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House Manager Hitch told Sabina he was going to a bartending class where he’d learn to twist lemon peel into garnishes and crack eggs one-handed for whiskey sours and to juggle the cocktail shaker while preparing a martini. Strong Male Role Model Hitch had told Brant that an old friend was in town and had simply insisted that hitch join him for a few hands at snooker at the local hall and Brant, who mistook snooker for blackjack, thought him a very patient man with a good poker face. Dear Hitch told Mrs Digby that he was going to try speed dating offered at a local pub because she worried that he was lonely. Agent Art Hitchen Zachary told LB that he was driving into San Diego to collect his new tailored suit, forced to book a late afternoon slot to avoid it clashing with his House Manager Duties, and Long-Suffering Agent Hitch told Ruby that LB wanted him to catch up on all the paperwork to explain the missing gadgets from HQ. 

Only one of those things was close to the truth. 

Hitch’s gunmetal-silver automobile nosed out of the Redforts’ garage, indicator blinking sleepily in the evening gloom, and pulled smoothly onto the main road heading towards the Downtown area. 

It went unnoticed by Ruby Redfort, who was bundled up with Clancy Crew on her numerous beanbags as they flinched their way through a marathon of the goriest alien movies that cable could offer them. Hitch had checked in on them about a half-hour before he left the house; made sure they had plenty of snacks (the fall of winter had encouraged Mrs Digby to dig out the recipe for her infamous oat-peanut-cinnamon cookies, and they had finished most of the plate already); that Clancy looked no worse-for-wear than usual beyond fearfully peeking through his fingers at a monstrous figure probing a screaming human girl, and gave Ruby the same aggrieved lecture when he spotted that she had used the Bradley Baker super-solider shield to help her tote crisps, biscuits, the calorie-dense protein bars she favoured now, and endless packets of gummy worms from the kitchen (“it is a weapon, Ruby, and a top-secret one at that. No, your parents will never believe that it’s a prop. Okay, well Mrs Digby will never believe you made it from paper-mache.”) 

He upended the tooth-rotting contents of the highly technologically advanced shield onto the shag carpeting in front of the teens, and slid it away in its hiding place, until Ruby needed it again. For super-soldier stuff, not as a shopping bag. 

It shouldn’t have been in Greenwood House at all. How one smuggled a two-foot diameter flying saucer out of a top-secret facility, Hitch did not know. Luckily it was not his fault that Ruby had gotten away with it; Froghorn was currently on stake-out duty for getting so aggravated at Ruby’s snide remarks last week that he had not looked at her once as she slung the shield under one arm, and strolled out of the coding-room like it was a newspaper.

When he returned to stand behind Ruby’s beanbag with his hands on his hips and watched the alien slurp intestines through its three mouths, Clancy gave him an appraising look from where he was puddled under a fleece blanket, sharp aura-dazed eyes cataloguing Hitch’s damp hair from his bath earlier in the evening. He was wearing a pair of Ruby’s fluffy socks (reading left-to-right when the feet wearing them were propped up: ‘if you can read this/ bring me donuts’) and Hitch tried to use his best resisting-torture techniques to focus his mind on anything but his evening plans, although he knew that Clancy’s powers didn’t really work like mind-reading. 

“Be careful on the roads,” he warned Hitch finally, and Ruby tilted her head as though to look at Hitch, but didn’t follow through with the movement, eyes remaining trained on the screen. 

“You’re taking the car to Spectrum? You always tell me to walk.”

“You can run faster to Spectrum than my car can drive me there,” Hitch reminded her. “Thanks Clancy, anything else?”

Clancy’s gaze skittered away from the grainy screen as the alien was exploded into a cloud of green goo on-screen by a laser-gun-slinging astronaut, saving the girl, but not her intestines. “Bring a bottle opener.”

Hitch nodded like that made sense, resolving to put his pocket knife in his trouser pocket. Of course, his watch had a bottle-opener attachment, but one couldn’t always use that in public. 

“Stop standing over me,” Ruby complained, waving Hitch off. “You standing there like a dad sets off alarms in my head,” 

“Best person to stand behind you loomingly,” Clancy pointed out, like that made sense, and also like he was seeing a multitude of other people looming over them in his strange aura vision. 

“Loomingly isn’t a word,” Ruby told him, and Hitch rolled his eyes and left before the actress on-screen fully bled out in her hero’s arms, guts sort of flopping around the scene and looking like pool noodles in pantyhose tights. Who wanted to see someone get eaten by a huge scaly monster for fun? 

“Don’t wake me when you get nightmares,” He called over his shoulder. 

“Have fun, you crazy kid,” Ruby called back, and Hitch knew that she could not possibly know his plan, knew that statistically Clancy could not pick out his real destination from one-hundred realities where Hitch was actually going to Mars or to the deceased-Count’s house, but he still quickened his pace to get out before Clancy could sniff out his real plan or Ruby thought to consider why Hitch was going into Spectrum on a Saturday already at 8pm. 

Frozen pines lined the roads that wound out of Twinford, and the radio ceased playing as the car crept up the mountain. Only the flashing reflective eyes of deer in the bushes alongside the road were visible in the gloom outside of the pooled headlights. Hitch had dressed in a blue pin-striped shirt, and a navy woolen sweater vest, and a pair of charcoal-grey slacks, forgoing his usual suit in an effort to blend in for his mission tonight. He had his waxen coat thrown across the passenger seat, where he’d stashed it earlier in the day upon making his mind up about his plan of action, and his penknife, complete with bottle-opener, in the pocket of his sensible slacks. He had taken his watch with him, knowing that it would torpedo his alibi if anybody cared to track his location, but he hoped that his reputation as LB’s best friend and one of the longest-serving Spectrum agents would mean that no one had doubted his bullet-proof lies about where he was headed. Ruby had finally stopped suspecting Hitch of betraying her, and working against Spectrum and skulking around secret rendezvous spots, and he hoped that her sci-fi drivel kept her occupied for tonight. 

He parked Dearie a few shopfronts down from his destination, brushed his hair firmly into place with his pocket-knife comb attachment without checking the small fold-down mirror, because it never hurt to be prepared, and walked with steady, unhurried steps towards the Little Green Diner. He had walked into much more dangerous situations and felt less dread than he did at this current moment in time. 

The Little Green Diner was the largest eating establishment that Little Mountain Side had to boast about, just down the street from the Daily Supplies shop that Mo Loveday had once worked at, and across the square from the little flat above the barbers’ that he had called home for ten years, and around the corner from the cafe that Hitch had idly stirred a mug of coffee when Bradley Baker, long-dead and long having forgotten everything about him, walked through the door. Hitch had tried not to think about it during his car journey, a losing battle fought every time he had to retrace the mountain roads that unspooled ten years earlier to the crash-site where Bradley Baker’s shooting-star plane had crashed in the frozen wilderness, and where Mo Loveday had walked out nearly unharmed, save for the massive head trauma.

