What you wish to see in the world

Rob looked at the scene in front of him in dismay. Chunks of masonry were strewn across the street and twisted rebar protruded from the ravaged buildings like tentacles. Choking dust still swirled in the air but most of the screaming had died away as fleets of ambulances had ferried the injured to hospital. Rob's crew had missed most of the immediate aftermath. Their job was to sit vigil, now, poised to help if and when the search and rescue teams pulled anyone else from the rubble.

A dog zigzagged across the street in front of him, nose to the ground and her little vest sparkling incongruously in the sunlight. She caught his scent and froze, whining as she cowered away. Rob stepped back slowly, carefully distancing himself before the dog's handler hurried over. He was here to help, dammit. Terrifying the working dogs into immobility was emphatically not in his brief.

Neither was helping them, though, and that injunction was threatening his self control with every idle minute that passed. His nostrils flared and his skin itched and he bunched his hands into fists as he willed his fingernails to behave.

His attention was caught by a flurry of activity at the closest corner of the building, his uncanny hearing picking out a handful of the words. What he heard turned his stomach, though, and he slumped back against the ambulance, ceding that particular casualty to the crews earmarked for transport to the morgue.

Dani gave him a strange look as she shouldered her response bag, poised to react as soon as they were summoned. "Rob?"

"Oh." He reached back and swung his own bag easily onto his shoulder, the weight of the gases and defib barely noticeable. "I just... it looked like they'd already called it."

Dani frowned, but then her face fell as she saw the rescuers signal the transport crew and she let her pack thump to the floor again. "Guess they had."

He tensed as footsteps approached from behind and waited until Dani turned before doing so himself. People got creeped out if he noticed them coming too soon. "You guys take a break," the scene commander said, brusquely, his eyes on the rescue teams working beyond their shoulders.

Rob bristled. "We've not done anything yet."

"Son." The man's exasperation was tinged with little enough condescension that Rob was only very slightly tempted to tear his throat out for the insult. "We'll all be here for days. And if we don't start taking rests in turn, we'll all crash at once."

"Oh." Rob dropped his eyes, licked his lips, and willed his ears not to twitch back. People really got creeped out when they did that. "Sorry. That makes sense."

The commander was already heading away, though, a million plates spinning in the air around him and far too much at stake to let any of them fall.

"I'm going to get a tea." The look Dani was giving him was, if anything, nowhere near withering enough given his increasingly twitchy behaviour. "I'll bring you one back."

The second he was alone he growled low in his throat and shook tension out of his arms, letting his nails lengthen into claws for just a moment and his hackles rise. There was so much he could do. But not right now, not without causing another major incident all of his own. Being a werewolf might not be illegal, but Changing in the middle of a populated area with no warning? That was. None of his colleagues knew about his... condition, since he didn't particularly enjoy being ostracised on a daily basis, and he wasn't keen to get tranquillised 'for his own good' if he did Change here and now.

So, no full on transformation. But maybe he could help a bit? Just while he was on his break? He rummaged in the door pocket of the bus and pulled on a beanie, tugging it low over his ears. He tucked his hands into his pockets, hoped no one was looking too closely at his ass, and let himself Shift just a little. His ears lengthened, sliding unsettlingly up towards the top of his head, and he heard fabric tear in his pocket as his claws extended. His trousers tightened as his tail started to grow, but the biggest change was in the world in front of him. Everything went sharp, the movements of rescuers a hundred metres away suddenly clear as day. He sucked in a breath as the sounds of the city hiked to almost unbearable levels, and was assaulted by the scent of blood and smoke and human. His ears pricked and he jerked his head around, unable to accurately pinpoint the victims from this far out.

It was hit or miss whether he'd be hauled over the coals for intruding on the scene without being summoned, but he couldn't do nothing. Hunching his shoulders to hide his now inhumanly yellow eyes, he walked purposefully into the hive of activity. No, he shouldn't be here, but if he looked like he should then maybe he'd at least have a chance to—

The scent that caught his nose was blood and fear and child and it took everything he had not to Change in that instant and dig the kid out himself. Instead he kept his pace, flicking his eyes sideways until he caught the little dog that had cowered from him before. Communicating only through sound, across species and without his ears and tail to help, was never easy. But the spaniel was motivated to understand him by a healthy dose of fear and, if it didn't exactly bound up to him, it did at least head in his direction with its handler hot on its heels.

There, he growled quietly, meeting the dog's eyes and indicating the place with a flick of his own. Puppy. Hurt. Satisfied that she was heading in the right direction and her own nose would guide her to the exact spot, he resumed his walk.

