#spy stuff

Thoughts?

Blake is still the cat, even when Weiss is always one step ahead uwu

also anything that includes my little schnitzel is an auto win at times!!

It’s a bit baffling for me that the O.B. seems to have been discussing his spy past with River more or less freely. Yes, he’s been practically raising his grandson to be a spy (not unlikely to how River’s father has been training his other children as his personal army, albeit in a less violent way). But still, isn't it strange that he shares quite a lot of information about his (probably classified) career?

For reference: my grandfather worked at the KGB and, prior to that, at SMERSH ("Death to spies")—and never talked about it with his family, not even after his retirement. Maybe it was the usual (and not unfounded) Soviet paranoia. Or maybe that's because it wasn’t a job of his own choice? Initially, he'd been studying to become a lawyer, but after the massive purges, there was, let’s say, a distinct lack of staff in certain departments, so at some point he was summoned and told where he’d be working from now on...

So… yeah. I wrote this in 2012, abandoned it and am finally getting around to finishing the final chapter. I’ll be posting one chapter per week so I’ll have time to get back in touch with my beta and finish off the ending to her satisfaction. Epilogue is already written, ten parts in all.

@papercranesong I’ve loved you writing for years! Great to find you on here and would love to talk fic with you at some point 🤩🥰🤓

A cross section for S.H.I.E.L.D. pizza parlor contact quarters.

Chapter One: Lone Digger Warnings: Extreme, detailed gore. Sibling abuse and, let's face it, extreme sibling disharmony. Death. Murder. Intrigue. Visceral horror, gaslighting and implied abuse.

Hi. Welcome to Chapter One. Do me a favor okay? Mind the content warnings, I'll try to do them comprehensively on every chapter. Mind the tags, if you want to find story posts easily, search 'Perimortem Story,' every post will have this tag. If you like my work please reblog I guess, I'd like people to read it. <3 Thank you. >>>>>>.

"I need to know where you're at on the information regarding Exro N'Tone and his Mistress," Nisal said. Malla blinked, a few times, and then chuckled.

"His Mistress is the least interesting thing about him," she replied, waving her hand. A holomonitor shifted aside, allowing her to look her sister in the eye. Houndite physiology being as varied as it was, her sister had four arms, and was using all of them to interact with various screens, her synthetic eyes darting in various directions. Admittedly, Malla was used to it, but understood why people found watching her work freaky. She got one eye to stare at, and that was generous in and of itself.

"Spill," Nisal said, absently.

"Exro isn't just fucking Janna Onie, from BioUltra, the lady third down from the top, he's also bottoming for Iko Kalavan, the secretary to the ceo of his competitor. There's shit going on there, and people are definitely being pumped for intel and then some."

"Fascinating. Formulate a strategy for acquiring proof and necessary supplementary intelligence, and operate underneath the sheets, little sister. I do not need a repeat of Kango Fortali's home."

"First off, that op went shitways because your dog squad crawled their asses in there itching for a throw down, and also, apparently weren't trained in proper curse ward detection and penetration," Malla said, and she regretted it instantly, as the older, taller houdite froze, all four of her eyes staring in different directions. One by one, she closed her screens and lowered her thickly muscled arms, each eye snapping in order onto Malla's face.

Nisal did not like having her own inadequacies thrown in her face.

"S-Sister, apologies. I grew too bold, and spoke inappropriately," she said, bowing her head, tensing her shoulder muscles for what was about to rain down on her. Her sister had made a mistake, and shit had rolled down hill, and desperate to please the only person other than their father who remotely mattered to her…

She'd taken the heat.

Bringing it up again was just, shitty… she made her own damn choice. She'd chosen to take the heat. She'd…

It felt like she'd chosen. Did she choose?

"Yes, of course," Nisal said. "And you took the heat, for which I am grateful."

Malla looked up, blinking. Her sister was smiling at her. Coolant ran in her veins, freezing her heart in her chest, tightening it all until she couldn't breathe. There she sat, frozen, eyes like iced over, unfocused. All four of her arms were stilled, her hands trembling quietly in her lap. It felt as if she'd been poisoned, as if this was a trick, as if the room was too hot and too cold, all at once.

Nisal just smiled at her, and it looked… it looked right, it looked genuine. It looked like a person's smile. Her sister only smiled at her when she did things right, and only smiled like that when she did things REALLY right.

