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English
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Part 9 of Challenge Works
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MCYTBLR AU Fest Summer 2023, DreamSMPFics
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Published:
2023-07-17
Completed:
2023-07-26
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A Hundred Things You Have Not Dreamed Of

Summary:

He was wearing a boar-face mask with bloody tusks. One of the lenses over the eyes had shattered, the light from a streetlight catching on the spiderweb in the glass. The swordsman tilted his head at the hawk, clearing his throat. “Yeah?” he said.

It tucked its talons behind its back. “Good evening,” it said obediently. Speaking was always a risk, no one wanted a noisy hawk, but it could take an obvious hint.

The swordsman pointed the sword in its direction. “You work for The Brotherhood.” His voice was raspy.

He seemed to want an answer. The rain dripped out of the hawk’s hair. “Not anymore.”

“Oh.” The swordsman eyed it. The empty spots for weapons and gear at its belt, the scorch marks and slashes in its clothing, its meek stance. He cleared his throat again. “You ran?”

The hawk nodded.

“Heh.” The swordsman lowered the point of the sword. “Do y’wanna stick together?”

Or: Emduo Human Weapon Recovery Arc.

Notes:

Betaed by the wonderful Odaigahara, with thanks to Beecord for the original brainstorming session. This story would be much poorer and worse-punctuated without your help.

Title from High Flight, by John Gillespie Magee Jr.

Updates daily.

(See the end of the work for more notes and other works inspired by this one.)

Chapter 1

Chapter Text

The hawk banked to the right above the buildings, staying just high enough to remain undetected in the dark. It had been flying for hours, longer than it was normally allowed to be off-lead, and it was starting to tire. It was pretty sure it had evaded detection, so it would be safe to try for next steps. The hawk spotted a flat roof and came in for a landing, claws skidding in the gravel. Not as silent as it should be, but still within proper operating parameters. It crouched in the lee of an industrial fan and ran its talons over its face. The adrenaline that had fueled it earlier had faded, but it still had an almost gleeful feeling stuck halfway up its throat. It had escaped. 

The nature of a bird of prey was that it was never tamed, merely controlled. Its handler had said so before, in explaining what it had done wrong and why certain unpleasant things were happening as a consequence. It thought that maybe the lesson it had been intended to take from that was why it was kept in the way it was, hooded in the dark between missions, but it had taken a different moral. No one kept perfect control forever, and it was, after all, a volatile killing machine. It had watched for its moment, and then it had struck. 

It licked its lips absently. The wind had chapped them, but it could still taste blood. It needed food and shelter. It would need a new handler. 

Its chest tightened, at that. It ran its talons over its face again. It didn’t like the idea of a new handler, somehow. In a perfect world, it could escape to the wilderness and live off wild-caught. But the hawk had long learned to be realistic. It was in a major city—it didn’t even know what direction to go to find the wilderness—and winter was coming. So there was no use in hoping for wild ideas like never seeing a human person again. It would simply have to choose a better handler this time. 

It grinned in the dark, running its tongue over its teeth. 

And if it didn’t like this handler, it could always kill the next one too. 

It nodded firmly. A raindrop hit it on the hand, and it glanced up. Night rain. Good for covering traces, bad for stake-outs. The hawk straightened up, rolled its neck a few times, and stepped carefully to the edge of the roof. It wasn’t anywhere close to being cold or tired enough to lose efficiency, so surely it could find an adequate handler in that time. It took to the skies again, scanning the ground below. 

There was a fight in the alley below. The hawk crouched on a fire escape, rain scouring it clean of bloodstains. It had seen several fights tonight, but none had been of decent quality. This one was different. A figure wielded a sword with simple, brutal efficiency at the centre of a crowd of assailants. The hawk tilted its head to the side, watching. 

The figure with the sword was using a reinforced-plastic shield of a design that it recognized. Agents from Cypher had been deployed against the hawk a few times (and on one memorable occasion, with it). It had won all its fights, of course. The assailants attacking the figure with the sword were wearing the same uniform as the operatives the hawk had torn through, the same uniform that belonged to the design of that shield. It didn’t seem to stop the sword-wielder, though. 

If there was internal reorganisation happening in Cypher, they might be open to collecting a new weapon. It watched the figure with the sword. They deployed the blade like an extension of their arm, and they moved like dancing. The attackers had been sent out by a handler who didn’t care about them, the hawk decided. That meant the figure with the sword was a high-value asset. On the one hand, that would make it difficult to kill them if necessary. On the other hand, that made it unlikely that the hawk would be taken from them. It always hated re-training. It shifted its weight minutely on the fire escape, thinking. It would simply have to be very docile, to lure them into a false sense of security. 

