Sweet Romance13 min read
The Grey Tail at My Pillow
ButterPicks14 views
"I dreamed him again last night."
"Same as before?"
"Same. Wolf ears, blue eyes. He looked at me like I belonged to him."
I say it out loud because saying it makes it less like a secret that will eat me alive.
"Cyrus sleeps here," I tell myself, "on the couch, every night. He won't hurt me."
He had been a tiny white dog when I found him. He had been called something like a number at the lab, but at home I named him. "Cyrus" fit his steady eyes, even when he tried to be only a dog.
"Are you awake?" I ask the darkness.
The tail brushes my hand. A thin grey tuft lies in my palm, softer than I expected and wrong—wrong color for the little white dog who snores at my feet.
"Who else would leave wolf hair in my bed?" I whisper.
"No one," a small voice says without moving. "No one would."
Cyrus steps onto the bed, light as a shadow. He does not look like a dog now. He looks like the dream—ears grey, eyes ringed with blue, a wolf's tail draped over the sheet.
"Are you—" I don't finish.
"Yes," he says. "I am Cyrus."
"You were a dog," I say, stupidly.
"I was what you called me. I was what I had to be to survive," Cyrus answers. He studies my face like a patient who has practiced reading expressions for a lifetime. "Do you remember the lab?"
"Too well," I say. "That is the problem."
He lowers himself to the bed, and the motion is fluid: wolf skin becomes human skin, fur recedes like a tide. He pulls on the jacket I bought him three days ago and tucks something blue into his pocket. He cuts a lock of my hair on instinct then rests his palm on my head as if to say: I choose you.
"You cut my hair," I say, half alarmed, half flattered.
"To remember," he replies, the word thin with meaning. "Keep it. Keep me."
"You can't stay," I say. "Not here. Not like this."
"Then where?" He says it like a challenge and like a plea at the same time.
The first time I took him from the roadside, he was bleeding, small and white except for a streak of red along his left leg.
"Little dog," I told him. "You need bandages."
He let me carry him home. He let me stitch him. He slept on my chest as if the warmth would hold him a lifetime.
"You left the lab," I say, "but they don't forget easily."
"They don't," Cyrus says. His thumbs trace patterns on my knuckles. "Which is why I will not tell."
"You won't tell?" This surprised me. "Who helped you then? Who opened the gate?"
"Felix," he says. "Felix opened the gate. He lied about it."
"Felix?" The lab man who came to my door the first time—insincere, brash, dangerous-looking. I remember the way he handled a syringe like it frightened him and like it did not.
"Yes." Cyrus lifts his head. "He wanted to help. He wanted us to trust. He does not trust easily either."
When Felix first knocked at my door, I almost didn't answer. He stood on my threshold like a question I didn't want to answer. He had asked for the wolf—forceful, clumsy, the kind of man who thinks the world owes him an explanation.
"Felix," I told him once, later, "why did you open the gate for him?"
Felix shrugged. "Because I could not let them break him into nothing. Because you were my colleague. Because I wanted to fix one thing."
"And then you came with the needle," I said. "You put it in me."
"It went wrong," he said. "I never meant—"
"I know." My voice did something small and steady. "You were right and wrong at the same time."
Cyrus is careful with words. When he speaks, every syllable carries the weight of the last trial he has survived. He stands in front of me like a guard I have asked to stay and the guard stayed.
"You can't keep him here forever," I say, sometimes angry with myself for having adopted a secret.
"I didn't plan to keep you forever," he says. "I planned to keep you safe."
"You locked my door last night," I say. "You fed me burned eggs and raw chicken. You do not cook meat."
"I tried," Cyrus says. He looks apologetic as if this is a sin on his soul. "I fail. I will try again."
"You are the one who taught yourself to iron," I counter, and the corner of his mouth lifts.
One night Felix came back with more than a brash apology. He came with menacing steps and a syringe. "You will bring him back," he whispered to me that first time, though I knew he meant Cyrus. He expected my hesitation to help him, to hand over the only gentle creature to those who had made gentle impossible.
"You're not taking him," I said, and my voice surprised me.
Felix's smirk was a razor. "He belongs to the lab."
"He belongs to no one," I told him. "You know the rules are wrong."
"Rules make us safe," he said.
"No," I said, "your rules bought them into cages. Your rules called them specimens."