Instead of a bell announcing his presence at the entrance, a little recording device played a theremin oo-wee-oo noise, like a sting in a sci-fi movie. Caught off-guard, Hitch’s neck snapped to look above him, leaving himself vulnerable to the hulking monster that perched on the counter, ink-black wings seeming to suck all the light out of the gaudy hanging bulbs. 

Then, with some embarrassment at his jump, he looked at the inhuman creature and the demonic thing looked at Hitch with deep red eyes that seemed to stare right through him, head turned nearly one-hundred-and-eighty degrees independent of the rest of its body to fix Hitch to the spot. 

“Well howdy, stranger,” Guy “Em” Uffmun said cheerily, and turned his whole self away from the customer he’d been serving to amble closer, a metal coffee pot shaped like a flying saucer held carefully in his clawed hands. He hadn’t been on the counter itself, he realised quickly, just relaxing against it in a comfortable sort of lean. 

Em, the Mothman, wore an apron that fastened perfectly over his head and around his waist to avoid the ten-foot span of glossy black wings that sprouted from his shoulderblades. The neon green text spelled, ‘Ask me about my Out Of This World Burgers’. He wore a baseball cap backwards that hung at an alarming angle, almost unbelievably tilted on the crown of his head to make room for two long, feathery antennae that sprouted from some unseen place along his hairline. His wings were kept close to his back tidily, folded as comfortably as a pigeon at rest, so he could move unhindered behind the long bar. No one at the booths  appeared too fussed at the mutant’s presence among them. 

Hitch hung up his coat on the pegs by the door, and his strides towards a free barstool at the counter were unafraid. “Evening,” he said smoothly, sliding into the seat, and Em cocked his hip against the counter to smile somewhat shyly at him. He had only seen Em twice since the intelligence-turned-rescue mission, and even then, never outside of Spectrum’s halls. He could tell that the other man didn’t know whether to let on that he knew the spy, or if he should act like he was just another local. As it was, aside from a few curious looks by locals who knew he wasn’t from around town, nobody seemed particularly interested. 

The walls of the diner were lined with booths that held only a few patrons, upholstered in a dark emerald green that was more reminiscent of oxidising rust on abandoned machines than aliens per se, and a similarly-rusty chrome that was spotted with age and no burnishing. If Hitch ever let the silverware at Greenwood House get to that state, he’d be let go sharpish. The long counter stretched across most of the left side of the room, dotted with stools. Above the counter, looming out of the darkness of the ceiling, hung the wreckage of an aircraft, its metal rivets and planes illuminated at points with spotlights that showed how the shape wasn’t quite of this world. 

Hitch tried to wrack his brain to remember if Spectrum had misplaced any tech recently, but came up empty. 

“What can I get for you, hon?” Hitch knew that he had Ruby to blame for that little endearment. Just days after returning from West Virginia, Ruby had hauled a satchel of movies into Spectrum as a crash-course in post-Russian-POW culture, and one of them must have shown diner waitresses calling customers such things like ‘hon’ and ‘toots’ for Em to have echoed it in his first real-person job. 

“Just a black coffee, please,” Hitch said easily, his eyes caught on a jar with a hand-drawn paper label that read, “I Believe… In Good Tips For Staff”. Em raised an eyebrow, and the action drew Hitch’s sharp eye to the fine hairs that dusted his temple, nearly connecting to his hairline. 

After the rescue mission, he had spent a week’s worth of insomniac nights researching moths and mutants and trying to map the overlap between the two. Despite their fuzzy appearance, moths didn’t have hair, but long flattened blade-like scales that were adapted to moth-activities like thermoregulation and bold patterns and pheromones. Hitch couldn’t help but wonder if those tiny, nearly imperceptible hairs feathering Em’s forehead were the same scales, and whether they were for anything more than guiding flight. He fought the utterly-academic urge to curiously smooth his thumb over them, to see if the delicate structures were human or other, and if his calloused fingers could tell the difference. 

“I can make other drinks,” Em boasted as he fetched a squared-off ceramic mug and a matching saucer that was lined with a serviette embossed with a flying saucer. “I can fix you a drink, we have spirits. Kitchen closes at nine, so get an order in before Al clocks out,” He jabbed a thumb behind him, over his folded wings to a small hatch in the wall that connected the kitchen to the serving-area, a sharp smile on his face. “We have wings.” 

Hitch smirked at the pun, teeth carefully tucked behind his lips, but shook his head. “I prefer coffee,” he replied, although he did want to see the Mothman that had terrorised West Virginia muddling a rum punch, just for him. Em flipped the cup the right way up, and deftly poured steaming coffee from the alien/flying saucer coffee pot he’d been holding earlier. “Nothing fancy for me, just keep it coming.”

His ever-shifting eyes were scanning the newspaper articles that were pasted and pinned and taped to the wall behind the bar, reading eerie headlines like “LOCAL EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT SEALED BY AUTHORITIES” and “TEEN TAKEN FROM TENT BY ALIEN”. The shelves behind the bar were lined with decorative uranium glasses, lit by black lights to make them glow in otherworldly light. Had the overhead lights not been bright enough to illuminate customers’ milkshakes, the eerie radioactive glow would have made Em look even more like an extraterrestrial from one of Ruby’s bad movies. 

“I can do that,” With a little flourish of the mug and saucer in front of him, Em leaned against the counter again, antennae twitching gently in the gusts of air from a wall-mounted heater. None of the other customers were paying attention to them, even the old men clustered on the bar stools further along the counter from Hitch. It was close enough to closing-time that the ordinarily-busy diner had emptied out, and the last few locals were finishing coffees and swiping cold fries through the last remnants of ketchup. 

His blackened claws had been trimmed since Hitch last saw him, utterly inhuman talons filed down neatly until they no longer resembled weapons, and he rested his chin on one fist, curving and bending his impossibly-tall body to pose like a bored waiter. With his other hand, he batted the sugar bowl down towards Hitch in a way more reminiscent of a cat than a bird, or even a moth. Hitch didn’t usually take sugar, but indulged himself this once, not looking away from Em as he picked a cube out and dropped it into the mug. 

“How come you find yourself in Little Mountain Side?” Em asked, and he seemed to have settled on acting like he didn’t know Hitch at all, even if he was being friendlier than his job description strictly required. Hitch took a long, slow sip from his mug. It was a good cup of coffee. 

“Just passing through on my way home,” Hitch lied easily. Em’s mouth curled up at the corners, a secret being kept between the two of them. 

