Roan sat back on his haunches and waited for the lead cougar to settle down. He didn’t know how he was going to explain this to Gordo and the rest of the guys outside, but he figured he’d worry about that later.

The common denominator between these cats, what presumably brought them together, was illness. What he didn’t understand was where they’d found each other, and why they hadn’t torn each other apart.

****

Diego wondered belatedly if he should have brought his EMT jacket along, to give him some implication of authority. Not that it would mean much here, but maybe they’d be more willing to answer his questions.

Or not. The jacket didn’t always work - it depended on the situation and the people involved, and he knew no one at this medical center, which wasn’t a proper hospital anyways, just a research center. He knew they were doing some studies on the virus that caused cat mutations, but he had no idea they’d advanced so far as Human trials. He was glad if Roan and Paris could get in, but what if it was too late for Paris?

Poor Paris. And poor Roan, come to think of it, although he’d never say that to his face. He was nothing if not a prickly, butch bastard. He supposed he had a reason to be that way - several good ones, actually - but still, it was the principal of the thing. He basically dumped him. Okay, it was a mutual thing, clearly it wasn’t going to work, but Roan was the one who laid it out on the table. They were in the living room, both having after work beers, Roan scanning the newspaper while he was playing Halo (playing video games relaxed him), when suddenly Ro just put down the paper, stared at nothing for a moment, then said, “You know what? This isn’t working. Why are we doing this?”

That was a damn good question, and beyond the obvious answer (sex), he had nothing. He was a decent guy, smarter than you ‘d suspect, good looking, good in bed, which is all he pretty much asked from a guy. (Although smart was negotiable.) But Ro could be a bit of a know it all, annoying, and he always interrupted his games, which was a cardinal sin. After a night dealing with bleeding, agitated, and sometimes dying people, all he wanted to do was get out of his own head with a little digital carnage, which was nothing like the real thing and meant absolutely nothing; that was all. Roan had his books and his personal “mysteries” for escape; he had the games. And if Ro couldn’t see that, he had his head up his ass.

So yeah, their split up was inevitable, and they both knew it. But since Ro was the first one to bring it up, he felt he had the right to be bitchy.

As he walked the cold, sterile halls of the center, finding his way to the Kesselman Wing, he wondered if he was also just a bit jealous. Maybe? He couldn’t have a relationship with a guy to save his life. Most of his so called “relationships” were basically one night stands that extended up to a month, and while that had been good with him for a long time, he was getting older, and he realized, to some personal horror, that maybe it would be nice to put up with one guy for a while, as opposed to a series of flakes. And it seemed that flakes were all he ended up with, besides Roan and Ethan. But Ethan wouldn’t give up his wife, and he was just not going to be some closet case’s boy on the side. (And what made it worse was Ethan was a surgeon at Saint Joe’s, so he saw him every now and again on the job. He just pretended he didn’t know him, although every now and then Ethan threw a wounded puppy dog look his way. Jerk.)

Roan and Paris seemed to be really good together; they seemed to be happy too, and they’d been together for what, about three years now? Maybe a bit more. How could you not be jealous? Especially since Paris was an absolute sex bomb, which just made it that much more painful. Roan couldn’t have split up with him and taken up with a dumpy guy with no hair and a small penis who would use him shamelessly? Was that so much to ask?

He found the Kesselman Wing finally, after two false starts, and found a reasonably attractive sister behind a semi-circular walnut finished desk. He told her who he was and who he was here to pick up, and she started to tell him that Mr. Lehane wasn’t out yet when a familiar voice asked, “Roan got called away again?”

Paris just emerged from a narrow corridor to the left of the receptionist’s desk, looking pale and thin in a bulky sweater that hung off him like a flour sack, with Roan’s fleece lined bomber jacket thrown over his shoulder . He had his sleeves rolled up, though, and Diego could see the piece of medical tape holding a cotton ball on his arm. It was either covering up an injection site or an IV site, but either way it probably wasn’t good. He couldn’t help but size him up visually in paramedic mode, and from the way he looked so tired, pale, and cold, that work side of his brain assessed him as probably being in shock. He needed to keep him warm and conscious, hydrated, see if he could answer some simple questions, ascertain his level of functional awareness. “Afraid so. Gordon needed him for some reason.”

Par just nodded, and the receptionist got out from behind her desk and gave him a note that Diego assumed was from Roan - he did love his notes. Par looked at it, read it quickly, then folded it up and shoved it in the front pocket of his jeans. “Yeah, apparently so. Makes you wonder why the police didn’t keep him in the first place.”

“’Cause he was a pain in the ass, remember? I’m parked out front.” Diego had to fight the urge to touch Paris’s arm, gently but firmly support him on the walk back to the car. He had to snap out of diagnostic mode; it wasn’t fair to Paris. And in spite of looking sickly, he was still hot, which was a credit to his supernatural sex appeal. Needing something to talk about, he asked simply, “How was it?”

“The exam?” Paris shrugged. “It was an exam. They don’t change much.” As soon as they walked outside, into the biting air, Paris shivered and shrugged on his coat, burying himself deep in it. He still looked cold.

As soon as they were in his car - a sky blue Volkswagen bug that Roan liked to occasionally tease him about - he couldn’t help but ask, “How’s your blood pressure?”

Paris looked at him with a small, sly smile , his lips so bloodless they were barely pink. “You can just tell it’s bad by looking at me, huh?”

‘Well, I am the world’s best paramedic.”

He seemed to appreciate his attempt at a joke, but Par looked away, out the windshield. “It’s low. They wanted to hospitalize me, but I told them that wasn’t happening. So they hooked me up to an IV, got me on a fluid drip with some meds, until the numbers hit a point they were happy with. I still feel a little out of it.”

“It wasn’t just your blood pressure, was it?”

Paris shrugged, still looking away from him as he pulled out into traffic. It wasn’t too bad this time of day, as most people were still at work. “I really don’t want to talk about it,” he finally said, leaning his head against the passenger window. “My metabolism is going haywire, and there doesn’t seem to be a way to stabilize it. We all know how this is going to end - I just don’t want it to end in a hospital.”

He nodded in understanding. Considering how much time he spent in hospitals, getting patients there or transferring them from one place to another, you’d have probably thought he would have liked them better than he did. He liked the people there - with some exceptions - but he still didn’t care much for the places themselves. “I’m hungry,” Diego announced, aware that it was a terribly obvious segue, but there was nothing to be done about it now. “I haven’t had lunch. You want something?”

Par glanced at him with that small, slightly patronizing smile. Of course he knew what he was doing. “A coffee would be good.” He paused briefly, long enough to signal a subject change. “I was wondering if I could talk you into doing something for me.”

