Chapter Text
“Do unto others.”
Nero waited until he was well and truly sure the connection had been cut, then wiped a hand over his damp brow. Speaking to Number One was never pleasant, but asking for something the shadowy leader wasn’t keen to give was downright harrowing. Asking for two things - both the termination warrant for the Furans and a reprieve for the girl who had tried to kill him - was at least as frightening as the assassination attempt he had just survived.
There was a buzz from the direction of the door, and Nero stood up and made his way over to it, painfully conscious of the bruising that was already starting to turn him all the colours of the rainbow. He opened the door to reveal Darkdoom outside.
“Still alive?”
At twenty-eight, Darkdoom was the youngest current member of the G.L.O.V.E. council, and he was yet to be inured - or as inured as anyone ever was - to the menace of Number One. Nero gave a wry smile as he beckoned his friend in.
“Just about,” he said, “he’s going to consider the termination warrant. He hasn’t directly ordered me to torture the assassin, but I’m on borrowed time with her.”
“What are you planning to do with her?” asked Darkdoom as they sat down across the conference table from each other at its narrowest point.
Nero spread his hands.
“Talk to her, I suppose,” he said, “god, I don’t know.”
He leaned forwards and hid his face in his hands, the events of the day - the falling out with his father, the near death experience, and the resurfacing of the people who had killed Elena after so long - landing on his shoulders all at once.
“I thought you said you weren’t going to torture her,” said Darkdoom, and Nero looked up, giving a weary laugh as he kicked his friend under the table.
“I doubt she’d break easily under torture even if I tried,” said Nero, “she’s miles better than any of their trainees I saw in the years before the rift, so it stands to reason she would be better trained in that sphere too. That she won’t talk to me at all is my main concern.”
Darkdoom’s eyebrows lifted.
“She’s awake already?”
“No. But I remember how Anastasia trained them, back in the day. This girl had no suicide capsule, which was a surprise, but she’ll still have been trained to give her codename, then not breathe a word, not even to talk about useless things.”
He had his own theory about the absence of a suicide capsule in her teeth, and it was the thing that had given him enough hope to petition Number One for a softer approach. He had seen her in surgery, and taken note of the scarring on her forearm, deep and old and unmistakeable. It was enough for him to guess at a story more complicated than blind loyalty to the Furans, and enough to prick what remained of his heart. She was only a girl.
“So what, you’re just going to talk at her until she’s so tired of you she talks back?”
“Oh, shut up,” said Nero, secretly grateful for his humour, “I’m going to...” he trailed off as he struggled to decide what he actually was going to do, then hit on the only idea he had yet had, “I’m going to read to her.”
Darkdoom gave him a bemused look.
“She looks about fourteen, Max,” he said, “I know she’s young, but she’s not a child.”
“No,” said Nero, “nor has she been for a very long time, if I know Anastasia. I think reading might be good. It should reassure her I have no plans to hurt her, and it will give me a way to talk to her without obviously prying or just talking to a brick wall. If I choose the right book, it might press a few buttons for her.”
“And how are you going to pick the right book?”
Nero had to admit that the person he would naturally have gone to for literary advice, he had left behind that morning in an expensive Hong Kong restaurant. It would be the height of embarrassment to ask his father now. He pinched the bridge of his nose, wracking his brains and trying to figure out what Nathaniel would say without thinking too hard about the fact that he wanted the advice he had earlier been so disdainful of.
“A Tale of Two Cities seems like a good place to start,” he said.
“Max,” said Darkdoom, looking still more like he thought he had lost his mind, “she’s fifteen at the very oldest, and English isn’t her first language. Why on earth would that seem like a good place to start?”
“Dickens reads well, and it has a gripping plot, so she won’t be bored. Believe it or not, I’m actually quite good at doing voices, which Dickens gives ample opportunity for, and if I can amuse her even a little, that can only be for the good.”
Darkdoom held up his hands and bowed out for the second time that day.
