Variant Strain

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In the end, despite MJ's playful insistence that he run down the freeway into Manhattan while carrying her, they had taken the subway in after a brief stop at the Watson house to drop off their purchases and for Peter to pick up his wallet. He was managing to keep himself from eating his phone every time he shifted, so he was reasonably sure he wasn't going to eat up his debit card or his bus pass.

They'd transferred to the bus and were standing on the block of Whelan's apartment within an hour. Peter had needed to keep his eyes closed for most of the ride in. The subway had been bad for him, but stepping out into the crisp, brisk air of Manhattan had been worse. So many scents and sounds. Too many to focus on individually. Not like back in their neighborhood where he could easily pick out individuals, here everything just washed out into a sea of humanity. A background hiss of overlapping heartbeats and scents that made it impossible for his senses to focus.

"Are you going to be okay?" MJ asked worriedly as he shuffled down out of the bus. She had to lead him by the arm.

"Sensory overload." He mumbled back. "Just too many... too much. It's a little overwhelming."

She gave a sardonic grin, "So... if you'd gone in by yourself, you probably wouldn't've gotten too far anyway?"

"No 'I told you, so's?" He whimpered. "Please?"

He groaned tried to pull his shirt up over his mouth and nose. It was a futile gesture, he realized. His sense of smell seemed to extend through his skin. No amount of holding his breath would seem to filter out the assault. He could sort of ignore the noise at least, when he tried. That one most people... normal people... could learn to do.

He hoped his sense of smell would shut down soon. If you kept them near a bad odor long enough, they stopped noticing it. His didn't quite manage it.

MJ continued to look at him in concern as she led him over to plop into a patio seat of a local coffeeshop. "Hold on."

She ducked into the shop and came back out a few minutes later with a hot paper cup of coffee. She held the fragrant beverage under his nose and he got the idea. It helped a little. Gave him something to focus on. The problem was that compared to the people smells, the single cup of coffee could barely hold his nose's attention.

"Is it helping?" She asked worriedly.

He shook his head, "Not enough. It's kind of..."

People smells. The coffee just didn't stand up against the concentrated smell of people all around him. He turned to look at MJ and she startled at the intensity of his gaze.

"What?"

"Um... sorry about this." He mumbled and leaned over to her, burying his face into the crook of her neck.

She froze. Every muscle in her body suddenly taut and he knew she was a bare inch away from screaming. He knew this, intellectually, but her scent enveloped him, washing out the rest of the scents in his immediate vicinity and he wallowed in it. He breathed in deep, holding his breath, holding the scent of her to him like a shield, keeping the rest of the city out.

It was just for a second. A fraction of a second and he immediately pulled his head back, his expression apologetic. Her expression, what he could see of it from under her hoodie was furious.

He felt dizzy. Heady from MJ's scent that wasn't exactly waffles and for a moment everything except MJ seemed to wash out a mono-chromatic haze.

"What. The. Hell." Technically it was a sentence. A question, but she spat each word out as a flat statement on it's own. Her hand had gripped the seat rest and it almost looked like she was ready to fling the cup of coffee into his face.

Part of him wondered just how his strange flesh would react to steaming hot coffee. Most of him didn't want to know.

It wasn't just anger in her face, Peter realized. She was hurt. Almost as though he'd betrayed her. He gulped nervously. "Sorry. Wasn't thinking straight... I..."

"I've heard that excuse before." She said coldly.

"No... I mean... I needed something to drown out the rest of the smells." He continued hurriedly, his words tripping over each other as he tried to explain. He hated that expression on her face. He wanted her smiling again.

She looked confused at that, then held up the coffee, "This didn't do it?"

He shook his head, "It's the people smells. It's not just scent in general, but my sense of smell seems to be most strongly triggered by scents coming from living things."

She spoke slowly, her expression growing less actively hostile, "So... you... nuzzled me to smell me." A smile was starting to break in on her expression.