“Anything.” He was kind of hoping it was something salacious, but he doubted it considering Paris’s physical state.

“I’m recruiting people to make sure Roan doesn’t retreat from the world after I’m gone. I’ve got Randi so far, and I’m trying to figure out who might be good at annoying the shit out of him. You can do that, can’t you?”

“In my sleep.”

“That’s what I thought. Exes are great at that, aren’t they? I’d consider it a personal favor if you didn’t let him slip away after I’m dead, because I know he’ll try. He’s already starting to neglect work because of me.” He sighed heavily, dry washing his face with his hands. “I hate the feeling that I’m going to hurt him so much. “

Wow. He knew Paris loved Roan enough that it made him just want to explode with envy - why didn’t anyone love him that much? He was prettier than Roan, damn it! - but this was almost too much. “Why the hell are you worried about him? You’re the one who’s …” Dying. He couldn’t quite finish the sentence, but he didn’t really need to. No one was more acutely aware of their own mortality than Paris.

He flashed him another smile, this one heartbreakingly sad. “I should have been dead years ago, Diego. All this time has been a gift. I have no right to complain.”

Diego snorted derisively. “You sure as hell do. You’re not even thirty.”

“Yeah, but I think I’ve had all the life I can stand as a tiger strain. I was never even curious what it might feel like to have all the bones in my body broken, yet I know it pretty well now. I don’t really think anyone should know that if they can at all avoid it.”

What could he say to that? He could only grimace at the thought, “You know, if you guys need meds …”

He shook his head. “Thanks, but no, we’re good. In fact, I’m not sure Roan needs them so much anymore. He’s adapting.”

That was such a curious thing to say that Diego briefly took his eyes off the road to glance at Paris’s profile. He looked oddly serene, a man at peace with himself and with the end. Diego was pretty sure he wouldn’t have that much dignity if he was facing death; he’d be screaming and flailing and quite probably throwing Molotov cocktails through his enemy’s windows. “What d’ya mean?”

Paris must have known he was looking at him, but he didn’t turn his way; he kept staring out the windshield like he was the driver. “Just that. He’s finally learned how to manipulate his inner animal, and his body has changed with it. He’s a virus child - he’s always been different. I just don’t think anyone ever knew how different.”

“Uh … what are you saying exactly?” He thought he knew, but he was having a hard time accepting it. Was he saying that Roan was part virus, less than Human? (Or more than Human?)

“You’ve seen him lately, haven’t you? Haven’t you noticed how he’s changed?”

He thought about it. “He looks … good. But that’s about it.” And Roan did look good; it looked like he’d started going to the gym. He looked fitter than he ever had before, although he’d never been the dumpy sort. He thought perhaps Paris’s slow deterioration had made him worried about his own health.

Paris nodded, as if he expected that answer. “He hasn’t really been working out; he hasn’t changed his diet. He’s just learned how to control the shift of his muscles. He can trigger the change, Diego. Anytime he wants.”

For a second there, he thought he was joking. He must have been joking, right? That couldn’t happen. The infected were slaves to their viral cycles, and the change was a slow, agonizing process that killed quite a few of them. That’s why he never understood the cultists and the Goths who thought infection was something to aspire to, like this was some stupid fucking werewolf movie and being one of the “transformed” would give them special abilities or something, when all it really did was promise you agony and an early death.

But maybe that was only true for some of them. After all, Roan did have his dubious bloodhound sense of smell, and hadn’t he healed abnormally fast from his bullet wound? He never did have the surgery to repair his torn muscles, had he? Viruses adapted; they could change with their environment in some cases. Was he saying Roan was doing the same thing? “You’re serious?”

Paris nodded solemnly. “I am. And if I don’t get around to it in time, I want you to recruit Matt into this conspiracy of bugging the shit out of Ro once I’m gone.”

Now Diego was starting to feel drugged. This seemed almost too big and too strange to comprehend. Roan could become a lion any time he wanted? Why hadn’t he told him that while they were seeing each other? The secretive bastard! “Matt? Who’s Matt?”

“Skouris. Remember, the puppy?”

“Him? Why would you want him in on this?”

“Because he obviously loves Ro, and won’t stop bugging him no matter what. Also, he’s more annoying than you could ever be. I have to make sure Roan doesn’t do a Michael Henstridge.”

“Okay, now I’m lost. What?”

He smoothed his hair back with his hand, still not messing up his expensive cut, and gave him a look that made it feel like his heart had cramped in his chest. It was full of such pleading it was almost painful. “I don’t want him to retreat into the cat and never come out. Make sure that doesn’t happen. Do whatever you have to do - just promise me you won’t let him do that.”

Diego shot glances at him as he tried to concentrate on the road at the very same time, finding the latter to be even more difficult than usual.

He wasn’t sure what was more unbelievable: the thing Paris was asking, or the fact that he was asking him.

****

The cats were resuming their positions on the barn’s packed dirt floor, not so much laying down as flopping down, eying him with some wariness but generally accepting him. Now that he concentrated on the smells, he could pick up more scents of decay and failure, as well as blood from the bleeding cougar. These were dying animals; it was astounding they had the strength to maul anyone. But why were they grouping together? It didn’t make sense, not across breeds. Sick animals were generally attacked by stronger animals too.

Was that a reason? Again, safety in numbers … but that was a Human thought, evidence of reasoning. What the hell was going on here?

His ears pricked up at the same time as the rest of the cats, his nose catching the scent of gunpowder as he heard the grit of stones under boot soles. The muddy cougar raised itself back to its feet, its sides heaving, but Roan made his way to the barn door first to see a couple of SWAT members slowly approaching, their bulky body armor adding about twenty pounds to their solid frames, assault rifles raised to fire. “Get the fuck away from here,” he spat at them, only aware in retrospect that he was growling while he spoke. “I have the situation under control. Stand down.”

The men paused, their rifles aimed at him, and finally one consulted someone on his radio. The order must have been given, because they started backing slowly away, back towards the fence, but their guns were still aimed at him. Why the fuck were they doing that?

Oh, yeah - he was still growling at them.

