Chapter Text
The morning that Pete wakes up with furry ears sprouting from his head is the same morning, coincidentally, that he receives an ominous email from Joe. Mostly because his laptop is sitting open on his chest from the night before, the email is the first thing of which Pete’s made aware. It immediately strikes him as odd. Joe has all their phone numbers saved to his cell and has been using them at least semi-regularly for the better part of a decade. But Pete brushes it aside, because Joe can be a little weird like that.
(Sometimes. Rarely. Once, years ago, he’d driven the van with a flat for thirty-five miles because he thought stopping to change the damn tire would make them late to their gig. And it had been fine, miraculously, and the metal rim hadn’t been badly damaged and there was a spare tucked in the back somewhere so everything had worked out. But Pete remembers the stubborn set to Joe’s jaw, his hilarious insistence, even as he was going twenty miles an hour on a six-lane highway, that it would be fine until they found the venue, and is comforted. Even Joe’s strangest behavior is always possible to explain away as a quirk—he’d probably just left his phone upstairs and couldn’t be bothered, on principle, to get up from his computer to send off a text message to the guys.)
The email is brief and informal but there is an unusual tightness to it that makes Pete nervous.
Hi guys, it reads, need 2 talk. 1pm?
There isn’t anything strange about the request itself — hell, Joe’s been sending organizational messages exactly like it since 2003 — but the concision of this one, the period at the end of the sentence and the capital H on Hi conspire to form a knotted too-warm lump of dread in Pete's chest. Again, though, he pushes down that instinctual fear, because he’s barely even woken up and he certainly doesn’t have any substantial evidence that anything’s wrong at all. It’s not until Pete moves to run a pensive hand through his hair, stretching, that he feels them: soft, twitching, definitely-not-human ears protruding from his head.
What the fuck. What the fuck.
Pete has to stuff a fist in his mouth to keep from screaming. He scrambles out of bed, throwing half his duvet haphazardly onto the floor, and races to the en suite bathroom opposite his dresser. He flicks on the light and spins to face the mirror and yeah, sure enough. Those are definitely dog ears. Pete leans in closer, staring. He reaches a trembling hand back up to touch them, and they must be real because he can feel the warm brush of his fingers on their pointed tips. Pete slumps heavily against the wall behind him, sliding down it until his butt hits the floor, and oh God there is something protruding from his tailbone too. Pete has a sneaking suspicion he knows what it is. A perfunctory glance confirms that it’s, as he feared, a tail, and he pinches himself twice on the inner thigh. This literally fucking has to be a dream. This isn’t happening, because a human man growing dog appendages overnight is impossible in all senses of the word.
Pete’s breathing begins to quicken, and he slouches back over to his computer to reread the email Joe sent. Pete can’t go out like this! He can’t just attend a clearly-very-important-and-future-deciding band meeting with fucking German Shepard ears sticking out of his head! He needs to see a doctor or something, find someone who knows how to deal with this kind of thing, except there is nobody on the planet Earth who has ever dealt with this before and that mid-thought revelation makes Pete want to cry. He is completely out of his depth with this, wonders desperately if he’s hallucinating, if he’s taken some leftover pills and forgotten, but he hasn’t kept them in the house since he’d learned Ash was pregnant. There’s only one thing to do in a situation as dire as this one.
Patrick picks up on the first ring.
Pete begins babbling immediately. “Patrick! Patrick, man, it’s really fucking bad, there’s like, dog ears on my head and I think they’re fucking real, dude! I tried touching them a second ago, it’s so weird, I can feel them—”
“Pete,” Patrick says.
“—and there’s a tail, and that’s fucking real and attached to me too somehow, and I’ve never heard of anything like this happening except there was that disease that used to get people put in sideshows, you know, the werewolf one where they’re covered in hair all over—”
“Pete,” Patrick says again, louder.
“—but this isn’t like that at all! I’m not any hairier than usual, man, I don’t have fur or any of that shit, it’s just these fucking—fucking protuberances that have grown on me overnight like I’m a—”
“Pete!” Patrick snaps for the third time, cutting him off at last. “You need to calm the fuck down. I know you have animal ears.”
Pete’s momentarily struck dumb. “What? You know?”
Patrick sighs, tinny and dejected over the phone. “It happened to me, Joe, and Andy too, man. Did you get Joe’s email? He called me on his landline at like, six a.m., said he threw his cell across the room when he saw his reflection on the screen.” Something shifts, then, in Patrick’s voice. “We need to figure out what to do. It’ll all be fine, man, it always is, you know it is. You just have to meet us at the studio later, okay? Will you meet us, Pete?”
He’s speaking gentle in that way he hasn’t for a while, as if Pete’s a skittish dog that needs handling, as if Pete will start snarling and slathering at the first sign of conflict, which, Pete has to admit, maybe isn’t a completely unfair assumption to make given their current circumstances. If he’s honest, Patrick’s soothing, trustworthy voice is creeping its way down his spine, relaxing his tense muscles and making him want to do something, anything, to please it—Jesus. This isn’t helping.
Pete pinches his thigh again and tries to collect himself. He nods before remembering Patrick can’t see him. “Yeah. Yes. Yeah, I’ll be there.” He pauses, listens to Patrick’s breathing on the other line, tries to align it with his own. (He knows, as if in some teen romcom, that Patrick won’t hang up before Pete does; it’s a leftover instinct from when it used to get really bad and the only way Pete could bear LA was knowing Patrick was there on the other line, however far away he might be. Pete is maybe currently abusing that knowledge.)
Pete finds himself fighting the urge to cry and takes a few shuddering breaths, half-hoping Patrick hears and comforts him a little more, but there’s still only breathing from the phone’s speaker. Patrick’s probably gotten distracted and is clicking around on his computer. Fair enough. Pete’s been silent for upwards of a minute already. But then, halfway to just hanging up and taking a long shower, he thinks of something.
“You said animal ears.”
“What?” Patrick asks absently. He sounds busy, like he’s focused on something else. Pete knew it.
“Earlier, when you said you already knew about the tail and stuff. You said we all have animal ears. Why didn’t you just say dog ears? Are you guys not all dogs too?” Pete’s aware that he’s not asking the most important questions that are probably there to ask, but this is a really fucking weird situation and he thinks he has the right to ask about one or two kind of stupid things. Sue him.
Patrick snorts, and he sounds young; for a moment he is pink-cheeked and sixteen and Pete's heart soars. “I’m a bear. Y’know, like the brown kind. Uh. Andy’s one of those weird curly haired cats. Joe’s a dog too, you’d have to ask him if he’s figured out the exact breed or whatever.”
The familiarity, the inherent understanding that lately feels like it’s slipping further away with every screaming match—it’s leached back into Patrick’s tone like it does every so often when Pete does something endearing. Pete’s heart leaps higher, up from his stomach to his chest.
And then, honest-to-god, his tail starts to wag.
He feels it like a compulsion, like muscle memory. He can hear faint swishing behind him and he squeaks.
“You okay?” Patrick asks. He sounds mildly concerned. That makes the wagging faster.
“Yeah,” Pete forces out, “um. Yeah. I am. Yeah.” He can practically see Patrick’s doubtful, reproving face through the phone.
“Pete—” Patrick begins, and if he finishes that thought then Pete doesn’t hear because he hangs up. In fact, Pete very purposefully leaves his phone far away charging in the bedroom while he takes the longest, coldest shower he’s ever had.