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Art Hitchen Zachary refused to look the mutant in the eyes as it slouched into a lead-white room in HQ that had been designated as the war room for Project FATE. The creature was not shackled, was not banked on both sides by men with guns, but every eye in the room was on him with a hair-trigger.
A muscle visibly twitched in the agent’s jaw, like he couldn’t imagine any travesty worse than mutants being brought into Spectrum. The great hulking cryptid ducked its head into the collar of its sweatshirt, clawed hands hidden deep in the sleeves. He couldn’t stand to see the sight of the bird mutant so far underground. Its wings were clamped tight against its back. Its russet-red eyes flicked around the room, catching on Hitch for only a moment before skirting away as though ashamed.
It had pulled its hood up to hide, up and over the rim of a baseball cap that Hitch couldn’t see properly, but he knew it probably said ‘NIGHT SHIFT’. Even with two layers of protection, its antennae were visibly twitching like a trapped animal looking for a route out.
“He shouldn’t be here,” Hitch said finally, when it was clear that LB was not going to say anything on the matter. As always in these meetings, Kid America was perched on a nearby chair, swinging her legs and pulling faces in the reflection of her shield, occasionally pumping a bicep or two just to watch the muscles bunch up under her skin. Right now she was watching Hitch and LB with great interest, albeit a look in her eyes that belied a frightened child whose parents were fighting.
LB turned to Hitch with a perfectly surprised look on her face, eyebrows raising and scarlet lips parting like she was acting. The agents scattered around the room shuffled their feet and cleared their throats.
Guy Uffman – Em, to people who knew him, Mothman Terror of the Skies, Doomsday Prophecier, Harbinger of Doom to everyone else– didn’t lift his head to Hitch as he spoke. Ruby had been trying to catch his eye, smile at him so he could see that he had a friend among the crowd of suited and sun-shaded government operatives, but she hadn’t succeeded yet. His wings were stiff with fear, too frightened to even fidget and twitch, like the stale underground air was closing in on him, like he knew he couldn’t fly to safety, but his antennae were trying to assess every threat in the room, hypervigilant feather-like scales trying to scent the air just as desperately as Em pulled his hood down.
There was a flash of his blackened fingertips in the barest gap between his shirt-sleeves and the cap on his head, but he drew in on himself, sat in the seat that LB had motioned him to, and tried to curl up like he could just disappear.
He was appearing as human as he could, although each agent was clearly hankering for any sign that the anxious, cowering man in front of them was actually something other, something that they could hate without having to contend with pesky facts like how Em paid his rent and worked 9-5 like anybody else.
“I didn’t know you had a problem with mutants in Spectrum,” she said evenly, and Hitch’s lip twitched, trying to pull back in a snarl to show sharp animal teeth before he bit it hard. “Mr Uffman has skills that he has agreed to let us use, in return for his continued protection.”
Ruby fidgeted, rubbed at her shield with her sleeve, and tried to itch her cheek under her mask. No matter how much she moved and wiggled, Em did not look at her.
“His protection should not be dependent on sending him into hostile territory,” Hitch argued, his temper rising higher and hotter than it ever used to, and LB slashed her hand down on the table, to get him to be quiet.
The thump made Em jump, his obsidian-black wings flinching and flaring before he got them back under control. At least five government agents reached for weapons, and Hitch took a bold step into the no-man's-land between the two parties: him, LB and Ruby opposite Em’s cowering form.
At that movement, Em raised his wide eyes, flashing in the overhead light, and gave him a warning look, one unlike his usual prophesying omen way, but a silent beseeching for Hitch to be silent. Hitch stopped dead, body falling still just inches away from his original position, shoulder tense and wound for a fight.
“I’m grateful to SPECTRUM for the help they have extended me,” Em said, and his low, hoarse voice rolled through the underground room like a distant lightning storm. He was hugging his elbows, had his feet tucked under his seat to counterbalance how he had to lean forward to comfortably position his wings on each side of the chair’s back.
Usually, when Hitch saw him, his antennae were free to wave delicately in the air, swaying one way or another to understand his environment, warn himself of incoming threats, and on several occasions, gently caressing Hitch’s face, moving so softly over the thickened patches of scaly skin that had risen over the past few months that he barely felt anything but the affection of the gesture.
“Why do we need mutants’ help?” a man’s voice at the back called. Hitch’s amber-hazel eyes stabbed into the crowd and after a split second that swelled like clouds, the speaker stood, and raised his chin. “Captain America was a hero, and he saved people with his powers. This…” he paused briefly and made an aborted gesture at the scene before him. “This isn’t the same at all.”
They might as well have wrapped Em in a sash that said ‘Sorry For Portenting That Bridge Collapse!’ for all the men in the room glared at him. Ruby kicked her legs to try and get rid of her nervous energy, the kind that made her want to meet Hitch in the dojo and kick training drone after training drone, and toss herself off the climbing wall to see how her body instinctively rolled and moved when she was in danger.
LB turned her gaze on the man, perfectly neutral compared to Hitch who was grimacing tightly like a dog who would be scolded if it growled, hackles raised, fists clenched. Em peered up at him in short snapshots, between staring at his own knees and waiting to be acknowledged. Once again, an antennae squirmed out of the confines of his baseball cap (NIGHT SHIFT– it was the only one he owned) and tasted the air outside of the black hood. Em ducked his head even further, curling up as he pushed it back under the shield, like a repentant Medusa. He could see with his own eyes that Hitch was there, he didn’t need his proprioception to sense the freshwater smell of Hitch, the freshly-ironed shape of him on the fringes of his sight.
“SPECTRUM protects mutants, agent,” she said in a chilling voice. Seated slightly behind and to the left of her, Ruby made a faint popping noise with her mouth, still trying to get Em’s attention. “You are right, Captain America used his abilities to save people. Mr Uffman will do the same. The only difference is, he can help before the first shot is even fired,” she jabbed a finger onto the table. Hitch’s eyes slanted to Em, but he didn’t flinch, he was wound too tight.
