Archive of Our Own ^beta

It’s getting late, the shadows stretching longer and darker across the warehouse floor, by the time Wanda’s snow leopard ears pick up the beating of eagle wings.

Took him long enough. Bastard.

She falls into a crouch, legs tucked neatly under her body, as the bald eagle swoops in through an open window and circles in the open space of the warehouse.

«Hello?» Tony calls out. Probably public thought-speech. Idiot. He lands on a support beam, a little unsteady, someone still not entirely used to a bird body. «You said you wanted to negotiate? Come out then! I don’t have all day!»

He’s nervous—his thought-speech voice is high-pitched, and he shifts his weight from one leg to the other, his talons scraping on the beam. «Hello?» he says, again, his head turning rapidly from side to side, eyes unable to see much of anything in the dim light.

«Hello, Tony,» she says, then, her weight coiling into her haunches, and she sees him go still as stone, sees the moment he understands—

-

(It had been so easy. To morph Bucky, the biggest of them, lock ver arm through Tony’s on the subway, and give him an address. An order. If he thought they were going to beg him not to sell them to the Visser, well. Whatever would get him to come.

Nobody needed to know what ve was actually going to do.)

-

Tony launches from his perch, wings beating at the still air.

The wrong way. Not that he knows where she is.

Wanda launches upward from her perch on the crates, one extended forepaw slapping him out of the air, and they both go tumbling down in a tangle of claws and fur and feathers.

They hit the ground hard, but Wanda’s had plenty of practice—enough not to lose her grip on impact. Her teeth sink into his fragile bird shoulder and she pulls, feeling his wing start to tear away from his body. His flailing talons score at her chest and neck, wounds that are easy to ignore with the adrenaline in her veins.

The wing comes free with a sharp pop and Tony shrills with pain, thrashing harder. This time a talon catches Wanda in the throat, snagging for a moment before pulling away. Blood spurts hot onto the concrete floor and she chokes, struggling to breathe as her vision whites out with pain.

It’s bad, she’s pretty sure. This, too, she’s had practice with.

(Demorph. Remorph. Finish this.)

She scrambles away, snow leopard fur shrinking back into her skin, and catches a glimpse of Tony, with a human arm beginning to form in the ruin of his eagle shoulder.

They can morph the wounds away, but the blood stays, spattered scarlet on the concrete and soaking their morphing outfits. Just another thing Wanda’s long since gotten used to, she thinks, spitting a bitter mouthful onto the floor.

“What the fuck is your problem?” Tony shouts at her, as if he doesn’t know.

Wanda wipes blood from her chin with the back of her hand. “You know what you did,” she spits back at him. “Don’t you fucking dare drag this out. Pick a morph. You get to die in it.”

Tony says, “You’re fucking insane,” golden fur already sprouting from his hands, his voice garbling at the end as his vocal cords change shape. Lion. She’d expected that.

-

(Wanda had spent an hour circling over the zoo as a pigeon, running over all of Tony’s morphs in ver head. His lion morph was bigger than Wanda’s usual snow leopard, and ver auxiliary wolf as well, so ve needed something new.

Ver first thought had been a tiger, actually. It had been Pietro’s battle morph, back before that one ill-fated mission. It would have been fitting, even if Tony wouldn’t have understood what it meant—

But tigers and lions were too evenly matched, when it came down to it. And elephants and rhinos and hippos were too big to fit in a lot of spaces, too easy for a lion to dodge.

But then, as Wanda had been circling lower, looking for a place to stop and demorph, ve’d seen it.

Bigger than any lion or tiger, but still small enough to fit through a doorway. A predator—something familiar, with claws and teeth made to rend flesh.

The polar bear.)

-

Wanda doesn’t respond, in vocal speech or otherwise, as her bones rearrange themselves, as her fingernails elongate into deadly claws, as her body grows and grows and grows. It doesn’t matter what she says. It doesn’t matter what he says. Only one of them gets to leave this building.

She snaps her new powerful jaws and rolls her shoulders and charges him.

The only thing Tony can do is run.

He’s smaller than she is, lighter, more agile—he twists and dodges through the mess of crates in a blur of gold, and Wanda barrels after him. Tunnel vision makes it near impossible for her to see anything but him, but it doesn’t matter what she crashes into—she’s heavier than a lot of whatever’s in the boxes, scattering them like dominoes.

This can’t go on forever. His stamina isn’t endless, but neither is hers, and they’re both heaving for breath by the time she skids around a corner and finds Tony trapped in a dead end. He’s looking around frantically and making an odd whimpering noise.

He knows.

He knows he’s going to die here.

Wanda laughs, a deep chuffing sound low in her chest, as she steps closer, slower now. She doesn’t have to hurry—there’s nowhere he can go. No one’s coming to save him.

At the last moment he lunges forward desperately, pressing his flank against one wall as he tries to slip past her, and she whirls and catches him with one massive paw, sending him flying. He hits the ground with a thump and skids, struggling to get to his paws as Wanda looms over him.

«Please,» he says then, his eyes white around the rims, his thought-speech voice practically shaking. «I won’t tell the Yeerks who you are. I’ll do anything. Please.»

She bowls him over, stomping her paws into his chest and belly, feeling flesh and bone give way to her weight. He howls, his claws scrabbling at her but unable to do much against her thick layer of polar bear fat.

She slits his belly open, and his guts spill steaming onto the warehouse floor. The noise he makes then—

well—

Wanda’s heard the screams of the hosts in the Yeerk pool, the ones waiting in cages, the ones being forced onto the reinfestment piers. Those people she pities. Tony’s high yowling shriek is the dying scream of an enemy, no more, no less.

(That doesn’t mean she can stand it, no. They’ve always tried to make the hosts’ deaths easy. This is not easy.)

«Wait!» he sobs as she closes her jaws around his neck. Wanda doesn’t care for his excuses anymore. They’d all given him too many chances already.

«This is for my brother,» she snarls, and bites.

-

(They’d found the peregrine falcon strewn in pieces across the alley, the bald eagle winging away into the distance as if he hadn’t done a thing.

They’d all landed around Pietro’s body still in their pigeon morphs, numb with shock. Pain meant nothing when you could morph it away, but the rage filling Wanda’s chest then was beyond that.

He’d turned to the others, flaring his wings, and spat, «I’m going to kill him.»

He didn’t wait for an answer.)

-

The adrenaline comedown hits harder than she’d expected. She demorphs when the shaking starts, throws up twice, and then curls into a ball on the ice cold floor until her limbs stop feeling like jelly.

Normally the others would be here—normally they’d be able to hold each other in the aftermath.

But nothing about this is normal. And it never will be again.

She doesn’t want to look at the disembowled lion sprawled nearby—but neither does she want to leave it there for the Yeerks to find. She’s not sure if they would be able to get anything out of it, but better safe than sorry.

When it’s properly dark, she remorphs the polar bear and drags the lion’s body to the bank of the river and drops it in. She watches as the dark water carries it off into the distance, and stays until it’s long since out of sight.

(Then she throws up again.)

When she crawls through Steve’s bedroom window later that night, there’s a peregrine falcon perched on the dresser.