Angry Red
By Musuko

“And how has your week been overall, Mister Harper?”
She looked across at me with the expression of calm receptiveness that I had seen too many times before. It was like they’ve got some factory somewhere churning out these guys. Care Workers man. Fucking weirdos.
	I sighed and leaned back in the chair. She was young and pretty and I suppose I couldn’t really be too hard on her. Probably had the best intentions and all that. Still, the sun was shining through the window behind her, and the pack of smokes in my hip pocket were itching to be enjoyed. Much rather be out there than in this stuffy little office, watching the dust motes dance.
	“Fine,” I said. “My week’s been just fine.”
	She glanced at the paperwork in front of her. She wasn’t really looking at it. She was just drawing my attention to it. All subtle like. I hated when they did that. Treating me like a fucking kid. I tightened my jaw and waited for it.
	“Tell me about what happened on tuesday, Mister Harper.”
	I glared at the stupid clock on the wall. Who has a clock with dancing ducks on, for fuck sake. “Nothing happened.”
	“Mister Harper.”
	“Why are you asking me?” I snapped. “You know what happened. You’ve got it all there in your...report thing.”
	“I would like to hear it from you.”
	Her soft, measured voice was tailor-made to defuse me, and that only made me want to get angrier. The trouble was that the voice worked, and I felt it all ebb away. And the fact that it worked made me want to get even angrier. I clicked my grippers together as if trying to create a spark. I felt uncomfortable in my skin. Fucking care workers.
	“Alright, fine.” I lifted my arms as if in surrender. The hinge on the left one squeaked a little. “These happened, alright? I was just in a bar, minding my own, and this fuckwit starts trouble. Called me a cripple.”
	“How did that make you feel, Mister Harper?”
	“You fucking know how it made me feel,” I snarled. I reached over and jabbed at the papers with my right arm’s gripper. “Says right there I bet. Smashed his fucking teeth in, didn’t I? And before you start, don’t. I’ve heard it enough times, okay? Sometimes it’s right to get angry. I’ve got a right, don’t I? I’ve got…”
	I could feel it welling up. Damn her. I needed a reaction from her, anything. A snippy retort, or some condescending comment. Just something to know I was getting to her. Something to show me that my venting was accomplishing something! Instead she just fucking sat there serene and understanding, her brow creased with a concerned frown she’s probably practiced in a mirror. And I knew that it was all intended to make me feel valued and listened to and all that junk, but instead it just made me feel pathetic. It made me feel...impotent.
	I sagged back in the seat again, the anger washing away just as quickly as it had come. I pinched at the bridge of my muzzle. At least, I tried to. The brace slipped on my shoulder stump again and the gripper just bumped uselessly against my nose.
	“I’m sorry,” I muttered. “Just...sorry, okay?”
	She waited in silence for me to calm down. And I did calm down, because I knew that if I didn’t we would just be sat there pointlessly for ages. Honestly, they were like robots, all running off the same script every damn time. Next up would be…
	“Have you given any more thought to looking at the more modern prosthetics we have available for you?”
	“No,” I said, bluntly. We had been through it all before. But, just in case she forgot, I added, “I’m not gonna hide what I am with some fake furred arms stuffed full of motors and computers. No thank you.”
	“Alright, Mister Harper. That’s your choice and you’re free to make it.”
	“Damn right.”
	“However, following your most recent incident, and in light of the others in the past…”
	“Where are you going with this?” I growled, sharply on edge now.
	“I’m inclined to recommend other support methods.”
	It was never good when they started getting euphemistic like that. I leaned forwards and rested my elbows on the table with a pair of hard thunks. I tried to stare her down, but she was used to this.
	“What kind of support methods?”
	“Home assist care.”
	The jolt of it rippled through my body and I thought I would reach across the table and throttle her. I bit back the growl and tried to make my voice sound more measured. I knew where the power really lay. And if I made too much of a fuss, she could “recommend” me right back into the assisted living ward. The mess of paperwork in front of her gave her that power. And she knew it. And her kindly, concerned eyes knew it. Fucking care workers.
	“Fine,” I said, trying to sound accepting through gritted teeth.
	“Excellent,” she said, and her smile dazzled. I felt like a fucking child. “I’ll arrange a visit for you tomorrow morning.” She gathered her papers together and stood up. Her paw extended across the table, and I eyed it cautiously before clumsily bumping my gripper against her palm and letting her gently shake it. “I will see you in a week, Mister Harper.”

I sat in my armchair and glared at him as he moved around my living room, spending a lot of energy for very little useful effort. Or at least, that’s how it seemed to me. Mainly he seemed to be running his mouth while he picked up each and every damn ornament and ran a cloth underneath them.
	“Uhuh,” I grunted. I had a mug of coffee at my side, but I’d be damned if I was going to let him watch me struggle to get it to my lips. It was bad enough that the fucker brewed it for me without asking, like I was some helpless invalid who needs looking after.
	God damn it, that was what he thought I was. That’s why he was here. Look after poor Mister Harper. He done and lost his arms in the war, what a hero, thank you for your service, blah blah blah.
	“Uhuh,” I grunted again. I wasn’t listening to a damn thing he was saying. At least he was alright to look at. I didn’t know they hired gym freaks to look after cripples like me. He definitely had a body that had been built with machines in well-lit air-conditioned comfort. He had all the right sort of muscle for showing off. Probably never done any real hard work in the dirt and the grease. He was young, I guessed. Probably only twenty maybe? I snorted. Heh. Young buck. Literally. Big ol’ rack on his head, hoof tips on his fingers. Hunky deer boy cleaning up my living room.
	Kinda amused me, and I smirked to myself, watching him, tapping my gripper gently against the mug, exercising my shoulder muscles. Who sends a deer guy to look after a wolf anyway?
	“Hey,” I said, and he stopped, looking over at me, a small wooden case in his paw as he dusted underneath it. “What’s your name again?”
	“Luke,” he said, infinitely patient. It prickled me.
	“That’s it. Luke. Put that fucking thing back and leave it alone.”
	He stared at me for a moment. Then instead of putting the box back...he opened it and looked inside.
	“You little shit!” I yelled, jumping up from my chair. My arm knocked the mug flying, splashing lukewarm coffee across the floorboards. Damn thing. I still hadn’t got around to adjusting the shoulder brace. I stormed across to him, fire burning in my gut, ready to smash his face in! But I managed just enough self control to snatch the box away instead. My gripper didn’t squeeze hard enough to hold onto it and it clattered away onto the hearth, sending its contents skittering into the ash, where it gleamed half-buried.
	“You...fucking…” I growled through my teeth. And he just smiled that calm smile designed to placate me. I bent down to grab up the medal, but my gripper couldn’t get an accurate hold. I was too angry! I beat at the ashes with clumsy frustration.
	“I apologise, Mister Harper. Let me help.”
	He plucked the medal, my medal, out with ease and dusted it off with his cloth, before setting it neatly back in its box and setting it back on the mantle. He left the box lid up, proudly displaying the medal, and I slammed it angrily closed.
	“Why don’t you like to show your medal, Mister Harper?”
	“Why do you think?” I snarled, walking back to my chair, kicking the mug away.
	“You should be proud.”
	“Proud?!” I spun on him. The brace had completely slipped now, and my left arm hung limp and useless. I gestured with the right, wishing I had a middle finger to hold up. “Of what? These?”
	He had enough shame to look away. Quietly, he went back to dusting.
