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"So, you're here for a month, then?"

Klein had sometimes wondered just how much you could and couldn't tell about people based on what their living quarters had looked like. Sometimes, it could be easy to jump to conclusions based on assuming too much based on too little, he'd reminded himself. Be that as it may, there had also been times when what people's dwellings had looked like had provided meaningful clues about the lives of their occupants after all. It'd depended on the situation.

"If you're sure that's not too much to ask, yeah!" Klein had felt self-conscious about having accepted Fugue's offer to let him stay with him in Brazil for a month. Bridges had introduced Klein to Fugue at the docks before the ship was to leave again. Klein had asked Bridges if the otter wouldn't rather have stayed with his port town friend himself, but Bridges had explained to him that he'd be going to be needed on the ship until its return a month later.

"Not at all," Fugue had assured him. Fugue always had a great deal to do around the house. He'd valued cleanliness greatly, but he'd led a kind of life in which he had always been kept busy to the point of over-exertion for far too long, so his apartment had not always reflected this to the best of his capacity. With Klein around to help with cooking, cleaning, and errands for a month, Fugue had been looking forward to having been able to have more time than usual.

"Have you been here for a long time?" Klein had asked him. They'd been sitting on the floor facing each other, sharing their first dinner in Fugue's apartment. "Ever since Bridges helped me come here after I found him on that beach that time," the blowfish/urchin hybrid had explained to the skunk, "right after I came out of med school basically." Klein had tilted his head at him. "What made you decide to become a doctor and to come to Brazil in the first place?"

"When I was growing up then studying to become a doctor in Japan," Fugue had started, "I'd keep hearing about just how bad fish had it here. I knew fish were being discriminated against everywhere in the world, even where I'm from," he'd admitted, "but from everything I'd heard, it was especially bad here, especially in term of access to medical services for the poorest among us, who were often left to die when treatable simply because they were too poor."

Fugue had sighed, bringing his chopsticks up to his mouth as he'd finished speaking. "So you came here to help them?" Klein had asked admiringly. "Yeah!" Fugue had answered as he'd finished swallowing. "As much as I could, or at least that was the idea, anyway." Klein had raised an eyebrow quizzically. "What do you mean?" he'd tilted his head at the fish. "Well, it's a high stress job," he'd euphemized, "often in less than ideal conditions. We do what we can."

Klein had noticed the caduceus hanging on Fugue's wall, two snakes entwined around the same staff facing each other. Even though he'd been at home, not at the hospital that he had worked at, he'd had it up on his wall like Christians who had kept a cross on the wall of their apartments, because healing had been something that he'd believed in. "I really respect that! Bridges was right to speak highly of you," Klein had told him.

"You're too kind." Klein had never seen a blowfish blush before. "Bridges always tries to see the good in everyone, really." That much had certainly seemed to have been true, the skunk had thought. "What brings you here, yourself?" Klein had not been sure whether or not it would have been a good idea for him to admit what his plans had been to Fugue after such a short time. Would Bridges already have told Fugue? Could Klein trust Fugue just as he'd trusted Bridges?

"Just some unfinished family business," he'd summarized. "Family business?" Fugue had tilted his head at him. "My parents are in the clothing business," Klein had answered. Technically none of that had been all that incriminating, since it hadn't revealed anything about what he'd actually been going to do, but it had said enough not to have seemed too conspicuously evasive, and it did have the merit of having been true.

"How well do you get along with them?" Klein had groaned. "Ugh, not very." Fugue had nodded knowingly. "Well, sometimes with family, you gotta do what you gotta do, you know?" Klein had chuckled. "I guess that's true. Oh, these are nice!" Klein had noticed a handful of plushies nearby on the floor of Fugue's apartment. "That's high quality fabric by the way, where did you get these?" So Klein really did know fabric, Fugue thought. Maybe Klein hadn't lied.

"I made them. I got the fabric for them at a place that ended up closing down," he'd said regretfully, "so I have to be careful not to waste too much of it now." Klein had seemed impressed. "Oh, that's pretty cool! I wish I could sew like that," he'd said. "What made you think to start making plushies like that?" Some of them still had thread and needles going through various parts of them, almost looking like little Voodoo dolls in their early state.

"Honestly? I had to get good with threads and needles," he'd explained. "I'm a surgeon, you know?" Klein had nodded in dawning comprehension. "So you figured that you'd start by practicing on these, then get good so you could sew up people once you'd be good enough at it?" Fugue had nodded as the skunk had brought food to his mouth. "Don't get me wrong, I do get attached to these little guys," Fugue had said looking at his plushies fondly, "they're more to me than just practice. They comfort me, as plushies are wont to. It still seems like, if I'm going to be making a mistake, it'd be better for me to make a mistake with them than with people, though."

