Archive of Our Own ^beta

The tape recorder is clicked on.

- Ah! You're the guy from the Magnus Institute, right? I'm Hawks, at your service!

- Yes, I am from the Magnus Institute. I initially called for this interview months ago for a reason, you know. I wanted to give you some information that was pertinent then, but is practically useless now-

- Regarding the League of Villains? Oh, yes, don't worry, I know all about them, and I know all about you, Archivist. Did you think I wouldn't? My interns told you all about the "spider problem" at my agency, didn't they? And who hasn't seen the paparazzi photos by now?

- Of course you're with the fucking Web. You've been forewarned enough, then, so get out of my sight.

- I assume you mean your physical sight, rather than whatever your Beholding has granted you? Either way, my answer is the same: no, I don't think I will. Come on, Archivist, I think we'll have a lovely working relationship! Me, weaving my webs, and you recording the fallout! Nothing that we haven't been doing already, right?

- ...What do you mean by that?

- Since you're asking so nicely- not even a hint of compulsion in there, I'm flattered and impressed, Annabelle told me much worse about you- I'll give you a freebie! Who exactly do you think got Peter Lukas to dock in Musutafu when he did? Not to mention my whole killing Mineta Minoru thing, I mean, really, that's technically a freebie too but dear Mother am I proud of that one! All without calling in any favors to boot!

- You're proud of killing an innocent child?

The Archivist's tone is deadpan, unimpressed, and dripping in sarcasm.

- Far from innocent! Offing the little fucker was as close to a victimless crime as you could get! No friends, no future, nothing but a leech to his family, really, the HPSC has had me do worse! And besides, the ramifications of that are what I'm really proud of! But I won't go on about that.

- Right. Well. If that's all... ?

- Ha. No. I'll tell you what, Archivist; I've got a proposal for you. Care to hear it?

- Not particularly, but I suppose I'm about to hear it anyway.

- You supposed correctly! I'll spin you a little yarn, a tale, a story, a Statement if you will; and in exchange, I want you to promise me something. Normally I wouldn't be so blatant about these things, but I'm on a bit of a time crunch, you of all people would understand that. Besides! Annabelle gave you one, and I'd be remiss not to follow in her footsteps!

- No, you wouldn't be, in fact I'd prefer if you didn't... what would I be promising, exactly?

- There's an old urban legend about a man, thought to be a monster, who lives in the dark and steals that which sets you apart. They say that he is pure evil, and only the brave and the foolish dare to say his name. All for One is the modern boogeyman; the King of the Underworld, The Supervillain Himself. The stories about him, however, are so old that they faded into obscurity decades ago, so hardly anyone recognized the Scourge of Kamino as who he was. People think that this was just another villain, not the great giver and taker of quirks that he is. All for One is a myth, a nightmarish bedtime story, in almost every eye. Don't go chasing after fairy tales, Archivist.

- ... Alright. I won't.

- Good! Now, for my end of the bargain.

Statement of Takami Keigo, otherwise known as Pro-Hero Hawks, regarding his youth with the HPSC. Statement direct from subject, recorded 24 November, 20XX. Statement begins.

The Hero Public Safety Commission has a very thorough step-by-step process for creating a hero. They are always efficient in everything they do, and so they have streamlined the process away from the human element of the industry, and towards a utilitarian future of heroics. Today, I'll enumerate all of these steps, with my own training as a prime example of successful training.

Step One: Acquire a child with a useful quirk. Must be powerful and extremely versatile, though not without minor drawbacks. These drawbacks will be exploited later in the process. Child must not exceed the age of ten at time of acquisition. Child must not have an adequate home life. In my case, I was eight years old when they scouted me. I lived in the slums of Fukuoka, with my alcoholic mother who didn't give two shits about me. Fierce Wings is a powerful and versatile quirk that they witnessed being used to save multiple civilians from a car crash. They bought me from my mother that very same day. I heard she disappeared soon after, but that wasn't the Commission's doing, ironically enough. She's probably dead by now.

