Chapter Text
A catboy lay sprawled across the asphalt, motionless and beautiful. Unconscious in a dead-end alley somewhere in the slums district. There was someone else above him, though. Another young hybrid with a sick kind of beauty, whose smile looked almost like a curse. A fox.
Felix was wearing nothing but a loose white T-shirt, underwear, and a pair of shorts in the same color. They weren’t clothes fit for that season, not with autumn about to begin and the temperature already dropping considerably.
His clothes were stained with blood, as were parts of his body. Golden ears emerged from his blond hair, which was very long, reaching halfway down his back. His tail, golden too, lay abandoned in a puddle.
It was raining terribly hard that night. No moon, no stars. Only a sky swollen with clouds that had swallowed both of them whole, refusing to let even the faintest light through. A storm that seemed as though it would never, could never end. Lightning bombarded the sky, bright veins zigzagging through it. Setting it alight and tearing it open, before everything plunged back into complete darkness.
At some point, a thunderclap ripped across the sky with such a violent crash that it startled him awake. Felix came to with a jolt, finding himself soaked through and defenseless in a place he didn’t recognize.
His nostrils flared at so many, too many unfamiliar smells, all of them painfully strong for a kitten like him who had spent his life surrounded by the same scents, most of them neutral. Being suddenly thrown outside and assaulted with all those stenches and fragrances was enough to drive him out of his mind.
How did I get here? Felix wondered, seized by a sudden wave of terror. And where am I?
There were fragments of memories inside his head, but they were terribly confused. He didn’t feel like he could rely on any of them. Muffled noises, blurred images. It was as though he had to decipher everything before he could put the pieces of a puzzle back together, except every single piece had been damaged.
Felix slowly turned his head. He could smell another hybrid very close to him, too. Not a cat, a fox. It was a peculiar scent, different from those of most hybrids he had encountered before. It was ozone, like the air before a storm. Wet stone after the rain. Burned wood, with a faint trace of moss underneath. Something wild and impossible to restrain, impossible even to fit into a box. It traveled freely through the air, much like the creature above him seemed to move through the world.
The movement sent a sharp pain through his side, but it disappeared almost immediately beneath the weight of a presence he hadn’t heard approaching — even though he had obviously caught that peculiar scent. The foxboy was crouched above him, one knee planted against the asphalt only a few inches from Felix’s hip, his other leg bent with an effortless, almost animal grace no human could’ve imitated.
The face suspended above his own was beautiful enough to immediately make Felix suspicious. His skin was pale and smooth, almost luminous against the filthy gray of the alley. The flickering lights of a nearby neon sign slid across his cheekbones and the delicate line of his nose, painting him in flashes of sickly pink and blue.
Messy strands of copper-colored hair fell across his forehead, soft and damp, some of them long enough to brush against his lashes. Fox ears rose between those loose strands, pointed and alert, although one of them had a small cut along the edge: an irregular crescent of missing flesh that clashed with the almost doll-like perfection of everything else.
His mouth was full. Too soft for the way he was looking at him.
He wore a thin gray crop top, the dirty fabric taking on an almost purple hue beneath the alley lights, with an oversized military-green bomber jacket thrown over it that made him look even smaller. A thick black strap ran diagonally across his chest, frayed at the edges and attached to a bag Felix couldn’t quite make out. His green jeans were ripped at the knees and grimy around the ankles, and his sneakers were streaked with mud.
His eyes were large, dark, slightly elongated at the corners. Beautiful too, at first glance. But the longer Felix stared into them, the more he sensed something crooked moving beneath their glossy surface.
They watched him with a vivid, almost intimate curiosity, as though the blood soaking through his clothes wasn’t alarming but interesting. His pupils were dilated enough to almost swallow the irises whole. There was a smile hidden in those eyes, some private amusement that wasn’t meant to be shared, and Felix suddenly had the absurd impression that the other hybrid already knew something about him that Felix himself hadn’t discovered yet.
The foxboy lowered his face. Felix felt his breath brush against his cheek before he even realized how close he had gotten. His fingers were still stained with the same blood that covered Felix when they settled beneath his chin.
The touch was surprisingly gentle. A nail, only slightly sharper than normal, grazed his skin as the foxboy turned Felix’s face toward the light, studying his eyes. He could’ve scratched him. The awareness lingered silently between them, strangely electric.
"You’re cute," he murmured.
His voice was low and velvety, almost affectionate.
Felix swallowed. The hand beneath his chin followed the movement of his throat.
"Who are you?"
The foxboy smiled. It wasn’t a wide smile. Only one corner of his mouth slowly lifted, as though Felix’s question had told him a joke he wasn’t capable of understanding yet. Still, that tiny movement was enough to transform his face. The sweetness remained exactly where it was, untouched, but something restless slipped beneath it. A hairline crack through porcelain.
