"You seem troubled," Kevin Kaslana says quietly over the whine of the transport. "Having second thoughts?"
"Is that a threat?" Raiden Mei's voice is huskier than she remembers—the sort of sound that comes after screaming, when the throat is scarred shut by helpless desperation. She can feel it even now, lurking in the hollows of her heart. Or maybe that's just the storm that birthed her, the thunder that rumbles across the sky outside to the rhythm of her discontent. "I've made my choice."
"I don't make threats," he says, and she might even believe him. She can see the lightning webbing beneath the aircraft's gunmetal skin, hissing through the sparking synapses of the pilot's muscles, a thousand thousand fireworks bouncing around his brain. It would be so easy to just reach out and take. But when she looks at Kevin Kaslana she sees nothing at all—just a yawning void, the cold, empty silence after the death of suns. Beneath him, the wide hangar's floor is frosting slightly. "Your expression was just… familiar."
"Familiar." Mei shakes her head, her hair lashing across her cheeks like rain. The bench beneath her is hard, cut from the same dark steel as the hangar it protrudes from; so is the wall when she leans back, pressing her skull against it as if she can press her thoughts out the same way. But the wall would break before her bones did, and what would be the point of that? "You don't strike me as a man familiar with regret."
"I suppose it must seem that way." Kevin steps away from where he's leaning up against the cockpit's door and takes a seat on the bench opposite her with a soft thump; there's something glacial about the way he moves, something inevitable. It's almost spoiled by the way his pants crease around his thighs and his coat folds awkwardly under him as he sits until he tugs it once or twice to get it out of the way. Almost, but not quite. "But I know a little of what it's like to sacrifice for love. Even now I wonder, sometimes, what could have been."
Mei snorts, harsher than she usually allows herself to be. An arc of lightning splits the sky outside, bloody and bright and searing. She shoves herself off the bench with almost violent impatience, her heels clacking loudly against the metal floor while she paces back and forth. The lightning blooming outside the window—on the inside of her eyes—joyfully grounds itself in rock and soil two hundred metres below but all Mei feels is too large for her own skin. There's something hot inside her chest, something tight in her jaw as she whirls to face Kevin, palms clenched to fists.
"There could have been nothing," she hisses, a little rough, a little ugly, nothing like the way Raiden Mei—the heiress, the friend, the lover who never was—is supposed to sound. "That's why I'm here. Because she… Because she loves everybody too much and herself too little. Because the world's given up on her and she's given up on herself and she thinks that makes it okay. Because she is the brightest thing I have ever known and if it keeps that flame burning on then there is nothing I will not use for the kindling no matter how much it hurts."
They put a bomb in her, once. Right above the heart. Mei thinks she loves Kiana a little like that—like somebody's cut her ribcage open and shoved in the seed of her own self-destruction, jagged in her chest.
But Raiden Mei chose the bomb, if it meant she'd never become the Herrscher of Thunder. Her life was an easy trade for the sake of the world.
What, then, does it say that she chose the Herrscher of Thunder for the sake of Kiana Kaslana?
(It's a simple question. She's already screamed the answer beneath the frozen rain, staring down the agony of her best friend begging her to believe that everything would be better off without her. But it bears repeating still:
The world means nothing to me without you.)
"A dangerous resolve," Kevin says quietly, and for a moment all Mei can see are his eyes, deep and blue and cold like ice over the endless ocean. But the moment passes like clouds before the Moon and once again he's just a man, tall and strong and, Mei supposes, faintly handsome the way the sporty boys in highschool were meant to be. "Are you sure you can live with it?"
Mei presses her feet into the floor to ground herself and it groans under the weight of her strength. She fists her hands against her thighs, black gloves creaking beneath the strain. The aircraft shudders in the wind outside, the storm howling, drowning out even the rumble of the engine and staining every viewport the searing red of tainted lightning. Only then does she breathe out, long and slow, and lets her anger settle deep into her bones like rain soaking into the distant earth, so very far below.
For a moment, she wonders how she must look to Kevin—this dark, frenzied thing with heels as long as her horns and lightning on her lips. Does he see how her shoulders, bare and terrifyingly scarless, flinch from the weight of the sky even as she forces herself to stand triumphant? The way her too-thin fingers hum faintly, her feet dig into the floor like grudges, her hair spills down her back in tired waterfalls? Maybe he can stare straight into the hearts of her; not just that trembling, human thing but the thing that's not human at all, the fierce howling star flushing her bones with stormlight and drowning her heartbeat in thunder. She can taste ozone on her tongue every time she goes to speak.
"I can live with anything as long as she does. Her life is the only thing that matters," Mei says, shaking her head and watching the individual strands of her hair track across her vision in slow motion, each one like the twilight spun to filament and polished sharper than swords. This, more than anything else, more than a will that splits the sky and breath that rumbles with caged lightning, reminds her what it is to be a Herrscher. It's not power. It's clarity.
