Powdery snow fell in the twilight of dawn, with not even a single strand of multicolored lights to be seen beyond Zachary’s wide bedroom window; the district but a darkened void, set apart from the rest of the world. There wasn’t any heralding sign that Christmas morning had finally arrived to deliver its yearly penance to all of the the naughty children who earned stockings full of coal, but as the young Penitatas stirred, he knew the time had come. Most wearing his letters would, dreading the day’s first light, but Zachary stretched under his covers with a spark of something else. After a whole month of learning about Earth’s culture and festive season as a newcomer to this world, he had Christmas-loving cheer to spare; sweeping a paw over to his nightstand to put on the fluffy red and white Santa hat he begged his fathers for, with slits cut for his ebony ears. They had told him how oppressively harsh the day would be at their claws, getting lashed with switches as hard as they could swing. Kayla even gave him the full rundown on how the ‘Special Punishment Day’ would work from an ex-penny perspective, getting spanked like he was an adult, and the judgment he’d soon face from the justice department’s stocking. The idea of it all scared the utter living hell out of him, already unable to take the most routine of spankings without turning into a complete crybaby, but there was more in his cowardly heart than the fear of paying his dues.

Sitting up to enjoy the snow wafting against his window, Zachary thought about the only friend of his that would be serving the holiday alongside him. Richter would have been in the middle of it, being six hours ahead in England, but a commiserating glance at his datapad lifted his brows at the unexpected glow of an unread message. Surprised that his fellow Penitatas had been able to leave him something to wake up to on a day like this, he curiously took the pad into his paws.


___________________________________
VeliusTheTarg:
You’re undoubtedly still wearing that flaccid hat of yours, so I’ll embrace the irony of using Earth’s traditional phrase in our present situation. Merry Christmas, Sea Fox. May we best our coming challenges.

It’s barely 3AM here, but my insomnia reared its head and left me tossing and turning. Even Othello was sick of my shit. I’ve since gotten up to reset my brain as I typically would to treat it, but my routine stroll around the house to get drowsy unfortunately resulted in me finding all of the articles for today’s disciplinary ritual already set out beside our coniferous foliage. I may not have been meant to discover it then, but as I did, I quietly took inventory of what I had coming to me. My ass has two stockings instead of one, because one clown sock couldn’t hold all of the combustible ore they wanted to give me. Fifty of the fucking rocks! I don’t even need a frame of reference to know how bad that is with the amount of crap they’ve got out here to beat me with! Black paddle included! Does that mean I’m getting fifty from everything in the house?! Harvey and Elizabeth told me that I literally have the hardest Christmas penance of any Penitatas in the world today with what all they’re going to have to do to me! A whole planet filled with Penitatas, and I get to have it the worst out of all of them? Excuse me while I go fuck myself.

Here’s a great example. We’re all supposed to get whipped with sticks today, but no, I’m fucking ME, so I get more than just sticks. What the fuck is this thing supposed to be???
___________________________________


With the light of his pad casting a shadow upon the darkened wall behind him, Zachary scrolled down until the muscles around his eyes tightened with perturbed inquisitiveness at the picture Richter had taken in the dim light of the farmhouse’s living room; his overfilled stockings caught in the frame. The implement in question certainly wasn’t a stick… he would have better described it as a bunch of smaller ones all bound together with a wrapping of twine at one end, forming a handle where the thin, countless little twigs sprayed out from. It was yet another foreign nightmare the fox didn’t envy, with as many of them as Richter often faced.


___________________________________
VeliusTheTarg:
Bet this fucker is going to hurt. FML. But, I intend to suffer through this kiddie purgatory like any other chore requiring my effort, and want to complete the day without a single demerit. If I’ve been assigned the most painful penalties that Earth has to offer, then I’ll take this opportunity to show our overseers my merit by cooperating without complaint. It’s honestly easier for me to endure what I have coming if I feel like I’m working toward something, and I’ll try to bolster that by considering my penance to be making amends for my fuckups, as I imagine you will from our prior conversations.

I know it’s not easy for you to just lay down and let yourself be beaten. Be assured as you go through it that Christmas is finite, and your guardians will see that you’re fully healed by tomorrow morning. Big PP until then. But, even after typing that to be encouraging, I still feel shitty about it. Your happy ass should be having fun with your flaccid hat.

Do you think you could call me when you wake up tomorrow? So we can both see that the other is still in one piece? I’m wholly consenting of breaking from text, if I could please ask that of you. Maybe you could show me your room, and what you got for Christmas? I doubt I’ll get anything but beatings, LOL. I’ll be looking forward to it, and shall use that thought to calm my brain and get back to sleep.

*The targ cub tucks Velly in with you for now.*
___________________________________


“… Merry Christmas, Richty.”, Zachary wistfully wished out of sympathy after reading all of that from him, imagining the agony he must have been in across the ocean.

Socially clumsy, even in his comfort zone of text, the poor Roferian couldn’t put his words together at the end to say that he was worried about his pain intolerant friend, and wanted to make sure he was okay when this was all said and done. They hadn’t spoken face to face since the day they met, but he’d pull out that ‘negotiator voice’ his mother said he had and outright plead to do something that would normally make him anxious? He appreciated him that much? When those feelings were mutual after everything they had shared with one another, bonding as two men who regretted having taken lives, Zachary could hardly wait to put this ordeal behind him and make that call – forming a ‘finish line’ between penny-pals.

“Hope you’re being all cool and brave right now, and it’s not so bad. Big pee-pee.”, he gave his well-wishes aloud to steady his nerves, staring at Richter’s thoughtful roleplay emote.

Empathy made it difficult to set his pad aside, but the faint, familiar sound of saurian footfalls across the house got the sharp-eared fox working his way out of bed with a child’s excitement; apprehensive butterflies or not. In his bare fur as he always was at home, the white pom of his hat bounced the same as his thinly furred sheath into the warmth of the living room, just in time to catch the shimmering blue glow of two mugs materializing in the kitchen replicator. It illuminated the huddled shape of his pajama-clad Drakonian fathers in the darkness, who craned their necks around the moment they heard his peppy little footpaws.

“Merry Christmas!”, he cheerfully greeted, throwing his paws up like it wasn’t even an S.P.D.

“Merry Christmas, Zachary.”, Patrick returned in awkward amusement, flipping on the lights while Thomas fetched his steaming mug.

“Ditto on the Merry Christmas, but good gracious are you up early! I was trying to keep from having hot chocolate in front of you!”, he flamboyantly lamented for flaunting what his son couldn’t have, making Zachary wave both of his paws.

“You should have as much as you want! Put some wine in it! Don’t let me stop you from having fun!”, he hurriedly dismissed, desperately wanting to not be a damper on their day, “I know I don’t get to have breakfast or anything with you guys, but I’ve still got dinner at Kayla’s big Christmas Party to look forward to! It’s gonna’ be awesome later!” All of the positivity came with the childish wag of his boyish vulpine tail, clasping his paws together for the social festivity that his ‘big sister’ was actually able to invite him to. Such a display of excitement was merely meant to reassure his fathers, but his beaming little muzzle was treated to a soft, yet serious tone for the amount of energy he exuded.

“Just don’t forget that she’s hosting a very non-penny Christmas gathering for her family, not just her friends, with guests who aren’t to see or hear any punishment business. No tears allowed – that’s her rules for everyone visiting. Best smiles for her grandparents and others who don’t live here, okay?”, Patrick stressed how uncomfortable district outsiders usually were for the Completatas’ sake, spearheading the holiday for the Targates as a budding, giving young woman. It was a sobering reminder of the pain and isolation to come, and Thomas further compounded it with his warm, gentle voice.

“It might be hard for you, but do it for your friends, too. Kayla was all over the news and left for dead by kidnappers a year ago today, and Doctor Vasse’s birthday tomorrow is the anniversary of his ship’s accident. Turning this into a happier time of year with all their loved ones must mean a lot to them, and I think they deserve the best Christmas they can get.”, he requested his son be mindful of.

“Yeah… ”, Zachary fought to keep his ears up, having already felt like he was the odd one out, “I’ll be good. I don’t want to be a downer either. They should have their fun without feeling bad. You guys, too. Its just… it’s hard not to get excited when they’re all I have here. I don’t really like the other pennies at school enough to ever want to hang out with them, and have friends with my own letters on a day like this. You can tell from how they act that it’s a class full of criminals.”, he explained of himself. The average Penitatas wasn’t as kind and collected as those that Kayla surrounded herself with; those diamonds in the rough. Looking off at the wall, the fox cracked a grin of self-conscious amusement, running his claws through the fur atop his head.

“How did Richty put it?… ‘Who could have guessed that muggers and child molesters would be shitty children’? If you don’t mind me quoting my only penny-friend like that.”, he nervously chuckled for saying, reconsidering his brazenness too late to stop the face that Patrick made in the midst of sipping out of his mug; his husband nearly choking on his own, trying to not laugh and be a bad influence.

“We just don’t want to hear any of your own screen-time swears, is all. His little ‘Richter-isms’ are excused.”, Thomas lightheartedly cut in to Zachary’s delighted relief, leaving the fox to wonder if he was just protected by the Roferian’s rule modifications by proxy, “But, since you’re up early and obviously feeling a tad spirited in your fuzzy hat, why don’t we enjoy our time together? What would you say to opening your Christmas presents, Zachary?”

Penitatas or not, the answer to that question was universal among six year old’s both rejuvenated and non; the boy stifling his footpaw stamping, tail swinging, elated little squeal only enough to keep from getting spanked for improper penny conduct. With his bare-furred vulpine hues bouncing behind his fathers’ saurian-tailored flannel pajamas; one crisscrossed with pink versus the other; Zachary took inventory of what was around their Christmas tree, tucked just far enough away from his usual corner-time spot that it could still be used all this month. He had only seen the gloss and bows of gift wrapping since the lights had been turned on, and though Richter’s picture had shown his stockings of coal propped up beneath the dangle of ornaments, there was no such surprise to be found among his presents once he flopped down on the carpet and excitedly waited to be handed his first wrapped box.

“Let’s get the ‘penny-present’ out of the way first. Fun ones after.”, Patrick said with a cozy, still-drowsy little smile across his snout as the gift’s weight sank into Zachary’s paws.

Not hearing any tainted syllables to suggest that the contents were something terrible, despite what it was called, the young fox squinted with cautious curiosity, tearing its wrapping to shreds with his claws. The plain looking box within didn’t yield any clues, but a pull of its lid explained everything in the form of a colorful painting upon a canvas of wood. While a full-sized paddle wasn’t the sort of ‘canvas’ a child ever looked forward to, the Penitatas’ eyes lit up to a golden Starfleet insignia at the center of its face, floating within a backdrop of dark blue, starry space. Given hints of white to make for a proud metallic shine, it sat atop a name and title that elated a once wayward little boy’s heart – Zachary Weiler, Chief Engineer.

“Whoa!”, his higher pitches exclaimed to the surprise of how cool the artwork turned out, instantly erupting his fathers into a titter, “This is awesome!”

“Well, that sure isn’t the response I was expecting to a paddle! I think it’s broken!”, Thomas enthusiastically joked, trying not to laugh while his son snickered with the face of a silly fool.

“I was always ‘gonna get one like this, though! Kayla’s is on her wall!”, Zachary accepted the inevitable as he lifted the personalized implement for examination. Much more rectangular than Kayla’s first paddle’s elongated oval shape, a cursory brush of his padded fingertips across the surface that would eventually cause him bruises had Patrick crouching his saurian form a little closer.

“I put a lot of thought into what yours should look like, and the usual just wasn’t cutting it. As hard as a good spanking can be on you, I decided that your paddle should always remind you of the man you want to become, and why you’ve chosen to bend over for it, turning yourself in like you did.”, the young Drakonian dad tried to be sensitive for his penny that could be described with the same word, wanting the paddle to continue being received as a thoughtful gesture. He knew he had to deliver such encouragements quickly when the little engineer had a knack for analysis, and it was toward his last sentence that Zachary’s ears weakened in midst of his inspection; his own paddle seemingly a bit heavier than the one Kayla got when she was six, and if his pads weren’t mistaken, a few millimeters thicker. Again, he was different. On cue to the look that tried creeping across his snout, Thomas reached over to distract him from overthinking it with the shiny, colorful gloss of another present, even bigger than the last.

“Trade you! This one’s from Doctor Vasse and Kayla.”, his bubbly mannerisms invited, ever-respectful of Jacob as his rejuvenated elder, “No idea what’s in this one yet, so let’s see!” Relieved of the wooden tool’s burden in more ways than one, the fox’s black paws dove right into what had been slid before him; tail flung upward in his forward lean.

“I hope it’s chocolate-flavored nano-lotion!”, Zachary’s attention span lapsed with a nearly Kindern giggle, wholly his age, and Thomas played along.

“Two of your favorite things in one!”, he said with a flick of a claw, watching the wrapping paper come apart until the vague colors and shapes of the box it covered began to make sense. The moment it did, Zachary gasped with a happy vulpine squeak while Patrick grimaced over his shoulder; the couple having gotten him the same set of electrical engineering tools for rejuvenated hands that Kayla had spotted in Calleet Mall’s toy store the day they met. There wasn’t anything wrong with wanting to give their Penitatas friend the lasting educational fun of a rejuve’s ‘older’ sort of play, and without the frustration of using tools meant for grown Drakonian claws, but such things were touchier than Kayla and Jacob appeared to understand when it came to their ex-pirate shipwright.

“A-aaaaaand this is why we should have set some ground rules for those two.”, Patrick groaned, putting a claw to his face while Thomas more playfully went about trying to catch Zachary’s excitable tail, ripping straight into the box to get at the kit, “Alright, these can be your tools, but I’m going to hold on to them. You’ll have to ask for your set, and I’ll lend it out just like I have been my own, okay? The rules aren’t changing – no tools of our trade anywhere near those paws without supervision.”

“Yes pa’pa Pat!”, elatedly flew from Zachary’s muzzle, friendly and agreeable even where other pennies might have felt slighted by such harsher restrictions; ones that made him surrender his new black and silver carrying case to awaiting claws, with but a fleeting glance at the instruments inside. That innocent spirit made it impossible to not glowingly smile, knowing what was next.

“That leaves just one present left! Now, I wonder who this one’s from?”, Patrick tried to sound sly, sliding the bow-decorated gift across the carpet with the side of Zachary’s tool case.

“I’d bet it’s something for the younger kid in you to play with, this time!”, Thomas followed suit with a wiggle of his saurian tail, sharing a fatherly smirk with Patrick.

The hints so thick and scene so telling, having parents that had never been able to give a Christmas present to a child they called their own before, Zachary was all too willing to clasp his arms around the box and pull it in close to open it with the excitement it warranted. He tried to tear at the wrapping paper with the finesse and care of a rejuve, up until the point his muzzle flung open and he couldn’t help himself, launching a scrap of wrapping paper airborne like a little kit.

“You got me ships!”, he squealed without restraint to all of the many little toy vessels blister-packed within. Simple yet still nicely painted, like miniaturized action figure versions of the starships they represented, there was no mistaking that the Federation variety set they chose was very Starfleet centric; so many N.C.C registration numbers for him to all endearingly memorize, and classes to imagine serving on. Ever so hungry for a real toy to call his own, and it being exactly what he would have chosen off a shelf himself, his tail flailed as he tried getting a look at everything in the set before the wrapping paper was even all the way off. “I love th-… !”

Just as he lifted his head to cheer his thanks, his muzzle swung into the surprise of a claw presenting something right before his nose. What was nestled in Patrick’s scaly fingers widened his eyes in an instant; his dad craning his neck down, grinning behind the colorful little item.

“There’s one more ship. Merry Christmas.”, he got to be a different, softer kind of dad with the toy he held – the starship’s orange and yellow hull plating rugged and recognizable, right up to its rearward-swept yet boxy design, side-tucked Sterrion-Axial drive nacelles, and numerous, shockingly accurate armaments.

“The Bah`vira!”, Zachary cried out, shooting his ears straight up at the custom replica Aspatrian privateer frigate his own two paws had crafted into being one of a kind. He launched himself off his black footpaws, snatching his father’s neck into one of the most heartfelt hugs a penny-parent had ever received.

“Now my other ships can fight it, and I can blow it up – again, and again, and again!”, he excitedly wagged his bushy tail at the blurring speed of a puppy, becoming an absolute Kindern to Patrick’s happy laugh. No pirates would ever be safe when Chief Weiler was on duty! Not even the ship born of his own lifeblood, now destined to forever be the ‘bad guy’ for his Starfleet ships to pursue. “Thank you guys! So, soooooo much!”

There was a certain pain gripping at the Drakonian men’s hearts, even though they beamed their smiles and gave their appreciative penny a familial snuggle between their snouts in the special moment they shared together. All they got to give Zachary was a basic toy set and personal nod, and here he was, so much more thankful than any other child they could possibly fathom. He was literally a little kid; a spirit that had been freed, no matter how sad some of his harder days could make him. It was a spirit that always wanted to be friendly, and so desperately wanted to be happy and have fun… things that being a Penitatas purposely, and often harshly kept from him. It would for a very long time to come. They couldn’t always just let him be ‘Zachary’, the way he so naturally was when their claws were gentle. It made them think of their boy as ‘not being allowed to be happy’, and that certainly did something to a loving father – penny or not.

“I’m glad you liked it. You can play with them come tomorrow.”, came affectionately yet somberly from Patrick’s maw after a spell of Zachary’s tail flailing. Pennies didn’t get play with their toys on Christmas like everybody else, so to say ‘tomorrow’ felt like a sullen reminder that their nice time was drawing to an end. Within their reptilian snuggle, the fox’s giddy look faded from his muzzle, and in the silence that fell, his tail stumbled; all eyes upon him. “… Are you ready for your stocking?”

“I’d watch the rejuve-toon Christmas Specials on the holo with you all morning, if I could.”, Thomas gently followed suit. Their warm breaths stirring his fur as they spoke, Zachary slowly nodded his head against their scales.

“It’s okay. I know it’s coming.”, he reassured; six year old voice light and airy.

Their union broke with one last nuzzle from his parents, and once the pair had shared a glance, Thomas tipped his head in acknowledgment before stepping away. Left standing with Patrick close at his side, Zachary stared down at the carpet, nervously rubbing up and down the black sleeve of his right arm’s fur, but the aversion of his eyes got him the grasp of a claw to his shoulder, if only to get him to lift his muzzle and see that his father was still there for him. Dipped down so close to his height, the fox looked into the shine of his slit pupil and took an anxious, chest-tightened breath.

“I don’t want to be a crybaby for either of you and make your wine taste bad, so… I was kind of hoping you guys could just forget about me when you’re done doing what you have to, and still enjoy Christmas like you usually would before I came. Maybe you could pretend that I’m not here, and I’ll try to be quiet in my corner?”, his quieter, more morose ‘college-kid’ voice didn’t make it to the end before his syllables began to quiver, and his final words hiked in pitch with the faint shimmer that gathered against his lower eyelids. Zachary’s jaw shook even though he tried to forcibly keep his resolve… and with the rub of Patrick’s claw, he let off an upset-sounding, self-conscious laugh.

“I just said I didn’t want to be a crybaby too, but it’s hard to say all that and not make myself feel bad.”, Zachary admitted of how asking to be forgotten felt, corralling his composure with a sharp rejuvenated mind’s will.

