FSE

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So, I should have been labeling these all with verses from a poem by Richard Wilbur, "Beasts." I'll copy up to the fourth here, and go back and edit the other three chapters to include them. Hope you don't mind. Also, there is a form of murder at the end of this story known as "curb-stomping." It's very graphic, though I leave out the messy details. Just warning you.

The story is always open to new characters.

t3h p05t, 4 j00

_Beasts in their major freedom

Slumber in peace tonight. The gull on his ledge

Dreams in the guts of himself the moon-plucked waves below,

And the sunfish leans on a stone, slept

By the lyric water,

In which the spotless feet

Of deer make dulcet splashes, and to which

The ripped mouse, safe in the owl's talon, cries

Concordance. Here there is no such harm

And no such darkness

As the selfsame moon observes

Where, warped in window-glass, it sponsors now

The werewolf's painful change. Turning his head away

On the sweaty bolster, he tries to remember

The mood of manhood,_

from "Beasts," by Richard Wilbur

The following Monday, Mrs. Buckshire handed out her papers with a glitter of hope behind her spectacles. Fae was awake, which was a plus, and Guin had been shooting the boy furtive, wondering glances while class began, distracted from the usual conversations he had with all of those around him. The fox was trying hard to cover up how anxious he was about the coming quiz, but the fact that he had scratch paper on his desk for the first time all year belied exactly how much it meant to him.

She took the quizzes up after half an hour and graded them in the next ten minutes while the class did some busywork. She was done quickly, as eager as she was for the class period to end. She knew that she had e-mailed Jeck about her findings, and was wondering if he had gotten any further with the English essays. He was to meet her before his lunch period and they would discuss what they had decoded. She was sure she had a good idea of something, but it wasn't complete. Maybe he could fill in the blanks.

Suddenly, she got to Faeram's quiz and started going through it, her lips thin in frustration. She hadn't expected this. She had thought that with the right encouragement, he would break out of this strange shell he had placed around himself, but instead, nothing had changed at all. With a sigh, she put a C-minus on his paper and moved on. What would she have to do to get anything through to him? It was nearing winter break, and she wanted to see him excel on the midterm exam. Guin's paper, though, did bring a pleased smile to her lips. A perfect score. She handed them back.

"Excellent job, Guinnevon. Keep it up for the next test."

"Yes, ma'am. Thank you." His ears went red at her words and he shoved the paper in his backpack as his cohorts around him started asking him wide-eyed questions.

"Fae, you barely passed. Again." She looked at him coldly.

He, however, met her gaze with a warm, playful glint in his eyes. "Ma'am, you should know by now that I never 'barely pass.'" He blanched as her look hardened. "Not to be offensive, ma'am," he said, flustered, and shoved the paper in his backpack. Right then, Buckshire noticed her mistake and hid a regretful gasp behind a self-righteous sniff. By grading the papers in class, she hadn't photocopied his. She had lost... how many letters would he have included in one paper? Four, five? Enough to cripple her efforts. Ashamed of herself, after all her years of service, she finished handing out quizzes, dismissed class, and went to her desk. Stupid, stupid mistake.

Guin caught up with Fae as they walked to the next class. "Hey, Fae. How'd you do? I aced it!" he whispered excitedly, trying hard to ignore the strange looks he was getting from those around them.

Fae shot him a sideways glance. "Why do you care? I passed. It's good enough for me." The squirrel hefted his backpack higher on one shoulder as a means of blocking off the fox and continued on while Guin was left, confused, in the hallway.

"Guinny, you shouldn't talk to him," said Hailey, a small vixen with breasts that would give her back problems one day, more makeup than a geisha, and a butt that followed her like a bunny's tail. "Why were you trying to, anyway?" Her voice was pitched to a sycophantic whine. Another girl pushed between them, a lioness whose red-rimmed eyes were the only lie to her otherwise regal appearance. "Yeah, don't worry about him. Some people are just lost, you know?" Her voice was lower, more womanly and robust, and was there to show how much she knew about the world.

He shook his head and turned to look at them, pushing a smile on his face. "Yeah. He just - I don't know, I guess I don't understand him, is all. You two want to walk me to class?" He grinned coyly at them and they blushed, each taking an arm, and they hung off him like ornaments until he reached the door to his next room, extricated his arms, and blew them each a kiss, a flawless charmer. These days, girls were less brainless, especially where he went to school, but the same ditzy quality leeched their humanity from them as they tried to mimic the moronic twits who landed jocks at other schools. So even though the vixen was taking AP Chemistry and the lioness was treasurer of the National Honor Society chapter at that school, each exhibited some level of insouciant idiocy that for the first time in his life, Guin looked at with a sort of repulsion. Why cheat yourself out of the quality of person you could be, when you were as smart as those two? It made no sense.