Mei remembers taking in every little flicker of Kiana's expressions, every iridescent flash of those ocean eyes, the way they'd twisted from grief to shock to determination beneath the Nagazora rains. Oh, how she'd wanted to reach out and wipe the raindrops off Kiana's cheek, hold her soft and hold her close and say this is the world, now, you in my arms and our breath trembling in each other's lungs.
But her hand hadn't trembled around her sword when she'd cut Kiana from the sky.
Do you see, now?
Clarity.
"You'll have to kill her one day, you know."
Kevin says it almost casually, raising an eyebrow when the sky outside splinters like bloodstained glass and the idea of lightning frozen to steel snaps into Mei's hand and arcs toward the crown of his head before she even realises she's started moving. She freezes in place and breathes out, stepping back and back again until she's settling back on the bench opposite. The frost spilling out of his boots hisses and cracks as it snap-freezes the molten dent in the floor the shape of her heel.
The sword drops back into her soul and she counts the way she used to do when she was young and alone in a classroom before Kiana came and smiled away her tears. It's not grief that moves her now, but it comes from the same place. Kevin does not smile, but when he crosses his legs winter no longer bleeds from the edges of his coat.
"You've promised to protect one person," he explains, watching Mei with something that's a distant cousin of sympathy, "but she has promised to protect every person. If you get in her way, you are stopping her from saving them. You are her enemy—she will go through you or she will kill herself trying unless you kill her first. If not a death of the body then a death of the self because to stop her is to make her no longer the girl who moved even a Herrscher like this. To this."
He speaks a little too clearly, Mei thinks. Like this is no new revelation, no fresh insight into someone he's met a handful of times at most; there's an ease to it, a thought worn smooth by practice, turned over in the hands a hundred times and again. So she's not surprised, precisely, when he has more to say, a strange sort of smile softening his jaw into something that might be fondness.
"You'll have to kill her—but you won't. How could you? What are you without a heart, without a smile, without a shadow? All you can do is stand between her and the path and hope you are too high a price to pay to take it."
Mei considers him for a time, gloved fingers held loosely in her lap, posture a half-slouch against the wall that her father would have frowned to see—not that she can remember what his frown looks like anymore. Her mind picks apart each little shift of breath, each unhurried syllable, the patient expectation in his silence.
Ah, thinks the part of her that grew up surrounded by riches and excess and all the grasping hands that sought to claim them, I see.
"Who was your price?" she asks.
This is when he surprises her: he laughs, bright with amusement, a boyish sound straight from the movies.
"Your friends must have told you they found me in the Sea," he says, still chuckling, like she's said the funniest thing he'd ever heard. "How do you think I got there?"
He brushes his hands across his belt, black gloves a stark contrast against the bright azure, and rests them again on his knees. Mei takes the moment to process, to strip the pieces from the model of Kevin Kaslana in her head and start to fit them together again into a more perfect shape.
She thinks she can see, now, how he became the World Serpent, how the World Serpent became his.
She was drawn to Kiana the same way.
(He has nothing of Kiana's gentleness, her bloody-minded sacrifice, her broken-jaw smile. Kevin is older and colder and Mei's instincts—the ugly ones that look at humanity and count only weakness—are sure that if given the choice he would always take ruthlessness over extinction.
But he is still here and his eyes are still soft with the memory of whoever he left behind. Sometimes that's all the lost and lonely need—the hope that one day someone will look at them the same way.)
"You couldn't kill them?" she asks, more curious than she expected. This is Shicksal's enemy, Anti-Entropy's enemy, Honkai's enemy. These days Mei numbers herself among all three. And yet here she is, pledged to his cause. She may as well learn something from it.
"No," he says, shaking his head, hair a white splash across his forehead. "I couldn't."
"Why not?" Mei looks him in the eyes, amethyst cutting sapphire. "You were willing to turn an entire city into a horrific experiment to further your cause, why couldn't you kill one person who must have set you back hundreds or thousands of years?"
She's not entirely sure how long Kevin Kaslana spent in that Sea. Long enough to drive any man mad, at least. Perhaps that explains the insanity of the World Serpent's plan in Arc City.
"I was trying to do something similar at the time," he says, the same way someone else might say they were trying to catch a fish. Mei crushes the part of her that's screaming beneath the look on Kiana's face when she'd said that it was her mission to die for a world that offered her nothing but pain. "He wouldn't accept it, so he tried to kill me. He knew it wouldn't work, of course—that was only ever a delaying tactic so he could trigger a trap and seal us both forever in the Sea."
Kevin leans back a little against the dark wall of the hangar, the metal shaking and rumbling against his skin from the turbulence, and lifts his gaze to stare at the bare roof of the transport. The distance in his eyes suggests he is looking far beyond it. Mei's own are inevitably drawn to the swell of his Adam's apple, bare and vulnerable above the crisp collar of his bodysuit. She is the Herrscher of Thunder. Surely she would be fast enough.
But what did she say only minutes before? I've made my choice.
"Even that would not have been enough. I could have broken the cage as it clamped around us both. I almost did. But it would have killed Su, too. Either I went through him or I went nowhere at all. So I threw him out of the bubble and told him to carry on his work instead."