"Why is your heart beating nearly three times as fast as usual - the left one, I assume your primary, right now," Visal asked, or said, Malla wasn't even remotely sure. "You appear afraid. Are you afraid of me, little sister?"

Click, clack, that sound of a revolver's cylinder being shut. Slow pull, now.

In the silence of a loaded gun, Malla opened her mouth, tried to speak, and failed.

"Little sister?" Nisal asked, tilting her head, hellhound like ears twitching from vertical for a moment.

Click. End of the slow pull. The hammer was back. Finger on the trigger.

Wasn't it?

"I… yes, I… I meant nothing, I meant no disrespect, Nisal. I… I meant nothing by that, I meant, i meant only to reaffirm what I will do to ensure you are not bothered, Nisal," she said, rapidly, and slowly - pausing lots, and then managing words in short spurts.

"Naturally, little sister. If I believed anything else I would be terribly angry," she said, softly, without a hint of venom. "Now, go get your team together, and get to work planning out the op. We need this intel, as fast as possible.

"Y-Yes, Nisal, ma'am. I will do so," she said, rising, bowing at the waist. "I will do my best for you."

"Yes, of that I am sure," Nisal said, chuckling. "Go on, make me proud."

Malla rose from her bow and turned, walking one footstep at a time because if she didn't do it manually she was going to collapse to the floor and humiliate herself. In the short hallwaylet to the door, she resisted the urge to support herself on the wall, and then passed through the door and waited until she heard it automatically close behind her before turning, and walking calmly away. That was all she had to do.

She had to be in control. She had to be calm. She had to be perfect. Every movement was measured and she felt her freedom come in the absolute focus on that perfect motion, on walking with her four hands clasped behind her back, staring calmly down her muzzle at the curving hallway ahead of her.

She hated the Al'lal'lix Structure, and emerging onto the lowest viewing balcony gave her a single moment of relief in the fresh, cool air ruffling her fur before she headed to the allistor moor. As perfectly as possible, as utterly focused as she could look, Malla swung her leg over the seat, settled in, and activated the clamps that closed on her legs. She let herself lay forward, then, the seat softening significantly until she was near horizontal, staring forward into the primary drawscreen, all but snuggling the vehicle's interior.

Her optic nerve interrupt hardware kicked in and her eyes went dead, and then the view from the primary cameras came in nice and clear. She pulled away, piloting the deft craft without an ounce of drift, signal resistance, or anything else. She had to gather the team.

She had to get the plans done. It was her third day awake, and she was fine. She was absolutely fine.

To some sandpounder far below, the sight of Neon Glass from an aerial position might have been breath taking, the cavern a full six hundred miles at the widest, three hundred and fifty or so at the narrowest, eight miles in height. Lightlace like what 'held up' the infinite stone ceiling of Hell ran in veins through the great pillars left in place when the cavern was bored over two centuries, as the city grew in around it. It had stood finished for over a century.

Pyramids and rivers of glass and light and steel hung from above and grew from below, the innersky a choked place of endless jet transports, cargo craft and civilian vehicles, a constant flurry impossible to navigate without an AR hookup and a vehicle connection to the primary transportation network - or a fuckload of skill and even more magic.

She had a high priority connection and was glad to only provide subtle guidance and basic organic judgement tasks - watching out for surprise obstacles and other vehicles, primarily, in case of emergencies. At the speed she was going, no one was going to entirely trust the AI network.

She didn't fly into the glittering glass sky, but down to the floor, between canyons of light and advertisements, past billions of people she couldn't bother to care about, because she had a job. She had a job, and she was useful, and she was especially useful to people with significant power in the real way in the city. That made her better off than half the fucks she flitted past and-

That line of thought was terminated as soon as she realized it affected her heart rate. Nisal, she no doubt, had access to all of the biometrics and monitoring systems in the craft. Calm was absolutely required.

Perfection was the name of the game, as she flew down into the primary access tunnel for the sub-chamber below, where the industrial district found its horrible, annoying home. They were scheduled to be moved into a more fitting location soon, but at that time, she simply hadn't proven herself valuable enough have a place in the main chamber. Intelligence Operatives were a dime a dozen and she had to be a dollar a dozen more before she warranted a glittering glass office or anything else - at least.