“What will it look like: relying on mutants to solve our problems for us?” The man stressed through gritted teeth. He glared at the back of Em’s head, seated at the front and hunched up to make a smaller target of himself. Even curled up, he was a full head and shoulders taller than the men around him, and his wings rose nearly a foot over that. Ruby had her best stink eye, staring the man down across the room.
“Your department was assigned to locate and find out what SPIDR are planning,” LB said, hard gunmetal gaze sweeping over the room of gathered operatives. “Mr Uffman volunteered… Despite the reception he has faced in this room. What would it look like if we refused help, went into the field unprepared, and people died?”
The man was silent.
“If your objection is professional embarrassment–” LB knew just how many deadlines the agent’s department had been given to try and pin down a solid plan. “Then I suggest you keep it separate from operational decisions.”
The man sat down. This time a cruel smile spread over Hitch’s face and stayed there.
Ruby popped her lips again.
“Mr Uffman will be assisting us with this operation,” LB continued, her patience visibly running thin. She had hand-picked the agents as her best, the ones she wanted in her own war room, and they were hung up on their own prejudice rather than the very real threat of SPIDR. The presence of Em seemed to be ruffling feathers.
“We have intercepted communications consistent with SPIDR planning an operation during the Ambassador’s address at the Town Hall,” LB got down to business now that everyone had aired their grievances. “We don’t know the exact target: the Ambassador, the audience, or something else entirely, but we know they have surveillance within the Hall, and we have picked up encrypted radio chatter. We know when they will act. Mr Uffman is here to help us understand how.”
Ruby cleared her throat, and LB turned her head a fraction to glare at her out of the corner of her eye. Em didn’t look up, knotting his fingers together over and over again. Hitch was clenching his jaw so tight muscles in his neck were jumping.
“We have one opportunity to prevent their operation, and potentially save lives,” her gaze sought out the man at the back of the room, no matter how he looked down at his feet and picked at a loose thread on his trousers.
“I do not intend to waste it.”
It was a week until the Ambassador’s speech, and Em had been provided a small teal room close to LB’s office, on an offshoot corridor where few agents had reason to visit.
He had called off of his waiter job sick, and was worried nearly to nausea how the Little Green Diner would cope in his absence. He liked his job, and the regulars, and Al, and the smell of coffee as it dripped through the filters. He liked opening up in the early morning and seeing the grateful faces of the early morning workers, and he liked watching the last patrons leave in the dusk and wishing them safe travels.
He hadn’t been allowed back out of SPECTRUM and he was not especially put out by this. He’d spent a handful of days in SPECTRUM when he had first returned from West Virginia, and the wardrobe department were still making him clothes and he only had a borrowed bobbled grey cardigan worn backwards. Everything had been borrowed: the baseball cap, comics about superheroes and comedy, Americana VHS tapes and a tiny crackly television that the helicopter pilot had offered him from the aerodrome, a space to live and food to eat.
Little Mountain Side felt like a dream the longer he spent underground, like he’d only just been rescued. His mood dipped, when he wasn’t in the war room with LB and Ruby and Clancy he found himself staring into the bright overhead light on his bunk, unblinking for hours. There weren’t many spare rooms in SPECTRUM that weren’t prison cells, or in more heavily trafficked areas, and he couldn’t stretch his wings out far enough to groom them, so they stayed cramped shut and drooping with loose feathers.
The wardrobe department had delivered a new set of clothes to top up his wardrobe, including some Polo shirts for a casual event he would never be invited to, and the catering team dropped food at his door three times a day. He picked at the meat unhappily, and left the vegetables untouched.
Hitch was in the war room each day, and he struggled to look at Em without a gravely guilty expression, and made up for this by not looking at him at all. Em picked at his fingers until they bled and then picked holes in his sleeves until they threatened to unravel and show his feathered, blackened arms, and closed his eyes to try and see through the fog of doom to try and understand what would happen.
The only person who seemed to be having even less fun than Em was Clancy, who had lost weight even in the last few days, and was being persuaded to drink meal-replacement shakes and doughnuts and rice crackers by Ruby. The threat of his father potentially being injured or used as a pawn by SPIDR had affected him greatly, and that was made worse by the fact he was unable to actually do anything concrete. He had black circles under his closed eyes, and he waded through potential outcomes like a swamp.
It was Em’s fourth day in Spectrum, two days and three nights until the day of the speech, when Clancy’s eyes finally rolled backwards in his head and he collapsed from exhaustion. LB rubbed her own stinging eyes, and put down her pen. Silently, Ruby gathered Clancy’s limp body into her arms and shuffled his head around until it rested on her shoulder. She shouldn’t have been able to lift him, and she should not have had to.
“I’m going to stay with him,” she said stoutly.
“Take the night off,” LB said. “Without him, we won’t make much progress in guessing and second-guessing what may happen. I’ll take today’s notes to the security team and have them implement plans.”
Ruby carried Clancy to the door, and gently shouldered her way out. Where she slept when she worked at Spectrum, Em didn’t know and he didn’t ask.
LB gathered the notes she had scribed for him and Clancy, one-hundred-and-one ways that it could all go wrong, and Ambassador Crew could be manipulated or killed, and stood to leave the room.
“You should sleep too,” she said to Hitch who was still hunched over his own notes, pages and pages of the worst case scenarios. “I mean it, we won’t stop again until the day of the speech.”
“Loud and clear,” Hitch said, and LB left them there in her office, without a word to Em.
Left alone finally, having to join Clancy in watching doom and horror and despair for hours, Em sighed deeply, letting his wings unspool and relax even if that meant his flight feathers dragged across the white carpet of LB’s office and encompassed the chair where LB had been sitting. He was exhausted, had a faint aura at the edges of his vision that threatened to develop into a full-blown migraine if he wasn’t careful, and still his tired eyes tracked Hitch across the room as the man finally put down his cup of coffee. It hadn’t been empty in hours, and Em had been silently and devotedly topping him up as soon as it looked half-full, like an experienced bartender, like a butler who never slept on the job.
