Chapter Text
Janus was having, by definition, a really bad day. He hadn’t thought any of this through. His initial plan had been to infiltrate this branch of RISE as a doctor, someone away on vacation, feigning an early return. Once he was inside, he would slink from room to room, destroying everything he could, making sure none of the data was usable. It wasn’t until he got there that he had no idea how to subtly destroy scientific data. Past that, he had no idea what the relevant scientific data actually was. It was shortly after that revelation that Janus smashed the nearest computer to shreds, causing every scientist in the room with him to panic and run in the opposite direction, and that everything went to shit.
The building went into lockdown. In crackling tones over the building’s loudspeakers, the staff were ordered to protect the data over themselves, and backup copies of the information began to download off of every computer within the building. His mission became a race against time.
He was angry, so angry. The thrill of the hunt was not something he partook in, but he took solace in his cheap attempt at bravado. The screams they made when he approached–it was enough to overwhelm him, head buzzing uncomfortably with abstractions of tearing others to shreds. He didn’t want to think about it, it wasn’t what he was here for. But still, his head sang in tune with the sizzle of copper-scented air.
Janus tried his best to just knock them out, even when they came at him with intent to kill. He told himself that they were evil, they deserved a bit of suffering. They would be fine, he’s just destroying data, not lives. He told himself anything and everything every time he faced someone new, watched the fear flicker behind their eyes as his body stretched into the weapon it was designed to be. He tried his best to be gentle.
He feared for a moment that he’d hit one of them too hard. Blood had welled from the back of her head where it bounced off a nearby cabinet, and her eyes fluttered shut when her body slumped to the floor. On her right hand, a wedding band gleamed. When he checked her pulse, he’d nearly fainted from relief.
Still, it did little to quell the thoughts racing through his mind. Maybe this was who he had been all along, maybe this was why no one had wanted him, not even his own parents.
Not murdering this woman won’t bring anyone that you’ve actually murdered back. Maybe this was why Remus–
He cut off that line of thinking before it could even start, before cracking his jaw and narrowing his eyes. He was here on a mission, here to stop what had been done to him from being done to anyone else. He had a purpose, for once in his life, he was doing the right thing. If he had to break a few bones along the way, he could live with that.
They wanted to make him into a monster, so he would become one.
He didn’t even know that he could, at first. When he’d woken up in that hospital all those months ago, heart monitor beeping in steady, calming beats, he’d been confused. Then, the pain began. Burning, twisting pain that wracked the right side of his body.
Janus had looked over, saw Remus asleep in the chair next to his bed. The other boy had dark circles under his eyes, and his hair was growing out, brown roots poking through at his hairline. All around them, machinery whirred and beeped. There was a needle in his good arm. A quick glance at the clock–it was 12:37. The city was more or less asleep.
In one smooth motion, Janus ripped the needle out of his arm and swung his feet over the edge of the bed. The linoleum floor was cold to the touch, and he wiggled his toes, thankful to still have feeling. The air outside was even cooler, and as Janus wrapped a stolen jacket around his hospital gown and walked out of the hospital, he was thankful for the chill.
It had taken him a while after the accident to realize he couldn’t shift fully anymore. Every time he tried, half of his body would comply, tingling with the transition, flexing, ready to affix itself onto whichever skeleton he so desired. But the burns remained, stubborn, unfeeling.
He spent weeks slipping from home to home, shelter to shelter. On occasion, he visited his grandmother, but didn’t stay long out of fear he would be discovered. As he suspected, her house was being monitored by Logan, in case he returned. His grandmother understood, she always did.
He scavenged where he could, pickpocketed and pawned for cheap cash to stay at seedy motels. It wasn’t nearly as hard back when he had a plethora of faces at his beck and call, but there was something to be said for raw skill. At night, he stared at himself in the mirror and traced over the burns on the right side of his body with ghosting fingers.
It wasn’t until he got caught that he felt the shift, low in his stomach. The man he was trying to pickpocket grabbed his forearm, tightening his grip until Janus felt the bones in his wrist start to flex uncomfortably.
