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I. QUOTH THE RAVEN
(Once upon a midnight dreary…)
Kaina no longer remembers a life without blood. The scent follows her wherever she goes, the coppery taste lingering on her tongue. It stains her skin and her dreams alike; it keeps her awake late through the night because all she sees in the dark is red splattered against cement and a magenta bullet lying in the middle of it.
The wind howls outside, tree branches tapping against her window, and she stares at the nightlight plugged into her wall like she’s a little kid hiding from monsters under the bed. Someday, the world is going to figure out what she’s done, and then they will turn her back on her. The Commission feign ignorance, looking the other direction while Kaina is carted off to prison for all the blood they made her spill, and she will deserve it.
The tapping continues, like the tick-tick-tick of a clock counting down to her demise.
Maybe it’s not the wind at all. Maybe there’s someone at her door, knock-knock-knocking. Officers armed with handcuffs and guns. Maybe it’s All Might himself, come to erase the blemish on hero society that is Lady Nagant.
Tap-tap-tap.
Kaina drags herself out of bed, through the darkness of her apartment, floorboards creaking beneath her feet. The tapping grows louder, and maybe it’s something worse than justice waiting at her door. Maybe it’s someone from the Commission with another assignment. She hasn’t been checking her phone. The Commission president may hurt her more than any imprisonment ever would if she missed an important message.
TAP-TAP-TAP.
It echoes through the empty apartment. Bare walls and minimal furniture, because what does it matter when Kaina is rarely home anyways? The sound bounces against the walls, cutting into her like a blade. Like a bullet made of bright magenta hair.
She swings the door open, blinking at the blinding fluorescent lights.
Nothing.
An empty hallway, the hum of the furnace, and nothing more.
(Distinctly I remember, it was in the bleak December…)
Kaina leaves her apartment before sunrise, breath materializing in front of her as she steps into the early winter morning. She pulls her scarf up over her mouth, then stuffs gloved hands back into her pockets, shoulders hunched. The streets are empty at this hour—the villains and underground heroes have retired for the night and those active during the daytime have yet to rise.
It’s an eerie silence Kaina walks through, with snow coating the ground and snowflakes drifting idly around her. The air is still.
The world is still.
Kaina trudges onward, towards the Commission headquarters, making no hurry despite the insistence that this is a matter of the utmost importance. She wasn’t given any details, which means it’s a mission that will end in bloodshed. She knows how this goes.
She watches her boots break through the blanket of snow on the sidewalk, listens to the soft crunch in lieu of any other noise to keep her company. The city is never this quiet—it’s uncanny. Unreal, almost dreamlike. Maybe she could pinch herself and wake up from the nightmare in which she lives, going back to a time before. When she believed in the inherent goodness of humanity.
She times her breathing with her steps. Tries to ignore the tightness in her chest.
When she finally reaches her destination, she looks up and finds herself face-to-face with a large black bird perched on a sign.
She starts, stumbling backwards and nearly losing her balance. Her voice shatters the quiet with an emphatic, “What the fuck.”
The bird stares at her with beady eyes, gleaming beneath the streetlights. Kaina’s heart hammers in her chest, adrenaline rushing through her veins with no way to excise it. It’s just a bird.
It’s just a bird, and nothing more.
(Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling…)
The boy stares up at Kaina with wide eyes, clutching an Endeavor plushie tightly against his chest. His pupils are too-big, almost entirely eclipsing his irises, beady like the raven that met her on her way to work last week. She wonders, now, if it was an omen.
The boy’s nails are sharp, talon-like. His wings are a muddied red, feathers twisted and bent. There are markings around his eyes. He looks human at first glance, but upon closer inspection, Kaina finds more and more bird-like features about him. He’s a cute kid, but there’s something haunted in his gaze.
Kaina doesn’t want to know what he’s seen.
“His name is Hawks,” the president says.
It’s not a real name—it’s a hero name. It settles wrongly in Kaina’s chest to imagine someone so young already stripped of his humanity, but she is in no place to do anything. She can’t even claim to be human herself. How can a living weapon save anyone else from suffering the same fate? Weapons are made only to kill and destroy.