In truth, Hitch had known exactly where to find Em after he was released into the wild. He had been the one to suggest Little Mountain Side as a safe habitat from SPIDR agents, close enough to Ruby and Clancy that they could pass on VHS tapes, and travel by bus to hang out with The Mothman, and also to Spectrum that he could have tabs kept on him. West Virginia wasn’t the best place for a cryptid who had maybe possibly terrorised some teenagers, and Spectrum had been safe enough for Em to get some strength back from being held captive. And for all the bad rap little towns got about being unfriendly to strangers, Little Mountain Side was friendly to mutants, even visibly-different seven-foot-tall mutants with antennae and insectile eyes that flowed red when he got overwhelmed and a habit of making screeching noises instead of laughter; friendly enough to let them work front-of-house in the local diner with no previous training. 

Looking at the man in front of him now, his eyes were a soft, deep brown that flashed russet when his head turned the right way under the lights. 

“You a long way from home?” Em asked, playing along with Hitch who leaned back in his seat and smiled at him, settling into the familiar game of play-pretend like an old coat. 

“Not too far, only over in Twinford,” he jerked his head like Twinford was within sight. “Just fancied something warming. How are you finding Little Mountain Side?” 

Before Em could respond, a pair of men gathered their coats at the door and called out, “Bye Guy!”, and he responded with a cheery wave and a goodbye. There were only the two men remaining the counter, and Hitch tuned into their conversation now Em’s five-o’clock shadow (which may or may not have been more hair-like scales) and deep crimson eyes weren’t pinning him to the spot. 

“That’s like saying that obviously the existence of mutants directly relates to Flat Earth theory!” One of them, the one with a long grey beard, was saying. 

“Just because mutants are real, it doesn’t mean aliens are!” The other wore a ratty T-shirt that listed twenty-five tour locations for a rock-metal band Hitch had never heard of. 

“Mutants being real doesn’t mean that every other conspiracy is possibly real, you can’t blame mutants for every rumour.” 

“I’m saying that if mutants were kept from us until it become too big to hide anymore, aliens crash-landing once every ten years is just as easy to hide! And we all know that mutants are real!” 

Hitch was not entirely sure they were arguing for different things, or if they were changing their minds after every statement, and he pretended like he had not been listening. If Em could hear them discussing mutants, he also pretended not to. He imagined that working here full-time would require a little bit of tuning out regulars’ conversations. 

“It’s great here,” Em responded, picking up the conversation where he’d been interrupted. “Not been here long, but everyone’s very friendly.” 

Just like Hitch had said they would be, was left unsaid. Little Mountain Side’s knack for sweeping up and protecting Spectrum’s messes was uncanny. 

Al, the cook who had finished up his shift slinging burgers, appeared from the back, taking his apron off and chucking it across the bar. “Guy is the best server we’ve had in years,” He announced, with some force, like he thought that Em’s statement was his attempt to defend himself against Hitch being anti-mutant. “Ain’t no one working harder, or more ready to learn.” 

Hitch nodded, smiled. “It’s a great cup of coffee,” he said appeasingly. 

Em’s wings puffed up a little, as though embarrassed. “He was just asking about the town,” He said calmly. “Can’t think of anywhere better to live.” 

One of the old men at the bar turned around, and Hitch noticed just a moment before he had changed position that one leg had been tucked neatly between the other man’s knees, casual but glaring to an agent who was always hypervigilant. Also, he blinked sideways. “You’re picking up a whole lot of stuff, Guy,” he said, gruffly encouraging, and tapped his mug for a refill. 

Em turned away from Hitch to refill their mugs, and he saw for the first time the slogan on his backwards baseball cap: Night Shift, the same one he had loaned him nearly two months ago. He’d kept it. 

“You should’ve seen him when he started,” The other man chimed in, and Hitch wondered if he should try to defend himself, but allowing the men to come to Em’s defence made him feel that it truly was the right idea to send Em to Little Mountain Side. “I was writing down my own order on his pad, and now look at him.”

Em beamed, wider than one would imagine a cryptid– who had been experimented on in a SPIDR base with his flight feathers clipped, and dumped hundreds of miles away from home, esentially kidnapped by a different organisation, in a metropolitan city full of strangers— could smile. 

“Aw guys–” 

“You get a feather in your drink, you pick it out easy,” the man continued on, impassioned. “Cleaner and quicker than someone’s greasy hair.”

The other man, Hitch didn’t want to distinguish him only by his sideways eyelids, so the one in the metal T-shirt, thumped his friend. “How does that help?” He asked. 

“I didn’t doubt you at all,” Hitch said finally, catching Em’s crimson eye, and the other man looked away, clearing his throat. Under the ruff of feathers that passed for a beard, his jaw was set tightly, embarrassed at being so praised. 

“Another for you, chickadee?” He asked instead, and offered out the coffeepot to top him up. Hitch angled the rim towards him, cold hands wrapped around the warmed ceramic, but he was holding the gaze of the bearded man, evenly and openly. The local watched Hitch for a moment, eyes narrowed like he was trying to place him, and then nodded and turned away. Hitch wasn’t sure if the nod meant he’d recognised him and decided to leave well enough alone, or if he had assessed that he wasn’t a threat. 

Em still hadn’t looked at him again, focused entirely on pouring a full mug, and Hitch decided that the only thing to do was angle his chin towards a framed picture, nailed against the pillar of the bar, surrounded on all sides by the hue of radioactive glassware. 

Hitch had noticed the photograph just as he’d sat down, unknowingly putting himself face-to-face with a grinning portrait of Mo Loveday, but it had been too late to change directions and sit elsewhere. “Who’s that?” He said, and was sure all those years of espionage had been worth it because his voice sounded dismissive and uncaring, yet still curious to ask after an answer. 

Em twisted his head around again, his wings acting as a counterweight as he spun around easily, from percolator, to coffee grinder, to the bin, to the coffee pot. 

“Mo Loveday,” He answered, even though he most probably suspected Hitch knew exactly who it was, better than anyone else in the room, and the men tuned back into the conversation– “Well I never said that mutants were descended from aliens!”- and made various respectful nods or knocks-on-wood. 

“He used to work in the Daily Supplies, moved out here a decade ago,” One said, but Hitch let himself catch Bradley’s eye, let himself look at the young face of his best friend, not mid-twenties like how he best remembered him, like how he best remembered himself, and not nearing fifty like the last time he saw his grinning face from across the Redforts’ dining table. 

Although Bradley Baker had nothing to do with the plane crash last Christmas, and Hitch had spent that week in the wilderness alone thinking Bradley was safe and sound in the security and domesticity of Greenwood House, thinking about him now made Hitch shiver, made him tuck his hand under his thigh on the stool to keep his fingers warm. 

“Passed away late last year,” The other man finished, resting a hand on his friend’s knee. “Ain’t the same around here without him.”

“No,” Hitch said softly, and Em turned around, wings shuffling and re-arranging themselves, eyes on Hitch. A thousand miles away, eating doughnuts and a burger after a successful mission, it had felt impossible to even explain how the name Mo was already taken because of some dead stranger that Em would never meet, but here in a town that held memories of Bradley at every street corner, Hitch could guess exactly how often Em heard about the deceased town hero, working alongside his smiling portrait at the bar that offered him a second home. “I imagine it isn’t.”

