Chapter Text
The city was quieter after dark.
Not silent - it was never truly silent - but the particular kind of quiet that settled in after midnight carried weight to it that the daylight hours didn't. The distant hum of streetlamps buzzing slightly too loud for the emptiness around them, the occasional clatter of something shifting inside an alley, wind moving through the gaps between buildings with a low and wandering groan, as though the architecture itself was exhaling slowly, trying not to draw attention to the fact that it was still standing at all.
Ratthew moved through it the same way he moved through most things. Close to the walls.
His black fur disappeared against the wet pavement without any effort on his part - that, at least, had always come naturally. He kept beneath awnings where he could, not for shelter from the cold but for the shadow they cast, the way they cut the lamplight into something manageable and kept him out of the open stretches of street where being seen became a real variable worth noticing. His ears rotated forward without him thinking about it, catching and sorting the sounds around him the way they always did at this hour. Wind. The buzz of the streetlamp ahead, uneven in its cycling in a way that usually meant the bulb was aging or the wiring had been disturbed by something passing too close too recently. Somewhere above, a ventilation unit wheezed on for the third time in ten minutes - it was too frequent, which meant a malfunction or a propped door bleeding cold air inside and confusing the sensor. He noted it and moved on, because his mind ran like that at this hour whether he asked it to or not, sorting and cataloguing the small mechanical language of the city the way other people might hum something familiar to themselves without realizing they were doing it.
He'd tried explaining this to someone once.
It hadn't translated well.
You think too much, they'd told him, with the particular patience of someone who genuinely believed that was a useful thing to say. He'd considered it seriously, which was perhaps proof enough. But thinking too much had also kept him on the right side of several situations that had ended badly for people who thought considerably less, so he'd filed the criticism away alongside everything else and continued.
His route to the hospital wasn't accidental. It hadn't been accidental for a long time now. It had been built slowly out of nights that had cost him sleep and occasionally more than that - adjusted each time something changed, each time a lamp went out or a camera got repositioned or a particular stretch of pavement gave him a feeling he'd learned not to ignore. By now it existed less as a conscious decision and more as something his body simply knew, the way it knew to keep his breathing even and his footsteps light and his tail tucked close so it didn't drag against something that might echo. He knew which streets the lamplight covered fully and which had gaps wide enough to swallow something large without complaint. He knew which corners gave him three seconds of sightline in both directions before committing, and which ones didn't, and what that difference meant in practical terms. He kept close to the eastern wall of the building on his left because he'd noted, weeks ago, that the two cameras mounted on its face left a narrow blind corridor there - not wide enough for most, but more than sufficient for him.
Size, he'd decided a long time ago, was the only advantage he'd never had to work for.
People looked past him without registering him. Conversations continued around him as though the presence of something small and quiet didn't constitute a thinking creature with functioning ears and a memory that retained more than most people were comfortable with once they figured it out. It had bothered him once - the dismissal, the way eyes slid off him and resettled on something they found more worthy of attention. It didn't anymore. He'd reclassified it somewhere along the way from an insult into a tool, which was the most practical thing he'd ever done with a feeling he couldn't get rid of anyway.
He was about a third of the way along his usual route, passing the gap between a shuttered storefront and a building whose ground floor had been empty long enough that the windows had gone opaque with grime, when he heard it.
He suddenly stopped, not because he'd decided to. Because his body had already made the decision before the sound fully registered, the same kind of automatic response that had gotten very good at arriving ahead of his conscious thought over the past year and a half. His ears pinned back. His eyes moved left, tracking toward the alley mouth across the street, and he was already pressing himself into the gap between the dumpster and the wall before he'd processed exactly what he was responding to.
The sound was wet and irregular. A skittering with too much weight behind it, punctuated by something that occupied the space where breathing should have been - pulled in and pushed out with a frantic, arrhythmic urgency that suggested whatever was producing it was running on something other than ordinary instinct. He'd heard enough ordinary things move through the dark to know the difference by now.
It came out of the alley fast with the wrong kind of momentum - a lurching, unevenly-weighted gait that spoke of a body whose instructions no longer matched its own architecture, joints bending at angles that made his stomach do something unpleasant. It was larger than it should have been, shoulders rolling badly with each stride. The fur - what remained of it - sat matted and patchy against skin that had gone a pale grey-yellow underneath, as though the colour had been drawn out from the inside slowly, over time, without anyone noticing until it was already done. It crossed beneath the nearest streetlamp for two seconds, maybe less.