“It’s a hard day, and we’re going to get through it.”, Patrick calmly promised; his tone pressing how much he cared, and the total lack of malice his claws had in the judicial duty they would perform.

It would have been enough to make Zachary at least half smile again, but the fearful knot in the fox’s white-furred chest twisted into his stomach; eyes widening in fear the very moment they peered to his side, following his vulpine ear’s pivot to toward saurian footfalls. Thomas had returned with his stocking, having kept it out of sight to make his first Christmas a little less distressing… but all that really did was delay what would have happened when he caught glimpse of the apple switches sticking out of the white woolen rim of the big, coal-weighted sock. They were long and thick, worse than any cutting the tree out back could provide, but there was a foreign component that surely shouldn’t have been tucked against them. In the same claw that braced his stocking, Thomas held the crude, twine-wrapped handle of a painfully familiar implement – a dense spray of its many bound twigs reaching out to dwarf and obscure even those age-extreme switches.

“Wha-… ?”, Zachary recoiled in shock, retreating a step back with a firm fling of his paws to his chest, “W-wait, why do I have one of those? This is something nasty they gave Richty! He sent me a picture of it!”, he sharply mewled, throwing an ebony claw out at the terrible looking instrument of sting being set down in front of the tree. Thomas flinched and swung his neck around, but Patrick had already been prepared for this; Richter or not.

“Zachary.”, got the Penitatas’ attention when delivered with a little firmness, coming eye to mortified eye.

“This might hurt to hear me say, but some black letter pennies with heavier crimes are going to be getting a birching rod like this from Santa today, and you’re closer to being one of them than most. Your whole crew ended up with those letters, and fell into that bracket. The only reason you got to stay silver is what you did to stop the killing, and the deal you took to help prosecute them all. I think they’re reminding you of that, for your role in what all your ship did.”, he envisioned of the old-fashioned birching that had come to loom over a kind boy with such stained paws, seeing its addition to be a taste of the far worse punishment his crew-mates scattered across Earth were all getting today.

It didn’t feel great to level with Zach in such a way, lumping him in with the likes of those he rightfully sold out, but there was no escaping the fact that his Penitatas was a literal architect of death, hand-crafting every kill the Bah`vira made as an offensive gunship. Every weapon, every system – he ensured the predator would be left with the prey in its maw, once the firefight ended. It was a sad reality that he had initially been in denial of, but with a father’s will and a good fox’s way, Zachary had grown these past months into the boy who would openly admit his doings to a remorseful kindred spirit, and become their sole ‘chat buddy’. It was that acceptant, sorry individual who hung his head without so much as a single thrash of his tail toward his dad’s honesty. He blinked, and after a thought, opened his muzzle.

“Having killed, doesn’t make us killers. Regret allows us to be more than our mistakes.”, soberly flowed from a place within, answering to ‘his role’ in the deaths of others. They were deeply introspective words, reflecting upon what separated him from a murderer, but they were clearly put together in a manner which Zachary did not speak.

“That’s from you and your new friend talking together, isn’t it?”, Thomas softly asked of the apparent ‘Richter-ism’, faithfully recited from Zachary’s heart like it had become a teddy-bear for his soul. How eagerly the fox nodded in gratefulness made him glad the two had found one another.

“Richty’s like that. He’s being brave today, even though he has it the worst in the whole world.”, he admired of him and his steadfast nature, working and trying so hard when life was being hard on him right back.

Glancing down at the crumple of his stocking and the purported ‘birching rod’ before it, Zachary stepped forward without hesitating any further; just as he imagined Richter to have done, hours ago. Anxious to the point of queasiness, the three long, nasty switches he’d been sentenced to were carefully pulled free so that he could reach in and begin counting his coal the way he felt he should. Not needing to be asked or told, lumps of raw coal emerged within his vulpine digits to be tallied upon the carpet, one by one. He didn’t know what to say, or if there even was anything to say. His fathers needed to be given their morning back, and he needed to howl, as the price he paid to wear his letters and imagine a future in Starfleet. It hurt so much to force himself to do, and the growing number of lashes stung his eyes, but…

“Twenty-one.”, Zachary grievously uttered into the last piece of coal, clutched in his paw’s pads; the empty stocking flat against the floor, the same as his lifeless tail in the quiet his fathers allowed him to have. Kayla had only gotten fourteen her first Christmas.

“You just need more time to show them how good of a guy you are.”, his glistening eyes prompted Thomas to say, breaking Zachary’s stare with his peer over his shoulder.

“You’ll be getting your first switch now, along with your birching right after.”, Patrick laid forth, guiding his son’s weary eye to the arm of their living room sofa behind him with the sweep of an open claw; a big, rounded sort for the size of drakes, and the perfect place to bolster a Penitatas’ bottom nice and high. Oh, the amount of times Zachary had dangled over it, kicking his legs to his father’s dreaded targ strap. “The second switch will come after lunch, and the last before an early bedtime, once we’re home from dinner at Kayla’s place.”

Without raising from where he knelt, Zachary turned away and closed his eyes. His fathers figured the black stripe down his spine was about to shudder with a hiccuping sob, but before they could resolve themselves toward ushering the little engineer to his feet, he raised his paws together, fingertip to fingertip, and bowed his head into them; the very end of his muzzle tucking into the vulpine-perfect triangle they formed, with his thumbs bracing his lower jaw. The pair of drakes had never seen such a thing from their Aspatrian before, but the spiritual connotations of the worshiping pose were universally recognizable. Neither Patrick or Thomas dared interrupt, glancing at one another with furled saurian eye-ridges until Zachary’s paws fell from his snout.

“I didn’t know you prayed.”, Patrick sounded guilty for not knowing something so important about his son. They’d have always accommodated his beliefs, but Zachary merely shook his head as he got up off his knees.

“I don’t.”, he weakly replied, “I just asked some people to come and watch, if they wanted.”

With a hanging head, Zachary sullenly peeled his Santa hat off of his folded ebony ears; cheer all but gone, in his submission to his fathers’ waiting claws. Assaulted by apprehensive butterflies, he put on no brave face as he was hoisted over the curved arm of the sofa and given some assistance in getting comfortable. What Richter had said about him finding it difficult to ‘allow himself to be beaten’ held true, even when he wanted to be just like the stoic, acceptant Penitatas. Still, he focused on his feelings of guilt and remorse, refusing to give in and sob like he didn’t deserve the collar of his tail-restraint being secured around his neck, or the bottom-baring tug the wrinkles of his tailhole felt from its binding string being tightened. He started into the brown, earthen tone of the sofa cushion beneath his nose until the dreaded trill of a defolicator made his folded ears flinch in surprise, only to have his nerves further jostled by the unseen device promptly touching his upper thigh. Its upward stroke over the base of his rear sent it petting through the fur of his bottom against the grain, gnashing Zachary’s eyes closed with a sharp squeal to the sensation of air touching naked skin in its wake. He had always been warned that his fur could be stripped from his backside for ‘bad ones’, and being the sort of boy who cherished his fur and wished to be cute, being essentially shaved down to his light, fleshy pink Aspatrian skin was a horrible, upsetting punishment in itself; two mottled patches of hidden black appearing upon his right cheek, much like a dalmatian's spots, in the hue that covered much more of Kayla’s body. Thomas comforted him with a warm clutch of his paws, and stroke of his shoulder, until all of the precious orange fur had been carefully trimmed away from the inner valley of his bottom, and up through the tuck of his tail above.

… But, in the confines of his own shadow, crumpled against the sofa cushion his position bent him into, the fox who wanted to steel himself like another penny he admired began to squint in absolute unease, once those two doting claws of Thomas’ subtly sank a weighty pressure down upon him. Slowly, slipped beneath his radar, his wrists were squeezed and pressed into the sofa, and more alarmingly, the base of his head and neck. The degree and harshness of the vicing restraint had Zachary trying to adjust his head even a little, indenting the sofa cushion with his muzzle, just to get one of his dark blue eyes to be able to peer up at his father; soaked along its lower eyelid with a barely held tear.

“Pa’pa Tom?… ”, he meekly squeaked, becoming quickly frightened by the implications of needing his neck protected from jerking his head back. If it was just to keep him down, that claw would have been on his back – and Thomas surely knew he’d figure that out instantly, having turned his snout entirely away.

“Dad?”, Zachary whimpered with urgency and fear, losing every fleeting drop of his will. Thomas’ averted eye returned to him, and within its sorry reptilian peer, Zachary saw how much pain he was about to be in; his everything turning to ice, losing the tear his eyelid could no longer hold.

“Deep breath.”, Thomas anxiously mumbled without his flamboyance.

Zachary hardly had enough time to gasp at his father’s sudden flinch before a throaty cutting of the air behind his upturned tail turned into the most painful straight line to ever be whipped across his body. More than just red-hot, the switch ripped through his bottom in the blink of an eye, abrasively branding his fur-less skin with its rugged bark. His entire body violently contracted out of reflex to the sudden immense pain, gnashing the back of his head into Thomas’ claw the millisecond his maw flew open to a deafening fox-like screech; footpaws flying up, kicking with the body-flinging panic of having touched a hot stove. Over the exposed mounds of his pinkish, black spotted vulpine haunches, those incredibly hard lashes multiplied one weighty ‘thwap!’ after another without a pause, coming down as briskly as Patrick could throw the switch back to the sky. The unrestrained capability of his father’s saurian arm kept Zachary’s scream going until the fox’s back arched into a desperate yowling cry that matched the furious kicking of his legs, slamming the side of the sofa with his feet to make a raucous chorus that could be heard from the street; the spanking already half over in a matter of seconds, as intensely as the sentenced thrashing was meant to be applied.

It was horribly severe, and meant to be abusive by design. Such a spanking would have been unconscionable upon a child, but as it were, a Penitatas wasn’t entirely a child, and hadn’t committed the wrongdoings of one. Their howling little rejuvenated minds contained the essence of a seasoned, criminally culpable adult, and it was that inner-person the justice department punished on a ‘special’ day, looking past their small statures. Short yet grueling, those twenty-one massive lashes upon Zachary’s six year old backside would deliver a heavy a lesson that so many Penitatas before him had come to learn the same way, on their own very first Special Punishment Day – just how much his parents held back, and how much worse he could really be spanked, when severity restrictions were thrown to the wind.

Bucking and thrashing beneath the clutch of Thomas’ protective claws, Zachary frantically cried the whole way through to the final smack of the branch, fighting against his tail-restraint; its white tip wanting nothing more than to shelter his bottom and guard his tailhole, after the spot of pink was crossed clear into its clenched gnarl amidst the switch’s flurry. He hardly calmed once it clicked inside of his racing, pain-racked mind that his switching had come to an end, loudly wailing from his open, spittle-cresting maw. Each and every agonizing stripe stung and burned at their peak intensity at the same time, all on top of one another, from the base of his quivering tail to the fur-stripped tops of his thighs. Those thick, fresh welts were still reddening and swelling into existence, prickling like needles as their rise began to pull his skin tight over their crimson marks. The sensation of cool, smooth scale came between his ears in a silent nuzzle, but Thomas’ claws didn’t let up the press that kept him down and unable to reach back to grasp his fiery rear. Other pennies would have been getting cuddled and consoled, but Zachary wasn’t done serving what he’d earned. The switch they all got was merely his warm-up, and the faint, scratchy rustle of the birching rod’s tiny twig-tips being lifted from the carpet winced the fox’s hyper-sensitive ears flat; his fur standing on end, clear down the ebony stripe of his spine.

“No! No, no, no!”, Zachary screamed into the sofa cushion he was pinned against, struggling against Thomas in a dire panic. Any fleeting glimmer of his elder mind’s force of will to repent with bravery slipped away from the overwhelming fright of getting a single lick more, falling into the shrilly sobbing, mortified tantrum no six year old was immune to; footpaws kicking up and down.

“W-wait! S-sto’hahap! It hur’s t’much! I can’ – I can’!”, he cried in barely intelligible hysterics, trying so hard to turn his head enough to follow Patrick’s tail on its return. No matter how sorry he might have been, putting Richter’s efforts on a personal pedestal as an example to be followed, there was just no way he could take anymore; so desperate to be let go of. “Don’t, plea’sh! No bir’sh!”, he begged, streaming tears to no reply.

Patrick was melancholic, and Thomas outright pained with sympathy, but their resolve as penny-fathers was palpable… and once Zachary noticed the telling absence of saurian footfalls, he shut his eyes with a shriek, “Daaaaaaaaaaa-… !”

Several stinging little birch twigs snapped his teeth back together, jerking the entirety of his body toward his core to curl up into a ball. The birching rod licked hard across the bare cheeks of his well-lashed bottom, instantaneously biting into already screaming nerves with a visceral, unfathomable sensation before disappearing in an irregularly fanned puff of disturbed air. Each flexible, durable twig acted as a little whip, and while they carried nary any weight and lacked the driving force of his switch, their light nature was what made them so awful; its spank an explosion of massive sting against the very surface of his skin, flogging his darkening switch welts with a criss-crossing spray of thin, scratchy lashes. It was a tool that could spank him as hard as Thomas could swing and still never bruise, but by only its third ‘thwip!’-ing whap; cracking down into the shape of his bottom’s valley and base of his thighs; Zachary was absolutely bawling from its scorching flaying. The white-hot, venomous pain it instilled felt like he was being covered in cuts and scratches, fraying his very fur follicles a little deeper with every spank. He was so sure he had to be bleeding in the howling fog he was in, sounding absolutely infantile, but while it surely did redden his haunches all over, he stayed in one piece.

It was inevitably the birching rod that didn’t, steadily wearing out the more it spanked its cross-hatching mess of razor-thin welts. Every whipping impact across his cheeks sent bits and pieces of the twig’s tips splintering all over the carpet, making a mess while its spankee writhed, crying his eyes out to an open-mawed wail. It was a cry that choked from its intensity, blasting out like the once-pirate meant it. As Richter had so recently come to learn, sometimes all that could be done was wait out the clock and accept that every spanking had an end, no matter how much of a forever it seemed to take. That might have been out of acceptance and a flavor of pragmatic penny-virtue in his case, but for Zachary, he found himself in that place simply because he wanted to be picked up and taken from that pain – the raw reaction of a real child, crying for the saving grasp of his parents to protect him from the hurt and make everything better again. Curled up and without fight, Zachary took his penance, crying out unintelligible words in neither panglish or Aspatrian until a lick of the rod ground his tear-drenched muzzle into the sofa.

“Daaa’… !”, whined through his bawling lament like an infant, calling for them; his bitter medicine all but taken, once swat number twenty-one came across his raw, blotchy streaked rear, covered in so many little red lines.

And, just like that, he was lifted away from that terrible sofa arm with haste into the all-encompassing embrace of Drakonian scale. Held and cradled between Patrick and Thomas, his paws shook with the dire need to nurse the scratched-up feeling, worst pain his backside had ever felt; ears plastered back. He nuzzled his forehead against Patrick and howled, blubbered, and wailed with the best of them. The way his fathers cooed and cuddled him made their lack of happiness overtly obvious, and continued to prove it for as long as they rocked and consoled their penny son; stood there long enough that Zachary’s tears and runny nose soaked through Patrick’s pajamas. There was only so much they could do when he’d ultimately be crying for a long while after such a thrashing… and, in time, they began to carry their poor fox toward the first corner he’d be serving the morning in – the one with his CornerStool, for fifteen minutes of misery.

It was how the day started for all the other hard-time Penitatas in the district as the sun rose to a gray glow behind the falling snow, though few had it rougher than Zachary’s beginning. There were greetings and presents, lectures and harsh words. Coal doled out the judgment of their merit, and once their stocking told them how bad they truly were, they cried for each piece they had to count. Switches came down upon them by olden Earth tradition, while even the drakes looked to their past, choosing to give their punitively rejuvenated young the tender penance of a metal-bristled brush against their most sensitive, private of creases. Diane Sak`kral suffered hers after a long talk about her poor choices and willful behavior over the year, while the likes of Paul did a bit better until he had a frustrated fit over how many more Christmases he still had coming. Stephanie got her first switch from the hard, driving lash of her father, destined to pay her dues to Kayla no matter how snobbishly behaved she may be under her present parents’ roof, and those her victim called a friend shed tears of their own; Anthony from school, for one, getting a more positive, encouraging talking-to from his lesson-loving father before being gingerly tucked into the corner with his red-striped bottom on perpetual display beneath the purposely upturned hem of his shirt.

Those first few hours of punitive isolation were to be spent thinking about what they had done, and there would be no break from sitting on their sore bottoms, or standing on their aching legs, until lunch came along to relieve their hungry, breakfast-deprived bellies. When Zachary finally got to kneel at the living room coffee table with a sandwich, dolefully eating it for as long as he could to hold off his second switching, it had already already become late enough for the stars to be twinkling coldly above his penny-pal in the English countryside, far across the world.

After having seen through an entire long, arduous day of suffering and wretchedness by then, Richter was seated silently in the corner of his bedroom; his shadow being cast into it from the warm amber light of his bedside lamp. With his hard and heavy Christmas being end-tier in nature, he had been forced to remain in the corner the entire day when he wasn’t being thrashed, and it had been his parents’ attempt at mercy to allow him to serve his final stint in the solitude of his own room. They had come to see that there was no need to closely supervise him anyway, from how the day had already gone with the unusually trustworthy Penitatas.

It may have begun with his little quips and ornery bitching from the moment he got out of bed, as to be expected when Richter was simply Richter, but once the motions had been gone through and it was time to begin paying his dues, the Roferian complied without a word of attitude. He took his whopping fifty lashes of the birch with his quiet, whimpering cry for as long as he could, same as his first switch, but just as his black paddle would soon force him later in the morning, his paws had to scramble for the nearest decorative pillow to bury his face and stifle his far more raucous cries. Thrashed so thoroughly, his scantly furred five year old bottom suffered a fair few bloodless scratches before the birching rod wore itself to tattered shreds. Despite it all, Richter still crawled onto the floor unprompted afterward, and proceeded to clean up the huge mess of scattered twig shrapnel that his own flaying had made. Harvey and Elizabeth were so taken aback by the scene that they didn’t know what to do, watching their penny cry so hard, yet still sweep the pieces into his trembling paws like it was his responsibility. Dead set on being exemplary on his hardest day as a personal declaration of his merit, he took spanking after spanking, and tacked-on punishment after the next, without ever bemoaning a single thing.

That unflinching obedience, looking rougher with every agonized tear he shed, left him sitting on a massive bruise from the base of his tail down to nearly the hollows of his knees, with patches of frayed white blisters and thickly raised welts in between. There were stings and throbs all over his aching body at that, when there simply hadn’t been enough Roferian backside for all the different corporal punishment methods he was he was to experience. One switch went painfully to his calves, and another across the ebony pads of his furred draconic foot-claws. A strap licked his little paws fifty times, and Elizabeth’s maroon, rubbery tool of paw’s bane gave his knuckles fifty more. Even the Earth-uncharacteristic surprise of a particularly harsh punishment enema was accepted and toughed out, no matter how shakily tense Richter was to the nozzle’s abhorrent, jelly-slathered violation; the concoction they sent their ‘number-one Penitatas’ smelling of chili oil and pure hate. It had been an incredible ordeal, and he hadn’t said a word in hours.

