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_ -- The First Moon rose and, borne upon its wind, came our first breath of order. The universe wanted us to treasure it and to follow its measure. There will no longer be recklessness between kith and kin. There will no longer be scorch marks upon our Earth. No, now, with our order the world shall steadily flow to greater Essences. There will be love among ourselves and among our plant brethren. _

_Ezekiel III smiled at his crowd. His words hung in the air like curtains ready to fall. His palms were outstretched. Across the pads of his paws blue engravings stood out in the night, captured luminescence like the various fireflies bobbing in and out of the green-dark distance. Ezekiel's long, pitch-black mane radiated with the reflection of his blue markings. _

-- My children, my brothers, my sisters, my wives, my future society, we must continue to follow the light that my grandfather foresaw on the night of the First Moon. We must continue to shed this light onto others. We must rise above our ancestors, my lions. We must roar with the vigour of our four-legged kin! We must fight with ferocity! But, we must also hold the wisdom we have been blessed with. We must retain names and teachings. ROAR!

The crowd watching him, the Ezekiels in his name, tossed their muzzles open and roared into the night. The sound gnarled and fierce. Ezekiel III raised his paws high in the air, commanding the sound, commanding the night....

Sam's phone buzzed, waking him crudely from his sleep. He pried his eyes open and glanced at it.

Father.

"Oh."

He pawed at it, holding it before him. His ringtone, a classic swing upbeat tinkle, rang out, into his face. The light scoured his features. He distantly heard Jaecob huffing in his sleep, through the walls. Sam yawned, wondering what on earth his father wanted from him at three in the morning. He answered, regardless.

"Hello?"

"Hello, Samson."

Sam inadvertently smiled. "Isn't it against the Ezekiel way to use phones."

"You left the number. This is upon your paws, my son." Samson would have recoiled at the words, but his father's voice was warm. "And any communication is better than none. That is also Our way."

Your way, he could have said. Sam yawned instead. "How is mother?"

"Upset."

"At me?"

"At the whole world, you know how she is. She takes all burdens and places them solely upon her own haunches. Tedious, it may seem, but who else is to do it?"

"Formal as ever."

To this his father had no response. Sam felt he crossed a line. His good humoured smile began to slip away. He sat up, swinging his legs off the bed. His shorts caught in his fur, turning it into a ruffled mess. He groomed at it with his free paw.

"Are you living alone?" His father asked. What he meant was: are you living with Dean?

"No. I have a roommate, his name is Jaecob. He's in the other room."

A grunt of approval. "Who is he?"

"A hyena."

To this, his father chuckled.

"I do not wish to spend more of your time. I only wished to remind you that Regal Feast is coming up very soon. If you wish to come home you may, but you will have to reside just outside. You are welcome to all our meals, however, and anything else you may need."

"Thank you. I'll consider it."

"Considering can be dangerous."

"I know."

"Good bye. I'll let your mother know you are well."

The phone call ended like that. Sam barely heard his father's phone flip shut. Well, it wasn't his phone per se. It was the phone the Ezekiel community used as a whole. Technology in abundance was about as welcomed as gluttony. Samson knew his father would place it back on its wooden podium, wash his face, his muzzle, his greying-gold mane, and offer a prayer of apology to the skies.

His father had a sense of humour and an even greater sense of Pride. The only reason he hadn't let his son completely slip off the map when he left the community. Sam hadn't exactly left on good terms. At least he had work to take his mind off his life.

. . .

The first couple shifts he spent doing exactly what Jaecob said he would. He ran files from room to room, he corrected spelling mistakes, he edited papers for grammatical errors for a couple hours, and he did any other meagre tasks that were asked of him. Secretaries often asked him to carry trays of coffee or tea back and forth. Having spilled once down his front he learned better than to rush. A small burn on his chest was not worth the surprised awe of the horse-faced lead scientist.

Sam had to don a blue shirt and khaki slacks. The affect was to blend into the walls, to be the silent messenger. It was just fine for him.

As for Erik, he seemed to have completely dismissed Sam. He walked around the halls when he wasn't in his office, his head tilted up and his ears cupping invisible air. He muttered to himself and made twisted gesticulations with his paws. Maybe once or twice he gave Sam an acknowledging smile, but otherwise, he too slipped into the wallpaper. Another decoration. Another way for the building to function smoothly.

On his last shift of the week, Sam managed to get his break on time. He sat in the lounge room, sipping aromatic tea and flipping through a magazine. A clock ticked away in the corner, flicking off seconds. His tail twitched, looped through the back of the chair where a specially-designed hole was. Usually he spent his breaks alone, save for a weary wanderer or two.

The door creaked open, proving today to be one of those days. Sam looked up and donned a perfect, unfaltering smiling. "Hello."

"Hello." It was another intern, a bear. Her fur was deep black, sticking out in tufts where her shirt held on too tight to the muscles that visibly bulged. She gave Sam a small smile and sat down.

"You new?"

She shrugged. "I've worked as a nurse before. But ambition didn't like me staying there. Here I am, back at college."