The syringe found the meat of my arm anyway when Felix lunged. It hadn't been intended for me. It was a dose designed for wolf muscles, for tempering a wolf's mind—detention instead of custody, containment instead of care. It hurt but not as suddenly as the surprise did.
Cyrus smashed him.
"Don't," I croaked, barely able to move, my head light and angry and oddly calm.
"Don't kill him," I said, as if I could mediate between animal hunger and human law. "If you kill him they'll have reasons. They will not stop."
Cyrus crouched above Felix, wolf teeth glittering near a throat that had once been human. "He lied to me," Cyrus said. "He hurt you. He—"
"Stop." I reached out and touched his jaw. "Please. Put him down."
Cyrus did. He tossed Felix away like an animal that had made a mess.
Felix lay there and the syringe had gone in me. My arm fluttered with bruises and the world tilted.
"You will not bring him back," I rasped later, and Felix, groaning, agreed.
"I was trying to help," he said. There was a humility I had not expected. "But I've helped enough."
In the quiet that followed, Cyrus crawled into my arms and slept like a child who had swallowed too many nights. He was far more dangerous awake than asleep and far more dangerous loved than alone.
"You are bound to me," he said once, awake now and whisper-thick with something like fear and desire. "You smell of medicine and of leaving. Stay with me."
"If staying means being caged, I won't," I told him. "If staying means living in fear, I won't. If staying means you kill me with your love, I won't."
He looked puzzled. "Kill you?"
"You lick my neck and pretend you are wolf. You have hunted before. I am alive because I ran. I am alive because they stopped. I am alive because you let me be."
"Let me be," he repeated. "Then be."
We learned a kind of life. We went to the market. We ate apples he chose for me. He observed bodies in sunlight like a student of light.
"You know what this is?" I asked at the market, pointing to a cheap kite child flying a plastic tail.
Cyrus's eyes followed the string with a reverence that made my face hot. "Wind," he said. "And the toy that stretches with the sky."
We bought a kite. He insisted on ironing the skirt. He insisted on knotting the string so well it would not break.
"You're domestic," I told him.
"I watch movies," he said. "Movies teach me how to kiss."
He kissed like a man learning arithmetic: overcareful, exact, astonishing. The first time he kissed me in a changing room I nearly cried. "Outside," I scolded when his hands remembered only love and forgot discretion.
"For you, I will practice," Cyrus answered, and then pressed his forehead to mine.
We were mostly happy—small happy: park benches, boxed lunches, quiet nights, stolen kisses.
But the lab had not given up.
"They promised me clean evidence," I told Felix once, two days before the court would decide to move against them. "They promised me the last files to close the case."
He looked worried. "They are desperate."
"Which means they will strike."
"They will," Felix agreed. "But we will be ready."
The night they struck, they came for me instead of him.
I woke strapped to a table that smelled of disinfectant and ozone and stale fear, the lights burning like good intentions. A man named Frank—his manner clinical, his voice calm—smiled as he checked machines.
"You're articulate," he said. "You found patterns they couldn't. I don't blame you for leaving."
"I was collecting," I said. "You will be exposed."
Frank Yamada laughed softly. "You think your papers and your testimony are enough? We do what we must for science. We are not cruel for the sake of cruelty."
"You will be punished," I spat.
He cocked his head. "Not if we ensure you say nothing publicly."
"Felix lied to you," I said. "Felix helped Cyrus escape."
"Felix is a useful scapegoat if he lets himself be," Frank said.
They bound me and injected things into me and left. They left because they had assumed Cyrus would be easy bait. They left even though I had the little blue hair in my pocket and the necklace he had tied from a scrap of his own fur.
Cyrus did not come for the lab quietly. He tore the power out of their grids and showed them what a caged heart can do when it breaks loose.
When I was left in a cage, bruised but breathing, I heard the commotion before I saw it. Cyrus's fury is not pretty; it is the kind of weather you have to live through once. He ripped men down to where their words became breath.
I waited for the end that would cheese the edges off our life—arrest, trial, more cages—but the night surprised me.
"Find her," Cyrus snarled to someone in the dark. "Don't touch her again."
A man who had once been my colleague slumped by a machine. Felix stood outside the cell door when Cyrus backed out, raw and shaking.
"Go," Cyrus told the other lab people with heavy claws. "Go and tell the world I am not what you want me to be."
"They locked him," Felix said. "They tried to make him yours."
