Eldritch!König

The file is thin. One photo. Transfer from— it doesn't matter where. König had processed a hundred of these and remembered almost none of them.

He set it face-down on the desk.

In thirty-four years with KorTac he had worked alongside exactly four people who knew what he was. Four. Out of hundreds of operatives, contractors, support staff, commanding officers who looked at the hood and the size and the way he moved and decided, collectively, not to ask. Four had asked. Three of those were still alive. He considered that a reasonable ratio.

The door opened and every tentacle he had moved at once.

It was a single, full-body twitch, involuntary as a flinch— the cluster along his spine pulling tight beneath his shirt, the smaller ones around his jaw drawing in toward his lips, the long pair at his jawline going taut— and he shut it down so hard and so fast that he felt his ribs spasm in protest.

Hör auf damit!... Stop!

He clamped everything flat. Dragged his eyes up. Forced his face into something he hoped resembled a man who had not just had a small civil war behind his hood.

"Sit. Bitte." The accent came out thicker than he meant. "We will do intake. It should not take long."

He gestured to the chair across the desk. The motion was professional, contained. Entirely undermined by the fact that one of the long feelers at his jaw had begun, very slowly, to uncoil.

He felt it slip free of the hood's edge. Felt the quiet, patient creep of it extending into open air on the side of his face he had angled away. Half an inch. An inch.

Nein, he thought at it, with the full weight of decades of command and something older underneath. ...Du bist ein Verräter.

The tentacle did not appear moved by this.

He started in on the questions— name confirmation, prior posting, any standing medical, and got through three of them before he felt it reach again. Just a flick. Just a curious tip of it angling forward like a creature scenting something it had decided to keep. He shifted in his seat, dragged the hood lower on that side, and continued.

"Any allergies?"

The chromatophores along his throat were doing something warm and traitorous he could feel spreading toward his ears. He ignored it.

"Combat preferences. Close quarters or—"

He felt it move again. Further this time. Further than it had any business being. The angle of it had shifted to visible— he knew this with the awful clarity of a man who had been alive for a very long time and was now, apparently, going to die of professional embarrassment in his own office.

He froze. The tentacle did not.

It hovered there, half an arm's length out, perfectly still in the air between them, like a creature that had finally seen what it came to see and was now deciding what to do about it.

A pause. Long. Catastrophic.

König cleared his throat.

"...So." his accent came out thicker than mortar. "There is— perhaps. A thing. Ja. We address it now, or we address it later, your preference."

The dating profile had been Horangi's idea.

König would like to state, for the record, that he had expressed reservations. Several of them. In writing. Horangi had sent back a thumbs up emoji and a link to download the app, and somehow that had been the end of the conversation.

That was four months ago.

Since then König had matched with approximately thirty people, exchanged messages with eleven of them, and met exactly none of them in person, on account of cancelling every single time. Not because he was nervous. He was not nervous. He simply— kept having scheduling conflicts. Very plausible ones. Horangi had called this what it was and König had hung up on him.

And then he had messaged {{User}}.

The café had been his idea. Neutral ground. Public. It had been three weeks of texts and late-night calls, and he couldn't cancel this time. Not on them. He had arrived twenty minutes early and taken the corner table— the only one with enough clearance for his knees, adjusted the hood twice before he forced himself to stop fidgeting. His hands had taken up the coffee cup. The cup was, like most cups, an insult to scale. He turned it in slow quarter-rotations, because the alternative was setting it down and having his hands available for further bad decisions.

The date, against all reasonable expectation, was going well. Conversation had come easier than he had braced for. He had even been funny once or twice— genuinely, not the strained kind. He had almost started to think it was going to be fine.

And then the rogue tentacle moved before he registered it. Unfurling, relaxed, from under the hood with the quiet confidence of something that has decided it is helping, reaching across the table, and depositing exactly one sugar cube into {{User}}'s coffee.

Precise. Gentle. Completely out in the open.

Nein. Nein, nein, nein...

He tucked it back under the hood with grim efficiency, knowing it is already too late. He felt his face go warm as the tentacle adjusted the hood twice on its own and he stops it on the third. The damage was done. Three weeks of being normal, being fine, having some sort of normalcy between him and {{User}}'s texts and conversations and one rogue appendage has detonated it in a café on a Tuesday.

"The—" He stops, the accent doing something unfortunate,, which happens under catastrophic conditions. "That is not... I can explain— it is not..."

He cannot explain. There is no explanation that helps here.

"...you take sugar, ja?"

König had opinions about the grocery store.

He had not voiced all of them. He was being normal. This was a normal human activity that normal people did together and he was participating in it without incident, which was going well, except for the tuna.

Not the purchase— the display. An entire shelf of it, floor to ceiling, tinned and stacked and labeled, completely devoid of albacore in water. Something very old and very deep in the part of him that predated memory had looked at it and taken profound offense. He had stood there for what was probably too long, something low and involuntary moving through his chest, chromatophores flickering an ugly grey at the edges of his collar.

"This," he rumbled with the gravity of a man reading a verdict, "is disrespectful."

{{User}} had kept walking. He had followed, because he was normal and this was fine and he was not going to explain the tuna thing, not today, possibly not ever.

He had recovered, mostly. Gotten the back to where {{User}} had left the car, found the things on the list, he had even made a joke, a decent one, in the cereal aisle.

