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They morph outside of the subway station, in the shadow of scaffolding, under a despondent bulb flickering on-off-on, like it's ten minutes away from giving up entirely and plunging them into true two AM darkness. The morph always takes about a minute, and it’s a little bit horrifying—human features elongating or shrinking into animal features, bones twisting oddly, feathers or fur sprouting—so they’ve learned to do it out of the streetlights, in a place they know they’ll have privacy, e.g. in the creepiest fucking corridor of scaffolding they can locate, which any sane person walking around New York at two AM would avoid like it was full of corpses and/or sewage, which, in this neighborhood at least, are two distinct possibilities.
Riff hates the morph to rat especially, hates the trembling fear that always threatens to overwhelm him as soon as his front paws hit the cement, hates the way his nose stretches out in front of him even as he’s shrinking down to the ground. He never watches Tony morph, although Tony seems strangely fascinated by the change—he hates watching Tony’s features shift and distort. “Like watching a freak show act,” he’d said last Friday, and Tony had said thoughtfully back: “More like magic.” Riff thought that was just about typical: Tony seeing the magic in everything. Glass half full, et cetera. What a fucking dweeb.
(It is—has always been—alarmingly, and unfortunately, endearing.)
Riff hates the change, but he likes being a rat. Mostly. He likes being quick and small and immensely good at sneaking. He likes that everything smells different and all of it smells good, even trash—especially trash. He likes that the world gets bigger and details change: his eyesight gets dimmer but the soundscape gets richer and he can feel movement in his paws like a warning tickle, pulling at the tiny little muscles all the way up in his ears and nose.
“Don’t go gettin’ distracted by the garbage cans,” Tony mutters, as they slip into the corridor created by scaffolding walls pushed too close together, both eying the dangerous-looking lightbulb sparking pathetically over their heads. “Focus, yeah? We don’t got that much time.”
“Man—I was the one who suggested this. I know exactly how much time we got. I’m fucking focused. I’m like a fucking—a fucking laser beam of focus. I’m a guided missile over here.”
Tony rolls his eyes. “I’ve heard that one before. It ain’t ever stopped you from eatin’ trash.”
“Slander and lies. Morph already, Jesus.”
“You first.”
Riff closes his eyes, thinks about the rat. He melts fast, feels the ground come up to meet his front paws. Next to him, Tony does the same.
Do you smell pizza? is the first thing Riff says, when he’s adjusted to his height and his new senses.
Focus, squeaks Tony. We gonna do this or what?
They head into the subway.
— —
Six months ago Riff had been wandering through a construction site in the Bronx when he’d been rudely interrupted by an alien—better seen than described, but suffice it to say that no creature should have horse pieces, lizard pieces, and eye stalks, it was both disturbing and horrifying, a crime against aesthetics in Riff’s opinion—who’d not even asked Riff before he’d “bestowed the gift of shape shifting.”
(Riff had decided the thing was male based only but fairly on the appendage visible between the thing’s back legs, an appendage so large and kind of… spiny… that it didn't really bear thinking about, and so Riff didn't. Or, well. Only a little.)
If Mr. Spiny-Dick-From-Outer-Space had asked Riff before “bestowing the gift of shape-shifting,” Riff would have had some pretty choice words about unwanted gifts, plus he would have asked some pertinent fucking questions about what the aforementioned gift entailed and what, exactly, Riff having this power did for the alien in question, because—oh by the way—apparently the alien had expected Riff to fight in a planetary war for him, which, no thank you, capital No. Riff, upon beginning to glean the particulars, had said as much. The alien had seemed confused.
“No?” he had said.
“No,” Riff had said.
The alien blinked with its eye stalks. Horrifying.
“I have given you this gift,” he said.
“Take it back.”
“Impossible. The gift of Shifting cannot be removed once bestowed—it is a Holy Act, and a great and terrible responsibility.” The alien seemed to talk with a strange emphasis on certain words, like they would be capitalized if written down. “You are obliged, henceforth, to use this power wisely, with great effect, to the benefit of your people and mine. It is a Sacred Act, to shift. A Sacred and Terrible Act.”
“Well,” Riff said, annoyed. “That doesn’t sound much like a gift, man.”
“It is the greatest of gifts. A terrible, holy—”
“Yeah, yeah—” Riff interrupted. “Holy, sacred, terrible—you know you’ve said ‘terrible’ three times? You ain’t really selling me on this gift. And you’ve already fuckin’ given it, so. You even know how gifts work? Once you’ve given it, it ain’t yours. I can use it how I fuckin’ want.”
“We are fighting a Great Enemy—”
“I ain’t fightin’ anything,” Riff said flatly. “I’m done with fighting—that’s kids stuff. I ain’t even hit Bernardo in… a week.” Six days, he amended quietly to himself. The alien didn’t need to know that.
The alien blinked with its eye stalks again. “Bernardo,” he repeated, as if he didn’t know the word.