	“Fucking doe-eyed deer piece of shit.”
	He didn’t rise to it. Just another harmless comment from a broken, harmless wolf. So I slumped back down in my chair and seethed. And the anger faded away, as it always did, swinging back away from one mood to another. I closed my eyes. The pain meds that kept my back muscles from roaring at me tended to send me easily into inconvenient naps. But this time, I was glad to be able to get away. Maybe when I opened my eyes again, Luke would be gone.

Our side knew that the school was being used as a prison and hospital. It was why they didn’t bomb it. Had they known what was really going on in there, I’d like to think they would have atomised the place. It would have been a kindness to us.
	Time was impotent to dull my memories of the place. I lay again on the table, lashed in place with belts. I heard jets overhead. Ours. But they were not there for me. The distant rumbles of bombing shook the walls. They hadn’t even taken the kids’ drawings down. I stared up at them as I tried to ignore the searing heat that waved above me. The fuckers babbled in their own language, but I knew mockery when I heard it. And though they didn’t understand how the tool they stole from my med-kit worked, they sure knew what it could do.
	They kept me awake for it. Kept me awake with my own damn adrenaline injectors. My own tools used against me. They turned me into an animal on that table. They wiped out my dignity. And they laughed as I pissed and shit myself. I screamed and begged as my flesh sizzled. They taunted me with the chunks they sliced from me, waving them in front of my nose, before dumping them to the flies in the corner. It was so easy for them. No blood, no mess, no danger of killing me. I had delivered to them the perfect fucking tool, and they were fucking me up with it.
	There was only the boy to keep me from slamming my head into the wall of my cell. He brought food to me and helped me eat it, instead of leaving me to crawl about and fall flat on my face trying to lap at the bowl on the floor. He added bread to the slops. I even tasted a little salt. Sometimes he brought me a little of his own meagre rations. He never talked much. I never learned his name, and I doubt he knew mine. But I stopped seeing the uniform he wore. I stopped thinking of him as my guard and captor. Instead, I saw the teenaged boy he was. And I saw the awe and respect in his eyes as he fed me, the way his eyes wandered across the muscles he didn’t have, the thick fur that contrasted to his smooth scales. They had me naked at all times, no way to hide a weapon or tool. He would kneel between my legs as he fed me, spooning slop to my lips.
	I knew it was going to happen sooner or later, and it surprised me that he waited so long. His expression never changed, and his spoon never stopped its robotic motions, as his other paw slid underneath my sheath and his fingertips gently massaged at the fur. I thought about this kid, probably growing up on some ignorant little farm somewhere, dragged into the service of some despot he’d never heard of before, stuffed in a uniform and made to commit atrocities he’d never recover from. And now he meets this exotic foreigner, strong and tough. My scent must have been a powerful spice in his nose. And here he was, burning with teenage lusts he probably had never been told about. So while the other guards drank and gambled and shoved their cocks into the screaming whores from the trembling city, he knelt in my cell and stroked my cock, his eyes searching my face, fascinated by every twitch and moan as he learned how to pleasure me.
	I would always remember his first smile, on that first day he brought me over the edge, as he lapped the sticky evidence from his fingers, trailing his long tongue and closing his eyes.
	The days blurred together. Terrible, helpless monotony, sat in a tiny square of concrete, my waste stinking in a hole in one corner, my nose always itching and demanding a scratch from the arms I no-longer had. I scratched the days off on the wall with my toe claws. But I just wasn’t flexible enough to reach my face with them. Not back then, anyway. The break from the misery always came when he arrived to my cell. He worshipped me. First with his paws, then later with his tongue. And nobody came to investigate my moans. I got louder each time, and he always stayed silent, kneeling prostrate before me, his mouth flexing perfectly around my cock.
	The bombing got louder each day. I saw less and less of the other guards. I started to think that only my boy remained. Finally, he spoke to me one day as he wiped his lips and swallowed, stumbling through the few clumsy words he knew in my language.
	“We go. You. Me.” He pointed towards the cell door. I should have felt fear, but I didn’t. He wasn’t going to lead me to the yard and put a bullet in my head. Nor was I going to the interrogation rooms. His eyes told me what was really happening. Escape. He wanted to get away from that place just as badly as I did. And I’m sure in his mind he had a fantasy of being free together, of living back home with me, on his knees and serving the wolf he’d come to treat like a god. I wanted it too, this sweet little lizard boy who saw me as a man while everyone else saw me as a helpless cripple.
	If only…
	One of us escaped. The crackle of the fire and the crash of concrete that took him from me in some derelict suburb halfway out of the city still burned in my mind. It was the agony that jolted me from my sleep, as it did every time.

I lashed out with both arms even before I was fully awake, instincts ramping up to their highest, heart pounding. My left gripper closes on flesh and I squeeze. Rip and kill. That’s the instinct.
	But when my senses resolve themselves I see Luke’s face practically in mine, with my gripper holding a fold of his fur at his neck, too weak to do any harm. Just a pathetic and harmless gesture, all bark and no bite. He looks at me with those placid, caring eyes, and I just want to smack him in the face.
	“What are you doing?” I growled.
	He tugs at my shoulder, as if to show me. “Fixing your arm. It’s slipped down.” He stands back from me, sliding out from my gripper as if it were nothing. The little rubber-coated pads click together. “There, that’s better, Mister Harper.”
	I let my growl rumble. I wanted him to fear me, to respect me. But he just looked...pitying. Oh sure, he tried to hide it behind that well-trained caring exterior, but I knew what he thought. I was less than a man. I was weak and helpless and I needed looking after. The memory of my lizard boy burned in my head. I remembered the way his eyes had looked when he stared up at me from my crotch. All that respect and worship, and none of it was showing here in Luke’s eyes. My growl faded away. What was the point?
	His eyes dropped, just a flicker. And I didn’t need to look down to see what had caught his attention. My dream had left me with a hardon, pressing up into the crotch of my slacks. He tried to keep his blank expression, but I saw the recognition there.
	“Well, go on then,” I snarled. “Don’t just stare at it. Suck it, you little prick. You’re here to serve me aren’t you?”
	He turned away from me, heading towards the kitchen. “It’s time to start dinner, Mister Harper.”
	I slammed my gripper against the armrest. It didn’t have the same satisfying thump of a proper fist. My head span with every insult I could think of, including a whole bunch newly invented for this moment. I felt tears prick at my eyes as rage turned into...that other thing. And I knew that this couldn’t go on. I had to do something to pull myself back onto the top again, else I would go outside and feed myself the barrel of my shotgun. If my grippers could manage it, that is. And to feel like I was on top again, I needed someone to be underneath me. I needed my lizard boy back again. Seeing as that wasn’t an option…
	The ideas drifted in my head, then suddenly locked down into perfect clarity, as if the plan had always been hiding there and I was merely discovering it. I felt a wash of cooling calm fall over me like a blanket of dewy fog, and I smiled. I felt crazy. I probably was crazy. But I felt free, and for that fleeting moment I soared in my own head. And I knew what I was going to do. It came in an instant flash, a fully-formed idea. And as the idea stirred in my head, it swelled into a plan.
	I got up and walked past the kitchen door. He leaned back from the oven, glancing questioningly. I stared at him for a moment, imagining his body as I saw it in my head, and couldn’t help but smile.
	“Yes?” he said.
	“Going outside. Got some stuff to do in the shed.”
	“Alright, Mister Harper.”
