FSE

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formerly SoFurry search engine

Well here it is after a loooong time of collecting dust on my desktop. Personally not feeling too good about this one, but I'll leave judgements up to you lot!

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"Man, it got cold fast." Melissa said as she hung on our arms.

We were slowly making our way home from the bar, not so much walking as stumbling as the three of us each tried to ensure we went in a straight line. Considering the three of us each had a different opinion on what 'straight' was given how much we had drank, it was probably an impossible task, but we tried nonetheless.

"That's a southern Ontario winter for you." Garret laughed as we walked along the lamp lit pathway down by the waterfront.

All I could manage was a good-hearted chuckle. The night had been fun beyond belief, even taking into account the number of times my ass got grabbed, and even the guy that tried to give me head in the bathroom.

I just couldn't stop thinking about Jason.

All I could really do was hope the fox was relaxing and not worrying too much about dinner tomorrow. Well, later today considering it was now nearly two-thirty in the morning.

We laughed and joked as we proceeded down the path, the sounds of drunken revelry in the streets gradually becoming quieter and quieter as we walked into the more seldom travelled areas of the waterfront.

"H-hey, uh, Mel?" Garret suddenly sputtered, trying to force his brain to work in harmony with the alcohol and his tongue.

"That's my name." The wolfess chuckled as she tugged on the panther's neck. "What's up?"

"Well, we've kinda been hanging out for a while..." He started. The sheer amount of nervous energy he was putting out made us all stop in our tracks. "I-I was just wondering if... If maybe you'd, I don't know, want to grab dinner? Just you and me?"

Garret was a mentor, a sage even, to me, but right now, he resembled a young child trying to tell a girl she looked pretty. Melissa and I exchanged knowing glances, then proceeded to divert all of our willpower to stop ourselves from laughing out loud.

I still don't know how the hell we succeeded.

"I mean if you don't think that would be overstepping any boundaries!" The panther quickly added. He was squeezing his fingers and looking at the ground now, which only made the scene a little less funny.

Only a little though.

Thankfully, Melissa wasn't feeling quite as cruel as she normally did after a night of drinking. She stepped forward and took hold of Garret's quivering hands, giving him a kiss on the end of his muzzle.

I didn't hear what she said to him next, because I was busy continuing my walk down the lamp-lit path. I knew she'd take Garret up on his offer. She had told me as much while my roommate had been getting us fresh drinks at one point in the night.

As heartless as it might have seemed now, we had known about Garret's crush on her for quite some time, but we were both interested to see just how long the outwardly confident and collected panther would take to make a move.

Seeing two people getting together romantically, however, wasn't exactly something I needed to see at that point. It was a little painful reminder of past attempts at having the same thing, and an even more recent failed attempt that I wasn't entirely sure I'd be able to salvage.

I was about five minutes from our apartment, already preparing myself to sleep alone with my headphones in to drown out the inevitable noises of Garret and Melissa coupling when I noticed a huddled form sitting on one of the park benches.

Of course I felt a little wary; for all I knew the person on the bench was lying in wait to mug anyone who had the decency to try and help out.

"Hey, you okay?" I asked, keeping my distance at first.

When I didn't hear a response or see so much as a twitch of the individual's white ears I got a little less worried about getting mugged, and a lot more worried about the possibility of stumbling onto someone who had been injured. Perhaps passed out?

"You okay there buddy?" I asked again, taking a few steps closer so I was only a couple feet away from the guy. I only assumed it was male because of the style of his leather coat, jeans, and dress shoes.

Come to think of it, the jacket looked familiar...

I sat down on the bench next to the huddled body, noticing with a growing sense of dread the large white tail curled up underneath him.

"J-Jason?" I asked, unable to keep the quiver out of my voice. The name at least earned a twitch from one of the white ears.

"Jason, what the hell are you doing out here? It's freezing!" Without thinking, I wrapped an arm around the fox and pulled him against me, rubbing my hands up and down his back in an attempt to warm him up.

When the fox didn't respond, I began to panic. He wasn't dead, but who knew how long he had been sitting out in these frigid temperatures?

I stood up quickly and slid an arm under his knees while wrapping the other around his back and hoisted him off of the bench. As I started jogging the last few hundred yards to my apartment, I looked down, noticing with dismay the frozen patches of fur under Jason's eyes.

