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The first time Spencer encounters Pete, he doesn’t necessarily know that it’s him.
The town is rather quiet tonight, so there aren’t as many things going on for Spencer to tune out as there usually are during the day. Mindless noise and chatter coming from both people and monsters alike have been dulled down into quiet, careful steps taken by either form of being, not wishing to be tracked or hunted. It’s easy to tune out, the only sound he pays any attention to being that of his own monster, making quiet little grunts and squeaks as he crosses the street, hands tucked into his pockets. The air is thick with fog, blurring out the buildings ahead of him and distorting any and all shapes into poorly formed blobs. He can hear water - he hopes its water - rushing in the sewers beneath him as he passes the storm drain, slipping his thumbs into the belt loops of his jeans.
It’s a relatively boring night for him. He’s completed his most recent case and with three days since delivery, he’s had nothing to do. Nobody seems to want anybody right now. He almost feels bad for wanting some kind of vendetta pinning a price to a random, helpless stranger. Almost. The business was scary and disagreed with his morals when he first got into it, but now, Spencer employs a “don’t ask” kind of policy. He doesn’t need to know why he’s hunting someone down. The only things he cares about are price, deadline, and whether they’re wanted dead or alive. Spencer isn’t proud of his work - it’s not something he tells his parents - but it’s worn at his morality enough that he can’t bring himself to care anymore. It’s a cruel world. People do worse things. There are gangs. There are organized criminals. What about the people hiring him? Don’t they get held accountable, too?
He almost considers going straight home when he picks up a strange noise, unlike anything he’s ever heard before. It’s strained, continuously babbling, gargling, snarling, all combined into some strange amalgamation of a noise that he simultaneously wants to never hear again, and hones in on to listen to eagerly. His face scrunches up and nose wrinkles in visible confusion, his bright blue eyes darting back and forth as he looks for the source of the noise. Nothing seems to sprout up and stand out against the fog, not as far as he can see. Spencer stresses to hear some kind of response from his monster, but the skittering he feels in the ground tingling against his own feet tells him that it’s gone into hiding. Perfect, he thinks to himself with a displeased hiss, just perfect. You’re a real fucking baby sometimes, you know that?
Just when he thinks he can locate the source of the noise purely by audio, an awful, terrible screech like metal being cut rips through the air, startling enough to make him jump and cover his ears, although it serves no other purpose than comical. That couldn’t possibly be a monster, he’s never heard anything like that, but the dread that sets in his gut tells him otherwise. Goosebumps dance along the surface of his skin and his jaw clenches as the sound finally ceases, only to begin again moments later. It’s like nails on a chalkboard, like a fork scraping a plate, like the drill at the dentist. Any awful noise you can think of, combined into one grittingly awful sound, drilling into his head nonstop. It takes all of his energy not to sink to the ground and hold his head in agony as it gets louder and louder and louder, until suddenly, at once, it all stops. The clicking. The snarling. The gargling. All of it.
Stops.
He uncovers his ears slowly, as if he doesn’t trust what he’s not hearing. It couldn’t have been something in the distance - that was definitely a monster.
And he’ll be damned if he doesn’t find out whose the fuck it is. Or what.
It isn’t until a month later that Spencer starts to actually hear his name. He’s seeking commission in a bar, working his way around the room, when he hears the name not once, not twice, but ten times within the past half hour. He couldn’t help but pay attention when the name was thrown in with the mention of a terrible grating sound, relating it to scraping something against rusted iron. It catches his attention like that, and all of a sudden he’s eavesdropping without even realizing it. The only thing that snaps him out of it is a client sitting down in front of him and starting to talk.
Fifteen minutes into the conversation and Spencer is already bored. He can’t help but excuse himself. It’s rare that Spencer denies a mission, and usually it’s based off the ground that the order is too complex, not the right time, et cetera, but this time it’s purely on his own disinterest. Nothing has ever held his attention more than the two girls hurriedly speaking to one another about their missing friend, who disappeared two weeks ago.
