Purple Line

Another dream, it seemed. A black fox trotted along the paths of her own mind and found a vision not unpleasant this time. Over these vivid dreams she'd been having, she'd come to at the bottom of the sea, in the middle of an endless desert, and standing above a hellish, black wood. This time, however, it seemed her dreams took place in a much less threatening locale.

Her very own Lower Commons formed the surroundings. Large, abandoned buildings sagged behind barbed wire and chain link fences. Every couple of blocks held at least one visibly crumbling building or collapsed lot, and nobody walked or loitered anywhere that she could see. Unusual as this seemed to her at first, she slowly came to realize that this version remained completely devoid of both the human and spiritual fauna that usually graced the filthy backalleys and ill maintained projects about her.

Apparently some sort of disaster had transpired some long period of time before, as the more she walked the more apparent the actions of the bordering forests became. Namely, vines grew up the sides of buildings and large patches of grass crumbled the parking lots. Trees ripped up sidewalks with their slow, insistent roots, and the persistent, once omnipresent fog had given way to clean air. Instead of the thumping bass of cars or the cursing of women or the heart catching overflow of music from the clubs, only the ageless songs of crickets and nightingales greeted her ears.

And her tongue hung out as she smiled, hopping from a branch of a tree onto a fragile brick roof to look up at the naked stars. Fireflies punctuated the ground below with their eerie, green glow and in reply glowworms every color of the rainbow faded into sight. This is pretty damn cool. I like this dream, she thought, hopping off of the tree and running through a field of the glowing insects, snapping at them as they attempted to ascend out of the way and barking loudly, puppyish and without caution. It had been forever since she'd had a good dream.

In the course of the little vixen's elated hopping about, snapping at the phosphorescent insects who danced in the air like fireworks, she'd come to step over a human, all four feet landing on his stomach at first, and then with another hop she'd land on his face, not seeming to notice he lay there. The ground felt uneven enough in other areas for the sudden softness not to bother her much.

One or two jumps more would bring her to the base of a great tree that grew in the same lot that the police person she'd jumped into lay. "Ah, all we needs is some mice up in this bitch..." she said satisfiedly, invoking the name of her second favorite food in hopes that it would appear.

A voice cut into her playful frolicking and she noticed a rock chucked in her direction. "Eh?"

The sight of the uniform brought her hackles up immediately and she lowered her head, glaring at him with her yellow green eyes. "Oy, pig. What are ye doin still here?"

But after awhile, her expression softened as a particular memory played back in her head. Yes, her friend Max... this was his... desired mate as it were... at least the way she recalled it. Even if he was a pig, a friend of her friend was her friend, and he wasn't half bad looking. She stood back up out of her menacing crouch and her tongue lolled out playfully. "Oy... what did he say yer name was? Ah, I guess that ain't important officer..." she said, amiably trotting over and sitting at his feet, her head tilted to the side as she looked up into his face from the ground. "You ever nail a dude before?"

From her tone she may as well have been asking about the weather.

"Awww..." she cooed, seeming as though she didn't notice his hostility at her lack of acknowledging that he had a name. She trotted around to where he'd looked off to, aiming to reestablish eye contact. "Awww, don't be like that. Nobody else is around. Come on, ye can tell ole Grunty. Might be able to give ya some pointers, yea? Ye don't seem like someone very experienced."

She paused to irreverently lick her chops. "I'll start off. I done a lot of dudes. No shame in it, lots of fun."

"Eh?" She scratched behind her chin with a hindleg. "You must've been the bitch. Yea, I hear being the bitch for dudes takes a lot of caution and practice and shit. I guess you ain't done a girl before then?"

Her tone only grew more irrelevant with each passing syllable. "Oh... eh, right. You saw me doing Max I guess. I don't know what it is with you humans and needing privacy or whatever. We ain't nothin but mammals. You see something you like and you take it. Much simpler approach to life."

His caustic words only managed to make her canine grin widen until something akin to playfulness once again rested on her visage. "Yer being too hasty, yea?" she began lowering herself until she lay on the ground, then rolled over, pawing playfully at the air. "I got stalkers if that's what ye want to know. Heh... everything has a fanclub, but that ain't what I'm talking about. Tell me somethin... Bruce was it? Yea. Ye humans don't live for very long, huh? When yer dead, are your friends gonna be able to say 'thank ye'? Is you gonna be able to hear it? Don't get me wrong, there's a time and a place for... y'know... not having fun, but other people will fuck you up if you let what they think control what ye allow yerself to do, yea?"

The fox, a little gladdened to win the "debate" as it were, moved a bit closer to the man when he sat. "And who told you it was wrong?" she began again, sitting herself and wrapping her tail around her legs. "If ye don't want to hurt people, then not hurting them is doing what you want, right? It's healthy to do what makes ye happy, yea? I've been betrayed before; it's not fun. Makes ye realize that ye really are alone... people just like to fool ye to get stuff out of ya... ah... but people can be fun..." she began to purr. "I'd recommend Max, eh? He's not a bad bottom if you don't find that sort of shit fun..."

