Chapter 1: The Squirmy Fox & the Unfazed Owl
Hank leaned against the wall, the cool of the cracked plaster seeping through the thin asylum-issue shirt. His tail, a stupid fluffy thing he couldn’t control, twitched once, twice, in a sharp, agitated rhythm against his legs. He watched the scene in the center of the common room with a simmering blend of disgust and a reluctant, itching fascination.
The fox-boy was at it again.
Kai writhed on the linoleum floor, the heavy canvas of the straitjacket straining with his movements. His long, white hair was a tangled mess across his face, sticking to the sheen of sweat on his forehead. “Please, Nurse Anya. Just one chance. I’ll be good, I swear. I can be so good for you.” His voice was a raw, cracked thing, equal parts plea and whine.
Nurse Anya stood over him, a monument of calm in the dim, fluorescent gloom. Her owl wings, massive and feathery, gave a single, dismissive ruffle before settling back into their folded position against the starched white of her coat. There was a smear of rusty red on her sleeve, just above the cuff. Hank’s eyes tracked it. Blood. From the last time Kai tried to… connect.
“Your medication, Kaidan. It’s time.” Anya’s voice was low, even, utterly drained of surprise. She held a small paper cup in one capable hand, a water glass in the other.
“I don’t need it,” Kai insisted, his pale throat working as he struggled to lift his head. The dark circles under his eyes looked like bruises. “The medication… it dulls the signal. I can’t hear the directive properly. The breeding imperative is very clear today. It’s you. It’s always been you.” His fox ears, poking through hastily cut holes in the straitjacket, lay flat against his skull.
Anya didn’t flinch. “The directive is a symptom, Kai. The pills help quiet it.”
“You’re quiet!” Kai cried out, his body arching. “You’re so quiet and still and… and warm. I can feel it from here. Let me just… let me touch your hand. Just your hand. My wrists, see?” He twisted, showing the bound leather cuffs. “I’m safe. I’m contained. Please.”
Hank’s own ears—big, stupid, droopy bunny ears—flicked forward of their own accord. He felt a snarl building in his chest. He’d been here two weeks. Two weeks of this droning hum from the other patients, the flickering TV screen of static, the smell of cheap cleanser and despair. And this guy. This fucking guy, who he’d put through a wall his first day for getting too close, was still at it. Like a broken toy, stuck on one terrifying command.
“You’re embarrassing yourself,” Hank said, the words escaping before he could choke them back. They cut through the humid air of the common room.
Kai’s head snapped toward him. Those sunken eyes, usually flitting and paranoid, locked onto Hank with a sudden, chilling intensity. “You. You’re new. You don’t understand the patterns yet. The need. It builds in the spine, did you know that? It travels up.” He dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, though it carried. “She’s the only compatible one. The only one whose frequency doesn’t screech.”
“Your frequency is a goddamn fire alarm,” Hank muttered, pushing off the wall. His green eyes scanned the room. The other patients—a bird-like woman humming tunelessly, a hulking figure with boar tusks staring blankly at the static on the screen—paid no mind. This was Tuesday. This was always Tuesday.
Nurse Anya took advantage of Kai’s distraction. In one smooth, practiced motion, she knelt, pinched his nose shut with her fingers, and tipped the paper cup’s contents into his mouth when he gasped. She followed it with the water, holding his head steady as he gulped reflexively, a strangled sound of protest caught in his throat.
“There,” she said, her voice softening a fraction. “It’s okay, Kaidan. It’ll ease soon.”
She released him and stood, brushing a stray feather from her coat. Kai lay still for a moment, chest heaving, before he began to cough weakly. The frantic light in his eyes was already dimming, softening into a foggy confusion. “Anya?” he slurred.
“I’m here. Rest now.”
Hank watched as the fight drained from the lanky form on the floor. The desperate energy faded, leaving only a brittle shell. A part of him, the part that still remembered the satisfying crunch of Kai’s shoulder against the drywall, was disappointed. The bigger part, the part that hated the itchy confinement of this place and his own twitching limbs, felt a sick twist of recognition.
He wasn’t like him. He wasn’t. His thing was anger, a rocket-fuel burst that lit up and blew out. Not this… this endless, grinding obsession. He had control. Mostly.
Nurse Anya turned, her sharp eyes finding Hank. “You shouldn’t engage, Henry. It exacerbates his paranoia.”
“He exacerbates my everything,” Hank shot back, his tail giving another violent twitch.
A ghost of a smile touched Anya’s lips. “Noted. Can you do something useful? The chairs need to be arranged for group at three. Line them up in a semicircle.”
A menial task. Busywork for the volatile newcomer. Hank got it. He also hated it. He shrugged, a sharp, jerky movement. “Whatever.”
As he started dragging the heavy, mismatched chairs across the peeling floor, he kept Kai in his periphery. The fox-boy had managed to worm his way onto his side, his bound form curling in on itself. His unfocused gaze was fixed on Anya as she walked away, the dark speckles on her wings seeming to blur and swim in his drugged vision.
“She doesn’t understand,” Kai murmured, his voice thick and drifting. It wasn’t meant for Hank, but the room was small, the acoustics terrible. “The emptiness… it howls. Filling it is the only quiet. The only peace.”
Hank arranged a chair with more force than necessary, the screech of metal legs on linoleum making the humming bird-woman flinch. “Peace isn’t groveling on the floor, man.”
Kai’s head lolled toward him. The medication was pulling him under fast, but a sliver of that eerie focus remained. “You’re angry. So angry. Your signal is all… spikes and fire.” He blinked slowly. “You haven’t found your imperative yet. When you do… you’ll understand the need. You’ll beg for it too.”
The words landed like a physical blow. Hank froze, his fingers gripping the cold metal of the chairback. His breath hitched. A tic, a sudden, sharp jerk of his head to the side, seized him. Twitch.
“Fuck you,” he hissed, the heat rising in his cheeks.
But Kai was gone, eyelids fluttering shut, his body going slack. The common room settled back into its baseline hum of dysfunction. The static on the TV hissed. The antiseptic smell tried, and failed, to cover the copper-tinged reminder of Kai’s earlier failure.
Hank finished aligning the chairs in a jerky, imperfect semicircle. He stood in the empty center, feeling the eyes of the others—not on him, but through him. He looked at Kai’s sleeping form, at the tragic, bound silhouette, then down at his own hands. They were trembling.
You haven’t found your imperative yet.
The sentence looped in his head, a terrifying echo in the sterile quiet. He shoved the thought down, deep, where the fire in his gut could burn it to ash. He didn’t have an imperative. He had a problem. That was all.
He walked back to his spot against the wall, sliding down until he was sitting on the floor. He pulled his knees up, wrapping his arms around them, willing the twitches in his shoulders to stop. His bunny ears drooped, framing his view of Kai.
The fox-boy slept. And Hank watched, the first cold trickle of something worse than anger beginning to pool in his stomach.