Chapter Text
1963, Cloudcroft
When the cupboard swells and all sides split
And the huge black cat pads out of it.
1964, Stuttgart
“Something’s the matter,” Mikhail stated.
Although he found difficulty expressing in the language (for anything more nuanced than some creative battle cries), most of their conversations ended up in English. Between Ludwig’s poor grasp of Russian and Mikhail’s worse German, it was honestly the happiest medium, though that didn’t keep the two of them from nobly trying to brush up on the other’s native tongue from time to time.
“Hm?” Ludwig said, feigning distracted nonchalance. It might have convinced they layman, but Ludwig so often said things with distracted nonchalance that Mikhail was wise enough to know the difference. “Nothing’s the matter, mien friend. Just thinking.”
“Have been ‘just thinking’ for two weeks now,” Mikhail pointed out.
“Two weeks? An odd timeframe to choose. I should hope I’m always thinking.” Ludwig looked up, hands on both sides of his desk, and smiled like he hoped Mikhail would accept the jest and drop the point. Not this time. This time he was prepared.
“You did not burn last letter. I looked at this one. Why is Doktor ignoring job offer?”
Ludwig’s smile froze on his face, sliding after a half second into a wrinkle of defensive annoyance. “You looked through my mail? Have you no sense of privacy?”
“You are one to talk,” Mikhail snorted. “Doktor is avoiding question. Who is Marcel?”
His spine was stiff, that twisting frown that showed more often than not these days back on his face. It was the one that curled up whenever another a letter came in, whether another bill or, more likely, a warning from one of his various friends that the authorities wouldn’t tolerate his presence for long, not the least because of his large collection of stolen birds. Mikhail didn’t like that frown. He’d do much to see nothing troubled his Doktor again.
Finally, Ludwig’s shoulder sagged. “An old friend. An old, persistent friend.”
“If is friend, should be happy to look at job.”
“Gah, you don’t understand.” Ludwig threw up his hands. “He’s thrown his lot in with Builder’s League United. Their contracts are ridiculous, ten years minimum; amazing salaries, but once they get their hooks in you, they never let you leave.”
“Doktor promised Mikhail he would start looking for work,” Mikhail reminded him. Sometimes Ludwig’s perfectionism was the equivalent to a stone in Mikhail’s shoe, especially when trying to get him to agree on a course of action. “You know we cannot stay here forever.”
Although being Russian on this side of the wall was tolerated, that didn’t make it easy. Not to mention that incident with the President’s wedding last year, which had really put the pressure on to leave Germany.
“I know, I know,” Ludwig said, pacing around his desk, close enough that Mikhail could reach out to him if he wanted. He refrained. “I just hoped…I’ve really been away from home so long, and I just got here. Certainly we can put off moving, just a bit longer, ja?”
Although he’d first began to work for the Doktor as security and nothing more, Mikhail had found that he’d grown to like the affable, if odd, man. Mercenary work did not leave room for many friends, but after several less than legal excursions where they had split profits fifty-fifty, he discovered he enjoyed having a partner as opposed to a faceless employer. So, for that, he pushed down his instincts and placed a hand on Ludwig’s shoulder.
“Mikhail understands,” he said truthfully. “But more days will not make less homesick. Might make more dead though.”
Ludwig glanced out the window at the half-gutted ambulance waiting for them on the street. After a moment, he sighed, and placed a hand over Mikhail’s. “I know, I know. I will…I will write him back. Or call. No, write, I have no interest in paying for that bill.” He turned. “Since you’re so sure of this, I should ask: is this something you would want?”
“We kill bad men, get paid,” Mikhail shrugged. “Is good. They will let Mikhail come, yes?”
“Oh absolutely,” Ludwig said dryly. “They were nearly begging for referrals in that first letter. Which, since apparently you’ve convinced me, is probably something we should look into more. If they are assembling some sort of company, it would be good to know more of the men we will be fighting with.”
“Da?”
“I have a few people I could get in contact with,” he mused, and it was good, very good to see him like this again. With a new idea to pick at, a twinkle in his eye. No longer resigned. “How about you? Do you know anyone who might be good to call?”
Mikhail thought about it for a moment. “Someone, yes.”
1965, Bushland Beach
“Piss off!”
To the stranger’s credit, he didn’t flinch as the kukri stuck into the wall less than an inch from his ear.
“I would be happy to,” he drawled in thick European accent, though Mick couldn’t make out what kind. “Though I am under contract to at least deliver my message before departing.”
“Yeah?” Mick growled, inches from the other man’s face. “Message that ya couldn’t leave on a little love note under the door?”
