Chapter Text
He was not ready for the responsibility of a company. A young wolf who was barely finishing his degree as a master of finance was now facing paperwork that revolved around money, money, and more money.
Wolfgang was sure that, sooner or later, he would cause his father’s company to collapse. He did not have the confidence in himself to run it with his eyes closed, the way his father had.
Or did he?
His sister talked about brand advertising, about how the lines went from green to even greener, and how the printers broke down when trying to print the charts.
He was not sure how she did it, but she managed to reach the top the way their father would have wanted. Zootopia could see a screen, and there it was: the logo of the waning quarter moon with the company’s letters engraved on its white surface.
A few days had passed—two, exactly—since people began to act hysterical. Predators had heightened their instincts in many situations, making them dangerous to the smallest ones.
In Zootopia, a kind of exclusion formed toward those with sharp teeth who were technically meant to eat the flesh of others.
On television, they would not stop mentioning cases of animals who suddenly went mad and began attacking everything in their path, being neutralized and locked away in a specific place to hold them long enough to seek proper rehabilitation—supposedly.
The city’s leading family had not spoken out about it. Lynxley, being part of the predator branch, needed to show support against exclusion, to try to dispel fear before people began doing crazy things to “stay safe.”
“Citizens of Zootopia,” the lion mayor began to speak before a crowd of reporters standing with microphones on the other side of the podium, “you are respectfully asked not to act with hostility toward other species. The walls have taught us to be united, and that will remain so despite the circumstances.”
“Sir, do you want us to act as if a predator couldn’t suddenly commit an atrocity?” a deer stood up to question the mandate’s words. Of course, the orange-maned one remained silent so as not to say something that would worsen things.
“Let’s not see it that way, please.” He raised a paw toward the deer as if to stop him, smiled at the crowd, and then the microphone caught the sound of him swallowing. “We are all one family in Zootopia. We cannot distance ourselves from others because of this situation. Our predator brothers need us now more than ever.”
“And why hasn’t Doctor Wolfgang spoken about the plague? Can’t the largest pharmaceutical company in Zootopia stop this?” The image went black.
The television reflected the wolf sitting on the couch, his eyes lost on the rug that mimicked warm fur. No, he could not stop this. He had tried; he was working on it. He studied the blood of the infected and found nothing with each attempt.
His pads felt the cold marble floor as he walked toward the living room exit with the remote in hand, feeling defeated. He could not stop this even with everything he had at his paw; he imagined those who had nothing.
His gray fur shook and fell in clumps onto the floor. Stress had been eating him alive for several moons now; his howls to the moon were almost inaudible, and he collapsed from exhaustion in the laboratories.
He clumsily left the television remote in the ashtray by the entrance and then leaned against the archway dividing the living room near the door. He was crumbling alive under social pressure.
“Wolfgang!” his sister’s voice appeared from the stairs. Her claws echoed against the floor, and he could only feel her guiding him by the paw back to the couch. “You should be in bed. Do you want to pass out somewhere and have no one find you?”
He received only silence, the same he had given for months. Lyka sighed; she could not have a sick brother for a meeting with the Lynxleys in a few hours.
“Milton and his children will arrive in a few hours. Are you sure you don’t want me to handle it?” She sat beside him on the couch, but her paw did not leave her brother’s cold pads.
“Yes,” he brought the paw his sister was not holding to where his muzzle connected with his eyes and forehead, “I am.” He answered fully before taking a bottle from the table where the television remote was—or should have been.
It was a bottle of antidepressants from the family brand, not something to regulate stress, even though such products existed and sold well among the felidae. But his sister was already fed up to her teeth and fangs of seeing him take those things.
“I told you to stop taking those. They make you euphoric; you don’t get better—at least only for a few hours. Don’t you understand?” Lyka said as she snatched the bottle and threw it into the fireplace. Her brother groaned loudly in frustration. “You’re going to take specialists. I don’t care if you feel weak or whatever.”
“Do you want your brother drugged at the meeting?” he said with a laugh devoid of irony. His claws tightened around his sister’s until she slammed him back against the couch, clearly asserting dominance.