LB’s chair was taken by Em’s left wing, but Hitch came closer and perched on the edge of the desk, leaning against it in a casual way that he nearly never allowed himself to. For the first time in several days, aside from Hitch’s hummed thanks and grateful smiles that never quite reached his eyes, Hitch made himself look ‘Em square in the face.
Tiredly, Em tipped his head back and stared at him back.
In the two months since Hitch had peeled barbed wire back to let Em outside of a SPIDR base and arranged for a private jet flight to SPECTRUM because the helicopter that Ruby and Clancy travelled on had little cargo space for a ten foot wingspan, Hitch had changed a lot.
He had always been muscled, from a lean life fighting, but he had packed on corded muscle recently, around his neck and shoulders and legs. He was broader, heavier, thicker, his centre of gravity sinking as though he was getting used to being closer to the ground.
His brown eyes had slowly but surely changed like a kaleidoscope to an amber glaze. His pupils didn’t always look round, but slitted and vertical in some lighting, tracking people and objects with a slow stillness that seemed older than he looked. When he smiled, he was always careful to keep his lips tight over his teeth, which had begun to sit wrong in his mouth, too many, sharp edges irregular and uneven.
He had started moving differently too, a different centre of gravity perhaps, more stillness between actions, and his protective streak over Ruby and Clancy frequently flared so strongly he punched first and asked questions later. He kept his temper tightly controlled inside the walls of Greenwood House, and the spiralled-ammonite of SPECTRUM, but in fights he skirted the lines of ‘reasonable force’.
His psoriasis had spread and blistered his skin across old wounds and new; no longer a skin disease but a pattern. Only Em knew how his old gunshot wound was now dark and scaly, thickened and fossilised until he was almost sure he was bulletproof. His neck and wrists had become thick-skinned, once or twice limiting his movement so much he would split open the scab again just moving his head. It was like his body was reinforcing itself, osteoderm spreading out from old injuries to defend its most vulnerable points.
On the very rare occasion he stayed at Em’s, he would not compromise his evening bath: long, almost ritualised soaks, that had his plating softening and body temperature rising. He made up for this absolution session by helping Em groom his wings, getting into the oil glands and unfurling pin feathers as gentle as a swan once Em had shown him how.
Once, in the woods, Em had told Hitch that he had guessed he was a mutant, and now it was becoming increasingly hard for him to hide it. His place as LB’s right hand man held off the worst of the whispers, as did his skulking around Spectrum in odd times and staying most of the time at the Redfort’s (who were feeding him kale smoothies and trying a dairy-free diet to try and help his skin issues), he simply wasn’t often seen around SPECTRUM. Hitch never commented on it, but Em, silent watcher, knew he had noticed the changes. The silence was an answer in itself.
“I wish you’d had a choice,” Hitch said finally. Em had weathered Hitch’s stormy silence, his shameful glances, because he knew exactly why Hitch hated him being here.
Em had openly told Hitch of what SPIDR made him do, but he clammed up on the details, and Hitch assured him he didn’t need them. The parts Hitch had seen: Em’s fear of men in suits, his clipped wing feathers that had finally grown in again, the ankle tag that Spectrum had managed to snip off like one given to a migratory bird, the tiny room in the West Virginian SPIDR base where Em had survived for several years… Those were enough that Hitch had swore to Em that he would be set free in Little Mountain Side and never called upon because that rescue wasn’t a favour, it was a benediction.
“I had a choice,” Em said mildly. When he turned around from the serving window of the Little Green Diner, balancing two trays of burgers and fries on each arm, LB was sitting in a booth in the corner, hands folded over each other on top of the laminated menu. He knew, even then, that he didn’t have to sit across from her, didn’t have to listen to her explanation of what she needed and what she was willing to offer him. He could have given her a short and sharp service, sloshed her water glass over the rim when he set it down and even spat in her burger. “I know the difference between your organisation, and what SPIDR used to do to me. I owe you a great debt—“ here, Hitch grimaced and Em reached out a claw-tipped hand into the space between their bodies, the cold cycled air of the underground office, and Hitch reached halfway and met him in a firm handshake, his own fingers clipped short and filed neatly into squovals, and squeezed. Hitch had sworn off any debt that Em owed him, had said that endless coffee from the Diner and hours sitting in companionable conversation was enough. No obligation, no transactions, just two men changing into something else not quite human, and learning each other as they went. “And SPECTRUM and LB by extension. She asked if I could use my foresight to help not just her, but Clancy. It’s not manipulation, or pushing myself to the brink for research and exploitation.”
LB had had the idea for Project FATE somewhere between realising what Clancy could do after his accident, and an incident she had lived through once. She had been given the option of killing one man, or two-hundred and eight men. She told him in the Diner, that she had the fate of 209 men in her hands, and she was able to make a choice and change the fates of everyone involved. When she said it, Em had been sure that his own foresight had been mismanaged, misunderstood and misutilised. Maybe he could see the future and make changes to help save even more people than he was supposed to doom.
He didn’t let go of Hitch’s hand, felt the sluggish heartbeat under his cool skin, that of a cold-blooded reptile, and squeezed so that Hitch could feel his conviction.
“Trust me to make this choice,” he added. “Trust that I can manage my own limits, that I can decide when to act for a friend.”
Hitch’s shoulders sank forward and for a second he seemed like the only thing holding him up was Em’s hand.
“I’ll take you anywhere you want,” Hitch said in a strangled voice, pleadingly. “I’ll get you out of here, just for tonight.”
