#also i am incapable of writing a daniel that isnt completely and totally in love with both peggy and jack

[tenderjock]

like the moon moves the tides [agent carter werewolf au]

part iv. tail tucked

Carter is out fucking cold, but Jack cuffs and collars her anyway.

The girl who found her is babbling to Sousa, something about ambulances, but Jack ignores her. Between her and the young wolf they questioned earlier that blubbered all over Jack, he’s getting a pretty low opinion of the women Carter hangs out with.

Carter growls under her breath as he sits her up. She hasn’t quite found her feet when he starts walking her out, so Jack keeps a hand gripping her elbow and the other gripping the back of her jacket.

She smells good. She smells good, musk and salt-sweat, nothing like the itchy copper and floral perfume that blonde girl was wearing that made Jack want to claw his nose off. Carter smells like he could bury his face in her neck and just – lie down, for a while, and that’s how Jack knows it’s a trick.

When he shoves her in the back of the car, Carter looks at him, blinking woozily. She inhales, quick, and goes limp as he puts her in the backseat.

Jack gets in the driver’s seat and starts the car as Sousa pulls himself into the passenger seat, Carter’s pocketbook in hand. He wants to scream. He wants to hit something. He starts driving, feeling so angry that he’s about to tear out of his skin.

“We have to go back,” Carter slurs.

She’s looking out the window. Jack ignores her.

“We’re taking you to the SSR,” Sousa reminds her. “You’re under arrest.”

“We have to go back,” Carter insists drunkenly. “We need to – Dottie. Jack, you smelled her.”

Jack glances back at her. “What the hell are you on about,” he asks tersely.

“The woman who drugged me,” she says. “Dottie Underwood. You smelled her, Jack, she’s not human. She’s going to …” Carter seems to be recovering from the sedative, but she’s still not very coherent. The collar probably isn’t helping.

“We are not doing anything,” Jack snaps. “You are going straight to a cell. You won’t have to worry about much after that.”

There’s silence from the backseat for a good five minutes. “I didn’t do what you think I did,” Peggy finally says. “I can explain everything.”

Neither Jack nor Sousa respond to that. There’s no point to it; they’re gonna be interrogating her soon enough.

: :

It’s about a month after the Howard Stark fiasco that Daniel gets hard proof of his theory regarding Peggy and Jack’s furry problem.

There’s a werewolf attack in lower Manhattan – something to do with a gang, he thinks. Daniel’s with Peggy, a veteran agent named Goldstein, and the rookie Mazzara, who is about twelve years old but gets very upset if anyone points that out. Chief Thompson gets roped into the cleanup, and that’s when the radio really starts squawking.

They’ve got one guy that won’t back off, and apparently he lost it when Jack tried to talk him down. The two of them turned, right there in front of everyone, and are brawling it out in a parking lot outside a warehouse.

Goldstein, who’s been working with Daniel and Peggy pretty intensely on the Underwood case, answers the radio, telling them that they have four more agents on the way. They leave the deli that they’d been eating in and pile in an SSR car illegally parked out front.

They’re not too far from the scene. It only takes about thirty seconds before there’s a choking noise from the backseat.

“What are you doing,” Agent Mazzara says, sounding panicked.

“Do you know how many pairs of these I’ve ruined shifting?” Peggy says, in a tone that implies whatever she’s doing is perfectly reasonable and Mazzara is overreacting.

Daniel looks back; Goldstein glances over his shoulder, too. Peggy has her heels kicked off and is casually rolling a stocking down her right leg. The left is bare, the other stocking already folded into a little bundle on the seat next to her.

Mazzara is staring fixedly ahead, face bright red. The poor kid looks like he’s gonna pop a boner, or faint, or both. Peggy calmly finishes taking her stockings off and starts on her belt.

“Uhhh Peggy –” Daniel starts, not entirely sure where he’s going with it except that he remembers some of the werewolves from his battalion would strip completely naked before turning and he doesn’t think Mazzara will be able to handle that.

“Relax, Daniel,” Peggy says in that no-nonsense tone that always preludes her doing some sort of nonsense. “I simply don’t want to ruin more clothes than I must. Here, hold this.” She shoves the belt and a pair of stud earrings into Mazzara’s hand. He looks terrified, poor guy.