He saw the eyes.
That was always the part that stayed. The rest of it he could process and file - the proportions, the gait, the ruined coat - he'd had enough practice that it no longer hit him the way it once would have, landed in his chest and sat there. But the eyes were harder to categorize and therefore harder to move past cleanly. Wide, like... really wide. Not in the way of fear or surprise but structurally, fundamentally wide, the pupil blown out far past anything the available light should have produced, ringed by something the wrong colour and shot through with thin red webbing that caught the lamplight and held it in a way that eyes weren't supposed to hold light. They didn't find him. They didn't find anything, as far as he could tell, sweeping across the street with a kind of frantic unfocus that suggested the thing behind them was no longer processing the world the way it once had.
Its mouth was open. Jaw dropped further than it had any business dropping, teeth crowded and overlapping and pale as old bone - too many of them, or the same number rearranged into something that no longer made sense. The sound it made wasn't a growl and wasn't a scream but lived in the unhappy territory between the two, it pressed against the back of his skull and stayed there even after the creature had disappeared into the dark between two buildings further up the street, swallowed completely, the sound of it fading in uneven intervals until only the buzz of the streetlamp filled the space it had left behind.
He counted to thirty. He always counted to thirty - it had started as an arbitrary number and had since proven itself enough times that he no longer questioned it. At twenty-eight he became aware that his heart was running fast, and he noted it the same way he noted the ventilation unit and the aging bulb and the blind corridor along the eastern wall, filed it away without judgment, and at thirty he exhaled slowly through his nose and pressed his paw flat against the cold pavement once, force of habit.
He stepped back out from behind the dumpster and continued walking.
His route didn't change. It never changed for things like that, not anymore... The anomalies moved through the city the same way everything else did - according to patterns, even if those patterns were harder to read than most - and he'd learned that stopping entirely accomplished less than pressing forward with appropriate caution, which he was already doing. He adjusted his angle slightly, keeping more wall on his left than usual for the next two blocks until he was confident the distance was sufficient, and that was all.
The hospital was still twenty minutes away at his pace.
He kept moving, ears still pitched forward, and let his mind return to its usual work the way water returned to a low point. He thought about the route.
He thought, briefly and against his preference, about Rattina.
He always did, eventually. It was like a gravitational pull - the way the whole shape of his life bent in that direction if he stopped actively steering away from it, because she was the reason for all of it. The route. The counting. The way he'd reclassified every disadvantage into a tool because tools were something you could use and grief was something that would simply take up the space where useful things should be if he let it.
He thought, briefly and against his better judgment, about Rattina.
Something about the last stretch before the hospital loosened things he'd prefer to keep filed away - don't, he thought, the way he always thought it, and the way it always failed - and Rattina had a way of being the first thing that fell out when something loosened. She'd built herself a permanent residence somewhere just behind everything else, and the rent she paid was showing up uninvited at inconvenient moments, which, if she were here, she would have found genuinely funny. She'd always found his inability to switch off funny. Very funny, Rattina. Hilarious.
She'd worked for the Animal Corporation. Happy about it, too - or she'd said she was, and he'd believed her, which in retrospect said considerably more about how much he'd wanted to than how carefully he'd actually been paying attention. I should have been paying attention. He knew the difference now between someone being happy and someone performing it for the benefit of someone they didn't want to worry. He'd learned that distinction the hard way, from her specifically, which felt like a particularly cruel way to acquire anything.
She'd stopped talking about work. Then stopped sleeping. Then started checking the window at sounds he couldn't hear from across the room, and he'd told himself stress, it's just stress, she's always been like this when things get heavy - he'd been wrong about that, he'd known somewhere underneath the telling himself that he was wrong, and he'd done it anyway because it was easier.
Then she was gone.
Everyone had an explanation. Several, actually, each one delivered with the specific narration of something that had been considered before it left someone's mouth, and that was the part that had never stopped sitting wrong - not the loss itself, which was its own separate wound he'd stopped trying to examine directly, but the explanations. Their tidiness. The way they arrived already finished, no rough edges, nothing that snagged on anything if you didn't press. I pressed, he thought. That's the whole problem. I pressed and nothing held.
