Chapter Text
You’re exhausted and - what’s that American phrase? You’re so hungry you could eat a horse? No - you’re as hungry as a horse? You suppose the exact wording doesn’t matter, not while you’re struggling to toe away from the brink of unconsciousness. That could mean death.
Shifting into your cat form eats up a lot of your energy. You’re not sure exactly how many calories are needed to compensate for the transformation - there's not exactly a science dedicated to the mostly-unknown world of shifters - but it's safe to say the action leaves you ravenous.
Whether you transform from a human to a cat or from a cat to a human, you’re left feeling starved and exhausted.
The clothes you had been wearing - tac vest, plate carriers plus various other bits of military equipment - had been heavy for you to run around in, even as a human. As a cat, who may or may not be bleeding to death, it’s worse. You’d struggled to slip out of them, but had done so with the help of a lucky adrenaline rush. Even that has abandoned you now.
Better bleeding as a cat than dead, you think, wincing as you hobble along on all fours. At the time - some thirty seconds ago - it sounded like a brilliant idea. Russell, no, Adler had shot you and the only thing running through your mind was… surviving. So, you did. He left you there, alone, without the decency to sit with you as you bled. You were dying, alone, and he was letting you.
Whatever - the second he left you, you shifted and got the fuck out of there, only realising how terrible of an idea that had been once the pain hit you. Sure, you were far too recognisable as a human, Bell is wanted dead - that much had been made clear to you - but how much worse would a bullet affect a domestic cat? Especially the hollow-points Russell favoured…
Shit, you think to yourself. Without medical attention, and quickly, you’re a dead-man-walking. Dead-woman-walking. Cat. Whatever.
You yowl in pain, panting with your jaws parted as you start to feel light-headed. Ah, shit.
You collapse in on yourself near the entrance of a monastery, your instincts screaming at you to take a look at the bullet wound. The urge to lick at it, and clean it up in some way is near overwhelming. Your coat, which you usually curse for being so short and keeping you cold all the time, thankfully allows for you to somewhat see the mess of flesh and fur. It’s an ugly thing. Looking at it makes you feel twice as nauseous.
Your senses are assaulted even more by the surrounding sounds of the CIA’s forces wrapping up their sensitive site exploitation and excusing themselves from the island. For an organisation that is supposed to specialise in various black operations, they are rarely quiet.
The sound of troops boarding their helo transports, yelling at each other so they’re audible over the loud rotors cutting through the air, makes your ears pin down in annoyance. The loud noises from CIA forces, the pain of the gunshot wound in your abdomen and the massive loss of energy from shifting into a cat compounds terribly on you, the combination of torturous sensations overwhelming you entirely. If you could cry, you would.
Suddenly, it’s all too much. You can’t fight the unconsciousness that vignettes your vision and with horror, you don’t. Your awareness leaves you shockingly fast and you fall unconscious uncomfortably close to the evacuating troops.
The first thing you notice when you come to is the fucking cone around your head. A cone. The next thing you clock is the size of the world in proportion to you. Everything’s huge, you’re not - it’s as easy as that to determine that you’re still in your cat form.
Then, the memories trickle in. The CIA, Perseus, Solovetsky and… and fucking Russell Adler.
He shot you. After all you did… you turned your back on your cause for him and he just fucking shot you! He’d made a mess of your mind and yet he still felt entitled to bury lead into your body when he was done with it, when it’d served whatever purpose he’d picked it apart for in the first place. Pfft, whatever - who needs a jackass like him, anyway? No matter how handsome he was when he spoke your language, no matter how rugged he looked, how nice he was when you warmed his bed - that was fucking it. You hate him!
Well, if you tell yourself that enough, it’s surely to come true one day, right?
“Make sure she’s hydrated,” a male voice says over you, muffled through the haze of your mind. You realise with trepidation that the familiar haze means you’re drugged, again. When will you escape that? MK-Ultra had been enough opiates for you for the rest of your damn life. You glance around the room you’d woken up in, investigating with both your nose and your eyes, despite the narrowed vision from the cone around your collar. It’s a veterinary office. Good. Somebody had found you after Adler had shot you - after you stupidly wasted so much energy shifting into a cat - and had brought you to a vet. They’re talking in Russian - you’re still in Russia. That’s ideal if you ever plan on finding your way back home. “I’ll send you along with some painkillers to be intravenously injected, as you mentioned you are a doctor yourself and cats are typically resistant to oral medications… of course, if you’d prefer suppositories- ”
You lift your nose to deconstruct the scent, eyes widening when you realise -
“We’ll manage with the shots.”
- the scent belongs to Russell fucking Adler. You swing the massive cone around to the source of the sound and smell, hissing at the American harshly.
His head jerks back slightly in veiled surprise when you bare your sharp canines at him.