Step Two: Manipulate the child into trying to become a hero. Use of role models or celebrity figures, as well as other forms of psychological conditioning, are highly encouraged. Physical torture is highly discouraged during this phase. The aim of this step is to instill the most powerful ambition possible in the child, while using minimal amounts of manipulation, in order for the child to see heroics as the natural path of their life. In my case, Endeavor was my hero already, because he had arrested my abusive father two years prior. The Commission just had to ask if I wanted to be a hero like him, and I was already sold.

Step Three: Dehumanize the child, who will hereafter be referred to as the subject. Erase all records of the subject's existence. Give subject a new codename, referred to as its "hero name." Punish the subject for use of its original name. Torture is encouraged, but permanent damage is unacceptable. The aim of this step is that the subject will, over time, become highly loyal to the Commission without a sense of individual identity. For a long time, I had even forgotten my original name, because I had gone by "Hawks" for so long, and the idea of my original name became associated with pain.

Step Four: Extensively train the subject in a large variety of useful skills, such as withstanding torture, extreme stealth, assassinations, masking emotions, and analysis of an opponent's psychology and physical characteristics. The subject must not be given any rest days. The subject must be given the bare minimum amounts of food and sleep needed for it to survive. Strength and endurance training should reflect the real world; withholding basic needs is mandatory at some point in this training. During this time, torture as punishments will lose efficacy as the subject builds its pain tolerance, so ensure that there is a unique torture method available that is immune to this deterioration; if unavailable, simply increase the intensity of all training regimens until subject learns its lesson. All quirk drawbacks will be overcome during this time, generally in a manner that has an auxiliary effect of increasing the subject's other useful skills. If the subject expires during this step, simply repeat the process with a new subject. Remember: survivors are the exception, not the rule. In my own case, I was the lone survivor of an original set of thirty possible candidates for the program, all brought in at roughly the same time. I am able to stay awake and stay effective for far longer than any other hero not trained by the Commission's program, which is due entirely to their specialized training program.

Step Five: When the subject reaches the age of sixteen, it will enter "phase two" of its training regimen. This includes real missions, including covert assassinations, as well as covert heroics, similar to unauthorized vigilantism. Subject will also be given a large variety of tests of loyalty to the HPSC; if the subject fails any of these tests, it will be terminated. I passed every single one of my loyalty tests, because I had already learned how to lie.

Step Six: The subject will "debut" at the age of eighteen. It will be given accommodations outside of the Commission, and be allowed more freedom and autonomy than it previously enjoyed. This is both to maintain the illusion that the subject is an independent human being, and to prepare the subject for longer-term deep-cover missions. The privileges of freedom, autonomy, and privacy will be meted out gradually, so that the subject does not believe itself to be fully independent even in situations in which, for all intents and purposes, it is. The first time that I ever realized that I could do what I wanted, as an independent adult, I was twenty-three and on a mission to infiltrate the League of Villains.

Step Seven: This is the most important step. The subject must never, under any circumstances, realize that the individual agents of the Commission are human and fallible. It must always subconsciously view them as omniscient, omnipotent entities, who cannot be fooled by it. The Commission is vast, and none of the individual members are aware of all of its facets, not even the President. Nobody controls everything within the organization. There are blind spots and errors, just as there are in every organization. The subject is never to be made aware of this. The subject must believe that it must always be honest with the Commission, and that it cannot do anything to manipulate any of its agents. If this step is not correctly followed, the subject will begin to lie and manipulate from an early age, eventually becoming more powerful than any individual agent of the Commission, even the President. Unfortunately for them, the HPSC is not aware of this possible consequence of incorrectly following Step Seven. That was their mistake with me. I have lied to the faces of the most powerful people in this country, and they have believed me every single time that I did.