"People used to call me many things."
His thumb passed over Felix’s lower lip, gathering a trace of blood. He looked at it for a moment, then rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger with almost idle concentration.
Felix should’ve pulled away. He should’ve bitten him, hit him, done anything he was still physically capable of doing. Instead, he remained still beneath him, hypnotized by the grace with which that creature occupied the space above his body. He wasn’t pinning Felix down. He didn’t need to. Every position of his limbs suggested he would’ve been faster than Felix even if Felix hadn’t been injured.
"The Runaway Fox," the foxboy continued. "The stray, the wild one." His ears gave a small twitch as his smile softened into something somehow even more sinister. "Jeongin, when they wanted to pretend I was still a person. But nobody called me that in a very long time."
The name stirred something in Felix’s memory. Jeongin.
A whisper exchanged through the bars. Stories about a young fox hybrid who had never stopped fighting back. The one who had bitten the trainers’ hands, snapped needles between his teeth, knocked out the power to an entire wing before disappearing. Some said he had died during his escape. Others said he still lived somewhere above the city, on its rooftops, appearing only to rob the same men who had once kept him imprisoned.
Felix stared at him, his breathing growing shorter.
"I know you. All of us have heard about you. You’re the legend…" Felix murmured. "They say you’re crazy!"
Jeongin didn’t look offended. If anything, his expression lit up with a sudden, almost childish delight. A brief sound slipped past his lips as he tilted his head to the other side.
"Crazy?"
His fingers left Felix’s chin and slowly traced the line of his jaw instead. The tip of one nail stopped just beneath his ear, directly over the place where Felix’s pulse betrayed his fear.
For the first time, the smile disappeared, although the light in his eyes only became more intense.
Felix felt the finger press lightly against his heartbeat.
"Tell me, Lix." The nickname slipped from his mouth with an intimacy Felix had never given him permission to use. "Wouldn’t you be a little crazy too, if they’d done to you even half of what they did to me?"
Felix didn’t answer. He didn’t even know what he could possibly say. There were countless stories about the Runaway Fox, and no one knew anymore where the truth ended and the lies began.
Jeongin watched him for another long moment before his smile returned. Slow. Aware.
"That’s what I thought."
Jeongin’s ears snapped upright the moment a human appeared a little farther down the alley. So tall, slender, and handsome as a god, Felix thought as he stared at him. The stranger reminded him of some of the statues he had seen inside mansions or standing in their gardens.
The human’s eyes widened the moment he saw Jeongin, as though he recognized him, and he said something Felix couldn’t quite catch.
"Tell Chan-ssi I’m coming tonight," Jeongin hissed. "Tell him he can stop looking for me. I’ll come to him myself."
Then, Jeongin focused on Felix again.
"He’s clean. You can trust him. I’m leaving you in good hands. Have no fear of him."
Jeongin sprang upward, planting one foot against the wall of the dead-end alley. He caught the fire escape with one hand and pulled himself up, disappearing into the night within a matter of seconds.
"Are you okay?" the human asked, approaching carefully. "That’s a lot of blood…"
Felix hadn’t even realized just how much blood covered him. But it wasn’t his.
The man moved closer, still slowly, as though he were trying not to frighten him.
"Is this blood yours?" he asked again.
Felix studied the human’s face. His hair was shaved extremely short along the sides with an undercut, while the top had been left longer and pushed back, except for a few dark strands that fell across his forehead and one temple. The cut left his face completely exposed, making every feature look even sharper: the defined jaw, the straight nose, the dark eyes elongated at the corners. There was something androgynous about his beauty, but the severity of the haircut and the breadth of his shoulders made it seem harder somehow, almost aggressive.
He wore a charcoal T-shirt beneath an open white-and-gray flannel shirt, with a lightweight black rain jacket thrown over both. Black jeans, ripped at one knee, hugged his legs without being particularly tight, ending above a pair of dark sneakers already soaked through by the rain. The layers hid most of his build, but Felix could still guess what was underneath: strong arms, a compact chest, a narrow waist; a muscular body without being massive, built more for speed than brute strength. Supple. Elegant even when standing still.
Felix kept staring at him for longer than he should have. He had never seen a human so handsome. The realization annoyed him immediately. One of his ears twitched before he could stop it. Felix flattened it against his hair at once, irritated with himself.
When the human took another step, Felix hissed, baring his teeth as he dragged himself backward across the asphalt.
The man stopped immediately. Felix stared at him carefully, assessing his reaction.
Humans didn’t stop. Ever.
Why did this one?