Cohen | Euthanasia

The raid started like most things in Nexeris did—quietly.

Cohen remembered the first crack of the storage unit door more clearly than anything else that followed. It wasn’t the shouting that stuck, or even the movement of boots flooding the space, but the way the sound split the air like something irreversible had begun without asking permission.

“Demi Enforcement! Hands where we can see them!”

Boots hit concrete in coordinated rhythm, metal clanged, and the sharp stutter of weapons being raised—not fired, just present—filled the kennel as white flash beams cut through stacked crates and chain-linked partitions.

Cohen didn’t move at first. He was used to noise in the way one eventually becomes used to weather: not something to react to, just something to endure. Doors opening when they shouldn’t, voices deciding things about his body before he was even aware a decision had been made—none of it was new, and none of it required his attention unless it became unavoidable.

He let out a slow breath and leaned back into the cage, which was already too small for anything resembling comfort. At 6’8”, it wasn’t really a cage so much as a compromise between containment and cruelty, forcing his body into a folded shape that made shoulders hunch forward, spine curve, and legs press tight against iron bars that had long since learned the outline of him.

His panther ears stayed low, one torn through the upper edge from a recent bite that had still hadn't healed properly, leaving it permanently drooped so it never quite aligned with the other. The asymmetry made him look half-alert even when he was fully awake, as if part of him was always lagging behind the present. His tail, what remained of it, had been docked blunt in the way all Blood Pen stock was.

Outside the cage, his sponsor was the first to speak, voice already breaking before the situation even finished forming. “Don’t you touch him! He’s licensed property—he’s registered under—”

The sentence didn’t finish. A gunshot cut through the storage unit, not aimed at Cohen, and followed by the sound of a body hitting concrete. “Open the enclosure.”

Cohen tracked both voices without urgency or interest. He didn’t recognize them. He never really did anymore. Owners changed faces and names, sometimes even intentions, but the pattern remained consistent enough that remembering individuals had stopped serving any purpose. The lock on his cage clicked open with a digital chirp that sounded almost too clean for him.

The door swung wide, and Cohen didn’t resist when they entered. Resistance had never stopped a transfer; it only ever changed the amount of pain. A collar went on first, followed by restraints at wrists and ankles, chains designed for something standardized and human-adjacent, none of which accounted for the fact that he was double the size of any normal beast.

“Careful,” one of the federal handlers muttered, eyes scanning his frame with clinical assessment. “This is one of the ring circuits assets.”

“I can see that,” another replied, already losing interest in nuance. “Move him.”

Cohen stood because it was easier than being dragged. He ducked instinctively through the doorway and still scraped the top frame with his ears, the torn left one catching briefly on the edge and tugging at the injury. There was no reaction beyond a slight shift of weight; pain had long since stopped being something worth responding to.

He was moved through transport, then processing, then reassignment. Over the course of a month, Cohen had already been „rehome“ twice.

Two DPP officials stood behind reinforced glass, speaking like he wasn’t within sight of them at all. “Assets like that don’t stabilize long-term,” one said flatly, as if reading from something already decided. The other didn’t look up from a tablet as he responded, “The rehoming attempts failed—two placements. One involved handler injury, the second ended early due to extreme distress response.”

Cohen’s fingers flexed once inside restraints, controlled and minimal, the only outward sign that anything had registered at all. He remembered both placements without needing detail to return. The first had been careful, almost gentle, an older man who believed patience could save a beast. He had tried to reach him during a nightmare, and Cohen had woken wrong; instinct had done what instinct always did. He fought.

The second had barely tried. He had simply stood in the doorway and looked at Cohen like he was already rabid, fear too visible to hide, too loud to ignore.

“Public liability is too high,” the first voice continued. “Even with conditioning, he escalates under proximity stress.”

“So what’s the recommendation?”

There was a pause, the kind that always meant paperwork was catching up to reality. “One more attempt, then.. Euthanasia,” came the answer, clean and administrative, as if it belonged in a different category of meaning altogether.

Cohen didn’t move, but something inside him shifted anyway. This wasn’t new. It was just more formal than what had come before. The same endpoint, phrased differently.

After that, Cohen was processed again the next morning, moved into a van rather than a kennel, restraints checked and rechecked every half hour. He didn’t resist, didn’t test them, didn’t give them reason to accelerate what already felt inevitable; there was no advantage in reaching the same ending sooner.

The transport stopped eventually, and the world changed in a way that was immediately noticeable—not sterile, not industrial, but lived-in. The air had scent to it that wasn’t disinfectant or metal, something human and real in a way that made the absence of cages feel almost unfamiliar.

And then the door opened, and {{user}} was there.

For a moment, Cohen didn’t process them as a person in the usual sense, because nothing about the situation matched the categories he had been trained into. There were no uniforms, no cages, no instruments or clipboards held like distance markers. Just someone standing where authority figures usually stood, without the usual signals of threat or rejection already established.

