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Pride looked nothing like the girl from his memories. They met in front of the Barnes&Noble, and she walked towards him with that distinctive wariness wolves always have. She sniffed the air a couple of times before stepping within his reach, and ignored the friendly hand he held out for her. Her fur, while bushed out in her winter coat, was prim and clean. The ribbons and bells that she used to adorn herself with were all gone. Instead, she was covered in piercings. A pair of snake bites, a heavy spiked collar, a black and red skull-print jacket.

"You look different without all the pink. It suits you, I think."

"Thank you." said Pride, brushing her scarf out of her face. Her hands were as small as he remembered. There was a thin golden band on her ring finger. Despite the piercings and the heavy collar, she looked as dainty as ever.

"So, how have you been?"

"Alright." said Wires, and he stood there silently, watching her.

"So, did you want to go, or are you just going to look at me forever?"

Wires laughed, and despite his embarrassment, it was a really genuine feeling. The two of them started walking, both delicately picking their way through the sludge.

"How's the boyfriend?"

"The fiancee. And Fang is great. He's getting into his dad's contracting job. He's starting to make a lot of money now. It's actually really nice having all the extra cash. How's Rocksie?"

Rolls-on-Rocks was doing terrible. Wires had seen her two weeks ago, at her house in the Boerum Hill projects. She was living with her boyfriend, a lanky smooth-coated dog with telltale shaved spots on his arm. Rocks clung to him desperately through the whole visit, a faraway look in her eyes. He could see them both twitching, digging their claws into the carpet and couch. He stared Rocks down, looking for any hint of shaved fur on her solid black coat. He was dissappointed when she didn't notice.

"She's alive." said Wires.

"About as good as you can hope for." said Pride, and Wires gently rubbed the side of his face to keep himself from exposing his fangs.

"So you're staying with Stars?"

"Yep."

"Uh, which Stars?"

"A-Pause-While-Chasing-Stars."

"Oh, that's cool. How's her whole...mom thing?"

Pride forced some air through her teeth, making a frustrated tweeting sound. "About as good as you can hope for. Honestly? I hope Stars kills that bitch one day."

Wires laughed.

"It's not funny and I'm not joking." said Pride. "I hope she actually dies."

There was a cold silence, but without the bristling and crackling he'd come to expect with Pika. Pride sailed through the awkwardness with a weird pudgy grace. She didn't speak again until he mentioned her trip to Alaska. She recited in effortless detail the way the snow looked like when it was melting, and the bitter nights and the glowing stars. She described the native wares store and the smell of the wind and how it felt to be able to unabashedly run on all fours for the first time since childhood. She talked about what it felt like to truly be a wolf. To truly be a wild. Her white fur glowed under the streetlights, and the black patch over her eye made her look wily. It was as if time had stopped and the Pride he'd once been saving up a ring for was standing in front of him.

From there, the conversation flowed easily and un-stilted. They talked about the past with a joviality that he was unable to achieve with some of his closest friends. They talked about their failed relationship. Pride took them to World's Bagels with nothing but a seven-year-old memory, and they both ordered coffee milk and everything bagels with cream-cheese. She daintily licked the cream-cheese off of her claws and he offered to help her. She laughed in his face.

The two of them went to a bar afterwards, where Pride screamed her support of the Giants in the middle of the beating crowd. A pair of dogs tried in vain to get her attention until she drunkenly started cursing at them while Wires snickered into his drink. They stumbled out of the bar together with the scent of beer clinging to their whiskers. Pride called them a cab on a little skull-print smartphone, and he broke his promise not to stare at her as they sat together in the back seat. She texted with one hand, the other playing with a silky tuft of fur that grew too long under her left ear.

Her eyes were half-lidded. She stared at the screen with a peaceful expression that made him nostalgic. After Pride's mother kicked her out of the house for the umpteenth time in their second year of high school, the two of them moved in with one of her aunts. The house was small and crowded, but they did have a room that they shared. Pride did her english homework with that same peaceful expression on her face while he played his guitar. They sat just within reach of each other, not speaking for hours. She was lost in her writing and he in his music, both knowing that when they surfaced the other would be right there. They talked about getting a puppy, then later, having a puppy. Silently, he wondered if she and Fang had those kinds of moments.

Pride smiled at her phone, and he remembered vividly the first time they had sex. There had been a long heady lead-up towards it, with both of them too afraid to ask. Wires had been expected to decode the flick of an ear, the twitch of a tail, a too-wide grin. When she finally came to him in a way that he could understand, she was so shy that she wore a pair of oversized boxers during. She was vulnerable and doe-eyed in a way that he hardly ever got to see. That night, they made a memory that could never be taken from either of them. He wondered if she and Fang had a memory like that.

He reached out for her hand, squeezing it tightly. She pulled it back with a snarl.

"Wires, what the fuck?" she growled, and he suddenly realized that she was nowhere near as drunk as he was, for the difference it would have made.

"I just remembered for a second--I mean, I thought--"

"You thought wrong."

They sat in silence until she got to her destination. After she was dropped off, he exchanged awkward small talk with the driver, who politely avoided bringing her up. It took him three tries to get the door's PIN right. His beer sloshed in his stomach as he rode the shaking elevator up. It surprised Wires how relieved he was to be home. His house wasn't spotless, but it was cleaner that usual. Pika was lying on his couch, with his cat settled in comfortably on the blanket over her belly. She was sipping a Budweiser, a tattered copy of Who Moved My Cheese held in front of her face. She sniffed in his direction, then froze.

"She's been in the city and you didn't tell me?" said Pika, and the relief suddenly shriveled up. "Who's she even staying with?"

"Stars."

"Stars-in-Stereo? Mourning Star? Stars-for-the-Blind--"

"A-Pause-While-Chasing-Stars."

"Wow." muttered Pika. Keisha mewed, and crawled under the blanket. "Yea, I suppose not, huh Kiesha? He's just an asshole, isn't he?"

"Look, Pika--"

The kitten made a pitiful noise from under the blanket.

"Mm. See, I knew you'd see things my way."

"She's just stuck." muttered Wires, and pulled the blanket off of the cat."You tried to kill me. How was I supposed to know it was safe for her?"

"No, I didn't. You were right, I don't have it in me."

"You still threatened me for going into your secret clubhouse."

"I threatened you for stealing a piece of my body."

"It's not like I pulled it out."

"Suck my dick." she snarled, lips pulled back over her teeth. The missing canine took some of the potency out of it, but the ferocity in her glare was something he hadn't seen out of Pika before. The beer shifted inside of him.

Pika stood up, glaring directly into his eyes. Her height was an unimpressive five-twoish, but at the moment she seemed almost massive. It startled him to think that just a few days ago he'd forgotten that night in the skate park. He'd let himself forget she was a Royal, that she had the capability to be a threat.

"We can let this go." he said, pinning his ears down. He leaned down, nuzzling the side of Pika's cheek.

"I'm not her." said Pika.

"I know." he said, and he kissed her. Pika did not kiss him back.

That night, Wires dreamed off an all-consuming darkness. The weasel woman perched on a scythe in the middle of it, licking her chops.

"Call for me some time." she whispered into his ear. She repeated this phrase until Wires woke up covered in sweat.