Farrar couldn't sleep.

He sat in bed, coughing and shivering, as was increasingly his habit these days. As tired as he was, almost all the time, it was next to impossible for him to ever get any kind of meaningful rest. Maybe an hour or two or night, at the very most, followed by extended periods of his lying awake, his chest feeling like it was on fire, his mind racing fast, seemingly unable to ever land on any one particular thought.

Every new threshold of exhaustion he reached seemed like it couldn't possibly get any worse, until it did, and these nights he prayed to the Moon Gods to simply reach out and take him. To spare him the suffering and indignity of living in this way, without hope, and without any kind of release from the pain.

Life had all gone so wrong for him... Everything had been so different from the way he'd imagined it would be. The way it should be, in fact, for the esteemed high alpha of a pack of wolf shifters.

Everything had been taken from him.

Every aspect of his life, and his legacy, stolen from under his nose, given away like it was nothing.

All he had left was his suffering- the only real bounty that remained to him in life, and the only thing he might ever have let go of voluntarily.

But of course that was impossible, short of the one big leap he wasn't yet willing to make.

He still held out hope, as faint and as intangible as it was, that things still might change.

He didn't really believe it, though...

And so there he was, sitting up coughing in the middle of the night, his handkerchief stained with blood as he pulled it away from his mouth. When suddenly a light came on, and he looked up, startled by the sudden materialization of figure at the foot of his sick bed.

His eyes brightened, for little more than a fraction of a second, but then grew dark again.

“Hello Father...”

There stood the fruit of his loins. The former pride, and now the great shame of his existence.

Naked from head to toe. His body torn up and dripping with blood. His face, though, the same as it ever was. The vibrant green eyes still skirting the same line they always had- soft and gentle, but more than capable of hardening, growing severe when the situation called for it.

“Son,” said Farrar, still eyeing him up and down. “You look like you're doing well for yourself...”

If things were as they once had been between the two of them, the son might have smiled at this. Now, though, his reaction was more of a grimace, considering how much he'd been through to get here and see this ungrateful old bastard.

“I could say the same for you,” he said scornfully, regretting it immediately as his elderly father broke into another coughing fit, so bad that he couldn't even speak. His son rushed over to a pitcher of water beside the bed, filling up a glass and returning to hand it to him. Farrar drank, and his son watched him, disbelieving just how badly his father's health had fallen since the time he'd last seen him.

After downing the entire glass in about twenty seconds, Farrar let out a deep gasp, and for a moment his son was foolish enough to believe he might express some slight gratitude for the gesture, and for the relief it had given him. Instead, though, he just wiped off his mouth with the back of one withered hand, and continued on with the same harsh tone as before, as though not even a single moment had passed.

“What did you come here for?” he asked. “Or are you here for no other reason than to insult a dying old man?”

His son looked at him harshly for a moment, then closed his eyes, and lowered his head, sighing.

“No Dad. I'm sorry. I didn't mean that.”

“Bullshit,” he said. “You meant it. You've always been calloused and ungrateful that way, ever since you were a child. And your abandonment of your people in their time of crisis is as much proof of that as anything.”

He held his tongue at this remark, deciding instead to respond to his previous question.

“I came here,” he said as patiently as he could, “Because I wanted to see how you were doing. You could have been dead all this time for all I knew...”

“Sure I could have,” he said bitterly. “And whose fault would that have been?”

His son's hands curled into fists, though just below his father's field of vision.

Still, though, he tried to remain patient. Not to snap at him as he so desperately desired to.

“You tell me,” he said, holding Farrar's gaze. “Derric had been running reports to me about your health ever since I left, almost every week. Then he just stopped, completely out of the blue, and I had absolutely no way of knowing what was going on.”

“Yeah, well... It sure took you long enough for your curiosity to get bad enough to actually do anything about it...” snapped Farrar.

“So you knew about this?” his son pressed. “You knew Derric had stopped coming to see me and tell me how you were?”

“I knew,” he affirmed with a nod. “But I didn't have jack to do with it. In case you've forgotten, Rannulf's the one in charge now, not me. And obviously not my son the runaway...”

“Wait... You mean Rannulf's been keeping Derric from coming to see me?” his son asked, indignant at this news.