Klein had nodded. "I wonder what it'd be like to be a plushie sometimes," the skunk had thought out loud, "to be someone's little comfort object, and to cheer them up when they're down," he'd smiled to himself. "It might be sort of nice if you could." Klein had chuckled. "I'm sorry, I'm talking nonsense at you." Fugue had laughed. "No, it's okay. It's been nice to have you here so far, really." Fugue had met a lot of people at work, but very few in his 'off' time.

"Thanks." Klein had also noticed a gaming console on the floor of Fugue's apartment. Fugue's apartment had very little furniture, basically just the futon bed, kitchen appliances, and a few low tables here and there. "You play?" Not that it had seemed out of place, but Klein had wondered how much time Fugue could find to play video games with the busy schedule that plagued him so.

"I started during training back in med school, actually," Fugue had explained as Klein had taken a swig of his drink. "The people teaching me told me there had been research studies according to which doctors' reflexes during operations had been demonstrated to have been measurably higher in terms of success percentages when they'd honed their reflexes by playing video games to improve their hand-eye coordination." It had been so much like Fugue, Klein had grown to believe over the month he'd spend at the fish's place, that Fugue would only have allowed himself to really know a form of leisure if he could justify it to himself as part of his job.

"It's all about precision."

Klein had noticed something else that connected both of Fugue's hobbies. For the first time, Klein felt like he'd been being exposed to the concept of someone who'd used temporarily treating certain objects like people - like plushies or game characters - as a means to an end, as a way of practicing getting better at doing good for real people. He'd wondered if religion could be useful after all, if it was used as a known lie to practice being good for the real thing.

While Fugue had been away at work, Klein had worked as hard as he could. He'd gathered as much information as possible about where the nearest fabric factory that his parents owned in Brazil had been located. Using some of the very skills that he'd learned from having lived with Boko, he'd tracked down its blueprints, and found its guard schedules, employee databases, and security measures.

He'd tried to find a way around every obstacle that could stand in his way, and had procured rudimentary equipment to help him on his quest. He would wait until the last day, infiltrate the factory, get evidence, get out, and leave the country the very next day. He couldn't afford to stick around for too long after that because the longer he'd stay, the likelier he'd have become of getting caught. Once he'd gotten all the information that he'd known that he could possibly need, but realized that he'd still had time to kill before Operation Mephit, he'd started looking for something else for him to do.

Then he'd seen capoeira on the street.

Klein had been mesmerized. The handstands had captured his imagination most of all. Just as when the black and white of the yin/yang symbol of Daoism had caught his eye, capoeira's handstands had seemed as though they had been designed specifically in order to make skunks feel good about himself. Like most skunks, Klein had found that with his center of gravity the way it had been it had been relatively easy for him to walk on his hands upside-down.

It had reminded him of his coming out/apostasy. Do the opposite. Go upside-down.

It had occurred to him that it had been likely that his mission might have been going to involve elements of physical danger, situations in which he might have to defend himself that his pepper spray would not have been enough to prepare him for. He'd always hated team sports growing up, but he'd thought that it would probably have been a good idea for him to become more at home in his own body, in a setting that would have made him feel like he'd belonged in it. So he'd started taking capoeira classes from a stingray who'd happily taught it to him along with her other students in the studio she'd lived in. She'd liked Klein, she'd talked to him a bit.

Klein had found the philosophy of capoeira particularly inspiring. In our capitalistic era, in which all of us had still been in a sense wage slaves, he had found nothing more valuable than the lessons to be learned from people who had valued the freedom from slavery that they had had to fight so hard to get back more highly than anything else. He'd hoped that, if the world were to listen to them, perhaps one day we could all aspire to greater freedom than that as well.

His stingray teacher had taught him about candomblé, the syncretic faith of those who had escaped from enslavement. The way that they had combined their ancient gods with the saints of the conquerors so that they could continue to worship their own gods while still appearing to and, in a sense, honestly worshipping the settlers' saints as well without contradiction had really spoken to him. Of course, they had had to do this because, if they had not worshipped the saints, they would have been severely punished, but they had not wanted to abandon their gods, or to become dishonest in their practice. So they had made a third way.