	I paused for a moment, thinking. Ah, to hell with it. I grinned. “Cut this Mister Harper crap and call me Red.”
	He smiled back, innocent and ignorant. This was better, much better. The dark imagination clouded like a brooding storm behind my eyes, but outside I was just Mister Red Harper, troubled and helpless, grudgingly opening up to my new helper, and he was buying into it wholesale. He didn’t know what I knew inside, and that made me feel like I had power again.
	“Alright, Red,” he said, cheerfully loading a chicken with onions and garlic. I left him to it. The shed and its goodies awaited.
	I used to like coming out here to relax, back when I had my arms. I could make the tools here sing, and I could shape wood and metal into anything I desired. I could make life out of materials here. All of life’s clutter and concerns would wash away out of my head, and I would be able to focus on the calming joy of sliding a blade through wood, or sparking a weld onto steel.
	Now the tools rusted away on their boards on the wall, and the stack of planks by the door were silently warping and dying, denied their destiny. By the back wall, covered by a sheet, was the cage I had built for my friend’s uncontrollable dog. She used to chew to bits the normal wire mesh ones. This was my gift to my friend. But then I went away to war and the dog died anyhow. So there it was, under the sheet, without any paint, and probably completely coated in rough rust. I stared at it for a moment. I hadn’t thought about it until that moment, but now it seemed perfect. Fate lining up just right for me.
	I brushed a few scraps of wood off the big workbench and blew some sawdust away. My grippers rested on the smooth, sturdy surface, and I remembered what it felt like to feel the wood under my fingers. I grabbed a pencil and, working from memory, I marked the various spots on the board with crosses, plotting out a rough anatomy. Then I drew in a dozen more, blotting out the obvious pattern. Time for the drill.
	The fucking thing damn near rattled my arms clean off. It bucked and skittered its spinning tip across the wood, and I fought hard to hold it in place. My back was a searing fire of pain. I hadn’t taken any pain pills that day, and the exertion of manipulating my arms with enough strength to hold the drill in place was turning into a torture. But I fought it, feeling the elation of having a mountain to climb. One by one the holes punched through the thick workbench, and I smoothed the splinters away with my gripper.
	The wire was a bit easier. There was a big spool of it stacked with the wood, still wrapped in its protective plastic. I unrolled some and tugged it between my grippers, feeling it slide through. Woven steel. Very strong. My wire cutter’s blades were blunt, and I felt miserably feeble trying to lever the handles together. Each length of wire ended up with a ragged end, but that didn’t matter. I crimped loops into the ends of each one. And by the time I had carried them all over to the workbench, I was sweating and exhausted.
	“It will be worth it,” I muttered to myself as I fed the wires down through the holes in the workbench. The ends dangled down underneath, and up above the wire formed a loop between the two holes and the surface of the workbench. I slid the wrist of one arm underneath the wire and imagined the loops underneath being pulled together and locked in place with a thick, sturdy cable tie. And I had a workbench covered in these wires, each one positioned and ready to take the corresponding body part of the victim who would soon lay down helpless and motionless. The cold feeling of power was getting stronger inside me, and I let myself bathe in it as I looked down at the hard reality in front of me.
	I heard his knock at the shed’s door and grunted. I grabbed a tarp and slung it loosely across the workbench, then turned to face the tools on the wall. I lifted a rasp off its pegs and made as if I were cleaning it off with an oily rag.
	“Come in.”
	Luke ducked his head around the door. I sent a smile his way. All friendly and disarming. “Your dinner is ready, Red. Whenever you’re ready.”
	Fate gives you opportunities.
	“Are you eating too?” I said. “Join me for dinner. You made it, after all.”
	“That’s very kind of you, Red. I’ll go plate it up.”
	And while he did that, I went inside and upstairs to clean up. And to fetch some of the pills from my medication box.
	The chicken smelled great, but my stomach felt chewed up. I waved him away from the carcass.
	“Stop. Let me do it.”
	“I really think I should.”
	I stared him down. “Let me carve my own damn food in my own damn house!”
	He held the knife to me and I held his gaze as I took it. The handle slipped in my gripper, and I clenched my shoulder muscles harder, gritting my teeth through the pain. I kept staring until he sat down. Then, finally, I set to work cutting at the breast. The bird rocked underneath the knife, and the blade made no progress. But that was okay. While he was watching that, with a pitying look in his face, and no doubt aching to be allowed to do it for me, my other gripper was hovering over his plate, squeezing the pill capsule and disgorging its tasteless white powder onto his meat, soaking into the juices and disappearing, invisible.
	I dropped the knife with a clatter and a growl of frustration that was only half fake. “Fine, you cut it.”
	He yammered incessantly through the meal. He probably thought he was being friendly. I didn’t listen to any of it. I concentrated on fumbling the hunks of chicken and salad into my mouth and kept my eyes on his plate, watching him clear it, imagining his voice engaged in producing very different sounds. I watched him as he grew groggy, his voice slurring, and I saw the confused frown creep into his perfectly cultured expression. And then, with a wet splat and clatter of crockery, he fell face down onto his plate.
	I set my fork down. “Hmm. Probably should have got you into the shed before knocking you out.”
	I went to fetch some rope.

Finally, with a last grunt of effort, and the use of a sturdy pulley, I got his limp frame hauled up onto the workbench. I dropped the rope from my teeth and winced. Felt like I’d tugged a few teeth loose dragging him out to the shed.
“Fuck, you weigh a bitch ton and a half. You know that?”
He didn’t answer of course. If I couldn’t see he was breathing, I’d think he was pretty much dead. Powerful stuff those pills. Blessed relief from daily pain. Not for him though.
I got to work threading the wires around his limbs. I made sure they were extra tight, digging into his fur and cutting into his flesh. The cable ties were easy to cinch up. Just a tug with my teeth and they were snug. And bit by bit, I had him bound down, metal wire looped over every conceivable part of him. I’d misjudged his height a little, and the wire I planned to go over his neck was too high up. But, making do with what I had, I wrapped the wire in a greasy rag and pulled it down into his mouth, pressing right against the corners of his lips as I tied it up underneath.
Now I had him secured, I had the luxury of clearing him ready for my attention, without worrying that he might wake. The big garden shears could have done with oiling, but they snipped cleanly enough. And with both my grippers working at the handles, I was slowly able to cut away the inconvenience of his clothing.
“Nice body,” I mused. “Been working out. Knew you had. Buff buck boy.”
The rags went onto the floor. I’d gather them up later. They’d mop up oil spills and spit-shine boots. Already they were hard to identify as clothing. And the buck on the workbench was raw and naked, a fetching picture of masculine perfection. His waist was perhaps a bit thin, and his butt was a bit rounded. It went with the slightly feminine leanness of his face. This why he went for all that body-building, perhaps? To burn away all that girlishness? I wondered where it came from. Prey genetics? Or cocksucking genes? Either way, it would all be the same in the end.
I set the tool from my war days between his feet. Such an innocent-looking thing, made of reassuring white plastic and medical-grade chromed steel. But I knew what it could do. I knew what it had done. I remembered the sizzle and the screaming agony in my arms. And soon...all I needed to do was wait.
So I fetched a book and sat next to him, feet up on the workbench, holding the book in my grippers and turning the pages with my tongue.
He groaned awake like a cliché. He’d probably picked it up subconsciously from pretty much every movie ever made. I felt a smile on my face as I closed my book. Clearly he hadn’t been trained to wake silently, to hide that you’re awake so that you can assess the situation. But then, why would he need to know how to do that? I stood up and let myself appear in his view.