“Don’t be so dramatic,” the stranger said and, to Mick’s utter bewilderment, flipped open a cigarette case and pulled one out. “Do you respond to all job offers with such unnecessary antagonism?”
Mick scoffed. “What sort job offer involves stalking a man’s motel room for two days?”
“So you did notice. Good. I’d had quite a low estimation of your skills up until this moment.” The stalker lit his cigarette with a lighter that hadn’t been in his palm a moment before. Mick had half a mind to knock them both out of his hands. “To answer your question, the kind of offer that involves scouting and observing before a decision is reached.”
“And what sort decision you land on, show pony?”
“Me?” He raised his eyebrows, hidden behind the blue balaclava that much have itched terribly in the Australian heat. “I think you are a waste of resources. You’re disgusting, inelegant, and there are far more experienced assassins we could get with the sum we were planning to offer you. However,” he blew a ring of smoke into Mick’s face, “the final say is not mine. My superiors would like to hire you as our Sniper.”
Mick didn’t look his age, and he liked it that way. The more anybody knew about him, the less likely they were to respect him, to see him as just some kid they could underpay and take advantage of. He’d never liked the taste of that. He inhaled the stranger’s smoke through his nostrils and held it in his lungs.
“Which are who, exactly?” His voice was soft, a growl, and he wanted to make this scoundrel flinch.
“Have you heard of Builder’s League United?” Silence was all he got. “No? A very wealthy company, currently locked in a several hundred acre land dispute in the southern United States. For some reason they want you, and for some reason they want me to be the bearer of bad news. Well, good news for you, I suppose.”
The BLU smoked again. Mick leaned back slightly. “And you had to follow me down six blocks into a dark alley just to tell me that?”
“I wished to see where you were going,” the BLU shrugged. “Why are you behind a sushi place, by the way?”
“Wanted to see if you’d be dumb enough to follow me somewhere where I clearly had the upper hand.” To emphasize, he ripped the kukri out of the wall and brought it close to the BLU’s throat, threatening to split the fine fibers in the mask.
To Mick’s chagrin, he only smiled. “Well, then it seems we are both the curious sort. Would you want to discuss terms here, or back at your motel room?”
Mick stood there, waiting, waiting for him to flinch. He never did. “Fine,” he finally snarled. “Talk.”
1966, Boston
There weren’t a lot of places she could go to swing her bat anymore. Nowhere that some new group of kids hadn’t claimed, nowhere that the developments hadn’t plastered over in the slow encroach of the city as it ate up every park, empty lot, and baseball diamond drawn in chalk. She’d taken to grabbing a singular baseball and her SandmanTM and heading out to the brick buildings behind 92nd, shooting the shit there for hours at a time, long after her arms were tired. She’d toss a ball, hit it thwack down the long alley into the wall at the end, and pick it up again. Perfect hit every time. Over and over again.
She could still run, too, if she wanted. Lou needed runners for the work he was doing, fast people, ones who could move stuff in and out with no one else seeing. She could do that, but Ma would always know when she’d taken one of Lou’s jobs; it must have been that ugly, guilty air about her whenever she walked in the door. Or Rex was right and being a mom just gave you superpowers for knowing when your kids were up to bad shit.
So she could run, and she could swing, but it was wasn’t the same. Fuck it wasn’t the same.
She peeled her cleats off quietly. They were filthy, and she cringed thinking how Ma would give her an earful for that, but her arms were sore and she didn’t want to take them to the tub and wash them out. They always took forever to dry when she did that, and smelled awful unless she put them on the fire escape. And if she did that, then it might rain, and she wouldn’t have any shoes for tomorrow.
On socks stained dirt-brown around the ankles, she padded to her room.
Just her room, now. It was only her and Ma in this place that used to have seven others, and what once had been like a sardine can was now impossibly empty with its rooms stuffed with whatever. The guys came back from time to time sure, but it wasn’t the same because they had lives out there. And she was still here. The baby. No place yet for her own and Ma would get this look on her face whenever she talked about it—lips pursed, one second away crying. She’d only ever get a few seconds in before losing her nerve and saying, never mind you know, never mind.
It wasn’t the money. She did enough jobs for Lou, Rex, Donny—whoever—to have enough saved up, it was-
So the thing is you can’t become a professional baseball player just by being good.
You got to go to college, and then from there someone might scout you for the minor leagues, and then from there, maybe you go big time. She knew that. Everyone knew that. Yet when she’d been a kid she hopped…aw whatever.
She lay on her bed and threw her arms over her face. She could hear Ma in the kitchen, talking on the phone, and all she wanted to do was succumb, to lie here forever and listen to the sound reverberations through the wall and never do anything with her life, just stay here, just take care of Ma. She peered out the thin gap between her arms, frowning at the sky as though the Sammy White poster plastered to her ceiling could tell her what was wrong with her. Where she’d gone sideways. Who she was supposed to be or what she was supposed to do with her life.