The man with the long beard cleared his throat, and slapped his hands on his knees. “We’ll head out, Em,” he told the waiter, and Hitch drained his mug quickly. He hadn’t wanted to be the last man in the bar, had just wanted to pop in for a drink. “Same time tomorrow.”

“See you later,” Em said warmly, taking their crockery to be washed up. His long arms stacked the plates easily up his forearm, practiced, and his fingers wrapped around the handles of both mugs to carry them in his other hand. 

Hitch watched his profile for one last, greedy moment as he blotted his mouth with the saucer serviette, but knew he was spotted when Em’s left antenna twitched in his direction, pre-empting the eerie head turn. 

“You heading out too?” He asked, a note of surprise in his voice. “We don’t close for another twenty, you’re welcome to finish your drink, write down some directions.” 

Hitch was already shaking his head. When he skirted around the bar, heading for the coat pegs, he caught a glimpse of himself in the reflection– something he had been avoiding doing these last few weeks in steam-fogged bathroom mirrors and shop windows. 

His eyes, slitted into an alarmed sidelong glance at the movement of his own reflection, looked glassy and amber, a predator’s. His hair was combed meticulously in his preferred style, and he wasn’t smiling with his teeth, but he knew exactly what he would see if he did: canines sharper than a human’s really ought to be, and serrated teeth lining his lower jaw. He set his jaw tight shut, and looked away quickly. Bradley continued smiling from his portrait, human-presenting and perfect and powers that made him a hero. 

“I’ll leave you to it,” he said, leaving a handful of bills on the counter. The men were counting their change, and dithering by their stools, seemingly to make sure Hitch did leave. “I’d better get on home.” 

Em took his mug as well, his thumb wrapping around the handle to carry it through to the kitchen, and his antenna flattened back against his head, stilling for the first time all evening. “Well, drive safe out there,” he replied, nodding at the payment in thanks. “And if you ever find yourself in town again…”

He trailed off, and Hitch shrugged his coat on, even though he knew his car was just down the street. It was a clear evening, and Hitch was always so cold nowadays. 

“Thanks,” He said, and jerked his chin at the dark night outside of the window. Even with his downcast, frilled antenna, he looked at home, back-lit by the creepy uranium collection and under the shadow of the spacecraft. 

“See you.” 

“G’bye,” The Mothman called after him, and Hitch heard the men begin to mutter as the door swung shut and the stylophone whined a farewell tune. “Nah, never seen him before, you?” 

A handful of minutes later, spent with his hands held up against Dearie’s heater blowing full-blast like it always was these days, Hitch swung the car past the shopfront, resolutely not looking in the windows, but he could tell that the lights were being clicked off, one-by-one. He thought that there was a circular route that would turn him around to the southern road if he took three rights, but he hadn’t managed the directions properly, because he found himself on a residential side-street, just a block away from the diner. 

The best thing about being a spy for much of his adult life, Hitch thought to himself, was that sometimes when he lied, he almost believed himself.

A strange shape ambled out of the darkness, illuminated momentarily by a puddle of streetlight that lit him up like an exhibit at a museum, or perhaps a mystery tourist trap. He’d lost the apron, and Hitch recognised the sweatshirt that he wore below it, holes already worn in the cuffs for thumbholes even though he knew for a fact that the clothing was new, was manufactured as a one-of-a-kind item from Spectrum’s Costume Department specially for him, because nowhere else created clothing that wasn’t put on over the head or from the back like a jacket. 

The jumper was more like a smock, or a dress in style, arms pushed through the sleeves and sliding on over the head traditionally enough, but importantly, with a bib that fell down the back of the wearer, meaning that the fabric fell around the wings and could be buttoned at the lower back to look like a normal shirt. 

At the Spectrum Costume Department, Hitch had put himself in charge of collecting the packed suitcase of button-down shirts (the buttons were fake and sewn shut, because of course, the fastenings around his wings were all at the back of the shirt), T-Shirts and vests and woolen jumpers and hoodies and sweatshirts, all artificially aged with chemicals and an intern with a pumice stone. They were an immense step-up from the tracksuit Em had worn in the facility, with its gnashed torn holes to thread the nearly eight-foot wings through, or the blanket toga he had cocooned himself in upon arrival to the Spectrum halls, or the backwards cardigan Sabina had unknowingly donated to the cause of Em not wandering around shirtless. 

The designer had told Hitch that she had gotten the idea for the backwards clothing from a book she had read once where everyone had wings, not in a mutant way. 

Hitch had had a sinking feeling that her book was not a spy thriller. 

Hitch flicked the doors unlocked, and thought about how he had made the journey out for this all along, and just hadn’t thought to let himself know the schedule. 

Em slid into the backseat easily, navigating his wings into the lowered chassis, and wriggling into the middle so that his wings could settle in the seat either side of him. 

“Fancy seeing you here,” Em chirped, and Hitch turned to look at him in the dim interior lighting. Hot air ruffled the feathers that formed the ruff just below the neckline of his sweatshirt, and his antenna were fighting the breeze, and quickly turned it down. If the scales really were for thermoregulation or flight, the heater’s fierce wind couldn’t be comfortable. 

“We’ll make a spy out of you one day,” Hitch said, with a smile just barely tugging up the corner of his mouth. “I almost believed you’d forgotten me.”

Because Em couldn’t lean backwards, due to his extra appendages, he stretched his arms out the length of the car, his back audibly cracking after an eight-hour shift on his feet, and looked utterly at ease. “It’s been a while, I’ll say,” he said, like he hadn’t been waiting for Hitch to roll into Little Mountain Side since he’d arrived himself with a one-way bus-ticket and a suitcase containing only specialised clothing and no personal effects. Except, Hitch realised idly, a baseball cap loaned by a friend. “Did you get to look into that thing we discussed last time?” 

If Em had been a spy, he would’ve danced around the question a little bit longer, maybe continued pretending that he didn’t care one way or another, but he was still a prisoner-of-war who had spent a whole lot of time inside an underground bunker. Hitch was suddenly uncomfortable with the thought of his car being spotted idling at the side of the road after collecting Little Mountain Side’s latest but beloved stray, and released the handbrake, changed gears and smoothly conducted a three-point turn to take them even further East into the densely wooded mountainside. Somewhere, at the back of his lizard brain, he didn’t want to keep Em waiting any longer than absolutely necessary. 

He’d already been waiting long enough. 

“Just the spot,” Hitch confirmed, and missed Em’s wide grin in the darkness. Again, the awkward positioning of his perch in the middle seat meant that Em had to lean forward, no seatbelt pulling at him, and his face was nearly between the front seats. This close, the other man smelt like grease leftover from his shift, and ozone. There was a smoky pine scent seeping through the car heater, and it reminded Hitch of time after time he’d slept outdoors with a small fire. It wasn’t always a good memory, as he’d usually be on the uncomfortable side of hungry, and aching from whatever had driven him into the wild, but it was familiar at least. 