In the dim light of his own shadow; Othello curled up against his heels; Richter came to sense a black cloud of morose, motherly worry approach his door. His stiff, tired brows furled into the crease of the two rustic walls, feeling certain that it hadn’t even been an hour since she had settled him into his desk chair, but Elizabeth crept quietly in, only to sit down on his bed without a sound. She was merely a thoughtful presence, finding herself unable to do anything else, but the weary mess of emotions she swirled behind him quickly became more pressing than the misery of his permanent corner-time.

“Elizabeth.”, his raspy, hoarse voice muffled into the wall, completely blown out from howling and crying all day, “I acknowledge that I’m violating my corner restrictions by speaking, but your brain is digging its thumb into the back of mine. Staring at me like that isn’t helping your present state of mind.”

As Richter’s interpretation of her unease figured, talking had come at no risk of a strike against his perfect behavior for the day; his mother sighing out some of her discomforts back there, simply being addressed by him. Sometimes Elizabeth didn’t have to say anything, and she’d still end up getting a reply from her familial empath.

“I’m sure you already knew that I’ve been having trouble this past while. Your father and I are no strangers to being hard on the special sort that end up on our farm, and we’d always be the first to remind our pennies that they had this awful day coming to them when they threw their tantrums. It’s just… it bloody hurt us both today to use our heaviest hand on you when you’ve been working so hard, help us around here, and just laid there without a fight, no matter what we had to do.”, she shared her sympathies with honesty; Richter’s sole bloodshot eye glistening into the confinement of his corner.

“Masters get to see more information than your usual parents. The… ‘inner workings’, I guess you could say. Turning over your your encryption key knocked off more than ten coal leading up to Christmas, which I thought was fair, but… some of those ‘extra’ punishments you got today were meant for a different, remorseless sort of lad. One you surely didn’t turn out to be. I’m sorry for them.”, Elizabeth felt compelled to apologize for how lopsidedly unfair her inner disciplinarian saw some his chastening as being, going beyond even Velius’ crimes’ ring of well-earned hell, now that they understood the spiny fireball’s mannerisms as well as they did.

“I had picked up on your unspoken objections to certain penances. Most notably the one that I never wish to speak of again.”, Richter gruffly alluded to his enema without so much as naming it, baring the tips of his fangs at the wall. It had been an agonizingly painful embarrassment, shrilly growling the whole time the red-tinged fluid ran down the tube she had worked beneath his curled, quivering tail.

Though when Richter failed to say another word, and the room fell unexpectedly silent, Elizabeth couldn’t help but pick apart how absolutely exhausted the Roferian both looked and sounded, breathing sharply in his seat upon bruise and blister. He might have still been his stoic self despite it all, but the unusual listlessness in his pain-filled voice gave her cause for concern, considering he always had such quip-laced vigor behind how he carried himself – especially when he was extremely annoyed, as that enema had surely made him.

“You’ve only done as you must, Elizabeth. I have as well.”, he softly dulled into the corner as a subdued, pragmatic response after a long delay, but it only served to make Elizabeth frown at the white spines trailing down his back.

“It’s okay to be upset. You don’t have to hide that you’re hurt in order to be a ‘good penny’, Richter.”, she gently assured, worrying that he was shoving down his pain and sadness, as if baring the intensity of the day’s sorrow would make him seem unrepentant, or unworthy. It was an all too ‘him’ thing to do. A mother’s trained ear was rarely wrong, and she already knew there was more beneath Richter’s surface than merely his goals, but there came to be no response from the young Roferian. His inability to answer weighed upon the ends of Elizabeth’s mouth, wanting so badly to cut the air and end these doldrums within her farmhouse.

“This long day is almost behind us. You’ll feel better soon, and can have the face-time you wanted with Zachary. It’ll be good for you two to cheer one another up like that. He’s had it hard today as well.”, she reassured, prompting a sudden jerk out of Richter’s tail for the sub-context her mind subtly gave away.

“Are you implying that a Penitatas as ridiculously amiable as he was somehow lacking in merit? The one who was echelons friendlier than the girl you claimed to be the pinnacle, failed to earn that supposed lighter hand?”, he sharply questioned the wood grain of his corner, deciphering that she was privy to what his ‘chat buddy’ was getting. Caught off guard, Elizabeth wasn’t even sure if the tone he took was with her, or only just as a result of speaking up while in pain.

“It’s not as simple as how the two of you are behaving in the here and now. You’ve experienced plenty of that today. His criminal charges are heavy, even if he’s a kind and playful lad. Any penny can change things around, but you boys have made an uphill climb for yourselves… and sometimes, when we really discipline you lot, we like to remind you of the gravity of what you’ve done, and punish you for it proper.”, his mother explained as the core tenant of a penny’s Christmas, getting a throat-rasped ‘tch!’ in return.

“What reminders does Zachary require? He’s already been eaten alive, up to the point he was willing to die to make amends. He literally gave up his life and handed it to your world on a silver fucking platt-… ”, Richter’s surly tones reemerged with a firm wrinkling of his snout, until the state of his vocal cords recoiled him into hoarsely coughing; something that Elizabeth sighed uncomfortably for, once Othello leapt up to respond to his ‘person’s distress.

“Even the best of our pennies pay their prices. I’ll save you the tired old ‘you know what you did’ speech, since neither of you lads seem to need a breath of it. You two have talked a lot about these things from what I can tell, and I’m sure it must feel like he’s already paid for a lighter hand, but a hard-timer’s discipline doesn’t work that way. Hard time is for punishment, and to cry for everything you’ve done; behaved or not.”, was a reality she had to impose upon her little realist, lifting a finger that he couldn’t see while Othello wormed laps around his feet, “But, that’s where our parenting, and your plans to reshape your merit, start to work their way into your life here on Earth. We like to say that ‘every Penitatas gets what they deserve’, and that’s not always a bad thing. We’re hard on our foulest pennies, and ease up on the ones who prove themselves to be good people, to reward and encourage them. Time, and your effort, shapes what comes next after every tear, well before soft time. It’s just that we… don’t spare the rod. The rod always comes first. Even Kayla had her share of terrible, terrible days, and she sure didn’t start her sentence getting ‘one of those’ only three or four times a month. It was three or four times a week for a while, no different from anyone else! Considerations come with penance paid, and it’s the size of that penance that you’re fighting against with all of your volunteering and nice deeds.”

“… We’ve not put enough water in the bucket to begin tipping the scale yet. I’m aware.”, the Roferian didn’t make her wait long to hear his weakened timbres, having already accepted as much in reference to himself; taking deeper, shakier breaths.

“You shrugged off your own punishment’s fairness when I brought it up, but you sure jumped at Zachary’s. Certainly says something about you.”, Elizabeth warmly pointed out, to the lift of one of Richter’s swollen paws.

“If you find one of your Penitatas unable to form moral objections, you should beat him until he morally objects to it.”, he gruffly retorted, wishing that he had even just half of the fox’s good nature and charm.

After how she had been feeling, hearing something so amusingly on-flavor for him made Elizabeth crack a grin. Confucius couldn’t hold a candle to Richter, and he wasn’t exactly wrong either. However, while he always seemed to enjoy getting a positive rise out of her, usually peering over with a smirk whenever he’d sense her inner reaction to a spicy quip, he didn’t at all react to the flicker of her spark; Othello still faintly whining, squirming around his ankles. Like a canary in a mine shaft, the trained puppy’s unrest raised a red flag.

“It is similarly apt to confiscate a murderer’s ability to participate in life, when they’ve stolen the same from others.”, Richter distantly uttered, turning his quipping on himself to form a penitent self-reflection after an entire day of penny-class corner-time; never moving, seeing, or doing. His mother hadn’t heard that lost-sounding melancholy out of him since he’d been paired with Othello, and it brought her such pause once the words themselves began circling her mind. The bed creaked, and after a moment, Richter’s dour stare at the corner was jostled by his chair being slid out of it.

“You’ve had enough for one day. Lets see your last punishment through so you can lay down. This has gone on too long for a five year old, and I need to see that you get your rest.”, Elizabeth firmly decided, pulling Richter’s ailing eyes from the sight of endless wood with the prompt reach of her hands under his arms.

“Ah, yes… my back.”, he matter-of-factly grunted and strained as his stiffened, battered frame was lifted from the hard seat, wrinkling his snout at what was to come, and the fact he had to be loathsomely carried toward it when his foot-claws were too badly spanked for him to walk straight.

Just as Harvey had warned him was authorized those few weeks ago, Richter discovered that he’d earned the specially-approved thrashing of a rattan cane across his back when he was shown all of the things he was to face that morning. His parents pointed to an unusually long, severe-looking tan cane propped up beneath the front window with a bright red handle, and the Roferian failed to repress a pained snarl at the floor when he was told what horrible-sounding thing it was for. Such a cane could have been the frightening instrument of a detestable boy’s school, long, long ago, and was even then by no means intended for use above a five year old’s tail. It sat there all day long, looming over him every time he had to return to the living room for another session of what he had coming. The woeful jitters within him translated into a tighter clutch of Elizabeth despite his hate of being carried, as if he was already grabbing hold of her wrist to comfort himself after a bad ‘unearned’ spanking.

“You’ll be able to tell this anyway, but I’d rather you hear it from my mouth. Neither of us want to do this.”, she let there be no mistake, being mindful of his split, broken blisters on her way out of the room; shimmering a wet pink where fur once was.

“With any hope, caning someone who has spines to protect their actual spine will be as ill conceived as the concept of placing a hacker on a low-tech farm to torment them.”, Richter tepidly growled out, sounding uneasy beneath his attempt to be deadpan.

“Jokes on them. I fucking like trees.”, he grumped against his mother-figure on his way to his fated gallows in the living room’s center.

The farmhouse’s modest, simple living space had been the stage for everything he’d come to endure, set against the backdrop of their Christmas tree’s snowy white lights. A bottle of real, actual dish soap remained on Elizabeth’s side table with a still-damp tablespoon beside it, having sat in her chair for a dozen spoonfuls before he was sent to his room’s corner, and every spanking implement that he had told Zachary was out there waiting for him during his 3AM stroll had been used and put away – all except for one, left untouched beneath the now pitch dark front window. His reappearance in Elizabeth’s arms was clearly not anticipated, but all it took was her solemn nod and one look at the his deadened, dangling tail for Harvey to grasp that bedtime had been moved up, and his hand was needed one last time. The room had long since become a place of few words and mutual discomfort, but the grim, humorless states of his guardian’s minds greatly thickened the air for the likes of an empath as he was brought to the throw-rug in the center of their family space and gently lowered down to his outstretched draconic toes. Bracing for the pain of baring his own weight did little to keep all those nerves in his feet from screaming out once his claws dug into the carpet fibers, seething a gasp through his teeth.

“The rules for this one are to stand straight, and keep your hands up front. You’ll be getting two extra strokes if you break that position.”, Elizabeth solemnly instructed, kneeling in front of Richter as she set him down; sounding all business but with none of the authority.

“Fifty left, and you’ll have finished the day a perfectly good lad.”, Harvey sounded no less languid in his attempt to be his encouraging, fatherly self.

“I accept this penalty’s terms.”, Richter hastily growled out, gritting into a pained, ornery expression while fidgeting on his feet to make a proper posture. Harvey came alongside him, and from a few short steps away, got down onto a single knee in order to raise the cane’s length to his back; its flexible form touching his shoulder-blades, taking aim between two of his spines. With a swallow, he took a deep breath to steady himself and his queasy, soap-filled stomach.

“… Just make this end.”, the Roferian implored of them with a stiff jaw, letting slip how badly he wanted to go to bed and not wake up until Boxing Day after everything he’d been through, and the amount of pain he was in.

Even knowing that their Penitatas could sense every murky emotion they made, Elizabeth and Harvey both had to look at one another where they knelt. It was the only thing he had asked for all day. Their reply came in the form of a soft nod from the face not far from his own, and the lightest tap of that rattan cane against his back, as a means to tell him to brace himself. Richter tipped his snout down, gritting his teeth with his paws grasped tightly together against his lap… and with the disappearance of the cane from his fur, he shut his eyes.

The rod went from motionless to full bore so fast, Richter didn’t hear its massive swing through nearly ninety degrees of air behind him before it slammed across his upper back with all of Harvey’s farm-honed might, bending it against him on impact like a hard whip. In the same instant its loud, violent thunderclap snapped through their ears, there came to be a crashing clatter against the wooden floorboards; Richter bouncing clear off Elizabeth’s shoulder before hitting the ground with a scramble of his limbs. He rolled and flopped like a fish in his frantic, claw-scraping retreat, stopping only once he hit Harvey’s side table with enough force to nearly topple his lamp. On a single paw, with the other trying to reach for the frayed line of fur left between two of his pearly Roferian spines, Richter shook and heaved; his slit eyes, both real and not, narrowed to a petrified stare at his startled, sullen guardians in the motionless tension that fell.

Lashed as hard as he was by a cane so unmeant for the likes of him, the blinding, destructive pain that ripped across his back almost paled in comparison to the violent punch he felt all the way through his chest. His spines didn’t protect him at all… if anything, they made the lash worse, by catching and directing the cane toward making a perfectly straight lash between his vertebrae. Fear and realization quickly began to make sense of his guardians’ hesitant, disquieted thoughts, when they’d never ever shy away from an honest, deserved spanking.

This wasn’t a spanking at all. It was one of Earth’s acts of cruelty.

“Y-...y-your world would do this to their… ?”, Richter’s voice trembled in disbelief, “They… h-hate me this much?”

Looking panicked, fearful, and outright wounded in his defensive shrink to the floor, his guardians tried to come closer and talk him, but all that did was make the Roferian squeal out the sort of scalded whimper that would never leave his throat, clambering further backward over his own limbs like a slinking animal until he bumped into the wall below the front window. He never took his eyes off of them, and as his thin chest leapt with his rapid breaths, Othello darted between he and they with a slide on his paws, barely any different from when he protected him in Liverpool. The small ball of black and white yapped out a single forceful bark, willfully violating his training to not interfere in disciplinary matters in order to cut in and provide emergent service as a therapy dog; confirming something that Elizabeth and Harvey had been afraid of. Richter wasn’t acting out – he was suffering a panic attack.

“What do they want from me?”, he rattled out, stumbling to quickly answer his own question, “Is this-… is this to make me apologize? I’ll say anything they w-want!”

Richter let off a brief hysterical sputter, losing tears from both of his eyes, “I’m sorry!”, he squeaked for the first time, sobbing, “You know I’m sorry!”

Against a wall with no place else to go, his quivering arms pulled Othello into a self-comforting hug when the puppy tried to slowly lick at his cheek and soothe the roar of his mind with a sense of ease. They were uneasy, and worried about doing so, but his trusted mum and pop gently crawled their way over; his only reaction being to smother Othello, huddling close to the floor with his tail tucked tight to his side like any other defenseless creature with spines.

“I can do more! Work even harder! I just… n-need to prove… !”, Richter cried into the floor and Othello’s fur, sounding increasingly frustrated until his labored words ceased with a hiccuping shudder.

Though the infinite loop swirling around his complicated mind waned, he didn’t have to finish that sentence for his parents know that he ‘needed to prove his worth’. His merit; his character. Things that validated him as a person, separated from murderers and monsters. All of the frustration in his voice, crying about needing to do more when he was already doing so much, suggested that half the reason he got so upset was the fact he broke from his ordered position. He slipped, and as he angrily realized it, spiraled deeper into the panic he was already in from the unbearable slash across his back. The writing was on the wall, when even in his state of unwell, Richter never pleaded any of the things that other Penitatas would have.

He never told them to stop. He didn’t ask them not to do it.

The Tanner’s had that howled to them from every Penitatas they ever had. Their absence was so glaring, it felt surreal. Gathering her thoughts into words, Elizabeth placed her hands on the floor and leaned toward the cowering five year old dragon.

“… Your perfect day isn’t ruined. I can say that the cane surprised you – that’s all.”, she encouraged as warmly as she could, though it still made Richter sharply sob, “You went and picked yourself right up, and took your extra strokes with a good-penny’s grace.”

“Facing the world’s harshest Christmas with a stiff upper lip shows a lot. You were a smart, good lad to figure that out and see this through like you have. We’d never be able to ask a Penitatas for more.”, Harvey praised in cheer of his good fight.

“I know I said that you have an uphill climb, but Richter, you are climbing that hill, taking the responsibility that you do. One of these days, you’ll get to the point that you aren’t being punished every single day. I truly don’t know when, or how often you’d see those days off that other pennies get, but you’re going to earn them, as long as you keep being… you, I guess I could say.”, Elizabeth heartened to help him stay his course, comforting the vile, thickening welt between her son’s spines with a gentle rub, “Because if that goal was all you had in your heart, you’d have broken today. I know you have it in you to show just how sorry you really are, and answer for what else you’ve earned, taking all of the lives that you did.”

As Richter had said himself, his mum and pop really did know he was sorry – and boy did she capitalize upon it, pulling at the strings of his remorse and regret to urge him forward. Earth always had a punishment to match the crime, and if this horrible fate couldn’t be made to go away without facing it, then all he could do was his best. Richter shrilly growled in anguish against the fluff of Othello’s side, and after three mere grieving sobs for his coming hell, lifted his sopping wet eyes from the warmth of his tiny companion to answer to his own pragmatic penny-virtue. The pair separated once his paws pressed against the floor to get up, but vicing, throat-closing tension and rage brought the hard slam his fists against the ground; his right one shakily punching the floorboard twice more before roughly launching himself right up off his knees. That tearful draconic snarl flew between Elizabeth and Harvey, stumbling as he hastily limped under his own power back to the center of the rug he’d left. A yellow bead of freshly ruptured blister fluid rolled down his upper thigh after hurting himself in his earlier scurry, only for it to be thrown from his thin gray fur by an ireful lash of his tail, spinning around into his prior caning position; paws up front, tucked hard against his sheath slit for another go.

Such fiery, surly rile mixed with unflinching obedience meant only one thing when it came to Richter Saccard – he had mustered the resolve to be acceptant of his discipline, no matter how incredibly it was about to hurt.

“Let’s prove w-w-whatever they want and g-get this over w-with!”, he snapped with trembling timbres, waiting for his guardians to finish returning to their places. Understanding his distress, Elizabeth knelt back down in front of him to be supportive, and it was with a heavy heart that Harvey promptly took aim with the rattan once again.

“Jump into my arms if you need. It’s okay. I’m here for you.”, Elizabeth consoled as best she could, looking over all of the frightful anticipation in the ornery wrinkles of Richter’s snout; her hands opening, ready to catch him if he leapt away from being lashed again. They’d be proud of him so long as he tried, as extreme as his darkest day’s penance was. She expected some sort of nod, or blunt affirmation like ‘understood’ or ‘acknowledged’, but instead Richter threw his head side to side vehemently enough to shake tears from his matted, messy fur.

