Off and on Again

by Tia Fielding

  Maybe it was his staring, but Derek blinked his good eye open and barely suppressed a jerk of surprise when he saw Cal awake.

  “Hey,” Derek whispered over Kit’s sleeping form.

  “Hi,” Cal croaked, feeling a bit stupid.

  They smiled at each other for a few precious moments. Then the feeling of guilt and everything else that’d happened rolled over Cal, and Derek could tell.

  Sighing, Derek reached behind himself to grab his phone off the bedside table.

  He turned it to show Cal the time. Past five in the evening.

  “I need to use the bathroom.” Derek rolled out of bed carefully. “You hungry?” he asked, stretching by the bed.

  “Yeah, I am.” Cal didn’t even find it surprising at this point. He’d spent a lot of energy shifting back and now healing, and well, the cat could only eat so much. He felt as if he’d lost weight during his time trapped in the cat form, too. He wasn’t sure if that was how it worked, but oh well.

  “I’ll check on the dinner next. Noah should be back to check on you soon.”

  “Okay.”

  Kit twitched a bit in his sleep and Cal put his hand over his son. It settled the tiny fox immediately.

  Cal felt a bit choked up. Kit needed him in this form. The cat was good for being there and guarding his boy, but that wasn’t enough parenting. Derek had been picking up Cal’s slack, and he appreciated it more than he could express.

  Soon, the front door of the house opened with a now familiar creak, and Derek greeted Noah.

  “Son, you might want to wake up,” Cal murmured to Kit, gently stroking his whiskers with his fingers. “Kit, time to get up.”

  The black eyes that blinked open were fully fox for that split second before Kit’s human side caught up. Then, the fox yipped, jumped a few times on the bed, and then shook through the shift.

  “Dad!” Kit barely prevented himself from tackling Cal and hugged him carefully instead. The tears Cal could feel wetting his chest made him tear up, too.

  “It’s okay, Kit. It’s going to be okay.” This was a new beginning, and Cal would have to believe that whatever would happen between Derek and him, things would work out.

  Noah walked in, smiling at Cal and Kit.

  Kit, naked after his shift, blushed and pulled a blanket over himself. Oh no, did the boy have a crush on Noah?

  “How are you feeling?” Noah asked, ignoring Kit’s embarrassment like the kind man he was.

  “Incredibly tired, more than ever before after an injury,” Cal confessed.

  “Might be the whole cat thing or the morphine having flushed out of your system,” Noah mused as he took off the bandages and poked and prodded the bites. “These look better. Do you want another drip?”

  Cal thought for a moment. “Nah, I think eating and drinking will be better at this point.”

  “Okay, you know your body best.”

  Kit left the room to get dressed and Noah looked at Cal more seriously. “How do you feel about the withdrawal? Do you need morphine for the pain?”

  Oh. Right. Cal hadn’t thought of that.

  Morphine was the only real thing that helped a shifter out when it came to pain. If he needed pain relief, he had a tough decision to make.

  “I… I think I’m good for now. I think I need to be pretty fucked up with the pain to actually want morphine at this point.”

  “Yeah, I thought you’d say that. Just….” Noah glanced over his shoulder toward the main area of the house where Derek was clanking around, fixing them dinner. “Take comfort in your mate. Your cat will recognize him as a source of comfort. Let him close, it’ll help you heal and hopefully you won’t need the meds.”

  If it were only that simple. The expression on Noah’s face seemed to suggest the jaguar knew exactly what Cal was thinking, so he said nothing.

  Noah rummaged around his medical bag and lifted a tube. “So, here’s a thing I really like to use for bites and scrapes. It’s spruce resin salve, it’s great stuff.”

  Cal nodded. “You know what you’re doing, so go ahead.” He winced when Noah made sure the salve penetrated some of the deepest bites and felt relieved once he was done with it.

  After redressing the wounds, Noah patted his arm. “I’ll come check you tomorrow. If you feel feverish, call me. Otherwise, just try to handle the pain. It’s not going to be easy, but you have Derek here.”

