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Long day today - though recently, every day had been a long day. Lusan sighed and tossed his backpack down against the foot of the wall as soon as his bedroom door closed behind him, long snow leopard tail flicking out of the way just in time. Tonight would be one of his few weekdays where he didn't have some kind of practice after school, be it for soccer, cross-country, or swimming, and he looked forward to this break every week.

And then, every week, he had no idea what he wanted to do with this time. His bed squeaked beneath his weight once he sat down on the edge, and right after he dropped his muzzle in his paws to brush his fur back - it always got messed up throughout the course of the day - he raised it right back up and looked down beside himself, where that tail twitched and flicked over the edge.

Oh, what are you complaining about, mattress? he thought, and looked up from there to the full-length mirror against the wall. Many times before he'd thought about moving that back into the closet, where he wouldn't have to see it every morning, every afternoon, every night, every midnight when something or another woke him up and kept him from getting back to sleep for another hour and a half. There's nothing here. I could stack three of my textbooks, and that'd be more weight than I have on my entire body.

The leopard remained there for a moment longer before he stood back up and padded his way over to that mirror. First went the thin hoodie he wore, torn and scuffed and stained in a few places for multiple different reasons, always a part of his wardrobe regardless of the heat outside; arms that felt, to him, a bit too thin held the balled-up fabric for a moment before he tossed it to the side. He looked himself up and down again, first pulling in a breath and then letting it back out a moment later; then, he started with his shirt, and stopped halfway.

There was the outline of that V pointing down beneath the waist of his jeans to his groin, the pants sagging down along his hipbones regardless of the belt he wore. He'd never once been able to find a standard belt that could go small enough for him, and besides, the cloth-draw style fit the rest of his daily outfit more anyway. _Blades,_one of his exes used to call those hipbones; shirt still half-drawn up his belly with one paw, Lusan reached the other down and touched at the protruding plate beneath skin and fur. If he tapped it with his claw it made a sound like a tightly-drawn drum.

"We gotta get some weight on you, son," Coach Hammond told him at basically every practice. Lusan pushed the waist of his jeans down a little bit further, following the clear line of that hip beside the valley leading in towards his groin, and the little puff of thicker pubic fur right at the edge. "I keep you on halfback because you're the best runner this team's got, but if you had a bit more meat on that skeleton-" that was where the big bear poked him in the chest; it still ached a little bit. "-then you'd have the inertia, too! The power! I could move you on to-"

That same pattern extended up above the cat's waist, too. Light touch, squeeze, feel along his belly; definitely abs there, definitely noticeable, but only because there was no meat above them to hide what was already there. Another inch lifted from his shirt showed the lower line of a rib... and then another above that... and another above that, furrowed hills and valleys beneath soft snow, beneath what should ideally be a smooth plain.

Ideally? I hate all of this.

Lusan's eyes flicked up and caught themselves in the mirror. A while back he'd fiddled things around so that when the light switch in his room was flicked, all it did was turn on the little forty-watt lamp over on his nightstand; he liked the dimness, the darkness. The wan light imparted a faint yellow glimmer to those eyes - he blinked, and still it was there. A small lick of the lips, a twitch of the whiskers, a swallow, another sigh. When he released the hem of his shirt it drifted easily back down his body, though caught along his other hip and remained there. Thing was, though, it wasn't just the weight that he hated.

I guess it's somewhere to start. I hope it works. I really, really do.

~ ~ ~

Nobody really noticed, anyway. Not after a week, which was understandable; not after two, not after a month. Not after spring break and all of the practices during it. Lusan even spent some extra time with Hammond's aid when he could, a tall, well-built timberwolf who looked like more of a football player than soccer. He was pretty good, too: it seemed that he took a particular interest in Lusan and his circumstances, and often pulled him off to the side during the individual drills and practices and talked him through different techniques and methods.

Once or twice, he sat down and had Lusan show him where he wanted to try to build his muscle and put on weight, and he'd give advice based on that. The first time the wolf's paws touched him, right along the curve of his ribs at the side of his chest, without any shirt between his fur and the canid's fingerpads... a little shiver, sharp and surprising yet sweet, rippled back through the snow leopard's body.