He still didn't understand how the others had simply set it down and walked away from it.
He'd watched them do it. He'd watched the specific moment arrive where someone who'd known her decided the official version was simply easier to carry than the alternative, and something in him each time had gone very quiet. Something underneath both of those, something that didn't have a clear name and that he'd mostly given up trying to give one. It doesn't matter what it's called. It doesn't change anything what it's called.
He'd stopped bringing her up.
The hospital sat at the end of the block. Its windows were lit, pale yellow light spreading unevenly across the wet street below. He looked at it properly before committing to crossing open ground. Windows, entrance, the strip of shadow along the left side of the building. - Same as always. - He crossed.
[...]
The lobby was small. That was the first thing he noticed - not small in a way that felt intentional, designed for efficiency, but small in the way of a space that had simply never anticipated needing to be anything larger. The ceiling sat lower than he'd expected from the outside. Two patients occupied chairs along the far wall, neither looking at the other, neither particularly looking at anything - the specific vacancy of people who had been waiting for a while. He clocked them both in a single pass before moving on.
Further left, two windows cut into two walls making a box. A little office sat behind the glass. A counter ran below the windows, low enough for most but requiring a slight reach for him, which he'd already accounted for.
So this is the place.
He crossed the lobby veryy slowly, not because he was uncertain but because slow was how you actually saw things. The floor was clean in a way that felt deliberate - the kind of clean that got applied over something rather than maintained from the start. He noted the camera mounted in the upper right corner, the angle of it, the slight leftward tilt that meant the bottom right quarter of the room was softer coverage than the rest. He noted the door next to the second check-in window, slightly ajar. He was almost at the window before he saw the person inside the office clearly.
He stopped in his track to look at the room.
The bunny was light yellow, wearing a grey hoodie and grey sweatpants, just standing there. Though that wasn't what held his attention. What held his attention was the face - or more precisely, the specific wrongness of it that his eyes kept trying to resolve and couldn't quite. No visible eyes, not really. Two small dots where eyes should have been, flat and dark and giving nothing back. And a smile - wide, fixed, the kind of smile that existed completely independently of whatever the rest of the face might otherwise be doing - no teeth, just the shape of it, curving up at both ends.
Ratthew looked at this for a moment. - Not an anomaly, he pondered, Just... that.
The bunny hadn't noticed him yet. They were looking at something on the desk, or appearing to look at something, the distinction between those two things being genuinely unclear given the available visual information. He watched them for another second, then pulled his attention back to the task at hand, which required him to think about what he was actually going to say.
Being small has its advantages. I hear things. I see things.
He ran it back through his head, editing as he went - too much, led with too much, what was the point of volunteering that immediately, he didn't even know why the instinct was there, some reflex of establishing himself before someone else established him as something worse. It's a dangerous job. True, also unnecessary to say out loud to a - he glanced again at the wide fixed smile, the dot eyes, the grey hoodie hanging slightly off one shoulder -
Stupid looking bunny that looks like it lacks the capability to process its own thoughts.
When he approached the window the bunny turned with the full sudden attention of something that had been aware of him the entire time and had simply been waiting. The smile didn't change. The dot eyes landed on him and stayed there, and Ratthew held the look without difficulty, because he'd looked at considerably more unsettling things in the last hour alone and he wasn't about to let a check-in window be the thing that got to him.
"I want to check in as a patient," he said.
He reached up, found the edge of the counter, and slid his papers across it. The reach was slight and he didn't comment on it.
The bunny looked at the papers. Then at him. Then back at the papers, with an expression that communicated absolutely nothing because it was physically incapable of communicating anything other than the smile, which remained. A stamp appeared from somewhere below the desk and came down on the papers with a sound that was slightly louder than necessary.
Nothing happened for a moment. He understood why.
