Chapter Text
“Miss Militia, I understand your apprehension, but… I… Me sharing this information is… borderline illegal, but I have to tell you. They’re planning on sending her to the Birdcage.” Dragon said through the drone, voice soft and worried.
She could only blink rapidly at the drone. She glanced back at the file.
“... She’s… fourteen years old. With a single manslaughter charge. And her power has made her body unsustainable without human flesh. Wouldn’t sending her to the Birdcage-”
“Have her starve to death or put down like a dog by the other inmates? Yes. Yes it would. This isn’t a sentence, it’s an execution. Of a child. Because the PRT can't figure out a way to work around her powers, and they expect her to turn into a Slaughterhouse 9 member if they let her go, and nobody will adopt her, and the trial is private, the information is all classified, it’s being buried, and… I know I’m asking for a lot here. But… please, just please consider it? It's the only way I can come up with to save her." Dragon genuinely pleaded, sounding more worn out than she'd ever heard her be before.
She opened her mouth, and closed it.
As her eyes closed and she sighed in defeat, she caught a muffled 'yes!' come from the drone.
She stared at the computer screen, brows furrowed.
All the information was there, along with a neat tide of notes from Dragon, all relevant and cited.
She tried to summarize the events in her head, feeling an incoming headache that would no doubt last only five minutes before her regeneration fixed it.
Taylor Hebert. Appeared on the boardwalk, covered in blood, with four crystalline, shapeshifting, gigantic tentacles coming out of her back. Attempted to drown herself, was taken in by Gallant, Aegis and Armsmaster. Did not resist arrest. Her home residence was trashed to the point the house was barely standing. Her father was found half-eaten in the kitchen.
Taylor confessed to the killing and cannibalism, stating that after two months of not eating her powers drove her mad. Has not cooperated or spoken since, only to deny that her father had anything to do with her trigger event. Severely distrustful and apathetic. Claims her power has made her only eat human flesh, and that anything else results in vomiting. Except coffee and water?
That was… bizarre.
And as if the rest were not enough, there was the following few lines.
Rough psych evaluation in cooperation with Gallant indicates that the girl is in a state of despair. Suicidal, refuses to eat, covers ears during meetings with psychiatrists, either cannot or will not put away the growths coming out of her back. Has attempted to severely harm herself many times with them, unsuccessfully. Has requested death penalty.
Prosecutor is the PRT with charges of first degree murder, public endangerment, public use of parahuman power with the intent to intimidate, and then a bunch of citations invoking specific laws and legal precedents that she frankly had no idea even existed.
A brief skim through them revealed that they were basically what she had decided to dub the ‘railroad package’. Obscure, vague to the point of genuine concern for most capes, herself included, and rarely used. A mixture of ‘this parahuman cannot be contained’, ‘this parahuman cannot be worked with or negotiated with’, and ‘this parahuman is of an unsound mind and is a danger to the public and thus cannot be released under any circumstances’.
No mention in the prosecution file of her… peculiar diet.
Which was the thing that most frustrated her.
It was possible to work with this girl. She was a traumatized child who somehow got handed one of the most gruesome powers she’d yet heard of in The Bay, requiring her to eat human flesh.
They could request a regenerator without a sense of pain, like Aegis himself, to chop a limb off every once in a while to keep the girl going, something he could regenerate overnight in his sleep. They could request or buy something from Blasto in Boston, one of his weird biotinker vats that grew humanoid creations whose flesh was as close to a human as one could get. They could give her some space, some time to process, a psychiatrist that didn’t just put her in a padded cell with a little window to peek through and start talking and asking questions.
The security footage was genuinely depressing.
The PRT could do all those things. But they wouldn’t.
The image of a Ward being asked to remove his limbs to feed another ward was not only absurd to even think of, if anyone even heard a whisper of this, anyone and everyone involved would be crucified, publicly and internally, careers irreversibly destroyed. The only other regenerator in the Bay was herself, and her rate of regeneration was abysmal in comparison to Aegis’s. She knew that Piggot wouldn’t let her attempt to feed the kid herself when getting that arm back would take two to three days.
The PRT also would not work with a villain. Blasto could give them a human steak production machine for free and they still wouldn’t accept it. Nevermind purchasing something like that, and having him perform maintenance on it.
The only other biotinkers she could think of were Bonesaw.
And then, they could give her some space and time to process, but they wouldn’t do that, because she was nothing but a drain on resources and a PR disaster waiting to happen.
