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I'm aiming for a once-a-week posting, with the target day being Wednesday, to spread things out between other author's postings *cough*...Hockey Hunk...*cough*... My LIfe is Super...*cough* I missed that target this week not because it wasn't ready, but because I forgot. Living with severe ADD poses some interesting life challenges, among which is occasionally having to remind yourself to do things that you really enjoy doing.

Hopefully, VictusLupus will show up and answer some of your comments. He's following along, but he should step up and get his accolades as well. This is his story, after all. I'm just telling it. Today's posting is rather short, but it sets us up nicely for next week's more substantial installment.

Chapter Two

Bright, yellow light from the security lamp streamed through the window, perfectly illuminating the one bunk that had been empty when Victus had arrived. He should have guessed that there was a good reason why the bunk was empty, but he really hadn't been thinking clearly at the time. Not that it mattered. He had to sleep somewhere, and his choices were limited to the bed or the floor.

A dozen other boys shared the room, but none looked like him. He was a "special case", according to the people in the office. He'd liked it when his mother called him special, but these people didn't make the word sound nearly as nice. Nobody here was nice, he thought, glumly, then corrected himself. The nun was nice. She'd given him a toy to play with when he'd first arrived, a little plastic man wearing a funny looking hat. It was broken now, though. One of the other boys had broken it in two and tossed it back on his bed. Victus hadn't even noticed which one had done it.

A glance at the clock on the wall told him that it was a little after four in the morning. He wanted to go back to sleep, but even more he wanted to not have that dream again. And he really didn't want to wake up the other boys. The last time he'd done that twice in one night, someone got mad and hid his shoes. He wouldn't have minded so much, but his teacher got mad. She pulled him up in front of the class and told him that only babies take off their shoes, and everyone in the classroom had laughed. One of the big kids said that he wasn't a baby, he was just a puppy, and Vic, to his unending shame, had cried.

He laid in his bed until the clock showed 5:00, then slowly, so as to not wake any of the other boys, Victus got up out of his bed and crept to the door. His padded feet made little noise on the floor, and he almost yelped in surprise when he heard rustling in the bunks nearest the door. "Where are you going?" The voice was sleepy.

Victus recognized it as Cain's, the oldest boy in his room and their obvious leader. It was his job to help Victus find his way around for the first few days. He'd been one of the few who hadn't teased him. "To the bathroom," Vic replied timidly.

"As long as you're up, you might as well take your shower." Cain yawned, his small white teeth oddly bright in the dim, alien light.

"Another one?" Vic's ears flattened against his head. His fur hadn't finished drying out from the last shower he'd taken. "Are you sure?" he whispered, uncertainly.

"Every day, Vic." Cain said, from the meager comfort of his bunk. "That's the rule." He yawned again and echoed the words of the headmaster. "Can't have us stinkin' up the place."

The young varius_ _returned to his bed and opened the small trunk at its foot, the security lamp doing a more than adequate job illuminating the contents. At home, he'd had a big closet full of toys and clothes. Here, he had a little pressed paper box that he could not have hidden himself inside. On his first day, he'd tried. Now, the box held three changes of clothes and the clear plastic bag of bathroom stuff that the nun had given him. Everyone had to keep his own bathroom stuff and take it with them when they took a shower.

He pulled out fresh underwear and closed the trunk. It had a latch on it, but nobody's trunk had a lock because nobody had anything worth stealing. Padding back to the door, he walked outside as quietly as he could and pulled it shut after him. The lights in the building were still in night mode, which, although dim, was still far more light than Victus needed to see his way to the bathroom.

Feeling better now that he was alone, Vic trudged to the bathroom and turned on the light. The cold light from the industrial fixtures hid nothing. Dingy plastic flooring and pitted chrome plumbing looked the same now as they did yesterday, and like they would look tomorrow and for the next few decades. The sink faucet squeaked when he opened it. After not being used for several hours, the water splashing out had a vaguely brown tinge and smelled weird. While waiting for the faucet to clean itself out, he put toothpaste on his brush and tried to read what was written on the back of the tube. Most of the words were long and meant nothing to him, but it killed time until the water smelled like water was supposed to.

He brushed his teeth carefully, then started the water running in the shower. Again the water smelled bad, but this time he had something to do while it cleaned itself out. Stripping off the underwear he'd been given was a real challenge. Even though his tail fur was years from filling out, the tiny hole they'd cut in the back of a pair of sapiens underwear made pulling his tail through a chore. They'd taken away his underwear on that first day. They said they would give them back, but nobody knew where they were. A centimeter at a time, he worked his tail free of the encumbering cloth as he pushed it down his thighs.

