FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

I must first apologize to the readers: I misjudged the length of this story when I started with the whole "Beasts" thing, so even though this chapter does have the full poem, it is not the last chapter. When I repost this as a single story, all will be made well. Also, I will have fixed *ahem* created *ahem* brushed up some of the symbols and motifs. I'm usually not so hot at those kinds of things. Also, I won't be posting the same stanzas over and over and over again. It was just that in series form, I feel repetition helps keep the poem in the mind of the reader.

So here it is, after a short bout of inability-to-post-itis: 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,

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.

Meantime, at high windows

Far from thicket and pad-fall, suitors of excellence

Sigh and turn from their work to construe again the painful

Beauty of heaven, the lucid moon

And the risen hunter,_

from "Beasts," by Richard Wilbur

"I can cause... anything, really." Fae blinked groggily, his vision clearing slowly. Who was talking? "How else would I know to be here, now? You cleaned up the evidence perfectly. No one should know. There's no reason for you to come back." Very gradually, shapes formed and he was able to make out a figure in front of him. He tried moving his arms and legs. No good. "Even the cops won't find out until someone goes looking for the kids, and who knows how long that could take?"

Suddenly, everything became clear. Fae stared at Razor, his jaw open. How had this happened? The wolf was pointing a gun at him, while Fae was bound naked, beaten, and humiliated in a chair. He should have been prepared. He was always prepared. He always knew what was best and when. It was how he survived, living the way he did. Why was he here, now?

Razor laughed, and it was a cruel sound, but the voice was strange in the cold, hollow room. It didn't sound like Razor. Fae shifted his bare feet on the hard cement. "You're so nae! Growing up with me, playing with me, living with me. I know you, Fae. I know everything about you, and I know it better than you." The light in his eyes was a deadly sort of playful. "You wanted to cure me, somehow. You thought you could make me better, make me... normal, I think you would say. But it didn't work, did it? I killed Vice. In fact, I knew I would kill him three years ago when I saw how badly it hurt you to have those people ripped away from you. I had been waiting for a reason to kill him. Although... I hadn't anticipated you killing the rest of them." He giggled.

"Are you finished monologing?" Fae asked, and gagged at the sound of his voice. It was his, to be sure, but it was sloppy and slurred, and he suddenly noticed the state of his face. Bruised, slashed, torn, his tongue nearly bisected, teeth missing, blood spraying with every word. And Razor just laughed again.

"Blf blu-bleah, fl-bleah? What, Fae? Has your one tool left you? Sure, you can think like this, but you can't do anything, can't manipulate anyone." He rested the gun on his chin in a parody of deep thought. "Speaking of which... have you been watching that Jeck kid? Damn me to fuck if he won't get you killed."

Concentrating as hard as he could, Fae managed to bring out the word, "How?"

Razor doubled over in laughter, the wicked scar across his face disgustingly evident. It went from the left corner of his mouth, across the bridge of his nose, to above his right eyebrow, the product of a drunken father. His favorite line, after the Batman movies, was, "Do you know how I got this scar?" When he smiled, it moved like a snake, slithering up his face and around desperately, trying to escape the madness that was there, deep within. The madness Fae couldn't cure.

"Ah-hah! He speaks! The belligerent bastard speaks!" He straightened. No one else was in the room, but he threw his arms out as to a crowd. "How will the human boy kill you, you ask me? Just think about it." He bobbed his eyebrows with a sly grin. "Ready for it? Huh? Here we go! He won't do it! That pussy couldn't pull a trigger on a child-murdering rapist! He's worse than you are, with all his destruction of potential' bullshit. He'll get that other kid, the one he's playing with, to do it."

"He'sth... nodt..."

"He's nodt? What's nodt,' Fae? I'm not familiar with that one. You know he's playing with that fairy-fuck of a fox. You've watched him do it. I know you have. Oh, but how would I know? I'm just some street-whelp everyone gave up on. I'm that pathetic little wolfling you need to save!" He growled deep in his throat, suddenly angry. "We could have fucking stayed friends, you know that? But no! Your only wrong move in the history of you put me where I am! So you know what? You got to make one mistake, and I've shaped my entire life around what you did wrong because of your experiments, your social brain-fucking."