“Whatever you think,” he said, “but Dickens is pretty hefty. Are you going to have time for it before you go home?”
“I’m not going home until she comes with me.”
Darkdoom’s eyes looked like they might pop out of their sockets, and Nero understood. He had never voluntarily spent more than a few days away from H.I.V.E. since becoming headmaster, and it pained him to do so now, but this was more important.
“What?”
“She knows where Anastasia is, Diabolus. Elena has been dead fifteen years, and this girl could be the only chance I get for another fifteen to find those two and put them in the ground. Until I know where they are, where she goes, I go.”
Darkdoom gave him an understanding look.
“Do you want me to do anything? Take any of your lessons for the next few weeks, anything like that?”
Nero looked down at his own bloodied shirt, and up again at Darkdoom’s clean one.
“If you could go to the local library for me, I’d be much obliged.”
***
Nero walked into the white walled room where the girl who had so nearly killed him lay strapped to the bed, conscious now. In some ways she looked far less threatening lying there in bandages - she looked a little smaller, and much more like a young girl. There was no mistaking though, even now, that she was dangerous. Her eyes were icy blue, and a look into them alone would have frightened any lesser man.
“You should have killed me when you had the chance,” she said, and he recognised Anastasia in her - the voice that said mercy was for the weak.
“I still have that option,” he said - he meant to be kind, but he wanted her in no doubt who was in charge here, “I am simply choosing not to exercise it at this precise moment. Now, you know my name, but I do not know yours. What should I call you?”
“My name is Raven,” she said, as he had known she would, “and that is all you will get from me.”
“Not your codename,” Nero said, though he knew it was pointless at this stage, “your real name. What is it?”
“My name is Raven. I have no other name.”
Nero filed that away for later. Not that’s the only name I’m giving you, but I have no other name. A villain had to become adept at spotting a liar, and there was no trace of a lie in her words, only a hint of madness in her eyes as she hissed them. He began to feel that A Tale of Two Cities was a more appropriate choice than he had realised.
“Very well, Raven. I imagine that someone like you must find this kind of incarceration rather boring, so I’ve brought this.”
He held up the battered leather-bound book in his hands. Having somehow failed to find an English copy at the library, Darkdoom with his infinite knack for getting on with people had fallen into conversation with an expat at the front desk there, who had lent him this from his own library. Nero had already sent for his copy - the one Nathaniel had read him as a child - from H.I.V.E., but this would do for now.
“I’m afraid I can’t release your hands, since I suspect that they would end up around my throat,” he went on, “so, I’m going to have to read it to you. I hope you like it, it’s one of my favourite novels, and my father read it to me when I was young.”
“Do what you like,’ said Raven, and her sneer was so reminiscent of what his had once been that it struck him, “it makes no difference to me.”
‘That’s exactly what I used to say to my father,’ he replied with a smile, opening the book and turning to the first page. He cleared his throat and began to read. ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...’
He read for a time without paying her too much attention. She fixed her eyes on the opposite wall and didn’t move a muscle, or so much as glance at him. He was undeterred - he had been met with many a stony silence in his time - and carried on at a steady pace until he reached the room over the wine shop, where Dr Manette, mad and shoemaking, awaited his daughter. This was where he had to watch, and he flicked his eyes up at her as often as he could manage while keeping his attention on the page.
“-or endeavouring, in the hope of some disclosure, to stay the spirit of a fast-dying man,” he read, then dipped into the voice of an old man (secretly modelled incredibly accurately on Professor Pike) to impersonate Dr Manette, “‘Did you ask me for my name?’” He dropped the old man’s rasp and affected a slight French accent, not strong enough to make the scene a humourous one. “‘Assuredly I did.’” He put on the old man again, for the crucial phrase. “‘One Hundred and Five, North Tower.’ ‘Is that all?’ ‘One Hundred and Five, North tower.’” Nero returned to his own voice. “With a weary sigh that was not a sigh, nor a groan...”
