after you will do so by physically attacking you. People have tried slipping in love potions into my food before, so you can expect some brand of assassination attempts. There’s also the fact that a Matrimonial Bond Glass was used and I’m uncertain if the Mantises were ever disbanded or not. So long as no one in the magical world know about you, you’ll be safe, but I doubt it’s going to stay quiet for long. Wixen are gossips, unfortunately. Especially where I’m concerned. Someone is bound to blow the whistle, so we need to decide how to address this, which is why we have Tsukauchi-san here to mediate.”
The next hour was spent with them discussing what each was comfortable with being known. Hallie wasn’t surprised that Mr Yagi didn’t want to feature in wizarding newspapers in all his skeletal glory and would rather avoid pictures, or having his name known, though he did agree it was probably for the best if the circumstances of how they got married were publicized, if just to avoid potential well-intentioned Mantis assassins if they still existed. He also accepted taking several detector artifacts to scan his items for anything that might be tampered with poison or cursed, since neither of them was too keen on the idea of living together. It was decided they would have a talk with Hermione and Luna as soon as possible to see how they could play the news to their advantage.
They were surprisingly in sync, which meant Mr Tsukauchi barely had to intervene safe for a few times. The detective had also been the one unfortunate enough to suggest living together for a while, just until Hallie could confirm Mr Yagi could take care of himself, which wouldn’t take long, and had both of them immediately shut down the idea.
Izuku, meanwhile, had called his mother to reassure her he was ok, after the incident showed up on the news. The nice lady, after a short conversation with Hallie to make sure of what exactly she wanted with her child, ended up inviting them all to come eat dinner with her. Mr Tsukauchi thanked but rejected the offer, having plans to eat dinner with his sister and Hallie left the answer pending on whether her son agreed to it or not, once he got home from the finals. Mr Yagi was gently ‘persuaded’ into taking the offer, though he acted very awkward about it.
With the final touches to their agreement finally decided, Hallie was about to stand up to shake hands with Mr Tsukauchi for being such a good sport about mediating for them when she heard the lock on the door opening.
Teddy was home!