Fae had heard all of this before, so he just glared at the wolf. "I... know..." he spluttered. Everything the wolf had said was true. They had both been born brilliant. It had taken no extra cultivating, no external influence; nothing. Raised in poor families in a destitute part of town, the two of them had met when they both ran from their homes to the same deserted street corner. Meeting in the ugly, cowardly lights, they had struggled briefly, two adolescents trying to vent some of their anger for their impoverished predicaments, when all of a sudden they started talking while they fought and each realized how gifted the other was.

On that night, they resolved to combine their intellect and solve their respective problems. Back then, five or so years ago, Razor had gone by his birth name, Christopher. Fae's brothers and sisters were being horribly mistreated by the squirrel's step-mother, after his biological mother had died from lung cancer. Without a single tear of sorrow or pang of regret, those two boys put together a scheme that ended with the step-mother not only out of town, but murdered and buried before the rest of the family could even react to her disappearance. His father remarried a few years later to the mother he had now.

The plan to fix Razor's father's drunkenness did not go as smoothly. At first, they tried opening his beers and wine bottles, pouring out the brew into the gutters, watering them down, and replacing the corks and caps with hardly a noticeable scratch. This did nothing but make his father buy more, because he wasn't getting the buzz he needed. The next plan was to simply take half of the booze away every time his father bought any, to see if they could "thirst him out," as they called it, just by making it increasingly difficult to buy the beer. It wasn't until that only resulted in the father changing the locks that Fae made his final suggestion.

_"You don't want him dead, right?" the squirrel asked as they sat on top of a randomly chosen hotel.

Chris nodded, his thin-haired tail motionless behind him despite the wind. "Right."

"Have you ever talked to him about it?"

"N- no. I couldn't do that. He'd just hurt me."

"But when he's sober, he's such a good guy. Just catch him then."

"I- I don't know. He's so angry, usually, and I think... I think what we've been doing has made him a little crazy. Maybe we should wait, and just see if he'll stop if we keep doing this."_

Fae shook his head. "No. I've known a lot of alcoholics. They don't just stop."

"I should just call the cops..."

"And have him arrested? What would that do to your mother?"

"I know! I know, and I don't want to hurt her, but I think it would be better than just... waiting until he hurts someone. Really bad."

"It will hurt your brother, if you don't do something." Chris's mother was pregnant with his only sibling. "You can't let him grow up with that."

"I know, Fae!" he snapped. "I've thought about this, too, you know." They sat in silence for a while. "Sorry." The squirrel just nodded and looked down into the city lights. Why had they been born like this? Other people in these situations just let life go on, made the same mistakes, died the same deaths. But they two... they were more than that. They were worth a lot to the world, and had started here. Smart people were supposed to come from smart families. Why were they in this hell?

The wolf shook his head quickly, trying to clear it. "Assume I did talk to him. What would I say? Don't drink'? I think you're a fool'? Me and this other eleven-year-old each have double your IQ and think we know how to live your life for you'?"

Faeram laughed at that. Chris laughed with him. "Hmm, maybe not. I dunno. I've never really done a whole lot of talking, myself. Maybe... just try to show him who it hurts, when he's drunk. See if you can get him to tell you why he gets drunk in the first place. If you can break him all the way down, maybe you can help him build himself up again."

A slow, thoughtful nod. "Makes sense. It's still the crazy part I'm worried about. He's been... well, the other day he bought a gun, to take care of those robbers.'"

"Heh."

"He hasn't been sleeping much, except when he passes out. I just..." He sighed, tiredly. "I'll give it a try. And if it doesn't work... I guess we'll just try again. I dunno. Maybe we should kill him." His eyes were looking at nothing.

"Your mother," Fae said softly.

"I know," Chris whispered.

The following day...

"BOY, YOU THINK YOU CAN LIVE MY FUCKING LIFE? YOU THINK YOU KNOW BETTER? You don't, you fucking shit-brained excuse for a son! And if your twat mother gets in my FUCKING WAY, I swear to God I will carve her face off!"

As it turned out, Chris's mother did get in his way, shortly after Chris had obediently sat still, shaking and trying not to look at the gun in his father's hand while the old, wild-eyed wolf took a straight razor in the other and carved the line that now adorned his face. The father didn't carve her face off, though. No, he put a bullet through it instead, instantly killing her and the child within her. "I keep my promises," he said. After that, he disappeared and turned up two days later, drowned in a gutter. The doctors said he had a blood alcohol level of oh-point-seven. They weren't sure how he had managed to imbibe so much beer and wine before he had passed out.