It had reminded him of the way that gays and atheists had used coded language among themselves among straights and Christians, so that the same words could be understood on two different levels based on who would be listening to them without betraying too much. It had embodied such a rejection of the taken-for-granted Western principles of 'spiritual copyright,' the 'us against them' mentality, like a sport in which you could play on both teams, make them one, and reinvent the game. He'd asked his teacher if it would've been offensive for him to adopt candomblé along with animism and Daoism. She'd told him her gods had not been jealous gods.

"Do these mean anything?" Klein had asked Fugue about short strips of paper with Japanese characters on them that he had noticed had hung here and there in the fish's apartment. "They're ofuda," Fugue had explained. "I put them up to protect my apartment from Ekibiogami, the god of disease." "Oh, you're Shinto, that's right," Klein had nodded, "I should have been able to tell that's what they were for."

"Some people think they're just for decoration," Fugue had added. "Sometimes, I just let them think that. I try not to bring up things like that unless someone else brings them up first. I can't help but worry that people might find some of my beliefs a bit silly, if they don't share them," he'd almost apologized. "No, not at all," Klein had reassured him. "I'd never think less of you for something like that." "What about you?" Fugue had asked him.

"I'm candomblé," Klein had said. For the purposes of this conversation he had been.

"Ah, because of your capoeira, of course," Fugue had understood. You didn't live in Brazil for years without learning a thing or two about things like that. "It's quite beautiful, isn't it?" Fugue had smiled. "Thanks!" Even with all the work that Klein had been doing around the apartment, he'd still had time to practice briefly now and then. Fugue had enjoyed watching him. "I often wondered what it'd be like to be able to dance like that," Fugue had thought out loud. "So, what's stopping you?" Klein had asked him.

Fugue had looked a bit embarrassed. "Well, Klein... You see, in my job, I always have to make sure that my hands are clean at all times. It kind of comes with the territory of being a surgeon, you know?" Klein had still carried the habit of having washed his hands too much, sometimes until they would bleed, because of the shaming that he had received from the other children for having been a supposedly stinky skunk as a child. He'd just realized that Fugue had been one of the only few people that he'd met who had washed his hands just as much as Klein did, and who had seemed to think nothing of it. They'd partly bonded over their shared OCD.

"As Shinto, I've also grown up to value ritual purity. I have a strange relationship to the concept of purity, though... You see, I'm a hybrid, Klein, both a blowfish and an urchin." Klein had nodded, encouraging him to continue.

"There are those in this world who say that fish like me aren't 'pure,' that we're 'contaminating' the species that we belong to. I fear contamination in fact, but I'm no one's 'dirty hybrid.' At the same time, people really are careless about germs. They act as though they believe that germs aren't real because they can't see them, just as they believe that the gods aren't real because they can't see them either. To come here and to do the work I do, I had to be willing to 'get my hands dirty,' rather than to stay home to keep them clean, but... In short, I can't do capoeira because I'm afraid of putting my hands on the ground!" he'd blurted out.

"It was weird when I met Bridges," he'd gone on, "because at first his thing where he takes everything and puts it somewhere else really threw me, you know?" Klein had almost gasped. How difficult that must've been to deal with for someone like Fugue! "At first, all I could think about was how he was making it easier for germs to hitch rides everywhere all over every object he'd move from place to place without washing anything," he'd confessed, "but at the same time, he was the same man whose life I'd saved, who I'd convinced it was worth it to live again. I told him he was doing more good than harm, and I meant every word of it."

Klein had smiled at him. "The thing is," Fugue had continued, "it hasn't been all one-sided either. I've had more time than I can count when I felt down and didn't know who to turn to. When I turned to Bridges, he always found a way to help me feel better about myself. He always told me that no one could find what was good inside an urchin that they rest of the world didn't see because they were stuck at the outside as well as an otter could," Fugue had chuckled.

Klein had found it heartening to think of someone willing to push past something that would have legitimately bothered them like that for the sake of someone else's well-being. "You don't have to put your hands on the ground to dance, you know," Klein had told Fugue. "You can do anything you want with them, really!" he'd chuckled amiably. Fugue had stopped, and thought about what Klein had said.

"Maybe you're right. I did always wonder. Maybe I should try it someday." Fugue had scoffed at himself playfully. "It may as well become one of those many things I'll get around to doing someday, can't it?" Should he or shouldn't he, Klein had asked himself? He may as well have asked, he'd told himself. "Fugue, do you want to try to go dance somewhere right now?" Fugue had raised his eyebrows at Klein's suggestion.

