I hate you. I hate you I hate you I hate you I hate--

Slate shut the voice in, like he was closing a door. Silence reigned in their mind for a blissful moment. Inquisitively, he reopened that door.

Oh freaking hell! This is my body, punk, and if you think you can just--

He shut the door. Padding a few steps onwards, between the legs of oblivious New York pedestrians, he cracked the door open.

I am going to hurt--

He clicked closed that mental door again, their large pink tongue lolling happily from their mouth. It was very curious, really. Very curious. In the weeks since he had first shut Calley out completely after Sonya's abandonment of them, Slate had discovered one truly interesting fact: Calley did not seem to share the ability to lock other elements of their mind away. Like their healing ability, this was something that was his. Not theirs: his. Their tail was wagging back and forth with the steadiness of a metronome as their feet padded along.

Above, the sky was speckled with clouds that did nothing to bloat out the sunlight. It made their fur warm. The pads of their feet touched down on the unshaded concrete of the sidewalk like they were walking upon hot coals. It was a pleasantly unfamiliar sensation.

They were currently in the form of a large, wiry-furred Irish wolfhound mix. Around their neck was a simple gray fabric collar without tags. As hard as Slate tried, he could not make their long legs and large paws move without the stumbling air of a puppy growing into its feet. Like their shifting ability, it appeared that learning a new form was strictly in Calley's domain. Unfortunately. This was their first day trying out this wolfhound form; in retrospect, Slate should have allowed Calley a bit more time to learn how to move it properly before he had begun his own experiment. Perhaps he could remedy that now. He slid the door in their mind open.

Would you help me control this form's legs better?

...Heh. Oh wow, you're serious. You're seriously asking for my help. You know what, Slate? I think you should just go--[/i]

Slate cut off the vulgar response. In all honesty, he did not think that the phrase 'go **** yourself' was what Calley should really be going for, given their situation. He padded on, weaving through the New York crowds with a simple aim: nowhere. He was curious to see how long it would take Calley to figure out a way to regain dominance. Until then, he was simply walking, with no true aim. He caused a slight stir, but New Yorkers were very good about minding their own business, and Calley would no doubt cooperate with him for a shift back to human if the dog catchers got called down upon their gray-furred head.

In front of him, a typical sidewalk collision occurred. Slate lightly danced around it. His intent was to keep simply walking. Something grabbed his attention, however. There was a smell of pain in the air. Sharp and fresh, overlaying an older, saturated smell. The man who had been jarringly bumped by his fellow bipedal stumbled against a building, muttering apologies.

The man who had committed the bumping was somewhat less apologetic. "Watch where you're going, why don't you?" He spat, taking a step closer. The man against the building cringed further away. Slate cocked their head. Intriguing. People really were... intriguing. 'Baffling' might be the better word. The point of this encounter: where was it? Their wire-haired muzzle turned towards the aggressor. Their tail had ceased to wag, and their tongue was back in their closed mouth. The man did not notice him, however, until Slate let out a low growl of disapproval. All along their spine, their naturally disheveled fur had risen in a fierce line, from the scruff of their neck to the base of their rigidly immobile tail.

"Woah. Nice dog. Easy." Slate's growl grew louder as the man began to wave his hands in the air, as if to soothe him. The movements were chaotic, and the scent of his fear was quickly distorting the other man's scent of pain that had first interested Slate. It was quite annoying. From such a chaotic man, it was yet another thing of which he could not approve. "Hey--call your dog off, man. I didn't mean anything by it. My bad."

The man against the wall shot a darting, furtive glance at the wolfhound. Then he straightened himself up and snuck a sideways step that took him away from the wall and safely lined him up next to the large dog's shoulder. "I, ahem... I..." The man with the pain scent cleared his throat. Then he whispered thinly, in a squeak that was trying to be loud: "You apologize. 'Cause you bumped me. That's rude manners."

"Yah, man. My bad. We cool?"

The man hiding with squared shoulders at Slate's side nodded his head vigorously. The other man walked backwards a step, then turned, and went on his way. He glanced back a few times, warily, until he turned at the next corner. Slate let his growl die out. It had a pleasant timber and a regular oscillation that appealed to him, but it was still rather a disagreeable noise. Silence was so much purer.