They had the night off after all. Em squeezed him one last time and tugged gently on their connected hands between them, drawing Hitch to his feet, and rising just a second after him. Hitch chivalrously held out his other hand to help him to his feet, steadying him with a hand on his elbow, completely unnecessarily. It was the kind of desperate touch, point of physical contact, that Hitch did under the guise of a helpful house manager, that could be waved away as nothing, but bridged the gap between them in front of prying eyes.
Hitch knew no place in Spectrum was as locked down as LB’s office was, and she would never allow any of the video footage from this night be turned over to anyone.
Em smiled, thought about teasing Hitch about a second rescue mission that wasn’t really a rescue, but he wasn’t really the joking sort. Instead, he pulled the brim of his baseball cap low around his ears, covering his dilated eyes and the pleased frill of his puffed-out ruffle, and thought of all of their secret spots they visited so Em could fly and Hitch could watch.
Hitch showed his affection through acts of service, poring over Spectrum’s maps of Twinford and surrounding areas, supposedly to be used to place new tunnels and entrances, to find areas where they wouldn’t be overlooked. He bought Em new books and VHS tapes and food from Twinford like dried fruits and jarred fish and trail mixes with seeds and nuts. He saw it in how he always had gum in his pocket for Ruby, had a doughnut ready for her every morning this week while they worked, forgot to eat himself but seemed to instinctively know when Ruby’s blood sugar was low and her mutant metabolism was gnawing at her bones, and would fetch her food without ever thinking of his own lunch. He acted completely and genuinely surprised when Em thought to refill his coffee, and bring him bacon sarnies from the kitchen staff. He knew Hitch lived to serve and loved a physical tangible sign he was helping his loved ones. Em didn’t speak as much as he listened and watched, and he knew Hitch from watching and listening to him.
“Get me out of here,” he murmured, and the look in Hitch’s eyes solidified, crystallised, and he turned single-mindedly to the door. Em fell in beside him, happily led from the room, through the winding corridors and up to the fresh, cold night air.
Hitch chartered a Spectrum van, drove with one hand out of the open window, tapping the metal bodywork along to the music on the radio, so that Em, in the back where he could sit comfortably, could feel the cold night wind ruffle his wingfeathers like he was really flying.
Blood was flowing freely and unimpeded from Hitch’s forehead, soaking the right side of his face like paint. He wiped his face once, trying to clear the flow from his vision, but it did nothing but spark pain further across his temple where the skin had split, and he didn’t waste time clearing his eyes again.
He was leaning heavily on a wall as he tried to find his way through the mess of the destroyed building, but the wall wasn’t standing where he’d left it. Big chunks of cinderblocks and plasterboard were scattered across the floor, and his dress shoes kept stumbling over rubble, tripping him up and landing him on his hands and knees once or twice.
He struggled to his feet, feeling dust settle over the hot blood running down his face, and coating the knees of his nice suit. The same dust was cloying in his lungs, and his chest was heaving in great gulps of humid smoky air with no real effect. Close to the epicentre of the explosion, the floor had collapsed in on itself, like a particularly brandy-soaked tiramisu, and the walls had crumbled down into the stories below. He skirted a pile of debris that might have been a waiting-room chair and table, and fought on towards where he believed the entrance to be.
SPECTRUM had the building surrounded, probably with the local police force’s cars stationed around the perimeter, guns bristling over their car doors. He would come out with his hands up and have his identity confirmed, and be ushered towards a spot where he could watch the action with a foil blanket over his shoulders, and have Ruby and Em brought to him when they were quite ready.
Ruby had gone through her transition with all of the pain of growing new teeth. She had her mood swings, had to re-centre her entire sense of identity and her world-view, and had been treated to some utterly unethical training methods that treated her like a missile to be pointed towards problems instead of a teenage girl stuck in a body that barely resembled her own. The thought of her being anywhere close to the explosion made his chest ache far more than the dust and broken rib had, and it was only the knowledge that he could stumble around in the bowels of what had once been the Town Hall for hours and hours without ever finding Ruby successfully. She would probably have punched herself through an exterior brick wall and been eating emergency doughnuts in his very nice action-watching spot.
A new rumble passed through the floor under his feet, and Hitch stumble-tripped a few feet forward into a doorway that was still standing. He clutched the steel-structure as hard as he could, and pressed his forehead against the cool, trembling brick. More and more chunks of masonry fell from the ceiling, and distantly, he could hear screaming. All he could think about was Ruby, Ruby, Ruby: had she found the Ambassador in time? Was she okay in the aftershocks of the explosion?
When the floor fell out from under him, and he landed somewhere in a clerk’s office, complete with a rubber plant that was dropping under falling plasterboard, the last thing he saw before unconsciousness caught up with him was a laminated Health & Safety Sign, hanging on a wall high above him.
IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, USE STAIRS.
“Art,” a voice like the first thunderstorm that snapped the heatwave, a welcome shower of rain after a long, dusty, hot day. “Art, can you open your eyes?”
Hitch tried to reprimand the voice that he no longer went by Art, it had been Hitch for almost as long as he could remember, and they would garner no respect from him by using his first name. Hitch tried to remember if he had been on the breakroom sofa when he passed out, if that was why his head was pounding and his mouth was so dry, because he’d ridden out a long stretch of coffee-fuelled work, and had finally crashed.
He felt like he’d been dropped out of an aeroplane, and then also been thrown off a very tall building.
But he was nothing but a loyal worker, and he cracked his eyes open, just as far as the crust of blood and dust and sweat could allow him, and groaned audibly at the painful, overwhelming light that was streaming down on him.
“There you are,” the voice said, not very far from him at all, somewhere just above his face. “Give me just a mo.” the light ebbed away, like a curtain had been drawn closed across his optic nerve, and Hitch released a pained breath. After a second, he tried to open his eyes again.
His ears were ringing, and his body was in so much pain he just knew that he wasn’t having a nap during the graveyard shift. That realisation flooded his body with so much adrenaline, he sat himself up without even considering the pain in his chest and the gritty texture that lined his eyeballs. He was on active duty, potentially in hostile territory and he was in no position to fight his way out.