He'd clearly been crying, but what could have been so horrible as to make him ignore his own health like this?

Luckily for me, the fox was light enough that I wasn't panting too hard by the time I brought him to the front door of the apartment. With great care, I lowered Jason to his feet, unwilling to let him go even as he began to stir while I took out my keys and unlocked the door.

Just as I pushed the door open, Jason seemed to wake up.

"C-Chris?" His voice was weak and quiet.

"Shh, don't talk," I said as I picked him up again and carried him through the threshold. "We need to get you inside and warmed up."

I set him down only long enough to get both of our boots off before walking him past the archway leading into the living room. His steps were uncoordinated, and he stumbled twice before we even got into the kitchen where I sat him down at the small square table along the wall.

"How long were you out there?" I asked as I unzipped his coat and pulled it off of him, unceremoniously dropping it on the floor behind his chair.

"I d-don't k-know." Came his reply as he leaned forward to bury his muzzle in his arms on the table.

"Too long, obviously." I said as I moved over to the pantry next to our fridge. It didn't take me long to find the tin of hot chocolate mix. "What the hell were you doing out there Jason?"

After I set the tin down on the counter next to the sink, I reached into the corner cupboard and pulled out our kettle, quickly filling it with water and plugging it into the wall. I doled out a healthy amount of mix into a mug and moved back to the fox, waiting for the water to boil.

I knelt next to him and placed a hand on his leg, earning only a tremble and the sound of sniffling.

"Jason, talk to me." I pleaded. Sure I had only met him once, but after talking with him through text for a week, he felt like an actual friend. It hurt to see someone I had connected with so easily in such a bad state.

A few minutes of silence passed as his trembling slowed to a stop, a sign that he had at least warmed up enough for me to feel safe giving him a hot drink. After hearing friends in the police force talk about people with hypothermia dying once they were brought into a heated vehicle or house too quickly for their bodies to cope, I didn't want to take any risks.

The kettle clicked and as I moved away to fill Jason's mug, I heard the front door open, followed immediately by the laughing voices of Melissa and Garret.

"Hey Chris! Who's boots are these?" I heard Melissa call from the front hall.

I looked over to Jason just in time to see the fox curl up into a tighter ball and begin trembling again. Clearly attention from anyone wouldn't be taken well, so I moved out to the hall just in time to block the wolf from entering the kitchen.

"Mel, Garret, sorry to do this, but, would you mind just avoiding the kitchen for a while?" I asked in a whisper. My tone was enough to catch the two off guard.

"What's going on?" Garret asked, looking concerned. It hurt me to see his smiling face wane the way it did.

"Don't worry about it. I'm taking care of a friend at the moment." I said, wanting to keep Jason's name out of the equation at least until the morning when everyone was sober. "He hasn't had the best night."

Melissa, having not known about my relationship with the fox, just tapped the side of her muzzle with her finger.

"Oh, I gotchya." She said with a smile. "We'll leave you two to it then."

With that, she grabbed Garret's hand and pulled him upstairs, the panther only able to give me a reassuring nod as they disappeared. I sighed and turned around to resume my task of pouring Jason his mug of hot chocolate.

"I-I'm s-sorry." The fox's voice was shaking, and as I turned around with his drink in hand, I saw him staring blankly at the tabletop before him. The fur below his eyes was wet again with fresh tears.

I walked over to him and set the mug down before him, pulling over one of the other chairs so I could sit next to the fox.

"Why are you sorry?" I asked, honestly confused at the statement.

It took Jason a minute of shuddering breaths before he responded.

"I r-ruined your night. I d-didn't mean to." He said quietly. "I have a h-habit of ruining things."

"Hey, you didn't ruin my night." I tried to reassure him with a chuckle as I started to rub his back. "You scared the hell out of me, but you didn't ruin anything. I wouldn't mind if you told me _why_you were sitting on that bench out in the cold."

Another few minutes of silence passed before Jason spoke again.

"I just... I don't know." The fox seemed to be struggling to work out what to say, and I couldn't really blame him. He didn't appear to be physically hurt at least, and for that I was thankful.

