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I didn't sleep that night. One advantage to being my age is having learned some tricks over the years, which includes how to get by with little or no sleep for short periods. I was to meet Johnny later, and I had a lot of thinking to do. I had already violated his trust once, by moving into his mind without his permission. It's possible that I had violated his trust by not telling him that I am kitsune; had he known, he might not have wanted to be with me, for precisely the reasons that I've just mentioned. Naturally, the old adage, "In for a penny, in for a pound" came to mind. It's an expression that is used to cover a multitude of evils, and my issue was that I wasn't sure what I would do with the pound if I spent it. For both our sakes, I knew I had to figure it out.

Late in the afternoon, he called to ask if I was coming over. I confirmed it with him, suggesting dinner. He asked if I'd pick up some things from the deli, we could eat at his place.

"Sure," I said, with practiced nonchalance. "Are you feeling all right?"

"Just don't feel like going out."

"Okay. Anything else I can bring?"

"Nah, I'm good."

I didn't challenge that comment, but I did make a note to bring Trigesic, which was a brand name for acetaminophen at that time. I wasn't sure it would help much, nor that I could get him to take it, but it was worth the try. Arriving at the appointed hour, take-out bags in paw, I knocked and waited to be let in. The chain lock slid, the dead bolt turned, the door opened.

I had prepared myself for the worst, and I got it. His face was spared anything noticeably worse, this time, but he stood slightly stooped in deference to the pummeling that his torso had taken. His dungarees covered his legs, but his bare hindpaws showed at least one claw that had been broken and left to heal as best it could. Bandages covered his forepaws loosely, a haphazard job at best; I wondered if it had been done by someone at the fight arena or if some emergency room jockey had grown tired of patching up street brawlers.

Johnny stood aside, trying to conceal a slight limp from favoring the left leg, and let me in. I had decided to take the less blinded path this time. "Good gods, are you okay?" I asked him. "What happened?"

He shrugged. "Some punk didn't like my face. I set him right."

Placing the bags on the kitchen table, I reached into my pocket for the drug. "Here," I said. "This'll help with the pain, at least a little."

Eyeing first the branded foil packet and then me with some suspicion, the young fox made no other move.

"I keep a few in my pocket, in case of headaches. It's the same stuff a lot of hospitals use. Safer than aspirin. Swallow the powder or dissolve it in water, either way. C'mon, it's not going to help you by staying in the packet."

It took him a few moments before he took hold of the packet as if it might suddenly decide to bite him. He examined it closely, saw no teeth, claws, or evidence of tampering, and decided to risk it. Tearing it open, he upended it into his maw and swallowed the powder with only the slightest grimace. I nodded, took off my jacket, went to hang it up while he emptied out the bags.

Dinner held little conversation. He declined to give me more information about the "punk" he had the fight with. There was "no way" he'd go to the cops to make a report, and he was already starting to "forget about it." He had more appetite than his bruised jaw could suppress, and I had rightly surmised that he'd make use of the chilled six-pack of beer that I'd brought along. For his size, he had a strong tolerance for alcohol; four beers didn't seem to faze him, and he convinced himself that the other two might taste better in the morning. He put them in the refrigerator, then invited me over to the couch.

You know that I'm a compact 165cm; Johnny had about ten centimeters of height on me and, coupled with his tendency toward dominance, he usually would have me sitting in his lap. On that evening, he had me sit next to him, leaning against him. I smelled traces of feline on him, the puma from last night's fight, along with a preponderance of sweat and other traces from the cat's various scents. It wasn't easy to endure the level of stink on him, but this moment of simple cuddling was surprising, and I didn't want to waste it.

After a long time, he spoke softly. "You wanna go to bed?"

"I'll help you bathe first. Can't be easy with your forepaws bandaged."

"You don't gotta."

"I want to."

"Is that a kink with you?"

"Maybe I just love the smell of your fur soap."

He grumbled, but he gave in. Plastic bags and rubber bands around his forepaws solved the first problem; my using the paw-held shower wand solved a second; my paws being careful on his bruised body solved the third. I again took inventory of his injuries, realizing that most of the damage to the legs was muscle-related, heavy bruising rather than cuts and abrasions. No broken bones, or he would not have been able to walk. I dried him off, made sure that the bandages hadn't gotten wet, and we retired to the bedroom.

Once prone, it didn't take him long to become sluggish. The Trigesic had taken some edge off of his pain; the beers and the food also had their affect. I didn't know when he had slept last, but with all he'd put himself through over the past week, it was no wonder he was exhausted. When his attentions to me began to languish, I told him to relax, let me take over a while. I tended him softly, gently, and his breathing slowed, his erection withered, and he finally fell asleep in spite of himself. Truthfully, I wanted to join him, but that wasn't why I was there.