The aid noticed, too. Even though Lusan tried his best to avoid eye contact right there, since that touch also made his pants just a bit tighter, he still caught a perk of triangular ears at the edge of his vision, and then looked down a moment later to see the wolf's amber-orange eyes looking up at him, lips lightly pursed. He kept his fingers in place, then settled the rest of his palm against Lusan's chest, and gave him a little bit of a squeeze. "Right here?"

"Yeah. I - I don't like how I can see my ribs."

Low rumble of contemplation, another flick of the ears. The wolf leaned in closer; Lusan could feel his hot breath, tickling through the short fur of his belly. "It's definitely less noticeable than it used to be. Keep going, Lou. You're looking good."

Over the course of the week, Lusan started staying behind longer and later into the evening, until the Friday before classes would start back up. The rest of the team had gone home, Hammond was back in his office getting things set up for the upcoming summer season, and his aid and Lusan were further back in the locker rooms talking about diet, exercises, plans, the usual.

And then the wolf touched him again. And Lusan felt another shiver and another throb, stronger than that first time. Their eyes met again; the timberwolf rose from where he knelt in front of Lusan, sitting on the bench; the cat looked up though remained where he sat, then swallowed, then licked his lips, then-

-then caught a light whiff of what could only be the canid's musk. That was what made him look down again, or rather straight forward towards the wolf's waistline, and the quite noticeable heft beneath the fabric of his shorts. Next thing he knew, Lusan had his muzzle pressed sideways right against that bulge, jaw hanging open and pulling in deep, slow breaths through his nose; then those shorts were in a heap at the timberwolf's ankles; then he felt that heat and weight against his muzzle, breathed that scent uninterrupted, tasted it within a few seconds; then there were strong arms, strong paws lifting up beneath his, turning him around, lifting his tail. Hot wet pressure of a tongue beneath the base, chin working against the back of his sack with each lick, followed by the sharper pressure of the tapered tip of a canine cock taking the place of that tongue, sinking in, stretching him open.

Then a few minutes later he felt himself pushed down further across the bench, gym shorts around his knees and upper lip stinking of rich canid musk, with eight and a half thick red-fleshed inches pistoning beneath his tail and a sack probably twice as hefty as his own swinging forward against his, again and again. And he loved it, he thought.

"I told you I could teach you how to be more of a man," that low voice growled in his ear, the spaces between his sentences punctuated by his own panting. Lusan remembered glancing to the side and seeing that long black-furred muzzle, and the sharp amber eyes glittering at him. Sure enough, that would be a look that he'd revisit in his own thoughts and fantasies for a while to come. "Better player. Bigger, stronger, faster. All it takes is - some time spent with someone who's already there."

The force behind the aid's thrusts actually knocked one of the old bolts at the foot of the bench loose, and rattled it with each pound forward into the smaller cat. That same paw that had first touched his chest earlier in the week now clamped around his muzzle, keeping in the panting and gasping and heavy moans of pleasure and desire and outright need. It felt so damn nice to be wanted and appreciated by someone, and during those twenty or so minutes, Lusan didn't even bother worrying about why this thirty-something-year-old college graduate would want to bury his fist-sized knot beneath a high school sophomore boy's tail. He didn't complain.

At least, not until the following Monday when he realized that he had a pretty noticeable scab forming beneath the fur of his shoulder, in the clear shape of a bite mark. It wasn't until Lusan looked at himself in the mirror the day after that he realized something, idly fingering that healing wound while he let his mind wander, towel wrapped around his waist from his shower a few minutes earlier. Suddenly he stopped, looked himself in the eyes again, winced at the little shock of pain from putting pressure on the bite.

Watching what he ate had been the biggest part, since all of his sports activities took care of most of the 'exercise' part of gaining weight. The leopard's shoulders had noticeably broadened, his stomach had come out a bit, his legs had tightened somewhat. He ran a thumb beneath the edge of the towel, lifted it, let it drop.

Thick white fur, smooth-skinned shaft hanging limp away from his body, weighty sack beneath. He ran his fingers down beneath and gave himself a small squeeze, though no pleasure came out of the touch. More of a man, the wolf had said to him. Hearing those words had tweaked at... _something_inside Lusan back then, but he'd just figured it was just the discomfort from taking a dick as wide around as his wrist. Now that he had the chance to think about it, though, something else definitely felt off.

