*Chapter Title taken from Squeegee Man Shooting by El-P
Simple life never seemed to appeal to Lashawn. Or maybe it was the other way around; maybe Lashawn never appealed to a simple life, seeing how he was always tossed around from one uninviting living place to another. Right now, he was standing in the middle of somebody else's kitchen, a glass of water in his paw, rationalizing whether or not he should investigate perturbing noises coming from the downstairs bedroom. The downstairs was where the provider of his current lodgings lived, as well as where the kitchen and the only bathroom with a bathtub were located.
The noises got louder, acquiring the shape of a fragmented, one-sided conversation. The rottweiler sighed through his nose. All he really wanted was one damn glass of water.
Bottoms up - the glass was emptied in one gulp - these tiny cat-sized dishes hardly satisfied any pang of hunger or thirst. Then again, he didn't refuse when he was offered to temporarily occupy the upstairs room until his family situation cleared up.
Bracing himself, Lashawn ventured into the other's bedroom (the door to which was conspicuously ajar - a weird occurrence as his unlikely landlord always cherished his privacy, never leaving the door open even to a millimeter) to investigate. The sounds he'd heard before shaped up even more, full phrases and even sentences reaching the dog's ears in an urgent, nervous tone.
The sleeping mammal before him was arguing with someone, questioning orders, and mumbling something or other about fulfilling his duty. There were a few apologies and one mention of his mother's name. Then the incessant repetition of the rank that Lashawn had frankly gotten tired of hearing.
"Major Princeps."
The black-and-tan canine standing in the doorway entered the room fully, running a paw tiredly down his face. There was a method to waking up sleep-talkers, right? There had to be. And the mammal in question here was definitely asleep: his eyes were shut tightly (more specifically, the only eye that wasn't permanently shut, that is), his paws unconsciously clenching and unclenching the boring white fabric of the blanket case. If it wasn't for his violent thrashing in the sheets, the rottweiler would have probably left the other animal to live out his traumatic memories in the relatively harmless state of his somnambulistic trance until the morning; but, as noted above, the thrashing was quite violent as if the small feline form was trying to shake off every little piece of this vivid, flashback-infused nightmare. Part of Lashawn's conscience couldn't vouch for the safety of his flatmate if the situation went like this, though the other part was 100% positive every one of this cat's nights went like this. Well, at the very least, every other night.
The canine approached the bed cautiously, taking a better look at the smaller animal in it: his chest was rising and falling rapidly, his tiny nostrils expelled air with barely audible angry huffs, and he was sweating profusely. Sometimes, one can experience curious things one never knew he'd find fascinating; for Lashawn, it was seeing actual droplets of water on another animal's skin. He got used to perspiring through the pads of his paws and never in his life was he put in a situation where he could witness sweat in such a detailed way - from the moment it started to form to its beady culmination, rolling off somebody's exposed skin, unhindered by even the smallest of fur bristles.
Staring wasn't going to give him any new ideas, however, and the old ones were being swiftly stricken out from Lashawn's mental list:Grab him by the shoulder. "Wake up, sir!"
No. He might get clawed.
Gently grab him by the shoulder and shake him a little. Maybe even call him by his first name. "Wake up, Vee. You're having a nightmare."
No. He might remember this preposterous display of unwarranted familiarity and have Lashawn's ass for it later.
The dog sighed again, massaging his temples. There was no agreeable way, was there? He just had to do this head-on and deal with the consequences, whatever they were going to be.
Maybe he should just leave. His unexpected benefactor was a grown cat. He could probably deal with it on his own. Right? Right. Though…
No. He wouldn't be able to go back to sleep once the realization of him standing idly by his former superior's bedside and doing absolutely nothing to ease his mental pain descended uncomfortably on his conscience like a blanket of rusty nails.
Lashawn came to a resolution: he would wake him up and go through whatever awkward conversation awaited him afterwards. With a newfound (albeit shaky) confidence, he came closer and sat on the bed.