The fight below was finishing up, the sword-wielder cutting the throat of its last assailant and scanning the area for other threats. The hawk made its decision and pushed off the fire escape, landing in the alley just outside of lunge distance. The sword-wielder spun in its direction, shield coming up.

He was wearing a boar-face mask with bloody tusks. One of the lenses over the eyes had shattered, the light from a streetlight catching on the spiderweb in the glass. The swordsman tilted his head at the hawk, clearing his throat. “Yeah?” he said.

It tucked its talons behind its back. “Good evening,” it said obediently. Speaking was always a risk, no one wanted a noisy hawk, but it could take an obvious hint. 

The swordsman pointed the sword in its direction. “You work for The Brotherhood.” His voice was raspy. 

He seemed to want an answer. The rain dripped out of the hawk’s hair. “Not anymore.”

“Oh.” The swordsman eyed it. The empty spots for weapons and gear at its belt, the scorch marks and slashes in its clothing, its meek stance. He cleared his throat again. “You ran?”

The hawk nodded.

“Heh.” The swordsman lowered the point of the sword. “Do y’wanna stick together?”

Informal, but maybe Cypher ran that way. It nodded and stepped forward, waiting for the handler to take out a hood or a lead. 

The handler pulled the mask off his face and shook some of the rain out of his eyes. He was a hybrid of some form, with tusks and pointed ears. From what the hawk had seen, he had increased strength and speed as well. Blood seeped from a bandage on his neck. The handler tossed the mask into a corner and crouched down to start checking the bodies. The hawk knew how to do that too, but it hadn’t hunted these ones, and it hadn’t been given a command. Maybe this would be a test to see what the handler wanted from his charge? It hung back and watched as the handler quickly checked necks and pockets. 

The handler pocketed the final item, a necklace he had snapped off the mangled neck of one of his assailants, and rinsed his hands in a puddle. He glanced up at the hawk. “You got no gear?”

It shook its head. It had moved in the moment when its collar was being replaced, it had not stopped to pick up mission supplies. It had wanted to fly as soon as possible. 

The handler nodded as he straightened up, unconcerned with the hawk’s inability to prioritise the mission. “I saw a place earlier.” He scooped up a black bag from where it had sat by a wall, turned and headed out of the alley. 

Turning his back to it? And it wasn’t even hooded? The hawk paused, almost offended. Part of it wanted to kill the handler on principle: don’t leave a bird of prey unattended. But the handler still had a hand on his sword, and some part of the hawk liked the way he was letting it follow on its own terms. It was probably just being underestimated, which it could use, later. The hawk followed its new handler, stepping around the bodies. 

The handler had brought them to a short-term apartment rental and paid in gold coins. The woman behind the counter had looked at them both dripping water and blood on the floor, and then had looked at the sword at the handler’s belt, and had clearly decided not to ask questions. Now the handler was checking the apartment room by room. The hawk stood in the main room, next to an orange chair with the texture of a pair of pants, and waited. It had managed to situate itself slightly over a heating vent, and the warm air was slowly drying its back.

The handler came back to the main room, looking at the hawk like he was surprised to see it there. “The place is clear,” he said. He squeezed one of his hands absently. It was bleeding sluggishly from the knuckles. “We should get into dry things, you can have the shower first.”

More water in its feathers. The hawk wanted to protest that it was clean from the rain already, but maybe the new handler was fastidious about being tidy. Such things had happened before. And a shower was nicer than being hosed off. It nodded. 

Not only was it not being cleaned by being hosed off, the handler had given it access to a shower that had hot water. The hawk stood by the tub, considering. 

Sometimes handlers would be displeased about “waste” for using hot water on a bird of prey. But the new one had not said anything about that so far, and he didn’t seem like the type to be trying to trap the hawk in badly-trained behaviour. He hadn’t done it so far, at least. And the hawk was cold. It turned the water to warm and stepped in. 

It hadn’t had warm water in a very long time. It hadn’t had access to a shower at all in a long while, not since it had been sent on missions where it had to pass for a person for a while. The handlers always made sure to remind it that it was bad at pretending to be a person, but was sometimes nice to imagine. 

The warmth felt wonderful over its cold body. It had been a long night, and it was tired. It turned so the water hit it right in a knot of muscle in its neck, letting out a pleased hum as the tension slowly eased. If the handler was going to let it pretend to be a person, it was going to enjoy it. The hawk turned around and held its talons under the stream of water, hissing through its teeth as the hot water ran over a burn on its arm. The handler and its guards had had shock batons, but foolishly they had set them to hurt, not to deaden nerves. The hawk could ignore pain. It carefully cleaned around its talons, getting the blood out. 

