Chapter Text
“I have eyes on the mandrake.”
You murmured this into your watch, your lips barely moving as you sat at the bar, nursing an ouzo, trying to pretend like you were a lot more sophisticated than you were. At the end of the bar, the target was drinking an ouzo as well, although he was doing so in the practiced manner of someone who had grown up drinking similar liquors and therefore did not remind one of a boy trying to fill his father’s too-loose jeans and clumsily figure out his leather belt, finally emerging from the closet with an unsure and hopeful smile.
You were at least good at masking this in small doses, though, so as long as no one was watching you the way you were watching the mandrake — though you were trying not to make it so obvious — then you’d be just fine.
The text back came through almost immediately: Permission to engage.
And then, in a separate text, but sent just after the first one: Carefully.
Even from several cities away, you could feel the tacit anticipation in that word, the crossed fingers from your superior, hoping against hope that you would heed their warning, but knowing that there was a nonzero chance you would not. Not because of your own behavior, really; it was just that the organization had recruited a few members that were not the sort of people that earned remarks like Follows instructions well and Gets along with other students on their report cards. You’d wanted to show them that you were the exception, but it was probably a little ridiculous to bring up your elementary school report cards in a job interview.
You sipped at your ouzo again — God, the stuff really was the worst, and seemed more suited for an after-dinner drink while sitting around the table with cigars or something — and motioned the bartender over. When she arrived, she crossed her arms on the bar and leaned forward, giving you a view of her assets, purring, “What can I do for you?”
You said, “That guy over there. In the hoodie? Drinking the ouzo. If I could, uh, buy him his next drink.”
The bartender, who was not unattractive but who was not even on your radar at the moment, not during a mission — you might come back after everything was said and done, at least just to spend the night with her to see what she was like, and also because you felt a little remorse for the white-person thin-lipped smile she adopted, clearly disappointed — said, “You got it.”
You watched from the tilted rim of your glass as she settled up another guest’s tab and then looped back around to the mandrake, whose dark hoodie with the hood pulled up would probably have raised suspicion if this hadn’t been a dive bar of the sort of emo variety. The lights were already producing what seemed like single digits of wattage, and he was leaning against the wall, sitting on the very last barstool, with the sort of look on his face that said a person really wouldn’t want to fuck with him — not because he was dangerous, at least not right away, but because it felt like getting past whatever veneer of defenses he had put up would be an operation of high risk and low reward.
Sure enough, when she informed him of your generous offer, he glanced at you, sneering, though it was possibly the smallest and least offensive sneer you had ever seen in your life, abated by his hesitation at performing the action. It was entirely performative, an Archen ruffling its feathers to make itself look bigger, because it was more scared of you than you were of it.
You caught sight of his fangs, though. Just for a second, and he probably didn’t even know it, but it cemented what you were doing here and what your mission was. Even if he was — from what you could see of him, at least, with the blond sections of hair framing his face — extremely pretty.
He said something to the bartender, and though you couldn’t hear it, you could hear her response:
“I’m not telling him that.”
You smiled, despite yourself.
But you stopped smiling a moment later, because the young man had slid some bills across the counter and was hurriedly making his way out of the bar.
You tapped your watch against the screen on the bar in front of you. The notification that payment had gone through took entirely too long, even though it was near-instantaneous. With an apologetic look back at the bartender, who only half-noticed your expression, already turning away to serve someone else, you followed him out of the building and into the adjacent alley.
You had guessed that if he was going to run he would do it using the power afforded to him by virtue of being a mandrake. In his case — shadows. The bright lights on the main street gave him nowhere to hide, while it was difficult to even see the corners of the alley. If you hadn’t been prepared, he would have slipped into the shadows produced by the single streetlight just over the wall that draped most of the alley in darkness. From there, he could have gone anywhere. You weren’t entirely sure how shadow travel worked, except that, like, it was nighttime, so probably a lot better and more effectively than it did in the daytime.
Fortunately, you were prepared.
The sight of the young man wrapped up in a spider web would have been amusing if he didn’t look so frantic about getting away. He was struggling so much that his hood had slipped away from his face and unveiled the blond hair that framed his face, which hung down his back and over his shoulders like sleet, white at the ends, anemically so. Though they were small, you were fairly certain you could ascertain the presence of two tiny yellow horns on either side of his head, positioned just behind his ears, like spikes growing out from his skull. His fangs flashed angrily as he struggled, and he glared with the silver eye not covered by his asymmetrical haircut at your Ariados, who was regarding him with a mostly bored expression, though you could tell her legs were just tense enough to get her out of the way if he somehow managed to escape. This was damning in itself — if he had been nothing more than human, she likely would have seen any attempt on her safety as laughable at best. The fact that she was preparing herself meant that he could do some real damage if he wanted to.