The next realization that came took its time in getting there, time across weeks, months. Almost every day after school Lusan would come home, and he'd feel entirely drained of energy and desire to do his homework or work out or even move, some nights. The first thing to go was the cross-country, followed by swimming, and then finally soccer; Coach Hammond kept that timberwolf aid through half of the summer session, and then between practices he inexplicably disappeared, without another word to the leopard.

Lusan still had his friends, and they provided some needed islands of comfort and balance. Nothing really solid or identifiable, but just presence, peace of mind late at night when his thoughts and his body kept him awake. Since freshman year he'd started taking meds to help with some of it, but sometimes the thoughts came through anyway - and they always, always came after he stood and looked himself over in the mirror.

Two months into junior year, that mirror still sat against the wall across from his bed. He'd learned very well how his own appearance made him feel, and at least twice a day he resolved to put it back into the closet, but no matter what, every day he came home from school to find it still there waiting for him, and soon enough his clothes sat by his footpaws while he looked, while he observed, wholly unsatisfied but unsure what to do about it and confident that he was unable to make any sort of change.

The snow leopard touched and poked and felt at himself, along those hips, the slight development of squish above them, at his smooth belly, his flat chest, his shoulder. His other shoulder. His chin, his jaw, his throat... the tough bulge of his Adam's apple. His fingers remained there for a moment, feeling and pressing at it, digging his claw against the stiff whatever it was until it hurt enough for him to draw back.

That and the... the mass_between his legs, the weight of what he had there. That weight, the soft squishiness, the _feeling of bulk between his thighs; those didn't feel quite right. As though there was something wrong with them, as though he could improve on it, make it better. Lusan started to cross his arms in front of him, then stopped when his eyes caught the sight of his smooth chest in the mirror - a moment later, he let his arms fall slowly back down to his sides.

Something definitely wasn't right. For what had to have been the fifth time this week, the snow leopard felt like crying, and couldn't put any reason to why. It hadn't been particularly unusual for him to feel that way leading up to that locker room encounter last semester, too, but now it felt stronger, fresher, more immediate. The more he thought about it, the heavier everything felt.

That had just escaped his notice when he'd kept himself busy with other things - putting on weight, spring practices, that damn timberwolf. But just like with any other things that bugged at the snow leopard, once it made its way into his awareness, it burrowed in and rooted itself tight in his head, and showed itself again and again regardless of what he'd been doing until then. It had gotten worse throughout this past week.

Inescapable, really. Usually sleeping helped the cat feel better, but the next morning he awoke with the same feeling of dread, still present, still hanging over his head and weighing down along his shoulders. And so it was for the next day, and the day after that. For a while the weeks just kind of floated by without Lusan's awareness of anything happening. It all felt the same, all equally bleh.

"I know exactly what you mean," one of his friends sent him in a text one night. He'd climbed into bed some four hours prior, and still hadn't been able to find sleep; these past several months, she'd been the anchor holding him down at moments precisely like these. "Are you free this weekend hun? I have some time off."

_ _

For the first time in weeks, Lusan realized he had something to actively look forward to. Even so, though, from Wednesday to Friday he still had a bit of trouble enjoying that feeling unless he intentionally and deliberated forced himself to; it wasn't really until he actually stood outside the door of the elevator leading up to her dorm level that the relief made itself easier to grasp. He hadn't seen Geneva in... months, probably, though they spoke quite often.

With the ding of the elevator arriving and the hiss of the doors opening, his tail stopped flicking around by his ankles, his ears perked, he looked forward - and then up a bit, at the slightly-taller and slim Abyssinian cat grinning up at him. She'd managed to wiggle her way into the modelling business these past few years, and that had a tendency to show itself in her movements and the air she carried about her, even if she wore something casual and simple such as, say, a cotton bathrobe that fell down along one of her shoulders when she leaned in to hug the leopard.

"Lusan..." she purred, and then settled back onto her feet. She looked as though she'd either just woken up, or had just finished getting ready for one of her shows. It could be hard to tell sometimes. "How are you holding up, dear?"