He blushed hard. "Sorry. I... I was going to explain... except... I just..."

Her eyes glittered with amusement suddenly, "So... I really smell that good to you?"

"Good enough to eat." He quipped and regretted it.

She laughed, her eyes turning wicked once more. "Well, next time, if you need another whiff, let me know first."

"Um... will do." He said with a weak smile.

She leaned in and whispered into his ear, "I'm a cuddler you know, I'd probably even like it."

He blushed hard. Cuddled with a lot of other folks before, has she? His voice drawled sarcastically. He quashed that thought hurriedly and swept his gaze around the street.

"Uh... so..." He said flailing once more.

She sat grinning at him as he got himself under control.

He took another deep breath to center himself. With her scent to focus on... he could sort of build the rest of the picture around her without overwhelming himself. He spoke awkwardly, "Um... so this actually gives us kind of a good vantage. We can probably figure out if his place is being watched from here, right?"

She nodded. "Nothing really obvious." She looked up and down the street. There were cars parked along the curb. Parking meters ticking away their time.

Peter looked up, "They could be in the building across the street." He suggested. "One quick way to check."

She gave him a hard look, "Are you going to try and sniff them out?"

"Um... yes?"

"Are you going to need to nuzzle my neck again if you do?" Her eyes glittered.

"Uh... I think I got the trick of it now." He replied with a weak smile. "Probably won't need to."

"But you might need to?" She was smiling at him again.

"Maybe?"

She inclined her head slightly. It reminded Peter a bit too much of how the victims in movies who'd been hypnotized by the vampire would offer up their throats. His eyes snapped to her throat and he had to lick suddenly dry lips as his eyes traced the graceful curve of it.

He'd just had his face buried in there a moment ago and it would've been so easy to just start running his to-- He shuddered and fought that image down hard but he couldn't keep the blush from rising to his face.

That was another thing that really starting to bug him. He could control his heartbeat to some extent. Manipulate his body to make him look like other people... why couldn't he control his blushing? There was probably some ludicrous trick to it that he hadn't caught on to yet.

He turned away and nodded hurriedly. "Okay, okay... I have this." He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, focusing on trying to pick out certain specific scents. The men who'd be after them would be armed. Gunpowder was distinctive to his sense of smell even though it wasn't a 'living scent'. Danger smell, maybe. He breathed slowly, sorting through the scents, exploring his immediate vicinity by keeping his attention anchored on MJ, he used something akin to an olfactory version of peripheral vision to catch glimpses of what he was looking for. It kept him from drowning in Manhattan's sea of humanity.

It also yielded results much faster than he expected.

His eyes snapped open.

"Well?" She asked.

He inclined his head towards the street. "White panel van. Right across the street from Whelan's apartment. Hydra smells. Something in there is infected with it. I can also smell the plastic stuff of those hazmat suits. Someone's watching. Probably has a tracker with them." He sighed. "I get anywhere near that door it's probably going to catch my scent too."

"You don't think it's picked you up?" She glanced from him to the van then back.

He shook his head, "I think my senses are better." His expression turned worried as he glanced over to the van, "At least I hope they can't pick me up."

"Too bad you can't just lock on to their scent or something and then follow them back home when their shift is done." MJ said after a moment. Then she looked at him, "Or can you?"

"Um... no clue. I know for sure I can pick up Hydra infectees for sure if they're within about a hundred yards of me. At least, that's how far the Drago thing was before I picked up on it." He looked thoughtful, "You're right, though. I could just tail these guys back to wherever they came from."

"Except you'd have to wait til shift change..." She pointed out. "We have no idea when that is. Aunt Anna is going to kill me if we don't get home in time for dinner."

He nodded. "Yeah." He fished his phone out and took a few shots of the van. He shifted just enough to catch the van's license plate in the pictures. "Well, we were going to try and dig up some more stuff we can give to Detective Stacy, right? A license plate is something he can use."

She nodded.