“This is normal,” the vet assures Russell, catching you off guard by grabbing you by your torso before he plants you into a cat carrier, swinging the caged door shut in your face. “She’s scared and in pain. Take good care of her, mister.”
You have the worst luck, you decide, hissing as you sulk in the carrier. Of all people to have found your injured cat form… you didn’t even know he liked cats!
Russell picks up the carrier, surprisingly gentle, and pays for the veterinary services at reception. You must’ve passed out just after shifting into your cat form… at least you weren’t awake for when they took your temperature - you’d never allowed yourself to be caught by a human before, let alone be examined by an animal doctor, but that doesn’t mean you haven’t looked into how these things work, mentally preparing yourself on what to expect. You’ll be damned before you let Russell near your parts again.
Fuck him, you vow, and not literally.
After he finishes paying for your life-saving services, which you only need thanks to him, he settles your carrier down into the passenger seat of a car.
He turns the radio on, something Russian starts to play - Kalinka, you recognise - and he promptly turns it off. You hear the rustling of a cigarette being retrieved from a crumpled carton, but the expected sound of a lighter flickering to life doesn’t come.
You allow yourself a guilty comfort, deeply inhaling his miasma, something poisoned with tobacco, expensive cologne, gun oil and blood. There’s some inane instinct scratching at the back of your head - it’s telling you to rub your face against him, to arch your back and grind the side of your body against his legs.
Another reason, amongst many, for you to completely disregard your instincts. Mama always said there was something wrong with yours - she’d blamed your entirely human father for screwing up the gene pool, not that it was her fault for marrying a non-shifter. The shifter population is dwindling - has been for centuries.
She’d been shocked when you were born with the disappearing ability - praised her cat instincts for her perfect luck.
Yours has caused you nothing but trouble.
Maybe, once this is all over, you’ll visit her grave and follow her example. You’ll find some mundane husband and grow old in the village you were born in, having lived the majority of your life from now on dull yet safe.
Russell returns with you to the warehouse in West Berlin and you presume it’s to wrap things up before heading back for Langley, where he’s shared with you that his home is located - if that hadn’t been a lie. Russell settles your cat carrier on his workbench while he deals with various stacks of paper, files, stationery and equipment.
“What’s this?” Mason hovers near the cat carrier curiously, giving it a strange look - as if it could be connected to an op somehow. He cautiously dips his head down to get a good look at you, and you don’t dare to blink - you’re not ready to be that vulnerable yet.
“Bell,” Russell says shortly, and your heart stops. Bell? Why- why would he name you Bell? Unless… no, perhaps he’s a particularly unimaginative person who names everything Bell.
Maybe all his pets shared that name - that’s… disgusting, if true, to think that you might have been considered a pet by him. A strange pet that he slept around with when convenient - a foreign pet whom he fooled into believing that he cared for her. That you were comrades, close friends fuelled by shared trauma in Vietnam. Russell elaborates with as few words as possible. “I adopted a cat.”
Mason’s expression remains ordinary, but his eyebrows shoot up. Woods blinks. “That’s fucked.”
You go still, wondering if Russell had really discovered the connection between you and, well, you. You scramble to the back of your carrier, a little afraid that somebody might actually realise you and your human form had the exact same eyeshade - a weird coincidence at best.
“So, Russ does feel guilt after all,” Frank sarcastically scoffs. “You named a cat after the kid you fucked around with?”
Huh. It almost sounds like Woods cares about you. Well, cared. You’re supposed to be dead, after all. Unfortunate, you really thought you’d sown some camaraderie with him during your shared op in Ukraine.
“Bell wasn’t some kid,” Russell snaps. “She was thirty, at least.”
Pfft. You’re fairly sure Russell’s actually called you ‘kid’ before, so, you’re a kid right until he shoots you - how convenient for his rationale. You’re sure the scowl you pull must look comical on the face of a cat. You wonder why they keep calling you that - Bell - rather than… the asset, or the subject, or even… your name.
Scratch that, you can’t really blame them for the last one - you don’t remember it either, yet. You wonder if you had been so resistant to interrogation that even your name hadn’t passed through your lips.
Woods sticks his middle finger up lazily. “You’re all kids to me.” A moment passes. “What’s the cone for, you get her freshly spayed or something?”
“No,” Russell says, “somebody shot her.”
“Shit…” Mason begins accusingly. “You do feel guilty.”
“After all these years… mercy killing a terrorist is what loosens the screws in your head?”
You’re a bit miffed that Woods refers to you in such a way, considering you’d given up… everything, essentially, in order to stop the green light nukes, and the only thing that softens the blow is the consideration that Woods is purposely trying to rile Russell up.