They couldn’t put her in the Wards because she refused to cooperate and they had no way of keeping her alive and fed even if she was cooperative, they couldn’t let her go because they were afraid she’d become a second Siberian, chasing and eating people for fun, they couldn’t outright execute her or place a kill order on her because that was ridiculous and dangerous to throw around especially for a single “murder”, and then…
Then there was the guardianship issue, and the sole loophole and angle of attack that Dragon was able to find to save the poor girl.
For someone to adopt a parahuman, they had to read their file, their superpowers, what they might need to accommodate them, and so on and so forth.
When someone, anyone, picked up a file and read ‘needs human flesh to survive, powers rather unknown, has shapeshifting tentacles with tentative brute two rating, severely traumatized’, they would immediately put the file down and run away.
Understandable.
So not only was the girl being tried, but because she had no parents, no next of kin to take care of her, and nobody to come adopt her, she was a ward of the state. Being a ward of the state gave the state guardianship rights, which included voluntarily revoking the girl’s underage status so she could be tried as an adult, when normally, such a thing was a contested decision, as far as she understood.
In short, this meant that in the trial, they would remove her underage status to trial her as an adult, then both prosecute her, and defend her, likely intending to put some bastard on her side to throw the trial completely so they could nail her to a cross and get rid of the headache that she was.
She leaned forward, staring at the letters.
Her eyes flit down, to the adoption papers on her desk, marred on the right corner with a splotch of pink tea.
If someone… somehow, miraculously, was to adopt her…
Then the girl had a chance. She would be tried as an underage because the parent could refuse to revoke that right, which would then be contested by the court et cetera until a conclusion was reached, and she would then get an actual lawyer.
And Miss Militia was unfortunately the only person Dragon trusted with the information of this trial. New Wave was considered, but with their hatred of the PRT, they were just as likely to use this as ammunition against the PRT as they were to help the girl, not to mention that Carol Dallon was an exceptional lawyer that would be best served defending the girl, which she would be unable to do as her legal guardian.
And of course, their ‘open mask’ policy would be a complete and utter disaster for Taylor. The girl needed absolutely nothing like a sudden spotlight on her, especially one she could not escape from, especially with her… condition. It wasn’t like Panacea could make clumps of human flesh to feed the girl, she was just a healer. An amazing one, but just a healer.
If Dragon had brought this up to them, they would likely use this to attack the PRT, while the ethical complications of how they could keep her fed would make them refuse to adopt the girl.
So…
Here she was.
A giant pile of paperwork on her desk, and a monumental mountain of a decision before her.
She couldn’t let a child be condemned to death.
But she also couldn’t raise one.
She wasn’t… motherly. She wasn’t stunted by any means, she knew the basics, the simple psychology behind raising a functional human, but this was a lot more complicated than just raising a child.
If she adopted her, she would have to prove a lot of things to actually gain guardianship.
Including an ability to feed her.
Which was possible. Colin had great anesthetics, and a nanolaser cutter. Chopping an arm off would literally be nothing more than a chore.
But she would essentially be signing herself off to permanently serving with one arm, always having to remove it when it grew back after a day or two to keep the girl fed.
And how often did she feed anyway? Would Taylor hate her? What was she even like?
Could Hannah really be a parent? She was-
She was…
Scared, actually.
Well, wasn’t this nostalgic? It’s been a while since she felt like this. Trapped between a rock and a hard place.
She took a deep breath, and rubbed at her eyes for a moment, before focusing back on the document.
Then she checked the time.
She entertained the idea of checking up on the girl, trying to approach her preemptively, see what she was like, what she might be dealing with.
Not that it would hold sway over her decision.
Even if Taylor hated her guts and vice versa, she refused to let such an extreme perversion of justice take place. She refused to let a traumatized child be sentenced to death via starvation because of a tragedy they likely couldn’t help commiting, as if they were stuck in the middle ages in some muddy craphole.
She grabbed her pen, hesitated.
Took a deep breath. Sighed it out.
Groaned, rubbed at her temples.
Then, before she could stall the inevitable any more or go into her fiftieth second-guessing session, she signed the first paper, then the second, then the third, and so on, until all seventeen pages of documents were signed in the corner with her official name.
Now to get acquainted with…
The girl she was going to adopt.
How the hell did this happen? She just wanted to be a superhero and serve her country.
Now she was going to try and raise a traumatized cannibal.
She almost burst out laughing due to the sheer absurdity of it, but she had a suspicion that it would probably sound at least a little unhinged from all the stress, so she held it in, and grabbed the papers, fixing her scarf.
Time to talk to Piggot.
Then the girl.
Then Colin.
Then Dragon.
Then-
Okay, she had a lot of people to talk to.
She straightened, and opened the door.