Jeck watched Fae come into class first, his eyes narrow as the taller boy took a seat in the back of the classroom. The squirrel was troubled by something that came from within, that much was certain by the empty gaze that brushed across his desk before he folded his arms on it and stared up at the front of the room. Jeck's heart took his stomach hostage and started beating it mercilessly. To destroy a human being...

Next came Guin, escorted by two of the loveliest girls to give up proper glamour for glitz and gilded eyes. The kisses he blew them were genuine falsities and he maintained his grin as he walked in. Jeck raised his eyebrows in question and the smile just broadened. The three of them, unknowingly, had formed a triangle in the beginning of the year when they chose seats that allowed absolutely no interaction. Fae and Jeck had done it as a necessity to preserve their respective images. Guin just wanted to stay away from Fae. To be fair, Fae did have an odor about him from the cheap drink he bought. It was understandable.

The human wasn't quite sure of what to make of the combination of Guin's belated entrance and Fae's disconcerted one. Was there a connection? In a relationship like the one that had begun Saturday night, everything could mean anything and anything could mean nothing and nothing could mean something and something could mean everything. A vicious cycle, that.

He opted to delay further analysis until he could get the two of them together again and take it from there. He already had enough background information to know that what he was planning could work. He just needed to make it work. An encounter between the two was his next task, after his meeting with Buckshire, then. That, and to figure out the stupid nickname that he still hadn't solved.

After class, he spoke with Guin for a few moments, fully appreciating the other boy's enthusiasm and the confusion that ran rampant around them while they talked about the fox actually doing well academically. Most of it turned quickly into drippy compliments that made Jeck turn away with a mumbled "I think I just became diabetic" to meet the teacher.

He walked in and immediately closed the door. She didn't look at him, instead staring at her computer screen and clicking intensely. "Hold on, Jeck. I'm playing TextTwist."

He laughed and went around behind the desk. "Really? I love that game." He stared as she clicked the letters into different words over and over again, her mind much quicker than he would have ever imagined while taking her class. He furrowed his brow. "What's a 'nee'? I thought that was Monty Python nonsense." The fact that they were working together like they were made him much more comfortable, even though he still ocassionally straightened his own spine and made sure his butt was tucked under him instead of sticking out like some idiot. Projects always negated his shyness, but only to a degree.

She still refused to avert her eyes. "It's pronounced like 'neigh.' It indicates a woman's maiden name. Like Katherine née Black, or some such. French origin."

His eyes lost focus. "I hate Fae."

She raised her eyebrows with a smirk. "Hate is a strong word."

"He does these word games, where he gives someone a nickname that has some sort of weird relationship with their real name, and this time he called some girl named Courtney 'Mabovna's middle ground.' I hadn't been able to figure it out until you told me that."

"That boy," she sighed, shaking her head. "I wish he would stop doing all those drugs and drinking. Did you know he did that?" She finished the game and looked at him. "You should tell him to stop. It seems like you're the only person who's at all close to him." He could have sworn she was watching the impulse that her words birthed travel down his spine. "I've called his parents, and they're both just... distant. I think they've given up on the boy, Jeck, and it makes me so mad!" Her volume didn't rise, but the intensity of her voice made her anger apparent.

Jeck nodded understandingly. He was running the nickname through his head while he listened. Courtney was really COURT-nee, so nothing followed the 'née' indicator, and Mab was Queen Mab from "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and "Romeo and Juliet," appearing as the goddess of dreams, which in another Shakespeare play - "Hamlet" - is mentioned as something "perchance to happen" in death, which is nothingness in that play. Fae would be one to consider dreams meaningless, anyway, thus, nothing. 'Ovna' is the Russian indicator for "daughter of," so daughter of Mab, which would be 'née something-to-do-with-dreams,' so that part was solved. And then the 'middle ground' would be the court, or courtyard, either of which is a middle ground, one between the queen and her people and one between the land and the castle.

That one was far more complicated and thinly-stretched than the others. He must have been troubled when he came up with it. Which would have been... while they were talking after he chastised Courtney Saturday night.

"So, Jeck, let's see what you have first. Is there anything you could find in the essays?"