Elizabeth hadn’t gotten past curling her brows to his intense reaction before he gnashed his eyes closed, baring his teeth to the empathic jolt that came once Harvey drew the rattan cane back behind him. Almost instantly a white-hot line of overwhelming sting walloped hard into his back with a loud, punching crack, striking his shoulder blades with enough force to make his entire body jerk forward before the Roferian could even finish his agonized, cringing wince. Richter’s foot-claws locked up the same as his fists, shakily holding his posture without anything more than the faintest squeak to the first of his fifty-one strokes. Thick, wide, and deep was the blindingly shrill welt that it left in its wake, and for as unrelenting as it would be for hours to come, it was paired with another just two seconds later, one spine further down; whipping the Roferian’s tightly wrinkled muzzle skyward for how uniquely the rattan hurt near his mid-back. The cane’s blows were unfeasible to swallow, instinctively needing to violently thrash away to protect such injury, but as the rod continued to slam across his torso harshly enough to bend the cruel instrument as far as it would go – one, two, three times more between his pearly Roferian spines – Richter merely quivered and writhed where he stood, barely making a sound beyond the choking sputters that came from the air being smacked out of his lungs in the midst of his stalwart, quiet cry.

Watching tears freely trickle down cheeks that were too sullied to absorb another drop, Elizabeth could hardly believe his sheer force of will, fighting to remain ‘Richter’ even in the barbarity of having his little back lashed as hard as a strong, grown man could. She’d never want to be struck with that cane even once, and that made the amount of pain he was in unfathomable. It left her jaw as slack as the arms she had left open for him to jump into when it had become too much, coming to see that he’d refuse to ever use them after his eyes cracked open; steadfast in their agony. Though, when the next two explosive snaps jerked his young body, she saw the rattan whip around his side at the level of his mid back, likely in the same spot just above the critical safety zone that Harvey was avoiding. His sharp-clawed toes crossed with a tearful, desperate whimper of suffering that he promptly darted his paws up for, covering the end of his muzzle with his arms huddled close to keep his back from arching.

“Breathe, Richter! You can do this!”, Elizabeth swung her fists up to be there for him as a coach instead, if he was still so dead set on taking this caning perfectly from start to finish, “Hang in there for about a minute more!”

That was already proving itself to be a monumental struggle for Richter, choking on all of the cries that wanted to start coming out of his sobbing, spluttering mouth; barely able to keep a tiny squint open in his perpetual wince. All of those big, searing white lines from one side of his back to the other had accumulated most everywhere they could, and as he took one jostling, snapping stroke after another, the cane had nowhere else to go but over the prior stripes. His back already felt mauled by claws, and the irregular stacking of weighty, plowing stings upon forming welt and bruise made for something that felt far more searing, pulverizing everything between the rattan and the bony surface of his back. The sheer deluge of endorphins from the beating dulled enough of his older aches and pains to allow him to step back and forth on his feet, gripping tightly at his snout as he tried so hard to not focus on the thwaps, cracks, and the tormenting agony that came with every one against his battered, ailing body. Richter’s head tipped back with a blub, feeling referred pain shoot all the way down his tail from the percussive ripples drumming down his spine, and his muzzle was swung back toward the floor with only the next stroke across his mid-back; his paws briskly darting from his face to let off a more open, howling tantrum sort of sob. Those arms of his shook in absolute strain just in front of his pelvis, clenching his fists so tight that his claws dug into the black pads of his palms. Bending his back in an anguished squirm, the Roferian lashed his tail to and fro, desperately struggling against the rhythmic blows with a long, growling howl that broke and leapt from the forceful slaps thumping against his lungs. That intense draconic snarl, both sad and surly, told Elizabeth that he was on the verge of collapse.

The constant lick of the rattan was the worst pain of his life – and he’d been shot before.

Anxious to help him hold on, Elizabeth urged, “You’re our farm’s little doer! Your perfect day tells us – everyone – what you think about what you did! It hurts, and it’s terribly cruel, I know, but… this is going to mean so much to you if you do this, so dig deep to be strong a little longer, lad!”

Richter’s growl turned to a strained, screeching gurgle that broke only once he picked his head up and curled his tense, fighting expression into one of sorrow, opening his maw into a frantic, hiccuping bawl that could absolutely take no more. He broke down not just from the destructive, torturous pain of the whip-like stripes, but because he further resigned himself to such suffering – something that would make anyone cry. Just like the night that he’d met his sole friend in this world, Elizabeth simply ‘got it’, the same as Zachary did. She understood him, and why today had to be perfect, regardless of anything else. It was simply important to him, and that was all that mattered. He had his reasons; so many of them; and it would have cut him to his soul if he couldn’t be a ‘good penny’ when it mattered most.

Barely able to stand right and keep his back bared, Richter crossed his arms up over his chest and sandwiched the end of his snout against them, right away catching his torrent of tears as they fell. In that guarding hug, lurching from stroke after stroke against his spine, he didn’t have to dig very far to scrounge up a little more kindling to his fire; pushing down the agony of having deep bruises lashed so ungodly hard. Being in the corner all day with nothing more than his inner void, saw to that.

Once upon a time, in a book of life he’d never gotten to read, there was a starship that traveled the galaxy. It saw new places and did new things, taking its crew on the same quest for adventure that his friend wished to embark upon.

He ended their story.

He wanted to put the pages back together, but he couldn’t.

A memorial for everyone who perished on his dark day was being constructed in the gardens of Starfleet Headquarters. He wanted to go there when it was finished, but he didn’t know how to ask.

Nothing about it made him self-loathing. He wished no pity for this path he now walked – not even from himself. The only thing he wanted on his second chance, was to be forgivable.

So when the rattan dug into the dark red and purple contusions splayed across the lowest point that Harvey was allowed to strike, and his knees buckled with nothing else left to give, he slammed them back and locked their joints. There was no being quiet, even if his throat didn’t have anything more to give either, hysterically gasping and bawling just to keep some air inside him. With his back nearly pulped and his fur splayed every which way, he didn’t know how much longer he could-… !

“Forty-seven!”, Elizabeth abruptly cried out how close he was while the last snap of the rattan was still ringing in his ears, watching him fight against his faltering tremble with every ounce of his being.

“Forty-eight!”, he barely heard over his own yowl, taking another whip across his mid-back. It throbbed so badly deep within him that it sent him onto the tips of his toes; tail outstretched.

“Forty-nine!”, his back arched for another, quickly stamping his feet on the rug with his bawling maw wide open.

“Fifty – just one more!”, came urgently alongside a lash that locked up every muscle in his body, including his diaphragm; there being no further sound from his contorted, straining red face. In the blackness of his mind, his immediate world around him went numb, bearing down so incredibly hard.

It felt as if he was slowly free-falling in a stream of air… and then came the thud.

“Richter!”, the exasperated Englishwoman exclaimed, lurching forward to catch him when his knees fell to the colored fibers of the rug beneath them; his young, shattered frame collapsed in her arms. Richter took in a sharp breath of air, and at a high pitch, cried in absolute exhaustion… there being one last hot, prickling line branded across the back of his shoulders, marking his fifty-first stroke and perfectly ‘good penny’ day. Elizabeth couldn’t have been more compassionate and shaken after that – or proud, as amazed as she was, cradling the infinitely willful Penitatas in her arms.

“It’s going to be alright! You did it! It’s over – this whole day is-… !”, Elizabeth hastily tried to soothe the quaking, pain-obliterated five year old, but a forceful clatter across the room spun her head like a dart; Othello scrambling from the rattan having been thrown against the wall in Harvey’s quick-footed disappearance into the farmhouse’s little hallway.

“Ha-… Harvey, where are you going? You can’t take a cane to a lad like that and just run off without comforting him!”, she shouted across the house, completely flabbergasted that he’d do that, even if he was quite bothered with what he’d just done to Richter. There was no immediate reply, but after a couple of thumps and a skyward, alertly curious tail from Othello, Harvey came back with a mound of linen in his arms.

“This is Richter we’re caring for, love! The best way to do that is to make him more comfortable as quickly as we can – actions before words!”, the fatherly man firmly declared in accordance with Richter’s beliefs, carrying a thick duvet and the unmistakably dark colors of Velly, fetched from the Roferian’s bed. Truly agitated by the act he was forced to take as far as he did, he took its aftermath personally, folding that cozily soft duvet over itself upon the sofa to make an impromptu bed.

“E-eliz-’beth… ”, Richter faintly squealed out, panicked and pained, but silenced by his lost voice, “It hurs’ to br-breathe… !”, he cried in her arms to everything he felt. Elizabeth cooed and shushed his fears as gently as she could, but another pair of hands came to help, as quickly as they’d finished their work.

“Easy does it… ”, came with Harvey’s cautious lift of the little Roferian, trying very hard to not bend or touch his back, but even the slightest jostle lit up every shredded nerve in Richter’s whole body, “You were incredible, Richter-boy. I’ll see to anything you need, and I’ll have nano-lotion ready for the first time you stir after midnight. You’ve well earned not having to wait until sunrise, so do your best to rest for now.”

Settled into the thick bedding on his stomach, Richter was joined by the softness of Velly, his mum and pop’s hands for him to hold close, and the warmth of Othello’s attentive snuggle. He weakly wailed, writhing against that folded, pillowy duvet for the far too long it took before the blessed mercy of sleep eased his hiccups away; too beaten to remain awake forever at his age, even if excruciating pain made it a shallow rest that would wax and wane for hours to come. No one would have to touch him, for him to suffer dearly. Only the strike of twelve would truly end his day of consequence.

By the time that would happen, the hues of the late evening sun had become dim behind Calleet’s perpetual sprinkle of snowflakes. In the cold, wintry twilight that steadily fell, an oasis of festivity had begun to stand out within the darkening, lifeless confines of its Penitatas District. Where most windows were dark, the Targate household’s were a picturesque scene of a wholesome Christmas – laughing families, shimmering tinsel, and a warmth you could feel from the street, packed with their scattered hover-cars. Their gathering had grown throughout the day, and the little vulpine hostess that helped it along as a yuletide social butterfly and new member of the Targate family had finally gotten to the part of it she’d been waiting for, welcoming in the company of her closest, most cherished friends. Being the giving young woman that Kayla was, sharing her good fortunes so that they might still get to have a some semblance of a real Christmas with her; far from forgotten; meant the world.

Glad as one of them might have been to arrive, to say that his excitement had been thoroughly trounced would have been an understatement.

“You’ll remember to be mindful of Kayla’s rules for her family, right hun? Dry eyes – no sad?”, Thomas craned his neck in stride to gently ask his son; crunching the snow below. Beneath the Santa hat he practically had to plead the fox to put back on, Zachary looked uncharacteristically brooding, staring at the ground with his arms crossed like he hadn’t heard a thing.

“Zachary Weiler?”, Patrick strictly snapped from Thomas’ other side to the silent treatment. It made Zachary’s arms hug himself tighter, nearly to the peek of vulpine fang.

“… Yes, sir.”, he replied as demanded, tempering his tone.

“I don’t want to be any more harsh than I’ve had to be, but I won’t hesitate to take you home and spank you with your last switch early if you at all misbehave.”, his sterner father warned as one would expect of a penny-parent dealing with potential attitude, melancholic in origin or not. Before Zachary’s ears could flatten harder in his bitter upset, they flung themselves upright with the eruption of light from Kayla’s front door gliding open.

“Welcome boys! Merry Christmas!”, the eight year old hostess herself threw her paws out to her sides with the sunshine of a girl having her first real Christmas with her family, raising eyebrows and eye-ridges alike for the pretty-yet-simple white dress the tomboy was wearing out of the blue.

Behind her meticulously fluffed tail was a whole house full of people; their voices and the savory scents of food striking all of Zachary’s senses, still only to be shoved aside once Jacob joined her in the doorway. In a dark, comfortable set of leisurewear to keep his reptilian scales warm, the Karrian had the sort of empathetic smile that said aloud how much he’d been thinking about his friend and playmate all day. The moment he reached out to offer a hug, a powdery puff of snow was all that was left behind by Zachary in his dart to snatch his arms around him.

“It’s alright. You’re here now. We’ll make it better.”, Jacob squeezed, imagining the sort of pain and gloom that must have been haunting him. He felt blessed that he didn’t have to watch Kayla suffer through it too, feeling how stiff and tense Zachary was from what ailed him; his tail perpetually bracing the seat of his shorts.

“Help yourselves to the buffet in the dining room! I’ve got a ton of food to go around, and my mom’s got drinks in the kitchen!”, Kayla swept herself aside to make way for Patrick and Thomas, making a gesturing lift of a ‘C’ emblazoned paw to a rather opulently catered spread beyond the crowd in the living room, courtesy of Ackart Enterprises; Emily’s recognizable ponytail dangling beside it, while Ki`rene and another drake’s height stood above the human crowd.

Thomas wiggled his saurian tail free of a few loose flurries in his flamboyance, following his husband’s lead, “It looks like I’ll have a lot of ‘hello’s and ‘Merry Christmas’es to give! You all have a nice time together!”

Zachary’s eyes cracked open against Jacob’s shoulder to give the pair a dirty look behind their backs, keeping his venomous leer up until his ear was rubbed by Kayla’s fingers, and the two boys parted their embrace. While his fur-shaven backside smoldered with sharp, gratingly hot stings, their gentle paws took sympathetic care in guiding him no faster than he wished to walk toward a hangout spot they had made up beside the Christmas tree. A penny-thoughtful circle of pillows had been piled up for their friends to use, and by the look of it, the fox was the last one to arrive; Ninne and Anne already packaged up like allosaurid loaves upon their pillows, keeping pressure off their paddled hips and the tenderized, puffy feminine crease tucked between them.

“I couldn’t wait to see you guys. I can’t believe how awful this whole day’s been.”, Zachary grumbled with a rough sigh, lifting his muzzle to Kayla as he shuffled, “I’m sure you’ve gotten this from everybody, but I thought you hated wearing girly stuff ‘Kay?”

“Ninne said I don’t look like a boy for once.”, she sheepishly smirked, grasping the drape of her dress to give the pearly fabric a rather unfeminine wiggle, “I thought throwing on a dress would make Christmas a little more special for my grandparents since they hadn’t seen me since I was paroled, and I wanted to make a good first impression with all of the aunts and uncles I was going to meet today. It seemed like the ‘adult’ thing to do if I wanted to be seen as the girl of Ackart Enterprises, and not just Packet-Storm the ex-penny.”

“She had fun prettying herself up, in case she tries to deny it later.”, Jacob cracked a single loose chuckle, and a trilling reptilian sound followed it.

“[Hey lil’ guy!]”, Anne craned her neck over as the trio got close enough to the mound of pillows, greeting Zachary with a little splash of Drakonian matriarchal sweetness considering she was nearly twice his age. Covered with a blanket to hide the crimson speckle of stud marks on her traditionally bare scaled hips, it looked like she had been rather cheerfully playing about with Ninne; a whole world better off than he was, or at least just plain happier in her effort to find solace from her miserable day. The fox wasn’t deeply familiar with her considering she’d hang out with Ninne while Jacob and he did their ‘younger kid’ stuff outside, but he at least knew her to be really friendly.

“You didn’t bring your present from the two of them with you to show off? That’s half the fun of Christmas!”, Ninne however prodded in the manner he knew Jacob’s penny step-sister for, questioningly lifting both of her occupied claws; Anne giving her own a flail before pulling her blanket aside to join in. Against her traditionally bare scaled saurian breastbone was a girlishly azure vest tailored just for her, left fully open for the sake of looks rather than to clothe.

“[Check it out! Kayla got me this cute vest with butterfly charms on the zippers, and they both got Ninne the gift of wishing she could heal our roasting you-know-whats!]”, the eldest of the group lightheartedly joked in regard to the “burning” temptation that came with getting to play with her very own medical tricorder when there was so much she wasn’t allowed to mend.

“A full civilian model! Engraved and everything!”, Ninne giddily threw both of her arms out to show off the fully white, modern unit’s colorful screens and the shimmer of its scanning cylinder. It had been a special present from Jacob after all these months of learning triage and nursing skills with him, and obviously must have cost enough of a fortune to make Kayla’s assistance in buying it necessary.

“[And I have pockets! I’ve never gotten to have pockets!]”, Anne was just as happy that Kayla paid notice to her endearment of accessorizing to look unique, like when Ki`rene gave her that scarf to wear to the courthouse.

“Kayla really does have a uterus. It only took her years to prove it!”, Ninne’s grinning maw snickered enough to let the faintest hint of a reptilian hiss out into the pitch of her panglish-trained voice, imagining the feminine tastes that must have come out when she went to have that bright, girly saurian vest made. Such lively spirits had been a welcome diversion for Zachary’s heavy heart, but feeling half left out made his empty paws hurt that he couldn’t share and play all the same.

“Oh, well… they got me a really nice engineering tool set for kit-paws, but my dad doesn’t let me keep things like that. I’m not allowed to take it anywhere, or use it without being watched.”, he tried to explain of Patrick’s rigid engineering rules so it wouldn’t seem like he was being a wet blanket in the face of his friends’ generosity, but the expression across his muzzle weakened before even his ears could, seeing the faces that Ninne and Anne snapped into as he began easing himself down to the floor.

“[That’s unfair.]”, even the silliest of the group’s girls didn’t hold back, sounding deeply disapproving of his parents’ decision – something Ninne followed up on after turning her eyes back to the fox.

“Seriously. I literally get to have a medical tricorder – on Christmas.”, she argued in his defense, when she didn’t exactly have the perfect track record that her other friends did and was still trusted enough by her mother to not misuse what she’d been given, “Like, what are you going to do, steal the lights out of Kayla’s Christmas tree with them? You should have the same fun as the rest of us. It’s not like we get a whole ton.”

Her reasoning undeniable, Zachary gruffly sighed, gingerly finishing laying down on his stomach; muzzle sinking into the pillow he hugged, surrounded by all those sounds and voices there beside the dangle of the lowest branches of the tree. It stoked the flames of his bitterness and forced his tail harder against his backside, not having expected to see another Penitatas with, as she put it, ‘literally a medical tricorder on Christmas’. He was sick to death of being treated so harshly and differently from other silver letters, firmly flattening his ears with the never-seen baring of his vulpine fangs.

“Yeah. I’m not happy with those two right now. Fuck ‘em both!”, he emotionally spat against his pillow, not getting to see the surprised lift of the drakes’ heads, or the taken aback look that shot across his friends’ muzzles above.

“Zach-y… ”, Kayla uttered out of pity, but her underlying tone of scolding, motherly disappointment to hear something like that caught the open lift of Ninne’s claw.

“It’s his first Christmas. I’m sure he must have had it rough.”, she pressed, speaking up for him.

Understanding the sort of betrayed, sour place that would have come from, Ninne eyeballed the stewing little fox in the moment of silence he’d managed to make. On his stomach with his chin shoved into that pillow, what little of his muzzle she could see was wrinkled with more than one kind of ‘upset’, glaring off into its cotton fibers as if to put his foot down and affirm what he said without saying anything; that dour, grumpy engineer of few words Kayla met in the mall, once the grief of being underfoot had raised the Aspatrian’s defensive walls. The feline-packaged drake craned her neck over to Zachary to have a moment and still be able to keep her voice down, not wanting to speak too loudly of penny-business for Kayla’s sake.

“I had to try really hard not to get mad today myself… and you probably know how much I love my ‘ma.”, Ninne softly admitted, assuming the role of ‘older fellow Penitatas’; the fox lifting an ear slightly to listen.