He turned back to the cats to find that the muddy cougar was still sitting there, and none of the other cats had gotten up. He’d been accepted as the alpha, the protector of the group. “I’m sorry, but this has to end now,” he said in a slow, quiet voice. “I drug you, or they kill you. It’s the only choice on the table.” Moving slowly but deliberately, he pulled out the drug gun and shot the muddy cougar, then the battered leopard. The drugs worked fast if you got them in the right spot, and he did - he shot them both in the neck, and they barely had time to lay down before they fell over. The other cats weren’t alarmed in any way; their “friends” weren’t dead, and he was the leader now anyways. He put the third dart in the cat that looked the most disturbed by this turn of events, and then returned to the open barn door, dropping the empty drug gun. “I need four more shots,” he shouted. The cops had retreated and seemed happy to let the SWAT team take over, although Gordo and Seb remained where they were at the split rail fence. In fact, it was Gordo and Seb that tossed him the extra drug guns so he could finish the job.

As soon as all the cats were drugged , he left the barn and returned to them, As he stepped over the fence, a SWAT guy suddenly stepped up to him. He was almost a full foot taller than him, with shoulders as broad as Par’s, but he was a Hispanic man with a round face, narrowed eyes, and a wispy hint of a moustache that looked somehow pre-pubescent pathetic. (He felt like bragging that if he really wanted to, he could have a good start on a beard tonight, but it was childish to point out a man’s inability to grow facial hair, or only grow facial hair that looked pubic.) “You do not order my men, nor do you threaten them,” the SWAT captain said, a sneer in his voice. “You’re a civilian.”

He wondered how he threatened them, then assumed he meant the growling. “I was a cop.”

“You’re a civilian now,” he insisted, his eyes like glowing embers. He hated him way out of proportion, it seemed. Did he hate cats in general, or him in particular? “Stop forgetting that.” The man spun on a heel and stalked off, showing him his back. Did he know how inflammatory that was amongst cats?

“Don’t,” Gordo warned him softly. What the hell did he think he was going to do? Even Roan wasn’t sure. He was torn between the obscene gesture and winging him with a rock. (A small one. ) Gordo then asked, in a normal tone of voice, “So what’s the deal with the cats?”

“They’re all sick and hurt, maybe dying. Call me when they’ve transformed, I need to talk to them as Humans to determine what the hell is going on.”

“Sick?” Seb repeated, so confused he almost showed an emotion. “Why would that make them group together?”

He shrugged, “That’s why I need to talk to them when they’re Human.” He had a hunch, but he wanted it confirmed before he started to wave it about. If he was wrong, he’d seem even more foolish than usual.

He left the cops to transfer the cats to the van that’d take them to the kitty holding cells back at the precinct, and walked back to his car, feeling surprisingly weary. Was everybody in the world dying? Sometimes it felt that way. Everybody but him.

He didn’t want to die, but he was slowly becoming aware that outliving everyone around you was its own special kind of pain. He felt like his own energy was being drained away just by psychic pressure, by the slowly dwindling life force of the people around him. He wished that he could contribute the energy to the others, keep them going, but it didn’t work that way.

Paris had told him often enough “You can’t save everyone.” And while he knew that logically, a part of him was just unwilling to accept it. There were some people he wanted to save no matter what, and Paris was on the top of the list. It might seem counter-protective, but he was willing to die if it would save Paris. If he could swap his life for Par’s, he would. He just didn’t know where to go to do that.

He sat in his car, resting his head on the steering wheel and willing himself not to cry or punch out the passenger window, when he felt his phone humming in his pocket again. He let it go for two rings, then figured it might be Paris or Diego, so he answered it. As it was, there was no phone number displayed - it was blocked.

“Leave town tonight or die,” a voice said, made slightly robotic by an electronic filter. “This is your only warning.”

Before he could even take a breath to say anything, they hung up. He tried to star sixty nine them, but it didn’t work.

Considering what he’d just been thinking, he wondered if this was irony or karma in action.

He tried to calm him, but he did a half assed job, and wasn’t good at it at the best of times anyways. So he told Matt he’d call some of his friends in the force and see if he could find out anything. It didn’t exactly calm him, but it gave him an easy out. As soon as he hung up, Roan sighed and hung his head, feeling a headache coming on. He opened the nightstand on his side of the bed, pulling a bottle of Excedrin out of the drawer, and dry swallowed three of them. Sadly he went through quite a bit of Excedrin, and while he preferred washing them down with liquids, he didn’t always have that option.

Pier twenty seven. That was on the run down side of the waterfront, wasn’t it? A popular spot for a lethal version of the pump and dump, as in “pump a bullet in ‘em and dump ‘em in the water”. Why would a little rich girl like Callie be anywhere near there? Of course the obvious answer was she wasn’t there; she was simply dumped there. She’d been killed somewhere else, perhaps somewhere nicer.

Okay, no - he was jumping to conclusions. Maybe she wasn’t murdered. Maybe it was an accident. (Oh yeah, sure. She got in a car with some strange men, and then accidentally died. That was plausible.) He punched up a familiar number, just now starting to hear the water drain in the bathtub.

After a couple of rings, the phone was answered. “Murphy, homicide,” a clipped voice said.

“Hey Dropkick, I’ve got some info for you.”

She sighed, a reaction only partially exaggerated. “Oh god, here comes trouble. What do you got, Angus?”

“You just fished a vic off pier twenty seven? Young Caucasian female. Partial i.d. as Thora Bishop?”

She tapped her keyboard for a few seconds. “We don’t even have a partial on that one, just speculation until we get a confirm from the relative. Don’t tell me she’s one of yours.”

“Yeah. If it is Bishop, she went missing the night before last, pulled into a car on North Avenue; I’ve got an eyewitness.”

Murphy made a noise of disappointment as she did a computer search. “I’m not pulling up a missing persons report.”

“Because it wasn’t reported. The family were afraid it would leak to the press. A friend of Thora’s hired me to look into it.”

Her reply was a disgusted groan this time. “So these are the Thorp Chemical Bishops then?”

“Yep.”

“Seriously, who gives a fuck? If the girl went missing under suspicious circumstances, why didn’t they report it regardless of whether the press would get it or not?”

“I was wondering that myself. Can you tell me anything about the body? Method of death?”

“It’s not really a homicide case, it’s just suspicious due to its location, and the coroner probably only got the body within the hour. You know damn well autopsies don’t move that fast.”

“But initial impressions were made, yes? Did the body appear to be in the water a while? Was she dressed? Was the body visibly injured? Come on, Dropkick. And don’t tell me you didn’t see it - you know who in the station did.”

An impatient sigh was followed by a “Hold on a sec.” After several long seconds, the bathroom door opened and Paris came out, hair partially wet, clad only in black silk boxers that clung sexily to his damp skin. Yes, he was too skinny, had lost a lot of muscle tone, but he was still a good looking man, still broad across the chest and shoulders, his legs long and strong. So what if he had inexplicable bruises and skin so unnaturally pale it almost looked translucent sometimes? He was still beautiful to him; he’d always be beautiful to him.