He blinked and shook his head, sweeping his hair across his face with a hand. "Huh? Oh, yeah, I found some patterns, but I don't know which ones to pursue." He put down his backpack and rifled through it, searching for the right documents. "Here we go." He perused a paper in his own writing. "See, he's done a number of different things to prove he knows what he's about, but I don't know that they mean any more than that. One paper, something on To Kill A Mockingbird, he bolded a bunch of letters so they fit into a Caesarean square, but I've tried a bunch of substitutions and haven't been able to figure out what it says. There's another one where he does the same thing with a different square and a bunch of spelling errors."

"Hold on," she said, putting a paw on the paper where he had copied the first square he spoke of. "Look at these letters. They're all Ds, Ps, Os, Qs, and Gs. Some Es, too. All the letters he used have holes in them. Looks like you even copied down a capital A here."

"It's not even a cipher," Jeck said with an interested frown. "It's a clue. In the book, Boo Radley would hide things in the knot of a tree trunk. I think he must have left ghost marks or something inside the letters. I'll have to check that out next time, if it's not too faded."

"See this, too," she said, pointing at where Jeck had put the dates of the two papers. "He wrote the Mockingbird one first. It's just a hint to look for the Caesarean square in the next essay."

"Christ," he swore with a smile. "We should just send these to the CIA and see if they'll hire him. I hate to ask what you have."

She laughed once, grimly. "Hm. Very little, I'm afraid. He was less... pervasive with the math papers." She got out her own notes. "Like we discussed on Friday, this is a collection of letters that seem like they have a reasonable frequency, but not in a Caesarean square. I've converted it just using what the letters are likely to be, but it may be incomplete, so any substitutions are going to be totally random and probably misguided."

"These are all from this year?"

She nodded. "I haven't had time to compare to the papers I have from his seventh grade, but I'm hoping they'll give me a clue. In hindsight, I shouldn't have started with this year. Oh, I've gotten old," she sighed in mild bitterness.

"Nah, there was no way to tell how far he was willing to go with this."

She smiled up at him and started putting things away and preparing to her next class. She had already eaten. "You're sweet. Go eat, and try to rub some of it off on him. Lord knows, he needs it. And thank you again, so much, Jeck. Come back on Friday and let me know what you've found. Be good."

"No problem. You t- I mean, I'll see you Friday!" he corrected, blushing as he packed up quickly and slipped out the door.

The old panthress just shook her head with a motherly smile. One day, he wouldn't be awkward. That day just seemed a long, long way off.

How cliché is this? Fae wondered to himself as he stared down the row of people facing him. Like I'm some sort of stereotypical druggee and they're some sort of stereotypical crime ring.

"Guys, I can assure you there's a better way to settle this." It was night in the city and he was wandering back from getting a forty from a reliable "friend" of his, a sloth who sold as close to pristine liquor as you could get where he was, at least when you were under age. Fae was probably overconfident, but he wasn't stupid enough to buy anything low-quality. Even the hash he had gotten off the fellows aiming two nines, three blackjacks, and a set of knuckles at him was good stuff. They just seemed to be confused by their own payment plan at the moment.

They were in an abandoned basement Fae used as a cut-through to avoid the streets above. Yellow lamps hung from the ceiling and sandbags lay piled around, haplessly scattered as though the previous occupants had used them for pillowfights, or something. Other than the odd crate or rotting carboard box and a four-legged rat or some bug, it was empty, cold, and gray. It smelled lke death.

"You owe us some Franklins, Fae."

His eyes narrowed and he kept the hand that wasn't holding his bottle of drink in his pocket. A cool wind blew through his ears where most people would have cultivated head hair. He kind of wished he had at that moment. It could be flowing all down his back and give him a pretty intimidating look. As it was, his torn clothes weren't much insurance against anything the six people in front of him had to offer.

A tiger, a wolf, a rat, and three humans comprised the entirety of the gang. He didn't know how they produced the pot, why, where, or in what volume. It was something customers didn't get to know, and these guys were good. Otherwise, they'd have been off the streets. So instead of finding their source, Fae had tracked down information about all six of them; things they had probably forgotten by now. Fae was good at this kind of thing.

"As I recall, I pay you the second half every Friday that I get hash on Saturday, and I pay the first half when I get it. Has that changed without my knowledge?" In school, he looked to everyone else like these six now looked to him. Out here, though, his shoulders were straight, his voice was crisp, and his senses were on high alert.

The wolf was the leader, unsurprisingly. An aura of evil, not unlike that which Fae seemed to carry, oozed out of him. Two humans had guns and another a blackjack, while the leader held knuckles and his furred friends had the other two blackjacks. The rat was casually swinging his while he sucked on a cigarette and tucked his coat tighter around him every thirty seconds or so. The tiger was the one speaking, as representative muscle.