“Instead of counting coal, we drakes get a slip that tells us what our smack count will be. Mine went up this year by a lot, and she took Christmas way more seriously than she normally would. It was the worst I’ve ever had, and I hated getting all of that from her. But, I was a huge bitch at the start of the year to someone who really didn’t deserve it, and she made a ‘mom-lesson’ out of why I couldn’t make the number on my slip go all the way back down to normal by behaving better the whole rest of it. She told me that my brush swats probably jumped by, like, thirty alone when I swung my claw at the girl I was fighting with at somebody’s house. It wasn’t like she was pissed with me, or really trying to be mean – she was just being my ‘ma.”, she used her harshly learned humility to explain how life with your punitive guardians could be sometimes, having been parented to the tune of one last serious reminder of what happens to hatchlings who dare use their claws. Though Zachary’s ears remained folded, their irritable tension had loosened to something more morose, and with it, Ninne lifted her snout to look Kayla in the eye.

“Not that she actually told me that my swipe had hurt her, but… she’s like that.”, sounded half like a gripe, and half like an apologetic ‘thank you’ that Kayla chose to never rub her snout in what she had done, having only come to learn of the harm she did from Ki`rene doling her Christmas penance out with a personalized lecture.

“You did help her meet somebody when she ran upstairs… just to say.”, Kayla kept up the coy veil to not muddy the guidance Ninne was lending Zachary.

Those long streaks of claw-tip scratches down Kayla’s back marked a grave error in the eyes of the department, and Jacob’s welcoming party became an important yet painful day for them both once transgressions turned to consequence nearly a year ago. It stirred Kayla’s memories, not just for Ninne needing to cry over bygones when she herself hadn’t been at all in the right either, but for an odd piece of context that she was forced to leave unsaid. Ninne’s Christmas swat count raising by ‘thirty alone’ was a strangely specific number for Ki`rene to have just randomly thrown out there, considering your typical parent had no idea what was happening to their charge’s end-of-year judgment until the day came for them to deliver it. She’d been suspicious of their mother drake’s potential status as a Master ever since Richter’s parents gave her those cryptic little clues, and it just added to the pile of vague hints that proved to do nothing but leave her wondering.

“[I did pretty good today, probably since I ratted your sorry tail out that day and actually kept my butt out of trouble most of the year. My parents think I’ll get an early parole when my birthday hits in a few months!]”, Anne cut in with her thrilled announcement, approaching her twelfth birthday and own day in court. A whole cycle of being good was just as important to the department as saving the world, and the thought of her joining Kayla in the silver ‘C’ club spurt an unsurprised titter from Ninne’s maw.

“All the more reason for me to get to know fox-boy. I’ll need a friend near my own age to run around the yard with when I get tossed into a rejuvenator for soft time.”, she foresaw with the red column she saw on Kayla’s parole day, knowing that she was going to be ‘left back’ while the rest of them grew up, “Soft time I hope.”

The chatter had given Zachary time with his thoughts, mulling over Patrick and Thomas just trying to ‘be his dads’ on this painful, abusive day. A guilty conscience began to mix with all the ire he held for what had been done to him; hardly able to lay still from the intensity of his lasting stings. He didn’t at all feel as terrible as his stocking declared he was, never having truly swallowed it, but with the way Ninne had put things, he was starting to feel like a screw-up; his ears further weakening.

“… You’re right. I broke Kayla’s computer, and got lost as a penny in public. I know I didn’t help what I got today.”, he mumbled in defeat, pointing out his own noteworthy instances of personal failure.

“Been there, done that. It’s easier to start feeling better at your age once you calm down enough to stop being the ‘pissed off’ kind of upset.”, Ninne encouraged as a veteran penny, raising a hissing snicker from Anne.

“[Holy crap, is your mother rubbing off on you, or was that Kayla?]”, she simply had to question of Ninne’s understanding and awfully ‘sunny fox’-sounding side, earning smirks and snickers all around.

“Both of ‘em! Shut up!”, Ninne swung her neck over bemusedly, having come a ways.

“On that note, now that everybody’s settled in, I think it’s time to get things started. I’ve got a plan to help everybody feel way better!”, Kayla decreed, elatedly and formally placing her paws behind her back to emulate a ‘prim and proper’ young lady in her stately dress; Jacob happily at her side.

“I wanted to share the normal Christmas I was getting to have with my best friends, so I made it a mission to figure out how a Penitatas could be allowed to come to a Christmas party if I threw one. Closest thing to a party we ever had was just having a few friends over for our birthdays, right? Stupidly enough, I got what I needed from an old penny-rule left behind from before the reform. I found out that pennies in Ki`rene’s time were taken to other people’s houses during the holidays all the time! They served way more of them back then, and pennies weren’t supposed to be an inconvenience to their parents’ family plans and make them shut-ins on every holiday, so when they ended up someplace else for dinner on one, a good little penny had to eat whatever ended up on the table. The host wasn’t obligated to make them anything else.”, she explained in amusement, wiggling a short vulpine digit before the deviously crafty, toothy grin she’d been holding back this whole time stretched broadly across her muzzle, “So, as long as you happen to be here for dinner while your parents are enjoying a Christmas party, and I serve it to you as the hostess… you can eat everything on my buffet menu – and I packed it with things you guys don’t get to have!”

“[Dinner party! Packet-Storm hacks again!]”, Anne hissed with a squeal of reptilian-equivalent laughter at why Kayla had dubbed this a ‘dinner party’; Ninne’s arms in the air for their resident sly fox. Zachary looked too stiff and pained to move, but he tried to perk his features up, smelling chocolate wafting on the spiced air. Be it lines of code or lines of rules, there was always a vulnerability to be exploited – even by a good girl, if it meant being able to give a little Christmas back to those she cherished.

“Meats, sweets, drinks – you name it, I ordered it! Oh, and you guys have got to try strawberry rhubarb pie! It’s my favorite, and I had some baked fresh with no replicated ingredients!”, Kayla’s tail flung back and forth in her excitement to share all of the freedoms she’d come to love, trailing a happy laugh into a sillier face that peered over her shoulder as Emily stepped by, proudly wearing her sapphire necklace, “And do help me eat them, because the person who’s supposed to keep me from being willy-nilly with my credits let the eight year old buy way too many pies.”

“Hey, ah… ”, Jacob spoke up quietly, giving her arm a tap with the back of his paw to cut in, “You mind if I stay with Zach?”

“I’ll get my mom and grandma to help put some plates together. You can cheer up your bestie.”, Kayla welcomed, catching the affectionate hook of her mate’s tail against her own as she stepped by.

Zachary still looked deep in his uncomfortable sorrows, but Ninne’s thoughtful coaching at least had his dark blue eyes peering up to watch Jacob calmly crawl down onto the floor beside him. Fetching a pillow to throw beneath his chest, the Karrian tucked himself between he and the curl of Ninne’s tail; the two boys propped up all the same, nearly muzzle to muzzle when they turned their heads partway.

“I’ve been worrying about you all day.”, Jacob caringly admitted, keeping his voice down, “Would it help if you talked about it? What did you end up getting?”

“I’m twenty one coals’ worth of shitty, and got an extra whipping they give black letters like Richty… because I ‘deserve to be one’, and got out of it with my plea deal.”, the fox’s maw crooked with an expressive frown, grumbling bitingly, “It was a bunch of little sticks put together. They called it a ‘birching’, and it was the worst thing fucking ever.”

“I… figured you’d have a bad time, but I didn’t expect anything like that. I learned about birching in a history course. I’m sure they did it to teach you a lesson and make you feel thankful it isn’t worse, but they shouldn’t have ignored your deal to prove a point. It wasn’t charity; you had to do something for that.”, Jacob’s tone of shaken surprise firmed up with his objection, considering Zachary had been assured his silver letter when he cooperated to prosecute the Bah`vira’s whole crew. The lingering heartache of unfairness wilted the fox into the floor; voice so airily boyish.

“Everything hurt so bad. The burning never stopped, even when I wasn’t in the corner and could lay down. It stings like thousands of little scratches all over, and I’ve still got one more switch to go. Patrick told me that I have to go to bed as soon as we get home, and I’m going to get it laying down with a pillow under my crotch before they tuck me in. I can’t take another! It’s already so unbearable!”, the Aspatrian’s pitch peaked with a childish growl of frightful frustration, breathing quickly with a balling of his paws against his face.

“Jacob, they shaved off my f-f-fur… ”, his sad, trembling voice broke with a squeak, right before his muzzle cracked open with a heartbroken, gratingly pained sob; the drakes cutting their chatter short in a panic to the sound.

“Zach, no!”, Jacob hurried, snatching a blanket he’d left out on Zachary’s other side with a fling of it over their heads; the light going far dimmer, glowing a festive red through its threads as that boyish, vulpine face meekly cried into his pillow.

“Alex and Emily are really adamant about keeping the penny-punishment stuff away from their parents! Kayla said she always got tons of nano-lotion when any of them visited! Please, we had to promise to follow their ‘no tears’ rule! Kayla won’t be allowed to do this again if we mess up, and she needs this with you guys, just as much as you need it too!”, Jacob urgently pressed despite his tone sounding so very much his age with the compassion it bled; hours away from being eight years old, “I’ll help you grow your fur back really quickly! It’ll be okay!”

“I’m sorry! I-… I din’ mean to, b-but-… !”, the poor fox lamented, nuzzling his narrow snout beneath his pillow to further muffle the tears he could no longer help; his breaking point reached, being so upset and emotionally torn.

“I heard f-from Richty this morning that he got fifty coal and everything in his house! Fifty from that fuck’n b-birch! Why did we have to get it so h-hard, like we needed to be convinced that we fucked up? We already know we did! We’re trying to be good!”, Zachary poured out of himself, keeping his mewling, sobbing voice beneath the pillow he was practically sharing with Jacob’s worried snout, “What haven’t I already given them? I didn’t have to put my paws up and surrender. I didn’t have to blow apart the Bah`vira and give them everyone on it. I could have just walked away from that fucking ship and not risked killing myself to get us all caught, but I didn’t! I did everything I could! There’s nothing more I could have done! Why do they ha-have t’ be so h-hard? They didn’t giv’ me a ch-chance!”, he cried, but with a solid pause and a stiff sigh through his reptilian nostrils, the good doctor reserved himself to bring the fox some calm through honesty.

“… Because you have to pay for everything that’s left on the table, after the good you did took some of it away. You’ve told me yourself what all you and the Bah`vira are guilty of. You’ve just never had that guilt quantified into something tangible, like a penny’s Christmas does with its coal and punishments. I’m sure the message you were given hurt in more ways than one.”, he phrased that way on purpose, subtly suggesting he not ‘shoot the messenger’ when it came to being mad at the fathers he loved.

“It’s about more than just whether or not you ‘deserve it’ when you’re punished this bad. I didn’t think Kayla deserved the awful spankings I saw – I hated seeing her cry, or be unhappy. She needed them, though. She was so nice, and so brilliant, but I understood that she had her troubles, and was still growing into the rounded, adjusted person that I loved. Those lessons, and that structure, helped her. I believe in the idea of making people Penitatas to raise them up, because I’ve seen it work. I don’t want to see you cry or be sad either, but you have to go through this. Not because you’re a bad guy, because you really, really aren’t… but because I know you’ll make better decisions and stay on the right path once you’re re-raised. You’re learning from your mistakes even more than you’re paying for them.”, Jacob shared as his heartfelt belief, even knowing that it wouldn’t coddle his friend to say that a wayward little pirate needed his penny-parenting. The birching was egregious, but his twenty one coal… he knew Zachary brought that upon himself, and was taking a lesson from it even as they spoke; sobering as it was to say and hear.

“And I know you and Richter are friends, but you have to let him pay for his own mistakes. Whatever he got today was his guilt, made as tangible as yours. He earned it, fair and square.”, he continued to beseech, softly and gently, not expecting the tiny, puppy-like growl that came after.

“Fair n’ square my fuckin’ ass.”, Zachary tepidly griped, not turning his eyes back from the pillow, “The amount of thankless shit he does? Being brave – volunteering? He’s a better person than I am, and a way better penny.”

“That’s really debatable, Zach.”, Jacob made a face that came thickly out in his voice, but Zachary scoffed, turning his head to surprise Jacob with something he’d never seen from him – a wrinkled snout, and a full glimpse of fang.

“Nobody needs to be beaten like he was going to be beaten! Nobody should ever be thrown away for hundreds of years either! That isn’t debatable!”, his sharp, exasperated little voice barked firmly in their hushed back and forth, putting force behind it that was far from the agreeable, sensitive boy he usually was.

Jacob struggled with his words, taking a breath to keep his nerves steady for Zachary. Being careful, he put forward a thought for the deductive little engineer to mull over and try to understand, “Kayla crunched the numbers once. Richter’s serving somewhere around four months for each person he killed. A whole life, being worth only four months of his own. Those two hundred and fifty five years are trying to give some justice to-… ”

“That’s not justice, that’s revenge!”, he was cut off with bite; the fox adamant and rejecting, if Richter’s sentence was going to be reduced to ‘an eye for an eye’.

“Nobody needs to be punished for that long to be taught a lesson! Not even a hundred years! You guys having rejuvenators doesn’t make it right!”, Zachary threw out as beliefs of his own, condemning Earth’s morality, “You’re not anywhere near as old as his whole sentence. Not even your drake-mom would have finished that sentence if it began when she hatched, and she’s old! Imagine being a penny for the whole time you’ve been alive, and still not being anywhere close to parole! I’m sure me saying it pisses you off after what he did, but I can’t accept what’s being done to him. It’s wrong… and I expected better of Earth when I threw myself at it.”, he spat into the carpet, waning his tears with the philosophy of his elder side. The Penitatas expected silence in reply to his staunch viewpoint, making waves he’d soon regret, but his ears partly unfolded at Jacob’s first still-calm breath.

“… Actually, it’s kind of nice to hear you not agree with me for once. You’re always so on board with everyone. Convictions are a good thing. They’re important to me.”, came with the rub of a warm paw against his back, respecting the reasoning given even if they disagreed. The moment of silence that Zachary had anticipated came, except it was he himself that had gone quiet; noticeably calmer, having his feelings merely accepted.

“I understand him, just like I understand how much he hurt you. Richty tried to murder Kayla in cold blood. You were a doctor, and her best friend, and couldn’t do anything to save her when she almost lost her paw. He was going to make you watch her bleed to death in your arms. You have every right to be upset, angry, and everything else you want to be for what he did. He owes you a lot, and damn well better give it to you. I just… know that he will.”, Zachary turned wholly around to show a hint of fang for the other party, before explaining why he’d even fathom defending Richter in his presence after what transpired on DeltaStar; those words far kinder, and so oddly thought provoking to hear him say.

“It’s not like I don’t get it. I just want everyone to matter, because that’s what matters to me.”, Zachary affirmed how he saw people and the world; his core doctrine; without tear nor bite. It was what made the Bah`vira go away. It was what made him Zachary Weiler, the fun, friendly fox.

Laid beneath their blanket, both boys drifted into what had become a personal, quiet moment amongst all the festive commotion that couldn’t be seen. Zachary’s eyes were damp, but there wasn’t a single hiccup or fresh drop to trickle down the orange of his cheeks; his muzzle merely resting on the floor, staring off in exhaustion once all of his six year old emotions had been corralled. Jacob thoughtfully looked away himself for a moment, before tipping his snout back with a lighter, slower voice.

“That’s Richter, though. What about you? Do you… feel like you’ve paid enough today? Given what you owed?”, he had to ask of Zachary’s conscience. The weary penny looked so uncertain, but ultimately his freshly focused thoughts took everything that made him cry before and summarized it into a single sentence.

“… I gave them so much more than I could take.”, was Zachary’s honest truth, suffering to the degree he did.

A sharp, cold pinch bit his neck hard enough to make him jerk. His ears snapped back with a snatch of his ebony paw to the spot that startled him, flinging his muzzle over to see the dull silhouette of a hypospray sliding back into the sleeve of Jacob’s pajama-like leisure top. The Aspatrian went pale beneath his fur, and it was profound enough to be seen in the confused, anxious look in his wide eyes.

“Wha-… what was that?”, he shakily fretted in disbelief.

“Exactly what you think it was. I made an Aspatrian analgesic for Kayla a while back to help her with pain when she was fighting to stop Richter, and you just got its maximum dose.”, he transferred the concealed hypo back into his pocket, confident and stalwart in the face of breaking his biggest rules with wanton abandon. Every worry imaginable rushed through Zachary’s mind, needing to know why Jacob would fathom doing something so shockingly brazen, but his squeaking, stumbling attempts to question it was met with an answer before he could formulate words.

“I didn’t tell Kayla that I was thinking of doing this for you if I thought your first Christmas was too much. She’d probably beat me half to death. The department could try to have my medical license suspended until I became an adult again for giving homemade pain medication to a penny, but nobody is going to be parting the fur on your neck to randomly check for hypo marks. You have nothing to worry about, and could just blame me for it if you had to.”, the good doctor assured so calmly and fearlessly, it was like he’d done nothing wrong.

“But I don’t want you to risk that for me!”, Zachary argued at a whisper’s urgency even if it was far too late to matter, already feeling the once insufferable fire across his haunches dulling to far more tolerable levels.

“I did say convictions were important to me.”, Jacob reminded with a smile, channeling the man that was Commander Vasse, “This is my Christmas present. A little mercy so you can be comfortable for dinner, and get to sleep after that switch easier. You’ll have a whole year to lighten your next stocking, so expect a cool toy next year instead of a hypospray, alright?”

Zachary barely stared with his slackened jaw any further before it curled into something joyous, reaching a paw across Jacob’s back to snug the Karrian against his side. The old boy was bashfully surprised to be given a nuzzle, feeling warm, boyish whiskers, but he happily let the person he constantly hung out and played with all these months show his appreciation through affection; pressing back enough to let Zach know it was okay. There was no better way to tell one another how thankful they were to have the other as a friend.

“… Think you could make me one of the fun drugs for my birthday?”, Zachary cheekily pitched against his snout.

“I’ll spank you myself.”, Jacob cheerfully replied without so much as opening his eyes.

“I believe you, too!”, the fox humorously squeezed; very much his usual playful self.

Validated by the forgiveness of someone he looked up to, it wasn’t but a minute more before the hobbyist chemist’s Aspatrian pain-reliever had the pair popping their heads back out from beneath their blanket as if they’d merely been playing. Kayla’s favorite grandmother had already brought over two big plates and was kneeling beside Ninne and Anne, curiously looking to find out what they thought of the seared, practically raw venalark made specially for their Drakonian guests, and more of their supper spread arrived on the bounce of orange paws. Zachary looked far cheerier than Kayla had left him, and was thrilled to see him throw his tail to the side and so stoically take a seat on a pillow to eat. She’d been afraid he’d try having dinner while lying down! Their circle of pillows ended up working out just as the fox had hoped, having savory indulgences and guilty pleasures with her other family – her best friends, bonded by all of the good times that came from coping together with the bad. The ‘penny’ part of Christmas all but disappeared, letting their young attention spans get lost in their conversations, wondering what presents they’d all been given, and what they would be doing tomorrow on Jacob’s birthday. Best of all, everyone liked those pies! Anne practically ate a whole one by herself, as big as tween drakes were!

Having one last important thing to do before anyone began to fathom heading home, Kayla excused herself from their company for a moment once the plates had stopped accumulating, and no one could do anything more than nurse their bellies and chat. Fetching her datapad from the sofa’s side table, she foxily snaked her way around all of those new branches of the Targate family to steal Ki`rene’s attention with a perky wave.