“Erk,” he said, so gracefully, discovering the gagging wire. “Ads oing on?”
To his credit, he didn’t seem to be panicking very much. But his scent betrayed him. It didn’t matter how civil our society got, you could never escape the basic biology inherent in us all. I was a predator species, and he was a prey species, and when he got scared the scent flared in my nose and tapped into some very, very old brain hardware. I felt those circuits flash alive, and I itched to flex claws that I no-longer had. I fought to keep the saliva from becoming undignified in my mouth. And I ignored his question. Instead of my answer, I held up the tool.
“Do you know what this is?”
His eyes flitted, looking down at himself, and I saw his arms and legs flex against the wires, impressive muscles failing to break the thick cable ties under the workbench. Just as I had thought; all show and no strength.
“Leg ee go!”
“It’s got a very catchy name. The P-VIP. Stands for something technical, and I’m sure you don’t care what. We used to just call it the Sabre.”
I pressed the button on its side with my gripper. From within, the nine inch blade shot out like a flick knife. It was entirely blunt, with a square tip. But a filament along its leading edge started to crackle and glow. Beneath me, Luke started to squeal and struggle, while I turned the blade from side to side, watching the heat grow.
“This used to be my best friend out in battle. I was a medic, did you know that? I had to do a lot of unpleasant things to save lives. When this thing came along, well, it was like all my Christmases come at once. One sweep of this and you could lop off any limb. Swift, clean and cauterised. It was an absolute miracle. Instead of spending minutes trying to staunch a gushing artery, I could spend seconds cutting the limb free and knowing it’d hold up until the poor fucker could get somewhere safe. Sometimes, if they were lucky, I’d have enough time to tranq them first.”
I swung the blade and listened to the crackle as it cut through the air. I acted like I was ignoring Luke’s shrieks. But in truth, I was bathing in them! Oh it felt good to hear his smooth, confident attitude descend into this animalistic mess.
“When I got captured, they used my own Sabre against me. This very one, in fact. I really shouldn’t have this thing at all. It’s ten years away from seeing the light of day in any domestic hospital. But I thought it’d be a good keepsake.” I looked at him, then laughed. “Of a sorts. Who knows why I kept it. Post traumatic stress making me do something weird, perhaps?”
“Unggh!” He flinched as I brought the blade close to his paw. His fingers trembled and tried to pull away from the heat.
“You wanted to know how I got that medal? I got it because they chopped me up, bit by bit, from my fingertips up to my fucking elbows! And every step of the way I screamed and begged. I would have told them anything they wanted to know, but they didn’t ask me any questions. I was just a toy for them to play with. And they just laughed as they cut into me. Can you imagine what that is like?”
I let the blade touch against his thumb, just a light brush against his fur. It left a smoking gouge in his flesh, seared and blackened. His eyes shot wide, losing focus, staring with pinprick pupils up into some distant emptiness beyond the shed’s roof. He gurgled wetly, then grunted out a sharp cry of indignant rage.
“And you think I want to display the medal and remind myself of all that? You fucking stupid piece of shit.”
I dragged the chair over and sat myself down, bringing my view down close to his squirming paw. I positioned the blade horizontally across the base of his fingers, one sizzling inch away from the fur.
“Pleath no!” he cried.
“You wanted to help me? Well, now you actually can. Every fucking psychologist said I needed to come to terms with what happened to me. Well, let’s consider this to be my way of dealing with it, shall we? Consider it therapy. You ready to help me, you selfless, sanctimonious prick?”
“Pleath!”
I let my mind fall back to that day in the classroom. I let my gripper drop down, an effortless motion, bringing the blade into contact with the wood, leaving a blackened line. I heard the crackle of his flesh and bone slicing into nothingness between them. His scream blasted like gunfire around me. I closed my eyes and let it wash over me, and I felt powerful again.
There, laying on the wood, were his fingers. Severed and useless, they would never again move to his command. He would never feel them again. I let myself think about that for a while, letting him whimper and plead ignored. It was a strange notion to grasp. I don’t think I had quite come to terms with it for my own arms. I mean, how could I?
But now I stared at his fingers and I felt it. The vicarious truth of it sank in. Like me, he would never again stroke his fingers through fur and feel the soft, feathery smoothness. He would never turn the pages of a book. He would never throw a ball and feel it roll off his fingers with a perfect spin. On and on, the list went. I felt breathless. It was amazing how such a tiny movement of my gripper and the tool it held could forever rob him of so much future. I felt an ugly twist in my gut and a wicked fire behind my eyes, and I knew what my captors must have felt.
“And we’ve got a long way to go…”
He thrashed his head from side to side as far as the wires would allow him. I held the blade poised above his wrist and watched as he flopped his ruined paw around in a desperate fight to escape. The wire dug into his fur and drew blood as he sawed his forearm against it. How could anyone hope to endure such nightmarish reality?
“You’re going to have to,” I muttered, half to myself. “I had to. You have to. Feel it, you little shit…”
The searing blade cut through his wrist like it was marshmallow. The crackling fire blazed white hot. Smoke rolled up past my face. And in my ears was his unearthly howl and the creak of straining wood and metal as he thrashed on the workbench. Then in the next instant there was only silence. And as I lifted the blade up from the stump of his wrist I saw that my big butch buck had passed clean away to blissful oblivion of unconsciousness. I clicked the Sabre off and watched the glow fade.
“What a fucking lightweight,” I spat.
 I brought him back around with a dose of stimulant, injected with the special applicator the hospital had kindly provided to allow me to self-medicate with my limited dexterity. How considerate of them. I reminded myself to thank Luke’s colleagues for their care. I wondered if they could ever imagine that their drug was being used to bring this deer back to the searing agony of reality, one which he now had no hope of escaping.
I lifted the Sabre and clicked it on. The low, weak groan that escaped his gagged mouth was almost as delicious to the ear as his screams.
“Giving up already? You don’t even know how much I’m going to take yet.”
He stared unfocused into nothing. Drool trickled down from the corner of his mouth. His cheek twitched beneath one eye, and with it I could see the rapid pace of his heartbeat. Perhaps a little too much stimulant. His senses must have been blazing. And into that mix I sliced the fire of blistering pain through his elbow. His groans turned to guttural cries, and he gagged on his own saliva while his powerful body convulsed like a landed fish. The acrid stink of urine hit my nose, and I glanced down to see the spreading patch of darkness on the crotch of his uniform. It brought back memories. I knew how terrible it must have felt for him. The sympathetic twinge in the limbs I no-longer had made my grippers twitch, and I nearly dropped the Sabre.
“Just there,” I whispered. I leaned across and brought my smiling face into his line of sight. His eyes barely flickered recognition. “You’ll be happy to learn that I’m done with this arm. However, we’ve now got the other arm to go, and this one’s going to be a lot worse, because you know what’s coming.”
He made a quiet retching noise. His eyes wavered and locked onto me.
“I bet you’re wishing you had sucked my dick right about now.”
“Gluh...pleath,” he wheezed. I ignored him. Around to the other side of the workbench I went. My back hissed with pain with the effort needed to constantly squeeze my muscles against the activators that kept my grip tight around the Sabre. It was worth it. I gloried in the moment as I lopped off each of his fingers, knowing that there was no going back for him or for me, and this moment would never be repeated.
I touched the blade to his wrist and looked over to his face and found myself shocked to see him staring back.
