Work Text:
The first full moon arrived on a Thursday, which was, in Nox's estimation, an acceptable day of the week for a were-coyote to be temporarily occupying his apartment. Not ideal. But acceptable.
He had prepared. He had administered the monkshood at the correct dosage, moved anything breakable to the upper shelves, cleared the floor of the living room, and settled himself in the reading chair with his book and the patient disposition of someone who had seen considerably worse things than this and expected to see considerably worse things than this before the night was out.
What he had not prepared for was the sock.
…
The first shift, in Nox's experience of watching other people go through it, was the most unpredictable. The virus at its least fluent, the body at its most resistant, the animal arriving for the first time into a space that had not yet learned to contain it. He had watched Chase go down — the spine first, then the hands, the sounds in between that he was not going to think about — and had done what he always did, which was stay close and stay still and let it happen, because the only useful thing available to him was to be the fixed point.
The shift had completed around nine-thirty. Incomplete — he'd expected that, the first time rarely went all the way — but substantial enough that what was currently occupying the living room floor was operating primarily on animal instinct with the human consciousness somewhere in the back, watching.
Nox had returned to his chair.
The Chaser, for the first hour, had been largely occupied with the apartment itself. This was also normal. A new animal in a space it had only previously occupied as a human — the recalibration of familiar smells, familiar textures, familiar dimensions at an unfamiliar height and angle. The Chaser had investigated the rug with its nose. It had investigated the gap under the worktable. It had investigated the curtains, briefly, and then apparently decided the curtains were not interesting and moved on.
Nox had read forty pages.
The Chaser had then investigated him, which he had also expected — a circuit around the chair, the amber eyes taking inventory, the nose doing most of the actual work. Nox had held still and let himself be investigated and the Chaser had concluded whatever it was concluding and settled at the other end of the room and Nox had read another twelve pages.
Then Chase's sock had blown off the radiator.
…
It had been sitting there since Tuesday. Chase's sock, a grey athletic one with a red stripe at the ankle, had been drying on the radiator after an incident involving a puddle on Clement Street and had been there long enough that Nox had stopped registering it as an object and had absorbed it into the background of the apartment the way you absorb things that have been there for several days.
The Chaser had not absorbed it into the background.
The Chaser had been watching it since approximately nine forty-five with the focused attention of an animal that had identified something and was determining its category. The sock sat on the radiator. The Chaser sat across the room. This arrangement persisted for twenty minutes, during which Nox read another eight pages and was cautiously optimistic about how the evening was going.
Then the radiator knocked, the way old radiators do — a sudden metallic clang that startled no one who had been living with it for any length of time and startled the sock off its perch.
The sock hit the floor.
The Chaser moved.
Not aggressively — that was the thing, there was nothing aggressive about it, it was the pure delighted pounce of an animal encountering a thing that had moved and was therefore interesting and possibly a thing that could be caught. The Chaser crossed the room in the specific way of a coyote at speed, which was faster than the apartment had previously accommodated, and landed on the sock with both forepaws and the expression of something that had successfully completed a project.
Nox watched this.
The Chaser picked up the sock. It turned to look at Nox with the sock in its mouth and the amber eyes bright with the specific satisfaction of an animal that had achieved something and wanted this to be acknowledged.
"Well done," Nox said.
The tail moved.
The Chaser brought him the sock.
…
This, Nox understood in retrospect, was where the evening pivoted.
The Chaser brought the sock to the chair and set it down at Nox's feet, which was — touching, actually, in the specific way of things that were Chase expressing Chase-ness from inside a different chassis. The impulse to give things to people he liked. The impulse to share the good thing. Even now, even like this, operating from a significantly different set of instincts, the fundamental quality of him was intact.
Nox picked up the sock.
The Chaser's ears went forward.
"It's a sock," Nox told it.
The ears stayed forward. The tail was moving with the slow deliberate wag of an animal that was very interested in what happened next.
Nox, who had not played fetch in any meaningful sense in seven hundred years and could not immediately identify the last time he had thrown anything for recreational purposes, looked at the sock and then at the Chaser and made a reasonable assessment of the situation.
He tossed the sock across the room.
The Chaser went after it with the same focused velocity as before, caught it before it hit the ground, and brought it back and set it down at Nox's feet and looked at him with the expression of an animal that had understood the structure of this activity immediately and was enthusiastically in favor of continuing it.
Nox picked up the sock.
He threw it again.
This continued for some time.
…
The problem developed around the eleventh throw.
Nox threw the sock. The Chaser went after it. Standard. The sock landed near the worktable and the Chaser retrieved it and turned to bring it back, which was also standard, and then something under the worktable caught its attention — a scrap of fabric that had fallen off the table at some point in the past week, dark green velvet, roughly sock-shaped in the way that things on floors are sometimes roughly sock-shaped in low light.
The Chaser stopped.
It looked at the fabric scrap.
It looked at the sock in its mouth.