He looked over to the man at his shoulder, only to find him gone. A turn on their paws showed him the man's hunched form scuttling off down the street, in the opposite direction. Hmm. Slate's ears pricked after the man. What an intriguing gait. There was something off about the way the man set down his left foot, but Slate did not know what it was. Tail wagging with renewed curiosity, the large wolfhound began prowling on the man's heels.

The man did not appear to notice him until Slate lowered their nose, and began sniffing at his foot. The pain scent was rich; it smelled a little like some of the back rooms in Mondragon Labs. The man gave a start, shuffling to the side and stopping. The New York traffic parted around them in twin waves of oblivious cell phones and those too hurried by their own business to bother with others'. Slate wagged their tail disarmingly.

"You're a nice dog," the man mumbled, "but you don't want to hook up with Old Larry. Old Larry is a jinx. He'll jinx you, nice dog." The man shuffled on, after one last statement that came with a polite nod of his head: "You have good manners, nice dog. Good manners."

The wolfhound held its position for a moment, its head cocked to the side as if it really could understand the words--and therefore, not understand the meaning--of what Old Larry was rambling about. With its tongue lolling, it began to pad after the man.

Old Larry lived in Central Park on Tuesdays. The wolfhound stretched its jaws up to the sky in a silent yawn that ended in a click of healthy teeth. The moon was waning, but still seven-eighths full; the stars could easily trick a focused dog into counting to infinity, or until sunrise: whichever came first. The grass had been mowed recently, but not enough for the fresh-cut scent to linger. The sun-stiffened blades poked through the dog's wiry coat like broad-edged pins. It was an agreeable night.

Old Larry was not pleased. "Nice dog. Nice dog. Stay, nice dog," he tried again. Slowly he stumbled to his feet, using the back of a park bench as an aid. The pain scent jumped into the air, clear and fresh and curious, as the man eased his weight onto his left foot. "Stay." The man ordered again, pointing one finger steadily at the dog, as if to give his wobbly words some much needed reinforcement. He turned and began hobbling away, deeper into the park. The wolfhound waited until the man had glanced back twice, and said "Stay" four more times. Then it stood, with a wag of its tail, and trotted after.

"Bad nice dog! Bad!" Old Larry turned to lecture. The wolfhound cocked its head to the side, and listened attentively to every word. Most of the rambling speech did not make much sense. Oddly, Slate did not mind. The man's voice was pleasantly low in volume, and his words seemed to string together in a rise and fall like a light wind, or a baby's babble. The wolfhound's tail swung regularly back and forth to the repetition of "nice dog" and "stay". When the man turned to limp on, the large dog padded after him.

Old Larry finally surrendered under the branches of an old sprawling ash tree. He shook his head in disapproval as the dog settled down next to him, its long body laid perpendicular to the man's own as if the dog cared for such things as angle measures and the only set of conditions in Euclidean geometry that resulted in four congruent vertical angles. The man reached out a hand, and scratched behind the dog's ears. He jerked his chin upwards, to where the crown of the tree spread out into wide, alternately set branches. Many of them were bare, with unopened buds laying sleeping along their lengths, even though it was well into summer. There was a red ring spray-painted around its trunk. Slate did not know what that meant. Old Larry did.

"You see the tree, nice dog? Old Larry sees the tree. He sees the tree, and he thinks, 'this tree probably doesn't see Old Larry, but it's a lot like Old Larry, this tree.'" The wolfhound lay its head down on the grass, its eyebrows rising above its cold baby blue eyes as it watched the man. Old Larry had leaned his head back on the tree trunk, and was staring up its tall length.

"This tree is diseased. Maybe it was something on the inside once, but it's on the outside now. It's not a nice tree. Not like a nice dog, and not like a nice man; it's like Old Larry. It's a jinx." Old Larry pointed across the park. "See?"

The wolfhound raised its head, ears flicking as it followed the man's finger to a series of tree stumps. They could not be very old: a year, at most. A swarm of shoots, as thin as arrows, struggled up from the bases of the stumps. The trees were trying to grow back. Slate knew this spot, from Calley's memories: this was where some inconsiderate ice user had gotten into a fight with another mutant, a few weeks before the King Pharmaceuticals incident. The trees had been destroyed in the cross fire.