He got to his feet and said, "We better get going before they noti--" He cursed as he felt a shift from the van. It bounced lightly on it's rear wheels for a moment, then the back of the van opened and out stepped a large, beefy man wearing a bright yellow windbreaker, jeans and a Yankees ball cap pulled low over his eyes. He smelled of powdered sugar, sour sweat and the hazmat uniforms. He smelled of gunpowder and danger.

Following him out was a smaller figure, black hoodie pulled low and keeping the face in shadows. Black jeans and work boots. Cletus' old uniform. Tracker. They had probably caught his scent. Damn.

Peter noted absently that there was some sort of collar ringing the tracker's neck. The T-bolt... the handler, held something that resembled a walkie-talkie. The windbreaker bulged in spots. Armed.

He rose to his feet and spoke sharply to her. "Go. Move. Get to the subway. Lose yourself in the crowds and head home."

"What are you... I'm staying with you, doofus." She replied just as sharply.

"They're going to be tracking my scent." He replied. "That tracker's picking up on me."

"And I've been with you all day." She shot back, grabbing his hand and pulling him roughly down the street. "I'm pretty sure there's enough of your scent on me for them to pick up on that. Now do you want to risk them going after me when you aren't around to protect me?"

Peter sighed and let her pull him. "Shouldn't we be running?"

She smiled at him, but it didn't show in her eyes. They were worried. "Don't run. Running calls attention. Right now, they may or may not have picked up on your scent. We don't know yet. We run and they will know for sure. Just move. Brisk pace. Look like you know where you're going."

They walked up the street, away from Ed Whelan's home, but the two figures shadowed them, pushing past the crowd. Peter glanced often in the store windows they passed, using the reflections to give him an idea of what was going on behind him. The small figure in the hoodie twitched and jerked its head often. It was trying to catch Peter's scent. The larger man in the wind-breaker kept touching his ear, but he quickly realized that the man was speaking to someone over a headset.

Radio controls the collar. Keeps trackers from gettin'... rowdy. Cletus' voice floated up to him. At the word 'rowdy' images of maimed bodies and blood-spattered crime-scenes presented themselves. Peter shuddered and fought down a tide of heat that suddenly shot up his spine.

"We're not losing them." MJ murmured to him, pressing herself closer. To anyone watching they probably looked like just a teenaged couple out on a stroll. Peter could tell there wasn't much urgency in the plain clothes T-bolt trooper's movements. He was just being thorough. The tracker had spotted something, so he had to check. Even if it was yet another false alarm. Except in this case it wouldn't be.

The crowds weren't any protection. Whatever scent it was the trackers locked on to, it cut through the human scents all around. Peter had a similarly strong lock on the tracker's carrion reek.

If they got close enough... if the tracker got a confirmed lock on Peter as the source, he was sure the man would be calling back up in. If Peter took the large man down, whoever was on the other end of that conversation was going to be calling for the backup. Peter wouldn't have been surprised if the man had a GPS transmitter on him.

He wondered idly how quickly they would be able to respond. He had to give them something to chase that wasn't him and MJ.

Sargeant Talbot had told Cletus that trackers had been going rogue.

There was a thought.

"Peter," MJ murmured, her voice tight with worry, "Not to worry you too much, but do you have any ideas on how to get us out of this?"

He nodded. He kept his senses open, looking around for a good spot. He noted an alley that they were about to pass by had what he needed.

He tugged her suddenly into the alley

"Hey!" She'd exclaimed. He gave her a serious look and he could see her chew on her lower lip for a moment then follow him.

Between all the cuddling they'd been doing while walking, it might certainly have looked like someone wanted to get off the street for a tiny bit of privacy... just long enough to do certain things.

He hoped it looked like that. Otherwise it might have looked like he was abducting MJ.

They walked briskly down the alleyway. It was a dead end, the back of another building closing it off. What Peter was looking for specifically were the trashcans. They were large, round plastic ones in dark green that had the heavy fitted lids of hard plastic.

