Derek
Cal slept for fifteen hours straight after dinner. Derek was worried, but when he called Noah in the early hours of the morning, he got the reassurance that he needed.
Cal’s cat had taken a lot of his energy and it was possible some of the tiredness came from the shifting and the detoxing from the morphine. All Noah had said was to stay close, make sure Cal didn’t try to overexert himself, and that Noah would be by to check the wounds around midday.
When Cal finally woke around eleven in the morning, he seemed bleary, but more energetic. He was also in a lot of pain and trying to hide it from Derek.
“Don’t do that,” Derek said when he saw the discomfort in Cal’s expression. “I know it hurts. I can’t be there for you if you hide from me.”
Cal, looking chastised, nodded and then winced when he tried to move his arm.
Cal hissed. “Shit.”
“Okay, let’s get you to the bathroom and then back to bed. I’ll get you breakfast and Noah will be here in about an hour.”
Cal seemed to adopt a go-with-the-flow kind of attitude, and concentrated on dealing with the pain. He was pale and sweaty when Derek deposited him back in bed. Derek knew what Cal was thinking, too. He couldn’t take the morphine that would help with the pain, because he’d just gotten forcibly clean with the so-called help from his cat. He wouldn’t want to slide back now.
When Noah examined the cuts, cleaned them and put some ointment on them again, he seemed hopeful.
“They’re already better. You have maybe two days of this kind of pain, then it’ll get easier.” Noah looked at Cal. “Do you want me to leave some m—?”
“No. I don’t want any in the house. That’s… that’s too easy.”
“Okay. I’ll leave my phone on. If it becomes unbearable, you call me. Any time. Even during the night.” Noah glanced at Derek, and Cal snorted, making Noah turn to him again. “No, I’m fucking serious, Cal. There are limits to what you should have to take. If I come and give it to you, it doesn’t mean you’re using again. It’ll be medicine. I’ll make sure you won’t get too much.”
Cal sighed. “Fine. I’ll try to go without, though. It’s… this shouldn’t hurt as much as it does, so maybe it’ll pass soon.”
Noah seemed dubious.
“Nobody knows how this shifter shit works,” Derek stated. “There are too many variables and causes. Just… I don’t want you to play tough guy when you don’t have to, love.”
“Yeah. What Derek said.” Noah packed up his stuff and left again.
Kit came home in the afternoon, took one glance at Cal and Derek and vanished into his room. Five minutes later, a tiny fox jumped up on the bed, padded its way to their heads and settled between their pillows.
Derek could tell how much it relaxed Cal to have Kit there. Cal closed his eyes and tried to nap or ride out the pain again, Derek wasn’t sure. Kit began to make snuffling noises in his sleep, and Derek smiled.
“I still haven’t heard the story of how you got to be his father,” he said quietly.
Despite the tightness around his eyes and mouth, Cal’s lips twitched a little. He turned his head carefully and opened his eyes to look at Derek.
“I got an assignment to go to Morocco. There were reports of someone trying to sell Fennecs in Marrakesh.”
“That’s where those red walls are? The marketplace thing?” Derek had read about it somewhere or seen a documentary.
“Yeah, there. It’s a very… old-timey place in some ways. Anyway, a tourist who happened to be a shifter saw Fennecs being sold there. He was sure there was a shifter among them, but he couldn’t tell anything else.”
Derek didn’t like where the story was going, but he nodded anyway, and Cal continued, “I got there a couple of days later and eventually located the guy selling the foxes. It was all black market and he had no idea about what he had in his hands. He did, however, have five foxes still. I roughed him up, told him he needed to let the foxes back into the wild, because they weren’t meant to be pets and wouldn’t survive. The usual animal protector spiel. Which, of course, was true.” Cal stopped to take in a deep breath.
Derek took his hand and stroked the back of it with his fingers. “And there was a shifter among them?”
“Yeah, an adult male. He was almost gone, so I told the guy I’d take it off his hands if he took the others and released them safely. Otherwise I’d call the cops and every possible authority that would fuck him up.”
Derek smiled at the words. Sounded like Cal all right.
“So I took this fox to where I was staying, managed to get him to communicate with me a little through yes and no questions and a lot of me pointing at a map and so on. He stayed shifted, he didn’t have energy left. Just enough to tell me where he’d left his son. He asked me to take him to the hospital, hide him in some bushes so that when he’d die, they’d find a naked dead guy there.” The pain in Cal’s eyes was obvious, and Derek squeezed his fingers.
“Did you?”