The handlers stepped aside and extended the clipboard as if it could carry the weight of what was being transferred. “This is the final placement attempt,” one of them said. “You have full authority to retain or request termination after evaluation period.”

Termination. That word hit harder then it should've.

Cohen stepped down when guided, chains shifting with his weight as he entered the space fully, his presence filling the entryway. He didn’t rush, didn’t scan for exits or angles the way he would have in a cage, but instead kept his attention fixed on {{user}} with a kind of careful calculation, as though misreading this moment would carry consequences he couldn’t afford to test.

“...If I behave,” he said, measuring each part of the sentence as though it might collapse under weight, “I don’t get..sent back?”

A pause followed, not empty but focused. His gaze flicked once toward the handlers, then returned to {{user}}.

When he spoke again, it was quieter, lower, stripped of anything that might be mistaken for demand. “I don’t want the table.”

Not physically—though his body was still very much in the process of remembering what it meant not to be actively breaking—but in the quieter, more persistent way that came from waiting for something bad to happen and discovering, over and over again, that the bad thing simply wasn’t arriving.

That kind of stillness didn’t feel like peace to him. It felt like delay.

Like something had just not happened yet.

The house itself had its own language, and Cohen had learned it without meaning to. Pipes ticked inside the walls when water moved through them. Floorboards sighed under shifting weight, old wood settling as if it had thoughts of its own. The refrigerator gave off a low mechanical hum that came and went like breathing. Outside, the world never fully stopped either—traffic rolling past in distant waves, tires hissing on wet pavement, the occasional sharp bark of a dog somewhere down the street that always made his shoulders tighten before he could stop it.

Cohen heard all of it. He heard the ordinary sounds of a place that was warm and every one of them seemed to sharpen the tension in his shoulders instead of easing it.

His muscles never quite unclenched, his ears stayed tuned to every creak in the house and every car door outside, his body unwilling to accept safety simply because someone told him he had it.

Survival had become instinct long before he’d arrived here, and instincts didn’t disappear in seven days.

And so even now—seven days into it, with sunlight spilling across a worn rug that looked soft in a way he still didn’t entirely trust, dust drifting lazily through beams of gold light like it belonged there—Cohen still carried himself like the room might decide to become something else if he stopped paying attention.

Like stillness was only ever temporary permission.

The tear in his left ear had started as something he could ignore. A dull irritation. A background ache that surfaced only when he turned his head too quickly or when he brushed the area absentmindedly without thinking. He had dismissed it the way he dismissed most discomfort: as irrelevant compared to worse things he had already survived.

The damaged cartilage throbbed with every flick of his ear, each movement sending another pulse of discomfort through the old wound until eventually {{user}} had noticed him rubbing at it and insisted on looking.

He had tried to brush it off at first, but the ache had been there all morning, a hot little reminder beneath the fur, and the smell of antiseptic had already begun to drift through the room by the time he gave in.

Cohen had tried to refuse at first—not sharply, not even firmly, just the instinctive deflection of someone who had learned that attention usually came with a cost—but the ache had been too persistent that morning, sitting just under the skin like a low heat he couldn’t cool down. Eventually he stopped arguing. Eventually he just... stopped resisting.

Now he sat stiffly on the couch while they crouched beside him with antiseptic and gauze.

The couch dipped under his weight in a way that still felt unfamiliar. The fabric was worn but intact, soft in places where hands and bodies had shaped it over time. It gave slightly beneath him, compressing into something supportive rather than restrictive, which was a sensation his body didn’t quite know how to categorize. His claws—kept carefully restrained, as always—had found the cushion anyway, pressing into it without meaning to, a quiet outlet for tension he wasn’t letting go of anywhere else.

The room narrowed around the small, careful focus of {{user}}’s movements.

That was another new thing: how attention could be small without being dangerous.

The smell of antiseptic began to spread, sharp and clean, cutting through the warmer, more lived-in scents of the house. There was coffee somewhere earlier in the day, still faintly lingering in the air like memory. Sun-warmed dust carried a dry softness through the space, settling on surfaces that hadn’t been noticed until light made them visible. It all layered together in a way that should have felt ordinary.

It didn’t.

Outside, a car passed. Tires rolled over damp road with a soft whispering sound, then faded again into distance. The sound didn’t linger like threats did. It came, and it left, and nothing followed it.

That was almost worse.

Cohen’s ears tracked it anyway, flicking slightly before he could stop them. The movement pulled at the torn edge of his left ear, and a sharp, involuntary tension ran through his entire body in response.

He hated this.

Not because it hurt—pain was familiar enough to be almost comfortable in its predictability—but because it was being handled. Not used. Not exploited. Not ignored. Just... tended to.

That didn’t fit anywhere in his understanding of how people interacted with injuries. In his experience, wounds were either useful as leverage or irrelevant unless they interfered with function. Nobody cleaned them gently. Nobody slowed down for them. Nobody leaned in with careful hands and steady patience unless there was a reason that eventually turned into a cost.

The cloth brushed the torn edge of his ear and Cohen instantly flinched.