"Their roots don't know they're dead." Old Larry stated, his voice wispy. "It's sad when things don't know they're dead. It's this tree's fault," the man said matter-of-factly, pointing upwards at the dying ash tree that he was resting against. "This tree is a jinx. This tree keeps things alive that shouldn't be. It's sad when things don't know they're dead, and it's bad, bad manners, what this tree's doing."

The wolfhound's head was tilted to the side, its gaze uncomprehending. It gave a soft woof, as if to ask what the ash tree was doing that was such bad manners.

Old Larry didn't speak dog so well. "Good night, nice dog," Old Larry said, scooting down the tree's trunk to curl into a fetal position at its base. "Old Larry won't blame you if you're gone in the morning."

The wolfhound curled up in its own comfortable ball, a foot from the man.

They cut the ash tree down the next morning. Old Larry watched it fall, a look of grave understanding on his face. He had a hand on the shoulder of the wolfhound next to him. "Watch it, nice dog. It would have died with or without Old Larry and the nice dog, but it died with us, and that means something."

The wolfhound watched as the unprofessional work crew cut down its upper branches one by one, letting them crash to the ground to leave splinters and scars on the grass he had slept on the night before. Finally only the trunk remained, upright, covered in round splotches of white where branches that held sleeping buds had waited. They did not bleed. They did not smell of pain. They did not stand a chance. The final death blow came; a cut below that red sprayed-on circle on its trunk that left the old tree as nothing more than a stump. Slate wondered whether its roots would send up shoots; whether it was too stupid to know that it was dead. He did not realize that the hackles were raised all along his spine until Old Larry's hand smoothed them down.

"It's all right, nice dog," he said, turning away. "Not everything needs to live. It can rest now. All of them can. Living is very, very painful, nice dog: you carry everyone you meet with you. They can get heavy."

Old Larry limped out of the park. The wolfhound looked at the ash tree for a moment longer. The work crew had parked a strange yellow truck on the path. Like the red circle, Slate did not know what it meant until they threw the first thick branch in. The sound of the chipper was the worst noise he had ever heard. He ran after the man, his puppy-like steps stumbling.

Not everything needs to live, Old Larry had said.

What if they want to?

Old Larry was a jinx. Old Larry was a jinx with a broken foot that had never really healed right. It made every step a trial. Since Old Larry liked being on trial, he liked his bad foot. The wolfhound thought he liked it too--that lingering, layered pain scent was really quite entrancing--until he saw it for the first time.

They were in an alleyway off of a side street off of a forgotten street off of a main street. It was three days since Slate had begun his experiment, and he'd only felt the faintest struggles from the cage he'd made for Calley. It was early evening, and Old Larry had been wandering around New York City all day with his newly acquired wolfhound trailing like a tongue-lolling gray shadow at his side. Old Larry plopped down in that alleyway, and took off his boots.

The foot came out. So did the similes.

It was hairy all along the back, like a mohawk. It was bruised up in shades of royal purple and blue like an auctioned-off date at a Navy fundraiser. Like an athlete's lucky sock, it hadn't been washed since Old Larry had first taken to the streets. The cracked and layered nail that inhabited the big toe had a strange air of sentience about it; as Old Larry gave his toes a luxuriant crackling wiggle, it reflected the yellow street light at the alleyway's mouth like it was trying to communicate with Morse Code. Most importantly, most noticeably, most offensively, the bones had healed subtly wrong. There was an overlap to them that creaked and groaned unnaturally with every step. It was this gave Old Larry his daily dose of welcome pain.

The wolfhound jumped away from the foot, growling. Then it took a step closer... closer... nudged the foot with one paw, and sniffed.

It leaped back, with a whimper that turned into a growling bark.

The foot had healed. Wrong. The foot had healed... wrong. As hard as Slate tried, he could not force those two words to cohabitate the same sentence: the foot had healed. The healing had occurred incorrectly. Therefore, the foot had... had...

Healed.

Wrong.

This was an atrocity of such a simple, base nature that the wolfhound's head began to swim. He turned in a circle, and looked at the foot again.

It was the most offensive thing he had ever seen. It was even worse than the two-headed kitten Calley had forced Charles Triggs to drive him to a traveling freak show to see. The concept was simply beyond the wolfhound's grasp: how could something heal wrong? The words were not bedfellows, lovers, siblings, or distant cousins. Slate did not understand. He did not understand to such a degree that he did not notice the crack in the wall at the back of their mind until something noisy came triumphantly out.