"I... I guess I just got sick of that 'alone in a crowded room' feeling." He continued. "I've got no right to feel this wretched about it, I know others have it worse, but... I just can't shake it."

Depression. From the sounds of things, Jason had been suffering with it for a while.

"How long have you felt like this?" I asked, trying to be careful not to pry too much into the why of the situation.

"Since the end of the summer before last." The fox took another gulp of hot chocolate as I bit my lip. Two years was a long time to deal with something like this.

"You haven't talked to anyone about it?" I kept my voice quiet and soft, not wanting to make it sound like I was judging him.

"No." Jason said with a sigh. "Friends usually come to me with their issues, and I try to help. What would they think of me if I couldn't deal with my problems on my own?"

"Just because you help people with their problems doesn't mean you can't accept help with your own." I was the same way after Chelsea had ripped my heart out, but thankfully Garret had been there to literally corner me and force me to unload all my heartache on him afterwards.

"I'm... I'm not really good at talking about this kind of thing." The fox continued to stare at his mug, and it wasn't hard for me to imagine he'd rather be alone.

"Well it's good to talk about it." I offered as I sat back in my chair, attempting to be as cool and collected as Garret had been when we had our talk so long ago. "If you don't talk about it, how will we figure out how to make things better?"

"If you're going to attempt some kind of motivational speech, I can tell you now it won't work." Jason said flatly. "Hearing other people's stories, speeches about overcoming your personal barriers... None of it's ever helped me."

Well, at least he seemed to be feeling well enough to take the offensive like that.

"Alright," I said, a little unsure of myself. "I won't share my stories. I won't try to tell you that you have to believe in yourself or anything like that, but can you at least tell me what's wrong?"

It was another five agonizing minutes of absolute silence as we sat there at the kitchen table. Jason's mug was at least empty, but the fox seemed no nearer to opening up to me than when I started.

"Can... Can I just go home?"

I won't lie; I had been starting to doze off, so when he spoke I gave a little involuntary jump at the sound.

"I'd rather you not." I said as I stood up and brought his mug over to the sink. "Jason, you left yourself out on a bench in the freezing cold. Can you blame me for not wanting to let you go just yet?"

All I got was a sad sigh in response.

"Come on. Time for us to get some sleep." I placed a hand on his shoulder, thankful to see him nod his head in agreement. "I'll drive you home tomorrow, but I hope we're still on for dinner?"

As the fox stood I noticed that he was blushing and the corners of his mouth were turned up ever so slightly in a very faint smile. His tail even seemed to be wagging, even if only a little. The sight warmed my heart as I led him up the stairs, though even I blushed when we heard the sounds coming from Garret's room.

He didn't seem to dislike the idea of sharing my bed again, and he didn't hesitate after we stepped into my room to pull off all his clothes aside from a tight black pair of boxer-briefs. I admired him for a few seconds before shaking my head of the inappropriate thoughts that immediately began to form. Tonight would be hands off.

I walked over to my computer desk to set up my iPod on its speaker dock and put on some relaxing jazz music just loud enough to drown out the distant gasps of Garret and Melissa.

"Not too loud?" I turned to ask Jason, finding him standing quietly by the bed. He shook his head slightly. "You can climb in you know."

I couldn't supress a chuckle as the fox climbed under the covers and settled as close to the edge of the bed as he could get. I dropped my pants and took off my shirt, confident in my ability to refrain from fondling the poor canine given his current state as I climbed into my side of the bed.

I pulled the covers over myself and sighed as my brain thanked me for the rest it was about to receive. I reached over to click off the bedside lamp next to me before stretching my arms behind my head.

Just before my eyes had a chance to close, Jason turned over and pressed against my side. The fox pressed his face against my chest and gave a shuddering sigh, to which my only reply was wrapping my left arm around him and turning onto my side to hug him tightly against me.

I figured any words would ruin the moment, so I simply laid there with Jason, holding his quivering form against me, noticing with a sinking heart that my chest fur was getting dampened by tears.

My spirits were lifted a few moments later by two words spoken in a voice just barely above a whisper:

"T-thank you."

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So? How was it? Let me know! Constructively of course. Saying "It was shit" will earn you a high-five to the face with a brick as such a comment is maddeningly unhelpful.

Hope you enjoyed!