Hitch wondered if Em could see the rough, scaly skin that hid under his collared shirt, creeping scar tissue that laced his neck and trapezius, but tightened his hands on the steering wheel instead of hopelessly adjusting his collar and drawing attention to it. It was dark, Em would have to stare at him head-on, and people who were not spies very rarely did that. 

“It’s another fifteen miles from town,” Hitch continued. “The directions were very much, turn left at the big pine tree, and take the path to the right of the boulder. It's an old hunting trail or something but meets all our criteria.”

Em reached forward, his arm, with his thumb hooked through the sleeve cuff, much longer than a human’s, and turned the radio up, letting the Golden Oldie station play quietly through the car. He rested his chin against the side of the passenger-seat headrest, possibly sensing that Hitch’s stiff posture was a sign not to get any closer, even though Hitch knew that he had no other choice in the cramped backseat. It had been a tight squeeze in the back of the Spectrum van the other week, but Hitch couldn’t get the keys to that without having to answer a whole lot of questions. 

“Thank you for looking into it,” Em said softly. Hitch swallowed. 

“You don’t need to thank me,” he replied stiffly. 

There were red eyes reflected in the rear-view mirror when Hitch finally chanced a peek at his passenger, but they didn’t scare him like they might have once. He’d invited the scariest thing in the forest into his car, and was willingly driving him to a secluded location. Of all the stupid things Hitch had done, and he sure had done a whole lot, this was up there, without having told any of his loved ones where he was going. 

But even as he turned left at the tree, letting Dearie’s all-terrain tyres and robust suspension rattle them over the worst of the pock-marked dirt trail into the woods, he knew he wouldn’t turn back. Em ducked his head against the low roof, amicably remaining silent even when he audibly heatbutted it on a particularly bad patch. 

There was a fluttering feeling low in Hitch’s spine, an anticipatory rush that any good agent got when they looked out of the belly of a plane with only a ‘chute strapped to them, a stupid head-rush feeling. 

“They say these woods are haunted,” Em said softly. His tone was always hushed, like he was trying to take up as little space as possible. If Bradley Baker’s ghost was to haunt anywhere, Hitch hoped it was LB, not winding underground hallways, or a clear glacial lake North of Twinford, or woods that raged a fire at a crash-site. 

“There’s no one out here but us,” Hitch told him, in the tone he dismissed Ruby’s paranoia with. Not Clancy’s paranoia though. “I think we could take any ghouls or critters on.”

“Not a bear,” Em added, and Hitch surprised himself by laughing. 

“I have bear spray if it would make you feel better,” Hitch still fancied their chances against a bear, of all things; they were far more predictable than a feral winged creature. 

Dearie’s headlights illuminated an abrupt stop of the trail in front of them, and Hitch performed a three-point turn, easing the trunk into the clearing, and ensuring a clear shot home. 

When Hitch killed the ignition, the heater and radio cut out. The only sound was Em’s wings rustling and shuffling restlessly in the backseat, like he was excited to get going.

“You can stay in the car,” Em added, and his quiet tone seemed to dip in concern. Hitch gave him a startled look, and traitorously, fingered his collar ensuring that it lay flattened along his neck. 

“And miss this?” Hitch asked, and opened his door to avoid thinking about what in his expression belied the other man’s suggestion. He pulled his coat around himself, tucked his hands into his pockets, and looked like he didn’t even notice that the weather had shifted into autumn sometime over the past few weeks, nor that the sky was utterly, enchantingly clear. 

Em tumbled out of the backseat, and spread his wings widely. Thirty minutes in a car unsuited for his body type had to be uncomfortable but he hadn’t complained once. Hitch hoped that he would be able to make the walk out here alone, if Hitch couldn’t return again. His eyes adjusted to the darkness quickly, the untouched undergrowth that carpeted the clearing and gnarled around Em’s knees, the half-clothed trees that closed ranks and shielded them from human eyes. 

Hitch walked to the back of the car, and hoisted himself onto the trunk, like a teenager at a drive-in. The moonlight was glinting off the shiny paint and Hitch was careful not to scuff the waxed finish. 

“Nothing around us for ten miles,” he told Em, who had stepped further into the clearing, and was looking up at a scabbed moon with his wings held out around him, and drawn up to what must be his full height, unafraid to take up the wild space around them, larger than Hitch had ever seen him before. “Clear night, town full of conspiracy theorists.” 

The boot of the car was just as comfortable as one would expect it to be, but he hooked his loafers on the metal bumper and rested his elbows easily on his knees. He really did want to watch this. 

Em chuckled. “They’re great when you get to know them.” 

Hitch stubbornly didn’t nose into the neck of his fleece-lined jacket, as Em returned to the car. He could do that when Em left. The other man’s breath was fogging densely in the still night air, and he held out a glass bottle, and a slightly squashed napkin-wrapped sandwich. Hitch took them both and placed them on the trunk lid beside him. 

“I had Al cook me up a sandwich for dinner,” Em said simply. “Sausage and bacon, you didn’t eat anything when you came in earlier.” 

Hitch turned the bottle so he could read the label. Coca Cola. 

“Thank you,” he said, touched. Mrs Digby offered him a lot of food, and Ruby was in the Double Doughnut enough that Hitch usually picked himself up a muffin every now and again, but no one went out of their way to think of Hitch and get him something he needed, noticed at all that he needed anything. That was usually something he did for others. 

The mutant, but really he was as human as Hitch himself was, was looking at Hitch even as his wings shivered over themselves again, the feathers hushing and susserating, and he tipped his head to look at the moon again, huge dark eyes reflecting the disc of light. With his head back and the stark tendons of his neck exposed, he reached up to take his cap off, and his antenna twitched and swayed in the same way that he had stretched out his back getting into the car, finally feeling out the air with freedom. He placed it carefully on the trunk. 

When Hitch lifted the sandwich to his lips, Em shook his wings out like some kind of water bird, and took a couple of steps back, eyes never leaving Hitch. Hitch pretended not to see Em waiting for his signal, instead fishing into his trouser pocket to find his bottle opener. He wasn’t Em’s keeper. This was a favour between friends, a bonus tip-off from a mate in the know. He cracked the cap, wondering if he strictly needed to thank Clancy for preparing him, and unwrapped the sandwich, which was warm once and now just slightly soggy. 