"They tried," Cyrus whispered to me later, when the guards had been tied and the damaged lab smelled like burnt wires. "They all will answer."
"How?" I asked.
"With you," Felix said. "With evidence. With witnesses."
We did not merely take revenge in whispers. We took the lab into the light the way rot gets air: fast and durable and final.
At the courthouse, the public hearing became a spectacle I had imagined in my worst dreams and in my sweetest triumphs. People filled rows like seeds; phones shone like constellations. The prosecutor laid out the cruelty: cages, injections, unconsented tests.
"Why would you do this?" someone shouted.
"We were looking for outcomes," Frank said blandly, like a man reading the weather.
"Outcomes?" someone else screamed back. "Outcomes are lives!"
Cyrus did not want to stand and testify. He did not want to be a spectacle without consent. But he came because he had always protected me in the rawest sense of the word.
"Do you hear them?" Frank asked in court even as the judge called order. "They would have destroyed us."
"You destroyed people," the prosecutor countered. "You destroyed the concept of consent."
"A wolf has no laws," Frank countered, and the entire room bristled.
"For whom did you say that, Frank?" a woman in the crowd asked. "For yourselves?"
"People were made into our steps," Frank said. "We climbed over them."
"Then you will fall," someone shouted. A chorus of agreement responded—photographs raised, whispers like a tide.
That was the first moment the crowd shifted. The lab had been quiet in its cruelty for years; this courtroom was not. This was the public unmasking.
"Take him out," Frank said finally, eyes frantic. He tried to bully the procession forward by shuffling words like furniture. "Look at me. I am a doctor."
"A doctor without a patient right to say no is a butcher," the prosecutor said.
The punishment had to be public. We wanted them to be watched when they were disgraced. We wanted the people who had refused to look during experiments to look now.
"Order," the judge said. "We will make a public exposure."
People were allowed to come into the atrium as a living archive of witness. The lab's managers were ordered to stand in the glassed enclave while survivors took the microphone.
"Why take me?" Frank yelled at one point, his voice small and failing in a room that had once applauded his grant successes. "This is harassment."
"Harassment?" a woman next to me said softly. "This is watching you explain what you did while the people you broke watch you try to explain it."
"They did not break me," Frank whimpered once, turning to that manlike defense that is useless when a city can see the bones behind your words.
A survivor named Guy Cobb—once a technician who had assisted on injection protocols—stood up, his voice cracked and then steady. "You told us we were advancing science," he said. "You told us we were helping. We marked their faces with numbers. I worked until I could not look at my hands. I want to speak."
He described cages where flesh had been written upon with wires. He described tests done for profit. He described names they had kept in code. Every word landed with a splintering sound.
The crowd shifted to in-person condemnation and to record everything. Phones raised; some people cried. Some stepped back as if they would be sullied by the smell of it all. Others shouted for immediate arrest.
Frank's face changed in the space of ten minutes. He went from placid to pale to seized with a thin panic. He tried to speak, to recast his years as necessary; his voice broke in the middle.
"You're a monster," someone yelled.
"Prove it," Frank sneered, but his sneer began to fracture when Guy named the people he'd killed and when a woman in the crowd produced a picture of a child who had dwindled after being tested on.
"They say your experiments were for species balance," a reporter asked him. "How many lives?"
"Balance," Frank repeated, desperately. "Balance preserves species."
"It cost people," the woman answered. "You call it balance but lives were taken."
He launched into denial—"We followed protocol," he said. The audience hissed like a wind.
"Protocol did not ask permission."
His expression changed like weather. He blinked hard, then reached for an alibi that was collapsing. He cried, a sound small and raw. "You don't understand," he stammered. "The research—"
"Stop," the judge said. "This is not a research summary. This is a reckoning."
The crowd buzzed; outside in the atrium, people whispered about the footage that would go online. Cameras rolled. Someone in the front row filmed the older man who had believed himself above reproach as he shrank. He looked into the lens and found no ally.
He tried a last defense: "We created samples for medicine."
"By stealing people's bodies?" someone shouted. "By shaving a child of speech into a number? You made a warehouse out of human life."
There were people in the crowd who had been held in small rooms and threatened with fear. They spoke in quiet voices that became the loudest noises.
"You expected us to be placid," a witness—Cyrus's mother, if that name existed now—said. "You expected us to be animals in cages. You taught us to believe you. Now your notebooks will be evidence in plain sight."