“Pleah.”
Just fatigue and defeat, nothing more. I growled. This wasn’t fair. It couldn’t be over already. Where were the screams? The rage? The fight?
“Fucking prey species,” I spat. The blade sizzled through his wrist, lopping his paw off. I wasted no time and moved it to his elbow, cutting through to complete the amputation. “No fight in you. Utterly pathetic.”
I walked down to the other end of the workbench and looked back. His arms, or what remained of them, were bound down with wires across his biceps. The stumps were fused, blackened knots of burnt flesh that I knew would heal nicely into tough scars, perfect for crawling around on. I eyed his knees and waved the Sabre carelessly, thinking.
“Hmm,” I mused. All the while he stared at me, gripped with terror, muted into irritating silence. I leaned back and peered at his feet. They looked so soft and vulnerable, like I could scrape a claw across them and melt him into squealing hysterics. As I stared, the toes flexed in nervous panic, as if they were little creatures of their own and they were sensing their doom. The little hooflets he had at their tips were delicate and dainty, so utterly unlike the big strong buck they were attached to. I reached my empty gripper towards one…
...and then stopped, and a burning bile of anger rose in me. Oh sure, I could use my toes to scratch and tickle. I could lap with my tongue and rub with my face, feeling the smooth pads and soft, silky fur. And maybe it would feel a little like the joy I felt when I stroked my lizard boy’s adorable little feet and listened to him coo gently, a sound of pleasure in that bombed out hell. But right at that moment I had wanted to stroke my fingertips along the curved arch of his foot, and the sudden jolt of reality was that...I couldn’t. I could never do that. And if I touched with that gripper I would feel nothing. My reverence turned to sickening revulsion, and with a howl of rage I brought the blade swinging down, smacking into his knee, searing through bone and sinew, cutting clear through the thick limb until the wood flashed into flame beneath. One foot went limp, and his groaning broke back into a weak wail. I swung my shoulders, back burning, and brought the blade sliding sideways through the other knee. The stink of burning flesh and fur filled the room, and the other foot went limp. Just dead meat now.
I clicked the Sabre off and let it drop with a hard clatter onto the floor. I stepped backwards, feeling with my tail, until the edge of the chair caught against my calves, and I slumped down into it. On the table the remaining parts of the buck that still had life trembled bleeding under the wires. He made noises that no-longer even seemed like they came from a thinking creature. He sounded like the wounded animal he was. It was like listening to a dying bird, a creature that couldn’t think, but knew by instinct alone that it was dying. Except he wasn’t dying. He would live. He would live such a life that would make him dream of dying. Had I broken his mind entirely with the ordeal? Were prey species so weak that this could finish them off?
I groaned, sinking further into the chair. Lightning crackled down my back, sharp stinging pain that throbbed outwards into a deep red ache. My nerves were protesting. I had exerted myself too much. I felt old, and I felt tired, and Luke wasn’t going to go anywhere. He had no control any more. That belonged to me alone…
“A short...rest now,” I murmured, closing my eyes.

When I woke again, to the drool on my chin and the itchy feeling that always came from sleeping in my clothes, I thought he was dead. He wasn’t moving. And it seemed to me that he wasn’t breathing. But he came alive alright when I prodded his raw stump with my gripper. He bit down on the gag wire and moaned in weak distress.
	“Ah,” I said. “Good.”
	I fetched a bucket. I had a distasteful job to do. His head tried to turn and watch as I lifted up all the chunks of his arms that were no-longer attached to him and dumped them into the bucket. They made sickening meaty sounds when they landed. When I looked back at him I saw the tears roll down his cheeks. Must have been a strange feeling to see parts of your body just get carted away. I never did know what happened to my arms. Probably fed to dogs.
	The legs went in last, and I chuckled at the sight of them sticking up out from the bucket, feet hanging limp. So pretty. Almost a waste. I dragged the bucket out into the yard, wincing from the strain on my shoulders, and kicked it over next to the compost pile. A quick drag with the rake and all the buck meat was buried under the steaming putrification, soon to become plant feed too.
“Feels weird to know you’re never going to see them again, doesn’t it? I know what you’re feeling. ‘Cept I had to go through it in a dirty cell. You get to come in the house if you’re good. Isn’t that nice?”
He stared at me, expression unreadable. Mind broken already? I rolled my eyes. Down under the table I wrestled a pair of scissors into position to start cutting at the cable ties. A tune started to grow in my head, and I let it out with lazy humming. Some half-forgotten pop song or foreign tune I’d once heard leaking out from a bombed out house somewhere. I shuffled along on my knees and clipped at each cable tie. Clip, shuffle, clip shuffle. And with each cut the wires tugged up towards the wood, the slack gratefully being taken up by the buck above. As I cut the last tie at his neck, the wires around me suddenly shot upwards, disappearing through the holes in the wood, and I heard a thud and the sudden drop of shadow beside me.
“Hey!” I cried.
I scrambled from beneath the workbench as the buck rocked towards the door, his stumped limbs lurching and flailing, but making ever forwards progress. I cracked my head against the workbench and hissed as the pain blossomed in my skull. Everything span around, and I saw him at the door, trying to jump up at the door handle, collapsing back with each attempt, his seared leg stumps giving out beneath him and forcing him down onto his rump.
I started to laugh. And he turned to look at me as I unfolded myself from beneath the workbench. The sight of his pitiful face made me laugh even harder. I walked over to him. His head tilted to watch me as I loomed over him. My gripper lifted, joint creaking, then swung down and hit his cheek with a meaty thump. The metal of the gripper’s joint caught in his fur and wrenched a short gash that instantly welled with blood. He cried out wordlessly and fell to the side, collapsing off his clumsy stumps and falling into a sobbing heap on the floor.
“Why?” he croaked.
I lifted my gripper and inspected it, flexing it open and closed. Not damaged. Good. “Because you tried to escape.”
“No,” he gasped. He rolled onto his side and curled up. His eyes fixed on the ruined stump of his left arm. “Why…”
“Oh that.” I waved an arm as if dismissing a triviality. “Treating me like I’m some crippled baby who needs your pity? Your face when I demanded you suck me off? You didn’t even give me the dignity of seeing you get offended. You just acted like it was nothing. Like I was nothing! An impotent, unthreatening nothing.” I spat, and I clumped my boot against his thigh as I walked past him. “So you know damn well why, you little shit. Don’t think it now though, do ya? No you don’t! Got you scared now, haven’t I? Now that I’ve got the power and you’re the impotent one!”
I let the chain fall through my gripper and slam into the floor beside his head. He shuffled away in fear, but stopped when I rumbled a threatening growl. I crouched down and dragged the end of the chain across his neck, curling it around and reaching underneath to pull it right round. He shied his muzzle away from my arm.
“Hmm. Clever boy. Didn’t try to bite did you? Two reasons I suppose. Smart enough to know that biting my prosthetic isn’t going to do me much harm. And then there’s those teeth of yours. Not exactly built for tearing flesh, are they?” And I punctuated by tapping at his face with my gripper. He winced and turned away.
“No, I thought not,” I said, fumbling the two ends of the chain together and threading one end through the big ring at the end of the other. I stood up and drew the free end towards me, noosing the loop of chain snugly around his neck. I gave a sharp tug, and the links dug into his throat.
“Come on. Get up. Don’t make me choke you.”