**** it, Slate! How long were you planning to try and keep me in--! What the... is that?[/i] The noisy thing was beyond indignant as it looked through Slate's eyes at Old Larry. For his part, Old Larry was cackling at the nice dog's antics as his toenail flashed a cryptic message in the light. That is! That's the hobo that stole my pants!

As a matter of fact, Old Larry was wearing those very pants right now. They were old and faded and Calley would never want them back except on principle, but there they were: the baggy blue jeans he'd worn when he was fifteen, on his first day in New York. They had been a little small on Old Larry, but he'd broken them in over the past two years.

...What the hell have you been doing with our body, Slate, and why does it involve a hobo wearing my pants?

It was a question that could be answered later. Slate roughly shoved the noisy thing back into its cage, and sealed up the crack. There were more important things to deal with, here. That foot was wrong. Therefore, Slate would correct it. That was all.

"I killed my wife, nice dog." Old Larry's whispering lips brushed against the fur on the wolfhound's left ear. The wolfhound lifted its long snout up from its contemplation of the man's booted foot, and leveled baby blue eyes on the man's face that seemed quizzical. Old Larry gave a frightfully accepting nod. "I did. I killed her, and I got away with it. It was the worst thing that happened to Old Larry's life, getting away with it."

It had been two days since Slate had first come face to face with the Foot. He'd tried trotting and woofing the man into the free clinics around town, but Old Larry had just smiled with a pat on his head and a "nice dog". Slate didn't know if the clinics could do anything, anyway. The Foot had healed. Wrong. The Foot bothered him: it made his own thread of their mind sent an agitated buzz through the rest of the clutter that had them swarming, waiting, for something. He didn't know what.

"It was sixteen years ago, nice dog." Old Larry continued, wrapping an arm around the large wolfhound's neck that curled around to scratch at its chest. The wolfhound sat down with a whump, its broom bristle tail beginning to swish against the trash-littered alleyway floor.

"It was sixteen years ago, nice dog," Old Larry continued, after a wet cough. "Sixteen years, they haven't caught me. Old Larry can't turn himself in. You can't turn yourself in after sixteen years, nice dog, because no body cares anymore. Her parents were dead when I married her. No brothers, no sisters; my Mary didn't have anyone to care about her before Old Larry fell in love with her hair. She had such hair, Beautiful Mary. Craw!--black as crows, nice dog, and it swished against her ass when she walked in that skirt--" Old Larry thumped his hand against the wolfhound's side. "But nice dog doesn't care about that, does nice dog?"

"Old Larry cut off a piece of her hair when he killed her. He thought he would keep it forever ever, even after they put the rest of her hair in the dirt, my Beautiful Mary's hair. But Old Larry got afraid that someone would find it, so Old Larry burned it. It had such a smell, Beautiful Mary's burning hair."

"Old Larry married Beautiful Mary twenty years ago. Beautiful Mary divorced Old Larry eighteen years ago. Old Larry didn't mind that. Old Larry was never good enough for his Beautiful Mary--he stayed at work late, he chased the secretaries, he forgot their anniversary. No." Old Larry rested his head against the alleyway wall, and ruffled the dog's hair without looking at him. "Old Larry signed her papers. He let her leave. But he couldn't let her take their daughter."

"Their daughter wasn't beautiful, nice dog. But she drew bad pictures in crayons of things no one had ever seen, and she sang off-key songs no one had ever heard. Old Larry couldn't let That Mary take his daughter. She was his daughter. She was his ugly daughter, ugly like he was, but the kind of ugly that touches things and leaves them better."

"So Old Larry went into her house and he held a pillow down on That Mary's face until she stopped moving. Then he left. His daughter found her in the morning. Then the police let his daughter come live with him, and he burned the piece of hair he'd cut, and he never got caught. Sixteen years he never got caught. Fifteen years ago he killed his daughter."

"He had chased a secretary out of the office and into his bedroom. His daughter was outside playing. She played right into the street. Old Larry didn't look out the window when the car honked or the tires squealed. The secretary was squealing, too. That's how Old Larry killed his daughter: he jinxed her."