"Plans change. We need the money now, rodent." Fae raised his eyebrows and looked at the rat, whose eyes went cold for the barest of seconds before he went back to pretending he wasn't there. He tossed down the cigarette and snuffed it distractedly.

"And what if I don't have the money?"

"We take it in flesh, chump."

"Six on one?"

"We saw what you did to Josef."

"That was the idea, after he tried to knife me. And you cisor shitheads think you can fuck with me? Tell me this: is Josef out of the hospital yet?" Two of the humans, a black brute and a white guy who looked like he'd been in flight so long he'd broken his landing gear, seemed confused at the calling of "cisor" and "rodent." True, inter-species relations had nearly grown seamlessly together with some well-placed political bandages. The fact that cisors had lynched molars, raped their women, and in extreme cases, eaten their children in the days before the Industrial Revolution and up until World War II had not been forgotten by society, though. Humans were often not "in the know" because they had been a continent away, for the most part, while the infighting was still so prevalent. The extreme black-white racism in Europe had gone mostly unnoticed by anthros while humans and furs tried to integrate, though, so at least there was an analog to the ignorance.

The tiger, whose name was Jace, looked back to the wolf, whose name was Razor, to check. Razor shook his head. "No, he's not."

"And he won't be for a fucking long time. Remember that. I don't have the money today," he said, meeting the wolf's eyes. He didn't look at the rat, but he knew that Vice had been looking for an out recently and besides - there had been venom in the tiger's calling of "rodent." "I can give you a downpayment, but it's not much."

"We need it all," Jace growled. All six of them shifted aggressively.

"Put the guns down, people." He raised his bottle. "Can't I just share this with you people and promise I'll have the dough... when you said I should have it?" He started measuring them. Humans were naturally better shots with guns - they didn't have muzzles blocking their points of view. It would have been interesting that it was the black ones who held them, except that the white guy was so far gone that he probably had too much of a chance of killing them all if he got his hands on one. Well, actually...

"Na-ah, Fae."

The squirrel whirled suddenly on Tee, the bigger African European. "Tee, shoot yourself," he ordered.

"What?" He was taken aback and lowered the weapon in confusion. Vice didn't waste a second. With no warning, he sped the rotation of his blackjack and smashed the human's fingers, drawing attention to that part of the room before dashing to the nearest exit. The gun went flying, and Fae dove for it, coming up from a roll to point it at the other gunman.

"Fuck, you guys!" shouted the wolf harshly. "How fucking stupid are you, Vice?" He ripped the tiger's blackjack out of his paws and threw it like a bolas at the fleeing rat. The gravel-filled sock hit him squarely in the back of the head, knocking him out. Razor started walking over to the rat, and Fae knew what would happen next if he didn't do something. As quickly as he could, he looked again at the situation. The remaining gunman was pointing at his head. How quick did Fae think he was?

Fast enough. He shot and ducked his head sideways and down in the same instant and heard the opposing boy's bullet impact the wall behind him as his opponent screamed and held his bleeding stomach, dropping the weapon. The white guy, who was closest, eyed it curiously, seemingly unperturbed by the whole exchange. "God, Razor, you know, I have no idea how to make sure you don't get your hands on the rest of these bullets." He tried to keep his voice whimsical and dangerous. Tee was sweating profusely and had his hands up, palms out, muttering about not shooting him. The tiger hadn't moved, instead just watching Fae and licking his lips disturbingly.

"You won't shoot me, Fae. I'm too much of a project for you," the canid sneered. "Your little urban experiment." He was quick, and moved before Fae could react, opening the mouse's jaws against the floor like an expert and placing a foot on the back of Vice's head.

The squirrel's grip did not waver. "Don't do it, Razor. I'll kill everyone in here if I have to, and you know I won't feel bad about it." His teeth were clenched as he held the gun trained on the other gunman. He was afraid of what would happen if he took the time to change his aim. He wasn't the best in the world, and anything he did needed to count. He knew Razor. Razor was fearless. There was no way Razor was that cold, though... was there?

"I know, Fae. But you'll feel bad about this. I mean, come on. Why do you think I named him Vice?" With that, he raised his booted foot and stomped down with the weight of his entire body. There was a sickening crunch, and Vice was no more.

"You fucking bastard!" Fae screamed, and shot five more times into the nameless black boy's gut. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. He was not one to not keep his word. He changed his aim and opened Tee's throat, pop, then handed the white guy the gun, sprinted past Jace, and closed and locked the door behind him before leaping up the stairs leading down to it. As he chased the wolf, he heard Jace screaming for mercy and pounding on the door. Three more shots echoed through the streets after him. Pop. Pop. Pop.