The person with him, in this darkened cocoon, made an alarmed chirping noise, and hands fell on Hitch’s shoulders to keep him balanced. “Where am I?” Hitch said, and used an equally dirtied hand to dig the dried crust from his eyes to try and open them further.
The first thing he saw was a man in his late thirties, powdered with dust like a bad movie extra, and framed on either side of his wide, concerned eyes, flashing red like warning signals through fog, by thick feathered wings dark as charcoal but so perfect and angelic that Hitch couldn’t help reaching out to touch where the nearest one arced over his head, blocking the light of the setting sun, and a large building fire.
Everything smelled like smoke and ozone, a disaster waiting to happen, but Em stayed very still and let Hitch bury his injured, broken fingers to the knuckle in his dirtied feathers.
“We need to leave,” Em said, and fear sharpened his features and made him more inhuman, more like a monster. Hitch rubbed his eye harder, and felt it when his third eyelid slid over his eye, clearing the dust and particles and clearing his vision. “SPECTRUM has been pushed back nearly two blocks, from more explosions and SPIDR ground units.”
That was exactly what Hitch didn’t want to hear, and he withdrew his hand from the dusty feathers, where he’d already been absently stroking dirt from the delicate structures, fussing with them like a pedantic housekeeper with a dusty mantle. He touched his suit, right over his heart, and felt the shape of his handgun.
“Get out of here,” Hitch said with the confidence of a man who had been in much deadlier situations, and none of those situations had involved him sitting down in the alleyway within sight of one of his favourite coffee places. Twinford had been his home for his entire adult life, he knew its back alleys and streets better than anybody. “Fly, get behind the barricade and tell LB I’m alive.”
Em’s huge eyes reflected back Hitch’s own upturned face, his thick lip and swollen eye, and a look in that blackened eye that made even Hitch, the wearer, embarrassed. “You shouldn’t be here,” he added brusquely. “I should never have let you.”
“You don’t let me do anything,” Em said, and his hand came up slowly, in full view of Hitch at all times, and stroked his wet hair, sodden with blood and sweat, and pushed it back against his forehead, like how he always fussed at it. “I won’t leave you here.”
“You’d be safer away from me,” Hitch said, thinking of how the walls had bulged before the blast incinerated them, how glass had fallen to the ground for a long time. “If you tell LB that I am accounted for, she can put her resources somewhere else.”
With his wing shielding them both from the aftermath of the explosion, Em’s smile was so tragic and forgiving that Hitch reached out to catch his wrist, where it was still patiently wiping blood tracks away.
“Clancy sent me,” Em delivered the line with the severity of a harbinger of doom, a portent for evil and gloom. Hitch’s heart dropped low. “He told me to come and save you.”
“I’m saved,” Hitch promised him, heart beating hard against the birdcage of broken ribs that made up his torso. Em’s wrist in his thick short fingers felt like a trapped bird, all fine bones and feather-light touch. “You pulled me from the building.”
The skinny human had been sitting in the middle of the road, cordoned so far away from the blast zone they hadn’t had to move him yet. He had a friendship bracelet knotted around his thin wrist, had given up meat and milk because his visions of food-bourne diseases made him nauseous, had demanded the agent stood over him had the safety ON his gun and his thumb off the trigger, and had both hands flat, palm-down on the warm tarmac. His eyes were shut, knotted at the brow, and his head moved and his mouth twitched like he was reading a hundred fortune cookies.
Em had stood in front of him, not giving the bodyguard a glance, and sank down to his knees. His wings were spread behind him.
“He needs you,” Clancy said, without opening his eyes. “You’ll find him in the building, it’s collapsing around him. You have to take him away somewhere safe.”
He opened his blood-shot eyes, and took in the sight of Em crouched in front of him with a glazed eye. “Don’t bring him back here.”
Em nodded sharply. For the mission, a black tracksuit had been dropped off outside his Teal room, and it looked disconcertingly like the one he had worn for weeks inside the SPIDR base. As usual, the shirt was put on over his head, and the fabric at the back split and draped around his muscled back and the thick roots where his wings spouted. They had perfected the closing mechanism, upgraded him from Sabina’s cardigan, to a shirt that buttoned at the back, and finally, tiny magnets sewn into the seam of the back panels, that snapped shut when he smoothed them down.
No bullet proof vest fit around his wings and there had been no time for Wardrobe to alter one for him. He had left the safety of the perimeter around the building anyway, and now he was trying to gather Hitch into his arms.
“Where is she?” Hitch asked, and used Em’s hands on him to steady himself, to sit up and withstand the rush of blood to his brain and running down his face. He could feel his pulse in his teeth.
Distantly, a chopper churned overhead, yet remained out of sight, somewhere on the other side of the smoke plume. “Do you have your gun?” Em asked instead. He didn’t know where Ruby was.
“We’re getting out of here,” Em said. “LB has the place locked down, agents are going through the building now to find whoever is left. You don’t need to go in. We’re leaving now.”
Hitch’s eyes were blown wide, and in the fading daylight, his pupils were vertical and jagged, more reptilian than human. The pain in his eyes had every scale across Em’s face and neck standing on edge, his antennae arching closely to Hitch’s dust-covered face.
There was a rattle of gunfire, and Em reached for Hitch in a terrified panic. He didn’t care, they were leaving. With sharp movements that weren’t intended to hurt, he crowded Hitch in close to his body, chest-to-chest, and wrapped his arms tight around his partner’s torso and waist, and his wings snapped out to their full length, touching the brick walls of each side of the alleyway, and flapped hard until they were both airborne. Shots continued to ring out, and Hitch curled his fingers into the material of Em’s shirt so tight that he left small holes from his nails. Something wild and feral had taken over Em’s brain, and he knew nothing except he wasn’t going to ever stop, not until the neat rows of cityblock streets turned into grass and the grass turned into pine trees and the trees turned into mountains. He had stopped once before, and they had caught him and he hadn’t been able to fly for years and years.