The bunny's attention had shifted - directed now at something outside the immediate transaction. Running the check. He'd expected it, had expected it from the moment he walked through the door, had honestly expected it sooner. He was small and black-furred and had arrived alone on foot after midnight and he was perfectly aware of what that combination suggested to people who were paid to be cautious about exactly that sort of combination. Surprised they didn't turn me away at the door,
The bunny moved to the camera. A quick snap of a picture. Then the monitors - Ratthew tracked the eyes, or what functioned as eyes, moving across the screens in a fast practiced sweep, checking the feed against whatever criteria they'd been given for whatever they were looking for. The smile stayed the entire time. It occurred to him that the smile probably stayed during everything.
Then, apparently satisfied - or at least finished - the bunny returned to the desk and the printer on the right side of it woke up with a mechanical whir and produced something small. The bunny picked it up. Looked at it. Looked at Ratthew. The printed paper was slid over the counter as Ratthew picked it up.
It was his badge. Laminated and properly formatted. Everything in order except for the field where a name should have been, which read, in clean printed letters:
???
He looked at this for a moment. - They actually printed that.
He turned the badge over, as though the back might offer some clarification, and it did not. He looked back up at the bunny, who was still smiling in the way that they were always smiling, apparently unbothered by having produced and distributed official documentation with three question marks where a person's name was supposed to go. He thought about pointing this out. - it's not worth the effort.
When he clipped the badge on, he spoke, "I'll be in room three," and stepped back from the window.
After having left the lobby section, the hallway that led to room 3 was narrow and lit badly.
Not dark enough to be concerning, not bright enough to be comfortable. The result was a faint unevenness to it, pools of slightly warmer light alternating with cooler ones, the whole corridor carrying the low, persistent hum.
Ratthew hadn't learned to stop hearing it. The smell reached him before he'd gone three steps in. Clean in the same purposeful way the lobby floor had been clean - antiseptic underneath something that was trying to be neutral and wasn't quite, the specific chemical approximation of absence that hospitals used because actual absence didn't smell like anything and apparently that was considered worse.
Rooms ran along the sides, with one separated right at the end in the middle. One through five, numbered in plain black on plain white placards, evenly spaced, each door identical to the last. He walked past one, past two. His eyes moved, checking the gaps under the doors, the slight variations in how each one sat in its frame, whether any showed light through the crack at the bottom, or the particular shadow of something standing close on the other side.
He glanced back only once. The hallway sat empty behind him, the lobby out of sight as the view stretched into another section of the hospital, where the rooms counted from 6 to 8.
He looked at the door marked three and pushed it open.
It was nothing. He'd looked back for a reason - he always had a reason, the reasons were rarely wrong, that was the whole problem with talking himself out of them - but the hallway had been empty, and the bunny had been exactly where they were supposed to be... Nothing had changed, which was either reassuring or wasn't, depending on the kind of night it was, and he hadn't decided yet what kind of night this was.
The door fell shut behind him.
Inside a bed in the centre, white sheets, frame slightly too tall for him to get onto without a moment's effort. Above it, mounted on the wall near the ceiling, a black screen - off, dark, reflecting the room back at him in a vague and featureless way. Along the walls, the margins of the kind of space that had been furnished just enough to technically qualify: a plant he didn't look at long enough to determine if it was real, a poster whose content he registered only as coloured shapes before his attention moved on, some bracket or fitting on one wall that probably held something that wasn't currently there.
It took slightly more effort than it should have for him to crawl on the bed.
He lay back and looked up at the ceiling, which was exactly as interesting as ceilings were, his paws settling at his sides, letting the room be quiet around him for that specific moment. The hum of the fluorescent light in the hallway was audible through the door, faint but present. The antiseptic smell was slightly less concentrated in here. The screen above him was dark.
The Animal Corporation is hiding something.
His thoughts wandered to the suitcases.
The people who came in here, who moved through this place with luggage that didn't make sense for a hospital stay. He'd watched three of them in the last two months alone, from the streets and the shadows underneath benches. Nobody carried a suitcase into a hospital unless they were carrying something out of it. The question - the real question, the one he kept circling - was what.
Rattina... What did you find.
Because she had found something. He was certain of it now. She'd changed before she disappeared - he'd catalogued that change in retrospect with the same methodical attention he gave to everything else and what it described, when laid out in sequence, was someone who had found something out and hadn't known what to do with it. The checking over her shoulder. The sentences that stopped mid-thought when she heard sounds outside. The conversations that went nowhere whenever he asked about work, it didn't feel evasive, it felt managed in a way. She'd been managing him, keeping him at a specific distance from something she'd decided he shouldn't be close to.