Hitch’s night vision was better than most, although he probably could’ve sprung for night vision goggles like his last tryst with the Mothman, and he could see exactly how the tendons pulled and shifted, even covered in feathers as they were, how something in Em’s expression shifted and his eyes grew impossibly bigger, like the creature that Hitch had ignorantly attacked back in West Virginia, glowing red. A shiver nearly unzipped Hitch’s spine, for once it wasn’t the chill of the late air, and the gifted sandwich was briefly forgotten about, arms wavering halfway to his mouth as Em bent his knees— sinewy half-starved angles— and his wings slashed broad strokes in the air before sweeping out behind him and bearing him up into the sky, a take-off executed only by birds-of-prey, no runway or run-up, just meters of wings that had looked ungainly and awkward behind the counter finally unclipped, untucked, and freed to work together to achieve flight. 

Hitch tracked him in the air, wings beating hard against counter-currents like a flare fired in an emergency, and thought to himself how silent the spectacle was, without the clumsy snap-clap of fat pavement pigeons, how the breeze that whispered about his face was no louder than the cubic meters of air that was being displaced by a man-shaped birdmothcryptid. There was no birdsong in their little sanctuary, and after a moment, Hitch realised there were no humming crickets or groaning cicadas. They were completely and utterly alone. 

Larger than a bird, smaller than a plane, Em’s trajectory (bullet fired from gun, kite unspooled, meteor shower: the mind raced to try to explain the sight) slipped from a silhouette in front of the moon, and suddenly Hitch couldn’t see him anymore, not for the sky full of stars. 

A weapon in the right hands, an asset to governments in need of muscle and a mutant. An experimental slip, a man who had been through enough already. 

This was what he was here for anyway, a stake-out that seemed more like a friend’s favour, and Hitch finished the meaty sandwich in a few bites, crumpling the paper and tucking it in his pocket automatically to hide all evidence of his journey to the middle of nowhere. No receipt, no evidence, no crime. He left the Coke to one side, just for the moment, and then shuffled himself more comfortably, tucking his chin down to the fastened zip. This was the warmest jacket that he’d found in any hunting and survivalist shop, both wholesale and… private trade, and it wasn’t enough for October, not anymore, he loathed having to approach the Costume Department for something even more insulated and the questions that followed, but he curled his fingers into fists in his pockets and fell absolutely still and motionless, and imagined a coat ribbed with built-in circuits like they did in the newer fancy automobiles to heat the seats, a warm and constant hug. Just his nose stuck out of the high collar, and he resigned himself to finding a hat that covered his ears and didn’t ruin his hairstyle. 

As he often did now, in any moment of silence and stillness, he ran through his to-do list, intertwined with Kid America, Ruby Redfort and her folks, and Spectrum, a ouroboros Venn diagram that lined up errands such as following the paper trail that linked Nine-Lives Capaldi to a highly illegal mutant-fighting ring outside of Twinford right up next to Brant’s need for a barber appointment now that his favoured stylist was back from Honolulu at the America’s Next Top Chop: Head of the Shears final. Bring Ruby in for her fitting of a new helmet, collect Ruby’s glasses frames which no longer held prescription lenses thanks to her miraculous 20/20 sight, but instead a tinted glass that cut out a lot of the interfering overstimulating light she suffered with. Call the gallery on Sabina’s behalf for her absence next Thursday due to her upcoming wine-tasting trip, organising Brant out visiting old college friends in Pennsylvania the same weekend, entering Ruby as a decoy mutant fighter in Nine-Lives’ fighting ring, remind Holbrook that he couldn’t bet for Ruby because it was still an illegal endeavour. 

The Mothman dropped from the sky, feet-first, and Hitch twitched forcefully, registering the shock almost simultaneous to recognising Em, his wings curled around himself like a peregrine falcon and Hitch had just enough time to brace himself as though he was a little child in Australia being swooped upon by territorial birds (been there, done that, Australian wildlife was sent straight from hell) when Em snapped his wings wide open again, an avenging angel with his arms out for benediction (or was it smiting? Hitch had not spent a lot of time in Sunday school) and his descent slowed like a parachute had been opened, and Hitch’s stomach flipped and floated in sympathy. 

Hitch grinned up at him, straightening up but Em was already twirling away to the side, wings moving just a single twitch for the wind currents to carry him away with an ease that Hitch couldn’t quite understand. 

Maybe Em had circled back to check he was still there, maybe to see if he was watching, or getting mauled by a grizzly, but now as he gained height, Hitch could follow his great flapping wings easier, and was perfectly adjusted to the gloom to watch as he soared up and backwards, heels over head and fell into another plunge, letting gravity take hold of his body and dash him to the ground. He righted himself slowly, not panicking, and Hitch’s heart jumped, just like when he watched Ruby do some kind of stupid stunt that usually involved a similarly high fall. Em didn’t have the supersoldier healing factor like Ruby did, but at least Hitch trusted him a little more to know what he was doing. 

That first halting somersault seemed to have warmed up his wings, and the second and the third loop-de-loops were even higher, even faster and tighter and Hitch found himself smiling, like a kid at the Red Arrows show. Em’s aerobatics were better than any Thunderbird or Blue Angel. 

Hitch knew a guy, the pilot Zuko who would have gladly zapped himself to pull off even half the loops and dead-stops that Em could do. Hitch had gone steady with him once long ago, before they amicably and mutually called it quits on a rare home-leave he had snuck, after the sixth month of non-contact while Hitch was in a little-known island somewhere south of Westerland trying to ensure it remained little-known. 

Em had barely been vertical long enough for his eyes to stop rolling in his head, when he tucked one wing in— Hitch could see his slender fingers holding his coverts close tidily— and tipped himself into a spiralling nosedive, legs sprawled like a skydiver’s because he wasn’t able to tuck them in like how an eagle would, if Ruby was here she’d be talking his ear off about evolutionary advantages and aerodynamics and what moth-babies would look like, but Hitch just leaned back into the rear-window, eyes fixed intently on his wheeling figure. He was just barely shy of the pine tree canopy when he recovered himself again, and Hitch was quick to applaud once he was in ear-shot, claps ringing out in the forest. Em twisted in midair, in a way that Hitch had never seen any bird do, gliding along the circle of treetops, honing in on his position. He landed nearly silently on top of the car, and Hitch twisted in his position, applause halted as he threw one hand up to shield his hair from the disturbed air from Em’s wide wings as he landed. He easily blinked the dust from his eyes. 

“I wasn’t expecting whifferdills,” Hitch commented, and Em reached for his right wing as it curved in towards his hands. Hitch ducked neatly, and watched as he raked his fingers through the feathers, for some invisible issue. The other man’s head cocked like a little songbird. 

“Slang,” he clarified quickly, “Your manoeuvres, your tricks, you’ve military precision.” 

Em shrugged and his wings rolled with the movement, every primary and secondary feather perfectly lined up next to the other, flexing in rippling moonlight. 

“I used to fly so much faster,” he said, and the low hum of his voice was mournful. “I could never measure it properly, but as fast as a car, faster even.” 

He left his wing along, seemingly satisfied with it, and his sharp night-vision eyes noticed the absence of the food wrapper.