“Yeah, Bernardo,” Riff said impatiently. “Another kid, like me, only not as cool. What, you gonna give him your ‘gift’ too?” He put quotation marks around ‘gift,’ to convey his disdain. The alien didn’t seem to notice.
“Yes,” he said slowly. “I will find this… Bernardo. Maybe he will be more receptive to our Plight.”
“I think fucking not,” muttered Riff, but he was already backing away, before the alien could ask him where to find Bernardo, or anybody else. “Listen, man, thanks and all—gotta jet—thanks for the—um—gift, and good luck with your…” he waved a hand vaguely; “—great enemy, or whatever.”
He turned and ran. Halfway home, a rat scampered over his foot. Later that night, he shape-shifted for the first time.
— —
The thing about being an animorph in New York City is, it kind of fucking sucks. Oh, wow, how great (is what everyone thinks, at first), you can turn into any animal you want? Well, no, you can’t, actually: you can turn into any animal you’ve touched. The rules for animorphing are pretty clear: 1) You can morph into any animal you’ve touched; 2) You can’t morph for longer than two hours, or you’ll stick; 3) You don’t talk about being an animorph.
Or maybe rule 3 is supposed to come first?
Whatever. Riff had broken rule 3 anyway. What, he wasn’t going to tell Tony?
But rule 1 (only animals you’ve touched) is pretty cut-and-dry unbreakable, and his neighborhood isn't exactly a menagerie of options, so he’s physically incapable of becoming an animal that isn’t a rat, a pigeon, a poodle, or Valentina’s evil cat. (He hasn't tried being a cockroach yet.) And he’s not planning to get stuck as any of them, God help him, so he follows rule 2 and watches the time like a hawk. Or, well, maybe like a pigeon.
The rules, by the way, had been laid out for him the second time he’d met the alien, the day he’d reluctantly returned to the construction site to see if somebody—Mr. Horrifying-Eye-Stalks, presumably—could explain why he kept inexplicably and unexpectedly turning into a rat. By Tuesday of that week he’d got pigeon down, as well—it had taken him forty-eight hours to catch one—and had broken the “no talking about animorphing” rule besides, as he’d recruited Tony to help him catch the pigeon.
When he’d dragged Tony to the construction lot and demanded that the alien bestow the gift on Tony, too, the alien had had the gall to demure, which, seeing as he had given it to Riff without even asking first, seemed both rude and, frankly, pretty chaotic. Which normally Riff could appreciate, only in this instance it was severely inconveniencing him.
“C’mon, man,” Riff had said. “Tony’s the one you should have given your gift to in the first place. He might even want to fight in your stupid war!”
“What?” Tony looked away from the alien (at whose various appendages he’d been gaping) to stare accusingly at Riff. “What war? You never said anything about a war!”
Riff ignored him. “My guy,” he said instead, to the alien. “Mister—do you have a name?”
The alien made a series of sounds so incomprehensible they made Riff’s brain go runny. Riff paused, waiting for his ears to stop ringing, then said: “Mister. Tony here, Tony is lots better at this kinda stuff than me. He’ll be a fuckin’ master at morph—uh—shifting.” Riff had already started calling it animal-morphing by that point, because he liked it better than shape-shifting, which quickly became ‘animorphing,’ and then simply ‘morphing’. He got the sense the alien wouldn’t appreciate this nicknaming of a Sacred Act. “Make him a shifter, and maybe we’ll help you out, huh?”
The alien turned to Tony. “You will aid us in our campaign against the Great Enemy?” he asked, hopefully. “You will assume the burden of our most Sacred and Terrible gift, that of shifting, for the ultimate betterment of your people and mine? You will Shift with us in our holy quest against the ravages of the Yeerk, join our Noble and Terrible effort to rid the universe of Parasites and Controllers?”
Tony blinked. “You said ‘terrible’ twice.”
The alien had bestowed his gift on Tony, too. They had made a run for it before the alien could tell them anything else.
So now they’re both animorphs, and the thing is, it’s kind of lost its luster. It was fun at first, when the flush of being an animal—even if it was just a rat or a pigeon—was still new and exciting and full of smells. They scampered as rats through the streets, into basements and back rooms and other secret places, discovering the hidden areas of the neighborhood they’d lived in all their lives. They flew as pigeons to the tops of buildings and took runny, amoniac shits on pedestrians. They stole hot dogs and french fries and spied on their neighbors.
(Once or twice they had spied on the girls, but Riff isn't all that interested in what Grazi’s got under her bra and even Tony lost interest after the first time, or maybe he just felt shitty about doing it. Riff hadn't asked.)
At first it was thrilling to be so small, so close to the ground, to run through the alleys and under fences. It was thrilling to fly, thrilling to throw themselves over the heads of strangers, the greatest thrill of all to dive from the roof of a building into Central Park, to watch the bright green grass come up fast and dangerous, to pull themselves up short and let the currents of air carry them soaring over the lake.
