FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

The Fall

Dr. Kay was a stoat who seemed to be exercising some extreme form of depillation, for his entire body was completely without fur except where it had started to slowly grow back. On any other species, it might have looked amusing. However, stoats seemed to have a natural talent for looking regal" no matter what one did to them, and Dr. Kay was apparently no exception. He leafed through several papers that were attached to his clipboard, most of them showing various images of Mitch's brain. "I can't find any serious trauma, here," the doctor said. "I'll let Dr. Bernstein take a look at them, but I'm pretty sure that you have nothing really to worry about. Now, as far as the hallucinations you reported, I can only speculate. However, what you described to me seems to be pretty common in people who have undergone a serious trauma."

"And the three suns?" Mitch inquired. He was laying there dressed in an open-backed hospital gown, and the remnants of his clothing laid folded as neatly as possible on a chair next to the bed. Thankfully, he hadn't had to wait long to receive care after being brought in person by Mr. Gently.

"Oh, yes! That was quite a sun dog, wasn't it?" the doctor said by way of reply, grinning widely. Offering no further explanation, he continued, "now, as far as your other injuries are concerned, firstly, I suggest that you stay off of that ankle for a while." He patted the bed next to it. "We are going to get you a cast put on it, and we want you to try getting around on crutches for a while."

"But I can walk on it just fine!" Mitch whined.

The doctor shrugged. "That's just my recommendation," he said. "If you don't want to follow it, you don't have to follow it. I just assumed you would want to try to restore it to as close to its original level of mobility as possible." Moving on swiftly, he began explaining to Mitch some of the papers attached to his clipboard. "So we're pretty sure that we've cleared any infectious material out of your wounds, and we managed to sew up the nasty lacerations you got during that slide through the rocks." Here, he looked at Mitch seriously. "And I suggest staying away from railroad tracks from now on, Mr. Carver. Many people coming in here after those kinds of incidents end up needing skin transplants, which you don't want."

The young tom nodded at that, looking chagrined. "I'll definitely keep that in mind."

The doctor smiled approvingly at that. "Good move," he said. "However, just to be safe, what we're going to do here is write you a prescription for an antibiotic. You don't have to take it; however, I ask that, if you do take it, you take the full course of the prescription, or we'll end up with penecillin-resistant nasties running around infecting other people. We don't want that. You would just take it three times per day; one in the morning, one with lunch, and one before dinner. Better taken on a full stomach. Again, you don't have to take it, just make sure to keep an eye on those wounds as they mend."

Mitch took the piece of paper and held it to his chest anxiously. "Hey, umm...doctor?" he asked.

"Yes?"

"Are my parents here?"

"They've been waiting out in the lobby for hours," the stoat said. "In fact, that fellow who brought you here left asking not to be identified, and we've got your brother contained in a back room here. However, we're not going to let you leave here without getting a cast or something on that foot. It's up to you what you do with it afterward, but there are certain standards of care we have to follow.

With that, Mitch was handed over to a string of other caregivers and specialists. First, the neurologist came in and gave him a more detailed explanation of the results of his scans, and he was being written yet another prescription to insure against any long-term brain damage. Nurses were in and out frequently, checking in on him and making conversation occasionally. Eventually, when all of the procedures were over, he hobbled out into the lobby, his foot in a much simpler brace than the general practitioner had suggested thanks to the young linsang who was supposedly the joint specialist.

And then he faced his parents.

~~ *** ~~

The automobile was very quiet, and Mitch's parents sat up a little bit too stiffly in the front seat. For some reason, the sound of the tires against the road was extremely loud to the young tom's ears, and he had a sense of something waiting to pounce him if he made an ill-timed move. It hadn't really struck home with him how serious his situation was until he had seen his parents face-to-face, and it had left him feeling shaken.

Eventually, his father, who was in the passenger seat, said coldly, "When we get home, I want you to start getting your bags packed."

Mitch was thrown off by that. "What do you mean?" he asked.

His mother looked up from her driving and explained, "We're getting you away from your brother for a while. You can't seem to handle the responsibility, so you're going to be spending semester with your aunt. At least."

Mitch lurched forward. "What!?"

"We're not going to argue the point, son," his father said harshly.