"I'm okay. I-"

Yellow-gold eyes glittered at him as Geneva held an arm across the elevator door for him, a few seconds later. "You know I don't like it when you lie to me."

Quiet whirr of the elevator starting to pull itself up, that sudden jerk making the snow leopard dizzy all over again. He sniffed, licked his lips, looked up at the little dome light set back into the roof next to the hatch. "Can we wait 'til we get inside?"

Small place, modestly furnished, rearranged since the last time he'd been here. Still, though, everything here carried the faint breath of the Abyssinian's scent, light and comforting to Lusan beneath the also-present haze of a few different perfumes - he remembered buying her one for her birthday this past year, a tiny amount of rich, glittery blue liquid in a crystal bottle, bearing a black anchor on the label and nothing else. Prohibitively expensive for a high school kid with no job, but Geneva was more than worth the price. He thought he caught a glimpse of it among her other selections, walking by the open door of the bathroom.

Suddenly a memory flashed into his head of being bent over that toilet with her beside him as his body refused the full bottle of wine that his mind thought he wanted. Actually, thinking about it, it seemed that those two were always at odds with one another, mind and body. A sharp sigh left his muzzle as soon as he plopped down in that big, over-soft armchair that Geneva had had since he first came over here, now pushed up near the curtained window at the other end of the room.

"Oh, oh..." The Abyssinian suddenly darted around the corner towards the small kitchen area, soon to be followed by sounds of cupboards opening and closing. "Mom sent me a... a nice bottle... from Laurie's estate in Sonoma. Pinot grigio. That's your favorite, right?"

Like many of their other visits and conversations, tonight started with Lusan sitting back in that chair looking up at the ceiling as if he were back in the therapist's office, one arm draped across that of the chair and the other holding the wine glass on his belly, fingers tapping against the surface. He'd say something, and Geneva would think about it for a moment and give her response, and then he'd consider it and say something else... she sat so silently that Lusan could almost forget she was there at all, if not for that comfort and confidence that she gave to him just by being close.

It was Geneva who had lent one of those rather large ears for his first time opening up about the troubles plaguing him throughout high school so far and their almost rhythmic growth and fade. Being a couple years older than him, she'd gone through her own experiences as well, and had given him advice before on a few different things: not really 'dealing with' those feelings so much as just learning how to handle them; relationship advice, between the girlfriend he had his freshman year, then his first boyfriend the semester after, and then the whole fiasco with the timberwolf in the locker room just a few months ago, and then what followed, and...

...and somewhat unlike their other times hanging out, tonight that wine-sipping and quiet conversation turned into the two of them both squeezing into that armchair, arms around one another, the bottle clutched between them. This in turn became Lusan chuckling into the short, warm fur of the Abyssinian's shoulder, which turned to soft sobbing, and then back to chuckling when she made a stupid joke about something that he couldn't remember a few minutes later.

Actually, there were multiple minutes missing there. One moment the two were sitting there in her dorm, and then they were out along the streets outside the dorm complex, brick sidewalks and carefully-trimmed decorative trees of the area lending it the college-town vibe that Lusan always thought of as being so cute, and a lovely contrast to what he had back at his own home.

Not to mention the bottle passed back and forth between them, becoming steadily lighter the further the pair made it down the street. The pinot grigio they'd left back at the dorm - why bother bringing an empty bottle with them? - and Geneva had revealed she'd already been saving this one for Lusan's next visit as well.

Her presence made him feel confident, made him feel good. One arm remained always around her shoulders slightly higher than his own, both for the closeness and because he felt as though neither of them would be able to support their own weight otherwise. As things would turn out, Geneva hadn't had a particularly great few weeks either, regardless of her modelling and her scholarship and her hookups, both business and personal.

That was something else they spoke about, if it could really be called 'speaking'. Maybe you need a job, Geneva said, and bumped her short muzzle down against the leopard's collarbone. Staying busy usually helps my own state of mind, and besides, having that income is really nice, too.

That was the gist of what she'd tried to say, anyway. Lusan understood about that much, but then had to take a moment to lean against one of those decorative trees rising up from a designated space between the cement of the sidewalk and the curb, forehead pressed against the smooth bark and world spinning around him. Geneva spent the first few seconds laughing quietly to herself beside him, and then she was there leaning against the tree with him, moaning some vile string of curses beneath her breath.