“You need me, dear?”, their resident mother drake sweetly asked, making sure she’d not bowl anyone in the house over with her tail.

“You’re the only one I haven’t given their Christmas present to yet! I didn’t want to do it in front of everybody when you got here earlier.”, Kayla bounced right up; pad to her chest.

“Oh goodness, you didn’t have to get me anything anyway! I’m just happy to get out and spend Christmas with everyone!”

“Well, getting out is something you’ll be able to do a lot more often I hope!”, the fox wiggled her pad before turning her attentions to it, cocking Ki`rene’s head curiously.

“See, my mom and dad told me this kind of present is usually kinda frowned upon, but I wanted to give you a long vacation away from working on those accounting sheets you don’t like, and couldn’t really think of another way to do that.”, came from her little muzzle all innocent and bubbly-like, but the connotations had Ki`rene’s own pad whipping out of her pocket with stiffened eye-ridges, “Now you can spend the whole day just being a mom!”

Unable to ignore the context clue and seemingly welcomed to follow it, gauging by Kayla’s suggestive tone, Ki`rene’s claw carefully jumped about her display to access her bank account. Sure enough, a pre-authorized transaction had just processed at one ‘Kayla Ackart’s behest, to the sum of a number that did something rather familiar to the sizable drake’s slit, reptilian eyes. It was the reaction everyone seemed to have when they saw a few too many zeros – the well-to-do girl’s gift coming in at a staggering three hundred thousand credits.

Shrinking down a fair bit more than drake tended when addressing the younger ones around her, Ki`rene faltered with the pad in her claws, “Kayla! Getting Alex a sports car for Christmas is one thing, but I’m-… !”

“He-heeee, I’ll block your connection!~”, Kayla leapt back with a slick flick of her lush tail, still tomboyishly playful even in her white dress. The tip of her tongue stuck out with the cheekiest of all grins, catching glances of amusement from her aunts and uncles, and all Ki`rene could do in the face of her hovering, waiting vulpine finger-pad was give up on her attempt to transfer the credits back.

“You’ve done so much for me. You’re like my ‘other mom’.”, the Aspatrian before her snout affectionately gave with a quieter voice, eye to eye, just between the two of them, “Love you. Merry Christmas!”

The hopeful perk of Kayla’s ears disarmed Ki`rene in her fight against her own butterflies, and the kind, glowing encouragement in her voice sealed away any desire to resist her gesture. There was nothing that happy, giving fox wanted than for her ‘other mom’ to accept her present like it was normal. To Kayla, it was merely the gift of free time away from a monotonous means of earning a living from home, and a fraction of what the person who stood up at her parole hearing deserved; a scaly angel in her own right, and her best fully-grown friend. A bright smile crept across Ki`rene’s snout as her features softened, and the moment she’d sent her datapad back where it came, she tucked herself down to the floor, beaming the warmth of appreciation Kayla so wished for.

“C’mon, hop on!”, Ki`rene welcomed with vigor, swinging a thumb’s claw over her saurian shoulder. Kayla was surprised by the equally playful reaction to what she’d given out herself, never having been offered a ride on a drake’s Allosaurus-like back, aside from when Ninne swam her around a lake. Bashful about doing so with a jam-packed house and really not knowing how to be graceful with a dress, Kayla climbed atop Ki`rene’s saurian Christmas shirt only to be whisked right away; tall above her relatives at the matriarch’s imposing height.

“We’ll be back!”, a claw patted Emily’s shoulder on her stride by, making a spirited dart for the door with all the rejuves beside the tree raising their brows fairly high at the sight.

“Wait! What about a jacket?”, Emily stumbled after her friend, but when she ended up in her front doorway, Ki`rene was already briskly trotting out into the snow between their family’s cluster of hover-cars.

“You know she doesn’t need one!”, she threw her neck over her shoulder to call back in stride. Kayla was rarely ever cold with all her fur! All Emily could do was awkwardly smile in amusement, watching the big dinosaur make distance into the flurry-dusted twilight with her daughter laughing as she went.

“… You do, though.”, she mumbled for the incorrigible drake.

Out into the snowy street, Ki`rene dipped into a raptor’s sprint as soon as she knew Kayla was holding on tight. Drakonians were known for being slow on land, not built for Earth’s gravity, but she’d always been a spry one, and made a fun reptilian gallop for her impromptu drake-ride. Puffs of vapor billowed from her snout, far bigger than the giddy wisps Kayla made, hunkered down against Ki`rene’s back. The mother drake was obviously happy as could be, and wanted to share it with the girl who gave her all of that joyous freedom. It wasn’t but a minute before Kayla began to recognize the route they were taking through the sterile cold of the Penitatas District, and much like how Halloween had went beside their chaperon of a candy-camel, the twinkle of festive life appeared around an open bend; the fence-less border between the realm of Penitatas and that of the free world. She wasn’t being ran out into Calleet’s flurries for any mere ride – Ki`rene had taken her young Completatas out to see all of the Christmas lights she’d been missing out on, and couldn’t well enjoy from high above in a car. Only once there were decorated, brilliantly glowing houses in front and behind did the bounce of Ki`rene’s jog ease back to a gentle walk to catch her breath. She craned her neck around to see her drake-back passenger sitting up, looking all around in the peaceful outing she’d been gifted.

“You want to know something? I always hated belting your backside with my tongue. Do you have any idea how much fur I got in my mouth?”, she candidly shared, treating Kayla as a parental equal.

“Turnabout is fair play.”, the fox cracked without a sour thought for how terribly those had stung, helping a warmer, more personal admission come to Ki`rene; sweetened butterflies be damned.

“And… I’ve always quite admired you. We’re pretty alike, I think. If you didn’t end up with Jacob, I would have asked you if you’d like to be with me when you got older.”, her claws came together, calmly and kindly as she walked. It left Kayla stunned, tearing her young attention span from the twinkling colors and shimmering holograms of reindeer beside her.

“I had no idea you even liked girls the way I do. Isn’t saying that going to make things really awkward between us?”, her ears expressively flung back, though she’d hardly finished before the mother drake laughed with sheepish amusement, waving both of her claws out in front of herself.

“No, no, it’s not something awkward! Not like that!”, she hastily assured, raising her claws.

“I’m ace.”, she formed the shape of a heart with her scaly fingers, chuckling at the fox’s predictable head-tilt of confusion, “Asexual, dear. Aromantic, specifically! I just don’t see other people that way. I’m still full of love, but it’s a love for my young ones, and my family.”

The nearly colorless sticker with a purple swath on the back of her old datapad that Ninne got to see on Halloween wasn’t that way because it was faded by time, but rather that the younger drake couldn’t identify an ace pride flag. Ki`rene came out for the first time when she was a Penitatas trying to make sense of all of her feelings, and needed to tell her mothers why the Voluntarus that had been coming to her penny birthday parties for a chance to spank her tail made her a special kind of uncomfortable. Swatting around the base of her tail slowly and intimately, feeling faint tugs like Scott was trying to find the personal creases her scales hid, created a situation she wanted no part of. A feminine parting was simply a body part, and she wanted to receive Scott’s “suggestive intentions” as much as she wanted to slather it upon others. She thought nothing of everyone’s spectacle nudity as a Penitatas, and took her licks with Aubrey as if she was her sister, even if she thought her friend was quite pretty. That friend – that family – was what the sunny-yet-lost, scarf-toting Penitatas found that she wanted in life.

“Ninne, and everyone who comes after her, will always be welcome to come back to me. I can stay their mom forever if they want, so they’ll always have a home to return to. If they need someone to be their parent as a Voluntarus, or even just care about them when they’re all grown, I’ll still be there. This is how I want to make my nest… my big, big nest.”, was her dream of starting a family with those she’d raise, smiling wishfully off into the snowy night. All Ki`rene needed to do to have kids of her own, was to simply adopt everyone who needed her.

“You’ve definitely got Ninne for life. I think she’d want to stay your daughter even if her parents weren’t awful, or… you know – incarcerated.”, Kayla cozily sank into the tranquil thought, leaning forward against the drake’s saurian shoulders.

“It would have been nice to have a close friend to share my home with in the meantime, is all. Play some video games – watch movies. We’d have made a pair of super-moms! But, based on all of the huge stains of yours that I’ve had to get out of Jacob’s sheets, you wouldn’t have been too satisfied with something that platonic.”, Ki`rene delivered with such casual humor, the fox bolted back up from lying down.

“Th-th-those aren’t mine!”, the legendarily messy fox stammered in embarrassment, feeling the percussive vibrations of Ki`rene’s laugh against her blushing groin.

“I’ve been the mother of a pair of spank-happy lesbians! Oh, I know which stains are yours!”, the mother drake peeked back with a smirk, sending Kayla forward to bury her scalding red muzzle against her.

“I know I’m being awfully candid, but that’s because act doesn’t really mean anything to me. It’s harmless, shameless biology. That’s why I protect you and Jacob’s ability, and ignore the occasional ruffled spot at the corner of Ninne’s mattress. She’s so careful about it. I won’t hurt anyone who’s not causing trouble.”, she reassured in her gentle, motherly way, though it did make Kayla squint with an immediate mental image of Ninne clutching a pillow, straddling the corner of her bed to hump one out as a sizable allosaurus-like girl; grinding fabric and bedding. Such a picture did little for Kayla’s glowing muzzle when that sounded like something she’d enjoy watching.

“Emily was on me like a hawk.”, the fox sat up and grumped with crossed arms despite, trying to ‘say without saying’ that she’d been disciplined for such self-gratification during her hard time. ‘Rules are rules’, she had been told when the sullied fur around her fingers’ pads tattled on her when checked; pulled out of the covers she had been tucked into for a harsh, lengthy spanking with her personalized paddle.

But, saying that thought aloud made Kayla pause. Penitatas were forbidden to ‘get off’ in any way, being expected to maintain their place as children in lieu of nano-webs forcefully altering their inclinations. It was an invasive, uncomfortable cardinal rule, and one Emily said had to be followed; painful history in regards to sexuality or not. Yet, here’s Ki`rene, the mother who always marched to the beat of her own drum, doing something contrary… something she seemed to do an awful lot in comparison. Did she pick and choose what rules to follow, or did she not have to dance around them because she had the power to tweak them when she decided it was right?

Kayla took a deep breath that she stiffly exhaled, making a cloud of vapor that trailed behind as Ki`rene walked.

“Doing things differently from the norm reminds me of a group of command-level parents that I heard about. The department calls them Masters. You’re one of them, right?”, her curious suspicions finally forced the probing question from her muzzle, out in the solitude they shared amongst the sprawl of Christmas lights.

As she figured it would, the leisurely trot that she felt through her body came to a stop once Ki`rene craned her neck around to her side to look at her rider. Her saurian eye-ridge was hiked questioningly, and the expression upon her snout was one of bafflement. It didn’t appear that she knew what she was talking about, and the inquiry out of left field had left the drake wondering what the heck she’d been asked. The only difference from what Kayla had expected of Ki`rene’s reaction was the way she quietly stared; her face loose, and scaly maw just barely cracked. It was an expression the fox gradually fell into the longer their mother drake failed to utter a word to match the confusion upon her face… but the more Kayla looked into her sunny, slit yellow eye in the light that reached the street, the more she began to understand what the silence meant.

“Oh my God, you are.”, Kayla’s ears utterly melted, shocked to the point of meekness.

“… I was always so careful. I never said or did anything in front of anyone. How?”, Ki`rene’s dumbstruck confirmation came from a calm, quiet voice; the feeling quite mutual.

“That day Richter and his parents called me. They told me I was ‘adjacent’ to one.”, only made the drake squint harder.

“The Tanners outed me?”, Ki`rene looked away in astonishment, but Kayla nodded her head anyhow.

“I thought it was really weird that they knew everything about me, so they let me know about the Masters and how their ‘Captain-Commander’ brought me up a lot because she liked me.”, she let the rest of the cat out of the bag to explain herself, especially if she was literally sitting atop the highest ranking parent in the world. It brought Ki`rene to drop her whole posture to slap a claw to her snout, filling the night air with a growling groan.

“What?”, the fox questioned out of worry, getting Ki`rene’s eye back with an expressive flick of her claw.

“I just went and unmasked myself for no reason!”, Ki`rene complained as if she was verbally sighing at her own misstep, “They weren’t talking about me! They were hinting to my Mother Sally with the nickname we all call her! I was adopted by the first penny-moms I ever had, much later in my life. Being the Captain of the Masters is her title. I told her all about you after you became friends with Ninne, and she liked you so much she started keeping tabs on all of your records. She’s… basically the ‘grandma’ you’ve never met.”, she fully unveiled what Elizabeth and Harvey had cryptically kept from her, and the unseen guardian who followed her whole transformation, cheering all the way; ‘adjacent to her’ through Ki`rene’s familial bonds, stories, and watchful eye.

It wasn’t the correct interpretation of the Tanners’ clue, but it lead to the truth none the less. This whole time, Kayla had been right beside a Master, a justice department official with the same incredible authority as she witnessed from Richter’s mother and father, and it had been their beloved mother drake all along. Shock kept Kayla’s ears frozen against her head just trying to make sense of the shattered secret, looking at Ki`rene with every jittery question imaginable flinging about her shaken mind. She leaned forward again, gripping her paws beneath the collar of the Drakonian’s tailored shirt.

“Why were you even doing that accounting work then? You were working two jobs and taking care of us!”, was hardly even a question, instead becoming a scalded, guilty realization when Ki`rene was a single mother of two with a full, heavy plate as it was.

“I have reparation payments, like yours. My paroling judge sentenced me to pay for the several story building I accidentally burned down, and back then, we were billed for the cost of our time as Penitatas too. That was fifty years worth of parents and… ‘child care’. Picking my old accounting job back up was something I had to do if I wanted to save up for a nice drake-sized house here in Calleet and still be able to pay my balance down. Thanks to you, I’ll finally be paying off my legal debt – and that’s after having been a department official for the better part of seventy years!”, Ki`rene actually sounded relieved to be able to come out and say, having wanted to tell Kayla why she was so thankful for her gift, and excitedly ran her clear out of the house to reciprocate the love. The vacation she wanted her to have was going to be permanent, leaving her with just her treasured duties and her children; finally free.

“I would have wanted to pay it off months ago… ”, Kayla practically whined in sympathy.

“All the more reason I kept it to myself.”, came with a pat to her footpaw dangling beneath her dress; Ki`rene having reached back to kindly reassure before resuming her leisure trot down the snowy street. It was as comforting as it was surreal to hear the drake sound so okay with her knowing that she was a Master, going right back to their quiet bonding time without making the big deal out of it that her eight year old mind did.

“How’d you get to be someone so high up? Ninne’s your first penny ever, isn’t she?”, she had to ask. Ki`rene already knew she would; it was understandable and expected, despite where the answer laid.

“That goes back to something really difficult for me to talk about. Something I don’t think I’ll keep being able to hide, with as much as you girls have come to find out. It was going to come up when Ninne asked me how I became so close with my old penny-mothers too, if I didn’t send her off to bed the night I showed her all of my old belongings.”, she harked back to Halloween, soaking in all of the twinkling lights in order to put her words together for the first in a while.

“Remember when I helped you girls with that group project on the justice system’s reform, and nudged you toward doing it on the ex-penny protesters that worked alongside Richard McDaft? After I gave you all of those ‘up close and personal’ holographs to wow your class and keep your tail-ends spank-free, you pointed out a drake woman in a scarf that you thought looked like me, if I was older. I told you her name was ‘Miss Ulrich’, and that she led the adult side of the reform movement with Richard.”, had been enough to lift Kayla’s curious ears intently, until she admitted, “Ulrich is another last name I go by. Those were my holographs.”

“You were-… ?”, snapped the fox’s ears back down, blown away by something that may well have been even more amazing than being a Master, “That really was you? You knew Richard?”

“I met him in a backstage waiting room, when we both ended up being interviewed on the same nightly holo-show. We got to know one another like that, the more we worked together. He was a nice boy… very smart, lively, and filled with so much confidence, even if it was obviously what got him into the trouble he was in. I became his Grandma Scales, and he became my Freckles. I kept up my public speaking and organizing all the way up to his big day, when he got to dress down the Corrections Council in front of the world government with everyone watching. But, before that turning point began, I got into an altercation with his parents and had to pull him out of it when he stood up for me. After I got him away from them and through the doors of the parliament chamber so he couldn’t be messed with, I stormed right out of the building and went to the city’s municipal P.J.D office. It wasn’t the first one I’d gone to in my travels, but after what had happened, I meant for it to be my last.”, Ki`rene’s storytelling firmed up toward the end, peering back over her shoulder in her saurian stride.

“When I went in, I did what I always did, and I plead my case for taking custody of Richie. I wanted to be his mother, and he wanted the same. Fighting to have a Penitatas removed from his parents was unheard of at the time, but the Baxters were vindictive, and neither of us trusted them to ever act in good faith again. They gave us so many reasons, but even with the new penny-parenting license I’d gotten, proving I could do the job, the department always sided with them in support. No matter what city’s office I ended up in, the officials there would jump down my throat. We had no grounds, because the things that we’d cite were allowed… all ‘part of the game’, that made the penny-culture of our time. His not feeling safe under their roof wasn’t good enough in order to do something so drastic. There was surely no other reason that I’d want to adopt Richie, except to publicly damage his parent’s reputations. Just another one of my lies, playing politics against the system. So, at the end of my rope, I held firm and refused to leave without my Freckles’ guardianship being re-assigned.”, she’d been so determined behind the scenes, fighting for him with the same tenacity and fearlessness that he gave his calls for reform. The mere concept of Richard McDaft becoming Ki`rene’s first Penitatas practically had Kayla’s jaw hanging, but for how history ended up going, the mother drake tipped her snout toward the snow below.

“… I got arrested for trespassing.”, she still grumbled after all these years, feeling Kayla’s tail reactively vice itself against her side.

“Arrested?! Again?!”, Kayla’s youngest side couldn’t help but outright exclaim, to Ki`rene’s sigh.

“Again. Third time’s the charm.”, her maw crooked in sarcasm, peering up into the falling snowflakes.

“Being a pest isn’t enough to get thrown in court, but I did end up spending the night in jail before they fined me and sent me on my way. There wasn’t any reason for me to stay in town, so I took an auto-taxi home, wanting to find out how Richie did… and, as you know, he wasn’t with us anymore by then. My old Mother Sally had come back into my life to support me when my name first got out there, so once she learned that Richie had been killed, she went into a panic trying to call me out of worry. When I never answered, she grabbed my Mother Rah’ , figured out where my apartment was, and got there as fast as she could, only for no one to come to the door when I was obviously home. They broke in without hesitating… smashed my door and nearly tore it out of the wall to make sure I was alive. It was right for them to have been afraid.”, Ki`rene’s voice grew weightily sobering, one claw gripping at the other as the painful, difficult part of the story she’d been hiding came to light.