"And now Old Larry has his ghosts with him, and he won't let them die. He keeps them alive, nice dog, and that's a sad thing, and a bad thing. They don't know they're dead, That Mary and his daughter, because he keeps them alive."

Old Larry closed his eyes, and his hand stilled. The wolfhound waited. Cars passed by, somewhere close, with indifferent noises of gutters draining. Eventually, the dog's nose drifted back down to the man's foot. The Foot. It was so wrong.

Old Larry didn't open his eyes. He let out a breath that carried words. "They're heavy, nice dog. They're heavy, and not everything needs to live."

What if I want to?

The hand brushed lightly against the dog's fur. "Then Old Larry hopes the nice dog's back doesn't break."

The dog's ears flicked forwards and its snout shot up in surprise. Old Larry, though, was either asleep, or suffocating under the weight of his ghosts. The wolfhound's nose slowly lowered back to the Foot.

Healing the foot would be exceptionally easy. The Foot had healed incorrectly: this was an atrocity. There was only one cure: break it. Break it, and have it be healed in the proper manner that had been intended. Going about this breaking was the difficult part.

The wolfhound padded with its puppy-like steps after the hobo, its snout trailing towards the Foot, as it usually did. A light up ahead turned green. In a surge of blaring horns and accelerators, the traffic swept by. The wind it caused actually flattened the wolfhound's hair to a more tidy state for a moment; then, with wiry tenacity, it sprang back into its former position.

Pushing the man into traffic simply would not do. The least likely thing to be broken was the Foot.

They walked through a tunnel of thin steel beams and plywood boards. Hammers and orders rang out from somewhere above, where construction was going on. At the end they emerged back under the sun of a summer sky.

A hammer would work, if applied with precision. It was an unlikely encounter to occur, however, seeing as the wolfhound itself lacked opposable digits.

They stopped at a corner just outside of Central Park, where Old Larry sat, with a huff, on the pedestal of a bronze statue. The statue was of a man sitting atop a horse with one leg raised. Though Slate did not know who the man was, he knew how the man had died: from battle wounds. A rearing horse for death in battle; one leg raised for death from wounds; all four legs firmly on the ground for a more peaceful death at a later date. Slate did not approve of the man. Death in battle was presumably quick, and death at a later date tended to be mandatory, but death from a more lingering sort of wound? It was a strictly unnecessary way to die. No doubt if the statue-enshrined man had fought his glorious battle in more modern times, more modern hospitals would have put him atop a horse with all of its legs properly planted. Then again, more modern men had invented more modern weapons. But then, rearing horses did cut a dramatic picture.

More modern weapons were of little use in combating the Foot. The wolfhound wuffed as it lowered itself to the ground below Old Larry's seat, its muzzle laying flat over the man's boot.

Since the nice doggie had started following Old Larry around, he'd been having better luck with his begging. In a mere hour's time, he had enough for two hot dogs from the vendor down the block. With great deliberation, Old Larry began holding each topping down for the wolfhound to sniff.

Ketchup. Wrr....

Mustard. Wuff!

Sauerkraut. ...Whine.

Pickles. Wuff!

"You want to get the health department called on me, man? Keep your dog's nose outta my toppin's."

Thus ended the selection process. Old Larry put ketchup on his own hotdog. Back at the statue, he began to messily chew. The mustard-pickle-hotdog was placed on the ground. After a moment of careful consideration with regards to cleanliness, the wolfhound delicately licked the toppings off, then snapped down the rest in three clean bites.

Now. Back to the issue of the Foot. The wire-haired dog nosed its muzzle back on top of Old Larry's boot, one coarsely furred cheek rubbing against Old Larry's coarsely furred leg where Calley's old pants were too short for the man. The dog's tail was meditatively on the ground as it simply lay there, soaking up sunlight like a bristly-haired sponge. The lazy warmth was not particularly conducive to the thought process, but the dog somehow was not about to complain. It feels good.

"It sure is a nice day, isn't it?" Old Larry said.

One of the dog's ears flopped over. ...I dislike sauerkraut extremely. The smell is offensive to existence itself.

"That vendor sure didn't like your nose in his things. It's not like you were hurting anything, nice dog. I hear that dogs have cleaner mouths than humans. You could have licked his toppings, and they would still be good."