This is the HPSC's Heroic Model. It barely covers beyond the age of eighteen, mostly because they're under the impression that they don't need to. They think that constant monitoring past that point is unnecessary and redundant, because the hero's already proved himself to their standards.

They're all so fucking stupid.

There have always been cracks in their walls. They are not perfect. Nothing that they do is completely airtight. Where there were cracks in my training, in my raising, that is where the spiders crawled in. They whispered to me, in the dead of night, when I was too exhausted to move and too full of the adrenaline which kept me alive to sleep. They wove their webs over my wounds, and some of them crawled into my skin, or laid their eggs below those webs, deep in my bloodstream. I didn't mind. I liked the company, and in return for allowing them to use me for their eggs, they whispered to me. They told me how to get anyone to do whatever I wanted. They told me secrets, the secrets of those who trained and tortured me.

Slowly, under their ministrations, I felt myself changing. I began to see threads, the faintest translucent strings of my spiders' webs, and I slowly learned how to touch them, move them to my own benefit. I learned how to make my own threads, and use them to connect things that seemed unrelated. I learned how to listen for direction from that invisible force that we call the Mother of Puppets. I learned how to make my threads reach inwards, how to pull them and keep my heart beating, even when it should have stopped long ago. Eventually, I stopped doing that, because it was pointless and redundant; I was alive and functional anyways, why should I bother making these organs work?

Did you know that some species of spiders view other spiders as prey? The strongest of us are dominant over the weakest; that is how we spiders work. My spiders are a part of me, now, and they demand to be fed. So, I snack on my arachnid brethren whenever I see them. Sometimes they belong to Mother; sometimes they do not. It doesn't matter to me, because Mother sends her spiders to me to dispose of them. My only opinion on this is that Mother's taste better.

I was never afraid of my spiders. They were good to me, they were kind to me, so why should I fear them? My spiders strengthened me, made me powerful. I could do anything I wanted, even though I didn't choose to. The Commission still had its tetherhooks in me, even when I was alone. There was always a nagging voice in the back of my mind that believed that they could still see every move I made, every thought in my head. That voice did not quiet until I was deep into my assignment to infiltrate the League.

Dabi was my contact. The moment I first laid eyes on him, I knew that he was important; Mother always tells me things like that, and his sleeve was trailing cobwebs that floated behind him. The webs were old, as though he had already served some purpose for the grander scheme of things. Not like he was Marked, though; he had never noticed the Spider's touch.

After a few meetings, I decided to look more closely at him than I had previously. My eyes had previously slid off of him unconsciously, so I made a decision to really look. Almost immediately, I understood why I hadn't looked closer. Dabi looked like he was made of plastic and fabric, full of sawdust and covered in paint. He didn't look real. One of the Stranger's lot, then; this alignment wasn't particularly endearing to me, nor was it repulsive. It was... tolerable. A development, but not really an impactful one. Neutral at best, negligible at worst.

We ended up flirting a bit, after a while. It didn't go anywhere, until it did. The fucking didn't go anywhere, either, until it did.

It was a decent while into our... relationship, for lack of a better word. I knew enough about his alignment, and I let him learn enough to figure out about mine. We both used our abilities in less-than-responsible ways, but who really cared? Mother didn't, and there's no one in charge of the Stranger to care. But he- in the middle of it, once, he called me "Kei." It felt... right. I had long forgotten my own name by then, only vaguely having the impression that I had been called something else before I was Hawks.

I froze. Told him to repeat himself. Asked him what he called me, and then I- I asked him if he knew my real name. He said he did. I all but begged him to tell me what it was, and he did. No fight about it, nothing. Just told me, plain and simple, straight to my face. "Takami Keigo." Fuck, it's embarrassing to think about now, but I started crying right in front of him, still naked on the bed. And he didn't- he didn't judge me or make fun of me or anything for it, even after the fact.

