Chapter Text
Chase had, by now, lost count of exactly how many times he'd had to restock the fridge since the full moon started.
It wasn't that Buddy was destructive about it. That was almost the worst part — there was no chaos to point to, no evidence, no dramatic mess to be annoyed about. Chase would open the fridge in the morning fully stocked, close it, do something else for twenty minutes, and open it again to find the bacon gone, the block of cheese reduced to a rind, and a suspicious absence where the leftover roast had been sitting in its container the night before. Buddy ate the way he did everything in this form — with total, uncomplicated efficiency, no wasted movement, no evidence left behind except the faint smell of fat and marrow and a very large, very smug creature currently taking up the entire kitchen floor.
"That was supposed to last me the week," Chase said, staring into the mostly empty fridge with the specific betrayal of a man who had done math that morning and had that math violently disproven.
Buddy, from the floor, thumped his tail once. He did not look sorry. He had spots the color of old rust across a coat gone thick and coarse for the season, a heavy ruff at his shoulders that made him look even bigger than he already was, and small round ears that swiveled toward Chase's voice with what could generously be called attentiveness and what was, more accurately, just tracking whether more food was imminent.
"You've got a whole coat now," Chase said, changing tactics, because getting mad at Buddy had approximately the same effect as getting mad at weather. He crouched down and ran a hand through the ruff at his shoulders, which had gone from short and sleek in October to something you could genuinely lose a hand in by December. "Look at you. You're a whole different animal."
Buddy leaned into it, immediately and without shame, nearly toppling Chase sideways with the sheer redistributed weight of him. He was squeaking.
"You're heavier too," Chase noted, catching himself against the counter. "Nox — I mean, you, this you — you're heavier than you were in October. I don't know how that math works when half the difference is fur, but it's happening."
Buddy huffed, which from a hyena the size of a couch was less a huff and more a small seismic event, and put his head in Chase's lap with the total unselfconsciousness of something that had never once considered whether it was too big to do that.
Chase let him. It was cold outside — properly cold, the kind of Iowa December that made the windows frost over from the inside — and the apartment's ancient radiator was doing its best and mostly losing, and Buddy ran warm in a way that Nox, in his ordinary shape, categorically did not. It was strange and it was wonderful in the specific way most things about this arrangement were strange and wonderful: the two of them had swapped so many of their old defaults that Chase found himself, some nights, running his hands through the winter coat of an enormous laughing hyena and thinking, distantly and with great fondness, this is my personal space heater now, and I have never been colder in my life without him.
"You're going to eat me out of house and home," Chase told him, scratching behind one round ear. "I had a system, Buddy. I had a grocery budget. You've turned my grocery budget into performance art."
Buddy's tail thumped against the floor, twice, unbothered.
"The neighbors are calling you the Cackler, you know," Chase added, conversationally, because he found it very funny and Buddy, in this form, could not roll his eyes at him about it. "Somebody heard you the other night — through the wall, mind you, through an entire wall — and now there's a whole thread on the local forum about 'the sound' near Temple Street. Very ominous. Very cryptid-coded."
Buddy lifted his head. He looked at Chase with the specific, pointed patience of someone waiting for the food-adjacent portion of the conversation to resume.
"I didn't say his real name," Chase said, laughing despite himself. "I know, I know. You're very dignified. Very mysterious urban legend. Meanwhile you just ate an entire pound of bacon and half a rotisserie chicken and you're currently drooling on my knee."
This, too, did not produce shame.
Chase gave up, the way he always did, and got up to see what was left to feed him — because there was always something left to feed him, because that had become the shape of their days without either of them quite deciding it on purpose, the same way Nox used to put eggs in front of Chase without asking, the same way finish it had once meant I am taking care of you and this is the only way I currently know how to say it out loud.
He found the last good piece of stew meat in the back of the freezer, still frozen solid, and Buddy's ears went up at the sound of the freezer door before Chase had even fully opened it — some instinct in him tracking food through walls and packaging and physics, entirely undignified, entirely unbothered by it.
"You," Chase said, setting the meat on the counter to thaw, "are going to bankrupt me by February."
Buddy, radiating heat and satisfaction from the middle of the kitchen floor, made a sound that in any other creature would have been called a laugh, and in this one — public rumor aside — Chase had long since decided was exactly that.