He hauled himself onto his stumps like the effort matched that of climbing a mountain. I waited for him, quietly and patiently. I could sympathise, I really could. And right now the cold shock of the situation would be sinking in. It didn’t come with the pain and the terror of actually losing the limbs. No, it came when you tried to do something perfectly ordinary, like standing up, and finding that your automatic reflexes and muscle memory are commanding your body to do something, only to be brought to halt with a sharp shock as your arm moved phantom fingers through empty air. It was like finding one extra step on the flight of stairs. A moment of lurching confusion, your mind and your body out of kilter. But when they two came back together, they didn’t meet in a neat agreement. The disparity between them left you feeling cold and ill. And I could see it in his eyes. He wanted to be sick.
“This way,” I said, staying firm. My gripper rested on the door handle. “Don’t call for help. The pleasures of rural living, nobody living too near to get involved in your business. But there might be traffic passing on the road. So, if you scream...you won’t live to see your rescuer, got it?”
He lowered his head. His shoulders trembled. Yeah, he got it. I pushed the door open and tried not to think too much about my bluff. Yeah right, how was I going to kill him? Try to strangle him with my weak little grippers? Stab him with a knife that’d only slip out of my grip the moment I tried to stick it in him? There was the Sabre, I supposed. But getting that warmed up would take time and…
Ah hell, why was I wasting thought on all that shit? If I cared about getting caught, I wouldn’t have started any of this. Let the prison take me. And no fucker would mess with me after learning of all this! I strode across the yard, ignoring the world and ignoring the whimpers of the choking buck as he struggled to waddle along behind me, his stumps lancing agony into him each time he brought weight to bear on his freshly cauterised wounds.
The house seemed so different now, even though it was absolutely unchanged. It was we who had changed. And I think he knew it too. His whimpers went quiet as I walked him back into the domestic normalcy. The chicken was still plated up on the table in the kitchen. His dusting cloth was still where he left it in the living room.
“Upstairs,” I warned him, before I put my boot onto the first step. I glanced back to see him hesitating at the bottom. I guessed he knew what was going to happen up there. Or he was simply daunted by the stairs themselves. I didn’t care. Either way, he was going up. I growled and tugged the chain, watching it squeeze at his throat and choke a gasp from him. He shifted his weight to one arm stump and felt upwards with the other, struggling to hold his balance while he found the step. Hauling himself up was another agony, and he whimpered with a knotted brow as his weight sank again into the stump’s blackened scars. But slowly, he made upwards progress. Noisy and wet, weeping and whimpering. I wondered why he didn’t use words, but then I remembered what I had been told once myself; it helps to survive the trauma; you switch off your thinking mind and just ride it out as a beast.
“Sometimes you can’t switch it back on again,” I mused to myself. He wasn’t listening. He climbed the steps like he was a lame dog, and he was gasping for air by the time I got him to the top. No time to rest. I yanked the chain and led him past the bathroom door and on into my bedroom. Nothing special there. Just the bed and the wardrobe and the nightstand heaped with medication boxes. But under the bed was a box, and I hooked it with my boot and pulled it out. Now my buck came back into awareness of the world, and he stared in shock.
“Yeah, aren’t you glad you didn’t get up here to clean, huh? Or maybe you’d have got a sick thrill out of seeing all this.”
He pulled back against the chain.
“Oh relax, you cowardly piece of shit.” I reached down and grabbed the first item from the box of toys; a simple leather flogger. “You think I’m going to beat you with this, huh? You’re afraid of this after what I’ve done to you already? Fuck sake...you should be the most fearless creature on the planet by now!” I dropped the flogger back and tutted. “Fucking deer. No spine. Come here and stop being such a child. Look.”
From amongst the leather and chrome and latex that filled the box of adult pleasures, I lifted out a simple tube of lubricant.
“This is what I was after.” I kicked the box back into its home. “Okay?”
He didn’t seem any less scared.
“I told you I was going to be kind to you, didn’t I?” But my grin didn’t match my words. Neither did the hardon snaking down the leg of my pants. I was gonna fuck this little deer bitch. He didn’t get a choice in the matter. And he couldn’t stop me.
“Get on the bed.”
He shook his head, whimpering and pulling backwards against the chain.
“I said, get on-”
“N-no. No! You’re crazy! This urk!”
I yanked hard on the chain and it pulled him right off his stumps. He fell crashing onto his face, and the cracking thud of his jaw against the floorboards made me wince.
“Don’t talk again,” I said simply, forcing my voice to stay level and cool. “And get on the bed. Now.”
With even more noise and effort than with the stairs, he hooked his arm stumps up onto the bed. He grunted with effort and strained, his leg stumps lifting a few inches off the floor before collapsing back.
“Need help?”
“Ye-” He silenced himself when I shot him a warning glare. Meekly, he nodded. I stooped down to hook my arms under his waist and pulled. The strain sent aches through my shoulders, and I hissed through my teeth as I hauled him up and dumped him onto the springy mattress. He rolled onto his back and lay limp, staring at the ceiling.
“All fours,” I said.
He obeyed like a robot, his eyes gone into distant space again. I wondered what he was thinking, if he was even thinking at all. There was a tremble in his body, one that didn’t seem to be going away. He moved like he were dreaming, barely seeming to be aware of it. I walked my gaze over the curve of his rear and licked my lower lip, then gripped the cap of the lubricant tube in my teeth and used a gripper to twist it open. It had been a while, but my cock remembered what to do. I tugged down my slacks with my other gripper and hooked underneath my cock to hold it up, dribbling cool, tingling lube onto it.
I shivered. Yes, it had been a while. Nobody since my lizard boy had touched it. Other than some fucking prissy nurses. And pawing off with crude lumps of metal and rubber wasn’t exactly fun.
And now...now I had trembling deer pet stood on my bed, trembling with fear of me. I lubed my cock to a shine and climbed up behind him on my knees, not caring that my boots were smearing dirt onto the sheets. I rested my grippers on his thick, curving thighs and held on gently. I didn’t need strength in my fake arms any more, because now I had another man at my mercy, one who was even less powerful than me. And that was all that mattered. I pressed the head of my cock against his pucker.
“Please…” he gasped. He pulled forwards a fraction, detaching my flesh from his.
I growled, low and menacing, and swollen with the menace that had only been a thin tone before, which now flourished as the threat of death and destruction it always should have been. I felt him shake under me. My nose flooded with the stink of a prey species gripped by mortal terror. I hooked my grippers more firmly around his thighs. And then, with the moment feeling like cold grey steel, I thrust hard into the unwelcoming and unwilling rear of my victim.
He bucked forwards and carried me down with him, collapsing onto the bed in a sprawl of truncated limbs. One of the pillows flung up as his arm stump bumped it, coming back down to cover his antlers. I pulled my arms out from under him and braced myself against the bed beside his head. I dug my knees in. And with nowhere to go now, he lay still and helpless as I powered my cock down into him, groaning in the blissful delight of feeling his heat gripped tightly around my shaft. His misery-drenched whimpers continued endlessly just below my ears, and I could almost imagine they were the needy sounds of a cockslut suffering the almost unbearable pleasure of being royally fucked in the rear. It took a snap of perspective change to remind myself that his suffering was more raw, more unwilling, and I felt my cock surge inside him at the juicy implications of this. Fuck, I practically came just from that thought alone.
“Fucking bitch,” I breathed against his ear. I could feel the sweat and heat of breath beneath me. He reeked of manliness, even if it was so wholly tinged by his prey species. He was a beast of power and control, but now reduced to this he was just a crying feral animal, and I was taking everything I wanted from him. “Little...buck...bitch.”
