ninefox | Fine Zinc Teeth

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Fine Zinc Teeth

There was a time Jedao would have said that half a century was barely any time; less than a mortal life, not more than two generations. But the world has changed so much since he first put the Americans' uniform on. Even the uniform has changed - they don't call dance halls dance halls any more, for another thing. But the smell of the place - sweat, desire, alcohol - that much is the same.

He slinks in under a stranger's face, although he doesn't disguise his own scent when he smiles, glittering, at the bouncer: a flashed lure that Fives might not even notice or recognize, let alone pursue. It took a few months to get someone to handle all the things which apparently needed handling for his "retirement", and a few more to track down one particular squad of decommissioned weretroops, out of thousands, mostly paperless, in the busiest city this side of the Pacific. But Jedao did find them.

He dances without keeping track of the time, lets his face slowly slide back to its default arrangement, lets his spine relearn how to hold him up without being army rigid. He has several drinks - people buy them for him, which is nice; one or two of them he even dances with until they can't keep up with him any more. Fives rotates from the receiving line onto the floor as the night wears on and patrons get drunker, and he maneuvers himself into Fives' line of view, always moving, twisting, flashing glances that catch on Fives' eyes as the beat hits. Slowly, as if by the whim of the music, he draws closer.

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"I wish cats weren't frightened of us," he admits wistfully, wrinkling his nose. "They look... soft, and on videos on the computer they make this really nice rumbling noise." But what can you do, when you smell like something that could snap them up in one bite and just might want to. He shrugs.

"Are foxhounds part fox? What do they do that's weird?" He doesn't know much about these things, clearly.

"Bred to hunt us," Jedao says, with a shake of his head, his expression more of distaste than anything. "They know better than to mess with me as a wild spirit but twenty generations as working dogs says go get him. It's all kinds of reactions, they get very confused. Sometimes they'll attack someone else, sometimes they just follow me nervously."

"Why would anyone breed something to hunt you?" He sounds positively scandalized by the idea. "You wouldn't even taste good." Which is the only reason he can think of for hunting.

Jedao laughs at that, then rolls one shoulder in a shrug. "Pest control at the beginning, I think. My cousins kept getting into other people's chickens. Later, it was for sport. But we're too fast for men on foot and too small for men on horseback to follow properly, so - stubborn little dogs."

"Well that's just reasonable, chickens are delicious." He remembers when they were pups, sometimes being thrown live chickens to run down and tear apart, remembers the squawks and the taste of blood and the simple joy of it.

"Men don't seem to be very good hunters." He sounds more than a little disdainful of it. "But I guess they're very good at getting others to do their hunting for them."

"They're better on open plains," Jedao allows. "Although it's a bit of a lost art in most places. And I shudder to imagine your opinion on falconry."

"I guess I can understand why." He gestures around them. "They don't seem to have much call for it." And neither do he and his brothers, which sometimes rankles, much as they love their newfound freedom. "What's falconry?" It's as curious as almost all his questions. The world is so big and wide and full of so many unknown things, and Fives wants to learn them all.

"Hunting with trained birds instead of dogs. Everything from little kestrels the size of your fists to golden eagles. They hunt foxes with those too, although that is for food. Not much else, on the steppes in the winter."

He gets a little bit of a wistful look, despite the subject. There's no sky anywhere like the sky on the steppe.

"I suppose it's efficient?" He's wrinkling his nose again, though, disdainful of the idea of humans' inability to do their own hunting without relying on the creatures they breed and train to be their servants.

The subject does remind him of something else, something he finds fascinating about this strange city they've made their home. "Have you seen the hawks that nest on some of the skyscrapers? It's like they think these are canyons and plains to hunt in."

"I like falconry, to tell you the truth. I don't get pack instinct like you, but there's something - feeling so in synch with another living thing, for something as primal as hunting, when the other end of that thread is a thing that flies -"

He shakes his head. "The hawks never like me quite as much as I like them. They're my cats, I suppose. But you've got a sharp eye. Those are peregrines. Bar magic, when they dive those are the fastest things alive under the sun."

Fives hums in something like understanding. "Working together as a Pack-" He grins a little haplessly. "It's amazing. It's the best thing." It's one of the few things he misses about their life Before. There's not much call for them to work together like that, all part of a greater whole, focused on the same objecting and instinctively supporting each other.

"They're gorgeous, and I can believe that about their speed. I saw one kill a pigeon in midflight last week, it just... came out of nowhere." He turns to grin at the General, almost bouncing on the balls of his feet. "It must be amazing to fly. Really fly, not in a chopper or a plane, but out in the air, using your own muscles, feeling the wind. I think parachuting's kind of the same." He'd loved HALO drops, feeling the wind rushing past, the breathless anticipation of that one, precise moment when you had to open your chute, because if you were early you'd be a target and if you were late you'd be a smear.