“Go do some sprints,” Hitch suggested, thinking of the suicide sprint drills that Spectrum field agents were expected to maintain in their yearly physical. “Do you know the beep test? A certain distance, and you try to run… fly it, I mean, in faster and faster intervals.” 

His head still tilted, Em smiled at him. “SPIDR had drills. They made me fly as fast as I could, as far as I could and reeled me back in to their base everytime. Until I refused to do it—“ his wings tucked in tighter, the elbow joint hovering a foot over his head. “And then they cut my wings and focused on other anatomy.” 

Hitch’s smile faded. “I didn’t mean for that to—“ 

Em’s smile was still kind, a patient but suffering quirk nearly hidden by his stubble. “I’m just going to take it slow and take in the scenery,” he cut him off easily. He hadn’t said it to put Hitch in his place, or make him feel responsible for the organisation drones who believed that a thing was only useful if it was fast and strong and helpful and ready to die for a cause, it was just fact. “I’ve missed the wind and the trees.” 

Hitch started to say something else, but Em stretched his full wingspan, some ten feet if Hitch could guess, his flight feathers at the very apex of his wings fully formed and groomed, and conducted the same takeoff as earlier, battering him with displaced air again. 

He settled back, somewhat unhappy at the way it had been left, and thoughtfully sipped from the Coke again. Em circled the clearing again, somehow dwarfed against the ancient trees even though Hitch knew exactly how long his sprawling wings were, and executed a barrel roll, low enough for Hitch to watch and applaud as a silent olive branch for the stilted conversation. 

It was nearly twenty minutes later when he saw Em’s alarming figure again, and was treated to a final display of his tricks and manoeuvres, clearly showing off with the centre of the clearing a bulls-eye target for his whiffeddills. 

Hitch didn’t know why he hadn’t expected Em to be out-of-breath when he landed for the final time, but the man was wind-bitten and chest-heaving, his ruff puffed out to its full-size (he had done a lot of research into mating rituals and puffed necks and plumage) and his frozen fingers curled into painful claws. An hour of physical exertion would do that, Hitch reasoned with himself, he had seen just how long it had been since Em had done this, and how much exertion he’d poured into his aerial tricks. 

“That was amazing,” Hitch told him, throat warring to say ‘beautiful’ or ‘breath-taking’, and hid the momentary pause by sliding from his perch on the car, and extending the last half of the cola to Em. He intended to turn away, unearth his car-key from his inner suit pocket; shed his coat; blast the heater; hold open the rear door for Em to climb in; remind himself that he wasn’t marooned in the wilderness again, that he had a safe journey home, but the gentle rasp of Em’s rough, artificially blunt fingertips stopped his train of thoughts in its tracks, whisking the bottle from his hand and taking a long, deep swig from the glass neck. It would have been easy to pick the bottle without touching Hitch at all, would have been even easier to snatch his accident-prone fingers back like Hitch was a burning coal, but instead they stroked, overlapped familiarly, in a way that was impossible to ignore. 

His enormous eyes pinned Hitch like a dried butterfly, a hypnotising blood-red iris that recalled every psychic accusation against the Mothman, as his mouth and throat worked to drain the last of the soda. Hitch couldn’t help but notice, spy’s instinct, how even after the last drop was drained, his lips lingered for a slow syrupy second, indirectly holding right where Hitch’s mouth had been. Savouring the last of it. Lingered like the last second of free-fall. 

Hitch took a hesitant step backwards, bumped immediately into Dearie’s wax-polished flank, said, “you must be freezing.” 

Huge glazed eyes, wind-drunk, flushed cheeks, a tongue poking out to lick chapped lips. A favour for a friend, a gift from one in the know. Wings trailing out behind him to rest on the soft mossy scramble of undergrowth, instead of held up tightly shoulders-to-ears, wing length shielding his head. 

A step forward, over the creeping ivy, and snarling blackberry canes and fanned ferns, among the whisper of sentry trees and a night breeze. A sky uninterrupted with aliens or plane crashes. A clearing full of two mutants who were trying to build something more human than either of them.

Hitch’s own filed nails plucked the glass from Em’s unresisting hold, fumbled to put it down behind him, quick before the moment broke, and Em stepped in again (or had Hitch taken that first step?) and his inky-black fingers wrapped around Hitch’s skull, thumb to cheekbone, cradling his frost-bitten ears, little finger just brushing the scaly scarred skin of his neck below his coat collar, and tilted his head that tiny fraction to kiss him. 

Hitch’s nose was cold, and his teeth tucked carefully behind his chilled lips. He twisted his fingers into the front of Em’s sweatshirt, pulling him even closer until there was nowhere to retreat to, and nowhere to run, cornered between the car and seven feet of cryptid. 

Something brushed Hitch’s face, impossibly soft and feather-light but he knew that it couldn’t be Em’s hands that were supporting him up into the embrace. His furrowed eyes cracked open, and saw that it was Em’s plumose antennae, feathered filaments tracing his face to scent him properly, and Hitch would have laughed at the memory of a particular factoid about moths using their antennae to identify a mate from a great distance if he did not have much more pressing matters on his hands. He let it stroke his hair, his nose, and his eyelids when he slid them shut like sinking into a hot bath. 

Em was still out-of-breath from his flight, and the kiss wasn’t as long as Hitch would have happily suffocated for, and he broke it first, his hot breath rolling across Hitch’s upturned face. 

“Hitch,” he whispered, thumb stroking a broad stroke across his cheekbone, holding him cradled in his palms like he hadn’t tried beating the shit out of him on first meeting him, like he was a precious thing in need of gentleness, like he deserved that tenderness. 

“Art,” Hitch said quickly, a sparse white flag of surrender that tried to meet Em halfway, man of many names. “Please, call me Art.” 

Em smiled, slowly, and his scarlet eyes should have frightened Hitch or made him afraid to be lost in the wild so far from home, but he could only feel a delicious thrill that they were so remote. “Art,” he repeated, whispered into the space between them, no louder than the wind. 

Hitch untangled his fingers from Em’s front, and instead reached up to touch his temple, stroking with a gentle touch that had murdered men in cold blood, the fine feathers that dusted his brow, smoothing them down never ruffling, following the migratory patterns of his fine-boned skull, his cheekbones now filled out with diner food and fresh fruit, a straight runway to his cropped hair, which felt very much like hair not scales. 

Although Hitch couldn’t know it, could only suspect it not confirm it, when his eyes met Em’s sanguine eyes in the bleak early winter night, they glowed and refracted light (Ruby would call it a tapetum lucidum but Ruby was under the impression that no humans had this), a shallow red-orange tinge. 

Had any poor hunter or camper come across their own little fairy ring, their trembling flashlights would have picked out the eyeshine of two mutants: one seven-foot-tall and winged, watchful and ethereal as smoke from an unseen fire, and the other a squat powerful man with too many teeth for his grin, and hands as capable of killing as any hunting rifle. 