“Ruby,” Hitch was saying directly into his ear. “I need to find Ruby.”
He hadn’t flown over streets in a very long time, certainly not streets in San Francisco, but possibly Virginian avenues and town halls.
In their few midnight outings to the middle of the woods, he would fly as fast as he could and then dip his head down into a free-fall, and spun around and around in rolls that had him so dizzy he couldn’t distinguish the inky night sky and the pitch-black wooded fields, except for the pricks of light of the stars even higher above him that he could never reach. He knew that somewhere in the SPIDR bunker were reams and reams of paper and calculations to show how fast he could go, but they never shared those figures with him, just gave him new concoctions of protein and substances to test whether he could go even faster.
Still, he believed that that dusky evening was the fastest he’d ever flown, straight North-West as the crow flies, streaking like an arrow to where the roads thinned out and spiderwebbed, to the flatlands. Hitch tucked his head down, leaving bloodied smudges across Em’s tracksuit.
He didn’t struggle in the talons of the cryptid, held on to Em just as tightly as he was being clutched, but in the same breath any ordinary person would have held or screamed, he whispered beseechingly, “I need to find Ruby, we need to go back.”
The flatlands opened up ahead of them, the end of civilisation opened up in front of them and Em knew that no landing with two grown men would ever be graceful, but he tried as hard as he could to glide down as close to the ground as possible, and then snapped his wings wide open, hitting a wall of air as solid as brick, and yanking them back like a parachute full of air, and Hitch tumbled from his arms and rolled to the floor.
Em drew his wings in, and found his feet, panting heavily, leaning over to counterbalance his wings and brace his arms on his knees. Hitch stood up, dusted his suit jacket although it was well past a good brushing-down, and turned to face Em, shaking out his wrist to tap at his communicator on his wrist.
“I need to go back and help Ruby,” he begged Em, cheeks bitten from the wind.
He looked up from his watch, and his slitted, amber eyes were hard, right up until they focused in on a flash of movement to his right, faster and smaller than his wings.
Slick dark blood was dripping from his wing, collecting in thick oxidised globs at the very tips of his feathers and falling to the ground in heavy drops, splattering on the dry sand like raindrops.
“Em,” he said, and his voice cracked on the one syllable.
Em followed his gaze, his wing instinctively drawing closer, and suddenly through the sharp ache in his lungs and the long-twitch muscle corded across his whole wingspan, he felt a sharp pain deep in the joint. When Hitch’s trembling hand reached out and parted the downy feathers about a third of the way down the appendage, the milky-white skin was stained with blood and jagged where the bullet had chewed through the muscle.
Em himself called that part of his wing his ‘drumette’, but Hitch wasn’t sure if that was the proper anatomy or a SPIDR agent’s love of Kentucky Fried Chicken.
“It’s gone straight through,” Hitch said, and Em fought to not twitch the wing away from prying fingers, trying with taut tendons to hold still. “You won’t have to have it taken out, they can dress it for you back at HQ.”
Em’s head swam, and he looked away from the wound feeling ill. He didn’t feel like they were deep enough into the flatlands, he felt like they were a target, and now he couldn’t escape. Hitch looked up at his face, ruffled plumage around his neck, and a wild look in his giant saucer-like eyes. The sun was setting, and the smoke from the Town Hall was just barely rising on the horizon.
Em wanted to go home. He wanted to see Ruby himself, instead of through the hazy fog that his portenting offered him. When LB had come to him in the Little Green Diner, with her eyes full of the knowledge that SPIDR had gleaned from their experiments, she had put across the idea that the reverse deja vu tableau that Em saw like an afterimage on his eyelids could be harnessed and used like how Clancy Crew waded through his own future, could be harnessed like a seismometer to evacuate and prepare. He had spent all week trying to believe that he could be useful, to try and avoid the deaths he could feel like an aftertaste of grief, like how he had tried during the bridge collapse.
Watching his own blood– hot, red and wet, he didn’t know why he still expected some kind of green ooze to sludge out of his veins, he had seen his own wounds often enough– drip and collect on the ground, soil soaking it up in seconds and leaving just a dark stain like a blastshadow, he knew that he hadn’t saved anyone.
Just by being there, in Twinford, outside of the Town Hall and watching the screens set up in the square, he knew that he had not foreseen anything helpful. His presence, dark wings and glowing eyes, had caused the explosions, and the deaths. Clancy Crew had sent him away, to ensure that Ruby would make it out alive, somewhere in the rubble of the marble hall and oak podium and canvas banners of Ambassador Crew, and he had sentenced Hitch to death in the desert to do so.
His very presence portented the doom, he was the harbinger not because he had some preternatural sense of doom, but because he caused it all. He was the bad news, the terror that had haunted Point Pleasant.
On the distant night breeze, there was the sound of a roaring engine, a van much like the one he and Hitch had liberated a few nights before. Their escape had not been unnoticed by SPECTRUM and SPIDR alike. Hitch shrugged his blazer off quickly, although it was a thick layer protecting him from the chill and Em knew just how much he struggled with that, and held the clean-ish silken lining against the bloodied hole.
Without his conscious thought, Em’s left wing moved quickly and instinctively to clobber Hitch as the pain of his wound being pressed upon. Hitch took the hit well enough, seeing it coming and holding a hand up so his bell wasn’t rung by the force, and Em reached out to seize the offending wing, drawing it close to him like a security blanket and tried to apologise through stiff lips.
HIs mind was still reeling, and right when he clutched at a train of thought, a new bolt of pain sent it spinning away again. They were targets, bad things came when he was around, Hitch wasn’t safe yet even though he was utterly focused on trying to stem the bleeding. The moon was a slitted eye glaring down on them and they weren’t far enough from the light pollution of Twinford to see any stars. He was panicking, and when Hitch looked up at him, on his knees in the dirt, shirt ripped and bloodied and blazer steadily soaking up plenty of Em’s own blood, he could see the look on his face.