I left the bed, sat cross-legged on the floor, prepared myself. I didn't wait for him to start dreaming this time. My decision didn't involve looking into his night terrors; this invasion was to be far more direct.

Moving into his mind wasn't difficult; he had let me into himself already, through our lovemaking. What was difficult, emotionally, was that I was there with the purpose of seeking information. More exactly, I was there to pull up a memory as it had happened, not as part of his nightmare.

No functioning mind is an empty place; what we call the Self is always present. Johnny was there with me. What I saw was a young fox, bewildered and uncertain, the Self behind the curtain. We were in a place without time or dimension, a simple emptiness without construct. I had the sense of his being a frightened adolescent, a Johnny before he had purchased his ticket to Hell. He saw me, started, blinked, confused.

"Who are you?" The voice was higher, that of a kit.

"A dream," I whispered softly. "I'm just part of a dream. Where are we, Johnny?"

"In my room."

The space appeared around us, a yowen's room that was trying to grow into adulthood. Posters on the walls included one from A Hard Day's Night and a promotional picture of a Rolling Stones concert. On a dresser, bendable Gumby and Pokey toys stood near a small bowl filled with polished stones, probably from a rock tumbling device. The mirror reflected neither of us. The bed lay unmade; door and curtains were closed, leaving the room in a comfortable dimness. It's said that you can't change the lighting in your dreams. This wasn't a dream, and there was no need to change it. I looked at the kit, smiling softly at him.

"It's nice."

"Thanks." He shifted nervously on his hindpaws. "You're a dream?"

"Part of one. I'm here to look at something. May I do that?"

"I guess so, sure."

I was only being polite; the fox was far too young to know what he was consenting to. "I'm going to move outside. You'll be okay here, won't you?"

"My room," he said quietly.

"Yes, it is. It's a lovely room. Thank you, Johnny."

Moving to the door, I found that I couldn't open it. Hardly surprising; it was his construct, and it was designed to keep him safe inside it. I passed through the closed door easily enough, finding the liminal kaleidoscope of thoughts, images, raw information that is the unconscious mind keeping itself entertained. In recent years -- recent to our time, not the one I'm talking about here -- science has hypothesized that dreams are the mind's way of staying active during sleep; without dreams, even the ones we don't remember, the mind begins to splinter and become unstable. It's why those who are REM-deprived exhibit signs of paranoia and experience hallucinations. The mind is always active, as those of us who have experienced such direct contact can attest.

Finding a specific memory isn't like asking an internet search engine for information. In my own mind, I held memories from the night terrors that I had observed a few nights ago. The unscientific description of what I was doing was akin to making myself attract the thread of memory that I was looking for, hoping that could (for lack of a better phrase) magnetize myself to the memory. It was easier to find than I'd hoped, perhaps because it was part of Johnny's recent dream. I watched it unfold from the beginning, through Johnny's eyes, through his senses and emotions.

The leopard's name was Hayden, a few years older than Johnny, a good 15cm taller, broader in the shoulders and chest, a few ranks higher. The fox was still green, largely untried, and Hayden had taken an interest in him that turned out to be more than merely professional. They had managed to reveal themselves to each other, finally beginning a furtive, cautious, utterly clandestine affair a few months prior to this. Any moments they could steal, anywhere at all, including this hut that they had cleared not half an hour before. The cat had opened up his button-down shirt, his dungarees puddled around his ankles, with Johnny all but starkers, his pants discarded at his side, his A-frame shirt pulled up to his armpits. I could feel it, as if I were in his body, experiencing what he did -- the sight of the leopard's intensely grimacing face and the spots covering his hypnotically rippling musculature, the sounds of his urgent grunting, the scent of him, of the hut, of the jungle.

It wasn't just Johnny's physical sensations that I shared; I could sense his emotions as well. Basic randiness was part of it, the raw sensations of the big cat being inside him, the rough pleasure of sexuality that youth still experiences so readily, that it craves so regularly. In addition, I felt that brotherhood-of-soldiers emotion, along with the living-on-the-edge feelings of being in enemy territory and surviving to tell the tale. There was more, though, something that the young fox called "love," as best he understood it. It wasn't quite the vision of leaving the army with Hayden, figuring out how to live and love and be together stateside, but it was close. He would have followed that leopard anywhere, especially for moments like this one.