Still, she kneels down, putting herself at eye-level with the boy in the same way she once did for her younger fans. She offers him a smile that feels more like a grimace. “Hawks,” she repeats. “It’s nice to meet you. My name is Tsutsumi, or you can call me Lady Nagant.”
“You’re…” Hawks eyes her, curled in on himself like he’s trying to appear as small as possible. “They said you’re a hero?”
Kaina’s chest clenches.
“Yes,” she lies.
Hawks nods. “I’m going to become a hero too.”
(As if his soul in that one word he did outpour…)
Dreams and nightmares are synonymous for Kaina. When she dares to sleep, she is haunted by her sins, and now—
she is haunted by the beady black eyes of a bird.
I’m going to become a hero, he says. Eight years old with a blood-red path laid out for him, and Kaina is meant only to aid in his fall from grace. She does not know where the Commission found this kid, does not know what name he was given at birth, does not know if his family is aware of his whereabouts or if he even still has a family at all. She does not want to know.
She dreams of him soaked in blood, crying, screaming that HE WANTED TO BE A HERO! She dreams of him turning sharp feathers and talons on her, slicing her open, because she’s easier to blame. Because she could have warned him, but she didn’t, because what good would it have done?
Hawks. A hero.
His name tastes the same as blood welling in Kaina’s mouth.
(Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden bore…)
Kaina watches as Hawks’ feathers hit targets with a higher accuracy than even her bullets. The kid is blindfolded, hands tied behind his back, not even as tall as Kaina’s waist, slicing through the throats of dummy after dummy. And when the demonstration is done, when he’s freed from his binds, he grins up at Kaina and asks, “Did I do good?”
And Kaina decides—
(Quoth the Raven—)
Tree branches tap against the window as Kaina tosses and turns late into the night. Hawks’ innocent smile haunts her as much as the thought of his hands covered in blood. Is it worse to know you’re doing wrong, or to have any remorse trained out of you before it can even develop? Is it worse to have hope torn from your chest as an adult or to have it stamped to nothing as a child? Is it worse to believe, and then see the worst in the world, or to never experience the light at all?
Kaina stands up. Throws aside the curtains and opens the window to find a raven perched in the branches of the tree that keeps her company when she can’t sleep. It stares at her with eyes like Hawks’, but emptier. It stares at her like what Hawks will become. Cutthroat, apathetic, disengaged from any sense of morality. A better weapon than Kaina could ever be.
The bird screams in her face.
Kaina smiles.
“You’re right,” she says. If they’re training her replacement, why not give them a real reason to replace her? Why wait for the world to catch up to the weight of her sins when she could force them into the limelight herself—when she could make a last-ditch attempt to save Hawks from the fate forcibly laid out for him?
Kaina is no hero, but deep inside of her soul, there is still a relentless ache to save others.
She laughs, and the raven echoes her.
Together, they vow—
NEVERMORE.
For the first time in years, Kaina aims her bullet for someone she truly believes deserves the punishment she is doling out. For the first time in years, as the body hits the ground and blood soaks the carpet, she knows she has served justice.
When they ask her why, all she says is, “Nevermore.”
Only that, and nothing more.
II. BIRD OR DEVIL
(thing of evil—prophet still, if bird or devil!—)
Despite her isolation in Tartarus, Kaina hears whispers of the outside world. From the guards outside of her door, from those passing by, when her meals are delivered or she is taken from her cell to be examined by a doctor after a week spent sick.
The Hero Billboard Charts have always been a common topic of conversation. Kaina peaked at Number 9.
Hawks, a mere twenty years old, is reigning at Number 3.
(tell me, truly, I implore—)
All For One seeks out Kaina directly.
If all her sacrifice was for naught, why should she deny his whims? Hero society is beyond reformation. It should be burned to the ground. Kain may not agree with All For One, but she does not agree with heroes either. Her last selfless act did no good, so now—
(NEVERMORE.)
—now, she’ll act in the interests of only herself.
(by that God we both adore—)
There’s a tap-tap-tap against the door of Kaina’s hospital room, and then Hawks lets himself in. He’s wingless, leaning on a cane, hair cropped short and face scarred. His fingernails are rounded, and his eyes are perfectly human-like.
But his gaze is still haunted.
Kaina won’t ask what he’s seen in the years since they last spoke. She doesn’t want to know all the ways she failed to save him.