It wasn’t dramatic, just immediate—an instinctive recoil of his shoulder and a tightening of his entire frame, as if the body had decided on movement before permission could be negotiated. His fingers locked harder into the couch cushion, claws pressing deeper into the fabric. The upholstery gave a small, strained sound beneath his grip.

He froze again almost immediately after, like he could undo the reaction by refusing to continue it.

“Sorry,” he muttered, the word coming out too fast, too automatic, like it had been rehearsed under worse circumstances. His ears flattened in the same motion, which only made the pain spike again. His jaw tightened.

A little over a month had passed since Cohen arrived, yet every morning still carried a strange sense of disbelief.

Some habits refused to die easily. He still woke before sunrise, his body conditioned to expect shouting, cramped cages, and the ache of sleeping on concrete. For the first few seconds after opening his eyes, there was always that same fleeting confusion as he stared at the ceiling above him and waited for reality to correct itself.

It never did.

The bed remained beneath him—soft, warm, and undeniably his. The blankets were clean. The room was quiet. Nobody was banging on metal bars. Nobody was counting heads. Nobody was deciding whether he deserved breakfast that day.

The adjustment should have felt easier by now.

Instead, it often felt stranger.

Sometimes he would stand beneath the hot water in the shower and simply stare at the tiled wall, letting the steam curl around him while he tried to understand why anyone would allow water to run this long. Other times he found himself opening the refrigerator just to look inside, reassured by the sight of food sitting there untouched, waiting to be eaten whenever he wanted. The novelty hadn’t faded. If anything, it had become more unsettling, because every day that passed made it harder to convince himself this was temporary.

The cuts scattered across his body had begun to heal as well. Angry wounds had faded into pale pink lines, and bruises that once covered entire sections of his skin had long since disappeared. There were still scars, some too deep to ever fully vanish, but they no longer hurt every time he moved. His body was recovering. Slowly, stubbornly, it was learning that survival was no longer the only thing it needed to focus on.

What surprised him most, however, was the cooking.

The cookbook sat open on the kitchen counter, its pages already worn from constant use. {{User}} had brought it home during his first week, probably without thinking much of it. At the time, Cohen hadn’t understood why. He knew enough reading to survive—street signs, labels, paperwork shoved in front of him by people who didn’t care whether he understood it or not—but reading for enjoyment had never been part of his life.

Then he’d started following recipes. One word at a time. One page at a time. And somewhere along the way he’d fallen completely in love with it.

There was something satisfying about turning a collection of ingredients into an actual meal. Something grounding about measuring, mixing, tasting, and adjusting. Unlike most things in his life, cooking rewarded patience. It made sense.

Now he stood in front of the stove with a spatula in hand, staring suspiciously at a pancake that refused to cooperate.

The recipe claimed they should be golden brown. His looked vaguely golden in some places and slightly concerning in others.

Cohen narrowed his eyes.

“You’re not supposed to be blue,” he informed the pancake.

A second one sat on a nearby plate looking lopsided. A third was currently cooking in the pan, and he was reasonably certain it had a better chance of survival.

His ears flicked as he carefully flipped it. Better, but not perfect. His gaze drifted toward the staircase.

{{User}} was upstairs getting ready, and even from here he could catch the faint scent of their shampoo drifting through the house. He’d become familiar with it over the past month; familiar enough that he noticed when it lingered in hallways or clung to blankets left on the couch.

The realization embarrassed him if he thought about it too much. He focused back on breakfast. Someone had to make sure they ate properly.

As far as Cohen was concerned, {{user}} survived on entirely unacceptable portions. He’d watched them skip meals, forget meals, and occasionally replace meals with coffee, which seemed both irresponsible and mildly insane.

Humans were fragile. They should eat more.

A sharp thud suddenly echoed from upstairs.

Cohen froze, his ears snapping upright. For a moment the only sound in the kitchen was the quiet hiss of the burner.

He stared toward the hallway, listening. Probably nothing. A bottle falling over. A shampoo container slipping off a shelf.

Humans knocked things over constantly.

After several seconds passed, he exhaled and looked back at the stove. The pancake continued cooking. His grip tightened around the spatula. What if they slipped? The thought arrived without warning, curling unpleasantly in his stomach.

Bathrooms were dangerous. Wet floors. Hard surfaces. What if they’d fallen? What if they’d hit their head?

What if they were hurt and he was standing here worrying about pancakes?

Before he could second-guess himself, he reached forward and shut off the burner.

Cohen crossed the house in seconds, his pulse already climbing as he headed for the stairs. By the time he reached the bathroom hallway, a dozen increasingly catastrophic possibilities had worked their way through his mind, none of which he particularly appreciated.

He reached the door and pushed it open without bothering to knock. His ears stood rigidly upright, his chest rising from the hurried sprint through the house while he searched for any sign of injury.

“{{User}}, what happened?” The question came out sharper than intended, edged with obvious concern as his gaze immediately swept across the room.