What is one plus one?

"Two," Old Larry stifled a yawn, then continued: "two hotdogs are easy to buy with you here, nice dog. People like to give Old Larry money when he has a nice dog with him."

...I cannot tell if you can understand me.

"I think a lot of people can't understand Old Larry. But when Old Larry is with a nice dog, there's not much to understand. A nice dog is a nice dog."

...You are either truly insane, or a mastermind.

Old Larry leaned back against one of the horse's legs, a lazy smile on his face as he bathed in the sun. That was about the only kind of bathing that Old Larry did. The man covered his mouth as a wet cough overtook him.

Proper hygiene reduces instances of illness, Slate tactfully thought, whether the man could hear him or not. Old Larry wiped his hand on his pants.

If only it was as easily as with Calley: all it would take was a brief mental oust, and two shifts: one to break up the improperly fused bone, and one to reset it correctly. It would be over in less than three seconds. Break. Set. That was all. The wolfhound drew in a deep breath, and wuffed it back out. Your foot irritates me. If it was mine, I could heal it. Because it is yours, I cannot. One paw gave an idle twitch. This irritates me, he repeated, quite intelligently. All it would take was having brief control of the man's mind. His inability to claim such was not for lack of trying.

With his muzzle on the man's foot like this, and his head against the man's leg, it was almost as if they were one being--he could hear the man's heartbeat, feel the slight movements of his body that came with every breath. There was something else, too--something that went beyond mere touch and smell and senses. He could feel it from an abstract distance, when he looked for it. He could get no closer than that, however. It seemed, almost, to be similar to the barrier that he used to keep Calley in, or Calley out, depending on his mood. It seemed less defined than that--more flexible, more breakable, and entirely less solid. Perhaps he could break it, if he tried. Something in the hairs between the pads of his feet stood on end at the thought of trying, though. Barriers generally existed for a reason. He was not about to destroy one simply for the sake of trying, any more than he was going to take a bulldozer to someone's fence to see what their lawn looked like. The bulldozer was quite as likely to destroy the lawn as the fence. Never mind that it was awfully messy, and mildly rude.

Irritation. Irritate. Irritated. Irritability. Listing words with similar stems in his mind helped, somehow. Irritant. Irritating. Irritable. He wasn't quite sure why that was, but it worked. Now, a sentence: Irritating irritants irritate irritable, irritated irritatees irritatingly. 'Iritatees' was not actually a word. Additionally, he had failed to work in 'irritation' and 'irritability'. Somehow, those facts left him feeling...

Why cannot I not heal your foot? What difference exists between healing you and healing myself? Besides that barrier, and the minor fact that the man's mind was not Slate's own, any more than the man's body was another of their forms. In this one case, however, logic failed to pacify the wolfhound. Logic demanded that he give up on the Foot. That was something up with which the dog could not put. What is wrong with trying to heal you? Why should I fail? Why can't I even try?

Old Larry coughed, and ran his sleeve over his mouth. His mouth looked dirtier for it. "The thing about trying is," he said simply, as if into the air, "you can always do it. It's just not a good idea. Trying causes a lot of trouble. Old Larry was a history major before he was a murderer--he knows. Trying starts things. You can't unstart a started thing, nice dog. Did you know that?" He coughed again. "Try all you want; it can only make things worse. Worse is the way Old Larry likes it."

The wolfhound tilted his head, one large clear eye angling upwards to look at the man. And just like that, he felt something: something that wasn't there at all. Something that had used to be. That barrier between their minds was gone.

Slate moved in cautiously. The consciousness was foreign--it was, in a word, distinctly more organized than Calley's mind. This somehow failed to surprise him. Ghosts leapt out at him. Memories of a young child with buck teeth that did not stop her from smiling widely. The aftertaste of a hot dog with ketchup. The way a pillow felt soft but tight and hard as you held it down, so long, so long, and then everything was still and the little girl was yours again and that woman had changed the locks on the house but she hadn't changed the hiding place for the key. So funny, so funny. Larry's ghosts were so funny. The whole world was so funny--the way people made the same face when they were surprised by divorce papers and search warrants and bad jokes at funerals; the way the sun shone sometimes while it rained; the way ghosts were so light and so heavy and so hard to see but so easy to remember. The wolfhound's tail thumped the ground as a million different jokes crashed through its mind, and the weight of the ghosts settled down around the base of its neck like a yoke. Its own consciousness was tossed from memory to memory like a very small twig in very rough rapids. A lawyer's bill, papers to sign, custody granted. There was a reason he was here. A doctor's paper, a cup of coffee, a promise to come back to the free clinic for therapy every month that he never meant to keep--such a nice young doctor, though. A real lady. She didn't know that the shiny new ring around her finger was a coffin for a ghost-in-the-making. These were not his memories. Such a nice dog on the street, though it had the weirdest obsession with-- The Foot.