  “Yeah, thank you.”

  Noah grabbed his stuff, talked to Derek a bit, and left the house.

  Kit came back to Cal after a while, looking bashful. Cal didn’t say anything, but he didn’t need to. Kit walked over to the other side of the bed, faceplanted, and groaned.

  Cal chuckled, reached over and patted Kit’s back.

  Kit mumbled something into the covers.

  “What?” Cal smiled.

  Kit lifted his head just enough to say “He has a mate for fuck’s sake.” Then he flopped back with another groan.

  Cal’s smile got bigger. Kit wasn’t someone who cussed a lot, so Cal hadn’t seen a point in scolding him about it.

  Derek appeared in the doorway, looking at the scene on the bed thoughtfully.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Kit has a crush.”

  Derek did the math, even glanced over his shoulder in thought, and then smiled, shaking his head.

  “Oh,” he said. “Well, we all have inconvenient crushes growing up. It’s part of that process.”

  “Derek’s right. Mine was Miss Eabha, the school nurse around Year ten, that’s… fifteen-ish.”

  Kit whined, most likely because he was a few years older now.

  “Mr. Wagner, the father of my best friend,” Derek commented. “All through puberty.”

  Kit lifted his head to look at Derek. “Well that must’ve sucked.”

  “Oh yeah.” Derek chuckled. “Dinner’s ready. Do you want to move to the table or eat here?”

  Cal frowned and tried to figure out how his body was feeling. “I’ll try to move. I need to take a leak anyway so might as well do it all in one go.”

  “Okay. Kit, you go ahead and eat, I’ll help Cal to the bathroom first.”

  Kit did as told and Derek came closer to the bed, ready to grab Cal if needed.

  Swinging his legs off the bed was easy, so was standing. He’d gotten a few solid kicks to his stomach and he was bruised now, but the worst were the bites. He swayed when any movement made the muscles of his arm and shoulder radiate with pain.

  Derek grabbed his good arm. “At your pace, love. No rush.”

  Love. Cal closed his eyes and soaked in the word. Derek probably hadn’t realized what he’d said, so he’d think Cal was battling the soreness. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

  “Noah said you being close will help,” he spoke as he started an experimental shuffle out of the room.

  “Yeah, that’s how mates work, right?”

  “Uh-huh,” Cal grunted as he turned sideways just so the door frame wouldn’t bump his shoulder.

  Who knew one dog could get him this sore. It hadn’t even been a bad fight, even though it must’ve looked horrible to Derek.

  It took them ten minutes to maneuver to the bathroom and get Cal settled at the table.

  “Chicken soup?” He threw a glance at Derek. “Really?”

  Kit was smirking. He’d already eaten and got up to take his dishes to the counter.

  “It was good,” he said. “Hey do you mind if I stay at with the wolves tonight? They’re doing sauna and I want to go, but then I don’t want to walk back here after?”

  Derek was the first to reply. “No, go ahead. Just be safe and if you need to come home for any reason, you just call us or just walk on your own.”

  Cal wondered if he should’ve felt weird for Derek taking over like this, but he didn’t. He cleared his throat. “Yeah, what Derek said. If you walk back, do it in human form though.” Kit was smaller than most things that went bump in the night around these woods.
>
  “Yeah, of course. Thanks dads.” Kit’s smirk was wicked as he bounced to his room to get his stuff.

  Derek had gone a bit stiff next to Cal. When they’d called bye after Kit and the front door closed, Cal turned to Derek.

  “You know we’re a package deal, right?”

  “Yeah, I just… I never thought I’d be anyone’s parent, you know?” Derek gave him a wavering smile.

  “Honey, you’ve been parenting him since you got here. And you’ve done a great job. He loves you already, his fox and my cat recognize you as my mate and part of the family.”

  Tears glimmered in Derek’s eyes, and Cal leaned toward him for a kiss, but his shoulder stung like a bitch and he hissed.

