Ugh, it was a mistake doing Disquiet. Because suddenly, I wanted to do another Black Lagoon crossover with a Harry/Sawyer pairing, only divorced from the Potterverse, for the most part. I sought out a story so that I could make it different enough from Disquiet, and ironically found it in yet another of whitetigerwolf's challenges, as well as one of sakurademonalchemist's stories.

The challenge from whitetigerwolf was the Animagus Lover challenge, where a crossover story had to have Harry becoming an Animagus, being stuck in his form, and becoming a companion of a crossover pairing, before revealing his true self. I also took cues from sakurademonalchemist's crossover with The Avengers, which was called Bruja, featuring a female Harry becoming a cat who became Bruce Banner's companion. The original title was Quoth the Raven: Nevermore, but GenkaiFan already has a fic of that title, so I decided to use an abridged version. I thought Sawyer might be a fan of Poe, and a raven as Harry's Animagus form was a good one, given its associations with death and carrion, things Sawyer is also associated with.

Whether this becomes a full fic or not, well, we shall see. Unlike Disquiet, I hope to have Harry become a moral compass for Sawyer, in much the same way as Rock becomes one for Revy. I just don't want this to be a copy of Disquiet with the serial numbers filed off. Hopefully, I can make it its own story. Already, I had one interesting bit in the second chapter: Harry, in his raven form, gets shot at by Revy. So he shits in her eyes from above. And adds insult to injury later by doing the same thing to her hair as she's entering the Yellow Flag. Let's face it, Revy's a cool character, but a decent person she is not.

Hopefully, you'll enjoy this...


QUOTH THE RAVEN...

CHAPTER 1:

CLEANER AND RAVEN

People look down on scavengers in the wild, those who make a living off the remains left behind by others. But this is actually something to be admired. It is the scavengers who make use of what was discarded, cleaning it up and converting it into something new. They are the unwanted but necessary cogs of a wonderful natural machine.

In human society, too, scavengers and carrion feeders are considered to be at the bottom of the ladder. And yet, they fulfil a role in society. In criminal society, cleaners are considered a necessity. They clean up the messy business involved in murder. Sometimes, they are even called upon to do the deed themselves, to send a message in messy mortal remains.

In a place like Roanapur, a town infamous as a den of vice and violence, cleaners are a necessity. And a rising star in the field is one who, while an independent operator, does much of her work for the local Triads. Not that most people know her. She almost invariably meets her clientele and victims dressed in surgical scrubs, like some back-alley surgeon. Though most back-alley doctors are in the profession of extending life, whereas the cleaner generally did the opposite.

Her name was Frederica Sawyer, though she was mostly known as Sawyer the Cleaner. Most of her clients didn't even know she is a woman. Then again, she wasn't the most social of people. Even when she walked abroad, free of her scrubs, she didn't like to draw that much attention to herself, beyond her fashion choices. That wasn't to say she didn't want a friend. She just didn't know how to go about it. The nearest thing she had to a friend was the Taiwanese assassin Shenhua, and she hadn't seen Sawyer beneath her scrubs.

Being a cleaner was a lonely profession by default. And Sawyer's past meant that she was doubly so. She was damaged goods, and it was hard to make a connection with others. But soon, she would find a connection in the most unlikely of places…


If people considered Sawyer's interests in film, TV and literature, they would think that her tastes ran to the worst excesses of horror and crime thrillers about serial killers. This was not wholly true: she actually read a wide variety of books and watched a variety of TV shows and movies. It was partially a function of her dark childhood: she had frequently read to escape to other worlds, something her otherwise apathetic mother encouraged.

That being said, she enjoyed reading horror stories and watching horror films. One of her first experiences with horror movies was sneaking in to watch a showing of The Shining, and while she would later consider the original Stephen King book to be superior, there was no denying that Stanley Kubrick knew how to keep atmosphere up. That, and Jack Nicholson was fucking terrifying.

Though in retrospect, Nicholson had nothing on her father. At least Nicholson was paid to act like a psycho. With her father, there was no acting involved.