Chris remembered that he hadn't watered down his father's alcohol stores that night.

For two days following, Fae tried to comfort him. The cut didn't heal right, because it was jagged from Chris's shaking while it happened. They hid in the basement beneath the corner they had first met, eating scarcely. Fae stayed with him for all of those forty-eight hours, fighting for him, doing everything he could, letting him weep, letting him rage, letting him beat his fists bloody against the ground. He watched and listened and held him and laughed when he could.

Then, when it was over, Chris made his final statement, ending with the last friendly thing he said to Faeram.

_"I think I'll call myself Razor. You know. Because Chris, it's like crisp,' like a razor. And for the obvious reason."

"Chri- Razor, you need to go find someone to take care of you. I want you to live with me, but my dad couldn't afford it."

"Stop scheming, Fae! You suck at it, and you don't want me! You want this at your house? I'm disgusting! Every part of me. My life, my family, my house, and now my God-damned face."

Fae looked at him, hard. "What part of me looks like that matters to me? We. Are. Incredible. You know that. If something I'm doing is somehow conveying the message that I don't want to help you, tell me so that I can carve it off for you. Damn it, Razor, if I thought killing my little brother would help, I would do it!" he whispered fiercely. "You are worth more than running away and making nothing of yourself!"

Razor just met his eyes with a sad look. "It isn't that, Fae. I know you would, and it means a lot to me that you would murder children to make my life better. Really." They shared a hopeful grin and a sad laugh. "But it's that logic that just ruined my life. It's your logic." A strange look came into his eyes, twisting into the grin in an evil way. "In fact, with my logic, I_

could decide to realize that it's really not your fault."

Fae's face shattered. "What?"

"On the other hand, though... I know that you just see this as a single mistake, don't you?"

"Well... I have to. I'm sorry, I am, I made a mistake. You were right, we probably should have waited, maybe he'd have killed himself, maybe..."

"Well, then I'll just have that one mistake, Fae. One thing for each of us. One flaw. You, you made a mistake, and me? Well, I watched my father kill my mother and now I live with the guilt of having caused her death, his death, and my unborn brother's death. So I guess I'm psychologically damaged, aren't I? It's just one thing, isn't it?"

"Razor, don't do this. We could... we could do anything! We're incredible! You can't throw that away!"

"I'm not!" the wolf snarled. "I'm still using it. I'll use it however I have to. I'll pin everything bad in my life on you, I'll hate you, I'll destroy you and everything you are."

"Don't... don't hurt my family."

"You think I'd kill your family? And listen to you! You've already accepted it! You can tell, can't you? You can tell I'm not kidding, you know you can't talk me out of it. You wouldn't care if I killed your family, and that's a fact. What you care about is me, and that's what's going to hurt you for the rest of your life, because you know me. I will never die!"

"Razor... please. We're more than this. We could change the world."

"No." He stood up to leave, and Fae stood up with him, still looking at him, searching the tear-filled eyes for something that might indicate he could be changed. Nothing was there. "I love you, Fae. Like a brother. I would kill for you. I did it once, and I wouldn't hesitate to do it again."

"You're... already starting. Don't do this to me." His eyes were beginning to fill, as well.

The wolf shook his head. "No, I'm not. That was the truth. That's the last. This is the end, Wolfbane, and this is the beginning."

He walked away, then, with Fae's lip trembling, holding back a flood of tears that never fell. Child services came to collect the pup from the police station and found him missing. The squirrel turned his back, as well, and dedicated the rest of his life to protecting his family by ignoring them. Whenever a sibling did well in school, he stayed painfully neutral, because he knew Razor was watching. Whenever his father got a promotion or a raise, he failed to respond, because he knew Razor was watching.

He started doing drugs the day he learned Razor was running a crime ring and twisted himself through the city's underground until he was buying from the wolf, so he could watch him. He sabatoged himself at school so he wouldn't be drawn into the upper circles, so he could watch Razor. Every time he saw the wolf, he was altering conversations, spinning tales, doing anything he could to show Razor how much the wolf was to him, but the wolf was doing the same to him, to hurt him. Vice was just a casualty caught in the cross-fire. He had developed his own motivation without any outside help, and by doing that had unwittingly offered himself up as a toy for both of the warriors to play with.