Then, again, there seemed to be several minutes missing out of the night. Lusan could _vaguely_recall hugging the Abyssinian close to him and trying to put together a coherent thanks, and then she returned the sentiment and said she'd see about calling up a ride to bring them back to her dorm for the night... and then he remembered sliding his paws down beneath the belt of a rather large spiral-horned ram, his own arousal curling and swirling with the dulled sensations of intoxication and making everything seem a bit foggy. He could remember asking - or more demanding - that the ram take those pants off, though in reality it probably came out as more a jumble of sounds than words; then he could recall getting dragged off into an alley between buildings, a strong, warm hand around the back of his neck guiding his movements. Then that hand tightened, and he felt the rough surface of bricks against his shoulders and the back of his head, and he looked up to see ram's sneering face.

Then his own muzzle got yanked down against a fat sheath and heavy sack, weight and meat obscuring his vision for a moment, hot scent burning his nose on the way down. He remembered bringing his paws up to touch and fondle, to feel that heft and what he was about to get himself into. Only a little bit of that, though, before the bricks were again right up against the back of his head, with that same thick cock pounding into the back of his throat and keeping him pinned there, rhythmically cutting off his breathing and making his entire body lurch and tense with the gagging. Actually, with all of that on top of the dizziness and swirling nausea from the probably-too-much wine he'd downed in the past two hours, it was amazing that he didn't empty his stomach right then and there.

Perhaps he'd let his mind wander. On the subject of emptying, a few more thrusts and then this big ram emptied his balls all across Lusan's tongue and lips and muzzle, hot spicy seed that burned his throat as he swallowed it. Before he could get himself cleaned up, too, there was suddenly another pair of paws at his hips yanking him up and turning him around, pressing the side of his face against those rough bricks, yanking his pants down his legs. A thick, sticky glob of spit, a pair of fingers with what felt like semi-retractable claws rubbing that up underneath his tail, and then the familiar pressure of a cock sinking up into him, tapered tip and little soft barbs along the shaft near the base.

Lusan never got a look at his second partner that night. From there he could remember little rumbles and growls and other noises of encouragement from the ram, who leaned against the wall beside him with his phone up and light flicked on. There was the heat of teeth on his neck, the heavy, rough pounding of a top who assumed his bottom was prepared (and had enough lube, for that matter), the slight sting of these last two turning out not entirely true... and then the lingering ache in his rump once they'd gone, and Lusan had come back to himself.

No idea where Geneva had gone off to, but he thought he could make his way back there from here. It took a few tries to stand up from where he'd crumpled down, pants still halfway down his thighs and stretched rump leaking thick cum into a puddle beneath him. The faint tingling in his abdomen and sticky heat streaked across his lower belly let him know that he'd finished, too, even if he didn't explicitly remember when that had happened.

Oh well. Getting to Geneva's and hanging out with her had been the wave climbing, up into the air with Lusan at its peak. Just like any other wave, though, this one had to crest and crash at some point. The snow leopard pulled himself up to his feet with one paw against the rough bricks for support, then worked his pants back up his legs and started to make his way back to the street.

When he got back to the dorm, she'd left the door propped barely open and apparently had fallen asleep waiting for him to get back, phone clutched in one paw. Whether they'd spoken about splitting up beforehand, he also couldn't remember, but - he certainly wasn't about to drive home tonight, so the snow leopard made his way over to the other couch and dropped off just about as soon as his head hit the pillow.

As he already knew though somehow did not expect, the crest and peak turned out to be the shortest part of the wave, followed by the slow crawl, the return, the drag back. The following morning Geneva brought him to breakfast and then sent him home with another two bottles of wine and her usual good wishes and quiet reassurances, which _did_help him for a while. Things quickly became tough, though, especially once he'd gotten back to his own silent bedroom, with the same bed in the same place where he'd teetered right on the edge of breaking down so many times before, and the mirror across the room.