He never had the time to even reach out to the smaller critter before he was violently thrown on his back, pinned down by a lighter but far more imposing weight. The surface of a blade flashed in the dark, materializing ominously below his chin. The cat straddling his chest looked awake, but his half-exposed torso was still covered in sweat and his sides quivered from the same frantic inhales and exhales. When the canine searched for the signs of reason in that singular expanded pupil, he found none. Whatever situation the cat was thinking he was in definitely wasn't nearly close to the present reality of him viciously launching himself at his closest - for the time being - companion with a sizeable bowie knife (Where the hell did he even keep that thing? Under his pillow?) in his right paw while the left one held the rottweiler's ear in an iron fistful, digging the claws in and pulling the larger head flush against the jagged edge of the old army weapon.
Great, Lashawn thought, he's a sleepwalker, too.
The canine would be dead meat if he didn't say something. Fast.
"Easy, sir," - he whispered, his voice surprisingly steady; must be the shock and the adrenaline rush working their uncanny magic, - "It's me, Lashawn Quint. You put me in a coma for a week back in the army, remember? Then, years later, I came looking for you and… here we are? I'm not an enemy. I live at your place."
The paw holding the knife couldn't resist a small tremor of hesitation. Lashawn's throat was too dry to continue talking but he was deathly afraid of swallowing or gulping - not with that thing right next to his windpipe.
"You're not at war with anybody now," - the dog continued, - "I was just checking on you. You were making a whole hell of a lotta noise here. I… I got worried."
Slowly reason returned to the feline's only eye, his pupil narrowing.
"Quint?"
The rottweiler withheld a sigh of relief.
"Yes, Captain. That's me alright."
A short bout of silence followed before the cat rolled off of the larger body with a frustrated groan, flopping on his back, the blade thrown to the side, probably ending up under the dresser or the bookshelf by the sound of it. Lashawn let the moment stretch out a little longer, savoring the sensation of still being in one piece despite the very real intent to kill that he'd witnessed in his former superior's furless, whiskerless face mere seconds ago. When the sticky, unpleasant feeling that the thought of dying because of his fit of good samaritanism awoke in him, finally settled down, the dog lifted his upper body, resting on his elbows, and looked at the feline. His only eye was closed again, his breathing still rapid but more controlled, and the droplets of sweat on his forehead, neck shoulders, and chest seemed to get tinier than before.
"Uh…" - the canine began meekly, - "You were having a ni-"
"I could have killed you, you fucking moron," - the cat's eye flipped open again, studying the cracks in the ceiling, barely visible in the bedroom's darkness, - "Never try to wake me up when I'm having one of those dreams. You might not walk away from it next time."
"Okay, sir, but you were…"
The cat turned his head to look at Lashawn with a furious glare.
"...Understood. Never approach you when you're having one of your army-time dream episodes."
The cat frowned, and boy did the dog wish he hadn't - there was something especially uncanny about seeing hairless animals frown: all those creases and folds, layers of skin on top of each other, wrinkled naked nosebridge… There were cats and dogs who found it cute, of course, but Lashawn was clearly kilometers away from that little fetish club.
"I didn't hurt you, did I?"
Ah. He's concerned now. He's expressing regret. One could milk this moment of vulnerability for all its worth, provided their conscience lived separately from their body. Or, conversely, if they were a two-and-a-half-year-old ex-military dog lounging on the upper floor of his former superior officer's two-storey apartment for no other reason than because.
"No. I'm unharmed," - Lashawn rubbed the front of his neck instinctively as he said it, - "Though you should've at least lemme know you keep a freakin' knife in your bed. That would have deterred me from entering your room at night much better."
He might have imagined it, but he thought he saw the cat smirk.
They lay beside each other for what felt like a minute of complete silence. Then the feline suddenly asked:
"How's your search going? Did you find your father?"
Ah. That.
Lashawn almost forgot. The initial reason why he stayed with the cat was shelved like a bad cop on an evaluation week. Back when the rottweiler came to the city of Scottfield to find one Virtue Kavan-Williams - an ex-military captain and Lashawn's former superior from the time he was still a First Lieutenant and Lashawn was but a regular first-time recruit - he came up with a meticulously rehearsed story about getting a letter from his father, which conveniently revealed his last recorded whereabouts as - what a coincidence! - Scottfield, Meso Region. Ever since he found Capt. Williams, the meticulousness and the complexity of this cover-up tale went straight out the window.