But after a while they’re tired of being rats: of morphing back feeling grimy and greasy, of the heart-clenching fear at the back of the rats' brainstems. Flying stays fun for longer, but the pigeons’ heavy bodies—made heavier by frequent french fry consumption—are difficult to heft off the ground, and Riff and Tony always morph back exhausted, with arms that stay sore for days.
“The zoo has a snow leopard,” Riff says one day. “Two snow leopards.”
“Yeah?” Tony asks sleepily. They’re lying prone in the sun by the river, recovering from pigeon bodies. Riff’s shoulders are pleasantly sore, and he’s getting hungry, but Tony looks half-asleep and he loves Tony like this: heavy-lidded, loose-limbed, sprawled at full length and chest rising and falling slowly. Plus when his eyes are closed, he can't see where Riff is looking: which, incidentally, is at the stripe of pale skin and dark trail of hair on his belly, revealed by the shirt Tony has let ride up without realizing. “I bet that’d be fun,” he says, and stretches, and Riff pretends not to care that the shirt rides up another inch, the slowest and most infuriating of strip teases.
“Yeah.” Riff clears his throat. “Imagine walkin’ onto the subway as snow leopards.”
“We’d get the cops called on us.”
“We get the cops called on us anyway.”
“Only ‘cause you keep jumpin’ the turnstiles.”
“What’re the cops gonna do about a pair of snow leopards, anyhow?”
“Shoot us, probably,” Tony says dryly. “Dunno about you, but I’d like to see twenty-one.”
Riff thinks about it, then says: “Okay, well, it’d be fun to be in the park as snow leopards. Like, at night. We could hunt.”
Tony snorts, eyes still closed. “Hunt what? Poodles? Somebody's labrador?”
“Racoons.” Riff grins to himself. “We could scare some joggers, huh? Get written up in the paper and everything. ‘Phantom Leopards Terrorize Locals.’ ‘Origin of Beasts and Current Whereabouts Unknown.’”
Tony finally opens his eyes and looks over at him, raising a skeptical eyebrow. “You volunteering to touch the leopard?”
Riff shrugs. “I'm not scared of a cat.”
“It's a big cat.”
“Still.” Riff sits up. “The zoo’s got seals, too. And monkeys.”
“And snakes?” Tony says, with a hint of a wicked smile. He’s under the impression that Riff is scared of snakes, which isn't fucking true—so Riff had yelped about one garden hose, big whoop. It had looked like a snake, and with the nozzle it could have been a rattler. And yes, Riff knows that rattlesnakes aren't native to New York, and yes he knows that they aren't green. But Riff figures it's better to be wary about snakes in general, and especially about snakes lying under plant pots all sneaky like that hose had been, and just because he had yelped so loud he’d got the neighborhood dogs barking doesn't mean he's scared of snakes, he’s just—
Anyway. Riff ignores Tony's stirring up shit and continues. “It's got birds that ain't pigeons.”
Tony shades his eyes against the sun, peering up at him. “How we gonna touch any of these? Climb into the enclosures?”
“We gotta go when nobody's around.”
“How we gonna get in the zoo when nobody's around?” Riff only grins, and Tony finally sits up. “Oh. Right.”
Which is how they’ve ended up in the subway at two AM, as rats, scampering under the turnstiles with the few New Yorkers who have ventured out this late, or who are maybe returning home, scuttling down the steps to the train.
Tony is already on the platform but Riff has found a slice of pizza, dropped cheese-side-down next to a garbage can, and although his human brain might have said “yuck,” it turns out what his rat brain says is “mmm, dinner,” and then it says “better share it with Tony” because if there’s anything that’s stayed the same between human Riff and rat Riff, it’s that he doesn’t do a goddamn thing without asking himself if it would be more fun with Tony there, and mostly, it would be.
He drags the pizza slice to the top of the stairs, then begins to clamber down, dragging it with him one step at a time. He’s dimly aware that he must look ridiculous, but he’s committed now—the pizza is coming with him, regardless of how much grit the cheese picks up along the way.
Tony, who must have wondered what was taking so long, appears at the bottom of the stairs. Come on, he squeaks impatiently. Train’s almost here.
I’m coming, Riff squeaks, even as he hears the noise of the train in the near distance: a rumbling roar in the tunnel, the approaching stampede sound of the wheels against track. He’s halfway down the steps; he’ll make it. With the pizza.
Leave the slice, Tony squeaks, scampering from the stairs to the edge of the platform, and then back again, the energy of the rat making him hyperactive and nervous.
Fat fucking chance, Riff squeaks back. He pulls the piece of pizza down another step, then another. The slice is cumbersome, half again as long as he is, the cheese congealed and the slice stale enough to be solid but large enough to trip him up at every step. Fuckin’ hell, he thinks, as he nearly flips himself down the stairs. This better taste as good at it looks.
