MALAKAI

silver edged fur

//

Dusk fell with the drip dropping of rain off the building's eaves overhead. The creature slumbering under them paid it no mind even when they slipped over his nose. He had bigger problems to attend to, like the gash in his side or the broken ribs threatening to puncture his organs and rip through his skin again.

It had been two days of nonstop rain, brought about by the slow change from a warm and resplendent fall to a much colder and wet variety. A vehicle had hit him on the road this morning, cracking his bones and skin like he was fine pastry, freshly baked. All along the left side of his body was caved in; more than likely his lung had collapsed or filled with blood. In his delirium, all he could realize was to hide from the driver when they searched for him. Under the brand new apartment building's maintenance doorway, he attempted to sleep it off, or at least provide a less painful end to his short and miserable life than having to find help from someone who might elect to euthanize him. The slow dripping along his side pulled him to sleep even as it ripped him into agony.

//

When he startled awake, he was no longer in the rain and eventual slush, judging by the heat settling into his bones and easing the ache and rip and tear in his side. Forcing himself into a sitting position, he found himself sedated and locked into a crate at a veterinarian's office. The door was locked with an actual padlock, not even just a push and slide that he could barely remember how to open. An ecollar was wrapped around his neck and obscured the edges of his vision, gauze and bandages were wrapped around his wound, and his paws were settled atop soft blankets that smelled like soap and kittens.

All in all, not bad for getting hit by an eighteen wheeler.

It took him a few minutes to really wake up, by which point someone crouched down to look at him. Wearing black scrubs with pale skin, they read the chart on his cage before going back over to jot a note onto a paper that they taped to the top of his prison. The now-cared-for-creature stared blearily up at them, finding a young man glancing down at his wounds before he left the room. Voices echoed down the hallway and he couldn't understand them, his words were gone, dripped out of his veins that the sedation replaced.
Several people entered and he attempted to scramble into the back of his cage. The woman who stood with them, watching him, she smelled like mint and wolfsbane. It burned his nose, driving his eyes to the point of tears. She stared down at him, trying to challenge him. He couldn't even answer the call to battle, he was too injured and scared of the larger of the two men who watched him like a hawk. The smaller man, wearing the black scrubs, was discussing something, obviously about his patient, with the larger man and the woman.

They wouldn't look away from him. Her gaze pierced into his soul and clawed around in his fragile chest while the man in the blue jeans stared at his bandages.

A few moments of silence held over the room as another animal in a crate next door rattled the gate keeping them locked away. Black scrubs went to check on the animal and the man and woman stared him down. She paced close and kneeled to his height, staring him directly in the eyes. Whimpering, he tried to hide under his blanket but found unrelenting metal beneath it, keeping him close to her steel edged gaze.

"We know who you are. You'd better keep quiet..." Her words finally filtered through his leaden head and he turned to look up at her. "That boy found you and brought you here so he could take care of you, the least you could do is keep everyone you love safe by shutting your trap," she concluded, standing and briskly turning on her heel away from him and his crate. He felt, with the finality of the slaughterhouse doors closing behind him, that he had a very high probability of dying today.

After a few hours of watching his potential savior work alongside his possible executioner, he grew restless and started to pace in his tight crate. The man barely glanced back at him but the woman stared with contempt, made ever more present by the dawn filtering in through the office windows. Streaks of dove gray marked the clouds outside and he knew that he didn't have much time. He stretched his legs and pushed against the crate door gently.