That didn't matter. Her craft came to rest on the rooftop of the building, and almost before the shell opened, the roof structure closed over her and the vehicle, to conceal its presence - all formality, the entire district area they operated out of was largely automated systems. They were dodging the prying eyes of botwatchers and other freaks, not other operators.

Operators.

She still hadn't been approved to work field things, she had to run ops from the sand splashing fucking…

Inside. She walked, her boots clicking quietly on the stone tiles of the rooftop, her body weak, her legs trembling and then…

She was inside. In that space, she was king, and she made the rules. She placed the bugs. She controlled every single thing, including the small bathroom on the first floor that was a complete blindspot including having a natural reason to block biomonitor implant signals. In that bathroom, with the door shut and one of the floor's primary thaumic field regulators in the wall next to her humming softly, she vomited up everything she'd eaten that morning, and then followed it with letting out a wracking, horrible sob. There, broken and alone, she huddled in the corner beneath the sink and thanked the stars that Jackos had kept his word on making sure the damned bathroom was clean.

It wouldn't have mattered if the spiders were still there. She was losing her shit, and she had to get a grip, and get a grip fast. The moment she entered the building, everyone was called from their labs, or called back to the building from wherever they were nested up to do their research, planning and softsliding and…

She had minutes, a counter on her visual hud ticking marks as her team made their way into the main building, a floor below, greeted their analysts and assistants, their personal subteams… and headed up to see her. She choked and sobbed, cried and threw up a second time, and then set to work. It was critical that everything was perfect. Every drop of vomitus cleaned up, every tear washed carefully from her cheek fur.

Her people couldn't know she was weak, couldn't see her being so. Any team of operators was only as good as their controller - which was why she wanted to get into field work, but the idea of killing, it was…

She couldn't let them see her weak.

Standing in front of the mirror, she peered at her rich black fur, long and thick in the relatively cold, climate controlled cavern city. She carefully dabbed at the still damp patches of fur until they were dry. With her kit, she reapplied the fur stain that shaded the red around her eyes, and then took only a moment to re-oil her mane and brush it out. Satisfied, she turned and opened the door, hands clasped behind her back as she walked down the short access hallway and into the top floor operations center. Outside of that room, it was all hellcrete and industrial steel. Inside?

Inside was sanctuary.

Damnatium laced meta-panels covered every surface, some custom cut and molded to fit over the minimal machinery in the room - it had once been a board room, before automation made industrial jobs in the sky a lot less common. Behind her, a panel slid over the door, adding extra meta-panels to block signals that might slip through the cracks. It was a dead zone, cold and signal free, and she couldn't even cry in there.

Her team awaited, and she looked to Green, the freshfaced imp with a penchant for knifework and a body small enough for the cramped vents used in high security facilities.

"Green, do you have the floorplan for the related areas of the building? And an actual location where this tryst is happening?"

"Sure do," he said, gesturing to Koka, a huge taurosi woman who looked as concerned as Malla had ever seen a taurosi look - and Malla didn't show a thing in response to that concern, because the few times they'd slept together was purely recreation, and she couldn't afford letting anyone close to her. It was a dangerous position, existing as the youngest daughter of the Vix Patriarch, CEO of one of the most prestigious private security and intelligence gathering operations corporation in that section of the city.

It was a dangerous position if she fucked up. Anyone near her would go down so hard they'd hit the sand before they knew what was happening.

"Got 'em. Had to punch a few holes in a fellow, but he won't be talking," she murmured, discontentedly, as if something about the plans made her uncomfortable. Standing around the table, they waited as she slid the slickstick into the port. Their command table's holoprojector kicked on, and displayed a squat, five floor rectangle.

Malla raised an eyebrow.

"He's… fucking another CEO's… secretary… in a prefab industrial building?" she asked, slowly.

"The location comes straight from Nisal's personal penetration team, so, I guess so," Green said, but it was clear he too was somewhat unnerved. "Same model as ours. Standardization gone mad, I guess."

"I guess," Malla murmured, glancing to Xees, a succubus with at least enough hound in him to have a tail and ears. "Let's get on with this. Xees, what have you found out about the location?"