With his hands tangled in Em’s hair, he could pull him down the distance for another kiss, longer this time. Em kissed like he was trying to pull Hitch into his very chest, and Hitch leaned up like he would very much like to live there, thank you. His eyes were furrowed closed, and he realised an embarrassing moment too late he was hovering up on the toes of his sensible shoes. He’d never had to tiptoe before to reach, he was a perfectly respectable 6”1’, average to blend into a crowd, poised to compensate for Ruby’s vertical challenges pre-super-soldier-serum, but he was dwarfed next to Em. 

He needed Em on a chair, or something, Hitch was far out of his depth (no pun needed) trying to bridge the distance between them. 

An undisclosed amount of time later had Hitch bearing his weight heavier on the car, and his hands had been warmed thoroughly by Em’s uncomplaining co-operation. In turn, Em’s own fingers had travelled down to the thickened skin of Hitch’s neck (choked by Hogtrotter’s butcher’s twine-like restraints, held too far away from Ruby to help her fight Hogtrotter himself, just curled and twisted and gagged as the filigree restraints tightened themselves around his neck) like he was confirming what he already knew, what Hitch had tried so hard to hide. 

When Hitch opened his eyes, even the light touch against his reptilian scars made his heart lurch and his shoulders tense like the razor-sharp wire was hog-tying him again, Em’s hands had immediately sprang back, held up in a splayed count-to-ten where Hitch could see they meant no harm. 

The night was a little darker, and in his peripheral, he saw why. Em’s wings had curled around their two bodies to nest them within a protective cocoon, blocking the cold wind from Hitch’s face and providing them both safe haven. 

“I’m sorry,” Em’s voice was hoarse. The smell of bonfire smoke and ozone made Hitch dizzy, and he reached to wind his fingers with Em’s surrender. “How long?” 

“It’s nothing,” Hitch said automatically, with the confidence of a man who would say the exact same thing if he’d been shot in the chest. “It’s just slow to heal.” 

“I told you, they had other mutants there,” Em said, and his voice lacked Hitch’s bravado, didn’t hold ‘mutant’ as a reclaimed identity, shied away from any mention of his life before Little Mountain Side and his waiter job. “I know what they’re like, what they look like.” 

At Hitch’s stony silence, his unmoving eyes that watched, his hushed voice continued. “When I first met you… I was too distracted to be able to tell, not really. Everything that went on, Ruby and Clancy, and Miles… You’re doing very well to hide it—“ his wings hissed and fidgeted. “But I can tell.” 

He squeezed Hitch’s hands where they were intertwined, brushed a fingerpad against the chapped skin of a knuckle. Hitch pulled his arm down for a greedy third kiss, and Em went willingly, as though the issue was solved. The relaxed knowingness of being other, and the prospect of Em being the only person he knew above the age of thirteen who had gone through ‘second puberty’ as Ruby had crudely put it, to ask about the teeth loss and the growing pains and the bone-deep fear that he would be found out at any moment… 

“It’s gotten worse over the last few weeks,” Hitch said through uncooperating lips, “I thought it was stress, I thought it would pass, but I can’t ignore it anymore.” 

Gently, with slow telegraphed movements, Em moved his blunted finger to his chin, Hitch’s hand gripping his wrist loosely, and parted his lip to see the sharpened predatory teeth that lined his gums. 

“I don’t know when it’ll stop,” Ruby had a book in her history shelf about ancient Egypt and pulling brains out of noses and entombed cursed. The god of power and protection and military ability; crocodile-headed. Hitch himself had been on a mission once to recover stolen canopic jars. But how could he complain about that when Em had fled his home and captors to live in the middle of nowhere without anyone knowing his name. At least if the worst happened, Hitch could travel to Egypt and go swimming in the River Nile. 

Em kissed those serrated teeth right afterwards. 

“It’s a long time coming,” Hitch found himself saying, for the first time to anyone ever. Em didn’t fully retreat, just far enough that Hitch could see one eyebrow twitched high. “I got bitten by a crocodile when I was seven,” 

“The stress model is pretty well-known now,” Em replied, and he twisted his hand easily to capture Hitch’s useless hand shackled to his wrist, and kissed his fingertips when Hitch seemed to need encouragement. “The things they did… to try to tip the scales for their experiments to work the way they wanted them to.” 

Hitch closed his eyes in agony, knowing the half-burned dossiers that listed the torturous techniques to try to shock a mutant’s body into protecting itself, to tweak genes into a phenotype that had the power for fight or flight beyond the human degree. 

“A life as a secret agent is not particularly relaxing,” Hitch agreed. “I was left for dead in the mountains about four hours North of here last year, there was a bit of a workplace scuffle, and Ruby’s whole transition was around that time as well. Every single week has had something since then, and it just hasn’t stopped.” 

Sensing the conversation was veering into dangerously emotional territory— Em was patiently listening for a man who had been experimented on— Hitch tried to flattened his collar, smooth his jumper down but Em was still holding his hands. “Were you bitten by a moth then?” He asked, and Em’s rumbling laughter seemed to roll right through Hitch like thunder. Had he ever heard him laugh before? His smile seemed to come faster and brighter nowadays, but little seemed to stir him to laugh. 

“I was hatched in a cocoon,” he said dryly, and Hitch’s mouth split open to reveal all sixty-something teeth, a dreadful dangerous beast that was wrapped into a chrysalis of night-sky wings, cold-blood warmed with feather-soft hands. 

It was a long time later when the dew settled on the forest floor and the sun threatened to spill over into dawn when Hitch spun his car keys around his index finger, let Em drape himself across the back of the passenger seat with wings akimbo, and dropped him near the outskirts of the town. Em had offered to duck into the Diner and fetch them both a styrofoam package of pancakes and bacon, and Hitch had offered to take him further afield still where nobody knew either of them, and they could drink coffee in a town where reality and normalcy had been forgotten, but in the end, they shared one last embrace in the shadow of the mountain and when Em shut the passenger door he did not look back once. 

And then Ruby plucked a single black feather from the backseat footwell when Hitch was giving her and Clancy (riding shotgun and fretting about the popcorn machine) a lift to the cinema, he feigned ignorance, despite both of their knowing looks (“I can hear your heartbeat Hitch! I know you’re lying!”) (“How are you telling me, the clairvoyant, that you haven’t had the Mothman in your car?”). 

And when Hitch pushed the Little Green Diner door open, Em turned around at the familiar sound of the sci-fi whine, and made a pleased high-pitched screeching noise inaudible to human ears and utterly at odds by the way he tossed a dishcloth over his shoulder and tipped up the brim of his NIGHT SHIFT baseball cap. “Well howdy,” He grinned, one arm pointing at the barstool directly in front of him, and the other already reaching for a mug. “Fresh pot, just for you, chickadee.”