“Tsutsumi-san,” he greets with a plastic smile Kaina recognizes all too well. “Do you have a moment?”
Kaina snorts. She’s cuffed to the bed and in too much pain to run; she couldn’t leave even if she wanted to. Hawks drops himself into the chair near her bed, which has seen only one other occupant—Midoriya, stopping by briefly to make sure she was alive and being treated as if he wasn’t heavily bandaged and scarred himself.
Hawks looks at her through too-small pupils, and she looks back with a stare black as night. “I’ve been wondering since it happened,” he says, casually. “Why’d you do it?”
Kaina raises an eyebrow. “Why’d I kill him?”
Hawks nods, almost hesitant.
She remembers Hawks, eight years old, with hope to be a hero. Fooled into believing the Commission wouldn’t just use him for their own gain; fooled into believing heroes are synonymous with good. She saw herself in him, saw his future in her past.
Why did Lady Nagant defect? What finally pushed her over the edge, hammered the final nail into the coffin, snapped her mind and convinced her to kill the former Commission president?
The bird perched on her windowsill.
“You,” she tells Hawks. You, and nothing more.
(Tell this soul with sorrow laden—)
Kaina returns to prison of her own accord, uninterested in being used as a pawn in a society that will not change even after all the destruction brought about.
Newly appointed Commission President Hawks visits her and offers to pardon her for her crimes—offers to let her walk free, as a thanks for her help in the war. But no Commission officer is to be trusted, even now.
(NEVERMORE, NEVERMORE.)
“No,” Kaina tells him. There is blood on her teeth and blood in her hands, and in Hawks’ future she sees everything the Commission wanted from her. She does not see herself—not anymore.
In the absence of his quirk, Hawks has not become human. He has gone from weapon to machine.
And Kaina vowed—
III. NEVERMORE
(Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!)
When Kaina’s sentence is up, reduced by Hawks despite her insistence otherwise, she steps out into a world that is exactly the same as the one she knew before. Heroes are celebrities and villains are monsters and the HPSC does everything it can to ensure these statements both remain true. Kaina moves into an apartment with a tree that tap-tap-taps against her bedroom window and she keeps a nightlight on and she rarely manages to sleep through the night.
With nothing else to do, she walks through the city streets and observes the world rebuilt into the shape of itself. The winter chill settles heavy on her shoulders as snowflakes drift through the sky.
Young heroes are ranking higher than ever before. There’s talk of allowing the third year students of UA to make appearances on the Hero Billboard Chart. I bet Deku could be Number 1, they say. D’you think Shouto or Dynamight would make Number 2?
And Kaina vowed—
She swore—
She walks, aimlessly, until she finds herself standing outside of the Commission headquarters. A red-tailed hawk perches on a nearby bench. It stares at Kaina, daring.
Kaina stares back.
(Quoth the Raven:)
In Kaina’s dreams, she sees a black bird with blood-soaked feathers. It reminds her of her promise which she failed to keep.
In Kaina’s dreams, she sees the child Hawks once was. He opens his mouth, and he says—
NEVERMORE.
Arm over her shoulder, hair torn from her scalp, bullet inserted, aim locked. It would take only one shot. Without his quirk, Hawks has no means of escape.
And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
“You were supposed to be better than this,” she says. “You were supposed to be better than him!”
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming,
“I did this—” bullet to the leg, prevent escape but don’t kill, “—I gave up everything—” blood soaks through slacks, terror in his eyes, such a familiar sight, “—for YOU!” Kaina’s hands have been stained red for years, but she was supposed to be the last.
It was supposed to be her, and then NEVERMORE.
“You—” rip out another chunk of hair, ignore the sting, load the gun, don’t think about it, “—are just like every single president who came before you.” Aim.
Remember Hawks, eight years old, grinning with untainted hope.
Aim.
Remember—
“I don’t understand,” Hawks tells her. “What else am I supposed to do? Do you want someone else in this position? Do you want them bringing in more kids like they did to us?”
“I want you to burn this all to the ground.”
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
“Hawks,” Kaina says, standing over him, barrel of her rifle positioned against his head. Gun loaded, blood staining the both of them. Kaina made her promise long ago. “I swore—
Shall be lifted—
(Hawks is ready, willing, eager to die.)
nevermore.”