Those two bottles of wine didn't last the rest of the weekend, naturally. Sunday night the leopard actually found the confidence, or maybe lack thereof, to drag the mirror away into his closet and push it back behind the dresser, knowing that it'd give him hell and a half to bring it back out. All of those feelings swirling through him, the distaste and hatred that he still couldn't quite pin down, the frustration, the anger, made it feel right. Made him feel good, almost.

For two days. Then he realized that the mirror was not the source of his feelings and his problems with himself. Sometimes during class he'd float off into his own thoughts, and come back to find himself circling endlessly around one part of him in particular, a vulture waiting for an imminent death. He'd managed to put on weight, sure, but where that weight went on felt wrong. The wider shoulders, the flatter waist, the... mass between his legs again. Sometimes the obsessing and worrying got bad enough that he had to dismiss himself from class and retreat to the... well, not the bathrooms. He'd go up, think about it, then feel as if he were trespassing as soon as his paw pressed against the door.

An inkling of something had started stirring in the back of his mind and in his heart, too quiet for him to really hear or notice as of yet, but it was there. Sometimes he could almost grasp onto it late at night, when he had nothing to busy his mind other than those same thoughts he'd spent all day trying to avoid. Over those coming weeks he and Geneva continued speaking, and he brought up those feelings every now and again for her to give her advice on. It only partially worked; it felt as though she were missing some key point of the whole thing, as if Lusan hadn't quite figured it all out himself, either. Not through the rest of the year, not over that summer when he got a job as a minor tech assistant at the local library, not for the first month or so of his senior year.

Near the end of that time he'd been assigned to work on a project with another good friend of his, a small, sweet mouse named Sydney, a little computer science assignment that would function both as a final grade for the period and as something to put on resumes and college applications. As long as it came out worthy of those, at least: Lusan and Sydney had put it off until two days before, and got together the night before to finally hack out some good progress on it.

The mouse's bedroom was this nice, spacious place, with a poofy couch pushed up in one corner, a shag rug, posters and flags covering the walls, and a pair of surprisingly powerful speakers set up beside her own little TV. For the first hour so they'd had on a Youtube playlist with visualizers, but that ended up too distracting so they switched the screen off, and now only listened to the quiet music at it played.

Naturally, though, it became harder and harder to focus anyway as the night went on, between the growing strain of sleeplessness and the pressure of the approaching deadline, not at all helped by how Sydney had brought up the coffee maker from downstairs and plugged it into the wall between them.

Sometimes when he hit a bugged section of code and just couldn't figure it out, the best thing to do turned out: just don't worry about it. Lusan squinted at his screen and turned his mug around in his paws, fingerpads grazing over the little enameled cat faces all along the outside. "Hey Syd?"

The mouse's soft, flat ears flicked above where she sat, half-swallowed by the large beanbag against the wall. Her little fingers continued _tp-tp-tp_ing across the keyboard of her laptop. "Mm?"

"Have you ever felt... I don't know. Wrong?"

"I'd like to say 'I'm always right' but that's not a good thing to say. Also not true. I'm often wrong. Why?"

"No, no, not like that. Like..." The snow leopard licked his lips and thought about it for a moment, eyes tracing down over the color-coded text along his screen. This was one of the first sections he'd finished, so of course it wouldn't play well with the rest of the project. The scent of the coffee twirled up, curled around his nose, tickled at his senses, gave him a little bit of a rolling shiver when he swallowed. "...I don't know. Like there's something about yourself that's not right, and nothing you can do can fix it."

"Oh. I mean, I haven't, but I don't think that's particularly uncommon. Especially for anxiety, depression... all that fun bullshit." Her eyes remained over her code for a moment longer, then flicked up past her screen towards the leopard across from her. She lowered her voice a little bit. "Speaking of, how are you doing with that? Holding up okay?"

"I'm still here."

The coffee pot bubbled quietly in brewing up a new batch and the music paused as it shifted to the next track in the list. Lusan and Sydney watched each other for a moment.

"I mean, I've been worse, you know? Been better. Been worse. Been lots better. It can just get really hard sometimes, though, you know?"

"And that's hard in itself because you can't pin down what it is that's making you feel that way." Sydney looked back down to her laptop. "I remember you mentioning that before."

Lusan folded his paws in his lap. He hadn't realized it before, but, God, his heart was pounding. "Well. I've been thinking."