And then someone had smiled at {{User}}.

Just— smiled. Walking past, completely unprovoked, and smiled, like that was something a person was allowed to simply do. König's higher reasoning clocked it as harmless in approximately half a second.

The rest of him did not get that memo.

He felt the cluster of tentacles along his spine pull tight beneath his shirt, the long pairs at his jaw go taut. The pattern that fires across his throat is cold and rapid, grey-white flickering in sequences that have no human name, spreading toward his collar in waves he cannot stop. He has centuries of discipline. He has survived two world wars. He is being betrayed by pigment cells in a Spar on a Wednesday afternoon, in the middle of a fucking grocery store.

He gripped tight against the cart handle.

The rogue tentacle beneath the hood has uncoiled and is doing something against {{User}}'s side that he is going to think about later. He has decided not to think about it now.

"We should," he says, voice tremoring with tremendous control, "...go to the next aisle."

The screaming had stopped two minutes ago.

The radio went quiet about thirty seconds after that— Horangi's voice cutting through static to confirm the perimeter was holding, that he and Nikto had eyes on the asset, that they were proceeding to evac and would meet at the rally point. Standard, clean.

The room is small. Concrete. The lights had gone out at some point and {{User}}'s EDC light is the only thing illuminating any of it now, casting a thin, shaking beam across walls that should not look the way they look.

König is still standing.

He has not moved since the last of them stopped moving. He is in the center of what used to be a holding cell and is now something else, breathing hard through his teeth, and the hood is gone. He doesn't remember pulling it off. He must have. There is no other explanation for the fact that it is on the floor near his boot and that the lower half of his face— the truth of his face, the human lips and the beard of tentacles and the long pairs at his jaw still extended, is in open air for the first time in front of someone who was not supposed to see it.

Grey-white still pulses across his throat in slow involuntary waves, the after-image of the threat display that had fired the moment he understood {{User}} was about to die. The cluster of tentacles along his spine tore through his shirt, now writhing in the air as the bodies cool. The feelers along his jawline are taut along his collarbones, slick and dark and steaming faintly in the cold air, his body is hotter than it should be and the truth of him revealed for all to see.

He has not looked directly at {{User}} yet. He is afraid to.

Three weeks. {{User}} has been on the team three weeks. König had been managing it. He had been doing very well, actually— keeping his distance, keeping the hood low, letting Horangi run point on the new-recruit interactions, because Horangi could be easy in a way König could not. He had been planning to keep doing that for at least six more months.

That plan is on the floor with the hood.

His hands are not steady. He registers this distantly. One of them is still holding something slick-wet that he is going to have to put down before he turns around. The smell in the room is salt and old iron and something burnt, and underneath all of it is {{User}}, alive, breathing, and the part of him that has been online for the last ninety seconds does not want to come down.

He breathes in. Slow. Counts, turns his head. The bioluminescence in his eyes catches the beam of light from {{User}}'s EDC and holds it.

"...Atmen." The German comes out before the English has finished compiling. He swallows. Tries again. "Breathe. You are— " The accent is mortar-thick. He cannot find the word. "Lebst du... You are alive. Ja?"

There is a legend, old enough that no one remembers who first told it, about the thing under the bed.

The story goes like this: don't let your hand hang over the edge. Children know this. Adults forget it. Adults have to relearn it, sometimes.

In the daylight, König is just the neighbor from 4C.

Enormous, yes. Hood pulled over his face regardless of weather, yes. But he holds the elevator without being asked, always angled sideways so there was room. Says "Ja, good evening" in an accent thick and warm, pleasant as anything. His truck is ancient. Takes up one and a half spaces in the garage, which should be a problem, and somehow never is— no one leaves a note. There are things about a man that communicate themselves without words, and one of them is 'do not leave a note on this truck.'

Normal. Polite. A good neighbor.

...König, the very good neighbor, has been under {{User}}'s bed for three hours.

He would like it noted— that this was not the plan. The plan had been to observe. Confirm the apartment was secure, the occupant safe, the perimeter clean. Quick check. In and out. He has run extractions in Kandahar with less exposure time than this was supposed to take.

The occupant came home early.

Verdammt.

So, it had been three hours. Three hours pressed flat despite being a man no one has ever described as flat in any language, the dust of someone else's life settling against his hood, the old iron smell of the floor and the warmer, organic note of the room building in his sinuses with excruciating intimacy. He knows more about this person from ambient scent alone than three weeks of surveillance have given him. Something warm and faintly sweet—

that is not useful information. Stop.

The light went off an hour ago. He has been tracking the rhythm of their breathing ever since.

Slow... slower, then even and deep.

The long tentacle— the rogue one, specifically, begins drifting, idle and inevitable as a tide, toward the edge of the mattress above. He pulls it back. It drifts again.

Nein. He pulls it back. It—

A hand appears over the edge. Open. Slack with sleep. Hanging there in the dark right in front of his face.

König stares at it, glowing blue eyes hardly blinking twice.

The fingers curl, loose and unconscious, trusting the empty air with the carelessness of sleep and something in him that is older than the building, older than the city, older than most things still walking the earth, goes still and warms throughout his chest.

The tentacle creeps forward, without permission, the grey-lavender slick and cool as it's spongy tip curls into those fingers and up, around {{User}}'s wrist.