Hayden pulled Johnny's hindpaws up to his chest, increasing his thrusting, getting closer. The fox grew closer as well, wiggling his toes into the leopard's thick chest fur. Breath quick, muscles straining, movements urgent. Johnny's forepaws grabbed the upper edges of the leopard's shirt, pulling him down into a wild, frenzied kiss, open maws, tongues searching and seeking, both of them nearing that inevitable, desperate, ecstatic moment...

Johnny tipped over first, by a matter of perhaps two seconds, Hayden finishing with a single, powerful thrust, deep into the fox's entrails, before several things happened at once. A huge, unforgiving sound rang in the fox's ears before a level of deafness set in. Hayden's eyes shot wide, uncomprehending. I felt a huge rush of blood in the muzzle, the taste of warm copper, the sharp stench of explosives, of burning wood, of burning fur. The slow realization that Hayden was held in place only by Johnny's paws and by grotesque final spasms inside the fox's madly gripping tailhole; another realization that the black night had been set ablaze, that fire was eating the hut around him, that he had a split second to decide if he still wanted to stay alive.

A flurry of movement in a surreal world. Johnny had been protected physically from the blast by Hayden's body, which had fallen away from him and now lay, eviscerated, on the dirt floor of the hut. The fox grabbed at his pants, jumped through a small window of flame surrounding the door, instinctively performing a tuck and roll when he landed, hearing the rattle of machine gun fire dimly through ears damaged by the concussive force of the explosion. Mindless survival instinct pushed him through dense undergrowth, unable to tell if he might be running right into another ambush. He spat blood repeatedly, only some of it his own. Panic, horror, loss, rage, a push to survive, some small part of him wondering why he should bother...

I backed out of the memory quickly, but not out of Johnny's mind. I sensed my body trying to control its breathing and its level of panic. I wanted to get back to myself, but there was one more thing I had to do. Calming down as best I could, I willed myself to return to the young fox's room, quietly, so as not to disturb or frighten him. He sat on the bed, looking at some sort of comic book; the pictures and dialog were unspecific, merely a representation, as is the way of memories, or perhaps dreams. The dreams of children, of the past, of innocence.

He noticed me, gave me an insecure smile. "Hi," he said softly.

"Hello, Johnny."

"Am I dreaming?"

"Probably."

"Are you someone I know? You're a fox. Are we related?"

"I'd be proud to think so."

He seemed to chew on that a little. "Dreams are weird."

"Yes, they are." I smiled at him. "Dreams can tell us things."

"Like what?"

"Like things we're trying to find answers for. Sometimes, dreams help us find answers to questions we have when we're awake."

"You mean, things like, why I'm in trouble all the time?"

"What makes you think that, Johnny?"

"My sire thinks so. Can't do anything right. Just stupid, probably."

"I don't think you're stupid."

"You don't know me."

"I'm a dream," I whispered. "Your dreams already know you. They're part of you."

The kit looked at me, wide-eyed, innocent, hopeful. "You know me?"

"Yes." In for a penny... "And I love you."

The bed made room for me to sit down, not too close to the kit, but not far away. He still looked at me, eyes not having seen anything that I had just witnessed, what I had been told about the adult Johnny's life experiences, what I had seen on my sojourn into Johnny's night terrors. He knew nothing of more than 500 blood-soaked revenges.

"What does that mean?"

"What does what mean?"

"You said, 'I love you.' What does that mean?"

Pushing past the stone that rolled against my heart, I tried to offer an explanation that this young kit might understand. "It means that I care about what happens to you. It means that I want to help you learn, and grow, and become who you really are. It means a lot of things, but those will do for a start."

"Become who I really am. How do I do that?"

"Do you see that candle on your dresser?"

He looked in that direction, finding a white candle, already partly used, the wick black, drips of wax down its sides and onto the ceramic holder beneath it. I made particular note of its appearance. The fox kit looked back at me.

"Use it like a beacon. You'll be doing a lot of thinking about who you are, and it can feel confusing. Here in your room, when you feel a little too confused, light that candle. There are matches for you to use."

Once more, he looked at the dresser, seeing a box of kitchen matches near the candle, then back to me.

"It will help focus your thoughts and, if you want, you can use it to call for me. If you want help, I'll help you."

"By lighting a candle?"

"It'll work. I promise."

He seemed both doubtful and hopeful, like a yowen too old to believe in Santa, too young to give up the idea that he might get gifts out of it somehow. "What will it look like?" he asked me. "I mean, you know, how do I know... who I am? That sounds so weird."