Okay, well, she did have an inkling of what was wrong with her. Had come to some ugly, begrudging conclusions about what she hated about being Jeremy pretty young. She hadn't made her peace with it yet. It was better to think about baseball.
And baseball was only a small part of it.
She’d gotten up because she was hungry and maybe she was going to try and talk herself into cleaning her shoes after all when she heard her name coming out of the kitchen. Immediately she flattered herself against the wall, listening hard as Ma talked circles around the phone.
“And I just know,” Ma was saying. “I just know any day now the recruiters are gunna come and-”
Her heart sank. That didn’t mean league recruiters.
“And he’s my baby I can’t…I can’t lose him. They went up and drafted Andrew too and he’s still over there and…and I can’t loose him too alright?”
The phone chattered.
“You could find him work, work like yours,” Ma said into the receiver. “Just something so he’s not around when-”
Scooting closer to the door, chewing the inside of her lip. A grumbling on the other end revealed exactly how popular that idea was.
“I don’t care if it’s dangerous,” Ma said. “Not as dangerous as where they’re sending all my boys. And it pays well, don’t try to tell me it doesn’t. Please Louis. For Jeremy’s sake.”
The voice went quiet. Ma listened with one hand on the kitchen table, head bent, her youngest peeking around the corner to watch as her mother quietly cried into her hand. The conversation picked back up again, but she hardly listened, almost too late realizing it was about to end. Just barely preempting the receiver’s click, she managed to sneak back down the way she’d come.
By the time Ma’s hand had pulled back, she was strolling through the kitchen on clomping feet, obviously just come in from a long day. “Yo Ma. Who was that?”
“Oh honey,” Ma blinked, tearing her gaze away from the derelict phone, seafoam green and gleaming in the kitchen lights. “How long have you been home?”
“Couple of minutes,” she shrugged. Maybe it was better that her mother hadn’t answered the question. “You alright? You ain’t looking so good.”
“I am good I’m just…oh honey.” Ma rushed forward, pulling her into her arms. “I love you so much baby. Don’t forget that.”
She let it happen. She didn’t know what to do anymore than Ma did, but still she said, “I know Ma. I won’t.”
1967, Bilious Gorge
This was bad. This was really, really bad.
Martia had come to this place because there weren’t supposed to be any people! They’d been avoiding people ever since they’d been run out of the factory, when the managers had started putting two and two together about all the accidents going on. They were pretty scared of people now-a-days, and people sure as shit were scared of them too, so in the interest of everybody they’d wormed out a little hole for themself where they had hoped they wouldn’t be noticed. The ravine had been a perfect discovery: nobody around, but plenty of fresh water flowing through the cracks in the rock. Food wasn’t a problem either with the powerhouse nearby. Martia had gotten good at sneaking, and if they went into the canteen at just the right time, they could stuff handfuls of food through the loosened suit filters and be gone before any of the workers spotted them. It wasn’t the most satisfying way to live, but it wasn’t starvation. They knew starvation, intimately, knew the way it made their ribs like great hills along their abdomen, knew how it could drive anyone to do horrible things.
They’d do anything to keep from that again.
Who were these strangers? They didn’t look like the workers: the man was dressed in blue overalls and the woman in a simple purple dress. Inspectors? The woman had a clipboard, and her friend was certainly poking all over the place.
“Think it’ll be a good test ground?” she asked him as he lifted up one of pallets, disturbing the family of chipmunks who’d been living there. That wasn’t fair. Martia had been feeding the chipmunks for a long time and now the man had just gone and made them homeless.
They hoped he wouldn’t make them homeless. That could go very very bad again.
“Sure, good as any,” the man in the overalls grunted. “Though I thought you were fond of 2Fort?”
“The Administrator is,” she said, tapping her pencil. “I have some personal reservations about…the surrounding area. But! Doesn’t really matter, right? They’re all going to be up and running the new system eventually. How long until it’s ready?”
“Beginning of next year,” he reported absently. He seemed more interested in one of the discarded tarps than the question. “At the latest.”
“Wow,” she hummed. “That’s almost ten years. And it’s finally becoming a reality.”
“…Mm-hm.”
A lump lodged itself in Martia’s throat when they saw what had caught his attention. That tarp had one of their fires under it—the ashy remains, bits of dark and charcoal they’d left behind when they’d just gotten so agitated this morning and decided to do something about it. Stupid. They fire was always hungry, it could have waited its turn, waited its turn for a day when strangers weren’t going to show up randomly. They should have known not to indulge it.