"Eh? Yer something other than human?" she said quizzically, as though the thought genuinely hadn't occured to her. Then again, she had to remind herself that sometimes humans got a spiritual affliction and then technically they weren't human anymore, even though she figured they must taste about the same. "What do you consider yourself, then?"

The vixen shrugged briefly. "Last time I saw him he was still vanilla." Of course, the last time she'd seen him was right before she'd seen fit to take a nap. "You see..." she said, her voice becoming more formal since she felt this was a more serious argument to go through with, or at least a point that might be a bit harder to make. "You help people at the expense of other people. You help out the people who want a nice neighborhood at the expense of the drug dealers. It's really a zero sum game. Now, well, let's start from the top," she'd say firmly, shifting a bit so she stood up a little straighter. "Why, my police friend, do you want to help people?"

He was a vampire, but he must be a recently converted one, she decided in her mind.

"Now..." she said formally, once he was finished explaining. "People don't realize I have been living a long time. I have talked with dead people. I have seen a lot of situations unfold. I have been a lot of places, and let me tell you, your biggest problem is the fact that you're mentally dividing people up into 'good' and 'bad'. When my parents were still alive and I still resided in Koutaku-shi... that's heaven for you people here on Yochi... I encountered a young girl. Her mother had put flashlights and knives up her coot and told her that's what boys would do when she got older. She starved and beat this girl. She locked her up in closets for days at a time. This girl, this spirit, still loved her mother. Nobody suspected the mother in that death because the lady was very what you call 'good'. She'd helped out countless homeless people at the shelters. She gave copiously to charities. She was always on hand to help a neighbor. In short, she was a pillar of her community, but all of that being good caused her a lot of stress and she'd relieve it on her little daughter. Nobody's innocent, would you agree?"

Grunty continued in her very plain, utilitarian tone of voice. "Surely you don't presume yourself able to see into men's hearts. How can you tell the difference between someone putting up a facade and someone trying genuinely to be a good person? All people have a lust for evil in their hearts, unless you, a vaspire, would like to tell me differently from your own experience. I didn't think so. How exactly do you presume you're so much worse than other people? Death is good; it gives a soul a chance to start over... a cleansing of sins, if you will..."

"So..." she said, reading the vague shortness of his responses as a digression-- a digression that might allow her to win on her points. "Why not view yourself as a savior instead of a devil for killing these people who are too afraid to kill themselves, huh?" Her voice turned soothing. "You're entirely too hard on yourself considering what a nice service you provide... you must have been given your gifts and wants for a reason. Pleasure is good for you, else it wouldn't feel so good, yea?"

"Precisely!" she chirped, thinking Bingo... in her mind as she made him see reason. "And now that you know it is a gift, what are you going to do, my good friend Bruce?" She broke away from her current position and paced in a small circle, the excitement apparent in her mannerisms. "Surely you can't continue in your old line of work... unless you used it to forward your own needs... which is perfectly fine if that's what you find fun, yea?"

"Eh? Weren't you planning to bang that dude?" she said, dropping her more formal tone since the argument seemed to have been won. "Oh, right, yea. What do I do for fun... heh heh heh. You ever stalk a guy for like miles? A drug dealer or some dude in a trenchcoat or somebody nobody's gonna miss? Scare 'im and nip at his heels and screw up his car and cell phone and get him like... on the outskirts of town or in a dark alleyway and just have yer way with 'im? Lots of fun, yea?" she said, licking her chops as though recalling a fond memory. "But mostly sex and drugs, yea? They're pretty fun; we didn't have them in heaven."

"Oh, right... sorry..." she began absently. "You wanted him to bang you. Sorta hard to tell with two guys, you know? The banger and the bangee I guesses, yea? Ah, but maybe that was a little offensive..."

She stuck her tongue out a bit, grinning. "Yea, so those... in heaven..." she said with a slight pause, her fur bristling up along her back as her eyes widened in insane menace. "They killed my parents, yea? I guess I don't ordinarily tell people that, but they don't have the right to tell me anything any more. It's why I'm down here, really. Why I do stuff for fun..."

The vixen shrugged it off, figuring it seemed a little odd to retain her form when talking to a person. Rather, she disliked the sensation of having to talk up at him. Black mist enshrouded her form, only clearing once she'd assumed that of a human woman, a decidedly grungy one. "Hey, nothin wrong with bangin if that's what ye wants to talk about, yea? Ha ha ha..."

The subject of her parents never sat well with her, and she liked to move on as quickly as possible after she initially mentioned it. "But it's nice to hear yer a top. He's pretty submissive, yea? Hope you're gentle to him; he's in my... employ after all. Don't need any work-related injuries... naw."

"Yep..." she chirped, turning away as though she planned to walk off into the grass, speaking very loudly over her shoulder. "He's my whore."

She didn't seem to think of any repercussions the sentence might have beyond her own honesty. "Pretty fun one, yea?"