And the nicknames. Every single one harder to understand than the last. It was a self-imposed punishment, a constant reminder of the very first one he had heard, and knives struck his heart whenever he made one because of it. He had destroyed someone, despite how clear Razor's decision had been, and he spent every day trying to resurrect what had been lost.

The voice that wasn't Razor's came through to him again. "So how are you, Fae, how're you doing? Now you know that Jeck's trying to kill you by breaking that little fox snot's brain. I'm surprised he hasn't gone on a shooting spree yet, with how weak kids are these days. It's like us two and that Jeck kid are the only people who are harder to break than petrified clam shells." We only feel the ripples. "God, I don't think us three could be broken. It's too fucking bad that one of us is determined to stay fractured, isn't it? And that one of has that little stain on his fingers from the acid he cracked me with. And that the last one's an elitist murderer. If only all three of us were perfect, we could probably mend the world."

Fae listened, but was enraged. He couldn't believe what Razor was telling him, but even now, he was reexamining the human. He shook his head painfully, refusing to accept it. "Ssho... why?"

The wolf looked down and sighed, almost seeming ashamed. "Sho isn't a word either, Fae," he mumbled. He was despondant for a while, but perked up unnaturally quickly. Such was their way. "Why did I break your face? Why did I strip you naked and strap you down? Why did I lure you here again? Why am I saying all this in a voice that isn't mine? Close your eyes, Wolfbane."

The choking bark of a squirrel hurled its way out of Fae's throat at that. His own, personal nickname. But he did as he was told. Razor wasn't stupid.

"Who am I, Fae?"

Fae's eyes shot open immediately. He could suddenly talk. None of it had been real. "Jeck! You want me dead? How dare you, you fucker, you God-damned traitor to your own God-damned class, how dare you scheme against me!" He screamed and howled and ripped free of his bonds, even knowing it was a dream, suffering the gunshots through his chest so he could beat the wolf speaking with Jeck's voice, beat him and beat him and beat him and beat him until he wasn't recognizable, until he

woke up sweating and yelling and thrashing at his bedding. Jeck. Jeck was playing him. Fae should have known not to trust someone as heartless in how they operated as that. Why Jeck wanted him dead was a mystery; Razor hadn't told him that. Razor, back from his hell to tell him in a dream that he was in danger. I would kill for you.

Well, murder was not an option. Not here. No, something far more deadly was in order for that bastard of a human being. It would be glorious. It would be rich.

Seething in his bed, Fae went over every interaction with the boy from a new perspective. He saw where it was leading. He saw why Guin was the natural target. He could see it all, as though a dark haze had lifted from his eyes. True, Fae could put an end to this plotting with hardly an effort, but he didn't want to. If Jeck was prepared to use his tools to this end, to eliminate all others with his power, then he deserved death. More than death.

Fae spent the night picking out threads from his past with the boy and weaving them into a pattern that in the end would obliterate his opposition and leave him not only dying, but regretful of his whole life, empty, and hopeless.

Jeck had never been to Fae's house before. Walking the chilled streets, he considered, reconsidered, and redirected his feet a thousand times. In his pocket, he held the end result of the last weeks of study. It was two days before exam week began, so a Saturday evening. Jeck's parents believed he had gone to a friend's house to study, and in a way, he had, even if in reality, all of his study was complete. Through what he had found, he knew Fae intimately, more than the squirrel had probably ever believed possible and so tonight, a death sentence was being written.

It seemed appropriate the last nickname had been morbid, more so than anything previous. Mrs. Buckshire, pronounced with a German accent, became Buchschere, or, translated, "book-shears." Cutting books. Cutting tomes. Cutting tombs. Reaping tombs. Reaping death. The Grim Reaper. Mrs. Grim. Everything was caught in this downhill slide, and the only question now was who would meet Mrs. Grim's grinning husband.