“I know the doctors in SPECTRUM,” he said softly. The engine drew closer and closer. “One, Doctor Harper, I would trust with my own life. Please let her take a look at this wing.”
He made a terrible noise somewhere between a screech and a wheeze.
Em was already shaking his head. Hitch’s own head wound had finally clogged up and ceased bleeding, crusted with plasterdust, and Em knew that it would heal into a scaly thick ridge of skin, and how Hitch would avoid his own reflection in glass to avoid having to see the green-tinged scales of a monster. It was plain on his face, there would be no easy way to hide it and explain it away. His fingers twitched to reach out and brush his face, to try and ease the swelling below his eye, but he just held onto his uninjured wing tighter. Flight feathers trembled the whole length of their shaft. Hitch reached out, but he didn’t make contact. Em was dizzy and hot and sick. He thought of Clancy sitting in the middle of the road, trying to pull strings so everyone he loved would make it out alive, twisting threads like a loom to pull everyone out alive.
When he had perched over Hitch in that alleyway, opposite the coffee shop, he could see his shadowy reflection in the big glass windows, and saw the horror of a great winged beast crouching over the human at his feet.
He had picked Hitch up from his broken sprawl in that devastated building, had gathered him in his arms and cradled his limp head like he was just a child instead of a grown man bound in muscle and grief and fear, and when he had left the building, he had thought for a moment that he must look like a guardian angel, but he wasn’t the joking sort.
“I won’t go back,” Em said, and his voice was high and distressed, buzzing with an unhappy squeak. The van engine roared as it left the cooling tarmac and turned onto the uneven hard-packed dirt road that would bring it as close to them in the flatlands as possible. The van was not expressly for off-roading, but its suspension coped well enough on the terrain.
“You said I had a choice,” Em said, and he reached to cover Hitch’s hands with his own, parting his palms and uncovering the wound to look at it properly.
“Of course,” Hitch said, although it killed him to agree.
Em looked at the gunshot wound, the chewed up muscle that tugged on the skin around it. He stretched out, and the tendons were slow to flare out, jerky as it pulled on the injury, and didn’t quite make it the whole way.
“Trust me to make my choice,” Em said. He had chosen to walk into Spectrum, to try to help, but he wouldn’t do it again. No doctor would know how to fix his wing, he would be better off dressing it and laying low. The van was rapidly approaching now, honing in on the emitted location from Hitch’s watch. If resources were being allocated to rescues, was everyone out of the Town Hall? If he left now, he wouldn’t know what happened to Ruby, whether Clancy was okay, whether it had all been worth it.
Em’s head swivelled, dilated pupils, night-vision watching the van. Hitch made his way to his feet, and the headlights flashed over his angular face, and lit up his amber eyes like matching traffic signals. He tried to push his blazer into Em’s hands to keep pressure on the wound, but Em wouldn’t take it.
Hitch opened his mouth to try and say something, ask when he would see Em again, if he could give him a lift to LMS, to reassure himself that Em wouldn’t stagger into the flatlands and die, but Em had asked him to trust him. He wouldn’t take that away from him.
His hands uselessly held the dirtied blazer, shuddering when the cold night air hit the open wounds on his back, and Em flared his wings open one last time, back to the van, blocking the driver’s view of each of them.
Delirious on blood loss and ebbing fear, he drew Hitch in close, one hand wrapping around his jaw on the side he’d been injured, and gently, soft as a breeze, kissed him one last time.
It was bloody and dusty, and Hitch’s mouth was dry and almost definitely smarting from the cut that bisected his upper lip, and it only lasted a few seconds.
He didn’t want it to ever stop. No matter the cost.
The van’s brakes squealed as it pulled up alongside them, and Em released Hitch before the other man’s eyes had even cleared, and pushed him outside of the chrysalis of his wings, towards the vehicle. It was Froghorn behind the wheel because he always was, he was a good getaway driver when he wasn’t experiencing road rage, and he reached over to push open the passenger door. The van door to the back cargo space opened on silent automatic rails, and the space inside was cramped and dark and Em knew that Hitch would make Froghorn drop him off anywhere, Little Mountain Side included, no questions asked. That was where he was going anyway. They would skirt around the perimeter of the blast zone, and Froghorn could debrief them of how Ruby had climbed free of the Town Hall with Ambassador Crew sheltered under her shield, how she had limped her way back to Clancy Crew who had undoubtedly cried when he saw them both, securing loose threads to ensure that everyone lived. He would delay Hitch getting to Ruby’s side, would force him to sit in silence on their way to Little Mountain Side without a promise of when he would see Em again, or an explanation of what the mutant had realised on their flight to safety, and would get out of the van and not look back.
Hitch took one step towards the van, still trailing his blazer, and then looked back at Em.
He swept his wings around him, once then twice as hard as he could, and managed to raise a few meters in the air. For a second, he thought that was all he could do, and he would have to return to SPECTRUM and the van’s cargo space like a performing canary, but then his flight feather caught a thermal breeze, and he was able to wheel once over the van and Hitch’s upturned face before banking sharply North. He would be able to get closer to town and walk the rest of the way, perhaps hitch-hiking the last stretch if he saw a regular he knew.
He would spend the night in his own nest, could hear about the accident in Twinford over the bar and bandage up his wing the best he could.
Four days after Town Hall, a clean-shaven man Em had never seen before appeared at the Little Green Diner and handed over a thick envelope of cash and a letter. Em could tell by the heft it was more than he earned in a month at the Diner, and he didn’t open either. He hadn’t helped the way SPECTRUM thought he had. The next Saturday, Em was informed that the two teens who usually visited him on-shift had swung by, the girl leaving a shopping bag of VHS tapes behind the bar for him, and stayed for soda floats, even when they saw that Em wasn’t working. They had passed on no message.