Sam nodded slowly. She had taken out her phone and was quickly composing a message. Her hair was nothing more than the fur on her scalp and body, the way most females in Sam's life had been. Her gender would have been ambiguous save for her voice, sweet and melodic and deep. It reminded him of black berries, for some reason.

"I'm Sam." He held out his paw. She took it and gave it a firm shake.

"Olive."

"Cute name."

She gave no visible reaction. "Thank you. Bears tend to have food-oriented names."

"Lions have..." he paused, "Well, depends on where you're from. Never mind," he laughed awkwardly. Olive only gave him a look that said she understood, there was no need to further prove himself. She leaned back on her couch, crossing her rather large legs. Her sneakered feet bounced as she fidgeted.

Sam felt a strong urge to continue conversation. He couldn't exactly tell where to go from there, and ended up slumping back down in the croaking fake-leather couch. He picked up his tea and took another sip. It had gone cold.

"Um."

"Um?" She perked up. Her small brown eyes pinned on him.

"So, what do you do around here?"

She shrugged. Her eyes went back to her phone and clicked away another email. "I mostly run tests back and forth. I do the blood work. I do the little scientific tasks they ask of me. I don't run coffee, lest I spill it."

"How'd you, I thought you hadn't been here that long. I haven't seen you before today."

"Just because you haven't seen me doesn't mean I wasn't here. That was actually the day I started." She grinned. "And, besides, I'm not mocking you. We all make mistakes. Better to spill a few artificial drinks than hundreds of dollars of tubed blood down your front."

"Did you?"

She nodded.

"Oh, that really... Must have been awful, really. I'm sorry."

"I was eighteen. No one expected much of me, but they didn't expect that. Had to work a whole lot to save my butt from expulsion." She laughed, a sweet, short sound. Sam felt he was taking to her instantly. Maybe he'd have a friend - a real one, not like Erik - here for once.

Sam stood up, looking at the clock. "Could I get you anything?"

"I'm not open to courting."

"Neither am I."

"What do you have against bears?"

"No--I..." But he realised she was joking. Her flicking ears and broad grin gave her away. He managed a small, pathetic chuckle and turned away, waving good-bye over his shoulder.

All while walking straight into Erik.

Erik yelped, standing back, his fur on edge. "I've been looking for you Samson!"

"No, really, I'm Sam."

"No, come, come!" He gestured with his paw. "I need you now in my office."

"I thought you'd give me at least a week before you threw me into the fire, bud."

"Patience."

"I have plenty of that."

Erik shook his head and traipsed straight towards his office.

"Anyway, I never asked - what exactly does your experiment consist of?"

Erik laughed. "I would have told you, but at the mere mention of 'death' you tuck your tail and cower like a kitten." Erik shut the door behind him. "Sit."

"Am I going to die now?"

Erik laughed again, but this time it was forced and choppy. "No, I'm having a brain wave. Now, sit." He commanded, giving the plastic chair a firm shake. Sam obliged, fear prickling in his gut. Erik was in one of his crazes. Rationality had completely disappeared from his head.

"Oh." Sam managed to muster out.

Erik sat in front of him, straddling the back of the chair with his lithe arms folded over it, his gaze wicked and sharp, his pupils slits. He watched Sam who fidgeted nervously with his many khaki pockets. His claws scratched at the rough fabric.

"Ok, I need you to tell me how crazy I sound."

Sam refrained from comment.

"What's worse - afraid that someone you love is gone forever or afraid that they're dead?"

Dean appeared in his mind, owl eyes and soft voice elite wind rushing through reeds. Sam stuffed it and instead thought of his father.

"Isn't that the same thing, being gone forever and being dead? Aren't those two synonyms?"

Erik shook his head and waved a paw. "No, I mean. What's worse - being in love with someone and then having them go away. Find someone else. Settle down there, love someone else, never say a word to you edgewise. To vanish but to be alive. Or for them to suffer death?"

Sam thought for a moment. "Well..." he cleared his throat, presenting his argument as pragmatically as he could. "If I really, really loved this person death would be worse. They'd be gone from the world. If I loved them, I'd want them to be happy. And therefore if they're with someone else and happy, that's good. That's the better option by far."

"Benevolent and morally outstanding as always, Sammy. Ezekiel taught you well." He flashed a grin. His ears twitched and rustled, signifying a change in his mood. "Anyway, back to our discussion. So, being afraid of death is one thing. Being afraid of another's is another deal completely. So what if you know for a fact, an absolute certainly denser than a black hole, that they will not be gone. They will exist." He gestured to the air around his head. "Their spirits detach from their bodies and go walking. They walk on their own journey. One the living does not know about and never will. For once they do, they no longer will be among the living but rather among the gone."

"You're reciting."

"I'm reciting because I think Ezekiel was right."

"You grew up listening to him, his father, and his father before him. Of course you think he's right. It's all you knew for most of your life."

"Until I renounced my faith."