  “Just stay still,” Derek murmured, leaned to him instead, and kissed him gently. When he pulled back, Derek said, “Now let’s eat and get you back to bed. You need rest.”

  “Yeah,” Cal agreed roughly. He needed sustenance, rest, and his mate.

  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?”

  “Yeah. It was the hardest thing I’ve had to do, leaving him there.”

  “That night, I found the house where he’d left the boy. He was hiding in a cupboard in a basement room. I would’ve never found him if I hadn’t been a shifter.”

  “How long ago was this?” Derek asked, letting go of Cal’s hand to stroke Kit’s fur.

  “Kit was around six then, so… twelve years. Something along those lines. I knew he was a fennec, even though all he was then was a scared, mute little boy. He was so traumatized….” Cal sighed and stared at the ceiling for a while, blinking back tears. “I named him Kit, because he couldn’t tell me what his name was. He had a lot of therapy. He doesn’t remember his childhood, other than glimpses here and there.”

  “But the fennec was his dad?”

  “Who even knows? Could’ve been, or just someone who wanted to make sure I’d go look. By the time I got him to Italy via Council’s private jet a couple of days later, he refused to let go of me. Someone came, a Council lackey, and tried to take him. I honest to God hissed at him. Or well, I guess the cat did but I was human right then.” Cal chuckled a bit.

  “Did he speak English then?”

  “Yeah, and some Spanish, too. There’s no way of knowing where he’s actually from and how he and the man ended up in Morocco. I mean, maybe they were headed to family, actual fennecs are from northern Africa.”

  “Rarer shifters tend to hide where their animal counterparts are from,” Derek said quietly. It made sense, because that way seeing one of them in shifted form wasn’t automatically alarming. Not like seeing a Siberian tiger in a Finnish forest, for example.

  “When they realized they couldn’t take him, they let me keep him. He couldn’t remember his name, but the man had called him Kit. So we kept that, because that’s what he was, a fox kit.” Cal smiled and watched as Derek stroked Kit’s forehead between those massive ears that laid flat right then.

  “He looks vaguely Asian, but that’s all I can tell, really,” Derek murmu
red.

  “Yeah, which was one of the things that tells absolutely nothing about his origins. His parents had to be fennecs, but that’s all I know. And I didn’t see the man in his human form so I don’t have a clue what he looked like.”

  Somehow, Derek felt relieved Cal hadn’t actually seen the shifter die and change into human.

  “Did Kit ever want to find where he was from?”

  “Not really. Of course he knows I’ve put out feelers. But fennec shifters live in family groups, much like the actual animals, so they could’ve been just the parents and him, and… well….” Cal sighed again. These weren’t easy memories, that much was obvious. “The Council has always agreed to give us information if anyone comes to ask, but in twelve or so years, nobody has.”

  Kit blinked a few times, then stretched his forepaws and leaned toward Cal to touch the tiny black nose to his cheek. Then he let out a tiny chatter.

  Cal smiled. “Yeah, son. I know. We’re family now, nothing else matters.”

  To Derek, it felt like an old conversation, an old reassurance that they were a family unit and nobody would take Kit away from Cal.

  Kit turned then, and poked Derek’s cheek, too. The same chattering almost-purr sounded, and Derek couldn’t help but to smile. “Yeah, kiddo. I’m family too. Everything isn’t just magically sorted now that your dad’s back, but we’re off to a good start.”

  He glanced at Cal over Kit, and saw the pained look in his eyes. Yeah, they both knew it wouldn’t be that simple, but this time, they wouldn’t give up, either.

  Cal started to heal quicker, whether it was Noah’s miracle ointment, having his family closer, or something completely different that enhanced the process.

  On the third day, he insisted on going outside, and they walked around the small yard together as a family.

  “Mikael said we still need to paint the house, but that can be next spring if we don’t want to do it yet,” Kit said when they stopped to examine at the house from the edge of the yard.