Zeke, strapped sitting upright in the seat next to Mitch, whined sullenly. Though Mitch was still in his hospital gown, the feral had been bullied into a pair of denim jeans, with a belt no less, and a button-down shirt. His parents had also put him back into the braces that forced him to stand upright, which Mitch knew was painful for him. That had stopped for a while after Zeke had become destructive his first time being forced to wear them.

After giving his brother a pitying look, Mitch tried again with his father. "Dad, you can't take me away from Zeke," he pleaded. "I've been taking good care of him."

His father turned around, uttering a laugh that altogether lacked amusement. "Okay, so that's what you call getting both you and your brother lost, apart from each other, out in the wilderness. And what was the rest of your story? You couldn't stop him from going off chasing a rabbit?"

Mitch clenched his teeth. "I don't know what it was, Dad," he said shortly. He had never specified it as being any particular species of animal.

His father waved his paws in the air. "Oh, whatever it was!" he hooted. "Rabbit, squirell, raccoon, do you think it makes any difference, Tammy?" He turned to look ironically at Mitch's mother.

"Nope," his mother said smartly.

His father turned his head back again. "That's exactly right!" he said triumphantly. "And, I bet that, if we were to ask Gertie, she would say the same thing."

"How do you know what Aunt G thinks?" Mitch challenged.

His father fixed him with a look. "Oh, we talked that over for a while. She has sworn to me and your mom both that she'll straighten you out, one way or another." He turned again to Mitch's mother. "She's your sister. What do you think, Tammy?"

"She's pretty tough," Mitch's mother said.

Mitch started to try to say something by way of retort, but he choked on his own voice. The rest of the ride home went on in silence, and they soon pulled into the driveway, parking in front of the garage door next to the other car.

There air felt heavy and metallic in the young tom's lungs as he watched his brother being frog-marched up to the door to the house, and Mitch felt like they were prisoners being hauled before a judge in a trial that had already been decided. His brother's body language told him that every minute was painful for him, and soon there would be nobody there to tell him he didn't deserve to be treated this way.

"Go to your room, and pack your things," Mitch's father repeated to him. "There are some totes down in the basement. Bring them up if you need them. I suggest just packing clothes and the books you need for school, but that's just my suggestion from knowing your aunt."

Mitch nodded numbly and hobbled off to his room. As he closed the door behind him, his eyes tried to tear up, but it was like there was some cold, oppressive force in him forcing it to sit in his stomach. He couldn't get it to come out. It was like it was stuck in there.

Like a puppet on a string, all he could do was just obey his father's command and get on with packing his bags, so he collapsed onto his floor and started trying to sort through his stuff. The first thing he did was break the clothing on the floor down into two different categories, one being the stuff that still fit and the other being the stuff that he could leave behind. Eventually, a third mound started to build consisting of things he wasn't sure about and needed to try on.

When he was pretty sure he had gotten everything so organized, he shed his hospital gown and bent down to grab the first bits of clothing in the "not sure" stack. To make it easier, he decided he would start with the pants. Again, his brother's longtime weight problem made itself known: nearly everything stopped at just a little higher than mid-calf. The most humiliating aspect of it was that nearly everything he had that fit was juvenile in style. Mitch began to realize that he hadn't been given more than two pairs of pants in the past three years, and those were the only two that came most of the way down to his ankles. Because of his last growth spurt, though, he had to suck in his gut to get into even them.

He sighed miserably as he struggled to pull off the oldest and most ill-fitting of them, bending over double as he tried to force the pant down over his calf. He finally got it down to his ankles, and he went down on all-fours to kick it off, and that's when he noticed himself in the mirror, standing there naked on all-fours. He looked like a slim, feminine-looking version of his brother bent over so. In fact, he had never realized it due to being used to compensating for it, but his hips were really more adapted to standing in this quadrupedal stance, his legs back and spread with his weight supported on his pads and digits. The main difference was that his legs went back a bit farther, and he had a more rounded butt instead of being cut at nearly a right-angle after his tail.

Perhaps it would be easier if he could be like his brother. He wanted to touch the hidden universe he had seen again. He wanted to escape into it and never come back. He loosened up his mind into the relaxed, submissive state that he assumed when doing the listening trick. He heard the universe singing the way he had when he had been laying on the premontery the night before. He started out by counting, and then he started sorting the numbers into categories based on primitive feelings like "taste" and "texture." At first, he knew what these feelings represented, but that faded eventually into the background. Somehow, it didn't matter anymore. Nothing had meaning.

In essence, Mitch went mad.