M hadn’t enlisted. This was one of the cycles where they were given over to the wilderness too young for their existence to be noted on any official documents, and they’d never bothered correcting the oversight. There were more than even odds that they’d’ve been turned away even if they did have their papers in order, anyway. Humans still tended to take one look at them and decide they were somehow wrong, for the terrible crime of being born with their fangs and fur and lashing tail. Add that to their being born in the mud, raised alongside the other wolf-pups in the pack that had found them while their mother’s body was still warm, and the unfamiliar, rumbling roughness that sometimes crept into their voice from too many years without words or willing targets for them, and yeah, they could see why the armies wouldn’t want them.
So no, they didn’t bother doing things the ‘proper’ way. They just followed the blood-trail to L, and, when she didn’t immediately kill them, despite the faint whispers of the Hunt clinging to her closer than cobwebs, fell into the ranks alongside her. The soldiers didn’t question their presence too much - they were accepted as a kind of Mascot, after bailing their asses out of fires enough times.
(An other, they knew it to mean, an amusing animal like the stray dogs that sometimes got scraps of jerky or expired rations when they ventured close to the cooking fires. They didn’t mind. A name was a name, and it wasn’t like the wolves had given them one. Amused acceptance was better than fearful rejection, for the time being.)
They’d had times like this before, the three of them. Or the two of them, as it sometimes played. Sometimes the ripples of the world turned to waves, and the Hunt had to be set aside, common cause found for however long it took to set things right enough that they could avoid being knocked over.
But always, it ended, and the Hunt returned. The war was over, and as they stood over the ashes of the last mortal battlefield they’d spill blood on this cycle, Mask could feel the strings tugging at them once more. Though not half as strongly, they thought, with a sidelong glance to their companion of the last few years, as they were tugging at L.
Mask was not the Hunter, this cycle. But they already knew that they’d be at her side, when she went to wage her own kind of war against the Hunted.
(It was a familiar place to be, after the years, but that familiarity was strange, interposed over other memories as it was. They’d fought her, before. They’d spilled her blood more times than they’d bandaged her cuts, torn her throat out just as they had done to others in her defense. Strange, they thought, but they brushed it aside as the two of them made haste for N, said nothing on the subject even when they had the time to speak over cook-fires and freshly caught roast.)
They were the Arbiter. It was a role that they rarely chose for themself, but they didn’t mind falling into it from time to time. It was… easier, in some ways, and harder in others, to sit in the in-between, the undecided, to be the peacekeeper for their band of merry murderers.
(That was what N liked to call the role, in his more poetic forms. M was no poet, but anyone with half a brain could see that it was an over-simplification. The Arbiter was only the peacekeeper when they wanted to be. More often than not, when M fell into the role, they were either a bodyguard or an accomplice. A second pair of hands for the Hunter. Another foot of flesh and bone between the Hunted and their pursuer. N liked his tea parties. M liked getting to use their shield.)
The strings of fate led them all the way to Berlin before they got too tangled to properly parse, all muddled with nearness. But unfortunately for N, Mask had seen him, once, when they were scouting deep behind enemy lines, and they’d caught the scent of his cologne. He was a creature of habit - even when everyone else was smeared with dirt and muck, he was crisp and pressed, not a hair out of place, and he’d been heavy-handed with the scent to compensate for the general stink of the battlefield. They’d caught it, memorized it, kept it for later use even as they crept away from the officer’s tent.
It led them to his apartment, and they arrived just in time to catch a puff of cologne from one of the black cars as the door shut and it pulled smoothly onto the street.
“Shit. He’s in that one,” Mask said, checking their gloves and scarf even as they turned to L. “Do you think he saw us?”
The cars weren’t speeding. Maybe he hadn’t. Regardless, they started pushing their way down the sidewalk, following the cars. They could probably go faster if they weren’t wearing these damn boots, but, well, they were keeping pace with L anyways. They’d pull out the stops if she did, but not before she did. It was a balance, being the Arbiter.