The man flipped the tarp over. He looked over his shoulder at the purple-woman. “Anybody been down here before us?”
“No, no the Gorge has been clear for months.” Her lips pursed in a dangerous worry.
They crawled further into their hiding place. The strangers wouldn’t know they were here, couldn’t know.
As they scuffled backwards, their boot kicked on of their lighters.
The two inspectors tensed. The man pressed a single gloved finger to his lips, and the woman nodded, reaching down to where they could now see a pistol was strapped to her thigh.This was bad, this was very bad, and Martia could barely think as the pair moved closer to the outer wall. They were well hidden. There was no way they’d be found. Unless they moved the panel. Which the man did. And then suddenly there was far more light than the meager peephole had allowed, and they were blinded them to the figures in front of them.
“Well I’ll be.”
“Is that a…person?” The woman leaned further in.
Martia withdrew further from the strangers, despite the fact that there was nowhere to go. They’d run out of runway.
“I think so.” The man crouched, even with where Martia was curled on the floor. “Hey there little fella. What’re you doin’ in there?”
“Dell, be careful. We don’t know what sort of person-”
“I’ll tell you what sort of person Pauling: a frightened one.” Dell turned back to Martia. “It’s alright partner, we won’t hurt ‘cha. Just want to ask you a few questions.”
Martia recognized that voice, the way he held out his hands and twitched his fingers. It was the same sort of voice they used when they wanted to coax a chipmunk to eat, to convince a raccoon to come a little closer. They weren’t some animal. Maybe they looked it with their big bug-eyes they caught reflections of in shiny surfaces, but they weren’t. Hunger had made them an animal, and they wouldn’t be that again. They crawled out without Dell’s help.
“Thanks partner. That wasn’t so hard right?” His grin was soft and friendly. He had shiny bug-eyes too, though his were a pair of goggles and not built into his face. “Now, can you tell me why you were setting fires all over the bottom of the ravine?”
That was an easy one. “<The fire gets angry sometimes. You have to feed it when it gets angry, otherwise it’ll come back, and it could hurt you or somebody else.>”
The soft-friendly grin soured, the burning lines of confusion Martia was all too familiar with. “Sorry, didn’t catch that.”
They tried again, their English thick and muffled when coming from the muzzle. “The fire’s hungry. It’s my job to feed it.”
Dell still just shook his head. “Can’t understand a word you’re saying partner. Mind taking that mask off?”
“<No!>” they stepped back clutching their face, shaking their head over and over again. If anybody looked they’d be chased off, Dell and Pauling would throw rocks at them, they’d have to run run run-
“Whoa, whoa, easy now,” Dell soothed. His hand was on their shoulder. Calming. It was like he wasn’t even afraid. “You don’t gotta if you don’t want to. We don’t gotta know about the fires, but we do gotta clear everyone out of here; some fighting’s going to start down in this area soon and we can’t have any civilians who might get hurt.”
That was…that was not a great thing, but they knew the word ‘civilians’ meant ‘war’, and if Dell was telling the truth then they supposed they should listen. They nodded.
“Great!” He patted them on the arm. He didn’t come up very high, his head even with their shoulder. Looking at Pauling, he added, “that wasn’t so hard, was it? We’ll just take him into town and-”
“Wait,” Pauling said. “I have an idea.” She hadn’t really been looking at them while Dell had been talking, instead gathering an intense scan over the multitude of fires. There were at least thirty burns in various stages of cleanup from this vantage alone. “There is a historical precedent for a Pyrotechnician as a part of full nine-merc company.”
“You can’t be serious,” Dell retorted, deadpan. “Critter’s scared as all hell, you can’t expect him to get involved in mercenary work after we just dragged him out of his burrow.”
Pauling shrugged, but ignored him for the most part. She addressed Martia. “Have you ever killed anyone?”
They’d never been asked that before. The bald-faced strangeness of it shocked them into nodding their head.
“Hold on now-”
“Would you be interested in killing people for money?” Pauling went on over Dell’s protests.
Money was good. When they had some money in their pockets, they didn’t have to steal when they wanted candy bars. And well…
They weren’t a ‘critter’. They were a person. And Pauling was more interested in treating them like a person than the man who wanted to ditch them in some town.
“That’s great then! I can start writing up a contract immediately. Car’s this way.”
They weren’t sure it was a good idea, but if they were being made to leave the Gorge, they didn’t have a better one. The lady was promising a job—they hadn’t had a job, a real, honest-to-goodness purpose—in so darn long, and the thought of staving off the hunger for another few days sounded good to them. They followed her toward where they knew the lift to be. Dell began to walk along too, and they noticed how stricken his face had gotten.