She was protecting me, and it didn't work.
Not for her.
He stared at the ceiling and let that sit where it sat and didn't try to move it anywhere. There was a version of this train of thought that led somewhere productive - to the next step, the next document - and there was a version that didn't, that simply circled, and he'd gotten reasonably good at identifying which one he was in. He was in the circling one again.
Somehow, that was comforting to know, so he let himself stay in it a little longer anyway.
The Animal Corporation was hiding something. The hospital was part of it, or adjacent to it, or the hospital was where the something eventually ended up - he hadn't decided yet, didn't have enough to decide for now, which was the reason he was here at all. There were answers somewhere inside this building. He didn't know their shape yet. He knew they existed, which was enough to work with, which was more than he'd had six months ago and considerably more than he'd had the night he'd stood in a hallway outside a door that didn't answer.
Whatever they are, he looked at the ceiling, at the dark screen that showed him a vague and colourless version of the room, whatever they did. I'm going to find it.
The door opened, pulling him out of his spiral.
His heart moved before he did - a single hard knock against his ribs that he felt in his throat - and he was upright on the bed before the thought had fully formed, eyes on the doorway, every part of him suddenly and completely present in the room in a way that the ceiling-staring had not required.
Nobody there.
The door had swung inward about a foot and stopped, sitting open at that angle with stillness. The hallway beyond it was the same hallway it had been. - The draft, he told himself. Old building. Doors do that.
Looking at the door, the door didn't do anything.
He was still looking at it, running through the reasonable explanations in the specific way that his mind did when it was simultaneously constructing them and not quite believing them, when something sharp drove into his left arm, and he heard himself say -
"Ouch-"
- his head immediately snapped around in response.
The bunny was standing directly beside the bed.
Right there. An arm's length away, close enough that he could see the texture of the grey hoodie, the fixed width of the smile, the same eyes. A needle in one hand, a small vial in the other, already half-filled with something dark, which meant the needle had already done what it came to do when he hadn't heard a single thing.
How did you get in here... he thought, with an almost calm clarity.
The bunny did not appear to be entertaining questions. They held the vial up briefly - examining it, or performing the examination of it, the distinction again genuinely unclear - then turned toward the counter along the wall that Ratthew had not paid significant attention to on entry and was now reconsidering. There was a machine on it. Compact, roughly the dimensions of something you'd heat food in, which was more or less how his brain categorized it for lack of a better reference. The bunny slotted the vial into it with a small click, causing the machine to beep once, a purple light came on and spread across the front panel.
The light caught the bunny's hoodie. Turned the grey of it faintly violet.
They stood in front of it and waited, which was what you did, apparently. Ratthew sat on the bed observing the purple light. His arm had a small, sharp ache where the needle had been.
The machine beeped again.
The bunny moved to the computer beside it - Ratthew tracked the motion but didn't try to read the screen, at least not from this angle, it wasn't the moment for that - there was a brief period of typing, or the sound of typing. The symptoms appeared on the screen, which was the one thing he gathered. Someone had determined his symptoms and was now making them official, which he found interesting on multiple levels but kept to himself.
Then the bunny left. Just walked out. Through the door, into the hallway, without looking back or offering any indication of when or whether they intended to return. The door stayed open behind them, sitting at the same angle as before. He sat with that for approximately a minute before the bunny came back.
They entered with the same quality of motion as before and crossed to the bed directly, and before Ratthew had completed the thought that was forming about what was happening, a spoon appeared and was inserted into his mouth.
Maple syrup.
He tasted it before he processed it. Sweet, thick, genuine maple. He sat there for a moment with the spoon between his teeth, his eyes on the bunny who was standing directly in front of him, wearing an expression that, given the fixed smile and the dot eyes, was technically indistinguishable from their expression at any other point in the evening, and yet somehow communicated an almost luminous pride in what they had just accomplished.
When he removed the spoon from his mouth, the bunny took it back without a question. - Okay... - He sat with the maple syrup taste on his tongue. After that weird moment, he settled back against the bed.