Paris gave him a questioning look as he searched for clothes, and he quietly signaled that he’d tell him once he was done. Par just nodded. It was nice having this kind of wordless communion with someone. He tried not to dwell on it. Finally Murphy came back on the line. “She was in the water long enough to discolor and bloat a bit, but not long enough to be significantly nibbled by fish. She was dressed, and there was no obvious wounds or blood. She didn’t appear to be harmed. That do ya?”

“Call me once the autopsy report’s in, okay?”

“That is so against S-O-P.”

“But you will?”

She grumbled. “Yeah, yeah. You’re lucky I owe you one.”

As soon as he hung up, he told Paris what had become of Callie as he stepped into his jeans, and Par frowned sadly, pausing as he pulled a thermal undershirt out of the drawer. “God, that’s terrible. Are we headed to the crime scene?”

That startled him. Why would Paris think that? “No. There hasn’t even been a positive ident of the body yet. If it’s not her, we’d look like idiots, wouldn’t we?”

Paris just stared at him for a moment, as if not sure what to say, then pulled a dark blue sweater on, using that as an excuse to turn away. Just by the set of his shoulders he knew Paris wanted to say something, that Roan had said something wrong, but he couldn’t imagine what, and Paris had clearly decided to let it go. He almost asked, but decided he didn’t want to know. The way the sweater hung off of him made him, for a single moment, feel like crying, but it passed. It was a feeling Roan lived with more often than not these days.

On the drive to the university medical center, they talked about the case, and what my have happened to Callie, what it could mean if it was her, then talked about whether it would snow or not, if those dark clouds on the fringe of the horizon were snow clouds. Paris insisted that being Canadian, he’d know better than him. The music filled the rest of the silence, and Par eventually leaned against him, resting his head on his shoulder as he drove. Roan put an arm around his shoulders, and wondered how a cynic like him had come to this, come to have his heart break in eight thousand little pieces a day at a time.

The medical center was a sprawling collection of buildings amidst lawns as sculpted and green as a golf course. Inside the Kesselman Wing, after talking with a painfully cheerful young receptionist, they waited in thinly padded chairs in a lobby with large windows, letting in lots of cold winter light, and a television they both ignored sat in a far corner in a wooden entertainment center, flashing pictures and lights that meant nothing.

They were escorted into separate exam rooms at different times; Paris first, him about five minutes later. The doctor who took his blood pressure and all the other routine shit was a young Indian man who was already starting to lose his hair; his black hair was thinning enough in the front that he was already brushing it forward over his forehead. He’d probably be totally bald by thirty five.

After taking a blood sample, Roan was sent back out to the lobby, where he expected to see Paris waiting for him. He wasn’t. He talked with the receptionist, whose name was Sarah, an attractive young woman with skin the color of coffee and a dazzling smile that seemed brighter than muted light of the lobby. She smelled of some vanilla perfume, but it wasn’t so strong that it was overpowering. She told him that sometimes the doctors around here worked at their own pace, and she’d check to make sure everything was okay. It was then that he felt his cell phone hum in his coat pocket, and the vibration actually startled him for a moment, as he’d forgotten he’d left it on in any capacity. Well, at least he’d remember to turn off the ring; the latest ring tone Par had inflicted on him was David Bowie’s “Cat People Theme”.

Roan had no intention of answering it, but as he returned to one of the lobby chairs he took it out to see who was calling. There’s no way it was Murphy with an autopsy report, but maybe someone else at the pier had seen something she hadn’t mentioned. But it wasn’t Murphy calling; it was Gordo. He hadn’t heard from in a while, so he was almost surprised to see his number. He answered out of curiosity.

Gordo didn’t even give him any foreplay. “You busy right now?” His voice sounded drawn, tense.

“Not particularly. What’s up?”

“We have a really weird situation developing here at the base of Washburn Road. If you can beat the SWAT team here, I’d appreciate it; I’m not sure I want to see a Human/cat bloodbath on the six o’clock news tonight.”

“What’s going on?”

“A homeowner seems to have a nest of cats in his abandoned barn, that’s what. We can’t even get close to it, hence the wait for the SWAT team.”

“A nest? Cats don’t nest.”

“Tell these cats that. I think they’re mostly cougars, but I haven’t seen them all. It’s … you have to see this, McKichan; you have to tell us what the fuck this means.”

He rubbed his eyes, wondering if he had the option of actually saying no, but his curiosity was getting the better of him, as well as a vague sense of guilt - the SWAT team probably wouldn’t even try and tranq them first. They’d just shoot them because it was more expedient. But he couldn’t leave Paris here. “What’s the ETA on the SWAT team?”

“Twenty minutes. As it happens, there’s a nut holding his ex-wife and her boyfriend hostage downtown, so they’re occupied.”

“Okay. I’ll … see if I can beat them.” He hung up, and instantly called Diego. It was Wednesday, right? That was one of Diego’s days off. He worked nights and weekends, and generally had afternoons and a couple weekdays off; he was deliberately odd and enjoyed it, which was how the two of them hooked up in the first place. Being weird was almost the only thing they had in common. When he picked up, he asked him right off if he could come down to the university medical center and pick up Paris. Because this was Paris and he’d mentioned “medical”, Dee stowed his usual attitude. “Is he all right?”

“He’s fine, we’re trying to get into these medical trials.” He hastily scribbled a note for Par, apologizing for his sudden absence, but he knew all he really needed to write was “Gordo” and Par would understand. “Gordo is having a cat emergency, I have to go. How soon can you get here?”

He heard the odd noise of a videogame being paused in the background. “Uh … six minutes, if traffic is good.”

He added that to the note, and held the phone away as he thanked Sarah for holding on to the note until Par came out. He talked to Dee on his way out to the car, still worried that Par hadn’t come out yet. He almost asked Dee what it might mean, but he already knew, didn’t he?

What if Par was too sick to be in the trials? What then?

He wasn’t going to think about it, mainly because he couldn’t. He’d deal with it if and when it occurred. In fact, even though he couldn’t get a decent station out here, he turned up the radio just so the music would drown out the possibility of thinking.

The head of Washburn Road was cut off by a hastily erected police cordon and manned by a couple of bored looking blues, but once he got of the car and flashed his card, the female cop, who looked a bit butcher than her male companion, obviously had been briefed by Gordo as she almost automatically waved him through without a glance at it.

He walked up the poorly maintained road, enjoying all the rural space for its temporary existence. Already all this former farm and grazing land was being bought up by developers for “exurban” housing developments, and while he smelled a strong scent of cow shit, he wondered when the last time there were cows here - a year ago? More?