The door opened, and there was the sound of movement. The hawk came alert behind the shower curtain. It was cut off from the exit, and the water made things slippery. “I cut a hole in the shirt for your wings,” the handler said, and then exited. 

The hawk peeked out of the shower. There was a pile of clothing resting on the sink. 

That was probably a hint. 

It decided to luxuriate in warm water through its hair once more, and then shut off the water and towelled off. The handler must have given his own clothes to the hawk, they had the Cypher logo on the grey fabric. They were dry though, and smelled of industrial soap. The hawk pulled the shirt over its head and worked its wings through the hole in the back. Water dripped from its feathers onto the clothing. The hawk tried to dry its wings with the towels, but the thin fabric wouldn’t soak up very much water, and there were only two towels in the room. Maybe the handler would let it stand over the heating vent again, and it could get dry that way. 

The clothing it had been given was too big. The pants were too long and the arms of the shirt came down to its hands. It tried to roll up the pant legs to avoid stepping on them, but the fabric came unrolled again as soon as it moved. It had been whole minutes since the handler had been here to hint that it should finish the shower. The hawk sighed at that, and then emerged from the shower room. 

The handler was sitting at the little table tucked in beside the fridge. It looked like he’d been doctoring small wounds, and had replaced the bandage on his neck. He looked up as the hawk entered the room, kicking its claws out to keep from tripping itself on the pant legs. 

“That doesn’t fit you,” he said. 

The hawk went still. It was in ill-fitting clothes, and its hair was messy too. Was this handler going to be focused on tidiness? He had already insisted on the shower. It tucked its talons behind its back, feeling its wings continuing to seep water onto its sleeves. 

The handler sighed. “We’ll have to get you more clothes.” He stood up, scooping his shirt from the table and turning it in his hands. “Do you want the bed or the couch?”

The hawk stared at him. This had to be a trick, trying to make it ask for something absurd so it could be punished. “A hawk just needs a dark corner to perch,” it said. 

“Well I don’t need to sleep every night,” the handler said. He was focusing on something on the hawk’s shoulder. “But I function better if I do, long-term.”

It did not know what to do here. Would the handler be more angry if it didn’t fall into the trap and earn a punishment? The hawk felt its feathers puff up slightly. 

“The bed has an exit through the window,” the handler said. He was still looking at the hawk’s shoulder, turning his shirt in his hands. “The couch has the window or the front door.” 

And both of them were for people , yes. Was the handler trying to trick it, or was he preparing it for a mission where it would have to pass for a person? Or was he just not very good at being a handler? “A hawk just needs a dark corner to perch,” it said again. 

The handler looked at it for a moment, then looked back at the hawk’s shoulder. “You can have the couch.” He picked up his black bag and headed towards the shower room. 

The hawk was left alone in the main room, where there could be anything in the cupboards. 

Was it really supposed to sleep on the couch? It wasn’t good at mind games. 

There was a blanket folded on one of the cushions. 

If this was a trap, it was an elaborate one. It was aware that its feathers were still fluffed up. 

It went to stand over the heating vent. The handler was going to come back, and it would find it being good, and the hawk would be, if not rewarded, at least not punished. It combed through its wings, wringing some of the water out of the feathers. 

The door opened, and the hawk looked up, watching as the handler came out of the shower room. He was wearing grey clothes in the same design that he’d provided for the hawk, and he had his wet hair wrapped up in his old shirt. He went directly to the bedroom and closed the door. 

The hawk squeezed its eyes tightly shut. 

It didn’t like mind games. It would prefer if the handler just told it what the expectations were, and then it could be punished or not, instead of having to guess. But instead, this. 

Was it supposed to just stay standing? It could sleep standing, for short snatches. It hadn’t been hooded, so maybe it was supposed to stay awake? 

It was quiet from the room the handler had gone into. The hawk could hear traffic and city noise from outside. 

It was so tired. 

It was so tired, and it had been cold and a little hurt, and now it was properly starting to warm up, and its body ached. 

Fine. Left it to its own devices, it would indulge itself. The hawk went and turned off the light, then came back to the couch. It scooped up the blanket. Obviously it couldn’t sleep on the couch. There was a pillow on it. But it could take the blanket, and maybe it could take one or two of the cushions off the couch and make a soft spot. It wedged the cushions between the couch and a chair to make an improvised nest, and then curled up inside it with the blanket. 

The hawk ran its talons along the inside of the blanket, safe in the darkened nest. The blanket was just a little scratchy and beautifully warm, and it had a silky edge on it. It tucked the blanket up under its chin and breathed out. It fell asleep almost immediately.