"You still haven't answered the question," Mei says, crossing her arms. Frankly, she can't really bring herself to care about what happened. She just wants to know why. Mei sold the world for the sake of a single girl—why would this man, of all people, do the same? What could they possibly share in common?
"It wasn't because I believed him. I still don't. Humanity must defeat the Honkai. Even if he was my friend, I knew he couldn't prove me wrong, and he was wasting his time trying. But he was my friend." He says 'friend' like it means something else, some small and precious secret he will not share with anyone. That's fine. She says Kiana's name the same way. "Killing him would have been no different to letting the Honkai kill me."
"You're still a monster," Mei says eventually. It's not a judgement—not really. How could it be? The blood of millions sits heavy on her hands. It's just an observation. Something she has to say so she can't pretend she doesn't know whose jaws she's walked into. If this is the darkness she must fall into to return Kiana to the light, so be it. But she will not allow herself to forget that it is darkness at all.
"I will be whatever is necessary to defeat the Honkai." Kevin looks straight at Mei and for a moment they each stare into infinity. "But some things, Raiden Mei, are not necessary. Never forget that."
"I'm sure that would have been comforting to all the orphans you'd have left behind in Arc City if not for Kiana," she says, too quiet to be a challenge, closing her eyes and letting the storm roiling outside crash against her mind until her head feels like a cymbal freshly struck. The words aren't meant for him anyway. They're meant for her. She stands, walking over to the viewport and staring out into the endlessly raging sky. Maybe she shouldn't show him her back. Maybe she doesn't care. "But don't worry. I understand what you've really been saying all along."
"Oh?" In the distorted reflection of the window she can see how he raises a snowy eyebrow, cocking his head to the side in admirably boyish confusion.
Mei laughs, a low, dry sound like sand up her throat. "You want me to know that you won't have any hard feelings when the day comes that I try to cut your head off to protect her."
"You're blunter than I thought you'd be."
"I grew up around sophists the way carrion does vultures." She curls her fingers like they're settling around a sword and feels how the lightning outside crawls up her veins with a biting sort of glee. If nothing else, her fangs are hungry still. "And the one who saved me is the worst liar I've ever met."
"It's interesting," he says softly, "the ways we become those we love."
Who loved you, then, Mei thinks but does not say, that you would turn out like this? She has little room to talk—some days she hopes she's been wrong all these years and Kiana doesn't love her at all, because who could want something like her? But that's the whole problem, isn't it? Kiana does love her, and that's why Mei is here, talking to this man, with the storm set high on her brow and a heart choked on conviction.
"Let's pray they never become us," she says instead, turning her head to look him in the eyes.
Kevin does not reply—but he nods, once, and that's enough.
They spend the rest of the flight in silence, the thunder outside slowly cooling as Mei watches the clouds fall away, laying a palm against the reinforced glass and wondering if she'll ever get to lay it against someone else. When they arrive at the nearest World Serpent base, some sprawling underground complex hidden beneath a farm, Kevin claps Mei on the shoulder like she's just another soldier and sends her off with a (surprisingly casual) civvies-slinging Raven to get familiar with the place.
Funny, isn't it? The World Serpent, nest of monsters and murderers, is nonetheless home to people who have loved; who have held their friends above themselves and sacrificed for their children. They are no less monstrous, no less murderous, for it—in many ways, they are worse, because they have known the precious fragility of the things they are willing to take from others and taken them regardless.
But still: they have loved. And so she cannot look at them and see only the monster, only the murderer. No. When Mei stares into that darkness, she sees something much more terrible than that.
She sees what she could become.
How many, she wonders, stood where she stands now and thought the same?
In the end, it does not matter.
This is Raiden Mei, entering the World Serpent's maw:
If saving Kiana is a sin, then I will gladly become a sinner.
Hi hey hello it's me, the fool who started writing this in July of 2020 and only finished it now when we're all Fu Hua nation instead.
I have complicated feelings about Mei's 'recent' choices, and there's no way she doesn't either. So I figured she should get a chance to talk about them a little with someone. I would have made it Raven, but I'm lowkey fond of their friendship and this didn't feel like a conversation that should be written between friends. So we got our boy Kevin instead.
It's kind of an interesting set of parallels, how in the World Serpent Kevin loves MEI, the manga is pretty suggestive about him and Su, Raven loves her children, Owl loves Ana, and now Mei who is moved by love for Kiana has joined them too. It excuses nothing, but it's just—well, Honkai is in so many ways a story about love, and it's neat how it's willing to do things like Mei and Kiana at the same time it's willing to do things like Fu Hua and Kiana.
Sometimes the characters make good decisions for love. Sometimes they make terrible ones. Sometimes they do their best to doom the world because of it looking at you Otto. And sometimes they make decisions for entirely different reasons but they're still connected to the world and the consequences of those decisions because of that love.
I think that's what I like most about Honkai's story, in the end.
No matter how many times it might stumble, it's willing to do things with feeling.