How did it even come to this? From the day Lashawn woke up in a hospital after a ten-day coma and the present moment as he stared in the eye of the mammal responsible for said coma, he struggled to explain. He woke up. His mother and sister were there, all but sobbing with relief. He was sent back home to his family with the air of a soldier returning after months at the front line. He continued his military training soon after. Heard 1st. Lieut. Williams had been transferred to a different city and a different military base. Quit the military. Got a job as a post dog, got fired after two months for not keeping up with the schedule.
Then…
Yes. He noticed it only then. His mother had always struggled to take care of him and his sister on her own, but in recent months, even without Lashawn's attempted input, she had been able to make ends meet quite fine. He assumed she got a promotion at her job. His sister was the one who gave him the idea that it might not be the case.
"How come mom looks so sad whenever she checks her bank account on payday?" she asked Lashawn once, "Isn't that supposed to be a happy moment? Will I get this bummed out when I get a job, too?"
He didn't know because he never paid enough attention; how could he if Bea Quint - an exasperated and overworked single mother of two adorable rottweiler pups - never took Lashawn with her to run any errands in town, only Liana (whose adorableness and, well, puppyness were still intact, unlike her older brother's)? He remembered raising the topic with his mother. She was reluctant to talk, pointedly avoiding the topic of her weekly salary. Somehow, to this day, he didn't know how this thought even occurred to him - he assumed she was being extorted for money and informed her he had a good mind to report the matter to the police - only then did she spill the beans. The situation was quite the opposite from extortion - someone was sending her money every month. She could never predict when it was going to come, yet, no matter what, once every four weeks, it was always there.
"It's him," she added after a moment of hesitation, "It's Williams."
Lashawn physically recoiled at the name.
"What's he got to do with anything?" - incredulously he inquired.
"Everything. After the news about you quitting the army reached him, he wrote me a letter. With it, a check was enclosed. The letter explained that he meant to do something for me to atone for what he'd done to you, and so he had no other idea but to offer financial support - at the very least, until you find a job to sustain yourself. I… I wrote him a reply, saying that I'm grateful but I couldn't take the money. I sent the check back to him. I thought I did the right thing. Then… I got the same check back again in the mail the following week. I wrote another letter and I sent the check back to him one more time; I wrote that nobody blamed him for what had happened, that I forgave him a long time ago, and that going to these lengths was entirely unnecessary, but can you guess what happened?"
"He sent you the same check back again?"
"No. He transferred the sum directly to my account."
"Did you try to..?"
"I couldn't. By that time, your birthday was already around the corner and the transfer was listed as a one-time present. The bank has no option to revert these types of transactions, so I had no choice but to accept it."
Lashawn frequently wondered what struck him as odd more - the fact that Capt. Williams remembered his birthday or the fact that he stoically and stubbornly kept sending the same sum until his mother was forced to take it and use it, whether she was comfortable with the idea or not. That feline's goal-oriented attitude sure was a thing to learn from.
"After that, he found new pretexts to make more of those transactions. Mother's Day, The first day of spring, Father's Day - his message read "I'm no father figure of any kind, but let me make my humble impact either way" - or something to that effect, I remember it better than the others but not verbatim… And, well… even though I used the money, I never stopped feeling guilty about it. No amount of explanations would convince him to stop. He's dead-set on doing this until you stand firmly on your own without my support. Though… even then I doubt he's going to quit. He's a driven feline who's obsessed with making amends, no matter if it conveniences the others or not."
"So you never even tried lying to him that I finally got a job?"
"I did once. A month later, he sent me a transfer, like always, with a message, "Bishop said he's unemployed. Happy International Post Workers' Day." I… never tried to pull the same trick again."