The hunting, the searching, and the analyzing had all ended the afternoon before, during Jeck's final meeting with Mrs. Buckshire. Through the days, Jeck had pulled out countless messages from the English papers, but they all pointed to the math tests. "Pythagorus knows me." "Euclid draws my spirit." "Descartes's philosophy is where mine lives." Time after time, Caesarean square after Morse analog, substitution after cipher, those math papers were where they led. At least, the ones that weren't just experiments or clues to the next indication.

Mrs. Buckshire had been distressed on that final day. She had everything she had managed to weed out, and the result was still bogus. "J T B O Z P O Z F M J T U F O J O H." Eighteen letters, so not a square. Seemingly random frequencies. Knowing the end was near, she was stressing herself far more than her old age should have allowed for, and it made her forget one of the original methods of encoding. Jeck saw it.

"Take one step back," he murmured. Fae had stayed one step back from glory, one step back from everything he could be. That was the key to this final message. Move every letter back one in the alphabet, and the message was plain as day. "I S A N Y O N E L I S T E N I N G." "Is anyone listening?" It was the same for both years of papers. He had been searching for someone who could hear him for six years, ever since middle school.

Jeck knew, then, that Fae was stronger than he was, and smarter. He had been working at this level of intellect for far longer and with far greater purpose, even if it was just to get noticed. The two analysts just stared at the message once Buckshire wrote it out. "You need to tell him," Buckshire said, her mouth dry. "You know him best. Let him know that someone is listening. Someone cares about him. If he was getting tired of this repetition two years ago, think how close he is to the edge now. You go tell him - here's his address. Thank you so much, Jeck. You're a saint." She made sure he was looking at her. "You will do great things one day, with your heart, and with your mind. If Fae is with you... nothing will ever be a barrier to you."

He whispered a thanks to her and left for the final time after returning the original papers. He had not been aware that it was possible for every part of his body and soul to hurt at the same time. There he was, though, despite even that, walking with the stance of a warrior and the mindset of a beaten and abused eleven-year-old boy.

Guin had not approached him again, but he had been making attempts to get to know Fae, all of which had failed. The squirrel slid away from him, brushed him off, sometimes even swatted him back, but the strangeness and the uncertainty in his eyes kept Guin coming no matter how he was pushed away. It was pathetic to watch, for those who knew how to, and Jeck could see Guin's mentality, as he continued to excel and Fae to remain static, begin to fail and fall apart. He was growing desperate and he had never before in his life felt desperate. Fae's dark aura had slid onto Guin, but unlike the squirrel, it had infected the fox's mood and bearing insidiously, like a toxin slipped in his drink every day, slowly building until the explosive, fatal end.

And Fae's reaction was dangerous. His eyes were always on the other two. Jeck knew by now that Fae knew, and he had had to alter his tactics to adjust for that development. How the squirrel had found out was not hard to surmise. Guin was too transparent he had spent no time in the real world of manipulation, thinking he knew what he was doing after the way he tossed around the succubi who circled about him day after day. His expressions, his eyes, the very state of his body reflected his degredation. His earring had darkened with the tarnish daily, and when he flicked it, he winced. Like a corpse in wet ground, he was breaking down.

Abruptly, Jeck found himself slammed bodily into a wall of a back alley, spun until the street was out of sight, and holding his breath agains the razor blade on his throat, praying his beating heart wouldn't push open his skin. A voice hissed in his ear, "What do you think you're doing?"

"I am a murderer, and I come to lay the dead to rest," he responded without thinking, the poetic words harsh to his ears. He could see the short, gray fur of a wolf on the hand that held the weapon and could feel it on the one trapping his arm. He didn't dare move. He knew that were he in the wolf's position, he would not hesitate to draw blood. Kill? Probably not. But Jeck knew well the cost of being scarred.

"I know who you are, Kindleford Jeck Gates. You're trying to kill my brother. You want to kill Faeram Nathaniel Marshall."

The arms slammed him into the opposite wall and a snarling face showed itself as he turned to find the knife on his throat again. An ugly scar wound its way across the wolf's features. "You would put out the brightest light this generation has failed to see."

Even the one was confused. How could he know? Impossible! Kill him! Kill him, he will ruin you! "Who are you?" he asked, throwing a growl into his voice.