“Ach!” he winced as spikes of fiery pain traveled up his right arm, tingling with an almost numbing ache.
“And just what do you think you’re doing?” the man barked out, glaring down at him through hairy eyebrows.
Janus opened his mouth to respond, but at that moment, every semblance of reality left the space of his arm, and it slithered out of the man’s grasp, melting and solidifying as soon as his fingertips slipped free.
“What the fuck was that?” The man lurched back out of instinct before making another grab for him.
Janus ducked under his grasp, clutching his burned arm to his chest and running until his legs turned to jelly and his heartbeat drowned out the sound of everything else.
That was the day he realized that he wasn’t hindered by humankind anymore when it came to his transformations. Albeit, only the right side of his body flexed and shifted with this new inhuman grace, but the realization was nonetheless fascinating.
With time, he learned to control the right side of his body again, regaining mastery of simple shifting, and feeling his old facade of a face settle back into place. His vitiligo disappeared, his burns faded back into untouched skin, his eyes blinked in honey and hazel innocence. The tips of his hair were still the dusty blonde they had been back at the Safehouse.
As he looked at himself in the mirror, he discovered he didn’t feel entirely whole like this anymore. So he let his skin revert, reappear as itself, and he let himself love it. If nothing else about himself, he could at least love that much.
He uncovered new properties of his shifting every day from then on. One day he awoke and found the right side of his body covered in tiny eyes, blinking up at him through the folds of skin. Another he awoke to find scaly green patches dotting that half of his body. He learned to flex the limits of his abilities, slink from form to form at will. He learned to conceptualize creatures, shift into people and things that never really existed to begin with. He breathed life into his own form, and felt it breathe right back into him. While the left half of his body remained regrettably human, he reveled in his newfound skill.
It was around then that Janus realized he could do something like this. He had more power than he’d ever had over his future, and he could do something to keep other’s futures from the pain that he had endured in his youth. He could strike out on his own, do something about RISE that no one back in the Safehouse had ever thought to do. (Why had no one ever thought to do this?)
He could erase it all, one step at a time.
And so he hatched a plan, detailed every step except the ones that mattered, and counted himself ready to go. He didn’t know why he did it, just that he had to do something that mattered, had to do something right.
No one was going to die this time, though, not because of him. He didn’t care which side they were on. He was done killing people.
_____
Their test subject had been on the hunt for so long, Alex was afraid he would never tire. They didn’t know the protocol to follow in regard to test subjects returning to their birthplace and tearing the institution apart, or how this one had even found them again to begin with. What he was looking for, they didn’t know. Alex was afraid to speculate.
In fact, Alex hadn’t even seen the subject since he was a child, some legal jargon about RISE being forced to return rented DNA. They’d shipped him off elsewhere when they’d finished toying around with his genome, casting him aside and moving on to what they had hoped would be a more successful experiment. That was how things worked at RISE, that was how Ian had wanted it.
Earlier that day, Alex had been concerned that he forgot to pack a fork with his lunch. Now, he didn’t even know if he would make it past the next couple of hours, and his lunch seemed insignificant. He did know one thing, however; it was only a matter of time until their hunter got what he wanted.
Alex and his team had taken shelter as soon as they’d heard the alarm, finding the first room with a lock on the door and throwing the bolt. It was there that the six of them sat, a ragtag band of overworked scientists with varying degrees of moral grayness. They allowed themselves some time to collect their composure, backs to the peeling beige wallpaper behind them as they listened and waited.
Their subject’s laugh echoed down the dark hallway as they cowered, listening to their coworkers on the other side of the door crying and pleading for help that wasn’t coming. His fingernails dragged loudly against the walls as he slunk by their hiding spot, scraping and screeching unnaturally.
It had been a mistake to even consider human experimentation and a bigger one to actually try and “improve” someone. Nothing about their test subject was an improvement. He had been an abomination from the moment they had gotten to work on him. Dr. Ian Bates, who had initially been running the enhancement project, declared all those years ago that he was going to improve human DNA in its ability to adapt. Subject 014 had been the somewhat dissapointing result of all that hard work, all those grant dollars. Alex still remembered his first day on the job, a bright-eyed new recruit watching his mentor at work. None of that mattered anymore. No unpaid-internship-turned-job-opportunity was worth this. Ian was dead, had died months ago, and the creature had found a new skin, a less human skin, to wear.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” the creature sang in a voice that was neither his own voice nor one of theirs. “Give it your best shot, just try and kill me!”