You slipped your hands into the pockets of your leather jacket, which had the effect of making you look casual and unaffected and arrogant as you walked down the alley, but was really because you had a smoke bomb in one pocket and Flygon’s PokeBall in the other, and had your fingers closed around each one of them, in case you needed to escape.
“You were a real bitch to track down,” you said, because you wanted to say, Holy shit, you’re beautiful, and so you needed to say something else instead.
“Don’t, love,” he said softly, and at first, you thought he must be talking to you, and that he had entirely turned the tables on you by hitting on you instead, to lower your defenses. But he wasn’t looking at you, and you realized with a strange lurch in your chest that he was instead speaking to the drake part of his mandrake, that the relationship between them was possibly more amicable than you or the organization had previously thought.
A lot more amicable.
“It’s alright,” he was reassuring his drake, and from the way his fingers clenched by his side you could tell that he was aching to do something with them, maybe to slide them over his heart reassuringly. “I’ll take care of it. He’s just some coward.” At this, he fixed vitriolic eyes on you, and then, just as quickly, a ridiculous amount of affection replaced the hatred as he stared back down at the ground, speaking once more to the invisible presence inside of him. His voice was gentle and so full you could almost see the words forming in the air in front of him. “Go back to sleep, alright? I love you.”
Hm. This was troubling.
He regarded you once more and said, “Me being hard to track down was intentional.”
“I’m sure it was,” you said, coming to a stop a few feet away from him, enough to see the storm raging in his eyes and possibly also to be shoved against the brick wall beside you if he got out of the web, but you would take that chance. You wanted to see what he was capable of, masochistic as it was of you. You had never actually seen a mandrake in the flesh before — or at least you hadn’t seen one that wasn’t separated from you by a foot-thick reinforced window. “What is it exactly that you thought we were going to do with you once we made contact with you?”
He was still pushing against the web. He was pressing so hard against the spider silk that you could see his skin was turning white — whiter than it was already, anyway — with the force of it.
“Doesn’t matter what you were going to do,” he growled at you. “It’s not your fucking situation to go poking your nose into. We’re not hurting anyone.”
Not yet, you knew your superiors would say. You knew it so surely that you could almost hear it from behind you. You wouldn’t have been surprised to turn around and find they had secretly accompanied you. You said, instead, “You’re dangerous. You’re a liability. If you wanted, you could hurt a lot of people.”
“If I wanted,” he shot back poisonously. “I don’t want. And my darling doesn’t, either.”
My darling. You turned that phrase over again and again inside your head. It had been spoken as if he could never say it hatefully, no matter how angry the words surrounding it were.
You had always been exceptionally curious. It was part of why the organization had recruited you. You found yourself curious now, probably to their detriment — but you were a human being, too, and you didn’t see the use in carving out that part of yourself to be the perfect example of effective espionage. You thought probably your judgment would suffer quite a bit if you denied yourself the chance to be humane when it came up.
You said, “Will you answer some questions I have—”
You were about to finish it with, if I let you go afterwards? But without warning there was suddenly a blade at your throat, and you could feel the insectoid thorax of a Scyther pressing against you from behind, and its disconcerting raspy breathing against your ear. Ariados was focused now entirely on you instead of the mandrake, which was strange, because she didn’t really have much to lose aside from being given to a less competent partner upon your death, but her eyes were wide in the way you were used to seeing on humans, not on Pokemon, and even less so on arachnid Pokemon with no personal connection to you.
“Oh, Christ,” came the rolling-r banchou accent from behind you on your other side — the owner of the Scyther, most likely. “I wasn’t expectin’ two of you. Hey, you’re a mandrake, right?” At the young man’s affirmative nod, the person — you obviously couldn’t turn your head to see them — said, “Then get outta here while you have the chance. Hey, fuckin’ spider… let ‘im go, or I take the head off of your precious agent.”
Ariados, bafflingly, relaxed her web, and the mandrake shouldered off the strands, looping one hand around the opposite wrist and massaging it a bit, and then doing the same to the other.
You expected him to disappear then, so you weren’t surprised when he sank down into the shadows, as smoothly as a stone slipping under the surface of a lake.
What did surprise you was when you felt him reappear — it was something like the creeping feeling of walking down a long hallway at night — just behind you, and suddenly the blade was no longer at your throat, and the Scyther was crying out in surprise and pain from what sounded like the ground. Your would-be captor said, “Hey, wait a damn minute—” but the mandrake was not interested in waiting a damn minute, apparently, because he hooked an arm around your waist, and then without warning the alley faded from view, and darkness overtook your vision.