Crow had followed his plan to the letter, spending months getting close to Joker, followed by several weeks of making friends and teammates with the Phantom Thieves. He became much more emotionally invested in Joker than he had counted on. He started visiting the cafe more and more often, staying later into the evening in hopes of having a brief conversation with the boy before going home. Crow had never felt a real connection with anyone before. And yet he spent countless nights at the cafe waiting, then telling Joker way more about himself than he ever meant to. It made carrying out the plan much more difficult for Crow, but he went through with it anyway.
Crow was completely shocked to find out that Joker and the others had outsmarted him. He had been absolutely fooled by their plot. He expected to feel full of rage, but instead he felt… proud. Impressed. Awed. And when Joker tried to talk him down and change his mind, it made him very, very angry. They were inside his father’s palace. The man who rejected his mother and abandoned her. The one who never even knew he had a son, let alone cared about him. The one who had been using him to gain political favor. Using him to kill. The killing didn’t bother Crow anymore at this point, not really, but his ultimate goal of killing his father had to be achieved, no matter what. And so Joker stood before him, telling him to give it up, and all Crow could do was laugh.
He showed them all his true self, and his true powers. How interesting that he and Joker shared similar abilities. Was that why Crow felt so connected to him? But he didn’t have Crow’s true power, the ability to cause someone to go mad. To bring about a mental shutdown that ultimately led to their death. He showed the Phantom Thieves what he could do, that he was special, and they defeated him anyway. It made him feel sick and broken when they still begged him to let them help. When they forgave him for killing their loved ones, for trying to kill Joker. Until he became a Phantom Thief, Crow had no idea that there was another way, a way to change a heart instead of killing. If he had met them a few years ago when he first discovered his powers, things could have been completely different.
Crow was about to accept, he really was. Joker had promised that they could change his father’s heart together, that it didn’t have to end like this. That they didn’t have to be enemies. The boy tugged at his heart. No one else ever really had. Joker believed in him. That was when his father sent a cognitive version of himself to kill him. If he wasn’t going to follow orders, he would be eliminated, by another version of himself. He knew that the cognition would also kill Joker and the others after he was gone. That no longer felt like an acceptable outcome. His cognitive self shot at him, but he wasn’t done fighting yet. When the alarms began going off, he knew it was his turn to act like a leader for a change. His powers were the same as Joker’s, so that made them the same in other ways, didn’t it?
Joker held his hand out, begging him to do it together, but Crow shook his head. He fired his gun, causing a partition to come down between Crow and the shadows, and Joker and the Thieves. The side Crow was on would flood. Joker would be saved. “No!” Joker yelled in anguish. “Don’t do this! You can’t survive this on your own!” Joker and Crow each placed a hand on either side of the partition.
A shot was fired on Crow’s side, and Oracle screamed. “No! What happened!”
Joker spoke quietly. “He knew he couldn’t survive this, but he had to try. He had to try and do the right thing this time. There’s no way for us to get to him in time; if he wasn’t shot to death, he will drown.”
The Thieves all mourned the loss of their friend, and promised to change his father’s heart.
Author’s Note:
This story is a retelling of The Crow that Thought It Knew from Eastern Stories and Legends by Shedlock. In the original, Buddha becomes a crow named Viraka, and a crow named Savitthaka pledges to be his servant in exchange for some of the fish that Viraka brings up from the bottom of the water. Savitthaka doesn’t understand that Viraka is a marsh crow and he is not. He thinks that because they look the same, he can do the things Viraka does. He tells Viraka that he will get his own fish from now on, and dives into the lake and drowns even after Viraka warns him. When Savitthaka’s wife asks Viraka where he has gone, he replies with the following:
"He was not born to dive beneath the wave,
But what he could not do he needs must try;
So the poor bird has found a watery grave,
Entangled in the weeds, and left to die.”
This made me think of the ending to Crow’s story in the game Persona 5. I have not really changed much about the way it happens, so it is sort of a retelling of its own.
“The Crow that Thought It Knew” from Eastern Stories and Legends by Shedlock. Web Source.