“Excuse me,” Spencer drawls out as he approaches the two women, each holding a drink in one hand. They fix him with suspicious looks. Immediately he knows that they know who he is, but he disregards that in favor of getting information. The sound has been tormenting since the very second he heard it, and he knows that his own monster never spooks, so what the hell could’ve pulled that off? “You mentioned someone… Pete, was it?” He knows it was. His hearing never fails him. “What were you saying about him?”
The girl with the short, curly blonde hair and big brown eyes doesn’t miss a beat. “Well, we were just saying how our friend disappeared. And it was totally him!”
“Totally,” the black haired one cuts in loudly in order to speak over the music, nodding vigorously in agreement as she touches a hand to the blonde’s shoulder. Her face is flushed. They’re drunk. “Georgie and I - we heard the sounds. And- and I totally saw him walking away from where we’d last seen her.”
“You didn’t see him, Lani!” the blonde - Georgie - interrupts, shushing her friend. “You didn’t see him - nobody has. Well, everyone who says they have ends up being a total liar.”
“You should find him,” Lani continues, slurring her words as she throws her hair over her shoulder. “You should kill him,” she says, looking almost serious before she bursts into a fit of giggles, planting her forehead on Georgie’s shoulder and laughing away.
Spencer blinks, and steps away from the scene. They’re drunk enough to cover their mourning with a sad attempt of jokes to be a method of coping, but the sounds of their monsters’ quiet, solemn grieving is enough to turn him away from the scene. It wasn’t a real offer, he knows that, but never has a name interested him more.
Months later, Spencer is finally met with the offer he’s been waiting for.
After weeks spent researching and meeting up with shady people to get the information he wants, Spencer is asked to track the one and only Pete. Not long ago was he presented with the task to deliver him, but it was difficult enough not to laugh in the face of the very man who’d asked him to do so. Word of mouth had told him that this guy was dangerous, and while Spencer was more than willing to take a challenge, he was not the type to do a suicide mission. He was ambitious, yes, but he wasn’t stupid . He knew better than to take on someone who could kill him with just his bare hands. Someone who wasn’t afraid to get messy.
Or maybe, not afraid of anything at all.
Instead, finally, finally, he’s asked just to track him. The offer comes from a woman whose name he’s heard around before but never bothered looking into - she’s powerful, and that’s that. The only thing he cares about just as much as the person to track itself is the compensation he’ll return for each report he hands in. Multiple reports! He’s expected to hand in multiple reports, and he’s going to get so much money to give to his family for them, and oh God , Spencer loves his job.
The thing is, he isn’t hard to track. His monster sticks out audibly like a sore thumb. It’s not always that terrible shrieking noise that frankly, still haunts Spencer’s dreams at night, but always a gross, wet gargling, like something trying to snarl underwater. He keeps his distance, he fills out his reports, and he carries on his merry way. Sometimes Spencer stays longer than necessary just for the fun of it - he can’t help but be entranced by this disgusting abomination of a man in front of him. He doesn’t look like a person at all - he looks like a zombie, like someone took a whole bunch of dead people and stitched them right up, and gave it life (little did he know, that was actually the case).
Spencer’s own monster eventually adjusts to being so close to Pete. He still doesn’t know what exactly it is about him that has his monster so worried, as for the first few weeks it scurried off and hid, leaving Spencer to fend for himself as he tried to be attentive to all of his surroundings. Usually he could focus on one thing while his monster paid attention to any dangers that might be nearby, but until it started to get used to the new commission, he was on his own.
The only thing Spencer notices is how much more frequently Pete seems to be running into a particular group of guys, meeting up with them more and more often by the day. It makes it a hell of a lot harder to keep an ear out for him - it’s like something is watching over Pete, too, something much more than a monster. There’s an unmistakable but odd presence that Spencer notices but can’t pinpoint, similar to the first night he encountered Pete.
It’s only when he locks eyes with one of them from far, far away that he realizes what that feeling is - he’s being watched, too.