“Don't get such a big head about it,” he snarled. “He's not targeting you or Derric, if that's your idea.” He had to stop for a moment and cough again here. His son offered him a drink, but he brushed him away, regaining his composure before it became necessary for him to accept it. “It's everyone,” he continued. “No one's allowed to go outside shifter territory, and no one from the outside world is allowed in.”

His son considered this, then nodded.

“Huh... I guess that explains my little welcoming party... Oh, and while I'm thinking of it, I left one of his cronies snapped in half against a tree trunk on my way in. He's still alive though, so once I'm gone you might want to send someone out to go and scrape him up off the ground before he freezes to death.”

Farrar just stared at him. His son could tell, from the look in his eyes, that he wondered how the boy he'd raised had turned into something so different from what he'd expected him to be. How he'd become so corrupted, so disloyal- or, at the very least, in his prejudiced eyes.

Perceiving this, his son rushed to defend himself.

“Hey, they attacked me. What the hell was I supposed to do? Just lie down and take it while they ripped me to pieces? Is that the sort of man you taught me to be?”

“The sort of man I taught you to be,” said Farrar, “doesn't in any way resemble the man I see standing before me...”

He stood there for a long moment, stunned and deeply hurt by this.

“The man I taught you to be,” he continued, “would never have left his people behind. But I told you, when you did, that your leaving could not be undone. That once you were gone, you could never come back. And yet, here you are, now with the blood of your own kind on your hands...”

His son stared, incredulous, until finally he couldn't help but snap.

“Oh for- You were sick! You were dying!” he practically barked, then added, “You are dying!”

“And you left!” Farrar boomed, his voice louder than it had ever been since he'd come down with his illness, like it had once been during his former days of glory.

“I left,” his son countered, “to try and figure out how the fuck I could help you get over whatever the fuck is wrong with you! Because our people are as medically and technologically advanced as cavemen, because they all hate human beings too much to even consider anything remotely modern or civilized!”

“Bullshit,” Farrar said again, throwing up his hands. “All. Total. Bullshit! Ever since you were a kid, nothing was ever enough for you… Being the son of a high alpha, having the whole world set at your feet. You would think you'd been deprived of love and attention your whole life, the way you clambered to get as far away from here as possible. You've always had a hard-on for humans and their ways, and for any life that wasn't the one you were living. Always had your nose in books, learning as much about everywhere but here as you possibly could…”

His son started shaking his head, his brow furrowed, but had a hard time thinking of anything he could say to this.

“The moment I got sick was the moment you knew you could finally escape. The moment you finally had some damn excuse to leave us all behind, and pretend you were doing it for our own good. Even if I believed you were doing this for me, I’ll still be long dead before you learn anything that could possibly help me!”

“Maybe I've always been fascinated with humans,” his son countered, “because they don't just leave people to die whenever they come down with some mysterious illness! They figure out what it is, and they treat it!”

“Our medicine men are doing everything they can for me, unlike you!” Farrar spat.

“Right,” he said, with a roll of his eyes, “because a few roots and berries mashed up together are doing wonders for the cancer, or whatever the hell it is that's eating you alive from the inside out! And you know, maybe I won’t be able to save you. Maybe I won’t figure it out fast enough to heal what’s making you sick. But I’m trying, Dad, which is more than you or anyone else can say. I’m studying, day and night, way beyond my course load, to try and think of something I might be able to do that could help you. And even if-”

His voice choked up a bit, and he had to backtrack.

“Even if you don’t make it, at least maybe someone in this god forsaken forest will know more about medicine than they did in the middle ages. Maybe someone will actually be able to do something the next time someone comes down with some mysterious malady, instead of just standing there perplexed and watching our people all dropping away like flies. Maybe doing something to level off our dwindling numbers is a little bit more important to our survival than me just staying around here and sitting on my hands while you die, don’t you think?”

Farrar just shook his head. “You're so transparent... You're like glass...”

“Again, I ask you, what the hell was I supposed to do? Just let you die, and not even bother trying to do anything about it? Forgive me if I can't see the good that's supposed to do anyone...”

“You were supposed to say with me! With us!” Farrar shouted. “You were supposed to man up take over as alpha when the situation called for it! Not leave me and my legacy to wither and die! Not to let some loudmouthed blowhard take over as high alpha, just because you're too chickenshit to take on the responsibility yourself! Instead you just run off. You join the bastards that have been killing us off for the past century, and act like you're doing it for anyone but yourself! I know you think we're all too stupid to tell our asses from a hole in the ground, but I hope you know you're only fooling yourself...”