The reaction had been slight, almost imperceptible. If he hadn’t been looking for it, he would not have seen it, but it had been there. When wizened Dr Manette, mad with his years of captivity, recited his cell number as his name, the codenamed assassin had slightly tightened her grip on the sheet by her side. As Dr Manette’s madness, vacancy and ignorance of himself had become increasingly clear, she had tensed still further, but never varied the line of her eyes, or spoken a word. He kept going as if he hadn’t noticed, until he reached the end of part one. He could feel his own exhaustion, the weakness of his voice and the pain in his chest where she had slashed him only that day. He prayed this would all be worth it.
“‘I hope you care to be recalled to life?’ ‘I can’t say.’ End of part one.” He marked the book with the ribbon attached and shut it, then looked at his watch and then up at Raven, who kept her eyes fixed on the wall. “Well, Raven, it’s getting late, and that will have to do for tonight. I’ll have them put a clock on the wall in here, so it isn’t so interminable. I’ll be back tomorrow. We’re going to the Old Bailey, in London.”
She still didn’t say a word. He hadn’t expected her to, and didn’t expect her to for quite some time. Still, the tensing of her hand around the sheet, tiny as it was, indicated to him that he had chosen the right book. His old friend Dr Manette would be of use to him now.
“I know you’ve been unconscious quite recently, but it you’d like to get some sleep, I’ll turn out the light.”
She didn’t look at him, or open her mouth, but she shook her head. He left the light on, and left the room.
***
“It should heal without difficulty, but you’re likely to have a scar.”
The head doctor shrank back just a fraction as he spoke, understandably nervous about informing one of the world’s most dangerous men that he was going to have a long slash marring his chest for the rest of his life. Luckily for him, Nero was not a man prone to either worrying about his wounds or shooting the messenger. There was even a certain degree of pride in many scars; less in this one, perhaps, which denoted a fight lost to a teenage girl, but at least he had survived.
“Good. Have there been any problems with Raven?”
“No,” said the doctor, “she’s-“
He was cut off by the deafening sound of a klaxon, and Nero rolled his eyes as he snatched up his shirt and started to put it on.
“I just had to ask,” he muttered as he finished buttoning it.
He burst out of the small room where the doctor had been examining him, looking right and left down the long white corridor. Not far away, he could hear shouting and, to his horror, gunshots. He knew he should have brought in some better trained security - the guards hired for medical facilities weren’t of the calibre needed to watch someone like Raven. He took off at a sprint in the direction of the commotion, whipping around corners and screeching down corridors. If his only lead died, he would kill the guard responsible himself.
He emerged into the main lobby of the medical facility, where the one lift that could take people up to ground level was situated. On one side of the lobby, a steel table lay on its side, and guards dotted around the room were shooting at it as a few of them slowly approached it. Nero ran out into the lobby.
“Hold your fire!” he shouted, and the gunshots ceased as he turned to the table, “Raven, you’re surrounded. Come out with your hands over your head.”
No response, and Nero looked over his shoulder at one of the guards.
“Is she hurt?”
“No.”
“Armed?”
“No.”
“Has she killed anyone?”
“No, but injured five.”
“Okay,” he took out his PDA and quickly typed a message while he spoke, “Raven, you won’t make it to the lift, and there’s no other way out.”
He tossed his PDA to the guard. Get me a tranquiliser dart was typed into the notes. The guard immediately went to a locker on the wall, and returned with one while they awaited an answer. Nero was just turning to take it when a smoking red canister came rushing towards them. The guards, too far away to recognise it as a fire extinguisher, instinctively dived away from it while Nero leapt over it through the smoke, sighting at Raven as she bolted for the lift. He fired, and she crumpled.
“Someone cuff her!” he shouted through the smoke as it began to dissipate, “and keep a better damn eye on her when she’s secured.”
He saw the unconscious escapee returned to her room and made sure she was secured to the bed again, but left before she came to. The less he was seen to be bothered by her escape attempt, the better, so he called into his afternoon lessons and did his paperwork after school as usual. He waited until that evening to go down and see her.
