Todd loved coming to the dog park, even without the pack's dog, Maxim, tagging along. It was nice to just be out in the fresh air, surrounded by canines. He wished that Tobias, or Ahri, or Evan, or Talia, or Zac—any of them would come along. (Don't get him wrong, he liked Soleiyu, but a Mauvian was still pretty cat-like, and he knew that would NOT be welcome at the dog park). The company was nice. After spending an eternity alone, with not even his Chrysocyon family to—

No. No, he wasn't going to be sad today. Sadness was totally banned from hanging around today. It didn't matter that in just a week, one year will have passed since he first dropped to Earth, soaking in the warm sun and green grass and chirps of birds, all things he'd gone nearly a millennia without. He swallowed against the feelings, choking them down.

The sun was still warm, and the grass was becoming green once more as spring filtered in. Life... returned. Winter had frightened him beyond all reason, even though he pretended he was okay. That everything was fine. He didn't have any feelings about it. Everyone seemed to expect things from him, expect that he would adjust to life on Earth so quickly that he would appear as a normal human, seamlessly.

It didn't work that way.

He didn't have the heart to tell them, though. Once things had started to really smooth over, despite the odd bump that still cropped up (both big and small bumps), it seemed like everyone forgot that... he didn't truly belong here. That nobody could just go from being alone for a millennium to being a full person on Earth in just under a year. Sure, most days weren't unbearably difficult anymore, and a lot of the time, he didn't just on the edge of crying and shaking and screaming his hurt and rage to the entire world, but that didn't mean he was safe from them. That just because the majority was good, it didn't mean the minority was actually all that small, either.

But it was easier to put that front up, because he could tell it made them happy that he pretended to be human so well.

He swallowed the feelings down again, as if that it would work the second time, that today wasn't crystal clear on torturing him, on making today one of his worse days. He was fine. He would be fine. There were plenty of dogs not Chrysocyon they could never be Chrysocyon even if some looked similar enough there were still too many that were so different it didn't feel good and made him want to sob even more put. those. feelings. away.

He was safe. He was fine. He couldn't be anything else. He took a deep, shaking breath, and leaned back against the bench once more, watching all the dogs with a smile on his face. Everyone looked so happy... As he let his eyes wander, they landed on someone with a whole herd of dogs surrounding them. At least seven! That he could see! They were GIGANTIC! He... oh, stars, today just insisted on being bad no matter what he did, didn't it?

Todd stood up and fled the dog park, running down streets and alleys until he found a place he could slip to the ground and cry in. Curled up in a ball, he let himself sob. Big, ugly sobs that wracked his frame and made him feel like death warmed over when he finally ceased crying so hard.

He held himself for a while before he sat up. He missed his Chrysocyon so much. The longing sank deep into his bones, nestled there, sharp as blades and as unexpected as the strike of a snake waiting in the grass for the moment you finally relax. And that made him feel guilty on two levels: he hardly missed the Fangan family he could remember nothing but a wisp of, and... he had bonded very much with his new family, on Earth. The humans. (And the dog and the Mauvian, too). Why did he need to miss what had been gone for so, so long? Why did it need to ache so much he felt physical pain?

If this is what he felt like nearly a year after leaving his planet, emaciated and broken down, then... how he could he ever stand to return? People talked about visiting their dead worlds like it was nothing. But Fang knew the pain, the cost, so intimately. He had starved on his home planet for hundreds of years. The first hundred or so wasn't so bad, when the people of the village he'd settled near still lived. When there were still a few animals out and about. But as everything died...

What if he went to visit it, and he couldn't make it back to Earth? What if—what if he went there, and his planet decided it needed him to stay, poisoned by Chaos, all living things destroyed beyond any repair, and it decided that he needed to die, as well?

What if he never died, either? What if he just went back to barely alive, scraping by on nothing but the little leftover magic there was, on the edge of death forever? What if he just suffered eternally for being unable to ever save his planet, to fix it, to help his people and all that came with it?

No. He would not take that chance. He refused to suffer like that again, to not be able to eat again, to be alone again. Not after he'd found a new pack. A new family. That loved him, and spent time with him, that fed him, and cared for him, even when he still felt isolated and so far beyond understanding what it meant to be human that he felt as though he could never fit in. Not on Earth, where there were so many rich cultures that he couldn't even scrape the surface of. Even just where he lived. It all still felt so incomprehensible.

He would never go back to Fang. And it hurt. But... it would be okay. Because if he spent enough years on Earth, maybe he really could figure out how to live here. Without being an undue burden.