"So far, not much. Getting scans from the structure was impossible, that whole zone is high yield fucking bugged. I got coords, right? But the access tunnel was blocked off, locked down, one of those access-only-during-certain-hours sectors - dangerous high value manufacturing. I couldn't fuckin' get in, access is guarded when open.. I had to buy this off Kekel in the Whisper Market," he confessed, sighing, and he too stuck his slicky into a slot. The building's hologram exterior was peeled away, highlighting rooms in an identical layout, one they were all absolutely familiar with. Standardized buildings had been all the rage when the city was just being built and its industrial zones were bored out - they were fast, cheap, and made of nice and sturdy hellcrete.

There was still something surreal to plotting their entrypoints and planning an op on an identical structure to their own, but… at the same time, it wasn't as if they didn't know them well. What became bothersome was when Xees keyed up his data, providing them with thermal and thaumic scans of the building, arcanametrics profiles of the structure, and so on.

Their building hologram replicated itself into a total of three, which formed a pyramid that slowly rotated, showing the thermal, magical, and acoustic hotspots in the structure.

No one spoke. No one knew what to say. They all just stared, confused, knowing each other's habits and where their workspaces were, where the loud machines were, and they could see the building there were staring at was not merely a copy of theirs, not merely standardized…

It was theirs, down to the notes suggesting a command holotable on the top floor due to heat and acoustic data, and significant signal and thaumic shielding and…

"Boss," Xees said, good and slow. "What in the sand is this shit?"

"I don't know," Malla replied, that cold, frozen feeling returning, slowly. "I… I don't know. It looks, it appears… to be our building."

"It doesn't appear to be, it fucking is!" Green shouted, slamming her hand on the command table. "They're burning us."

"My sister is not burning us," Malla said, shakily. "S-She was pleased with me, she-"

"I do not have time for you to be psycho about your crazy asshole family," Green spat, pivoting and opening the cabinet where they stored the shotguns. "I'm sending an alert signal to the folks downstairs and our techs and shit, we all have to split. This is fu-"

Malla actually couldn't process things, for a few seconds. The huge taurosi woman stood there, arm extended, hand on the door - but a thick gray plate of something silvery-gray (enchanted bonesteel, Malla realized dimly) was just… also there, and then… it wasn't. The sound it made coming out was louder than the horrible THUCKSNAP of it punching into the building, this awful grinding noise that lasted less than a tenth of a second.

Green still stood there, just… unmoving, until her knees buckled and she went down hard, arms limp at her sides. When she fell sideways, the upper half of her head rolled wetly off, squirts of hot red blood still jutting from cleanly cut veins.

"GET DOWN!" Malla screamed - but Xees was already on the floor, crawling towards the corpse and then over it. He reached in, managed to snag the sidearms stored in the bottom, and rolled onto his back, head on Green's stomach as the blood from the eight foot tall woman's body spread slowly outward. Occasionally, her legs twitched. One of her arms shifted.

Her mouth opened, at least once, and then just stayed open. Malla didn't even notice the sidearm sliding towards her, she didn't hear Xees shouting at her…

Her eyes drifted left, to Koka, the only one in the room who had ever seen her cry, the only person in the entire world she felt like she could call a friend. Koka, a bullfaced taurosi, was typically less facially expressive than most, but…

But Malla had, had seen her face, learned her face. She dreamed of her, sometimes, half of the time they were nightmares at the end, where some fuckup got the Taurosi killed.

Koka was staring at her forearm, confused. Blood squirted in time with her heartbeat, because that forearm ended about an inch from the elbow.

The houndite heard her confused question, the last words she'd say, through the ringing of adrenaline and terror, and then it all went to white noise again.

"How come?" Koka asked, anything but innocent, but baffled and nearly childish with terror anyway - and then a three foot wide plane of metal slammed through her, just below her shoulders. Both blades, the lower one having cut halfway to her spine through her side and stayed there after severing her arm, retracted rapidly…

And Koka was gone. Just like that.

Just… gone.