He was back by the bus when Dani returned, two large paper cups steaming in her hands. She looked at him sidelong and he snatched the cap off his head and shoved it in his pocket, checking as he smoothed his hair into place that his ears were back to human. "You ok, Rob?"

"Fine."

She took a breath as if she was about to say something more, but then a shout from the far side of the scene had them scrambling. Another crew took the kid in the end. Rob wasn't ashamed that he checked in on him when they dropped their own casualty at the hospital, and the assurance that the little guy would be just fine eased a little of the clawing horror of the day.

------

He came back, of course. In many ways it was easier at night.

He Changed. Not the teeth-itching Shift of the daytime, his sensitive ears crammed in his beanie and his tail tucked between his legs, but a full-body, exhilarating Change. He stripped off quickly behind a nearby building first, hating how seedy the action felt but well used to its necessity. The Change swept all cares away, though, as it always did: the heady rush of power flooding him like hard spirits, unfettered life crackling from his paws to the tips of his ears, it was almost impossible to remember in that moment why he didn't spend every minute in this form. He shook out his fur, retracting his claws enough to silence his footfalls, and took a deep lungful of the cold night air.

Reality flooded back in with the breath, the scent of fear and decay and blood and hurt pervading his whole body. His ears flattened against his head and he whined almost silently, keening into the darkness for the loss of life. Not now. Not when there was work to do.

In the darkness there were shadows in which to slink, and he could hold himself still enough to be indistinguishable from the larger chunks of rubble. He whined and growled as quietly as he could to the tireless sniffer dogs, their vision acute enough in the low light to interpret his body language. But there were floodlights too, for the humans, and while he could cover far more ground than a spaniel, both by dint of his longer legs and his supernaturally acute senses, he couldn't move nearly as quickly as he'd like without risking discovery. Discovery, tranquillisation, captivity, and shame.

Come morning he would be back on shift fettered by his human form, exhausted from a sleepless night. But tonight he could help, and that's all he'd ever wanted to do, and so help he would.

------

"Are you sure?"

Rob stopped as he entered the ambulance station, something in the tone of Dani's voice telling him this wasn't a conversation he wanted to interrupt.

"Yes."

A single word, but easily enough to identify his colleague Hans, who'd been on shift last night at the incident site and should definitely be home in bed by now.

"It's not like a... microaggression or something?"

Hans snorted. "Never mind that, coming from anyone else it's a whole damned lawsuit. That's why you're giving it to him. You're his partner."

Rob stilled, his ears straining to lengthen and his fingernails itching as every sense he had screamed danger. They were talking about him. And there were very few things that might associate his name with 'lawsuit' and one very, extremely obvious one.

It's not illegal, he reminded himself. Werewolves were protected by law from discrimination. Technically. As long as they didn't, you know, act all werewolfy where anyone could see. The law was a bit more technical than that, but it boiled down to the same thing. You'd probably get arrested these days for hunting werewolves. It was certainly frowned up to display even antique pelts in polite society. But those little asides and – his lips curled into a snarl – microaggressions that made day-to-day life that bit more unbearable? You'd need a hell of a lot of evidence to get anything like that past the stonewalling of even the most liberal-leaning HR folks.

There was a reason why no one at work knew, damn it. He'd built this whole career, slogged through the years of uni and on-the-job training, with not one person knowing his secret. And great heavens that was lonely. But he'd done it, clawed (hah) his way to this rung of the ladder, and his stomach swooped with dismay at the idea it could all be gone by lunchtime.

Setting his shoulders, he forced himself to complete the walk to the break-room. If this was it, then at least he'd go out on something of a high. He'd found three people in the rubble last night and every one of them had been breathing, if only barely, when the spaniels had alerted their handlers and the cavalry had swung into action.

"Morning." He dragged his eyes up from the floor, pasting a semblance of a grin onto his face. "How's—"

No. With the best will in the world there was no way he could keep up the act in the face of that.

"Dani?" he asked, his voice wavering alarmingly, and the blood drained from her face at his expression.

"It's a present!" She thrust the fabric towards him. "And it was Hans' idea!" she added hurriedly, waving unnecessarily at the hulking man beside her who was trying and failing to blend into the background.

"A present." Despite himself he reached out and took the thin fabric, which slipped through his fingers as he shook it out. Service dog, the vest proclaimed, and the faintest hint of a growl that he fought to suppress rose from his throat.

Dani made an alarmed eeping noise but, to his shock, stepped closer. "We're proud of you!" She sounded terrified, but she was still moving closer, and that couldn't be right because people didn't come close to werewolves, not once they knew. "You... last night. You found all those people. Hans saw."

Rob snapped his head round to the room's other occupant, blinking back the yellow that he knew must be rimming his eyes. "What?"