He walked past a long, low slung ranch house at the end of a gravel drive - the mailbox read “Thurman” - past a split rail fence, until he found the assault weapon armed cops and two members of the kitty crimes division - Gordo and Seb - standing with them beyond the fence, looking at an old barn, whose red paint had faded to a hint of fleshy pink. The big door was ajar, although everything beyond it was swathed in shadows.

But he smelled them, didn’t he? A fierce stink of cats who had marked their territory; it made the hair rise on the back of his neck, and he had to suppress the instinctive urge to growl. Definitely cougars; maybe one or two others - it was hard to tell.

As he came up to them, both Gordo and Seb glanced at him, while the cops in body armor, holding their assault rifles as uncomfortably as U.N. Peacekeepers, gave him strange sidelong glances and stepped back. “You smell ‘em?” Gordo asked, apparently catching the flair of his nostrils.

“Yeah. What’s the approximate number? I think I’m smelling about a half dozen.”

Far behind him, he heard one cop mutter, “Did he say smell?”

Gordo shrugged expansively. “Your guess is probably better than ours. We were called by the homeowner, who had moved from this properly several weeks ago and had come back to give it a once over, to make sure he hadn’t left some equipment behind. When he approached the barn, he suddenly found himself confronted by several cats, including a cougar who mauled his arm pretty badly before he was able to get in his car and call 911 on his cell. We thought it was possible we were dealing with wild cats as much as infecteds, but this grouping behavior … that’s not normal.”

“And the cougar I saw had an odd build for a wild one,” Seb interjected coolly. When did he not say something coolly? “Also the coloring was off.”

“They’re definitely infecteds. I take it you haven’t approached?”

“We did try initially,” Gordo told him. “But as soon as we were within fifty feet of the place, they all started comin’ out, growling and snarling. We retreated, and they seemed to do the same thing.”

“More odd behavior,” Seb noted.

“Not necessarily - they may have smelled the gunpowder on you. God knows I do. They may not be Human right now, but they haven’t totally taken leave of their senses.” He looked at the barn and sighed, fairly certain he could see the chatoyant glimmer of eyes in the dark. “I’ll go in, calm them down. Hold off the SWATs.”

“You got your piece?”

He shook his head. “I’m not armed, but I don’t want to be. They’ll smell it and freak. I need to confront them as just me. That’s enough.”

Gordo stared at him with great dubiousness. “Look, I know you got something on all of us, but -”

“I will dominate the pack or I won’t, but I have no need to shoot them,” he reassured him. “If worse comes to worst, I’m a lion - I’m bigger than a cougar.”

Gordo snorted, as Seb handed him what looked like a flare gun, but was actually a form of modified tranquilizer gun that the kitty crimes unit carried in their cars. He did take that with a grateful nod and stuck it behind his back, in the waistband of his pants. It only had three “shots”, so its usefulness was limited, but if you took down key members, three could be all you needed. “You can’t turn the lion on and off, Roan.”

Okay, that confirmed that he and Dropkick hadn’t exchanged notes and no one had sent Gordo the video of him and Paris … or they had, and he just assumed it occurred in the correct part of his viral cycle. “It won’t let me die at the fangs of cougars,” he told him, easily climbing over the waist high split rail fence. “That’d be too fucking humiliating.”

The body armored cops either didn’t know who he was, or had never heard of “Big Gay Roan, the kitty fag” back at the station, because there was quite a murmuring coming from them. They mostly thought he was an idiot approaching the barn alone without a weapon, which made him want to turn around and shout that he was the weapon, but he couldn’t be concerned with them. There was a pride of cats in there, and he already got the sense they wanted him nowhere near them.

This was good, though. Ever since he grew out of pre-adolescence, he was never afraid of a fight. If anything, he prided himself on his instinct to fight, no matter how hopeless or pointless it was; he always wanted to go down swinging. Going quietly was something other people did. He didn’t win every fight, not back then, but at least he left scars, little reminders that fucking with him was a mistake. Now that he learned to manipulate the virus, the lion in him, he had no concerns at all about winning a fight - he would, one way or another. But he’d also come up against an enemy he couldn’t fight, one he couldn’t beat, and the sheer helplessness of it all made him furious, terrified. His lover was dying, and all he could was watch. He hated it, he hated himself for his uselessness, and he wished that death was a physical presence, a guy in a black robe holding a scythe - he’d kick that fucking bastard’s ass right up into his shoulder blades, and take great pleasure in ripping its head from its body with his bare hands.

In lieu of that, these cats would have to do.

He was growling low in his throat as he neared the barn, the smell of the cats pungent and overwhelming, and finally a cougar came out to edge of the door, growling at him in return. He could see what Seb had meant about its build being off - it seemed a bit more squat and square than most real cougars, and its tawny coat of fur had a slightly muddy tinge to it. Its lips pulled back to reveal rows of thin, sharp teeth, its eyes as yellow as a traffic light, and its growl grew to a low roar. Roan matched it in volume, roar for roar, never looking away from its eyes. He could feel his muscles starting to tense, some shifted, but not in a major way … not yet. But they would. How far he went would depend on how hard he held on to his temper.

They just stood there, the protector cougar in the doorway and him outside the barn, and it lowered its head, tensing, and roared louder, taking up a defensive stance. Roan roared back even louder, a partial scream, the force of it scouring his throat raw, and the cougar’s ears twitched back in annoyance. If it didn’t acquiesce, he’d have to force the issue.

It was all quiet behind him. No one was speaking - he wasn’t sure any of the police behind the fence were even breathing.

Finally the cougar looked away and went back into the barn, almost a grudging invitation. Roan walked after it, keeping his shoulders loose, feeling his muscles as sleek and hard as steel beneath his skin. He was ready for anything, and part of him was hoping for a fight. He had a lot of pent up frustration to get out.

The barn still had the faint scents of horses and hay, although the scent of cat and mildew and bat guano was so strong they were hard to discern. The only light came from the open hatch in the hayloft and a couple of holes in the roof, so there was more shadows than illumination. But still he could see that he was surrounded by about seven cats of various sizes, all cougars save for one, who may have been a pretty sad, battered leopard, small enough to have been either a child or a very petite woman. Most had been laying down, but as soon as their eyes focused on him, as soon as they caught the scent of a man who wasn’t quite a man/a cat who wasn’t quite a cat, they were all on their feet, their growls a low rumble like the distant warning of an earthquake. The bigger ones began to pace around him, circling him like sharks, their paws scuffing up small clouds of dust that threatened to make him sneeze. He was growling back, keeping it low, something he could feel, and trying to work out who was the pack leader. In this dark, noisome barn, all the cougars looked roughly similar, and there was no way to work out their coloring unless they stepped in a dusty shaft of light.