Alex could picture him now, his face sliding and sagging as he changed forms. Subject 014, Janus. Shapeshifter. Sometimes they caught glimpses of him looking more humanoid, but other times the echo of his laugh was the only human thing about him. The subject’s only constant was his eyes, a honey color that hadn’t changed yet whether he had two eyes or twenty. Sometimes he scuttled across the floor, his feet making strange clicking noises.
Alex glanced to his left, where his coworkers sat, shaking. He ran his fingers through his graying hair, pressing his lips into a thin line. The creature had been wandering the halls for what felt like forever. He never tired, never ceased his movements. He was everywhere and nowhere at once. They were just lucky he hadn’t found them yet.
_____
Janus neared the last room quietly, bare feet padding lightly over the linoleum floor. It was easier to go barefoot these days, it didn’t hinder his shifting.
The door to the room was surely barricaded. It was the last one, there were no other living beings on the premises. He had to be careful with these final rooms, make sure to destroy any research as he went, any chance at recovering data. After all, he only got one shot at this.
Room after room was cleared. Anyone he encountered pleaded with him, begged, none of it made any difference. Some of them stood between him and their computers, arms out, eyes determined. He knocked them out with swift blows, broke arms and legs and ribs without batting an eyelash. Some of them passed out from the sheer shock of the situation alone.
The mainframe was in the final room at the end of this hall. There would be scientists in there, he was sure of it, but they were of little concern to him, once they unlocked the door. He didn’t want to risk blowing through it and almost killing someone again.
His bones creaked lightly as he shifted, conjuring the image of one of the many faces he’d bloodied that day. Something in his chest twinged as he thought about her body, lying crooked on the floor. She was unintimidating, with knobby knees and pinched, underexaggerated features. She would work well for his needs.
And as he became someone else again, he never felt more like himself.
_____
There was a crunching sound as the door across the hall from them was destroyed. Everyone held their breath for a moment. The worst part was the bloodcurdling scream, cutting out abruptly only seconds after it began. Alex shuddered.
For a while, it was silent. No good came of silence, but as the seconds ticked on, Alex could see his coworkers visibly relaxing a little, daring to believe that the creature had ended his massacre. Alex wasn’t as hopeful as his coworkers; call it a personal flaw.
No one was expecting the knock at the door, frantic and quiet. Alex had already moved to brace himself against it, having convinced himself that that would do anything at all to stop the test subject. He knew their subject was stronger than ten men. A human that could transform into anyone on Earth was dangerous enough, but unlocking the ability in him to shift past the confines of human DNA? Their subject was anything he wanted to be, and right now, he wanted to be a predator.
The knocking was getting more frantic, and a feminine voice called to them. “Please, please, I know you’re in there! Please let me in! Oh God, he’s going to kill me if you don’t let me come in, please!” Her voice sounded choked, like she’d been sobbing.
Alex hesitated, but the man to his left, George, straightened up, his eyes wide. “That's my wife!” he cried out, scrambling up and pushing past him.
“No, wait!” Alex hissed, but it was too late. George had shoved him aside and flung open the door.
In front of him stood a shaking woman, tear tracks down her cheeks and her lips bitten bloody. Alex recognized her vaguely, having seen the young couple together on their lunch breaks in the past.
“Lydia!” George led her into the room and Alex quickly moved to block the door again, this time using all of his strength to move a large filing cabinet in front of it. The bottom of it grated against the ground, but It fit snugly, the top of it just grazing the underside of the doorknob.
“There,” he said, looking back at their small band of survivors. The seven of them stood in a circle. They all stared at him nervously.
“How do you know he can’t get through?” Lydia asked him, turning her honey colored eyes on him. Despite the tears still on her face, her gaze was steady and challenging. Alex felt a twist of fear. Her eyes were so familiar.