Russell doesn’t respond, straightening some papers on his desk that had been strewn about in a messy pile. Your sharp vision catches the bit of paperwork, recognising the ciphers and code on them from before Cuba… God, that feels so long ago. It’s your paperwork that Russell is gathering… probably to put it in the shredder, later.
If only he’d let you out to roam for a bit - with your KGB skillset, it shouldn’t be hard for you to slip out of the safe house, it should be easier, actually, as a cat. West Berlin, tactically, isn’t the worst place to be. Sure, you’d betrayed Perseus by giving Solovetsky away - that bridge is as good as burned - but that doesn’t mean you can’t utilise your skills to fade into obscurity elsewhere in the world. You just had to get out of here.
“Hudson’s not going to want it just roaming around.” Woods taps the side of your carrier and you flinch a little, unable to see him from the inside.
“I’m putting her,” Russell stresses, “in medical.”
You blink- oh, for fuck’s sake-
Russell picks up your carrier, careful when it comes to minimising how much he swings it around, a small duffel bag slung over his shoulder as he walks into medical with you, closing the door behind himself.
He sets up the room to be sufficient for a cat to exist in, sort of. He places a mug of water down on the ground, along with a paper plate of… a cut-up Burger Town burger patty. Alright, at least it isn’t cat-food, which you’re not entirely confident that you wouldn’t eat, given how hungry you are.
He unlocks the latch to your carrier and you decide to play shy, pressed to the back of the carrier and not daring to creep out - not with him in the room.
You have no such luck, Russell reaches into the carrier and pries you from the back, pulling you forward with a tiny syringe in hand. It makes your blood go cold and you hiss, mewling strangled noises as you try to squirm out of his grip.
Movement from the corner of your vision confirms that Woods is spectating the entire ordeal through the glass, a smirk as he watches Russell wrestle with a cat. Mason’s there, too, albeit he looks far more concerned than amused at the scene he’s watching. Woods and Mason murmur something between them, and through your screeching, you manage to catch the words ‘psych eval.’
Hmph. You lose when Russell manages to get a hold of you properly for half a second and he seizes the opportunity to pinch the back of your neck in order to scruff you. You howl at that, unable to shake the foolproof hold without causing yourself an immense amount of pain. He delivers the syringe into the skin of your neck and injects the contents in before releasing you.
Disgruntled, you hiss at him a few times. He stares at you both impassively and exasperated. “I’m helping you,” he says.
You’re a cat, so even if you had the desire to, you couldn’t deign that with a response.
Instead, you shift your stare from him to Woods, who hovers outside the window. He gives Russell an incredulous look of his own and Russell’s answer comes in the form of closing the blinds on the older agent.
Childish, you would scoff, could you talk. You might’ve found such… activities endearing, before, but now you feel rather pathetic. This is the group foiling Perseus’ plans.
Whatever painkiller Russell had injected with you just now is fast working because you begin to feel airy, your head heavy and limbs leaden. Exhaustion is creeping in on you and despite being unconscious for the better portion of the past day, you feel like you can sleep for weeks to come.
Your hunger, however, isn’t something that becomes suddenly bearable with the administration of the painkiller - so you attempt to give the bit of Burger Town patty a go.
You struggle, immensely. The patty is too low on the ground and the stupid fucking cone around your head prevents you from reaching it with your short feline neck. Your attempt at drinking water is slightly more successful.
A quick look around confirms Russell’s presence leaning against the wall, watching you struggle. Resorting to meowing at Russell feels like defeat.
He immediately identifies the problem. “Can’t reach that?” He reaches down, picking up little bite-sized bits of patty and offering them directly in front of your face. You’re scandalised at the prospect of eating from his hands, embarrassed that he’s offering to feed you, like you’re just some baby.
A disgusting feeling of deja vu washes through you; you’ve done this before, you think. Not as a cat, but as a human with your arms incapacitated, head hung limply from your neck. The memory is blurry, but the feeling of weakness persists. The figure in your memory, an outline of Russell, spoon-feeds you gruel in a nondescript dim laboratory.
Now, like then, you have little other choice than to accept his help. It’s alright, you reason, you are starving.
You accept the food offered between his thumb and forefinger, not caring to mind your teeth on his skin - surely nothing he hasn’t felt before - finishing off the lukewarm Burger Town patty before searching for somewhere comfortable to curl up and sleep.
It’s harder than you expect. The bright overhead light is an assault on your eyes and, besides the gurney, every surface is cold and hard. You dismiss the gurney as a viable spot and, in some twisted irony, crawl willingly back into your own carrier. A comfortable cage - it’s dark, there’s a small blanket at the back and it’s private.
You wonder if Russell’s going to leave now that you’ve settled in - like he left you when you were bleeding out in the open arctic air.
He doesn’t.