Chapter Text
When she is seventeen, she is too curious not to look in the dark corners of the basement where her grandparents boxed up her father’s life. They didn’t tell her not to open the boxes, but she knows to be afraid of the dark, knows not to touch unless she is braced for the consequences, knows not to look if she does not think she can handle what she will see.
(They are her mother’s parents, bless them, and they want her safe above everything. They hope they can keep her safe by clipping her wings. She doesn’t resent them for it, because they can’t ever understand the itch at her back, through her bones, and what it means that it was unscratched for seventeen years.)
She finds in the pages of her father’s notes, the Yatagarasu, three legs and two wings branded in black on stark white, smudged ink in his hand, a record of his thefts of the truth. And beneath the old book, she finds, tattered and dull with the years of dust, a scarf, the deep blue of midnight with edges like wings, and she remembers it without knowing.
When she touches it, she does not feel fabric; smooth beneath her hands are inky blue-black feathers, and she knows. She throws it about her shoulders and it lays against her skin like it was always meant to be there, like it is a second skin, hers flayed from her and only now healed. She ascends to the kitchen where she finds her grandparents sitting at the kitchen table, and they share a look, wordlessly, that they knew, that they have always known, and kept from her – kept her from danger.
But hers are legs – just two of them, not three – not meant to stay grounded, and Kay pulls the feathers close and spins, and a crow takes flight for Los Angeles to finish what her father started. She soars, and she knows that this is what she is meant for, this is where she is meant to be, her hollow bones filled with magic, feathers glossy and a harsh caw to the clouds. The second Yatagarasu has arrived. The second Yatagarasu is here for your secrets.
Even with the passage of years, her sharp eyes, meant to spot truths and shiny objects from high above, recognize the man with the ruffles and the wine-red suit who investigated her father’s death. He’s in trouble; she came here looking to stick her beak in trouble, and besides, she has something to return to him.
She alights in the open window. He pauses in his struggle with the restraints tying him to the column in the room, his brow furrowing in confusion as he stares up at her. Strange for a bird to readily venture indoors, perhaps.
In this shape, she can’t smile, but she would.
He’ll only be more confused in a moment.