He crouched down to be at eye level with them, catching their eyes as they passed and making them look away, their low growls so constant Roan couldn’t distinguish his from theirs. He smelled fresh cat blood, saw dark marks on the packed earth, and realized one of them was hurt. That added a level of instability, because if they’d been hurt by the men outside, they’d be extra agitated.

He sensed their low level rage, the confusion he dragged with him and his unusual scent, and he finally snarled to up the ante, to get a reaction. Finally the muddy cougar and the battered leopard let out snarling roars in response, the cougar nearing him, breaking the circle. It stalked close and he met it eye to eye, snarl for snarl. Neither were willing to back down, but one of them was going to have to. Roan felt his jaw shift, felt his hands curl like he had claws, and he fought to hold it back as he sensed the other cats gathering around him, preparing to either fight or flee depending on how this turned out. The fact that the alpha cat hadn’t yet ceded to him was troubling, because by now it should have. Something was weird with these cats, beyond the obvious. This could be trouble, although he couldn’t even find a small corner of his mind where to be concerned about this.

He called Eric Chiang at home (he was not calling him Chi-Chi), and caught him in. As soon as he explained who he was and why he was calling, he told him to go ahead and come on over, as he’d be happy to help if he could. He actually didn’t sound that enthusiastic about it, he just wanted to placate him on the off chance he was really a cop.

He told Paris about the case, mainly because he had to, and even Par blanched when he saw the photo of Callie. “Holy shit, are you sure she’s not sick?” That could explain her thinness, but somehow he doubted it. When he discovered where he was off to, Paris suggested he should come with, since Eric was more likely to be amenable to him - actually a good point. After all, Eric had hit on Paris enough that he not only knew his name, but his personal kink.

Of course he didn’t know if Paris was up to it, if he had the energy to do it, but he couldn’t think of any way to ask without offending him, so he just let him come along.

Eric lived in one of the apartments over a small ground floor bookstore/coffee shop called “Remains of the Day” (which might as well have called itself “Gay Gay Gay Gay”). There was a back way to enter the apartments, so they avoided going in, but it looked interesting enough that Roan made a mental note to check out the shop sometime. Paris must have noticed him looking at the books in display window on their way around the back, because he whispered in his ear, “You love your damn books more than me.” When he shot him an evil look, Par was grinning at him ear to ear. He nudged him with his elbow, hoping he didn’t blush at being caught in his book lust. What could he say? They saved his life when he was kid; books took him out of hospitals, group homes, and foster homes. They let him know that there was something other than this. He was eternally grateful.

They went up the outer stairs to an inner corridor, redolent of French Roast, where four doors led to four different apartments, all marked with brass numbers. The one they wanted was number three, which was at the end of the hall on the left side. Roan knocked, but he took a step back, so the first thing he saw would be Paris. That was an automatic reflex now - letting Paris take the lead was a guarantee you’d get in the door, whether it was a swanky party he’d never be invited to a million years, or into a reluctant witnesses’ home. Paris was like a magic key, and they both knew it.

Eric opened the door a crack, but when he saw it was Paris on his doorstep, he threw the door wide open, gaping in shock. “Oh my god! You’re the hot - I mean that guy from the club! Sister, where the hell have you been?”

“Working on my tan,” Paris replied with a full wattage smile. Paris was actually looking Gothic-ly pale these days, but Eric’s eyes were so riveted to his face he bet the bartender didn’t even notice.

Roan stepped forward and introduced himself, handing him a business card, and while Eric nodded and took it all in, he almost never looked at him.

Eric’s place was small but neat, with only good Goodwill furniture and a tastefully stark futon, and a single framed photo of a well built naked man’s torso. It was in arty black and white, cutting him off at the neck and at the waist, so all you could see was the rocky surface of a gym blessed chest, which was sadly waxed. He was with it as a piece of art until that little detail; even that tiny line of hair that usually started just below the navel was completely missing. He wasn’t into bears, but come on - real men had hair. That picture was as erotic as a mannequin.

Eric himself was nice looking in a somewhat fey way, with delicate features and attractive almond shaped eyes in a slender face, his black hair short and spiky in a cut not unlike Matt‘s. He was a wisp of a guy, maybe five five and a hundred and twenty pounds, and he asked if they minded him getting ready for work while he talked. They didn’t, and they sat on his hard futon while he shouted at them from the tiny bedroom. He left the door open, and there was a full length mirror in his room that was turned just so, so that every now and then they caught a glimpse of skin. Was he putting on a show for Paris? He suspected he was, and found it hard not to smirk. Par grinned right back at him, trying not to laugh.

Eric told - shouted - them a slightly more elaborate version of the story Matt told him. He was out in the back alley of Panic sneaking a smoke, and while he was smoking he noticed a really thin girl being carried to a car on North Avenue. He figured she was a junkie of some type or maybe a “party girl” being taken away by her friends; she looked limp and unresponsive. He only noticed it because she looked so damn skinny, “like one of the Olsen twins”. He didn’t know cars at all, so all he could say was it was a silver car, “sedan-ish”, and he never noticed the plate, nor could he describe the men, except they were white and “kinda big“. As witnesses went, Eric kind of left you wanting. Even having Paris here didn’t bring any extra details to mind.

He came out wearing low slung jeans, professionally worn in all the right places, and a leather vest without a shirt, showing a lean, hairless torso of his own. (This was another reason why he hated gay bars.) “It’s a little cold to be without a shirt, isn’t it?” He couldn’t help but ask. Paris elbowed him in the ribs for that.

“Not in the club it ain’t,” Eric responded, talking to him but glancing at Paris. “You stopping by tonight?”

“I doubt it,” Paris told him. “I’m working.”

“So you’re a private detective, huh? I had no idea they made ‘em as hot as you.”

Was he flirting? Yes, he was flirting with Paris right in front of him. Clearly he didn’t notice the matching rings, or the emphasis he put on “partner” when he first introduced them. Or he did and he just didn’t care.

Paris smiled coyly and glanced down at the threadbare mustard colored carpet, as if abashed by this attention. But Roan knew from the way he was biting the inside of his cheek that he was trying really hard not to laugh. “I’m really an associate; Roan’s the private dick around here.” And Par raised his eyebrows lasciviously when he said “dick”, forcing Roan to look away and then dry wash his own face. Bastard was trying to make him laugh too.

Eric didn’t look disappointed more than confused, as if he wasn’t sure exactly what associate entailed. “Oh. So what’s with this chick anyways? I heard she was rich or something?”