At this point Frank's composure dissolved. He reached out toward anyone who would take his hand, but only faces turned away. Journalists filmed, the judge gave him a quiet glare.
"Let it be known," the prosecutor said into the microphone, "that the actions of this lab were deliberate abuse. We will strip funding, revoke licenses, and pursue criminal charges."
"Shame on you!" someone in the crowd shouted. "Shame!"
The good part of this theatre was how small he became. The man who once ordered tests and read results was now being recorded by people whose loved ones had been turned into footnotes.
"A witness will now present a public account of what happened daily in these labs," said the judge.
One by one, survivors told their stories. They told them in low voices and high ones. They told of nights without sleep and of injected lights. They told of stitches in cheeks and of people who never spoke again. Each testimony was met with a wave of gasps, of cameras held tight, of hands covering mouths.
Frank's defenses began to dissolve into the air, outright denial crumbling into stammering shame. He moved from feigned competence to floundering ad hominem. "You are attacking science," he shrieked.
"You're attacking your conscience," someone said.
He lost his power to the crowd. He had been a man who controlled access to cages; now he had no control over the eyes looking into his face. People clapped when verdicts were read aloud, though the judge made sure due process ran its course. Still, the public element—this communal watching—was meant to punish in a way that mattered: reputation stripped, work dismantled, license revoked, public denouncement.
"You will be supervised," the judge told him, then allowed the crowd a moment to hiss if they wished. Cameras recorded his expression as he was led away. His face was no longer the face of a scientist; it was a man who had been observed long enough to feel his shame.
The crowd outside stayed for hours. People took pictures of the empty lab's glass door, of the courthouse steps that had hosted a living denunciation, of the papers that proved abuse.
"Do you feel better?" Felix asked me later that night, when the light had gone soft and the city hummed like a grateful thing.
"I feel exhausted," I said. "Mostly, I feel like we did it right."
Cyrus rested his head against my knee. His tail tapped in a slow, satisfied rhythm.
"He had to be punished in public," I murmured. "They had to see him shrink."
"Did he shrink?" Cyrus asked.
"He did," I answered. "He had to. So other people stop thinking cruelty is invisible."
The months after were small and domestic and luminous. The court ordered the lab closed; its assets seized; its records catalogued and made public. People who had been subjected to experiments received outreach, though justice is never wholly satisfying and compensation never adequate.
Felix left the courthouse that day different. He had been part of the machine and had chosen, belatedly, to stop it. He stayed in our lives in a quiet way, visiting with a sandwich, handing over a folder of documents he had been too frightened to submit earlier.
"You're one of the reasons he came out," I told Felix once, when he sat on my balcony like a repentant storm.
"You're one of the reasons he learned to trust," he countered. "We both did badly and we both tried better."
"What will you do now?" I asked.
He shrugged. "I will find work that stitches people back together instead of cutting them apart."
Cyrus learned patience inside a world that has little time to teach it. He taught himself to iron shirts so I could have neat collars. He learned to cook meat, finally—still a little raw, but edible. He learned words like "sorry" and "please" until they felt less like commands and more like the weather between us.
"We will walk in sunlight," I told him one morning.
"And at night," he said, "we will sleep without wires in the walls."
It was accurate enough.
Months later, on a clear day, I found myself touching the pendant he had given me—a small vial with his grey fur tied by a blue string.
"Did you mean the vial to be a tracker?" I asked, laughing.
He shook his head. "I meant it to be a promise."
"A promise?"
He nodded. "When I went out that day and left you alone, I cut a piece of myself. I put it near you to say: if I cannot be there, you have a piece of me."
"You left a tracking device," I said, smiling. "You used a notion of love as a GPS."
He grinned, showing a sliver of teeth. "Love has many uses."
The pendant was our story and the courthouse was the city's memory of their crimes.
On the last day I mention: I hold the pendant in my hand and wind the string around my finger.
"Where will we go next?" I ask.
"Where the wind takes the kite," Cyrus says.
We step out into a world that has learned to look. We walk, he with his grey ears faint against the sky, his tail a slow banner of living fur, and I with the blue-haired lock safe in my pocket. The crowd may forget the faces who spoke at the courthouse, but they will not forget the images: a small white dog who became the man who would not be caged, a woman who refused to be silenced, and a pendant of grey hair that read like a promise every time I felt it warm against my skin.
The End
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