"My name is Razor, and I will break you in half if you keep going the direction you were headed. I will skin you alive and wear your flesh for clothes. I will eat your heart out while it is still beating and you will shriek like all the banshees of Hell, but no one will save you. Either you will murder me, or you will get no further while you are still alive." With a swiftness that sent Jeck's eyes wide, he felt the weight of the blade leave his throat and the wood of the handle press into his palm. His fingers closed instinctively around it.

Razor backed away, the snarl still there, but his hands and arms open wide. "I know you, Leif, son of Eric, son of Thorvald, son of Asvald, son of Ulf." He was just showing off knowledge. Showing Jeck who he was. "You would make way for hordes of tyrants just to discover a new world. You would walk on the backs of giants and call yourself Prometheus. Do you know how I know? Because I know. I talk to your fox friend, and that sad little fucker has quite a mouth on him, if he has the right guy to talk to. You know. An angel' his feeble little psyche can pretend is there so he has a reason to fall in love with another man." And suddenly, sexuality was just another tool.

Jeck's breathing was hard and fast. He couldn't understand. Kill him! Kill him now! "No, no, I won't kill you! I'm not a real murderer. I don't want to put Fae out, I want to uncover him. He's been suffocating for six years, and I want to bring him out!" He even had the paperwork to prove it.

"DON'T LIE to me!" the wolf raged. "You would betray the light of the world! You would chain Prometheus to a rock and feed eagles his organs!" So much knowledge, so much insight! Jeck's head was reeling. Who was this?

"Why would I do that?" the human gasped desperately. "What sense does that make? He's more than I am!"

"And you want to cut him down so that you will be visible! I know that that's it. I know it is, because I know your kind! Filthy, white, human bastards in your mansions and your villas, you want to paint the world white and rich!"

Jeck's eyes narrowed quickly in anger and he straightened himself with a violent twitch. "Racism? Racism at this level of being? Don't be so filthy; I know you better from the ten seconds here. What do you think you're doing, traitor? You're one of us!"

The wolf just grinned, a half-mad, half-sorrowing light in his eyes. "You'll be the one who lives this through, but I won't let Fae die if he feels like there's any hope left at all, and you need some practice killing. You're a murdering bastard, and I'm a suicidal bastard, and he's the only one of us all who deserves to live, even in this world full of unthinking bastards, so if you're going to kill him, by God, I'm going to fix any part of you that is still inadequate, and I will make him hate himself and die lonely."

He grabbed the hand that held the razor and guided it forcefully against his throat, but Jeck pulled back. "No! You can't die! There's too much of you! I don't want him dead, I want him to live! Don't you get that? We're eternal!"

"None of it matters! This is the beginning, and this is the end!" Razor screamed, and twisted himself and Jeck's wrist, slashing the human's hand across his throat, opening it in a spray of blood that he turned so it couldn't stain the human, couldn't provide a reason to keep him from going to Fae's home.

Jeck cried out and backed away, dropping the bloody tool into the quickly-spreading pool of crimson ripples. He didn't understand. Why couldn't Razor have lived? Why was he dying? It wasn't supposed to be this way! Jeck had gained and lost another nautilus in the space of a minute. Ripples, ripples blustering currents. Why?

But he knew the value of knowing your enemy, dead or alive. Careful to avoid the still-spreading blood, he extracted the other boy's wallet and checked the driver's license. Christopher Tajex Fowler. Jeck could not seem to tear his eyes from the depth of the miasma that swallowed that name. It was disgusting, it was pungent, and it was horribly, horribly familiar, like looking into a frosted mirror. This was a darkness he knew well, one he had seen in too many of the people he knew. Breathing with a feral rage, he tried to take a moment to collect himself. Just breathe. You have time. Don't worry. But he couldn't, he knew.

_Making such dreams for men

As told will break their hearts as always, bringing

Monsters into the city, crows on the public statues,

Navies fed to the fish in the dark

Unbridled waters._

from "Beasts," by Richard Wilbur

He swept furiously out of the alleyway, leaving the soaked body behind and on the verge of baring his teeth. So stupid. Why were people stupid? Why did Guin have to talk? Was Razor dead because of racism? Was he dead because of insanity? Was he dead just for vengeance? None of them good reasons. None of them.

He was baring his teeth and seething until he reached the door to Fae's house and knocked. Then, he composed himself, smoothed his low-lying hair, and greeted the smiling mother squirrel with a cheery grin and a wave. End game was nigh.