He passed them by and gently, but firmly pushed MJ up against the alley wall and loomed over her. He wasn't too tall, but she was about an inch or so shorter than he was. One hand pressed into the wall above her shoulder. They wouldn't have been easily visible from the outside of the alley. The trashcans gave them some cover.

Her expression was nervous, but her eyes glittered. She deliberately ran her pink tongue across her lips. "Is this really the time for this?"

He leaned in close... very close. He was blushing hard, his heart was hammering. He was sure it was from the nervousness of the chase. Of what he was about to do. His heart was not doing that because he was so close to her.

Pretty sure, anyway.

He tried to keep his voice confident for her. Strong. Except his voice shook slightly, betraying his nerves. "Ha-hah. One of three things is going to happen really soon." He whispered to her urgently, leaning his hoodie almost overlapping with hers and looking to anyone from the outside as though they were in the middle of kissing.

He really did his best not to enjoy the idea too much. "Either they miss us ducking into here... then the tracker keeps going and we can get away..."

"Or?"

"Or it looks in here and its handler notices us looking like we're about to make out and decides to leave us alone."

He could feel more than see her teasing little grin, "Are we going to have to actually do it to make it more realistic?" The grin was shaky. She was as nervous as he was.

"Or the third possibility happens." He said, his voice taking on a slight edge as he felt the tracker and his handler enter the alley.

"What's the third possibility?" She whispered harshly.

"The one where you need to duck." He said with sudden emphasis.

The two figures had completely entered the alley now, they weren't easily visible from the street.

Just perfect for Peter's purposes.

He pulled his hand down from the wall and onto MJ's shoulder, gently guiding her down so that the trashcans kept her from being easily visible. His other hand reached down, as though to reach for the belt on his pants.

A move that also made it look like they were about to do other things to an outside observer.

Just the sort of distracting thing that makes for a perfect ambush.

The tracker gave an animal sound, a snarling, inhuman noise that could have been a warning... or it could have been anything at all.

That just helped divert the man's attention further. It glanced from them to the tracker and Peter's entire body blurred as he moved. He felt a haze begin to settle around him. The same one that had hit him in every fight he'd been in so far.

Hunger. Anger. A thought rose up hard and hot to the forefront of his mind. How dare they hunt him?

He snatched up a trashcan lid, trusting to his recently developed perfect coordination and threw it at the man's face with all of his strength.

The hard plastic lid sailed through the air like an oversized frisbee, smashing into the bridge of the man's nose. Peter saw a gout of blood obscure the man's face as he fell back with a scream.

Peter was already moving before the man had even fallen all the way down. His body shifted to Cletus' form, the blank tumor face under the hoodie twisted into his closest equivalent of a snarl.

The tracker leaped at him. It's face was also a mass of disgusting tumors stretching the skin taut. A close enough match to Cletus's face for it to work, he hoped. The tracker's needle sharp teeth snapped, trying to catch at him, it's arms extended fingers tipped with hard sharpened nails trying to rake at him.

Peter backhanded the tracker while they were both in mid-leap. The tracker caught his fist on it's shoulder and slammed into the alley wall, where it bounced, falling down on all fours. Dazed.

Peter's landed atop the T-bolt trooper. The man had lost the little radio control just as Peter had hoped. The man was still barely conscious. Obviously in a lot of pain, but his eyes shot open as he felt Peter's weight settle on his chest.

Peter leaned in close, snarling loudly into the man's face, hard enough to spatter spittle on the man's face blood soaked face. Blood flowed freely from his now crooked nose and Peter could tell he'd probably broken it. He let the man get a good long look at Cletus' tumor face, through the blood and the tears and the haze of pain, leaning in close enough to keep him from seeing the other tracker. Peter hoped it was long enough for him to think his tracker had turned on him, before slamming his fist into the man's jaw, knocking him out.

He grinned fiercely. That didn't go so badly.