As the lift opened, both the guards at the end of the long corridor turned to face him, relaxing as they saw it was only him. This was the twenty-second day on which he had been a daily visitor. After reading Raven the whole of part one on the first day, he had more than halved that amount, reading her one or two chapters a day ever since. She had remained resolutely silent. She never spoke, never even looked at him, and especially given the escape attempt, he was starting to despair. At least it had been effectively quashed - if she had gotten seriously close to escape, she might have tried again, but he didn’t think for a moment she was stupid.
Before he could get far down the corridor, the door next to the one leading into Raven’s room opened, and Darkdoom came out. He gave Nero a wave and came up the corridor to meet him.
“I’m headed home in a few hours,” he said when he reached him, “I thought I’d take a peek through the glass to see how she’s getting on, I do feel a little guilty about shooting a teenager in the back. I didn’t want to go in, in case I mess with your process somehow.”
“I wouldn’t worry about that,” said Nero with a sigh, “I don’t think I’m getting anywhere.”
“Oh? Here I thought there wasn’t a student in the world you couldn’t handle.”
“Well she’s hardly my student. She just stares at the wall, until today of course. Perhaps you were right about Dickens and it being her second language. I thought I got a small reaction when Dr Manette was first introduced, but his whole recovery since then... nothing. If she’d engage with me even a little, I’d have something to give Number One when he asks, but we’re past three weeks with nothing at all.”
“Well you know what they say about slow and steady,” said Darkdoom, “finish the book, or she’ll know she’s thrown you. If it doesn’t work at all, you can try something different. How long before you go home?”
“I don’t know,” said Nero, “the doctors say she’ll be fit to be moved soon, but I don’t know how soon exactly. If they haven’t given me a date by tomorrow, I’ll have to be more persuasive. Teaching by teleconference is not my preferred method.”
He commanded enough respect with his classes that he had been given no trouble even when teaching as a hologram face at the front of the lecture hall, but he hated it. He was keen to be home, but he knew any progress he might have made with Raven - he had to hope there was some - would be ruined if he left before her. He hoped it would only be a few more days.
“No, it’s not ideal,” said Darkdoom, “still, you haven’t been away for long. Keep me posted on how you get on with her.”
“I will. I’ll see you soon, I’m sure.”
“Of course.”
They shook hands with a smile, and Darkdoom went to the lift while Nero continued down the corridor. The guards let him in, and he found Raven as she had been before, strapped firmly to the bed.
“Good evening,” said Nero, “I trust you’ve shaken off the tranquiliser by now, I’m told there are no unpleasant aftereffects. I hope this has demonstrated the futility of any attempt to escape this facility, or any other you are kept in during your stay with us.”
Her stare didn’t leave the wall. It was as if the escape attempt had never taken place, save for some mild bruising on her jaw, which he was told she had sustained in a short lived fight with a guard who was now in his own medical room.
“The guards you fought with all survived,” he said, “though I suspect you already knew that. Whether you spared them on purpose, or it was simply more convenient not to kill them, I and their families are glad of it.”
He sat down in the chair that had now become his - she had no other visitors save the doctor she didn’t speak to - and opened the book again, starting to feel the futility of it, but determined to go on to the end.
“Book the third, chapter four. Calm in storm. Dr Manette did not return until the morning of the fourth day of his absence...”
He sunk into reading for a minute or two without looking up. The chapter was one of his favourites, one he remembered climbing out of bed to thumb through by the light of his bedside lamp after his father had stopped reading and gone to bed. He didn’t think to glance up until he was a few pages in.
“For the first time, the doctor felt, now, that his suffering was strength and power. For the first time he felt that in that sharp fire, he had slowly forged the iron which could break the door of his daughter’s husband, and deliver him. ‘It all tended to a good end, my friend; it was not mere waste and ruin’.”
