Parallels

Chapter Twenty-Six: Ice Ice Foxy

Finally, time to get back to the streets... gods, I was starting to get a little stir-crazy in there. Well, a little more stir-crazy, anyways... maybe I should be a chef, or maybe Mister Marlboro should be, because he's a master at stirring that damn pot...

We're free to leave from the hospital whenever we want, yet all of us know that we're just being forced into another trap, we just have no idea where that trap is...

When I saw the guards coming to the doors, I thought they were going to.... well, not leave us alive... thankfully, no, that wasn't the case, they were just coming to let us know what we already knew, that we were free to go, thank god, I thought we were gonna die... either that or be marched to the nearest street corner and told to get to work.

"So what the hell are we gonna do now?" Luka asks, his tail wrapped around my mother's legs. "They'd better not hurt us, they'd better not, they'd better not, they'd better not..."

"They won't, I'll fucking kill them first. Those assholes aren't touching my family," I spit out, my teeth clenched, paws shaking. I'm wound up and I hate it, but I'm not lying, any asshole touches my family... ow, damn it, I pinched myself...

"And you'd be executed for that, Theodore..."

"Yeah, Luka, I know that, I'm just stressed, that's all. What's today? Is it April already?"

"Yeah, April first, April Fools Day, Theo... why do you ask?"

"Just wondering how much of my life I've wasted trying to get up on my paws instead of running away. Let's see here, sixteen years, three months, and five days..."

"Awfully exact..."

"Yeah, it is, Isaac, and it's also exactly how old I am.... ya get the picture? I've spent most of my life believing I was a piece of shit, and I can't get that out of my head, bro," I say, hugging my tail, which I haven't done in forever. It's comforting, though...

"Yeah, I had the same thing happen to me, Theo, okay, and it only got worse when I came out to my mom... she turned on me quicker than I thought was even possible. Life sucks, but it's the life we have, and well, we can't choose them. Sometimes, I used to wonder what my life would have been like if I was human, but then I wouldn't be me... if we were anything but what we are, who would we be? Not us, that's for sure, but we are us... get what I'm getting at, hmm? Come on, we're free to go whenever we get out of here, let's go back to Barre..."

...and not back to Matlistor...

"Um," Mama says, turning to us, worry wrinkling the fur on her forehead, "you might want to look out the window and reconsider that..."

"What're you talking about, Mom?" Tony asks, and Mama smiles softly, so softly that I barely even catch that it's there before it flickers away again, like the light leaving a Sturgman's eyes.

"Those, Tony, those," Mama says, pointing out the window and up at the sky, where I can see bright red and orange streaks, streams of light burning their way through the clouds and I figure everything's going to go to shit soon and that everyone (but us, hopefully) is going to be panicking. "Shit must be going down... are those missiles?"

"Not missiles, that was a lie, there never were any, those are Terran ships... all those cities that you saw get bombed, Theo, those weren't bombs, those cities are fine, they're all still on the map, those were smokescreens for all of us..."

Well, if I thought that my world had been shaken up enough already...

"So you're telling me that-"

"There are thousands of animals like you and me and all of us on our way here to Earth, a planet that thinks that half of its population has been bombed off of the map and that it's all their fault and there's a war ongoing? Uh, yeah..."