I told him everything after that, and he repaid in kind. There was a new understanding between us, then, and we got closer even outside the bedroom. He started invading my apartment at first just to hang out, then to cook me dinner because I "couldn't take care of myself," never mind the fact that we both knew that neither of us needed to eat. Eventually, he just stopped leaving.

I'm glad that his sister's back in his life. Toushou's good for him, you know? I know he regretted leaving her behind when he did, so all's well that ends well. I'm glad that he's going to talk to his brothers soon, too, I think that things are really looking up for him. Toushou officially crashes with the League, but she's over at our place so often that she might as well live there herself. It's... weirdly domestic, but I think it's nice.

I think I really do love Dabi. I once thought it was impossible for me to do that, at first because of the pain of what the HPSC did to me, and then because of my spiders and my death. I'm glad that it's not.

Statement ends.

The tape recorder is clicked off. It is clicked on a moment later.

- So it appears that Hawks truly is a servant of the Web, although I shouldn't really be surprised. How else would he have managed to survive in the League for this long if he was human? They don't need him. They have no reason to hold themselves back on his account. He also answered a few lingering questions, about who exactly killed Mineta. I still don't know the perpetrator's name specifically, but I know who arranged it, and that's good enough for me. He also answered some things that weren't questions, like why Peter Lukas was even in Japan at the time. I'd just assumed that it was a normal stop on his trips, not something ordained by the Web. Of course I can never forget its involvement in everything.

- Given Hawks' alignment, I cannot reasonably assume that he is telling the truth. Why should he? What does he have to gain by bearing his soul to the tape recorder, rather than just saying what he thinks would be entertaining, or what he thinks would influence me in a way beneficial to him? He even said that he was telling a story, a tale; a lie. I can't trust anything that he said in this Statement. I don't know if the Commission really does train children that cruelly, I don't know if their individual agents are as brainwashed and manipulated as Hawks claims them to be.

- If this is true, then... I don't know how to feel about it. I wouldn't blame Hawks for turning to the spiders; he was a child at the time, fighting to survive. However, that's exactly why I don't think that it's true. And this, of course, is one of the few Statements that I cannot verify. The Spider refuses to be Seen properly.

- I don't know what to make of the promise that he extracted from me. Why would I search for All for One? Why is he on a "time crunch?" Is he saying that at some point soon, I will? Why would I do that? What kind of secret is this man hiding? Does he know things that the Eye won't tell me? Rumor has it that he is over two hundred years old; in that case, he's almost certain to know something. However, someone that old either has an immortality quirk, which isn't impossible for the man who can give and take them at will, or else has an alignment of some kind, to something. I hesitate to see if the latter is true.

- There is a bit of a break in the interview schedule, due to a lot of rescheduling and last-minute emergencies popping up. I've still got a vague outline of the order in which the students will give their Statements, or not, depending on if they have any; however, there are no dates. I'm probably going to be spending this week hashing that out with UA staff, which will be boring at best. I am glad that not all of these students have Statements; those interviews have been interesting in mundane ways. It was nice, actually, being able to talk to these kids who still have hopes and dreams of doing some good in the world.

- End recording.

[The following is the transcript of a letter that sits on the dormitory desk of Todoroki Shouto. The letter itself is almost illegible.]

Shouto-

Sorry about the handwriting, first of all. Certain... circumstances have made it much harder to write, but I was going to be a doctor before all of this. Bad handwriting was always going to happen to me, right?

So the main reason that I'm doing this is to let you know that I'm not dead, mostly. I'm about as alive as you are, I guess. I heard Yumi did something similar to us, is that true? Don't respond to that. Or this letter in general, actually- let me know later.

That brings me to the second reason that I'm writing this. On the night of November 27th- Saturday- I'm gonna need you to sneak out of your dorm, and meet me at the address written on the backside of this letter. No, it's not a trap, I swear. I know you won't get caught.

If you ever need to talk and I'm not there, make sure you tell the bees. We're always listening.

See you soon,

Natsuo