Slate's consciousness snapped to that focus. The memories were irrelevant. The ghosts were not his own. The thoughts were unnecessary. His mind sought a deeper level, one unclouded with intelligence. One that existed without thought: the basic template for Old Larry's body, as it was supposed to be. It wasn't stored in his mind. It was stored in every cell of his body, except for an odd handful in his lungs that were easily ignored.

Slate had been wrong: it took only one shift to heal the Foot. Then he was retreating back into the safety of their own skull. The wolfhound's body jerked upright into a disquiet rear: death in battle. Then all four pads of its feet hit the warm concrete again. It shook its head out. It could no longer remember what had seen inside of the man's mind that had left it feeling so battered; Old Larry's memories were his own, and not the dog's. Slate remembered the healing, though. When he was able to blink his eyes back into focus, he found himself confronted with the Foot.

No.

The foot, lowercase. Old Larry had pried off his boot, and was freely wiggling his hairy toes in the sunlight. "Well," he cackled, setting the healthy appendage onto the bronze base of the statue to bask. "Old Larry's not sure how this is worse, but he's sure he'll find out."

The wolfhound tilted its head critically to the side as its heart rate leveled out to a more agreeable tempo again. You can hear me, it accused.

The hobo started whistling.

Slowly, the wolfhound settled down a short distance away, and set its head down. It was suddenly tired, and the sun was warm.

Old Larry was right. This was worse. Much worse.

He had healed the foot, and that had started something: now, he knew he could heal others. What he did not understand was why he could not heal this. It was worse, far worse, than never having been able to heal others at all. He did not know if he was doing something wrong. He did not know if there was a better way to go about things. He did not know if it was possible.

Old Larry was dead, and Slate could not heal him.

It was not because the man had put back up that barrier between them--no, he had left that down. Slate suspected that the hobo did not see any point in putting it back up. It made it hard for Slate--he had spent several days dodging from the man's pets with a whimper, or a curling of his tail between his legs. Without the barrier there, there did not seem to be a distinction between Old Larry's mind and his own. There was no line in the sand that the ghosts could not cross: at a touch, at a stroke, they moved freely into Slate's own mind. He could never remember afterwards what they had been. He only knew that they were as heavy as Old Larry claimed, and that he did not want to carry them for that man.

Several times, Slate learned from the man's old mind about the cough. About the diagnosis. About the inevitable count down; the red line that had been painted on the old man, and the days left until the cutting team came for him. Several times, he forgot it. It was not his to remember.

He did not begin to suspect for himself that Old Larry was dying until the first time he smelled blood after a cough. That was the same day the pain smell returned. Not from his foot--from his arm. Later, he would learn that this was from the growing tumor pressing on the man's nerve endings. At the time, he could not understand it. Old Larry did not feel like eating that afternoon, even though the wolfhound brought him a hot dog that had been within easy jumping range of his teeth.

It was not hard to find where they buried him. All he had to do was wait at the loading bay of the coroner's office until the body was sent for burial. After the third day, the people who worked there stopped trying to shoo him away, and gave up on calling the dog-catcher, who was of the opinion that they were sending him after a ghost dog. It took ten days before they gave up trying to identify him. Dental records were taken, photographs snapped, and the body moved out of refrigeration and shipped to a nearby funeral home that handled such things for the morgue. It was hard to recognize Larry's scent through the black bag. He did not know for certain he was chasing the right van until much later, when his large gray paws perched on a windowsill at the funeral home, and he saw Old Larry lying on a table.