As much as she enjoyed the blood-soaked viscera in many horror tales, she also liked less blood-soaked and more disquieting, disturbing tales. While she didn't like the dry writing style and racial attitudes of HP Lovecraft, there was no denying that the man knew how to create horror. Some of the stuff Roald Dahl wrote for adults was surprisingly horrific(1). She also enjoyed some of the great Victorian horror novels, like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus, or Dracula by Bram Stoker. And there were, of course, the works of Edgar Allan Poe. The Pit and the Pendulum, The Tell-Tale Heart, and, of course, his famous poem The Raven.

She actually liked ravens. Sawyer thought them magnificent and intelligent, even if they were, like her (figuratively), carrion-eaters. Ravens and crows were amongst the smartest of birds. And they were considered harbingers of death, and even of gods. The Norse god Odin was said to have a pair of ravens, Huginn and Muninn, 'Thought' and 'Memory', heralds and spies who brought him news from across the world. In Greco-Roman mythology, they were the heralds of Apollo and considered good luck. The ravens of the Tower of London were also considered good luck, and if they ever left the Tower of London, the Kingdom of England would perish. In the Pacific Northwest of North America, the Raven is revered as creator and trickster by the indigenous peoples of that area.

Of course, in Roanapur, birds of all kinds were considered target practise by the trigger-happy population. Ravens and crows were considered pests, and people thought nothing of shooting them. Sawyer found that irritating, but could do little, though one time, when she was brought one rather annoying man who liked to shoot those birds to make an example of, she took her time dismembering him.

One particularly hot day in a Roanapur spring, Sawyer had come back home from groceries shopping (her apartment being an adapted office in the meat-packing factory that she ran as a cover for her true business) to find a raven squatting near her door. She frowned. It didn't look injured, but it looked exhausted, even starved. In fact, if she didn't know any better, it wasn't a species of raven native to Roanapur. Not that she was any kind of ornithologist, but she had a feeling. Plus, it had a weird white patch above one eye, like a lightning bolt.

It opened one eye blearily at her, and she was struck by its colour. Again, she wasn't an ornithologist, but she was sure no raven had emerald eyes as clear and as beautiful as those. The raven croaked weakly, plaintively.

After a moment, Sawyer opened the door and walked inside, noting with curiosity that the raven didn't startle and try to get away from her as she approached. In fact, as she walked inside, the raven managed to get to its feet and hopped inside before the door closed. She wondered briefly is its exhaustion and starved look was an act, but she noticed it sagging. Either the raven was a good actor, or it really was in a bit of a bad way.

Sighing quietly, she walked further through, wondering if the raven would follow her. After getting her shopping dealt with, she fished around in the fridge for some diced meat which she put on a plate, and then filled a small bowl with water. She retraced her steps to find the raven not far from where she left it. Silently, she placed the water and food down in front of it, almost like a votive offering.

The raven seemed surprised, before it went, surprisingly, for the water first. After a quick drink, it then attacked the meat hungrily. Judging by the way it did so, it hadn't eaten for some time. She even had a brief concern that it might choke, a surprising sentiment for an animal she had only just met, an animal she had fed and watered on a whim.

The raven soon finished, washing down its hasty meal with more water, before it looked at her with, she thought, a look of gratitude. It croaked a couple of cries that oddly had a sound of gratitude to them. Almost as if it was saying thanks.

Sawyer found that oddly endearing. While generally a rather shy and distant woman, she wasn't immune to whims, especially outside of her professional life. And while she normally wouldn't be in the habit of taking in stray animals, there was something about this raven that intrigued her, piqued her interest.

A smirk came upon her features. Ravens were heralds of death. Maybe she could add to her mystique by having this one as a pet, visible when she received her clients.

With that, she fished out her electrolarynx, and pressed it to her scarred throat. In her Cyberman-like buzzing tone, she rasped, "I think I will keep you. But first, you need a name." She considered it, before she hit on a perfect name. "Vincent."

There were a few reasons she chose this name. The first was that St Vincent of Saragossa, a Christian martyr she had read about, whose corpse was actually defended by ravens from wild animals trying to devour it. Supposedly, his grave and the shrine built over it was guarded by ravens for a long time, and even his body, when transferred to Lisbon, was escorted by a flock of ravens. The second and more obvious reason was after Vincent Price, the famed horror movie actor who had appeared in adaptations of Poe's works.