I twisted my head to the side and opened my jaws wide. The taste of his fur bathed my tongue as I clamped down hard on the back of his neck, chewing hard, drenching down to his skin with my drool. The dark instinct of my subconscious hindbrain begged me to bite down past the critical point, to taste iron and rip my head back and paint the wall with his blood. But I fought down that part of me...barely. I rumbled my heady growl into his neck and knew that he shivered in the very real fear of me doing what I was imagining. And all the while my rear bounced, probably looking almost comical from anyone else’s perspective; a wolf getting his rocks off, humping like a common mutt. I didn’t give a shit what I might look like. My knot had swollen up, and I slammed it at the raw, stinging ring of his pucker, seriously tempted to thrust it right inside and hear his screams. But the frenzy of lust overtook me too fast. My head went back, raking teeth through his fur and bruising his skin, flinging spittle across his head and antlers. My grippers fell limp as my shoulder muscles failed to keep tense while my attention exploded up into the blistering white light of orgasm.
I felt hungry. I felt sated. I felt like tearing and ripping and mating and going wild. I pumped my seed into his rear and felt fertile, my mating instincts rewarding me with the primal satisfaction of procreating my genes. It didn’t give a fuck about the details. I brought my head back down and chomped hard on his shoulder. I did feel blood this time. And I rode through his feeble struggles and his desperate screaming as I milked every last shred of sensation from the glorious bliss of orgasm.
Feeling wet and drained, but glowing within like a coal fire, I slumped limp on top of him, panting against his wet fur. My tongue extended lazily, and I licked at the tooth wounds on his shoulder. I felt like a puppy again. Post-sex vulnerability. Guys say they don’t like to cuddle, but I say fuck them. I do. But I had to fight the urge. You can’t fucking cuddle with prosthetics. What would be the point?
He had gone very quiet underneath me. For a while I thought maybe he’d passed out. Or even died. I didn’t care, frankly. My head was away, floating and happy. And it took a long, long time to come back down to giving a shit about the world. And when it did, all I wanted to do was pull my softening cock from the wet, ragged hole of his rear. I rolled over onto my back next to him. Yeah, I figured maybe he might try to fight me then, slamming at me with his antlers or something. But he just lay still.
“Fuck then. Clean me off, bitch.”
And he probably could have bitten my cock clean off too. I didn’t care about that either. Right then I was too happy and he was utterly broken and miserable. And that was great. But when I kneed him roughly and growled, indicating quite clearly that I was pissed off with his lack of enthusiasm for licking my cum and his ass juice off my cock, he finally rolled onto his side and showed me something so shaming…
“Fuck me! You enjoyed that!”
He was hard as a rock! He answered me with a pitiful shake of his head. Smart boy, staying silent. Still I laughed. Yeah, I knew it was just a physical response and he had no control over it, and he definitely didn’t enjoy it. But that just made me laugh even harder. Even his own body, what was left of it, was treating him like a bitch!
“That’s pathetic,” I said, and he cringed and welled up with tears. I sat up. I didn’t want to, really. I wanted to lie still and bask in the afterglow while the cum dried on my cock or got licked off by his bitch tongue. But I wasn’t going to pass this up! I shifted around on the bed and brought my boot up to his cock. Pretty impressive thing it was too.
“Part horse, are ya bitch?”
I laughed, and he groaned; the sharp rubber ridges on the sole of my boot ground hard against his shaft. The head looked like it was going to pop, swollen and purple, pressed against the fur of his taut tummy. He tried to pull back away from me, of course, but I just hooked my other leg around behind his waist and held him fast.
“Go on then,” I said, grinning, feeling like I might get hard again from this. My cock hadn’t got fully hard. And this was a fucking turnon. “Fuck my boot like the bitch you are.”
He shook his head, and the whimpering rose again in his throat. But he started rocking his hips anyway. Fast learner. He clenched his eyes shut, but that couldn’t stop the tears. And with his stumps pressing into the bed for leverage, he rubbed his fat cock against the unforgiving ridges on the sole of my boot, grinding away for what seemed like hours, finally pushing him over the edge into the ultimate shame; a miserable, painful orgasm that I cut off an instant after it started, pulling my boot away from him to leave him pulsing and dribbling untouched, all the pleasure of release utterly ruined.
And then, to cap off his shame, I shifted around further to lay top to tail, and I thrust the cum-splattered sole of my boot against his face, grinding dirt and cum into his fur, smearing it in the open cut on his cheek. And with a throaty growl I demanded: “lick!”
And, with a single whimper of shame and defeat, he did.
Watching him lap at the rubber definitely pushed me over the edge into full arousal again. I stroked at it with the rubber tips of my gripper, without any real urgency to pleasure myself. I had him for that now. I shivered at the delightful sight of his tongue sliding up from the tip of my boot, bringing with it a streak of his sticky cum.
	“Some would call me crazy, doing this to you.”
	He shot a look at me over the toe of my boot. It was a look that said he was one of those people. I wiggled my foot, bumping his lips, and his gaze fell back down. His tongue lapped again at the rubber.
	“I bet that would feel good on my bare sole. Why don’t you undo my boots for me? Just…” I caught myself and laughed. “Oh right. Hmm. Well, you can use your teeth, can’t you.”
	He looked uncertainly at me. And for a moment, a flash of hatred passed through his eyes. But then his constant friends returned; the misery and the shame. I lowered my boot away from his face and admired the dirt and cum matted into his fur. I lay back into the softness of the bed, crossing my ankles and nodding the tip of my boot towards him.
	“Go on then. Can’t be that hard to unlace a boot with your teeth, can it? I learned how. I’m sure you’re a smart deer…”
	But he was already leaning over and biting at a lace. I drifted into silence and just watched. His obedience was strange. Did it not even occur to him to try and bite at my throat? Did he fear my own sharp teeth that much?
	Ah. I knew what it was. He was biding his time, waiting for rescue. I knew what that was like. I had tried to do that myself. And my reward was the slow severing of my arms. I shivered at the memory and forced myself to refocus on his struggling efforts to tug at the tightly knotted laces. So clumsy, so weak. He was only now learning how useless he was without his paws.
	“That’s it, puppy. Keep working hard.”
	It was encouragement intended to shame. I saw his eyes close, shutting away tears before they could start. 

I think he wanted to say no when I first led him to the cage. He recoiled from the stink of dust and oil. The dark shadow under the bars was cold and unwelcoming. I could see him shiver against the night’s chill.
	“Are you going to go in there willingly?”
	He ducked his antlers under the top of the cage and crawled inside. He was getting better at moving around. I watched that curvy rear of his waddle past me, my seed still splashed around his tailhole, drying into his fur. And with my sweat mashed into his fur, he was marked fully as mine.
	He tried to turn around in the cage, but the sides hemmed him in. The whimper he made when he discovered this was delicious. He turned his head back over his shoulder and looked up at me with big begging eyes. Just like a child.
	“Sorry pup. Looks like you’re facing the wall tonight.”
	He opened his mouth, then clamped it shut. He lowered himself down on his stumps. He looked for all the world like a real dog laying down. I swung the cage door shut behind him and clamped the padlock shut. He was going nowhere.
	Just as I was turning to leave, he spoke. “They’ll find out. They’ll look for me and...and they’ll find out.”
	I paused at the door. “Yeah, I know.”
