Chapter Text
She knows she walks a fine line. She knows she falls in the category of Villians. She understands that perfectly. It makes it funny, like a joke only she gets, that she’s a licensed underground pro-hero. Double lives are funny like that to her. Not that anyone’s ever really connected her and her quirk to her side job. It’s funny really. They should see it but they don’t and it’s a combination of willful blindness and her own skill at covering her tracks that keep anyone from noticing.
To be honest, she never set out to have the side job she does, but underground heroics don’t pay enough bills and a girl has to eat. So she’s an assassin on the side and it works beautifully, even if morally she knows it’s wrong. She justifies it by having rules— no kids, no torture, quick, clean kills only, no killing outside the contract. She’s picky about the jobs she takes and she’s very, very careful to cover her tracks. Her Quirk is helpful for that. It helps that no one but her knows the full extent of it. Having a quirk that lets her “tag” anyone whose shadow she steps in and then use those shadows to teleport from place to place? Really, it was too easy to end up an assassin. Especially considering no one knows she doesn’t need to tag the shadows of inanimate objects, and nighttime? That’s her playground.
There’s drawbacks of course. People can feel when she passes through their shadow— like someone walking over their grave, she’s been told. And she has a limit to how far she can travel in a day through the method— fifty kilometers, anymore and she risks hypothermia, damage to her lungs, and heart problems, especially if it’s all at once. She can’t use shadows she hasn’t tagged beforehand either, with the exception of inanimate objects, though she has to see the shadow of the object she wants to appear in to use those. It doesn’t help that she’s always aware of the shadows she’s tagged if they’re in her range, it can be maddening when she’s trying to sleep and all she can focus on is the fact all those shadows are moving around her. Drives a girl a little insane. Especially when she loses a tag when it’s well within her range. That means the person the shadow belongs to died. She learned that a long time ago.
As it is, she’s running on three hours of sleep, enough coffee to kill an elephant and she’s in her assassin uniform running from fucking Eraserhead because he erased her goddamn Quirk and she just needs to get out of sight and she’ll be gone. The single online news outlet that’s noticed her says she has a teleportation quirk of some kind, or an invisibility considering no one has ever seen her actually use a quirk to escape. She thinks it’s pretty funny how close they are to the truth on the first assumption. It’s funny that they only suspect Ghost of being an assassin, aren’t even positive she is one. She thinks it’s genuinely hilarious because they’re looking so closely and yet they don’t see. They only see Ghost, no matter how closely they look they don’t see Sweet Dream. And they definitely don’t see Takagi Satomi. There’s no reason too. It’s why there’s only a single news outlet that’s noticed her even as Ghost starts catching the attention of Heroes. Teleportation Quirks aren’t a particularly rare thing after all, even if her Quirk’s details make it rather unique.
She grits her teeth behind her mask and ignores him yelling at her that it’s the end of the line for her. It really isn’t. She dodges his capture weapons with the same ease she did back when they were students and hopes he doesn’t recognize the movements. She’s not looking for a fight and she really just wants to go home. Her last job was a pain in her ass. The man was almost never alone. Took far longer than she thought it would to find an opening. Really, she came close to abandoning the mark. She refuses to have witnesses because she refuses to kill if they aren’t her mark, her rusted and weakened moral compass just won’t let her do it. She can feel the moment he has to blink because her sense of the shadows she’s tagged snaps back into sharp focus and as soon as she rounds a corner into an alleyway she’s picking a random one that feels close to her home and stepping through the shadow of the dumpster into the shadow of a man walking past a different alley. She’s freezing as she orientates herself to her surroundings, she’s always cold when she uses her Quirk. She sighs behind expressionless dark grey mask she wears as Ghost and closes her eyes as she visualizes the shadow of her Apartment fridge. Inanimate objects takes more effort, since she can’t tag them or anything. She actually has to think about it if she wants to use them. Still, she manages to step through one shadow, freeze her ass off for a second, and reappear again in her little apartment.
She doesn’t waste time relaxing. She doesn’t relax after she’s striped the uniform off and hidden that and her knives and poisons in the hidden compartment in the back of her closet. Which she has to reach through the other hidden compartment in her closet that she keeps her hero uniform in. When she’s satisfied her second life is hidden she sets to work showering and scrubbing off the night. Showers are the only thing that make her feel clean after she’s completed a contract, she imagines she can see the blood washing down the drain away from her. It helps warm her up after repeatedly using her Quirk too.
When that’s done, she pulls out the phone she spent far too long making secure and untraceable and sends the photo of her mark to prove the contract has been completed then wrings the water out of her hair as she waits for the client to pay her the rest of her due. It’s been a long time since one has been dumb enough to try and rip her off. The first and only client to try was a warning to everyone else what happened to cheats. The point was made, but still, she always feels nervous until the final deposit is made. It’s not done until her cryptocurrency wallet is just a little fatter.
She never cared much for cryptocurrency until she realized how good it was for things like this. Anonymous and untraceable. Easy enough to transfer into her official bank account in small enough increments not to raise suspicions. Just enough to keep her going through the month. When the phone chimes once, she finally relaxes. The contract is complete and she doesn’t have to take another job for at least six months if she manages the money right and nothing happens that causes her to have to spend more. Ghost can be forgotten for awhile. Maybe she’ll find a legal side job by the time she needs Ghost again.
Satomi is still wired from everything even as she relaxes, which means another sleepless night. So she sits on her little couch and paints her toenails a plain blue grey color as her hair dries into weak, messy brown curls over her shoulders. She’s alone in her little one bedroom, one bathroom apartment, no pets. And since becoming Ghost, she’s distanced herself from most of the people she considered friends, so there’s really no one to talk to. Not since her mother died last year anyway. That’s alright though. She prefers the distance. Less risk of being caught as Ghost, less risk of getting someone hurt because they got close to an Underground hero. Less risk of hurt in general. It’s easier that way. Safer for everyone. Even if it is a bit lonely.
Truth is, Satomi is utterly alone in a way few heroes, even underground heroes, are and she’s tired. She needs to figure out how to get rid of Ghost completely. She needs to quit distancing herself from people. She needs to get some sleeping pills or something because she’s barely sleeping these days. Really, she needs to do a lot of things, but Satomi tries not to think about that, it’s a lot of things to fix and she doesn’t have the energy to figure it all out. It doesn’t really matter anyway.