It put the sock down and picked up the fabric scrap instead, which Nox observed with the mild interest of someone watching an animal make a categorical decision.
Then it brought both back. One in its mouth, one batted along the floor with a forepaw, because apparently the Chaser had decided that the correct response to finding a second interesting object was not to choose between them but to bring both, which was, Nox thought, very Chase.
He accepted both. He held one in each hand.
The Chaser sat in front of him and waited with the alert expectant posture of an animal that had delivered the goods and was ready for the next phase of proceedings.
Nox threw the fabric scrap.
The Chaser went left.
Nox threw the sock.
The Chaser pivoted, caught it mid-air, and Nox had a moment of genuine appreciation for the coordination of it before the Chaser landed, turned, and came back at speed — and in the specific way of an animal that had identified the source of the thrown things and had decided that the most efficient retrieval strategy was to go directly to the source rather than the thing, launched itself at Nox's arm.
Not at Nox. At the arm specifically. The arm that had been throwing things. The arm that, from the Chaser's operational perspective, was the object of interest — the thing that had the sock, that produced the thrown thing, that was clearly the relevant variable in this situation.
The logic was, Nox had to admit, internally consistent.
What the Chaser had grabbed, with the focused purposeful grip of an animal collecting something it had decided belonged to it, was Nox's left arm just below the shoulder.
What the Chaser had then done, in the same motion, with the cheerful confidence of something completing an action it had started, was pull.
The arm, which was attached to Nox, came with it.
Then it wasn't attached to Nox.
Both of them went still.
The Chaser stood in the middle of the living room holding Nox's left arm in its mouth with the expression of an animal that had retrieved something and was only now, in this moment of stillness, processing that the something it had retrieved was not the sock.
Nox looked at where his arm had been.
He looked at the Chaser.
The Chaser's ears went back. Not aggressively. The specific ear position of an animal that has done something and is registering, through some channel available to animals that is not quite guilt but is in the neighborhood, that this was perhaps not the intended outcome.
"Hm," Nox said.
The Chaser set the arm down very carefully, with the deliberateness of something returning an object it had borrowed without asking. It looked at the arm. It looked at Nox. It looked at the arm again.
"It's all right," Nox said.
The ears stayed back.
"Chase." Nox kept his voice at the same register he used for everything — even, unhurried, the voice that communicated that the situation was being managed and did not require additional alarm from anyone present. "It's all right. Come here."
The Chaser came to him, slowly, with the reduced posture of an animal moving carefully through a situation it had complicated, and put its head in Nox's lap — his remaining lap-adjacent area — and looked up at him with the amber eyes and something in them that was Chase, was recognizably Chase, mortified and present behind the animal expression.
Nox put his remaining hand on the Chaser's head.
"It will reattach," he said. "Give it an hour."
The Chaser made a sound that was low and miserable and not quite a whine.
"It's fine," Nox said. "I've had worse."
This was true. It did not appear to comfort the Chaser, which made a second miserable sound and pressed its nose harder into his knee.
"The sock retrieval was very good," Nox offered. "Up until the end."
The Chaser's tail moved once. Reluctantly.
"There," Nox said, and kept his hand on the Chaser's head, and looked across the room at his arm, which was on the floor next to the green velvet scrap and the sock and was already beginning, slowly, the process of becoming something he was going to need back.
He would need to feed tomorrow. Sooner rather than later. The regeneration without feeding was going to be slow and unpleasant and he was going to need both arms for the commission due next week.
He looked at the ceiling.
He looked at the Chaser, which had its eyes closed and its nose on his knee and its ears still in the apologetic position.
He looked at his book, which was on the side table and which he could reach with his remaining arm, and reached for it, and opened it to page three hundred and forty-two, and read.
The Chaser breathed against his knee.
Outside the August city went about its business, entirely unaware.
…
The arm reattached by two in the morning, which was slower than usual and faster than it could have been, and Nox spent the intervening time reading and periodically reassuring the Chaser, which remained in a state of low-level distress about the whole situation, that everything was fine, that he was fine, that it was going to be fine.
By the time Chase came back to himself on the floor just before dawn, pale and wrecked and himself again, Nox was intact and had finished his book and was starting another one, and the sock was on the radiator again, and the green velvet scrap was in the bin.
The left sleeve of the turtleneck was not recoverable.
Chase looked at the ceiling. He looked at Nox. He looked at Nox's arms, both present, both apparently functional. His brow furrowed.
"Did something happen to your sleeve?" he rasped.
"No," Nox said.
Chase looked at him for a long moment with the post-shift eyes, not quite focused, the human consciousness still reassembling itself. Then he apparently decided he didn't have the resources to pursue it and closed his eyes again.
"Okay," he murmured. "Good."
Nox looked at his book.
"Get some sleep," he said. "I'll explain in the morning."
He did not explain in the morning.
Chase found out when the next full moon arrived and Nox, with the calm foresight of someone who had learned from experience, put the socks in the bedroom before it started.