Once he was finally naked, Victus pulled a clean towel and a cylinder of soap out of their respective dispensers and brought them with him into the shower. The soap wasn't anything like what he'd used before. When it was dry it was about the size of his little finger, but as soon as it hit the water it swelled up and dissolved. It hadn't taken him long to learn that he had to hurry if he wanted to get most of his body soapy before it disappeared down the drain. But he hadn't yet learned how to get all of him soapy. Even though he had a lot more fur to clean than the other kids did, he got the same amount of soap. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn't get the machine to give him a second piece. The thought occurred to him that maybe that was why he'd been so itchy. Maybe he really was a dirty little boy. He felt his ears lower in shame. He would have to learn to scrub faster.

He rinsed until his fur squeaked under his fingers, then shut off the tepid water. He pushed as much water as he could out of his fur with his handpaws, then rubbed the towel over his body until it wouldn't absorb any more. He wished they had a drying cabinet, or at least a hand wand. When he'd first asked for one, the attendants had treated him like he was asking for something special and had laughed at him. He'd quickly learned to watch and see what the other boys were doing, then to do that and nothing more.

Back in his room, the other boys were beginning to stir. Victus had barely closed the door behind himself when Cain spoke to him. "You've got school today," he reminded Victus, unnecessarily.

Victus sighed, feeling betrayed by this lackluster impostor of a school. School was not supposed to be like this. It was supposed to be fun and happy, with friendly teachers who made you feel safe. They were supposed to show you interesting things and work puzzles with you, to take you on field trips and teach you how to play games outdoors.

What these strange people called "school" could not have been any more different. The teachers expected him to sit in a desk all day without moving around, to keep his eyes on the sapiens person at the front of the room, but also to write down everything they said on a pokey old slow school tablet. He knew how to write, but how was he supposed to do it with a stupid little stylus that had been designed for sapiens fingers? And without ever looking at the screen? His notes were so sloppy that later, he couldn't read anything he'd written.

His math teacher was trying to explain something Victus already knew when a knock at the door interrupted the lesson. Without waiting to be answered, the door pushed open and a tall, dour man poked his head in. He scanned the room, his gaze settling on Victus. "You," he said, "come with me."

Victus looked back at the man for a few beats, uncertain whether the man meant him or someone else. "Come on, boy, don't make me wait," the man insisted, waving his hand in a 'come hither' gesture. Victus didn't know what the man wanted, but at that point he didn't really care. Anything to get him out of math class...

Vic virtually jumped out of his desk and followed the man down the hall, tail wagging back and forth with his curiosity. The man ushered him into a room that had been dark for the past two weeks. "In here." Upon delivering his charge, the man closed the door and walked away, the hard soles of his shoes clacking against the plastic flooring.

The office was small, with barely room for a desk and a couple of chairs. Aside from a few posters of animals, there was little to look at other than the man on the other side of the green metal desk. There was even less to do here than there had been in his classroom, eliciting a frustrated wuff from the boy.

The man checked his notes. "Hello, Victus!" he said, a bit too brightly to be authentic. "How are you doing?"

"Fine." It wasn't true, but it was the expected response.

"Good!" The man smiled broadly. "I'm Mr. Barr, Victus." the man folded his hands in front of him and leaned forward. "I'm your case worker. Do you know what that is?"

Victus's ears lowered. He had the uncomfortable feeling that he was supposed to know this, by now. He'd heard the other adults talking about case workers, but he didn't really know what they were. He'd seen other boys pulled out of class to talk to theirs, so maybe having a case worker was a good thing. "No," he said, timidly.

"I'm here to help find you a new home," the man said, with the subtlety of a hammer.

Victus bristled, shocked speechless that the man would even suggest such a thing.

Mr. Barr consulted what was written in his folder. "Your test results are good, but your classroom performance so far..." he paused, uncertainly. "Well, let's just say, there's room for improvement. That's understandable," he said, quickly, "you've just gone through a traumatic experience." He consulted his papers, then looked quite grave. "There aren't very many varius_ _families this far away from Earth, Victus. If you ever want to have a family again, you need to work on getting along with the other boys."

They talked for another ten minutes or so. Or rather, Mister Barr talked and Victus endured. The boy nodded his head when he thought it seemed appropriate to do so, he shook hands and agreed with whatever the man said and tried his best to not cry, but in the end none of it mattered. In his memories, the experience had turned into a single, monolithic blur of anger, sadness and fear.