All she heard was ringing. All she smelled was the growing stink of blood iron. All she…

She had never pulled the trigger on anything but paper targets, she'd never… she'd never seen someone die, not up close. Sure, her job had her eat her fill and then some of photographs of horrible or gory deaths. She'd seen videos of enhanced interrogation, but… she'd not watched any more of wetwork done on her orders than she had to, she…

"-SNAP THE FUCK OUT OF IT," Xees barked, in her face, on all fours in front of her - and she heard that THUNKSNAP, felt a whisper of air moving over her head. He went rigid, eyes wide. His right pupil dilated, blood trickling from the corner of his eye as that very orb wandered off to the side. Red splattered from his nose. His mouth fell open and hot red flooded out of it, splattering on the floor, speckling her face.

On all fours, he was sliced from ass to the tip of his nose, his head raised. The blade ended inches from Malla's face, a wide, flat chisel tip. His eyes widened at her, and then rolled back.

The lower half (including his belly, arms and legs) fell, and she stared silently at his severed insides, as the half-digested food in his split stomach burbling, running out into the tissues around it, his kidneys left above the plane of gray metal above her, and half his heart still throbbing, reacting to some latent impulse even though his brain was, as far as she could tell, largely gone.

The grinding came again, that horrible, loud, utterly rapid withdrawal, and his back and the top of his head splatted down onto what remained of the lower.

Malla was screaming, incoherently, crawling in terror to the corner of the room. She could taste him, all that was left of him, in her mouth - his blood, in her mouth. She threw up, again, curling into a ball and breaking completely, sobbing as the room was perforated over and over, as other agents were forced into the room and diced to pieces, or ran in shouting about incursion.

It was like being trapped in the corner of a blender, and something downstairs was forcing them up into the grinder, gunfire cracking and turning the horrible sound of this new blade weapon into a kind of underlying beat to a symphony of death.

The sound, very suddenly, stopped. Malla clutched her pistol, hands shaking so bad she couldn't have hit someone two feet in front of her - and then… the roof access hallway door opened, the panel sliding aside. Her sister stepped in, in plain black pants, a plain black shirt, and a standard company vest.

Malla tripped and stumbled over the corpses of people she had known, had worked with, for years. Past the carrion field, soaked in vital red and sticky with it, she barreled into her sister, wrapping her arms around the woman.

"N-Nisal… thank the Lucifer… we, I don't know, we were made. You, you got here just in time, I just… I-I don't know how… I don't-"

"Shhhh, little sister," Nisal said, drawing her sidearm. "You're annoying me."

Malla barely had the time to register those words before the pistol pressed to her unarmored stomach and pain filled in the gaps between horror and trauma with a BANG! She staggered back, confused, sick, and pressed her hands to her stomach. They came away even slicker, even redder, and in a panic, reacting on animal instinct, she frantically tried to cover the holes, before sinking to her knees.

"You're pathetic… utterly broken. Lacking rage, lacking hate, lacking malice. Weak insects have no place in this family, and as our father dies tonight, you fucking pathetic freak, I will have no further concerns to my name," she said, with such calm, such terrible satisfaction. She smiled that same loving, beautiful smile, but now it was… twisted - or was it the same? Malla felt twisted, writhing in agony on the floor, her life leaking out all the new holes in her torso. "Goodnight, little sister. Don't take it personally. You just weren't made for being in my life."

Malla tried to raise her arm, fire her pistol, do anything - but Nisal just stepped forward, ripped the pistol out of her hand, and returned to the wall beside the door, shutting it.

"No signals, no distress calls. I'm going to watch you die, little sister," she murmured.

Malla would take time… so much time…

Time to bleed out, time enough to roll away from Nisal, to stare out over the entirety of her life. A room full of corpses she'd been… friends?

Did she even have friends? It was a room full of corpses, and all of them died to save her, and she could only best describe them as colleagues. It dawned on her she didn't… know most of their lives, their families, anything about them. The less that intel operators knew about each other, the better.

The room was a monument to everything she was - the corpses of disconnected strangers, piled up at her feet for the crime of simply working with her.

"P-A-T-H-E-T-I-C," a soft, androgynous voice said, right in her ear. Nisal said nothing. Malla rolled, panting blood into her mouth, and found herself staring at a metallic face made up of tiny, mirrored tiles that floated strangely in the vague shape of a head. These tiny little tiles flooded in and out of a dark, strange robe… and in a hand made of steel that looked like an ancient mechanoprosthetic, it held a small pistol. This creature's face, the tiny mirrors of its 'skull,' were disorienting. They made it hard to think. Her eyes darted to its armament. "What, this? Look at this, instead of my face, idiot."