If we miss this train—
We won’t! Riff squeaks, and with a jerk of his little rat head and shoulders he flips the piece of pizza down the last two steps just as the train grinds to a stop. The doors slide open and Riff and Tony have just enough time to run inside, pizza in tow.
Idiot, Tony squeaks, although Riff can hear the breathy rat laugh bubbling through. I’ll bet it’s not even good pizza.
Tony is wrong, Riff thinks smugly, as they nibble at the slice under the train car’s bench seating. It’s very good pizza.
— —
They get past the zoo’s guard so easily it feels almost too good to be true. He doesn’t react to the two rats scampering through the entrance gate—doesn’t even seem to register them, in fact. Past the gates the zoo is quiet and dark, and they scamper through it quickly to the snow leopards, changing back to human bodies when they’re there, relatively hidden by the shadows of silhouetted trees. Riff sneaks a glancing look at Tony as he’s changing, then away again—the shift from rat to human is better to watch than the reverse (Tony’s paws becoming his own hands again, strong and roughly textured from work, brown from the sun and square-nailed; his face returning to un-whiskered familiarity; the disappearance of the scaly, disturbing tail) but Riff doesn’t really like seeing either. He turns his attention to the leopards, instead, waiting until Tony has fully changed and has stepped up next to him before acknowledging him.
“Slowpoke,” he says.
“Fuck off,” Tony mutters. He pushes his face close to the fence, peering through. “You’ve been going rat longer than me.”
Riff almost argues (By one week, as if that makes a difference—) but then decides he can’t be bothered. Instead he pushes his own face up against the bars, eyes sweeping the rocks and water on the other side of the fence.
It takes a few minutes for their eyesight to adjust to the dark, time in which they also adjust to the sound of the park: muffled and one-dimensional after the sensitivity of the rats’ ears. Something barks in the distance: a dog, or a seal. A non-native bird says koo-Ooo, and another one answers. There’s something a little spooky about being alone in the park at night, the late-night traffic hum muffled by the trees and the animal sounds floating through softly.
Tony’s hand curls around the bar just under Riff’s own, and he’s shifted a little closer, like he’s also noticed the spine-tingling solitude of the zoo at night. They’re more alone here than they are in most places, Riff thinks. Just them and the far-off guard, and a bunch of creatures. The thought is strangely electrifying. A world to themselves.
Movement startles Riff from his thoughts; one of the leopards is stalking the enclosure, eyes shining in the dark. Now that Riff’s eyes have adjusted, he can see the thing slinking up the rocks and briefly disappearing into the trees on the far side of the space, before reappearing again and bounding down to walk beside the fence, tail flicking. Then it leaps back onto the rocks: making a slow circuit, like a patrol.
Riff and Tony watch it for a few minutes in silence, both of them presumably contemplating the logistics of getting close to the cat without getting eaten by the cat.
“This is stupid,” Tony finally says. “We're gonna get chomped.”
“We ain’t gonna get chomped. We're fast.”
“You're fast. I never figured out how to lift off like you do.” This was true; Tony was quick when he was a rat, but he was slow as a pigeon. Once he was in the air he had grace enough, but it always made Riff laugh to watch him take-off: an ungainly, effortful flapping of wings, his pigeon eyes squinting in concentration.
“I'll distract it if it starts to look feisty.”
“Where's the other one?”
“Asleep, hopefully.”
Tony groans. “Man… we gotta know where they both are or I ain't risking goin’ in there.”
Riff scans the enclosure. “There,” he says, and points. The other leopard is behind an outcropping of rock, only its tail visible. “Happy?”
Tony looks nervous, even in the dark. “No.”
“Come on,” Riff says, prodding at him. “We came all the way here…”
“And we could make it back, too. Uneaten.”
Riff grabs Tony’s shoulder and shakes it gently. “Tony. Look at me.” Tony looks at him. “Ain’t you sick of being rats? And rats with wings? ‘Cause that’s all a pigeon is. Don’t you wanna be something cooler? We got this power, we might as well make the most of it.”
Tony’s reluctance is bleeding away, Riff can see it in his face. “We gotta be fast,” he says, and Riff knows he’s won.
“Sure. We’ll be so fast the damn cat won’t even know we were there.”
“Hm.” Tony sighs, but he’s got his determined face on now, and Riff grins. “Okay. Jesus. Fine.”
Riff closes his eyes, concentrating on the pigeon. When he opens his eyes, he’s shrinking quickly, and he can feel the shape of his arms changing into long, broad wings. There is the familiar, unpleasant feeling of his bones leeching mass—like somebody is sucking the marrow out of them—and the equally unpleasant feeling of feathers sprouting with prickly insistence out of his skin. Then he’s a bird, light-boned and beady-eyed; he stretches his wings and hops from foot to foot, remembering what the pigeon body feels like. He lets the initial shock of surprise and fear roll through the bird’s brain, waits until he can wrest control of himself, before he looks up at Tony and coos, softly.