"... Yes!" What a snap decision that had been. "If I don't do it now, I'll never do it."

So they'd taken the metro together to a nightclub downtown after all. It had been something that neither of them had ever done in their lives. They had both been the indoorsy type, and they had both spurred each other on to motivate each other enough to try to push past their respective resistances to going out into a setting like that, for once. It had been okay to go out and have a good time if someone you respected had given you 'permission' to, hadn't it? Fugue had seemed just a little nervous on the metro, but Klein had held his hand, and Fugue had gratefully accepted the skunk's offer of emotional support.

When they'd been at the club, Fugue and Klein had wondered at the beauty of the multicolored lights shining all over the dance floor. The sea of writhing arms had made it seem as though they had been watching algae swaying underwater in some kind of stunning coral reef. It was as if they'd gone on a big journey, like salmon would go on, only to finally reach somewhere where they'd felt they'd belonged the whole time. Klein had often disguised his anxiety as a resistance to the stereotype of the raving gay guy, but now that he'd finally overcome his anxiety and had embraced a trope that had actually fit, it'd felt ever so right!

They both had a little too much to drink. People around them had danced raucously, rowdily, and their exuberant sensuality had become increasingly contagious to the two usually shy, newfound ravers. After having eased their way onto the dance floor among the twirling glowsticks the way someone skittish slowly tiptoes their way into a pool that seems too cold for them at first, they'd begun to feel more and more at home where they had been.

Their inhibitions had continued becoming correspondingly lower. They'd danced closer and closer to each other, unselfconsciously waving everything they had at each other with everything they'd got, pressing against each other without moving any less than they had been when they'd had more room, without holding anything back. Eventually they had gotten even a few frequent goers' attention, who'd begun watching them and enjoying the show they'd given.

When they'd gone back to Fugue's apartment after it, they'd sang songs they'd heard at the rave that night to each other on the street on their way back. All of the warm, sensual energy that they'd been accumulating throughout the evening had kept pleasingly, frustratingly bouncing around inside their bodies looking for a way out as they'd gone. They'd each ended up finding a way out for it with each other on the futon before passing out on top of each other on it. Removing his arm from around Klein while lying on his side, Fugue had turned around in bed as he'd yawned himself awake the next morning to look at the time on his alarm clock.

"Oh, shit!" he'd screamed. "I'm late for work!"

As soon as he'd said it, spikes had suddenly erupted from Fugue's skin all over his body.

"Ah!" Klein had yelped, doing a side rolling dive out of the bed onto the floor to roll back up kneeling on one knee, having turned to face the bed on his way down. As Fugue had precipitously jumped out of bed as well, Klein had grabbed his arm and had looked at it. He'd seen that one of Fugue's spikes, having been ripped out of the blowfish/urchin's body, had become embedded in his arm, and his eyesight had blurred. As he'd seen the fish rush to open his medicine cabinet, the skunk had begun to feel a little woozy, and it'd become difficult to move.

"Don't worry, I'll be right there!" Fugue had assured him, rummaging through his medical supplies in a panic before finally finding what he'd been looking for. "You'll be all right," he'd said, carefully bringing Klein up from the floor to lie him down on the bed as well as he'd been able to in spite of the encroaching paralysis that had been resolutely making its way through the skunk's metabolism by that point. "I'll handle this."

'Just lie flat on your back,' Klein had almost wanted to add mockingly in his blurring mental state, 'and do what the nice doctor tells you,' he'd also realized that his mouth had been too numb for him to have been able to say by then. Had he been right to trust Fugue after all, he'd asked himself? If it'd been a mistake, it'd been too late for him to do something about it by then, so he'd better have hoped it hadn't been, he'd answered himself grimly.

Klein had seen Fugue take a small syringe out of a small med kit that he'd thrown over his shoulder on a sling - only to realize it hadn't been an ordinary syringe, but that it'd seemed to have been made from one of his body's spikes themselves - which had quite retracted by that point. Gently inserting it in Klein's arm, the solution in it had felt weird to Klein as it had made its way into his body. However, it had also seemed to dampen the impact of the previous substance that the spikes that had erupted directly from Fugue's body had inadvertently injected into Klein, so Klein's body had seemed to welcome it. He'd become tentatively less panicked.

"It took me a while to come up with this," Fugue had told Klein, indicating the now empty spike syringe that he'd just injected him with, "but it was really worth it. You'll be up in an hour or two. Before I came up with this, that would've been in a day or two!" he'd explained. "But I diluted some of my venom and combined it with something else to come up with an antidote. It's not perfect, but it'll have to do for now. I'm sorry, I have to run! See you tonight."

