Work Text:
The trouble with bathing the Chaser was that he did not, on any fundamental level, understand what a bath was for.
He understood warm. He understood wet, but the good kind. He understood, with great and immediate clarity, the smell of the raw chicken thigh Nox was currently holding just out of reach on the far side of the bathroom, which was the only reason the Chaser was standing in the tub at all instead of somewhere under the bed, vibrating with suspicion.
"In," Nox cooed, gesturing with the chicken like a conductor's baton.
The Chaser was in. He was also, at the same time, trying to get out, which made for a confusing several seconds of a very large coyote-shaped young man doing something between a crouch and a lunge in eight inches of lukewarm water, ears back, tail doing wide unhappy arcs that sent water over the lip of the tub and directly onto the bathmat Nox had just laundered.
"You are going to fall," Nox informed him, with the specific flat patience of a man who had said this exact sentence, in some form, every week for two months. "You are enormous now. This tub was not built with you in mind."
This was true, and also entirely Nox's fault, a fact the Chaser could not currently articulate but which he communicated instead by leaning the full and considerable weight of himself against Nox's side, nearly toppling both of them into the water, because Nox fed him. Nox fed him steak and chicken and, on one memorable and deeply regretted occasion, an entire uncooked pork loin that had required forty minutes of very calm negotiation to retrieve, and the Chaser's body had responded to two months of this the way any sensible biology would: by getting bigger. Broader through the shoulders. Heavier in a way that made him difficult to lift, difficult to redirect, and — currently — difficult to keep in a bathtub.
"Sit," Nox said.
The Chaser did not sit. The Chaser looked at the chicken.
"Sit, and I'll give it to you."
This was more compelling logic. The Chaser sat, abruptly, sending a second wave over the tub's edge, and fixed his attention on the chicken with the single-minded intensity of a creature who had, at some point in the last several weeks, stopped being able to imagine wanting anything else.
Nox gave him a very small piece. He had learned this the hard way as well — give the whole thing at once and negotiations were immediately over, the Chaser having gotten what he came for and seeing no further reason to remain in the tub, dripping and smug, while Nox chased him around the apartment with a bar of soap. Small pieces. A economy of bribery, doled out at intervals precisely calculated to maintain interest.
"Good," Nox said, and meant it in the specific, careful way he meant most things — not indulgent, exactly, but not nothing either. He worked shampoo into the Chaser's fur with both hands while the coyote sat, briefly cooperative, gnawing with great seriousness on his sliver of chicken. His fur was dense and coarse under Nox's palms, several shades darker than Chase's actual hair, and threaded through with a warmth that Nox had never quite gotten used to — the specific heat of him, always running hot, a furnace shaped like an animal shaped like a man.
It lasted almost ninety seconds.
Then the chicken was gone, and the Chaser remembered, with the abrupt totality of an animal whose object permanence extended primarily to food, that he did not want to be in the bathtub. He stood. He shook, thoroughly, from nose to tail, in the manner of every wet animal in the history of wet animals, and Nox — who had, in seven hundred years, developed excellent reflexes for a great many things and apparently none whatsoever for this — was soaked from the collarbone down.
He stood there for a moment, dripping, holding an empty hand where the chicken had been, and looked at the Chaser, who looked back at him with his tongue out and his ears up and an expression that could only be described as proud of himself.
"You," Nox said, "are going to be the death of several centuries of composure."
The Chaser wagged.
Nox produced the second piece of chicken from the dish on the sink — he had learned to keep reserves, plural, hidden in increasingly creative locations after the first week had taught him that visible chicken supplies did not survive contact with the Chaser's opinions on fairness — and used it, shamelessly, to lure him back down into a sit long enough to rinse the shampoo out properly. It took four more pieces. It took a fifth to get the conditioner in, because apparently the Chaser had opinions about conditioner that he did not have about shampoo, opinions he communicated by attempting to climb directly out of the tub and into Nox's lap, which given his current size was less an act of affection than a controlled catastrophe.
By the end of it Nox's shirt was ruined, his hair was plastered to his skull in a way that made him look considerably younger than his several centuries, and the bathroom looked like the site of a minor flood. The Chaser, freshly clean and smelling of lavender instead of whatever he'd rolled in that afternoon, sat in the tub looking enormously pleased with the entire arrangement, chicken residue on his whiskers, tail thumping wetly against the porcelain.
"There is no dignity in this for either of us," Nox told him.
The Chaser leaned forward and licked him directly across the face, once, with great and uncomplicated satisfaction, and Nox — soaked, exasperated, hair dripping into his own eyes — found that he could not, in fact, summon much objection to that either.