“I can’t believe you talked me into this. I really must be bird-brained.” Tony shakes his head, then morphs. He melts into his own pigeon body quickly, stretching his wings and doing the same sideways hop that Riff had, coo-ing once wordlessly, a little resentfully, as if to say: Here I am, against my wishes. If Riff could have rolled his pigeon eyes, he would have.
Come on, he says instead, in the soft twittering pigeon language that is really only good for simple directives (Come here, go there, fly, fly away) and food items (hot dog, french fries, candy, candy with wrapper, white bread, brown bread, seeds, et cetera—pigeons have more words for food than any other category of thing, Riff has learned).
They take off, a heavy struggle of madly flapping wings, and soar over the fence, into the enclosure. Once flying, they are more graceful; Riff flaps himself into a slow glide around the arena, looking for a good place to land.
The leopard has stopped pacing and is sitting on its haunches, watching them. Riff feels the eyes like search beams, and the fear prickles hot and acidic in his tiny skull, but he’s got enough of himself in his head to force himself back to calm, and after one more airborne circuit of the perimeter he drops onto the rocks, twenty feet away from the cat.
By the time he’s morphed back to human, bones filling with mass like lead is being pumped into them and feathers disappearing with the slightest of shivers, Tony has landed next to him and is doing the same. Neither of them stop watching the leopard as they morph, but it hasn’t moved. If anything, it’s gone even more still: it doesn’t twitch a single whisker as they change from birds to humans again, although the warm yellow eyes track the height change.
“Now what?” Tony asks in a whisper.
“Now we touch it,” Riff answers without taking his eyes off the cat’s face, whiskery and soft-looking, surprisingly un-predator-like.
“How?” Tony presses. Riff answers by moving a couple steps closer. “Riff!” Tony hisses, and grabs his wrist. “That thing is vicious.”
They both look at the leopard, which looks back, head cocked sideways. When they were pigeons the cat had been tense, watchful, ears flattened and tail swishing. Now it’s relaxed, like its associations with humans are more along the lines of friendly. Its gaze moves from Riff to Tony, whiskers twitching softly. Then it lies down, head on its paws.
Riff grins around at Tony. “Yeah, a real beast.”
Tony’s fingers are still wrapped around Riff’s wrist, like he’s forgotten he’s holding on. He’s watching the leopard, eyes narrowed. “I don’t like it,” he says quietly. “It’s lying in wait.”
Riff snorts. “You’re paranoid.” He takes a step forward, pulling Tony with him. “Look at it. So cute.” Tony’s fingers tighten around his wrist. Riff’s pulse speeds up; he can’t tell if it’s because of the leopard. “It’ll just take a second. It’s calm. Look, he’s relaxed.” He’s talking low, slow, with careful soothing rhythm—he realizes, belatedly, that he’s talking the way he does to the stray neighborhood dogs. As he takes another step forward, he feels Tony let go. Something like disappointment crawls up his arm from the cold place where Tony’s fingers used to be; he ignores it.
He takes another step, then another. “Almost there,” he says quietly. “I ain’t gonna hurt you, kitty cat.” He’s moving forward along the rock, step by step. The leopard is close now; it still hasn’t moved. It’s watching Riff approach. “It’ll be so easy,” he continues, voice even softer. “Just gotta touch you. Just for a second. Easy as apple pie. Easy as sneezing. Easy as—” He reaches forward. Touches the leopard, very lightly, on its forehead. Draws his hand away again; takes a step backwards. Lets out his own breath. “Easy as that,” he says, and thinks: Thank Christ.
“Riff.”
“I did it,” Riff says, taking another step back without looking away from the leopard. “C’mon, your turn. It’s easy.”
“Riff!”
“It’ll just take a sec—” Riff turns to face Tony, who is no longer looking at him. He’s looking up and to the right—at the second leopard. Who is creeping towards Tony, low to the ground. Tail swishing. Ready to pounce.
Both Riff and Tony seem to understand instinctively that Tony morphing into a smaller, more munchable creature right in front of this second, hungrier-looking leopard is the worst possible option. The feline eyes are laser-focused on Tony, and Riff knows enough about cats to guess that Tony moving at all will prompt an attack.
“Don't move,” Riff says, unnecessarily. Then he concentrates on being a pigeon.
By the time he takes off in an awkward bafflement of wings, startling everyone in the near vicinity, cats included, the second leopard is only ten feet from Tony, and poised to leap. The muddle of feather and claw shooting past distracts it, however—a paw shoots out at Riff but Riff manages to be two inches shy. The leopard’s gaze shifts back and forth between Tony and Riff, clearly debating which to go after.
Riff circles back and flaps past again, just out of reach. This seems to clinch it: the leopard’s eyes are now locked on Riff as he flies around the outcropping of rock, carefully two wingspans short of the lethal claws at any given time.