"I'm still using you, you God-damned lupine bitch! Don't you ever forget it!" he shouted into the scarcely-populated streets. Razor was gone, though, and there was nothing to be done about it. He ran and he ran, but he knew it was pointless against the wolf's naturally superior senses. In this city, Fae's keen sense of smell was useless to track him. The wolf was gone, and Vice was dead.

It wasn't that Fae knew Vice at all. They had spoken briefly during exchanges for the evil weed and gotten along because Vice seemed to feel somewhat protected, having another molar there in the midst of everyone else. Even that, though, was just an occasional something, nothing special. It was that Fae knew Vice had wanted out. He had felt threatened and wanted to start something with his life that didn't have him always in danger of cops and gangs. He wanted to go somewhere. And now he was dead.

Snarling like the animal he had just chased off, Fae made his way back to the basement. Upon opening the door, he found a pair of feline legs limp behind it. The face at the other end of the body was hardly recognizable, because it appeared the white guy had picked up the other gun, too, and gotten happy to have it. Fae pulled a spray can of ammonia out of his backpack and went to work after seeing the white guy's limp body a few feet away. No DNA evidence here. He collected the guns, too, to bury later. No fingerprints, either.

It took a while to get everything straight, but when he was done, he knelt reverently over Vice's mutilated head, wishing he could make the rat look at all presentable. No one deserved to die unconscious, and not as horridly as this. Having done the rituals to cover all of their asses in stony, stoic silence, he slowly started weeping, his quiet gasps and choking cries echoing in the useless chamber, and silently prayed to anyone who would listen.

No, it wasn't that the rat was anything special to Fae. But Fae was not one who made friends easily. Except for Jeck and a fellow stoner or two, he was alone at school. In the city, he couldn't afford to make friends because he had learned in a similar fight three years ago that friends would either turn their backs or be used against you and let themselves be used.

The rat wasn't special. Fae had watched him for a long time. He wasn't especially smart. He had no charm, no way with words. He was a good shot and a decent fighter, sure, but where does that get a man? He knew enough to partake of his own product only in limited quantities. His parents were decent people and he seemed to respect them. The school he went to was a dirty place. His siblings were, for the most part, filthy vermin who didn't care much for their brother.

There was nothing to set him apart from anyone else, but Fae knew he was lying to himself. Vice was the only person who had been a genuine friend, however far the distance they both tried to make between them was, who had wanted something better for himself. Fae knew. They hadn't talked about it, but they hadn't had to, even if they had had the chance when they saw one another. The way Vice let Fae see him looking nervously at Razor and Jace. The way he joked about "getting a broad" with an odd look in his eyes that meant this joke held more truth than most.

The only one. The only one left in the city. Stuttering through his tears, Fae repeated the words of the only prayer he had bothered to learn, an Irish one he had seen scrawled on a bathroom stall somewhere. "Do not stand on my grave and weep. I am not there - I do not sleep. I am the thousand winds that blow. I am the diamond glints on snow. I am the sunlight on ripened grain. I am the gentle autumn rain. When you waken in the morning's hush, I am the swift uplifting rush of gentle birds in circling flight. I am the soft star that shines at night. Do not stand at my grave and cry - I am not there. I did not die." He poured some of the liquor on the back of Vice's head, his tears nearly run dry, and took a swallow for himself before capping the bottle and standing. He put away the can of ammonia and hefted his backpack, then thought better of it. Here, when money meant so much and when information had saved his life more than once, it was stupid to leave behind things like wallets.

He searched each body carefully, moving his fingers delicately so his fur wouldn't brush off and implicate him during an investigation. His tail was especially vulnerable, so he tucked it up under his coat, probably too late, but the chances there would be a serious investigation were slim. He had just used the ammonia as ritual. Anyway, he found little, except that Jace was carrying an eight ball of cocaine. That would explain why they needed the money. Razor wouldn't have let one of his own be in debt, but he'd certainly let them die. He let the coke lie. It wasn't a good idea to have too many drugs around when he was emotional

Beyond that, the money was pitifully scarce and the wallets gave him the identification he needed and the identification the cops wouldn't get. He stood again, sniffing once and pretending it was from the cold, then grabbed his possessions and glanced once more at Vice's body. It was time to go home.

_But lies at last, as always,

Letting it happen, the fierce fur soft to his face,

Hearing with sharper ears the wind's exciting minors,

The leaves' panic, and the degradation

Of the heavy streams._

from "Beasts," by Richard Wilbur