“Scarves were my identity, ever since being a little penny… and they came in to find every one of mine shredded to threads by my claws, after they’d been a symbol of the reform movement. Pieces were scattered all over, and there was me, slumped over at my computer. See, I… was always so careful with my claws. It was like I never had them. I never wanted to be big and scary, but … I lost track of them, and any sense of control.”, the gentle giant drew her eyes down to them, slowing and softening her words, “I shattered my key-panel just trying to type in one of my spreadsheets, and… while I cried and gripped at my snout, I had been doing the same harm to myself. I’d clawed my face apart. There was blood everywhere. I was… very, very sick. My mothers got me help, and to a hospital.”

“I’m so sorry!”, Kayla squeaked in compassion for Ki`rene’s loss, and everything she’d suffered while trying to live a life of love. That was what she’d been hiding – not the fact she’d once been a figure in the public eye.

“History ended up demonizing the Baxters into sexually abusive drunks for the night they made Richie suffer, but the truth of the matter is crueler than that. Those two were disgusting, but they weren’t stupid. No, they didn’t mistakenly murder him because he was a toy, or film the whole thing because they wanted to get off – those particular animals wanted to make the whole thing so horrible and ‘memorable’, all they’d have to do is force him to watch the holo-vid of it to remind him to sit down and shut up. They were putting an end to the reform with all the pain and fear they could cram into one night, and enjoying it in the process. The thing with extreme forms of cruelty though, is that they aren’t safe… especially in the hands of those who don’t know how to do them. Mister District Attorney had learned of a little something that a few olden days nuns used to do on Earth, where they’d turn a paddle on its side to give a child a few chops across the small of their back. As hard as he did it, and as much, he made a tear in one of Richie’s renal arteries. He internally bled to death.”, so committed was Ki`rene to telling her story, pushing through despite its sadness.

“I’ve been told it would have been very painful, and he eventually would have become aware that something was deathly wrong. It made me imagine his mind crying out for someone to save him, and that someone being his Grandma Scales. He faded away, and I never came. You have no idea how much I blamed myself for his death. I didn’t know if the Baxters would have still done what they did if I didn’t piss them off so much that day, or if I could have done something more than get myself thrown in jail when I went to that office. If I did things different… if I was just better, maybe he would have left his hearing with me instead, and I’d still have a son.”, made it clear that she was still burdened by lasting, ruinous emotions.

“It’s not your fault.”, Ki`rene came to hear closer to the back of her head, with Kayla laying down to hug between her saurian shoulders.

“In no universe would it ever be.”, the sweet little fox did some reassuring of her own, soft and airy, like the mother Ki`rene knew she’d be. She couldn’t resist cracking a smile.

“I know. I’m doing alright now, but I’ve had a long road to get here. That first day at the hospital, I wouldn’t let the doctors treat the gashes I gave myself, and pawed at my snout even after being sedated. Nothing they regenerated healed right, and became scars within minutes that I refused to let anyone touch, as ill as I was. It didn’t take but a week for my therapists to decide that I needed to be rejuvenated as a Psychalos for comfort and counseling. Sally and Rah`veia never left me, and took me home to mother me back to health with my first loving childhood… and I’ve been a full-fledged Ulrich ever since. I really only hold on to Dal`krest out of a hope that my birth family might still find me again.”, she warmly and proudly spoke of her forever-moms, now that she could; their trio of a family bonded by timeless affection, after being born from a broken little girl’s tears.

Ki`rene took a comforting breath after having said all that, puffing a cloud of vapor into the chilly air before watching a pair of Kindern giggle their way back to their parents’ car to head home for the night. She anticipated her rider pepping up after her happier note, or at least taking the quiet moment to gush over the mountain of wild things she’d come to learn with the inhibitions of an eight year old, but the peace maintained.

“Dinosaur got your tongue after all that, dear?”, the drake smirked over her shoulder to lighten the mood, but found a pair of eyes squinting at her.

“… You wouldn’t let Jacob fix the scar that Dianne gave you either.”, Kayla pointed out with a rather noticeable hint of accusatory firmness, drawing a distinct parallel between the scar she had now, and those in her story. Ki`rene claimed on a grassy hill near a lake that she held onto it like a memory, and that such things didn’t have to be erased. Making a face, Ki`rene looked away and shrunk a tad; her footfalls crunching the snow below.

“When you meet my Mother Sally, maybe don’t mention that I have that. There’s no such thing as ‘too old to be spanked’ in our family, and I’m sure girls who don’t listen to their therapists catch some… well earned blisters.”, she guiltily admitted to regressing into an old behavior when no one who knew about it was around to stop her. It was the ingrained apologetic tone of one who had once been a Penitatas, but still, the mother drake gruffly sighed, putting a claw to where the scar was beneath her clothing.

“Oh, what am I saying, I like you because you’d do the right thing for me, even if it hurt. I have issues with wanting to keep remnants of trauma. I even held on to a scrap of fake scaly hide from a toy as a penny, just because I was so upset I broke it… like I didn’t actually lose my Gnawing Gracie, if I still had a piece of her. I promise I’ll cope the way know I’m supposed to, and ask Ninne to heal that scar for me tonight. It can be a bonus Christmas present, and let her use her new tricorder.”, Ki`rene accepted, saying it half for Kayla, and half to pep-talk herself into letting go of the physical reminder of something that had hurt her. That earned her the rub of a paw; the amazing fox summoning enough maturity at her age to still think of her first, before all the shock and awe.

“The reform made everything I got to have. It let my mom work toward a parenting license to have a kid with. Everyone owes you for everything. Why didn’t I ever learn about you?”, Kayla couldn’t figure in wake of her tale. Considering she was the architect and champion of a path to a full parenting license for penny-parents, her biggest personal contribution to the reform, the glowing words bashfully humbled Ki`rene.

“I was one cog in a machine of many, but… I had arranged to be forgotten. Once I was little again and felt able, I reached out to the ex-Penitatas as I always had, and let them know why I’d disappeared. I didn’t want the stigma of my mental illness to harm the movement, so I had asked them to sweep me under the rug and follow Richie’s final words to the reform he called for. That was exactly what my Mother Sally chose to do, too.”, ended with a happy look across her snout – the sort you could hear.

“After everything I had done, she was determined to climb into the department itself and make it happen. She took care of me, and fought on when I couldn’t anymore. Barely a year later, my Mother Sally founded the Masters to oversee the environment of care a Penitatas lives in, and act as an administrative body for a properly reformed system. She brought me in as soon as I came of age, for my insight to the reform and... mastery of being a penny.”, Ki`rene answered the how and why she became a Master, following on the coattails of her own involvement in the reform, and everything her hard, rough life had taught her about the world of corporal punishment and parenting.

“Now I advocate for Penitatas, make sure they’re safe, and punish bad parents. I’m the person that Richie and I needed, and didn’t have back then. If a penny tells someone at school that something’s wrong, or we catch wind of it ourselves, I’ll suddenly appear at their home’s doorstep to see that everything is alright. We keep our identities masked, not for the Penitatas, but so that we can oversee parents freely. If they knew who that friendly drake was at their door, they’d realize I’m the scariest person in the world, and were about to get the rod. I’ve suspended and revoked more penny-parenting licenses than every other Master combined.”, came down with the vocal firmness of someone with high authority, forcing Kayla’s widened eyes to blink.

She’d slip away when school was in session, or make excuses for Ninne to be babysat in the summer – as if an ace woman with no apparent local friends actually had all these supposed people to see. It was where her life’s grandest adventure had taken her, carrying on in Freckles’ shadow. Sure, she made better homes for pennies and helped the ones with different needs find their own ways to thrive, same as the Tanners, but protecting them beneath her wing was what she lived for; never again letting one feel scared, or like a toy to be abused in someone’s playground.

“… I almost unmasked myself and suspended Emily’s license when I found out about the beating she gave you underground in San Francisco. There’s no excuse for what she did, especially for using a pressure point we teach for self-defense only. I wanted to take you right home with me and sort her out! It’s just, with her being my friend, and admitting to the whole thing in order to talk about her mistake, I decided to let her have a chance to prove it would never happen again.”, she still managed to sound ruffled about it all these months later, again flattening Kayla’s features at what nearly happened to her mother.

“Did you… you know, ever use your powers on me?”, Kayla had to wonder after hearing that.

“There were a few times. Last big one I can think of is when I adjusted your unearned spanking schedule to try and help when you were sad, after the whole ‘Velius’ thing. Removed any mandated corner time from any of them too. You were already isolating yourself too much. Your parents would have figured the department was being considerate; just not who decided it.”, rather explained the light month that she had before her parole, “I was also looking at letting you and Jacob be together if you couldn’t find a healthy resolution on your own, and I did have myself a laugh for you when I saw that the little hacker who hurt you was being sent to the farm.”

Ki`rene craned her snout toward her shoulder with an tickled grin to get her reaction, and was taken wholly aback to find Kayla uncomfortably toying with the fabric of her dress. She thought the fox would have been thrilled to the moon to know that she had a guardian angel protecting her all this time, and that her relationship would have been sorted out even if she wasn’t paroled, but her voice came to sound genuinely hurt.

“But… why didn’t you help me when I really needed it? Like last Christmas when I was really, really unfairly punished for what I did when I was kidnapped. I had the worst two days of my whole sentence, and then they took everything I had away from me when I wasn’t allowed to touch computers anymore.”, the subject’s absence forced her to ask, having always wished that someone would have saved her from having her heart broken. The notion that Ki`rene had abandoned her in that moment made the mother drake coo with sympathy, understanding that feeling from having felt it so many times when she was Kayla’s age, wearing those old letters.

“Your ‘make-up’ Christmas punishment came down from the Corrections Council sweetheart. I didn’t have the authority to undo anything they imposed on your mother, or something as core as a penny’s ‘special day’.”, she soothingly assured, to the disappointed crook of Kayla’s mouth. It was only to be expected that the Council’s governance was law. The Masters may have existed as a full-authority parenting oversight committee, able to adjust and discipline as they saw fit, but the Council still laid the system’s foundations, and directed how that system would operate as an institution.

“But, that wasn’t where your technology restriction came from. They didn’t give it to you.”, Ki`rene corrected of her assumption, turning her eyes back to the snow-dusted view of Christmas lights, “That was me.”

“What?! You?!”, the abruptness had Kayla shout, practically squirming in an urgent, eight year old fluster, “Why would you ever do that? I shouldn’t have been punished for anything I was made to do as a hostage! That was one of the meanest things anyone had ever done to me!”, she’d come to lean far forward in her wounded dismay, letting off a stream of chilly vapors from her muzzle. It initially irked her how little Ki`rene seemed to react to her scalded rant in the sudden heat of the moment, but once she’d stopped to breathe, she found a yellow eye peering back again.

“It wasn’t meant to be a punishment, dear. It never was.”, Ki`rene softly assured in comfort, reaching back to try and rub Kayla’s vulpine snout with the back of a scaly knuckle. She’d taken the outburst like she expected it, and had forgiven it before it’d even began.

“While you were missing, Ninne showed Emily that private folder of yours, and we skimmed through it together once she was ready. It had some things you’d written, probably when you were upset and trying to work through it. You brought up hacking a lot… being sorry for it – haunted by it. One of the papers said something about ‘not being able to get away from it’, and you said things like that out loud later, trying to explain the rush it gave you. I know you got very mad that it was ever shown to us, but that whole thing was a cry for help. You might not have realized it, but all put together, you were describing addiction.”, painted Kayla’s once agonizing struggle with her wayward ‘old ways’ in a whole new light, striking her hard enough in the gut that her roiling emotions collapsed upon themselves, “So, I made the tough-mom call, and I took it all away. You hadn’t been found yet when I went in and modified your rule-set, and it helped me keep my hopes up that you’d come back to us.”

Floored to the point that her muzzle initially only squeaked a single lost, lonely syllable, Kayla froze, gripping Ki`rene’s shirt in the spin of her mind’s gears. ‘The rush’ was something she brought up a lot when she was younger, in the wake of hacking into Newstat Elementary’s network, and what scared her so badly when she was forced to use her illicit talents to rescue the man she cherished from injustice. She wanted to be a behaved Penitatas and good person, living a new life with her prior in the trash where it belonged, but her paws just kept…

“It was the only real escape I had. The one thing I knew and loved. It didn’t have to go away indefinitely.”, Kayla weakly lamented, ending on what could have been a sullen pout.

“Being ‘indefinite’ only means there isn’t a set time. I was only taking it away for a while. By the time Starfleet reached out to the department to ask about removing your restriction, I had already revoked it. Seemed like a good time to do it after I looked out my front window to see all of their vehicles decorating your lawn.”, Ki`rene stayed positive and motherly for her, completely changing what all Kayla thought had happened, and just how much her neighboring drake had been in her life. Smiling as her sunniness did best, she took the paw that had been resting near her collar.

“I’m sorry it hurt so bad… but I’m not sorry I did it. I’d always do it for you. Instead of hiding with your cathartic addiction, you had to get out of your house to try and find some comfort. You met Jacob, when you very well might have begged Emily to let you stay home. The pain you were going through helped you connect with him, and the void where your coding play used to be slowly filled with other things in life.”, shocked Kayla’s perception of everything that’d happened to its core.

She wasn’t punished. She had been parented.

“You’re a better and wiser girl, for having put technology down for a while.”, the master-class mom could happily say; congratulatory and proud.

It frightened Kayla’s imaginative young mind to contemplate what her year could have been like if Ki`rene was right. Could she have really not even met Jacob? Spent all of her time with him, the way she did? How bad it all hurt, and the way she cried when she was told she couldn’t touch a computer… she reacted like an addict, didn’t she? She even just now called it an ‘escape’ of hers back then, losing herself in compilers full of code. When it was all gone and her paws had nothing to reach for, she endured the loss cold-turkey, and slowly coped until the day she touched her old baby once again. She did so as a different person – one who didn’t struggle as she once did, having the clear mind to fight Richter and conceive Ackart Enterprises.

“… It’s like if I had told your mom about your scar, isn’t it? You did the right thing for me, even if it was going to hurt?”, weakly fell from Kayla’s maw, realizing so much at once.

“That’s what we share alike, Kayla. Love, without compromise. It’s a lot easier to keep someone happy all the time, than it is to be the person they need.”, was the principle at the heart of a kind penny-parent. Those sweetly spoken words rumbled against Kayla’s body, laying down to reach her arms across Ki`rene’s big dinosaur-like frame and hug her as best she could; blown away and pacified.

“You really are my second mom.”, she squeezed in appreciation for everything she had, “Thank you for helping me go on all of those walks with Jacob in Misses Rich’s garden.”

“You’re welcome.”, Ki`rene never thought she’d get to say to a penny she’d placed on restriction. It was a lovely reminder of the acceptant Penitatas the fox used to be – and still was, inside. “Now, you do understand you can’t unmask me to anyone? That only happens if I need to act. I don’t at all expect you to keep this from Jacob, but let me tell Ninne. No one needs to worry about tip-toeing around secrets in my home. It’ll be the safe-haven where we can be honest and open about my being a Master, okay?”

“I’ll keep it to us… and I’ll definitely not tell my mom you almost threw the book at her.”, Kayla promised the long-lived historical figure, already back to their stroll with a little less weight upon her.

“Please do.”, Ki`rene snickered, starting to wish she brought a jacket.





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Powdery snow fell in the twilight of dawn, still without any stray twinkles of festive lights to cut through the snow-weighted branches of the canopy tree outside Zachary’s wide bedroom window. A new day had begun, and with the same lack of fanfare that it rode in on, Christmas had come to pass for another year. The naughty children who earned their stockings full of coal would awaken ‘naughty children’ once more, without any forgiveness nor reprieve for the penance they paid; still Penitatas, all the way until the day they were paroled. Like most would come to experience, his morning stirring had aggravated the harshly stinging, aching welts across his backside, and roused early to find his paw already rubbing at a fur-less vulpine cheek. Jacob’s pain reliever had since worn off in his sleep, leaving Patrick’s final ‘goodnight kiss’ of a hickory switch as deeply tender as could be.

Zachary pushed himself off his pillow with a muzzle-wrinkling wince, braving sitting up in bed to take a worn, beaten-down glance at his datapad. His attentions far removed from the tranquil snowflakes beyond his window this time around, he shifted his weight onto his thighs as best he could and began pulling up his messenger app before he was even fully awake in his haste to reach Richter. As requested, and he himself so eager, a few swipes of a finger had the pad initiating a video call to check up on his friend after all of their suffering. Mutually needing the company of their sole Penitatas companion from afar, the pad wasn’t on its ‘calling’ screen but a second before it was answered just as swiftly.

“Sea Fox!”, Richter studiously greeted upon the display with the lift of his free paw, sounding relieved to finally hear from him; a bit more enthusiastic than Zachary recalled of his vocal mannerisms.

Seated cross-legged upon his bed with Othello snuggled beside him, his bedroom’s rustic wood walls were lit up by the afternoon sunlight the same as his gray fur by the window just off to his side. It surprised the Aspatrian to see that his domicile looked that much more like a farmhouse than other pennies’ sterile rooms, simple yet warm, but what caught him the most off guard was the unexpected amount of fur visible upon Richter’s thin draconic frame.

“Hey Richty!”, he fired back, sheepishly tickled in his fatigue, “I know I do this myself sometimes, but… I think you forgot that you’re not wearing anything!”, came with the point of a vulpine claw to his chat buddy’s bare pelvis. The Roferian stumbled a tad with stage fright, but never did adjust how he held his pad; quite clearly lacking external genitalia, despite his cross-legged position hiding his sheath slit.

“I stayed disrobed in anticipation of your call, in order to join you in your preferred level of dress. The social stigmas that would have made this embarrassing aren’t actually present, considering your traditions. It seemed appropriate to extend the solidarity when it was just the two of us.”, turned out to be a conscientious act of friendship on Richter’s part, and so unexpected from a non-Aspatrian that it helped Zachary smile, even as crappy as he felt.

“Also, um-… Va’sk, Zachary. Ra’k te tik’?”, Richter wrestled with his tongue to ask, shyly and awkwardly, nearly missing the perk of all the fox’s features in his inability to maintain eye-contact.

“You’re learning Aspatrian? For me?”, bashfully stunned Zachary.

“It felt proper for me to study your language. We can both learn new words.”, his timid shyness maintained, though it waned a tad once he squinted in surly, studious banter, “The cartoon owl tutoring me on my datapad is an impudent fuck, but has made the process enjoyable none the less. I’ve been allowed time to practice in the evenings.”

Being willing to toss off his clothes to join in on what Zachary saw as comfortable, on top of the incredibly respectful gesture of trying to learn Aspatrian, made the fox realize very quickly to what regard Richter held him. Typical of the boy who spoke through his actions, he clumsily, and perhaps even nervously, extended an olive branch as far as he could; desperate to be a good friend, and not lose the only one he had in this world. It was a little heartbreaking to think of it that way, but there was no looking past how much being given this chance meant to him. If anything, Zachary thought it was sweet, in the spiny Roferian’s own way – and surprisingly submissive, come to think of it, for an ex-super-villain.

“Val’tu.”, he enunciated, hoping that Richter had at least learned ‘thank you’, before answering his question in understandable panglish, “And… I’m doing okay, I guess. It’s over now. I just have to wait for my Pa’pa Tom to wake up, and I’ll get my nano-lotion.”, felt like a massive fib, glossing over his wounded feelings, but he didn’t want to drag Richter down.