Hoping that Tony will understand his intention, Riff swoops around one more time, gaining some height, then plummets past the cat towards Tony, flying close enough for the swipe of a paw to catch the edge of one of Riff's wing feathers. Riff dips sideways, almost loses control, but regains it in time to sweep past Tony, very close. They can't talk to each other—Riff in pigeon form, Tony human—but Tony understands what Riff is trying to do regardless, he isn't even looking at Riff as Riff plummets by, is watching the leopard with narrowed eyes, hand up and legs braced, waiting for the leopard to leap forward, past him.
The leopard does exactly that—as if compelled, it pounces after Riff, past where Tony is standing at the ready. It leaps off the rock, chasing the tasty morsel of pigeon, and Tony runs a hand across the sleek furry flank as it passes, unnoticed.
Riff doesn't let the leopard get any closer; he flaps madly to get the height and then darts over the enclosure glass, aware that Tony, behind him, has also morphed into a pigeon and will follow not far behind. Sure enough, they're on the other side of the glass—and human—seconds later, Riff cackling breathlessly and Tony looking white but relieved. Behind the glass, both leopards pace back and forth. Riff flips them off, then turns away, still cackling.
“Jesus,” Tony gasps, when he can talk. “I warned you about the second one.”
“It was asleep!”
“Obviously it wasn't,” Tony grouses, but he's grinning wide now, his eyes crinkled with suppressed laughter. “Jesus,” he says again. “If I’d been mauled—”
“It would have been just like any Tuesday. Just another scar for the collection.”
Tony grunts. “I got enough scars, thanks.”
“Should we try it?” Riff asks. “Here?” No need to clarify what he means: both of them can feel the potential of the snow leopard at their fingertips: the tingling power of a new acquisition. It will only take seconds to access it, to put themselves in the heads of the cats. Seconds to shrink down into a feline body, lithe muscle and fur.
But before Tony can say yes, they both hear the approaching footsteps, the tap tap tap of a baton against a belt. They both see the beam of a flashlight sweeping across the bars of the nearby fence, casting jagged toothy shadows across the sidewalk.
“Guard,” Tony whispers, and Riff says: “Park.” They're pigeons again in seconds, and soaring out over gates not long after, Riff veering off course only to take a shit on the night guard, to the guard’s disgust and Tony's delight.
They land on the grass of a hill in Central Park with twin whumps of heavy, fluffy down—neither of them had quite mastered graceful landings. But the grass is soft and the night is the perfect temperature—cool, clear—and Riff is too impatient to land carefully, or without the accompanying quiet squawk. They come to themselves and Riff says, immediately: “Last one to morph to leopard buys dinner tomorrow.”
Tony frowns. “You always figure out new shapes first.”
Riff grins, and ruffles Tony's hair hard enough to jerk his head back and forth. “Well, if you wanna quit buying dinner, you better get faster.”
Tony pushes Riff off impatiently. “Count us off, then.”
Riff counts down from three, then closes his eyes. He pictures, as clearly as he can, the snow leopard as it had looked at the moment he'd touched it: white and black in the moonlight, its face upturned and expectant. He remembers the soft fuzz of fur under his own hand, the tail swishing slowly, the giant paws. He pictures himself behind the whiskers, the teeth, the big yellow eyes. He imagines the furry tail switched sideways, under his own control.
Riff begins to shrink. The world gets bigger around him; the ground comes up to meet him.
It’s nothing like melting into the rat’s body feels like. He feels himself getting stronger, leaner, more compact. He feels like he’d been boiled down to his absolute essentials, like he isn’t made out of flesh and bones anymore but steel, or carbon-fiber, or wire: something light and flexible, but unbreakable. And although he can feel the cat’s thoughts invade his own, he doesn’t feel the fear of the rat, the scattered confusion of the pigeon. This is something else entirely. There is wary suspicion, floating at the back of his eyeballs, but underneath the fear is confidence, surety, clean-lined determination. Riff is ready to fight. Riff is taut at the seams, ready for action, pumped. Kill or be killed, he thinks, although they aren’t in any danger.
He shivers, nose to tail, feels his fur prick up. He sniffs at the air: fresh grass and smoke and the metallic tang of humans, plus something else, something musky and familiar, a scent he’s occasionally picked up as a rat. He picks up a paw, stretches experimentally. Razor-sharp claws sliding out of delicate-looking pink pads. Knives, Riff thinks, and smiles to himself.
Next to him, Tony morphs. Riff doesn't watch it happen, but the smell of the air changes so fast Riff feels like he's been punched in the nose. Suddenly the air is thick with the same musk he’s caught in tantalizing wisps before, something both familiar and unfamiliar, a smell that is now so unmistakably Tony it makes the fur at the nape of his neck stand up straight. He twists to look: Tony is fully morphed, sitting next to Riff in snow leopard form, examining his own paws. His fur is sleek and unruffled by the change. He's a little bit bigger than Riff, broader across the face, and his fur is marked slightly differently: larger spots across his shoulders and back. His whiskers quiver, and he gets off his haunches to turn in place, watching his own tail flick out behind him.