"You'll know when you start feeling stronger. You'll start liking yourself more, and trusting yourself, and being good to yourself." I smiled at him. "You're right: It's weird. But you pick up clues from things. You like your comics?"

He saw the one on his bed, and a small pile of them on the table next to it. "Yeah," he said. "I like the stories. I like how the good guys win, cuz they have all these special powers and stuff."

"You imagine yourself like that? Fighting the bad guys?"

"Yeah, you know, helping people, keeping the bad guys from hurting them."

"People get hurt a lot, don't they?"

"Yeah." The expression on his face darkened. "Yeah."

"That's not right, is it?" I ventured.

"No. It's not."

"Then maybe that's part of who you are. Not wanting to hurt people."

He nodded slowly. "Yeah. I don't want to hurt people. I mean, why do people want to hurt people? That's just... mean."

It was a yowen's definition, the simplistic views of youth, but it was a yowen I was dealing with, a yowen who had yet to learn and didn't have anyone to teach him. "That's a good point, Johnny. That sounds like something to hold on to. Something that helps you know who you are."

"Thank you," he said. In a moment of perception, the kit said, "You can't stay, can you?"

"Dreams come and go," I said truthfully. "Remember the candle. I won't be far away."

He looked sad, small, returning his attention to the comic book.

I backed out of the memory, out of Johnny's mind, into my own body again. I breathed, shivered a little, brought me back to myself. There in the darkness of the bedroom, I sat on the floor for an hour, weeping long, silent tears.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Leaving was out of the question; I had to ascertain, as best I could, that Johnny hadn't been adversely affected by my meddling. As tired as I was, I didn't dare let myself fall asleep; I would need a significant quantity of deep sleep to restore myself. Instead, I used another trick, a relaxation technique that provided a light doze without losing awareness of my environment. I wanted to be sure that I would "wake" about the same time that Johnny did. He was out for a good ten hours before he began to rouse himself. I had crawled back into the bed just in time to cuddle up to him, to be where he expected me to be. He apologized for "passing out" on me, his bandaged forepaws touching me as best they could, picking up where we'd left off the night before. To that extent, at least, he was back to his usual self.

Over the next several days, I scoured the city looking for a very specific item. Once found, I arranged to meet him at his apartment again, bringing dinner and a gift: a ceramic candle holder with a white candle, along with a box of kitchen matches. Our "romantic dinner" of Chinese take-away made him smile more naturally than before, now that his muzzle had had a chance to heal. Sometime later, when the wax had dripped onto the ceramic holder, he looked at the flame with greater interest and a touch of apprehension. I blew out the flame when we'd finished the meal, and he watched the smoke rising, the tip of the wick glowing briefly, and then he gazed at the candle itself for a long moment. I rose, suggesting that we adjourn to the couch; he looked at me, blinked, then smiled again as he joined me for a cuddle.

I'd love to tell you that we sat and talked; that he opened himself, told me the truth about his fighting; that he asked for my help; that he went with me to his therapist the next day, got back on track with his meds and his sessions, and began the slow, painful road to recovery; that he lived perhaps not happily ever after, but he lived and did as well as any of us might do in the so-called Real World. Instead, he began to distance himself from me, slowly. He would disappear from time to time, but only for a day or so, and he would return in reasonably good condition. I resisted trying to tag him, in case I needed to locate him when he was on these mysterious junkets, because I'd already interfered magically with him, more than once, and I didn't want to risk compounding the crime. Perhaps that was a mistake.

On one of the evenings when he had gone missing, and despite its effect upon me, I forced myself to go back to the fighting arena. I used a third glamour just in case my companion of that first night was there again. I kept to myself, watching only enough to see what pairing was up next, then turning my attention anywhere but the ring. My behavior made one old bear solicit me. I was tempted to take his money then deceive him into thinking he'd gotten what he'd asked for, but magic is best not squandered idly. Instead, I told him I wouldn't arrest him if he didn't tell anyone I was undercover. That kept him at bay long enough for me to realize that Johnny wasn't there that night. I wondered if he had found some other venue, one less debauched, perhaps one with enough rules that neither he nor his opponents would became too severely injured. It wouldn't have been as satisfying for him, but he could sustain it better, and more frequently.

On yet another of the occasions that Johnny had disappeared, I found Lily at home. I explained to her what I could without betraying Johnny's trust even further. The mouse had heard of bare-knuckles boxing; I didn't enlighten her as to the ferocity and sexual violence of the fox's first chosen venue. She wasn't surprised to hear about the boxing, which I found interesting. It was part of her opinion that Johnny had gotten, as she put it, "a raw deal."