“Or something,” Roan said, as soon as he was sure he wouldn’t laugh. He stood up from the futon, wondering if it had left indents in his butt. It felt like it. (How did anyone sleep on these things?) “If you see this car again, or remember any more details, please call me.”

Paris stood up with him, looking beatifically alluring, and Eric was just riveted. He should have had his tongue hanging out like a cartoon wolf - he couldn’t have wanted Paris more. And of course Par was doing this on purpose, perhaps to make him a friendlier witness, or perhaps just to prove that, sick or not, he could still turn the world on with his smile. “Yes, please. No detail is unimportant.”

Eric nodded like his neck was a spring, suddenly so eager to please Paris Roan half expected him to make something up on the spot.

They left, and somehow made it to the outside stairs before they exploded into laughter, leaning into each other as they howled helplessly at Eric’s desperate little show and Paris’s shameless performance. They both laughed until they had tears running down their face. It wasn’t quite that funny, but being forced to hold it in made it come out with that much more power.

When he could finally speak, Roan wiped the tears away with the back of his hand, and told Par, “That poor kid. Could you have been more of a slut?”

He looked at him with sparkling eyes, looking flush with vitality. “Dare you ask that? Of course I could. I could have asked him if he wanted to give me an opinion on my new Speedo.”

There was no point in replying that he didn’t actually own a Speedo. “His balls would have exploded.”

“Oh, I know,” Par grinned, starting to laugh again.

Shameless. But that’s what he loved about him, right? He was fearless, and Par was shameless; together, they could mortify the world.

As they were leaving, Par pulled him into the bookshop to have a look see, apparently deciding they were in no hurry to get back to the office. And they weren’t, were they? Talking to Eric had really not given them anything of note.

The shop was owned by a woman named Ally, a thirty-ish lesbian with nut brown skin, well toned arms and many tattoos and piercings, her severely short hair a whitish blonde with pink streaks. She was friendly, though, although the shop cat - a ginger tabby that was apparently called Maya - hissed and ran away to hide in the stacks when they came in, Roan soon found it following him, its pale green eyes bright and wide. It stayed out of pouncing range, but seemed almost perversely fascinated with him. “I don’t make much sense, do I?” he whispered to it, crouching down and holding out his hand. Eventually it crept over towards him, and after a wary sniff of his fingers let him pet her. Her fur was soft and glossy; she was a well fed, well cared for cat. “I’m glad Humans can’t smell how wrong I am.” She purred, a low rumble, and rolled over until she was exposing her stomach. He wasn’t sure if that was a sign of submission to the alpha cat or just an invitation to rub her stomach, so he scratched her belly and then went back to perusing the stacks of used books, which were crammed messily into plain wooden shelves. But he liked this set up better than the ones in the big bookshops; there was a controlled chaos that suggested people actually read these books, not just looked at them.

Maya continued to follow him around. As he returned to the front to buy some books and pay for the overpriced coffee Paris had gotten, Ally looked around to see Maya standing behind him. “Weird. You must be a cat person, huh?”

He couldn’t help but stiffen, even though he knew she meant “a person who likes cats”. “Why do you say that?”

“She doesn’t like men,” she replied casually, pulling his change out of the till with a practiced ease. “I got her from the pound, and the woman there told me she was pathologically afraid of all males; she even cringed at their voices. I’ve been kind of hoping exposure to guys here would help her get over it, but … we don’t get a whole lot of guys in here.” It was a lesbian place? Oh, yeah, that might explain why everyone in the coffee shop appeared to be female.

Paris waved at Maya, and she arched her back and zoomed off towards the stacks like a bat out of hell. Par raised an eyebrow at him, quietly wondering if she was afraid because he was male or because he was a tiger. Roan could only shrug - could be a little of both.

Instead of returning to the office they went home. Roan said it was due to his book purchases, but truth be told, he had all the business he cared to handle right now. He didn’t want to handle any, actually; only the threat of bills he couldn’t meet made him go in. He knew he should go talk to Hannah Noyes, but he didn’t want to; he didn’t want this fucking case at all. He wanted to just spend as much time with Par as he could before … no, he couldn’t even finish that thought; he wouldn’t finish that thought.

He made sure calls to the office would get forwarded here, and was almost glad when Paris said he was going to go take a bath to warm up. Even wearing layers hadn’t kept him warm enough.

He waited until he heard the water running upstairs before digging the post-it note out of his pocket. He’d put this off as long as he could bear to, hadn’t he? He decided to call her on his cell phone, so in case Par came down, he could always duck into the garage.

He went into the kitchen to start heating up the milk for Paris’s hot chocolate, and only then did he call, trying to ignore the gnawing in his gut. Hot chocolate was great for both warming him up and getting lots of calories into him, which was especially true when he substituted half and half for milk, as he was doing now. Not that throwing calories at Paris ever seemed to help much - he probably needed some horrific Homer Simpson diet of nothing but fried foods and pureed doughnuts at every meal.

He set the half and half on low simmer, and called Petra Rosenberg, half expecting her machine, and was surprised when she answered. It took him a moment to figure out what he was going to say. “Um, yeah, hi, this is Roan McKichan. Apparently you called me earlier?”

“Yes, Roan, hello, how are you?” She said familiarly, sounding as friendly and sweet as a long lost grandmother. The problem was, she wasn’t. (Was she?)

“Who the hell are you?”

She chuckled warmly. “I treated you as a child and young adult at the McAmmon Center. Once, I -”

“Yeah, I remember. I just don’t know why you’re calling me.” He pulled the dark chocolate syrup out of the fridge, let it clunk on the counter, let her hear it as he wedged the phone between his cheek and shoulder and pulled a microwavable mug out of the cupboard.

She cleared her throat nervously, not sure how to continue in the face of his aggressive disinterest, but she just jumped right in. She sounded like she was maybe sixty, and a smoker at one point in her life. “I was sent a very interesting video the other day. It showed what appeared to be a man talking to a lion on a street I recognized downtown. The man appears to be communicating with the lion; it seems to understand what he’s saying.”

Roan suddenly knew where this was going, and his heart sunk to his stomach. Fuck those people and their videophones. He poured the right amount of chocolate syrup into the mug, and put it in the microwave to nuke it for a couple seconds. It didn’t need to be hot, just warmer than it was. “People can do amazing things with computers these days.”

She wasn’t dissuaded. “It’s a very poor quality video, and the sound quality is laughable, but I was able to make out a name the man used: Roan. It made sense, certainly; there’s no forgetting your hair color, and the lion had unusual coloring in its mane.”