Klein had had time to think about what had just happened to him as he'd been lying on the bed completely unable to move, but knowing that he should be okay in a relatively short time nonetheless. He'd understood why Fugue and Bridges would have related to each other. They'd both been people whose conditions had made them unintentionally hurt others, but who'd been trying to do everything they could do intentionally to try to mitigate some of the harm that they'd been causing. In the context of his life, remembering the factory worker who had lost a limb because of him, Klein had found that in some ways, he could relate to them as well.

A lot of Fugue's anxiety around people had made more sense in the context of knowing this. The fish had always been operating under the knowledge that, if he'd had a panic attack, the consequences could be too surprising for the average person to know how to deal with. He'd always been working knowing just how much he'd stood to lose, perversely making him likelier to panic because of it in turn. It had been something that would have driven some people away.

Yet, if he'd thought about his life until that point, supposing he'd had to choose, Klein had thought to himself: a lifetime of doing what his parents had wanted him to? A lifetime of pretending to be a straight Christian to fit in around the griffin and lioness? A lifetime with Boko? Even Bridges' kleptomania, while comparatively easier to deal with than the rest of them, had been no picnic. So far, Fugue had still been the easiest person to deal with that he'd known.

How about that.

Fugue had been super apologetic when he'd come home that night. "I hope you were okay!" Klein had nodded, rubbing his arm but still a bit sore, but alive and moving. "You were right, it only took about an hour or two," he'd said. "I'm sorry, I take my job very seriously, as you know, so I panicked when I saw I'd overslept. I hadn't set my alarm because I'm not used to this. I'd never... I'd never done this before, Klein." Klein's eyes had widened. "You mean...?" Fugue had given him a meaningful look. "Sleep! I'd never slept before." That's right, Klein had suddenly remembered - fish didn't need to sleep! "No, I'd done *that*!" Fugue had laughed.

"That must be a pain to deal with," Klein had said, indicating one of Fugue's now-disembodied spikes on the floor near them. "You have no idea," Fugue had sighed. "Public transit is a nightmare. I tend to get really agoraphobic and claustrophobic on public transit, and when I have an anxiety attack, they just... come out. I've gone to multiple doctors and mental health specialists, but no one's managed to help me find a way to hold them in for good so far." He'd never left his apartment without multiple antidote syringes on his person, just in case something would have gone wrong and he'd have ended up needing to use them.

"And nothing's ever made it better?" Fugue had stopped and thought about it. "Before I went to the club with you that night, I never would have been able to be around so many people without having a panic attack. I wouldn't have been able to breathe. I'd have been terrified." Klein had been surprised. "But you were able to that time?" Fugue had nodded. "Yeah! I'm not quite sure what it was, but it was amazing. I wasn't even scared they'd come out by the end."

"Wow."

A few days before his plans were to be set in motion, Klein had met Mano at an anti-capitalist protest that he'd went to, he'd learned about her connection to Eli, and he'd talked with her about their respective pasts and plans for their futures. By that point, Klein had become attached enough to Fugue that he'd begun to feel bad for not having told the fish the full story behind his visit to Brazil. So, he'd eventually decided to trust him enough to tell him after all.

"Ah, so that's why you're leaving right after, then," Fugue had nodded in understanding. "Good luck, then." Klein had to admit that he'd been going to miss Fugue by that point, but he'd already felt guilty about having imposed on him for that long. He'd worried that, if he'd gotten caught trying to pull the stunt he'd be trying to pull, that Fugue could have gotten in trouble for having let the skunk stay with him. All good things did have to come to an end, after all.

"Before you go, can I show you something?" Fugue had asked him. "Sure," Klein had nodded. Fugue had interwoven his fingers in front of Klein in nine complex, successive patterns, mesmerizing him. "What is it?" Klein had titled his head at him. "It's called kuji-in. If you're ever in a situation in which you need to really focus your mind, to break through something that's being used to cloud your mind somehow... Concentrate, perform it, and think of me."

Klein had smiled, and nodded yes.

Soon after, Klein could have been found dangling upside-down by his legs in the dark taking pictures in the fabric factory before dropping back down to the ground right-side-up unnoticed. He'd covertly parkoured around various obstacles on his way back out. The next day, he'd already been back on Bridges' ship, which had been on its way back to North America, where his parents' unethical clothing business had been about to undergo the reorg of a lifetime...