Bishop was a familiar last name. The same last name belonged to Lashawn's former Drill Sergeant. The same Drill Sergeant he accidentally bumped into at a marketplace near his block a few months back. He remembered the encounter well: civilian clothes seemed to change her temper - it was difficult to recognize in her the same hard-ass military instructor universally feared by all of the novice soldier dogs at the base. Cheerful and surprisingly charming in person, she said she was on vacation, and he was greatly missed in the army - with his potential, his chances at a promising military career were quite high if he were to curb his relentless disregard for discipline. She asked him about his life and what he was doing, and yes, he remembered complaining to her about his inability to find a steady occupation - the aforementioned disciplinary issues were still present, adding insufferably to Lashawn's forgone higher education. Unflinchingly and quite bluntly, she confessed she expected as much from him. He was offered to come back to the base and continue his training; he shrugged his shoulders and left it at that, leading her to regard his unenthusiastic answer with a crestfallen "Oh well."
To think that Williams knew about that. No. To think that Williams asked her to seek him out during her next vacation and find out whether his mother lied about his employment situation. Expecting Sgt. Bishop to comply with Williams's request wasn't too difficult: she was a subordinate officer and, the rank and the hierarchical norms in the army notwithstanding, she held 1st Lieutenant Williams in high regard as long as Lashawn could remember - even more so than 1st Lieutenant Lynch, who was bigger, more imposing, and, well, a fellow canine. Of course, she'd do it. Of course, she'd report back to him. Of course, she'd ignore the fact that Williams was probably already out of the army by that point.
He couldn't bother to ask why his mother didn't try to start a new account with a different bank - at that point, he was positive that if anything were to suddenly change, Williams would know. That's when Lashawn decided: he'd go to Scottfield to find that overbearing feline and ask him personally to stop sending the money.
So he was feeling guilty. Big deal. He made Lashawn's mother feel guilty, too, and this Lashawn found hard to live with day to day.
Only, like many bizarre situations that had a myriad of ways to go wrong, it went wrong.
He located Williams's Security Agency in Scottfield and demanded an audience with the owner. A tiny Bichon Frise at the reception desk frowned at him but still pressed the corresponding button on her intercom.
"There's a rottie to see you, Sir. Says it's urgent."
An answer rang through the machine in the voice that made Lashawn's blood run cold.
"A male or a female?"
"A boy. Not sure if he's a good boy, though, with the way he's staring me down right now."
It wasn't Lashawn's intention to intimidate the petite secretary. He was tense in general and the intensity of his stare was directed mostly at the intercom device rather than the canine operating it. Either way, the entry was granted with a quick and decisive "Let him in."
As the rottweiler entered Williams's office, he promptly forgot the reason for his visit: his back paws froze stiffly in place and his mind struggled to give him any sentence ideas to voice - the impact of seeing this cat for the first time in years was unexpectedly colossal and only induced one response in the dog: fear. He was afraid his visit would end the same way their scarce interactions did back in the army, even without him saying or doing something to aggravate the smaller mammal in front of him. Sure, he admitted, back then he behaved like an unhinged brat and a juvenile delinquent-in-the-making, initiating the conflict that eventually landed him in the hospital for 10 subsequent days. Today was different. He was different. But what stayed tragically the same was the acquired terror reflex at the sight of a black hairless cat with three vertical cuts crossing his right eye, forever clammed shut to keep the gruesome damage behind those eyelids secret from the sensitive public view. That terror reflex prevented Lashawn from voicing the only demand he came there to voice, powerlessly following and maintaining the conversation the cat started and led as soon as the canine entered the office.
"How have you been, Quint? How's your mother? How's your sister - Liana, was it?"
"Good, Sir. Never been better, Sir."
"How's your neck? I imagine I left a mother of a tooth print back then…"
"It's all healed, thank you for your concern, Sir."
"What brings you here?"
The dog paused. Then he remembered that cover-up story about his father. The excuses spilled smoothly like honey: he got this letter, he decided to look for his estranged parent despite his mother asking him not to, he was in the area and he wanted to drop by to...
To do what?
"I wanted to express my utmost gratitude for all of your patronage, Sir."