“And you just remembered me off the top of your head, is that it?” The microwave dinged, and he checked the saucepan on the front burner of the stove. The half and half was starting to roil ever so gently, a hint of steam coming off the smooth white surface of the liquid.

“I never forgot you,” she replied, and he could hear a smile in her voice. “You were so very unique.”

He snorted, turning off the burner and removing the pan from the heat. “Yeah, the freak boy. I never outgrew it.”

“I always thought you could, you know.”

That almost seemed like a non-sequitur. “Could what?”

“Transform out of viral sequence,” she replied, as casually as if they were discussing the weather. “The way the virus incorporated itself into your cellular structure was just so unique. You and a good percentage of virus children seemed to have the potential to express traits of the virus, but most are unable to capitalize it for obvious reasons. Yet you … you were always special. I assumed that you could learn to manipulate it to a certain degree, but it isn’t something you can really discuss with a child, even one as bright as you obviously were.”

Taking the mug out of the microwave, he carefully poured in the hot half and half and stirred it, watching the liquid turn into a rich, deep brown. It smelled good too, but Roan hardly noticed it. His heart was thundering in his ears, and he had the urge to toss the phone in the microwave and nuke the fucker. This was not a conversation he wanted to have. “What is it you want from me?”

She sighed as if disappointed in him. “I’m not calling to … I have no desire to upset you or your life.”

“Then why call?”

She paused. He’d been trying to call up a mental image of the woman, but he continued to fail. It wasn’t going to happen. “I’m working on a research project here at the University now, and I was wondering … would you be at all interested in an experimental medication?”

He almost dropped the empty saucepan, but managed to get it on the counter. “What? A medication for what?”

“For the virus, although it’s not a cure or a preventative. What we’re hoping it can accomplish is a lengthening of the viral cycle, essentially delaying full expression. We’re hoping that this can lengthen the life span of -”

“I have a husband,” he blurted, suddenly feeling weak in the knees, feeling his pulse pound in his temples. Oh god, was this it? Was this an honest to fucking Buddha ray of hope in all this crushing darkness? “He’s infected. Can you take him instead? I mean now, today. Can you get him in?”

She was stunned into silence for a moment. “A husband? Is that legal yet?”

“Not really. Look, can you?”

“I take it he’s not a virus child?”

“No, he’s a standard infectee, tiger strain.”

That made her suck in a sharp breath, as if punched. “Good lord. I didn’t know we even had one in this state. How, uh, how old is he?”

“Twenty seven.”

“How long has he been infected?”

“Seven years.”

“Really?” She sounded depressingly surprised. “That’s incredible. I’ve never heard of anyone with the tiger strain surviving that long.”

“He’s not a normal man,” he replied, and felt tears suddenly spring to his eyes. He had to close them and concentrate to make them disappear, to swallow down the lump inexplicably forming in his throat. No, Paris wasn’t a normal man; Paris was the only man he’d ever trusted this much or loved this much. He had a feeling that if Paris died, he would die - maybe not physically, but in all other respects he would die. “Please. If this medication doesn’t work on the deadliest strain, then what fucking good is it? You need a tiger strain in the trials.”

She was quiet so long he wondered if he’d scared her. Finally she cleared her throat again, and he could hear her typing on a keyboard in the background. “You have a good point. It would also be a good idea to have a virus child in the trials, just to see if it effects you in the same way as it does the infectees.”

“Is that it? You want me? You have to take him too, or it’s not happening.”

“I’m not trying to blackmail you into this,” she assured him. “We’d be happy to have him in the trials as long as he volunteers for it.”

“He will.” He’d blackmail him into it if he absolutely had to, but Paris was going to volunteer, damn it. If there was any chance at all, they had to take it. “How fast can we do this thing?”

“Well, if you come down to the University Medical Center today, the Kesselman Wing, we can have you fill out the forms and take some medical details. The trials themselves won’t begin until next week -”

“Fine, whatever, we’ll be there.”

“There is no guarantee this will work,” she quickly exclaimed. She must have heard his note of desperation. “This is experimental.”

“I know, I heard. But some hope is better than none, right?”

She had no real answer to that. He didn’t think she would.

As soon as he composed himself - he was shaking; why the fuck was he shaking? - he grabbed the mug of cocoa and went upstairs, mentally preparing his script. He was hoping Paris wouldn’t fight him, but he really didn’t know; Paris could be so stubborn. And he was afraid that he’d already given up and become comfortable with the reality of dying.

Roan knocked on the bathroom door before going in, the heat and steam of the room clubbing him like a wet velvet fist. Paris must have been using the hottest water he could stand, and Roan bet it would have been too uncomfortable for him. Par was slumped low in the big white porcelain bathtub, a behemoth that could easily hold two people and was probably almost as old as he was. Paris’s head was tilted back, resting on the edge of the tub, his chin dipped just below the surface of the water. His eyes were closed and he looked asleep, but he opened them tiredly as he approached the tub, and smiled weakly. “I don’t suppose you want to join me, huh?”

“Some other time,” he told him, crouching down beside the tub and handing him the mug of hot chocolate. He told him everything: about why Rosenberg called him, the trials, the fact that he wanted to do this all as soon as possible. Paris’s expression was simply tired as he sipped his drink, not giving anything away, but that in itself was troublesome. Had he really given up?

Finally he looked at him with weary blue eyes, his expression still frighteningly flat. “You really want to do this?”

He nodded. “Don’t you?”

He rubbed hot water into his face before weakly nodding himself. “Sure. Give me a few minutes, then I’ll get out and get dressed.”

Was he humoring him, playing along? Maybe. But he didn’t care; he hadn’t felt this hopeful in a long time. He kissed him on the forehead - his skin seemed feverishly warm - and left him be to soak in the warmth for a few more minutes.

Roan decided to change his shirt, swapping the plaid flannel out for a dark green fisherman’s sweater, figuring he didn’t need to see Doctor Rosenberg after a nearly twenty year absence looking like a gay lumberjack, when the phone rang. He was afraid it was Rosenberg calling back, saying they decided they didn’t want a tiger strain in their study, but after a couple of rings he forced himself to pick up the receiver.

It wasn’t Rosenberg, although it took him a moment to identify the voice; it was so broken and small. “Matt?” He asked, taking a guess.

There was a sniff, and his voice came back, a little stronger but still choked with grief. “Roan, god, I’m sorry. But Hannah just called me, and -” his voice disappeared in a strangled sob.

“What, Matt? What’s going on?” But even as he asked, even as he suspected the answer, he didn’t really want to know. Paris was the priority here; fuck the case.