“I'm. Trying. To Save. Your. Life.” his son said, the words escaping through gritted teeth, and every syllable emphasized to extreme degrees.

Farrar simply laid back on his pillow, grinning at this.

“I know fully well what you're doing, my son. Please don't insult my intelligence. I know about the parties. About the hedonistic orgies you have every other weekend. Getting drunk out of your mind and going to bed with any man who looks at you with the remotest of interest. No interest in commitment. In self control. In restraint. Living like some male whore, with no shame whatsoever, and acting the whole time like you're some kind of martyr. Like you really give a damn about me, or your people, or about what happens to a single damn one of us. Please, son. You can stop pretending now. As I said before- you aren't fooling anyone but yourself. And I don't really think that that's even true anymore...”

His son just stood there, frozen.

He tried to speak, but couldn't find whatever words he was looking for.

He wondered, with a growing heat in his chest, whether there was at least a grain of truth to what his father was saying.

He tried to muster up some excuses for the way he'd been living ever since he left the pack. He told himself that it obviously wasn't true that he'd left just to go have fun and fuck around. He'd genuinely sought to learn as much about medicine as he possibly could,, and do what he could to try and treat his father's sickness before it was too late. After all, he hadn't started partying until he'd begun to realize the importance of social relations between humans- an importance that almost matched the importance of alphas, betas, and omegas among his own kind.

He couldn't possibly expect to achieve any kind of success in medicine living like a complete hermit. He needed connections, and to establish relationships with other students. And as an alpha male, he felt his best chances at achieving popularity and the favor of his peers was to use his charm and his strength to his advantage. To be the host, with the most, as it were, and build up a reputation for himself, all while maintaining top grades with his work and proving himself totally capable as a student of medicine.

That was the excuse he used to justify it all.

And yet, now that his father had said these things to him, it did all begin to seem quite hollow. Like a sham. Something he'd let himself believe because he'd wanted to, and not because it was actually true.

He tried to reckon with this. To twist it around and around in his head until the story in his mind matched the truth.

But he couldn't...

Was his father right?

Was the high alpha's illness simply the excuse he'd been waiting for, all his life, to get as far away from there, as fast as possible, and indulge in the many excesses of the human world?

He thought about it, for a long time, feeling worse and worse about himself with every notion that occurred to him.

But then he thought of something else...

He looked up at his father, his brow furrowed.

“Wait... Have you been spying on me?”

Farrar stared at his son, again with a look that seemed to ask just where he'd gone wrong in raising him. It nearly broke his son's heart.

“For a while,” he said sadly, “When you first left. I had one of my former men keep an eye on you. As bad as things were on the night of your departure, I really did worry about you. I wanted to make sure you were okay... But then, as my man watched you, and reported back to me what he saw, I found that I no longer liked hearing what he was telling me. And so I called him off. You're free, now. To do whatever the hell you feel like. To leave your father and your pack behind, and forget that we were ever here to hold you back in the first place...”

His son just stared at him, shaking his head.

“I'm sorry that you feel I've forgotten you. I really am. If that were true, do you think I would've risked my ass like I did just to come and see you? Just to see how you were doing, and to make sure you were alright? Knowing as I did that I would probably be subjected to the exact bullshit you're putting me through right now?”

His father continued to glower at him, his expression unchanging.

“Keep telling yourself that these token efforts of yours count as genuine faith or loyalty, and that they aren't just empty gestures to make yourself feel better about your abandonment. Maybe, many years from now when you're trapped in the isolation you've created for yourself, it will console you some to believe that.”

Father and son stared at one another.

The words no longer existed to pave across the chasm now dividing them.

There simply wasn't a point in arguing any longer.

Farrar's son turned, not even seeing fit to pay him a final glance as he made his way toward the window.

“Goodnight Father. Try and take care of yourself.”

Farrar didn't say anything.

His son heard him begin to cough again as he climbed out the window, but that was about it.

The bruised and tattered alpha shifted in mid air, then landed on the ground on all fours. Scarcely missing a beat, he thundered off back in the direction from which he'd come, only about half paying attention for signs of other attackers as he disappeared into the night.

He wished, as he dissolved into the darkness, that he'd never even come back here at all...