There, he glanced up for a moment as he read, knowing the next sentence already, and to his amazement, met blue eyes with his own. For the first time, she was watching him as he read. He looked down again in an effort not to discourage even the tiniest progress, and carried on.
“Thus, Dr Manette. And when Jarvis Lorry saw the kindled eyes, the resolute face, the calm, strong look and bearing of a man whose life always seemed to him to have been stopped, like a clock, for so many years, and then set going again with an energy which had lain dormant during the cessation of its usefulness, he believed.”
He dared another glance up, and this time Raven didn’t hold his gaze, but quickly tore her eyes away. He didn’t know if it was desperation that made him see a flicker of emotion there before she did.
***
Nero woke with an unpleasant jolt to the sound of the buzzer to his room going off. It blared a second time as he rolled out of bed and made his way on sleepy, wooden legs to the door, checking his watch and finding it to be five o’clock. He wiped his eyes and righted himself while the buzzer went off a third time, then opened the door, in spite of his pyjamas and slippers, looking as imposing as ever.
A terrified looking young doctor stood outside, against the opposite wall of the corridor.
“What is it?”
“I’m so sorry, doctor,” said the man, “it’s just you asked- you asked us t-to tell you if anything happened with- with the assassin.”
“And?” asked Nero, feeling the blood drain from his face. This girl was his only route to Anastasia.
“She’s... well-“
“Is she still alive?” asked Nero, fighting the urge to snap at the young man to spit it out.
“Yes- when I left, yes,” he said, “she tried to kill herself. She’s in surgery.”
“Wait there.”
Nero shut the door and ran to the chair across the room to throw on the clothes he had taken off a few hours ago. Trust one of the Furans’ assassins to be trained to eliminate any risk. Less than ten seconds later, cravat shoved in his pocket to be donned later, he came out again.
“Take me there,” he said, and as the doctor began to walk, “run.”
He reached the room that adjoined the operating theatre out of breath, and a more senior doctor who had just scrubbed out was waiting for him there.
“Sir,” he said with a nod, “we caught her just in time. One of the guards had a bad feeling all of a sudden and went in to find blood everywhere. She must have grabbed this when she tried to escape.”
He held up a small shard of glass that was now clean, and that he wouldn’t have wanted to see the state of not long ago. Nero looked through the two way mirror, but the operation was screened from sight.
“Is she going to live?” asked Nero.
“Yes. We’ve sedated her, and she’s in surgery right now. She’s going to be fine, and the bullet wound has healed enough that she’ll be okay to move to the alps in a few days. She’ll just need to be put on closer watch.”
“Obviously. When will she be awake?”
“Hard to say, the sedative has varying effects. I’d guess about twenty-four hours.”
“Alright. Thank you doctor.”
Both doctors left the room, and Nero stayed where he was, and buried his face in his hands once they were gone. He had been headmaster for nine years and a teacher for six before that. He had seen all manner of things during his tenure, but one that never failed to deeply upset him was a student attempting. It happened very rarely - less than in the teenage population of most countries - but any was still more than Nero could accept.
He always felt responsible, and he felt even more responsible for Raven. He ought to have known that she wouldn’t be prepared to sit around and wait for him to run out of patience, especially with his reputation for ruthlessness. She would have been trained to go to any lengths to avoid betraying the Furans, regardless of her own feelings; as soon as her escape attempt failed, he should have put her on suicide watch.
Hours later, she was wheeled, still unconscious and deathly pale, back to the room she had been in before. She had been much more thoroughly checked, and the head doctor suggested guards in the room, but Nero refused. He went himself, and called into his lessons from the hospital room, half an eye always on her.
He was still there at one o’clock the next morning, in the chair he had read to her from for the last three and a half weeks, when her eyes finally flickered open. He was suddenly conscious that he hadn’t shaved, and his cravat was loosened around his neck.
“I’m glad to see you awake,” he said, “are you in any pain?”
“You should have let me die,” she said, and the bitterness in her voice cut Nero to the core. He tried not to show it.
