I have no idea what’s going on. That’s the first thought that flits through my mind as I turn the corner onto the busy road. It’s after midnight, but the city is still very much awake, bright headlights shining into my car and highlighting the scene inside.

There’s a man in my passenger seat, bleeding from a bullet wound and passed out from the blood loss. Beautiful white rabbit ears are on his head, decidedly less perky than the first time I saw them. I’m almost positive the man is also the rabbit I’ve been taking care of in the lab and rescued, a fact that I really need to ask said man about but since he’s passed out, I can’t. My brain is working overtime as I drive on autopilot, my eyes constantly drifting over to his unconscious face.

He’s injured, and yet I can’t get over the fact of how beautiful he is. He isn’t beautiful in a normal sense; it’s a harsh beauty, like he belongs on a battlefield rather than on a runway. Where the hell did he come from? I’m starting to feel like I’m in the Twilight Zone. Maybe I’m actually passed out back in the parking garage. Maybe Josh isn’t really dead, and I imagined the whole thing. I pinch the skin on my arm and flinch at the sharp pain that shoots through my body from the action. Okay, so maybe I’m not dreaming.

I should be heading towards the hospital. I have a gunshot victim in my car, bleeding out the longer I take, but instead, I’m driving towards my apartment. Rabbit Man said it wouldn’t help to go to the hospital, and I’m not sure how I would explain the large rabbit ears protruding from his head. Besides, if he really is my white rabbit like I think, I’ve seen him come back to life too many times to count. Somehow, he can’t die. Why should a gunshot wound be any different? My sensible side is telling me to take him to the hospital, anyway, but I ignore it. Something bigger is going on, I just know it.

I pull as close to my apartment as possible, not paying attention to the clearly marked slots and taking the empty space of one of my neighbors. I’m certain they’ll be displeased in the morning when they return from their graveyard shift, but I can’t bring myself to care at the moment. I have a sudden thought that I should call the cops and let them know about Josh in the parking garage, my heart speeding up when I think that they could suspect me as the murderer, but I focus on one thing at a time. The fact that I’ve left the crime scene is already suspicious enough. If I also have a bleeding man on the brink of death with me, that’ll be even worse. I’ll get Rabbit Man inside and then call the cops. I can tell them I was so panicked that he was trying to attack me that I had to leave before I realized what I was doing.

I turn off my little Subaru and jump from the car, rushing around the side. I look around the apartment complex, noting that there doesn’t seem to be anyone moving around. Good. I don’t want to have to explain to someone why I’m carrying a half-dead man into my apartment.

I open the passenger door and lean in, shaking his shoulder in an attempt to rouse him. The most I get is a pained groan, and I huff out a breath. I glance at the door to my apartment, never more thankful that I’m on the first floor rather than having to climb the stairs. But Rabbit Man was heavy as hell when I heaved him into the car. I’m not sure I’ll be able to get him inside the apartment. I can’t leave him in my Subaru, though.

I run and unlock the door to my apartment and prop the door open before coming back to the car. I unbuckle the seatbelt and thread my arm under his and around his back, wrapping my other one around his wide chest. Leg strength, don’t fail me now. I heave with all my might, grunting as my muscles twinge in dismay.

“You need to lay off the carrots, buddy,” I grunt as I shove him against the side of my car, breathing hard. He moans in response, his head lolling to the other side, as if he’s trying to wake up. I perk up. It would be a lot easier to get him inside if he could help me.

No such luck. He doesn’t move again. I curse him under my breath, slamming the car door, before I jerk him upright, stumbling under his full weight when it bears down on my shoulders. I can already tell I’m going to hurt my back from the movement as I begin half dragging, half carrying him towards the open doorway.

By the time I get him to the apartment, I’m sweating enough to soak through the t-shirt I’m wearing, and my breath is wheezing from my chest. I kick the door shut after we make it inside. I’m able to make it to the couch before I drop the dead weight, none too gently, onto the ugly orange cushions. I shove the hair out of my face that had come loose from the tie and take a moment to just breath in giant lungfuls of air. My eyes land on the picture hanging on the wall again, of Neptune and I.

“This is not what I had in mind when you told me to go on an Adventure, Nep,” I tell the still image. I shake my head and glance around the apartment. Most of my belongings are still in boxes. I haven’t bothered to unpack yet, only going so far as to take out the essentials. A coffee pot sits on the counter, surrounded by a few groceries I didn’t put away. A box with clothing is open with material hanging over the sides where I had dug through it. My eyes glance once more at the hanging picture before I turn them back towards the man hanging halfway off the couch. I sigh.

Neptune had hated this couch. The day I’d brought it home, she’d been sober enough to come over. She’d wrinkled up her nose at the color and told me it was the ugliest couch she’d ever seen. I had to agree the orange wasn’t the most attractive color, but I argued that the ugliness is what gave it character. We hadn’t seen eye to eye but at the end of that visit, just before she started itching at her arms again, she’d told me she understood why I had bought it, that I was always searching for the good in the ugly. I hadn’t realized then that she’d drawn a parallel between herself and the ugly orange couch. Even though it now had a few stains on it, making it even uglier, I couldn’t bear to part with it.