"They draft yowens, even those not out of high school yet, and train them to kill," she spat angrily. "It becomes all they know. They get back home, some on drugs, all of them broken and left entirely on their own. No help, no respect..."

I let her vent a bit. I sensed more than knew where her anger came from; mentally, I banked on the suffering of a sibling. Her vehemence on the subject let me know that, despite her small size, she was not a female to be trifled with. I had the feeling that, should society fall apart and predation become necessary (gods forbid), she would be a survivor and not a meal.

Even so, I cautioned her to treat Johnny with great deference, perhaps even some distance until he could present himself with greater stability. She didn't like the idea, so I suggested instead that, if he seemed to get upset for any reason, become as submissive as possible -- no sudden moves, no verbal challenges, a lot of agreeing with what he said, as far as she could.

"I really don't think that he would hurt you intentionally, but he does have outbursts that he has difficulty containing. After World War I, it was called 'shell shock'."

She nodded sagely. "I've heard that term. It was different for..."

Her silence told me that my guess was likely correct. She gathered herself and finished.

"I'll be careful. Thank you, Abram. If there's anything you need..."

Smiling softly, I leaned in to kiss her forehead. "Thank you, too, Lily. I won't forget. It would be good to share our fur again."

That was the last time I saw her.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Abram stopped his story, and I found myself with my jaw hanging open. "Oh, gods above and below, tell me he didn't..."

"Truthfully, Tristan, I don't know exactly what happened."

The tea service lay cold and still on the table. Neither of us had moved in some time. The weight of these memories was shared, yet they continued to weigh immensely heavy.

"Several days after I saw Lily, I found that she simply wasn't around anymore. Not long after that, Johnny wasn't around anymore either. The last time I saw him, his behavior was erratic, his speech random, his entire demeanor haunted, crazed."

"Could you reach inside him again, try to see what was wrong?"

He shook his head, his tails giving a nervous flick. "There are some forms of madness that take over so completely, everything is shut out. Even magical touches are repelled; when tried, they only make things worse." He sighed heavily. "There are, after all, limits."

I wanted to reach out to him, but I knew that the story wasn't finished. The waiting was painful; in a fairly short time, he took pity on me.

"After I'd not heard from him for a few days, I went over to the apartment. The place appeared to have been torn apart. After having seen all the fastidious neatness of the place for so long, it was genuinely shocking. Furniture overturned, lamps broken, cabinets emptied onto the floor, refrigerator door hanging open, contents pulled out and scattered. His clothes were gone, as was a duffle bag I'd seen in that closet before. There was no question that he was gone.

"I got the super and showed him the place. He came to the conclusion that someone had come in, possibly looking for drugs. 'These vets,' he said, 'some of 'em come back hooked. I didn't think Johnny was one of those, but maybe somebody else did.' He was surprised by my observation that the fox seemed to have left, but he shrugged it off philosophically. I offered to help clean up. 'Leave it,' he told me, 'that's what insurance is for.' He phoned the cops to make a report of the break-in; they would take a look at the place to make a record that he could file with his insurer. As I had one last look around, I saw the candle holder and candle, smashed to pieces. There were no CSI shows in those days, but some things are reasonably easy to suss out. It seemed to me that, since it was largely beneath other detritus, it might have been the first thing that he smashed. That image stayed with me."

"And you found nothing else?"

"Nothing. No idea what happened to him or to Lily. I have my nightmares about it, and I can only hope and pray that I'm wrong. I filed missing persons reports on both of them -- concerned friend sort of thing -- but that, too, came up empty; police weren't staffed enough to pursue it for long. I thought about investigating myself, or hiring a private investigator. Truth is, I wasn't sure that I wanted to find out. It's been a few decades now, and I can't imagine how to look for them."

He turned his eyes me. It's seems strange to say he loved me so much that he let himself hurt me so deeply with the look in his eye. Even more than when he had shown his tails to me, he was trusting to the point of letting me see into his soul. The pain that I saw there was immense. It begged forgiveness that no one could offer. It would never end.

"That is why, Tristan, I never use my deep magic on someone without their express permission. When I feel tempted, I think of a shattered ceramic candle holder, and I stop myself."

I shifted myself to take him into my arms. The slender dancer cuddled up against me, fur to fur, expressing one more shudder before finally lying still against me. I pet his back slowly, tenderly, trying not to cry. This was his demon, and I could not wrest it out of him. No one could. I thought perhaps it was part of the reason that he was able to free me of my demon. He had carried this fearsome monster for perhaps four decades. Now, I carried it with him.

Kissing him atop his head, I accepted that weight with all my heart.