Goldstein is visibly fighting laughter, but he keeps driving while Peggy takes off her jacket, her watch, her hat and about twenty-two hairpins. In a blouse and skirt, curls falling into her face, she stops stripping, just as the car skids up to the parking lot next to a ruined SSR car.

Daniel squints at it. It’s hard to tell, with it all busted up, but it looks like the one Jack and Faut had taken. Three more SSR cars are parked blocking the entrance to the lot, so they stop in the street.

In the lot, surrounded by a perimeter of half a dozen human agents, two werewolves are facing off. Daniel doesn’t immediately know which one is who: there’s a dark brownish one, face visible as it snarls and snaps, and a larger, more sandy-gray one, only its back and the bony line of its spine in view.

Jack must be the larger one, he thinks to himself. He’s acting defensively, keeping his back to the entrance and the other agents, reacting rather than striking first. The other werewolf’s desperation is palpable as it launches itself at Jack, biting his neck and scrabbling at his belly with its paws.

Peggy bursts out of the car. It takes her just a moment’s breath to turn, blouse and undergarments tearing at the seams. As always, Daniel fights the urge to gag at the sound the transformation makes, the sick, organic sound of dozens of joints popping out and back into place, muscles growing faster than skin can contain, hair follicles working overtime.

Peggy claws at the scraps of linen and silk that still stick to her huge, muscled thighs. Her lips are pulled back from two-inch-long fangs in a fixed snarl. She casts one look back at the Daniel, a yellow, slit-pupiled eye catching his gaze for a moment before she whips around and charges at the wrestling werewolves.

Peggy hits the brownish one hard in the side of the ribs, knocking it off of Jack, who scrambles to his feet behind her. She's smaller than both of the male werewolves, slighter too, but she makes up for it with the fury that she bites at the other werewolf with, snapping her teeth in its face until it cowers back, whimpering.

Jack steps up next to her on four feet, his own teeth bared at the enemy werewolf.

It’s over fairly quickly once the werewolf realizes it is outnumbered. After a handful of expectant seconds, it crumples to its haunches, turning back into a naked man as it does so.

Peggy and Jack back off to let the agents arrest the guy. They put handcuffs and a heavy iron collar on him. He doesn’t react to being manhandled by the agents, or to being out in public without a stitch on him, but he does walk to the car in a route that’s as far away as possible from the SSR’s two werewolves.

They haven’t turned back yet, neither of them. Peggy has Jack held in place with a paw on his head while she sniffs at the shallowly bleeding bite marks on his neck and shoulder.

“We should do something about them,” Goldstein says.

“Yeah,” Daniel agrees, then sighs and starts to crutch over. There’s no point in being scared, he figures; even if it weren’t just Peggy and Jack, it’s not like he’d be able to outrun a werewolf. If it wanted him dead, he’d be dead.

Jack turns his head to him, sharp, as Daniel approaches. Peggy backs away a bit on her hind legs, making a low whuffing sound, before butting her head into Jack’s cheek. Jack gives her a flash of teeth, but it seems more playful than anything.

“So, uh,” Daniel says. “We got some extra clothes for Jack. Peggy, you’ve got about half an outfit in the car. We’ve also got a truck that’ll definitely hold one werewolf in the back, but we can’t take both of you at the same time – you’d be too heavy. We can take you home, though.” He considers them. “What, uh, what’s the plan here?”

Peggy whuffs again. She dips her head at Daniel, then scampers over the truck, where with some difficulty she undoes the latch on the back and crawls in.

The whole bed of the truck dips about six inches when Peggy steps on it. Daniel shudders to think what it’d do to the struts to have Jack, who looks about two hundred pounds heavier, in there too.

“Do you want me to close the back?” Daniel calls. There’s that nauseating sound behind him. When he turns back, a nude Jack Thompson is glaring half-heartedly at him. There’s a row of bloody but no longer bleeding tooth-pricks marring his left shoulder, layered over a bruise, and pink scratches up and down his chest and belly.