“There’s no way,” Alex answered quietly, just as much to himself as to her. “These walls are solid steel, and the door is the only weak point. We can wait him out, rig up something to call for help, and let the higher-ups take care of this mistake.”
Something was wrong, something was off. Lydia’s honey colored eyes were dancing around the room, like she was analyzing it.
“Why can’t you call anyone right now? He took out the landline?” Lydia guessed, continuing only after Alex nodded. Her posture softened, and she looked Alex dead in the eyes. “Good.”
In a heartbeat, Alex found his own heart in his throat. Lydia’s body boiled and shifted right in front of his eyes, her form contorting as extra legs sprouted from the right side of her body. A mandible protruded from her chin, and one of her eyes became faceted, bulging and ugly and bubbling with the potential for more. Even as he watched, the unstable shifting fractured the eye into two, and then four, and then back to one.
All around him, his coworkers were screaming, crying, begging. Some were pounding on the door (pull it, you fools!), trying to leave, some were curling up under the desks. Some of them just stood there, paralyzed with fear.
Lydia, who, of course, was not truly Lydia, turned to look at Alex. She let out a string of clicking noises.
Honey and hazel, Alex thought with dread, thinking back to the child he’d handled all those years ago. There was nothing to be done now. Sinking to his knees, he closed his eyes and prepared for the worst.
But there was only a rush of air, and when he opened his eyes, the creature was sizing up the central mainframe behind him. The air sparked and sizzled as it punctured its target, not even bothering with the spooked survivors.
When the job was done, the mainframe a smoking heap, the creature turned back to the startled scientists. And with that, the creature shrunk back down into a boy, no older than college age.
“I trust I don’t have to deal with you lot?” he asked them, voice surprisingly raw. His eyes were rimmed with red, and even as he stood there, every muscle in his body was wired taut. His gaze flickered around the room, twitchy.
Alex stared at what was left of the child he used to swaddle after his shots and rock to sleep. “Why?” he whispered.
The other scientists in the room turned to look at him, but none of them spoke.
Janus looked back at him like he was nothing. That was fair. To him, Alex was nothing more than another scientist from the lab that created him. “Why don’t I want to kill you?” the shifter asked. “I never wanted to kill anyone.” His voice broke on the last syllable.
For a moment, no one in the room spoke.
“I used to rock you to sleep,” Alex said. He wasn’t sure why he blurted it out, frozen from guilt in the moment. “I was an intern, fresh out of college, and they asked me to rock you to sleep when you were fussy.”
Janus looked down his nose at the groveling scientist. “Then you should consider yourself especially grateful that I don’t want any more blood on my hands.”
“I never knew what this would do to you,” Alex whispered. “Forgive me, please, I’m sorry.”
At that, Janus cocked his head to the side ever so slightly. On his cheek, amid the burned flesh, a single eyeball opened. The boy gave him a sad smile filled with twisted fangs. “I don’t believe you.”
_____
Janus walked along the boardwalk, glancing around himself as inconspicuously as possible. After walking out of that room, he’d hotwired a car and drove until the fuel gauge lit up empty. He had ended up here, at a cheap tourist trap. He still had blood on his collar, but barefoot was at least in season at the beach.
Slinking behind the ferris wheel, he leaned against a nearby wooden bar and watched the crowd. A million thoughts raced behind his eyes, none of them really registering. One branch down, six to go, he thought. All that was left to do now was regroup and plan his next attack. He’d have to be better about planning it, not as sloppy; they would be waiting for him this time.
Janus looked up at the sky. It was beginning to get dark out, and stars were poking through the emerging night. He missed Remus and the others. But it would do him no good to return to them now, not after what he’d done. The lives he’d destroyed. The mess that his foolish decision had gotten them into. They wouldn’t want him anymore. He didn’t blame them. He wouldn’t want him anymore after what he’d done.
His head filled with images of that night, the flames, the smoke. Remus. He banished those thoughts and looked back out over the beach and to the water. The ocean was steely gray, white foam cresting each swell.
In his pocket, his phone buzzed.