Jedao's mother could cloudrun, but he never quite got the hang of it; once he almost walked out of a plane in the middle of a thunderstorm, though, because he could feel it, crackling and rumbling and drumming in his bones, feel it calling to him, pulling him with the force that pulls birds north, that pulls salmon upstream, nature and need. Sometimes he wonders, if his 2IC hadn't stopped him, like Odysseus tied to the mast, whether he would have learned before he hit the ground, or if he'd ever have come down at all, if he could have gone wild right in the heart of the whirlwind.

"Diving probably is," he agrees. "Although the distance fliers do more gliding - I don't know how you'd get into hang gliding, but people do it. And then hummingbirds are a class of their own, of course."

"Maybe we'll be able to try it some day." It's hard to tell, from the way he says it, whether he means he and the General or he and his brothers. Or maybe all of them.

"I don't understand how hummingbirds even fly," he agrees with the same wonder and enthusiasm. "Echo and Tup have some flowers on the roof, and a hummingbird found them, so they put a feeder up there and now four or five come by a day. They're so tiny and fast and bright." He's clearly absolutely charmed.

Tup will probably want to show you their garden," he adds, beaming. "Mostly they grow vegetables, but Tup fell in love with the flowers at the bodega, so Cutup and Hevy bought him some plants as a surprise."

"With truly excessive effort, as I understand it," Jedao says dryly, although his eyes and smile are lit up at the description of the garden.

"It's important to have flowers," he says, with baseless conviction. "I'm glad."

Fives laughs at Jedao's answer, thinking of the bright little birds flitting around. "I don't know about important," he counters, but he's grinning impishly. "But I'm sure Tup had wanted some for ages and just didn't want to ask for something that wasn't strictly necessary, so-" He pauses, goes a little more somber- "Maybe you're right. Maybe they are important."

"If you never have flowers, part of your brain thinks it's always winter," Jedao says softly. "People weren't meant to live like this, you know, all concrete. The world changes so fast now - sometimes that's amazing. But it's too easy to forget, sometimes. That flowers can be important."

"It does?" Fives frowns. "Maybe we should bring some into the apartment. He'd probably like that."

Fives spins as he walks, looking up at the buildings rising around them. In this part of town, few of them are more than five stories, most of them only three to four, but it's still enough to block a significant amount of the light, and the only green are some scraggly trees and the weeds pushing up from between concrete slabs, or the occasional display of flowers and plants at a shop.

"It is amazing, all the lights and colors, and the different people. Sometimes you can hear seven or eight different languages just walking a couple of blocks. But sometimes it almost feels like being back in one of the training mazes," he adds, more quietly.

"The park's just up around the corner, though?" He perks up and gestures left at the next cross street. "It has a lot of flowers in the spring. And grass and trees and a pond and a playground."

"There's a pond?" he asks, interested and pleased. "All the parks in the old days had rivers, even if it was just little ornamental ones, but here so often it's just trees, without the water element. No balance."

"Yeah. It's not very big and it's a little overgrown with water weeds, but there are fish in it, and ducks a lot of the time. I think the ducks actually like the weeds," he adds, taking the corner and speeding up a little, so obviously enthused by Jedao's pleasure.

"Sometimes people bring food for the ducks and they all gather around pushing each other to try and get the most. And the fish will rise for food thrown into the water, sometimes, to try and beat the ducks to it."

"They aren't weeds to the ducks," he points out, because of course Fives is right. "Only gardeners say what's a weed and they want to grow." And then,

"Do you?" feed the fight between the ducks and the fish, he means. If any city animal has zero concern about the predatory position of wolves, it's probably ducks. Ornery bastards.

"Huh. I hadn't thought of it that way." He grins, brief and bright, then ducks his head a little sheepishly.

"Sometimes, but not often. I probably shouldn't at all, when we need the money, but-" His shoulders twitch a little in something not quite a shrug and he looks at Jedao through his eyelashes. "They're not afraid of me. And they're kind of ridiculous." He loves watching them squabble among themselves, it reminds him a little of his Pack, sometimes.

"If you can afford roast beast for me then you can afford a handful of frozen peas for the ducks," Jedao observes.

"Should I worry?"

Fives looks stricken for a moment when he realizes what he's said. "No! I didn't mean it like that. It isn't the same at all." Rex will kill him if he flubs this which, unlike his brothers' reaction to his awkward flirting, actually does bother him. "Hospitality is different than wasting food on fat little ducks that get fed by everyone." Just because he likes having them waddle up to him and watching them squabble and scuffle.

"I could get anyone to feed me. I'm very charming," Jedao informs him, his voice tart and light, but his shoulders shifting in a way not entirely unlike the ducks when they strut.

"Anyway, they're your neighbors. There's nothing unworthy about wanting to be neighborly."

"You're- our Fox General, we want to feed you," he protests instantly, worried the General might change his mind. And if there had been a bit of hesitation as he stopped himself from claiming him as his General, well, it was a very brief one.

He scrunches up his nose a little at the rest, at the idea of the ducks being neighbors. "Maybe I'll tell Hevy that the next time he says I should be eating them, not feeding them."

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CW: killing and eating animals, blood

Re: CW: killing and eating animals, blood

Re: CW: killing and eating animals, blood

Re: CW: killing and eating animals, blood

Re: CW: killing and eating animals, blood

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