"But it's engrained into your very being. You resort to it even if you rationalised yourself out of that hole. You still slip back in." Sam made a vague falling gesture with his paws, "When you get stressed you think of Ezekiel's parable about Mother Mercy-Kindness of the Plains. When you feel sorrow for the loss of a life you think back to what he said about it."

"Which was?"

"That they'll walk..."

-- ...with us and near us. Their spirits shiver near our bodies whenever we grow cold. They are the particles in the air we breath and they are the liquid in the water we drink. They float through the air and they descend upon us like falling dust. They are here where we tread. They have their path. Do not fear for lack of life, my lion cubs, for they will always be in our plains and in the wind that rushes through them. They have their path...

_Ezekiel III nodded at the crowd, their pelts shimmering in the falling rain. The sound of falling water nearly drowned out his voice. Their heads were bowed. Before them a small cub lay, twisted in the brambles with his neck opened a sore, dried-blood smile. His paws were spread outwards. The beginnings of a mane cropped up on his head. The rain fell flat on him, spreading in drops like coins. _

"Poor kid..." Sam whispered softly at the memory. He was there, everyone of them were there. He stood near the back, clutching his mothers leg. The secret of his own diversion from the group held deep in his belly like a mortal coil. He said nothing, watching the funeral, hearing Ezekiel's words.

"When was that?" Erik asked, curiosity plain on his face. He never hid emotions. It went against the creed they were taught.

"It was a month or so before you came. A group of heretics, Ezekiel called them, well they were really some crazed 'activists' who forgot what their goal was and instead attacked us. Slit Noah's throat and left him there. They screamed at us for hours. I was terrified. But things cleared up, a bit. You showed up and Ezekiel held you in his arms and took you to his tent and spoke to you for a long long time. We heard the rumbling of his voice but not the words."

Erik nodded. "I remember that. Sometimes I think back and feel a bit of guilt for when I left. Just a bit before you. I called them out and married research."

The memories stung and dug into Sam's flesh. He tried to shake them off. He sighed weakly, but turned towards Erik, moving hard back to their intended topic.

"Ok, can you be more specific with what exactly you found that proves our dead-among-us theory?"

"Stop interrupting me and maybe I will." Before Sam could protest, Erik gave him a severe look and continued on. "Say I put you to sleep..." He smiled. Sam's heart sunk.

. . .

"Dear lord did he do a number on you!"

It was Olive. She stood at the front of the office, a raggedy blue bag hanging off of one of her shoulders. She looked at Sam with deep concern. Sam looked back at her, his face clearly in a visage of turmoil. His shoulder sagged and his paws trembled at his sides. He had a rucksack with him which he had pulled out of his locker. Every detail of him was open to Olive, ready to be read.

"I guess." Sam walked towards the door, where Olive stood. She scrutinised him.

"What'd he do? Did he give you the numbing agent?"

"No. Worse."

"What worse?"

"He brought up the past." Sam growled. The sound was low. "I told him to not FUCKING bring up the FUCKING PAST!" The words tore free from him, ripping his emotions out and laying them out: naked, exposed. He stood, panting. His eyes were wide and tears trembled at the corners. Olive approached him. She didn't touch him, but only gave him a look of honey-warmth.

"You can quit. I can help you find another place to work."

"I--sorry for exploding like that." He tried to regain his composure but failed and ended up slumping against a wall. Embarrassment flooded through his system. He was grateful Mindy was on break and only Olive was there to witness his seemingly unfounded words. "He just brought back people and faces from a time I'd like to forget. He said if I did this for him I'd never have to worry. But you know what? He doesn't mean that. Every damn time he says 'you' he means himself. He doesn't feel things like other people do, not anymore. He's scorched his sense of feeling out. And he thinks everyone else has to. 'Die for me' he says, as if I can let my life go after building it up... Maybe once I would have agreed, just to see, but he holds on to that moment like it's still there and..."

He stopped, realising how much he had rambled. The insides of his ears flushed.

Olive nodded, watching the words tumble out.

"I've worked with him a short while. I bring some of his tests in. Creepy what stuff that cat does and actually gets away with. You'd think some of the other nurses would call him out on it. I asked Jasmine, you know, the cute little lizard gal?" Sam nodded, not sure what cute meant in this context, "Well, she said that they let him because he'd do something worse if they didn't. Makes no sense if you ask me." She laughed.

Sam found himself almost at peace again.

Almost.

"I think I'll work here still, I'll just avoid Erik." Sam said.

"We can have the manager look into it."

"No--!" Olive looked taken aback by his sudden exclamation, and probably the panic in his voice. "I mean, no. It's my problem. Not anyone else's. I don't want anyone unnecessarily poking their nose into my life."

"Alright. But you have friends here. Understanding friends." She added. Giving Sam an impression that she knew more than he had told her. He smiled, nonetheless.

"Thank you."

She shrugged.

"A job's a job. Gotta stick together." She pushed the doors open and gestured for Sam to go first. He obliged.

. . .

"You set me up on a blind date?" Sam asked, bewildered.

Jaecob grinned. "You'll love it."

"No..." But maybe it was the distraction he needed. In a fit of what Sam later believed to be insanity, he agreed.