Tp-tp-tp...

"It's all... body stuff, I think." He caught a perk of those big round ears across the room. "I've noticed that much. And, like, I've been looking around online, and talking to Geneva, and thinking that... well. I don't know. Maybe I'm just blowing it all out of proportion and I just need to get back to working out."

"What?"

Inhale, exhale. Lusan crossed his arms and leaned back against the pillow behind him, looking up at the popcorn-texture ceiling and the stretched shadows of the ceiling fan blades spinning around and around. "Well, for this past year or so I've been... kind of thinking that, maybe, y'know... maybe I'm..." It felt like coming out all over again. The weight of the words on his tongue, the feeling of them in his head, as if it wasn't quite right even though he'd spent countless nights thinking about it and working it out. "Maybe I'm trans. But then I realize, well, no, it's more likely that that's not true and I'm just not satisfied with, like - you know? There's people out there that really have dysphoria, and I'm over here just-"

Sydney pressed her paws down against the sides of her laptop with enough force that the resulting sound made Lusan jump and look at her. Then, in a surprisingly forceful voice for such a small mouse, she said-

"You're trans."

-and then, tp-tp-tp, got right back to work on her part. That wasn't the end of the conversation, of course; that idea, that thought, the _conviction_with which Sydney had stated it, bounced around inside of the snow leopard's head, ringing a sweet-sounding bell every time. The two let that hang in the air between them as the last words shared, until Lusan glanced down into the bottom of his mug, looked back up at his code, flipped through the length of it, and said "I think I'm done", followed by Sydney doing the exact same.

The sun had just started to shine its yellow-orange glow through the slatted blinds.

Following a much-needed nap after the pair compiled their work and turned in their project, then panicked about whether they'd actually turned it in, and then double-checked to make sure, Lusan woke up with his heart beating as it hadn't in what felt like months. There still lingered a bit of the cold shiver of anxiousness and self-doubt, but he felt good. Even better when Sydney brought her things in from the bathroom and sat him down in front of her mirror with her. Usually she liked his input on things like that, with the nail-painting and clothes, but today she took his paws in hers, felt over his fingers, looked up at him, and gave a sweet little smile.

"I think... silver would look good on you. What do you think?"

It seemed as though her eyes sparkled with the light of the sun through the window, then.

"A woman has the right to choose how she looks, doesn't she?"

The conversation between them never really finished. Throughout the next few weeks he kept on going back to Sydney, asking for advice on what to do, how to paint nails, whether he should let his hair grow out, if a certain color of clothing looked good on him. The clouds had started to part, and things didn't feel quite so bad anymore. Soon "Lusan" disappeared from the contact lists of all of his close friends, and "Luci" took his place. And it was a slow change for sure, but one day he woke up, looked at himself in the mirror he'd pulled back out of his closet, and thought:

Well, I'm not there yet. But I've gotten a pretty good start, I think. And for the first time, the snow leopard felt genuinely good about herself.

Naturally it wasn't an absolute_clearing of the waters, though. Sometimes late at night those old thoughts and insecurities would still come back and drive their icy little fingers into her heart, and she'd resume that so-familiar position of being curled up around a pillow with her phone pressed to her ear and Geneva on the other end, or Sydney, or one of the other friends she'd made over the course of the year and further on into the summer. It didn't seem so bad when she had other things to worry about - college applications, plans for the future, internships and jobs, and all the other things she mentally filed under _myriad bullshit.

Maybe she'd expected that figuring out the source of her discontent would make that frustration and sometimes-hopelessness feel less intense. Very quickly Luci learned that that was not the case, however. Not to diminish the impact of all her friends and the people she held close to her, though, and besides, heading off to college might give her more room to explore these new feelings and realizations.

One of the hardest parts came in finding someone that thought of her the same way that she thought of herself. And then out of the blue, so suddenly it took her by surprise, that person was there: another rather large guy, in terms of both shoulder width and in girth of what he had between his legs. It started out slow and easy, talking between classes and doing homework together, then moved on to getting dinner in the evenings, and watching movies together, and then eventually falling asleep on one another's shoulder on the couch in his dorm.