“It’s better than a trembling ball of fur,” she spat the truth before standing and looking at the defeated gray wolf on the couch. “If the inventory says again that you stole a bottle of antidepressants, I’ll put you in the shelter for out-of-control predators. I’m not joking, Wolfgang.”
His brother remained silent until he chuckled under his breath, shaking his head as he watched her leave the living room, leaving him once again in the place where he daily watched the news talking about how he could not find a cure.
His golden eyes stayed on his own paws until, with a sigh, he watched his sister’s reason leave at a painfully slow pace. He could not evade his situation with a medication that made him feel euphoric; he had to deal with the stress from within, not with a sensation that lasted hours.
It was uncomfortable—very uncomfortable. Ulrichlabs had sent four invitations to the offices for the most influential family in Zootopia, of course without knowing the closeness between the family and its youngest member.
In front of his siblings and father, he felt small, watching his hands fidget with his own gifts in an attempt to dissipate his nerves; but feeling his father’s disappointed gaze and the mockery in his brothers’ eyes did not help.
“I want you to behave, Pawbert,” Milton told his youngest son. He nodded, his brows drawn together in a submissive expression.
“Yes, father,” he replied like a robot upon receiving an order he could not refuse. He had only one option: accept and do. That was all he had when it came to them.
The building was as large as he could imagine. He had not been there since he was a lynx cub. He remembered his father’s laughter and the gray wolf who moved his paw every time he spoke. He knew Mr. Ulrich had died a few months earlier; it had been major news in Zootopia—how the most renowned man in medicine for the city had fallen victim to age. Supposedly.
“Mr. Lynxley!” someone shouted at the door, muzzle raised with a smile when he saw the older man and his children enter the building.
The younger but taller lynx stepped aside after being left for last, behind everyone. He watched the tall, cheerful bicolored figure of a single palette pat the old man whom he tried to make proud every day. His honey-colored eyes settled on the wolf who opened his eyes in welcome to Cattrick and Kitty, who spoke with more professionalism and bearing than Pawbert would have for years.
“Oh, a pleasure to meet you.” The canine’s paws clasped those of the older lynx with a soft gesture of acknowledgment. “Our facilities will always be open to you, Mr. Lynxley.”
The yellow eyes searched around for his sister for guidance, but what he saw was a lynx withdrawn from his family, distant, with his enormous paws crossed over his chest, whiskers twitching as much as his own. A sign of anxiety in animals—he was a doctor, of course he knew that.
“Pawbert! Your youngest son, right?” He laughed as he walked toward the feline with the poorly tied tie at his neck. The latter tried to step back, but the wolf’s pat on his back pulled him forward, his paws tripping over themselves. “With that height, I could mistake you for one of mine.” He said it jokingly, since Pawbert was almost the height of a wolf, the only species working in his laboratory company.
The Lynxley family laughed at the wolf’s words while Pawbert remained silent, watching with near meticulous attention the canine who moved away from him to greet the gray she-wolf approaching with a tablet in hand. Lyka guided the associates toward the boardroom, and her older brother merely seemed to follow the instructions of the one who spoke more than he did; this was only noticed by the anxious lynx with unkempt whiskers.
When they entered the room with a long table and chairs around it, of course each head would sit at the short ends while the companions took the side seats. The last to enter, of course, was the younger lynx, who struggled to close the door with as little noise as his enormous paws could make.
He sat one chair away from his siblings and looked only at his paws playing under the table through the glass. No, he did not entirely like being there, but he found it incredible that they had invited him as well to such an important meeting under these circumstances in Zootopia.
“Mr. Lynxley,” unsurprisingly, the one to speak at the meeting was the younger sister, while the wolf at her side had a trembling paw beneath the table; one paw on the table held his head as he watched his sister present the financing plan for a cure for the affected predators by… whatever this was. “We are glad you were interested in planning a better path for our natural branch.”
The yellow eyes moved anxiously; both pairs felt out of place being locked inside an executive room. The feline’s ears were low—too low—while the canine’s were tense toward the sky, as if searching for the slightest auditory cue to leave the place with a good excuse.
The cure, the cure, the cure, the cure.
“I need to get some water.” Two voices interrupted Lyka’s female speech. From across the table, she watched her brother and the younger lynx stand up as if they had timed it perfectly.