Once my breathing is under control, I move Rabbit Man fully onto the couch, picking up his feet and pulling them up on the cushions. I stare at the heavy-duty boots in confusion. There are so many buckles, I’m not sure where to begin in order to take them from his feet. I flip the top buckle open and realize they’re simple enough clasps. When I get the first boot off, I’m startled how heavy it is when I drop it to the carpeted floor with a loud thump. I hope the crazy cat lady above me isn’t awake. She’s already knocked on my door three times this week with complaints about everything from how she can hear the thumping in the pipes when I take a shower to the sound of my coffee machine beeping when it brews coffee. I have no idea how to tell her there’s no way she can hear such things through the floor, but maybe she has superhero hearing. As I free the other boot from a man with rabbit ears on his head, I accept that it could be truer than I originally thought.

I look at where blood still coats the emerald-green waistcoat on his stomach and frown. In the lab, he’d never been cut into or forced to bleed externally before. Maybe a gunshot wound took more time to heal. I refuse to think about how it would look if I ended up having a dead man in my apartment; the second dead man associated with me. I really don’t want to go to jail. Standing and walking to the box I’d labeled bathroom, I pop open the tape and dig around to find the first aid kit inside. It’s a huge sturdy thing I kept on hand when Neptune had been alive. I was always prepared in case she showed up with wounds or about to overdose. I hadn’t thrown it away afterwards, another memory forcing my hand. I grab the gauze from inside and the antiseptic spray. There’s some numbing spray and long tweezers I grab, too. I hadn’t seen an exit wound for the bullet. I’ve watched enough crime shows to know I should probably remove the metal. I’m not too worried about not having the official medical training since he’s some sort of immortal. I’ll admit I’m a tiny bit nervous about him feeling pain. I know he can feel it after watching the tests back at the lab.

I drop the supplies on the table and stare down at him. I look at the waistcoat warily, before reaching down and beginning to pop the silver buttons free. He doesn’t stir as I finish the task and open the material gently. I bite my lip when I see the perfectly chiseled abs I reveal, shaking my head. Now is not the time to be ogling him. There’s a small hole to the side of his abs. I hope he’s lucky enough that it missed his organs. Sticking tweezers in body parts is not my forte.

I grab my phone and shine the flashlight over the wound. The light bounces back from a small glint of metal, and I breathe out a sigh of relief that it isn’t so deep I have to dig. I spray the area with the numbing spray and give it a minute to kick in. He doesn’t stir as I grab the tweezers and gently stick them inside the hole, clamping the ends around the bullet. When I pull it free, the muscles around the wound twitch as more blood seeps out. It isn’t bleeding like a gunshot should, the blood slowly moving, as if it’s already healing. He remains silent and still the entire time. He must be pretty out of it to not feel a bullet being pulled from his stomach.

I wipe the blood from around the wound, before I coat it with antiseptic spray and tape gauze against his skin. Satisfied with my work, I lean back only for my eyes to slam into a pair of silver ones. He’s watching me, a hard glint in their depths that makes my body ache in response. What is wrong with me? This man is a stranger, and a weird one at that. I shouldn’t be so attracted to someone with rabbit ears on their head. I blush as the thoughts run through my head and a tiny smile curls his lips. The way he’s lounging on my couch, it shouldn’t be a sexy position, wounded and exposed, but it is.

“How are you feeling?” I ask. My eyes drift to the rabbit ears on his head again, the urge to touch overwhelming. I want to know if they’re as soft as they look.

“They’re real.” His voice is husky, and deep enough that it threatens to curl my toes. “You can touch them if you want.”

I raise my brow, a smile flitting to my lips.

“That sounded vaguely sexual.”

“I must be doing something wrong then,” he chuckles. “I meant it to be completely sexual.”

The ears twitch at his words. I’m certain my face is as red as a tomato, and I want to rebel and not touch the interesting things on his head, but I’m above all else, a slave to my curiosity. I scoot closer to him where I kneel on the floor, my face above his as I study the ears. His silver eyes watch me intently as I lean closer. The ears come right out of his skull, no way possible for them to be prosthetics or fake. I reach forward and gently touch my fingers to one. It’s stiff, and yet soft beneath my skin. It feels exactly as my rabbit’s had, like cashmere. He sighs at the feeling, his eyes closing as if in ecstasy.

“Am I mad?” The words slip from my mouth before I can stop them.

His eyes pop open, meeting my own.

“All the best people are.”

I jerk my hand away in shock, falling backwards onto my ass as his words sink in.

“No,” I gasp. “Please don’t tell me you really are the White Rabbit! I was just kidding before. This has got to be a joke. I’m being Punk’d.” I look around me as if I really do expect Ashton Kutcher to jump from my bedroom door before pointing and laughing at me.

White grunts as he hoists himself up into a sitting position, his nearly white hair disheveled but in no way unattractive. His waistcoat spreads further, and I have to force myself not to look at the muscles he exposes even more. When he begins to pick at the bandage, I frown.

“No, don’t do that,” I scold him. “You’ll start bleeding again.”

He winks at me with those molten silver eyes.

“No, I won’t. It’s almost healed.”

He pulls the bandage completely off and reveals skin, pink as if from a healing wound. There’s no raised mark, only the slight discoloration indicating there was a wound there to begin with. My breath stutters in shock, my curiosity urging me forward again. I gingerly touch the skin that only a few minutes before sported a bullet hole.

“Who are you?” I ask in wonder.

He shrugs.

“You got my name right, Jupiter. I’m the White Rabbit.”