But the longer it went on, Luci felt both better and worse about it. "You're one of the loveliest women I've ever met," the big bull terrier liked to tell her, and every time she heard that statement it made her heart jump both with pleasure and with nervousness. You're not a woman, her mind would tell her, not yet, and you never will be. You know that. He doesn't yet. He'll find out. You're not a woman; you're just lying to yourself, aren't you? The same thoughts that plagued her on those late nights, and shot cold, painful spikes into her chest when she tried to breathe and calmed down, now made her almost dread seeing him.

She felt as though she were keeping a secret from him, as if he had a right to know but she just couldn't get herself to tell him. Then the first night came where she found herself being pulled gently back towards his bedroom, him almost constantly looking back at her and asking if she was okay, wanting to know if she really wanted to do this, offering to drive her home if she wasn't comfortable... and Luci rested her paws on his waist, looked up at him, swallowed, and told him. The exact words escaped her, but it was something along the lines of You might not like what you see. Then he was on his back on the bed, jeans unbuttoned and unzipped, one snow leopard paw reached back to gently stroke his already-hard length - she figured, maybe if she could keep him busy and distracted, he wouldn't notice.

Then her clothing went, too, the bra falling away from her body and releasing the bunched-up tissues, floating down to the mattress like drifting ash. The bull terrier's eyes opened a little bit more, but Luci didn't give him any time to react before she rose up and let her skirt go, too, slim panties unable to contain her own arousal and excitement, despite herself. She'd moved forward so she could grind back against the canine's length, hot and slick and throbbing against her tailhole, further muddling her thoughts and mind as to whether her heart beat out of want or out of shame, and... she felt his paws tighten on her hips, and for a moment she actually almost worried about her safety. The snow leopard squeezed her eyes shut, turned her head, and-

...felt the tension melt out of her with a soft kiss, placed right there against her turned cheek. "I've told you you're a lovely woman," he said, in that gentle low voice of his. He brought his paw up along the small of her back, blunted claws just barely pressing in against her skin in just the way that made her shiver. "And I wouldn't lie to you, hon. You are. Don't let anybody tell you otherwise." Shift of his paws, grip against her rump, spreading her, pushing her back down against him. He started to sink up into her; Luci tightened her arms around his shoulders. "Not even yourself."

After having him on her tongue and in the back of her throat a few times before, she'd already expected him to be fully capable of filling her with this shivering, satisfying warmth, but this was something else. As the snow leopard slowly worked herself in his lap, pushing back down along that slick length and then tugging back up, her rhythm eventually coming even with his own against her. Beneath the pleasure, her eyes fluttered open and caught his, and he flicked his broad tongue over his lips - and smiled again, a soft, sweet thing, deep desire thrumming beneath clear appreciation and affection. Until that point, it was the closest Luci had ever felt to another person.

And just like usual, he reminded her the following morning when her alarm vibrated her awake for her first class of the day: You are a beautiful, lovely woman.

It took time, but eventually that set in. Of all the pillars holding her up, between friends and lovers and partners, probably the most important - and the one she'd been neglecting the most - was herself, unstable and threatening to crumble, held up by all those others. She just needed the time and the opportunity to take a closer look and find out how to make that stronger, and with a cool morning in her second semester, she thought she'd finally figured it out.

The snow leopard clutched her phone in her paws between her legs, worrying for the hundredth time today that her hair looked okay like this. That was a small worry, sure, but... termites were a small thing, too, that often caused a much larger, much harder-to-fix problem. That one worry moved on to another one, about whether she'd filled in the form correctly, and if it was okay that she wrote in 'Lucienne' instead of 'Lusan', and if she shouldn't have gotten here forty minutes early for her appointment, and-

Stop. She closed her eyes, licked her lips, drew in a breath, tasted the smooth sterile air of the waiting room, let it back out slower than she'd taken it. This would be okay. She would come out of this alright.

Across the room near one of the obviously plastic plants, the door leading into the back halls of the facility opened up for a slim cheetah to poke her head through. "Lucienne?"

Her ears perked.

"If you'll come with me, the doctor's ready to see you."

Inhale, exhale. First day of gender therapy. Luci squeezed her paws around the hem of her shirt, then relaxed them and stood up.

"I'm ready."