“At least with today being a holiday, and the doctor’s birthday, you’ll be able to recuperate at your leisure. I’ve been doing the same since I awoke and looked out my window to see Harvey already finishing my chores.”, Richter didn’t expect, finding even his personal alarm disabled in an effort to let him sleep in; back in his own bed after getting practically bathed in nano-lotion during the night.

“What do you mean about today being a holiday?”, confused Zachary.

“It’s Boxing Day.”, only further cocked the fox’s head.

“… I’m pretty sure it isn’t? I’ve never heard of it.”, sounded so genuine, it brought a moment of silent, mutual uncertainty. Though, in typical surly fashion, Richter’s muzzle furled, tensing the muscles around his eyes; snout going right up against his pad.

“Are you fucking with me?”, he glared with a growl, getting the brisk, panicked wave of an ebony paw.

“N-no! I promise!”, Zachary vehemently assured, not being the sort, even in jest. Those slit reptilian eyes moved back from the display with a hum of consideration, accepting his friend’s answer without distrust.

“Perhaps this planet has regional holidays. Britains must celebrate boxing up all of their bullshit baubles and conifers as expediently as possible. A difference in rubbish management ordinances, I assume.”, Richter could only deduce to be the cause. While his compatriot nodded his head in agreement to that assessment despite having no idea what an ordinance was, a fully-built terrestrial Lego vehicle with wheels came into view within the Roferian’s paw, “Did you get anything nice as a gift?”

“Oh! Yeah! Check this out!”, perked Zachary up, reaching over to turn his lamp on. He winced in his haste, but without missing a beat, a small, ragtag and rugged space vessel came up to his screen, clutched in his short vulpine digits.

“This was my ship! My dads had it made as a toy to go with new Starfleet ones, so I’d have pirates to fight! Even the weapons I put on it are right!”, he finally got to show what the Bah`vira and his shipwright handiwork looked like, hiking up one of Richter’s brows at the size and number of cannons the gunship had; all made lethally functional by the talented fox. It was the reason the next thing he fetched from his nightstand was so unironically befitting, bringing into view the starry, painted gloss of his brand new paddle bearing his name, “And I got my personal paddle! That part sucks, but look at the art! Chief Engineer me!”

His joy to share the implement with his penny-pal faltered once he saw the look on Richter’s face wilt. Being a fellow letter-wearer, he figured that Richter would have understood its inevitability and purpose best of all, and would take the Starfleet nod for the gesture it was, but his focus remained glued upon the painted wood; pained, and without reply. Clutching the paddle uneasily to the white of his chest, Zachary folded his ears back apologetically.

“Did I do something wrong?”, he had to ask. Richter’s maw curled a tad, and once he’d averted his eyes from the display of his pad, he shook his head softly.

“No. Seeing you with that insignia makes me feel a special kind of guilty, is all.”, he admitted, imagining his best and only friend being a Starfleet officer like those he’d slain. So many aspirations died that day, and so would have the fox, if he were that engineer he wished to be.

In the same apt vein that Zachary’s show and tell had gone, Richter’s culpable conscience gave him fair mind to make a much longer reach off screen, breaking his seated position and proper grasp of his datapad enough to bare the zenith of the boyish slit between his legs. It served as unintentional proof of his willingness to share that camaraderie with his friend before he straightened himself back out, raising a highly unusual paddle in his opposite paw. It was a tan-ish brown, and the light from the window shined right through it – including the name of ‘Richter’, scrawled across its semi-see-thru face like the title upon the cover of a leather-bound book. Beneath it was a smaller subtitle, written with his own words in mind: ‘The Second Chance’.

“Despite the unique translucent aesthetic, I wish mine wasn’t made out of acrylic. Fucker stings. I’d rather get splinters in my ass.”, the Roferian gruffly griped, even if his voice lacked any actual fire to it; reading its face thoughtfully as he had been, while Zachary partly lowered his ears. It had slipped his mind that Richter would be getting his first very-own paddle too. They’d both been ignoring the bad part of Christmas, but the creep of punitive affairs and wrongdoings had brought it unavoidably back to the forefront, whether they liked it nor not.

“… If I may ask, how many lumps of carbon did your stocking contain, in comparison to my own?”, Richter more uneasily inquired after all of his concern.

“Twenty one. I got the birch, too.”, a lower, quieter voice replied.

“That vile fucking thing? You?”, sharply wrinkled the Roferian’s muzzle in ire, lowering Zachary’s head and ears at the same time with its familiar umbrage.

“You’d think everyone reacting that way would make me feel better, but knowing it really was unfair just… ”, he airily trailed off, finding there to be a unique pain in the fact that no one agreed with his birching. A creeping stiffness came to the ends of his maw in his stare toward his lap, with words coming to him that he couldn’t keep inside.

“Sometimes I’m treated like a silver letter, and other times I’m like… somewhere in between everyone else and you. I fucking hate it when they’re so hard on me. All I wanted when I woke up was to have some kind of Christmas with my dads, but instead I got my fur shaved off and hurt until I wanted to crawl into a hole. That’s my fur!”, the same sadness and anger that he’d directed toward his fathers came back out, losing the resolve to keep his eyes from tearing once he began to upset himself with his own rile, “And I’m sick of being different! Jacob’s sister got to play with a medical tricorder she got – why couldn’t I play with my tool set and show my own stuff to them all? I don’t know if it’s because I know how to make weapons, or the fucking chronostatic dirty bomb they found in the Bah`vira’s hold, but-… ”, he hiccuped into a wounded sob, “I w-wanna serve my time an’ play with my f-friends like everybody else!”, his quivering, teary voice mewled.

Such devolved into a stumbling mess of heartfelt sobs and hiccups through clenched teeth. After all of the suffering they’d endured, the eruption of feelings couldn’t be helped. Zachary tipped his teary eyes back to the display of his datapad to find Richter slumped with a paw over the bridge of his snout; those sounds of lament being the Roferian’s, and not his own. Othello crowded himself into the sloppily held scene, becoming hugged within both of the five year old’s arms.

“T-t-thank fuck I-… d-don’t ha-have ta’ hold it in any m-more!”, he sputtered and sobbed so tearfully he could hardly be understood, before completely losing it into a hard, obliterated bawl; letting it out like Zachary’s tears had given him permission.

Zachary’s throat squeaked and burned, wanting so badly to speak up and say, ‘Richty, don’t cry!’, but all that happened when he opened his muzzle was sob. Even though they were separated by screens and an ocean, the boys did what all Penitatas did together. They cried. That hysterical howl of Richter’s was everything he’d bottled up from one horrific punishment alone to the next, just as Elizabeth called him out for hiding. No matter how stoic or brave he seemed, the agonizing misery of what he’d faced had left him completely destroyed on the inside. He cried harder than Zachary thought even he ever did, and that told the crybaby fox all that he needed to know.

“Richty, w-what happened?”, Zachary tried to be the strong one for his friend; the shoe on the other foot.

“The whole day was torture! I was in the corner for all of it, and-… e-e-every part of me was whipped! I couldn’t use my paws or walk! I know what dish soap tastes like – and I shouldn’t fucking know what dish soap tastes like! I’ve never n-needed to throw up so bad!”, Richter’s shrill, heavy blubbering rapid-fired out of his mouth, remembering the frothing, vicing contractions of his stomach; painful as could be, and all up to him to swallow back down, again and again. He writhed, burying his face.

“T-they beat my back to a fu-… f-fucking pulp with a cane!”, his crying fit barely got out what wounded him the deepest, locking his jaw to the point a toddler’s spittle was glazing the lip of his muzzle. Any semblance of the Roferian’s fiery wrath was all but extinguished, and in the uncontrollable tears of a five year old, he curled up into a ball where he sat.

“I don’t ever want to be hurt like that again! Never! I am not the worst person on this whole planet! P-please, n-n-never d-d-… ”, his powerful cries collapsed into being unintelligible, and all that were left were his infantile, shattered wails – the truth of how much he hurt, and what he actually felt. The idea that Christmas was finite, and nano-lotion would relieve them of its woes, couldn’t have been more wrong. For the likes of Velius, the punishment for his inner adult had been cruel enough to leave a mark he’d not soon forget.

“You’ll make it better! We both will! Next year’ll be different!”, Zachary fought against his tears for him, trying to be comforting when his youngest inclinations only wanted to cry about how horrible Richter’s day was. The positivity that attempted to put it all in the past, never to be repeated, got a tearful growl. For a time, the air was filled with nothing but the younger boy’s sobbing before he could get a handle on his sore, burning throat.

“N-next year?! How the fuck do I do anything now? I haven’t left my fucking room since I woke up to piss! I let Othello out to toilet himself with my window! It’s not Elizabeth and Harvey’s fault; I know it isn’t, and how shitty they feel; but how can you face someone who did that to you? All the fucks in Liverpool – how do I go to the library with all these fucking people and help them if they hate me so much, and want me beaten like that?”, Richter’s ireful rant demanded to know, finding his fire in admitting just how bad off he’d been. The pain was more than understandable, but the fox wasn’t going to let it keep having a free ride around the inside of his friend’s head.

“None of them know what happens to us, and the ones who do are sad it happened!”, Zachary threw a thumb up to the white of his chest, eyes red and watery, to pull his elder side forward when it would have been selfish to not be there for Richter, “It was our first Christmas. If they were going to throw a birching at me to prove some point, then they totally did the same thing to you! That Shits-mas is over and not coming back! Kayla even told me that they never punish us more the day after – we can breathe!”

“Fuck off with that!”, Richter venomously shouted; draconic teeth at full bare, to the spatter of spittle, “Maybe you and fucking everybody else won’t get beaten, but I will! Worse than usual too – they always go hard after I get our restorative cream! I bet it’ll be this-… fucking thing!”, his new acrylic paddle came back into view with a shake before being outright thrown, knowing damn well how his unearned spankings functioned.

Folding his ears back, Zachary winced, “But-… they’d still-… ?”

“Every – fucking – day!”, flew from Richter’s gnashed snout with wrathful, tear-tainted emphasis.

His tumultuous mixture of anger and sadness left him heaving, glaring at his pad with sputtering hiccups seething between his teeth. Othello whined in his puppy-like desperation to quell it, squirreling all over the Roferian’s bare lap, and the longer he sat there without a word being shared, the more noticeable Zachary’s ears remaining plastered to his head became. The tension around Richter’s brows wavered, blinking tears from his eyelids once everything roiling within him began to be quenched by a heavy, remorseful heart. He was a fool for ever thinking he could use anything but textual conversation. Swallowing, watching his ‘chat buddy’ droop like he had nothing he could say to all that nastiness, he lowered his head and tried to steady the quiver of his muzzle’s lip.

“I didn’t mean for that.”, his heightened timbres apologetically hiccuped.

“Mean for what?”, Zachary wiped his eyes, unfolding an ear to listen. It lifted Richter’s head with the most dumbstruck, disarmed look washing over him; floored to the point it hurt, if the fox literally thought nothing of getting yelled at.

“… I don’t fucking deserve you.”, Richter muttered into his paw.

“Yeah you do.”, a perkier sounding sniffle followed, “As much of me as you want!”

The idea that Zachary only became so glum because he felt bad that his buddy was going to be copping a thrashing before bed was sobering enough to help the spiny fireball calm himself down. That fox, trying so hard to smile for him, was a real friend. After using it yesterday, a phrase he usually shied away from for it’s potential shallowness came back to him, knowing would be plenty of time to reinforce it with his actions in return.

“Either way, I’m sorry. I don’t wish to take away from what you were dealing with. The severity of my day doesn’t change how shit yours’ was as well.”, his mannerisms began slipping back into his damaged, weary voice.

Zachary merely sighed, reconsidering his own place in penny-life, “I need to be more like you anyway. Maybe try a bit harder, if I don’t want them to be so harsh.”

“Tch’.”, Richter flicked off his tongue, “If I was more like you, I wouldn’t have to try so hard.”

“Soooo… together we make one healthy, happy person?”, the once-pirate cracked in observant amusement, if their faults and strengths interlinked like two puzzle pieces coming together. That was more than enough to make the likes of Richter bashful.

“Philosophically speaking.”, he replied with a warm, reddened muzzle for the ‘social union’ such a statement naturally implied. It may not have gone over Zachary’s head either, seeing a hopeful look come through his still-misty eyes.

“Um… I know you were sort of making an exception, asking to talk like this instead of over our messenger, but… do you think we might be able to meet in person if we asked really nice? Visit each other?”, he wondered.

“I certainly can’t go over there, considering your local companions.”, Richter threw a brow up above one of his damp cheeks, fearful of all the problems he’d cause just by being anywhere near Calleet, “But I… have no objections to seeing if you could spend time in my company, granted you’re alright with the zoo-smell of a farm, and the chores I’m tasked with. My guardians and therapist do have the means, I’m sure.”

He never would have thought he’d say such a thing so amiably. An excited butterfly came to his throat, and with it, the realization that the young half of his mind was experiencing the joy of getting to ‘have a friend over’, as children tended. Richter had no idea what they could do together, or even how to properly play with others, but-…

“Oh, I’m totally going to sneak you a blowjob!”, Zachary quietly exclaimed in cheer, shooting the Roferian’s eyes wide open. That boldface statement left him looking like he did when he was subtly called out for being a furry, and had Zachary sheepishly-yet-playfully waving his free paw at his apprehensive stare, “I mean, I’d really like to, if you’re okay with it. It’s what a pal’s for! I could draw you something too if it helps!”

“Your signal of willingness for… casual ‘escapades’ is duly noted, Sea Fox.”, he couldn’t help but sound awkward for, as awkward as he truly was. The Aspatrian was rather extroverted, as he probably should have figured, if he had a better grasp of the obvious.

“I think you might be bigger than me, by the way.”, came through his pad while his mind was busily processing the suggestion, catching Zachary’s grin and apparent gawk at the lower edge of his pad.

Richter faintly yelped the moment he figured out his anatomy had put itself on full display, changing his posture and how he held his pad; teeth grit in embarrassment, considering the latter half of his dick basically gave the concept of a blowjob a ‘thumbs up’ when it rose up into view. He hadn’t been paying any attention to it, and in a cub’s typical fashion, failed to notice he’d even popped his tapered draconic length from the lips of his sheath slit.

“I like that ‘Roferian’ look. It’s pretty.”, he was kindly complimented before his shamefaced reaction could get any further off the ground, with Zachary merely smiling. Coming from a race that doesn’t clothe their young, it was only expected that friends would see everything – even if his tone made it clear that he liked what he saw. Richter’s asocial clumsiness and unspoiled virginity made coming up with a ‘cool’ reply daunting enough to make him sweat, though in the midst of his scrounge for a reply beyond ‘your genitals are equally pleasing’, the chipper chime of an incoming notification came across their open line.

“It seems Elizabeth has sent me a rather sizable message.”, Richter hummed for how unusual that was, though a snicker from Zachary had him wittily lifting a finger, “That was not a double entendre, mind you.” Using it as an out, he began reading the wall of text aloud for his cohort.

“I wanted to check in since you still haven’t felt up to saying hello yet. I’m sure you need space after yesterday, but I miss you being around, and do want to feed you.”, he then sighed, suspecting this to be in response to hearing him lose his shit.

“Christmas sends a lot of hard messages, but not all of the ones you deserved. Our hands couldn’t tell you how much we appreciate you for all your help around the farm. How great we think you’re doing, and how proud we are to have a penny who volunteers his time and likes to learn. You were so upset when your streak of perfect behavior ended, but when it was an honest mistake like you figured it would be, it made me happy. I know we were ornery that the rabbits got out, but we could tell you cared. You broke a sweat even in this cold, running around with your extra sense to find every one as quick as you could. Your father smacked you a nasty one, but did you notice there was barely any time in the corner after, and nothing else bad before bed? That’s what a good lad gets.”, had Richter speaking in ups and downs, taken aback by his guardians’ praise, and shy over the inevitable spanking that came with the mistake of forgetting to latch the rabbit hutch’s door. He did find it surprising that they let him go on about his day once he’d stopped crying.

“All I want is to help you feel better, and give you what Christmas couldn’t. I’d like it if you could join me in our bedroom to have a nice lunch and… watch our holo with me in bed? I found th-… the first season of ‘Ironscale’?!”, Richter stumbled through in shock of what he was reading, to the exclamation of a child at the end. He’d never been allowed in their bedroom before! She’d really let him?!

“But, if you’re not ready and would rather have some more time to yourself, I’ve gone ahead and… fully enabled everything on your pad? You could play your game with Zachary, browse the net, or listen to some music. I-… ”, his younger sort of astonishment slowed his reading down, until Richter’s maw curled; a paw covering it, with a nuzzle from Othello against his lithe belly. Loudly he sniffed, shuddering like he’d swallowed down a whole sputter of hiccups.

“I trust you.”, his pitch hit new heights; the words he read wobbling from the well of tears upon his eyelids, being validated as a person like that. For an atypical boy that never lied, choosing to stand with his authoritative figures as the ‘loyal’ archetype of Penitatas, being trustworthy was what his heart so dearly hoped for. Those three little words meant everything to him, coming from Elizabeth.

“I like your mom. She’s not as scary as Kayla’s.”, Zachary chimed in warmly, despite it being bittersweet for him. It seemed that he was the one and only person who couldn’t be trusted.

“… If it’s all the same Zachary, I think I’m going to take her up on her offer to watch ‘Ironscale’ together. I believe the five year old part of my brain wishes to have its mum.”, Richter decided, calm and thankful, like when he was permitted to keep Velly, “Would you like to play our game a little later, before you head out to the doctor’s rejuvenation-day festivities?”

“Sure!”, the agreeable fox spurt without a second thought, even with a birthday to attend. Being given such equal importance made the Roferian look happy, staring down with a timid toy of the fur on his thigh.

“You’re very supportive, by the way.”, he shyly thanked for everything Zachary had said and done to comfort him, “I’ll relay our visitation inquiry to Elizabeth, and see if there’s anything I can do to get it arranged.” In the midst of saying that, he saw the fox’s ears flick and pivot, and as he expected of those ebony vulpine parabolic dishes, he turned his head from the screen a moment later.

“Oh Mister Weeeeiii-ler!”, came over the pad clear enough for Richter to need snatch a paw over his snout, muffling a forceful ‘snrk!’. It was painfully difficult to not drop a sarcastic quip about Thomas ‘surely not being gay’, but Zachary’s delight saved him from the foibles of his mouth.

“Nano-lotion time! Have fun with your anime Richty! I’ll see you later!”, he greatly perked up, seemingly better himself after getting to talk, and knowing his stings and aches were about to melt away.

“Enjoy your healed ass.”, Richter tiredly smirked, lifting a paw before the connection chirped closed.

Alone with Othello again and feeling a lot different than he did before Zachary called, he took a long, hard breath, stroking his fingers through Othello’s fur. He was glad that his penny-pal was able to best his dour feelings and look at the fun day ahead of him, recovering as a Penitatas was wholly intended, but on his own end, there was only so much healing Richter could do after getting the worst punishment that Earth had to offer; scratching his draconic claws carefully against the side of his puppy’s neck. He would need time, as bad as it was, but he supposed that was okay. There was a life to be lived alongside all of the hardship, and like a ‘good penny’, he wanted to persevere to see all of the things he was looking forward to.

“… Even if I have to do extra chores.”, he promised Zachary, and himself, to get the fox there.