"Last night. You were there, weren't you?"

Rob swallowed. "I don't know what you mean."

"Come on, man." Hans shook his head. "There was a wolf there last night, no question. Those spaniels? Great little guys, sure, but the way they were working? Stopping and looking into the dark and then suddenly finding folks? Every time they did it there was something bigger in the shadows and I've seen wolves, man, I know what I saw."

"Even..." Rob cleared his throat, forcing his voice to steady. "Even if there was a wolf. Doesn't mean it was me."

Hans shrugged, one shouldered, his studied casualness falling just short. "Greg's wondered for a while. Said yesterday he thought you maybe—"

"Greg?"

"Scene commander yesterday," Dani supplied, but Hans' posture also screamed mate. Oh.

"Yeah. He, ah, he said one of the dogs, the new one, did this weird thing where she just went still and then shot off straight to a kid a hundred metres away. And I said it was strange because that happened a couple of times last night and he said you'd just gone on your break when she did that and, well. Like I said. He's wondered for a bit."

How? Rob thought. He'd been so careful. And somehow a man senior enough to be bronze command at a major incident had kept tabs on him enough to have put together the clues he would have sworn he never even left and oh god, it was all over, everything he'd worked for, and— Fight for it, his subconscious growled at him, and he summoned up every ounce of nonchalance he could fake and said, in a voice that didn't quite falter, "Pretty thin evidence, isn't it?"

"Well." Dani was scarlet now, not pale. "It would be. Only... um. Look, Rob, we've worked together a while. You... you're never without something to cover your ears, even in summer."

He raised an eyebrow. Thin.

"Your uniform might be spotless but outside of work you've hairs all over your clothes that are the exact shade of gold your hair is.

Circumstantial. "I have a cat?"

"There's flea shampoo in your locker, Rob."

"I... what? How do you— I mean, I like the... smell?" He winced. The stuff smelled vile by anyone's lights, but needs must. And some things just weren't talked about in polite society.

"Rob." Dani sounded so gentle it hurt. "I've known since the second month we worked together. You remember? The rave?"

How could he forget? Spiked drinks and drugs cut with heavens knew what and a bunch of underage ravers suddenly looking every bit the children that they were. No one died that night but every crew in the area had worked flat out to make sure of it and they'd crashed in the break-room when they got back, no one willing to risk the drive home once the adrenaline wore off.

"What about it?"

"You, um." She huffed an exasperated breath. "Rob, you curled up on a rug in the corner in a frankly improbable position, and before you can tell me it's circumstantial or whatever, your nose grew four inches and what you covered it with was more paw than hand and I'm trying to tell you, doofus, that we don't care."

"You don't... what?"

"I mean..." she waved a hand vaguely. "We obviously care. I'm not trying to, like, be dismissive of your culture or whatever—"

Rob, at a loss, mouthed "Culture?" over her head at Hans, who shrugged back helplessly. Dani was on a roll, it seemed.

"But you saved a bunch of lives last night and look, the jacket was probably stupid and I'm sorry and we never have to talk about this ever again if you don't want to but you don't have to hide, Rob." She subsided, her voice going quieter. "We're your friends. That's not changing."

A half smile grew slowly on her face and her eyes twinkled dangerously and Rob held up a quelling hand. "Don't say it. Please don't make a Change joke." She subsided, eyes still dancing, and he shook his head. "You mean it, don't you? It doesn't actually make a difference to you?" She shook her head. "You're... you're not scared."

The noise Dani made was, frankly, insulting. "Course not, you great idiot." She pulled him into a rough hug. "Like I said. Proud of you."

"Right." He nodded, cleared his throat, nodded again. "Right." There was a short silence. "Look, I... thanks. I just... I need to go and like, um, reevaluate everything I thought I knew about my life? So I think I might need to be alone for a minute, but, um."

"Go." Hans flapped his hands. "It's all good. Go have your little crisis. We'll be here."

"Yes. Right." He turned to the door. "Right."

He took three steps then reconsidered and spun back round. Neither of them flinched. "I, um. Thanks?" He plucked the service dog vest out of Dani's hand and gestured between them with it. "Thanks."

The pair held their silence almost long enough for him to leave earshot.

"Told you."

"Hans, I already knew."

"Well, yes. But I still worked it out."

Dani's eye roll was almost audible. "Yes, Hans, well done. Very clever."

"Still think it was a microaggression?"

"Anyone but Rob, buddy, it's an entire lawsuit."

------

The vest lived tucked in Rob's pocket most of the time. Neither he nor Dani relished the days when he had to put it on, because those days came with more terror and death than the average. But a volunteer S&R handler and her striking golden partner could do an awful lot of good, given half a chance.