I lay in my bed that night and closed my eyes. He was right. They would look, and they would find me. Maybe I had weeks. Maybe I had days. It would all end. He would be taken away. I would be locked up.
	But until then, and in this very moment...I felt whole.

He became a missing person, and then it was only a matter of time. Two days passed before they came to my door. I confessed immediately. His car was still in my driveway. How could I fabricate a story with that big lump of evidence counting against me? Their faces when I showed them to the shed almost brought a smile to my face. This little cripple had surprised them. They clearly had not expected me to be capable of so much. They took me away and they took him away. It was all very expected.
	The days and weeks passed in a blur. Maybe it was even months. I recounted my side of the story in endless detail, staring into the deadpan eyes of my interviewers, seeing no responses flicker there, but I knew their dreams were haunted each night. First there were police. Then the courts. Then military, barking questions and building stacks of paperwork. I was a very bad boy for keeping hold of the Sabre. I was a massive breach of security. It seemed almost to me that they cared more about the fact that I had stolen it, than with what I had done with it afterwards.
	And then, with an inevitability that did make me laugh, it came the turn of the doctors and caretakers. And once again I was in their care. My old friends, back again. And my old home; the pale green walls, the clean, crisp linen, the utilitarian cleanliness of it all, and the gentle softness of the drugs and their patient faces: we care, they seemed to say, just as far as the law requires us to.
	Then one day I had a visitor. He stood in the doorway and I barely looked up. He was a blur of white in my peripheral vision. Just enough doctor in his white coat, another of the gaggle of groupies I had accumulated, here to question me for some theory or other, fodder for their thesis.
	“Hello sir.”
	My head shot up. The dullness of the calming drugs withered to nothing as that voice cut through and brought me back with intense sharpness.
	“Luke?”
	My voice sounded strange. I had barely used it recently.
	“I see they’ve taken your prosthetics away.” He stepped into the room and nodded behind him. The door closed smoothly and silently, then clanked locked. He looked whole again, but it was only a temporary illusion. I saw gleaming chrome and white plastic where his paws should be, and he stood on two blades of carbon.
	“Of course they did. Why waste a straitjacket when you can just pop the arms clean off? I’m sure they’re glad of the cost saving. I see they’ve given you some,” I said. I frowned. “Why are you here?”
	My voice must have carried a defensive edge, because he raised up one of his prosthetic paws, palm out. It really was a slick and expensive thing. “I’m not here to hurt you, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m not looking for revenge.”
	“Then what.” I shifted uneasily on the edge of the bed. Without my arms, I felt vulnerable. I wondered how strong those metal fingers of his were.
	“A few things, really.” He walked across to the far wall, stripping off his coat with an ease and grace that I could never manage with my prosthetics. He hung it up on a hook and turned back to face me. While he spoke, he unbuttoned his shirt. “I understand what you did to me, and why you did it. That’s the first thing. I want you to understand that.”
	“I don’t need your forgiveness.” I looked away. This was worrying.
	“No, you’re right. I don’t think you do. I do, though. Forgive you, I mean.” The shirt slid down off his arms, and I could see the neat clamps that held the prosthetics in place. He hung the shirt up too. Then he started to unbutton his pants.
	“What are you doing?”
	“I’ve had a lot of time to think about you, and about the things that happened. And I’ve had a lot of therapy, as you might imagine. You left me broken. But...not quite as broken as you’ve been all this time.”
	I felt my hackles rising, and my upper lip peeled from my teeth. But he held his paw out again.
	“Not like that,” he said. “Not in a way that insults you. The war broke you just as you broke me. Am I to blame for what you did? Are you to blame for what they did? We’re both victims of the same thing here.”
	“What are you babbling about?” I growled.
	My eyes dropped to follow as he stepped out of his pants. Now he was naked, and I felt almost like I might panic. Was he going to get revenge after all? Was he going to rape me? The nurses and doctors would here...but surely he could have paid them off? I felt like I was about to scream, panic rising. Until, that was, he sat himself down on the floor and pressed a catch on each knee. His prosthetic legs fell away with a click and a hiss, and he nudged them away.
	“What are you doing?” I cried, my throat closed up.
	“I’m still a careworker in the end. And there’s a lot of debate about how to treat you. Everyone has theories. I’m no exception. Mine might be a little unorthodox...alright it’s very unorthodox. But it’s the method you used to try and self-medicate yourself. And I feel that, despite everything, it’s worth exploring.”
	“What…”
	I trailed off. He had reached to press the latch on one arm, then leaned down to press with his nose at the other. He shook his upper arms, and together his prosthetics fell off. I could see that his stumps had been cleaned up, fur grafted across the scar tissue, leaving smooth, rounded nubs. He rolled sideways and came up onto all fours. Across the room he walked, towards me, coming to stand at my feet. He could move smoothly on his stumps. He’d been practicing. His head lifted, his eyes met mine, and I squirmed with the acute discomfort of fearing that I’d be caught, here with the limbless, naked buck, and somehow I would be to blame.
	“You have me for two hours, sir.”
	I growled. “What is this? Some kind of sick joke? Get...get your clothes back on!”
	He shook his head. “Not a joke, sir. Treatment. You needed to feel like you had power and potency again. Doing what you...did to me...gave you that feeling. I’m here to let you feel that again.”
	I wanted to hit him. I felt like I was being mocked. “Get the fuck away from me. You’re trying to say you liked what I did to you?”
	“No,” he said sharply. “I hated every second of it. But that was the point, wasn’t it?”
	“Why do you want to do it again if you hated it?”
	“Because it might help you. Because I care.”
	My eyes flitted uncertainly to the door. This felt like a trap. But then, how would they even be allowed to pull something like this? I licked my lips. They felt dry. Well, if this nutcase wanted to pull this kind of shit, then I would call his bluff.
	“Fine,” I snarled. “Well, prove it.” I spread my legs and nodded down at my thin cotton slacks. “Suck my cock, fucking bitch deer.”
	I expected to see smug triumph in his face, and hear some mocking confirmation that I hadn’t changed, that I was still broken in the head, that I deserved to be locked away forever. Instead, I saw his eyes cast downwards, and I saw in them the meek shame that had raged so fierce there during our time together, an ember rekindling back to flame. He lowered his muzzle in towards my crotch. His nose brushed my tummy and his teeth caught the waistband. Slowly, he pulled it downwards, up and over the bulge of my cock, which rose up to meet him, the tip brushing against his cheek on its way up. I couldn’t believe it...but my arousal definitely did.
	“Suck it...bitch.” I breathed.
	His lips felt just like I imagined they would...and just like I remembered, from what felt like another life; those nights in my cell, with my lizard boy. I looked down and I saw the buck, slurping and bobbing his head. And I saw the smooth snout of my lizard. They merged in together, and a knot of lust and revulsion boiled in my chest. I wanted to touch him, and I wanted to beat him. Would he visit again? Would they give me my arms back when he came?
	I rumbled a growl and felt my cock surge against his tongue. My lips peeled back from my teeth again, rising in a smile. I heard him whimper, muffled around my cock, his saliva dribbling down his chin. The tight clench of his eyes told me that he was telling the truth; he was hating this, every second of it. And like a balance of scales, as he felt weaker, I felt stronger.
	And with a roar of triumph that must have been heard by the entire damn hospital, I came hard into his throat, and thanks to this caring, selfless, stupid, bitch of a buck...I felt one small step on the way to feeling whole again.