In the end, it was not the lung cancer that killed Old Larry. The pneumonia was much faster. There was no funeral. No last rites. Only cold storage for another two days, and then an unceremonious trip down the hallway to the in-house crematorium. How convenient.

Slate had tried to heal him. Old Larry had never put the barrier back up; he had, in effect, given Slate blanket permission to do as he would. To try as many times as he wished. To fail as many times as he could physically and mentally tolerate. The foot had been an honest injury: easily fixed. The cancer, and the virus behind the pneumonia... those had been something else. Something outside of the man's own body, yet so intrusively inside. He had not been able to touch them. They had no mind he understood; no mind he could break into or reason with. Yet they had life. And they could not be smoothed out of the way, like a broken bone healed wrong.

The mortician had been warned by the corner's staff, half-jokingly, and half-not, about the gray ghost dog that followed the old man's remains. The corner's staff had been warned as much by the police who had first come to the scene.

Old Larry had not eaten for two days, and the pain scent was no longer entertaining. Slate had simply wanted it to go away. His mind was hazy and raw from too many brushes with Larry's ghosts, but he could not stop trying. The man had kept persistently scratching behind his ears with one tired hand. The other, he used to cover his coughs. "Nice dog. Old Larry knew you were a nice dog." Many people walked by the alleyway. The wolfhound tried to herd them inside; this only resulted in his first run in with the dog catcher, and three hours of Old Larry's death that he had missed. Three hours which could have been spent in far better ways than playing fox and hound with a government employee. Even if he was failing to heal the man--even if he continued to fail--the least he could do was lay at the man's side. The nights were beginning to get cold. Summer was dying. Like a tree with a red ring painted on it. Like Old Larry, in the alleyway.

He had been right. In the end, it was surprisingly easy to see one simple fact: Old Larry was not insane. He was right, about everything. About ghosts being heavy. About trying leading to starts, and about starts being something that couldn't be unstarted.

Old Larry was a man who kept his ghosts alive. He was dead now, and Slate did not know his last name. He had healed him, but he could not heal him all the way. And he could not heal death. Old Larry's breath had stopped first. He had been asleep when it happened. His chest simply stopped moving, as if it, too, was going to sleep. The wolfhound stretched along his side had felt the man's heartbeat continue on for several long moments. It had started out as a frightened bird. It had slowed. Calmed. Stilled. And that was when a more complete barrier than he had ever felt had slammed into place between them. It was not the barrier of Old Larry's mind; the barrier that naturally existed between two sentient beings, that the man had eased away so that Slate could try as he pleased to heal him. It was much more final than that. It was a grayer color than Slate's own thoughts, and he knew without trying that breaking past it was futile. This was not the fence in front of a house. This was the fence around a demolition site, already cleared of debris. There was nothing to see on the inside. Old Larry was gone. Slate had not understood death before then. Or life.

It was his howling that had eventually brought the police. He had not known what else to do. The sound seemed to free him of the weight of the man's ghost, for as long as he could keep it up. So he had thrown back his head, and howled as loudly and as long as he could. And he had kept going, until they had come for Old Larry's body.

He did not see what they did with the man's ashes. One of the mortician's workers had caught sight of his large, lanky shape in the darkness; intelligent blue eyes glittering outside of the windows. By then, the police, the coroner, and the mortician himself had built up the dog's myth. The nameless John Doe had his own ghost dog, that followed him wherever he went. The worker had slammed the shades down on the windows as fast as she could. She had raised them again, checked all the locks with a shaky hand, then slammed them back down. She was the only one working so late. She did not need ghost dogs breaking in. But it was really the other way around, wasn't it? He wasn't Old Larry's ghost. Old Larry was his.

The wolfhound padded away from the mortician's place, its steps as awkward and stumbling as a puppy's, its head and tail held in a level line with its spine. Slate took down the barrier between his and Calley's parts of their mind without preamble.

Finally! What the hell, Slate? What, do you want me dead? Where's your hobo friend? Done gallivanting around in my body? Hey--hey! I'm not done yelling at you! Hey--![/i]

Slate set the barrier back up, in reverse. He settled it around his own thoughts. Thin, smooth, and without holes. Calley's voice cut off. All voices did. Not even ghosts could find him here, if he did not let them.

Old Larry was right. Not everything needed to live. Especially not a healer so weak, he could not even heal death.