Cool, he says, in a quiet low purr like pebbles shifting in the tide.
‘Cool’ doesn't even begin to cover it, thinks Riff. He feels thrown off center, pushed sideways. The smell in his nose is as intoxicating as the best tequila, as warm and addictive as cigarettes, sweet and fresh as summer fruit. He thinks he’s smelled it all his life. He’s only really smelling it now. It’s like being drugged—like being hit. It’s horrendous, and glorious, and he never wants to stop smelling it.
He puts out a paw, bats at Tony's shoulder. He doesn’t exactly know why he does it, only that he needs Tony to look at him, which Tony does. He cocks his head, watching Riff. The smell is so strong Riff can taste it.
Riff bats him again, this time on the face, a quick bap to the snout. Tony blinks, slowly, and his nose twitches. Then he lifts a paw, and bats Riff back.
Got you, Tony says. It's in the same grumble purr that Riff can feel in his bones like an oncoming train, in the space between paw-pads, in the ventricles of his quick-beating feline heart. The smell is fucking him up; he can barely breathe. Tony's nose is still twitching, like he can smell something, too, and the whole moment stretches out more solemnly than any moment ever has as rats, or pigeons, or even humans.
Riff reaches out again, bats him a little harder across the face. This time Tony rears back onto his haunches.
Got you, Riff says, like an echo. Tony's eyes widen at the sound, and Riff guesses that his own leopard voice has the same timbre as Tony's: bass notes only, deep in the chest, a grumble and a roar and a hum, all mixed up together like they've been put in a mortar and pestle and ground fine. Tony pauses, sitting up tall, his tail swishing back and forth: watching him. Waiting for something. It's funny, Riff thinks to himself, how much it feels like a challenge.
Tony, without warning, leaps forward.
The funny thing about being an animorph is that you spend a lot of time defending your own brain against the brain of whatever animal you're in. That's what it feels like: playing defense. Identifying directions from which the animal brain is attacking—fear centers, instinctual urges—and putting up fortifications against it. Controlling the fear. Controlling the instinct to cower (the rat) or flee (the pigeon).
Riff is good at this. He can feel the animal fighting to take over, and he can tamp it down, beat it back. He can pick and choose, to some extent, which pieces of animal he lets worm their way into his brain, which instincts he lets move his limbs for him.
The side effect of this inner battle is that Riff can’t always tell what's animal and what isn't. If Tony had jumped him when he was human, would he have reacted so quickly? Would he have known what to do? Would he have done it?
Because now, as if time has slowed down to the creepy slide of dreaming, he watches the muscles of Tony's flank tense in preparation for the pounce, watches the tense and release of the action. Tony is fast, but it doesn't matter: Riff’s reflexes—either his actual reflexes or his cat-brain reflexes—are excellent, and he’s ready. He rears up, and when Tony barrels into him he hits Riff’s chest. Riff wraps his paws around Tony and the momentum bowls them both over; they roll down the slight incline of the hill together, a ball of white fur and limb and thrashing tail.
Riff can feel Tony’s teeth in his neck, not hard enough to hurt but definitely there, buried in the fur and flesh, clamped down on the pulse of his blood like a vice. When they reach the bottom of the hill Tony is on top of him: heat and fluff and his teeth still in Riff’s neck. But Riff hasn’t been called “scrappy” all his life for nothing: he’s got them both flipped around in seconds with a neat push of paw and thrust of shoulder. He yanks his head back, pulling himself out of Tony’s teeth, and pushes down hard on Tony’s chest, pinning him into the cold, crushed grass.
Stay, he says, and feels the rumble of his own voice in both their chests.
Like hell, is the answering growl, like a gut punch, the sound like a blow to Riff’s sternum that he can feel ricochet through every bone in his body. It hits him here, and here, and here; it makes him crazy, that growl. And the smell of Tony still in his nose. And the silk of Tony’s fur. And Tony's paw, on Riff’s face—
Fuck.
Tony has tipped them over again by the time Riff realizes what's happening. They roll and wrestle and Tony’s back legs are paddling at him wildly, his front paws wrapped around Riff’s shoulders again. They go head over tail four or five times and then fall apart, scrambling away from each other and then crashing back again, the full weight of muscle and bone coming down hard. Again and again they roll over each other, scramble away, jump back. Claws out. Biting and scratching and kicking—somehow never enough to draw blood, but not gentle, either.
As they leap around and over each other, paws swiping, Riff lets the cat take over a little bit more. He thinks Tony does, too, because they settle into a liquid confrontational dance over the grass, somehow an even give-and-take. The fighting is a game they both know the rules of with every muscle in their bodies, something instinctual and ingrained in the cats. It’s fierce but kind, serious but joyful. It's play: genuine, wholehearted play, with claws thrown in for fun, and Riff could do it for hours.