The raven in front of her seemed to consider it, before it croaked in what sounded like assent. It flew into the air, and landed on her shoulder. Or at least it tried to. It unfortunately fumbled the landing, either out of weakness from starvation or clumsiness, and crashed to the tiled floor with a squawk of annoyance.

Sawyer sighed quietly. Well, she should have known there would be something…


One of the few things he remembered from his past life was something one of his friends once talked to him about. Everything else was a distant fog, even his own name. But he remembered a bushy-haired girl telling him something that confused him at the time, and confused another friend of his.

"Zhuang Zhou, a famous Chinese philosopher, once dreamed he was a carefree butterfly, flitting around, ignorant of his time as Zhuang. But he woke up, and remembered the dream. He wondered whether he was Zhuang, having just finished dreaming he was a butterfly, or a butterfly, beginning to dream about being Zhuang."

At the time, he had dismissed it as confusing. It sounded like something another girl would have said, a girl whose name he couldn't quite remember, but had something to do with the Moon. But now, with it being one of the few scraps of his past life he could remember with any clarity, it struck home.

It had been a year since the betrayal by those he saved, since he managed to flee the cold stone walls and the demons that patrolled them. Since he fled a country filled with the ungrateful and the capricious. He had slain the monster, and had been called a thief, a murderer, a monster in his own turn.

A deranged fragment from a song he had heard wormed its way through his mind. Is this the real life, is this just fantasy? Caught in a landslide, no escape from reality.

He didn't know exactly where he was. He had been travelling for so long, trapped in the guise of a raven, that a lot of his past life, assuming that wasn't delusion, had been lost in fog. He was fairly sure that he was in Thailand, and a rather dark part of Thailand too. It was a city filled with sin. And yet, this young woman had shown him kindness on a whim when he had hopped into her home, hoping to try and steal some food and water.

She was dressed in a style that could have been considered goth fashion, with a short plaid skirt, a dark shirt with a cross symbol on the front over a long-sleeved jumper that went right up to her palms. He would soon learn that the sleeves concealed scars from what appeared to be self-harm. Her face, framed by a messy mass of dark hair, was pretty, even beautiful, but had a strangely flat, apathetic look to it, not helped by her dull blue eyes, ringed by dark circles that spoke of stress and sleeplessness.

Most noticeable of all, though, was the ragged scar across her throat. A perverse choker of scar tissue that spoke to an injury that could have killed her. Instead, as he learned, it had robbed her of her voice, forcing her to resort to a mechanical mockery that nonetheless seemed as part of this macabre-looking woman as her clothes.

The smell of death was all around her. This was a woman who killed. Being so intimately linked to death allowed him to discern that. And yet, there was something within her more than that. A light within the darkness, some small spark behind those dull, dead eyes that had never gone completely out.

If he was a man dreaming of being a raven, and not the other way around, then perhaps it was time for the man to die in his sleep, and let the raven take his place. A small connection had been made between himself and the woman, and he was grateful for it. He thought about the name she had christened him with: Vincent. Yes, that sounded nice. A lot better than the name that even now only occasionally peeked out from the fog.

A lot better than Harry.

CHAPTER 1 ANNOTATIONS:

So…Harry's a raven now. And has become Sawyer's pet. Oh my. I thought that whole Zhuang Zhou thing was perfect for an Animagus who had submerged himself too much in the animal he had turned into.

Now, before you guys say anything, there's probably going to be little, if at all, bashing, at least of the more heroic characters of the Potterverse. Ron and Hermione hadn't betrayed Harry, the Ministry and Gringotts had done so. And yes, they were idiotic enough not to place Animagus suppression charms in Azkaban.

Choosing Harry's name as a raven was actually a little tricky. I didn't want to go for the obvious route of Odin's ravens. I considered using 'Matthew', after Matthew Cable, the character from Swamp Thing who, after he dies, becomes one of the ravens within the Dreaming in The Sandman. I even considered Poe, for obvious reasons, before I settled on Vincent for the reasons stated above.

And, of course, the lyrics mentioned above come from Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen, which I don't own.

1. No, really! He wasn't just a children's author, he wrote a number of short stories for adults too. Dahl also wrote the screenplay for You Only Live Twice.