MJ screamed suddenly and he turned. As it turned out, while he had been congratulating himself, the now recovered tracker had decided to leap on him. Its clawed fingers grabbing hold of his chest. Sharpened nails dug into his flesh, piercing through his pseudo-clothes and latching on to the meat of his pectorals. He roared a wordless cry of pain as blood began to flow. That moment of distraction was enough for the tracker to use it's hold on him to slam him hard into the ground, pinning him in place.

He met gazes and it felt the same as the vulture. There was nothing behind those glowing red eyes. It might have been human once, but it wasn't any longer. Unlike the Drago though, the tracker wasn't a wild animal. It was a domesticated one. It had a collar. It may even have felt that it was defending it's master, but at the end of the day, they were animal reactions. Not human ones. Peter had to wonder how Cletus had managed to stay sane through his transformation.

Was he sane to begin with? His voice drawled back. Cletus was already an animal.

Cletus' voice floated up, I should probably resent that.

Peter blinked and forced himself to concentrate on the matter at hand. The tracker hissed into his face, then pulled it's free hand back to rake at his throat. Peter just barely managed to bring his forearm up, slamming it into the tracker's wrist, barely keeping the claws from striking.

With his other hand, he struck upward, just a straight punch, right into the tracker's almost non-existent chin, sending it flying off of him and tearing its claws free of his chest. They both rolled to their feet almost at the same time. That was when Peter noticed his mistake.

He was near the entrance to the alley.

He'd just sent the tracker towards the end of it.

Where MJ was.

MJ was cowering behind trash cans. Her eyes were wide and terrified and she was looking right at Peter. Pleading. Begging him to make it stop. She was trying to curl herself up as small as she could.

Peter's heart practically stopped. He licked his lips, hoping against all hope that this thing would keep it's attention on him. He could feel hot, sticky blood dripping down his chest, the ringing in his head from having been slammed to the ground. Why hadn't Cletus been this hard?

The tracker twitched its head towards MJ causing her to scream. Sharp and piercing. Peter could tell immediately what the tracker's limited animal intelligence was telling it. Easier prey.

The tracker was turning it's attention fully towards her when Peter exploded forward, roaring "NO!" It was his fault MJ was here. His fault she was in danger. He promised he'd protect her. He'd promised! It was his responsibility to make sure she didn't get hurt.

His terrified leap had been so strong that he'd overshot his mark, forcing him to flip in mid-air as his feet somehow found purchase on the wall above MJ's head.

He'd beaten it to her and now he was going to make sure she was safe. He caught it in the midst of it's own lunge towards her. snatching the tracker up in his arms before even it's spit could touch MJ.

He was angry. Terrified. His heart was hammering and this thing... this THING had just tried to take from him. He welcomed the sensations as his body unfolded, petals of flesh unraveling, tendrils drilling into the hissing and squirming tracker as he absorbed it into his body.

Consumed it.

Ate it.

It happened almost faster than he could perceive it happening, but he felt it's strength and it's mass enter his body. His wounds closed and even the blood was reabsorbed into his body. The red haze had surrounded him he noticed and also noticed that he was still in Cletus's tracker form.

There were flashes in his mind. Scenes, places... there were dozens. No words, no explanation, no sense of identity either. Just... memories of where she'd been. She. The tracker had been a woman he realized with a start. The outfit she had worn and her face had rendered her completely androgynous.

When he finally came to himself, he found himself staring down at MJ. She had stopped screaming sometime during his... meal... and was simple staring up at him. Her face was ashen.

A single speck of blood had landed on her cheek.

He shifted to his own form with almost casual ease and realized that somehow he was able to assume his proper size despite having absorbed another hundred and fifty some-odd pounds of mass. He didn't even feel that weight, even as he felt the mass. Which was a very strange sensation indeed.

He was also standing on the wall almost vertically and looking down at her. That felt really strange. The weight that he did feel was oriented towards the wall.