“Yeah, she does,” he says.

Daniel nods, trying not to stare. Agent Lewis has the book with the agents’ home addresses, so Daniel just tells him to drive to Peggy’s place before heading back to the SSR. He closes and latches the back of the truck, waving to Peggy – she gives him a toothy, lolling grin – as he does so. He bangs on the side of the truck, and Agent Lewis starts the engine and pulls out of the lot, following the other cars out.

Jack is still very naked when Daniel turns back, of course. He fights hard to keep his eyes above the neck, when all of Thompson is just there, tan skin and soft, golden fuzz over firm muscle. The asshole is injured, which Daniel shouldn’t find so appealing. He’s also standing closer than he really should be, close enough that Daniel notices that his eyelashes are fine and blond, that his nipples are the exact same shade of pink as his lips.

Peggy probably has occasion to see it all, Daniel thinks to himself bitterly, and that should kill the attraction, but now he’s thinking about Jack and Peggy, together, and it’s – well.

“We brought some clothes,” he says instead. He retrieves the bag that Goldstein had left for them. It contains boxers, a pair of socks, rough laborer’s pants, an undershirt and short-sleeved shirt. No shoes and no jacket. “Not exactly your style, and I don’t know how well they’ll fit, but.” He shrugs.

Jack’s giving him a very funny look when Daniel turns back to him. “What?” Daniel asks.

“Nothin’,” Jack says, a bit defensively. “You just – it’s nothing.” He inhales, slowly, through his nose. His frown gets a bit deeper. “I’ll take the clothes now, Sousa.”

He dresses quickly. The other agents left them a car, and Jack gets in the driver’s seat in just his socks before Daniel can argue. He grips his crutch, fighting back annoyance, and takes his time limping to the shotgun seat.

A week later, Chief Thompson tells Daniel that he’s being promoted – and, oh, by the way, he has to move to Los Angeles if he’d like to accept the promotion. It comes with a significant pay raise and a free house, and without Peggy or any other veteran agents. L.A. already has some people hired, all locals, but Daniel plans on talking to some of the switchboard girls about transferring out west, too.

In the end, Rose Roberts is the only one who’s interested. She’s alright, although she and Daniel aren’t close. He knows Peggy likes her. Before they’re shipped off together, he offers to buy her a coffee and talk about what he knows of the L.A. office.

It’s not much, honestly. It’s a smaller building with a different cover story than the New York office, but her job would be much the same. She would be the only SSR agent in the front of the office, and he doesn’t know any of the men in the back of the office. He tells her the address and the pay scale and after a few minutes they lapse into silence.

“Are there any wolves in the L.A. office?” Rose asks.

Daniel’s surprised, but he answers truthfully. “No. They hired mostly out of the LAPD and they aren’t big on werewolves there. Not like Boston or New York.”

“I’m human myself, but I have a branch of the family that’s furry,” Rose clarifies. “I just like to know who I’m working with, and wolves tend to think and act a bit differently.”

“How so?” Daniel asks. He has his own observations about werewolves; during the war, they were mostly those scary fuckers and now, with his only points of reference being Peggy and Jack, it was more those uncomfortably attractive fuckers.

“Oh, they just have different ways of doing things,” she says breezily. “You know, I knew Peggy – Agent Carter was a wolf from the day that I met her. Just a feeling, you understand. But I didn’t realize that Chief Thompson wasn’t human until months later.”

That’s a surprise, too. “Why’s that?”

“He doesn’t have a very wolfy way about him.” Rose considers Daniel for a beat, then says, “And I think Agent Carter didn’t expect it. Wolves tend to pack up if they spend enough time together, even ones that don’t like each other that much man-shaped. From what I’ve seen, Chief Thompson was resistant to that.”

And now he wasn’t. Daniel chews on that for a minute, then says, “Well, it looks like we won’t be dealing with werewolf politics in L.A., at least not right away. Assuming you’re still interested?”

Rose beams and nods, and Daniel thinks about a city he’s never been to and two werewolves that don’t want him and the way his back has been keeping him up at night, spasming from all the crutching around on New York City pavement all the time –

Yeah. Maybe he could use a promotion.