“Whether you would like to be or not, my dear, for the time being you are a minor in my care,” he said, “while you remain here, you remain under my protection. I am responsible for your safety, and I very nearly failed to keep to that responsibility yesterday. Rest assured, it won’t happen again.”
She looked at the opposite wall, head angled so Nero couldn’t see her face. He felt a wave of sadness as he looked at her. That anyone so young could feel - not just in a moment of madness, but feel strongly enough to premeditate it and regret failing - that bleeding out alone in this plain white room was her best option... a weak part of him would almost have wanted to let her go if he hadn’t known that going back to the woman who had trained her to feel that way would be even worse.
“I know this was planned, but regardless I don’t doubt it was rather traumatic,” he said, “so I brought the book in case you wanted to hear the next part, but I’m equally prepared to leave and come back tomorrow. Shall I go?”
She didn’t turn to look at him, but she shook her head. Nero opened the book, resigning himself to a night of little sleep before his classes tomorrow, but relieved to know that his insistence on staying instead of any guards hadn’t been completely useless.
“Part the third, chapter thirteen. Fifty-Two. In the black prison of the Conciergerie the doomed of the day awaited their fate...”
He only had three chapters to go, but he didn’t want to finish tonight. He resolved to read two, and save the last for tomorrow evening. He was thankful at least for the upcoming opportunity to perform - Miss Pross’s shrieking hysteria and Jerry Cruncher’s cockney brashness made good roles, and they were comic enough characters that it didn’t ruin the tone to put on a humourous mimicry. Comedy was sometimes the only antidote to something so grim.
As always, he pretended not to notice a thing, but he heard her hold her breath at the height of the drama, could almost have believed he heard the tiniest of gasps at the eleventh hour. He was exhausted, and she looked sleepy too, but after the day’s events, he didn’t want to leave her with something too serious. When he reached Miss Pross and Jerry Cruncher’s final section, he abandoned dialogue tags, relying on his own impersonation to tell her who was speaking.
“Oh my good man,” he said in his best feminine shrill, “there was first a great crash, and then a great stillness, and that stillness feels to be fixed and unchangeable, never to be broken any more as long as my life lasts!” He dropped the voice for an exaggerated cockney accent and a mystified tone. “If she don’t hear the roll of those dreadful carts, now very nigh their journey’s end, it’s my opinion that indeed she never will hear anything else in this world.” He returned to his own voice. “And indeed she never did.”
When he looked up, Raven was in her usual position, eyes fixed on the opposite wall, but her bottom lip was tucked slightly under her top one, as if she was trying not to let him know she was biting it. If he didn’t know better, he might have said she was trying not to laugh.
“I’ll be back tomorrow for the final chapter,” he said, making a great effort not to smile himself, in spite of everything, “goodnight.”
***
“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done. It is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.”
Nero shut the book and set it down on the bedside table.
“Finis,” he said, “did you like it?”
“He was an idiot.”
Nero blinked at the response - he hadn’t been expecting one at all, never mind anything beyond a yes or no. He didn’t dare answer, hoping she would go on.
“Giving his life for her when she didn’t love him.”
Nero let the irony of that hang in the air for just long enough that she dropped his gaze, then responded.
“Well, people do all kinds of things out of devotion.”
She didn’t reply, and he suspected that was all he would get for the day. It was far more than he had ever had before.
“We’re moving tomorrow,” he said, “the doctors tell me you’re well enough to be taken to H.I.V.E. Did the Furans tell you about H.I.V.E.?”
“Your school.”
“That’s right. I’m the headmaster there, so of course I live there, which means I’ll have access to my library again soon. I’m afraid I still can’t release your hands, for my own safety and yours, so I’ll be reading you another book. Do you have any requests?”
She gave a sneer much like the one she had shot him before he began A Tale of Two Cities.
“Of course not.”
“Then I will decide myself. I’ll see you on the helicopter tomorrow. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight.”