His arm still ached faintly. The purple machine had gone dark. The door was still open. Somewhere in the hallway, the fluorescent hum continued, even and indifferent, and the maple syrup was actually not bad, which felt like the least useful observation he'd had all night but wasn't entirely untrue.
The bunny decided to randomly give a thumbs up, some try at communication.
Ratthew looked at the thumb, simply processing the sight before him. - Those are the side effects of working here.
Had to be. Something in the ventilation, maybe. Whatever it was, it had clearly gotten into this one and produced this thing. He didn't know what they were on, but it was doing something for them; he'd give them that.
As the bunny had already left, he lay there for a moment longer, staring at the ceiling again, listening to the door settle back into its frame. The ache in his arm had dulled to something ignorable. The maple syrup taste had mostly faded. He felt, on the whole, approximately the same as he had before any of this had happened, which he supposed was either a good sign or a commentary on what his baseline currently was.
When he finally sat up, there was something around his head.
He reached up and found it before he'd consciously gone looking - a bandage, wrapped neatly, sitting just above his left ear, seemingly applied by someone who knew what they were doing. He pressed on it lightly. No pain. No memory whatsoever of it being put there, no moment in the evening he could locate where his attention had been elsewhere long enough for this to have happened without his knowledge.
He let himself sit with that for a moment. Not too long, though, as he got off the bed, straightened his coat of fur, did not think about the bandage for longer than was useful, which was to say he thought about it constantly while his legs carried him out of the room and back into the hallway.
The fluorescent hum received him. The uneven light. The antiseptic approximation of neutral. He walked past four, past two, past one, eyes moving the same way they always moved, even when there was nothing new to find - maybe especially then - and came back out into the lobby.
The bunny was at the check-in window.
Another patient at the counter, papers being processed, the stamp coming down with the same slightly-too-loud sound. Business as usual. The dot eyes didn't find him. The smile pointed straight ahead. He looked at them for exactly as long as it took to confirm there was nothing new there before he looked away. His legs were already moving toward the exit on their own; something in him had apparently decided for him, and he found he didn't disagree.
When the door opened, the cold came in, hitting his muzzle, making his nose twitch before he was fully through it.
The rain had come and gone while he was inside.
He couldn't tell how long he'd been in there - longer than he'd clocked, probably, time moved differently in spaces that smelled like that - but the street told him what he'd missed. The pavement was dark and wet, reflecting the streetlamps in long broken streaks, and the air had the particular washed quality that followed rain, clean in a way the city rarely managed.
His usual route back was the same as the route there, reversed. He took it without thinking about it, feet finding the familiar angles, keeping close to the walls, ears doing their quiet work. The city was even stiller now than it had been. The small hours are pressing in.
His thoughts wandered to what he'd found... Which was nothing. Technically. A lobby and a hallway with a room that had a machine that beeped purple and a bandage he couldn't account for, also a spoon of maple syrup delivered by someone who looked like they were having the best night of their life. Nothing constituted evidence. Nothing he could lay out in sequence and point to and say - here, this, this is what I came for.
But.
He turned a corner, stayed close to the brick, and passed through the blind corridor along the eastern wall.
But there's something in that building.
There was no telling which room it was in, which shift knew about it, or whose suitcase it was going to turn up inside of eventually. But the feeling he'd carried into the hospital tonight was the same feeling he'd learned to trust. If anything, it was sitting heavier now, more specifically, the way a smell got stronger the closer you got to its source.
If I could get more familiar with the place. If I could get a better read on who's there, what moves, what doesn't.
The thought didn't finish itself. It just hung there in front of him the way thoughts did when they were less like conclusions and more like doors - waiting for him to figure out what was on the other side.
He stepped into a puddle.
The cold water came up over his paw instantly, and he stopped walking for one flat second, looked down at the dark water spreading back out around where he'd stepped, and then continued. His paw was wet. His fur was slightly damp from the residual mist the rain had left behind.
I'll find it. - Not tonight. Tonight had given him nothing he could hold. But tonight had given him the shape of the place, the smell of it, the specific way it was quiet and what that quiet was covering over - that was how it always started.
When turning into the alley, the dark closed around him, despite that he kept walking, paws soft against the wet ground, ears forward, the city breathing its slow, careful breath above him and around him, and the answer still somewhere ahead in the dark, he was going to figure it out, no matter what.