He looked into MJ's round, horrified eyes and realized, this was probably it.

She'd finally seen what kind of a monster he was. He'd... eaten something else. Someone else. Nevermind that it's mind had become that of an animal. It had been a person. She had been a person. And now, MJ had seen him do it. Seen him kill something else, right in front of her.

It had been one thing to tell her these things. One thing to show her bits and pieces. Now she'd just watched him tear apart the tracker and consume everything. Well... almost everything. He noticed belatedly that there were bits of metal around them. The collar was on the ground. A belt buckle. The buttons, rivets and zipper from her jeans.

Leftovers of his meal. The picked over inedible bones of it.

He'd had to do it. He'd brought her here. He'd had to keep her safe. That was that. If she hated him... or was terrified of him now, then so be it.

Then we eat her so she can't tattle, Cletus's voice rose up.

Unable to take the silence any longer, Peter licked his lips and finally asked quietly, "Are you okay?"

She blinked at his question, as though she hadn't expected it. As though she had expected to be next, Peter told himself.

She got back to her feet, shakily, one hand holding on to the trashcan with no lid to help her up, never taking her eyes off of him. She chewed her lower lip for a moment as the color began to return to her face, then motioned sharply downwards at him.

He wasn't sure exactly how, but one moment 'down' was towards the wall. The next, it was towards the ground. He got his feet under him and she surged towards him, running her hands all over his unmarked chest, "Am I okay? Are you okay? I thought it killed you!"

He swallowed hard, savoring the warmth of her fingers against him. Breathing her scent in like a lifeline to banish the carrion stink of the tracker. "I'm... I'm fine. We should get out of here though. His backup is probably going to arrive at any minute."

She glanced to the unconscious man near the opening of the alley. The man's noisy, gurgling breathing confirming that he was, in fact, still alive.

She asked shakily, "Are you going to leave him--?" She let the question trail off.

He nodded. "All he saw was a tracker attacking him. I think he'll report that his tracker went rogue. That'll keep them off our trail."

She nodded and they began to walk out of the alley. As they were about to pass the man by she chewed on her lower lip and stopped.

"What?" He asked.

"Hold on." She knelt down next to him and began rifling the man's pockets.

"Hey!" Peter said in surprise.

She looked up sharply and said, "He might have something. Some... clue." She pulled a gun from the man's coat. MJ's eyes glittered, not with amusement this time but with something he couldn't quite identify. She put the gun into an inside pocket of her hoodie and pulled out the man's wallet as well as a set of keys and what looked like a cellphone that was paired to the headset he was wearing hidden under his cap. "That's it."

"You're keeping the gun?" Peter asked worriedly as she also tucked the man's keys and wallet away.

MJ swallowed and turned to him with a hard expression. "Hanging around you is kind of dangerous."

The cellphone she dropped and then stomped down hard on, shattering the cheap plastic.

He winced, looking down, "Sorry. If you want to stop and just say ho--"

She smacked him in the shoulder, "No, doofus. I'm not saying that." She huffed and her indignation drained out of her, leaving her looking very small and scared, "I'm just... I mean I can't wire-fu like you can. I need some kind of protection if we're going to keep doing this kind of thing, right?"

He nodded slowly, "I guess. So... um... you aren't... scared of me?"

She gave him a sunny smile and it was like a light switch had been flicked on. All her earlier fear, all the anger at her helplessness had suddenly just... vanished. Peter blinked and if he hadn't seen it happen would not have believed it was possible.

"Of course, not." She said lightly then chewed on her lower lip, eying him as they breezed out of the alley and began to mingle with the crowds.

"What?" He asked after a minute, not sure what to make of the thoughtful expression on her face.

She snuggled up against his arm and smiled. "You really did it. You protected me."

He nodded jerkily. "It was my fault you were in danger in the first place."

As they walked to the subway and hopefully back to Queens, she stayed pressed into his side, a warm, comforting presence.

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