On his next day off, he ignored the bus as it sat idling outside the bus shelter, and watched one of the movies that Ruby had lent him. He put the VHS and some comics into a little paper bag, and sat it at the front door to be returned. He finished a book that he had picked up from the second-hand bookshop, and spent an indulgent amount of time grooming his wings.
It had been nearly a full month, a few extra shifts picked up here and there, and helping out by closing down the diner at the end of the day, when Em had his scheduled day off and felt like he could stand to leave the safety of the tiny town. He caught the bus out of Little Mountain Side, standing at the front where pushchairs and wheelchairs were supposed to go, his wing unbandaged and open to the air now it was starting to scab over slowly, and watched the trees and greenery flash past, a breeze from the open window catching his antennae and ruffling his feathers, eyes closed and face upturned to the fresh air.
He did not go near the square that led to Town Hall, although he passed several trucks, and could see construction fences up along the way.
He didn’t really know where he was going, he had been driven into SPECTRUM on both occasions he was there, and while he knew vaguely that entrances were random and in the most unexpected public spaces, he had no idea of where to begin. Entering the Double Donut Diner felt like a sin against the Little Green Diner, and the bright neon lights and shiny chrome tables were as though from another world, but the waitress behind the counter smiled at him just the same.
Em didn’t really have a plan for finding who he wanted to find, but he had an inkling, a hunch that Project FATE might actually have more uses than just the Town Hall incident. He looked at the selection of glistening, sugary doughnuts and pastries, and ordered a drink before looking around for a seat.
Art Hitchen Zachary was seated at a booth in the very centre of the Diner, reading a newspaper like he had been there for hours already and was in no rush to leave.
“I’ll bring it over to you, just sit anywhere,” the waitress said, and Em nodded once, without looking away from the sight of Hitch, bare neck visible over the collar of his shirt and crisply-pressed blazer, looking so vulnerable. He drifted over, careful to keep his wings tucked close to his body so that he didn’t knock any coffee cups off tables or clobber anyone around the head, and rested a hand, covered in his sweater sleeve, over the back of the chair opposite Hitch.
“Is this seat taken?” Em asked, and Hitch looked up from his newspaper, and produced a look of artificial surprise.
“Not at all,” Hitch said. The cut on his face had healed and the bruising around his temple had all but faded. He still wore a bandage over the spot though, and Em was quite sure that a bandage was easier to explain away than a visible sign of his own mutant transformation. He felt a pang of shame that he hadn’t been around to help Hitch, to convince him that his scaly patches weren’t the heinous sign of monster that he seemed to think they were.
Em sank down into the chair, antennae bobbing around to keep vigil over the other self-absorbed guests at their respective seats, and tried to hide a smile. It always seemed to be diners with them two, it was never somewhere private or somewhere that wasn’t their respective work-places.
“I’m sorry it’s been so long,” Em started, and Hitch closed his newspaper, folded it, and put it aside. The front cover said TOWN HALL RESTORATION.
“You don’t need to apologise,” Hitch said quickly. “I understand.”
Em smiled, a squeaky chirp stuck low in his throat at the kindness in his eyes. It was true, he was sorry it’d been so long, but he was not sorry for going away in the first place. It was probably also true that Hitch understood that he had to go away, but not why.
He wasn’t sure he could explain to Hitch exactly what he had realised during their mad flight across Twinford, suffering blood loss and an animalistic fear. He wasn’t sure he’d ever had the words for it, to express how he was the harbinger of doom, and not because he saw it forecast like how Clancy did, but rather just that his very presence sealed the fates of everyone around. He opened his mouth, and the only word he could voice was a distressed chirp.
Hitch’s eyes softened, and he wrapped his hands around his cooling coffee cup to resist the urge to reach out. It was the middle of the day in Twinford, and he didn’t want to draw any further investigation.
“How about I tell you what happened at Town Hall?” Hitch asked, and Em braced his chin on his hand, letting his wings relax as much as possible in the space around them, and waited for the waitress to bring his drink over. “You never got the whole story, what happened after you left.”
Em jerked his head in a nod, and watched Hitch’s face as he filled in the details in a low voice, wary of listening ears. Ambassador Crew had been bundled to the back of the Hall as soon as the tremors had started and the disruption in the crowd and from there into the corridors of Spectrum where he had been assured that everything was alright. The corridors had withstood the explosion obviously. Ruby had not managed to make it to the corridors, for once she’d seen that Agent Holbrook had Ambassador Crew by the arm and getting him to run double to the entrance, she had turned around again to find reporters and caterers and Twinford’s Mayor and town hall employees to send to the exits. Hitch hesitated at this part, taking a slow moment to drink his coffee and mull over his words. Ruby had been trapped in the rubble at one point, and Em stroked his antennae down, to try and hide his own anxiety.
“I know you don’t like spending long in Twinford,” Hitch said, after that long tale. His coffee was all gone, and the waitress had dropped off Em’s drink, which he had barely touched.
Em’s eyes crinkled at the corners, recognising the old song and dance. Did he want Hitch to swoop in and save him from the big city? They could go to one of their haunts in the middle of the woods, although the jig was up, now that he had flown in the daylight, right in the centre of Twinford.
“Waitress here is no good, she hasn’t even refilled my drink,” Hitch added, with a smile because Em didn’t make jokes although he was clearly thinking it.
“I know a much better place,” Em suggested, eyes caught above him at the bright light that hung over their heads. Then he blinked, frowned and corrected himself. “Come back to mine?”
He was tired of the public spaces, of the distance between them, of sitting awkwardly on chairs, even of leaning over a Diner counter.
Hitch looked genuinely surprised then, frozen reaching inside his blazer to fish out some bills.
“Are you–” he stuttered briefly. “Are you sure? I wouldn’t want to impose on—”
Em just wanted to be home. He wanted Hitch there with him.
“Trust me.”