He didn't ask him to stop.
"Well, I'll be going, Sir."
The stress came back and the dread rang louder in his mind again.
"Where are you staying?"
Williams asked where he was staying. Williams had the audacity to offer his evaluation of the temporary lodgings that Lashawn's limited finances allowed him to rent. The rottweiler couldn't say he'd found an ant-infested hostel where black mold spotted every corner in every room. What if that creepy obsessive feline offered to help him again?
"At a three-star hotel. Sir."
He lied that he was staying at a hotel. It should have worked. Williams didn't back down, however.
"How long are you planning to stay here?"
"Until I find my father, Sir. Or until I make sure it's pointless, Sir."
"Until I gather enough courage to tell you to stop patronizing us with money" should have been the answer. He had to come back again to deliver it.
Williams closed his eye and shook his head.
"You're gonna go broke in three days, even if you skimp on the essentials and spend strictly on booking."
That cat was showing condescension. He had the absolute nerve to show condescension when Lashawn was here to give him a piece of his mind! A piece of his mind that he hadn't yet grown balls big enough to give, sure… But still! Had he actually gone through with it, this conversation would have been completely different…
"Tell you what. My apartment has two floors. You can stay on the second floor while you're looking for your father. Use the money you're spending on the hotel for your daily expenses."
"I…"
"We're not in the army anymore and it's not an order. Still, I'm urging you to give this proposition thorough consideration."
Not in the army, true. But old habits die hard. And now, as Lashawn had already eloquently put, here they were.
Coming back to reality, the troubled canine remembered that the nightmare-plagued feline was still in the room with him, waiting for an answer to his question about the former's father-seeking progress.
"No. Not yet," - was all he managed out of himself. Williams nodded and rolled over to the edge of the bed. He slid down to the floor and headed for his bedside dresser. From the very bottom drawer, he fished out an object that Quint never expected to see in the feline's apartment in any shape, considering him a hellbent straight-edger - a bottle of amber-colored liquid. With a practiced motion, Williams unscrewed the cap and took a few long, determined swigs. Lashawn, still lying on his ex-superior's bed, followed the motions with a surprised, unblinking stare.
"You better hit the hay, Quint. I'll be fine. Take care of your own shuteye," - Williams instructed as he screwed the cap back on and put the bottle in its place.
"If you say so."
He hesitated before adding
"Sir."
Strange. This form of address had been gradually losing its punch the longer Lashawn stayed at William's place. He wondered if it was because of the eviscerating banality of their current side-by-side existence - somewhere along the way the encompassing dread the canine felt around the smaller animal in the military uniform (why this hairless nutjob, living a civilian life for a few years now, still wore his captain attire to work every day, Lashawn had no idea) dispersed, gradually getting replaced with awe at first, then tremulant curiosity, and finally the rollercoastering expectations of the mundane and the treacherously incalculable an offspring of a single parent would typically have. How weird was it? When Lashawn lived with Bea and Liana, he never thought of it as something special unless he got into a fight with the former and was tasked with calming down the latter after the fight was over. He regarded living alongside someone, an older family member in particular, as a routine one was forced into for the lack of a better place to live and a more enticing company to share their time with. It was something boring cats and dogs did because they led boring, unremarkable lives.
With Williams, it was similar but different at the same time. In fact, the banality and the uneventfulness of their mutual cohabitation were artificial constructs that Lashawn fell back on imagining in order to conquer the stress of residing in the same apartment as his former superior officer, and the dog would always get morosely aware of this as soon as he gave the situation a thorough think-over. There was nothing normal about this. There were better ways. But… Not one of them included being this close to the famed and feared Black Sphynx of Meso, and none of them offered such an intimate glimpse into his personal habits, secret guilty pleasures, and unredeemed regrets he had been holding too close for comfort for who knows how long.
The dog got up from the feline's bed and prepared to leave. One of these days, he'd tell Williams he had nothing to apologize for and that Lashawn would do the same in his place. For now, though, the canine simply followed another order of his like a good boy.
He heard the cat climb back into the bed as he closed the door.