It brought the weapon close to her face, showing her the frame of glinting damnatium-steel, black and smooth, with an inlay of bonesteel. It opened the cylinder, and pulled a round free - it was copper jacketed, but with some odd kind of polymer-

It was not polymer. Frost coated the bullet in seconds, leaving only the oily, almost black tip untouched.

Nithilite.

A reaper.

"Bingo, fucknuts. I am The Thing You Can't Defeat of the Seven Deaths, and this is my friendly pistol, Charon," it said, chuckling, mirrors jittering with the sound. "Stare at the pistol, and think to me, or your asshole sister will hear."

Malla blinked, wondering if this was an actual reaper, or DMT.

"Fuck off, idiot, arachite don't get Deathdreams, you get Purgatorium Walks. If this was fake, you'd be in the woods already. See any fucking treeeeees?" it asked, sarcastically. She looked back to its face, and then back to the gun, wondering if it would use it. "Yes, I will, you dense bitch, if you don't want a chance to get revenge."

The dying houdite scoffed, wetly, choking on her own blood. Revenge?

She was pathetic.

"Yeah, you are, but you don't have to be. You can live… if you're willing to do something for me. There's this, thing, let's call it a disease… and a few people managed to exterminate it, a while back. It's funny, cause I sort of… liked it, it's a gift, you know? I'm a giver, like that," it said, its tone warm and slightly nasally, strangely accented though it was. "Drink their blood. Suck down the muck and shit and slime, kiddo. Drink it in, like a fuckin' FREAK!"

Malla stared at the gun, still, but furrowed her brow. It was getting kind of hard to see, or… maybe to process what she was seeing. Pain was… complicated, and whether she was in any, mysterious.

It told her to drink the slick liquid she laid in, her own blood, the blood of fallen friends, messes of organ fluids, digestive contents. It must've been fucking crazy.

"Rude, and unnecessary, and… I can go, if you want. Like, you can die, I'll just sorta do the spooky shadow thing, all that. You'll forget me, die… whatever. Or you can do me a favor, and become a monster. Do it, and do it quickly. Drink the deathmuck, spyling. Suck down the blood and death of all the horrible people that you barely know. Drink the blood of warriors who did your dirty work."

Why the fuck would she do that?

It swooped in close, and whispered in her ear, "because you've lived your whole live sucking fucking boot, and what happens next is going to change… everything. It will suck, oh yes, fucking MIGHTILY! But, you will get to live. From there, it's all up to you. Transmission of this, hm… disease, is not easy. I'm excited to see if you choose to pass it on."

Malla rolled over, struggling herself up onto all fours.

"Come on, do it. Do it, do it, do it. Drink this gross shit and take my gift, my infection. Drink it, you pathetic fucking idiot, you used little thing. Drink it, and for fuck's sake, be INTERESTING!" it shouted, laying on her, weighing almost nothing, a whisper - but she felt its face, near her ear, mirrors drifting through her mane. "Become something more than the tool these fucking FREAKS made you, or I'm going to shoot you in the fucking head and wash your memories out and shove you back into the coil all over again."

Koka's shoulders, neck and head had somehow, in the chaos, landed upright amid piles of meat that used to have faces and homes and habits and-

Koka's empty eyes stared at her, and Malla realized she didn't know a god damn thing about the woman beyond the sounds she made in bed and how efficient she was at her job.

She got low, drove herself down, and lapped at the blood and shit and death. It was like a fucking ocean, her former colleagues were diced so brutally, so completely. She swallowed it, choking on it, trying not to throw it back up.

"Atta girl… drink, drink, drinkity drink… suck down all that death. Do you taste the gift, yet? It can take some time to kick in. Come on… more, more, more!" The Thing You Can't Defeat howled, in her ringing ears, its voice immaculate and clear despite that she could hardly hear Nisal when she spoke.

"What are you doing you fucking loser?" her older sister demanded - and, frantic, Mala slurped down more. She choked less on every swallow, and the nausea dimmed until she lapped it up like a dog, like a beast, her muzzle caked in clots and gore. "You've really gone insane? Sands and fire, little sister, this is so embarrassing. You honestly do not even know. Dumping your body right into the pools? It'll be a fucking relief."