At some point Tony bounds off into the darkness but with a look over his shoulder like: Follow. So Riff does, and they run into the trees, racing around trunks and boulders, leaping against each other and scrabbling on the dirt at each turn, crazy frenetic energy sliding them into obstacles and each other at speed. It’s like they’re kids again, playing catch-me-if-you-can; except it isn’t, not quite, because they do catch each other, over and over and over, the game isn’t so much to run as to be caught, and each time they’re wrestling longer and longer, Tony’s teeth in Riff’s neck, Riff’s claws in Tony’s fur.
They exhaust the copse of trees and run back into the grass, rolling in the dew, leaping again and again, yowling now—something urgent rising in Riff’s chest—
And then Tony is on top of him. He has his paw on Riff’s neck, pressing down.
Stay, he says, mimicking Riff from earlier, but he says it sweeter, with a feline smile—half-shut eyes, ears pricked forward—and the way he says it makes all the strength flood out of Riff’s body immediately. He goes limp just as quickly as he had been pinned, head falling back and his tail flopping next to him with a soft, gentle thump. It’s as if Tony’s flipped a switch, as if he’s found the button on Riff that says: Power Down. Riff is suddenly, uncomfortably aware that Tony has had this ability the whole time, and has only just decided to use it.
Riff looks up; Tony looks down. They aren’t making any kind of noise now, not growling or yowling or anything, Tony is just looking at him with his harvest moon eyes and his soft leopard face, his paw pressing gently, and Riff is lolling under him, rag-doll limp and waiting. He doesn’t even know what he’s waiting for.
Tony licks him. It’s very slow, and very gently done: a single lap of the tongue from snout to forehead. Fine sandpaper against his fur, the warmth of Tony’s breath, and then it’s over before it’s really begun. Tony leans back again, and his paw comes up off of Riff’s neck. But he doesn’t move away.
They look at each other for a long, silent moment. Then Riff licks him back: swipes his tongue over the fluff at his cheek, a rough push of his face against the side of Tony’s jaw. Tony pushes back gently against him, and so does Riff, and then they aren’t fighting at all.
And the smell of Tony still quivering in his nose. And the silk of Tony's fur yielding under his tongue. And Tony's paw, on Riff—
Riff transforms back. He tears himself away, mid-morph, steps back and away from Tony even as he can feel the seeping cold of his fur disappearing, the strange shrinking sensation in his mouth of his teeth becoming human teeth again. Tony, after a beat, follows—Riff doesn’t turn away this time. He watches the human emerge from the cat, claws becoming nails, tail disappearing, paws becoming hands. Whiskers turning into stubble. Fur into hair.
“It’s been almost two hours,” Riff says, before Tony can speak.
“Oh,” is all Tony says. He looks pink, flustered. He looks exactly how Riff feels. There are two heavy, awkward beats.
“We should go back,” Riff blurts out, over his thumping heart. “Before—uh. Before it gets light out.”
“Sure.” Tony hasn’t looked away once. Riff’s heart is beating a million miles a minute. When he thinks about Tony’s tongue on his forehead, he wants to laugh. He wants to ask: Did you mean it?
By wordless agreement they skip the subway and fly home in pigeon form, even though it’s miles of flying. Also by wordless agreement, they go to Tony’s: flop into his room through the window and change back quickly, both of them wincing as they feel the lactic acid built up by flight settle into their human muscles. Tony throws Riff a pair of pajama pants and they get into Tony’s bed: all of this without speaking, half habit and half ritual. Only, tonight it feels very different. Tonight it feels dangerous.
Every other time they’ve transformed for the first time, they’ve talked about it afterwards. They’ve talked about how it feels to be a rat, or a pigeon, or—that one terrible time—a poodle. They talk about different senses, trying to describe the world through another animal’s eyes, trying to make sense of what they’d seen.
This time, they don’t talk for a long, long while.
“I liked that,” Tony finally says. His voice is quiet in the dark, soft and low. The words have an odd heavy significance, like Tony is telling him a secret. “Being leopards.”
“Me too,” Riff says back, into the dark. Fifteen minutes after they’ve gotten into bed, his heart is still beating fast, and his own words don’t seem enough. He can’t figure out what to say, can’t explain exactly how he feels right now: tense and tender-raw and shaking—hopeful and frightened and so, so desperate. Like the cat is still in him, and its paw is stretched out. Like all his claws are extended. Like he’s got a growl at the back of his throat. “We should do it again tomorrow.”
“Yeah,” Tony says. He turns onto his side, so that he's facing Riff—Riff can only barely see him, but he can feel the shift and hear Tony's voice change. “Yeah, let’s. Tomorrow. We’ll—we’ll do it again tomorrow. The park.”
He’s speaking, but his words are slurry and vague. And the smell of him—his human smell—is in Riff’s nose. His hair—his human hair—is close enough to tickle Riff’s cheek. His human heart is beating as fast as Riff’s, and so hard Riff can hear it. And his hand—his hand, his human hand—his hand has found Riff’s hip, in the dark.